Author: Lee M.

To say that religion and science can’t come into conflict should not, in my view, be taken to mean that there are “two truths” or that science deals with the world of “facts” while religion deals with “values” or “meaning.” Both purport to give us information about the world; that is, both make truth claims. The difference, I think, is that science limits its scope to the investigation of natural phenomena using a certain method and set of assumptions which, by definition exclude God and the supernatural.

Science investigates reality insofar as it is measurable, quantifiable, and subject to prediction (and ultimately control). Necessarily, then, it excludes from its purview anything not measurable, quantifiable, and subject to prediction. And surely that includes things like God, the soul, angels, demons, and any other supernatural entities that may or may not exist. Science, qua science, simply tells us nothing about whether these things exist, unless they have effects in the phenomenal world that are subject to its methods of investigation.

The problem arises, it seems to me, when this methodological limitation is taken to outline the limits of reality itself. Then you get scientism, which says that only that which science investigates is really real and that science, at least ideally, gives us an exhaustive account of reality. The method has become an epistemology and a metaphysics. On its own terms, though, science seems to be compatible with a variety of metaphysical outlooks. One can be a theist, a materialist, or a Berkeleyean idealist and still accept all the established findings of science. As Huston Smith, I think, once said, taking science to be an exhaustive account of reality is like mistaking an increasingly detailed map of Illinois for a map of the entire United States.

Which is not to say that there might not be interesting “border disputes” where it isn’t clear what the best method of investigation is. It has, for instance, long been supposed that there is something transcendent about the human mind, that it isn’t entirely enmeshed in the nexus of cause and effect that science studies. However, science has made some fairly impressive inroads into the study of the mind, though hardly to the same degree as in its study of the physical world. I doubt there is anyone who would argue that we are even close to offering an exhaustive scientific account of the mind. Notably, John Paul II, while accepting evolution in broad outline, still thought that direct divine intervention was necessary to account for the existence of the human soul. And atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel has recently argued that rationality itself cannot be accounted for in purely naturalistic terms (in a way that harks back to C.S. Lewis’ “argument from reason.”). It seems the jury is still out on that one.

But God, at least as Christianity and other monotheistic faiths conceive of God, belongs to a different order of being altogether. He is not a phenomena among other phenomena that can be investigated with the methods of science. Or, to put it in the language of ontology, he is not a being among beings, but being-itself. The web of phenomena that science studies owes its existence to him. This suggests that, if we’re to know God at all, it will be by a very different means than the methods of science.

Salon has an interview with philosopher Michael Ruse, an agnostic with a keen interest in the evolutionism-creationism debate. While thinking the creationism (and Intelligent Design) is bunk, Ruse nevertheless thinks that “evolutionism” (the materialistic worldview, as distinct from evolution or scientific theories about evolution) has become a kind of psuedo-religion in its own right.

Ruse is drawing a crucial distinction between evolutionary science, narrowly considered — which need not have any religious or spiritual consequences — and evolutionism, the secular, atheistic religion he says often accompanies and enfolds Darwinism. Leading evolutionists like Dawkins, Ruse believes, have failed to draw clear distinctions between the two, and have led many to believe that Darwinian science is fatally allied to an arrogant atheism and a hostile caricature of religious belief. In essence, Ruse believes that fundamentalist evolutionists like Dawkins and W.D. Hamilton hold similar beliefs to fundamentalist creationists — both sides would agree that Darwinism is a “dark theology” that removes ultimate meaning and purpose from the universe and augurs the death of God.

You might say that, in this new book, Ruse is calling for a Reformation within the church of evolutionism. He himself honors the truth claims of science and is “a hell of a lot closer” to atheism than to religious belief. But he thinks evolutionists must purge themselves of reflexive anti-religious fervor, and acknowledge at least the potential validity of the classic Augustinian position that science and theology can never directly contradict one another, since science can only consider nature and God, by definition, is outside nature. Without this consciousness, Ruse suggests, evolutionism is in fact a secular religion, a church without Christ.

I like this bit:

Creationists will describe evolution as a “dark theology,” a view of life as a meaningless process driven by death and extinction. To what extent do evolutionists themselves agree with that?

There are those who think just that. It’s not just Dawkins. The idea that life is driven basically by chance and necessity is a fairly popular refrain. Not all of them come across that way. Someone like Edward O. Wilson, who has no more theological belief than Dawkins, nevertheless sets out to present a very optimistic, humanist position. It’s like Christians: You know, Calvinists present one hell of a dark picture. On the other hand, you have a few drinks with Martin Luther and you go home pissed as a newt and with a lot of funny, dirty stories.

