Michelangelo hid brain stem in God’s throat… or not.

You know the old expression, “To a hammer, all the world looks like a nail?”

I couldn’t help thinking that today when I read a news report about two medical researchers who believe that the great Renaissance artist Michelangelo embedded an anatomically correct drawing of the human brainstem in his drawing of the throat of God in one of the paintings of the Sistine Chapel.

Two researchers — one a neurosurgeon and the other a medical illustrator — published their theories in the May issue of the journal Neurosurgery.

“We speculated that having used the brain motif successfully in the Creation of Adam almost a year earlier, Michelangelo wanted to once again associate the figure of God with a brain motif in the iconographically critical Separation of Light from Darkness,” wrote authors Ian Suk (the medical illustrator), and Dr. Rafael Tamargo, both of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

MSNBC pointed out that this is not the first time that over-eager doctors have seen evidence of their own field in the great artist’s work.

“In an article published in 1990, Frank Lynn Meshberger, a gynecologist, identified an outline of the human brain in the Creation of Adam,” the website pointed out. “Among other details, he noted that the shroud surrounding God had the shape of the cerebrum, or the upper part of the brain. A decade later, another researcher pointed out a kidney motif.”

It’s true that experts say Michelangelo put hidden messages in his paintings of the Sistine Chapel.  Two Jewish scholars, for example, believe that Michelangelo painted Jews into his portraits of heaven, making the (then daring) theological point that Jews, too, would be saved.

But I’m not convinced about the brain stem.  It’s a little too much like the images of Jesus routinely found in flour tortillas in California.

Today’s Golden Age of Philosophy

Few people know this, but our age is an amazing time for people who love philosophy.

When I was in college 30 years ago, philosophy was strictly an academic exercise and there were few resources available for people, like me, who view philosophy more as a way of life or avocation than as a job.

Today, however, all that has changed.

There are three or four excellent “magazines” about philosophy – such as Philosophy Now and The Philospher’s Magazine – that are filled with funny, off-beat, irreverent articles about philosophical topics. A number of top-rate publishing houses, mostly in the UK, such as Routledge and Blackwell Publishing, produce books aimed at a general philosophical readership.

There are philosophy radio programs such as Philosophy Talk… coffee houses… salons… adult education classes… and literally hundreds of websites for the interested reader. There are even philosophy comic books, such as LogiComix about the life of British logician Bertrand Russell. It’s simply amazing. It’s a golden age of philosophy, I think.

The irony, however, is that there is still no solid consensus on what, precisely, philosophy actually is. In its historical and etymological sense, philosophy is literally “love (philia) of wisdom (Sophia),” and that is always how I have looked upon it. Philosophy, for me, is the attempt to reflect upon experience in order to understand more about life and how we are to live. My aims, like those of Socrates, are primarily practical: I want to understand the world and myself to live better.

Today, there are three, perhaps four major “schools” or approaches to philosophy, each with their own journals, intellectual heroes and methodologies. It is one of the scandals of contemporary philosophy that these schools are somewhat incommensurable, meaning they are so different in their approaches and ideals they are almost incapable of speaking to one another. It’s as though organic chemistry and 17th century French literature are forced to share the same offices and pretend they are the same discipline (I exaggerate but you get the point).

The first approach may be called, for lack of a better word, Traditional Philosophy: this is the approach now largely taught only in Catholic universities. It is primarily historical in orientation, a “history of philosophy” style in which students study the thought of, say, the ancient Greeks, and Descartes, the British empiricists, Kant, Hegel and so on. There is very little attempt to think through how the thought of these philosophical greats can be reconciled. The idea appears to be that by working through all of these great thinkers, eventually the student will come to his or her own philosophical conclusions — although there is really no fixed “method” or approach given for doing so. I always think of this as the University of Chicago or Great Books approach. A variation of this approach is Catholic philosophy, including various schools of Thomism (such as the Transcendental Thomism of Merechal, Karl Rahner and, my guru, Bernard J.F. Lonergan)

The second major approach to philosophy today is what is known as Continental Philosophy. This is the philosophy that is most commonly taught in Europe and, again, in some Catholic universities in the U.S. In practice, it means primarily the philosophical systems of phenomenology, existentialism, so-called “critical theory” and their postmodern descendants. When I was in college, this is what I studied (in addition to traditional philosophy). We read the classic texts of phenomenology as well as such trendy philosophers as Jean-Paul Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Max Scheler, Edith Stein and others. Today, those names have largely been replaced by those of postmodern French thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard. While classical Husserlian phenomenology does attempt to “solve” major philosophical problems and actually be a descriptive science, in practice students of Continental Philosophy, like their Traditional Philosophy counterparts, spend much of their time studying the works of individual thinkers and writing papers on aspects of their thought. (There is a greater interest in Continental Philosophy in social and political questions, however.)

The third and allegedly dominant approach to philosophy today is Analytic Philosophy. This is the philosophy most commonly taught in the UK and in major U.S. universities. Built upon the infrastructure of British empiricists such as David Hume, Analytic Philosophy appeared in the early 20th century through the work of such thinkers as Bertrand Russell, Gottlob Frege, G.E. Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein. When I was in college, I found Analytic Philosophy to be mostly unintelligible gibberish. The emphasis on symbolic logic and the solving of trivial intellectual “puzzles” was, to me, an absurd waste of time.

In the past few years, however, I’ve been reading more about Analytic Philosophy and I am now much more impressed. Analytic Philosophy has matured over the past few decades and is now more of a philosophical “style” than it is a collection of doctrines. The style is more like that of my hero, Bernard J.F. Lonergan, in that Analytic Philosophy is much more interested in actually solving philosophical problems than it is in clarifying the thought of past philosophers. Thus, Analytic Philosophy is characterized by a thematic, rather than a “history of philosophy,” approach. It uses or creates a specialized technical vocabulary to elucidate the various “options” available in any given philosophical issue… marshals the evidence in favor or against those options… and then attempts to actually “settle” the issue. It’s actually quite refreshing.

