A Thinking Reed

Author: Lee M.

  • Was this trip really necessary?

    In a comment to the previous post, Jeremy said:

    And if [the new creation] is “a brand new order of a completely different kind” then why didn’t God create it that way in the first place. If I recall, Keith Ward said that the universe as it exists may be the only kind in which we can have life as we know it. If we say that God can eliminate suffering and death in this universe as it stands in the age to come then that aggravates the problem of theodicy.

    This isn’t a question I have anything like satisfying answer to, but here’s an idea I’ve been kicking around: Maybe if God wants to raise human beings to blessedness, he has to create this kind of world.

    My reasoning is that, just as my personal history is an essential part of my identity, the history of the human species is an essential part of its identity. For God to simply create creatures like us in an immediate state of blessedness would not be to create human beings, but some other kind of creature (however much they might resemble us in certain ways).

    Consider: if God were to create a replica of me as I now exist in a state of blessedness, would it be me? I want to say no because who I am essentially includes my personal history. Even if the heavenly replica-Lee had all my memories, they would be false memories since he wouldn’t have actually lived through the experiences that they were memories of.

    By the same kind of reasoning, maybe the long evolutionary history of humanity is an essential part of us. Human-like creatures created in an immediate state of blessedness simply wouldn’t be human beings since they wouldn’t be the heirs of human biological history. If they were close enough replicas they might have the characteristics of humans, but those characteristics wouldn’t be the result of the same process that created us.

    So, I’m suggesting that for God to destine specifically human creatures for blessedness requires creating creatures who pass through the specifically human process of development. Anything else would not be human beings, however valuable they might be in their own right. And creating human beings requires a world in all essential respects like our world, since its only in a world like ours that specifically human beings could come to be. (Tradition obviously holds that God did create rational beings in blessedness, but they’re angels, not humans.)

    This is all highly speculative, of course. So, let me buttress the case a bit with some considerations from the Christian tradition. Christian theology has usually held that the condition of the blessed redeemed is superior to the original condition of Adam and Eve in the garden. Redemption is not simply a restoration of Eden, but a transition to a higher state. So it seems that humanity was always destined for a journey from a less exalted state to a more exalted one; going through a historical process is essential to our destiny.

    Another consideration: creation, in the opening chapters of Genesis, is said to be good, not perfect. This allows for a development or process toward better things, even if we recognize that at some point humanity went off the rails into sin and away from God’s intentions. (This is a more “Irenaean” picture of the fall than an Augustinian one.)

    Finally: a robust minority tradition in Christian theology has held that, even if there had been no fall, God would still have become incarnate to unite human nature to the Divine, and to manifest the divine love to creation. This also seems to imply that humanity was not created in an original state of perfect blessedness, but with a potential for that state – being united in the closest possible relationship with God.

    So, there are both theological and broadly philosophical reasons for thinking that some kind of process of development, some kind of journey, is essential to what it means to be human. This suggests that, if God wanted to create human beings and raise them to communion with the divine life, then it was necessary to create them as part of an unfolding, historical process rather than in an immediate state of static perfection. And that only after becoming the kinds of beings we are can we be raised to communion with the divine life. And it may further be that such a process inherently involves the possibility of suffering, death, and sin.

    Like I said: extremely speculative and not completely satisfactory.

  • I Am Legend, human extinction, and theodicy

    We watched this the other night and I liked it quite a bit more than I expected. I think using CGI zombies was a mistake, but other than that it was a taut sci-fi/horror thriller with some interesting themes (the fate of humanity, providence, the nature of heroism, etc.). Will Smith nicely toned down his usual wisecracking everyman to deliver a more credible character who is hopeful, determined, despairing, and paranoid at various points.

    The movie raised the interesting (to me, anyway) question of what stake God has in the survival of the human race. At one point, Smith’s character recites, in response to another character’s claim that God led her to find him, the statistics of the disease that has wiped out most of humanity: it’s killed 90% of the human race and the remnant is divided between bloodsucking nocturnal zombies and their victims. “There is no God,” he concludes.

