Discussion Grounds

Greetings, Luke,

I could also rattle off a long list of things I think are wrong with atheism, if that were our purpose here. I could “give a hint at” why I think atheism is “a terrible explanation for the world,” for indeed I think it is. I haven’t done that (“not even close!”) because that’s not what we’re about here. So I’ll take it as duly noted that you believe Christianity is a “tangled mess,” etc., and move on to the discussion we’ve agreed to have.

I’m also not going to get into your misrepresentations of Christian theology, because that would just throw us off track. That discussion is proceeding just fine without me in the comments.

Now for the meat of it. You said,

I think the natural explanations for these phenomena are plausible, while the Christian explanation is absurd. You think natural explanations for these phenomena are weak, while the Christian explanation for them is strong. Therefore I suspect we have very different ideas about what makes an explanation strong or weak, good or bad…. Personally, I tend to think of a good explanation as one that possesses many explanatory virtues: testability, consistency with background knowledge, simplicity, informativeness, and so on.

I would center my conception of explanation around this:

x is a good explanation for y if

(A) by knowing x we understand y better than by not knowing x; and if

(B) there is adequate reason to believe that x is true, reliable, trustworthy, etc.; and if

(C) there is no competing z, such that z is contrary or contradictory to x and fulfills the conditions of (A) and (B) more successfully than does x.

That’s a fairly simplified and generalized picture of what I think explanation is about. It leaves open the door for variations like tentative explanation (the best explanation we have so far, where (B) could possibly be true, but is not well established), multiple coinciding explanations (where z is complementary rather than contrary or contradictory to x), and so on.¹ It also provides for some comfortable flexibility in how we determine whether (A), (B), and (C) are each true. Certainly your list of explanatory virtues is relevant.

Now I think that Christianity certainly meets condition (A) for the phenomena I focused on in my last two posts. The Judeo-Christian doctrines of the imago Dei and the fall certainly help us to understand the confusing, paradoxical human condition. We were created in dignity, love, and moral innocence for an intimate relationship with a holy God and with others of his creation. We rebelled against God and fell away from that state of complete dignity, love, and relationship; and we feel the sting of it in the form of alienation, moral failure, and multiple indignities including physical illness and death. Our longing for something better or something more is a sense that is built into us by virtue of being in God’s image. Our moral awareness, which is largely (not perfectly) in tune with truth, is a reflection of God’s moral character still stamped in us. Our successes in love, giving, sacrifice, etc. are real successes in living in tune with that character as it is known to us through conscience and natural law (and also, for those who know and accept it, by revelation from God). Our awareness of failure, on the other hand, is a result of really not matching up to a really existent standard. It’s an awareness that is not born of our own imaginings, it’s not a mere social construction, it’s not the result of evolution, but it is based on a standard that has stood forever.

Knowing our origin and state—created in the image of God but fallen—certainly gives us a better understanding of our paradoxical condition than not knowing it does. Thus it meets part (A) of my definition for an explanation. Does it meet the test of (B)? I think so. I know you disagree. I cannot present the whole case for that here; it would require having our whole discussion about all of Christianity at once! I am content to show that it meets (A), but not just that; that it meets (A) better than the competing naturalistic explanation. If it succeeds in that, then that by itself contributes to the case (B) for its being true.

The naturalistic explanation for the human condition seems problematical to me. Yes, I know there’s more than one naturalistic explanation, but they all share the view that every cause that produces every effect, including every human feeling, thought, or behavior, is purely natural: matter and energy interacting according to necessity (natural law) and chance (quantum effects).² The naturalistic worldview entails the causal closure of the physical; that is, that all causes are physical. Matter and energy interacting by law and chance constitute the entire ultimate causal picture for everything.

More proximately, the cause of all human feeling, thought, behavior, etc. is to be found in evolutionary processes that are built in randomness and seek and reward³ only reproductive fitness. If there is any other naturalistic explanation available for any organism’s characteristics, well, it hasn’t been suggested yet.⁴ Random variation and reproductive success constitute the entire causal schema for all organisms’ attributes. This, too, is causal closure. On this level of analysis, there are no other causes for human behavior.

