tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9755432366529391942024-02-20T01:44:06.868-08:00It's a Sic et Nonderful LifeBecause there are no easy answersS. Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08843076081982674203noreply@blogger.comBlogger31125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-975543236652939194.post-62616573593921127632012-04-18T17:52:00.002-07:002012-04-18T18:04:21.157-07:00Relativism and TruthQuests are meaningless without goals, a distinct “somewhere” which must be reached. This is true even if that goal is ultimately unattainable, because even if ultimately impossible the goal still drives the energy of the knight-errant and gives his work direction. Without such a goal, human activities are reduced entirely to mere work, in the pejorative sense of sheer business. While countless such goals have come and gone throughout the course of human culture, one goal that seems to be nearly universal in its appeal is the goal of truthfulness - that is, of attaining some sort of harmony between oneself and reality. Truth at its simplest is nothing other than the correspondence between our beliefs (and, one might include, our subsequent actions) and reality.<br /> Humans do not have an unmediated access to reality, however - except, perhaps, one’s access to one’s own inner “space,” the private sanctum of the self which is truly not shared by anyone else and which it is impossible to escape short of true madness or death. Even here, though, we must accept the possibility of self-deception, delusion, and ignorance which can distort or obscure our self-knowledge. Additionally, our inner dialogue is a dialogue mediated by symbols. As for the rest of reality, our experience is mitigated through a variety of representations or symbols that are both physiologically and socially determined. A representation is not unreal - that is, it is not that representations lack some sort of existence - but what distinguishes a representation from other objects in reality is that a representation conveys information about an object other than itself - as, for example, the phenomena of the color green might carry the information that there is a large bush only a few meters from where I am standing whose pigments reflect light of about 550 nm wavelength. Since I have spoken about representations in another note, I will simply sum up the fact that all of our perceptions - that is, the entirety of the world we encounter - is a collection of representations produced by the interaction between our physiology and the rest of reality. Furthermore, our forms of both representing and communicating about that reality with others all takes place in the form of symbols whose meaning is entirely dependent upon socio-cultural contexts and which are all ultimately human products.<br /><br /> These facts combined introduces an inescapable type of relativism: the relativism of representation. Insofar as we do not have a direct apprehension of objects as an object but rather only have an apprehension of objects through the representations provided by our senses, and further because our claims, apprehension, and communication about that object takes place only through the means of socio-culturally contingent symbols, no statement can simply stand as an uncontestable absolute - that is, as a statement which stands above our beyond the possibility of future revision or correction. Even a statement of seemingly necessary truth, such as the law of non-contradiction, is subject to this possibility. First, because the reality which it seeks to describe is fundamentally “larger” than the representations of it to which we have access, we are always in the position of possibly being in the dark about an important aspect of that reality. Second, because the combination of symbols we use to represent reality imposes upon its meaning the requirements of its own peculiar grammar and syntax, we cannot be certain that the symbols themselves introduce novelty or distortion into the aspect of reality which we seek to describe. Third, because these symbols are themselves not static and indeed introduce a variety of hermeneutic difficulties, the perceived (and, indeed, intended) meaning of an identical set of symbol can vary quite immensely even amongst similarly socialized peers. In short, the very nature of representations renders statements of absolute truth (including this one, it might be wryly noted) implausible.<br /><br /> What then? As I remarked, the end of the preceding paragraph may have evoked the obvious objection, “What about your own statements? If you do not believe that statement to be an absolute statement, it means it is open or subject to correction - which means, you must accept that that statement is potentially false.” I believe this objection, although quite popular, is misguided in a number of ways. In the first place, the recognition that a statement is possibly false is quite different that the belief that it is false. Nothing I have said necessarily points to an attitude of constant self-doubt that feels it necessary to mumble sadly at the end of every statement, “but I might be wrong.” Indeed, I have noted that despite the unavoidable shortcomings of the representations which constitute the world of our experiences, those representations do indeed represent reality. We are not cut off from reality - rather, these representations form the bridge and link with reality. We are not simply receiving the sensory impression that we are touching a flower - we are really touching it, and even if that touch is a representation of the flower rather than the flower itself it is still indeed representing information about that flower. From a strictly evolutionary standpoint, we developed the senses we did because the information those senses provide about reality give us an actual advantage over creatures that lack such senses. This advantage is simply that through these senses we are able to understand more about our reality and act in advantageous ways upon that information.<br /><br /> The access to this information about reality is what allows the evaluation of statements as true or false. Since truth is the harmonization of our beliefs with reality, we are able to use whatever information we have access to, and the best symbols and cultural representations we have access to, in order to fashion beliefs that harmonize with the given information as best we understand it. The flipside of saying that we might not have all the information is to say that the evaluation of our beliefs should proceed solely on the basis of the information we do have. Tomorrow, we may sprout organs that let us see things about reality which challenge beliefs currently assumed to be true, and in this case the representative relativism of our beliefs will be unveiled, but without such an event we must continue to assess the truth of things by comparing our beliefs with the reality as we know it through our currently available representations of it.<br /><br /> Indeed, the relationship between reality, our sensory representations of reality, and our cultural and social symbols for that reality is dialectic and dynamic and not reducible to a mere one way causal mechanism. Insofar as our senses portray information and subsequently allow us to craft symbols to represent that reality, those same crafted symbols allow reflection upon the entire process - reality’s relationship to our senses, our senses upon our symbols, and vice versa. The set of symbols is open to self-critique in the face of the information about reality which we gain through our senses and which we gain a better understanding of precisely through the manipulation of that information made possible through our cultural symbols. The symbols allow us to see relations between the pieces of information we garner through our sensory representations, relations which themselves can be represented and then used as a tool to revise or correct a growing body of knowledge. This is the dialectic of the human quest for knowledge.<br /><br /> In summary, then, it must be noted that the human quest does have a goal: truth. Reality is only partially subject to human manipulation, and even that manipulation assumedly must follow the “rules” of reality. But to say that reality is not relativistic - and that, therefore, the “standard” for truth is not relative, but is an external absolute - is very different from saying that our statements and beliefs about reality - and our subsequent truth evaluations of those claims - are not relative. We encounter reality through limited means and can express it only through limited means: in short, our claims and beliefs are always by their very nature tentative even if we express them to ourselves as absolute (indeed, the question of why we tend to think of our claims in absolute, rather than relativistic, terms is interesting in itself). This relativism is not a call to wholesale methodological doubt nor a reduction of all our knowledge to sense experience - after all, we gain insight not only through sense experience, but also through the construction and manipulation of symbols representing the reality we experience and providing the possibility of non-empirical or rational insights. It is, however, a call to what I would call fallibilism: the constant awareness of beliefs as possibly subject to revision or correction. Such fallibilism recognizes all human epistemological claims - whatever the methodological or ideological source and justification for those claims - as ultimately conditioned by human biology and artifice even if it is representative and derived in some way from a reality.<br /><br /> As a final note, I am again well aware that this theory is self-critiquing - that is, it presents in itself a reason to suspect that it might be subject to revision and correction. I would simply note that I would not wish it to be any other way.S. Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08843076081982674203noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-975543236652939194.post-69849249991667048092012-04-17T11:38:00.001-07:002012-04-17T17:42:17.885-07:00Departure from Dogmatism Need Not Mean Irreligion<div class="mbl notesBlogText clearfix"><div><p>In "A World of Representations," I noted that the terms of our interaction with both social and non-social realities are dependent upon and consist of the manipulation of various physiological and socio-cultural symbols and representations. While the physiological symbols are results of our peculiar anatomies, and thus lay farther from though not entirely beyond the reach of direct or intentional manipulation, the socio-cultural symbols - language, our social institutions, the expressions of our creeds and so forth - are entirely human products. Their existence is entirely dependent on the ongoing participation of their members and their form and contents are also the result of historical processes. Religions tend to externalize themselves as eternal or cosmic structures, and so tend to deny that their content, rites, and symbols are indeed human products: the typical Catholic experiences the Mass not as a rite developed by humanity but rather as a dark mystery instituted by God and thus fundamentally beyond the invention of humanity, even if he acknowledges that certain particularities of its form are indeed historical products. A dogmatic religion believes that its symbolic representations of reality (its creeds, doctrines, rites, structures, and other symbols) are incontestable and perfect representations of the divine and which thus denies the possibility of genuine revision of those symbols (although elaboration or "development" of these symbols, as long as they do not constitute a repudiation or denial of a previous prototype, are cautiously permitted). This is generally achieved by a denial of the human origin of those symbols: that is, either a complete denial of their history or an interpretation of their origins within history as having been a moment of divine intervention or providence. As a divine, rather than human symbol, the religious dogma attains an unimpeachable status and is experienced and felt to be nothing other than the "hard truth" of reality, the questioning of which is a moral failing.For many, this is what religion is - regardless of whether they admire or reject the idea. The new atheist has as his primary adversary nothing other than dogmatic religion (and indeed he is a participant within a form of non-religious dogmatism which replaces a divine facticity with a natural or scientific facticity - that is, an interpretation of the symbolic representations used by secular science and philosophy as dogmatically the "hard truth or facts" of reality). Interestingly, new atheists share their rejection of the institutions of religion with fundamentalists who also recognize the "produced" status of religious institutions and thus reject them as not divine in origin. These latter individuals, who typically are responsible for the rather superficial assertions that they are spiritual but not religious and who speak much of relationships with Jesus and the dangers of "man's religions," although still fundamentally self-deceived in that even their "bare bones Bible-based" Christianity is still a socio-cultural human product, have come to the conclusion that a religion produced by human effort and upheld only by human participation cannot be divine in origin. Their own dogmatism, usually based on an unrecognized and parasitic dependence upon the very institutions and symbols which they decry, is typically believed to be upheld by more direct divine links, such as the near-divinization of the Bible, a belief in themselves as priest, and so forth. </p><p> </p><p>In any case, dogmatism seems to be such a persistent feature of modern religion, and especially conservative Christianity, that it seems that rejection of such dogmatism must necessarily mean a rejection of religion. The focus of Christianity in combating heresy - that is, in suppressing and rejecting voiced from within its own fold which question the given meanings or otherwise reject or modify the dogma - reveals the centrality of dogma to historical Christianity and lends credence to this identification of Christianity with dogmatism. Christianity, it seems, does not merely propose a particular set of symbols which must be believed, it also demands a very specific sort of belief in order for the member to be considered in a right relationship with the institution and the divine reality which it represents and which is assumed to be its originator. The Christian must not simply believe the Resurrection, but must believe it dogmatically - that is, he must believe it to a degree in which the falsehood of that belief cannot be entertained as possible and in a way in which he would rather suffer pain, torment, and death rather than question or deny. This quality is present in the entirety of what might be called the dogmatic content of the Church's belief, down to, as it has become apparent, such a matter as whether a married couple may morally use a condom. </p><p> </p><p>It is precisely this dogmatism that has made Christianity a target in a secularizing world (that the secularizing world might not have its own dogmas is a very important point that is worth an entire note in itself). Christianity no longer has enough control over the major institutions of society that its claims are perceived as an obvious, objective and external reality - that is, the cosmos in no longer in general perceived in a fundamentally Christian context that legitimates the Church's claims as to its own nature. Insofar as Christianity presents itself as a divine institution, and inasmuch as it is now perceived as a product - that is, an institution human in origin - there is the possibility of rejecting the religion simply on the grounds of its dogmatism. The dogma, no longer upheld by the simple "facts" of social reality, is subjected to the questioning and doubt of human persons no longer comfortable with the dogma as such but who demand a broader, more human justification for the beliefs. This questioning and doubt can lead to apostacy insofar as the individual is unsatisfied with the religion's proposed justification for its dogma.However, I would like to note the possibility that this situation is not the only possible outcome of recognizing the fully human socio-historic origins and development of religious symbols. In other words, rejecting the dogmatic quality of the institutions claims does not necessitate rejecting the religious structure as such - it does not necessitate the choice of irreligion. To say that a symbol is human in origin does not mean that it is without merit, and although this is obvious in nearly every other field of human endeavor it seems to be forgotten by both the defenders and detractors of our great religious structures. Science is, after all, nothing more than a secular, human, socio-culturally contingent system of symbols meant to represent reality - one that by its own methodology cannot be treated dogmatically, and yet is often portrayed as such. Its conclusions are fundamentally open to revision even while maintaining credibility as statements representative of some reality. Even though classical mechanics, for example, has been shown to be incomplete and flawed in various ways, it nevertheless maintains its usefulness and a contextualized degree of "truth" that are not rendered null by the recognition of their incomplete status or their status as human products. </p><p> </p><p>What is needed, then, is a coherent account of religious development - that is, an account of the fully human history of religious structures - that validates the religious institution as a representation of reality without succumbing to dogmatism. That is, it is possible to admit fully that religious institutions are human products and that their beliefs and statements are potentially open to revision, chance, and development without concluding that religious institutions cannot also simultaneously really be representing - albeit, incompletely - a feature of reality, even a divine feature. Of course, such a justification would look quite different from current religious formulas, and the development and acceptance of such a justification from within the institution itself seems rather unlikely, as it would require an admission of error, if not necessarily in content then at least in form. Yet such a project opens itself as a possibility for the individual who cannot accept the dogmatism of religion and yet is still fascinated by the representative content of religion.</p><p> </p><p>As I have done before, I would point to a work like Rodney Stark's Discovering God as a starting point for such an account of religious development. Discovering God produces an account of all of human religious development as a single history. The awareness of the universality of religion suggests that religion does indeed represent a reality, and not necessarily simply its own reality - which is to say that religion might not represent merely its own existence as a part of reality but may genuinely represent man's understanding of his own relationship with the foundations of reality. As such, its validity can be re-established not in the denial of its status as a human product but rather because it is a human product - although this would mean the repudiation of dogmatism and the embracing of a fallibility that recognizes one's religious symbols as part of an ongoing process whose perfection is uncertain.</p></div></div>S. Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08843076081982674203noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-975543236652939194.post-22681085947814016692012-04-05T10:43:00.003-07:002012-04-05T10:46:29.084-07:00A Brief Reflection on Julian the Apostate<p>Once upon a time there was a man born in the relatively auspicious position of being the future emperor of a decaying but still glorious Roman empire. His name was Julian, and he was raised a Catholic. The Church had just been recently accepted in the empire, with the whims of Constantine having swept away the ancient privileges of the Roman deities and replaced them with a vacillating commitment first to one and then to another of the divided sects of Christianity. Julian was not really meant to take throne; jealousy had spirited him away to Athens, where he grew up in the academy among the ancient halls of the philosophers. While there, the young Christian had a conversion experience: he discovered the heritage of the empire, the old myths and rites of the ancient gods, and even while a lector in the new religion he began his initiation into the ranks of the old. When he was at last raised to the purple and granted the title Augustus, he had shed the Christian religion and became, variously, Emperor Julian the Defender of the Roman Religion or Emperor Julian the Apostate. </p><p> </p><p> Julian would also be the last of the Roman emperors to worship the old gods, to wake each morning and sacrifice bulls to the sun or cast the incense zealously before the altar of Mars. His reign was short and memorable: he was an energetic young prince, very learned, relatively moderate even towards his enemies, productive, spartan, and bespoke the best virtues of the ancient pagan. He led the legions himself, would run with charges, and in the end he was killed in combat attempting to lead to safety his beleaguered army, which he had run too far into Persia with a series of impressive but profitless victories. Yet all this is obscured in the epithet he has earned within the place of a specifically Christian history: the Apostate. The most important thing about him, it seems, was his refusal to accept the new religion and his enduring devotion to the old. </p><p> </p><p> Moments of religious and social transition - whether it be the conversion of an empire, the enforced cultures of a conqueror over the vanquished, or even the growth of doubt or conversion of an individual - all offer moments in which the apparent "objectivity" of a society or religion is temporarily broken. The Christians had won an impressive series of social victories after Constantine, to the point that they would soon be able to persecute the pagans in vengeance for the injuries to which they had submitted the Christians. The old religion - once considered the heart of the Roman state and household - was suddenly shaken. Jupiter ceased to be the acknowledged king of the gods; the wrath and potency of Mars was called into question. While it would be incorrect to say that the pagans were not already uncritical of their own religion (at least, the philosophers were), it is clear that the religion was considered as an objective quality of the world: the blessings of the gods were seen as really and objectively demonstrated by the success of the legions and the might, wealth, and success of the empire. The transition to Christianity shook this conviction, and it is noteworthy that while Christianity had suffered social opposition and persecution with growing resolve, the majority of pagans seemed to have fallen in line with the new religion. But in the case of Julian the Apostate, we have a counterexample: a man who had everything to lose and really nothing to gain from his advocacy of a dying, disfavored, philosophically untenable religion nevertheless directed his short imperial reign to the rekindling of its ancient flame. </p><p> </p><p> His project was cut short in Persia by his death, and he had barely begun to revitalize the old religion. Soon, whatever small headway he had made was undone, and within decades the shrines which Julian had worshiped at had been locked, stripped, and razed. But what if they had not? What if he had survived Persia? What if the brief efforts of his youth had been dilated into the work of a lifetime? This is where the currents of history and society begin to unveil religion's social and historical character, where the sheer objectivity of religious belief - that is, the easy-going and dogmatic assumption that religion is unmediated, transcendent, and universal truth - faces its most difficult counterpoint: it is made by and contingent upon temporal events. Christianity's hard-won triumph never faced the difficulty of a pagan revival spurred by a learned and eloquent pagan emperor, and while the old religion lingered in the backwoods of the provinces for centuries the urban capitals became unquestionably (and perhaps only nominally, in some cases) Christian. </p><p> </p><p> Christianity's eventual triumph secured its doctrine as an objective experience within reality: within the empire, or at least within its cities, one was born, lived, and died in a cosmos that grew successively more explicitly and more unquestionably Christian. The moment of crisis - that age of transition in which the future of Christianity was uncertain and it which the shrines of the pagans stood alongside the Christian altars like a social sign of a clash of deities in the heaven - passed, leaving in its wake only the certainty and self-referential dogmatism of the prevailing religion. Christianity had become true, in the political sense, by becoming the most powerful social force - by externalizing its beliefs into the social structures of reality. This is not to say that it might not also be true in that other, more obscure sense of harmonizing with reality. But it is certainly the case that the securing of its political triumph allowed it to control society in such a way that members would grow up without facing those socially dangerous moments of crisis in which doubt and conversion are possible - in which another Julian might arise with the zealousy of an opposed dogma. </p><p> </p><p> It is true that Christianity still retains a powerful degree of social control, but that control is yearly waning in the secularized west and elsewhere. As its social control wanes, the breach of social crisis is once again reopened, and apostasy once again becomes a distinct possibility: people no longer grow up, in general, in a world in which the truth of Catholicism is externalized in a dogmatic social structure designed explicitly to prevent doubt. The new, secular social structures do not serve to reaffirm Christianity. Christians are painfully aware of this situation, which is explicitly framed in terms of crisis, decay, or imminent disaster (one has only to note that there exists an online magazine called "Crisis Magazine" that is quite popular among the conservative Catholics). Yet the roles have switched from the ancient crisis, and now Christianity is on the defensive: it is now the old social order, the old religion, trying desperately and with all the zeal of Julian the Apostate to reaffirm its relevance.</p>S. Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08843076081982674203noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-975543236652939194.post-75983379320090876202012-04-03T07:12:00.002-07:002012-04-03T07:13:53.201-07:00A World of Representations<p>The world you inhabit is first and foremost a collection of representations. The phenomena which both inhabit and constitute the space in which you consciously live, think, and act are physiologically derived symbols of the objects we assume populate the cosmos. Your biology provides both the grounds and the limitations of these phenomena, and it is fair to say that with a different physiology you very well could experience the world as a vastly different place.</p><p> </p><p>Consider for a moment that the phenomena you encounter - that green, swaying, woody tree over there; the fluttering colors of the flag; the electric touch of another human being - are all derived primarily from the action of five senses. Each of these senses is anatomical in origin: you see because you possess eyes of a certain structure which reacts to photons, you smell because of the interaction of particles with your olfactory nerves, so forth and so on. Your brain is able to process the information from these senses and edit them into something coherent and unified. But these structures only serve to gather specific types of information; they do not give you the full picture. Even though it is quite easy without reflection to assume that this world of phenomena is identical with the reality outside yourself, you need only consider the very different phenomenal worlds which animals with different anatomies possess. Bees, for example, are capable of sensing ultraviolet wavelengths which are absent in your phenomenal world: the representations which they experience differ in terms of the information to which they have access. If you suddenly sprouted an organ that could detect X-rays, your world would appear radically different. The same reality which you naturally assume lies beyond yourself would give rise to a different set of representations given.</p><p>There is nothing wrong with this circumstance, of course - you are the product of evolution, a process which is in one sense quite blind of the possibilities open to it: you have developed these particular senses, and thus this particular set of representations, because of a long series of incremental developments each of which had to justify itself in terms of survival, no necessarily in terms of increased information. Another way of saying this is that you have senses which have developed to take advantage of information (but not necessarily all of the information) most relevant to your survival and reproduction. But evolution is not an optimizing process - that is, evolution will not always come up with an optimal structure. Your eye, for example, has the curious property of having a blind spot, because your optical nerve starts from the inside and most make its way out. This is clearly not an optimal design, and it can be contrasted with cephalapods who have developed an eye where the optical nerve is positioned in such a way that it does not have a blind spot. So, too, your anatomy as a whole gives you access to some information and not other information, so that, from the very start, every phenomena you encounter is already a highly specific representation of the reality beyond. In a word, your world has already been interpreted for you from the instant you perceive it.</p><p> </p><p>With this in mind, it is clearly a mistake to idolize your perceptions - that is, to assume that your perceptions are actually the objects in reality rather than merely the representations of those objects. The scientific revolution has likely served to enhance your awareness that the objects in reality have a mind-independent existence, have intrinsic properties which are discoverable through observation, and so forth; but it is also possible that it has made you somewhat forgetful that all of your observations are already interpreted and biased by your anatomy. Scientists themselves are generally keenly aware of this fact and are especially aware of the limitations of our sensory inputs, and must use devices that transform the information that is not available to us through their anatomy into information that they can sense: they make devices that sense X-rays, for example, and then represent those X-rays in terms of visible light. Of course, in these circumstances there have already been two acts of interpretation the moment the scientist experiences the phenomena: one, the mechanical interpretation or representation, and secondly the representation of that representation by means of human physiology.</p><p> </p><p>Nevertheless, this situation is only the most basic foundation or grounds for the world of phenomena you experience; it does not, in itself, constitute a full world. The representations which fill your world are not merely neutral or indifferent representations of sensory information: they are interpreted according to the social constructs in which you were raised and which you have appropriated through a variable blend of acceptance and rejection. You analyze and evaluate the representations by means of a dazzlingly complex set of social symbols - the most obvious of which is language. By means of language, you categorize the phenomena by names, and through the symbolism of names you are able to give meaning to the representations, understand their relationships, and even learn how to manipulate the reality they represent. You experience this process as a process of discovery - that is, when you are educated and socialized, you experience your particular society's social symbols and structures as a given indistinguishable from non-social reality. Here is a boulder: you cannot move it, it was there before you were born, it is part of reality. So too you experience grammar as something beyond your control, something out there, something fundamentally part of reality. You will discover, of course, if you are clever, that the two are not quite the same: your language is a product of society and culture. It does have reality, for sure: you cannot simply use whatever words or syntax you wish and expect to be understood. But its reality is the product of a very specific series of events within human society, and the language exists only so long as it is used - that is, it is dependent on human action for its reality. As such, it is also shaped by its use: they symbols you use to represent reality are themselves subject to flux.</p><p> </p><p>This is not to say that you are "trapped" in a negative way within your culture - that would be like complaining that you are trapped in your body. Your body is the means by which you experience reality - its limitations are the flip-side of its abilities. So too the social symbols you use are the means by which you know reality. Your beliefs about reality - all of which are made in terms of these changing symbols - are not "false" simply because they are composed of symbols whose relevance and validity are historically and socially contingent any more than your visual experience of a tree is "false" simply because it is contingent on your specific physiology. Your visual representation of a tree is a representation, sure: but it is a representation of something, some object, and even if it is flawed in some way (as it is even when you are at your most healthy) it still is reporting information about reality, information that can be used to check and either confirm, refine, or discard the social symbols. It is true that there is no known way to escape the representations - that is, to experience reality in a way unfiltered by these physiological and social structures (not even, contrary to some who have read Huxley's Doors of Perceptions, mind-altering drugs: this only serves to distort and alter the representations into something unfamiliar that might be taken to be the "underlying truth of things," but which is really no more enlightening that viewing yourself in a fun-house mirror). But because the representations are based in reality, there is the possibility of correction - that is, the possibility that through the careful manipulation, comparison, study, and reflection upon your social and phenomenological symbols, you can refine those social symbols in a way that better represents the reality.