The Crisis in Our Culture

Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures

Pope Benedict XVI's recent book Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures is one that should not be missed. As I said in my previous post, it is a radical riposte to post-Enlightenment thinking which, for the foundational Christian insistence on the personal dignity of man, made in God's image, substitutes the absolute liberty of the individual to express himself freely ... as long as doing so mortally offends no other individual or group.

Unfortunately, that Enlightenment postulate contains its own internal contradiction. There is ultimately no way in which such radical freedom of our individual, personal self-expression doesn't run aground on the angry sensibilities of others who despise what we say. We in modern society, accordingly, devise laws to protect us vessels of radical freedom from each other's "hateful" expression. Laws then unavoidably proliferate to enshrine offended citizens' claimed needs for further protection, and state powers grow at the expense of liberty! Thus, the contradiction.

The Christian postulate, that human dignity itself lies at the root of all morality and justice, is grounded in the belief that God made everything, including man, upon which event he beheld his creation, finding "it was very good" (Genesis 1:31, quoted on p. 71). The key word is "behold": God sees us, includes us in his gaze, however small and weak we may be. Therein lies our unimpeachable claim to personal dignity.

And therein lies the personal moral responsibility we each have to use our own eyes in a way that validates the like claim to dignity of every other human person ... rather that to close our eyes to him or her and to treat that other human person as an object to be utilized and/or disposed of at our pleasure.


Secularists who prefer the Enlightenment credo to the Judeo-Christian one are not ogres who are snarlingly, universally blind to others' dignities. Unless and until, that is, the fact that they have put the individual freedom mandate they inherit from the Enlightenment at the center of their value system — in place of the erstwhile religious mandate to publicly circumscribe our own freedoms in deference the claims others make on us — forces them to choose the former credo over the latter, if only not to make liars of themselves.

This, the pope observes, is what happens when abortion rights are said to be within the province of a woman's private discretion, as a radically free individual. When a "privacy" justification for abortion rights is asserted in today's society, it necessarily forces all of us to avert our eyes from the unseen fetus, hidden away in a womb. And we are only too willing to look away, for when we decline to envision that the fetus has a face and eyes of its own, we avoid the cognitive dissonance that would otherwise spring from our instinctive readiness to accord a being with human face and human eyes some sort of claim to inviolability, if we but look upon that face and into those eyes.

The pope thinks our culture is in crisis because we accept abortion-on-demand's legality in the name of radical individual liberty. I find, somewhat to my own surprise, that I agree with him.


Throughout my life, including the last twenty years of it, during which I have called myself a Christian, I have nurtured a strong bias toward accepting unquestioningly the Enlightenment prescription of radical individual liberty. It is this very prescription which the pope says is a distortion of the Christian ethos that gave birth to it.

I have no intention here of giving a full account of the history of my libertarian assumptions, but my attitude in the 1960s toward the War in Vietnam gives you its essential flavor. If I am going to be completely honest with myself, I have to admit that perhaps the major reason I opposed that war as a late-teen and then a twenty-something had to do with the indignation I felt at the thought of being drafted and forced to fight in it.

The question, for me, was more than one of whether the war was right or wrong. It was a question of, "How dare they not ask me whether I think it's a right and just war, before they draft me?"

In other words, my assumption that my own liberty trumped any and all claims that my society made upon me — my assumption that I had no civic responsibility to serve — was something that I never called into question. And to avoid calling it into question, my psychological strategy was to call the war immoral on its very face.

Now, that particular war may indeed have been immoral and unjust ... but so too, I now see, was my assumption that the dictates of radical individaul liberty mandated my right to opt out, at my own personal discretion, from fighting in it.


For me to follow the pope and honor what he says in Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, I'll have to scrap that attitude. It's admittedly tricky to do, for there are indeed Christian justifications for pacifism and nonviolence, ones the pope would respect. And there are indeed Christian criteria for a war's being just, according to which the Vietnam conflict may not have passed muster.

Yet, the pope seems to suggest, when one argues against a war from Enlightenment-enshrined considerations of personal liberty alone, one is building one's house on moral quicksand. Hmmm ... tricky, indeed, to see that the moral conclusion may be the same — this war is a bad war, for example — but the justifications for that conclusion are nevertheless flawed and need to be jettisoned.

Yet this is what the pope is telling secularists. No matter how much religion and secularism (he calls the latter "laicism") may agree on a great many grand moral pronouncements, ultimately what matters is how you get to those pronouncements. Just as the end never justifies the means, the conclusion never justifies the arguments. If a system of argumentation — a philosophy — is flawed and contains an internal inconsistency, at some point morality itself becomes mutilated.

The Self-Contradictions of Liberty

Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures

Today I finally got hold of a copy of Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, a book I originally mentioned in Reason and Love. Written just before its author, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, was elected pope, it argues that Europe and the West are experiencing a cultural crisis for a very deep-seated reason: we Westerners have bought into a crippled, incompletely rational philosophy that has an internal contradiction at its core.

At the root of the philosophy that grew out of the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment in Europe, a stance that continues to dominate our Western culture today, is the value we call liberty. Personal liberty as a value and a right was originally derived from the Christian idea of the intrinsic dignity of the human person created in God's image. But the scientific version of rationalism which flourished in the wake of the Enlightenment cut the umbilical cord between such values and an erstwhile belief in God. Liberty became its own supreme good.

The pope shows how that seemingly progressive idea has carried the seed of its own self-cannibalization. Protecting the right of man to liberty inevitably leads to the prohibition of discrimination — see pp. 34-35 — which equally inevitably leads to a reverse discrimination wherein we lose, say, the liberty loudly to proclaim ideas resented by legally protected groups.

There are many manifestations of this that can be listed, among them:

• Women, as possessors of abortion rights, are protected from hearing the speech of anti-abortion protesters on the way into an abortion clinic, by keeping the protesters at a certain distance away from the woman's path.
• Meanwhile, as the pope himself mentions (p. 35), the rights to life and liberty of the human fetus about to be aborted get lost in the shuffle.
• A church that calls homosexuality "objectively disordered" and claims that it, as a church obedient to divine revelation, "does not have the right to confer priestly ordination on women" is, according to the pope's book, relegated to the status of an institution whose tenets are deemed entirely private matters of merely subjective belief — which, I think the pope would agree, is equivalent to designating them "not even wrong" at the level of our publicly shared culture.
• On many progressive college campuses, "politically incorrect" speech is simply not tolerated, and can be grounds for dismissal.
• We in the U.S. now feel we need special laws against "hate crimes" in which, for example, assaults aggravated by hateful, discriminatory motivations on the part of the perpetrator draw longer jail sentences. How does a jury know the perp's inner motivations? Well, if the perp has spoken out against homosexuality and slugs a gay guy in a bar fight, presumably it was a hate crime. The onus is on the assailant to show that it wasn't.

I'm not trying to say that hate is OK, or that laws should change, or that controversial positions taken by the Catholic Church are unassailable. The overarching point that the pope is making, and that I agree with, is that liberty, unmoored from the Christian religious values which engendered it, ties itself in knots. It then needs ever more knots in order to balance out the first knots. The compensating knots need to be tied — by an increasingly powerful state! — at the cost, ultimately, of handcuffing liberty itself.

This is the logical flaw in the hard diamond of Enlightenment thought, to the extent that its science-only version of rationality disenfranchises the Christian religion and associated moral understandings which originally gave rise to secularism's most cherished values.


To the Enlightenment axiom that personal liberty can serve as the indisputable source of all else we need to believe in, morally and ethically, the pope juxtaposes Christianity's foundational assumption: human life itself is sacred; it belongs to God. Liberty, though itself a worthy value, derives from the dignity of the human person who is made in God's image, and whose life comes as a gift from God.

