Strange Loops and Souls

Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop, as I said in More about Strange Loops, accounts for the soul — the self, the "I," the supposedly unique and indelible person that one thinks of oneself as being — as what emerges when a human brain, capable of symbolically representing anything, so represents itself.

The brain represents all of reality in terms of symbols. Each symbol corresponds to a category into which we are capable of assigning the various things we perceive. Symbols interconnect to form larger symbols. Symbols can refer to other symbols. They can combine into symbol sets. They can symbolically represent said symbol sets ... sets that contain symbols that represent these very sets themselves. It all gets very incestuous. It's like a neurosurgeon doing brain surgery on herself ... except that it's all happening on a symbolic level, not on a physical level.

A symbol is not a physical structure in the brain. It is a pattern of neuron firings. When a symbol in the mind signifies the totality of that mind itself, then that intrinsically recursive, all-inclusive super-symbol is what we call the "I" or self.

Hofstadter advances the view that this all-inclusive self-symbol, embellished by the brain over the course of a lifetime of elaboration and refinement, is tantamount to the soul. The soul does not inhere in any "extra level of being" above and beyond our merely physical "stuff": the cells of the body and brain and the patterns of our brain's neuronal interconnections. The set of patterns constituting the "I" can grow without limit, once the underlying symbol set becomes capable of self-reference.

The "I" pattern set emerges only gradually, starting out small and simple, or barely even there, and ideally getting more elaborate, subtle, and capacious as life goes on. The upside of this growth potential of the human "I" is that the more "I" we develop, the greater the size of our soul.

The downside is that our supposedly fixed "identity" is actually changing, impermanent, illusory. It is, after all, a trick the brain plays on itself. Hence there is no fundamental reason why our identity — our supposedly unique and indelible soul — could not be transfered to a different body, provided that body were sufficiently like the original ... perhaps after teleportation of our physical "stuff" to a different planet.

The brain of an atom-for-atom, quark-for-quark transposition of the body elsewhere would necessarily contain all the same neuron-firing patterns and mapping categories of symbolic representation as were materialized in the original body, and so produce a duplicate "I." In other words, whenever our body is precisely enough replicated somewhere else, our soul gets cloned as well.


Some philosophers of mind distinguish between self-awareness, à la the "I," and a separate thing called "consciousness," which for them is the capacity to undergo the ineffable "inner experience" associated with perceiving whatever it is we happen to be perceiving and categorizing at the moment. For instance, the what-it-is-like feeling that goes along with seeing a purple flower is, on this view, separate from the underlying act of perception/cognition of the flower.

According to this wing of philosophy of the mind, consciousness arises from and accompanies physical brain states and processes, but it is not itself physical. It is an immaterial "extra."

That may or may not mean it equates to the God-given soul spoken of in religion. In past installments of my Consciousness series of posts, I discussed The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, a book by philosopher of mind David J. Chalmers. Chalmers thinks consciousness (at least to a first approximation) is epiphenomenal; it is natural and not mystical, yet it cannot directly or indirectly cause any physical events to happen in the material world.

Chalmers does not adhere to any belief in God. He has no religious ax to grind, and yet I thought it might be a good idea for me to try to show how the "extra" mind feature he calls consciousness might equate to the entity that my religion calls the soul.

Hofstadter devotes a chapter of I Am a Strange Loop to explaining why he thinks Chalmers' theory of consciousness is bunk ... even though Chalmers is a good friend of his, and a former student, to boot. To Hofstadter, there is nothing more to the soul than the "I" pattern that emerges and manifests itself in the neuronal organization of the brain.


Still, Hofstadter believes in something he calls "greatness of soul": magnanimity or empathic generosity. Different people have souls of different sizes measured, in the final analysis, by how open each person is to admitting the "I" symbols of others into their own "I" symbols.

A person that has developed only a "small soul" has, ipso facto, only an impoverished set of symbols that form the basis of his or her own personal super-symbol, the "I." Such a person, commonly spoken of as having a "large ego," actually has a tiny "I." He or she is self-centered and capable of only the most rudimentary sort of empathy with others. People whose "I" starts out minute and stays minute amount to psychopaths with no loving-kindness whatever and zero empathy for others.

But the "great of soul" — Hofstadter mentions Albert Schweitzer — are willing to vicariously incorporate into their own lives and concerns the sufferings not only of their own closest family members and loved ones, but also of humanity at large ... and even of supposedly brute animals.

Hofstadter does not mention Jesus in his short list of the great of soul, but it seems to me that empathic generosity toward "the least of these" was his stock in trade. It could be imagined that Jesus' soul was as large as a soul can get. It could even be thought that Jesus' message was, in Hofstadter's terms, quintessentially about opening up the "I" to the "I"'s of others, so as to allow our own souls to become as close as possible to his in capaciousness.

More about Strange Loops

It's been nearly a year since I last mentioned Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop, in Back to Dualism. I've picked up the book again after stalling out on it about halfway through.

Hofstadter's quarry is an understanding of the soul — the self, the "I," the unique person referred to by that pronoun. What is it about the human mind that makes the conscious "I" possible?

Is the "I" equivalent to the brain itself? Is it part of the neural wetware of the human cerebrum in particular? Or is the fissured and involute organ inside the cranium something of a sideshow, with the "I" or conscious soul being instead a pattern of signals among the cells that make up that organ? Isn't the self or soul but a super-rich symbol system, a mega-concept housed in a brain but ultimately independent of the brain?

Hofstadter likens the conscious "I" to a mathematical system, Principia Mathematica, devised in the early 20th century as an attempt to subsume all of mathematics into a single symbol system independent of everyday language's inescapable ambiguities. It was hoped by the authors of PM, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, to develop a system by means of which every true mathematical proposition could be derived and proven, while all false propositions could be exposed as such.

But then the Austrian logician Kurt Gödel showed two things about PM:

1. Self-referentiality: PM contains a back door by which it can be used to construct symbol strings representing propositions about itself.
2. Incompleteness: At least one such self-referential proposition (and in fact an infinite number of them) exists which can be demonstrated outside PM to be true — since denying the truth thereof creates a manifest paradox — but which PM itself cannot internally prove ... thus making PM inescapably "incomplete" as a truth-proving engine.

To Hofstadter, the neural structure of the human brain is, like PM, capable of

• manufacturing and using symbols
• making and testing the validity of propositions couched in the form of combinations of these symbols
• doing so with or without being expressly aware that that is what is going on — the symbol processing per se can either be unconscious or raised to the level of consciousness
  
• doing so in tandem with, but ultimately independently of, the use of natural language
• generating and testing self-referential symbol strings/propositions that underpin the emergence of the conscious "I" super-symbol
  

The brain is therefore like PM, an artificial product of two brains, those of Whitehead and Russell. Messrs. Whitehead and Russell wanted to use PM to bypass the brain's difficulty with doing formal mathematical logic to perfection. Instead, Gödel showed that PM, and by extension every symbol-manipulating engine powerful enough to generate self-referential propositions, shares the same inability to decide all truth without getting tangled up in paradox instead.

Hofstadter's own lifelong intellectual journey seems to have picked up first on Gödelian incompleteness as of primary interest to his mathematician's mentality, then to have realized that Gödelian self-referentiality trumps even that — because it gives us a basis for explaining the conscious "I" we call the soul.

He shows that Gödelian self-referentiality, the potential for "I"-hood, is first cousin to universality, the principle established by British mathematician Alan Turing at the dawn of the computer age by which it can be determined whether a computer is capable of being programmed to do anything any other computer does. The critical condition for universality to hold is that the computer be able to manipulate symbolical representations of its own capabilities: self-referentiality.

Virtually every computer in common use today can do that — which is why, among other things, the Mac I am writing this on is capable of pretending to be a Windows machine.

So universal computers running appropriate software can in effect emulate themselves, a capacity which at least potentially means they could generate arbitrarily complex symbol sets, up to and including the granddaddy of them all, the conscious "I."

(Why is it that I'm wondering at this moment whether my Mac may be laughing at me?)

The human brain has enough neural connections to be Turing-universal, and to generate an "I," but animal brains probably don't. The capacity for having what we call a human soul probably appeared somewhere along the evolutionary path from the last common ancestor we share with the other primates, such as chimpanzees, to our species, Homo sapiens. The first possessor of a human soul was very likely a Homo, but not a Homo sapiens.

All this, I note, chimes with A Brief, Liberal, Catholic Defense of Abortion, by Seattle University philosophy professors Daniel A. Dombrowski and Robert J. Deltete, which I discussed most recently in Faiths of Our Fathers. It argues that Catholics such as I should be open to a pro-choice position concerning abortion because the church, prior to the seventeenth century, held that the fetus in a human womb lacked a human soul until late in pregnancy.

