The Taproot of Moral Law

I talked in C.S. Lewis on "The Invasion" about Mere Christianity, the primer on Christian belief by a great defender of the faith whose lectures on British radio during World War II that still-popular book recapitulates. It was a time when the great evil of Nazi aggression under Hitler threatened to undermine European and world civilization. As bombs were falling on London, Lewis told his countrymen of God's ongoing battle with Satan, the Prince of This World.

Lewis's argument toward God and Christ in Mere Christianity begins from the axiom that we all believe, deep down, in right and wrong. That is, we all think that the right is really and truly distinct from the wrong, even if our fumbling attempts to say what is right in particular situations often result in honest disagreements among ourselves, and even if none of us manages to obey even our own conscience with notable constancy.

Francis S. Collins, in The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, says the Lewis book was and remains a touchstone of his commitment to Christian belief, following a period of atheism as a young man. Lewis also started out as an atheist. Collins, again like Lewis, cites the existence of a universal notion of Moral Law among us humans as (along with a common experience of spiritual longing) a prime reason why he now firmly rejects his former nonbelief on God.

Collins says science cannot explain the sense we humans invariably have of an absolutely real right-wrong, fair-unfair, unselfish-selfish, good-evil dichotomy. Lewis, in his discussion, pretty much ignores whatever advances science may or may not claim to be capable of making towards filling the "gaps" in our naturalistic understanding of why things are the way they are, including why we humans think the way we do. For the most part, he simply assumes that the Moral Law binds us, ergo there must be something real outside this world to which we are thereby bound.

At some point, it seems to me, these two arguments run the risk of circularity, of begging the question. Either by treating the phenomenon of our awareness of right and wrong as a brute fact needing no further explanation (Lewis) or by assigning it to an explanatory realm wholly beyond scientific inquiry (Collins), both arguments fail to convince those who begin from a different axiom: that all that can be explained, science will eventually explain.

Of course, those who propose such an axiom are prone to their own sort of circularity. There is something better — i.e., more good, more right — about adopting a wholly materialistic view of the world, they seem to say. But that implies a "higher standard" of what is good and right and proper, a yardstick by which their worldview ought to be judged superior to the theistic worldview.

They may well say their yardstick is reason, or human progress, or (since so many injustices have been committed by religion) justice. But even so, they are making Lewis's and Collins's point: we all believe there is such a yardstick.


My approach to resolving this deadlock of dueling circularities is to try to figure out which, if any, brute fact about our common human experience we ought to treat axiomatically, as a given.

In addressing such a question, I don't think Collins hits the nail bang on the head when he identifies the Moral Law mainly with our capacity for noble, unreciprocated, entirely altruistic acts which, especially when they are done in secret, cannot boost our evolutionary "fitness." While that argument is true as far as it goes, it doesn't encompass human goodness in its entirety. Most of the good we do is not that pure or noble. A lot of it comes, quite grudgingly, out of a sense of duty which overrides our usual inclination to bypass doing the right thing.

In this regard Lewis is spot on. He acknowledges time and again our absolute incapacity to do the right thing all the time, or even most of the time. The insufficiency in his discussion, by today's scientific standards, is that he doesn't actually specify in no uncertain terms exactly what the feature of the human soul is that we would like science to explain, without foreseeable result. Instead, he resorts to homely examples that (quite successfully, in my opinion) call up for us the experience of being committed to a higher standard.

One is tempted at first to call this scientifically inexplicable feature of the universal human experience a sense of "duty," or perhaps of "obligation." We all know we have a moral duty, an obligation to live by some high standard of conduct which, if lived by, would keep us from doing evil.

So I would say that what science has to try to explain, entirely under its own steam, is the combination of our knowledge of a higher standard and our wavering — yet sometimes passionate, and never quite dead — commitment to it.

Robert Wright's Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny

This goes along with something I said a while back in a post in another blog. The blog is called Beyond Darwin, and the post was Non-Crazy Questions (II). It was one of a series of posts looking into Robert Wright's book Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. Wright, who is a science writer, not a scientist, suggests that life on earth has a non-intelligent designer: natural selection itself. Natural selection processes information in the form of feedback from the environment and "decides" which variants of existing life forms are best-suited to survive. In so doing it blindly pursues a goal: ever more elaborate expressions of living complexity.

That sort of thing is pretty much bound to result, eventually, in the advent and further increase of intelligent life, in the form of organisms that are ever better at doing their own information processing and maximizing the gains they realize from playing "non-zero sum games" with one another. Positive non-zero sum games are interactions in which both parties benefit. Wright says they predominate in evolutionary history over either one-winner-one-loser zero sum games or negative non-zero sum games in which both parties lose.

But, says Wright, intelligence is not the same as consciousness, no matter how high creaturely IQs soar. Consciousness — sentience, subjectivity, "inner" experience — is not necessary to evolutionary fitness. It's an add-on. There might exist in the world (though there aren't actually) quite clever living and breathing zombies with no inner experience whatever, "robots with unusually good skin" (pp. 320-1), who would be just as expert as we human beings are at gaming the environment and fostering their own evolutionary success.

Crucially, these imaginable-if-nonexistent zombies provide us with a moral lesson, says Wright. Because they lack subjective, sentient inner experience, they partake of the same moral standing as a computer. It is not morally wrong to turn off a computer, or to dismantle it into its component parts, or to throw it on the junk heap when its useful life is over. The same would be true of these hypothetical zombies: Thou Shalt Not Kill would not apply to them.

In other words, the taproot of our moral obligation lies in the soil of our sentience. If we were not conscious, the whole idea of moral imperatives borne toward one another would be null and void.


I find this a crucial addition to the argument that both Collins and Lewis make about how there exists a basic Moral Law, common to all humans, that serves as a signpost to God. If we are aware of bearing a shared, mutual commitment to a higher standard, however much we may waver and wobble in living by it, then both the awareness and the commitment bespeak our non-zombieness. The fact that we are conscious, something the most highly evolved robotoids could never be, shows that there is something extra in our makeup.

Accordingly, Wright's argument that the existence of God is a "non-crazy question" patterns closely with the logic of Collins and Lewis. They too advert to a "something extra" in us which Darwinian evolution by natural selection cannot account for. In their case, it is the Moral Law. In Wright's, it is the sheer fact that we are conscious, though we needn't be.

I would be remiss here if I didn't note, by the way, that Wright's ideas about human consciousness being superfluous to our underlying brain states/processes is not universally held. Philosophers of mind like Daniel Dennett dispute that consciousness is anything at all above and beyond a strict identity with those underlying mechanics.

Or, sometimes, Dennett and others like him talk as if consciousness does exist as a mental state, separate from the underlying brain mechanics — but one with its own independent causal functionality, such that natural selection would "see" it and act on it.

Wright carefully admits to there being such a view as Dennett's, while stating how incomprehensible it seems to him. The gist of Wright's rebuttal, extended a bit by me, is this: if there is no distinguishable human trait of consciousness, apart from our brain mechanics, then any advanced robotoids who evolve naturally on some hypothetical planet elsewhere in the galaxy, and who have the same brain mechanics as we do, will perforce be as conscious as we, and it would accordingly be a sin to destroy them. Put another way, such non-human robotoids as these imaginary ones could never ever be — they'd be as "human" as we are!

But that would mean that Thou Shalt Not Kill would apply to them too. Reducing consciousness to a mere identity with certain neurochemical mechanics of the human brain fails utterly to obviate the Moral Law which serves us a signpost to God.

Or, if consciousness is a real mental state above and beyond the brain's neurochemical transactions, but it is not transparent to natural selection — if it produces its own causal effects in the material world, that is — then science as we know it cannot properly deal with it. "Truly scientific models," Wright says in an endnote on p. 398, "must invoke only 'publicly observable' causal phenomena (neurotransmitters, etc.)." Purely "mental forces," even if they exist, are not "publicly observable" and as such lie outside the legitimate range of scientific inquiry!

Again, in this case, science fails to explain the Moral Law. Thus Wright argues (I think quite convincingly) that human consciousness is something which science alone cannot account for. I accordingly find it to be the soil wherein lies the taproot of Moral Law.


