The Power of Names: A Critique of Realism

In Plato's Cratylus, Socrates rejects the notion that the names of things have a divine origin. Language, as sign, is inferior to the thing signified. 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. 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. 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. 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 believe that the way in which language shapes, directs, and forms our thoughts and our perception of the world 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.

Realism's variety and tradition is far too diverse and expansive to receive a full treatment. Indeed, there are many subtle varieties of realism that may avoid the criticism which I will present. 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. This ontological relationship is described in many ways, but the main vocabulary I will use is participation. An entity - physical or non-physical - participates in a form, which is eternal and unchanging. 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.

Words, then, are conceived of as socially agreed upon utterances signifying these essential concepts. 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.

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. This theory nicely fits with any philosophy that requires the universality of certain sorts of concept: for example, natural law, among others.

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.

Indeed, research on this subject is emerging which reveals that language shapes the content of our mental concepts as well as our phenomenal world. Take, for example, the experiments conducted by Lera Boroditsky of Stanford University. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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.

These differences in language - and the resulting differences in how we actually perceive the world - go on and on. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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 nature of these concepts.

Proposal for a New Christian Synthesis

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. 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. 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.

As corollaries to this first principle, I offer the following principles as a tentative proposal for the guiding principles of a new synthesis.

I. Each claim or belief must be evaluated according to its nature.

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. Of course, this is practically much more difficult in some cases than in others. 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. 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.

This is not the same with the variety of religious claims. In general, religions tend to make a variety of claims: mythological, moral, historical, philosophical, and theological. These claims may encompass a wide variety of fields of study, and may include claims of a biological, anthropological, social, psychological, or other nature.

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. 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. We may use the famous Galileo case as an example: a certain religious body made the statement:

“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.”

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. 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. Very well. 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. 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.

So, then, whatever claims are made by Christianity regarding the physical nature of the universe should be confirmed or falsified by empirical means. Similarly, anthropological claims should be subject to the standards of evidence used in the study of anthropology. 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. 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. 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. 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.

Historical claims should be subject to the same scrutiny as any other historical claim made by any other institution or piece of literature. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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.” 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). How, then, are we to evaluate these claims, these specifically and irreducibly religious claims?

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.

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. 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. 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. The truth is, we do have systems of evaluating these sorts of claims, which I will call broadly “claims of authority.”

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. 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). These are all examples of claims in which evidence is theoretically possible but practically unavailable.

Other claims do not admit of more or less scientific evidence at all, such as “I will meet you at noon on Wednesday.” 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. 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. 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. Practically, this type of belief is extraordinarily important, because it comprehends a vast number of beliefs without which social life would be impossible. 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. It incorporates elements of mythology, history, and relationships. It is, to use the word in its original sense, a matter of faith, and it is indispensible.

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. 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. 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. 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). 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.

Which leads one to ask: how much evidence is enough evidence?

3. The amount of evidence required to justify a religious claim should be in proportion to the “magnitude” of the claim.

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.” 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. 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.

Take, for instance, the evaluation of claims of miracles. 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. Yet such evidence is possible. 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. 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. 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. 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.

However, it is certainly true that these matters are not subject to the same objective standards of judgment as are more scientific claims. 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. 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. 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.

Which brings me to the topic of Faith, as a specifically Christian concept. As I believe this framework must include the Christian tradition, it must of course include Faith; but what is Faith? Is it subject to this sort of scrutiny? 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. 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. 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. 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.

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.

Pluralism is perhaps the most difficult topic that a thoughtful religious individual must encounter. 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. 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. Now, we must all admit to practicality: I cannot track down every last belief system. 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.

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. I propose as a blueprint for such a broad, sweeping theory and subsequent criteria the book by Rodney Stark called Discovering God. 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.

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.

The Need for a New Synthesis

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

An Empirical Critique of Natural Law

Natural 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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.”

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.

A Purely Philosophical Argument for a Pro-Life Position

Let 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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).

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).

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.

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.

In which I break my long silence about free will

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.