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Religion

Response to Radner’s “Anglicanism on Its Knees”

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This post is in response to Ephraim Radner’s opinion piece entitled “Anglicanism on Its Knees“, which popped up in my Facebook feed yesterday.   I’ll get back to philosophy (and specifically reductionism) soon.

Radner’s “warning” seems to me entirely off-base on so many levels.

For starters, the claim that, “We simply don’t know enough about what we call ‘sexual orientation’ … to embrace completely novel understandings of the ultimate purposes of love and sex” can only be true if “we” applies only to a subset of the population that is unwilling to listen to the testimony of their brethren who can tell them first hand what it’s like to be gay. This is not an area that needs more study. Nearly all medical and social scientists who have studied the topic agree that homosexuality is not a psychological disorder, that efforts to change one’s sexual orientation overwhelmingly fail (often times with dire consequences), and that the sexuality of parents has absolutely no impact on any children that they raise. There is also nothing novel here about the purposes of love and sex. John is quite clear on the matter — the purpose of love is the knowledge of God. “Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” (1 John 4:7-8) The physical manifestation of eros in sex is part of how we forge the relationships that allow us to live in love.  It is through those relationships that we come to understand the truth of St. John’s message: “He who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.” (1 John 4:16).

Equally wrongheaded is the statement that, “Anyone who, by this time, cannot admit that marriage between a man and a woman holds a privileged status in Scripture, in human history, and in the moral order of natural forms is deluded.” The term “marriage” certainly has a long history and appears often in Scripture, but, when it is used in ancient texts, it describes a relationship totally unlike the heterosexual relationships presently sanctified by the Church under the same term. In ancient “marriages,” husbands basically owned their wives, children were traded as commodities in the interest of forging alliance or acquiring goods, and fidelity was understood largely in terms of inheritance and succession (recall that, in Genesis 16:2, it’s Sarah who encourages Abraham to “go in to [her] maid” when she was convinced that she could not bear children). If this were still the institution we were talking about, marriage equality wouldn’t be an issue since no gay couple would want any part of it (and most straight couples probably wouldn’t be interested in it either). Thankfully, we long ago abandoned the institution of marriage as it is described in Scripture ; that institution no longer has any bearing on the moral order. Much closer to our modern conception of marriage is the scriptural account of David and Jonathan.  That account describes a loving relationship between equals, first in the erotic language of 1 Samuel 18:1-4 and then subsequently in other parts of the book, consistent with the expectations of our modern sacrament. Whether or not Jonathan and David were actually considered married (arguably they were, based on 1 Samuel 18:22’s account of David’s marriage to Michal making him Saul’s son-in-law “by two”), it’s nothing short of selective reading and semantics to say that there is a “privileged relationship” in Scripture for an institution that simply didn’t exist in the ancient world (modern heterosexual marriage) while, at the same time, ignoring an ancient scriptural reference that describes two men joining themselves in a union that closely mirrors the unions for which advocates for Church sanctified same-sex marriage now seek recognition.

Then we come to the outrageous statement that, “Once the Church affirms ‘marriage’ as something this is not defined at its base in terms of male-female generative union, the creative purposes of God to be found in the world’s history and in the history of Israel’s election and redemptive mission are hidden, perhaps even contradicted.” Can it really be the case that the “creative purposes of God” are so limited that they can only be made manifest in biological procreation? I should certainly hope not, and indeed, there are no provisions in the Church for dissolving marriages after women have passed child bearing age. One might look at examples in scripture where seemingly barren women end up bearing children by the grace of God and argue that we can view marriage purely in generative terms even after natural birth is possible because nothing is impossible with God, but that’s not really a justification. If an omnipotent God can find a way for a virgin to conceive and bear a son, then surely He could also find a supernatural way to make gay couples procreate if He really wanted to. “Nothing is impossible with God” cuts both ways. But more to the point, the very idea of annulling marriages when reproduction is impossible is offensive and makes no sense because the Church doesn’t actually define marriage “at its base in terms of male-female generative union”. The binding of two souls together (much as in the story of David and Jonathan) is itself a new creation that reflects the creative purposes of God. And surely, that binding can go on to bear fruit in many other non-procreative ways after it has been solemnized, regardless of the sex of those making a covenant to one another.

