The Piety That Lies Between: A Progressive Christian Perspective

The State of the God Debates: Some lessons from Shook vs. Craig

2012-02-16T13:01:00.003-06:00

Back in December, I was given two opportunities on the same day--and they conflicted.

That morning I got a phone call from John Shook, a friend of mine from graduate school and a former OSU colleague who now works for the Center for Inquiry (a kind of atheist think tank). He invited me to debate him at an event in California in February--perhaps on the topic of God and morality. Later that day, I was handed the violin part for "I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change." It was to run during February--encompassing the weekend of the event John had invited me to participate in.

My father having passed away just over a month earlier, I was thinking a lot about life priorities, about what goals matter the most for living a full, rich life. Participation in a debate about God and morality could certainly fit into a rich life, especially given my interests and profession. But so, too, could participation in the musical. The question was which would do more for me, at this point in my life, to help me build the best kind of life I am capable of.

I've been a violinist since the second grade--far longer than I've been a philosopher. In high school, playing the violin was central to my identity, and I very seriously considered a career in music. I've been involved with the local community theatre for far less time, but it has been a rich source of creative opportunity and community. And here was a rare chance to bring my long training as a violinist into the communal creativity of community theatre.

That's what I chose, and I haven't regretted it. In fact, the experience of connecting with this particular cast has been a great gift. I've made new friendships, deepened old ones, and laughed more these last few weeks than I have in years. The experience has also opened further doors for musical creativity. I've come to know the keyboardist, a very talented musician who does music (among other things) for a living and is eager to have me play with her band on numbers which call for a violin or fiddle part.

The debate with John would've looked better on my professional CV. It might have sold some of my books and helped get some of my ideas out to audiences who otherwise would've have heard them. These aren't trivial things, and I hope to have other opportunities to pursue these things.

But I doubt that flying out to California for a debate would've fed my soul the way that the last few weeks of communal, playful, joyful creativity have done. Part of the reason for that has to do with the current state of the God debates.

This morning, with the date for the debate-that-might-have-been drawing near, I found myself thinking about the option I turned down and I took another look at parts of John's debate with William Lane Craig from a couple of years ago. It reminded me of why debates of the sort exemplified there don't feed my soul (and why I wouldn't want to debate Craig).

Let me say, first, that intellectual exchange with those who disagree with me can feed my soul quite richly. I really enjoy going to professional philosophy conferences to present papers. And at such conferences, there is always a designated commenter on the paper you present. The commenter typically raises objections and critical questions. Sometimes the exchange that follows has some of the character of a debate. But it's also constructive. Each is afforded the space to develop his or her thoughts. If someone makes a good point, it is (usually) quickly acknowledged. And if someone is trying to make a potentially good point but is having some trouble finding the best way to articulate it, others will sometimes jump in (perhaps even a philosophical opponent) with a clarifying question: "Is this what you're trying to say?"

At its best, the aim at a philosophy conference is to increase clarity and deepen the collective understanding of the philosophical problem and the best arguments for alternative solutions.

That isn't the aim in most of the current God debates--where the objective is to win. When John first proposed a debate, my counter-offer (this was before I was invited to be part of the musical) was to have a philosophical conversation--that is, something more like what happens at a philosophy conference than like what happens in typical God debates. John thought that sounded great. But I know that even if we went into the event in that spirit, we would be doing so in a context defined by a different spirit--one in which the zero-sum model of a sporting event seems to prevail. And it's easy to get sucked in by that broader spirit--especially if you have an ego (as both John and I do).

One clip I looked at this morning from the Shook-Craig debate strikes me as instructive here. It appear on youTube under the belligerent title "Dr. William Lane Craig humiliates Dr. John Shook." Here's the clip:

There are a few lessons I want to extract from this clip. First off, the title of the clip is misleading. What appears here is a brief moment in a considerably longer exchange in which neither debater humiliated themselves, even if Craig did manage to trip John up a couple of times here. I'm not saying that Craig didn't make some legitimate points that should have been made--but the title of the clip treats this as equivalent to scoring points against an opponent in a win/lose sporting match. It's as if the video's poster is delighting in a good blow landed by a favored boxer in a title fight.

And then there's the applause. That doesn't happen at philosophy conferences. And when, in this clip, does the applause happen? When one debater "scores a point" against the other.

But the most important point I want to make is this: Presumably because Craig was interested in winning the debate, he didn't display any interest in unpacking the analogy that John was trying to invoke, to understand that analogy within the larger context of John philosophical convictions. Adept at debate, Craig piped in with telling questions or comments (verbal jabs) before John could fully develop his line of thought. This put John into a defensive posture which made it hard for him to collect his thoughts so as to be able to connect the example to its larger philosophical context.

Since I know John, I know that larger context. I pretty sure I know what he was trying to do. John is a specialist in John Dewey, an American pragmatist. Put in somewhat oversimplified terms, what matters most for pragmatism is how our ideas and beliefs are related to behavior. If two seemingly different philosophies have the same pragmatic impact--if they affect how we behave in identical ways--then they have the same pragmatic meaning. The test of truth, for pragmatism, is how an idea works in practice.

So how does that connect with the analogy John was trying to use, about investing money in the stock market? Here's the thing: If I have my money in the bank and I have no good reason to suppose that moving it to the stock market will be to my advantage--and I am risk-averse--then I will behave in the same way that I would if I have my money in the bank and believe that putting it in the stock market would be a bad idea, ultimately losing me money.

Craig is clearly correct to say that the lack of evidence for the view that the stock market will rise in the coming months is not evidence that it won't. But for the hypothetical potential investor with a conservative disposition, the absence of such evidence will have the same pragmatic significance as evidence that the stock market won't rise in the coming months. The belief clusters here are pragmatically the same. For someone who is a pragmatist, these two belief clusters have the same pragmatic meaning.

So, from this perspective, consider someone who (a) operates as if the natural world is all that exists until convinced otherwise by evidence of a supernatural reality, and (b) hasn't yet been convinced otherwise. Even if this person acknowledged that one cannot know that the natural world is all there is, this person would qualify as a naturalist from a pragmatic perspective. Why? Because the person operates practically in the same way that someone who is convinced that there is no supernatural reality would operate. Such a person is a pragmatic atheist. John has said to me before (not in these precise words) that he isn't big on the category of agnosticism precisely because self-professing agnostics typically operate as if there is no God--and so, from the standpoint of pragmatic philosophy, they are atheists.

John may very well have defined naturalism as the belief that the natural world we know through empirical inquiry exhausts what's real. But if he was operating with a pragmatic understanding of "belief," being a naturalist in this sense is consistent with being agnostic (in a more conventional sense) about the existence of a supernatural reality.

John is perfectly capable of making these points. But Craig's debating style, evidenced in this clip, interfered with rather than facilitated John's ability to lay out what he was really wanting to say. This made it possible for Craig to invoke more traditional terminology--which does recognize a distinction between agnosticism and atheism even when a person who professes not to know behaves as if there is no God. The result is that John's position could be neatly knocked down--but it was a mischaracterization that was being knocked down.

What John is committed to is the idea that, in the absence of compelling reasons to believe in a supernatural reality, we should operate as if there is none. We should be naturalists or atheists in the pragmatic sense. He is also committed to the view that there are no good reasons in favor of the idea that there are supernatural realities. Now, I disagree with John on both points. My first book, Is God a Delusion?, can in some ways be seen as an extended critique of both of John's commitments here, with special emphasis on the first.

But my point is this: We don't do the pursuit of wisdom a service by using the sort of debate techniques that interfere with the ability of others to lay out their position with the clarity needed to assess it on its own terms. Were Craig operating in professional philosopher mode rather than debate mode, he might have said, "If we take your investing analogy in such-and-such a way, it just seems silly. So I suspect you might mean something else by it. What would that be?"

But the current state of the God debates discourages that more philosophical approach. And it's not just theists who are guilty of favoring the pursuit of victory over the pursuit of philosophical clarity, even if in this clip it is the theist who's doing it. The new atheists offer plenty of examples of the same sort of thing.

Now none of this is to say that there isn't a place for debate. I think debate can be helpful in sparking more meaningful critical dialogue. Debates are exciting, and can attract interest in toipc. The seductive power of the competition, the zero-sum face-off, can draw people into an issue in a way that exposes them to opposing arguments they wouldn't otherwise have heard, perhaps stimulating deeper reflection and more substantive dialogue. Unfortunately, this very same seductive power of zero-sum confrontation makes it always in danger of eclipsing and replacing more productive dialogue.

This is not just a danger in the contemporary God debates. Too much of what goes on in the exchanges between theists and atheists has just this zero-sum character. And that is why community theatre does more to feed my soul.

But real dialogue between people of opposing views can be deeply rewarding. It can be a creative and communal activity every bit as rich as working to create a theatrical production. I like to think that this blog is one place where such deeper dialogue can happen on issues about religion and God and ethics. The question is how we work to make that kind of dialogue happen more. How do we make meaningful critical discourse the natural outflow of those more sexy "debates" that bring attention to the issues--as opposed to allowing such discourse to be eclipsed by the debates?

Thoughts?

Is Everything Paul Says in his Epistles the Inspired and Inerrant Word of God?

2012-02-15T17:17:00.001-06:00

It occurs to me (based on comments on my last post) that it's been a while since I've posted anything directly addressing the fundamentalist Christian belief that every word and sentence in the Bible is there through a direct act of divine inspiration, and as such inerrantly represents divine truth even if the application of it to human life seems to magnify suffering, alienate people from one another, inspire bitterness towards religion, etc.

The idea (in its original Protestant articulation called the Doctrine of Plenary Verbal Inspiration) is that although God worked through human authors, they wrote precisely what he wanted them to write, thereby guaranteeing that what they had to say contained no mistakes. An this is taken to be so certain, such a given, any evidence to the effect that certain proof texts bear "bad fruits" when treated as inerrant truth is dismissed summarily. Jesus' injunction to distinguish between true and false prophets by their fruits is regarded as inapplicable to the teachings of any author whose work has made it into the biblical cannon.

I don't want to retread old ground here, but it occurs to me that there is a line of argument--a kind of "confutation" of this fundamentalist view--that I haven't shared on this blog. I'm not sure how convincing it ultimately is, but it's easy to lay out and, I think, worth considering. By a "confutation" I mean an argument that challenges a view on its own terms--that seeks to show that if you take the view seriously, you have to accept things that undermine the view.

Before laying out this possible confutation, let me quickly point out, for those who may not be used to thinking about the Bible in these terms, that there are a diversity of positions one can adopt concerning the Bible's relationship to divine revelation and its authority for Christians. Far too often, a false dilemma is presented according to which there are only two options with respect to the Bible: either (a) treat the Bible from cover to cover as the inerrant word of God, or (b) throw out the whole thing, regarding it as nothing more than a collection of superstitious writings by ancient peoples who knew next to nothing and surely weren't inspired by God, since there is no God. We might call (a) the fundamentalist Christian theory about the Bible and (b) the fundamentalist atheist theory.

These are not the only theories that you could have. You might, for example, believe that the biblical authors were endeavoring to report their own experience of God at work in their lives, or their community's experience of God at work among them. You might think that these authors were moved by profound revelations of the divine moving in their lives (or were trying to give voice the the collective revelatory experiences of their community)--but also believe that these authors were limited by their cultural and historical contexts, by their filters of prejudice and ignorance.

You might, in other words, treat these writings as a seminal collection of "testimonies" to God and his work. No evangelical Christian I know treats the witness testimonies of members of their congregation in terms of the sharp either/or that options (a) and (b) provide. If someone stands up in church and shares a moving story of how God has been at work in their lives, do evangelicals say, "Either we must treat this testimony as inerrant, or we must throw out the whole thing as rubbish?" Of course not. Nor do we treat our most trusted and admired pastors as inerrant, no matter how much we respect and attend to their sermons.

Likewise, one possible way of thinking about Scripture is along these lines: inspiring and inspired, but not inerrant. And you might treat the Scriptures as more than this, even without embracing inerrancy, because you might believe that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. You might, for example, believe that even if the human authors were fallible, where several are gathered together God becomes present in a transformative way (a way He wouldn't be when one focuses in narrowly on what one author has to say while ignoring the broader context).

After all, many voices in conversation can serve as a mutual corrective, exposing the errors of some by bringing to the fore the most resonant truths. A police officer who wants to know what happened at the scene of a crime will appreciate the presence of many witnesses--and if he interviews enough of them he will become pretty darned confident about at least some core facts even though he treats no witness as inerrant.

What is true about facts and events may be even more true about persons. If four people tell you about someone they all know, and their portraits of this person don't always match up--one describes the person as serene and in control during a moment of crisis, the other as fiery and anguished during that same moment--their collective witness might nevertheless give us a more accurate portrait than we'd get if we listened to any one of them. In fact, sometimes when you hear enough stories about someone, from enough different people so as to get past the individual perceptual prejudices, the subject of the stories becomes multi-dimensional, coming alive for you in a way that wouldn't happen with just a single narrative.

You might think that Scripture not only does something like this in relation to the person of Jesus, but does so in a way that facilitates a genuine relational encounter--that the Bible is a "means of grace" in much the way that the sacrament of holy communion is treated by many Christians as a means of coming into relational contact with God. And here's the thing about the sacrament: the bread could be stale, the wine sour, the minister who speaks the words of institution rather rough around the edges. It doesn't mean the sacrament can't be a transformative experience in which God's presence is deeply felt.

In the greatest symphonies, there is something that emerges that is greater than the parts. In fact, as a violinist I know that even in the best orchestras, individual musicians sometimes miss a run or play a high note off-key. Some people fake their way through a section because they haven't managed to practice it. But despite the individual errors here and there, the performance as whole can be magnificent. But you won't appreciate the whole if you focus narrowly on one note being played slightly flat by the basoon.

The point of all of this is that a confutation of the fundamentalist view of the Bible, even if successful, doesn't entail that you must throw your copy of the Bible in the trash or cease to treat it is as a profound vehicle for building a relationship with God. This black-and-white either/or approach serves the interests of fundamentalists of various stripes, but it doesn't necessarily serve the interest of truth.

So with that preface, here's the confutational argument. According to the fundamentalist Christian, when Paul writes something in the epistles, he's serving as a channel through which God communicates His revelation to humanity. God is speaking to us through Paul's pen--and God is doing it consistently. Everything Paul says has the character of a divine revelation.

And yet, in 1 Corinthians 7:10-12, Paul says the following:

To the married I give this command (not I, but the Lord): A wife must not separate from her husband. But if she does, she must remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband. And a husband must not divorce his wife.

To the rest I say this (I, not the Lord): If any brother has a wife who is not a believer and she is willing to live with him, he must not divorce her...

This is incomplete because what I'm interested in here isn't the content of the teachings about divorce, but rather about the distinction Paul makes in his paranthetical remarks. He is distinguishing between what he takes to be commanded by the Lord and what he takes to be his own injunctions. He distinguishes between what is coming from the Lord (perhaps he has heard various reports that Jesus himself issued a prohibition on divorce) and what is he is exhorting the community to do on his own authority.

This seems to suggest that Paul does not take himself to be doing what fundamentalist Christians claim that he was actually doing. Now, I suppose fundamentalists could say that God could work through Paul in this way even without Paul's knowledge. God could inspire every word Paul wrote, guaranteeing its inerrancy, even if Paul didn't himself realize that this is what was happening.

But if so, why didn't God keep Paul from erroneously distinguishing between his own exhortations and those that come from a higher authority--a divine one? Why does Paul set two sets of commands apart, indicating one as having a divine source in the Lord and the other as coming from Paul ("I, not the Lord")? If Paul is wrong to make this distinction, then Paul's letters aren't inerrant. If he's right to make this distinction, then the fundamentalist view of the Bible is mistaken.

Now I can imagine one rebuttal, that goes as follows: Paul was not saying that the second set of injunctions didn't come from God. He was simply distinguishing between injunctions that had been explicitly voiced by Jesus while Jesus was alive, and injunctions that Paul was now issuing. But that is consistent with both injunctions having their origin in God's will.

Now this move is possible, but it strains the natural reading of the passage. Why make a distinction of this sort if, as funamentalists maintain, Paul's injunctions have the same divine mandate, the same link to God's authority, that Paul took Jesus' words to have? The distinction becomes trivial on that assumption. It becomes a distinction not worth making. There is meaning not only in the direct sense of words, but in what is said and when. If you rush into my office and ask me urgently for a fire extinguisher, you'd have reason to complain about my deceptiveness were I to direct you to one three flights down if I knew there to be one right around the corner. There is something called "conversational implication." In this context, my directing you to a particular fire extinguisher conversationally implies that the one I'm directing you to is the nearest one. If this isn't true, I've deceived you.

You make a distinction because you think it matters. Paul thought the distinction between his own exhortations and those of the Lord mattered. This is conversationally implied by the text. If fundamentalists are right about the Bible, then this implication of the text is false. Paul was misled and expressed his false belief by treating his own pronouncements as relevantly different in authority from the pronouncements of Jesus.

Or maybe Paul wasn't misled. Perhaps the distinction he makes here is sound. In that case, we shouldn't treat everything Paul says as if it came directly from God. Either way, it seems that the extreme fundamentalist approach to Scripture has to go--although I don't think this undermines "high" views of Scripture more broadly.

So what do others think? Does this argument work, or am I missing something?

A Valentine Reflection on Romantic Love--and Some Lessons for Current Events

2012-02-14T11:17:00.003-06:00

One of the picture books in my daughter's closet recounts the story of St. Valentine. According to the story, in ancient Rome there was a Christian priest named Valentine who married Christian couples in defiance of an imperial decree that young men remain single (on the grounds that single men made better soldiers). Valentine was subsequently arrested and martyred, but not before curing the blindness of his jailer's daughter...through the miraculous power of a letter he sent her, signed "From your Valentine."

So little is known about the actual Valentine that one would be hard pressed to claim that any part of this story book is factual. From what I can tell, the bit about marrying Christian couples in defiance of Roman law was a later addition to the legend. In the version that appears in Legenda Aurea in the 13th Century, this piece is not present. There, the story focuses on Emperor Claudius II taking a personal interest in Valentine and trying to convince him to save his life by disavowing his Christian faith in favor of the official religion of Rome. Valentine not only refused but tried to convert the emperor to Christianity, and so was put to death.

At some point, however, Valentine's Day became linked to romantic love, and so elaborations were added to the Valentine legend to justify this link. A quick glance at internet sources suggests that the jailer's daughter is more usually presented as deaf rather than blind, and that the miraculous letter is a pretty recent development (invented by greeting card companies, perhaps?).

But however tenuous the link between romantic love and the saint --actually more than one saint--for whom Valentine's Day is named, the rise of a holiday dedicated to romantic love tells us something about ourselves.

Part of what it tells us is surely about dominant culture. Not every human society has connected sexual desire, long-term partnership, and the cultivation of romantic feelings in the ways that we do.

Even so, culture elaborates on possibilities and dispositions that are part of human nature. Sexual appetite needn't be connected with that complex cluster of feelings we call romantic love. But it often is. And while culture can strengthen this connected or attenuate it, the roots of the connection are tangled up in our biological natures. That intimate bonding that expresses itself in cries of eternal devotion, that surging desire to melt wholly into another person, that addictive longing in which the mere presence of the beloved can bring a heady rush of feeling, and absence is an unbearable ache--all of this is the raw material for romantic love as we know it.

And as far as I can tell, this raw material manifests itself to greater or lesser degrees in essentially every culture and every human heart...whether or not romantic love is lifted up, whether or not it is cultivated, nurtured, and celebrated in the ways that we see in our culture.

And it's no wonder that our culture cultivates, nurtures, and celebrates this cluster of feelings and desires and attendant practices. Because wherever it flowers, it's wonderful. Our love lives can and do enrich us profoundly, even as they make possible heartbreak, jealousy, volatile waves of emotion, and the anguish of unrequited longing. The heights of romantic love, when attained, make all the attendant risks seem worth it. The mere memory of such heights can keep couples doggedly together through extended periods of alienation.

The peaks of volatile passion that hit early in a relationship cannot, of course, be maintained forever. It would be exhausting, and it would distract us from the business of living. But those peaks can set the stage for something else, something at times tender, at times comfortably intimate, at times (of course) frustrating and disappointing, and at times echoing and even reclaiming those early summits of intensity. At their best, those early peaks can help to forge the conditions for a lifelong partnership in which our capacity to love is explored in all its many forms, and deepened.

A few months ago my father passed away. My parents had been married 49 years. What they had in those years was a complex mix of shared experiences, early passion, comfortable closeness, mutual support--and, of course, all of the frustrations and conflicts that inevitable accompany human relationships. My father died as my mother held him, stroking his head. When she reflects on the loss, she says she had the privilege of spending 49 years with one of the best human beings she's ever known. Romantic intimacy served as a foundation for the creation of something beautiful--a lifelong love story that enriched both of the people who shared in it, as well as spilling over onto countless others.

Our bodies are intimately involved in this, of course. But romantic love cannot be reduced to the mechanics of sex. Romantic love isn't about putting this body part into that one. No one who has been in love would engage in such reductionism. What romantic love does is the opposite of reduction: It contextualizes and hence lift up the physical acts of sex, making it more than it would otherwise be. The kind of partnership my parents had likewise contextualizes romantic love itself--making it an integral piece of something greater.

Romantic love at its best is a very great good. It is a gift that can sometimes become an integral dimension of one of the greatest blessings of a person's life. This doesn't mean that a life can't be rich and rewarding without it, that there aren't a great multitude of ways that a human being can discover meaning and learn to flourish, even in the absence of such love. But our human longing for romantic love is not a trivial thing. The opportunities for real joy in this life are finite, and romantic love provides one important place where human beings can drink from the well of joy, where they can come to know depths and heights of value and meaning they might not otherwise have known.

To attempt to systematically deny anyone the opportunity for such love and the resources for nurturing it...this is a very grave matter. The legend of Valentine that is found in my daughter's picture book is really about just such an effort, and the heroic response of a saint who refused to bend before the coercive effort to shut down love. Who would do such a thing today?

Rick Santorum would. Numerous people who live in my neighborhood would. Those who push for constitutional amendments to prevent marriage equality are doing it all over the country right now. Because, of course, this is precisely what the categorical condemnation of homosexuality--and the attempt to deny marriage equality for gays and lesbians--amounts to.

Our sexual orientation does not merely determine who we are attracted to sexually. It determined with whom we are capable of experiencing romantic love. Because sexual orientation does not lie within our control, a rule that would prohibit sexual relations between two people of the same sex is a rule which would systematically exclude some people from romantic love.

It is a rule that says, to some people, the following: "You are never to have this very great good in your life. While those around you fall in love, get married, struggle for the heights of passion and the tender comfort of long-term intimacy, you are required to go through life completely cut off from this monumental human good. We permanently exclude you from access to this source of richness and meaning because of factors beyond your control. And if you happen to fall in love, to build an intimate partnership around this love, to nurture and support another person in all the ways that define the best marriages, we will call what you have forged an abomination, and we will treat it as something that ought to be destroyed. If we find that you are drinking from this well of joy, we will think it a good thing if you and your partner are torn away from one another, and the well filled up with concrete."

The part of the Valentine legend which says that Emperor Claudius made marriage illegal may be nothing but myth. But today, there is an Emperor Claudius. His spirit is at work in all those who seek to systematically deprive our gay and lesbian citizens of access to marriage, who seek to promulgate and enforce norms that would ensure that sexual minorities never know the joys of what is celebrated on Valentine's Day.

There are those who seek to justify this, who think there are good reasons for it. But given the enormity of what is being denied some people, the justification would have to be as powerful as the source of joy and meaning that some people are told they can never have access to.

Waving a napkin around the way Rick Santorum does isn't enough to justify such systematic exclusion from a profound human good. Pretending that it's just about sex and perversion doesn't cut it. Other arguments--appeals to a bare smattering of biblical proof texts or to a controversial working-out of a religious moral theory that roots ethical norms in the perceived purposes of biological plumbing--have never struck me as very compelling even within the Christian traditions that espouse them. And these arguments certainly can't be given decisive weight in a secular society that embraces the separation of church and state.

But it isn't my aim here to decisively refute the supposed justifications for the categorical exclusion of some human beings from one of the great joys of human existence. My aim is to highlight just how serious, just how presumptively wrong, such an exclusion is. My aim is to invite an application of the Golden Rule, to ask all of us on this Valentine's Day to think about what romantic love means to us in our lives, and to think about what it would mean for us were our deepest loves to be labeled abomination.

My aim is to invite everyone to imagine growing up being told something like the following: "Better to have never loved at all, or to have loved and lost, than to have found true love and been enriched by it."

My aim is to invite us to think about what we celebrate today, and then to think about living in a world where this good is celebrated by others but denied us. Imagine falling in love with a good soul, a beautiful person, being filled with all those feelings we call romantic love, and then being told, "Don't you dare act on those feelings. That would be an affront to the very creator of the universe. But that's just you, of course. I'm going to go home and drink deeply from the meaning that my marriage gives me. Look on and envy, but don't think of trying to commit such an awful abomination as to love in anything like the way I do. That is a privilege reserved for people like me, who had the good fortune to be straight."

Only if we can appreciate what that is like can we have any claim on fairly assessing the moral status of condemning someone's propensity to love. Justifications for condemning same-sex love that don't begin with deep empathetic reflection on how it would be to have this done to us--justifications which so decisively ignore the Golden Rule--should never be taken seriously.

Opening Night for Love

2012-02-09T09:29:00.000-06:00

Tonight's the night! It's opening night for the hilarious (and slightly naughty) musical comedy, "I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change" at Town & Gown Theatre in Stillwater, OK.

The brilliant cast is depicted above. I provide the violin part. There are more than 20 musical numbers--and the violin is featured in almost all of them. So I've been busy practicing things outside my usual classical repertoire (tango, blues, jazz, even some serious rock violin!). Here's me posing with the pianist (Gloria) and music director (Cody):

I'm sure that were I to reflect on it for long enough, I could connect themes in the show with the kinds of issues I typically discuss on this blog...but I don't want to. So nya. Instead, I'm going to go practice the bit I stumbled over during dress rehearsal last night. Then I'll probably spend a few moments thinking and writing about Simone Weil.

Chris Trapper in Concert--What Happens When a Philosopher Tries to Write a Concert Review

2012-02-03T15:30:00.001-06:00

I remember Chris Trapper as a lanky high school kid with Garfunkel hair and a lovely tenor voice.

More significantly, I recall that he was a genuinely good soul, a bit shy, and something of a goofball—which suited me well when we ended up wandering the swanky hallways of the city-in-a-building hotel in the Catskill Mountains where the New York State School Music Educators Association hosted its annual All State Music Festival.

I was there playing my violin in the orchestra. He, of course, was singing in the choir. But when we weren’t rehearsing, the two of us seemed to find some kind of special pleasure in disrupting the tonsil-groping passion of high school kids cooler than us who’d hooked up at the festival. We’d practice slapstick tripping-over-our own feet in front of them. Or we’d break into the “Love Boat” theme song in two-part harmony.

Last Sunday, for the first time in more than 25 years, I saw Chris again—in concert at the Performing Arts Studio in Norman, Oklahoma, as part of the Winter Wind Singer-Songwriter series. It was an intimate venue inside a converted train station. Trains still occasionally went by.

Chris's lankiness is gone, as is the Garfunkel hair. His tenor voice, which in high school still retained traces of that boy soprano timbre, has given way to something more mature and suited to the alternative folk-pop genre he now performs. But it seems that Chris has remained a genuinely good soul, a bit shy, and something of a goofball.

The weekend of his show was, for my wife and me, bookended by concerts. On Friday night we went to the huge BOK Center arena in Tulsa to see Darius Rucker (former front man for Hootie and the Blowfish) and the new country-pop group sensation, Lady Antebellum. It was a great show, polished and energetic, filled with great songs performed by tiny little people very far away.

Chris Trapper’s show on Sunday night was, for me, the more enjoyable event—and not just because I got a hug from the performer at the end of the show. Chris’s songs tell stories, and between songs Chris shares amusing, self-deprecating anecdotes from his life which often reveal the inspiration behind the songs in ways that add depth and texture to the music. And I laughed a lot, because, of course, he’s still a goofball (as evidenced by the autobiographical song he played during the second set, “Not Normal”)

The songs he sings in a performance are a mere sampling of a truly prolific songwriting career, and it’s hard not to be impressed with just how many really good songs he’s written. I’ll confess that while I knew he’d composed “This Time” from the Grammy nominated August Rush soundtrack, and I knew he (and his former band, The Push Stars) had something on the soundtrack for There’s Something About Mary, I hadn’t known what…until he sang “Everything Shines” and I found myself humming along with a song I really liked but never knew was his.

Chris started the evening without saying a word—just picking up his guitar and drawing us in with a pair of energetic songs. Finally he paused, smiled to the too-small gathering (it should have been a packed house, even if it was his first time in Norman and second time in Oklahoma). After being on the stage and singing his songs for a few minutes, he was ready to introduce himself. Within moments, everyone in the converted train station was caught up in Chris’s spell, his charm and humor and music.

Part of that spell is cast by what I’m calling his shyness. On Friday night, Darius Rucker moved across the stage with infectious energy, as if this were the most comfortable place in the world for him to be. The front man for Lady Antebellum was effortlessly charismatic, even slick as he owned the BOK arena stage.

Chris, by contrast, isn’t slick. He’s human. He pushes past an initial nervous stutter to tell a story about his own imperfect history—and you know he’s on the stage because making music, and sharing it with others, is what he loves.

Having just recently read the Time Magazine article about introverts, I can’t help but think of this contrast in those terms. The arena performers on Friday night struck me as classic extroverts: energized by the crowds, feeding off the adulation, the cheering masses waving their cell-phone equivalents of bic lighters. But were I to hazard a guess, I’d say that Chris’s prolific songwriting abilities are in part fueled by the same kind of introversion that typically characterizes writers and academics. In our solitude we are able to focus, to process our experiences and ideas, and to channel them into words or arguments—or songs. But at some point as we move into adulthood we realize that these creations need to be shared, that their true value and meaning is born when they resonate with another human soul, when someone else hears and understands and is moved.

And so we stumble, perhaps trembling a bit, out of our solitude and into the crowded room. And there we are, in all our vulnerable humanity, blinking into the lights because we have something to say.

In an arena concert like the one I went to Friday night, the crowds are entertained—often enormously—while the performers are fed by the adulation. In Chris’s more intimate show, the dynamic is different. I’d say that it’s the audience that’s fed.

I’m not going to make any sweeping generalizations, claiming that this is the difference between performances by extroverts and introverts or anything like that. But at least in Chris’s case, that goofy shyness I remember from when he was a kid has come to shape the dynamic of his shows. Here is someone in all his complex humanity, sharing songs about humanity in all its complexity.

And all of us who’ve had the privilege to be there are a little better off because he stepped out of his solitude and onto the stage.

Is Gingrich a Hypocrite? Should We Care? Some Reflections on Hypocrisy

2012-02-01T20:50:00.000-06:00

It's a bit of an understatement to say that I’m not a fan of Newt Gingrich. But I’ll confess to feeling a pang of sympathy for him when I read about his recent exchange with Univision correspondent Jorge Ramos.

In that exchange, Ramos pushed Gingrich on the matter of Gingrich’s supposed hypocrisy, something Gingrich has been relentlessly accused of—by various media pundits and bloggers, students, academics, surfers, Chinese acrobats, perhaps a few dogs. The primary basis for the charge is that Gingrich led the charge against President Clinton in the wake of the Monica Lewinski sex scandal…while he was himself energetically pursuing his own extramarital affair. These hypocrisy accusations have gotten new life recently from the revelation—in an interview with Gingrich’s second wife—that around the time of the Lewinski scandal Newt approached his wife about an “open marriage,” presumably so that he wouldn’t have to give up either woman.

Gingrich deflected efforts at the South Carolina debate to confront him about his infidelities and supposed hypocrisy—by attacking those who would focus on such irrelevant concerns. Ramos, however, had more luck in engaging Gingrich on the issue last week at a forum in Florida. But before the charge of hypocrisy could even be leveled, Gingrich quickly stressed that his criticisms of Clinton weren’t about the affair as such, but about Clinton perjuring himself under oath.

Ramos doggedly pressed on with his line of questioning as if Gingrich hadn’t made this distinction. Three times, in fact, Ramos pushed the hypocrisy charge as Gingrich continued stressing that what he targeted Clinton for was not his infidelities but his felony perjury—a crime Gingrich stressed he had not committed.

Ramos essentially ignored the distinction Gingrich was making. The third time Ramos ignored Gingrich—saying that “people think that’s hypocritical to criticize President Clinton for doing the same thing that you were doing at the same time”—Gingrich snapped back with, “Okay, there is some place there where there’s a mental synapse missing.”

By that point, I wanted to say to Ramos the same damned thing.

Here’s the point: It is not hypocritical for someone with chronic infidelity problems to push for the impeachment of a sitting President if the reason is that the President committed felony perjury. To plow ahead as Ramos did, in the face of Gingrich’s explicit assertion that Clinton’s infidelity was not the issue—well, at best it seems bullheaded and evasive.

And Ramos is hardly alone. Gingrich has, essentially, offered two rebuttals to the argument that Ramos and others have been making: First of all there's the pre-emptive rebuttal, which he offered at the South Carolina debate: It doesn’t matter, it’s a distraction from the real issues that should define a campaign. Secondly, there's the substantive rebuttal offered to Ramos: He wasn’t guilty of hypocrisy in any event.

You don’t do anyone a service by simply ignoring these rebuttals and plowing ahead with the hypocrisy charge as if Gingrich had never opened his mouth.

So: Is Gingrich a hypocrite? And does it matter?

As to the second question, it’s important to be clear about something. Sometimes what hypocrites have to say is exactly right. If a pot calls the kettle black…well, if the kettle is black, then the pot got it right. That you’re being hypocritical doesn’t mean you’re wrong. So if there's a problem with hypocrisy, it isn't that it falsifies what the hypocrite is saying.

In fact, the ubiquity of human shortcomings means that anyone who preaches against moral failings--especially ones that involve falling prey to temptation--is bound to be a pot calling the kettle black. Does that mean no one should exhort us to resist various temptations on pain of hypocrisy?

Hardly. Real hypocrisy is more than just failing to live as you preach. Falling short of your own moral ideals isn't hypocrisy. It's humanity. Real hypocrisy involves a kind of self-righteousness in relation to what one is preaching against--a self-righteousness that invites others to abhor "those" people, people against whom the hypocrite hopes to present him- or herself in a favorable light. In other words, hypocrisy involves explicitly expressing and encouraging harsh judgments, punitive responses, and moral outrage against others who have behaved in a certain way—while seeking to avoid similar judgment in one’s own case (even though one has done the same sort of thing). In another variant, it involves making harsh judgments of people with whom one doesn't identify (such as candidates one doesn't like, or members of a different religion) while shielding from such judgment those with whom one identifies (even if they're guilty of the same thing.