The only problem with Analytic Philosophy from the perspective of a traditional philosopher or “lover of wisdom” is that it’s still focused primarily on trivial problems or mere puzzles (perhaps because those are the easiest ones to “solve”). Academic analytic philosophy is often little more than “chloroform in print,” boring to the point of dispatching its readers into a catatonic stupor. The cure for this tedium has been, over the past several years, the appearance of those popular philosophy journals and publishing houses I mentioned earlier. Precisely because they are aiming at a wider audience, the popular philosophy authors have to turn their attention to the Big Issues that interest real people – and thus are forced by the market to abandon the tedium beloved by academics and use their philosophical skills to address topics people actually care about. An example of how wonderful this can be is a book I am reading right now, Michael Sandel’s magisterial Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? It’s clear, concise, lays open the various options available on contentious issues, concerns serious subjects (what is justice?) and doesn’t resort to pretentious displays of symbolic logic to make its points.

These days, I mostly read good Catholic philosophy (such as can be found in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly or Method: A Journal of Lonergan Studies) and “popular” analytic books such as Justice or those produced by Routledge.  I still can’t read academic analytic philosophy journals.  I tried subscribing to Faith and Philosophy, the (mostly analytic) journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers, but found it deadly dull and exhibiting the worst aspects of analytic pretentiousness.  Here’s a sample, taken from John Turri’s essay, “Practical and Epistemic Justification in Alston’s Perceiving God” (July 2008, p. 290):

“Alston’s thesis is that putative perceptions of God often justify beliefs about God.  A subject S has a putative perception of God when S has an experience e in which it seems to S that God appears to S as P.  If, based on e, S forms the “M-belief” that God is P, then S has a justified belief that God is P.  An M-belief is a belief that God is P, which is based on a putative perception of God.  (I will often substitute ‘q’ for the proposition that God is P.)

I dunno. My reaction to writing like that is the same as George Will’s: Just because life is absurd that doesn’t mean philosophy should be as well.

I don’t mean to pick on John Turri, whom I am sure is a great guy and a lot smarter than I am. But this sort of stuff is meant solely for professional philosophers in universities… and is largely what turns people off to philosophy as an academic discipline.  If Socrates had spoken like that, they probably would have forced him to drink hemlock much earlier and philosophy would never have gotten off the ground.

The Nature of Existence

For a beach philosophizer like myself, it doesn’t get much better than “The Nature of Existence,” the quirky little documentary on the Meaning of Life that is opening this weekend in Los Angeles and Irvine, California. Filmmaker Roger Nygard wrote down the 85 toughest questions he could think of about the meaning of life — and then set out with a camera crew to ask them of such luminaries as Indian holy man Sri Sri Ravi Shankar (The Art of Living), professional atheist polemicist Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), 24th generation Chinese Taoist Master Zhang Chengda, Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind (co-discoverer of string theory), wrestler Rob Adonis (founder of Ultimate Christian Wrestling), confrontational evangelist Brother Jed Smock, novelist Orson Scott Card (Ender’s Game), director Irvin Kershner (Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back), Stonehenge Druids Rollo Maughfling & King Arthur Pendragon and many more. The result is his interesting little film:

The Nature of Existence - Original Trailer from Roger Nygard on Vimeo.

Elena Kagan and the Perils of Legal Positivism

It goes without saying that Supreme Court nominee (soon to be justice) Elena Kagan is a charming, intelligent, well-spoken woman who, unlike most politicians, gives every impression of being a genuine “moderate” in her views, someone who understands the complexities involved in great social issues and who is willing to acknowledge that people of good will could disagree with her.

Yet there was one point in the confirmation hearings today that revealed an ideological seed that, I fear, will grow into something quite disturbing during the 30 years or more she will be seated on the bench.  And that is her apparent agnosticism towards the existence of unalienable natural or human rights.

Questioned by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., about whether she believed in “unalienable rights,” such as those referenced in the Declaration of Independence, Kagan replied quite firmly that she did not.

“You should not want me to act in any way on the basis of such a belief” in people’s rights outside the Constitution and laws, Kagan said. “I think you should want me to act on the basis of law.”

This exchange reveals that Kagan is, as many liberals today are, a believer in what is known as legal positivism. Legal positivism was a highly influential theory of jurisprudence throughout the first half of the twentieth century. But the horrors of World War II and Communist and Nazi totalitarianism made many law professors rethink whether it is a good idea to teach the doctrine that what is legal is whatever the State says is legal.

After all, Adolf Hitler was democratically elected by the people of Germany. The summary executions and brutalities of the Communist regimes were “legal” in the sense that the State authorized and approved them.

Much of what has gone wrong in the western law, over the last 150 years — from the approval of slavery in the Dred Scott decision to the legalization of abortion in Roe v. Wade — stems from this fundamental, anti-Christian belief that basic human rights do not really exist, that the State may grant, or take away, whatever rights and “privileges” it deems necessary.

In contrast to the “new” theories of rights advocated by Hobbes, Bentham and others, the classic Judaeo-Christian view (expressed most succinctly in natural law theory) has always been that governmental elites must answer to a higher law than mere human legislation.

When governments repeatedly transgress these fundamental human rights, it is the right of the people, as Jefferson put it in the Declaration of the Independence, “to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security.”

Governments that fail to respect the “unalienable rights” endowed by God are tyrannies and, therefore, illegitimate.

Once again, these ideas stem, not from atheistic philosophers, but from Christian theologians reflecting upon the truths found in the Bible.

The notion of a Divine Law above mere human law was expressed clearly by Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica, ratified by John Calvin in his Institutes, and summarized succinctly by Sir William Blackstone in his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765), one of the chief sources used by Jefferson (and all the Colonists) in crafting the new American government.

According to Blackstone, civil law is given, not to create rights, but to protect already pre-existing natural rights.

The primary object of law, he says, is to maintain and regulate those “absolute rights of individuals … such as would belong to man in a state of nature, and which every man is entitled to enjoy, whether in society or out of society.”

