The George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum

Last week saw the dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum, situated on the campus of Southern Methodist University. The project is the result of one half billion dollars in fundraising. Its dedication was attended by every living president, from James Carter, through a wheelchair bound George H.W. Bush, to a spry, and comparatively young, Barack Obama. For a brief moment, it occupied national and international attention, with most major American news sources adding their particular take to a very well worn story. Here is a sampling of journalistic fare from the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Mother Jones, the New York Times, and The Atlantic.

Reporters seem to have gravitated towards telling one of two stories. The first looked at the "Obama angle". Yes, the current POTUS was in attendance, and also was able to set aside ideological bickering across parties for a very brief moment. This story is favourable towards Obama, but rides on the idea that the Office of the President stands above the Washington fray. Bush escaped largely unscathed. The second story looked more closely at the content of the library and museum. The library and museum will house around 43,000 artifacts and millions of documents from the 43rd president's tenure. Reporters chomped at the bit of demand for journalistic objectivity to raise obvious questions about whether the history told the library and museum will in any way reflect reality. The Mother Jones article linked to above lists eight things you won't find in the new library and museum facilities--the eighth being evidence of the existence of WMDs of Saddam's Iraq. (Because there wasn't any.) In this second story, Bush assumes the form of an object of scorn.

Of the two stories, I find the second is intrinsically more interesting. With the first, we get to watch the great game being played out in a highly controlled environment. Instead of being allowed to criticize your opponents explicitly, politicians have to score points by appearing to play nice. Obama and Bush are cast as figureheads for much larger trends in American society. Their ability to play nice for a brief moment is indicative of the fading memory of a common destiny for all Americans. Compared to the immediacy of the first story, however, the intrinsic charm of the second story is found in its impoverished rendition of Winston Churchill's audacious claim, 'History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.'  Churchill wrote rather glowing accounts of the role he himself played in WWII in a six-part book series on the conflict. Consider the many hours invested in literary production alongside the achievements of Bush, who has taken up painting. Bush solicited wealthy friends to put up millions of dollars to have someone else do what can only be described as whitewashing a rather tarnished public image. Intellectually lazy only begins to describe this latter-day attempt to resuscitate a legacy.

My own take own the efforts of Bush and friends will be obvious from the tone of the preceding. The outrages of the GOP alumni against historical scholarship, however, interest me more as a illustration of larger problems associated with the interpretation of human history than they do as examples of individual failings. The default assumption, or what can best be described as the common sense way of thinking about things, is that the study of human history gets at something objectively out there waiting to be discovered, in the same way that the fundamental features of matter or new species of animals are out there waiting to be discovered. Hence Bush is confident that the 'facts', maturing with the passage of time, will reflect well on his tenure as president. Once all the facts are known, or have come to light, or what have you, they will show him in a much better light than his detractors are presently willing to admit. Not unsurprisingly, those detractors are convinced the same set of facts, in due course, will prove otherwise.

Which raises the question, What is meant by the term 'fact'? The dedication of a temple of Dubya's prowess raises questions about whether and in what sense the study of human history, or the study of the humanities more generally, is comparable to the natural sciences, like physics, chemistry, or biology. Is the historian's object, say, Bush's tenure as president, objectively available in the same sense of the natural scientist's object is available? This is not something scholars and scholars spend much time fretting about. The construction of the modern university discourages comparison between academic disciplines (even as it encourages something called 'interdisciplinarity'). Both groups can go about their day without giving much thought to where they stand vis-a-vis the other.

The fundamental criteria for factuality are that the object in question be observable such that others can verify what was observed in order to confirm the success of a theoretical framework framework to account for what was observed. The theory of evolution one such framework, within which is organized the relationships between different species of animals--or 'the facts' derived from the observation of fossils and living organisms. On this definition of factuality, Bush's tenure as president fails one of the fundamental criteria of factuality. While there is initial observation of the object, there is no possibility of verification. Bush's tenure is a one-time unrepeatable affair--thankfully.

But so is the evolution of this or that species of organism, would seem to be the obvious objection. That's true; but there's a second consideration will further complicate the comparison The material evidence for evolution and the material evidence for Bush's tenure as president are fundamentally different. Scientists theorize about processes operating in biological materials independently of creative human input. Human beings don't guide the long process that lead to the evolution of human beings. The material evidences for the evolutionary process is there to be studied, theorized about, maybe even interfered with, tweaked, 'improved' upon--but that's all. The historian, on the other hand, studies a body of material evidence that could have no existence apart from creative human input. It is impossible to conceive of all those textual, audio, visual artifacts attesting to Bush's tenure as president arising through non-human agencies, which is what evolutionary processes are. The historian never escapes the circle of humanity.

So I raise a Shakespearean equivalent to the middle finger and call a pox down on all their houses. How Bush's tenure will be judged in the long term won't come down to something called 'the facts', however broadly or narrowly that might be interpreted. Bush and friends need to take a page about the inevitably that future generations will judge you out of a Confucian playbook. Future generations will judge your actions, not against a set of objective facts, but for your humanity. If, to cast it in terms of extremes, you were a tyrant or a dandy, don't expect to be looked favourably upon. If the suffering of the mass of humanity increased under your watch, don't expect to be lauded. It one of the features of the interpretation of human history that the next generation is not likely to agree with your own assessment of yourself, especially if its trumped up way out of proportion. And if the next generation doesn't, then the generation after that will--or the generation after that, and so on, and on, and on, and on.

The lesson is that one does best measuring oneself against one's fellow human beings than against some objective standard or abstract goal. We are all, every one of us, in this together.

Teaching Philosophy

The study of philosophy, or the study of what other people have said that gets categorized under the heading 'philosophy', has the potential to leave one feeling a perpetual student. Expertise can be acquired in a so-called "field" of study. Along the way, however, students will have realized their "field" of study looks less like an actual field and more like a narrowly defined section of a bookshelf in a stuffy library. They will have also realized that one never finishes studying philosophy.

It's an interesting thought experiment to put the shoe on the other foot. What if you had to teach philosophy? Where would you start? Any student can give a non-committal answer questions about what they are studying. They are on their way to knowledge, and, in any case, there is too much to capture is a single phrase. On the hand, a teacher lacks that bohemian luxury. They must say something

The first thing I would do is set aside any latent Socratic inclinations. The Ancient Greek philosopher Plato cast his teacher, the famous Socrates, in the role of questioner, leading his conversation partners to the realization of truths they already knew, but had quite been able to articulate on their own. My approach would include a discussion of a famous philosophical text. We would have never known Socrates, after all, unless Plato of cast him as a character in his philosophical dialogues. Regardless how much talking philosophers do, they are always falling back into texts, each of which is going to preserve a small portion of a tradition of reflection that never quite comes clearly into focus.

More to the point, then, which text would you start with? And let's say, for the sake of argument, it could only be one text. Not one thinker. Not one philosophical school. Not one series of texts. One text.

My choice would be Rene Descartes' Discourse on Method (1637). There are a few reasons why.

First, the text is relatively brief. It contains six chapters in total, all of which can be digested in a single sitting, or over a number of sittings without much difficulty..

Second, the purpose of the text is to take a position on anything in particular, but to introduce the reader into a way of thinking about things. You are invited to follow Descartes on his philosophical journey, to think through why he came to the conclusions that he eventually did.

Third, Descartes' philosophical observations are woven through a personal narrative allowing for historical commentary. That means a teacher can put "flesh" on the bones of the argument, placing arid speculative suggestions in a more recognizable human context.

Fourth, the Discourse contains recognizably contemporary intuitions about the nature of things. It takes the form of a personal narrative. It is playful experimental with the ideas it presents. It wonders about the nature of the human self. And, most importantly, God has been displaced from the center of inquiry. The entire world of human experience is no longer assumed to come from God and return to him. (It still does, of course. Descartes holds God to be the Creator of all things. He is not willing, however, to start with that as the presupposition of his inquiry.)

The basic argument of the Discourse is that all those things Descartes had formerly held to be true he had discovered many reasons to doubt. His experience of violent and destructive discord among different Christian sects during the Thirty Year's War had lead him to seek a more certain basis for knowledge. The revelation of God could not be trusted, as it was mediated by human beings. The same went for the teaching of the schools, by which was meant the abstruse logic-chopping arguments of the late medieval world.

So Descartes resolves to doubt all that can possibly be doubted, and in the process doubts no only what other people have told him, but also what his own eyes and ears "tell" him. He even suggests, for the sake of experiment, it is possible to conceive of oneself existing without a body. After "emptying" his mind of all those doubtful thoughts, Descartes arrives at the one conviction he cannot shake: I think therefore I am--"that is to say, the mind by which I am what I am, is wholly distinct from the body, and is even more easily known than the latter, and is such, that although the latter were not, it would still continue to be all that it is."

All of this is ripe for discussion. Is the format of philosophical dialogue effective in conveying the author's intention? To what extent is one's thinking conditioned by one's lived circumstances? What would it mean to begin one's thinking with God rather than oneself? and vice versa? Is it possible to doubt everything? Can we ever be certain of anything? What might it mean that our minds our completely distinct from our bodies. Does any of this even makes sense?