</p><p> </p><p>This has been the human quest. At its best, it is like a function approaching an asymptote: you get closer and closer to reality with each refinement, but the symbol will never be identical to reality. Practically speaking, things are far more bumpy - and this is not even taking into account the fact that reality is itself in flux along with society and yourself. But it is a good reason to be both optimistic that truth - understood as the conformity of your symbols with reality - is possible, even if the absolute remains out of reach. It is also a reason to be skeptical and reflective of the claim that a particular set of symbols is perfect: that is, that it identical with reality. This is dogmatism, and it is a form of conceptual idolatry that fails to recognize that the symbols it uses are contextualized both by human physiology and society - and that, for that reason, all systems of symbols necessarily fall short of describing reality perfectly. This imperfection suggests strongly that you should be a fallibilist: that is, you should view all your representations as potentially flawed in some way. "Flawed" does not necessarily mean "false." Geocentrism is clearly flawed, but it is not altogether "false," because it does model the phenomena of reality: the sun rising each morning, the procession and recession of planets, and so forth. There is much in it that is, indeed, true, and it is arguable that without that series of representations modern science might not have ever come about. But the fallibilist is willing to modify or even set aside such venerable symbols because he recognizes that they are, in the end, constructs: mental tools, whose usefulness may very well be contingent on a very specific set of circumstances.</p><p> </p><p>I have only described phenomena, symbols, and representations in a very superficial way, and I must accept my own conclusion that my account is quite possibly flawed, but I hope that you will accept that there is much about it that is true. The implications for religion are most interesting to me right now, and I leave most of them for a later note. But I would like to simply say that these insights do not make religion invalid. Atheism can be as dogmatic as religion, and there is just as much conceptual idolization and self-deceit going on in the atheist who shouts that a wafer cannot become the body of Christ as there is in the soothsayer who interprets the movements of birds to be a sign of fate. In all these matters, the key insight is not a matter so much of truth or falsity, but a matter of context and absolutes, because even what counts as true and false is dependent upon the structure of our social symbols. The Incarnation in Christianity presents this for my closing meditation: let us say that God becomes a man and wishes to reveal something of Himself to us. He must use our symbols to communicate to our minds, and thus whatever He reveals will take on the limitations of the symbols He says it in. Even if somehow He were able to undo the limitations of human physiology and culture - if through some miraculous process He destroyed all the structures that we use for thought as we know it and replaced it with an unmediated experience of His reality - the moment we attempted to communicate it or act on it within a social, human context, we would be again forced to use symbols, and once again would be in the position of the human: the thinking, growing, changing, limited, mortal thing called man.</p>S. 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Emphasis"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="21" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Intense Emphasis"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="31" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Subtle Reference"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="32" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Intense Reference"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="33" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Book Title"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="37" name="Bibliography"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="39" qformat="true" name="TOC Heading"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormal">In 1963, the Pontifical Commission on Birth Control was established to study the possibility of an alteration in the Church's teachings on contraception.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>By the time its work was done, 68 of the 72 members had drafted a <a href="http://catholicsforcontraception.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=9:majreport&catid=6:chrchdocs">report</a> supporting an alteration in the Church's teachings.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>This report, titled "Responsible Parenthood," concluded that contraception could not be considered intrinsically evil, and that it was incoherent to accept the legitimacy of the rhythm method while excluding artificial contraception.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>This majority report in no way meant to strip away the connection between sexuality and procreation, but merely made the argument that within a productive and fertile life it should be perfectly acceptable to use artificial means to control the rate of birth, to space births out, and to ensure better provisions for offspring.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">However, in writing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Humanae Vitae</i>, the Pope rejected the majority consensus of his Pontifical Commission, instead opting to enshrine the <a href="http://catholicsforcontraception.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=10:minrpt&catid=6:chrchdocs">minority opinion</a> - signed by only 4 of the commission's members - in his encyclical.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>While reaffirming the common and traditional natural law arguments against birth control, the primary concern of this minority report seems to be less theological or philosophical in nature and more a worry about the Church saving face - that is, the worry that the Pontiff may have to admit that his predecessors were in error.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>In the report, which is far more lengthy and pedantic than the majority report, the basic form of argument is that since the Church has consistently rejected the use of contraception as evil, the use of contraception must be evil; and, interestingly, the Church has consistently rejected the use of contraception as evil because the use of contraception is evil.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">The circularity of this argument cannot be denied; however, I am less concerned about the circular rationale of the minority report as I am in a very interesting point made by the majority report:<br /><br />" The tradition has always rejected seeking this separation with a contraceptive intention for motives spoiled by egoism and hedonism, and such seeking can never be admitted. The true opposition is not to be sought between some material conformity to the physiological processes of nature and some artificial intervention. For it is natural to man to use his skill in order to put under human control what is given by physical nature. The opposition is really to be sought between one way of acting which is contraceptive and opposed to a prudent and generous fruitfulness, and another way which is, in an ordered relationship to responsible fruitfulness and which has a concern for education and all the essential, human and Christian values."</p> <p class="MsoNormal">The report calls into question the definition of "natural" used by the opponents of contraception.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>After all, the argument from natural law indicates that man's artificial control of his reproductive faculties is intrinsically evil, in the sense of being intrinsically unnatural.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Yet this argument is found nowhere else in the tradition, and in no other situation is the artificial intervention of the works of the human intellect into natural or physiological processes considered intrinsically evil.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Man can take medicine which halts or hampers his natural bodily processes, he can turn aside great rivers, manipulate genetic structures, govern the breeding of other animals, use artificial insemination to breed those animals, cross-breed them, dig up minerals from the bowels of the earth, purposely alter his own bodily chemistry for various therapeutic and non-therapeutic effects, so forth and so on - and in these cases, it is strictly the intentionality, not the means, of the act that governs the morality of the act.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>However, in the case of artificial contraception, it is argued that simply the artificiality of the act - that is, the means itself, understood as an intentional and artificial control over the reproductive organs - is evil, regardless of intention.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>A couple who has licit reasons for avoiding pregnancy under Church rules, and whose intentions are in line with these rules, would fall into a state of mortal sin or not depending upon whether they have sex with artificial contraception or using natural family planning - even if their intention is identical, namely, to have sexual relations without intending to procreate.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">The majority opinion reveals the absurdity of this position, and questions why rhythm should be allowed but artificial contraception condemned.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Nature should include the works of the human mind, and God's command to go forth and multiply is understood within the grand context of man using his intellect to become a master of nature - both his environment and himself.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The report is firm in its reaffirmation of the intrinsic connection between sexuality and reproduction, but it shifts the moral gravity of contraception away from the intrinsic means of contraception to the intentionality of contraception.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Clearly, the majority report would have us realize, it is possible for a couple to exercise a fruitful sexuality - that is, a sexuality that yields children - even if not every sexual act is itself fruitful.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>A couple who uses contraception to regulate rather than complete nullify this connection is indeed acting well within the boundaries of natural law under this view, and the commission still coherently rejects the use of contraception solely for the purposes of having a fruitless, hedonistic sexual life.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">The Catholic Church needs to reevaluate (or rather, pay attention to the already extant reevaluation) its stance on birth control, leaving completely aside the rather pathetic concern that it may have to admit it was mistaken.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>However, interestingly enough, the majority report shows that it would be entirely plausible to alter the teaching and remain firmly within the tradition, since it is the tradition itself that recognizes the dignity of man and the natural goodness of his intellect's power to understand and manipulate himself and the world around him.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>It would be unnecessary to reject the Church's teaching that marriage, sexuality, and procreation all have an indelible link; one would merely have to affirm that the exercise of that sexuality, like the exercise of any other natural function, can rightfully be responsibly controlled by the art and knowledge of the human mind.</p>S. Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08843076081982674203noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-975543236652939194.post-54849207595351198602012-02-17T17:01:00.000-08:002012-02-17T17:02:13.612-08:00Three Points of Agreement in the Contraception Debate<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves/> <w:trackformatting/> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:donotpromoteqf/> <w:lidthemeother>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:lidthemeasian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:lidthemecomplexscript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:snaptogridincell/> <w:wraptextwithpunct/> <w:useasianbreakrules/> <w:dontgrowautofit/> <w:splitpgbreakandparamark/> <w:dontvertaligncellwithsp/> <w:dontbreakconstrainedforcedtables/> 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Emphasis"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="21" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Intense Emphasis"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="31" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Subtle Reference"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="32" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Intense Reference"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="33" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Book Title"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="37" name="Bibliography"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="39" qformat="true" name="TOC Heading"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormal">Contraception has taken on a strange quality in Catholicism.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>It is a litmus test, and many treat it as an easy way to categorize your particular "brand" of Catholicism.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Use contraception and think it is no deal?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>You are labeled a liberal Catholic, or maybe simply a "cafeteria Catholic" or an "American Catholic," where "American Catholic" is used as a pejorative.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>On the other hand, condemnation of contraception is seen as not only a sign of one's commitment to the Magisterium, but certainly one's membership in the ranks of the conservative Catholics - the self styled "traditionalists."<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Certainly, the battle of words and ideas between these two forces within the Church is nothing new, but the use of this particular issue seems to have only heated up in the last fifty to sixty years - and, in some ways, the generations of Catholics in American growing up in the long shadows of the Second Vatican Council have inherited this litmus test as a given (well, at least any who give more than a passing moment's worth of thought to the matter).</p> <p class="MsoNormal">As usual, the polarization has not only increased each side's zeal, but has decreased each side's ability to make compelling arguments.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>On the one hand, conservatives push two issues: the declarations of the Magisterium and their arguments from natural law.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I have elsewhere discussed my critique of natural law, but the insistence that the immorality of contraception is a universally applicable (and, indeed, rationally demonstrable) ethical principle has only served to alienate the conservative Catholic voice; it may be that some set of arguments, carefully poised and hashed out with the right set of assumptions, could make a valid case against contraception, but more often these arguments consist of tired catch-phrases and begging the question (after all, if I begin with the assumption that it is immoral to separate the exercise of a bodily function from its natural purpose, I've already formed my conclusion that contraception is immoral - it is contained in the assumption). </p> <p class="MsoNormal">Similarly, the "liberal Catholic" crowd seems to have attempted to move on from the debate entirely, no longer spending much time at all critically considering issues of contraception and its moral implications (except when those implications happen to coincide with certain left-leaning talking points, such as the environment - a liberal Catholic who would not even bother with you if you say contraception is a sin would probably become quite talkative if you mention that birth control pills might be permanently damaging the ecosystem).</p> <p class="MsoNormal">Amidst all this, a more reasoned analysis of contraception seems improbable.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But there are some common points that both sides tend to share, common assumptions that could form the basis of a more fruitful dialogue (and, perhaps, more fruitful compromises).<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Allow me to share what I believe to be the common concepts of both conservative and liberal Catholic appraisals of the contraception issue.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">1. Contraceptive practices have grave social consequences.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">Both sides accept the public, social nature of sexual practices.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Though members of both sides (more likely, the liberal side) may plead the "private" character of what goes on in the bedroom, reproduction is a public issue.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The creation of new citizens, who may potentially become either productive or parasitical and whose upbringing will be a strong determining factor in his future, bears with it a social responsibility.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>As such, there are grounds for the ethical treatment of contraception.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Of course, this common belief is diverted by the question of in which direction social responsibility lies: are couples' primary duty to procreate (at a reasonable, but consistent, pace), thus providing society with new members and conforming with the natural function of sex, or is the primary duty to carefully withhold this procreative power in the light of increasing awareness of social and global problems related to population growth?</p> <p class="MsoNormal">However, I claim that these two responsibilities are not ultimately contradictory, but are rather rendered so by the unnecessary dichotomizing of procreation and contraception.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Pope John VI asks in the beginning of Humanae Vitae, "could it not be admitted that the intention of a less abundant but more rationalized fecundity might transform a materially sterilizing intervention into a licit and wise control of birth?"<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Of course, against the advice of the majority of his own commission on the subject, the Pontiff would go on to answer with a resounding "no."<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Yet the question seems to combine the concerns of both parties: a view of contraception as part of an overall fertile marriage, rather than a view of it as simply contrary to fertility.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Perhaps revisiting this question could provide a source of common discussion on both sides, as long as conservatives are truly willing to consider that the use of contraception is not equivalent to a complete rejection of procreation and the liberals are willing to admit that a purely contraceptive sexual lifestyle may represent a kind of unsupportable turning against the functions of the body.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">2. There are good reasons not to have children</p> <p class="MsoNormal">While conservative Catholics often treat this part of Catholic teaching with a kind of begrudging acceptance, a corollary to the Church's condemnation of artificial contraception was the admission that there are indeed reasons why a couple could engage in sex without intending on procreation (that this admission is used as justification for natural birth control via natural family planning and not for artificial birth control seems to be, among other things, a failure in logic).<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>This is actually a point of agreement with liberal Catholics: both groups recognize that the financial, emotional, and physical burdens of raising children are great, and that as such it is not to be taken lightly.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The liberal Catholics perhaps have a far more extensive list of acceptable reasons, including concerns for the social aspect of procreation, its strain on global resources, and the impact on the environment (the very sorts of things Paul VI mentions in his introduction to the topic in Humanae Vitae).</p> <p class="MsoNormal">Then, if there are valid reasons why a couple should wish to avoid having children, the conservative Catholic may wonder why he condones one means to this end and forbids another; what about the artificiality of contraceptive devices and pharmaceuticals makes them sinful in themselves?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I will put to the side the issue of abortifacient contraceptives, concerns about which are of an entirely different nature.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Simultaneously, cannot liberal Catholics (and, perhaps, liberals in general) approach the same question from a different angle, in order to concede that the responsibility of procreation (it is, indeed, an important duty of a species to reproduce, even if we have reason to moderate that activity) renders certain types of excuses invalid, and that couples with ample resources and time should seriously consider engaging in the same act without which they would not exist?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>After all, who hasn't seen the utter waste of a three-thousand plus square foot home, two middle class wage earners, two cars, and...no children.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">3. Teenage pregnancies, abortions, unwanted children, and STD's are all indicative of social ills that need to be addressed</p> <p class="MsoNormal">Conservative Catholics often blame contraception and the Sexual Revolution for these social ills, pointing their finger squarely in the faces of the liberal Catholics as being the ones whose imprudent endorsement of birth control and feminism are responsible for what can generally be called the overall smuttiness of society today.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Liberal Catholics point the finger right back, maintaining that it is actually the stuffy and outdated sexual morals of the conservative forces in America that have prevented a true response to these issues in the form of better sexual education, better access to contraception, and the liberation of women from their role as reproductive vessels.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">Both see these issues as bad, either in themselves or as indicators that all is not right in the world.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>And, yet again, we see a mirror image in their accusations.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But if the truth is in the middle, the acknowledgement of these social ills and studies as to their causes and relationship to contraception and other variables might be a good place to start a more productive dialogue, especially if liberal Catholics will acknowledge that the unpinning of sexuality from procreation and the laissez faire attitude towards casual sexuality may be just as responsible for these issues as are a general lack of a sense of social sexual responsibility in society.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Conservative Catholics can acknowledge that part of taking responsibility might come in the form of birth control as well as abstinence - an admission that merely needs history, even Catholic history, to back up the truth that many people will have sex with each other no matter how persuasively you might point out its immorality. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p>S. Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08843076081982674203noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-975543236652939194.post-42011343407773260792012-02-06T16:37:00.001-08:002012-02-07T10:17:38.655-08:00The Power of Names: A Critique of Realism<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves/> <w:trackformatting/> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:donotpromoteqf/> <w:lidthemeother>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:lidthemeasian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:lidthemecomplexscript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:snaptogridincell/> <w:wraptextwithpunct/> <w:useasianbreakrules/> <w:dontgrowautofit/> <w:splitpgbreakandparamark/> <w:dontvertaligncellwithsp/> <w:dontbreakconstrainedforcedtables/> <w:dontvertalignintxbx/> 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Emphasis"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="21" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Intense Emphasis"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="31" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Subtle Reference"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="32" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Intense Reference"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="33" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Book Title"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="37" name="Bibliography"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="39" qformat="true" name="TOC Heading"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormal">In Plato's <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Cratylus</i>, Socrates rejects the notion that the names of things have a divine origin.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Language, as sign, is inferior to the thing signified.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>This imperfection could be used to account for the variety of languages, the multiplicity of systems of signification used to talk about, assumedly, one reality.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Yet such a position suggests that our names are derivative of things - or, to put it another way, that the singular reality which we experience, filled with a variety of phenomena which we ostensibly share with others, provides a kind of prototype from which language is drawn.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>There is, however, another theory about language and its connection with the things around us: that the language we use actually shapes our phenomenal world, and that the words we use have the power to alter our perception of reality.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>To some degree it may even be arguable that the use of a particular language - or even the use of a particular vocabulary or dialect within a language - can actually define the phenomenal contents of our world.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal"> </i><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I believe that the way in which language shapes, directs, and forms our thoughts and our perception of the world<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>suggests that realism - which would attempt to tie our words and associated conceptions to universal, unchanging forms or essences - overestimates the universality of human concepts and underestimates the power of names to shape our reality.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">Realism's variety and tradition is far too diverse and expansive to receive a full treatment.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Indeed, there are many subtle varieties of realism that may avoid the criticism which I will present.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>For my purposes, however, I will define realism as consisting primarily in the belief that things are what they are because of their ontological relationship to an eternal, unchanging reality called an essence.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>This ontological relationship is described in many ways, but the main vocabulary I will use is participation.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>An entity - physical or non-physical - participates in a form, which is eternal and unchanging.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>When we perceive such an entity, our intellects are able to abstract this form from the particulars of the phenomena around us: we are able to see past certain accidental or non-essential qualities, such as the fact that the thing is sitting in water, is brown, is chewing on a fish, and so forth, and are able to abstract that the entity is, in essence, a duck. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">Words, then, are conceived of as socially agreed upon utterances signifying these essential concepts.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Whatever variety there is in language does not change the fundamental content of these universal concepts: a man speaking Mandarin Chinese would possess the knowledge of the same form, "duckness," as an English speaker, even if the utterances used to signify that concept differ.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">Language, on the realist's account, is always primarily derivative, in the sense that the content of our mental concepts shapes our language rather than vice versa.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>This theory nicely fits with any philosophy that requires the universality of certain sorts of concept: for example, natural law, among others.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">However, if language is not primarily derivative, and if instead the utterances we use actually alter the content of our mental concepts - that is, if language changes the way in which we perceive the world - then realism's claims that humans have access to universally uniform mental concepts in the form of essences is doubtful.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">Indeed, research on this subject is emerging which reveals that language shapes the content of our mental concepts as well as our phenomenal world.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Take, for example, the experiments conducted by Lera Boroditsky of Stanford University.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Comparing the speakers of a language like Kuuk Thayorre, a language that insists so much on absolute frames of reference that it lacks concepts such as "left" and "right" and instead requires all statements to be made in terms of the cardinal directions, to speakers of a language like English, which tends to use more relative spatial terms, Boroditsky found that the language spoken by the individual had profound effects on his spatial and temporal perceptions.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Kuuk Thayorre possess a nearly perfect sense of direction in any environment, even indoors, and tend to see temporality in terms of cardinal direction, especially east to west.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>When asked to arrange photographs in temporal order, Kuuk Thayorre speakers place the cards in line from east to west; English speakers, not surprisingly, will place the cards in order from left to right, while possessing none of the unique spacial perceptive abilities of the Kuuk Thayorre speakers.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">Furthermore, her research revealed that the choice of conceptual metaphors and idioms - especially temporal idioms - alters a speaker's perception of the passing of time.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>English speakers, who tend to use idioms of length to speak about the passage of time, actually perceive the passage of time differently when thinking about distances than when not thinking about distances, while Spanish speakers, who tend to think of time in terms of quantity or size, perceive the passage of time as longer when thinking about quantity and size.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">These differences in language - and the resulting differences in how we actually perceive the world - go on and on.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Speakers of languages with a greater number and variety of words for color are actually better able to distinguish different shades of colors; the different genders of words in different languages results in differences in speakers' perceptions of those objects; the same object will be described by vastly different terms in different languages; and so forth.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>What is, in a sense, another important distinction is that these differences in perception will carry over even if a speaker is speaking in a different language: that is, a native Spanish speaker speaking English and a native German speaker speaking English will use an entirely different English vocabulary - and, sometimes, even contradictory vocabulary - to describe the same object based upon the gender biases of their native language.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">These findings all serve to support the conclusion that language is not merely derivative in nature: that, rather than our utterances being simply socially determined representatives of otherwise uniform mental concepts, the particular characteristics of our language serves to inform and determine the content of our mental concepts.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Of course, this does not mean that our concepts are wholly products of language - we know that animals without complex languages, such as monkeys, are able to perform tasks that demonstrate the use of mental concepts, including number.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>However, in studies of various people groups in South America who lack numeral language, researchers have discovered that the lack of numbers in their spoken language correlates to numerical imprecision: that is, when asked to do rudimentary numeric exercises such as identifying how many of something there were or in the performance of basic arithmetic, these people groups were consistently unable to provide exact numbers, even if their estimates demonstrated an ability to handle numerical concepts in a rough or ready way.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>This latter experiment suggests that even if language does not play the sole role in shaping our mental concepts, it does play a role in refining those concepts; when combined with the earlier experiments, I believe it is possible to see that the content and precision of our mental concepts is not indifferent to the utterances used to describe them.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">If, then, the content and precision of mental concepts is partially derived from language, we have reason to at least refine the realist notion that utterances are merely social constructs depicting otherwise uniform, universal, or eternal concepts.