Category: Christian Doctrine

Modern Genetics and the Fall: Science and Religion in Collision?

John Farrell, a long-time friend of Maverick Philosopher, has an article in Forbes Magazine entitled Can Theology Evolve?  Early in his piece Farrell quotes biologist Jerry Coyne:

I’ve always maintained that this piece of the Old Testament, which is easily falsified by modern genetics (modern humans descended from a group of no fewer than 10,000 individuals), shows more than anything else the incompatibility between science and faith. For if you reject the Adam and Eve tale as literal truth, you reject two central tenets of Christianity: the Fall of Man and human specialness.

Commenting on this quotation, Farrell writes, "I don’t know about human specialness, but on the Fall he [Coyne] is correct."

Let's think about this.  If one rejects the literal truth of the Adam and Eve story, must one also reject the doctrine of the Fall?  We can and should raise this question just as theists while prescinding from the specifics of Christianity, whether Roman, Eastern Orthodox, or Protestant.  For if the issue is, as Coyne puts it above, one of the compatibility/incompatibility of "science and faith,"  then it won't matter which particular theistic faith we adopt so long as it includes a doctrine of the Fall of Man.

The question, then, is whether the rejection of the literal truth of the Adam and Eve story entails the rejection of the Fall of Man.  Coyne and Farrell say 'yes'; I say 'no.'  My reason for saying this is that man can be a fallen being whether or not  there were any original parents.  I will assume (and I believe it to be true) that evolutionary biology gives us the truth about the origins of the human species.  So I will assume that the Genesis account of human origins is literally false.  But what is literally false may, when taken allegorically, express profound truths.  One of these truths is that man is made in the image and likeness of God.  I explain the easily-misunderstood sense of imago Dei here.

But how can God create man in his image and likeness without interfering in the evolutionary processes which most of us believe are responsible for man's existence as an animal? As follows.

Man as an animal is one thing, man as a spiritual, rational, and moral being is another. The origin of man as an animal came about not through any special divine acts but through the evolutionary processes common to the origination of all animal species. But man as spirit, as a self-conscious, rational being who distinguishes between good and evil cannot be accounted for in naturalistic terms. (This can be argued with great rigor, but not now!)

As animals, we are descended from lower forms. As animals, we are part of the natural world and have the same general type of origin as any other animal species. Hence there was no Adam and Eve as first biological parents of the human race who came into existence directly by divine intervention without animal progenitors. But although we are animals, we are also spiritual beings, spiritual selves. I am an I, an ego, and this I-ness or egoity cannot be explained naturalistically. I am a person possessing free will and conscience neither of which can be explained naturalistically.

What 'Adam' refers to is not a man qua member of a zoological species, but the first man to become a spiritual self. This spiritual selfhood came into existence through a spiritual encounter with the divine self. In this I-Thou encounter, the divine self elicited or triggered man's latent spiritual self. This spiritual self did not  emerge naturally; what emerged naturally was the potentiality to hear a divine call which called man to his vocation, his higher destiny, namely, a sharing in the divine life. The divine call is from beyond the human horizon.

But in the encounter with the divine self which first triggered man's personhood or spiritual selfhood, there arose man's freedom and his sense of being a separate self, an ego distinct from God and from other egos. Thus was born pride and self-assertion and egotism. Sensing his quasi-divine status, man asserted himself against the One who had revealed himself, the One who simultaneously called him to a Higher Life but also imposed restrictions and made demands. Man in his pride then made a fateful choice, drunk with the sense of his own power: he decided to go it alone.

This rebellion was the Fall of man, which has nothing to do with a serpent or an apple or the being expelled from a physical garden located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Original Sin was a
spiritual event, and its transmission is not by semen, pace certain  Pauline passages, but by socio-cultural-linguistic means.

If we take some such tack as the above, then we can reconcile what we know to be true from natural science with the Biblical message.  Religion and science needn't compete; they can complement each other — but only if each sticks to its own province. In this way we can avoid both the extremes of the fundamentalists and literalists and the extremes of the 'Dawkins gang' (Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, Harris, et al.)

Our question was whether rejecting the literal truth of the Adam and Eve story entails rejecting the doctrine of the Fall.  The answer to this is in the negative since the mere possibility of an account such as the one  just given shows that the entailment fails.  Man's fallenness is a spiritual condition that can only be understood in a spiritual way.  It does not require that the whole human race have sprung from exactly two animal progenitors that miraculously came into physical existence by divine agency and thus without animal progenitors.  Nor does it require that the transmission of the fallen condition be biological in nature.

Can What Is Impossible to Achieve be an Ideal for Us?

In The Stoic Ideal, I stated that the Stoic ideal is "is for us impossible, and so no ideal at all."   The ideal of the Stoic sage is the attainment of a state of god-like impassibility by means of a retreat into the inner citadel of the self, a retreat  of such a nature that one is no longer affected — unless the sage wants to be affected — by anything not in his power.  My double-barreled thesis, aphoristically put, is that (i) Stoic impassibility is for us humans an impossibility, and thus (ii)  cannot be an ideal for beings of our constitution. In illustration of my thesis I adduced Jesus on the cross:  Jesus died in agony like a man, even though, if he was God, he could have realized the Stoic ideal.  Of course my argument was not the following:

1. Christianity is true and Jesus is our Exemplar
2. Jesus did not exhibit on the cross or elsewhere the behavior of a Stoic sage
Therefore
3. The Stoic ideal cannot be our ideal.