“Those rights then which God and nature have established, and are therefore called natural rights, such as are life and liberty, need not the aid of human laws to be more effectually invested in every man than they are; neither do they receive any additional strength when declared by the municipal laws to be inviolable. On the contrary, no human legislature has power to abridge or destroy them, unless the owner shall himself commit some act that amounts to a forfeiture.”

This great tradition of classical natural right — which extended from the biblical prophets and the teaching of Christ through the medieval scholastics and Protestant divines up to the U.S. Declaration of Independence—was challenged directly by what is sometimes called “political atheism.”

A long string of anti-Christian thinkers—first Machiavelli, then Thomas Hobbes, and finally Jeremy Bentham and John Austin—rejected the notion of human rights as nothing more than, as Bentham put it, “anarchical fallacies.”

The English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) advocated a strong totalitarian government (the “leviathan”) as the only way to save human beings from themselves. Famously describing human life as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” Hobbes insisted that the reality of human interaction was that of “war of every one against everyone.”

From this, he says, it follows that “nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have no place [in the state of nature] (Leviathan, 13.13)

The only hope for a modicum of peace and civilization, Hobbes thought, was for individuals to surrender irrevocably their natural rights to a totalitarian state (such as an absolute monarch). Fear of the “leviathan” would force selfish and violent men to maintain order and limit their crimes. For this reason, Hobbes rejected the Christian notion that individuals could ever disobey immoral laws or criticize the State in any way.

Nevertheless, Hobbes accepted the classic notion, developed in the early Middle Ages, that government derives its powers from the “consent of the governed.” This “social contract” idea did influence the American Founders. But for Hobbes, the “consent,” once made by a majority, is irrevocable and cannot be changed or transferred without the permission of the original sovereign.

It sometimes happens that a sovereign puts to death an innocent man, he says, but, in essence, this is simply the price people must pay for having a government. “Nothing the sovereign representative can do to a subject, on what pretense soever, can properly be called an injustice or injury, because every subject is author of every act the sovereign does,” he says. For this reason, “tyranny” is merely an empty word for a monarchy that someone dislikes … just as “oligarchy” is merely a word used for an aristocracy that someone dislikes.

Needless to say, the American Founders didn’t accept Hobbes’s notion of absolute, unquestioning obedience to the State. Rather, they worked out an entirely new theory of government that combined the best of both the classic Christian theory of natural rights and the notion, drawn from the early Middle Ages, that the legitimacy of a government was the result of the “consent of the governed.” But unlike Hobbes, the Founders believed that, when a government violated a people’s natural rights “endowed by their Creator,” then it was the “duty” of the people to “alter or abolish it” and to “institute new government.”

Not surprisingly, not everyone took to this new theory of government. Totalitarians throughout history, whether monarchists or communists, dislike the idea that the power of government can be constrained in any way.

The English philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), who witnessed the American Revolution, rejected entirely the notion of natural rights and the entire natural law tradition. His enemies were both Sir William Blackstone and John Locke. The idea of natural rights, he said, “is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense,—nonsense upon stilts.” The founder of the movement called “legal positivism,” which is still influential today, Bentham believed that the only rights that truly exist are rights created by the civil government. If the government hasn’t granted the right, he said, it’s not a right but a wish. Whereas Aquinas and other Christian thinkers insisted that a civil law that violated the law of God is not a true law and can be justly disobeyed, Bentham and legal positivists insist that this is not the case. According to John Austin, another influential founder of legal positivism, morality and law have nothing to do with one another. The validity of a law lies only in that it is proclaimed by a sovereign. The influence of Thomas Hobbes is evident throughout legal positivism. The power of the state is virtually limitless.

This is the disturbing philosophical pedigree, if you will, to Elena Kagan’s off-hand remark that she doesn’t recognize any natural rights “not found in the Constitution or in law.” In other words, if the State doesn’t say it’s wrong… it isn’t wrong. If the State says it’s okay to do something, it’s okay.

After the horrors of the Nazi era, we know that isn’t true. Elena Kagan knows it, too. And that’s why, as nice as she is, what she said is so disturbing to anyone who believes in human rights.

Cowboy Constitutionalism

Jacob Weisberg wrote a thoughtful piece on the various factions on the Right. It was published in the dying Newsweek blog:

The GOP Looks West

Here’s my favorite paragraph:

The GOP’s new Western tone harks back to Goldwater’s disastrous but transformational presidential campaign of 1964. Goldwater didn’t care about religion—he was a Jewish Episcopalian who once said that Jerry Falwell deserved a kick in the nuts. He wasn’t focused on racial politics; there weren’t many black people in Arizona then. What mattered to him was limiting government and preserving liberty. To Goldwater, political freedom was inseparable from economic freedom, a view distilled in his most famous phrase: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”

It was great analysis until the end… when Weisberg predictably proclaimed that what America needs is “a conservatism that hasn’t been in evidence lately—a version that’s not Western, Southern, or Eastern, but instead tolerant, moderate, and mainstream.”

In other words, a “conservatism” that is anything but conservative… sort of Country Club Republicanism that most Americans don’t want and which consistently loses.

Bernard Lonergan a Closet Kantian?

One of my favorite Catholic blogs, Lex Christianorum, had an interesting post on my philosophical guru, Bernard J.F. Lonergan, yesterday.  Lonergan is accusing of being… the horror!… a Kantian in disguise.  Of course, this comes as no surprise to anyone who knows Lonergan or his work.  It’s the standard slam against almost all of the so-called Transcendental Thomists (Marechal, Rahner, Coreth) and is somewhat justified.  Nevertheless, I find Lonergan to be the best philosophical synthesis between classical Thomism and the new statistical methods of modern science — far better, in my view, than the work of Jacques Maritain.  Here is just one of Lex Christianorum’s digs. The post is discussing the work of a new book, By Nature Equal: The Anatomy of a Western Insight by John E. Coons & Patrick M. Brennan.

