A Thinking Reed

Category: Science and Religion

  • The end of the world as we know it (4): Human nature

    As we’ve seen, Polkinghorne is developing an eschatological vision that takes the findings of modern cosmology seriously, but is consonant with the deepest insights of the biblical tradition. The key principles are: that any hope for life beyond this world must be rooted in God’s faithfulness and that the shape of this hope will be determined by the kind of discontinuity-in-continuity. This is displayed preeminently in the resurrection of Jesus.

    Polkinghorne believes that the view of human nature that is most consistent with modern biology and neuroscience is one that sees human beings as integrated wholes rather than soul-body compounds. The language of “the soul” can be maintained, he thinks, but we should think of it as the “information-bearing pattern” which makes me the unique individual I am. Polkinghorne sees this as an updating of the traditional Thomistic-Aristotelian language of the soul as the “form” of the body. “It would be altogether too crude to say that the soul is the software running on the hardware of the body–for we have good reason to believe that human beings are very much more than ‘computers made of meat’–but that unsatisfactory image catches a little of what is being proposed” (p. 106).

    Polkinghorne’s suggestion, then, is that our destiny beyond death consists of God “re-embodying” our “information-bearing pattern” in a new form:

    It is a perfectly coherent hope that the pattern that is a human being could be held in the divine memory after that person’s death. Such a disembodied existence, even if located in the divine remembrance, would be less than fully human. It would be more like the Hebrew concept of shades in Sheol, though now a Sheol from which the Lord was not absent but, quite to the contrary, God was sustaining it. It is a further coherent hope, and one for which the resurrection of Jesus provides the foretaste and guarantee, that God in the eschatological future will re-embody this multitude of preserved information-bearing patterns in some new environment of God’s choosing. (p. 108)

    Polkinghorne addresses the objections that some philosophers have had to this notion of “re-embodiment” or “replication.” The concern is that such a replicated person living in the eschaton would not really be me, but merely a new person who resembled me with respect to certain psychological traits. This has sometimes been expressed by the hypothetical scenario in which two replicated individuals with the same “information pattern” are brought into existence – which one is the authentic “descendant” of the deceased person?

    Polkinghonrne argues that this is a pseudo-worry. “The answer is surely that only God has the power to effect such re-embodiment and divine consistency would never permit the duplication of a person” (p. 108). But this seems to me not to do justice to the objection. The problem isn’t that there’s any reason to believe that God would actually bring about such a state of affairs. It’s that the mere logical possibility of post-mortem “twins” shows that this kind of resemblance is an insufficient criterion for continuity of individual identity.

    It’s actually somewhat surprising that Polkinghorne invokes St. Thomas in trying to articulate the relation between body and soul. For, though Thomas certainly employs Aristotle’s “form/matter” terminology, he also clearly believed in a substantial soul that survives the death of the body. Whatever qualifications he makes, Thomas is clearly a kind of dualist. (Though Thomas is clear that a human soul without a body is fundamentally “incomplete” and that we will be re-joined to our bodies at the final resurrection).

    Polkinghorne admittedly is treading a middle ground between outright dualism and a pure replication theory. He’s not entirely clear what type of subjectivity a disembodied “soul” has in the “intermediate” state. So, there may be room for him to assert a degree of continuity that is sufficient to guarantee personal identity. There’s support for this in Polkinghorne’s suggestion that there will be a kind of purgatorial “healing” in the intermediate state.

    Wherever one comes down on this particular issue, Polkinghorne is right, I think, to insist that our hope for resurrection is grounded in the love of God, and that God intends to save us in our entirety, not as disembodied shades. This point is reinforced by Polkinghorne’s insistence on the fundamental importance of relationality in constituting our selves. The people we become are formed by our relationship to the world around us, and these relationships are mediated by our bodies. To exist without bodies of some kind would to be cut off from any kind of relationship. And these relationships extend beyond other human beings to all of creation.

  • The end of the world as we know it (3)

    (See here and here for previous posts.)

    The third part of The God of Hope and the End of the World is Polkinghorne’s attempt to construct a positive theological vision out of biblical insights, but one informed by what scientific cosmology tells us about the nature and destiny of the universe. The resurrection of Jesus, in its illustration of the principle of continuity/discontinuity, provides the key to understanding the future of the cosmos as a whole. Polkinghorne takes seriously the biblical promises that God will redeem the entire creation, not just human beings. He envisions a transmutation of the material cosmos into a new cosmos that parallels the transmutation of Jesus’ dead body into his glorified raised body (Polkinghorne suggests that part of the significance of the empty tomb is to be found here; matter is not to be discarded, but taken up into something new).