I did not argue this way because this is not the way philosophers qua philosophers argue. They argue from premises that do not rest on faith.  My argument was this:

4. What is not in our power to achieve cannot be an ideal for us.
5. Stoic impassibiity is not in our power to achieve.
Therefore
3. The Stoic ideal cannot be our ideal. 

The evidence for (5) is overwhelming.  I have never met a Stoic sage, and neither have you.  Some people are more stoic than others, and there are some Stoic philosophers about; but a philosopher is not the same as a sage.  A philosopher is a mere aspirant, a seeker of wisdom; a sage has reached the goal.

The background assumption, (4), is open to question. I have deployed this principle in other contexts, and it seems to me to be a sound one.  It is a generalization of the 'ought' implies 'can' principle:  if I morally ought to do X, then it must be in my power to do X.  Contrapositively, if it is not in my power to do X, then I have no moral obligation to do X.   My principle is a generalization of the familiar Kantian principle because it covers not only the obligatory but also the supererogatory.  So I call it the Generalized 'Ought' Implies 'Can' Principle.  Roughly, an action or state is supererogatory if it is good to do or achieve but not bad to leave undone or unachieved.   But an astute  reader took issue with my principle that genuine ideals must be achievable: 

I wonder, do you really want to discriminate against ideals that may be practically impossible for us to achieve?

Take anamartia. Errorlessness. Every time I go out on the tennis court I aim for an errorless set & match. Never gotten close. Every time I write a long document (under time pressure) I try for an errorless document, but there are always some mistakes & typos. I don't want to back off and accept a certain error rate as OK. It isn't OK. In principle and ideally I could be errorless and that's what I want to be. That ideal motivates me. I keep trying. I am not discouraged.

It is not clear that this is a counterexample to my principle.  The reader says that he "could be errorless" in his slinging of words or hitting of balls.  If that means that he has the ability to be errorless, then I say that errorlessness is a genuine ideal for him, even if he has never yet achieved errorlessness.  (Something can be achievable by a person even if it has never been achieved by that person.)  Surely my man ought to strive to perform to the very best of his abilities.  If 'ought'  is too strong, then I say his striving to perform to the best of his abilities is better than his not so striving.  Either way, errorlessness is a genuine ideal for him.  It is a genuine ideal for him because it is achievable by him.  But he said, "in principle and ideally."  Those are vague phrases in need of analysis.

To be errorless in principle could mean that a) there is no narrowly-logical or broadly-logical bar to his being errorless; b) there is no nomological bar to his being errorless; c) both (a) and (b).  Clearly, errorlessness is possible for my reader  in either or both of these senses.  Neither the laws of logic nor the laws of physics rule out his being errorless.  But satisfying the logical and nomological conditions  does not suffice to make errorlessness a genuine ideal for him.  For that more is needed: he must have the ability to be errorless and be in circumstances in which his abilities can be exercised.

So I stick to my claim that nothing can be a genuine ideal for a person unless it is concretely achievable by that person given his actual abilities and circumstances and not merely achievable 'in principle' by that person.

It may help if we distinguish two senses of 'ideal.'  In one sense of the term, any desirable goal that one sets for himself is an ideal.   But that is a use of 'ideal' so loose as to be useless.  Suppose I desire to slice two hours off my marathon time the next time I run that distance.  In one sense, that would be an 'ideal' time for me.  But in the strict sense in which I am using the word, such an accomplishment is not achievable by me and so no ideal for me at all.  But it may be an ideal for you.

I am tempted to insist  that (4) is a self-evident practical principle, as self-evident as the principle of which it is the generalization. I rather doubt that I can prove it using premises more evident than it, but talking around it a bit may help. 

Ideals must be realizable if they are to be ideals.  The ideal 'points' to a possible realization.  If that be denied then it is being denied that the ideal stands in relation to the real when the ideal has its very sense in contradistinction to the real.  At this point I could bring in analogies, though analogies seldom convince.  The possible is possibly actual.  If you say X is possible but not possibly actual, then I say you don't understand the notion of possibility.  Or consider dispositions.  If a glass is disposed to shatter if suitably struck, then it must be possible for it to shatter.  Analogously, if such-and-such is an ideal for a person, then it must be possible  — and not just logically or nomologically — for the person to realize that ideal.

I believe this is an important topic because having the wrong ideals is worse than having no ideals at all.  Many think that to be idealistic is good.  But surely it is not good without qualification.  Think of Nazi ideals, Communist ideals, leftist ideals and of their youthful and and earnest and sincere proponents.  Those are wrongheaded ideals, and some of them are wrongheaded because not realizable.  The classless society; the dictatorship of the proletariat; the racially pure society; the society in which everyone is made materially equal by the power of the state.  Ideals like these cannot be achieved, and if the attempt is made terrible evils will be the upshot.  The Commies broke a lot of eggs in the 20th century (100 million by some estimates) but still didn't achieve their fabulous and impossible omelet. 

Their ideals were not realizable, not warranted by the actual facts of human nature.

I suggest the same is true of the ideal of Stoic impassibility:  it is not warranted by the actual facts of human nature.  This is not to say that most of us would not be a lot better if we were more stoic and detached in our responses to what is not in our control.

The Stoic Ideal

The Stoic sage would be as impassible as God is impassible. But here's something to think about: Jesus on the cross died in agony like a man, even though, if he was God, he could have realized the Stoic ideal.