Now suppose what you are preaching against is something you yourself have done in the past—but you explicitly disavow and condemn your past actions now. If, in fact, you really are reformed and you really don’t do that sort of thing anymore, we wouldn’t call you a hypocrite. Maybe we should call you a “remorseful moralizer” (there may be something troubling about moralizing in general, but not every case of moralizing is necessarily hypocrisy).

But suppose you adopt the attitude of a remorseful moralizer as a strategy for deflecting condemnation from the current you--in effect, trying to restrict that condemnation to the "past" you. Suppose you’re still just as bad as you ever were. Suppose you’re still a shameless womanizer with pathological infidelity problems—a “fornicator,” for short. You want to condemn fornication without tarring yourself (because you see an advantage to be gained from doing that), but there’s no hiding from your past fornication. Everyone knows about it. In that case, you might pose as a remorseful moralizer even though you’re not one. Instead, you’re a hypocrite.

And this example helps reveal why hypocrisy matters. Hypocrisy essentially involves misrepresentation. And it’s misrepresentation for a purpose—the purpose being to enjoy the benefits (whatever they might be) that come from condemning others while avoiding the costs of being condemned oneself. It is, in short, a kind of self-serving deception. A habitual hypocrite is, put bluntly, a selfish liar.

Of course, no one is fully defined by hypocrisy—no one is simply a hypocrite. But for some people, the propensity for hypocrisy is so much a part of their character that there is reason for us to be concerned about how extensively self-serving deceptiveness might shape their behavior (in, say, political office). On that level, the question of whether a person is guilty of hypocrisy—and how habitually—is indeed relevant in a Presidential candidate.

So: Is Gingrich a hypocrite? On this point, it’s important to remember that when Gingrich takes a strong stand on the campaign trail for “family values,” you can’t paint Gingrich as a hypocrite simply by dredging up past misdeeds—especially if he’s gone on record expressing remorse. Gingrich is putting himself out there as a remorseful moralizer. The question is whether this is an honest representation, or whether he is posing. It's only in the latter case that he's being hypocritical.

Along similar lines, the fact that Gingrich at one time sought an “open marriage” does not as such render hypocritical his current claims that same-sex marriage should be rejected because it violates the traditional “one-man/one-woman” model of marriage. After all, Gingrich might have undergone a profound change of heart. He might now look upon his past desire for an open marriage with horror. He might be deeply committed to the one-man/one-woman model now, even if he wasn’t then. In that case, he wouldn’t be a hypocrite—even though, of course, he’d still be deeply wrong in opposing marriage equality (and that’s a reason not to vote for him whether he’s a hypocrite or not).

Another thing to keep in mind: Even if Gingrich used to be a hypocrite, it doesn’t mean he is still a hypocrite. But a past legacy of hypocrisy is certainly admissible as evidence when trying to decide whether someone is a hypocrite now. Entrenched habits of character being hard to break, in the absence of clear evidence of character transformation it is often wise to be skeptical of someone who says, “But I’ve changed!” You don't go back to a wife-beater just on their say-so that they're no longer abusive. Likewise, you might not want to re-elect a chronic self-serving liar without clear evidence of a transformation.

So, in deciding whether Gingrich is hypocrite now, it will be helpful to take seriously his track record. But that goal is not served when people like Ramos throw out the hypocrisy label without considering the kinds of objections Gingrich offers. Taking a track recond seriously means honestly assessing it, which isn't served by ignoring objections. More significantly, Ramos's approach may lead many to pre-emptively dismiss the hypocrisy charge as nothing but groundless name-calling.

For a hypocrisy charge to be warranted, you have to demonstrate a conflict between what someone was preaching at a given time and what the person was doing at that time. And so, if Gingrich insists that in pushing for Clinton’s impeachment, it was all about perjury rather than infidelity, an astute journalist wouldn’t just keep plowing ahead with the same unmodified argument.

Suppose, however, that while Gingrich pursued impeachment based on the perjury charges (because those are the charges that would stick legally), he knew that the infidelity itself was what would have the most traction with the public—and so engaged in and encouraged moral grandstanding about Clinton's failures of moral character displayed by his sexual dalliances. If Gingrich had done that during the whole Monica Lewinski affair, he would have been deeply hypocritical then and a liar now.

So, did Gingrich engage in moral grandstanding about Clinton’s infidelity during the Monica Lewinski affair? Is that something he’s deceptively leaving out now, in order to avoid the hypocrisy charge? If so, that speaks to an ongoing pattern of deception and not just a past tendency towards hypocrisy. To be honest, my memory of those events is sufficiently hazy that while it seems to me that Gingrich did engage in such grandstanding, I can't swear to it. But a journalist has the resources to very readily determine the answer.

Speaking of lying, one could quite convincingly argue that no small measure of hypocrisy is displayed in taking a strong, self-righteous stand against lying under oath if, for example, you’ve just lied multiple times to the Congressional ethics committee in an attempt to get ethics violation charges against you dismissed. If you’ve been recently fined a whopping $300,000 for ethics violations that include deliberate deception aimed at deflecting an investigation of misconduct, there may be something hypocritical about leading the charge against someone else for doing the same sort of thing.

Maybe Gingrich can make a distinction here. I suppose, strictly speaking, lying your way out of an affair in a legal deposition isn’t exactly the same thing as lying your way out of an ethics violation in letters to the Congressional ethics committee. Legally, the two are different. Can hypocrisy concerns be derailed by appeal to such legal differences?

And for how long has the rhetoric of conservative “family values” shaped his political career? Was his rhetoric very much like it is now…back when he was cheating on his wives, divorcing them to marry different ones, asking for open marriages? If so, there is a pattern of hypocrisy here—and that pattern may lead us to justifiably ask whether anything has changed, whether his current thumping for family values is any less hypocritical today.

Again, my memory tells me that Gingrich has been thumping for family values in much the way he does now for a long while--but, again, a clear record of this (of the sort journalists could readily provide) would be much more helpful in substantiating hypocrisy charges that a bullheaded line of questioning that is so oblivious to Gingrich's rebuttal that even someone with no political sympathy for Newt wants to cheer when Newt spits a quip about missing synapses.

One final remark: Whether or not Gingrich is a hypocrite, anyone who has insisted of other politicians that their private sexual lives are highly relevant to assessing their suitability for political life would be courting hypocrisy if they treated Gingrich's blatant record of sexual infidelity and disregard for marital vows as politically irrelevant.

Damned Sinners Addendum

2012-01-25T15:25:00.000-06:00

My God's Final Victory co-author, John Kronen, has been pushing me a bit on my arguments in this "Damned Sinners" series. Specifically, he's been stressing that there's an idea embraced by supralapsarian Calvinists (not by infralapsarian ones) that I don't seem to take seriously enough in these posts. And he's suggested that it's this failure to take that idea seriously that might've led someone like Steve Hays to think that the Problem of Damned Sinners could be so quickly dispensed with.

I think John has a point. You see, on supralapsarian Calvinism the ultimate purpose of creation is to display God's majesty, which is found both in God's merciful love and in His justice. But this theology assumes that God cannot fully display both together (an assumption that I think wreaks havoc on some of the most important and profound understandings of the Atonement, by the way, but I won't get into that here). To fully display both and thus achieve the full purpose of creation, the creation must be such that there are appropriate beings on which to manifest the glory of His justice--"vessels of wrath"--and others on which to manifest His merciful love--"vessels of mercy."

It follows from this that the supralapsarian God couldn't fully achieve the purpose of creation without the existence of vessels of wrath to serve as proper objects of the divine displeasure. And so, the existence of sin and sinners is taken to be required in order for God to put His majesty on full display. In other words, the supralapsarian Calvinist believes that God wants there to be sinners--and actually designed His creation so that there would be--because in their absence He'd only be able to display half of what is so majestically wonderful about Him.

If this is right, then what I say about sin and divine retribution in this series of posts is incomplete. It's not simply the case that divine justice neutralizes the negative value of sin (althought that's part of it). And it's not simply the case that sin justly repudiated by God is "as good" as no sin at all. Rather, on this theology a world without sin would be worse than a world with sin--at least so long as in the latter, all the sinners end up writhing in eternal anguish for the sinfulness that God guaranteed they'd possess in order to be able to justly punish them for all eternity and thus display His justice.

Or, put another way, this theology takes it that the act of neutralizing the negative value of sin with a punitive response produces a meta-level good (the display of divine justice) that wouldn't have otherwise existed. On this theology, the problem of explaining why there is so much wickedness in a world created by a morally perfect God is answered as follows: God wants wicked people to be there, because only then can His justice be fully put on display through His smiting of them.

And so, on this view, God really is like the government that would rather have the murder rate spiral out of control, so long as every murderer is justly punished, than have a society without murder. On this theology, God positively wills sin as a means of displaying His justice, and as such does not want a world without sin. On this theology, the existence of that which is fundamentally opposed to God is better than its nonexistence, so long as it's properly punished. On this theology, sin simply isn't as thoroughly bad as other theologies (including my Lutheran one) take it to be.

But here's the thing: this theology strikes me as so morally awful that the thought that there are people out there who really embrace it at a fundamental level (not just playing pious lip service to it out of communal allegiance) makes me spiritually nauseous. I think that if I could get myself to really believe that deep down anyone wholeheartedly embraced this idea, I'd be pushed in the direction of a species of supralapsarian Calvinism in which God created supralapsarian Calvinists so as to have vessels of wrath on which he could heap his just outrage against people who harbor such awful convictions.

I'm kidding of course. I'd remain a universalist even if I could be convinced that anyone wholeheartedly embraced supralapsarian Calvinism. Really. My point is that since my aversion to this theology is so potent, part of me doesn't believe that there are people who honestly think it's right; and so I find myself developing my arguments as if there were no such people--and this means that some of what I say may end up begging the question in relation to anyone who really does embrace this theology deep down.

Reviewing my previous posts in this series, it seems clear to me that I did not ever take very seriously the following idea: Murder punished is better than no murder at all because the former not only fully erases the negative value of murder but in the process of doing so manifests the meta-level good of justice-having-been-done. And hence, God deliberately acts to ensure that there are murderers (and other kinds of sinners).

I never took this idea seriously, and hence never show how my arguments bear on it. But this idea is one that some Calvinists explicitly endorse. As such, my arguments don't seriously and explicitly engage with an idea that at least some Calvinists explicitly endorse.

Mia culpa.

That said, I don't think my core argument is undermined by this oversight. Even if the existence of justly repudiated sin is taken to be better than no sin at all because it makes possible the meta-level good of manifesting God's justice, we still have to confront the intuitively implausible idea that an act which guarantees the propagation of sin succeeds in neutralizing sin's negative value. You can't get the meta-level good if the evil of sin isn't neutralized by the punitive response. And I just can't see how this punitive response is supposed to achieve such a result.

It seems pretty clear that (given Calvinist assumptions about grace being a necessary condition for overcoming sinfulness) being cast eternally from God's presence does guarantee that one persist eternally in a state of sin. The punishment for sin thus perpetuates sin, and this magnification of sinfulness in the universe is supposed to produce the meta-level good of manifesting God's just wrath against sin.

How?

One answer I anticipate runs something along the following lines: "It's a mystery we can't understand, but we know it's true because of divine revelation in Scripture." But even if you grant a high view of Scripture according to which Paul's use of the "vessels of mercy/vessels of wrath" language (Romans 9:22) was God-inspired, it's an enormous challenge to holistically interpret such passages in light of other ones--such as, for example, all of Romans 11, which is following up on the same issue that motivates Paul to ask his hypothetical "vessels of wrath" question (Paul asks "What if" God operates in the way that the supralapsarian Calvinist insists God in fact operates).

In Romans 11, the "hardening" of Israel against God, and the concomitant divine repudiation, is described as a stage in a process aimed at saving both "the full number of the Gentiles" and "all Israel" (vs. 25-26). This chapter ends with the striking claim that "For God has bound over all men to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all" (vs. 32). This starts to sound as if, on Paul's view of things, each of us is both a vessel of wrath and a vessel of mercy, albeit at different stages in our moral and spiritual evolution--and it sounds as if serving as a vessel of wrath is always in the service of the ultimate goal of mercy being shown to all.

But, of course, at other points it doesn't sound as if he's saying this at all. Limiting ourselves to Paul's epistle to the Romans, sometimes Paul sounds like an outright and blatant universalist (e.g. Romans 5:18-19 and elsewhere); at other times he sounds as if this is merely a fervent hope and prayer (Romans 10:1). And at one point he asks a hypothetical question that, if treated as if it were a veiled assertion rather than a question, would support supralapsarian Calvinism.

The attempt to read the whole, to understand the parts in light of the whole, and to extract from such a complicated text a coherent theology that does justice to the whole given the apparent tensions and conflicts--that task isn't easy. And it seems to me that part of what Christians who pursue such a task need is to recognizing when a particular interpretive effort has, for example, implications that clash with the voice of conscience, or produces internal problems that raise concerns about consistency.

In other words, even given a very high view of Scripture there is an important place for philosophy in the assessment and development of doctrinal views--an important place for the pursuit of such philosophical tasks as tracing out the counterintuitive implications of a view, or calling into question its internal coherence, or determining what other plausible beliefs have to be rejected if one is to hold to a certain view.

But all such efforts are, of course, fallible and shaped by human prejudices. Which is why it is so important to engage in such efforts in thoughtful conversation with others who might not share our particular prejudices (although they'll have their own), who might know things we don't (and vice versa), and who might notice where our reasoning goes astray even as we notice where theirs does.

Philosophy done best is philosophy done in community. One reason I appreciate my co-author, John--and other philosophical interlocutors in my life, and the various thoughtful contributors to this blog--is because they help to provide me with this community of discourse.

Damned Sinners, Part III: Why Think the Damned Would Sin Forever?

2012-01-24T12:36:00.004-06:00

This is the third part in a series of posts. If you haven’t read the first two, they can be found here and here.

In these posts I am considering two responses to what I am calling “The Problem of Damned Sinners.” The problem is one faced by traditional vindicatory views of hell, which see damnation as a just punishment for sin. In brief, the problem is that damnation involves alienation from God, and alienation from God deprives persons of a necessary condition for overcoming sin (arguably the necessary condition), namely divine grace. So damnation punishes sin by making sure that sinners can never escape their sinfulness. How in the world is that supposed to erase the negative value of sin and make things right?

In my last post I looked at a response offered by a conservative Calvinist, Steve Hays, and I argued that the response fails to appreciate the force of the problem, and as such faces two difficulties: First, even if its chief premise is acceptable, it fails to undercut The Problem of Damned Sinners; second, its chief premise is not acceptable.

In this post I want to consider a question about the Problem of Damned Sinners posed by Randal Rauser in a comment on his blog. Now Randal seems to understand the problem, and I think he senses the force of it. But he raises an important question: Why suppose that damnation has to involve endless sinning? We might reframe this question as an argument against the Problem of Damned Sinners, as follows:

1. If we adopt a conception of damnation according to which the damned do not endlessly persist in sin, then we escape the Problem of Damned Sinners.

2. There is nothing that prevents us from adopting such a conception of damnation

3. Therefore, we can escape the Problem of Damned Sinners

Now Randal, an astute thinker, already anticipates some responses to such an argument: First, it appears that passages of Scripture naturally lend themselves to interpreting the state of damnation as essentially involving rebellion against God—such that if you view this state as eternal, you will be called upon by Scripture to view the rebellion as eternal, too. (And, of course, to rebel against God is to sin.)

Second, even if we escape the Problem of Damned Sinners by adopting a view of damnation in which the damned don’t sin forever, this solution may generate new problems relating to the justice of inflicting eternal damnation on creatures who at some point stop offending against God. You might end up with a kind of “out of the frying pan, into the fire” response.

I will pursue neither of these responses here. I do, however, think it is important to stress that there has been, over the centuries, a range of conceptions of hell (John and I, both in GFV and in our contribution to The Problem of Hell: A Philosophical Anthology, provide a kind of philosophical taxonomy of possible species of the doctrine of hell). And it is important to stress that problems that arise for some conceptions of hell may not arise for others.

I’ll be the first to admit that the Problem of Damned Sinners does not arise in relation to more liberal conceptions of hell, such as C.S. Lewis’s, according to which the gates of hell “are locked from the inside” by the autonomous choices of the damned. The interesting question, then, is how extensive the problem is. It would not be very extensive if the notion of ongoing sinfulness were logically and conceptually separable from other things that defenders of eternal damnation have been committed to.

Since my formulation of the problem specifically targeted the coherence of a Calvinist conception of damnation, I will concern myself primarily with that perspective. Unless my grasp of Calvinist theology is deficient, traditional Calvinists believed all three of the following:

(a) The damned are permanently alienated from God as a just punishment for sin
(b) The damned endure eternal conscious torment, again as a just punishment for sin
(c) The damned continue eternally in a state of sinful rebellion against God

If this is right, then I could, in principle, rest my case and simply note that here is a traditional view of damnation that faces the full force of the Problem of Damned Sinners simply by virtue of its affirmation of (c). But the philosophically interesting question is whether one could give up (c) while continuing to endorse (a) and (b). If one could, then defenders of a fairly traditional Calvinist view of damnation could escape the Problem of Damned sinners readily enough, without having to give up too much.

What I want to do here, then, is argue that this can't be done--that, at least within a broadly Calvinistic theology, embracing (a) and (b) requires also embracing (c). If you want to hold to a punitive view of damnation in which God casts sinners away from His presence and subjects them to eternal conscious torment, then eternal sinfulness will also have to be part of your view. And so, the Problem of Damned Sinners will be one you'll need to confront.

I am thus not going to argue here that the Problem of Damned Sinners is a problem for views of hell that give up on (b). For example, one might hold that the damned are eventually so overcome by the horror of their state that they retreat into perpetual unconsciousness to escape their suffering (something God permits). While we could imagine such a view of hell, I will concede for the sake of argument that it avoids the Problem of Damned Sinners as I have been posing that problem here.

But making this concession requires that I pause to draw a distinction between what I am doing here and what John and I do in our book. As I noted in the previous post, the version of the Problem of Damned Sinners that John and I develop in GFV is a bit different from the version I’ve been considering in these posts. In GFV, we argue that a perfectly good God would not will sin, but that by imposing eternal alienation as a punishment for sin, God would be willing sin by withholding from the damned what is necessary to avoid sinning.

This problem would not disappear, even if we conceded that the damned eventually fell into a state of permanent unconsciousness. My argument here, then, is that there is a further problem confronted by those who want to say, not only that being cast away from God is a just punishment for sin, but that those who are justly cast away experience eternal conscious torment. By including the traditional idea of eternal conscious torment in their view of hell, they thereby commit themselves to the idea that the damned keep sinning forever—that the very offense which warrants the punitive response is endlessly propagated by the punitive response. And it is hard to see how the negative value of an offense can be erased by a response that propagates the offense.

One thing to note up front is that much of the Christian theological tradition (not just Calvinism) has been committed to (c), that is, to the idea that the damned are eternally mired in a state of extreme sin. John and I, in our book, look at why the tradition has done so. In briefest terms, if damnation involves being preserved in a state of permanent alienation from God, then damnation involves being preserved in existence while being forever cut off from the only thing that can (given Christian theological assumptions) result in a non-sinful reorientation of our values. At the very least then, we should conclude that the damned will never succeed in overcoming their fundamentally disordered values and the sinful dispositions which accompany them.

Some might challenge the strength of the case for this conclusion, and I invite those who do so to look at what John and I say in GFV. But that invitation aside, it would be hard for a Calvinist to challenge our view on this point, given their theological commitments. Calvinists hold that we are lost to sin without divine grace, and they hold that damnation means being cut off permanently from divine grace. My original argument was directed to a Calvinist theology, and it’s pretty clear that on such a theology the damned could never overcome a sinfully disordered value system.

Even so, a Calvinist might claim that, while the damned never cease to have sinful dispositions, they do stop sinning actively. When Randal says, “But the doctrine of hell doesn’t require that we view the final state of the lost as consisting of ongoing active rebellion,” we might view him as gesturing to a rebuttal along these lines: The damned, while surely doomed to a state of eternal sinfulness given Calvinist theology, needn’t be construed as actively sinning against God for all eternity. Could the problem posed for Calvinist theology be escaped if we see the damned as (eventually) pushed into a passive state in which they are unable to act on any of their intolerable dispositions?

Let me approach the question this way: It seems to me that essentially every theological tradition that embraces some variant of the doctrine of hell holds that the damned hate God. And hatred of God is, of course, a grievous sin in any remotely orthodox theological tradition. But when it comes to something like hatred, we might reasonably ask whether we can meaningfully distinguish between actively hating God and simply possessing a hateful disposition. At least some might wonder whether, when it comes to an "attitudinal sin" of this sort, such a distinction can be drawn. If you “harbor” hatred for God but don’t have the opportunity to “do” anything about it—not even shake your fist at God, or curse God in your thoughts, or gnash your teeth—is your hatred any less actual?

In other words, there's a difference between merely having the potential to hate God if certain conditions obtain, and actually hating God. And surely the damned actually hate God. And so, it might be argued, they are actively hating even when they can't act on their hating.

Again, we’re assuming a view of hell in which the damned endure eternal conscious torment. In other words, they’re conscious. And they hate God. And they are in torment because of the rejection of this God they hate. Even if they’re not doing anything about their hatred—even if they’re not making active choices in which hatred is the motive—wouldn’t the hating itself nevertheless be active under those conditions?

But let’s set that worry aside, and imagine that this distinction can be made. What would prevent the damned from actively hating God, given their disposition to do so? The only answer I can think of appeals to eternal conscious torment itself: The damned, we might imagine, are so caught up with their subjective suffering that all their attention is focused on it, leaving them no time to “act on” any of their sinful dispositions, even their dispositional hatred of God. There’s still a sense in which they hate God here, but they aren’t “actively” hating him because they’re too fixated on their suffering.

This picture strikes me as problematic on a number of fronts. First, it seem that the perpetuation of dispositional hatred of God, even if the person is prevented from activating it, is an orientation of the self so opposed to God that it would constitute an ongoing affront to God’s majesty whether it could be actively expressed or not. Why think that futile gnashing of one’s teeth against God is an affront, but it isn’t a comparable affront to harbor a hatred that would result in such futile gestures were one not screaming in agony?

But I won’t develop that argument here. Instead, consider the following. If we are supposing that the damned are in a conscious state of suffering, one in which they are so fixed on their suffering that they cannot attend to God enough even to actively hate him, it follows that their attention is fixed wholly on themselves and their own misery. Let’s call this the self-fixation of the damned.

I would argue that, on an essentially conservative theology of sin, attention lies at the heart of sin. Those who hate God do so because they are not attending to God as such (were they to see God as He is in Himself, there would be no room for anything but love). They are instead focused on themselves and “seeing” God only through the filter of that self-absorption. They have made their (confused) self-seeking desires the object of their fixed attention, and when they think of God at all, it is in terms of the imagined effects of God on the satisfaction of these desires.

Because, of course, they see enough to recognize that God challenges the single-minded pursuit of their subjective desires. What they don’t see is that, were they to attend fully to God, those subjective desires would be displaced by desires that would truly satisfy them (in a way that the attainment of their existing desires simply can’t). They don’t see that God’s opposition to their subjective desires is an opposition to what harms them. Because they are so fixed on their own self-seeking impulses rather than on God, they are fundamentally confused about both their own good and about God. This is the heart of sin—it’s root, if you will: Sin as an act of misdirected attention, attention that focuses more on the self than on the Ultimate Good.

And the self-fixation of the damned, whereby their attention is so focused on their own suffering that they can pay attention to nothing else, seems to be nothing but an intensification of the misdirected attention that is the root of sin. And attending is something we do. To attend is active. And so the damned would, it seems, be actively sinning.

Of course, we are assuming that their suffering is so overwhelming that it’s impossible for the damned to focus on anything else. God has brought this about, imposed upon them suffering that (given their psychologies) totally consumes them. But if that’s right, mightn’t someone argue that, since they haven’t chosen to attend as they do, their attention isn’t active?

Let me make two points here. There is a difference between potentially attending to something and actively attending. Surely the damned here are actively attending to their suffering. In that sense, it is clear that their attention is active whether they chose it or not. Second, the idea that their attention can’t be something they do because they couldn’t have done otherwise rests implicitly on the assumption that an action isn’t an action unless it is free in the libertarian sense.

And this is something that conservative Calvinists have to deny. Following the biblical claim that sinners “are in bondage to sin and cannot free themselves,” Calvinists (and not just Calvinists) insist that, in the absence of divine grace, our sinfulness is entirely determined. Hence, Calvinists have to believe that our sinful actions remain actions even though they are determined. More broadly, I would suggest even those who believe in some kind of libertarian freedom aren’t committed to the view that only libertarian free acts are acts. Even if there are cases in which, in doing something, one could have done otherwise, it doesn’t follow that when one couldn’t have done otherwise one is no longer doing anything.

In any event, Calvinists have to believe in actions that, even though determined, are still actions. And so no Calvinist could coherently insist that, because it wasn’t freely chosen in a libertarian sense, the self-fixation of the damned isn’t actively sinful.

In sum, then, the point is this: Human consciousness attends to things. As such, so long as the damned are conscious, they are active at the level of what they attend to.

Hence, if damnation is characterized by eternal conscious torment, the damned (being conscious) would of necessity be committing sins of attention—unless, of course, they attended wholly and purely to God, in which case their attention wouldn’t be sinful. But in that case, they wouldn’t be damned, either.

It seems to follow that the only way to avoid the conclusion, within a broadly Calvinist theology, that the damned actively sin for all eternity, would be to deny that they are eternally conscious, and so to deny that they suffer eternal conscious torment.

Damned Sinners, Part II: Can the Negative Value of Sin be Erased by Eternal Damnation?

2012-01-23T17:22:00.002-06:00

This post picks up where the previous post left off. You may want to look at Damned Sinners, Part I, before turning to this follow-up.

In this post, I want to consider Steve Hays’ response to what I’m calling The Problem of Damned Sinners. The problem, in brief, is this: Some theologies (e.g. traditional Calvinist ones) hold that God damns some sinners as a just punishment for sin, thereby repudiating sin clearly and forcefully. But by damning some persons as a punishment for sin, God is responding to the “affront” of sin by guaranteeing that this affront continue for eternity. But how is that supposed to repudiate sin? How can you repudiate something by guaranteeing that it never stop?

In a nutshell, Steve responds to this problem by denying that, on Calvinist theology, there is any meaningful sense in which sin as such is “intolerable” to God. What is intolerable is sin unrepudiated, sin for which just punishment has not been meted out. In other words, he takes it that the main challenge I’m raising in the Problem of Damned Sinners is this: By tolerating the never-ending sinfulness of the damned, the Calvinist God “tolerates the intolerable.” He then responds by saying that never-ending sinfulness as such isn’t intolerable, so long as it is fittingly punished.

But here, Steve is both misconstruing the main force of the Problem of Damned Sinners and, in responding to the misconstrued argument, relying on a premise I find highly implausible.

Before making these points, I should stress something that my co-author, John Kronen, wants emphasized. The argument I presented first on Randal’s blog and then in the previous post—which I’ve dubbed “The Problem of Damned Sinners”—is adapted from an argument in God’s Final Victory and brought to bear on certain Calvinist claims. But it is not identical to that argument. In our book, the argument John and I develop is not premised on God’s finding sin intolerable, but on the premise that God would never will sin. We argue that by permanently casting the damned away from the only thing that can save them from their own sinfulness, God does end up willing sin. In the book, we consider and respond to a host of objections to this argument--both to the claim that God would never will sin and to the claim that God would be doing exactly that were He to impose eternal alienation as a punishment.

In other words, as formulated in our book, the argument doesn’t even rely on the premise that Steve attacks. As such, Steve's rebuttal is irrelevant to the argument formulated in our book. That said, it may at least seem as if it is relevant to my formulation of the argument. In either formulation, however, the main focus of the argument is on whether imposing eternal damnation as a response to sin makes sense—whether this is a coherent “response” to sin, given what sin is to God (namely, something fundamentally opposed to God’s nature).

Even formulated in the terms I've used here and on Randal’s post, the argument isn’t reducible to the claim that, on Calvinist and similar theologies, God tolerates the intolerable. Rather, the focus is on the coherence of damnation as a response to sin. In terms of the tolerable and the intolerable, we might say that what the argument challenges is the idea that eternal damnation can make sin tolerable. In short, it doesn't quite capture my argument to say that sin is intolerable even if repudiated with just punishment. Rather, the argument is that you can’t properly repudiate sin with a response that guarantees its continuation.

Think of it this way. Even if Steve holds that punished sin is tolerable in a way that unpunished sin is not, to make sense of this position he has to hold that sin as such has a negative value that needs to be “erased” (if you will) through appropriate punishment. Thus, sin as such is bad, and what just punishment does is somehow “balance the scales” that have been set off kilter by sin. Steve himself uses this language of scale-balancing, which makes sense only on the assumption that sin in its own right throws things off balance.

In short, Steve and other Calvinists would be disingenuous if they claimed that, on Calvinist theology, sin weren’t deeply offensive in itself. Its profound negative value is what generates the demand for justice, the need to make things right.

Put another way, in order to hold that eternal damnation makes things right, you first have to hold that sin “makes things wrong.”

In short, Steve has to hold that sin has significant negative value. In fact, if sin is going to warrant endless punishment, that negative value would have to be very grave indeed. In fact, traditional Calvinists follow Anselm in explicitly embracing the view that sin is *infinitely* grave insofar as it affronts God’s infinite majesty. Sin—moral wickedness—is that in the created order which is most contrary to God, the gravest “turning away” of the creation from its creator.

One concise way to put all of this is as follows: sin is intolerable.

Now part of what Steve wants to say is that this way of putting things is misleading, since what might be intolerable all by itself needn’t be intolerable when combined with something else. Sin may be intolerable without a scale-balancing retributive response; but with such a response, justice has been done and the situation as a whole isn’t intolerable.

Even if Steve is right about this, I don’t think it solves the fundamental issue at stake in the Problem of Damned Sinners. But before making that point, I want to explain why I think Steve isn't right about this. Take the case of murder. We find murder to be such an “intolerable” crime that, as a society, we respond to it with the strongest punishments we consider intrinsically permissible (life imprisonment or capital punishment). Is it adequate to say that murder unpunished is intolerable, but murder justly punished is just fine since the scales of justice have been balanced?

Think of it this way: Suppose the murder rate in a country of 1 billion people is enormous: say one million murders every year. Does this become a tolerable situation if every murderer is caught and subjected to proportional punishment, but the murders continue unabated at the same rate? Is that state of affairs “just as good” as a society in which no murders happen? When confronted with a horrific offense, is it enough for the offense to be justly punished or does the horrific nature of the offense also entail that it should stop happening?

Intuitively, it seems we should go with the latter. Doesn’t it? Given that murders occur, we might agree that proportionately punished murder is better than murder going unpunished. But far better that no murders occur at all. And what would we think about a government that thinks the wrongness of murder is communicated most clearly in just punishment—and so, in order to demonstrate how bad murder is, enacts policies that magnify the murder rate so as to have more murders to justly punish? Do you really repudiate murder if you make sure more murders happen so as to have more murders to repudiate? Or is repudiation what you do in response to something that you think shouldn’t happen at all?

Put simply, if some behavior is so bad as to call for serious punishment, that’s a reason to want the behavior to be reduced or eliminated. As such, it seems you've got a distorted theory of retributive justice if you think there’s nothing wrong with the murder rate spiraling out of control so long as every murder is justly punished. In fact, I'd be so bold as to insist that any retributive theory that calls for the punitive repudiation of an act would also have to regard the act's non-occurrence as preferable to its occurrence. And if so, there’s something amiss in Steve’s claim that, for God, there’s nothing intolerable with sin as such, but only with unrepudiated sin.

But despite the deep intuitive difficulties with Steve's claim, let’s grant it for the sake of argument. Let’s suppose that appropriate punishment can somehow fully erase the negative value of sin, such that the sin taken together with the appropriate punishment does not have a negative value. Even if sin taken in isolation is intolerable, justly punished sin isn’t an intolerable situation at all. This is the point on which Steve Hays rests his rebuttal.

But how is appropriate punishment supposed to achieve this “erasing” of sin’s infinite badness? John and I actually develop a theory of this in our book—a theory of “vindicatory justice” that follows the lead of the Lutheran Scholastics. But explaining that theory here would take us too far afield. For now, it’s enough to note that what is needed in order to erase something of enormous negative value is something of comparable positive value. But even that’s not enough. If I owe a hundred thousand dollars in credit card bills, and my neighbor Joe has a hundred thousand dollars in his bank account, the existence of his money doesn’t erase my debt. In order for my debt to be erased, Joe's money actually needs to be applied to my account. To get to zero, the positive sum has to be “added” to the comparable negative sum. Only then can the negative value be “erased.” Only then is the intolerable situation turned into a tolerable one.

(In fact, as John and I argue, it is Christ’s Atonement that is thought to do this vindicating work in theological traditions following Anselm—and one section of the book is devoted to making the case that if you take that view seriously, you can no longer argue that the demands of justice require eternal damnation…but that's a different argument which I won’t pursue here.)

The point I was making in my comment on Randal’s blog was simply this: It doesn’t make much sense to suppose that you can erase the negative value sin by acting so as to guarantee that it never stops happening. How do you erase the enormous negative value of sin by propagating it? It seems that you would then be magnifying the negative values that need to be erased, as opposed to erasing them.

In short, suppose we grant Steve Hays’ claim that the continued existence of sin is a tolerable situation to God so long as sin’s negative value is erased by God’s justly punishing it through eternal damnation. Even if we grant this, we still have to ask whether eternal damnation really could erase the (infinite) negative value of sin.

Steve Hays supposes that eternal damnation can do this. In our book, we consider more than one reason to be highly skeptical of such a supposition. The focus in these posts is on one of them.

Here’s the thing about eternal damnation: Its central feature is eternal exclusion from the beatific vision. Whatever other positive evils might be thought to accompany damnation, the heart of hell is that the damned are decisively cast out of God’s presence and cut off from God’s grace. But Calvinists (along with other Christians) hold that the only cure for sin is divine grace. Without grace, ongoing sinfulness is inevitable. On this theology, eternally withholding divine grace amounts to eternally withholding the necessary condition for not sinning…and as such guaranteeing that sin continue unabated. The essential feature of the state of damnation—exclusion from the grace of God—can thus be characterized as the act of making sure that a person’s sinful state never be overcome.

And so the conservative Calvinist view can be summed up as follows: Some sinners have the negative value of their sin neutralized by being deprived of what is necessary to stop sinning. God punishes sinners by doing the one thing that guarantees their sin never ends. And somehow, THIS is supposed to neutralize the negative value of sin, making an otherwise intolerable situation tolerable?