    Now, this could be just a variation on the problem of evil–why would God allow so much pointless suffering?–but you can also interpret it as a claim of God’s existence being falsified by the (impending) extinction of the human race. And, given that we have pretty good reason to believe that the human race will become extinct at some point in the real world, does this count against belief in God?

    After all, science tells us that, as our sun dies out, the Earth will eventually become uninhabitable. Consequently, humanity will die off, assuming we haven’t already exploded, poisoned, cooked, or infected ourselves to extinction (or been destroyed by super-intelligent machines of our own creation) in the meantime. Does this mean that God’s project will be frustrated?

    It seems to me that theists can take a variety of approaches to this, with varying degrees of plausibility:

    1. God will supernaturally intervene before then to either whisk humanity away to heaven/hell or to remake the Earth prior to our solar system’s demise, effectively overriding the laws of nature as we know them;

    2. God will leave the universe to wind down into either a lifeless entropic state or a “big crunch” that will give rise to a new universe, but the souls of dead humanity will be preserved and/or resurrected in heaven/a “new earth” existing in some kind of parallel reality;

    3. the human race will, in fact, not go extinct, but will spread out into the universe, possibly becoming the kind of vast, artificial intelligences that believers in “the Singularity” like to talk about;

    or

    4. humanity will simply go extinct, there is no afterlife, and our existence will be one small part of the vast cosmic tapestry that, perhaps, adds some kind of value to God’s being, as in some forms of process theology.

    (There are undoubtedly other possibilities, but these are the ones that occur to me.)

    I lean toward something along the lines of option 2, but 4 intrigues me in its rigorously non-anthropocentric outlook. Christian theology, I think it’s safe to say, is still strongly anthropocentric, but how plausible is that? If humanity exists in only a tiny fraction of the space and time that makes up the life of the universe, are we supposed to think that the rest of it is entirely pointless?

    A book came out recently called The World Without Us that, according to the website, tries to describe “how our planet would respond without the relentless pressure of the human presence.” I haven’t read the book, but the idea is worth thinking about: if we disappeared, the world would go on, and most of the universe would be entirely unaffected.

    I guess what I want to believe is that sentience does have a special significance and that God will gather in all his creatures–at least the sentient ones–into some final consummation. But, as H. Richard Niebuhr taught us, “radical” monotheism means seeing the world in relation to its Source, not in giving absolute value to any finite part of it, including us.

  • Dark Knight blogging – post-viewing edition

    I’m happy to say that The Dark Knight met or exceeded most of my expectations and didn’t fall into most of the traps I feared it would. I liked how its version of the character harked back to the noirish 70s Denny O’Neil version, though seen through a gritty, Frank Miller-ish lens. Some (slightly spoilerish) thoughts:

    I still think, though, that Nolan’s Batman lacks some of the qualities of Tim Burton’s, namely its larger-than-life, gothic, and almost supernatural aspect. (Think, for instnace, of some of the iconic shots in Burton’s version like the scene when Batman comes crashing through the museum skylight.) By contrast, Nolan’s Batman, at times seems like a run-of-the-mill action hero in a weird getup, with his heavy, almost thuggish, fighting style and reliance on technology.

    Heath Ledger was, as everyone says, brilliant. At times I forgot who was playing the part, so thoroughly did he vanish into the character. A bit too long and bloated, and I’m still not completely sold on how they handled the Harvey Dent/Two-Face character. But, all in all, excellent.

  • Kristof on Prop. 2

    The NY Times columnist, an admitted meat-lover, writes in favor of the California ballot measure to outlaw some of the most egregious practices of confinement farming:

    “My hunch is that in a century or two, our descendants will look back on our factory farms with uncomprehending revulsion.”

    Via Erik Marcus.

  • Fake out

    Via Marvin and Matt Yglesias, a study showing that vegan “sausages” were able to fool a surprisingly large number of people.

