Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

Given my mounting frustration of late with the ignorance of history so oppressively present among our generally-educated masses, I’ve been meaning to get around to some blogging on David Bentley Hart’s Atheist Delusions. This book is about as good a response to contemporary atheism as one can give, recognizing as Hart does, with brilliant eloquence and tight logic, that the New Atheism is a disconsoling sign of cultural degradation. Hart asserts repeatedly in his book that the new bookselling atheists (Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, Harris, etc.) are desparately shallow and ignorant of history, in many ways unworthy adverseries of the Christian proclamation, unlike the great anti-Christian philosophers of the past, such as Nietzsche.  Hart seems to imply that there is really not much that an historically-informed intellectual can say about them or to them, because they are so much beneath the European tradition of high culture, whether atheist or not. It is hardly worth one’s time. His own book, in fact, is not so much a response to any one of these men, whom he considers to be rather truculent, overgrown adolescents, as it is a primer on history meant as edification for generally educated humanists of good will. Indeed, he implies that the spokemen of the New Atheism are just so proudly and obstinately and arrogantly ignorant of the historical revolution that Christian faith brought to man, and that is at the foundation of our modern sense of what it is to be human, that it is tempting for the Christian intellectual simply to ignore them and to go on with his business. After all, there remain a handful of genuinely sophisticated intellectual adverseries of the faith today, at least on the continent, though their ranks seem to be dwindling.

I. The Whigs: Modern and Postmodern

Yet, I am of the opinion that for all of the anti-intellectual petulance of the New Atheism that Hart laments, it is good that these men (are their any women among them?) are bringing out into the open the fact that the Whig myth of history remains the driving narrative of Anglophone culture. The postmodern, postcolonialist turn in the humanities might have temporarily blinded us to this fact. What does it mean to speak of a “Whig myth of history?” A bit of etymology is in order. In a well-known interview with Zenit, Tracey Rowland, herself a noted postmodern Catholic theologian, defined the term “Whig”:

Originally the word “Whig” came from the Scottish word “Whiggamor” for a cattle driver — though some sources say cattle thief and others say horse thief. It was initially applied to Scottish Presbyterians, mostly from the west coast of Scotland, who opposed the Stuart cause in the wars of the 17th century.

Their counterparts, the Tories — a word derived from the Gaelic for “outlaw” — consisted of some aristocrats, large landowners and agrarian peasants. They were mercantilist in economic policy, royalist in politics and tended to support the succession of James II [1633-1701].

Over time the term was used to refer to a faction in British politics. Although there was never anything like a strong doctrinal definition of the term, as a sociological generalization it can be said that the Whigs were the heirs of the Scottish Enlightenment, which emphasized economic and political liberty, or an emerging philosophy known as liberalism, which was often fused with a Puritan form of Protestantism.

In addition to what Rowland says, it should be noted that the view of history that emerged in a Whig context was anti-Catholic and rabidly secular. It equated the Middle Ages with the Dark Ages and saw the Church as an enemy of progress. The Whig vision of history was the predominant understanding of history taught in England and America, in the universities and on all levels of public education, for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The postmodernists, who gradually took control of the humanities departments in the western universities in the last half of the twentieth century, presumed themselves to have exposed the Whig narrative as a mere fable, whose sole purpose, they argued, was to provide a justification for the exploitation and subjugation by European civilization of traditional cultures throughout the world. But, it must be admitted, none of the postmodernists or postcolonialists had any deeply-set objections in principle to modern, western colonialism as such. They simply did not much care for the West in its Christian religion, on the one hand, or its economic capitalism, on the other — not that these two are necessarily intertwined.

The advent of modern Europe was rightly connected by the postmodernists to some sort of Christian inspiration, however heretical in its theological foundation that inspiration may have been. The Whig vision of history was itself seen as a product of vestigial Christianity. With the continued fading of Christian belief, and the expansion in the twentieth century of socialist colonialism, the need to wage a prophetic rejection of the Whig fable diminished.

Already, by century’s end, the shibboleths of the postmodern rejection of modern colonialism could themselves be seen as ideological constructions, and it was clear that in fact a new Whiggish colonialism was in place that had brought the expansion into the “Global South” of a permutation of the domineering, western ideological tradition. Only this time, the colonialism involved scientific eugenics and the transgression of the natural family. Western Europe was well-underway, in other words, in exporting its sexual nihilism to the “Global South,” and the postmodern postcolonialists, it turned out, were little more than the new Whigs, proudly advocating a western-derived, secular ideology of history and progress as a justification for the worldwide subjugation of traditional religious moral values pertaining to marriage and the family.

Whether the contemporary academy basks for the moment in the light of modernism or postmodernism, underlying it all is the deforming secular ideology of Whiggish progress. Whether it is manifested in the capitalism of Adam Smith, or in the reactionary relationalism of Karl Marx, or in the post-Marxian, misaptly described “postcolonialist” form of idolatry that just is identity politics and revolutionary, proselytizing sexual transgression, the Whig vision of secular progress is the unifying, underlying root condition of the contemporary universities and of the secular cultural imperialism that they have spawned.

II. Hart’s Response

The incoherencies of postmodernism are well-known, and its relativism is rejected by those whose intellectual predilection is for science rather than the humanities. This is actually, in some respects, a relatively noble characteristic of the New Atheism. Perhaps we might conclude, then, contra Dr. Hart, that Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett in fact make more respectable adverseries for Christian apologists than Jacques Derrida, or Michel Foucalt, or even Friederich Nietzsche.

Well, perhaps that is taking things too far. At any rate, Hart has undertaken the evisceration of the vulgar and logically inconsistent outpourings of a Christopher Hitchens, or a Samuel Harris, in Atheist Delusions, though by placing his focus not on their actual works but on the over-riding cultural situation that makes their productions possible. He lays bare, in other words, the cultural ignorance that makes possible the New Atheism. 

Though he does not use the term “Whig,” he in fact goes straight at the Whig ideology that each of the New Atheists presumes. Hart confronts it in all of its popular manifestations. One of the most important aspects of this is his putting to rest the Whiggish myth of the origins of science. He has a wonderful chapter on this topic. In showing the Christian origins of modern science, his argument seems to derive, at least in part, from the work of Stanley Jaki.  Hart’s demonstration is not nearly as thorough as Jaki’s – after all, Jaki dedicated his whole career to this topic. And, unlike Jaki, Hart admits that it is not necessarily a knock-down point for Christian apologists to demonstrate the roots of modern science in Christian theology. The “progress” of science has been, in many ways, an annihilating, anti-humanist force, so Christians should be careful about proudly laying claim to its origination. Still, it is worthwhile to trace his argument for the Christian origins of science. Perhaps all of those high-school boys nowadays, who are natural targets for for the New Atheism, could benefit from a basic presentation in this regard: which they will not, unfortunately, receive at any point during their formal education.

III. Contra The Whig Myth of Science

In order to have a clue about where science takes its origins, one has to take the logic of history with much greater seriousness than Whig ideology allows. First of all, one must dispel the myth of an interminable “Christian Dark Age” existing in the West from the period of the conversion of the Roman Empire under the rule of Constantine, in the 4th-5th centuries A.D., to the time of the Florentine Renaissance of the 15th century A.D. No serious scholar of history has such a facile view about a presumed Christian Dark Age, nowadays, and yet, in popular culture, such a view still fascinates a great many people. This is mainly so, I suppose, because it is the basic notion of history that the generally educated masses still get in their grade schools and high schools and in their undergraduate textbooks at college or university. And, of course, it is the view of things that masturbatory and snickering sophomore men in college get from watching those oh-so-clever Monty Python productions.

The basic premise of the history of science that is propounded from the prism of Whig ideology is that the victory of Christianity under Constantine killed the Greco-Roman pursuit of science and high philosophy. Christianity, so the argument runs, values only blind obedience to authority and not the life of reason. The fideism of Christianity, then (so it is claimed), was the destructive agent that buried pagan wisdom, and it was only in the Renaissance, with the disinterment of the great pagan philosophers, that reason could once again flourish. It was only then that Christianity could finally be cast off and modern science take its origin.

No competent historian of science nowadays gives any weight to this sort of account of things, and, yet, it is the basic premise of so much that pours forth from the pens of the New Atheists. Pierre Duhem, a physicist and eminent scholar of science, had destroyed this myth over a century ago. Even lesser lights in the study of the history of science, who yet decisively shaped the field, such as Alexander Koyre, and who were even anti-Christian, realized that the Whig history of science was very much in need of demythologization.

Hart puts to rest the Whiggish mythical understanding of the history of science with the very basic and irrefutably logical point that “scientific thought does not lurch from one mind to another across gulfs of time, nor do great scientists suddenly and miraculously emerge from the darkness, like Athena springing from the head of Zeus.” (p. 58) In other words, the advent of Copernican and Galilean science has to be understood in terms of the immediate historical context in which it arose, and not by reference to a fabulous past that Copernicus could have suddenly rediscovered and revivified by his own unaided genius. Competent assessment of the history of an idea requires a thorough assessment of the immediate social context of its advent. It is an example of incompetent and amateurish historiography to place the genesis of a modern idea by finding its explicatory context in ancient history.

In short, what the Whig historians always fail to account for is that the ideas and advances of Copernicus, and Galileo, and Kepler, and Newton were made possible by the Christian universities in which these men matriculated, and which the Church created and zealously nurtured and defended, and which were, in fact, truly Christian institutions far longer than they have been secular institutions.

IV. The Christian Presuppositions for Science

We must, then, root the history of the origin of modern science in its immediate context. What was it about the Catholic universities of Europe in the centuries leading up to Copernicus and Galileo that made it possible for them to develop the essential thrust of inquiry that gave us modern science? Hart shows that the key lies in seeing  the recognition by 14th century scholastic cosmologists in Oxford and Paris, such as Buridan and Oresme, that the motion of bodies can be understood without reference to an a priori theory of causality, as in Aristotle’s physics.

