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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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.

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.