Category: Religion

Why Science Will Never Put Religion Out of Business

If science can eventually provide what religion promises, then science will eventually put religion out of business.  But can science provide what religion promises?  I will argue that it cannot.  My argument will  not assume that any religion, or any combination of religions, is true, wholly or in part.  Perhaps no actual or possible religion makes contact with reality at any point.  Perhaps every actual or possible religion is nothing but an elaborate expression of human neediness, of human wishes, dreams, hopes, and fears. Still, there remains the fact of these fears and hopes, and the question whether anything can assuage the former and fulfill the latter.  I will begin by listing the main types of problem that religion addresses, and then ask whether current or future science, or rather, a technology that implements current or future science, can supply the needs that religions cater to.

The Problems Religion Addresses

1. The first category of problems includes the facts that shook young prince Siddartha to his core, moved him to forsake the royal compound with its impressive perquisites and blandishments and set him on the austere path to becoming Buddha, the supremely enlightened one who saw to the bottom of our predicament and saw the way out (as his followers believe), and went on to found Buddhism.  What shook Siddartha and shocked him deeply were sickness, old age, death, and everything connected with them, everything that causes them and everything they bring in their train. We can lump all this under the rubric of natural evil: suffering and misery in all its forms that arises from natural causes.  For Buddha the fundamental fact and the fundamental problem was that of suffering, which is why the First Noble Truth, which is not only first in the order of presentation but also first in the order of importance, is "All is suffering," sarvam dukkham.

2. The second category is that of moral evil.  These are the problems that come into the world via the exercise of free will, from the merest unkindness on up to the horrors of rape, torture, slavery, mass murder, abuse of power by governments and their agents, as well as by private individuals, and all the crimes that fill the history books and the pages of every newspaper in every corner of the globe every day.  Here belong all the ills that derive not just from weakness of will, but even more from perversity of will. 

3. The third category is that of moral and intellectual blindness, ignorance, and delusion, for example, the delusional thinking of someone who believes that happiness will be his if he succeeds in murdering his wife, collecting on a life insurance policy, and getting away with the crime.

4. Under the fourth rubric I collect all the problems associated with the ontological deficiency of the world of our ordinary experience.  All of the deeper heads in the East, the Near East and the West from Buddha and Ecclesiastes to Plato and Plotinus to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche have been struck and shocked by the vanity of existence and the transitoriness of life.  "I am aggrieved by the transitoriness of things," wrote Nietzsche to his friend Overbeck.  A homo religiosus with the bladed intellect of a skeptic, Nietzsche couldn't bring himself to accept any traditional religion.  And yet the religious need was alive in him, and it was that need that gave rise to his peculiar scheme of Redemption in the form of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same. 

Connected with the vanity of existence and the transience of life is the apparent meaninglessness of our lives.  Albert Camus famously argued in the The Myth of Sisyphus that the one and only serious philosophical problem is that of suicide.  Does the Absurd demand suicide as the only appropriate response?  That was his question.  He characterized the Absurd as the disproportion between the human craving for meaning and the universe's apparent meaninglessness.  What we want it cannot provide.  It is not that the universe is indifferent to us — indifference, after all, is a human attitude which presupposes concern and is a privation thereof — but beyond indifference and interestedness. The silence of ther universe is not a privation of speech, but something deeper — and worse.

We suffer from a lack of existential meaning, a meaning that we cannot supply from our own resources since any subjective acts of meaning-positing are themselves (objectively) meaningless. Connected with this is our deep existential insecurity which erupts into consciousness from time to time in the form of the anxiety, anguish, dread, Angst that Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre described.  This is not an anxiety about this or that; its intentional object is global, our very Being-in-the-world in Heideggerian jargon.  This is experienced as unheimlich.  Anxiety reveals that we are not at home in the world.   We feel desolation.  I feel fear for an intramundane being, ein innerweltliches Seiende; I feel Angst for my very In-der-Welt-sein, which is precarious desolate and lived in the face of das Nichts. (The connection between original sin and dread/anxiety is explored by Kierkegaard in The Concept of Dread.)

I don't claim that the above catalog is complete or even very well constructed: #4 bleeds back into #1 especially if suffering is taken in the radical Buddhist sense in which all-pervasive dukkha (suffering, ill, unsatisfactoriness) is undepinned by anatta (selflessness, insubstantiality) and anicca (radical, Heraclitean impermanence).  For the Buddhist, suffering goes deep, rooted as it is in the very ontological structure of the world of our ordinary experience. 

But I have said enough to make clear what sorts of problems religion addresses.  It follows that the salvation religion promises is not to be understood in some crass physical sense the way the typical superficial and benighted atheist-materialist would take it but as salvation from meaninglessness, anomie, spiritual desolation, Unheimlichkeit, existential insecurity, Angst, ignorance and delusion, false value-prioritizations, moral corruption irremediable by any human effort, failure to live up to ideals, the vanity and transience of our lives, meaningless sufferings and cravings and attachments, the ultimate pointlessness of all efforts at moral and intellectual improvement in the face of death . . . .

I should add that anyone who doesn't feel these problems to be genuine problems will have no understanding of religion at all.  And I remind the reader that I do not assume that any religion can deliver on its promises of salvation from the above litany of problems. My point is that natural science and its resulting technologies are powerless to solve these problems.

This ought to be self-evident to anyone who appreciates the problems.  Consider #1.  If suffering is rooted as deeply as the Buddhists think, in the very ontological structure of this changeful world, then obviously no mere manipulation of matter will solve the problem of suffering.  You can drug people into a stupor, but being rendered insensate is no solution to the problems of sentient suffering.  Suppose you don't think suffering is as deeply rooted as the Buddhists think.  Sickness, old age, and death remain inevitable despite the welcome alleviations and life-extensions that modern science makes possible.