What is the lesson? Perhaps that to be impassible is for us impossible, and so no ideal at all.

Addendum 8/26:  Leo Mollica supplies this appropriate quotation  from Malebranche's The Search after Truth (Bk. II, Pt. iii, Ch. 4; tr. Lennon and Olscamp):

Epicurus was right in saying that offenses were bearable by a wise man. But Seneca was wrong in saying that wise men cannot even be offended…. Rather, let Christians learn from their Master that the impious are capable of hurting them, and that good men are sometimes subjected to these impious ones by the order of Providence. When one of the officers of the High Priest struck Jesus Christ, this wise man of the Christians, infinitely wise, and even as powerful as He is wise, confessed that this servant was capable of wounding him. He is not angered, He is not vengeful like Cato, He pardons, as having been truly wronged. He could have been vengeful and destroyed His enemies, but He suffered with a humble and modest patience injurious to no one, not even to this servant who had wronged Him.

On Temptation and the Perfection of Jesus

Joshua Orsak e-mails: 
Your recent posts on temptation got me thinking (again) about a problem I've wrestled with a long time. I'm a Christian minister and I've long thought about a tension between Jesus Christ's focus on intentions and sin in the internal life of man and the Christian conviction summed up in Hebrews 4:15 that Jesus was tempted in all the ways that we are but did not sin. I accept Jesus' injunction against (for instance) lusting after a person in one's heart and being angry at a person as sinful mental states or attitudes. I know from many of your past posts that you, too, are sympathetic with such a view. I believe that attitudes and intentions can be sinful as well as actions, and no doubt I get that from my Christianity.
 
But it seems to me that to be tempted is at least in part to (for instance) 'lust after a woman in your heart'. To be angry at someone is to be tempted to act against them. To be attracted to a woman and think about (say) cheating on my wife is to be tempted to cheat. But isn't that lusting after her in my heart? This creates a problem with the view that Jesus was sinless and indeed has often made me question that particular doctrine. How could Jesus be tempted 'in all ways' that we are and yet not sin, since it seems that to be tempted is to adopt, if only for a moment, the attitudes he labels as sinful? I've never come up with a satisfactory answer to this question, so I was wondering what you might think of it.
I had actually never thought of this.  The problem seems genuine and worth discussing for anyone who takes Christian orthodoxy seriously.  To throw the problem into sharp relief, I will formulate it as an inconsistent pentad:
 
1. Being fully human, Jesus was subject to every manner of temptation and was actually tempted.
2. To be tempted to do X is to harbor the thought of doing X.
3. Thoughts are morally evaluable: there are such things as evil (sinful) thoughts.
4.  If a person habitually harbors evil (sinful) thoughts,  then the person is sinful.
5. Being fully divine, Jesus was wholly sinless.
 
This quintet of propositions is logically inconsistent as is obvious from the fact that if  the first four are true, then the fifth must be false.
 
To solve the problem we must reject one of the pentad's limbs.  (1) and (5) are clear commitments of orthodox Christian theology and so cannot be abandoned by anyone who wishes to remain orthodox.  (3) has a NT basis, and so it cannot be abandoned either.  But (2) and (4) are rejectable.
 
As for (2), I can be tempted to do something like cheating my inexperienced customers without harboring the thought of doing so: I might just have the thought but then suppress it or dismiss it.
 
As for (4), even if  a married person dwells on the sinful thought of a trip to Las Vegas (where, we are told, "what happens there, stays there") to hook up (in the contemporary sexual sense) with an old flame, that by itself does not make the person a sinful person.  To be a sinful person one must habitually sin in thought, word, or deed.  Going on a drunk or two does not make one a drunkard; lying a few times does not make one a liar, etc. 
 
Note that (2) and (4) are necessary to derive a contradiction.  The problem can thus be solved by rejecting one or both of these propositions.  Rejecting (2) suffices to solve the problem.
 
In sum, Jesus' being tempted and his being perfectly sinless are consistent because, while Jesus had tempting thoughts, he did not entertain them with hospitality but rejected them.  "Get behind me, Satan, etc."
 

Pee Cee Christians

Do some Christians have a death wish?  Campus Crusade for Christ has changed its name, dropping 'crusade' and 'Christ.' 

And then they have the chutzpah to say they are not bowing to political correctness.

There is nothing wrong with unintentionally causing offense to people who take offense inappropriately.  If 'crusade' and 'Christ' are offensive to you, then that is your problem.  This thought is developed in Of Black Holes and Political Correctness.

And besides, Christianity is offensive to the natural man.  It is supposed to be.

Christian Stoicism

Richard Wurmbrand, From Torture to Triumph (Monarch, 1991), p. 5:

     A brother who had been terribly tortured by the Communist police
     shared the same prison cell with me and told the following incident:

     I once saw an impressive scene in a circus. A sharpshooter set out
     to demonstrate his skill. In the arena was his wife with a burning
     candle on her head. From a distance he shot the candle so that it
     fell, leaving his wife unharmed.

     Later I asked her, "Were you afraid?" She replied, "Why should I
     be? He aimed at the candle, not at me."

     I thought about this when I was under torture. Why should I be
     afraid of the torturers? They don't beat me. They beat my body. My
     'me,' my real being, is Christ. I was seated with him in the
     heavenly places. This — my real person — could not be touched by
     them.