    I have to say, though I’m a vegetarian and not a vegan, I eat very few ersatz meat products. There’s a kind of paradigm shift that you make when you realize that a meal doesn’t have to consist of meat (or “meat”) + potato + some anemic looking veggies. Most of my meals involve delicious combinations of beans, lentils, grains, etc. which aren’t tricked out to look or taste like meat plus (ideally) fresh produce.

    Which isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy the occasional veggie burger or veggie “sausage,” but even there I tend to prefer the ones that aren’t even trying to taste like meat (e.g. a black bean burger). On the other hand, if authentic-tasting meat substitutes help people make the switch to eating less meat, I’m all for ’em.

  • Durable community

    An experiment in local energy self-sufficiency in Germany. I’d like to see some discussion of how scalable something like this is, but it sounds promising.

  • Gibbons are people too!

    Well, they’re apes at least.

  • “The love of God in Christ Jesus” – but do we believe it?

    Today in church we heard a passage from Romans that contains one of my favorite couple of verses in the entire Bible (I imagine I’m not alone in this):

    For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom. 8:38-39)

    I’ve come to think of the Incarnation itself in these terms: Jesus is God’s love, manifested and enacted, and sent into the darkest depths of human experience. In Jesus, God identifies with humanity in all its suffering and its sin. There simply is no “place”–physical, moral, or spiritual–where we can escape from God’s love. The Reformed theologian William Placher writes:

    Reconciliation, then, is not about how Christ’s suffering appeases an angry Father. Our suffering has cut us off from God, and we can experience God’s love only as anger. God comes to be with us in the place of sin, as the way to bridge the abyss that lay between us, so that we can be in loving relation with God again. But coming into that place of sin is a painful business that costs a heavy price. It is a price that God, in love, is willing to pay. (Jesus the Savior, p. 141)

    But if this passage from Paul is a great comfort, it’s also a challenge. Reading about Paul’s confidence in God’s love in the face of (as he writes earlier) “hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword” highlights how weak my faith in that love is, even though my distractions, sufferings, and temptations are much more mundane. And I can’t help but think that if I had a more robust faith I’d be able to act more bodly, doing risky things in the name of God’s love.

    Part of the paradox of the Protestant notion of faith is that faith is supposed to be the ground for genuine good works–we are freed by God’s love to love our neighbors fearlessly–and yet we can’t will ourselves to have faith. Faith is a gift; though there is difference of opinion about the extent to which we can each prepare the soil to receive it.

    So the question is, how can we come to trust viscerally in the love that Paul is describing, in a way that makes a real difference? Is this where spiritual practices play their role? Do we learn to love God, and to perceive the love from which nothing can separate us, by learning to pay attention to God? Is that what prayer is for?

  • At the risk of becoming a one-note blog…

    I don’t really want to be in the position where I feel like I have to blog about everything that appears in the media on animal rights, especially since the same arguments tend to get repeated over and over again. But since this piece appeared in the Washington Post Sunday Outlook section, it might be worth looking at where it goes wrong.

    The author, Russell Paul La Valle, writing about the Spanish Parliament’s impending protection of great apes, explains why animals can’t have rights:

    Should animals have rights? The quick and only logical answer is no. A “right” is a moral principle that governs one’s freedom of action in society. This concept is uniquely, and exclusively, human — man is the only being capable of grasping such an abstraction, understanding his actions within a principled framework and adjusting his behavior so as not to violate the rights of others. The source of rights is man himself, his nature and his capacity for rational thought. To give rights to creatures that are irrational, amoral and incapable of living in a rights-based environment makes a mockery of the very concept of rights and, ultimately, threatens man.

    For starters, it’s just not true that we only ascribe rights to beings capable of grasping abstractions, understanding their actions within a principled framework, and adjusting their behavior so as not to violate the rights of others. Infants, children, the severly mentally retarded, the comatose, and those suffering from dementia all have rights, but none of them meet this stringent set of conditions. They depend on others to press their claims and protect their legitimate interests, which doesn’t stop them from being rights-bearers. Why shouldn’t the same hold for animals?