St. Augustine and, later, St. Thomas Aquinas believed that the soul of a fetus prior to some indeterminate point of blossoming into a full-fledged human one went through merely vegetative and animal stages first.

Abortions were immoral no because they destroyed ensouled human beings. They were wrong because they frustrated the only defensible use of the sex drive: procreation.

At the dawn of the scientific age, the Augustinian theory of late ensoulment (aka delayed hominization) was supplanted by a belief in the instant arrival of the human soul from the very moment of an egg's fertilization by a sperm. This was a logical consequence of a mistaken scientific theory of the day. The sperm was thought to be a very miniaturized but fully-formed human being, the "homunculus," complete with human soul.

Later, the microscope debunked the homunculus theory — but by that time, the church had hinged its objection to abortion on the idea of immediate hominization that went along with it. To abort an early-stage fetus was as immoral as aborting a late-term fetus, and for the same reason: it was the murder of a being, however tiny, with a human soul.

But if Douglas Hofstadter is correct, the human soul is the conscious "I" that can only develop when the brain of the human fetus is fully "wired up," such that it can (immediately or eventually) turn to constructing symbols of itself. Specifically, suffering as we know it is not possible until there can be an "I" to do the suffering.

And thus it can be seen that thinking like Hofstadter's is not really compatible with traditional religious thought about the soul — although it is compatible with the thought of the early Church Fathers, long since abandoned but ripe for recovery.

Mystery and Theodicy

James Wood's book review in The New Yorker of June 9, 2008, Holiday in Hellmouth, tackles an almost forbidden subject these days in religious circles: the problem of why a good, all-powerful God up there in heaven permits such suffering and devastation down here on earth. Bart D. Ehrman's new book, God’s Problem, is the occasion for Wood's review/essay. (Full disclosure: I have not read either of Ehrman's books to date.)

Ehrman, a scholar/skeptic of religion, famously wrote the 2005 bestseller Misquoting Jesus debunking the reliability of the very text of the Bible, especially the New Testament, as an inerrant guide to faith. The new book makes Ehrman's own atheism explicit:

“I no longer go to church, no longer believe, no longer consider myself a Christian,” he announces on the third page. “The subject of this book is the reason why.” In a nutshell: “I could no longer explain how there can be a good and all-powerful God actively involved with this world, given the state of things. . . . The problem of suffering became for me the problem of faith.”

To be sure, says Wood, this is not an outright denial of God's reality. It is, rather, anti-theodicy: "wounded theism, condemned to argue ceaselessly against a God it is supposed not to believe in." Theodicy is argumentation in support of continued faith in God, as we experience a world shot through by woe. Anti-theodicy is the position that such pro-God arguments won't wash.

Wood, Ehrman's reviewer, explains that he himself lost the conservative faith his family imbued in him, when, as a late teen, he confronted two issues. The first was the fact that prayer quite apparently does not avail to relieve or forestall suffering, and the second was the problem of suffering itself. Why does a mighty God not put an end to evil and woe, right here, right now?

Wood says the problem of suffering and evil would not have impressed Westerners as a reason "to reject the idea of God [, until] about 1700, at the very earliest." Before that, it merely occasioned (albeit sometimes tortured and Job-like) inquiry into "how to understand God and how to relate to him, given the state of the world.”

My reaction to that tidbit is to wonder what changed to allow the premise "An all-powerful, all-good God exists" to be conceivably negated, whereas it had originally been more of an unassailable axiom than the hypothetical premise of an argument. Did we start to whittle away at Christendom's longstanding axiom set — everything known to be true beyond argument or evidence — in the West? Or did we simply become more insistent that no proposition be deemed acceptable if the argument toward it creates logical quandaries?

One name for any assertion about bedrock reality that ineluctably ties further attempts at reason in knots is "mystery." Theodicy in its purest form is something we in recent centuries have invented to try (Ehrman and Wood would claim without success) to

crush [the mystery of] suffering down to the logician’s granules of P and Q . (“Let P be the proposition that God is benevolent, and let Q be the existence of ... useless suffering.”)

Ehrman and Wood object to the "scholastic" obviousness of reducing a mystery to a formula of logic in this way. The "entrapped invocation of a God who is not believed in but is nonetheless despised [which] gives [Ehrman's] book a rough power" avoids that sort of dry reductionism. However, neither Ehrman no Wood seems able to swing his mental pendulum fully back in the other direction and admit to the ultra-basic "rough power" over our souls of mystery-qua-mystery.

In other words, taking the mystery out of human apperceptions of God does indeed leave us with seeming contradictions between theology and manifest reality that seem to impugn theology more than reality.

On the other hand, taking the mystery out of God leaves us with a mere conceptual abstraction, not the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob ... and Jesus. Showing that that abstraction of a divinity makes no sense and therefore could not reasonably be said to exist is in no way binding on Yahweh, the Lord of Hosts, who for Moses' own protection appears to Moses as a Burning Bush.

A God of Fluctuations?

My previous post, "Let There Be Light" and Entropy, suggested that the universe's conspicuously low physical entropy at the time of the big bang — entropy measures disorder, so low entropy means high order — corresponds to the lowering of informational entropy that comes with the production and receipt of any message or utterance. The state of things prior to the utterance is high-entropy: there are any number of possible utterances that can be made/heard, and thus the crystallizing of many possibilities into one actuality dramatically lowers entropy.

So when the Bible attributes the utterance "Let there be light" to the Lord at the dawn of creation, may it not have been right after all? Isn't this a poetic way of saying that the universe as we know it began when God delivered to it the entropy-lowering command of all entropy-lowering commands?

If so, then it looks as if the physical concomitant of that poetic utterance may have been a single paltry "fluctuation." According to cosmologist Sean M. Carroll in Does Time Run Backward in Other Universes? (Scientific American, June 2008) physicists believe that a lot of abstract entities can experience fluctuations, and when they do, new worlds can emerge into existence:

In the presence of dark energy, empty space is not completely empty. Fluctuations of quantum fields give rise to a very low temperature—enormously lower than the temperature of today’s universe but nonetheless not quite absolute zero. All quantum fields experience occasional thermal fluctuations in such a universe. That means it is not perfectly quiescent; if we wait long enough, individual particles and even substantial collections of particles will fluctuate into existence, only to once again disperse into the vacuum. (These are real particles, as opposed to the short-lived “virtual” particles that empty space contains even in the absence of dark energy.)

Among the things that can fluctuate into existence are small patches of ultradense dark energy. If conditions are just right, that patch can undergo inflation and pinch off to form a separate universe all its own — a baby universe. Our universe may be the offspring of some other universe.

In an earlier post, Chance ... or God, I also spoke of "fluctuations" in so-called dissipative systems. These systems, among which are all living systems, take in energy that propels changes in the systems' own states of organization. The processes of change traverse "bifurcation points" at which one new state is chosen, seemingly arbitrarily, and other equally likely possibilities are discarded for all time. What decides which new state is chosen? A quantum fluctuation or perturbation.

Such a fluctuation is treated as happening at random, by sheer chance. There is, for scientists, no possible further explanation.

The genetic mutations that are the raw material for Darwinian evolution may be, at bottom, products of quantum fluctuations in living matter. Again, the scientist is committed to attributing them to blind chance.

Notice the commonality here? Novelty — cosmic or biological — is born of random fluctuations. At such a juncture, entropy is lowered by virtue of the choice of one actuality out of a bevy of (henceforth foregone) alternative potentialities. In both the cosmic case and the biological one, there is an available parallelism between the physical lowering of entropy and the lowering of entropy that information theory would associate with receipt of a message or command ... in this case, from God.

"Let There Be Light" and Entropy

Does Time Run Backward in Other Universes?, asks cosmologist Sean M. Carroll in the June 2008 Scientific American.

He says a not-very-well answered question in physics is why time never runs backward in our universe. The inexorable arrow of time corresponds to the evolution of entropy. The universe is a closed system, since no energy is ever added or subtracted. In a closed system, entropy — a measure of the disorder of the system — never decreases. Typically, it increases.

The early universe had very low entropy, just after the big bang. Today's universe is medium-entropy. In the very distant future the disorder will be maximal, and the cosmos will contain virtually nothing worthy of mention.

Carroll asks how we can explain the very low entropy just after the big bang. Present attempts at explanation, he says, only give the illusion that anything has been accounted for. He posits instead that the universe had a pre-history, before the big bang. It originally had high entropy. Then things happened — "fluctuations" — that caused a new, low-entropy baby universe to inflate into what became the cosmos we know today.