Their [Coons' and Brennan's] radical reinterpretation of the tradition is not of their own breeding, but comes from their devotion to the theological method of Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984), whose system must be viewed with suspicion as it led him to dissent the Church’s teaching on artificial contraception as contained in Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae, implying that somewhere, somehow Lonergan got it badly wrong. Lonergan despaired of any ability of the human mind to comprehend objective being or objective good (as traditionally understood as the correspondence of the mind to the external reality, veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus). So he escaped like any good Kantian would from the effort. He withdrew, much like a tortoise into its shell, or perhaps better, imploded, sort of like gravity and light into a black hole, into a subjective objectivity, or objective subjectivity, clearly confusing both dimensions of reality. The objective retracts into or collapses into the subjective, and, in all but name, objectivity becomes subjectivity.

This is tremendously unfair to Lonergan, I think. Funny, but unfair. Lonergan’s great insight was that objective knowledge is not, as we imagine, “taking a look” at the “really real,” but is the fruit of the act of judgment. Human knowing is a grasp of the virtually unconditioned, a judgment of fact that something is or is not so.

Debating Atheism, Part 1

A week ago, I was scrambling to get my daughters off to a major swim meet at six o’clock in the morning, when I got a strange email: I was being invited to come to the Philosopical Society at University College Cork, Ireland, and participate in a debate about “whether this house would” reject atheism. The debate would be in mid-March, just a few weeks away.

I was flabbergasted!  I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why they had invited me, of all people. I have no qualifications as a philosopher (my B.A. in philosophy, as impressive as it is, doesn’t quite cut it). I haven’t written a book about atheism. My only academic work has been in Biblical studies, and even that is pretty popular.

Of course, my wife’s first reaction, upon reading the email, was to say, “Well, plainly they must be desperate…”

But I was tempted. The university was offering to pay all my expenses… plane ticket and beer money… and I’ve always wanted to see both Cork and its rather famous university. What’s more, the “Philosoph,” as the UCC Philosphical Society is known, has had quite a few famous speakers and debaters address it, including most Irish politicians and even the prime minister.

However, in the end, sanity prevailed. The debate was right about the same time that I am taking my whole extended family on a 10-day trip to Rome. If I accepted, I would think about nothing else for three weeks and would get nothing done.  It was just too much. I reluctantly declined.

Alas, that hasn’t stopped me from thinking about what I would have said. Why should “this house” reject atheism? Here are a few ideas off the top of my head:

1. That This House Would Reject Atheism because atheism is, by its very nature, irrational, and universities should not encourage more irrationality than they already do. Logically speaking, atheism is what is known as a “universal negation” — such as “there are no gods” or “there are no purple toads” — that is impossible to prove empirically. (That’s one of the few things I remember from the Introduction to Logic class I took in college.) Therefore, precisely because atheism is illogical, an assertion of empirical fact without empirical evidence, it should be rejected as the official doctrine of any university regardless of its religious orientation.

2. That This House Would Reject Atheism because atheism, unlike agnosticism or theism, promotes the closing of the human mind rather than the opening up of it. Atheism asserts dogmatically that the case for God is not “unproven” but CLOSED — Science has “settled it,” rather like climate change — and this closed-mindedness represents the very antithesis of the scientific spirit that universities are supposed to inculcate in the young and foolish.

3. That This House Would Reject Atheism because atheism, in its most popular contemporary forms — as represented by such authors as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett — offers primarily insults, not arguments. The so-called “new atheist” writers merely belittle the vast majority of mankind as intellectually dim-witted compared to, well, themselves. “Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma,” said Sam Harris in The End of Faith, which is the closest he actually gets to mounting a philosophical argument of any kind. Phillip Roth once said “Roman Catholicism would insult the intelligence of a gorilla” just as Clarence Darrow, the famous scourge of creationism, noted that he “doesn’t believe in God for the same reason I don’t believe in Mother Goose.” Danniel Dennett famously proposed that atheists call themselves “brights” to contrast themselves with the “dims” who believe in God. Universities should not promote an ideology that merely insults or belittles the vast majority of human beings on the planet.

4. That This House Would Reject Atheism because atheism has, historically and more ominously, been an force for intellectual intolerance and, at times, political oppression. The atheism of the French Revolution led inexorably to the guillotine… just as the atheism of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot led to concentration camps and genocide. The New Atheists, like Sam Harris and Dawkins, while not as murderous as their intellectual forebears, nevertheless display the same authoritarian streak. “I hope to show that the very ideal of religious tolerance — born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God — is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss,” Harris writes (The End of Faith, p. 15). Universities should not embrace any ideology that asserts human beings should NOT be free to believe whatever he wishes about God.

5. That This House Would Reject Atheism because atheism’s version of empiricism represent a crabbed, discredited 19th century “scientism” that rejects out of hand virtually every intellectual endeavor not conducted with lab equipment. In philosophical terms, atheism adopts a positivistic epistemology that is intellectually indefensible (if it can’t be quantified or measure with instruments, it doesn’t exist or isn’t worth thinking about). Universities in the 21st century should not revert to philosophical doctrines that the vast majority of actual scientists, philosophers and university professors no longer accept.

6. That House Would Reject Atheism because atheism’s principal argument — that order and complexity in the universe can be better explained as the result of chance than intelligence — merely asserts what it must prove. Anyone who has studied Richard Dawkins’s writings knows this. Dawkins’s primary argument is that the overwhelming fact of order, complexity and design in the universe is merely an ILLUSION that can be explained as the result of random events. However, he does not then explain them. Instead, all Dawkins does is show that the theory of evolution offers a plausible account of how biological change could occur through random forces — and then merely asserts that a similar mechanism must exist for the physical universe (what he terms a “crane”), even though he concedes none is known. It is just as logically plausible that order and complexity in the universe are the result of intelligence as it is that they are the result of a yet-to-be-determined random mechanism. Universities should not be promoting as established fact what is, instead, merely hypotheses.

