Irreligious - Epistemology and god: Rationalists are from Mars, Empiricists are from Venus (3) -
Terence Lee writes his third post on ‘“Epistemology and God”, an ongoing series of essays on the theory of knowledge and how it relates to God’.

ONGs on the way – Japanese husbands, love your wives… – The Ongs, who are (full disclosure) my cousins, write about the Japanese stereotype of the Male Chauvinist Husband, and how a couple of Japanese pastors honor their wives.

World Traveler – “For the Sake of my Brothers” – The writer talks about Paul (and other Biblical characters’) Messianic statements – that is, offering their own damnation in exchange for their brothers’ salvation.

And they built the high places of Baal, which are in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to cause their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire unto Molech; which I commanded them not, neither came it into my mind, that they should do this abomination, to cause Judah to sin.
Jeremiah 32:35

Then God said, “Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about.”
Genesis 22:2

In my opinion, all art is part of a triptych, whether it admits it or is conscious of it at all. A triptych has three parts: The Garden of Eden/The Fall; The Crucifixion/The Sacrifice; The Restoration/The Kingdom of Heaven. Another way of saying it would be to say, there are three realms in art: Heaven, Earth and Hell. There is something very human about being fascinated with hell. Perhaps this is why the Inferno appeals more to people than either the Purgatory or the Paradiso. Perhaps it is the same instinct that draws people into horror films summer after summer. I know that I have difficulty looking directly into the heart of Evil, but that it is those books and works of art that do so that are the most powerful to me. They have also the stature of Great Literature: 1984, for example, is the most harrowing thing I’ve read from the 20th century. Catch-22 literally made me sit down in exhaustion and fear when I got to The Part. Dogville made me weep with anger and horror. 28 Days Later still haunts me. Animal Farm, Brave New World, Lord of the Flies all made me look at my fellow human beings a little more warily. And just last night I picked up Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and it’s one of the most brutal things I’ve ever read. And I’m not even halfway through, and I haven’t even got to The Part yet (which the man who recommended the novel to me assures me will come). I’m not sure what The Part is, yet – does he kill the boy? Does he eat the boy? Does he meet his mother on the road and kill her? I’m not even sure I want to know.

This unflinching honesty, though, is the sort we do need in our coddled 21st century first world cocoon. It is necessary. It is necessary to be jolted out of the complacent stupor that comfort and abundance lull us into. For Man’s Heart is very dark, very very dark indeed – for there is a beast within each of us. What I love about The Road is its bleak portrayal of a world under Natural Law – that is, under the Laws of the Jungle. With no constraints, with no Leviathan, with, most importantly, no God, this is what becomes of Man. The child is a natural theist – so far the jury is still out on the father, but I have already met the old man who is a nihilist whom they feed. And I know that the heart of nihilism is destruction. And that the child would not stand a chance for even a second if he were alone, because he would be slain and devoured.

I think I first understood cannibalism a little better after watching the brilliant 1999 Julie Taymor film version (which makes you want to go vegetarian) of Shakespeare’s most gruesome play (featuring amputations, rape, torture, and the cooking of sons to be served to fathers and mothers), Titus Andronicus. It is so visceral, and really made me realize what a redeemed horror is at the heart of Christianity and what an irredeemable horror lies in the breasts of men. Steeped in the horror of the Spanish Civil War, Goya expressed this best when he painted Saturn devouring his own children.This is, after all, what war is: the sending of sons and daughters to protect fathers and mothers. Even worse, Civil War – the war of brother against brother, of father against son – senseless, timeless, uncontrollable. This is also genocide, the wiping out of entire tribes of brothers – and of course, this is cannibalism itself: the killing of brothers to devour human flesh.

Freud explained this phenomenon as occurring in the unconscious, due to prehistoric events at the time when consciousness arose in Mankind. He posited a band of brothers killing their father and eating him – a ritual which brought about (according to Freud) a rule of law. Indeed, before Christendom, this was pretty much the norm everywhere. It still is, in many places in the world today – the law of the survival of the fittest. C.S. Lewis also talks about the Fall of Man in the Problem of Pain, and posits that the first human ancestor, once self-consciousness had arisen, had to make the choice between himself and God. It would not, I guess, be a stretch to make that between himself and the Imago Dei in another man. Certainly we know that Cain killed Abel, one generation outside the Garden of Eden.

But it is child sacrifice that is the rankest thing to the nostrils of God – idolatry He tolerates for a certain number of years. But when the “abomination of abomination” occurs – making children pass through the fire, as the peoples did to Molech – judgment is at hand. Before the invention of childhood in around about the Victorian era, children were less than nothing in most societies. Some societies didn’t even name them until they came of age, because the emotional investment would be just too great. Children worked as a matter of course, were abused, used as cheap labor or slave labor (see Oliver Twist), were bought and sold as chattel. In other words, children, especially orphans, were the weakest of the weak, along with widows, who also had no protection. To sacrifice one’s children was then not only an affront against all natural familial love, but also against God’s justice, which is always on the side of the poor and weak.