As for “compromise”, the issue is obscured by the fact that Radner has portrayed the issues of same-sex marriage and the punitive imprisonment of gays as two points on the same spectrum. They are actually quite ontologically different. The former is about a sacrament of the Church, and the latter is about the human-rights of individuals. Of course there can be no compromise between them. There are, however, many compromise positions when we are talking about each on their proper axes. The present position of the Episcopal Church on same-sex unions (which allows priests to perform civil marriages and then bless those marriages, without sanctifying them sacramentally) represents one such compromise. Reciprocally, conservative societies might create strong social taboos against homosexual behavior, without outright criminalizing it. Personally, I hope to live in a world where the sacrament of marriage is made available to everyone, regardless of sexual orientation.  I also hope to live in a world where everyone enjoys the liberty to conduct their personal lives without any sort of government interference. On both counts, however, compromise is possible. It would be odd for the Church to sanctify marriages while not also speaking out against governments that violate the civil rights of their citizens, but the opposite is not nearly so strange and we should not conflate the issues.

Of course, what Radner really means when he’s talking about gay marriage not being a “compromise issue” is his broader assertion that “slippery slopes are real” and that, if the Church affirms that same-sex couples can join in sacramental union, then the Church will have abandoned its commitment to biblicism, crucicentrism, and conversionism. First, there’s a reason logicians usually describe slippery slope arguments as a type of fallacy. It shows a total disregard for nuance to suggest that we can’t draw lines and evaluate situations on a case-by-case basis. Second, and more importantly, we absolutely should reject the idea that, if we affirm the sacramental value of same-sex relationships, we cannot take the Bible seriously, affirm the centrality of sacrifice and atonement in our faith, and continue to speak of God recreating the world in His image. It is one view among many to say that the Bible clearly condemns homosexuality, that homosexuality is a cross that people ought bear in chastity, and that through this trial, it’s possible to form a deeper relationship with God. There is a certain logic to this perspective that isn’t inconsistent with the Christian message, but that something is logical doesn’t mean that it’s right. The initial premises are hugely debatable here, given that Scripture is largely silent on issues of homosexuality — especially in comparison to the volumes that it has to say on the importance of love and companionship. That someone disagrees with your conclusion does not mean that they are arguing in bad faith or that they don’t agree with you on central principals. It is a huge mistake to say that we have to give up on the central tenets of the Church if we further change an already changing institution by reinterpreting 6 verses of scripture in the light of historic evidence, cultural context, and modern science. After all, one of the other central tenets of the Church is that the body of Christ is a living collective, guided by the Holy Ghost in an ongoing quest to learn to better love and serve God.

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A Story Worth Believing

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Imagine for a moment a man who  has never before seen an airplane. His friends might try to explain what one is like to him by making analogies to birds and other flying beasts, but at the end of the day, the man may reasonably insist that he will need to see an airplane for himself.  Now, if his friends really want to convince him that airplanes exists, they might invite the man to come with them to a field over which planes routinely fly.  Then, the man’s friends might point skyward and the man might get some sense for the aircrafts above him.   However, if before they set out, the man insists further that he must first gouge out his eyes, when the party finally arrives at the field, the man’s friends might point to the airplanes flying above as much as they’d like and the man will still be unable to see them.

If Christianity is correct, then we have all already partially gouged out our eyes.  This, I think, is the fundamental difficulty that needs to be overcome when we discuss whether or not there is continuing evidence for the truth of Christianity in our modern world.  Absolutely correctly, the non-believer says, “I cannot see Christ walking out of the tomb”.  This, however, is not to say that Christ isn’t right in front of him.  Just as in our imaginative example above, it may be the case that it is not more evidence that is required, but rather a doctor who can fix our vision.

To ask questions like, “How do you know that God exists?” or “What evidence is there for the Resurrection?”  is to get everything backwards, for faith in God is not an end unto itself.  Instead, it is the starting point from which we begin on our quest to break ourselves free from the blinding practice of examining our experience purely in terms of an isolating sense of self.  It is how we start to see the world differently.  To paraphrase Thomas Aquinas and the 13th century hymn Pange lingua, faith is the thing that “befriends our outwards senses” and “makes our inward vision clear.”  More concisely, it is the thing that allows us to see the things that really matter.