    Eschatology is concerned with hope. What can we hope for in a world in which it appears that human aspirations, both individual and collective, are destined for ultimate defeat? “Hope,” says Polkinghorne

    is the negation both of Promethean presumption, which supposes that fulfillment is always potentially there, ready for human grasping, and also of despair, which supposes that there will never be fulfilment, but only a succession of broken dreams. Hope is quite distinct also from a utopian myth of progress, which privileges the future over the past, seeing the ills and frustrations of earlier generations as being no more than necessary stepping stones to better things in prospect. (p. 94)

    But what is hope’s positive content? It’s the conviction that “all the generations of history must attain their ultimate and individual meaning” (p. 94). But the only thing that can guarantee this kind of meaning is “the eternal faithfulness of the God who is the Creator and Redeemer of history” (p. 94). Polkinghorne says that a “thick” eschatology requires an equally “thick” theology and Christology. “To sustain true hope it must be possible to speak of a God who is powerful and active, not simply holding creation in being but also interacting with its history, the one who ‘gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist’ (Romans 4:17)” (p. 95).

    This is a robust, “supernaturalist” eschatology, wherein God will act to bring about a new creation that will supplant the old. Polkinghorne’s background as a physicist may give him a more cosmic perspective here. Theologians frequently seem to reduce eschatology to concerns with human destiny, sometimes even to political aspirations. Polkinghorne distinguishes his view from a fully “realized” eschatology that doesn’t privilege the future over the present (a view he attributes to Kathryn Tanner; I’m not sure if this is right since I find Tanner pretty obscure on that point), as well as from the concept of “objective immortality” favored by some process theologians. Both of these options condemn the lives of countless beings to permanent incompleteness. “Actual eschatological fulfilment demands for each of us a completion that can be attained only if we have a continuing and developing personal relationship with God post mortem” (p. 100).

    Polkinghorne thus stakes out a position between a fully “realized” eschatology and a strictly “futurist” one which he calls an “inagurated eschatology.” The pledge of God’s future victory of sin, death, and suffering has been given in the resurrection of Jesus, but the final consummation is still in the future. We can to some extent participate in that future now by being incorporated into Christ’s body through his church and the sacraments. Ethically, this means that follow the way of the crucified and risen one, even though we can’t see exactly where that way is leading us. But we can be assured that “our strivings for the attainment of good within the course of present history are never wasted but will bear everlasting fruit” (p. 102).

  • The end of the world as we know it (2)

    The key principle that Polkinghorne uses to construct his eschatological vision is that of continuity/discontinuity. If God is going to bring new life out of this fated-for-death universe, it must be both continuous with what has come before and discontinuous in overcoming the frailties, limitations, and evils of the present universe. The paradigmatic expression of this principle for Polkinghorne is the resurrection of Jesus: it is both the same pre-Easter Jesus who has been raised, but he has been raised to a new kind of life that is qualitatively different from earthly life.

    In terms of physical continuity, Polkinghorne attempts to isolate some of the fundamental aspects of the universe. He sees the cosmos as essentially a process, a self-evolving spatio-temporal cosmos that eventually gives rise to intelligent, self-aware beings. This cosmos is also characterized by a deep relationality: everything from quarks to human beings find their identity in relation to other parts of the universe; it is imbued with information: patterns and wholes exert genuine causal effect on what happens; and it displays a deep intelligibility and transparency to mathematical reasoning. Polkinghorne’s suggestion is that these deep features of the present universe reflect the will of the Creator and that we can reasonably expect them to persist in some way in the new Creation.

    Hope for a new creation, though, can only be rooted in the faithfulness of God. Consequently, it’s important to discern what we can of the divine nature and character if we are to have hope for the future. In a survey of the biblical material that manages to be both extremely concise and comprehensive, Polkinghorne paints a picture of a faithful, loving deity that emerges from the Old and New Testaments. The Bible, for Polkinghorne, is not “a conveniently divinely dictated handbook in which to look up the answers, but it is the record of the persons and events that have been particularly open to the presence of the divine reality and through which the divine nature may most transparently be discerned” (p. 53). In God’s faithfulness to Israel, in its growing eschatological expectations, and preeminently in his raising of Jesus from the dead, Polkinghorne discerns a God who, because of his loving faithfulness, will act to bring about a state of affairs where God’s presence is made immediately apparent to God’s people and in which the sufferings and limitations of this present life are overcome.