We may not set up pyres or literally eat up our children, but what does it say when, in societies where achievement is the end goal, or where parents try to live vicariously through their overachieving offspring, and twelve-year-olds regularly leap off tall buildings or hang themselves or slit their wrists because they cannot live up to expectations? Or conversely, where children are had and not cared for, abandoned to the roving militias of the ghetto, to addiction and crime and violence? Remember that God provided the Ram, and that because of that Abraham did not have to slay the son he loved.

Oedipus’ tragic flaw was the most fundamental one of all: Hubris – that is, pride, the willingness to defy the gods.

image from Wikipedia

He displayed this when he claimed that the prophecy concerning his birth would be unfulfilled. He declared this at the height of his powers: the man had, running from exile from Corinth (where he had been adopted as a little baby and brought up as a prince) in order to not fulfill the prophecy concerning the Corinthian king and queen, met with a strange man who challenged him. He had a duel with him and killed the man. Then he met a Sphinx along the way, and being a wise man he solved the Sphinx’s riddle, freeing the people of Thebes from its tyranny. He was given a beautiful bride, the Queen of Thebes, as a prize, and made King of Thebes. As King of Thebes he ruled wisely, excising the sinners from the land, bringing peace and prosperity to the citizens of Thebes. It was at this point that he said, Apollo’s oracle will fall! And of course, (anyone who has read any myth at all will know) this is when the metaphorical shit hits the metaphorical fan.

At the time I thought this a pagan play, with a skewed morality which I could hold at a critical distance. I would appreciate it aesthetically, I thought, but not morally. After all, I’m a Christian (I thought to myself). My God is not like Apollo at all – He would never hold me accountable for something he predestined me to do anyway, and in any case, He wouldn’t make me go through this kind of horror. My God also knows that I only have the best of intentions – he won’t hold me accountable for sins I commit unknowingly! So I reasoned: I will not be swayed by some silly Greek play. I had already decided ahead of time that the gods were unjust, when I wrote the essay. Now to list the evidence, I thought. You can read my argument, which I still think very reasonable, here.

Yesterday I realized I was wrong. I had been guilty myself of hubris – for putting the gods (yes, even pagan gods) in the dock, as such, along with Oedipus. If gods and men were equal – on a level moral playing field, as such – I would take the part of Oedipus in a heartbeat. After all, who’s the better man: an unknowing father-killer and mother-ravisher who did everything he did out of compassion for strangers, or Mr Zeus himself, who’s pretty much raped every pretty girl and goddess this side of Creation, smote people he didn’t like for no good reason, fathered a pantheon of illegitimate bastards and then been an absent father to them all, and pretty much (pardon my French) dicked around for all his everlasting life? I thought Oedipus the better man! But you see, gods and men are different. This is the lesson of humility.

Well, first of all, the Zeus that the ancient Greeks worshipped and theorized about, and probably the Zeus that the playwright Sophocles had in mind when he wrote this, is quite different from the Zeus of popular legend. People did not think of Zeus as my Mr. Zeus, as described in the above paragraph. Apparently the Greek and Roman myths about the gods being capricious and annoying – all those delightful stories – were as controversial as say, Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat, or, more to the point, Jesus Christ Superstar or even Madonna’s music or the Da Vinci Code are to Christians today. Perhaps the best analogy to how Sophocles’ play today would be Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ – reverent, controversial, with a moral god in the centre, not some capricious serial adulterer, written probably by a devout but flawed man. So I was wrong on that count – I brought a straw man of a god to the dock, when really I should have been considering Someone far more like my God.

If the God of Abraham, Isaac and Joseph were the One who put Oedipus through this particular play, I realized, just yesterday, I would agree with Him. Here are several things I have learned in the last ten years, sometimes at great personal expense, which compel me say this:

1)   Direction, not intention, determines our final destination.

I have done terrible things out of good intentions, and I can honestly, having searched my heart, say that I did not mean to do them. Nevertheless, I did them, and the consequences of my actions were real. My experience of reality is subtly different from my friends’ and acquaintances’ and enemies’. They each have an interior world, with a personal narrative. Until I am in touch with this narrative, I can never know if the words I say, or the things I do towards them, are helping or hurting them. The road to hell truly is paved with good intentions – I’ve realized this because I have both tossed carelessly my friends into the flames, as well as been abandoned to the Pit by the best of people, all thanks to good intentions.

2)   Sin is not just personal – it is generational and collective.

