A Thinking Reed

Month: September 2007

  • By faith, not by sight

    Atheists sometimes describe faith as “believing something without evidence.” But is this the way religious believers understand faith? I don’t think so, but I do think that there’s a kernel of truth here and that it’s important to distinguish between faith and knowledge.

    First it should be noted that there often lurks a polemical and tendentious understanding of “evidence” behind this definition. The kind of evidence being appealed to is usually the sort of measurable, repeatable evidence appropriate to a scientific experiment (and, it has been well-argued that the scientific enterprise itself rests on a certain kind of faith). But much of our life proceeds on “evidence” in a much wider sense, and there’s no a priori reason to allow this kind of methodological imperialism to go unopposed.

    But there is a legitimate point poking out of this straw-man definition. We do distinguish between faith and knowledge, say. Kierkegaard described faith as “the contradiction between the infinite passion of inwardness and the objective uncertainty” That’s a bit more paradoxical than I’d want to put it, skating toward Tertullian’s “I believe because it is absurd,” but it nicely illustrates the point that faith and knowledge are, in some respects, mutually exclusive. If we knew, we wouldn’t need faith.

    In the Bible, faith has little to do with belief in God’s existence. Mostly it involves trusting God’s promises, believing that God will be faithful and that he will be vindicated and his purposes fulfilled. Abraham is the archetype of faith because he believed God’s promise that he would be the father of a great nation and acted accordingly.

    Often, though, faith involves trusting in God even in the face of evidence to the contrary. Confining ourselves just to the Psalms we often see lamenting that God’s will doesn’t seem to be done on earth: the wicked prosper, the poor and orphaned are oppressed, and God’s people are dragged into exile. And Abraham believed in God’s promise, despite his and his wife’s advanced ages.

    So, in the biblical sense there is a distinction between faith and “sight.” We don’t see Gods’ purposes unambiguously realized in the world, but we trust that they will be, even if we can’t see how. Hebrews says that faith is “assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” and St. Paul says that we walk by faith and not sight. But this doesn’t mean that we have no reason for our faith, rather it means that the world doesn’t yet reflect the presence of God in such a way as these things would be obvious to anyone. That state of affairs is associated with the end.

    And I do think that this tension between faith and sight can apply to the question of God’s existence. Some people claim that God’s existence can be proved (or disproved), but, whatever their merits, these arguments have failed to achieve universal assent, even among well-informed disputants. However, I think many people would agree that our experience of the world is religiously ambiguous.

    By this I mean that neither God’s existence nor nonexistence is overwhelmingly obvious. There are certain philosophical considerations that can point to the question of God, such as the sheer existence and order of the universe. There are also, to steal a term from Peter Berger, “signals of transcendence.” I would include here moral, aesthetic, and religious experience of various kinds. But, at least in most cases, these aren’t absolutely compelling on pain of irrationality.

    In other words, it’s possible to interpret the totality of our experience in a theistic or non-theistic way. And I think that in this ambiguous situation we find ourselves in it’s possible for reasonable people to differ on the best interpretation. Faith, in this aspect, is trust that there is a God, not in the absence of evidence, but in the face of evidence that is partial and ambiguous. Like the Psalmist who continues to trust in God even in the midst of the exile, the modern believer trusts in God in her exile in this world.

    Also, faith isn’t just a set of beliefs about the world, but a commitment to a way of life. It does have an essentially “practical” aspect. And, it can, I think, be reasonable to stick to this commitment even during those periods where the beliefs that undergird it seem doubtful (at least I hope so!). In fact, one strain of the Christian tradition has it that following the path of faith will lead to experiences of “sight” which partly confirm the direction that one is traveling in.

    I think that the justification of religious belief ends up being quite agent-relative. There is no algorithm for interpreting the totality of our experience, and each of us will have different particular experiences that we weigh differently, and not in some value-neutral way. That doesn’t mean that there can’t be reasonable debate between adherents of different perspectives, but faith remains (in the words of Keith Ward) “a practical commitment beyond what the evidence would compel any reasonable person to believe” (Pascal’s Fire, p. 223).