That idea is the only true basis for morality, for justice, for a rationality that is not crippled and incomplete ... and, yes, for liberty.

Prominent Evangelical Theologian Returns to Catholic Church

A recent Catholic News Service article, "Prominent Evangelical Theologian Returns to Catholic Church," is of great interest to me. According to the article, Francis J. Beckwith, one of the most prominent Evangelical scholars in America, has returned to his childhood roots and re-entered into full communion with the Roman Catholic Church. His switch, accompanied by the conversion of his wife, has involved his resignation as president of the Evangelical Theological Society. That resignation is documented in this post he made to Right Reason, the "weblog for conservative philosophers." That post also contains a wealth of comments from others about Mr. Beckwith's change of church affiliation, both pro and con.

I happen to be a Catholic who converted from Protestantism of the Episcopalian/High Anglican variety after spending my early years mostly unchurched. My lapsed parents' backgrounds were Southern Baptist on my mother's side and Methodist on my father's. When I finally felt called to worship God at about age 40, I found my way to an Episcopal congregation, thanks to the help of a friend. Later, another friend introduced me to Catholicism — or, re-introduced me, since I had learned much about the faith as a student at Georgetown in the '60's — at a time when I had become personally dissatisfied with Anglicanism. I underwent the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults and was confirmed as a Roman Catholic in 1995.

I now, to some inner surprise, find my religious journey has left me bewildered by some of the matters raised by Mr. Beckwith and others, in the wake of his conversion.


Mr. Beckwith writes in his blog post:

... I began reading the Early Church Fathers as well as some of the more sophisticated works on justification by Catholic authors. I became convinced that the Early Church is more Catholic than Protestant and that the Catholic view of justification, correctly understood, is biblically and historically defensible. Even though I also believe that the Reformed view is biblically and historically defensible, I think the Catholic view has more explanatory power to account for both all the biblical texts on justification as well as the church’s historical understanding of salvation prior to the Reformation all the way back to the ancient church of the first few centuries. Moreover, much of what I have taken for granted as a Protestant—e.g., the catholic creeds, the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, the Christian understanding of man, and the canon of Scripture—is the result of a Church that made judgments about these matters and on which non-Catholics, including Evangelicals, have declared and grounded their Christian orthodoxy in a world hostile to it. Given these considerations, I thought it wise for me to err on the side of the Church with historical and theological continuity with the first generations of Christians that followed Christ’s Apostles.

To be quite honest, I don't follow all of that. The prose is a bit turgid ... and the basic Protestant-Catholic controversy over justification — God's act of declaring or making a sinner righteous before God — is one I simply don't think deserves all the ink it has been given over the centuries since the Protestant Reformation.

Of course, I get why justification is crucial in Christianity. It's a no-brainer, the idea that God and sin can't share the same "space" in heaven, so the fact that each of us humans is a sinner, even post-Crucifixion, has to be offset or overcome somehow.

I also understand that Martin Luther believed in sola fide, justification by faith alone, when in 1517 he challenged (per Wikipedia) "the Roman Catholic practice of indulgences for penance, and for that reason it [sola fide] is called the material cause of the Protestant Reformation, while the doctrine of sola scriptura is considered the formal cause."

Sola scriptura as a Protestant doctrine basically holds that Sacred Scripture — the Holy Bible — does not need interpreting by church teaching that takes place in the context of Sacred Tradition.


Sacred Tradition is the continuing, post-biblical elaboration of Christian understanding and doctrine reflected in the dogma of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches — Christian churches that adhere to the apostolic succession (the unbroken line of bishops beginning with the original apostles). It is the apostolic succession which is said to justify those churches in so extending Christian dogma from time to time.

The Catholic Church, for example, treats as dogma the ideas of papal infallibility, the Immaculate Conception of Mary, the Mother of God — i.e., Christ — and Mary's bodily Assumption into heaven. Admittedly, that any of those three items ought to be taken as indisputable articles of faith is not obvious from reading the Bible alone. Without the elaboration of Christian understanding that is embodied in the Sacred Tradition, it would be hard to credit them.

When Mr. Beckwith writes in his blog piece:

There is a conversation in [the Evangelical Theological Society] that must take place, a conversation about the relationship between Evangelicalism and what is called the “Great Tradition,” a tradition from which all Christians can trace their spiritual and ecclesiastical paternity. It is a conversation that I welcome, and it is one in which I hope to be a participant ...

... the "Great Tradition" he refers to is that same "Sacred Tradition." I gather he feels, uncontroversially, that this tradition is rooted in the writings of the early Church Fathers. Those writings are to him a source of valid authority and purportedly show him that "the early church is more Catholic than Protestant and that the Catholic view of justification, correctly understood, is biblically and historically defensible."


Today, the Catholic News Service article says, the official Catholic view of justification, as expressed in a 1999 joint declaration with Lutherans, is this:

By grace alone, in faith in Christ's saving work and not because of any merit on our part, we are accepted by God and receive the Holy Spirit, who renews our hearts while calling us to good works.

Such a formulation seems to contradict what I imagine to be an erroneous, if widespread, understanding of the Catholic position: that virtuous works can supposedly get us into heaven.

As Mr. Beckwith would have it (per the CNS article):

... "Protestants often misunderstand" what the [Catholic] church is trying to convey in its teachings on the need to be virtuous. "The Catholic Church frames the Christian life as one in which you must exercise virtue — not because virtue saves you, but because that's the way God's grace is manifested," he said.

"Grace" is theo-speak for the notion that what God does to save us is unearned and unmerited: done out of the goodness of his heart, as it were. When we receive the free gift of salvation based on faith, it is only natural that we should respond by feeling called to perform "good works." This is what the Catholic Church actually teaches.

According to the Wikipedia sola fide article:

Protestants have historically summarized their view with the formula: "Justification is by faith alone, but not by the faith that is alone [that is, not by a supposed faith that has no accompanying works]."

It accordingly seems to me that there isn't a dime's worth of difference here! Catholics and Protestants actually believe the same thing!


True, that doesn't defuse the issues surrounding the Protestant sola scriptura outlook, which boils down to the question of whether any Church, Catholic or otherwise, has teaching authority beyond what the Bible "says," all by itself. I freely admit that that sounds to me as if it is but a purely formal controversy — as long as what the Church teaches is in harmony with what sola scriptura advocates substantively hold, anyway.

Is there anything about crediting the Immaculate Conception or the Assumption that leaves any of us in a different place, in terms of how we lead a properly Christian life? If so, my Protestant friends, I'd like to know what it is.


Or, take the disagreement over the true nature of the bread and wine of Holy Communion. Whether, or how, Christ is "really" present "in" the Eucharistic elements seems to me less important than that they bring us all to share one table with the Lord. For us to fall out over the precise nature of the items on the menu has to be just plain wrong.

The fault, I recognize, is on both (or all) sides. For reasons I don't understand, we Catholics feel that anything short of the full traditional doctrine of transubstantiation — the bread and wine at the Mass are changed into Christ's body and blood: the Real Presence — puts us on the slippery slope to perdition. But the marks of receiving Holy Communion — in the Catechism of the Catholic Church they include "preserving, increasing, and renewing the life of grace received at Baptism"; "growth in Christian life"; "cleansing us from past sins and preserving us from future sins"; and "strengthening our charity" — would seem to me to be in effect, even if the communicant has no idea of the Real Presence. Ergo, if we fall out over a philosophical dispute concerning the "substance" of the Eucharist, what can be said about our Christian charity in the first place?


As I talked about in Reason and Love, the well-known Catholic writer George Weigel has it that "the reason of God, the Logos through whom all things were made, calls us beyond reason to love" (see this article by Mr. Weigel). That notion echoes what Pope Benedict XVI has been saying, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and as pope. Says Mr. Weigel:

[The "scandal" of the Cross] is not a scandal against reason; it is a scandal beyond reason. Creation, Joseph Ratzinger once wrote, displays the “exaggerated infinity of God’s love.”