From the Mail: Christianity and Judaism

Dear Mr. Vallicella,
 
I want to begin by thanking you yet again for your fantastic blog. Your recent posts on Osama Bin Laden, the correct response to his death, and on evidentialism have been absolutely superb. I have linked to a great many of your posts in recent days on my facebook and I sing your praises regularly.
 
Thank you so much; that explains the uptick in social media traffic.
 
I wanted to bring up a couple of issues on your recent commentary on Prager's reaction to Bin Laden's death, and particularly your comments on the relationship between Judaism and Christianity.
 
It is important to remember that Judaism as it is practiced today is NOT the way it has always been practiced. And first century Judaism in particular was very diverse indeed. One of the biggest challenges for Biblical interpreters has been archeological evidence that counters the view of Judaism presented in the Gospels and in Paul's letters as they are normally interpreted. Judaism was far more varied and diverse than what we once believed, at the time of Jesus and Paul. Many issues we think of as settled in Judaism were up for grabs, and arguments about and around them were common. One was the issue of intention verses action.
 
There are many similarities between Jesus' focus on the inner self and some parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls, for instance. So thoughts could be sinful or righteous, in some sectors of 1st Century Judaism, at least. Christianity is the triumph of those sectors of Judaism, and not a new religious idea 'superseding' Judaism. I'm just not sure your characterization of Christianity 'superseding' Judaism is correct on the issue you and Peter were arguing about. I certainly do think Christianity and Judaism are possessed of important differences and Christianity gets some things right that Judaism gets wrong. But in the case of whether thoughts can be sinful, I think it is more accurate to say that Christianity is the triumph of a certain sector of Judaism.
 
That's an excellent objection, and you may be right.  So it is not that Christianity supersedes the whole of Judaism on the issue Peter and I were discussing, but that Christianity develops and champions a strand of thought that is already present in Judaism.  Now that I think of it, that is more plausible than what I was suggesting.
 
My main concern, though, was to figure out why Peter and I disagree about the moral evaluability of mere thoughts, and why Prager and I disagree about the moral appropriateness of rejoicing over a man's violent death — even when the man in question is a mass murderer who was justly executed.
 
In light of this concern, I think there is some justification in viewing Judaism as a block and contrasting Christianity with it.
 
I think a criticism that can be leveled at Prager could be that there is a bit of literalism in his view. His proof-texting approach just doesn't make much sense to me, at least in this case. Most Biblical scholars believe, for instance, that the story of the crossing of "The Red Sea" (which is probably not the right translation for the name of the body of water), is several older stories edited together. When those stories are distentangled, some versions don't even include the death of Pharaoh's men. There are a lot of sentiments expressed in the Old Testament that I doubt Rabbis would readily suggest we can rightly hold.
 
So these are just some thoughts that shot through my head when I read that post, which like so much of what you write, really got the juices flowing.
 
Peace and Blessings
Joshua Orsak

The God of Christianity and the God of Islam: Same God?

One morning an irate C-Span viewer called in to say that he prayed to the living God, not to the mythical being, Allah, to whom Muslims pray. The C-Span guest made a standard response, which is correct as far as it goes, namely, that Allah is Arabic for God, just as Gott is German for God. He suggested that adherents of the three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) worship the same God under different names. No doubt this is a politically correct thing to say, but is it true?

Our question, then, is precisely this:  Does the normative Christian and the normative Muslim worship numerically the same God, or numerically different Gods?  (By 'normative Christian/Muslim' I mean an orthodox adherent of his faith who understands its content, without subtraction and without addition of private opinions.)  Islam and Christianity are both monotheistic.  So if Christian and Muslim worship different Gods, then one is worshipping  a nonexistent God, or, if you prefer, is failing to worship the true God.

1. Let's start with the obvious: 'Allah' is Arabic for God.  So if an Arabic-speaking Coptic Christian refers to God, he uses 'Allah.'   And if an Arabic-speaking Muslim refers to God, he too uses 'Allah.'  From the fact that both Copt and Muslim use 'Allah' it does not follow that they are referring to the same God, but it also does not follow that they are referring to numerically different Gods.  So we will not make any progress with our question if we remain at the level of words.  We must advance to concepts.

2. We need to distinguish between the word for God, the concept (conception) of God, and God.  God is not a concept, but there are concepts of God and, apart from mystical intuition, we have no access to God except via our concepts of God.  Now it is undeniable that the Christian and Muslim conceptions of God partially overlap.  The following is a partial list of what is common to both conceptions:

a. There is exactly one God.
b.  God is the creator of everything distinct from himself.
c.  God is transcendent: he is radically different from everthing distinct from himself.
d. God is good.

Now if the Christian and Muslim conceptions of God were identical, then we would have no reason to think that Christian and Muslim worship different Gods.  But of course the conceptions, despite partial overlap, are not identical. Christians believe in a triune God who became man in Jesus of Nazareth.  Or to put it precisely, they believe in a triune God the second person of which became man in Jesus of Nazareth.  This is the central and indeed crucial (from the Latin, crux, crucis, meaning cross) difference between the two faiths.  The crux of the matter is the cross. 

3. Now comes the hard part, which is to choose between two competing views:

V1: Christian and Muslim worship the same God, but one of them has a false belief about God, whether it be the belief that God is unitarian or the belief that God is trinitarian.

V2:  Christian and Muslim worship different Gods precisely because they have different conceptions of God.  So it is not that one of them has a false belief about the one God they both worship; it is rather that one of them does not worship the true God at all.

