Deus Decorus Est

Ichthus Post: Science of the Gaps

2009-07-17T10:21:00.000-04:00

The Appeal of the Gold Star Mother

2009-07-14T16:16:00.005-04:00

The Appeal of the Gold Star Mother

Alexander M. Sullivan

To him the call in life's morning,
He whispered a fervent adieu,
He followed the flag of his country,
Far away as she knew he would do.
Somewhere by a hill or valley,
Stands a cross o'er the grave that he won,
In that place where the ivy is clinging,
Let the mother draw close to her son.

Let her gaze on the white cross above him,
Marking his flower-decked bed,
Let her kneel where he fell in his glory,
And pray where the laddie lies dead.
Let her weep where the sod rise o'er him,
Like a canopy fit for the true,
Let her pour out the love a mother,
And receive consolation anew.

Not long may she linger beside him,
But happy in heart she will be,
With green sod, the cross and the ivy
Entwined in sweet memory.
Back home in the land that he died for,
She will think of her pride and her joy,
And in fancy she'll see a red poppy,
Abloom on the grave of her boy.

I came across this while doing some research on soldiers. It's incredible how we often forget how much soldiers truly sacrifice for us. Their love is the kind of self-sacrificing, Christ-like love for which we should all strive, and their level of disciple is absolutely admirable.

Ichthus Post: Atonement and the Problem of Evil

2009-07-10T10:53:00.006-04:00

My latest post for The Fish Tank is up. (And read everyone else's posts, too!)

Global Cooling?

2009-07-09T17:46:00.005-04:00

So it seems like every year (at least for 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009), there's been someone talking about global cooling. Based on the most recent climate change data, it appears that the world may actually be cooling (or, for the sake of being cautious, it appears that the world cooled in 2008).

So I know I shouldn't be, but I'm confused about how this mounting pile evidence was somehow trampled by the global warming bandwagon. Can they take back Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize now? Please? It'd be a shame if it was awarded for nothing.

Love Is All We Need...

2009-07-07T06:00:00.034-04:00

...as long as it is in the right place.

So many people desperately want to hear those words, "I love you" or "I can't live without you!" As humans, we long to feel loved and to express our feelings for those whom we love. We want to find the perfect person, marry them, and live happily ever after. We want to pretend that we can be satisfied in marriage, that we can find rest in this life. The problem is: we can't. As Augustine said, "Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee."

I wonder if our longing for love in other people isn't just a displacement for the love that God has for us. I'm reminded of Psalm 139.

"O LORD, you have searched me and you know me.You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar."

- vv. 1-2 (NIV)

We want someone who can know what we are thinking, just with a glance or a smile.

"You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways."

- v. 3 (NIV)

We want someone who knows all of our idiosyncrasies, and who loves us because of (or in spite of) them.

"Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O LORD."

- v. 4 (NIV)

We want someone who finishes our sentences for us.

We want these comforts from people of the opposite sex, but it is only the Lord who can truly fulfill them all. Even our spouses cannot not know us perfectly. We cannot share our every thought, our every feeling with another person. The demands of life (and our not having telepathy) prevent it from occurring. Only the Lord can know everything about us.

But more importantly, when we look for love in other people, we want it to be constant. G.K. Chesterton said, "It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word." We get married because we want someone to love us for the entirety of our lives, and often beyond. Yet the high rate of divorce indicates that even marriage cannot guarantee the eternal love of fallible humans.

The Lord reassures His people, "I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with loving-kindness" (Jeremiah 31:3, NIV). His love is unceasing - not just in this life, but in what lies beyond it as well. His love never fails. Yet time and time again, our trust and our love placed in other humans fails us. We continue to place comfort in other people, instead of seeking our security in God. Rather than letting the Lord be our refuge, we put our heart and soul and mind and strength into our relationships with other people.

It's funny, because we don't normally think of romance as being sinful. Obviously, relationships can lead us into impurity and sin, but we don't think of longing for others as necessarily bad (that's not to say it always is, either). But when we seek our security in relationships, we are filling that God-shaped hole in our hearts. We are filling a void that is meant for God, and inadvertently separating ourselves from Him. We are accidentally falling into sin!
Before official relationships begin, both people tend to develop a crush on each other first. The characteristics of a crush are pretty clear: constantly thinking about the person, talking to your friends about him or her, writing adorable heartfelt poems, doodling on every spare scrap of paper, and floating through the day because of being generally happy with life. I can sense these characteristics when I think of 1 Thessalonians 5:16-17: "Be joyful always; pray continually" (NIV).

I wonder if, before we start to deal with our human crushes, we should start cultivating a more divine crush. God ought not be second in our hearts. Plus, I think it'd be much more romantic to hear my husband say, "I can live without you, because I rely on God, but I don't want to live without you, because you help bring me closer to Him."

Moser on Russell

2009-07-04T11:03:00.002-04:00

From Paul Moser's The Elusive God: Reorienting Religious Epistemology:

"Bertrand Russell (1970) anticipated his response if he were to meet God after death: 'God, you gave us insufficient evidence.' Insufficient for what? For Russell's highly questionable expectations of God? In any case, Russell's charge against God sounds blaming, to put it mildly. Russell might have considered a bit more modesty in the presence of an authoritatively and morally perfect God. In that case, a humbled Russell, unlike the actual Russell, would have asked: 'God, what purposes of yours led to your being subtle and elusive in the purposively available evidence of your reality?' It's astonishing, and regrettable too, that Russell as a self-avowed rational truth-seeker gave no indication of being aware of such a compelling and important question for a rational truth-seeker."

Denis Lamoureux's Book and Genesis 1-11

2009-06-13T15:28:00.004-04:00

I'm planning on reading Dr. Denis O. Lamoureux's Evolutionary Creation: A Christian Approach to Evolution. I'm extremely excited, because Dr. Lamoureux (who is at the conference I am at!) has Ph.D.'s both in biology and theology.

This excerpt from the Preface seems to summarize the book's thesis:

"An assumption embraced by many Christians is that God revealed scientific facts in the Bible hundreds of generations before their discovery by modern science. This view of biblical inspiration asserts that the Holy Spirit dictated information about the natural world to secretary-like writers. As a result, there is purportedly a correspondence or alignment between Scripture and science. This is known as 'concordism.' Christians often claim that it is a feature of biblical inerrancy and infallibility. However, chapters 4 and 5 [of the book] review the astronomy, geology, and biology in Scripture and conclude that the science in the Bible is an ancient understanding of nature - the science-of-the-day a few thousand years ago. According to this perspective, the Holy Spirit descended to the knowledge level of the inspired authors by using their conceptualization of the physical world in order to communicate as effectively as possible inerrant and infallible Messages of Faith. This approach to biblical revelation is modeled on the greatest act of revelation - the Incarnation. God revealed Himself by descending into human flesh through Jesus, and in a similar way, the Bible uses a human understanding of the structure, operation, and origin of the world.

Chapters 6 and 7 [of the book] examine Gen[esis] 1-11 in order to determine whether concordism characterizes the relationship between the biological origins accounts and the facts of history. Like the ancient science in Scripture, it will be shown that these opening chapters include an ancient understanding of the origin of the cosmos and humanity. This ancient history is a vessel that transports inerrant and infallible foundations of the Christian faith: the universe and life were made by the God of the Bible, the creation is very good, only men and women are created in the Image of God, the Lord intended us to be in relationships with one another and in particular with Him, everyone has fallen into sin, God judges humans for their sinfulness, and He has chosen a special people through which to bless the entire world. Together, the four chapters on scriptural interpretation conclude that concordism is not a feature of Gen[esis] 1-11, and as a result there is no conflict with the modern understanding of origins offered by academic disciplines of science and history."

Some preliminary thoughts:

1. Buy or read the book!

2. Seriously. I saw Dr. Lamoureux present a lecture yesterday on evolution and intelligent design, and he is a fantastic, faith-filled speaker - with a killer moustache to boot.

3. There is nothing overly radical in Dr. Lamoureux's thesis. Virtually all Christians would deny that the Earth is flat or that the Sun revolves around the Earth, despite the several passages (e.g., Joshua 10:1-15; 1 Samuel 2:8; Job 9:6, 38:4; Psalm 19:4-6, 104:5; Isaiah 41:9; Daniel 4:11; Matthew 5:45) that could indicate otherwise.

The analogy, of course, is not perfect. Many of the references to the "ends of the earth" or the sun's rising and setting are poetic or metaphorical, not meant to be understood as "scientific" descriptions of the world. But this certainly is not always the case; one would be hard-pressed to believe that the author of Joshua, for example, wrote Joshua 10 the way he did whilebelieving that the Earth was a sphere that revolved around the Sun.

4. Of course, Genesis 1-11 are much trickier than Flat Earth theory or geocentrism, because Genesis 1-11 describes the Creation and Fall of Man - a topic of much more theological import than the shape of the Earth (cf. Romans 5-8, 1 Corinthians 15). Dr. Lamoureux promises to address these issues in his book.

5. All Scripture is God-breathed (2 Timothy 3:16). We know this much. But we do not know what exactly it means for Scripture to be "God-breathed" (i.e., inspired) means without some careful investigation and reflection. And I, for one, am excited to buckle down and investigate.

My First Post on The Ichthus' Blog

2009-06-12T13:04:00.008-04:00

I have started writing for The Harvard Ichthus' new blog. The Ichthus is an undergraduate journal of Christian thought at Harvard College. Here is my first post there. Enjoy!

Philo and Early Christian Thought

2009-06-11T03:19:00.002-04:00

A paper I wrote for a class. Because it'd be too complicated, I'm not going to worry about formatting.

