Metaponderance

The Image of the Christ as Portrayed in the Beatitudes

2011-05-01T08:16:00.000-07:00

A simple discovery: The beatitudes function as an implied dialog. They begin with the crucial first step for proper functioning in an ethical community, followed by a second step that addresses a moral pitfall that besets an exclusive emphasis on the first step. The second step also has an associated moral pitfall that needs to be addressed by a third step, and so on through the nine beatitudes. Because the first beatitude begins with the crucial first ethical perspective and the last with a meta-point that intensifies and personalizes the preceding eight beatitudes, it is plain that the implied dialog is intended. Furthermore, it is plain that what is intended is a conceptual depiction of moral balance, a way of "seeing" how to avoid the moral pitfalls associated with human attempts to maintain an ethical equilibrium. They can, then, be viewed as a depiction of the points of view that provide proper moral balance.

Since the beatitudes are the central moral teaching of Jesus, and Christianity has traditionally claimed moral perfection for Jesus, it follows that Jesus' central moral teaching will be seen as descriptive of Jesus within Christian tradition--and, of course, the Gospels are a product of Christian tradition, thus preventing a vicious circle in the reasoning. In that sense the beatitudes depict Jesus, the Christian image of the Christ. This is significant, since the central image of the faith is the cross, and--to be blunt--the cross is no way to live.

The form of exposition to follow will be to simply put the beatitudes in order along with the "missing" implied dialog. First, however, a brief explanation of why the first of the beatitudes provides the crucial first ethical perspective.

THE CRUCIAL FIRST ETHICAL PERSPECTIVE

Immanual Kant addressed the ubiquitous human tendency to engage in a "natural dialectic" that "quibbles with the laws of duty" and perverts moral principles by adapting them to "our wishes and inclinations; that is, to pervert their very foundations..."1 Jesus addressed that very tendency in the religious culture of his time. "...woe to you, Pharisees! For you tithe mint and rue and herbs of all kinds, and neglect justice..." (Luke 11. 42, NRSV) Kant prescribed the "categorical imperative" to counter the tendency to adapt ethics to our wishes: "I ought never to act except in such a way that I can also will that my maxim should become a universal law."2 In effect, Kant advised us to continually act on a rule that is designed to prevent the use of convenient exceptions for ourselves to rules of action we expect of others in our society. That is, it is the purpose of the categorical imperative to remind us that we are not in a different category than others in our society.

But what of another human tendency, equally likely to pervert the foundations of our moral principles, namely pride? It too impels us to place ourselves apart from the rules that we expect others to be bound by. This is an especially insidious moral problem, because it addresses the very idea that one OUGHT to function within the same moral categories as are expected of others. It is precisely this meta-Kantian danger that the first beatitude addresses:

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." (Mt. 5.3, NRSV) The Phillips translation uses "humble minded" rather than "poor in spirit." In simple language Jesus endorsed a moral/ethical principle that persons who understand ethical principles should not see themselves as above them. It can be argued that Jesus began with a blessing that is at once more fundamental and more practical than Kant's imperative, since it addresses the root cause of the human tendency to find exceptions to moral principles when they considering the application of those principles to their own case. In that sense, the first of the beatitudes states the crucial first ethical perspective: be "humble minded."

(The hypocrisy Jesus confronted in the Pharisees is an ironic form of pride as an underlying moral hazard: They viewed themselves as superior to those who were not in a position to keep the small points of the law, thereby justifying an injudicious pride by means of which they dealt with those who did not keep the small points of the law with contempt.)

With that in mind we are ready to see the beatitudes as an implied dialog by which Jesus provided the Christian community with an ethical perspective held in proper balance.

THE BEATITUDES WITH INTERPOLATED IMPLIED DIALOG (MT. 5.3-11)

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."

But if a person is "poor in spirit" isn't it a moral hazard that she or he will decide that their hopes and wishes just don't matter, that they will lead lives of resignation and detachment?

"Yes! Therefore, I say to the poor in spirit...

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted."

But if a person cares so deeply that they are in mourning, don't they leave themselves open to developing an angry and vengeful attitude?

"Yes! Therefore, I say to those who mourn...

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth."

But isn't it possible that those who are meek will lack resolve in the face of life's challenges and injustices?

"Yes! Therefore, I say to the meek...

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied."

But, isn't it possible that those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will become heartless and legalistic in their pursuit of justice?

"Yes! Therefore, I say to those who hunger and thirst for righteousness...

Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy."

But isn't it possible that those who love mercy will become morally slack?

"Yes! Therefore, I say to the merciful...

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God."

But isn't it possible that the pure in heart will be unyielding and uncooperative to those with less pure points of view?

"Yes! Therefore, I say to the pure in heart...

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God."

But isn't it possible that peacemakers will become disillusioned, since peace is often illusive, and even opposed by those who unjustly want to get their selfish ways?

"Yes! Therefore, I say to the peacemakers...

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."

[Here, the beatitudes' thematic structure at once has gone full circle--they have returned to the first blessing of "their's is the kingdom of heaven"--and goes meta: the implied rejoinder to this beatitude concern's the hearers having ears to hear.]

But, isn't it possible that a person can agree with these recommendations you make without really taking them to heart?

"Yes! Therefore, I say to someone who understands and agrees with these moral values and blessings but has not personalized them...

Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven."

ENDING COMMENT

For our purposes here, three outstanding attributes run throughout this implied dialog: 1. Each moral desideratum is kept in proper balance and perspective against a wider range of moral desiderata. 2. Conviction and strength of character are necessary and to be prized (blessed). And 3. The person who is able to avoid the pitfalls inherent in the possibility of any single moral value's capacity to distort our minds when taken singly will have an extraordinary suppleness of mind. Strong will. Good will. Great intelligence. All are needed to see the counterpoised balance among multiple moral and ethical desiderata that must be maintained to achieve moral perfection. That is the image of Jesus that the beatitudes gives us, on the assumptions given above. It is a moral and conceptual likeness, in Christian form, that bears a likeness to the Greek ideals of balanced perspective and strength, as seen in statues of Apollo, in which the Greek arche' is depicted. The image of Jesus, implied, is a striking, beautiful image: a Christian arche'.

NOTES

1. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanual Kant, tr. H. J. Paton (Harper and Row, New York, 1956) 73.
2. Ibid., 70.

Seeing Bertrand Russell as Christian: Commentary on "The Grand Design"

2010-12-18T16:03:00.000-08:00

The importance of THE GRAND DESIGN" does not derive from the finality of its point of view with respect to extirpating philosophical theology. It cannot be, since the point of view used to show that religious/theological/metaphysical/philosophical points of view are obsolete is--frankly--embarrassingly flawed. Nevertheless, it makes a landmark claim. And furthermore, that Hawking and Mlodinow have not argued their case well is not the same thing as saying that they do not have a good case to make. So how does a person go about trying to be fair to them and the point of view they wished to establish?

It occurred to me that Bertrand Russell had a more nuanced view of the question than Hawking and Mlodinow, which just might provide some insight into how to appraise THE GRAND DESIGN's big claim. Plus, we can have some fun with the fact that Russell seems to have made, in some sense, "a decision for Christ" near the end of his A HISTORY OF WESTERN PHILOSOPHY. The "decision" is couched in an amusing--and very clever--thought experiment in which Nietzsche and the Buddha argue their views for the Almighty. The quote is extensive:

If Buddha and Nietzsche were confronted, could either produce any argument that ought to appeal to the impartial listener? I am not thinking of political arguments. We can imagine them appearing before the Almighty, as in the first chapter of Job, and offering advice as to the sort of world He should create. What could either say?

Buddha would open the argument by speaking of the lepers, outcast and miserable; the poor, toiling with aching limbs and barely kept alive by scanty nourishment...and even the most successful haunted by the thought of failure and death. From all this load of sorrow...a way of salvation must be found, and salvation can only come through love.

Nietzsche, whom only Omnipotence could restrain from interrupting, would burst out...: "Good heavens, man, you must learn to be of tougher fiber. Why go about snivelling because trivial people suffer? ... Trivial people suffer trivially, great men suffer greatly, and great sufferings are not to be regretted, because they are noble. Your ideal is a purely negative one, absence of suffering, which can be securely accomplished by non-existence. I, on the other hand, have positive ideals: I admire Alcibiades, and the Emperor Fredrick II, and Napoleon. For the sake of such men, any misery is worth while. ..."

Buddha, who in the courts of Heaven has learned all history...replies with calm urbanity: "You are mistaken, Professor Nietzsche, in thinking my ideal is a purely negative one. True, it includes a negative element...but it has in addition quite as much that is positive as is to be found in your doctrine. ...I too have my heros: my successor Jesus, because he told men to love their enemies; the men who discovered how to master the forces of nature...; the medical men...; the poets and artists and musicians who have caught glimpses of the Divine Beatitude. Love and knowledge and delight in beauty are not negations..."

"All the same," Nietzsche replies, "your world would be insipid. ...what is more beautiful than the tiger, who owes his splendour to his fierceness? No, if the Lord should decide for your world, I fear we should all die of boredom."

"You might," Buddha replies, "because you love pain, and your love of life is a sham. ..."

For my part, I [Russell] agree with Buddha as I have imagined him.
(771-2)

So Bertrand Russell comes down on the side of Buddha and Jesus, as he understands them. What do we make of this "decision for Christ," partial and in need of much qualification though it be?!! I will admit to a perverse delight in framing Russell's view here in an Evangelical Christian category--but the question is entirely legitimate.

I began playing with the question after reading a post on Bonhoeffer's "religionless Christianity" at Experimental Theology. The question of what happens to Christian faith when emptied of metaphysical and religious elements dovetails precisely with the question of what one might say about a professed atheist who expresses agreement with arguably the core message of Christian faith. And that question also illustrates something important for anyone asking whether a positivistic doctrine such as Hawking and Mlodinow's "model-dependent realism" can really be used to limit the scope of one's (meaningful) beliefs.

Let's look at how Russell framed his own approach in order to get some commentary on these dovetailing questions. Immediately following the statement of agreement "with Buddha [and by implication the Jesus the Buddha admires in Russell's dialog] as [Russell] imagined him" Russell went on to say:

But I do not know how to prove that he is right... I dislike Nietzsche because he likes the contemplation of pain, because he makes conceit a duty, because the men he admires most are conquerors, whose glory is cleverness in causing men to die. But I think that the ultimate argument against his philosophy, as against any unpleasant but internally self-consistent ethic, lies not in appeal to facts, but in an appeal to the emotions. Nietzsche despises universal love; I feel it the motive power to all that I desire as regards the world." (773-4)

That Russell felt universal love to be "the motive power to all that [he] desire[d] as regards the world" makes the question of whether he can be considered Christian more than a framing of his words to fit some technicality of Christian faith. The words just quoted describe precisely what ought to be the motive of anyone who believes that God is love and that the great commandments of the faith are to love God and neighbor. What other motive could capture the core Christian view of how one ought to live better than Russell's?

I suppose that the basic point to the question of whether, and if so in what sense, Bertrand Russell can be considered Christian is this: It is clearly possible to see the basic stance of Christian faith (ostensibly, at least) as right, at least for oneself, without seeing it as true in any "deep" sense. He could look at Buddha and Jesus as say "Those are my heroes in my quest to enact an ethic of universal love." Yet he could also be an atheist with respect to belief in the metaphysics of traditional faith.

This is where the question of how to make sense of a "religionless Christianity" dovetails with the question of whether and in what sense Bertrand Russell can be called "Christian": In Bonhoeffer's exploration of the idea we are forced to consider the possibility of a faith without metaphysics, something that sounds very much like being asked to be Christian in whatever sense Russell might be considered to have been.

But Russell's perspective breaks through this impasse too, albeit probably unbeknownst to him. Consider the final paragraph of his History.

In the welter of conflicting fanaticisms, one of the few unifying forces is scientific truthfulness, by which I mean the habit of basing our beliefs on observations as impersonal, and as much divested of local and temperamental bias, as is possible for human beings. To have insisted upon the introduction of this virtue into philosophy, and to have invented a powerful method by which it can be rendered fruitful, are the chief merits of the philosophical school of which I am a member ["logical analysis," often called positivism]. The habit of careful veracity acquired...can be extended to the whole sphere of human activity, producing a lessening of fanaticism with an increasing capacity of sympathy and mutual understanding. In abandoning a part of its dogmatic pretensions philosophy does not cease to suggest and inspire a way of life. (836)

Two things need to be said. First, it is odd, to say the least, that Russell credits a philosophy that bases "beliefs on observations as impersonal...as possible for human beings" for "inspir[ing] a way of life" that increases the "capacity for sympathy" amongst peoples. Just a bit ago we read that there is no "appeal to facts" (774) to determine whether a Nietzschian antipathy to humanity in general or a Buddhist/Christian ideal of universal love ought to serve as one's motive in life. Clearly it is Russell's experience that the two (his philosophy of logical analysis and a Buddhist/Christian ideal) can exist together. But that they are compatible does not change the fact that--on his own view--the commitment to compassion is a supplement to his ideal of truthfulness based on impersonal observation rendered coherent by logical analysis. Moreover, it is a supplement which, if we hold him to his philosophy, he ought not make: he chose the Buddhist/Christian view over the Nietzschian challenge by an appeal to "emotions," claiming that it is not established by "an appeal to facts." (774) Clearly, his habit of basing his beliefs on "impersonal observations" was not nearly as well established as he believed. His choice of an ethic of universal love was neither impersonal nor based on factual observation. It might even be called atheistic fideism.

Second, there is an important sense in which Christianity has always implied, and required, a form of atheism. A man hanging on a cross looks like anything but a god. To say it is so is to contradict everything a person who did believe in the gods or God of the first century would have thought, at least prior to becoming a Christian. In that case to be a Christian is to be an atheist with respect to the old beliefs about God. And here's the coup de grace: A very good argument can be made that the cross is supposed to function as an ongoing reminder that the very human temptation to deify one's own view in order to make the world serve one's own goals (whether cultural, national, personal, philosophical, biological, or even non-sensical, etc.) is "demonic"--or "fanatical," to use Russell's word. (I am using Tillich's view here.) So rendered, Christianity marries a commitment to universal love to a reminder that any attempt to set up our personal (cultural, etc.) view of the divine as THE divinity is both wrong and false. And need it be added that God rendered as something that is impersonal and observable and then rendered intelligible by logical analysis is idolatry by any fair understanding of relevant biblical texts?! But in that case a right thinking Christian and Bertrand Russell--with his thoughts straightened out a bit--are saying the same thing! Apparently, at least at a high level of abstraction. (I did say this would be fun--at the end of the last post.)

What are we to make of this extremely odd situation in which the 20th Century's most famous atheist's core beliefs are the same as the core beliefs of Christianity? I think that Paul Tillich--whose framework we will borrow again--framed the best possible answer in his conclusion to BIBLICAL RELIGION AND THE SEARCH FOR ULTIMATE REALITY.

The correlation of ontology and biblical religion is an infinite task. There is no special ontology that we have to accept in the name of the biblical message [in which case Russell is Christian without qualification]... There is no saving ontology, but the ontological question is implied in the question of salvation. To ask the ontological question is a necessary task. Against Pascal I say: The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the God of the philosophers is the same God. He is a person and the negation of himself as a person.

Faith comprises both itself and the doubt of itself. The Christ is Jesus and the negation of Jesus. Biblical religion is the negation and the affirmation of ontology. To live serenely and courageously in these tensions and to discover finally their ultimate unity in the depths of our own souls and in the depths of the divine life is the task and the dignity of human thought. (85)

Two sentences stand out. The first: "To ask the ontological question is a necessary task." If so, whether we frame positivism as the philosophy of logical analysis (Russell) or "methodological realism" (Hawking/Mlodinow) our philosophy is incomplete. Russell's importing of a foundational value based on feelings at the very point he is asserting a philosophy based on impersonal observation is a nice case study in support of Tillich's claim. But if our philosophy is always incomplete, we will always be in need of supplementing our philosophy with some form of faith.

The second: "Biblical religion is the affirmation and the negation of ontology." Isn't it interesting that we have been considering the puzzle of whether an atheist can be considered Christian, when it can be just as well asked whether a theist can be! Life is fun, and don't let anyone tell you differently, except when it's not. If you want it simpler than that, just don't try to do theology--or atheology for that matter: You'll be in over your head. On the other hand, if you don't know you're in over your head, you're not doing theology--or atheology.

That's what Hawking and Mlodinow need to know. They, like all the rest of us, are in over their heads. That's what Russell came within a hair of discovering within the sphere of his own philosophy.* That's what Tillich was getting at--and Bonhoeffer appeared to be, though I've got some reading to do on that question. That's what's implied in the biblical prohibition against idolatry conjoined to the injunction to love God. Atheistic theism? Religionless faith? What's the alternative? Well, it seems that either one can be in over their head and not know it, or be in over their head and know it. And to know it is compatible with faith. In fact to know it is a form of surrender to faith--and doubt!

*William James made what I take to be the deepest view possible on this: "One's objective deliverance, when one says 'the absolute exists,' amount[s]...to this, that 'some justification of a feeling of security in the presence of the universe' exists, and that systematically to refuse to cultivate a feeling of security would be to do violence to a tendency in one's emotional life which might well be respected as prophetic." (Preface to THE MEANING OF TRUTH) And this comes very close to bringing together Russell's smuggling in a commitment to universal love founded on his personal feelings with the Christian view that we must all come to God as little children.

The Grand Move in THE GRAND DESIGN

2010-11-20T06:20:00.000-08:00

Overview

The first two chapters of THE GRAND DESIGN lay out this view:

A quantum-informed understanding of the world is very different than a common sense understanding of the world. Unlike a common sense understanding of the world, a quantum understanding of the world can answer the big questions surrounding why there is a universe, with the laws it has, which make the seeming miracle of our existence possible. Given this claim, the rationales for belief in God that arise out of a common sense understanding of the world are obviated by a quantum-informed understanding of the world. The "space for God" once reserved by natural theology with its common sense view of reality has been eliminated.

As it pertains to the--supposedly now defunct--God question, that is the first two chapters of THE GRAND DESIGN in pure abstraction. Since the Hawking/Mlodinow approach was to give a brief overview based on their expert understanding, it is best for me to give you the bare abstraction and refer you to the book, if you wish to begin filling in a few details. Since I will in no way contest the science--just the conclusions drawn from it, aka, the Hawking/Mlodinow philosophical perspective--that is sufficient.

The just referenced "Hawking/Mlodinow philosophical perspective" implies that even if we grant to them that their quantum-informed science answers the big questions of the old common sense view of reality, there is a new field of metaphysical speculation opened up by their quantum science. Does anyone really think that we won't go meta on the new science and ask "is that all there is?" with respect to the understanding of the world wrought by the new physics?

Implicitly Hawking and Mlodinow address this question. For it is the need to close off this pretty obvious human tendency to "go meta" that they resort to a new form of that old chestnut, positivism: their "model-dependent realism."

The Grand Move

Model-dependent realism is the grand philosophical move in THE GRAND DESIGN. The argument for it is found in Chapter 3, "What Is Reality?"

Hawking and Mlodinow begin their exposition of model-dependent "reality" by making the point that a pet goldfish looking out from a frame of reference that begins with its transparent, spherical bowl would arrive at a different science--we're assuming that fish can do science--than someone outside the bowl. We might hope that the fish would arrive at a paradigm that allows it to think outside the bowl, but let's not spoil the point of the illustration: we are influenced by our means of observing the world, at least till we (via science) arrive at a better way to "see."

They begin with the illustration for an important reason. They want to establish that there is complete identity between what we think of as "reality" and our observation of it. To wit:

"According to model-dependent realism, it is pointless to ask whether a model is real, only whether it agrees with observation. If there are two models that agree with observation, like the goldfish's picture and ours, then one cannot say that one is more real than another." (46)

This follows from two things. First, the definition of model-dependent realism, and second, the claim that "There is no picture- or theory-independent concept of reality." (42)

Here's the definition:

"...model-dependent realism: the idea that a physical theory or world picture is a model (generally of a mathematical nature) and set of rules that connect the elements of the model to observations." (45)

Obviously, if there is no concept of reality apart from a model formed from a person's (or fish's) frame of reference, then reality simply IS what we perceive it to be--presumably it should be added, "in coherent moments where one's frame of reference is not distorted," i.e., we can't be on acid or be looking out from a place where our "fishbowl" has a crack or flaw in the glass.

Here's the crucial point--though it is never explicitly addressed in the book. It is incoherent to say of a false point of view that it is "real." For that reason, the Hawking/Mlodonow position must be that "If there are two models that agree with observation, like the goldfish's picture and ours, then one cannot say that one is more real than another." (46) For if model-dependent observations of the world are sometimes wrong, unbeknown to the person in the thrall of their frame of reference at a given time, then it must be allowed that Hawking and Mlodonow implicitly endorse a view by which--incoherently--they claim of a false point of view that it is real.

In my first post on this book, I expressed my frustration with the central use of model-dependent reality for this very incoherency. To buttress my opinion I cited Thomas Kuhn's comment below:

"Looking at the moon, the convert to Copernicanism [from a Ptolemaic frame of reference] does not say, 'I used to see a planet, but now I see a satellite.' That locution would imply a sense in which the Ptolemaic system had once been correct. Instead a convert to the new astronomy says, '...I was mistaken.'" (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Second Ed. (University of Chicago Press, 1970) 113-4.)

But in THE GRAND DESIGN the authors specifically take on the view that one frame of reference, or "model" of reality, can falsify another by disallowing the very point I had Kuhn make for me:

"So which is real, the Ptolemaic or Copernican system? Although it is not uncommon for people to say that Copernicus proved Ptolemy wrong, that is not true. As in the case of our normal view versus that of the goldfish, one can use either picture as a model of the universe, for our observations of the heavens can be explained by assuming either the earth or the sun to be at rest. Despite its role in philosophical debates over the nature of the universe, the real advantage of the Copernican system is simply that the equations of motion are much simpler..." (41-2)

Is it really that simple--just a choice between alternative realities based on which frame of reference is more convenient or, perhaps, familiar? No. In fact, the example can be clearly falsified, making Kuhn's point of view clearly true, and the Hawking/Mlodonow view clearly false.

Falsifying the Hawking/Mlodinow Grand Move

If one scientific frame of reference simply subsumes another--which is one way of construing the move from a Ptolemaic to a Copernican model of the universe--there is no contradiction between them, and both can be coherently called models of "reality," just as Hawking and Mlodinow wish us to do. But that is not the case, either here or with respect to the move from a Newtonian framework to an Einsteinian one, or from an Einsteinian one to the quantum-based framework in THE GRAND DESIGN. We will look at the falsification of the Ptolemaic model by the Copernican, since it is so simple to show (and it was the case used for purposes of illustration by Hawking/Mlodinow).

Assume just these two commonly known truths of "reality" that current science has confirmed for us: that the speed of light is constant in all frames of reference, and that we live in an amazingly vast cosmos, in which the nearest star to the Sun (Alpha Cantauri AB) is 4.37 light years away. Since a frame of reference in which the Sun goes around the Earth will include the third brightest star in the ski (Alpha Centauri AB) as part of the observational backdrop, Alpha Centauri AB will also have to travel around the Earth. But then every day Alpha Centauri AB will need to travel its distance from our (presumed) geocentric center of reference, doubled to get the diameter of the circuit it must travel, times pi to get the circumference of the curcuit, times 365 to convert light year speed to a distance traveled in a single 24-hour period, by which we arrive at a speed for Alpha Centauri AB as it travels around the Earth of 10,016 light years per day. That's a little over one million percent of the speed of light, which is a constant in all frames of reference at one millionth the extrapolated speed of Alpha Centauri AB. If that is not a blatant falsification of the Ptolemaic model, it's difficult to think of what would be.

But that is not the end of the embarrassing problems for Hawking/Mlodinow, based on their own statements. Recall the claim that "There is no picture- or model-independent concept of reality." (42) But what about their handling of the question of free will in the face of the admission that their deterministic paradigm may well never be able to provide a model of how human volition works:

"How can one tell if a being has free will? ... We cannot even solve the equations for three or more particles interacting with each other. Since [a being our size has]...about a thousand trillion trillion particles...it would be impossible to solve the equations and predict what [a being our size]... would do. We would therefore have to say [by default] that any complex being has free will--not as a fundamental feature, but as an effective theory, an admission of our inability to do the calculations that would enable us to predict its actions." (178)

So no effective model of human volition is possible, but free will is posited by default as "an effective theory." That sounds like "a model-independent concept of reality." Of course, the hedge that the "theory" is not a "fundamental feature" was made. But there it is for all to see: a "fundamental feature" of reality for which there is no model. That directly contradicts the claim that "There is no picture- or theory-independent concept of reality." That is, unless a "theory" that can't account for what it is a theory of counts... This is a version of the commonplace objections to old-style positivism that things like love, which we know about, can't be observed in the way positivism requires. But it's nice to have THE GRAND DESIGN provide another example for its ideological opponents.

This is enough to show that Hawking and Mlodinow are very much in need of the philosophical perspective they begin their book by disparaging. Since the grand move by which they want to place philosophical theology out of bounds forever more (model-dependent realism) is so deeply flawed, we can safely call that project as questionable in the least, if not outright failed.

A more interesting line of enquery going forward is whether the questions one can ask when going meta on the new quantum-based physics account of consmology are still meaningful. (Hint: See the C. S. Peirce quote at the head of this blog!)

Note: What a friend has called "the occasion gauntlet," aka, "the holidays," is upon us. I'll get to the next post when I can--but I promise, it will be fun. Since the comments are disabled, email me at Tracy.Witham@gmail.com with any questions. Any credible challenge will be noted and responded to.

A Lesson to Remedy Overconfidence

2010-11-15T05:38:00.000-08:00

After a very busy weekend filled with making plans for promoting my rower next year, including exploring possible speed record attempts that have me really excited, I thought I would comment on a life lesson that the weekend reminded me of.

Of words I've heard that seemed way off base when I first heard them, these--spoken at the end of a conversation with the patent examiner of my first application--stand out: "Next time..." The entire comment does not matter here. It is the two words, "Next time..." that matter most.

Having invested a year developing a product to the point that I had tested it enough to believe in it; having spent a year learning how to write a patent correctly; how to research and specify and make the claims effectively in an arcane and detailed form; having called on favors from friends and family to test and comment on and draw the rower for me; the thought of "Next time..." seemed ludicrous. I was just so pleased to be DONE.

Two realizations had not yet set in for me, which would transform my attitude toward those words. First, once begun, an area of experiment and investigation takes on a life of its own--assuming there is enough success for the idea to remain "live." And second, it is very difficult, having already put in tremendous time and effort in an area, not to continue that effort when a promising way forward presents itself. The psychological momentum is just tremendous. Apparently the patent examiner knew all this--as well as the fact that I was far from having perfected my idea.

There are two applications here, for the analysis of Stephen Hawking's and Leonard Mlodinow's view that Feynman's quantum theory obviates theological speculations about ultimate origins. The first is indirect--a background point. Before making an application for a patent, it is crucial that a careful and thorough job of researching the "prior art" has been carried out. Hawking and Mlodinow cite Augustine's ideas from Book Ten of the Confessions about the interface of time and eternity, but utterly fail to understand, let alone appreciate them. Put simply, Augustine's "prior art," with respect to THE GRAND DESIGN, undercuts the Hawking/Mlodinow point of view. I will not link to prior posts on Augustine's argument here, since I have improvements to it that I want to introduce on this blog in forthcoming posts.

More directly, the authors believe that they have finished the work of knocking the life out of philosophical theology. (The direct quote, you will recall, is "...philosophy is dead." (p. 5.)) Well, "next time" the authors take up the subject--and I take no joy in stating this--they will need to think through the implications of their science with more precision. Which is to say that a resurrection of the supposedly "dead" discipline is needed, if they are to clarify their thinking.

An example will help:

"Though it may sound like philosophy, the weak anthropic principle can be used to make scientific predictions. For example, how old is the universe?" (sic., p. 154.) That's a line that--I would have supposed--would be found in the likes of my favorite cartoon, non sequitur. In fact, the thought process--and I may go into this in more detail in a later post--for the authors is a deductive application of current scientific understanding (of the processes that had to be in place to arrive at a planet like ours that supports intelligent life) to the question of the earth's age. But the process of deduction as a means of "advancing" scientific understanding is Aristotelian!

Don't get me wrong. I intend to take Hawking's and Mlodinow's word in all areas of their scientific expertise. Thus, I intend to accept the deductions by which they extend their understanding of quantum theory as it appliers to the origin of our cosmos. So this won't be the latest version of the Flat Earth Society. What it will be is a sober analysis of whether THE GRAND DESIGN is the end of anything.

And as I prepare my thoughts about that I could not help but recall the words, "Next time..." directed my way when I had made the mistake of thinking I had brought a subject to its terminus.

This will be fun. But I hope not to be mean spirited or flippant: it is precisely because THE GRAND DESIGN tells us important new things about the state of scientific understanding with respect to philosophical theology that it is important and interesting. And if Hawking and Mlodinow made a few mistakes and left a few stones unturned that an amateur theologian can point out and pick up, well, it was nice of them to set me up!

Appraising Hawking's THE GRAND DESIGN--Introduction

2010-11-06T06:55:00.000-07:00

With co-author, Leonard Mlodinow, Stephen Hawking begins THE GRAND DESIGN by telling the reader that "...philosophy is dead." ((Bantam, New York: 2010) p. 5.) Having just read the quote a few weeks ago when I had a chance to talk with a friend who teaches ethics through the philosophy department at the local university, I was treated with a little joke: "If philosophy is dead, then nothing is permitted!"

The grand claim, otiose though it certainly is when applied broadly to "philosophy," contains a core point that anyone who cares about the interface of science and theology will want to note. Hawking and Mlodinow employ an approach to quantum physics pioneered by Richard Feynman that obviates the version of the cosmological argument for the existence of God that most persons--who take an interest in the interface of science and theology--will be familiar with. William Lane Craig's simplified version of the cosmological argument summarizes the familiar line of argumentation well:

Everything that has a beginning has a cause. The universe has a beginning. Therefore, the universe has a cause. ("The Existence of God and the Beginning of the Universe.")

Paul Davies' words, below, provide insight into why someone as bright as Hawking could arrive at such an immoderate appraisal of their own position.

This so-called cosmological argument has in one form or another often been used as evidence for the existence of God. Over the centuries it has been refined and debated by many theologians and philosophers, sometimes with great subtlety. The enigma of the cosmic origin is probably the one area where the atheistic scientist will feel uncomfortable. (THE MIND OF GOD (Touchstone, New York: 1992) p. 39.)

Clearly Hawking and Mlodinow were focused on "the one area" where a philosopher doing natural theology could still make an "atheistic scientist...feel uncomfortable." If they are correct that the cosmological argument is based on a "naive view of reality...not compatible with modern physics," (p. 7) it follows that the "one area" where philosophy (and theology) still had something of note to bring to a conversation with atheistic scientists has been lost--that is, assuming the informed point of view makes the old, naive philosophical point of view obsolete. In that sense, philosophy would be "dead." They are not correct. But at least we have marked the origin of their overweening claim.

What I like and appreciate about THE GRAND DESIGN is that it wastes no time in getting to the point: An informed understanding of the new, quantum-based physics closes off any need to posit a reason for the origin of the cosmos that comes from outside the scientific model itself. That is their claim, and they stay on point from first to last, to their credit.

What I like and appreciate least about the book is that its reliance on "model-dependent realism" as the criterion of meaningfulness--pathetically--falsifies itself every time a more encompassing model is devised. In Thomas Kuhn's words,

In the sciences...if perceptual switches accompany paradigm changes, we may not expect scientists to attest to these changes directly. Looking at the moon, the convert to Copernicanism does not say, "I used to see a planet, but now I see a satellite." That locution would imply a sense in which the Ptolemaic system had once been correct. (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (The University of Chicago Press: 1979) p. 114-5.)

Of course, looking backward, it is not a problem that better new paradigms can falsify and obviate older inferior ones. So long as I am in possession of a never-to-be outstripped point of view, I can without fear of contradiction identify reality itself with my model of it. But this view is inconsistent with what a study of the history of science tells us about science itself. It used to be the black mark against positivism--sometimes called "scientism"--that it was a philosophical stance toward science that placed a philosophical stance toward science out of bounds (i.e., that science marked the boundary of the meaningful). This new scientism is inconsistent with the history of science. It places the supposed boundary of meaningful inquiry at the boundary of today's scientific models. One would hope for better from the likes of Hawking.

Nevertheless, the core point of the book is not affected by this almost incredibly ironic philosophical naivete, which will prove the book's downfall. That point, again, is that an informed understanding of the new, quantum-based physics closes off any need to posit a reason for the origin of the cosmos that comes from outside the scientific model itself.

So it is important to note the philosophical naivete employed in the book, because it exposes the importance of examining the (rash) claims that Hawking and Mlodinow make in dismissing philosophical arguments, to their immediate discredit (and ultimate demise). But an account of the new quantum-based physics' challenge to traditional views of the relationship of natural theology to science is both interesting and important, and I want to voice my appreciation for the clear challenge THE GRAND DESIGN poses.

I hope to do a creditable job of depicting the core argument found in THE GRAND DESIGN in coming posts. Most of us can learn much from the Hawking/Mlodinow narrative--I have, at least. And in saying so I intend to express my trust in their depiction of the new quantum-based physics and how the model of the cosmos it provides affects an analysis of the cosmological argument--that supposed last stand for the philosophical theologian.

Next week we will look at an overview of the Hawking/Mlodinow argument.

[Note: I will not be enabling comments. However, I will pose any substantive question or challenge that I get via email: Tracy.Witham@gmail.com.]

Note to Readers

2010-06-12T12:42:00.000-07:00

I look forward to sharing a few things via this blog, probably starting again next fall. A partial list:

1. I discovered that the argument from Augustine's Confessions, that I shared last fall here, appears to not just avoid but turn the tables on critics of the cosmological argument in the form that harks back to St. Thomas' "Five Ways." I've reformulated the argument to take advantage of that and sent it to a journal for review. If I don't find a journal to publish it, I'll post it here, and if I do, I'll ask permission to do so.

2. I'm learning some things as I attempt to share my love of theology and philosophy with my 16-year-old son. Since this blog started because I wanted to share a piece I wrote with him in mind, it would be fitting to also share what I am learning by way of my ongoing attempts...