As one who is forever inclined to look for ways in which religion an science might harmonize, I am much interested in the fact that entropy was at its lowest in the very beginning, and we can't really explain why. Postulating a high-entropy cosmic pre-history — one that probably cannot be verified empirically — doesn't really tell us what caused the "genesis fluctuation" to happen.

Could it have happened when God said, "Let there be light"?

In theology, "Let there be light" is a divine command.

In information theory, "Let there be light" is a message. As with any message, its basic characteristic is its ability to reduce entropy.

Any message source, before the message is sent, has entropy, the measure of the number of possible messages it can send. A message source that consists of a single bit of computer memory has just two possible messages, "on" and "off." Its entropy is low for this reason. When an actual message is produced — say, "off" — there is only a minimal reduction in the amount of entropy.

More complex message sources have much higher entropy, because the number of possible messages is larger. When an actual message is received — say, "Let there be light" — the reduction in entropy is huge, simply because of the sheer number of alternatives — "Let there be chaos," "Let there be little green men," "Let it be," "Eat at Fred's," etc. — that have been ruled out.

Maybe "Let there be light" stands metaphorically for the capacity of the very first divine command to reduce entropy mightily in the communications-theoretical sense, such that the infant universe was indeed a place of surprisingly low entropy in the cosmological sense.

Religion Under the Microscope

Religion has often viewed evolution — the theory and science thereof — as the enemy.

Now science is asking whether religion itself evolved as a cultural adaptation. Perhaps religion as a cultural system has given its believers survival advantages as a group over competing groups of individuals who harbor no shared religious beliefs.

Perhaps, somewhere in the mists of human prehistory, there was a genetic mutation which made some members of genus Homo capable of living by an unselfish code of mutual aid and assistance. These milder mutants would learn to sacrifice their competitive individual agendas and work together for the common good. Their covenant of mutual aid made their group fitter in an evolutionary sense than any group whose members, lacking the cooperation gene, knew nothing of self-sacrifice.

Maybe, since humans are so good at picking up cues from other humans, the whole idea of mutual aid spread even to groups whose individual members, many or all of them, lacked the cooperation gene.

Could religion have been born as a transmitted social code enshrining self-sacrifice for the common good?

Could we even have religion (or religions, plural) today unless religions are in fact (or at least once were) adaptive in an evolutionary sense: making their possessors fitter to undergo the harsh rigors of survival in an impassive, even hostile environment?

In Beyond Demonic Memes: Why Richard Dawkins is Wrong About Religion, biologist David Sloan Wilson says something like this may indeed be so. Though Wilson says he himself is an atheist, he assails The God Delusion, the recent book by fellow atheist Richard Dawkins, for suggesting that human religion evolved more in the way a virus evolves. Even though it harms its host's chances of survival, a virus nonetheless spreads to other hosts, mutates, and thereby ensures its own survival.

To Dawkins, Wilson says, religion is maladaptive to us:

As he sees it, people are attracted to religion the way that moths are attracted to flames. Perhaps religious impulses were adapted to the tiny social groups of our ancestral past, but not the mega-societies of the present. If current religious beliefs are adaptive at all, it is only for the beliefs themselves as cultural parasites on their human hosts, like the demons of old that were thought to possess people. That is why Dawkins calls God a delusion. The least likely possibility for Dawkins is the group-level adaptation hypothesis. Religions are emphatically not elaborate systems of beliefs and practices that define, motivate, coordinate and police groups of people for their own good.

Dawkins, Wilson says, even likens religious enthusiasm today to that old-fashioned experience, demonic possession. A meme, which amounts to the cultural equivalent of a gene, is acting as a virus and infecting our minds, to our detriment.

Wilson supports the alternative hypothesis that religion is a complex cultural adaptation, not for human individuals, but for human groups. He wants to see "hard empirical work" done to determine if his hypothesis, Dawkins' counter-hypothesis, or some other explanation accounts for the evolution of religion in human culture.

A Hinge of History

In "Marriage Bills Cause Concern," an article in The Catholic Review of May 8, 2008, news comes of the opposition of the Archdiocese of Baltimore to two recent bills awaiting Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley's signature or veto. One, Senate Bill 566, "grants unmarried couples the same status as married couples for making medical decisions, while Senate Bill 597 establishes in law a definition of domestic partner and gives domestic partnerships marriage-equivalency status in parts of tax law."

The article says Archbishop Edwin F. O'Brien has written the governor to inform him of the opposition of the archdiocese to these bills, partly on grounds that "the legal definition of marriage should not be diluted in order to bestow those privileges."

Suggesting that relationships supported by the legislation would too often be transitory ones not deserving of special legal protections, the archbishop called the legislation an "insult" to

the religious traditions which exalt marriage and regard it as sacramental ... . At a time when communities of faith and society at large strive against formidable cultural forces to address the devastating results of the dissolution of the family structure, [this legislation] would prove counterproductive.

And so the lines are drawn. On one side are those such as myself (a non-gay Catholic) who support the gay community in their efforts to get domestic partnerships, civil unions, and even gay marriages recognized under the law and given equal status with heterosexual unions. On the other side are religious traditionalists such as the Catholic hierarchy who firmly oppose gay unions.

In The End of Traditional Sexual Ethics I suggested the issues surrounding how the Church deals with homosexuality pattern with how it deals with such other matters as abortion, divorce, birth control, sex outside marriage, and even its attitude towards women priests.

The longstanding beliefs of the Catholic Church regarding men, women, sex, marriage, and procreation are out of step with society today. I'd say we are at a hinge point in our cultural history, in fact. The moral attitudes of yore no longer apply today.

The Church's position on matters of sex derives from deep-seated beliefs, inherited from Christianity's Jewish roots, about the procreative capacity of women. As I said in The Anti-Defilement Covenant and embroidered upon in Faiths of Our Fathers and Signs of Sacrificial Solidarity, Judeo-Christian religion has always called for its adherents to sacrifice to show mutual solidarity.

The main thing that the original Hebrews sacrificed to show their loyalty to Yahweh was their erstwhile pagan attitudes about sex. Pagan cultures used sex in their fertility rites and practiced elaborate forms of temple prostitution. Yahweh demanded that a woman's fertility be treated as sacred ... and as the property not of the woman herself, but of the males in her society. Her womb was also symbolically the property of the male deity, who arranged for and blessed the new life she conceived inside her.

So sex, marriage, and procreation became intensely regulated by religious law. What we would in later times call promiscuity was forbidden, for women and for men. Men had to sacrifice their natural inclinations to have abundant sex partners and cleave to their wife alone, so as to be fruitful and multiply in a lawful way. "Knowing" another man's wife or daughter or sister "in the biblical sense" was a sin. A widow had to be married by her dead husband's unmarried brother in order that her fertility continue to be lawfully possessed.

Symbolic of the male's sacrifice as a member of the covenant was his circumcision, the painful removal of the foreskin of his penis.

Homosexuality was an "abomination" in the Lord's eyes. The symbolic, sacrificial meaning of male circumcision was of little value when the man was not interested in "knowing" women in the first place. The pain of ritual circumcision was, in his case, for naught ... and Judaism is a rational religion in which things are not done for nothing.

2,000 years ago, Jesus of Nazareth was a circumcised Jew. He was a member of the covenant of the Law of Moses. He was born into a society in which the rules regarding human sexuality had not changed, of a mother whose womb was so sacred she was still a virgin. According to Catholic dogma she remained, and will forever remain, a virgin.

The sacrifice of his life which Jesus made upon the cross was not for naught; it saved all mankind from the wages of sin. The most important picture in the entire Christian gallery is that of the crucifixion. Christ on the cross is, naturally, in the foreground of the image. In the background, however, is the Jewish idea of sin itself, which centers upon various and sundry ways in which a womb can be violated.

Again symbolically, the very earth upon which the cross stands represents a womb. The earth as womb, the source of all life, is a symbol not just in Judeo-Christian religion, but in every religion. In Judeo-Christian religion, the first man, Adam, was made by God from the earth itself.

The Christian Bible, Old Testament and New, comprises a long, convoluted story about the creation, about man falling into sin, about God's manifesting himself to the Jewish patriarchs, about God redeeming not just the Jews but all mankind by the Son's death on the cross and resurrection, and ultimately about, in the final book, the marriage between the returned Jesus, as the groom, and the Bride of Christ: the saved Church as a whole.

The Catholic Church has long preached the sanctity of a woman's fertility in ways that have entailed: finding women to be so constituted that their holiness is separate and apart from that of the ordained male priesthood; holding that abortion is always sinful; maintaining that homosexuality is wrong; asserting that the good order of society depends crucially upon the good order of the family; restricting sex to the marital bed; refusing to sanction divorce and remarriage; prohibiting the use of artificial means of birth control, and so on and so forth.

