Essentially Contested America

Stanley Fish “reviews,” if  that’s the proper term, Terry Eagleton’s latest book “Reason, Faith and Revolution.” Apparently, (I have not read Eagleton’s book), Eagleton attempts to defend the faith of his fathers against the attacks of such irksome atheists as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Fish’s summary doesn’t explicitly reveal what he himself thinks of the book, but it it does explicitly reveal his feelings about “the shallow arguments of school-yard atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins.” The contrast seems to be between those who have faith in faith and those who embrace something called “liberal rationalism.” Fish never mentions the possibility of a third approach to understanding our penchant for believing in something greater than ourselves. To understand this third approach one must recognize one’s own morality as an influential power in one’s self-consciousness. To oversimplify shamelessly, appreciating one’s own morality is like no other phenomenological experience conceivable. How can it be that I (or you), someone who can engage in both theoretical and practical reasoning, a being that can take an impersonal stance toward oneself, can make oneself an object of one’s own examination, how can such a being perish, permanently exit existence? For those who can appreciate the significance, force, and import of these type of query, the gods we constructed, whether they be God, science, rationality, progress, and so forth. These are all easily recognizable as monumental attempts to distract ourselves from existential anxiety over our impending death.  How many years is it for you?  Thirty? Ten? Five? We all await death and the civilizations we construct are all designed to repel, negate, and “falsify” the permanence of our own deaths. Both sides in the controversy between Eagleton, on the one side, and Dawkins and Hitchens, on the other, simply haven’t the courage or understanding to appreciate how puerile their controversy in the face of death.  But where does Fish stand on this issue?

Barack Obama gave his first address to Congress on what we typically call Mardi Gras.  Mardi Gras is the day before Lent begins on the Christian holy day Ash Wednesday.  Typically, we think of Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday) as the day of gorging before the day of reckoning.  I wish Barack Obama had used the Fat Tuesday/Ash Wednesday dichotomy in talking about our country. Leaving the more obvious gorging/fat cat analogies to Fat Tuesday alone, it is fair enough to suggest that our nation has not engaged in much retrospection over the last several years.  We have not been terribly mindful of our responsibilities to our fellow Americans, to our fellow countries or to the world in general.  However, we can leave those failings to the side on Fat Tuesday night.   Ash Wednesday is a new day, albeit a somewhat depressing one.  In many churches, Ash Wednesday includes services at which one’s minister reminds parishioners, as he or she is putting ashes on foreheads that, “You are dust and to dust you shall return.”  However, once the shock wears off, we realize that Lent is about self-examination, self-denial and fasting (another form of self-denial), among other things.  The core of Lent is not about showing how much pain we can inflict on ourselves physically or psychologically, nor is it explicitly about losing weight.  Indeed, Lent is not really about giving something up or taking something on, as many folks do during Lent. Rather, the self-examination, self-denial and fasting – by stripping ourselves bare and using fewer things that make us feel better – allow us to realize that we have been given all we need to survive in this world.  In the process of counting our God-given assets, we can determine whether we are making the very best use of those assets.  We can come out of Lent, a season of want, with real hope for the future and a recognition that brighter days are ahead.  Those brighter days are not brighter because we can stop fasting, but because we will recognize that we do not need as much stuff for the journey.

It may be that Barack Obama is guiding America through its own Lent.  We as a country have been given an embarrassment of riches.  If the self-examination is critical enough and if the self-denial is serious enough and if the fasting is productive enough, we just might be able to see our brighter days ahead with a leaner and more focused republic that is an even more powerful force for good in the world.  President Obama is not the Messiah.  However, he knows his way around a church and should feel very comfortable climbing into his bully pulpit for the good of the country.