This is a hard lesson to hear, particularly in America, or anywhere in the West where individualism is the dominant ideology. America tells you that “you can make it on your own”. So Americans make up stories (let’s take Disney films for example) in which the hero is largely orphaned (usually he or she has only one parent, and that single parent is pretty ineffectual), and the orphan makes it in the world anyway, within one generation, accomplishing what he sets out to do. Of course, the true nature of American success is very rarely like this. Michael Sandel, building on the work of John Rawls, has already begun arguing against individualism with communitarianism. In Political Science, Robert Putnam brought to our attention the consequences of the breakdown of community in America. Going back further, John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government was written upon seeing early America, and the most salient difference he had seen between the New World and the Old was the American genius for organization – that is, of building community, of grassroots groups and movements. Given these roots, communitarianism may really be as American as individualism.

But back to my point about collective Sin. This is not to say that (as people in Jesus’ day argued) something such as blindness was an indication of parental sin. Nor should it ever give credence to such horrible thoughts such as that the melanin of those of African extraction is a symbol of the sins of their fathers, and therefore we should blithely exploit them as slave labor. No, this is not what I mean by collective Sin. I think that collective Sin is actually more of an accumulation of tiny individual sins. Let’s get back to Oedipus for an illustration. When the King and Queen of Thebes hear of Apollo’s oracle concerning their son Oedipus, (that he would kill his father and rape his mother), they are horrified and decide the only way to save themselves and Thebes is to kill their newborn son. However, love stops them. The baby is instead abandoned on a hillside. A shepherd sees the baby and is moved to compassion, and takes him in and raises him as a shepherd boy. Later he is brought into the King of Corinth’s palace and raised as a prince. A drunkard Oedipus meets one day tells him about the prophecy concerning him. Oedipus is horrified, and flees Corinth to save his adoptive parents. This is when he meets his actual father on the road, and commits parricide.

Truly, the road to hell was paved with good intentions! I do not have the heart to blame the King and Queen of Thebes for not killing their child. Nor do I have it in me to say the shepherd should have left well enough alone (if you ever find yourself ensnared in a myth, taking in a changeling child is always a bad idea). But perhaps we can definitely say that that man should not have been drunk, and gone around blabbing about ancient oracles while drunk. Who knows, if Oedipus had never talked to that drunkard, he could have ended life as a very satisfactory King of Corinth. In any case, all of these people broke the law. The law against a person who would kill the King and rape the Queen was death. Even though Oedipus was a newborn infant, he deserved death if the prophecy was true. The shepherd did not know the law (that the baby was condemned), but he should have known the law of myth (never pick up a changeling baby). However, out of compassion he thwarted the law. Defying the law leads to Death – this is the burden of all knowledge and Wisdom. I think if each of us knew what we were capable of, and the evil that we will in fact unleash in our lives, we would probably all quite impartially sentence ourselves to death. It is God’s grace that allows us to move through time like blind little minnows, not knowing what we do, and who we kill daily on the road. It was the accumulation of these tiny little transgressions – against laws of reason (logos), against laws of myth (mythos) – that added up to tragedy.

3)   Sin has eternal consequences because God does not work inside Time.

Albert Einstein divined that Time is merely one of many dimensions, although we tend to experience the world in three dimensions, traveling down the line of Time. God doesn’t (for obvious reasons) do this. He is able to see all of human history (as well as pre- and post-human history) as happening all at once. This solves the conundrum of free will vs. predestination. We are responsible for every single sin we commit, and if we imagine Christ eternally on the cross, being nailed by each sin as we commit it, perhaps we would be a little more hesitant in our words and actions. We are even more culpable for particular sins if directed by a particular prophecy not to do something. (Fortunately most of us do not find ourselves in this situation – although it does call for a careful, thorough examination of the prophecies of the Bible).

At one and the same time, everything has already happened in the sight of God. This is why God is able to deliver prophecy via his prophets. This is also why prophecy is useful – because the prophetic message has always included “repent!” as its basic, fundamental cry. If people hear the prophecy, and repent, judgment will be held back. Well, at least until the stench of sin reaches a certain noisome pitch, and when the cry of the poor and the widows becomes quite unbearable again, at which point the whole thing starts all over again. This makes every sin a lot more terrible, even the small ones, because each one echoes down the long reaches of history, geography, Eternity itself. Furthermore, it joins the sins of our fathers, the sins of our friends, and the sins of total strangers to form a stream of narrative: these various tributaries converge to form the River of Death: the Styx, that runs through Hell itself. The sins of the fathers are handed down to the next generation (via genes, via inherited patterns of behavior, via kinks or omissions in the moral code). So it really isn’t Apollo’s fault that Oedipus is predestined and free to commit sin. That is simply the human consequence of only living in three and a half dimensions.

