A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • Ward on God’s action in the world

    I’ve been reading side-by-side Arthur Peacocke’s Theology for a Scientific Age and Keith Ward’s Divine Action. While they construct similar positions, they have some important differences. Peacocke, for instance, argues that God acts on the universe in a “top-down” fashion that sets the parameters of what happens in the world, even while at the same time natural laws describable by science can provide a full account of what happens in the world.

    In differentiating his position from Peacocke’s account, Ward suggests that we live in an “open and emergent” universe that leaves room for God to act. The indeterminacies of quantum mechanics and complex systems theory show that the Laplacian universe of strict, mechanistic determinism is an unwarranted extrapolation from the success of Newtonian physics. The universe has a “loose,” probabilistic structure–or at least it looks that way, and this means that divine action in the universe can’t be ruled out.

    Is this a return to the much-maligned “god of the gaps”? Ward argues that it’s not. The point isn’t that there are causal nooks and crannies where God can intervene. It’s that science is, by its very nature, an abstraction from the fullness of reality. Physics, for example, takes as its subject matter one slice of reality–that aspect of it which is describable in quantifiable, law-like terms. But, logically, this can’t show that all of reality has this character. An exhaustive account of reality would have to include all the non-quantifiable, qualitative aspects too. To the extent that physics (and other natural sciences) abstracts from the totality of reality, there is something it doesn’t capture. Thus, in principle, God’s acting in the universe can’t be ruled out.

    This isn’t to say that science can positively show that God acts in the universe; on the contrary, given the limitations of its method it couldn’t pick up on divine action. This is because God’s action couldn’t be subject to repeatable, controlled experiment. As the ultimate subject, God’s activity can’t be captured in any kind of regular, law-like conceptual scheme. It would be missed by any natural science acting according to its own prescribed methodology. Evidence for God’s activity comes instead from historical and personal religious experience.

  • Faith and economics

    A conservative evangelical questions his uncritical embrace of laissez-faire economics.

    When you think about it, the marriage between evangelicalism and free market capitalism is downright odd, and, as far as I can tell, largely confined to the U.S. (British evangelicals, for instance, seem quite a bit more left-wing on economics than their American counterparts).

    I’m not saying that a Christian can’t be a free market libertarian; in this sinful and imperfect world we have to use our reason to determine the best set of social arrangements. But it does, on its face, seem strange that Christians, of all people, should think that the unhampered pursuit of self-interest would maximize the social good.

    A libertarian counterargument might be that only laissez-faire provides sufficient check on various centers of power that would otherwise tend to become concentrated. But, whatever might be the case in the anarcho-capitalist utopia, in our world the concentration of economic power is a reality that seems to many people to require a public counterweight (anti-trust laws, regulation, etc.).

    I don’t personally think that there’s any ideal social and economic system from a Christian point of view. We’ll always be responding to changing circumstances in a somewhat ad hoc fashion. But Christians can bring certain principles to bear on the discussion, such as a concern for the worst off members of society, an insistence on the dignity of the human person, and care for God’s creation. Implementing these principles, though, will require a knowledge of the principles of economics and an awareness that trade offs are inevitable.

    Too, there’s a certain wisdom in the idea that the market has to be subordinated to human ends and needs. The market was made for man, not man for the market, we might say. This would seem to imply some role for public and democratic control of the economy, limited though it might be by the dangers of over-regulation.

    This article from sociologist Peter Berger, though written in 1993, still seems pertinent, particularly this part:

    It is clear that a market economy, once it has reached a certain level of affluence, can tolerate a considerable amount of governmentally managed redistribution. This, of course, is the basic lesson to be learned from the coexistence of capitalism with the welfare state. It should also be clear that this tolerance is not without limits. If political redistribution reaches a certain level, it must either send the economy into a downward spin (wealth being redistributed faster than it is produced) or dismantle democracy (to prevent those whose wealth is to be redistributed-a population which, as redistribution expands, will be very much larger than the richest group-from resisting). Now, it would be very nice if economists and social scientists could tell us just where this level is-one might call it the social-democratic tolerance threshold. Right-of-center parties in Western democracies perceive a very low threshold (each piece of welfare state legislation another step on “the road to serfdom”); left-of-center parties believe in a very high threshold, and some in that camp seem to think that there is no limit at all. What evidence there is clearly does not support either the disciples of Hayek or Swedish social democrats; but neither, unfortunately, does the evidence locate the tilting-point. Once again, a sort of “interim ethic” is called for, full of uncertainties and risks.

    An “interim ethic” is a far cry from a blueprint for utopia, whether of the left or right. But it seems singularly appropriate for Christians to the extent that they recognize the complexities and frailties of a fallen world.

  • “God is not beyond”

    This meditation by Christian Wiman at the Christian Century is worth your time. Though, Wiman, being a poet, writes in a way that’s somewhat opaque to my flat-footed mind. Still, your mileage may vary.

  • What could Jesus have been wrong about?

    One Christian anti-evolution argument that I came across recently goes something like this: evolution can’t be true because Jesus believed in a historical Adam and Eve, a historical fall, etc., and this is incompatible with evolution. Clearly this is an argument aimed only at convincing other Christians.

    What’s interesting here is the implicit view of Jesus. In olden times there were indeed Christian writers who seemed to think that the man Jesus possessed divine omniscience. But more recently this view has been abandoned by most theologians for a variety of reasons. Not least of which is that it contradicts the Nicene Creed itself: if Jesus is truly human, then his knowledge must have been limited. Strict omniscience isn’t, as far as we know, a potential human capability.

    Jesus was a man of his time; his mind was formed by the concepts and language available to him in his particular context, and so on. It would be absurd–wouldn’t it?–to think that Jesus knew, for instance, all of modern physics, or that Barack Obama would be elected the 44th president of the U.S.A., or that he was familiar with post-structuralist literary theory.

    Maybe I’m naive, but surely no one wants to defend the omniscience of the historical Jesus in this strong sense. So, at least on first blush, it would seem that there’s no problem with saying that Jesus likewise was unfamiliar with evolution and probably had a view of the development of living things that he inherited from his culture and its sacred stories, most prominently the creation narrative in Genesis. More speculatively, Jesus may not even have had the conceptual apparatus for clearly distinguishing between “myth,” history, sacred story, and scientific explanation that we take for granted.

    Still, I imagine the idea that Jesus was wrong about Adam and Eve (assuming for the sake of argument that he did believe in what we’d call a “historical” Adam and Eve) may not sit well with a lot of people. Maybe the discomfort here comes from the suggestion that Jesus was wrong about something of specifically religious importance. Sure, we may say, Jesus can’t have been expected to know everything there was to know about science, history, geography, and so on. But surely the Son of God knew all there was to know about moral and religious subjects!

    What this objection assumes, though, is that the “religious truth” of the Genesis story is identical, or at least inextricably bound up with, the existence of a historical Adam and Eve. If we deny this (as I think we should), then we can say that Jesus was correct about the “religious” issue–in this case his diagnosis of the human condition–while admitting that his apprehension of this truth might have been expressed in a way that we can’t share. In other words, Jesus was right about sin even if he was wrong about Adam and Eve.*
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    *For what it’s worth–and I’m well out of my depth here–my impression is that Judaism has a very different understanding of the significance of the story of Adam and Eve from the one that has prevailed in Christian churches; so, what Jesus understood as the significance of that story may well not be identical, or even very similar, to how most Christians have understood it.

  • 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.