The pre-Copernican scholastic theologians had begun to extricate themselves from the a priori conceptual schemes of Aristotle and Ptolemy that had been for so long the accepted cosmologies of late Antique and early Medieval science, in both Christian and Muslim lands. They had begun to develop, more specifically, an understanding of impetus that was “kinematic” rather than “dynamic.” This is to say that they had begun to study the laws of motion in themselves without consideration of an external force or “dynamis” as the ultimate causal agency of motion. This new, “immanentizing,” non-Aristotelian concept of motion was the stepping stone to the modern concept of inertial motion. It enabled the 14th century scholastic cosmologist to postulate, even, the existence of terrestrial rotation: whereas Aristotle and Ptolemy both understood the world to be stationary. Even more, it opened up these scholastic cosmologists to consideration of falling bodies and to their centers of gravity. This new type of study of motion was the Christian scholastic beginning of modern science, and Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton were the heirs of its spirit of inquiry and not its initiators sprung from a remote past or from nowhere.

Hart points out that the success of 16th and 17th century science amounted to the final defeat of Hellenistic science and not its ultimate triumph. Hart realizes, with all good historians of science, that the story of science as told by a Carl Sagan or an Arthur C. Clarke is pure nonsense. As early as the 6th century A.D., the Christian John Philoponous had already critiqued the Aristotelian and Stoic pantheistic doctrines of the cosmos as a cosmic machine or as a wondrous divine organism. Philoponous argued, contra the Greek natural philosophers, that the stars were not immutable and that terrestrial and celestial objects did not possess distinct natures. This made possible a valuation of the empirical study of the celestial regions. No longer could it be assumed, as almost all educated Greeks had done, that the nature of the stars and their motions could be deduced by a priori deduction. The celestial realm, Philoponous realized, is every bit as “creaturely” as the terrestrial realm. It was not a divine realm, as for Aristotle, and was susceptible therefore to the same contingency as the terrestrial realm. Its motion, therefore, had to be studied by empirical observation.

What made Philoponous able to make this breakthrough from out of the Greek natural philosophy? It was his implicit acceptance of the Christian doctrine of the transcendent God who created the world ”ex nihilo” — out of nothing. The celestial realm and the terrestrial realm of matter were able, as a logical consequence of this doctrine, to be seen as of the same basic substance(s), amenable to the same scientific laws, requiring empirical study in order to make sense of their contingent ordering.

Though Aristotelian science would still hold sway in the medieval universities for a long time, the breakthrough to modern science was enabled by recognizing, as these Catholic schoolmen in Oxford and Paris had done, that the world is not a divine being and that God is transcendent to it. It is ordered, to be sure. The scholastic theologians all recognized that God had made all things, as the Wisdom of Solomon tells us, according to measure, number, and weight. Many ancient cultures did not see things this way. For much of the Orient, for instance, the world was understood to be a pure illusion. Indeed, the Christian scholastics went even further in their estimation of the order of creation. They understood that the very orderer of the universe had united himself to matter in the most intimate manner conceivable in the Incarnation of Christ. The “logos” or rationality of matter was given thereby a special consecration that Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Neoplatonist, and Oriental cosmologists could not even have dreamt of and probably would have thought unseemly and undignified.

So, given its status as creature, the Christian scholastics began to understand that the universe has to be studied empirically and not by a priori deduction. Its being cannot be deduced in the way of, for instance, Anselm’s a priori argument for the essence and existence of God. On the other hand, given the dignity of its inherent logos, the universe is open to being known in its immanent laws. Both of these presuppositions about the nature of the universe, its contingency and its rationality, had to be held together in order for the scientific spirit of inquiry to develop. Both presuppositions are the logical outcome of the Christian doctrine of creation, held by all of the scholastic theologians who eventually, like Philoponous before them, were able to extricate themselves from the vestiges of Aristotelian pantheism and pave the way for the advent of modern science.

V. Overcoming the Myth of the Galileo Affair

Hart, then, has a nice and brief discussion of the shift in understanding of the universe that was enabled by the Christian doctrine of creation. It is not on the same level of Jaki’s thorough demonstrations, but it can serve as a good primer.

Yet Hart is even more concerned in his chapter on the history of science to lay to rest ridiculous myths about the presumed warfare between science and religion that fascinate contemporary culture. Such is the case with the Galileo affair. He gives a good presentation of basic points of the story that are too often missed: that Galileo was not subjected by the Church to torture or imprisonment in a dungeon for his science; that the conflict involved in the incident was not in essence between the Church and modern science but between Aristotelian science and modern science; that Urban VIII was not defending the faith, which we have good reason to think that he may not even have held, but the traditional science of Aristotle (in spite of the fact that the best scholastic theologians had already overcome its defects); that the Galileo incident was but one minor incident in a cultural context in which the Church’s universities were producing Jesuit and Franciscan scientists who were as truly scientific as any major modern scientists who have succeeded them; and most importantly, that Copernicus’s heliocentrism was a hypothesis at the time of Galileo and not an established empircal fact.

Regarding this last point, Hart shows that Galileo put forward an incomptent case in support of Copernicus’s heliocentrism. Indeed, he makes the plausible suggestion, given the poor case that Galileo had made to the Roman censors, that it was the Church who was in fact defending reason and Galileo who was acting on faith. Hart shows that Galileo was defending a theory that he had not proven and that violates our most basic common sense: we do not, after all, experience the earth to revolve around the sun. The extraordinary claim of heliocentrism, then, to parrot the unfortunate Carl Sagan, should have required extraordinary evidence, which Galileo, for all of his genius in fields other than astronomy, was not able to give.

None of this is to say that Hart rejects heliocentrism. It should be needless to point this out, but in this day and age one has to take extraordinary steps to state the obvious. But it is to say that it is hightime that the myth of the Galileo affair is put to rest in popular culture.

There are other important points that Hart makes in his chapter on science that are worth attending to, which is only a small part, and perhaps the most inessential, of his book. I don’t have time to go into these other points here. It should be reiterated that Hart does not wish to rest his whole case against the New Atheism on the issue of science, which has been in many ways but an ambiguous good in the modern age. Indeed, Hart has some deep sympathies with Martin Heidegger’s critique of the utilitarian objectivism and nihilism that gives rise to science-worship.

Nevertheless, the chapter in question is a good primer and worth reading as a whole. Upon doing so, one may want to turn to Jaki’s many volumes to fill in the details.

In this post, continuing in my series of posts dedicated to the issue of why scientific materialism undermines human reason, I want to deal briefly with the question of postmodernism. I take as my starting point this illuminating quotation from Hannah Arendt, wherein she describes the consequences of modernity’s denial of the existence of a supersensual reality, or a realm of being beyond that which comes to us through our senses:

In increasingly strident voices, the few defenders of metaphysics have warned us of the danger of nihilism inherent in this development [modernity's denial of the supersensual realm]; and although they themselves seldom invoke it, they have an important argument in their favor: it is indeed true that once the supersensual realm is discarded, its opposite, the world of appearances as understood for so many centuries, is also annihilated. The sensual, as still understood by the positivists, cannot survive the death of the supersensual. No one knew this better than Nietzsche who, with his poetic and metaphoric description of the assassination of God in Zarathustra, has caused so much confusion in these matters. In a significant passage in The Twilight of the Idols, he clarifies what the word God meant in Zarathustra. It was merely a symbol for the supersensual realm as understood by metaphysics; he now uses instead of God the word true world and says: “We have abolished the true world. What has remained? The apparent one perhaps? Oh no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one.” (Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Consideration,” Social Research 38 (Autumn, 1971): 240.

Nietzsche was the “prophet”/philosopher/philologist whose aphoristic, 19th-century utterances became the inspiration of much continental philosophy in the latter half of the twentieth century, the type of philosophy that we have come to refer to as “postmodern.” Increasingly, he wields an influence in Anglo-American philosophy. It is, in one sense, good that he should do so: at least if his thought is properly interpreted.

Nietzsche was indeed a nihilist: he denied that we can rationally affirm our intellectual or moral judgments. But at least he was generally honest that scientific materialism, if one is forthright and self-aware, leads to nihilism. He knew that a commitment to scientific materialism or a denial of the “supersensual” world should cut one loose from all conceivable moorings. He knew that scientific materialism implies the unreality of our experience, of all appearances, and of the objectivity of all cultural creations: religion, poetry, art, and even science (and perhaps science most of all). He did not go into a desparate Kantian direction, trying to save science by stressing the universal nature of human mental constructs. Unlike Kant, Nietzsche took the poison pill of scientific materialism with all the of the steely-willed resolve of the uebermensch whom he portrayed as the savior of the world. He did not go in for palliative measures in this regard. He fully embraced, and consistently, the sort of forelorn solitude and dejection that was only an occasional encumbrance to Hume’s daily living (see the quotation toward the end of my first post in this series).

Arendt points out that the reduction of reality to what comes to us in appearances through our sensory organs is in fact the abolition of even the appearances themselves. Appearances of color, fragrance, beautiful music, etc., can only be, if matter is the only reality, as illusory as the world was in itself for Kant.  Indeed, the entire Kantian project rests on self-delusion. Without any external reality as a correlate to our experience, knowledge, and moral judgments, we do away not only with the world-in-itself but with any substance to our own experience and lives. The postulation of universal organizing categories of the self is manifestly lacking in realism and cannot overcome the radically contingent and ephermeral reality of our subjective existence.

It is this general sense of things that feeds postmodernism. Recognizing the radically contingent and constructive character of human experience and judgment (intellecual or moral), postmodernism sees the human person as a being entirely bound by historical and cultural context. It is impossible for us, in the postmodern view of humanity, to reach universal intellectual truths or moral judgments. Least of all can we come up with a logically compelling picture of universal destiny, such as one finds in neo-Darwinism. There is no “Big Picture,”  to use the expression of Richard Rorty, that we can derive from reasoned experience. All that we can do is to construct “metanarratives,” to use the expression of Lyotard, or concoct our own particular tales about reality. Indeed, as the postmodern Catholic philosopher Gianni Vattimo has put it, postmodernism is the “demythologization of demythologization.” Everything is a myth now, a personal story that we tell, a narrative, fit for a particular time or place but with no universal validity. Even modern science tells a grand narrative on this view, a story not unlike the story of salvation that one finds in scripture. It is no more true or false than the cultural stories of human origins and destiny that were edifying to previous generations of humanity, given their own volitional concerns deriving from their peculiar historical circumstances.