At least in my own experience, I feel most at home in the world when I am struck by beauty, touched by kindness, or loved by someone else.  I think it’s a mistake to ignore this evidence simply because it’s emotional.  There may be scientific correlates to our emotions, but that doesn’t explain them away or make them untrue.  Rather, those chemical correlates imply that humanity is called to love at a very basic level.  If, as I suggested in a previous post, we call our purpose here “God”, then it’s not a far leap to say that “God is love.”

In the epistle of John, the evangelist writes, “Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.  … No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.”  (1 John 4:7,12)  And so it us that we meet Christ in our modern world.  To me, the experience of love is both mystical and transcendent.  Those experiences turn the usual order of things upside down.  When I am capable, ever so briefly, of loving someone else as myself, my life seems to take on a purpose that is otherwise lacking (despite my near continuous efforts to involve myself in projects and to work towards particular goals).  Moreover, that purpose itself feels quite odd.  Instead of being directed towards some distant future, it is immediately present.  The point of existence becomes the joy and fullness of the moment itself.  This, to me, is so different from how I otherwise experience the world that it seems obvious to distinguish it as something otherworldly — even though its source is clearly present here, as a part of our embodied existence.

It may seem a leap to go from a fleeting sense of love to a belief in Christ, but again, the point is not to “prove” the merits of Christianity.  Rather, Christianity is meant to orient us such that we can see that perfect love in one another and in the world around us.  Insofar as it helps us more fully experience that love, it is proof of itself.  This reality, I think, is most fully articulated in the sacraments of the Church, which are, at the end of the day, all about transformation.

When a believer receives a small round wafer on his tongue and experiences not just bread but a profound sense of both love and yearning, the Church says that that believer is really and truly experiencing the presence of his risen Lord.  Admittedly, this point of doctrine was a stumbling block for me for a while.  Now, it seems to me obvious.  In fact, that Christ can be found in the sacraments is not all that different from a scientific fact.  Many hundreds of thousands of people report having encountered Him unfailingly in an experiment that is conducted multiple times, every day of the year.  This shared and repeated experience goes beyond mere aesthetics.  It is one thing to listen to a brilliantly composed Mass setting and hear in the beauty of the music something that points one towards God. It is quite another to  encounter mundane things like bread, wine, water, and oil and experience them, in themselves, as a truth that goes beyond the mere elements that compose them.

If our theology is right, the sacraments are themselves a path to knowledge.  They are the way that we meet Christ for ourselves here and now, and through Him, learn to live again.  Then, they are the vehicle by which we come to be Christ to each other and to the world.  Faith is the jumping off point, but once one takes the plunge this conversion and the feelings that underly it become themselves justification for continued faith in an omni-benevolent God who is remaking mankind in His own image.

And so  I come to the point of this series of posts:  When we hear a story that is self-consistent within a logical framework and that story comes to us through an unbroken chain of  sources who’ve believed so passionately in its truth that they’ve been willing to die for their beliefs,  then it seems to me that we have a responsibility to approach the story on its own terms, with an an open mind.  If in asking “what if this is true?”, we begin to have intangible experiences that point beyond the physical reality with which we directly interface, then that story seems to me a story worth believing.  Even more so if, in belief, we grow to find that our lives are both transformed and enriched.

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Surprisingly Logical

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For the most part, the feedback I received on my last post amounted to the following complaint: “It makes no sense to believe a story, no matter how convincing it was to the generations who preceded us, if that story has as its central element an event totally unlike anything we can presently observe directly.  The ancients were wrong about lots of other things, so when their accounts don’t fit into our present scientific models for how the world works, we should be skeptical of what they have to say.”

This argument strikes me as problematic for three reasons.  First, its very from is a clear example of the Argumentum ex Silentio logical fallacy.  Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and there is a certain hubris to inferring from our own limited experience that others were mistaken in their own observations.  Second, it is a fundamental misunderstanding of how science works to suggest that we should disregard evidence simply because it can’t be explained by our present theories.  Finally, and most importantly, it is false to suggest that direct access to the truth of Christ’s resurrection died with our ancestors.  Belief in Christianity is justified not just by historical accounts but also by philosophical argument and our modern experience.  In this post, I would like to argue that the narrative of Christ’s incarnation, death, and subsequent resurrection follows a consistent logical thread.  Then, in my next post, I’ll discuss the ways in which we can witness the unfolding of that story even today.