For nearly 2,000 years, this vision of how things ought to be held up remarkably well, even when the strictures were being observed mostly in the breach.

My how things have changed!

Today we have the majority of Catholic couples using birth control in violation of the teachings of the Church. A sizable percentage of the total number of abortions in the U.S. are performed for Catholic women. The number of divorced and remarried Catholics is large. The number of Catholics who have premarital sex is vast.

There are plenty of the Catholic faithful who are openly or semi-openly gay. A plentiful number of Catholic priests are secretly gay.

At the same time, feminism has succeeded in liberating a great many of us from outmoded ideas about who and what women actually are.

An increasing number of Catholic women, meanwhile, resent the fact that they can't be priests ... as the all-male priesthood in this country struggles year by year to replenish its aging ranks.

And, oh, yes ... as a recent hit Broadway show tells us in song: the Internet is for porn.

All the signs say it: we are presently pivoting upon a hinge of history. We revel in what used to be called sin ... considered sinful because, at bottom, it was behavior that violated divinely established laws having to do with the sanctity of the female womb. By ancient religious strictures, males would ritually sacrifice their own polymorphic, "natural" sexual behavior — as symbolized by circumcision in Judaism and, in Christianity, the baptism which "kills" the original, "natural" self — and would accordingly be designated as patriarchal guardians of female fertility.

That was a hugely successful cultural development. It underwrote the rise of the West. But it's ancient history today. We just don't know it yet.

The End of Traditional Sexual Ethics

On the front page of the Washington Post recently was "Catholic College Leaders Expect Pope to Deliver Stern Message," an article about a speech Pope Benedict XVI plans to make when he visits the United States in April 2008. It seems conservative Catholics want him to denounce the lack of orthodoxy in a great many Catholic colleges and universities, specifically in their teachings and condoned campus activities. Objects of conservative dismay include:

... a rally by pro-abortion rights Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton at St. Mary's University in San Antonio; a Georgetown University theologian's questioning whether Jesus offers the only road to salvation ... [and] ... a conference on teen pregnancy held on the campus of the College of the Holy Cross that included speakers from Planned Parenthood and NARAL.

Moreover,

St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke said St. Louis University basketball coach Rick Majerus should be disciplined for his comments in support of abortion rights and embryonic stem cell research; and Catholic bishops moved a theological seminar off Notre Dame's campus to protest an on-campus performance of the play "The Vagina Monologues."

And,

Bishops have criticized Georgetown [University] for hosting Hustler publisher Larry Flynt and allowing the establishment of a pro-abortion rights student club there. Conservative Catholics are complaining about plans to open a gay resource center soon at the school.

All this hubbub in the Catholic Church comes amid my personal quest to understand and deal with the ways in which my own beliefs conflict with the teachings of the Church.

Though I am a Catholic, I believe that abortion is morally permissible and that women need to have the right to choose. I believe that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with gay orientation or gay sex. I believe using artificial means of contraception such as condoms or the Pill violates no God-given precept. I think masturbation is natural and normal. Nor does sex without the benefit of marriage necessarily constitute a sin. I do not care to judge Larry Flynt of Hustler, or Bob Guccione of Penthouse, or Hugh Hefner of Playboy, simply on the basis that they extol sexual pleasure, frankness, and openness.

Though I am Catholic, I do not believe the Church is right to insist on an all-male, celibate priesthood. I do not believe Jesus offers the only road to salvation. And I certainly do not believe that a Catholic institution of higher learning ought to bar events and speeches by politicians whose views on such things as abortion are not in line with Church teachings.


I would like, then, to make the following sort of case. First of all, the traditional views of the Catholic Church about sex and related matters are deserving of the greatest historical respect. Second, they are now outdated.

As far as I can tell, the Church's traditional ideas about sex, etc., are pretty much identical with those of Christianity's august predecessor, Judaism, as described by conservative Jewish commentator Dennis Prager in "Judaism's Sexual Revolution: Why Judaism (and then Christianity) Rejected Homosexuality." If the greatest historical respect were not already due to the teachings concerning sex of the Catholic Church, they would certainly be due to the teachings of the foundational writings of the Torah, the Five Books of Moses which were the cornerstone of Judaism, and then of Christianity.

When Prager's article begins with

When Judaism demanded that all sexual activity be channeled into marriage, it changed the world. The Torah's prohibition of non-marital sex quite simply made the creation of Western civilization possible. Societies that did not place boundaries around sexuality were stymied in their development. The subsequent dominance of the Western world can largely be attributed to the sexual revolution initiated by Judaism and later carried forward by Christianity.

we are treated to a great kernel of historical truth in a very compact nutshell. Prager shows that Judaism, from its outset several thousand years ago, was the complete antithesis of all the other religions surrounding it in the ancient world. The pagan cultures gave their gods and goddesses sex lives, while sexual actings-out were part and parcel of human devotions to these deities.

Psychiatrist and sexual historian Norman Sussman describes the situation thus: "Male and female prostitutes, serving temporarily or permanently and performing heterosexual, homosexual oral-genital, bestial, and other forms of sexual activities, dispense their favors in behalf of the temple." Throughout the ancient Near East, from very early times, anal intercourse formed a part of goddess worship. In ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Canaan, annual ceremonial intercourse took place between the king and a priestess. Women prostitutes had intercourse with male worshippers in the sanctuaries and temples of ancient Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, Cyprus, Corinth, Carthage, Sicily, Egypt, Libya, West Africa, and ancient and modern India. In ancient Israel itself, there were repeated attempts to re-introduce temple prostitution, resulting in repeated Jewish wars against cultic sex.

Prager goes on to show how

forcing the sexual genie into the marital bottle ... ensured that sex no longer dominated society, heightened male-female love and sexuality (and thereby almost alone created the possibility of love and eroticism within marriage), and began the arduous task of elevating the status of women.

As a result of Judaism's "placing controls on sexual activity," sex

could no longer dominate religion and social life. It was to be sanctified — which in Hebrew means "separated" — from the world and placed in the home, in the bed of husband and wife. Judaism's restricting of sexual behavior was one of the essential elements that enabled society to progress. Along with ethical monotheism [i.e., the belief that one morality for all humanity emanates from the One God], the revolution begun by the Torah when it declared war on the sexual practices of the world wrought the most far-reaching changes in history.

I personally agree with Prager of the importance of this radical departure in religious history, but disagree with him that the traditional Judeo-Christian outlook on sex is valid for all time.

Rather, I look at the modern attitude to sex as emerging out of and ending the dispute between ancient paganism and Jewish (then Christian, then Islamic) monotheism in the way that philosophers have called dialectical. First there is a thesis, in this case, pagan religious-sexual practices. Then comes an antithesis, the ethical monotheism of the Jews, carried forward in Christianity and then Islam. The thesis and antithesis seem to be wholly opposed, irreconcilable, either-or ideas. But then comes the synthesis, a merging together of the two earlier ideas in wholly unexpected ways.

For example, Prager says the Torah labeled homosexuality an "abomination," thus raising it to the highest level of censure. From the Bible's perspective, gay sex epitomizes any form of sex which, in the words of Martha Nussbaum, professor of philosophy at Brown University, "is understood fundamentally not as interaction, but as a doing of some thing to someone." It is therefore ugly and wrong.

But today we see gay men (and lesbian women) seeking to obtain the right to marry and establish the kind of union in which their sex acts can be fully interactive and mutually giving of, and to, one another. Gay sex no longer has to be a question of merely one person "doing" something to another. It no longer needs to be exploitive.


Prager says the Judaic revolution in religion "began the arduous task of elevating the status of women." He is right, and today's feminists have a lot to thank ethical monotheism for. Yet I don't think traditional Judeo-Christian-Islamic sexual morality suffices to finish that arduous task.

The problem with it is that it makes a woman's womb — her reproductive capacity, her fertility, her womanhood — the property of men. As I wrote in this earlier post, the menfolk of the biblical Jewish tribe were required to participate in a sort of communal "anti-defilement covenant," in which:

Together, the men control each and every woman's sexuality from the cradle to the grave.

According to such a covenant, a woman's sexual chastity is a precious possession, to be guarded at all costs by its possessors: the men. The men collaborate to set up the rules of conduct and official ceremony by which this can reliably be done. In the case of the ancient Hebrews, the rules were said to have come to Moses from God.

The underlying notion is, again, that a woman's sexual and reproductive identity belongs to her husband, her father, her brothers (whose job it is to avenge any adultery or rape committed by or against her), and the tribe's menfolk in general (who are adjured, for the sake of domestic tranquility, to rein in their natural tendency to want to "lie with" this woman or that, and with the other as well).