The closer you look at a text like the Discourse, the more perplexing it becomes. Descartes is perhaps best described as not quite modern enough. Which makes his Discourse the perfect choice to begin teach philosophy.

Does anyone else have other suggestions?

Menial Labour

I am no stranger to what is elsewhere called 'menial' labour. Growing up in rural Ontario, my first jobs were both physical and monotonous. The same tasks had to be performed day in and day out. The jobs were, almost without fail, dirty jobs--especially when I was cleaning things. I was good at these menial jobs. I wasn't great at them. I could perform adequately the tasks required of me, though I was unlikely to perform them expertly or to take much of my own initiative. The sorts of thinking required to see solutions to very rural and/or blue collar problems was not in my possession.

I also have exposure to white collar 'menial' labour. The most recent bit of experience I can cite comes from last night invigilating a chemistry examination. I thought I would try invigilation out this year, so I threw my name into a pool of potential hirees. A single hour and a half training session a week in advance and a 15 minutes pep talk before the exam was supposed to make our tasks straight-forward and obvious. Then a 25+ person team was sent in a number directions, with an examination 'package' in hand, but more or less without support.

Sent to the room with the examination package, complete with examination papers and instructions for their distribution, as well as a half hour to spare, I realized immediately that someone getting paid a lot more than me had failed to assign the necessary second person to the room. Unable to raise my supervisor on the phone, I started prioritizing tasks. The examination 'circulator' eventually made their way to the room that I was in and realized much the same thing. For some reason, though, it was my fault that things weren't getting done the way they were supposed to get done.

A second person was sent to the room, a half hour after the examination had started, which had been delayed by ten minutes. Having been told repeatedly to follow every step on the invigilation instruction sheet, I relished the oppourtunity to cut corners where corners could be cut. It wasn't my fault, you see. I did the best with what I was given. If my best wasn't good enough, don't blame me for doing my best. Blame my superiors for their incompetence.

This most recent experience with white collar 'menial' labour impressed upon me the dreadful impenetrability of bureaucratic structures, in particular that of those in immediate authority above you. The experience also raised some questions, in my mind, about the exercise of authority is so proceeds so differently in a rural and blue collar world from a white collar world (though my observations would also apply to highly structured factory environment).

As I said above, I was a good worker, but not a great worker. Those persons who I worked under, whether that was in farming, landscaping, moving, or construction, seemed to understand as much. I put in long days of work, and only once or twice over the course of a decade remember being belittled for a failure or mistake. More to the point, those persons with whom the responsibility ultimately laid usually went about fixing the mess that I had made without too much complaint. There is a certain inevitably in mistakes, was the guiding sentiment. Try to prevent them, but deal with them as humanely as possible when they do happen.

I was surprised how vigorously my supervisors made it plain to me that their failings were ultimately my responsibility. There is a certain rationale for doing so, of course. In the moment, I am the one who has to perform in order for their program to be put into action. But the bureaucratic structure falls to pieces when those in charge fail to anticipate an obvious problem and also vigorously protest the smallest exercise of independent judgment in the matter. The bosses not only think you are stupid and incompetent. They treat you like it too.

Why the difference between these two sorts of bosses? It may be that what I am describing is merely a function of the size of the organization. But I have to also think it is a consequence of the sorts of materials being worked on. In the rural and blue collared trades, you work with particularly stubborn, resistant, and in every case also non-rational materials. Fields of wheat do not rebel against you, nor skids of lumber and brick talk back at you. Persons assigned to do a specific task, in highly structured, rationalized processes, on the other hand, are expected to comprehend and implement a set of instructions in very short order. They are also instructed not to think for themselves, which, if something should go wrong, has a real potential to allow things to go from bad to worse in a very short order.

So I wonder if facing stubborn non-rational resistance necessarily inculcates a very different sort of response from bosses than does facing the apparent irrationality of menial wage labourer in a highly structured working environment. Why do we expect different from persons than we do from the non-human sorts of materials that we work on? Arguably, human materials are more difficult to shape to our wishes.

What is Philosophy?

I have a few moments. So I want to ask the basic question: What is philosophy? Instead of answering the question, though, it might be useful to reflect on how the question might be answered.

It seems to me we have two basic options, whether due to the limitations of language, or cognitive capabilities, or both. We can say philosophy is what it is (that is, philosophy, which doesn't get us very far at all), or we can define it in terms of something else (e.g. the love of wisdom, critical thinking about X, Y, and Z, etc.). These two possibilities represent relations of identity and relations of difference. They are probably best termed strategies for analysis, not necessarily methods for getting at the truth of things. Relations of identity presuppose differences between identities, and relations of difference presuppose identities which are different. When I ask, What is philosophy? simply by using the word, I bring along a host on more or less (as yet) uninterrogated meanings.

If wisdom is identified with the divine and philosophy is the love of wisdom, for example, then philosophy is also the love of God--which raises questions about whether philosophy and theology and/or religion are so different. If critical thinking is identified with an inquirer ready to question every possible assumption, then philosophy is allied with critique, doubt, or skeptical stance towards knowledge claims--which raises questions about whether philosophy has anything in common with the dogmas of religion and theology. I don't want to ally myself with either of these definitions. I do want to observe the interrelatedness of definitions with other definitions.

Now, I have a Masters in Philosophy. However, I was warned, in a round about way, by my supervisor not to pursue a Ph.D. in the discipline. The result was that I ended up in Religious Studies, where I am quite happy teaching and thinking about subjects related to religion and its history. The reason given was that my thinking was much too theological in cast to succeed in a philosophy program. That's probably more or less true, though I ended up in a Religious Studies Faculty, not a Theology department, which was my preference.

You see, it seemed to me, for the same reason I wasn't prepared to do a Ph.D in Philosophy, I also wasn't prepared to do a Ph.D in Theology. Everyone was talking (that is, from my naive, undergrad and Masters degree perspectives) about philosophy and theology as if they were objectively describable things to be studied. With regards to theology, that made a small amount of sense, since theologians claim to be talking about something real, something 'out there', which has been mediated by scriptural sources and a long textual tradition of reflection on those scriptural sources. In the case of theology, there is something out there to objectify, something I can point you towards, something we can consider together and talk about.

What about philosophy? There appears to be a textual tradition going back to Plato and Aristotle that can be studied. Though I suspect philosophers prize at least the idea of freedom of inquiry too much to be explicitly tied down to any specific set of texts. One hears it suggested that philosophy is not limited to the study of a certain body of literature, but is a way of thinking about things imparted from teachers to students (much like Socrates was supposed to have imparted his wisdom). That may be the case. Such a definition only distracts from the omnipresent place the study of texts plays in philosophy departments or philosophical armchairs (whereupon the armchair philosopher sits).


At this point, in order to wrap up a blog post that is already much longer than I anticipated, I want to show my cards. I have soured towards the idea that separate academic disciplines (philosophy, theology, history, political theory, English literature, etc.) are as distinct from each other as many of our teachers have supposed. It seems to me that common too each of the so-called separate disciplines is the thinking human being, reflecting on some body of evidence. There is no thought without some object, as David Hume reminded his Cartesian interlocutors  at least none that I am ever aware. The theologian thinks, the historian thinks, the philosopher thinks, etc. They think differently, however, according to their different objects of inquiry.

And it seems to me, if philosophy is anything, it is reflecting on (or thinking about) how we think about things. Full stop. The definition of philosophy needs to be made with reference to the human being who thinks about things, and not some set of abstract definitions. Not, say, the love of wisdom apart from the person who loves wisdom. Not critical inquiry apart from the person who inquiries critically. Not a definition considered at an abstracted remove from the person considering the definition. Rather a person who can say to themselves, I am thinking about things, and that's what I normally do; and when I philosophize, I think about what it is to think about things.

A/theism and Certainty

Patrol Magazine retweeted an article published last October on the modern history of A/theism. The two words theism and atheism are paired together, the article's argument goes, because modern theism cannot be understood apart from modern atheism, and vice versa. They 'emerged from the early modern world together, as two sides of the same coin', a claim which fits well with the portrait of modern culture painted by the intellectual authorities, including John Millbank (Theology and Social Theory) Charles Taylor (A Secular Age). The contest between theism and atheism in the modern age is presented by partisans as a zero-sum game. The winner must take all and the loser must be vanquished from the field.

The author of the article, Kenneth Shephard, notes a correspondence between late 20th century assessment of modern A/theism and 16th and 17th century attempts to cover the same intellectual ground. For so many of the persons involved in the discussion, theism and atheism go together like transcendent and immanent, each term in these pairing excluding the other, but also presupposing the existence of the other in their own need to exclude something. Atheism needs theism like science needs the straw-man of religion to knock down. Theism needs atheism like good needs something evil to vilify. In this sense, they are like children behaving badly.

