Thinking Christian

In a bow to the growing diversity of America’s religious landscape, the Claremont School of Theology, a Christian institution with long ties to the Methodist Church, will add clerical training for Muslims and Jews to its curriculum this fall, to become, in a sense, the first truly multi-faith American seminary…. Eventually, Claremont hopes to add clerical programs for Buddhists and Hindus.

[From Claremont seminary reaches beyond Christianity - latimes.com]

This makes sense, in a way. It makes sense if the purpose of a seminary is to equip students in understanding religion. It makes sense if religions are traditions, culturally contingent ways of looking at reality. It makes sense if members of a religious tradition see themselves as just that: members of a tradition. It makes sense if religion represents an association, a voluntary club to belong to, or a way of expressing solidarity with one’s background. It makes sense if religion and truth have no conversation with each other.

Yet it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense if the purpose of a seminary is to equip students to minister truth. It doesn’t make sense if Jesus Christ actually died for our sins. In fact it doesn’t even make sense if the seminary just believes that Jesus Christ died for our sins; for no one holding that belief can support any contrary beliefs. To believe in the Cross is to disbelieve every alternative.

According to the article (for whatever that’s worth), the Jewish seminary being established at Claremont holds at least some of its core beliefs loosely. Maybe its leaders take the view that Judaism is a culturally contingent kind of association.

I wonder if the Islamic group sees it that way.

I wonder how Claremont can still consider itself “a Christian institution.” With these changes it has given up all claim to the name.

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I’m only partway through my reading of the long debate on theology and ID, but some patterns seem to be falling into place already. As I read it, the Thomists in the discussion (all of whom are far better philosophers than I) object to Intelligent Design because ID is mistaken regarding what life is in itself, and how life relates to God in himself. I think that’s fair as a very brief summary. They say, for example, that ID commits to a mechanistic view of life, and that it fails to recognize the teleology or final causation that inheres not only in life but in all substances (life’s teleology being of course of a different order than inanimate objects’). ID is said to err in accepting false, non-teleological, reductionistic or mechanistic assumptions of modern empirical science. The result of this, they say, is that ID gets God wrong, it gets life wrong, and it even gets molecules, cells, and everything else wrong with respect to what they actually are

All of this might be true. I know very little of Aquinas. Thomistic language of final causes and natures and etc. remains rather opaque to me. I’ll have to keep working at it. But unless I’m severely mistaken in what I do understand, all that is beside the point anyway, because it misconstrues who ID is for and what ID is for. Intelligent Design, as I understand it, starts from a different place altogether and has different purposes. Its argument (as I understand it; I speak for myself) has a form similar to a reductio ad absurdum. If it allows naturalistic assumptions into the picture, so what? That’s how reductio arguments are conducted: by starting with the opponent’s assumptions, and in the end showing they fail.

The ID question in its current form could never have arisen before Newton. Democritus may have proposed an essentially lifeless and purposeless vision of all reality, but it was not until Newton (himself a theist) that theoretical foundations were laid to make such a world plausible. LaPlace expressed it as well as anyone: nature works mechanistically. At least inanimate nature did, in his mind; but his machine-picture had a gap that remained for Darwin to fill. The Origin of Species completed the picture: all the cosmos was explainable by purposeless principles of law plus chance, leaving room for no transcendent intelligence whatever. Ultimate being was no longer considered to be God. Eventually, ultimate reality was understood as a handful of fundamental particles and forces. Reality was explainable—and defined—by and through all these tiny, mindless, insignificant forces and particles repeated ad nauseum throughout the galaxies. That was all there was.

Such a picture is only true, however, if those forces and particles really are “all there was.” The Bible tells us God is a jealous God (often misinterpreted, but never mind that for now); no other god can stand next to him. But God’s jealousy is at least matched by that of mechanistic naturalism: no god, no minor angel or demon, no imp or leprechaun, no tiniest hint, even, of any supernaturalism can stand next to it. This is not because naturalism cares about supernaturalism; such an anthropomorphism would itself violate naturalism. It is because either naturalism is the whole story or else it is the wrong story. There is no middle way.

