Sep
1
Philosophia Perennis
September 1, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Dr. Michael Liccione of Sacramentum Vitae has launched a new group blog, called Philosophia Perennis, to host the writings of a number of Catholic philosophers who have been around the blogosphere for a while. I find myself among those invited to contribute to this new effort, and I will do so happily–if everyone invited actually takes part, the enterprise promises to be an exciting addition to the Catholic blogosphere.
Aug
23
The Evolution of Christianity
August 23, 2007 | Leave a Comment
If, like me, you have an interest in the developmental patterns that structured the Christian religion during the first century, you are probably most familiar with those elements of the patterns that have been popularized in the mass media, elements such as the work of the Jesus Seminar, the publication of various Gnostic texts, and the like. Less familiar to most folk theologians such as myself, I imagine, are the internecine struggles that shaped the earliest Christianity of all, the Church of the Apostolic age. So I was quite interested in an essay published in the July, 2007 issue of New Testament Studies called “Matthew 7.21-23: Further Evidence of its Anti-Pauline Perspective” (53:325-343). Here is the abstract:
The redactional pericope in Matt 7.21-23, in which Jesus the final judge condemns certain false Christians, can and should be viewed as an anti-Pauline text. Those rejected by the Matthean Jesus are none other than Paul and those of his circle. This identification is indicated not only by their description as workers of lawlessness, but also by their defense that they are true Christians because they prophesy, work miracles and perform exorcisms in the name of Jesus. These charismatic activities were clearly associated with Paul and/or his churches.
I am not an expert in this field, so it is beyond the scope of my training to evaluate adequately the evidential claims made in this article, but I must say that the thesis strikes me as very interesting. It seems clear to me that the gospels of Mark and Matthew in particular show evidence of that patchwork composition that can be taken as evidence of having been cobbled together from a variety of sources with a variety of ends, audiences, and methods. That the gospel of Matthew in particular should have anti-Pauline elements does not strike me as implausible at all, given the nature of the various factions at work within the Church at that time.
It would be fascinating to know more about the earliest history of the Church but, as is often pointed out, the history of conflict is mostly written by the victors, so it seems unlikely that we will ever find the sort of evidence that would be necessary for a genuine reconstruction of the period in question.
Aug
22
Same Old Same Old
August 22, 2007 | Leave a Comment
A new book by Philip Kitcher has been reviewed by James Kreuger for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. The book, Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith, is published by Oxford University Press. The book, which I have not read, appears to be a little different from recent books by Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett to the extent that it does not say that religion is for morons, but it is rather like them, and like a recent book by philosopher Owen Flanagan, in arguing that if religion has any value at all it is in the myths that it passes on to us for our comfort. Here is an extract from the review.
Kitcher argues that the reason so many find evolutionary theory so disturbing is that it truly is incompatible with a certain kind of religion, what he calls providentialist religion, which involves “belief that the universe has been created by a Being who has a great design, a Being who cares for his creatures, who observes the fall of every sparrow and who is especially concerned with humanity” (122-123). Evolution presents two problems for such religious views. First, it makes suffering an essential part of the world. It forces us to suppose that “a providential Creator . . . has constructed a shaggy-dog story, a history of life that consists of a three-billion-year curtain raiser to the main event, in which millions of sentient beings suffer, often acutely, and that the suffering is not a by-product but constitutive of the script the Creator has chosen to write” (124). Second, all providentialist religions accept certain truths about the supernatural (for example, asserting the existence of some god). Such claims, the argument goes, are simply not subject to rational evaluation and as such there can be no reason to prefer one supernaturalist story to another. Thus the basis for accepting any particular religion disappears. Kitcher contends that these kinds of arguments are at the heart of the enlightenment critique of religion, a broader set of arguments that the debate over evolution must be situated within, and that this critique is devastating for providentialist religions.Nonetheless, Kitcher tries to look beyond a simple rejection of religion to see what it is that religion provides for believers. He writes, “the benefits religion promises to the faithful are obvious, and obviously important, perhaps most plainly when people experience deep distress” (155). Drawing on the writings of Elaine Pagels, he argues that it is this desire for comfort, particularly in the face of death, that is so important to the faithful. The fear of losing this, of being cast free in an uncaring universe, is what leads to such strong commitment to providentialist beliefs and thus what drives the debate over evolution. This is the source of commitment to the anti-evolution cause.
