The Peculiar Human Organism

One of the central components of my thesis (which is, mercifully, coming closer to completion) is that the new atheist account of reality is not “deep” enough - it does not provide a rich or satisfying enough account of the phenomenology of being human. Huge swaths of human existential concerns are relegated to the realm of evolutionary peculiarities or “misfirings” in the attempt to squeeze everything into what John Haught has called an “explanatory monism” which assumes that one mode of explanation - the scientific one - is all we need. This reductive approach to human beings is then held alongside (awkwardly and incoherently, in my view) an arrogated moral authority in the attempt to discredit the very religious traditions which it is unwittingly borrowing from.

I couldn’t help but think of this while reading the opening chapter of Walker Percy’s The Message in the Bottle. The book is about language and, among other things, what our ability to use it - to address others and to be addressed as subjects - might say about our uniqueness in the cosmos, but here, at the outset, Percy simply wonders about how an understanding of human beings as nothing but “organisms in environments” can account for the alienation and longing that is so pervasive a feature of human existence - even when our environment is the best (materially speaking) that our species has ever seen:

If beasts can be understood as organisms living in environments which are good or bad and to which the beast responds accordingly as it it has evolved to respond, how is man to be understood if he feels bad in the best environment?…. A theory of man must account for the alienation of man. A theory of organisms in environments cannot account for it, for in fact organisms in environments are not alienated.

Percy, writing in the mid-twentieth century, summarizes a human predicament that I suspect has not changed much since he penned these words:

Man knows he is something more than an organism in an environment, because for one thing he acts like anything but an organism in an environment. Yet he no longer has the means of understanding the traditional Judeo-Christian teaching that the “something more” is a soul somehow locked in the organism like the ghost in the machine. What is he then? He has not the faintest idea. Entered as he is into a new age, he is like a child who sees everything in his new world, names everything, knows everything except himself.

We might behave as “organisms in environments” on the physical level - we have the skills to survive and have proven wondrously adept at bending the natural world to our material purposes - but at the psychological or spiritual level, this is certainly not the case. If the story of cosmic history is about the emergence of species suited to their environments, why do we seem to be such an odd fit? How has nature thrown up a creature that expects so much more from its environment than it could possibly give it? Is it because, for reasons unknown, we’ve evolved prefrontal lobes that are too big (and overactive) for our own good? Or are human beings more than just organisms in environments.

Percy sets forth the metaphor of human beings as “homeless” wayfarers as opposed to organisms adapting to their environment in order to account for the alienation we feel. While the word “homeless” gets my theological antennae up (it seems to connote an escapist eschatology - “this world is not my home, I’m just-a-passin’ through” - which is problematic on a number of different levels), I think Percy powerfully captures the Christian idea that human beings were made for more than our current experience of the world allows.

To say that we are made for “more” does not require the further claim that this world is not a good one, just that it doesn’t seem to be enough for us. This is more of an empirical observation of how human beings, in fact, think and live in the world than it is a theological claim. The relentless human search for purpose and meaning, no matter what exotic paths this might take us on, is evidence that we at least think we are more than just “organisms in environments.” Simply put, we expect more from the world than it seems able to deliver.

There are, broadly speaking, two ways of interpreting this empirical phenomenon: 1) With Richard Dawkins (among others), dismiss it as the “whingeing self-pity of those who think that life owes them something”; or 2) With Percy (among others), consider the possibility that it might just represent a clue to the mystery and meaning of the universe. Either the phenomenon is an evolutionary oddity which makes no contact with what is actually true about the cosmos, or it is a hint of things to come.

 

A Strange Salvation

One of the dangers of choosing a thesis topic related to a relatively recent (and controversial) socio-cultural phenomenon is that there is invariably a lot of material produced on the subject that one should at least attempt to keep abreast of while writing. In the case of the phenomenon that is the new atheism, this is proving to be a monumental task.

It seems like every two weeks another book comes out in response to the recent attacks on God and religion - many, unfortunately, doing their best to cleverly work into their title the word “delusion” in a rather pathetic playground-esque attempt to one-up Richard Dawkins (”you’re deluded about God,”… “no you’re deluded about atheism“… “in fact, you’re so deluded that you’re probably from the devil“… and on and on we go). I’m getting close to the finish line here, so I’ve more or less given up on the attempt to keep up with the backlash, but I did sit down and read Chris Hedges I Don’t Believe in Atheists (another unfortunate title choice) last week. It was enough to convince me that I’ve read enough reactions now.