But there is another essential part of the argument concerning the Moral Law, one which I don't think Collins pays enough attention to: the sheer impossibility we encounter in trying to live by this standard. Lewis says:

And what did God do? First of all He left us conscience, the sense of right and wrong: and all through history there have been people trying (some of them very hard) to obey it. None of them ever quite succeeded. (p. 54, Collier ppbk.)

It is this feature of our situation, our wavering commitment to a higher standard, which makes the Christian religion so specifically appropriate. Jesus, after all, made the shocking claim to forgive us our sins, just as if he were God and the wrongs we have done were wrongs against him (see p. 55).

P.D. James says in one of her Adam Dalgleish mysteries that all murders are motivated by Love, Lust, Lucre, or Loathing, with Love being paradoxically the most dangerous. You would think our sense of moral obligation would invariably be clarified by it, but no. Love can be a killer.

I attribute this wrinkle in the fabric of our nature — as well as our susceptibility to Lust, Lucre, and Loathing — to the fact that we who possess the Moral Law descend from species that do not. Their instincts, passions, and moral blindness linger on in us today. Here is another reason why Christians ought to feel Darwinian evolution is their ally, not their enemy!

C.S. Lewis on "The Invasion"

In The Burden of Evil I said that I have:

... recently been exploring my at least quasi-heretical notion of "neo-Manachaeanism" in posts beginning with Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part I and ending with Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part V. It's not good Christian doctrine because it sees God as all-good but not all-powerful. God's ongoing struggle with Satan reflects into the material world as a neverending clash between (say) order and chaos.

I then went on to posit an alternate explanation for why we encounter such evil in a God-made world, an explanation that I think is far less "neo-Manichaean." I said that God, who could trounce evil once and for all, refrains from doing so in order to "co-opt" it instead. Our lives are thereby burdened with not only the results of evil but the tempatation to do evil deeds, or else to fail to do good ones. To be so tested and challenged is the only way we can possibly be brought to die, little by little, to our own innate selfishness.

C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity

I'd now like to extend those remarks by noting how the great Christian defender C.S. Lewis dealt with the same subject in Mere Christianity. Lewis (1898-1963) was an English professor of Medieval and Renaissance literature at Cambridge University and author of such books as the children's series The Chronicles of Narnia. During World War II, in a series of radio addresses, Lewis laid out what he felt to be the bare essentials of Christian belief. Those addresses became Mere Christianity, which has never since disappeared from bookstore shelves.

Lewis had been a staunch atheist in his younger years but had suddeenly come to recognize in Christian belief the most accurate way of understanding and explaining precisely what we face here in this world. The most telling aspect of our human experience, he says in the introductory chapters of Mere Christianity, is that we are, all of us, aware of a standard of good and evil which presses on us to do naught but the former. Yet we so often do the latter instead, and then we make all sorts of excuses about it. In fact, we are incapable of perfect goodness.

Lewis gives his reasons for dismissing religions that attribute everything that occurs in the world to the actions of a pantheistic God or gods, far beyond "good" and "evil." Then, in his chapter on "The Invasion," Lewis takes aim at dualism: "next to Christianity ... the manliest and most sensible creed on the market" (this is from p. 48 in my Collier Books paperback edition).

Dualism holds "that there are two equal and independent powers at the back of everything, one of them good and the other bad, and that this universe is the battlefield in which they fight out an endless war" (p. 48). Lewis doesn't name Manichaeanism as a dualist philosophy, but I'd say it quite obviously is. So if my self-styled "neo-Manichaeanism" isn't dualist, I'd better say why not. Otherwise, as Lewis makes clear, I'm no Christian.

To Lewis, the crux of dualism is the idea that the two "powers at the back of everything" are independent of one another. The "good" one is good for goodness's own sake. (Either that, or the goodness we each attribute to it degenerates into a matter of personal preference, in which case there is really no such as goodness qua goodness, and the whole discussion is pointless.)

So if the "bad" is equal and independent, this power "at the back of everything" must accordingly be bad for badness's own sake. But Lewis shows this to be a contradiction in terms. We cannot really conceive of badness for badness's sake. All our experience of badness shows it to be universally employed as a means to an end, such as "money, or power, or safety" (p. 49).

Actual badness or evil is in every instance "a parasite, not an original thing," Lewis says (p. 50). It takes something which is fine in itself, such as money, power, or safety, and perverts it by pursuing it in a wrong way. Evil is spoiled good.

Good therefore has primacy over evil. Good ends can be used to explain perverted ones in a way in which perverted ones cannot serve to explain good ones.

Here is where that old Christian chestnut the devil comes into the picture, for Lewis. As a fallen angel, Satan is a self-willed, rebellious, perverted creation of the good God. And we live in "enemy-occupied territory," in this world of ours (p. 51). Christ, our "rightful king," has fortunately staged an invasion. He has "landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage."


Lewis's other main point in this chapter is that the foregoing in no way justifies us in believing that our "campaign for good" can be simple or pure:

It is no good asking for a simple religion. After all, real things are not simple. They look simple, but they are not. ... And if you are content to stop there [i.e., with false and wishful thinking about the possibility of simplicity and moral clarity in the real world], well and good. But if you are not — and the modern world usually is not — if you want to go on and ask what is really happening — then you must be prepared for something difficult. ... Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd. It is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect. ... Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. ... The problem is not simple and the answer is not going to be simple either. (pp. 46-48)

Christianity, says Lewis, is precisely a religion which admits how complex the problem of sabotaging Satan's earthly intrigues really is.

I find that, in spirit and letter, Lewis's explication of all this is exactly what I had in mind by calling myself a neo-Manichaean before. There is such a thing as pure goodness. It is real; it is God. But in our reality, it is ever polluted by Satan's nefarious schemes, which keep us from performing facile acts of sabotage without first disentangling the good (metaphorically, the innocent civilians) from the bad — to extend the metaphor, Satan's minions.

So maybe I'm right on the mark, Christianity-wise, to believe in both a pure source of good and a morally complex world.

The Burden of Evil

I've recently been exploring my at least quasi-heretical notion of "neo-Manachaeanism" in posts beginning with Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part I and ending with Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part V. It's not good Christian doctrine because it sees God as all-good but not all-powerful. God's ongoing struggle with Satan reflects into the material world as a neverending clash between (say) order and chaos.

I've thought of another approach to the same question of why the all-good, all-powerful God of standard Christian belief would not trounce Satan straight away and end all our suffering and vulnerability at the hands of evil. This approach, unlike neo-Manichaeanism, would probably pass muster with most theologians.

To lead up to it, I have to make an admission. I am a person who has trouble distinguishing between two categories of experience: the truly evil, and the merely burdensome. By our personal burdens I mean all the "stuff" we have to endure in life: things which we would rather not have to put up with, like hangnails and nosy neighbors, menstrual cramps and hot, humid days. By evil I mean that which either is prima facie wrong or is absolutely wrong, as I laid out toward the end of Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part V. From a religious perspective, it's what an all-good God doesn't want.

My admission is that I all too often identify anything which ruins my own particular day as evil.

This is a mistake that perhaps many others are prone to as well. And, I think, the problem of distinguishing between the two is rendered all the more complex because there can be actual evil behind that which ruins one's own particular day.

In my case, I have had assorted health woes of late: an operation to fix an aortic aneurysm and perform a double heart bypass seems to have brought on a reactive bout of clinical depression. A fair number of my days have been "ruined." I'm now recovered from the surgery and am taking an antidepressant to combat the mental woes. Perhaps quite naturally, this thought has on several occasions popped into my head, "Why is God doing this to me?"

Now, if evil is real, I think it's fair to identify the ground of suffering as Something or Someone Evil. Human suffering, writ large, is much worse than just "having a bad day." So another way to ask the question is, "Why doesn't God destroy the ground of suffering once and for all?"

And this is the answer that has just occurred to me: He doesn't destroy it, but he does "co-opt" it. He does turn evil into a burden for us, and for good reason. Bearing burdens is absolutely necessary for us if we are to grow as persons.

Personal growth seems to require that we die, little by little, to our selfishness. That's the bottom line. We won't die to our selfishness unless we are somehow burdened in life. Jesus was burdened with carrying his own cross prior to his crucifixion. We, too, must pay a (much smaller) price and bear a (much lighter) burden, if we are to locate a more "selfless self" to supplant our native selfishness.