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>It is noteworthy that nominalism would not suffer the same weakness from this finding: indeed, the nominalist account of utterances (or names) as sets of similar phenomena described under common words can very readily accept that the act of naming is itself a variable determining the content and precision of the mental concepts which we name.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>On a broader scope, this also suggests that attempts at formulating universal definitions or universal systems - that is, any attempt to describe a set of universal human concepts - must account for the linguistically (and, we might add, culturally, socially, and historically) conditioned<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>nature of these concepts.</p>S. Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08843076081982674203noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-975543236652939194.post-91088723205868812952012-02-01T17:16:00.000-08:002012-02-01T17:17:36.216-08:00Proposal for a New Christian Synthesis<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves/> <w:trackformatting/> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:donotpromoteqf/> <w:lidthemeother>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:lidthemeasian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:lidthemecomplexscript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:snaptogridincell/> <w:wraptextwithpunct/> <w:useasianbreakrules/> <w:dontgrowautofit/> <w:splitpgbreakandparamark/> <w:dontvertaligncellwithsp/> <w:dontbreakconstrainedforcedtables/> <w:dontvertalignintxbx/> 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Emphasis"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="21" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Intense Emphasis"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="31" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Subtle Reference"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="32" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Intense Reference"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="33" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Book Title"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="37" name="Bibliography"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="39" qformat="true" name="TOC Heading"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormal">A new synthesis of the Christian religion with modern and postmodern bodies of secular knowledge must be built on the principle of mutual respect, mutual charity, and mutual honesty.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>In practical terms, this means that Christian theology may not dismiss scientific knowledge (or its broader implications) nor deform its conclusions to fit its own preconceived schema.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>It also means that the scientific method cannot be applied, nor used as grounds for viewing empirically unfalsifiable statements with undue suspicion (after all, as I have mentioned previously, such an undue level of suspicion would render the vast majority of human beliefs – religious as well as secular – subject to uncalled for doubt.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">As corollaries to this first principle, I offer the following principles as a tentative proposal for the guiding principles of a new synthesis.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><br />I. Each claim or belief must be evaluated according to its nature.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">While there are a variety of different sorts of claims made in the sciences, they are more or less united with the common theme: they are subject to falsification through observation.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Of course, this is practically much more difficult in some cases than in others.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Confirming that objects of different masses nevertheless fall to earth with the same acceleration is somewhat easier than confirming the predictions of Einstein’s relativity.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Nevertheless, admitting the difficulty with which truly controlled and valid observations are sometimes made, it is conceivable that an observation could really falsify a scientific claim.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">This is not the same with the variety of religious claims.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>In general, religions tend to make a variety of claims: mythological, moral, historical, philosophical, and theological.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>These claims may encompass a wide variety of fields of study, and may include claims of a biological, anthropological, social, psychological, or other nature.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">In an attempt to synthesize Christian beliefs with contemporary knowledge and practice, it is necessary to admit that each of its claims must be subject to a level of proof consonant with non-religious claims of the same type.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>For example, a claim about the physical nature of the universe made by a religious source should require the same level of confirmation – and be open to the same sort of falsification – of a similar claim made by a secular source.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>We may use the famous Galileo case as an example: a certain religious body made the statement: </p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">“We say, pronounce, sentence, and declare that you, the above-mentioned Galileo, because of the things deduced in the trial and confessed by you as above, have rendered yourself according to this Holy Office vehemently suspected of heresy, namely of having held and believed a doctrine which is false and contrary to the divine and Holy Scripture: that the sun is the center of the world and does not move from east to west, and the earth moves and is not the center of the world, and that one may hold and defend as probable an opinion after it has been declared and defined contrary to Holy Scripture.”</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">Whatever else may be said about this statement, it is clearly a statement with physical implications and, like any similar statement, needs to conform to the standards of evidence of the physical sciences.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Many notable Catholics have defended the Inquisition of Galileo by pointing out that Galileo was technically wrong: the sun is no more the absolute immobile center of the universe than the earth is.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Very well.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But the Inquisition was not condemning Galileo because Galileo didn’t realize the ultimate relativity of physical frames of reference: they were condemning him because they believed the Bible, and therefore the Catholic faith, taught that the earth was the immobile center of the Earth.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Time has proven that, despite his own errors, Galileo was making a very important leap in our understanding of the physical universe simply by recognizing that a heliocentric model corresponds better to observation than the increasingly cumbersome Ptolemaic system.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">So, then, whatever claims are made by Christianity regarding the physical nature of the universe should be confirmed or falsified by empirical means.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Similarly, anthropological claims should be subject to the standards of evidence used in the study of anthropology.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Obviously, such claims are not held to the same standards has physical scientific claims; however, this does not mean that such claims are free from empirical scrutiny.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Consider, as I have mentioned before, such a broad, sweeping theory as natural law, a theory whose truth would have empirically observable effects on the universal development of human cultures.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Now, a theory like natural law is quite broad itself, and not all of its claims can be studied using such methods: again, according to Principle 1, each claim should be confirmed or falsified according to its own evidence.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Even if natural law’s universality claim were falsified, we would not need to jettison the entire theory of natural law: instead, the theory could conceivably be modified to take into account the way the world actually is, inasmuch as we can observe how it actually is, and would be all the better for it.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">Historical claims should be subject to the same scrutiny as any other historical claim made by any other institution or piece of literature.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>When dealing specifically with literature, effort must be made to ascertain whether a passage is intended historically; and, when it is, its historicity is open to falsification or confirmation through archaeological, literary, and other similar historical tools.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">Moral and philosophical claims made by religion – that is, those claims of such a quality that they cannot be falsified by direct observation, such as “abortion is a moral wrong” – are still subject to standards of logic, consistency, and coherence.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>As it happens, much of Christianity’s philosophy has been the subject of continual and rather rigorous logical scrutiny and careful refinement, yielding a body of Christian philosophy that is quite self-consistent.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>However, even if such claims are not directly falsifiable, I would argue that the implications of many of these theories is still subject to scientific scrutiny – or, at least, scientific observation, theory, and knowledge is not inconsequential to Christian philosophy.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>To use abortion as a prime example, while “abortion is a moral wrong” is not directly falsifiable; it carries with it a number of implications.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>For example, the reason that abortion is a moral wrong is that the developing human being is at all stages of its development considered an ensouled human person.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>However, the claim that a zygote is an ensouled human person requires that I put forward a coherent and consistent definition of what counts as an ensouled human person that does not have unintended side effects – a problem that can only be solved by reference to our vast body of human biological knowledge.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">Finally, Christianity makes a number of important theological claims, by which I mean that it makes claims based on an assumed authority rather than by means of evidence, such as “God is three persons.”<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Of course, these claims cannot be confirmed, but as I mentioned before this fact alone is not reason for undue suspicion (nor, of course, does it count as a reason for belief).<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>How, then, are we to evaluate these claims, these specifically and irreducibly religious claims?</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">2. Specifically religious claims must be evaluated according to indirect or circumstantial evidence; or, rather, they must be analyzed according to the authority of the claimant.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">We should evaluate those religious claims which are not subject to direct falsification by means of the same sorts of indirect evidence upon which we base our acceptance or rejection of any other claim presented to us without the possibility of evidence.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>These types of claims come to us in two forms: claims which evidence is theoretically possible but is ultimately impractical, and claims for which evidence is truly impossible.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>We encounter these claims in non-religious contexts all the time, and rarely make a fuss about them or throw up our hands that we cannot evaluate them.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The truth is, we do have systems of evaluating these sorts of claims, which I will call broadly “claims of authority.”</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">When we read an article from the Associated Press, we rarely have time or resources to personally investigate the accuracy of its report: in general, however, we accept its accounts of events as being more or less accurate based upon our trust in the Associated Press’ reporting – or, to phrase it in a different way, the level of authority we grant the Associated Press as far as accurately reporting the news.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Similarly, in grade school we are commonly presented with various scientific and mathematical claims that we were simply unable to defend or understand based upon evidence but which we nevertheless accepted based upon the authority of our teacher (and, of course, based upon whatever forces of coercion could be turned against us if we refused to accept that authority).<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>These are all examples of claims in which evidence is theoretically possible but practically unavailable.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">Other claims do not admit of more or less scientific evidence at all, such as “I will meet you at noon on Wednesday.”<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The acceptance of such a claim and the subsequent beliefs it engenders is based entirely upon indirect evaluations of that claim: evaluations based on the merits of the claimant rather than the merits of the claim itself.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>If someone who in a vast number of instances has shown himself to be completely unreliable made this claim, I might place little trust in him: I would grant him no authority on the subject of where he will be and when.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>On the other hand, my other experiences with him might prove him to be a trustworthy individual who always honored his meetings, I might trust his statement with nearly the same level of certainty that I believe scientific claims.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Practically, this type of belief is extraordinarily important, because it comprehends a vast number of beliefs without which social life would be impossible.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>These are often the beliefs of the community, certain shared assumptions about who will do what, when and how we should respond to each other, what projects we should work on together, what things are of ultimate importance or significance, and so forth.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>It incorporates elements of mythology, history, and relationships.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>It is, to use the word in its original sense, a matter of faith, and it is indispensible.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">Now, when a religious institution makes such claims, it is clear that they should be evaluated in the same manner: through an indirect analysis of their authority.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The analysis of the authority of the claimant, as I mention above, stands in place of the impossible analysis of the truth or falsehood of the statement.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>This analysis may involve the analysis of claims that are subject to empirical scrutiny, each of which, according to Principle 1, must be evaluated according to its own nature.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>So, for example, at least part of the professed authority of the Catholic Church lies in its professed historical ties to the person of Jesus; this historical claim, if falsified, would also falsify the claimed authority (or, at the very least, would force a redefinition of the basis of the Church’s authority).<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Similarly, if confirmed, it would provide some indirect evidence that the Church does have authority – although the confirmation of the historical basis would certainly not be enough evidence on its own.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">Which leads one to ask: how much evidence is enough evidence?</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">3. The amount of evidence required to justify a religious claim should be in proportion to the “magnitude” of the claim.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">In practice, we tend to require more evidence for a claim the broader its scope: it is for this reason that we rarely scrutinize a medicine that makes modest claims like “brings down a fever” while we tend to label as snake oil something touted as a “miracle cure.”<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>To a great degree, this practical filter makes sense: if a claim seems more improbable or outlandish to begin with, we need a great deal more indirect evidence about the authority of its claimant in order to accept it.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>When it comes to religious claims, this also holds true: but so does the fact that simply the unusual or perhaps wondrous nature of a claim does not mean that it is untrue.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">Take, for instance, the evaluation of claims of miracles.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The evaluation of such a claim rests almost entirely on the evaluation of its claimant or claimants, and except for the especially credulous, or those who have accepted an entire framework which would make the claim more likely from the get-go, such claims would need extraordinary authority consonant with their extraordinary nature.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Yet such evidence is possible.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>For instance, the general trustworthiness or accuracy of a person, persons, or document in describing other, more easily verifiable phenomena might be a good indicator of his likely trustworthiness in describing something miraculous.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>If a document is filled with historical inaccuracies, false statements about physical reality, or similar errors, this tends to discount its authority with regards to something miraculous, while a document that has verified accuracy with regards to other matters is much more likely to be accurate when describing something miraculous.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Similarly, if the claimant is an individual with established credentials in the sorts of phenomena in which the miracle appeared, we would likely give that account more credence: a well-known medical doctor’s account of a seemingly miraculous cure has more authority than a self-reported “miracle cure” by a layman, especially if he can produce artifacts of record that corroborate his story.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>All this to say that accounts of miracles are subject to a certain sort of evaluation, and that this sort of evaluation is similar to the type of evaluation that must be made of the authority of a religious claimant.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">However, it is certainly true that these matters are not subject to the same objective standards of judgment as are more scientific claims.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Individuals vary greatly in the degree to which they trust or distrust others, institution, or certain types of claims; these prejudices may be based on good or bad reasons, but even a prejudice with a seemingly good basis can potentially cause the rejection of a true claim.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>There is indeed a continuum of personalities, from the credulous mind that accepts anything from anyone, to the hardened skeptic who has closed his mind to what cannot be proven – or at least distanced himself from it lest he accidentally believe as true something that is false.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Even our evaluation of where someone falls along this continuum is a matter of subjective belief; a credulous person will call the same man a skeptic that a skeptic might call credulous.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">Which brings me to the topic of Faith, as a specifically Christian concept.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>As I believe this framework must include the Christian tradition, it must of course include Faith; but what is Faith?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Is it subject to this sort of scrutiny?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The tradition has voices that answer both yes and no, and which offer a number of alternative frameworks of Faith’s relationship to rational scrutiny.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But in deference to the rest of the framework, I would have to conclude that Faith, as a trust in the authority of a claimant, is at least indirectly subject to empirical examination.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>This does not mean that there is no virtue to Faith – indeed, I have noted before, a sincere examination of human society reveals that this sort of virtue is imperative to community, and no man, no matter how skeptical, can function without recognizing to some limited degree the authority of others without proof.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>So, then, it would be only a matter of prejudice to reject specifically religious faith, and if we require more evidence or a closer scrutiny on religious claimants than we do of the nightly news it is because the scope of religious claims is far greater than the weather.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">4. All religions must be analyzed on the same footing, and a coherent system of cross-religious evaluation must be used; and, as a corollary to this, a coherent theory of historical, social religious development should be put forward as a means to this end.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">Pluralism is perhaps the most difficult topic that a thoughtful religious individual must encounter.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>A Christian wakes up in the same world with the followers of a thousand different faiths, each of them waking up with a different level of commitment to a different set of beliefs, many of them contradicting the claims of the Christian faith.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>If my belief is not to be reduced to an accident of my birth (i.e., I am a Christian because I happened to be born to a Christian household, and so forth), I must be able to not only evaluate my own beliefs but evaluate then along with the beliefs of other religions.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Now, we must all admit to practicality: I cannot track down every last belief system.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Practically speaking, perhaps even theoretically speaking, it is an implausible task to discover and categorize all human religious beliefs, especially if we include all the beliefs from mankind’s long history.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">However, if we could take all we can track down and mold it into a single coherent theory of religious development – that is, if we could develop the history of religion into a theory which recognizes the evolution of the idea of God and all the corresponding religious claims – we could create criteria for understanding the place different religions hold within that development. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I propose as a blueprint for such a broad, sweeping theory and subsequent criteria the book by Rodney Stark called Discovering God.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>In the book, he presents a history of religious development and subsequent criteria by which he judges the relationship of various religions to a single, coherent narrative; such a method holds the promise of producing real criteria by which to evaluate different religions while still affirming a certain degree of universal religious validity – or, in other words, a way to understand why one believes what one believes rather than something else that does not boil down to either accident of place or simple bigoted rejection of other religious beliefs.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">All this is merely a proposed framework for a project that would be quite immense and which would require the effort of individuals of every type of belief or non-belief and of a variety of scientific and liberal arts backgrounds.</p>S. Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08843076081982674203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-975543236652939194.post-28666448762921110432012-01-31T16:54:00.000-08:002012-01-31T16:56:05.902-08:00The Need for a New Synthesis<div class="mbl notesBlogText clearfix"><div><p>St. Thomas Aquinas is responsible for the last, greatest synthesis of theology and philosophy, the Summa Theologica. Its importance to Christianity during the previous millennium cannot be understated, since even well into the 19th century the Church prescribed the study of St. Thomas and the body of scholasticism as the bread and butter of Catholic theology, and especially as an antidote as what was called the Modernist heresy. </p><p>That synthesis is now nearly eight hundred years old. It was written prior to the most revolutionary five hundred years in the history of humanity, an era when man learned how to hone and focus his observational powers, when he learned that the truths handed down to him do not always stand the test of honest scrutiny, when, in short, he learned the weakness of arguments from authority. Such insights can easily appear dangerous to an institution founded upon principles of faith. While it is a fabrication to say that the Church and science have always and everywhere been mortal enemies, it is only a matter of history that the Church has not always been friendly to science; it is only a couple of decades since the Church, in the person of Pope John Paul II, apologized for its treatment of Galileo, and even the progressive views of that Pope contain numerous admonitions to science, warnings about its limitations, and hints (and outright declarations) of the inherit superiority of theology and the faith. I do not mean to disparage that beloved Pope, who certainly did much to change the Church's public stance on modern science from the curmudgeony condemnations of earlier pontiffs. I simply mean to say that, in general, the Church's policy towards science has been one of - at best - a sense of motherly guidance (if not to say, overbearing interference), and at worst a sense of annoyance, irritation, and fear towards a discipline that offers the possibility of discovering reality through one's own senses rather than through submission to received wisdom.</p><p>This somewhat dour picture of antithesis is not without its flaws. For one, modern science grew out of a Catholic culture (even if it was sometimes oppressed by that culture). Many early scientists saw their work (or, at least, went through the trouble of pretending to see their work) as consonant with faith, with belief in a God who orders the universe. And to return once again to the figure of John Paul II, there may very well be a way that the Church has recognized the need for a new synthesis, even if the hierarchy has not yet come to the realization of the full implications of such a synthesis. As late as sixty or seventy years ago, the Church's leadership continued to pronounce its skepticism of evolution, its concerns over the growing pluralism of western society, a fear of the relativism that might result from certain sorts of ecumenical or inter-faith dialogue and interactions, and perhaps above all of the continuing secularization of society that chipped away slowly the last vestiges of the Vatican's then-already-absent secular power. Then came Pope John Paul II. Then came an acknowledgement of the soundness of evolutionary theory (and, indeed, of the validity and importance of broader attempts at a fully scientific cosmology), an acknowledgement that the Church had mishandled its relationship with science, an acknowledgement - if not of the full truth - at least of the dignity and importance of other religions, of a need to dialogue and even cooperate. In his encyclical, Fides et Ratio, the Pope offered the image of faith and reason in full cooperation, even as co-equals, the two wings of a dove. </p><p>Yet it is clear that despite whatever good intentions coincided with the late pontiff's hinting at a new synthesis, no full-bodied attempt at reconciling the faith with science has emerged. There are two responses that appear often, but which far from representing synthesis rather represent deformation either of faith or science. On the one hand are those who, so jealous of Theology maintaining her crown, put her in a position of ultimate authority over all the other sciences - despite how ignorant she has often proved on matters of physical sciences, they follow her lead, place all questions under her final judgment, and when the other sciences clamor about such trivialities as evidence, observation, and so forth, Theology's eager servants scoff at what they consider the unbounded pride of the little, sinful creature called man. On the other, the elite enlightened, who view faith and the institutions of religions as (perhaps dignified, perhaps decrepit) relics of a bygone age, who armed with telescopes and computers and particle colliders have come to believe themselves the possessors of the truth - that either God doesn't exist, or even if He does we do not have any evidence (as though God were to appear to them if only they slam protons together hard enough). Lady Theology is for them either that ranting old lady that one smiles sadly at as one walks by, or perhaps a madwoman who needs to be locked away - for the good of humanity. These two images are, of course, caricatures (though it is certainly true that both sides have members for whom these would be perfect portraits), and perhaps the larger portion, both of scientists and the faithful (and, of course, faithful scientists) somehow manage to accept the validity of both disciplines - or manage not to think about the subject at all.</p><p>In any case, a synthesis has not emerged. Perhaps it is because the implications of such a synthesis would be so dangerous to the more radical members of both camps. For one, the recognition of the true validity of modern science and the postmodern sciences would mean the Church must reevaluate Her own position vis-a-vis truth. She makes claims of two different types: claims that can falsified empirically and claims that cannot be falsified empirically. But the falsification of the former would imply the potential falsehood of the latter: that is, if the Church's claims about anything observable turn out to be false, this would imply the real possibility that Her claims about the unobservable realities might also be false. This matter is of some relevance to the Galileo case: the Church (or, at least, Her ministers) really did claim that it was a matter of faith that the earth was the immobile center of the universe, and however Her apologists might try to distance themselves from that claim or modify that claim into something more acceptable to modern ears it is clear that this was mistaken - even the Pope has, finally, admitted it! Of course, the Church can maintain the infallibility of its doctrine by retroactively excising from Her teaching anything that has been falsified, but this cannot help but appear to be a semantic game, a post hoc "correcting" of the past to fit the needs of the present. But such a synthesis would cut two ways: scientists already recognize, for the most part (there are exceptions, one being the notable popular scientist Stephen Hawking) that there are limits to scientific methodology. But there nevertheless remains what I would call a truly scientific prejudice: that unless a claim is subject to verification through scientific methodology, it should be viewed, if not as false, at least as a suspicious and perhaps entirely trivial claim. Yet, as another odd piece of this prejudice, it is rarely directed at anything other than specifically religious claims: that is, few individuals of this mindset have complained about our belief in the reign of a king called Nebuchadnezzar, though a few might complain about our belief in a man named Jesus; history is not subject to suspicion, as long as it remains tame. But if the history contains a miracle, this is taken as reason enough to discount it! This prejudice is, of course, utterly unscientific in its origins: a history claiming that a miraculous event took place must be judged on its historical, rather than scientific, validity. This is not to say that there is no reason to not investigate such claims; only that there is no reason to discount the supernatural simply because it is supernatural.</p><p>In short, the synthesis would require a great deal of true humility on the part both of those who prize the faith and those who prize science (and, perhaps most of all, from those admirable individuals who truly prize both, and whose leadership in such a synthesis would be essential). Yet I fear that such a synthesis will never appear, because the cost to both sides would be so great - that is, the cost in terms of prestige and social power. Yet, to be honest, such a synthesis would likely be far more costly to the Church than to the institutions of science. Science has on its side the fact that it is a truly democratic process, while the Church remains, for good or for ill, a hierarchy - in fact, it is quite arguable that as science has grown more democratic, the Church has grown more and more a hierarchy.<br /></p></div></div>S. Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08843076081982674203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-975543236652939194.post-54215808601816005442012-01-19T17:10:00.000-08:002012-02-03T11:29:32.070-08:00An Empirical Critique of Natural LawNatural law has been the primary scaffolding behind Catholicism’s critique of much in postmodern America. From its condemnation of abortion and homosexuality to its arguments in favor of the existence of God, the Church maintain that there are ethical principles universal to rational man. These principles are not part of a supernatural revelation, but are rather available to anyone with sufficiently developed rational faculties; and although culture might condition how these principles are expressed their content is not culturally dependent. It seems natural to me that if these claims are correct the content of natural law must be a proper object of empirical research, rather than simply a subject of rational speculation. However, despite what in my opinion is an unavoidable conclusion, I have yet to see any Catholics putting forward a truly empirical treatment of Natural Law. It is unclear what this means, but at least one possibility is that the results of such an empirical investigation would be a very messy ordeal for proponents of Natural Law, and that it is easier to propose the universality of certain ethical principles than to demonstrate it. Furthermore, I hypothesize that any attempt to formulate the essential or primary content of Natural Law would either be contradicted by empirical observation or would be so empty and vague as to count as tautological.<br /><br />First, it is necessary to admit that Natural Law proponents readily accept that different cultures have different ethical norms. For one thing, there is a degree of leeway within the principles of Natural Law; as Chesterton put it (and here I am paraphrasing from memory), “different cultures may disagree about whether one can have one wife or many, but all agree that one cannot simply have sex with whoever they want.” Putting aside the lack of empirical evidence for this statement, I can readily agree with the sentiment that a principle of Natural Law might be less a statement of extremely specific rules, but rather general categories or “first principles” of ethical behavior that might be embedded in different culturally specific rules. Furthermore, these rules might vary in their degree of adherence with the first principles: one culture might take very stringent or strict stances on such a general code as “do not harm your neighbor,” while others might very well be more relaxed in their definition of what counts as “harm.”<br /><br />But Natural Law proponents also have another rather important distinction between what might be called primary or essential principles of natural law and secondary principles. For example, if we hypothetically counted “do not harm your neighbor” as a primary principle of natural law, we might count “do not steal your neighbor’s property” as a secondary principles: that is, it is a principle stemming from the concept of “do not harm your neighbor,” and it is at least conceivable that a culture might follow principles of “do not harm your neighbor” while not ascribing to “do not steal your neighbor’s property:” in their case, for whatever cultural or historical reasons, they might never have counted the theft of property as particularly harmful (some may even have considered the ability to steal their neighbor’s property as a sign of virtue and strength, such as the Germans that Thomas Aquinas describes in some of his treatment of Natural Law). Natural Law proponents allow for the loss or absence of these secondary principles in human society - that is, circumstances can potentially “erase” these principles from a society. However, primary principles are universal and indelible.<br /><br />This latter characteristic is the backbone of Natural Law: if we assume that all sufficiently rational creatures have access to a set of universal ethical principles, then we may also assume that, regardless of culture, we have the ability to reach objectively “True” ethical imperatives and prohibitions. Furthermore, we can critique culture from a standard that is outside or beyond culture: that is, our access to universal ethical precepts should allow us to criticize any culture, even our own. This is quite a powerful assumption, and it also carries with it the potential for a very specific kind of abuse not uncommon in history: if a person or peoples have a different set of ethical norms, we may assume that they are either wicked, in the sense of openly disobeying Natural Law, or rationally inferior, in the sense of being not developed enough to recognize it. There are positive elements to this assumption, because it would provide a common ground for any ethical discussion between cultures - more importantly, it suggests that there are universal ways to come to the “right” conclusion about ethics. However, I would argue that history has shown the misuse of Natural Law to be more harmful than its proper use has been beneficial. Genocide, religious war, and slavery have all often been justified by the dehumanization of its victims through arguments based on cultural diversity: more specifically, that the perpetrator or conqueror’s culture and ethical norms are superior to the victim, and that the victim is either hopelessly wicked, less-than-human due to their inferior intelligence, or both, and are thus deserving of death or slavery.<br /><br />Of course, the affirmation of these claims - that a culture lacking the ethical principles of an assumed natural law is either wicked or inferior - would implicitly affirm that those principles can be lost, and thus deny that Natural Law is truly universal to humanity. That this conclusion is rarely arrived at by the conquerors or perpetrators of these acts is perhaps a sign that the theory has been misappropriated as a tool of political convenience.<br /><br />Now, if the essential content of Natural Law really were universal, if follows that it would be present in the ethical principles of every human culture. Since secondary principles can be lost, they would not necessarily be present in every human culture. So, then, if there are such universal ethical principles, at least one way (and possibly the only way) to verify them is to conduct empirical investigations into every human society, both past and present, and see if such principles are found universally. After all, if empirical investigation found absolutely no such universal principles, then at least one element of Natural Law would be falsified: the concept that its principles are universal to rational creatures.<br /><br />Thus follows my conclusion that empirical observation would be essential not only to demonstrating the truth of Natural Law but also to the description of its primary, indelible principles. But here lies yet another problem for Natural Law: how does one describe these principles? The more specific and substantial one's description of the principles, the more likely one will find ample evidence of cultures in which ethical norms lack or contradict one or more of those principles. For example, one would probably find far more cultures contradicting a principle such as “marriage is between one man and one woman” than would find contradicting a principle such as “marriage is between men and women.” Successively broader and more vague principles would likely have even fewer contradicting cultures. However, even one culture in which ethical norms contradicted or lacked such a principle would be enough to falsify the hypothesis that that principle is universal!<br /><br />Now, such an undertaking would need certain sorts of caveats. For example, there are plenty of examples from history in which a society reacted to a sudden social ill or calamity in a way which is fundamentally at odds with its own ethical principles; such short-lived malaises may be excluded from the study if it represents only a momentary breach of a society’s underlying principles rather than a true change in principle. Researchers more learned and adept in these matters should set such requirements, but I would venture to guess that if such a breech in principles lasts less than the average lifetime of its members, it can be discarded, but that changes that last over more than one lifetime are indicative of a substantial and accepted change in that society’s ethical norms, even if later events return that society to its original (or nearly original) norms.<br /><br />It is my hypothesis, simply from my rather scant knowledge of anthropology, ethnography and sociology that no substantial ethical principles will pass such an empirical test. In order to fashion an ethical principle that can be found in every culture, one would have to resort to a statement such as, “one should pursue good and avoid evil,” which is a fundamental tautology, since ethical good may be defined as “that which should be pursued” and ethical evil may be defined as “that which should be avoided.”<br /><br />What would be the consequences of the discovery that no non-tautological ethical principles are truly universal? For one, Natural Law would lose its ability to provide critiques of cultural norms from “outside culture,” because it would be revealed that ethical principles are not universal but are dependent upon culture. I do not believe this conclusion to be ultimately irreconcilable with Christianity (which, in my mind, has always been extremely insistent upon the particularity - even the cultural particularity - of its revelation) nor even to cross-cultural criticism. Instead, it would destroy any attempt at moralizing from the pure ethical high-ground of universal law and would instead force all ethical conversations to proceed in culturally specific terms grounded in history and particular societies. None of this would either deny or affirm the presence of some “right answer” to ethical questions: it would simply change the terms (and perhaps, to some degree, the attitudes) of those undertake the discussion.S. Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08843076081982674203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-975543236652939194.post-1146174836767298182012-01-12T17:02:00.000-08:002012-01-12T17:03:58.803-08:00A Purely Philosophical Argument for a Pro-Life PositionLet us say that a worker has the rather unenviable job of doing away with stray cardboard boxes in a large warehouse, and that in the course of his labor he spends hours throwing the boxes into a compacter. One day, as he picks up an unusually heavy, sealed box that has been placed in the garbage pile, he hears a co-worker shout, “Stop! Don’t do it! There’s a toddler asleep in that box!” Other coworkers smirk, and one notes sardonically that the concerned coworker must be an idiot, judging from the improbability of there being a toddler in the warehouse in the first place, much less in a sealed box. Our worker is now faced with a decision.<br /><br />I do not want anyone to believe that I present this as an analogy for abortion, at least not in anything but the accidental sense. I merely wish to present what I believe to be a valid and quite acceptable ethical principle that could be accepted by anyone, pro-life or pro-choice: in a matter of ethical uncertainty, one should err on the side of moral caution, not moral license. There may be very little chance that there is a toddler in the box, but I believe that the worker does have a duty to investigate the claim. This is especially the case the more grave the ethical concern: the fact that a life may very well be at stake (and, moreover, a life that few if any contemporary ethical frameworks would neglect to extend the rights of personhood) means that if the worker simply ignored the warning and tossed the box into the compacter he would be acting in an unethical manner, even if the box were empty, simply because he acted in a haphazard way without investigating the claim. And, of course, in the unlikely event that there had been a toddler in the box, he would have been in even more trouble.<br /><br />Now there are caveats and limitations to the principle. For example, if the co-worker had shouted that the God-Alien Timalzek from Vesta was hiding in the box, we might more easily have a right to dismiss the claim. This is not to say that it is flat out impossible that such a state of affairs might exist, but as a matter of principle there must be limits to acting on uncertainties in order simply to avoid paralysis. Thus, in order to qualify as a matter of ethical uncertainty, the competing ethical claim(s) must be able to present a compelling and rational case. But, similarly, once such a competing claim has presented at least some form of evidence, it cannot simply be passed over as “weaker” without any investigation. Unlike many non-ethical practical decisions (such as, which of these ties should I wear in order to make the best appearance at my job interview) which by their nature usually allow for a great deal of uncertainty, it is my contention that ethical decisions by their very nature can have only a very low tolerance for uncertainty, because the consequences of ethical decisions can potentially impact others’ lives in a very negative manner. We even have words for failing to recognize the possible negative implications of our ethical decisions: recklessness or neglect.<br /><br />But there is another limitation: to what degree can the uncertainty really be solved, what resources must be expended to solve the uncertainty, and are those costs worth failing to make a decision? In the box example, the uncertainty has a rather straightforward, low cost solution: simply unseal the box and look inside. The question admits to very little beyond that. In fact, I would argue that it is precisely the low cost and ease of solving the uncertainty compared to the potential cost of ignoring it that makes the example a solid case in which the principle of ethical uncertainty applies. We may very well imagine a different case, which lowers the potential damage of the uncertainty while raising the cost of coming to a solution. Let us say that workers have spent days preparing for a massive concrete foundation, and on the day scheduled for the concrete to be poured one of the workers shouts that they must stop the operation in order to see if a watch he has misplaced is somewhere in the labyrinth of wood and metal rods that will soon be immersed in concrete. The cost of investigating this uncertainty in both time and money is quite higher than the potential losses, and we might imagine the foreman denying his request with a certain gruff indifference.<br /><br />The final caveat, which is really more a reformulation of the preceding concern, is that we must weigh moral uncertainties against moral certainties. On his way home from work, our worker crosses a railroad track near a switch at which the line branches. He sees that both branch lines have a car sitting on them, and that a train is heading at full speed towards the switch. It will clearly not have time to stop. As he looks at the cars, he can clearly see that there are passengers inside, somehow oblivious to their peril. The other car, however, seems from his distant vantage to be empty. He has no time to make a better investigation: he must act. He knows there are persons in one car, and is uncertain about the other; weighing these, the ethical choice would be to flip the switch so that the train will demolish the car that appears empty rather than the one he knows is full.<br /><br />I believe the force of this principle is obvious, and that once accepted (as it should be regardless of one’s pro-life or pro-choice stance) its implications for the abortion debate should be equally obvious. But still, consider the principle of uncertainty vis-à-vis abortion.<br /><br />The basic question in the pro-life/pro-choice debate is “Is the embryo or fetus a person, and thus entitled to the ethical and legal status and protections or personhood?” At this point I should wish to note something that might tick off members of both sides of the issue: this question cannot be answered by the biological sciences, sonograms, or anecdotal stories of fetal hands grasping at fingers. The question is ultimately ethical-philosophical and legal in nature, rather than biological, even though it is also clear that our philosophical stance on these matters must be informed by what we know through science. But, to be even more clear: it is not certain that simply because the fetus has an anatomical connection to its mother that it is to be considered a part of its mother’s body rather than a person. Making this claim would also force us to deny the unique personhood of members of conjoined twins, who are anatomically connected and in some cases even dependent upon that anatomical connection, which is something I believe most pro-choice adherents would want to resist. Second, the status of having a unique set of DNA does not render one a person, as this would mean that chimerical individuals would have to treat the chimera cells present in their body with all the respect of a separate person, which I believe is clearly an unwanted ethical conclusion. Third, the ability to grasp someone’s finger, or the fact that aborted fetuses are often quite unpleasant to look at, are so clearly unrelated to the question that I believe they deserve no further comment.<br /><br />How, then, can we solve this dilemma? Well, part of the difficulty is that we have not even yet come to consensus on what a “person” really is. Many contemporary definitions have used “the ability to choose rationally” as a corollary to “having the right to choose” and thus having the rights of personhood. Of course, this sort of definition has the unpleasant side-effect, confirmed by its own philosophical champions, of denying infants, toddlers, and young children the status of “person.” They must then be given a special ad hoc defense to make killing them unethical, such as comparing them to “priceless works of art.” Not only that, but I believe this unpleasant side effect is coupled with another: namely, that even “the ability to choose rationally” is itself a suspect concept: whose rationality? What standards do we set for this rationality? And, finally, what if “choice” is an illusion? <br /><br />Another simply takes sentient consciousness as its guide to “personhood,” although yet again there is the problem of the status of infants, who assumedly do not develop self-awareness until later and must be either subject to infanticide or given an ad hoc ethical defense that protects them while underscoring the flaws of this definition of personhood. <br /><br />I will dispense with religious definitions of personhood on the grounds that a revelation or revelations not accepted by all cannot be the basis of common consent, but I will also note that these definitions are not necessarily free of their own internal difficulties, such as the possibility of inconsistencies with biological understandings of human reproduction.<br /><br />There are many more definitions of “personhood” and many variations of the above definitions, which I do not have the time to exhaustively list. I would like to make the observation, however, that to some degree almost any definition of personhood is an ad hoc claim. That is to say, we have certain people that we wish to include as “persons” and certain people that, for good or bad reasons, we wish to exclude, and we then create a universal definition that attempts to fall along these pre-chosen lines. That it is so difficult to do this without either excluding wanted entities or including unwanted entities is perhaps one sign that the terms of the debate are themselves flawed. But it also seems to suggest that to some degree neither side is treating the status of the fetus as a real uncertainty. Pro-Life individuals, for the most part, have previous philosophical or religious commitments, or perhaps have simple sentiments or “gut instincts,” which compel them to include fetuses and embryos, and as such theories of personhood which emanate from this corner tend to simply include fetuses and embryos. Pro-Choice individuals, similarly, have previous philosophical or sometimes social commitments that tend to compel them to want to not include fetuses and embryos as persons, and as such their theories of personhood tend to focus on essential qualities that exclude these entities (and, usually, many born individuals as well).<br /><br />In other words, the language and debates of personhood have been used on both sides to obfuscate the real uncertainty of the issue: that, lacking a solid biological or scientific basis for “personhood,” the debate has taken the form of each side developing a definition of personhood that suits its agenda and tastes and then “discovering” that fetuses and embryos are or are not persons. This may not be a necessary outcome: that is, I do not believe that the discussion of personhood must take this form. I do believe that, at least in the American abortion debate, this is more or less the form the argument has taken (that is, whenever the argument takes a coherent form and is not limited to a bumper sticker slogan or billboard).<br /><br />I believe that if the true ethical uncertainty of the fetus’s status as a person were acknowledged, the result would be strongly towards something resembling a pro-life position, with caveats. For example, we must weigh uncertainties against certainties. If a pregnancy has resulted in life-threatening complications for the mother, the certainty of the mother’s personhood takes precedence in ethical considerations (interestingly, even the Catholic Church has come to this conclusion, although it has taken extra special care to phrase its teachings on the matter in a way that obfuscates that they are permitting abortive measures). More difficult to weigh, but certainly of importance, are the possible social ramifications, psychological, or developmental ramifications of certain sorts of traumatic pregnancies, such as rape and extreme underage pregnancies. However, I would like to point out that I believe the principle of ethical uncertainty would deem unethical all sorts of “abortions of inconvenience;” or, in other words, “I don’t want a baby yet,” “I don’t know where I will get the money,” “raising a child is difficult and I never wanted that,” or so forth. That is, the possibility that the entity created as a result of conception might be a “person” is itself sufficient cause on its own to outweigh these concerns, especially in a nation with the social service infrastructure of the United States. I am not meaning to make light of these concerns: as a poor man myself with two children, I know the difficulties of raising children, of making extreme career and other sacrifices for them, and I furthermore know that these difficulties can only be magnified in the case of single mothers. But I believe that both sides, pro-life and pro-choice, can admit that abortion has become a means of creating a scapegoat for our social problems. The United States, as good of a country as it is, is host to single mothers living in poverty, crime, poverty, unwanted or neglected children who often end up spending much of their time in jail, and so forth. However, I believe it has also been abundantly clear that legal abortion has not solved these problems, and I believe that to some degree the shouting back and forth on both sides has only served to distract from social programs and solutions that would more ably strike at the source of these social malaises, of which “inconvenient pregnancies” are the symptom.<br /><br />This may seem unfeeling. I do not believe that I am unsympathetic to the plight of the poor, unmarried girl who ends up pregnant and soon finds herself in a situation she would much rather avoid. I am a strong advocate of social programs to aid such an individual. I simply believe that we have not yet really engaged the real uncertainty of the ethical status of the fetus, and that until we have a better sense of what makes a person a person we had best act with ethical caution rather than ethical license.S. Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08843076081982674203noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-975543236652939194.post-51996738948239529132011-12-26T16:24:00.000-08:002011-12-26T16:28:15.912-08:00In which I break my long silence about free will<h6 style="font-weight: normal; font-family: arial;font-family:times new roman;" class="uiStreamMessage" ft="{"type":1}"><span class="messageBody" ft="{"type":3}" style="font-size:100%;">Is there anything practical at all about free will? Perhaps I shouldn't worry about practicality; since the entire question is rather esoteric, its discussion is an exercise in theory. Yet, we all agree, no matter our philosophic prejudices and tastes, that the psychological phenomenon of choice exists and plays an important role in our experience of existence. We feel as though we choose - moreover, we really do choose. Our choices are valid and real, and are no less or more authentic if determinism is true than if it is false. Few - if any - have, while wrestling over a particularly difficult choice, ever solved the problem by appealing to free will or admitting determinism, The resolution of such quandaries never rests in our philosophical framework of choice. On the contrary, such a tangent in our deliberation would represent a paralysis, a fruitless meta-thinking or meta-deliberation that, even if it "answers" the age old question, "are my choices predetermined by my history, and thus beyond my ultimate control" will nevertheless bring one no closer to answering the question, "which college should I attend?" What, then, is the practical value, if any, of the question of free will?<br /><br />I have stumbled across this question in my own quest to defend free will from its detractors. I have since been brought to a standstill, forced by the difficulties of the entire undertaking to remain mute. Perhaps the best defense, maybe the only defense, which free will still has is the retreat into mystery. I do not want to treat that defense lightly, although I recognize the skepticism that the word "mystery" might provoke. Mystery can be many things, including a charlatan's cloak, a puff of smoke to distract and obfuscate the awful emptiness of a concept. Perhaps it might even be said that the strength of the mystery is inversely proportional to the doubtfulness of the concept: the more empty and absent the god, the more that absence must be veiled, covered, and hidden in ritual- the more, in the end, it must be spoken about. We speak least about what is most evident, and words must fill in the gaps of uncertainties. Yet there can be something genuine and sincere about mystery, especially in doubtful matters; in a real sense, such matters do remain secret to us, at least as dignified unknowns at which it would be unwise to scoff without the most powerful of evidence.<br /><br />Yet this defense - mystery - serves only to undermine the great difficulty of the position. At last, free will seems to be only a great, reverenced, venerable idea - a great idea, to be sure, and one that has animated much that is good in the human race - but little more. For an idea to be venerable is not for it to be true, and if it is treated as true only for respectfulness sake, it is perhaps time to reevaluate its place. And since practical matters are often easier to judge than the ethereal definitions and syllogisms of theory, perhaps it is best to look at the question of free will's practical place.<br /><br />Most of our choices are made without any real deliberation; we act and react quite often in an automatic, unreflective way. It may be the case that these are often the healthiest choices. But those choices about which we deliberate, worry, and generally wring our hands, and about which the outcome of our deliberation is uncertain, are precisely those in which the psychological phenomenon of choice is most evident. At these times, it seems very possible that any of a number of futures are available, that we are really in command of a fate over which our will is a free master, that at the very least our part in the story is yet to be written and is awaiting our final "fiat." Of course, this is only the most hopeful and positive psychology of choice. We may just as well be paralyzed by the burden of choice; like Hamlet, our thoughts may lose the name of action. The uncertainty can puzzle the will. But in either of these cases, the practical psychology still affirms that we have freedom in the choice, even if that freedom is paradoxically the source of our inaction. Hamlet is not paralyzed by a lack of possible choices, but from the multiplicity of variables he must weigh: the veracity of the ghost, his mother's culpability, the eternal penalty of suicide.<br /><br />In any case, this psychology of free will is quite simple, even if it gives birth circumstantially to quite complicated situations and decisions: we can act in any number of ways, the way we act is determined primarily by our self, and we could really have chosen to act other than we did. We often feel this way, although it further complicates the matter that we often feel otherwise: as when we feel pushed by outside forces, and so forth. And, as a matter of practice, we make these choices in isolation from our philosophical theories of the will.<br /><br />It is precisely this isolation of our practical choices and the psychological phenomenon of free will from our philosophical theories of the will that brings to light the practical irrelevance of our theories. We do not need them to choose; we use them to explain choice within a broader philosophical system. I am certainly not arguing that these theories have no further implication beyond themselves, and probably the most obvious are moral and theological in nature. But as far as choice-making itself, it is a stretch to imagine how these theories could ever be relevant to our deliberations.<br /><br />This lack of relevance means that, for the purposes of practical deliberation, the psychological phenomena of will and choice are of primary importance: that is, these phenomena actually do impact our deliberation. The feeling of being in control, of being able to make a choice, is far more important to our making a choice than whether that choice is determined or free. It is itself an important variable, so much so that it could be called part of our faculty of being able to choose. We have a consciousness, and whatever its constituents (be it reducible to purely material components, or to some spiritual or incorporeal force or soul, or to some synthesis of both) that consciousness will more than likely come up against some existential problem or question that demands its deliberation, choice, and action. Moreover, to do this, it will often engage in a number of activities associated with choosing: cost-benefit analysis, appeal to philosophical or religious principles, weighing duties, identifying rewards, and so forth. All these phenomena take on significance within a practical assumption that as an agent I can choose to act one way or another. This assumption is different in content and kind from the theoretical assumption that I can indeed choose different outcomes from the same causal history, because it makes no claims regarding the nature of choice itself beyond my ability to make them. Furthermore, this assumption brings with it only a validation of the psychological phenomena of choice, which is necessary for choice itself and says nothing about any metaphysical realities or truths. It is affirming the appearances for appearances' sake, in the end perhaps constituting nothing more than the statement "I can choose."<br /><br />But this lack of relevance has an even more important implication: without a practical tie to our actual deliberations (whatever those mechanisms might be), the theories also are unfalsifiable. The primary difference between determinism and free will hinges on the question of whether an identical causal history can given birth to different results, all at the behest of the will. But to test this would require the impossible: it would require the same will to somehow inhabit the same causal history twice to see if a different outcome were possible.<br /><br />So, what role can an unfalsifiable theory with no practical application play in choice? Clearly, none, except in the accidental sense that one may choose to beat someone up over their view of free will or determinism (or that theological determinism, predestination). Why, then, have we come to believe so strongly in the importance of these doctrines?<br /><br />I have reached a certain point of agnosticism over this question, and certainly over the grand question of free will itself. My present hypothesis is simply this: for some reason or conglomerate of reasons, we have come to convince ourselves that the validity or authenticity of our choices is dependent upon their status as "free" choices, where "free" is very specifically defined as "having been able to be otherwise even under the same causal history." There is perhaps something a little Kantian about this, for sure: the notion that freedom is synonymous with a kind of autonomy. But even Kantian autonomy aside, free will advocates have always had to search for some space, some breathing room in causality, in which the will may play its special role. There is always some analogue to the Lucretian "swerve," the seemingly ad hoc explanation that atoms merely move of their own accord at times, in any free will interpretation of reality; in some cases, only an appeal to God Himself is sufficient to procure this breathing room.<br /><br />Another hypothesis (or perhaps a correspondent hypothesis to the above) is that the psychological phenomena came to be enshrined; that, through whatever process, the feeling of choice evolved into an assumption of control, even absolute control, interpreted as the ability to really make one's future. Undoubtedly this would be possible in the above scenario: the need for absolute control (and absolute authority) led us to assume a metaphysical depth to a psychological phenomenon.<br /><br />Yet both these exaggerations seem in my mind to underrate the real role of the psychology of choice. They are searches for something far behind the choice, some metaphysical "I" laying beyond the choosing and which controls the choice. This "I" must have absolute control and be to some real degree unhindered by all the material and physiological concerns that make up the apparent "me," my body, mind - even, perhaps, my soul, for if a soul exists it too would be subject to its own spiritual history, however that may be imagined. But this extra "I" is a phantom, an unnecessary hypothesis that fails to recognize the identity of the "I" with my body, mind, and soul. There is a great degree to which I am my appearances; it is only the myth of dualism that seeks to separate my apparent self from some real "I." If this myth is abandoned, it becomes clear that the psychological phenomena of choice has its own authenticity apart from some theoretical free agent behind my choosing, because that phenomena is itself inseparable from me. In other words, the psychological phenomenon of choice stands on its own as a guarantee of the validity and authenticity of my choices; I am myself, embodied, a body even if I believe in a soul, and I exist in a particular environment with a history that is essential - not accidental - to who I am. I cannot reject that history. That history is part of my choices.