A Thinking Reed

Author: Lee M.

  • God, value, and “secular reasons”

    Camassia and Eve Tushnet have been discussing this Stanley Fish column that takes aim at the idea of “secular reasons”–reasons which, according to Fish, “because they do not reflect the commitments or agendas of any religion, morality or ideology, can be accepted as reasons by all citizens no matter what their individual beliefs and affiliations.” This seems like a pretty tendentious definition to me since it equates “secular” (i.e., non-religious) reasons with non-moral ones, and I’m not sure how many secular people would accept that.

    Here’s my view in a nutshell: values–truth, beauty, compassion, happiness, etc.–are part of our experience of the world and we experience them as “objective.” These are compelling to most people with even minimal sensitivity, and they often inform our thinking and debating about what public policies to pursue, what kind of lives we should lead, and so on. This is true of both religious and non-religious people.

    As a religious person myself, I believe that these values reflect, or point to, God, but I don’t think you have to believe in God to apprehend them. It’s quite possible to perceive the goodness of compassion or happiness, or to apprecitate beauty or truth, without thinking that they require the existence of God. So I think Fish is wrong if he thinks that “secular reason” can’t appeal to moral values. Secular reason only has this problem if you define it to exclude values a priori.

    It’s true, of course, that some hard-bitten materialists may want to deny that values are anything more than subjective, emotional responses, but (a) most people aren’t hard-bitten, reductionistic materialists and (b) even hard-bitten materialists, happily, don’t generally live their lives as though they believe this. Plus, it’s quite possible to be a non-reductionistic naturalist of some sort or the other who affirms the objectivity of values (say, J.S. Mill).

    When people talk about “secular reasons,” what they’re generally talking about are reasons and arguments that don’t make explicit reference to theological claims, particularly confessional ones, and can be offered as potentially compelling to one’s fellow citizens who don’t share one’s theological commitments. I think there are good moral and pragmatic reasons for Christians and other religious folk to approach public debate in this way.

    Certainly, much of our public discourse is constrained by a narrowly “utilitarian” or economistic set of assumptions. But, in my view, that has more to do with capitalism than secularism. We can supposedly do without public discussoins of value because everyone’s preferences or interests will be automatically taken into account by the functioning of the market, and the result will be the optimal outcome for society as a whole. Value-talk thus becomes extraneous. This is the dream of the fully self-regulating market society.

    However, since values aren’t reducible to preferences or interests, this economic picture of society is radically incomplete. For example, we may argue for government provision of health insurance on the grounds that it is just or compassionate. Or we may argue for environmental preservation for aesthetic or spiritual reasons. These are the kinds of values that transcend mere preference and require a kind of public deliberation to put them into effect. That’s why we need democracy to frame, and constrain, the market. This public deliberation will necessary make reference to the language of values, but it’s a language that is available, in principle, to anyone, regardless of their relgious beliefs.

  • God-blogging

    This is pretty funny.

  • Gary Steiner on the moral status of animals and the “intellectualist” bias

    Marilyn tipped me off to this very interesting-looking book by philosopher Gary Steiner: Animals and the Moral Community: Mental Life, Moral Status, and Kinship. Looks like the book came out in 2008, but I wasn’t previously aware of it. Steiner provides a summary of the book’s argument here .

    Interestingly, Steiner takes a tack that is opposed to that of at least some animal advocates. These advocates have argued that, contrary to what we’ve previously thought, animals really do have capacities for complex thought, reasoning, self-awareness, etc., and that we should attribute moral status to them accordingly. Steiner maintains, however, that these capacities are morally irrelevant and it’s enough that animals have “rich inner lives”–lives of their own that are entitled to respect regardless of how closely they approximate human lives.