So what is the whole point of Grace, anyway? What’s the point of compassion if it merely leads to hell, the same way cruelty leads to hell? What difference does it make whether you do unto others as you would have them do to you?

If I were God, I would never have put Oedipus through all that. I also would never have inflicted that horrible prophecy on him. However, if none of this had happened, we would lack one of the first and greatest heroes of the Western Canon: blind Oedipus, who put out his own eyes and exiled himself from his Kingdom the moment he realized what he had done. Why did Oedipus blind himself? I think I finally see why.

Oedipus wanted his outward self to be a reflection of his inward condition. “I was blind,” he says, as he stabs one eyeball after the other. “Therefore let me be blind.” It is an affront to the gods for him to have sight, because it creates a chasm between heaven and earth – between the spiritual world and the physical world. Blindness is what Oedipus longs for, after all: if he had never known any of the prophecy, if he had continued having fulfilled it, without knowing he had, he may have been a great king, (he already was). Cloaked by blindness, protected by wool pulled over his eyes, he could conceivably have been a good king of Thebes. But he would never have gained the stature of a tragic hero, whose name is uttered by mortals even today.

I wrote a little poem about blind Oedipus wandering in exile. If Oedipus had been Christian, I would have said to him, one day your Savior will come and redeem those eyes. You have repented more than an ordinary man can bear – you have repented in dust and ashes, and your crying eyes show me your nobility, your sincerity. One day when you are caught up in heaven you will lift up your sad face, and see. And He will restore your sight.

passing by Oedipus

I was walking by

the walls of a kingdom

flushed in the fading sun

and passed hardly a glance

at the cloak in the gutter –

the one with the noble heart

(the eyes were closed,

I could not see

if they were truly blind)

Slate’s Since you Asked – My advice to you is… just wait – Cary Tennis, advice columnist extraordinaire, writes a very very wise piece on resting which seems to speak directly to my Commencement/Moving out/Loss of bunnies-addled self.

Facebook Note – A Poem on the Occasion of A Church Being Probed For Financial Irregularities – Gwee Li Sui, Singaporean poet, responds to, well, a church being probed for financial irregularities and then pointing fingers at the devil for making them do it.

Slate’s Since you Asked – How to Get a Job – Yup, double post, but I’m graduated, and this is good!

But instantly she was annoyed with herself for saying that. Who had said it? Not she; she had been trapped into saying something she did not mean. She looked up over her knitting an met the third stroke and it seemed to her like her own eyes meeting her own eyes, searching as she alone could search into her mind and her heart, purifying out of existence that lie, any lie. She praised herself in praising the light, without vanity, for she was stern, she was searching, she was beautiful like that light.

- Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse.

What exactly is going on here? She chants to herself that continual loop of consciousness, and suddenly her consciousness is intruded upon by something else. It does not come from her, she insists – but isn’t that a greater theological implication, if it came from someone else?

What if it comes from another consciousness? In To The Lighthouse, Woolf litters recurring phrases everywhere, and they always have a source. But there is no source for this phrase. Unless it is the Source itself – but would the novel possibly admit that? Then the empathetic denial – why this defensive rebuttal, if it is simply something that comes randomly to you? And why does it turn to searching, to the denial of lies, the searching of truth? Yes, “that lie” – is the lie of religion, or rather the lie of God, that she rejects. But can she really resist it? Is it simply language (my professor, James Wood asked) that forces her hand, or rather whispers through her mind – the simple remnants of a Christianity-steeped tongue that has simply accrued so much religion in it that it cannot be rid of so easily? Is it language that speaks her?

What if it IS language that speaks her? I think this is a marvelous thing, if true. It means that the ghosts of our ancestors are still with us, still eddying in the syllables we wrap our tongues around. And why should this not be, if it is the Word that made all in the first place? Isn’t it a blessing that even though Western Civilization may shun Christianity today, it is inevitably, and beautifully laced with it? Isn’t it worth being called beautiful?

I’m not, of course, calling To the Lighthouse a book with a Christian worldview – Mrs Ramsay seems to believe in something that endures – but it is without personality, whereas at the web of all thought and all events and texts and contexts and angels and principalities and powers and histories and nations – in the centre of all narration, to me, is Christ.

These are my illustrations of To the Lighthouse which I did for my final final project at Harvard. I am quite exhausted by them, but also very happy with them.