Philo and Early Christian Thought

Whatever its claims to divine inspiration, Christianity cannot pretend to have arisen independently of the intellectual and cultural landscape from which it emerged. The omnipresence of Judaism and Jewish thought within early Christian writings is obviously undeniable, and the influence of (and exposure to) Greek philosophy can also be witnessed from the very beginning; St. Paul himself is reported to have debated Stoic and Epicurean philosophers in Athens,^¹ and St. John began his Gospel with the proclamation, “In the beginning was the Word [λόγος],”^² identifying Jesus Christ with a term from Greek philosophy denoting rationality and animating power. According to Runia, “Christianity could not have become the Christianity that we know, if it had not accepted the challenge posed by Greek philosophy with its trust in a world-view based on rational thought.”^³

In particular, Mack has identified Hellenistic Judaism, which incorporated elements of Greek philosophy into the Jewish faith (thus synthesizing the two primary traditions from which Christian thought sprung), as the “religious milieu in which many of the theological concerns and language forms common to [early Christianity and Hellenistic Judaism] were first molded.”^⁴ And by far the most prominent Hellenistic Jewish figure in early Christian thought (and probably in all of antiquity) was Philo of Alexandria (20 BC-50 AD), a philosopher and exegete who wrote extensively on Mosaic scripture and, as the Jesuit scholar Thomas Tobin describes it, “clearly influenced the interpretation of the Bible for centuries. His impact on patristic exegesis was immense.”^⁵ The Church Fathers' respect for him, though not universal, was impressive; St. Jerome placed him among the “ecclesiastical writers,”^⁶ and Eusebius mentioned a legend (whose plausibility he does not dismiss) in which Philo spoke to St. Peter in Rome.^⁷^,^⁸ (Not coincidentally, we owe the breadth of the extant Philonic corpus – if not its very existence – to the early Christians, who included him in the incipient Christian tradition: “Had [Origen] not taken copies of Philo's treatises with him when he moved from Alexandria to Caesarea in 233, then these would have gone lost, together with the remainder of the Hellenistic-Jewish literature of Alexandria.”)^⁹^,^¹⁰ No one contests that Philo had an enormous impact upon early Christian thought.

In this essay, I intend to probe the extent of that impact, analyzing both Philo's role within the larger Hellenistic-Jewish tradition and his place in Christian intellectual history. Doing so will allow me to determine and compare Philo's and Hellenistic Judaism's effects upon Christian thinking.

Philo is often (vaguely) classified as a “philosopher”; however, his main intention was not to construct a systematic philosophy, but instead to understand the Torah;^¹¹ in fact, twenty-six of Philo's thirty-three surviving works consist of interpretations of biblical texts.^¹² Though his œuvre provides us with our “first sustained reflection about pentateuchal literature and how it should be read,”^¹³ Philo, unsurprisingly, drew upon a longstanding tradition of Jewish exegesis in his work. (For example, in his Quæstiones et solutiones in Genesim alone, Philo specifically attributed certain interpretations to previous Jewish thinkers over a dozen times.)^¹⁴

Unfortunately, “this rich literature [of Hellenistic Jewish thought] has almost entirely disappeared,” and it is therefore frequently difficult to distinguish between the Philonic and the pre-Philonic in Philo's works, especially because Philo “is the most important and most vital representative of a wider movement, in which the biblical tradition was first brought in direct contact with the philosophical thought that was developed in Greek culture.”^¹⁵ Consequently, although several pre-Clementine Church Fathers discussed topics that undoubtedly relate to themes which Philo also explored, it remains uncertain whether these connections stem from a patristic familiarity with Philo himself or from a knowledge of other related sources.^¹⁶ (This confusion potentially arises even with St. John; Dodd suggests that “the cast of the [the thoughts of the author of the Gospel of John] clearly suggests that he was acquainted, if not with Philo, at least with Jewish thought proceeding on similar lines.”^¹⁷ Furthermore, Philo was quite comfortable with giving multiple interpretations of single texts, often listing previous interpretations which he would sometimes qualify but rarely reject.^¹⁸ Because he valued the interpretations of his predecessors enough to assimilate them into his works even when they were not altogether concordant with his own, we must wonder “at what point in this history of interpretation Philo [appeared].”)^¹⁹

All of this complicates the task of separating Philo's personal influence upon Christianity from the effects of the broader Hellenistic Jewish tradition. It would be an exceedingly onerous endeavor to parse the two with any success, and I will not attempt to do so here; instead, I have merely flagged some of the obstacles preventing an elucidation of the relationship between Philo and Hellenistic Judaism.

Of course, these obstacles themselves only lead to more questions: What exactly is “Hellenistic Judaism”? In what sort of intellectual environment does Philo write? As Bentwich remarks, “It should be remembered that until the second century of the common era the mass of Jewish tradition was a floating and developing body of opinion not consigned to writing or formalized, but handed down by word of mouth from teacher to pupil, and preacher to congregation.”^²⁰ Philo was not a Jewish thinker who subscribed to a particular “Hellenized” branch of Judaism; rather, Philo lived in a time (the first centuries BC and AD) when Greek philosophy had enmeshed itself into Jewish thought and in a place (Alexandria) that was the center of exchange between those two traditions.

Not much is known of the philosophical atmosphere in Alexandria before the first century BC.^²¹ However, we know of several Alexandrian philosophers who wrote slightly before Philo's lifetime, one of whom, Aenesidemus of Knossos, founded a Skeptical school of philosophy around 45 BC; Stoic and Peripatetic schools also existed.^²² Philo employed some of Aenesidemus' methodology in De ebrietate, drawing upon Peripatetic and Stoic doctrines as well.^²³ However, the main Greek influence upon Philo was Middle Platonism, “in which the central position [was] given to Plato's physics or, more importantly, to certain interpretations of Plato's physics.”^²⁴ Though the origins of Middle Platonism are unclear, what is known is that first-century Alexandria saw a turn away from Skepticism, an emphasis on Plato's Timaeus (which sketches much of Plato's physics and theology), and a “return of the notion of transcendence” – often including “an intermediate figure between that transcendent deity and the world.”^²⁵ Elsewhere, Middle Platonists accentuated Plato's formulation of the purpose of life as “likeness or assimilation to God.”^²⁶ Moreover, Middle Platonism possessed a thoroughly religious flavor and a propensity for allegorization of religious stories and rituals:

In general...the Middle Platonic thought of the latter part of the first century B.C., especially in Alexandria, is deeply affected by a Platonism (influenced by Neopythagoreanism) in which cult myths and mystery rites are reinterpreted and allegorized. This interest in the reinterpretation of cult myths and mystery rites...reflects the intensely religious character of much Middle Platonic thought. The attraction, then, of Middle Platonism for Jewish interpreters was not simply its conceptual structure but also the religious sensibility that was a crucial part of that framework.^²⁷

All of these developments in first-century Greek philosophy, many of which became fundamental for Philo, primed it for consolidation with (and application to) religious texts. They were vital for Middle Platonism, Hellenistic Judaism, and – eventually – Christianity.

Admittedly, neither Philo nor the early Christians derived the idea of a transcendent God from Greek philosophy; that concept was present enough in the Jewish tradition. However, even before examining the Philonic texts themselves, some salient points can be made about Philo's (and, by extension, Hellenistic Judaism's) importance to Christian thought.

First, as Runia recognizes, The Church Fathers did not learn Platonism from Philo, but rather a means of

[establishing a link] between Platonist ideas and the contents of scripture. ... [Philo and Hellenistic-Jewish thought] showed how insights from the Greek philosophical tradition could be localized in the authoritative words of scripture. ... The history of [Philonic thought] in the church fathers is the process in which a long sequence of apologists and theologians takes over themes and ideas from Philo and the broader Hellenistic-Jewish tradition. These ideas are seldom abstractly philosophical. They are connected to the exposition of the biblical text or – as occurs later – introduced in polemical dogmatic discussions.^²⁸

Even where Philo did not provide specific interpretations or hermeneutical principles, his writings illustrated the centrality – indeed, the necessity – of a balanced integration and synthesis of philosophy and scriptural religion. (To borrow Bentwich's bon mot, Philo offered the Greeks a “philosophical religion” and the Jews a “religious philosophy.”)^²⁹ Importantly, the early Christians employed a similar methodological equilibrium that allowed them to preserve the distinctiveness of the faith while engaging the surrounding zeitgeist.

Such engagement, crucial both for Philo and for the early Christians, required a noticeably apologetic exegesis – one for believers and non-believers alike. And Philo exemplified this approach:

Why, it must be asked, does Philo artificially attach his philosophy to the Scriptures? He does so for two reasons: first, because he holds and wishes to prove that between faith and philosophy there is no conflict, and his generation worked out the agreement by his method; he does so also because he wishes to establish the Torah and Judaism upon a sure foundation for the man of outside culture. ... A superficial knowledge of the materialistic or rationalistic theories...was made the excuse for indifference to the law. ... The dominating motive of Philo's work is to show that the Bible contains for those who will seek it the richest treasures of wisdom, that its ethical teaching is more ideal and yet more real than that which hundreds of sophists poured forth daily...and lastly that the cultured Jew may search out knowledge and truth to their depths, and find them expressed in his holy books and in his religious beliefs and practices.^³⁰

This external and even evangelistic focus of Philo's (with which the Fathers would, of course, wholly empathize) served as a primary impetus for his thought, as it would for the Church Fathers.^³¹

But what exactly did Philo say to become so singular a figure in Christian history? What was the substance of his conclusions? How did he come to them? And in what ways did the Church Fathers agree with him?

