A Thinking Reed

Category: Books

  • Doubting Dawkins

    An excerpt from Keith Ward’s Why There Almost Certainly Is a God, a response to Richard Dawkins. (In Ward’s defense, he’s been debating Dawkins for years, so this isn’t cheap bandwagon jumping.)

    The world of philosophy, of resolute thought about the ultimate nature of things, is a very varied one, and there is no one philosophical view that has the agreement of all competent philosophers. But in this world there are very few materialists, who think we can know that mind is reducible to electrochemical activity in the brain, or is a surprising and unexpected product of purely material processes.

    In the world of modern philosophy, there are idealists, theists, phenomenalists, common sense pragmatists, scientific realists, sceptics and materialists. These are all going concerns, living philosophical theories of what is ultimately real. This observation does not settle any arguments. But it puts Dawkins’ ‘alternative hypothesis’ in perspective. He is setting out to defend a very recent, highly contentious, minority philosophical world-view. Good. That is the sort of thing we like to see in philosophy! But it will take a lot of sophisticated argument to make it convincing. It is not at all obvious.

    Though this is only an excerpt, I think the objection an atheist would naturally raise is that, even if most of history’s great philosophers have been idealists (in the sense of believing that reality has something mind-like as at least one of its most fundamental constituents), we now think that many things can be explained without appealing to consciousness or purpose. Not that I think that’s a knock-down argument by any means, but it’s a challenge that needs to be addressed (and I assume Ward addresses it in the book).

  • Jacques Ellul vs. the Kindle

    Well, sort of. John H. at “Confessing Evangelical” has a very interesting post using 76 questions Ellul suggested we ask about any new technology.

  • The Life You Can Save 5

    So, where have we traveled so far? Singer has argued that 1) we have a moral obligation to help those who lack access to sufficient food, shelter, and medical care and 2) that we can do this by donating to aid agencies. Assuming we agree with him, how much should we give? Part 4 tries to tease out an answer in detail.

    On its face, the book’s argument seems to imply a pretty demanding level of giving. After all, I could deprive myself of a lot of luxuries (and donate the money saved to aid agencies) before being in danger of not having enough to adequately meet my own needs and those of my family. Are we then obliged to sacrifice everything beyond what we need to live more or less comfortably for the sake of helping the very poorest people of the world? Singer admits that the logic of his argument seems to point in this direction, but he also knows that many (perhaps most) of us would balk at such an extreme conclusion and, human nature being what it is, maybe decide not to give anything at all. If such seemingly onerous sacrifices are called for, we might say, then there must be some flaw in Singer’s reasoning.

    Singer presumably doesn’t think his own reasoning is flawed, but he offers a kind of compromise position as a public standard that he thinks most people can aspire to, but which can still make a huge difference. To this end, he proposes percentages that people in the top ten percent of the U.S. income distribution should give to aid. Those making more than about $105,000 a year should give 5% of their income away; those making over $148,000 should give 10%; more than $383,000, 15%; over $600,000, 20%; and over $1.9 million, 25%. To avoid dis-incentives to move to a higher bracket, this standard could be made more progressive – e.g., someone making $500,000 would give away 5% of the first $148,000; 10% of the next $235,000; and 15% of the remainder.

    The amount of money this would raise–from affluent, or at least comfortable, people in the U.S. alone–is about $471 billion a year. For comparison’s sake, Jeffrey Sachs, author of The End of Poverty, estimates that it would cost $189 billion a year to meet the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. (Bracketing for the moment the question of how effective the MDGs themselves are.) Singer adds that there’s no reason to think that people in the bottom 90% of the income scale can’t also give something; if they gave just an average of 1% of their income, this would add about another $40 billion. While it’s obviously difficult to generalize about how much any of us can give, which will depend a lot on circumstances, when I did the math it was pretty clear that I could give according to Singer’s scheme without being seriously deprived.

    As is often the case with Singer, there’s a tension between what consequentialist morality seems to require of us and what our own particular attachments–to our family, friends, compatriots, etc.–seem to demand. This isn’t to say that Singer opposes all particular attachments; he thinks there are good (consequentialist!) reasons for preferring that parents raise their own children rather than society trying to institute some kind of communal parenting arrangement. But many of us will balk at this rather cold-blooded argument. It just seems right, we say, that we should prefer our own children to the children of others.