There was even the custom of levirate marriage, in which a man was obliged to marry his brother's widow, lest her womb with its ability to conceive and give birth cease to be possessed lawfully by a man.

This husbanding — in both senses of the word — of a woman's womanhood did elevate the status of women, but at a price. Pagan goddesses had been conspicuously in charge of their own sexuality, their own bodies ... which implied that female wombs were not necessarily male-possessed. Under the new Jewish covenant, that changed.

On those terms, abortion is abominable because it suggests that a woman need not consider the fetus in her womb to be the property of a man — or of a male deity — to dispose of as only he wills.

On those terms, sex for a woman became a duty to her husband, not necessarily a source of pleasure to herself.

On those terms, women's modern "our bodies, ourselves" movement would have made no sense.


My point is not that these ancient ideas, still much with us today, about sex and womanhood were "wrong" in any absolute sense. Indeed they were very right for their time and place — a very long time, in fact, and a very capacious place. For they, as much as anything else, insured the survival and growth of ethical monotheism down through several thousand years of world history, in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim forms.

But now their time is rapidly drawing to a close, and their place is rapidly receding into the hearts and minds of a minority of modern people who are disinclined to relinquish them without a fight. More on this in future posts ...

Signs of Sacrificial Solidarity

"Hacking as an act of faith" is a front page feature in today's Baltimore Sun. Reading between the lines, I find it brings out something I alluded to in my last post, Faiths of Our Fathers.

In that post I said:

One of the most fundamental aspects of our [human] nature is that we value our communal solidarities so highly.

When Catholics or Evangelicals, or secular humanists, or anyone else, bond into communities, there have to be some meaningful signs given by each member of communal solidarity, which generally amount to the making of some sort of personal sacrifice on behalf of the community.

Personal sacrifices on behalf of one's community, made as meaningful signs of solidarity, play a noticeable role in the Sun article, which is about how a legendary computer hacker managed to turn what many would say is a force for evil into a force for good.


Johnny Long, known online as just "j0hnny," with a zero, not an "O," had a split life. He was a lifelong Christian who nonetheless dismissed fellow Christians as "culturally and socially inept." And he was a hacker: someone who devotes himself to figuring out how to defeat security schemes and break into computer systems.

Long thought he'd hit the heights when he was invited to address the famous DEF CON hacker convention in Las Vegas in 2003. Yet, though his speech went fine, the adulation he received from his fellow black-shirted hackers left him feeling ... nothing at all, just empty inside.

Even though Long is married with kids — "he's also funny, self-effacing and a hands-on dad to his three kids. He takes in stray cats, houses a Korean exchange student, mentors dozens and wants to be a ninja (he has a brown belt in Bujinkan Budo Taijutsu)," says the article — something was missing: meaning.

After stewing about the emptiness he felt, about the apparent meaningless of his life, he took action.

The first thing he did was to make it crystal clear to others in his hacker community that he is (surprise!) a professing Christian.

The reaction to that surprised him: a big collective yawn. No one seemed to care one way or the other about his religious convictions.


Meanwhile, his hacker career began to hit the stratosphere:

Within a month, a publisher had called and asked Johnny to write a book (Volume 1 of Google Hacking for Penetration Testers was published in 2005, and Volume 2 hit the shelves last year). That led to a dozen more book projects.

He became a talking head on CNN, MSNBC and CNET. Within a year, there were more than 80,000 users registered on his site — johnny.ihackstuff.com — up from 500.

Here's where it gets interesting. Long was still without a sense of purpose in his life when he went with his wife Jen to Uganda, "a small country obliterated by AIDS," on a church-sponsored trip to do missionary work. There, the AIDS Orphans Education Trust, or AOET, put him to work turning discarded computer parts into a functioning online network that was sorely needed by the charity, an organization that treats and educates AIDS orphans.

Long was, actually, miffed about this. He had envisioned "romantic notions of [doing] manual labor. He wanted to work side-by-side with his wife and feel the nightly satisfaction of aching muscles and a hard day's work." Leveraging his computer expertise wasn't his first choice.

Even so, it turned out, "for a while, [the success of his cobbled together network] was enough for Johnny. He'd done something, he'd made a difference, he'd put his skills to work in a way he never had before. And he was feeling pretty good."


Once home, though, he found the feeling was fading.

At home, he started pining, then thinking. How could he get that feeling back, but from here?

Then he struck on it: He would hack charities.

Through a web site, www.hackersforcharity.org, he would "get hackers from around the world to volunteer their time and used gear to various charities that seriously need technical help, whether it's through securing their sites or finding ways to pair children with sponsors online, like Johnny is working on for AOET."


Here's what I find really interesting about Johnny's story, though. When Johnny and Jen Long wanted to go to Uganda — it was the first time for Johnny; Jen had been there before — they didn't have enough money to finance the trip. This was just after Johnny had "come out" to his fellow hackers as a Christian, and they had generally been nonplussed. Then ...

Johnny wrote a letter about his desire to go to Uganda and ... sent it to The Hacker Foundation, an organization that connects technology projects with the resources needed to get them off the ground.

His missive was immediately posted online and asked its readers to "forego that triple-venti white chocolate mocha, and send [Johnny and Jen] a few bucks instead." Roughly 24 hours later, $4,800 had been raised — $600 more than they needed for the trip.

And so, in May of this year, Johnny, Jen and a half dozen others from the church set out for the Jinja district of Uganda ... .

As soon as Johnny gave members of his hacker community a way to make personal sacrifices in order to show solidarity with him, the community pricked up its ears!


Maybe giving up a triple-venti white chocolate mocha wasn't a big sacrifice, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that, in coming to Johnny's aid, several thousand hackers were proving how powerful the spirit of shared sacrifice can be in cementing a community in their mutual search for good works that can be effected in the world.

So it becomes clear to me why Johnny Long's "coming out" as a Christian at first provoked such a massive yawn: there was no way his fellow hackers, most of whom were presumably not practicing Christians, could show solidarity with him through personal sacrifices they could envision themselves making.

Only when Johnny figured out how to ask for visible signs of sacrificial solidarity from them did his Christian orientation begin to "work" for them. And, though they weren't themselves Christian, they responded.


I'm beginning to believe that signs of sacrificial solidarity lie at the heart of all human community and at the heart of my (Catholic-Christian) religion. I believe they lie at the heart of the latter because they lie at the heart of the former.

• Remember, the whole Christian belief system revolves around Christ's cross, on which Jesus of Nazareth made the perfect and ultimate sacrifice: he died once, scourged and in shame before his own community, so that all of humankind could live forever.

• Remember, the Holy Communion which is the high point of every Catholic Mass celebrates and even recapitulates Jesus's sacrifice. As the bread and wine of communion become Christ's body and blood, we recollect how and why he died for us, and then we consume that consecrated body and blood for our spiritual nourishment.

Just before the rite of Holy Eucharist begins, it is no coincidence that we Catholics put money in the collection plate, in a way that makes it clear that we are making our own signs of sacrificial solidarity: we publicly give up some of the money which nominally sustains our lives. There'll be one less triple-venti white chocolate mocha for us because we put a dollar or two in the plate.

• Remember, in my last post I talked about how the sign of sacrificial solidarity made by a soldier who takes up arms against an enemy on behalf of his or her country and possibly has to kill an enemy combatant. What is being sacrificed here is much more than a chocolate mocha: a soldier's very innocence (if not life or limb).

The principle is the same, though, even if the stakes are higher. Communal solidarity, even at a national level, demands personal sacrifices. These personal sacrifices, whether tangible or intangible, are vouchsafed by visible signs made before the eyes of the community. The soldier's uniform is just such a tangible sign of an intangible sacrifice.

When those who are not in the military and aren't making personal sacrifices put yellow ribbons on their car bumpers in support of the troops, they are doing what little they can to join in the shared sacrifice.

I think signs of sacrificial solidarity, whether they are in a religious context or a secular one, come close to defining what is truly special about human nature.

Faiths of Our Fathers

A Brief, Liberal, Catholic Defense of Abortion, by Seattle University philosophy professors Daniel A. Dombrowski and Robert J. Deltete, continues to interest me. It argues that Catholics such as I should be open to a pro-choice position concerning abortion because the church, prior to the seventeenth century, objected to early-stage abortions only because they were said by St. Augustine and others to pervert the only non-sinful use of sex: procreation by married couples.

St. Augustine and, later, St. Thomas Aquinas, held that a fetus could have no truly human soul until the later stages of pregnancy, when it was fully formed.