Runia proposes two Philonic doctrines, God's immutability and his “exaltedness” (or transcendence), as partial answers to these questions; the former “gave expression to the conviction of God's faithfulness and reliability,” while the latter stresses the notion that “God, as he really is, is known only to himself.”^³² (Or, as Philo has God says to Moses when asked to reveal Himself: “I bestow what is appropriate for the one who is to receive it.”)^³³ According to Runia, this second idea of transcendence was particularly popular with the Cappadocian Father Gregory of Nyssa – so popular, in fact, that he appropriated the title of a Philonic text for his work on the subject, De vita Moysis.^³⁴

Philo also “furnish[ed] the church fathers with numerous allegorical themes and schemes, especially in the area of physical (or cosmological), psychological and moral exposition.”^³⁵ Pointing out that Philo refuses to allegorize God, Runia nevertheless cites the abilities “to connect up with and exploit contemporary philosophical ideas” and “to preserve at least partly the narrative element of the biblical text, but then at the more general level of the quest of the soul for God” as critical advantages of the allegorical method; it promotes flexibility and unity of message.^³⁶ (This essentially is why Bentwich names Philo's allegorical commentaries as “the crowning point of his work.”)^³⁷

Several features of Philo's allegorical method bear mentioning. For Philo, “the Torah [was] a unity, and every part of it [had] equal value”;^³⁸ in Philo's words,

[T]he giving of the law...is a sort of living unity, the whole of which one ought to examine carefully with all one's eyes, and so discern with truth, and certainty, and clearness, the universal intention of the whole of the scripture without dissecting or lacerating its harmony, or disuniting its unity.^³⁹

For Philo, no other hermeneutical perspective can be valid: “[B]y any other mode everything would appear utterly inconsistent and absurd, being dissociated from all community or equity.”^⁴⁰ This means that almost every passage in scripture must have a symbolic meaning – and, indeed, Philo devoted his Quæstiones et solutiones in Genesim to answering hundreds of questions about allegorical interpretations of specific pentateuchal clauses, including the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, God's indignation with Noah's generation, and such esoterica as the ordering of Shem, Ham, and Japheth's names.^⁴¹ Interestingly, he (following interpreters before him) differentiated between the man created in Genesis i. 26-27 and ii. 7; one symbolized the mind, the other virtue.^⁴² This is part of Philo's “allegory of the soul,” which “emphasize[d] that the figures described in the text of Genesis are also symbols of faculties and processes that are within each individual.”^⁴³ Significantly, Philo considered “both [the 'literal' and the 'allegorical' or 'symbolic'] levels of interpretation legitimate,” and sought to maintain both when possible.^⁴⁴ (Important exceptions include Philo's aforementioned refusal to allegorize God on the one hand and his non-literal readings of potentially anthropomorphic passages on the other.)^⁴⁵^,^⁴⁶ This method of double allegory is perhaps the defining characteristic of Philonic exegesis.

There is no room here for an exhaustive survey of the Fathers' use of allegory in biblical interpretation; however, as a representative case, we can consider interpretations of the Genesis creation accounts in Philo and in some of the Church Fathers. Are the six days of the creation story literal days? Philo offers a numerological, non-literal exposition:

It would be a sign of great simplicity to think that the world was created in six days, or indeed at all in time; because all time is only the space of days and nights, and these things the motion of the sun as he passes over the earth and under the earth does necessarily make. ... When...Moses says, 'God completed his works on the sixth day,' we must understand that he is speaking not of a number of days, but that he takes six as a perfect number.^⁴⁷

Origen, who is closely associated with Philo and is known to have studied his works thoroughly,^⁴⁸ echoes Philo's view, lambasting literal interpretations as absurd:

For who that has understanding will suppose that the first, and second, and third day, and the evening and the morning, existed without a sun, and moon, and stars? ... And who is so foolish as to suppose that God...planted a paradise in Eden, towards the east, and placed in it a tree of life...so that one tasting of the fruit by the bodily teeth obtained life? ... And if God is said to walk in the paradise in the evening, and Adam to hide himself under a tree, I do not suppose that anyone doubts that these things figuratively indicate certain mysteries, the history having taken place in appearance, and not literally.^⁴⁹

But Origen's rather dismissive tone belies the variety of opinions the Fathers held.^⁵⁰ St. Basil, for instance, holds a view diametrically opposed to Origen's, and specifically eschews the allegorical approach:

I know the laws of allegory, though less by myself than from the works of others. There are those truly, who do not admit the common sense of the Scriptures, for whom water is not water, but some other nature, who see in a plant, in a fish, what their fancy wishes, who change the nature of reptiles and of wild beasts to suit their allegories, like the interpreters of dreams who explain visions in sleep to make them serve their own ends. For me grass is grass; plant, fish, wild beast, domestic animal, I take all in the literal sense. “For I am not ashamed of the Gospel.”^⁵¹

It is clear, then, that Philo's writings did not sway all patristic writers. Furthermore, even those fathers who were more inclined toward allegorical interpretations often approached the Old Testament in deliberately Christian (and thus non-Philonic) ways. Bentwich (somewhat of a Jewish apologist) laments that the early Christians “[learned] from Philo to trace in the Bible principles of universal thought and profound philosophy; but...used his method and his lessons to support notions of God and the Logos which were alien to his spirit.”^⁵²

Indeed, the Christian appropriation of the concept of the Logos presents another fascinating glimpse at the relationship between Philo and the Church Fathers.^⁵³ For Philo, “The logos was both the power through which the universe was originally ordered and the power by which the universe continued to be ordered.”^⁵⁴ It is referred to as the “idea of ideas, according to which God fashioned the world,”^⁵⁵ “the man of God, who being the reason of the everlasting God, is of necessity himself also immortal,”^⁵⁶ and the “second deity, who is the Word [λόγος] of the supreme Being.”^⁵⁷ Unquestionably, it is central both to Philo's thought and to the thought of the early Christians; after all, Jesus himself is identified with the Logos in the Gospel of John.^⁵⁸ Yet Philo obviously did not have any specific human in mind when he wrote about the Logos, nor did he ever identify the Logos with the Jewish Messiah.

Based on these two (hastily covered) examples, we can safely conclude a few things. The Church Fathers plainly felt no qualms recasting Greek philosophical (or, for that matter, Jewish) concepts in a Christian light, even if this reinterpretation was far removed from the original. (The Philonic Logos may be superficially similar to the Christian Logos, but the two are fundamentally different.) For all of the Hellenistic and Jewish influences that supplied the material (as it were) for the Christian faith, something uniquely Christian egressed of the early writings and creeds. Its vocabulary, methodology, and philosophical outlook may have been Jewish and Greek – but Christian thought cannot be reduced to the two traditions upon which it was founded.

What, then, is Philo's ultimate significance? His allegorical method granted a hermeneutical versatility that allowed the early Christians (including many of the New Testament authors) both to connect Christian ideas symbolically to Old Testament figures and events and to accommodate contemporary philosophical (and, later, scientific) trends. His exposition of Hellenistic Jewish philosophy furnished them with the philosophical lexicon and world-view necessary for Christianity to flourish in the classical world. Finally, he supplied the Church Fathers with a paradigmatic illustration of philosophically grounded exegesis, in which foundational scriptural and philosophical assumptions illuminated each other and coalesced into one truth.^⁵⁹ Christianity could not have established its intellectual footing without the possibility of such a religio-philosophical synthesis, and Philo provided early Christendom an excellent rubric for such an integration. This means of unifying reason and faith set the course for the tradition which would come to dominate and define Western society for the next two thousand years.

References: Secondary Sources

Bentwich, Norman De Mattos. 1910. Philo-Judæus of Alexandria /. Philadelphia : The Jewish Publication Society of America.

Bouteneff, Peter. 2008. Beginnings : Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives /. Grand Rapids, Mich. : Baker Academic.

Mack, Burton L. “Exegetical Traditions in Alexandrian Judaism.” Studia Philonica, no. 3 (1974-1975).

Dodd, C. H. 1953. The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel. Cambridge Eng.: University Press.

Runia, David T. 1995. Philo and the Church Fathers : A Collection of Papers /. Vol. . 32. New York : E.J. Brill.

Tobin, Thomas H. 1983. The Creation of Man : Philo and the History of Interpretation /. Vol. 14. Washington, DC : Catholic Biblical Association of America.

References: Primary Sources

Basil. 378 AD. Homily IX.

Eusebius. c. 4^th century AD. Historia Ecclesiastica.

Jerome. 392 AD. De viris illustribus.

Origen. c. 220-230 AD. De principiis.

Philo. c. 1^st century AD. De specialibus legibus.

Philo. c. 1^st century AD. De confusione linguarum.

Philo. c. 1^st century AD. De migrationi Abrahami.

Philo. c. 1^st century AD. Legum allegoriae.

Philo. c. 1^st century AD. Quæstiones et solutiones et Genesim.

Stobaeus. c. 5thc entury AD. Eclogarum physicarum et ethicarum.

1cf. Acts xvii. 16-34

2Jn i. 1

3David T. Runia, Philo and the Church Fathers: A Collection of Papers (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995), 16.

4Burton L. Mack, “Exegetical Traditions in Alexandrian Judaism,” Studia Philonica, no. 3 (1974-1975): 71.

5Thomas H. Tobin, The Creation of Man: Philo and the History of Interpretation (Washington: The Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1983), 1.

6Jerome, De viris illustribus, XI.

7Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica, II.16-17.3

8Tobin discusses Jereome's and Eusebius' opinions of Philo slightly more expansively at the beginning of The Creation of Man: Philo and the History of Interpretation.

9Runia, 7-8, 117. To be fair, Runia himself notes in his Philo in Early Christian Literature that at least one pagan author, Heliodorus of Emesa, almost certainly was acquainted with Philo; a passage from Heliodorus' Æthiopica virtually mirrors a passage from Philo's De vita Moysis.

10In his Philo-Judæus of Alexandria, Bentwich observes that one very essential part of Philo's work, referred to as “The Hexameron” (τό 'Εχημερὸν), has been lost. In this treatise, Philo apparently gave his “philosophical account of the first chapter of Genesis.”

11“For Philo scripture was limited to the books of Moses.” Runia, 15.

12Tobin, 2.

13Peter C. Bouteneff, Beginnings: Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 27.

14cf. Tobin, 5. Tobin lists sixteen relevant passages from the Quæstiones.

15Runia, 11, 12. Philo and Hellenistic Jewish thought are actually so intertwined in the extant literature that Runia proposes categorizing the former as “Philo” and the latter as “Philonism,” acknowledging the centrality of Philo's writings to the preservation of Hellenistic Jewish thought while differentiating his contributions from the broader tradition.

16Ibid., 10-11. “Philo is first explicitly mentioned and cited by Clement of Alexandria.” Runia cites Justin and Theophilus as specific examples of Fathers possibly acquainted with Philo's corpus before the time of Clement.

17Charles H. Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 41.

18cf. Norman Bentwich, Philo-Judæus of Alexandria (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1910), 100; Tobin, 32.

19Tobin, 32.

20Bentwich, 200-201.

21Tobin writes, “Serious philosophical discussion seems to have come into its own in Alexandria only in the first century B.C. There was probably no lack of philosophers in the third and second centuries in Alexandria, yet, apart from the polymath Eratosthenes (ca. 274-194 B.C.), no prominent philosophical figure was associated with Alexandria during these two centuries.”