  • The Fall and natural evil revisited, pt. 2

    In the last post I expressed my unease with the notion of a cosmic fall, largely on the grounds that, for it to be radical enough to exculpate God from creating an order shot through with suffering, death, parasitism and predation it would risk creating a gulf between God and his creation. If fallen angels or other spiritual beings are responsible for much of the shape of the created order as we find it, then I worry that we come eerily close to attributing the shape of creation to a kind of malevolent demiurge with God floating distantly in the background.

    Not that I don’t think there’s a real problem here. How do we reconcile the existence of the world as we find it with the existence of a benevolent creator? In his post David refers to Andrew Linzey’s concern that if we take predation to be “natural” then we are less likely to be concerned about animal suffering. (David offers an illuminating comparison with Thomas Aquinas’ attitude toward animals.) And you know I’m a sucker for this stuff.

    And in fact Linzey himself does address this issue and emphasizes the importance of the fall as a reminder that creation isn’t as it should be and is groaning in bondage waiting for its redemption, just as we are. In his book Animal Gospel, Linzey says this:

    What is at stake in the question of the Fall is nothing less than our imagination, that faculty which can help us…to hold “in mind the completeness of a complex truth,” and at the same time our fidelity or–more often than not–infidelity to the moral insights to which it gives rise. In theological terms the complex truth to which this debate corresponds is the dual recognition that God as the Creator of all things must have created a world which is morally good–or at least be justified in the end as a morally justifiable process–and also the insight that parasitism and predation are unlovely, cruel, evil aspects of the world ultimately incapable of being reconciled with a God of love. (Animal Gospel, pp. 27-8)

    Linzey is right about this in my view. He points out that the denial of this complex truth can have morally abhorrent consequences such as the denial that there is evil in the natural world, that there is possible redemption for nature, that human beings have an obligation to cooperate with God in the redemption of nature, and even that there is a morally just God. If what is, is good, then we have sacrificed any moral standard existing over and above the empirical world to guide our actions.

    But Linzey also provides a hint here of a possible “third way” between merely accepting what is as good and positing a state of perfection “once upon a time.” It’s no secret that many of the ancients valued the notions of eternity and permanence and that more recent thought has emphasized becoming and process. The traditional creation account was often interpreted as God creating a perfect state of affairs whence there was nowhere to go but down. Adam and Eve were sometimes thought of as having virtually superhuman abilities, complete control of their physical faculties, and to enjoy blessedness in the presence of God. Likewise, nonhuman nature was understood to be endowed with fixed (and pacific) natures rather than being part of an ever-changing process.

    But if there’s one respect in which science has influenced a lot of contemporary theology it’s in taking the categories of change and process much more seriously. And this goes beyond process theology which, unwisely in my view, makes change an elemental aspect of God’s being, and thus seems to trap him in the flux of events. But you don’t have to accept the process view of God to recognize that it’s now much more common than it was in the ancient world, or even the world of the Enlightenment, to see nature as fundamentally a historical process.

    If nature is a process, then the idea of an initial state of perfection becomes much less intellgible. If modern cosmologists are right, the initial moments of creation consisted of a super dense infinitesimal speck. To realize the existence of the manifold variety of creatures that exist today required almost unimaginable stretches of time. And life on earth, we think, went through its own process of long development, with earlier lifeforms dying out to make space for later ones. There is no single slice of time that we could identify as the ideal state of unfallen creation. In other words, the universe has a history.

    It might be, then, that the inherently temporal nature of created reality means that its consummation could only occur by means of a temporal process that would necessarily contain states of lesser good. This is what I take Linzey to be getting at when he says that God “must have created a world which is morally good–or at least be justified in the end as a morally justifiable process….” As the title of the chapter from which the quote above comes from has it, creation is “unfinished and unredeemed.” Linzey is, I think, agnostic about whether there was a historical Fall, but he definitely sees Eden as a symbol of what creation is destined to be. Creation is inherently on its way toward something else.

    Of course, even if that’s right the obvious question is “was this trip really necessary?” Or why the long slog of blood, sweat, and tears to get to the New Jerusalem? And will all that suffering be seen to have been worth it – morally justifiable as Linzey says? Could God not have simply created a state of affairs all at once that was perfect and complete? Is the long arduous process of cosmic and terrestrial evolution necessary to get to where God wants the universe to be?