There is some good that has come out of postmodernism. Aside from unmasking, in a definitive manner, the dire consequences of modern notions of rationality based upon philosophical materialism, postmodern thought has opened up philosophy to values of a more literary nature. Stories and myths, postmodernism has shown, do not lack cognitive legitimacy. Moreover, postmodernism has the possibility of leading to what the Catholic philosopher Hugo Meynell has referred to as a “New Enlightenment,” where the foundations of human knowledge are definitively established and the materialism or scientism of the “Old Enlightenment” is done away with. Postmodern thought shakes modern thought to its very foundations, denying that there can be any rational grounding for knowledge or the human moral good. A new foundation, in this situation, can be laid. And much twentieth century Catholic thought could come to the rescue in this regard. Meynell points to Bernard Lonergan. But one might also point to the Catholic phenomenologists, or to Aristotelian Thomists, or to the participants in the Augustinian revival in twentieth century Catholic thought. A vast treasure of Catholic thinking, that has dealt with the epistemological problems of modern materialism, awaits recovery and synthesis in the wake of the postmodern challenge. Would that our Catholic colleges and universities would take this treasury seriously and orient their educational pursuits around it!

With all of this said, there is no getting around the dark skepticism and cynicism that postmodernism brings in its wake. Postmodernism relativizes truth, goodness, and beauty. But it is often not fully brought out that the cognitive accomplishments of science are themselves relativized by postmodernism, and this fact is the thrust of my posts in this series. 

If matter in motion is the only reality, then human persons are inevitably caught up in a flux of purely spatio-temporal processes, of pure location, and so cannot transcend their biological/historical/cultural standpoint to reach universal truths, including scientific truths. It is meaningless to try to locate the universality of scientific truth in the human subject, because the human subject, on a materialist view, has no lasting interiority. We are, each of us alone and altogether, caught up inevitably and irrevocably in the fleeting processes of material processes in motion. Our natures, then, could not be universal, underlain by universal categories, but contingent upon history and culture. Science has value in our age, given the strong manner by which we experience the technological imperative, but it may just as easily disappear in a future age, where other values are experienced and asserted, and a different story or narrative is told. And if it should disappear, we have no way of adjudicating whether that is a good thing or a bad thing.

If you are an atheist, which implies (practically-speaking in our culture) a commitment to scientific materialism, the only intellectual choice you have, ultimately, is this relativist direction of postmodernism. Matter, however it is conceived, does not transcend the locality of spatiotemporal instances. It does not admit of universal knowledge, only of particular moments, times, and places, of a radically individual character. Material processes, if there is no formal causality in nature, could admit of no generalized laws, no universal truths.

I shall make this last point clearer, hopefully, in my next post, where I shall discuss formal causality: the missing dimension of modern attempts to understand human knowledge and the world.

Getting back to my demonstration of why philosophical materialism undermines human reason, I want to discuss briefly Immanuel Kant. Recall that the dilemma posed to human knowledge by materialism was keenly felt by Hume, a problem that has become especially acute in our own day now that many scientists and philosophers have come to argue that human consciousness is reducible to physical brain processes.

If consciousness is just brain activity, how could it reveal to us a world that is external and other? Our neural activity exists entirely in the spatial confines of our own brains. Given that this is so, the best that our brains could do for us is to give to us representations of the world external to us, but they cannot give us the world as it is in itself.

Hume saw that reductionism of the sort that is prevalent in contemporary brain science should lead us to deny the objective reality of all so-called secondary qualities, which is to say of our entire perceptual experience. Our perceptions of color, sound, taste, etc. could only be innate ideas or internal representations that tell us nothing about reality in itself, if we presume philosophical materialism. In itself, reality would be a flux of material processes wholly other from our experience. Hume saw that the materialist account of perception also requires us to doubt the objective reality of our ideas of uniform causal influence and therefore of universal logical, mathematical, and scientific laws. If constant material flux or process is the only objective reality, then there is no “place” in the world to situate universal, uniform, unchanging laws of reason — except in the human mind. Our ideas of universal natural laws, then, can tell us nothing about the world in itself but only about our own psychology and ultimately about our own neural structure (Noam Chomsky has in fact reached this conclusion, albeit inconsistently, with his postulation of a “universal grammar” of the brain). All that we directly experience is the constant, contingent flux of matter striking our sense organs, and this can come to us only in point-instants of material process from which it is impossible to deduce universal causal influence in nature. Any universal laws of logic, math, or science, then, would have to be abstract or purely mental realities.

Hume, in drawing these consequences, was simply bringing a tradition of thought stemming from Descartes and Galileo, and consolidated on seemingly unimpeachable grounds by Isaac Newton, to its inevitable conclusion. In doing so, he unexpectedly shattered the logical foundations of modern science. No one understood the earth-shaking consequences of Hume’s conclusions better than Immanuel Kant, who sought to refute Hume and put science on a surer foundation of reason. But, in the end, all that he ended up doing was to give birth to a fantastic idealism that has given philosophy a bad name in the modern world. At least this is so in England and America, which have never been able to embrace fully the post-Kantian idealist strand of continental philosophy. Though, one could argue that this is largely to the discredit of Anglo-American philosophy, whose proponents are mostly shallow and ignorant of history.

Kant started his career as a science teacher and a physicist. He wrote a treatise in 1755 entitled The Universal History of Nature that anticipated many of the scientific cosmological theories that would be explored in astronomy in the next two hundred years. Kant was thoroughly Newtonian in these early stages of his career, but his reading of Hume in the 1760s called the whole Newtonian project into question for him. The question that Hume raised, that Kant realized was unavoidable, was how Newton’s purely empirical, contingent, and natural science could correspond to the necessary and universal dicta of formal and mathematical demonstration. Mathematical explanation was the ultimate goal of modern science for Newton and Kant (as it is for science today). But how could such universal descriptions fit the radically contingent structure of physical nature as it presents itself to our fleeting experiences?

Kant (and Newton) sought for universal and necessary axioms of nature, a goal that presupposes the conviction that nature is governed by uniform systems of cause and effect. As noted above, Hume called this conviction into question, and rightfully so, given the “sensationism” to which he was committed by virture of his materialism. The presupposition of uniform causal influence has no basis in reason because we have no access to it by experience. If matter is the only reality, there is no way that we could truly be said to know of the existence universal laws of causality. In fact, such laws could not even exist, though Hume himself did not reach this latter conclusion.

Kant, understanding the fundamental truth in Hume’s objection, tried to refute Hume and to establish the reasonableness of the Newtonian project by laying out a highly complex “transcendental” argument that presumed to show the basis in the human subject of all knowledge and experience. Jonathan Robinson, in his wonderful little book detailing the effects of bad philosophy on modern liturgy, summarizes Kant’s argument in support of the universality of science.

Beginning with the fact that physics is possible, because after all we in fact do it, he [Kant] then asks what the necessary conditions for the possibility of physics are. He then argues that among these conditions is the truth of the proposition that every event has a cause; and, if every event has a cause, then this establishes the reign of law in nature. The reality of this reign of law is what makes it possible for us to do physics. His position is that natural necessity constitutes the objective world we all experience, but we have no way of knowing whether or not this necessity also characterizes the world lying behind the objective world of experience. (The Mass and Modernity, 81)

Kant “rescues” or “saves” the reality of science, then, not on the basis of a correspondence between human experience and physical nature as it is in itself but on the basis of our own inner or “transcendental” experience. He remains committed to the materialist axiom that physical nature comprises nothing more than contingent material flux, whose importance for the problem of knowledge was made clear to him by Hume. But he refutes Hume by arguing that there is universality to our experience, as a result of the universality of human nature, and therefore that there is universality to science. In other words, the universal structure of physical laws is not found in nature but in the organizing capacity of the human person or subject.

Kant worked out a list of formal structures of the human subject that he held to be responsible for the ordering of our experience of contingent physical nature and which thereby make universal scientific deductions possible. These are known as Kant’s a priori categories of understanding. He establishes twelve such categories under four headings (quantity, quality, relation, and modality), each with three categories of its own. Kant also absorbed universal space and time entirely into the human subject. As for space, Kant says:

Space is not an empirical concept which has been derived from outer experiences. For in order that certain sensations be referred to something outside me (that is, to something in another region of space from that in which I find myself), and similarly in order that I may be able to represent them as outside and alongside one another, and accordingly as not only different but as in different places, the representation of space must be presupposed. The representation of space cannot, therefore, be empirically obtained from the relations of outer appearance. On the contrary, this outer experience is itself possible at all only through this representation. (Critique of Pure Reason, New York, 1958, 43)

As for time, Kant has this to say:

What we have meant to say is that all our intuition is nothing but the representation of appearance; that the things which we intuit are not in themselves as they appear to us, and that if the subject, or even only the subjective constitution of the senses in general, be removed, the whole constitution and all the relations of objects in space and time, nay space and time themselves, would vanish. As appearances, they cannot exist in themselves but only in us. What objects may be in themselves, and apart from this receptivity of our sensibility, remains completely unknown to us. We know nothing but our mode of perceiving them. (Critique of Pure Reason, New York, 1958, 46)

Space and time, Kant argues, are intuitions or forms of our innate sensibility, but not realities of the objective world itself. They must be presupposed in our experience and not derived from empirical encounter with physical nature. It can be no other way, once again, if we presume that the process, contingency, and flux of matter is the only reality of physical nature. We have to impose our mental life on physical nature in order to establish physical science, not understand nature in itself. If we want to save science, Kant realized, and yet maintain our commitment to philosophical materialism, we have to place the uniformity or universality of science entirely within our own mental life.