22Tobin, 11.

23Ibid., 11. cf. Philo, De ebrietate, 171-205.

24Ibid., 11.

25Tobin, 12-17.

26Stobaeus, Eclogarum physicarum et ethicarum, II.49, 8-12.

27Tobin, 19. For a more thorough analysis, Tobin refers the reader to Antonie Wlosok's Laktanz und die philosophische Gnosis.

28Runia, 15. Runia writes this about one specific Church Father, Clement of Alexandria, not the Fathers as a wholel; however, because he is considering Clement as a “striking example” of the wider relationship between Philonic and early Christian thought, I have taken his words as referring not just to Clement, but to the Church Fathers in general.

29Ibid., 96.

30Bentwich, 92-23.

31It should be noted, however, that Bentwich mentions a polemical side to Philo which “is directed less against the Greek schools in themselves than against the Jewish followers of the Greek schools.” Bentwich, 95.

32Runia, 17-18.

33Philo, De specialibus legibus, I.8.

34Runia, 18. Also, cf. Runia, Philo in Early Christian Literature: A Survey (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1993), 256. Runia observes that this is “the first time we have a patristic writing with almost exactly the same title as a Philonic work and covering exactly the same ground.”

35Runia, 13.

36Ibid., 13-14.

37Bentwich, 96.

38Ibid, 107.

39Philo, Quæstiones et solutiones et Genesim, III.3.

40Ibid., III.3.

41cf. Genesis ii. 9, vi. 7, x. 1; Philo, Q.G I.11, I.95, II.79.

42cf. Tobin, 32-33.

43Ibid., 34.

44Ibid. 34-35.

45cf. Runia, 14.

46cf. Tobin, 36-55. Tobin cites Genesis i. 26-27 and ii. 7 as important passages interpreted allegorically by Philo to avoid the taint of anthropomorphism.

47Philo, Legum allegoriae I.2.

48cf. Runia, 117, 120-121. Runia writes, “Clearly one of the most prominent Church Fathers who was well acquainted with Philo was Origen.”

49Origen, De principiis, IV.3.1.

50For one discussion of different early Christian perspectives on Genesis i-iii, cf. Bouteneff, 55-87.

51Basil, Homily IX.1. The scriptural quotation is from Romans i. 16.

52Bentwich, 195.

53Before I begin this discussion, I should note Bentwich's argument that the personality of the Logos was only ever intended to be figurative, and that several passages concerning the Logos in the Philonic corpus are “probably spurious.” cf. Bentwich, 155-156.Andrew Wiese, “‘The House I Live In’: Race, Class, and African American Suburban Dreams in the Postwar United States,” in The New Suburban History, ed. Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 101–2.

54Tobin, “Creation in Philo of Alexandria” in Creation in the Biblical Tarditions, ed. Clifford and Collins (Washington: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1992), 116.

55Philo, De migrationi Abrahami, 18.

56Philo, De confusione linguarum, 11.

57Philo, Q.G. II.62.

58cf. John i. 1-18.

59Not that Philo was by any means systematic in his approach. cf. Bentwich, 167.

Freud, Evolutionary Psychology, and Religious Experience - An Expansion

2009-06-11T01:36:00.007-04:00

I would like to expand on one of the points considered in the previous post, and expound upon one of my own.

As for the second point, I completely agree that most psychological theories on religion are based on the "assumption that religious belief is unjustifiable." I think this is particularly important to keep in mind, because, as far as I know, religions claim to be true. Many - if not most - Christians would not be Christians if they did not believe (for example) that Jesus rose from the dead. If such an event occurred, then there is no need for a psychological explanation for religion - religious belief is justified by fact.

7. Freud writes, "[I]t is a very striking fact that all this [religion] is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be." I find this assessment to be patently untrue. While there are some Christians who will revise the teachings of Jesus to justify their prior beliefs, most Christians feel challenged by his teachings in one way or another. I wish that my religious beliefs could justify my pride or ambition or selfishness. But they don't. They challenge me to be very different than I would otherwise be in order to obtain salvation. True, they may grant me the opportunity for an eternal world beyond this life, but I don't find that desire particularly strong to begin with. Religion is an answer to my search for truth, a truth which is radical and discomforting to my natural state, not an opiate to appease me.

Metaphysics and the Historical Jesus

2009-06-10T22:45:00.007-04:00

(N.B.: I have no solid data on the religious and metaphysical beliefs of historians beyond my own impressions of the American, Canadian, and English academies. This means that I have to generalize substantially. Nevertheless, I feel that this will not detract significantly from my argument. If anyone knows of any evidence that would contradict my claims about historians, I would love to see it.)

Most scholars of the historical Jesus who believe that he rose from the dead are theists. Most historians who do not share this belief are non-theists. Makes sense, right?

Yes - and no. Of course, theism seems to be a "prerequisite" for belief in Jesus' literal resurrection - but the inverse is not true. One need not be committed to atheism to disbelieve the resurrection; one could be, for example, a Jew or a Muslim.

Why I find this interesting is that the vast majority of historians (as far as I know) who leave Christianity do not become non-Christian theists, but atheists or agnostics. In other words, they are modifying not only their historical views but also their metaphysical views - their belief in God, belief in the soul, &c.

Why? What is the connection between metaphysics and history?

Some thoughts:

1. If we think of the evidence for the resurrection probabilistically (which we can only do as a heuristic for quantifying different degrees of certainty), then one connection between metaphysics and this particular (alleged) historical event becomes clear.

Belief in the literal resurrection of Jesus presupposes a few metaphysical beliefs (e.g., belief in a personal, loving God). Let us suppose that we can "calculate" the "probability" of the resurrection's having happened by multiplying the "probability" that the metaphysical requirements are met by the "probability" that the historical evidence is sufficient. (I am not at all saying that this probabilistic meanas of thinking is how we should think of the resurrection; it is simply one means of illuminating the role metaphysics plays in our evaluation of the evidence.)

If that is the case, then the probability that the literal resurrection happened varies directly with the probability that these metaphysical requirements are met. If we double the chances that the metaphysical requirements are met - say, from 40% to 80% - we also double the chances that the resurrection happened. In the case of the resurrection, our metaphysical beliefs should - and do - influence our historical analyses.

2. Why do many historians who leave Christianity leave it for atheism? Are their historical beliefs motivating a change in their metaphysical beliefs or vice versa?

As I noted above, our historical beliefs concerning Christianity are largely dependent on our metaphysical beliefs. If God does not exist, then the resurrection is impossible; if God does exist, then the resurrection is not only possible, but (in my unscholarly opinion) very likely. (Of course, the relevant metaphysical discourse goes beyond the mere existence of a "god" to a discussion of such a being's qualities.)

However, I do not see that our historical beliefs should influence our metaphysical beliefs to a similar extent - or at all. If I were to reject the resurrection, I would still be some sort of theist. Some of my idea of Who God - the part that is specifically Christian - would change. But the core belief would remain. This is because I believe in God on philosophical grounds, not on historical grounds. I do not see that there is any reasonable alternative.

Therefore, when Christian historians abandon the faith for atheism or agnosticism - in other words, when they simultaneously reject both historical and metaphysical propositions - I cannot help but question their philosophical approach.

(Of course, this transition may not always occur simultaneously. I may disagree with a former Christian who comes to believe that God cannot exist and then, on the basis of that belief, rejects the resurrection - but at least I can say that he has not put the historical cart before the metaphysical horse. The same reasoning would apply, mutatis mutandis, to a Christian who came to believe that the historical evidence for the resurrection was lacking but remained a theist.)

3. One interesting possibility this leads me to consider: Perhaps Christians should evaluate the historical treatment of the resurrection given by atheists quite differently from the historical treatment of the resurrection given by non-Christians who nevertheless believe that the resurrection is at least metaphysically possible.

I say "Perhaps" because I only think that would really be true in an ideal world in which historians always had their philosophy on straight.

4. Another thought: In a way, there isn't that much of interest that an atheist can say about the resurrection. Consider, as an analogy, the following "blurb" from a fictional scholar:

"Many people believe that a round square appeared two thousand years ago. They believe this based on certain historical evidence such as eyewitness testimony. But obviously, no round square appeared...because the eyewitness testimony is shabby."

Perhaps the eyewitness testimony truly is shabby - but the main grounds for the scholar's skepticism of the appearance is not historical, but metaphysical. Assuming that the scholar doesn't believe that round squares can exist, he will have to analyze the putative "eyewitness testimony" presupposing that no appearance happened.

The point is not that atheists and non-Christians are shoddy historians. They are often excellent historians. The point, rather, is that one's metaphysical framework has a tremendous impact on one's historical opinion concerning the resurrection - even if that historical opinion is a scholarly one.

Thus, when an atheist historian challenges a Christian historical claim, I must meet his challenge - but I must also remember that he is operating within a (faulty, in my opinion) philosophical framework that prejudices him against certain interpretations of historical events.

5. An interesting question for non-theist historians: "If God existed, how plausible would Jesus' resurrection be?" I'm not sure a non-theist could answer that question very well; I say that because I know that is difficult for me, a theist, to consider "If God did not exist, then..." questions.

(6. At this point, you might be thinking, "What about Jews, Muslims, and other non-Christian theists?" For the most part, this post does not apply to Jewish and Muslim scholars of the historical Jesus. The main reason for this is that almost all of the people who study the historical Jesus are either Christians or former Christians. However, I will briefly note that Jews and Muslims, though they are monotheists, might still have metaphysical scruples with Christianity related to concepts such as the Trinity. This means that they may, for all intents and purposes, be as committed to the metaphysical impossibility of the resurrection as atheists would be.)

Freud, Evolutionary Psychology, and Religious Experience

2009-06-10T11:16:00.007-04:00

Just read an interesting summary of some of Freud's ideas about religious belief and experience. (I also read parts 1 and 2 of the series.) A few thoughts:

1. The distinction Beck makes between the question "Is religious belief true?" and the question "Why is there religious belief?" is very important to keep in mind. You'd be surprised by the extent to which anti-religious discourse centers on the latter and not the former.