The naturalistic explanation requires one to suppose that the painful, paradoxical experiences that go with being human led to reproductive success sometime in our species’ natural history. Now, I have trouble seeing how a purely natural process could have thrown up any reliable sense of right or wrong whatever: it’s just not in the nature of physical things to be right or wrong. I can imagine natural processes producing a sense of right or wrong, but not a reliable sense; for there is nothing about natural processes that could be expected to produce such a thing, in a way it could be relied upon as true. So on naturalism, I have to take it that our sense of being somewhat right, somewhat wrong; somewhat good, somewhat bad; somewhat dignified, somewhat dirt; somewhat eternal in value, somewhat eternally flawed—all of this is just a sense, and there is no reason to consider it the least bit reliable. It is only a sense, one that was developed and preserved in humans just because it served our ability to make more babies that made more babies.

I have spoken of two levels of explanation for human behavior. On the most ultimate level, all causation is accounted for in terms of physics, interactions of particles by lawlike or chance processes. On a more proximate level, all causation relevant to human behavior is accounted for by random variation and natural selection (reproductive success). This does not obviate or contradict the most ultimate level of causation. Evolution expresses physics, at a more complex level of organization, it does not deny it or override it.

Of course there are still other levels of explanation, including our mental processes of belief-forming and decision-making; but on naturalism, given the causal closure of the physical and the causal closure (on another level) of random variation and reproductive success, it is impossible for this level of explanation to escape the causal necessities of the more ultimate levels of explanation. Therefore whatever mental processes we think are influencing our behavior, those mental processes are ineluctably and inescapably caused by physical interactions of particles (on one level) and by randomness and reproductive success on another level. There is no other causal stream contributing to human attributes, and thus no other causal stream contributing to human mental processes.

To state it baldly: all of my and your most human mental attributes—our aspirations, hopes, dreams, confusions, moral victories, moral shames—do not exist because we really do have dignity, worth, moral value, etc. They exist in us because attributes like this helped our ancestors reproduce more successfully and for no other reason.⁵ This is the conclusion Dawkins draws in The Selfish Gene, and if naturalism is a true picture of reality, then I don’t see how he could be wrong on this.

Further evidence for my position is found in the immense difference between humans and animals in this respect. Animals do not agonize over unfulfilled aspirations, and they don’t mourn their moral failures. They don’t reach for something higher. What could evolution have done to some population of primates to produce this in homo sapiens? It would have had to introduce in us a sense that some things were right, and other things were wrong. But is it plausible to think of this happening in that population of primates, when what evolution cares about⁶ is getting the male and the female together in some environment where they’ll make babies that will live to make babies? It works awfully well in animal populations without all this mental anguish of hope and failure; why would evolution have bothered to do more than that for humans? Where is the reproductive advantage in it?

So naturalism could plausibly explain the sense of human aspiration and failure, but it cannot explain it as a reality. It can tell how we feel worth and dignity, but it certainly cannot say how we really have worth and dignity beyond those feelings. If that sense or feeling is actually tapping into something real, then naturalism’s explanation for it is inadequate. Or as I put it last time, what we know to be true about the human condition fits within the Christian worldview. It takes some serious Procrustean hammering to make it fit with naturalism.

1. I’m also saying we can call x a good explanation without requiring that it be the whole explanation. The pot is boiling on the stove because I want to make spaghetti is a good explanation, even if it doesn’t make reference to how the electricity was supplied, how the resistive stovetop coil produces heat, how heat makes water boil, etc. The greater the explanatory scope of x, the better an explanation it is, of course. [↩]
2. I have seen attempts by naturalists to avoid the such reductionism, but I’ve never seen any that succeeded in avoiding self-contradiction. [↩]
3. Please pardon the anthropomorphism [↩]
4. Genetic drift is just randomness writ large. [↩]
5. There actually is another possible reason: that these things came up as a co-adaptation along with some other human feature that served purpose of reproductive success. If so, and if there is any actual truth to be found in this co-adaptive state, that’s just marvelously lucky indeed. The odds are not in favor of such a thing happening. [↩]
6. I know, I’m anthropomorphizing again [↩]

Greetings, Luke,

I have to agree with some of the comments that have been posted since your letter number 10, especially here and here. One of them said it would have helped if my last letter had been shorter, and I’ll accept that advice and correction. I got carried away with Pascal, plus it’s been a rough week with the loss of a friend. But I do want to recall for you the idea of this website, which is to keep our debate focused and somewhat disciplined. I wrote about one topic and received a response that covered just about everything you think is wrong with Christianity.