There is no easy way to decide rationally between these two views.  We have to delve into the philosophy of language and ask how reference is achieved.  How do linguistic expressions attach or apply to extralinguistic entities? How do words grab onto the (extralinguistic) world? In particular, how do nominal expressions work? What makes my utterance of 'Socrates' denote Socrates rather than someone or something else?  What makes my use of 'God' (i) have a referent at all and (ii) have the precise referent it has?

4.  It is reasonable to hold, with Frege, Russell, and many others, that reference is routed through, and determined by, sense: an expression picks out its object in virtue of the latter's satisfaction of a
description associated with the referring expression, a description that unpacks the expression's sense. If we think of reference in this way, then 'God' refers to whatever entity, if any, that satisfies the definite description encapsulated in 'God' as this term is used in a given linguistic community.

Given that God is not an actual or possible object of (sense) experience, this seems like a reasonable approach to take.  The idea is that 'God' is a definite description in disguise so that 'God' refers to whichever entity satisfies the description associated wth 'God.'    Now consider two candidate definite descriptions, the first corresponding to the Mulsim conception, the second corresponding to the Christian.

D1: 'the unique x such that x is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, created the world ex nihilo and is unitarian'

D2: 'the unique x such that x is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, created the world ex nihilo, and is triune.'

Suppose that reference is not direct, but routed through sense, or mediated by a description, in the manner explained above.   It is easy to see that no one entity can satisfy both (D1) and (D2).  So if reference is routed through sense, then Christian and Muslim cannot be referring to the same being.  Indeed, one of them is not succeeding in referring at all.  For if God is triune, nothing in reality answers tothe Muslim's conception of God.  And if God is unitarian, then nothing in reality answers to the Christian conception.

And so, contrary to what Miroslav Volf maintains, the four points of commonality in the Christian and Muslim conceptions listed above do NOT "establish the claim that in their worship of God, Muslims and Christians refer to the same object." (Allah: A Christian Response, HarperCollins 2011, p. 110.)  For if reference to God is mediated by a conception which includes the subconcept triune or unitarian, the reference cannot be to the same entity.

A mundane example (adapted from Kripke) will make this more clear.  Sally sees a handsome man at a party standing in the corner drinking a clear bubbly liquid from a cocktail glass.  She turns to her companion Nancy and says, "The man standing in the corner drinking champagne is handsome!"  Suppose the man is not drinking champagne, but sparkling water instead.  Has Sally succeeded in referring to the man or not?  Argumentative Nancy,  who knows that no alcohol is being served at the party, and who also finds the man handsome, says, "You are not referring to anything: there is no man in the corner drinking champagne.  The man is drinking sparkling water.  Nothing satisfies your definite description.  There is no one man we both admire.   Your handsome man does not exist, but mine does." 

Now in this example what we would intuitively say is that Sally did succeed in referring to someone using a definite description even though the object she succeeded in referring to does not satisfy the description.  Intuitively, we would say that Sally simply has a false belief about the object to which she is successfully referring, and that Sally and Nancy are referring to and admiring the very same man.

But note how this case differs from the God case.  Both women see the man in the corner.  But God is not an object of possible (sense) experience, of Kant's moegliche Erfarhung.  Hence the reference of 'God' cannot be nailed down perceptually.  And so it seems that what we succeed in referring to is whatever satisfies the definite description that unpacks our conception of God.

5.  My tentative conclusion, then, is that (i) if we accept a description theory of names, the Christian and Muslim do not refer to the same being when they use 'God' or 'Allah'  and (ii) that a description theory of names is what we must invoke given the nonperceivability of God.

If, on the other hand, 'God' is a logically proper name whose   meaning is exhausted by its reference, a Kripkean rigid designator,  rather than a Russellian definite description in disguise, then what would make 'God' or a particular use of 'God' refer to God?

A particular use is presumably caused by an earlier use. But eventually there must be an initial use. Imagine Moses on Mt. Sinai. He has a profound mystical experience of a being who conveys to his
mind such locutions as "I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt not have false gods before me." Moses applies 'God' or 'Yahweh' to the being. But what makes the name the name of the being? One may say: the fact that the being or an effect of the being causes the use of the name. 

But a certain indeterminacy seems to creep in if we think of the semantic relation of referring as explicable in terms of causation. For is it the (mystical) experience of God that causes the use of 'God'? Or is it God himself who causes the use of 'God'? If the former, then 'God' refers to an experience had by Moses and not to God. Surely God is not an experience. But how can God be the cause of Moses' use of 'God'? Causes are events, God is not an event, so God cannot be a cause.

If these difficulties could be ironed out and a causal theory of names is tenable, and if the causal chain extends from Moses down to Christians and (later)to Muslims, then a case could be made that Jews, Christians, and Muslims are all referring to the same God when they use 'God' and such equivalents as 'Yahweh' and 'Allah.'

So it looks like there is no easy answer to the opening question.  It depends on the resolution of intricate questions in the philosophy of language. 

Easter Morning Thoughts on 1 Corinthians 15:14

Biblia Vulgata: Si autem Christus non resurrexit, inanis est ergo praedicatio nostra, inanis est et fides vestra.

King James: And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.

Orthodox Christianity stands and falls with a contingent historical fact, the fact of the resurrection of Christ from the dead. If he rose from the dead, he is who is said he was and can deliver on his   promises. If not, then the faith of the Christian inanis est, is vain, void, empty, delusional.