Intelligent Design takes naturalism, in all its jealously, quite seriously. This bothers the Thomists. But in fact ID can be conceived of as an investigation into what must be true if naturalism is true. Should that investigation lead to a dead end—if naturalism turns out to entail facts that cannot be true—this provides strong evidence that naturalism itself is a dead end. (Whether it does indeed lead to such a dead end is a different question not at issue in the current debate.)

To restate the point, naturalism presumes that chance plus law acting on purposeless initial conditions led to life and all its diversity. If it should turn out that chance and law can’t do those sorts of things with any reasonable likelihood, then that would pose severe problems for naturalism. Roughly stated the reductio-like approach goes this way:

1. Assume the truth of naturalism, which entails that all of the cosmos and all life and its diversity came about by some set S of circumstances characterized by purposeless law and chance acting on likewise purposeless initial conditions.
2. Using methods and constraints entailed by naturalism (including methodological naturalism as a guidepost for inquiry) explore the likelihood that all features of the the cosmos and life can be explained through S.
3. If there is at least one feature F of the cosmos, life, and/or its diversity that cannot, in principle, be explained by S within bounds of reasonable probability, then
4. Naturalism is false in either assumptions, methodology, or both.

The argument hinges on (3). (If there is more than one such unexplainable feature F, then ID’s case is all the stronger.) But the test for (3) must be conducted on naturalistic assumptions. To introduce Thomistic conceptions of substance, being, and causation would be inappropriate. It would invalidate the argument—and this is so even if Thomism (in any form) is exactly the truth about God and reality. A reductio argument must remain within its own parameters. This is what Dembski and Behe have been working on.

Now, you have likely noticed that this does not represent all of Intelligent Design. (It seems to me that it does cover the part the Thomists have most often identified as being objectionable.) Stephen C. Meyer’s approach is different. For him ID is not just a negative argument; it is a positive inference to intelligence, based on the fact wherever we see information of the sort coded in DNA, it always has intelligence as its source. His argument for ID is not a reductio, it is abductive, an inference to the best explanation. It begins at the same starting point Dembski and Behe use, however: the findings of the natural sciences, in all of their details and particulars. This to the Thomists is a fundamental error. But Meyer is not making his argument to directing his argument toward the Thomists primarily, or to any other theists.* Neither are Dembski or Behe. They are making their arguments to directing their arguments toward the world of science—people who couldn’t tell a final cause from their “final answer,” and who don’t care that they can’t. They are speaking the language of their audience those on the other side of the argument.

The Thomists start with certain observations and assumptions going back to the thirteenth century (Aquinas) or some some 1500 years before that (Aristotle). Meyer starts with 21st century biochemistry. Is there something wrong with starting with biochemistry? Does it not represent real data? And if the path he takes from there does not land him where Thomas landed, does that necessarily signify a contradiction? I don’t see how it does. Or, if starting from naturalistically conceived biochemistry, he arrives at the conclusion that naturalistic biochemistry cannot be the whole story, does that put him at odds with Thomistic beliefs about causes and natures? How does it do so?

Here in summary is what I am saying: Intelligent Design cannot tell the story of God as theology can (whether Thomistic, Scotistic, or Baptistic or Presbyterianistic). If that were its purpose, yes, it would be a dismal failure, just as the Thomists are saying it is. Aristotelian-Thomism might have it in its capacity to go further than that. Biblical theology certainly does. But just because ID cannot go where they go, does that mean it is fundamentally wrong-headed? ID can’t get very far at all into an understanding of God’s nature, or even the nature of nature itself. What it can do, though, is point to the absurdity of naturalism, and hint at the necessity for an intelligence behind nature. It can do it using language that modern Westerners generally understand. These are eminently worthwhile projects.

Perhaps I’ve utterly misunderstood the Thomists’ position. If so I’d be glad to be corrected. As I see it now, though, ID’s validity has nothing to do with Scholastic conceptions of causes, natures, being or any of the rest. There are valid reasons behind ID’s non-theological, non-Aristotelian assumptions. I find it hard to see why there is any debate at all.

*See here regarding the edits.

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We’re in the season of expectancy, preparing to celebrate the birth of Christ. There was a season of expectancy before his actual birth 2,000 years ago–expectancy both on earth, where prophecies of a coming Messiah were passionately studied and only partly understood, and also in heaven, where the eternal God was preparing to break in to time and space and human life. It has been said that Jesus was the only person who chose to be born.

