A Thinking Reed

Month: June 2007

  • On almost being liturgically indifferent

    See here for a well-informed (my comment excepted) discussion on things liturgical in light of the rumored forthcoming liberalization of the use of the pre-Vatican II Mass in the RCC. Obviously Protestants don’t directly have a horse in this race, but as Derek points out what the RCC does tends to affect Protestant bodies.

    I admit that I am still quite the liturgical philistine. As a parishoner at what is widely considered to be the flagship parish of Anglo-Catholicism in America it’s still very much a matter of casting pearls before swine in my case. 😉

    We still gravitate toward the Rite II Sung Mass rather than the High Mass in Rite I, due to the greater prevalence of congregational singing and participation. Maybe the sign of a true Protestant is that you have a hard time imagining a church service without lots of hymn-singing! I’ve certainly met some people whom I affectionately refer to as “liturgical fascists” – they genuinely seem to believe that the High Mass is objectively superior to any other possible service.

    For my part I think C.S. Lewis’ self-description fits me pretty well:

    [M]y whole liturgiological position really boils down to an entreaty for permanence and uniformity. I can make do with almost any kind of service whatever, if only it will stay put. But if each form is being snatched away just when I am beginning to feel at home in it, then I can never make any progress in the art of worship. You give me no chance to acquire the trained habit — habito dell’arte. (Letters to Malcolm, p. 5)

    Of course Lewis didn’t live to see some of the more banal, not to mention heretical, liturgies that have been inflicted on long-suffering Christian people in the last thirty years or so. Still, I can’t get too excited about arguments over liturgy, though of course I want worship to be reverent, reflect sound doctrine, etc. I definitely have my preferences – I probably feel most at home in a highish traditional Lutheran service that many Anglicans would probably consider pretty middle-of-the-road. But it’s not a hill I’m particularly willing to die on.

    I am glad that there are smart people like Derek, et al. who give this stuff serious thought since they’ll be the ones influencing the shape of worship for the rest of us in the future!

  • How animal rights gets a bad name

    It seems to me that there a few reasons that animal rights groups get a bad reputation, even among those who might be expected to be sympathetic to the cause of better treatment for animals.

    First, animal rights groups, like activist groups of all stripes, have a tendency to use rhetoric that is imprecise at best and inflammatory at worst. “Meat is murder!” and “Animal Liberation” are slogans that lack nuance.

    This creates the impression that AR-ists value animal life equally with human life. While this may be true among a tiny minority, it certainly doesn’t represent the mainstream AR view. Certainly no organization I’m familiar with, even those that advocate legal rights for animals, has suggested that killing an animal is or ought to be treated as just as serious a crime as killing a human being.

    This becomes even clearer when one turns to the “theoreticians” of the AR movement. In fact, given the charges often made against the AR position, one wonders if the critics have ever bothered to read the works of the primary thinkers associated with AR. Peter Singer, for one, doesn’t categorically reject all human use of animals, nor does he regard animal life as morally equivalent to human life (though there are borderline cases, such as an adult gorilla vs. a newborn human infant, where, on utilitarian grounds, he seems to draw an equivalence).

    Tom Regan, who takes a more rights-based approach, categorically denies that an animal life is morally equivalent to a human life, and even goes so far as to say that a virtually unlimited number of animals could be sacrificed to save a single human life.

    Part of the confusion no doubt comes from the term “speciesism” which seems to imply that any moral distinction between humans and animals is akin to unjustified prejudices like racism and sexism. This was probably an ill-chosen term since what most people who use this term want to say is that animal suffering that is equivalent to human suffering shouldn’t be disregarded simply because it’s animal suffering. In other words, animals aren’t equivalent to humans, but some kinds of animal suffering are equivalent to some kinds of human suffering, and so deserve to be taken into account in any moral calculus.

    It’s not surprising that the AR movement, like so many other movements to social change, are more concerned about effectiveness than philosophical clarity and fine distinctions, but this is a case where I think a lack of clarity has hurt their cause. To the extent that the rhetoric of AR seems to connote a moral equivalence between animals and humans it will fail to win over the majority of people.

    It’s noteworthy that a book like former Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully‘s Dominion received favorable, if not entirely uncritical coverage in major conservative publications like National Review, the Weekly Standard, and the American Conservative. Political conservatives are rarely seen as sympathetic to AR. And yet Scully’s language of stewardship, mercy and compassion for animals tapped into a moral tradition that is much more amenable to the mainstream of Western political and religious thought. This doesn’t mean that everyone will agree with the AR agenda, but AR-ists shouldn’t give critics such an easy target by allowing themselves to be caricatured as holding the simplistic view that “a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.”

    A second, and more discreditable, reason that AR-ists are often dismissed as extremist wackos is that groups regarded as extremists like the Animal Liberation Front and Earth First! are taken (often disingenuously one suspects) to be representative of the broader animal rights and environmental movements.