Just the brief version of what I was trying to do: These are recurring portraits of four main characters in To the Lighthouse, in order of appearance: Mrs Ramsay (the cover), Lily Briscoe, James Ramsay and Mr Ramsay. The portraits are interspersed with three landscapes of increasing menace, marking World War I that occurred in the middle segment, “Time Passes”. I was trying to weave the progression into modernity between the 19th and 20th centuries, which is when Woolf writes her novel. So I tried to demonstrate this in the evolving art style, from more 19th century impressionism through dark surrealism, cubism and finally pop art (the final portrait of James Ramsay). I was also focusing on Mrs Ramsay as the “lighthouse”, or centre of the novel, and also the Madonna figure (I had wanted to do one of her holding James, but I am better at single portraits than combinations). Also, fun fact: the lighthouse can be found in most of the paintings, if you look hard enough.

Recently, I have been reflecting on the concept of magic – on the face of it, a profoundly un-Christian and un-philosophical subject, but one which I have found to be very instructive.

G.K. Chesterton

My thoughts were prompted by a couple excerpts I re-discovered from G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy:

“Granted, then, that certain transformations do happen, it is essential that we should regard them in the philosophic manner of fairy tales, not in the unphilosophic manner of science and the ‘Laws of Nature.’ When we are asked why eggs turn into birds or fruits fall in autumn, we must answer exactly as the fairy godmother would answer if Cinderella asked her why mice turned into horses or her clothes fell from her at twelve o’clock. We must answer that it is MAGIC. It is not a ‘law,’ for we do not understand its general formula.”

That made me think: What, ultimately, is the difference between a magical world and a lawful (or nomological) one? What, that is, is the ultimate difference between our world and Narnia or Middle-Earth? I realized that I did not have clear answers to these questions – and, more importantly, that there were no answers for me to find. The wizard’s craft was just as orderly and determinate as the scientist’s – and perhaps more so.

In The Lord of the Rings, Lady Galadriel tells Sam that she does not know what the hobbits mean by “magic” – for those features of her world which we would deem magical are, for her, merely ordinary. After all, a magic mirror in her land behaves just as regularly and predictably as the (supposedly non-magical) weather in ours. One man’s magic is another man’s law: “[T]he cool rationalist from fairyland does not see why, in the abstract, the apple tree should not grow crimson tulips; it sometimes does in his country.”

The inevitable conclusion is that our world is just one magical world among many:

“A tree grows fruit because it is a MAGIC tree. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched. The sun shines because it is bewitched. I deny altogether that this is fantastic or even mystical. We may have some mysticism later on; but this fairy-tale language about things is simply rational and agnostic.”

Why is this all important? This is Chesterton’s opinion:

“All the terms used in the science books, ‘law,’ ‘necessity,’ ‘order,’ ‘tendency,’ and so on, are really unintellectual…. The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, ‘charm,’ ‘spell,’ ‘enchantment.’ They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery.”

Our world is governed, not by irrevocable laws (such as those that govern thought), but by one brand of magic among many; it is governed arbitrarily, or (in the parlance of contemporary philosophy) contingently. In our world, the word “Mellon” has no special power; but it could just as well open the door of the mines of Moria. In our world, we have gravity; but we could just as well have anti-gravity.

None of these considerations should be taken as endorsements of what is typically meant by “magic”: trust in astrologers, mediums, and demons rather than in God. Such dark arts are repeatedly condemned in the Bible: Our trust is not in the dread spirits of the night, but in the living God of Light. Instead, my intention is mainly to show how we moderns have (yet again) turned reality on its head. We have placed our hope in understanding Nature to Her very roots, all the while despairing at ever knowing Her Maker. But our hopes are entirely misplaced. The magic that we call “Nature” is incomprehensible; it is only the Magician Who has been revealed to us.

We do well to study the Book of Nature; in such a world as ours, we might as well get a handle of some magic tricks. But we must not forget that we are studying the Book of Nature and not another grimoire only because God chose to cast one spell and not another – only because God said Fiat lux and not Abra Kadabra.

If God is omniscient, are our actions truly free? The Bible leaves no question of God’s omniscience or our free will. Yet if God’s knowledge is perfect, then it seems that He must know everything we will do before we do it. And if we have no alternative but to do what God already knows we will do, it looks like we have no choice in the matter. We are thus presented with a problem. The thesis that “infallible foreknowledge of a human act makes the act necessary and hence unfree” is known as theological fatalism.1,2

The argument for theological fatalism goes as follows:

1. God knows, with certainty, everything in the past, present, and future.

2. Therefore, at time t = -1, God knew that Jack would go up the hill at time t = 1.

3. Because the past is unchangeable, Jack cannot change God’s knowledge at t = -1 that he would go up the hill at t = 1.

4. If Jack cannot choose to behave in a different way, then he does not have the ability to freely exercise his will in the matter.