  • The end of the world as we know it (1)

    One of the things I usually make a point of doing when we’re visiting my wife’s family in Indianapolis is to make a trip to Half Price Books. They sell both used books and remainders, and it’s rare that I can’t find some gem at low, low prices. (They also have HPB in California, but I’ve yet to find any on the East Coast.)

    Anyway, when we were there over Christmas I picked up John Polkinghorne’s The God of Hope and the End of the World. Polkinghorne, the physicist-turned-Anglican-priest, offers here a meditation on eschatology in the 21st century. His contention in that Christian theologians need to engage with the picture of the destiny of the cosmos delivered to us by modern science: cosmologists are able to predict with a high degree of certainty that the physical universe will end either in a “big crunch” — where the universe essentially collapses back in on itself — or will continue to spread out indefinitely with entropy reigning as everything decays to low grade radiation. More locally, our sun will eventually go nova and destroy any remaining life on earth (assuming we have avoided man-made or biological catastrophes).

    Even though these events are billions of years in the future, Polkinghorne says, they still call into question the ultimate significance of the universe. If the cosmos is destined to end with a bang or a whimper, it seems to threaten a kind of ultimate meaninglessness. The human prospect will long since have come to an end and all that will be left is, at best, a dead cosmos. Polkinghorne thinks that a credible eschatology has to take this rather bleak picture seriously. His book is part-apologetic, part-constructive theology as he attempts to show how sense can be made of the biblical promise that God will create a “new heaven and new earth.” In this series of posts I’ll highlight some of what I think are Polkinghorne’s more fruitful and intriguing reflections.

  • October reading notes

    A smattering of theology, philosophy, and even some fiction this month:

    The Environment and Christian Ethics by Michael Northcott. This is part of Cambridge University Press’s “New Studies in Christian Ethics” series. Northcott is (at least at the time of this book’s publication) a lecturer in theology at the University of Edinburgh. This text is a nice overview of environmental problems, a survey of the common philosophical and theological approaches to environmental ethics, and a defense of the notion that a traditional Christian outlook can ground concern for, and fairly radical positions on, the environment (as opposed to approaches of a lot of eco-theology which are fairly revisionist). Northcott also argues that social justice for human beings is not in opposition to care for the earth, but an essential component of it.

    Small Is Still Beautiful, Joseph Pearce. Reviewed here.

    Animals and Their Moral Standing, Stephen R. L. Clark. A collection of papers dealing with various aspects of the moral problems associated with non-human animals. Hits most of the uniquely Clarkean themes: a traditionalist philosophical and theological orientation combined with radicial views on animal welfare. (A nice companion to Northcott’s book come to think of it.)

    A Case of Conscience by James Blish. I mentioned this book here. I’ve also just started The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, who seems, to say the least, to have borrowed some ideas from Blish as both books revolve around Jesuit priests who have disastrous encounters with alien civilizations. Russell’s book is contemporary, while Blish wrote his in the 50s. It’ll be interesting to compare the two.

    Early this mont the Templeton Foundation Press reissued Keith Ward’s Divine Action, which had been out of print virtually from the time of its original publication due to a publishing acquisition. This is his account of how modern science and philosophy allow us to give a coherent account of how God can act in the world. While taking some ideas from process thought, Ward goes beyond the view of many process theologians that God acts sheerly “persuasively” on the world. Ward argues that modern physics has given us a picture of the physical world that is much “looser” than that of classical Newtonian physics, and that, in principle, God can act in the world in ways that would make a real difference, but be undetectable by the methods of science. He also offers persuasive and insightful accounts of miracles, the Incarnation, and the relation of Christianity to other religions under the rubric of ways that God acts in the world.

    Also currently working on Wandering Home by Bill McKibben, which narrates his hike from the Champlain river valley in Vermont into the Adiorondacks in New York. Along the way McKibben encounters various friends and acquaintances trying to find new ways of living sustainably, from localist vinters making wine for the region to an Earth First!-er living in an electricity- and plumbing-free shack in the woods. All of this provides much fodder for McKibben’s ruminations on possibilities of treading more lightly on the earth.