You wrote,

I would love to have somebody explain to me how Christianity makes sense. Even before we discuss whether Christianity also happens to be true, I would first like to hear a presentation of Christianity that even makes sense.

It appears to me you missed the point of what I wrote. Maybe it got buried in the glut of words I used. I’m going to repeat most of an entire paragraph in hopes it will come through this time:

The first reason I would adduce for my believing in the Christian revelation is … a step towards a first-phase outcome I hope to reach, which is to show that Christianity makes sense. This is more important than it once was…. Now we have the New Atheists (including Hitchens) presenting [Christianity] as something ridiculous or awful; or we have writers representing its beliefs as equivalent to Casper the Friendly Ghost or involving something as absurd as “metaphysical ectoplasm.” In an environment like this I don’t think it’s such a great idea to start with trying to prove Christianity. I would rather tell its story in a way that shows that it really does make sense.

In other words, what you called for in your Letter 10, with all the accompanying invective implying its impossibility, is something I said I was working on in my Letter 9. Moreover, I said it was a first step. I’m well aware of the questions you raised in your last letter. They’re not new to me. I’m not going to try to answer them all at once, okay? I’m taking it a step at a time.

Apparently my last letter did not present a clear and coherent enough argument for you to respond to. You wrote,

Tom, you have said many flowery things and quoted the lovely Pensées at length, but your argument was presented so vaguely that it raises suspicions of obscurantism. If you present your argument so unclearly it cannot be refuted or supported, and if you can present it more clearly I suspect it will be easily refuted.

I’ll try to be more clear. But whatever floweriness there was in my last letter was there for a purpose: to represent or to call to mind what it means to be human. I didn’t want to dry that out like dust in some syllogism. Since you asked, though, I’ll be glad to clarify my argument, as follows.

To be human is to experience a paradoxical mix of awareness of dignity, moral purpose, goodness, destiny, value, beauty, and wonder, along with all of their opposites. This is not easily accounted for by naturalism and especially by evolutionary explanations for behavior. Evolutionary psychology is a pseudo-science in the first place, since it has little to no evidence to draw on for most of its conclusions. In the second place, even its supposed explanations fail to to explain adequately how the first arising of these paradoxical experiences took place. And in the third place, naturalism provides no ontological ground for the actual existence of things like dignity, truth, destiny, beauty, and value, or for their opposites, either, for on naturalism there is only matter and energy arranged in varying degrees of complexity, interacting according to necessity and/or chance. I don’t know how matter, energy, necessity, and chance can acquire properties of truth, dignity, value, or destiny.

Naturalism cannot actually deny the reality of these things, so it tries to accommodate them, but based on the evolutionary picture of organisms (including humans), the ultimate explanation for these things must resolve down to their contributions to humans’ reproductive fitness, or what Churchland called the Four F’s (feeding, fighting, fleeing, and reproducing). This is a poor fit with what we know to be true about our experience of these things. We know they have more meaning and more reality than just perpetuating some set of selfish genes.

Further, the sense of human experience is that there is something higher toward which we ought to be striving, and that this something higher is real. On evolution it’s not real, it’s always a proxy or a scheme for producing more offspring, which is the only ultimate explanation for any behavior.

On Christianity,¹ the sense of greatness, dignity, higher purpose is grounded in a reality of having been created in God’s image. The paradoxical experience of failure is explained in our having fallen away from the ontologically genuine goodness of our origins. It makes sense, on Christianity, that humans have high intrinsic value and such a confusing mix of goodness and badness.

That’s the essence of my argument at this stage, and this is the portion of the discussion I’m asking you to interact with at this time.

1. Also on Judaism, for this comes from the part of the Bible Christians call the Old Testament, which we share with the Jews [↩]

Greetings, Luke,

I have just come home from the National Conference on Christian Apologetics, a truly great experience, where the final event was something you would have enjoyed too: a debate between Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D’Souza. I did not meet either of them personally, but sitting on the front row I was struck with something that I hope nobody involved in these dialogues will ever forget: They are human beings.

I could not tell you the question of the debate in exact words, but it had to do with how we ought to respond to radical Islam. Hitchens had the first statement, and there wasn’t a word in what he said that I could disagree with.¹ He is very concerned for the future of the Western world, in view of many persons’ unwillingness to see terrorism for what it is (especially following the Fort Hood massacre). He was brilliant on that topic.