Interesting analysis from Michael Lind:

Can the Democratic Party regain the kind of majority enjoyed by the New Deal Democrats between the 1930s and the 1960s? Not an occasional bare majority, but the kind of solid, enduring majority that permits the passage of major legislation?

The answer is yes–but only if the Democratic Party ceases to be defined by social liberalism. As a social liberal party with economic liberal and economic conservative wings, the Democrats are doomed to perpetual minority status. As an economic liberal party with social conservative and social liberal wings, the Democrats might have a chance–but only if the social conservative Democrats outnumber the social liberal Democrats in the Democratic Party itself.

This is the conclusion Lind comes to after crunching the numbers on where the American electorate is. Basically, he says, the American people are center-right on social & cultural issues and center-left on economic issues.

Read the rest here.

Interesting piece from the Miami Herald (via Hit & Run):

Today marks the 60th anniversary of the atomic destruction of the Japanese city of Hiroshima during World War II.

Americans reflect on this event in sharply differing ways. Some Americans recall the event with shame and express their hope that nuclear weapons never be used again. Others firmly believe that the use of atomic bombs saved American lives by ending the war prior to a bloody American invasion of Japan.

More challenging to consider is whether it was an unjustifiable act in a fully justified war.

Those who believe that the bomb’s use was justified often label their opponents ”pacifists,” ”1960s radicals,” ”bleeding-heart liberals” or ”revisionists.” These epithets merely delay the day when Americans will consider the import of having used nuclear weapons.

Our failure to grapple fully with the ethical questions stemming from our use of mass violence against civilians has meant that we unwittingly endorse an act that some would consider state terror.

We rightly expect Germany and Japan to confront painful episodes from their participation in World War II. Now it’s our turn.

Conservatives today are the natural candidates to take the lead in confronting our most painful episode from the war, because they were once among the most vocal critics of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Consider the following: On Aug. 8, 1945, two days after the bombing, former Republican President Herbert Hoover wrote to a friend that “the use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul.”

Days later, David Lawrence, the conservative owner and editor of U.S. News (now U.S. News & World Report), argued that Japan’s surrender had been inevitable without the atomic bomb. He added that justifications of ”military necessity” will “never erase from our minds the simple truth that we, of all civilized nations . . . did not hesitate to employ the most destructive weapon of all times indiscriminately against men, women and children.”

Just weeks after Japan’s surrender, an article published in the conservative magazine Human Events contended that America’s atomic destruction of Hiroshima might be morally ”more shameful” and ”more degrading” than Japan’s ”indefensible and infamous act of aggression” at Pearl Harbor.

Such scathing criticism on the part of leading American conservatives continued well after 1945. A 1947 editorial in the Chicago Tribune, at the time a leading conservative voice, claimed that President Truman and his advisors were guilty of ”crimes against humanity” for “the utterly unnecessary killing of uncounted Japanese.”

In 1948, Henry Luce, the conservative owner of Time, Life and Fortune, stated that ‘if, instead of our doctrine of `unconditional surrender,’ we had all along made our conditions clear, I have little doubt that the war with Japan would have ended soon without the bomb explosion which so jarred the Christian conscience.”

A steady drumbeat of conservative criticism continued throughout the 1950s. A 1958 editorial in William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review took former President Truman to task for his then-current explanation of why he had decided to drop an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. The editors asked the question that ‘ought to haunt Harry Truman: `Was it really necessary?’ ”

Could a demonstration of the bomb and an ultimatum have ended the war? The editors challenged Truman to provide a satisfactory answer. Six weeks later the magazine published an article harshly critical of Truman’s atomic bomb decision.

Two years later, David Lawrence informed his magazine’s readers that it was ”not too late to confess our guilt and to ask God and all the world to forgive our error” of having used atomic weapons against civilians. As a 1959 National Review article matter-of-factly stated: “The indefensibility of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima is becoming a part of the national conservative creed.”

But times change. In recent decades most American conservatives have become uncritical of America’s use of atomic weapons and dismissive of anyone who holds a contrary view.

Conservative publications now routinely defend Truman’s atomic bomb decision. Critics of his decision, to quote from a representative National Review editorial from 1987, are “wrong, and profoundly offensive to all Americans and Japanese who died in that war, and to those Americans who still possess the ability to think.”

Sixty years after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, we have an opportunity to grapple anew with the questions surrounding that event. American conservatives should renew their earlier, deeply held ethical criticism of the Hiroshima bombing instead of promoting the inaccurate but politically convenient view that criticism of the atomic bombing can come only from the Left. Their response will not only tell us much about contemporary American conservatism; it will also determine whether we finally can have an honest debate about Hiroshima’s destruction.