    On deck is James Alison’s The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes. I blogged about Alison’s Raising Abel a bit here. Although impressed by the way Alison’s Girard-inspired exegesis sheds new light on the biblical texts, I expressed some skepticism about aspects of his project. But, inspired in part by this review of Alison’s work from Charles Hefling that Christopher tipped me off to, I decided it was worth delving in more deeply.

  • Transcript of Rowan Williams talk on the new atheism

    If you’re interested but don’t want to sit through the video of Rowan Williams’ talk on Dawkins and the new atheism that I linked to last week, you can read a transcript here.

  • The Fall and natural evil revisited, pt. 2

    In the last post I expressed my unease with the notion of a cosmic fall, largely on the grounds that, for it to be radical enough to exculpate God from creating an order shot through with suffering, death, parasitism and predation it would risk creating a gulf between God and his creation. If fallen angels or other spiritual beings are responsible for much of the shape of the created order as we find it, then I worry that we come eerily close to attributing the shape of creation to a kind of malevolent demiurge with God floating distantly in the background.

    Not that I don’t think there’s a real problem here. How do we reconcile the existence of the world as we find it with the existence of a benevolent creator? In his post David refers to Andrew Linzey’s concern that if we take predation to be “natural” then we are less likely to be concerned about animal suffering. (David offers an illuminating comparison with Thomas Aquinas’ attitude toward animals.) And you know I’m a sucker for this stuff.

    And in fact Linzey himself does address this issue and emphasizes the importance of the fall as a reminder that creation isn’t as it should be and is groaning in bondage waiting for its redemption, just as we are. In his book Animal Gospel, Linzey says this:

    What is at stake in the question of the Fall is nothing less than our imagination, that faculty which can help us…to hold “in mind the completeness of a complex truth,” and at the same time our fidelity or–more often than not–infidelity to the moral insights to which it gives rise. In theological terms the complex truth to which this debate corresponds is the dual recognition that God as the Creator of all things must have created a world which is morally good–or at least be justified in the end as a morally justifiable process–and also the insight that parasitism and predation are unlovely, cruel, evil aspects of the world ultimately incapable of being reconciled with a God of love. (Animal Gospel, pp. 27-8)

    Linzey is right about this in my view. He points out that the denial of this complex truth can have morally abhorrent consequences such as the denial that there is evil in the natural world, that there is possible redemption for nature, that human beings have an obligation to cooperate with God in the redemption of nature, and even that there is a morally just God. If what is, is good, then we have sacrificed any moral standard existing over and above the empirical world to guide our actions.

    But Linzey also provides a hint here of a possible “third way” between merely accepting what is as good and positing a state of perfection “once upon a time.” It’s no secret that many of the ancients valued the notions of eternity and permanence and that more recent thought has emphasized becoming and process. The traditional creation account was often interpreted as God creating a perfect state of affairs whence there was nowhere to go but down. Adam and Eve were sometimes thought of as having virtually superhuman abilities, complete control of their physical faculties, and to enjoy blessedness in the presence of God. Likewise, nonhuman nature was understood to be endowed with fixed (and pacific) natures rather than being part of an ever-changing process.

    But if there’s one respect in which science has influenced a lot of contemporary theology it’s in taking the categories of change and process much more seriously. And this goes beyond process theology which, unwisely in my view, makes change an elemental aspect of God’s being, and thus seems to trap him in the flux of events. But you don’t have to accept the process view of God to recognize that it’s now much more common than it was in the ancient world, or even the world of the Enlightenment, to see nature as fundamentally a historical process.

    If nature is a process, then the idea of an initial state of perfection becomes much less intellgible. If modern cosmologists are right, the initial moments of creation consisted of a super dense infinitesimal speck. To realize the existence of the manifold variety of creatures that exist today required almost unimaginable stretches of time. And life on earth, we think, went through its own process of long development, with earlier lifeforms dying out to make space for later ones. There is no single slice of time that we could identify as the ideal state of unfallen creation. In other words, the universe has a history.

    It might be, then, that the inherently temporal nature of created reality means that its consummation could only occur by means of a temporal process that would necessarily contain states of lesser good. This is what I take Linzey to be getting at when he says that God “must have created a world which is morally good–or at least be justified in the end as a morally justifiable process….” As the title of the chapter from which the quote above comes from has it, creation is “unfinished and unredeemed.” Linzey is, I think, agnostic about whether there was a historical Fall, but he definitely sees Eden as a symbol of what creation is destined to be. Creation is inherently on its way toward something else.