Sheppard situates A/theism in larger 'processes of disenchantment, desacralization, and secularization'. Instead of seeing theism and atheism as opposed over matters of religion and science, the better thing to do is observe how theists and atheists make sense of the world as the language of scientific discovery drives fantastical claims from the public square. Instead of demonizing one from the vantage of its opposite, pause and take note of those cultural trends they commonly presuppose. The two sides may talk as if they share nothing in common. Historians like Sheppard, however, know better than to buy into their self-assertive, but partial, ideological perspectives. Where there exists contiguity in space and contemporaneity in time, ideologues are shown to be liars of the first order. All the talk in the world cannot hide the fact that some cultural currency is shared in common.

The analytic framework proposed is a helpful move in the right direction. Once one stops trying to measure the perspective of one's opponents against the measuring stick of History (with a captial 'H"), it should become a whole lot easier to have a conversation--in principle, at least. When the political left inclined towards atheism and political right inclined towards some variety of theism are divided from each other as past is from future, there is very little reason to talk. Conservatives are stuck in the past say the progressives, and progressives have forgotten the past say the conservatives. The measuring stick of History tends to distract from obvious truths: that all of our business with each other is transacted in that shared moment the past is no more and the future not yet called the present.

The purpose of the article, if I have understood correctly, was to do what is termed in very post-modern language creating space for dialogue where 'traditional religious believers, “nones”, and atheists can relate to and work with one another in spite of what can seem like our insurmountable differences.' This is all well and good, and I am all for having a friendly conversation on a level playing field. But the article's argument seems to thrust readers in the direction of abandoning their idols, all those things they hold dear, without actually interrogating why we hold onto our idols with the tenacity that we do.

Sheppard speaks very generally about historical processes, and very little about historical actors. That is a problem, it seems to me, because I have never encountered one operating apart from the other. He speaks very generally about what we believe about the nature of God and the world, and very little about what we have thought about ourselves.

If there is one thing that sets modern A/theism apart from its premodern manifestations, in my estimation, it's an ideal of certitude shared by all alike. The modern atheist rest assured that there is no God because the evidence is lacking, while the modern theist does the same because that's what the Scriptures say. The sorts of evidence to which appeal is made changes, but the constancy of conviction does not. The origins of the certitude might be traced to such luminaries as Martin Luther ('Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason...Here I stand. I can do no other.') and Rene Descartes ('This proposition, I think, therefore I am, is the first and the most certain which presents itself to whoever conducts his thoughts in order.'). The exposure of the baseness of all these simplistic appeals to certitude, e.g. in the work of Nietzsche and his post-structuralist disciples, might also be cited, though as proof of just how deep our certainty runs, now that we have become certain of our uncertainty.

So I will take my departure from Sheppard where he suggests we tell 'critical stories' about the 'conditions of our belief'. (Why not build a campfire and bring some guitars?) That suggestion sounds like an exercise in talking around the issue, which has instead to do with whether and in what sense we are certain.

Muller on Thought and Language

The Ancient Greeks used the word 'logos' to symbolize two sorts of things today we usually keep separate: on the one hand thoughts, and on the other hand spoken words. Not even written words (like these words on the screen in front of you) were regarded as highly as spoken words. Only the spoken word carried the immediate force of a persons thoughts. They carried the force of a person`s soul, their purpose, even their life. Words on the page were dead letters, hollow reminders of things once spoken.

Reading through Friedrich Max Muller's lectures on Natural Religion, just how far our intellectual convictions in the 21st century have wandered from Ancient preoccupations was impressed upon me. More recent figures like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke could have still carried on an agreeable conversation with the Ancients about things that follow as a consequence of the intimate relationship between spoken words and thoughts. Intuitively, I think, we should also be able to recognize what they are talking about. We each have our own 'internal monologue' by which we think through ideas in the form of a more or less broken conversation with ourselves. (Please tell me I am not the only one!) But we don't place the same sort of theoretical value on the distinction between our internal monologue with ourselves and an external dialogue with other people (or with yourself, though that usually attracts the concerned attention of other people.)

Muller establishes, fairly persuasively in my estimation, that no human being thinks without words. Our knowledge of language comes out of processes of socialization, especially early on in life. Knowledge of language allows for the communication of desire, purpose, or query. All of those 'higher cognitive functions' seem to depend on a mastery of language. Now that is not to say that other animals do not cognize and communicate. But what they lack, Muller thinks, is the ability to abstract and categorize, analyze and synthesize--specifically those things that have allowed human beings to cultivate the ground, transform the natural world, build up a civilization, and write books and blogs about it, wondering what it is to be a being that has words--logoi.

The conclusion he eventually puts to his readers is still manages to be something of an eye-opener.

The reason why real thought is impossible without language is very simple. What we call language is not, as is commonly supposed, thought plus sound, but what we call thought is really language minus sound. That is to say, when we are once in possession of language, we may hum our words, or remember them in perfect silence, as we remember a piece of music without a single vibration of our vocal chords...But as little as we can reckon without actual or disguised numerals, can we reason without actual or disguised words.

The first part of Muller's observation is strange enough on its own. It never dawned on me to ask myself whether language was thought plus sound or thought was language minus sound. The comparison itself is intelligible enough. I have thoughts, and you can't hear them unless I speak my thoughts, at which point my thought become audible words. But I never thought the difference might be theoretically productive.

Muller's decision against defining language as thought plus sound in favour of thought as language minus sound is even more perplexing. (Hence I am blogging about it.) The decision corresponds well with the above noted observation that our knowledge of language--and our ability to think--comes through processes of socialization. We don't just make up our own words. Someone, usually parents, teaches us how to use them. The decision also conceptualizes words as objects of study. They are cast as things that we can both look at and think about, and then have a conversation about. They are perceptible objects, ultimately not reducible to the interpretive whims of persons.

But does Muller's account make sense of our individual experience using words? When he says thought is language minus sound, he seems to suggest that the language we use does our thinking for us. And, no doubt, there is something to this. If people spend enough time together, talking to each other, they end up thinking more or less on the same lines. We tend to listen to and read things that confirm our sense of the world around us.

I have to wonder, though. I personally have had a not infrequent experience of lacking the right words to express my intention. The words don't correspond quite right to an objective states of affairs, and so I find myself unable to communicate my meaning. The result is that the logoi in my head don't always seem to match up with the logoi in someone else head. The only thing to be done is root around in my head for better words or better ways of stringing words together.

The Ancient Greek idea of logos is able to make sense of this situation. It locates intelligence both inside and outside a person's head, but doesn't require that the correspondence between them be completely transparent. About Muller's conception of language, I am not so sure. If thought is really just language minus sound, if the correspondence really is transparent, one has to wonder who is doing the thinking.

Dying with Iain (M.) Banks

The Scottish science fiction writer Iain Banks announced to the world today that he probably only has a few months left to live. Diagnosed with gall bladder cancer a couple of weeks ago, Banks has put his feverish rate of literary output on hold indefinitely, asked his partner of many years if she would do him 'the honour of becoming my widow', and plans to spend the remainder of his days visiting with family, friends, and locations that hold personal meaning. He is not yet decided whether he will pursue chemotherapy treatment to extend briefly what time remains to him.

Banks breathed new life into the high art of hard science fiction, which had known such masters as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, with a series of Culture novels. The better examplars of the genre are defined by a certain cosmic gimmick, setting the stage on which the plot line unfolds. For Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, for example, the discipline of psychohistory, developed by the patriarchal character Hari Seldon, promised to unlock the key to social development. Seldon predicted the decline of the Galactic Empire, and laid foundations for a much more durable successor. The predictive failure of psychohistory to account for an enigmatic figure known as the Mule, a sort of galactic Napoleon, drives the plots of the second and third parts of the trilogy.

The cosmic gimmick driving Bank's Culture novels does not allow for quite so much human participation. The Culture novels form a collection of more or less disconnected narratives set in the same universe. The Culture is a vast civilization governed over by massive artificial intelligences, who keep a human population sprawling across planets, airspheres orbital platforms, shellworlds, and ships spread across a large portion of several galaxies (if my memory serves me correctly). The narratives play out in the vast distance between the finite human mind and, what are for all intents and purposes, practically infinite Minds. Banks has a gift for imagine vast intelligences whose experience of space and time is utterly dissimilar from human perception.

The Culture is a 'post-scarcity' society, in which no citizen lacks for their basic needs. Surrendering the government of human society to the Minds, removing human avarice, error, and whim from the political equation, meant that material equilibrium in society was now possible. Money and personal possessions no longer exist, though material prosperity still allows for the cultivation of privacy. There is a moral seriousness to Bank's storytelling. He doesn't shy away from explore the fiber of a society that has grown fat, complacent, and playfully irresponsible, and whose personal bonds are reinforced by an artificial structure. At the same time, the Culture narratives seems to play out like an internal monologue in Banks own head as he explores the logic of his atheist convictions. Many of his characters regard their own existence with a sort of bemused shrug one can well imagine their author shares. A touch of the great stoic Scotsman David Hume exists in Banks--and there would be more, if he weren't so damned Hegelian.