The Pope has sent a terrible message concerning the Catholic Church’s position on Holocaust denial. In order to avoid a continuing “schism” in the Church Pope Benedict decided “to lift the excommunication of four ultra-traditionalist bishops, including one who has denied the Holocaust, has angered many Jews and Catholics who say the bishops represent repressive and anti-Semitic currents in Catholicism that they want the pope to now explicitly repudiate.” Listen to the mother of all rationalizations based on “historical evidence.”
Adolph Hitler killed no Jews “by gas” in “gas chambers.” According to the good Bishop, anyone who believes the contrary rejects “evidence” and bases his or her judgment on emotion. Oh yes, the good Bishop concedes that two to three hundred thousand Jews were killed by the Nazis, but not one of them by gas. Williamson’s conclusion is that no “Holocaust occurred. He also “has written that women should not attend universities, empathized with the Unabomber’s views on modern technology and suggested that the U.S. government staged the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks as an excuse to invade Afghanistan.” Does Williamson believe that there is greater “historical evidence” supporting the proposition that Christ was crucified and resurrected than there the proposition that the Nazis killed millions of Jews? If so, he advances quite a curious conception of “historical evidence.”

Frankly, Williamson and his cohorts are morally lost causes, but what’s wrong with Pope Benedict? The Pope decided to overturn Pope John Paul the Second’s excommunication of Williamson, and now has recalled Williamson to the bosom of the Church and restored him to a sacred role as priest.  Why would Pope Benedict lift the excommunication of such a moral/sociopath as Williamson? The perfunctory explanation is that the Pope seeks to heal the schism in the Church. Bravo! But not on the backs of Jews and the epistemic dimension of “historical evidence.” A darker explanation is at work here.

Isn’t it curious that people suffering the loss of a loved one due to the deadly work of wrongdoers or natural catastrophes often congregate in their Church to seek comfort from God. If God  is understood to be an omniscient, omnipotent, morally perfect being, it would seem to follow that evil or suffering would be absent  among humans. This is the notorious problem of evil that some theists take seriously, though unfortunately all too few.  One response to this problem, offered by Jews and Christians, is that God is not the cause of evil, rather God gave human beings the gift of freewill and evil humans abuse this freedom when they engage in wrongdoing. In short, don’t blame God for what evil people do. Consequently, the Judeo-Christian God, a perfect being, is compatible with evil existing in the world, or so the argument goes.  The problem with this response is the fact that it overlooks the idea of original sin.  According to the conventional account, God told Adam and Eve that they could enjoy all the fruits in the Garden of Eden, except the fruit of the tree of knowledge.  But this admonition and the idea that God gave us the gift of freewill are at odds with one another.  Freewill requires knowledge–the knowledge of legitimate ends as well as knowledge of  appropriate the means to those ends.  Thus, the Judeo-Christian picture must give up one of the following elements: (1) freewill requires knowledge, or (2) God gave us the gift of freewill. However, the idea of freewill and the idea of knowledge are inextricably intertwined. It is conceptually absurd to think that one can have genuine freewill without knowledge. So (1) is ineliminable.  If that’s so, by forbidding us to eat the fruits of the tree of knowledge God did not give us freewill; indeed, this prohibition denies us freewill.  But, if God did not–could not–give us freewill then the problem of evil lies at His doorstep, not ours.  Since freewill requires knowledge, in forbidding us to acquire knowledge God was in effect denying us freewill. In that case, evil and suffering are never caused by humans exercising freewill. These twin horrors occur either because God permits them to affect helpless humans or because it is impossible for God to do anything about evil and suffering.  In either case, God is not a perfect being. Our conceptions of God, freewill, and knowledge cannot then be sustained. One or more of them must be misconceived.