    Of course, even if that’s right the obvious question is “was this trip really necessary?” Or why the long slog of blood, sweat, and tears to get to the New Jerusalem? And will all that suffering be seen to have been worth it – morally justifiable as Linzey says? Could God not have simply created a state of affairs all at once that was perfect and complete? Is the long arduous process of cosmic and terrestrial evolution necessary to get to where God wants the universe to be?

    Here we get into a very sticky wicket, for the question, in essence, is what kind of universe was it possible for God to create? This may sound like a silly question, for if God is omnipotent, then presumably he could’ve created any kind of universe he wanted. But the Christian tradition of thinking about these things has rarely held that God can do absolutely anything without qualification (though there is a minority report that seems to take this ultra-voluntarist line). It has usually been said instead that, for starters, God can’t do evil, since that is inconsistent with his nature. Also, that he can’t do the logically impossible, not because logic is “outside” of or “above” God but because what is logically impossible is simply not something coherently describable or thinkable.

    With respect to the physical world there is a legitimate question as to how many combinations of physical laws or fundamental physical facts are possible which would give rise to a universe ordered in such a way that the existence of life is possible (or likely). For instance, cosmologists hold, as I understand it, that, were certain fundamental physical constants even slightly different from what they are, the universe would’ve expanded either too rapidly or too slowly for life to develop. Our existence, in other words, is rather more closely tied to the fundamental facts about the physical universe than we might’ve thought. So, if God wanted to get us (not to mention all the other creatures that we know of), it may be that he had to choose a universe very much like the one we inhabit.

    Now you may say, dear reader, that God could simply have created us with a snap of the fingers, so to speak, without going to all that trouble. But I’m not sure that such creatures would in fact be human beings, as opposed to a very well-executed simulation of human beings. Our history and our interconnections to other forms of life on earth, and to the earth itself, are part of what we are as a species. It’s not clear to me that God could get us without the whole messy history that goes along with it. (Incidentally, it’s even more doubtful that he could get you and me specifically since our identities are tied pretty darn strongly to our particular histories.)

    I’m not at all confident that this is right. It may be that there are no constraints on the kind of world God could create and still get all the creatures he wanted in it. But I’m not confident it’s not right either. And if it is, we can at least begin to tell a coherent story where the only means available to God for realizing certain great goods (i.e. the existence of the myriad creatures that populate this universe, including us as intelligent personal ones capable of entering into a loving fellowship with their creator) involve some degree of suffering on the way to realizing those goods. This doesn’t involve God choosing evil means when he could’ve chosen good means, but choosing unavoidable evil as a necessary concommitant (or side-effect) of great good (perhaps not unlike the doctrine of double-effect).

    So, I’m not really sure where this leaves us. On the one hand, a doctrine of a cosmic fall saves God from complicity in evil, but at the cost (or so I maintain) of removing him from much of the process of creation, especially if modern science is correct in seeing all of life as inherently bound up with processes of decay, dissolution, suffering, and death. On the other hand, if we say that God was bound by a finite set of possibilities, thus limiting what kinds of universe he could actualize in choosing to create a universe with life, are we tying God’s hands and diminishing his omnipotence? I’m not totally happy with either option, frankly.

  • God and the evolving universe

    I’m glad to see that First Things made Avery Dulles’ article on God and evolution available as this month’s free article.

    Dulles distinguishes three (non-creationist) approaches to evolution: theistic evolutionism which sees the process of evolution as the outworking of inherent properties of the universe established by God, Intelligent design, which claims that certain particular facets of the evolutionary process are inexplicable without reference to a divine intelligence, and what we might call “holism” which maintains that the behavior of higher existents (such as organisms) isn’t reducible to or fully explicable by the laws governing lower ones (such as the laws of chemistry or physics).

    Dulles cites John Polkinghorne as an example of someone in this third school of thought. In his recent book Exploring Reality Polkinghorne makes that interesting suggestion that the human mind’s access to a realm of intelligible universals such as mathematics and logic, goodness and beauty, could itself be a factor in human evolution. That is, he wants to expand the relevant sense of “environment” to include the non-physical “environment” of the intelligible world.