I think the principle of "not against reason, but beyond reason" offers a way out of the disputes that formally divide Protestants and Catholics.

Take, for example, Mr. Beckwith's saying in his blog post:

... I began reading the Early Church Fathers as well as some of the more sophisticated works on justification by Catholic authors. I became convinced that the Early Church is more Catholic than Protestant and that the Catholic view of justification, correctly understood, is biblically and historically defensible. Even though I also believe that the Reformed view is biblically and historically defensible, I think the Catholic view has more explanatory power ...

What jumps out at me here is that Mr. Beckwith thinks the Reformed (Protestant) view of justification is "biblically and historically defensible," and so is the Catholic view. They're both defensible to human reason. In other words, neither is "against reason."

Accordingly, I think it ought to be possible for us Catholics and our Protestant friends to learn to debate in amity which of our two distinctive views "has more explanatory power," or whatever ... but debate it only after we have broken bread together, as we share in the “exaggerated infinity of God’s love," a love that we all agree lies "beyond reason."

An Ever-So-Desperate Need

I woke up on this Memorial Day 2007 to thoughts in which I pondered the mystery of why some people believe vociferously in God, some aver equally adamantly that there is no God ... and some seem to have little interest in the question.

That's when it hit me, once again: the reason why, about twenty years ago, I moved abruptly from the third column to the first.

It was in 1985 that my mother died, soon followed by my father in 1988. After my first loss, I began to be beset with mysterious symptoms of psychosomatic illness. Just before the second, I found I suddenly believed in God.

Today, I recognize that underneath all my rational arguments for such a belief in God lies a usually only barely conscious, yet ever-so-desperate need to see my mother and father again. If there is no God, then there is no heaven. If no heaven, there are no souls that survive earthly death ... and Mom and Dad would be forever lost to me. No reunion would be possible. I need to believe that isn't so.


In fact, this concern of mine to be reunited with my loved ones is so strong, it dwarfs any concern I have for my own salvation ... except, of course, for the logic which says that my own soul would have to survive, if I am to meet theirs again. I don't think my parents' souls went to hell, either of them, but I am conscious today of the thought that if by some chance they went down rather than up, I'd gladly follow them into the brimstone, rather than spend the rest of eternity separate from them.

This is a day in which countless bereaved mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, children, and loved ones mourn the fallen in Iraq and Afghanistan, or of other wars such as Vietnam and WWII, and realize how desperately they miss them, and will always miss them. This is a day when a lot of people will know they believe in God.

Brute Facts, Alchemy, and Belief in God

I have been spending a fair amount of time recently looking into philosophy, especially the philosophy of mind I discussed in Whither the "Magic" of Mind? and, before that, in a whole host of other posts. One of the phrases I find many of today's philosophers using with some frequency is "brute fact."

A brute fact, in the way in which I read the term, is one which cannot be further explained: it just is. In the Oxford Companion to Philosophy, the definition "a terminus of a series of explanations which is not itself further explicable" is given. A brute fact is accordingly one that, though it may help explain other facts, is not itself susceptible of its own explanation.

For example, some physicists refer to the strength of the gravitational force in our universe as a brute fact, a just-so story that cannot be derived from other physical facts or laws. Science amounts to a hunt for systematic ways to explain what goes on in the world, accounts that can be validated experimentally and empirically, so when a scientist says X is a brute fact, what is being implied is that the hunt ends there, with X.

On the other hand, many scientists hold out hope that there is a Theory of Everything — perhaps some version of superstring theory — from which the strength of the universe's gravitational force just "falls out," as other supposed brute facts (e.g., Planck's constant describing the size of quanta in quantum mechanics) also would do.

But then the Theory of Everything would itself become a brute fact, lacking more basic explanation. Implicit in explanation-seeking science is the contradictory notion that there is an end to explicability, and it lies within the radius of the physical, material world.


At the same time, there is a preference for having everything explained as elegantly as possible, which means by making as few explanatory assumptions as one can. If two facts can be derived from one law as opposed to two separate laws, prefer the one law. This is Occam's Razor at work: "All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one."

There may be a physical Theory of Everything which we will validate someday. It may account for a whole passel of cosmic constants — strength of gravity, Planck's constant, etc. — that (according to certain interpretations of the Anthropic Principle) make ours a universe "fine-tuned for life." Even so, wouldn't there be certain other brute facts it doesn't account for?

I'm thinking of the existence of consciousness, the moral order in the universe, and the sheer rational coherence of the cosmos.

That consciousness transcends the mere physical is a subject I took up at great length in Whither the "Magic" of Mind? and its predecessors. That the world has a set moral order was one of the topics of the item I posted immediately before this one, Ethos Optional?. I have taken up the subject of the rationality of the mind of God and of his created world in To Reason Is Divine and Free Will and Divine Coherence, among others. But I feel I have yet more to say about rationality here. The big question is, why should we not take the sheer rationality of the cosmos as a brute fact, and nothing more, rather than (as I myself take it) as a sign that there is a God?

Rebecca Stott's Ghostwalk

I am presently reading a fascinating novel, Ghostwalk by Rebecca Stott. It concerns a modern-day writer delving into the details of Isaac Newton's biography revolving around an interest in alchemy. Alchemy was at one time a pseudo-scientific inquiry into something supposedly hidden and esoteric in nature. Per Stott (pp. 65-66):

Alchemists, like our scientists today, were trying to uncover nature's secrets, her patterns and processes, trying to work our how the five elements — earth, fire, water, space, air — transmuted into and out of each other under various astrological conditions to make up all forms of matter. They believed that everything, even those things that seemed inert, was actually teeming with spirits and that therefore everything could be raised or provoked into fuller form. They believed that all matter was on the move, moving into and out of everything else, waxing into or waning away from fullness so that lead fell short of gold, just as mortal man fell short of immortality. Under a certain pattern of stars and through fire, any matter (like lead) or spirit (like the human soul) might be "healed" or "killed" or "perfected" or "transmuted" into a greater state. A blossoming would take place. It had a rare beauty, this secret hybrid art made up of magic, chemistry, philosophy, hermetic thought, sacred geometry, and cosmology, a beauty in that passion to make things bloom into a fuller being.

A world in which the "philosopher's stone" could turn base metals to gold and the "elixir of life" could make us immortal would be a decidedly less rational, less coherent one that we actually live in. You might be able to flip a copper penny up through the right sort of air and have it come down a gold doubloon, or a perfected formula for Gatorade might ward off death forever.


In Christian thought, historically, such a world simply does not exist ... but not because it is inconceivable that it might exist. Ours might indeed have been an alchemical universe. But it isn't.

If our rational world were suddenly to become a world of magic, instead of what it is, such an upheaval would generally be thought of, in the long history of the thinking of the church, as the devil's work — for, in our rational world, God limits magic to his own miracles. Stott, for her part, mentions as being among these "the wine into blood, the burning bush, Lazarus raised from the dead" (p. 66). One might also mention Christ's resurrection.

Accordingly, the rationality of the world — the fact that alchemy is not really in the cards for us — would seem to be more than a brute fact. It needs to be taken seriously. It needs explanation. When a scientist skirts this issue by making of the world's rationality a just-so story — "It just so happens that there is no magic in the order of things" — it smacks of a willful blindness to other conceivable orders and to the Creator-Sustainer who holds them at bay.

Suppose I am right, and the rational order of things stands next to the existence of human consciousness and the existence of a moral order in the universe as not brute facts but facts deserving of further explanation. Occam's Razor would seem to dictate that explaining them all with recourse to one single assumption — that there is a God — makes perfect sense.

Ethos Optional?