As for the rest of my categories, it is self-evident that there are no technological solutions to moral evil, moral ignorance, and the apparent absurdity of life.  Is a longer life a morally better life?  Can mere longevity confer meaning?

The notion that present or future science can solve the problems that religion addresses is utterly chimerical.

So if you reject religion, then you ought to honestly face the problems without evasion and without cultivating 'pie-in-the-future' illusions.  Companion post:  Can Belief in Man Substitute for Belief in God?

The Stove ‘Dilemma’ and the Lewis ‘Trilemma’

This from D. J. Stove, the son of atheist and neo-positivist David Stove:

When the possibility of converting to Catholicism became a real one, it was the immensity of the whole package that daunted me, rather than specific teachings. I therefore spent little time agonizing over the Assumption of Mary, justification by works as well as faith, the reverencing of statues, and other such concepts that traditionally irk the non-Catholic mind.

Rather, such anguish as I felt came from entirely the other direction. However dimly and inadequately, I had learnt enough Catholic history and Catholic dogma to know that either Catholicism was the greatest racket in human history, or it was what it said itself that it was. Such studying burned the phrase "By what authority?" into my  mind like acid. If the papacy was just an imposture, or an exercise in power mania, then how was doctrine to be transmitted from generation to generation? If the whole Catholic enchilada was a swindle, then why should its enemies have bestirred themselves to hate it so much? Why do they do so still?

This reminds me of the famous 'trilemma' popularized by C. S. Lewis:  Jesus is either the Son of God, or he is a lunatic, or he is the devil. This trilemma is also sometimes put as a three-way choice among lord, lunatic, or liar.  I quote Lewis and offer my critical remarks here.

Just as I cannot accept the Lewis 'trilemma' — which is not strictly a trilemma inasmuch as not all three prongs are unacceptable — I cannot accept the Stovian 'dilemma' which strikes me as a text-book case of the informal fallacy of False Alternative.  ". . . either Catholicism was the greatest racket in human history, or it was what it said itself that it was."  Why are these the only two alternatives?  The Roman Catholic church claims to be the one, true, holy, catholic (universal), and apostolic church.  One possibility is that the Roman church was all of these things before various linguistic, political, and theological tensions eventuated in the Great Schism of 1054 such that after that date the one, true, etc. church was the Orthodox church of the East.  After all, both can and do trace their lineage back to Peter, the 'rock' upon whom Christ founded his church.  That is at least a possibility.  If it is actual, then the present Roman church would be neither a racket nor what it claims to be.  It would be a church with many excellences that unfortunately diverged from the authentic Christian tradition.

Or it could be that that true church is not the Roman church but some Protestant denomination, or maybe no church is the true church: some are better than others, but none of the extant churches has 'cornered the market' on all religiously relevant  truth. 

I get the impression that Stove has a burning desire to belong to a community of Christian believers, is attracted to the Roman church for a variety of reasons, some of them good, and then concocts an obviously  worthless argument to lend a veneer of rationality to his choice.

My point is a purely logical one.  I am not taking sides in any theological controversy.

Will Science Put Religion out of Business? A Preliminary Tilt at Transhumanism

A correspondent writes:

Here's how I think science will eventually put religion out of business. Soon medical science is going to be able to offer serious life extension, not pie-in-the-sky soul survival or re-incarnation, but real life extension with possible rejuvenation. When science can offer and DELIVER what religion can only promise, religion is done.

1.  Religion is in the transcendence business.  The type of transcendence offered depends on the particular religion.  The highly sophisticated form of Christianity expounded by Thomas Aquinas offers the visio beata, the Beatific Vision.  In the BV — you will forgive the abbreviation — the soul does not lose its identity.  It maintains its identity, though in a transformed mode, while participating in the divine life.  Hinduism and Buddhism offer even more rarefied forms of transcendence in which the individual self is either absorbed into the eternal Atman, thereby losing its individual identity, or extinguished altogether  by entry into Nirvana.  And there are cruder forms of transcendence, in popular forms of Christianity, in Islam, and in other faiths, in which the individual continues to exist after death  but with little or no transformation to enjoy delights that are commensurable with the ones enjoyed here below.  The crudest form, no doubt, is the popular Islamic notion of paradise as an endless sporting with 72 black-eyed virgins.  So on the one end of the spectrum: transcendence as something difficult to distinguish from utter extinction; on the other end, immortality mit Haut und Haar (to borrow a delightful phrase from Schopenhauer), "with skin and hair" in a realm of sensuous delights but without the usual negatives such as heart burn and erectile dysfunction. 

I think we can safely say that a religion that offers no form of transcendence, whether Here or Hereafter, is no religion at all.  Religion, then, is in the business of offering transcendence.

2.  I agree with my correspondent that if science can provide what religion promises, then science will put religion out  of business.  But as my crude little sketch above shows, different religions promise different things.  Now the crudest form of transcendence is physical immortality, immortality "with skin and hair."  Is it reasonable to hope that future science will give rise to a technology that will make us, or some of us, physically immortal?  I don't think so.  That would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics according to which the entropy of an irreversible process in an isolated system increases leading in the case of the universe (which is both isolated and irreversible) to the heat death of the universe and the end of all life.  Granted, that is way off in the future.  But that is irrelevant if the claim is that physical immortality is possible by purely physical means.  And if that is not the claim, then the use of the phrase 'physical immortality' is out of place.  In a serious discussion like this word games are strictly verboten.