2. Often implicit in the question "Why is there religious belief?" is some assumption that religious belief is unjustifiable. In other words, people who pose the question "Why is there religious belief?" are often really asking, "Given that religion is implausible, why is there religious belief?"

3. Freud writes, "We shall tell ourselves that it would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent Providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be." (Or, as Beck puts it: "[F]or Freud, the fact that the very thing we vitally wish for is precisely the thing we believe to be the case seems a bit too coincidental.") In Freud's mind (as in the mind of many other people), potential psychological explanations for religious belief count as evidence against religion - the questions "Why is there religious belief?" and "Is religious belief true?" are somehow linked.

4. For some (hypothetical) fact to constitute evidence against religion, it must be a fact that would be incompatible with a particular religious worldview. But there is no prima facie reason to believe that God would design us not to be psychologically inclined toward religion; on the contrary, most religious people (or at least monotheists) would agree with St. Augustine's assertion in the Confessiones: "Thou [i.e., God] hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee." This is an important point to remember: For a fact to count against a certain belief, it must be incompatible with that belief. But the "facts" which Freud discusses - our natural inclination to desire that God exist - are not incompatible with most religious systems.

Of course, a non-religious account of religious belief and experience (such as Freud's) can possibly neutralize some arguments for religion that are grounded in design or experience. But it cannot neutralize religion itself.

In fact, I could construct an argument from Freud's psychological theories for the opposite metaphysical conclusion. I could "spin" the psychological evidence the other way: Given that we are psychologically inclined toward belief in God, is it not reasonable to conclude that God was somehow involved in our creation? Is it truly plausible that evolution accidentally inclined us toward belief in a fictional being completely unlike anything else in existence? Or that evolution would lead us to some philosophical abstract for our emotional consolation? (This echoes C.S. Lewis' line from Mere Christianity: "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.")

I am not saying that this is a good argument; in fact, I would be wary of it, because I am not an evolutionary psychologist. But the point remains.

5. As Beck notes, religious belief and experience are multifaceted and powerful phenomena. It will not suffice simply to identify some experience associated with "religion" and explain that experience. Religious experience varies tremendously within and among religious traditions. Can the same evolutionary hypothesis explain Benny Hinn, Laozi, and everything in between? I doubt it.

In my opinion, the fact that this entire debate is centered around "religion" betrays a central conceit of those opposed to "religion" - a tendency to group all "religious" people together. But from a psychological perspective, this hardly seems reasonable, given how differently a Taoist and a Pentecostal will "experience" "religion."

6. None of this necessarily means I disagree with any or all of the theories proposed by evolutionary psychologists concerning religion.

Galaxies and G.K. Chesteron

2009-06-05T20:57:00.007-04:00

In The Everlasting Man, G.K. Chesterton wrote:

Modern people...seem to forget, for instance, that a man is not even certain of the Solar System as he is certain of the South Downs. The Solar System is a deduction, and doubtless a true deduction; but the point is that it is a very vast and far-reaching deduction and therefore he forgets that it is a deduction at all and treats it as a first principle. He might discover that the whole calculation is a miscalculation; and the sun and stars and street-lamps would look exactly the same.

Recently, a rather enormous miscalculation was discovered. Harvard researchers found that our galaxy is 50% more massive than previously thought.

...As if we didn't have enough reasons to recognize Chesterton's genius already.

Everything You Know About Mediæval Europe Is Wrong

2009-06-02T14:38:00.004-04:00

Well, kind of. Or not really. But some things you (thought you) knew about Mediæval Europe, or at least about twelfth-century England, are wrong.

I am assuming, of course, that most people conceive of Europe during the "Dark Ages" as almost uniformly Christian - as I once did. But Peter of Cornwall, as quoted by Robert Bartlett in his England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings, gives us reason to believe otherwise:

"There are many people who do not believe that God exists, nor do they think that a human soul lives on after the death of the body. They consider that the universe has always been as it is now and is ruled by chance rather than by Providence."

Probably not what you would have expected from a prior writing centuries before Hume and Spinoza. Incidentally, this is yet another indication of the strong historical ties between atheism and belief in an eternally old universe.

(Hat tip to Peter van Inwagen.)

van Inwagen on the Origins of Human Rationality

2009-05-30T23:58:00.002-04:00

From the fifth of his lectures on the problem of evil:

"It is not a discovery of evolutionary biology that there are no miraculous events in our evolutionary history. It could not be, any more than it could be a discovery of meteorology that the weather at Dunkirk during those fateful days in 1940 was not due to a specific and local divine action. Anyone who believes either that the coming-to-be of human rationality or the weather at Dunkirk had purely natural causes must believe this on philosophical, not scientific, grounds. In fact, the case for this is rather stronger in the matter of the genesis of rationality, for we know a lot about how the weather works, and we know that the rain clouds at Dunkirk are the sort of thing that could have had purely natural causes. We most assuredly do not know that rationality could have arisen through natural causes - or, at any rate, we do not know this unless we somehow know that everything in fact has purely natural causes. This is because everyone who believes that human rationality could have arisen from purely natural causes believes this solely on the basis of the following argument: Everything has purely natural causes; human beings are rational; hence, the rationality of human beings could have arisen from purely natural causes because it did so arise in fact."

Liberal vs. Conservative Values

2009-05-28T20:51:00.007-04:00

So Experimental Theology posted about a thesis on morality that explains the moral differences between liberals and conservatives.

The blogger, Richard Beck, summarizes Jonathan Haidt's five moral foundations:

Harm/Care: Harming others, failures of care/nurturance, or failures of protection are often cited as reasons for an act being “wrong.” Some virtues from this domain are kindness, caretaking, and compassion.

Fairness/Reciprocity: Inequalities or failures to reciprocate are often cited as evidence for something being “wrong.” Some virtues here are sharing, egalitarianism, and justice.

Ingroup/Loyalty: Failure to support, defend, and aid the group is often cited as evidence for “wrongness.” Virtues include loyalty, patriotism, and cooperation.

Authority/Respect: Failure to grant respect to culturally significant groups, institutions, or authority figures is often cause for sanction. Virtues include respect, duty, and obedience.

Purity/Sanctity: Anything that demeans, debases, or profanes human or religious dignity or sacredness is also a cause for sanction. Virtues include purity, dignity, and holiness.

Research has shown that liberals and conservatives differ in the degree to which they deploy these moral grammars. Specifically, liberals tend to emphasize the first two: Harm and Fairness. Conservatives, by contrast, often appeal to the last two: Authority and Purity. This is not to say that liberals or conservatives restrict themselves to these warrants, but they do display moral tendencies with some warrants being used more than others or some warrants held as more vital than others.

I think there is definitely some truth to this thesis. (After all, isn't there a little bit of truth to almost all ideas?)

I think of the difference between one of my best friends and myself. As a conservative, I am much more disturbed by premarital sex than my liberal friend is. In fact, she barely understands my disgust with it, while I cannot comprehend how she is so at ease with it. This seems to confirm the hypothesis.

Yet I still doubt if this hypothesis is accurate. I think conservatives value stay-at-home mothers much more than their liberal counterparts. After all, children need to be cared for, and it is unfair for them to not have a proper upbringing. Yet conservatives also feel that mothers have a “duty” to care for their children, whereas liberals seem to apply this concept of “duty” more... liberally. Even if the conservative mentality is that of Authority/Respect and not Harm/Care or Fairness/Reciprocity, I would say that the categories are not as easily classifiable as is suggested. A mother's duty comes from conservatives' sense of justice and obligation to take care of children.

For a firmer counterexample, I think of race relations. When looking at the issue of affirmative action, conservatives talk about equality and fairness for all people, including whites. It often seems that liberals today demand “respect” for what they deem culturally significant groups – minorities.

Liberal human rights campaigns are often couched in terms of human “dignity.” Conservatives are the ones who demand “justice” for the victims of violence. Compassionate Conservatism seems to defy this system of classification. Democratic soldiers appear to negate this hypothesis.

After taking the test, it revealed some more insight: Republicans are ranked almost evenly on all five categories, while Democrats rank much more highly on the first two. Essentially, Democrats care little for Authority or Purity, whereas Republicans care about all moral factors.

The more interesting component of what Beck discusses is the “disgust-factor” which is addressed in this recent New York Times article. The article essential states that Republicans tend to feel more disgust than Democrats, and thus are psychologically different. This appears easy to link to the fact that conservatives value purity more than liberals.

Yet I wonder if the difference in values system might stem from other, more relevant differences. The Democratic Party is much more secular than the Republican Party, and I can easily understand why religious people would be more affected by moral situations involving purity. Christians are also called to fulfill their duties and act with respect for authority, whereas secular humanists feel more of an obligation to help other human beings. I think that these religious differences may be more key to understanding morality than simple political affiliation.

Needless to say, much more research needs to be done on the subject before I will grant it any weight.

Lewis on Prayer

2009-05-27T13:37:00.002-04:00

From Lewis' essay "The Efficacy of Prayer":

"Can we believe that God ever really modifies His action in response to the suggestions of man? For infinite wisdom does not need telling what is best, and infinite goodness needs no urging to do it. But neither does God need any of those things that are done by finite agents, whether living or inanimate. He could, if He chose, repair our bodies miraculously without food; or give us food without the aid of farmers, bakers, and butchers; or knowledge without the aid of learned men; or convert the heathen without missionaries. Instead, He allows soils and weather and animals and the muscles, minds, and wills of men to cooperate in the execution of His will. "God," says Pascal, "instituted prayer in order to lend to His creatures the dignity of causality." But it is not only prayer; whenever we act at all, He lends us that dignity. It is not really stranger, nor less strange, that my prayers should affect the course of events than that my other actions should do so."

Calvin on Certainty

2009-05-25T11:57:00.003-04:00

I think there's an idea floating around that faith used to mean "complete lack of doubt," and that recent Christian attempts to "reconcile" faith with doubt are just products of modern or existentialist thinking. It makes sense that Kierkegaard would write about the leap of faith (or, in his own terms, the leap to faith) - but would Paul think in the same way?