3. I'd like to share some of the challenges and thoughts I've had as I re-engage with a local church community.

Finally, I disabled the comments after it became clear that on-line parasites like to use (seemingly) abandoned blog comment areas for their purposes. If you want to contact me about this blog, you can email me at Tracy.Witham@gmail.com. Please put "blog' in the title line.

Being Wrong about Being Right and the Mystery of Being

2009-12-04T05:12:00.000-08:00

Clearly St. Thomas was correct to stress the importance of teaching a subject "according to the order of the subject matter." I have soberly quoted that remark from the Prologue to the Summa Theologica before, and before I go on, let me stress that I have tremendous respect for the Saint's work, even where I think he got it wrong. That said, a funny thought occurred to me this morning. Theology may well be the most disputed "subject" of all time! How then can one be sure that one's own point of view is the right one with respect to God? Now, I'm well aware of how St. Thomas ordered his theology--he began with positions on theology as a science and then went directly to his famous "Five Ways" (of proving God's existence), followed by arguments establishing God's simplicity, infinity, goodness, and so on.

Well, it certainly was not for lack of effort, but neither in his time or any time since has St. Thomas' views on theology caused widespread agreement on the subject. That's a cheap shot, in the sense that his views deserve respect--and I do respect them--but it nevertheless needs to be made: What's the use of teaching theology if it never clears up anything--at least beyond the mind of the person who espouses the view? It would be foolish not to ask that question.

That spurred this further thought. Perhaps it is inherent in the subject of "God" that there cannot be agreement, for this reason: God is a mystery. Certainly St. Thomas would have endorsed that: "...[humanity] is directed to God as to an end that surpasses the grasp of[its] reason." (ST, I,I,I.) His theology--this most reasoned of theologies--is an ordered dance around a subject that cannot ever, really, be known. Real agreement requires a subject that is known and thereby supplies the substance of what is agreed.

Augustine's argument from the Confessions that we looked at, in a couple of versions in past posts, takes this a step further. What is "always before" has never entered into time (for those of you who are not practiced in such abstractions, if it had, it could not be before each and every moment of time, from everlasting to everlasting, if necessary). And what does not enter time does not enter human understanding--for reasons outlined in the argument in previous posts. Because Augustine sets up his understanding of how God's relationship with creation is to be understood in light of this point of view, he essentially makes mystery the starting point of his understanding of theology.

If you like irony or paradox, that's a fine instance of both. It's the same as what we noted for St. Thomas; just arrived at a bit differently. The genius of Augustine, however, is evident in that he shows that our understanding of this world implies a real mystery beyond it as its source. He thereby arrives at what everyone has always called God by arriving at a mystery beyond our understanding. What we know is grounded in what we cannot know. Now that's REAL paradox!

It brings us right back to our opening thoughts, only with a vengeance: How can we be "right" about our musings on "mystery?" It seems incoherent, and I believe it actually is.

If I had to pick the prototype for biblical revelation, the giving of the Ten Commandments would be my choice. And as soon as that is stated, we are confronted with the prohibitions on the making of false gods and of having any gods before God. Surely it is odd to think of making something we can't understand. I think that's the point. The act of making and the fact of being false are inextricably tied with respect to God. Mystery cannot be represented. Beyond that, the Creator cannot be created. At least, the Creator conceived as the mystery that is "always before," and so cannot enter time as a creature cannot be created. These thoughts are not theology as neology; it's as old as the Bible.

Consequently, all true biblical theology is negative theology. Negative theology is the background to Job, chronologically the first book of the Bible. It tells us what we cannot know about God. Smug conceit about God is not just wrong, it's idolatrous. Moreover, avoiding this heresy of biblical heresies--idolatrous conceit about God--ought to be the starting point for any thinking about God.

There, I've said it. We have a starting point now, and I hope you will believe me when I say it's called Christianity--at least when it's properly understood, which is very far from always being the case... I arrive at that claim with a quote from Paul Tillich, which is tied to my understanding of faith in the way the writer of Deuteronomy intended when he wrote that God's commands are to be tied to our hands:

"The criterion of the truth of faith...is that it implies an element of self-negation. That symbol is most adequate which expresses not only the ultimate but its own lack of ultimacy. Christianity expresses itself in such a symbol...namely, in the Cross of Christ. Jesus could not have been the Christ without sacrificing himself as Jesus to himself as the Christ. Any acceptance of Jesus as the Christ which is not the acceptance of Jesus the crucified is a form of idolatry." (Dynamics of Faith, 97-8.)

I believe that my analogy between my use of Tillich's words here and the writer of Deuteronomy's words is apt, in that the cross is the ultimate, the final, the core, the overriding revelation from a Christian standpoint, and Tillich makes the right case for understanding the cross as the final revelation: we sacrifice our right to create gods in our image when we understand what it means to have faith in God. And if we do not understand that, we do not understand God as both clear thinking and the biblical witness require us to: God is NOT what we would make God out to be. Again, that is idolatry, the core heresy of the biblical witness.

In a final point, this is tied also to the view that God is love. To think that I am right is to think that I have a standpoint against which others can be known to be wrong. From that point of epistemic privilege I can look down on others, who are not right. What better form of justification for treating others badly than to be right about ultimate truth over against which they are wrong?! There is no mystery about why religion and ideals generally are the source of much that is truly worst in human nature. But if I am looking at this question clearly, Christian faith--and I do not speak for or against the many religions I do not understand well enough to appreciate properly--ought to be the cure for that all too human illness.

To say that God is love is to say that I have no basis in the Great Mystery of being to critique you, only to love you as a fellow traveler in this world--this house for our mortality provided by that source of being that is always before us, but never understood, yet always implied in all our understanding.

I truly think Augustine and Tillich are good guides to helping us think as Christians. I think they point us to the correct starting point. But it is a starting point that ought to make us exceedingly humble about our approach to God. For though that starting point gives us more than enough for faith, we are mistaken if we think it gives us enough to judge others as wrong relative to our point of view. In that case we are wrong about being right, and the mystery of being convicts us of our conceit. There is no conceit in the Cross of Christ.

It might well have become obscured that I have been thinking about how to teach Christian faith to young people over the course of these last half dozen posts. In the comment to the last post I indicated that i would not be posting again for a couple of months. My failure to make the point of this post, about the incompatibility of conceit and Christian faith, made it imperative for me to do so. In fact, as I hope is now clear, the starting point in teaching Christian faith should be precisely that.

This may well be my final post, ever, in that once one has made the most important point, it seems rather pointless to continue. And in terms of the purpose of this little blog, it is to get a few people thinking about this crucial topic, which I will state once more: how do we teach Christian faith to young people. There are few topics more important in the minds of my Christian friends, I would think.

Best wishes for Christmas and the holidays!

Augustine's Lesson for Our Time

2009-11-21T05:51:00.000-08:00

It's a familiar story. There are discrepancies between scripture and science; religious authorities claim scripture is true; scientific authorities claim science is true; and people who take the time to see which point of view squares with the best evidence side with science. It's the subtraction story.1

It's a story that has played a big part in my life, derailing my plans for seminary. We think of it as a story that began with the rise of science in Modernity. But in fact, it is not. It played out in the life of perhaps the most important post-canonical Christian thinker, Augustine. And it is chronicled in his most famous work, The Confessions of St. Augustine. How the much-needed lesson from Augustine's life for our time has been overlooked, I could only guess, and I'd rather look to the lesson directly.

If you've read the Confessions you know that Augustine had been a Manichaean. Comparing their writings with "true things which the philosophers have said about this created world," Augustine "could see the reason for what [science] said in calculation, in the order of time, and in the visible evidence..."2 In short, he took the time to see which view sided with the best evidence, and science won: the subtraction story.

An extended quote will be useful:

"What then was the point of this Manes writing on these subjects, which are not necessary for the learning of goodness and piety? ...all he achieved by his numerous statements on these matters was this: he was shown up by people who had an acccurate knowledge of them, and it was thus made perfectly plain how much reliance could be placed on his understanding... He certainly did not wish to be thought little of; for he made it his business to persuade people that the Holy Ghost..was personally and with plenary authority resident in himself. And so when he was caught out making false statements about the heavens and the stars and the movements of the sun and moon, even though these things are not an integral part of religious doctrine, yet it was clear enough that his presumption was sacrilegious: he was talking about things he did not know..."3

This directly prompted Augustine's decision to leave the Manichees. Yet it just as clearly applies to a large portion of the Church today, and it applied to some in the Church in Augustine's day. He continued:

"Now whenever I come across any Christian brother, whoever it may be, who is ignorant of these sciences and has mistaken views on them, I can listen to him patiently enough as he delivers his opinions. ...I cannot see that it does him any harm if he is ignorant about the situation or conditions of material objects [of no practical importance to him]. But it does do him harm if he imagines that this scientific knowledge is an integral part of the structure of the doctrine of piety, and then has the audacity to make overconfident assertions on subjects of which he knows nothing."4

In short, Augustine knew Christians who were doing the same foolish thing which drove him from Manichaeanism. The obvious question arises, why didn't he find it necessary to leave Christianity too? A portion of the quote above says it precisely: "...scientific knowledge [is not] an integral part of the structure of the doctrine of piety," in the case of Christian faith.

On first pass that seems right, and there's a simple way to show why. Believing as a Christian means believing in Christ, as portrayed in and understood through the gospels. But there is no science, modern or ancient, which is "integral" to the gospel narrative. On that "common sense" view, the subtraction story as the narrative of what modern science has made incredible about Christian belief has no traction--it is not integral to faith. Nothing needed can be subtracted by science. That was the gist of my insistence that a "worldview" cannot be Christian. If anything, being Christian means believing that worldviews are all broken.

But that will seem fascile to many. What about what history and philosophy have made incredible? To respond, there needs to be a deep rationale for the inconsistency of trying to subsume the gospel narrative to ANY temporally-mediated point of view.

I believe that giving us that deep insight was precisely what Augustine turned to at the end of the Confessions. He did not just draw the foolishness of trying to turn scripture into science to his reader's attention, he provided the deep rationale for why it is not just foolish, but impossible--for any right-thinking person.

That deep rationale is crucial for everyone whose understanding of Christian faith turns on the assumption that makes the subtraction story possible--which is to say, every Christian I know and all the critics of Christianity that I know of...

What Was God Doing?!

My guess is that second to the famous opening prayer of the Confession that the ancient joke Augustine tells in it is cited most often. "And now I have an answer to the man who says: 'What was God doing before He made heaven and earth?' Someone once, evading the force of this question, is said to have made the jesting reply: 'God was making hells for people who look too deeply into things.'"5 Of course, Augustine--and we along with him--would be the butts of that joke.

But I fear that the crucial point he sets up with it is usually missed:

"...if by 'heaven and earth' we mean 'every [being that is not eternal],' I boldly declare that: 'Before God made heaven and earth, He did not make anything.' For if He did, it could have been nothing else except [something not eternal]. And I wish I knew all those good and useful things which I want to know as clearly as I know this, that before there was any [being that is not eternal] there was no [being that is not eternal]."6 (Bracketed phrases replace "creature.")

Augustine's point is simple, but it's importance for theology and scriptural interpretation cannot be overstated: Since God is eternal, literally nothing that is "tensed" can apply to God. To make the most crucial and obvious connection, the "days" of God's creation cannot be literal days, in which case God would have acted in time and would not be eternal.

How do I know this for sure? Three compelling reasons:

1. Augustine said it: "...You call us to understand the Word who is God...the Word which is spoken eternally and by which all things are spoken eternally. For here it is not the case of first one thing being said and finished, then another thing so that all can be said: no, allo things are said together and eternally. Otherwise there would be already time and change, and not a true eternity..."7

2. Augustine both poked fun at and worried about those who disagree: "Some people, for example, when they read or hear the world which we are discussing ["God created"] think of God as though He were a kind of man or else some great force associated with an enormous mass, and they imagine that by some new and sudden decision He made heaven abnd earth... Such people are...feeble little creatures... ...[who stretch out] beyond the limits of the nest where you are nourishing [them], ...I fear that this poor creature will have a bad fall, and I pray, Lord God, that you will have pity and will not allow the passers-by to tread upon that unfledged nestling..."8 I quoted more than needed to make the point, so that it can sink in that anyone in the grips of the subtraction story will fit the description of Augustine's "poor creature," in that scientific/philosophical/historic accounts of "creation" can only threaten theological accounts when the work of God is conceived of temporally. It is clear that Augustine saw, and provided for a solution for, the present crisis 1,600 years ago. The prescience of his thought can also be seen in statements making it clear that there could be no space or time before God created them.

And 3. Augustine sets up the last three "Books" of the Confessions with the argument that was presented in the previous three posts--an argument demonstrating our dependence on eternity to understand time--and proceeded to an analysis of the first verse of the Bible in the last three chapters.

Some Final Comments

I am not sure that I would like Augustine, if I had been priviledged to meet him. He comes off as arrogant in the same way that Dawkins, for example, does. And the story he tells in the Confessions, if you have read it, is not flattering--and I am not referring to stealing apples from a neighbor. Worst of all to my sensibilities, his prayers are obsequious, whereas I cannot imagine an honest prayer that doesn't include a fair element of Job's "attitude." To my mind faith includes existential honesty, or it is absolutely false--that's my inner Sartre coming out.

That said, perhaps no one loved discovering the truth more that Augustine, and in that he is a wonderful model: We can only be happy "when, with no distractions to interpose themselves, [we] will find ...joy in that only truth by which things are true."8 For Augustine the beatific vision was the consumation of the love of truth. (And his prescience even here is amazing, if we take his solution to where "truth" is found to be, "in God": What was Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature if not an exhaustive search, ending in failure, for how to cash in the meaning of how the human mind "mirrors" nature? And what was Augustine's point, if not that human understanding cannot "cash out" the meaning of "God,"; ergo... "When we see these things...it is you who see in us."10)

The besetting sin of those of us who value truth on par with love is a tendency to be a jerk when dealing with--and Augustine's tendency comes out here--"feeble little creatures." But, in fairness, it appears that we--the Church--have played the part, intellectually. We need Augustine, and that seems plain, to extract ourselves form the subtraction story. More importantly, we need Augustine to correct our thinking about God.

I will stop here, though the entailments of Augustine's starting point for theology are exceedingly great. "See, Lord my God, how much I have written on these few words ["In the beginning God created..."]! Really how much! What strength of ours...would be enough to comment in this way on all your Scriptures!"11 I will stop here not only because I am no Augustine, but because I want to avoid obscuring the crucial starting point which Augustine set up for the Church. People who are not disposed to abstraction can be counted on to ask, "But what does that mean?" after having been given a starting point for subsequent thought. Augustine's point, his gift to us in our need today, is to have given us a solution to our present difficulty from which everything else follows. In short, it is a big gift. The Church would be foolish in the extreme not to take it.

NOTES:
1. Charles Taylor, from whom I borrowed the phrase, actually argues against "subtraction stories" in the sense I use it here. (A Secular Age (The Belknap Press, Cambridge, 2007) 22.) Taylor's project is to explain how ancient ways of experiencing life are replaced with modern, and he focuses on how new ways of understanding and living have changed human experience. In his view, simply put, to focus on the past is to mistakenly think that educated people today--allowing for exceptions--feel the change as loss. Surely Taylor is right to point out that a historical perspective that has moved away from earlier perspectives will not, by the very fact of having moved on, experience the past as "lost," since what is past is not present. (Yes, I take pleasure in reducing subtle points to simple truisms, but in my experience that can usually be done: hence, my "metaponderings.") But for institutions that cling to ancient perspectives--and people whose lives are dominated by them--Taylor's argument does not apply, while his phrase does, and aptly.
2. Confessions [Book 5, Chapter 3], tr. Warner (Mentor, New York, 1963) 93-4.
3. Ibid., 94-5 [Book 5, Chapter 5].
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., 265-6 [Book XI, Chapter 12].
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., 262 [Book XI, Chapter 7].
8. Ibid., 308 [Book X!!, Chapter 27].
9. Ibid., 234 [Book X, Chapter 23].
10. Ibid., 345 [Book XIII, Chapter 31].
11. Ibid., 314 [Book XII, Chapter 32].

3rd Objection before Augustine's Lesson for Our Time

2009-11-20T05:43:00.000-08:00

If there is an objection one can expect from philosophical naturalists to an argument for the existence1 of God, it would be very foolish to put that argument where those philosophically opposed to theism are going to read it--unless the reply to the objection makes the argument look stronger. That's the case with the argument from science for the existence of God that I posted in the comments on the Templeton Big Question site. But I am sorry to say that the site seems to no longer allow give and take among mere commenters. I don't blame them. The focus should be on the expert opinions. Nevertheless, it seems that I won't get to trot out this reply there, because, it seems the objection will not be forthcoming there. So I make the objection myself, so that I can trot out the reply here.

But first the rationale for focusing on Augustine's argument: It sets up a crucial lesson to be taken from his life, 1,600 years ago, for the life of the Church today. But that's for the next post. Here's the objection I so fervently want to reply to! (I'm calling it "Objection 3," since I already noted two others.)

Objection 3: No one needs to look outside what science tells us to find "being that has always been as the source of being for what is here now": it's called matter and energy, which are convertible.

Reply to Objection 3: "Matter" and "energy" are abstractions. That is, they are placeholders for a variety of forms and states. Hats and dogs and stars and cars and photons and singularities at the origin of a cosmos are all instances of matter and energy instantiated, together, in one form or another. Furthermore, the best current understanding is that these varying forms do not range over an absolute universe of possibilities. The fundamentals of the universe were forged in a singularity of near-superlative improbability. In Augustine's delightfully simple words: "See, there are the heaven and the earth. They cry aloud that they were created; for they change and vary. Whereas anything which...[has always been] cannot have anything in it that was not there before."2 But what is "always there before" does not enter into time, as it has no tense. Eternity is assumed in temporality, and a consideration of matter and energy simply drives the point home.

NOTES:
1. Peirce was clearly technically correct in holding that we should speak of God's "reality," rather than "existence"; it's just easier to fold to custom.
2. Confessions, Tr. Warner, Bk. 11, Ch. 4.

Augustine's Argument, Simplified

2009-11-16T15:45:00.000-08:00

I decided to simplify the argument from the last post to post in the comments on the Templeton Big Question site, "Does Science Make Belief in God Obsolete?" Before offering the argument, however, I'd like to note two objections and my rejoinder to teach.

Objection 1: Metaphysics is the projection of human grammar into a realm beyond where it has any knowable object.

Reply to Objection 1: The following argument is an entailment of language used in science as it engages this world.

Objection 2: Arguments for Belief in God are attempts to know something inherently metaphysical. Ergo, go back to objection 1.

Reply to Objection 2: To say that something is entailed metaphysically is not to say that it is known. For instance, immense gravitational fields have led physicists to posit dark matter. One does not need to know what dark matter is to posit that there is something that creates the gravitational field. The same holds for the eternal being entailed in the argument to follow.

The Simplified Argument:

To explain something scientifically requires explaining how it came to be (or how it brings something else about). Consequently, something that has always been cannot be explained scientifically. But "has always been" has two relevant meanings here: 1. "has always been" temporally, and 2. "has always been" as the source of being for what is here now. For purposes of scientific explanation, however, "has always been temporally" depends for its coherence--literally--on "has always been as a source of being for what is here now" (otherwise temporal succession would comprise ontologically discrete elements with respect to being, and there could--literally--be no coherent explanation of how the discrete elements in the temporal sequence came to be). But as already noted, what has always been cannot be explained scientifically. Therefore, either there is no scientific explanation, or there is being that has always been as a source of being for what is here now, and such a being cannot be explained scientifically. But there is scientific explanation. Therefore, there is a scientifically mysterious eternal source of being for what there is here now, which we refer to as God.

An Argument from Science for the Reality of God

2009-11-14T11:47:00.000-08:00

In the Confessions Augustine makes the following argument to carve out room for his view that the relationship of humanity to God involves the inter-relationship of time and eternity:

"See, there are the heaven and earth. They cry out that they were created; for they change and vary. Whereas anything which exists but was not created cannot have anything in it which was not there before, and this is just what is meant by change and variation. They cry aloud also that they did not create themselves: 'We exist because we were created; therefore we did not exist before we were in existence, so as to be able to create ourselves.' And the voice of the speakers is in the very fact that they are there to be seen [observed]." (Confessions, tr. Warner (Mentor, New York, 1963) 260.)

I have updated Augustine's Argument as "An Argument from Science for the Reality of God."

1. To understand and explain something scientifically means to show the development of or cause of that object's present existence and state within the natural environment or framework of natural laws which are used to understand and explain it.

2. An entailment of what it means to understand and explain something scientifically, then, is that everything that is understood scientifically has come into being: otherwise its present existence and state would not have a development or cause.

3. But, in Augustine's words, "...anything which exists but was not created [did not come into being through development or cause] cannot have anything in it which was not there before...": otherwise something came into existence without cause or development, which is contrary to scientific understanding and explantation.

4. "There before," however, can have two relevant meanings: either "there before, temporally," or "there before, as the source of being for what is there now."

5. But for purposes of scientific understanding and explanation, "there before, temporally," depends for coherence on "there before, as the source of being for what is there now": otherwise temporal succession would be made up of descrete elements with respect to being, in which case it could not be true that one being or state in time is integral to another, as is required to show the development of or cause of an object's existence and state.

6. Therefore no temporal sequences, even if infinite in number and extent, explain the present existence and state of the world without assuming being that is "there before, as the sourse of being for what is there now."

7. But an assumed being that is logically distinct from time and is the source of being for the world's existence is Eternal Being serving as Creator, or God.

8. It is thus demonstrated that the same assumption that supports the reality of God underlies the work of science.

A Modest Proposal with a Hopeful Challenge

2009-11-07T05:05:00.000-08:00

A TELLING THEOLOGICAL SNAPSHOT FROM BEN MYERS' Faith and Theology:

I'll begin with a restatement of the purpose of the last few posts: to respond to the clear need for a better way to teach Christian faith to young people. The truth, purpose, and need for faith have all been called into question from voices and points of view too well known to need rehearsal. Specifically, I have claimed that "Conservative Christianity today is largely a reaction to the fact that liberal Christianity has fallen victim to the subtraction story." That sets up a classic catch 22 for someone who would like to frame their faith positively: either way, one's approach to faith is dominated by the subtraction story's negative influence.

In a post on Ben Myers' Faith and Theology blog a couple of months ago Kim Fabricious offered a spoof, warning of "two potentially fatal forms" of "divine flu." It's a fun read, and instructive. With apologies for spoiling a good laugh with analysis, I intend to note a few things that can be gleaned from the joke and more especially from the comments that followed. I think you'll find the insights worthwhile.

The subtraction story is clearly in evidence in Fabricious' "symptoms" of "neo-liberalsism": "...the omission of Old Testament readings...," "Tell us the Creeds are old-fashioned..." "Give Trinity Sunday...a miss," "Deny the divinity of Christ..." And the anti-intellectualism of Conservative Evangelicalism in response is characterized--and I think it right not to use "caricatured"--as: "Read the Bible only in the original version--the NIV...," "Hold tenaciously to the quite unbiblical...doctrine of biblical inerrancy," etc. Clearly the subtraction story and it's deforming influence on those who wish to avoid it is in play.

In the comments, however, it became clear that not everyone was amused, and I am sorry to say, not without good reason. To illustrate, I do a quick, informal categorization of the comments, and will note--what I take to be--the most significant of them.

Of the 71 comments, I counted 24 that unambiguously agreed with the gist of Fabricious' barbed spoof. Seven clearly did not agree. And in about 40 of the comments either the opinion was not clear or did not address agreement with the spirit of the spoof. Of the latter, 26 responded to a tangent in the direction of the comments: arguing that one "side" or another is better--including a "middle path" or "third way" introduced as an alternative in the comments--by arguing from history, or faithfulness to the Church, or to a tradition, or from adherents' willingness to die for the gospel, etc.

Since the spoof presented unfortunate alternatives--"potentially fatal forms" was the language--it is the "middle" or "third way" which ought to be of interest. But this comment paints the alternative as just as much under the pull of the subtraction story as the risible "flus": (anon.) "Middle ways are transition routes..." Filling in "anon's" implicit rationale, if the alternatives arise from the one being a reaction to the other, as when Conservative Christianity is to/from liberal Christianity, then it follows that a middle point between them is just what this commentator said: a "transition route" to one or the other "flu."

That said, one would expect Fabricious to write his spoof from a superior perspective outside the sicknesses he describes. Surprisingly, that is not the case, in fact, he explicitly concedes the critique: "Who said anything about a 'middle way', as in 'third way', let alone THE 'middle/third way'? ...in fact, plenty of theologians...are out there in the BROKEN middle..." But if the broken middle is the alternative to the broken sides, there's no interesting alternative. The post portrays the very thing a Dawkins or Hitchens would expect to see!

In fact, it's not quite that bad. For instance, a commenter (anon.) noted the "Barthian" option as an "academic option," though it is clear that such is a clear step down a road to irrelevance, in the commenter's mind. Another commenter (yet again, anon.) "What precisely needs arguing, not [mere] asserting, is the possibility of a genuinely distinct tertium quid that is neither conservative nor liberal; conservatives and liberals both deny that there is such a thing, arguing attempts at it are simply inconsistent lapses into one or the other... Barthians and Co. always seem to assert this most fundamental and controversial point, rather than address the many sharp criticisms of it offered by the...[to-be-avoided]...'liberalism/conservatism' binary."

Much more hopefully, the following two comments suggest--without actually offering anything concrete--a far better way that is intrinsic to Christian faith: ("Sean") "...when I try to figure out the heart of all your critiques, it's essentially this: the Bible cuts through...everyone's...beliefs about God." And (Kim Fabricious), "Onto [my]...bulletin board...I recently pinned Jaroslav Pelikan's inspirational statement: 'If Christ is risen, then nothing else matters...'" I find these statement encouraging precisely because they imply [that possibly?] the gospel critiques us, not vice versa. More on this later.

THE MODEST PROPOSAL

Since (1) playing out the subtraction story, (2) playing out an anti-intellectual reaction to the subtraction story, and (3) entertaining a middle way still dominated by the subtraction story are all sure routes to the irrelevance of Christian faith, let's just admit that conservative, liberal, and neo-intellectual academic points of view that can't take on the subtraction story ARE ALL DEAD, AND DONE, AND IF NOT QUITE DONE, OUGHT TO BE.

SUGGESTING A NEW WAY BEFORE MAKING A HOPEFUL CHALLENGE

First, an admission. I'm about to propose what I believe to be a very old way--as old as the first proclamation of the Christian gospel. But it will seem new to those who haven't realized it before. That is, it will be new to those who find themselves caught in the narrative stemming from the subtraction story.

The way out must be a way of transcending the negativity while remaining true to the gospel. Ideally, one would do this by showing that the gospel itself provides the means to transcend the negativity of the subtraction story. My recent posts try to articulate my convictions that that very ideal is true.

1. Kierkegaard got it right when he wrote, "...faith cannot be distilled from even the nicest accuracy of [historical] detail. The historical [claim] that
God has existed in human form is the essence of the matter..."1 But I find his "explanation" for faith that "the eternal condition is given in time,"2 in the view that faith is a miracle, even if inspired by a passion for the Infinite, unhelpful. What I do find helpful is his comment--which I have noted a number of times in past posts--that "If the contemporary generation [with Jesus] had left nothing behind them but these words: 'We have believed that in such and such a year God appeared among us in the humble figure of a servant, that he lived and taught in our community, and finally died,' it would be more than enough [for faith]."3 My starting point, then, is that Kierkegaard offered a new way--a way out of today's theological catch 22--but that I find his particular offering unhelpful, while still agreeing with the crucial, core point: that in the gospel itself we find "more than" enough" for faith. Thus, though I do not think that Kierkegaard provides a helpful way out, I do think he suggests that the gospel itself holds "the way," which ought to be viewed as encouraging to a Christian who is troubled by the present dilemma, the very point I am making. And as a side benefit, Kierkegaard's view here goes far in the way of answering troubling aspects of biblical criticism: no informed critic would deny the quoted words above.

2. Taking Kierkegaard's lead as we move on, focus our inquiry into the gospel as "the way out" by means of asking how the paradox "that the eternal condition is given in time" is resolved in the gospel. The gospel, that is, must provide a substantive way to illustrate, in Augustine's phrase, "that all times past and future are swallowed up in your eternal stable permanence..."4 The point is that an eternal difference in a historically mediated understanding of truth would have to be by way of transforming the meaning of history itself. It's a big "difference," but nothing less is sufficient to the gospel, as the Church preaches it.

3. Thus, I have argued that to avoid contradiction, as the eternal transforms the meaning of history, it must break the immanent frame, not be an element in it. (Fabricious' bulletin-board quote seems to imply this.) And certainly the Christian gospel must "break" the salvation story out of which it arises to be seen as good news: a man hanging on a cross does not look like a messiah, or a Son of God, etc. We know then that it breaks "salvation history." That's a start. The important point for our purposes is that such a starting point cannot be taken to fold into a narrative that does not include it. I have noted this to be a fascile way to avoid the problem with which we are dealing, unless it facilitates a deep understanding in its wake. If so, it is a powerful fascility for today's Church to be able to say, "A true understanding of the gospel cannot be subject to the subtraction story."

4. So, though 3 gives us a negative criterion, its provision is a necessary starting point. The need in its wake, however, is for a positive criterion. To that end, I argued that agape requires a person to be committed to transcending their limited personal perspective, since agape implies reaching out to others and the world in love (love implies a desire to know--which when embedded in time means know better: hence, agape love is a positive transformative commitment intellectually as well as morally/spiritually).

5. But 4 would weem to be possible without religion generally, or Christian faith in particular: Can't one be good and loving without faith? A great many people are quick to make that assertion; in effect, out of the pan and into the fire. In reply, I have argued that claims to humanity's goodness are naive, unless one has asked some hard questions and given some good answers. With the help of Sartrian analysis to clarify (see last post), what looks very much like a Christian commitment is in order before any claim to being "good" or "loving" can be credible. In fact--and it is ironic in the extreme, given Sartre's overall project--it is by means of Sartre's analysis of "bad faith" that Christian faith can be clearly framed as a "good faith" answer to humanity's core existential question. In fact, Sartrian analysis not only squares with traditional notions of sin and human nature, it frames the view that Jesus is "truth" in an interesting light, both of which are important in making the connections between Sartrian analysis and the current need to frame theology in a new (old!) way.

To be sure that the point is not missed, it is because Christian faith offers a way to tranform human nature that it offers a way to read human history from a perspective which transforms it, and so cannot be folded into a narrative which explains it away (our subtraction story). Thus, the gospel is itself a way of answering how, in Kierkegaard's phrase quoted above, "that the eternal condition is given in time."

6. As I have noted, Tillich's analysis of faith resonates with and informs my approach here. His conceptual centerpiece is seeing faith as ultimate concern; seeing ultimate concern as an abstract presentation of the Great Commandment; and seeing the cross as the crucial symbol expressing the need to reject false ultimacies and to thereby serve as a guide to the true ultimate concern. It's a neat circle, and Tillich's analysis is indeed crucial in my view, but it does not answer the question posed in 6 (restated for present purposes): "Why not just take the moral from Tillich's analysis without reifying the solution, via faith?" The critique of human nature alluded to in 5 makes salvation necessary--that is, human nature needs a real answer, a real transformation, not just a symbol that understands human nature at the depth Christian thought (ought to) critique it.

7. As I have also noted, Augustine's approach to scripture can be used to reinforce the approach that I advocate. (Augustine's approach--in a coming post--is to make room for multiple ways and ongoing reinterpretations, not just a third way.)

A HOPEFUL CHALLENGE

I don't mean to suggest that the outline for my view should be followed, though I wouldn't have suggested it if I didn't think I can produce excellent arguments in its favor. What I do want to suggest is that the gospel does address the core question about what it means to be human, and answers it hopefully in the person of Jesus Christ: Behold the man.

Surely an amateur shouldn't be unpacking the theological implications of that point of view. I would apologize, if I knew of someone else doing just that. Now, I am delighted and amazed at the wonderful work Ben Myers shares on his blog, as a pertinant case in point. But if the analysis above is at all accurate, our theologians have not yet formed a vision for how to respond to the subtraction story. I hope that it is encouraging to see that the answer is simply: with a competent rendering of the gospel. I would be extremely pleased to hand this work off to those who are professionally qualified. And I should add, that if this work is being done, I would be ecstatic to be so informed.

A last point. I agree with the spirit of St. Thomas in his aproach to theology; the crucial thing is to get the starting point right, so that everything else can flow from it "...according to the order of the subject matter..."5 In other words, first things first. Accordingly, Christians should give the most attention to the most basic things, because they turn out to be the most important. It wouldn't do to take up this challenge and forget that.

NOTES:
1. Philosophical Fragments, tr. Swenson (Princeton University Press, 1936) 87.
2. Ibid., 53.
3. Ibid., 87.
4. Confessions, tr. Warner (Mentor, New York, 1963) 310.
5. Summa Theologica, Prologue.

The Criterion of Eternal Truth--Part 2, Addressing Humanity's Tragic Predicament

2009-10-31T14:29:00.000-07:00

"You don't have to be religious to be a good person." Comments to that effect make it abundantly clear not so much that that Christian faith, but human life is in great need of being understood. For one cannot understand Christian faith without understanding the tragedy embedded in human existence to which it supplies an answer. To that end we look to the personal challenge at the heart of Christian faith, a challenge that applies the criterion of eternal truth set up in Part 1 to an individual human being's life.

In Part 1 ("The Criterion of Eternal Truth: An Abstract Challenge") we noted that it doesn't make sense to talk about the eternal entering human history unless it transforms all of history, and I used the first gospel--historically--to construct a simple model of the gospel that shows us that "If we aren't transformed by the good news...it won't be good news to us." That was the abstract point. The substance introduced by Christian faith--I claimed--is this: "...to be committed to the principle of love is to be committed to transforming ourselves with respect to the unfolding of the world in history. ...[it requires] an unchanging approach to an ever changing reality. Love, that is, meets the criterion of eternal truth with which we began." The object of today's post is to make the general point of Christian faith relevant to individual human lives.