Matthew and Luke tell the story of Jesus’ birth “from the ground up,” through the eyes and ears of Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, and the Magi. John (John 1:1-14) gives us the view from the sky, as it were:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John [the Baptist]. He came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him. 8He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light.

The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

The Word became flesh on that first Christmas. We use words to express meaning and to connect with one another. From the beginning there was meaning and there was relationship among the three Persons of the Godhead. From the creation of man, God’s intent has been that we would live with full understanding of meaning, and in close relationship with him, with one another, and with all of his creation. No one needs to be convinced that we have not lived out that ideal. The Word became flesh to restore us to it. Merry Christmas indeed!

He was and he is both life and light. By coming to live as a human among humans, he opened to us the door to true life in true light. John says his own people did not receive him, and tragically some still will not see his bright light. But those who do receive him are born into new life through him. It’s a life of grace and truth: truth to guide us, to show us what is real and what is right, and grace so that we can recover from our failures in living by what is real and right.

The message of Christmas is not just about a stable and a star, not just a mother and a child. It’s about the glory of God shining on earth, through one who became flesh to show us his great glory.

This is what heaven was looking forward to during that first advent season. Merry Christmas indeed!

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In my previous posts on Mary Midgley’s view of morality, I noted my appreciation for her unwillingness to accept reductionist explanations (especially for human experience), and her nearly answering a lifelong question of mine: is there really no way to ground a solid sense of morality apart from God? At the end of each post I wrote that there was nevertheless something lacking. As I put it most recently,

Thankfully, what is lacking is not interest, for as I said, it is the closest I’ve found to a positive answer for my lifelong question. Yet there are at least two specific and serious shortcomings that I will return to in my next post on this topic.

So I proceed now, with respect for the questions she raised. Let me reprise my two-sentence summary of her take on morality:

Morality is the means by which a reflective species arbitrates the competing demands of various naturally derived motives/motivations, which are in some way shared with or consistent with motives/motivations of related creatures, and which have a genuine reality of their own, not susceptible to scientistic reductionism. This takes place both individually and socially, and its chief benefit is in allowing the reflective being to make decisions and to behave consistently with long-term social and individual motives higher than short-term motives.

Does this suffice? The question I had early in college was this, quoting again from my last post on this:

Why couldn’t I just do anything at all? What was really wrong with getting drunk, having all the sex I wanted (whether the woman wants it or not), cheating in class? I couldn’t think of any reason not to do those things, other than that I’d been raised differently. That wasn’t enough.

I had not read Dostoyevsky yet, but I was running into what he said so succinctly: “Without God, everything is permitted.” But that just seemed impossible to me. There had to be some difference between right and wrong. Yet I couldn’t think of any way that difference could make sense without God.

It’s time now to explore how well she answers questions like mine.

I was describing Midgley’s book The Ethical Primate to my seventeen-year-old son, and he fairly cut me short, saying, “Ask her how she knows what’s right and what’s wrong.” Now, he hadn’t read the book, and I hadn’t given him a very thorough description, but that was a great question anyway, because until he said that, I hadn’t noticed that the words right and wrong never appear in the book, in the context of moral evaluation—not that I’ve conducted a full computer-assisted search, but I’m pretty sure they don’t appear anywhere in there. For Midgley, morals are apparently not about right and wrong.

Yet her morality is not relativistic, it is objective; but it is contingently objective. Morality is a set of rules summarizing what we works for the long-term good of the species. If through evolutionary contingencies the species had turned out different than it had, the long-term good might very likely have been different; and therefore if anything like morality had appeared in that case, such morality would also be different. It’s hard to imagine it being so different that, say, total wanton mutual destruction was advantageous. It is not so hard, however, to imagine evolution leading to a world where theft, total selfishness, hatred, incest, Machiavellian power maneuvering, race-centrism, and so on were applauded. Our own attitudes on these ethical issues could have come out differently than they did.

To which Midgley simply says, “but they didn’t.” We have the ethics we have because we are what we are. “Live with it,” she might add (I’m putting words in her mouth here), “Our sense of morality is the contingent product of our contingent evolutionary history, but the way it is, is the way it is.” I find there is something attractive about that answer. (This is why I found her book so captivating.) It’s reality-based, within limits I’ll come to later. And it’s objective, in that it’s focused on something very definable, something almost concrete: the longer-term motivations of the organism and species, grounded in what evolution has made us to be. Why should I ask for more than that?