When scientific inquiry in Europe ramped up during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, scientists at first incorrectly found reason to think the embryo was, contrary to Augustine and Aquinas, fully formed from the moment of conception — just very, very tiny. Ergo, it could have a God-given soul after all, and early-stage abortions were wrong.

Since that time, two key things have happened. The sexual mores of Catholics have changed, and procreation is no longer seen as the only legitimate function of sex. The intensification of conjugal love and even the taking of physical pleasure in the sex act are now seen as legitimate uses of sexuality.

Sex can be appropriate today, many Catholics believe, as long as there is "mutual agapic respect" between consenting adults. Agape, a Greek word for love, is synonymous with Christian love. As long as erotic love is subsumed within agape or Christian love, Dombrowski and Deltete argue, it is not necessarily sinful — even if the adult partners are not married or are of the same sex.

Also, science has rectified its original supposition that the tiniest embryo is a fully formed, potentially soul-bearing "homunculus." We now know (for example) that the ability of the fetus to undergo experiences — e.g., to suffer — begins only when the cerebral cortex has been fully "wired up," which happens no earlier than the 24th week of fetal development. It looks as if Augustine and Thomas Aquinas were right about "delayed hominization" after all.

Dombrowski and Deltete argue that today's liberalized sexual mores and the latest evidence concerning fetal development combine to offer us Catholics a reasonable way to support a woman's "right to choose."


Dombrowski and Deltete go on to argue, in their chapter on "Catholicism and Liberalism," in favor of what they term a "liberal" form of societal governance. To them, "liberal" governance is what makes for political and social "justice," a state of affairs which I think boils down to an active appreciation by all in the society of pluralism. Though we all tend to identify with communities having "relatively comprehensive religious, philosophical, or moral views" (see pp. 106ff.), we all are supposed to see that "the only way to have one 'comprehensive' view reign supreme over others is to force it down people's throats ... " (p. 107).

As an example of a "relatively comprehensive religious, philosophical, or moral view," take Catholicism. As another, take Evangelical Protestantism. Yet another might be "secular humanism," an outlook of which many atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers are accused by Catholics and Evangelical Protestants. The list of comprehensive views is a long one. Each, according to Dombrowski and Deltete, ought to recognize that the path to mutual pluralistic "justice" runs through the setting aside of one's own party's "reasonable" positions concerning disputed matters, such as abortion rights, in recognition that other "relatively comprehensive religious, philosophical, or moral views" can also claim to be reasonable ones.


That wholesale embrace of pluralistic "justice" is a taller order, I think, than Dombrowski and Deltete admit.

I think the reason has to do with human nature. One of the most fundamental aspects of our nature is that we value our communal solidarities so highly.

When Catholics or Evangelicals, or secular humanists, or anyone else, bond into communities, there have to be some meaningful signs given by each member of communal solidarity, which generally amount to the making of some sort of personal sacrifice on behalf of the community.

Not all signs of communal sacrifice need to be in any way illicit. That said, they can be and often are at least quasi-illicit.

Take, for example, the sign of sacrificial solidarity made by a soldier who takes up arms against an enemy. Killing is generally seen as a violation of one of God's commandments — or, for nonbelievers in God, of one of the basic principles of morality and ethics — yet when a soldier kills an enemy combatant, that's not seen as a sin. One reason for the exception is that the soldier's sacrifice of his personal innocence in wartime is an unmistakable sign of his solidarity with the nation as a whole.

Another, more debatable example might be that of a protester against abortions who kills an abortion doctor. As Dr. Susan Wicklund's This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor shows, Wicklund as an abortion provider lived in constant fear of assassination at the hands of true believers who think abortion is murder.

Again, I think killers of abortion providers are sacrificing their personal innocence in order to give an unmistakable sign of their solidarity with other "right-thinking" folks.

Their actions are clearly (a) immoral and (b) irrational. But that's my point. Human nature so values signs of sacrificial solidarity with one's own party or group that considerations of rationality or even basic morality can easily get shunted aside.


We Catholics are far from immune. That's why I think Dombrowski and Deltete's arguments that Catholics ought to reevaluate their positions on abortion fall mostly on deaf ears. Many — dare I say most — Catholics today take it that, even if Dombrowski and Deltete are right from a strictly philosophical point of view, such a view is an intrinsically "deracinated" one.

"Deracinated" is a word Dombrowski and Deltete use often. Stances such as that of Dombrowski and Deltete that Catholic traditionalists and communitarians oppose, the traditionalists and communitarians call "deracinated" ones. To deracinate is to pull something up by its roots. Certain philosophical positions that have been advanced, traditionalists and communitarians complain, tend to pull Catholics right out of the soil of their tradition.

For example, many Catholics feel they are being deracinated by views such as that of Dombrowski and Deltete that make abortion seem less than absolutely wrong.

Consciously or not, such Catholics probably feel that entertaining a pro-choice stance constitutes a break with the faith of their fathers. ("Faith of Our Fathers" is a hymn we Catholics sing often in church. Every community organized around "relatively comprehensive religious, philosophical, or moral views" could adopt the same hymn!)

Accordingly, if only as a sign of sacrificial solidarity, many Catholics consent to give up any personal, individual attempt to reason abstractly about the morality of abortion. Their assumption is that the church has done all the abstract reasoning that is required, and it is simply the duty of themselves as Catholics to follow their church's lead and oppose abortion.

Signs of sacrificial solidarity — ways of upholding the "faiths of our fathers" at some (possibly great) personal sacrifice to ourselves — mean so much to us that "deracinating" philosophical arguments like that of Dombrowski and Deltete don't often stand much of a chance.

The Great Thought Divide

A Brief, Liberal, Catholic Defense of Abortion, by Seattle University philosophy professors Daniel A. Dombrowski and Robert J. Deltete, is a must-read for Catholics such as myself who are locked into neither a pro-life position nor a pro-choice stance, but are honestly trying to decide whether abortions are in and of themselves sinful. Dombrowski and Deltete argue they are not.

There are two horns to their argument. Horn One: virtually no Catholics still believe, as St. Augustine did, that sexual sin is anything sex-related which fails to uphold procreation — not bodily pleasure, not even conjugal love — as the sole acceptable basis for sex between two marriage partners. That abortions make a mockery of the biblical procreation mandate ("Be fruitful and multiply") was the reason Augustine found abortions sinful, for he did not believe — and neither did St. Thomas Aquinas — that an embryo or fetus possesses either sentiency or a rational, God-given soul until some point late in pregnancy.

Horn Two: if "delayed hominization" — the position of Augustine and Thomas — is correct, then modern abortion foes who explicitly or implicitly assume there is "immediate hominization" — or a God-given soul which arrives on day one of pregnancy — are philosophically out of step with current medical science, which seems to affirm delayed hominization. To wit, we now know that it is only in the 24th through 32nd weeks of pregnancy that the central nervous system has developed to the point of being able to undergo any sort of experience. Being able to have conscious experience, including the ability to suffer, is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the development of a rational soul, which is the fulfillment of human personhood.

So say Dombrowski and Deltete. I think they're right.


Unless, that is, there is reason to believe that a fully human "identity" simply exists at all points in the temporal career of the fetus, past, present, and future, being there from the instant of its conception through all of its embryonic and post-embryonic developmental stages; being present at its birth; then accompanying its life as an infant, as a child, and as an adult; and finally persisting to its death and beyond.

This view, which Dombrowski and Deltete explore, and the antithetical one which they prefer both bear upon the question of what time is. As Dombrowski and Deltete point out in their chapter on "The Importance of Temporal Asymmetry," there is and has long been a tendency among philosophers to believe that time is basically symmetrical.

If time is symmetrical, then it indeed makes sense to say that a newly fertilized egg cell already contains that immutable "substance" which gives it, now and forever, its unique "identity." Abortion is, on this view, wrong because it snuffs out that "substance," that "identity."

Philosopher-mathematician Gottfried Leibniz held in the 17th century, say Messrs. D. and D., that there is indeed an immutable "substance" in which inheres the constant "identity" of a person throughout life.

Time is therefore symmetrical, in Leibniz' view, because a person accumulates no added identity as time goes on. What is essential to a person's identity never changes.

The identity of any one person is, on this view, something like the subject of a sentence. It can accumulate more predicates over time, without itself being changed in any essential way.

Or, it is like a noun that can, over the course of time, have more and more adjectives attached to it, without having its core meaning altered in any fundamental way.


Dombrowski and Deltete disagree with Leibniz on this matter of time and identity. To them, we are what we have become. Our life is an ongoing process whose events, though they do not cancel the past, mean that a partially new and even unexpected identity emerges with each event that transpires in our lives. Each new identity is not strictly the same as any of our previous identities, though it subsumes all of them.