Progressives supporting the President-elect may be asking themselves just what Barack must do to begin reclaiming American ideals–including, of course, a fair economic system–from the depredations of the past eight years. Here are some ideas from Paul Krugman: “Times have changed. In 1996, President Bill Clinton, under siege from the right, declared that ‘the era of big government is over.’ But President-elect Barack Obama, riding a wave of revulsion over what conservatism has wrought, has said that he wants to ‘make government cool again.’  . . .  Before Mr. Obama can make government cool, however, he has to make it good. Indeed, he has to be a goo-goo.  . . .  Goo-goo, in case you’re wondering, is a century-old term for “good government” types, reformers opposed to corruption and patronage. Franklin Roosevelt was a goo-goo extraordinaire. He simultaneously made government much bigger and much cleaner. Mr. Obama needs to do the same thing.  . . .  Needless to say, the Bush administration offers a spectacular example of non-goo-gooism. But the Bushies didn’t have to worry about governing well and honestly. Even when they failed on the job (as they so often did), they could claim that very failure as vindication of their anti-government ideology, a demonstration that the public sector can’t do anything right. . . .  The Obama administration, on the other hand, will find itself in a position very much like that facing the New Deal in the 1930s. To read Krugman’s important suggestions click here. Krugman’s suggestions are worth considering.

Two additional elements for a successful Obama presidency might also be considered.  First, the 44th president must avoid symbolic mistakes such as inviting Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration. The essential mistake in this choice, as I have written earlier, is the message it sends to an oppressed, mistreated gay and lesbian community.  Reverend Warren’s good works are insufficient to justify this choice just as it would be insufficient to point to the good works of a rabid segregationists during the Jim Crow era. Indeed, in once sense, opposing homosexuality is worse than racism.  Racists are committed to keeping blacks subordinate. Homophobes want gay and lesbians to go away. Symbols matter especially in this case because the message it sends rejects the existence of a particular minority community. (Oh yes, it’s not a rejection of gays and lesbians it’s just a rejection of the trivial matter of their sexuality.) On balance, however, African Americans have been systematically treated worse than any other ethnic group with the possible exception of Native Americans.   Second, the new president needs to hear genuine progressive voices. His cabinet is completely devoid of a single progressive voice, for instance, a voice like Paul Wellstone’s. Obama needs to consult progressive perspectives in fixing the economy as well as in dealing with the other enormous problems the Bush administration bequeathed to the nation.

In his single act of choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate, John McCain quieted the evangelical wing of the Republican Party. Palin has now deafened them. As a consequence, McCain can be himself without worrying that he will offend the religious right by being insufficiently religious. That, rather than any energy expertise or supposed foreign policy chops, may be Palin’s biggest contribution.

McCain’s speech accepting the Republican Party’s nomination to be president of the United States suggests just how little he needs to do to keep the evangelical wing of the Republican Party happy in the wake of choosing Palin. The day after Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech electrified the delegates in St. Paul, John McCain spoke. In his speech, he reminded the assemblage of his five-plus years of POW captivity. He did so to explain his love of and devotion to the United States. During the speech, he explained that when faced death, he turned to his country to sustain him. Under normal circumstances, many evangelicals might have panned McCain as a secularist, suggesting that when a man of faith faces death he puts his trust in God or Jesus Christ. Luckily for McCain, the Republican evangelicals could see his lips moving but could not hear him. They could not hear him because Sarah Palin’s speech from the night before was still ringing in their ears.

Michael Heller, recent winner of the Templeton prize made the following common, but nevertheless astonishing, remark, and I paraphrase: “If you don’t believe in God, evil is meaningless.” Therefore nonbelievers are more likely to commit crimes and cause evil and suffering. Accordingly, a belief in God is required to protect us from the temptation of evil and the ravages of immorality. It’s astonishing because there’s no hard empirical evidence to suggest theists commit fewer horrendous crimes than nonbelievers. Consider the justification of slavery and segregation as biblical dictates, the Spanish Inquisition, the perpetrators of 9/11 and other acts of terror, the religious wars that historically have enfeebled Europe and now cause death and destruction. Consider Steven Weisberg’s trenchant remark: “With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil–that takes religion.” But what’s really astonishing is the supposition that if you don’t believe in God and you’re confronted with human suffering and evil, it will leave you indifferent. If observing evil does not, by itself, itself horrify one to realize it is something to eradicate, I can’t see how the supposition that God exists will. Undeniably, evil and suffering in religions crafted along the lines of the Abrahamic religions are more likely to be acceptable since the victims will be rewarded with eternal life anyway. But why does a perfect divinity need to go through such an onerous process in the attempt to explain away suffering. Why not just construct the world differently.