Speaking to all readers now, I don’t know whether your inclination is more to believe Hitchens or D’Souza on Christianity. Either way it might do you good (as it did for me) to see them giving each other a hug, and to be reminded that even though we all differ in many ways, we share so much that we ought not to regard one another as less than brothers or sisters in humanity.

To do this is not always easy. I came home from the conference to find out that a friend, fellow church member, our car mechanic, had been killed by an angry intruder in his home. The suspect has apparently turned himself in; he is being held on first-degree murder charges. I don’t know the suspect personally, and I really don’t know anything more about what happened, except that I cannot imagine my friend doing anything to incite anything remotely approaching the anger he experienced. He is (I have to say “was” now; that’s painful) just a really good guy. It is upsetting beyond imagination.

It’s hard to make sense out of being human. This is the post I’ve been planning to write for several days, but it’s a lot more emotionally charged than I had expected it to be. The feelings fit the topic, however.

The first reason I would adduce for my believing in the Christian revelation is not one I would present as any kind of proof, but rather as a step towards a first-phase outcome I hope to reach, which is to show that Christianity makes sense. This is more important than it once was. Though there never was a time when everybody thought the Christian view reality made sense, still there was a time not long ago in the Western world when a lot more people viewed it that way than do now. Now we have the New Atheists (including Hitchens) presenting it as something ridiculous or awful; or we have writers representing its beliefs as equivalent to Casper the Friendly Ghost or involving something as absurd as “metaphysical ectoplasm.” In an environment like this I don’t think it’s such a great idea to start with trying to prove Christianity. I would rather tell its story in a way that shows that it really does make sense.

The story I want to tell begins with what we all know best: ourselves. Christianity makes good sense of the human condition. How did we get to be so marvelous and yet so miserable at the same time? Why are we so good and so bad? Someone at the conference I attended this weekend put it this way: the lion eats the antelope. It does not strategize or conspire to wipe out entire herds. It doesn’t even think of eliminating the whole neighboring pride of lions. We can be very, very bad indeed.

But no animal can be as good and loving as a human can. No animal rings bells at Christmastime for the poor among them. Apart from the communication/awareness problem, it’s hard to imagine any animal caring for cyclone or tsunami victims on the far side of the world.

It’s especially hard to think of animals seeing their moral faults and weaknesses, trying to improve themselves, believing they ought to be better.

We are a very confused lot. No one has expressed this better than Blaise Pascal, in his Pensées.

The nature of self-love and of this human Ego is to love self only and consider self only. But what will man do? He cannot prevent this object that he loves from being full of faults and wants. He wants to be great, and he sees himself small. He wants to be happy, and he sees himself miserable. He wants to be perfect, and he sees himself full of imperfections. He wants to be the object of love and esteem among men, and he sees that his faults merit only their hatred and contempt. (100)²

“Full of faults and wants,” and full of contradictions. Nothing else we know of has an experience at all like this:

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be miserable. A tree does not know itself to be miserable. It is then being miserable to know oneself to be miserable; but it is also being great to know that one is miserable. All these same miseries prove man’s greatness. They are the miseries of a great lord, of a deposed king. (397, 398)

A tree does not know its misery. An animal may certainly know its pain, but what does it know of greatness? There is no such paradox in its experience.

The universe, for all its vastness, has nothing on us small humans:

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this. (347)

Where does this sense of great wretchedness, or wretched greatness, come from? The naturalistic story is that we have arisen out of the animal kingdom; but no, not out of it at all, for we are part of it. Pascal sees the answer in our having descended: not as in Darwin’s “Descent of Man,” in which we are the children of the animals, but as in having descended from a higher, better condition in which we were originally intended to live.

The greatness of man is so evident, that it is even proved by his wretchedness. For what in animals is nature we call in man wretchedness; by which we recognise that, his nature being now like that of animals, he has fallen from a better nature which once was his.

For who is unhappy at not being a king, except a deposed king? Was Paulus Æmilius unhappy at being no longer consul? On the contrary, everybody thought him happy in having been consul, because the office could only be held for a time. But men thought Perseus so unhappy in being no longer king, because the condition of kingship implied his being always king, that they thought it strange that he endured life. Who is unhappy at having only one mouth? And who is not unhappy at having only one eye? Probably no man ever ventured to mourn at not having three eyes. But any one is inconsolable at having none. (409)

From an evolutionary perspective this is a puzzle. At the moment in our history when we supposedly developed this unhappiness, what was its adaptive value? How did the first discontented men or women bear more offspring? How did the first population that said, “We are not as good as we should be,” outstrip other competing populations in making babies that lived to make others? How does it even make sense today to regard our failures as failures? For no other organism seems to depend on this sense for its survival.