Turning evil into a growth-sparking challenge to us: it patterns with a notion I draw from the new sciences of complexity. Some scientists have discovered an "edge of chaos," a fecund conceptual/mathematical region between order and chaos that is said to be the seat of evolutionary progress. The edge of chaos exerts its pull on computer models of living systems in such a way that perturbing a system into actual chaos causes a rebound toward order. During that rebound, growth and progress accelerate.

Perhaps this is exactly what happens when God co-opts evil, rather than banishing it outright.

Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part V

In a series of posts (most recently, Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part IV) I've talked about being a "neo-Manichaean": seeing the world as a battleground between a good God and an evil Satan.

The "neo" in "neo-Manichaean" reflects my idea that sometimes good and evil embrace so tightly in real-life situations as to be hard to distinguish. Order and chaos are quite literally joined in battle so as to create a zone of fecund evolutionary change, the "edge of chaos." As a result, not only is chaos sometimes benign — the weather over the long term is a chaotic system, after all — but there is such a thing as too much order.


Those are my metaphysics. My stance on good and evil is more or less one of moral relativism.

Moral relativism stands in contradistinction to moral absolutism. I'll contrast the two with reference to a book I'm reading, The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, by Peter Beinart.

Beinart writes (p. 121ff.) of how today's political conservatives don't want to fight terrorism by using foreign aid to attack economic root causes such as too little funding for public schools in many Arab and Muslim countries. Too many young people in the Muslim world are educated in religious madrasas, where some are taught jihadism. Yet American conservatives object to funneling U.S. tax dollars into aid to institutions abroad that would undercut totalitarianism.

Why the objection? One big reason, says Beinart (p. 121), is that such a policy

... shifts blame from the terrorists themselves, and thus threatens the quality conservatives cherish most: moral clarity. As conservative commentator William Bennett has written, the question "shouldn't we work on getting rid of the poverty and oppression that are the root causes of terrorism" bespeaks a "want of clarity about the difference between good and evil."

After 9/11, writes Beinart (p. 133):

Bernard Lewis, the eminent Arabist who became the Bush administration's leading guide to the Muslim world, explained that in the jihadists' view, "the United States had become morally corrupt, socially degenerate, and in consequence, politically and militarily enfeebled." And conservatives found that argument compelling because it matched their own deep fears about American society. They too saw the Clinton administration's foreign policy weakness as the product, ultimately, of its moral weakness — a weakness they feared had seeped into the marrow of American life. Beneath the superficial novelty of America's terror war lurked the same old conservative fears. Could America match the absolute confidence of its fanatical foes? Had liberalism produced a nation of relativists, unable to distinguish good from evil? The religion of non-judgementalism ... has permeated our culture, encouraging a paralysis of the moral faculty," wrote William Bennett, in a book titled Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism. "We have been caught with our defenses down — our intellectual and moral defenses as much as our physical ones."

Hence, Bennett is a moral absolutist. As a relativist, I don't agree that we're in a moral morass if we don't see the world purely in black and white. That is the basis of my moral relativism.

Beinart speaks of the moral absolutism of conservatives as making the achieving of "moral clarity" or "moral purity" job number one our fight against terrorism. Accordingly, don't attack anything but terrorism itself, say the moral purists. Home in on that which is purely and unremittingly evil, and fight that.

Moral relativists such as I say that's too simplistic. The real world is ineluctably complex. Sometimes you have to fight evil using subtle, nuanced strategies that lack ideal moral clarity.

I'll come back to the topic of moral relativism later on in this post, when I will investigate it more thoroughly as a philosophical position.


Meanwhile, some words on the basic ideas of "good" and "evil." I am also reading the new book by Francis Collins, the scientist who headed the Human Genome Project. The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief is Collins' testimony that his love for science and his faith in God are not irreconcilable.

Collins began life indifferent to religion, moved into agnosticism and outright atheism in his college years, then in his mid-twenties started to take the "God hypothesis" seriously. He began to be convinced by the book Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis that humans are universally guided by a Moral Law or "law of right behavior" (p. 22ff.). We have trouble sticking by it or discerning how it applies to particular situations, but we all have an inner sense of right and wrong that is common to all members of our species in all cultures, places, and times.

Collins says that our innate, shared human moral sense could only derive from inside us and thus bespeaks a God. Collins argues that no strictly scientific explanation, based on Darwinian evolutionary pressures or anything else, suffices to explain what Lewis called our uniquely human love for agape (ah-GAH-pay) or selfless altruism. Collins identifies our notion of true selflessness as the basic kernel of the whole concept of goodness.


I'm not wholly convinced by Collins' argument alone, which I feel could be a bit more rigorous, but I note that it goes along with something I've just read in an old college textbook, an introduction to philosophy. In the section on moral judgments, one of the book's authors points out that "the most influential writer on ethics during the last fifty years," G.E. Moore — the book I have is now over thirty years old — found a way to prove that "good" cannot really be defined.

There are some words, Moore showed, that are not meaningless but can be explained only by pointing to instances of what they convey: words like "yellow" or "bitter" or "pleasure" ... or "good." These words are all incapable of being analyzed into simpler concepts. "Yellow" and "bitter" refer to natural phenomena that are of the senses. "Pleasure" and "anger" and "fear" are natural but introspective. "Good," however, is not strictly sensory or introspective, since it is not "natural" to begin with; it is instead a "non-natural" quality.

Our capacities for pleasure, anger, and fear, Collins would argue, are natural inasmuch as they derive from evolutionary processes. But our capacity for moral judgment is by this same reasoning non-natural, just as Moore said.


Now for the further discussion I promised on moral relativism. I have a second book, this one titled Ethics and Metaethics, from 1963. Ethics or morality asks questions about how specific human actions are to be evaluated, and metaethics or metamorality asks whether, and how, such ethical/moral issues can in fact be settled, once and for all.

The book has a section on "Right Action," whose introduction by the book's author, Raziel Abelson, suggests to me that what I above called my "moral relativism" may be a misnomer. My position may actually be one of "intuitionist absolutism."

Abelson presents five readings in this section of his book, whose subtitle is Readings in Ethical Philosophy. They alternate between absolutism and relativism. The religious absolutism of Anglican Bishop Robert C. Mortimer (1902 - ?) leads off the parade with an assertion that an act is right if and only if God commands it. Filtered through "natural law," à la Thomas Aquinas, God's commands are also for Mortimer mediated by personal conscience and church pronouncements.

Mortimer's religious absolutism is challenged by the secular "conventionalism" of Thomas Hobbes (1588 - 1679), who based morality and ethics on something other than an appeal to higher authority. This was in an age when the prerogatives of kings were giving way to the rights of individuals and their voluntary mutual associations. Instead of divine or monarchical fiat, morals and ethics were grounded by Hobbes firmly in society's own laws, customs, traditions, and agreements: "an uncritical conformity to social authority and custom," Abelson says (p. 304). Hobbes' conventionalism was relativist in that moral laws did not derive from anything immutable or absolute; still, they could not be meaninigfully challenged or criticized.

Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804) sought to derive moral laws from critical appeals to absolute reason, not to absolute divine will. He "was a devout Pietist and regarded Christianity as the highest moral ideal, but he made ethics more fundamental than theology" (p. 306). For Kant, "logical consistency [is] the single standard of what is right." Thus, "the single condition that qualifies a rule of conduct as a moral law is that it be logically possible to want every rational being to want to follow it under any conditions" (pp. 306-7, my italics).

Kant's rational absolutism was challenged by the utilitarian relativism of John Stuart Mill (1806 - 1873), who says that which is morally right is such because it produces the most pleasure, or alleviates the most pain, for the most people. Ethics derive, that is, from worldly situations. But Mill's utilitarian relativism doesn't explain why (among other things) "we feel that actions such as breaking a promise are wrong, even when we are sure that they produce more pleasure than pain" (p. 308).


Thus we come to the intuitionist absolutism of W.D. Ross (1877 - ?). Why is is wrong to cause unnecessary pain, intuitionists (or "deontologists") ask of utilitarians? Why right to alleviate suffering? Ross and other intuitionists "maintain that the rightness or wrongness of an action cannot be inferred from any other facts, but must be recognized directly and immediately, as a self-evident feature of the action itself" (p. 309).