3.  Physical immortality is nomologically impossible, impossible given the laws of nature.  Of course, a certain amount of life extension has been achieved and it is reasonable to expect that more will be achieved. So suppose the average life expectancy of people like us gets cranked up to 130 years.  To underscore the obvious, to live to 130 is not to live forever. Suppose you have made it to 130 and are now on your death bed.  If you have any spiritual depth at all, your lament is likely to be similar to that of Jacob's: "The length of my pilgrimage  has been one hundred and thirty years; short and wretched has been my life, nor does it compare with the years my fathers lived during their pilgrimage." (Genesis 47:9) 

The important point here is that once a period of time is over, it makes no difference how long it has lasted.  It is over and done with and accessible only in the flickering and dim light of intermittent and fallible memory.  The past 'telescopes' and 'scrunches up,' the years melt into one another; the past cannot be relived.  What was distinctly lived is now all a blur.  And now death looms before you.  What does it matter that you lived 130 or 260 years? You are going to die all the same, and be forgotten, and all your works with you. After a while it will be as if you never existed.

The problem is not that our lives are short; the problem is that we are in time at all.  No matter how long a life extends it is still a life in time, a life in which the past is no longer, the future not yet, and  the present a passing away.  This problem, the problem of the transitoriness of life, cannot be solved by life extension even if, per impossibile, physical immortality were possible.  This problem of the transitoriness and vanity of life is one that religion addresses.

So my first conclusion is this.  Even if we take religion in its crudest form, as promising physical immortality, "with skin and hair," science cannot put such a crude religion out of business.  For, first of all, physical immortality is physically impossible, and second, mere life extension, even unto the age of a Methuselah, does not solve the problem of the transitoriness of life.

4.  But I have just begun to scratch the surface of the absurdities of transhumanism. No higher religion is about providing natural goodies  by supernatural means, goodies  that cannot be had by natural means.   Talk of pie-in-the-sky is but a cartoonish misrepresentation by those materialists who can only think in material terms and only believe in what they can hold in their hands. A religion such as Christianity promises a way out of the unsatisfactory predicament we find ourselves in in this life.  What makes our situation unsatisfactory is not merely our physical and mental weakness and the shortness of our lives.  It is primarily our moral defects that make our lives in this world miserable.  We lie and slander, steal and cheat, rape and murder.  We are ungrateful for what we have and filled with inordinate desire for what we don't have and wouldn't satisfy us even if we had it.  We are avaricious, gluttonous, proud, boastful and self-deceived.  It is not just that our wills are weak; our wills are perverse.  It is not just that are hearts are cold; our hearts are foul.  You say none of this applies to you?  Very well, you will end up the victim of those to whom these predicates do apply. And then your misery will be, not the misery of the evil-doer, but the misery of the victim and the slave.  You may find yourself forlorn and forsaken in a concentration camp. Suffering you can bear, but not meaningless suffering, not injustice and absurdity.

Whether or not the higher religions can deliver what they promise, what they promise first and foremost is deliverance from ignorance and delusion, salvation from meaninglessness and moral evil.  So my correspondent couldn't be more wrong.  No physical technology can do what religion tries to do.  Suppose a technology is developed that actually reverses the processes of aging and keeps us all alive indefinitely.  This is pure fantasy, of course, given the manifold contingencies of the world (nuclear and biological warfare, terrorism, natural disasters, etc.); but just suppose.  Our spiritual and moral predicament would remain as deeply fouled-up as it has always been and religion would remain in business.

5.  If, like my correspondent, you accept naturalism and scientism, then you ought to face what you take to be reality, namely, that we are all just clever animals slated to perish utterly in a few years, and not seek transcendence where it cannot be found.  Accept no substitutes!  Transhumanism is an ersatz religion.

It could be like this.  All religions are false; none can deliver what they promise.  Naturalism is true: reality is exhausted by the space-time system.  You are not unreasonable if you believe this.  But I say you are unreasonable if you think that technologies derived from the sciences of nature can deliver what religions have promised.

As long as there are human beings there will be religion.  The only way I can imagine religion withering away is if humanity allows itself to be gradually replaced by soulless robots.  But in that case it will not be that the promises of religion are fulfilled by science; it would be that no one would be around having religious needs.

 

A Test for the Religious Sensibility

Some have the religious sensibility (inclination, predisposition, call it what you will) and some don't.  Here is one of several possible tests to see if you have it.  Get hold of Augustine's Confessions and Pascal's Pensées. If you read these books and they do not speak to you at all, if they do not move you, if they leave you cold, if they do not in any measure inspire you to reform your life, then it is a good bet that you don't have a religious bone in your body. It is not matter of intelligence but of sensibility.

"He didn't have a religious bone in his body." I recall that line from Stephanie Lewis' obituary for her husband David, one of the most brilliant American philosophers of the postwar period. He was highly intelligent and irreligious. Others are highly intelligent and religious. Among contemporary philosophers one could mention Alvin Plantinga, Peter van Inwagen, and Richard Swinburne.

The belief that being intelligent rules out being religious casts doubt on the intelligence of those who hold it.

The Religious Predisposition and Predestination

A UK reader e-mails:

In your recent post My Relation to Catholicism, you write; "For a religion to take root in a person, the person must have a religious nature or predisposition to begin with."

If this is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition of becoming, let's say, a Christian, it seems very close to the idea of predestination. Those who have the necessary (and inherent?) predisposition are among the few who have been "chosen" by God. Many others who neither have nor can acquire such a disposition, have no hope of salvation because they cannot will themselves to believe. This seems like an affront to divine justice. Maybe you'll say a few words about the "affront" of predestination as you expand on your religious views.

The truth of what the reader quotes me as saying was brought home to me once again yesterday over lunch with a friend. He is the same age as me, comes from a similar background, and also has a doctorate in philosophy.  From the ages of 6 to 16, he attended a school run by Jesuits .  So, starting as an impressionable first-grader, he was exposed to the full-strength pre-Vatican II Catholic doctrine sans namby-pamby liberal dilution.  And this was in the '50s when distractions and temptations were much less than they are now.  He was an altar boy, indeed the 'head' of the altar boys; he memorized all the Latin responses, and was so good at this that he was paid for his services at weddings and funerals.  But despite the rites, rituals, and indoctrination from an early age, none of it took root in his inner being.  It is not just that he sloughed it off later when pretty girls and other earthly delights proved to be irresistible; he told me that he never took it seriously in the first place.  It was all just a load of hocus-pocus and mumbo-jumbo.