I started reading Banks' work about six years ago, around the same I picked up George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones series. It was his ability to expound on philosophical themes in novel form that prompted me to read as much as his work as I had the time the to spare. Like so many other science fiction authors, Banks rethinks divine transcendence in terms of a future state of affairs, rather than an eternal present, which is the same everywhere, past, present, and future. Divinity, though still exceedingly powerful, is placed under spatio-temporal constraints. In the case of Bank's Minds, they emerge from the depths of human creativity, achieve independent sentience, and are let loose to care for their creators. Granted this only seems like a different form of servitude; but the Minds, particularly the ship-based Minds, seem to take it all in stride and dry humour.

Science fiction writers are usually at their best mocking the old ideas of God and domesticating it to their purposes. I say usually because I am not sure that someone like Robert J. Sawyer actually knows how to do anything more than preach to an atheist choir. Bank's literary engagements succeed, to my mind, on account of his willingness to acknowledge that dethroning the old gods does not eliminate the existential questions for which the old gods provided answers.

Not wanting to sound insensitive, I will be curious to watch the moment when the pen which Banks uses to write this final chapter in his life finally falls from his hands and is taken up by an increasingly vocal atheist elite. Banks' life is likely to be eulogized, his self-sufficient hold on existence, his lust and zest for life, held up as an example for atheists everywhere, much like late Christopher Hitchens' life has been celebrated.

Hagiography is a double-edged sword. When you extol the virtues of mere mortals, they usually end up appearing more mortal and less virtuous. It has very little to do with the person being eulogized, in any case, and more about what s/he has meant or continues to mean for we who live on. But perhaps it best not to speed Banks along his way just yet by thinking on what might be. Some time still remains. And the publication date for one final book has been moved up.

They Knew Not Dawkins

The Book of Exodus begins with the ominous words, 'Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph.' The words signal the beginning of a new chapter. One of the twelve sons of Jacob (Israel), Joseph's prudent government had saved Egypt, and by extension Israel, from seven-years of famine. But at the beginning of Exodus, we find Israel's children in slavery.

Now I don't want to make to much of the analogy I am going to draw with the opening lines of Exodus. At least, nothing ominous. It seems, in the course of four short years of teaching in an Introduction to World Religions class, I have witnessed the coming of a generation of students who do not know Richard Dawkins. The realization caught me by surprise, and got me thinking about what sort of cultural groundswell might be occuring.

Lecturing on Judaism four years ago, I used Dawkins' dismissive reading of the first chapter of Genesis as a counterpoint for what one might expect the original readers took away from the text. I countered the Dawkins take on so-called six-day creationism by observing that the only real expectation original readers probably took away was that a week had seven days. Not five days, or six days, nor eight days, or ten days. Seven days: six on which people work, like God worked, and one of which they rest, like God rested. My evidence? That's what is says the original readers were supposed to take away from the text in Exodus 20, otherwise known as the Ten Commandments. Before I gave my pious spiel, however, I asked how many people in the audience knew who Dawkins was. Out of a class of 50 or 60, a full third raised their hands.

When I asked the same question this semester, not one person is 50 raised their hand. A bit taken aback, I think I sputtered through an explanation of who he was and why he was significant. The life of an atheist is not exactly on message in a world religions class, I will grant you. Tying the now irrelevant reference to Dwakins into a short discussion of the shortcoming of six-day creationism I managed not to look too much the fool.

Students of 18, 19, or 20 years of age did not know Dawkins. Wow. As far as popular intellectual discourse goes, it seems like Dawkins is all I've ever known. What changed over such a short period of time? In the broader scheme of things, popular culture has most likely chewed Dawkins up and spit him out. Which will happen to almost everyone who courts the public eye. Dawkins, who only has a single message, is bound to be effective in short term, but will tire audiences out over the long term.

More tellingly, perhaps, the composition of the world religions class has also changed. My general impression is that the number of Caucasian students has declined in proportion to other ethnic demographics--Arabic and Indian especially.

So the reasons may run deeper than mere generational shifts. For the first time in my life, many students come to religious studies largely innocent of the lengthy 19th and 20th century traditions stemming from the Enlightenment tradition of criticizing religion--specifically Christianity, but religion more generally. I have caught myself a number of times using Western atheism as a foil in conversation with student, for example, in comparison to Buddhism or Hinduism, or in comparison to the charge of atheism brought against early Christians. Students are always polite, but I have left conversations wondering whether alluding to Western atheism was the best way to illustrate a point.

Prospects for the future are interesting. My intellectual battles, the intellectual battles of my teachers, and their teachers, and their teacher's teachers, may be nothing more than an antiquarian curiosity to the next generation of students. That's strange to think about. The Christian sub-culture in which I grew up and was educated defined itself over against a secular world, which was in its turn defined by nominal professions of faith and outright skepticism. The Christian sub-culture was animated by the myth of a lost Christendom, a place from which we came and back to which the faithful would have to bring the country, kicking a screaming if necessary. Growing immigrant communities, however, don't carry the same chip on the cultural shoulder that Christian communities do. They do not necessarily have the same suspicion of the secular public square, nor do they see the sort of tensions between religious life and public life that domestic Christian communities have internalized.

Perhaps I shouldn't underestimate the ability of Western academia to thoroughly inoculate the second of third generations in immigrant families against religious beliefs. At the same time, I fairly confident Christian communities will not abandon their suspicion of the secular public square any time soon. These are intellectual potentialities. What about the demographic numbers? Given the growing numbers of immigrants, it is becoming increasingly unlikely that immigrant communities are simply going to choose between one of Caucasian two solitudes.

I wonder, therefore, how debate about the nature of secularity is also going to change in the next few decades. For the last 40 or so years, the North American arm of the debate has increasingly been couched in winner-take-all terms. The character of the debate changes if there's more than one major religious participant (or two, if you count Judaism; or three, if you count Mormonism). The character changes significantly if one of the new participants is not a native Western European tradition.

Evangelicalism and Science

For the sake of clarity, though the title may allude questions about the relationship between something called religion and something called science, I should point out my intention is not to commit cognitive suicide. Sometime in the middle of the 20th century, academics, including not a few Evangelicals, decided it would be a good idea to pretend religion and science were discrete things. Ian J. Barbour's taxonomic, historical analysis of these supposedly discrete 'things' is an especially famous example. Those who followed his line of thinking bought into a fundamental conceptual error, which would have beggared belief among pre-modern and early-modern thinkers. No longer did the human being have thoughts in their head, but thoughts had human beings through whom they expressed themselves on the historical stage. Religion did this and that, these taxonomists said, while Science did the other. In short, they commit cognitive suicide.

So, for the sake of clarity, what here is meant by 'Evangelicalism' is how self-identified Evangelicals have understood and continue to understand themselves in relation to a world full of other persons and a myriad number of other things. More to the point, what is meant by 'Evangelicalism and science' is how self-identified Evangelicals have thought about the methodological assumptions of contemporary science. Neither Evangelicalism nor science possess a thing-like qualities. Rather they are terms employed to designate ways of thinking about the human experience of things in the world. A self-identified Evangelical, on the other hand, does possess a think-like quality; though the capacity for self-definition means, despite evidence to the contrary, Evangelicals are thinking things--or what classical thinkers termed rational animals.

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The relationship between Evangelicalism and science is best described as a highly-selective exercise in self-justification. The results of any scientific process through which a research question is formulated and a hypothesis is developed will be highly contingent upon the personal motivations, values, outlook on life, and so on. In the case of Evangelicals, however, there occurs a conflation of moral and scientific reasoning, which reduces both scientific study and moral judgment to mere exercises in self-assertion.

The paradigmatic example of how Evangelicals have understood the relations between moral judgments and the methods of scientific study is quite naturally creationism, as well as its intellectual progeny, scientific creationism and now intelligent design. Original six-day creationism was formulated as a response to social-Darwinism. After Darwin had made men out of monkeys, the scientific elite began proposing all manner of social engineering programs for the betterment of the human race. Social engineering was the province of totalitarian governments, who ran roughshod over the personal dignities and liberties of individuals. The moral deficiencies of social-Darwinism, in the minds of creationists, meant that the evolutionary accounts of humanity's natural history were therefore wrong. The idea of the human being created in the image of God provided a moral bulwark against the temptation towards social engineering, which meant that the natural history of humanity's origins related in the first chapters of Genesis were therefore right.

The prospects of original six-day creationism eroded steadily through the 20th century. The larger moral battle against social-Darwinism was largely won in the North America and Western Europe with the fall of Nazi Germany. Scientific creationism and now intelligent design theory both operate with a much restricted agenda. No longer possible to claim to be fighting on behalf of humanity, these are now regarded as markers of Evangelical identity, both inside and outside the community. The difference between the earlier creationism and its progeny turns mainly on its relationship to scientific methodology. Instead of rejecting the theory of evolution for its implicitly immoral conception of human nature, the tendency now has been to express moral truths in the language of scientific study.

