The Dream of the Earth, Part 1

The Dream of the Earth, by Thomas Berry, ought to be required reading for any Catholic who is grappling, as I am still, with questions of how much our religious commitment ought to extend to concern for the earth and the natural world.

The book, whose author was an ordained Passionist monk who died at age 94 in 2009, appeared in 1988 under the imprint of Sierra Club Books. Unknown to me until quite recently, Berry was an advocate in a movement I'd been equally unaware of, Deep Ecology.

Deep Ecology has it that we ought to care about our planet and its natural environment first and foremost because our present ways will sooner or later bring ruin. Our plans for progress toward a "wonderworld" of human economic fulfillment are bound to fail, Berry says. We have to steal from Mother Nature to build our imaginary wonderworld. The bill for that is surely coming due.

We might justify "going green" by that reasoning alone, but Berry offers a deeper reason. We ought to care about the earth because in despoiling our world in the name of material progress, we risk losing

... contact with the revelation of the divine in nature. Yet our exalted sense of the divine itself comes from the earth, in all the splendid modes of its expression. Without such experience we would be terrible impoverished in our religious and spiritual development, even in our emotional, imaginative, and intellectual development. (pp. 80-81)

"Our fulfillment is not in our isolated human grandeur," Berry writes (p. xiv), "but in our intimacy with the larger earth community, for this is the larger dimension of our being. Our human destiny is integral with the destiny of the earth."

Berry's Thought

Few educated people today can disagree with Berry's basic framework of thought and belief. Our species emerged on this earth, which is the only known home for life in the universe, after billions of years and the earlier evolution of tens of thousands of our cousin species. The earth itself and its sun emerged in the cosmos after an even greater number of billions of years of expansion following the big bang.

Berry accordingly writes:

Such a fantastic universe, with its great spiraling galaxies, its supernovas, our solar system, and this privileged planet Earth! All this is held together in the vast curvature of space, poised so precisely in holding all things together in the one embrace and yet so lightly that the creative expansion of the universe might continue on into the future. We ourselves, with our distinctive capacities for reflexive thinking, are the most recent wonder of the universe, a special mode of reflecting this larger curvature of the universe itself. If in recent centuries we have sought to collapse the larger creative curve within the horizons of our own limited being, we must now understand that our own well-being can be achieved only through the well-being of the entire natural world about us. The greater curvature of the universe and of the planet earth must govern the curvature of our own being. In the coincidence of these three curves lies the way into a creative future. (p. xv)

Ergo, we cannot go on leveraging the indiscriminate industrial-technological-agricultural destruction of numberless life forms and our natural environment as a whole without squandering the legacy of fourteen billion years of cosmic evolution, a protracted process of development which produced the only life form anywhere, so far as we know, that can reflect on its own existence: us.

Certainly we know about divinity through Scripture and religious teaching, but, Berry says, we cannot fully savor the Creator's unimaginable greatness except through our experience of the natural world. If we turn that world into a trash heap in which we are reduced to being semi-alive and spiritually impoverished, we render the ultimate insult to God.

Berry puts it this way:

We should be clear about what happens when we destroy the living forms of this planet. The first consequence is that we destroy modes of divine presence. If we have a wonderful sense of the divine, it is because we live amid such awesome magnificence. If we have refinement of emotion and sensitivity, it is because of the delicacy, the fragrance, and indescribable beauty of song and music and rhythmic movement in the world about us. If we grow in our life vigor, it is because the earthly community challenges us, forces us to struggle to survive, but in the end reveals itself as a benign providence. But however benign, it must provide that absorbing drama of existence whereby we can experience the thrill of being alive in a fascinating and unending series of adventures. (p. 11)

Many Cultures and Their Creation Mythologies

In one of his early essays — each chapter in his book amounts to a self-contained essay — Berry recites a history of "creative energy" in our world. He writes (p. 25), "Belief in a personal creative energy principle is the primary basis of Western spiritual tradition. Thus the creed opens with a reference to power as the distinguishing attribute of the creative principle of heaven and earth and all things."

Berry refers here to the start of the Nicene Creed which we say at every Catholic Mass:

I believe in One God, the Father, the Almighty
Maker of all that is, seen or unseen ...

Power and energy — almightiness — are crucial to Berry's worldview; he believes the universe itself reveals "creative intentions." Even so:

Unfortunately Western religious traditions have been so occupied with redemptive healing of a flawed world that they tend to ignore creation as it is experienced in our times. ... So concerned are we with redemptive healing that once healed, we look only to be more healed. We seldom get to our functional role within the creative intentions of the universe. (p. 25)

"In an earlier phase of human development," Berry continues, "creation mythologies provided the basic context for personal and social existence. In accord with these great mythic statements the various cultural forms were established."

The Archetypal Age of Antiquity

We need to keep in mind here that our Christian creation myth, the first chapter of Genesis, is what tells us that our Lord God is "Maker of all that is, seen and unseen." Before our modern times, it and innumerable kindred creation myths powered the development of various civilizations in the world. "Thus," writes Berry (p. 26), "the sages, rishis, yogis, gurus, priests, philosophers, prophets, heroes, and divine kings of antiquity: Confucius, Buddha, Ignathon, Moses, Isaiah, Darius, Ch'in Shi Huang Ti, Asoka, Plato, Christ, and, later, Mohammed."

Those great figures of antiquity and their successors in recent times, says Berry, "have been instrumental in keeping the energy level of the various civilizations sufficient to carry on the basic functions required for their continuance."

Civilization's "Basic Energy Structure"

The "personal energy principle" of which Berry speaks amounts to, in other words, "a basic energy structure" (p. 27). This basic structure is of a kind which fuels every civilization, including our own.

This basic energy structure, inflected through the classical pagan cultures that preceded our Judeo-Christian one, "was a kind of energy pulsating in and through sacred liturgies carried out in seasonal life periods, as well as in the personal life cycle from birth to maturity to death." According to the prevailing mystery religions of the time, nothing ever really changed. Decay and death led inexorably to new life and growth.

A New Interpretation of Myth and Ritual

But the modern period introduced a new interpretation of myth and a "new historical mode of thinking." Now the ceaseless ebb and flow of life in the world developed, for the very first time, a vector of "progress." Berry writes of the new mode of thinking:

The world was [now] a one-time emerging world. There was no established cosmos, no abiding society, only a cosmogenesis and a sociogenesis. The evocation of energies continued within the ancient patterns, but these patterns themselves came to be interpreted within a new historical context. (p. 27)

So, in our modern Western world, our Christian "evocation of energies" — our rituals, prayers, creation myth, scripture — came to be reinterpreted in such a way as to harness them to a secular vision of man-made, earthly progress.

The Secular "Millennium"

Berry shows that the dream of the modern world to control nature and turn it to the economic benefit of humankind, leading to our eventually inhabiting an "industrial wonderworld" (p. 29), is just a secular borrowing of ancient biblical prophecy:

Although this new vision was first set forth in the prophetic writings and in the apocalyptic visions of Daniel [in the Old Testament], it found its most effective presentation in the Revelation of John the Divine [the final book of the New Testament], especially in his reference to the "millennium," the thousand years at the end of the historical process when the great dragon would be chained up, when peace and justice would appear, and when the human condition would be decisively surmounted. This millennial vision is the source of what may be the most powerful psychic energies ever released on the earth, psychic energies that have eventually taken extensive control over the physical functioning of the planet and are now entering into control of its biological systems. (p. 28)

Our "Mythic Addiction" Today

Berry says we are creating not a "wonderworld," but a "wasteworld" instead. Our world has become "anthropocentric," centered on our own needs and wants, rather than "biocentric," centered on the prerogatives of the living earth from which our species derives. Our secular reinterpretation of the religious myth of the "millennium" has been driving all this. Our secular co-opting of religious myth has gotten to the point where it controls us rather than us controlling it:

We could describe our industrial society as counterproductive, addictive, paralyzing, [a] manifestation of a deep cultural pathology. Mythic addictions function something like alcohol or drug addictions. even when they are obviously destroying the addicted person, the psychic fixation does not permit any change ... . (p. 32)

Our Need for a New Myth

We now need to replace our current, dysfunctional "mythic commitment" with what Berry poetically calls "a mystique of the rain." This amounts to a new mythic font of psychic energy:

A taste for existence within the functioning of the natural world is urgent. Without a fascination with the grandeur of the North American continent, the energy needed for its preservation will never be developed. Something more than the utilitarian aspect of fresh water must be evoked if we are ever to have water with the purity required for our survival. There must be a mystique of the rain if we are ever to restore the purity of the rainfall.