That seems to accord with my own ideas — which surprises me, since intuitionism is classified as an absolutist position. True, it doesn't appeal to divine commandment or to Kant's reasoned "respect for universal law" as the bedrock of moral judgment, but only to the highly abstract notion that whatever is right is right in itself. We must ultimately rely on our personal intuitive faculties to recognize what that right action is.

"There is no simple or easy answer" to the question of how we are to decide which of our moral duties are "absolute" and which are merely prima facie, according to the intuitionist view (pp. 310-311). Though we have a prima facie duty to keep our promises, that duty can be overruled under special circumstances, such as if we have promised to meet a friend for some trivial reason and an opportunity arises to alleviate some great suffering, at the cost of breaking our promise.

"The relative weights of our various duties," Abelson writes (p. 311), "develop slowly through the accumulated experience and wisdom of mankind, and are matters of intuitive recognition." They can thus appear as self-evident to us; or, failing that, we can sharpen our moral intuition by "consult[ing] those of greater moral sensitivity and wisdom, to whom right and wrong are intuitively clear."


To me, when you start talking about the "relative weights" of various moral duties, you're very close to being a relativist. Indeed, per Abelson, "The intuitionist view as stated by Ross combines the merits of relativism with the merits of rational absolutism" (p. 311). Absolute duties are independent of circumstances, while prima facie duties are indeed situational.

Yet, whither objectivity? There's the rub, with intuitionism. How can our moral obligations be justified with reference to something other that the inner workings of our own minds?

W.R. Ross sidesteps this cavil by likening our prima facie duties to mathematical axioms such as 2 + 2 = 4, the truth of which become self-evident at some point in our intellectual development. Yet, crucially, our axiomatic prima facie obligations are unlike our mathematical axioms in that they fail to make the results they tend toward absolutely obligatory:

... no mathematical object (no figure, for instance, or angle) ever has two characteristics that tend to give it opposite resultant characteristics, while moral acts often (as everyone knows) and indeed always (as on reflection we must admit) have different characteristics that tend to make them at the same time prima facie right and prima facie wrong; there is probably no act, for instance, which does good to anyone without doing harm to someone else, and vice versa. (W.D. Ross, "Right Action," p. 374)

According to Ross, what our actual or absolute duty is in any given situation is determined by weighing the prima facie rights and wrongs of all the moral elements which make up the situation, no one of which is by itself determinative. If our conscientious decision to act causes us to shortchange one of our prima facie obligations, we naturally feel a sense of compunction and do whatever is necessary to seek forgiveness or make amends afterwards. At the same time, however, we need feel no "shame or repentance" (p. 371).

For this reason, I would prefer to call intuitionist absolutism something else. Most absolutists are like Kant, as characterized by Ross: they say "that there are certain duties of perfect obligation, such as those of fulfilling promises, of paying debts, of telling the truth, which admit of no exception whatever in favour of duties of imperfect obligation, such as that of relieving distress" (p. 369). For the intuitionist, "duties of imperfect obligation" can outweigh "duties of perfect obligation." Sometimes, relieving distress takes primacy over moral punctilio. I'd call that relativistic. It's "situation ethics."


Abelson points out (p. 312) that religious absolutism, conventionalist relativism, rational absolutism, utilitarian relativism, and intuitional absolutism form a progression:

Religious absolutism generalizes from the rudimentary moral consciousness of the small child, who identifies right with whatever his parent [i.e., God as Father] commands. Conventionalism or cultural relativism expresses the next stage of development in the child, when he becomes aware of social authority outside his home. Kantian rational absolutism recognizes the authority of individual reason which the child, on reaching maturity, employs in criticizing both parental and social authority. But no matter how well developed his reason may be, a person cannot discover the best rules of life without enough experience to predict the consequences of his actions for himself and for others. Utilitarianism brings attention to the need for this practical wisdom in evaluating rules of conduct. Finally, intuitionism points out duties and obligations independent of one's own welfare and even of the common good, and expresses the moral consciousness of the cultivated and mature man, so deeply committed to his moral principles that he no longer needs a practical motive for following them. This unwavering committment to a moral code expresses a very high level of moral consciousness. But the actual code of conduct to which the moral individual is committed may vary from one social environment to another. Consequently, intuitionism does not provide a final answer to the question, "What is right action, and how can we prove it to be right?" ... .

At this stage of the evolution of my own moral consciousness, I'd say I'm an intuitionist who doubts that that question can ever be settled, once and for all, except by an appeal to prima facie axioms of right and wrong.

Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part IV

I am not sure that in my previous posts in this series, most recently Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part III, I have managed to convey adequately that my idea of what "neo-Manachaean" means is not all that much like what "Manachaean" (or "Manichean," without an extra "a") means to a great many people.

In The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, Peter Beinart writes (p. 71), "Immediately, liberals and conservatives divided into opposing camps [over what to do about the leftist Sandinista rebels who overthrew the anti-Communist dictatorship of Anastazio Somoza in 1980s Nicaragua]. As in El Salvador, [President Ronald] Reagan waxed Manichean about his dubious right-wing allies, infamously calling the [anti-Sandinista] contras the 'moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers'."

That use of "Manichean" is not what I have in mind. It suggests that there is a simple, clear dividing line between good and evil, and only if we stay well to the good side of the line, exercising our might for God aganist Satan, will things turn out for the best. That sort of thinking, says Beinart, fueled Reagan's "dreams of military victory" in Central America.

The American left generally opposed Reagan with an anti-imperialistic and equally simplistic "U.S. out of Central America" stance. Yet there was a split among liberals. A few, like "left-leaning" journalist Paul Berman, defied the wishes of editors like Michael Moore at Mother Jones (yes, that Michael Moore) and condemned the "human rights abuses and disastrous economic policies" of the Sandinistas. Democratic congressman Dave McCurdy of Oklahoma visited Nicaragua and was disturbed by "evidence of growing Sandinista repression" (p. 72).

McCurdy, Democratic senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, and others in the fledgling Democratic Leadership Council (its members were called the "New Democrats") backed nonmilitary aid to the contras and efforts at economic development conditioned "on respect for human rights ... [and on purging] former Somoza loyalists from leadership roles." By the time all was said and done, Nicaraguan voters had rejected both combatants and elected Violetta de Chamorro, the leader of the nonviolent opposition, as their new president. Beinart chortles, "Both the Sandinistas and the contras had lost, and a genuine democrat had won."

True, Beinart adds quickly, most of the forces leading to this outcome that was so fortunate from the U.S. perspective had lain outside our control. But ...

... for the evolution of liberal foreign policy, [the efforts of the New Democrats] mattered. Whether they realized it or not, the New Democrats were stumbling toward the synthesis that had eluded [President] Jimmy Carter: a liberal antitotalitarianism for the post-Vietnam world, which prized human rights without taking refuge in morally pure isolationism, promoted liberty without pretending that the threats to liberty came only from the other side [i.e., the Communists], and ceded some U.S. control to gain legitimacy abroad. It was a synthesis that would reappear years later, once the cold war was gone. (p. 73)

Neo-Manichaenism as I envision it is big on synthesis. Philosophers have noted how an antithesis (Reaganism; the contras) to a thesis (Carter-style post-Vietnam liberalism; the Sandinistas) gives way to a synthesis (the New Democrats; Chamorro). It's called dialectics, and in different guises it's been embraced on both the left and the right.

Neo-Manichaeanism embraces it as a reflection of the "dance" of good and evil in the world. One side of every thesis-antithesis pair is always called "good," the other "evil" ... though different people choose, in perfect conscience, opposite sides as truly representing the good.

Somehow, then, a synthesis emerges in which those erstwhile unbridgeable differences are bridged after all. Result: progress. But also, there is inevitably a new thesis which calls forth a new antithesis ... and the dance goes on. God never defeats Satan. Satan never defeats God. Time, and progress, march on.

Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part III

In Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part II, I tried to give an indication of what I mean by saying I am a neo-Manichaean. The ancient pseudo-Christian heresy, Manichaeanism, posits (as I understand it) a God who is all-good but not (and herein lies the heresy) all-powerful, such that His struggle with Satan is ongoing. That translates, in my version of the story, into a world where order and chaos square off to create the "edge of chaos," where evolution develops its outcomes good and bad, there are new species and extinctions, and there are multitudinous births and deaths, for better or for worse.