To begin, I should start with what I believe to be the central doctrine of the Church.  This doctrine is, of course, already expressed concisely in the Creeds, but briefly, this is what I mean when I talk about the Christian story:  An infinite, omni-benevolent God created the world out of an outpouring of love.  Subsequently, mankind has consistently rejected the very love that is the fabric of his being, denying God and replacing Him with false idols (i.e. manifestations of power, material entities, and even one’s own sense of self).  Death, then, emerges as the spiritual distance we create between ourselves and the very thing that sustains us.  Because this situation is intolerable, God took further action to rescue mankind from itself and ultimately Himself became incarnate.  We continue to reject Him and crucify Him (I knowingly use the present tense here, even though I am, in part, referring to an historical event).  Yet, in the words of St. Paul, “Death is swallowed up in victory” (Corinthians 15:54), and through God’s own atoning act, we ourselves become divine.

There is no doubt that elements of this story seem outlandish — even offensive to our modern sensibilities.  The proposition that our frail frames have the potential to bear within them an infinite Godhead itself seems preposterous.  The idea that God somehow redeems the world by suffering death on a cross, only to rise again in victory seems even more so.   However, if we think seriously about the matter, it’s hard to see any other solution to the problem of evil, and in that light, the incredibility of the Christian story becomes itself circumstantial evidence for its truth. As C.S. Lewis writes in Mere Christianity:

Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have.  (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 2, Chapter 2)

I have already addressed the question of whether it makes sense to believe in purposeful creation or nihilistic randomness in a previous post.  I have also already suggested that it is self-evident that we live in an imperfect world. The portion of the story above about false idols amounts to a re-articulation of this point.  It is, of course, the Christian doctrine of original sin (albeit expressed in less mythical terms) and it is exactly consistent with my intuitive sense that it is my obsession with my own sense of self that distorts my relationship with everything else.  The rest of the story, I argue, follows naturally from the proposition that the creator of this world (i.e. God) is all-loving.  We will come back to this proposition in my next post, but for now, assume that it is true.

If it is the case that we exist because of the act of an omni-benevolent God, then, by definition, we exist because of an act of love (as all acts of an omni-benevolent being must be imbued with His all-loving nature).  My experience with love is that it is characterized fundamentally by a willingness to give unconditionally one’s self to another.  So, logically, if God created us by an act of love, then we can say equivalently that God created us by giving Himself to us.  To reject God’s love, then, is to reject one’s own creation.  It is to reject life itself, and this is the very definition of death.  The exact mechanisms of death are a matter for medical science, but the underlying cause becomes undeniably that we are corrupted by our own depravity.

In this context, God’s response in our story is a matter of common sense.    Of course an omni-benevolent God would seek to restore life to those who are rejecting it.  Of course He would seek to transform our flawed and decaying existence into something perfect and incorruptible.  To breach the divide that is the source of Death in the first place, God needs to make Himself known to us, such that we are open to receiving Him.  What better approach could there be for this than for God to become man?  What clearer a way to enable the creation of a right relationship than to become the only thing that we really understand and relate to — ourselves?

Sadly, the next chapter of the story is just as obvious.  Einstein famously said that the the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”  This is almost exactly the story of the incarnation.  Over and over again, we create our own demise, and yet, God is “betting” that if we can just meet Him face-to-face, we’ll finally understand.  And of course we don’t.

But here we come to the “queer twist”.  If the ontology of Death is the destruction of our relationship with God, and if that culminates in the killing of God Himself, then what can possibly remain after Death’s ultimate victory?  The concept of relationship with a life sustaining God ceases to make any sense if God is dead.  The very existence of the world sustained by God ceases to make any sense in the absence of a God who can sustain it through the continual gift of Himself.  Thus, the death of God must also be the death of Death, for the latter cannot exist without the former.

On the other hand, in no way can the utter destruction of the world be seen as an act of love if that’s the end of the story.  To suggest that an all-loving God would recklessly “bet” everything on an act of insanity clearly doesn’t work.   And so we come to the Resurrection.   To be an act of love, God’s death can’t just be the cataclysmic end of the world; it needs also to be the inflection point in human history that brings about a totally new creation.  That this should begin with God, who is outside of time and space, giving back to Himself the life of the world makes perfect sense.   How else could there be any light out of the darkness?