The ad hoc character of such reasoning is also revealed in Heller’s remark:

Various processes in the universe can be displayed as a succession of states in such a way that the preceding state is a cause of the succeeding one . . . (and) there is always a dynamical law prescribing how one state should generate another state. But dynamical laws are expressed in the form of mathematical equations, and if we ask about the cause of the universe we should ask about a cause of mathematical laws. By doing so we are back in the Great Blueprint of God’s thinking the universe, the question on ultimate causality, . . . ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ When asking this question, we are not asking about a cause like all other causes. We are asking about the root of all possible causes.

It’s simply a non sequitur to insist that seeking the cause of mathematical laws, whatever that means anyway, requires appealing to “the Great Blueprint of God’s thinking the universe.” Moreover, if a preceding state is the cause of a succeeding state, how can there be a “root of all possible causes.” Whatever that means, it would need a preceding cause to explain it. To reply that “the root of all possible causes” necessarily lies outside of the ordinary series of causality is completely circular. Presumably, one is attempting to explain whether there exists a cause outside of the series of causes, which serves as a first cause or ground. One needs to argue for that proposition not assume it in the premises of an argument.

In my view, there never has been a successful rebuttal of the problem of evil or suffering. Neither the freewill defense, the appreciation of good defense, the builds character defense, nor the best of all possible worlds defense have been persuasive, certainly to intelligent lay persons. That God is necessary to appreciate evil and suffering is a hubris that flies in the face of what we know of the ordinary communal life of human beings. I don’t need much of a reason to want to stop your suffering, but I certainly need one to start it.

Check out the article in yesterday’s NY Times on scientific laws. Here is an introductory passage: “Unlike, say, traffic or drug laws, you don’t have a choice about obeying gravity or any of the other laws of physics. Jump and you willcome back down. Faith or good intentions have nothing to do with it. . . . Existence didn’t have to be that way, as Einstein reminded us when he said, “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.” Against all the odds, we can send e-mail to Sri Lanka, thread spacecraft through the rings of Saturn, take a pill to chase the inky tendrils of depression, bake a turkey or a souffle and bury a jump shot from the corner. . . . Yes, it’s a lawful universe. But what kind of laws are these, anyway, that might be inscribed on a T-shirt but apparently not on any stone tablet that we have ever been able to find? . . . Are they merely fancy bookkeeping, a way of organizing facts about the world? Do they govern nature or just describe it? And does it matter that we don’t know and that most scientists don’t seem to know or care where they come from? . . . Apparently it does matter, judging from the reaction to a recent article by Paul Davies, a cosmologist at Arizona State University and author of popular science books, on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times` . . . Dr. Davies asserted in the article that science, not unlike religion, rested on faith, not in God but in the idea of an orderly universe. Without that presumption a scientist could not function. His argument provoked an avalanche of blog commentary, articles on Edge.org and letters to The Times, pointing out that the order we perceive in nature has been explored and tested for more than 2,000 years by observation and experimentation. That order is precisely the hypothesis that the scientific enterprise is engaged in testing.” (Click here for more of this interesting article.)

“Order,” a hypothesis? “Faith” in an “orderly universe”? What’s going on here? Maybe a particular kind of “order” is a hypothesis, but not order itself. What sense can we give to the extravagant claim that scientists have faith in the existence of an orderly universe? Scientific “faith” is not a choice, but rather it’s an inescapable truth. Any universe must be orderly, at least in some elementary sense, before we can even began to investigate its precise nature. Similarly, and with a copious amount of respect for Professor Einstein, any universe must first be comprehensible, again in at least in some elementary sense, before the question of whether it’s completely comprehensibility, in some more robust sense, can be raised in the first place. For scientific purposes, as well as for descriptive purposes, there is no realistic choice between a lawful universe and a lawless one, an orderly universe or a disorderly one. Only lawful universes can be subject of our investigations and debate. As David Hume, the eighteenth century philosopher, pointed out: we would be unable to describe or even conceptualize a completely lawless universe. The very idea of a lawless universe is quite unintelligible. Alternatively stated, for any of our purposes, as we understand ourselves, such a universe cannot exist. Of course, there are coherent and incoherent descriptions of the universe, coherent and incoherent scientific claims about the universe, but that is a far cry from incoherent universes, whatever that would mean. So we’re stuck with the notion of an orderly, comprehensible, at least to some degree, universes. We have no choice in the matter; faith is not only unnecessary in scientific explanation; it has no place pertaining to the axiom that the universe is orderly. Consequently, Dr. Davis’ claims about scientific faith are and must be erroneous.