Compare Buddhism. It too promises salvation of a sort. But the salvation it promises is not a promise by its founder that rests on the existence of the founder or on anything he did. For Christianity, history is essential, for Buddhism inessential. The historical Buddha is not a savior, but merely an example of a man who saved himself by realizing his inherent Buddha-nature. The idea of the Buddha is enough; his   historical existence unnecessary.  'Buddha,' like 'Christ,' is a title: it means 'the Enlightened One.'  Buddhism does not depend either on the existence of Siddartha, the man who is said to have become the Buddha, or on Siddartha's  becoming the Buddha.

Hence the Zen saying, "If you see the Buddha, kill him." I take that to mean that one does not need the historical Buddha, and that  cherishing any piety towards him may prove more hindrance than help.  Buddhism, as the ultimate religion of self-help, enjoins each to become a lamp unto himself. What is essential is the enlightenment that one either achieves or fails to achieve on one's own, an   enlightenment which is a natural possibility of all. If one works diligently enough, one can extricate oneself from the labyrinth of samsara.  Oner can achieve the ultimate goal on one's own, by one's own power.  There is no need for supernatural assistance.

Is this optimism justified? I remain open to Christianity's claims because I doubt the justification of self-help optimism. One works and works on oneself but makes little progress. That one needs help is   clear. That one can supply it from within one's own resources is unclear.  I know of no enlightened persons.  But I know of plenty of frauds, spiritual hustlers, and mountebanks.

Both Buddhism and Christianity are life-denying religions.  But while Christianity denies this life for the sake of a higher life elsewhere and elsewhen, Buddhism denies this life for the sake of extinction.  The solution to the problem of suffering is to so attenuate desire and aversion that one comes to the realization that one never existed in the first place.  Some solution.  And yet there is much to learn from Buddhism and its practices.  They are the two highest religions.  The two lowest are the religions of spiritual materialism, Judaism and Islam, with Islam at the very bottom of the hierarchy of great religions. 

Islam is shockingly crude, as crude as Buddhism is overrefined.  The Muslim is promised all the crass material pleasures on the far side that he is forbidden here, as if salvation consists of eating and drinking and endless bouts of  sexual intercourse.  Hence my term 'spiritual materialism.'  'Spiritual positivism' is also worth considering.  The Buddhist is no positivist but a nihilist: slavation though annihilation.

Admittedly, this is quick and dirty, but it is important to cut to the bone of the matter from time to time with no mincing of words.  For details see my Buddhism category.

Note: By 'orthodox' I do not have in mind Eastern Orthodoxy, but a Christianity that is not mystically interpreted, a Christianity in which, for example, the resurrection is not interpreted to mean the   attainment of Christ-consciousness or the realization of Christ-nature.

Good Friday: At the Mercy of a Little Piece of Iron

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, tr. Craufurd, Routledge 1995, p. 75:

The infinite which is in man is at the mercy of a little piece of  iron; such is the human condition; space and time are the cause of  it. It is impossible to handle this piece of iron without suddenly reducing the infinite which is in man to a point on the pointed  part, a point on the handle, at the cost of a harrowing pain. The  whole being is stricken in the instant; there is no place left for God, even in the case of Christ, where the thought of God is not  more at least [at last?] than that of privation. This stage has to  be reached if there is to be incarnation. The whole being becomes privation of God: how can we go beyond? After that there is only the resurrection. To reach this stage the cold touch of naked iron  is necessary.

'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' There we have the real   proof that Christianity is something divine. (p. 79)

Christianity is the ultimate in "heterogeneity to the world," to borrow a phrase from Kierkegaard.  God becomes man in a miserable outpost of the Roman empire, fully participates in the miseries of human embodiment, is rejected by the religious establishment and is sentenced to death by the political authorities, dying the worst sort of death the brutal Romans could devise.  Humanly absurd but divinely true?

The Christian ‘Anatta Doctrine’ of Lorenzo Scupoli

Buddhism and Christianity both enjoin self-denial. But Buddhism is more radical in that it connects self-denial with denial of the very existence of the self, whereas Christianity in its orthodox versions   presupposes the existence of the self: Christian self-purification falls short of self-elimination. Nevertheless, there are points of comparison between the 'No Self' doctrine of Buddhism and the   Christian doctrine of the self.

In his Combattimento Spirituale (1589), Lorenzo Scupoli writes:

     You my mind, are not mine: you were given me by God. Neither are
     the powers active within me — will, with its energy – mine. Nor
     does my feeling, my ability to enjoy life and all my surroundings
     belong to me. My body with all its functions and requirements,
     which determine our physical well-being, is not mine either….And
     I myself belong not to me, but to God. (Unseen Warfare, St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1995, p.   172)

Apart from the references to God, this meditation of Scupoli, of which the above is merely an excerpt, bears a striking resemblance to the one contained in the Anattalakkhana Sutta. Buddha there examines each of the khandas, body, feeling, perception, etc., and concludes with respect to each of them that "This is not mine. This is not my self. This is not what I am." In Scupoli we encounter virtually the   same litany: body, feeling, mind . . . of all of which it is true that "This is not mine, etc." Of course, nothing depends on the exact taxonomy of personality-constituents. The point is that however one classifies the constituents of personality, no one of them, nor any combination of them, is veridically identifiable as one's very self. I say 'veridically,' since we do as a matter of fact (falsely) identify   ourselves with all manner of item both within us (feelings, memories, etc.) and without us (property, progeny, etc.) But these false self-identifications are part of what our ignorance/sinfullness consists in.