I'm not going to analyze Paul's writings for existential angst, but I will point out a relatively modern-sounding quotation from John Calvin I recently saw:

"When we inculcate that faith ought to be certain and secure, we conceive not of a certainty attended with no doubt, or of a security interrupted by no anxiety; but we rather affirm, that believers have a perpetual conflict with their own diffidence, and are far from placing their consciences in a placid calm never disturbed by any storms. Yet, on the other hand, we deny, however they may be afflicted, that they ever fall and depart from that certain confidence which they have conceived in the divine mercy."

Runia on the Hellenization of Christianity

2009-05-14T14:26:00.008-04:00

From David T. Runia's Philo and the Church Fathers:

"[I]n retrospect the process of [the Hellenization of Christianity] was inevitable. By this I do not wish to say that it could not have gone differently. This is a matter of pure speculation. What I want to emphasize is that Christianity could not have become the Christianity that we know, if it had not accepted the challenge posed by Greek philosophy with its trust in a world-view based on rational thought. ... The process of Hellenization took place, but it did not penetrate to Christianity's heart. This heart is to be located in the Gospel, and within it, at the cross of Jesus Christ. This nucleus stays out of the reach of both Philonism and Platonism."

Gratitude

2009-05-06T16:05:00.000-04:00

I always find it disconcerting when people ask me what my cafeteria is like. If you've ever seen Annenberg, you'll understand why the term cafeteria doesn't quite do it justice. The only sad thing about having such an incredible eating facility is that after eating there three meals a day, seven days a week, you begin to take it for granted. You forget how beautiful the building is, how much time went into producing the stained glass, how much effort was expended on its construction.

I feel that my developed indifference to the beauty of Annenberg and the skill of those who created it is similar to our acquired apathy to to the beauty of the world and the incredible nature of the God who created it.

Imagine what the world must appear like to a newborn: a strange set of colors, movements, and objects appearing randomly and without reason. It is only as the years begin to wear on us that we begin to treat the world as though it could not be any other way. As we begin to see the same beauty year after year, we begin to take sunrises and sunsets for granted. After a couple decades, we forget our love for first winter snowfalls and sunny summer days, crisp spring air and autumn's vibrant hues. We lose our sense of wonder at the world. We seek visible miracles while overlooking the fact that our very existence is a miracle in and of itself.

I love the random moments when I look at my dining hall and realize what I have been taking for granted because they remind me to thank God not only for the material things He gives us: food, shelter, and money, but for the fact that anything material even exists.

As Oscar Wilde said, "The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible."

Andúril

2009-05-06T15:58:00.004-04:00

We are now featuring a new blogger: Sword Reforged.

Valedictory Address

2009-05-03T16:41:00.002-04:00

This is the speech I gave at my high school graduation.

Before I begin, I'd like to thank Dr. Laurie, Mr. Laurie, Ms. Butts, Mrs. Shienvold, Mrs. Cvammen, Mr. Gulotta, the administration, deans, faculty, guidance, my peers and my family. Also, thank you to all the friends and family of the graduates for joining us.

It is now my honor to give a final valedictory address before we all blindly plunge into adulthood, following Life's ever-winding road. I have only a few words of advice to give, and though they might seem trite or corny now, I think they are very important.

Life can at once seem extremely beautiful, profound, and terrifying; our understanding of it is only imperfect and flawed. But among all doubts and uncertainties, among all the travails and absurdities of existence, I have always been sure of one thing: love. In my mind, there's nothing else really worth talking about.

Love is, unfortunately, a tired word, one reiterated unceasingly in our songs, farewells, and text messages. We "heart" nearly anything, from new bands to New York, from McDonald's to McSteamy. We constantly tell people we love them, and almost exclusively devote our literature, music, and cinema to the subject of love.

And yet, despite all our professions of love, despite all our emphasis, we still live in a desperate, crying world, a world that is beautiful but fragile, in which "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." We live in a world that all too often is lonely, cruel, and empty – a world, in short, that lacks love.

I have often wondered why a world that so obviously desires love would be so lacking in it, why a world that so idolizes love so desperately needs it. Although no one can be sure, I think our error often lies in not understanding love.

Love is not just a passion or a feeling, not just an attraction or an emotion. Love is nothing more or less than a willingness to sacrifice oneself for others, to value the well-being of others above our own.

Virtually since birth, we have been deluged with messages of individuality and self-discovery. We have placed a primacy on what we want to do, on what we want to be, and I fear we have forgotten that a life lived for oneself is no life at all.

I was asked to speak about the future, about the paths we all will pursue, about where the Road will lead us. I could have spoken about careers, crossroads, or choices, but I believe now and always that where we go and what we do will mean nothing if we do not love the people around us. Health, knowledge, and comfort are all stale and meaningless without this sincere love. "One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love."

Every day, we are blessed with the irreplaceable opportunity to brighten the lives of those around us, to make this world beautiful with our kindness and concern for others. We can love with our actions, love with our thoughts, and love with our words. We can't all be rich or famous or pretty or smart – but we can all love, even when it is difficult.

About two years ago, five Amish schoolchildren were murdered in a small Pennsylvania town. The response of the Amish community to such a tragedy was beautiful and powerful: love. The Amish, whom we often mock, loved and forgave in a way we rarely would, inviting the murderer's family to the funeral. As one grandfather watched his granddaughter's burial, he told the young Amish boys, "We must not think evil of this man."

I have been given the opportunity to speak today because of my academic performance. But the honest truth is that grades aren't what really matter. What matters is the people around us. Today, I am truly honored to share this moment with people who aren't just classmates, but friends. Many of you have sacrificed time, energy, and sanity for me and for each other, and that sacrifice is beautiful. I am proud beyond words that my three co-speakers and I never competed for accolades, but supported each other every step of the way, and I know all of us had friends like that during these past few years. Class of 2008, you are beautiful, intelligent, and talented people, but I respect you most for your kindness and compassion.

I can't tell you which college you should have chosen, which field you should major in, or which career you should enter. But I can make you one promise: if you love, if you are truly willing to dedicate yourself to friends, to family, to acquaintances, and even to strangers, it'll all be worth it. It won't be easy, it won't be safe or cautious – but it will be beautiful. "Love is strong as Death..." As we embark anew upon the Road, I hope we all can remember what the Beatles said: “All You Need Is Love.” Congratulations, Class of 2008.

A Letter About God

2009-03-17T15:28:00.005-04:00

This is a slightly abridged version of a letter I sent to a friend of mine in response to a letter she sent me about her atheism. I think it addresses a lot of my central thoughts about the existence of God. Redacted portions are marked by brackets.

"[]

I should begin this letter with a sincere apology for my overly delayed response. I envisioned a proper reply to your letter as a monumental task, and, as such, I was wary to undertake it – not out of unwillingness, but out of fear, lest any response of mine were inadequate. I felt that your seeming eagerness to understand Christianity left me no excuse for failure, should I not convince you of its truths. This fear of mine is unfounded – it is not I, but God, Who can save you – but it exists nonetheless.

My fear is a symptom of doubt – primarily of myself, but also of God. I cannot and should not pretend that I do not doubt []. In a very real epistemological sense, I cannot be anything but an agnostic. I cannot, as you said, 'profess to have all the answers.' I do not know that God exists; for that matter, I do not even know that you – or I – exist. Man's knowledge and reason are so very, very frail. 'Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie.' Every which way I turn, I am faced with the unavoidable conclusion that the Truth, whatever it may be, is incomprehensible and absurd. 'Adhuc lates, Domine, animam meam in luce et beatitudine tua, et idcirco versatur illa adhuc in tenebris et miseria sua.'

And yet – despite all lingering doubts – I am still convinced that God exists. Even your objections to His existence strengthen my conviction. You may believe that we are blind because the Truth lies shrouded in darkness; but I, I say that the Truth's light is not too feeble, but too overpowering – that I am blind, not because of its absence, but because of its brilliance. 'The light shineth in darkness; and the darkness hath comprehended it not' (John i. 5).

When I consider this world of sunsets and suicides, of loves and wars, of minds and madness – when I consider the atom or the photon – I cannot escape my impression that beyond our stunted perceptions lies something Transcendent. This world alone is not enough – it cannot be enough – for it cannot explain anything, even itself. And thus, to me, nothing will ever be more unbelievable than the assertion that time, substance, and space arose from non-being and chaos – that there truly is nothing else. (This is what I believe Chesterton means when he says that atheism entails belief in a 'universal negative.') Perhaps we do not understand the Transcendent, but it must exist, it cannot not exist. Reality without it is dead and senseless. There must be something beyond time to explain time, something beyond space to explain space, something beyond causation to explain causation, something beyond order to explain order, something beyond the mind to explain the mind. There must be something which lies beyond our grasp, beyond our sight, beyond our reach, something which itself needs no further explanation or justification – something Transcendent. That is my fundamental conviction. And this Transcendence I call God.

(With this definition of transcendence, I remember the words of M. Whitehead, a mathematician who once taught here at Harvard: 'Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind and within the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realized; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.')

The skeptic may reply (rightly) that what I have said is all well and good – but that I cannot know much, if anything, about this Transcendence. Who are we, we mortal men, to dare to know the source, not only of men, but of reality itself? And the Christian, in a sense, would have to agree. The Christian God is one Whose ways are higher than our ways and Whose thoughts are higher than our thoughts (Isaiah lv. 8-9). As Barth said, 'God is inconceivable.'

Fortunately, we know one terribly important thing about God; we know that He has created us. He has created the universe such that it could support life, and He has breathed into that life His spirit. The importance of these two truths cannot be underestimated. Because I am not a scientist, I will not belabor the details of the first point (which, incidentally, presupposes that abiogenesis itself can be accounted for scientifically), but will leave it to you to imagine all the possible universes that never would support life - universes with different 'laws of nature,' and chaotic universes, with no laws at all. (It is challenging enough for a universe to support stable heavy atoms, let alone advanced life-forms.) Do not forget [] that one of reality's most miraculous features is its orderliness: 'Das Unverständlichste am Universum ist im Grunde, dass wir es verstehen können.' This orderliness and ability to support life, in and of themselves, do not prove anything, but to me, they are very indicative. At the very least, a situation in which a Transcendent being created a universe which just so happened to support intelligent life would be extremely bizarre.

The second point – that man is more than matter – is more interesting, and ultimately much more crucial. And, before I explain its relevance in full, I must first discuss your invocation of emergentism as an explanation of consciousness. Though I intend to address each of your arguments individually later on, I cannot proceed any further without pausing to consider it.

