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My latest: why Christians are conspiracy theorists, in CT
A link to my latest column in Christianity Today.
I’ve got a column up this morning in Christianity Today called “Christians Are Conspiracy Theorists.” Here’s a sample:
By any reasonable definition, Christianity is a conspiracy theory. Let’s say it’s a theory of two conspiracies, in fact: the conspiracy of sin, death, and the Devil to put humanity and all creation in “bondage to decay” and the conspiracy by God to liberate creation and redeem his people through Christ (Rom. 8:18–23, RSV throughout).
I realize it seems odd to describe our faith this way, but that’s the proposition I’d like you to ponder. Because if Christianity is a conspiracy theory, then what follows for how believers approach other conspiracy theories in our culture?
Start with a working definition. A conspiracy theory is a form of stigmatized knowledge formally repudiated by elites and/or experts that alleges malign forces behind public events. Knowledge of this truth is kept from the public through official channels and is therefore difficult to prove. As a result, those who learn the truth tend to be suspicious of authorities and may form communities of dissent, or at a minimum be drawn to them. Within these groups, rejecting the public story on a given topic becomes a badge of honor—and belonging.
It seems plain to me that, on this definition, the church’s faith in the gospel qualifies as a conspiracy theory. This was certainly true at its inception, and I think it’s true in our time too.
Click here to read the whole thing.
Readers of the blog may recall of a post on here from back in September 2023 with a similar title. Clearly the idea lodged in my brain; this was a chance to unpack it for a general audience and at length, with a particular view to how Christians behave themselves, so to speak, “epistemically” in the public square and the consequent social dynamics at work. Looking back at that post now, I focused much more then on the spooky, strange, and non-empirical beliefs of Christians: an invisible deity, angels and demons, the blood of a Galilean rebel cleansing an American gentile from his sins against the Creator two thousand years later, and so on. The focus in the CT piece is more about suspect convictions and the way “common sense” functions to ostracize, cordon off, and exclude them—and thus why Christians should be allergic to this strategy when society deploys it about others and tempts us to do the same (even and especially when the convictions in question are genuinely suspect!).
But that’s to summarize in advance; go read the piece for the full argument.
Carr, Sacasas, and eloquent reality
A long reflection on an essay by Nicholas Carr engaging L. M. Sacasas about enchantment, reality, and contemplation.
In a list of the best living writers on technology in the English language, the top ten would include Nicholas Carr and L. M. Sacasas. Yesterday the two came together in an essay I can’t get out of my head.
The essay in question is the third in a series called “Seeing Things” on Carr’s Substack “New Cartographies.” Titled “Contemplation as Rebellion,” it continues Carr’s reflections on the nature of perception in a digital age. Perception is both neurological and social; it is a mediated phenomenon; it can be done well or poorly, deeply or cheaply. And works of art, especially visual art like paintings and engravings, have the power to call forth the kind of attention that repays time, energy, focus, and affection.
Interwoven with these reflections is Carr’s intervention in the “enchantment” discourse, one I have myself dipped into more than a few times (especially in conversation with Alan Jacobs). In yesterday’s essay, following meditations on Heaney and Hawthorne, Carr turns to something Sacasas wrote last August titled “If Your World Is Not Enchanted, You're Not Paying Attention.” He begins with an excerpt from Sacasas:
This form of attention and the knowledge it yields not only elicits more of the world, it elicits more of us. In waiting on the world in this way, applying time and strategic patience in the spirit of invitation, we draw out and are drawn out in turn. As the Latin root of attention suggests, as we extend ourselves into the world by attending to it, we may also find that we ourselves are also extended, that is to say that our consciousness is stretched and deepened.
Here is Carr’s response, which ends his own essay and which I quote at length:
Even as I find Sacasas’s essay inspiring, I find it troubling. The way he frames the contemplative gaze as a means of re-enchantment makes me uncomfortable. An enchanted world is, by definition, a world that presents a false front to us — a front composed of what Sacasas terms, at the end of his essay, “mere things.” To see what’s really there in an enchanted world, you need to see beyond or through the surface. You need to discover what’s hidden, what’s concealed, by the merely material form, and that requires something more than sensory perception. It requires extrasensory perception. In this framing, the contemplative gaze is not just unlocking what lies untapped within us — the powers of perception, imagination, interpretation — but also exposing some spiritual essence that lies hidden within the object of the gaze.
The issue I take with Sacasas’s essay is not a matter of sense — I’m pretty sure we’re talking about the same perceptual phenomenon — but of wording. When he suggests that “enchantment is just the measure of the quality of our attention,” he’s muddying the waters. When we look at the quality of attention demonstrated by Heaney, Muñoz, and Hawthorne, we’re not seeing enchantment. We’re seeing an exquisite openness to the real. A sense of wonder does not require a world infused with spirit. The world as it is is sufficient. The reason the wording matters here is simple. What bedevils our perceptions today isn’t a lack of enchantment. It’s a lack of reality.
“Things change according to the stance we adopt towards them, the type of attention we pay to them,” Iain McGilchrist wrote in The Master and His Emissary. He’s right, but it’s important to recognize that the changes take place in the mind of the observer not in the things themselves. The things, whether works of art or of nature, have a material integrity that’s independent of our own thoughts and desires, and the stance we adopt toward them should entail a respect for that integrity.
The desire to re-enchant the world may seem like an act of humility, a way of paying tribute to the world’s unseen powers, but really it’s the opposite, an act of hubris. In demanding that the world hold greater meaning for us, that it be a reservoir for the fulfillment of our own spiritual yearnings, we are attempting yet again to impose our will on the world, to turn its myriad material forms to our own purposes, to make it our mirror. Whatever enchantment may once have been, re-enchantment is a power play.
It’s interesting that, in the English language, we have enchantment, disenchantment, and re-enchantment. What we don’t have is unenchantment. A state of disenchantment is by definition a state of loss, one that begs to be remedied by a process of re-enchantment. A state of unenchantment presumes no loss and requires no remedy. It is a state that is entirely happy with the thinginess of things. So let me, by fiat, introduce unenchantment into the language. And let me suggest that the contemplative gaze is best when it is an unenchanted gaze.
There is much to unpack here. Before I respond, let me be clear that nothing whatsoever hangs on the use, retention, or recovery of the term “enchantment” and its many variations. This entire conversation could be held, and all that technologists, philosophers, critics, and theologians want to say about it could be said, without Weber’s Entzauberung or any of its translations. Weber, for his part, was seeking to offer a sociological description of an epochal cultural change. Whatever the merit of his description, neither the concept nor the term nor its denial bears on the substance of the arguments that Sacasas and Carr make above.
I take Carr to be taking issue with a spiritually charged material reality for at least five reasons. First, it is reductive; things become “mere” things. Second, it is narcissistic; things must be what I want or need them to be to have value, in themselves or for me. Third, it is coercive; it imposes upon things what they evidently lack. Fourth, it is ungrateful; it fails to receive things as they are and thus to attend to them with the care they deserve. Finally, it is unreal; it substitutes my subjectivity for the stubborn objectivity of the thing before me. No longer am I interacting with some material item of the phenomenal world; instead, I am playing with projections upon the screen of my mind.
These are all valid and useful worries; no doubt they have a legitimate target. I don’t think Carr’s comments are an adequate response to Sacasas, however, or a successful critique of the broader view of enchanted perception that Sacasas is seeking to represent. In part there seem to be some misunderstandings between them. But perhaps more than any serious misunderstanding there is simple, unbridgeable disagreement. That disagreement, in turn, reverses the terms of the reproach: it is Carr, not Sacasas, who makes the world into a mirror.
More on that later; for now, consider definitions.