Relatedly, Brandon at Siris had an interesting post on Catholic philosopher G.E.M. Anscombe, who protested Oxford’s granting of an honorary degree to President Truman on the grounds that the bombings constituted mass murder. Anscombe, who criticized pacifism and engaged in Operation Rescue-style sit-ins at abortion clinics, was certainly no bleeding-heart liberal, but a strict adherent to just war theory.

Doug Bandow writes:

I don’t think it is Clinton bashing to point out that President Clinton side-stepped the UN because he knew he could not win Security Council approval. I opposed both the Kosovo and Iraq wars, but in my view at least the latter arguably involved fundamental U.S. security interests, and could be solved by no one else. Kosovo was a tragic civil war, not unlike dozens elsewhere around the globe, but Milosevic was a bit player with no capacity to harm America. And the Europeans were capable of acting if they desired to do so. So the argument for acting without international sanction there was far weaker than in Iraq. (Of course, the ultimate consequences of the Iraq war are proving to be far more deleterious.)

Moreover, I believe that Kosovo was more important than Iraq in encouraging countries like India, Iran, and North Korea to develop or expand nuclear arsenals. It was Kosovo that dramatically demonstrated there were two categories of countries: those which bomb and those which get bombed. If you wanted to get into the first category, developing nukes was your best strategy. The Bush administration’s attack on Iraq has reinforced this lesson for any state that might have missed it the first time around.

A lot of the criticisms of the Bush administration have focused on the “neocons” or “the Christian Right” or some other nefarious cabal that has allegedly “hijacked” U.S. foreign policy and altered it in some fundamental or radical sense. However, it was Madeline Albright, recall, who referred to the U.S. as the world’s “indispensable nation” and asked Colin Powell “What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” And any Democrat who is likely to be nominated in 2008 will almost certainly be from the “hawkish” wing of the party (this most certainly includes Sen. Clinton, who has long favored the judicious use of the cluster bomb).

Uh oh, if this gets out it could really wreak havoc with political fundraising:

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the rate of family violence in this country has dropped by more than half since 1993. I’ve been trying to figure out why.
A lot of the credit has to go to the people who have been quietly working in this field: to social workers who provide victims with counseling and support; to women’s crisis centers, which help women trapped in violent relationships find other places to live; to police forces and prosecutors, who are arresting more spouse-beaters and putting them away.

The Violence Against Women Act, which was passed in 1994, must have also played a role, focusing federal money and attention.

But all of these efforts are part of a larger story. The decline in family violence is part of a whole web of positive, mutually reinforcing social trends. To put it in old-fashioned terms, America is becoming more virtuous. Americans today hurt each other less than they did 13 years ago. They are more likely to resist selfish and shortsighted impulses. They are leading more responsible, more organized lives. A result is an improvement in social order across a range of behaviors.

The decline in domestic violence is of a piece with the decline in violent crime over all. Violent crime over all is down by 55 percent since 1993 and violence by teenagers has dropped an astonishing 71 percent, according to the Department of Justice.

The number of drunken driving fatalities has declined by 38 percent since 1982, according to the Department of Transportation, even though the number of vehicle miles traveled is up 81 percent. The total consumption of hard liquor by Americans over that time has declined by over 30 percent.

Teenage pregnancy has declined by 28 percent since its peak in 1990. Teenage births are down significantly and, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the number of abortions performed in the country has also been declining since the early 1990’s.

Fewer children are living in poverty, even allowing for an uptick during the last recession. There’s even evidence that divorce rates are declining, albeit at a much more gradual pace. People with college degrees are seeing a sharp decline in divorce, especially if they were born after 1955.

I could go on. Teenage suicide is down. Elementary school test scores are rising (a sign than more kids are living in homes conducive to learning). Teenagers are losing their virginity later in life and having fewer sex partners. In short, many of the indicators of social breakdown, which shot upward in the late 1960’s and 1970’s, and which plateaued at high levels in the 1980’s, have been declining since the early 1990’s.

More…

I freely admit to not knowing that much about the whole “emergent” church phenomenon, but if this article is at all accurate, it really is starting to sound like a re-hash of liberal Protestantism. Or liberal Protestantism with jangly rock guitars, a more casual dress code, and some faux-medieval trappings.

The two elements that stand out are an emphasis on “social activism” over a narrow focus on individual salvation (it’s interesting how the evangelical Right gets criticized both for not being concerned enough about politics and for being too concerned about politics!), and a focus on “following Jesus” rather than the “rules and doctrines” of the institutional church. But isn’t this just liberal Protestantism in a nutshell? Though it styles itself as a movement “that rejects what it sees as the rigidity of the religious right and the timidity of liberal mainline churches,” it’s hard to see anything radically new here.