Thus the way forward, Kitcher suggests, is to meet this need without having to accept dubious providentialist claims. He argues a “spiritualist” religion, a religion that gives up “the literal truth of the stories contested by the enlightenment case” (152), can do this. So, for example, a spiritualist Christianity would keep “the teachings, the precepts, the parables, and the eventual journey to Jerusalem and the culminating moment of the Crucifixion” (152), but these stories would be transformed from stories about the literal Son of God to “a symbolic presentation of the importance of compassion and love without limits” (152). Such spiritualist Christianity, he claims, could still provide the basis for a community of believers that provides genuine comfort without coming into conflict with modern science or enlightenment rationality.
The problems with such a position, however, are not hard to recognize. From the point of view of the religious believer, such a spiritualist religion looks much too thin to count as genuine religious belief. Could one really be called a Christian if he or she didn’t believe that God exists, that Jesus is the Son of God, and so on? Can being a Christian simply mean reading the Bible to find parables one finds useful in illustrating certain general ethical precepts? On the other hand, the secularist is going to immediately ask why it should be that one should focus on one set of stories over another. The same enlightenment critique that was pressed against the providentialist can be pressed again. Some reason for accepting one set of stories must be provided. But, if such a justification can be offered (offered, as it must, in a way that relies on no supernaturalist claims), then why isn’t the position really just a secular humanism dressed up in some fancy stories? Why go through the charade of faith at all?
Kitcher is a better writer than Dawkins and Dennett, and a better philosopher than Flanagan, so I am looking forward to reading this book in spite of the rather bizarre claims it makes about the compatibility of science and religion. It’s beginning to look as though Dawkins has made good his boast of a few years ago that the self-styled “Brights” of the world will come together in their attempts to bring religion down, because we’re starting to hear the same old song being covered by a rather wide variety of bands. One thing seems clear to me, however. Flanagan and Kitcher are wimps. There’s absolutely no point in tolerating religion at all if it is false, and on that point I actually agree with Dawkins and Dennett. It’s either real religion or no religion, as far as I’m concerned, and I can’t really take seriously even for a moment suggestions such as Flanagan’s, that an intelligent person can go around calling himself a “Catholic” while rejecting the ontology and theology of the Catholic religion. That sort of thing might satisfy a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, but it will never do for an adult.
So what is needed is a broader discussion of the grounds for asserting that religion simply cannot be taken seriously by an intelligent person. So far the argument, such as it is, always boils down to nothing more than “we materialist empiricists can’t make sense of religious claims, therefore they don’t make sense”. A ballsy claim, to be sure, but useless as far as this discussion is concerned. A better contribution would focus on the merits of empiricism and materialism as such, and would attempt to answer the objections raised by rationalists and anti-realists. But that is a rather herculean task, as I suspect these one-hit-wonder bands already know, else they would have written new and different songs.
Aug
17
The Sands of Time
August 17, 2007 | Leave a Comment
They’ve been a-blowin’ at me all day, as I sit here enjoying the beach at Lake Michigan on a beautiful, if windy, late summer afternoon. We’ve been hanging out here all week, somewhere in the vicinity of Holland, Michigan, but tomorrow we head on home. The kids will be back in school in a week, and then Ohio University will start its fall term the week after that. I’ll be teaching philosophy of science and ancient Greek philosophy–a great combination of fantasy and reality.
In Holland there are more Reformed churches than you can burn a stake at, but as far as I could tell there was only one Catholic Church, which I wasn’t able to find (it did not appear to be visible at the address where Mapquest said it would be, but maybe they have to keep a particularly low profile in these parts). The tourist dollars appear to keep the area well funded in terms of public monies: there is beautiful sodded grass in every lawn, the sidewalks are clean and tidy, the buildings are all well-kept, and everywhere you look there are happy smiling faces. Living here during the off season might be just a little bit like living in River City in 1912, except for the whole reformedness of the place. Lots of Dutch names everywhere, too, and I’m not sure I’d be very comfortable living in a place where I had to pronounce lots of “oe” and “eevvff” combinations. It’s also rather difficult to get over the feeling that one is rather insulated in places like this. Back in Athens there are reminders everywhere that Appalachia is not an economically thriving area, and there are many opportunities to get involved with helping people out. I’m sure that there are plenty of similar opportunities here, but there’s this nagging feeling that much of the information about such opportunities gets swept under the rug or at least put into the back broom closet during the tourist season, and for some reason I find that a little disquieting.