We have at least three possible responses, the two most obvious of which are not what I urge.

Perhaps the most obvious of the three possible responses is a studied, even principled amorality. If God and the Devil are roughly equipotent, why choose sides? I find that a copout both repugnant and ridiculous. After all, good is, by definition, better than evil.

The second most obvious of the three possible responses is to go to the opposite extreme and seek — nay, insist on — moral purity. Extirpate all reflections of Satan from the circumstances of our lives.

That, too, I reject; this post discusses why. But first, here is the third option, the one I favor: Understanding and dealing squarely with the fact that, in life as we live it, goodness and purity are not the same things.


A good way to illustrate what I mean comes from the recent book by The New Republic editor-at-large Peter Beinart, The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again.

Beinart is not talking about religion, philosophy, or theology, but about political ideology. His book is a call-to-arms for latter-day liberals to take up the mantle of their august forebears in the earliest days of the Cold War.

It was a time just after World War II, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the Communist Soviet Union, our erstwhile ally, had gobbled up Eastern Europe and begun to prove itself, under Stalin, as totalitarian as the Nazi and Fascist enemies we had just defeated together. Many on the American left were themselves Communists, ex-Communists, aligned in some way with Socialism/Marxism, fellow-travelers, or dupes.

In the years from 1946 to 1948, there was a bifurcation between leftists who were willing to shortchange liberty in favor of equality and fraternity, and those who weren't. The latter group formed Americans for Democratic Action, underwrote the Truman presidency, and laid the foundation for the anti-totalitarian American liberalism to come — that of Presidents Truman and Kennedy, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., diplomat-historian George Kennan, Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and the like.


Not long thereafter was born the anti-Communist right, led by such thinkers as James Burnham and National Review founder William F. Buckley. They did not approve of Truman's emphasis on foreign and military aid. Economic assistance to floundering nations in the postwar period, countries such as Greece and Turkey whose governments, albeit anti-Soviet, were not model democracies, would, they said, just undermine our chances of winning the Cold War. Why? They betrayed our lack of moral purity and clarity.

The anti-Communist right embarked on a series of domestic witch hunts, led by the likes of Joseph McCarthy, U.S. Senator from Wisconsin from 1947-57. "For the right," writes Beinart (p. 20), "the question lurking behind all these cases [of alleged Communist sympathies] was whether America believed in its creed strongly enough to expel those who did not." For the anti-Communist left, on the other hand, the point was exactly the reverse: America needed to be strong enough to tolerate espousers of even those ideologies most adversarial to it. Anything less would mock liberty, not strengthen it.

It came down to a recognition by the liberal anti-totalitarians that America's goodness was not the same as its moral purity. "If the cold war liberal tradition parts company with the right," says Beinart (p. xi), "in insisting that American power cannot be good unless we recognize that it can also be evil, it parts company with the purist left in insisting that if we demand that American power be perfect, it cannot be good."


Moral purism thus has its left- and right-wing versions. Many left-wingers have traditionally objected to pragmatic, half-a-loaf policies that aren't squeaky clean, social justice-wise. Right-wingers, to those that leave something to be desired, liberty-wise.

This is just as true in the international sphere as on the domestic scene. The dust jacket of The Good Fight says, "Peter Beinert offers a new liberal vision, based on principles liberals too often forget: That America's greatness cannot simply be asserted; it must be proved. That to be good, America does not have to be pure ... ."

For God, of course, there is no distinction between goodness and moral purity. For us, there is. How can this be?


Here is where my understanding of neo-Manichaeanism enters the picture. If God, the supernatural source of good, is locked in battle with Satan, the bastion of evil, then we live in an edge-of-chaos world where the back-and-forth between order and chaos can't meaningfully be avoided. To try to quell the battle by unduly purifying our own little corner of the world, silencing or casting out all complexity or dissent, is ultimately self-defeating and counterproductive.

I am saying such things as if I find them easy to demonstrate the truth of and accept. The opposite is the case. My soul is actually torn between such an outlook and a strong preference for moral purity and clarity.

Little wonder. Embracing complexity and diversity is a lot harder than calling for purity and clarity.

Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part II

In Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part I, I set forth some of the reasons why I suddenly find myself something other than the good Catholic believer I had been for a decade.

Or, rather, why I still believe in a God who is all-good, but not in one who is all-powerful. We Catholics aren't supposed to be neo-Manicheans — latter-day descendants of those early Christians who were declared heretics by the Church for finding this world to be a perpetual battleground between God and Satan, neither of whose supernatural powers are limitless or decisive.

After I wrote Part I, something happened to me that I consider emblematic of what I'm getting at: I got stung on the left thumb by a yellow jacket. I had awakened from a nap and saw something on the carpet that needed to be picked up and disposed of. I couldn't tell through sleep-drenched eyes that it was alive, if near-dead. It injected me with its venom before I could say ouch. Today my swollen hand is painful.

Symbolically, chaos zapped my life with that bee sting. Though slight in itself, it set my immediate future off on a wholly unexpected trajectory.

My life will of course recover its accustomed order soon enough — which in my worldview means a personal return somewhere to the orderly side of the "edge of chaos," the locus of change and growth where chaos' eternal novelty is tempered by the world's capacity to refine what has been introduced. Evolutionarily, according to the laws of natural selection and self-organized complexity there is nothing so constant as change.

By those laws of nature, order that is statically frozen — or that repeats itself ad infinitum, world without end, amen — is never preferred. By those laws, surprising emergence is followed by graceful evolution that transpires in a mathematically describable regime at the edge of order, cheek-by-jowl with chaos. When chaos obtrudes, there is death and destruction.


That's the way I see the world. It is no longer possible for me to square it with my Catholicism.

I've never been able to square it with what I know of evangelical Christian worldviews. I have friends and relatives in that realm of religion, and in fact my own family, on my mother's side, is Southern Baptist.

Mainline Protestant outlooks, as well, are determinedly non-Manichean. My late father's abandoned Methodist upbringing qualifies here.

All Christian approaches today, as far as I know, insist that God is both thoroughly good and omnipotently great. They are heirs to the belief of the Early Church, after it had purged itself of Manichaeanism alongside a litany of other heresies, in this regard.

But it is Roman Catholicism and its closest Protestant cousin, Anglicanism, that I know best as a religious tradition.. The Church of Rome and the Church of England share much theology and a good deal of liturgical practice, including a belief in sacraments — though they still quarrel over the exact nature of (among many other things) Holy Communion. They have in common their emphasis on the Trinity, on bishops as direct successors of the Apostles, on "high" liturgies, and on the Church as a unitary institution that is God's beachhead in a sin-corrupted world.

The Church thus stands between us and God. We have a mediated relationship. Theology is essential to it — not just you and I reading our own Bibles and possibly sharing our conclusions, posssibly not.


The foregoing paragraphs suggest the sheer variety of Christian outlooks in the modern world. There is not just one. All of them assume, though, that God's victory over evil has "always already" been won.

God, theologians say, foreknew that man would fall from grace in the Garden of Eden, that he would not be able to redeem his own sin, that God's own death on a cross would be needed ... and provided, in due course, in Christ, the Son of God, who would suffer and die like one of us. He would be one of us, in all ways but sin. After his resurrection and eventual departure from this world, Satan's defeat would be secured on our behalf for the rest of time.

That defeat of Satan would be manifested, though, only at the end of time. Meanwhile, we would have our strong faith to shield us from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

My faith in that upbeat scenario is not so strong any more.

Perhaps it never was.


It is a beautiful picture, I grant. In fact, I would say that all the elements of good Catholic understanding (I'll revert to the particular system I know best) dovetail and interlock in ways that make for a lovely jigsaw puzzle, all the individual pieces serving one another to create a compelling, seamless tableau of thought and belief.

For the longest time, I habitually averted my gaze from those details of the Catholic theological tableau which otherwise might have bothered me. Among them: the historical tendency of the Church to dictate to believers, rather than solicit assent; the tendency to stifle free inquiry; the lack of openness to other points of view; the self-protectiveness to the point of failing to confron, say, anti-Semitism within the Church; and so on.

But I also studiously ignored how central to the magisterium of the Church is its doctrine about sex, gender, marriage, contraception, and so forth. That is not properly part of my topic here, but I need to fully disclose that I now believe the coherent "jigsaw puzzle" falls apart if you, say, affirm homosexual lifestyles. I'll return to this difficult topic in some future post.