Let’s put this in terms of a metaphor (however imperfect all such metaphors inevitably are): For the Calvinist, if sin is the disease, then divine grace is the only cure. Without grace, the “disease” of sin will continue unabated. And this disease is taken to be so bad that it must be repudiated—by forever withholding the cure and making sure that the disease continue unabated.

Huh?

Or to invoke an earlier metaphor, it sounds as if one is saying something like the following: If unpunished murder is intolerable, then of course we must erase its negative value with just punishment. So let’s punish murderers in such a way so as to guarantee that they continue to commit murder after murder eternally. Then the negative value of murder will be erased! Adding countless murders to the first one will eliminate the badness of the first one, bringing about a condition which is no longer bad!

What?

Or to invoke yet another metaphor: Suppose someone owes a debt. How do you get rid of it? Suppose someone answered, “Make sure the debtor keeps wracking up more debt forever! THAT is sure to make the debt go away!”

Umm…

Even if we don’t object to Steve’s claim that the negative value of sin, properly neutralized by divine punishment, ceases to be intolerable, the central concern at issue in the Problem of Damned Sinners remains. In some way, depriving sinners of the necessary condition for ceasing sin is supposed to do this work of neutralizing the negative value of their sins (even as it guarantees that the negative values requiring neutralization grow without bound).

Now maybe there is some way for the Calvinist to make sense of this. But it is a problem—a pretty big one. And I think the burden of proof lies on the shoulders of the Calvinist to resolve it. Otherwise, those of different theological persuasions have a right to be deeply skeptical. Simply asserting that, mysteriously, God depriving sinners of what they need in order to avoid sin somehow neutralizes sin’s negative value—well, that doesn’t cut it.

Damned Sinners, Part I: An Argument Adapted from GOD'S FINAL VICTORY, and Two Responses

2012-01-20T17:32:00.000-06:00

A month ago I commented on a post on Randal Rauser’s blog entitled “Does God hate those he does not save?” The post was a brief, critical engagement with traditional Calvinist theology. Here is what I wrote in my comment:

Here is, for me, the big problem: God’s preordaining some sinners for reprobation is supposed to reflect God’s justice, which tempers His mercy and love (or the other way around?). The idea is that sin is such an intolerable affront to God’s holiness and majesty that divine justice demands that it be repudiated. And so God casts some sinners away forever as a display of His just wrath against sin, even as he elects others for salvation to display His mercy and benevolence.

The problem is this: In casting sinners away from His presence, He casts them away from the only thing that (according to the very theology underlying this theory) can overcome sin. Thus, God guarantees that this intolerable affront to His majesty continues eternally in the souls of the damned. In short, the view essentially amounts to this: sin is so terrible that God decisively acts to guarantee that this intolerable thing continue in all its intolerability forever and ever. “What you’re doing is so inconceivably unacceptable that I am going to make absolutely sure that there is no way for you to ever stop doing it!”

And making sure that this intolerable affront to His holiness never stops is supposed to be God’s justifying reason for not electing all, and so for truncating the scope of his benevolence? Is that a coherent understanding of divine justice?

I think a variant of this problem obtains not only for Calvinists, but for any adherents to that understanding of hell according to which the God-justifying purpose for damnation is to justly punish sin. It is not a problem for those understandings of hell that are more like C.S. Lewis’s, in which damnation is a regrettable outcome of divine respect for the free choices of rational creatures.

But if I go on, I’ll end up summarizing John’s and my entire book in a blog comment, and then no one will buy it even when it comes out in the affordable paperback version…

In brief, the problem I was posing was this: According to traditional Calvinist theology, damnation is supposed to be a just punishment for sin that somehow repudiates and so sets right the affront of sin. But whatever else damnation involves, it is essentially characterized by being cut of from God and His grace. Calvinist theology teaches that divine grace is utterly necessary to overcome our disposition to sin. And so, by damning some sinners, God guarantees that they keep being sinners for all eternity.

So: Sin is so terrible that it demands an extreme response to repudiate it. And the extreme response that supposedly repudiates sin is nothing other than an act ensuring that sin persist unabated for eternity. But can you really erase the stain of sin by an act that guarantees that sin never end? Isn’t that kind of like trying to remove an ink stain on your coat by putting your coat under a hose that eternally pours ink all over it?

Let me call this, for ease of reference, “The Problem of Damned Sinners.” It’s adapted from an argument that appears in the first part of Chapter 6 of John's and my recent book, God’s Final Victory. This particular line of argument originated with my co-author, John Kronen, as he was studying with care the writings of the Protestant Scholastics. Of course, as with all parts of the book, the final formulation and development of the argument was a collaborative effort…and as my adaptation of the argument to specifically target a conservative Calvinist position indicates, I’m a fan of it. I not only think the argument makes a significant point, but I think the problem it raises for traditional Calvinist theology (and similar theologies) may be one of the most serious that defendes of such theology need to overcome.

Shortly after posting my comment on Randal’s blog, Randal suggested a line of challenge in a follow-up question, and a reader of Randal’s blog, Steve Hays, posted a response at Triablogue under the heading “Sloppy philosophers.”

At the time, I ignored both responses. Let me stress that this isn’t because further comment might compromise the marketability of God’s Final Victory. The closing sentence of my comment might have left that impression—and, in fact, both Randal and Steve, in their responses, seemed to take that remark seriously. Randal says, “Feel free not to respond to my comment if it will compromise further the marketability of your book,” while Steve derisively says, “I’d like to thank Reitan for sparing us the need to read his book. Given the quality of his summarized argument, it would be poor stewardship of time and money to invest in the book.”

In fact, the closing remark was a bit of a self-deprecating joke. I seem to find myself incapable of being especially concise in blog posts…or even in blog comments (the current post is no exception—in fact, it’s getting so long that I’m breaking it up into a series of three posts!). My natural inclination, it seems, is to write articles and books.

Part of the reason for this inclination is that, even given my propensity for long-windedness in blog-writing, blog-appropriate summaries of arguments cannot be as clear and precise as what can be laid out in a book, cannot be as complete in anticipating and responding to objections, and cannot be coordinated with all the other relevant arguments that should be addressed in a comprehensive book-length treatment of a subject as substantial, say, as the doctrine of hell. The advantage of blogging is that, however inadequately, it can get the ideas and arguments out to more readers.

In any event, the argument in question is featured in one part of one chapter of God's Final Victory. There’s really no way I could do justice to all the work John and I put into that book in a blog comment, and I really doubt that what I say in the blogosphere will negatively impact sales. (The price of the book does that well enough all on its own.) In short, I have absolutely no objections to addressing questions and criticisms relating to my books in blog-format—although, again, anything I say here will be more comprehensively treated in the book.

So, why did I ignored Randal’s thoughtful response and Steve’s…response? Well, the day after they were posted, my mother came to visit for the holidays…and promptly fell, breaking both arms (three fractures total, two of them pretty serious).

And so, with real life intruding on my blogging life, I had more important things to attend to. It happens more often than you'd think!

But now, at last, I find my attention turned back towards this topic. And so, without further ado, here are the concerns raised about The Problem of Damned Sinners. The first, thoughtfully and respectfully posed by Randal, runs as follows:

Your comment assumes that those who go to hell continue to sin there. Of course that is one common view which is suggested by the reference to “gnashing of teeth” (e.g. in Acts 7 the Pharisees gnash their teeth in rage at Stephen). But the doctrine of hell doesn’t require that we view the final state of the lost as consisting of ongoing active rebellion.

While there is some advantage in claiming that the reprobated get to a point where they no longer sin (perhaps they are inert, maximally remorseful but not repentant creatures), this view raises more sharply the morality of hell as eternal conscious torment.

The heart of Steve’s response (with intrusive numbering, ad hominem attacks, and self-congratulatory chest-thumping deleted so as to focus in on what may actually have philosophical merit) runs as follows:

As for Reitan’s argument (such as it is), he tries to contrive an artificial dilemma by casting the issue in terms of tolerance. As he frames it, the Calvinist God tolerates the intolerable. Hence, Reformed theism is self-contradictory.

But he’s burning a straw man. In Calvinism, “sin” is not “intolerable” to God. “Sinners” are not intolerable to God.

What’s “intolerable” (if you wish to put it that way, which may not be the best way to put it) isn’t sin, but injustice. Isn’t sin, but allowing sin to go unpunished. What’s “unacceptable” isn’t the existence of sinners, but justice denied. Sooner or later, the scales of justice must be righted.

It not a question of “overcoming” sin, but exposing sin for what it is, then meting out a suitable punishment. That, in turn, reveals the moral character of evil–for the punishment fits the crime.

I want to consider Steve’s criticism first, since what I have to say may set some groundwork for more efficiently addressing Randal’s (to my mind more interesting and challenging) question. But because this post is already as long as it is, a consideration of Steve’s response will have to wait. So, look forward to “Damned Sinners, Part II,” coming soon to a blog near you (probably Monday, since I rarely blog on weekends).

Orwellian Obfuscation and the Christian Struggle over Homosexuality

2012-01-18T17:09:00.000-06:00

As part of my research for my new book project, I’ve recently been looking into the “Biblical Witness Fellowship” (BWF) within the United Church of Christ (UCC)—a denomination I and my family belonged to for four years when we left the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) to protest its failure to allow for the ordination of partnered gay and lesbian clergy. We chose the UCC then because of its inclusive stance towards gays and lesbians.

But that inclusiveness has not gone uncontested within the UCC—and the clearest, most organized voice of protest appears to be the BWF. The Biblical Witness Fellowship describes itself as a “confessing movement within the United Church of Christ” committed to opposing what its members see as “decades of continued denominational decline that has resulted from the UCC’s theological surrender to the moral and spiritual confusion of contemporary culture.”

This last bit grates on me, because I've heard it so many times. It seems to be something of a defining narrative that conservative Christians carry with them into disputes with their more progressive brethren: the commitments of progressive Christians spring from “theological surrender” to modern culture.

But is this narrative right? Probably sometimes. But always?

For members of the BWF, one of the clearest signs of this supposed “theological surrender” came in the form of the UCC’s 2005 resolution in support of same-sex marriage, which the BWF blog describes as an “idolatrous decision…to attempt to tell God that marriage was whatever we, in our human delusions, wanted it to be,” a decision that “placed the UCC beyond the boundaries of reality.”

In opposition to this “idolatrous” betrayal, the BWF offers the following position statement on human sexuality:

Human sexuality is a gift from God, a reflection of His creative plan. God ordained sexual intimacy to be expressed within the covenant of heterosexual marriage. Sex outside of that covenant dehumanizes, destroys and leads to fragmentation, social chaos, violence, and death. We believe our contemporary culture to be a vivid parable of this truth.

What are we to make of this statement? First of all, given my own experience in the UCC, I can attest that the less conservative majority would agree with much that is said in the statement. Specifically, they’d be inclined to agree, right along with the BWF, that sexuality expressed outside the confines of marital commitment is fraught with dangers, risking personal and social harms that the covenant of marriage helps to ward against.

In fact, this is a main reason they support same-sex marriage. Excluding gays and lesbians from access to the marital covenant deprives them of the option to express their sexuality within the stable, intimacy-building context of marriage. Without the social supports of marriage, it’s far easier for sexuality to fall into promiscuity and the various harms this entails—including, arguably, social and psychological fragmentation (as intimacy and sexual pleasure become severed), increases in relational instability and emotional volatility (jealousy and heartbreak and the forms of inner and outer violence these things engender), not to mention the potentially lethal effects of sexually transmitted disease.

But implicit in the BWF statement is the conviction that were the covenant of marriage to become generally available to same-sex couples, sex within the covenant of such marriages would then somehow contribute to the same dire results. Here is where progressives in the UCC differ sharply with the BWF. Both agree that the covenant of marriage plays a crucial role in securing a healthy and life-affirming sexuality—sexuality as God intended it. But while progressives argue that for this very reason the covenant should be available to gays and lesbians, members of the BWF think that extending the marital covenant to same-sex couples would sanctify a kind of relationship that (somehow) brings fragmentation and death even when it otherwise embodies all the virtues of an ideal marriage.

The BWF statement obscures this point by treating “heterosexual marriage” as a single monolithic norm—that is, by attempting to frame our thinking such that we are discouraged from thinking about the heterosexuality of a relationship apart from its conformity to what might be called the "marital ideal," by which I mean the relational ideal that is held up in the institution of marriage and that married couples strive to approximate: lifelong loving commitment, life partnership, sexual fidelity in a monogamous bond in which sexuality nurtures and expresses a multifaceted love that is also nurtured and expressed through emotional openness and honest sharing of oneself with the partner.

Anyone who has known a loving same-sex couple knows that this marital ideal can be pursued by them as well as by any heterosexual couple. But by lumping the marital ideal and heterosexuality together, as if they couldn't be promoted apart from each other, we are discouraged from distinguishing between two very different questions. The questions I have in mind are these:

(a) Are there long-term and pervasive social costs for rejecting the marital ideal as the normative model for expressing sexual intimacy?

(b) Are there such costs for expanding the marital ideal to encompass non-heterosexual couples?

If we do distinguish these two questions, it becomes clear that the framers of the BWF statement want to answer “yes” to both—but this seems highly implausible. If broad cultural rejection of the marital ideal leads to “fragmentation, social chaos, violence, and death,” then it would seem that the more we expand the scope within which this ideal holds sway, the better off we are in terms of reducing these harms.

Think about it. If communities that aren’t bound by the marital ideal are more likely to exhibit promiscuity and fickleness in their sexual lives—and if this brings with it both tangible health costs in terms of the spread of STD’s and less tangible social and psychological costs—then shouldn’t we conclude that restricting marriage to heterosexual couples will mean greater promiscuity and fickleness—and concomitant costs—in the non-heterosexual subculture (a subculture that is in part created by the exclusion of sexual minorities from a social institution as foundational and pervasive as marriage)?

Let’s spell it out clearly. To extend the marriage covenant to same-sex couples would mean that these couples are afforded the same social supports for practicing fidelity in a monogamous life partnership that heterosexuals enjoy. Such supports can only reduce promiscuity and encourage relational stability—thereby both reducing the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases such as HIV/AIDS and reducing various forms of relational and psychological fragmentation.

Excluding gays and lesbians from marriage, by contrast, means excluding them from two things: first, the basic unit of social life in our culture; second, our primary model of responsible sexuality. By virtue of the former, gays and lesbians feel excluded from society and so gravitate to one another, forming a subculture of their own at society’s margins. Society as a whole becomes more…fragmented. By virtue of the latter, the sexual constraints characteristic of the broader society are less likely to be carried into the LGBT subculture. Their sexual relationships thus become less permanent, more…chaotic and fragmented. And with greater promiscuity comes dissociation of emotional and physical intimacy—an inner psychological fragmentation. Not to mention the spread of deadly diseases.

If sexuality without marriage really does have the negative costs that the BWF identifies, then this will be as true for gays and lesbians as it is for heterosexuals. Which means that restricting marriage to heterosexuals will promote greater “fragmentation, social chaos, violence, and death” within the LGBT community.

In short, a “yes” answer to question (a) above would seem to call for a “no” answer to question (b). The BWF’s capacity to say otherwise depends on obscuring the distinction between these two questions. By obscuring them, the “yes” answer to (a) can be implicitly attributed to (b) in a way that is simply not plausible when we are clear about the distinction.

The obfuscation here makes possible a kind of Orwellian double-speak. An institution is identified as a necessary guard against fragmentation and death; and so, in the name of avoiding fragmentation and death, some people are denied access to this very institution. True means false. Peace means war. Language has become a smokescreen for motivating people to embrace the opposite of reality.

But why throw up such a smokescreen at all? The reason, I think, is this: the BWF is committed to a strong view of biblical authority, one which requires them to treat as inerrant the negative judgment of homosexual relationships coming out of Paul’s epistles. And if such relationships really do embody everything that Paul apparently attributes to them--if they really are just an expression of "shameful lusts" inspiring "unnatural" acts that are "indecent" and "perverted" (Romans 1:26-27)--then how could we officially sanction them by enshrining and uplifting them with the same legal institution that we use to honor the marital relationship that we treat as having such positive worth? Taking Paul's comments here as literally authoritative seems to have some clear implications for how we should and shouldn't treat same-sex relationships.

But the progressive majority within the UCC is concerned that such biblical literalism can be and often is a source of unloving behavior. In effect, the view of the UCC's majority is something like this: If we really pay attention to the actual effects that following through on certain biblical teachings have, we see that those effects are harmful to our neighbors. Using love for our neighbors as the measuring stick for making judgments of “good” and “bad,” what can we say about the categorical condemnation of homosexuality that springs from an uncritical appropriation of isolated scriptural passages? All we can say is that they bear bad fruit.

And so, if we are to be faithful both to the core scriptural call to love our neighbors and to Jesus’ injunction to distinguish true prophecies from false ones by their fruits, we have to set aside certain teachings that seem to flow from an inerrantist approach to Scripture.

This is a deeply Christian—and, in a way, deeply biblical—critique of certain teachings that seem to flow from certain ways of approaching the Bible as a source of moral teachings. At the same time, it is a deeply Christian and biblical challenge to those ways of approaching the Bible. But conservatives have embraced a narrative according to which progressives are not motivated by deeply Christian concerns or by a fidelity to the actual content of Scripture. They are have, instead, “sold out” or "surrendered" to secular culture.

But the actual motives of Christian progressives (at least many of them) don’t fit with this narrative. Instead, progressives are (generally) motivated by a spirit of Christian love, and they look at the world and their neighbors through loving eyes…and find themselves noticing the “bad fruits” of some very traditional Christian teachings.

The harm that is done to gays and lesbians by the traditional condemnation of homosexuality is a case in point. The eyes of love see bad fruit growing from the tree of Paul’s un-nuanced treatment of same-sex relationships. The eyes of love give an empathetic appreciation of what it's like to be gay, an appreciation that is nowhere in evidence in Paul's comments in Romans. It's as if (surprise, surprise) Paul were writing his comments out of a deep well of ignorance, as if he had no notion of homosexuality as an orientation, no notion that some people might actually pursue monogamous same-sex relations out of such an orientation as opposed to being driven by an excess of lust to have sex with anything that moves, even someone of the same sex. And those of us who have paid compassionate attention to our gay and lesbian neighbors know the kind of debilitating effects that result from being told that their impulses to love, to build romantically intimate relationships, can never be anything but sinful (since they can never be towards people of the opposite sex). We know the potentially crushing psychological effects of being systematically excluded from participation in the bedrock social institution of marriage, of being set at the margins of society.

What is going on in the BWF position statement is, if you will, an attempt to turn the tables on this way of approaching the subject—to argue that if we look into the world with the eyes of Christian love, we will see the bad fruit that results from turning away from “heterosexual marriage.” The modern world becomes a “vivid parable” that attests to the costly consequences of rejecting traditional Christian teachings--including Christian teachings about restricting marriage to heterosexual couples.

There is an attempt, if you will, to show that this approach of loving attention to our world—one with deep Christian roots—has implications which converge with those that result when we approach the Bible in the way conservatives are inclined to do: as inspired by God from cover to cover, as the ultimate authority for Christians, as authoritative in its “plain sense” at least when the meaning and authorial intentions are clear. In short, the BWF seeks here to reconcile two deeply Christian ways of reaching moral conclusions: the path of compassionate attention to how practices and policies actually affect individual and social life; and the path of appealing to the authority of clear biblical teachings.

If that argument can be sustained, then progressives who claim to be challenging the latter path on the basis of the former will be exposed as disingenuous. The conservative narrative—according to which progressive Christian ideas are ultimately the result (however unconscious) of selling out to secular culture—can be rehabilitated. Unfortunately, that argument is convincing only with the help of Orwellian obfuscations of the sort we find occurring (perhaps inadvertently) in the BWF's position statement.

Once such obfuscation is cleared away, I think we are left with the following picture: There is a real tension within traditional Christianity, one that has been brought to light by our current understanding of what it's like to be gay. Christian conservatives on the issue of homosexuality think that a certain traditional way of approaching the Bible, a certain way of approaching its authority for the purpose of reaching moral conclusions, is utterly central to an authentic Christian faith. Among other things, they believe that this sort of allegiance to the Bible and to the resultant teachings have to trump the lessons that emerge when we carefully attend, with compassion, to the actual effects of such teachings. Christian progressive, by contrast, think that the lessons of compassionate attention--a deeply traditional Christian approach to engaging with the world, one which is rooted in core biblical teachings--should trump the traditional approach to the Bible that conservatives cleave to. Progressives argue, furthermore, that a different kind of allegiance to the Bible favors giving compassionate attention such trump-card status.

This picture of things doesn’t support what, for conservatives, is surely a rather comforting narrative: “Progressives are sell-outs to modernity, while we conservatives are faithful to tradition.” Instead, we are left with a picture of things according to which the current Christian debate about homosexuality is a debate about what should be held as most central to Christianity—at a time when it is becoming increasingly clear that some deeply traditional elements of the faith are in conflict.

Some Remarks About Christian Love

2012-01-13T14:30:00.001-06:00

Neither politics nor human character are simple things. It's rare to find politicians whose motivations are wholly unsavory, even if one disagrees strongly with their platform. In my last post I argued that, while cloaked in explicitly Christian language, Rick Santorum’s political rhetoric targeting gays and lesbians actually violates the spirit of Christian ethics.

But it's important to stress that when I say this, I'm not saying that Santorum's character and motivations should as a whole be judged in these terms. Reflecting on the last post, I think I didn't stress this point enough. In fact, there is reason to suppose that in many respects Santorum's political platform is driven by his allegiance to Christian love as he understands it, leading some to see him as the return of compassionate conservatism. Some conservatives even take him to task for this. Santorum is less inclined to let national borders define the boundaries of our concern, and so is more willing to speak out in support of a duty to provide foreign aid.

His homophobic obsession with villifying human beings who seek to overcome marginalization based on unchosen sexualtiy is, in an important respect, an anomoly. More significantly, perhaps, it is a kind of poison at the heart of his outlook, all the more eggregious because of what it is poisoning. But if I'm going to defend these claims--both the claim that his anti-gay rhetoric violates the spirit of Christian ethics, and the claim that much of his broader view expresses that spirit--I need to offer an account of what I take to lie at the heart of Christian ethics.

To offer a full account I’d need to do two things: explain what I take the heart of Christian ethics to be, and explain why I take this to be the heart of Christian ethics. Since I can’t adequately do both tasks in a short blog post, I focus here on the first—the task of explicating my understanding of Christian ethics.

On this issue I follow in the footsteps of theologians such as Anders Nygren and Paul Ramsey and Christian moral and social leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr. The tradition of ethical thought they represent is deeply rooted in New Testament interpretation as well as in early Christian beliefs about what it meant to live as Jesus lived. It is a tradition that understands Christian ethical life as being fundamentally characterized in terms of the call to consistently practice agape—that is, a distinctive kind of love, one believed to be exemplified in Jesus’ life and described in Jesus’ twin calls to love our neighbors as ourselves and to love even (perhaps especially) our enemies.

How do we love ourselves? And how in the world can we love our enemies, those who wish us ill? These questions are actually interconnected. One feature of self-love is that it involves care for our own good simply because it is good for us, apart from questions of desert. Self-love is an immediate concern for personal welfare that doesn’t spring from such things as reciprocity (what would reciprocity even mean in relation to oneself?). Furthermore, rather than being conditioned on a judgment of our worth, self-love immediately motivates an interest in warranting a positive judgment of worth. Where we perceive ourselves as not warranting such a judgment, we are motivated by self-love to act and choose so as to warrant it.

Not that this motive is always going to win out against other motives. We might despair of any capacity to change for the better, in which case the very desire that would otherwise motivate us to change might lead us to reject the values that inspire a negative judgment of self-worth. We adopt, perhaps, an attitude of disdain for these values and concern ourselves exclusively with hedonistic ones. We make ourselves "good enough" by tailoring our standards of good enough to fit our failings.

Despair over our capacity to change for the better might also lead us into a state of conflicted self-loathing in which the part of us that is moved by self-love wishes for us to be good and happy, while another part of us, gripped by the widespread idea that love should be conditioned on desert, sabotages everything that might enrich our lives. Not all of us are ruled by self-love, and Jesus' injunction to love others as we love ourselves doesn't assume that we are. Rather, it assumes that we all have some instinctive self-love, even when it is overridden or stifled by other things. And that love is one which is directed towards our own good--both our happiness and our moral worth--in a manner that isn't conditioned on whether we deserve it or have earned it.

To love others as we love ourselves is thus to care for their good--including their character and self-development--in a similar way, a manner which is unconditioned by matters of merit or reciprocity.

And this is where the injunction to love our neighbors as ourselves dovetails with the injunction to love our enemies. The latter makes sense only if love is unconditioned by desert. A.J. Muste, at a Quaker meeting in 1940, put it this way: “If I can’t love Hitler, I can’t love at all.”

When you think of it, that’s a pretty staggering statement. In making it, Muste was making a definitional point about what’s involved in agapic love: To love in this way is to love in a way that does not attend to matters of reciprocity or desert. And the ultimate test of whether one is actually loving in this way is whether one’s love extends to one’s bitterest, most hostile, most villainous enemies. If it doesn’t, then one isn’t loving in this distinctive way.

In short, the idea of loving our neighbors as we love ourselves, and the idea of loving our enemies, converge on the same idea: We are to be concerned about the neighbor’s good—including the enemy-neighbor—for the neighbor’s own sake and without regard for whether the neighbor deserves such care.

Following Simone Weil and Martin Luther and others, I am convinced that such love is first and foremost a matter of attention. We attend to the neighbor as another subject like ourselves. Instead of seeing them through the filters of our own wants and needs and beliefs, we attend to them in the same way that we ordinarily attend to ourselves: experiencing as best we can the range of their wants and needs, hopes and fears, convictions and doubts--in short, empathizing.

But this is not to say that we abandon our best understanding of the truths of the human condition, adopting those of the individial with whom we empathize. It does not mean endorsing their choices and sharing their ends. After all, a Christian call to empathize with Hitler is not a call to adopt his lack of empathy for his victims. The empathy that is an essential piece of Christian love is not the limited, truncated empathy of someone like Hitler. It is, rather, the kind of empathy that involves rising above such limits. The empathy that is the starting point of Christian love is thus an attempt to expand our discernment of truth by wearing our neighbor's shoes (including those of our enemy-neighbor), not to truncate our discernment of truth by limiting ourselves to what is seen while standing in our neighbor's shoes.

The ultimate goal here is a kind of global empathy in which decisions are made as if each and every neighbor were as much a part of me as I am. What is being described here, of course, is a God's-eye view. We are called to love as God loves, to be vessels through which divine love operates. And this is something none of us can actually do. We cannot, in fact, adopt the God's-eye view, the universal empathy, that we aspire towards; nor can we in fact make decisions from such a standpoint. We will fail to love Hitler as if he were our own child, with all the concern for Hitler's good that we have for our own children (a concern, by the way, that wouldn't merely be for Hitler's happiness, but for his moral character; a concern that wouldn't pander to his actual desires, but seek what is in his best interest; and this, I believe, means wishing for him that he satisfy the desires he would have were he to actualize his potential and be the best person he could be, as opposed to being the moral monster he became).

In a sense, then, Christian love is merely aspirational. But in another sense it is not. Because the Christian love ethic is embedded in a broader theology which affirms the existence of a God who actualizes what we aspire for--a God who is love, and whose loving will operates in accord with the kind of universal benevolence and profligate empathy we cannot attain. Within this broader theological context, there is something we can do beyond merely aspiring: We can submit ourselves to that God who realizes what we can only hope to approximate. We can make of ourselves channels of divine benevolence.

And this is what it means to love God: It means giving ourselves over to a love that isn’t limited and constrained in the way that finite human love is limited and constrained. It involves saying “Your will, not mine, be done”—and so subordinating our will, not to an arbitrary tyrant, but to the being who is love.

None of us do this—except, perhaps, in rare flashes. Most of the time we cling to our own egos, our own finite perspectives, our own wills...defined as they are by a restricted scope of love. Or we want to be universally benevolent but we want to be responsible for it--a vestige of our allegiance to the notion that good will should be merited, and hence that to be loved as we long to be loved we need to achieve moral perfection on our own terms. And, of course, we fail. And we respond to that failure either by truncating the scope of the moral demand to fit better with our limits, or by beating ourselves up. Or we flicker from one response to another--at one moment justifying our behavior as good enough, at another smacking ourselves for not being good enough. The third alternative--so tritely but accurately captured in the saying so often repeated by evangelicals, "Let go and let God"--is a rare and difficult achievement even for those who believe in God.

But this third alternative is what Christianity calls for, what is at the core of the injunction to love God with all one's heart and soul and mind. And the Christian notion of divine grace at work in the world is the conviction that this third alternative is not merely a fiction, but that "letting go and letting God" actual makes a difference. To believe in grace is to believe that it is possible for us to realize levels of love we could not achieve on our own, by become channels for a love greater than our own. It also means the possibility of escape from the twin traps of rationalization and pathological guilt.

I see in my own life the failure to love as widely as I should--and the propensity to alternately justify it or beat myself up about it. I see it in something as minor as the uncharitable messages I almost post in the comments section of this blog. This is, I think, a real failure—a “sin,” to use the language of Christianity—even when I ultimately resist the temptation. The fact is that often enough I don’t resist it, and even when I do I typically find myself indulging my animus in private. That I don’t publicize it doesn’t eliminate it.

The truth is that there’s a ubiquitous human impulse to exclude some persons from the scope of our love. We want to push some people onto the other side of a divide. On this side there are those who have value and dignity, who deserve basic respect, whose needs matter, whose good is something to be sought. And then there are the people on the other side.

Sometimes this impulse manifests itself in genocidal wars. Sometimes it manifests in verbal slights against colleagues that cause them to fume even as we smirk. Sometimes it manifests in something as small and seemingly trivial as thinking that a particular commentator on my blog has finally crossed outside the line within which human decency is called for. We call it “taking the gloves off” or “no more Mr. Nice Guy.”

This is not, in my view, a trivial issue. And, unlike certain other human dispositions, it is universal in its scope. Everybody is prone not only to lashing out, verbally if not physically, against those who offend against us, but to convincing ourselves that the requirements of love do not apply to them--that lashing out is okay because they don't deserve any better, and hence that the lashing out needn't be constrained by questions such as "How would I react if someone said/did that to me? Would it motivate me to be a better person or would it be more likely to inspire retaliatory vindictiveness?"

Let’s be clear about a distinction, however. Loving someone isn’t the same as being nice. Sometimes it requires being honest in a way that’s painful to hear. Sometimes it may call for a refusal to enable self-destructive behaviors. Sometimes love means saying no.

But too often we call our behavior towards others “tough love” when it is neither tough nor love. We are following the easy path of lashing out in a way that’s purely spiteful, that’s nothing more than a desire to see the other person suffer. We feel the surge of testosterone, the fist-pumping delight in knocking down the enemy. This has nothing to do with love.

If the essence of the good is a love that knows no boundaries, then the essence of sin is any impulse that truncates the scope of love. And to affirm this is to be forced to acknowledge our own sinfulness. Far easier to focus on dispositions that other people have, and to call them sins. Far easier, for example, for the straight majority to obsess about homosexuality and to treat the disposition to be romantically attracted to the same sex as if it were a disposition to sin. Then sin is something that other people do, something in relation to which one can feel self-righteous.

Real sin isn’t like that. Real sin is found in the failure to live up to Jesus’ model of radically inclusive and sacrificial love. Expressing romantic feelings in the context of committed monogamy, and working hard to build a relationship of mutual trust and care, to overcome conflicts and build a life together—such a thing is the crucible from which virtues are built, from which admirable character traits can be cultivated. How exactly is such a thing rendered sinful, let alone perverse, simply because the person with whom one works to build such intimacy and partnership happens to be of the same sex?

To ask this question is, admittedly, to question the inerrancy of the apostle Paul. Paul clearly had no concept of committed homosexual monogamy. He seemed to think that all homosexual love sprang from an excess of lust, a lust so indiscriminate that one couldn’t limit oneself to those one was naturally attracted to, let alone to a single partner in the context of fidelity and life partnership. We know better now, at least those of us who listen to our gay and lesbian neighbors and who have witnessed the lives of fidelity that many have pursued despite the odds.

But there are those who have been steeped in a view of Scripture that makes no distinction between an example used by Paul (to exemplify a broader theoretical point) and the very word of God. And they sincerely wrestle with the tension between the implications of this view of Scripture and the seemingly admirable character of a same-sex relationship they've encountered. Their moral intuition is at odds with the moral authority to which they have been taught to defer, and so they struggle.

Many who struggle in this way are genuinely trying to live out a spirit of love. They wrestle with how to be authentically loving towards their gay and lesbian neighbors in the face of the biblical injunctions that, faithfully pursued, would seem to call for their social marginalization, their exclusion from bedrock social institutions such as marriage. They strive to figure out how to do this because they are convinced that the God who is love has, in fact, categorically condemned all homosexual acts. To my view, their struggle is rooted in a failure to see the difference between the word of God and a what their own theory about the Bible implies concerning the word of God. They confuse question the latter with questioning the former.

But there's a difference between struggling to reconcile what I take to be Paul's ignorance and prejudices with the ethic of Christian love, and treating Paul's comments about same-sex activity as an opportunity to indulge feelings that might otherwise be viewed with moral suspicion. There are those for whom "defending God's word" opens the door, perhaps unwittingly, for guiltlessly letting loose those darker, meaner human impulses--indulging in the tribal impulse to divide and exclude while congratulating oneself for righteously defending God's will.

For many, the biblical passages that appear to condemn homosexuality do not merely provide an opportunity for such guiltless indulgence; they provide a way to distance oneself from sin. The serious sins, after all, are the things the perverts do. “I may have my failings, but I’m not a pervert.” Being a decent human being becomes easy. After all, it is astonishingly easy for a heterosexual to avoid having gay sex—about as easy as it is for a white person to avoid being black. Avoiding the worst sins becomes a matter of having the good fortune of being born into the right group.

This is an exercise in not taking sin seriously. And yes, paradoxical as it may sound, I am arguing that those who trumpet against the supposed sins of some group or other--some "them"--are thereby not taking sin seriously. They are making sin someone else's problem rather than a shared feature of the human predicament. We take sin seriously when we see its ubiquity…most especially when we see it in ourselves. We take sin seriously when we take the serious sins to be precisely those forces of alienation that abide in every human heart, including our own. We take sin seriously when we see it as the negation of love, and when we understand the essence of love that is captured in A.J. Muste’s words. We take sin seriously when we don't seek to truncate the demands of love to suit our limitations, but seek instead to transcend those limitations by opening ourselves up to being moved by a love that is not so limited.

This inspiration to reach for grace--to earnestly yearn to be more loving that our natures incline us to be--is what is most clearly poisoned by divisive ideology.

Partisan Politics in Christian Guise: Santorum's Disturbing Success

2012-01-04T17:36:00.000-06:00

Mitt Romney's win in Iowa may have helped strengthen his case for being the Republican front-runner for the presidential nomination, but the more surprising story is that he beat out Rick Santorum by a mere eight votes. Apparently, Santorum's propensity for attacking same-sex marriage by flapping napkins around struck a chord with conservative Republicans in Iowa.