Carr opens by saying that an “enchanted world is, by definition, a world that presents a false front to us.” This is an unfortunate way to begin. Let me offer an alternative. At a minimum, an enchanted world is one that is full of life, intelligence, events, experiences, agents, and phenomena that exceed the capacity of secular, instrumental reason—especially the “hard” sciences—to measure, name, calculate, contain, control, or grasp. For Christians, the word for such a world is simply “creation.” But creation is not a false front. There may be more than what you or I can measure or glimpse, but there is not less. Creation is artifice in the sense that there is an artificer; it is not artifice in the sense that it is a façade.
Carr writes: “When we look at the quality of attention demonstrated by Heaney, Muñoz, and Hawthorne, we’re not seeing enchantment. We’re seeing an exquisite openness to the real. A sense of wonder does not require a world infused with spirit. The world as it is is sufficient.” These claims are all question-begging. What if openness to the real discloses to one’s awareness a deeper reality than one previously supposed to be true or possible—a reality not limited to one’s consciousness but objectively existent in the very thing one is contemplating, antecedent to one’s act of contemplation? Whether wonder requires a world infused with spirit is beside the point; it’s a hypothetical we aren’t in a position to answer. The question instead is whether this world is in fact suffused with spirit. To call a spirit-less world “the world as it is” begs the question, therefore, because we cannot and do not know a priori that the world lacks spirit, or that the spirit it manifests to so many in such a variety of ways is contained without remainder in the mind.
Carr is right to insist on respecting the integrity of the things of the world and of the world itself. Things aren’t playthings, and when we reduce the former to the latter both we and they are diminished as a result. So let me avoid the generic and embrace the particular. What follows is a specifically Christian account of why, in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ words, seeing the world as charged with the grandeur of God is not a failure to attend to the thisness of things.
Hopkins is a good person to start with, as it happens, given his emphasis on “inscape” or the proper “thisness” of created things, drawing on John Duns Scotus’s haecceitas. Each thing is just what it is; it isn’t anything else. It is the particular thing God made it to be, and it is this precisely in virtue of its relation to God the Creator, to his creative power and good pleasure. To, in a word, his delight.
The doctrine of creation extends this notion to anything and everything in existence. Material objects, then, are not windows we will one day raise (much less smash) in order to see “true” reality more clearly. Nor are they akin to Wittgenstein’s ladder, necessary to climb but kicked over once used. Nor still are they masks donned to deceive us or allegories that, in pointing to what they are not, exhaust themselves in their reference (somewhat like the self-destructing tapes of Mission: Impossible fame).
No, the Christian doctrine of creation teaches that the surfaces of the world contain depths and that seemingly silent things have a voice. They speak. They sing, in fact. Reality, in the words of Albert Borgmann, is eloquent. Significance in the broadest sense is therefore not only a product or property of the conscious human mind; it belongs to the things of the world prior to my contemplating them and emerge, intelligibly and fittingly, in the encounter between us.
Two concepts govern this theological perspective, each centered on the incarnation. The reason why is straightforward: the man Jesus is fully and utterly human without being merely human. He is more than human, but he is not less. Nothing in one’s phenomenal experience of Jesus’s humanity—nothing measurable by observation, analysis, or a thousand scientific tests—would tell you anything about who he is, only what he is: namely, a human being and, in that respect, like any other. Yet this man is God. Who he is is thus hidden from view.
Are we back, then, to the “false front” of Carr’s worries? By no means.
On one hand, Jesus’s humanity is not a fiction; it is not like the façades of Petra, which appear to be exteriors of magnificent temples yet contain nothing on the inside. Jesus’s humanity is, apart from sin, like yours and mine in every way. He really is a human being, and his humanity is not a temporary meat-suit he sloughs off at the Ascension. Jesus is human forever.
On the other hand, Jesus’s divinity is not opposed to his humanity. He is neither a hybrid nor a shell in which two competing principles vie for space. In all his actions, in all he says and suffers, he does so as God and man, divinely and humanly. Indeed, part of the revelation of the God-man is that God can be man without contradiction. Contra John Hick, the incarnation is not a square circle.
The most common patristic image for this reality comes from Scripture: the burning bush. The divinity of Jesus suffuses and saturates the humanity of Jesus without consuming it. This in turn came to govern the fathers’ view of the sacraments, the Eucharist above all. Anthony Domestico draws this out in a review of Paul Mariani’s biography of Hopkins:
Mariani is most affecting when describing what he calls Hopkins’s idea of “thisness—the dappled distinctiveness of everything kept in Creation.” He links Hopkins’s concept of inscape and instress to the poet’s abiding devotion to the Eucharist. Hopkins was drawn to Catholicism, Mariani suggests, through the doctrine of the Real Presence, “God dwelling in things as simple as bread and wine … the logical extension of God’s indwelling among us.” His poetry and his religion are necessary to one another: Hopkins was the poet he was because of his Catholic understanding of the Eucharist, and he was the Catholic he was because of his poetic apprehension of reality.
To be sure, the world is not a sacrament per se; a sacramental logic applies to creation in virtue of its status as created. In this way the sacraments help to explain how creation can be just what it is and, in the language of Alexander Schmemann, an epiphany of its Creator. It seems to me that Carr and other critics of (at least a certain Christian style of) enchantment substitute an “or” for the “and,” seeing the former as necessary and the latter as impossible. For Christians, it is the incarnation that demonstrates the truth and thus the possibility of the “and.”
The second concept that enters here is typology, or the use of “figure” in reading Scripture. The most famous study is Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis. He rightly argues there that the “types” or “figures” of the biblical narrative are not extinguished by their trans-local, trans-personal, trans-temporal signification. The fact that David figures Christ, or somehow mysteriously points forward to him, confirms and upholds his unique historicity; it does not obliterate it. Here is how Paul Griffiths puts it:
One event or utterance figures another when, while remaining unalterably what it is, it announces or communicates something other than itself. Eve’s assent to the tempter and her consequent taking of the forbidden fruit from the tree figures, in this sense, Mary’s fiat mihi in response to the annunciation and the consequent incarnation of the Lord in her womb. The second event—the figured—encompasses and includes the first, without removing its reality. The first—the figuring—has its reality, however, by way of participation in the second. This is in the order of being. Ontological figuration may, however, be replicated at the level of the text, and in scripture it inevitably is.
Put bluntly, figuralism falls apart if the human figures of history recorded by Scripture are neither truly human nor truly historical. It is exactly in their three-dimensional, irreducible humanity and historicity—their personal haecceity—that they “figure” Christ in advance of his advent. Saint Augustine writes in De Doctrina Christiana that humans signify with signs but God signifies with both signs and things. Salvation history, inscribed in Scripture, is thus the grand narrative of all creation, at once told by humans through written signs and told by God through created things—including the lives of human beings themselves, both their words and their deeds.
In sum, both typology and sacramentology manifest the logic embodied in the incarnation: a simultaneous affirmation of the goodness and thisness of creation in all its parts and of creation’s capacity to communicate, signify, or otherwise mediate depths of reality not immediately evident on the surface of things. “Re-enchantment,” as I see it, is one way to describe a Christian reassertion or recovery of this way of understanding and inhabiting the world. Carr acknowledges that such re-enchantment “may seem like an act of humility, a way of paying tribute to the world’s unseen powers, but really it’s the opposite, an act of hubris.” Why? “In demanding that the world hold greater meaning for us, that it be a reservoir for the fulfillment of our own spiritual yearnings, we are attempting yet again to impose our will on the world, to turn its myriad material forms to our own purposes, to make it our mirror. Whatever enchantment may once have been, re-enchantment is a power play.”