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From Philosophy to Religion

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I concluded my last post with the assertion that, if one assumes both that our senses are reliable and that there is inherent meaning in the world, then there is a solid basis for reflecting on the our experiences through the lens of theology.  Yet, it’s somewhat of a leap to go from the general philosophical premises I outlined to any particular religion.  To do that, one needs additional input — that is to say, evidence of what the world is really like.  In this post, I intend to present the evidence that compels me to believe specifically in Christian doctrine. I set about this task fully aware that much of this evidence, being historical in nature, is incomplete both because it has come to me through generations of selective interpretation and because it was likely never really understood in the first place.  Accordingly, it is not my intention to argue that any non-Christian religions are “wrong”.  I don’t even mean to argue that my own understanding of Christianity is “right”.  Quite to the contrary, I’m perfectly happy to accept that any attempt to understand anything greater than ourselves will never be totally successful.  Nonetheless, I also think that if there is indeed meaning in the world, then that we are endowed with reason surely suggest that we are intended to use that reason to try to grasp the purpose of our existence.  In our western tradition, we call that purpose “God”.  So then, what can we say about Him?

Although I am not an historian, my understanding is that there is a general consensus among scholars of antiquity that there was, in fact, a man named Jesus who was crucified by the Romans for sedition.  To the extent that I have investigated the matter myself, I find the fact that Jesus is referenced independently by both Josephus and Tacitus to confirm that there is at least a kernel of truth in the Gospel accounts.  Admittedly, none of these sources are themselves first-hand accounts, but considering that we’re talking about a peasant from a small town of a remote province of the Roman Empire, it seems to me that there is more historical evidence to establish that Jesus was crucified than can reasonably be expected.  That he rose from the dead and was God incarnate is obviously a more contentious claim.  Even so, I think there is good reason to believe that also.

Surely, Jesus was neither the first nor the only Messianic figure whom the Romans crucified in Palestine.  The historical record highlights several other prominent revolutionaries, and I think we can safely assume that there were still others whose memory has been lost to us.  So what was it about the Jesus movement that enabled it to survive the humiliating execution of its leader while so many other moments withered away when challenged by the same Roman tactics?  Part of the answer probably lies in the message of the moment itself (Christianity wasn’t just about political revolt), but the inescapable fact here is that Christianity survived because thousands of people were so convinced that they saw and interacted with the risen Jesus that they were willing to suffer terrible deaths for proclaiming His resurrection.  We may question the correctness of their belief, but we cannot question their sincerity.  In our modern western world where Christianity is often used to control and manipulate, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the first Christians had nothing but torment and disgrace to gain from proclaiming the Gospel — nearly all of them were martyred and a great many of them were entirely forgotten within just a couple generations.  So, how do we make sense of the fact that a multitude of people genuinely believed that they witnesses first hand something so extraordinary that we generally believe it to be impossible?

The dead don’t just come back to life — this is a fact of nature that was no more lost on the ancients than it is on us today.  Yes, there are other examples in pagan mythology of men and gods coming back from the afterlife, and yes, there are sects of Judaism that believe in a general resurrection at the end of time.  There’s even the Gospel account of Jesus restoring Lazarus back to life.  However, none of this changes the fact that revivified corpses were no more common in the ancient world than they are today.  Indeed, if we suspected otherwise, then there would no reason to disbelieve the resurrection story in the first place.

So, what happened to convince the early Christians that they had seen their risen Lord?  Maybe there were many cases of mistaken identities.  Or maybe it was a case of metaphoric language growing into a collective belief in something that was never really true.  Or maybe there was a concerted effort by some of Jesus’s followers to keep the movement alive through lies.  We will probably never be able to know for sure exactly what happened after Jesus was crucified, but none of the possibilities I’ve just suggested seem to me particularly likely (the Gospel accounts suggest very close interactions between Christ and the apostles that would have eliminated the possibility of mistaken identity; metaphoric resurrection of an incorporeal soul only makes sense in terms of neoplatonic thinking that was developed at least 300 years after the time of Jesus; and inconsistencies among the Gospel narratives are more suggestive of many people not understanding what they were experiencing than they are of a small group intentionally propagating a series of lies).   There are probably other “explanations” for the resurrection about which I’m not aware, but I’m skeptical that any one of them is ultimately more verifiable than the simple proposition that numerous early Christians did, in fact, see Jesus (with some sort of glorified body) alive after His crucifixion.  We are, after all, talking about people who lived in an advanced society whose traditions and practices have come to define our modern notions of logic and reason.