Berry's Prophetic Voice

I hear Berry's voice as more prophetic than mythic, though. I mean "prophetic" an an Old Testament, Biblical sense of calling us back to a prior commitment from which we have fallen away. The commitment Berry has in mind is not that of Yahweh's original people, but more like that of Christianity in the West prior to the Enlightenment.

Yet it must also be a return to the commitment that all of earth's peoples have in fact made, from pre-Neolithic times on. If humankind's needs are once again to turn to "the natural fruitfulness of the earth" for their sustainable satisfaction, that's the commitment that all of us need now to make. "This is not a socialism on the national scale," Berry writes (p. 79),

... nor is it an international socialism, it is planetary socialism. It is a socialism based on the Summa Theologica of Saint Thomas [Aquinas], wherein he deals with the diversity of creatures. Beyond planetary socialism he proposes an ultimate universal socialism where he says that because the divine goodness "could not be adequately represented by one creature alone, he produced many and diverse creatures, that what was wanting to one in the representation of the divine goodness might be supplied by another. For goodness, which in God is simple and uniform, in creatures is manifold and divided; and hence the whole universe together participates [in] the divine goodness more perfectly, and represents it better than any single creature whatever."

Into the Future

Yet Berry does not want to turn back the clock. We cannot move back in time — only forward. Berry writes that we need a renewal that can propel us into the future, not a return to the past:

Just now one of the significant historical roles of the primal people of the world is not simply to sustain their own traditions, but to call the entire civilized world back to a more authentic mode of being. Our only hope is a renewal of those primordial experiences out of which the shaping of our more sublime human qualities could take place. While our own experiences can never again have the immediacy or the compelling quality that characterized this earlier period, we are experiencing a postcritical naiveté, a type of presence to the earth and all its inhabitants that includes, and also transcends, the scientific understanding that is now available to us from these long years of observation and reflection.

Berry by no means rejects the scientific understanding of the world that began for us "in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century work of Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton" (p. 40). It is just that we must now turn the insights our empirical science has given us toward the work of healing the earth, not conquering it.

Catholics and Sex

Sexuality and Catholicism is a must-read for Catholics concerned with the church's stands on artificial birth control, population control, abortion, homosexuality, women's priestly vocations, masturbation, oral sex, carnal love, sex outside marriage, celibacy, the all-male priesthood, priestly sexual abuse, and other issues revolving around sexual morality.

This 1995 book's author, Thomas C. Fox, was a reporter and editorialist who served at The National Catholic Reporter as its editor and has also written for and/or worked for The New York Times, Time, The Detroit Free Press, and The Washington Star.

The premise of Fox's book is that the Catholic Church is suffering badly from its refusal, since the late 1960s, to modify its traditional teachings about birth control and about sexual morality in general, teachings that many Catholic theologians, clergy, and lay people think make no sense today.

The Church on Sex and Artificial Contraception

In the book's early going, Fox emphasizes how out of step the church's refusal in the 1960s to sanction artificial means of contraception has been judged by many Catholics. Use of birth control pills, condoms, and other devices and methods — other than the rhythm method — that reduce the likelihood of pregnancy are, in official church teaching, sinful.

In explaining this issue, Fox details the long history of the church's attitudes about sex, inasmuch as that history wound up seemingly tying the hands of Pope Paul VI in 1968 when he issued a papal encyclical that (contrary to the expectations of many Catholics) refused to sanction artificial birth control.

The history of Christian/Catholic thought on sex begins in ancient Jewish society before the time of Jesus, when the earliest worshippers of Yahweh codified rules about marriage and sexuality that had the overall effect of rendering the status of women inferior to that of men.

Jesus, though a Jew, did not treat women as of lesser worth than men. The few pronouncements Jesus made concerning sex, gender, and marriage had a pro-woman thrust. When he said that "... everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart" (Matthew 5:27-28), he meant, in today's lexicon, that it is sinful for men to treat women as sex objects.

Early Christian Teaching on Sex

Through 2,000 years of Christian history, the church has taught that the main purpose of marriage is the bearing and rearing of children; so, sex must take place only within the context of a stable, monogamous marriage-for-life that has been contracted between a man and a woman.

Fox shows how this idea developed historically. The early Christians were fighting for survival in the eastern reaches of the (then-hostile) Roman Empire. Many lived in portions of the Middle East whose culture was Hellenic, and so the philosophies of the ancient Greeks were widespread. Christian theology was influenced by various Greek philosophies, among them that of the Stoics.

The Stoics were in extreme reaction against earlier Greek schools of thought that held that the pursuit of bodily pleasure was the principal goal of life. The Stoics said, contrariwise, that willpower and self-discipline were the royal road to inner peace. Desire, fear, anger — all such irrational attitudes must be sternly uprooted.

The early Christians adopted a middle road between the pleasure-loving Hedonists of Hellenic yore and the Stoics, holding that procreative sex within marriage was morally defensible — not because it is pleasurable, but because it engenders children.

But that was only part of the story. Not long after the Christian era began, thinkers in the early church decided that celibacy, virginity, and sexual abstinence were morally superior to marriage, sex, and procreation!

St. Paul                                                          

Fox points out that the apostle Paul, whose letters would one day form much of the New Testament, beseeched the Christians of Corinth to avoid marriage if at all possible (1 Corinthians 7:26-27). Paul believed that Christ's Second Coming was imminent. For those who wished to prepare for the return of the Savior, the passions of sex would be a positive distraction.

Paul had to some degree absorbed the Stoics' attitude that sexual desires were impure, and so he strongly advocated celibacy over marriage.

St. Augustine

As the fourth Christian century began, St. Augustine wrote in his Confessions that all of us need to (in Fox's words) "escape from the prison of bodily limitations" in order that we might "reach pure spirit."

Augustine did affirm, though, that marriage and procreation were generally good things. He thereby opposed the Manichaean theologians of his day. Asserting themselves to be true Christians, Manichaeans held that "dark substances" dwelt within the human soul right alongside "light" ones. Sexual passions, they said, interfered with the ability of the Redeemed Christ to enable "imprisoned particles of light to escape from the darkness." Hence, not even sex within marriage for purposes of procreation was acceptable to the Manichaeans — whose extremism was quickly declared heresy by established church authority.

So Augustine, like Paul and the very earliest Christians, took what appeared at the time to be a middle road: it's wrong to engage in a life of lust, but it's equally wrong to insist on total celibacy and asceticism as an absolute which all Christians must observe.

The Church's Two-Tiered Approach to Christian Life

The upshot of all this was to establish a two-tiered approach to Christian life. Those who were considered "better" Christians — a notion that crystallized later in church history in the form of a celibate, all-male priesthood — were unmarried and ostensibly had no sexual passions or relations whatsoever. Those Christians who married and had children — and presumably underwent sexual passions/pleasures of various sorts — were taken to be inferior, in some spiritual sense, to the higher-in-God's-eyes celibates.

Medieval Penitentials

In the early Middle Ages, the church codified their grudging support of sex-for-procreation-only in the form of "penitentials": books for priests to use in hearing confessions, doling out penances for sins, and granting absolution. Various sins, including sexual ones, were catalogued in exquisite detail in the penitentials. The penances for "unnatural" acts such as "anal sex, oral sex, and even certain positions of sexual intercourse," Fox writes, "might extend from seven to fifteen years, in some cases." The penitent might be required to (for example) fast on bread and water for the duration of his penance.

St. Thomas Aquinas

In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas and other medieval Scholastic philosophers put "natural law" — "human reason reflecting on human nature" — as the basis for all church teaching thenceforth. Reasoning in accordance with "natural law" took primacy over both faith and Scripture in the Aquinan view, which became the official view of the Catholic Church.

Reason, said Aquinas, tells us that our human "nature" is like that of other animals insofar as sexual reproduction is concerned, so (per Fox) "sexuality becomes understood in light of those acts common to human beings and to other animals."

My interpretation: other animals engage in sex in order to procreate. Hence that is the one reason that, according to natural law, sex is permissible to humans.

Fox continues, "Thus, the human can never morally interfere with the physical act of sexual intercourse. It is unnatural, wrong, and sinful to do so. It follows that any form of artificial contraception is always wrong."

The Counter-Reformation

In the 16th century, the Protestant Reformation triggered in the Catholic Church a Counter-Reformation, during which period the church first began grappling with the bare possibility that, per Fox, "sexual intercourse in marriage could be justified for its own sake."

If so, the erstwhile insistence on procreating (along with the educating of) children as the primary function of marriage might conceivably give way, if only slightly.

Jansenism

It didn't give way, though. Instead, a movement grew within the church to make the rules about sex and marriage even more strict than before. This movement, Jansenism, was officially disavowed by the church, but it was far from stamped out. In particular, Irish clergy who followed their countrymen to America in the 19th century were heirs to Jansenist thought.