This bothers me. It bothers me because Santorum's support base undoubtedly self-identifies as Christian, and because, to my mind at least, Santorum comes closest of the Republican candidates to overtly defying the fundamental spirit of Christian ethics. And, more eggregiously, he does so in the name of Christianity.

As I've argued before, Santorum deliberately seeks in his stump speeches to establish an us/them ideology, one that pits the "Christian" in-group against an out-group encompassing, in particular, sexual minorities. He represents the latter's pursuit of social equality as an attack on Christianity, one against which Christians should rally. And he, of course, is the champion of the chosen group, the one around whom the rallying should occur.

Since I've looked closely at these rhetorical moves before, I won't do so again here. The point I want to make here is that, in pursuing this politics of division, Santorum abandons in the most overt possible way any real concern for living out the love ethic of Christianity. He abondons it in favor of using Christianity as a group-category for establishing a form of what, in Is God a Delusion?, I call "religionism." Here's how I summarized this idea in the last chapter of that book:

When one racial group brutally oppresses another, we blame racism, not race. When people of different nationalities go to war out of misplaced pride, we blame nationalism, not nationality. When rival ethnic groups practice "ethnic cleansing," we blame ethnocentrism, not ethnicity.

Likewise, I would suggest that what we should blame for all the violence that has been done in the name of God is not religion but what might be dubbed religionism. Behind each of these "isms" is a common human tendency: the drive to divide humanity into in-groups and out-groups, to define oneself in terms of group membership, and to define one's group against rivals.

In Is God a Delusion?, my purpose for bringing up this distinction was to challenge the New Atheist argument that religion is pernicious because of its propensity to motivate intergroup hostility and violence. My claim was that the source of the problem lies not with religion as such but with divisive ideology--and such divisive ideology can but needn't be built around distinctive human systems of religious belief and practice.

Of course, the line between religion and religionism is blurrier than the line between race and racism, insofar as both religion and religionism involve beliefs and practices. I may say more about this in a later blog post. For now, however, my point is this: Santorum's invocation of Christianity in his stump speeches has the clear markings of religionism. It is about dividing people, defining battle lines, and mobilizing one group by placing it in opposition to another.

And such divisive ideology is the very antithesis, I would argue, of the love ethic that Jesus taught and modeled. In the name of standing up for "biblical" teachings about homosexuality, it seems to me that Santorrum has ignored what lies at the very heart of living out the Christian ethical life.

A claim like that requires some account of what I take to be at the heart of the Christian ethical life. Obviously this is something I can't do full justice to in a short blog post (maybe I'll devote more attention to it in later posts). But the essence of the Christian approach to ethical life is, I think, beautifully characterized by Simone Weil in the quotation that appears at the header of this blog. It's about a lived connection to the transcenden that breaks down distinctions and divisions among each of us "here below." It's about seeing the divine in terms of agapic love, a love that does not wait on worth, that does not distinguish between the worthy and the unworthy...and then deliberately pursuing connection with the divine by loving the creation in this same extravagant way.

When I hear critics of religion talk about the deep moral failings of Christianity or other faiths, it is clear to me that while they are putting their fingers on real problems, they are also missing something fundamental (not only in Christianity, but in other religious traditions that teach very similar things). But it is also clear to me that it is the very public claims and arguments of people like Santorum that make it so easy to miss this fundamental something. When the heart of Christian ethics is missed by those who most visibly thump their chests as exemplars of the faith, who can blame outsiders for missing it too?

Santorum's propensity to do this, however, is not the main thing that bothers me. Santorum, after all, is a politician. And divisive ideologies have been invoked by politicians throughout history. What bothers me the most is that many of those who most visibly wear the "Christian" label in our society are so apparently sucked in by such invocations of faith in the service of partisan politics. It's not just that the spirit of partisan divisiveness in Christian guise is mistaken for the introduction of Christian values into political life. More disturbingly, that spirit seems to have succeeded, again and again, at introducing partisan divisiveness into Christian life.

Believing the Christmas Story (From the Archives)

2011-12-25T17:10:00.000-06:00

What follows is a repost of a seasonally appropriate essay from last year. Parts of it resonate with a different kind of significance this year, in the wake of my father's recent passing.

What does it mean to believe in the Christmas story? In terms of substance and significance, what does it mean?

I’m not asking about facts. I’m not asking for a recitation of one or more of the Christmas narratives with the concluding remark, “To believe in the Christmas story is to believe that these events really took place.” If there is one thing that bothers me more than anything about biblical literalists, it’s that their religion is, far too often, so shallow. Their faith becomes about affirming that this or that happened, that this or that factual claim is true. There is no effort to really dwell on what it means to live as if this is true, to let one’s attitudes and choices, one’s patterns of engaging with the world, be informed and transformed by a narrative vision. When I ask what it means to believe in the Christmas story, that’s what I’m asking for.

I ask for it in the midst of my own finitude. I live with a constant awareness of my limitations, limits which I feel in so many different ways. My wife is a triathlete. She’s run marathons, swum unfathomable (to me) distances. Recently, my 7-year-old son has taken up running—and I’ve found myself called upon to keep up with him in the fun run or the 5K at an area event while my wife runs a longer distance. And so I’ve been trying to run, to build my stamina. I’ve been feeling and pushing the limits of my aging body.

One can extend one’s limits, but they remain. I might find myself huffing less intensely after a mile on the treadmill. I might stretch the distance I can cover without a walk break, until I can run around Boomer Lake in Stillwater twice without a rest. But the limits will remain. And starting to run in my forties means that I do so with a clear awareness that whatever limits I stretch will soon close back in on me, as countless little signs of age have their inevitable cumulative effect.

My father was recently diagnosed with cancer. He will be having surgery in a little over a week. This fall, a fellow violinist and retired music professor in my congregation passed away, and I sat at his funeral listening to the testimonies of his violin students and remembering Bernie, my own wonderful violin teacher, who’d passed away decades ago. This summer my wife’s grandfather died, and so I found myself thinking about the deaths of my grandparents—one dying in indignity and anguish, the other with unexpected swiftness. A few months back, Dame Joan Sutherland—La Stupenda—breathed her last. Only recordings of her exquisite breath control remain (many of them in my music collection). All of us confront this ultimate limit, the outer boundary of our mortal life. The generations take turns pushing at it.

Our consciousness moves inexorably forward through time. Even if Einstein is right and we live in a “block universe,” one in which time is just another dimension of reality—even if my experience of “now” is a kind of illusion of consciousness, and that past (and future) are every bit as real, every bit as much there, as the present—even so, it remains the case that my experience of time is sequential, that I am caught in a current I cannot turn against or step out of.

That current not only points me towards the limit we call death, but constrains me at every moment—constrains me in every moment. I’m visiting my parents, who live in the same house I grew up in. Earlier this week I drove past the home of my childhood friend Doug. I’ve reconnected with him recently on Facebook, so I know he was in Buffalo this summer, emptying out his childhood home. I saw the “Sold” sign out in front of Doug’s house, and I saw the bronze eagle that his family had installed over the garage decades ago. I wondered how long that ornament would last once the new tenants moved in.

And I remembered playing in Doug’s basement. I remembered his mother coming downstairs with toast slathered with raspberry jam. I remembered the taste of it, the crunch of toasted Wonder Bread and the burst of sweetness. And for one anguished moment I want to visit then. I wanted more than just the memory, the ghost that haunts the present. I wanted to be that child playing with that friend, tasting the flavors of that moment. And it seemed a terrible injustice that one can travel to old familiar places but not to old familiar times.

The other experiences of limitation are more personal, having to do with my incapacities, my inability to find the right words or gestures to help or comfort those I love. Presented with their needs, I come face to face with my faults. Too often, because I don’t know the right thing to do, I do nothing when something is urgently required.

My “pleasure” reading these days is Stephen R. Donaldson’s fantasy novel, Against All Things Ending. If anything—like all his novels—it’s a narrative meditation on finitude, on the flaws and limits that not only constrain us but define us. His characters’ flaws are always extravagant, their brokenness almost unendurable. And he casts these broken people into a mythic universe which reflects and magnifies that brokenness as well as their beauty, an environment whose threatened virtues demand their self transcendence.

In this novel, Thomas Covenant—who in earlier novels sacrificed his humanity to become an integral part of the mythic Arch of Time—is thrown back into mortal life due to the extremity and reckless urgency of his former lover’s (Linden’s) efforts. Towards the end of the novel he finds himself wrestling with what it means to be a finite mortal creature again, and he has these thoughts:

Now he was human again: he could no longer see past his limitations. Like every creature that died when its time was done, he could only live in his circumscribed present.

This was the truth of being mortal, this imprisonment in the strictures of sequence. It felt like a kind of tomb.

In his earlier state, he had recognized that this prison was also the only utile form of freedom. Another contradiction: strictures enabled as much as they denied. The Elohim (mythic beings of pure “Earthpower”) were ineffectual precisely because they had so few constraints. Linden was capable of so much because her inadequacies walled her on all sides.

Now, however, he had to take that perception on faith.

In the Christmas story, Christians affirm something like what Covenant strives, in the midst of his limited perception, to hold onto on faith: the idea that limits can encompass redemptive possibilities.

One of the most extraordinary images to come from the Hubble Space Telescope emerged when the telescope was pointed towards an area of seemingly empty space. What would the telescope reveal? The answer was galaxies. Galaxies upon galaxies. Multitudes of galaxies filling that tiny sliver of darkness. The vastness of the universe, the immensity of creation, came to light in a stunning way.

To believe in the Christmas story is, first, to believe that behind that immensity is an infinite creator whose vastness dwarfs His creation. The creation itself is one that we cannot even begin to fathom, and which demands our stunned silence—but that stunning immensity is only a symbol of the magnitude of what lies behind.

Second, to believe in the Christmas story is to believe that this infinite creator descended into His creation to take on the boundaries of matter and time and vulnerable flesh. All that immensity, all that unfathomable vastness, became paradoxically defined by mortal limitations: the strictures of sequence, the inevitability of death, helplessness, susceptibility to despair.

Our anguished consciousness of our limits, our fallibility and fragility, finds no purer symbol than the wailing infant, the baby whose only power is to scream out its need. And in the Christmas story, that symbol of frail finitude is juxtaposed against the heavens: the blazing star over Bethlehem, the heavenly host that comes with terrifying splendor to the shepherds—or, in the language of our own age, the vastness of the universe, galaxies upon galaxies that fill up one sliver of darkness in the sky.

But part of the message is that what the child represents is something far greater that the teeming enormity of the physical universe, despite the strictures of sequence, despite mortality and frail flesh. The eternal Logos, the Word that from the beginning was with God, one with God, fully present in a child stripped of any trappings of grandeur. A stall. Hay. Outcast shepherds. Peasant parents. It isn’t the emperor who is exalted, who can claim the mantle of the infinite. The infinite presses itself into mortal strictures at that point where its meaning cannot be warped by artificial hierarchies, the imagined constructs we fashion to tame the vastness of what lies beyond us.

We exalt a man in a big room, on a big chair, wearing glittering clothes—and if such a man is the definition of greatness, then greatness is a miniscule thing. It won’t dwarf us. Such a parochial vision of greatness can help us not to think of the galaxies upon galaxies filling up one tiny corner of the heavens. If God came to Earth in such a man, we’d make God as small as an emperor.

But in the Christmas story we are asked, not to tame our vision of God, but to expand our vision of frail humanity. In the Christmas story, we are invited not to hide from the immeasurable vastness of the universe and its creator, but to confront it in the knowledge that we will not be lost or crushed or driven to despair by its enormity. Rather than taming God, rather than putting God in a manageable box, the Christmas story buttresses us in all our frailty so that we needn’t hide from what transcends us. It does so not by making us equal to God; not by erasing our limits. It does so by making the infinite God one with us, by bringing God down into those limits. To believe in that, to believe in the Christmas story, is to be capable of enduring and accepting our limits, our finitude, the strictures of physical existence and the one-way flow of time—capable of accepting them even when we honestly see them for what they are.

And this capacity in turn enables us to do what inevitably exposes every frailty and imperfection in a blazing light. It enables us to look to the infinite, to open ourselves to it, to face the mysterium tremendum with the joy of relationship rather than in despair over our own inadequacy.

And to believe in the Christmas story is to set aside the fear of inadequacy and all the ugly things that go with it: the jealousies of others’ accomplishments; the envy of others’ talents; the shame of being merely human; the other-directed judgments and condemnations that are really about misdirection, about getting those around us to look somewhere else so that they don’t see our own glaring sins; the self-directed loathing and despair that comes when we cannot hide from our own sense of insufficiency; and all the superficiality, the consumerism, the empty entertainments that we throw ourselves into in the hope of distracting ourselves, of keeping ourselves from noticing our staggering limitations.

To believe in the Christmas story is to look at all this friable life, in ourselves and others—this life constrained by mortality and sequence, impotence and ignorance, sin and fallibility—and to treasure the precious reality that dwells within those limits, rather than the vast nothing which lies beyond them.

A Bit More on Hitchens

2011-12-19T10:21:00.003-06:00

Glenn Peoples, over at Say Hello to my Little Friend, has posted a rather scathing "tribute" to Hitchens almost worthy of Hitchens himself. He begins by noticing (for the sake of bucking) the supposed trend of "Christians coming out of the woodwork to say nice things about him" now that Hitchens is dead. One can almost hear the scorn in his voice.

I would certainly qualify as one of those Christians who, on hearing about Hitchens's death, felt moved to say something nice. To be honest, had he died immediately after I'd first read god is not Great, I wouldn't have had much nice to say and so probably would've remained silent. But the more I followed Hitchens' career in the wake of finishing Is God a Delusion?, the more...fond...I became of him.

And so I wrote the following response to Peoples' roasting:

I generally agree about the quality of Hitchens’ arguments, which were routinely more pugilistically clever than sound. But when it comes to the motivations at the root of those arguments, and their ultimate effect, I think there is much more room for debate.

As far as motivations go, the more I studied Hitchens the more I came away with the sense that underneath the bluster and sneering bravado was outrage at what he saw to be the range of foolishness and inhumanity in the world–and hence, at an even deeper level, a devotion to the true and the good. This is not to say that his response was the best one, or even an especially good one. It is to say that a devotion to the good and the true was the deep source of the passion with which he delivered even his most hostile verbal diatribes.

Of course I could be wrong about this–we cannot readily plumb the hearts of human beings. I certainly did not have this sense when I first started reading Hitchens on religion. In my book, Is God a Delusion?, I rarely had anything positive to say about him–and the general weakness of his arguments on a philosophical level meant I actually gave him less attention in that book than the other so-called new atheists. But as I continued following his career I just had this growing sense about his driving motivations–a sense that I still don’t have with respect to, say, Dawkins or Sam Harris. This sense led me to respond to him with almost a sort of affection (an affection that would, I’m sure, crumble if he ever turned his vitreol directly on me; so not an especially durable affection, but an odd kind of affection nonetheless).

But even if my intuitions here are wrong, there is something I am prepared to say with considerable confidence. Hitchens was a human being, and human beings have an inherent worth and dignity that warrants our respect–even in the cases of those who were not themselves prone to displaying such respect in their own rhetoric. It is quite possible that a roasting of Hitchens at his death–of the sort that Hitchens himself was wont to offer towards those he took to be particularly egregious fonts of foolishness and inhumanity–is a kind of sideways show of respect for him (Kant’s arguments about retributivism point in that direction). But my own inclination is to show my respect by reaching beyond the layers of crud towards what I take to be the mark of his creator at his core–and to live in the hope that this will be preserved long after his pugilistic screeds are forgotten.

I didn't, in that comment on Peoples' post, take up the issue of the effects of Hitchens' attacks on religion. Peoples claims that Hitchens "contributed nothing of value to public discussions around religion," and that his writings and public debates and talks ("circus antics") "only served to egg on the very worst intellectual element of atheism".

I'm not at all convinced that Hitchens' legacy can be reduced to this. One of the things Hitchens liked to do was attack our sacred cows with all the eloquent disdain of which he was capable. He was one of the few, for example, who was prepared to question the near-universal esteem in which Mother Teresa is held--calling her "a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud" (among other things). His attack on her was certainly over the top. Unbalanced, unfair, unfitting, disrespectful--all of these are terms I'd be inclined to apply.

But sacred cows often operate as an impediment to intellectual honesty. And while Hitchens' attacks on sacred cows weren't themselves models of intellectual fairness, I suspect that, at least sometimes, his willigness to attack them created a public conversation that hadn't been there before. In place of nothing but pious repetition of Mother Teresa's virtues, Hitchens' attacks forced at least some people to actually come to her defense. And some of those defenses carried with them explicit concessions that wouldn't otherwise have been voiced, or at least wouldn't have been voiced in a way that made it into the broader public conversation. Perhaps there was something problematic--or at least worth critical discussion--about a nun devoted to giving love to dying orphans in an overpopulated city (in an overpopulated country, in an overpopulated world) while continuing to unquestioningly endorse the Roman Catholic opposition to birth control.

When it comes to religion, Hitchens was of course attacking sacred cows that were already being attacked in lively style by Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and others. Arguably, then, he didn't spark a public conversation that wasn't already well underway. But it is surely the case that the New Atheists taken as a whole sparked a public conversation that had been largely sequestered up until that point in philosophy of religion classrooms and in the occasional (mostly ignored) blog. Prior to the New Atheist onslaught, my qualified and conditioned defense of religion--one which takes sharp issue with fanatical, fundamentalist, and science-hating expressions of faith--would have received far less attention than it did (and would likely not have been read at all by conservative religious believers). This is a point I've made in the past in relation to Richard Dawkins.

So, taken as a whole, the New Atheists did in fact provide a public-conversation-starting function. And Hitchens was a defining voice in that movement.

Let me be clear that this is not an unqualified defense of Hitchens' brand of rhetoric or of the New Atheist movement. One of the great dangers of the approach exemplified by the New Atheists is that the public conversation may become polarized to the point of ideological entrenchment. Going from a world in which the merits of religion go largely undiscussed except in rarified intellectual circles, to a world in which the discussion has the character of a shouting match across metaphorical picket lines, may not qualify as progress. And I'm not yet sure that this isn't the nature of the transition we've undergone.

In other words, there is something to Peoples' claim that Hitchens egged on some of the less intellectually respectable voices in the atheist community. My point is that Hitchen's legacy is more complex that this single effect. That complexity needs to be acknowledged and thought about.

And since I have more questions than answers when it comes to the ultimate impact of Hitchens' brand of anti-religious public rhetoric, let me open it up at this point to the thoughts of others: What do you think is the long-term legacy of Hitchens' brand of hyperbolic anti-religious campaigning?

So what exactly IS the Vader-Christmas Connection?

2011-12-17T10:32:00.001-06:00

Reflection on Hitchens' Death At Religion Dispatches

2011-12-16T19:44:00.000-06:00

I have a brief reflection on Christopher Hitchens' death at the Religion Dispatches blog. Check it out here if you're interested.

The Intelligent Design/Justin Bieber Connection

2011-12-13T14:44:00.000-06:00

Okay, so this blog title is a bit misleading. My aim here, really, is to critically assess a proposal offered by Randal Rauser on his blog. Randal’s blog is one I like to check in on occasionally, since Randal is a philosophically-trained theologian who is consistently thoughtful, clear, and witty. While he self-identifies as an apologist in a way that I do not, his brand of apologetics is far more appealing to me than, say, William Lane Craig’s.

That’s not to say I always agree with him. About a month ago he put up a post, "In Search of an Arsonist," that I would likely have commented on—in critical terms—if I hadn’t been grieving my father’s death. The post had to do with the method by which we determine whether something is the product of intelligent design. Randal’s thesis is that we decide that something is the product of intelligent design by ruling out other causes until intelligent agency is all we’re left with.

Sometimes, of course, this is exactly how we proceed. Randal offers the example of forensic investigators who conclude that a fire was arson (and hence the result of intelligent agency) by ruling out other causes. But can we generalize from such cases? Is it always or even usually true that we infer intelligent agency by a kind of process of elimination? More significantly, can we or should we rely on such a process in the effort to infer an intelligent designer behind natural phenomena?

Before tackling these questions, I want to take a slight digression. Specifically, Randal’s arson investigation case is precisely the kind of case commonly invoked by members of the so-called “ID movement” to support their claim that what they are doing is science—that it is methodologically in line with established scientific procedures and so should qualify as science. Is this right?

I’m not sure Randal wants to draw this conclusion. After all, if intelligent agency is best inferred by ruling out other kinds of explanations, then the quest to decide whether phenomena in the natural world are the product of intelligent design might best be pursued by dedicating a discipline to the task of uncovering and testing these other kinds of explanations. In short, we might use Randal’s point as a basis for arguing that science should be “methodologically naturalistic” in something like the way that opponents of ID movement insist it should be.

But let’s set this concern aside for now. To determine whether the ID movement is pursuing an approach that qualifies as scientific, we need to know how ID theorists actually defend their views. As I understand it, the modern ID movement (as opposed to believers in design or defenders of philosophical arguments from design) grew out of "creation science," and it shares with its predecessor the political aim of getting the God hypothesis into the public school science classroom. But ID's approach is much more sophisticated than what one finds in creation science, setting aside pseudo-scientific arguments for the literal inerrancy of Genesis in favor of modern updates of William Paley’s version of the argument from design. Where the modern updates differ from Paley is not in the basic logical structure of the argument, but rather in their choice of examples of things-that-are-best-explained-by-positing-a-God.

Contemporary ID theorists typically rely on examples taken from two sources: molecular biology and physics. The first version of the modern argument, which might be called the Argument from Irreducible Complexity, relies primarily on the views of biologist Michael Behe. Put simply, the argument runs as follows: Certain complex biological systems on which organisms rely are said to possess the property of “irreducible complexity”—that is, they are such that, were they to be rendered any simpler by having any of their components removed, they would cease to function altogether and so would confer no adaptive advantage on organisms possessing them. Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, it is argued, cannot account for the emergence of such irreducibly complex systems, since evolution explains complex systems in terms of incremental increases in complexity, where each such increase is preserved by the adaptive advantage it supposedly confers. Intelligent design, by contrast, can account for such systems. There is, supposedly, no credible third alternative. Therefore, these systems are best explained by positing an intelligent designer.

Second, we have what’s sometimes called the Fine-Tuning Argument. A set of physical constants are said to possess the property of being “fine-tuned” for the emergence of organized complexity (and hence life). No purely physical theory, it is argued, can adequately account for such fortuitous fine-tuning. Intelligent design can. There is no credible third alternative. Therefore, the fine-tuning of the universe is best explained by positing an intelligent designer.

In each of these cases, what the ID movement offers is an argument, some of whose premises are susceptible to assessment in the light of established scientific methods. But notice what it doesn’t offer: a strategy for positively testing the “intelligent design hypothesis” itself. Instead, what we have is a disjunctive argument in which ID theory is endorsed based on a process of elimination—which is, of course, precisely the mechanism that Randal endorses as the proper one for inferring intelligent agency.

One question we can ask is whether reliance on such a disjunctive argument alone can ever justify one in saying that the conclusion reached was arrived at scientifically. Clearly, scientists can and do make use of this sort of disjunctive reasoning—ruling out known causes for a phenomenon as a way of concluding that some unknown cause is at work. But this is typically a kind of prelude to further scientific work, involving speculation about what the unknown causes might be, and then conducting experimental tests (in some sense repeatable) to determine whether one’s guesses have any merit.

But maybe invocations of intelligent design just can’t work like that, because intelligent design brings things about through agency, and agency is subject to will rather than uniform laws. The argument might go as follows: When a hypothesized cause is mechanistic (to use Hermann Lotze’s language), we can test it—by, paradigmatically, making predictions and seeking to falsify them. But freedom isn’t law-like and so doesn’t allow for that kind of testing. And intelligent design inevitably involves an exercise of freedom. Thus, intelligent design can’t be tested for scientifically, and so can only be rationally embraced in some other way. Perhaps this “other way” is the process-of-elimination approach Randal endorses: If nothing else can explain it, we are left with intelligent agency by default.

If so, we might well ask whether this process-of-elimination approach qualifies as science (i) always, (ii) sometimes (and if so, when and why?), or (iii) never. If it isn’t science, then this just goes to show that intellectual inquiry can and does proceed beyond the boundaries of scientific inquiry, invoking a palette of resources that are still available when science has hit the limits of what it can do with its methods. At stake here is not just the credibility of other methods of inquiry, but the political agenda of the ID movement. If this sort of thing isn’t science, then it shouldn’t be in a science classroom—although it arguably should be part of high school education even so, as part of the philosophy curriculum that high schools shamefully lack.

But the question of whether the process-of-elimination approach to inferring intelligent agency is science needs to be assessed in the light of a deeper question: Is it generally true that we can and do infer intelligent design by elimination of other causes?

I think that, in fact, the situation is much more complex. Consider again the case of the forensic scientists investigating a fire. In this case, we have a certain kind of event (a fire) about which we have considerable experience. On the basis of this experience we have derived a list of “known culprits”—that is, kinds of causes (lightning strike, untended campfire, discarded cigarette, deliberate arson, etc.) which are typically responsible for an event of this kind.

In a situation of this sort, we can systematically rule out the various kinds of causes until we are left with only one—and thus, by process of elimination, arrive at the conclusion that, most probably, the cause was of the remaining kind. I say “most probably” because, even though a rich body of experience tells us that events of this kind are ordinarily produced by causes within this list, there might be unusual kinds of causes that don’t appear on the list. The list is fairly exhaustive, but not completely so.

Some contexts aren’t like this, however. Suppose I’m a space explorer who has recently landed on Planet X. The terrain is uniformly flat in most places, but on my third day I come across a big mound of dirt. After investigating the mound, the ground beneath, and other bits of evidence, I’m able to ascertain that what I’m witnessing is the result of a kind of “dirt-geyser” phenomenon produced when trapped gas pushed up through a silt-filled fissure.

Now I come across another mound of dirt. Upon investigating, I conclude that it is not the effect of a dirt-geyser. But, being new to the planet, I have very little experience with such mounds, and hence very little experience with what might cause them. My list of “known culprits” has one member, and I’ve eliminated it. Presumably, in this case, we can’t reasonably infer intelligent agency on the basis of eliminating all the other known culprits.

What we might say is that the explorer is in the process of creating a known-culprits list for dirt mounds. At that stage of the game, the negative method of determining causes through a process of elimination is unavailable, or in any event untenable. There is just too little that is known about how things work on the planet, and hence no reason to suppose that the list of “known culprits” for dirt mounds even approaches being exhaustive.

Furthermore, there is no reason as of yet for the explorer to suppose that intelligent agency should be included in the list of causes for dirt-mounds on Planet X. The explorer has seen no intelligent denizens on the planet, let alone any who were busy making dirt mounds. This distinguishes our explorer from forensic scientists on Earth who are exploring an unexplained fire, insofar as these scientists know there to be intelligent agents running around and also know that these agents have the means to start fires and sometimes do so.

Of course, this may not be quite right. Suppose our explorer is exploring the planet with a colleague, who is a known practical joker. In that case, the explorer would be well advised to investigate the theory that his colleague created the dirt mound as a joke.

But there’s a difference between appealing to a known sort of intelligent agent—an intelligent agent of a kind known to exist and known to be capable of producing the effect observed—and using observed phenomena as the basis for concluding that a new kind of intelligent agent, one not otherwise observed to exist, in fact does exist. If, after years of study, the Planet X explorer has produced a fairly exhaustive list of causes for dirt mounds—but has never observed any intelligent denizens of the planet—can this explorer really deduce that there must be such denizens if he encounters a dirt mound that cannot be explained by any of the known culprits on his list?

It doesn’t seem so. In fact, it seems that were the explorer to reason in this way, he’d be guilty of a kind of question-begging. What running out of known culprits warrants is the conclusion that there is a heretofore unknown culprit. To assume that the new culprit is an intelligent agent is, in effect, to operate as if the “gap” in one’s list is in fact not a gap at all but is filled by precisely the new kind of intelligent agent one is seeking to establish. The explorer has, in effect, treated the hypothesized new sort of intelligent agent as a member of the known culprits list in order to reach the conclusion that a new sort of intelligent agent should be included in the know culprits list.

But now suppose I’m exploring Planet X and come across an enormous rock in the shape of Justin Bieber’s head. I mean the resemblance is perfect. Of course, I scream in utter terror. Not only are there intelligent beings here, but they clearly wish me ill.

In this case, unlike the dirt-mound case, I immediately infer intelligent agency. I don’t infer this because I have eliminated all non-agent causes from my list of things-that-can produce-perfect-stone-replicas-of-Justin-Bieber’s-head. Rather, I infer it immediately from the nature of the phenomenon that stands in need of explanation. And I infer it (rightly, I would say) without having ever observed any intelligent agents at work on this planet, without having any idea of what those intelligent agents are like, how they produced the stone head, etc.

The reason I justifiably make this inference is because a sculpture of someone’s head is the kind of thing that, in my experience (and not just mine), is only produced by intelligent agents. Once I rule out my practical-joker colleague as the cause, I might now reasonably add a new kind of intelligent agent to my list of known culprits for things observed on Planet X.

In effect, then, from the above we can identify two distinct ways of arriving at the view that intelligent agency is responsible for some phenomenon of type P: (1) A body of experience teaches us that P’s are typically caused by a range of causes, one of which is intelligent agency; the phenomenon at issue is a P; and all causes other than intelligent agency have been eliminated; (2) A body of experience teaches us that P’s are caused only by intelligent agency, and the phenomenon at issue is a P.

(1) and (2) may not be exhaustive. They wouldn’t be if, for example, we could ever immediately intuit, without a body of experience, that certain phenomena require intelligent agency. I'm inclined to suspect that, in fact, we can do exactly this. But I won't pursue that case here. Instead, I simply want to summarize what I take to be the lessons of the above analysis:

(a) Inferring intelligent agency by a process-of-elimination is an acceptable approach (arguably a scientific one) in cases where there is a known set of culprits for a given phenomenon, intelligent agency is among the known culprits, and there is reason to suppose that the set of culprits is fairly exhaustive (that is, most phenomena of the given sort are explained by one of the known culprits).

(b) In cases where we have no firm reason to suppose that our set of “known culprits” is fairly exhaustive, the process-of-elimination approach is not acceptable for inferring intelligent agency or any other cause.

(c) If we are asking whether there exists a new kind of intelligent agency that we haven’t seen before, the process-of-elimination approach is question-begging—unless the phenomenon we are seeking to explain is the sort that we justifiably believe on other grounds could only be produced by an intelligent agent. In that case the process-of-elimination approach would operate on known intelligent agents who might have caused the phenomenon, with the inference to an unknown intelligent agent reached when all known intelligent agents have been eliminated.

In place of Randal Rauser’s process-of-elimination strategy for inferring intelligent design, I would therefore offer up (a)-(c). And given (a)-(c), it would take more work than Randal has done to say that the fine-tuning case should be approached in the same way that forensic scientists investigate a possible arson.

Anyway, that a first run at articulating my thinking about this. Thoughts?

The Politician's Beatitudes, Take Two

2011-12-12T19:57:00.001-06:00

Some time ago I composed these "Politician's Beatitudes." Since my last two posts were, for better or worse, related to the statements and arguments of a couple of politicians, I thought it might be the right time for a repost. So, here they are: The Politician's Beatutudes. Enjoy!

Blessed are those who act to preserve the privileges of the rich, for they shall receive substantial campaign contributions.

Blessed are those who swallow back tears at strategic moments only to quickly compose themselves again, for they shall be regarded as having a sensitive side but still be seen as strong, thereby being judged more trustworthy by the electorate (unless they’re women, in which case they risk being seen as dangerously emotional).

Blessed are the aggressive, since negative campaigning has proven time and again to work even though the electorate complains about it.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for prestige and influence while pretending to care primarily about serving the public, for they will gain levels of political influence that those motivated more by a spirit of public service than ambition can only dream of.

Blessed are the merciless, because they’ll ruin the political credibility of their opponent before their opponent does the same to them.

Blessed are those who can look earnestly into the camera and sound really sincere as they say things like “God bless the United States of America,” for they will win the heartland.

Blessed are the warmongers, at least if they can properly time their war-related popularity surge to an election cycle.

Blessed are those who can spin their political opponent’s attack ads as persecution for righteousness’s sake, for they can engage in an underhanded attack on their political opponent while appearing as if they are standing against negative campaigning—thereby both enjoying the benefits of a negative campaign and enjoying the benefits of pandering to the public’s theoretic opposition to negative campaigns.

Blessed are those who, in moments of moral integrity, defy this cynical list of political beatitudes and act from a sense of authentic justice, compassion, or moral purpose—for although they might not get reelected, they may actually find true fullfilment in the lives they lead after leaving public office.

Rick Perry's New Ad: A Translation

2011-12-09T09:23:00.003-06:00

One more political post, just because it's the season for that sort of thing. It occurs to me that some people may not understand why Rick Perry's most recent ad campaign, "Strong," grates like fingernails on the chalkboard with people like me. So I thought it would be helpful to offer a translation of sorts. For those of you who haven't seen the ad, here it is:

And here is what I hear as I listen to it:

I’m not afraid to explicitly link my bigoted and hateful beliefs to Christianity in an attempt both to baptize hate and to garner votes, even though doing so gives all Christians a bad name among those who care about justice, equality, and a love that isn’t constrained to one religious community or one sexual orientation.

I believe there is something wrong with the decision in this country to end a painful and damaging discriminatory practice in the military. I think we should have continued to discriminate against some of those who have chosen to risk their lives and sacrifice their comforts in the name of promoting the security and freedoms of their fellow Americans. Because of who they happen to love, their courage and sacrifice means nothing to me.

Furthermore, I think it is terrible that we take separation of church and state seriously in this country. In the name of this principle, our public schools are prohibited from officially sanctioning one religion over others or setting aside school time to explicitly carry out a religious practice or celebrate a particular religion’s holidays. So long as this principle is in place, there will never be schools in this country that require Christian children to observe Ramadan on pain of enduring stigmatization if they refuse. But it also means that Muslim children will not be required to sit through school functions that explicitly endorse the majority religion. And since I belong to the majority and want to impose my views on those who don’t share it, this is an intolerable cost to me.

I know full well that prohibiting schools from explicitly sanctioning one religion over others does not mean that any child is prohibited from praying in school according to their beliefs, or celebrating their religious holidays and traditions in a manner that doesn’t shove them down the throats of others who think differently. It just means that each child, regardless of faith or lack thereof, is allowed to do this in their own way when it doesn't disrupt school activities, or during times set aside without prejudice for children to pursue their individual convictions—for example, during moments of silence that are still officially observed during school assembles. Even though I know full well the distinction here, I will deliberately choose to ignore it and misrepresent reality for the sake of political gain.