When we hear, "You don't have to be religious--meaning Christian, here--to be a good (or loving) person," who decides what's good, and how? The simple fact is that anyone can be good in their own estimation, if everyone decides how "good" is determined. But everyone has their own circumstances and preferences, so based on one's own circumstances and preferences everyone is justified. Even if a person is committed to "moral goodness"--based on cultural norms and expectations--ambiguities run deep, ambiguities that allow a person to get out of just about any moral judgment that is deemed unfortunate. I have used Sartre's analysis elsewhere to establish how ambiguities obscure responsibility to act in situations that contradict an underlying wish to avoid an inconvenient responsibility. Say that a correct choice puts a person's job in danger, and the ability to obfuscate arises. One can either accept alternatives which are unfortunate or obfuscate in an attempt to escape them. To be presented with an opportunity to ask with sincerity, What is truth? would be an ultimate instance, as the writer of the Gospel According to John must have seen, as I have argued here.

But what if the core choice were very simple, with just two alternatives? First, the option of ambiguity and obfuscation, of maintaining one's ability to seek good by one's own standards for one's own purposes and when desirable to hide the fact that one does so by putting the many alternative versions of "good" to use: the option of ambiguity includes your goods, my goods, the law's goods, my in-group's goods, my community's goods, ecological goods, aesthetic goods, state goods, the goods of society now, the goods of future generations, even the the goods of taking a holiday from worrying about the good, or concerns about the goods of those who might impose their standard of good on me, or us, or society, and so on till one just gets tired of the question and asks, "What is good?" One can then find a satisfactory answer by--of course--appeal to one's own standards. After all, whose standards should you, or I, prefer? It's all very messy, and convenient for implementing what Sartre called "bad faith," evading responsibility for inconvenient choices by obfuscating. In Paul Tillich's words, "Is not the split in one's conscience the end of the authority of one's conscience? If one has to choose between different authorities, not they but oneself is ultimate authority for oneself, and this means: there is no authority for him."1

And second, the option of clarity: Committing oneself to framing good by the best overall determination in any situation, including your goods, my goods, the law's goods, and so forth through all of the same kinds of goods that are used to muddle the search for a defining sense of good in the first alternative. The difference is that the search is in good faith and that it is not done to preserve a single person's goods as the determining factors--the covering up of which motivates the first choice. One cannot help but think of how the story of the fall illustrates this very thing.

Though the alternatives are complex in their ramifications, we are familar with them. They identify complexities embedded in our interactions with other people. Navagating complex political situations using one's own preferred goods as the primary goals makes it necessary to conceal that fact to other person's who expect good faith cooperation in a common goal. Alternatively one can try to genuinely navigate complex interpersonal situations in good faith seeking to determine the best overall plan.

But seeking the best overall plan over seeking the plan that best suits one's personal goals and values means putting others' good above one's own. That is the meaning of Christian agape love. And it requires a willingness to sacrifice one's desire for others' to sacrifice themselves for us. Stated more simply, it requires us to be willing to sacrifice ourselves for the sake of others when the greater overall good is at stake. In the domain of human interaction, to love and to clearly seek a path of truth rather than obfuscation are inseperable. For one cannot love what one does not know.

That is the core point: One cannot love what one does not know. Clarity in human interaction only makes sense from the perspective of personal motivation when love is valued over personal success. In personal interaction, one seeks to know when one seeks to love. Alternatively, it is obfuscation that makes sense from the standpoint of human motivation when one seeks personal success over love (or it should be added, the success of a group a person identifies with over other groups).

What, then, should be said to a person who claims that it is possible to be good without being religious? Just this: Then you do not define good by narrow self-interest, but are committed to an ever-wider understanding that makes an ever-growing love for others possible? A person who sees the need for that commitment will see the prototype for that commitment in the proclamation of the Christian gospel.

A commitment to the ideals of seeking truth and love cannot be combined with self-seeking or seeking the advantage of a group one identifies with. Hence the gospel narratives portray Jesus as rejecting personal temptation before the start of his ministry and refusing to fulfill the expectations of a nation awaiting its Messiah to take them to national ascendency in the sequence that set up the passion: goodness brings tragedy. The resurrection in turn answers this tragic truth. It affirms that even when one understands the true nature of the tragedy at the core of human existence that the pursuit of truth and love, which usher the tragedy into human life, is not foolish. It is that hope which motivates faith.

Faith, then, is a full commitment to the highest human ideals of love and truth in full view of the nihilating human predicament which requires us to be willing to trade the goods we have in order to remain true to the ideal. This is a tragic, nihilating predicament for anyone who has not taken the time to be honest with themselves about their "goodness." No one's opinion that it is possible to be good as a human being can be taken seriously, until they understand that to be good is to court tragedy in this world. This is the meaning of the cross and the resurrection as its correlary: it is the statement of and answer to the tragic human predicament.

It is the glory of Christian faith to protray the tragic truth, to understand its entailment in the very best of human motives, and to offer through faith a perspective that transcends it. Positing a dimension transcendent to the reality we can sense--whether an infinite, or eternal, or holy, or spiritual--is not important as an abstract exercise. Theology is important because it cuts to the core of what it means to be human. At its most basic, the question of God and the question of man are the same question, and that question is brought to a head in the cross of Christ. "Behold the man!"

Paul Tillich tells us that all we can do, and all scripture can do, is to "...point passionately..to the Crucified--as does the Baptist, in the tremendous picture by the old painter Matthais Grunewald. ...his whole being is in the finger with which he points to the Cross."2 (Italics added. This is the quote that I said I would add to the end of Part 1, and left off because I could not find it at the time--it works better here to help tie the two parts together.) All of one's being captured in a pointing to Christ on the cross, or not. Either the tragedy is contained and transcended in God, or not. Those who do not understand the ultimate tragic nature of human existence do not understand faith, or its denial. They are lost in what Sartre called "bad faith," the very nature of which is to keep us lost with respect to the tragedy Christian faith addresses.3

NOTES
1. "By What Authority?" in The New Being (University of Nebraska Press, 2005) 86.
2. Ibid., 88.
3. By this I mean that bad faith as Sartre explains it applies to the core human tragedy that Christian faith addresses. That is not to say that Sartre ever understood Christian faith at the level where his term applies to it; he did not. But if true, there is no citation that can establish the negative. :-)

A Comment on "The Criterion"

2009-10-25T08:45:00.000-07:00

There are perspectives which fail to convince us not because they aren't reasonable, but because they are almost too reasonable, and whatever we think, out instinct is that the world just isn't THAT reasonable. Theology has a few. The ontological argument, for instance: that than which nothing greater can be imagined is not that than which nothing greater can be imagined unless it exists, and that than which nothing greater can be imagined must be called God. You won't find a flaw with that reasoning, but you will find yourself doubting whether reality is quite so reasonable (which is the essence of Kant's claim against the argument, that existence is not a predicate).

Another for instance: St. Thomas' view that God's creation consists of giving being to creation, whereas evil is a privation of being. Hence, God should not be faulted for the evil found in creation. The neat categories obviously make the logic work, but it comes off as almost slick, and no one can be faulted for objecting to a slick response to a complaint as ultimately serious as the reality of evil in the world.

I note these examples, since my explication of "the criterion" in the last post can be faulted for possessing the same slick framework: God's eternal (or infinite, or holy) reality cannot be expressed in time (of finitude or unholiness), therefore the subtraction stories told about faith in the secular world cannot have force, and a right thinking Christian would never have taken historically mediated understandings of the world as binding for an understanding of God or revelation.

But just because such slick reasonings are not sophisticated enough to make us feel that they do or even can mediate reality to us does not mean that they are without value. Mortimer Adler, for instance, in How To Think About God, demonstrates how the ontological argument can be used as a premise in a convincing argument (it ultimately convinced him, at least). And anyone who has read Gilson or Maritain, for instance will no longer think that the use of Thomistic categories condemns a person to a simplistic intellectual framework.

In that vein, I am arguing--using Augustine and Tillich as models and sources--with the goal in mind of setting up a starting point that will be helpful for framing further thinking. In fact, as I hope was made clear, I am arguing for a point of view that insists on a continual--I put the word in capitals, if you recall, in the last post--reshaping of our thoughts to make them adequate to the Christian commitment to love of God and neighbor.

With that in mind, it is a virtue, not a fault, to have a framework that is "slick." The whole point is to facilitate thinking within a framework that is conducive to thinking as a Christian without falling into a static, and SIMPLISTIC, "worldview" trap. To be fascile in pursuit of that goal, I think, is good, because the goal is to fascilitate further thought.

Let me apply this to the--not directly stated--situation that motivates these thoughts, generally. I am trying to come up with a way to communicate a compelling Christian framework to young people that does not fall into the trap of, basically, saying "Think like this." Whether conservative or liberal, Thomistic or Reformed, etc., I want to say, "That static approach is too lazy for love!"

I've met with a couple terrific young youth pastors in my community recently. Both minister at conservative churches. Both to one degree or another feel a tension between the desire to teach their young people to think as Christians and the need to conform their teaching to traditions that are static on one way or another. The old wineskins just aren't holding, and they know it and the kids--most of them anyway--either know it or suspect it, and their churches are is denial.

I can't solve the church politics for them, and I am deeply troubled by the fact that association with me may even further their distress. But the least that I can do is provide them, and to the extent I can a few people in churches beyond my personal sphere of influence, with a way to fascilitate rethinking how to think as Christians.

Let's be frank. Conservative Christianity today is largely a reaction to the fact that liberal Christianity has fallen victim to the subtraction story. Secularists see in this a progressive sickness unto death of God. Can anyone blame a conservative--who experiences through her faith a sense of salvation that scholars do not account for--if she dismisses such "progress?" (To push back the other way, it is a scandal of attempts to understand faith scientifically and philosophically, that such experiences are not given more serious attention. In fact, if I have anything to say, it is--I believe--precisely because academia has failed in this respect...)

The Church needs a way of framing its understanding that insists that--and here's my "bumper sticker"--stale ideas: too lazy for love. Fascile? I hope so!

The Criterion of Eternal Truth--Part 1, An Abstract Challenge

2009-10-24T05:51:00.000-07:00

Let's begin by acknowledging an abstract problem that the question of revelation faces. If there is an eternal perspective, it cannot be mediated to us temporally, and yet there must be positive content to an eternal perspective, if it is to be meaningful. The criterion of an eternal truth, then, is that it be something definite that can avoid being mistaken for something temporally mediated.1 But everything we know is mediated through our temporal existence. How then is any helpful understanding of God possible, for humanity?

Against this abstract challenge a Christian will want to affirm that the concrete historical narrative of the gospel, which proclaims God's entry into our world, meets that challenge. We should waste no time in looking to the gospel, then. A brief overview of the first gospel, historically, will be helpful. I abstract from it only the narrative's thematic contributions to an understanding of the core message that constitutes Christian belief--the "kerygma."

1. Jesus begins his ministry by proclaiming the gospel, the "good news," and it has a definite, simple content: "'The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand...'" (Mark 1:15, RSV)

2. Jesus orchestrates the spread of his fame as the Son of God who will usher in the kingdom, beginning with the death of John the Baptist (Mk. 1:14) and culminating with ther triumphal entry into Jerusalem for the Passover week (Mk. 11:10).

3. Jesus orchestrates the passion sequence--arrest, trial crucifixion--thereby contradicting the expectations of the masses and disciples (a man hanging on a cross certainly does not look like a Messiah). (Mk. 11:11-15:37)

4. The resurrection, thereby contradicting the contradicted expectations, albeit with this added moral: our expectations of the good news are not a good guide to understanding it. (Mk. 15:38-16:8--I see the transition to resurrection narrative starting with the miracles which attented Jesus' death.)

There is a clear moral to this story: Our understanding of the good news needs to be transformed by the good news, or it won't be good news to us.

But, there's a catch. If we take that to be a once-for-all transformation, then the good news has been mediated into time, once for all, in which case it ceases to be an eternal truth. If we want to think about the eternal entering into time, that won't work. The eternal must transform our understanding without being reduced to it, or the abstract challenge that the idea of revelation faces has not been met. This is the "negative" side of the message; the "rule" we can't break, if we take the challenge with which we began seriously.

There is a practical side to this rule: if we don't insist on it, we are stuck with a subtraction story with respect to our faith, for the gospel cannot be reduced to part of our historical understanding, or scientific understanding, without incredulity resulting. I am arguing that the gospel cannot be understood without a transcendent backdrop, which is to say that it recommends a story for our belief that cannot be translated into a contxt that has no room for it. That ought to be obvious, and I suppose that my frustration showed in the last post.

Allow me to add this to the moral, then: Our understanding of the good news needs to be transformed by the good news--CONTINUALLY--or it won't be good news to us.

Anyone familiar with the gospel narrative knows that I left off the transformative remark tied to Jesus' proclamation of the good news of the kingdom: "...the kingdom of God is at hand; repent..." (Mk. 1:15) If we aren't changed--CONTINUALLY--by the gospel, as the need to repent suggests, we don't "get" its transcending essence--its function of pointing us beyond ourselves and our world to the transformation inherent in the gospel.

But the pointing cannot be directionless, or we are left with an abstract point that cannot guide us. The positive side of the pointing beyond ourselves must be tied to a form that is itself essentially transformative--and therefore CONTINUALLY transformative, which entails a second reason for endorsing the non-historically mediated view of the kerygema--and that form is agape love.

Clearly, love requires a person to look beyond themselves to that which is loved. That is analytically true; true in the abstract. But it is an abstraction that insists that we look to the concrete details of this world as they unfold in time in order to be realized. That is, to be commited to the principle of love is to be commited to transforming ourselves with respect to the unfolding understanding of the world in history. To stop that process is to fail with respect to the command to love. To love as a first principle is to take it as an unchanging approach to an ever changing reality. Love, that is, meets the criterion of eternal truth with which we began.

Grunwald's picture of John the Baptist pointing to Jesus famously symbolizes this understanding of the function of theology at its best as pointing to Christ, the eternal truth entered into human history. And once we understand that theology cannot be subsumed to any reductionist view--of history or science or bad theology--we are freed from the subtraction story, the bugaboo of today's Church in the wake of so much bad theology.

Part 2 will look at the personal challenge inplicit in the gospel, the eternal "kerygmatic" revelation.

[I will add an extended quote from Tillich here, when I get time. My explanation is too abstract for most tasts, I fear, and the quote from Tillich will provide welcome details for those who would like them. Oh, for more time in the day!]

NOTES:
1. It should be pointed out that other exclusive categories associated with God could be used to make the same point: especially finite/infinite and holy/unholy.

Can a Worldview Be Christian? No!

2009-10-20T14:22:00.000-07:00

In the last post we noted Tillich's seperation of the eternal truth proclaimed by the Church from the temporal situations in the cultures to which it is preached. The entailment of that separation is that to mingle the eternal with the temporal is to confuse the "kerygma" with the "worldview" of the person preaching the "gospel." But confusing the things of God with the things of "man" is idolatry.

That is deliberately provocative, but with this end in mind. Perhaps you, like I, know persons--whole churchs with respect to some issues--who question whether, or more likely how, a person can be an evolutionist, or a conservative, or a liberal, or a relativist, or pro-gay, etc., and a Christian. The impression I usually get is that in fact a Christian who says that kind of thing believes that a right thinking person can't, but that some people are so muddled that they get a pass. And in my experience most Christians are mild-mannered enough to hear such things, smile, and walk away from a potential argument, even though they are bothered by such "worldview" militancy.

My point here is that we shouldn't walk away from this kind of thing. That is, we should engage in a kind of anti-worldview militancy with respect to understanding the gospel. For if we understand that there is a distinction of the kind Tillich makes, then we can't make truths bound to our historically-mediated understanding criteria of fidelity to the eternal truth we claim it is the duty of the Church to preach.

Now, despite my belief in militancy over this point, I want to be nice. But it's tough: Does any sane, informed person think that one's opinion on relativity, or evolution, or heliocentricity--or any historically conditioned belief--is part of the gospel? Well, perhaps a few; but then, they are so muddled that they get a pass. For being nice, that's the best I can do.

True, marvelous books have been written on whether there is such a thing a "Christian philosophy," and the point is well taken that we must try to think as Christians. (Gilson's The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy contains an excellent chapter on the question.) But my rejoinder to those who would stop there is that you aren't thinking enough. We can't stop at any point and say, "Eureka! My view of Christian faith is final and perfect." That would be idolatrous, not to mention crazy.

We must make a distinction between the gospel which is the message of the Church--the kerygma--and the way the churches at any time express it and think about it. If not, there are a great many things that a great many Christians have thought and expressed over the last 2,000 years. Do you really want to be saddled with them all?

If not. A criterion is needed. The critirion will be the subject of the next post.

To Care for the Gospel Paradox

2009-10-16T09:03:00.000-07:00

The first Gospel, historically, begins by paraphrasing Isaiah 40:3: "Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, who shall prepare thy way; the voice of one crying in the wilderness; Prepare the way of the Lord..." (Mark 1:2-3) The "praeparatio evangelica," however, is broader. It views the fortuitous historical circumstances which made it possible for the gospel to spread rapidly in the first centuries, C.E., as divinely ordered: the vast Roman Empire with its roads and law, the Greek language and philosophical heritage, the Jewish diaspora, and much more, set the table for serving the gospel to the world.

The praeparatio evangelica, then, was/is a way of reading history from a Christian perspective: If God were to enter history, surely the way would be prepared, and so a Christian understanding of history expected to find, and did find, evidences of just that. I remind you of this to suggest that a correlative concept is needed today. The Church needs a "custodio evangelica," a way of surrounding the gospel with a contemporary theological interpretation of it that fits a claim of a divine revelation as a hub of history. Clearly, faith requires either that or a fierce anti-intellectual culture in the Church, to successfully fight off important questions that--given the negative supposition--are not answered.

On first blush the negative supposition will seem right to many intellectuals. Rather than rehearse the usual list of set-backs for the Church, beginning with Copernicus and reaching a crisis in the 19th Century with the arrival of biblical criticism, Darwin, and Nietzsche--what Charles Taylor calls "subtraction stories"1--let's do something simpler and more revealing; let's go right to that point in time when the explicitly Christian understanding of the world represented by the praeparatio evangelica was replaced by an explicit denial of the possibility to understand the gospel as the hub of history: "Historical study is the implacable enemy of...inspiration: when we remove the mist, we remove the mystery."2

This claim from a brilliant biblical scholar will be stunning to a church-goer unacquainted with biblical scholarship. Michael Goulder's view amounts to a negative counterpoint of the praeparatio evangelica: history is seen as removing the gospel narrative from the center around which the subject revolves--"his-story" as so many preachers have called it over the years--and placing it in the realm of myth.

That's a mouthful, and I'm not a scholar in any relevant area. How, then, do I propose to have anything helpful to say? Let me begin by stating what I do not intend to say (and if it leaves a reader wondering how there can be any means of keeping the faith, all I can say is, please read on): First, I do not intend to say that biblical scholars are uninformed or incorrect in their pronouncements, and second, I in no way intend to make an argument based on expert judgments.

Rather, I recommend a simple, common-sense argument to you. The Christian faith proposes the gospel to all of humanity as the means of salvation. Not only would it be odd if the question of faith were then only a matter that scholars who have dedicated their lives studying could judge with competence, it would effectively undercut a key background assumption crucial to the Christian faith. I will not apologize, then, for advancing my non-expert opinion. More importantly it follows that the crux of Christian faith ought to be obvious--pun intended.

And yet how can this be--if we ought to expect the crucial question to be obvious to pretty much everyone, how do we explain the exceedingly fractious nature of faith? (13,000 Protestant denominations alone.) One could be excused for thinking that faith thereby refutes itself. (If there are any atheists reading this, use this argument well.)

This problem has influenced my turn to Kierkegaard's view, given near the end of his Philosophical Fragments:

"If the contemporary generation [with Jesus] had left nothing behind them but these words: 'We have believed that in such and such a year God appeared among us in the humble figure of a servant, that he lived and taught in our community, and finally died,' it would have been more than enough [for faith's purposes]."3

One need not know how this view fits into Kierkegaard's thought to appreciate the central point, that the gospel is neither complex nor subject to the kinds of debating points that scholars occupy themselves with. Perhaps that assertion itself could be debated, but Kierkegaard pretty clearly advanced a claim that no competent scholar would dispute: A community whose roots are contemporaneous with Jesus does advance just what Kierkegaard stated. Thus, if Kierkegaard's claim is correct, the Church needs nothing more. Of course, from the point of view that I am suggesting, the problem is that the Church--at least in a great many of its manifestations--claims much more than the core gospel story. How does one deal with that?

Fortunately, Paul Tillich made it the central goal of his life's work as a scholar of the Christian faith to answer that question. He called a use of the core gospel narrative as the guide to doing his work "kerygmatic" theology (kerygema = proclaiming salvation through Christ). He described his method as "[emphasizing] the unchangeable truth of the message...over against the changing demands of the situation."4

An extended quote will point out twin dangers that this approach tries to avoid.

"Theology moves back and forth between two poles, the eternal truth of its foundation and the temporal situation in which the eternal truth must be received. Not many theological systems have been able to balance those two demands perfectly. Most of them either sacrifice elements of the truth or are not able to speak to the situation. Some of them combine both shortcomings. Afraid of missing the eternal truth, they identify it with some previous theological work, with traditional concepts and solutions, and try to impose these on a new, different situation. They confuse eternal truth with a temporal expression of this truth.5

Tillich frames the core problem as follows. By elevating "something finite and transitory to infinite and eternal validity," theology destroys "the humble honesty of the search for truth, it splits the conscience of its thoughtful adherents, and it makes them fanatical because they are forced to suppress elements of truth of which they are dimly aware."6

I begin with Tillich's diagnosis because it answers the question of how a simple, core truth can become fractious for the Church by suggesting this narrative: The core gospel, which ought to unite Christians, has been given expression many times over the 2,000 years of its history. But every temporal expression of its eternal truth becomes inadequate, and so needs to be replaced by another expression, adequate to its time's historical situation. That, however, means that traditions have either given up old formulations, not as false, but as for a former time, or if that is not done, outmoded versions will co-exist as news ones arise to face the successive contemporary situations. It is a recipe for factions, unless the Church universal understands its dual need to remain faithful to its "kergyma" and to continually revise its expression of it for new times and situations.7 Since that focus has rarely been maintained, for those of us who like Tillich's diagnosis, the "disease" of the fractious Church has been explained.

To care for the gospel is to avoid this disease, then. The irony is that those who may well be in the best position to help the Church get over this disease are doing the most to spread it. For example, talk of worldviews is now popular in conservative Christian circles. Here is a quote from a pamphlet that accompanies a video featuring Rick Warren and Chuck Colson:

"Worldviews will inevitably be shaped by either the media or by the Bible. Unfortunately, Christians have all too often neglected the command to love God with our minds, not just our hearts. This is a result of emphasizing feeling over thinking. We need to learn to think biblically..."8

This pamphlet is notable for explicitly recommending what Tillich warns against: failure to stick to the kerygma--the essential gospel message--as the eternal content of belief and failing to understand that any time-bound expression of what is eternal will contain an outmoded "worldview" in later times. There is an extraordinary naivete and confusion about how to relate the gospel to honest, well-informed people today. Tillich went so far as to call the elevation of "something finite and transitory to infinite and eternal validity...demonic...."9

We have reviewed here only the basic, starting points from which Tillich begins to articulate his theology. But from them we can understand that every generation of Christians has the renewed task of "preparing the gospel." The praeparatio evangelica is a "perpetuus praeparatio." In that sense we must make history in order to prepare the way of the Lord... That is, what the first gospel, historically, begins, we must continue.

But for that to actually work, it must be possible to identify the eternal truth in the kerygma--the gospel proclamation--which we must continually strive to adequately express, and THAT too can only be expressed in time. Accordingly, the next post addresses the paradox of finite, temporal creatures trying to adequately express what they believe to be a divine revelation.

NOTES
1. A Secular Age (The Belknap Press, 2007) 22.
2. Michael Goulder, "The Two Roots of the Christian Myth," in The Myth of God Incarnate, ed. John Hick (The Westminster Press, Philadelphia, 1977) 65. The book was a historical marker in that it collected the judgments of esteemed Christian scholars about a core Christian belief, which they rejected. Rather than consider the positions the scholars advocated, I simply note the book as a landmark against which the the confident historical view implicit in the praeparatio evangelica was lost, completely.
3. (Princeton University Press, 1937) 87.
4. Systematic Theology, Vol. One (The University of Chicago Press, 1951) 4.
5. Ibid., 3.
6. Ibid.
7. This is a simplification. Among other things, this "story" leaves out "the psychological or sociological state in which individuals or groups live." Tillich admitted that these are driving considerations in determining whether the or a church is popular at a given time. But he makes it clear that such factors are outside of the question of how to express the kerygmatic truth to a particular group at a particular time. The point is that the dynamics of what is popular can encourage a disregard for truth. It is an important point.
8. "Framing Your Worldview," taught by Rick Warren and Chuck Colson [actual authors not cited] (Saddleback Church, 2006, 2009) 9.
9. Ibid., 3.

5 Degrees from Perfection at the Death Row Regatta

2009-10-11T12:01:00.000-07:00

Typically this blog tries to dig into into questions on the boundary of theology and philosophy. Not this time. This time's just for fun as we look at my experience of rowing 25 K, 15 1/2 miles, upstream from the Port of Duluth to the mouth of the St. Louis River in a Rowpedo/human-powered canoe. I'll use a series of numbers to frame the experience.

54/54

The picture here is of a 54-year-old man and his daughter who rowed as a mixed pair. To celebrate his birthday every year Peter rows as many kilometers as he is years old. That's 33 1/2 miles, more than double the Death Row Regatta distance. One wonders how long he will be able to meet that challenge. I certainly hope to talk with Peter again next year at the race and hear about his 55th birthday celebration!

116/60 & 208-20=188

OK, so I'm no model and a loss of 20 lbs. isn't big news. But the picture here shows a 51-year-old man (me) with blood preasure at 116/60 and a resting heart rate of under 60 beats per minute to boot. Having gone from 140/70, boarderline high blood preasure, to pretty much ideal blood preasure and heart rate, I think that I can call the training that I did this summer to prepare for the race a success--at least by the really important measures. As a side note, 20 years go when I was training for some road races my blood preasure was not this good. I can't claim that this is more than a guess, but perhaps exercising in a recumbant position allows the body to pump blood at a lower preasure than is needed when the body is vertical, and perhaps exercising at a lower blood preasure somehow fascilitates a lower resting blood preasure. It's a question worth asking.

55 and 0

Ideal weather for a 25 K Regatta would be cool with no wind. That's what we had on the morning of September 13: 55 degrees and no wind.

5

Looking at this picture, give special attention to the oar blades. They're canted about 5 degrees forward. That slight tilt made for a very difficult row. Sweeping backward in the water, the incline caused what rowers call "oar dive." That is, the oar blades functioned like an inclined plane in the water, causing the blades to dive. Here's the impact:

a) Pushing on the pedals (with the force I trained at) overpowered my ability to keep the oars from diving: So I cut back on the effort directed to the pedals.

b) Pushing forward on the oars to propel the canoe would have meant that the oars dove even more, and would have taken away from the effort of the arms to keep the oars from diving: So I lost the effort of the arms that would have gone to propelling the canoe.

c) Because less effort went into pushing on the oars, the stroke rate went down.

d) Because oars that dive tend to get stuck in the water at the end of strokes, two unfortunate consequences occured. 1) Sometimes I dragged an oar at the end of a stroke, breaking the canoe's momentum, or 2) the oars were not timed exactly as they came out of the water, causing the canoe to wobble. And when a canoe is unstable, it is difficult to row effectively. Do you see a vicious feedback loop? I spent the first part of the race figuring out how to deal with this unwelcome challenge...

e) I therefore had to take extra care to prevent the vicious circle just described rather than enjoy the race and focus on the beautiful setting.

How did this happen? Well, I think I'll blame it on all the really terrific people I met while I was rigging my canoe! :-)

What was the total impact? Well, one horsepower is 550 foot pounds per second. My strokes--arm and leg--are about 18 ", and I was training at a little over 60 per minute most of the summer. Last figures: my leg imput went from 40-50 lbs. per stroke to around 35-40 (estimated), and I lost all of my arm input, estimated at around 12 lbs. per stroke. Using these numbers, the following horsepowers result.

Before 5 degree error: (40 X 2) + (12 X 2) X 1.5 = 156 foot lbs. per second, or .28 horsepower expected over the course of the race.

After 5 degree error: (35 X 2) + (0 X 2) X 2/3 X 1.5 = 70 foot pounds per second, .13 horsepower. (The multiplication by 2/3 was needed to account for a slowing stroke rate from about 1 per second to about 2/3 per second due to the factors noted above.)

Conclusion regarding the 5 degree error: It was a lot bigger than one would imagine! I'll pay a little more attention to my rigging next time...

2, 1, and 2:20

Even with my self-inflicted handicap, I was able to race OK. With my Wenonah Wilderness canoe I came in just ahead of a father and son team paddling a Wenonah Spirit II, to beat the only other canoe in the race. The competition was great fun, and my 3:13.40 time was the second best in the race's ten-year history--not that a lot of canoists have participated in the ragatta. Only seven, by my count. My point, here, is just that to sustain somewhere around 70 foot pounds per second of effort over more than three hours isn't too bad, even if it's about 45% of one's expectations going in...

So here's my commitment for next year: To lose 10 more pounds and get in even better shape. To race in a racing, rather than a recreational canoe (19 lbs. lighter, a 12% vs. a 16% aspect ratio, and much stiffer and narrower in the bow and stearn). And to make several improvements to Rowpedo. And finally, need I say?, to rig the oars correctly! Given good weather, I predict a 2:20 time in 2010. Brash? Yes. But my brash commitment to lose weight and get in shape paid off this year, so I'm just doing it again--and I'm doing it right away to prevent any feeling that I can afford to "let myself go."

Below is a picture of the father of the single scull winner--and one of the two paddlers that I was furtunate to meet and enjoy competing against. Typical of the kind of people I met over the weekend, I was being given terrific advice on how to improve my performance next race. How cool is that from a fellow competitor?!

Next is a picture of some of my family, who came to support me. I have seldom felt as loved as I did by this show of support! Thanks Sally, Tug, Carl, Nan, Maria, (and Willa, Frieda, and Walter)!

It was a fun year of rowing. Below, see the proper canting of the oars and the changing of the seasons here in Minnesota. Yea, that guy in the photo looks lost in thought--whether about his next rowing or biking design or something Augustine said 1,600 years ago is not known...

Ask to Receive A THEOLOGY FOR ATHEISTS Chapters

2009-08-31T18:01:00.000-07:00

I am grateful for the readers that I have. Problem is, I basically have time to blog half the year, and the last four months have not been in that half. It's showed, and to make things worse, I decided to start work on a book project that I thought would be the best use of my limited time to blog. It wasn't; for me at least the first takes on a big idea are likely to be false starts--and my first efforts at A THEOLOGY FOR ATHEISTS were. Sorry about that.

Rather than try to set up a rhythm on a project that I want to take as much time as I need to do well, I'm going to offer to send chapters out to anyone who would like to read them. But there might be months between installments.

So what about this blog? I'm going to try to set up a little club for Christian thinkers in the St. Cloud, MN, area. Something youth pastors could send youth who might be interested in going a bit deeper into Scripture and theology than is usually done in a church setting. It's a good thing for a Christian dad with a bright 15-year-old to do. If it happens, this blog will likely turn into a record of the topics and presentations done at that group. But it's all tentative for now.

To receive chapter emails of A THEOLOGY FOR ATHEISTS, drop me a line at Tracy.Witham@gmail.com, and put "chapters" in the subject line.

Thanks!

To Think, or Not to Think (about Faith): Introduction to A THEOLOGY FOR ATHEISTS

2009-08-27T06:02:00.000-07:00

Not long ago I met with a young man who is a youth pastor at a local Pentecostal church. He's very bright, and we talked through the first couple of chapters of C.Stephen Evans' introductory book on the philosophy of religion (Evans' work is excellent for an interested young person who wants to explore Christian faith: the presentation is balanced, thorough and clear, and the reader is never bogged down in jargon wondering where the exposition is going, which is crucial...). When we were about to conclude our visit I asked whether he had shared his new interest in philosophy with other pastors at his church. Since he is reading theology written from perspectives outside of his church in addition to philosophy, he indicated that he had shared his readings with the head pastor, and got two different reactions: (1) encouragement to read and understand the perspectives of other Christian denominations, and (2) bemusement (my word) at his interest in philosophy, since God has so obviously made his existence known to the world through revelation and--recall that he is Pentecostal--through healings, prophecy, etc. It's a remark that reveals an utter difference in intellectual orientation between people in the Church and educated secular people: the Church values credulity, and the academy teaches the value of skepticism. I had a professor who marked the difference by calling the University "the Church of Reason."

Before proceeding I should state two stances that I am taking for purposes of exposition: First, yes, I am intentionally sidestepping my young friend's Pentecostal claim that healings and prophesy, etc., point so strongly to God that to look to philosophy for evidence is preposterous. The point of view I want to engage is the cultural dynamic that yields Christians who think their faith is so obviously true that any need to seek for the truth about it is absurd on the one hand and adherents of the Church of Reason on the other hand who can't imagine being credulous enough to "fall" for claims such as my young friend's pastor makes. The evidence of God's grace in the world to the Church of Faith is evidence of the fall from grace to the Church of Reason. That extraordinary dynamic is worth understanding.

Second, lest my young friend's Pentecostal point of view be taken as an outlier relative to the Church generally, consider what I read at the bottom of my Lutheran Certificate of Confirmation: "We know that we cannot by our own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ our Lord, nor come to him..." Weber's Protestant work ethic immediately sprang to mind as I read that; for if faith is necessarily a miracle of sorts, one will look very anxiously to see whether there is any evidence of that miracle in one's life, when Christian faith dominates the interpretive background. And in a Christian culture where having a 'regenerated' life is socially expedient, well, the entailment of Weber's principle is obvious: a large segment of Christians will look for evidence of faith within their christian experience, as opposed to looking for evidence before taking a step of faith--and yes, my Lutheran heritage states that that step cannot be of my will or mind. That will naturally lead to a cultural dynamic within the Church in which a critical appraisal of personal religious experience is out of bounds. That the Lutheran Church does not extend that credulity to all of the elements of religious experience that Pentecostal churches do does not affect the point. A culture of credulity is born.