    Steiner isn’t the first to make this sort of argument. In his contribution to the anthology The Great Ape Project, which promotes extending basic rights to the great apes, philosopher Steven Sapontzis contends that the bias toward the intellectually sophisticated is just one aspect of our species bias:

    Rejecting our species bias–overcoming speciesism–requires that we also reject our bias in favor of the intellectual (at least as a criterion of the value of life or of personhood in the evaluative sense). Overcoming speciesism requires going beyond the modest extension of our moral horizons to include intellectually sophisticated, nonhuman animals, such as chimpanzees and whales. It requires recognizing not only that the origin of value does not lie in anything that is peculiarly human; it also requires recognizing that the origin of value does not lie in anything that is human-like or that humans may be assured they have the most of (because they are the most intellectually sophisticated beings around). (“Aping Persons – Pro and Con,” The Great Ape Project, p. 271)

    Using intellectual sophistication as a criterion of moral worth can have uncomfortable consequences even apart from the question of animal rights. For one, wouldn’t it introduce a hierarchical ranking among human beings such that the more intellectually sophisticated, reflective, etc. people were worth more, morally speaking, than others? And wouldn’t it also imply that an extraterrestrial species far exceeding us in intellectual sophistication would be morally more valuable than us, and perhaps even justified in using us the way we use nonhuman animals?

    Steiner’s book also tries to reconcile liberal rights and individualism with the apparently heavy demands that the recognition of animals’ moral status would make on us. He offers what he calls an “Ideal of Cosmic Holism” in which human beings are understood as “a special form of life—a form of life that is capable of reflecting on its own nature, and hence of taking on moral responsibilities, but whose capacities for critical reflection do not render it morally superior to non-human nature.”

    Human beings are in the unique position of being able to recognize and act on moral obligations toward animals (and perhaps toward non-sentient nature as well), even though non-human beings lack the capacity for reflection and hence lack the ability to take on reciprocal obligations toward humanity. Our moral relationship to animals is one of stewardship: we have obligations to protect animals and to refrain from interfering with their efforts to flourish according to their natures, even though animals have no corresponding obligations toward us. The fact that for millennia we have exploited animals with little if any self-restraint is a sign not that we have any right to do so but simply that we have failed to acknowledge our place within a cosmic whole of which we are merely a part.

    I don’t know what religious affiliation, if any, Steiner has, but this is remarkably consonant with the Christian view of humanity’s place in the cosmos (or at least the Christian view, properly understood), so I’m very interested in seeing the details of how he works this out. Unfortunately, the book is a bit on the pricey side, so unless CUP wants to send me a review copy, you may have to wait a while for my take on his argument, dear reader. 😉

  • Friday Metal: Overkill, “Bring Me the Night”

    One of the veteran thrash bands (they’ve been putting music out continuously for 30 years!), still going strong:

  • Edwards on animal redemption

    If the entire creation–not just human beings–is to be taken up into the divine life (deified, to use the term Edwards prefers), then it makes sense to ask whether individual, sentient, non-human creatures (i.e., animals) will participate in the new creation. Edwards thinks that, based on the character of the God revealed in Jesus, we can hope that animals will share in the resurrection life.

    He points out that the Bible affirms God’s love for each thing that he has made. Further, the God revealed in Jesus is one of boundless compassion. At the very least, Edwards says, we must affirm that God remembers, holds in the divine mind, the travails and triumphs, sufferings and joys of each one of his creatures. But, he goes on to argue, the biblical concept of God’s memory is much more robust and metaphysically significant than our ordinary human concept. For God to remember us is for God to hold us in the divine mind, to keep the divine attention on us. Metaphysically, God’s holding us in the divine mind is what keeps us and the entire world from lapsing into non-existence. Moreover, the incarnation is God’s assumption of flesh, not just humanity. In some way, it reconciles “all things” to God, not just wayward human beings. So is there something more we can hope for in terms of animal participation in the life of the world to come?

    I have been proposing that each animal is known and loved by God, is the dwelling place of the Creator Spirit, participates in redemption in Christ, and abides forever in the living memory of God. Can more be said? I think it can. It can be said that animals will reach their redemptive fulfillment in Christ. They will not only be remembered and treasured, but be remembered in such a way as to be called into new life. (How God Acts, p. 165)

    Edwards admits that we can’t really form an imaginative picture of what this would be like, but, then, the same is true of the resurrection of human beings. Our inability to adequately imagine something doesn’t show that it isn’t real. As he says, the “basis for our hope is not our imagination but the God revealed in Jesus. … As Elizabeth Johnson has said, our hope is not based upon information about the future but on ‘the character of God’ revealed in the Christ-event” (p. 165). Animal fulfillment, Edwards says, must be based on their proper nature, and we don’t need to think of it as strictly parallel to human fulfillment. “The God of resurrection life is a God who brings individual creatures in their own distinctiveness in some way into the eternal dynamic life of the divine communion” (p. 165).