Neo-Jansenists

Even as late as the 20th century, such neo-Jansenists as Henry Davis could, in 1936, write:

It is grievously sinful in the unmarried [person] deliberately to procure or to accept even the smallest degree of true venereal [i.e., sexual or carnal] pleasure; secondly, that it is equally sinful to think, say or do anything with the intention of arousing even the smallest degree of this pleasure. ... [T]he smallest amount of this pleasure is an inducement to indulgence in the fullest amount of it.

Pope Pius XI's Encyclical Casti Connubii ("On Christian Marriage")

The less extreme degree of sexual stricture in the church's official doctrine, which was already more liberal than Jansenists would have liked, had already begun to get more liberal in 1930, when Pope Pius XI wrote in his encyclical "On Christian Marriage" — in Latin, Casti Connubii — that "the cultivating of mutual love" and a "mutual inward molding" between husband and wife were "the chief reason and purpose of matrimony."

A "determined effort to perfect each other," Pius XI wrote, was sufficient reason why marriage partners might be justified in intentionally engaging in non-reproductive sex: for instance, having sex during that part of the woman's menstrual cycle in which she is infertile.

Thus was born the Catholic Church's support for the "rhythm method" of birth control, known today as "natural family planning."

Even so, Pius XI resolutely refused to permit the use of "artificial" birth control methods, which in those days before the arrival of "the pill" in 1960 were oriented toward the use of as yet crude condoms or, more frequently, coitus interruptus, the practice of withdrawing the penis from the vagina just prior to ejaculation.

Vatican II

Four times between 1962 and 1965 the world's Catholic bishops convened in Rome under the auspices of the Second Vatican Council to consider how to make the Catholic Church more relevant to the modern world. As a result, many reforms in church practice were instituted, and Vatican II was hailed a tremendous success.

But Pope Paul VI — who had succeeded Pope John XXIII, the pontiff who had initiated Vatican II but had soon died of cancer — would not let the council update the church's stance on sex in general or on artificial birth control in particular.

Notably, "the pill" had been introduced in 1960, just two years before the council first convened, but it was as yet unclear what effect it might have on the sexual mores of the church or the world at large.

A Personalist View of Marriage

Liberal bishops of the time wanted their brethren at Vatican II to affirm a new, "personalist" view of marriage. In it, the old "juridical" norms would be deprecated in favor of a more up-to-date stance. This imagined stance would be one that allowed marriage partners to decide more freely for themselves how to handle questions of sex and procreation. Instead of a depersonalized, prepackaged hierarchy of rights and wrongs which put celibacy, virginity, and abstinence above even marital sex and procreation — and which went on to constrain the freedom of marriage partners to decide when and how to procreate — the liberals wanted to replace absolutist taboos and norms a doctrine that said (borrowing the words of Pius XI) "the cultivating of mutual love" is "the chief reason and purpose of matrimony."

Further, they wished to emphasize that this "chief reason and purpose" was in no way inferior to the call to celibacy, virginity, and sexual abstinence felt by some but by no means all Catholics.

This meant to Catholic liberals that "artificial" means of birth control ought legitimately to be within the purview of a loving married couple to decide to use ... or not.

Post-Vatican II Teaching on Birth Control

The bishops at Vatican II, as it turned out, would have little to say about sex, marriage, and birth control. Pope Paul VI, moreover, would not accede to liberals' wishes for him to act on his own to codify the radical changes in Catholic teaching that they desired.

The pope's recalcitrance came even in the face of the liberals' claim that to continue to oppose "the pill" and the use of condoms was condemning the world to an impending "population explosion" that would lead to hunger and deprivation, armed violence, and other affronts to traditional Catholic values of social justice and peace.

Pope Paul VI's Encyclical Humanae Vitae ("On Human Life")

The work of Vatican II was completed in 1965. It wasn't until 1968 that Paul VI promulgated his encyclical Humanae Vitae ("On Human Life") reaffirming traditional Catholic teaching that "artificial" contraception is wrong. In so doing, the pope (said his critics) was continuing to view issues of sexual morality, within marriage and outside it, as "act-centered"— i.e., each and every act of using artificial means of birth control was in and of itself absolutely wrong — rather than taking cognizance of a married couple's intentions, context, and life history before pronouncing upon the act.

The very act of using the pill — or a condom or coitus interruptus — to forestall pregnancy was in and of itself against God's will, the encyclical held. Only "natural family planning," as the rhythm method had come to be called, was acceptable.

The Papal Commission on Birth Control

Pope Paul VI's 1968 pronouncement came after an expert commission launched by the previous pontiff, John XXIII, and enlarged more than once by Paul VI himself had sent to Paul a "majority report" suggesting a new view of birth control. The report held that modern times had made the use of artificial contraception no longer the enemy of the main purpose of marriage — which continued to be viewed by the commission's majority as procreation and the education of children.

Thanks to antibiotics and to better hygiene, diet, and health care, the report said, a "demographic transition" had occurred such that no longer were the births of seven children necessary to ensure that two made it to adulthood, thus to replace their parents in the population.

Moreover, masses of humanity in poorer nations were abandoning agricultural villages and moving to cities, meaning that it was becoming increasingly harder to pull lesser-developed countries out of poverty, if population growth were not curbed. Not allowing families to avoid unwanted pregnancies by means of artificial contraception, said Catholic liberals, severely aggravated those dangerous demographic trends. That alone was justification enough, in the liberals' view, for the church to revise its stance on birth control.

The Commission's "Minority Report"

Along with the commission's "majority report," a countervailing "minority report" that argued for continuing the traditional Catholic proscription against artificial contraception was leaked to the press not long before Paul VI published his encyclical Humanae Vitae. As a result, large numbers of Catholics had already become exercised over the issue by the time Humanae Vitae came out, so, when that occurred, great numbers of bishops, theologians, priests and religious, and lay Catholics were extremely disappointed in the anti-modernist stance the pope took.

Why Paul VI's Anti-Birth Control Stance?

Fox asks why Paul VI took the stance he did and suggests that at the end of the day he may have had four motives.

1. One was the possibility that the traditional church had grown "increasingly defensive and even ghettoized" in the face of modernity's attendant "evils," and the pontiff wanted to draw a clear line in the sand against said "evils."
   
   
2. Another possibility was the danger seemingly imposed to the longstanding "systematic theory" the church had promulgated concerning matters of sexuality, a theory which linked moral beliefs about contraception with those proscribing extramarital intercourse, homosexuality, and masturbation.
   
   If childbearing within marriage alone justified sexual expression, and if the church changed that teaching to allow sex for purposes of other than creating new life (such as cementing the loving relationship between husband and wife), might not changes concerning other matters of sexual morality be unavoidable?
   
   
3. A third possibility was that the pope might simply have wanted to reaffirm the church's "great emphasis on tradition."
   
   
4. And fourth, there was the question of the church's authority, never mind the details of the particular moral issue involved. If the pope changed the church's signals on birth control, would he not be admitting the church might have been wrong in other of its previous stances.
   
   As Fox puts it, "How could the Holy Spirit allow the church to have been wrong?" If wrong on one important matter, then possibly wrong on others ...  and the whole edifice of church authority might come tumbling down.

Patriarchy and Church Authority

It isn't until Fox, in three separate chapters, deals with abortion, homosexuality, and celibacy that, in his chapter on "Women and the Church," he expands on the topic of patriarchal church authority.

In the Catholic Church, as most people know, women have never been priests ... much less bishops. For women to be priests, they would have to be ordained: to undergo the sacrament of Holy Orders. Today, numerous Catholic women in the U.S. would like to see other women — or themselves — made eligible for ordination to Holy Orders. The church hierarchy, though, opposes this.

Why shouldn't women be ordained? The official church teaching is that Jesus chose only men to be his apostles. Bishops in the Catholic Church are successors to the original apostles. If a woman could be made a priest, she might licitly be made a bishop ... and that would be unthinkable! All heirs to the first apostles must be men!

Another rationale is that the priest as the celebrant at a Catholic Mass is considered to be an icon of Christ himself. Through the person of the priest, the person of Christ himself is rendered visible. This putatively requires that the priest be of the same sex as Jesus was.

Catholic Church clerical power structures and the priesthood have accordingly always been male-only.

Feminist Theology

There is today much "feminist theology" within the Catholic Church and in the wider Christian community that disputes the assumption that the exclusive maleness of the Christ-called apostles or the gender of the Savior himself is binding on us today. In view of the fact that having only male apostles was mandated on Jesus by the male-dominated culture he lived in 2,000 years ago, we can change the tradition without giving offense to God. Also, women today can serve as icons of the Savior just as well as men can.