At this point, I suspect that my secular humanist friends are objecting that I am making arguments “from authority”.  It’s true that I cannot know for sure that Jesus was resurrected from the dead.  It’s also true that the argument I’ve just made essentially boils down to, ” The Resurrection likely happened because people who were alive at the time said it did.”  However, this is only part of the story.  Philosophically, if one starts with the proposition that evil exists in the world on account of our very human nature, then one can begin to see in the narrative of Jesus’s passion a certain logic in which incarnation, atonement, and resurrection become the obvious solution to the problem at hand.   More on that in my next post, but for now, I’d like to suggest that that logic combines with the historical accounts we’ve inherited to justify a faith in Christ that is neither blind nor purely owing to a sense of deference to authority.

 

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“What do you think I should believe?”

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A couple weeks ago, a friend and I were engaged in a far reaching discussion, and, as often happens around Christmas, the conversation turned to religion.  My friend, who is a firm atheist, started expressing his difficulty in understanding how someone whom he otherwise considered intelligent could possibly believe the nonsense that I claimed to believe.  In particular, he was distraught at the idea that I would be so willing to “disregard science.”  Now, I don’t see that there is any incompatibility between science and Christian doctrine, and I certainly don’t think that I’m at all willing to “disregard science.”  So, I asked my friend what exactly he thought it was that I believed.  He retorted, “What do you think I should believe?”

At the time, I struggled to answer this question.  My obvious response should have been to point out that the answer to this question really has no relevance to the conversation we had initially started to have, but I clearly wasn’t thinking straight and launched into a poorly worded articulation of what I believe to be the core doctrines of the Christian faith.  Since then and despite its irrelevance to our initial conversation, I’ve been thinking a lot about the question that my friend asked me.

For starters, I’m not sure that I agree with the very premise of the question.  Of course, I think my own beliefs are justified.  Because of the content of those beliefs, I hope to live in such a way that I might help others come to accept them as well.  However, philosophically, I don’t think anyone should believe anything that doesn’t resonate with their own experience.  I have no problem admitting that my own beliefs may be wrong.  Nonetheless, I don’t think that my life experiences to this point have been so wildly different from my friend’s that they should be mutually incomprehensible.  So, I’d like to use the rest of this post to articulate an answer to a different but related question to the one that my friend asked.  Specifically, “Why do you believe the things you do?”

I am, fundamentally, an empiricist at heart.  I believe that there exists a reality external to myself and that my senses give me some ability to experience that external reality as it actually is.  I believe these things not because I have been convinced that they are true, but rather, because I cannot think of any way to make sense of my experience if they are not.  In short, I believe them axiomatically.  Though I think they can be supported by a sort of circular logic once one introduces religion, I admit that they are philosophically groundless.  Yet, they are also entirely unproblematic for the purposes of this discussion.  One cannot function sanely in our modern world, let alone affirm any belief in science, without making these very assumptions.  I know that my inquiring friend shares these beliefs, and I think I can safely assume that everyone else reading this blog post does too.  This empiricism is the foundation upon which my own faith is built.

It would be an under statement to say that it was with reluctance that I came actually to believe Christian doctrine.  At first, I convinced myself that it was silly to put stock in any unnecessary assumptions.  Science could explain the world perfectly well, so why turn to religion — especially in light of the fact that many historical religions had clearly been about modeling (poorly) natural phenomena?  While in this mindset, I delighted in every finding I came across that suggested that we humans might be nothing more than automata ourselves — mere physical processes responding deterministically to physical stimuli.  To me, these discoveries only strengthened the argument against spirituality, which I understood to require some notion of free will.