    In some ways, the problem of animal suffering is more acute for theology than that of human suffering. This isn’t because animal suffering matters more (whatever that might mean), but because, as C. S. Lewis memorably put it, animals can neither deserve nor be improved by pain (as humans arguably can). Plus, there’s no free-will defense available for animal suffering, at least not directly. If God has the character that Christians believe he does, and if the distinctively Christian answer to the problem of evil is that God has acted and is acting to redeem his creation, then it’s hard not to draw the conclusion that God will include his beloved animals in the resurrection life.

  • Denis Edwards on new creation: radical transformation and real continuity

    One problem for any Christian eschatology–an underappreciated one, it seems to me–is reconciling it with the rather bleak view of the universe’s future provided to us by modern science. We’re told that our universe will, after billions of years of expansion, either collapse back in on itself in a “big crunch” expand endlessly into an ultimately lifeless, dissipated “heat death.” Neither scenario aligns particularly well with the hope of a “new creation” offered by Christianity.

    In How God Acts Denis Edwards tries to provide an account of that hope that is intelligible in terms of modern science. He says that it is first important to be clear about the limits of theological concepts and language; imagination is indispensable in religion, but we shouldn’t mistake our images of the ultimate destiny of creation for the thing itself. Nevertheless, he ventures that the Christian hope should be seen in terms of a “deification” of the created, material universe. Taking the death and resurrection of Christ as both an analogue and the definitive sign of God’s promise, the destiny of the material universe will be one of both radical change and continuity. Somehow, the material world will be taken up into the life of God. We hope for this because, echoing N.T. Wright, we hope that God will do for the whole universe what he did for Jesus at Easter.

    Edwards emphasizes that we are to see this transformation as entailing real continuity. We shouldn’t think of the new creation as God scrapping the old one and starting over. But what does continuity mean here? We can, perhaps vaguely, understand what it might mean in the case of a human being–we at least think we can understand how a person’s individual self could be preserved even through a radical transformation. But what about the physical cosmos? Edwards suggests that we should think of matter as inherently “transformable” into a new state; it has a potential, as part of its nature, to become something more–and radically different–than what it is. He points out that our tendency is to think of “spirit” as somehow mysterious and “matter” as basically straightforward. But science has revealed, particularly over the last hundred years or so, that the nature of matter is far more mysterious than we thought. Who knows what it might be capable of becoming?

    This sense of continuity, Edwards contends, gives weight to our actions here and now. While the final consummation of all things is definitely God’s action, everything will in some way be preserved in the new creation:

    Our own efforts, our ecological commitments, our struggles for justice, our work for peace, our acts of love, our failures, our own moments of quiet prayer, and our sufferings all have final meaning. Human history and our own personal story matter to God. The Word of God has entered into history for our salvation. History is embraced by God in the Christ-event. In the resurrection, part of our history–the created humanity of Jesus–is already taken into God. We are assured that all of our history has eternal meaning in God. This means that our stories have final significance, as taken up into God and transformed in Christ. (How God Acts, p. 159)

    It seems that both radical transformation and continuity are necessary to make sense of the struggles and suffering that take place in our world. Transformation is required to right the wrongs and wipe away every tear, but without continuity the whole history of the world would look like a pointless waste. Paul’s metaphor of creation “groaning” like a woman in childbirth is apt.

  • Book notes

    Currently reading:

    Denis Edwards, How God Acts. See my posts on this here, here, and here. The second half of the book, which I may or may not blog about in more detail, is less concerned directly with the question of divine action, but offers Edwards’ take on redemption, the atonement, and the salvation of animals, among other things. Edwards discussed some of these ideas in a previous essay that I blogged about here. I think his “participatory/incarnational” model of redemption has a lot of promise for thinking about the work of Christ as it applies to the wider, non-human creation.

    Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals. I was worried this book on factory farming by novelist Foer would be too precious, or postmodern, or that it would simply cover already well-trodden ground. But it’s actually really good! Full of interesting (and alarming) facts, but written with a novelist’s verve. There’s also a recurring theme about the importance of this in light of his being a new father, which resonates with me for obvious reasons.

    Heidi Murkoff, et al., What to Expect the First Year. So, apparently these baby things require a lot of care! Who knew?

  • German frugality: threat or menace?