In a recent article called "The End of the Anglican Communion," Catholic conservative George Weigel writes of the stresses that today threaten to tear apart the Anglican Communion: the worldwide group of churches that historically look to the Church of England as their center of gravity. The Episcopal Church in America is the branch of Anglicanism we hallow here. Since the national Episcopal church has recently ordained a gay bishop, for that and other related reasons many local Episcopal congregations are considering affiliating with an evangelizing African bishop, outside the Episcopal Church USA, rather than sticking with a homegrown hierarchy who seem to them to have abandoned all vestiges of traditional Christian morality.

Mr. Weigel writes of

... an Anglican [i.e., Episcopal] church, St. Luke’s, a few blocks up Old Georgetown Road from my parish in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. [that] recently posted a large sign on the church lawn: “No matter who you are, no matter what you believe, you are welcome at our table.”

Mr. Weigel takes this ecclesiastical open-door policy as a token of something he rues: "the Episcopal Church USA's determination to bless same-sex unions and ordain practicing homosexuals to priestly and episcopal ministry." I further assume that, to the extent that the no-matter-who-you-are proclamation at St. Luke's includes women who have had or are contemplating an abortion, Mr. Weigel objects to that as well.

I assume he objects, that is, not to the love-the-sinner aspects of such a policy — you can't seriously call yourself a Christian if you don't profess Christian love toward all people without regard to sin — but to what could be an implicit tolerate-the-sin attitude that may seem to go along with it.

Or, is there an effort being made in the Episcopal Church USA simply to redefine the sin out of existence?


Actually, there is a third possibility: to take cognizance of the fact that our society has become one which lacks a guiding ethos all of us can share.

I don't know whether I am using the word "ethos" the way social scientists do, but to me an ethos is a set of rules of moral conduct, written or unwritten, official or unofficial, stated or unstated. All members of the society simply know what these rules are — whether they are written, overtly stated, and officially promulgated, or they are unwritten, unofficial, and never stated as such, right out loud — and agree that they are the rules.

Furthermore, most members of an ethos-based society tend to follow the rules, and expect others to do the same.


It doesn't work that way here any more. While it is true that many in our society continue to observe the old moral and ethical rules, few now expect others to do the same. So, while many of us still think homosexuality is wrong, far fewer people consider that moral opinion binding on anyone besides themselves. Ditto, the old rule against having an abortion ... or, for that matter, against getting pregnant out of wedlock, or having extramarital sex, etc., etc., etc.

So let me suggest that our ethos is no longer an ethos at all, if there is no longer any reasonable assumption on the part of each person that everyone else in the society needs to, or will, adhere to the stated or unstated rules. An ethos-optional society is no different from a society that doesn't have, or never had, an ethos at all.


Christian churches, Catholic, Anglican, Protestant, or otherwise, have a well-deserved reputation for being, or intending to be, ethos preservers. George Weigel is an ethos preserver. And so, as a Catholic, am I ... except that I worry that we ethos preservers and supporters are spitting into a gale-force wind.

More, I worry that perhaps the number one reason why church pews are empty today is that so many are put off by an institution, the Christian church, that promulgates an ethos they no longer feel any general obligation toward upholding. They may still personally believe in God, they themselves may live lives as chaste and pure as any professing Christian achieves, but they may feel it downright hypocritical to join a church that asks yet more: belief in a communally shared, universal system of absolute right and wrong.


By "absolute" morality I do not mean to imply that there are no contexts in moral choice. In most contexts, for example, the dictum "thou shall not kill" applies, but there is such a thing as self-defense, or just war. Still, the commandment against killing other persons is, or so I believe, absolute and universal ... that is, once the given situational context has been factored in in a way that itself stands up to objective ethical scrutiny.

Today, however, one gets the feeling that not committing murders is something we, most of us in this society, opt to abide by; we are, in doing so, not binding ourselves to any old-fashioned set of general, absolute moral codes or rules. We accordingly exercise our "radical freedom" in deciding to, yes, live by certain ancient but no-longer-absolute rules. If someone else takes the opposite tack and is in fact a murderer, we today oppose that (to the extent we can) solely out of a pragmatic understanding that murderers, if not stopped, may eventually threaten us and those we love.


But gone is the belief that something is right or wrong simply because it is. For each of the old rules, today there is a hyper-pragmatic attitude which says, in effect, I don't care what you do with your life with respect to that particular rule unless and until it impacts on my life and that of (say) my children, so if you want to look at porn on the Internet, fine ... as long as I have some way of making sure my kids don't see it.

What happened, then, to our erstwhile belief in absolute (albeit situational) rules of morality? Inasmuch as it's hard to imagine traditional Christian religion without them — an I'm-OK-you're-OK God, I ask you? A no-fault deity with a "whatever" attitude? — it's no wonder George Weigel thinks the no-matter-who-you-are welcome posted at St. Luke's Episcopal is tossing religion's baby out with the bathwater.

Reason and Love

Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures

"Only that creative reason which has manifested itself as love in the crucified God can truly show us what life is," Pope Benedict XVI has written in Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, a book I expect to read as soon as my public library can fetch it on inter-library loan. Meanwhile, I am engaging in a pursuit of the pope's thought as seen through the eyes of Catholic explicator George Weigel, one of whose recent columns, "To the rescue, again," is a big help.

The article is only indirectly about the Holy Father's ideas concerning rationality. It is, rather, a paean to the “exaggerated infinity of God’s love,” to borrow another of Benedict XVI's phrases.

As I have discussed in earlier installments in this "Divine Reason" series, Benedict XVI has proposed that the gaze of the Christian West needs to put reason back at the center of its visual field. But one is entitled to ask whether reason is the be-all and end-all of Christian values — and if not, what is?

Weigel's article makes clear that the “exaggerated infinity of God’s love," as revealed in Christ via the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection, is, if not the be-all, the end-all:

The reason of God, the Logos through whom all things were made, calls us beyond reason to love. Walking the Way of the Cross, Jesus reaches the end of the road of the world’s rationality — and becomes, thereby, a stumbling block and a folly. But a more ample “reason” is at work here: the logic of love, carried out to infinity. That is what bursts the bounds of the tomb on Easter morning. The tomb is empty. The world has been suffused with the power of divine love, which is the most living thing there is.

The “scandal” of the Cross, as it is spoken of in the New Testament, is for Weigel "not a scandal against reason; it is a scandal beyond reason." I am glad he drew that distinction, for it is one which allows reason to remain firmly at the center of the Christian outlook, even as divine love wreathes it all about at the leading edge of an expansion toward infinity.


I am put in mind of what can happen to certain garden plants that under adverse circumstances tend to die off at their centers, even as their outer parts flourish. This is not good, for without a healthy middle, a plant will soon die. The cure is often to feed the roots.

Pope Benedict is saying that we need to fertilize the roots of the "plant" of Christianity, whose soil is made of reason. This emphasis on reason is not an affront to Christian love. It is its restoration and salvation.

In Search of Comity

Christopher Hitchens' god Is Not Great

"Atheists with Attitude" is Anthony Gottlieb's review, in the May 20, 2007, New Yorker, of one of several prominent recent books promoting atheism. Christopher Hitchens' god Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything now joins Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, and Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation and The End of Faith on the freethinkers' must-read list of screeds disparaging faith.

In the title of Hitchens' book, the first word is spelled with a small "g": god. That's how in-your-face Hitchens would be toward those who believe the Deity deserves a capital letter. Gottlieb says that, with reference to the books listed above, this one is "both the most articulate and the angriest of the lot":

Hitchens is nothing if not provocative. Creationists are “yokels,” Pascal’s theology is “not far short of sordid,” the reasoning of the Christian writer C. S. Lewis is “so pathetic as to defy description,” Calvin was a “sadist and torturer and killer,” Buddhist sayings are “almost too easy to parody,” most Eastern spiritual discourse is “not even wrong,” Islam is “a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms,” Hanukkah is a “vapid and annoying holiday,” and the psalmist King David was an “unscrupulous bandit.”