If we know anything, we know that we exist mentally. Cogitamus, ergo sumus. Consciousness is an undeniable fact (though some atheists have, of course, denied it); the question, then, is whether or not it is a so-called 'scientific fact.'

I propose first and foremost that free will cannot be explained scientifically, even if consciousness itself can. Belief in free will is belief in personal causality – belief that physical events can be caused or affected by mental entities, or persons. But science, properly understood, is the study of impersonal causality – the study of how objective, physical states of affairs change according to certain underlying principles. To assert that the mind can have power over matter is to assert something quite remarkable indeed; it defies scientific explanation. It is not at all a solution to say that free will 'emerges' from chemical reactions in the brain. How would personal causality 'emerge' from impersonal causality? How can matter generate minds? I simply do not see satisfying non-religious answers to these questions. (Remember, if free will did in fact emerge from matter and impersonal causality, it would itself become nothing more than an effect of impersonal causality, not a personal cause. In other words, it would no longer be free will. To explain the will is to abrogate it.)

Of course, I do not see how emergentism can explain any aspect of consciousness, let alone free will. The mind-body problem is similar to the is-ought problem; the mind may be completely dependent upon the body (just as 'ought' statements are largely contingent upon 'is' statements), but knowledge of the body alone cannot give an adequate account of the mind. (To borrow an example from M. Nagel, we know a lot about bats, but we know absolutely nothing about what it is like to be a bat. Science cannot give us true knowledge about the subjective mental states of other beings.) Put another way, though the brain may be necessary to explain the mind, it is not sufficient to explain the mind; something more is required. Mental entities are as fundamentally different from physical entities as normative facts are from positive facts. Thus, the fact that mental entities exist is extremely radical for the atheist, who must believe that, after thirteen billion years of matter and energy, the mind abruptly came into being.

But is this fact truly so radical? To answer that question, I first will ask you to consider computers – machines that can process incredible amounts of information and perform tasks far beyond man's capacity, but do not have minds. Their 'artificial' intelligence is in fact non-existent. They are not self-aware; they do not perceive; they are not conscious. Everything about their existence is objective and available to empirical study. There is nothing categorically different about computers with respect to the rest of the world.

There is, however, something categorically different about humans. We are self-aware; we do perceive; we are conscious. Some things about our existence are objective and available to empirical study; but some are not. I cannot see or measure your perceptions, [] only the neural activity which corresponds to them. For all I know (and for all the best scientist knows), you could be a biological 'computer' programmed to act as if you were conscious. That you can perceive the external world and ponder your own existence reveals that you (and all mankind) are categorically different from everything else that has ever existed before. (It is irrelevant to my argument whether or not other putatively sentient creatures, such as gorillas, actually have minds – the difference in category remains – but I will henceforth assume that they do not, for the sake of simplicity.) A few million years ago, a chemical process whose reactants consisted of matter and energy led to products that consisted of matter, energy – and mind. This fact can be nothing less than astounding.

If the honest naturalistic scientist were to hypothesize how 'intelligent' life could have developed, I imagine he would conjecture something akin to biological computers, M. Minsky's 'machines made of meat.' He would probably propose organisms whose brains were so advanced that impressions from the external world – light waves, sound waves, &c. – could trigger neurobiological reactions, which would then trigger behaviors. But he would hardly venture to guess that these agglomerations of matter would somehow become aware of their own existence – that the mind would sprout randomly from mindlessness. A world without minds would be much more concordant with the naturalistic worldview and account of reality – were it not for the fact that minds exist.

But minds, alas, do exist. How are we to explain them? You might answer that, in the future, science will discover some new physical fact which will quickly and simply explain the existence of minds. After all, has not modern neuroscience gone a very long ways toward explaining the mind? My answer would be an emphatic No: It has not moved one inch closer toward explaining the mind. It has, of course, done very well with explaining why the mind behaves as it does, and how the mind relates to the body. But it has not provided one scintilla of evidence to explain why the mind exists at all, nor do I see how it ever could. Our perceptions themselves, after all, are subjective, and thus not measurable. How, then, is the scientist who glories in the objective and orderly behavior of the universe to contend with subjective and inexplicable minds and wills?

The explanation for the mind must come from the Transcendent – from God. And the knowledge that the fountainhead of all existence somehow imbued us with minds should be very unsettling for the deist (whose deity merely sets things into motion). It leads inevitably to a question that has dogged man's steps since the psalmist posed it to God three millennia ago: 'What is man that Thou art mindful of him?' (Psalm viii. 4)

We must keep in mind three central facts when answering this question: first, that men, because we have minds, are categorically different from all other creation; second, that the first fact cannot (as far as we know) be explained by science; third, that God, in some way, must have taken special interest in the affairs of men. The third fact, which follows from the first two, is the most essential. And in light of these three facts, our picture of God becomes much more theistic and much less deistic – in a word, much more Christian. The deist's account of God becomes sorely wanting. As someone Who has taken an interest in people, how could God Himself not be personal (or 'super-personal')? If we know from our own existence that the mind itself is an active agent, how can we then reduce the Transcendent to some inert, slumbering 'force' less self-aware than a child? It is not enough to say, as the deist does, that God caused the world to exist and then retreated to His chambers – for that does not explain men as persons, only as biological automata.

If the deistic God cannot explain men as persons, how much less can He explain them as moral beings! You yourself have admitted how insufficient non-theistic accounts of morality are. Your morality, if it does not come from God, is nothing more than an evolutionary instinct. As powerful as your moral and æsthetic convictions may be – and I know that they are powerful – they cannot be anything more than chemical accidents unless an active, personal, and moral God has imbued us with them. Could God have created men who seek the good and the beautiful if He Himself were not in some way good and beautiful?

We live in an orderly world, a personal world, and a moral world. And I simply do not see how the neo-Platonist's or deist's δημιουργός can properly account for a world such as ours. There is too much light in this world – even in us, whose hearts and minds are dark – for me to believe in anything less than Light, pure Light – not some half-conscious nightmare or impersonal agent (How can an agent be impersonal or inactive?), but in Light itself, not lesser than I, but infinitely greater. 'Deus lux est et tenebrae in Eo non sunt ullaeq' (1 John i. 5).

Ah, but you may say, 'What is Light?' What do I mean when I say that? And truly, my words are but a shadow of the reality. 'Die Worte tun dem geheimen Sinn nicht gut, es wird immer alles gleich ein wenig anders, wenn man es ausspricht, ein wenig verfälscht, ein wenig närrisch.' Even ignoring linguistic limitations, the conceptual difficulties that arise when attempting to describe that which is, by definition, beyond conception are considerable. It is unrealistic to except a full understanding of God; God cannot and should not be limited to our fallible thoughts.

And so we proceed by intuition; the line between thinking and feeling is blurred; and we become swayed, not by arguments themselves, but by impressions – subtle, emotional, or subconscious reactions to complex, contentious, and charged issues (such as religion and politics). These impressions affect us profoundly, especially with regards to what standards of proof we demand. I cannot ascertain the substance of your past and present impressions concerning religion, but I hope that you will consciously evaluate your religious impressions, as I have sought to evaluate mine. In particular, I hope that you will not misunderstand the philosophical God I have hitherto defended – a God who, though similar to the Christian God, is not necessarily identical to Him.

You will notice that my belief in God is significantly grounded in my impressions about Christianity (and, to a lesser extent, my negative impressions about deism and atheism). To a certain extent, this is inescapable, because it is difficult for us to separate the person of God from the idea of God. (Indeed, I believe it is impossible to extricate impressions from our mental processes, nor do I see that it would be productive to do so.) For a long time, I believed in the idea of the Christian God without acknowledging Him as a person. Mlle. L'Engle said, 'Those who believe they believe in God but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God Himself.' At some point, my belief that God existed became a conviction that God was beautiful – and even Beauty. It will be a useful enterprise for you to ponder the person and idea of God separately.

Unfortunately, you will notice that I cannot prove the idea of God. In this letter, I have sought to demonstrate that the idea of a Christian God is plausible – much more plausible, in fact, than any alternative. Such a demonstration does not technically constitute a proof. But my endeavor here was not to prove to you the existence of the Christian God, but to enumerate both my rational arguments and my more nuanced impressions concerning Him. Every which way I consider the matter, the Christian God (or theistic God) becomes more and more unavoidable. During those times in my life when I would have desired to leave Christianity, I could not bring myself to believe in its falsity. I could not do away with God, and the thought of doing so terrified me; like M. Geisler, I did not have enough faith to be an atheist. I cannot say that my arguments for the existence of God are 'sufficient,' because I do not see how we can determine what are sufficient grounds for believing something. All I can say is that I have considered the matter quite carefully and remain convinced of God's existence.

Nonetheless, you apparently are not convinced – and you have raised some compelling objections to the existence of God (or at least to the necessity of God's existence) which now demand my attention.

In your letter to me, you mentioned a question asked by many men before you, a question which drove M. Russell away from theism: Who created the Creator? If God explains the universe, whence God? Furthermore, you stated that my position could not explain the universe any more than yours could.

My first response is that is not logically possible for a perfect explanation to exist, because justification cannot be a closed system. I have mentioned the Münchhausen-Trilemma to you before, and I will quickly restate its ideas here. For us to know any truth with certainty, we must have justification for believing it – but to know the justification with certainty requires further justification. It is easy to see how perfect justification then becomes impossible. (I always think of Todd Anderson's words in Dead Poets Society: the truth is rather like a blanket which cannot cover everything up. If you try to cover up one thing, you uncover something else.) Chesterton put it more eloquently: 'Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.'

With regards to your initial question about who created the Creator, I would only note that God, as a being Who exists beyond time, would not require a cause or a creator in the same sense that spatiotemporal entities themselves would. (This entire line of thought was broached tangentially when I discussed the Transcendent.) Everyone is forced to believe in something uncaused; the real question, then, is, What sort of thing could be uncaused? I can only conceive of an uncaused entity if that entity exists beyond time. And thus God is a much better candidate for the uncaused than anything else, especially that singularity of matter and energy with which the world began.