For now, let me just say that I and Pope Benedict XVI probably agree on this much: a neo-Manichaean outlook implies we humans confront evil on a completely different footing than does a "good Catholic" point of view.


To a neo-Manichaean such as I now call myself, evil is not severable from any aspect of our human experience.

I'm struggling to find the words to express my thoughts here. Please bear with me: Just as chaos is not severable from order, just as the "edge of chaos" is essential to the evolving world that has produced our human species, everything that happens, everything that we know, is potentiated by the struggle between a good God and his evil adversary.

I use the word potentiated advisedly. An electrical "potential" is a voltage set up by the difference in charge between two elements of a battery. Without the other element, nothing happens.


This is not to say that the ideas of good and evil are any different from our usual pure conceptions of them. What is good is of God; what is bad is of the Enemy. We still ought to favor good and hate evil, in my neo-Manichaean outlook. We still need to be idealists. It's just that we're also realists who recognize that it's never really possible to surgically cut out the cancer of evil from any organ of the living, breathing world.

Every cell is healthy. Every cell is also potentially cancerous.

As I write this, the Middle East has blown up again. Israel, responding to abductions of soldiers by Hamas and Hezbollah, is engaging in military strikes many say are disproportionate. There are those pundits who recommend we deal with Iran as the only power broker in the region who might put Hezbollah back on its leash. Iran could, in fact, become a new source of regional stability, if we deal with it cagily. But we're not talking to Iran. They, after all, seem to be developing a nuclear arsenal.

Every cell is healthy. Every cell is also cancerous.

There are other pundits who say our best option is to treat everyone and everthing that might be anti-Israel or pro-Islamist as absolutely malignant to the rest of the world. Cal Thomas, for example, recently wrote in Understanding the Temper of the Times, "Israel's enemies are all of the same piece by whatever name they call themselves. There are no 'moderates,' at least none who have the power to make peace."

To Cal Thomas, a well-known and dedicated member of the religious right, some cells are evil, some good.

I agree with Mr. Thomas that radical Islamism, as a pure idea, is fundamentally totalitarian and evil. And the notion of a permanent, secure Jewish state in Israel is one I, too, who recognize the absolute intolerability of the Holocaust and genocide in general, support without reservation.

But I disagree with Mr. Thomas that the fight against evil can ever be antiseptic. If the white hats in America don't talk to the black hats in the Middle East, America loses power like an anode without a cathode.


But my intention is not to talk of politics and ideology. Nor is it to evangelize in favor of a Manichaean outlook on the world. It is rather to try to state what that Manichaean outlook entails, and why it appeals to me so. More on that in upcoming posts.

Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part I

A snippet from the latest Adam Dalgliesh mystery by P.D. James, The Lighthouse, in which Commander Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard is questioning a witness in a murder investigation, Jo Stavely, about Adrian, an ex-priest and a possible suspect whom Stavely has nursed for a time while he was drying out:

"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.

The Heart Wants What It Wants...

"The heart wants what it wants," Woody Allen said when asked to justify his leaving Mia Farrow to be with her adoptive daughter Soon-Yi Previn. It seems to be a good way to characterize his latest film, Match Point, and indeed his entire oeuvre, once you get past the irrepressible zaniness of his early work.

"The heart wants what it wants until it doesn’t want it anymore," amends Danny Miller at this blog, in an entry which embodies Miller's somewhat tortured personal response to Allen's film. The film shows us Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, as tennis pro Chris Wilton, in a marital-sexual tangle with wife Chloe Hewitt Wilton (Emily Mortimer) and mistress Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson). Chloe and her well-to-do British family originally seemed just the ticket for Chris to segue from a dead-end lifestyle as a has-been tennis player to the career of a successful business- and family man. Only problem is, his heart wants Nola, not Chloe.

Until, that is, Nola (a) gets pregnant and (b) pressures Chris to devastate Chloe by telling her what's been going on behind her back.

Allen, who wrote and directed the film but does not appear on screen, breathes life into this stock situation by deftly showing us exactly what possesses Chris, Nola, and Chloe to act as they do, aware as they are at every moment that none of their motives could withstand the closest moral scrutiny.

(WARNING: Spoiler ahead!)

As luck would have it, Chloe's family estate provides Chris, or so he thinks, with the means — a shotgun of a type used by English gentlemen to hunt birds — to carry out what he intends to be a perfect double-murder. The pregnant Nola will be its apparently impromptu second victim, the first being Nola's next door neighbor, a widow who will be found shot after nominally interrupting a burglar (actually Chris, intent on misdirecting the police). Nola ostensibly (from the police perspective) has been killed, too, simply because she happened on the scene at just the wrong moment. Of course, Chris thinks he has removed luck from what he hopes is his carefully scripted outcome by staging the crime at the time just when he expects Nola to come home to meet him. Hence, it's hard for the police to imagine Nola as the primary, intended victim.

Even so, a canny detective, who has read Nola's secret diary and knows Chris was involved with her, literally dreams the truth one night ... but is talked out of pursuing the investigation because of, yes, a stroke of pure luck. In order to furnish evidence of robbery, Chris had taken the first victim's valuables, including the wedding ring off her finger, and tossed them off the embankment into the Thames. All smug, he had nearly walked away, then dug in his pocket and discovered the ring still tucked there. So he'd pitched the ring back toward the river, turned to leave ... and (as the camera shows us, but not him) the ring had caromed off a railing back into plain view on the embankment.

The stroke of luck which saves Chris from detection, pursuant to that accident of fate which at first seems like it will ruin Chris's game, is that a known felon turns up dead with the ring in his possession, which he obviously had stumbled on fortuitously.

Case closed. Chris gets off scot free.

The universe has given Chris the break he needed to score what is, in effect, his personal "match point" in the game of life; it has taken charge of the fate of the ring. What turns out to be the pivotal moment in the entire story is, if the viewer recollects, basically a reprise of a shot at the film's outset of a tennis ball striking the top of the net and falling, unreachable by the opponent, just on the other side.

(End of spolier.)


Match Point implies that the universe can turn a benignant eye on the moral wrongs perpetrated by a person who lives, however stupidly or clumsily, by the maxim "The heart wants what it wants ... until it doesn’t want it anymore."

That's a profound moral assertion — "moral" in the sense that, in Woody Allen's worldview, the heart's inscrutable urges trump conventional morality even (or especially) at some cosmic level. The cosmos can give those who follow the dictates of the heart a bye, where conventional morality would punish them.

I agree with that worldview. How tough, though, it is to say so. For it would seem to cut my religious views off at the knees.

Put another way, there seems to be an unfathomable logic to how things work out — for the best, I'd say (Woody Allen might not agree). There is an impenetrable governor of events which all our morality is blind to. It's as the Geoffrey Rush character, Henslowe, says in the movie Shakespeare in Love: "Strangely enough, it all turns out well" (see this post in another blog for more on that topic). Henslowe doesn't know how to prove it; it simply proves itself.


I use the phrases "turns out well" and "for the best" to indicate, not the outcome we think is morally "right" or the one we imagine we "want," but the outcome to which our heart, at the very last, gives its assent. The heart knows, where the head doesn't, that it wants Chris Wilton's fate to turn on what amounts to a coin flip. Chris is a protagonist we have come to like and identify with, who has done something terrible for reasons we don't quite understand and yet perversely sympathize with. Because of the awfulness of his deed, we don't want him to get away with it. Yet because he is a carefully calibrated stand-in for each one of us — thanks to Allen's scripting and direction and Rhys-Meyers's acting — we do want him to escape detection. So the "right" thing — what "has to happen" to make our hearts happy — is that the film's outcome must hinge on which side of a razor-sharp knife's edge the finely honed plot just happens to topple over on.

That's what I mean when I say that Match Point turns out well and for the best. It pleases our hearts, even as it confounds our heads.

But my religion doesn't really want to hear that. My religion has it that things turn out badly unless we toe a strict and absolute moral line. There is no gray area wherein the heart can overrule the head.


Million Dollar Baby is a film which makes a similar point.

(Sorry, here comes another spoiler:)

If you haven't seen this masterpiece directed by and starring Clint Eastwood, see it before reading the following.