And I will not only aim to increase public confusion on these issues, I will take those who are clear about them to task, labeling their respect for our soldiers regardless of their unchosen sexuality, and their allegiance to church/state separation, a “war on faith.” I will deliberately invoke us/them rhetoric, magnifying the ideological divisiveness in this country for the sake of gaining political power.

I am Rick Perry. I mask my bigotry in the cloak of Christian faith. And despite the fact that doing so plants hate and division into a faith defined essentially by a love that knows no boundaries, I approve this bigotry.

So that is what I hear, for better or worse, when I listen to this ad. And that is what many people hear. And that is why we cringe--or blink in horror at the fact that this man is a serious contender for the most powerful political position in the world.

Philosophical Public Service Announcement: Michele Bachmann's Argument Against Same-Sex Marriage is Bad

2011-12-07T13:49:00.000-06:00

One public service that professional philosophers can (and probably should) provide is to carefully explain why certain popular arguments on matters of public interest aren't any good.

Doing this is important because some bad arguments are delivered sincerely by politicians and pundits in the public sphere; and these arguments, despite their unsoundness, play a role in shaping or solidifying people's convictions. And even though anyone who isn't already a true believer can smell something fishy, in some cases it can be hard for the ordinary person to pin down and clearly explain what's gone wrong.

Occasionally I feel the need to present such arguments to my students. A few weeks ago, when discussing same-sex marriage in one of my classes, we were looking at an argument for same sex marriage that relied on the following premise:

Restricting marriage to heterosexual couples amounts to legal discrimination, and thus stands in need of a substantive justification--a compelling state interest, beyond majority preferences or sectarian religious beliefs, that could warrant the state in waiving the presumption of equality under the law.

This premise strikes me as clearly true--and it seemed that pretty much everyone in the class agreed. Those who were opposed to same-sex marriage didn't deny that current practices are discriminatory. What they denied is that the discrimination is unjustified. They thought there were good reasons to exclude same-sex couples from the legal institution of marriage, but were prepared to concede that gays and lesbians were being legally denied something that the heterosexual majority enjoyed.

But I knew full well that there's an argument often repeated in the public sphere which challenges this--an argument which purports to show, not that the discrimination is justified, but that no discrimination is going on at all. So I threw it out there. Here's how the argument goes:

A law that restricts marriage rights to heterosexual couples is not discriminatory at all, because everyone in society has the same rights with respect to marriage that everyone else in society has, namely to marry someone of the opposite sex. No one is excluded from marriage. It's just that everyone in society faces exactly the same constraint on who they can marry. It must be someone of the opposite sex. So: no discrimination, and hence no need to justify the discrimination by appealing to some consideration that could warrant differential treatment.

So what did my students say when I laid out this argument? Very little. I saw some eyes roll. One student said, "I refuse to dignify that argument with a response." They generally sensed it was a bad argument, but they weren't quite able to spell out where the argument goes wrong.

"But if you don't think the argument is convincing," I said to the student who refused to dignify the argument with a response, "you need to be able to explain why. Because this is a major public dispute right now. And not only are there people out there who are sincerely making this argument, but there are people whose prior convictions are being strengthened by it. Put simply, the argument sounds reasonable to them."

Of course, one person who delivers just this argument is GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann. Here's a video in which, among other things, she articulates precisely this argument in response to a high school student questioning her opposition to same-sex marriage:

So why is Bachmann's argument bad? (There's actually more than one bad argument in this clip, but I want to focus on the one about same-sex marriage.) The teenagers in the clip were persistent and courageous, but they didn't articulate the fatal flaw in Bachmann's argument with the kind of clarity that would expose it for what it is (maybe even to Bachmann herself).

And what's the fatal flaw? Put simply, the argument is premised on the assumption that everyone has the same sexual orientation. If everyone had a homosexual orientation, then a law restricting marriage to heterosexual couples would require that everyone marry someone they have no attraction to, cannot fall in love with, cannot sustain romantic feelings with, etc. Everyone in society would be equally denied access to a deeply valued social good, namely legal recognition and support for their intimate, romantic loving partnerships. No discrimination there--although we might wonder why the state would systematically deny everyone access to this social good. (I suppose if everyone had a homosexual orientation, the reason might have something to do with motivating reproduction in a world where no one is drawn to reproductive sex).

If everyone had a heterosexual orientation, then--once again--a law restricting marriage to heterosexual couples would be unproblematic. It would preclude everyone from doing something no one had any interest in doing in any event: namely, marrying someone they cannot be attracted to or cultivate romantic feelings for. It would be a kind of silly and pointless restriction, a bit like prohibiting people from eating unhealthy food they despise in contexts where courtesy doesn't demand it.

And, of course, if everyone had a bisexual orientation, then a law restricting marriage to heterosexual couples would put the same limitation on everyone (I've often joked that conservative Christians think everyone is bisexual--after all, they declare that "it's a choice"). We might wonder why this constraint should be imposed, but the constraint would not be discriminatory against any individuals (although it would still discriminate against couples who happened to be of the same sex, and thus would cause considerable pain when people had the bad luck of falling in love with someone of the same sex and then had to face the decision of whether to break up with someone they loved or go on with the relationship knowing they'll never have access to the social and legal goods of civil marriage).

But people don't all have the same sexual orientation. And so, legally limiting civil marriage to heterosexual couples means that heterosexuals are afforded access to a distinctive good (having their intimate romatic partnerships recognized and supported by the state) that is denied to those with a homosexual orientation. (Furthermore, the law creates a situation in which bisexuals are confronted with a potential life challenge--see above--that heterosexuals are immune from).

Of course, Bachmann claims that a homosexual orientation is something that can be "healed" through so-called reparative therapy or ex-gay ministries. The evidence hardly supports this claim. At best, gays and lesbians can be habituated to more effectively suppress their natural attractions and, perhaps, learn strategies for functioning sexually with people they are not attracted to. But that isn't conversion to heterosexuality. They remain persons with a homosexual orientation who are, we might say, better able to outwardly mimic the sexual lives of persons with a heterosexual orientation (but who, in mimicking this, cannot experience the inner satisfaction and relational intimacy that is possible for heterosexuals).

But suppose Bachmann is right. Suppose reparative therapy actually can succeed in turning a non-heterosexual into a heterosexual. Would it then be the case that restricting marriage to heterosexual couples is not discriminatory? No. It would still be discriminatory. Why? Because, in order to enjoy the distinctive social goods offered by the legal institution of marriage, those who happen to have a homosexual orientation would be required to do something that heterosexuals would not be required to do: They'd need to successfully undergo conversion therapy.

Heterosexuals who fell in love could head straight to the appropriate municipal offices to apply for a marriage licence. If civil marriage were available to same-sex couples, then gays and lesbians could do the same thing. But as it is in most states, they can't. Instead, they're denied the benefit of legal recognition and support for their intimate relationships unless and until (assuming, as Bachmann does, that this is possible) they achieve a successful "conversion" (and spend the time and other resources needed to achieve this).

Imagine, if you will, that public funding for attending state universities were only available to people who spoke English with an American accent. And suppose that there are accent coaches out there who have a track record of success in teaching this ability to those willing to invest the time and resources. Does the latter fact make the policy non-discriminatory? Of course not. Discrimination in the conferral of social goods based on one's accent remains discrimination even if it is possible, with time and effort, for those who have the "wrong" accent to change it.

None of this implies that discrimination is unjustified (although I think it is). But it does imply that to argue that there is nothing discriminatory going on is just misguided. Bachmann's argument is bad. No one should be influenced by it one way or the other. And so its badness needs to be explained, again and again if necessary, so as to shut down any power it might have to erroneously shape public thinking. Consider this my small effort in that cause--and feel free to direct others to this post if you'd rather not explain the badness of the argument yourself.

Hand Over Your Coat as Well

2011-12-05T14:14:00.001-06:00

Jesus' radical ethic is no more vividly described than in this key passage from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:38-42):

You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.

What did Jesus really have in mind here? Let evil go unconstrained in the world?

Maybe not. Maybe what he had in mind was something more along the lines of what the social worker Julio Diaz did when he was mugged in the NYC subway. Check out the NPR story here. As Diaz demonstrates (quite literally), "handing over your coat as well" might be a bold act of unexpected--and transformative--compassion. If only more of us were like Diaz, demonstrating creative compassion so consistently that even our muggers are caught up in the web of it, blinking in wonder that such a thing is really possible.

Blog Update

2011-12-05T09:48:00.000-06:00

It was my intention--mostly kept--to take November off from blogging so as to focus on family during this time of loss. I intend to resume regular blogging shortly, and I have some topics in the works. Among other things, a philosophical colleague at another university was apparently using my first book in class and sent me a list of questions his students had put together. I will likely use these questions as the basis for some blog posts. I also have a post on intelligent design inspired by a recent essay on Randal Rauser's blog. And I have several posts that are emerging out of the research for my new book project, God and Gays.

But all of that will need to mostly wait until I can see myself clear of the current backlog of term papers and student journals that are now cluttering my office...

Thanksgiving in a Time of Loss

2011-11-24T11:39:00.001-06:00

This Thanksgiving is, for me and my family, a time of mourning. On Tuesday of this week we celebrated the life of my father, who passed away a few short weeks ago. I sit now in my childhood home and find myself expecting to see my father at every turn.

It's easy to fall into melancholy memories, to sit there in the aching remembrance of a childhood whose pains are long forgotten but whose joys are as clear as they're out of reach--joys bound up with my father, who is now gone. It's easy, in such moments, to lose touch with the spirit of gratitude that we celebrate today.

The experience of loss is part of the human condition, and it is often felt most keenly during the holidays, when established rituals are pregnant with memories. On the first holiday after a loved one has passed away, the empty spaces left behind are especially potent: the place where she sat, the role he played in preparing the meal, the story she always told, the distinctive resonance of his laughter.

You look with habitual expectation and find yourself jolted by absence. With time, of course, the habits fade. The absence no longer hits with such a shock. But it remains an empty space. And as we grow older, there will, inevitably, be more such spaces.

This year my family confronts my father's absence--my father who was always the attentive host, the one who raised the glass in our welcoming "Skål," who always made sure everyone had what they needed. How can we help but feel his absence, so fresh and vivid, as we sit down to the Thanksgiving feast? What does it mean for this holiday, whose purpose is to offer thanks, to turn our eyes upward in a spirit of gratitude, to thank God for the gifts of life?

Part of the answer is offered afresh every day by my children. When I find myself falling into the past, longing for what is gone, I'm grateful to my children who exist so wholly in the joys of the present that I'm forced to live there too. And I'm thankful for my own childhood and the family that made it possible--imperfect as all human families are imperfect, but defined by the kind of love that casts a long shadow into the future.

Were it not for that love, I wouldn't feel the ache of loss. Those who are gone move us to mourn because, when they were with us, we were present with them, attending to them, loving them. And so loss must recall love, and love must flow out again into this place where we find ourselves now, this place where joy waits to be tasted along with the feast. We honor love by loving. We revere treasured memories by make new ones.

Another part of the answer hit me on Monday night as I was sitting at the table with friends and family who had arrived in town for the memorial service. We drank wine from the wine rack my father had filled (with his impeccable taste), and we told stories and laughed (and cried) and ate together late into the evening. We were living and present to each other, thankful for who my father was and for each other. We were alive and living our lives at the table together.

And I thought about the final notes of the violin piece I'd composed for my father's service. A "double stop"--two notes of a chord played together. And the thing that struck me is this: When you play two sustained notes of a chord on a violin, the interaction of the sound waves audibly produces the third note in the chord. If you listen carefully for it you can actually hear it. It's there, sounding clearly above the other two.

And of course my father was there, in just that way, as we gathered at the table. And as we gather for our feast tonight, he'll be there again, sounding clear and true.

In Memorium: Paul H Reitan, August 18, 1928-October 30, 2011

2011-11-17T12:06:00.004-06:00

I don’t know if many people beyond my immediate family knew about my father’s capacity for silly dancing. He was a quiet man, reserved with his feelings—in many ways very classically Nordic in temperament. He was a college professor who looked and carried himself like a college professor, who spoke with a combination of careful deliberation and passion about topics that mattered to him. In later years, he was a wise elder statesman of sorts for the community of geoscientists devoted to making the geosciences relevant to contemporary social and environmental problems.

But I remember him dancing in the kitchen while we were washing dishes. It wasn’t quality dancing. And it wasn’t flamboyant. It was very deliberate, almost stately, but at the same time utterly absurd. He’d furrow his bushy brow and perform each move as if it were a thing of regal beauty, even though it was just…well, lifting one arm, then another, then a leg. Kind of a slow-motion hokey pokey.

My parents would sometimes have parties that lasted well into the night: gatherings of well-travelled people with intellectual and artistic sensibilities who’d sit for hours around the dinner table talking energetically, laughing, eating, and drinking fine wines or imported beers (sometimes with Aquavit if it was a Norwegian smorgasbord featuring pickled herrings and smoked fish).

It wasn’t uncommon, in these gatherings, for some kind of silly dancing to erupt late into the evening. Once, when I was a child, I remember wandering downstairs because I heard something utterly uncharacteristic: the sound of an electric guitar playing on the stereo. My parents never listened to anything but classical music, usually classical vocal music. But on this evening they’d abruptly decided to put on an LP of Czech rock music—something they’d gotten as a gift from some friends who lived in Prague.

As I came down the stairs, I saw my father dancing in a descending spiral, finally ending up in a heap on the carpet. What else could he do, when a drawn out electric guitar note was descending steadily down, down, down?

Another time, years later, I remember a line dance through the house to the tune of Hava Nagila (played by me on the violin).

And, of course, there were the more traditional folk dances that we did around the Christmas tree every Christmas Eve without fail. My mother would play the piano (or, in later years, I’d play my violin). But my father always danced.

One of my great regrets is that I never got to do an Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP) workshop with him. AVP is an organization founded by a collaboration between prison inmates at Greenhaven Correctional Facility and the local Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). AVP runs experiential workshops—in prisons and in community settings—focusing on conflict resolution and communication skills, community-building, and cultivating the psychological/spiritual resources for living a more nonviolent life.

Not long after I became an AVP workshop facilitator, I introduced my parents to the program. They both went through a basic workshop, but my father got hooked. He went on to become a facilitator himself, and after his retirement worked for about a decade coordinating the AVP program at Wende Correctional Center in upstate New York. I understand that he became something of a beloved grandfather for many of the inmates he worked with there.

One of the distinctive things about an AVP workshop is that, for all the seriousness of the skills and personal resources being cultivated, a spirit of play weaves its way through the whole. This comes out most clearly in what are called “Light and Livelies,” activities that are a bit like the ones that parents plan for their grade-schoolers’ birthday parties (except more fun). Intense discussions, deep sharings, thought-provoking activities—all are woven together by a spirit of play.

After all, what is the point of passionate engagement with social issues, of intellectual inquiry and deep personal sharing, of learning nonviolent communication and conflict resolution skills? What is the point, if not to work towards a world where people can enjoy their lives together more richly, laugh more often, delight in one another more fully? What’s the purpose, if not to learn how to unburden ourselves of all the crud that we too often carry with us, especially in our intimate relationships, so that those relationships may become, more truly, a source of childlike joy?

It’s no wonder that my father was drawn to AVP in his retirement, or that he was such a good and well-loved facilitator. Because although he may have looked the role of a quiet elder statesman imparting wisdom with passion and clarity—although he was such a quiet elder statesman—there was always in his heart a spirit of play.

My mother, in the days following my father’s death, expressed over and over her sense of privilege in the midst of loss: the privilege of being able to live 49 years with one of the best men she’d ever known. I had the privilege of being raised by him. And if there’s a personal basis for my staunch opposition to those exclusivist theologies that condemn to hellfire anyone who fails to embrace the doctrinal details and practices of their brand of faith, it lies in this: My father, an agnostic scientist, was one of the best men I’ve known. He could never share my Christian faith, but he was the first to treat it with respect. He could never see his way to believing beyond what his scientifically-trained mind saw as evidence. But he proudly bought up copies of my first book and mailed them to everyone he knew, include some very staunch atheists.

And the idea that he should be eternally rejected by the God of love because he couldn’t bring himself to believe this or that religious doctrine—well, the idea isn’t just absurd. It’s evil. It’s the kind of crud that keeps people apart, that stifles and truncates our capacity to find joy in each other, to love more fully and richly.

If there’s something I’ve learned from my father, it’s that good, thoughtful people can and do see things differently—often because they can’t help it given their upbringing, their experiences, their inspirations and their loves. None of us can pay adequate attention to it all; none of us can draw all the right conclusions from what we do attend to with care. But we can learn from each other.

Sometimes I get passionate about things, and I debate vigorously with those who disagree. Sometimes I pursue causes in the knowledge that others stand opposed to me. In this I’m like my father. I only hope that, like my father, I can remain focused on what it’s all about. If my father cared so much about the environment, about war and violence, to become passionately engaged in debates and causes, it was for the sake of furthering the kind of community that AVP forges, of lifting the impediments to its spread, of helping to realize a world where everyone can dance.

From the Archives: Some Reflections on Kierkegaard

2011-11-07T15:41:00.000-06:00

Having missed my classes last week due to my father's passing, I'm a bit behind--especially in my philosophy religion class, since we could find a substitute for only one of the days I was out of town. Since one of the topics that was slated for discussion last week was Kierkegaard's fideism, I can make up at least some of the lost class time by directing my students to this blog post from the archives--an explication and reflection on Kierkegaard's fideism. And so I reproduce it here.

Fideism is generally defined as the thesis that it is sometimes appropriate (especially in relation to ultimate matters pertaining to the fundamental nature of reality and the meaning of our lives) to believe something on faith rather than based on reason and evidence, perhaps even in the teeth of reason and evidence.

What this means depends on what we take believing something “on faith” to mean. In practice if not in theory, believing something “on faith” often ends up meaning essentially the same as believing it “just because” (where there is absolutely nothing after the “because”), and doing so with complete certainty that one is right (again, with no foundation at all). Typically, the believer then adds that this conviction is due to God implanting it, even though one has no reason to think that God implanted it.

Understood in this sense, if I happen to believe that the entire population of African elephants is right at this moment flying around inside my refrigerator, then so long as I have no reason and evidence for believing this but remain firm in my belief, and so long as I insist that I believe it because God implanted the belief in me (even though I have no reason at all for thinking that this is true), then I am believing it on faith. Seen in this light, it becomes a challenge to justify the worth that is so often attached to believing something on faith.

But this isn’t Kierkegaard’s fideism. In fact, if fideism is defined in terms of believing things without evidence, I think one misses Kierkegaard’s point altogether. Because for Kierkegaard, faith isn’t really about what you believe at all. In fact, so long as what you care the most about is the content of your belief, faith in Kierkegaard’s sense has eluded you.

Consider an analogy. Suppose you meet someone for whom you feel an immediate attraction. You go on a few dates. You start to fall in love. In fact, you feel yourself falling hard. But then you pause and ask yourself, “Who is this person, really? Does she deserve my love? Is she the kind of person with whom I can sustain a long-term relationship?” Suppose you take these questions seriously and so back off from your burgeoning feelings so as to get an appropriately objective perspective. You investigate her history, interview her friends and her boss at work, all the while not letting your feelings for her color what you hear, since you want to get a wholly objective picture. Finally, through this process, you come to know more facts about her than virtually any other person alive.

But, of course, at this point the rhythm of love has been shattered. You have no romantic feelings for her anymore because you’ve stifled them in favor of a wholly objective consideration of what is true and false about her. Likewise, in the process of doing this, she’s sensed your withdrawal and moved on emotionally. Even should you decide from what you learn that a love relationship with her might be a good idea “on paper,” the very process of pursuing such an investigation has killed any chance of having such a love relationship in fact. Furthermore, the things you learn through such an objective investigation are the wrong things in any event. What really matters for whether a love relationship is possible depends on what you learn through relating to her as a lover.

When it comes to the ultimate nature of reality, Kierkegaard thinks something along the same lines is the case. Kierkegaard tells us that “the highest truth is that the knower is an existing subject,” by which he means that the most important thing for me to know is that I am a subject of experiences with a life to live and relationships to form. One of those relationships is with reality—with the world around me as it truly is. But if I investigate the world objectively and dispassionately, in order to collect all the right facts about it, I become like the deluded fool who squashes any chance at actually being in love with a real person because he is too focused on collecting all those facts that can only be collected by setting passionate interest aside.

The real truth about me is that I am a creature who cares passionately, and to be true to myself, I must live passionately in relation to the world. If I squash that passion in favor of objectivity, I stifle the truth about me and so fail to live the truth—all for the sake of collecting propositions that are more likely to be objectively factual. I end up living a life that is utterly false to what it means to be the kind of being I am—and my consolation is a collection of facts.

Consider the following passage from Kierkegaard (in which Kierkegaard is assuming for the sake of argument what he will readily admit is unknowable, namely that the Christian God is the true God—that, in other words, what Christians believe is true):

If one who lives in a Christian culture goes up to God’s house, the house of the true God, with a true conception of God, with knowledge of God and prays—but prays in a false spirit; and one who lives in an idolatrous land prays with the total passion of the infinite, although his eyes rest on the image of an idol; where is there most truth? The one prays in truth to God, although he worships an idol. The other prays in untruth to the true God and therefore really worships an idol.

Kierkegaard frames the question in terms of objectivity and subjectivity—such that believing the correct doctrines is characterized as the objective side of faith, while believing in the right way, with the right kind of passion and love and attention to one’s relationship with the object of devotion, is the subjective side. I think this characterization may actually be misleading, because in reality both of these aspects of faith are subjective. Believing the right doctrines is a subjective achievement. My beliefs are a subjective matter, and hence believing in the truth is one dimension of having the “right” kind of subjective relationship to the truth. The other dimension is having the right kind of passion, the right kind of attitude, towards the object of belief.

The objective reality—such as the truth about God, about whether God exists at all and what He is like—is a different matter than how closely my beliefs correspond with this truth. And it may well be the case (as Kierkegaard seems to think) that it is impossible to ascertain how closely my beliefs about God correspond to reality. But that, of course, is Kierkegaard’s point: If I devote myself to this question, and to the task of bringing my beliefs about ultimately reality into alignment with ultimate reality as it is in itself, I am devoting myself to a task that, when pursued dispassionately, becomes a distraction from living life (which is passionate). And since this question about ultimate reality is unanswerable, a commitment to answering it before I decide what attitude to adopt towards the universe and how to live my life amounts to the decision to refuse to live a human life at all.

Now I think there’s something to all of this—but I want to make several qualifications. First, sometimes an objective study of something can be an expression of one’s passionate devotion. Because I love my wife, I pay attention to little details about how she moves, about the inflections of her voice. I want to hold these things in my heart accurately, and so there are moments when I attend so closely to her that I lose sight of myself for awhile. Likewise, the best scientists are full of wonder at the physical world—and their devotion to describing it accurately is a manifestation of that passion.

Second, our beliefs affect our attitudes and passions (and, of course, our attitudes and passions affect what we believe). We cannot cleanly separate the two. If I come to believe that my wife has cheated on me or that she disdains me, that would affect our relationship. If I come to believe that God is indifferent to human needs and human suffering—even that God is cruel and hateful—these beliefs will almost certainly impact my attitude towards God. It will be hard to sustain a passionate devotion in the light of these beliefs. More to the point, such devotion would be unfitting.

While it is true that a focus on dispassionately collecting facts about a potential romantic partner is inimical to actually having a romantic relationship, it also true that some people are blinded by their passions and so fail to see ugly truths about the object of their devotion—and their love is thereby rendered pathetic or even dangerous.

And when it comes to loving reality as it is in itself, such love is hardly being expressed when one unswervingly clings to certain beliefs about reality and loves them with all the passion of the infinite while ignoring reasons to doubt their veracity. In that case, the object of love has become one’s own picture of reality. One has become an idolater.

So how are we to pursue the balancing act between believing the right things about ourselves, others, and reality, and living the right way in relation to all of these things? I think Kierkegaard may be best understood as a kind of pragmatist—but not Pascal’s kind. Pascal saw faith as a betting game, in which you bet on the side which offers the highest payoff and the lowest risk. But for Kierkegaard, the proper analogy is not that offered by the betting table, in which you calculate which is your safest bet. Rather, it is that little table in the bistro, sitting across from someone you think you might be falling in love with, aware of the risks and costs of giving your heart in error, but prepared, for the sake of living life, to take the leap.

But if that is the right analogy, then what are the implications for how we construe reality at the most fundamental level, for what kind of meaning we attach to our lives, and for our decisions about the kind of life we forge? Surely it's not blind and unwavering dogmatism, but rather a habit of learning from one's leaps.

Death and Time

2011-11-05T10:19:00.001-05:00

I know I said I probably wouldn't blog again for awhile. But last night I lay awake for awhile, things running through my head, and I knew I needed to process it in writing, put it into words. I'm still at my parents house in Buffalo, feeling ghosts and grief.

Yesterday I fixed my mother her Friday martini--something my father had done with a religiosity that belied his personal lack of religion. The last Friday before his death he wasn't able to do it, and he expressed to my mother his regret.

I made it too strong, but my mother drank it anyway, and we listened to Sumi Jo, a Korean soprano. We cried a little, and talked about music, and about the perfect photograph of my father for the memorial service.

The phone rang. It was Uncle Ralph, my father's brother. There was a time when my father and Ralph were estranged--a conflict involving another brother, Harold. Because of my father's childhood family role as Harold's caretaker (Harold had contracted polio, and couldn't use his arms), my father had fallen into a dysfunctional relationship with him, one which Harold reflexively took advantage of in numerous ways. Ralph pointed this out, perhaps not gently, and my father came to Harold's defense.

It took some years for my father to realize that Ralph was right. It took some more years for them to become close again. Of the five siblings, it was clear that the two of them were the most alike (and not just because they virtually looked like twins). They were kindred spirits, both of them with similar outlooks on the world, both accomplished scientists (Uncle Ralph the more accomplished, considered by many the father of modern neuropsychology). And so in later years they built--or perhaps rebuilt--a strong emotional attachment.

When my mother answered the phone, Ralph could barely talk through his sobbing. When he finally was able to talk, he told my mother what was, for me, a revelatory story. After a lifetime as brothers, what Ralph told my mother about was how he felt when my father was born. He was six years old, and he just loved this little baby boy--loved him so much that he ran home from school day after day in his eagerness to see him.

I could imagine this little first grader holding the baby, maybe feeling the silky head against his cheek, awash in affection. And now, after growing up together during trying times in American history (the Great Depression, World War II), after estrangement and reconnection--after more than eighty years of history together, when he heard about his little brother's death it was as if he was losing that little baby boy. As if death, somehow, has the power to erase time...or, perhaps, the power to erase our temporality.

I lay awake in the night, thinking about this. Because I knew in my own way the same thing. I'm a middle-aged man. I moved out of my childhood home well over half my life ago. But on confronting my father's death, I am that little boy hiding under the kitchen table with my sister, and my father is peeking under at us and calls us Englebert and Humperdink. And how can that little boy manage without his Papa?

Of course, I'm not that little boy. That little boy had his Papa, was lucky enough to have his Papa. And I, a husband and father, teacher and writer, will manage. I have plenty to do. But I think about the way the death of loved ones seems to unmoor us from the inevitable forward flow of time. I think about Einstein's understand of time, as a fourth dimension, one in which every moment is as real as the present, nothing lost with age. I'm reminded of Boethius's understanding of God's eternity, an ancient refection on time that parallel's Einstein's: God isn't trapped in the flow, but is present at each moment "at once." This is the perspective of eternity: to be eternal is to stand, not so much outside of time, but within every moment of it in the way that each of us inhabits the present moment.

If Einstein is right about time, then the mystery is why we experience it as we do. The standard contemporary answer--that biological organisms resist or move against the flow of entropy in the universe--is not so much an answer as a gesture: "Somehow, maybe, this fact has something to do with it." Were I to speculate, I'd say that experiencing time as we do is essential to our status as agents, as selves who act, causally, in the world. To be part of the chain of cause and effect, we need to inhabit time in the way we do, first experiencing the moment of decision, then the moment of outcomes.

Perhaps death is the threshold to eternity--not in the full sense that Boethius takes God to be eternal, but in some deep sense. At death, as our consciousness hits the outer edge of our experience in this life, we subjectively hit the place where another perspective on time becomes possible. Even when it is the death of another, the death of a loved one, we sense the strangeness of time as we experience it, we feel the tug of another perspective.

And so we're jarred loose. The years evaporate. For a moment we're children again, re-inhabiting an earlier slice of our world. We're holding a precious little baby brother, smelling him, savoring him. Or we're laughing underneath a table, looking at Papa's slippers and savoring the silly names he gives to us.

Monumental and Routine

2011-11-02T11:00:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking those words a lot over the last ten days: "Monumental and routine." As I saw it approaching--this universal thing, this utterly enormous and shattering thing--my gaze would drift to my right hand.

I wear a ring there--on the middle finger--that many people mistake for a wedding band. They wonder why I have one on each hand. It's an understandable mistake. The ring is old, and the raised area with the stylized harp stamp is well-worn and hard to see. It is, in fact, a Norwegian PhD ring that my father received from the University of Oslo when he finished his degree in Geology. When I earned my PhD, my father passed it on to me. The gift was a reserved man's way of saying, "I love you more than you can know, and I feel connected to you, and I am so very proud." I've worn it ever since.

Less than two weeks ago my family got word that my father's cancer--which had occasioned the removal of his bladder last winter--had spread to the abdomen and liver. Last week, on Tuesday, the oncologist gave his assessment: Without any treatment, he could expect to live weeks. With chemo, he might stretch it to months.

Wanting another holiday with the family, my father opted for a chemo treatment for later that week. I ordered a plane ticket to fly home the following week, so that I could be sure to see him again before the end. I just assumed there'd be that much time. He was ill but walking, talking, hoping to try out the Skype camera they'd finally managed to get hooked up to their computer. When I talked to him on the phone, he expressed regret that, as things were, they probably wouldn't be able to come to Oklahoma for Christmas. I assured him we'd come there.

I was supposed to fly to Buffalo on Thursday of this week--tomorrow--but on Sunday afternoon my sister called, urging me to come sooner. His condition was rapidly deteriorating. She'd asked him if he could hold out until Thursday, and he'd said yes. But she didn't believe him.

I changed my ticket so that I'd leave first thing the next morning. I started packing my bags, not really sure what I was doing. I put the kids to bed--who abruptly decided they wanted to curl up together in one bed "like we do sometimes on vacation." They sensed this was a different kind of night. A couple of hours later I got the phone call that he'd died.

The next morning, a friend drove me to the Tulsa airport. It was a trip I've taken dozens of times--and most often to fly where I was flying now, to Buffalo, to visit my family there. The passage through security--empty pockets, take off belt and shoes, take liquids bag out of carry-on--had the feel of habit. But this time, what waited at the end of the journey was an empty space.

As my first plane was getting ready to take off, I reached into my carry-on bag for something to read. It's what I always do on a plane. I sit and read, usually a fantasy or science fiction novel. As I reached into the bag I saw the cap my eight-year-old son had insisted I pack. He'd snatched it down from a door knob as I was scurrying madly about to get ready for the unexpected flight. He told me I should take it with me and show it to "Fafa." Because, of course, my father loved caps. He'd been bald since his twenties and had devised a creative assortment of ways to protect himself from a sunburned scalp.

But even within the context of my father's collection, this cap would've stood out. I'd imagined sitting next to him, wearing it, telling him his grandson wanted him to see it. I can picture his smile. And so I found myself turning away from the woman next to me on the plane, choking on the rush of feelings. Stupid Perry the Platypus cap.

I thought about all the people who'd come up to me over the last few days, who'd heard about my father's condition, about the inevitability and uncertainty of it all. "I remember going through that with my mother." "I just went through that this spring." "I'm so sorry. Liver cancer took my dad."

Monumental and routine.

On Friday, two of my father's former students flew to see him--one from Norway, the other from Sicily. My father sat up with them on Friday evening, weak but excited to see them, talking with them about their research. On Saturday he was weaker but still alert. He couldn't talk as much, but he listened.

A third former student was on a business trip in California when he learned about my father's illness, and so delayed his return flight to Russia and arrived in Buffalo on Sunday. When he arrived, my father said his name. It was one of the few moments that day when my mother felt sure he was aware of what was going on.

I didn't make it there before he died, but he was surrounded, even so, by sons. Their devotion moved me but didn't surprise me. My father had been more than a teacher to them. Year after year my parents provided a home-away-from-home for the international graduate students in the geology department. They became family. My parents talked about their "adopted kids" in Italy, Poland, Korea, Russia, Norway. The relationships endured for years after the students had graduated (or, as the case may be, dropped out).

I'm pretty sure that each of the sons who surrounded him at his death had, at one point or another, lived in my parents' finished basement. They'd certainly spent many hours around the unfinished wooden dining room table, talking and laughing and drinking wine (or beer if it was a beer meal, or Aquavit and beer if it was a holiday). My father would've been the deceptively calm presence (the deception unmasked if you got him on a topic he was passionate about--such as the environment--at which point his fire would break through). He would've been the one making sure no one's glass was empty unless they wanted it to be. He would've been the one smiling down through those bushy white brows he refused to trim.

At the end, my mother, his wife of 49 years, was beside him. She held him, kissing his forehead. He drew three last shuddering breaths, and she saw the life leave his eyes. And she called out to her three adopted sons, and they came.

I came the next day, too late to see him again, with a cartoon character cap in my bag that my own son wanted his grandfather to see, and a ring on my finger with my father's name inscribed within. And I walked through a house full of his traces: his reading glasses, his well-worn slippers. The symbols of a life--the routine symbols that all of us leave, the monuments to who we are, scattered everywhere.

This is not a memorial. In a week or two, when I can step back from my own feelings of loss and grief, I will write about him. For now, I just needed to write about losing him. It will likely be my last post for awhile. When I have a memorial to him written I may post it here. But I think I'll otherwise take November off from blog-writing to focus on other things.

Craig Debates an Empty Chair

2011-10-26T18:09:00.001-05:00

It’s the dream match-up, the ultimate showdown in the contemporary God debates: In one corner we have William Lane Craig, a prolifically published professor of philosophy with dual PhD’s in philosophy and theology, and arguably the most prominent living Christian apologist.

In the other corner we have Richard Dawkins, Oxford biologist, bestselling author of books explaining and defending evolutionary biology to a general readership, and—largely by virtue of his hugely bestselling The God Delusion—arguably the most prominent living apologist for atheism.

Or not.

When Craig began to plan a fall 2011 series of debates and lectures in the United Kingdom, many thought it was the ideal opportunity for Craig to finally face off, one on one, against Richard Dawkins. Instead, on Tuesday evening Craig--at least if the event lived up to its billing--lectured opposite an empty chair, one symbolically placed to remind the audience of Dawkins’ absence.