Thus Scupoli (who I take to be a representative Christian, and who is of interest here only as such) and Buddha agree with respect to the (negative) thesis that nothing in one's experience is veridically identifiable as one's very self. Thus nothing that we ordinarily take to be ourselves (our bodies, our thoughts, feelings, memories, etc.)  can in truth be one's self. But there is also similarity in their reasoning. One way Buddha reasons is as follows. If x (body, feeling, perception, etc.) were my very self, or were something that belonged to me, then I would have complete control over x. But it is evident that no x is such that I have complete control over x. Therefore, no x is either my self or anything that belongs to me. This could be called the 'complete control' argument. Scupoli has something similar:
     Let us remember that we can boast only of something which is a
     direct result of our own will and is done by us independently of
     anything else. But look how our actions proceed. How do they begin?
     Certain circumstances come together and lead to one action or
     another; or a thought comes to our mind to do something, and we do
     it. But the concurrence of circumstances does not come from us;
     nor, obviously, is the thought to do something our own; somebody
     suggests it. Thus, in such cases, the origin or birth of the
     thought to do something cannot or should not be an object of
     self-praise. Yet how many actions are of this kind? If we examine
     them conscientiously, we shall find that they almost all start in
     this way. So we have nothing to boast of. (174)

This passage suggests the following argument: One cannot justifiably take pride in anything (an action, a physical or mental attribute, etc.) unless one originates it 'independently of anything else.' But   nothing is such that one originates it in sublime independence of all else. Therefore, one cannot justifiably take pride in anything.

But does this amount to an argument against the self? It does, given the Buddhist assumption, crucial to the reasoning in the Anattalakkhana Sutta, that a self is an entity that has complete control over itself. Such a self could justifiably take pride in its actions and attributes. For it would be their fons et origo. So if one cannot justifiably take pride in any of one's actions or attributes, then one is not a self. Pride is one of the seven deadly sins  precisely because the proud person arrogates to himself a status he lacks, namely, the status of being a self in the sense in which this term is employed in the Anattalakkhana Sutta.

In sum, both Buddha and Scupoli are claiming that no one of us is a self for the reason than no one of us is in complete control of any of his actions or attributes. No one of the things which one normally takes to be oneself or to belong to oneself (e.g., one's body, habits, brave decisions, brilliant insights, etc.) is such that one has originated it autonomously and independently.

The main difference between Buddha and Scupoli, of course, is that the latter maintains that God gives us what we do not have under our control. Thus for Scupoli, what we do not have from ourselves, we have from another, and so have. But for Buddha, what we do not have from ourselves, we do not have at all.

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust

"Remember, man, thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. This warning, from the Catholic liturgy for Ash Wednesday, is based on Genesis 3, 19: In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane, donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es: quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.

How real can we and this world be if in a little while we all will be nothing but dust and ashes?

     Our plesance here is all vain glory,
     This fals world is but transitory,
     The flesche is brukle, the Feynd is slee;
     Timor mortis conturbat me.

     No stait in Erd here standis sicker;
     As with the wynd wavis the wicker,
     Wavis this wardlis vanitie;
     Timor mortis conturbat me.

     (William Dunbar c. 1460 — c. 1520, from "Lament for the Makers.")

     Here lie I by the chancel door;
     They put me here because I was poor.
     The further in, the more you pay,
     But here lie I as snug as they.

     (Devon tombstone.)

     Here lies Piron, a complete nullibiety,
     Not even a Fellow of a Learned Society.

     Alexis Piron, 1689-1773, "My Epitaph"

     Why hoard your maidenhead? There'll not be found
     A lad to love you, girl, under the ground.
     Love's joys are for the quick; but when we're dead
     It's dust and ashes, girl, will go to bed.

     (Asclepiades, fl. 290 B.C., tr. R. A. Furness)

     The world, perhaps, does not see that those who rightly engage in
     philosophy study only death and dying. And, if this be true, it
     would surely be strange for a man all through his life to desire
     only death, and then, when death comes to him, to be vexed at it,
     when it has been his study and his desire for so long.

     Plato, Phaedo, St. 64, tr. F. J. Church

Kerouac October Quotation #30: The Holes in Jesus’ and Buddha’s Bags

Vanity of Duluoz, Book Thirteen, X, pp. 274-276, ellipses and bold emphases added:

Kerouac again.  .  .  .Mad Dog creation has a side of compassionate mercy in it . . . we have seen the brutal creation send us the Son of Man who, to prove that we should follow His example of mercy, brotherly love, charity, patience, gave Himself up without murmur to be sacrificed.  Otherwise we would have taken his example lightly.  Seeing that He really meant it right down to the cross, we are impressed.  [. . .] But we cant be redeemed "unless we believe," it says, or follow His example.  And who can do that?  Not even Count Leo Tolstoy who still had to live in a "humble hut" but on his own lands even tho he had signed over his "own lands" of course to his own family, and had the gall then, from that earthly vantage point of vaunt, to write The Kingdom of God is Within You.  If I, myself, for instance, were to try to follow Jesus' example I'd first have to give up my kind of drinking, which prevents me from thinking too much(like I'm doing in awful pain this morning), and so I'd go insane and go on public debt and be a pain to everybody in the blessed "community" or "society."  And I'd be furthermore bored to death by the knowledge that there is a hole even in Jesus' bag: and that hole is, where He says to the rich young man "Sell everything you have and give it tothe poor, and follow me," okay, where do we go now, wander and beg our food off poor hardworking householders?  and not even rich at that like that rich young man's mother? but poor and harried like Martha?  Martha had not "chosen the better part" when she cooked and slaved and cleaned house all day while her younger sister Mary  sat in the doorway like a modern beatnik with "square" parents talking to Jesus about "religion" and "redemption" and "salvation" and all that guck.  Were Jesus and young Mary McGee waiting for supper to be ready? While talking about redemption?  How can you be redeemed when you have to pass food in and out of your body's bag day in and day out, how can you be "saved" in a situation so sottish and flesh-hagged as that? (This was also the hole in Buddha's bag: he more or less said "It's well for Bodhisattva sages and Buddhas to beg for their food so as to teach the ordinary people of the world the humility of charity," ugh I say. No, the springtime bud I talked about with rain dew on its new green, it's the laugh of a maniac.  Birth is the direct cause of all pain and death, and a Buddha dying of dysentery at the age of eighty-three had only to say, finally, "Be ye lamps unto thyselves" — last words –"work out thy salvation with diligence," heck of a thing to say as he lay there in an awful pool of dysentery.  Spring is the laugh of a maniac, I say.

Schall on Belloc: Islam as a Christian Heresy

This is a thought-provoking essay. Excerpts with a bit of commentary:

Belloc’s thesis is that Islam began as a Christian heresy which retained the Jewish side of the faith, the Oneness and Omnipotence of God, but denied all the Christian aspects – the Incarnation, the divinity of Christ, who, as a result, became just a prophet. The denial of the church, the priesthood, and the sacraments followed. Islam succeeded because, in its own terms, it was a simple religion. It was easy to understand and follow its few doctrinal and devotional points.

Question: Given that Islam is much closer to Judaism than is Christianity, what explains the murderous ferocity of the Muslim hatred for Jews? One part of the explanation must be in terms of envy. Muslims feel profoundly diminished in their sense of worth by Jewish success and well-being. The Jews have made outstanding contributions to culture out of all proportion to their sparse numbers, whereas the hordes of Muslims have languished for the last four hundred years in backwardness and negativity. What else but envy could motivate the wild cries for the extermination of Jews and the destruction of Israel? Ahmadinejad, you will have noticed, is not a Palestinian, but an Iranian. When non-Palestinian Muslims call for the elimination of Israel, and prepare for decades of suicidal jihad, their 'beef' cannot be a relatively minor land dispute between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs.

Unlike Stanley Jaki, Belloc did not think that there was something in Islamic theology that militated against Islam’s ever becoming a major industrial or military-technological power by itself. (133). The fact that it never accomplished this transformation was for Belloc merely an accident, whereas for Jaki it was rooted in the relation of an absolute notion of divine will to its consequent denial of stable secondary causes. Jaki sees much of the rage in modern Islam to be due to its failure or inability to modernize itself by its own powers.6 Most of the weapons and equipment found in Muslim states are still foreign made, usually inferior, and paid for with oil money.

Islam apparently takes an occasionalist view of divine omnipotence. God is all-powerful not just in the sense that he has the power to do all, but in the sense that he exercises all the power that gets exercised. Thus secondary causes — so-called to distinguish them from the causa prima — are not causes at all, strictly speaking, but mere occasions for the exercise of divine causality, the only causality there is. If so, then everything is up to God, and nothing is up to secondary 'causes' including ourselves. When I lived in Turkey, I was struck by the prevalence of the belief in kismet, or fate. It is reflected in driving habits. Turks are arguably the worst drivers in the world. It is as if they don't believe that what happens on the road is largely up to them: kismet rules. When your number's up, it's up, and it doesn't matter what you do.

The very existence of Christianity is a blasphemy in Muslim terms if we insist on the truth of the Incarnation, that God became man.

In the eyes of Islam, Christianity is a form of idolatry: a mere man is identified with God. Schall quotes Belloc:

Mohammedanism was a heresy: that is the essential point to grasp before going any further. It began as a heresy, not as a new religion. It was not a pagan contrast with the Church: it was not an alien enemy. It was a perversion of Christian doctrine. Its vitality and endurance soon gave it the appearance of a new religion, but those who were contemporary with its rise saw it for what it was — not a denial, but an adaptation and misuse, of the Christian thing (76-77). Though it is not often attended to, saying Mass itself is forbidden in Saudi Arabia, even in private, and, even when permitted in other lands, it is restricted and constantly hemmed in by various formal and informal practices. Freedom of religion is not a concept that rises naturally in Muslim theory but it is a Western idea, even largely a modern Western idea. In Islam, the very practice of freedom of religion is thought to be a species of not giving submission to Allah, even where some non-Muslim churches are permitted.  Belloc thought that the Mohammedan temper was not tolerant. It was, on the contrary, fanatical and bloodthirsty. It felt no respect for, nor even curiosity about, those from whom it differed. It was absurdly vain of itself, regarding with contempt the high Christian culture about it. It still so regards it even today (90). The practical compromise in this situation was to allow the Christians to remain but within very confined areas and occupations. They had to pay a tribute. Many were gradually absorbed into Islam (91).