A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • Asking the right question

    In comments to my previous post, John corrected my understanding of Dennett’s views. It’s not, apparently, that Dennett denies that theism is logically compatible with evolution, it’s just that theism doesn’t explain or add anything to our understanding of evolution.

    But I’m not sure this is really a bad thing. I’m perfectly content to assume that evolution can be explained entirely with reference to natural processes and that it doesn’t require appeal to an “intelligent designer.” I don’t see any reason that Christians or other theists should fight on that particular hill. After all, there are good theological reasons to think that God imbued created being with the properties to unfold in a certain direction without requiring God’s occasional intervention.

    Where I think theists do have something useful to contribute is in stepping back and looking at the broader picture. We know that the possibility for the evolution of life as we know it is tied into the basic properties of the cosmos at a very fundamental level, as revealed by modern physics. Almost as though the universe has a built-in tendency toward evolution. So, we can usefully ask, I think, why the universe has this tendency to give rise to organic life, and to conscious, purposive beings.

    Rowan Williams puts it well in his book Tokens of Trust:

    Faith doesn’t try and give you an alternative theory about the mechanics of the world; it invites you to take a step further, beyond the nuts and bolts, even beyond the Big Bang, to imagine an activity so unrestricted, so supremely itself, that it depends on nothing and is constantly pouring itself out so that the reality we know depends on it. Creation isn’t a theory about how things started; as St Thomas Aquinas said, it’s a way of seeing everything in relation to God. (p. 37)

    I don’t know that asking the question of creation as a whole compels a “theistic” answer, but it locates the question at the right place: at the borders of what we can understand about the processes of the world, the place where explanations internal to the workings of the cosmos break down. Why the laws or processes of the universe are what they are at their most fundamental level doesn’t seem to be a question that can be intelligibly answered by appealing to those laws or processes themselves. Is there something that gives meaning and intelligibility to the whole shooting match? That, I take it, is the right question to ask.

  • Evolution, creation, and human uniqueness

    There’s an account making the rounds of a recent debate between atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett and Christian theist Alvin Plantinga. One of the issues that comes up is the compatibility between Christianity (or theism more generally) and evolution, a perennial topic of interest here at ATR.

    Dennett seems to see them as incompatible. Plantinga not only thinks they are compatible, but makes the stronger argument that believers in evolution ought also be theists, because only theism adequately accounts for our ability to understand the world in the ways required by modern science, as opposed to being just adaptive enough to get by. In other words: if naturalism is true, we have no reason to trust our ability to know that it’s true!

    That’s a difficult argument to evaluate, and I’m not particularly interested in trying right now. In fact, I probably disagree with Plantinga almost as much as I would with Dennett, so I don’t really have a dog in this fight. However, I do have a dog in the fight about the compatibility between theism and evolution.

    Some critics point out that evolution would seem to be a circuitous and wasteful means of bringing humans into existence if that was the creator’s sole intention. But there’s no reason for a Christian, or any other variety of theist, to think that creating human beings was God’s sole purpose in creating.

    It’s quite plausible–and indeed I think true–that God’s purposes, so far as we can discern them, include bringing into existence the entire array of creatures that exist and have existed for their own sake, not just as a means to the end of creating humans. I see no reason, for example, to think that God isn’t quite fond of dinosaurs, considering they were around for a lot longer than we have been.

    Clearly Christian theology is committed to some kind of unique status for human beings. Though we should be wary of confidently stating what that is. After all, the gospels teach that God goes to excessive lengths precisely for the ones who least deserve it. So it could be that we’re special in our unique ability to ruin things.

    However we come out on that issue, though, it’s perfectly consistent with Christianity to say that the purpose of the evolutionary process is to bring into existence not only humans but the entire bewildering array of creatures, each of whom in their own way reflect something of God’s glory. Humans, with our intelligence and potential for spiritual awareness, are one, but by no means the only, reflection of that glory.

    (Link via John Schwenkler)

  • Darwin and the deity

    Check out Kim Fabricius’s ten propositions on the subject.

  • “Christian Ethics and Nonhuman Animals”

    It doesn’t break much new ground, but this essay in the online journal of Orthodox Theology Theandros nicely brings together several strands of thought about re-evaluating Christian attitudes toward animals.

  • Lent — always beginning again

    I hope everyone’s enjoying their Fat Tuesday. I plan on “feasting” on a bowl of pasta in a cream tomato sauce with roasted cauliflower on the side and watching some Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVDs.

    Lent is upon us again and what’s struck me this year, as in years past, is just how crappy I am at living the Christian life. As a Lutheran, I should fully expect this. And yet it’s always a bit disappointing.