    Polkinghorne writes:

    Once one accepts the enrichment beyond the merely material of the context within which human life is lived, one is no longer restricted to the notion of Darwinian survival necessity as providing the sole engine driving hominid development. In these noetic realms of rational skill, moral imperative, and aesthetic delight–of encounter with the true, the good and the beautiful–other forces are at work to draw out and enhance distinctive human potentialities. (p. 56)

    Obviously Polkinghorne isn’t suggesting that our cognitive access to the non-material intelligible realm alters the individual genetic structure that is passed on to one’s descendants. Rather, it creates

    a language-based Lamarckian ability to transfer information from one generation to the next through a process whose efficiency vastly exceeded the slow and uncertain Darwinian method of differential propagation. It is in these ways that a recognition of the many-layered character of reality, and the variety of modes of response to it, make intelligible the rapid development of the remarkable distinctiveness of human nature. (p. 57)

    The idea here is that human development is explained, at least in part, by the responses we make to this more comprehensive “environment” that includes the realm of intelligible truth, goodness, and beauty and thus isn’t reducible to more materialistic accounts.

    Dulles cautions against the “God of the gaps” thinking that seems to characterize the Intelligent Design school, but he also warns that “Christian Darwinists run the risk of conceding too much to their atheistic colleagues.”

    They may be over-inclined to grant that the whole process of emergence takes place without the involvement of any higher agency. Theologians must ask whether it is acceptable to banish God from his creation in this ­fashion.

    The kind of holism championed by thinkers like Polkinghorne (I’d also place Keith Ward somewhere in this school) seeks to show how God can influence the process of evolution without resorting to the kind of tinkering that ID theorists seem to imply. Some process thinkers, for instance, describe God as “luring” creation toward certain states of being. Polkinghorne (as well as Ward, I think) wants to say that God intervenes in more direct ways too. But I have to say that I find Polkinghorne’s concept of “downward” causation as the input of information by which he tries to explain God’s action in the world pretty darn obscure, at least as it pertains to action on non-living/non-intelligent things.*

    What Polkinghorne, et al. are up to here, it seems to me, is trying to thread a third way between the deism of the theistic evolution crowd and the God-of-the-gaps tinkering of the ID crowd. They base this partly on the idea that modern science has shown the physical universe to have a “looser” causal structure than that imagined by classic Newtonian physics (and more to the point its philosophical popularizers). If physical events are underdetermined by preceding ones, then there appears to be room for God to exert some kind of influence without “violating” the laws of nature. The trick, or so it seems, is to give some account of how God exerts that influence without conceiving of it in some kind of quasi-physical infusion of energy. That’s what I take Polkinghorne to be getting at in talking about causation by means of “information.”
    —————————————————————————
    *I note that next month the Templeton Foundation Press is reissuing Ward’s Divine Action which seeks to address these questions. That’s one that’s probably worth checking out.

  • The cow-man cometh

    This story reports that the UK has given the green light to scientists to create human-animal ‘chimera’ embryos for research purposes (see here for a bit more background).

    Essentially this involves combining an animal egg (cows in this case) with human genetic material to create an embryo from which stem cells can be extracted. The hope, I take it, is that these embryos will be close enough to human embryos for the resulting research to be of value.

    Some opponents have objected to what they consider the blurring of the boundary between human beings and other animals. Researchers respond that getting eggs from animals is more efficient and less ethically troublesome than getting them from women, a process that is described as “invasive, painful and potentially dangerous.”

    This research doesn’t remove the moral controversy over destroying the resultant embryos: though there may be some debate about whether such an embryo is “technically” human, it’s close enough for those who oppose embryo-desctructive research more generally. Ironically, this concern is somewhat at odds with the “blurring the lines” argument, but not outright inconsistent with it.

    There’s also the question of whether it’s ethical to get the eggs from cows. If the process of getting eggs from women is dangerous and painful, how do the cows fare? None of the stories I read addressed this particular issue, but one can only assume that the well-being of the cows isn’t foremost in the minds of those who are using them in this way.

    Of course, this touches on the issue of using animals in scientific research more generally. Is it permissible to use them, without their consent (obviously), and in a fashion that leads to pain, suffering, and/or death on the animal’s part?

    I don’t have a settled view on this. I’m strongly inclined to say that routine product testing and experimentation sheerly out of curiosity or the desire to know aren’t sufficient justifications for most animal experimentation. It’s hard to see how, say, having another variety of deodorant on the shelves justifies subjecting animals to painful tests.