Indeed, Kant, through the influence especially of Ernst Mach, had an impact on Albert Einstein’s revolution of modern physics in his formulation of the relativity of time and space, though Einstein, who was not a competent philosopher, did not take things in the purely subjective direction that Kant did.

Can the universality of science really be rescued on a purely subjective basis? Postmodern thought has called the Kantian “rescue operation” into question by stressing the radically historical and contingent constitution of human nature itself. Nowadays, there are many who argue that science is an artifact of a particular historical mentality and not an expression of universal human nature. Indeed, human nature does not, for these postmodernists, even exist. So, the findings of science are not universally true for them in either an objective or a subjective sense. The postmodern turn will be the topic of my next post.

What is missing in the Humean/Kantian analysis? In the end, Kant does not succeed in saving science from Hume. If we truly want to affirm that science tells us about the universal laws of nature and not about our own psychology or history, we have to affirm (as Hume and Kant did not) the reality of formal causality in physical nature. In other words, we must affirm the presence of spirit in physical nature in order to account for the objective correlation of physical nature and human reason. But that will be the subject of my final post in this series.

I recently had the displeasure of running across a post on Rod Dreher’s blog where Dreher had made reference to an internet discussion hosted by Stanley Fish of Terry Eagleton’s new book on the silliness of contemporary atheism. Fish had in this discussion given his own public unmasking of the epistemological naivete of philosophical materialism. A bunch of people who seem to crosspost one another so as to gang up against theists in comment boxes had put together a string of comments attempting to dismiss Eagleton and Fish. Their comments were, as is usually the case with these people, embarrassingly ignorant and shallow.

I decided to enter into the fray, pointing out to these sadly ignorant atheists that the implicit assumption of philosophical materialism or naturalism would, if its implications were truly understood, lead to skepticism of all forms of knowledge. Of course, many atheists tend to presume that science undermines Christian faith. They view themselves as the upholders of reason and science against the obfuscations of Christian belief. Little do they realize that the scientific materialism that they have embraced, in whatever particular form it may take with them, undermines the valid achievements of human reason altogether, including the achievements of science. Atheism, in other words, and not religious faith, undermines science.

Needless to say, my comment was met by blank incomprehension and by evasion. It tended to annoy these shallow atheists, mostly trained in engineering methods but not in the exercise of human reason as applied to ultimate issues. Unfazed by their ignorant and uncomprehending dismissals, I have decided to demonstrate here, in a series of posts, why it is that the embrace of philosophical or scientific materialism must lead ultimately to a skepticism toward all knowledge. I shall demonstrate, in effect, that postmodern relativism is the inevitable outcome of believing that the only things in the world that are real are those entities that are in principle capable of being discovered by modern scientific investigation.

I’ll take as my starting point for this demonstration the philosophy of the great British Empiricists Bishop Berkeley and David Hume. Berkeley and Hume, in the 18th century, were the first to see the problem for human knowledge that comes with assuming that matter in its various forms is the only reality.

Berkeley saw the problem and was thereby led to reject the dogma of modern materialism that physical nature is composed entirely of material substances whose only reality is extension in space (res extensa) or geometrical shape. This doctrine had been upheld by Descartes, Bacon, Hobbes, Galileo, Newton, and Locke. It assumes that our perceptions are caused by that which is in fact imperceptible. Berkeley realized that this dogma must lead to a denial of the objective validity of human perception and knowledge. He argued, in order to counteract this materialist presupposition, that there is in fact nothing in nature that goes unperceived. All of physical nature is perceived: by humans, angels, and the mind of God. The imperceptible, in his view, is not the cause of the perceptible. Rather, all things are caused by the infinite perceiver: God himself (who does not go unperceived to himself).

Berkeley’s understanding of perception has generally been castigated as a form of subjective idealism. He has been accused of denying the objectivity of the world external to human perception. This is the standard reading of him. In fact, he did no such thing. He argued that the world that we perceive is the world as it is in itself. It is real, but it has its basis in the perceiving (read: knowing) mind of God. He argued that one must reject the reality of  purely material substances if one is to uphold the objective validity of human perception. Louis Dupre has rightly said of Berkeley’s position that it is, like Cardinal John Henry Newman’s 19th century epistemology, a form of spiritual empiricism, not of subjective idealism. Berkeley, unlike the subjective idealists and scientific materialists, upholds a doctrine of epistemological realism. He holds that we really perceive the objective world and that we can really come to know it.

Be that as it may, it is Hume who is the key figure of modern thought because he shows better than any other modern philosopher outside of Kant (on whom Hume was the decisive influence) the despair and skepticism to which scientific materialism must lead if its implications are rightly understood. Hume saw the validity of Berkeley’s insight that if material substances are the cause of all that we perceive then our perceptions cannot possibly put us in touch with objective nature. Hume realized this, but unlike Berkeley he did not come to reject the doctrine that material substances are the only principles of physical nature. He accepted the materialist doctrine and took it to its logical conclusion. He chose skepticism over Berkeley’s intuitive realism.

Hume understood that philosophical materialism implies a doctrine of perception that sees all human experience as rooted entirely in material processes (a doctrine that Alfred North Whitehead would later label “sensationism”). All human experience, if material substances are the sole reality of physical nature, must be caused entirely by material sensory impressions striking our sensory organs. Hume realized, like Berkeley before him, that if the striking and beating of material processes on sensory organs is the objective correlate of experience, then our perceptions must be internally generated ideas in the mind and not gateways to the objective world. How could it be otherwise? The colors, sounds, tastes, smells, etc., that we experience are not what is real in nature. What is real in nature is the bumping and striking of material substances whose whole reality can be encapsulated in mathematical formulas. The experience of the redness of an apple, for instance, is an illusion of our inner ideas. What is objectively real in the experience of an apple is its material or sensory basis: the light frequencies that extend from the material substance of the apple striking, in consecutive fashion, the human eye and optic nerve. These give us sensory impressions in our brain that our mind’s eye contemplates and turns into perceptual realities that bear nothing in common with the material sense impressions in themselves. The infinite array of human perceptions is qualititatively different from these purely material sensations. Yet, only the sensations are objectively, publicly real. The sensations are “primary” or real qualities. The perceptions are “secondary” or imaginary qualities.

This led to quite a dilemma for Hume. Refusing to reject materialist substantialism, he had to assume the existence of two separate worlds: one is the real world outside of perception that is mathematically describable, and the other world is the world that we perceive, a world of fragrance, and color, and beauty — a world that is felt in emotion and expressed in art, and religion, and poetry, but that does not correspond to the world-in-itself. The world of human culture is merely one of expressed ideas of impressions. It does not express the world as it objectively exists in time and space. Indeed, Hume was quite despondent over this situation. When he played the role of philosopher he found himself isolated, much as would later happen with Nietzsche:

I am first affrighted and confounded with that forlorn solitude, in which I am plac’d in my philosophy, and fancy myself some strange uncouth monster, who not being able to mingle and unite in society, has been expell’d all human comerce, and left utterly abandonded and desolate…I call upon others to join me, in order to make a company apart; but no one will hearken to me. Every one keeps at a distance, and dreads that storm, which beats upon me from every side. (A Treatise of Human Nature, Oxford, 1960, 264, 269)

Many “concretely-minded” Anglo-Americans in our day view such expressions of dread with a wink and a nod, seeing Hume as an exaggarator, or as a bit cracked. But Hume is a greater “agent of truth” than they. He is more perceptive and honest. He has considered the full consequences of the philosophical materialism that he has adopted. He realizes that if matter is the only ultimate reality then the world of common human experience, the world of human discourse and cultural achievement (including science), is nothing but a subjective illusion. And this should indeed shake one to the core of one’s being, if one truly understands or is truly honest.

Kant, originally a physicist who was himself “shaken from his dogmatic slumbers” by Hume, realized that science required a defense of its universal validity in the face of the dilemma of materialism that Hume had exposed. How did Kant “rescue” science? That will be the topic of my next post.

I recently read the English translation of the book covering B16’s 2006 Schülerkreis (a yearly meeting he has with his former students) published by Ignatius Press under the title, Creation and Evolution. That is probably why Carl Olson’s post on the book interested me. What caught my eye in particular was Carl’s reference to a Reuter’s article/post on the topic. The Reuter’s author, Tom Heneghan, recently did a Reuter’s blog post on the English translation in which he makes reference to an earlier article of his based upon the release of the German edition of the book.

Heneghan says that anyone who wants to know where the Catholic Church stands on the issue of creation and evolution, should read this book. His claim is that B16 proclaims in the book, the classic Catholic teaching on the topic called, Theistic evolution. He doesn’t explain this term but does link to a wikipedia entry on the topic which I guess we must assume is his definition. Wikipedia indicates that this term refers to those who believe there is no necessary conflict between Christian faith in creation and the theory of evolution. However, the term itself, and Heneghan’s use of it, seem to imply that the biological theory of evolution is accepted by B16 on some level.

I would not agree with Heneghan’s assertion that this book will explain the Catholic position on evolution and creation. There is no magisterial, or even private, attempt to explicate the Catholic position. One should not even read the book with the expectation of a great insight into B16’s thought on the subject (though the Foreword does contain copious relevant quotes from his pre-Papal writings). The bulk of the book is comprised of the presentations and discussion that occurred the day prior to B16’s joining the group. On the day that Benedict was there, he did not comment at any considerable length. In fact, of the 210 pages in this translation, there are perhaps only about five pages in which B16 gives his view. One hears much more from Cardinal Schönborn than from the Holy Father.

Heneghen only comments upon Benedict’s interventions so it is not clear whether he read the whole book or made himself aware of the context of the discussion upon which the Pope was entering. Rather, it seems his primary concern is to show that Benedict rejects what Heneghen terms “Intelligent Design.” Heneghen does not make any precisions about ID and so he does not correlate the views that B16 does present to the various ID theories. It is, therefore, hard to know if Heneghen has the background to make such a claim.

