If you can't trust God, who can you trust, who can ya?

I'm going back to Alpha tomorrow, but without Telford, sadly. He has to get ready for an important happening the next morning. (Don't know if I'm at liberty to say what it is, but everybody pray or cross your fingers or whatever your belief system allows for him, OK?) In the meantime he wrote a post about how we have trouble communicating sometimes because he so implicitly trusts God, and I don't.

I think he had several reasons to be thinking that now, and one of them was probably the conversation we had at the last Alpha session. As I mentioned before, I started off talking about this post from Minute Particulars:

Our very existence is from God and is actively sustained by God, so much so that Aquinas claims that God could cause us not to exist, could annihilate us, without any prejudice to the goodness of His actions, i.e. He could annihilate us with perfect justice since He owes us, literally, nothing. Think about that for a bit because I think it's a very, very foreign notion. God creates freely and God creates everything that is. Not just all the "stuff" of the world, not just the space-time fabric of the universe, but existence itself if from God. There is no distinction sharper and simpler than that. God could reduce us to nothing with perfect justice.

Now consider that such a God has chosen to create each one of us, has given us free will to turn toward or away from Him, has chosen to send His only Son that we might know Him, has chosen to dwell among us, suffer and die at our hands, descend into Hell, and rise up in defeat of death.

There is no act more staggering in our history, in the history of all of Creation. It is staggering because it is something we could not deserve. It is staggering because every fiber of our being owes its existence to the One who created us and yet we can turn away from Him at any moment. It is staggering because He chose to redeem us from our turning from Him and show us the way back to Him.

I didn't mean for this to be pick-on-Mark week -- really, I didn't! But I was thinking about that comment after my convoluted discussion about sin with Tom and Louder Fenn, as well as after reading Isaiah. It all emphasized the unworthiness of humans before God, and how he was responsible for everything good about us but somehow we were responsible for everything bad.

I said to Telford that I didn't like this idea that God owes us nothing because he created us. God is constantly being compared to a parent, but isn't a parent responsible for his children? Don't you feel responsible for your children?

"But before God," he said. "So the analogy breaks down."

I wasn't sure what he meant by that, but I pushed on. If God is that powerful, the creator of everything, and yet we didn't turn out the way he wanted, isn't he responsible for that? Maybe not entirely responsible, but at least partly responsible?

Somewhat to my surprise, Telford warmed to the idea. When God makes a covenant with the Hebrews, he pointed out, he limits himself. He binds himself to keep his end of the deal, even when people let him down. That does seem to say something about God's character.

"I know," I said. "And actually, it's really tempting to think of Jesus as taking that responsibility. You know, coming down, taking on the burden of the world -- literally, in a way, taking up the cross... But no one ever spins it like that. It's all about how this was totally undeserved, and God just did it because he's such a nice guy."

We batted around the idea some more, and somehow got sidetracked on St. Anselm. Then the actual business of Alpha interrupted the talk. But after it was over we went on, lingering like the last couple drunks at a bar, sitting on a table because they were putting the chairs away. And to my surprise, Telford conceded still more. He said he thought this was something theology had not adequately covered, and he should look into it more.

"The thing that bothers me, though," I said, "is that you're always talking about the importance of looking to the tradition of the Church. And I don't see this in the tradition of the Church."

"It is in the tradition, though," he said. "Maybe not so much in the New Testament. But if you look at some of the Psalms, a lot of them are saying to God, 'Here's a problem. Do something.' Not 'Please please please help us,' but 'Well? What are you going to do?'"

"Yeah," I said. "You know, I don't know much about Judaism, but it seems to have more of a tradition of, I don't know..."

"Chutzpah?"

"Yeah. Actually, there's an interesting article in First Things this month by a rabbi, about the differences between Jewish and Christian attitudes about a lot of things. And part of it was about heaven. You know, Christians don't think they deserve to go there, so you can only get in by the grace of God. But Jews think they do deserve to go there. They followed the Law --"

"Yeah, but who gave them the Law, huh?" Telford said snarkily.

"I mean, I think they felt like they held up their end of the bargain. And he also describes how the Jews accepted the Law. God offered it to them, and they accepted by a sort of voice vote."

He smiled. "Yeah. That was pretty cool."

We haven't had a chance to talk about it further, but in an email the other day he remarked, "I haven't found a reason to take back my affirmation of your point that God has a responsibility to rescue the creation because he has invested it with his own glory. Hope that proves to be solid common ground for the conversations to come."

I don't know if that will help me trust God, but I do think I was put off by the feeling that God -- or his spokespeople on earth -- was evading a sort of parental duty by expecting the obligations to go only one way -- from us to him. Perhaps Mark's cosmic God who brings existence itself into being would look at it that way; it seems rather Calvinist, and hard to fathom how anything could have happened that he didn't intend. But if you're getting that cosmic, it's hard to see how we could deserve anything good or bad from God; what we deserve is what he decides we should have.

In any case, the God of the Bible doesn't seem like that. Otherwise, his anger and disappointment and regret would be an elaborate act. I don't know how to see such a human-seeming God as an omnipotent being. But as I said to Telford at one point in the evening, all I really have to go on is my sense of what's good. If the Christian God doesn't seem to harmonize with that, what can I do?

It seemed like a good idea...

I don't know why I get myself into these abortion debates, because I don't even have a firmly held opinion on the subject myself. But at any rate, Minute Particulars responded to my response to his post on the differing motivations of people opposed to and supporting legal abortion.

When I see the phrase "a study of _________" in an argument my lies-damned-lies-and-statistics sense tingles and lots of concerns click into play: correlation is not causation, many good studies are contradicted by other good studies, models of human behavior are probable at best and hollow when applied to the concrete particulars of individual actions, etc.

Well, you're right. I knew it was kind of weak to say that, especially since I don't have the study on hand and couldn't cite the authors or the methodology or anything like that. But it actually wasn't a data-points sort of study anyway; it was really a series of interviews with activists on both sides of the debate, illustrating their different worldviews. I just brought it up because I do remember many of the pro-life women they quoted really did sound personally threatened by abortion.

Actually, I don't have to imagine what a "devaluation of motherhood, and a shift in expectations of what women are supposed to be like" is like nor do I doubt the concern: I'm married to a mother and she combats it daily.


My wife's job makes demands on her that rarely include reasonable accommodations for nursing a child, general caring for a child, or even the plain fact that evenings and weekends -- time that she's not "officially" required to yield -- might be time she'd want to spend with her family, not with committee members who seem oblivious to the fact that she has a very young child at home.


I'm personally and painfully aware that our society sucks and that the world of work devalues motherhood and has reshaped expectations of what women are supposed to be like. But these are institutional trends and patterns, institutional concerns (cf. ENTERPRISES OF GREAT PITH AND MOMENT for an oblique comment on this) that are utterly trumped when compared with the concern for human life. My wife is not motivated in her position on abortion by discrimination or even the possibility of discrimination against her. She's motivated by the concrete reality of another human being unlike her in a predicament she'll never be in. And that motivation is different from the motivation of most moral issues.

Well, if you say so. I just can't help noticing how most people's view of whether a fetus is a person seems to frequently coincide with a lot of other social and sexual attitudes. Just as Mark would say the pro-choice folks are blinding themselves to the fetus' personhood for their own self-interest, most pro-choicers think the pro-life side is puffing up the status of the unborn because it serves their own ideas of how society and gender relations should be. Who's right? I dunno. It's this sort of issue that makes me pessimistic about really seeing anything without your bias glasses on.

Self and other

Minute Particulars has a post, whcih he admits at the outset might be half-baked, on the differences in motivation between those who favor and those who oppose legal abortion. The gist of it is that pro-choicers are motivated by self-interest -- I or someone like me might want to have an abortion -- while pro-lifers are only concerned for others, because no one's in danger of becoming a fetus.

That premise is half-baked, in my opinion. I actually blogged about this a while ago when Charles Murtaugh argued from the similarly half-baked premise that abortion is in the interest of all women and against the interest of all men. My post wasn't exactly baked to crispy brownness itself, but I brought up a study of pro-life and pro-choice women that I'd read about in college. Essentially, there was a disagreement between them about what makes women valuable. The pro-life women were heavily working-class, and found meaning and power in motherhood that they did not find in the workplace. The pro-choice women were the reverse: more affluent, more likely to see children as getting in the way of a career.

Now, you could say, that's all very well for women who choose not to have abortions themselves, but where the self-interest in trying to stop others from having them? The strong feeling I got from that study, as well as a lot of other pro-life rhetoric, was that the presence of abortion on demand leads to a cultural devaluation of motherhood, and a shift in expectations of what women are supposed to be like.

Connected to this fear is the fear of male irresponsiblity. In another past post I half-jokingly proposed a quick-and-dirty test to predict a woman's view of abortion: are you more afraid of a man controlling you, or running out on you? Pro-choice rhetoric is full of scare language about "controlling women's bodies," while pro-life language often expresses the fear of men screwing around without consequences. Just today Jane Galt wrote:

More troubling, the feminist movement has not merely tried to render the legal ability to choose that men have always had (and pro-life readers should remember that while the choice of men to abandon their children is not quite as final, it is nonetheless horribly detrimental). Rather, it has sought to make the choice to abandon a child created through consensual sexual activity not merely legal, but also an acceptable, even laudable, moral choice. In doing so they have also legitimated the decision of men to abandon their children, which makes them sound a bit thick when they complain about gents who have decided to retroactively excercise some reproductive choice by failing to pay their child support.