And now I am reminded of Tony Jones from high school days.  He like to invert a favorite saying of St. Dominic Savio.  The saint said, "Death before sin."  Tony wrote in my graduation year book, "Remember my motto, 'Sin before death!'"

So I say that to take a religion, any religion, seriously one must possess an inner disposition, an inner religious sensibility.  Some people are just inherently irreligious in the way others are unmusical or illogical or amoral or not disposed to appreciate poetry.  No amount of indoctrination can make up for the lack.  If you are illogical, no logic course can help you; all such a course can do it is articulate and make explicit the implicit logical understanding that must already be present if one is to profit from the formal study of the subject. If you cannot think in moral categories, if you have no nascent sense of right and wrong, no ethics course can help you.

One consequence of this is that there is no point to discussing religion with the irreligious.  It cannot be anything other than superstitious nonsense to them.  You may as well discuss colors with the color blind, music with the tone deaf, modal logic with those who are blind to modal distinctions. 

Since my point is a general one, applying as it does to any religion, it is distinct from any Christian predestination doctrine.  But if the religion in question is Christianity, then the reader makes an excellent point.  Suppose that salvation is predicated upon one's acceptance of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Obviously, one cannot even begin to take such a notion seriously in the interior manner alone here in question without having the religious predisposition.  In a theistic framework, a providential God is responsible for whether one has the predisposition or not.  So what I am saying, when situated in a Christian context, does seem to smack of predestination.  I'll end with a quotation from G. R. Evans, Augustine on Evil, Cambridge UP 1982, p. 134, emphasis added:

Augustine sets out for their [certain semi-Pelagians'] inspection the obvious truth that many people hear Christian truth expounded to them, and while some believe, others do not.  There must be a reason why their responses differ.  Augustine suggests that the reason is that God has prepared some but not others (De Praed. Sanct. vi 11). Those who receive the truth are the elect, and those who do not have not been chosen to be Christians.

 That there is predestination, however, strikes me as morally dubious as that guilt is inheritable. 

My Relation to Catholicism

This from a graduate student in philosophy who describes himself as a theologically conservative Protestant who is toying with the idea of 'swimming the Tiber':

In a recent post  you say this: ""Study everything, join nothing" means that one ought to beware of institutions and organizations with their tendency toward self-corruption and the corruption of their members. (The Catholic  Church is a good recent example.)"

Until I read this comment, I, for some reason, was under the impression that you were a Catholic.  I was wondering if you would be willing to elaborate on this comment, say more about your take on the Catholic Church, direct me to a post in which you say more about these  issues, or direct me to some literature on this topic that you think  would be useful.

This request allows me to clarify my relation to Catholicism.  (This clarification may be spread over a few posts.)  I was brought up Catholic and attended Catholic schools, starting in the pre-Vatican II  days before the rot set in, when being Catholic was something rather more definite than it  is now.  Many with my kind of upbringing were unfazed by their religious training, went along to get along, but then sloughed  off the training and the trappings as soon as they could.  For a religion to take root in a person, the person must have a religious nature or predisposition to begin with.  Only some have it, just as only some have a philosophical predisposition.  Having the former predisposition is a necessary but not sufficient condition of a religion's taking firm root.  Another necessary condition is that the person have some religious and/or mystical experiences.  Without the predisposition and the experiences, religion, especially a religion as rich in dogmatic articulation as Roman Catholicism, will be exceedingly hard to credit and take seriously in the face of the countervailing influences from nature (particularly the nature in one's own loins) and society with its worldly values.  For some Catholics of my Boomer generation, the extreme cognitive dissonance between the teachings of the Church and the 'teachings' and attitudes of the world, in particular the world of the '60s,  led to radical questioning.  For example, we were taught that all sins against the 6th and 9th Commandments were mortal and that premarital and extramarital sex  even in those forms that fell shy of intercourse were wrong.  The 'teachings' of the world and the surrounding culture were of course quite the opposite.  For many brought up Catholic, this was not much of a problem: the cognitive dissonance was quickly relieved by simply dropping the religion or else watering it down into some form of namby-pamby humanism.  For others like myself who had the religious predisposition and the somewhat confirmatory religious/mystical experiences, the problem of cognitive dissonance was very painful and not easily solved.

And, having not only a religious, but also a philosophical predisposition, it was natural to turn to philosophy as a means of sorting things out and relieving the tension between the doctrines and practices that had been the center of my life and the source of existential meaning, on theone hand,   and the extramural wide world of sex, drugs, rock & roll, and the secular values of 'making it' and getting ahead, on the other.  The sex bit was just one example.  The fundamental problem I faced was whether any of what I was brought up to believe, of what I internalized and took with utmost seriousness, was true.  Truth matters!  As salutary as belief is, it is only true beliefs that can be credited.  This brings me to a fundamental theme of this weblog, namely, the tension between Athens and Jerusalem. I see this as a fruitful tension, and I see the absence of anything like it the Islamic world as part of the explanation of that world's inanition.

It is a fruitful tension in the West but also in those few individuals who are citizens of both 'cities,' those few who harbor within them both the religious and the philosophical predisposition.  It is a tension that cannot be resolved by eliminationof one or the other of the 'cities.' But why is it fruitful?

The philosopher and the religionist need each other's virtues. The philosopher needs reverence to temper his analytic probing and humility to mitigate the arrogance of his high-flying inquiry and overconfident reliance on his magnificent yet paltry powers of thought. The religionist needs skepticism to limit his gullibility, logical rigor to discipline his tendency toward blind fideism, and balanced dialectic to chasten his disposition to fanaticism.