As a point of comparison, note that even in the strongest possible reading of the classic Thomistic tradition--and no other Christian tradition relates reason and faith as directly--the foundation of natural theology does not direct one to the articles of faith so compellingly that there is no leap of faith. Accordingly, the essence of my young Pentecostal friend's view is not an outlier, as Christians in more "mainline" or traditional churches might think, and the point can be established clearly in the negative. No church has classes in the philosophy of religion that its members must pass to show that they have sufficiently understood and weighed the evidence for Christian belief thoroughly and carefully enough to qualify as Christian. The very thought is absurd enough to strike one as funny. By default, a leap of faith is in the very least tolerated, meaning no Christian tradition stands apart from the charge of being "a culture of credulity."

Here I need to state that I write as a Christian, so that I can make it clear that the purpose of this essay is to take us beyond the critique and counter-critique offered by the Church of reason and the Church of faith respectively. That, I am certain, is an end devoutly to be wished. To do so, however, will require us to rehearse the critiques as they are typically found in an introductory text in the philosophy of religion. The basic point/counterpoint is simple and embedded in the classic expositions of William Clifford and William James on the subject:

Clifford (paraphrased): A person has no right to a belief adopted without a careful inquiry that scrupulously avoids belief on insufficient evidence: In fact, to do so is unethical and can be dangerous.1

James (for faith): "Our [passions must]...decide an option between two propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot be decided on intellectual grounds."2

It was James' intent to create an exception to Clifford's point that it is unethical to forgo responsible inquiry into one's beliefs, which we have just observed is in the very least tolerated by the Church. The details of this classic debate do not concern us here for a very straightforward reason: The thesis worked out in the chapters to come is that in the case of Christian faith a careful inquiry of the kind Clifford advocates is precisely what lands us in James' domain of an "option that cannot be decided on intellectual grounds." This is a crucial point for three reasons.

First, it impacts James' view that where the intellect ends the passions become the default means of determining a choice. As shall become apparent, faith itself becomes a means to interpret the dispositional options at the limits of human understanding. That is, the issue is bigger than the simplistic "default-to-passion" view that James is usually taken to advocate and that his opponents falsely think that by opposing they have blocked the route to a reasoned and responsible faith. To give flesh and bones to the claim that faith functions as a means to interpret the dispositional options at the limits of human understanding is the of these essays. But it needs to be said that James is usually given unfair treatment on this count. He went into "The Will to Believe" with a Kantian view of the foundational claims of philosophical theology which claims that the best informed minds see the metaphysical arguments for and against belief in God as equally plausible. Smaller minds ever since have misinterpreted him by interpreting his point from a partisan--and diminished--point of view.3 (The test case to prove James'/Kant's savvy in advancing the view of the ambiguity of the evidence for and against faith at the limit of human understanding is Positivism: Even the view that one ought not include any metaphysical content in one's view is a view about the nature of metaphysics that cannot be advanced on the basis of the principles Positivism advocates. The only possible evidence concerning whether or not to advance a faith position from the limit of human understanding is that there is no other option, except not to think at all. From that perspective the charge against theology that committed philosophical naturalists make comes from the mouths of people who have walked off a cliff and haven't figured it out yet.)

Second, this approach is crucial for anyone who wants to understand the relationship of faith to reason at the level where the connection actually happens. And it happens at the level where faith gives life an interpretive framework for understanding the dispositional options at the limits of human understanding. While James did inform his view with a Kantian background which his critics typically fail to catch in critiquing "The Will to Believe," it is a shortcoming of James' own understanding of faith that he did not draw the contours of the boundary of human understanding with the theological perspectives which extend it through faith: For an understanding of theology at its widest and deepest points must be framed by its particular interaction with human understanding at its metaphysical limits, or the most important and far-ranging elements of that understanding are missed. In fact, a core function of religion and its place in human life is simply ignored or missed.

And third, it is by making the metaphysical connections at the limits of human understanding, by seeing "the dispositional options at the limits of human understanding" as I have called it, that it is possible to trace the re-entry of those dispositions into human life via religion. Yes, in a delicious paradox, one cannot be scientifically profound about faith without becoming metaphysically savvy about religion at the same time. For with religion and faith, properly understood, one is dealing with the means to extend the human quest for meaning beyond the physical, immanent sphere. Framed a bit differently, since human beings extend their perspectives beyond nature by means of metaphysically informed faith, science cannot understand human nature unless it examines metaphysically informed perspectives that extend beyond nature, rigidly construed. But on some accounts of science--that rigidly insist on methodological naturalism--that's not possible. I cannot weigh in on the matter beyond noting the challenge and suggesting that scientists ought to at least take note of what it is that they imply if they do dismiss theology on the basis of an anti-religious or anti-metaphysical metaphysic.

It can hardly have escaped notice that I am not making friends in these essays with either fo the entrenched camps of the so-called culture wars. We live in a culture in which opinion are bifurcated along all-too-easy lines of discrimination, and that discrimination is vicious at times. By questioning religion and faith, I am an outsider to the culture of credulity that the Church has all but become synonymous with, and yet by suggesting that there is a side--and the most important side, for that matter--that the Church of Reason has not accounted for in its view of religion and faith, I am likely to be viewed as an outsider and enemy there too. So allow me to just say it, what passes for both religion and a critique of religion, even in the academy, is shallow and prejudiced. I am aware that there are historical reasons for this unfortunate mess. But rather than dwell on it, I propose to get beyond it.

NOTES:

1.William K. Clifford, THE ETHICS OF BELIEF, see here.
2. William James, "The Will to Believe," see here.
3. A. J. Burger, THE ETHICS OF BELIEF, see here. I chose to use this link to both Clifford's and James' essays not only because they could be compared together here, but because Burger's commentary illustratres the point just made. I encourage anyone who has not read the essays by Clifford and James to do so.

Augustine's Joy in Truth--Ideal or Real?

2009-08-09T13:39:00.000-07:00

The last post described Augustine's answer to the deceptively simple question: "What, then, do I love when I love you [God]?" (CONFESSIONS, tr. Warner, p. 216--10/7.)

The short outline of how Augustine answered the question was:

a) "...we all want to be happy." ((p. 230--10/21.)

b) We all desire to know the truth. (Condensed from p. 233--10/23.)

c) Therefore, "...certainly the happy life is joy in truth..." (p. 233--10/23.)

d) "...that means joy in you, who are truth, God..." (p. 233--10/23.)

This line of thought brings up two divergent questions, only one of which we looked at last time. Let's review that one before going on to the second one. The first question is whether Augustine's identification of God and Truth is true/convincing.

"Truth" works as an answer to Augustine's question, "What..do I love when I love [God]?" because it transcends any particular object (accommodating the prohibition on God being an object), because it represents an ideal (accommodating the need to see God as the highest good), and because it can be known (in the sense that we seek to know it better--and can usually do so to some extent). We quickly reviewed Peirce's "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God" as a means of appreciating that Augustine's thoughts may not be as antique as they first sound to our ears.

(In fact you may recall that in a post from last winter I suggested that Peirce's argument would turn the Templeton "Big Question," "Does Science Make Belief in God Obsolete?" on its head. So, to the extent that Augustine's point of view agrees with Peirce's, his approach seems particularly apt to address our secular age. The following quote can be found here: "[Peirce] wondered why human beings have any knowledge at all; and in particular, he wanted to understand how people manage to increase the accuracy of their ideas. He wrote, 'in my own mind all of my work has been exclusively the study of how to find the truth..." (William A. Stanley in an online article.) It seems that Augustine makes the same point about himself here: "When have you not walked with me, O Truth, teaching me what to beware of and what to seek after...? With my outward senses I surveyed, to the best of my ability, the world, and I observed both the life which my body has from me and these senses themselves. From these I entered into the recesses of my memory, space folded upon huge space and all miraculously full of innumerable abundance, and I considered it and was amazed..." (CONFESSIONS, p. 253--10/40.) There are few human beings for whom such a description would be credible, but in the cases of Augustine and Peirce it seems altogether apt.)

But there is a second question that is likely to trouble a reader of Augustine's exposition: Is his identification of happiness and truth together as what all people desire credible? Augustine does address the problem in this way: "[People] love the light of truth, but hate it when it shows them up as wrong." (p. 233--10/23.) It is a flaw in human nature that makes it possible for us to turn against the truth when it doesn't tell us what we want to hear.

It is here, then, that the re-reading of the CONFESSIONS dovetails with the project I am working on: Humanity's double-mindedness about truth because of sin was described this way, in a quote used in an earlier post, "So my two wills, one old, one new...were in conflict, and they wasted my soul by their discord." (p. 168--8/5.)

As you will recall, the project is to transpose the biblical narrative onto an evolutionary framework to show that the biblical perspective answers a question that biological history cannot: Will we act like creatures who expand their sphere of interest within the environment as determined by self-interest, or from the perspective of the best choice for the environment itself (social/cultural/biological/geological/etc.)? Will we take the view of a creature looking out for itself or a creator looking out for its creation? I will argue that the biblical creation story poses just that dilemma, and that just that dilemma marks off the need for humanity to transcend its evolutionary history, and that the gospel narrative presents the Creator doing just that. In short, Christian theology contains the answer to the core dilemma posed by our place in the evolutionary line: will we behave like creatures or creators; like Jesus or ourselves? I know that it sounds incredible, but I am pretty sure that a very good case can be made for this assimilation of theology to evolutionary narrative and vice versa. It will be fun.

However, I have family trips to take over the next couple of weeks, and must stay in training for the Death Row Regatta next month, so something's got to go--and I'm afraid that it's the blog for a little while. For anyone who's hanging in there with me, many thanks! I'll be back in a couple weeks.

Tracy

Augustine's Joy in Truth and Peirce's "A Neglected Argument"

2009-08-08T06:37:00.000-07:00

I've been re-reading THE CONFESSIONS OF ST. AUGUSTINE. If you've read it before, perhaps you will recall that (in Book 10) Augustine asks a deceptively simple question: "But what do I love when I love [God]?" (tr. R. Warner, p. 214.) We will skip over the mere fact that a considerable portion of life's great mysteries would be resolved, if we could fill in the blanks following that question. Augustine himself took a cursory inventory of the ways we can become acquainted with "things," so that he could lead the reader to a seemingly hopeless conclusion: If God is not to be identified with anything that we can identify within the scope of human experience, it seems that God cannot be found. Let that sink in fully, so that you can appreciate the impact of the classical Christian answer to Augustine's "simple" question: "...when I seek you, my God, I am seeking the happy life." (p. 229--10/20)

In fact, Augustine is about to set out his version of St. Thomas' magisterial starting place in the SUMMA THEOLOGICA: "...[humanity] is directed to God as to an end that surpasses the grasp of [its] reason." (Part One, Question I, First Article) This is the central question for anyone who wants to appreciate what the Christian faith brings to the table intellectually. My guess is that not one in a hundred Christians can lay out the contours of either Augustine's or Thomas' teachings--the source for the classic answer to this primary question for anyone who wants to begin an honest inquiry into the intellectual tradition accompanying Christian faith.

But I digress. It is Augustine's response in his CONFESSIONS that I find most helpful. In seeking happiness, we seek God (if only we knew it): "How, then, Lord, do I seek you? ...when I seek you...I seek the happy life." (p. 229, 10/20)

Here's a very short outline of the rationale that supports that answer. Focus on the bold text for the overview.

a) "...we all want to be happy." (p. 230, 10/21)

b) [We all desire to know the truth.] "...if I ask anyone: 'Would you rather have your joy in truth or in falsehood?' he would say: 'In truth...'" (p. 233, 10/23)

c) [Combining the two universal human desires,] "...certainly the happy life is joy in truth..." (p. 233, 10/23)

d) "...that means joy in you, who are truth, God..." (p. 233, 10/23) [The rationale for the claim that God is truth: "We see the things that are, because you have made them, and they are, because you see them." (p. 349, 13/38) This statement voices a view of absolute Truth: Being emanates from the divine mind thereby perfectly accomplishing a correspondence of divine thought and all objects by positing the complete dependence of being on the divine mind. (Truth is often defined by such correspondence, even though the theory has never been successfully delineated.)]

This rationale is stronger than it might appear at first to a 21st Century intellectual. No one doubts that ultimate explanations must derive from Being itself. But Being itself is an abstraction, since we can only contemplate being in specific manifestations. Thus, those who want to stick to the facts as they can be confronted in the world will want to deny the meaningfulness of asking ultimate questions.

Here is Augustine's reply, and in answering his question posed at the head of this post, he is responding to the central claim of those who advocate scientism:

"Where then did I find you, so that I could learn of you? I could only have found you in yourself, above me. Place there is none; we go backward and forward, and there is no place. Truth, you are everywhere in session, ready to listen to all who ask counsel of you, and at one and the same moment you give your answer to every diversity of question." (p. 235, 10/26)

The gist is this: When we seek answers to our questions about the world, the world accommodates our quest. Being and truth do seem "convertible," and this "gist" is the same--as far as I can tell--as the underlying point in Peirce's "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God." The universe accommodates minds, and therefore works like mind. As was noted in a post on Peirce's argument, the human mind is in no respect able to counter an analogy with itself that depends on the working of the mind. (BTW: Using evolution to explain the fact doesn't blunt the surprising nature of the ongoing discovery of the amenability of being to mind. The evolutionary explanation is that we have adapted our minds to the underlying reality, in which case evolution supports the view that the underlying reality is amenable to mind, in the crucial respect at hand, and this is necessarily true of science generally. In fact, all scientific projects are instances of the Augustine/Peircian point of view: "I could only have found you in yourself, above me. Place there is none... Truth, you are everywhere..." The life of the mind is the life of faith, on this level, and in this sense the life of the mind is at the core of the Christian tradition. And yes, ironically, I say this while maintaining that not one in a hundred Christians know of this connection to the life of the mind.)

Perhaps this seems a bit too abstract to be absorbed into the biblical source of the Christian tradition, since the spirituality of the Bible is so concrete and (it is claimed) embedded in history. In fact, this disparity might explain the irony just noted.

It is to that disparity that my core insight in A THEOLOGY FOR ATHEISTS WILL is addressed.

A Theology for Atheists--Introduction

2009-07-31T03:43:00.000-07:00

Labeling oneself in contradistinction to something else creates a peculiar kind of link: opposition. It is not true, then, that an atheist will not care about theology. She has tied her self-description to the view that she does not believe that the subject has an object. Presumably that position is important to her. Accordingly, it just might be important if someone takes the time to point out that the matter has not been properly understood. But this is not to be an attempt to convert atheists to theism. Rather, this theology for atheists takes up a more modest goal of creating a better understanding of what is being denied.

That said, the paradoxical fact is that a theology for atheists ought to be of even greater interest to theists. For no realistic theist can doubt that among the ranks of atheists are many well informed, sincere, and intelligent persons. Consequently, by engaging those persons who challenge their beliefs most radically, theists are given a prime opportunity to probe the object of their belief more fully. Surely a healthy faith will engage worthy challenges, not avoid them. By realizing the goal of creating a better understanding of what atheists deny--when theism is properly understood--the possibility of having a productive dialog is increased.

That said, the following statement just might unite theists and atheists in a common skepticism. When properly understood, something atheists do believe in--evolution viewed through the lens of philosophical naturalism--leads to a dilemma that the grand sweep of the biblical narrative both addresses and resolves.

It is a big claim. But to the atheist I make this point. Religion obviously occupies a central place in human history. Isn't it reasonable to explore whether there is an equally central reason in the evolutionary narrative for that unarguable fact? And to the theist I make this point: Unless you are a fundamentalist you need to frame your faith along side your understanding of evolution. If faith is to claim the central place in the lives of the faithful, and it must to be faith,1 doesn't that call out for an understanding of evolution that supports that claim? Fortunately, a candidate to produce that understanding for both the theist and atheist is not difficult to find, at least after one gets over the strangeness of the thought that evolution might actually help theists and atheists alike understand the point of faith better.

The followng words from St. Augustine almost shout the hypothesis that connects evolution to a better understanding of theology. "So my two wills, one old, one new...were in conflict, and they wasted my soul by their discord."2 A very short explanation suffices to make the connection.

With humanity evolution must be said to have taken a giant stride forward, from an animal that mostly expands to fill a niche in its natural environment to one that mostly modifies its environment to suit itself. If the world was a place where creatures mostly adapt to their environment, it became a place where the dominant species actively and knowingly adapts the environment to its will. To adopt theological language, the creatures began doing a lot of creating.

That view places us squarely in the opening biblical narrative, where the Creator makes humanity in the divine image: creatures made in the image of the Creator, presmably, will create. With the evolutionary narrative informing the biblical, it becomes clear that the Bible's starting point is pretty much the same as the most salient point about human beings from the evolutionary perspective: If evolution tells the tales of the survival of the fittest, for the first time an animal is going about the business of creating its fit, and is intelligent and self-aware enough to contemplate the consequences of its actions.

But as soon as that is said, we are reminded of Augustine's words, because only such a being can be expected to have "two wills": the will of the creature it is evolving out of and the will of the creature it is evolving into; "one old, one new" and "in conflict." The Genesis mythos portrays this precisely.

1. Paul Tillich's Dynamics of Faith argues this persuasively.
2. The Confessions of St. Augustine (Book 8, Chapter 5), tr. Rex Warner, (Mentor-Omega. New York, 1963) p. 168.

PALIMPSEST--DISCARDED Creature and Creator--Introduction

2009-07-26T11:53:00.000-07:00

Introduction to CREATURE AND CREATOR: A THEOLOGY FOR ATHEISTS

If we are not fully, unambiguously, and without ambivalence living in a secular age, there certainly are large, growing, and highly influential pockets of the contemporary world that--for the most part--are: academia and pop culture are the prime examples.1 With that as the growing contextual environment to which those who espouse a theological view must speak, the overriding question becomes, why bother with theology at all?

Answering that question by starting within traditional theology can hardly be to the point, if it is precisely why one should care about traditional theological answers that is being asked: Theological speech must leave its traditional turf to speak to the question. To be taken seriously, theology must demonstrate that it engages questions that people care about, and to have a chance of being taken seriously as centering human life on what matters most--the core, animating claim of the great monotheistic religions--then theology must demonstrate that it engages the core, animating questions of our humanity. It is the attempt to provide just such an answer that motivates the writing of these essays.

But what would count as the core, animating questions of our humanity? One approach to answering that question would be to point to the core questions that have animated humanity's search for answers in philosophy: What is most real (ontology)?; what is most important (axiology)?; what is knowledge (epistemology)?; and so forth. But as anyone who has read the Bible knows, it does not answer those questions in a way which would satisfy someone who does not begin by taking its point of view seriously. Traditional theological or biblical speech does not speak to those matters in ways that will interest those who do not share its point of view. And that "share" is getting smaller.

What is not getting smaller is the number of human beings who inhabit our world. A perspective that answers the question of how we as human beings should live in the world, then, is a very important and relevant perspective, and if it addresses the primary question that needs to be resolved in order to answer how humanity ought to view life in this world in order to get along, a good case can be made for saying that it answers the crucial question of our time. Perhaps of all time.

Since evolution provides the accepted means of answering how human beings came to be, let's ask a core question about what we have become: Animals capable of adapting our environment to our ends in utterly unprecidented ways and to utterly unprecidented extents. We do not simply adapt as a species over time to environmental changes. We adapt our environment to changes we wish to impose on it. In large measure we create our environment, often to a larger extent than we would like to be the case.

But as soon as that abundantly and clearly true position is stated, an equally clear and true statement about the Bible can be made. It begins attributing the world to a Creator, stating that humanity was made in the image of the Creator, and placing humanity in a garden where--naturally--it can go about the creative work of shaping its corner of the world. The obvious answer to the question of in what sense humanity is made in the image of God is that like the God of the Bible, humanity is creative. In fact the only real question here is how anyone would have ever thought otherwise. (The answer in that case, I believe, is that theologians did try to graft theology onto philosophy in the paradigm of the Greek thinkers who created philosophy as we know it. The problem is that Greek thought has no directly practical view of God as the Creator. Following the Platonic/Stoic/ Aristotelian lead, God became an intellect, and we became like God in possessing intellect. Thus, the simple, direct, obvious answer was overlooked that we are like God in that we are creative.) But what happens to a creature emerging from a stage in which it adapts as a species to the environment when it learns to shape its environment in important ways according to individual preference? The operatives are turned upside down.

Humanity was confronted at that point--and still is--with the fact that it has two very different sources of value. One source derives from its perspective as a being within a given environment. The other source derives from its perspective as a being that can shape its environment for good or bad. A series of related antonyms depict at the divided perspective: subjective/objective, individual/collective-holistic, egoistic/altruistic, and so on. But for purposes of these essays, we will focus on what I believe to be the root antithesis: We can be viewed from a theological perspective as both creatures and creators. And as we shall see, the tragedy enacted in the Genesis mythos is that humanity is tempted to see the creaturely point of view as the highest and best. It is tempted, in other words, to create false gods by using creaturely perspectives to inform its creative goals.

The upshot of this brief characterizastion of the biblical creation mythos is that it begins by dramatically framing humanity's most central and most urgent question: will we and can we get over the continual temptation that besets us to take the point of view of our lower nature as animals (creatures) seeking to get the most for ourselves in a world created for us rather than the point of view of creators who need to responsibly situate ourselves in a world ever more of our making. What science needs to understand is that religion has been asking and answering that question for milenia. And religion too needs to inform itself of that very thing.

To my knowledge it was C. S. Lewis who first explicitly framed this point of view in a way that connects how it is that evolution lands us in the midst of the very point of view enacted in the biblical mythos:

"...everyone has been told that man has evolved from lower types of life. Consequently, people often wonder 'What is the next step?'"2

The claim here is that the next step has been contemplated, though not framed in terms of evolution, for as long as intelligent people have read and thought about the Bible. Whether one is a Christian or not, or even a theist or not, a tradition that has formulated an answer to this fundamental question facing all of humanity deserves to be listened to--especially when the question, let alone an answer to it, has not even occurred to the philosophical and scientific traditions. That is not to say that one need be a theist to consider the point of view to be presented here. That is one reason I call this a theology for atheists.

[Note: I will work on CREATURE AND CREATOR: A THEOLOGY FOR ATHEISTS periodically, as I have time. And some times I will rewrite or add to what I have written, rather than add new chapters. Infact, expect quite a lot of that, since I tend to work best from a "centered" perspective, which means that new insights tend to affect my central point as well as being additions or extrapolations from it. I am taking this approach so that i do not have to decide between working at then depth I want to write from and posting frequently enough to generate interest in the ideas.]

Honesty as Fully-Informed Logical Elegance

2009-07-24T10:49:00.000-07:00

I'm working out the final strategy for a patent application today, and in trying to perfect the application my goal can best be described as "fully informed logical elegance." That is, I want my application to be the simplest possible depiction of only the essential aspects of my invention, where "invention" is understood as a new way or means to accomplish a desirable end. Of course, one cannot assume one actually has an invention: Each patent claim requires research to be credible, and even after being granted a patent, the patent has provisional "credibility" in the sense of being subject to disallowance on the basis of further research. My goal in writing my patent application, then, is to give the simplest, fullest and most straightforward rendering of my invention that I can claim, given a full understanding the the field in which I claim my invention. In short, it is my duty to strive after a fully-informed logical elegance in describing my patent claim.

This might sound obvious to the point of making the point needless. That would be wildly false. I'll give you a couple examples.

First, from talking with a patent examiner a couple of years ago. Because I filed a patent as a "small entity," I qualified as a "pro se" applicant. That is important for this story only in that I qualified to get help from the patent examiner as a result (assuming he believed that my claim was patentable but could use some professional help--BTW: the only changes that resulted were correcting a couple of spelling errors, which no patient reader of my musings will be surprised to hear :-)). In describing my approach to the claim in question, i basically said what I just wrote about seeking the shortest and most logically elegant description of my invention that I could manage. In telling him that I noted that most of the patents I had reviewed in preparing my application didn't seem to take that approach. "Lawyers!" he exclaimed, and proceeded to explain that in trying to protect every possible way to invent around their client's patent that lawyers typically take the opposite approach that I had: They seek to file a claim for every means of accomplishing the basic idea of the invention. The result is an extraordinary amount of needless complexity in a patent application. Now I don't want to be too critical. A patent for a good invention will probably--if the idea is really good, almost certainly--result in copy-cat versions of the invention that try to get around the patent on a technicality. One way to fend off such attempts is to make a seperate 'claim" of invention for every possible way that the filer can imagine a copy-cat "inventor" trying to evade the main claim. That sounds like a justifiable approach, given the fact that a lawyer is hired to protect her client's rights. That is, it sounds justifiable until you hear that a patent has a section called "Conclusion, Ramifications, and Scope" in which the patent writier can explain why she chose the particular "ideal embodiment' that she did, and how alternative means of accomplishing the desired end were considered and rejected. By simply rejecting alternative means of accomplishing the desired end, one puts a notice in the public record that that idea has already been considered, thereby disallowing any patent claim using that idea. So why do laywers add those alternative means of accomplishing the main claim to the claim section? Because by putting them there, they add the the technical section of the patent application that they can charge much more for writing. (There is a very specific and arcane set of rules for writing claims.) But by doing so, the logical clarity of the claims is obscured; the process of researching claims made much more difficult; and in general, much more work is made for lawyers who want to wrangle of money over hard to understand legal claims. It takes a certain amount of faith to take the opposite tack from the norm in writing a patent claim, but if a person has got an invention; describes it cogently; and can defend the description as the "ideal embodiment" in relation to inferior means of accomplishing the desired end, then there is no need for the multiplication of claims that serve no real end beyond lawyers' bank accounts and do damage to a system that ought to seek after fully-informed logical elegance...

The second example: The current US health care debate is full of either insincere bluster or profound ignorance. Either way there is a tremendous need to move in the direction of fully-informed logical elegance. Consider the conservative claims that the free market is the best way to deal with the current problems in our broken health care system AND that if the government creates an alternative to the free market offerings that the government alternative will have unfair advantages over the free market alternatives that may well put them out of business. It astounds me that apparently sincere people can hold those positions simultaneously and not begin to blush. And yet on the other hand, it astounds me just as much that a person as bright and knowledgable as our President can argue that the free market has had its chance, thereby rendering the conservative claim false (as Mr. Obama has claimed on many occasions). Isn't it clear that the kinds of standards that clarify grades of butter, apples, and eggs are not clarifying our choices in purchasing health care? But that instead an endlessly changing set of rules embedded in documents the size of books and written in dismaying jargons of the medical and legal professions make comparrisons across plans difficult and pointless even if they weren't difficult. That is enough to make it impossible for "the market approach" to work. But add to that the fact that people making the most important and expensive choices are often in a state of duress and extreme need, and the guarante is in place. If we don't fact the hard choices, and do so by clarifying what they are and how we might approach them--that is quite a task, but nothing less has a chance to work!--the entire present debate is disingenuous and doomed.

Well, it's sad that too often people protect their interest by obfuscation. The only way to combat that is to present a clear account of the matter that is being made unintelligible and hope that those who care about the matter will choose honest discussion over bluster and BS. Only by making fuly-informed logical elegance one's goal can a complex subject be rendered as clar as the subject allows. It is a goal devoutly to be wished...

Father-In-Law's Comment Prompts Change to Blog

2009-07-17T10:24:00.000-07:00

This is mostly a slice of life post, but it affacts my blogging. My eighty-one-year-old father-in-law and I were talking last weekend when my family and I visited him in Wisconsin. A kind man and a good host, he inquired about my doings. I told him that I had begun working on an essay about Nietzsche's critique of Christian values that starts from a comparison between the Apostle Paul and the author of The Antichrist. He replied, "Say, 'Paul was antichrist; then God healed him.' That's all that needs to be said."

So much for impressing the inlaws. Now, I'm no prophet, but this is a great matter. And a few words are in order about not putting my head on a platter.

I would agree that not many Christians need to concern themselves with Nietzsche. But in an ever-more pluralistic society, we can't just define good and bad according to our ingroup morality and expect others to say, with us, "That's all that needs to be said." So if we don't allow a few Christians to be different with respect to understanding and even appreciating outgroup perspectives, the result cannot be good.

More importantly, if I am right about doubt informing faith, we are doomed to being superficial even in our "in-group" understanding of faith, and precisely because we don't incorporate out-group perspectives. Since Nietzsche's is, perhaps, the ultimate "out-group" perspective." On that view he is our best teacher. I sincerely believe that.

Though I have not had the time this summer to do a proper job of writing about the insights that accrue as a result of taking up Nietzsche's challenges, I am more than ever convinced that there is much to be gained by doing so. If you read my posts the liklihood is that you came to them by way of following Into the World on Richard Beck's Experimental Theology blog. There I took up Nietzsche's view of Pilate's dismissive "What is truth?" comment. I've come to understand that there are equally valuable insights to be mined from his critique of Christian values.

But it is too much to ask of you that you follow my mere explorations on that topic. Since I can't devote more time to blogging till the fall, I will only post when I have a (relatively) finished chapter to present here. That means the posts will be infrequent for the duration of the summer, but I'm convinced that it is more important to leave my reader feeling "That was good, what there was of it," rather than, "That was a lot to read, but it wasn't very good." After all, my father-in-law is already convinced that I can blather on to no point. Why spread that point of view?

This is no dog--I hope!--but it does eat my blogging time...

2009-07-13T09:42:00.000-07:00

I've been having fun "working" in my spare time trying to perfect "RowPedo" so that it can be sold by next spring. Just thought you might like to know why my blogging is so infrequent of late.

Nietzsche VII: The Overman at the Evolutionary Crossroads

2009-07-04T10:54:00.000-07:00

If the will to power is embedded in human nature, we do not transcend it even when acting in accord with the moral law. Niestzsche's comment that "When the great man screams, the small man comes running with his tongue hanging out from lasciviousness" captures that view. True, "the small man's" desire to take "the great man's" place is not a dictate of the moral law. But the moral law is a way for "the small man" to level the power differential with "the great man." And so as we have noted, Nietzsche's overman was above the moral law and its stultifying effect on human greatness. Morality does not bring out our better selves, it imprisons them. Morals are based on a lie that denies the foundational struggle for power at the base of all nature, including human nature.

So goes the Nietzschian harangue. And if we translate Nietzsche's will to power into the view that each living organism by nature "seeks" the life strategy that has the best chance of perpetuating its genes, Nietzsche can be said to have a present-day defender in Richard Dawkins (THE SELFISH GENE).

But as noted in the last post, human beings are not just creatures embedded in a given environment. We are also creatures that modify our environments. That changes a lot. The old rules cannot be applied to the new reality. What does it mean to successfully colonize one's environment, if those doing the colonizing are also those overseeing and judging the merits of doing so? One possible outcome is that we will see ourselves as "weeds" in our own "garden." We oversee ourselves; go "meta" on ourselves; create our own good and evil, relative to our "garden"--the little corner of the world where our creative effort is directed. As noted in the last post, rather than being a primitive, simplistic myth that humanity has outgrown, the garden of Eden mythos is profoundly germaine to humanity's defining relationship to its world: we are creators of it as well as creatures in it. And that, I argued, is the foundamental message of Genesis 1-3. (And one need not be a theologian, or even a theist, to see it.)

That said, the Nietzschian/Dawkins point that it is foundational in human nature to seek a life strategy that optimises the chances to passing on our genes--construed as the evolutionary version of the will to power--hits a crossroads with a being that can become a weed in its own garden: will we sacrifice our lower selves for the sake of our higher--the weeds for the garden--or our higher for our lower--our garden for our weeds? It's a universal human dilemma; no other animal faces it; and the metaphor of the garden expresses it exceedingly well.

It was C. S. Lewis, to my knowledge, who first (in 1943) pointed out that Christianity functions like our next evolutionary step:

"People...ask when the next step in evolution--the step to something beyond man--will happen. But on the Christian view, it has happened already. In Christ a new kind of man appeared..." (MERE CHRISTIANITY, 62.)

Nietzsche's overman is still embedded in nature when humanity needs to transcend it--to go meta. But to go meta, when that implies that our old nature may have to be sacrificed when the new nature differs with it, that is no moot endeaver.

The solution to the possibility of sin discovered in the garden? Well, one must turn one's back on the desire to act out of the same impulses that motivate our lower natures: power and all that we can have because of it. We must learn to act from a position that values the good of not just ourselves but everyone who shares our environment. We must learn to serve, and to serve even sacrificially, or we are not acting with the best interest of our garden in mind... In that case we are acting like a weed in our own garden. Or a wolf in sheep's clothing.

I think that the King of the Kingdom of God would have to turn his back on the motivations that would have him replace human leadership without transcending it. He would have taught us that Nietzsche's overman missed the turn on the evolutionary road that really leads to a new kind of human being, and one fit to be "over" other men.

True Faith's Paradox

2009-06-27T11:58:00.000-07:00

I am going to be talking to a couple of young men in the next few weeks about philosophy and theology. Both are thoughtful, intelligent, youth pastors at conservative churches. When I think about what is essential to faith and what is not I keep coming back to the Tillich quote below. It is helpful to frame it by first considering a point well expressed in a comment, posted on the Templeton Foundation’s Big Question site—one I agree with while being unambiguously Christian. It’s important to get one’s head around this “point” if we are to have a compelling approach to our faith in our multicultural society.

RE: Whole Series
David
05/02/2009
I don't think that science makes belief in God obsolete. We will simply never be able to prove or disprove the existence of God. However, I think science (and history) DO make religion obsolete. It is simply an arrogent and psychological flaw to believe that God endorses a specific group's particular beliefs (and traditions) over others.

That a universal creator would share his divine secret among one group (or actually a select group, which preaches to the rest of the group) and allow the rest of the world to be fooled by "false" or "lesser" religions is utterly ridiculous.

This quote from Paul Tillich’s Dynamics of Faith forms a nice counterpoint to “David’s” comment above.

“[Christian faith] must also apply against itself the criterion which it uses against other forms of faith. Every type of faith has the tendency to elevate its concrete symbols to absolute validity. The criterion of the truth of faith, therefore, is that it implies an element of self-negation. That symbol is most adequate which expresses not only the ultimate but also its own lack of ultimacy. Christianity expresses itself in such a symbol in contrast to all other religions, namely, the cross of Christ. Jesus could not have been the Christ without sacrificing himself as Jesus to himself as the Christ. Any acceptance of Jesus as the Christ which is not the acceptance of Jesus the crucified is a form of idolatry.”