    But you don’t need to buy completely into Singer’s utilitarianism to feel the force of his argument. Even granted that we have special duties to our own kith and kin, isn’t there some point at which showering them with luxuries seems grotesque given the magnitude of human suffering in the world? Is it really OK to spend tens of thousands of dollars to send your kid to a fancy private school, or to buy him a new car for his 16th birthday, or send him on a European vacation when there are millions of children in the world who lack access to the basic necessities of life? Surely our particular duties to those we love don’t trump all claims that others might have on us.

    The book ends with a consideration of how giving to others can be a way of finding meaning in one’s own life. He cites ancient wisdom and modern research to suggest that helping others is actually a source of deep satisfaction. It almost goes without saying that, from a Christian perspective, it’s well-attested that it is better to give than to receive.

    Whatever else Singer has accomplished here, I think he has, at the very least, put the burden of proof on those who deny that we have obligations to do a lot more than we currently are to alleviate world poverty. The fact that this often barely registers as a blip on our political or personal radar screens is a scandal. There are groups doing good work that make a difference in people’s lives, even if it’s sometimes difficult to say how much difference they’re making. And the sacrifice required for most of us to make a significant difference would be comparatively small.

  • The Life You Can Save 4

    While chapter 6 of The Life You Can Save was concerned with identifying individual programs that make a real difference in the lives of those they aim to help, chapter 7 looks at criticisms of aid at what we might call the “macro” level.

    One prominent critic of international aid is William Easterly, author of The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. Singer quotes Easterly:

    The West spent $2.3 trillion on foreign aid over the last five decades and still had not managed to get twelve-cent medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths. The West spent $2.3 trillion and still had not managed to get four-dollar bed nets to poor families….It’s a tragedy that so much well-meaning compassion did not bring these results for needy people. (p. 105)

    However, when you break out the numbers a bit, there doesn’t seem to be quite as much “well-meaning compassion” here as Easterly suggests. For starters, $2.3 trillion over five decades amounts to $46 billion a year, and the average number of people in the affluent nations over that five-decade period is around 750 million people. So, the aid given amounts to about $60 per person per year, or about 30 cents of every $100 earned. Not exactly a staggering proportion of the affluent world’s wealth (see pp. 105-6).

    Beyond that, though, much of the aid included in Easterly’s $2.3 trillion figure did not go toward poverty relief, but toward buying political influence. For instance, the West poured money into the coffers of African dictators during the Cold War in order to get them to tilt toward the West. And the countries currently receiving the lion’s share of U.S. foreign aid are places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Colombia, Egypt, and Jordan. You can tell just from the list that this is politically-directed aid, not aid aimed at maximizing poverty relief. “Only about one fifth of U.S. aid goes to countries classified by the OECD as ‘least developed,’ while about half of all U.S. aid goes to ‘lower-middle income’ nations” (p. 107). Singer also points out that much of the aid that is given is self-interested, such as food aid that, by law, must be grown by U.S. farmers (essentially a domestic agricultural subsidy), which often has the result of depressing local markets in recipient countries.

    Moreover, while Singer concedes that much government-to-government aid is corrupt and inefficient, Easterly, he says, doesn’t reckon with the effectiveness of non-governmental charity and hasn’t shown that more of this kind of aid is a bad idea:

    Because it hasn’t been tried, no one really knows whether poverty on a global scale can be overcome by a truly substantial amount of aid provided without political interference. The political and bureaucratic constraints that encumber official aid only make private donations to effective nongovernmental agencies all the more important. As Easterly himself says, the annual total amount of foreign aid for the world’s approximately 3 billion poor people (this figure includes those who are living on less than $2 per day, as well as those who are living on less than $1.25 per day) comes to only about $20 per person. Should we be surprised that this paltry sum hasn’t ended poverty? The worst that can be said with any certainty is that in the past, a lot of official aid has been misconceived and misdirected and has done little good. But it scarcely seems possible that, if we truly set out to reduce poverty, and put resources into doing so that match the size of the problem–including resources to evaluate past failures and learn from our mistakes–we will be unable to find ways of making a positive impact. (pp. 110-111)

    The balance of chapter 7 discusses some other common objections:

    “Trade, not Aid”–It’s sometimes argued that the key to lifting people out of poverty is to include them in the global market, rather than giving aid. Singer agrees, to a point. He singles out rich nations’ agricultural subsidies in particular as causing great harm to the world’s poor. However, aid is still necessary “for those who for whatever reason are not benefiting from economic growth.” Those who just want us to focus on expanding the economic pie are peddling a global version of trickle-down economics where the poor will (someday!) benefit from policies that currently seem to favor the rich.