    I say this is discreditable because virtually every social movement of any significance inevitably attracts extremists, some of whom resort to violence. But this by itself hardly shows that the concerns of the broader movement are illegitimate, though opponents often try to use the actions of the extremists to discredit them. Few would seriously argue that John Brown, the Black Panthers, Eric Rudolph, or violent anti-war and anti-globalization protesters somehow show that the causes they were associated with were or are mistaken. So why should the existence of the ALF show that AR concerns are ipso facto unimportant? Those causes have to be debated on thier merits. Of course, representatives of those broader movements should disassociate themselves from and condemn those extremists who try to use violence to bring about social change*, and to the extent that they fail to do that they may justly bring public suspicion upon themselves.

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    *Leaving aside the interesting question whether violence as a tool for social change is ever justified when other means have been exhausted.

  • Modest natural theology and epistemic pluralism

    At the suggestion of Andy and Thomas I started reading some John Polkinghorne, the physicist and Anglican priest, this weekend. I picked up his Belief in God in an Age of Science, the only title of his they had at our library. It’s a collection of lectures Polkinghorne gave at Yale in 1996, with some additional material and so far (only twelve pages in) it’s good stuff.

    In the first chapter Polkinghorne discusses what he calls the “new natural theology.” There are two aspects of the physical world, Polkinghorne thinks, that provide “hints” of the existence of God. The first is the fact that our minds are fitted to understand the deep structure of the physical universe and that this structure can be expressed in elegant mathematical forumlas. “This use of abstract mathematics as a technique of physical discovery points to a very deep fact about the nature of the universe that we inhabit, and to the remarkable conformity of our human minds to its patterning. We live in a world whose physical fabric is endowed with transparent rational beauty” (p. 2).

    Polkinghorne rejects as implausible the view that our ability to comprehend the fabric of the physical world and express it in the language of mathematics is a mere by-product of our evolutionary development:

    No one would deny, of course, that evolutionary necessity will have moulded our ability for thinking in ways that will ensure its adequacy for understanding the world around us, at least to the extent that is demanded by pressures for survival. Yet our surplus intellectual capacity, enabling us to comprehend the microworld of quarks and gluons and the macroworld of big bang cosmology, is on such a scale that it beggars belief that this is simply a fortunate by-product of the struggle for life. (p. 2-3)

    He likewise rejects any “constructivist” account of knowledge which says that we merely project our preference for mathematical reasoning onto the physical world. “Nature is not so plastic as to be subject to our whim in this way” (p. 3). The great discoveries of physics, however aesthetically pleasing they may be, depend on the belief that it is nature speaking to us in revealing aspects of its deep structure.

    The second aspect of the physical world that Polkinghorne holds up as a hint of God’s existence is the purpose displayed in the development of the cosmos as a whole. He concedes that evolutionary biology has seriously undermined the old-fashioned design argument, but points out that the development of the physical world itself seems favorable to the emergence of life at a very deep fundamental level. This is the so-called Anthropic Principle, which refers to the fact that if certain very fundamental physical variables were even slightly different, life, much less intelligent life, would not have developed:

    What we have come to understand is that if this process is to be fruitful on a cosmic scale, then necessity has to take a very specific, carefully prescribed form. Any old world will not do. Most universes that we can imagine would prove boring and sterile in their development, however long their history were to be subjected to the interplay of chance with their specific form of lawful necessity. It is a particular kind of universe which alone is capable of producing systems of the complexity sufficient to sustain conscious life. (p. 6)

    As with the phenomenon of the universe’s “rational transparency,” Polkinghorne recognizes that there are alternative explanations for the life-friendly structure of our universe. One popular way of avoiding recourse to God is to opt for some version of a many-world hypothesis that posits the existence of multiple – or even infinite – universes originating from a single point. On this hypothesis the existence of life-sustaining universes won’t seem special or noteworthy since every possibility will be realized. Polkinghorne rejects various versions of this account on a variety of grounds, regarding the most plausible versions to be insufficient for the job and the others increasingly speculative and ad hoc (see pp. 8-10).

    It’s important to be clear on what kind of status Polkinghorne is claiming for this new natural theology. He writes that “the theistic conclusion is not logically coercive, but it can claim serious consideration as an intellectually satisfying understanding of what would otherwise be unintelligible good fortune” (p. 10). Unlike the older versions of natural theology which sometimes claimed to offer deductive proofs of God’s existence, this more modest version is content to exhibit the “rumors of divine purpose” contained in the physical world. It also, unlike some of the older design arguments, appeals to global, rather than particular, features of the cosmos, on the “character of the physical fabric of the world, which is the necessary ground for the possibility of any occurence” (p. 10).

    Polkinghorne also observes an interesting divide here between physical scientists and biological scientists. “Physical scientists, conscious of the wonderful order and finely tuned fruitfulness of natural law, have shown significant sympathy with the attitude of the new natural theology. Biological scientists, on the other hand, have been much more reserved” (p. 11). He cites Richard Dawkins here, and it’s noteworthy that among the “new atheists,” Dawkins and Daniel Dennett prominently make their case against religious belief by appealing to biology.