7. That This House Would Reject atheism because atheism’s secondary argument, that an appeal to an intelligent creator involves circular reasoning, is logically fallacious. This secondary argument is the closest Dawkins comes to an actual philosophical argument (Hitchens and Harris don’t even bother with philosophy: they merely throw insults and glib one-liners). Dawkins claims that, while postulating the existence of an intelligent creator does make at least a little intellectual sense, given the existence of so much interlocking complexity in the universe, nevertheless such a hypothesis is intellectually indefensible because it merely begs the question, “Well, then who created God?” But in fact it does no such thing: If I find a baby on my doorstep, and I assert that SOMEONE must have put him there, the fact that I cannot explain who put that someone in a position to put the baby there does not justify me asserting that NO ONE put the baby there… the baby must have appeared randomly out of nowhere.

8. That This House Would Reject Atheism because atheist, at its very root, involves a fundamental rejection of an empirical, even metaphysical fact that all intelligent human beings (except atheists) accept: that nothing happens without a cause. To accept atheism is to believe that things happen without purpose, certainly, but also without any cause whatsoever: The universe “just is,” as Dawkins puts it. While this is logically possible, it contradicts the overwhelming evidence of our own eyes and even of all scientific inquiry: Virtually everything we know about DOES have a cause. Science was born precisely because the Christian belief in divine “laws” gave early modern scientists the stamina to search for underlying causes they were certain MUST exist. Had western Europe embraced atheism, as the Chinese embraced the mysterious Tao, science as we know it would never have been born.  Universities should recognize the role that religious belief has played in the intellectual development of mankind… rather than merely belittling it as atheism does.

How Chaos Theory Refutes the Blind Watchmaker of Richard Dawkins

I would like to briefly examine the claim, made by advocates of Neo-Darwinism and others, that advances in contemporary systems theory now give a rational explanation for the development of highly complex structures in the universe without recourse to the hypothesis of a Divine Creator.

Further, I will show that such claims, while purporting to be based on the evidence of empirical science, are, as certain postmodern philosophers of science have shown, metaphysical assertions. I will offer a few brief remarks on how advances in the mathematics of complex systems (illustrated by cybernetics and so-called chaos theory) actually can be reconciled with a theory of theistic evolution. Finally, I will discuss how the “critical realist” philosophy of the Canadian Jesuit cognitional theorist and theologian, Bernard J.F. Lonergan, offers a coherent response to the dogmatic scientism of the neo-Darwinists, on the one hand, and the simplistic “pseudo-science, relativism and nihilism” of postmodern philosophy on the other. You do not have to throw out the baby of logical coherence and rationality with the bath water (rightly critiqued by postmodern theorists) of metaphysical naturalism and scientism.

The Blind Watchmaker

Many contemporary Christians, especially those without training in mathematics, the metatheory of logic or the philosophy of science, are under the impression that the teleological argument for the existence of God has been definitively refuted by new developments in cybernetic systems theory, fractal geometry and evolutionary biology. This refutation is symbolized, in popular culture, by the widely influential book, The Blind Watchmaker, written in 1986 by the British zoologist Richard Dawkins. Dawkins purports, and is purported by many others, to have delivered an analytical coup de grâce to the classic “argument from design” as formulated, for example, by the 18th century theologian William Paley. Paley argued that, just as a watch is far too complex and functional to have simply sprung into existence by chance, and so provides indubitable evidence of the existence of an intelligent watchmaker, so, too, the universe’s far greater complexity and functionality are proof of purposeful design by a Divine Watchmaker.

Au contraire, says Dawkins. The complexity and apparent functionality of the universe only give the illusion of design and planning. In reality, the intricate complexity inherent in the universe’s systems is merely the result of blind, unconscious natural forces. “There may be good reasons for belief in God, but the argument from design is not one of them,” he writes.

“Despite all appearances to the contrary, there is no watchmaker in nature beyond the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special way. Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.”

Advanced Systems Theory and Evolution

Dawkins’s assertion, that random mutations alone explain what he calls “cumulative selection” – the gradual evolution of more and more complex biological structures – has seemingly been buttressed in recent years by rapid developments in systems theory, aided, of course, by the analytical tools used in creating new supercomputers . For our purposes, systems theory actually has two relevant components.

(1) Chaos theory, pioneered by such scientists as Edward Lorenz, is the scientific study of simple, nonlinear, dynamic systems that give the appearance of random activity but which are actually the result of simple deterministic forces. A practical example of chaos theory is fractal geometry and the study of snowflakes, which show how simple processes can give rise to apparently random variations of immense complexity.

(2) Cybernetics, developed by the Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann (d. 1957) and further developed by the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Ilya Prigogine at the University of Brussels, is the scientific study of what are called “self-organizing systems.” Self-organizing systems are complex assemblies that generate simple emergent behaviors. Practical applications of self-organizing systems studies can be found in the study of cellular automata (self-reproducing systems), neural networks (artificial learning), genetic algorithms (evolution), artificial life (agent behavior), fractals (mathematical art) and physics (spin glasses).

Interestingly enough, systems theory is not really the stalwart alley that advocates of a blind, random universe believe it to be. And in fact, many Neo-Darwinist theoreticians now recognize this. The inability of Darwinist and Neo-Darwinist theories to convincingly explain the origin of life from non-life is part of the reason why “self-organizing systems” are among the hottest topics in the philosophy of science. Further, analysts who study self-organizing systems often insist that they resist reductionist explanations, indeed that the properties that emerge are not explicable from a purely reductionist viewpoint. This is why systems theory has been so enthusiastically embraced by advocates of process theology, because it provides for both a scientific study of the complex processes of nature and yet does not reject the existence of a Divine Intelligence that set these processes in motion in the first place.

In other words, systems theory, like any branch of science, can be viewed as merely the rigorous, mathematically-based description of actual processes that exist in nature. It describes precisely how these processes work themselves out in practice – simple forces giving rise to seemingly random, complex structures (chaos theory) and complex systems giving rise to simple behaviors (self-organizing systems). Neo-Darwinists want to pretend that these bare empirical descriptions alone constitute a rational explanation for the complexity of the universe, but of course that goes far beyond the scope of systems theory as an empirical, descriptive discipline.