    On the other hand, research aimed at curing serious disease has, at least on its face, a stronger claim. Surely saving human lives justifies sacrificing some animals?

    Still, it might be worthwhile to at least examine a dissenting view. As it happens, I’ve been reading Andrew Linzey’s Christianity and the Rights of Animals. Among other topics, he examines the argument for animal research and ties it to concerns about research that destroys human embryos.

    Linzey’s concern is that animal experimentation, justified as it is in terms of harms and benefits, or an essentially consequentialist moral framework, is intrinsically likely to lead to experiments on unwilling human subjects. If experiments on animals are justified by pointing to their prospective benefits, what stops us from experimenting on embryos or “sub-standard” human beings for the same reason? “Once our moral thinking becomes dominated by crude utilitarian calculations, then there is no right, value or good that cannot be bargained away, animal or human” (p. 120).

    He goes on to ask: even if we can accept that these kinds of moral trade-offs might sometimes be justified, do we want to institutionalize them? That is, do we want entire industries whose products (and profits) are premised on treating both animal life and nascent human life as disposable commodities to be exploited for our benefit? Or do we want to somehow recognize that they have intrinsic value that must be respected in some way?

    Like I said, I don’t have a settled issue on the matter, but I think it’s worth thinking about. Our tendency is to see the non-human (or even the marginally human) as essentially a resource. For a variety of reasons I don’t think this is a healthy, sane, or sustainable view. And yet it’s not easy to draw the line between abuse and legitimate use.

  • Modest natural theology and epistemic pluralism

    At the suggestion of Andy and Thomas I started reading some John Polkinghorne, the physicist and Anglican priest, this weekend. I picked up his Belief in God in an Age of Science, the only title of his they had at our library. It’s a collection of lectures Polkinghorne gave at Yale in 1996, with some additional material and so far (only twelve pages in) it’s good stuff.

    In the first chapter Polkinghorne discusses what he calls the “new natural theology.” There are two aspects of the physical world, Polkinghorne thinks, that provide “hints” of the existence of God. The first is the fact that our minds are fitted to understand the deep structure of the physical universe and that this structure can be expressed in elegant mathematical forumlas. “This use of abstract mathematics as a technique of physical discovery points to a very deep fact about the nature of the universe that we inhabit, and to the remarkable conformity of our human minds to its patterning. We live in a world whose physical fabric is endowed with transparent rational beauty” (p. 2).

    Polkinghorne rejects as implausible the view that our ability to comprehend the fabric of the physical world and express it in the language of mathematics is a mere by-product of our evolutionary development:

    No one would deny, of course, that evolutionary necessity will have moulded our ability for thinking in ways that will ensure its adequacy for understanding the world around us, at least to the extent that is demanded by pressures for survival. Yet our surplus intellectual capacity, enabling us to comprehend the microworld of quarks and gluons and the macroworld of big bang cosmology, is on such a scale that it beggars belief that this is simply a fortunate by-product of the struggle for life. (p. 2-3)

    He likewise rejects any “constructivist” account of knowledge which says that we merely project our preference for mathematical reasoning onto the physical world. “Nature is not so plastic as to be subject to our whim in this way” (p. 3). The great discoveries of physics, however aesthetically pleasing they may be, depend on the belief that it is nature speaking to us in revealing aspects of its deep structure.

    The second aspect of the physical world that Polkinghorne holds up as a hint of God’s existence is the purpose displayed in the development of the cosmos as a whole. He concedes that evolutionary biology has seriously undermined the old-fashioned design argument, but points out that the development of the physical world itself seems favorable to the emergence of life at a very deep fundamental level. This is the so-called Anthropic Principle, which refers to the fact that if certain very fundamental physical variables were even slightly different, life, much less intelligent life, would not have developed:

    What we have come to understand is that if this process is to be fruitful on a cosmic scale, then necessity has to take a very specific, carefully prescribed form. Any old world will not do. Most universes that we can imagine would prove boring and sterile in their development, however long their history were to be subjected to the interplay of chance with their specific form of lawful necessity. It is a particular kind of universe which alone is capable of producing systems of the complexity sufficient to sustain conscious life. (p. 6)

    As with the phenomenon of the universe’s “rational transparency,” Polkinghorne recognizes that there are alternative explanations for the life-friendly structure of our universe. One popular way of avoiding recourse to God is to opt for some version of a many-world hypothesis that posits the existence of multiple – or even infinite – universes originating from a single point. On this hypothesis the existence of life-sustaining universes won’t seem special or noteworthy since every possibility will be realized. Polkinghorne rejects various versions of this account on a variety of grounds, regarding the most plausible versions to be insufficient for the job and the others increasingly speculative and ad hoc (see pp. 8-10).

