This meditation by Christian Wiman at the Christian Century is worth your time. Though, Wiman, being a poet, writes in a way that’s somewhat opaque to my flat-footed mind. Still, your mileage may vary.
Month: March 2009
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In defense of pleasure
I liked this article at Slate making what should be an obvious point: whatever health benefits it may be shown to have, it’s OK to drink wine because it tastes good and makes you feel good! The “medicalization” of food and drink, where everything is touted for its (real or imagined) health benefits, has gone way too far. Other things being equal, pleasure for its own sake is good!
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What could Jesus have been wrong about?
One Christian anti-evolution argument that I came across recently goes something like this: evolution can’t be true because Jesus believed in a historical Adam and Eve, a historical fall, etc., and this is incompatible with evolution. Clearly this is an argument aimed only at convincing other Christians.
What’s interesting here is the implicit view of Jesus. In olden times there were indeed Christian writers who seemed to think that the man Jesus possessed divine omniscience. But more recently this view has been abandoned by most theologians for a variety of reasons. Not least of which is that it contradicts the Nicene Creed itself: if Jesus is truly human, then his knowledge must have been limited. Strict omniscience isn’t, as far as we know, a potential human capability.
Jesus was a man of his time; his mind was formed by the concepts and language available to him in his particular context, and so on. It would be absurd–wouldn’t it?–to think that Jesus knew, for instance, all of modern physics, or that Barack Obama would be elected the 44th president of the U.S.A., or that he was familiar with post-structuralist literary theory.
Maybe I’m naive, but surely no one wants to defend the omniscience of the historical Jesus in this strong sense. So, at least on first blush, it would seem that there’s no problem with saying that Jesus likewise was unfamiliar with evolution and probably had a view of the development of living things that he inherited from his culture and its sacred stories, most prominently the creation narrative in Genesis. More speculatively, Jesus may not even have had the conceptual apparatus for clearly distinguishing between “myth,” history, sacred story, and scientific explanation that we take for granted.
Still, I imagine the idea that Jesus was wrong about Adam and Eve (assuming for the sake of argument that he did believe in what we’d call a “historical” Adam and Eve) may not sit well with a lot of people. Maybe the discomfort here comes from the suggestion that Jesus was wrong about something of specifically religious importance. Sure, we may say, Jesus can’t have been expected to know everything there was to know about science, history, geography, and so on. But surely the Son of God knew all there was to know about moral and religious subjects!
What this objection assumes, though, is that the “religious truth” of the Genesis story is identical, or at least inextricably bound up with, the existence of a historical Adam and Eve. If we deny this (as I think we should), then we can say that Jesus was correct about the “religious” issue–in this case his diagnosis of the human condition–while admitting that his apprehension of this truth might have been expressed in a way that we can’t share. In other words, Jesus was right about sin even if he was wrong about Adam and Eve.*
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*For what it’s worth–and I’m well out of my depth here–my impression is that Judaism has a very different understanding of the significance of the story of Adam and Eve from the one that has prevailed in Christian churches; so, what Jesus understood as the significance of that story may well not be identical, or even very similar, to how most Christians have understood it. -
Our future: skyscraper farms?
Paul Roberts (author of The End of Oil, The End of Food–you get the idea) writes that creating a sustainable food system will require more than “buy local” or “buy organic.” In some cases, he says, these can be misleading and oversimplifying labels for a much more complex reality. For instance, how food is produced is more important in many cases than how far it traveled to get to your plate.
Getting where we need to be, he argues, will require some more imaginative steps between our current industrial system and and a sustainable one. This will mean abandoning in some cases the demand that food be “pure” organic for the sake of creating hybrid models that are environmentally and ethically sounder while still being able to feed people on the scale that industrial food does currently. And the local food movement is going to have to come to terms with regional specialization and long-distance trade if it wants sustainable food to be something other than a luxury item for rich countries.
As this more pragmatic system emerges, it’s a good bet that many of our romantic notions about alternative food production will be cast off. The vision of a nation of small farms, for example, will give way to farms of multiple scales—small farms, but also massive agricultural operations that can produce bulk commodities like grain at the lowest possible cost.
Jettisoned, too, will be the postcard image of the small farm with its neat rows of crops, vegetables, and livestock as constraints on space and resources necessitate new and quite unfamiliar designs. Proponents of vertical farms, for example, envision enormous glass-walled skyscrapers filled with vegetables, fruits, poultry, and aquaculture. Towering as high as 30 stories, and based on soilless farming, these space-age facilities would epitomize efficiency and sustainability: Water would be recycled, as would nutrients. The closed environment would eliminate the need for pesticides. Better still, the year-round, 24-hour growing season would boost yields anywhere from 6 to 30 times those of conventional dirt farms. Dickson Despommier, a Columbia University public health and microbiology professor who has championed vertical farming, claims that a single city block could feed 50,000 people.
The shift will also require more than changing consumer preferences and letting the market do its magic, as ethical consumers and romantic libertarians sometimes contend. The problem, Roberts says, isn’t farm subsidies, but that we’re subsidizing the wrong kind of farming.
Read the whole thing, as the kids say.
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Asking the right question
In comments to my previous post, John corrected my understanding of Dennett’s views. It’s not, apparently, that Dennett denies that theism is logically compatible with evolution, it’s just that theism doesn’t explain or add anything to our understanding of evolution.
But I’m not sure this is really a bad thing. I’m perfectly content to assume that evolution can be explained entirely with reference to natural processes and that it doesn’t require appeal to an “intelligent designer.” I don’t see any reason that Christians or other theists should fight on that particular hill. After all, there are good theological reasons to think that God imbued created being with the properties to unfold in a certain direction without requiring God’s occasional intervention.
Where I think theists do have something useful to contribute is in stepping back and looking at the broader picture. We know that the possibility for the evolution of life as we know it is tied into the basic properties of the cosmos at a very fundamental level, as revealed by modern physics. Almost as though the universe has a built-in tendency toward evolution. So, we can usefully ask, I think, why the universe has this tendency to give rise to organic life, and to conscious, purposive beings.
Rowan Williams puts it well in his book Tokens of Trust:
Faith doesn’t try and give you an alternative theory about the mechanics of the world; it invites you to take a step further, beyond the nuts and bolts, even beyond the Big Bang, to imagine an activity so unrestricted, so supremely itself, that it depends on nothing and is constantly pouring itself out so that the reality we know depends on it. Creation isn’t a theory about how things started; as St Thomas Aquinas said, it’s a way of seeing everything in relation to God. (p. 37)
I don’t know that asking the question of creation as a whole compels a “theistic” answer, but it locates the question at the right place: at the borders of what we can understand about the processes of the world, the place where explanations internal to the workings of the cosmos break down. Why the laws or processes of the universe are what they are at their most fundamental level doesn’t seem to be a question that can be intelligibly answered by appealing to those laws or processes themselves. Is there something that gives meaning and intelligibility to the whole shooting match? That, I take it, is the right question to ask.
A Thinking Reed 