I see now that the thinking I just described isn’t logically sound.  Evidence of free will is evidence in support of a dualist notion of a soul, but evidence against free will is not evidence against religion.  Christianity’s insistence on incarnation and bodily resurrection, to me, underscores that the Church has been as much committed to the idea that physical effects need to have physical causes as is any modern scientist.  It seems to me that this line of thinking reaches its natural conclusion during the Reformation when both Luther and Calvin argue explicitly for determinism.  So, while I continue to be a determinist who rejects the idea of free will, I no longer see a tension here.  In fact, as I studied the philosophy of science, I increasingly came to the view that science and religion are entirely complementary in so far as they address different questions (how should I model the world vs. what meaning underlies our experiences).

In any case, it wasn’t the works of theologians or any theory of non-overlapping magisteria that ultimately convinced me to become a Christian.  Rather, it was a single empirical observation that I found myself making over and over again.  Specifically, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong in the world and that I (along with the rest of mankind) was to blame for it.  Put another way, I kept feeling that the world should be different — it should be a place of peace and plenty; it should be a place where hope triumphs over fear; it should be a place where we are able to love one another as ourselves.

This wasn’t the sort of realization that comes suddenly.  In truth, I think I’ve always felt this way. In my younger years, though, I think I saw all of the world’s faults not as failings but as challenges yet to be overcome.  What changed for me is that I’ve slowly come to realize that I cannot be the change that I want to see because I am the problem (in the sense that it is my very conception of self that is the issue).  I value my own happiness and wellbeing above that of the stranger I encounter on the street; I vainly try to control the world around me to ensure my own comfort and security; and, even when I do something for someone else, it’s almost invariably to produce some sort of benefit for myself (even if it’s just the fleeting sensation of feeling good about myself for a few moments before I get on with my day).  I don’t think any of this makes me a bad person — I just think it makes me human.

I suspect that most everyone who subjects himself to careful self-reflection finds most of what I’ve just said about myself to be true.  We can console ourselves by observing that there are other people who are “worse” than ourselves, but this somewhat misses the point in that it sidesteps entirely the question of why we should be so imperfect in the first place.  One could argue that we’re the product of evolution and that, from a survival of the fittest perspective, greed is good, especially since it is kept in check by our natural inclination to form communities and empathize with one another.  Maybe so, but if the world in which we live is really just the unfolding of physical processes according to some doubly constrained optimization problem that trends towards success by making us feel guilty about the very thing that drives us forward, then that’s a bleak picture indeed.  It’s also one laden with nihilistic assumptions that actually go well beyond the mere axioms of empiricism that I laid out above.

As I said before, science does not answer the question “why?”  So, to argue that processes just happen, for no metaphysical reason, is to make a choice.  One can never show through the lens of science whether it’s the right choice or not, since that’s not the sort of question that science answers.  Frankly, there’s no physical solution to the question of whether or not there’s inherent meaning to our very existence.  Thus, we reach a fork:  We can choose to believe that we are part of something inherently meaningful that is greater than ourselves, or we choose to believe that the world is ontologically random and that all meaning is merely the product of our own creation.  Either way, it’s not a silly extraneous assumption to turn to religion (or the rejection of it) to fill in the metaphysical gaps — it’s actually necessary to have a coherent world view.

For the same reasons that it makes sense to be an empiricist, I argue it makes sense to adopt the view that there is inherent meaning to the world.  Just as I can vaguely imagine that my senses totally deceive me, I can vaguely imagine a world utterly devoid of meaning (which is to say, I can posit its existence, but have no real sense of what that would actually entail).  So, I choose to believe that there is meaning to the world not because I am convinced that there must be meaning, but because I cannot make sense of my experience if there is none.  Within this context, the angst I feel about our imperfections begins to make sense.  If there is objectively a way that the world ought to be and we have some intuitive sense that that isn’t the world in which we live, then we should feel anxious.

At this point, I haven’t given an answer to the question of why we’re imperfect.  Truthfully, at the most fundamental level, I don’t think one can do any better than mere speculation.  To do so would be to claim not just that there is meaning to the world but also that one understands how that meaning came to be.  This goes beyond me, but at the very least, I think that, if we add an assumption of inherent meaning to the empiricist assumptions with which we began, we have the basis for a theology that we can use to interpret both our own experiences and the history that we’ve inherited.   More on that in my next post.

 

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