Whatever the truth of this critique applied to other types of (re-)enchantment, I hope I’ve made clear by now why it doesn’t apply to the Christian variety. Christian attention to the world and to things as the creation of God makes no demands, imposes no extrinsic meaning, bends nothing to our will to power or pleasure. It is a response (bottom up) to what we discover the world and its things to be, in themselves apart from and prior to us, just as it is a quest (top down) to see the world and its things as we have been told by God they in fact are. In the words of Psalm 19:
The heavens are telling the glory of God;
and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours forth speech,
and night to night declares knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words;
their voice is not heard;
yet their voice goes out through all the earth,
and their words to the end of the world. (vv. 1-4)
The claim of the psalmist is that, in reality, the voice-that-is-no-voice and the words-that-are-no-words speak—are speaking, at all times, even now—whether or not we have ears to hear them. We do not imagine or construct what they say; we hearken to what they have to say to us. This is why Wendell Berry is so obstinate in his unfashionable insistence that the meaning humans find, whether in art or in the natural world, is just that: discovered, not created. Franz Wright captures the point well in his poem, “The Maker”:
The listening voice, the speaking ear
And the way, always, being
a maker
reminds:
you were made.
Berry himself puts it this way in a 1987 essay:
[Consider the concept] of artistic primacy or autonomy, in which it is assumed that no value is inherent in subjects, but that value is conferred upon subjects by the art and the attention of the artist. The subjects of world are only “raw material.” As William Matthews writes in a recent article: “A poet beginning to make something need raw material, something to transform.” For Marianne Moore, he says,
subject matter is not in itself important, except that it gives her the opportunity to speak about something that engages her passions. What is important instead is what she can discover to say.
And he concludes:
It is not, of course, the subject that is or isn't dull, but the quality of attention we do or do not pay to it, and the strength of our will to transform. Dull subjects are those we have failed.
This apparently assumes that for the animals and humans who are not fine artists, who have discovered nothing to say, the world is dull, which of course is not true. It assumes also that attention is of interest in itself, which is not true either. In fact, attention is of value only insofar as it is paid in the proper discharge of an obligation. To pay attention is to come into the presence of a subject. In one of its root senses, it is to “stretch toward” a subject, in a kind of aspiration. We speak of “paying attention” because of a correct perception that attention is owed—that, without our attention and our attending, our subjects, including ourselves, are endangered.
Mr. Matthews’ trivializing of subjects in the interest of poetry industrializes the art. He is talking about an art oriented exclusively to production, like coal mining. Like an industrial entrepreneur, he regards the places and creatures and experiences of the world as “raw material,” valueless until exploited.
Such an approach to “things” is, I recognize, just what Carr opposes. But the irony, and therefore the danger, is that Carr’s approach threatens to join hands with Matthews against Berry—as well as against Borgmann, Schmemann, Augustine, Wright, Hopkins, and Sacasas. (A formidable crew!)
Recall Carr’s modification of McGilchrist’s claim, “Things change according to the stance we adopt towards them, the type of attention we pay to them.” Carr writes, “He’s right, but it’s important to recognize that the changes take place in the mind of the observer not in the things themselves. The things, whether works of art or of nature, have a material integrity that’s independent of our own thoughts and desires, and the stance we adopt toward them should entail a respect for that integrity” (emphasis mine). It is crucial to see that the last sentence is a non sequitur. Enchanted, disenchanted, and unenchanted alike agree that all things possess a certain integrity (material and otherwise) independent of our thoughts and desires and that our relation to things ought to show respect for that integrity.
As a result, however, does Carr’s proposal not end up throwing us back into the cage of consciousness? Are not things thereby reduced to a mirror, in which we see not things but our thoughts about things? Are not things now become playthings in the inner theater of the imagination? So that I am no longer contemplating the thisness of what lies before me, but projecting it from a variety of angles—with countless filters and settings tried and tested—on the screen of my mind?
Consider Carr’s own words:
To see what’s really there in an enchanted world, you need to see beyond or through the surface. You need to discover what’s hidden, what’s concealed, by the merely material form, and that requires something more than sensory perception. It requires extrasensory perception. In this framing, the contemplative gaze is not just unlocking what lies untapped within us — the powers of perception, imagination, interpretation — but also exposing some spiritual essence that lies hidden within the object of the gaze. (emphasis mine)
So far as I can tell, the last sentence puts the shoe on the other foot. With respect to the contemplative gaze, what Carr seems to want is not for the conscious human mind to encounter an object as it is, much less to penetrate to its inexhaustible depths, but to double back on itself, thereby “unlocking what lies untapped within us—the powers of perception, imagination, interpretation” (emphasis, again, mine). It follows that, for Carr, “unenchanted” contemplation is not finally about the object in its independent objectivity but about the subject exercising his unfathomably creative subjective powers. Perception is turned inside out. Attention transforms into solipsism, even narcissism. What I see is ultimately about me, the one seeing, and what I choose or want to see. What is important is no longer the object interpreted but the change induced in the interpreter by his powers of interpretation.
This epistemic loop is just what Sacasas was worried about in his original essay. Following the work of Jane Bennett, Sacasas writes that we find ourselves “trapped in a vicious circle. Habituated against attending to the world with patience and care, we are more likely to experience the world as a mute accumulation of inert things to be merely used or consumed as our needs dictate.” He goes on:
And this experience in turn reinforces the disinclination to attend to the world with appropriate patience and care. Looking and failing to see, we mistakenly conclude there was nothing to see.
What is there to do, then, except to look again, and with care, almost as a matter of faith, although a faith encouraged by each fleeting encounter with beauty we have been graced to experience. To stare awkwardly at things in the world until they cease to be mere things. To risk the appearance of foolishness by being prepared to believe that world might yet be enchanted. Or, better yet, to play with the notion that we might cast our attention into the world in the spirit of casting a spell. We may very well conjure up surprising depths of experience, awaken long dormant desires, and rekindle our wonder in the process. What that will avail, only time would tell.
Carr is understandably worried that the “mere” in “mere things” suggests that things as they are are inadequate unless and until we impose on them a higher meaning suited to our needs, a weightier significance than they themselves can bear. Such an imposition both weighs them down and occludes their actual significance. What Sacasas has in mind, though, is the “raw material” of “industrial art,” the instrumental reason that sees things as nothing more than what they appear to be, nothing more, therefore, than their constituent elements. On such a view, what a thing is is what it is made of, which is only one step away from the constructivist view that what a thing is is whatever I make of it. In the words of David Graeber, “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently.”
Sacasas is right to delineate an alternative. I don’t know whether he’d called it the Christian alternative, but I will. I’ve spent many words outlining it in detail, so let me close here by summarizing it by contrast to both Graeber and Carr.
Regarding Graeber, his radical constructivism fails to approach and attend to the world in its thisness, in its independence and integrity apart from and prior to us, and for this reason fails to receive it as the gift that it is. With this critique I think Carr is in agreement.
As for Carr, however, his own view falls between two stools. Theoretically, it lacks sufficient metaphysical grounding to anchor reality—both its thisness and its givenness—while practically, it terminates in a contemplation that is curved in on itself. Whether the result is modern in a Kantian mode or postmodern in a Graeberian mode matters little.
To be clear, my claim is not that Christians alone can or do attend to the world as it is or that Christian enchantment (what I’m calling the church’s doctrine of creation) is the only viable, coherent, or dominant version on offer. It is instead that Carr’s critique falls short in relation to a properly Christian account of creation, contemplation, and haecceity. And it is this account that I understand Sacasas to be explicating and defending in his recommendation of seeing the world as always already enchanted, if only we take the time to pay it the attention it deserves.
The metaphysics of historical criticism
Fifty metaphysical propositions that underwrite the practice of “historical-critical” biblical scholarship.
I, the historical critic, exist.
That is to say, my mind exists.
My mind is not deceived by a demon.
My mind is not self-deceived.
My mind has access to external reality.
External reality exists.