    Bad Institutions Undo Good Projects–Some nations seem to suffer form endemically corrupt and fragile institutions, which can undermine aid projects. This provides a good reason, not for abandoning aid, but for making certain kinds of aid conditional on government reform.

    “The Planet Can’t Hold Them”–Does giving aid just encourage a reckless population growth? Are people like Paul Ehrlich right that we’re facing a population explosion and there’s simply not enough to go around? Unsurprisingly, Singer disagrees. First, any “food crisis” could largely be solved by shifting away from a meat-intensive diet to a plant-based one, considering that meat production is a highly inefficient use of the world’s grain. Second, the best way to reduce fertility is to reduce poverty. Not to mention that it would be morally repugnant, as suggested by, for instance, Garrett Hardin, to simply adopt a “lifeboat ethic” and leave starving and sick people to their fate.

    The bottom line here is pretty clear: we simply can’t claim that we’ve yet made a truly serious effort to combat global poverty. There are clear examples of programs that make a difference, and the objections that aid is distorted by politics constitute an argument for more and better-designed aid, not giving up. So, if that’s right, what kind of obligation does each one of us have? That’s the topic of part 4.

  • The Life You Can Save 3

    In part 3 of The Life You Can Save, Singer tries to answer the question whether we each really can save a life (or several) by donating more to overseas aid. Specifically, how much does it take to save a life, and is aid actually effective in improving the lives of the world’s poorest people?

    Chapter 6 looks at the cost of saving a life and how you can tell which charities do it best. Singer spends much of this chapter telling the story of GiveWell, a nonprofit group dedicated to determining the effectiveness of charities. As Singer points out, groups like Charity Navigator look at charities’ program costs vs. their administrative costs, but this is not necessarily a good proxy for the impact charities have on the lives of those they’re trying to help.

    GiveWell, by contrast, actually tries to measure this impact, which–not surprisingly–turns out to be pretty difficult. The organization gives grants to charities based in part on its assessment of their effectiveness. The founders, two former hedge fund employees named Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld, found that the information provided by most charities on the effectiveness of their programs was nowhere near the level of the information they would’ve expected to be provided with for a prospective investment.

    Karnofsky and Hassenfeld undertook a study of organizations working to save lives and improve health in Africa, and, of the fifty-nine organizations who applied for GiveWell grants, only fifteen provided what they considered adequate information. Of these, they gave their top rating to Population Services International, a DC-based group that “sells condoms, bed nets, water purification treatment, and treatment for malaria and diarrhea, and educates people on their uses” (p. 88), all at nominal prices. Other highly-rated organizations were Partners in Health, a group that started in Haiti to provide health care to poor people, and Interplast, which provides surgeries to correct cleft palates, among other things. GiveWell also looked at poverty-relief programs and high marks (and a $25,000 grant) to Opportunity International, a microfinance organization that gives very small loans at low interest to poor people.

    The point here is that proving effectiveness is a pretty tricky thing to do. Virtually all aid organizations can offer descriptions of the kinds of activities they undertake, but not their effectiveness or efficiency. Singer discusses some attempts to quantify the effectiveness of aid programs, but he also recognizes that not all benefits can be so easily quantified. For instance, Oxfam ran a program that helped organize a group of Indian “ragpickers” (“women who make their living by sifting through the town garbage dump to collect not just rags but anything else that can be recycled” (p. 94)), enabling them to demand higher prices, avoid harassment, and receive entry to apartment buildings to collect residents’ recyclables. This resulted in not just more money for these women, but a greater sense of dignity, something that’s pretty hard to reflect in numbers. Singer also discusses another Oxfam effort, one to improve the legal rights of women in Mozambique, as providing hard-to-quantify but still undeniable benefits.