She's not the only one to feel that abortion has women importing some of the worst traits of men. Eve Tushnet characterized this as "making women equal by making us men--adapting women to a man-made world rather than adapting that world to women."

It's also worth noting, in a First Things article a couple months ago, how quickly Federica Mathewes-Green slid from talking about cultural attitudes toward abortion to talking about cultural attitudes toward sex in general. For many -- probably most -- pro-lifers, legal abortion is tied up in a complex of sexual mores that they find deeply threatening.

None of this says, necessarily, that there isn't an altruistic reason to oppose abortion. Just that I don't think you can reduce it to the simple binary that Mark does. I think that pro-choicers know this, and so if you try to persuade them you're in the cause purely out of the goodness of your heart, they're not going to believe you.

In the beginning

So as I wrote yesterday, I went to this Alpha course last night. In case it wasn't clear, this was at the church I've been attending, the Christian Assembly. The program actually started at a church in England, I believe, but it's been picked up by churches all over the world in many denominations.

Telford was also there, which was a definite plus. I suppose given how often I mention him on the blog it sounds like we've been hanging out together a lot; but actually, our contact really fell off in the last couple months, mostly because his schedule is so insane. (His blog has suffered from this too, sadly.) So the Alpha course, which meets weekly for ten weeks, seemed like a good opportunity for us to meet and talk at length in a regular way. Also, Telford had heard about the course but never been to one, and he was curious about it.

Anyway, the event itself was a mixed bag. It started with dinner (a free meal is always welcome!) which allowed attendants to meet and greet. Although actually I wound up talking entirely to Telford, since we got into a lively discussion about what (if anything) God owes us, inspired partly by this post from MInute Particulars. The discussion deserves its own post, and I don't think it's quite finished yet, so I won't go into it now.

Then there was music. It was essentially a smaller, shorter version of the same singalong we do in the services, and it didn't really work in this format. The big, spirited, Pentecostal sound can be uplifting in a large room with an enthusiastic crowd, but it's too much for a small room full of people at varying stages of spiritual certainty. It may be, as Telford said, that this church can't do anything without an electric guitar, but I think they should have restrained themselves this time.

Then there was a...I'm not sure what to call it, I guess a lecture. A man from the church basically outlined the reasons why Christianity matters, at a grade-school level pretty much. I knew I shouldn't expect anything at the intellectual level I get from Telford (or any of my other favorite Christian bloggers) but I was disappointed at how condescending it was. Surely no one is going to want to come to church to be talked to like an eight-year-old.

After that, the crowd split up in three separate rooms for dessert and discussion. That was more interesting. Everyone introduced themselves and talked about why they were there. People were in rather different places. There was one person like me, just showing up and not sure of anything; a man who said he had always felt "called," but various things got in the way; a woman who'd fallen out with the faith after a divorce, feeling Jesus had let her down; a woman who had just converted via her boyfriend. I do not want to go into detail about it because there was a promise of confidentiality (even though I'm anonymous, the church isn't, so I'm playing it safe). But the people were very honest about their struggles.

Telford didn't really like it. He disapproved of the singing even more than I did, and he was disappointed the discussion "didn't go anywhere." I reminded him we were all just getting to know each other. (Since Telford is never shy about talking God -- or about much of anything, really -- this was not an inhibition to him.) He didn't openly pass judgment on the event, but I noticed when somebody asked him if he'd come back next week, he responded by asking me if I was coming back. I said I was. I think it's worth it just for the talking. I don't meet anybody in my regular life who's going through what I am. If meeting them means putting up with a little schlock, well, them's the breaks.

Into the Alpha quadrant

I don't have much time to blog tonight because I'm going to Alpha, a program for nonbelievers and seekers and wobblers and what have you who want to learn more about Christianity. In other words, it's pretty much like what I've been doing on the blog, but more organized and in 3-D.

Speaking of which, I apologize to Tom and Louder Fenn for rudely ignoring their latest comments in our discussion. I meant to respond, but one thing or another drew me away. And now, frankly, I've kind of run out of energy for the discussion. But if I post about Alpha I wouldn't be surprised if it starts another one...

On another note, I'd been hoping biologist Charles Murtaugh would weigh in on l'affaire Dini, and he came through like a champ. He writes one of my favorite lines so far on the subject: "It may be true, as Theodosius Dobzhansky said, that nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution, but then nothing actually makes that much sense in biology."

School days

I recently learned about the site No Indoctrination, which lets students anonymously post complaints about ideologically bullying professors. It also gives professors a chance to respond, as at least one of them did.

Reading over the complaints reminded me of my own college days. Most of my professors were quite good; they were just about all liberal, but that's OK. I don't mind a professor bringing opinions into the classroom; after all, some of my favorite bloggers are opinionated professors. But there is a point where it crosses the line.

There were actually two rather different types of inappropriate behavior I remember. One basically comes from professors living in their own little society and forgetting there students aren't from there. So they make comments and jokes as if there aren't any conservatives in the audience, and we all agree on these things. That's irritating, but so long as they're willing to listen to students who disagree, it's not really a problem.

The second type actually stems from the opposite assumption. This type of professor often comes from the '60s counterculture or some other protest movement, and so assumes that students are brainwashed children of the Establishment in need of enlightenment. Often, what they fight against is laughably out of date. My sister's Asian Civ professor apparently spent a lot of time disabusing students of the idea that Chiang Kai-shek was a hero, which he firmly (and wrongly) believed they all held.

But what's worse is that they often end up displacing the subject of the class with their own political rants. My Asian Religions professor was the worst offender I had this way. As any reader can tell, I'm keenly interested in religion, and his lectures were informative when he stuck to the topic. But he kept wandering off on left-wing diatribes. I was most bitterly disappointed the day before Thanksgiving, when we were supposed to have our lecture about Jainism. Many students had already left, so the class was small. Somehow, the professor convinced himself that this was reason enough to jettison the Jainism lecture and tell us his "personal thoughts on Thanksgiving." Which were a predictible rant about oppression of the Native Americans. Apparently, it didn't occur to him that the people who'd actually stuck around to hear the lecture might be more interested in Jainism.

No Indoctrination has examples like this. One student in a human geography course says the professor "will allow herself to stray so far off topic that by the end of the lecture she will have covered the reasons why the healthcare system needs to be nationalized, why the minimum wage needs to raised threefold, and why severely penalizing industries for their pollution is the only way to protect the environment." Oy, I can believe it.

Far scarier, though, is the Mesoamerican art professor:

During the second to last lecture, when we should have been learning what was going to be on the final, he started with his usual lecture about understanding these "oppressed" people in the middle east. He made us out to be the evil oppressors and said that we don't understand these people (Islamic Terrorists) until they BLOW it into us (in reference to September 11). He then got very animated and began to pretend that he was a terrorist. He made the point to the class (evil America) that if we tried to buy him, he would tell us to take our money and shove it up our asses. This all culminated in him pretending to strap a bomb to himself, sitting down next to a student, and saying something to the effect of, "If you try to get rid of us, we'll take you with us."

As with all the stuff on the site, this story is unverified. But if it's true, it makes my Asian Religion professor problem look piddling by comparison...

The heart of the matter

Thanks, O mighty bringer of blog hits, for your kind words!

I wondered a little if I was getting carried away in my reaction to the Dini controversy, but it seems to have brought a lot of passion on both sides. When Patrick Nielsen Hayden posted about it, it generated 117 comments and counting.

Somewhere in those comments Erik Olsen, and I think a few other people, made an argument that got me thinking. He claimed that Dini's question was justified as a test of scientific thinking. The basis of science is being willing to put aside beliefs when conflicting evidence appears, so he was testing students' ability to do that. That chimes with Dini's own rationale: "...good scientists would never throw out data that do not conform to their expectations or beliefs. This is the situation of those who deny the evolution of humans; such a one is throwing out information because it seems to contradict his/her cherished beliefs. Can a physician ignore data that s/he does not like and remain a physician for long?"

I have two problems with this. For one thing, this really only tests one group of students: creationists. Many people blindly accept Darwinism because they were brought up that way, so affirming their belief in it says nothing about their ability to think critically.

But the larger disagreement I have is with this attitude about "cherished beliefs" and data you don't "like." It's true that scientists often have their pet theories, and if they hang onto them in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, they make fools of themselves. But a pet thoery is a different order of magnitude than a religious belief. A scientific thoery (one hopes) does not give meaning to your existence or become central to your identity. But religion does that, which is why people are so loath to discard it.