    Personally, I’m not wedded to the language of rights. I think it serves some useful purposes, particularly in setting strong moral limits to what may be done to recognized rights-bearers. But the language of rights can easily be taken, as it seems to be here, to mean that morality is fundamentally an agreement between rational adults to respect certain limits in their treatment of each other for the purposes of furthering their self-interest. When morality is conceived of in these terms, “marginal” cases tend to be pushed to, well, the margins of moral concern. The weak, the mentally disabled, and those who don’t meet a certain level of “rationality” end up morally less important.

    This “contractualist” understanding of morality manages to ignore what are, for most of us, the lion’s share of our duties to others. Duties to family, friends, compatriots, ancestors, posterity, distant strangers, animals, the biosphere, and God don’t arise from agreements between self-interested parties. Giving undue prominence to quasi-contractual relationships seriously distorts the broader moral landscape.

    Furthermore, it’s contestable whether all animals are “irrational” and “immoral” if this is taken to mean that don’t exhibit these capacities to any degree. Evolutionary theory should lead us to expect that animals exhibit degrees of rational and moral behavior, and experience bears this out. “Rationality” is not something that appears, full-grown in all its majesty, only with human beings.

    Mr. La Valle continues:

    Unlike most mammals or other types of creatures, humans are not born with instinctual, inherited knowledge of how to survive. Rather, man’s survival is achieved through reason, which allows him to integrate the facts of his surroundings and apply this knowledge to use and shape the natural world for his preservation and advancement. This includes the use of animals, whether for food, shelter or other necessities.

    As the Nobel laureate Joseph Murray has observed, “Animal experimentation has been essential to the development of all cardiac surgery, transplantation surgery, joint replacement, and all vaccinations.” Indeed, animal research and clinical study is paramount in the discovery of the causes, cures and treatments of countless diseases, including AIDS and cancer.

    Cruelty to animals is of course repugnant and morally indefensible. Yet we should not lose sight of who we are or of our place in the world. Yes, humans have a responsibility as stewards of our domain, but not at our own expense or with the mentality that a cat is a rat is a chimp is a person.

    Once again Mr. La Valle betrays an odd and extremely outdated view of animals’ lives. Modern studies of animals hardly support the idea that all non-human animals live solely according to instinct, and not by learning from their environment and applying that knowledge. Recent decades have seen an explosion in the understanding of the social and emotional lives of animals. La Valle, by contrast, seems to be operating with something like a Cartesian understanding of the difference between human and non-human animals.

    It’s also odd, to say the least, to infer that because human beings are superior in at least some ways to non-human animals that they are licensed to use animals for whatever purposes they deem necessary. One person who certainly didn’t hold to human/non-human egalitarianism, and who was philosophically light-years away from, say, Peter Singer, but opposed the heedless exploitation of animals was C.S. Lewis:

    We may find it difficult to formulate a human right of tormenting beasts in terms which would not equally imply an angelic right of tormenting men. And we may feel that though objective superiority is rightly claimed for man, yet that very superiority ought partly to consist in not behaving like a vivisector: that we ought to prove ourselves better than the beasts precisely by the fact of acknowledging duties to them which they do not acknowledge to us….If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, or capitalists for the same reasons. (“Vivisection,” from God in the Dock)

    It’s good, of course, to oppose cruelty to animals, but in practice this all too often means opposing cruelty only when no human interest (expansively defined) is at stake. For instance, if our animal cruelty laws don’t prevent factory farming or cutting open the brains of apes for research purposes, how sincere is our professed opposition to cruelty? If we hold that that any human interst, no matter how trivial, always trumps the vital interests of animals, how different is that really from “might makes right”? To talk about “animal rights” means, at the very least, that animals don’t exist for our sake, or as raw material for our purposes, but have their own lives to lead and a claim to being left alone to lead them.

  • Eat PB&J, save the planet

    As a big fan both of peanut butter and jelly and reducing our meat consumption, I really like this.