It is true that the two have appeared once before on opposite sides of a debating stage. The event, however, was a tag-team panel debate in Mexico between three atheists and three theists, on the question, “Does the Universe Have a Purpose?” And that event gave little opportunity for either of them to probe the other’s views.

The most substantive interaction in Mexico was a kind of straw man exchange. Craig, focusing narrowly on the topic of the debate (as he is wont to do), defended the view that theism makes life objectively meaningful in a way that atheism does not. He made sure to note explicitly, however, that this conclusion does not as such give us reason to believe that God exists—a view that Craig defends on other grounds. Dawkins responded by attributing to Craig the argument that God must exist because a universe without God is too unpleasant to contemplate.

Theists and atheists alike have been hungry for something more substantive—an opportunity for Dawkins to respond explicitly to the objections Craig has been leveling against The God Delusion for the last few years; or a chance for Dawkins to directly challenge the arguments for God’s existence that Craig didn’t have a chance to develop in Mexico.

But Dawkins has steadfastly refused to play. The pressure to debate Craig during his UK visit was strong. There were separate debate invitations from the British Humanist Association, the Cambridge Debating Union, the Oxford Christian Union, and Premier Radio. There was even a much-publicized insinuation of cowardice by a fellow atheist and Oxford don, Daniel Came.

But the final blow to those hoping to see a face off between Dawkins and Craig came last week, days before Craig’s scheduled Oxford lecture, when Dawkins felt called to make a public defense of his decision. It appeared in the form of an essay in The Guardian, “Why I refuse to debate with William Lane Craig.”

In that essay, Dawkins begins by minimizing the significance of Craig as a public intellectual and defender of Christianity. “Don’t feel embarrassed if you’ve never heard of William Lane Craig,” he begins. “He parades himself as a philosopher, but none of the professors of philosophy whom I consulted had heard his name either.”

To get this result from a consultation of philosophy professors, Dawkins must have been careful to consult only philosophers long dead. Indeed, as a professional philosopher myself I would be hard-pressed to find colleagues who haven’t at least heard the name of William Lane Craig. And in the sub-field of philosophy of religion, it would be hard to find any who weren’t well-acquainted with at least some of his work.

This is not to say he enjoys universal respect. In fact, many would likely make a low growl or roll their eyes on hearing his name. Some might say he’s not really a philosopher in any true sense, because he uses what are admittedly substantial philosophical skills mainly in the service of Christian apologetics.

But in a discipline that still practices blind refereeing in professional journals, Craig has enjoyed enormous output. And few would deny the significance of his scholarly contributions to the philosophy of religion, especially in connection with his revival and defense of the so-called Kalam Cosmological Argument.

And over the years, Craig has had one-on-one debates with a veritable who’s-who list of academically astute atheists: Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchen, Victor Stenger, Paul Kurtz, Anthony Flew, just to name some of the more renowned. Indeed, one might make the case, given Craig’s reputation as a formidable debater, that Dawkins’ absence from this list is a bigger credit to Craig’s reputation than would be his appearance on it.

Nevertheless, in his account of why he refuses to debate Craig, Dawkins dusts off the dismissal he’s borrowed from a former Royal Society president to rebuff creationists’ debate invitations: “That would look great on your CV, not so good on mine.”

When the debate invitations come from creationists who want to attack the theory of evolution, this rebuff actually makes sense. Such creationists are people with little or no legitimate scientific background who want to challenge the credibility of evolutionary theory in debate with a renowned evolutionary biologist. Even if Dawkins could easily wipe the floor them, the act of dignifying them a place next to him on a podium would lend a false stature to their arguments and credentials.

But in this case the proposed debate has almost the opposite character (and not just because Craig is uninterested in denying the science of evolutionary theory). In this case, what we have is an established professional in the philosophy of religion inviting Dawkins—who has no philosophy of religion training but who’s nevertheless written a popular book on the topic—to discuss issues in the philosophy of religion. Let me say that another way: Dawkins, a non-philosopher, is being invited to take the stage with an accomplished philosopher to discuss philosophical arguments. Under these conditions, Dawkins’ invocation of the Royal Society president’s rebuff rings hollow.

But Dawkins saves his main argument for last, when he points to some deeply troubling dimensions of Craig’s apologetics: specifically, Craig’s effort to defend Old Testament reports of God commanding genocide. Craig seeks to argue that these reports might be taken as veridical, as genuine accounts of divine commands, without thereby undermining the moral perfection of God.

These arguments are hardly central to Craig’s public apologetics. The passages Dawkins quotes don’t come from Craig’s published works or lectures, but from the Q&A section on his website, practically buried among hundreds of questions on more traditional apologetic topics (one wonders how and why Dawkins came across them). Nevertheless, Craig said the things he said there, and he stands by them—and Dawkins largely lets them speak for themselves. He quotes them and invites us to look upon them with horror.

Like Dawkins, I find Craig’s efforts seriously disturbing—even after looking at the quoted passages in their broader context, in which Craig (among other things) confesses that they “offend our moral sensibilities” and then roots this aversive response in the jarring contrast between the genocide passages and what he takes to be the holistic ethical message of Scripture.

In my view he should’ve stopped there. In purely pragmatic terms, do we really want to say, as Craig does, that since children are innocent and will be ushered into heaven at death, God might very well command their slaughter since such slaughter would do them no harm (and might do them some good by taking them out of the world before they can fall into mortal sin)? Do we really want to lend this sort of presumptive credibility to the claim that indiscriminate slaughter of children and adults can enjoy divine sanction? What implications does Craig’s argument here have for how we should assess contemporary terrorist claims to be acting on God’s will?

If this were legitimately Dawkins’ reason for refusing to share a stage with Craig, one might at first see it as principled, even heroic. Can we really dignify such apologetics-run-amok with a public platform?

Of course, this argument may be nothing but a pretext. Perhaps, as one author recently insinuated, the obscure source of these quotations suggests that Dawkins did "a little internet trolling" in order to dredge up a rationale for a decision already made. There is, after all, a much more obvious reason why Dawkins might refuse to debate Craig: He was afraid he'd lose.

This wouldn't be an idle fear, given Craig’s years of experience debating atheists, and his extensive training in philosophy and theology. He's a more formidable debating opponent than, say, the bishops Dawkins has expressed a willingness to take on (since the latter are devoted to ministerial and administrative tasks rather than to honing their arguments for theism). And even though Dawkins is clearly convinced that he has the truth, he knows full well that in a debating context, having the truth doesn't guarantee a win.

If so, I’m not at all convinced that “cowardice” is the right word for such motivations. Consider: In the recent book that John Kronen and I wrote defending Christian universalism, one of our targets was Craig. I’ve challenged Craig’s views on hell before—in what I think is one of my best philosophical articles. I still think my critique of Craig is brilliant and devastating. In broader terms, I’m pretty darned confident that, on the issue of hell, my arguments are better than Craig’s.

But if he challenged me to a public debate on the doctrine of hell, I think I’d refuse. Why? First, because I don’t think the public debate format is the best way to explicate and assess the arguments on both sides with the degree of precision that’s required. Second, because I’m a plodding thinker who needs to consider and think about arguments for awhile before responding to them, and who generally feels compelled to rewrite and revise what I say multiple times before I’m confident it expresses what I really mean. I feel an obsessive need to qualify and nuance my remarks, sometimes to the point of losing my audience.

And I say “Um” a lot.

And so, in a debate with Craig, I’d be trounced. And I’d lose convinced I had the better arguments on my side—and I’d rush home and write up what I should have said, publishing my crushing refutation of Craig in a book that nobody will read.

Knowing this, is it cowardice to refuse to debate Craig? Or is it simply an honest recognition of my own limitations, and a recognition of the fact that debates are sometimes lost by people with the better arguments on their side, simply because the opponent is the better debater? Perhaps Dawkins, although convinced he has the truth on his side, knows full well that the debate format will favor Craig and thus hurt Dawkins’ cause and hence the truth as Dawkins sees it.

If so, this the decision not to debate isn’t cowardice but an expression of certain virtues—among them, honesty with oneself.

But if this is Dawkins’ real motivation, he isn’t being honest with the rest of the world. While his decision not to debate for reasons of this sort may be legitimate, his overall behavior remains less-than-admirable. So let’s assume that his stated reasons are honest: He is so offended by what Craig stands for that he doesn’t want to lend those ideas the kind of platform that a public debate with Dawkins would generate.

The problem, of course, is that Craig already enjoys an enormous public platform. The controversy around Craig’s visit to the UK virtually guaranteed a large audience for his UK lecture/debate tour, whether Dawkins was a part of it or not. And while there’s something to be said for refusing to dignify certain arguments with a response, it’s sometimes necessary—and, we might think, the job of public intellectuals—to take on bad arguments and explain why they are bad. This is especially true when the bad arguments are being voiced by prominent figures who happen to enjoy a substantial audience. Do we really want to allow their claims to stand unchallenged?

But there is, a think, a deeper reason why, if Dawkins was being sincere about his reason for not wanting to debate Craig, he should’ve reconsidered. As a reason to refuse a debate with Craig, his moral objection comes off sounding like a smokescreen whether it is or not. It’s painfully easy for a jaded public to roll their eyes, dismiss his moral indignation seriously, and conclude, “He’s just afraid he’ll lose.” And under those circumstances, his moral message itself is lost behind its perceived insincerity.

Another, more powerful gesture in support of this moral message would have been possible if Dawkins had actually shown up for the debate. Dawkins says he doesn’t want to shake Craig’s hand. But one needn’t shake someone’s hand to debate them. Consider the impact of showing up for the debate—a context in which handshakes are customary—and refusing to shake Craig’s hand…and then explaining why with all the moral indignation of which Dawkins is so eminently capable.

Rude? Yes. But people couldn’t cynically dismiss the moral message as nothing but a smokescreen for cowardice. The refusal, precisely because of its deliberate violation of normal etiquette, would carry no small measure of symbolic weight. In fact, this is why I think it's sometimes morally right to be rude.

As it is, the weightiest symbol of this event may have been an empty chair.

The Politics of Division: A Case Study in Anti-Gay Rhetoric

2011-10-25T13:33:00.000-05:00

Last month I devoted a blog post to picking apart the anti-same-sex marriage argument of Republican Presidential candidate Rick Santorum—what we might call his “napkin gambit.” The other day I was reminded of that post—and the YouTube clip of Santorum’s campaign speech that inspired it—by a cartoon that a friend called my attention to. As a reminder, here is the campaign speech at issue:

And here’s the cartoon:

Now Santorum’s hopes of winning the GOP nomination are thankfully slim, but he's still pushing remorselessly at the same themes. And the ideas driving his campaign are not restricted to him along. Of those ideas, the ones I find most disturbing here aren’t his opposition to same-sex marriage as such (although I think that is unjust), or his argument in support of that opposition (which I find as flimsy as, well, a napkin). I know people who oppose same sex marriage--often on the basis of arguments I find flimsy--whom I'd describe as decent, well-meaning human beings. If they have a reason for standing where they stand, it's neither hate nor homophobia. You can talk to them about the issues, and they'll listen to you with (it seems to me) an openness to being persuaded.

In fact, I know opponents of same-sex marriage who actually seem to want to be persuaded--who feel compassion for the plight of their gay and lesbian neighbors and wish for their sakes that they could endorse a different view. But something--usually what they take to be the necessary implications of their religious faith--has led them to regretfully take the stand they've taken.

Now I think there are things going on in these cases that are troubling, but they aren't nearly as disturbing to me as what I see going on in the Santorum clip. What’s so disturbing here is the in-group/out-group ideology which frames Santorum’s perspective, his arguments, and his campaign.

The cartoon above exposes part of the dynamic that defines such bifurcating ideologies. But I think it’s worth digging a bit deeper into this dynamic. If we look carefully at the clip from Santorum’s campaign speech, we see Santorum framing his candidacy in terms of an epic struggle between two communities: “the faith community” and, of course, gays and lesbians.

In the spirit of the bible-thumper in the cartoon, Santorum goes so far as to describe LGBT responses to his attacks on marriage equality as a “jihad against Rick Santorum.” But this labeling is the culmination of a broader effort to paint LGBT efforts for equality as an attack on the faith community as a whole. Referencing the landmark Lawrence vs. Texas case which declared sodomy laws unconstitutional, Santorum catastrophizes the implications of allowing that ruling to stand uncontested:

…we will see not only marriage destroyed but we will see ultimately the faith community destroyed and...ghettoized as bigots because they stand up and preach biblical truth.

With a final flourish, he represents himself as, among the presidential contenders, the best defender of the faith community—the one who cares enough to fight the LGBT community’s supposedly sinister efforts to realize marriage equality.

In evoking the language of jihad—which the American religious right takes, however imprecisely, to be Islam’s equivalent of “holy war”—Santorum not only frames himself as a soldier in a war against Christianity’s enemies, but seeks to place the pursuit of marriage equality into the same category into which so many conservative Christians locate the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Muslims and homosexuals are battering at the gates of the faithful, and the very survival of Christianity is at stake.

There is nothing especially new about this pattern of thinking, nor is there anything novel about using it to pursue political power. Nevertheless, it is worth reflecting on the structure of Santorum’s rhetoric—because it helps reveal why this campaign speech before an anemically small gathering is not something to be laughed off or dismissed as just the ideas of a harmless crackpot who’ll never get elected. After all, he did get elected to the Senate.

Santorum’s rhetoric is dangerous precisely because of its structure. In fact, the ideological picture that Santorum paints on the campaign trail has precisely the same structure as those ideologies used to support what John Ladd, the recently deceased Brown university philosopher, has called “collective violence.”

Ladd argued that there’s a crucial difference between private violence pursued for personal gain and “collective violence,” by which he meant violence done by people who see themselves as agents of a larger whole, and who target their victims not for personal reasons but simply because those victims belong to the enemy group.

So, for example, Anders Breivik—the homegrown Norwegian terrorist who perpetrated July’s horrific attacks—saw himself as an agent of a culturally Christian west struggling against a hostile Islamic world and its enablers. He was not acting for personal gain but to further a conceived group mission. His victims were not chosen because of any personal qualities, but simply because they attended the wrong summer camp—and so identified themselves as members of the wrong group.

Ladd pointed out that collective violence occurs within the framework of a justifying ideology. And what does that ideology look like? Santorum’s recent campaign speech is nothing short of a blueprint. First, the world is divided into groups—a chosen group and the “others.” Ladd called this the “Doctrine of Bifurcation.” Next, the groups are represented as being locked in a zero-sum struggle, one in which any gain for one group means a loss for the other. Members of the chosen group are faced with a solemn mission to defend their group—and by implication all that is good and right—against the dire threats posed by the others. This is what Ladd called the “Doctrine of Group Mission.”

These elements are clearly present in Santorum’s stump speech: There’s us, the chosen group, the heterosexual Christians; and then there’s them, the jihadis, the Muslim terrorists and the homosexuals. We’re locked in a struggle in which any gain for them—even so modest a gain as no longer being subject to criminal prosecution for having a consensual sexual relationship—is perceived as a threat that may very well destroy us.

Sometimes, within such ideologies, a case is given for the direness of the threat. But such a case needn’t be especially compelling (and Santorum’s clearly isn’t), since its function isn’t to undergird a substantive philosophical position but to set up the ideological divide. That ideology, in turn, serves a function of its own, one which becomes clear at the close of Santorum’s speech, where he announces himself to be the agent who will defend the chosen group. This becomes elevated to a sacred mission, a duty that others are shirking but that Santorum is prepared to live out, even at risk to himself.

Let me be clear about some things. I’m certain that Santorum has no plans of going on a killing spree. The fifty or so people in the room with him have no such plans. There is nothing about his ideology of division that explicitly promises violence. And just because collective violence is embedded in ideologies of division, it doesn’t follow that every ideology of division gives birth to a murderous Anders Breivik. In fact, it may even be true that the impact f Santorum’s message is partly sanitized by the “love the sinner, hate the sin” mantra, which operates (most of the time) to keep the violence against gays and lesbians covert and psychological rather than overtly deadly.

Nevertheless, ideologies of division are a stewpot for a distinct kind of violence. Not long ago the ideological message of “Islamic invasion” hit home with murderous consequences in Breivik’s twisted psychology—causing quick defensive responses from some of those who had been preaching this message. They’d been preaching it not because they wanted anyone to go on a killing spree, but because they wanted to promote restrictive anti-Islamic policies. They couldn’t—or wouldn’t—see how supporting their agenda in these ideological terms could breed self-styled soldiers willing to take the war to another level.

Likewise, Santorum likely doesn’t see how his rhetorical choices contribute to the patterns of thought that culminate in gay bashing. He and others will continue to paint overt violence against gays and lesbians as born out of the twisted individual psychologies of the perpetrators. But Ladd’s message is that we make a grave mistake when we confuse collective violence for individual violence, precisely because we fail to see how our broader social patterns of thinking feed into the motivations of those who do the killing.

I need to stress here what I am not arguing. I am not arguing that Rick Santorum and his conservative followers are the enemy, an “other” group with whom we, the chosen ones, are locked in epic struggle. It would be frightfully easy to fall into that pattern of thinking—but to do so would be to fall prey to the very thing I am criticizing, a phenomenon so seductive that even moral outrage against it can easily slip into its perpetuation in another form.

What I am arguing is that Santorum is promulgating a dangerous pattern of thinking, dangerous in part because it is so seductive. It is a pattern that doesn’t fall on just one side of party lines. On the contrary, the hostility across party lines is one of its effects. Santorum is a case study of how easily and naturally we fall into ideologies of division, without ever seeing the role that such ideologies play in fomenting the range of social problems we bemoan, from congressional deadlock to hate crimes.

And refusing to see this, we behave as if the rhetoric of holy war, the message that we are doomed unless they are stopped, is just a way to drum up votes.

Attention and Imagination: Some Thoughts on Simone Weil's Religion of Attention

2011-10-24T16:22:00.000-05:00

Attention is important. In fact, for the sake of actualizing the full potential of our lives, it may be more important than anything else.

The moments of purest joy in my life have come at those times when I forget about myself enough to pay attention, with absolute purity, to the world in all its beauty. I watch my children at play, and instead of seeing their play through the filter of my own desires and concerns, instead of thinking about how their play is affecting me, I focus so completely on every laugh, ever twirl, that there’s no longer any room for the other stuff.

For my stuff. My son likes to “make smoke” by throwing Oklahoma red dirt into the air. And more often than not I think about the bath he’ll need to take, even though he just had one. And he’ll probably leave his bath towel on the floor, and a dirt ring in the tub.

As simply as that joy eludes me. But sometimes I manage to stop and look, to silence my own stuff enough to let what is out there in. To really let it in, unfiltered by my own stuff. To let it be, for me, what it is.

To pay attention. And in that moment the beauty and goodness of my son, flinging dirt into the air to see it turn to smoke, hits me with heartbreaking power.

I think we tend to underestimate the significance of attention. One reason I love the philosopher-mystic Simone Weil is because she didn’t. For her, attention was a centerpiece of her philosophy. She took attention to be the essence of both love and prayer, and she saw it—not willpower—as the crucial element in self-transformation.

The other day, I was directed to the website/blog of my dissertation director, Newton Garver. Of the occasional thoughts/reflections appearing there, I was particularly caught by the ones that focused on attention. One entry was nothing more than a single sentence from Irish Murdoch: “If I attend properly I will have no choices and this is the ultimate condition to be aimed at.”

About half an hour after posting this—perhaps after meditating on it for a time, thinking about its significance—he posted the follow up comments:

Iris Murdoch holds that proper attention both reduces choices and increases freedom. Wow! When we get our minds around that inspired thought, we will have put some distance between ourselves and the stultifying dogmas of our outcome-oriented civilization.

Paying proper attention, which is especially important with respect to other people, means appreciating the inherent reality of what we are attending to. Simone Weil took mathematics or formal logic to be good training for paying proper attention, because it is so difficult in these fields to hide reality under hopes or desires. Seeing other people as they really are is much more difficult than seeing mathematical reality.

In reading this comment, I was struck by how often I am accused, by atheist critics, of failing to attend to reality, of seeing everything through a filter of hopes and desires. Atheists almost inevitably—perhaps irresistibly—perceive religious conviction as precisely this: an exercise in projection, as the outcome of imposing one’s own wishes and cultural prejudices onto the field of experience and staunchly refusing to see the stark reality underneath.

And there certainly is much religion that looks exactly like this—which is undoubtedly why Simone Weil, devoted as she was to a philosophy of pure attention, was inspired to describe atheism as a purification. “Of two men who have no experience of God,” she says, “he who denies him is perhaps nearer to him than the other. The false God who is like the true one in everything, except that we cannot touch him, prevents us from ever coming to the true one.”

And for Weil, the opposite of attention is imagination, which she calls the “filler of the void.” She claims that “if the imagination is stopped from pouring itself out, we have a void.” And the existence of such a void is crucial to attention. Paying attention means establishing within ourselves a space free from our own stuff, our own desires and anxieties and presuppositions and imaginings, a space of emptiness into which reality can flood.

Imagination is the enemy of such attention. “The imagination,” Weil says, “is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.” The true God, for Weil, is not the superman fashioned by our imagination to satisfy our subjective needs, but is, rather, that which floods us at precisely that moment when we achieve this void and thus find ourselves open to reality—attentively present to it—in all its mystery.

In other words, God is what fills us when we love reality for itself, absolutely and perfectly, apart from our preconceptions and imaginings, and no matter how it affects us for good or ill. Weil’s fixation on affliction may be seen in this light: To love reality even in the face of affliction—even when it shatters us—is to relate affirmatively to reality apart from its propensity to serve our desires. In that moment of afflicted love, we have stopped filling up the fissures with imaginings that suit us.

We can understand Weil’s comments about atheism in the following way: When atheism is arrived at based on a rejection of imagination and a desire to attend to the truth, the atheist has thereby adopted the attitude that is essential for any authentic experience of God. And this remains the case even if theistic belief is in important ways closer to the truth about God than is atheism. Even in the face of similarities in appearance, there’s a huge difference between believing an invention and experiencing reality free from the filters of invention. The latter happens when we pay attention. And attention to something means openness to it that is unconditional, that does not wait on its worth, that is prepared to accept whatever comes.

Given much of the history of religion and much of what goes by the name of religion today, it shouldn’t be surprising, I think, that many atheists see themselves as more serious about paying attention to reality than are theists. But it seems to me that both atheists and theists can be bad at paying attention to reality—although, perhaps, bad in different ways. Both can and (probably inevitably) do see the world through the filter of their preconceptions, through the lenses of their desires, through the unconscious reification of speculative imaginings.

Those who imagine an empty room beyond a locked door are just as guilty of filling the room with the products of their imagination as are those who fill it with imagined furniture, or imagined crates. The only difference is that refusal to imagine is easier to confuse with imagining emptiness than with imagining a room full of stuffed clowns. Likewise, those who imagine that there is nothing beyond the boundaries of what science can discern are just as guilty of filling in the fissures with their imagination as are those who populate the transcendent with personality.

And those atheists who immediately dismiss religious experiences of a transcendent love at the root of reality, who immediately cast away such experiences as of course nothing but delusional projection of wishful hopes—well, isn’t it clear that, in confidently attributing imagination as the source of these experiences, they are assuming that ultimate reality can’t be anything like what this religious experience teaches? If so, they are not just begging the question in their dismissal of these religious experiences. They are, more significantly, basing their dismissive assessment of such experience—their conviction that the experience must be rooted in imagination rather than attention—in their own exercise of imagination.

It is not this sort of atheism that Weil takes to be a purification.

I think atheists sometimes adopt a self-congratulatory attitude towards their powers of attention because they—unlike too many religious believers—take very seriously the lessons of science. The fact is that science is built around the effort to pay attention in much the way that Weil describes. For this reason if for no other, those who are drawn to Weil’s brand of religiosity need to take science and its conclusions seriously. There may not be a single “scientific method” that correctly describes all the various things that scientists do—but it is clear, at least, that science pays attention to the empirical world, to its building blocks and to the laws that regulate it.

But it is one thing to praise the attention of a good scientist. It is something else again to conclude that Simone Weil’s religious experience cannot be the outcome of sincere attention, because to treat it as such would require that there be more to reality than what attentive scientists study. It is one thing to say that scientists pay attention to their subject matter. It is something else again to insist that the subject matter of science exhausts what there is to pay attention to.

And there clearly is more to pay attention to. But to make this point, I don’t want to focus on religion. I want to focus on what my former mentor and teacher, Newton Garver, focuses in on: paying attention to persons.

What does it mean to pay attention to a person? A person is a whole, the sum of many parts, and what is most definitive of persons is not our syntax but our semantics (if that metaphor makes sense). I do not pay attention to you if I am focused on the hairs protruding from your nose and the way that they flutter when you exhale. I might be paying very good attention to those hairs, but in so doing I am not paying attention to you.

But the same is true if I pay attention to your nervous system, or your skeletal system, or your brain. If I study you the way a scientist might, I am failing to pay attention to the person. I am focused on the grammatical structure of a sentence, or the word order, or the use of punctuation, or the shape of the letters—not on what the sentence means.

I don’t want this point to hinge on what we think about the relationship between mind and brain. But it certainly is true that I cannot pay attention to a person if I am not paying attention to them as conscious beings—beings who experience, believe, hope, fear, anticipate, plan, intend, do. Subjectivity and agency, whatever their ultimate explanation, are clear loci of personhood. Persons experience the world and act in it. And even if you think that both of these things have their roots in brain processes, it’s still clear that I would not be paying attention to you as a person if I were fixated on understanding the inner workings of your brain.

It is one thing to attend to a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, something else to sit down with one’s music theory background and the score, and study how Beethoven constructed each movement. Both can be worthy exercises of our attention—but in each case, we're attending to something different. Perhaps what we're attending to are aspects or dimensions of a reality that's bigger than we can encompass all at once, in one single act of attention. Perhaps once we engage in piecemeal attention—to this, then to that, then to the other—we can arrive at an integrated attention to the whole that is more complete. Nevertheless, to experience the emergent whole is not the same as to study the parts out of which it emerges.

Loving a person means paying attention to the person—the subject who acts in the world, who grasps meanings and expresses those meanings in both verbal and nonverbal ways. To pay attention to a person means paying attention to what they’re doing, what they’re communicating, how they’re feeling, what they think and believe.

You don’t pay attention to a person if you reductionistically explain them away. You don’t pay attention to a person if your focus, when hearing what they say, is on attempting to understand how they could come to be so stupid. Nor are you paying attention if you’re trying to understand how they got to be so smart. Nor are you paying attention if your main goal is to understand their psychology so you can later manipulate them. Attention is a matter of openness, of having who they are enter into the fissures that you leave room for. This kind of attention does not primarily lead to propositional knowledge. You may not be able to come up with a list of facts about them. Nevertheless, if you’ve paid close attention, you know them.

What such attention to a person allows for is grasping something of their more private experience, as opposed to an array of empirical facts about them. And part of what paying attention to a person involves, I think, is treating what one thereby grasps as important, as meriting respect, even if it isn’t reducible to any empirical fact.

You don’t pay this sort of respectful attention to atheists if you immediately assume that their atheism springs from a desire to be free from obligations to a creator to whom, were theism true, they’d owe their existence. You don’t pay this sort of respectful attention to theists if you immediately dismiss their religious experience as nothing more than wishful thinking.

None of us can communicate our whole selves to each other without considerable work, considerable efforts at self-expression on the one hand, and open, unprejudiced attention on the other. And even then, the communication will be incomplete. Nevertheless, there is a big difference between knowing someone as a subject, however incompletely, and knowing them as objects. It is the latter sort of knowledge that science is after, and insofar as we regard persons with nothing more than scientific attention, we are not attending to them as persons. We have reduced them to mere things in our sight—and however much we may be attending to their parts and processes (including psychological ones) we are not attending to them.

I think it is also possible to attend to the universe in something like the way that we attend to persons: holistically, focused on knowing it as opposed to knowing a litany of facts about it. Is it possible that this sort of attention—which is, I believe, what Weil has in mind when she speaks of prayer—opens us up to an aspect of the universe that is not available to the scientific eye? The universe as subject rather than mere object? Is it possible that this distinctive sort of loving attention is precisely what brings us into contact with the meaning beyond the universe's syntax, the person for whom the universe is an endless form of communication?

There are those who have sought to pay attention to the world in something like this way, and who report the same thing that Simone Weil reported on the basis of her efforts at absolute attention: a personal presence brimming with love.

Dismissal is, of course, easy. Not everyone has this experience. It could be mere delusion. But is dismissal required? By what? By the urgings of our own imagination, which fills up the spaces beyond science’s limits with emptiness?

As I said, sometimes I pay attention to my children while they play. I really pay attention, so fully that I lose myself and my agendas. And it is then that I’m most overwhelmed with the beauty and goodness of what I see. Put simply: In my experience beauty and goodness overwhelm me, they most seize hold of me, when I am least invested, when my desires and dreams and hopes have been pushed back to make a space for what I’m attending to, so that it may flood in. Does it then make sense to say that beauty and goodness are nothing more than subjective projections, that these things aren’t part of reality, that they must be imposed upon reality by me in that moment, even though it seems to be the very moment when my stuff has been most successfully put away?

Why? Is this judgment really rooted in the weight of evidence? Or is it, rather, rooted in an exercise of imagination, one which, again, fills up those dimensions of reality outside the domain of scientific inquiry with gobs of emptiness?

It may, indeed, be very hard for all of us to distinguish between the products of imagination and the outcomes of pure attention. Real attention may be so hard that few of us actually achieve it, even when we tell ourselves that we have. It is possible that my religious experiences (far less vivid than Weil's, but of the same general kind) are the outcomes of my imagination filling up the void, and I'm just telling myself that I'm paying attention? Of course that's a possibility.

But there are other possibilities. And in our efforts to attend to each other, we fall short to the extent that we treat some possibilities as certainties, and others as impossible.

Cosmic Gratitude and Ways of Seeing

2011-10-17T18:44:00.001-05:00

In the recent post outlining my overall “philosophy of religion,” I offered the following comment: “With respect to the origins of the cosmos, we have to decide whether to adopt a stance of gratitude—the kind of stance that makes sense if reality is the product of loving agency.”

My point here was to given an example of how ways of seeing the world are implicated in the practical choices we need to make in our lives. Among many examples I might have chosen, I considered the act of being grateful for the existence of the cosmos and everything in it. We might call this "cosmic gratitude." I chose this example because I wanted to be clear that some practical decisions are more matters of inner stance than outward action. While being grateful might express itself in concrete gestures (saying “Thank you,” for example), it is first and foremost an internal attitude that one adopts.

And adopting this attitude of cosmic gratitude clearly makes sense if the whole of our reality is seen as the product of loving agency. It might not make sense given certain other ways of seeing--in fact, I'm pretty sure it doesn't. But since I hadn’t thought about the issue deeply enough to decide whether adopting this attitude makes sense only if reality is the product of loving agency, I deliberately chose not to say that.

At this point, as a philosophy teacher, I can’t resist pausing to offer a brief mini-lecture about the kind of basic logic you're likely to learn in a critical thinking course. (And I don't mean to be condescending in doing this. Even those of us who know this stuff quite well can sometimes benefit from taking the time, every once in awhile, to walk through it deliberately, like a novice). A proposition of the form, “If x, then y,” is called a conditional. the statement that appears in place of "x" is often called the antecedent of the conditional, while the statement in the "y" place is called the consequent. Unlike conjunctions ("x and y") and disjunctions ("x or y"), switching the placement of x and y makes a difference.

When you do switch the antecendent and the consequent, what you get (“If y, then x”) is called the converse of the conditional, and it is logically distinct from the original conditional—in other words, they’re saying different things, which means that formally speaking the truth value of a conditional and its converse needn’t be the same.

Unfortunately, things get a bit messy because conditional statements can be expressed in a variety of ways. For example, “If x, then y” is also sometimes worded as “x only if y.” Even though the "if" here appears before the statement in the "y" place, the "only" has a logical function such that "y" is still the consequent. But if someone says, “x if y,” they mean “If y, then x.” In other words, “x if y” is the converse of "if x, then y," and so is the converse of “x only if y.”

To sum it up: "x if y" is the converse of "x only if y." The two are not logically equivalent. Contrast the following: (a) “A thank you letter is polite if you receive a birthday gift”; (b) “A thank you letter is polite only if you receive a birthday gift.” Based on the conventions of etiquette in the US, (a) is true while (b) is false. Likewise, we need to clearly distinguish “Cosmic gratitude makes sense if reality is the product of loving agency” from “Cosmic gratitude makes sense only if reality is the product of loving agency.” It was my intention in the earlier post to say the former (a view which I am confident is true), not the latter (since I haven't considered it carefully enough to say for sure what I think of it).

But it is quite easy on a quick reading of someone’s argument to confuse a conditional statement with its converse--especially when the positioning of the "antecendent" and "consequent" are out of their usual order, as was the case in my earlier post. And, judging by recurring comments on my previous post, many readers apparently did just that. For example, SecularDad asked, “Why can’t someone have this sense of gratitude without belief in a loving agency?” Burk said, “The fact is that we can feel gratitude in any case.. it is all about us, not about the cosmos. We are here, and have feelings, so we can feel gratitude, and do so. The idea that we need a conjured ‘father’ or other totem on the other end, whose existence is, as above, hypothetical at best and utilitiarian in origin ... that is simply absurd.” More cautiously, Bernard said, “I, like Burk, feel hugely grateful for my own existence without having any conception of that beyond the physical, and readily accept it doesn’t work this way for you.”

But even if these comments were sparked by a misreading of my original remark, they raise an interesting set of questions. After all, this cosmic gratitude--this sense of gratitude for one’s existence and for the world in all its mystery and wonder—is a common human experience that seems to cut across religious and philosophical differences. And there is at least some reason to think that this sort of gratitude is healthy. People who cultivate cosmic gratitude (as opposed to very selective gratitude) are more likely to be at peace with themselves and their lives, even if things aren’t perfect.

Given the ubiquity and value of this attitude, it is worth digging deeper into the conditions for its coherence. What I said explicitly in my earlier post was that such cosmic gratitude is coherent under the traditional theistic view that existence is a gift of love. Given this way of seeing things, cosmic gratitude “makes sense.” Implicitly, of course, my remark suggested that there might be ways of seeing things where such gratitude wouldn’t make sense. (While I’ll resist another critical thinking mini-lecture, I will point out that this latter suggestion emerges based on principles of “conversational implication”: In ordinary conversation, one doesn’t typically point out that A is true under condition B if one thinks A is true under ALL conditions—and so, while one cannot make this assumption in formal logic, when someone asserts a conditional it is usually fair in conversation to impute to them the belief that the “consequent” of the conditional isn’t true under all conditions.)