    The chapter ends with a list of forms of aid that, in Singer’s words, “we can reasonably judge to be highly cost-effective, even without formal studies” (p. 97). These include

    –providing well-drilling equipment to villages in Ethiopia, relieving women from having to walk miles each day just to get clean drinking water

    –providing arsenic filters to families in Nepal

    –providing cooking stoves that shorten cooking time, allowing girls time for school

    –helping residents in a slum of Kathmandu build indoor toilets

    –helping villagers in remote mountain areas of Nepal to build a school

    –providing inexpensive surgeries to correct cataracts

    –providing surgeries to help women with fistulas (a hole between a woman’s vagina and either the bladder or rectum that is sometimes produced by the pressure of a baby’s head during labor)

    Singer writes:

    It’s difficult to calculate how much it costs to save or transform the life of someone who is extremely poor. We need to put more resources into evaluating the effectiveness of varoius programs. Nevertheless, we have seen that much of the work done by charities is highly cost-effective, and we can reasonably believe that the cost of saving a life through one of these charities is somewhere between $200 and $2,000. (p. 103)

    He notes that, by contrast, the median cost of saving a life in the U.S. is around $2.2 million, and the EPA estimated the value of a generic American life at $7.22 million. Given the money we spend on saving lives here, and the money we spend on what can, by any reasonable accounting, be considered luxuries, nearly all of us could make a huge difference to the life of someone very poor by giving away more of what we have.

    This doesn’t mean that aid as it exists doesn’t need to be improved, which is the subject of chapter 7.

  • The Life You Can Save 2

    In part 2 of The Life You Can Save, Singer considers some of the psychological obstacles to giving more, as well as some ways they might be overcome.

    Chapter 4 reviews some research that provides a measure of insight into our reluctance to give to strangers living in extreme poverty. For instance, people are less likely to give more generously if they

    don’t think it’s going to an identifiable individual;

    are being asked to give to foreigners rather than their compatriots, even if, impartially considered, the foreigners are far worse off (Singer compares the response to victims of Hurricane Katrina to the response to victims of the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia; Americans gave $6.5 billion to victims of Katrina, which claimed 1,600 lives and gave $1.54 billion to victims of the tsunami, which killed 220,000 people);

    perceive the effort as futile (the “drop in the ocean” effect);

    responsibility is diffused–people are less likely to step forward when others are around and not doing anything;

    don’t believe that others are giving too–that is, people don’t like to fee like suckers or have their sense of fairness violated; or

    associate giving with a monetary reward–studies indicate that a society built around the “cash nexus” reduces people’s sense of connection to others in the community.

    Singer then goes on to discuss some recent theorizing about the connection between ethics and evolution and how our evolutionary history might have conditioned us to be less giving to distant strangers. Some of the psychological obstacles to giving discussed above reflect what philosophers sometimes call our moral intuitions–our reflexive judgments about right and wrong. And to some extent, evolutionary theory can shed light on these intuitions. For instance, since for most of history human beings lived in small tight-knit groups, it makes sense that people with an innate preference for the interests of members of the group (versus the interests of outsiders) would flourish.

    However, as Singer points out, intuitions that may be the legacy of our evolutionary history are subject to reasoned criticism. Preference for kith and kin and or the sense that I ought only to help those I can individually identify might have served our ancestors well, but they don’t necessarily provide sufficient moral guidance for our very different world:

    Patterns of behavior that helped our ancestors survive and reproduce may, in today’s very different circumstances, be of no benefit to us or our descendants. Even if some evolved intuition or way of acting were still conducive to our survival and reproduction, however, that would not, as Darwin himself recognized, make it right. Evolution has no moral direction. An evolutionary understanding of human nature can explain the differing intuitions we have when we are faced with an individual rather than with a mass of people, or with people close to us rather than those far away; but it does not justify those feelings. (pp. 60-61)

    But Singer isn’t so naive as to suppose that we are all going to be guided by impartial reason rather than feeling. In fact, following a tradition in moral philosophy that goes back to David Hume (and includes Adam Smith and Darwin himself), Singer sees feelings–or “moral sentiments”–as an important part of ethics. Contrary to some accounts of evolution as producing creatures that are purely egoistic and competitive, a more complex and accurate picture reveals a mix of self-regarding and other-regarding elements in our psychological make up. The trick is to encourage the latter and to try to bring them into closer alignment with an impartial evaluation of the interests of all people.