External reality is apt to be known by a mind like mine (and by other rational beings, should they exist).
I am a rational being, in virtue of my mind’s existence and capacity to know external reality.
My mind’s access to external reality via my rational nature is epistemically reliable.
Natural languages are, likewise, a reliable vehicle of rational pursuit of knowledge of external reality.
Natural languages are a reliable vehicle of communication between rational beings.
At least, that is, between rational beings of a shared nature.
There are rational beings of a shared nature; other minds exist besides my own.
(I can know this—I am in a position to know it, with something like certainty or at least confidence—just as I can know the foregoing propositions and many others like them.)
Mental life is linguistic and vice versa; human minds, or rational persons, communicate through natural languages.
I can (come to) know what other persons think, believe, intend, hope, or love.
I can (come to) know such things through many means, one of which is the use of a natural language.
Natural languages can be translated without substantial loss of meaning.
Rational users of natural languages are capable of mastering more than one such language.
Such mastery is possible not only of living languages but of dead languages.
Such mastery is possible not only through speaking but also through reading and writing.
Written language is not different in kind than spoken language.
The living word can be written down and understood through the eyes alone, without use of the ears or of spoken language.
The written word offers reliable access to the life—norms, beliefs, hopes, fears, behaviors, expectations, habits, virtues, vices, and more—of a culture or civilization.
This truth obtains for ancient, or long dead, cultures as for living, or contemporary, ones.
(“Truth” is a meaningful category.)
(Truth is objective, knowable, and not reducible merely to the perspective of a particular person’s mind or thought.)
(There are truths that both antedate my mind’s existence and exist independently of it.)
(The principle of non-contradiction is itself true.)
(The prior four propositions are true irrespective of any one individual’s affirmation or awareness of them, including my own.)
Records of ancient peoples’ and regions’ artifacts offer a limited but nevertheless reliable window onto their respective cultures.
Through accumulation, comparison, and interpretation of evidence, probabilities of likelihood regarding both historical events and certain cultural beliefs and practices can be reliably achieved.
The space-time continuum in which ancient peoples lived (“then and there”) is one and the same as mine (“here and now”).
The sort of events, experiences, and happenings that mark my life or the life of my culture (“here and now”) likewise marked theirs (“then and there”).
These include occurrences commonly labeled “religious” or “spiritual” or “numinous.”
Such occurrences, however labeled, are knowable and thus (re)describable without remainder in wholly natural terms.
They can be so described because religion is, without remainder, a natural phenomenon.
That is to say, as an artifact of human social life, religion is “natural” inasmuch as it is a thing that humans do, just as dancing, gambling, and wrestling are natural, inasmuch as they are things humans do.
In a second sense, too, religion is “natural”: it is a thing wholly constructed by human beings and thus without “reference” beyond the human lives that give rise to it.
There are, in a word, no gods; God does not exist.
Neither are there spirits, angels, demons, ghosts, jinn, souls, astral beings, or any other entities, living or dead, beyond this universe or however many universes there may be.
Accordingly, there are no interactions with or experiences of such beings, divine or celestial or otherwise.
Accordingly, such “beings” do not act in the world at all, for what does not exist cannot act; a nonexistent cause has nonexistent effects.
Accordingly, miracles, signs, and wonders are a figment of human imagination or an error of human memory and experience.
What happens, happens in accordance with the laws of nature recognized and tested by contemporary scientific methods and experiments.
Claims to the contrary are knowable as false in advance, prior to investigation; they are rightly ruled out without discussion.
There are always, therefore, alternative explanations in natural terms.
This principle applies to every other form of mystical or transcendent experience, whether dreams or visions or foreknowledge or prophecy or glossolalia.
The fact that many contemporary people continue both to believe in religious/spiritual realities and to claim to experience them is immaterial.
Any attempt to undertake any form of epistemic inquiry based on any other set of principles besides the foregoing ones is ipso facto unserious, unscientific, irrational, and to be dismissed with prejudice as unnecessarily metaphysical, unduly influenced by philosophical commitments, biased by metaphysics, prejudiced by religious belief, and ultimately built on unprovable assumptions rather than common sense, natural reason, and truths self-evident to all.
Christianity is a conspiracy theory
Christianity professes some bizarre things, at least according to certain standards. That doesn’t mean it’s unreasonable; it means what’s reasonable is up for debate. Let the reader understand.
Christians are people who believe in a God they cannot see, in a man who rose from the dead after being publicly executed, in countless phenomena denied by modern science (walking on water, passing through walls, stilling a storm with a word, healing a disease with a touch, hearing a message spoken in a foreign language as if it were in one’s own, and much more), in unseen and immaterial inimical intelligent powers constantly assaulting and accusing and harassing and possessing human beings, in a world beyond this world that cannot be measured or accessed through empirical or other typical instruments of knowledge, in an ongoing contest or battle between that world and this world (carried out chiefly by the aforesaid intelligent powers, some of whom are good, some of whom are evil), in the real presence of a once-dead man’s bodily elements—his very flesh and blood!—available in bread and wine that, Christians readily admit, are chemically and constitutionally identical to ordinary bread and wine, the sole difference being the words spoken over them, words that mediate the omnipotent power of, again, the invisible Creator with whom we began.
Christians are weird. Our beliefs are bizarre. Our doctrines are wacky. We are not ordinary people, if by “ordinary” you mean adherents of the reputable epistemology of the secular West as defined by scientism, empiricism, and Enlightenment.
Being an orthodox Christian, attending a traditional church, will only ensure that you are a spookier person, in all the ways outlined above, and thus less “normal” in your beliefs. You’re bound to become the kind of person who believes that exorcisms happen. Who believes that angels and demons are rampant. That our enemy is not flesh and blood but the principalities and powers and rulers of this present darkness.
Going to church, you’ll come to take for granted that this world of ours is headed somewhere, that it is governed by an all-knowing and all-powerful Intelligence, that despite the charnel house that is this earth and its history the secret heart of the cosmos is infinite Love, that in the end all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well. Also that, more than occasionally, saints levitate.
You’re weird! You’re a Christian! The blood spilled on a tree by a Galilean Jew two millennia ago saves you from the wrongs you’ve committed against the Creator of the universe! Right? It makes perfect sense to me, but then again, I’m a Christian. Maybe common sense isn’t our forte.
If others suspect of us of a grand delusion, a sort of mass psychosis or hypnosis, who can blame them? Christianity is a conspiracy theory. There are devils hiding around every corner. None of this can be studied in a lab. All of it is taken on trust.
Whether that means they are crazy for not believing it, or we are crazy for buying it, one of us is right and one of us is wrong. More to the point, “what’s reasonable” isn’t the criterion for deciding. We don’t as a general matter know in advance what counts as reasonable. “What’s reasonable” is the question.
And by definition, it’s question-begging to suppose otherwise.
The smartest people I’ve ever known
A little rant about well-educated secular folks who look down on religious people.
have all been religious. Most of them have been devout Christians. Whether within the academy or without, my whole life has been full to the brim with brainy, well-educated, introspective, self-critical, “enlightened” folks who also believe in an invisible, incorporeal, omnipotent Creator of all things who became human in the person of Jesus and who calls all peoples to worship and follow him.
The fact that a bunch of believers are also intelligent and well-informed doesn’t, in and of itself, entail anything about the truth of Christian faith. Perhaps they’re all wrong, just as Christians suppose atheists are all wrong. It doesn’t make a lick of difference that atheists include educated, thoughtful people. If Christianity is true, then all the smart atheists are dead wrong (at least about God)—and vice versa. On the topic of religion, as with any other topic, a lot of bright people in the world are wrong; their brightness doesn’t ensure their rightness.