In any event, I think it is pretty clear that there are ways of seeing reality such that, given those ways of seeing, an attitude of cosmic gratitude makes little sense. Here's an example: Suppose you see the cosmos and everything in it as the product of a supremely powerful Devil who created the universe solely for the sake of having targets for his malevolence. Everything exists purely so that this supreme Devil can achieve his goal of a universe teeming with endless conscious torment of the worst conceivable kind. And this Devil, being supremely powerful, will not fail to achieve this goal: In the end, every conscious being will be brought to a state of eternal suffering so horrific that it would have been better not to have existed at all. Those who at present enjoy their lives, who experience love and happiness, are afforded this glimpse of goodness only for the sake of making possible some special sort of torment later: perhaps the torment of having precious goods decisively and permanently ripped away, or the anguish of witnessing the crushing ruin of loved ones, etc. Ultimate affliction, we might suppose, is so much worse when there are points of contrast, so that endless, hopeless yearning for lost love and joy can be an additional source of anguish in the Devil’s arsenal.

And yes, I am fully aware of just how close this worldview I’m describing is to views actually embraced by some Christians—specifically, strict double-predestination Calvinists, as well as those who see eternal hell as the fate of all those who die without having explicitly accepted Jesus as Lord and Savior. In fact, I think an important objection to such versions of Christianity might be built around what I am saying in this post. But I won't develop that argument now.

My point here is this: If you see the joys of this life as fleeting moments in a whole existence definitively stripped of worth by neverending, soul-crushing anguish--and if, furthermore, you see the purpose of existence to be the realization of such states of torment in every conscious being--well, it hardly makes sense to adopt a stance of cosmic gratitude for existence. If, by contrast, you think that the sufferings of this life, no matter how serious, are but fleeting moments in a whole existence definitively imbued with worth by neverending, soul-uplifitng goods--and if, furthermore, you see the purpose of existence to be the bestowal of such goods on every conscious being--well, it clearly makes sense to adopt a stance of cosmic gratitude.

But these extremes are hardly the only two options. There are numerous alternatives, some of which make cosmic gratitude coherent, others of which don't. The interesting question raised by the comments on my previous post is whether you need to see the cosmos as having loving agency at its root--whether, in other words, you need to see the cosmos as a benevolent creation--in order for cosmic gratitude to be a coherent response to existence.

In addressing this question, I first want to consider a line of argument that won't work. Specifically, the argument that of course gratitude makes sense without adopting this condition, because we exist and have feelings, and so can feel gratitude, and may do so. This won't work because the question is not whether we can feel cosmic gratitude no matter how we see the universe. The question is whether cosmic gratitude makes sense no matter how we see the universe. It is a question of coherence--over whether every way of seeing the universe can coherently undergird a grateful attitude.

I've already argued that seeing the universe as wholly the product of malevolent agency can't be coherently conjoined with cosmic gratitude. But few see the world in such a hideous way (although it may prove to be more common than one might think, once one digs below the surface of certain theistic beliefs). The more interesting question is whether gratitude makes sense given a naturalistic worldview. And here, rather than try to give an answer of my own, I want to consider something Bart Ehrman has to say on the matter.

For those unfamiliar with Ehrman, he is a religious studies scholar who has authored a number of highly successful popularizations of work in biblical studies. In one of those works, God's Problem, Ehrman devotes several pages to reflecting on his own deconversion from evangelical Christianity--a process that occurred in stages, and that took him from a "Bible-believing" Christian intent on saving souls from damnation, to being a progressive Christian, to being an agnostic who views the Bible as wholly a human artifact. In discussing this deconversion process, he reflects on some of its more painful aspects. One of those aspects has to do with gratitude. Here is what he says:

Another aspect of the pain I felt when I eventually became an agnostic...involves another deeply rooted attitude that I have and simply can't get rid of, although in this case, it's an attitude that I don't really want to get rid of. And it's something I never would have expected to be a problem when I was still a believer. The problem is this: I have such a fantastic life that I feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude for it; I am fortunate beyond words. But I don't have anyone to express my gratitude to. This is a void deep inside me, a void of wanting someone to thank, and I don't see any plausible way of filling it.

Now let me stress here that I'm not at all sure that Ehrman is talking here about cosmic gratitude, that is, the sense of gratitude for existence as such--both one's own and the existence of the universe. It seems to be more a case of gratitude for the kind of existence that he has come to enjoy. We might call this "specific gratitude." And he rightly notes, a bit later on, that this species of gratitude is problematic. As Ehrman puts it, "If I have food because God has given it to me, then don't others lack food because God has chosen not to give it to them? By saying grace, wasn't I in fact charging God with negligence, or favoritism?"

These concerns are, of course, bound up with the problem of evil--which is Ehrman's focus in God's Problem. And it seems to me that the theist's only escape from these concerns is to deny that God is directly responsible for the precise distribution of blessings and challenges in this life. If this is right, then gratitude for specific blessings may not make sense within a coherent theistic framework.

But my concern here is with cosmic gratitude, and with the question of whether seeing the world as the product of loving agency is a necessary condition for such gratitude to make sense. And here, a different aspect of Ehrman's discussion becomes relevant. Specifically, gratitude is a feeling with what might be called a "double-intentionality." There's what we're grateful for, but there's also who we're grateful to. Is gratitude possible without the latter? And can the object of the latter be anything other than an agent who meant well in providing what one is grateful for?

If not, then while an atheist or agnostic might be happy for existence, or take delight in it, or have feelings that are in some sense analogous to gratitude, they couldn't be genuinely grateful (at least not coherently so). And that would mean that anyone who was genuinely grateful for existence itself would thereby be operating, at least implicitly, as if there were someone to be grateful to: an agency responsible for existence itself.

But this conclusion follows only if we give negative answers to the questions I just posed (Is gratitude possible without the latter? And can the object of the latter be anything other than an agent?). So--what do you think of these two questions?

My "Philosophy of Religion" in Outline

2011-10-11T15:52:00.000-05:00

As I was getting ready to reply to several comments on my earlier post, Monks, Miracles, and the God of the Gaps, it seemed to me that the comments I was starting to write were really aimed at fitting together the pieces of my overall "philosophy of religion." And that task seemed more suited to a blog post than to a set of comments. And so I decided that I really should offer a post which affords such an overview--one that doesn't systematically defend every piece, but instead seeks to show how the pieces fit together, to show how the ideas developed in various places on this blog and in Is God a Delusion? are related to each other.

Obviously, not every aspect of my thinking on religion is going to appear in such a sketch. What I want to highlight here are the "themes" that are most helpful (I hope) in giving a big picture summary of my philosophy. Things which I don't explicitly discuss here, but which are clearly significant to me (religious experience, the nature of consciousness, etc.), should not be considered less important to me just because I don't address them explicitly here. I'm pretty sure that readers can readily see how and where these other topic fit into the broad scheme I'm offering. At the end of this overview, I offer "further readings" suggestions, directing those interested to places where I develop these themes in greater detail.

Here, then, is my attempt to summarize and coordinate several key dimensions of my overall "philosophy of religion":

1. I take a religious worldview, insofar as it is religious, to offer a framework for a "way of seeing" the whole of experience. A way of seeing attaches a certain meaning and significance to what is experienced. It weaves the features of experience together in a certain way, and attaches a meaning to the elements of experience and to one's life as a whole. It also has implications for how one should respond to the world--both in terms of actions and in terms of attitudes. Insofar as a religious worldview is a way of seeing, it must "fit" with experience in some broad sense. Not every "ways of seeing" is coherent given the actual content it is trying to invest with meaning (we can coherently see the duck-rabbit as a duck, or as a rabbit, but not as ballerina dancing atop a monster truck).

2. Many ways of seeing involve positing things about reality that are not themselves part of the field of experience. Generally, religious ways of seeing--especially theistic ones--are like this. They make claims about a transcendent reality that make possible a distinctive way of seeing. To see reality theistically requires, in effect, that one affirm that the empirical world of our experience is the outpouring of a transcendent conscious agency. In Is God a Delusion?, I thus describe religious beliefs as "meaning-bestowing beliefs about the transcendent."

3. Sometimes a way of seeing is chosen out of a kind of moral hope. Of the possible ways of seeing experience, one in particular may strike us as the most optimistic, the most expressive of our moral sense of what is good. Put another way, we embrace one way of seeing among a field of alternatives because, given our understanding of what is good, we judge that it would be good if this were what it all means. In Is God a Delusion?, this is what I have in mind when I talk about "the ethico-religious hope," and I define faith in terms of this hope. To be precise, faith in this sense means choosing to live as if this hoped-for possibility is true.

Conceived thus, faith is not knowledge and does not imply knowledge or certainty or any such thing. To embrace a particular way of seeing "out of faith" is not to claim to have special grounds for belief that make one's way of seeing more likely to be true than the others that "fit" with the field of experience. To believe on faith, in this sense, is thus NOT the same as claiming that "it's lovely so it must be true." To claim that would be to claim that the loveliness of a worldview is proof of its truth--which is a clearly dubious epistemic assumption (although, as a postulate worth testing, it may be worth considering the more modest idea that the moral attractiveness of a worldview has evidentiary signficance--a point I get to in #6).

Nor is faith nothing but wishful thinking. Better to call it hopeful living--since it is about living as if a hoped-for possibility is true. But if so, it is hopeful living regulated by evidentiary constraints. Unlike mere wishing, it must meet the constraint of what "fits" with the field of experience. It must be a hopeful possibility.

4. The pursuit of knowledge, when it comes to that which transcends the empirical--when it comes to what Kant calls the "noumenal" reality (things as they are in themselves) behind the "phenomenal" realm (things as they are for us, or as they appear to us)--cannot proceed in the way that we pursue knoweldge of phenomena. Knowledge of phenomena cannot be pursued in advance of adopting a certain way of seeing. While some ways of seeing appear to be common to humanity, and form the basis for a common experience of the world and public claims of empirical knowledge, this common foundation can fit within a variety of broader, more holistic ways of seeing.

When deciding among these broader ways of seeing and the claims about the transcendent/noumenal that they presuppose, either no knowledge is possible (Kant's view) or we must rely on an approach very different from the one that guides the acquisition of empirical knowledge (such as, for example, the approach endorsed by Hegel). Each of these options warrants independent consideration.

5. If we go with Kant's view, then holistic ways of seeing--including, I should add, naturalistic ones--all fall into the same category: they are unknowable speculation, and if there are any reasons for us to choose among them, the reasons will be more practical/pragmatic/moral than "evidential." At least sometimes it is practically impossible to operate from a position of neutrality, to fail to take a stand with respect to one way of seeing or another. With respect to speculations about human agency, we either have to operate as if we are free, or not. With respect to the origins of the cosmos, we have to decide whether to adopt a stance of gratitude--the kind of stance that makes sense if reality is the product of loving agency. At least sometimes, elements of one's personal history make a position of indifference, of neutrality among ways of seeing, inconceivable.

The point is this: many of us confront an existential choice that we cannot ignore indefinitely--and so we have to decide on what basis to make that choice. If Kant is right, then deciding on the basis of moral hope--that is, a hope shaped by one's conception of the good--seems as good a basis as any, if not a better one. Kant himself invokes morality as providing the decision-making standard by which "postulates" about the noumenal are made. In other words, he thinks that given the inability to have "speculative knowledge," we nevertheless can and should embrace those beliefs about the transcendent that make our moral lives coherent--that offer, in my terms, a "way of seeing" the world in which moral norms are meaningful and moral life is possible. But as soon as this kind of hope is allowed in as a basis for decision-making, we need to consider another possibility, one which speaks to what might be called an epistemic hope: namely, the hope that Kant is wrong, that there is a way to move towards seeing the truth when it comes to ways of seeing.

6. And so we come to Hegel, who describes a mechanism whereby holistic worldviews can (and do) evolve against the testing ground of human life. On this Hegelian view, a worldview lived out as a matter of moral hope--while not thereby a matter of knowledge--might (like all other worldviews adopted for other reasons) evolve progressively in the light of "contradictions" or experienced deficiencies that emerge as that worldview is lived out (especially insofar as it is lived out communally). The idea--perhaps the hope?--is that noumenal reality, even if it transcends our understanding, nevertheless is the substance of both us and our world, and so impacts the tenability of certain lived-out worldviews. We just won't succeed forever in living as if the world in which we live is fundamentally unlike the way it really is. And so, whatever the origins of one's "way of seeing," lived experience becomes its testing ground, the venue in which decisions made in hope are refined, ideas embraced on the basis of faith are adjusted or even, potentially, overturned.

And the Hegelian evolution of faith-based worldviews offers the opportunity to test experimentally a notion that we cannot just dogmatically assume, but which we cannot simply dismiss out of hand either--namely, the notion that goodness and beauty are in some fundamental way related to truth.

In a way, this is what I take to be what distinguishes evolving religious traditions from other evolving (nonreligious) worldviews: They adopt, as part of the operative presuppositions which are being experimentally lived out, the presumption that beauty and goodness are not mere epiphenomena, not merely the subjective projections of a consciousness that is itself nothing more than the by-product of blind matter and energy, mechanism and chance; they are, rather, clues about the ultimate nature of reality. That something is in tune with our deepest, most stable, and pervasive value intuitions is thus treated as having evidentiary significance (albeit not overriding significance) in the formation of our beliefs.

The Hegelian religious project, then, becomes the long-term, evolving effort to critically live out, in Hermann Lotze's language, "the conviction that what is so fair and full of significance cannot be an accidental product of that which is without significance, but must be either the very Principle of the world or closely related to its creative principle." In short, the act of faith--the decision to live as if the fulfillment of one's moral hopes is real--establishes a framework from which the pursuit of transcendent knoweldge is sought through a plodding, historic process of pragmatic refinement. And it is a framework whose central postulate lends defeasible evidentiary significance to our moral (and aesthetic?) intutitions.

From a Hegelian standpoint, when it comes to such postulates "the proof is in the pudding." Unfortunately for all of us, this is a pudding we're cooking intergenerationally, and none of us will be alive to see the finished product. In the microcosm of our own lives, Kant may be right about the inaccessibility of the noumena. Moral hope may be all we have to go on. But that shouldn't keep us from taking part in the evolving social project that promises to discipline our speculative hopes with the pragmatic implications of living them out.
__________________________________________________________
For more on #1, see especially here and here

For more on #2, see especially Is God a Delusion? (IGAD) Ch 5

For more on #3, see especially IGAD Ch's 8 & 9

For more on #'s 4 & 5, see especially my series of posts on characterizing naturalism.

For more on #6, see my recent posts on Hegel.

Decriminalize Domestic Violence? Really?

2011-10-07T11:25:00.002-05:00

Okay, time for a little rant.

Apparently, the city council of Topeka, Kansas, is considering repealing the part of the city code that prohibits domestic battery. The problem arose because the county District Attorney's office, confronting a 10% budget cut, announced it would stop prosecuting misdemeanors--leaving that to the local municipalities. And this meant that domestic battery--which in most forms is a misdemeanor--was left to the cities to prosecute. Since the cities are not in any better financial position than the county, this literal passing of the buck just made matters worse. Topeka, like everywhere else, is looking to cut costs, and suddenly it has extra financial burdens dumped into its lap.

I empathise. Passing off costs to others is a common way to deal with budget shortfalls, but when the buck is passed in a climate in which everyone is looking to cut costs, the effect is that someone is left with an inordinately heavy burden. That in itself is a problem--it seems far better that the burden be shared equitably, which will only happen without this sort of buck-passing.

But that isn't the problem I want to focus on here. The problem is one of priorities. The problem is about what a society is willing to consider in situations of scarcity. One might reasonably ask whether some vocal minorities have so anathematized the "increase tax revenue" option that certain options that are far less tolerable end up being considered first. Yes, there are concerns about increasing taxes on those who have more than they need--worries that those taxed would, if allowed to keep the money, do more with that money to promote the common good than would the state. And there is no doubt that there are cases of government waste--but is it really true that the rich routinely use their money more productively, in terms of stimulating the economy and promoting the public good, than does the government?

When the matter at hand is domestic violence, I can't think of much that the rich would do with their excess that would compare, in terms of significance for the public good, to the importance of intervening in cycles of domestic violence. On this issue, it seems to me there can be no doubt at all. If the choice is between raising taxes on the rich and decriminalizing domestic battery, it's clear what should be on the table and what shouldn't.

This is not to say that these are the only choices. The point is that new taxes should be on the table long before we consider the idea of letting abusers beat their spouses with impunity. There are some things you just don't put on the table as things to potentially cut from the budget, so long as there are other options. And so long as their are people so rich that they've long ago hit the point at which increased wealth doesn't translate into increased human happiness, there are other options. So how did this proposal ever make it onto the table?

Some might object here that what is at issue in Topeka is misdemeanor domestic battery, not felony assault. Severe beatings and murders would, of course, still be prosecuted.

But a big part of the problem with domestic violence is that there is a cycle of abuse that has the propensity both to accelarate and to escalate. Abusers use violence as part of a broader pattern of control--a pattern that also includes contrition and apology, a "honeymoon" period, and a phase of escalating tension in which fear of another violent outburst has the victim scurrying to appease the abuser until, inevitably, she doesn't scurry quite fast enough.

Early in an abusive relationship, the outburst of abuse may be merely verbal, and it is an isolated event set against an extended period of bonding in which the victim feels special, perceiving herself as the treasured focus of the abuser's life--a perception which, perversely, has a measure of accuracy. Abusers do tend to make their intimate partner the centers of their lives. At the heart of abuse is a genuine human longing for intimacy that has been twisted by fears and insecurities into an obsessive need to maintain control over the intimate partner so as not to risk loss.

And the abuser relies on an arsenal of tools to keep the victim under control: sincere apology, gifts, adoration and worship, selective manifestation of insecurities and frailties at moments when such revelations are likely to inspire empathy, efforts to create dependence through financial disempowerment and social isolation, psychological hazing aimed at shattering self-esteem and (as occurs in fraternity hazing and some military training) rebuilding the victim's sense of worth around the abuser ("I'm nothing without him!"). And then, of course, there is physical intimidation, the looming threat of violence aimed at inspiring the visible displays of subserviance. This may provide the most tangible assurances of control.

And then, finally, the explosion of violence. Early on in the escalating cycle, it's a slap or a shove. But as the cycle progresses, the honeymoons get shorter. Perhaps the heady feeling of control that comes during the escalation towards violence is addictive, and so the urge to get to that stage sooner becomes irresistible. The "honeymoon" strategies become perfunctory, simply what needs to be done to keep the victim from running away in the wake of the violent episode--keeping her around so that the "drug" of her terrified subservience can be enjoyed again. And again.

The outbursts of violence become more frequent, and at the same time more extreme. Like the drug addict, the abuser needs more frequent and bigger doses to get his high.

The point of all of this is to stress the significance of misdemeanor domestic battery laws. What they do is make legal interventions possible at a stage in the escalating cycle when tragedy may still be averted. This is not something that we should even consider dispensing with when there are other, less terrible options. And there are other, less terrible options. While there are people who scream and rage as if a tax hike on the rich were the end of the world as we know, this sort of hyperbole cannot, must not, be allowed to distort our collective priorities so badly that decriminalizing domestic battery is preferred to mildly inconveniencing the richest Americans.

If one has a strong opposition to graduated tax increases, that argument should be heard and the reasons discussed in public debate. If there are instances of government waste that could be eliminated as an alternative to raising revenue, by all means these should be discussed. But when taxation is so villified that allowing domestic violence to occur with impunity makes it onto the table when revenue-increase options are possible, something has gone terribly wrong.

Am I missing something?

Monks, Miracles, and the God of the Gaps

2011-10-06T11:28:00.002-05:00

I'm going to be in another play. This one is, in part, about miracles--or, more precisely, about the desire for them. The rather utilitarian desire.

The play--"Incorruptible," by Michael Hollinger--is a dark comedy set in the Dark Ages. All the action occurs inside a monastery in Priseaux, France, where the bones of St. Foy are on display--bones that have failed to produce a miracle in over a dozen years. The monks, their faith and finances failing them, embark on a mercenary plan to save their order: digging up bones from their churchyard and selling them as holy relics.

My character is, arguably, a monk who never had any faith to lose. The heir apparent to the abbot, Brother Martin sees the churchyard scam as a natural extension of what he does every day: make a living by peddling lies. At one point early in the play, the abbot and another monk are urgently hoping the Pope will see through a deception that sidetracked his planned trip to Priseaux. Brother Martin asks, "Why would he?" When they answer, because it's the truth, Martin dryly declares, "If the truth were always apparent, we'd be out of business."

Martin lives in a community looking for God. But where are they looking? The villagers have sick cows and sicker spouses, and so they turn their eyes towards the bones of St Foy, hoping for miraculous healings. When none come, their faith withers. Jack, the one-eyed minstrel, has begged and prayed to have his sight restored to his mangled eye (the result of an occupational hazard: juggling knives). But now, after years of unanswered prayers, his faith is gone.

Brother Martin, too, is in his own cynical way focused on miraculous healings. In his case it's because miracles (or the appearance of miracles) bring pilgrims, and pilgrims bring money. And the monastery is in rather desperate need of money. Others are readily caught up in Martin's way of thinking--or, more correctly, drawn down by it.

By "miracle," all of them mean a Deus ex Machina solution to their troubles--a breach in the regularities of nature that helps them achieve their desires. For all of them, this is what it means to believe in God: It means there is a power beyond the world that--if you pray hard enough, with enough faith--will break into the regularities of nature and, with cymbals and trumpets, take away some cause of pain or restore something lost.

Today we turn to technology to solve our troubles: medicine to heal the sick, pesticides to drive off the locusts. In the medieval world of "Incorruptible," miracles offer the fickle equivalent--and in such a world, the religions that promise miracles are, more often than not, valued simply to the extent that they can deliver on that promise. Such religion depends for its credibility and its survival on a cymbal-and-trumpet God who shatters the ordinary patterns of the world, perhaps in the form of an "incorruptible," a saint so holy that, in death, her body refuses to decay. Such religion relies on signs and wonders--or, in their absence, on the capacity to fabricate the illusion of one.

The contemporary purveyors of so-called "ID theory"--those who search through the annals of modern biology looking for some "irreducibly complex" organic structure that just can't be explained by the mechanisms described in evolutionary theory--are also, in their own way, placing their bets on this cymbal-and-trumpet God. And if they can't find their miraculous protein or organ, then there's always the Museum of Creation and Earth History to fabricate slick illusions.

What they all exemplify is one way to be religious, one way to conceive of what it means to believe in the divine. Hungry for miracles, they ignore the taste of chocolate and only shout the name of God when the chocolate drippings form a likeness of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Miracle-seekers embody a species of "God of the gaps" theology. But they don't just believe in the God of the gaps. Their eyes are glued to the gaps, committed to the reality of gaps, disappointed when gaps are closed, disillusioned if they cannot find enough gaps for God to fill. A miracle isn't a miracle unless it's a gap, unless it's an inexplicable violation of the order of nature.

I'm reminded of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's admonition to those who "use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge." In Bonhoeffer's words, "We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don't know; God wants us to realize his presence, not in unsolved problems but in those that are solved." To see the presence of God in something is to experience it as miraculous. And when we restrict our understanding of the miraculous to the inexplicable, we leave God out of the rest of our lives--the majority of our lives. God becomes caulking in the wall, rather than the home in which we live and breathe and have our being.

The poet and scholar Frederick Turner makes a similar point, in a Dallas Institute lecture, when he says, "It is easy to deceive ourselves that something strange, something supernatural, is happening, as we know well from accounts of flying saucer enthusiasts, superstitious cultists, and ghost hunters. But perhaps our greater danger, our greater credulity, lies in deceiving ourselves that something strange and marvelous is not happening."

We stare up at the star-littered sky, waiting for fireworks. And when the ephemeral sparks don't come, we hiss and walk away, disappointed and disillusioned under the ceaseless stars. Fixated on the extraordinary, the inexplicable, the gap, we cannot experience the miraculous in the seamless beauty of the world. Our quest for miracles shuts out the miraculous in an ordinary day, an indrawn breath, the smile on a beloved face.

The problem for those monks in "Incorruptible" isn't that their saint's bones have failed to perform a miracle in recent memory. Their problem, rather, is that the miracle of existence eludes them. Caught up in the trials of life, the pain and loss, the worry for the future, they have lost sight of being itself, the unutterable mystery of what we take to be routine, the unfathomable depths that lie beneath the problems that have been solved.
This is what Schleiermacher had in mind when he spoke about "the intuition of the infinite in the finite," or that constant, unrelenting inkling that existence as we know it has a "whence."

There is the religion that clings to the promise of extraordinary miracles--violations of nature's laws that we imagine vividly and long to see. And then there is the religion that arises out of the experience of the world all around, when its miraculous character rips through the humdrum of life, lifts us out of our skins, and grants us inklings of truth beyond imagining.

Or in the more poetic language of Kahlil Gibran,

…if you would know God be not therefore a solver of riddles.

Rather, look about you and you shall see Him playing with your children.

And look into space; you shall see Him walking in the clouds, outstretching His arms in the lightning and descending rain.

You shall see Him smiling in flowers, then rising and waving His hands in trees.

From the Archives: Norman Malcolm's Ontological Argument

2011-09-30T17:43:00.000-05:00

Because I wasn't able to get to a discussion of it in my philosophy of religion class this week, I'm posting on this blog the main portion of an earlier post outlining and discussing the version of the ontological argument that Norman Malcolm develops in his essay "Anselm's Ontological Arguments."

What Malcolm discovered as he reread Anselm's Proslogion was this: what everyone seemed to take to be just a rewording of the argument Anselm is most famous for is actually a different argument. The first argument holds that existence is, in effect, a great-making property, and that therefore the greatest conceivable being must exist. Malcolm agrees that this argument is unsound, accepting Kant's contention that "existence is not a real predicate." But the second Anselmian argument, rather than focusing on existence, focuses on existing necessarily rather than contingently. Anselm argues, in effect, that it is greater to exist of necessity than to exist contingently. Hence, it is part of the very concept of a greatest conceivable being that this being exist necessarily.

What Malcolm notes is that the property of existing necessarily rather than contingently does meet the test of being a "real" predicate in Kant's sense. That is, it adds to our concept of the thing, describing what it is like rather than merely stating that the thing as described has an instance in the world.

For this very reason, of course, it remains an open question whether there actually exists an entity which possesses its existence in this unique way--necessarily rather than contingently. So we haven't defined God into existence by noting that the very idea of God presupposes necessary existence. We can still reasonably ask, "Does there actually exist a greatest-conceivable being?" If the answer is yes, then that being does not exist merely contingently but necessarily. But Malcolm goes further than this. He argues (and here he is following in the footsteps not only of Anselm but of Leibniz) that the only reason why a greatest-conceivable being wouldn't exist would be because the concept named something whose existence was impossible.

In other words, a crucial feature of Malcolm's development of Anselm's argument is his insight that, as conceived, either "God" names an impossible being or a necessary being that actually exists. Put another way, if God is possible, God is actual.

This is a very interesting result in its own right, but Malcolm goes on to argue (in a manner reminiscent of at least some of Gödel's efforts to construct an ontological argument) that God's existence must be deemed possible.

Another feature of Malcolm's argument is that he sets aside Anselm's language of greatness (perhaps worried about this term being understood in subjectivist ways). Instead of defining God as the "greatest" conceivable being, he defines God as "an absolutely unlimited being." Now certain kinds of properties, he thinks, imply limitation (for example, having a shape--since a shape is defined by its outer boundaries). On this definition, then, God would not have a shape. More generally, physical existence in time and space seems to require boundaries or limits, and so God wouldn't have such spatio-temporal properties. God would be "eternal" and "transcendent." But the possession of power (capacity to do something) does not similarly imply limitation. Nor does the possession of knowledge. If this is right, then these are things an unlimited being would possess without limit.

What Malcolm argues, following Anselm, is that necessary rather than contingent existence is also something that would have to characterize an unlimited being. Here is an outline of his argument for that conclusion:

1. “God” means an absolutely unlimited being

2. Any being whose existence depended on something else, or which could be prevented from existing by something else, would be limited by something else and so would not be an unlimited being.

3. For every proposed being, B, its existence is either possible (but not necessary), necessary, or impossible

4. To say of B that its existence is possible but not necessary is to say that it exists in some possible world (call it PW1), but not in another (PW2)

5. If B existed in PW1 but not in PW2, then either (a) there is something that exists in PW2 that prevents B from existing, or (b) there is something missing from PW2 that B requires in order to exist.

6. Hence, if B’s existence is possible but not necessary, then (a) or (b) is true.

7. If (a) or (b) is true, then B is not an unlimited being.

8. Hence, if B is possible but not necessary, then B is not an unlimited being

9. Hence, if God is possible but not necessary, then God is not an unlimited being

10. Hence, it is not the case that God is possible but not necessary

11. Hence, God is either impossible or exists necessarily

At this point Malcolm takes up the question of whether God, conceived as an unlimited being, is possible. To make his argument here, he invokes two ideas: first, that an entity's existence is impossible only if it is characterized by contradictory properties (e.g., a round square); second, that such contradictions arise only when one property-attribution negates what is affirmed by another property attribution. But to negate what is posited elsewhere, a property attribution must embody, at least implicitly, a limitation. Roundness negates squareness because it imposes boundaries or limits on the space occupied by the object precisely where squareness does not, and vice versa. These concepts, in other words, are partly "negative" concepts--they don't merely ascribe some property to an object, but deny something of it. But an absolutely unlimited being would be such that no real "positive" attribute could be denied of it (we could only deny "negative" properties of it--that is, properties which ascribe absence or limit). As such, Malcolm concludes that an unlimited being cannot embody a contradiction, since that would require the possession of both a positive property and a negative property that denies the former. But an unlimited being would only possess positive properties. This part of his argument can be outlined as follows:
12. In order for the existence of some proposed being B to be impossible, the concept of B must imply, with respect to at least one positive property P, each of the contradictory claims “B has property P” and “B lacks property P.”

13. To lack a positive property is to be limited.

14. If 13, then the conception of an unlimited being cannot include or imply anything of the form “B lacks property P.”

15. Hence, God is not impossible.

16. Hence, God exists necessarily.

Critics of this argument are often skeptical of the idea that the positive and negative property distinction is a meaningful one. If it's not, then we might be forced to say that the failure to possess certain properties is a limitation, whereas their possession would contradict the possession of the opposing property (which one could not deny possession of without imposing limitation). But while it might be difficult to offer definitions of "positive property" and "negative property," there does seem to be an intuitive distinction here. Some property attributions assert that an object lacks something ("ignorant" or "impotent" or "empty"), while others that it has something ("knowledgable" or "capable" or "full"). Others are mixed, in that they assert than an object has this but lacks that ("round" or "green"). Nevertheless, especially when we get to the idea of mixed properties we wade into thorny territory. To use what is perhaps a silly example: Is heat the presence of something and cold the lack of it, such that we must say of God that God is infinitely hot? Or does being the sort of thing that's subject to heat and cold imply a limitation, such that anything of any heat is limited, and an unlimited being would therefore have to be something to which the categories of hot and cold simply do not apply?

Other questions arise, of course, when we consider moral properties. Can there be such a thing as unlimited goodness? And if so, what does that look like? To adhere with traditional theology, we'd need to hold that evil is a lack (something Augustine affirmed), such that any presence of evil implies limitation. If we think of evil as something positive, we get a God who must embody unlimited evil (as well as unlimited good--and hence must embody a contradiction). As such, Malcolm's argument leads us directly into a consideration of the nature of good and evil.

For the Bible Tells Me So

2011-09-29T15:03:00.000-05:00

This evening I will be leading a discussion of the documentary film, For the Bible Tells Me So, on the OSU campus. In case you're local and want to attend, the event--hosted by OSU's Sexual Orientation Diversity Association (SODA)--begins at 5:30 PM in rm 112 of the Classroom Building. Discussion will follow a screening of the film.

The film offers a powerful look into the lives and struggles of several families with strong Christian roots and a family member who is gay or lesbian. I know one of the profiled families pretty well: the Reitans. The parents, Phil and Randi, are the godparents to my son--which kind of makes their son, Jake, my son's godbrother? Dunno. In any event, Phil is my first cousin.

But even apart from this personal connection, I would be a strong advocate for this film. I don't think anyone can honestly and sincerely reflect on the traditional Christian teaching on homosexuality without considering its human impact, at least not if one is motivated by an ethic of love--which is, after all, the sort of ethic that Christians profess to endorse. To love our neighbors requires, first of all, paying attention to them. And this includes paying attention to our gay and lesbian neighbors and their families. It requires paying attention to how our choices, our actions and our attitudes, our teaching and preaching, affect them.

The makers of this documentary did just that. They paid attention. And in so doing, they have afforded a way for others to pay attention, too. Not that a documentary film is a substitute for actually sitting down with real live human beings, finding out about them and their lives, listening with compassionate attention. But it can be a starting place.

And even those of us who have close gay and lesbian friends may not always be comfortable initiating those hard, intimate conversations, the conversations which expose truths about the human condition that may challenge or even convict us. Sometimes it can be helpful for a filmmaker to ask those hard questions on our behalf, and record the answers for us to see. Sometimes that is what it takes to stimulate real, face-to-face conversations among human beings. Sometimes, that is what it takes to motivate someone to seek out people they otherwise avoid, people they are afraid of because they are entangled in misinformation and prejudice.

And so, even if my cousins weren't one of the featured families in the film, I'd encourage you to see it. It's a moving film (not long ago, for what it's worth, Katy Perry tweeted that the film had moved her to tears). But it's more than that. It's a window into human lives, an invitation to empathy and compassion. And it's a challenge to all those who sit easily in righteous "Christian" judgment on their gay and lesbian neighbors. Christ's warnings against Pharisaic self-congratulation and judgment are bound up, intimately, with his prioritization of love. His aim was to break down those things which prevent us from being channels through which love flows in the world.

Many such impediments have been in place, for a long time now, in the Christian community's relationship to those whose sexuality doesn't fit with the conventional pattern. As I've said before, the Bible becomes such an impediment to love when people plug up their ears with Bible verses so that they cannot hear the anguished cries of their gay and lesbian neighbors. If nothing else, "For the Bible Tells Me So" is an invitation to unplug our ears.

And in case that's not enough to spark your interest, here's the trailer:

Of Heaven and Triathlons

2011-09-27T14:29:00.002-05:00

I was thinking about heaven over the weekend. More precisely, I was thinking about how Christians should envision heaven.

Let me try to explain what I mean. It is easy enough, I think, to offer a Christian portrait of heaven. In classical theological terms, “heaven” names the state of eternal loving union with God and the blessed. To be in heaven is to experience and be transformed by the “beatific vision,” that is, the immediate experience of God. And that experience is thought to have two primary effects: perfect bliss and moral sanctification. Since Christianity defines moral goodness in terms of love, the “sanctification” element means that heaven involves being perfected in love by virtue of an unfiltered experience of God’s love.

Those in heaven become, in effect, channels through which divine love radiates outward to everyone and everything else. And so, to be in heaven is not merely to experience perfect joy; it is to experience that joy on account of belonging to “the beloved community” (as Martin Luther King, Jr., called it). In part it is the joy of being loved in such a community, but more deeply it is the joy that comes from loving as purely as it is possible to love.