On a related point, have you ever wondered about claims that God or the Big Bang explains the origination of the universe and all that it contains? It is incomprehensible how these claims can be taken seriously. If the universe needs explaining, positing the existence of God or the Big Bang simply moves the question of explanation one step beyond what we originally wanted explained. If what we originally wanted explained actually needs explaining and is capable of being explained, then why doesn’t its explanation also need explaining? Accordingly, if we posit the existence of God or the Big Bang to provide the explanation we need, why don’t we need an explanation of the origination of God and the Big Bang? Within our current conceptual framework, there can’t be a privileged first explainer that needs no explanation because then the initial need for explanation seems inexplicable. Now our current conceptual scheme might be losing its explanatory force and should be replaced by a sexier version if that is even possible and desirable. But until we do, longing for God or the Big Gang to provide the security and understanding some say we need is beyond belief, and for that matter, beyond faith as well.

Credit for First Image
Credit for Second Image

Consider the story of retired American generals acting conscientiously to change our policy concerning Mr. Bush’s War. “What might be called The Revolt of the Generals has rarely happened in the nation’s history. . . . In op-ed pieces, interviews and TV ads, more than 20 retired U.S. generals have broken ranks with the culture of salute and keep it in the family. Instead, they are criticizing the commander in chief and other top civilian leaders who led the nation into what the generals believe is a misbegotten and tragic war. . . . The active-duty generals followed procedure, sending reports up the chain of command. The retired generals beseeched old friends in powerful positions to use their influence to bring about a change. . . . When their warnings were ignored, some came to believe it was their patriotic duty to speak out, even if it meant terminating their careers.” The stories of these generals are profiles in courage. The shame is that their “commander-in-chief’s” moral character is impoverished and his commonsense unequal to theirs.

Check out an interesting article on faith and science in the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Here’s the introductory paragraph: “The relationship between faith and science in the United States seems, at least on the surface, to be paradoxical. Surveys repeatedly show that most Americans respect science and the benefits it brings to society, such as new technologies and medical treatments. And yet, religious convictions limit many Americans’ willingness to accept controversial scientific theories as well as certain types of scientific research, such as the potential use of embryonic stem cells for medical treatments.” The bigger problem is that the medical benefits American embrace derive from the same scientific methodologies that underly the controversial issue of intelligent design versus evolutionary biology. Following intelligent design results in neither one medically ameliorative pill nor one life-saving surgical procedure. Following evolutionary biology does. Thus, if concrete results is what determines whether a theory is also a fact, then intelligent design is just a theory, and a poor one at that, while evolutionary biology is, through its practical benefits, just as much a fact as a thunderstorm or a tree that is felled by the thunderstorm.

While it is true that ordinary there is no necessary contradiction between science and faith as the ultimate answer to the question of what origin of the universe is, in the final analysis, a conflict will arise. Theists say God. Atheists say matter. Theists say what is the origin of matter, but are baffled when asked the question what is the origin of God. The standard theistic answer is God always existed. Well if that’s possible, why isn’t it equally possible that matter always existed. Human, even some very smart humans, seem to buckle when confronting the idea of eternity. But the problem applies to both science’s answer and equally to faith’s answer. Conceptually, God cannot have a privileged position in this argument without circularity.