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My contention is that creationism is but one example of an Evangelical need to conflate moral and scientific reasoning--to the detriment of both moral and scientific reasoning. Because it presumes to pronounce upon matters related to the natural sciences, creationism comes across to most as quackery. With the social sciences, the Evangelical penchant for conflation comes across as a little more credible, no doubt because the object is not merely natural, but also moral. Lift the lid on a world of conservative, evangelical think-tanks in the United States just a little, and what you discover is a wide-reaching effort to marry old natural law arguments for this or that social configuration with the new methods of social scientific analysis. The result is an odd hybrid of 'outreach strategies" meant to bring in the unchurched while preaching to the choir.

My contention, further, is the need to conflate scientific claims and moral judgments are widespread. I am going to comment on two specific examples, both using the methods of social science, one to defend the normativity of heterosexual marriage, and the other as a justification for remaining in conservative churches. Please keep in mind that these patterns of thinking may be found beyond the case studies offered below.

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A junior editor over at First Things, Ryan T. Anderson has published 'Marriage: What It Is, Why It Matters, and the Consequences of Redefining It. A position paper outlining the natural law argument for why governments should keep their hands off an social institution whose existence 'precedes' or 'predates' government, one needs to look in the bibliography to find actual sources of empirical evidence. The links provided are not exactly plentiful, but a little patience yields reward. Marriage and the Public Good, published by the Witherspoon Institute, dedicates almost half of its space to the discussion of actual scientific studies of familial relations, including an attempt to measure the physical presence of fathers on the development of children. Another study by the Social Trends Institute suggests that healthy economies owe something to marriage and fertility rates. Still another study, led by the Institute for American Values, looks at the cost of single-parent and broken homes to the taxpayer. It's immediately obvious the some of these studies are credible, while others leave a person scratching their head.

The plausibility of any one particular study is neither here nor there. Rather, the basic strategy of statistical correlation that everyone of these studies presumes draws my attention. The form of the statistical argument in social scientific study looks like this: between dataset X and dataset Y there is significant evidence for correlation Z, from which we conclude... The basic strategy is very much like moving puzzle pieces around on a board trying to figure out which one's fit with each other. There is an inescapable element of arbitrariness and contingency in the process of selecting one dataset, or one set of phenomenon, instead of another. The social scientist has to be very aware of the experimental constraints under which their dataset is collected. Those constraints have to be factored into any conclusion drawn.

The extremely limited purview of a social scientific claim makes empirical generalization difficult. Any generalization is open to an infinite number of qualifications. The data may indeed show it to be a good idea (which is defined empirically as the possession of something or the achievement of some state of mind or well-being) for a child to grow up with their father--expecting those situations where the father is abusive, an alcoholic, pedophile, sadist, and so on. An infinitely qualifiable, general empirical claim is not yet an normative moral judgment. The later sort of judgment has the power of organizing the infinite number of empirical qualifications into categories of good and bad, better or worse. But normative moral judgments are not necessarily sensitive to the complexities of a situation--that is, unless the person passing a moral judgment is sensitive to their own inability to process every possible piece of relevant data. A moral 'ought' (value) is can never be extracted from an empirical 'is', no matter how suggestive the empirical 'is' appears. Facts don't appear like anything in particular until they are interpreted by persons who see them as something.

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The second example has to do with Evangelical self-assessment. The more conservative strains of Christianity have proved, especially in the last few decades, much more resilient to the tides of cultural change than liberal and mainline Protestant instances of the faith. Not a few Evangelicals have turned statistical tools furnished by the social sciences on the study of their own traditions and concluded that they must be doing something right. In fact, it was a liberal Protestant by the name of Dean Kelley who brought this to the attention of American readers. The question was again bandied about on the internet a couple of years ago, in response to an opinion piece in the New York Times reflecting on the virtues of inflexibility doctrinal versions of faith.

More seriously minded evangelicals will no doubt want to distance themselves from the cheap panacea of health and wealth preaching, which says, if we do A, B, and C, then God will reward us in very tangible ways. But the subtle allure of a statistical study, which discerns God's hand in absolute numbers and percentage increases, plays on the same sort of need to reduce divine purpose to very tangible manifestations. The only difference is one has the air of respectability because it appeals to certain scientific standards. There is also an irony implicit in conservative Christian appeals to raw data to demonstrate the superiority of their principled version of the faith over that of liberal and mainline churches. What killed liberal Christianity, the story goes, was a watered-down social gospel. grounded in late 19th century sociological theory. If sociology always leads to bad theology, just empirical conclusions should never be confused with moral judgments, what business do Evangelicals, on the terms of their own confession, have framing their arguments in the contemporary methods of social scientific study?

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It is more or less true that reality has a liberal bias. By refusing to search for moral significance in every piece of empirical data, the liberal mindset is much more in tune with the contingent and conditional conclusions of the natural and social sciences. There are, of course, liberally-minded individuals who also behave as if certain scientific conclusions obviously lead to certain moral conclusions. But those moral conclusions usually presume something about the individual's right to self-determination, which conforms to the contingent and conditional character of scientific conclusions. The conservative Evangelical mind still assumes the natural order is fundamentally Aristotelian, invested with teleological purpose, orienting all things towards their transcendent end, foreshortening the distance between fact and value. There would be no problem if this were the 16th century. But the in the 21st century, our basic assumptions about scientific investigation of the natural order have fundamentally changed.

Perhaps more troubling is that the attempted marriage of natural law theory and the methods of social scientific study has the potential to cut the heart out of the longstanding Western moral and legal tradition. The conviction essential to the rule of law that one has to distinguish between the actions and nature of a person, allowing for the presumption of innocence until guilt is proven. If the only way one knows how to think about human beings is to quantify human action, prior assumptions about the nature of the human being--e.g. as a thinking thing or rational animal which is deserving of the dignity any being sharing in that nature deserves--cease to hold sway over our moral imagination.

Still Writing that Thesis Proposal...

This is a little more on the thesis proposal I am in thee process of writing. The general topic is the prospects of natural theology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Natural theology is traditionally associated with proofs for the existence of God from some observable natural phenomenon. Or, more precisely, practitioners of natural theology had assumed that the existence of a First Instance of some observable natural phenomenon could be inferred from the natural phenomenon themselves. From the chain of movers and things moved could be inferred a First Mover. Likewise from the chain of causes and things caused could be inferred a First Cause. Other more direct sorts of arguments were made as well. From the (contingent) existence of things was inferred a necessarily existent Being, a Being whose essence was its own existence, or existence itself. From the 'goods' of observable things could be inferred perfections, and from perfections, perfection itself. Into the modern European age, as scientists became more studied in the anatomy of living organisms, one also saw arguments from the apparent complexity, or orderliness, of the components of things. So William Paley, in his treatise named Natural Theology, likened God to a watchmaker and living organisms, like ourselves, to extremely sophisticated watches. Where there is a watch, there is also a watchmakers, Paley argued. It follows from this that where there is an extremely complex organism, there must also be a Designer of organisms. And so on.

At the end of the 19th century, however, the assumptions about natural world significantly changed. Scientists now lived with the intellectual memory of Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Theology (1687) and Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859). The cumulative effect of these two works had been to call into question whether it was legitimate to speculatively infer the existence of God from observable natural phenomenon. Their criticisms were so effective, and so wide-reaching, that even today, when a person looks at a natural vista or observes the birth and 'praises the wonders of God's creation', they don't mean the same thing persons living prior to Newton and Darwin did. Persons today most likely have a 'sublime' experience the breathtaking vista or the squealing baby, which is ultimately not expressible in words. The experience is almost entirely subjective. Prior to the modern age, persons were more likely to have been able to point and say, this that there thing* exists only because God created it or made possible its existence. Evidence of God's handiwork was written through the observable order of the world. No caveat was offered for a natural scientific explanation about how things came to be--and none could be, at least not on natural scientific terms as we understand them, since those formulations still lay in the future.

How does one make sense of the change? At the most basic level, what was meant by nature and how nature was studied changed. And once what one understands to be natural changes, so does what one can accomplish with natural theological argumentation.

The endower of the Gifford Lecture Series, Lord Adam Gifford, left a series of perplexing instructions, to which lecturers repeatedly returned  and puzzled over. He wanted the object of natural theology, God, treated the same as the objects of the study of astronomy and chemistry. Most every lecturers didn't think such a thing was possible--the existence of God being of a wholly different order than the existence of stellar phenomena or chemical bonds. What lecturers did not entirely agree upon was what to make of Lord Gifford's instructions, though they serve as a focal point to inquire more broadly into questions about the relationship of theology and the natural sciences more generally.

The first two and a half decades of the Gifford Lecture series are like an intellectual petri dish, a fertile breeding ground for trying to make sense specifically of the consequences of evolutionary theory for natural theology. My interest is in how Gifford lecturers made use of evolutionary theory, not merely as a metaphor for God's providential government over the natural order, but as a key to explain the historical development of the Western intellectual tradition.