Telford Work, in his FAQ section, wrote a number of responses to questions he commonly gets from creationist students (here, here and here). It's quite illuminating about how creationists think:

Lots of conservative churches have sold their people on this argument: If we can't trust the Bible to conform to our expectations of its accuracy in every detail, then we're allowed to disbelieve all of it. If there wasn't really a talking snake in the Garden, then Jesus might not really have risen from the dead, so we'd better hold the line and defend the fact that there was a talking snake in the Garden. I consider this strategy a form of theological coercion: Our faith in Jesus is used to hold entire churches hostage to literalism. But then the Bible (let alone Jesus) is no longer our ultimate authority; the ultimate authority is our presuppositions of what God's truth should look like. And under all this apparent confidence in the truth of the Bible runs a strong current of disbelief. Many churches have fostered not a calm confidence in Scripture, but a hard-line apologetic technique that I think secretly terrifies a lot of evangelicals: What if it's not all true? What if there really is a contradiction in Scripture, as liberals allege? Does it mean Jesus is still buried, and I'm still dead in my sins?

Clearly these students don't "like" creationism the way I like a good margarita, or even the way a physicist likes the mind-bending elegance of special relativity theory. Neither one of those things, if removed, threaten to leave a gaping existential hole in one's psyche. If students are lucky they'll have someone like Telford around to show them how they don't have to throw out the baby Jesus with the bathwater, so to speak. But a lot of people don't have that, so it's not surprising they go through mental contortions to protect that belief from scientific scrutiny.

For that reason, I don't think it's fair to say, "Oh, if they're not willing to throw out that belief, they won't throw out any belief or theory that they don't like." It's because of the special nature of this belief that people like Clayton Cramer's petroleum geologist can think perfectly rationally about everything except that.

Reading Telford's essay also reminds me of why Dini's words sound so cold-hearted and mean to me. These are kids we're talking about here. The way some people have been carrying on in Patrick's comments, you'd think these barely-out-of-the-nest striplings were the dead-eyed foot soldiers of militant fundamentalism. But they're the victims of the culture as much as the perpetrators. If they need to reconcile their faith with science, they deserve better than this.

UPDATE: A new article mentions that Dini is a devout Catholic. This came as a surprise to the Electrolite folks, who seemed to assume this was a Christian/atheist conflict. But Christians can discriminate against Christians. Dini is a Catholic, and I'd bet money that about 90% of his creationist students there in Texas are Southern Baptists. These are two groups that have historically not liked each other, to put it mildly.

By the way, I tend to agree with most commenters that this isn't really worth a lawsuit. But I think it's crummy pedagogy and a dubious defense of science, so I say so.

The evolving debate

Minute Particulars has an interesting post on the Dini business, in which he describes current Catholic thinking on human origins. He sums it up thus:

Human bodies give evidence of evolution (e.g. DNA similarities, vestigial organs, mammalian characteristics), but how a human being originated is not explained by evolution theory. A human being is an animal and has a principle of life that is similar to other animals in that it causes a body to be alive; but this same principle in the human being is responsible for operations like the ability to reason, understand, and choose freely, operations which any arrangement of matter cannot explain and which evolution theory cannot explain. Human beings are mammals and subject to biological principles as are other mammals and biological life in general. But, simply put, they are more than evolution can explain.

Would Dini have accepted that? It's hard to tell. But one reason the whole thing smells fishy to me is that the professor specifically asked about human origins. If he were really concerned about things like antibiotic-resistant bacteria, he could have asked about them, or for a general explanation of evolutionary theory. But in asking about human evolution he's punching the rawest nerve in the whole debate. That's where even Catholics, who generally accept evolution, start getting queasy.

Mark Kleiman also has another terrific post on this subject. Says everything I would have said, but probably better.

Under the stars

A few years ago I did an article about the Mars Society, a group lobbying for a future mission to Mars. I talked to some of their members who worked for NASA, and a grad student in aeronautical engineering (I loved his T-shirt -- "Yes, actually, I AM a rocket scientist!") He and some other youngsters in the group nurtured the dream that they would one day be on such a mission. Even the older guys who figured their chance was past harbored a wistful yearning for space, like the old sailors' songs yearned for the open sea. They knew how dangerous space missions are, but death did not seem as powerful as the call of other worlds.

If there's some comfort for the loss of seven astronauts today, it's that they probably died happy. I'm sure they longed for space the way the Mars buffs I talked to did. Few people get to where they did, though many wish to. May they rest in peace in the heavens.

Ever since Darwin

Mark Kleiman makes some excellent points about the Dini affair:

I think lots of people who say they don't believe in evolution don't actually have any fixed opinion about the origin of species; rather, they're denying an apparent implication of that belief: that, in reality, human beings are merely animals. Those people are holding out for the idea that humans have something of the divine nature. That view can be taken as a metaphysical proposition about human beings, but it can also be the expression of a moral stance: that it's wrong to treat human beings the way animals are treated. Neither the metaphysical proposition nor the moral stance is obviously false. (And if we take the the "divine nature" statement as an image rather than a propostion, a simple evaluation of truth or falsity isn't even appropriate.)

Linking those beliefs to a particular view about paleontology seems to me a mistake, but, given the intellectual history of the matter, not a silly mistake. Poorly understood Darwinian views can be, and have been, given very wicked practical applications. So if someone wants to make a principle of refusing to say that humans descended from animals by natural selection, nothing compels me to think the worse of him for doing so.

Right. I've been fussing in several recent blog posts over the question of what Darwinism does to our concepts of the human being and of original sin. That's the real conflict that the arguments over whether the earth was created in six days tend to distract us from. And Darwinism is so commonly misunderstood even by its defenders, and so closely identified with materialism and savagery, that it's not surprising many people object to it out of pure ethical distaste.

The problem is, a biology teacher has a good opportunity to cut through those misconceptions. But by stating upfront that he won't recommend creationists, Dini drives any creationist-leaning students out of his class. This is a cause he isn't helping.

Mark's "sermon" is also worth a read.

All over creation

Eugene Volokh has an interesting series of post on a religious-discrimination suit. (Start here and scroll up for more comments.) I don't know about the legal issues, but as an amateur science enthusiast I can't get behind Professor Dini's supposed defense of science.

For one thing, this is a medical student we're talking about. Dini's explanation of why beliefs about evolution matter to a doctor is pretty flimsy:

Whereas medicine is historically rooted first in the practice of magic and later in religion, modern medicine is an endeavor that springs from the sciences, biology first among these. The central, unifying principle of biology is the theory of evolution, which includes both micro- and macro-evolution, and which extends to ALL species. How can someone who does not accept the most important theory in biology expect to properly practice in a field that is so heavily based on biology? It is hard to imagine how this can be so, but it is easy to imagine how physicians who ignore or neglect the Darwinian aspects of medicine or the evolutionary origin of humans can make bad clinical decisions. The current crisis in antibiotic resistance is the result of such decisions.

First of all, Dini is ignoring the fact that many creationists accept micro-evolution, in the development of disease-resistant bacteria and such things. What they don't accept is the idea that evolution accounts for the appearance of all species on earth, including us. (That's Intelligent Design theory in a nutshell.) Second, as Clayton Cramer points out, the appearance of such bacteria is hardly the result of rampant creationism.

It gets worse:

Good medicine, like good biology, is based on the collection and evaluation of physical evidence. So much physical evidence supports the evolution of humans from non-human ancestors that one can validly refer to the "fact" of human evolution, even if all of the details are not yet known. One can deny this evidence only at the risk of calling into question one’s understanding of science and of the method of science. Such an individual has committed malpractice regarding the method of science, for good scientists would never throw out data that do not conform to their expectations or beliefs. This is the situation of those who deny the evolution of humans; such a one is throwing out information because it seems to contradict his/her cherished beliefs. Can a physician ignore data that s/he does not like and remain a physician for long? No. If modern medicine is based on the method of science, then how can someone who denies the theory of evolution -- the very pinnacle of modern biological science -- ask to be recommended into a scientific profession by a professional scientist?

A while ago I blogged about the question of whether science is a religion, and pointed out that the basic difference between the two is that science puts its faith in a method of knowing, not it in a particular set of beliefs. Dini seems to have missed this point completely: if you believe in science, he says, you must believe in the Darwinian theory of evolution. This is a deeply unscientific attitude.

Consider the effect on scientific innovation if this were broadly applied. I am sure that before Einstein it seemed that no rational scientists could disagree with Newtonian physics. I am glad nobody excluded Einstein from the club. I don't think "creation science" is going anywhere, but that doesn't mean Darwinian theory is unassailable.

Intelligent, conscientious Christians are often embarrassed about the raving fundies who speak in their name, and that's how I feel about this guy. Why is he even asking students this before he'll write a letter of recommendation, and ranting on and on about it on his website? How can he say that not accepting Darwinism means you're incapable of rational thought about anything? We're all irrational about something. In Dini's case, apparently, it's about creationists.

Hey hey Boo Boo

Minute Particulars points to a post by a woman who calls her baby "Boo Boo" because he was an accident. "Our teenaged kids are convinced that this will someday land him on a psychiatrist's couch, explaining, 'My parents didn't plan to have me, and then they called me "the Boo Boo" for my first two years,'" she writes.

This reminds me of a few weeks ago when my mother was here, and we visited briefly with Telford and his brood. My mother was cooing over the baby when she remarked upon the obvious: he sure has a heck of a lot of kids.

"This one's the last," he said. "Well, the last one was supposed to be the last, but this one's the last last."