So am I a Catholic or not?  Well, I am certainly a Catholic by upbringing, so I am a Catholic in what we could call a sociological sense.  But it is very difficult for a philosopher to be a naive adherent of any religion, especially a religion as deeply encrusted with dogma as Roman Catholicism.  He will inevitably be led to 'sophisticate' his adherence, and to the extent that he does this he will wander off into what are called 'heresies.'  He will find it impossible not to ask questions.  His craving for clarity and certainty will cause him to ask whether key doctrines are even intelligible, let alone true.  Just what are we believing when we believe that there is one God in three divine persons?  Just what are we believing when we believe that there once walked on the earth a man who was fully human but also fully divine? 

I distance myself both from the anti-Catholic polemicists and the pro-Catholic apologists.  Polemics and apologetics are two sides of the same coin, the coin of  ideology.  'Ideology' is not a pejorative term in my mouth.  An ideology is a set of beliefs oriented toward action, and act we must.  So believe we must, in something or other.    Religions are ideologies in this sense.  But philosophy is not ideological.  For more on this, see Philosophy, Religion, and the Philosophy of Religion: Four Theses.

I am skeptical of organizations and institutions despite the fact that we cannot do without them.  The truth is something too large and magnificent to be 'institutionalized.'  The notion that it is the sole possession of one church, the 'true' church, is a  claim hard to credit especially in light of the fact that different churches claim to be the true one.  Also dubious is the notion that extra ecclesiam salus non est, that outside the church there is no salvation.  And note that different churches will claim to be the one outside of which there is no salvation.  That should gve one pause.  If it doesn't, then I suggest you are insufficiently critical, insufficiently concerned with truth, and too much concerned with your own doxastic security.  Why do I need a church at all?  And why this one?  Why not Eastern Orthodoxy or some denomination of  Protestantism? 

Now if you are a philosopher this is all just more grist for the mill, along with all the things that Catholic apologists will say in defense of their faith.  They will say that their church is the true church because it was founded by Jesus Christ (who is God) and has existed continuously from its founding under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit whose inspiration guarantees the correctness of the teachings on faith and morals. 

They will tell me that a church is necessary to correct the errors of private opinions.  Now it must be frankly admitted that thinking for oneself, treading the independent path, and playing the maverick can just as easily lead one into error as into truth.  If thinking for oneself were the royal road to truth, then all who think for themselves would agree on what the truth is.   They don't.  But let us not forget that that church dogmas often reflect the private opinions of the dominant characters at the councils.  The common opinion is just the private opinion that won the day.  You say Augustine was   inspired by the Holy Spirit?  That is a claim you are making.  How validate it?  Why don't the Protestants agree with you?  Why don't the Eastern Orthodox agree with you?

This only scratches the surface, but one cannot spend the whole day blogging.  This may turn out to be a long series of posts.

 

Related articles
Solubility Skepticism, Religion, and Reason
The Stove 'Dilemma' and the Lewis 'Trilemma'

Five Attitudes Toward the Christian Dogmas

Original Sin, Trinity, and Incarnation are three Christian dogmas.  There are others as well.  Here is an off-the-cuff taxonomy of possible attitudes towards such dogmas. 

1. They are just nonsense to be ignored or even a sign of deep mental dysfunction.  When I first started blogging about the Trinity, John Jay Ray commented (6 January 2005):

The blogosphere is an amazing place. Over at Maverick Philosopher there has been an extensive discussion going on about the doctrine of the holy Trinity! Generally sympathetic to Christianity though I am, I cannot see that particular doctrine as anything but the most awful load of codswallop. It is a self-contradictory formulation that arose out of the controversy among early Christians about whether Christ was God or not. [. . .] It is conventional to describe the doctrine as a mystery but it is no such thing. It is just a theological compromise that sacrifices logic for the sake of keeping all parties to the debate happy. How anybody can take it seriously is beyond me.

And then there is that other Australian, the neo-positivist David Stove, who thinks that something has gone dreadfully and fatally wrong with the thoughts of anyone who takes Trinitarian speculation seriously, in particular the debate over the filioque clause.  See The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies, Basil Backwell, 1991, p. 179.

2. They are false and/or incoherent, but worthy of study as concrete points of entry into various logical, metaphysical, and ethical questions that are salient for all, including atheists and materialists. What is identity?  Is it absolute or sortal-relative?  What is personhood?  Can guilt be inherited?  Scores of such questions arise when these dogmas are carefully thought through.

3.  They are false and/or incoherent but worth studying as part of the history of ideas, or the sociology of knowledge, or the psychology of belief.  Ideas have consequences, whether true or false, coherent or incoherent, sane or insane.

4.  The are false and/or incoherent in many of their formulations, but hide nuggets of truth that can excavated and refined and reformulated in ways that are rationally acceptable.  An example of this is Kant's project in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone.

5.   The dogmas are coherent and indeed true as formulated and promulgated by some particular church such as the Roman Catholic church or the Eastern Orthodox church.

I reject the extremes of this spectrum of opinion.  Thus I reject #1 and #5.  My approach is closest to #4, though I feel no particular commitment to the Kantian variant.  Although the main reason to take seriously Original Sin, for example, is that it expresses something deep and true about the human predicament,  the reasons supplied in #2 and #3 are also good ones.  The notion that blacks are owed reparations for slavery, for example, is one that is closely related to the notion that guilt is transmissible from the perpetrator of a crime to his descendants.  This gives rise to the suspicion that the demand for reparations is a secularization of certain Christian dogmatic themes.  How then can the evaluation of the reparations demand proceed without any consideration of the theological doctrine?