It’s not that it’s a terrible book - Hedges has some good insights, and properly challenges the new atheists on their conviction that scientific rationality is poised to usher the planet into a future of untold bliss and religionless harmony. But it seems like every time Hedges makes a valid and necessary critique, he follows it with a prolonged rant against the view (from the new atheists or from right-wing religious fundamentalists - Hedges seems just a little too desperate to distance himself from American Christianity) that history is a story of progress toward a fixed end. For Hedges, this belief is not just mistaken, but evil, in and of itself. It has led to too much violence and misery over the years, as those who claim to have an exclusive vision of this utopic future, be they religious or atheistic, impose their vision on others. Here’s a sample:

The greatest danger that besets us does not come from believers or atheists; it comes from those who, under the guise of religion, science or reason, imagine that we can free ourselves from the limitations of human nature and perfect the human species.

We are not saved by reason. We are not saved by religion. We are saved by turning away from projects that tempt us to become God, and by accepting our own contamination and the limitations of being human.

Human history is not a long chronicle of human advancement. It includes our cruelty, barbarism, reverses, blunders and self-inflicted disasters. History is not progressive. The ancient Greeks, like Hindus and Buddhists, saw human life and human history as cyclical. We live, they believed, in alternating stages of hope and despair, of growth and decay. This may be a more accurate understanding of human existence. To acknowledge the purposelessness of human history, to refuse to endow it with a linear march toward human perfection, is to give up the comforting idea that we are unique or greater than those who came before us. It is to accept our limitations and discard our intoxicating utopian dreams. It is to become human.

As I was reading this book (which might have been more appropriately titled I Don’t Believe in Utopias), I found myself frequently writing in the margins “yes, but…” Yes, a measure of historical humility is obligatory; yes, it’s a good and necessary thing to recognize human limitations; yes, human beings are not going to “perfect” themselves.

But…

…in light of our predicament, what ought we to do? Is the answer really moving back to a cyclical understanding of human history? Is recognizing human limitation and acknowledging the purposelessness of history really salvific? Is giving up our “intoxicating utopian dreams” really what it means to become human? In his haste to condemn the new atheists for imposing their vision of the world on others, Hedges seems to default to a bleak pessimism that, at least to me, is difficult to square with the human need for hope.

I think that Hedges is misguided in his approach to new atheists. Rather than attacking their deeply flawed means of achieving legitimate and irreducibly human ends, Hedges simply labels the ends themselves as illusory. It’s one thing to say that this or that tool is not up to the task of fulfilling human longing or that, ultimately, human beings are incapable of manufacturing the conditions that would fulfill our “utopian” desires. It’s quite another to simply label the desires themselves illusory and call this understanding salvific. The problem with the new atheists is not, from my perspective, the illegitimacy of the ends they have in mind; rather, it is with the theoretical justification they offer for these ends and the unwillingness to acknowledge their religious character.

According to the Christian vision, we do not become human by recognizing our limitation and adopting a posture of resignation to a fatalistic universe in the present, nor does salvation consist in turning away from “projects that tempt us to become like God.” In a sense, becoming “like God” is exactly what we are called to do as image-bearers - not in the idolatrous sense of believing that the task of ushering in God’s future falls exclusively to us, but in the responsible sense of understanding that God has called us to represent him well, to do our part in allowing, however incrementally, his kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven.

A central component of the Christian faith is the idea that this history is not a purposeless cyclical meandering with no fixed end in sight, that it is governed and guaranteed by a “God who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not” (Rom 4:17). The goal and the hope of a future unlike the present can be and has certainly been a dangerous one and the source of much suffering throughout history. But it has also produced an awful lot of good - indeed, it is largely responsible for the very shape of Western history itself. The answer for the dangerous “side-effects” of our religious and irreligious hopes is not to declare their object illegitimate, but to orient it within a proper framework which validates it and gives it shape, and which provides the resources and motivation to work toward its fulfillment.

To suggest that the solution to the conflict between religious and atheistic approaches to understanding and living in the world is to simply discard our “absurd hopes” is just as simplistic as the views Hedges is criticizing. Our best hope is to stop hoping? Sounds pretty sterile (and hopeless) to me.

 

How Do You Know?