I say this to make a point I’ve made before: It is a strangely persistent myth, but a myth nonetheless, that sincere faith or religious belief or devout piety is a kind of maturational stage that persons above a certain level of intelligence inevitably leave behind given enough time, education, and social-emotional health. It isn’t true. Anyone not living in a bubble knows it’s not true. Yet it endures. Not only among tiny scattered remnants of New Atheists but also among graduates of elite universities, the types who congregate in big cities and fill jobs in journalism, academia, and politics. The types who love to celebrate what they call “diversity” but look down on anyone who, unlike them, believes in God and attends church, synagogue, or mosque.
The joke isn’t on the dummies who keep on believing. The joke is on people whose social and intellectual world is so parochial that they’ve honestly never read, met, or spoken to a serious religious person—one who’s read what they’ve read, knows what they know, and “still” believes. Better put, someone who’s read and knows all those things and continues to believe in God because of the evidence, not in spite of it. Someone whose reason points her to God, not someone who has sacrificed his intellect on the altar of faith.
Christians and other religious folks in America are fully aware that there are people unlike them in our society. They know they’re not alone. They know that atheists and agnostics and Nones include geniuses, scientists, scholars, journalists, professors, politicians, celebrities, artists, and more. They’re no fools. They know the score. They don’t pretend that “intelligence + education = believing whatever I do.”
Yet somehow that equation is ubiquitous among the secular smart set. I’m happy to leave them be. They’re free to continue in their ignorance. But I admit to being embarrassed on their behalf and, yes, more than occasionally annoyed.
Calvin, zombies, and the false faith of the reprobate
Edward Feser on the zombie problem, Calvin on the false faith of the reprobate, and the connection between them.
This week I read Edward Feser’s wonderful book Philosophy of Mind. One section in particular brought to mind an interesting connection.
In the middle of a dense discussion of Daniel Dennett, David Chalmers, and property dualism, Feser adverts to a common trope: namely, the difference between a conscious human person and a zombie duplicate. While criticizing Chalmers, Feser deploys the zombie example to show that Chalmers cannot account for a conscious human being’s knowledge of qualia as reliable knowledge if his theory would imply also, and necessarily, that a zombie would falsely but sincerely suppose it had qualia. If the latter were true, in other words, then why should anyone believe that her qualia are real and not the figment of her imagination? On what grounds would you or I suppose we are not zombies? For, epistemically speaking, we are in an identical position as a zombie that believes itself to be the conscious subject of genuine experiences. Even if it is just the case that I am a non-zombie with qualia and the zombie is a zombie without qualia, I have no good reason to believe I am any different; and the zombie may equally well believe its condition not to be what it in fact is.
A complex matter, to be sure. What it brought to mind is this.
In the third book of the Institutes, Calvin takes up, among other things, faith and election. After a brief introductory treatment, chapter 2 addresses the matter in detail. In section 11, Calvin faces head-on the obvious question: Aren’t there people who sincerely believe that they believe in Christ? I.e., believe they have saving faith in Christ? But who, according to Calvin, lack saving faith? I.e., are not among the elect? What of them? Not least given Calvin’s understanding of divine sovereignty?
Calvin bites the bullet, as only he can. Let’s just say it’s not the most satisfying part of the Institutes. And given the intended pastoral aspects of the doctrines of election, sola fide, assurance, and the perseverance of the saints, Calvin’s answer is doubly unsatisfying. In a word, it’s the original zombie problem, at least for Christian theology. Here’s how it unfolds:
The elect (non-zombie) “knows” he is saved, whereas the reprobate (zombie) believes (falsely) that he is saved. But precisely because there are reprobate (zombies) intermixed with the elect (non-zombies), the elect have no certain grounds for supposing themselves not to be reprobate (zombies)—for it has already been established that the reprobate (zombies)’ belief that they possess saving grace is utterly sincere; and, moreover, that God himself is the agent and source of their having this belief. Why, then, should anyone in the church, in the full knowledge of this spiritual and epistemic situation, suppose himself truly saved, because elect, rather than falsely confident (even “certain”) of a status lacking all independent verification?
That, it seems to me, no Calvinist, including Calvin, has ever resolved satisfactorily. At least not in this non-Calvinist’s eyes.
In any case, here are the two passages in full. I’ve not indented the quotations, given their length; I’ve placed in bold the crucial sentences; and I’ve broken up a few of Calvin’s ultra-long paragraphs. The first passage comes from pages 111-114 in Feser; the second comes from sections 11, 12, and 19 in chapter 2 of book 3 of the Institutes.
Feser on the zombie problem
The whole point of property dualism is to insist that there are non-physical qualia; if the theory also entails that we can never know that there are such qualia, then how (and why) are we even considering it? How can dualists themselves so much as formulate their hypothesis? Chalmers attempts to deal with this problem by suggesting that the assumption that there must be a causal connection between the knower and what is known, though appropriate where knowledge of physical objects is concerned, is inappropriate for knowledge of qualia. The existence of a causal chain implies the possibility of error, since . . . it seems to entail a gap between the experience of the thing known and the thing itself, a gap between appearance and reality: it is at least possible that the normal causal chain connecting us to the thing experienced has been disrupted, so that the experience is misleading (as in hallucination or deception by a Cartesian evil spirit). But knowledge of qualia, Chalmers says, is absolutely certain. Here there is no gap between appearance and reality, because the appearance—the way things seem, which is constituted by qualia themselves—is the reality. Knowledge of qualia must therefore somehow be direct and unmediated by causal chains between them and our beliefs about them. The fact that they can have no causal influence on our beliefs thus does not, after all, entail that we can’t think or talk about them.
But an objection to this is that it seems question-begging, since whether our knowledge of qualia really is certain is part of what is at issue in Dennett’s argument. Moreover, Chalmers’ claim that there is no gap between appearance and reality where knowledge of qualia is concerned seems problematic, given the assumption he shares with other property dualists that propositional attitudes can, unlike qualia, be reduced to physical processes in the brain. For while there is a sense of “appearance” and “seeming” which involves the having of qualia (a sense we can call the “qualitative” sense), there is also a sense of these words (call it the “cognitive” sense) which does not, but instead involves only the having of certain beliefs: one might say, for example, that at first it seemed or appeared to him that Chalmers’ arguments were sound, but on further reflection he concluded that they were not. Here there need be no qualia present, but only a mistake in judgment or the having of a false belief. But the having of beliefs and the making of judgments are, by Chalmers’ own lights, identical with being in certain brain states, so that there is a sense in which even a zombie has beliefs (including false beliefs) and makes judgments (including mistakes in judgment). But in that case, it could “seem” or “appear” even to a zombie that it had qualia, even though by definition it does not. So there can be a gap between appearance and reality even where qualia are concerned. Dennett’s challenge remains: how can property dualists so much as think about the qualia they say exist? How can they know that they aren’t zombies?
Chalmers’ view seems to be that this sort of objection can be avoided by arguing that it is just in the very nature of having an experience that one is justified in believing one has it, that there is a conceptual connection between having it and knowing one is having it. The evidence for my belief that I’m having the experience and the experience itself are the same thing; so I don’t infer the existence of the experience from the evidence, but just know directly from the mere having of the evidence. But this seems merely to push the problem back a stage, for now the question is how one can know one really has that evidence—the experience—in the first place, given that an experienceless zombie would also believe that it has it (and, if it’s read Chalmers, that there is a conceptual connection between having it and being justified in believing it does). Chalmers’ claim seems to amount to the conditional: if you have qualia, then you can know you have them. But that raises the question of how one can know the antecedent of this conditional, i.e. of how one can know one does in fact have qualia. Chalmers’ reply is “Because it seems to me that I do, and its seeming that way is all the justification I need.” But a zombie would believe the same thing! “But I have evidence the zombie doesn’t have my experience!” Chalmers would retort. Yet the zombie believes that too, because it also seems to it (in the cognitive sense) that it has such evidence. Any response Chalmers could give to such questions would seem to invite further questions about whether he really has the evidence he thinks he does. His only possible reply can be to say that he has it because he seems to have it, but if he says that he seems to in the cognitive sense of “seems,” then he’s saying something even a zombie would believe, while if he says, even to himself, that he seems to in the qualitative sense of “seems,” then he’s begging the question, for whether he has the qualia that this sense of “seems” presupposes is precisely what’s at issue. Chalmers’ reply to the sort of criticism raised by Dennett thus seems to fail.