This, I think, is a pretty good theological description of the Christian notion of heaven. But what I was thinking about this weekend wasn’t about how to describe heaven in abstract theological terms. A description doesn’t always evoke a sense of what it would be like to experience that which is being described. Unlike recipe-book descriptions of dishes, which prompt us to almost taste the explosion of flavors and textures, theological descriptions of heaven don’t typically produce a similar experiential echo.

But, for reasons I’ll get into in a minute, I think the concept of heaven needs to be more than just a theological abstraction. Events over the weekend inspired me to think about how such abstractions should be fleshed out—and then, coincidentally, a posted link from a facebook friend yesterday morning directed me to a rather interesting short essay on Randal Rauser’s blog, one that dovetailed remarkably with my own thoughts.

Apparently, there is this phobia called “ouranophobia”: the fear of heaven.

Randal Rauser opines that this fear is rooted in a conception of heaven as one endless church service. We hear theological descriptions of heaven like the one offered above—a community of the faithful united with God—and Christians quite naturally think about church, where people come together in a deliberate attempt to form a community defined and shaped by God’s presence.

It happens, I think, almost out of a sense of duty. We’re supposed to associate our church experience with nearness to God. And so we’re supposed to think of heaven in terms of that model. But the result speaks for itself: heaven becomes an endless church service.

And this is clearly the wrong way to think about it. In Rauser’s words:

…we are better off thinking of all the greatest moments of beauty and goodness as more appropriate icons for our heavenly destiny. You don’t look at an icon so much as through it to the transcendent reality beyond. And so it is for the world. All that is most wonderful and glorious about earth now is but an icon, a pale image like a shadow flickering on the back of Plato’s famous cave, which draws us to look at the unimaginable glory that awaits.

I remember the first time that my thoughts took me in something like this direction. I was in my late teens, and I was in Norway for the Christmas holidays (for the first time in many years). I went with my relatives to a “Sølvguttene” concert in the National Cathedral (Sølvguttene are the Norwegian version of the Vienna Choir Boys). I remember sitting in this beautiful building, surrounded by loved ones, listening to Sølvguttene sing, in Norwegian, the lovely German Christmas carol, “Es ist ein Ros entsprungen.”

I was swept up in that moment, in the wash of sounds and the presence of family and the prospect of having a big Norwegian Christmas Eve with my extended family, complete with all the family traditions…and I found myself thinking, “I wish heaven were like this.”

Not “I hope heaven is like this.” Not “Perhaps heaven will be something like this.” My thought was a counterfactual one: I was sitting there thinking that this moment was so much better than heaven was going to be.

And then I stopped and asked myself, “Why am I thinking that? What, exactly, is my image of heaven anyway? Puffy white clouds and people with wings and harps?”

I wasn’t quite sure, but one thing became immediately apparent: I believed in life after death, in heaven (and, at the time, in eternal hell), but my image of heaven was linked to one feeling above all others: tedium.

Heaven was about being bored.

And as I sat there listening to the beautiful music, I thought to myself: “Then I’ve got the wrong idea of heaven.” But the problem wasn’t with my theory of heaven. While I probably couldn’t have provided precisely the theological account sketched out above, I believed something in that ballpark.

I say “believed,” but it was mainly a matter of rote endorsement. I didn’t believe it in the way that I believe in the promptings of my senses, an automatic and irresistible affirmation hardwired into me and rich with content. I knew that my grandmother, sitting near me in the cathedral, believed in God and heaven in something like that way. She couldn’t help it. She believed as automatically as breathing, and it was a belief full of color and substance.

My belief wasn’t like that. But it wasn’t a matter of hope, either. If heaven was something to be dreaded (not for its horrors, as one might dread the idea of hell, but for its tiresome monotony), then how could my belief be a matter of hope? It didn’t spring from the yearnings of my soul, from my longing for the good. After all, what filled my image of heaven wasn’t the good at all.

Or maybe the problem lay further down. Maybe it’s better to say that what filled my image of the good wasn’t the good. I had the kind of deficient view of the good that leads people to insist that evil people are more interesting than good ones. Goodness, for me, was uninteresting—as if being interesting weren’t a good thing. And so, armed with my deficient view of the good, God and heaven became utterly banal.

“But that’s upside down,” I thought to myself. Perhaps, somewhere in the back of my head, I was recalling the phrase “the banality of evil.” And I knew that here, in this moment, there was rich vibrancy that was not the least bit boring. At the same time, of course, I was aware of others sitting around me who were, indeed, bored to tears.

You always see them at classical concerts. They have no sense of the music, of the transcendence of that moment when dissonance resolves. There are enough times in my life when I have been one of them, bored in the presence of exquisite music. What makes the difference is the extent to which I am in the music, living in it and through it, invested wholly and completely in the moment-to-moment depth and flow. It’s a matter of attention and love.

And as I sat there in that concert, something shifted in me. What changed was my vision of heaven. That word, “heaven,” started to be fleshed out with new content, new resonances. It ceased being about some alien future on the other side of death, something I couldn’t help but feel disconnected from. As is true of music, disconnection means disinterest, and so tedium. To put heaven wholly on the other side of death is to strip it of the very things that make it meaningful—or, perhaps better, of the kind of substance that fits with its meaning.

Our concept of heaven needs to be filled up with things that seize us and hold us, the moments that are deepest in their savor, the things that inspire, not ordinary desire, but yearning, that soul-hunger for the good.

Let me explain this distinction a bit. Desire is a kind of unpleasantness that we feel on the wrong side of getting what we want. We don’t notice the unpleasantness if the desire is readily satisfied. And the process of satisfying desire is pleasant enough, often intensely so. But desire smacks of pure subjectivity: the object of desire is good because we desire it, whatever it happens to be.

When I speak of yearning, I have in mind something different. Yearning fills us when we have intimations of something we didn’t know to desire. The yearning is a foretaste of something greater than we could hope for or imagine, a good whose worth is utterly independent of our desires. And yearning is not pain, but an exquisite and at times terrifying movement in the direction of something that has brushed against us, something whose touch we never expected and can barely comprehend.

When we desire, we feel a lack that needs to be filled, and we know exactly what will fill it (if only for a time). When we yearn in the way I have in mind, we feel as if some lack we never knew about is being filled, as if we are closer to complete than we have ever been. And as we lean urgently in the direction of what is filling us, we sense a great not yet. We aren’t ready yet, not for the totality of what is there. What promises to complete will only swamp us if it comes in all its fullness now.

But there is no disappointment, no frustration of the sort that accompanies thwarted desires. Instead, we feel more alive, more real, more whole. To yearn in this way is to stand on a threshold.

It is moments of such yearning that, in the years since I sat in that cathedral, have been filling in for me the conceptual space of “heaven.” But I never really thought about it that way, not explicitly, until this weekend.

On Saturday, my wife participated in Oklahoma City’s Redman triathlon, competing in the half-Iron (70.3 mile) distance. She and I went down to the city the night before so she could pick up her race materials and put her bike in the transition area, and we stayed in a hotel down there so that she could sleep a little later (until 4 AM instead of 3). Unfortunately, the folks in the hotel room next to us decided to host a party there. Requests for quiet and phone calls to the front desk finally succeeded, but not until closer to 1 AM. The remaining hours of sleep were, at best, fitful. When the alarms went off, I joked that she was really doing a quadrathlon: go a night without sleep, then swim 1.2 miles, bike 56, and run 13.1.

We drove to the race venue in the darkness. Once we were parked it was a brisk 15 minute hike to the starting area, much of it in a darkness so deep it was hard to see the sidewalk in front of us. When we reached the venue, it was alive with activity. Athletes were hurrying around in the artificial light, taking care of last minute preparations, transition-area setup, and, of course, potty stops. As the sun began to rise over Lake Hefner, I helped my wife into her wetsuit and shared her nervous anticipation. It was the longest endurance event she’d ever done, and she’d been training hard for months. Her body was ready. She was ready.

Finally it was time. I wished her luck as she pulled on her swim cap and headed into the starting chute. I snapped pictures as the full-Iron-distance athletes trotted down to the water for their mass start. Then came the half-Iron athletes in waves. After I watched my wife’s wave scramble into the water and begin swimming, I turned and headed back towards the car. I had a two hour drive ahead of me: one hour up to Stillwater to get the kids and my mother-in-law, then another hour back to the race venue.

I walked along the path that had been shrouded in darkness two hours before. Now the sky was a brilliant blue and I saw the white heron fishing by the lighthouse, and the sunflowers, while behind me I felt the weight of dreams, of human struggle and aspiration, and ahead of me my children, who would likely clamor about me as I came into the house, demanding hugs. And I paused and breathed deeply. I had to choke back tears.

There it is, I thought. Not some rote belief but a real presence pressing in on me, filling the moment with almost more than I could hold.

For awhile I just stood there, yearning, leaning against the threshold of joy.

Love, Freedom, Universalism...and Abortion.

2011-09-23T14:51:00.000-05:00

In his blog post today, Richard Beck has offered a beautifully accessible and compelling case for universalism in the form of a critique of Rob Bell's "conditionalism" (the idea that God's offer of salvation is unlimited, but whether all are saved depends on the free response of creatures). Really worth checking out if you are interested in the topic.

Beck's essay is so nicely done that I'm inclined to let it speak largely for itself. But since his essay bizarrely dovetails with the class discussion I had today about Judith Jarvis Thomson's essay, "A Defense of Abortion," I can't help but say a few words about that connection.

Thomson makes a distinction in that essay between the question of what you ought to do and the question of what you have a right to do. There are some things we ought not to do--it would, in Thomson's words, be "indecent" of us to do them. But we might still have a right to do them.

Thomson's distinction here led to a class discussion about what it could mean to have a right to do something that, morally, you ought not to do--especially if it's not merely a legal right we're talking about, but some more basic right that is invoked to justify the legal right. In what sense can I affirm your right to do what it would be horribly indecent of you to do? I can't mean that your choice is a matter of moral indifference, so that either choice is morally "alright." So what, then, could I mean?

The basic idea seems to be that, in some sense, the choice should be yours. The choice should be left up to you. But what, exactly, does that mean? Does it mean I've violated your right if I try to talk you out of it? If I point out that it would be an indecent thing to do? If I seek to persuade you not to do something so terrible?

(I'm not implying here that the choice to abort is necessarily indecent here, although it might be. Thomson certainly doesn't think abortion is always indecent. But she thinks there are choices which are indecent which we nevertheless retain the right to make. So let's have in mind a different choice: Suppose your sister is dying and urgently needs a bone marrow transplant. You are the only one who can provide it. But to save her life means being out of comission during the championship baseball game that you finally have a chance to play in. The choice, we might say, should be yours. But many, I think, would regard the decision to play the game and let your sister die--assuming this was a certain outcome--as the wrong choice to make. Seriously wrong.)

In our class discussion, we generally agreed that there was a difference between persuasion and coercion, and that the right to make a choice is more clearly a right to be free from the latter than from the former. Of course, there may be efforts at persuasion that are pursued in deeply intrusive ways--I may, in effect, force you to put up with my persuasive diatribes, shoving my opinion down your throat so relentlessly that the persuasion becomes coercion. The message becomes, in effect, "Unless you choose as I want you to choose, I will hound you relentlessly."

And, clearly, one can be coerced into being subjected to persuasive efforts one would rather not hear. In short, there are legitimate question about how to draw the line between persuasion and coercion, or about when persuasion is as problematic as coercion. The line here is not neatly drawn. But still, there is a difference.

We also talked about species of coercion. If I make it clear that I don't want to associate with you any more if you make that indecent choice, is that coercive? Presumably it has a different status than putting a gun to your head or telling you that I will inflict financial ruin on you if you choose to let your sister die. But still, might it not qualify as coercive?

On the one hand, it seems I have certain rights about who I will and will not associate with. And it may be only fair to let you know how I will exercise those rights if you choose in ways I find detestable. We might think you have a claim on making a fully-informed choice, aware of the consequences for such things as friendships. If I just can't spend time with a person who would choose to play in a baseball championship rather than save their sister's life...well, shouldn't I have the right to tell you that, even if I acknowledge that the choice between playing the game and saving your sister is yours to make?

Then again, telling you something like that may be manipulative or even coercive, a way of intruding illegitimately into your choices. One might imagine that a great deal depends on context. In any event, there may be a difference between threatening a cost if you make the "wrong" choice, and letting you know what I will do if you make that choice, where what I will do is something you won't like. Not every case of the latter is necessarily a case of the former.

These were the sorts of things we talked about in class today. And what is the lesson that my class drew from this discussion? Well, there were more questions than answers, I think. But I would guess that the following constitutes one small point of consensus: To say that the choice should be yours is not to say that others--others who care about you and your choices--must abandon you to your choices, so as to ensure that you operate in a social and personal space completely free from others' thoughts, feelings, and convictions.

And here is where my class discussion about what it means to have the right to choose merges with Beck's line of thought. There is, obviously, room for discussion about the concept of freedom at work in Beck's argument, his idea that what you care about has a more basic status than what you choose. But even if you lean towards a more strongly libertarian view of freedom than Beck seems to have, there is something to be said for Beck's conviction that the kind of God affirmed in Christian theology would never merely abandon us to our choices--especially not when those choices are rooted in confusion and ignorance and deeply misguided priorities.

It is possible to let a person make choices without abandoning them to their choices. It is possible to be involved, and involved in a loving way, even though there are difficult boundary issues, even though the line between persuasion and coercion--or between stating intentions and making threats--is sometimes hard to draw. Consider again the case involving the choice between a playing a championship game and saving your sister's life with a bone marrow transplant, but now imagine that a loving parent is on the scene. Would staying out of your choice be the most loving thing? Could she still respect your freedom while urgently pleading with you to make the life-saving choice?

And what about a choice more akin to what is at stake in salvation--a more choice without a time limit and more clearly about one's own fate, one in which the resources to turn away from a destructive path remains available. Imagine an addict and a loving parent who cares deeply about the addicted child, who has resources that can help break the addiction. Is the parent violating the demands of respect for freedom by staging an intervention?

There are difficult boundary issues here, lines between respectful persuasion and coercion, between manipulation and loving confrontation. But a God of love who knew the heart of every creature would, it seems, be uniquely situated to maneuver those complex boundaries, to preserve the balance between loving involvement and letting people choose.

Love does not walk away, even if it does not coerce.

Foundationalisms

2011-09-21T15:19:00.000-05:00

On what should we base our beliefs? "Reason and evidence," some are inclined to reply. Sure. Fine. But what is reasonable, and what counts as evidence?

Biblical fundamentalists think that something being asserted somewhere in the Bible is a piece of evidence that the asserted proposition is true. Why do they treat such a thing as evidence? Because, we might say, they believe a certain story about the Bible and its origins, a story which, if true, implies that biblical assertions have enormous evidentiary weight. But why think this story about the Bible is true?

Most everybody thinks that sensory experiences can serve as evidence for the truth of claims about a world external to the mind, claims prompted by our sense experience. Why? Maybe there's a story here, too, a story about our senses and their relation to the world that would have to be very different from the story told in the first part of the movie "the Matrix." But why believe that story? Or maybe there isn't a story here at all. Maybe we just believe the deliverances of our senses, period. There is no reason. We just can't help it.

Leibniz thought that the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), much like the principle of non-contradiction, was a self-evident principle (self-evident to our intellect) which could reliably guide our reasoning. As such, he thought he could reason from some pretty uncontroversial propositions to the conclusion that a necessary being must exist. We might say that, based on his understanding of "reason," the existence of contingent things is evidence for the existence of a necessary thing. Why does Leibniz accept PSR? Why does Hume reject it?

In each of these cases we are led to think about foundations. Our reasoning has to have starting points from which we reason--things that are either immediately taken as having evidential value, or are taken to have evidential value on the basis of some broader system of beliefs--perhaps organized into a narrative framework. And our reasoning doesn't merely need evidential starting points. We also need to have standards of reasoning--principles which guide our inferences, leading us to take some body of evidence to be evidence for a conclusion.

In short, to base our beliefs on reason and evidence, we need rational and evidential starting points. Foundationalist epistemologies treat our starting points as that upon which our whole network of beliefs is ultimately built. Following the metaphor of building construction, we need a solid foundation or the whole edifice becomes unsound.

In my last post, I suggested that Hegel could be viewed as a foundationalist, but of a special kind--namely, a fallibilistic foundationalist. In this post, I want to distinguish some different species of foundationalism, locate Hegel's dialectic within this taxonomy, and offer a case for the advantages of Hegel's approach.

I'll begin with a broad distinction between what I’ll call absolute foundationalism and fallibilistic foundationalism. Absolute foundationalism treats one’s foundations as beyond challenge, and might be further divided into two sub-species: what I’ll call Cartesian-style foundationalism, and what I’ll call dogmatic foundationalism. Cartesian-style foundationalism seeks to discover which foundations are, in fact, beyond dispute—through something like the methodological doubt pursued by Descartes in his Meditations—and then rely only on such foundations. Dogmatic foundationalism, by contrast, treats its starting points as beyond dispute but makes no attempt to offer a philosophical case for doing so.

In fact, dogmatic foundationalism might be viewed as arising out of the perceived failure of Cartesian-style foundationalism, based on a pair of prima facie compelling critiques. The first critique runs basically as follows. To rely on nothing other than those starting points which are indubitable is to rely on starting points that can’t get you anywhere. If you insist on believing only what can be grounded on such starting points, you are driven to a kind of solipsism: the only thing you can trust is the existence of your own thoughts, and you are unwarranted in believing that any of those thoughts correspond to any reality outside your own mind. This is a kind of extreme skeptical outcome that is intolerable—it makes living a human life impossible—and can only be overcome by allowing in foundations that don’t have the Cartesian stamp of indubitability.

The second critique should be familiar to followers of this blog: No attempt to prove that one’s foundations are beyond dispute can be successful, because no such attempt can be ungrounded. How, then, can the attempt itself avoid relying on foundational starting points? And these will be either the very ones one is attempting to establish, or different foundations which, therefore, have not themselves been proven to be beyond dispute.

In effect, dogmatic foundationists draw three lessons from these critiques of Cartesian-style foundationalism: (a) everyone has foundations, (b) everyone has more foundations than the class of indubitable ones (assuming this class has members at all), and (c) no set of foundations can be justified or shown to be the right ones, since all such efforts are either circular (and hence dogmatic) or appeal to deeper, unconsidered foundations that are held to dogmatically.

This third lesson is what leads them straight to dogmatic foundationalism: we have no choice but to be dogmatic foundationalists, but we do have a choice about which dogma to embrace. On this view, the only difference between the empiricist and the biblical fundamentalist is which foundations are being held to dogmatically—"who" one has chosen to treat as one’s ultimate epistemic authority.

The problem with this argument, of course, is that it is a false dilemma. There are more options than the two versions of absolute foundationalism (Cartesian-style and dogmatic). There is fallibilistic foundationalism.

The fallibilistic foundationalist accepts (a) and (b), but isn’t prepared to embrace an unqualified form of (c). Instead of insisting that “no set of foundations can be justified or shown to be the right ones,” the fallibilistic foundationalist wants to say instead that “no set of foundations can be justified or shown to be the right ones prior to their adoption.” But once one has adopted a set of foundations, a critical stance becomes possible with respect to specific foundational beliefs.

Hegel's dialectic can be seen as falling into this class. I will concede that there are those who would resist using the term "foundationalism" to describe Hegel's method, but this is a linguistic quibble in which I'm not much invested. I recall that once, at a party in graduate school, I announced that Hegel "has a coherence theory of knowledge but a correspondence theory of truth." In so doing I classed him as a coherentist rather than as a foundationalist. But these are terms of art in the discipline--and there is something about Hegel's epistemology that strikes me as warranting the foundationalist label (as I noted in my last post).

In describing Hegel's approach as it relates specifically to philosophy, Michael Allen Fox notes in his surprisingly accessible book on Hegel (called, interestingly enough, The Accessible Hegel) that Hegel was largely indifferent to one's starting point in the philosophical journey. Wherever we start, "our philosophical journey will inevitably be a prolonged process of self-examination in which thought interrogates itself and remedies its deficiencies as it progresses." The end result of this process will be what "'justifies' the starting point we have chosen by proving its fruitfulness in yielding knowledge."

We have to start somewhere--to think at all requires us to have rational and evidential starting points that characterize what that thinking will look like. But as we engage in whatever style of thinking these starting points entail, we will inevitably encounter and transcend deficiencies. Whatever we think about, we will eventually be forced inward to thought itself, and called upon by its failures to revise our starting points.

In fact, Hegel thought this was true not just of philosophy. The same dialectical process plays out not just in the history of philosophy, but in human history. The efforts of human societies to engage with the world drive humanity towards "self-interrogation" in which deficiencies are discovered and remedied.

As a way of clarifying and defending this Hegelian approach, I want to consider a version of fallibilistic foundationalism out of which Hegel's species might be thought to arise. I’m inclined to give it a big mouthful of a name: defeasible-but-trustworthy doxastic practice foundationalism. After all, it’s important for academics to come up with pretentious-sounding names, or they wouldn’t be academics. But to save space, I’ll call it DTDP foundationalism for short.

To understand this species of foundationalism, we need to know what a “doxastic practice” is. The term is one I get from William Alston, and it basically refers to any belief-forming practice one might engage in. Here are some examples:

Assign a set of contrary beliefs to heads and tails on a coin, flip the coin, and believe in accord with the outcome of the coin flip.

Use your senses to investigate your environment, and believe whatever propositions you find yourself immediately inclined to believe based on such sensory investigation.

In attempting to form beliefs about what happened to you in your past, consult your memory.

In forming beliefs about regularities in nature, make predictions about what one ought to observe under given conditions if the supposed regularity holds, then create or put oneself into the given conditions and determine if one observes what was predicted. Keep doing this. If the supposed regularity remains unfalsified after extensive testing, accept it as true.

In forming beliefs about what happened in Europe in the 19th Century, consult your old “History of Western Europe” textbook.

In forming beliefs about what happens after bodily death, consult the Upanishads and the Vedas and believe whatever is clearly stated on this matter in these texts.

DTDP foundationalism attaches credibility to some but not all of the range of possible doxastic practices, in effect treating as foundational any belief that comes from this select list of “trustworthy” practices. But a belief coming from a “generally trusted” practice is not immune to criticism. Rather, any such belief, call it B, is believed unless and until it is confronted with “defeaters,” that is, other beliefs that arise out of trusted doxastic practices and which call B into question.

There are different sorts of defeaters, but I won’t get into that now. What this rough characterization makes clear is that this species of foundationalism acknowledges the fallibility of our foundations, and builds a kind of checks-and-balances system into our belief-forming practices. The checks and balances cannot be implemented apart from embracing the presumptive trustworthiness of a set of doxastic practices, but insofar as the trustworthiness of their deliverances is only presumptive rather than absolute, it allows for specific foundational beliefs produced by the agreed set of doxastic practices to be rejected based on the total deliverances of the entire set.

But how do we arrive at which doxastic practices to trust in the first place? Here, there seem to be a range of alternatives. You could take an essentially social approach: identify those doxastic practices that enjoy both wide social use (they are widely relied on in the formation of beliefs) and a high degree of intersubjective corroboration (they typically lead most people to the same beliefs when used in the same circumstances).

Then there’s the introspective approach. You look to the “phenomenological features” of the doxastic practice and its deliverances—that is, those qualities or characteristics available to introspection. Perhaps the beliefs formed by the practice consistently just seem right to you, so much so that you essentially “cannot help but believe them.” Or maybe the practice itself has an inner “veridical feel”—a sense of putting you in touch with truth as you’re engaging in it.

Or maybe you identify those doxastic practices you pretty much have to trust if you want to live anything remotely like an ordinary human life, and you trust them and only them.

Alternatively, you might take the approach of someone like Alvin Plantinga, saying that those doxastic practices are trustworthy which involve the use of cognitive faculties under those conditions in which the faculties are generally reliable. The problem here, of course, is that there may be a difference between a doxastic practice being reliable and our being able to tell that it is reliable. Plantinga has famously proposed that we have a cognitive faculty dubbed "the sensus divinitatus" which is responsible for theistic belief and which produces that belief reliably. His critics instantly cry foul--but part of Plantinga's point is that we have no inner guarantee or non-circular proof that any of the things we treat as reliable cognitive faculties are reliable cognitive faculties. That a congitive faculty is trustworthy, in the sense of consistently delivering true beliefs, does not clearly entail that we have immediate access to this fact. And that, of course, is part of the problem. How do you decide which doxastic practices to presumptively (not absolutely) trust?

However you decide, it appears at least initially as if you confront variants of the same troubles that plagued absolute foundationalism. The problems have simply shifted from the level of foundational beliefs to the level of foundational doxastic practices.

Consider: Suppose I adopt a social version of DTDP foundationalism—trusting my senses, the pronouncements of certain socially agreed-upon authorities, etc. Either I have grounds for believing that doxastic practices embodying the relevant social features are more likely to produce true beliefs than those that lack these features, or I don’t. If I do, what would those grounds be like? Wouldn’t they either be circular (relying for their support on beliefs that are ultimately derived from these very same doxastic practices) or based on different doxastic practices that then fall outside the scope of justification in terms of their social features? Aren’t we then driven to being dogmatic in our embrace of the doxastic practices we embrace, simply shifting the problem from unjustified trust in certain foundational beliefs to unjustified trust in certain foundational belief-forming practices?

Here is where we are, I think, pushed towards something more Hegelian. The reason why DTDP foundationalism offers a basis for critiquing foundational beliefs, even when they come from trusted doxastic practices, is because the whole set of trusted practices can generate defeaters for individual beliefs. But by the very same mechanism, DTDP foundationalism also provides a basis for critiquing the doxastic practices themselves.

Here’s what I have in mind. If a doxastic practice that was initially put into the “trustworthy” class keeps encountering defeaters for the beliefs it generates, it might eventually be bumped out of that class. Or if the doxastic practice encounters defeaters in a certain context, it might be judged untrustworthy in that context. We might find that it encounters fewer defeaters when certain refinements are made to the practice, and so the practice might evolve to embody these refinements. It is very easy to see the scientific method as emerging out of precisely this sort of refinement.

But keep in mind that all of this evolution is influenced by one’s starting points—that is, by which doxastic practices one has initially included in the generally trustworthy set. What set of doxastic practices one treats as trustworthy will shape what defeaters, if any, drive the evolution of the whole set. Start with too narrow a set, or get “unlucky” in your starting points, and you may be left with only a few refined doxastic practices that you trust—and can you really trust even them? Maybe their having escaped defeat is mostly a function of the shrinking set of possible sources of defeat.

The worry here is this: The smaller the set of trusted doxastic practices, the less likely any of them are to encounter defeaters—simply because of how few they are, rather than because of their intrinsic merits. And as the evolutionary process described above continues, you won’t be pumping out new doxastic practices. Defeaters destroy. They don't create. As the evolution continues and the number of trustworthy doxastic practices shrinks, we’ll thus be put into a position in which we should be increasingly less confident that continued-failure-to-be-defeated is a good gauge of trustworthiness.

Perhaps this worry isn't decisive, but a different worry looms nearby. Even if one's remaining doxastic practices are deemed trustworthy based on their success in producing undefeated beliefs, we might worry that the subset of beliefs generated by these practices is far too narrow to be representative of reality, or that it is too narrow to help us live our lives in a way that meaningfully embodies the truth about ourselves and our world. We may have evolved certain practices to a point of high refinement but left ourselves with a set of practices that is nevertheless deficient, because the boundaries of the knowable that they establish are too narrow.

But once one treats doxastic practices as mutually evolving in the light of each others’ deliverances, one can begin to ask whether this fixation on nothing but doxastic practices might not itself speak to a set of unconsidered presuppositions—some hidden starting points that shape our ideas about what should be our starting points. Why should we make doxastic practices the sole underpinnings of our belief system? Why not, instead, begin with an interpretation of the whole of experience, embrace a set of doxastic practices based on that interpretation, and then critically live out this whole?

In other words, starting with doxastic practices as the foundation for all our beliefs is not the only way to start, nor is it the only thing that can lead to an evolutionary process. So, why not allow as a legitimate starting point a perspective which treats a narrative picture of reality as foundational, and doxastic practices as derivative?

A process that treats only doxastic processes as foundational, and then evolves by successively refining and discarding doxastic practices in the light of experience, is in danger of ultimately leaving one with too small a set of foundational beliefs on which to build. As noted above, while experience with the failures of doxastic practices can refine and rule out ones that were already part of your epistemic arsenal, it doesn’t generally introduce into your arsenal wholly new doxastic practices that you’ve never thought to try.

Consider the analogy of natural selection: to take advantage of all the "niches" available in the environment, it’s not enough to have a mechanism that kills off unsuccessful species. You also need some creative wellspring from which new species arise. Storytelling, speculative philosophy and theology, mythological narrative—these things are the creative side of the human endeavor, and it is in part from them that new ways of engaging with the world, of wrestling with what to believe and what not to believe, come about. Perhaps, then, we shouldn't just allow holistic interpretations and narratives as potential starting points, but should allow a place in our epistemological lives for the creative process by which such interpretations and narratives arise. In other words, we should treat storytelling and speculative thinking as not just an entertaining diversion but as helping us in the quest for truth.

This is not to say, of course, that every story we tell should be immediately embraced as true or anything like that. But some stories resonate in such a way that people are moved to live them out as if they were true. And in some cases these initial experiments don't immediately come crashing down by virtue of a volley of defeaters. Instead, the experiments knock down some parts of the story but not others. And some elements in the narrative motivate new doxastic practices which themselves prove extremely fruitful, in the sense of pumping out beliefs that resist defeat. Many see the birth of the scientific method in these terms: the Christian conviction that the universe is essentially orderly, that there must be a regularity and structure beneath even the most chaotic-seeming dimensions of our experience, set the stage for science.

And of course there’s more to life than telling stories and engaging in doxastic practices. We have artistic and athletic activities, cultural and religious rituals, spiritual practices, ways of life that embody value systems and moral codes. Engaging in the business of living impacts, in all sorts of ways, our beliefs and our ways of forming beliefs.

The point is that doxastic practices are not isolated from human life in all its richness and diversity. To allow them to evolve in isolation from the rest is to presuppose that there isn’t anything in the rest that has the power to promote the quest for coming into alignment with the Truth. And I would say that the fallibilism implicit in DTDP foundationalism calls one to be suspicious of any such presupposition. So, not only does DTDP foundationalism move beyond criticism of the deliverances of one’s adopted doxastic practices and towards lived-out criticism of the practices themselves; it also moves towards allowing for more than just doxastic practices into the class of legitimate starting points one might legitimately live out critically.

And so we've made our way towards something that looks more like the Hegelian approach. But how does it work, you may ask? How does one framework give rise to another? What sorts of deficiencies motivate a change in one's system?

Here I must confess to an attempt to be clever. In case no one’s noticed yet, this post has not merely been an attempt to make a case for the Hegelian dialectic. It’s also been laid out, however imperfectly, to serve as an example of the Hegelian dialectic at work.

Hegelian Foundationalism

2011-09-20T14:07:00.000-05:00

Some comments on my last post (mostly received in private correspondence) suggest that my use of the term “epistemic foundationalism” was a bit too broad—implying, in effect, that one had to choose between epistemic foundationalism and some more nuanced alternative such as the one offered by Hegel.

In putting things this way, I oversimplified matters by lumping a range of foundationalist epistemologies into the same category. More significantly, I gave the impression that Hegel was not a foundationalist. But there’s a sense in which that’s exactly what Hegel was, insofar as he thought we had to have starting points from which to build the belief systems that we then make use of to engage with the world—starting points that, among other things, determine the parameters of what counts as evidence.

What distinguished Hegel was his consciousness of the diversity of potential starting points and our human fallibility in their selection. And he wanted to endorse an approach that took these seriously. His question thus became what we should do given the fact that our judgments about what should and should not be foundational might be mistaken. His Hegelian method was intended as an alternative to dogmatic allegiance to a set of starting points.

But that’s not to say that he didn’t think we have to have starting points (it's just that we have to adopt them in a way that reflects our fallibility). Nor is it meant to imply that all starting points are seriously suspect.

Consider the principle of non-contradiction. Hegel’s entire dialectical process depends on assuming the unacceptability of “contradictions” that emerge as one seeks to live out one’s worldview (I think of a worldview as being a product of one’s starting points as they interact with the field of experience). And while Hegel’s sense of “contradiction” may be broader than what the principle of non-contradiction focuses on, it clearly includes contradictions in this narrower sense. As such, any evolution in one’s worldview that did away with the principle of non-contradiction would also do away with the dialectical process itself. It would be a kind of evolutionary dead end. All progress would stop, because no “failures” in the resulting system could be called failures.

“Yes,” the advocates of this failed system might say. “It is true that our system systematically fails to achieve any of the ends that the system endorses. But such failure does not rule out calling the system a total and perfect success. To rule out perfect success simply on the grounds that what we have here is abject failure is to endorse a principle of non-contradiction that we reject. Since we reject the principle of non-contradiction, there is nothing stopping us from saying that our ends are most perfectly realized when those ends are completely thwarted at every turn. Since we reject the principle of non-contradiction, ruling something out should never be taken to mean that anything has been ruled out.”

You get the idea. Deny the principle of noncontradiction, and you’ve got no epistemology, no methodology for guiding belief formation, Hegelian or otherwise. I doubt any human being could actually do this in practice. And this means, of course, that whether he was explicit about it or not, Hegel has to treat the principle of non-contradiction as a starting point that isn’t going away in the course of the dialectical evolution.

And there are probably other starting points that will be like this, although it seems clear that no one’s actual foundations are limited to these. But while I’m pretty sure Hegel would have to say that some foundations are, in fact, secure (that is, they’re not going to be exposed as inadequate in the course of the dialectic), it doesn’t follow from this that Hegel believes we are infallible in our judgments about which of them is secure and which isn’t.

We might get this wrong—being convinced that one of our foundations is rock-solid, only to find out in the course of the dialectical evolution that it is crumbling underfoot. But this fallibility cannot prevent us from treating our starting points as foundational. Not only don’t we have any choice but to start somewhere, but he thinks that it is only by presumptively trusting our starting points enough to live them out seriously that we come to discover their inadequacies.

In this sense, then, Hegel remains a foundationalist. But it is a different kind of foundationalism than, say, the foundationalism of the die-hard empiricist or the strict biblical fundamentalist. It is, if you will, a fallibilistic foundationalism--one that acknowledges the fallibility of our starting points by inviting us to live them out critically, that is, live them out with an eye towards noticing their shortcomings, the ways in which they fail us, and then revising them to overcome these failings.

In short, there are different species of foundationalism, and Hegel's strike me as a species that avoids the failings of others. In my next post, I want to offer a kind of taxonomy of foundationalisms, situate Hegel's dialectic within this taxonomy, and show what I take to be Hegel's virtues.