This weekend, a friend alerted me to an interesting DVD special where four of the more prominent atheists out there right now (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris) get together for a round-table discussion. The two hour unmoderated discussion is, interestingly, entitled “The Four Horsemen” - a reference, presumably, to the protagonists’ understanding of themselves as the agents entrusted with the hastening of the demise of the blight upon human history that is religion.

From the bit that I watched, the special seems to be mainly about these four guys sitting around congratulating themselves on the obvious superiority of their views, ridiculing religious people, and sharing stories about the “persecution” they’ve experienced from those who have not yet attained their level of intellectual development. I watched twenty minutes or so of the first hour on YouTube and found it fairly uninteresting - mostly, I presume, because I’ve read each of their books and they don’t really say anything in their discussion that they don’t say in their published works.

One part that did interest me, however, was near the end of the first hour when Sam Harris asked his fellow atheists if they had ever come across an argument that gave them pause, that planted even the smallest seed of doubt in their minds that their militant assault on religion might be misguided. For the most part, they said that they could not. Dennett just bluntly said “no”; Dawkins and Hitchens said something to the effect that they sometimes wondered about the political ramifications of angering religious groups, but not one of them claimed to have ever come across an actual argument that wobbled the foundations of their atheism in any way. One gets the sense that it is literally beyond their capacity to imagine how or why any intelligent person could possibly not see thing the way they do.

The new atheists are frequently accused of a rather breathtaking and condescending form of arrogance in claiming to understand and diagnose the “disease” that is religion, but for me, their arrogance is most obvious in their implicit view of the history of human thought and experience. They really do portray themselves as representing the absolute pinnacle of human intellectual development; they, alone, occupy the privileged position of surveying the human condition with absolute clarity, free from the superstitious fantasies that have clouded the judgment of the overwhelming majority of human beings who have ever inhabited the planet.

C.S. Lewis once said that one of the things he found most troubling as an atheist was the view he was forced to take with respect to how others think. In Mere Christianity, he says:

If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake. If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all these religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth. When I was an atheist I had to try to persuade myself that most of the human race have always been wrong about the question that mattered to them most; when I became a Christian I was able to take a more liberal view.

The “Four Horsemen,” it seems, have no such misgivings. They simply know the truth; the only issue is how to break the news to the rest of us - how to relieve us of our delusions in the most painless manner and avoid stoking the flames of religiously-fueled violence.

In each of the new atheists’ books that I’ve read, the author expresses astonishment at how religious people can claim to have certainty about their beliefs. After reading their books, observing a few of them in debates, and now my brief exposure to their discussion amongst themselves, I can only wonder where the epistemological humility they plead for from religious folks is. John Stackhouse, in a word of warning to those tempted toward claims of certainty in the arena of faith, has recently posted on the importance of recognizing the epistemic limitations faced by all human beings, religious or not. Here’s a summary passage:

This is, finally, the point of it all. We Christians “live by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7)—and so does everybody else, actually, since no human being can transcend our common situation of epistemic finitude. In fact, if we enjoyed all the certainty (in the former sense) that some Christians say we should claim, well, then, we wouldn’t need faith anymore. We would just know things, and we would know that we were entirely right about them.

I think that a little more humility would be a very good thing, on both sides of the atheist/theist divide. We simply are not the sort of creatures who can know, with 100% certainty, that we are right - especially when it comes to metaphysical questions of meaning and purpose. A kind of “fortress mentality” is as evident in “The Four Horsemen” as it is in the most dogmatic circles of religious fundamentalism. In response to the ambiguities and complexities of the real world, both retreat to the safety of certainty, simply declaring (louder and more angrily if necessary) that they are right and everyone else is wrong.

The problem is that the certainty being sought and claimed (on both sides) is illusory. As Stackhouse reminds us, it simply is not possible to transcend the inherent limitations of being human. A wider appreciation of this truth could lead to the welcome recognition that conviction and commitment can be held and articulated humbly and graciously, without demonizing, ridiculing, or questioning the intelligence of those who do not share it.

 

Dostoevsky and Dawkins on the Significance of Origins

There are few things better than getting free books. Last week a friend of mine happened to find himself helping clean out the basement of James Houston (one of the founders of Regent College) and was rewarded with a stack of books for his troubles, some of which, due to my friend’s generosity, found their way into my hands. Among these books is Houston’s two-volume compilation of various “letters of faith”written down through the ages and arranged into a year-long collection of daily readings.