Here’s why. First, what Midgley offers is, in the end, the morality of what works; or, more accurately, it’s the morality of what has worked, in proto-fashion for our evolutionary relatives and forebears, and now in full fashion among humans. We developed rules because they helped us keep our behavioral motivations in line with our longer-term interests. The rules have nothing to do with what is right or wrong, for there is no such category for Midgley. Perhaps she uses those terms elsewhere, but surely if she does, they function only as a language shortcut to “that which guides/does not guide us to behave consistently with our long-term motivations.”

Some of my correspondents on this blog have responded to this kind of statement in the past by saying, “That view of right and wrong is sufficient, Tom. You’re stacking the question in your favor when you call for something beyond that for right and wrong.” Perhaps, but I think I do it justifiably, because I am quite sure that most of the time when we (including my correspondents) say, “That was just wrong!” we don’t mean, “that didn’t work for the long-term interests of the species!” If right and wrong really mean to us, “what works for the long-term interest of the species,” then I would say Mary Midgley’s account of it was more than adequate. I just don’t believe that’s what we mean when we use the words.

Or are we just confused? Maybe right and wrong actually should mean to us,”that which works for the long-term good of the species.” Here we approach my second objection to Midgley’s ethics. It’s one I am loathe to register, because it’s so closely related to something I appreciate so much about her. It’s her insistence on explaining human experience non-reductively. As I wrote before, she won’t accept reductivist physical/chemical explanations for who and what we are, because (like all of us) she just knows better. Our freedom, our human agency, our thoughts, our decisions, our emotions—in all these things we know that it is we who are doing the acting, deciding, thinking, feeling. We are not unwitting and unwilling passengers on a train of physical/chemical reactions.

I agree with her on that, but I cannot credit that evolution got us here. There is too great a disconnect between the presumed processes of evolution and the observed result. Midgley carries on fierce disputes with Richard Dawkins with respect to his Selfish Gene idea, and with other reductivists for similar reasons. She has little positive to say for Daniel Dennett’s views on consciousness. She differs with them for good reason, because their positions clearly do not accord with life as we observe it and experience it. Yet they have a powerful position in the secular debate nevertheless, for they take seriously what evolution is and what it says. Given naturalism as a starting point, where from the beginning there has been nothing but matter and energy, and their interactions by necessity (natural law) and chance processes, human agency and freedom could only appear by magic. That which makes us human was never in the building blocks, nor in the mortar, nor even in the blueprint from the beginning; for the only blueprint was, try one thing after another and keep what reproduces successfully (and even that is unacceptably anthropomorphized, but it sure is hard to keep that out of one’s language on these things).

Thus Midgley’s morality must—I hate to say it but I must—reduce to “what motivates/does not motivate our species to long-term reproductive advantage.” If there is any other motivating force besides that, where did it come from? For evolution itself knows of no other force directing behavior (I am of course speaking of naturalistic evolution). Midgley’s take on human freedom is likewise cut off from the reality of its roots. It’s there, but on her terms it is completely unexplained. It popped out of thin air, and no less so if it “popped” gradually, having appeared first in the whales, dolphins, octopi, and lower primates. It still appeared from nowhere. Atoms and molecules, genes and proteins—they do what they must do according to chance and necessity. Who are we as humans to think we can interfere with that?

Our longer-term motivations are not toward the longer-term good, unless we say that good means “for reproductive advantage, of the individual, group, or species.” But there is a further problem. I made an unannounced shift in terms a few paragraphs ago. I said, “Maybe right and wrong actually should mean to us, ‘that which works for the long-term good of the species.’” Before that, though, I had been using Midgley’s terms, describing morality as “”that which guides… us to behave consistently with our long-term motivations.” Without notice or explanation, I shifted from talking about long-term motivations to long-term good. Shame on me! But—did you notice? Or were you yourself ready and willing to equate long-term motivations with long-term good? It’s an easy mistake to fall into, but what are these motivations? Does the term good really apply to them? How so? They’re what evolution gave us. What makes that good? No matter what evolution had given us as motivations, that’s what we would have. If whatever you get from evolution is what you’re going to call “good,” then “good” just means, “whatever you have.” That’s pretty weak.