Eastwood plays Frankie Dunn, an aging trainer of prizefighters who against his better judgment instructs a "girly" boxer, white-trash Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank, in an Oscar-winning female lead). Maggie's career takes off under Frankie's tutelage, until finally, as a title challenger, she comes up against the dirtiest fighter ever, a taut bundle of pure malevolence nicknamed the "Blue Bear."

Maggie's opponent, being outfought, slugs Maggie hard from behind well after a round-ending bell, as Maggie is heading for her corner ... and the plot of the movie veers off in a totally unexpected direction. Maggie winds up in a hospital bed, paralyzed irreparably from the neck down.

It gets worse. Skin ulcers from her enforced immobility turn gangrenous, and she loses her leg.

But she doesn't lose Frankie, the only person on earth (other than Frankie's longtime protégé, Eddie "Scrap Iron" Dupris [Morgan Freeman], who serves as the film's narrator) who actually cares about Maggie.

Finally — she can talk — she requests that Frankie, a practicing if theologically confused Catholic, turn off her respirator while she is still able to remember her glory and success in the boxing ring. At first he says he can't and won't. His pastor at church even tells him he'll lose himself forever if he accedes.

But then he does it. Plus, he injects her with enough adrenaline to flatline her monitor instantly and keep her from any agony as she dies.

And the heart of the viewer, whose head has been rooting for some kind of impossible miracle to occur, thereby reversing everything bad that has happened, assents. It's what had to happen. It's for the best. Things have turned out right in the end — however tragically.

(End of spoiler.)

So, again, the movie gives the heart, not necessarily the head, what it wants.

I think there's a profound lesson here. The thing is, the lesson resists being put into words and thereby made property of the head. Here's the best I can do: what the heart "wants" is also what the universe "wants." The head, with all its moral intentions and religious precepts, sometimes just has to take a back seat to the heart, which wants what it wants.

And that's fine.

Yesterday, a Religious Experience . . .

An odd feeling came over me yesterday evening as I set out from my home to drive to the liquor store for a sixpack of Fuller's London Pride and then to Ledo's for takeout pizza. I had just been napping and I felt a certain post-sleep detachment from everything around me. It occurred to me that all the things I was seeing — the other cars, the stores, the traffic signals, the people — were sort of like on-screen objects in an elaborate computer game.

I don't know if you have played any of the massively multiplayer online computer games like EverQuest or World of Warcraft, but they have become so sophisticated that what you see on the screen is very much like a slice of life. Items that really have nothing to do with the game itself, such as flocks of birds and sunsets, just appear. So when I saw a flock of birds winging against a stunning sunset, and especially when a low-flying helicopter vectored out of the sunset toward my position on U.S. Rte. 40 W., I thought, "These are like things in a computer game. They don't absolutely have to be here ... but they're here!"

And then I thought, "Just as the on-screen details of World of Warcraft are there only because the author of the game put them there, the 'on-screen details' of real life are there only because God put them there. None of this rich panoply of highly improbable stuff that I'm noticing right now, right at this minute, could possibly be here without a Creator God."

"Couldn't my friends who don't believe in God see that?" I asked myself. "Couldn't they see the whole marvelous world as not having to exist at all? As irreducibly contingent, and not in any way necessary?"

The word "thrownness" came to my mind. It seemed to me as if I had been thrown into a world which itself had been thrown into existence for the sheer love of the game.

Which suggested that God is not at heart as judgmental as he is often cracked up to be. The helicopter I saw was probably a police unit looking for an evildoer who had run away into Patapsco State Park, as often happens in these parts of Baltimore County. But the suspect, the police, the 'copter, and I were all part of the same vast tapestry, the same marvelous milieu, the same sublime scenario.

I thought, "My intuition that God is not all that judgmental would astound my friends who know me as a good Catholic." But I thought, "We humans don't know everything. We try to form a coherent picture of God ... but at the end of the day that picture pales in the face of the pure 'thrownness' of creation."

I realized I was having a religious experience. It was one of awe, and it brought a lump to my throat and tears to my eyes which I'd not like to have to explain to my not-so-spiritual friends. And it was one that I hope to capture and memorialize through the "thrownness" of this particular blog post!

The Second Baptism and the "Absurdity of Our Own History"

Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word, by Thomas M. King, S.J., makes the case that there are in the Gospels two Christian baptisms, one of water and one of fire. The latter is also a baptism into the Holy Spirit, as distinct from the Word of God (see my earlier post Enchantments and Disenchantments for more on this).

King points to Christ's passion and resurrection — his "glory" — as turning a corner away from the exclusively verbal teaching of Jesus's earlier ministry. Jesus had originally been preaching to a "'closed circle' of listeners, those who [because they were Jewish, like Jesus] shared a common book." But then, "hearing of the interest of the Gentiles [i.e., Greeks who reportedly wanted to see him] he knew that the time of preaching was over; it was time for crucifixion and silence" (p. 143).

"I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself," Jesus accordingly said at John 12:23. "His [Jesus's] glory would be manifest on the cross," amplifies King, "where all power, all sense and meaning were defeated" (p. 144).

That is, the cross of Christ might be seen as akin to, in another cultural setting, Zen Buddhist koans: "paradoxes which [are intended to] take the disciples beyond words" (p. 144). In effect, finally leaving Jewish words, texts, and meanings behind, Jesus surely knew that now "the phenomena itself would be the revelation. ... By meditating on such a koan, even the Gentiles would be drawn to him."

Yet Christianity, in the earliest centuries following the resurrection, began an organized resistance to any form of spirituality which did not center around "a word that would deliver [us] out of the world" (p. 145). That resistance is carried forward today by Christian fundamentalists who insist absolutely on a literal reading of the Bible. But in the early church, it was the province of "various gnostic and docetist claims." These theologies "included a strong strain of Orphism" (p. 144).

The Gnostics and Docetists, right in line with the traditional Greek (pagan) followers of Orpheus,

... emphasized the saving power of divine truth and generally despised the present world as the work or an "evil creator" who used it to keep humanity in ignorance; the revealed word was from God, but the physical world was from Satan. ... [T]hey believed that divine Truth was calling them apart from their body-tomb and into a world of pure form. (p. 144)

But, King contends, Christ

... did not come to draw his listeners out of their body-tombs. By the events of his Glory (passion and resurrection), the body itself would rise: his own body and the bodies of all who share in it by eating his flesh. ...

And here is the key thing:

The resurrection of the body would prove a stumbling block to all who are seeking a pure teaching, a word that would deliver them out of this world. But the followers of Jesus would not be delivered from history, as the Gnostics, Docetists, and Orphics had claimed, but through history. The world itself would come to deliverance. God had created matter by his word, and in matter the divine storyteller is saying something. If one were to meditate on the koan Jesus offered humanity (the crucifixion), one would be baffled into setting aside the accretions of meaning [found in holy scripture and other verbal texts]. Then perhaps one could have eyes that see and ears that hear; then one might become aware that God is speaking to us apart from the sacred text; he is speaking in the absurdity of history. And that means that the absurdity of our own history is the basis of our response. (p. 145)


The strongest possible refutation of "conservative" or "fundamentalist" Christian views, I would call the passage above. Let me try to say why.

First of all, let me refer to my earlier posts, Is Self-Love OK for Catholics? and More on Self-Acceptance, in which I laid out my own personal experience as being "stunted" and "immature" in my psychosexual development, and in which I suggested that (though I am not myself gay) my situation parallels that of men who, under recent Vatican rules, can no longer be admitted to Catholic seminaries to train for the priesthood, simply because they "present deep-seated homosexual tendencies."

In other words, I find my own "history," particularly as it bears upon my personal psychosexual development, to be "absurd." Little wonder that I likewise imagine the situation of gayness to be a fine absurdity, whatever else it may be practically, personally, morally, or religiously.

For one thing, there is something extra-rational about any sexual attraction, in the sense that it simply happens or it doesn't. At least, though, heterosexual leanings can be rationalized post facto; they ensure the propagation of the species, after all. Homosexual leanings admit of no such rationale.

I don't claim to be an authority on gay culture, but I see gays depicted in movies and on TV as having a sharp sense of the absurd. It is as if the basis of their response to life is already a keen awareness of "the absurdity of their own history." Extending that thought, I'd say gays may even have a leg up into the very type of spirituality Thomas King associates with the second Christian baptism, that of fire and Spirit.

