"Was it the alcoholism [Dalgliesh asked Stavely] that made him [Adrian] leave the church? Did he confide in you about that?"
"Yes, as far as we could communicate at that level. I don't understand religion. Partly it was the alcoholism, but mainly because he'd lost faith in some of the dogma. I can't understand why that worried him. I thought that that was the thing about the dear old C of E [Church of England]: you can believe more or less what you like. Anyway, he came to believe that God couldn't be both good and all-powerful; life's a struggle between the two forces — good and evil, God and the devil. That's some kind of heresy — a long word beginning with M."
Dalgliesh said, "Manichaeanism."
"That sounds like it. It seems sensible to me. At least it explains the suffering of the innocent, which otherwise takes some sophistry to make sense of. It I had a religion, that's what I'd choose. I suppose I became a Manichaean — if that's the word — without knowing it the first time I watched a child dying of cancer. But apparently you're not supposed to believe it if you're a Christian, and particularly not if you're a priest. Adrian is a good man. I may not be good myself, but I can recognise it. Oliver [the murder victim] was evil; Adrian is good."
Dalgliesh said, "If it were as simple as that, my job would be easy. Thank you for telling me."
When I read that passage, I felt a surge of recognition: I, too, seem to have become a Manichaean without quite knowing it.
I, too, increasingly feel that life in our world is an ongoing struggle between a God who is all-good but not all-powerful and an Enemy who is evil through and through. The Dark Enemy — call him Satan or the Devil — is likewise unable to claim victory, once and for all, in the battle with his luminous adversary.
For over ten years I have been a practicing Roman Catholic, and before my conversion to that faith I was a high-church Episcopalian: an "Anglo-Catholic" adherent of that branch of the worldwide Church of England which we encounter here in the U.S. Before that, going back almost twenty years now, religiously speaking I was not much of anything.
During the past two decades, I have investigated the history and theology of my adoptive church enough to know that Manichaeanism was a heresy, one of several that came to be denounced by the early Church Fathers in the first centuries of Christianity. I recall even having read what the M-word originally meant to its adherents at some time in the distant past, but it was a scholarly definition that I admit went in one ear and out the other.
I now suddenly find that the M-word, or rather what I consider its updated meaning, resonates in my soul.
The resonance is set up for me by the fact that for several years, until just a year or two ago, in fact, I was absorbed in an attempt to write a book. It was to be a book about how the new sciences of complexity chime with my personal understanding of Christianity.
Complexity study is a fledgling branch of science which finds that "chaos" — another long-used common noun recently folded into the empirical scientist's lexicon, now in a mathematical way — can be found cheek-by-jowl with "order" at a conceptual location dubbed "the edge of chaos." I have written in another of my blogs, Beyond Darwin, of how the edge of chaos is the favored location for the fountainhead for all Darwinian evolutionary change. See, for example, my post The Edge of Chaos, Chaos, and Heroism.
As the regime where surprising innovations can burst forth in dynamical systems and then proceed to evolve gracefully, à la Darwin, the edge of chaos has been documented by theoretical biologist Stuart A. Kauffman in his book At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity. Kauffman calls self-organization the "handmaid" of natural selection, Darwin's primary principle, and says the two together better explain the world's evolutionary history than does natural selection alone.
That idea has fascinated me since I first heard of it some ten-plus years ago. At first I thought I could reconcile it fairly easily with my religion.
I thought that especially, inasmuch as self-organization makes evolution very, very likely to produce a species like us; Kauffman accordingly calls us "we the expected." Straight Darwinism, by itself, seems to make the odds 0f our advent highly improbable.
When self-organization is added in, Kauffman shows, the broad outlines of the earth's evolutionary history become anything but happenstance. Rather, there seem to be laws of nature, the laws which Kauffman seeks to find, which predispose this planet to advancing biological complexity over the course of evolutionary time, leading to brains, leading to us.
As I tried to dovetail that theory of self-organized complexity with my understanding of Christainity, "the gripping hand" of the argument seemed to me to concern a new understanding of the nature of the opposition between order and chaos.
That metaphor, "the gripping hand," comes from (according to this Wikipedia article) "the science fiction novels The Mote in God's Eye and The Gripping Hand by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, [in which] the gripping hand is literally the strongest of the three asymmetrical arms of the aliens called 'Moties.' Some species of Motie have two weaker arms with better fine control on one side, and a single much stronger arm on the other side."