<br /><br />I should be careful to note that this is neither a wholesale rejection of what has been called "the theory of freewill" nor at all a wholesale embracing of everything called "determinism," though I will be the first to say that it has far more in common with the latter than the former. I suppose in a way it is an attempt to see beyond what I have come to see as an increasingly irrelevant dichotomy that has become quite puzzling to me. As far as theory goes, I am quite content - for the moment - to accept to mystery of the metaphysical groundwork of our choices, meaning by "mystery" to signify the ultimate hidden "truth" behind whether my choices might have been different. What I need for now is a working theory, and accepting the psychological feeling and phenomena of choice at face value - that is, to accept it both as real and as what it is, a feeling and a phenomena that may or may not betoken grander metaphysical truths - seems to fit the bill for now.</span></h6>S. Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08843076081982674203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-975543236652939194.post-52849782317116385822011-09-30T17:00:00.001-07:002011-09-30T17:00:34.130-07:00A Defense of Free Will, Part 3<p>Causation and determination are closely related but distinct concepts. I will not pretend that defining these concepts is not itself problematic and even controversial. Nevertheless, causality is relational in nature: the relation of cause to effect involves the cause being in some way prior to the effect and either partially or wholly responsible for the effect. Determination is generally less focused upon the relation of cause and effect as entities as much as it is focused on the relation of particular qualities of the cause and dependent qualities of the effect. Or, in other words, X causes Y tells me that X is prior to Y and is either partially or wholly responsible for Y; thus, also, Y is contingent upon X, either in whole or in part. If X is a necessary cause of Y, I can state unambiguously that if Y were not, X would not be. If I said, on the other hand, X determines Y, I would be stating that some set of Y's qualities are "fixed" by X; or, again, that Y by virtue of its causal relationship to X also has a similar but derivative causal relationship to X's qualities. I would argue that this distinction is uncontroversial, although I understand if some of my readers would argue that it is nevertheless completely artificial.</p><p> </p><p>Yet another way to discuss "determination" is to link it to the concept of predictability. by predictability, I mean that before X's causal interaction with Y, it is possible to accurately know how all the relevant qualities of Y will be changed before the interaction takes place. An interaction with an unpredictable outcome would not be a determining interaction, because some of the qualities of Y after the interaction cannot be ascertained from a consideration of X. Now an interaction can be unpredictable in three ways: accidentally, partially, or arbitrarily. An accidentally unpredictable interaction is one that is not unpredictable in itself but is rendered unpredictable either due to the impossibility of ascertaining all relevant information needed to make a prediction or because the laws by which the interaction occurs are unknown. It is needless to say that free will cannot be established on the ground of accidental unpredictability. Nor can it be ascertained on the grounds of arbitrary unpredictability, meaning that there is no connection whatsoever between the initial conditions and the conditions after the interaction. Because I have defined free will as requiring an element of control, I cannot be satisfied by simply saying that the will arbitrarily acts, as this means there is actually randomization rather than responsible control. However, an event may be partially unpredictable if there are intelligible connections between the circumstances prior to the causal interaction and the effect of the interaction that are simply only observable after the event; that is, if when agent Q in situation R decides to perform action X, the relationship between R and X is intelligible but could not have been conclusively predicted before the action actually took place.</p><p> </p><p>In order to bring these distinctions into what I hope might be a more sympathetic light, I would ask that one consider for a moment what a faculty like free will, if it could exist, would be. Clearly, it is considered a faculty of choice with regards to action: that is, my free will would have the power to determine myself with respect to some action or inaction. I would strongly disagree, however, with any attempt to separate my "self" from my "will" in an artificial way that makes the real "me" into some agent operating behind my will. Clearly, such a model would degenerate into an infinite regress of choosing. The real "me" would have to have some faculty of choice by which I choose what I would will, and so forth. My will is part of my self. Another important distinction I would like to make is to point out that my will does not operate in autonomous seclusion from the rest of me, including my intellect. </p><p> </p><p>In any case, this faculty would clearly not be uncaused; whatever forces are responsible for my formation as a mature rational agent are also responsible for the formation and development of my free will as a faculty. But I would argue that because one of the requisite qualities for a free will is that it be able to determine myself with respect to some action or inaction, it is not necessary to believe that my free will is determined by its causes with respect to making that determination or choice. The free will would have to have this power in order to operate as it does. It would have to be the case that my will developed as precisely the sort of thing that has the power to determine itself with respect to actions and inaction.</p><p> </p><p>There are three models I would put forward for discussing free will in the way I have outlined above. These are not three different models but rather three views of the same model, through which I hope to clearly describe the features of a free will which makes partially predictable choices. Underlying all of them is the concept that the will is incorporated into our rationality in such a way that it is not determined by its causal history, though it is limited by that history in certain ways which are actually necessary for free choice.</p><p> </p><p>The first model is the causal gate model, in which the will is understood as being presented with a multiplicity of potential causal histories for its future actions. In short, as rational beings we are presented with the possibility of acting in response to different aspects of our own causal history and present circumstances.</p><p> </p><p>The second model is the teleological model, in which the will is provided with the possibility of choosing among different proximate ends.</p><p> </p><p>The third model is the indeterminism of thought model, in which the will's reciprocal control over our intellectual processes provides for the possibility of partially unpredictable, non-arbitrary judgment with regards to future action.</p><p> </p><p>In the next part, I hope to discuss the first of these models: free will as the causal gate.</p>S. Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08843076081982674203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-975543236652939194.post-56570388100154029962011-09-27T17:52:00.000-07:002011-09-27T17:53:45.300-07:00A Defense of Free Will, Part 2<p>So what are we left with by which to defend freedom from the taciturn determinist's powerful argument? First, we need to look at how the argument works.</p><p> </p><p>Let us assume some moral agent, Q. We want to say that Q is free if Q can cause some action X in a way determined either solely or primarily due to Q, and if Q could have willed to act otherwise. Q is not its own cause; it cannot be. Nothing is the cause of itself. So, Q was caused by some cause or set of causes, which we will can label P. P caused Q; and now Q exists in some determinate way because of P, a way which makes P the sort of thing that would do X rather than not X. Now Q performs some action, X. It is certainly true that Q causes X, but because Q's nature is determined by P, it is also true that action X proceeds from a state of reality which Q did not create nor bears any responsibility for. It cannot, then, be the case that Q causing X is due primarily to Q's will; Q may genuinely will X, but Q genuinely wills X because P caused and determined Q to be such an such a thing that would do X rather than not X. Furthermore, because Q is such a thing that would do X rather than not X, it is also not the case that Q is really free to have acted otherwise.</p><p> </p><p>I contend that the entirety of the argument rests on the notion of causal determination, or the idea that causation always determines the nature of the thing caused. Because P caused Q, P also determined Q with respect to all its properties, including whether it is the sort of thing that would do X rather than not X. Now, practically speaking, it seems like a no brainer to state that whatever causes a thing will also determine all of that thing's relevant qualities; for example, if one cue ball strikes another and causes it to go off in some direction, it also determines the direction that other ball will go. This is true universally, it seems, and in such a way that the argument above basically takes it for granted that P not only caused but also determined Q, and furthermore that this determination includes P's being the sort of thing that would do X rather than not X. But the entire point of free will is that causation does not always mean determination - that is, that some faculty called free will involved with Q choosing X is not determined by P, but is rather self-determined (which is something distinct from being self-caused). In other words, the argument sidesteps the traditional understanding of free will by positing that because P caused Q, it also determined that Q would do X. Because this is precisely what free will theory posits, namely, that P does not necessarily determine that Q will do X, there seems that free will has a line of response: putting forward a sensible theory explaining how a faculty can be self-determining.</p><p> </p><p>Free will theory must assume (as it traditionally has) that the will is self-determining, which is different from it being its own cause. It is true that the will is not its own cause: like the rest of the human person, it is the product of a vast number of different causal factors. But even though these causes might provide limitations to the will (we cannot will literally whatever we want, which is something I will discuss later), I do not think it is necessary to say that these causes determine the will. </p><p> </p><p>But how can this be, especially considering our common experience of determining causality? It may be helpful to note that my example of determining causation involves physical mechanics: one something bouncing off another. In a strictly materialist world, all interactions and entities whatsoever are ultimately reducible to similar events, in which there can be no intelligible doubt that causation also means determination. I think it is clear that a determinist will win the an argument as long as materialism is a unquestioned assumption. But I will not allow it to go unquestioned: why must we believe that all the relevant entities or qualities by which Q choose to do X are strictly material? There is a rich philosophical, not even to mention theological, intellectual history for the non-materiality of some aspects of the human person. For the rest of my argument, then, I will make a counter-assumption to materialism: Q possesses a faculty, namely, free will, which is incorporeal in nature. </p><p> </p><p>In discussing the assumption that we have some incorporeal component to our nature, I would like to strongly resist what I believe are easy fallacies. First, I am not proposing that my "real" self is something incorporeal, and that my body is therefore merely a shell or empty framework in which the real me dwells and which is under my control. If someone were to kick my leg, they would be kicking me, not merely my apparent outer form. I also want to resist the idea that the will, or any aspect, needs to be "entirely incorporeal." These two ideas both present dualities, in which incorporeal and corporeal are separate or even opposed realities. Rather, I mean to say that I am a union of incorporeal and corporeal realities; one can effect the other, they are intertwined and even, to some degree, inseparable. At the very least, to attempt to talk of the "soul" or "mind" without reference to the body is to distort the human person.</p><p> </p><p>From the idea that the will has an incorporeal nature I will make an argument that Q's free will is caused by P but not determined by P. I will discuss this argument further in the next part.</p>S. Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08843076081982674203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-975543236652939194.post-6683658095431821082011-09-26T17:45:00.000-07:002011-09-26T17:46:36.584-07:00A Defense of Free Will, Part 1<div class="mbl notesBlogText clearfix"><div><p>"No man can pull himself up by his bootstraps."</p><p> </p><p>With this declaration, a particularly taciturn determinist might colloquially sum up one of the challenges to free will: at the end of the day, the cause of one's choice lies in pre-existing states over which we had no control. We were born in such a way; raised in such a way; grew in such a way; almost all without our input. By the time we are even making choices that we think are free, our initial condition has developed without our control. And if we want to preserve causation, we must believe that effects follow from their causes. I am such and such a way, most of which is and has been beyond my control. I choose what I choose because of who I am. My choices are beyond my control, except in a very limited experiential way in which it can be said that I psychologically "feel" in control when I make the choice.</p><p> If our taciturn friend wanted, he could even go farther, and laud this subjective feeling. Of course, it is psychologically important to feel like one is in control. We wrestle with decisions, boldly or timidly making our wills into reality, reacting with all the confidence or temerity of a conscious, sentient agent. This is all well; we need this. These feelings, he might go on, are just another part of our nature, another aspect of our existence over which we have little to no responsibility and which nevertheless subsequently comes to rule our thoughts and actions. </p><p> Before I go on to discuss a reply to this argument, let me only point out that it is a bold philosophical, and only philosophical, claim. Empirical science cannot come to the rescue; it can only be an aide, bringing us some bits and pieces about a mind whose secrets still are shrouded in mystery. It is a question beyond the competency of its methodology; quite frankly, it is an unfalsifiable story. I could never reply to my determinist friend, as he could never reply to me, that if only we set up the right experiment we could clear the whole issue up. The question lying at the heart of the matter is really, given any situation in which a sufficiently aware rational creature did one thing, was it really and truly a possibility that he could have not done it? No experiment can ever bring back a past moment and make it present. I cannot bring back this evening's dinner to see if I really could have chosen not to put dressing on my salad, and no amount of controlled experiments regarding tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow's dinners will bring me any closer to a conclusion on the matter.</p><p> Nor can sentiment be our guide. Clearly, we do experience moments of subjective freedom just as we experience moments of subjective encagement. It is just as likely that I might feel that I have a hundred choices as that I might feel I cannot do anything differently. And either feeling may be experienced as positive: it is, in fact, often more relieving to experience the continuity and safety of routine and habit, engrained qualities which can render action into something nearly mechanical. Sometimes the very feeling of choice can be painful, as though the specter of moral responsibility has raised itself to weigh us down with concepts like duty, guilt, good, and evil. We can feel enslaved by choice, paralyzed in our ability to act by the sheer number of apparent possibilities, like the man who starved to death because the menu had too many excellent dishes.</p><p> There is a little that can be said for the concept of moral responsibility on the whole, but not enough to constitute an argument for either side: clearly, a society with some concept of justice, duty, and morality would want to preserve some notion of subjective moral freedom and a corresponding responsibility. Perhaps the determinist is right, and Harry sawed off Harriet's arm because of a conglomeration of pre-existing causes over which he had no control. It's not his "fault" in a deep moral sense. It's only his fault in the sense that he did it, not in the sense that he had any other choice he could truly have made. And yet - and here is the rub - we do, in fact, want to maintain that he chose to do it, is responsible for it, and ought to have some form of justice applied to remedy the situation. Here, I think it is safe to say that our ingrained tendency towards freedom is made most manifest: we really do want to maintain a sense that one should and can choose the right thing. We really hope that our neighbor chooses to not murder us in our sleep, as we really do expect that fellow drivers choose to obey traffic laws. "You shouldn't have done that" has the subtext "You could have not done that." We hope to rehabilitate the guilty, to aid them through therapeutic or other means so that they will make better choices in the future. All of this must maintain the vocabulary and concepts of freedom even if the overarching theory of human freedom were eliminated.</p><p> I do want to be somewhat clear about what I mean when I say "free will" or "freely chosen act," or anything of the sort. I think that I would be satisfied with a definition of freedom which simply states that I am either the sole or primary determining factor in a free act, and I could have acted otherwise. I do not think it is necessary or even wise to assert that I must be the sole determiner of my actions. I think it safe to acknowledge that even in a free act there are forces other than my will at work. But I do think it is necessary that I am the primary or ultimate determiner of my actions, in the sense that I act that way only because I willed to act that way and I would not have acted that way if I had not willed to act that way. If, on the other hand, I acted in some way but didn't really will it (as if, for example, someone grabbed my hand and used it to slap my wife, or if I was so drunk or drugged that I was unaware of my own actions) or if I acted in some way that I did will but not because I willed it (as if, for example, I wanted to ask a girl out, didn't have the courage to, got drunk, then in my stupor asked her out), I wouldn't call those acts "free." Similarly, especially to the latter case, if I willed to act in some way, X, and did in fact act that way, but the reason I acted was not because I will to act in that way but rather was because forces beyond my control determined that I should act in that way, I would not be free. Moreover, if I never had any real ability to will something other than I did, then I really would not be free. The crux of free will, then, is twofold: primacy of control, in the sense that I act the way I will because I will it, and the possibility of contrary action, in the sense that I really could have willed to act otherwise, and would in that case have acted otherwise because I willed to act otherwise.</p><p> I present this as merely a prologue; in my next part, I will more closely examine the argument against free will.</p></div></div>S. Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08843076081982674203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-975543236652939194.post-54365619796856503572011-09-23T21:26:00.000-07:002011-09-23T21:29:10.131-07:00Perception and Three Ways of Seeing<p>There is something suspicious about the way the word "viewpoint" is used these days. It has become something of an ace in the hole, a final redoubt unassailable by common sense or evidence. When someone in a conversation retreats to the phrase, "from my point of view," they more often than not are evacuating the intellectual battlefield in favor of their own private sanctum. From the privileged, unique, and irreducibly private vantage of his point of view, a particularly determined interlocutor can withstand any reason, for he has abandoned "reason" as something common to all men. The man whose beliefs are most safe from change is often the madman.</p><p> This is particularly distressing because, like most errors, it is the exaggeration of a truth. In the dedicatory letter of Machiavelli's The Prince, he writes,</p><p> "For just as those who sketch landscapes place themselves down in the plain to consider the nature of mountains and high places to consider the nature of low places place themselves high atop mountains, similarly, to know well the nature of peoples one needs to be a prince, and to know well the nature of princes one needs to be of the people."</p><p> We may raise an eyebrow about Machiavelli's motives in this observation and question if he might not be eyeing the princes with more than an artist's interest, but the analogy rings quite true: different persons are often possessed with different perspectives on the world. There is a genuine notion of "viewpoint," or, to distance myself a little from a loaded word, of "a way of seeing," that does not abandon the need for intersubjectivity and a belief in some shared, common, objective reality. Rather, it is a way of discussing perception, which is a participatory act in which the perceiver's unique subjectivity contacts with the reality of the thing perceived in order to form a phenomenon.</p><p> First allow me to discuss a participatory theory of perception, because my three ways of seeing depend on it. It draws heavily from a work by Owen Barfield called Saving the Appearances, as well as a number of other sources. Barfield writes:</p><p> "Participation is the extra-sensory relation between man and the phenomena."</p><p> Perception is not simply the physical interaction of my biological senses with the outside world, because this raw sensory information does not constitute a world of distinct intelligible phenomena. I will not say "objects" here, although the two words are related, because by "phenomenon" I simply mean an intelligible representation, while "object" implies an actual external entity. It is well known that the process of developing a sense of perceiving distinct and unique phenomena requires time, even for a mature mind. There are accounts of individuals blind from birth or quite young ages receiving sight through various visual prosthetics, who even when presented with sensory information took long periods of time to develop a sense of seeing distinct phenomena. Rather than mere sense data, perception involves more or less complex interpretations of visual data, seeing trees rather than mere swaths of green and umber, identifying people and places. As such, it is always at least partially active, requiring the mind to use its past experience and knowledge to aid (usually quite unconsciously) in deciphering the received sensation. This act is participation, as it involves the mind bringing itself into contact with the outside world as perceived through the senses and thus encountering the phenomena.</p><p> It is thus, as Barfield noted, that participation is extra-sensory. Thus it is also the case that it can never be purely objective, in the sense of without reference to the physical and mental state of the subject. This does not mean it is arbitrary: on the whole, we have good reason to believe that our senses do accurately report information about reality. This is primarily due not only to the continuity of our experiences, since we are usually able to tell when something is wrong with our perception if it involves a distinct discontinuity with previous perceptions, and more poignantly due to intersubjectivity. We are not solitary creatures, and our interaction with other perceivers provides us with a community against which to evaluate the validity of our own perceptions. If I am the only man in a room of twenty who sees pink elephants flying about, I not only should recognize this as in distinct discord with all I know about elephants, but I should also take note that no one else sees them and attribute it not to external reality but rather to the gin and tonics I have been downing. Whether I am capable of doing this analysis at the time is another story altogether.</p><p> On the whole, we also tend to recognize phenomena as objects, distinct entities inhabiting a world external to ourselves about which we can gain at least partial knowledge. It is important, however, not to engage in what Barfield calls idolatry: that is, mindlessly assigning this objective status to the phenomena themselves. This is perhaps one of the most tempting fallacies that has followed in the footsteps of the scientific revolution. Science has made a methodology of the senses, systematically setting mathematical and logical rules about how to interpret our sense data in a way that maximizes our ability to verify or discredit our notions about the objects in the universe. Because of its accuracy, it is easy to forget that the phenomena are still participatory: we very easily forget that it is still an act of interpretation. This can be somewhat ameliorated by simply considering a hypothetical life form with a vastly different set of sensory organs. Imagine that such a being, instead of our senses, was equipped with a type of auditory sonar, similar to a bat, and an organ that could detect X-rays. The phenomena which would populate that creature's perceived world would be quite different from the phenomena of our own perceived world, even though the underlying objects behind the representations were identical. Phenomena must be understood as representation and icon.</p><p> We commonly look at the world in a myriad of different ways, according to the needs or whims of the moment, and the phenomena in which we participate can take on vastly different meanings or even be interpreted in different ways. I would distinguish three primary ways of seeing, which I hope you will accept not as set in stone, but as a tentative sketch of the different ways we commonly perceive the world. It is important to remember how complex we are, in such a way that even stubborn, single minded people are usually not so because they are simple. It is often the most complicated of people who become singularly obsessed. Also, I am not pretending that at any given time we are simply and only engaging in one or another of these three ways, or that the three ways are dichotomous, but it does seem equally true that we form habits, and that these intellectual habits can fixate us in one of these ways of seeing.</p><p> Another important caveat: I will use the phrase "gives meaning" or something similar to this several times. It is important to realize that the mind is both passive and active. In the great debate over the growing constructivist epistemology, in which all meaning is a creation of an active mind, against the belief that meaning is a fundamental given which is received passively, it is forgotten that the truth can be a mean between two extremes. Participation is passive and active. It is not only the passive reception of sense data through various physical media, but the active interpretation or resolution of that data into representative phenomena.</p><p> The first I call "the way of private mythology." It is perhaps the most closely associated with the word "viewpoint" as I first described it. One's private mythology is comprised of a complicated and heavily colored amalgam of experiences, creativity, thoughts, whims, vices, virtues, hopes, aspirations, and dreams. However, it tends to distill these complicated emotions, thoughts, and relationships into relatively simple narratives. It can encompass some forms of belief. Our private mythology is both the summation of our experiences viewed almost existentially, as well as individual moment, events, and thoughts that are highly meaningful to ourselves but only tangentially or accidentally meaningful to others. This way of seeing is behind the modern concept of "experience," which is a more or less contrived attempt of actively forming or reforming one's private mythology. </p><p> A few explanations. By "private," I do not mean that the contents of this mythology and the way in which it colors or fills the world of phenomena with meaning are completely opaque to others. Its content can be communicated, and it often is. For example, Plato's Republic occupies a peculiar and special place in my personal mythology, because I believe it, specifically the allegory of the cave, was the reason I abandoned my initial plans to become a screenwriter and instead pursued philosophy. Now private mythology always contains a bit of what postmodernists call "constructivist" epistemology. It's not exactly true that Plato's Republic was the reason, even though I often find myself attributing almost everything to it as a kind of simple and powerful way of summing up why I switched to philosophy. If someone were to ask me why I chose philosophy (and someone has), I would simply use this narrative: I changed because of the allegory of the cave. There is a way in which it encompasses a much longer, more complicated, and more boring narrative. Private mythology is life with the boring parts cut out, and in that way it shares much with art as it is currently understood.</p><p> There is a danger to private mythology. It can tend toward the megalomaniacal and the delusional. It is prone to error and exaggeration. A private representation may be the result of a simple mistake: everyone else sees a man running across the beach, but I turn and in that moment I believe it is a motorboat speeding past in the water. I may or may not be corrected, but if I am to be corrected I must always be open to the corrective influence of my community.</p><p> If you really want to get a feel for what I mean by private mythology at its best, watch Big Fish.</p><p> Which brings me to the second way, "the way of faith." By faith here I do not necessarily mean religious faith, but rather simply believing or trusting in another's understanding or account of the world. While our private mythology can be, in the worst of times, insular and even delusional, the way of faith opens us to community and the correction of intersubjectivity. There are countless narratives which we accept from others and participate in, and these narratives inform a common set of phenomena which we share with others. It is very passive, focusing on received truth and meaning. It is not, for that reason, in any way inferior, because it is only through this way of faith that we can be assured of the validity of our own perceptions. </p><p> This does not mean that the way of faith is necessarily always accurate. Communities can be wrong, and a shared delusion does not become less delusional because it is shared. But it does mean that the stories and meanings which we receive from others cannot be discarded for the simple reason that it is received. </p><p> In other words, the way of faith is a way of trust, of accepting and receiving meaning from others on the basis of their authority rather than on the basis of demonstrable evidence. Much has been said on this matter, not all of it flattering. But I think it is only fair to say that this is the primary way in which most of us see the world. We must, by practical necessity, go about our day accepting and believing a great many things about the world for which we do not possess a great deal or any demonstrable evidence. This is not credulity unless it is taken to an extreme; that is, if the way of faith becomes the sole mode of perception. But the greatest champions of religious faith have been the ones who proclaim that faith seeks understanding: that faith is not content with mere opinion but struggles to perceive the world anew and find evidence for the community's narrative.</p><p> As for Faith proper, in the Catholic sense, this is clearly the passing on of a narrative, or, as we believe, the Narrative. It is a gift received from God, guarded by a community, and to which we can appeal as a corrective to our own perceptions. There are, of course, many who do not share this narrative. I do not intend in this note to defend the Catholic faith, so I will simply add that the fact that a story cannot be demonstrably proven is not, in itself, a reason to discount it as invalid, as this would reduce almost the entirety of human history to rubbish, not to mention the news and stories that your grandpa told you. As I mentioned before, we are actually rather prone to believing stories, and rightfully so, because a political animal relies on trust to form the glue that holds society together. That we moderns have developed an immediate mistrust of any narrative that involves something not readily demonstrable by science is both a mixed blessing at best, and is usually offset by our ironic propensity to embrace our own personal myths as "authentic." It is, at worst, simply a prejudice to assume that what is not "scientific" in the modern sense is invalid.</p><p> The "way of science" is not only modern methodological science, although this is its contemporary and most rigorous form. It is a form of perceiving the world that is concerned with categorizing phenomena, studying them, and systematically understanding their relations. It has a closer tie to the notion of scientia, a systematic knowledge. Methodological science, as the contemporary incarnation of man's attempts to rationally and circumspectively understanding himself and the universe, is particularly adept at coming to accurate conclusions about physical interactions. It does this primarily by attempting, inasmuch as possible, to remove interpretation from the process by which it discovers and predicts facts about reality. However, as I noted before, there is always a degree to which it is inescapably tied to the other ways of seeing.