Property dualism would thus appear to lead to absurdity as long as it concedes to materialism the reducibility of the propositional attitudes. If it instead takes the attitudes to be, like qualia, irreducible to physical states of the brain, this absurdity can be avoided: for in that case, your beliefs and judgments are as non-physical as your qualia are, and there is thus no barrier (at least of the usual mental-to-physical epiphenomenalist sort) to your qualia being the causes of your beliefs about them. But should it take this route, there seems much less motivation for adopting property dualism rather than full-blown Cartesian substance dualism: it was precisely the concession of the materiality of propositional attitudes that seemed to allow the property dualist to make headway on the interaction problem, an advantage that is lost if that concession is revoked; and while taking at least beliefs, desires, and the like to be purely material undermines the plausibility of the existence of a distinct non-physical mental substance, such plausibility would seem to be restored if all mental properties, beliefs and desires, as much as qualia, are non-physical. Moreover, property dualism raises a puzzle of its own, namely that of explaining exactly how non-physical properties could inhere in a physical substance.
Property dualism, then, is arguably not a genuine advance over substance dualism . . . .
Calvin on reprobate “faith”
11. I am aware it seems unaccountable to some how faith is attributed to the reprobate, seeing that it is declared by Paul to be one of the fruits of election; and yet the difficulty is easily solved: for though none are enlightened into faith, and truly feel the efficacy of the Gospel, with the exception of those who are fore-ordained to salvation, yet experience shows that the reprobate are sometimes affected in a way so similar to the elect, that even in their own judgment there is no difference between them. Hence it is not strange, that by the Apostle a taste of heavenly gifts, and by Christ himself a temporary faith, is ascribed to them. Not that they truly perceive the power of spiritual grace and the sure light of faith; but the Lord, the better to convict them, and leave them without excuse, instills into their minds such a sense of his goodness as can be felt without the Spirit of adoption. Should it be objected, that believers have no stronger testimony to assure them of their adoption, I answer, that though there is a great resemblance and affinity between the elect of God and those who are impressed for a time with a fading faith, yet the elect alone have that full assurance which is extolled by Paul, and by which they are enabled to cry, Abba, Father.
Therefore, as God regenerates the elect only for ever by incorruptible seed, as the seed of life once sown in their hearts never perishes, so he effectually seals in them the grace of his adoption, that it may be sure and steadfast. But in this there is nothing to prevent an inferior operation of the Spirit from taking its course in the reprobate. Meanwhile, believers are taught to examine themselves carefully and humbly, lest carnal security creep in and take the place of assurance of faith. We may add, that the reprobate never have any other than a confused sense of grace, laying hold of the shadow rather than the substance, because the Spirit properly seals the forgiveness of sins in the elect only, applying it by special faith to their use. Still it is correctly said, that the reprobate believe God to be propitious to them, inasmuch as they accept the gift of reconciliation, though confusedly and without due discernment; not that they are partakers of the same faith or regeneration with the children of God; but because, under a covering of hypocrisy, they seem to have a principle of faith in common with them. Nor do I even deny that God illumines their minds to this extent, that they recognize his grace; but that conviction he distinguishes from the peculiar testimony which he gives to his elect in this respect, that the reprobate never attain to the full result or to fruition. When he shows himself propitious to them, it is not as if he had truly rescued them from death, and taken them under his protection. He only gives them a manifestation of his present mercy. In the elect alone he implants the living root of faith, so that they persevere even to the end. Thus we dispose of the objection, that if God truly displays his grace, it must endure for ever. There is nothing inconsistent in this with the fact of his enlightening some with a present sense of grace, which afterwards proves evanescent.
12. Although faith is a knowledge of the divine favor towards us, and a full persuasion of its truth, it is not strange that the sense of the divine love, which though akin to faith differs much from it, vanishes in those who are temporarily impressed. The will of God is, I confess, immutable, and his truth is always consistent with itself; but I deny that the reprobate ever advance so far as to penetrate to that secret revelation which Scripture reserves for the elect only. I therefore deny that they either understand his will considered as immutable, or steadily embrace his truth, inasmuch as they rest satisfied with an evanescent impression; just as a tree not planted deep enough may take root, but will in process of time wither away, though it may for several years not only put forth leaves and flowers, but produce fruit. In short, as by the revolt of the first man, the image of God could be effaced from his mind and soul, so there is nothing strange in His shedding some rays of grace on the reprobate, and afterwards allowing these to be extinguished. There is nothing to prevent His giving some a slight knowledge of his Gospel, and imbuing others thoroughly. Meanwhile, we must remember that however feeble and slender the faith of the elect may be, yet as the Spirit of God is to them a sure earnest and seal of their adoption, the impression once engraven can never be effaced from their hearts, whereas the light which glimmers in the reprobate is afterwards quenched.
Nor can it be said that the Spirit therefore deceives, because he does not quicken the seed which lies in their hearts so as to make it ever remain incorruptible as in the elect. I go farther: seeing it is evident, from the doctrine of Scripture and from daily experience, that the reprobate are occasionally impressed with a sense of divine grace, some desire of mutual love must necessarily be excited in their hearts. Thus for a time a pious affection prevailed in Saul, disposing him to love God. Knowing that he was treated with paternal kindness, he was in some degree attracted by it. But as the reprobate have no rooted conviction of the paternal love of God, so they do not in return yield the love of sons, but are led by a kind of mercenary affection. The Spirit of love was given to Christ alone, for the express purpose of conferring this Spirit upon his members; and there can be no doubt that the following words of Paul apply to the elect only: “The love of God is shed abroad in our hearts, by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us” (Rom. 5:5); namely, the love which begets that confidence in prayer to which I have above adverted.
On the other hand, we see that God is mysteriously offended with his children, though he ceases not to love them. He certainly hates them not, but he alarms them with a sense of his anger, that he may humble the pride of the flesh, arouse them from lethargy, and urge them to repentance. Hence they, at the same instant, feel that he is angry with them or their sins, and also propitious to their persons. It is not from fictitious dread that they deprecate his anger, and yet they retake themselves to him with tranquil confidence. It hence appears that the faith of some, though not true faith, is not mere pretense. They are borne along by some sudden impulse of zeal, and erroneously impose upon themselves, sloth undoubtedly preventing them from examining their hearts with due care. Such probably was the case of those whom John describes as believing on Christ; but of whom he says, “Jesus did not commit himself unto them, because he knew all men, and needed not that any should testify of man: for he knew what was in man” (John 2:24, 25). Were it not true that many fall away from the common faith (I call it common, because there is a great resemblance between temporary and living, ever-during faith), Christ would not have said to his disciples, “If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:31, 32). He is addressing those who had embraced his doctrine, and urging them to progress in the faith, lest by their sluggishness they extinguish the light which they have received. Accordingly, Paul claims faith as the peculiar privilege of the elect, intimating that many, from not being properly rooted, fall away (Tit. 1:1). In the same way, in Matthew, our Savior says, “Every plant which my heavenly Father has not planted shall be rooted up” (Mt. 16:13). Some who are not ashamed to insult God and man are more grossly false. Against this class of men, who profane the faith by impious and lying pretense, James inveighs (James 2:14). Nor would Paul require the faith of believers to be unfeigned (1 Tim. 1:5), were there not many who presumptuously arrogate to themselves what they have not, deceiving others, and sometimes even themselves, with empty show. Hence he compares a good conscience to the ark in which faith is preserved, because many, by falling away, have in regard to it made shipwreck. . . .