The Wikipedia article goes on:
Figuratively, [the term "gripping hand"] was typically used when presenting a third choice or fact after two others, usually after the second had been presented with the phrase "on the other hand...". Thus, a discussion of choices could follow the typical pattern of saying "We could do this, but on the other hand we could do that," followed by what would in conventional English be a non sequitur, "but on the gripping hand, there's another alternative." In keeping with the idea that this represents the strongest arm, the last fact is often one that is most unpleasant or difficult to deal with, in some way, although sometimes it is merely a third alternative. An alternate method uses "On the gripping hand" to present a stronger or more compelling option, point, or fact than the previous two.
I thought my view of the edge of chaos to be one of those "gripping hands": a third alternative between the customary identification of God with order — order being thoroughly "good" — and Satan with chaos, the latter being thoroughly "evil." If there is an edge of chaos from which all evolutionary novelty wells forth, I reasoned, it could not exist without order and chaos existing as well, both of them together, creating the necessary borderland.
I spent countless hours — days, weeks, months — trying to write about how this insight fits with traditional Christian understandings of the world. In the end, I ran dry: I hated to admit it: by such lights, the sheer cruelty of evoultionary history "takes some sophistry to make sense of."
Too, I failed to come to grips with the fact that so does the cruelty of our own history, and the pain and suffering of our human experience in general. Stuart Kauffman shows that our historical, cultural, economic, and technological trajectories are very likely guided by the very same laws of self-organization and complexity as is biological evolution — with the edge of chaos and all that implies.
The sophistry I chose to fall back on revolved for the most part around the longstanding notion of free will: what we do is truly not determined by any external force, personal or impersonal, divine or satanic. Nor is what nature does. Neither we nor the natural world are puppets of a supernatural will or an overarching determinism.
Except ... except that Christians typically believe that an all-good, all-powerful God takes charge when we ask him, in heartfelt prayer, to change things.
I've lost my faith in that. I no longer feel God answers prayers — at least not reliably.
For quite a while, I rationalized unanswered prayers this way: they are the necessary concomitants of free will. Whenever God intervenes in the world, freedom takes a hit. How can God bring about the outcomes we pray so earnestly for without forestalling all other possible outcomes, thereby robbing the world of the freedom to do its own thing?
That kind of thinking inevitably shades itself into the longstanding philosopher's conundrum the problem of evil, also called the problem of pain. If God has some subtle way of intervening in this world to bring about that which he wills on our behalf — a way that somehow does not abridge the world's intrinsic freedom — why doesn't the all-good, all-powerful deity use it to banish evil and woe altogether?
Oh, I know very well what Christian dogma holds: that evil and woe have been vanquished by Christ's redeeming death on the cross, a salvific act initiated by God the Father, carried out in history in the person of God the Son, but foreordained from the beginning of time. Theologians are apt to say, in reconciling an all-good, all-powerful God with the human experience of ongoing woe, that despite present appearances God's defeat of Satan was "always already" guaranteed, from before day one.
But from our point of view, evil and woe persist. Chaos continues as part and parcel of this world. Evolution continues, orienting itself to the edge of chaos where the separateness of order and good from chaos and evil is called into question from one moment to the next.
It now occurs to me that a simpler explanation than the one I have, admittedly, just barely begun to sketch in the words I essayed above, is that God is all-good, but not all-powerful.
Another traditional explanation for worldly woe is original sin. The rebellion of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden stains all our souls to this day and necessitates the saving cross of Christ.
The doctrine of original sin, or something much like it, impresses me as being absolutely necessary, as long as God is said to be both all-powerful and all-good. But if God is perfectly good, yet less than omnipotent, the explanation for woe becomes much simpler: God and Satan create good worldly outcomes (evolutionary advance) and bad ones (death, destruction, extinction) as a spinoff of their cosmic ongoing struggle.
That idea appeals to me quite deeply. It furnishes me with a reason to side ever more strongly with good while recognizing crucially that real-world problems are rarely cut and dried, black and white. It justifies, for me, being both an idealist and a realist at one and the same time.
In subsequent posts, I'll explore those thoughts further.
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