</p><p> For one, the way of science does not exist in a vacuum. The practice of science always occurs within the context of a community, which pursues scientific goals for the sake of extra-scientific reasons usually rooted in the common, shared narrative of the community. Secondly, although the operation of scientific methodology is relatively free of interpretation, the broader meaning and implications of its findings about phenomena and the objects that underlie them are still matters which are open to both the way of private mythology and the way of faith; that is, the stories which science tells are quite accurate but also somewhat limited. They can tell us how to do some or another physical act, but not why or whether we should do it. But it also can operate as a powerful corrective to both private mythology and faith. Let us take the example of a literalist interpretation of Genesis, which maintains that the earth was created some ten thousand or so years ago in a period of six, successive, twenty-four hour periods. Although I received this narrative in my youth, I have since encountered plenty of scientific evidence that this is not the case.</p><p> But this brings up another point about science, which is that to a degree it involves storytelling as well. The grand theories of science are often broad and arching stories about the way the universe is structured and interacts that are often not easily subject to immediate proof, must be proven piecemeal over a period of time and only with great labor, or still remain only the best hypothesis that fits the data (but which is not necessarily for that case true). In this way, even scientists sometimes engage in storytelling by which they interpret the meaning of the phenomena around them - although, again, even this storytelling is in a profoundly different mode, as it focuses on telling stories that best fit all available data. </p><p> These three ways of seeing must remain balanced, and they offer certain sorts of correctives to each other. They bleed into each other to some extent. Perhaps wisdom is a harmony between these three ways, so that they mutually support and balance each other. An excess of any can result in a very imbalanced mind: private mythology can lead to delusion, the way of faith can lead to credulity and superstition, and the way of science can lead to self-deceptive phenomenological idolatry and detachment from the sources of shared meaning, ethics, and so forth. <br /></p>S. Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08843076081982674203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-975543236652939194.post-32881946033012120282011-09-20T11:42:00.001-07:002011-09-20T12:25:20.837-07:00Errors Come in Pairs: Fideism and ScientismConsider the following two propositions:<br /><br />1) We know from the faith that the earth is the immobile center of the universe, unmoved, about which the universe rotates.<br /><br />2) We know from science that God is an unnecessary entity; we can account for the formation of the universe and all physical phenomena without positing his existence.<br /><br />As polarized as these two statements are, they represent the mirror image of fideism and scientism.<br /><br />Scientism has been discussed quite well in a recent article titled "<a href="http://virtuouspla.net/2011/09/19/scientism-knowledge-and-truth/">Scientism, Knowledge, and Truth</a>," and there is not much for me to add. Suffice to say that scientism, which I have discussed on this blog before, is a peculiar habit by which some scientists and other personalities affirm the methodology and findings of modern natural science as a self-contained, universal philosophy. Science is seen, at least to some degree if not in its totality, as its own context and justification, bounded only by whatever moral and ethical concerns can be put forward by the secular state in which it is operating. The descriptions and explanations of physical phenomena put forward are posited as "cold, hard facts," indisputable statements which are meant to form the foundation of a constructivist attempt at formulating meaning, guiding politics, and informing individual lives. It is not necessarily that a proponent of scientism rejects anything not "scientific," but rather that science becomes the predominant, if not only, tool by which ideas and propositions can be validated.<br /><br />The problems with this view are manifold. The most immediately apparent is that it deforms the methodology of science and ignores one of the most important aspects of that methodology: modern science can only speak on hypotheses regarding observable physical phenomena which are falsifiable either through experimentation or through the observation of a theorem's predictions. Science performs this task admirably, so much so that the beginnings of modern science shook the established order so thoroughly that one of its early proponents, Galileo, was placed on trial by the Inquisition to challenge his novel idea that the earth orbited the sun. But its power comes from the relatively narrow scope of its methodology. Science may be able to prove whether two objects of different mass fall at the same speed in a vacuum. It cannot tell us what Shakespeare meant to teach us - if anything - in "Measure for Measure." Though science can provide an indispensable service to various arts and other areas of human endeavor, it cannot take over their roles, because a great deal of meaningful human existence consists of propositions, stories, and narratives that are not falsifiable through experimentation.<br /><br />Science requires a context of meaning, and that context will always consist to some degree of extra-scientific assumptions drawn from culture. Scientism, by rejecting this principle, not only obscures the role of science, but it also becomes a self-deceiving project which must work constantly to obscure the extra-scientific assumptions at its core.<br /><br />But if scientism is the distorting of science into an all-encompassing philosophy, fideism is a mirror image error which distorts faith into something equally malformed. Fideism is the error by which the proponents of a faith (in my case, I will assume Catholicism) construe that faith (at least, faith as they understand it) is an all-encompassing and complete, incorrigible body of knowledge that supersedes all findings of reason. The temptation to fideism and the temptation towards scientism are both ultimately a desire for a complete, circumscriptive comprehension of all reality under a single unimpeachable system.<br /><br />Fideism is dangerous to true faith because, as Catholics understand, our understanding of the faith is always subject to growth. While the core and fundamentals of faith have been universally present throughout the history of the Church, it is of no doubt that our understanding of those fundamentals have undergone a kind of evolution, in which principles once obscure or uncertain are gradually brought to more and more certain light. In some cases, especially in the case most relevant to this particular point, the inquisition of Galileo, the touchstone for a re-examination of a then contemporary interpretation of the faith - an interpretation that required a painfully literalist hermeneutic - was actually the findings of science. While it is clear that science and faith have separate "zones of competency," it is also the case that both sides have at times stepped beyond their own competency. Faith, the body of revealed truth given by Christ and handed down under the teaching authority of the Church, represents the knowledge of God, man, and creation necessary for salvation. It does not, then, necessary to believe that it means to teach us about the physical structure of the cosmos or the presence of some preferred frame of reference.<br /><br />What is needed, then, is a complementary view of faith and science which understands their unique competencies as mutually correcting. Faith, as an integral part of the culture in which science operates, is also an indispensable part of the context for the findings of science. While it is certainly true that science can operate without theistic or other religious assumptions - and, in fact, there is a real sense in which it must operate without these assumptions in order to fulfill the requirements of its own methodology - it is also true that the meaning of these conclusions are not self-evident from the empirical method but must be interpreted with the guide of culture and extra-scientific narratives. Similarly, science's power to teach us about the physical structure and history of the cosmos offers faith a correction to overly literalist interpretations of scriptures, as well as providing insight into the human person as a body. These insights are necessarily of interest to the faith, which should always be watchful lest we condemn the next Galileo without first considering the possibility that we have misunderstood the gift which Christ has given us.S. Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08843076081982674203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-975543236652939194.post-19128831005906432912011-09-19T18:38:00.000-07:002011-09-19T18:44:17.104-07:00Rawls, Augustine, and Liberal Democracy<p>For many years I have been an armchair critic of liberal democracy, the sort of ironic figure who mused in conversation and internet forums about the benefits of a Platonic aristocracy or a wistful longing for a romanticized version of Christendom. Rawls was a public enemy; and even though his <em>Theory of Justice </em>is only a single, albeit well-known, formulation of a political philosophy of justice in a liberal democratic society, I took it and still take it as representative of the larger body of thought on the subject. I still remember a doodle I made during one of Dr. Robert Baird's philosophy lectures. Satan, suspended halfway in the ice of frozen Cocytus, chewed on my own personal unholy trinity, including Rawls.</p><p>Why would I have sentenced Rawls to such a fate? At the time, the faults and errors in his philosophy seemed overwhelmingly obvious. He seemed to think that one could come up with a theory of what's right without considering what's good; or rather, and more damningly, that one could run a state without any conception of the highest good whatsoever. Moreover, what he describes as the original position has always seemed to me an odd condition for determining anything, much less a system of justice. The veil of ignorance is a bit like the curtain hiding the Wizard of Oz; except instead of a somewhat good-natured Nebraska con-artist handing out fake diplomas and phony medals, the man behind the curtain is Rawls himself, handing out a very select set of facts for his amnesiac quorum and subsequently telling them what they should make of those facts. In the end, Rawls seems to be pulling the wool over the reader's eyes.</p><p>There is little question in my mind that these criticisms remain more or less valid. But most importantly, the ahistorical character of his treatment of liberal democracy is in many ways the source of the other errors, and an examination of history really does provide a framework for understanding liberal democracy not as a substanceless, empty procedural shell, but as a philosophy drawn from a substantial heritage. There is more to liberal democracy than once appeared, and it may be that it was Rawls' own veil of ignorance that had blinded me.</p><p>Liberal democracy, even in its purely secular and even atheistic forms, has its origins in Christian thought. In fact, liberal democracy is an elegant attempt to solve the problem of government put forward by Augustine:</p><p> </p><p>“But a household of human beings whose life is not based on faith is in pursuit of an earthly peace based on the things belonging to this temporal life, and on its advantages...So also the earthly city, whose life is not based on faith, aims at an earthly peace, and it limits the harmonious agreement of citizens concerning the giving and obeying of orders the the establishment of a kind of compromise between human wills about the things relevant to mortal life.” - <em>City of God </em>XIX:XVII</p><p> </p><p>He goes on to discuss the irrelevance of what system is used within the temporal government to achieve this earthly peace, as long as the laws and customs of that system do not interfere with the just and proper worship of God. This passage in general is a foundation for the separation of Church and state that constitutes a marked departure from the pagan systems before it. In Rome, sacrifice to the gods was not merely a religious observance, but a civic duty. The Pontifex Maximus was a prime political and religious position, because the rise and fall of the state was seen as directly tied to the Roman religious system. Christianity cleaved in two this partnership; but like every divorce, this was a messy break, and for centuries we have seen Church and state clawing for each other's possessions. Christendom was not a unified kingdom of God on earth, but really more of a bitter fracas in which prince and pope struggled for control of the remnants of what was once a united politico-religious empire. It was through the hard lessons of these violent years, sealed by the Wars of Religion that were the birthing pains of a modern political era, that formed the impetus towards liberal democracy.</p><p>Like any attempt to paint a picture of fifteen hundred years of political development in the space of a paragraph, this is a caricature, but I believe that the generalization has a great deal of truth to it. Liberal democracy is one formulation of the post-Augustinian division of religion from <span style="font-style: italic;">polis</span>. I would now like to turn to one particular expression of the broader notions of liberal democracy: the near-creedal statement present in our nation's own Declaration of Independence.</p><p> </p><p>“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these rights are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”</p><p> </p><p>Much complaint has come from certain Catholic circles about the problems with the language of rights. Yet in this statement I believe we can find both a defensible foundation for liberal democracy that avoids the charges normally leveled against Rawls' formulation while preserving the division between Church and State. By accepting a near-creedal assumption regarding unalienable human rights, the state has a set of operating principles which give its procedural justice a substantial philosophical basis without resulting in an oppressive or dominating state philosophy or cult. It may seem of small importance, but I believe the fact that the statement is “we hold” rather than “we believe” highlights the subtle difference between a government which has an operative philosophy of the highest good, and thus believes certain assertions about that good, and a government which merely holds that certain principles regarding its citizens must not be violated. In the latter case, a procedural justice, such as both Augustine and Rawls describe, is possible which allows all manners of practical political philosophy without requiring citizens and politicians to subscribe to some particular vision of the highest good.</p><p>Yet the inviolable principle of rights is necessary, and in my opinion still provides a point of frailty vis a vis liberal democracy: as long as the state is willing to hold that principle as an unqueried starting point, the system can operate more or less effectively; when this principle is absent or is subjected to state query, the system immediately begins to crumble. This is not only because such querying will almost certainly issue in a state philosophy, but because subjecting rights to state scrutiny immediately abnegates the notion that such rights are unalienable and instead suggest that they are really defined, created, and/or granted by the state. This was, of course, the source of some objection to the United States Bill of Rights. Once the routine issuance of explicit declarations of rights becomes programmatic to a liberal democracy, that government's stance on rights seems to have clearly shifted from the concept of rights as unalienable to a concept of rights defined.</p><p>Another source of contention between liberal democracies and the Church is that in attempting to maintain an earthly peace under the principle of universal unalienable rights a government may enact legislation which allows or protects certain acts which are repugnant to the laws of the Church. However, a civil law may be repugnant in several ways: it may allow someone to do something which the law of the Church forbids, or it may require someone to do something which the law of the Church forbids. I would like to briefly examine a few examples and make only preliminary comments on the way in which I believe a liberal democracy and the Church should view the example. I will start with what I hope is the least controversial.</p><p>(1): A law in which all citizens must worship the state gods. Clearly, in this example, the state has not only developed its own substantial religious philosophy, but it violates the premise of the unalienable rights of its citizens, who should be free, insofar as they do not violate earthly peace, to pursue their understanding of the highest good. The Church would be forced to disobey this law, and Christians would by conscience be forced to protest unto martyrdom. However, the Christian would not be justified in breaking other laws which do not violate their universal rights (I wrote on this topic in my note On Civil and Ecclesiastical Disobedience).</p><p>(2): A law in which a Church must turn over information to the state. This can be a grey area; insofar as the Church is an institution operating within a state's boundaries, the Church is beholden to provide certain sorts of information to the state regarding its economic activities. Since the privacy of this information is not generally a tenant of their faith, it is unnecessary and unjust to withold it. However, information given under the seal of confession is protected by the faith and the oath of the priest, and it is unjust for a state to require it. A Christian would have to protest unto death, and martyrdom for the seal of confession has happened.</p><p>(3): A law allowing homosexuals to marry. It is important to remember there is a difference between ecclesiastical marriage and civil marriage. In truth, I believe that in a liberal democracy the state in order to maintain earthly peace must understand marriage according to its citizenship; and thus it is possible that such a state would consider homosexual marriage valid according to universal rights. This cannot effect the Church; if the state attempted to force an ecclesiastical body or authority to recognize or perform such a marriage, it would be crossing the lines and interfering with its citizens' pursuit of the highest good. A Christian may and should vote his or her conscience regarding the issue, but the state's recognition of homosexual marriage should not spark civil disobedience.</p><p>In this third example, the compromise which is made by liberal democracy may be at odds with the beliefs of the Church, but it does not directly require the Church or its members to do something which is against their belief or forbid them from doing something which their beliefs require. In many ways, it shows the flexibility of liberal democracy to accommodate a diverse population in peace. And it is precisely this flexibility towards earthly peace in the world of practical politics that has of late made me look more approvingly on the philosophy of Rawls.</p>S. Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08843076081982674203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-975543236652939194.post-38601247612534489822011-09-17T20:07:00.000-07:002011-09-17T20:12:30.412-07:00A Ramble at the Intersection of Religion and Science<div class="mbl notesBlogText clearfix"><div><p>Permit me to begin with a rather odd and admittedly speculative thought that I hope is illustrative of a larger problem: what does Einstein have to say about the Second Coming of Jesus?</p><p>I have recently been making a valiant attempt to read Einstein's The Meaning of Relativity. I had heard of relativity, and believed it as the second-hand passing on of some great scientific mind. But reading the work and digesting its contents has taxed my mathematical understanding far past its breaking point and has left me wondering why I did not take more math courses in college. That notwithstanding, I believe I have grasped, in my own layman's way, the major points of departure that Einstein's theory makes from previous physics. Furthermore, the impressive nature of this portentous break struck me as being of utmost importance to Christian theology, yet strangely and probably owing to my own ignorance I have not encountered a theologian discussing the implications.</p><p>Time is by no means a Christian invention, but I believe it is safe to say that the Christian narrative revolutionized the way the western world understood time. Christianity's concept of universal history book-ended the events of space and time with definite boundaries of beginning, middle, and end. While many philosophies and religions of various mythological origin posited an eternal universe, or at least an eternal underlying prime matter, Christianity proclaimed creation ex nihilo. The predominant creation myth of the old world was that of a god forming or imposing order on an eternal chaos of warring elements; even the Genesis account has God "hovering over the face of the waters," an image of God moving on seemingly already present matter or chaos. However, Christian philosophy and theology departs from the old myth and declares that God creates something from nothing. At God's command, the universe existed, not the remaking or reforming of prior stuff but rather a completely new and strictly superfluous collection of beings. Furthermore, God punctured time, entering into it as an agent not only through miracle but most poignantly through incarnation. Finally, according to the narrative, time will end in judgment, terminating the history of the cosmos as it is presently understood.</p><p>The universe, it would seem, has an expiration date, a moment at which it will cease to be as it is. The era of time stops at judgment and is "succeeded" only by eternal endurance, a separate epoch, and an entirely new order of creation, the new heavens and the new earth. Yet while this notion of the moment of judgment and an end of the universe makes sense within a universe or Cartesian space ruled by Newtonian physics, it is somewhat more problematic within a universe governed by relativity. In order to explain allow me, complete novice in relativity, to briefly explain the difference between pre-relativity and post-relativity understandings of time (I encourage those far more advanced in this field to correct any blunders on my part).</p><p>Basically, pre-relativity, distances in space are absolute and time is an omnipresent invariable. One could imagine space like a grid or cube of evenly marked "units" of any arbitrary size. Omnipresent within the cube, perhaps even floating above it, is a clock. Anywhere in the cube, it is the time indicated on the clock. Two individuals in the cube will both understand it to be the time on this clock, even if one is trillions of trillions of miles from the other. Within the three dimensions of height, width, and breadth, one can move about in any direction, and the distance one travels will always be simply the rate of travel (measured against some arbitrary frame of reference, like the earth's crust, or theoretically the cube itself it its dimensions were known) multiplied by the time one travels. This works out fine for almost all of our activities. When we set a meeting, we reasonably expect others to arrive at the set time, and the ubiquitous nature of the modern clock doubly reinforces the intuitive belief that everyone goes through life experiencing identical intervals of time proceeding at a uniform pace. Both the pace of the clock and the dimensions of the cube of space are absolute and unvarying, which given most of our experiences seems quite right.</p><p>However, things are not so clear cut when one takes into account an experimentally verified quality of light. Let us say that I throw a ball at you while you are standing still. I manage to get the ball up to 90 mph, and as it narrowly misses your head you manage to clock it with a radar gun at 90 mph. If you chose to flee in terror at 10 mph away from me as I threw the ball at you, your radar gun would clock the ball at only 80 mph, and likewise if you ran at the same speed towards me, hoping perhaps to knock me cold, you would clock the ball at 100 mph. We expect that if one thing's frame of reference is moving relative to another, the perceived speed of the objects involved will be modified by each others' motions. Light does not do this. Regardless of the motion of an observer or frame of reference, light in a vacuum will always be observed to travel at the same speed: C, around 3 x 10^8 m/s. </p><p>Skipping over the mathematics, which I am hardly in a position to explain, the discovery of this phenomenon means the Christian must rethink his claims about events in time and space. While pre-relativity physics envisioned time and space as separate, independent, and absolute concepts, relativity merges time and space into a single inseparable entity - spacetime - and renders discussions of time meaningless without references to space and velocity. Furthermore, time can only be meaningfully discussed in reference to specific frames of references at specific velocities, and then the time relations discovered are only valid for that frame of reference. It is impossible to absolutely determine the simultaneity of two events that are separated in space, only the relative simultaneity of events given a specific frame of reference. </p><p>Because of this, a spacetime event may only propagate at the speed of light. For example, if I shine a light at Omicron Persei, it will take somewhere around one thousand years for that event to propagate to that location. The effects of my action will not be simultaneous to an observer on that planet; it will take time, from my frame of reference, for my light to reach that place.</p><p>If the second coming is a literal spacetime event, it too would propagate in this fashion. Rather than a single universal and simultaneous moment, such an event could only be understood as a conglomeration of individual moments relative to individual observers. Furthermore, the "moment" of judgment would be completely subjective, by which I mean the velocity and position of each individual's own frame of reference would determine when the second coming had occurred, a moment which would not necessarily be identical across different individuals. This would be especially compounded if man's programs of space exploration has brought him to colonize other planets, as their experience of judgment would lag behind those on earth.</p><p>This brings into question the notion that the second coming and subsequent interruption of the universe can be understood in a literal spacetime fashion; we are already, in general, prepared to admit that the Scriptural account of the beginning of the universe is mythological in nature, a narrative whose truth is not related to a literal account of actual material events in spacetime but rather to its revelation of the relationship between creatures and Creator. Is it possible, then, that the notion of the "second coming," at least as it has been popularly imagined, is also an over-literal application of scriptural narratives?</p><p>Which brings me to the real point of this note. The faith has had a somewhat spotty track record regarding science. On the one hand, it is true that science has its origins in the bosom of two of the monotheistic religions, Islam and Christianity; in fact, its origins are somewhat more Muslim than Christian, as the origins of alchemy can be traced back to Muslim natural philosophers. Christianity, though, played its part in fomenting a culture of curiosity, especially in its scholastic days during the twelfth through fourteenth centuries. As intellectuals sought more and more systematic accounts of the relations of all things, God, man, and the universe, they gradually grew more and more scientific, in the modern sense of the word. Especially in these early days, there seemed to be a consensus that all could be synthesized, a consensus fueled by a belief in a fundamental wisdom which under-girded all things theological, philosophical, and physical.</p><p>But at some point, it was perhaps inevitable that the faith and reason should come into tension. This was because certain individuals had made claims, based apparently on the contents of the Christian faith, about the structure and interactions of the physical cosmos, interactions which were becoming increasingly scrutinized by means of the nascent modern sciences. Galileo is perhaps the most sensationalized conflict between faith and science, and much has been over-exaggerated or overstated by both sides of the conflict. Those who "take sides" with the Church are often quick to point out that the Church was not so interested in squelching the theory of heliocentrism as to stop Galileo from proclaiming its absolute truth, sometimes even going so far as to claim that relativity actually justifies the Church's condemnations (of course, the same individuals who condemned Galileo's assertion that it was an absolute truth that the earth orbited the sun had no qualms arguing from Scripture the absolute truth that the sun clearly orbited the earth). Those who "side with" Galileo are quick to note the Church officials' incorrigibility in the face of demonstrable evidence, going so far as to point to the incident as one of many that demonstrate the Church's growing irrelevancy in a period of increasingly detailed and accurate models of the universe provided by the scientific method.</p><p>In these matters, I have found myself increasingly without a "team," unable to "take sides" in what has become something of a partisan brawl. Intelligent design and atheistic evolutionists, Dembski and Dawkins, and all the other antithetical movements and personalities have created a culture of polarization in this and a host of other battlegrounds in the "culture wars." </p><p>What has happened? What has driven a wedge between the claims of religion and the claims of science, and is this division absolute? </p><p>I believe the origin of the division has actually been the tendency of both sides to deny the different but complementary roles of theology, philosophy, and natural science, as well as a corresponding rejection of traditional causal categories. For a certain type of educated Christian, especially one steeped in the ancient and medieval tradition, the formal division of the natural sciences from philosophy and theology has artificial, in the pejorative sense, written all over it. Theology is the "Queen of the sciences," and while they would admit the different methodologies of theology and science they have no qualms in giving theology an authoritative position over natural science. It may be an exaggeration to say that this sort of Christian looks down his nose at the entire project of modern science and can make only a derisive snort, but there is no doubt an attitude that science has brought about only confusion, a shattering of ancient and cherished truths, and even idolatry. This is most clearly illustrated by those moments in Christian history in which a religious figure has used arguments from theology to "disprove" a hypothesis about the formation, structure, or history of the natural world.</p><p>For example, Humani Generis. In this encyclical, Pope Pius XII writes:</p><p>"When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own."</p><p>Here we have the Pope arguing, ostensibly from the doctrines of the Church, that we cannot believe in polygenism. But it further claims that we must believe that there literally was one man from whom all living men descended, and further that this man was part of a unique and solitary first couple. Some of these claims are at least contested, if not outright contradicted, by genetic evidence, which although supporting the notion of common ancestors does not support the existence of a primal, solitary couple of humans. Like the Galileo incident, this is a case in which theology and religion has assumed for itself the peculiar authority and ability to make judgments about empirically verifiable matters without reference to empirical methodology. That the Pope worded his announcement in such definitive language only exacerbates the situation for a Christian, who is now put into the position of either ignoring all contradicting scientific evidence or dissenting from a Papal Encyclical (of course, the authority of such encyclicals is itself a matter of debate, though Pius XII claims in the very same work that Catholics cannot dissent from a statement in an encyclical).