The Philosophical Temptation

That is why, when all is said and done, Dawkins, like many scientists before him, can’t resist abandoning science for philosophy. The crux of Dawkins’ argument in favor of a blind, random universe is not, as he imagines, scientific analysis but a metaphysical assertion.

Dawkins’ rejection of theism is actually the old objection that recourse to an original “first cause” is essentially a circular argument. After hundreds of pages in which he attempts to show how the complex structures of nature are the result of natural selection and random mutation, he must, in the end, resort to a philosophical argument. “To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer,” he says. “You have to say something like, ‘God was always there,’ and if you allow yourself that kind of lazy way out, you might as well just say, ‘DNA was always there,’ or ‘Life was always there,’ and be done with it.”

But Dawkins, like many scientists before him, is making a fundamental epistemological error here. The inability to explain one reality (e.g., God) does not, in and of itself, free one from the necessity of explaining other realities. If that were the case, then one should abandon science altogether. Advocates for the argument from design assert that it is illogical, and contrary to all observable phenomena, to assert that something can happen without a cause. That human beings cannot, at this stage, explain what caused God does not logically mean that we can rationally assert that things happen without a cause. If Dawkins can prove that a sophisticated robot factory exists that can produce, blindly, a perfectly made watch – and scientists and engineers can describe in detail the complex processes by which the robot factory produces these watches – that does not answer the obvious question of who or what made the robot factory. It merely begs the original question.

If anything, chaos theory and its related disciplines are only further strengthening this fundamental metaphysical axiom that all things must have a cause, showing how the apparent randomness of certain natural processes are not, in fact, random at all – but only appear to be random. Chaotic systems appear disorderly, perhaps random, but are not. Underneath their random behavior lies an order and a pattern that, with the aid of new supercomputers, can now be for the first time actually tracked mathematically. It was Lorenz’s discovery that, as his famous metaphor put it, the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Ecuador may affect weather patterns in Alaska. The Alaskan weather patterns may appear random, and without cause, but that is only because of the inability of human minds to know all of the deterministic processes involved.

Theistic Evolution

Advocates of Neo-Darwinism and so-called creation science rarely agree on anything, but they are often united in their contempt for what is called theistic evolution. Dawkins asserts that any attempt to bring God into the scientific picture is “transparently feeble” because “science” can show how organized complexity arises spontaneously. As we have seen, science does no such thing: It merely describes the processes by which complex systems arise, without explaining what set these processes in motion in the first place. Creationists, for their part, object that theistic evolution is, in effect, incoherent, an ungodly pact with the devil in which Christians compromise their fundamental belief in divine providence. Typically, theistic evolution is described as evolution guided by God. But, creationists argue, this is a contradiction in terms: If it is evolution, then it is a theory of change in which natural processes are governed by random chance. If it is theistic, then change occurs through divine guidance.

But this presents a false dichotomy. As some of the early “fundamentalist” theoreticians saw (A.C. Dizon, Louis Meyer, R.A. Torrey), there is nothing inherently anti-theistic in a theory of Creation by which God created the universe using evolutionary processes. Christians have long accepted the notion, in physics and chemistry, that there exist observable, seemingly deterministic laws of nature. What is the essential difference between laws which govern atomic particles and, say, the complex DNA encoding by which a single cell develops into a newborn child?

Moreover, it is not even clear, from a logical standpoint, why a theistic worldview could not accommodate elements of randomness as part of the universe’s physical processes – why, contrary to Einstein’s famous assertion, God could not play dice.

Purpose, design and planning do not, in and of themselves, rule out an element of randomness. Indeed, randomness can be part of a design and purpose. College officials may plan and organize a football game – to be played according to fixed, unvarying rules – and yet require, as part of their plan, that the first kick-off be determined by a random flip of a coin. God, for His part, could conceivably create a universe in which randomness can and does occur – not least in the free choices of spiritual beings not entirely bound by deterministic forces. In other words, even if Quantum Theory (to take one example) is somehow able to prove the existence of irreducibly probabilistic laws – in which random events simply occur apparently without a cause – that could still be seen within the boundaries of natural laws established by a Divine Creator.

This is what the Canadian Jesuit theologian Bernard J.F. Lonergan set out to show in his classic work Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. Lonergan thought through the implications of a shift from a classical to a statistical worldview, from a mechanistic cosmology to one in which universal order is constituted by emergent probability. Lonergan argued that a world process, governed by schemes of recurrence best described by the laws of probability, is still a world of design and purpose. Intelligence can both discern, and, ultimately, create, an underlying purpose in an aggregate of systems – a system of systems – that operate seemingly independently.

Systems theory and chaos theory have, in fact, proven Lonergan’s basic point: Systems are fundamentally “schemes of recurrence” that, while often appearing to be random, and which are best described by statistical probability, nevertheless exhibit patterns of cumulative complexity.

In the end, therefore, we begin where we started. Popularizing scientists such as Dawkins are justly proud of their new analytical tools. As a methodological starting point, science can and should proceed according to naturalistic presuppositions – lest every scientific mystery be explained away as “God does it.” The purpose of science is to describe the mechanisms discoverable in nature, to discern the patterns observable in what appears to be, to unaided human eyes, random or disorganized events. Chaos theory… and Ilya Prigogine’s self-organizing systems… have demonstrated just how unfathomably complex the processes of nature actually are.

But science, by its very nature, must recognize that its descriptive theories do not, ultimately, explain the origin of the universe. They only describe how the universe works, not how it came into existence or for what purpose. It is the task of the philosophy of religion, and systematic theology, to learn from new disciplines such as chaos theory and propose a new rational synthesis that takes into account the discoveries of these new disciplines and integrate them into classical Christian affirmations about creation. It is by no means clear that we live in a random universe, but if we do, Christian theology can show how the Creator can work His purposes through the “schemes of recurrence” of emergent probability just as He could under the old laws of classic Newtonian mechanics.