    On the other hand, there’s some deeply embedded wisdom in the tradition of dedicating Lent to prayer, fasting, and alms-giving. For a very simple reason: this is what Christians should be doing all the time anyway! Lent isn’t about adding on onerous new tasks, but recommitting ourselves to the Christian life.

    So, maybe one way of looking at Lent is that it’s our opportunity to begin anew what we should’ve been doing all along. A kind of reset button for the Christian life.

    Similarly, Luther recommended “drowning” our old self anew every morning in the memory of our baptism, recognizing that we’re always beginning anew and we always need grace and forgiveness. Spiritual “progress”–particularly self-discerned–is often a snare and delusion.

    Anyway, that’s how I make myself feel better about my backsliding and sloth over the last year (among other sins, known and unknown). So, tomorrow I’ll have the ashes imposed on my forehead and try to remember that my efforts are always going to be dust, but that living into God’s ever-present and unfailing grace is our truest calling.

    (I have a sneaking suspicion I wrote a similarly-themed post in some previous year, but that just proves my point, doesn’t it?)

  • Some thoughts on Christianity and evolution

    This is a bit late for the Darwin 200th birthday bash, but I thought it might be worth jotting down some thoughts on Christianity and evolution. This post could serve as a kind of summary of things I’ve been thinking and reading about over the last few years, though naturally they’re all subject to revision:

    1. The argument over “literal” vs. “non-literal” readings of Genesis 1-3 is, in my view, a total red herring. It just seems clear from the text itself that what we’re dealing with there is myth or “saga” (to use Karl Barth’s term). That doesn’t mean that the stories don’t contain memories of some historical events, but their main point is to illustrate key truths about God’s relationship to creation and to humankind.

    2. “Young earth creationism” is an intellectually bankrupt position and not worth taking seriously. Not only does it require rejecting virtually all modern biology, but also geology and astrophysics. A “young earth” is simply not tenable given current knowledge about the physical world. Moreover, as noted above, nothing in the Bible compels us to posit a young earth.

    3. “Intelligent design” has always struck me as completely beside the point. Once you grant that life evolved through a gradual process, it seems unnecessary–or at least premature–to assert that God tinkered with the process at various observable points. Better to think that God superintends the entire evolutionary process.

    4. A common response to evolution among mainline Christians–at least in my experience–is to accept it, but to keep the scientific and religious outlooks in hermetically sealed compartments. Apart from rejecting “literal” readings of Genesis, evolution has too often been prevented affect theology’s content.

    5. Specifically, there are several particular areas where evolution poses a challenge to traditional Christian beliefs that are still taken for granted, even among people who reject creationism.

    5a. The problem of evil: traditionally (though not unanimously) Christians often held that death and suffering only entered the world when human beings sinned. Thus God could be relieved from any responsibility for the world’s suffering. But modern biology tells us that death and suffering not only pre-dated human beings, they are inextricable parts of the evolutionary process itself. Without them, life wouldn’t have been able to develop. This would seem to require a re-thinking of God’s relation to these processes.

    5b. Humans as part of creation:     Christian theology has usually emphasized humanity’s transcendence over nature, focusing on our reason or free will or some other capacity that sets us decisively apart from the rest of the animal kingdom (though the Bible itself has a more balanced and “earthy” view). But we now know not only that we emerged from animal life, but that many of the differences we once thought were unique to humankind have been shown to be present to some degree in other animals, including reason and morality. This challenges the anthropocentrism of much traditional theology, but opens the possibility of a truly theocentric theology, which only seems proper.

    5c. Original sin: Just as evolutionary theory denies that suffering entered the world with humanity, it also denies that humans lived in a paradisiacal state of innocence prior to a historic “fall.” And if there was no historic fall, then it’s difficult to know what to make of the teaching that, because of Adam’s transgression, humanity was cursed with death and incurred an inherited guilt, with the implication that each one of us would be properly damned were it not for Christ’s atoning death. This isn’t to deny that human beings are “turned in on themselves,” to borrow Luther’s phrase. But this should probably be seen as a legacy of our evolutionary heritage and/or cultural transmission.

    5d: Atonement:     The abandonment of a “forensic” account of original guilt would also seem to require re-thinking the atonement as a sacrifice for human sin required to balance the books with God. We might say instead that, in the Incarnation, God pledges God’s love to creation by identifying with it, including with the suffering victims of the evolutionary process, and re-creates human nature in Jesus, making possible our participation in a new humanity lived in restored relationship with God, each other, and the rest of creation.

    5e. Eschatology: if humans are embedded in the physical world in a much more profound way than we previously imagined, we can begin to recover aspects of the Christian tradition which hold out hope for a redemption of all creation.