19. The whole, then, comes to this: As soon as the minutest particle of faith is instilled into our minds, we begin to behold the face of God placid, serene, and propitious; far off, indeed, but still so distinctly as to assure us that there is no delusion in it. In proportion to the progress we afterwards make (and the progress ought to be uninterrupted), we obtain a nearer and surer view, the very continuance making it more familiar to us. Thus we see that a mind illumined with the knowledge of God is at first involved in much ignorance,—ignorance, however, which is gradually removed. Still this partial ignorance or obscure discernment does not prevent that clear knowledge of the divine favor which holds the first and principal part in faith. For as one shut up in a prison, where from a narrow opening he receives the rays of the sun indirectly and in a manner divided, though deprived of a full view of the sun, has no doubt of the source from which the light comes, and is benefited by it; so believers, while bound with the fetters of an earthly body, though surrounded on all sides with much obscurity, are so far illumined by any slender light which beams upon them and displays the divine mercy as to feel secure.
Inoculation
Over the last year I’ve noticed something of a theme emerging on this blog. The theme is what people, especially Christians, and most of all well-educated Christians, feel permitted or pressured to believe (or not). I think a good deal of my experience of this phenomenon is a function of having lived for eight years outside of Texas or even the Bible belt—three years in Atlanta (technically the South but not exactly a small rural town in Louisiana) then five years in New Haven, Connecticut.
Over the last year I’ve noticed something of a theme emerging on this blog. The theme is what people, especially Christians, and most of all well-educated Christians, feel permitted or pressured to believe (or not). I think a good deal of my experience of this phenomenon is a function of having lived for eight years outside of Texas or even the Bible belt—three years in Atlanta (technically the South but not exactly a small rural town in Louisiana) then five years in New Haven, Connecticut. At least weekly and sometimes daily a friend, a colleague, a pastor, or a student will remark in my presence about some topic, and invariably the remark reveals that s/he understands it to be outdated, unenlightened, or outlandish. As I wrote yesterday, usually the topic is one I care about and, indeed, the belief presumed to call for nothing so much as an eye-roll is one I myself hold.
I wrote last year about the existence of angels as a case study. At the very moment that certain aspirationally progressive (in west Texas “progressive” means “moderate-to-slightly-left-of-center on certain issues”) seminarians and pastors unburden themselves of belief in superstitious follies like angels—having belatedly received the decades-old message from third-rate demythologizers that celestial beings belong to a mythological age—at this moment, as I say, angels and demons are sexy again in academic scholarship. I could walk through the hallways of the most liberal seminaries in the country holding a sign that read “I believe in angels!” and from most professors it would elicit no more than a shrug. One more reminder that being intellectually in vogue is a moving target; best not to make the attempt in the first place.
But that’s not my point at present. I’ve already written about all that. Here’s my point.
I understand why people feel pressure to believe, or to cease to believe, in this or that old-fashioned thing. Likewise I understand why they assume that I—returning from a half-decade sojourn among the coastal elites, having pitched my tent in the Acela corridor, now with an Ivy doctorate in hand—not only share their up-to-date beliefs but will do them a solid by confirming them in their up-to-date-ness. I get it.
But the secret about having gotten my PhD at Yale isn’t that I learned the cutting edge and now live my life teetering on it. The opposite is the case. I didn’t journey to the Ivy League only to be disabused of all those silly beliefs I came in the door with—about God, Christ, Scripture, resurrection, and the rest. What I received was far better, if wholly unexpected.
What I received was inoculation.
What do I mean? I mean that I learned the invaluable intellectual lesson that knowledge, intelligence, and education are not a function of fads. I learned that substituting social trends for reasoned conviction is foolish. I learned that no one else can do your thinking for you. I learned that coordinating one’s own beliefs to the beliefs of an ever-changing and amorphous elite is a fool’s errand and a recipe for spiritual aimlessness. I learned that smart people are often wicked, and that sometimes even smart people are stupid—in the sense that raw intelligence is no match for wisdom, prudence, and practical reason.
Most of all, I learned that there are no “outdated” beliefs in Christian theology. As Hauerwas might put it, passé is not a theological category. Think of any doctrine or conviction that is particularly unhip today, or rarely spoken of, or even that you might be embarrassed to admit you believe in mixed company. At Yale, and in the circles of folks who criss-cross Ivy campuses and circuits and conferences, I met people who believed in every single one of those unfashionable doctrines, and they were the smartest, most well-read people I’ve ever met in my life. Certainly smarter and better read than I’ll ever be. To be clear, that fact alone doesn’t make them right: their frumpy beliefs may be erroneous. But the lesson isn’t that prestige or scholarly caliber validate theological ideas. The lesson, rather, is that the notion of some threshold of intelligence or erudition beyond which certain beliefs simply cannot across is a lie. Such a threshold does not exist.
In short, if what you want is for folks with an IQ above X or a PhD from Y to tell you what you’re allowed to believe while remaining a reasonable person, I’ve got some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that you can be a reasonable person and believe just about anything. No one above your rank is going to set the terms for what you’re permitted to suppose to be true about God, the world, and everything else. The good news is just a reiteration of these same truths, only in a different register: No one gets to make you feel bad for believing what you do. That’s not a license to believe untrue or foolish or evil things. It’s a liberation from feeling like personal conviction is a matter of not being made fun of by the Great and the Good peering over your shoulder, looking down their noses at you. Truth is not a popularity contest. Right belief does not follow from peer pressure. Be free. Be inoculated, as I was. Ever since leaving I’ve found myself blessedly rid of that low gnawing anxiety that someone is going to find me out, and what they’re going to find is that I’m a deplorable—not because what I believe is actually risible or indefensible, but because for about fifteen seconds of cultural time something I’d be willing to stake my life on (as I have, however falteringly) has become intellectually unstylish.
Style is deceptive, and the approval of the world is fleeting; but the one who fears the Lord will be praised. Fear God, not unpopularity. Your life as a whole will be happier, for one, but more than anything your intellectual life will benefit. Seek the truth for its own sake, and the rest will take care of itself.
“As we all know”
I have a friend who once told me of a professor he had in seminary. She instructed the class at the outset of the semester that, when they wrote their papers, she wanted them to imagine her peering over their shoulder. At every sentence featuring a claim, an assertion, or an assumption, they should imagine her asking them, “How do you know that?”
I have a friend who once told me of a professor he had in seminary. She instructed the class at the outset of the semester that, when they wrote their papers, she wanted them to imagine her peering over their shoulder. At every sentence featuring a claim, an assertion, or an assumption, they should imagine her asking them, “How do you know that?”
This bit of imaginative pedagogy might be a recipe for paper-writing anxiety, but it’s a good bit of writing advice. It’s a strong but necessary dose of epistemic humility. So little of what we take for granted is actually something we know, or at least can claim to know with some confidence, much less provide cogent reasons for knowing it. That’s not a problem in daily life most of the time. It’s rightly a matter for conscious attention in the academy, though.
I think of this anecdote regularly, for the following reason. In my experience, people consistently take for granted that they know in advance what I believe, including about the most important or controverted of matters. I don’t mean, say, that non-Christians assume I believe in God. That would be a reasonable assumption to make, given who I am and what I do. I mean fellow Christians who, because of my education or my profession or my reading habits or some other set of factors, project onto me beliefs regarding topics about which they have never heard me speak and about which I have never written.