Most of the early Gifford lecturers worked out of an intellectual tradition called historical idealism, whose origins can be traced to the work of G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831), and ultimately to Immanuel Kant's The Idea of a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Intent (1784). Darwin's evolutionary account of the origins of species fit quite naturally with the Kantian-Hegelian account of the development of the Western intellectual tradition. So most of the lecturers assumed, if what went for one also went for the other, then everything (quite literally: all things in space and time, what has been, is , and will be) can be understood in terms of a single principle of explanation: cosmic evolution. Instead of trying to prove the existence of God, these lecturers looked back over the course of Western history and tried to make sense of what had become of traditional conceptions of God.

The entire course of human history was the new natural order. Where did God go? Formerly we thought God was 'above us', that his existence could be inferred from the natural order of things, that he revealed himself, etc. Now all such conceptions of God have fallen by the wayside. Some even suggest that God died at some point during the 19th century. Others suggest that all things have become one with God. And still others wonder if God's death and the pantheistic unity of all things are not, in the end, the same thing.

Some of the early Gifford lecturers, a very small number of obscure figures, sounded a dissenting voice. They pointed to a crack in the edifice of all-encompassing theories of evolution. They wondered if it made sense to suppose the study of fossils and morphological features automatically equated with the study of the historical record of human thoughts and actions contained in texts. The two sources of evidence were obviously different. The latter human beings had a hand in creating; but the former human beings had no hand in creating. It was there to be found, studied, and theorized about.

There was also the problem of human death. A person's thoughts die with them, expect for those thoughts that have been written down. Textual residue of what persons have thought about the world cannot actually be expected to behave like a natural laws like Darwin's description of the laws of natural and sexual selection. Rock strata are not organized like bookshelves, in the same sense, to use Paley's Watchmaker Analogy, plants are not constructed like watches. The thought of death raises questions about free will, morality, and the ultimate purpose of life, subjects much explored in texts. Do the innards of laboratory specimens have anything to say about these subjects apart from human speculation about what they might mean?

These two different lines of questioning represent two very different answers to the question about what one does with natural theology after the Origin of Species. After one thinks through what is being proposed by the different parties, the differences are actually quite startling. Either you redefine the nature of God in the light of evolutionary theory, or you think through human nature in the light of evolutionary theory. What startles me is how many lecturers simply assumed that it was the divine nature which was the more obvious thing that needed to be rethought

*This delightful alliteration is owed to Bob, who, if he reads this post, will recognize his own conceptual craftsmanship.

Time to Write a Thesis Proposal...

So...I am hopefully in the final stages of putting together a thesis proposal, which will determine my course of study for the next year or two. The proposal brings together interests in the the study of 'religion and science' and 'world religions'. My plan is to look at Gifford Lecture Series from its inauguration in 1888 until the outbreak of war in 1914. In total there are around 40 different lecturers, and a few more lectures, as some lecturers lecture more than once. Usually this would be an entirely impractical project, but I am not interested in any one lecturer. It's the prolonged conversation they have about the plausibility of natural theology that draws my attention--arguments for the existence of God like the cosmological, ontological, and teleological arguments exposed by Immanuel Kant as baseless in an age of the methods of modern scientific inquiry. Under the label natural theology was placed all manner of reasoning about God, supposedly without reference to usual textual sources of special divine revelation. In the process of debating the plausibility of traditional forms of natural theology, lecturers like the grandfather of the discipline of religious studies, Friedrich Max Muller, were also thinking about the nature of something they liked to call Religion.

Natural theology had been conceived as something was studied alongside 'revealed' or 'supernatural' theology. By the end of the 19th century, it was proposed that both older forms of theology could be brought together under the single umbrella of Religion. Instead of positing a difference between knowledge obtained through the exercise reason and and knowledge obtained by the acceptance of faith, the science of Religion was meant to encompass all such medieval distinctions.

Apologies if any of that is a bit technical. To illustrate what I mean, think about the sort of history that might be told about the relationship between church and state. Through the medieval period, relations between church and state weren't always comfortable, and their respective jurisdictions were never quite settled, but the reality of two authorities claiming separate areas of jurisdiction remained. So it was with faith and reason, which were held at arms length from each other. In the modern age, on account of any number of societal factors, like population growth, higher levels of education, increased amount of trade, etc., the church was largely stripped of its independent authority, and was granted a more or less autonomous standing within the state's jurisdiction. So it was also with the science of Religion, which was rational in the way that natural theology, but in encompassing way that made faith explicable on rational grounds.

How is the move from two forms of theology, one based on faith, the other on reason, made to the one science of Religion?

In some way, shape, or form, all of the Gifford lecturers take up the problem of 'historical knowledge'. It's an inescapable 19th century intellectual reality that the records of the human past exercised a much larger influence over programs of education. The problem rests on what is made of the following distinction. A person may not believe anything particular about God, or whether there is a God at all, but that does not present any difficultly believing that other people have believed in these things. Sounds like a superficial distinction, right? 

A fairly profound change, I want to argue, occurs as one moves from affirming something specific about the nature of God to affirming different persons have believed different things about God. In his A Secular Age (2007), Charles Taylor characterizes the shift by saying secularity is not about the decline of religious belief, but the pluralization of religious options--which only appears to be a decline because domestic political authorities no longer walk in close step with a particular group of spiritual authorities. Taylor's observations illuminate, after the implosion of medieval Christendom, why many Catholic thinkers over the last four centuries cannot but see Western civilization as descending into Protestant chaos. The same analysis can also be applied to the slow erosion of Evangelical America. It's not evidence things are worse than they have been in the past--at least, not in an abstract sense of a spiritual decline. It's rather evidence that the current cultural changes are profoundly disorienting. 

My assessment fits with Taylor's thesis, but I'm interested in centers of 'intellectual gravity'. The center of intellectual gravity for the distinction between natural and revealed theology rests squarely in a transcendent divine order--give it whatever name you want: God, YHWH, Allah, or even give it the names, Brahman, Nirvana, etc. The distinction says A, B, and C can be known about God through the exercise of reason, while X, Y, and Z can only be known through faith because God has determined to reveal himself to humanity in these ways. 

The center of intellectual gravity, however, shifts when you say different persons have believed different things about what can be known about God and how God can be known--or, indeed, if there is a God to know at all. The obvious thing to be noted is that divinity no longer stands at the center of one's inquiry. Humanity does. The other important thing to be noted is that one's thinking is no longer pegged to a timeless standard, but to a temporal (or timely) standard. How so? The distinction between faith and reason gets pegged to a timeless account of how human nature relates to a timeless God. When the center of gravity shifts, however, the focus is turned on the person giving the timeless account, not the account itself.

It's only at this point that things get interesting. If you follow the change of the center of intellectual gravity, from the divine to the human, from eternity into time, any number of conclusions can be drawn. For example:

-- timeless metaphysical abstractions must be anchored in the course of human history, or
-- divine revelation cannot be understood apart from its human mode of transmission, or
-- the divine and the human are, and have always been, one and the same, or
-- the human consciousness of God, Nature, or the truth of things has evolved in the course of history, or
-- the thought of God passed its date of expiration sometime during the 19th century.

These conclusions do not all lead to a secular and/or unbelieving destination. Some of them do, of course, in a round about way. The general consequence, however, would be to anchor timeless metaphysical abstractions in the course of human history by tying them to the mental operations of persons who have lived or may still be living. This is important. What it does is deny causal necessity to any particular person's take on where things are going. Things aren't going anywhere with any sort of certainty, except maybe in the very short term, after which things get very fuzzy very fast. The conclusions drawn from the apparent consequence of confronting 'the problem of historical knowledge' are manifold--as manifold, in fact, as the social phenomena of something called Religion. (The basic lesson is Augustinian: if you think the world the world is fundamentally getting better or inevitably getting worse, you've been given an inoculation against contributing towards any real long-term good in the world.)

A prevailing majority of the Gifford lecturers choose the analogy with biological evolution to describe the transition from an intellectual situation in which natural and revealed theology are distinguished from each other as reason is distinguished from faith, to an intellectual situation in which everything is contained in the science of Religion. There are certain consequences for choosing the evolutionary analogy, including imparting to the historical process a problematic necessity. But I am not one to begrudge the lecturers how persuasive the the evolutionary analogy is and continues to be.

The Real Question Behind the Question of Gay Marriage

In the March edition of First Things, the Back Page contributor, David Bentley Hart, penned a provocative, albeit erudite, reflection on a 'subtle tradition of natural law theory' that 'certain self-described Thomists, particularly in America, to import this tradition into public policy debates'. The article generated a wide range of responses, some appreciative, some agreeing, and some disagreeing, vehemently. I suspect most of the participants in the conversation knew they were talking about the question of gay marriage. Though Hart's erudition--the article was titled 'Is, Ought, and Nature's Laws', recalling such philosophical luminaries as Aristotle, Aquinas, Hume, and Kant in a single phrase--raised the debate out of the muck and mire and a hackneyed partisan slur-fest.

Let's repeat this a second time for rhetorical effect. Hart's article was about gay marriage--and I say this whether Hart intended it to be so or not. The one place natural law theory keeps on creeping back into the public discourse is precisely over questions about the nature of marriage. Tired out arguments about the institution of marriage preceding the foundation of the state or appeals to the supped antiquity of marriage are trotted out again and again by political pundits. Even the US Supreme Count Justice Samuel Alito, in a recording of proceedings from the court aired on CNN this morning, appealed to these old platitudes.