Which is particularly weird in this particular place. These people are all Calvinists, after all, and who’s more prone to dismality than Calvinists? When on vacation it can be easy to forget that things are not all that great in many parts of the world, that people are suffering while you’re sitting in the sand watching your daughter play on a boogie board. So what’s with all the white-washed anti-Calvinism of this place very Calvinist locale? Maybe this is what happens when money trumps religion.
Aug
16
Comfortable With the Size of My Muskens
August 16, 2007 | Leave a Comment
According to a story at the Washington Post, there really is a bishop in the Netherlands named Tiny Muskens. This is the same bishop who advocated the use of condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS. Now he’s going around saying that everyone ought to refer to God as “Allah”. I suppose if I lived in the Netherlands I might be worried about losing my Muskens to rabid religious fanatics too, but let’s get real.
Aug
15
Aristotle Vindicated Again
August 15, 2007 | Leave a Comment
The latest issue of Nature (08/16/2007) has an interesting cover headline: “Form Finds Function” introduces an article by Johannes Hermann called “Structure-based activity prediction for an enzyme of unknown function” that argues, in effect, that the function of a certain enzyme can be predicted on the basis of its underlying structure. This is an interesting finding to Aristotelians, who think that there are such things as essences in nature that do, in fact, determine the functions of things.
It also reminds me of a rather interesting factoid that I only learned about because my wife is a crime-novel buff. It seems that there is a certain compound that is often used in cough-syrups called dextromethorphan. This compound is identical to another, called levomethorphan, in every way except one: dextromethorphan twists to the right (hence the “dextro” part of its name) but levomethorphan twists to the left. Apart from the direction of their twisting they are indiscernible. Oh, actually, there is one other difference between them: dextromethorphan relieves your cough, but levomethorphan can kill you if you take too much of it. One is antitussive at low doses and dissociative at high doses, the other is an opiate that relieves pain at low doses and kills at high doses. That’s why these compounds figure in crime novels: because they are chemically identical they cannot be distinguished when they are in your body doing things to you, so somebody who had access the the left-leaning molecule could kill you without being caught. I told you leftists were dangerous.
To make a long story short, it seems that we have some grounds here for thinking that strictly reductive, materialist accounts of systems are insufficiently explanatory of mechanism: form is also a necessary component of a full explanation.
Aug
14
The Human Families
August 14, 2007 | Leave a Comment
The most recent archaeological evidence (published last week in Nature, 08/09/2007) suggests more trouble on the horizon for Biblical “literalists”, the pinheads who think that it’s not enough for the Bible to be “true”, it has to be “literally, word for word, jot and tittle true”, otherwise it’s all just a pack of lies. According to these folks, God created the entire material and spiritual universe in six twenty-four hour periods, and then rested for twenty four hours (maybe he wanted to watch himself on 24 Hours). Since this all happened nearly 6000 years ago it’s a rather difficult hypothesis to test, but since it sez so in the Bible who needs to test it? It’s proven science, folks. Anyway, on this view of things, all of humanity is descended from an original pair of humans, Adam and Eve, who had no navels since they themselves were directly created by God, not born from other animals.
The latest archaeological evidence suggests that Homo habilis and Homo erectus were living broadly sympatrically in the same lake basin for nearly half a million years. If this is so, then it is at least possible that present day homines sapientes are descended from more than one genetic lineage. There is genetic evidence supporting the hypothesis that we are all descended from a single lineage, but this most recent evidence may complicate that somewhat. The possibility of more than one lineage has always existed, of course, but it is interesting to contemplate the further possibilities opened up by this work.