</p><p>Likewise, we are familiar with the brand of atheistic scientism put forward by the likes of Hitchens and Dawkins, and the sorts of statements with Stephen Hawking has recently made. They amount to something like this: because we are rapidly approaching a point at which we may be able to explain and predict all physical events in the universe by means of a single, encompassing scientific knowledge, we may dispense entirely with the now outdated and unneeded concept of God. These sorts of philosophies make a habit of ignoring or reducing phenomena which do not fit easily within a purely materialistic framework. They are also guilty of a misuse of science, which is competent only in material-efficient causality and cannot conclude on other forms of causality. Of course, these same scientists will typically dismiss other forms of causality, either claiming them to be reducible to material-efficient causality of denying their status as causes altogether. </p><p>So it is that both sides have their own peculiar difficulties. Each has become very good at pointing out the flaws of the other; neither seems particularly aware of its own. For Christians, admission that science has demonstrated that certain things once held as a matter of faith (even if not matters of dogmatic faith) were really incorrect seems at the very least to be the beginning of a slippery slope, a form of rebellion, if not outright heresy and rejection of God. Likewise, admission that religion and faith still have access to relevant, eternal, and critically important truth unavailable to natural reason seems intellectually suspect to the agnostic or atheist, if not superstition. </p><p>What is necessary, then, is both meditation and mediation, governed by a spirit of synthesis analogous, if not necessary identical, to the spirit which permeated the best of medieval scholasticism. This requires a genuine interest in the truth of things unconcerned with saving face. Christians possess a narrative of salvation, a story whence comes all its doctrines and truths and which spans time, space, and eternity. It is thus the case that Christianity can never be unconcerned with the study of space and time by natural means, including the methodology of science. We must be willing to give way when science has adequately demonstrated that something or other is really the case when it comes to the physical structure and interactions of the universe. But, likewise, scientists must be aware of the grave limitations of their art. It is a powerful method, but its power lies in its being focused like a laser on one aspect of existence. In practice, we know that there is far more to human knowledge than what can be scientifically demonstrated. History is a field of human study which, though aided by science, is nevertheless ultimately a field of storytelling, the careful weaving together of documents, artifacts, and oral tradition into a compelling narrative that makes sense of our past. Mysteries of intelligibility and intelligence, judgments of moral and ethical issues, the rational unraveling of the invisible and incorporeal realities of mathematics and logic, and the question of why there is existence rather than non-existence all remain beyond the competence of science in itself. </p><p>So it is with the Second Coming. We know and must believe from the faith that Christ will come again "to judge the living and the dead." But we must also be careful with that belief. There are obviously absurd versions of this belief, in particular the man who this year predicted a literal space-time rapture and subsequent second coming; in fact, it was thinking about the absurdity of his predictions from a physical standpoint that sparked this entire meditation. I still do not know what is meant by the mystery that Christ will come to judge us. Will it be a literal spacetime judgment? If so, how will this be possible? Will there be a suspension of all law and order, with the sky rolling up and the foundations of the earth dissolved in fire? Or is this a mythological rendering of a more profoundly spiritual judgment? I do not claim to know such matters. I do know that I will not do what one recent interlocutor of mine did, a Monsignor at that, who recently told me that since the creed tells us that Christ will come again to judge the living and the dead we can rightfully conclude that it is impossible for the human race to go extinct, since there would then be no living humans extant for a spacetime judgment. From all appearances, as far as we know from reason, the universe will exist for an immeasurable time after the human race is likely to go extinct - far after any form of life familiar to us is rendered impossible. </p><p>But the list of beliefs that must be synthesized with our scientific knowledge does not end there, although some are more speculative than others. It was once believed, for instance, that the earth was fully unique and special, being the setting for the drama of salvation that constituted the purpose for creation itself. Even after physical geocentrism was discarded, this theological geocentrism remains fully intact. Yet as the last hundred years has blown open the universe and revealed to us millions of galaxies each likely hosting millions of planets, this geocentrism becomes more and more strained. The existence of other forms of life in the universe is unproven but seems more and more likely, even if we might have little to no hope of ever contacting such beings. The possibility that other rational beings inhabits the universe is at the very least a hurdle for Christianity, leading to a tendency towards ignoring, if not downright deriding, those who ponder the possibilities and theological implications.</p><p>Perhaps the most controversial and complicated matter is the relationship between body and soul, and the nature of the human mind and will. As science slowly reveals the structure of the brain and the relationship between mental phenomena and physical realities, it becomes necessary to understand what the soul is. Is the soul a free independent spiritual form somehow separable from the body? Is it, rather, an inseparable part of the body, an incorporeal and intelligible entity that can only arise out of some physical arrangement of tissues, just as a piece of music is an incorporeal intelligible entity that can only arise out of some physical arrangement of vibrations? </p><p>While I stand no chance of answering such questions, which are far beyond my capacity, it will not stop me from attempting to understand what is at stake. We Christians claim that the Logos became flesh: we believe that Truth is a person as much as an idea. But we can sometimes miss the way the Logos is behind every reality and truth, not in the same way as the full incarnation, but nevertheless incarnate as the wisdom behind all truth, even those truths discoverable through science. It falls on such a believer, then, to accept the discoveries of natural science as revelations of Christ, and to understand that whatever science discovers must be compatible with the truth of the faith - not by denying, distorting, or ignoring the discovery to fit our preconceived notion of the truth, but to fully accept the discovery as part of a larger, still mysterious, and veiled wisdom.</p></div></div>S. Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08843076081982674203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-975543236652939194.post-8886601877241130672011-09-15T10:38:00.000-07:002011-09-15T10:41:10.952-07:00Aquinas, Natural Law, and Homosexual Marriage<div class="mbl notesBlogText clearfix"><div><p>Legalizing homosexual marriage has roused deep-seated angers, fears, and passions on all sides of the debate. For those who support the traditional view of marriage, the legalization of marriage represents a rejection of a self-evident truth, while for those who support such legislation marriage is a union of fellowship which only prejudice denies to a particular segment of the population. At stake beyond the surface is the relationship of politics, religion, and natural law, and the perception that legalizing homosexual marriage is a wholesale rejection of a traditional moral, religious, and political concept that is both a symptom and a cause of a much broader cultural deterioration. Meanwhile, the self-proclaimed “progressives” view homosexual marriage as merely another step away from the stifling religious superstition of a tyrannical and corrupt edifice and towards an egalitarian paradise. In both cases, the legislation is seen as a monumental step (forwards or backwards) and a portentous breach from the past.</p><p>But amidst the clamoring, caterwauling, and occasionally self-aggrandizing antics of both sides of the debate, is it possible to find a saner<em> via media </em>solidly grounded within Catholic tradition? Can an understanding of natural law lead to a less reactionary view of the legislation of homosexual marriage? </p><p>A complete explanation of natural law is far beyond the scope of a blog entry. A brief passage from the Summa Theologica will suffice to make clear the pertinent implications of the theory.</p><p>“…the precepts of the natural law are related to practical reason as the first principles of scientific demonstrations are related to theoretical reason…Therefore, the first precept of the natural law is that we should do and seek good, and shun evil. And all the other precepts of the natural law are based on that precept, namely, that all the things that practical reason by nature understands to be human goods or evils belong to precepts of the natural law as things to be done or shunned.” ST I-II, 94, 2</p><p>Natural law is understood as a principle of action, and its precepts are divided into primary and secondary precepts. The primary precept is nearly tautological in form, but nevertheless asserts an indelible connection between the rational moral agent and the good; although we may question the extent of the helpfulness of this connection in forming specific moral guidelines, it is nevertheless presented and accepted as a self-evident truth that the will seeks the good. Aquinas later presents it as analogous to the principle of non-contradiction; it is certainly the case that on its own the principle of non-contradiction will not serve in itself to present a complete scientific knowledge of the universe, but it is nevertheless absolutely necessary to the work of science. Similarly, natural law suggests that moral principles of action are impossible without the understanding that the will is linked to the good. There are, then, secondary precepts - and possibly tertiary precepts, and so forth - that are ultimately derived from this primary precept and are implicitly but not explicitly contained in it. </p><p>It is important for the topic at hand that natural law theory asserts that this principles are principles of reason, not faith, and that as such they do not in themselves require the assent to revealed truth in order to be binding. Furthermore, the primary precept is indelible in any rational moral agent (although he leaves open the possibility that the mentally malformed may not have access to this precept because of his undeveloped rationality). Natural law’s primary advantage is that it grants that all humanity have access to a common first principle of moral action, which theoretically allows for rational, non-coercive, and corrective dialogue regarding moral precepts. However, a somewhat nebulous passage has always given me some concern about the usefulness of natural law in this regard.</p><p>“Therefore, regarding the general principles, the natural law in general can in no way be excised from the hearts of human beings. But the natural law is wiped out regarding particular actions insofar as desires or other emotions prevent reason from applying the general principles to particular actions, as I have said before. And the natural law can be excised from the hearts of human beings regarding the other, secondary precepts, either because of wicked opinions, just as errors in theoretical matters happen regarding necessary conclusions or because of evil customs or corrupt habits. For example, some did not think robbery a sin, or even sins against nature to be sinful, as the Apostle also says in Rom. 1:24-28.” ST I-II 94, 6</p><p>It is thus revealed that secondary precepts can be lost, not only from an individual but, as he mentions in another article, from within an entire nation. This is troubling because the possibility that secondary precepts can be lost undermines the potential for natural law to be used as a non-coercive form of moral persuasion. Furthermore, I have remarked to various individuals that if natural law theorists want to take this notion seriously, they would recognize that the study of natural law must be empirical and anthropological in nature. If general precepts of the natural law are defined by their indelibility, while secondary precepts are subject to loss through various causes, then determining what precepts are general and what precepts are secondary is entirely a matter of empirically searching for common moral precepts across time and culture. But this is merely an aside; the more pertinent issue is that because these secondary precepts can be lost, legislation regarding moral commands and prohibitions related to these secondary precepts becomes a much more complicated matter.</p><p>It is not the role of human law to prohibit everything which is potentially prohibited by natural law. As Aquinas puts it:</p><p>“…laws are established as certain rules or measures of human actions, as I have already said. But measures should be homogeneous with what they measure, as the Metaphysics says, since different kinds of things are measured by different kinds of measures. And so laws need also to be imposed on human beings according to their condition, since laws ought to be ‘possible regarding both nature and a country’s customs,’ as Isidore says.” ST I-II, 96, 2</p><p>Because laws are just insofar as they tend towards the common good of those ruled, the extent and nature of laws depend greatly on the customs and condition of a nation’s citizens. At the time Aquinas wrote, the citizens of most Christian nations were so homogeneous in belief that it seemed reasonable to issue civil legislation forbidding and even punishing the homosexual act (whether this really was prudent or even just is another question). But even a cursory glance at the United States’ citizenship reveals widespread heterogeneity. There is clearly a great deal of disagreement about many secondary precepts, and clearly there is disagreement regarding the moral implications of homosexuality. But according to Aquinas’ own account, this disagreement is indicative that it may not be just to enact laws forbidding homosexual relations.</p><p>But, of course, the issue is not merely homosexual relations, but the legalization of homosexual marriage. Many Catholics and other Christians have laid the blame for this occurrence squarely on the homosexual community, some even going so far as to characterize the wave of legislation as a deliberate attack on traditional marriage. I cannot and will not comment on the possible range and variety of motives that drive homosexuals, but I will say that they have become a scapegoat. Principles regarding marriage are clearly secondary precepts of the natural law, insofar as there has not been consensus across time and culture as to what constitutes marriage, the present debate not being the least sign of disunity. But the current departure from the natural law understanding of marriage is not the fault of the homosexuals. According to natural law, marriage is inextricably linked to family and the fertility of the marital act, and as such homosexual relations are barred from the possibility of marriage. But with the rise of widely accepted and effective birth control, among other social innovations, the prevailing understanding of marriage among heterosexuals shifted to a union of mutually loving individuals who seek a more or less lasting commitment. As family and children became an accidental rather than essential component of marriage, the natural law rationale behind the prohibition against homosexual marriage lost ground. Insofar as that secondary precept of the natural law was excised from the mainstream cultural conscience, the prohibition against homosexual marriage took on the character of arbitrary discrimination and mere distaste.</p><p>Now, governments must govern according to the character of their people. In the words of Augustine,</p><p>“It seems to me that laws written for the people’s governance rightly permit such things, and that God’s providence punishes them.” On Free Choice 1, 5, n. 13.</p><p>It is permissible and even in a limited sense just for permission to be granted for certain actions considered immoral by natural law, insofar as those governed no longer have access to those relevant precepts of natural law. Legislation allowing homosexual civil marriage then becomes an issue of prudence with respect to the people governed, and the democratic or representative process of government is one structure that attempts to prudently determine the fittingness of prohibiting or permitting homosexual marriage. Some states have rejected homosexual marriages, while others have accepted it, assumedly on the basis of the constitution and understandings of their respective citizens. In this, the government is acting correctly, and even in accordance with the tradition of politics as treated by Aquinas and Augustine. </p><p>This does not mean that Catholics need mindlessly or joyously accept the legalization of homosexual marriage. Insofar as it is permissible or right for a government to legalize homosexual marriage, the secondary precepts of the natural law must have been excised from the consciences of the nation. It is thus meet to grieve, not the legislation, but the widespread loss of these moral precepts. Even if a Catholic is perfectly right to vote against such, the passage of these acts of legislation need not be viewed as a monumental point of no return; nor, even, must we believe that the legislation is itself evil, because it is merely the act of a government attempting to maintain earthly peace. To assume it to be anything more is actually to make the government the guardian or magisterium of eternal truth, which I believe is a dangerous move. If action is to be taken, it must be towards the restoration of these precepts of natural law - provided, as I have mentioned before, we can even be sure of them ourselves. As recipients of the faith, we can rely on the revealed moral law as our guide, but outside of a sinful presumption of grace there is no short cut to the Truth. We can certainly not expect arguments from faith to be always persuasive to those who have not assented to the faith, although we should continue to pray that grace reveals the beauty of the faith and the truth of Christ not only to those around us but also to ourselves. This is not a campaign against homosexuals, who in any case are probably not the originators of our current cultural confusion regarding marriage and are instead to some degree the victims of an unhealthy and incorrect view of marriage which originated among heterosexuals. We should continue to search for compelling reasons for the natural law precepts regarding marriage that draw from the entire armament of the mind, including the physical sciences, in an effort to inasmuch as possible restore an awareness of these lost precepts. In doing so, we should be aware that our own understanding of the natural law is also always subject to improvements, correction, and perfection, and therefore that it is possible that imperfections or misunderstandings in the always unfolding tradition may have led in part to the current loss of the precepts of natural law. Most importantly we must not be the Pharisee who points back at the wretched sinner in an attitude of self-assured holiness.</p></div></div>S. Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08843076081982674203noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-975543236652939194.post-41529963102613074562011-09-14T17:08:00.000-07:002011-09-14T18:21:47.516-07:00Genesis: Exegesis, Creation, and ScienceSt. Augustine once wrote, "There is knowledge to be had, after all, about the earth, about the sky, about the other elements of this world, about the movements and revolutions or even the magnitude and distances of the constellations, about the predictable eclipses of moon and sun, about the cycles of years and seasons, about the nature of animals, fruits, stones and everything else of this kind. And it frequently happens that even non-Christians will have knowledge of this sort in a way that they can substantiate with scientific arguments or experiments. Now it is quite disgraceful and disastrous, something to be on one's guard against at all costs, that they should ever hear Christians spouting what they claim our Christian literature has to say on these topics, and talking such nonsense that they can scarcely contain their laughter when they see them to be <span style="font-style: italic;">toto caelo</span>, as the saying goes, wide of the mark." <br /><br />This brief statement can serve as a most useful preface for a reading of Genesis, as well as for the relationship between faith and science as a whole. The entire Genesis narrative opens with fantastic poetry, a creation account written in the genre of myth and which, as Augustine puts it, "should rather be discussed by asking questions than by making affirmations." We as readers must possess humility to approach the narrative, not as something that we can easily grasp at a moment's notice, but something to be approached again and again in a spirit of inquiry. The temptation to go with our gut reaction, to either wholeheartedly embrace the Genesis narrative of creation as literally true or to reject it as a scientifically invalid and irrelevant fable, is a mark of our own flawed belief that we should be able to immediately understand the mystery of scripture.<br /><br />There are plenty of atheists and agnostics who have rejected Christianity because of this misunderstanding of scripture. We as Catholics have a long tradition of understanding the different meanings of scripture: the Bible does not talk to us in a single, monotone voice. It uses a variety of different voices, sometimes talking to us about literal events and sometimes using poetry, storytelling, and fables to teach us about God. These spiritual senses allow us to avoid the danger which St. Augustine warns us against of assuming that Genesis is meant to be a science textbook.<br /><br />"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." The doctrine of creation <span style="font-style: italic;">ex nihilo</span> is the recognition that God neither made the cosmos from some pre-existing matter, nor did He fashion it from His own indivisible essence. We believe that He made all things, seen and unseen, and that this creation was both superfluous, in the sense that it was freely made, and that it was truly given its own nature and integrity. God is fashioning something new.<br /><br />Science has sometimes questioned the relationship between God and the universe. As we have discovered more about our universe, we can again face the temptation of immediately assuming that we can understand it totally. It is tempting to believe that we can somehow discover the essence of the universe through reason alone, to dispense of God and to trust in the fruit of our intellect. But the humility of Sacred Scriptures teaches us that whatever else we may learn about the universe is always an incomplete part of a much larger picture. There is a mystery here, a recognition that the reality of the universe exceeds our ability to comprehend it. The mystery of creation does not deny that we can learn about the structure and history of our world. It does not limit science from continuing to bring us new and important insights about our biological history, evolution, and the earliest moments of the universe. It does prohibit us from assuming that these descriptions, however true and elegant, do not constitute a complete understanding, and we believe that the full meaning of the universe can only be found when the findings of science are paired with the insight of faith. In this way, the story of our faith functions as a context of science, like the setting of a play.<br /><br />"The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters."<br /><br />The poetry of Scriptures brings us the powerful, even haunting image of complete chaos: the deep waters of unformed creation. These deeps waters are brought to life by the Spirit of God, rushing over the face of the waters like a mighty wind, tossing up great waves. There is something both magnificent and horrifying about the ocean; the recent tragedy of the tsunami in Japan brings to mind that although water can be life giving, it can be destructive as well. Over the next six days of the narrative, God will form an ordered universe out of this chaotic void. We do not believe these days to be descriptive of literal historical events, but rather as a poetic blueprint of the ordered universe God created; although I would like to note that there will always remain something of the nature of the "deep waters" in creation. We know that creation, like a great body of water, can at alternate moments be tranquil and serene, but that in a moment's notice it can become powerful and dangerous. <br /><br />Science probes the nature of this ordered universe, and it stands in testimony to a universe that has elements of serene order while still remaining ultimately mysterious. On the one hand, science functions to categorize nature, to find links and relationships, and to inasmuch as possible sum up the interactions of the universe in concise laws. But on the other hand, nature frequently eludes any final, definitive understanding. Science is frequently renewed by revolutionaries like Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and Einstein, who each saw that the universe was a much broader, wilder place than contemporary science gave it credit. We are likely to see these revolutions continue, as we continue to find that the wildness and wonder of creation remain just beyond our full scientific grasp.<br /><br />"Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day, and the darkness He called night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day."<br /><br />St. Augustine believes this light is a spiritual light; it is just as well that there is an accompanying spiritual darkness. Christian theology is full of references to both light and darkness, to the theology of the light of Christ that has come into the world as well as to the night of our souls as we wrestle in the dark with the mystery of God. We rely so much on sight as the primary way we learn about our world. There is a real sense in which physical light is our guide to the earth, and those who have never been blessed with sight or who have lost it must valiantly thrive without it. So, too, there is a spiritual light: God has made us capable of understanding the world as something ordered. As Genesis continues, we will see this theme of spiritual light return: the gift of faith, which will allow us to believe in things unseen.<br /><br />This brings to mind again the good work of faith, especially in regards to science. Science focuses on the seen; it guides our understanding of physical phenomena, it works through experiment and observation. It can tell us nothing of spiritual realities. While in this secular age many have rejected traditional religions, it is a testimony to our nature as embodied souls that many of these still continue to pursue some form of meaningful spiritualism. We love stories of the supernatural. We eagerly search the heavens, hoping to contact enlightened beings who may be able to help us make sense of our universe. When someone rejects the cult of the saints, it is just as possible that they may make a cult of science, or sports, or celebrity; anything to find something transcendent and truly meaningful. The Catholic Faith teaches us both to take pride in Christ, to certainly rejoice in the gifts He has given us and to stand fast in our beliefs, but it also instructs us to be humble, to recognize that we have not yet achieved a full understanding. We can be students to all, for even the atheistic scientist may have much to teach us about our role in God's universe.S. Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08843076081982674203noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-975543236652939194.post-28669711204149016932011-09-13T17:08:00.000-07:002011-09-13T17:40:06.079-07:00Nasty Pro-Life Pictures: The Implications of Subrational Discourse in the Abortion DebatePeter Kreeft has recently come out saying that <a href="http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/kreeft-it-would-be-wonderful-if-100-bishops-got-thrown-in-jail-for-marching?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+LifesitenewscomLatestHeadlines+%28LifeSiteNews.com+Latest+Headlines%29&utm_content=Google+Reader">he wished that bishops would march with graphic pro-life pictures</a>, and that in doing so they would be arrested, leading (we might assume) to media exposure. In light of my earlier discussion of beauty and truth, it seemed like a good starting point to reflect on the practice of using unseemly and <a href="http://www.priestsforlife.org/resources/abortionimages/archive1.htm">disturbing images of aborted fetuses</a> as part of a pro-life campaign. <br /><br />I have always been strongly pro-life. I remain convinced that it is precisely because of the various philosophical uncertainties about the relationship of personhood to embryos and fetuses that we should rely both on the teaching of the faith and side with moral caution rather than recklessness. I am not unaware of the philosophical difficulties of the pro-life position, any more than I am unaware of the difficulties of the pro-choice position. The truth is that both face the problem both of vagueness or uncertainty in the definition of what counts as a person deserving of protection and of including or excluding groups of beings that they would rather not include or exclude within that definition. For example, on the pro-choice side, definitions based on rational choice would seem to exclude infants and even young children from the protected status of person, leading to the seeming permissibility of infanticide. On the pro-life side, one has the problem of defining personhood in such a way that would include embryos and fertilized zygotes while excluding tumors from parasitic twins, partial molars, and other similar complications. <br /><br />Nevertheless, I believe the difficulty of the debate is itself reason to maintain a pro-life position. Let us say that I am outside a box into which I cannot see. A number of people around me have told me there is a baby inside, while others scoff and tell me there is only a lump of tissue. Until I have very good reason to believe it is not a baby, I believe it would be immoral for me to, say, sledgehammer the box. Similarly, the lack of philosophical consensus and the impossibility of the answer being definitively answered by empirical science (although empirical science is of undoubted help in clarifying the terms of the problem of personhood), I believe a pro-life stance is more ethically responsible.<br /><br />Now, with that introduction to the topic out of the way, I will turn back to the issue of aborted fetus images. The use of these images signals to me a breakdown in the moral discourse and a retreat from rational debate. The basic premise of the use of these images is that the disturbing nature of an aborted fetus should produce an emotional reaction in the part of the viewer. It is meant to associate the concept of an abortion with a picture that is "gross," "distasteful," and otherwise ugly. <br /><br />But the use of this subrational line of argument does two disservices to the pro-life movement: first, it suggests that we have nothing better to say about the issue than that aborted fetuses are ugly things. Ugliness, as a contrast of beauty, is here reduced to the most superficial level of what is displeasing to the eye. On a rational level, it makes about as much sense as attempting to dissuade someone from having a biopsy by showing them pictures of a bloody tumor. Furthermore, by intentionally evoking an emotional rather than a rational response to abortion, the use of these images has all the makings of intentional controversy or even scandal. While it is true that such a tactic may indeed turn someone away from having an abortion, in much the same way that it is conceivable that the FDA's new disturbing cigarette warning labels may turn some away from smoking, in another way it might just as easily turn off a woman to the entire pro-life message. The images are meant to instil fear and guilt, precisely the two emotions someone considering abortion needs to avoid in order to make a good decision. How we expect someone who is considering abortion to make a wise choice when we use deliberately polarizing tactics is beyond me.<br /><br />There is another way in which the superficiality of the attempt to make a connection between the ugly and the immoral is that it undermines the connection of the truly beautiful with the good and the true. The beautiful does not point the way to the true merely in the external surface of its decorous or pleasing pattern or shape, but more importantly in its harmony with the unseen world of the intelligible. For this reason, we cannot immediately label whatever is aesthetically pleasing with the qualities "true" and "good." Similarly, we cannot label whatever is ugly with the quality "bad." There is always an extent in which the surface appearances of the world require the active participation of the intellect in order to truly appreciate beauty, and this process, though certainly incorporating subrational elements, must always be united with a rational comprehension of the relevant realities. <br /><br />In other words, someone who sees a disturbing picture of an aborted fetus, winces, and decides not to go through with their abortion may, at that moment, have been prevented from committing an immoral act, but they will likely walk away from that experience with just as unreflective a view on abortion as they had before. The difficulties of their circumstances will remain, and there is no telling if, once the gut wrenching reaction wears off, they will not simply return to their initial course. More likely, encountering such a billboard will simply produce a shallow understanding of the pro-life argument, one that might blind the viewer to the important and philosophically nuanced arguments put forward by the pro-life position. Finally, it may simply resolve the entire debate into a partisan standoff of insult trading and sign waving, a condition that is endemic in American politics in general.S. Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08843076081982674203noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-975543236652939194.post-10784344025500684312011-09-08T16:47:00.000-07:002011-09-08T17:26:14.729-07:00The Inanity of the New Catholic MoralismConsider this article from <a href="http://www.patheos.com/community/theanchoress/2011/09/08/deacon-greg-and-the-hooters-shirt/">The Anchoress</a>, in which Elizabeth Scalia joins a host of other voices from the Catholic Blogosphere in condemning spaghetti straps, short shorts, and tight t-shirts, among other violations of the American bourgeois Christian dress code. This issue is just one of many that now has become almost a point of obsession in what I believe is an emerging hyper moralistic, neo-conservative Catholicism possible only through the Internet. The new Catholic moralism does not merely attack what it perceives as the gross immodesty of many contemporary parishioners, but has at various times set its sights on rock and roll, the Novus Ordo Mass, and handshaking during Mass, and which makes an almost painstaking conformity with (their interpretation) of every and any proclamation originating from ecclesiastical sources one of the most fundamental marks of true Catholicism.<br /><br />The truth is, there is much to be commended in such a crusade. In many ways, today's Catholics, especially the younger to middle aged Catholics more familiar with technology, the Internet provides a method of seeking communion with other Catholics who are not impressed with the more liberal direction the Church has often taken in the recent American past. There is no doubt that there is truth behind their objections, and most importantly their objections and concerns indicate a genuine interest in the preservation of a genuine Catholic culture, something that is in danger of becoming an almost non entity in the public and popular sphere. <br /><br />Yet there is also a danger to the inanity of certain aspects of the crusade, a danger that results from the new insular nature of the Catholic blogosphere. By sequestering into an online enclave capable of mutually reinforcing rants about everything from flip flops to a scrupulous level of concern over the perfect form of confession to worries about less-than-ideal liturgical celebrations, the entire programme risks more than irrelevance: it risks an insidiously deformed vision of Catholicism and a disordered sense of the most important battles against the culture of death. Not only is condemning (mostly young female) parishioners for wearing the most widely available, most current, and most popularly ingrained styles to Church likely to be a failed crusade more probably resulting in the loss of their interest in an increasingly condemning environment, but it errs in two other ways as well: the recognition that modesty is always to a great extent a culturally determined concept and secondly the recognition that Catholicism is the religion of the masses. When it comes to Catholicism, "here comes everybody."