And despite all the postmodern mumbo-jumbo, the idea of peeling away “doctrine and rules and just loving people” in order to uncover the essential kernel of Christianity is the quintessential modern project. Will emergent leaders start writing books about how the “simple faith” of Jesus was obscured by the theological chicanery of Paul who excessively Hellenized (or Judaized, depending on the critic) Jesus’ message of brotherly love?

(Also, from a Lutheran point of view it’s worth pointing out that simply telling people to “follow Jesus” is a classic confusion of Law and Gospel. If you keep telling people they should be like Jesus without preaching the Gospel you threaten to simply terrify consciences and leave people in their sins. As Luther liked to say, Christ must be received as a gift before he can be followed as an example.)

It’s hard not to see the notorious American evangelical penchant for ignoring history at work here. Will this just be an evangelical recapitulation of the history of liberal Protestantism, or will it result in a genuinely new form of Christianity for the 21st century? And do we need such a thing?

Today’s Inquirer ran an interview with an Iraqi Catholic priest who is working to secure a constitution for Iraq that separates religion and state.

As part of a religious minority (Christians constitute about 3 percent of Iraqis), editor of a theology journal, member of Baghdad’s literati, social activist, and dogged bridge-builder across faiths, [The Rev. Yousif Thomas] Mirkis brings an unusual perspective to the conflict. In a recent interview during his Philadelphia stop, the 56-year-old Dominican pressed his urgent case for a new Iraq “beyond ideology.”

Like many others, Mirkis believes the United States “succeeded in making war but didn’t succeed in making peace.” Still, he says, Saddam needed to be toppled, and Mirkis is not eager to have coalition forces pull out soon. He leaves it to Americans to hash out American policy, focusing instead on the volatile realities of Iraqi society that preceded the occupation and will outlast it.

Inquirer: Since the war, Christians have suffered attacks from extremists. Was it different under Saddam Hussein because his regime was secular?

Mirkis: Yes, but I cannot compare our situation before and now. Saddam’s government was never afraid we could collapse the regime, so we weren’t enemies of the regime. We wanted only to live peacefully.

But it was a big prison. Christians were doctors, engineers, but we didn’t feel involved in politics. Politics was prohibited for everybody who was not with the regime. Now, the situation is very different. We can be a target for all kinds of fundamentalism, terrorism, even gangs who are now free to kidnap people, to take money. The ancient peace was false. The new chaos is not to compare with it.

Inquirer: Many Christians are fleeing the country now, right?

Mirkis: Some try. Others cannot go because they have no economic possibility. And there are those who don’t want to go because they believe their place is in Iraq and they can do something.

I like this third kind and try to encourage them. Yes, stay, but we have to change our mentality. We are not only 2 to 3 percent of the population. We have between 30 and 40 percent of the high [college] diplomas. Twenty percent of doctors in Iraq are Christian, 30 percent of engineers and architects. And we can have another role in this society.

Inquirer: Are Christians involved in drafting Iraq’s constitution?

Mirkis: Yes, we have at least two among the 71 members of the constitution [drafting committee]. Before I left, I spent one month gathering interviews about the constitution with different kinds of people, not only Christians. By Internet, and with readers of my magazine. Fifteen percent of my readers are Muslims. I asked about 600 people 40 questions.

Inquirer: What were the main findings?

Mirkis: They didn’t want to speak about “minorities.” We all belong to Iraq, so that word is very bad. Until now, in our identity cards we wrote the religion. We don’t want it anymore… . There is something that can unify all our religious denominations, which is Iraq. Our model is Switzerland, which is four nations with four languages. Why can’t we do it like them?

[…]

Inquirer: What are the consequences for Christians if Islam becomes the official religion of Iraq?

Mirkis: We are afraid, because they can oblige our women to wear the veil. They can oblige the population not to drink alcohol. The situation of women is dangerous, not only the Christian woman. Even if the [Saddam] regime was difficult, the situation of women was rather good… . The problem is, 35 years of terrorism under the regime created a kind of passivity in the Iraqi population. People are frightened. They have not enough strength to go in the streets to make manifest against this kind of decision.

Inquirer: What can the American church do?

Mirkis: Pray for us. Not only the church, but all Iraqis who suffer too much. We need to take some rest.

When you read stuff like this it’s hard not to conclude that we have an obligation to stay on and try and help make something decent out of this mess.