In so admitting, though, the church would be opening up the ranks of vested church authority to people with different agendas and worldviews: women. Feminist Christians looking to promote their agenda and worldview have sought accordingly to expose the roots of traditional church teaching about women, to show that this teaching makes no sense today.

Church Belittlement of Women

Why have women been so belittled by the church that even today the priesthood and the episcopacy (the bishops) remain all-male? In answer, feminists start by citing (says Fox, pp. 218-219)

... Old Testament passages that associate women and evil, especially those that depict women as temptresses, as in the Adam and Eve story. Of course, the subjugation of women preceded Hebrew and Christian biblical writings, dating back to antiquity where it was common to view women as a source of disease and bad spirits, especially during menstruation when intercourse was often prohibited. Both pagans and Jews looked upon menstrual blood as infectious and poisonous. For example, in the Old Testament book of Leviticus (15:19-24) God defines a menstruating woman as unclean for seven days, and anyone who touches her or anything she has touched, or anything touched by someone she has touched, as unclean. Such attitudes were common at the time and were widely shared by the early Christians. The subjugation of women by men was reflected in New Testament injunctions as well. For example, Christian women were told to be silent in the Christian assemblies and were to subordinate themselves to male "headship." Early Christian writers, again reflecting broader cultural currents, had little understanding or sympathy for women's bodily functions, which they commonly feared. Around the year 200, the church father Clement of Alexandria ... warned men not to have intercourse with menstruating women, claiming that children conceived during menstruation would be born impaired. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, menstruation had the added disadvantage of being tied to sin, commonly seen as the result of God's punishment after Eve tempted Adam to eat of the Tree of Knowledge. Clement was only one of early church writers to express virtual contempt for women. He once observed that a woman should properly be shamed when she thinks "of what nature she is."

In such writings are found examples of long-held male prejudices as well as the early beginnings of church structures built to help keep men pure and women at a distance. It was not long before these notions worked their way into church theology and traditions, becoming integral to Christian reflections, especially those dealing with sexual morality. Augustine, writing in the fourth century, for example, noted that "the good Christian likes what is human, loathes what is feminine." Eight centuries later, Thomas Aquinas wrote that "woman is defective and misbegotten" and that "it is not possible in the female sex that any eminence of degree can be signified."

Unbroken Church Tradition

The Catholic Church's unbroken tradition, then, has been both anti-woman and anti-sex. It has been considered "better" for a man to be unmarried and celibate than to marry and accordingly have sex with a wife. The men who answer the call to the celibate priesthood have always been the ones in power positions in the church, from the pope and the prelates in the Vatican on down through the local archbishops and bishops to the male priesthood. The church has always been patriarchal.

If a man eschews being a priest and marries, furthermore, sex with his wife must always remain "open" to procreation. If pregnancy is not desired, the only sanctioned method of avoiding it is to abstain from sex during the wife's fertile time of the month.

Forms of sexual expression that by their nature can never be "open" to procreation are accordingly prohibited: homosexual acts, masturbation, oral sex, anal sex, coitus interruptus, etc.

As for women, according to church tradition they can best serve the Lord if humble and virginal. If they marry, they must grant "headship" to their husband. They may not become priests.

Fox writes that the church has recently, during the pontificate of John Paul II, defended this arrangement by appealing to the "complementarity" of men and women. In this view, men and women are said to be made equally in God's image, but their basic natures are "complementary," not identical. This, indeed, is why traditionalists insist a woman cannot serve as an iconic representative of Christ in saying the Mass.

In today's culture, such a view of women has been called into question by feminists and the women's liberation movement. Likewise, feminists in the church have dissented from this traditional view.

An Alternative Theology: Creation-Centered Spirituality

If traditional church teaching is out of step with today's world, Fox asks, is there an alternative?

Some Catholic theologians, writes Fox in his chapter on "Carnal Love," have proposed a "creation-centered" spirituality. The Creator, the Redeemer, and the Holy Spirit — the three persons of the one Trinitarian God — have alternated insofar as which has stood out in Christian history and culture. In the Orthodox Christianity of Eastern Europe, the Holy Spirit has traditionally commanded attention. In the West, it has been the Redeemer, Jesus Christ, who has been the focus of attention. Now the proponents of a creation-centered spirituality say we need to throw the spotlight on the Creator, traditionally known as God the Father.

The Cosmic Story

A creation-centered spirituality, says Fox, would depart from "the anthropocentric Adam and Eve story" to instead "stress the cosmic story, the creation of galaxies, of the solar system, of the planet, and the evolution of species, including humanity."

There are, according to this alternate approach, "complex webs of ecological support systems" that exist at various levels of complexity in the world, with God being seen as "part of all that is." Creation-centered spirituality is all about "finding God in nature" ... a challenge which, Fox writes, comports easily with the traditional Catholic emphasis on the sacraments: "ordinary substances and actions that point believers toward the mystery of the divine." Creation-centered spirituality is quintessentially sacramental.

The "Original Blessing" of the Cosmos

Fox says the "foundation truth" of such a newly understood cosmic story would not be Original Sin, as in the Adam and Eve story, but "original blessing." All creation itself is placed front-and-center here. The big bang happened 15 billion years ago. Compress all of cosmic history into a 100-year time scale, and our species appeared on the very last day of the ninety-ninth year. On the last day of the final year our classical religious culture, the one we today know so well, emerged ... at 11:40 PM!

We are cosmic newcomers who are still developing our understanding of who and what we are.

A New "Ecological" Period of Religious Culture

Now perhaps it's time for us to transition from "classical" religious culture into a new "ecological" period, says Fox. He tells of how Passionist priest-theologian Thomas Berry has written, in his 1988 book The Dream of the Earth, that in this new ecological period we ought no longer to focus on our "redemption out of this world through a personal Savior relationship that eclipses all concerns with cosmic order and process." Instead, we need to think of ourselves primarily as God-created beings in our universe.

The universe, says Thomas Berry, is at all levels of organization "a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects." On this planet, we humans especially compose a "communion of subjects." We humans are conscious and reflective. We uniquely have our own interior, subjective experiences. We must therefore not treat one another — or anything else in our universe that likewise reflects its Creator — simply as "things," as mere objects.

Accordingly, the larger world of Planet Earth is fundamentally not a "thing," a dumb object for us humans to "subdue," as the traditional injunction in Genesis goes. It too is a "communion" of non-"things" — for example, of populations of species interacting within their environments to form ecosystems.

Catholic Novelist Demetria Martinez & Sociologist/Novelist Father Andrew Greeley

How is ecological, creation-centered spirituality related to Catholic attitudes about sex? Catholic novelist Demetria Martinez provides Fox with one answer. She has written that "being grounded in the physical" — including the sexual — is "a way of experiencing the divine."

Father Andrew M. Greeley is a sociologist who since the early 1970s has researched the question of why Catholics, though turned off by the anti-birth control stance of Humanae Vitae, stay Catholic. He likewise endorses the notion, Fox writes, that what we experience is how, first and foremost, we each come to know the divine.

"Popular Tradition" vs. "High Tradition"

Catholics stay Catholic, Fr. Greeley's research shows, because for them it is the "popular tradition" of Catholicism, as they experience it, that counts — not the "high tradition" of official teachings about sex and other matters.

In the Catholic "popular tradition," writes Fox, "religion is more about imagination than it is about doctrine. ... Greeley says Catholics are remarkably faithful to their religious beliefs no matter how negative their experiences have been with the Catholic institution. Those beliefs, [Greeley] says, work out of a deeper realm within the believer. Simply stated, [Greeley] says, Catholics like being Catholic."

Why so? "They especially like the 'sacramentality' of the church ... the imaginative outlook that views creatures as metaphors for God, as hints of what God is like."

The "Theology of Story"

For Greeley, who is a novelist as well as a priest and a sociologist, there is a "theology of story" that counts for more, to faithful believers, than does the official theology of the church:

[Greeley] speaks of the theology of story, saying that believers tell religious stories of themselves and others to help give meaning to their lives. He says these stories help predict the way people live out their lives. "The idea is that religion is, first of all, an experience of the holy, the sacred, the good, and then it's the image and memory which recalls that experience, what we would call a symbol, and then it's the story we tell to others to explain the symbol and to recount our experience. That's religion," Greeley has said.

Personal experiences of the sacred. Stories. Images. Symbols. They all fit together, Greeley has found ... including in the ways that Catholics experience sex.

A New "Body Theology"

Greeley's research shows that Catholics have sex more often than non-Catholics, even into their later years. Catholic spouses stay romantic, says Greeley, manifesting what he calls "a series of religious and erotic behaviors that do not substitute for one another."

That means (in my interpretation) that the "religious" and the "erotic" are for Catholics not polar opposites. They intermesh. To them, as Fox puts it, "good sex is good for religion and good religion leads to healthy sex."