So now I will circle back around again to my short statement of Midgley’s moral theory. She says morality is what allows us, as reflective organisms, to manage our behavior according to the long-term good. But we have discovered that this really means that morality is what allows us as reflective organisms to manage our behavior according to long-term reproductive advantage. From where did we gain our intelligence, language, and capacity for reflection? From evolution, which, you recall, has no motivating force but reproductive success. We’re about to spin in a dizzy circle now: The advantage morality gains us is reproductive success. The reflective abilities we have were formed by a process that had no end in mind but reproductive success. The development and propagation of those reflective abilities has been driven by one force: reproductive success.

There are no philosophers more reductivistic than Paul and Patricia Churchland. I believe it was Patricia who said everything in the natural world comes down to natural selection’s four Fs: feeding, fighting, fleeing, and reproducing. (Pardon me, but that’s what she said.) Midgley wants to accept the reality of human experience, while also accepting evolution as our creator. Unfortunately for her, the two really cannot be melded. Her version of morality doesn’t fit her picture of reality, for her picture of reality is itself hopelessly disjointed; nothing could fit it. So like all other non-theistic moral systems I’ve had opportunity to survey, this one, too, falls short.

Finally, and very quickly and without developing them, I must mention two last problems I have with Midgley’s moral system. First, the longer-term motivations of organisms make for an incredibly vague starting point for moral theorizing. What does this tell us about, say, supporting or opposing homosexual rights, or abortion? I think that any answer could be argued.

Second, I must raise a reminder here of what I wrote last time. My search for a satisfactory secular morality comes from a specific source: I was looking for it in college, I never found it then, and I’ve been curious since then whether such a thing exists. It seemed incredible to me at that young age that nothing of the sort was possible, and that sense of surprise has never quite let go of me. As I said once before, it also surprised me, and in a way worried me, that this was something I more or less figured out as a very green college freshman!) Along the way, though, I found another source and system for morality, in the triune God and his word. I’m certainly not dissatisfied with that. I’m very confident that God exists and he has spoken; thus Midgley’s morality, which excludes that reality, fails on that count also.

The Ethical Primate, though possibly the best book I’ve read on evolution and human experience as we know it, still fails to explain how the one could realistically have led to the other.

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If I thought this was an isolated sentiment I wouldn’t pay it much attention. Unfortunately it’s not.

“We can sympathize with gay people because they are a minority and we are a minority,” said anti-Prop. 8 rally organizer Doug Kalagian, 17, a senior who founded the school’s Freethinking Atheist and Agnostic Kinship student club.

“Prop. 8 is not only a religious issue. It’s an issue of discrimination and prejudice. Who’s to say atheists and agnostics won’t be next?”

This is appallingly upside-down. What Kalagian is saying is this: the religious people have mounted an attack on gay marriage, and “who’s to say atheists and agnostics won’t be next?”

The real sequence of history is that gay-rights activists mounted an attack on marriage. And who’s to say Christianity won’t be next? Is that an overstatement? Not necessarily. Look at Canada. Look at San Francisco.

I could be wrong on that, time will tell. But the verdict is already in on Kalagian’s version: it’s already wrong.

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Daniel Dennett, one of the four most prominent “New Atheists,” is no proponent of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. The hallucination theory to explain Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances is no longer held by many scholars. Nevertheless there are exceptions to this, including Gerd Lüdemann (detailed further here). In Consciousness Explained, however, Dennett says on page 7,

Another conclusion it seems we can draw from this is that strong hallucinations are simply impossible! By a strong hallucination I mean a hallucination of an apparently concrete and persisting three-dimensional object in the real world—as contrasted to flashes, geometric distortions, auras, afterimages, fleeting phantom-limb experiences, and other anomalous sensations. A strong hallucination would be, say, a ghost that talked back, that permitted you to touch it, that resisted with a sense of solidity, that cast a shadow, that was visible from any angle so that you might walk around it and see what its back looked like.

(See the full argument here; go to page one if it doesn’t open directly there) Based on Dennett’s analysis, then, hallucinations cannot explain the events in Matthew 28:9-10, Luke 24:13-48, John 20:24-28, or John 21:4-19.

See Gary Habermas for more on hallucination theories.

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