I take Hart's attempt to raise the discussion above its usual expression in partisan political witch-hunting as a hopeful sign for the future. So-called social conservatives can take it as an oppourtunity for introspection and get beyond the zero-sum calculus of deciding whether a person 'belongs' or is 'one of us' if they agree with 'us' on issue X. A good number of self-appointed Evangelical leaders to whose Twitter feeds I subscribe are unduly burdened by the thought that they have been appointed gate-keepers to Evangelical identity. They need to be unburdened of the thought that the Kingdom of God stands and falls on whether the definition of marriage extends to civil unions between homosexual partners in the 21st century United States. It's embarrassing for the rest of us to see the whole of human history reduced to such a bare and unimpressive nub.

Being Canadian, I speak to a North American situation, rather than simply an American situation. Speaking to that broader situation, I see so-called social conservatives investing an incredible amount of confidence in the idea that history is on their side. They are partially right; though the absoluteness of their claim leaves them in the position of being absolutely wrong.

It is true that definitions of marriage, or more generally the household, tends to be begin with the union of male and female. The first chapter of Genesis and Aristotle's Politics are in lockstep on this point. When later thinkers reflect on the foundation of the polity--and by later, I mean thinkers from the 3rd and 4th century B.C.E right down to Karl Marx in the 19th century--they talk about its foundation in the union of man and woman. That's more than 2000 years of people talking over and over about the same thing.

But it's not true that the relationship between the family and the state, or between families (pl.) and the legislating authority of the state (s.), has remained the same. The so-called social conservative movement, in fact, has been very selective in its reading of the intellectual tradition. The contemporary nuclear family is not the same as Aristotle's household, nor the 'being united to his wife' from Genesis. Most obviously, the household of antiquity served many more economic and political functions than the nuclear family presently does.

The relationship between family and state is where so-called social conservatives get things entirely wrong--where they, in fact, cease being conservative enough, and become something more like Nietzsche's Overman, who lives merely to overcome lesser persons, imposing his arbitrary will. They assume that because the intellectual tradition has seen fit to ground their descriptions of the polity in the union of male and female, it therefore follows that political authorities should legislate in favour of a particular conception of the union of male and female. If that were the case, then one would expect so-called social conservatives to be arguing for a reinstatement of the old household idea of a matriarch and a patriarch ruling over children, servants, retainers, and slaves. But they aren't.

What they are arguing for, in fact, is a peculiar conception of the relationship between the family and the state is that is the quintessential product of 21st century America. This is not, and never was, a question about the family. Heterosexual unions will continue to outnumber homosexual unions. The simplest way to have children will continue to be one man and one woman getting to know each other better--in the biblical sense of knowing, if you know what I mean, wink, wink, nudge, nudge. People will continue to plan to raise families, regardless the situation. They will choose partners accordingly. That's the way things are. These demographic trends were never in question. This always was, and always will be, a question about the relationship between the family and the state. Which is a far more complicated matter.

And you know what? The same intellectual tradition to which so-called social conservatives make their heavy-handed appeals has an answer to questions arising from this far more complicated matter. Distinguish between individual person and the political community, between personal morality and public legality, between personal faith and public reason, yes, even between personal commitment to a communal faith tradition (church) and public submission to the executors of a corporate rule of law (state). Keep that distinction clearly in mind. Don't pretend that the two can be brought in step with each other, as if the corporate body of the state might become the receptacle of one's personal whims and wishes.

Don't pretend the historical record says otherwise. Don't pretend the whole of human history testifies to the truth of a particular way of seeing things. History, strictly speaking, doesn't do anything. It waits to be interpreted. The more one pretends history is on their side, the more one channels Nietzsche's Overman, who rewrites history to serve his own ends, and the less they look like the God-become-man who many in the movement claim to serve.

The best defense of marriage act is and always has been to love your spouse. Only after that much is admitted can we all sit down and have a productive conversation about the relationship between family and the state.

Oh, I should add, in case it wasn't absolutely obvious, I don't see any reason why homosexual unions should not be called marriage.

Analytic Philosophers Doing History

This is my second foray into the world of analytic philosophy. (The first is here.) What I discuss below, analytic philosopher's doing history, is actually what got me thinking about analytic philosophy in the first place. The historical claims analytic philosophers make seem entirely arbitrary, especially given a passing familiarity with the subject matter they propose to narrate. The reason analytic philosophers fail so badly at doing history, in my estimation, is that they don't actually think through the relation between words and things--or, in this particular case, between the historical claim and the evidence on which that historical claim is based. So they aren't concerned with the sort of historical claims their evidence can sustain. The result is that old prejudices sneak into their historical accounts.

Here's one example of the very arbitrary ways analytic philosophers tell history from Analytic Philosophy of Religion (2002) by James F. Harris. It's fairly clear Harris hasn't a clue about how coordinate his historical narrative with entry-level, first-year university textbooks published in the last 25 or 30 years.

The italicized bits below comprise a single continuous passage from Harris' book about the conflict between religion and science through the lens of the conflict between geocentrism and heliocentrism. My commentary, which is interspersed throughout, is based on very generally accepted, contemporary truisms in the history of religion and science.


 Let's begin...

Contrary to popular belief, Galileo Galilee did not have a hand in actually formulating Copernican astronomy.

Rough start. The statement is banal and superfluous without any actual connection to what follows.

He was, however, its most influential supporter and popularizer, and he did provide the first experimental evidence to support the new heliocentric view of the solar system.

On the whole, true. Galileo was an 'influential supporter and popularizer' of Copernicus' theories. It is a bit of a stretch, though, to say Galileo provided 'the first experimental evidence'. His Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems is a dialogue in the spirit of a Platonic dialogue. He suggests different ways of thinking about natural phenomena; but he does not have a scientific methodology, as we would understand it. Most of the experts are also agreed that Galileo never actually performed the visual 'demonstrations;' attributed to him, and if he did, they still wouldn't count as experimental.

At the time, the new heliocentric cosmology was in direct conflict with the accepted and dominant Ptolemaic geocentric astronomy.

Not exactly. To say that Copernican heliocentrism was in direct conflict with Ptolemiac geocentrism is a very simplistic comparison that assumes all other things were equal. They weren't. Those in the know recognized heliocentrism posed significant challenges for geocentrism. But it was generally accepted by both Galileo and his opponents, per the shared standards of 'scientific' accuracy at the time, different astronomical theories weren't strictly true. They were useful mathematical fictions that 'saved the appearances' of stellar motion which did not necessarily correspond to the actual physical (or metaphysical) reality of things.

In terms of explaining and predicting astronomical phenomena, such as the position of the planets, Copernican theory was immediately and imminently more successful than Ptolemaic theory.

Egregiously false. Well into the 15th century, after Copernicus published his heliocentric theories, the Ptolemaic system still remained better able to predict stellar phenomena. The only thing Copernicus had going for his system was its relative intellectual simplicity--it's je ne ce quoix.

Committed to the Aristotelian notions of the "perfect" circular motion of heavenly bodies and their uniform speed, Ptolemaic astronomers had to appeal to the introduction of increasingly ad hoc and more complicated notions such as epicycles and deferents to explain the irregular motions of the planets.

Yes, Ptolemaic astronomers were heavily invested in the idea that stellar phenomena moved in perfect circles. But so also was the Copernican system. It too traded on perfect celestial circles, though heliocentrism greatly cut down the number needed to 'save the appearances'. It would take until the end of the 17th century when Isaac Newton systematized Johan Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion, which described the orbits of planets as ellipses, not circles. So the point, while true, makes absolutely no sense in the context of a debate between Ptolemaics and Copernicans.

Of course, Copernican astronomy also struck at the heart of accepted and dominant Christian theology and its anthropocentric view of the unique importance of human beings.

Oh? This farcical canard doesn't actually make sense of the general trend of European thoughts about the nature of the human being until, oh, the 19th century. Just a passing familiarity with Christian theology will inform readers that it doesn't matter where the human being is spatially situated in the universe in order for them to retain the image of God.


What's the problem? The basic mistake Harris makes is his assumption that geocentrism and heliocentrism are always everywhere entirely different things: one is the result of speculative formulation, while the other is the result of scientific study. Like a good analytic philosopher, Harris fixes his definitions before he looks at his evidence, and then reads his prejudices into the evidence in light of the fixed definitions.

Someone might object that every historian inevitably reads their particular concerns into and out of texts. That's true. In Harris' work, however, these particular concerns are actually quite precisely focused around a series of mutually exclusive pairings (e.g. geocentric vs. heliocentric, speculative vs. experimental, perfect circles vs. observed motion, anthropocentrism vs. scientific displacement), which is suggestive of a far more programmatic reading meant to smooth out obvious difficulties for one's theoretical formulation that emerges from the evidence.