It is for this reason that Dombrowski and Deltete say that time is asymmetrical. The future for each of us is not set in stone, even as all of our past identities remain exactly what they always were.

As I said in this earlier series of posts, Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine has written in The End of Certainty of scientific discoveries and insights that give him abundant reason to think science should abandon its longstanding conviction that time is symmetrical, and that our awareness of an "arrow of time" is but an illusion. If we think Prigogine is right, then I'd say it becomes easier to find Dombrowski and Deltete right as well.

But we are all somewhat heirs to the other type of thinking, the one which Leibniz upheld, which looks for an immutable, unchanging core of our (or anything's) existence. Such an immutable core of existence makes each of us in the present moment not different in any fundamental way than what we were in our (already determined) pasts and/or what we will be in our (equally predetermined) futures.

Einstein said, "God does not play dice." If indeed God were never a dice player, we could be assured that being, rather than becoming, is alone at the heart of who we are. If that is so, our future is somehow already written, and an omniscient God knows what it is.

But, as Dombrowski and Deltete point out, this view of what divine omniscience supposedly is contradicts the traditional Catholic belief in free will, which denies that each of our fates, salvation-wise, is predestined.


It seems we have two dueling sets of ideas here, each set being a constellation of multiple notions that somehow "go together" and likewise somehow mutually contradict all the notions that make up the other constellation. One set of ideas elevates being over becoming, identity over process, constancy over change, omniscience over wait-and-see knowability, determinism over free will, destiny over potentiality. The other set of ideas flips the picture over and emphasizes the second of each of these matched pairs.

The first set of ideas seems to me (and I am not trained in philosophy) to be basically Platonic, while the other is basically Aristotelian. In the view of Dombrowski and Deltete, the Catholic Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas were more Aristotelians than Platonists, while (I gather) people like Leibniz and René Descartes were more Platonists than Aristotelians.

Platonists believe that objects in the material world are fleeting, imperfect renditions of eternal ideas or forms. These forms are more real than anything tangible or physical. Christian Platonists think of the God-given soul as a real, eternal, indestructible thing; hence the soul is much like a Platonic form. At base, the soul's existence is independent of the physical body of the embryo or fetus that it is bestowed upon. Hence, God's act of bestowing the soul can be assumed to take place at the moment of conception.

Aristotelians (I gather) grant more reality to physical matter than do Platonists. There is no absolute divide between form and substance, mind and matter, etc., such that the one can exist without the other. Hence, it can make sense to believe that that which anything presently is can come about, at least in part, only through a process of becoming, and no part of that something's "identity" can be separated from the process by which that identity has been built up.


If I am right about this distinction — this Great Thought Divide — between Platonists and Aristotelians, then I imagine the late Ilya Prigogine was an Aristotelian (and Einstein was a Platonist).

And I, too, am an Aristotelian at heart, even if I sometimes catch myself thinking like a Platonist.

For too many years to count, I have been assiduously working out a worldview in which my belief as a Christian need not contradict my views as an (amateur) philosopher or (equally amateur) scientist. In my capacity as amateur philosopher-scientist, I have yearned to see how the Darwinian theory of evolution can be brought into accord with Christian belief, or vice versa. To make a long story short, I've come to embrace the extensions of Darwinism that the sciences of "complexity" have recently offered (see my Beyond Darwin blog).

According to the sciences of complexity, even chaos (defined mathematically and scientifically, of course) is of creative value in an unfolding cosmos. The "edge of chaos," where genesis is ongoing, is where evolution takes place.

Complex systems that evolve at the edge of chaos, and even chaotic systems per se, pass through "bifurcation points" where they opt for one possible future trajectory and bypass at least one other. In this earlier series of posts about Prigogine's book — a book which upholds the notion that all "dissipative systems" are intrinsically "complex systems" in the above sense — I suggested that God works minor miracles at the bifurcation points of such systems' developmental processes. With the "assent" (in some sense of the word) of the system itself, an evolutionary branch is taken which pleases God.

Yet God does not coerce assent at the time of what I am calling the mini-annunciation that he makes to the system, seeking its cooperation, nor does he know what the system will choose to do in advance.

Such an idea about mini-annunciations and mini-miracles, it seems to me, tips the philosophical scales toward the Aristotelian constellation of notions, and away from the Platonic. Time is asymmetrical, and the future is not somehow already latent in the past. The human person, likewise, is not somehow already "there" in the fertilized egg cell. The genesis of worldly being is not somehow "above" the process of evolutionary becoming. And God in his omniscience does not know everything that will someday happen.

Such an idea about mini-annunciations and mini-miracles as part of the ongoing process of creation, while it flies in the face of Platonic notions of genesis and ensoulment, does not make me un-Christian. It just puts me on the other side of the Great Thought Divide from a great many other Christians.

Flip-Flops on Abortion

If you go back and read my entire series of Abortion Rights posts to date — and please don't waste your time delving into them at any length — you can see that I've been flip-flopping on my support as a Christian for a woman's right to choose. At this point in my evolving attempt to confront the issue, I am pro-choice, but as recently as a year ago, I was anti-. Prior to that, I had once thought I'd found good reason to support women's abortion rights, while earlier still, I was against them. And so on and so on, as far back as I can remember.

Recent readings have, for now, changed my attitude yet again from pro-life to pro-choice. Among them:

• Garry Wills' Head and Heart: American Christianities (see this, this, and this post)
  
• Susan Wicklund's This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor (see In Defense of Abortion)
  
• A Brief, Liberal, Catholic Defense of Abortion, by Daniel A. Dombrowski and Robert J. Deltete (see, again, In Defense of Abortion)

One of the main things that I have learned from Wills and also from Dombrowski and Deltete concerns embryology. The fact that medical science now knows more about how the fetus develops than ever before gives me good reason to believe that "ensoulment" — the conferring by God of an "intelligent" human soul of the type identified by Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas — happens only after the cells in the developing brain start to communicate with one another. That happens between the 24th and 32nd week of fetal development, meaning that a fetus in its first two trimesters of existence need not be considered a human person.

Sentiency — higher mental function of a human-specific sort — coincides with fetal viability, the infant-to-be's ability to survive outside the womb, which arrives during that same span of weeks. That fact is another clue that pre-viable fetuses don't have the moral status we accord to newborn infants.


In so saying, I repudiate ideas I expressed in, among other posts, The Future of Abortion. In that post I said a five-week-old embryo, but 10 millimeters in size, already has recognizable eyes, ears, organs, and appendages. It therefore presumably has the moral status of a human person.

That assumption, however, misses the fact that the cerebral cortex, though it exists early on in the budding embryo, has yet to be "wired up."

According to Dombrowski and Deltete, it is only during the third trimester that "neural pathways are connected through the thalamus to the neocortex (p. 45). The neocortex — the most recently evolved part of the cerebral cortex of the brain — is the part of the higher mammalian brain concerned with sight and hearing. Before it is "wired in," the fetus cannot form sensory knowledge about the stimuli it receives.

Prior to the 24th through 32nd week of gestation, according to Wills, the cerebral cortex's neurons are functionally isolated from one another, pending the development of tiny synaptic gaps between neurons for electrochemical signals to bridge and thereby propagate thoughts, feelings, cognitions, and perceptions within the higher brain.

From these reasons which flow from modern embryology, the authors conclude that fetuses do not yet have the moral status of a sentient human person.

Augustine and Aquinas lacked such sophisticated knowledge of embryonic development, but both of them likewise argued against the view that "hominization" — the conferring by God of an immortal human soul — coincides with fertilization of the woman's egg cell by the male's semen or sperm.

Hence, said Augustine, if an abortion is sinful, it is not because the soul "arrives" then and there, at the time of conception. It is sinful, rather, because it is one of several sorts of behavior that thwart or pervert what he believed to be the essential function of coitus: to procreate. Augustine went so far as to declare that any sort of pleasure derived from the marital act, even when procreation is also intended, is "lustful cruelty." Augustine was anti-sex, as we understand and experience sex today.

Aquinas, centuries later, was pretty much silent on Augustine's "perversity" argument against "lustful" sex and (consequently) against contraception and abortion. But Aquinas elaborated Augustine's notion of late fetal hominization into a scheme by which there was a "succession of souls" during the development of a fetus, only the last of which comes from God.


This "succession of souls" schema has never been formally repudiated by the Catholic Church, but since the 17th century a great many Catholic (and other) thinkers have informally set it aside in favor of a growing belief that an embryo at very early stages of development is well enough formed to receive a God-given soul. Early scientific investigations of embryonic development, using powerful magnifying glasses and the first microscopes, convinced scientists (wrongly) that the embryo (or the seed it comes from) is a "homunculus." That is, it is already a fully formed human being, albeit exceedingly tiny. All that happens during the nine months of gestation is that it gets bigger.