Sam Harris, says Gottlieb, is almost as bad. Harris maintains

that religious belief not only aggravates [armed sectarian] conflicts but is “the explicit cause” of them. He believes this even of Northern Ireland, where the Troubles between pro-British Unionists and pro-Irish Republicans began around 1610, when Britain confiscated Irish land and settled English and Scottish planters on it. As far as Harris is concerned, Islam brought down the Twin Towers, thanks in no small part to the incendiary language of the Koran; Middle East politics, history, and economics are irrelevant sideshows.

Whence such an absence of comity among today's "atheists with attitude"? Their quarrel is not with any particular religion, but with religion in general. Hitchens' polemic is a case in point, says Gottlieb:

The tangled diversity of faith is ... no obstacle for Hitchens. He knows exactly which varieties of religion need attacking; namely, the whole lot. And if he has left anyone out he would probably like to hear about it so that he can rectify the omission. From the perspective of the new atheists, religion is all one entity; those who would apologize for any of its forms — Harris and Dawkins, in particular, insist on this point — are helping to sustain the whole.

It is my belief that what militant atheists like Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins, and Dennett are really on about is power — specifically, the abuse thereof by churches and religions since time immemorial. (Gottlieb mentions Voltaire, "one of the fiercest critics of superstition, Christianity, and the Church’s abuse of power," as a notable early freethinker.) Whenever a theology or a theocracy hitches the name of God to an earthly agenda, that yoking together can all too easily become justification for coercion.

Sometimes the coercion manifests itself externally, as when Christian Europe marched (or sailed) to wrench the Holy Land from infidel control during the Crusades. At other times, coercion is internal, as when the Inquisition burned Europe's heretics at the stake. Obviously, the two forms of coercion can go hand in hand.

As I have mentioned recently in To Reason Is Divine, The Pope of Reason, and The Pope and Islam, the current leader of the Roman Catholic faith, Pope Benedict XVI, has gone out of his way to show that reason, friendly persuasion, and comity are actually the heart and soul of Christian tradition — despite the all-too-frequent historical lapses. For, as papal explainer George Weigel has put it, "the West’s loss of faith in reason, which erodes our capacity to defend the universality of human rights and the superiority of the rule of law over the rule of coercion," is of paramount concern to this pope.

The way the Holy Father talks about rationality makes it clear: to him, reason and coercion are so mutually exclusive, God so intrinsically rational in his very nature, that God's work and Word simply cannot be spread by force. The papal prescription for the future of Western religion is at once a return to tradition and a radical break with home-grown trends that demote reason in favor of the subjective and the downright irrational. If the pope has his way, people in the West and elsewhere will come to their senses and reason thoughtfully together in comity and grace — and the valid objections of atheists like Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett to theological abuses of power and religiously "justified" urges to sectarian violence might simply melt away.

The Future of Abortion

Associate Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy

"Justice Kennedy: The Highly Influential Man in the Middle" appeared on Sunday, May 13, 2007, in The Washington Post and piqued once again my interest in the question of whether the Supreme Court is going to — or ought to — overturn its 1973 Roe. v. Wade decision legalizing abortion on demand. (I last took up abortion in any depth in
Roe, Casey, and Originalism in July 2005.)

Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Post article says, was the key "man in the middle" on several cases that were heard during this 2006-2007 term of the court and which were decided by 5-to-4 votes split otherwise along liberal-conservative ideological lines.

The '06-'07 court under still-new Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has achieved an impressive number of unanimous or near-unanimous decisions. It has also decided a fair number of close 5-4 cases that had no clear ideological cast — with Kennedy casting the swing vote in most of them. But in the several 5-4 cases involving a sharp ideological divide, Kennedy has cast the decisive fifth vote in all of them.

This makes Kennedy's vote the sine qua non of close, ideologically based decisions which the view of recently retired justice Sandra Day O'Connor used to be. O'Connor's replacement, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., typically sides with the conservative Chief Justice Roberts and Associate Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Associate Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John Paul Stevens, David Souter, and Stephen Breyer usually line up on the liberal side. In many key cases, whichever cadre can earn Kennedy's support wins.

It came as a surprise to many court watchers that it was the conservative bloc which won Kennedy's support in the recent Gonzales v. Carhart decision, in a case concerning the late-term abortion procedure reviled by critics as "partial-birth" abortion. Kennedy himself wrote the April 2007 decision upholding the 2003 Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of the U. S. Congress. (The full text of the decision, along with its concurrences and dissents, can be read here.)

When the Carhart decision was handed down in April, the Post reported in this article:

"The government may use its voice and its regulatory authority to show its profound respect for the life within the woman," Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote. He said the ban on the controversial method for ending a midterm pregnancy is valid because other abortion procedures are still available.

Kennedy had (per the first-mentioned Post article) spoken some perhaps contrasting words from the high bench in 1992, in handing down the decision he himself had jointly written with O'Connor and Souter in another key abortion case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. On that day, as a decision basically upholding Roe was being issued, he said that "at the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existing, of meaning, of the universe and of the mystery of life."


And there we have the nut of the abortion issue which continues to divide America: the woman's right to assert her "own concept" of moral right and wrong versus society's "profound respect for the life within the woman."

If Mork from Ork or E.T. the Extraterrestrial asked you to give an accounting of the proper, objective way to resolve the tension between those two ethical claims among Earth's populace, would you be able to comply? I don't know that I would.

I do believe the question needs to be debated again in the political arena, not the judicial one. That's one of the reasons why I hope Roe gets overturned. If that happens, the laws of the 50 states concerning (generally outlawing) abortion would once again come into force. These laws are presently held in abeyance under Roe, at least to the extent that they prohibit abortion outright in certain stages of pregnancy.


Those laws that make few or no exceptions to a state's general ban on abortion would surely become the focus of intense political efforts to change the law, given that polls show most Americans wanting abortions to be mainly illegal but with broad exceptions to protect a woman's life and health and to permit abortions in the case of rape or incest.

There might also be efforts to pass federal laws establishing abortion rights legislatively at a national level, and/or a movement to make abortions either unconstitutional or constituti0nally guaranteed, via an amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

So there would surely be a massive debate, during which a whole generation of citizens who weren't even alive when Roe was decided would have to confront the issue directly, stripped of any obfuscating questions of whether the Supreme Court's now-vacated pronouncements in favor of abortion rights were properly decided or not.


Another reason why I favor such a back-to-square-one debate is that we know more about how a fetus develops in the womb than we did in 1973. Some (admittedly disputed) scientific evidence now suggests that the fetus is able to feel pain in the first trimester, for instance. We didn't have much of a basis for validating such a claim of early fetal sentience in 1973. Modern diagnostic and imaging procedures now offer us such a basis.

Although we knew prior to 1973 that the heart of the fetus begins to beat in the fourth week after conception, at a juncture when a prospective mother may not yet know she is pregnant, that fact was still relatively new to the general public consciousness.

The human brain begins to form in the same early week of pregnancy and is formed enough to produce brain waves by six weeks — just two weeks after brain formation begins — which means that most abortions destroy a human brain that is in some sense functioning. We apparently weren't aware of just how early the fetal brain starts to function back in 1973. (I am drawing on "Science and Abortion," a religiously oriented pro-life tract, for some of this information.)

10mm human embryo, about five weeks old

By about five weeks into pregnancy, an embryo (the fetus-to-be is still called an embryo at this stage) is only 10mm in size (see this Wikipedia article), yet it already has recognizable eyes, ears, organs, and appendages. Images such as the one to the right were groundbreaking at the time of the Roe decision. (This one is from an ectopic pregnancy, outside the uterus.) Images of this type are commonplace today.