Moreover, according to Greeley, "Catholics — especially Catholic women — score significantly higher on the sexual playfulness scale. For example, Catholics are half again as likely (three out of ten as opposed to two out of ten) to say they have purchased erotic undergarments either often or sometimes. They are also significantly more likely to report showers or baths with their spouse."

So, Catholics "bring a playfulness to their sex ... because of the gracious images of God they carry within them, images fostered by their religion, images of benign human relationships — mother, spouse, friend, and lover — as metaphors for God.

Accordingly, in our Catholic "popular tradition" our "story theology" is also a "body theology," in which "we take our body experiences seriously as occasions of revelation."

Sexuality and Church Authority

After discussing such new attitudinal approaches to theology and sexuality, Fox goes on to a chapter about how the church's stands on birth control and sexuality in general affect ongoing worries about the world's population growth, especially in poorer nations. Then he wraps up with a long chapter and finally a shorter one on how issues of sexuality relate to church authority and the Catholic future.

Pope John Paul II, who was pontiff when Fox's book was written, issued encyclicals such as Veritatis Splendor ("The Splendor of Truth") asserting that the church could not and would not "discuss" changes of its teaching vis-à-vis artificial contraception.

Fox casts this as obdurateness in service to shoring up the authority vested in the Vatican hierarchy, with the pope himself expressly at the top of the pyramid. If the church reverses itself on contraception, the thinking seems to have been, it undermines its whole magisterium — the Catholic Church's body of traditional teachings, down through the ages.

John Paul II and his successor, Benedict XVI — who as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was head of the Vatican's archconservative Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under John Paul II — have seemed to view the modern world as infected by a deep malaise. In the mind of John Paul II, the malaise was a problem with more than just sexual morality. Sexual matters aside, it seems to have included such things as rapacious capitalists ... of exactly the sort that brought America's financial industry down in 2008. It also included many of us baby boomers who have formed the self-centered "Me Generation." And so on.

Veritatis Splendor

In 1993 Pope John Paul II promulgated his encyclical Veritatis Splendor ("The Splendor of Truth"), which Fox describes as "calling for a restoration of rules of behavior in moral theology."

In it, the pope decried "modern tendencies" and "certain currents of thought," blaming liberal bishops and theologians for defecting from church orthodoxy and creating a crisis in the church. John Paul II had previously gone so far as to deprecate "the Second Vatican Council's statements about the omnipresence of grace in the world" as "wildly optimistic," and Veritatis Splendor was, in his mind, apparently, a corrective to that.

But according to polling research done by Father Andrew M. Greeley in the 1970s, what had created the crisis, in the American church specifically, was not Vatican II but the 1968 encyclical that blocked Catholics from using artificial contraception, Humanae Vitae:

"The encyclical and not the council is responsible for the deterioration of American Catholicism in the last decade," [Greeley] wrote, "Had it not been for the council, the deterioration would have been worse."

Yet John Paul II saw things otherwise. In reaffirming Humanae Vitae in no uncertain terms, he (per Fox) "said that contraception under any circumstances is 'intrinsically evil' and therefore can never be justified."

Implications for Catholic Moral Theology

Post-Vatican II, during and after the 1960s, Catholic priests and moral theologians had transitioned to judging the gravity of putative sins, confessed by penitents to priest-confessors, as determined "in the light of the gospel and of human experience." This was new. It added "human experience" to "the usual Catholic triad of Scripture, tradition, and natural law" as determinative of what is or is not sinful and how serious the sin might be.

True, the new approach harkened back to traditional ways in which confessors had long adjudged sins only after inquiring into the "intention" or aim of the act being confessed, into the circumstances of the act, and into its results. At least in the modern era, there was never a time in which the personal context of a penitent's act counted for nothing in the confessional.

But John Paul II's Veritatis Splendor undermined that. Acts such as the use of artificial birth control, since they were deemed "intrinsically evil," could not be exonerated by human experience and personal context. Here was instead a papal declaration of moral absolutes, done on the authority of the pope alone.

Evangelium Vitae

In 1995, John Paul II followed Veritatis Splendor with a new encyclical, Evangelium Vitae ("The Gospel of Life"). In it, he posited the need to overcome a modern "culture of death" that had taken root in the church and in the world. He asserted a "consistent ethic of life" as its antidote. In such a way did he take a clear stand against abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide, capital punishment ... and also against contraception, sterilization, scientific experiments on surplus embryos, artificial insemination, and other such modern reproductive technologies.

With Evangelium Vitae the list of "intrinsically evil" sins concerning matters sexual and reproductive grew, meaning that confessors who wanted to toe the official Vatican line could not consider personal experience or other potentially mitigating factors of context and life history in assessing sin.

A Single Theological Pathway ...

As Fox puts it, "Both Veritatis Splendor and Evangelium Vitae vigorously affirm a single theological pathway as true for all time for the doing of Catholic moral theology." And that inerrant pathway comes to the church only through "the papacy itself." The world at large may, in terms of its broad human experience, find such things as artificial contraception to be, if sinful at all, the lesser of possible evils. But that counts for nothing, John Paul II asserted, if the pope takes a different view.

... Versus Two Opposing Models of Church

What is really going on, Fox shows, is that two distinct models of church are contending with one another.

In the conservative model put forth by popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the Holy Father can infallibly declare certain things to be "intrinsically evil." End of discussion. Even when the declarations technically stop short of invoking papal infallibility, for all practical purposes the result is — or is intended to be — the same. No bishops or moral theologians are permitted to dissent. No lay persons or priests hearing confessions can make up their own rules based on human experience and personal witness.

But some bishops, theologians, feminists, etc., in the U.S. and elsewhere have posited a new model of church. In the new model the rightness or wrongness of sexual, marital, and reproductive acts is not to be left entirely to the dictates of a celibate male priesthood and church hierarchy. The personal experience of such a priesthood does not match up with, say, that of a woman who desperately wants to have no more children but for whom the rhythm method of birth control does not work.

Nor does it match up with the experience of gays and lesbians who do not want to go through life with no sexual intimacies or marital unions whatsoever on grounds that their orientation is deemed "intrinsically disordered."

Nor with the experience of Catholics in second marriages whose first marriages ended in civil divorce, but who for one reason or another cannot obtain from the church the necessary "annulment" of their first marriage that would allow them to receive the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist without Vatican opprobrium.

The New Church Model

Instead of a "vertical" model in which "a God 'up in heaven' ... sends down graces through a series of chosen mediators" — to wit, the pope, the Vatican hierarchy, the bishops, and the priests — a new "horizontal" model has it that God is preeminently "among the people and shares their experiences."

"In this model," writes Fox, "God is not 'above'; God is within the church, present to it in Word and Spirit. Jesus did not leave the world in his Resurrection; Jesus in Resurrection became the Christ dwelling 'until the end of the world' with those who in faith and hope accept the redeeming truth that unending life comes from the Cross."

In this new model of church, God's law is written in all of our hearts and calls for our reasoned response in terms of personal experience and conscience. On this view, we were created basically good and can be trusted to use our consciences appropriately as guides to reason.

This is the model of church Vatican II promulgated, Fox tells us. But John Paul II in effect rescinded it, along with much of the spirit of Vatican II itself, by declaring a list of acts that, in and of themselves, he called intrinsically and absolutely wrong.

In so doing, he likewise moved to rescind the new model of church that many non-conservative post-Vatican II Catholics have shown themselves eager to embrace.

Fox's Final Chapter: Moral Theology and the Catholic Future

Fox finishes his book with a chapter discussing what the future may hold, in terms of Catholic views on moral theology. Many theologians, he says, are attempting to integrate the two opposing views of church and of moral theology.

The two views can be characterized as a "classicist" view and one that brings "historical consciousness" into the picture.

In the classicist view, reality is understood "in terms of the eternal, the immutable, and the unchanging." Meanwhile, historical consciousness promotes the importance of "the particular, the contingent, the historical, and the individual" in assessing the propriety of our relationship to God.

Only when the church's teachings can develop and evolve, the historicist view goes, can Scripture be properly interpreted (an reinterpreted) from one age to another.

Theological Forces in Tension

Fox accordingly writes (p. 337):

The conflicting forces of Catholic moral theology involve the drive toward totality on one hand and the recognition of diversity on the other. Catholic moral theology since Thomas Aquinas has proclaimed a living, unified, intelligible vision in which moral evaluation occurs. In this scheme the morality of sexual acts is seen in the light of a preexisting law called natural law. It governs all, is intelligible to all, but is proclaimed by the church.