Harris, of course, is probably not in the position to reread all the primary sources himself. But that's what actual historians could do for him. It's just too bad Harris himself doesn't appear aware of that fact. If you get published by an academic publisher in 2002, however, you probably shouldn't be telling the history of the conflict between religion and science that still resonates with Bertrand Russell's treatment of the subject.

And Harris doesn't appear to do have done that...presumably because, as an analytic philosopher, the evidence matters a whole lot less than one's ability to form a coherent argument. All he had to do was open a textbook, any textbook in fact, published after 1980. His egregious errors and farcical canards would be a plain as day.

The Arbitrary Assumptions of Analytic Philosophers

There is this other tradition of philosophy called analytic philosophy. Reading analytic philosophy is like reading what Chinese tourists have to say about your hometown. The cultural distance has creates a comical blurring effect--very much like the effect of a Canadian trying to telling a Chinese person about their home metropolis.

Analytic philosophy is a whole different world. I've been there before, but it doesn't feel like home. The assumptions made by analytic philosophers seem so arbitrary. A thorough lambasting of an earlier version of this post by the purveyors of The Policy Tensor, The Grumpy Christian, and my own wife no less!, who has an expertise in linguistic analysis which I do not, has prompted me to try again. In my defense, dear, I would point out that I have already admitted that I am on the outside looking in, in the opening paragraph.

What do I mean by arbitrary? Very generally I mean that analytic philosophers tend to assume definitions can be fixed prior to performing a very careful conceptual or logical analysis. The insistence the definition must be fixed in and with language appears arbitrary because it is a general rule of thumb in the world of classical and continental thought in which I am infinitely more comfortable thinking that human language is always everywhere ultimately inadequate to represent extra-lingual realities. Classical and medieval thinkers tended to think of truth as the adequation between words and extra-lingual things. Namely: only when the word was adequate to represent the nature of its object could one ever claim to speak truly. Such a definition, of course, placed truth just beyond the reach of the human mind. That wasn't, however, necessarily considered a problem. If you are a human being (and not, for example, an all-knowing god), you should be aware both of the reality of the difference between words and extra-lingual things, as you yourself are one of those extra-lingual things which language can be used to describe. You should also be aware that the truth is always just beyond the reach of the human mind. Period. No ifs, ands, or buts about it.

The strategy of the analytic philosopher seems arbitrary it avoids questions of the limitations on human cognitive capacities. Take, for example, an analytic philosopher's attempt to analyze the idea of God's omnipotence. The obvious way to analyze God's omnipotence is to contrast the limited strengths of human beings with something all-powerful that can be invoked to explain the existence of all things. But the analytic philosopher wonders if it is possible for an all-powerful God to create something so heavy even God can't left it. If yes, then God is not all-powerful. The same goes if the answer is no. A logical opposition is highlighted without any consideration about what is being talked about.

There seems to be some confusion on the part of the analytic philosopher. They seem compelled to think of God as if God is a really Big Person, subject to the same constraints of little persons like ourselves, rather than a being of a wholly different order, who can't really be cognized, accept as a marker of the limit of human rationality and a ontological marker designating the absolute origin of all things. After all, lifting an object that possesses weight, even infinite weight, only makes sense with reference to objects determined by spatio-temporal constraints. That is: those same spatio-temporal determinations to which human beings are subject. Which, if you are talking about God, is an utterly arbitrary determination. Traditionally God, with a capital 'G', isn't restricted to spatio-temporal constraints. Small 'g' gods are so restrained, but they also aren't defined as omnipotent.

So where does this leave me standing with respect to the analytic tradition of philosophy? You know, I am still working that out in my own head. Analytic philosopher's concern to analyze the form of arguments seems to me inimical to their ability to judge whether what is being said is in fact true. The truth of a statement, of course, has to do with whether reference fairly represents a factual state of affairs. Does this make sense? is as important a question as, Does the evidence support my claims? or Are my words adequate to the things I suppose them to represent?

From someone outside the tradition of analytic philosophy, to only pay attention to one of these questions is philosophical equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot.

There was a second part to the original post, in which I wondered why analytic philosophers were such terrible at narrating history. My suggestion was that their penchant for supposing things are true, rather than actually defensible with reference to the evidence (the truth as an adequation between words and things...), means that their way of analyzing evidence is fundamentally flawed. I've saved that for the time being.

Research on the Brain of McGill's New Principal

There is a subdued debate shaping up around the appointment of Suzanne Fortier as McGill University's new Principal and Vice Chancellor. The appointment to the position follows the ten-year tenure of Heather Munroe-Blum, whose time McGill actively courted research monies from the private sector, while mounting tensions between the student body and the administration ended in open revolt on a number of occasions.

A well-established member of academia, Fortier comes to McGill from the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), where she is credited with courting--you guessed it!--research monies from the private sector for 'applied research'. Ivory towers, after all, don't fund themselves out of thin air. As federal funding dries up, new sources of revenue have to be secured in to maintain the relevance of universities in the knowledge-producing economy. The story goes that Fortier played a significant role in NSERC's strong push towards commercializing scientific research.

But education and commerce, it seems, don't mix very well. Thinking way back to my days in high school, I can remember student run campaigns to evict pop machines from hallways and cafeterias. The fight was played out again during my undergraduate degree. The soda manufacturers had to go...which raises questions about why they were there in the first place. Unscrupulous corporate interests? In a move perceived far less controversial, Microsoft funded a computer lab in my high school, whose nebulous purpose was to entice young people into the world of computer programming. A few of my friends followed that path to a career in the industry.

Schools have a difficult time turning away lump sums of corporate cash, which can be used to fill holes left after federal and provincial and other funds have all been spent. McGill is no different than any other school, in this regard, though more ties with the corporate world is bound to ruffle a few feathers along the way. The appointment of Fortier will probably raise the ire of the student body in a few years. If she was appointed for her experience raising and dispensing federal funding for scientific research, which would suggest that McGill wants to continue investing in scientific research, then student are going to see her policies through their lens of concern for the quality of education. I can't imagine her image will come through the process of student scrutineering very well.

Battle lines may be forming up on a second front. The Montreal Gazette published an article just last week airing the concerns of professor's and others working in the natural sciences. During her stay at NSERC, decisions implemented by Fortier saw funds move from 'basic research' projects to 'applied research' projects to the tune of $100s of millions. At stake in the minds of some of the parties involved is academic freedom and integrity. Basic research means research for the sake of doing research. Professors who have dedicated their lives to the study of the problems of this or that particular scientific field want the freedom to pursue their own interests. Applied research means research done for the sake of generating wealth and building up the economy. When a particular scientific study may be attractive to corporate interests, professors are encouraged to court outside investment in exchange for licensing and developing rights to the findings.

There are two very different visions of scientific research. Those in favour of academic freedom, who are therefore also more reliant on government funding, point to the history of scientific discovery. The greatest discoveries, they argue, always seem to happen when very intelligent people are allowed the freedom to explore. Albert Einstein is the post-child for this vision. Those in favour of 'cooperation' with the private sector, which means private funding, hold up the ideal of synergy across social sectors.

Brilliantly satrirized by Alec Baldwin on 30 Rock in his roll as the GE executive Jack Donaghy, synergy is one of those gobbledegook bullshit words coming out of the corporate training handbooks. (Much like, in fact, the word 'leveraging'.) It sounds good, and it even feels good, but it only means what people want it to mean. The synergy between academic and corporate interests to which Fortier's appointment harkens conjures up bad memories of a McGill study of long-term consequences of asbestos exposure in Quebec mines.

Now, I am in no position to pass judgment specifically on McGill's appointment of Fortier. Standing outside the natural sciences, squarely at the intellectual heart of arts faculties, though marginalized on the edge of the campus in a religious studies faculty, I can at best roll my eyes and decry the fact that nothing has changed to reverse the erosion of the study of the humanities. Which seems a little pointless.

Though I think I am allowed to wonder what, in the grand scheme of things, Fortier's appointment portends. The Government in Ottawa has deemed it important to encourage 'applied research', moving funding away from 'basic research'. The McGill administration seems in lock-step with their attempts to restructure how capital moves between public and private sectors. I have questions about whether such restructuring can engender a constructive learning environment for future generations. I also have questions about where my own intellectual passions fit in a new world order built on the so-called S(cience). T(echnology). E(ngineering). M(athematics). subjects. Nor am I so stupid as to buy into all that P.R. nonsense about how all change is automatically change for the better. Nor am I willing to swallow that tasteless pill about how sole purpose of representative government is to 'grow the economy', as if politics was just economics by another name.

I worry about the concentration of decision-making authority in the hands of persons with the most to gain financially and the least amounts of public accountability. The extension of the voting franchise in the Western world through the 19th and 20th centuries steadily eroded the ability of concentrated centers of wealth to simply dictate public policy. At the beginning of the 21st century, the economic base of our polities have fundamentally changed. It remains to be seen whether our representative political institutions will be able to adapt--or even what adapting might mean.

It seems to me, however, the form taken by our educational institutions is an important indicator of things to come. That's where the negotiation of the social transfer of priorities and values with future generations takes place.