    In fact, Keith Ward, in his Is Religion Dangerous? points out that critics of faith misfire a bit when they treat the traditional design argument as the primary reason for religious belief, thinking that in pointing out its shortcomings they are striking at the very heart of reasonable religious belief:

    There is a particular view of the history of European philosophy that has almost become standard, but which is a misleading myth. That is that everybody used to accept that there were ‘proofs of God.’ The first cause argument (the universe must have a first cause) and the argument from design (design in the universe shows that there must be a designer) were supposed to prove that there must be a God. But then along came Immanuel Kant, who disproved all these proofs. After that, belief in God had no rational basis and had to become a rationally unjustifiable leap of faith (where ‘faith’ means belief without any evidence). (p. 92)

    Replace “Immanuel Kant” with “Charles Darwin” and you get an account of one seemingly popular view about the status of faith in a post-Darwinian world. As Ward goes on to point out, there have always been a variety of views about the various arguments for God’s existence and what level of support they provide to belief in God. Plato and Kant himself both offered reasons for believing in a Supreme Good that had little to do with the kind of natural theology popular in the 18th and 19th centuries.

    Both Polkinghorne and Ward would, I think, refrain from claiming deductive or coercive certainty for the kinds of considerations they bring to bear in support of the view that the structure of the cosmos as we know it points to the existence of God. I suspect both would agree with Diogenes Allen who argues in his Christian Belief in a Postmodern World that “the fact that nature’s existence is unexplained by our sciences and philosophy should lead a thinking, inquiring person actively to consider the possibility that there is an answer to the question and indeed that God may be the answer” (p. 84).

    The thing is that there is rarely going to be a single knock-down argument that is going to convince a person of important, life-altering truths, in religion or elsewhere for that matter. In ethics, or politics, or just in our own personal life decisions and relationships we often rely on converging lines of evidence and consideration rather than a single conclusive line of reasoning. Ward makes this point when discussing the contestability of various worldviews (such as materialism, idealism, theism). Every worldview has advantages and disadvantages over against its competitors in terms of things like clarity, explanatory power, being adequate to our experience, simplicity, consistency with other beliefs, etc. There’s no single algorithm that can demonstrable show one to be superior to all the others. What we should aim for, he says, is to elaborate our worldviews in “a critical and reflective way, using rational criteria for judgment that are always open to diverse interpretations” (Is Religion Dangerous? p. 97).

    This isn’t relativism. There’s a truth about the way the world is that our beliefs aim at. But we’re not given a failsafe process for determining what that truth is. All our attempts rely to some extent on personal judgment in weighing different pieces of evidence, as well as value judgments about what is good and beautiful. There does seem to be an irreducible epistemic pluralism in that reasonable people can come to different conclusions on these matters, even though a realist epistemology affirms that there is a single truth about the way things are.

  • More on evolution, human dignity, etc.

    Thomas at Without Authority has a great post exploring the threat posed to human dignity by the acceptance of a sheerly materialistic philosophy.

    Also, for what it’s worth, last week’s post on Sam Brownback got a nod at Slate here (and thanks to Thomas for bringing that to my attention). There have also been some terrific comments to that post, many of them better than the original post itself, so I encourage folks to check them out.

  • Sibling rivalry

    This is interesting – Peter Hitchens, who unlike his brother Christopher, is religious, conservative, and opposed the war in Iraq – reviews the latter’s God Is Not Great.

  • Brownback vs. Darwin?

    I don’t think I’m saying anything wildly controversial when I say that it’s extremely unlikely that Sam Brownback will be our next president. And given his general philosophy of “compassionate conservatism” on steroids, I think that’s probably a good thing.

    Still, it’s interesting that Brownback felt the need to take the pages of the NY Times to explain his position on evolution:

    If belief in evolution means simply assenting to microevolution, small changes over time within a species, I am happy to say, as I have in the past, that I believe it to be true. If, on the other hand, it means assenting to an exclusively materialistic, deterministic vision of the world that holds no place for a guiding intelligence, then I reject it.

    What’s noteworthy here is that these two options hardly exhaust the possibilities. It’s possible, and I believe true, that there has been not only change within species but between species and that this doesn’t imply “an exclusively materialistic, deterministic vision of the world that holds no place for a guiding intelligence.”

    It seems that Brownback shares the concern of many religious believers that accepting “macro” evolution would undermine the uniqueness and worth of human beings:

    I am wary of any theory that seeks to undermine man’s essential dignity and unique and intended place in the cosmos. I firmly believe that each human person, regardless of circumstance, was willed into being and made for a purpose.

    In fact, I’d be willing to speculate that this, more than worries about literal vs. symbolic interpretations of the Bible, is the source of much religious anxiety about evolution.

    Though it may sound plausible on the surface, I’m not sure that this is really a problem. Each individual human being comes into existence by way of natural processes, but that in no way justifies treating their individual worth as somehow diminished. So why should the fact that the species came into being by natural processes diminish the worth of human beings as such? If we can say that God intends my particular existence, even though I came into being through natural processes, then why can’t we say that God intended to bring human beings as a species into existence by means of natural processes?

  • Friday metal (old school edition) – Metallica, “Four Horsemen” (Live, 1985)