I suppose that B16’s response to the one evolution proponent in the book’s recorded discussions could be an indicator that he does not find compelling the ID theory that irreducibly complex organic structures necessitate a designer of some type. Peter Schuster, professor the theoretical chemistry and one who follows Darwinian mechanisms for common descent argued that there was not to be found, God’s activity in the process of biological evolution. This he said, put one in danger of falling into the God of the gaps conundrum. B16 said that he did not wish to cram God into the gaps but he went on to say that evolutionary theory implies questions which the natural sciences do not have the competence to address and so, must be assigned to philosophy (see pp. 161-62; all page numbers in this post refer to Creation and Evolution from Ignatius Press).

However, one cannot read the discussions carefully without understanding that Benedict seems to favor Cardinal Schönborn’s ideas. In other words, neither seem to be a fan of the biological theory, or at least its Darwinian mechanisms of random mutation (and its subsequent modulations) and natural selection. Referring to John Paul the Great’s oft cited statement that evolution is more than an hypothesis, B16 says that JPII had his reasons for saying this, strongly suggesting that he did not share the thought (see p. 152).

He says several times that evolution is something that science can never prove by empirical methods (which modern science limits itself to) because one can observe 10,000 generations in a lab (see p. 162). He refers to Cardinal Schönborn’s interest in the fact that punctuated equilibrium has replaced Darwin’s gradualism and suggests that evolution “by leaps” has many questions to answer before he would find it compelling (see p. 162). This much is further suggested by his subsequent reference to the fact that positive mutations are very rare (see p. 163). Benedict does not make his views explicit but one can legitimately say that he appears to be suspicious of Darwinian mechanisms; what he thinks of common descent is not as obvious.

This is all to say that one cannot assume that Benedict would reject the design detection algorithm proposed by William Dembski, though the ability to mathematically detect a designer is certainly not necessary, or one might add a strong advantage, for Benedict’s view of creation. He says that he is aware that there is a certain “rationality” in matter, it can be read (primarily through mathematics). Further, there is a rationality to the process of evolution as proposed by modern science. All of this rationality corresponds to the human intellect’s capacity to know and to understand.

He asks where this rationality originates? This question is not one that modern empirical science can answer, in fact he says, it must not try (see pp. 163-64). This, presumably, is because of its reductionist methodology. He answers the question about rationality’s Source later on. This Source can only be found in the creative and redemptive Logos of faith. It is here one can turn to find not only the Source of rationality but the source of irrationality (the Fall) that has the capacity to be surmounted, nay, redeemed, in the loving act (the Incarnation, death and Resurrection) of the Logos.

Cardinal Schönborn does the reader a great service by including quite lengthly quotes from Benedict’s pre-Papal writing in the Foreword. In his book Truth and Tolerance, Ratzinger more profoundly indicates his thinking on this matter. He asks the question whether it is more “reasonable” to believe that the rational has been begotten by the irrational. In the Logos, Christians choose the rational over the irrational. This is very profound when considered carefully. Those who reject God based on claims of reason are in fact placing the priority on the irrational and thereby undermining the basis for their confidence in their reason. Ratzinger asks: “. . . can reason really renounce its claim that the Logos is at the ultimate origin of things, without abolishing itself” (quoted in Creation and Evolution, p. 20).

Contemplating the fact that all of creation is rational (qualifications aside) and in the visible world, that the human mind alone has the innate capacity to understand it should be enough for most. The atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel, in his book, The Last Word, contemplates this paradox. He is committed to reason and he is fascinated at the fact that reason always seems to work. He admits that he greatly dislikes the implications of this because it points to a world view he is uncomfortable with, that there is a Creator. However, he admits that an honest thinker has to recognize that the mind seems to be made for the world.

I think, in general, Heneghen does not have a sufficient understanding of the nuances of Benedict’s philosophy or of his knowledge of the sciences to allow him to recognize that he (Heneghen) is jumping the gun in trying to classify B16’s position. Heneghen provides a snarky response to a critique of his first article which suggests the same thing. However, in truth, I think that he does not show he is aware of the distinctions necessary for his claims.

A similar problem seems to be at play in the discussions with the evolutionist, Peter Schuster, in this Schülerkreis. Schuster, several times, makes the claim that God cannot be found in biological evolution because there are no points at which he must “intervene.” He does not think philosophy/theology has much to say about biological evolution with respect to creation. He believes there is more potential for fruit in cosomology, presumably because of anthropic principle.

These statements seems to completely miss B16’s thought. Benedict is not the only one of the participants to try to show Schuster that he is presupposing organization of matter (even more, cosmic order) and then using its existence for arriving at philosophical assumptions (e.g. God does not need to intervene). One participant points out that modern science assumes that if it finds a mechanism (the efficient cause), it has exhausted not only questions of an empirical nature, but it has also obviated philosophical questions to boot. In other words, this is the reduction of all causality to material and efficient causality. This is not as a matter of method mind you, but as a matter of ontology.

A Johannes Lehmann-Dronke (identity unknown to me), in a very insightful intervention that goes on almost as long as all of B16’s combined interventions–but is much worth reading, points out that the intelligibility of matter can only be presumed by empirical methods, but it cannot be understood or explained per se (see pp. 166-70; though much of this material seems to have been added during the book’s editorial process). Schuster’s paper shows that he completely misses this point.

Schuster’s paper points to evolution through computer programs as evidence that it is more than a theory and so God does not need to “intervene.” He never steps back to realize that the logos for that program came from a human intellect. He also attempts to demonstrate that complexity can come from simple structures by pointing to mathematical structures called “cellular automotons” [sic]. He does not appear to stop to ask the question: “why that should be?” Simply knowing the mechanism by which it takes place is sufficient for the modern scientist, even when he plays philosopher.

Schuster, who appears to be a believer, is not alone. I recall a lengthly interchange that Hierothee and I had with some otherwise solid Catholics back in 2005 after the Schönborn article came out in the NY Times. They also had a difficult time stepping back and asking these meta-questions. I had intended to call this post, “Confessions of a Recovering Reductionist” because I too continue to uncover reductionist presuppositions still latent in my thinking; put there by my upbringing. I was going to describe my challenges with extracting myself from this perennial problem of so many coming from the science and engineering fields, but I the post ran too long.

The problem is what I call “ontologizing of the method.” Modern science reduces reality to its component parts as a method of study but then makes the unwarranted (and unarticulated) philosophical leap that this is the way of reality. That all entities are simply the sum of their parts. Some fields of science and engineering are beginning to come to terms with this philosophical error (e.g. the quality movement in engineering and systems biology in science). However, it takes much work, patience, and critical thinking to exorcise this demon. Hopefully this Schülerkreis can be Dr. Schuster’s path on his road to recovery.

LifeSiteNews is running an article about the near harvesting of the organs from a 45 year old man in Paris who later recovered from what was thought to be a fatal heart attack. After the “standard” protocol, he was apparently declared “brain dead” by the attending physicians. It seems to me that this is just one more case which calls into question the position of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences acceptance of “brain death” as a legitimate determination of death.

The Pontifical Academy of Sciences met both in 2005 and 2006 to reassess their acceptance of brain death. As with their initial acceptance, there was also much controversy about these meetings. The earlier meeting’s papers were not published by the Academy while the 2006 papers were. A 2007 CNS news story summarizes the controversy when members of the 2005 meeting decided to publish the earlier meetings papers on their own. In a nutshell, those who were involved in the publishing of the 2005 papers, in a document entitled Finis Vitae, were critical of the Academy’s position. This group includes physicians, theologians, philosophers, and two bishops.

As a result of the 2006 meeting, the Academy reaffirmed its 1985 and 1989 positions that brain death is a valid determination of death (N.B. the CNS article ascribes the Academy’s position to the “Vatican;” this is not only misleading, it is wrong and they should know better. The Pontifical Academy of Sciences does not have magisterial or even executive authority).

The position of those who reject the Academy’s position can be found here. Here is the summary of their conclusions:

1. On the one hand the Church recognizes, consistent with her tradition, that the sanctity of all human life from conception to natural end must absolutely be respected and upheld. On the other hand, a secular society tends to place greater emphasis on the quality of living.

2. The Catholic Church has always opposed the destruction of human life before being born through abortion and she equally condemns the premature ending of the life of an innocent donor in order to extend the life of another through unpaired vital organ transplantation. “It is morally inadmissible directly to bring about the disabling mutilation or death of a human being, even in order to delay the death of other persons.” “It is never licit to kill one human being in order to save another.”

3. “Nor can we remain silent in the face of other more furtive, but no less serious and real forms of euthanasia. These could occur for example when, in order to increase the availability of organs for transplants, organs are removed without respecting objective and adequate criteria which verify the death of the donor.”

4. “The death of the person is a single event, consisting in the total disintegration of that unitary and integrated whole that is the personal self. It results from the separation of the life-principle (or soul) from the corporal reality of the person.” Pope Pius XII declared this same truth when he stated that human life continues when its vital functions manifest themselves even with the help of artificial processes.

5. “Acknowledgement of the unique dignity of the human person has a further underlying consequence: vital organs which occur singly in the body can be removed only after death–that is, from the body of someone who is certainly dead. This requirement is self-evident, since to act otherwise would mean intentionally to cause the death of the donor in disposing of his organs.” Natural moral law precludes removal for transplantation of unpaired vital organs from a person who is not certainly dead. The declaration of “brain death” is not sufficient to arrive at the conclusion that the patient is certainly dead. It is not even sufficient to arrive at moral certitude.

6. Many in the medical and scientific community maintain that brain-related criteria for death are sufficient to generate moral certitude of death itself. Ongoing medical and scientific evidence contradicts this assumption. Neurological criteria alone are not sufficient to generate moral certitude of death itself, and are absolutely incapable of generating physical certainty that death has occurred.

7. It is now patently evident that there is no single so-called neurological criterion commonly held by the international scientific community to determine certain death. Rather, many different sets of neurological criteria are used without global consensus.