    6. Some Christians have tried to avoid some of the apparent implications of evolution by positing a “cosmic fall”: sin and suffering entered the world through the actions of supra-human intelligences (the devil or his minions), and this accounts for the evil we see in the world. I think this is untenable for a variety of reasons, preeminently because it implies that the world isn’t really God’s creation, since it developed from a primal state of affairs that was corrupted at a fundamental level. This view skates too close to gnosticism and is contrary to the balance of the biblical witness.

    7. Other Christians have gone to the opposite extreme and embraced a kind of nature mysticism. They view the natural world almost as ultimate reality itself, thinking that whatever happens in nature is right and embracing a kind of ethical Darwinism. The error here is to treat nature not just as God’s good creation, but as a finished product. Instead, we should see nature as “in process” and “groaning in travail,” destined for a redemption where suffering and evil will be banished and all God’s creatures will be given the opportunity to flourish. Nature by itself doesn’t provide the standard for morality, though the study of nature can provide us with knowledge about what’s good for us and for other creatures.

    In a sense, I think some very conservative Christians have sound instincts in rejecting evolution, since it does pose challenges to certain traditional formulations of the faith and requires a significant re-thinking of what is essential and what isn’t in Christian belief. But if rejection isn’t an option, as it’s not for me, it’s not enough to treat science and religion as “non-overlapping magisteria” as Stephen Jay Gould suggested. Religion makes truth claims, and Christianity in particular makes claims about God’s relation to and involvement with the world. Consequently, as our knowledge of the world changes, our understanding of how God relates to it may have to change too.

  • Atheism, theism, and live options

    A good post on theism/atheism (follow the links for more discussion).

    I like seeing William James’s “The Will to Believe” name-checked, as it was pretty formative in my own thinking about this stuff.

  • More on God and temporality

    In his Gifford Lectures, published as The Faith of a Physicist, John Polkinghorne considers the relation of God to time, calling it one of the “most puzzling, and most pressing, of general questions about God” (p. 59):

    It is clear that there must be an eternal pole to the divine nature. His steadfast love cannot be subject to fluctuation if he is worthy of being called divine. Emphasis on this alone would lead us to a static picture of God, but could that be true if the nature of love is relatedness and that to which God relates, namely his creation, is itself subject to radical change? (p. 59)

    Polkinghorne considers the traditional response that all moments of time are eternally present to God and this explains how God can be related to each of them. This response, Polkinghorne says, is motivated by a belief that saying God is affected by time would imply change in God and would, under a particular understanding of divine perfection, jeopardize the divine excellence. However, Polkinghorne replies that we can coherently develop a “dynamic” idea of perfection “which resides, not in the absence of change, but in perfect appropriateness in relation to each successive moment. It is the perfection of music rather than the perfection of a statue” (p. 59).

    Another argument sometimes offered for taking an eternal, “static” view of God is that, only if creation is “eternally present” to God can God exercise providential care for creation:

    Only if in his eternity he knows simultaneously that tomorrow I shall pray for a particular outcome and that today my friend is making a decision relevant to that outcome, can he really be a God capable of responding to prayer in influencing that decision. […] Only a God who sees all that was, and is, and is to come, “at once,” is able to produce the best for his creation. (p. 60)

    Polkinghorne responds that this rests on a false picture both of God’s providential care and of time. First, he denies that God is the all-determining force that seems implied by some traditional views of God. Instead, he approvingly cites Arthur Peacocke’s phrase that God is an “Improviser of unsurpassed ingenuity” who is capable of responding to any contingent event that occurs. Second, Polkinghorne wonders if the “block universe” (as William James called it) is even a coherent understanding of time. It seems to presuppose a deterministic “Laplacian” view of time and causality, but this is neither the world humans experience nor, Polkinghorne contends, the view revealed by modern science.

    If temporality is genuine feature of the world, rather than just appearance, Polkinghorne suggests, God’s knowing temporal events “in eternity” would not be knowing them as they really are. This would imply a deficit in God’s knowledge, which would mean that God is not omniscient. The processes of reality are a real aspect of the created order, and knowing them truly means knowing them as processes. If God is unrelated to time, it seems, God’s knowledge of us and our world would be like our knowledge of historical figures, not the relatedness we have to existing flesh-and-blood people.

    Polkinghorne concludes: “I am pesuaded that in addition to God’s eternal nature we shall have to take seriously that he has a relation to time which makes him immanent within it, as well as eternally transcendent of it” (p. 61). This is similar to the position I tentatively endorsed in the last post. To me, the most compelling consideration is that, if God is truly related to the creation and to the creatures in it, there must be some aspect of God that is temporal, or involved in time.

    I realize there’s always a great deal of speculation any time you start talking about God’s nature, so I’m not claiming to have reached any definitive conclusion here. Here’s a post I wrote a while back discussing Keith Ward’s incorporation of certain “Hegelian” insights into his theology. Here’s an interesting lecture from Wolfhart Pannenberg. Here’s an article from philosopher William Lane Craig.