Obstetric ultrasonography — ultrasound — is routinely used during pregnancy these days. Real-time ultrasound technology in which moving fetal images may be viewed by the patient as well as the doctor or technician as they are being gathered was not, as far as I can tell, widely available in 1973. (See this article on the history of real-time scanners. See this video at YouTube.com for a scan of 13-week-old fetus.)

If nothing else, the pervasiveness of this kind of imaging today has made the general public aware that a recognizably human life form is present in the womb well before the time of pregnancy at which many abortions are performed. That awareness is new since 1973.


All in all, more of us know more about pregnancy and fetal development today than people did in 1973, and most of that new knowledge comes from a revised medical science which makes it harder, not easier, to support abortion-on-demand morally during the second trimester of pregnancy.

Roe prohibited states outright from outlawing first-trimester abortions, based in part on scientific evidence that is no longer generally accepted. Subsequent Supreme Court decisions, though mainly upholding Roe, have tried to accomodate more up-to-date science concerning early fetal development in various ways, with varying degrees of success. Still, it's clear to me that if they had it to do all over again, the justices would need to approach at least the first-trimester abortion issue in a wholly different way.

And if first-trimester abortions could be legally proscribed by the states in view of present understandings of early fetal development, what would that say about second- and third-trimester abortions? States would presumably have even fewer constitutional hurdles to jump in outlawing most of them.

So I think our society needs to wipe the constitutional slate clean and hash out such issues in the political/legislative arena. That's why I'll be happy if Roe bites the dust. And if Justice Kennedy casts the deciding vote against Roe sometime in the not-too-distant future, I won't be at all surprised.

The World According to Me

In the last week or so I have posted a handful of articles to this blog which together sketch out a bird's-eye view of what I'm going to call the World According to Me, or WAM.

• In I Am a Camera I said the human mind's consciousness feeds the immortal soul with the "qualia" of our subjective experiences, which the soul (acting as a metaphysical "camera") records and carries into the afterlife.

• In Free Will and Divine Coherence I said "coherence within the universe of reason" describes God's true inner nature, which is why we find ourselves living in a rational, comprehensible universe of God's own creation. Then, alluding to the Incompleteness Theorem of the Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel, I went on to give reason to believe that we have free will in this rational, comprehensible world specifically because God had to choose between that option and having us be deterministic machines, mere robots with good skin.

Had we been deterministic robots, we would have either been somewhat less smart than we are, or else truly stupid. If the former, we would have lacked the ability to see the truth of (among other things) the "Gödelian sentence," the telltale proposition by means of which Kurt Gödel was able to distinguish between human intelligence and that of all producible formal systems of logic, as embodied by even the smartest machines.

If the latter, we would have had mental capabilities less than that of a simplistic formal system that can do no more than derive the basic laws of arithmetic.

Given that our Gödel-aware brains are not flummoxed by the "Gödelian sentence" G — "G [this proposition itself] is not provable within this formal system of logic" is a true statement, and we know it's true, yet the formal system itself is ineluctably blind to its truth — we had to be other than deterministic androids. Hence, we had to have free will!

• In To Reason Is Divine I said more about the idea that rational coherence constitutes God's inner nature, which is why "creative logos" characterizes God's activity in founding and sustaining our world, according to the Christian Bible. Pope Benedict XVI has made a point of emphasizing this aspect of Christian theology, as over against views which hold that God is so "other" than us that his will is not constrained by rationality, or anything else

Though the pope has implied that just such an anti-rational view of God's nature besets the religion of Islam, at least according some of its interpreters, he has also pointed out similar strains of anti-rationalism in Western Christian thought over the last few centuries. He believes we in the West need to get back to our patrimony of truth-seeking reason if our culture is to be able to "give an account of its political commitments and their moral foundations, to itself, or to those who would replace the free societies of the West with a very different pattern of human community, based on a very different idea of God — and, consequently, of the just society."

To which I can only add, "Hear, hear!"

• Finally, in Esse Est Percipi I championed a metaphysics, based in part on that of the early-18th-century philosopher and Church of Ireland bishop George Berkeley, which holds that "to exist is to be observed" — seen or perceived by an agent with a conscious mind.

I alluded to a real-world test that confirms a thought experiment dreamed up by quantum physicist John Archibald Wheeler: which of two equiprobable paths a photon follows to this planet from a galaxy millions of light years distant is not determined until we train our attention on one path or the other!

While it is not universally agreed that the photon's arrival has to be observed by a conscious agent, as opposed to merely recorded by a non-sentient mechanism, there are physicists who believe the former. If they are right — and I like to think they are — then observational consciousness somehow produces material actuality.

Hopping back to the thought of Berkeley, I then hypothesized that the material reality of the universe is sustained in its existence by God's observational consciousness.


God, soul, afterlife, free will — all are longstanding topics of theological and philosophical inquiry. So, too, are questions of human consciousness — what it is, how it arises — and of mind in general — is it real, is it distinct from the physical, material world? In WAM, the World According to Me:

• God
• the soul
• the afterlife
• human free will
• human consciousness, and
  
• the actuality of mind, as distinct from matter

are all real.

The four posts just mentioned show how these questions interlock together, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. I could also have introduced into the puzzle picture the question of Darwinian evolution, which I also believe in. In fact, I believe that particular puzzle piece latches directly to the piece concerning human free will. If our lives are not determined by an ineluctable destiny, then neither is the life of the world. Our planet is free to evolve as it will.

Another puzzle piece would seem to be that which represents the lawfulness of the universe — i.e., the pervasiveness and reliability of the laws of nature which science discovers. Without that lawfulness, graceful evolution would have been impossible. The laws of nature themselves are evidence of a Creator who is rational to his core.

Thus, the tenets of WAM, the World According to Me.


My purpose in going to such lengths to sum up WAM as it stands at present is partly to delve into the subject of personal bias.

I clearly have a bias in favor of the sort of worldview WAM represents. Perhaps my sort of worldview is best characterized by what it isn't. It isn't religious fundamentalism, and it isn't anti-religious atheism. I'm biased against both of those.

By religious fundamentalism I mean the sort of "conservative" religious outlook that upholds creationism or "intelligent design," the literal inerrancy of the Bible, and a radically personal or individual style of faith that de-emphasizes collective reason and ecclesiastical teaching authority. I'm afraid I have to be upfront about this: I think many "evangelical" Christians are simply wrong in some of their foundational beliefs.

Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion

I am equally nonplussed by the foundational beliefs of outspoken atheists like the British biologist Richard Dawkins, whose latest book I expect to read soon: The God Delusion. Dawkins is presently one of the more eloquent spokespersons for a strictly materialistic worldview which allows for nothing either supernatural or metaphysical to exist.

Inflected into the realm of questions of consciousness and the separateness of mind and body, this materialist/physicalist worldview is argued for by Daniel Dennett, the noted philosopher of mind. In the area of more abstract philosophy, it is represented by the school of thought known as positivism.

I do not mean to imply that all these anti-religious thinkers and views are in total sync. There are positions which metaphysically assert that everything that exists has a physical property, for example, which others, such as that of philosopher A.J. Ayer, claim that metaphysics per se is bunk.

Still, all seem to have in common that there is, and can be, no God, no soul, no afterlife. If there is a mind apart from matter, it in some way arises out of matter. If consciousness is not an illusion, it is merely a side effect of the workings of our physical brains.


My WAM mindset asserts exactly the opposite on all these questions. That I am prone to such a worldview reflects, I am sure, the deep-seated biases of my particular style of temperament.