    Here we get into a very sticky wicket, for the question, in essence, is what kind of universe was it possible for God to create? This may sound like a silly question, for if God is omnipotent, then presumably he could’ve created any kind of universe he wanted. But the Christian tradition of thinking about these things has rarely held that God can do absolutely anything without qualification (though there is a minority report that seems to take this ultra-voluntarist line). It has usually been said instead that, for starters, God can’t do evil, since that is inconsistent with his nature. Also, that he can’t do the logically impossible, not because logic is “outside” of or “above” God but because what is logically impossible is simply not something coherently describable or thinkable.

    With respect to the physical world there is a legitimate question as to how many combinations of physical laws or fundamental physical facts are possible which would give rise to a universe ordered in such a way that the existence of life is possible (or likely). For instance, cosmologists hold, as I understand it, that, were certain fundamental physical constants even slightly different from what they are, the universe would’ve expanded either too rapidly or too slowly for life to develop. Our existence, in other words, is rather more closely tied to the fundamental facts about the physical universe than we might’ve thought. So, if God wanted to get us (not to mention all the other creatures that we know of), it may be that he had to choose a universe very much like the one we inhabit.

    Now you may say, dear reader, that God could simply have created us with a snap of the fingers, so to speak, without going to all that trouble. But I’m not sure that such creatures would in fact be human beings, as opposed to a very well-executed simulation of human beings. Our history and our interconnections to other forms of life on earth, and to the earth itself, are part of what we are as a species. It’s not clear to me that God could get us without the whole messy history that goes along with it. (Incidentally, it’s even more doubtful that he could get you and me specifically since our identities are tied pretty darn strongly to our particular histories.)

    I’m not at all confident that this is right. It may be that there are no constraints on the kind of world God could create and still get all the creatures he wanted in it. But I’m not confident it’s not right either. And if it is, we can at least begin to tell a coherent story where the only means available to God for realizing certain great goods (i.e. the existence of the myriad creatures that populate this universe, including us as intelligent personal ones capable of entering into a loving fellowship with their creator) involve some degree of suffering on the way to realizing those goods. This doesn’t involve God choosing evil means when he could’ve chosen good means, but choosing unavoidable evil as a necessary concommitant (or side-effect) of great good (perhaps not unlike the doctrine of double-effect).

    So, I’m not really sure where this leaves us. On the one hand, a doctrine of a cosmic fall saves God from complicity in evil, but at the cost (or so I maintain) of removing him from much of the process of creation, especially if modern science is correct in seeing all of life as inherently bound up with processes of decay, dissolution, suffering, and death. On the other hand, if we say that God was bound by a finite set of possibilities, thus limiting what kinds of universe he could actualize in choosing to create a universe with life, are we tying God’s hands and diminishing his omnipotence? I’m not totally happy with either option, frankly.

  • Friday metal – Nightwish, “Amaranth”

    If you like lush, operatic European power metal with foxy female singers and videos that look like outtakes from Lord of the Rings, then this one’s for you:

  • How much of a planet-wrecking consumerist are you?

    Find out with this fun quiz a friend of mine sent me.

    My score was 2.5, which means it would take 2.5 earths to support everyone in the lifestyle to which I’ve become accustomed.

    I scored the worst on food (6 earths!), which I think may have something to do with the superhuman amounts of coffee I consume.

  • Richard Dawkins does not exist

    That’s the only conclusion I can come to after reading things like this.

    “Richard Dawkins” is obviously a pseudonym of someone seeking to discredit atheism by associating it with the most ridiculous and childish “arguments” available.

    (HT: Richard at Connexions, who insists on perpetuating this charade by responding to “Dawkins” in a reasonable and intelligent manner.)

  • The Fall and natural evil revisited, pt. 1

    Eric tipped me off to a great new theology blog, Ipsum Esse, written by a Catholic layman, David Walsh. David recently had two posts that generated some good discussion, one on evolution and the other on the idea of a “cosmic fall.”

    Longtime ATR readers will know that these are topics near and dear to my heart. What we might call our “theology of nature” rests at the intersection of a lot of important and fascinating issues (theodicy, human nature, animal suffering, eschatology, creation, etc.!). Most of what follows is an expansion of some comments I left over at David’s site.