8. Neurological criteria are not sufficient for declaration of death when an intact cardio-respiratory system is functioning. These neurological criteria test for the absence of some specific brain reflexes. Functions of the brain not considered are temperature control, blood pressure, cardiac rate and salt and water balance. When a patient on a ventilation machine is declared “brain dead,” these functions not only are present but also are frequently active.

9. The apnea test–the removal of respiratory support–is mandated as a part of the neurological diagnosis and it is paradoxically applied to ensure irreversibility. This significantly impairs outcome, or even causes death, in patients with severe brain injury.

10. There is overwhelming medical and scientific evidence that the complete and irreversible cessation of all brain activity (in the cerebrum, cerebellum and brain stem) is not proof of death. The complete cessation of brain activity cannot be adequately assessed. Irreversibility is a prognosis, not a medically observable fact. We now successfully treat many patients who in the recent past were considered hopeless.

11. A diagnosis of death by neurological criteria alone is theory, not scientific fact. It is not sufficient to overcome the presumption of life.

12. No law whatsoever ought to attempt to make licit an act that is intrinsically evil. “I repeat once more that a law which violates an innocent person’s natural right to life is unjust and, as such, is not valid as a law. For this reason I urgently appeal once more to all political leaders not to pass laws which, by disregarding the dignity of the person, undermine the very fabric of society.”

13. The termination of one innocent life in pursuit of saving another, as in the case of the transplantation of unpaired vital organs, does not mitigate the evil of taking an innocent human life. Evil may not be done that good might come of it.

I seems to me that the Academy falls into a reductionist presupposition. What I mean is that while there are certainly empirical manifestations of life, life, and so death, are ultimately philosophical issues. The Pontifical Academy of Sciences seems though, to equate brain activity (and here it is certain brain activity) with the presence of the soul. However, human life is more than brain activity; it is dogmatically defined to exist when the body is informed by the soul. As well, death occurs when the soul leaves the body. The soul is immaterial and as such, it is not directly empirically accessible and so empirical science can only indirectly assist in the determination of death. While the Academy would most likely agree with this, they seem either to overestimate the insights of modern science and/or reduce the soul to its manifestation in brain activity, a reductionist presupposition.

The failure to understand the limits of science in this matter is a major problem in the struggle to protect life today. Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz makes the observation that there seems to be a dichotomy between the Academy’s position that the lack of brain function can be used as a determination of death and the Church’s position that the destruction of human embryos, who do not yet have a developed brain, is a moral evil. Perhaps there is also a logical fallacy at play in the Academy’s rationale?

It is true that the presence of cognitive functions in the brain necessitate the presence of the soul but it is a logical fallacy to assume that the lack of that activity necessitates the departure of the soul. Now this Parisian case would seem to verify that brain activity alone is insufficient to determine death.

This is not a minor issue. Modern medicine, as the minority report points out, is not so concerned with the value of life itself as it is with the quality of life. In its triage/utilitarian mentality, it is too often motivated to harvest organs from those whose chances for an “adequate quality of life” are much less than those who could benefit from the organs. In other words, they are not so concerned with knowing if the person is actually alive, just what they believe the patient’s chances are of recovering in order to lead what they would find to be a sufficiently happy life.

What the delegitimization of “brain death” might mean for organ donation could be significant. I suspect that it is this concern that causes the Academy to err on the side of the status quo. However, I think that it is an issue that the Pontifical Academy of Sciences needs to readdress in light of this event. Even more so, I think that it is an issue that requires Magisterial comment, at least of caution, lest the faithful consider the Academy’s problematic position as authoritative.

Note to self…no matter how badly you need to see your sports rehab specialist, do Not try to drive from Waco to San Antonio through Ft. Hood and Marble Falls in the afternoon, become evening, the day before Thanksgiving. Twelve hours round trip when it should have taken eight.  Now, with the whining out of the way, I would like to add a couple more thoughts to yesterday’s post.

I had mentioned that modern psychiatry takes an unwarranted step in presupposing the human person to be no more than a biological entity. The quote I cited yesterday reflects one way in which they do this:

“We don’t really know, but we suspect that exposure to, say, 10, 20, 30,000 pages of pornography may bias a young person in terms of what they consider a normal relationship,…

Why do you suppose that this person thinks that it might take 10-30K repetitions of exposure to pornography to “bias” a young person? Well, he appears to have no clue, apparently, about the lasting, even ontological, effects of one’s decisions upon his personal constitution. In many ways, we are self-made. That is, our decisions make us into the persons we are for the better or worse…not what we are, but who we are.

This representative of the academy seems to assume that the child is a pavlovian test subject who is simply conditioned by a rather large regimen of repetitive stimuli. Rather, the child, assuming he is of the age of reason, when he sees obscene images and consents to the perhaps rather confusing impulses he experiences, develops a distorted appetite for these images. If he recognizes the evil of his consent, he (de)creates himself as evil.

Archbishop Fulton Sheen, in a treasure trove of great insights in a work called Way to Inner Peace, provides a sort of phenomenological assessment of the process of decision making in this regard in a chapter about what makes us normal (Chapter 32). He points out that emotions are what lead us to action and so when we experience an emotion, we need to act in some way in order to discharge the motivational energy that is the emotion. But before we experience the emotion, the process starts with an idea. The idea must come first and then the emotion is begotten. He points out that before the emotion arises is the most effective time to banish an evil idea from our minds. If the evil idea is allowed to remain it can give rise to an emotion. If it does, we then have a more difficult task because we now have to discharge the emotional energy in someway, but the inertia is going to be in the direction of the evil idea.

In banishing the evil, we are not talking about repressing the emotion (i.e. supressing it from our consciousness but allowing it to remain) out of guilt which is not yet a factor until consent occurs, but we are banishing the evil idea from our minds. But what to do with the emotional energy?  Sheen shows that we can direct the energy in the opposite direction so that it becomes a force for good. For example, the rush that one might get from the idea of viewing porn, the subject of our post, can be used to get oneself up and go to make to an appointment with our priest to go to confession if we have consented in the past, or if we have become habituated to giving in to temptations and cannot get out of it ourselves, to get up and find a good counselor who can help us to deal with our addiction.

Let me say that I do not know if the egg head quoted above has ever done an examination of conscience, but I think if he were to do so, he would find that it takes fewer than a dozen events of consenting to evils associated with primary needs such as sex, food, or drink, to become habituated to consenting to the evil. Some with a predisposition to addiction can become addicted in as many consents.

Bishop Sheen warns us that the appetite grows on what it feeds upon. If we give it evil, it will develop an insatiable appetite for more and more evil. If it is good, the appetites will develop an insatiable appetite for the good. The difference being that evil is a privation of being and so this appetite can never be satisfied. For the one addicted to evil then, the world eventually comes to seem a cruel joke. For one addicted to the good, there is only one ultimate satisfaction for what becomes a desire for the infinite Good and that is Good Himself–God.

As I said in my last post (though not in these words), one need not consult Pub-Med to find out if someone has done a study that would verify what I am saying. He need only consult his experiences to know the truth of it because while we are all fallen, and even though some of us are wounded in ways much more severe than others, we are also all human.  We know from experience that our virtuous acts lead us to happiness and our evil acts lead us, once the novelty of the pleasure wears off which it always eventually does, spiritual woundedness. Some may not have a clear idea of what it is to be normal because normalcy was denied them an all too early age.  But while they may not be able to verify that the good alternative exists to the evil they have experienced, they can verify that the insatiable evil does exist.  They know that living in a way that plays to their base emotions does seem to lead to a hopelessness about ever finding authentic happiness and life then does seems to become little more than a cruel joke upon them.

It is not among those who remove morality from consideration that anyone who needs healing from evil is going to find it. One must go to the expert in human personhood, the Catholic Church, if one is going to find the full resources for healing. The psych docs who plot the demise of common sense also lead their patients into the death spiral which comes from treating a human person like little more than an animal. Anyone who is faced with the prospect of a dealing with one of these reductionists ought to demand that the doc incorporate Catholic anthropology and the Sacramental system into the treatment plan or else find another doctor. God has given us what we need to overcome the ramifications of the fall, we need to ensure that our scientistic culture, and cultural elites do not deprive us of our sacred patrimony.

Christopher, who is in the midst of a graduate degree program in counseling and so is excused from not having posted in a while, was perusing the APA’s website last week and sent along a link to this story that they had featured that day. Here is the header:

Web pornography’s effect on children

Although research is scarce, investigators see links between young people who access Web porn and unhealthy attitudes toward sex.

The average person reading this would respond with “duhhh!!!!!” I would suspect. However, in reading the article, even the short intro above may seem to overstate the case. I say this because the author concludes the article with:

It’s too early to say what these findings mean—or even what to do if clearer results are shown. Some, for example, believe that being sexually curious is part of the developmental process and that Internet porn is one, albeit problematic, way to satisfy that curiosity. And it may prove nearly impossible to completely prevent it … .

This statement, while it certainly reflects the sad state of affairs, indicates that the sad state of affairs is contributed to in no small measure by a psychiatric academy that has jettisoned an integral view of the human person. Rather, they have left aside traditional morality as socially relative and completely unrelated to personal wellbeing. They do not even seem to know what comprises wellbeing any longer. For example, this appears to be the most that we can say about human flourishing in terms of healthy relationships:

“We don’t really know, but we suspect that exposure to, say, 10, 20, 30,000 pages of pornography may bias a young person in terms of what they consider a normal relationship,…

“We don’t really know.” This is the main point of this post. What is revealed by this statement is that theses folks assume that common sense must be dismissed in their new “world order.” Why? Because we do not “know” anything unless it has been empirically established and verified by other empirical investigators. This is scientism at its worst. That is, it is assuming that empirical science is the only source of valid knowledge.

But wait you say, isn’t this just medicine? Don’t we use the scientific method in medicine? Yes, we do. However, what is problematic is that when we reduce what we can know about the human person to that which can be established by empirical methods alone, then we have a reductionist view of the human person and so we make ourselves utterly incompetent in trying to understand him.