True, their orientation violates the "pure teaching," the holy "word which would deliver them out of this world." The word of God in the Holy Bible, as everybody knows, calls gay sex an abomination.

But baptism — christening by water — remains sacramentally effective for gays. There is nothing about being gay (or being similarly psychosexually twisted) that blocks it from joining the individual soul to the Body of Christ.

So, I would argue, there is nothing about being gay per se — nothing about "presenting deep-seated homosexual tendencies" — which deserves the animus that conservative and fundamentalist Christians have attached to it.


Exhibit "B" in my case that Father King hits the nail squarely on the head, in differentiating second-baptism Christian spirituality from fundamentalism, is that there is no notion more "absurd," from the fundamentalist point of view, than that our species arose out of the blind forces of Darwinian evolution. King's idea that God speaks to us "in the absurdity of history," and not "from the sacred text" — i.e., not just from the Book of Genesis — is as delightful to theological liberals as it is anathema to religious fundamentalists.

Evolution à la Darwin is indeed a modern context in which "the physical world had to manifest some meaning of its own" — where "the revealed word and the phenomenal world [do] not seem to fit" (pp. 139-140). If, as so confounded the Pharisees in Jesus's day, "the visible world could no longer be dismissed as outer Darkness, [since] it too contained a message from God," — specifically, the Word made Flesh in Jesus — then that same perplexity can be said to go doubly for fundamentalists in our day.

"[W]hat if what God says in events does not ... readily coincide with what God says in his Word?" asks King, at one point. "Then, like Job, one must struggle with the apparent ... difference." Or, alternatively, one can simply say, with today's fundamentalists, "God said it. I believe it. That settles it." As Christians we have two spiritualities from which to choose. One is based on the first baptism, the other on the second.


Despite how liberal I may sound above, I personally struggle with my own second-baptism spirituality. For me, hell is getting stuck in the puritanism of the first-baptism mindset. It is a mindset to which, sadly, I find my way at regular intervals.

Something in me desperately wants my life to be without surprise or absurdity, without spontaneity and uncertainty.

Something in me wants to take each ane every verbal formula for goodness and happiness which inveigles me at any givenmoment and slap it onto all of the rest of my life, forever and aye.

Not just my life, either. Everyone else's life, too.

So when I read and am enchanted by a book such as Christopher West's Theology of the Body for Beginners: A Basic Introduction to Pope John Paul II's Sexual Revolution (see my earlier posts, culminating in Theology of the Body, Part 6: The Riddle of the Third Way), I want to impose its charming ideas on my (and everyone else's) world.

But at some point, such dutiful, faithful adherence unfailingly starts to make me feel "thin and stretched," as Tolkien said of his character, the hobbit Bilbo Baggins. Bilbo was locked in thrall to the One Ring, which remained corrosively in his possession.

At that point in my own personal quest, the only possible antidote is to rejoin "the absurdity of [my] own history" — to stop living by a supposedly "pure teaching" and to recognize (yet again) the limits of all verbal formulas, no matter how enchanting, or holy, or sacred.

Enchantments and Disenchantments

Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word, a now-hard-to-find 1989 book by Thomas M. King, S.J., offers rare insight into how it is that fundamentalist and liberal Christians differ so radically in their spiritualities.

King is a Jesuit priest who teaches theology at Georgetown University (or did at the time this book came out; I don't know if he still does). He is considered an expert on the thought of the French Jesuit theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, but this book has little to say about Teilhard. It focuses instead on how texts of all kinds — scripture, literature, drama — can raise us up out of this messy phenomenal world into "a vivid world that enchants us with its own compelling truth" (p. vii).

Such a world is the one written of as the Bible's Kingdom of God. Fr. King likens it to, among higher worlds spoken of in other stories and texts, Don Quixote's ineffable "Golden Age" (an "impossible dream," according to the musical Man of La Mancha) and Plato's world of pure Ideas and Forms. In such ethereal heavens, people live exclusively by "the word," or, as capitalized in the Gospel of John, "the Word."

That is, words can be used as incantations to extract a single, set order of affairs from the chaotic whirligig of possibilities that could otherwise arise in the world of material phenomena. Those who live by such enchanting words of law and order are, in biblical terms, said to be righteous souls. Those who decline to succumb to the enchantment of such righteous verbal formulas are said to be lost to evil.

Thus, the first baptism spoken of in the gospels: the baptism "with water for repentance" for which John the Baptist was famous.

But there is also a second baptism mentioned in the gospels: a baptism of fire, which is also a baptism of Spirit.

In the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus undergoes three temptations by Satan in the desert after being baptized by water by John and hearing the voice of his Father emanate from heaven: "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased." As the Son of God referred to in traditional Hebrew scripture, Jesus knew he was henceforth to identify with and live by a text — specifically, by the Law and the Prophets of his Jewish people, which we Christians now call the Old Testament.

But the Evil One's voice came to Jesus, as he fasted for forty days in the desert, and offered him three temptations which collectively amounted to his, Jesus's, baptism of fire.

The first blandishment which Jesus confronted during his desert ordeal was the temptation to turn stones into loaves of bread — which, had Jesus acquiesced, would right then and there have put paid to the heavenly ideal Jesus now upheld as the supposed Son of God.

The second temptation was yet more problematic, since Satan turned Jesus's ideal itself into a form of temptation. Jesus was asked to renounce his material body by stepping out from the pinnacle of the Temple and walking successfully across the sky (pp. 118-119).

By rejecting that second temptation (see p. 120), Jesus rejected the purely verbal — just as by rejecting the first temptation, he had rejected the purely experiential. The combination of the two rejections left him prey, then, to the third temptation: to seize pure power. The Tempter offered Jesus all the kingdoms of the world as his personal dominion, as if to say, "Since you reject both the purely verbal and the demands of the flesh as limitations on your actions, that seemingly leaves you wholly unconstrained. Why not, then, simply rule the whole world, as my viceroy?"

But Jesus did not fall into this trap of seeming bifurcation, instead finding a happy medium: per King, "[H]e would give first place to the word of God; he would [also] understand the weakness of human flesh (for the word is not everything); and, finally, he would never worship the powers of this world" (p. 120).

The part about understanding the weakness of human flesh is the key one. Those who undergo the first baptism alone, the baptism of righteousness and repentance, often lack "an ongoing experience of the world and their own sensibilities" (p. 120). This is no wonder: such believers are prone, after all, to using only "set phrases with no surprises" (p. 121) to convey the truth, "for surprises are found in experience — not in the inevitablity of a text."

These, then, are today's fundamentalists — as well as the Pharisees and religious authorities of Jesus's time. Both today's Biblical literalists and the contemporaries of Jesus who upheld the Law by condemning Jesus for healing on the sabbath are in righteous thrall to a text which purports to be God's word. Neither outlook is wrong — it just lacks the second baptism, the baptism of fire which (the Gospel of John tells us) also is a baptism of Spirit.

"Something fundamental about Spirit" is, King tells us (p. 140), that "it cannot be captured in words." This is because "it blows where it will and it lacks both measure and form." Spirit is "what God says in events" — that is, in phenomenal occurrences taking place here in the material world.

"But what if what God says in events does not coincide, or readily coincide, with what God says in his Word? Then, like Job, one must struggle with the apparent — or more than apparent — difference" (p. 140). This amounts to the Dark Night of the Soul. This is what the mystics tell us accompanies the temptation — as in "Lead us not into temptation" — that necessarily precedes our baptism of fire and Spirit.

After the second baptism, the baptism of fire and Spirit, we cease to be funadamentalists/Pharisees. No longer in thrall to the Word of God as distinct from the Spirit, we are apt to become theological "liberals." No longer blinded to the weaknesses of human flesh, we develop true compassion.

Yet we are in danger of swinging too far to the opposite extreme: some Christians, so very "liberal," "have felt so deeply their Baptism of Fire, their baptism back into humanity, that all they can recognize is the extent of human ambiguity. They find all talk of Kingdoms and heavenly identities to be a puzzling rhetoric without meaning. These too [like the fundamentalists] would reduce Christianity to a single baptism, [in this case] that of fire, and see Jesus only as a human ideal" (p. 123).