I suppose if you want to send your kid to the shrink by calling him a redundant nickname, you could do even better than Boo Boo by calling him Last Last. But I wouldn't want to give anyone ideas...

My reason for reasons

Tom from Disputations says in the comments to the previous post:

When Louder Fenn writes, "it is sin that corrupts the world," I take him to mean "world" in the sense of human life and society, rather than the purely natural world of earthquakes and hurricanes. The nature sin corrupted is human nature.

One of the primary absences in fallen human nature is that our reason has been clouded and no longer rules our emotions. Emotions, including anger, are themselves neither sins nor sinful, but since we aren't very good at properly reasoning about our emotions, they often do lead to sin.

Hermaphroditism isn't sinful either, of course, although my impression is that a hermaphrodite lacks the good of being either fully male or fully female.

So what the first sin removed from human nature is, among other things, the proper harmony between reason and passion.

In this formulation, by the way, sin is a kind of evil. Evil in general is the lack of something that a thing ought to have, so blindness can be said to be evil in a human but not in a rock. Sin is the type of evil caused by a person's free choice to be less than they are supposed to be.

I hauled this out of comments to answer here because my response is going to be long. (Is anyone surprised?) First of all, what is "reason" in this scheme, and what does it have to do with goodness? In the context of this particular discussion, what rational causes are there for saying that homosexuals and hermaphrodites can't have sex? Lots of rational people think otherwise.

Reason can, of course, be helpful in ethics -- making them more consistent, for instance. But ultimate judgments about good and evil aren't based on it. Consider St. Paul's concise summary of ethics in Romans 13:9:

The commandments, "Do not commit adultery," "Do not murder," "Do not steal," "Do not covet," and whatever other commandment there may be, are summed up in this one rule: "Love your neighbor as yourself."

I don't see what reason has to do with that. (This line also, to my mind, goes against Louder Fenn's insistence that "what's right" can be abstractly detached from human suffering. But that's another subject.)

There also seems to me to be a fundamental conflict between what Tom is saying and what Louder Fenn said. LF says: "Yes, you are asking them to fight their nature ... Morality is all about fighting your nature -- your fallen nature, that is; your nature which is imperfect due to the imperfection of the world." He goes on to blame the imperfection of the world on human sin. Tom, meanwhile, seems to be saying there isn't anything sinful about, say, having certain feelings or being a hermaphrodite, you just can't act on it. Sin, apparently, comes from a lack of restraint on these things. Now, technically LF said "fallen" and "imperfect" rather than "sinful," but this seems like a distinction without a difference. LF seems to be saying that the need to control and suppress our feelings is an effect of our fallenness, while Tom seems to be saying that was in the original plan, we're just not doing it right. One version says being moral is fighting our nature, the other says it's harmonizing with it.

Both these views are problematic in terms of original sin. It occurs to me, now that I write this out, that Louder Fenn's argument is essentially circular. We sin because we give in to our fallen nature. Why is our nature fallen? Because we sin. Original sin is a chicken without an egg.

On Tom's side, we have the problem of what this "harmony" means in practical terms. In fact, homosexuality is an especially good example of this. This is an emotion that, in Catholic thinking, should never be acted upon. It serves no conceivable good purpose to feel it. So as a sin, it's an absence of...what? In a theoretical pre-fallen Eden, what happens to it?

It is the nature of feelings to impel action. They have no other reason to exist. In fact, in a sense feelings are actions. The physiologic changes that they bring to your body are preparing you to take a particular course of action -- fight, flee, have sex, etc. We can stop ourselves before it goes farther than that, of course, but in doing so we're already passing a value judgment over the feeling. So the logical wiggle that God didn't make us bad just because he gave us feelings that would be bad if acted upon seems nonsensical to me.

OK, gotta get back to work. Interview in 45 minutes...

Worms a-wriggling

Louder Fenn responds to my response to his post. Turns out he wasn't really responding to me originally, just to UnSpace, so I was getting a little excited over nothing. Now that I'm in, though, he has a few words:

Third, what I was trying to say regarding the categories of male and female is that they are the only categories. But I didn't say that very well. So let me try this: Male and female are not "archetypes" that are "real and meaningful" for the "vast majority of people" -- they are objective realities. Yes, there are those people who diverge; but such divergences do not constitute categories of being. They are -- to put it bluntly -- defects. Blindness is not a variant of sightedness. It is a defect. Being a hermaphrodite is not a variant of gender. It is a defect.

OK, so they're objective realities. I don't see how that's different from what I said, but I'm not gonna sweat the semantics. Although one thing I'm wondering here is, why does something have to belong to a category in order to be good?

Yes, you are asking them to fight their nature. We ask drunks to fight their nature. We ask rapists to fight their nature. We ask a child to fight his nature and not lie or punch his sister. We ask ourselves to fight our natures all day long. Morality is all about fighting your nature -- your fallen nature, that is; your nature which is imperfect due to the imperfection of the world.

I'm not saying God messed up in making anyone. He made the world and, yes, the world sucks a lot. Did God mess up? Or did we? Remember, it is sin that corrupts the world; our sin. You might ask why God would have made everything in the first place, if He knew we would sin, ruin everything, and essentially cause such pain and harship; but, as I said, that's a matter of theodicy, quite larger than the matter only of gay sex and gay marriage.

This is what drives me crazy about Christian arguments from nature. We can infer God's intent from nature by looking at it, such as the fact that male and female are objective realities. Except the bits of nature we don't like -- that nature was corrupted by our sin. Basically, you can argue anything you darn well please that way, because you get to rule out conflicting evidence. I realize this is not completely arbitrary -- it's ultimately based on moral law in the Bible -- but one wonders why Christians bother arguing from nature to begin with.

Also, I have discussed on this blog before, but it bears repeating, why I have trouble buying the argument that it was human sin that corrupted nature. Basically, it boils down to two reasons:

1) Unless you're a six-day creationist -- I don't know if Louder Fenn is, but I don't think any of my usual correspondents are -- you know that nature predated humanity by quite a bit, and evidence indicates it was always pretty much like it is now. I explicated that problem in this post. (Click here for Telford Work's response and here for my response to the response.)

2) It gives humans an inordinate amount of power. If humans basically created sin, and God did not, humans made it ex nihilo, and theoretically only God can make things ex nihilo. And if you buy into the notion that sin corrupted nature in this way, this is more than just "the choice to disobey God," as some have defined sin. It makes sin into a kind of creative entity itself, giving birth to defective children and weird desires and natural disasters and whatnot. As I complained in the November post I linked above, this seems to amount to a de facto dualism by Christians, as "sin" takes on godlike power.

Louder Fenn is right that this is a bigger topic then just sexual rules. It's the topic I've been worrying for months now, to no satisfactory conclusion.

Hyperactivate

Michael Fumento attacks the idea in some conservative circles that attention-deficit disorder is a big hoax.

One of my psych professors in college remarked that except for schizophrenia, which just about everybody recognizes as "crazy," most mental illnesses are an extreme form of something that's in everybody's experience. We have all had times that we tend toward depression, mania, phobia, compulsiveness and so on. This leads to an unfortunate tendency among a lot of people to think that the illness is essentially no different from what everybody goes through, so it's not a "disease." Everybody who has a mental disorder is going to meet somebody who says, "Why, that's no different from how I was when..." Except that it is different.

Fumento doesn't go into why conservatives, in particular, tend to think like this. But I expect it has to do with a couple subjects I've picked over on this blog before, free will and mind-body dualism. Religious conservatives in particular don't like to think that a lot of people's behavior comes from their brain chemistry. They want the solutions to behavior problems to be spiritual: parental discipline, self-mastery, and so on. Psychiatric explanations seem to undermine that. As Fumento says in his conclusion, the one doesn't necessarily negate the other. But they are two views of human nature that come in conflict, and there is no avoiding it.

Dare to be stupid

CalPundit theorizes about why European firms haven't seen technology-based productivity growth like the U.S. has:

I puzzled over all this for quite a while, and in the end my armchair theorizing added up to this: Europeans on average are actually more rational about technology than we are. They demanded rigorous ROI analysis before they would buy. They recognized that the technology didn't work as well as the hype. And they had a more realistic view of future growth prospects than Americans did.

But here's the weird part: it didn't matter. I think they were actually right more often than American business people were, but the Americans did better anyway. They drank the Kool-Aid, they invested heavily, they reorganized with gay abandon, and then a whole bunch of them went bankrupt. But the ones that stayed around ended up — by hook or by crook — with better businesses.

A week or two ago, I interviewed the CEO of a software company that does business in both Europe in the U.S., and he said something similar. Europeans, he said, are "smarter" about buying software than Americans. They stick with the tried-and-true and rely on established contacts and word-of-mouth rather than ad campaigns, while Americans tend to go for whatever the latest, hottest thing is.

Since this CEO ran an old-school firm, Europe had been taking up a greater and greater percentage of its revenue as the Americans went on to hipper products. But post-dot-com-crash, he said, Americans are starting to buy more like Europeans -- that is, more conservatively. That might have been wishful thinking on his part, but the firm is coming back financially, so maybe he's right. It would follow that Americans would be more cautious about tech buying than they were in the 1990s. If CalPundit is right, though, this may mean settling into European levels of productivity growth. Until the next craze comes along, of course, and then we'll be off and running again...