    Creating this “culture of giving” is the topic of chapter 5. Singer explores various ways in which a higher standard for giving away one’s wealth has become a norm in certain communities. For example, a group of philanthropists started a group several years ago called the 50% League, which was dedicated in supporting members in giving away at least half of their wealth. Much of what we consider normal or adequate is defined by our peer group, so changing the expectations of that group (or joining another one) can make a real difference in terms of how much we feel comfortable giving away.

    Along the same lines, Singer identifies some other factors that can help people give more, such as (1) being open about what we and others give; if we think others are doing it, we’re more likely to do it too; (2) linking giving with identifiable recipients, as with some programs that ask donors to “sponsor” a child in another country, even if their donations aren’t going exclusively or directly to that child; (3) “nudging” people in the right direction as some corporations have done by making giving to a charitable cause something that employees must opt out of instead of opting in to; and (4) challenging the norm of self-interest.

    The last is one of the more interesting discussions in the book so far. Singer argues that we are actually prone to describing our actions in terms of self-interest even when we’re acting generously and to over-estimate the degree to which self-interest motivates other people. One study, for instance, found that people vastly overestimated the extent to which men would oppose increased medical funding for women’s health issues. Singer also discusses an experiment which showed that students were less likely to return a lost envelope containing $100 after taking a semester of economics! Having to some degree internalized the axiom, common to so much economics, that people act purely out of self-interest, they changed their behavior accordingly! Even though there is ample evidence that people often act from motives other than self-interest, we seem intent on unmasking apparent altruism to reveal darker motives beneath. But the evidence seems to be that motives can be encouraged or discouraged, at least to some extent, by social and cultural norms.

    However, even if giving is the right thing to do, and psychological obstacles to giving more can be overcome, will it actually do any good? The next part will look at the many questions surrounding the effectiveness of giving to people in extreme poverty.

  • The Life You Can Save 1

    I finally got my hands on a copy of Peter Singer’s The Life You Can Save: Acting Now To End World Poverty, courtesy of the DC city library, and have been working my way through it. Like most of what Singer writes, it’s extremely clear and accessible, filled with facts as much as philosophical arguments.

    Chapter 1     begins with what the late philosopher Robert Nozick would call an intuition-pump: a thought-experiment designed to prompt a certain moral response. Singer asks us to imagine passing by a shallow pond and seeing a drowning child in it. If we can save the child at very little cost to ourselves (muddy shoes, a ruined suit, being late to work say), isn’t that the right thing to do? Moreover, wouldn’t be be guilty of a serious wrong if we didn’t wade in and save the child?

    But this, Singer maintains, is analogous to the situation we (that is, we in the rich parts of the world) are in with respect to people elsewhere in the world who live in extreme poverty. We routinely spend money on things that are, by any reasonable definition, luxuries, especially when you consider the situation of extremely poor people living on the equivalent of $1.25 per day.

    And he’s not just talking about the ultra-rich here. He’s talking about those of us who routinely spend money on bottled water, iTunes downloads, nice vacations, dinners out, and so on. The money we spend on these luxuries could be going to help desperately poor people elsewhere in the world without any significant blow to our well-being. So, aren’t we just as guilty as we would be if we refused to pull the drowning child out of the pond?

    In chapter 2, Singer provides a more formal version of the argument:

    1. Suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad.

    2. If it is in your power to prevent something bad from happening, without sacrificing anything nearly as important, it is wrong not to do so.

    3. By donating to aid agencies, you can prevent suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care, without sacrificing anything nearly as important.

    Therefore, if you do not donate to aid agencies, you are doing something wrong. (See pp. 15-16.)

    Singer points out (correctly, I think) that premises 1 and 2 of this argument are pretty difficult to object to. Premise 3 looks like the most controversial, and Singer will spend much of the book defending the notion that giving to aid agencies can make a difference. But, bracketing that issue for the moment, it looks like a pretty solid argument based on fairly uncontroversial premises.