5. Therefore, Jack cannot go up the hill freely.

A typical response to this problem is to declare that God is timeless and thus not capable of being understood within our conception of time. As C.S. Lewis puts in Mere Christianity:

“Suppose God is outside and above the Time-line. In that case, what we call ‘tomorrow’ is visible to Him in just the same way as what we call today. All the days are ‘Now’ for Him. He does not remember you doing things yesterday, He simply sees you doing them: because, though you have lost yesterday, He has not. He does not ‘foresee’ you doing things tomorrow, He simply sees you doing them: because, though tomorrow is not yet there for you, it is for Him. You never supposed that your actions at this moment were any less free because God knows what you are doing. Well, He knows your tomorrow’s actions in just the same way – because He is already in tomorrow and can simply watch you. In a sense, He does not know your action till you have done it: but then the moment at which you have done it is already ‘Now’ for Him.”3

In the context of the above argument, it seems that Lewis denies the second premise because he believes that God’s timelessness means He cannot be described as being (or knowing) at a particular time t. Perhaps this response even seems reasonable considering that God created the universe of space-time and thus (we might think) must exist outside of it. Yet Lewis’s explanation of the nature of God’s timelessness fails to resolve the issue because it is based on an inadequate understanding of God’s perspective. It depends on the idea that God experiences everything in the present, in the now.

Yet if He is beyond the time-line, then He isn’t experiencing all events as “in the now”; He should instead be seeing all of the points on the time-line at once. And if He is observing all the points on the time-line, then the points must be fixed in place. If the points are fixed in place, then it seems that it is outside of our power to change them. God may not “foresee” our actions from his perspective, but he certainly “foresees” them from ours.

Although Lewis rejects premise 2 from God’s perspective, it is still true from Jack’s and our perspective. The claim is that because God is timeless, He cannot be characterized as knowing future events at a prior point in time. That is, God only knows what occurs at time t = 1 because he observes it happening at that time. Yet because He lies beyond the time-line and can observe the actions at all points on it, He should see the events at time t = 1 before they occur. A better characterization from our time-bound perspective is that God knows all the events at all points. At time = -1, God does know what Jack will do. At the point at which Jack is deliberating whether or not to go up the hill, God already knows the outcome he will choose. There are a few ways to try to escape this problem. Lewis could reject the first premise and claim that God chooses not to observe the time-line beyond the particular point in time that Jack is experiencing. He could claim that even if God knows all of our actions, He does not force us to choose the particular action that we take. Yet both of these solutions would require arguments beyond God’s timelessness. The argument by timelessness alone cannot resolve the apparent contradiction of foreknowledge and free will.

[1] Zabzebski, Linda. “Foreknowledge and Free Will.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Mar 13, 2008 <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/free-willforeknowledge/#2.5>.

[2] It is important to note that the lack of free will stems from foreknowledge and not from causal determinism. God’s timeless nature implies that he should be aware of the future and what our actions will be, not that his infinite knowledge of the past enables him to predict by a causal chain what will occur. If it were the case that free will were denied because one’s actions are contingent solely upon one’s past experiences, then God would be entirely unnecessary to the discussion. Determinism alone would suffice. However, I am unaware of any passage in the Bible that would justify determinism, and therefore I will not discuss it here.

[3] Lewis, C. S. Mere Christianity. HarperCollins Edition 2001. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. Print.

____________________________________________________________________________<em>
Jordan Monge ‘12, a Philosophy and Religious Studies concentrator living in Currier House, is the Opinions Editor of </em>The Ichthus.

Via exapologist, a paper by philosopher Erik J. Wielenberg which is essentially a response to various theistic criticisms of atheistic moral realism (or, more precisely, “non-natural non-theistic moral realism.”) His view is that there are ethical brute facts, which are metaphysically necessary and require no grounding or justification.

I read the paper quickly, mostly because I could tell that the objections which Wielenberg addressed were not at all the sorts of objections that I would raise to atheistic moral realism. (My impression was that Wielenberg handled most of them adequately.) The sort of objection that I would raise to atheistic moral realism is essentially Mackie’s argument from queerness, which Wielenberg briefly discusses in his paper. It has been a while since I read Mackie’s paper, so I won’t attempt to reproduce his arguments. Instead, I will simply raise my own objection, which I think Wielenberg should address if he has not already.

Professor Wielenberg has written an entire book defending his atheistic moral realism, and probably appreciates my free advertisement.

Suppose there are such things as ethical brute facts even if God exists, as Wielenberg maintains there are. Wielenberg believes, that “pain is intrinsically bad.” In fact, Wielenberg believes that it is necessarily true that pain is intrinsically bad, even in possible worlds in which no beings capable of experiencing pain exist. (He makes this claim explicitly about another ethical brute fact: “The state of affairs that it is just to give people what they deserve obtains whether or not any people actually exist.”)

The claim, in other words, is that there are necessary ethical brute facts about the psychological states of contingent sentient beings like humans (pain, after all, is a psychological state).