Let's talk about sex, bay-bee

Louder Fenn comments on the posts by UnSpace and myself about hermaphrodites and Christian sexual morality. His basic point is that he does not believe "compassion trumps moral law." Suffering is part of Christianity, and so we shouldn't change our morals around just to prevent people from suffering.

Rob reponded to this from a Christian theological perspective. Being merely a seeker, I can't speak with authority on these things. But I wanted to respond to a couple of things Louder Fenn said that I think mischaracterized my views.

First, he makes it sounds as if sympathy were the only reason to doubt the rules here -- as he puts it, "you can't let your feelings determine the answer." Actually, though it's true that my emotions are more on the side of the deviants here, I also have an intellectual problem that I tried to spell out in my post. Many Christians, including my pastor, argue that our sexuality was meant to be a certain way because God made us in a certain way. They tend to use Adam and Eve as a paradigm. But that story is, at best, a metaphor, while the evidence from people like hermaphrodites suggests that God did not make everybody according to a single paradigm.

This leads to another objection. Louder Fenn counters Rob's line, "Nature is not confined to simple categories of man and woman," with "That a person may be hermaphroditic does not mean male and female do not really exist -- or, more to the point, that male and female are not insistent categories with moral implications." I don't think anyone implied male and female don't exist. I think for the vast majority of people, the archetypes of maleness and femaleness are real and meaningful. I also said in my post that I can believe that heterosexual monogamy is the healthiest and most moral state for most people. But there are some people out there who don't fit the archetypes, and yet they are imbued with sexual desire just like everyone else. Why did God make them that way? I don't know. I don't know why God made blind people blind either. But we don't generally make a moral issue out of blindness.

I also felt LF overreached when he concluded, "And that some humans are not clearly male or female certainly does not mean males may do whatever they want with males." This is an irritating conflation that happens in these discussions -- somehow we got from gay marriage to "males may do whatever they want with males." I didn't actually discuss gay marriage before (though Rob did), but I think marriage is not "doing whatever you want." As I said in my earlier post, I do think that sex has an explosive power and needs to be handled with great care; and unlike Andrew Sullivan, apparently, I do think it belongs in moral teaching. My problem was with the concept that if you're sexually nonstandard in some way, you can't let yourself have a libido -- no marriage, no fantasizing, no whacking off, no nothing. It is not just that this makes people suffer; it is that you are asking them to fight their nature. It seems perilously close to saying God messed up in making them, so they have to make up the difference.

Why I like this town

It's been an unusually warm winter even for L.A. Today it hit 83 in my neighborhood, and we're just a couple miles from the ocean. I took a walk this evening and went by a house that was having an outdoor Superbowl party. They'd hauled the TV out to the patio, set up a bunch of deck chairs and invited about 20 friends over. People were watching, chatting, going indoors to get beer, even shooting hoops nearby. I imagine there are few other places in America where a Superbowl party looks so much like a Fourth of July fest. What a place!

Do for the other

I'd been thinking, even before I started going to church last fall, that I wanted to do some charity work. I've never been good about that, and it was bothering my conscience. I'd always felt that I didn't have money to spare, and I still don't; but I do have a lot of extra time. The question was, what should I do? How do I find who to volunteer for?

Once I became a regular at Christian Assembly it occurred to me that they must have something going on, and indeed they do. Yesterday morning I got up and went to a monthly event they do at a housing project in Watts. At the end of the month people's welfare checks are running out, and some are going hungry. So the CA volunteers go around to various local markets and pick up their surplus goods, take it to the parking lot of an associated Watts church, and give it away to whoever comes.

The food had already been picked up the day before, so I spent the morning helping prepare it for giveaway. I and a few other people were going through these huge bags of beans and rice, scooping out portions into plastic produce bags and tying them up. One of the people helping with that task I recognized as an usher I had spoken to the first time I ever went to CA, back in October. It was a Saturday night service -- the Saturday before I started this blog, in fact. (It was a week for starting things, I suppose.) I knew of the church because I'd been corresponding with Telford, and thought someday I might check it out. But that night I was lonely and depressed and felt I couldn't stand my own company anymore, so without telling him or anyone else, I went. The service actually didn't help me much -- I left feeling, if anything, even more depressed. But I remember before I left I gave that usher what was probably one of the oddest conversation starters she's ever experienced.

"I haven't been here before, but I have a friend who goes here," I said. "But I don't know what he looks like."

I had, at that point, never seen Telford; and neither had she. It was strange to think of that, and how much had changed. Here just barely more than three months later, I was shoveling rice in Watts. Who would have thought it?

It was also hard not to think of Jeanne d'Arc's post about her own childhood experience with a Christian charity involved in a similar activity. I was worried the Watts residents might look at us like that, since the CA denizens are, to a large extent, the kind of shiny-happy evangelicals that can be so irritating in that way.

Fortunately, I think the situation was a little better here. People came to us voluntarily, so there wasn't the sort of invasiveness that Jeanne described. What was also cool was that a lot of people who came to help us set up were actually there for food themselves -- they wanted to contribute something even though they had far less than I do. It could make communication a bit cumbersome because some of them didn't speak English -- despite Watts' reputation as a black neighborhood, and the fact that the church we were at was black, most of the people we gave food to were Latino. The inter-ethnic nature of the effort was one of the better things about it.

In a way, what we were doing was a small thing. I could imagine people from both left and right criticizing this -- from the left because it entailed no change in unjust social structures, from the right because we just handed stuff out without trying to sort out who was deserving. But the project is just a few years old, and you have to start somewhere. I do not know of any society that's arranged itself in such a way as to eliminate poverty. Sometimes the most you can do is say, if there are hungry people today, feed them.

Ka-chunk, crank crank crank...can of worms now open!

UnSpace last week featured a thought experiment. Suppose a pastor is counseling a couple that wants to marry, and finds out that the bride-to-be is genetically male but has complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (CAIS) and has spent his/her life as a female. Should he perform the wedding?

This question brings somewhat closer to home the issues I was trying to raise in my post about God and nature two days ago. There are actually a lot of people out there who are in between genders, and they come in all manner of variations. Some have even organized to oppose efforts to assign them surgically to one sex or the other. Rob Carr later says that, in his mind, the very existence of such people invalidates arguments against gay marriage, because "Nature is not confined to simple categories of man and woman."

By coincidence, the pastor at the church I attend is in the middle of a two-part sermon about sex. (This is within a six-part series on that triumverate of temptation, "money, sex and power.") Last Sunday he outlined a general Christian theory of sexuality, a lot of which I liked. I agreed with his disenchantment with the way our current society deals with it, at once magnifying and trivializing it. I liked the paraphrase of Paul on how the body is a temple of God, and should be treated with commensurate respect. I liked the acknowledgement of sexuality's power and potential both for good and for destruction. I understood when he said that adultery can be one of the most painful things on earth.

As a lot of Christians are wont to do, the pastor appealed to Adam and Eve as a paradigm for how things were meant to be. God created man and wife, told them to be fruitful and multiply, sex was wonderful until sin came along. Unlike some, the pastor did not identify original sin with sex (that popular spin isn't actually in the Bible). But he identified that as the point when it all started to go bad.

I couldn't tell if the pastor took the story literally or not (I suspect not, but you never know). Either way, though, many Christians do look to the story as a description of what God intended for us, before it all went horribly wrong. The innocent monogamous heterosexual union of two people who were literally made for each other was God's original design.

In a funny way, this Christian account of sex reminds me of its cultural archenemy, the sexual revolution. That was also an attempt to bring sex back to its supposed state of nature, and thereby cleanse it of its shame and darkness. Its idea of the natural state was less like turtledoves and more like chimpanzees, of course, but it shared the utopian dream that if you lose the dishonesty, jealousy and power plays, you could somehow return to paradise.

Very few sexual revolutionaries that I know of actually managed to live by the ideal. The time-tested institution of marriage is more suited to human nature, I think, and I am willing to buy the Christian assertion that it is the best home for most people's libidos. Heck, I feel I was made for it myself, despite my lack of actual experience with marriage.

But as Rob says, nature isn't that simple. Christian sexual utopianism also takes leave of reality at a certain point, and hermaphrodites are a good example. Although there is no conclusive evidence on this, it seems to lend credence to the idea that people can be born homosexual: if nature can make people physically in between genders, couldn't it mentally make all sorts of kinks as well?

I don't know what the Christian Assembly's position is on this sort of thing, exactly -- I suppose that will come in the next sermon. But I am somewhat familiar with Catholic thinking on these things, and as I understand it the Church admits some people are born different, in various ways. But the solution for those people is celibacy. What bugs me about this is the way it makes sex the exclusive privilege of those in the fat part of the bell curve. If you're gay or intersexed, if your spouse left you -- or doesn't get along with you -- if you don't want to have children, if you just haven't met the right person, and may never do so (like in my case), sex is not for you.