A Pascalian Pointer to Our Fallenness

Edward T. Oakes in a fine article quotes Pascal:

The greatness of man is so evident that it is even proved by his wretchedness. For what in animals is called nature we call wretchedness in man; by which we recognize that, his nature now being like that of animals, he has fallen from a better nature which once was his. For who is unhappy at not being a king except a deposed king? Who is unhappy at having only one mouth? And who is not unhappy at having only one eye? Probably no one ever ventured to mourn at not having three eyes; but anyone would be inconsolable at having none.

Yes indeed, man is wretched and only man is wretched. Man's wretchedness is 'structural': man qua man is wretched. Wretched are not merely the sick, the unloved, and the destitute; all of us are wretched, even those of us who count as well off. Some of us are aware of this, our condition, the rest hide it from themselves by losing themselves in what Pascal calls divertissement, diversion. We are as if fallen from a higher state, our true and rightful state, into a lower one, and the sense of wretchedness is an indicator of our having fallen. We are in a dire state from which we need salvation but are incapable of saving ourselves by our own efforts, whether individual or collective.

Well, suppose you don't accept a word of this. And suppose you don't lapse into nihilism either. What option is left? The illusions of the Left and the notion of the perfectibility of man by his own doing? Then I recommend this passage from Reinhold Niebuhr also quoted by Oakes:

The utopian illusions and sentimental aberrations of modern liberal culture are really all derived from the basic error of negating the fact of original sin. This error . . . continually betrays modern men to equate the goodness of men with the virtue of their various schemes for social justice and international peace. When these schemes fail of realization or are realized only after tragic conflicts, modern men either turn from utopianism to disillusionment and despair, or they seek to place the onus of their failure upon some particular social group, . . . [which is why] both modern liberalism and modern Marxism are always facing the alternatives of moral futility or moral fanaticism. Liberalism in its pure form [that is, pacifism] usually succumbs to the peril of futility. It will not act against evil until it is able to find a vantage point of guiltlessness from which to operate. This means that it cannot act at all. Sometimes it imagines that this inaction is the guiltlessness for which it has been seeking. A minority of liberals and most of the Marxists solve the problem by assuming that they have found a position of guiltlessness in action. Thereby they are betrayed into the error of fanaticism.

I refuse to lapse into nihilism and I refuse to be suckered by the illusions of the Left, which illusions have been amply refuted by the horrors of the 20th century. That is why I take original sin seriously. But I reject Biblical literalism with its tale of a first man and a first woman in a garden. And of course I reject the idea that I am guilty because of what some other people did. So this leaves me with the task of articulating the doctrine of original sin/original ignorance in a way that is philosophically respectable.

Kant on Peccatum Originale Originans and Peccatum Originale Originatum

1. An important distinction for understanding the doctrine of original sin is that between originating original sin (peccatum originale originans) and originated original sin (peccatum originale originatum).  This post will explain the distinction and then consider Immanuel Kant's reasons for rejecting originated original sin.  It is important to realize that Kant does accept something like original sin under the rubric 'radical evil,' a topic to be explored in subsequent posts.  It is also important to realize that Kierkegaard's seminal thoughts about original sin as expressed in The Concept of Dread were influenced by Kant, and that Reinhold Niebuhr's influential treatment is in turn derivative from Kierkegaard.

2. So what's the distinction?  According to the Genesis story, the Fall of Man was precipitated by specific sinful acts, acts of disobedience, by Adam and Eve.  The sins of Adam and Eve were originating original sins. They were the first sins for the first human beings, but also the first sins for the human race.  Their sin somehow got transmitted to their descendants inducing in them a state of sinfulness.  The sinfulness of the descendants is originated original sin. This originated original sin is hereitary sin:  it is inherited and innate for postlapsarians and so does not depend on any specific sin of a person who inherits it.     Nevertheless it brings with it guilt and desert of punishment.  Socrates, then, or any post-Adamic man, is guilty and deserving of punishment whether or not he commits any actual sins of his own.  And so  a man who was perfectly sinless in the sense that he committed no actual sin of his own would nonetheless stand condemned in virtue of what an earlier man had one.  This doctrine has the consequence that an infant, who as an infant is of course innocent of any actual sin, and who dies unbaptized, is justly excluded from the kingdom of heaven.  Such an infant, on Catholic doctrine at least, ends up in limbo, or to be precise, in limbus infantium.  A cognate consequence is that a perfectly sinless adult who lives and dies before Christ's redemptive act is also excluded from heaven.  Such a person lands in limbus patrum.  (See here for the Catholic doctrine.)

3.  The stumbling block is obvious:  How can one justly be held morally accountable for what someone else has done or left undone?  How can one be guilty and deserving of punishment without having committed any specific transgression?  How can guilt be inherited?  Aren't these moral absurdities? Aren't we morally distinct  as persons, each responsible only for what he does and leaves undone?  There might well be originating original sin, but how could there be originated original sin?  It is worth noting that to reject originated original sin is not to reject originating original sin, or original sin as such.  There could be a deep structural flaw in humans as humans, universal and unameliorable by human effort, which deserves the title 'original sin/sinfulness' without it being the case that sin is inheritable.

Again I revert to my distinction between the putative fact of our fallenness and the various theories about it.  To refute a theory is not to refute a fact.

4.  Kant rejects the Augustinian notion of inherited sin.  Sinfulness, guilt, desert of punishment — these cannot be inherited.  So for Kant there is no originated original  sin.  Of the various explanations of the spread of moral evil through the members and generations of the human race, "the most inept is that which describes it as descending to us as an inheritance from our first parents." (Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, trs. Greene and Hudson, Harper 1960, p. 35)  But this is not to say that Kant rejects the notion of original sin.  He himself speaks of peccatum originarium, which he distinguishes from peccatum derivatum.  (26)  For Kant, original sin is a propensity in us toward moral evil which is universal and logically prior to specific immoral acts.  I hope to say more about this in a subsequent post.