  • God, time, and finitude

    Marvin asks: “Is God subject to time or not?”

    I’m not sure if this is right, but I take this as a stand-in for the cluster of issues grouped around the question of whether God can be affected by finite, temporal being, or whether we should continue to think of God–with the classic tradition–in terms of apatheia.

    In the classical tradition, derived in part from Plato and Aristotle, God is thought of as actus purus–pure act–with no unrealized potentiality. If this is the case, then God cannot change, much less be changed by anything “external” to God, simply because there is no un-actualized potential in God to be realized. God is perfection and any change (per impossible) would be for the worse anyway. It’s generally thought that the Fathers and the Scholastics followed classical philosophy on this score (though, I understand there’s some debate about this point, as you’d expect, since the Fathers were grappling with the paradox of the God-Man).

    The 20th century saw a re-thinking of this classic conception of God, driven by a few different sources. One was the widespread sense that classical metaphysics was no longer tenable, and that we needed a new ontology that was more “relational” and less “static.” This is where process thought–stemming from the work of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne and developed by an entire school of thought–comes in. Process thought tends to re-configure the idea of God as exerting a persuasive influence on creation and being affected in turn by what happens in creation.

    Another impetus for reconsidering the traditional concept of God came from post-Holocaust theologizing about the problem of evil, which led in some quarters to a renewed emphasis on the Incarnation, and particularly the Passion, of Christ as a revelation of the divine nature. Like process theology, this sometimes involved a re-evaluation of the notion of divine omnipotence; God was no longer seen as the controller and determiner of events that occurred in the world, but as the “fellow sufferer who understands,” to use Whitehead’s term. Feminist and other liberationist theologies often concur with this revision of the God-concept, as they often argue that the God of classical theism exhibits stereotypical “male” qualities of control and domination.

    Given that there’s no way to do justice to this issue in a blog post (even were I competent to do so!), I will cop to having been influenced by at least some of these streams of thought. The most compelling arguments to me are those that take the Incarnation as their point of departure: if the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus are the best representation, or revelation, we have of what God is like, then we may need to re-think our concepts of power and divinity quite radically. Additionally, if God genuinely enters into relationship with creatures, then it’s hard to see how God can avoid being “affected by finite, temporal reality in some way.”

    That said, I think some of the revisionist theologians go too far and aren’t sufficiently attuned to the biblical promises of God’s ultimate victory over evil, suffering, and death. Divinity isn’t just expressed in weakness and solidarity with suffering–though I take it that’s part of the truth of the Incarnation–it’s also expressed in the triumph of the Resurrection and in the final victory over the forces that mar God’s good creation. In other words, God isn’t captive to the forces of evil nor will God be prevented by the recalcitrance of creation from realizing God’s purposes (a possibility suggested by some of the more radical forms of process theology). I think this means that God’s power is more than the persuasive and attractive power of love. Or maybe it would be better to say that God’s love has a power that is sufficient to overcome that which opposes it (which is part of what makes it different from creaturely love).

    I’m attracted to the view of Keith Ward, who’s accepted some of the insights of 20th century revisionist theology but still has one foot solidly in the camp of classical metaphysics. Ward suggests that God’s eternal nature is pure bliss and perfection, and yet, because God chose to create a world that was other than God, there is an aspect of God’s being that is affected by what happens in the world. Further, in the Incarnation, God enters into the world’s travail in a uniquely intimate way. Nevertheless, God is affected by the world only because God freely chooses to enter into realtionship with finite being, and the ultimate triumph of God’s purposes isn’t in doubt. This view seeks to uphold both God’s involvement with the world and his transcendence.

    Like I said, this just scratches the surface and probably raises thorny metaphysical issues. I’m just jealous that Marvin gets to take a whole seminar on this stuff. Hopefully we’ll get regular blog reports.

  • Does the environment need God?

    A lifelong atheist learns to jettison his simplistic views of religion (God as “an old guy sitting in a chair”) when he realizes that something very much like a religious zeal will be required to address the climate crisis.

    The worry I have here is of Christians being enlisted into providing a religious imprimatur on any political movement, even one as worthy as I believe the environmental one to be. And yet I can’t help but think that the author of this piece is right: that we do need a shift in “values” (maybe virtues is a better term to use), not just bigger and better techno-fixes, if we want to make a sustainable society.

    (Though, let me note for the record that I’m skeptical of simplistic dichotomies between “theism” and “panentheism” that seem to be popular in these circles. The idea of God in the classical theism of the sort that Sts. Augsutine, Anselm, and Thomas believed in is far from the caricature of an overly-anthropomorphized supernatural being “out there.”)