I wouldn't even mind this so much if it were just about intercourse. I can understand being sparing with the procreative act, what with all its mental and physical consequences. But it seems like a lot of these, er, nonstandard Christians are sentenced to fight the fact that they have libidos at all. I can't help thinking of this tragicomic anecdote that appeared last month on Sed Contra, in which a homosexual (or as they say on that blog, same-sex-attracted) guy tried to confess to masturbating, only to get in an argument with the priest over whether it was actually a sin. Now, masturbation is a crude, second-rate sort of sex, I grant you, but it bothers me that someone who does not seem to have the option of heterosexual marriage can't even get the second-rate stuff. It's the ideal, or it's nothing. I also don't know where sexual fantasy, without any action, fits into this. I sort of elliptically tried to get at this with Telford Work a few months ago, but his response didn't quite address the subject.

But anyway, the point is that arguments that God meant human sexuality to be this way or that way tend to run up against nature. Sex comes in a great variety in nature, and trying to draw from animals, whether doves, chimps or anything else, tends to oversimplify things.

It's not like I know the solution to this. Another post this whole thing reminds me of is Eve Tushnet's response to Andrew Sullivan a while back. He wondered, "Why can we not leave the dark and difficult realm of eros out of fundamental moral teaching? ...More specifically: Why can we not hold up marriage and committed loving relationships as the goal but not punish and stigmatize the non-conformists or those whose erotic needs and desires are more complex than the crude opposition to all non-marital and non-procreative sex allows?"

Eve answered, "This is, no doubt, great news for the Mickey Sabbaths of the world; and the 30-year-olds who hang around DC high schools and impregnate my pregnancy center's 15-year-old clients ("but we're in love!"); not to mention those who seek to grope a goat (a dark and difficult goat, no doubt, but aren't they always). One of the reasons we should be grateful for the Church's guidance in the "dark and difficult realm of eros" is precisely that it is so dark and difficult, and it is good to have a light. Sex and eros often appear centripetal--driving us toward one another--but when they are not linked to caritas, promise-making, and loyalty they become centrifugal, alienating, isolating, and ultimately they can fragment our sense of self."

The annoying thing is, I sympathize with both of them. I understand Andrew's feeling that you should have an ideal of marriage without sexually freezing out everybody else. But I agree with Eve that simply leaving it out of moral teaching is untenable. If morality is anything, it's a philosophy of human relationships, with each other, with nature or with God; and sex is right in the middle of human relationships. It's also true that with "noncomformists," except those with physical deviations such as hermaphrodites, we only have their say-so about how they were made. Separating them from garden-variety sleazeballs is not so simple.

So for all the words I've expended on this post, I come to no conclusion. But since I am confronting everything Christian these days, it seems I have to deal with this one as well. And what God intended seems more perplexing than ever.

Blog roundup

I don't have anything very interesting to say for myself today, so I thought I'd make like Eve Tushnet and list some posts worth reading:

A blog called UnSpace, by a Presbyterian church elder. Includes an appalling post about his brush with HIV and the minister who wouldn't pray for him. (UPDATE: Rob points out in the comments that the pastor didn't refuse...he just refused to lead the church in it, for fear of controversy. I fell for the reporter's disease of making a short, punchy summary that kind of let the facts slide...)

Mark Kleiman on MLK Day.

Ideofact on the Muslim conquest of Byzantium.

Minute Particulars explains why Christians seems so wacky to us nonbelievers.

CalPundit defends market research.

David Post at The Volokh Conspiracy on Roe vs. Wade. Peter Nixon has also been writing well on the subject all week.

Undisputed

I'll give Disputations the last word. For now. I'm sure I'll be back to dispute another day...

Housekeeping

I've rearranged the template a bit, shrinking the formerly intrusive comments and moving the permalinks to the bottom of the posts instead of the top. I never liked the way they sat on top of the headlines. So anyone who wishes to link to me, please note.

And speaking of evolution...

This is kinda cool.

UPDATE: Charles Murtaugh's got pics!

The fly II

Readers with long memories may recall that a few months ago I blogged about a dream I had, which turned into a theological question aimed at Telford Work. Telford responded a couple weeks later with what was meant to be the first of a two-part post.

Unfortunately, events intervened and part two never happened. But I knew Telford was drawing his answer from a chapter in a book, so this week I borrowed it from him and read the relevant chapter myself.

I was not very happy with Telford's post because I felt he was arguing against a stereotyped Darwinism that I was not actually promoting. I thought the sequel might put a different cast on it, though, so I held my tongue. Unfortunately, now that I've read the chapter I still feel like the question hasn't been answered.

I do not know, of course, exactly how Telford would have interpreted the rest of the chapter. But it seems to me that the crucial points are in two quotes. One is from Frans de Waal:

We human beings, having our natural frame and basis [in the evolutionary process], with our own (it seemed our own) penchant for community, and (it seemed) our own hankerings after adventure, found ourselves, before long, in trouble. Our very adventurousness led us astray; our drive to cohesion fostered monstrous imperial alternatives to the adventure and sociality of the Way God had intended, while our continuity with nature became an excuse to despise ourselves and whatever was the cause of us. We sin. In his loving concern, God set among us, by every means infinite wisdom could propose, the foundations of a new human society; in his patience he sent messengers to recall the people of his Way to their way; in the first bright glimmers of opportunity he sent -- himself, incognito, without splendor and fanfare, the Maker amid the things made, the fundamental Web as if a single fiber, the Ground of Adventure risking everything in this adventure. His purpose -- sheer love; his means -- pure faith; his promise -- unquenchable hope.

The other quote was from Holmes Rolston on suffering in nature:

Nature is...cruciform. The world is not a paradise of hedonistic ease, but a theater where life is learned and earned by labor, a drama where even the evils drive us to make sense of things. Life is advanced not only by thought and action, but by suffering, not only by logic but by pathos...The pathetic element in nature is seen in faith to be at the deepest logical level the pathos in God. God is not in a simple way the Benevolent Achitect, but is rather the Suffering Redeemer. The whole of the earthen metabolism needs to be understood as having this character. The God met in physics as the divine wellspring from which matter-energy bubbles up... is in biology the suffering and resurrecting power that redeems life out of chaos...

The secret of life is seen now to lie not so much in the heredity molecules, no so much in natural selection and the survival of the fittest, not so much in life's infomational, cybernetic learning. The secret of life is that it is a passion play. Things perish in tragedy. The religions knew that full well, before biology arose to reconfirm it. But things perish with a passing over in which the sacrificed individual also flows in the river of life. Each of the suffering creatures is delivered over as an innocent sacrificed to preserve a line, a blood sacrifice perishing that others may live. We have a kind of "slaughter of the innocents," a non-moral, naturalistic harbinger of the slaughter of the innocents at the birth of the Christ, all perhaps vignettes hinting at the innocent lamb slain from the foundation of the world. They share the labor of the divinity. In their lives, beautiful, tragic, and perpetually incomplete, they speak for God; they prophesy as they participate in the divine pathos. All have "borne our griefs and carried our sorrows."

The abundant life that Jesus exemplifies and offers to his disciples is that of a sacrficial suffering through to something higher. There is something divine about the power to suffer through to something higher. The Spirit of God is the genius that makes alive, that redeems life from its evils. The cruciform creation is, in the end, deiform, godly, just because of the element of struggle, not in spite of it. There is a great divine "yes" hidden behind and within every "no" of crushing nature. God, who is the lure toward rationality and sentience in the upcurrents of the biological pyramid, is also the compassionate lure in, with and under all purchasing of life at the cost of sacrifice. God rescues from suffering, but the Judeo-Christian faith never teaches that God eschews suffering in the achievement of divine purposes. To the contrary, seen in the paradigm of the cross, God too suffers, not less than his creatures, in order to gain his creatures a more abundant life.

Now, consider that the original dispute between Telford and me was on the origin of evil. Here were our positions:

Telford: "I think refusing to explain, make sense of, or originate evil in God's character or plan is a theological move... I find the definition of evil as senselessness to be a profound Christian answer to the problem of evil's nature and origin. Sin contradicts the grammar of all good sense. It goes against every grain. It has no grammar of its own; it is grammatical error in creation. Any other answer is liable to turn evil into a form of good – dismissing or trivializing the radical seriousness of sin."

Me: "[E]vil makes all too much sense. When humans came to be, we were both predator and prey, born into violence, terror, pain, competition, and death. It is hard to see how we could have existed in that without 'falling.' ...Now, many people draw a distinction between animal cruelty and human cruelty by saying animals are merely following their instincts, whereas humans have a choice. But the mere presence of those instincts rather defies the idea that sin 'goes against every grain'... This world is not only full of nasty stuff, it would cease to exist without the nasty stuff."

Now consider the two quotes from the book above. Which one of us do they support? It seems to me that they support me more than Telford. Telford thinks that evil is senseless and inexplicable, and yet these authors do make sense of it. Like me, they find it woven into the very fabric of nature, and human nature. Rolston even seems to do what Telford says one should not do: make evil into a form of good. Evils "drive us to make sense of things." Suffering is holy, suffering is part of the plan. And how can suffering happen without somebody inflicting the suffering?

De Waal claims that sin was "not what God intended," but even he locates evil in the way that God made us. Neither one of these philosophers addresses a point that I made, which is that animals do a lot of things that in humans are considered sin. Should God have been surprised that we sometimes act like those from whom we are descended? Though de Waal considers human sin to originate in the proud human traits of "adventurousness" and "sociability," it seems to me that what Christians consider sin could be more logically located in more basic drives like sex and status-seeking. But locating it anywhere, really, seems to invalidate Tellford's point.