Relevance for Apologetics

Ultimately, Christian apologetics must face up to the intellectual challenges posed to it by the culture in which it is operating – and that culture, in the West at least, is dominated by increasingly sophisticated computer technologies and disciplines that call into question both the simple-minded determinism of 19th century modernist science and the “head in the sand” anti-science attitudes of postmodern “critics.” Young people, born with Nokia cell phones in their hands, and struggling with the challenges of mastering ever-more-complex technologies, know that postmodern philosophers are not serious when they deny the existence of objective facts.

Just as there are no atheists in fox holes, so, too, they are no sincere postmodern theoreticians in the cancer ward. When the postmodern theologian is sitting on the examination table, and her physician is explaining that she could have (a) a brain tumor requiring immediate surgery to save her life; or (b) a headache, requiring an aspirin, it’s a good bet that this postmodern theologian will NOT explain to the doctor that, in fact, she rejects the “foundationalist” premises of his science “practices,” that reality is really a social construct and that just because a tumor is “true for him,” it doesn’t follow that it is necessarily true for her. Instead, she will probably demand more tests – thus proving to everyone, including her students, that when push comes to shove she very much believes in objective reality over and above what she thinks about it. She even believes in absolute truth – because, if she takes an aspirin rather than undergoing surgery – and makes the WRONG choice – she will probably die. In her case, at least, the truth matters. Her life depends upon it.

In a similar way, a Christian apologetics that does not display at least as much conviction will not persuade anyone. That is why it is important that theologians today meet the challenges posed by contemporary science and not flee from them into a postmodern humanist ghetto. As I have attempted to argue in this paper, such flight is unnecessary. We have the intellectual resources to meet the challenges posed by contemporary systems theory, evolutionary biology and quantum physics. We do not have to accept either a simplistic naturalism, advocated by proponents of neo-modernism, nor a simplistic postmodern relativism and skepticism. While critiquing the excesses of 19th century modernist science, we do not have throw out the baby of truth with the bath water of scientism and naturalism.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and a Return to Eden

I just finished reading Leo Damrosch’s magisterial 2005 biography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius) and I’ve been thinking a lot about how Rousseau’s vision ties in, or doesn’t tie in, with the problems of modern urban society. (Full disclosure: My wife hates Rousseau because he forced his lifelong mistress, Therese Levasseur, to give up their five children to foundling homes and then had the temerity to instruct women on why they should breastfeed their children and raise them according to his precepts.)

Rousseau, born in Switzerland in 1712, was basically a professional vagabond and loafer who ran away from his home in Geneva at the age of 16, was almost entirely self-taught, and who earned his living through menial jobs, copying musical manuscripts and writing books that both titillated and outraged most of Europe. Rousseau’s basic argument is that “civilization,” far from being an engine of progress and advancement, is actually a corrosive, even destructive force.

Rousseau was original in that he went against what everyone believed about social advancement, the value of science and art, technology and so on. Things aren’t getting better and better as the Enlightenment philosophes taught; they actually getting worse and worse. And nothing is getting worse quite like human beings themselves — who, Rousseau taught, are slowly degenerating from centuries of living in cramped, ugly cities, bad nutrition and the demands that social life imposes.

Rousseau was thus the world’s first hippie.

He championed a more “natural” lifestyle free from the artificial constraints and absurd duties that society demands. Much of what the modern world believes about human beings — from the importance of child-centered education to an emphasis on “authenticity” and natural foods — comes from this strange and highly original thinker.

Although denounced by both Protestant and Catholic religious authorities for his departures from Christian orthodoxy, Rousseau remained, to the chagrin of his agnostic friends, an obstinate believer throughout his life; and his vision of an original “wholeness” and perfection in nature is a kind of secular version of the creation story in Genesis.

Rousseau, like Christian theology, believed that mankind was created good… but that, through the actions of men and women, that natural perfection became disfigured. Here is how Rousseau explains it in his strange book on education, Emile:

Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man. He forces one soil to nourish the products of another, one tree to bear the fruit of another. He mixes and confuses the climates, the elements, the seasons. He mutilates his dog, his horse, his slave. He turns everything upside down; he disfigures everything; he loves deformity, monsters. He wants nothing as nature made it, not even man; for him, man must be trained like a school horse; man must be fashioned in keeping with his fancy like a tree in his garden.

Powerful stuff! I’ve always thought that our (my!) modern obsession with health can be seen in a Rousseau-like light, as a kind of primal “therapy” to correct the imbalances, weaknesses and deformities that our indolent modern lifestyles have bequeathed to us.

Rousseau was well aware that his “natural man” may never have actually existed… and that in reality primitive life may have been the way Thomas Hobbes described it as being (brutish, nasty and short)… but he imagined what human beings might have been like free from the artificial conveniences of cities and bad food.

He imagined “natural man” as strong, free, healthy, honest and direct. As imagined in his strange romantic novel Julie, Rousseau wanted to help people to get back, in a sense, to Middle Earth, to a time before the furnaces of Mordor destroyed the natural beauty of Man and his environment. Who can’t sympathize, at least a little, with this primeval longing?

More later…

Biblical Heritage Leads to Freedom, Religious Toleration & Human Rights

The new atheist crusaders (such as Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins) like to pretend that the concept of universal human rights just popped out of thin air in the 17th and 18th century, the creation of the agnostic and atheist thinkers of the French Enlightenment.

But the truth is precisely the opposite: The recognition of universal human rights is one of the preeminent legacies of the Bible and the two religions, Judaism and Christianity, centered around it.

We forget that the great English political philosopher John Locke - widely credited with working out the first systematic theory of natural (human) rights in modern times - based most of his arguments on Biblical precedents.

In his First Treatise on Civil Government, which is more Biblical exegesis than philosophy, Locke argued that human rights are not privileges dispensed or withdrawn at the discretion of the State. Rather, they are gifts from God which no prince or potentate, no state or sovereign, may take away.