Counterposed to that, Fox says, is this:

During this century and especially in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, Catholic theologians began also to consider history, sociology, and anthropology, having acquired the theoretical ability to stand outside history and see it as history, rather than being immersed in it. These capabilities allowed greater awareness of circumstances and, if not allowing complete objectivity, moved the analysis to particulars demanding their own analysis. Circumstance entered theological discourse as did the need to understand the persons as well as the acts before coming to moral judgment.

The post-Vatican II stances of John Paul II (and now Benedict XVI) have undercut that second trend in Catholic moral theology by undercutting its emphasis on human diversity and the personal circumstances within which various acts take place.

Resolving the Tension

Fox comes to no firm conclusion as to how the tension between the two theological and ecclesial models can be resolved.

He does say that few Catholics, no matter how opposed to recent papal pronouncements concerning birth control and other sexual, marital, and reproductive issues, would embrace a church in which the pope and the Vatican had no authority whatsoever in matters of faith and morals. His implication, then, is that there clearly needs to be a top-down/bottom-up dialogue.

Unfortunately the Vatican, as of the time Fox's book was being written — it was published in 1995 — had actively moved to forestall such dialogue by going so far as to remove at least one (French) bishop who vocally dissented from official doctrine and to clamp down on academic theologians who likewise dissented. This, says Fox, created a "chill factor" which has prevented bishops from frankly representing to the Vatican the attitudes of their flocks.

For the moment, it seemed to Fox, no creative top-down/bottom-up dialogue was in the offing. His belief clearly was that the future would surely bring a just resolution to the tension.

Beauty and Soul

With this post I'm rededicating this blog (yes, yet again!). It's now dedicated to all things Catholic — I'm a Roman Catholic, after all — and it asks the question what does it mean to be a Catholic in today's America and in today's world.

In today's world we are confronted with a new and virulent form of atheism. New, because it takes its cues solely from a scientific naturalism or scientism which says we can know and believe only what science tells us we can know and believe. Virulent, because it is widely disseminated through a bevy of recent best-selling books. One of the most well known of these is The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins.

At the same time, we are dealing with a high culture/popular culture twofer which tells us this supposed moral truth: We can do anything we like, as long as no one else gets hurt.

This seeming cancellation of the "old" moral values taught by religion has, it is widely said — I think misguidedly — "freed" us. "Liberated" us. "Deprogrammed" us. We no longer need religion. In fact, say Dawkins and his fellow anti-religion authors Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett, religion must be jettisoned entirely from our lives in order that we may avoid the "evils" religion confers on us.

No wonder cognitive dissonance besets many of us as we think about God.

Avoiding Cognitive Dissonance

Cognitive dissonance arises whenever we try to hold two contradictory ideas in our head at one time. Our heads then labor to obliterate one of of the two. If one of the ideas is that we are radically free to do whatever we like as long as no one else gets hurt, and the other idea is that our true freedom arises only from living out moral limits graven in human hearts by God, then either the first idea or the second idea must go.

In our world, it is the second idea which many people have given the old heave-ho. If religion conflicts with our supposed radical freedom to do as we like, so much the worse for religion.

True, many of us remain "religious." Some of our faith denominations have even become "liberal" and "progressive" enough to enshrine a great deal of what the culture is teaching us now anyway. Many of the old moral proscriptions and limitations have been abandoned by various churches in the name of keeping as many folks in the Sunday morning pews as possible.

Yet — and this is especially true in Europe — the pews are growing increasingly empty. Conclusion: watering down religion hurts, rather than helps, the cause of faith.

In America, lots of us still go to services at churches and synagogues. Yet there's a divide that is more evident here than in Europe. Here, not all those who attend church or synagogue regularly are singing from the same hymn book. The Great Divide in American religion is tripartite, in that devout Americans who are religious "fundamentalists," those who are religious "liberals," and those who are religious "traditionalists" (I'm in this third group) have little to say to one another.

The Third Group: Religious Traditionalists

Who else, besides me, in this third group? Many regular worshippers here in America are traditional Christians or Jews whose churches and synagogues haven't caved in to the culture. Among those traditional Christians and Jews are so-called "conservative" Catholics, of whom I lately find that I am one.

But we "conservative" Catholics are not fundamentalists. We are not creationists who reject Darwinian evolution. We do not read the Bible literally. We do not take the Bible to be the only written words that inform our faith. In fact, we believe in teachings and doctrines that have, yes, evolved in the Church over the course of the last 2,000 years.

The word "conservative," however, is at best a term of convenience: traditional, orthodox Catholics are "conservative" in ways that can seem positively radical. Is it "conservative" to seek, for example, to end the death penalty or to remedy the gross disparities in income and wealth in our present society? "Conservative" Catholics can be firebrands for social justice and zealous exponents of respect for human life and dignity.

Why Many Have Left the Catholic Church

Still and all, great numbers of baby boomers who were raised as Catholics — I'm a boomer, but I'm a midlife convert to Catholicism — have left the Church, and perhaps all religion, behind. There are many reasons why. One of them, I think, was what happened in 1968. That was the tumultuous year in which Pope Paul VI promulgated his papal encyclical Humanae Vitae, "On Human Life." It prohibited use by Catholics of birth control pills, condoms, and all other forms of "artificial" contraception.

My Catholic classmates at Georgetown University, or at least many of them, went into revolt.

If I had been Catholic then, I would have done so too.

I now believe the pope was right, and we were wrong. Using "the pill" — or condoms, etc. — saws away at the psychological and therefore spiritual connection between sex and procreation.

It therefore saws away at our understanding of the connection between our human sexuality and the inner life of the God in Three Persons — the Holy Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. According to Catholic belief, that inner life of God expresses itself in the fundamental nature of our worldly reality. Sex and procreation-within-marriage mirror the love of the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity for one another, a love that spills over in God's very act of creating the world. It tattoos the created reality with certain truths which we then encounter as "moral" verities — "thou shalt nots," from one (not necessarily fully insightful) point of view.

They're actually not just "thou shalt nots"; they're actually "thou ought betters." Thou ought better to keep marriage and reproduction holy and sacred. Why? Two reasons. Doing so (despite the teachings of today's culture) makes ours a better world. And doing so makes us as individuals better people — people better suited to spend eternity with God.

Thus Endeth the Sermon ... 

OK. End of sermon. My point here is really that what I just sermonized about is hugely controversial in today's culture, which means it helps divide us mainly into five camps:

1. Committed atheists and agnostics; many of these are "scientific naturalists" who believe in science as the only revealer of truth
2. The many today who are apathetic toward religion; these people have been cleverly labeled "apatheists"
3. Committed Christians, Jews, and Muslims — I'll call them Peoples of the Book — who are so averse to modern times that they (in the view of the Catholic Church and of yours truly) wrongly reject scientific insights such as Darwinian evolution; these are the "creationists" and "fundamentalists"
4. Committed Peoples of the Book who go so far the other way and are so "open to modernity" (and "postmodern" thought) that they toss out all of the "old" ways of looking at things that now cause "modern" folks heartburn; these are the theological "liberals" and "progressives"
5. Committed Peoples of the Book who refuse to set aside the orthodox beliefs that form the doctrines and teachings of their religious traditions; among these are today's traditional Roman Catholics, including yours truly

I am, for purposes of this discussion, setting aside people of religious backgrounds other than monotheistic ones: other than, that is, members of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religions.

Given that those in Camp 1 — committed atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers — are "center stage" in today's bastions of arts and letters and at today's better universities, we in Camp 5 who would duel with Camp 1 followers have to do so as if "from the wings." At the same time, we'd like to avoid veering into Camps 2, 3, and 4. We must sidestep any temptations to become apathetic about challenging the current culture, playing into the hands of Camp 2; any temptations to disdain modern science, thus joining Camp 3; or any temptations to jettison the old moral teachings, affirming Camp 4.

If we manage to do all that, we still run aground on the popular culture's assumption of radical moral freedom. If the high moral ground is held today by the "I Did It My Way"/"Different Strokes For Different Folks" crowd, arguing for the existence of God and against the atheists' viewpoint won't work for those folks if it's grounded in old-fashioned religious moral dictates.

Beauty and the Soul

But what else is there? How can Camp 5 even begin to answer back to Camp 1 without alienating the great many in Camps 2, 3, and 4 who do not want to hear about the old "thou shalt nots"?

One way is to talk about beauty and the soul. We can all agree that we know beauty when we see it. What does this fact tell us about who we are, and how can it lead us to belief in God? I ask and try to answer these and related questions in my Google Doc "Beauty and the Soul." Please feel free to read it and then post any thoughts you may have about it as comments to this blog.

Alone in the Universe

My argument for the existence of some sort of Creator God is that we seem to be alone in the universe.