The problem with this claim, to me, is that it is extremely bizarre. As far as I can tell, Wielenberg must believe that the entirety of human existence can be explained by science except for our moral beliefs, which concern an utterly different, non-scientific kind of brute fact (namely, the ethical kind). In an age when scientists fantasize about a Theory of Everything – a complete theory – a theory with no exceptions – such an exception for ethical brute facts is glaring.

Of course, atheistic moral realism could be true - but I see no reason, apart from a fear of moral nihilism, for it to be true. In my opinion, it would be much, much more ontologically elegant (and thus plausible) for the naturalist to reduce morality to psychology, rather than positing ethical brute facts that are not empirically discoverable.

(Let me put this another way. As far as I can tell, most scientifically oriented atheists would agree with the following principle: If something can be reduced, it should be reduced. There are, in fact, many scientists currently seeking to demonstrate that our moral beliefs can be explained purely in evolutionary terms. If Wielenberg accepts the general principle I just mentioned, he needs to explain why morality is not susceptible to the same sort of reduction that all sorts of other things have been. If he does not accept the general principle, however, he needs to explain why he is in disagreement with other atheists – especially when he believes that pretty much everything else about humanity can be reduced by evolution.)

If ethical brute facts are not empirically discoverable, how are they discoverable? How does Wielenberg know that his ethical beliefs are any better than anyone else’s? How did humanity as a species evolve to apprehend ethical truths at all? After all, if naturalism is true, human evolution was not affected at all by ethics. Thus, if E is an ethical brute fact, it is perfectly conceivable to me that humanity could have evolved such that most humans (including Wielenberg) strongly believe that not-E obtains. In other words, even if Wielenberg’s thesis is true, I do not see how he can escape a radical skepticism about his ability to discern ethical truths.

What advantage does theism give us with respect to these concerns? I think the existence of ethical brute facts becomes much less spooky if God exists – if our origins (and the origins of the universe) are transcendent and personal rather than (solely) natural and impersonal. And I am far from alone in having this intuition.

There is, admittedly, a lot more to be said (and a lot that could be done to organize my thoughts). But, if naturalism is true, I think the burden of proof lies on the naturalistic moral realist, not the naturalistic nihilist.

Some time ago, an atheist friend (who subsequently became a Christian) presented me with a paradox that purportedly disproved God’s existence: “Could God create a stone so heavy that He could not lift it?” If God could, it seems that He would not be omnipotent; if God could not, it seems that He would also be omnipotent.

Some Christians attempt to resolve this paradox by arguing that God can do the impossible: construct square triangles, allow something to exist and not to exist at the same time, and create stones so heavy He Himself cannot lift them. God, in other words, is not bound by logic.

Why believe that God is not bound by logic? Perhaps Matthew 19:26 (cf. Mark 10:27), in which Jesus says, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” God is not bound by logic because God is not bound by anything.

Ignoring the fact that this picture of God is (quite literally) irrational – ignoring the fact, that is, that it is a picture of God operating beyond the realm of (human) reason – the idea that God is not bound by anything itself goes against the Bible. The Bible says that God “cannot disown Himself” (2 Timothy 2:13) and “cannot be tempted by evil” (James 1:13). According to the Bible, God cannot sin. God is bound by something – in this case, by morality or His own nature. This is not a bad thing; I do not want a God Who can sin.

When we see that God’s omnipotence, as understood in the Bible, does have limitations, our main reason for believing that God can violate logic disappears. In fact, as I argued in my response to my friend concerning the paradox of the stone, “[T]here is no reason to believe that the idea of omnipotence as espoused in scripture connotes the ability to violate logic.” Instead, omnipotence in the Bible concerns God’s dominion and sovereignty over creation.

In a way, that is all that there is to say on the matter. But I think the fact that so many Christians are willing to attribute irrationality to God is problematic, and I would like to reflect on that briefly now:

1. A moment’s reflection would let us see that a “no-holds-barred” omnipotence is dangerous. Can God make Himself cease to exist – or both exist and not exist at the same time? Can God create other omnipotent gods? Of course not – nor would we want Him to.

2. God cannot sin because God’s nature is fundamentally good. We understand this. What we don’t always understand is that God’s nature is fundamentally rational. Jesus after all, is the Λόγος (Logos) – God’s rational and creative principle. To say that God cannot construct square triangles, therefore, is not to limit God’s power, but to comprehend God’s nature.

3. In practice – in any other circumstance than when we are specifically asked about God’s omnipotence – we assume that God cannot violate the laws of logic. We argue, for example, that the Bible cannot contradict itself; in fact, Christian apologists spend a great deal of effort attempting to explain apparent biblical contradictions. We would never ascribe irrationality to God in concrete cases; we would never say, for instance, that God could send someone to Heaven while also sending that person to Hell. It is only in abstract cases involving square triangles that we even consider the possibility that God could violate logic. This, to me, indicates that belief that God could violate logic is not something that we apply consistently in our Christianity, but only a quick (and rather shoddy) response to questions about God’s omnipotence.