Like I said before, I'm not claiming that this makes nature inherently evil and hopeless. It does not even refute the existence of God. I kind of like the idea of God as a benevolent being who intervenes periodically to try and lift us above our animal existence, sort of like the aliens in 2001: A Space Odyssey. But it does not seem very Christian. It does not fit with the concept of human fallenness; it is really more like a rising. You're either stuck with a God like Rolston's who likes suffering so much that he made a universe full of it, or a God like the Zoroastrian Ahura Mazda, who is good but fighting an evil force very nearly as strong as himself. That was my original dilemma, and I do not see how this solves it.

Dying for sins: digging up souls

Disputations has another response in our discussion of the Atonement. I get the feeling this dialogue is winding down, partly because I'm running up against this that's-just-the-way-it-is attitude that seems beyond argument, and partly because no one's said jack about my last post on the subject (OK, that was more about free will than the Atonement, but I'm still kind of disappointed). But anyway, since we're here, I wanted to know more about this "harrowing of hell" concept. I am not familiar with that, and I was wondering, who gets harrowed out, and why? (Or do we know that?)

Lovesick

Teresa Nielsen Hayden has a long and disturbing post about animal hoarding. It is, she points out, coming to be considered a mental illness, since the hoarders seem severely delusional. They do not seem to realize their animals are sick, dying or dead; they concoct paranoid theories of persecution when others try to interfere. They persist in their obsession even in the face of prison.

Some experts Teresa cites (boy, does that woman do her research!) think the phenomenon is allied to obsessive-compulsive disorder. OCs often collect and hoard things, including totally useless things like dryer lint, and become extremely anxious when someone tries to take the crap off their hands.

But at least from reading the descriptions thus far, and being intimately familiar with OCD, I don't think it's really the same. There are two very important differences here. For one thing, these amazing feats of denial, in which the hoarders think they're taking excellent care of the beasts while they're obviously in terrible shape, is not at all characteristic of OCD. OCs are perfectionists; they see flaws in their behavior that no one else sees, and do things over and over until they get it "right." And more importantly, I think, OCs know that they're ill. It's a peculiar trait of the disease that the sufferers know they have no real reason to do what they're doing, but can't stop themselves. In contrast to the animal hoarders, who insist unyieldingly that they're perfectly fine and others are persecuting them, OCs are only too happy to get help.

I am not a psychologist of course, but I do have a psych degree, and reading these animal hoarding cases actually reminded me of a different disorder, called erotomania. This is known to the public mostly through celebrity stalkers, because erotomaniacs have a delusional belief that they're having a love affair with someone who may not even know them. Although erotomaniacs who make the news are usually men, because they're more prone to violence, most of them are actually female. Curiously, this is also true of animal hoarders. Also, not all erotomaniacs fixate on celebrities -- sometimes co-workers or neighbors are their targets.

Celebrity stalking may not sound much like animal hoarding, but the way these hoarders talk sounds awfully similar. They believe they have a "special relationship" with their animals, an almost mystical calling. One lawyer Teresa cites who's dealt with a lot of hoarders says the standard line is, "I love these animals and no one can love them as I can." And both erotomaniacs and hoarders are in deep denial about the suffering they're causing their victims. When the love-objects of erotomaniacs tell them to get lost, erotomaniacs refuse to believe them, concocting elaborate conspiracy theories about why the person is lying or is being manipulated. In some cases -- the famous cases -- they lash out in violence. Also like hoarders, erotomaniacs can seem otherwise normal and functional, although they are usually socially withdrawn. Unlike OCs, they fail to recognize their own insanity.

Erotomania refers only to romantic delusion (hence the name), but I see no reason why they same process couldn't happen with another type of relationship, like with animals. I suspect that with animal hoarders we're seeing the grim reality of what would happen if stalkers actually gained control of their victims. I don't know if anyone has investigated a connection between the two illnesses -- both of them are rather new to the lexicon -- but it seems worth a look.

Free to be

Everett Vandagriff wrote a long letter responding to my somewhat rude reaction to his earlier letter. This post is going to veer somewhat off the subject of the Atonement and into free will, an interesting subject in its own right. Minute Particulars also wrote on this subject, and like Everett includes a lot of C.S. Lewis. Which is too bad, because I don't much like Lewis. (Well, not on this subject -- I liked The Lion, the With and the Wardrobe.)

I think it may have been misleading for me to link to Julian Sanchez' post arguing against the existence of free will and in favor of materialism. I was not endorsing everything Julian said, but I thought he made some good points questioning how we think about free will. I am agnostic on the subject of materialism; and when it comes to the makeup of the human being, in fact, materialism does not necessarily run counter to Christianity. In fact, a while ago I posted part of a letter from Telford Work in which he says: "I myself tend towards holism: my 'soul' is linguistic shorthand for my 'self', which seems to be entirely material. When I die, I'm nowhere but in the casket until resurrection day."

So I'm going to skip that part of Everett's argument, and move on:

When we take a course of action, there are several things which tend to make us want to act one way or another. These are, ultimately, reason and emotion. Setting aside whether or not emotion is entirely chemical or not, I am going to proceed on the assumption that human reason is not merely controlled by chemical processes. When weighing our options, we look, ideally, at each one and determine which alternative is best based upon rational thought, emotional reaction and, occasionally, intuition. Now, in order to weigh the options, we need to determine which factors (within each of the areas of influence) take precedent and weigh them against each other. When this reflection has reached its conclusion we, hopefully, have decided which course of action is best. Once that determination has been made, we then have to decide whether or not to follow our better judgment. Sometimes we do, and sometimes we don't, be it for emotional reasons, indifference, what have you. There is something in us which determines whether or not we should follow that judgment, and it is not our reason or our emotion: it is our will. That will is bound by neither reason nor emotion, but sides with one or the other (in some cases both or neither) in determining our course of action. In order for it to be able to do this, it must be something different than both reason and emotion because otherwise, it would by its very nature be subject to one or the other. It must also be able to supersede the demands of reason, emotion and intuition so as to measure and reconcile them and react accordingly. Ultimately, it must choose, and the fact that it can choose on a purely rational basis, a purely emotional basis, purely intuitive basis, a purely habitual basis, or on several of them is an indication of a degree of independence from the various influences that lend weight to various options.

I disagree that the "will" must be some sort of free-floating entity within the mind. I think this description (which doesn't quote Lewis, but has Lewis' fingerprints all over it) overly compartmentalizes the self. Reason and emotion -- not to mention our many conflicting reasons and emotions -- are ultimately part of one organism. I think of my "will" as what I end up doing once all those factors play out within myself. The fact that "will" does not always side with one faction or the other, I think, simply means that the interplay comes out differently depending on the circumstances of the decision.

I also want to point out that there's another factor in decision-making that Everett doesn't mention: perception. Not all the variables in a decision are inside our heads. The first question is what we perceive our choices to be. And that's why I got so hot under the collar in the first post. Everett and other Christians say unbelievers "choose to reject God," as if everybody looked coolly over the situation -- Jesus, love and heaven or sin, death and hell -- and inexplicably chose the latter. I suppose, given the strangeness of humanity, some people may exist who feel they've done that. But the vast majority have not. In fact, most non-Christians believe they've accepted God -- but they don't think the Christian God is the real one.

Think of it this way. When you're choosing between two anythings -- cars, women, political candidates, you name it -- you start out believing that both of them exist, and you generally try to find out as much as you can about their various attributes. We do not take our knowledge that they exist, or the knowledge we might gain from learning about them, as interfering with our free choice. What drove me bats about Lewis was the way he acted like, when it comes to God, there's no free will without ignorance.

Everett, in his original letter, put it this way:

God wants a people who will follow Him out of free will, who will submit to them by their own choice. To simply declare the relationship restored is to place people in submission Him irrespective of whether or not they wish to be. This elimination of free will violates the basic dignity which God bestowed upon man.

This brings me to the second point. Any sort of divine decree or any other act of power that would restore the relationship between God and man would necessarily destroy man's free will. If God makes a decree, man has no say in the matter. If He moves in a worldwide act of power, He leaves no room for choice, for faced with the glory of God, man cannot but accept God as Lord.

I have been wondering, as I've pondered Everett's two letters, why God should care if people follow him out of free will. Why should he confer this "dignity" on us, since we are far inferior beings to him? It's true that we humans prefer that in our own relationships: a marriage freely entered into seems more meaningful than having a sex slave. But why?

I think because all that having a sex slave shows is that its owner is powerful. It does not show that the owner is lovable. And we humans want -- need -- to love and to be loved. So most of us hold back on the power that we could use over other people; we allow them some freedom so we know whether they really love us, and therefore whether we are really lovable. (This is, of course, leaving aside the moral problems with enslaving people. Since God is already the ultimate authority and the whole universe is his slave of sorts, I do not see how that is an issue.)