    Is it possible that there’s something wrong with an economic system that requires us to scold people for being too frugal, not buying a bunch of useless crap they don’t want, etc.?

  • “Cetacean psychosis”

    Does captivity drive orcas crazy?

  • Denis Edwards and Keith Ward on miracles

    Miracles present what is probably the toughest challenge for Denis Edwards’ noninterventionist account of divine action. After all, isn’t a miracle by definition an act of God “intervening” in, or overriding, or bypassing the normal chain of events?

    Edwards considers one traditional view on what a miracle is, namely that of Thomas Aquinas. As we’ve seen, Edwards follows Aquinas in distinguishing between God as the primary cause–that is, the cause of created beings’ very existence–and creatures as secondary causes, “the patterns of relationship we find in the natural world, everything studied by the sciences, and everything that could ever be studied by the sciences” (How God Acts, p. 81).

    A miracle, for St. Thomas, is an event where there is no secondary cause, but which is brought about by God directly. A miracle, in Thomas’s words, “surpasses the capabilities of nature.” Despite following Thomas’s general metaphysical line, this is a point where Edwards differs: “miracles can be seen as wonderful manifestations of the Spirit that occur through secondary causes” (p. 84).

    To flesh this out, Edwards takes a bit of a detour through the philosophy of science. Miracles are often said to be “violations” of the “laws of nature.” But we can distinguish several meanings of “laws of nature.” It can refer to our theories or intellectual descriptions of the patterns and relationships of nature, but it can also refer to those underlying patterns and relationships themselves. Our theories, at best, imperfectly model the reality they seek to describe, and there are multiple levels of reality–mental, personal, ethical, aesthetic–that are, as yet, not comprehensible under some general law-like description.

    The upshot is that so-called miracles may be beyond the laws of nature in the sense that they are not explicable by our currently formulated theories, but may still be intelligible in light of the natural order taken as a whole (if we fully understood it). “This opens up the possibility that miracles may occur though a whole range of secondary causes that our current science cannot yet model or cannot yet model well” (p. 87).

    But if that’s the case, then what makes an event a miracle? Following Karl Rahner, Edwards proposes that a miracles are “signs and manifestations of God’s saving action” (p. 87). To be a miracle, it’s necessary, not that an event be directly brought about by God, but that it be experienced by us as a revelation of God’s grace. For example, in principle, science might come to some understanding of how “prayer, human solidarity, love, or faith can contribute to biological healing,” (p. 89), but that would not detract from the religious significance of such an event.

    It might be useful to compare Edwards’ view with that of another contemporary theologian–Keith Ward, whose book Divine Action is devoted to many of the same problems as Edwards’. Ward would agree with Edwards that miracles are events in which God’s purposes are disclosed to human beings, but he goes further: a miracle can be understood as a sequence of events “which takes physical objects beyond their normal physical realizations, and displays their relation to their spiritual origin and goal” (Divine Action, p. 176).

    Ward argues that contemporary science offers a picture of a universe that is much “looser” and more open than the one offered by, say, deterministic Newtonian physics. The universe, Ward argues, is thus open to being influenced by God: “the whole ‘seamless robe’ picture of nature as a closed causal system is much less compelling than it once may have seemed” (pp. 177-78). In Ward’s view, the universe “is always orientated toward God” as the “purposive causal basis as of the universe itself” (p. 179). Consequently, direct divine action can’t be ruled out.

    This is obviously a complex issue, but there are some considerations that incline me toward Ward’s side of the debate. Edwards is concerned to safeguard the completeness of scientific explanations of phenomena, which, he thinks, requires a closed causal system on the level of creatures. But as Ward points out, miracles and other special divine acts are not the kind of measurable and repeatable events that would fall under general scientific laws or explanations. So, you could theoretically have a “complete” physics without it necessarily excluding divine acts that make a difference to how things go in the world. It therefore seems rash to rule out divine intervention for the sake of preserving a closed causal nexus.

    Secondly, Ward agrees with Edwards that God respects the autonomy of the created order, but that this is not an “unrestricted” autonomy. God will act to bring the divine purposes to fulfillment. “A miracle will be an extraordinary event, improbable in terms of the physical system considered in itself, but fairly probably in the wider context of a spiritual purpose for the whole system” (p. 180). The causal processes of nature are not, in themselves, the final word because the universe as a whole is, by its nature, rooted in and open to its creator (and redeemer).