    In his posts David suggests that the idea of a “cosmic fall” might provide a more satisfying account of the suffering and disorder we seem to see in the natural world. This is because such “natural evil” understood as an inherent feature of reality seems, at least on its face, incompatible with the existence of the loving God Christians believe in. With Ivan Karamazov and David Hart he wants to reject the idea that the evil of the world is instrumental to the acheivement of a greater good. This would seem to make God complicit in, if not the creator of, evil in that God would be choosing evil means to attain his ends.

    This flies in the face of a many modern theodicies that take the evolutionary development of the cosmos and life to be a given, resulting in a rejection of some traditional theolgical notions such as death and suffering as the consequence of sin. The evolutionary process is instead seen as the means by which God realizes certain goods, such as the existence of persons who can enter into relationships with God. Consequently, death, predation, and suffering are part of the very fabric of life, at least as it has developed so far.

    The “cosmic fall” view, endorsed by Hart, C.S. Lewis, and others, holds that the present state of things is at least in part a result of the malicious acts of supernatural agents who rebelled against God. Somehow they were able to tamper with the fabric of the physical world in such a way that it became diseased and disordered, ceasing to perfectly reflect God’s original intentions for it. Thus the evil in the natural world, such as suffering and death, isn’t God’s fault, but the fault of rebellious angels.

    I’ve worried that this view, if taken seriously enough, leads to a kind of quasi-gnosticism. My reasoning is that if what appear to be such fundamental aspects of the natural world are actually the results of a fall, then in what sense can any of creation as we know it be said to be an expression of God’s will? For instance, a cat who isn’t a carnivore would have to have a radically different nature from the one she in fact has. Being a carnivore is part of her “catness.” So, can we say that God created cats? (I realize some readers will be all too ready to agree that cats are creatures of the devil.)

    Needless to say, the same applies to people. An evolutionary process that didn’t involve predation, death, and suffering (assuming such a thing could be imagined) would be so radically different from the one we think took place that it’s not clear in what sense we can say that the existence of human beings was intended by God if we accept the cosmic fall hypothesis. Depending on how far back in cosmic history you think such a fall ocurred, virtually everything that currently exists would be a manifestation of a radically distorted nature.

    Further, I’m not sure the cosmic fall even works as advertised in getting rid of the need to construct theodicies. David quotes John Milbank as saying “I definitely line up with the die-hards who think that death comes into the world after the fall. And I agree with the nut cases who say, ‘If you abandon that, you abandon Christianity.’ In fact, if you abandon that, then Christianity becomes really a rather nasty sort of doctrine in some ways that is going to get into all sorts of peculiar theodicies and so forth.”

    However, it seems to me, that even if death and suffering weren’t part of God’s original plan for creation, we’re still faced with the fact that he has permitted death and suffering to go on for a long time. And in explaining this, aren’t we going to ultimately have recourse to some traditional theodicy strategy, such as the free will or greater good defense? Now, it may be that God is less culpable for permitting evils than choosing them, though at the level of omnipotence this distinction starts to appear less compelling. So, I guess I’m not convinced that the cosmic fall hypothesis, leaving aside what appears to many as its implausibility, even gets God off the hook, so to speak.

    But this doesn’t mean that I don’t think there’s a problem here. In the next part I’ll try and dig into this a little more.

  • Wednesday hip hop? – Public Enemy, “Harder Than You Think”

    A great new track from PE’s 20th anniversary album(!) How You Sell Soul to a Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul???

  • The devil’s music

    I had to make note of this theological reflection on the lyrics of a Tool song if only because it lives at the rarely visited interstection of heavy metal fandom and Christian belief. Oh, and the album’s good too.

    On a somewhat related note, Beliefnet recently interviewed the former guitarist for Korn who converted to Christianity and left the band (Personally, I disapprove of Korn’s music because it’s generally lousy and not for any theological reasons).

  • The need for enemies

    Conservative columnist Steve Chapman writes on the inflation of the Islamist threat and the way some people thrive on being part of a grand ideological crusade. Normal people, meanwhile, prefer to live in relative peace and freedom.

  • God and the taxman

    The September “issue” of the Jounal of Lutheran Ethics is now up, with a special focus on taxes, wealth, and poverty