Today’s letter was written in June, 1876 by the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky to V.A. Alekseyev, a soloist with the Marinsky theatre orchestra. The letter was written prior to Dostoevsky’s completion of his masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov, in which the Grand Inquisitor condemns Jesus’ failure to turn stones into bread in response to the devil’s temptation in the wilderness (Mat. 4:2-4). Dostoevsky strongly resisted the idea that once the material needs of human beings were met, all of their problems would thereby be solved. It is in the context of his resistance of “European Socialism” that the letter containing this excerpt was written:

If the question had been simply one of satisfying Christ’s hunger, would there have been any reason to broach the subject of man’s spiritual nature in general? Besides, Christ did not have to wait for the Devil’s advice on how to obtain bread. He could have obtained it before if He had chosen to. By the way, remember Darwin’s and other contemporary theories about man’s descent from the ape. Without going into any theories, Christ declares directly that, besides belonging to the animal world, man also belongs to the spiritual world. Well then, it does not really matter what man’s origins are (the Bible does not explain how God molded him out of clay or carved him out of stone), but it does say that God breathed life into him. (But what is bad is that by sinning man can once again turn into a beast.)

What I found fascinating (and refreshing) about this letter was Dostoevsky’s almost casual treatment Darwin’s theory of human origins. He seems to not much care - indeed he assumes - that human beings are a part of the “animal world.” How God brought human beings into existence seems to be of little concern to him. It is obvious to Dostoevsky (as it is to most people) that while human beings are similar to animals in many respect, they are different in obvious and important ways. God breathed something different into human beings - something to which we are accountable to nourish and cultivate. Failure to do this, according to Dostoevsky, represents a return to the beastly part of us which we are called to transcend.

I couldn’t help but compare Dostoevsky’s understanding of the significance Darwinian evolution to the following passage from the opening pages of Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene:

Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence. If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilization, is: ‘Have they discovered evolution yet?’ Living organisms had existed on earth for, without ever knowing why, for over three thousand million years before the truth finally dawned on one of them. His name was Charles Darwin.

The difference between the two passages and their assessment of Darwinian evolution is remarkable. For Dostoevsky (who is writing, it is to be remembered, only a decade or so after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species), the mechanics of human origins are almost incidental; what is important - what is conveyed by Christ’s statement “man does not live by bread alone” - is that human beings have a destiny that goes beyond the material, the animalistic.

For Dawkins, Darwin’s theory represents a new kind of Copernican revolution in human understanding which fundamentally reorients our conceptions of all important questions. Elsewhere, Dawkins approvingly quotes zoologist G.G. Simpson who, in a discussion of such questions as “what are human beings for?” and “what is the meaning of life?” claimed that “all attempts to answer that question before 1859 [the year of the Origin's publication] are worthless and we will be better off if we ignore them completely.” Dawkins sees Darwin’s theory as the hinge upon which the history of human understanding turns.

Dostoevsky, on the other hand, sees it as an unexceptional reminder that we are simultaneously “of the earth” and made for a future that goes beyond our present experience of it. While Dawkins feels compelled to write off most of the history of human reflection upon life’s most important questions as primitive, unenlightened nonsense (although he’s not entirely consistent here - at other points Dawkins is quite clear that on moral and political issues, we cannot expect much help from Darwinian evolution), Dostoevsky is perfectly able and willing, apparently, to incorporate new discoveries within an overall framework which makes sense of fundamental human needs and capacities and which has the happy benefit of not rendering thousands of years of reflection on important questions “irrelevant.”

That’s a pretty important benefit, in my estimation.

 

The New Atheism as Inadequate Theodicy

Another shameless self-promotion alert!

The Other Journal is an online journal that explores a whole range of issues related to the intersection of theology and culture. This month their focus is atheism, and they’ve been gracious enough to publish an article I wrote which attempts to summarize the main gist of my thesis. From now on whenever the inevitable “so what are you writing about?” question comes up, I can just refer them here…

If you’re interested, here’s the link.

 

“Belief” in God

One of the things I find interesting, whether in the course of my thesis research or just ordinary conversations, is the matter of what inclines people to belief or unbelief in God. How is that person A, when presented with the raw data of the natural world, will incline toward atheism while person B will look at the identical data and choose belief? Is faith simply an arbitrary “gift” given by God to some and withheld from others? Or, as fundamentalists on either side of the atheism/theism divide would have us believe, is belief/unbelief simply a matter of who is intelligent (or spiritually perceptive) enough to see the “obvious” truth? All of us, as twenty-first century “modern” people, live in what Charles Taylor has called “the immanent frame” - a set of social, technological, scientific, and political structures which can be understood on its own terms without reference to the supernatural. Why do some choose to see this frame as “open” to the possibility of the transcendent while others see it as “closed?”