Another issue you brought forward was whether or not agnosticism was cowardly. I mostly agree with your Socratic formulation of wisdom: 'The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.' (Of course, I prefer Solomon's version in the ninth proverb: 'The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom.') I hope you see that I have attempted not to exceed my philosophical reach; as M. Whitehead said, 'The chief error in philosophy is overstatement.'

I should begin by clarifying my own position on the matter. First, it is important not to conflate statements of belief with statements of knowledge. Agnosticism is a position about knowledge, not about belief; thus, as I have mentioned before, agnostic Christianity is not an incoherent or inconsistent view. Second, describing agnosticism as cowardly or brave is not entirely reasonable; agnosticism as such can exist for a multitude of emotional and intellectual reasons.

However, I still believe that many (if not most) agnostics are simply unwilling to acknowledge what their true beliefs are in the matter. Almost all the self-proclaimed agnostics I have met are atheists, whose beliefs have never struck me as brave or humble. In contrast, I have found that true Christians are very humble – much more so than agnostics and atheists, for the humility of the genuinely devout stems from lifelong submission to God. (So you know, I would not number myself among these devout yet.) Concerning this humility, I can only echo M. Muggeridge's words: 'Animistic savages prostrating themselves before a painted stone have always seemed to me to be nearer the truth than any Einstein or Bertrand Russell.' If I were to name the primary impetus behind atheism today, it would be pride. In my opinion, emotional (and spiritual) factors such as pride are a main influence upon someone's willingness to believe in God. (In your letter, you wrote that your political beliefs were in your 'character.' Religious – or irreligious – beliefs are hardly different.) But this entire argument about agnosticism's bravery implies that we have direct control over our beliefs, which you know from your own experience to be untrue.

Is my appeal to God an 'appeal to the unknown,' as you suggest? I know of no argument that can preclude or falsify unknown alternatives, and so, in a sense, I am defenseless against this claim. I can only say that science, in my view, could never explain itself in the same sense in which God can. Science is not some mystical force that marches irrevocably toward the Truth; it is a collection of our interpretations of data about how reality changes in time. And our interpretations, though often meticulously refined, are inevitably human and limited to a specific set of statements about reality. For example, science cannot answer Leibniz' question, 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' (I could name several other questions which science cannot, and almost certainly can never, answer.) You contend that my God is a 'God of the gaps' used to explain phænomena that science cannot yet explain. I would counter that my God is not merely an explanation for scientific phænomena, but also one for science itself. For all these reasons, I do not believe that your faith in science (which Lewis called 'mellontolatry,' or worship of the future) is entirely warranted.

You assert that you have more 'evidence that science will prove capable of finding solutions than that the Christian God exists.' I will reply with the words of M. Jastrow: 'There is a kind of religion in science, it is the religion of a person who believes there is order and harmony in the universe, and every effect must have its cause, there is no first cause.... This religious faith of the scientist is violated by the discovery that the world had a beginning under conditions in which the known laws of physics are not valid, and as a product of forces or circumstances we cannot discover. When that happens, the scientist has lost control.... Consider the enormity of the problem. Science has proven that the universe exploded into being at a certain moment. It asks, what cause produced the effect? Who or what put the matter and energy in the universe? Was the universe created out of nothing, or was it gathered together out of pre-existing materials? And science cannot answer these questions.'

Your 'evidence' for science's ability to find solutions to these problems can be nothing more than inductive reasoning applied to the wrong category of question. And, ironically, science itself has removed what was the linchpin of atheistic arguments until not even a century ago – for science has demonstrated that the world had a beginning. I return to M. Jastrow: 'For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.'

For millennia, atheists founded their unbelief in the knowledge that theists could not prove that the world had a beginning. This past century, science essentially proved that the world had a beginning – and yet atheism did not retreat, but has continued to advance (and even prosper) thenceforth. I ask you to ponder why that is, and to remember that the Pharisees who crucified Jesus were the very same men who witnessed his miracles. M. James spoke of the Will to Believe; the Will to Disbelieve is just as real.

You mention the paradox of the stone (or of the burrito), a quite interesting problem. As far as I can tell, this is the only argument you have advanced which concerns solely the Christian God and not the deistic God; all the others apply as much to the latter as to the former. (The reason for this is that only the Christian God is allegedly omnipotent.) Thus, in my view, the paradox of the stone is the only argument you have advanced that favors deism over theism. If the paradox of the stone can be dismantled, it seems to me that Christian theism is much more philosophically rigorous than deism (whether or not it ultimately is true).

I fear that my initial tripartite response to this paradox was flawed, and I hope that I can correct my errors here. The simplest way to answer the paradox is to consider what God's 'omnipotence,' as described in scripture, actually entails; a quandary for the Christian arises only if scripture attributes to God that which is incoherent. But there is no reason to believe that the idea of omnipotence as espoused in scripture connotes the ability to violate logic; thus, the paradox of the stone is irrelevant. To illustrate this point, consider that scripture says that God cannot lie (Titus i.2); as you can see, the Bible itself asserts that God is technically 'bound' by some 'law.' God's omnipotence, then, signifies only complete dominion over nature and all active powers, not over 'logic' or 'morality.' Obviously, this sort of omnipotence is perfectly compatible with logic. Because neither 'logic' nor 'morality' is active in any sense – in fact, it is questionable whether they exist as anything more than descriptors of other entities and actions – God's being 'bound' by them is not troublesome at all. Essentially, the paradox of the stone depends upon an anachronistic understanding of omnipotence.

You observe next some potential flaws in my argument based on what you called the 'statistical unlikelihood of human life evolving,' referring also to multiverse theories related to this issue. Note that I was not employing the argument from 'statistical unlikelihood' as an argument for the existence of God (though I believe that it could function as such when conjoined with other arguments); rather, I was invoking it to answer the separate question, What is the nature of the Transcendent? I believe the fact that the Transcendent brought into existence a world which could support sentient life is extremely telling. ('Who knows what other life forms could have developed if gravity were GM1M2/S3?' From what I have read, scientists are able to simulate alternate universes with an impressive degree of precision. Of all the possibly universes that could exist, very few can support stable atoms, let alone stable multicellular organisms.)

Apparently, you are under the impression that I said multiverses could resolve the flaws in my argument. On the contrary, few things could be more damaging to this aspect of my argument than the existence of parallel universes. (This is one reason scientists have postulated the existence of parallel universes; in a way, they provide a much more comforting and "scientific explanation than deism or theism.) Of course, I see no reason to believe that parallel universes exist or could exist, nor do I see how we could ever directly observe universes which never intersected ours.

Finally, you propose some of Ayn Rand's idea of man as an alternative to Christianity. Though this does not directly pertain to the main purpose of your letter or my response, I feel it necessary to comment on Mlle. Rand's views. You write, 'Her characters have been described as "flat," but I view them more as super-humans, the ideal you strive to achieve. You don't need to see or know anything besides the ideal, because that is your only goal.' Then, you quote Rand herself: 'Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all.'

Perhaps her characters are ideal; but even if they are, they represent an ideal which we cannot achieve. Perhaps man's natural estate is an upright posture; but even if it is, man has fallen and cannot bring himself to rise again. Perhaps our minds should be intransigent; but even if they should be, they most certainly are not. You say that Rand's characters are super-human. I say that they are not human at all; they are machines. Humans are weak and stunted and far too often evil – our hearts are hearts of darkness. Humans are those whom Mlle. Rand regards with contempt.

I propose, as an alternative to Howard Roark and Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden, the twisted and rent body of Jesus Christ. Should man remain upright? Perhaps – yet Christ hung low and limp upon the cross. Should we remain unflinching and uncompromising and 'intransigent'? Yet Christ became obedient to Death, even death on a cross (Philippians ii. 8); 'and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth' (Isaiah liii. 7). Let Rand proudly boast all the more, yet Christ's words upon the cross were broken: 'My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?' (Matthew xxvii. 46) Let her conquer the world with her strength; Christ shall conquer the world with his love.

God help us [] if we are called to save ourselves; I know that I cannot. The truth is that the ideal is far, far greater than anything Rand ever devised: the ideal is perfection itself, Love itself, Jesus himself. And the miracle is that we can draw closer to this ideal, not merely when we rise, but even when we stumble. For my God has promised this to me: 'My grace is sufficient for thee, for My power is made perfect in weakness' (2 Corinthians xii. 9). Mlle. Rand may keep her philosophers, kings, and giants. Christ will call the weak, the poor, and the downtrodden – the human.

Everything fades []. People die or move away; old friendships sputter out; our aging memories cheat us of our pasts. Things change. There is so much death in the world – physical death and spiritual death. Every lie, every burst of anger, every selfish act: with every sin, something – trust, innocence, beauty – dies. Something dies, and it cannot quickly be restored. Something dies, and you and I are powerless to do anything about it.

But God is not. And because of God, I know that Death itself shall die; 'for Love is strong as Death' (Song of Solomon viii. 6). All the earthly deaths that encumber and surround us will one day be utterly forgotten. Jesus' sacrifice will triumph over all of them; he will swallow up Death forever (Isaiah xxv. 8). 'God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away' (Revelation xxi. 4). 'Our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us' (Romans viii. 18). And thus, we can boast: 'Where, O Death, is thy victory? Where, O Death, is thy sting?' (1 Corinthians xv. 55) For 'the last enemy that shall be destroyed is Death' (1 Corinthians xv. 26).

Aquinas is reported to have told another monk that all his works seemed like 'straw' compared to what he had seen. And as I conclude this letter, I know, like Aquinas, that my words cannot do justice to that beautiful Truth which has consumed me; I can only pray that the thoughts expressed herein will draw you closer to it. [] I ask you to look beyond my words; seek the hidden meaning. Do not be swayed by the Beauty without first being swayed by the Truth – but do not forsake either lightly.

'For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known' (1 Corinthians xiii. 12).

[]"

Owen on War

2009-03-16T23:38:00.002-04:00

From Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est":

"If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori."

Twilight of the "Christian" America

2009-03-09T23:30:00.002-04:00

So I doubt anyone finds this particularly surprising. But a couple of interesting questions come to mind:

1. Why is this shift occurring? (I can think of a number of different potential reasons.)
2. How can American Christians reverse this trend?