Oh, WAM is (I fully believe) an outlook that is eminently reasonable to support — now that I have managed to develop a rational way of accounting for and upholding its tenets. Not that my arguments to date are conclusive, or even complete. I imagine they establish at best a sort of sketchy, prima facie case for the World According to Me. Still, I humbly suggest that WAM — God, souls, consciousness, and all — is plausible because

1. it explains the facts at hand
2. it does so simply and elegantly
3. it does so without disenfranchising vast areas of human experience

1. Among the "facts" which WAM "explains" is (in addition to the customary scientific explanations of the physical world) the presence of mind-slash-consciousness, which strictly materialist outlooks have to relegate to the unexplainable and/or call an illusion. According to WAM, God has (or is) a mind — a rational mind which is reflected in our own rational, conscious minds. Existence per se is conferred by the observational activity of such minds.

2. If true, that explanation is about as simple and elegant as any could be. There is a supernatural mind — God's — behind it all. God's conscious activity creates and sustains all material existence. The material world recapitulates the mind of God in the conscious minds of creatures who evolve in it freely, albeit according to the firm laws of nature, and who themselves have free will.

3. WAM accordingly carefully avoids disenfranchising empirical science, human reason, or longstanding religious beliefs. WAM is compatible with all three.


What WAM is not compatible with is, as I say, religious fundamentalism in it various guises and atheistic materialism in its various guises. Just as I am aware that WAM, despite the rational arguments I make for it, originates in the biases of my own particular style of temperament, I assume that the fundamentalists and the materialists have their own temperament styles whose biases lead their possessors toward worldviews that differ radically from each other, and from mine.

What I would like to be able to do — but see no way to accomplish at present — is to explain why those three basic styles of temperament exist and accordingly divide us as badly as they do.

Esse Est Percipi

The Irish philosopher George Berkeley, who became Bishop Berkeley after he took Holy Orders in the Anglican-affiliated Church of Ireland, lived during what was, here on this side of the pond, our colonial period. He eventually gave his name, which was pronounced BARK-lee, to a branch of the University of California and the city that grew up around it, pronounced BERK-lee.

Bishop Berkeley, as a philosopher, objected to some to the ideas that had been put about by John Locke, the British empiricist who was slightly his elder. Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), held that many of the qualities we perceive in the objects around us pertain, not the the objects themselves, but to the "ideas" conveyed to us by means of what we today might better call "sense-data." For example, the redness of a red vase is an "idea" that does not belong to the vase per se but inheres in the sense-data that our eyes receive from the vase. (Remember, this was written at a time when science was just beginning to understand about the wavelength composition of light.)

Locke was thus a "dualist" concerning the "reality" of the objects we see. Some of their qualities, such as their weight, in fact inhered in the objects themselves. Other qualities such as color, and also shape, inhered only in the "ideas" conveyed to us from the objects in the form of sense-data. The latter qualities are in some sense bogus: a coin is only round, not oval, if we look at it face on.

Berkeley, on the other hand, was a "subjective idealist," though he himself referred to his view as that of "immaterialism." Where Locke would have said that sense objects have "real" existence and accordingly persist in existence when no one is looking at them, Berkeley's thesis was esse est percipi, to exist is to be perceived.

The notion that things exist independently of outside observation depends on their being made of some sort of ineffable substance or material, beyond their perceptible qualities such as weight or color or shape. If they have mass or weight, their substance gives it to their atoms. If they have color, it reflects how their atoms or electrons are arranged. Substance, if real, is not what atoms are, it is what they have.

We can talk of atoms and electrons and wavelengths today; Locke and Berkeley could not. But never mind; the metaphysical question of the persistent being of objects by virtue of their substance or material "stuff," independently of their being seen, that is, remains the same — a philosophical one, not a scientific one.

Edwards and Pap's A Modern Introduction to Philosophy

Just as in the 17th and 18th centuries, human beings today start out as "naive realists" who believe implicitly that objects exist, even if unseen, and have "just those qualities which they appear to have" (see the Introduction to the section on "Perception and the Physical World" in A Modern Introduction to Philosophy, 3rd Edition, by Paul Edwards and Arthur Pap, p. 568).

Locke in part debunked the second of that pair of beliefs — while still holding that some qualities are real — but Berkeley alone questioned the first. He felt it was

... just as meaningless, or self-contradictory, to suppose that something which is not a mind exists without being perceived, as to suppose the existence of a husband without a wife [p. 571].

In other words, there simply was, for Berkeley, no material substance by which a non-mental object, unperceived by mind, could be said to exist.


Not only does this pronouncement deny our naive realism, it seems to defy our commonsense understanding that the universe was in existence long before any sentient creatures were around to observe it. Berkeley got around this objection in a way I find compelling to the max: he noted that "the material universe has always existed in the divine consciousness" (p. 571, my italics).

I interpret that as meaning that existence is conferred on our material universe by virtue of God's seeing it and observing it. It is in God's mind that the existence of the world and of all the things in it is registered, thereby to be sustained, by an act of conscious observation on God's part. His eye is on the sparrow ... and everything else ... and Berkeley was right: to exist is to be perceived. Or, as I would rather put it, to exist is to be observed.


This seems in fact a corollary of some of the most up to date science we have today. As I reported in Genesis by Observership, a thought experiment dreamed up by physicist John Archibald Wheeler and confirmed indirectly at the University of Maryland shows that quantum events such as photons emitted from distant galaxies don't "choose" which of multiple possible paths to take to the Earth unless and until an observer on our planet aims a telescope at one of those paths, ignoring the others. Another physicist, Andrei Linde, asserts (and here he disagrees with Wheeler) that the act of observation which fixes the photon's path must be done by a conscious observer, not just any mechanical recording device.

If Linde is right, then Berkeley's principle becomes "to exist is to be consciously observed." This, indeed, is my own conviction. I am drawn to it in part because it makes mind or consciousness an equal partner with matter (if not a preexisting, preeminent partner), rather than an illusion of, or an epiphenomenon of, physical activity in a brain.


Furthermore, it squares with my belief in God to think that God's "vision" is fundamentally required if a world is to be created and sustained in existence. It gives a welcome new spin to the religious claim that we conscious humans are made in God's "image" — God possesses a conscious mind, and so do we.

If one act of human observation can "make" a photon choose an intergalactic path that by normal reckoning must have been settled on millions of years ago, there is something going on that our "normal reckoning" boggles at — and our conscious, observing mind is apparently responsible for it. We have an ability that represents some tiny fraction of God's ability to make something "be" just by looking at it.

In future posts I would like to expand upon how a philosophy of esse est percipi, or a modern version thereof, might be able to help bridge the present gaps between philosophy itself, science, and theology.

To Reason Is Divine

As I hinted in The Pope of Reason and The Pope and Islam, I nurture a late-blooming respect for the now-leader of my church, Pope Benedict XVI. For tutelage in his thought, I've turned to the recent writings of Catholic ethicist/author George Weigel, many shorter ones of which may be found here. One of them, "Pope Benedict XVI: The Master-Teacher," does an excellent job of laying out the Holy Father's views on the future of Europe and the Judeo-Christian West vis-à-vis the present threats from Islamic fundamentalism.

Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures

In this article originally written for The Catholic Herald in the U.K., Weigel emphasizes the book which the pope published in 2006 under his birth name, Joseph Ratzinger. In Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, which I have yet to read, the then-cardinal (per Weigel) "distils a lifetime of reflection on the relationship between faith and reason, and on the cultural consequences of a collapse of both faith and reason, into a challenge of prime importance for the entire world — but especially for Europe, in its current crisis of civilisational morale."

This pope is making quite a few pointed assertions these days about rationality and reason being part and parcel of the Christian faith. I'm inquiring into his ideas in part because I'd like to know more about what he means by reason.