    It’s important to be clear on what kind of status Polkinghorne is claiming for this new natural theology. He writes that “the theistic conclusion is not logically coercive, but it can claim serious consideration as an intellectually satisfying understanding of what would otherwise be unintelligible good fortune” (p. 10). Unlike the older versions of natural theology which sometimes claimed to offer deductive proofs of God’s existence, this more modest version is content to exhibit the “rumors of divine purpose” contained in the physical world. It also, unlike some of the older design arguments, appeals to global, rather than particular, features of the cosmos, on the “character of the physical fabric of the world, which is the necessary ground for the possibility of any occurence” (p. 10).

    Polkinghorne also observes an interesting divide here between physical scientists and biological scientists. “Physical scientists, conscious of the wonderful order and finely tuned fruitfulness of natural law, have shown significant sympathy with the attitude of the new natural theology. Biological scientists, on the other hand, have been much more reserved” (p. 11). He cites Richard Dawkins here, and it’s noteworthy that among the “new atheists,” Dawkins and Daniel Dennett prominently make their case against religious belief by appealing to biology.

    In fact, Keith Ward, in his Is Religion Dangerous? points out that critics of faith misfire a bit when they treat the traditional design argument as the primary reason for religious belief, thinking that in pointing out its shortcomings they are striking at the very heart of reasonable religious belief:

    There is a particular view of the history of European philosophy that has almost become standard, but which is a misleading myth. That is that everybody used to accept that there were ‘proofs of God.’ The first cause argument (the universe must have a first cause) and the argument from design (design in the universe shows that there must be a designer) were supposed to prove that there must be a God. But then along came Immanuel Kant, who disproved all these proofs. After that, belief in God had no rational basis and had to become a rationally unjustifiable leap of faith (where ‘faith’ means belief without any evidence). (p. 92)

    Replace “Immanuel Kant” with “Charles Darwin” and you get an account of one seemingly popular view about the status of faith in a post-Darwinian world. As Ward goes on to point out, there have always been a variety of views about the various arguments for God’s existence and what level of support they provide to belief in God. Plato and Kant himself both offered reasons for believing in a Supreme Good that had little to do with the kind of natural theology popular in the 18th and 19th centuries.

    Both Polkinghorne and Ward would, I think, refrain from claiming deductive or coercive certainty for the kinds of considerations they bring to bear in support of the view that the structure of the cosmos as we know it points to the existence of God. I suspect both would agree with Diogenes Allen who argues in his Christian Belief in a Postmodern World that “the fact that nature’s existence is unexplained by our sciences and philosophy should lead a thinking, inquiring person actively to consider the possibility that there is an answer to the question and indeed that God may be the answer” (p. 84).

    The thing is that there is rarely going to be a single knock-down argument that is going to convince a person of important, life-altering truths, in religion or elsewhere for that matter. In ethics, or politics, or just in our own personal life decisions and relationships we often rely on converging lines of evidence and consideration rather than a single conclusive line of reasoning. Ward makes this point when discussing the contestability of various worldviews (such as materialism, idealism, theism). Every worldview has advantages and disadvantages over against its competitors in terms of things like clarity, explanatory power, being adequate to our experience, simplicity, consistency with other beliefs, etc. There’s no single algorithm that can demonstrable show one to be superior to all the others. What we should aim for, he says, is to elaborate our worldviews in “a critical and reflective way, using rational criteria for judgment that are always open to diverse interpretations” (Is Religion Dangerous? p. 97).

    This isn’t relativism. There’s a truth about the way the world is that our beliefs aim at. But we’re not given a failsafe process for determining what that truth is. All our attempts rely to some extent on personal judgment in weighing different pieces of evidence, as well as value judgments about what is good and beautiful. There does seem to be an irreducible epistemic pluralism in that reasonable people can come to different conclusions on these matters, even though a realist epistemology affirms that there is a single truth about the way things are.