5.  But what is Kant's argument against hereditary guilt and originated original sin? Kant as I read him accepts it as a fact that in all human beings there is radical moral evil, a peccatum originarium that lies deeper than, and makes possible, specific peccata derivata.  What he objects to is the explanation of this fact in terms of a propagation of guilt from the original parents.  The main point is that a temporal explanation in terms of antecedent causes cannot account for something for which we are morally responsible.  If we are morally responsible, then we are free; but free actions cannot be explained in terms of temporally prior causes.  For if an action is caused, it is necessitated, and what is necessitated by its causes cannot be free. 

What is true of actions is true of moral character insofar as moral character is something for which one is morally responsible.  Therefore our radically evil moral character which predisposes us to specific acts of wrongdoing  cannot be explained in terms of temporally antececent causes.  Hence it cannot be explained by any propagation of guilt from the original parents to us.  Thus there is no originated guilt.  Our being guilty must be viewed "as though  the individual had fallen into it directly from a state of innocence." (36)  Thus all actions which make us guilty are original employments of the will. All original sin is originating original sin.

Perhaps we can put it this way.  Adam has nothing over Socrates.  It is not as if Adam went directly from a state of innocence into a state of sin while Socrates inherited sinfulness and was never in a state of innocence.  If there is such a thing as original sin then both are equally originative of it.

The Genesis account gives us a temporal representation of a logical and thus atemporal relationship.  The state of innocence is set at the temporal beginning of humanity, and the fall from innocence is depicted as an event in time.  But then we get the problems raised in #3 above.  The mistake is to "look for an origin in time of a moral character for which we are to be held responsible . . . ." (38)  We make this mistake because we want an explanation of the contingent existence of our radically evil moral predisposition.  An explanation, however, is not to be had.  The rational origin of the perversion of our will "remains inscrutable to us." (38)

6.  Kant thus does accept something like original sin.  We have within us a deep propensity to moral evil that makes us guilty and deserving of punishment.  But there is no deterministic causal explanation for it.  So while there is a sense in which our fallenness is innate, it is not inherited.  For it is morally absurd to suppose that I could be guilty of being in a state that I am caused to be in.  Each one of us is originally guilty but by a free atemporal choice.  This makes the presence of the radical flaw in each of us inscrutable and inexplicable.  The mystery of radical evil points us to the mystery of free will.  On Kant's view, then, there is only originating original sin.  Each of us by his own free noumenal agency plunges from innocence into guilt!

We shall have to continue these ruminations later.  Some questions on the menu of rumination:

Q1.  Is Kant's account with its appeal to atemporal noumenal agency really any better than Augustine's biological propagation account?

Q2.   How can guilt be innate but not inherited, as Kant maintains?

Q3.   Why believe in radical evil in the first place?  If the evidence for it is empirical, how can such evidence  show that radical evil is both universal (and thus inscribed in man's very nature) and ineradicable by human effort?

The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil

Mr Vallicella,
 
I want to give you a heads up on the "Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil". The phrase is probably an idiom that means something like 'universal wisdom' or 'all knowledge'. A better translation may be 'The Tree of the Knowledge of Everything From A to Z'. There is, in fact, nothing in the story that indicates that Adam and Eve had no free will before the eating of the fruit. God, in fact, gives them orders that presuppose the freedom to disobey…to tend the garden, to refrain from eating some fruit, etc. The eating of the Tree was literally to eat of the fruit that gives one the wisdom of God, to overcome the limits God had placed on them and become more like Him. And the result is the clothing of the self, and later the tilling of soil and animal husbandry and after Cain the building of cities. It is not 'moral' knowledge they are coming to but the knowledge of what it takes to enact their own wills to 'get what they want…things like technology and the building of cities.
 
Peace and Blessings,
Joshua Orsak
 
1. The crux of the matter is indeed the interpretation of 'the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.'  So one question for Mr Orsak is how he would support his interpretation.  After all, the phrase speaks of the knowledge of good and evil, not the knowledge of all things.
 
2.  In yesterday's post I did not say that Adam and Eve did not have freedom of the will before eating the forbidden fruit; I said that they were not moral agents before eating it.  I specified two individually necessary conditions of moral agency (and I left open the question whether they are jointly sufficient).  The one is free will and the other is knowledge of the difference between good and evil.  Since both conditions are necessary, absence of either prevents a being from being a moral agent.  So what I was arguing is consistent with Adam's and Eve's possession of free will prior to their eating of the forbidden fruit.
 
3. The point I was making (and I got this from Peter Lupu, to give credit where credit is due) was that there is something prima facie puzzling about Genesis 2 & 3.  Roughly:  How can God justly banish Adam and Eve from paradise for disobedience prior to their knowing the difference between good and evil?
 
4. Orsak's solution is to interpret 'the tree of the knowledge of good and evil' as referring to a tree the eating of the fruit of which confers all knowledge.  I agree that if this interpretation is defensible, then the puzzle collapses.  But what considerations speak for Orsak's interpretation?  After all, the most natural way to interpret 'the tree of the knowledge of good and evil' is to interpret it as referring to a tree the eating of the fruit of which confers either (i) the knowledge that there is an objective difference between good and evil, or (ii) the knowledge of which actions/omissions are good and which evil, or (iii) both.

Fall of Man or Rise of Man? The Aporetics of Genesis 2 and 3

At Genesis 2,17 the Lord forbids Adam from eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, on pain of death.  In the next chapter, however, Eve is tempted by the serpent, succumbs, eats of the tree, and persuades Adam to eat of it too.  As punishment for their disobedience, Adam and Eve are banished from the garden of Eden  and put under sentence of death.  Thus mortality is one of the wages of Original Sin.