Science has peered outward and found that there are as many as 200 billion galaxies in the observable universe. There are some 100 billion stars in our own galaxy, the Milky Way. Our own star, the sun, is very, very average in size and age, and exists in the humdrum outer reaches of a plain-vanilla spiral galaxy. Yet it has just one inhabited planet, as far as we know: earth.

We have lately discovered planets around other stars in the galaxy, though we can't as yet detect any planets as small as ours. So we have not yet confirmed the existence of planets elsewhere whose conditions can be considred ripe for the evolution of life. I assume, however, that innumerable such planets exist, and the question is, are any of them inhabited by intelligent life forms?

In his Cosmos TV series and book, the late astronomer Carl Sagan presented the Drake equation giving an estimate of the potential number of extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy. Frank Drake, an American astronomer and astrophysicist, devised the equation to take into account:

• the average yearly rate of star formation in the galaxy
• the fraction of those stars that have planets
• the average number of planets per star that can potentially support life
• the fraction that actually develop life at some point
• the fraction of life-bearing planets that develop intelligent life, and therefore civilizations
• the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that gives off detectable signs of their existence into space
• the length of time such civilizations give off detectable signals into space (as they may cease doing so for a number of reasons, including self-destruction via, say, nuclear weapons)

These imprecise factors were estimated by Drake in such a way as to yield a result of just 10 civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible.

Of course, if there are 200 billion galaxies out there, by such estimates there may be on the order of 10 x 200 billion, or 2,000 billion planets in the cosmos that can give off signs of intelligent life. In SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, we have been searching for such signs for the last fifty years. So far, nothing.

Meanwhile, Sagan in his Cosmos series was openly skeptical about such things as UFOs and alien abductions. There is no hard evidence, he said, that any earthling has ever encountered beings from outer space.

My guess, in view of all the above, is that we're alone. If I'm right, then what does that say to us?

I personally believe in evolution. Life somehow began on earth and then evolved, producing (among countless other species) us. No one in the scientific community knows for sure how life began on earth. Darwin himself simply assumed that it began in ways that lie outside the scope of his theory of evolution.

Logically, if life began in the same way on Planet X, a planet enough like ours to allow intelligent life to evolve in the ordinary way, then there must be some non-zero probability, however tiny, that intelligent life would evolve on that Planet X. The "however tiny" probability factor here relates closely to Drake's fraction of life-bearing planets that develop intelligent life, and therefore civilizations.

So, if there are really 10 planets in the galaxy that have undergone earth-like evolution leading to currently existing species whose individual members possess minds, then on each of those 10 planets there must have been Darwinian evolution by natural selection from simple, original life forms that lack minds.

Yet we have yet to see any signs whatsoever of "little green men". Where are they?

If they are nowhere, then intelligent life has developed, from an original life form we cannot as yet explain, on earth alone. How decidely odd. Sagan and other scientists have emphasized how ordinary our planet, sun, solar system, and galaxy are. If that's right, then our being absolutely alone (if we indeed are) must mean sommething.

To me, it means there is a Creator God. This God, whatever else is true about Him, Her, or It, must be capable of mighty works: the creation of life. Moreover, He/She/It must be capable of intentionally deciding to create life in just one of numberless hospitable habitats in the physical universe.

We generally say that any being capable of having and expressing such discrimination of intent is a "person" with a "will". So the fact that we are alone implies, to me, a mighty Creator God who is a person with a will. I'll call that person male by convention and use the masculine pronoun accordingly.

If there were more than one such creative Deity, then we would expect more than one instance of intelligent life in the universe. Hence, our Creator God is most likely also alone.

All this says nothing whatever about how the universe itself came to be. It might have existed always and forever. It might have come to be as the result of a big bang, which may or may not imply divine agency, depending on who you ask. My argument sidesteps that discussion entirely. All I'm saying is that, if we're alone in an otherwise vast and fecund universe whose laws are wholly consistent with the sustenance of life and the evolution of intelligence, then maybe that's because the spark of life on our planet came from a God whose intent was to make us His unique creatures.

Decoding Quantum Reality

A new book by physicist Vlatko Vedral, Decoding Reality: The Universe as Quantum Information, gives me new insights about reality.

We know the world — or, put more expansively, the universe — is made up of matter. Einstein's E=mc² showed that matter is a form of energy, so matter and energy are the same thing.

Meanwhile, other physicists such as Niels Bohr were showing that the basic particles of matter and energy — say, electrons for matter, photons for energy — behave in ways that defy common sense. Thus was born the science of quantum physics.

Quantum physics — a.k.a. quantum mechanics — shows how the tiny particles and packets of energy that make up everything we know do strange tricks like being in two places at once. You can pass a photon of light through a "beam splitter" and find that half the time it actually does pass straight through, and half the time it gets reflected onto a different path. Which path it takes is truly random.

Actually, it takes both paths at the same time. Only when we measure or observe the photon's behavior do we lock it into once choice or the other.

Before that observation takes place, you could say (but only very, very loosely) that there are two-photons-in-one. Better put, "they" share "mutual information," which means that our observation of "their" behavior at the beam splitter results in that behavior becoming either-or, not both-and, and it only thus becomes consistent with our common sense and logic. (But which choice the observed photon actually uses is a coin flip. We can never, under any circumstances, predict it. We can never force one outcome to occur over the other.)

Mutual information is known to us in our everyday lives. For instance, if two people are in a bar deciding on what drink to order, and if one says to the other, "I'll have what you're having," then an observer would say there exists mutual information. Knowing what Imbiber A orders tells us what Imbiber B is going to have.

Vlatko Vedral talks a lot about mutual information, which is what typically occurs in the world of "quantum information."

Quantum information is an enlargement of "information theory." The latter began in the middle of the 20th century when Bell Labs researcher Claude Shannon was trying to figure out how best to send information down a noisy telephone line. What is information, actually? asked Shannon. It's anything that, by surprising us in some way, conveys a state of affairs we weren't expecting. "Congratulations, you've won the lottery!" contains a huge amount of information. Static on a telephone line contains zero information (especially in the old, pre-digital days when static was always present on phone lines).

We know that information is, on a computer, contained in bits. Each bit is either a zero or a one. In quantum information, quantum bits or "qubits" are used instead of regular bits. A qubit can in effect be zero and one at the same time. For example, it can be "1/3 zero" and "2/3 one." That is, when we actually observe it and lock it into one definite value or the other, 0 or 1, the chance that it will wind up being zero is 1-in-3, while the chance that it will wind up being one is 2-in-3.

As long as the probability that it's zero and the probability that it's one — after being observed by us, that is — no laws of nature are being violated at all.

So what? Well, the answer to that question has practical dimensions and philosophical ones. I'll let Mr. Vedral tell you about some of the practical ones in his video discussion of his book:




The philosophical dimensions are the ones that interest me. Vedral hints at some of them toward the end of his video.

He shows, mainly in the last part of his book, that there's good reason to believe that information — of the quantum variety — is the stuff of all reality. Matter and energy very likely emerge from qubits, and qubits are repositories of mutual information which — only when they are measured by some observer such as us, using a beam splitter — behave themselves like regular bits, 0's or 1's, of information.

But where do the qubits come from? Here's where things get very interesting. Quantum information doesn't have to have a source or cause of existence.

If we ignore for a moment that qubits are probabilistic and think of them as if they were regular bits, we know that regular bits represent numbers (out of which computers construct other sorts of data). Numbers can, like qubits, be said to be primary to all our reality. That's why quantum theory and Einstein's theory of relativity can be collapsed into a set of formulas like E=mc². Formulas are just ways of manipulating numbers.

So to answer the question of where do number-representing qubits come from, we can ask where numbers themselves come from. Vedral shows (borrowing from computer pioneer John von Neumann) that numbers come from ... nothing whatsoever!

The behavior of numbers can be shown to depend on "set theory." "Sets" are, basically, collections of numbers. {1,2} is a set of numbers that is, in turn, a subset of {1,2,3}. {1} is a subset of {1,2}. Does {1} have any subset? Yes: the "empty" set.

Von Neumann showed that the empty set contains itself ... meaning that the contained empty set has one element. Thus does the number 1 emerge from the number 0!

The contained empty set also contains itself. Thus does the number 2 emerge from the number 1!

And so on. All the numbers that exist emerge from an empty set that represents 0, or nothingness!

If qubits equate to numbers, then all quantum information emerges from nothingness. If all the world's a body of quantum information, then the whole universe emerges from (as I'll call it) "zerohood."

Furthermore, each number in the sequence of emergence-from-zerohood depends on all the earlier numbers in the sequence. They share mutual information, just as Imbiber B who says "I'll have what you're having" depends on Imbiber A.