<br /><br />We would not expect an African tribeswoman to observe the standards of dress as a Victorian widow. There are areas of the world in which going topless is considered completely normal (often not only for purposes of comfort but for the utility of breastfeeding; an often neglected part of the culture of death is a war on breastfeeding which manifests itself in the ironic labeling of breastfeeding as an immodest act). Our culture, too, has norms about what is appropriate, although these norms are in constant flux. You will get no argument from me that much of the western proclivity towards less covering is not so much motivated by environmental or parenting considerations as a movement towards the over-sexualization of every aspect of life. But at the same time, the new cultural norms are so ingrained that to an extent it is not even a sign of immodesty for a woman to attend Mass wearing a short skirt and spaghetti strap: it is merely a sign that she has purchased the latest fashion. And while it is rather easy for us to compare our current dress with the vogue of the fifites (or, more likely, the late 1800's) and wag our finger at the change, we might just as well wag them at the bust raising corsets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.<br /><br />Furthermore, the concern over standards of dress at religious occasion is primarily bourgeois in nature: Church becomes a primarily social event in which attendees must conform to particular expected norms of dress, behavior, attitude, and demeanor, and in which failure to conform results in, at the very least, being subject to a thorough "looking down the nose." More regularly, it may result in explicit condemnation and provide an occasion for those who abide by the expectation to reaffirm for themselves their own goodness. But as I have already mentioned, there is the genuine possibility that these "immodest young women" are not by any means intending any disrespect to the proceedings: it may be the case that they are actually wearing some of their best clothing, clothing which happens to form to a style no longer in conformity with the expected standards. <br /><br />Of course, this is probably only a concern in a few Churches in any case. But whereas before the invention of the Internet, those few zealous and sincere if possibly overly moralistic watch hounds would be mostly confined to their local parish, they now have the capability of banding together and condemning spaghetti-strap-wearing Catholic women all over the country. This has resulted in a false sense of what I like to call hyper-Catholicism, a self-appointed enclave whose imagined jurisdiction covers the face of the earth.<br /><br />Furthermore, it draws much attention and effort away from true calamities. Abortion, war, disease, economic exploitation, poverty, lack of access to health services, and so forth are regular fare for the human race, and the faith must still grapple with the challenge of scientism as well as the ever changing existential struggles of postmodernity. In such an environment, concern over flip flops becomes not quaint, but downright inane. If the world wants to walk around topless, all it would mean is that half the allure of sins like pornography would probably be gone, especially if it were coupled with a society-wide insight among believer and non-believer alike that the breasts are primarily for nurturing the young, not for sexual fetishism. But the struggle against meaninglessness and violence would still be one of the most important social missions for the Church, and the spreading of the Gospel of peace might trump the concerns of pietistic moralism.S. Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08843076081982674203noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-975543236652939194.post-11182130199364916792011-09-07T16:43:00.000-07:002011-09-07T16:45:28.242-07:00A Groundwork for Theodicy<p>Theodicy is the burden of Christianity, and it is a task caused by Christianity's own insistence on the primal goodness of God and creation. It is made even more challenging by the numerous insights which science has brought to cosmology. The cry of the tormented soul for some reasonable answer from the Almighty is found in Scripture and even in the mouth of the Son of God, whose experience of chaos and the seeming absence of divine justice issues forth in the cry, “<em>Eloi Eloi Lama Sabachthani</em>.” In the terror of the abyss of meaninglessness and evil, the appearance of moral order within the universe seems a facade undermined by the fundamental forces of violence and displacement that have operated within the universe. Even on a personal, psychological level, this meaninglessness threatens our psychological health against which faith can seem only carrion comfort.</p><p> </p><p>“God, though to Thee our psalm we raise</p><p>No answering voice comes from the skies;</p><p>To Thee the trembling sinner prays</p><p>But no forgiving voice replies;</p><p>Our prayer seems lost in desert ways,</p><p>Our hymn in the vast silence dies.”</p><p> </p><p>-From “<em>Nondum</em>” by Gerard Manley Hopkins</p><p> </p><p>It is perhaps this challenge which stands as the most important challenge for Christianity, and is perhaps the most persuasive seed of doubt: the apparent absence of God in the world seems to challenge the claims both of God's omnipotence and His moral primacy. In the character of Voltaire's Pangloss we see a caricatured satire of a cold and unimpressive theodicy which sidesteps the problem of evil and replaces reflective thought with blind dogmatism. Versions of Pangloss' flawed arguments have often permeated popular and even clerical-pastoral attempts to understand divine justice in the face of unimaginable suffering. Other similarly flawed theodicies make their rounds, many of which can be summed up as follows:</p><p> </p><p>1. A good God will not let anything evil happen without making something even better come of it.</p><p>2. God is a good God.</p><p>3. God will not let anything evil happen without making something even better come of it.</p><p> </p><p>Besides more or less including the conclusion to the answer in the premises (since the entire issue of theodicy is whether God really is good), the assertions result in sometimes painful absurdities. I recently read an address that Pope Benedict XVI issued to a Japanese child in the wake of the recent earthquake and subsequent tsunamis. In it, the Pope answers the girl's questions about the suffering she must endure. The Pope, in what I believe to be a great sign of his wisdom, more or less answered that he did not know why she had to suffer. In the end, silence is preferable to the hollow assurances to the victim of some horrific calamity that “it is all for the best” or “God doesn't let anything happen that won't be for good.” A true theodicy is so difficult precisely because it must completely accept the meaninglessness of violence, and with the alien nature of what seems like moral evil, a disorder fundamentally opposed to the original intent of creation.</p><p>Greek mythology, like many mythologies, begin with primal violence. Chaos reigns in the depth of ancient Night; and amidst the eternal strife of warring seeds all peace and order must be superimposed. A god comes and arranges the Chaos, imposing order, although even this action cannot help but be an act of violence. Meaning and structure is super-added by intelligence, not present in the primal origin of things. Even the Biblical creation story follows in some degree in this vein, for although the differences outweigh the similarities the story in Genesis 1 begins with the void of the face of the deep and the Spirit of God moving upon the face of formless waters. While Christianity holds theologically to creation <em>ex nihilo</em>, the poetics of scripture require the story to be told as a series of steps by which God creates an ordered reality out of the void and perhaps meaningless deep of primal waters. This same poetic trope is found in Milton's <em>Paradise Lost</em>, as the poet sews together Christian and pagan imagery: Chaos reigns in the meaningless void of warring seeds, and Milton's Satan goes on a protracted journey through a primal Chaos seemingly identical to the Chaos of Greek Myth.</p><p>Meaninglessness and Chaos present themselves in these stories as the primal and original violence, antecedent to acts of ordered creation. The Christian doctrine of creation alters the fundamental relationship between chaotic violence and creation, indicating that creation in its original integrity is good, while the curse of violence is an alien disorder. This reversal, however, does not eliminate the strife which Chaos introduces, but rather imposes a heavy burdern on the Christian thinker: the burden of theodicy. If Chaos is primal, and creation is an attempt by some being to impose a livable and peaceable order, then there is no need to “justify the ways of God to man.” Violence and chaos can always be understood as the ordinary way of things, and peace is obtainable only through power; thus, any appearance of justice is reducible to power. There is no questioning such a god. Even if he is not like Zeus and does not sit with two jars to pour out on man, one of good and one of evil, his explanations of his actions, however seemingly good, would have no non-violent rhetorical force. In the end, such justice could only be the false mystery of might.</p><p>However, Christianity has through its conception of creation opened the door for the topic of theodicy. God is not an arbitrary force superimposing an extraneous order on primal strife (and thereby ironically confirming the rule of Chaos), but is rather the author of an <em>ex nihilo </em>order conceived in its origins as intelligible and good. The presence of evil and chaos in such a creation therefore introduces a tension that requires harmonization. The Greek hero may lament when the cruelties of fate and the arbitrary whims of the gods plunge him into deepest misery, but he has no real recourse to ask why it has happened. Zeus' actions are explicitly the arbitrary doings of a capricious god whose rule is founded on might and the thunderbolt, and to ask him why he does what he does can only serve to reveal the primal violence which underlies all apparent order (and will probably get you zapped). Job, on the other hand, seeks a fundamental and intelligible reason for why bad things happen to good people in a fundamentally good universe ruled by a good God, and even if his story's account of theodicy raises more questions than it answers it at least sets the stage and terms for a dialogue between God and man. That this dialogue is often conceived as wrestling only serves to further underscore the difficulties of conceiving primal peace.</p><p>Further complicating the issue of theodicy, scientific insights have led us to a cosmological model of violence; this is most appreciable in the issue of our understanding of evolution, which requires us to accept the continuous suffering of countless organisms. The universe has seemingly been revealed as a morally indifferent space filled with warring seeds, and even the orderly physical processes of the universe are usually cycles of displacement and violent disjunction. Morality seems to be a form of imposed violence, and even if we accept, as I do, Socrates' pronouncements in the <em>Republic </em>that justice is really good in itself and that justice is something greater than the might of the ruler over the ruled, our observations of the world leave us with lingering doubts tending towards Thrasymachus' insistence that justice is merely the advantage of the stronger. We live in a world in which moral order must be accompanied by might, and even if a few are persuaded on rational grounds experience has demonstrated the necessity of coercion to give teeth to law.</p><p>There is another way in which science, or more precisely scientism, has made the task more difficult. While science brings us understanding and knowledge, scientism, the attempt to transform science from an empirically based methodological system of inductive reasoning into a fully fledged philosophical and metaphysical system, has done much to make theodicy, like any non-scientific philosophical endeavor, seem illegitimate. I have discussed this issue much in other places, and will only repeat firmly here that scientism only serves to undermine science and fails to satisfy its own requirements; we are not bound as rational creatures to expect every truth or belief to be discernible through induction from observations, and any such claim is itself unjustified by its own criteria.</p><p>I certainly cannot claim to know more than the Pope. However, I have a hypothesis, which may be rubbish or which may have some amount of truth to it. This hypothesis is not at all intended to be an answer to the question of theodicy or even a theory of theodicy at all. It has to do with what I believe is a confusion between moral good and the goodness of creation. In a way it is a groundwork for theodicy, because I believe that a great deal of effort has been wasted in attempting to justify God on strictly moral grounds. To be more specific, morality is only applicable to the actions of rational beings capable of discerning things under the categories of “good” and “evil,” along with any number of the host of subsidiary moral vocabularies which have attempted to understand the depths of those two realities. Within Christian tradition, the notion of natural law affirms that man is unable to lose the primary precept of the moral law, which by some formulations is simply that one should pursue good and avoid evil. Now, I have had many questions and doubts about natural law formulations, not the least of which is to what degree such a precept could ever really serve as a helpful basis for morality. It is overly broad, and it seems that when it comes to secondary precepts of natural law, which are the more content specific prohibitions or obligations, natural law theorists tend to indicate that such precepts may become completely lost. Nevertheless, implicit or explicit expectations for social behavior does seem to be universal, and morality seems strictly peculiar to humans living in groups.</p><p>In other words, morality is only one species of goodness, and a contingent one at that; if the universe contained no rational creatures capable of acting in accordance with prescribed moral precepts, it would be impossible to describe any entity in that universe as morally good or morally evil. The primal “goodness” of creation, then, is not a moral goodness, although it is related to moral goodness as genus is to species. Rather, the goodness here is a goodness of actuality, as opposed to potentiality; it is a goodness of form. This actuality is filled with a great deal of violence and strife as beings jostle against each other and sap one anothers' energy in more or less mindless pursuit of the fullness of its own being. The mystery of the universe's goodness is found in the apparent darkness of its moral ambiguity: what I mean by this is that the universe is filled for the most part by beings of complete moral indifference that serve as a neutral background for what is often called the drama of salvation. Earthquakes, tsunamis, animal attacks, disease, and so forth are all part of creatures' pursuit of the perfection of their own forms. Poetically, we tend to focus on the beauty of creatures perfection without dwelling on the path that those creatures must take to reach such perfection. Thus the lion is a type of Christ; though it is a sign of the moral ambiguity of creation that the lion may also be a type of Satan. This potentiality for creatures to be significant both <em>in bono </em>and <em>in malo </em>is not itself a product of evil; only its actualization by means of a rational mind capable of the knowledge of good and evil can make a lion tearing up its prey become a sign of the threat of sin.</p><p>But what can be said about the experiences of rational creatures, whose knowledge of good and evil make them morally liable for disordered actions and allow them to view the universe in terms of goodness and evil? Most entities in the universe cannot be described as morally good or evil, yet many times they result in suffering for man; furthermore, man's knowledge of moral categories allows him to view himself in primarily moral relationships with himself, other men, and the rest of the universe. How does this ability relate both to the Fall, Original Sin, and theodicy?</p><p>The Fall links together Original Sin with the knowledge of good and evil. By possessing a will undetermined with respect to future contingent actions, man is free to choose his course within certain biological and logical constraints. However, by virtue of his rationality man is also aware of moral categories that are not pertinent to irrational creatures. This knowledge results in a subjective difference in man's perception of reality that in some way embodies and constitutes part of the curse of Original Sin. We know from empirical research that the story of Genesis does not constitute a literal-historical account of our origin, and that our evolution within time and space was not marked by some sudden and unprecedented curse of death, work, or toil; but through knowledge of our moral nature, the natures of good and evil, and our recognition of our own guilt, our entire perception of reality is altered from that of the brute and amoral animal. We are conscious of the world as the object of moral actions, and we are able to act beneficently or maliciously.</p><p>There is another side to rationality. Complementing our ability to view the world under moral categories is our ability to understand it, and not only to understand it through perception but to understand it logically, systematically, and rationally. The universe of matter and energy operate according to regular principles which can be grasped and understood; its neutrality is guaranteed by the rule of a set of natural laws which we have come to know better and better. Natural disasters are part of the universe as it is, the effect of the working out of various physical constants and relationships some of which are still beyond and may always be beyond our complete comprehension. They cannot be construed as being caused by human sinfulness.</p><p>Perception is an act in which the perceiver and the perceived unite, and as such perception is always subjective even though it is not groundlessly relativistic. As moral creatures we tend to see in the events of the world hints of morality which may not be actually present in the events themselves, or are not present in the events in the way in which they are perceived. Color is like this, as the color green truly does not inhere in grass but is available as a perception only in the mingling of the grass' chemical structure, the interplay of light on that structure, and its reception and process by our eyes and nervous system. This allow for the possibility that our perceptions of morality and meaning in what are otherwise morally neutral events are not mere constructs or delusions; just as the perception of the color green is related to an objective reality lying outside our minds, so also the perception of moral meaning in the otherwise indifferent events of nature are indeed related both to those objective events as well as our own moral constitution.</p><p>As such, in considering theodicy we must be constantly aware that our perceptions of the universe will naturally tend to see the moral significance of an otherwise morally indifferent universe. Natural disasters, as the working out of indifferent moral laws, are not moral evils and thus do not pose a problem to theodicy in themselves (although they will prove to be part of a larger set of problems for theodicy which I will discuss in the next paragraph). Furthermore, because man has a tendency to reject the precepts of morality, regardless of whether these precepts are human conventions or divinely revealed law, our moral perception of the universe is tainted by the desire to exploit and dominate. Thus, the knowledge of good and evil brings the possibility of spiritual death, in the sense that only as creatures in possession of such a knowledge and the corresponding perceptions it allows can we engage in sin. The actions that we take in the course of acting out sinful desires will have effects governed by the morally indifferent laws of the universe, which may or may not result in suffering. It is one of the curses of sin that it tends to multiply the suffering man experiences during his life, and as such theodicy can somewhat readily account for whatever evil directly and indirectly results from sinful action.</p><p>Nevertheless, this is not the most problematic part of theodicy, because the primary question is why God created a universe in such a way that such suffering might even be possible. Why should the universe be construed in such a way that natural disasters occur, even granting that due to the moral indifference of entities bereft of rationality and will these events cannot be classified as morally evil? Why should the goodness of creation, understood as the gift of actuality granted by God to creatures and by which they are themselves and act according to intelligible principles, result in suffering? Why would a morally good God allow this?</p><p>My initial hunch is that this arrangement is necessary in order for a will to be free. In order for a creature to make free and uncoerced choices he must exist in an environment which is morally indifferent to the choices he makes; if his environment is conformed in some way that prevents the execution of his actions based upon their morality, he no longer is a free agent, at least in the sense that he would not be free to actualize his choices. Such an environment would have to operate according to laws and intelligible, but morally neutral, principles, and the working out of these principles would and in fact do cause countless events over which moral agents have no or limited control. Thus, a universe in which natural disasters, understood as a deleterious event not directly or indirectly caused by human action or sin, occur seems to be required in order to allow a creature to make truly free choices.</p><p>Now this “answer” may still be unsatisfactory, because it means that the universe in its foundation and creation carries with it the seeds of suffering apart from the commission of any moral evil. But I do not mean, as I mentioned, to offer a theory of theodicy, but only to offer the suggestion that in order to “justify the ways of God to man” it is necessary to be extraordinarily clear on what this justification should look like. I think that any decent theory of theodicy must accept that the potential for suffering and strife is in some sense built in to the universe and perhaps even constitute part of its overall goodness; that, even if the Greek mythology is flawed in its representation of the relationship between chaos and order that there may yet be a grain of truth in the notion that strife may be an integral part of this universe. The real theodicy, I propose, is to demonstrate that this potential for strife is the deep mystery of the goodness of creation. We must face the reality of the universe as Leviathan, a creature of vast power and might unfettered by moral concerns and indifferent to our attempts to place it within our schema, yet still part of the unbridled and wild goodness of creation.</p><p> </p><p>“Can you pull in Leviathan with a fishook</p><p>or tie down its tongue with a rope?</p><p>Can you put a cord through its nose</p><p>or pierce its jaw with a hook?</p><p>Will it keep begging you for mercy?</p><p>Will it speak to you with gentle words?</p><p>Will it make an agreement with you</p><p>for you to take it as your slave for life?</p><p>Can you make a pet of it like a bird</p><p>or put it on a leash for the young women in your house?</p><p>Will traders barter for it?</p><p>Will they divide it up among the merchants?</p><p>Can you fill its hide with harpoons</p><p>or its head with fishing spears?</p><p>If you lay a hand in it,</p><p>you will remember the struggle and never do it again!</p><p>Any hope of subduing it is false;</p><p>the mere sight of it is overpowering.</p><p>No one is fierce enough to rouse it.</p><p>Who then is able to stand against me?</p><p>Who has a claim against me that I must pay?</p><p>Everything under heaven belongs to me.”</p>S. Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08843076081982674203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-975543236652939194.post-70508931465064594952011-09-06T16:44:00.000-07:002011-09-07T11:38:50.121-07:00The Many Sides of Work: A Response to Msgr. Charles PopeWork is variously seen as both curse and blessing; as the penalty for sin and a means of sanctification. For example, in a blogpost titled "<a href="http://blog.adw.org/2011/09/labor-is-a-gift-from-god-that-precedes-original-sin/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=labor-is-a-gift-from-god-that-precedes-original-sin">Labor is a Gift From God that Precedes Original Sin</a>," Msgr. Charles Pope takes note of the good of labor, which he sums up in five points:<br /><br />1. <strong style="font-weight: normal;">Human Labor precedes Original Sin and hence is not an imposition due to sin but part of our original dignity.<br /><br />2. </strong><strong style="font-weight: normal;">Human Work is a duty and prolongs the work of Creation.<br /><br />3. </strong><strong style="font-weight: normal;">Work can be sanctifying and redemptive.<br /><br />4. </strong><strong style="font-weight: normal;">Work is an acceptable sacrifice to God.<br /><br />5. </strong><strong style="font-weight: normal;">To work is participate in the Common Good.<br /><br />Now, in order to frame a response I think it might be necessary to make some clear statements and distinctions about work or labor, which I will use interchangeably throughout this post. Work is human activity done not for its own sake but which is aimed towards the achievement of some goal. This is in distinction from leisure, which is human activity aimed not towards the achievement of some goal but for its own sake.<br /><br />There are two kinds of work: Servile and liberal. Servile work is done by necessity. In today's economy, it is wage slavery. One works in order to secure basic commodities necessary to survival or some minimum standard of living. Servile work is also the appropriate name for any work in which the achievement of the end has become so consuming that one goes beyond the bounds of necessity: that is, a greedy man who works only to accumulate more money is just as enslaved to his work. Liberal work is work done freely, without the burden of necessity: hobby jobs, for instance. There is a way that such work is a kind of hybrid between work and leisure.<br /><br />Now, I believe that Msgr. Pope quite rightly points out that work can be good. Not only is there the basic insight that only through labor can a human society achieve great things, but more basically we have become dependent on an interconnected series of economic, labor-based relationships. As Adam Smith noted, labor is in a sense the basic resource of an economy, and the more efficiently that labor is managed the higher a nation's standard of living will be.<br /><br />Not to be a killjoy, however, I think it necessary to point out why work has traditionally been considered a curse, and why there is great and even grave reasons to pause and reconsider the notion of work as gift. I will present these reasons, not as counter-arguments, but merely as questions that arise in my mind when I consider each of Msgr. Pope's points.<br /><br />1.</strong><strong style="font-weight: normal;"> Human Labor precedes Original Sin and hence is not an imposition due to sin but part of our original dignity.<br /><br />"But doesn't the Genesis narrative recognize that as a result of sin, whatever original labor relations existed were fundamentally altered?"<br /><br />According to Genesis mythology, there was an idyllic pre-lapsarian paradise in which all work relations we perfect, and furthermore in which work was not toilsome. But whatever relations this hypothetical arrangement provided seem far removed from our more practical considerations: instead of a self-watering garden pre-provided with a natural and apparently replenishing store of food, we have a world with more or less difficult to reach resources which can only be had "by the sweat of our brow."<br /><br />Furthermore, not only has work become harder and toilsome, but there is a degree to which work has become tainted with sin itself. We see this notably in greed, the callous destruction of the environment, and systems of exploitation ranging from slavery to class warfare that constantly threaten workers. I do not mean to dismiss the ideal of perfect and paradisaical labor arrangements, but merely to point out that these arrangements do not currently exist; instead, we find labor to be burdensome, or, as Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it,<br /><br />"Generations have trod, have trod, have trod..."<br /><br /></strong><strong style="font-weight: normal;">2. </strong><strong style="font-weight: normal;">Human Work is a duty and prolongs the work of Creation.<br /><br />"But what if we really didn't have to work?"<br /><br />As I noted before, work is a necessity socially. But I do not think this necessity is from the essence of work itself, but is rather due to man's lack of resources. In other words, we work because we lack certain sorts of resources that we consider necessary to our survival. If we were in a situation in which unkempt nature provided for all these necessities, both because we lived in an adequately lush or fertile region and because we were willing to forgo the luxury commodities that drive the majority of contemporary human labor, this necessity would not exist.<br /><br />Of course, this is not the situation most of us are in, and for that reason there is a degree to which work will remain an accidental social duty. But the degree to which this is true is already lessening. Because of increases in the productivity of a single worker, a superfluous amount of commodities and resources are available to us with an ever decreasing labor cost. This quite recent development has altered the way in which we view work, since now it is not the case that the majority of the human race must labor from strict necessity, as was the case during the era of subsistence farming. Instead, we are faced with an increasing number of work options, as well as an increase in our leisure time.<br /><br />It is not an impossibility that sometime in the future technology could further reduce work requirements, until a quite large population could be provided with a remarkable number of goods with the most minimum labor cost. In such a society, would it really make sense for work to be a "duty?" Wouldn't it make more sense to use the time provided by such a society to allow mankind to pursue both liberal work and leisure in order to improve themselves and others?<br /><br />Finally, human work quite as often - in fact, more often than not - destroys creation. Today's economy of total work, which measures all things - land, animals, nature, and people - in terms of sheer productivity has resulted in some of the most barbaric and callous exploitation and disregard for nature. Even in the fact of continued international unanimous pleas from the scientists who have dedicated their lives to studying natural phenomena to reduce carbon emissions and otherwise cease polluting the atmosphere, America, among others, continues to show no signs of stopping the ravenous juggernaut of human work.<br /><br /></strong><strong style="font-weight: normal;">3. </strong><strong style="font-weight: normal;">Work can be sanctifying and redemptive.<br /><br />"Can it not also be vicious and destructive?"<br /><br />You'll get no argument from me that the suffering undergone through work, as well as its fruits in both the person working and in terms of those whom it benefits, can be redemptive. But suffering can just as easily make one bitter, especially in cases in which one gets only a pittance in return for one's labor due to an inequitable economy.<br /><br />There is also the problem of greed, especially in affluent societies, being the impetus for work that otherwise would seem amazing and virtuous. But there is something unhealthy about this obsession for working longer hours in order to secure a promotion or add another for dollars to the quarterly earnings. Those who pursue work for this reason are quite possibly guilty of disordered loves, but perhaps more strikingly they confirm that for them the goods of leisure are inferior to the goods of work, in contrast to our Lord's confirmation that Mary had chosen better than Martha.<br /><br /></strong><strong style="font-weight: normal;">4. Work is an acceptable sacrifice to God.</strong><br /><br />"What about leisure?"<br /><br />I have no doubt that God accepts our work, especially when we place it through prayer in union with the suffering of Christ. I also believe, however, that there is a way in which it is an even greater sacrifice to dedicate our leisure to Him in the form of meditation, prayer, devotion, worship, and so forth.<br /><br /><strong style="font-weight: normal;">5. </strong><strong style="font-weight: normal;">To work is participate in the Common Good.</strong><strong style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><br />Here, I have absolutely no quibbles. But I will only repeat my remark that the common good might be served without the requirement that all work, especially if circumstances of technology provide ways to multiply the labor of one into the goods for many.<br /><br />It is not that I do not believe that work can be a good thing, but rather that I know that the over-glorification of work can be part of a project of devaluing the human person by measuring his dignity in terms of production rather than intrinsic worth. In the post-reformation world, there is something irreducibly Protestant about the notion that work is sanctifying, not only because Protestants ended up making successful work a sign of the elect (ironic considering their mistaken objections against what they believed was a "salvation by works" theology), but because, as Weber as taught us, Protestantism provided the force behind the winds of what is today global capitalism, a system of interrelated series of exploitations that consistently alienates the worker from his own work and prevents work from being a truly fruitful experience for him.<br /></strong>S. Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08843076081982674203noreply@blogger.com0