Accordingly, the soul began to be envisioned as a separate, fully formed entity that God attaches to the physical homunculus, perhaps as early as the moment of fertilization. Before the 17th century, though, Aquinas' view held sway. According to the Thomistic (after Thomas Aquinas) theory of "hylomorphism," the soul and body develop step by step, in tandem, during a woman's pregnancy. It is only at the last step of this developmental trajectory that the "intelligent" soul can pair with a sufficiently developed brain to yield a being whose life is thenceforth sacrosanct.

In my earlier Abortion Rights posts, I spent a lot of time trying to decide when sentience and self-awareness arrive in an embryo/fetus/newborn child. One reason I wavered so much on the subject was that I had never been made aware of of the Augustinian and Thomistic viewpoints, derived from Aristotle.

As Dombrowski and Deltete show, the "early hominization" position that fully emerged in the 19th century had its roots in the 17th century, when the homunculus notion became, briefly, gospel. This position, which informed the attitudes of the Catholic Church toward abortion in the centuries following the 17th, came to overshadow the Church's original Augustinian-Thomistic-Aristotelian view ... although, as Dombrowski and Deltete point out, the Church never formally repudiated the Thomistic doctrine of the succession of souls.

It was then, in the 17th century when scientists temporarily believed in the homunculus theory, when Rene Descartes said "I think, therefore I am." That is, Descartes championed a Platonic notion of the soul as an entity basically higher than and separate from the body. The Greek philosopher Plato had held that "ideas" or "forms" exist on a higher plane than physical beings, which were imperfect representations of the forms. Descartes' notion of the thinking mind as the true locus of our existence, rather than the physical brain or body, was fundamentally Platonic.

We are all, myself included, prone to the Platonic-Cartesian view today. Yet up-to-date science leads us back toward the Aristotelian-Augustinian-Thomistic view, in which the fully formed physical body is a precondition of the existence of the rational soul. Today's embryology seems to show that a human fetus is not wholly formed, not capable of higher mental function, and not viable outside the womb until the third trimester of pregnancy.

In Defense of Abortion

Right now I am reading two excellent books on the subject of abortion. The first is Susan Wicklund's This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor, the memoir of a doctor who has provided women with first-trimester abortions and other reproductive health services for over twenty years.

Wicklund came from a traditional, upper-Midwestern, rural background and was, judging by her family's history, unlikely to do anything so bold as go to medical school, much less, as a professional doctor, provide women with abortions. But when as a young woman she became pregnant, under circumstances that made it impossible to try to have and bring up a child, the abortion she had instead was an experience made needlessly traumatic by medical professionals who hadn't the vaguest idea of how to treat their patient as a worried, fearful fellow human being. Wicklund decided she needed to do something to keep that sort of thing from happening to other women in the future. She became an abortion doctor.

This was in the 1970s, in the wake of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that made state laws banning abortions unconstitutional. When Wicklund found her medical school loath to train her in abortion procedures, it was but a foretaste of how hostile the communities in which she would eventually practice, medium-sized cities scattered across the North Central United States, would be to women's newfound reproductive rights. Her story is as much about how much danger she was perennially placed in from menacing, if supposedly well-meaning, "pro-life" protesters — and occasionally from angry perpetrators of paternal incest — as it is about how she allayed the fears and anxieties of her patients, none of whose fetuses she would abort unless patient and doctor were both clear that it was what the patient really, truly wanted.

As I read through the episodes of Wicklund's professional and personal life — the latter being circumscribed by the need to cope with the ceaseless perils of the former — I am frankly ashamed of myself for having failed to recognize for so long just how evil are the intentions and actions of those who would kill abortion doctors (!) in order to prevent the supposed "murders" of "unborn children."

But could "pro-life" forces be somehow correct when they say embryos and fetuses are human persons whose lives are, inexplicably, more sacrosanct than that of an abortion doctor like Wicklund? Wicklund's book is not the place to explore such issues coolly and philosophically. For that, one needs to turn to ...



The second book I am presently reading, which is as detached and intellectual as Wicklund's book is personal and emotional. It is A Brief, Liberal, Catholic Defense of Abortion, by two (Catholic, male) professors of philosophy at Seattle University, Daniel A. Dombrowski and Robert J. Deltete.

This book examines the history of Catholic thought about abortion ... which in many ways is the history of Western thought on the subject, since two of the Christian West's philosophical pioneers, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, wrote before the Reformation.

Prior to the 17th century and the rise of enlightened science, Western Christians looked to their forebears — Augustine, Aquinas, the other Church Fathers — for guidance on thorny issues such as when and whether abortions are anything but sinful, and when the new life in a woman's womb acquires the status of a human person.

As Dombrowski and Deltete set forth, neither Augustine nor Aquinas based their rejection of abortion on the notion that a just-begun embryo, or even an early-stage fetus, has yet been infused with a God-given soul. Ensoulment, they reasoned, happens later, in the final stages of pregnancy, when the fetus becomes what we would today call sentient. Before that, Aquinas said, the fetus has but a vegetative, nutrition-seeking soul, and later a sensing, questing, animal soul ... but not yet an "intellectual soul" of the sort conferred and cherished by God.

Aquinas' view echoed that of the much earlier St. Augustine. Augustine's notions on the "succession of souls" were not as elaborate or consistent as those of Aquinas, yet they nonetheless led to the same conclusion: that the soul whose extinguishing constitutes murder does not arrive until the later stages of pregnancy.


But, never mind. Augustine found another way to show that abortion was sin. Though he sidestepped the "ontological" argument, that the God-conferred soul exists from the time of conception on, he pretty much originated the "perversity" argument: that abortion blocks procreation and thus perverts the true purpose of sex and marriage.

In fact, it was St. Augustine's belief — one that hounds many of us to this day — that anything that admits the slightest glimmer of pleasure into the marital dealings of wives and husbands was an occasion for "lustful cruelty":

Married persons who have intercourse only (sola) for the wish to beget children do not sin, whereas those who mix pleasure with sex, even if sex with one's spouse, commit sin. A remarkable view! It must be granted that this sin is venial (i.e., venia or pardonable), but the mere fact that it is a sin at all should alert us to how negative Augustine's view of sex is. Even worse than intending pleasure in sex is to try to prevent pregnancy, say through an evil appliance (opere malo), or, we might add, through the "rhythm method." For Augustine those who use such contraceptive devices retain no vestige of true matrimony, which is synonymous with, not accidentally connected to, propagation. These people sometimes (aliquando) go so far as to have abortions in their lustful cruelty (libidinosa crudelitas). Since Augustine also accuses those who have merely used contraceptive devices of being cruel, we can be sure that it is not cruelty to a human person inside the womb that he is worried about. It is Augustine's own clever pen that makes this clear when he rephrases his accusation as cruel lust (libido crudelis). Lust itself (or even the desire for sexual pleasure) is cruel, whether or not a fetus is aborted. (p. 21)

Sexual mores have changed radically since Augustine's time, yet the Catholic Church still condemns using contraceptive devices. (The "rhythm method" is somehow excluded from latter-day condemnation, though by Augustine's own logic it, too, ought not to be permitted.) And the Church continues to call abortion sin.


However, since the 17th century the Church's continuing condemnation of abortion has moved prudently away from emphasizing the perversity argument, Dombrowski and Deltete show. Nowadays, the argument most heard as to why abortion is bad is an ontological one — the sort of argument Augustine and Aquinas expressly shunned.

When scientists first got hold of optical devices in the 1600s — the microscope, etc. — which let them peer at aborted embryos and fetuses with a high degree of magnification, they found human contours and organs begin to develop very early on. They quite naturally jumped to the conclusion that perhaps Augustine and Aquinas had been wrong: perhaps "hominization," the juncture at which a fetus becomes a human being, occurs at or precious near the very moment when sperm meets egg.

Hence, maybe all abortions kill a human person.

But wait. Today, as Dombrowski and Deltete point out, our much more advanced science of embryology gives us reason to believe that Augustine and Aquinas were correct after all. Though tiny embryos quickly develop recognizable organs, including brains, the cells in the forming brain don't actually start to communicate with one another until the 25th through 32nd weeks of pregnancy.

Accordingly, what Messrs. D and D refer to as "sentiency" — sentience, self-awareness, higher cognitive function — are entirely missing in younger fetuses. And it is to the onset of sentiency that the authors say we may ascribe the advent of the "intelligent," or truly human, soul. That this is the time at which the fetus can first hope to survive outside the womb is further indication that abortions in the first or even the second trimester of pregnancy are not murder.