    But this deceptively innocuous argument, Singer says, would have radical implications for how we live our lives. It would require us, at a minimum, to consider giving away much of what we now spend on luxuries (as defined above; we’re not just talking about giving up our private jets and jewel-encrusted Rolexes here) to agencies dedicated to helping people living in extreme poverty.

    Chapter 2 concludes with a review of traditional religious attitudes to giving charity. Traditional Christian, Jewish, and Muslim authorities, Singer says, are united in insisting on the duty of charity. To cite one example, St. Thomas Aquinas maintained that “whatever we have in ‘superabundance’–that is, above and beyond what will reasonably satisfy our own needs and those of our family, for the present and foreseeable future–‘is owed, of natural right, to the poor for their sustenance’” (p. 20).

    In chapter 3, Singer considers some common objections to the argument above. Not all of these are equally compelling (e.g., an appeal to relativism, that there’s no universal moral code for everyone), but he does consider a serious challenge from libertarian philosopher Jan Narveson. Narveson says

    We are certainly responsible for evils we inflict on others, no matter where, and we owe those people compensation … Nevertheless, I have seen no plausible argument that we owe something, as a matter general duty, to those to whom we have done nothing wrong. (quoted on p. 28, ellipses in Singer’s text)

    Singer has a two-part response to this. First, he appeals to the general implausibility of libertarianism as a political philosophy which would require abolishing “all state-supported welfare schemes for those who can’t get a job or are ill or disabled, and all state-funded health care for the aged and for those who are too poor to pay for their own health insurance” (pp. 28-9). Even many libertarians balk at such conclusions and thus, implicitly at least, reject the principle that we owe nothing to those whom we haven’t previously wronged.

    But even if you do accept that principle, Singer says, there is still ample reason to believe that we have obligations to the world’s poor because we have wronged them in various ways. Singer offers the examples of overfishing by Europe, China, and Russia in African coastal waters, which has devastated the livelihood of subsistence fishermen; the extraction of oil and minerals from poor countries, which, at best, enriches a tiny minority and essentially constitutes stealing those nation’s wealth; and the rich nations’ use of our shared atmosphere as a carbon sink, leading to global warming that will disproportionately harm very poor people. Even by the strictest libertarian standards, rich nations have committed aggression in various forms against the world’s poor.

    Singer also debunks some other common myths about aid, including that the U.S. is excessively generous with foreign aid. Interestingly, surveys find that people frequently support cutting foreign aid, but they also drastically overestimate how much the U.S. actually gives in aid. For instance, one survey found that a majority of people think the U.S. gives too much in aid. However, the median respondent estimate of what the U.S. gives was 20% of the federal budget! (The actual figure is about 1%.) Meanwhile, the median preferred amount was 10%, ten times the actual amount!

    Singer considers other objections, but toward the end of the chapter bumps up against what he sees as a crucial issue: it just seems to go against human nature to extend our circle of concern beyond our immediate family and personal relations, community, and perhaps our nation. Singer takes up this question of “human nature” in part 2, which I’ll talk about in the next post.

  • Why do we have pets?

    A new book suggests that we get a bio-psychological reward from them. Salon interviews the author:

    Touch releases oxytocin in humans and animals. Oxytocin is one of the most powerful hormones that the body makes. This is a chemical that is responsible for social bonding.

    When you pat your cat, you should be getting a release of oxytocin, as should your cat, too, that slows your heart rate down, lowers your stress response. You feel this warmth and this attachment, as does the cat. So you’re getting an emotional and a physiological anti-stress response. It’s a wonderful renewable system.

    Read the rest here.

  • Salvation as re-creation

    A while back I wrote about Keith Ward’s understanding of how God acts in the world, as explained in his book Divine Action. Later in the book he devotes a chapter to the incarnation and offers an interpretation of the atonement.

    Ward argues that Jesus is properly seen as the enfleshment or embodiment of God’s love in the world: “We could then say that Jesus does not only tell us about God’s love or even act out a living parable for the distinctly existing love of God. Rather, what he enacts is the very love of God itself, as embodied in this human world and for us human beings” (p. 215).