Thomas Jefferson relied primarily upon Locke’s insights, and not those of French Enlightenment thinkers, when penning the Declaration of Independence — which, for the first time, proposed founding a state upon this fundamental, God-given, Biblically-based idea: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…”

There is also some empirical evidence that respect for human rights grew out of the Biblical heritage when comparing the “freedom” rankings produced by the international democracy watchdog organization Freedom House - co-founded in 1941 by Eleanor Roosevelt — with the percentage of the population in each country ranked as Christian by the CIA. (The CIA designation refers more to “nominal” rather than “practicing” Christians but nevertheless is illuminating when it comes to the cultural context that produces civil liberties.)

Each year, Freedom House publishes its annual survey which attempts to measure the degree of democracy and freedom in every nation of the world, producing “scores” that represent the levels of political rights and civil liberties in each state and territory - from 1 (most free) to 7 (least free). Out of 194 countries and territories surveyed for 2006, 73 countries (38 percent) were rated Free, 54 (28 percent) were rated Partly Free, and 67 (34 percent) were rated Not Free. (This is a marked improvement over 1980 when only 23.9% of nations were rated Free… 24.8% were rated Partly Free… and 51.3% were Not Free.)

Among the countries ranked as the most free (1) and with the highest respect for civil liberties (1) are Australia (66% Christian), Austria (78.3%), the United States (79%), Canada (66%), Costa Rica (92%), Belgium (100%), Chile (100%), Denmark (98%), France (90%), Finland (86%), Germany (68%), Great Britain (71.6%), Ireland (93%), Iceland (93%), Norway (90.1%), Portugal (98%), Spain (94%), Switzerland (78.9%), Sweden (87%), Italy (90%) and New Zealand (79.5%).

These are not fixed absolutes, of course. There are exceptions.

Haiti, for example, is listed as 96% Christian by the CIA yet has among the very worst record for human rights and political freedoms. The same is true of Rwanda: Rated 93.6% Christian by the CIA, it scores a 6 out of 7 for political freedom and a 5 for civil liberties. Some Latin American countries, just emerging from years of civil war or military dictatorship, have higher Christian populations but somewhat restricted freedom. For example, El Salvador, which is 83% Roman Catholic, is rated “free” but only scores a 3 for civil liberties. Mexico, which is 95% Christian despite its historically anti-Christian government, is rated 2 for political freedom and civil liberties.

But at the opposite end of the spectrum, those countries with the smallest percentage of Christians are rated overwhelming “not free” by Freedom House and are among those with the worst ratings for civil liberties by far – but again, with a few interesting exceptions. Almost all of the Islamic countries have very small Christian populations and rank near the bottom when it comes to political freedom and civil rights - including Saudi Arabia (0% Christian and no political freedom), Sudan (5% Christian and no political freedom), Libya (3% Christian and no political freedom), Iran (1% Christian and no political freedom), and so on.

Current Communist regimes, such as China (4% Christian), Cambodia (0%), North Korea (0%), Laos (1.5%) and Vietnam (7.2%), also have very low Christian populations and virtually no freedom whatsoever.

Interestingly enough, although some of the former Communist states are still ranked as “not free” or “partly free,” including Russia (only 15% Christian) and Albania (30%); a number of former Communist countries with sizable Christian populations are now ranked near the top in terms of civil liberties and political liberty. Once these countries were freed of Soviet military domination, they quickly adopted laws protecting political liberty and basic human rights. These include Bulgaria (83.8% Christian), which scores in the top rank for political freedom and a 2 for civil liberties; Poland (91.2% Christian), which now scores 1 for both civil liberties and political freedom; Hungary (74% Christian), which now scores 1s as well; and Lithuania (85%), which now scores 1s; Romania (99%), which scores 2s;

There are also some countries that are neither Christian nor communist but which nevertheless score badly in terms of civil rights and political freedom, including Bhutan (0% Christian), rated 6 for civil liberties and 5 for political freedom; Nepal (0.2% Christian), rated 6 for political freedom and 5 for civil liberties; the Maldives (0% Christian), rated 6 for political freedom and 5 for civil liberties; Guinea (8%), rated 6 for political freedom and 5 for civil liberties; and Malaysia (7%), which scores 4s.

Finally, there are a handful of countries with extremely low Christian populations but which nevertheless score high in terms of political freedom and civil liberties. These are Israel (2%), which scores 1 for both political freedom and civil liberties; Japan (0.7%), which also scores 1s; Taiwan (4%), which scores 1s; South Korea (26%), which scores 1s; and India (2.3%), which scores 2s.

Clearly, therefore, a sizable Christian population is not a requirement for civil liberty and political freedom, but you could still make the case that those non-Christian societies that have a solid record on human rights and political liberty benefited from prolonged contact with, and influence by, Christian nations.

Israel is a special case because respect for fundamental human rights and political freedom is a preeminently Jewish cultural legacy, one that is implicit in the Torah and which Israel bequeathed to Christianity. Japan, of course, had its western-style democratic government more or less imposed upon it by U.S. Occupation Forces following its defeat in the Second World War - but what was imposed by force has now taken root and grown into a distinctly Japanese style of liberal democracy. India, which was a colony of Great Britain’s for more than 175 years, and which today still prides itself on its membership in the Commonwealth and its record as preeminent cricket champions, is today a federal republic with a president, prime minister, a bicameral Parliament and a legal system based on English common law. While only 2.3% Christian, India has adopted many of the cultural values of liberal democracy and retains, like other members of the Commonwealth, remarkably strong ties to Britain.

In conclusion, therefore, we can say that the enemies of Christianity, Judaism and the Bible have it exactly backwards: Far from being a threat to liberal democracy and political freedom, the biblical heritage is, in fact, the intellectual matrix out of which both arose.

The values and beliefs that permeate the Bible — the notion that all human beings are equal in the eyes of God and that no king or ruler may claim unquestioned obedience — were the proximate cause for the development of a religious theory of liberty and the recognition of universal human rights. It is certainly not true, as atheist crusaders claim and as the freedom rankings from Freedom House refute, that commitment to Biblical religion results in intolerance and oppression. In fact, with a few exceptions, the countries on earth that practice freedom of religion and social tolerance are those with large Christian or Jewish populations.

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