It will be fun--and I hope productive and helpful--to talk to Jeremy and Alex about this point of view.

St. Nietzsche VI: Over the Overman's Head

2009-06-26T10:13:00.000-07:00

In 1944 a book called "Plowman's Folly" took the United States by storm. Scandal of scandals, the book's author claimed that plowing the ground in preparation to plant crops was a bad idea. A blurb on the dust jacket, taken from Time Magazine, reads "The hottest farming argument since the tractor first challenged the horse..." That, by the way, was not a joke, and yes, the book's thesis was a hot topic nationally.

When my brother and sisters converged in Minot, ND, in 2007 to help my mother and step-father move out of there long time home into assisted living, my mother gave me Plowman's Folly with this note, dated December 10, 1993, inside:

"Lyle (my father) loved this book. I want one of my children to have it."

So "Folly" found its way to me, and I was delighted to find this note inside, which captured my father's passion for agriculture along with his personality very well:

"One of silliest and [most] cynical statements ever made in the history of our country is that "Anybody can farm." Devoid of truth. Good farmer has to know more about more things than any professional man. This belief has cost untold amounts of $. But nothing compared..."

These are shorthand talking points on a note card that was torn in half and used as a bookmark in "Folly."

What in the world does this have to do with Nietzsche's criticism of St. Paul? Everything, it turns out.

Gardening--which I will use as a metaphor for human interaction with the environment--is endlessly interesting. There is no sphere of human understanding that it does not enter. As Dad said, the good farmer "has to know more about more things than any professional man," who is ensconced in a particular area of expertise. As beings who continually learn more about how to manipulate our environment, rather than making the garden metaphor ever more remote as our agricultural roots fade in the distance, it becomes ever more germane. Gardening is explicit human interplay with the environment, but all human action is de facto human interplay with the environment. Conscious human manipulation of the environment began on a large scale with agriculture, but human activity in all "fields" entails interaction with our environment, whether we are mindful of it or not.

Furthermore, it would seem that agriculture was the progenitor of science. The particulars of what to plant where and when are rules of thumb analogous to scientific "laws" that followed on much experiment in the "garden," which is still the agronomist's "laboratory."

Here's the rub for Nietzsche's argument. He claimed that the will to power is fundamental making the moral law an impotent agent when it comes to changing human nature. On this, recall, Nietzsche and St. Paul agree. But Nietzsche goes on to point out that the moral law as Christians view it is contrary to nature, since it advocates for mercy and charity and humility, whereas nature always sides with the strong. Since nature is fundamental in making all living beings strive after the things they want--and Christian morals are no exception to this as they pervert nature by being a ploy to give "power" to the weak--to go against nature is to go against reality.

But, ironically, Nietzsche's view cannot survive a realistic view of human interaction with nature. Nietzsche sees wider nature as determining human nature. Our nature is subject to the will to power. But what determines the will to power? Does an organism do best by exploiting its niche, or by understanding its environment and doing best by way of its environment? An organism struggling to maximize its interests within a given environment will say the first. That organism will have a subjective view of good. "Good" means "good for it." An organism that can inpact the environment in a signifacant way must also consider its impact on the environment as part of its view of "good." That organism will have a subjective and an objective view of good, at least in the sense that its subjective "good" is tied to the good of its wider, "objective" environment. That means there are two points of view for a creature, like us, who sees good in a wider and more narrow frame of reference. For such a creature it seems that the wider frame should inform the narrower, making "Good" an objectve matter. But Nietzsche does not take note of this. He writes as if nature informs us that the strong whould dominate the weak. That makes "domination" the goal and hence the good. But is it good that mold overtakes--dominates--its host orange? By that analogy, it would be good for us to despoil our environment, the "orange" called earth.

But once we back away from a narrow frame of interest and admit the need to understand our environment in order to be good in relationship to it, we have a god's-eye view of the world. We are no longer just creatures reacting within an environment. We are creators making it.

Theologically this recasts my view of what it means to be makde in the image of God. For the writer of Genesis I think that the metaphor of the garden captured this very dilemma: we with God are makers of our world. Theologically, this metaphor, then, must hold the answer to our rejoinder to Nietzsche: We have a god's-eye view of nature that cannot be reduced to your narrow view of the will to power as determining our good. To be good, we must function within a wider, wholistic view of good. And that means that there is a moral law that is outside of us and should inform our sense of what we need to do. The moral law may not be fundamental--and with St. Paul you establish that in fact it is not. But the wider view says it SHOULD be. And the metaphor of the garden is precisely what brings that wider view into play in a way that converges with our very real human dilemma: We are creatures with two views of good, a god's-eye view and a creature's-eye view, and it is--in some sense to be sure--sin to capitulate to the creature's-eye view.

Re-read Genesis 1-3 and see if that children's story isn't a lot more sophistocated than it appears on first blush. IN fact, having read Dawkin's "The Selfish Gene" again recently, there is no mention of this crucial level of consideration. As creators of our world, we need the god's-eye view. As creatures within it, we loath to take on that responsibility, along with the sacrifices it might ential...

The picture at the head of this post is of the corner plot at our home. My wife goes out and gazes at it and the other plots lon Saturday mornings wondering what will make it better. As you can see, at the center fot he plot there is an open area, and she has yet to decide what should go there. It's a big decision, for a serious gardener.

Well, gotta go... Please forgive my not proofing this; recall this is prep for a rewriting in the fall.

St. Nietzsche V: Parting Company with St. Paul

2009-06-19T09:35:00.000-07:00

In the last Nietzsche post (numeral IV) I agreed with the third argument, that "it is the will to power, and not the moral law, that is fundamental to human motivation." And, "Accordingly, seeking to follow the moral law does not change human nature, fundamentally." Of course, the whole idea behind morals is that they really improve us and the world. So if they are but window dressing on a perspective which, if it is looked into deeply enough, shows us that we aren't really moral, we ought to be honest enough to face the fact. I agree with Nietzsche on that, completely. It happens that Paul agrees that, if we look deeply at ourselves, we aren't really moral: To quote Paul, "...sin has made its home in my nature." (Rom. 7:17, Phillips)

In addition to that, Nietzsche has the following complaint against Christianity and the Apostle Paul, whom he called "The First Christian" (an essay from "The Dawn" with that title explains Nietzsche's view): "The Christian conception of God [is of] God as god of the sick..." (The AntiChrist, tr. Kaufmann, section 18.) By teaching us to value compassion and humility and mercy and charity, etc., Christianity betrays our natural devotion to greatness and strength. My rejoinder to Nietzsche's view is that there is no human greatness or strength without long, loving, nurturing patience with human weakness and incompetence. Nietzsche's hyperbolic disparagement of Christian values is at least as naive and misguided as he takes the object of his scorn to be. But this impasse is hardly worth arriving at.

Fortunately, the disagreement can be followed to a deeper point. Both the Apostle Paul and the Great Atheist agree on the need to transcend the moral law: Nietzsche announces the "uber-mensch" and Paul "a new creature." (Gal. 6:15 KJV) The status quo is, to be sure, an impasse that is hardly worth arriving at.

But for Nietzsche,

"When one speaks of humanity, the idea is fundamental that this is something which separates and distinguishes man from nature. In reality, however, there is no such separation..." (from "Homer's Contest" in The Portable Nietzsche, tr. Kaufmann.)

The Apostle Paul agrees that,

"we [live] on the level of our lower nature." (Rom. 7:5, NEB)

The point of absolute departure for the two is precisely where it should be: grace, as understood in its primary, theological sense: divine assistance given to humanity in its state of helplessness apart for it. "For by grace you have been saved through faith..."

Before tracing the separation, let's note the astounding unity of the Apostle Paul and the Great Atheist on this point: we are estranged from the moral law by our very human nature. We are helpless in the face of the law, and here Nietzsche's view informs faith, precisely because it is unnatural; it is not in accord with who we fundamentally are. The "third argument" makes that case persuasively, and so we should be grateful to Nietzsche.

And since we are using the Great Atheist to make the point, why not bring in another to second it. ""There is really only one entity whose point of view matters in evolution, and that entity is the selfish gene." (Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006) p. 137.) And, "Genes are selected for their ability to make the best use of the levers of power at their disposal..." (Ibid.) A better "fundamental" explanation of human nature in accord with Nietzsche's will to power would be impossible to find. Since Dawkins does not think that his view from 1976 is outmoded--see his "Introduction to the Thirtieth Anniversary Edition"--it seems that Paul's point of view prior to grace accords with Nietzsche and Dawkins. And as a matter of fact, it is not a stretch to say that it is because his view accords with Dawkins and Nietzsche that he sees the need for grace. Paul was thoroughly up to date 2,000 years ago.

Of course, at that very point their views diverge in irreconcilable ways. But all this is to set up the following point: the way to transcend the impasse is encoded in the first biblical metaphors describing the relationship of divinity to humanity. And, I will contend, the view that Christianity set up--when understood at the necessary depth--offers a view of a truth that to too big for nature of science; a truth only faith can accept; but a truth none-the-less.

Preparation for Next Post

2009-06-12T05:53:00.000-07:00

Perhaps I've stretched your suspension of disbelief too far? St. Nietzsche? Doesn't nature contrast with supernature? Moral with immoral. Compassion with ruthlessness, etc.? Isn't Nietzsche on one side of these divides and saintliness on the other? Well, yes, but he has something important to teach us (persons of faith), and it was because of his iontellectual courage that he was able to think it and say it.

We who call ourselves Christians need to fully appreciate Nietzsche's critique, it turns out, to more fully understand our faith.

As preparation for the next post, it will help to read--again--Chapter Five from Into the World. You will find it by clicking on "September" in the sidebar and going to the September 19, 2008, post.

The material there--in "The Bible's Broadest Theme"--will be used to form the needed response to Argument III from the last post. As indicated before, I'm taking an informal approach to gathering the points of view for a more considered exposition in the fall. If you're willing to stick with me through this messy process, I'm grateful! And any thoughts about where this might be going will be appreciated.

St. Nietzsche IV: Arguments II and III

2009-06-06T09:38:00.000-07:00

Is it really so easy to counter Nietzsche as to note that there is no human greatness--no "uber-mensch"--without the long patience with weakness and smallness on every level that form the crucial initial stages of every human beings history? Well, it was with the first of the three arguments. Let's look at the next two. (And just a reminder, I'm basically vamping on implications taken from one of Nietzsche's aphorisms, which you can read by looking back a couple of posts.)

ARGUMENT II:

This argument begins with the point that the first argument turned on (see last post): If the two main ideas connected to "justice" are getting what one deserves and delivering equality of opportunity, then justice is inherently elitist in that it should overturn any biases AGAINST the best--the greatest--among us from getting the lion's share of the goods sought for in competition with other lesser human beings. And stated in the abstract, it is undoubtedly true. The entailments of the two main senses of "justice" brought into conjunction auger in Nietzsche's favor. I am both surprised that Nietzsche never offered this argument directly and sincerely of the opinion that the simple and summary critique offered above--and in the last post--counters it effectively. Consequently, my best guess is that Nietzsche also saw that making the argument explicit was a dead end. But that suggests the question, if he saw that this argument was a dead end for the reason stated, what else did he presumably see in it (to account for the fact that he did not recant)? That brings us to the second argument.

The remaining rationale is, in fact, easy to locate: Nietzsche thought that it was bad for human society to corrupt the moral law in order to overturn the elitist bias natural to justice. It is bad precisely because it is against nature.

So here's the second argument, reduced to a sentence: to the extent that it's against nature, human beings should not value mercy and compassion, as Christianity teaches them/us to do.

Notice that this second argument--or this supplement to the first, if you like--does not fall by applying the critique of the first: Since human beings mature slowly and need much nurture, it is good to be patient with the weakness and smallness of human beings in development. And if the more talented often take longer to develop because they are in training for the more difficult disciplines, well then, we should indulge them fully with patience and good will as they take their time developing.

And so it seems that there is a simple and effective Nietzscheian rejoinder to the simple and effective anti-Nietzschian rejoinder offered in response to the first argument.

Critique of the SECOND ARGUMENT:

Much of the human society each of us keeps is weak and small. Should I not love and honor my 85 year old mother because she has become frail and weak? That would imply an inhuman smallness of a particularly repugnant sort, certainly not something to be credited to an "uber-mensch." It is healthy and and good BECAUSE NATURAL for human beings to cherish friendships and institutional connections just because our personal histories--if nothing else--are tied to them. Nietzsche's crude endorsement of "greatness" and "nature" simply offends human nature.

ARGUMENT III:

This is the argument I originally was going to critique, before discovering while forming its critique that there were three separate points or arguments that needed a response. (And as a reminder, I am working this out for putting together as a more considered monograph-length essay to complement "Into the World.") Here it is, again, modified in accordance with my evolving understanding of it:

Tautologically, everyone wants what they want, and if one really wants something, all things considered, one also wills the means. This is a rationale for Nietzsche's will to power: we all want what we want along with the means to get it; the will to power is a truism.

Accordingly, the moral law as something people want is subject to the will to power.

But then it is the will to power and not the moral law that is fundamental to human motivation.

Accordingly, seeking to follow the moral law does not change human nature, fundamentally.

In that case, any hope to bring real, fundamental change to humanity must be by way of addressing the will to power, not through the moral law.

This, by the way is the "Principle of Futility" that I announced as forthcoming in a post about three weeks ago--should have made that connection earlier. Oops! The futility is with respect to the moral laws ability to change human nature for the better. That is, fundamentally the moral law does not make us more moral. If you think of Paul's view of the law as presented in Galations and Romans, I'm pretty sure you can see how this can be developed.

Critique of the THIRD ARGUMENT:

I have no critique of this argument, narrowly considered. That is, I think that Nietzsche is correct. But here's the fun part. I think he is making the same point as the Apostle Paul! I'll make that connection explicit in the next post, along with how Christianity addresses the will to power with the gospel...

[Note: I'm trying to get a business off the ground, and one that must "make hay" in the summer. It just might be a couple weeks before I can post again. Sorry about that.]

St. Nietzsche III: How does one get more life?

2009-06-05T10:13:00.000-07:00

How do we get more life? In many ways the answer is likely very particular for each of us. The things that you want, beyond the basics, are not likely to overlap much with my wants. But even in the particulars where we are more at variance than alike, we share an abstract commonality: we want power. We all want the power to get the things we want. True, a person can want something, but not enough to do what it takes to get it, but in that case, all things considered, she doesn't really want it.

In the last couple posts we looked at an argument inspired by a comment of Nietzsche's that entails--on my interpretation at least--that the moral law can be a way for the "little man" who envy's "the great man" to gain power over him. This point of view is destabalizing for morality, since it means that it does not necessarily "right" anything when it protects the little man from the great. It just churns the wheels of power without making any real change in the character of the person wielding it. Of course, for Nietzsche, the problem is much worse: The moral law is counter to nature in its protecting the little man from the dominance of the great.

The surprising point in the last post is that Nietzsche and Christianity agree on this: The moral law does not make us better; it does not improve humanity when it turns the tables on a powerful person by subjecting her to its sanctions. The history of the Jewish nation, in Paul's writings, teach us that: it was our "tutor" to bring us to the understanding that "If a law had been given which had power to bestows life, then indeed righteousness would have come from keeping the law. But Scripture has declared the whole world to be prisoners in subjection to sin..." (Galations 3:21-2) In effect, Paul makes the underlying complaint of Nietzsche--that the law teaches us that human nature makes the law a sham--into a fundamental doctrine of the faith. It's interesting when Christ and Antichrist find a point of agreement. To me, that's a place where we just might learn something important.

Last week, I stated that I would critique Nietzsche's argument (or the argument implicit in my interpretation of him). In looking more closely, I found THREE. My approach is still informal and tentative, but the value of thinking this through can hardly be overstated: We are considering two very different views of how to approach life, and we have found a common point of departure. What we learn about these basic and antithetical approaches to life almost can't fail to be important. Today I will critique just the first of the three distinct arguments.

ARGUMENT 1:

Justice, as an end that many people want, entails wanting the power to achieve it.

But justice can be approached from two very different starting points: A. People should get what they earn or otherwise deserve, and B. People should all be given an equal opportunity to pursue the goods they want.

Crucially, if everyone is given an equal opportunity to pursue the goods they want, it will be the "great" who are successful.

Therefore, justice should not overturn the natural order in which the strong or "great" win and the weak or "small" lose. Let's just say it: Justice should be--and by nature is--elitist. In fact, if it really were, Nietzsche would have, I believe, endorsed it.

But under the spell of Christianity's transvaluation of values, we have unnaturally learned to love the weak and value mercy. Therefore "justice" has become unjust. The great of humanity should be above it: hence, the uber-mensch.

CRITIQUE OF ARGUMENT 1:

This will be short. Obviously no human greatness is achieved without great nurture. Greatness follows on a patience with weakness and smallness that takes decades and even scores of years to achieve. The idea that a "great man" like Nietzsche can look back at the people and tradition that raised him and scorn it for indulging weakness and smallness is not just bad manners, but ludicrous inconsistency. It is crucial to human greatness that we love the weak.

Nevertheless, there are also crucial lessons to be learned from Nietzsche's critique, lessons connected with the point of departure he shares with Paul. We will turn to lessons after considering the other two arguments. And remember; we are thinking about how to approach life to get what we want from it--to get the most out of it.

St. Nietzsche Part Two: Nietzsche and Paul on the Law's Futility

2009-05-29T07:04:00.000-07:00

[Note to Readers: Before beginning this post I thought I'd share some self-criticism related to this blog and why my conclusion is that I should continue. There are plenty of people as bright, as informed about the Bible, philosophy, and theology, as able to form their thoughts in apt language, etc., as am I. In short, if eminence is the justification for continuing to blog, I should not. (It is a different matter that I get a lot out of the process: I could simply journal.) So why wouldn't I leave my kind readers in those many more eminent hands? The answer comes down to approach. I believe that I am modeling something that deserves--in fact needs--to catch on with religious intellectual leaders: faith that demonstrates its relevance and importance by taking on its greatest challenges. For too long a choice between conservative Christianity's anti-intellectualism and liberal Christianity's capitulation to Modernism/Post-Modernism/Whatever-Comes-Next has gutted faith of its integrity, its relevance, and its power. To those of us who see faith as the most important aspect of life--and there are different ways of framing why--that is a travesty. Anti-intellectualism or capitulation--either way Christians feed the view that faith lacks relevance, integrity and power. So what's special about my approach? It moves against the "avoid or capitulate" dynamic, because it engages the toughest questions it can find. And oddly enough, there are answers, even for a less-than-eminent thinker such as I. That's precisely what needs to be modeled, and though I'm certainly not unique in this. That's why I will continue to blog, despite the fact that I have very little time to devote to it. And who better than Nietzsche to be our friend in this important project of engaging the tough questions?]

Apparently Nietzsche thought so little--I speak literally here, though the same is certainly true figuratively--of Christian morality that he failed to see the powerful argument against it embedded in his anti-Christian stance: favoring the weak empowers them, thereby unnaturally frustrating the strong. His "overman" would see through this and have nothing to do with the herd that follows its unnatural, even sick, point of view. We looked at the argument embedded in this perspective in the last post. The argument is implicit in the quote, "When the great man screams, the small man comes running with his tongue hanging out form lasciviousness." (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, tr. Kaufmann, Third Part.)

From the Christian point of view Nietzsche's comment is potentially devastating. In essence he is saying, "By envying the strong, the herd shows that its claim to equality under the law is just a way of turning the tables on the natural order without changing it for the better: The law empowers the weak without changing the fact that it is the will to power--the desire to be the one wielding power--that is in play. He called this "...the self-deception of the moral concepts..." (The Anti-Christ, tr. Kaufmann, section 20.)

Let's frame the argument Nietzsche might have made--provisionally and informally for now:

Christians want to do good. We define "good" morally, and claim that biblical law prescribes it, at least more-or-less. But the de facto good for all people is what they in fact want, and all people want power, even if that want comes in the form of a purported desire for moral good to prevail. Therefore, the moral good is not a species apart from the will to power. Moreover, if particular goods always inform the content regulated by the moral law, the moral law does not change the nature of goodness in the sense of changing what is wanted, but only adds a regulative dimension which--when enforced--prevents the stronger individual from taking advantage of the weaker by taking a proportionately greater amount of the good. But one measure of justice and goodness is that people get what they deserve. If we then define "deserve" as a product of what a person can do, we derive the conclusion that the stronger should get the lion's share of the goods that people seek: the domination of the weak by the strong is natural. The moral law does not change the fact that the strong can get more goods by dint of their strength. Hence, it does not change the fact that it is better to be strong. But if it's better to be strong, then the moral law stultifies the good by preventing the stronger individual from taking advantage of the weaker by taking a larger proportion--even the lion's portion--of the good. From the standpoint of nature, the moral law is a self-inflicted sham, a self-deception, perpetrated on society by which the weaker individual (or nation or culture, etc.) overthrows the natural order without offering a good of its own to justify the overthrowing of the natural order, in which the strong dominate the weak.

For now it is enough to note that this argument depends on the strong and the weak both wanting the same thing--the goods of nature. And if human nature cannot be--has not been--transcended, Nietzsche's point of view, which I hope to have used fairly to construct this "argument," prevails. But a critique from a meta-Nietzschian Christian point of view will wait for another post. Today, it is the congruence of the Apostle Paul's point of view with Nietzsche's that we will observe.

For Paul, the moral law was/is "our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ" (Gal. 3:24, KJV) or "the law was like a strict governess in charge of us until we went to the school of Christ..." (Phillips) or "...the law was a kind of tutor..." (NEB).

Paul's point is that we should have learned from our tutor and graduated to something better: "Christ set us free, to be free men. Stand firm, then, and refuse to be tied to the yoke of slavery again." (Gal. 5:1, NEB) We, as Christians, should live for something higher. In that we agree with Nietzsche and his call for the "ubermensch": "Man...is something that must be overcome." (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, tr. Kaufmann, Fourth Part.) In fact, Paul is every bit as emphatic--and that is a euphemism--as Nietzsche: "You stupid Galations!" (Gal. 3:1, NEB) Why? They were returning to the law, which could not provide authentic "life" or produce "righteousness." (Gal. 3:31)

On this level of abstraction, Paul and Nietzsche are in complete agreement. Humanity needs a higher kind of life than that made possible by the law. In fact, we would have to be stupid--Paul's words--not to see it. And it is my contention that by taking Nietzsche seriously, we get a better view of Christianity and the good that it proposes.

[A second note to Readers: I have come to see that a second monograph length essay derived from Nietzsche's criticism of Christianity is in order. The first was, for those who did not read it, "Into the World," an answer to Nietzsche's view that Pilate's famous question is the annihilation of faith. This summer I will examine facets of this challenge and prepare for a more considered response in the fall, when I have more time...]

St. Nietzsche Part One: On "the most corrupt kind of corruption"

2009-05-22T03:20:00.000-07:00

Our conclusion from last week, that the resurrection turns the tables on the tables that keep turning in human history answers Nietzsche's uber-complaint against Christianity, that it engenders "the most corrupt kind of corruption." (The Antichrist, tr. Kaufmann, section 58.)

A fuller statement is found earlier in The Antichrist (section 18): "The Christian concept of God--God as god of the sick...is one of the most corrupt conceptions of the divine ever attained on earth. It may even represent the low-water mark in the descending development of the divine types. God degenerated into the contradiction of life, instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yes! God as the declaration of war against life, against nature, against the will to live." I contend that Nietzsche's point, when unpacked, does not threaten the Christian position, but rather makes it clear why it is needed.

Speaking entirely in the abstract, if a weaker, aggrieved party uses legal or moral sanction to overthrow a stronger, aggrieving party, though justice will presumably be served, but is it necessarily the case that good has been served in addition? Nietzsche helps us see that the presumption is false.

He, of course, opposed moral and legal sanction against the stronger party on behalf of the weaker on the grounds that it is natural for the strong to dominate the weak. That is what nature sanctions, he would say, so we should too.

But there is a much more interesting aspect of this charge that he brings against Christianity: that its transvaluation (its unnatural love of weakness instead of strength: cf "the beatitudes") is born out of envy: "'When the great man screams, the small man comes running with his tongue hanging from lasciviousness.'" (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, tr. Kaufmann, Third Part.) If Nietzsche is correct here, it is the end of a moral justification of justice: we may support justice out of social necessity, but the idea that it serves good has been burlesqued. From this perspective the Apostle Paul and Nietzsche agree: Humanity is "a slave to the law of sin." (Romans 7:25--of course Nietzsche would not call it "sin.")

The tablative justice that we considered last week, then, turns on the power that the law gives to the aggrieved. But the power of the aggrieved is just another form of power, and a form that Nietzsche hates because it overturns the natural order and that Christianity critiques--or at least ought to--as spinning the wheels of justice without making any progress toward good. Nature will not be transcended in Nietzsche's view: So justice is a sham. He was correct in this, at least, a justice that does nothing more than turn the tables on the natural order without implementing a clear good in its place is, in fact, the most corrupt kind of corruption." And that is not possible without a change of heart that redefines the human nature. We ought to thank him for that crucial point and take it to heart.

To make progress toward good, it is necessary that the one who takes power does so with the intent of benefiting others with that power. That is the ostensible goal of the Christian view of Agape love. The question, of course, is whether Christianity really turns the tables on the turning of the tables. More on that next time, as we examine a related and further critique of Nietzsche's, for which we should be grateful.

As relief to the abstract point of view given here, it's worth noting that as Talk of the Nation ended yesterday (5/21/09, NPR) the parting comment following a discussion of the ongoing debate between our President and the former Vice president was that--and I paraphrase--projecting strength (Cheney) or projecting values (Obama) is a classic dilemma. If this post is on target, it is only by using strength to promote the welfare of others that the dilemma can be resolved.

Christianity Overturns the Thaumaturgical Urge

2009-05-15T03:23:00.000-07:00

I think that my dad dreaded long drives alone with me, which happened from time to time, since he was a rancher who sold registered cattle to commercial ranchers and would offer to deliver the cattle as a means to close the sale. I'd go along at my mother's urging (which might be telling about me in some way, especially since my brother and sisters didn't). Why the dread on my dad's part? My endless string of musings about whether cows or horses, trucks to tractors, bears or lions, and so on ad nauseum, would win in a fight. I might think that I was a strange little boy, if Pokemon, X-Men, Transformers, Ninja Turtles, etc., hadn't proved beyond a reasonable doubt that little boys are typically oriented toward such questions. In the days before commercial exploitation of this fighting fixation, my special reverie was imagining one variety of dinosaur pitted against another, which is now played out on the Discovery Channel in the name of science. Life is good.

So what does this have to do with "Christianity" and "the Thaumaturgical Urge"? Let's begin with "thaumaturgy." It's a contest between wonder workers or miracle workers. A very special sort of fight. And the fight of fights would be between gods.

One need not be a polytheist to have the fun, though a monotheist's version of a divine thaumaturgy will have a very predictable outcome. Obviously the false god can't beat the One True God. (There is something odd in even making these statements as a Christian: To have such a contest God would have to act on the plane where gods act--which is to say, on Olympus or Valhalla--OK they're not exactly planes, let alone plains, but you get the point: God would have to be a non-God, i.e., a creature to be in such a contest directly.) Nevertheless, thaumaturgical contests are played out in the Bible, albeit with the help of God's representatives, to avoid the prohibited representation of God. I suppose the most famous one is where Moses throws down his staff, which turns into a serpent and eats Pharoah's magicians' serpents.

But there is a much more explicit version: ""'How long will you go limping with two different opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Ba'al, then follow him." (I Kings 18:21, RSV) Eli'jah's thaumaturgical challenge follows. Both Ba'al's prophets--450 of them--and the Lord's prophet (Eli'jah was the one remaining faithful prophet of the Lord)were to set out sacrifices on an alter and ask their god/God to send down fire to consume it. Ba'al's 450 prophets "...cried aloud, and cut themselves after their custom with swords and lances, until the blood gushed out... And as midday passed, they raved on..." (18:28-9) You get the picture. Lots of drama out of Ba'al's 450 prophets, but no action from Ba'al.

Then it's Eli'jah's turn. He made an alter of twelve large stones; built a trench around it; laid out the sacrifice; doused the alter with water; and filled the trench. Then he douses the alter two more times. "Then the fire of the Lord fell, and consumed the burnt offering, and the wood, and the stones, and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench." (18:37-8) Moreover, after God wins, Ba'al's prophets, all 450 of them, are killed. (Ironically, it's in the next chapter that the famous phrase describing God as speaking in "a still small voice" is found.)

If there is something a bit embarrassing here for Christians, you're already getting the point that I am about to make: we haven't really understood the point of Christianity unless we understand that it overturns the thaumaturgical urge--that little-boy preoccupation with "My God can beat up your God!"

For, after all, Caesar was thought of as a god incarnate by the Ancient Romans. And Jesus was thought of as God incarnate by Christians. Jesus walked into Jerusalem to the cheers of a capital city that hoped he would become a king to overthrow Rome, and implicitly to defeat Rome's incarnate god. He declined. Jesus declined to take on Rome. Instead, he accepted the cross (which he spent three years aiming at, as is clear from the narrative structure of Mark, but that's for another post). And in doing so he should have made it clear to us that the little boy's view of life must be left behind. Whose god can beat up whose god, whose culture can beat up whose culture--even whose team can beat whose team,oops, that's just for fun!--are all questions that bespeak spiritual immaturity.

I'm not sure why you haven't read this elsewhere. It's the gestalt narrative that can only be seen against the backdrop of the 1st Century Jewish peoples subjugation to Rome and its imperial claim to incarnate divinity at the helm. Tablative justice would have the Lord God turn the tables on Rome's puny human "god." Jesus did not enter that contest. Instead he turned the tables on the thaumaturgical urge to have one's god defeat one's enemies. He offered a better way: Love your enemies.

The narrative goes on to say, after the crucifixion, that Jesus rose from the grave. Now doubt is a good thing, if you understand what you doubt. Hume made a good point when he noted that nature's laws are know as laws precisely because they tell us what always happens. Hence, no resurrection. But it precisely the contention of Christianity that it describes something completely unique: God showing us a better way that we can accept by faith.

Reality makes us we accept what we cannot change. That makes might the ultimate right, and it means that little boys understand the real game when they play at their imaginary thaumaturges. Wolf and bear cubs play at their appropriate life and death contests. For little boys the imaginations stand in, as the human mind is the battleground where victory is gained or not with our species. (I don't want to leave out little girls, it's just that I can speak for little boys much more confidently...)

In asking us to mature beyond a little boys' view of the world, Christianity also asks us to move beyond a cynical view of the world in which might is right. In doubting the resurrection one doubts the reality of the view that that tables have been turned on the tables that keep turning in human history. It asks us to believe that something outside history has offered us an answer to the trouble with human history--something that really counters the might is right view of reality.

If you want to doubt that that was ever vouched to us through the token of the resurrection, I join you. But then you can't understand faith unless you begin with doubt. It's the backdrop of doubt that tells us the content of faith. And as much as I doubt, I can't help but believe that Jesus showed us a better way... And that's faith. A faith that's only meaningful because I doubt.

Next week we'll look at "The Principle of Futility" as a backdrop for faith.

Another "Does Science Make Belief in God Obsolete" Post

2009-03-23T19:07:00.001-07:00

It will be interesting to see if this attracts any comments on the Templeton Foundation's "Big Questions" site. I know that I noted that I'd post again around May 15, but this condenses Peirce's idea better than my previous post on this argument. I'll be reading through background info on this argument in the meantime. I will post further "conversation" on this topic, if it arises. Otherwise, posts will resume by 5/15.

RE: Whole Series
Tracy Witham
03/12/2009
From C.S. Peirce's point of view, science confirms the God hypothesis. If we entertain the idea that an analogue of mind is suggested by the universe, the only way to test the hypothesis is to investigate the world in a way that sees to what extent it does conform to human understanding. Thus, the ongoing march of science is the basis for belief in God.

But Peirce was careful to separate the reality of God from an understanding of God that supposes God's "[reacting] with other like things in the environment," which he called "fetishism" ("A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God"). If so, neither can the kind of understanding science provides undermine Peirce's God hypothesis.

Peirce begins with a simple analogy that suggests the reality of God; the operation of science confirms it in the only possible way; and yet the analogy cannot be critiqued by science without implying "fetishism." This fine little conundrum deserves a name: how about "Peirce's Pretty Pickle"?

On Religious Right

2009-03-21T02:20:00.000-07:00

How can "being religious" be about "being right" if it means believing that something greater than you or I can understand requires us to affirm each other?

If the creeds of my faith are ways of affirming that something greater than I can understand makes that demand of me, then I believe in those creeds. If not, then not. I do affirm that something greater than I can understand requires that of me. That is my creed.

I'll Be Back at Metaponderance by 5/15

2009-03-20T06:48:00.000-07:00

Ice will be out on Minnesota's lakes in a couple of weeks!!!!! That along with the annual meeting for my little company coming up in May means I need to focus on prototypes and presentations. I look forward to returning to blogging on 5/15, or so. Here are some things I'll be thinking about between now and then.

1. Is sacrifice essential to faith? And if so, what kind or kinds?

2. Where does religious authority come from? and where should it?

3. What, if anything, is unique to faith, and is it essential? And,

4. We'll revisit Peirce's "Neglected Argument" with the hopes of making the name a misnomer--or at least determining whether it deserves better.

There is a provisional theological circle forming in my mind around these topics, so we'll see what happens.

Best wishes till May!

Tracy

Peirce's "Suggestion" of God

2009-03-16T07:55:00.000-07:00

Peirce's "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God" has two very interesting features:

1. It overturns the usual view that science and belief in God are at odds.

And 2. It has a one-way valence with respect to logical entailment. It will be helpful to review the latter before moving on. Peirce claimed that an analogue of mind is "suggested" by the universal feature of a scientific understanding of the universe, that it provides for "later stages in earlier ones." (Peirce, "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God.") Presumably he meant to call attention to the fact that both human understanding and the universe proceed by "working towards" their "conclusions." And to use Chomsky's words, quoted in the comment to the previous post, "...our mental constitution permits us to arrive at knowledge of the world insofar as our innate capacity to create theories happens to match some aspect of the structure of the world." ("On Interpreting the World" in Problems of Knowledge and Freedom, p. 20.) Presumably, then, the human mind's unfolding understanding of the world and the world's unfolding that the human mind studies share common features. Peirce's God hypothesis simply notes this.