4. It is true that God’s ways are higher than our ways (Isaiah 55:9). But the fact remains that God is a God Who has sought out a relationship with mankind – Who has sought to be known by mankind. Indeed, “this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (John 17:3; emphasis added). In contrast, the God of Irrationality, unconstrained by logic, is fundamentally unknowable. Thus, he cannot be the Christian God.

I conclude with C.S. Lewis’ words in The Problem of Pain:

“His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to his power. If you choose to say ‘God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it,’ you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words ‘God can.’ [...] It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of his creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because his power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.”

Knoll’s epilogue is part summary, part argument, and part exhortation.  It is a summary in broad strokes of the evolutionary story told in earlier chapters; it is an argument (partly implicit) concerning the history and significance of the relation between science and religion; it is an exhortation on the basis of ecology to steward the earth.  My concern is with Knoll’s argument and his exhortation.  Aside from the emotional appeal of the rhetoric he employs to motivate us toward environmentalism, the worldview Knoll advances (and opposes to the religious worldview) fails to motivate.

Knoll’s story about science and religion is typical of Enlightenment-scientistic thought.  All religions (Knoll mentions Christianity, Hinduism, and Aboriginal mythology) are deprecated attempts to account for natural phenomena, their obsolescence was ushered in by the great Scientific Revolution of the seventeeth century, their emotional appeal has led the irrational masses to reject clear evidence for their falsehood, etc.  Knoll sets down none of this, but (I argue) it is clear from his identification of disparate religious traditions, his suggestion that creation myths be treated as parables (not, in itself, objectionable – but Knoll almost certainly has in mind the kind of parable we would do better relegating to anthropological or ethnographic investigation rather than the kind of parable that teaches important truths about the universe and our place in it), and his strange suggestion that science has allowed us to become like God(s).

Well, the Enlightenment-scientistic tradition is one that I have considered and rejected.  There are, I believe, good reasons for doing so.  But my point here doesn’t involve convincing anyone to reject that tradition.  I want merely to reflect on one way in which it differs from religious traditions, and particularly from the religions tradition with which I am most familiar – the Judeo-Christian tradition – and the significance of that difference for Knoll’s argument.  The difference I want to bring out is a difference in the sorts of claims the two traditions have the capacity to make.

Or, "Everything you always wanted to know about Cyanobacteria but were too afraid to ask."

Science is descriptive, predictive, and explanatory.  It is not normative.  That is, science can tell us what is and will be and why, but it can’t tell us what ought to be.  In fact, the thoroughgoing Enlightenment-scientist will deny that normative claims have truth values, or try to paraphrase normative language into language about occurrent emotions.  Religious language, on the other hand, abounds with normative claims.  One thinks, for example, of the Levitical law (“You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy”) or the teachings of Jesus (“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”), where imperatives are naturally understood to be equivalent to claims about what one ought to do.

So Knoll has a problem.  He feels strongly that the earth ought to be preserved; he would like to communicate his feelings to the reader; but his intellectual tradition gives him no tools with which either to articulate his own conviction or argue for it.  So he turn to emotive appeal: “If we can understand the immensity of our evolutionary inheritance, we may be moved to preserve it.”  It is ecology, Knoll argues, that convinces us to protect the earth.

But why?  Surely humans are ecologically dominant.  Surely we have the power to build and destroy.  Surely we could, if we chose, destroy the world as we know it.  But none of these merely descriptive claims get us any normativity; none of them tell us what we ought to do.  The Enlightenment-scientistic tradition is not permissive of normativity.  Ecology is not enough.

The reason I bring all this up is that I am frustrated by the prevailing misconception that one can be steeped in the intellectual tradition of the Enlightenment and yet keep the uniquely religious, or at least anti-Enlightentment, aspects of human experience like normativity.  No.  We cannot have our cake and eat it, too.  If we adopt Knoll’s worldview, biological diversity has no intrinsic value.  We should think of a living earth and a desolate earth with the same cool detachment.  We should be untroubled by the desolation of the rainforest or the death of thousands of miles of Carribean coral reef.  If we want to care about the earth at all, we need to step outside the Enlightment-scientistic tradition.  We must believe that some things have value and that there is a way things ought to be.  But if we do that, then we must regard Knoll’s claims and stories with some suspicion.  It is, I think, only when we see what we give away by endorsing the Enlightenment-scientistic tradition that we realize exactly how much is at stake in the dialogue between science and religion and begin to think about the issue with some clarity.