For example, one does not need to empirically verify in order to know as fact that anyone who habitually submits to his emotions without subjecting them to reason and gaining full possession of himself, will not flourish. Experience tells us that we will become slaves to our passions. We do not need a research study to tell us that this in order to know that it is true for everyone, though some experience it more severely with some things rather than others. We know that there is a universal structure to human beings that we call human nature. We know when we violate human nature, that sooner or later, we will suffer for it.

Furthermore, empirical data is meaningless outside of contextual models. The data has to be understood in terms of a world view for it to be useful. These models are built upon theories about the human person. The difficulties found among the soft sciences is that there is an inbuilt contradiction between the underlying presupposition that the subject of the study can be reduced to a biological entity describable by deterministic laws and the recognition that, in reality, there is something that cannot be accounted for (called intellect and free will) and this works at cross purposes with these presuppositions.

These models (not proven–i.e. not “scientific” but presupposed) cut the subject free from any structure that one could call human nature and so the subject is to be understood only in terms of the variety of individuals studied. The closest thing to nature they will allow is statistical averages. If one comes at this data from the reductionist perspective, he will interpret it completely differently than if one comes at it with the common sense, traditional, perspective…i.e. that there is such a thing as human nature and violating it comes with problems.

This is what explains the hesitancy of these so called “experts” to say that exposing kids to pornography will damage them. Someone with less knowledge and more wisdom can look at the data and say, yes, this confirms what we know about children and human nature. The academy, most of whom have traded wisdom for knowledge, say no we have to collect more data to be make such a claim because they rule out, out of hand, the classical understanding of human nature.

These are the people to whom we subject ourselves for healing when we, our children, or other loved ones experience psychological or emotional difficulties. The “experts” reductionism ought to scare you given the sage insights this article reflects. Added to that, is that too often, those who enter the profession (as Shelray has pointed out many times) are drawn to it because they suffer from the same maladies they are trying to treat. Because those treating them cannot heal them because they do not have an integral view of the human person, the most they have learned are coping skills. This brings to mind the local psych hospital in which the child sexual identity expert is a man who is undergoing a “sex change” operation. I cannot imagine a parent in good conscience letting her child be “treated” by someone who himself needs treatment.

I’ll tell you what. I think that the average person would be better off sitting down with a wise ole grandmother or grandfather who can apply their common sense with wisdom than subjecting oneself to these folks who are not willing to say that children should be prevented from being exposed to pornography because the data is not yet conclusive that it is harmful. If a psych doctor does not exhibit common sense, I would recommend exercising your own…and finding one who does (like here).

Monica posts some interesting news on the recently reported monkey embryonic stem cell research advances and a recent surprise by the researcher who brought us Dolly the cloned sheep.

We mentioned a little while back that Monica had begun the Adult Stem Cell Awareness blog. She has arranged to have Dr. Dan Pepin write a regular Q&A column for ASCA. Dr. Pepin is professor of Anatomy and Physiology at Edison College in Naples, FL; instructor of Human Biology at North Central Michigan College in Petoskey, MI; and Consultant on Bioethics for the Dioceses of Venice, FL and Gaylord, MI.

So, if you have questions about stem cells, Monica has given you the venue to get them answered. Go over and ask Dr. Dan your questions.

The other day I cited John Paul’s admonition of what happens when we forget God–man become an enigma to himself and ends up turning against himself. As I was preparing for a theology of the body lecture, I reread John Paul’s Jan 20th, 1980 Wednesday Audience in which he teaches that because man is created in the image of God, Who is Self-gift, man becomes a gift to the world.

How different this view of man is from those who have rejected God. We are hearing more and more from even the mainstream media about man as not a gift to the world but rather its bane. This view is being fed to them by misguided atheistic ecologists who, after rejecting the Triune, transcendent God of Christianity, have divinized sub-personal creation. They now consider mankind a virus. For example, last year a Texas ecologist was being investigated by the FBI for statements he made that seemed to advocate bio-terrorism. According to LifeSite he said:

“Good terrorists would be taking [Ebola Reston and Ebola Zaire] so that they had microbes they could let loose on the Earth that would kill 90 percent of people.”

To “save” the world from the “scourge of humanity” he advocates the eradication of 90% of what he terms the “fat, human biomass.” Earlier this year an interview with an author who wrote a book about what would happen if humans suddenly disappeared from the earth, Matt Lauer from the Today Show seems to advocate this same line of thinking. Rather than asking critical questions, he and co-host Meredeth Vieira talk about human developments such as cities, dams, canals, etc. as making a mess of the environment. They both agree that the world would be much better off without us. What the world without humanity would mean is a unanswered question. Does it make a difference to the world if it is a molten mass of lava or a lush green paradise? These confused souls seem to presuppose that “better off” means pristine conditions for the highest forms of life but then they reject the highest forms of life–human beings–as the problem. This dichotomous thinking is also epidemic amongst those fanning global warming hysteria. Global warming, if human caused, will only harm humans…so what would be the beef that these anti-human ecologists have with it?

Let’s look at this confused “thinking” a little more closely. The interesting thing here is that the first premise in their logic is that humanity is just another form of life, with no more value than any other. They reduce humanity to the animal aspect of its hylomorphic nature. However, they then have to distinguish humanity from the rest of the animals in order to be able to declare that human beings are the virus while the rest of the animal kingdom is not.

Therefore, for the next step in logic they are forced to make a distinction and it is a fundamental one. The reason that humans are dangerous for the world are that they alone have the capacity to transcend themselves and their environment. The capacity that makes us distinctly different from the rest of creation is no longer a sign that man has a vastly higher moral worth than sub-personal animals. Rather, not being constrained by instinct and having intellect and will, free will, becomes a danger that reduces us to the level, ironically enough, of a virus. A virus is a non-living entity that has no free will and simply responds to environmental pressures according to its nature. A virus is seen as bad, by the way, because it is dangerous to humans. There is no consistency in thought here, except to throw whatever one can at one overriding idea–the self-hatred of man.

However, it would not be correct to say that this self-hatred arises simply out of nowhere. It is a self-hatred that arises from a hatred of God and the fact that we are made in His image. It is a rebellion against the only creature which God put here on earth for its own sake. When one rejects God, he rejects himself and comes to hate in himself the reminder that he is created in God’s image–his free will. Paradoxically, he must employ and, in fact, make his will into an idol in order to do so. But again, we have shown that it is hate and self-will, not logic, which drives this movement.

We have removed God from public life and our late-modern thinking has eliminated the idea of things having a nature. The result is that there is no foundation for morality. One can no longer speak of divine law in public discourse. Nor can one easily speak of natural law because there is professed to be (by our high priests of modern science) no order to nature but a random arrived at arrangement of matter (that only begrudgingly will these “thinkers” admit is ordered). The “thinking” exhibited by these folks is vague at best. If one recalls the tradition that Satan’s non serviam was a rebellion against serving humanity because its animality was too far below him, one might justly call this latest assault on human dignity, satanic.

I read an article earlier today about a scientist, Craig Venter, who believes that the artificial chromosome he has created from lab chemicals will be able to take over a donor bacterium cell in order to replicate and metabolize. While the construction of an artificial 381 gene, 580K base pair chromosome has not been done before, I wonder why this announcement comes prior to verifying that this chromosome will in fact work as he plans.

While it appears to me that at this point the concerns here are more over safety than morality, what does cause me pause is the attitude he seems to display in the comments attributed to him. Venter told the reporter that this is:

“a very important philosophical step in the history of our species. We are going from reading our genetic code to the ability to write it. That gives us the hypothetical ability to do things never contemplated before”.

The phrase “philosophical step in the history of our species” seems quite misplaced for a scientist. What does he mean by this? At most here, as I understand it, is that if he is successful he may coax a cell of one bacterium species to replicate according to the genome of an artificially assembled chromosome that was based upon another bacterium’s genetic sequence which had been pared down to the minimum they think necessary to support life. I suppose that this could mean that he thinks that this project in some way brings man more to the level of creation ex nihilo? If this is what he is getting at, it seems that he ought to keep his day job or go back and take some classical philosophy.

The final quotation is just as vexing. He states:

“We are not afraid to take on things that are important just because they stimulate thinking,” he said. “We are dealing in big ideas. We are trying to create a new value system for life. When dealing at this scale, you can’t expect everybody to be happy.”

Well, again, it seems that his purpose is not so much for improving life and healing disease, but in dealing with”big issues” and “trying to create new value systems for life.” Perhaps this might be the reason for his early announcement. A failure might dampen or even put the breaks on his ability to deal with big issues and create new value systems. For that he needs media attention. If his primary interest for the sake of the science and medicine, the artificial chromosome construction would probably be sufficient even if he cannot get the last phase to work.

I dunno. This sounds to me more like the “science” of Richard Dawkins than Louis Pasteur. That is, the abuse of science to promote an ideology. I don’t want to say megalomaniacal ideology but does this not smell like an attempt to wangle an apparently significant biotechnical achievement into a bully pulpit for promoting what seems to be a Nietzschean world view in which Venter is the ubermensch? I wouldn’t mind being wrong here.

According to a nationwide survey, psychiatrists are the least religious of all physicians. Although a religious belief does not necessarily mean one will always behave according to an established set of moral standards/ commandments, a lack of faith may most certainly make one more susceptible to adjusting one’s moral obligations according to the social contract theory (read media pressure). The APA has illustrated this point brilliantly when it succumbed to political pressure rather than empirical scientific data (much less common sense) in its decision to remove the diagnosis of homosexuality as a legitimate DSM diagnosis (but still permits the diagnosis of “Sexual Disorder Not Otherwise Specified” for someone with “…persistent and marked distress about sexual orientation“) and has recently adopted a pro-abortion position based on the perception of civil rights NOT scientific data.