Along those lines, Weigel alludes to the lecture Benedict XVI made last year at Regensburg, Germany, in which

... the Pope warned his listeners that an unreasonable faith is a real and present danger to the world — a faith, for example, in which God can be imagined capable of commanding the irrational, like the murder of innocents. But so, the Pope argued ..., is a loss of faith in reason: that, too, is a real and present danger. If, for example, the West limits the concept of "reason" to a purely instrumental rationality, or, in a fit of post-modern self-indulgence, denies the human capacity to grasp the truth of anything with certainty, then the West will be unable to defend itself. Why? Because it will be unable to give an account of its political commitments and their moral foundations, to itself, or to those who would replace the free societies of the West with a very different pattern of human community, based on a very different idea of God — and, consequently, of the just society.

The Pope seems to feel that cutting our traditional anchor line to divine reason in the Christian West could sap our ability to stave off the forces of unreason in the Muslim East. Historical trends we moderns have inherited from the Age of Enlightenment in 18th-century Europe are sawing away at that line.

Stripped to its essentials, the story seems to be that denizens of the Christian West at one time believed implicitly in "the human capacity to grasp the truth ... with certainty." Over the last two or three centuries that confidence has eroded into an attitude of skepticism toward the knowability of truth in general and of moral truth in particular. The pope would like us at least to reclaim our patrimony of truth-seeking reason ... even those of us who do not believe in God.

Weigel says the Holy Father "lays down a challenge" to religious nonbelievers today:

"In the age of the Enlightenment, the attempt was made to understand and define the essential norms of morality by saying that they would be valid etsi Deus non daretur, even if God did not exist... [Today], we must... reverse the axiom of the Enlightenment and say: Even the one who does not succeed in finding the path to accepting the existence of God ought nevertheless to try to live and to direct his life veluti si Deus daretur, as if God did indeed exist. This is the advice Pascal gave to his non-believing friends, and it is the advice I should like to give to our friends today who do not believe. This does not impose limitations on anyone's freedom; it gives support to all our human affairs and supplies a criterion of which human life stands sorely in need."

I suspect the pope believes that living a moral life based on rational principles — living "as if God did indeed exist" — might bring even agnostics under God's spell, since (as I indicated in The Pope of Reason) he feels that reason or logos lies at the very core of God's nature. "Only that creative reason which has manifested itself as love in the crucified God can truly show us what life is," Benedict has written in his book. Logos, the Greek word for creative reason, was the one selected by the evangelist for the prologue to his Gospel of John.

In future posts in this, my "Divine Reason" series, I intend to explore Pope Benedict XVI's ideas about the place of reason in Christian faith and Western thought more thoroughly.

Free Will and Divine Coherence

In recent days I've read two documents which, taken together, seem to have something important to say about human free will in the light of God's inner nature.

One of these documents is philosopher J.R. Lucas' 1961 article "Minds, Machines, and Gödel," the full text of which may be read here. I discussed that monograph in Whither the "Magic" of Mind?. The other is Pope Benedict XVI's September 2006 Regensburg lecture, which I talked about in The Pope of Reason. Its prepared text can be read here, or in PDF format here. The Wikipedia article on it and the controversy it ignited concerning the supposed difficulty of interreligious dialogue between Catholicism and Islam is here.

The real subject of the Pope's address at Regensburg was the "coherence within the universe of reason" that describes God's true inner nature, as well as that of his creation. Benedict affirms that "not to act 'with logos'" — the Greek term for both "reason" and "Word" — "is contrary to God's nature." In other words, God cannot do anything that is not in keeping with the fundamental coherence at the core of his very being.

Because God is internally coherent, he cannot say one thing and do another. He cannot pretend he wills this and actually will that. He cannot wear a mask for our benefit that belies who he really is. Nor can he create us in our world to be, at the deepest metaphysical level, anything but as rationally consistent and logically coherent as he himself is.


Lucas' "Mind, Machines, and Gödel" is likewise concerned with questions of internal consistency and logical coherence. Lucas' intent is to show that the universal "incompleteness" of formal systems that was proven by Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel in 1931 means that no machine can duplicate the human mind.

A formal system is a system by which a large set of theorems can be proven, drawing on a small set of axioms and rules of inference. For example, a formal system can easily be constructed that will derive all the laws of simple arithmetic that we learn in elementary school.

Gödel took up the question of whether every formal system is intrinsically incomplete. "Incomplete" in this sense means "unable to prove all true theorems about itself." Gödel demonstrated quite rigorously that any system which was at least powerful enough to produce the laws of simple arithmetic was in fact incomplete.

That is, it was logically incomplete as long as the system was internally consistent. An internally inconsistent formal system is one that is able to derive perfectly good theorems that are mutually contradictory. In the most general formulation, "P is true" and "P is false" are the contradictory propositions that coexist within an inconsistent formal system.

In particular, Gödel constructed a proposition, call it G, whose English equivalent is "G [i.e., this proposition itself] is not provable within this system." That so-called Gödelian sentence is the Achilles' heel of any formal system. Gödel showed that, as long as a formal system is internally consistent and powerful enough to derive the laws of arithmetic, a Gödelian sentence G is unprovable within its own system. Yet we who stand mentally outside that formal system can see, by our knowledge of of G's very unprovability, that G is in fact true.

In his paper, Lucas extends Gödel's logic to show that our minds, which can indeed perform outside-the-lines feats of truth divination, could never be fully emulated by machines. Machines, Lucas says, are but "concrete instantiations" of formal systems, and they are as such equally limited by Gödelian incompleteness.


In discussions of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, as the key proposition proven by the Austrian mathematician in 1931 is called, there is an interesting bias. It is simply assumed that formal systems would rather be incomplete than inconsistent.

I find this interesting because the Pope in his Regensburg speech seems to be implying that God, too, prefers incompleteness to inconsistency. But God apparently prefers to both of these possibilities a third possibility: that we, his prized creatures, be free.

When the Holy Father asserts that God by his very nature creates and sustains a cosmos ruled by "coherence within the universe of reason," we are entitled to ask what might constitute the diametrically opposed notion. A God, we might suppose, who is prone to incoherence: an incoherence which equates to the sort of internal contradiction spoken of in the Lucas paper, as it pertains to formal systems.


Put another way, we as God's creatures might conceivably have been created as computer-like beings whose behavior is wholly determined by our programming (akin to a formal system's rules of inference) and our input data (akin to a formal system's axioms). We would then have been deterministic machines in a deterministic world.

True, we would have been unable to divine the truth of the likes of the Gödelian proposition G. We would, that is, not have been as smart or as capable of seeking and finding the truth as we actually are. But there would have been an even worse concomitant: we would lack free will. Deterministic machines are not able to follow paths of intentionality that violate their basic programming.

Of course, if said humanoid machines are capable of harboring logical inconsistency at their inner, most fundamental level, that would change things. Just as with formal reasoning systems, machines with any substantial degree of "processing power" — ones that are roughly as "smart" as we — can be either formally incomplete or logically inconsistent. If they are incomplete, they are blind to the truth of their own Gödelian sentence. Hence they are not as smart as we.

In fact, to be fully as smart as we — to be able to see the truth of Gödel's proposition G — a machine would have to be internally inconsistent, in terms of its ability to derive contradictory truths!


If Lucas is right, though, we are not machines at all. We could never be replaced by a machine, whether it is a formally incomplete one or a logically inconsistent one. We can conclude from this that God made us free in order to avoid having to build rational incoherence into us, at the very base of our being — given that his only other choice was to let us remain as mentally limited as a computer or robot that cannot see the truth of its own Gödelian sentence.

In other words, it seems that smart creatures that evolve in a fundamentally rational world created by a metaphysically coherent, non-capricious God must perforce have free will! Lacking free will, such creatures would have to be mentally deficient machines — either that, or the world in which they evolve would have to have been founded on the quicksand of a radical, through-the-looking-glass logical incoherence.