Aug
8
The Evolution of Affluence
August 8, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Cultural evolution can be a controversial topic. When one thinks about evolution it is natural to think about variation and change in the rather straightforward anatomical traits that one can visually assess or the more complex and discrete traits found at the level of the genome. But behaviors, beliefs, attitudes, and the like are no less phenotypes than one’s hair or eye color, and they are, for the most part, heritable (there are some curious exceptions, such as celibacy). For some reason the academic interest in the evolution of behaviors, beliefs, attitudes, sometimes classified under the rubric of “cultural evolution”, has tended to center in the field of philosophy of biology: one finds few working biologists who specialize in it, and only a handful of sociologists and anthropologists, historians, and economists. This is unfortunate, because it is an empirical discipline in the end, and it needs some folks besides philosophers doing some work if it is to really take off.
The field took a hit in the early days that has not helped it much since. When Edward Osborne Wilson published his Sociobiology: A New Synthesis in 1975 it caused something of a stir among both philosophers, biologists, and sociologists, some of whom saw his interpretation of the interaction between biological traits and human behavior as a thinly-veiled neo-fascism on the rise. That was, of course, a silly idea, but the damage was done, and sociobiology was often viewed with some suspicion during the late 1970s and the 1980s.
Now Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis, has a new book forthcoming from Princeton University Press (A Farewell to Alms, due out next month) that seems situated to cause a similar stir, though thankfully without the charges of neo-fascism. According to Clark, the growth in affluence that was witnessed by countries where the Industrial Revolution had its greatest impact was a consequence of cultural evolution. That is, whereas historians and economists ordinarily trace the effects of such things as the Industrial Revolution to the institutions and practices that underlie them, Clark wants to trace the whole kit and caboodle to fundamental changes in human behavior that he thinks were consequences of cultural evolution.
In particular, he notes that technological change often increases the capacity of humans to feed and take care of themselves, but often the technological advantage is soon swamped by a “Malthusian trap” in which the population expands in such a way that the overall affluence of the people is not increased in any tangible way. What happened on the eve of the Industrial Revolution was quite interesting. From 1200 to 1800 in England the population went through several evolutionary bottlenecks, such as the Black Death, where the population was suddenly and severely reduced. Casualties were mostly in the cities, and so immigration from the countryside was required to replenish the inhabitants of the large, industrial centers. These people, in turn, came to be better off than they had been when living in the country, and as they grew richer and better able to care for themselves and their children, it was their offspring that mostly survived the various bottlenecks. By the late 1700s the population of England was largely derived from the economic upper classes of the Medieval period. By studying documents from the period from 1200-1800, Clark shows how work hours steadily increased, literacy and numeracy levels rose, and the rate of interpersonal violence dropped. More importantly came a concomitant preference for saving over consumption. These behavioral traits slowly became embedded in the English population, and they stoked the furnace of the Industrial Revolution.
According to Clark, the peoples of industrialized nations such as England are substantially different from the peoples of hunter-gatherer societies as a consequence of this behavioral evolution in which the more affluent out reproduce their poorer neighbors, thus insuring the survival of the behavioral traits that gave rise to their affluence in the first place and, as a result, helping future generations to survive population bottlenecks. It is a fascinating hypothesis, and I am eagerly awaiting the publication of the book. Those who would like to learn more should check out this story at the New York Times.
Aug
7
Sungenis Gets (Real) Religion?
August 7, 2007 | Leave a Comment
According to a post at Pertinacious Papist, Robert Sungenis has removed some of the anti-semitic materials from his CAI website. I suppose that’s good news of some kind, though it is interesting that it took brute force rather than intellectual dialogue to get him to see the error of his ways, if indeed he does see it. As Our Lord said, it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles, but what comes from the heart.
Aug
5
Dark Material Indeed
August 5, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Brandon Watson of Siris posted a nice essay on Friday about the Rowling and Pullman books. His comments on both were interesting and enlightening, and they got me to thinking. I confess that I have not been as swept away by these sets of books as others have, though I did read them, and in the case of the Potter books I also enjoyed watching some of the movies. But I can’t say that I have any dogs in the race over whether these books are any of the good or bad things that their friends and enemies are saying that they are.