Apparently God also wants to be loved, and apparently he is also withholding his potential power. But I have a bit of trouble translating the human experience with this to Everett's formulation. For one thing, when you get down to it, this is less about free will than it is about emotion. You can make a slave sleep with you, but you can't make her love you. Nor do you have the fulfillment of emotional union with her, needless to say. A wife, on the other hand, does not choose to love you; it's just that when you give her the chance to walk away from you and she doesn't, she's showing you what is really in her heart.

God is supposedly our Creator. So even if we are not his slaves, he made us complete with our impulses and desires and capacities and what have you. While you cannot control what is in your slave's heart, God can control our hearts -- he made our hearts. Where does the love in your heart come from? Do you will it? Or does it just happen? What does freedom really mean here?

Another, less romantic possibility is that God wants us to recognize goodness even when it is not clothed in power. This seems to be behind Jesus' long series of "if you knew God, you would know me" answers to the questioning authorities in the Gospel of John. The trouble I have with this in the Christian context is that there are two parts to this: recognizing goodness, and recognizing that goodness = God. The first part of that comes from listening to the innate morality within ourselves. The second part involves a huge leap of faith.

After all, when we look around the world, right and might don't seem to be especially associated. For untold millenia down to the present day, pagans worshipped gods that were essentially amoral. I am reminded here of a quote from a Haitian, when asked how he could theoretically be Catholic while practicing voodoo on the side. "Jesus is good," he said, "but Eshu is powerful."

Where does the faith to overcome this sort of attitude come from? I don't know, but I don't think you can will it into being. I would like to believe that good is stronger than evil, and indeed that is the chief thing that drew me to Christianity in the first place. But wanting, alone, does not make it happen.

There's another complication to this, which I alluded to in the previous post. If you have recognized God, you may not be seeing him in all his glory, but the choice to follow him becomes something of a non-choice. Especially if you believe in hell. You would not say a man was giving a woman free choice if he said, "Marry me. Or I will cast you into a pit of unspeakable torture." She theoretically has a choice, but it ain't much of one. Part of the reason why a woman choosing to marry you is meaningful is that she could walk away without any negative consequences. She's with you entirely because she loves you.

And yet, in the current letter, Everett says he does have a choice:

Choosing to follow God, to enter into the relationship I was made to enter into is not something that is done once, nor do I have to do so simply because I believe Christ died so that I might be united to HIm. I can decide one day that I want to live a life united with Christ, and I can then decide the following day that I don't want to after all. Initial submission to God does not mean permanent submission to God, nor does it mean perfect submission to God. Because God created me with free will, I can walk away from Him at any time I choose (I should point out that when I say "walk away from Him," I am referring to what I at a given time intend to be a pemanent decision not to follow God, as opposed to simply instances of sin). What's more, because I have free will, even though I may have decided to unite myself to God, there are times when I am going to choose to do something contrary to His will. I will sin. It happens. I am not perfect, nor have I ever claimed to be (at least not seriously). Ultimately, submission to God is consistent with free will because we have to constantly choose to do so. God will not compel us to do anything, even if he sometimes gives a little encouragement (e.g. Jeremiah and Jonah).

I can't say, of course, what goes on in the mind of a Christian. But I wonder, again, how serious the option to walk away is. Many Christians -- if not all of them -- wrestle with belief in God, but I doubt many have believed firmly in God and chosen to walk away. Again, the question seems to be of faith rather than morality or even choice.

Also, getting briefly back to the subject of the Atonement, I quote Everett again:

I'd also like to briefly address the question of who goes to Heaven. It is correct to say that Christ died for all men. However, it is wrong to say in absolute that people do not go to Hell for their sins, and it is also wrong to say in absolute terms that people go to Hell for unbelief. We are judged ultimately by whether we accept or reject God, yes, but as you have noted, what about the ones who have not had the opportunity to make the choice? My general understanding of how it works is that we as human beings are wired to be in communion with God. Even if we are cut off from God, we sense that there is more to life than what we see before us, a transcendant element, if you will, and there is something in us that urges us to pursue that Truth (God). If we allow ourselves to be driven by that urge, to seek the Truth, but do not do so because we lacked sufficient knowledge or opportunity, or because of some other mitigating circumstance, then God will be merciful toward us. However, if we live our lives seeking simply our own self-gratification, ignoring any urge to seek the Truth, then God will have no recourse but to condemn us to Hell.

This is why Christian lines like "your sins are forgiven" can sound like doublespeak to me. They're forgiven unless you're really bad and you don't seek God, or something.

Finally, (yes, this post will eventually come to an end!), Everett writes:

I find it admirable that you are taking time to examine things, to try to gain a greater understanding of the Christian life. Would it were that more people pursued it with the same zeal as you. However, it is essential to recognize the limits of intellect. There is an element of mystery to religion that can't be explained away. There are things we can never fully understand on an intellectual level in this life. I encourage you, in addition to picking people's brains, to step out in faith. Much, if not all, of what is being said in this discussion will not satisfy you completely, nor can it. I know what I've said here does not satisfy me entirely, but is just a workable understanding. However, I believe because I have faith. I have stepped out off of the cliff and not fallen to the ground. So don't confine yourself to asking people who are by their very nature fallible. Ask God to help you come to grips with the questions you have, and continue to do so. Try to quiet your thoughts and listen for His reply. It may come directly from Him, or you may find yourself moved to read something, or someone may say something that clears things up for you. You never know, something might happen. Ultimately, be prepared to live with mystery. You don't have to know all of the answers, and that's a good thing.

I quote this partly because other readers have said similar things. And I should say that I have indeed been pursuing a sort of two-track policy on this. On the blog I've been having these brainy discussions about theology, since this seems like a good format for it. But I've also been attending a church, involving myself in its activities, and, in my own spotty way, praying. Telford, if he shows up here, can vouch for it. So yeah, I can sound like Supercritic on the blog, but I am also trying to get this more experientially/intuitively. And thanks for the kind words, Everett. I'm sorry I was so snappy with you before.

Dying for sins: righteous brothers

Disputations has completed part one and part two of his explanation of the Atonement. I feel like this is covering ground that we've been over before, but there are some interesting features to his discussion.

I was pretty confused by this part:

The Law was God's revelation to Moses and the Jews of how they were to live if they were to be righteous in His sight, yet as St. Paul points out "by works of the Law no one will be justified." If the Law could make someone righteous, then there would be no need for Christ to die.

I know the theory of the Atonement leans heavily on Romans, which I have read (I didn't come to this topic from a state of total ignorance, much though it may seem like it). Romans was pretty confusing to me too, especially on the topic of Jewish law. The gist seemed to be that God laid down the law but no one followed it perfectly, hence the need for Jesus to come and render forgiveness. What I can't tell is whether this was because giving the laws to Moses was a previous attempt at getting people to live right that failed, or whether the Law itself is somehow inherently inadequate to actually make people good enough to meet God. If the former, it makes God sound rather fallible, trying one tack with humanity and then another; if the latter, it makes the purpose of lawgiving rather mysterious.

Paul does offer one suggestion: that "through the law comes knowledge of sin." The implication apparently being that once people have laws and fail to obey them, they realize what sinners they are, and thus how much they need God's grace. Aside from seeming like a strange reason to hand down law, I am not sure how this applies to the many non-Jews who converted to Christianity. Evidently, they perceived their own sinfulness without knowing or caring that they were breaking Jewish law.

But anyway, this is a roundabout way of getting to the question that I asked earlier: what was the fate of those who lived before Jesus? Disputations offers hints:

Before Jesus' death, men were helpless, unable to please God by their lives. After His death, men were no longer helpless. By their faith in Jesus, they could live for Him rather than themselves, and living for Christ means living together with Him. Since Christ is living at the right hand of the Father, living with Christ means living in the presence of the Father, an unthinkable thought before Jesus, since no man sees God and still lives (Exodus 33:20).

So no man can see God and live, but what of the afterlife? If none were righteous, was everyone damned? Could Christ save the dead?

Disputations also says:

So Jesus' sacrifice, once for all, establishes a new covenant, a new agreement between God and all mankind, by which God promises to forgive our sins if we have faith in His Son. The one necessary sacrifice of this covenant -- the whole of mankind's side of the bargain -- was made before people even became aware the covenant was offered. Jesus died so that we would have a sacrifice through which our sins can be forgiven.

I must say I have the same objections which I spelled out here to the idea that your whole salvation rests on faith in one person. It's not a rational or theological argument, it just violates my inmost moral sense. But more on that in the next post.

I am also a bit doubtful that Catholics believe that mankind's whole side of the bargain was paid through the Crucifixion. Aside from the faith caveat -- an awfully big one -- people also evidently have to repent their sins. Maybe I'm taking Shakespearean theology too seriously, but I was under the impression that even a believer who died "in his sins," that is before repenting them, was destined for otherworldly punishment. Am I correct about that?

Holding pattern

Yes, I said I'd respond to some things today, but I got a late start and didn't have time for everything I wanted to do. So I will put it off again till tomorrow.

One thing that's taking longer than expected is reading Isaiah, which I told Telford Work I'd do because he thought it would help me understand the crucifixion business. I don't see the connection from what I've read, though it does show me the provenance of the guy who walked around San Francisco with a sandwich board saying "Fallen, fallen is Babylon..."