I know there are evolutionary psychological answers to these questions. Set aside for now that I think evo-psych is about the ultimate in evidence-free “science.” Let me suggest that even if there is some plausibility in its stories of human altruism, they are pale, thin, and watery compared to what we know about our own real selves.

Judeo-Christianity’s perspective on this paradox is utterly unique. Pascal says,

All these contradictions, which seem most to keep me from the knowledge of religion, have led me most quickly to the true one. (424)

The Judeo-Christian view is that we have indeed descended from a height. We were made in the image of God, intended to live in harmony with him, living a truly good existence, enjoying life in our physical, mental, social, and spiritual dimensions. But we rebelled. We chose against that goodness, and tried to develop an alternate one of our own. (The original source of this is in Genesis 3.) The image of God is still present upon us, and the awareness of something better is not lost. But it is certainly marred.

No other religion has recognised that man is the most excellent creature. Some, which have quite recognised the reality of his excellence, have considered as mean and ungrateful the low opinions which men naturally have of themselves; and others, which have thoroughly recognised how real is this vileness, have treated with proud ridicule those feelings of greatness, which are equally natural to man.

“Lift your eyes to God,” say the first; “see Him whom you resemble, and who has created you to worship Him. You can make yourselves like unto Him; wisdom will make you equal to Him, if you will follow it.” “Raise your heads, free men,” says Epictetus. And others say, “Bend your eyes to the earth, wretched worm that you are, and consider the brutes whose companion you are.”

What, then, will man become? Will he be equal to God or the brutes? What a frightful difference! What, then, shall we be? Who does not see from all this that man has gone astray, that he has fallen from his place, that he anxiously seeks it, that he cannot find it again? And who shall then direct him to it? The greatest men have failed. (431)

…

After having understood the whole nature of man.—That a religion may be true, it must have knowledge of our nature. It ought to know its greatness and littleness, and the reason of both. What religion but the Christian has known this? (433)

What a chimera then is man! What a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, imbecile worm of the earth; depositary of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error; the pride and refuse of the universe!

… Know then, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself. Humble yourself, weak reason; be silent, foolish nature; learn that man infinitely transcends man, and learn from your Master your true condition, of which you are ignorant. Hear God. For in fact, if man had never been corrupt, he would enjoy in his innocence both truth and happiness with assurance; and if man had always been corrupt, he would have no idea of truth or bliss. But, wretched as we are, and more so than if there were no greatness in our condition, we have an idea of happiness, and cannot reach it. We perceive an image of truth, and possess only a lie. Incapable of absolute ignorance and of certain knowledge, we have thus been manifestly in a degree of perfection from which we have unhappily fallen.

I could quote Pascal for pages, but I’ll restrain myself finally here.

To summarize, we all know that there is a good, that the good can be known, that the good is real, and that we are meant to aspire to it. Other systems, like evo-psych, can shoehorn something similar into their overall perspectives, but in most (or perhaps all) of them this paradox is solved in an ad hoc, uncomfortably fitting kind of way. In Christianity it is core, it fits, it belongs. It explains how we know murder is wrong, but how we can do it to each other anyway. It explains what Solzhenitsyn called the line dividing good and evil, which “cuts through the heart of every human being”—yours and mine. Christianity makes sense in terms of what we know to be true about ourselves.

It has an ultimate solution to the paradox, too. I’ll just allude to it briefly, by way of Pascal once again:

The knowledge of God without that of man’s misery causes pride. The knowledge of man’s misery without that of God causes despair. The knowledge of Jesus Christ constitutes the middle course, because in Him we find both God and our misery. (526)

…

Jesus Christ is a God whom we approach without pride, and before whom we humble ourselves without despair. (527)

This is not the whole reason I believe, and certainly not offered here as proof of the Christian faith. But it is one reason the Christian faith makes sense. I’m content with that for a start.

1. D’Souza had the interesting task of making a debate out of it, which he did by enlarging the issue to other questions relating to religion and violence. [↩]
2. Numbers in parentheses are “fragment” numbers, by which the source can be found in the Pensées. [↩]