The Inquirer ran a story this morning touting signs of John Roberts’ possible “liberalism.” According to the story, one of the pieces of evidence for his alleged liberalism was his advising President Reagan to strongly and unequivocally denounce abortion clinic bombers when working as White House legal counsel.

As a legal adviser to President Ronald Reagan, Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. joined a scathing denunciation of abortion-clinic bombers and urged Reagan to stay out of an effort to post tributes to God in Kentucky schools.

Roberts’ advice, in documents obtained by the Inquirer Washington Bureau before their public release later this month, might help him counter critics who portray him as a doctrinaire conservative. Abortion-rights groups and groups that advocate a clear separation between church and state oppose his nomination.

[…]

“The president unequivocally condemns such acts of violence and believes that those responsible should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law,” their draft reply said. “No matter how lofty or sincerely held the goal, those who resort to violence to achieve it are criminals… .

“Neither the cause that these misguided individuals mistakenly believed they were serving, nor the target of their violence, will in any way be considered to mitigate the seriousness of their offense against our laws.”

Now, call me paranoid, but isn’t the irresistible implication here that it’s chiefly liberals who are opposed to the bombing of abortion clinics? If strongly favoring the full prosecution of clinic bombers is taken to be prima facie evidence of Roberts’ “liberal streak” doesn’t it follow that the Inquirer thinks that conservatives generally favor the bombing of abortion clinics? Or at least aren’t really strongly opposed to it?

(See here for previous post.) Suppose we grant that Allen’s description of the “experience of perfect love” – a loving apprehension of the givenness of beings which don’t exist for our sake or to be of use to us, but which have their own integrity and goodness – correspondes to a real, if fleeting, part of human experience. Why should this experience be taken to be particularly revelatory of the nature of reality in general? Why privilege this experience over those of pain, futility, hatred, boredom or any of the myriad other states that make up our experience?

Allen says that a portrayal of the universe such that the experience of perfect love is central is necessary “for one experience among many to be given overriding importance, as the one experience that allows all others to be ordered around it. Given an appropriate view of reality, we see how it is that the experience is the correct one for people to have as their goal and standard. To give it a setting, then, allows us to understand how that experience may be a bearer of truth” (p. 40).

This may sound like he’s begging the question. After all, why construct a picture of the world specificially to provide pride of place to one kind of experience? Following Iris Murdoch, he says that one reason to trust the experience of perfect love as a truth-bearing experience is that it enables us to take a more realisitc perspective on things. When I realize that I am just one particular thing in the universe rather than that around which everything else revolves, when I see other things and people as having their own integrity and goodness quite apart from any use they might be to me, I attain a truer understanding of the world. “The experience of perfect love is a bearer of truth precisely because we are but one reality among many others” (p. 40).

But his purpose, at least at this point, is not to compel us to accept this account of reality, but rather to show how an interpretation of reality that takes perfect love as its animating principle can be a “plausible and attractive one, and this view can be used as one standard in the evaluation of other theological interpretations” (p. 57-8).

Although he doesn’t elaborate at this point, part of what I take him to be saying is that our interpretation of reality is “underdetermined” by the “data” of human experience. That is to say, our experience doesn’t “force” any one interpretation on us, but allows for a multiplicity of views about the ultimate nature of reality. So how we determine which view will guide our lives depends, at least in part, on factors like “attractiveness.” He maintains that Christian teachings shed a certain light on our experience and can show us why love matters. “If love matters, this doctrine matters, since it expresses love on a cosmic scale; love does matter, as we have seen, because to perceive from a moral position is to perceive more realistically” (p. 45).

Allen goes on to explain how the doctrines of creation ex nihilo and the Trinity portray a God of perfect love. “Prior” to creation (if we can talk that way) God, while alone, lacked nothing. He exists in perfect, self-sufficient blessedness. Creation, then, is an act motivated entirely by God’s love. God freely ushered into being a universe of creatures and delights in their existence. Rather than an abstract piece of speculative metaphysics, the doctrine of creation shows us what it means for God to be a God of love. What this picture of reality allows us to do, Allen thinks, is to test competing views to see if they can make adequate sense of our experience.

One thing I like about Allen’s approach is that he’s “postmodern” enough to realize that he’s not going to offer an argument that will compel any sufficiently rational person to accept the truth of Christianity. And he also realizes that the hegemony of the Enlightenment account of truth and rationality is waning. But that doesn’t mean that Christians should retreat into their own little cultural-linguistic enclave where there is no point of contact between the Christian account of reality and general human experience. No amount of post-modern hand-waving is going to prevent people from asking the question But is it true?