But in noting "this," how could anyone reach a deeper understanding of the "suggestion," or "hypothesis" in order to critique it? The clear problem is that the needed commonality that supports the suggestion underlies any ability to critique itself. Stated metaphorically, we can't get "behind" the point of view that Peirce uses to suggest his God hypothesis, and yet every explanation that science does succeed in making furthers the suggestion. The valence is, therefore, one-way.

But the argument is a form of the teleological argument, only brought to the level of the core assumption of any ability of ours to understand the world. As such it bears some similarity to the critique of the fine tuning argument by way of the anthropic principle.

My aim in this (last) post on Peirce's argument is to eliminate a reason why a scholar looking at it might discount its worth prior to examining it carefully. (And my hope in posting on it here is to do my small part in drawing attention to it as possibly an important--but "Neglected," as Peirce claimed--argument.

But those who critique the fine tuning argument by way of the anthropic principle do so by suggesting that we shouldn't be surprised to live in a universe finely adapted to supporting human life: Otherwise we wouldn't be here! Therefore the apparent improbability of such fine tuning has no implicative force (and I am being simplistic with the purpose of just "suggesting" the argument here). See here.

But that move will not work to critique Peirce's argument. For to claim that any universe that we can understand will have to share basic features with the human mind is exactly Peirce's point: the universe suggests an analogue of mind--in fact human understanding of the universe implies it.

That the universe works like a mind cannot be doubted by a mind that claims to understand the universe. And a mind that doesn't claim to understand the universe cannot comment. One-way valence.

How strong is the suggestion? That question implies the ability to critique the "suggestion," which is precisely what cannot be done by a mind that assumes it.

That's why the suggestion of God cannot be eliminated...

A Fascinating Feature of Peirce's "Neglected Argument"

2009-03-13T08:52:00.000-07:00

C. S. Peirce’s “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God” possess this extraordinary feature: It blocks critique on the level at which it is presented. That feature is at once, potentially, a troubling and/or exciting feature of the argument. It deserves our attention.

Recall the core of the extremely short presentation from last week.

A universal feature of our scientific understanding of the universe is “its provision for later stages in earlier ones.”1

This line of reflection “will inevitably suggest the hypothesis of God’s Reality.”2 (By “God” here Peirce meant “an analogue of mind.”3)

Since you can refer back to the previous post, I will get right to the extraordinary feature, and to make it stand out, I will present it in the starkest possible terms.

The extraordinary feature becomes apparent when we review how science confirms Peirce’s “God hypothesis.”

The only way to confirm the hypothesis that an analogue of mind is suggested by the universe’s “provision for later stages in earlier ones,” is to examine it to the best of one’s ability to see whether it conforms to human understanding. Thus, the success of science becomes the basis for belief in God.

Peirce, however, was careful to separate the Reality of God from this misunderstanding: that God “reacts with other like things in the environment,” which he called “fetishism.”5

But if so, neither can the kind of understanding science provides undermine the God hypothesis. For that would be to analyze the God hypothesis at the logical level of fetishism. (See comments for further explanation.)

Consequently, Peirce’s argument advances a hypothesis that science and only science can support, but cannot critique.

Peirce sometimes calls his “Argument” a “suggestion”; other times a “hypothesis”; it is in fact a hypothesis based on an analogy. He goes into some depth, actually, to explain the “retroductive”—-yes, yet another word for it--reasoning used in this “Argument” as a form of what he elsewhere called “an appeal to one’s own instinct, which is to argument what substance is to shadow…”6

In summary, Peirce begins with an analogy, and science supports it, but cannot critique it without falling into “fetishism.” That's the "feature." If I were to write a monograph explicating the idea, I would call it "The Flaming Sword of God" to make use of the Genesis Chapter 3 metaphor.

In the following comment to the Templeton Foundation’s Big Question site on “Does Science Make Belief in God Obsolete” I suggested that the Foundation might “assign an investigation of Peirce’s view to a real scholar." (I had actually posted the comment with the thought that it was for internal use, not public, and addressed it to “The Editors” of the site to explicitly make that designation. After the fact I realized that it is customary for publications to post letters “To the Editor.” If my web readers think that in meeting me they would be impressed by my evident brilliance, keep that in mind. :-) That said, this post shows that my hubris is tenacious: I fear that any “real scholar” who evaluates of Peirce’s argument may very well miss the “extraordinary feature” I just pointed out. That's the reason for this post. At any rate, it will be interesting to see whether anything comes of this.)

RE: Whole Series
Tracy Witham
03/07/2009
I just came across an article by the founder of pragmatism, C.S. Peirce, titled "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God." Its content is tremendously relevant to this conversation. Peirce thought that "many of the [scientists] of [his] generation" believed in the reality of God, without knowing it. Why? Because "the discoveries of science, [with] their enabling us to predict what will be the course of nature, is proof conclusive that . . . we can catch a fragment of [God's] thought."

Peirce's view follows from his claim that a universal feature of our scientific understanding is "its provision for later stages in earlier ones" and from his view that the statement in quotes entails an analogue of mind, and therefore God. In Peirce's view, science is the confirmation of the God hypothesis. Since a famed philosopher of science and the founder of America's only native philosophy framed a view of the relationship of science and God that turns your "Big Question" upside down, I thought you'd like to know about it.

It's an idea that brings to mind Paul Davies's "The Mind of God" and Einstein's famous statement to the effect that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is its comprehensibility. So the idea's been around, but Peirce was correct in calling it a neglected argument. It deserves better. Maybe someone at your foundation should assign an investigation of Peirce's view to a real scholar. My guess is that people of good will on all sides could applaud it.

Notes:
1. Charles Sanders Peirce, "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God," here.
2. Ibid.
3. "The Concept of God," in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, (Dover Publications, Inc., New York, 1955) 376.
4. "Neglected."
5. Ibid.
6. "Concept," 377.)

Microclesia: What the World Needs Now

2009-03-09T15:25:00.000-07:00

Would you like to see some great thinking about the present world and national crises--energy, environmental, financial, cultural? Or are the problems just too overwhelming? Do yourself a favor and check out John La Grou's blog, Microclesia. The March 3 post with a video of Willie Smit's "TEDTalk" is a good place to start, but don't stop there. Microclesia.com

"A Neglected Argument"

2009-03-07T04:58:00.000-08:00

God Doesn't Exist, but Is Real

As this quote from Charles Sanders Peirce states, saying that God is real but does not exist seems like "overscrupulosity," but it has important implications: "I...take the liberty of substituting 'reality' for 'existence.' This is perhaps overscrupulosity; but I myself always use exist in its strict philosophical sense of 'react with the other like things in the environment.' Of course, in that sense it would be fetishism to say that God exists." ("The Concept of God," in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (Dover Publications, Inc., New York, 1955) p. 375.)

Whether one calls it "fetishism" or not, the important point is that from the workings of the world we cannot detect the hand of God in operation. Therefore, no "argumentation" (distinct from "argument" in Peirce's lexicon) about God is possible; that is, no specific understanding of the operation of the world of the kind science gives us can terminate in a conclusion implicating God as in, "Therefore God must have begun or entered the causal sequence leading to this observable effect." This view makes "creation science" oxymoronic.

But, surprisingly, it does not eliminate a kind of "argument" (distinct from "argumentation" in Peirce's lexicon) for God's reality from being used.

Only "Arguments," Not "Argumentations," Can Be Made for God's Reality

"An 'Argument' is any process of thought reasonably tending to produce a definite belief. An 'argumentation' is an Argument proceeding upon definitely formulated premises." (From "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God." Public domain.) See here.

The point here is that as soon as one gets specific about the idea that God is real, one changes from a (legitimate) argument to (illegitimate) argumentation. This follows from the view that by using "definitely formulated premises" one references specific aspects of the world that must be explained by God. This lands one's "argumentation" in the sphere of oxymoronic "creation science."

Yet that seems to leave any possibility for acceptable "arguments" in a very weak position. How can an argument that lacks specificity produce any conclusion that isn't too vague to be of use? After all, Peirce did define "An argument" as "any process of thought reasonably tending to produce a definite belief." ("Neglected," Part I.)

To "A Neglected Argument"

To answer that objection, it is best to actually present Peirce's "argument."

(a) The study of metaphysical problems runs into difficulties "that logical analysis will not suffice to solve. Some of the best [metaphysicians] will be motivated by a desire to comprehend universe-wide aggregates of unformulated but partly experienced phenomena." ("Neglected," Part I)

(b) A universal feature of our scientific understanding of the universe is "its provision for later stages in earlier ones." ("Neglected," Part I.)

(c) This line of reflection "will inevitably suggest the hypothesis of God's Reality." ("Neglected," Part I.)

That's it, and I must confess that when I read through the argument--not having any "that's it" to notify me of its passing--I continued reading on as if there must be more. Well, in a sense there is, in the form of how it is that the hypothesis of God is "suggested." But before we turn to that, it is important to recall one thing and note another.

Recall that Peirce informs us that it is fetishism to think of God functioning within the causal nexus of the world, thereby making any definite formulation of God's action in the world a misunderstanding to begin with. From that we cannot be surprised to see no "argument" set forth that uses specific attributes of the world or arguments depending on specific understandings of the world. Defending his approach, Peirce wrote, "[Those] who are given to defining too much inevitably run themselves into confusion in dealing with the vague concepts of common sense." (Concept, p. 376.) To state the obvious, perhaps, Peirce puts God's "Reality" in the sphere of common sense. And to designate the "confusion" to which Peirce refers, it is that of logical levels: If one begins an argument on the level of the specifics of the kind that science can analyze and investigate, one must end it on that level. But to do so is to leave God out of the question: Peirce's very point.

Consequently--and this is the point I wanted to note--any idea that is supported by scientific understanding is, by that fact, not supported by faith. It would seem, then, that if one has faith in God that one does not do so on the basis of any specific information that science relates. (Note too, that the possibility of general metaphysical ideas related to God's Reality are not thereby placed out of bounds.)

"Suggesting" the Reality of God...

Peirce made the outlandish-sounding statement "that pretty nearly everybody [does believe in the Reality of God]...including many of the scientific men of my generation who are accustomed to think the belief is entirely unfounded." (Concept, p. 375.)

How could that be? First, they correctly observe that "Argumentation" in Peirce's sense cannot conclude in God's existence. And second, they do not understand that the God of common sense is suggested by an understanding of the world that contains no "Argumentation."

Peirce explains this common sense suggestion of God's Reality in his account of pragmaticism's (sic--the term replaced "pragmatism" when Peirce's idea became popular and he lost control of its meaning) answer to the meaning of "God." "...just as long acquaintance with a man of great character may deeply influence one's whole manner of conduct...so contemplation and study of the psysico-psychical universe can imbue a man with principles of conduct analogous to the influence of a great man's works or conversation, then that analogue of a mind--for it is impossible to say that any human attribute is literally applicable--is what he means by 'God.'" (Concept, p. 376.)

Does this "suggestion" escape the trap--in Peirce's view at least--of originating in some definite attribute of the world that God is held to "explain"? His point is that as we can recognize the cast of a strong mind's effect on the world without being able, even in principle, to say precisely what or how that cast of mind produces its effect, since it is bound up with a holistic impression of a person's character and cast of mind, so we can get from the world as a whole an impression of "that analogue of a mind..." called God. (Peirce's "argument" above that it is universal to our understanding of the universe that "its provision for later stages [is found] in earlier ones" was framed as indicating that the world depicts development or "growth." As such the universe is open-ended, a feature that I think Peirce wanted his readers to align with the open-ended development of a human mind--which makes his "suggestion" (analogy) stronger: a human mind is open to the future, in which its freedom lies, and so the universe seems to us. But it would be unrealistic to try to critique this "suggestion" in any further detail here. It is enough to show that it has initial credibility.)

Still, how does that show that "many of the scientific men of [Peirce's] generation" believed in the Reality of God while opining that they did not? "...the discoveries of science, their enabling us to predict what will be the course of nature, is proof conclusive that, though we cannot think any thought of God's, we can catch a fragment of His Thought..." (Concept, p. 376.) What he means here is that if we entertain the hypothesis that an analogue of mind is suggested by the universe, then the only way to confirm that suggested hypothesis is to experience the world in a way that conforms to our minds': When we predict the course of nature, that is just what we do. The ongoing march of science is the basis, in Peirce's analysis, for belief in God: Science is the confirmation of the God hypothesis.

One almost cannot fail to recall Einstein's famous opinion that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. Peirce's argument can be reduced to the simple fact that the universes comprehensibility can be taken to suggest an analogue of mind--in just the way that Paul Davies' best seller, The Mind of God, used the "suggestion" or analogy a few years back. But what i enjoyed most about coming to terms with Peirce's view of God is this, it turns the Templeton Foundation's Big Question, "Does Science Make Belief in God Obsolete?" on its head. To investigate Peirce's point of view we would have to ask, "Does Science Make Belief in God More Credible?"

A Last Point

In thinking through these kinds of ideas there is a continual--for me at least--awareness of how the thoughts bear on traditional religious beliefs. Here the view that God is seen as a fetishism if his presence is thought to be found in the nexus of cause and effect in the world. What is left out in this view is that it would be possible for God to create new forms of being without violating Peirce's view. The New Heaven and the New Earth and spiritual bodies all conform to that possibility. Keith Ward has some interesting things to say in that regard, which might, for that reason come up in future posts.

As ever, I am posting this without taking the time to proof it. Sorry, and I can only hope that my haste doesn't make the ideas unreadable--because they are worth thing about. On a brighter note, I see that my first attempt at creating a link worked. So just maybe I'll get better at this!

Planting One's Foot in One's Mouth as Revelation

2009-03-02T06:28:00.000-08:00

There are layers of our experience that lie deep enough for us to be unaware of them, till they surprise in an unguarded moment or during an emotional outburst. Those times can be revelations. They reveal ourselves in ways that we would otherwise hide to others or even ourselves. A word spoken in anger; an untimely laugh; or a Freudian slip can expose an inappropriate undercurrent of thought. Today I have a particular instance of foot-in-mouth disease in mind. I performed the psycho-social contortion last summer.

I will give an account of it here because doing so will place my appreciation of Paul Tillich's thought on a very personal level. Tillich's shorthand definition of faith is "ultimate concern." Clearly, one's ultimate concern is the animating core of who we are as conscious, intelligent beings. That's what it means, and by defining faith as ultimate concern he designated it as that which forms the animating center of our personal life--that than which nothing can affect us more personally. (Of course in the context of a post relating moments of unwitting personal revelation, it must be admitted that what we assume to be our ultimate concern may be burlesqued in a moment of passion or vulnerability to be different than we had thought--which is to say that it is entirely possible that a person fails to understand her- or himself in the most radical possible way. But we set that possibility aside here, since it is difficult to write about something that one does not realize to be the case.)

I must set the stage for the faux pas. My wife and I used to attend a Bible study with a group of people, most of whom share an interest in music and cooking with us. We still go to Christmas and Valentine's Day parties and summer picnics with the group and count ourselves to be graced by the wonderful persons we have met through the study. One couple--Jim and Jennifer--started getting together with my wife and me when Jim and I were conscripted to cook for the Valentine's Day party and we decided that we should test our recipes in advance. (Jim has worked as a baker and I as a cook.) Because Jennifer is a talented musician, and I went to college years ago with a failed determination to become one, there is that connection too, in addition to a love of theology and philosophy that all four of us share to one degree or another.

Imagine, then, hearing me say aloud during a meal hosted in Jim and Jennifer's home that I used to be interested in gourmet food and fine music. In the first place, it branded me as a boor. Second, it contradicted the common interests on which the blossoming friendship we as couple's were sharing was based. Third, it seemed to indicate that I had found our friends' interests to be somehow beneath me. And last, it was just plain stupid and insensitive. It's the kind of remark that is difficult even to apologize for, since it's so wildly obtuse. "I apologize to you for being acquainted with me."

So how does a bright person find himself saying something so bizarre? The facts of my biography stated above can account for it. For a time during my young adulthood I wanted to be a musician more than anything else. Paul Tillich would have called that my "ultimate concern." When that didn't happen, despite my best efforts, I turned from my actual ultimate concern to the one sanctioned by by upbringing, and decided to go to seminary. But in the course of preparation that I entered into for seminary, my faith was undercut, leaving me skeptical, cynical, disappointed, and disillusioned. My almost involuntary reaction was to make philosophy my ultimate concern in a reactionary determination not to be duped or disappointed again. I have referred to myself as an amateur philosopher in the past, but more accurately I have been more desperate for wisdom than a lover of it. It is Tillich's connection of my personal history to the hinges of past ultimate concerns that best accounts for the twists and turns of my life--including the occasional foot-in-mouth remark that begs for an accounting.

Very simply, as the conversation turned to interests my wife and I share with Jim and Jennifer, the wounds of lost hopes and dreams and faith welled up and reminded me not to be too taken in. "I used to be interested..." I said to persons who had presumed that I shared a passionate interest with them. A boorish, foolish comment. On another level an honest, understandable one.

It is central to Paul Tillich's thought that only an ultimate concern that opens us outward to others and the world in a spirit of good will can fulfill us as human beings. By contrast, anything that limits our ability to remain outwardly focused in a spirit of love for others and the world leaves us diminished. Music, food, theology, philosophy, friends, and any of thousands of other good things and pursuits can be ways of expressing love and concern and good will. In that case they can be fulfilling. But they can become our focus in a way that we look to them to fulfill us. They can become our ultimate concern. In that case we will be disappointed, and my personal history, including an occasional inappropriate remark, bears that out.

The Ten Commandments begin by directing us to have no Gods before God and to make no idols. Tillich saw his thought as an extrapolation of those commands: "[That] is what ultimate concern means..." (Dynamics of Faith, p. 3.) The gospel story can best be seen, according to this hermeneutic, as Jesus' refusal to become a national idol so that he could depict the real end of human life, agape love. Every once in a while I say something so foolish that I give myself an opportunity to meditate on the wisdom of that message.

Tillich's Resurrection Theory

2009-02-26T09:25:00.000-08:00

Recall a quote from an earlier post:

"Christianity is not based on the acceptance of a historical novel; it is based on the witness to the messianic character of Jesus by people who were not interested at all in a biography of the Messiah." (Systematic Theology, Vol. II, p. 105.)

There is a sense in which Tillich's statement here is exceedingly odd. That the details of the life of a person called the Christ, the Son of Man and of God, would not interest the world is absurd. Yet in another sense it is completely understandable. It is only because Jesus is said to transcend the ordinary details of life that define humanity that his life is of interest in the senses claimed: Messiah, Son of Man, Son of God, etc. In fact, had the New Testament authors not understood that the human details of Jesus' life are not what concerns us, they would have fallen prey to the problem implied in what I called "the primary question" (see the first Tillich post): How can Jesus represent God to us without violating the prohibition (Second Commandment) against idolatry? Tillich's use of the term "transparency" was the answer: "The absolute side of the final revelation, that in it which is unconditional and unchangeable, involves the complete transparency and the complete self-sacrifice of the medium in which it appears." (Vol. I, p. 151.) The details of Jesus' humanity would be the "medium" in which he appeared. Accordingly, the details had to be "sacrificed," since to focus on them would be to confuse oneself on the very point on which the gospel story must be unequivocal: "Jesus could not have been the Christ without sacrificing himself as Jesus to himself as the Christ." (Dynamics of Faith, p. 97.) This all follows from asking the primary question and understanding the only possible way to answer it.

But what about the central events of the ministry of Jesus--those by which the sacrifice of Jesus' humanity in order to represent God to humanity were achieved? Aren't those "details" that depict his life to us? I will answer the rhetorical question: It was by refusing to be a Messiah who would fulfill the expectations of a nation awaiting his rule and accepting the consequences of his denial that he pointed to a Kingdom beyond this world--that is, if his crucifixion is to be seen as a triumph. Let's review the context that informs this paradoxical "triumph." (See previous Tillich posts--the argument to follow is a simplification.) I'll sketch an argument by way of positions argued for in previous posts:

We distort ourselves ethically and degrade ourselves as human beings if we elevate any contingent, finite good to be our overarching good. (See the post on Tillich's view of humanity and freedom.)

We need an overarching sense of good in order to lead lives coherently shaped by our values. (See the post on Tillich's Functional God. Tillich calls the perspective which determines this overarching good "ultimate concern.")

Therefore, to have the overarching sense of good that we need without the distorting and degrading influence of a finite, contingent good filling that role, we need an overarching sense of good that is not finite or contingent.

Agape love, alone, is a value that is neither finite nor contingent:

"All love, except agape, is dependent on contingent characteristics which change and are partial. {They are} dependent on repulsion and attraction, on passion and sympathy. Agape is independent of these states. It affirms the other unconditionally, that is, apart from higher or lower, pleasant or unpleasant qualities. Agape unites the lover and the beloved because of the image of fulfillment which God has of both. Therefore, agape is universal; no one with whom a concrete experience is...possible ("the neighbor") is excluded; nor is anyone preferred." (Vol. I, p. 280.)

By making the commitment to agape one's overarching value, therefore, the ethically deforming, humanly degrading elevation of a finite, contingent good to be one's overarching value is avoided. For we are committed to a value that transcends any finite representation. Love thereby functions as one's "god," a god that cannot be represented, in answer to the primary question with which this series of posts on Tillich began.

We are, therefore, oriented toward the transcendent, and that orientation finds its proper object by making agape love one's ultimate concern. Since for Tillich our "ultimate concern" constitutes our faith and the object of our "ultimate concern" is our God, "it is obvious that this type of love is the basis for the assertion that God is love." (Vol. I, p. 281.)

How does this relate to Tillich's favored theory of the resurrection? To say that "God is love" is to say that ultimate reality is love--that one's overarching sense of good as agape is the very ground of our being. And it is by faith in God so understood that our humanity is kept free of the degrading and deforming elements of placing false gods, idols, where only agape should be.

In Jesus a life of agape was fully manifest. To say that death conquered Jesus is to deny either his full manifestation of agape love or the truth of the claim that God is known through agape love. But Jesus was crucified. Therefore, according to Tillich's "restitution theory," "...the resurrection is the restitution of Jesus as the Christ, a restitution which is rooted in the personal unity between Jesus and God and in the impact of this unity on the minds of the disciples." (Vol. II, p. 157.) In short, the life the disciples experienced could not be reconciled with Jesus' ignoble death. Hence, the resurrection was necessary.

To affirm the good news is to affirm that what is most needed was manifest in the resurrection of Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God. This is a far cry from what is usually heard on Easter mornings, where the evidence of the resurrection is preached as an indubitable historical fact (by twists and turns of chop logic). But if we are to believe in Jesus and not take a bait and switch in which the meaning of the gospel is exchanged for a suspension of disbelief in a certain historical assertion, well, then we will want to thank Tillich for pointing us in the right direction: The gospel accounts of Jesus' life help us transcend the finite, contingent focus that continually threatens to estrange us from God and our true humanity. If Tillich is correct, we can know that, but to claim more is to step outside of faith in the name of faith: We are oriented toward transcendence, and should not forget it in the name of affirming the belief by which we assert it.

I hope that you have enjoyed this glimpse into Paul Tillich's theology.

Tillich and Peirce: Love's Grand Perspective

2009-02-21T08:22:00.002-08:00

The other day I realized that my depiction of Tillich's thought adopts ideas that I first read in the thoughts of Charles Sanders Peirce. Both think that a closed mind is stultifying at best and degrading at worst. Here's a quote from Peirce to illustrate. "...no blight can so surely arrest all intellectual growth as the blight of cocksureness..." (Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler, p. 4) In fact, Peirce held this dictum so close that he called his philosophy "fallibilism" before he coined "pragmatism" as his thought's moniker. (There is a delightful story--for those of you who share in my bemusement with eccentricity--about Peirce abandoning his coinage after it became famous, saying that his new term, "pragmaticism" would be too ugly for anyone else to adopt it.)

What I find most interesting about Peirce's thought in conjunction with Tillich's is that it can be used to frame Tillich's views more adeptly than--I think--Tillich ever did. I refer to Peirce's "agapasm." "In genuine agapasm...advance takes place by virtue of a positive sympathy...springing from continuity of mind [with a conception of reality as good]." (Ibid., p. 369.) Here's the key to Peirce's self-described intellectual development: "...out of a contrite fallibilism, combined with a high faith in the reality of knowledge, and an intense desire to find things out, all my philosophy has always seemed to grow..." (Ibid., p. 4.)

I'll rephrase that to draw a parallel with his agapasm: "...out of a contrite fallibilism, combined with a high faith in the goodness of reality, and an intense desire to realize that goodness, the healthiest form of spirituality grows..." That view was, in his estimation, fully in line with Christianity, when understood correctly.

Accordingly, Peirce, like Tillich, combined an intellectual curiosity with a view of agape love to produce a Christian philosophical perspective that can be fully merged with science. (The quote above is from his essay, "Evolutionary Love." Clearly Peirce shares with Tillich (and C.S. Lewis) the view that Christian faith represents an evolutionary jump offered to humanity.) In the heading to the blog you see one of his most famous quotes: "Do not block the way of inquiry." Perhaps his agapasm could be seen as an extension of that dictum: "Do not block the way of good will."

For Tillich the root problem in human nature is to put a finite, closed, object or perspective where only an open-ended commitment to love and to learn should be. In that he shares Peirce's perspective exactly: the same "blight" that "arrests all intellectual growth" arrests all spiritual growth. It is a truly grand perspective. And for both men, it was the perspective to which Christianity lends itself, when properly understood.

A Little Metaponderance

2009-02-17T04:47:00.002-08:00

That everything can be doubted cannot be believed without falsifying itself. So far a standard self-referential problem. Yet by showing itself to be falsified, it demonstrates itself to be a true instance of itself. Therefore, by way of its contingent truth the statement demonstrates its formal fallacy. And that is interesting.

I came upon this thought whole working on the next Tillich post. It is, actually, relevant...

Dough Boy to Do Death Row Regatta

2009-02-15T14:37:00.000-08:00

On the principle that a life-changing resolution should be made public, I am letting friends and family know that I am going into training for Duluth Rowing Club's annual Death Row Regatta. (25 kilometers upstream from the port of Duluth along the mouth of the St. Louis River.)

The date is always late summer or early fall. Just got off the phone with the DRC president to confirm that the race will be held again this year.

FYI: I recall that I was actually holding in my stomach a bit when this picture was taken in late October, '08. I'll show before and after pictures, along with pictures from the race. Some middle-aged men get shiny new sports cars; I'm going to try to get a little more personal with the sporty look. :-)

Tillich on Freedom and Humanity

2009-02-13T08:58:00.000-08:00

Because I'm hoping to go to Minnesota's "Boundary Waters" this summer with my son, I've been reading and thinking ahead about the trip. This metaphor for Tillich's view of freedom comes from imagining the trip. Between lakes in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA) one must follow paths while carrying one's canoe or kayak. Portages between the lakes are by way of trails, and the trails pick their way between various hazards. I'll name just three; bogs, rapids, and thickets. If I were a salamander, the bog would be a good place to go. If I were a trout, the rapids would be a good place to go. And if I were a rabbit, the thicket would be an excellent choice. But I am a person, and If I want to make it through the Boundary Waters, I had best stay on the trail. The trail is my "destiny," because I am a human being, that is, assuming that my son and I go to the BWCA this summer. But it is also my choice, since I don't have to go to the BWCA. But it is also my destiny in another sense: I think that a trip to the BWCA is the best option, all things considered, for spending time together with my son this summer. In that sense my "choice" is determined by the point of view that leads to it, in a way that is analogous to the portage trails between BWCA lakes being the best option in that literal landscape. And we can keep on creating new levels of understanding to add to this analogy: Will I go just with my son? and if so, why that rather than the alternatives, and so on. The point is that freedom and determinism are not exclusive in Tillich's view of Freedom.

"Instead of separating the spirit from the conditioning psychological realm, we shall try to describe the rise of an act of the spirit out of a constellation of psychological factors. Every act of the spirit presupposes given psychological material and, at the same time, constitutes a leap which is possible only for a totally centered self, that is to say, one that is free." (Systematic Theology, Vol. III, p. 27.)

John Stuart asked for a clarification of this uniting of destiny and freedom in Tillich's thought--above, "the conditioning psychological realm" and "the rise of an act of the spirit out of a constellation of psychological factors." Specifically, he was interested in whether destiny is predetermined or character influences choices. Here is Tillich taking that question head on:

"...the whole complex of acts, in which this [act of choosing] happens has the character of freedom, not freedom in the bad sense of indeterminacy of an act of the will, but freedom in the sense of a total reaction of a centered self which deliberates and decides. Such freedom is united with destiny in such a way that the psychological material which enters into the moral act represents the pole of destiny, while the deliberating and deciding self represents the pole of freedom, according to the ontological polarity of freedom and destiny." (Vol. III, p. 28.)

In an ordinary spacial frame of reference we have up/down, near/far, left/right. We do not ask whether these "opposites" exclude each other. We understand that they describe poles within a complete frame of reference. In the same way that we cannot have a meaningful sense of "right" without "left" in a physical space we cannot have a meaningful sense of freedom without destiny as its pole in Tillich's formulation of the reality of freedom in human life. If I make a "choice" for no reason, it is a meaningless freedom, a vacuous choice. If my choice is constituted by a meaning that determines it, it cannot be viewed in the traditional way as being incompatible with determinism. In fact, to be meaningful, freedom must be compatible with determinism. But how?

John asked a great question precisely because it requires us to get beyond this impasse where the discussion traditionally stalls.

Here's the further question that will help us specify how freedom is manifest in the framework of destiny and the "rise of an act of the spirit" by which a choice is made: What constitutes the cognitive space in which the pole of freedom manifests itself?

Since Tillich does not confront this question specifically--and it is this question that will allow us to best understand his perspective on freedom--I will: we can always go to a further logical level of understanding or explore further in the present psychological and cognitive context, or seek out another person's advice. That is, we are free because our cognitive/psychological frame of reference open.

This comes as a bit of a shock to me, since I had always thought that Wiliam james had frames the question in the best and shortest possible way when he wrote that the free will problem was about whether "the will is a free variable." But if the will is "free" with respect to being determined, then it is only vacuously so (according to the rationale of Tillich's sketched above).

The important point comes in here: at any point in time doesn't the "Tillichian" view of freedom--assuming I've got it right--reduce to the perspective that determines it, and if not, then doesn't it reduce to an act of freedom separated from that which determines it, thereby falloing prey to the critique of Tillich's by which James' view was just discarded. (That is, was Tillich just going in a conceptual circle that he did not complete, but if he had would have put him right back with the Jamesian, traditional, view?)

Recall the quote used last week to set out the crucial point: "All ethical material...is open to ethical criticism under the principle of agape." (Vol. III, p. 103.) To which I pointed out, "Agape is not one of the factors determining the psychological forces acting on us, but a commitment to remain open to all possibilities in a spirit of good will toward all." (Feb. 7, 09) In essence, I asserted the point that we are now questioning. Tillich asserts that it is "the elevation of one element of finitude" (Vol. III, p. 103.) over others that distorts human values and morals as it destroys human freedom.

It is the commitment to love that keeps us outwardly focused, that keeps us focused in a way that preserves the cognitive and psychological space that makes human freedom possible. But to be loving just as to be free we must carefully avoid the temptation to elevate a finite good to the place of defining the meaning of life--the perspective by which we make our way through life. If we do so, we are no longer "open to ethical criticism under the principle of agape." To be self-serving, and to serve any finite good, is to destroy the perspective of ethical freedom guided by love out of which our actions are meaningfully determined and free.

To understand that is to understand the core point in Tillich's thought and--if his thought succeeds--in Christian faith: God is Love, and we only "represent" God correctly when we understand that God cannot be given a finite representation (idolatry) but must be realized through human nature (Tillich's "transparency") as the continual openness toward transcendence made possible by agape, the ground of human freedom. For Tillich freedom and humanity have the same root, the divine ground of being, which is love.

{Note: I am sorry about the rather frequent typos over the last few posts. I am both very busy and am not able to save my posts or import them... So you're reading first drafts, and my "craft" isn't up to to snuff as a result. Sorry! It's only my belief that the subject is very worthwhile that keeps me posting.]

Tillich on Transcendence

2009-02-07T11:10:00.000-08:00

Every coherent theology must make the question of transcendence central and primary. The classic expression comes from Thomas Aquinas' great Summa (Part I, Question I, Article 1): "...[humanity] is directed to God as to an end that surpasses the grasp of [its] reason."

Here is Paul Tillich's statement, which is couched in the context of his section on "The Reality of God" from Vol. I of his Systematic Theology: "The crucial question must now be faced. Can a segment of finite reality become the basis for an assertion about that which is infinite? The answer is that it can, because that which is infinite is being itself [which Tillich identifies with God] and because everything participates in being itself." (p. 238)

It is fun to get to this point in studying the thoughts of a truly great thinker, where the major parts can be fit in place according to the principles that determine them. Starting with Tillich's definition of God as Being Itself, we can trace his connection of concepts as diverse as essence, freedom, morality, humanity, love (agape), and transcendence as connected directly to his starting point. It is the last, "transcendence," will be the key to seeing the theological circle that Tillich sets up.

How is it, in light of Tillich's statement above, that humanity "participates in being itself"? Because we have a sense of how we ought to be, we have an essence: a defining sense of ideal humanity against which we measure our individual humanity. But please do not think that this individual sense is something that can be "cloned." We are individual persons with unique histories and perspectives by which we weigh experiences and ideas in light of their impact on our destinies. We need to unpack this cluster of notions.

We are moral beings; we have senses of "ought"--derived from norms, ideals, goods, virtues, moral perspectives, etc.--to which we assent and to which we feel obligation. But it is only when we connect these external "oughts" to a sense of destiny that takes the oughts and combines them with our individual sense of how we should live that we make them ours, that we combine our "senses of ought" with individual senses of how we can participate fully as human beings to realize those "oughts." In short, we assent to our destiny as human beings by acting on our senses of how we ought to live.

But that implies that we combine freedom--implied by the assent--with a sense of destiny. An extended quote will help (the first portion was quoted in last week's post).