Our act of measurement or observation of quantum behavior is like when we take a photo of kids jumping on a trampoline:

It looks like they're motionless, but of course they're not! Likewise, when we "capture" a quantum event by observing it, it turns into a randomly chosen, but definite, outcome. We lose, meanwhile, the "mutual" information whenever a qubit of information is turned by our observing it into a hard-and-fast bit.

For example, when we observe the position of an electron, we thereby lose any ability to learn its speed, direction of motion, and momentum. An electron's position and its velocity are related by virtue of being mutual information.

Can you tell, in the photo above, whether the kids are on the way up or on the way down?

We could say that the kids' direction is basically, as far as we are concened, a coin flip: we might as well flip an ordinary coin to decide which direction they are going in.

But at the same time, we are aware that what direction the kids were actually going in when the photo was taken is deterministic, not random. If we knew what forces were acting on them just prior to the taking of the photo, we could say for sure what direction they were moving in.

Not so with quantum behavior. There is no way to be sure, for example, which direction of motion a beam splitter will yield when a photon is sent into it: will it pass straight through, or will it be reflected?

Yet, says Vedral, quantum behavior is (according to the equations of quantum theory) just as deterministic as the mechanics of jumping on a trampoline! It's just our act of observing quantum behavior that turns it — seemingly — random.

So there's a mysterious interplay between deterministic quantum information and any and all acts of observation and measurement of that information, which makes the quantum information seem, in some of its aspects, random.

From the point of view of its randomness, quantum information is truly random. It's not like a physical coin flip, which seems random in its result but is actually subject to the laws of classical physics, à la Isaac Newton. If we had enough information about (among other things) the force applied to it by a thumbnail when it is flipped into the air, we would be able to predict with perfect accuracy whether it is going to come down heads or tails.

Not so with "quantum coin flips." No amount of prior knowloedge could tell us whether a photon will pass through a beam splitter or be reflected.

That means that we have no business saying that the outcome of a "quantum coin flip" has a cause! In fact, it has no cause whatsoever.

But everything we observe in the universe is, ultimately, a series of quantum coin flips!

That suggests that the observable universe is, at base, uncaused. As it emerges from "zerohood," it is fundamentally without cause.

This is what really interests me.

We see a world in which, for most practical purposes, everything that happens — every "event" — has a cause. Newton's laws of mechanics and of gravity seem to tell us everything we need to know ...

... except that they don't. Einstein proved that, and then the theorists of quantum physics came along and confounded even Einstein, who said "God does not play dice with the universe."

Well, if there is a God, He clearly does play dice — specifically, the fact is that quantum coin flips are behind everything we see. Before there is matter and energy, the stuff of reality is quantum information.

To me that suggests that we, as observable beings of and in the universe, are radically free. At root we are, by the ceaseless acts of observation that ascertain our very being, a coterie of random, quantum coin flips. At root, we are uncaused.

By the logic that applies to quantum phenomena — see above — we are also, in addition to being random and uncaused, deterministic in the very fabric of our being. We are both random and deterministic. We have free will, by virtue of our essential "quantumness," but we are also swept along in the Newtonian, deterministic flow of all the physical events in the universe.

Wrap your mind around that, if you can!

* * *

This view of reality both giveth and taketh away.

It giveth us the ability to say something intelligent in favor of the gut feeling we all have of possessing free will. Philosophers have long debated free will vs. determinism as if the two were mutually exclusive — as our ordinary, everyday logic would seem to dictate. But if Vedral is right about reality being at base quantum, then ordinary logic need not apply.

We can be wholly deterministic beings like the planets in their orbits, and yet we can still have free will!

Of course, common sense still tells us that that conclusion has to be bogus. Seemingly, we have to be, at base, either free-willed or deterministic. Yet Vedral's worldview says no.

There's still a fundamental mystery here, of course. But there's just as much mystery about all things quantum. Richard Feynman, winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics, once said, "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics."

This view of reality also taketh away — see above — our justification for imagining that the universe and all things in it have a cause.

We who believe in God are accustomed to thinking that it must be true that, however metaphorical we may take chapter one of the biblical Book of Genesis to be, God caused the universe to come into existence. The view of reality expounded in Vedral's book says no to that.

If we want to trace reality back to God, says Vedral, we must instead do so apophatically. Wikipedia says in this article:

Apophatic theology — also known as Negative theology or Via Negativa (Latin for "Negative Way") — is a theology that attempts to describe God, the Divine Good, by negation, to speak only in terms of what may not be said about the perfect goodness that is God.

For example:

... one should not say that God is wise since that word arrogantly implies we know what "wisdom" means on a divine scale, whereas we only know what wisdom is believed to mean in a confined cultural context.

One can accordingly say only that God is not ignorant.

Similarly odd to our way of thinking is the idea that God does not cause the universe to exist. Yet such apophatic thinking is precisely what gives us any basis at all for claiming free will! If God causes the universe to exist, then there is no entry point for "zerohood." If there is no entry point for zerohood, Vedral's whole view of reality collapses — as does any quantum basis for claiming free will.

That there is, at the most fundamental level, a break in the chain of causation where "zerohood" asserts itself is, to me, a hugely liberating realization. God tolerates a break in the (ordinarily) totally caused chain of events. God, in fact, insists on it!

* * *

Here's what it's like, for me. Unconsciously for the most part, I seem to operate, usually, under the assumption that I am like a driver on a highway who needs, first and foremost, to be a "good citizen of the road" — for, if I'm not, some sort of huge "accident" is bound to happen to an untold number of cars.

My assumption, deep down, usually is that everything is chained inexorably to everything — as would be the case if all the cars on the road were somehow chained to one another, so that if I run amuck, gun my engine, and run myself into a brick wall, they'll all crash too.

But, no. The world is not cars that by "tight causality" are chained inexorably to one another, such that my errors of comission, or merely of omission, will cause untold driver deaths. Rather, the world is — fundamentally is — a set of bumper cars in an amusement park ride.

Ever ride bumper cars? They have a mind of their own. Try as you might to steer them the way you intend, they insist on veering off on their own tangent and hitting — or missing — whatever might come in their way.

If Vedral's view of reality is right, we live in a "bumper cars world." There is so much stuff that happens that is without any cause whatever, that wrecks on the highway are inevitable. They can't be headed off by everyone being "good citizens of the road." They just can't. They're built into the fabric of reality.

Let me try to put it in a more concrete way. In my usual, tightly causal view of reality, I normally am burdened with the assumption that "bad" stuff like, say, homosexuality can be "fought against" successfully. Hence, someone who is homosexual obviously is or has been the victim of something or someone whose influence, way back during the person's formative years, possibly, has "made" that person what he or she is today.

What was it that did that terrible thing, that had that awful influence over the fate of a fellow human being? Possibly it was a gay teacher in elementary school. Possibly it was a character on a kids' TV show. Who knows exactly what it was? But in a tightly causal view of reality, it is something that can be identified, fought against, and rooted out.

By the same token, in a tightly causal view of reality, I personally have a responsibility to do whatever is necessary, on my little part, to help wage a war against all sorts of "bad" stuff like homosexuality. I ought accordingly to support, say, counseling programs that (claim to) turn gays into straights, or ballot initiatives that (hope to) make gay marriage illegal, or campaigns to put the kibosh on, for example, TV Teletubbies who are "obviously gay."

But in a "bumper cars" view of reality, nothing "causes" all the "bad stuff" in the world. Cars just veer into one another, willy-nilly, and I'm personally off the hook if "bad stuff" like homosexuality happens in this, our mutual "society of the road," while I'm behind the wheel of a vehicle.

In fact, "bad stuff," like someone being attracted sexually to his or her own gender, is not put in train by any event, past or present, which has "made" him or her gay. The bumper sticker is right: it is really true — basically, fundamentally — that "shit happens." There is no devil luring us inexorably, by some tightly coupled chain of adverse causality, to wrack and ruin.

If I thereby let the world off the hook for all the wrecks that I personally think I see on the highway — gay sexual orientation being a metaphorical stand-in here for a whole lot of stuff I normally try to steer my own personal bumper car away from, in hopes of making this a "better world" — then I have to let myself off the hook, too. I am in no way responsible for all the shit that happens in the world.

That's why it is a hugely liberating realization that Vedral's book makes me aware of: the fact that there is, at the bottommost level of that-which-is, a fundamental break in the chain of stuff-causing-other-stuff. There is, in the way that I put it earlier, a place at the very bottom of the deck of reality where causal "zerohood" asserts itself, and cards, good or bad, can be dealt completely at random.

That fact alone lets me personally off the hook for all the shit that happens in the world. And then that hugely liberating fact goes on to pay wonderful dividends: it lets me treat myself and everyone else not as bundles of effects of inexorable causes that make us "bad" or "good" without recourse, but as persons who are worthy of respect regardless.