The Pullman books, obviously, are hostile to religion in general and Christianity in particular, but their “attack” on religion, such as it is, is so inept as to be easily ignored in favor of just enjoying what is otherwise a ripping good yarn (well, until the last book, anyway, where it suddenly and irrevocably becomes the tedious celebration of adolescent hormonal activity that seems to be the cri de coeur of our age). I think Brandon is right that Pullman is the better stylist, but because the movie version of his oeuvre is not due out until December he has garnered nearly the attention, either positive or negative, that Rowling has.
The Rowling books, by contrast, have managed to attract massive amounts of attention, both good and bad, in spite of the fact that the books are simplistic, episodic, plot-driven vignettes that read like–surprise!–screenplays. In light of the intensity with which both fans and detractors have at it with one another I suppose it should come as no surprise that both sides would start looking around for authoritative endorsements of one kind or another. In my view the most embarrassing of these attempts was the one undertaken a few years ago to get then Cardinal Ratzinger to condemn the books as unchristian. You can still find in the blogosphere links to a letter he wrote in reply to a query from some hand-wringing moron in which he makes it about as clear as clear could be that he has never read any of the books and knows nothing about them beyond what one could learn from tendentious sources such as the meanderings of hand-wringing morons. This is actually a good thing in a way, because it would be a frightening prospect to learn that the future Pontiff thought that he had the kind of time to waste that would allow him to read literally thousands of pages of second-rate children’s’ literature. The downside, however, is that we now have many other hand-wringing morons out there who think that this worthless document constitutes some kind of valid moral advice about the Rowling books.
The principle complaint seems to focus on what these people regard as the glorification of witchcraft in the Rowling books. In making this complaint they simultaneously make a number of very different but very ignorant mistakes.
First, they confuse the sort of “witchcraft” portrayed in the Potter stories with the sort of “witchcraft” that people in the middle ages believed to exist out there in the world as a kind of assault on objective goodness. Even if the latter sort ever existed (it didn’t) it is clearly not the same thing as what is portrayed in the Potter stories, which is magic indeed but magic employed in the service of the good, not as an assault against objective goodness itself. Writers have compared the magic of the Potter stories to the magic that is condemned in the Bible, but that is the sloppiest sort of literary criticism; it’s like saying that the Ancient Greeks were opposed to birth control because they fought against the Trojans.
Second, they mistake literary portrayal for didactic purposes with literal endorsement. This is a particularly annoying mistake, since some of the people who attack the Rowling books are, at the same time, huge fans of Tolkien, Lewis, and other Christian writers who fill their stories with magic of all kinds, good and bad, as a device for portraying in a metaphorical way such concepts as power, submission to authority, control over natural processes, order amidst chaos, and plenty of other themes that are no more hostile as such to Christianity than the stories of exorcism in the New Testament are.
Third, these sorts of readers seem incapable of understanding the overarching theme of the Potter stories, which has nothing at all to do with Wicca, medieval assaults on goodness, glorification of the material, or any of the other things that are pointed to as “dangerous”, and everything to do with friendship, loyalty, courage, compassion, and the triumph of good over evil. In short, most of the folks who attack the Potter stories as “dangerous” appear to be incapable of reading literature to begin with, let alone critiquing it.
Finally, consider the following charge. One writer has said that “from a Christian perspective, children immersing themselves in Harry Potter are being desensitized to the dangers of spiritual practices explicitly condemned and forbidden by Holy Scripture.” This is the sort of magical thinking that one ordinarily finds only among the most ignorant literalist fundamentalists, and yet I’ve seen this very idea endorsed by intelligent, well-educated Roman Catholics. Are we supposed to imagine our children running out into the woodshed to draw pentagrams on the floor and start conjuring up Voldemort only to find that they have accidentally conjured up Ol’ Scratch himself by mistake, and that they are now doomed for all eternity? If I may borrow from my fine pagan friend, Cicero, O tempora! O mores! In qua urbe vivimus? You would have to know virtually nothing about Christianity to believe such a thing possible.
With folks such as this standing at the front of the queue in the Culture Wars it’s no wonder that people like Philip Pullman look at organized religion and shake their heads. The only dark materials we need to worry about are the ignorance and superstitions of a bygone era that Christian intellectuals such as Erasmus, Thomas More, Newman, and others worked so hard to eradicate. Why go back?