It’s become a recurring phenomenon. Before commenting on a subject, a friend or acquaintance or colleague or person I’ve just met will either say aloud or imply, “As we all know…” or “As I’m sure you, like me, believe…” or “As any reasonable person would suppose…” or “Obviously…” or “We, unlike they, think…” or some similar formulation. I’ve come to learn that the phrase, spoken or unspoken, is a social cue. The other person is marking off the fearsome or foolish They from the wise or educated Us. Whatever the issue—usually moral, political, or theological—there is one self-evident Right Answer for People Like Us; but People Unlike Us (the dummies, the fundies, the voters or church folk who can’t be trusted) think otherwise, for some inexplicable reason. Typically the implication is that They are bad people; or, even more condescendingly, They would surely agree with Us if only They had (Our) education. Bless Their hearts, if only They knew better!
What’s remarkable is that, nine times out of town, the belief my interlocutor is attributing to Them is in fact my own. If I were inclined to take offense, I could do so with justice. I’m not so inclined, however, for the simple reason that I’m secure in my own convictions. I don’t need to roll my eyes at those I disagree with in order to feel confident in what I believe to be true. Nor do I need to whisper about Them in mock-conspiratorial or patronizing tones. After all, one thing all my education has done for me is show me how far from obvious any answer to any question is, certainly those questions that animate and roil our common life. People who think I’m wrong aren’t stupid; nor are they ignorant. They’ve merely come to a different judgment about a complex question than the one I have. Logically, I think they’re wrong just as they think I’m wrong; one of us is right (unless both of us are wrong and someone else is right), and this calls for humility, because it’s difficult to say in the moment, from the midst of one’s all-too-parochial life, whether one’s reasons for one’s beliefs are strong, weak, or just post hoc justifications for what one wishes were true or was raised to believe.
In any case, what most fascinates me here is the social phenomenon of presumptive projection onto others of what they must believe, given their intelligence, education, career, or what have you. I’m struck by the sheer lack of curiosity on display. People rarely ask me, directly, what I think about X or Y. Not that they don’t want to talk about it (whatever it is). Usually, though, they dance around the issue; or they assume they know what I think, and take the trouble to inform me of it. I sometimes wonder what would happen if I began, however so gently, to commit the faux pas of pausing the conversation in order to clarify, in no uncertain terms, that the Bad Belief my interlocutor has so passionately forced onto a Benighted They is actually my own. I almost always avoid doing so, since it would likely embarrass the other person, make him feel defensive, ruin the chat we were having , etc. On the other hand, it might actually make for a deeper and richer encounter, not least because here, in the flesh, would be a member of Team Stupid—ask me anything! A real education might ensue, in which it would become evident (using the same word in a different vein) that the world isn’t divided into stupid and smart groups, the latter tolerating the former with magnanimous mercy. This might also encourage avoiding such presumption in the future, and seeking to learn and to understand what other people believe and why.
Then again, maybe not. Regardless, the experience is a lesson in itself. Don’t assume you know what others think, and don’t carve up your neighbors into Good and Evil. Allow yourself to be surprised. People you love and respect have different beliefs than you. Formal education is not a one-way ticket to enlightenment, where “enlightenment” means “believe the same things as you.” Be curious. Ask away. You might learn a thing or two. You might even find one day that your mind has been changed. Imagine that.
More on the analogia entis (from my inbox)
Friend #1:
I like the first half of this. I think you’re right to make the doctrine fundamentally metaphysical (with the latter allowing certain epistemological moves). I read the analogy of being in Thomas as shorthand for the whole metaphysical process of emanation and return, and with that of the corresponding epistemological moves of affirmation and negation in positive and negative theologies.
My reply:
I wasn't per se trying to do a Barthian spin on analogy. I was actually coming from the other direction: Reading a book on Jenson by someone doing the typical Barthian anti-analogy routine, and finding myself frustrated at what felt like the usual rhetorical moves inspired by Barth without charitably articulating the best, most substantive Christian theological approach to analogy.
So this was an attempt at simple clarification, first of all: "If you're going to disagree with anything, disagree with this." My mention of Barth in the second half is then a way of saying, "It isn't obvious or clear why the Barthian has to reject all this. Say more if he still does."
Obviously I'm both reducing a lot and doing some constructive work. Doctrines don't speak or act, their interpreters do. (All praise to Dale Martin.) But part of what I was trying to do, at a simple level, was show the necessary rather than accidental commitments of analogy, ontologically construed, as well as some of the non-necessary entailments. So that, e.g., a Barthian in my view basically has to admit analogy after the fact, and it's silly to then call it analogy of faith, when you're still doing ontology, and locating it at the level of creator/creature distinction and not soteriology.
As to the provenance of analogy, I have less to say about that. Given that Denys and Thomas and their reception are (to me, clearly) modifying the Neoplatonists in their Christian theological explication, I have less of a problem with infection-at-the-source. And I should also add that the post is meant to be ambivalent about natural theology: i.e., that it doesn't seem to me that natural theology necessarily follows from a doctrine of analogy, though it can, as it has been, made complementary to it. In other words, Thomas can affirm some kind of knowledge of God apart from the revelation in Christ, but that is a logically independent claim from analogy, which secures something different.
Friend #2:
As I see it, you're basically asking the Barthians what's wrong with the analogy of being when paired with a strong doctrine of sin, esp. the noetic effects of the fall. That seems like the right question. But some quibbles:
"Third, God speaks to human beings, as the rational embodied creatures they are, thus eliciting their reply and constituting a unique relationship (compared to other creatures' relationship to God)."
If "speaks" here refers to revelation, as I take you to mean, then it is not entailed by the analogy of being, which holds even in the absence of revelation. But if God's speech refers to God speaking creation (and God said...), then this is basically the heart of the doctrine.
"...not being an epistemic principle, it is not concerned with the source or medium of knowledge of God, whether through revelation or nature or anything else."
Analogy at its most basic means that nature and indeed any existant is in principle a medium for knowing God, though we may be blind to it. Not sure if you mean to deny that here.
"...it does not make a claim to be itself a generic or universally perspicuous or philosophical doctrine: it is a Christian theological claim about the ontological conditions 'on the ground,' so to speak, that in fact obtain, conditions necessary for knowledge of and speech about the triune God to occur."
I think the analogy of being has to be necessarily true: if there are creatures, then their being is analogically related to God's. So it's not about what just happens to obtain. But it may be that we only know this necessary truth through revelation. Like the trinity: a necessary truth that we do not know necessarily but only through God's free revelation. Unlike the trinity, the analogy of being is classically held to be knowable through natural reason, though of course there is room for debate as to how much this holds of corrupted natural reason. But this much is consistent with both Calvin and Vatican I.
"Finally, the analogy of being does not make any positive claim about the human capacity for speech about God, whether it is pre- or post-lapsarian humanity in view."
I think some kind of prelapsarian natural theology is implied by the analogy of being, though I'd probably need to bring in more Christian Platonism to say why. But I also don't see the problem with that, given Rom 1, the Institutes, etc.
My reply:
–No, by speech I don't mean "revelation." I mean the twofold speaking of Genesis 1: God speaking creation into being, and God addressing humanity personally—however one wants to construe the latter.
–Yes, agreed about your analogy to the Trinity: analogy is necessarily true but we do not necessarily know it. And agreed about the classical claim regarding analogy's being knowable through natural reason, but apart from the effects of sin, my further claim is that it doesn't seem to me to follow necessarily from the doctrine itself that the doctrine of analogy must be knowable through natural reason. Sin levels this disagreement anyway, in my opinion, but that's my claim.
–And yes, agreed: I've never really known what's at stake in the denial (does anyone deny it?) of prelapsarian natural theology/natural knowledge of God. Particularly if natural theology is not specified such that God is somehow inactive or passive in being known.