The story has a puzzling feature that Peter Lupu made me see.  Let us agree that a moral agent is a being that (i) possesses free will, and (ii) possesses knowledge of the difference between good and evil, right and wrong.  Clearly, both conditions are necessary for moral agency.  And let us agree that no agent can be justly punished unless he is a moral agent and does something wrong.  But before eating from the tree, Adam and Eve are not moral agents.  For it is only by eating from the tree that they acquire the knowledge of good and evil, one of the necessary conditions of moral agency.   And yet God punishes them.  How then can his punishment be just?  My problem concerns not the truth of the story, but its coherence and meaning.  The problem can be set forth as an aporetic pentad:

1. If God punishes, God punishes justly.
2. If God punishes an agent justly, then that agent is a moral agent that deliberately does something wrong.
3. A moral agent possesses the knowledge of good and evil.
4. God punishes Adam and Eve for eating the forbidden fruit.
5. Adam and Eve did not possess the knowledge of good and evil prior to eating the forbidden fruit.

The pentad is logically inconsistent: the first four limbs entail the negation of the fifth.  To rescue the coherence of the story one of the limbs must be rejected.  But which one?

(1), (3), and (4) are undeniable.  This leaves (2) and (5).   One might think to deny (2).  My dog is not a moral agent, but I can justly punish it for some behavior.  But punishment in this sense is mere behavior-modification and not relevant to the case at hand.  So it appears that the only way out is by denying (5).  Adam and Eve did possess the knowledge of good and evil prior to eating the forbidden fruit.  If so, the so-called 'tree of the knowledge of good and evil' is not a tree the eating of the fruit of which is necessary for becoming a moral agent.

Support for this way out can be found at Genesis 1, 26: "Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness . . . ."  This image, I argue, is a spiritual image.  You would have to be quite the lunkheaded atheist/materialist to think that the image is a physical one.  Now if God created man in his spiritual image, then presumably that means that God created man to be a moral agent, a free being who is alive to the distinction between good and evil, right and wrong. So before receiving the command not to eat of the tree of good and evil, Adam and Eve were already moral agents.  On this interpretation, whereby (5) is rejected, the coherence of the story is upheld.

"But then why is the tree in question called 'the tree of the knowledge of good and evil'?"  I have no idea.

Another intriguing suggestion that Peter Lupu made to me in conversation was that the Genesis story recounts not the Fall of man, but his rise or ascent from a pre-human condition of animal innocence to the status of a moral being possessing the knowledge of good and evil.  This makes sense if if it is by eating the forbidden fruit that man first become man in the full theomorphic sense.  And so, to put it quite pointedly, it is only by disobeying the divine command that Adam becomes a son of God! Before that he wallows in a state of animal-like, pre-human inocence.  Now surely a God worth his salt would not want mere pets; what he would want are sons and daughters capable of participating in the divine life. He wants his 'children' to be moral agents.  Indeed, one might go so far as to suppose — and this I think is the direction in which Peter is headed — that God wants them to be autonomous moral agents, agents who are not merely (libertarianly) free, and awake to the distinction between good and evil, but who in addition are morally self-legislative, i.e., who give the law to themselves, as opposed to existing heteronomously in a condition where the law is imposed on them by God.

The trajectory of this interpretation is towards secular humanism.  God fades out and Man comes into his own.  I don't buy it, but that's another post. 

Theocracy and the Left

I wrote, "To reverse the scriptural phrase, they will swallow the imaginary gnat of 'theocracy' while straining at the all-too-real camel of Islamo-terrorism."
 
A reader comments, "I'm not so sure it's gullibility as much as flat-out dishonesty half the time. Honestly, when I first heard the 'Dominionist' rumblings again, I thought it was comedy. As in, someone was making a joke, not that this was a serious charge. Imagine my surprise."

It is indeed dishonesty and we can expect more of it as Perry and Bachmann gain traction.  The Left will trot out the same old tired exaggerations and lies that they deployed during the Bush administration.  So it is appropriate that I repost  the following 2005 entry from the old blog.

………………

Serious thinkers, those who aim at the truth, do not engage in linguistic sleight-of-hand. This is a tactic of ideologues and polemicists, whose goal is not truth but power. So my advice to all contenders in the political arena who want to be taken seriously as serious thinkers is that they avoid trying to advance their positions by way of the misuse of language. One sort of misuse is verbal inflation: one takes a word with a fixed specific meaning and inflates it to cover phenomena to which it cannot legitimately be applied. A good recent example is the loose and irresponsible use of the word 'theocracy.' I should think that this term counts as a pejorative for most all of us, whether on the Left or the Right. Very few of us want a theocracy. But to proceed further, we need a definition. 

Theocracy is a form of government in which the rulers are identical to the leaders of the dominant religion, and  governmental policies are either identical to or strongly influenced by the principles of the majority religion.  The idea is much better conveyed by 'ecclesiocracy' since 'theocracy' is something of a misnomer inasmuch as God himself does not rule in any so-called theocracy.  But the word is in use and we are stuck with it.  In a theocracy, the government claims to rule on behalf of God or a  higher power, as specified by the religion in question.

This definition of 'theocracy' is clear enough and comports well with standard usage. In light of it, those who refer to the Bush administration as 'theocratic' are clearly inflating and misusing the term. They are trying to win the debate by changing the rules of the debate in midstream. Among these rules is one that forbids tampering with the neutral terminology in which alone a reasonable debate can be conducted.

Let us see if we can be clear about some elementary points. A  conservative is not the same as a theist. A theist is not the same as a Christian. A Christian is not the same as a fundamentalist. A theist is not the same as theocrat.

Lefties need to be careful about their identity theories. Theist =  theocrat is perhaps not as outrageous as Bush = Hitler, but just as false.

Are there advocates of theocracy here in the USA? Yes. Do they pose any sort of threat? Not that I can see.  But lefties don't care about truth; they care about winning.  And they will do anything to win.  The end justifies the means.