    However, the incarnation isn’t merely a lesson for us about God’s love. Or, as Ward says, “Jesus is not primarily an educator, who comes to bring salvation through knowledge, achieved in meditation and stilling of the individual mind” (p. 221). The human predicament is more radical than that; “liberal” views of the atonement sometimes suggest that we merely need to see or learn what is right in order to do it, reducing Jesus to an example:

    [God] cannot simply forgive us, while we are unable to turn from our sin — that would be to say that it does not really matter; that somehow we can love God while at the same time continuing to hate him! He cannot compel us to love him, without depriving us of the very freedom that has cost so much to give us. He cannot leave us in sin; for then his purpose in creation would be wholly frustrated. (p. 222)

    What Ward suggests instead is that the atonement is God re-creating human nature in the life of Jesus. In his life, obedience, suffering, passion, and death, Jesus re-enacts the drama of human life, but in a way that maintains its complete fidelity to God. He thus overcomes sin and the powers of evil to which we are subject. “He takes human nature through the valley of the shadow of death, and in him alone that nature is not corrupted. He is the one victor over evil; he has experienced the worst it can do, and he has overcome it” (p. 223).

    In Jesus, human nature is made anew, the way God intends for it to be. But how can this help us? Aren’t we still stuck in our sins? Ward contends that Christ can help us because he “has remade human nature in an uncorrupted form” (p. 223), and we can participate in that nature, or have it implanted in us through faith in Christ. As St. Paul puts it, “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation” (cf. 2 Cor. 5:17).

    The nature that we receive from God is a human nature that has triumphed over evil, that has entered into its heart and remained uncorrupted. It is not that God simply creates a new nature in us when we ask; but that he takes human nature to himself, shows what it truly is and what its destiny is and shows that it cannot be conquered by sin and death. That is the nature he places within us, making us sons by adoption, taken into the life of the Son.

    This view seems to have more affinities with the Eastern Christian emphasis on theosis than certain substitutionary or retributive models of the atonement promulgated in the West, particularly since the Reformation.

    The idea of incarnation and atonement as “new creation” also, it can be argued, fits better with an evolutionary view of the development of human nature. As I’ve argued before, evolution seems to require that we relinquish the supposition that humans existed in a state of perfect righteousness prior to a historical fall. Instead, we might propose that early human beings were immature and undeveloped and that God intended them to develop along a certain path. Instead, however, humanity has taken the wrong road, preferring self-seeking, greed, and violence to altruism, justice and peace. Atonement, then, consists of setting us back on the right road.

    A view very much like this has been developed by George L. Murphy, a physicist and Lutheran pastor, in two interesting articles: “Roads to Paradise and Perdition: Christ, Evolution, and Original Sin” and “Chiasmic Cosmology and Atonement.” Regarding atonement as re-creation, Murphy writes:

    Atonement comes about because God in Christ actually does something to change the status of people who “were dead through the trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1). To be effective, the work of Christ must overcome the nothingness toward which sinful humanity is headed, a nothingness which through its terror of death, guilt, and meaninglessness, it already experiences. If humanity and (as we shall note later) the rest of creation with it, is on the way to nothingness, God must re-create from nothing. Atonement parallels in a precise way the divine creatio ex nihilo.

    One benefit of this view of salvation is that it puts humanity back in its proper place as part of creation. As Lutheran “eco” theologian H. Paul Santmire says:

    The Incarnation of the Word is thus a response to the human condition of alienation from God and rebellion against God, as well as a divine cosmic unfolding intended to move the whole of cosmic history into its final stage. United with the Word made flesh, human creatures are restored to their proper place in the unfolding history of God with the cosmos. Thus united, they are free to live in peace with one another and with all other creatures, according to the imperfect canon’s of creation’s goodness. Now they may live as an exemplary human community, as a city set upon a hill, whose light cannot be hidden. (Nature Reborn: The Ecological and Cosmic Promise of Christian Theology, p. 60)

    I think this provides one fruitful way for thinking about salvation that avoids some of the pitfalls of both a forensic and merely exemplarist view and has a certain consonance with an evolutionary picture of the world.

  • Bacevich book club

    TPM Cafe is hosting a “book club” on Andrew Bacevich’s The Limits of Power, wherein various smarty-pants foreign policy thinkers weigh in on the book and Bacevich gets an opportunity to respond. Read it here.

    I blogged about Bacevich’s book here.