"...a large amount of material is present in the psychological center--drives, inclinations, desires, more or less compulsory trends, moral experiences, ethical traditions and authorities, relations to other persons,k csocial conditions. But the moral act is not the diagonal in which all these vectors limit each other and converge; it is the centered self which actualizes itself as a personal self by distinguishing, separating, rejecting, preferring, connecting, and in doing so, transcending its elements. The act...in which this happens has the character of freedom...in the sense of a total reaction of a centered self which deliberates and decides. Such freedom is united with destiny in such a way that the psychological naterial which enters into the moral act represents the pole of destiny, while the deliberating and deciding self represents the pole of freedom... (Systematic Theology, Vol. III, p. 27-8, emphasis added.)

Given the shortest possible expression, freedom is choosing to live authentically (or, to be fully human) the subject of Tillich's The Courage to Be. This might still seem a bit counterintuitive. But combining this aspect of Tillich's view of human freedom with his statement that our decision making process represents a transcending of self will help.

If I were to shoot off a bottle rocket on the Fourth of July, a rocket scientist could note the weight of the firework, the amounts, proportions and condition of the explosive agents, the elevation and air density and wind speed and direction, etc., to explain why the firework performed as it did. In Tillich's language, just quoted, it would be explained by the way "in which all these vectors limit each other and converge." But human freedom, by contrast, is "a total reaction of a centered self which deliberates and decides." (Vol. III, p. 28. Emphasis added.) To understand the bottlerocket, the unique physical circumstances contributing to its trajectory and explosion need to be understood. Likewise, to understand a person's decision, the unique psychological circumstances contributing to it need to be understood. But in addition, there needs to be "a centered self" in order for there to be human freedom and consequently an authentic human decision enacted out of our senses of "ought" and individual "destiny." What is this "centered self"?

Tillich, to my knowledge, never explicitly defines what "centered" means. But implicitly he refers to a perspective which takes in the various relevant considerations and impulses contributing to a comtemplated action and evaluates them by means of a sense of self, including: one's goals, hopes, fears, needs, abilities, disabilities, and so on up to and including one's sense of what life is about. The last is the crucial part--the sense of what life is about. Because, if a person does not have that sense, then they have no overriding concept or sensibility by which the competing psychological factors contributing to a decision should be ordered. In that case, a person's "choice," though psychologically determined, resembles the account we imagined with the bottlerocket: "these vectors limit each other and converge" on a decision. By contrast, a self centered by virtue of possessing a sense of what life is about has a meaningful criterion by which to order the various factors and decide. It's the difference between what Aristotle called a "passive" and an "active" intellect. The active intellect is not defined by the way in which the various factors "limit each other and converge" on a decision. It defines its own criterion and makes a decision based on it.

At this point we could go in various directions in connecting Tillich's thought. For instance, we could focus on how this provides the groundword for understanding the second of the conceptual bookends quoted in the last post: "If faith is understood as what it centrally is, ultimate concern, it cannot be undercut by modern science or any kind of philosophy." (Dynamics of Faith, p. 126.) The connection here is that the centering perspective referred to above is the sense or idea of what life is about, and that is also the content of one's "ultimate concern," Tillich's shorthand definition of faith. And it would be fun to trace the reason why faith is essential in Tillich's view of freedom. It would also be instructive to inquire further into his ideas on freedom. But here we have another critical point to make.

If we are fully human only in achieving a centered sense of self by which we transcend the various factors that motivate us as beings in the world, then never, ever, can we be fully human and identify the sense of self with any of the possible factors that can compete to determine us as an object rather than a self or person. To do so is to degrade ourselves. Religiously and biblically, it is idolatry--making a mere thing "the object of life." Morally, we distort ourselves by elevating a contingent good into the center of the decision process where the contingencies should be evaluated, not determining the evaluation. But if so, how is it possible to have a sense of self that is definite enough to be the psychological center that gives meaning to our lives without that definite sense of self becoming a distorting, degrading, idoloatrous "object of life" which prevents the active engagement of a human personhood as the determining center of our lives.

It is the principle of agape--good will toward all--which provides the answer needed by our humanity.

"All ethical material...is open to ethical criticism under the principle of agape..." (Vol. III, p. 268.) Agape is not one of the factors determining the psychological forces acting on us, but a commitment to remain open to all possibilities in a spirit of good will to all.

In Tillich's words, "This is easily understandable... the elevation of one element of finitude...necessarily produces the reaction from other elements of finitude... The demonic self-elevation of one nation over against all the others in the name of her God or system of values produces the reaction from other nations in the name of their God. The demonic self-elevation of particular forces in the centered personality and the claim of their...superiority leads to the reaction of other forces..." (Vol. III, p. 103.)

The story of Jesus triumphally riding into Jerusalem and ending up on a cross at the end of the week is precisely a story of a man rejecting the temptation to become the object by which a subjected nation is elevated and offering instead as a picture of perfect humanity the need to sacrifice the idolatry implicit in all self-elevation, an elevation that distorts and degrades our humanity by subverting the only answer by which our humanity is adequately expressed: agape.

To return to the theme of past posts, by the gospel story we can see God in the narrative of Jesus' ministry precisely because in him is depicted our undistorted, undegraded humanity, and in that humanity is depicted the image of God. Now we see that, truly--if Tillich's analysis is correct--our humanity can only be depicted paradoxically by seeing it as essentially requiring transcendence of us.

We believe in God, because we are oriented toward transcendence by our human nature. We believe in Jesus, because he is the picture of our human nature transcended. As such we have faith that our humanity "is directed to God as to an end that surpasses the grasp of our reason." to return to Thomas Aquinas' classic formulation, and complete this little theological circle.

Tillich's Functional God

2009-02-01T10:14:00.000-08:00

"The religious principle cannot come to and end. For the question of the ultimate meaning of life cannot be silenced as long as men are men." ( Paul Tillich, Christianity and the Encounter of the World Religions (Columbia University Press, New York, 1963) p. 96.) The foregoing statement appeared on the next to last page of Tillich's Encounter. The opening statements of his Dynamics of Faith read, "Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned: the dynamics of faith are the dynamics of man's ultimate concern." ((Harper and Row, New York, 1957) p. 1.)These statements function as conceptual bookends to Tillich's thought in this sense; they are two ways of stating the place of religion in human life. The first says, in effect, that it is human nature to ask about life's meaning, while the second says, in effect, that this asking (and consequent answering) can be traced in terms of a definite "dynamic" in human life. More emphatically, this dynamic of question and answer centered on the meaning of life is inherent in our human nature--as an essential part of it, no less--since it "cannot be silenced as long as [human beings] are [human beings]."

If we call the object of ultimate concern God--and that is precisely what Tillich intends--then it follows that whatever one thinks about the reality of God, that a functional deity presides in the hearts and minds of all human beings.

It is for this reason that we began the Tillich posts with a consideration of the "primary question," as I called it: How can Jesus Christ represent God to Christians when Christianity originates and extends a tradition in which the representation of God is forbidden? The answer, that Jesus lived in a way that made God transparent through his human nature because he embodied the image of God in human nature by the way he lived, was the answer. We must now turn to the question of why we think that the way that Jesus lived can meaningfully and really be called the embodiment of the life of God. As we will see, for Tillich, the answer "is derived from the basic christological assertion that in the Christ the eternal unity of God and man becomes actual..." (Systematic Theology, Vol. III, 269-70)

And that leads us to an elaboration of the meaning of faith: "...faith is the state of being grasped by the transcendent unity of unambiguous life--it embodies love as the state of being taken into that transcendent unity." (Vol. III, p. 129.) So, how does "love as the state of being taken into that transcendent unity" play out?

Unity is achieved by overcoming the plethora of ambiguities that compete with each other in human life. There are ambiguities of religion, culture, morality, life, and creativity. To take the moral sphere as an example the following ambiguities vie with each other. In the moral act "a large amount of material is present in the psychological center--drives, inclinations, desires, more or less compulsory trends, moral experiences, ethical traditions and authorities, relations to other persons, social conditions. But the moral act is not the diagonal in which all these vectors...converge; it is the centered self which actualizes itself as a personal self by distinguishing, separating, rejecting, preferring, connecting, and in doing so, transcending its elements." (Vol. III, p. 27-8.)

Here it is important to note that the ability to transcend the psychological interplay of competing, ambiguous motives and make a moral decision does not imply that one has made a decision about which one is not conflicted. In other words, the ability to decide does not imply the ability to resolve the dilemmas of being a finite being who wishes to fulfill ends and ideals that compete for our limited ability, attention, energy, and time. Failure is built into human experience.

That is the meaning of Tillich's important concept, "existential estrangement." It is human to have ideals and goals and morals, etc., and it is universal to human experience to have only limited success in fulfilling those ends. We thus become estranged from ourselves when we consider the gulf between what we believe we should be, what we want to be, what we desire to accomplish, etc., and what we are and do, "for life is neither essential nor existential, but ambiguous." (Vol. III, p. 32.) This follows in that our ideals and morals, etc., are expressions of our essential side and our limited abilities to fulfill those essential ends, against which our human limitations ensure that our experience will include a large doses of failure. Better stated, our best wishes "burden our consciences because we cannot do justice to all of them." (Tillich, The New Being (University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 2005) p. 158.)

What are we to do? In this context that question is a meta-moral. It asks, how does one solve a problem embedded in morals and life itself, more generally? The answer that Tillich gives us has two parts.

First, we are to solve the ambiguity of our attitude toward the moral frameworks which have authority for us by adopting love as the lens through which we view our moral obligations: "Love contains and transcends the law. It does voluntarily what the law commands." (Vol. III, 272.) But if we adopt the law of love, aren't we just bound by law on another level? Tillich asks and answers this question by saying, ""...love is not a law; it is a reality. It is not a matter of ought-to-be...but a matter of being." (Ibid.) The ought/is divide which estranges us is conquered, in this case, by being motivated by love.

But what about our finitude? Aren't we still estranged by our failure to fully achieve our goals in the moral sphere and so many others? Yes, we are. And here we need the Christian message of forgiveness as acceptance by God despite our unacceptability. When we are united to the reality of love, we are accepted into the reality of God. In Tillich's words again, "He who is grasped by the one thing that is needed has the many things under his feet. They concern him, but not ultimately, and when he loses them he does not lose the one thing he needs and that cannot be taken from him." (The New Being, p. 160.) It is possible to enter into love in a way that our wills overcome the ought/is divide and our experience tells us that we are united with God, despite our moral failures, and the experience of failure is inescapably part of human nature.

It is possible to make love one's ultimate concern, and it is possible to make belief in the God who is love the object of a faith that heals the estrangement that can rob our lives of any credible moral meaning. In the story of Jesus the Christ we are told of a life in which the preliminary concerns that compete with love never eclipse the picture of human life unconditionally committed to portraying the love of God as a reality open to all people. Isn't that what the cross means--that abandoned on all sides by human failure that God still loves us? Tillich's thought should be seen, most basically, as a theological picture of why the answer "Yes" to that question is the very answer that is most needed for the sake of our humanity. And when that answer is accepted, it is accepted because it is seen as the true representation of God to humanity precisely because it is the best representation of our humanity.

See Gran Torino: Forget the Oscars

2009-01-31T07:16:00.002-08:00

Just a very quick note to say that Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino is full of paradoxes, the foremost ones being (1) that an ostensibly racist old man demonstrates what it means to relate to other people on the basis of their character rather than their race, religion, etc., (2) that an ostensibly angry old man epitomizes selfless love, and (3) that an ostensibly anti-religious old man teaches the priest in the movie the essence of religion. The Gran Torino (car) in the movie instantiates the paradoxes (but I will not say why for the sake of those who have not seen the movie).

This movie makes a thoughtful viewer rethink what it means to be a good person. It does so by putting its hero in the body of an old, scowling, disillusioned man whose attitudes and language are not just politically incorrect, but the stereotype of racism in action. Yet Eastwood's character (Walt) comes to realize that "I have more in common with these people (his Hmong neighbors) than my own family."

By the end of Gran Torino it is apparent that Walt's anger and disillusionment come from his awareness that America has become superficial and spoiled, and that those who have the courage to buck the shallow values cannot be superficially identified by race or class or religion, etc. but only by their character. "Walt" may be the most unlikely character imaginable to embody Martin Luther King's goal to have it be the content of a person's character that matters, but that is what makes Gran Torino a wonderful movie--along with the terrific acting and compelling story. It is outrageous and funny and exciting and important in its ability to confront our easy assumptions.

The Academy has lost its credibility with me for failing to give Eastwood a single nomination for this terrific movie.

Last Comments on Does Science Make Belief in God Obsolete?

2009-01-24T19:02:00.000-08:00

I exchanged comments on the Templeton Foundation's Big Questions site a few weeks back, again. It's been a good opportunity to think through this, well, big question. Having just checked out the site to copy the comments, I see that the "conversation" is winding down. In fact, it's beginning to look like I was the person most determined to get in the last word. Kind of embarrassing. But I'm done now, and maybe someone will come along and rescue me from taking "last place." :-)

You'll see that I used the quote from William James' Varieties that you see on the side bar.

RE: Whole Series
Eugene Bucamp
01/12/2009
Let's go back to Tracy Witham's example (12/19) of the young person wondering whether "she should become a teacher to use her life to help others or become an actor to fulfill a personal passion," an example given, as he put it (01/10), to illustrate that "existential questions are not answered by science but can be answered by religion."

Witham may call this an existential question (I call this a moral question), but my point remains that Witham still has to show that belief in God helps. In my view, God does not exist, and values are formed in the crucible of our personal, social, and political relationships, through time, and so-called religious values are no exception. Like Witham put it, "human beings can decide what their lives are about." To claim that religion helps is to claim that it helps people find an appropriate response to moral problems. But how could we assess whether this is the case? As Witham contends, this is not a scientific issue, so presumably there is no way to do that. So we cannot assess Witham's claim, which is therefore gratuitous.

From a rational perspective, moral problems cannot be the object of any short-cut methodology. Science can help us guess to some extent what the near future will be, but it will never tell us all the consequences for all time of our actions now. This is the reason why we remain free. We are free because there is no rational methodology to tell us what our actions should be. Let me repeat that animals, small and large, as well as pre-historic man, including Australopithicus, Homo erectus, Homo neanderthal, and Homo sapiens have all thrived for eons without the support of the Ten Commandments. Witham may think religion or a belief in God can help, but he still needs to substantiate his claim, whereas we already know how science helps. Nobody really needs religion or a belief in God, but we are all free to soothe our anxieties as best we can.

RE: Whole Series
Tracy Witham
01/15/2009
Few educated people would choose scripture over science as a means of understanding the origin of the universe and its features. By that measure, science clearly makes belief in God obsolete. On an emotional level, things are less clear. Nature does inspire awe, and an understanding of science helps further those emotions. But it does not tie the awe to a sense of devotion to something greater than oneself the way belief in God does. That leaves a huge void for religion to fill when we consider the crucial aspects of human life that outstrip any factual understanding of the world that science can--even in principle--offer. Hopes, fears, desires, hunches, metaphysical speculations, etc. go beyond the known facts and yet serve to motivate us. Moral sensibilities, emotional commitments, and competing cultural values add further layers of complexity that no understanding of the "facts" that science might give us can encompass. In William James' words (conclusion to The Varieties of Religious Experience) "our overbeliefs are the most interesting and important things about us."

In comments exchanged here with Eugene Bucamp, I had assumed it would be obvious that, historically and factually, belief in God provides an authoritative center by which the diverse points of view--the hopes, fears, desires, morals, etc.--that are not subject to science can be ordered. Thus, my point is extremely simple, and can be conceived by imagining a simple Venn diagram. Science cannot rule in the crucial sphere of human understanding where "overbeliefs" play a major role in human life. That sphere has traditionally been the sphere of religion. Now Bucamp might think that science can eliminate all overbeliefs in some hypothetical future omniscience. In that case, it will certainly make belief in God obsolete. But I think that overbelief is based on a confusion. I believe that human beings will always face existential questions that science cannot answer, leaving the door open for religious beliefs of all kinds--including Bucamp's seeming faith in science.

Notes and a Paradox

2009-01-23T15:56:00.000-08:00

Last Sunday morning I watched EWTN's Bookmark, on which Richard M. Hogan was interviewed about his book, The Theology of the Body. I learned that John Paul II had taken an existential approach to theology to make it more relevant to contemporary culture. That could also be said of Tillich's theology, which he framed as a "reinterpretation" for our time. But the outcome of John Paul II's thought was very different from Tillich's--though I say this as a person who knows very little about John Paul II's thought (I've got his Fides Et Ratio on a shelf somewhere, and have intended to read it).

Hogan neatly divided the intellectual orientation of those over 45 years old from those under this way. Those under tend to be inductive, subjective, and experiential in their thinking, whereas those over tend to be deductive, objective, and principled. The phenomenological/existential approach, according to Hogan, appealed to John Paul II, because it was a way for an older person to frame his thought in a way that would work for reaching younger minds. Since a second, more conservative take on the existential approach would be worthwhile, I plan to read Hogan's book, and will share it with you, if in fact it complementsTillich.

But in thinking about this, I realized something. I'm neither conservative nor liberal. If a conservative is one who concedes little or nothing to religion's (or culture's) critics and a liberal is ones who accedes much or all, theologically I am neither. I am, rather, an intellectual Christian who thinks that Christianity is not about the intellect, and yet thinks that to be intellectually honest one must have a good intellectual justification for that stance.

Paradoxically, this allows me to be both an intellectual and a non-intellectual when it comes to faith. Intellectuals tend to accede to faith's critics, not realizing that an intellectual approach to a conceptually transcendent object is impossible; conservatives tend to to define their approach to faith in contrast with faith's critics, making faith into a determination to concede nothing to faith's critics, and thus also not realizing that an intellectual approach--in their case an intellectual approach based on an anti-intellectualism--to a conceptually transcendent is impossible. Therefore, both conservative and liberal approaches to faith are fundamentally in error. In fact they make the same error.

Well, this week was very difficult at work and I must start work on a prototype this weekend, so these off the cuff comments take the place of the Tillich post I had intended to do. Nevertheless, I think it is a good thing to have revealed a little bit about the larger context I use to frame my thoughts. I look forward to continuing the posts on Tillich next week.

Tillich Simplifying Tillich

2009-01-19T08:29:00.002-08:00

I opened a book of Paul Tillich's sermons this week to see how he simplified his thought for presentation to groups that were not scholars of religion and theology. I was pleased to see that I can use his sermons to present his abstract theology in concrete terms. For example, here's a statement from Tillich's theology--extremely abstract as is typical--followed by a quote from a sermon that helps explain the theology. The subject is still "transparency."

"In every picture of [Jesus'] individuality appears his universal significance." (Systematic Theology, Vol. II, p. 151.

"Jesus could have become an idol, a national and religious hero, fascinating and destructive. This is what the disciples and the masses wanted him to be. They saw Him, they loved Him, they saw with and through Him the good and the true, the holy itself. But they succumbed to the temptation of seeing [by making an idol of him]. They kept to that which must be sacrificed if God shall be seen with and through any mortal being. And when He sacrificed Himself, they looked away in despair... But He was too strong; He drew their eyes back to Him, but now to Him crucified. ...they say with Him and through Him the God who is really God. He who has seen Him has seen the Father: This is true only of the Crucified. But of Him it is true." ("Seeing and Hearing" in The New Being, p. 133.)

As we move through the main theological concepts that Tillich uses--transparency, estrangement, cross, ultimate concern, courage to be/destiny/freedom, the ground of Being--the structure of his thought will appear as though a jigsaw puzzle were being put together. I am very pleased to have discovered the help of Tillich's sermons as sources of simplification and guides to the correct extrapolation of his thought.

By the way, visit prairiechurches.org to see some beautiful pictures of steeple-topped churches of the Great Plains. The site does not include pictures of the prairie trinity together, as it focuses on the churches, but the churches are beautiful expressions of "the point" of Christian faith, with their cross-topped steeples.

Tillich's "Transparency" and All Roads Lead to Church

2009-01-16T15:24:00.004-08:00

Three kinds of man-made structures are typically seen against the horizon of the Great Plains: grain elevators, water towers, and church steeples. And these three structures are related by the core symbols of the New Testament: "the bread of life"/communion, "living water"/baptism, and of course, the cross, which stands atop most steeples. (See, for example, Matthew 4:4 and John 4:11.) But is there a real link beyond the symbols' centrality in the New Testament?

I grew up on the Great Plains, and no town that I have ever seen lacked a steeple. Likewise grain elevators and water towers are ubiquitous. Since roads link the towns, in my experience all roads lead to church. But what's the point?

Clearly, the point of the symbolic linking is that the cross on top of the steeple is just as crucial to human life as is water and food. But is it really?

I think that a very simple and compelling case can be made that it is. People often do not get along. If the reasons for their disagreements are judged to be more important than keeping the peace, the peace will not be kept. What gatherings of people need, obviously, is something that effectively communicates the overriding need of loving one's neighbor, rather than fighting with her. Roads lead to churches because they preach that message and symbolize it on and by their steeples. They are needed in human communities just as water and grain is. (And on a side note, the role of so many churches in the so-called 'culture wars" puts that underlying reality in danger.) So steeples--or the counterparts in other religions-- belong with water towers and grain elevators, and the Church's core symbols express that connection: We do not live by bread and water alone.

This simple truth, however, is not an easy truth. Loving others as I love myself is more ambitious than doing just what I can get by with. And sometimes sacrifices must be made to keep the peace. That's the way the world is. The Church symbolizes that tough truth with the cross. In fact, if the truth weren't tough, there would be no need for cross-toped steeples. In Paul Tillich's words, "The Christ of the biblical picture takes upon himself the consequences of his tragic involvement in existence." (Systematic Theology, Vol. II, p. 134.) And so this constitutes his transparency: "The decisive trait in [Jesus'] picture is the continuous self-surrender of Jesus who is Jesus to Jesus who is the Christ." (Ibid.) The transparency is this: Jesus getting out of the way for Christ to show us the way--and the way is symbolized by the cross. We need that picture, and we need to believe in it, just as we need the water towers and grain elevators. That's what the steeple, the elevator, and the water tower against the horizon of the Great Plains tell us. That's what the roads leading to prairie towns tell us. That's what the core Christian symbols tell us. And if you are a Christian, that's what your heart tells you.

[Note to readers: I had planed to simplify Tillich's ideas to make their importance clearer, since his extremely abstract style can be a barrier. But simplification required further abstraction yet, and the writing wasn't working. So I went the other direction here by making the ideas more concrete. It's a real challenge for me, but an enjoyable one... Thanks for your patience!]

More Templeton "Big Q" Comments

2009-01-12T16:04:00.004-08:00

Here's one more exchange in the comment section of the Templeton Foundation's Big Question, "Does Science Make Belief in God Obsolete?"

RE: Whole Series
Eugene Bucamp
01/05/09
I fail to identify any substantive point in Tracy Witham's comment (12/19) or indeed in any of his previous comments. Animals, small and large, as well as prehistoric man...and Home sapiens have all thrived for eons without the support of the Ten Commandments. Witham may think religion or a belief in God can help, but he still needs to substantiate this strange notion, whereas we already know how science can help. Nobody really needs religion or a belief in God.

RE: Whole Series
p
01/07/2009
What really needs to be done is to advance the whole "God" discussion. For example, it seems to me that the question is largely rhetorical, and many of the essayists said so in their opening statements. It is not about belief or if there is a God, but whether, if there is a God, you can prove it or not. It seems things like these could be organized on a flowchart of sorts--that is, let's clarify where to begin the discussion of God by discarding or explaining away the standard errors in logic.

RE: Whole Series
Tracy Witham
01/10/2009
Eugene Bucamp (01/05/09) comments that he fails "to identify any substantive point" in the examples I gave to illustrate that existential questions are not answered by science but can be answered by religion (12/19/08). But then how could he, since he does not know what an existential question is? For Bucamp: Jean Paul Sartre's famous slogan, "existence precedes essence," is the usual shorthand way of defining existentialism. From it we are to grasp that--in contrast to other kinds of beings--human beings can decide what their lives are about.

Careers, moral frameworks, marriage, children, and, yes, belief in God are all subject to choices via values and assumptions that science cannot determine for us. Religion informs value systems and so helps answer existential questions in ways that science cannot. In a discussion about whether science makes belief in God obsolete, that is a very "substantive" point. I take this to be an instance of Mary Midgley's view that the question of God "is an element in something larger and more puzzling" than science considered apart from wider questions of human existence.

On a separate point I think that p (01/07/09) made a great suggestion: "let's clarify where to begin the discussion of God." How about starting with two separate definitions that would give us a real subject matter that everyone can subscribe to: 1. objectively, God is whatever explains the existence of the universe (or would explain it if human beings understood it), and 2. subjectively, God is whatever contributes most fundamentally to one's value systems. In both cases, "God" attains agreed upon "existence" via semantics, albeit semantics that retain core aspects of the traditional meaning of "God," and yet real referents are also given. It might be a way to start p's "flowchart."

Note to readers: The more i think about the difficulty of having a productive conversation about this issue the more I think that Tillich's contribution to it is crucial. I'll put the next Tillich post up on Saturday (the 17th).

Tillich's "Transparency of Jesus"--Why It's Needed

2009-01-09T11:18:00.000-08:00

"...so abject is their punishment,
Disfiguring not God's likeness, but their own,
...
...since they
God's image did not reverence in themselves."
Paradise Lost, Book XI--520-25

One way, and I think it is a good one, of viewing Tillich's overall view of theology, is as an explanation of Milton's words, quoted above. If the gospels give us "a lens of transparent vision," as claimed in the first post, then presumably there is a need for the transparency and the "lens" which imparts it. A short recap of the first post will set up the metaphor.

There we considered what I called the "primary question" for understanding the gospel writers' message: How can Jesus be "a vision that imparts knowledge of God" from within a tradition that forbids any representation of God? Now there must be a negative as well as a positive answer to this primary question. The negative answer is that Jesus must been seen as a "transparent vision." As a "transparency," Jesus can then become the "lens" that makes it possible to see God, and as a "transparency" he thereby avoids being a literal image of God. In fact, his "transparency" consists precisely in his not being in any way an idol: something that is not God that is (supposedly, but impossibly) used to represent God. Tillich quotes from The Gospel According to John to make the basic point of "transparency," that one must avoid confusing "the bearer of the ultimate with the ultimate itself."1

"A protest against such a confusion is found in the Fourth Gospel, which has Jesus say: 'He who believes in me does not believe in me but in him who has sent me."2

This "negative" view is supported by the fact that there is no physical description of Jesus given in the gospels. And the only scriptural "exception," if it is taken to be one, is the exception that proves the rule: "...he had no form or comeliness that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him." (From the description of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53) On a side point, that the gnostic gospels are in vogue as ways to shed light on the early church and perhaps the historic Jesus--since they clearly cannot be understood to function as answers to the primary question--shows that contemporary scholarship has taken a very wrong turn from the standpoint of historical analysis, not to mention faith.

In fact, the need for this "negative" aspect to an answer to the primary question makes the search for the historical Jesus into a search for an idol. It is a search for what the gospel writers left out precisely because it had to be! So it is ironic in the extreme that the inability of scholars to shed definite light on the historic Jesus is seen as a problem for faith: An understanding of the gospels from the perspective of the primary question tells us that it is Jesus' "transparency," and not his historicity, that the gospel writers wanted to confront their readers with. To understand this is to understand Paul Tillich's lack of concern with the historical Jesus, which was confronted in the first post in the form of a joke (recall: the story goes that Tillich was told that Jesus' bones were found to which he replies, "So, he really did exist, then?"). The joke is on the critics who don't understand what they are critiquing.

Moreover, a frank description of the "results" of biblical criticism is enlightening. In Harold Bloom's introduction to The Book of J he states, "...I will begin by pointing out that all of our accounts of the Bible are scholarly fictions or religious fantasies..."3 In Tillich's words the same point is made this way.

"Historical research... ...sketched 'Lives of Jesus.' But they were more like novels than biographies; they certainly could not provide a safe foundation for the Christian faith. Christianity is not based on the acceptance of a historical novel; it is based on the witness to the messianic character of Jesus by people who were not interested at all in a biography of the Messiah."4

What they were interested in, again, is how Jesus represented God to them, without violating the scriptural prohibition on representing God. The point of Tillich's metaphor of "transparency" is precisely that to represent Jesus' life, except as a means to representing God, is to misrepresent what his life was about in the minds of the gospel writers. And I have argued that it is in Tillich's thought that we find a theology that is consonant with what I have called the primary question.

We must also consider the positive side of the answer--how the end of representing God is reached without violating the prohibition behind the primary question. (The answer will be found in the idea that human beings are made in the image of God. To avoid the appearance of incoherence, I stress that ultimately the metaphor of transparency will be seen to rest on faith in a mystical analogy. And interestingly faith is contrasted with "vision" biblically just in the sense required: "Now faith is...the conviction of things not seen." (Hebrews 11:1) Faith thereby supplies what a vision cannot without violating the prohibition on representing God. The interesting thing here is that once we ask the primary question we can unpack the implicit rationale operating in the biblical narratives and teachings.)

But we do all this to no avail, unless we can show why it matters. And that is the reason Tillich stresses the correlation of faith's symbols with humanity's existential situation of estrangement. We will dig into the specifics of Tillich's use of the metaphor of "transparency" in the next post.

A final note of contrition. I wrote with conceit to the effect that I would make Tillich's difficult ideas easier to understand and appreciate. I must add to that now that if I am to do so, these posts will have to be read as first drafts in route to that goal. My defense in asking any readers that I have to remain with me is this: Tillich's thought is profound and insightful and repays serious effort. If I can point out a few of his main themes and make them understood, well, that can't help but be of interest to anyone who is wrestling with the meaning of faith and belief in God.

NOTES
1. Dynamics of Faith, (Harper and Row, New York, 1957) p. 104.
2. Ibid.
3. Bloom in The Book of J, (Grove Weidenfeld, New York, 1990) p. 10.
4. Systematic Theology (The University of Chicago Press, 1975) p. 105.

Strength Can Be Weakness: Note to Readers

2009-01-05T06:51:00.000-08:00

A quick comment on why I won't be posting on Tillich again till next weekend fits the general stated purposes of this blog: showing how the "point of view we take with respect to what we don't or can't know" has a big impact on our lives. In this case I'd like to make the point that something I can't know because it would require giftedness in an area where I have ordinary gifts (at best) makes me innovative in a significant way. For, paradoxically, lacking giftedness can be a gift--and since very few of us are gifted in all areas, think of this post as an incentive to love yourself and others for all of your, and their, quirks and deficits.

(For those of you who wish that I would write in simpler prose, you already think of my areas of giftedness--logic and language--as a deficit that impacts clear communication. That is, I display the reverse of my claim that a lack of giftedness can be a gift: the presence of giftedness can produce a deficit too. And viewed from the outside, it might not be apparent whether a person suffers from too little ability or too much. For instance, I recall well an English professor who celebrated a paper that I handed in in which I finally wrote in a style that he found suitably easy to read. Annoyed, I told him that since I didn't have anything very interesting to say, I thought I had better at least follow his advice. Life really is quite fun.)

To the point. I have rather poor visual intelligence. As a consequence, if I am to think of a way to accomplish a goal that requires visual intelligence to conceive, it will only be really simple ways of accomplishing the goal that I come up with. But, assuming that there is such a way, simplicity is often good thing. It tends toward elegance, and structural integrity, and, practically speaking, relative ease of manufacture. And by eliminating complexity it can mean saving in areas like weight and resources.Simplicity can be really cool! And you can think of my deficit of visual intelligence as functioning like "conceptual gravity" attracting only really simple solutions to problems requiring visual intelligence, well then my simple mind (visually) is a good mind.

I will have to wait till next weekend to post further on Tillich, because I had a breakthrough in designing my next rowing prototype. It's really simple--and will save resourses and cost and make for greater efficiency and will look a lot better than my previous design. And all that because I'm not very smart in the way most relevant to creating that design. Very cool.

Well, I half lied. The other reason why I won't be posting on Tillich till the weekend is that I have to do my year-end bookkeeping for my little startup company.

But let's focus on the positive. Dumb can be smart. Or if you enjoy focusing on the negative, in which case it is negative to focus on the positive, smart can be dumb...

:-)

More Tillich on the 10th or 11th. And I do hope that this doesn't convince any of you that Tillich is too complicated to be worth the effort. You see, not everything worth knowing is simple...

The Lens of Transparent Vision: Tillich Introduction

2009-01-01T08:08:00.000-08:00

If God cannot be represented (second commandment; Deut. 5: 8-10; Ex. 20: 4-6), how is it possible for a specific man of history to be the true representation of God to humanity? This is not a question for an idle conceptual game. If one looks to the tradition out of which Christianity arose, it must be the primary question. For apart from a compelling answer one does not have a coherent way to claim that in Jesus of Nazareth human beings encountered God. One then has a break with the tradition that Christians claim Jesus Christ fulfills. The solution to this question is therefore central and primary for Christian faith.

The following is a metaphor borrowed from New Testament scripture to use in approaching this primary question, and used as the title for this post: "The Lens of Transparent Vision." Now a "vision" is something seen, whereas to be "transparent" is to be something through which something else is seen. A transparent vision, then, is an oxymoron. That is, unless there is a specific circumstance that turns the meaning of the concepts inside out.

Imagine that there is a race of people who are blind, but for whom a special lens has been made that can cure their blindness. For that people the lens would constitute a transparency that creates vision, and by so doing it would bring an awareness of light into their world. It seems that the gospel writers viewed the entire human race as "blind" in just this sense, and that they viewed the gospel as providing a lens to see the light--and thus cure their blindness.

My Bible lies open to the end of Luke and beginning of John. On its pages I can read "'These are my words which I spoke to you, while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled.' Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and said to them, 'Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all nations..." (Luke 24: 44-47) And in John, "The true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world knew him not. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God..." (John 1: 9-12)

These quotes suggest that the gospel writers were wrestling with the primary question of how the story of Jesus the Christ can represent God to us, can be for us a vision that imparts knowledge of God. Clearly these quotes address the conceptual puzzle contained in this primary question: "...he opened their minds to understand the scriptures," and " The true light that enlightens every man...was in the world...yet the world knew him not. But to all who received him...he gave power to become children of God..." For clearly something very like a conceptual lens that opens one's understanding and shows us "the Way" is at work here. And it is this very conceptual lens that must be in place to see Jesus as the Christ imparting a vision of God to us rather than a radical break with the tradition out of which the expectation of the Christ arose. In short, something very like the answer to the question that had to be primary in the minds of a group of Jewish believers in First Century Palestine must be found in the gospels, and is, I believe.