This morning’s Washington Post has an interview with Rick Warren (he of “purpose driven” fame) where this question, among others, comes up. The interviewer asks Warren a question which, in my opinion, points to an important feature about how the question of belief vs. unbelief is understood today: “How come some people ‘get’ to believe and others do not? ” Why does God “allow” some, like Rick Warren, to believe but not others? After all, many people would really like the comfort provided by religion but for whatever reason just can’t bring themselves to believe. In response, Warren says a few things about how the Bible promises that who seek God will find him, but he doesn’t (at least in this interview - an admittedly limited forum) challenge the root assumption of the question: God’s primary interest is that we set aside our rational objections and “believe in him.”

I think that most people who are honest about their faith or lack thereof would admit that they are pulled in both directions at different points in their lives (or even at different points of the day!). There are times when God’s existence seems self-evident and there are times when it seems utterly impossible. The world we live in is a deeply ambiguous one; there is no sense denying this and claiming that it points unequivocally to either atheism or theism. Frederick Buechner has memorably stated that “there is doubt hard on the heels of every faith, fear hard on the heels of every hope”; I would say that the opposite is also true - that the persistence of hope hounds even the most hardened skeptic. Belief and unbelief are both plausible ways of “reading” the “immanent frame” in which we spend our days.

So what do we do? Just passively accept whichever way we happen to be inclined and not give the matter another thought? Try to “force” ourselves to believe or attempt to perform the necessary exercises to convince God to gift us with this ability? Or might we perhaps use the ambiguity which makes the matter so difficult to consider a different understanding of what God might be after. What if God’s primary interest wasn’t in getting us to “believe” certain things? What if he was willing to take whatever faith we could muster and use it in the promotion of his intentions for the world? What if God has created the world in such a way that living authentically human lives involves things like trust, commitment, uncertainty, and risk; what if it requires recognizing our dependent and creaturely status and living within the parameters (cognitive and otherwise) which this entails?

I spent some time last night in Pascal’s Pensées (more time than I would have liked - I was digging around for a quote that proved stubbornly elusive!). Pascal is mostly known for the famous “wager” he proposed, an argument that is often ridiculed and dismissed based on an inadequate understanding of what he was really getting at. The wager ought not, I think, to be seen as a crude calculation - I’ve got more to lose if I don’t believe and I’m wrong than if I do believe - but a simple recognition that to be human is to be forced into acting with less certainty than we might like. Near the end of §233, Pascal addresses a variation of the question posed to Rick Warren above: “What if I just can’t believe?” His answer (very loosely paraphrased): live as if it were true and see what happens. Rather than thinking yourself into belief, try living yourself into it? If loving (or even believing in) God is difficult at the moment, start with loving your neighbour.

I don’t think that the ultimate standard by which God will judge us is the degree of certainty about his existence that we manage to conjure up before we die. I cannot imagine God asking me, on judgment day, “did you manage to preserve your belief in me, despite living in a world where my existence wasn’t always obvious?” I can imagine him asking: “Did you act according to what light you were given? Did you seek me with your entire being? Did you refuse to let pride and fear overcome hope in my promise of a better day? Did you nourish and make the most of what faith you had or complain that it wasn’t stronger?”

These questions are certainly difficult ones to imagine answering, but they seem to avoid the implication that human beings are little more than proposition affirmers/deniers (James 2:18-20 is ringing in my ears!). At the end of the day, nobody really benefits from a bunch of people “believing” in God if “belief” is understood as something like “rational acceptance of the existence of a supernatural being.” It’s hard to imagine how God benefits from a bunch of people nodding their heads when asked “do you believe in God?” just as it’s hard to imagine how it changes much for human beings. But if God has intentions for the world that go beyond individual human brains and what they find rationally plausible, and if the realization of these intentions depends, in part, on our ethical behaviour, then maybe this ought to be our main focus. Perhaps if we busy ourselves with doing what we’re reasonably sure God wants us to do, the “belief” in him that we struggle to maintain or discover may be closer than we think.