This resolution of the gospel story as a break with the tradition out of which it came seems top have been the foremost "problem" on the minds of the gospel writers, both in terms of giving the gospel story "truth traction" in its native land and giving it conceptual coherence in its native tradition. Thus, the idea of the gospel story as a lens by which those who "receive it" can now see the truth about God seems especially apt, as the gospel quotes here indicate. And if we go to the first gospel (in terms of its writing) we see the vision of Jesus as the Son of God presented literally at the point that Jesus is introduced: "In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens opened and the Spirit descending like a dove; and a voice came from heaven, 'Thou art my beloved Son..." (Mark 1: 9-11)

And so I make an immodest claim. If we do not ask the primary question of how a man can represent God to humanity from within a tradition in which God cannot be represented, we do not understand the gospels. For the answer to that question is the lens through which the gospel is presented. In fact, to fail to perceive the answer to that primary, implicit question is to ignore the historical reality in which devout Jewish people proclaimed Jesus to be the Son of God and the Christ. It is bewildering that this is not the central piece in the puzzle both of Christian believers and scholars who employ methodical doubt in approaching the historical rise of the Christian faith. For neither group can make sense of what they seek to know apart for seeing Jesus' life as the answer to this primary question.

It is Paul Tillich who best understood this interface between the primary question of faith and historical research and how Jesus is presented as the answer to it. But Tillich did not communicate the nature of that interplay clearly enough for lay readers or even the majority of scholars, I am afraid, to appreciate his interpretive lens. And so I take up that task here; not as a scholar, but as someone who appreciate the contribution to this core insight, this primary insight, this crucial insight, into Christian faith. It is a contribution that makes of Jesus a lens of transparent vision onto God, no less.

Tillich speaks to the need for that transparency here:

"The question of the final revelation is the question of a medium of revelation which overcomes its own finite conditions by sacrificing them, and itself with them. He who is the bearer of the final revelation must surrender his finitude--not only his life but his finite power and knowledge and perfection. In doing so he confirms that he is the bearer of the final revelation (the 'Son of God' in classical terms). He become completely transparent to the mystery he reveals."1

Tillich's writing style is itself not entirely transparent. Nevertheless, in my estimation he is the most important theologian for understanding and appreciating the Christian faith from the perspective of its primary question. And yet in the eyes of many his work abandons faith. That makes for an interesting paradox; one we need to confront from the start. An old joke about him will convey it.

Antiquities scholars are unanimous: Jesus' bones have been discovered. And so the question arises, how to tell the faithful the news? It is decided that Tillich is the man for the job, at which point he is contacted and after hearing the news says, "So, you're saying there really was a Jesus, then?"2

How is it possible that Tillich rates so highly--has priority as the theologian who understands and responds to the primary question of Christianity--in my estimation and can be the butt of a joke for having abandoned faith in another sense? It is because, in his words, "It is a disastrous distortion of the meaning of faith to identify it with the belief in the historical validity of the Biblical stories."3

Yet, from the first, faith in the historical Jesus of Nazareth has been preached. "Men of Israel, here these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God..." (From Peter's Pentecost sermon in Acts 1) And as Tillich states, "This [confusing belief in the historicity of the New Testament narrative with Christian faith]...happens on high as well as on low levels of sophistication."4

The question here, I believe, is the same as that with which be began. That is, it is the primary question: How can a human being represent God to us and be seen as a coherent fulfillment of the Hebrew scriptures? And the answer here, again, must be by becoming a transparency--in the sense described above--by which the light that illuminates God is seen. Those who saw Jesus saw God; and in saying that it must be emphasized that in Jesus a transparency that allowed God to be seen was present. His humanity functioned as a "lens" by which God was revealed. Otherwise, one is guilty of idolatry. If we read Tillich's theology as an answer to this question, then we are able to laugh at the joke that pokes fun at his apparent lack of concern with the historicity of the gospel accounts. It will takes several posts to make this plain.

Whether there is a back door to belief in the historicity of the narratives through faith is a separate question, and one which Tillich neglected. Accordingly, it will fall to the end of these posts on Tillich, when it is appropriate to appraise the value of his theology to consider it. Here it is enough to know that I view his thought as crucial for our time precisely because it is easy for faith to confuse belief in the gospel accounts or even in the narrative about Jesus for the object of Christian faith, when it is precisely a belief that those narratives and that the man Jesus make God transparent that is the object of Christian faith, correctly understood.

It is the purpose of the coming posts to specify just what this means as understood from the writings of Paul Tillich. There could scarcely be a more crucial "clarity" for Christians to seek than this one, both for our present moment and perennially.

NOTES
1. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. I (The University of Chicago Press, 1951) p. 134.
2. Joke simplified from version told by Michael Goulder in "Jesus, The Man of Universal Destiny," in The Myth of the God Incarnate, ed. John Hick (The Westminster Press, Philadelphia, 1977) p. 48. Goulder's account of how to glean an understanding of the historic person from the New Testament narratives of Jesus in this essay is the best simple account that I have ever read. Yet he--and The Myth of the God Incarnate as a whole--fails to see the gospel narratives as implicit answers to this primary question. That crucial omission relegates the majority of historical research into the origins of the gospels to near irrelevance: the main point of the exposition is left out!
3. Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (Harper and Row, New York, 1957) p. 87.
4. Ibid.

Yet Another Reaction: The Templeton Big Q--Does Science Make "God" Obsolete?

2008-12-20T07:12:00.002-08:00

In the last post I signed off till after the holidays, not realizing that there would be any more commenting to respond to on the Templeton Big Question site. But there was, and the response actually helped me push my understanding of the interface of "belief and unbelief" along. So it's worth sharing. And again, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

RE: Whole Series
Eugene Bucamp
12/16/2008
Tracy Witha (09/19) claims that religious faith helps answer existential questions that science cannot. This is not true. There are in fact two very different kinds of existential questions, at least as I know them: the metaphysical ones and the ones arising from some form of psychological misery. Metaphysical questions exist in two varieties, those that are trivially absurd and those which we don't quite understand, let alone try to answer, and are likely absurd too. Both sorts we can ignore here unless someone gives an example worthy of consideration.

The second sort of existential questions, those that arise from some form of psychological misery, e.g., a medical condition, inadaptability to social intercourse, a serious conflict with somebody else. etc., most likely would not arise if not for the underlying misery. Hence, they would disappear if scientific progress could remedy the underlying condition. Though we are trying, it is true that we are not very good at it yet, but we can also note that science already remedies many cases of physical distress, something no religion does, which are also cause for psychological misery and hence a source of existential questions. Hence, science demonstrably does what Tracy Witham says it could not.

RE: Whole Series
Tracy Witham
12/19/2008

In considering Eugene Bucamp's comments of 12/16, I am led to the view that science (and research more generally) cannot answer an existential question. Two examples: 1. A young person wonders whether her life would be more productive of good if she became a teacher or an MD. In this case, a battery of tests and multiple research projects would be telling. Consequently, the question is instrumental; it asks how to achieve a goal, and science can help. 2. A young person wonders whether she should become a teacher to use her life to help others or become an actor to fulfill a personal passion. In this case, the question is existential because it asks what her life is to be about. It involves a choice between two values competing for primacy in her life, and science must wait till the choice is made to be of service.

It is obvious that the Ten Commandments, for instance, seek to tie a person's sense of what life is about to love of God and God's law, or as rendered in the New Testament, love of God and "neighbor," which is seen as fulfilling the law. Now one can clearly and truly speak of one's foundational value system as one's "God." This is apparent even in the atheistic writings of Sartre, for instance.

In that case, "God" remains relevant even for atheists, at least to the extent that they live according to well-formed value systems, systems that can be informed but not determined by science. Science cannot make "God" obsolete in this sense. In fact, "God" remains the most relevant question a person can ask, in this particular meaning of the term. Since the Foundation's Big Question HERE concerns God's continued relevance, not existence, this view carries the day.

Reaction #5: The Templeton Big Q--Does Science Make Faith in God Obsolete?

2008-12-15T08:38:00.000-08:00

In this final reaction I ask about the wisdom of engaging in this exchange in the first place.

As indicated in an earlier remark, I view the "conversation" as a pastiche of opinions rather than a true conversation. And as was also indicated earlier, that alone has value, as the pastiche forms a pretty good view of the range of opinion on the subject. But did the dialog actually move "the big question" forward? On that question, the answer has to be no.

An example from my experience will be helpful. As readers will know, I offered an argument to the effect that religion offers existential guidance of a form that science does not and cannot (see Reaction #1). A telling and interesting way to challenge my argument would have been to note that unless religion--"God" for purposes of this post--is the only game around for informing existential questions, that my argument does not put "God" on very strong ground. In fact the very reason that Tillich's theology is next in line for posts here on Metaponderance is that Tillich's view of faith as "ultimate concern" makes that very point. But I digress. Here's how the "conversation" in the comments concluded on the thread my argument started:

RE: Whole Series
Walter W. Lee
09/22/2008
Regarding John Cozijn's comment of (09/19): I submit a scientific theory: the inescapable basis for human values is the survivability of the species.

Observation on Mr. Lee's comment:

"Existentialism" is infamously difficult to define, but the reason is straightforward. In all of its forms it stresses the need for existing individuals to determine the meaning and values that guide them. Therefore the one way that a person can respond to a premise that claims that science cannot give human being existential guidance and completely miss the mark is to posit "survivability" as science's answer. ("Existence," in effect, cannot be the answer to an existential question. But the response does make me smile.)

Since I will assume for discussion here that the commentators on the Templeton exchange are bright and well intentioned, I must conclude that Mr. Lee has never taken the possibility that the opposing side has anything worthy of careful consideration to say. Which is to say that, at least where my comments are concerned, only the appearance of a conversation took place--and an appearance that is easily dispelled by careful consideration.

The final comment in the thread I started is worth noting, for the suggestion it provides on just what level the "conversation" was taking place.

RE: Whole Series
Jack King
09/24/2008
Walter W. Lee (09/22) theorizes that the basis for human values is the survivability of the species. I agree, but I would add to that the survivability of the culture. The ongoing discussion on this page is testimony to that. This forum has become one of many battlegrounds where the God culture and the science culture struggle for supremacy. The survival of science is not in doubt. At this point I think that the culture of God just wants to coexist.

Observation on Mr. King's comment:

Here, as before, the fact that the comment has not even addressed the relevant premise has not dawned on the responder. And making "culture" rather than the individual the focus of the question does not change the fact. What the response does do is depict what Mr. King thinks the real point of the discussion is: that "the God culture and the science culture struggle for supremacy."

It is alternatively sad or absurd--and hence funny--that a supposed "exchange" of ideas is interpreted in a way that makes the ideas beside the point--it's a power struggle--and that does not take the suggestion of the person to whom one "exchanges" an opinion with seriously enough to even engage the opinion--making the word "conversation" a misnomer here. On that count, I can note that clearly my jumping into the fray in the comments to this Big Question was a waste of time.

Simply put, Mr. King's comment, at least, shows that he doesn't think there is a richer and more interesting debate to be had than that which we see daily in the so-called "culture wars."

I conclude with two observations that are at odds with each other. First, there is a real need for respectful inquiry on both sides. If there is no need for that, there is no point to the question. I believe there is a big need. Thus, the "culture war' mentality needs to be lost. And second, there may be little real hope for that any time soon. In my small way, nevertheless, I will try to contribute to a more rewarding approach to the question.

And that "try" will take the form of some basic ideas taken from Paul Tillich's thought that I think advance the conversation in a positive way, for those willing to seriously engage those ideas.

Note: This will be 2008's last post. What we call "the holidays" are in fact a very busy time of year for me, as they are for so many of us! Since it is important to give a good effort in representing Tillich's thoughts, I think it is wise to wait till there is time to do a proper job...

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Reaction #4: The Templeton Big Q--Does Science Make God Obsolete?

2008-12-12T09:34:00.000-08:00

On one level it was unkind to set a trap for a fellow commenter (see previous post). My interlocutor fell for the trap, thereby demonstrating the substance of my claim, but he did not fail to question my questionable tactic: In fact, he accused me of hypocrisy, claiming it to be "the worst of New Testament sins." It was that accusation that I found challenging, and that I want to address now, by asking whether there is another level to consider.

"Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, self-control": if those traits are to characterize a Christian, then it would appear that the charge of hypocrisy is correct. Should I have let the disparaging and prejudiced comments go unchallenged? One response is that if I had to say unkind things in order to address my interlocutor, that a person committed to kindness, love, peace, patience, etc. would forgo comment. But if so, whenever "the truth hurts" Christians should avoid it in discourse with others. Whether that is always or ever true is a hard question--one that cannot be dealt with flippantly--and it threw me. Moreover, it may well have led to one (the?) reason that my comment in response was not published: It was a tepid response (I have no record of it).

A variety of questions need to be asked. To begin, is hypocrisy "the worst of New Testament sins"? A superficial reading of the NT might seem to indicate that, since Jesus railed against the religious authorities of his place and time for exhibiting it. And yet in every case that I can think of the evident motive for the railing is an oppressive use of religion to benefit religious authorities at the expense of the people they were to serve. Thus a self-serving attitude replacing the law of love is the source of Jesus' outbursts. The hypocrisy is manifest in holding the people to the letter of the law when the authorities let themselves off the hook. Thus Jesus' examples of a sheep falling into a well, David raiding the Temple, and deliberate healing on the sabbath, all contravene religious law as a barrier to the underlying law of love. (Matt. 12, et al) It is not hypocrisy, per se, but hypocrisy in the service of selfish , loveless religiosity that Jesus opposed, and so vituperatively!

In that case, harsh words from Christians can be appropriate when they serve the law of love.

But was that the case in my criticism of Mr. Cozijn's statements? If only it were the law of truth and not the law of love, I would be exonerated! But what The Sermon on the Mount tells us to "let shine" is "good works."

Luther famously opened the "hard nuts" of scripture by "throwing them on the rock of grace." Today the hard questions that scripture presents us with should, I think, be thrown against the rock of love.

Interpreting the New Testament today requires a thoughtful person to choose between faithfulness to the literal words of the text and faithfulness to the example that Jesus set. Jesus was kind to so-called "sinners," but he railed against religious hypocrites. No one is faithful to the bulk of scriptural laws and prohibitions. Therefore, to choose the horn of the dilemma "faithful to the text of scripture or the example of Jesus" that aligns us with the letter of the law rather than Jesus' example of loving inclusiveness makes us the kind of people that made Jesus mad--pure and simple.

[For interesting commentary on this go to Richard Beck's Experimental Theology blog and read his posts on Daniel Friedman's To Kill and Take Possession: Friedman's book makes the argument that moral progress can be traced in scripture. If so, for Christians it must be the example of Jesus in the context of their culture that is relevant. That is the crucial question today's Christians must face, and the answer is clear...]

If I set a trap for Mr. Cozijn that exposed his prejudiced opinion of the Church, perhaps he will forgive me if I concede that he caught me in a trap too. I thank him for that.

One last post remains on my experience reading and commenting on the Templeton Foundations' Big Question ofthe continued relevance of "God."

Reaction #3: Does Science Make God Obsolete?

2008-12-07T08:38:00.000-08:00

If the Templeton Foundation's Big Question, Does Science Make Belief in God Obsolete?, was intended as a kinder and gentler approach to Nietzsche's claim that "God is dead," then I suppose that after John Cozijn ratcheted up the rhetoric beyond genteel constraints and I stepped into the fray to challenge him, that the expected response of the Foundation would be to end our participation in the exchange on its forum. I have no complaint about that, though it must then be called a mistake to have allowed Mr. Cozijn to use such rash language to dismiss his rhetorical foils to begin with. By ending the exchange before a response was made to Mr. Cozijn's comments (see the previous post) the Foundation has allowed a false and irresponsible position to stand unchallenged. I am certain that that does not square with their goals in hosting such a forum.

In following posts I will consider, from a wider perspective, the wisdom of engaging in this exchange in the first place. And I will also respond to the purely rhetorical points Mr. Cozijn made. But my response to the substance of his comments follows, as that is basic to understanding the rest.

Response to the substance of Mr. Cozijn's comments from his 09/21/08 response to my challenge of 09/19/08:

Mr. Cozijn writes,

"My starting point, as per my first post in this thread, is that the God discussed here has virtually nothing in common with the religious beliefs and practices of actual believers, including 'educated, intelligent people.' To take Tillich as an example, his entire 'method of correlation' requires the acceptance of Christian revelation as a fact. To quote: 'The Christian message provides the answers to the questions implied in human existence. These answers are contained in the revelatory events on which Christianity is based...'"

I respond that Mr. Cozijn clearly thinks that Tillich correlated the supposed historical facts of Christian Scripture with "the answers to questions implied in human existence." In making this claim he is trying to accomplish two things. First, to reconnect the exchange to his starting point, and second, to take up my challenge (09/19/08) to give an expert abstract of a central position of Tillich's or Kant's, "and explain why they deserve his mocking."

But Tillich did not correlate supposed historical events with existential questions. In fact, he denied the possibility of doing so:

"The truth of faith cannot be made dependent on the historical truth of the stories...in which faith has expressed itself. It is a disastrous distortion of the meaning of faith to identify it with...belief in the historical validity of the Biblical stories." (Dynamics of Faith, p. 87)

How, then, do the stories impact Christian belief?

"All [historical] questions must be decided, in terms of more or less probability, by historical research. They are questions of historical truth, not of the truth of faith. Faith can say that something of ultimate concern has happened in history because the question of the ultimate in being and meaning is involved." (p. 88)

What, then, are the actual correlates of Tillich's theology? He "makes the correlation of existence and the Christ [his theology's] central theme." (Systematic Theology, Vol I, p. 19) It is, then, the symbol of the Christ and its relation to human existence that must be understood to represent the gist of Tillich's theology.

Mr. Cozijn did not only miss-state the correlates that he ventured to explain, he got them backwards, as the remainder of his comments--as they relate to Tillich--confirm. In fact, it would be nearly impossible to venture a coherent point of view about Tillich's theology and state it more incorrectly.

I admit to having set a trap for Mr. Cozijn, knowing that if he took up my challenge, it would be very unlikely that he would succeed in making an "expert abstract" of one of Tillich's (or Kant's) views, let alone critiquing it successfully. My "gotcha" approach may not have been nice, but it could not have been more successful in eliciting the truth of my complaint: Mr. Cozijn clearly "feels free to demean...people he does not understand."

Enough said on this aspect of his response!

What about his objection to "...this kind of high-minded theism which deliberately obscures its relationship to the myths fervently held by the real people--educated or not--who populate the pews...of this muddled world"?

Again, he could not have got "this kind of high-minded theism" more wrong: For Tillich, "Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned: the dynamics of faith are the dynamics of man's ultimate concern." (Dynamics of Faith, p. 1--opening statement.) It is almost painful to note that the entire project of Tillich's theology is the opposite of what Cozijn claims: to "deliberately make plain" the relationship of the biblical stories to the beliefs "fervently held by the real people--educated or not--who populate the pews..."

Finally, in response to Mr. Cozijn's complaint that I "upbraid" him for insulting people, I simply ask, how can I depict his wildly irresponsible remarks in a positive light? Should his extraordinarily inaccurate remarks have been allowed to stand unchallenged? One would think not!

Yet, I take the question seriously, and will address it in the next post. Was the Templeton Foundation right to post his derogatory comments based on a prejudice never backed up by serious inquiry, and then not to post my response? There are two practical problems with their allowing a response, which makes it defensible for them not to have done so. And so this deserves further exploration.

But as an outgoing comment, I would like to note that Mr. Cozijn is a formidable polemicist, and if only he knew what he was talking about, I'm quite sure he would make a good conversation partner for a person seriously looking for the truth about the ideas on which we disagree. Alas!

Reaction #2: The Templeton Big Q--Does Science Make God Obsolete?

2008-12-05T06:57:00.000-08:00

A brief recap of Reaction #1:

I observed that in the Templeton Big Question, Does Science Make Belief in God Obsolete? that no one--none of the featured contributers nor anyone who commented on the contributions--offered an explicit rationale for the opinion that science cannot supersede religion. So I did in a comment on 9/19: "If faith provides a framework for answering existential questions and science cannot, then science cannot supersede religion." I then offered the Shema, The Eightfold Path, and the Great Commandments as evidence that it is of the essence of religion to provide existential guidance and threw out the naturalistic fallacy as a reason to think that science cannot.

Responding to my argument John Cozijn conceded that values and ethics do not arise from science, and then went on to ask, "But what makes anyone think that religion has anything to contribute?" and then claim: "The entire history of the Church would seem [to be] eloquent testimony that religion provides no special insight..." As you will read, I jumped on that claim and challenged Mr. Cozijn.

Before reading my challenge and Mr. Cozijn's response, it will be instructive to know that there is a 2,000 character limit to comments at the Templeton site, making any detailed argumentation next to impossible. In fact, the contributors were also given scant space for their opinions. So the entire Templeton project could be viewed as little more than--as noted in the first reaction--a pastiche of opinions--albeit notable ones. And that alone has value.

RE: Whole Series
Tracy Witham
09/19/2008
John Cozijn's (09/19) words show that he feels free to demean and insult people he doesn't understand. The pity is that he asked a good question: "What makes anyone think that religion has anything to offer?" It deserves a good response. But he quickly--between insults--asserts that "The entire history of the Church would seem eloquent testimony that religion provides no special insight into moral problems or any other dilemmas." That's a big claim. Then he must have really done his homework!

Since I have great respect for Paul Tillich's theology, perhaps he will disabuse me of the view that Tillich's use of ultimate concern and false ultimacy successfully re-interprets religious faith for educated, intelligent people, and that it offers the key to solving humanity's central moral dilemma. Or perhaps, since I originally brought up the problem of existential crisis, he would rather explain why existential estrangement isn't a good modern re-interpretation of the concept of sin, one that both secular and religious persons can learn from and respect. Perhaps he spent more time in philosophy. How about a critique of Kant's assertion that the only unqualified good is a good will and its relationship to the central theme of his Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone--followed, of course, by an explanation of why Kant or any neo-Kantian religious thinker is such a rube that she or he deserves only ridicule?

So, can Mr. Conijn give us an expert abstract of any of these concepts and explain why they deserve his mocking? His big claim implies that he can. My suspicion is that his "argument" has much in common with the straw man it attacks.

RE: Whole Series
John Cozijn
09/21/2008
Tracy Witham upbraids me for insulting people "I don't understand" and insinuates I haven't done my "homework," etc. Well, let us not waste time feigning outrage at the polemical tactics of those with whom we disagree lest we be accused of that worst of New Testament sins: hypocrisy. My starting point, as per my first post in this thread, is that the God discussed here has virtually nothing in common with the religious beliefs and practices of actual believers, including "educated, intelligent people." To take Tillich as an example, his entire "method of correlation" requires the acceptance of Christian revelation as a fact. To quote: "The Christian message provides the answers to the questions implied in human existence. These answers are contained in the revelatory events on which Christianity is based ..."

However, the historicity of these "events" is itself entirely based on the implausible and contradictory narratives contained in the extended press release we now call the New Testament (and its rather troubled relationship to a diverse set of ancient Jewish texts we know as the Old Testament). Now if the test of historicity fails, so does Tillich's entire project. This is an empirical question, and it seems to me that in these "highbrow" discussions people go to great lengths to disguise their necessary adherence to dogmas of talking snakes, virgin births, assorted miracles, bodily resurrections, and other Iron Age nonsense. Instead we are treated to meaningless abstractions such as "God is Love" or vacuous philosophising that purposefully disguises its preposterous premises. I actually have no problem with Deism (since it implies no empirical claims at all), but I do object to this kind of high-minded theism which deliberately obscures its relationship to the myths fervently held by the real people--educated or not--who populate the pews and prayer mats of this muddled world.

Note: My response to Mr. Cozijn was not posted in the Templeton comments. I have a couple of hunches why that I will offer in the next post, along with a response to Mr. Cozijn.

Reaction #1: The Templeton Big Q--Does Science Make God Obsolete?

2008-12-01T07:51:00.000-08:00

If you haven't looked at the John Templeton Foundation's "Big Questions" series, you are missing a chance to read responses to important questions by brilliant contributors. The articles are actually written at a more-or-less popular level, which means that they are surprisingly readable, though the downside is that controversial claims are frequently made on the basis of the contributor's notable authority, and then controverted by the next authority. The result is a pastiche of differing opinions set out by luminous intellects. My overall impression is that it is the Kantian view that antinomies arise at the limit of human understanding that is vindicated, and not any particular position. And as Kant long ago opined, that leaves those who frankly acknowledge that the expression of their point of view is done on faith who are on the strongest ground.

Philosopher Mary Midgley came the closest of all the contributers to expressing that view. "Belief--or disbelief--in God is not a scientific opinion... It is an element in something larger and more puzzling...the set of background assumptions by which we make sense of the world as a whole." (See the Templeton site for her entire comment.)

That said, I thought something was missing in the series and contributions: an explicit rationale for the opinion that science cannot supersede religious belief in God. So I had the temerity to offer one in the comments to the contributors' articles. There are some interesting lessons to be learned from the reaction that I got from others who jumped on my comments. So I thought that I'd share the experience with you, starting with the comment that put some rather nasty responses in motion.

RE: Whole Series
Tracy Witham
09/19/2008
Jack King (09/17) concedes that science cannot address the existential doubt in Marcel's play (see my 9/15 comment). Perhaps it will help to make the underlying argument explicit: If faith provides a framework for answering existential questions and science cannot, then science cannot supersede religion. The core of the great religions expressly provide that framework (the Shema, the Eightfold Path, The Great Commandments, etc.).

The Marcel plot was a specific example to illustrate how it can be that a person must choose a meaning in response to a situation that cannot be better understood "scientifically," and where faith provides the only helpful way out. Then I pointed out that the facts of natural history are also beset with opportunity for existential doubt, and that more facts are not likely to change the need for faith--and just think of faith here as "belief where doubt is possible," to use William James's definition--in making up one's mind.

Last, I used the naturalistic fallacy to point out that the understanding of the world that science gives us cannot be turned into the moral and value systems that people use to make decisions. My conclusion follows: science cannot supersede religion. In reply to Mr. King's counterpoints, "science" does not "apply" itself; human beings working as scientists do. Science does not accomplish the greater good. People decide to use science to do good.

To drive the point home that science is contingent on the non-scientific value systems of its practitioners, I ask, will science still contribute to the greater good if a scientist gives atomic bomb technology to terrorists? Is that a terrible thought? Yes. Is that judgment scientific? No. Would the terrorist share it? No. Could the scientist be a terrorist? Yes. Mr. King should consider whether "science" has become his "god." If so, my faith says he can upgrade for free.

RE: Whole Series
John Cozijn
09/19/2008
Values and ethics are not derivable from science--that would indeed be the worst kind of scientism. But what makes anyone think that religion has anything to contribute? Fall of man via a trick played by a talking snake, followed by a blood sacrifice that "saves" humanity from this Original Sin? Puh--lease!

Why is a prelate more qualified to offer "moral guidance" than a plumber? The entire history of the Church would seem eloquent testimony that religion provides no special insight into moral problems or any other human dilemmas. And given that science has effectively overthrown its entire ontology, the pronouncements religion does make on such questions are invariably wrapped up in layers of obfuscating mumbo-jumbo.

This of course is the fundamental problem with Steve Gould's position of "non-overlapping magisteria," or NOMA, which just hands over the entire sphere of morality to "religion." The reality is that the world does not need men in dresses to pontificate or evangelical conmen to command others "how to live." Religion in the 21st century is surplus to requirements. We are on our own, so let's just grow up and start taking responsibility for our ethical and personal choices based on the best information about the world we can get (which is where science comes in).

Into the World--Epilogue

2008-11-26T18:44:00.000-08:00

We can now see that divine sacrifice on our behalf affirms the radical question of life that, ultimately, reality is moral. The message of the cross, by depicting that affirmation, becomes the proper object of human faith. The Gospel According to John calls the message of Jesus’ life and death “the light of men.” (John 1:4) We have identified that light with conscience, and connected the light of conscience to faith that God will vindicate the person who seeks to live in its light.

Of course, these last statements are statements of faith. But we now understand that no neutral position is possible with respect to the supreme question, and a person who does not understand that does not understand the first thing about faith, that it begins with a decision. For the supreme question is posed to the naked human psyche, with not even a conceptual fig leaf in place to divert one’s gaze from the naked fact that one must choose.

A man who farms near a university that is famous for the study of agriculture likes to tell this story. He hosts students from the university on tours of his farm, and on those tours students frequently ask questions such as, “What’s growing in that field?” and, “What’s that over there?”

“Beans,” he says, and “Planter.”

As a person can study agriculture without learning the first thing about it from the perspective of a farmer, so a person can study theology without learning the first thing about it from the perspective of a person of faith. Consider a Christian who goes to church on Sunday and is told of her need for faith in God’s gracious sacrifice for her. Somehow that message strikes a chord in her heart. Somehow that message addresses troubling practical dilemmas that arise in her life. Somehow the sacrament of communion cuts to the very core of her being, and she strives to live in accord with the message. Her will has engaged the message, and the message has engaged her will. That is the first and most important thing about her faith. Her faith is not supported by any formal rationale, and she knows that. But her faith is vital, because it moves her feelings and motivates her actions. She believes that she is a better person for having faith.

A student of theology may look to wrap these first things of faith in a rationale, and so provide clothes to cover this naked faith. But by doing so, he makes them last things, conclusions, and he thereby treats faith as though it is a mistake, or at best, a stand-in for understanding. The implication is that the truth about God did not need to come into the world. From the standpoint of faith, however, we should not expect to discover the truth about it by means of science or philosophy, or even theology, any more than we should expect to discover the meaning of an author’s text by placing it in test tubes. For the answer we seek requires a higher order than nature; consequently, anything that we can discover by means of answering lesser questions is necessarily not what seek in asking the supreme question. Christian Scripture tells us that Jesus was God incarnate, the divine Logos of creation given human flesh, who in a supreme irony died for us. That message poses itself to us as creatures, putatively, by divine inspiration. Thus, we must hear it as creatures listening to the voice of God speaking to our core existential question, not as scientists or scholars.

We have considered the spiritual meaning of Jesus’ life on the supposition that he was God incarnate. All that we can know is that the message of the cross answers the deepest question that we face as free, morally sensitive beings. In other words, all that we can know, apart from faith, is that we are considering the right answer to the right question. To call the answer the truth, however, is a choice, not a conclusion: and a naked choice, one that cannot be clothed in conclusions derived from this world’s wisdom. But there is a much better way to say this: “Truly, I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” (Mark 10:15)

Kierkegaard once wrote that it would be good enough for the purposes of faith “If the contemporary generation [with Jesus] had left nothing behind them but these words: ‘We have believed that…God appeared among us in the humble figure of a servant, that he lived and taught in our community, and finally died… …this nota bene on a page of universal history…would be sufficient to afford an occasion [for faith] for a successor, and the most voluminous account can in all eternity do nothing more.”¹ I agree, in that faith is a permanent possibility for all human beings; for it is the resolution of a dilemma at the core of human nature, as I hope has been shown. It must be added to Kierkegaard’s nota bene, however, that divine sacrifice for the sake of humanity is needed. For it is the question of whether to sacrifice one’s self-interest in order to do the right thing for the sake of others, when necessary, that underlies the supreme question, the radical question of life. In biblical language, it is “the message of the cross” that answers that radical question of life by depicting divine sacrifice for the sake of humanity. And so the message of the cross becomes the object of faith for a righteous belief, a belief fit for a humanity that accepts the call to a higher way of life.

Jesus is said to have used parables to describe the impact of having faith that one has “found” this higher way. Here is one.

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. (Matthew 13:44)

Returning a last time to the story of Jesus’ trial, it presents an ideal microcosm in which to examine the essential teaching of Christian faith. Jesus prompted Pilate’s famous question—“What is truth?”—by saying, “Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.” The famous question followed, and then Jesus’ silence, a silence made suspect by his statement. And yet the suspicion grows out of a preliminary, a superficial understanding of the passage. Having examined the context surrounding it in some depth—both scripturally and conceptually—we now understand that Jesus could not have answered the question and remained true to his purpose. For to have done so would have removed the pressure from Pilate of deciding the supreme question, thereby contravening Scripture’s main theme in application to his life, and averting Jesus’ mission as the Word of God made flesh in depicting that theme to us through Scripture.

It all comes together in that scene. Consequently, we have now answered the overarching question that constituted the conceptual peak that we have wanted to climb: We now see why Jesus’ silence in the face of Pilate’s famous question depicts his divinity. He had to silently accept his condemnation and crucifixion in order to enact the supreme sacrifice in answer to the supreme question.

In closing we should note that the text converges on the reader also. It does so in that the reader along with Pilate is left to judge the truth of Jesus’ claim. Astoundingly, the reader, like Pilate, is allowed to enact the supreme irony of the trial by making a judgment about Jesus. But then, again, this too is a statement of faith.

Nevertheless, whether or not one chooses faith, the point of view from the literary summit in The Gospel According to John is truly a revelation. For it strips human life of all pretensions, uncovering a choice at the core of our humanity.

“Pilate said to them, ‘Here is the man!’”

NOTES
1. Soren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, Tr. David F. Swenson (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1936) p. 87.

Looking Ahead

2008-11-23T13:44:00.002-08:00

The last post of Into the World is coming up next Wednesday. I thought it would be a good time to let you know what is coming up next.

Earlier this fall I got into an exchange with a couple of other persons commenting on the Templeton Foundation's last big question, "Does science make belief in God obsolete?" I think there are some interesting things to learn by thinking about both the Templeton Foundation's contributors' and the comments about the contributions--including mine.

In thinking about what can be learned, I realized that my thoughts merge pretty well with Paul Tillich's views, especially in Vol. II of of his Systematic Theology. So that's where we're going: a few posts on the Templeton Foundation's big question, "Does science make belief in God obsolete?" followed by some thoughts by Paul Tillich that I think are especially apt.

Last comment. As I did following the first run of Into the World (kindly hosted on Richard Beck's wonderful Experimental Theology blog) I am happy to offer any interested reader a copy of my little work. Just email me at RowAhead@charter.net and put "Into the World copy" in the title line.