The survey, published in the September issue of the journal Psychiatric Services, found that religious physicians are more likely to refer patients to a clerical person rather than a psychiatrist because “the gap between the religiousness of the average psychiatrist and her average patient may make it difficult for them to connect on a human level.”  Unfortunately, I have first hand experience in witnessing the business side of the psychiatric industry and the inability of the average psychiatrist connecting on any level with the patient.  The ability to be sensitive to the patient’s beliefs (i.e. connect) was not a primary concern. When venturing into the largely subjective (in the pejorative sense of the term) world of the professional psychiatric industry, one should beware of a dark sided subculture in which some practitioners and patients figuratively feed off one another for the purpose of attaining self-centered mutual benefits (income stream, appeasement, pharmacology, victimology, co-dependency, etc…). If your require mental health assistance, if at all possible, I would recommend you check out the Catholic Therapists’ listing, if you are in the Maryland, Northern Virginia or DC area either Alpha Omega Clinic or IPS Clinic, or consult your local Catholic charities.

An elitist scientific establishment actively suppresses any research that conflicts with the accepted Darwinian theory.

“Big Science in this area of biology has lost its way,” says Stein. “Scientists are supposed to be allowed to follow the evidence wherever it may lead, no matter what the implications are. Freedom of inquiry has been greatly compromised, and this is not only anti-American, it’s anti-science. Its anti-the whole concept of learning.”

Movie Trailer from “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” starring the New York writer and intellectual Ben Stein. The film, set for release in February 2008.

LifeSite

A couple of months ago I posted on, among other things, the religion of those involved in the human caused global warming crusade. One of the problems of late modernity is that they have rejected much of the rationalism of early modernity. This in itself isn’t problematic. What is, is that in its place they adopt the Nietzschean admonition of the will to power. Thus, they deem it fair to use any method they think useful in order to obtain their ends.

They take advantage of the fact that much of society is bewitched by the word “science” but that many knowing little about science’s limitations. Thus, late moderns will appeal to science when it suits them. In that they cannot debate on the level of science, they will deny the credibility of those who present opposing scientific evidence. They rarely debate the evidence but rather seem to go straight to ad hominem.

A recent lecture by S. Fred Singer, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia, takes on the emoting of these pseudo-scientists on the issue of human caused global warming. Looking at the claims of the global warming promoters, Singer notes that it is possible that global warming is not even a real phenomenon. For example, he shows that temperature have not risen over the last eight years although the rise in CO2 levels has increased. This suggests to him that last 30 year warming trend is due to more to other causes than to human causes. He also notes the failure of measured data to validate greenhouse computer models which also points the finger toward natural causes for the trend.

He also clears up misstatements about so called scientific consensus on this issue. He first shows that there is no consensus. Explaining that only a relatively few scientists have been consulted on this and that estimates are that well over half of the members of American Meteorological Society disagree with the so called “consensus” position. He goes on to explain that science does not proceed according to democratic means of establishing truth claims. Rather, science proceeds by validation of theories with empirical evidence that goes beyond simple trend correlation. I suppose that the media is so used to using their truth by poll method that this error could not be helped.

The irony here is that the claims of scientific obfuscation by those who oppose the will of the late moderns is what they themselves are guilty of. It is these same folks who know little about thinking and usually less about modern science, who use their scientism to justify their unbelief.

The next time you hear Christopher Hitchens railing about the inanity of Christianity in this age of science, think Al Gore and his scare mongering “documentary.”

At first glance, Eugene McCarraher’s recent, sharp-tongued rebuke of Christopher Hitchens’s ridiculous and juvenile God Is Not Great sounds like one of the more genuinely Catholic pieces ever penned for the equally ridiculous and juvenile periodical Commonweal. McCarraher seems rightly to pull no punches in attacking Hitchens’s alarming sophistry and ignorance. God Is Not Great, McCarraher tells us, is “Bullying and shallow…a haute middlebrow tirade, a stale venting of outrage and ridicule.” Hitchens is a mere “amateur in philosophy, an illiterate in theology, and a dishonest student of history.”

McCarraher fulminates against Hitchens for having become a run-of-the-mill spokesperson for capitalist modernity, that is, a bourgeois simpleton through-and-through. Hitchens has come to sound, McCarraher opines, more and more like one of Nietzsche’s infamous “Last Men,” the ignorant and arrogant (and godless) saps whose lives would embody the final, degraded spiritual condition of the European bourgeoisie. McCarraher follows Nietzsche: “Disdainful of all that has gone before them, the Last Men mistake their cynicism for knowledge and wisdom, ‘They are clever and know all that has happened, so there is no end to their derision.’” Of course, if I may fill in a bit from Nietzsche, in reality the “Last Men,” like Hitchens himself, are deluded. They are neither wise nor clever. Their cynicism comes too easy, without any real knowledge. They are not worthy of the great causes of the past whose spiritual impulses they dismiss in favor of their own trivial pleasures.

McCarraher summarizes quite well the real roots of contemporary atheism, found in the degraded condition of soul that passes for civilized humanity in the 21^st century, a condition exemplified by Hitchens himself:

Today’s atheism pays extravagant homage to idols dear to the professional and managerial ranks. Science as truth; the technological mastery of nature; credentialed expertise as the only credible form of learning; efficiency and profit as the sole ends of economic and political life: these shibboleths comprise the mental universe of the Western middle classes. Colored by an incoherent blend of Darwinism and environmentalism, a bland infatuation with science and technology is the bourgeois halo around instrumental reason, and nothing in the new secularism of Dawkins, Harris et al. serves to exorcise that enchantment.

There is little to quibble with in this pithy segment of McCarraher’s review of God Is Not Great. Indeed, if I may extrapolate, the all-consuming quest for middle-class comfort, on the one hand, and religious obligation, on the other, are antithetical to one another. It is no wonder that Hitchens so greatly hates religion. Marx’s protests to the contrary – that religion is the tool by which capitalist modernity promulgates itself – are of no lasting value: after all, Marx himself wanted little more than to spread the condition of the bourgeoisie as a privileged class to the entire globe (interestingly, for much of its history, this goal was quite consonant with Commonweal’s usual published fare – more on that in a second).

McCarraher continues his review by providing a list of facts demonstrating Hitchens’s palpable ignorance: Hitchens exhibits, for instance, no awareness of the role that Christians like Roger Bacon, Robert Grosseteste and Gregor Mendel played in the advent and development of science; he extols the Human Genome Project as a nail in religion’s coffin, while failing to notice that the head of the Project, Francis Collins, is an evangelical Christian; he makes the most simplistic errors in regard to theological argument – such as his childish assertion that theologians have never been able to overcome the dilemma posed for them by the question of “who created the creator?”; he accuses Christians of biblical literalism, ignoring the vast tradition, ancient and modern, of biblical interpretation that transcends the level of literal meaning. Other examples abound…

McCarraher is quite good, as well, in dismantling Hitchens’s pretension, common among the liberal intelligentsia, that modern literary and artistic culture should replace religious cultus. After all, McCarraher notes, 90 percent of our literary and artistic heritage is based in religion.

But, in the end, there is one thing above all about Hitchens that seems most irksome to McCarraher, and this requires us to take a second glance of the review as a whole. That is, McCarraher seems particularly upset about Hitchens’s increasingly vocal Americanism, and especially his support for the Iraq war. In this, we see how typical McCarraher’s review really is of Commonweal pabulum. After all, at various points in the article, McCarraher makes some other rather strange statements: at the beginning, he is flattering toward Hitchens’s earlier work, including his surpassingly stupid bromide against Mother Teresa; he includes religious intervention in abortion and gay marriage among “obvious sources” for the reaction of contemporary atheists against religion (apparently McCarraher doesn’t realize just how “bourgeois” the counter-forces to religion are on these issues); he wonders aloud if Hitchens has ever taken the time to debate a stalwart religious intellectual such as Garry Wills – whose own disingenuous religiosity, in my opinion, would serve more to confirm Hitchens (if Hitchens is at all honest) in his anti-religious sentiment than to dissuade him; he asks why Hitchens does not include in his book any mention of the profound conversations that Hitchens self-admittedly had with the Catholic senator Eugene McCarthy on religion. Indeed, McCarthy was, in McCarraher’s opinion, the last intellectual in American politics. But, truth be told, if one is not blinded by the Commonweal ideology, McCarthy was no more intellectual than, say, Newt Gingrich (Ph.D.).

The ultimate flaw in Hitchens’s latter-day polemics, in McCarraher’s opinion – it seems, is that it evinces a faith-above-all-else in capitalism. But this, in my opinion, is no more problematic than his earlier faith-above-all-else in socialism, expressed with an anti-religious fervor every bit as venomous as can be found in God Is Not Great. McCarraher thought that Hitchens’s earlier writings were the product of a “rigorous and undaunted mind.” In fact, they were no more or less so than his latest drivel. Why then should McCarraher turn his poison pen on Hitchens now? Is it truly because of his infantile atheism, or because of his “neoconservative” Americanism? Given Commonweal’s dubious track record, I suspect that the latter is the case.

An e-mail friend of mine, Steve, passed along an editorial in the 28 June 2007 issue of the journal Nature. The editors describe a claim by ETC Group out of Ottawa, Canada that “for the first time, God has competition.” This “environmental pressure group” suspected that the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, MD had “created” an organism using a synthesized, artificial genome–so called, synthetic biology.

While this turned out to be false, the Nature editors say clearly that synthetic biology will produce an artificial life form “in the next few years” (others claim it is only months away). They take this opportunity to turn from science to philosophy, though they do not realize it. In the context of these synthesized life forms they ask the question:

But should such efforts be regarded as ‘creating life’? The idea that such creation is a momentous step has deep roots running from the medieval homunculus portrayed by Paracelsus and the golem of Jewish legend to the modern faustian myth of Frankenstein. It will surely be hard to uproot. This is unfortunate, as the idea is close to meaningless.

What is it that the editors find to be meaningless–the “meaning of life” or the “creation of life”? Well it turns out that it is the former:

There is a popular notion that life is something that appears when a clear threshold is crossed. One might have hoped that such perceptions of a need for a qualitative difference between inert and living matter — such vitalism — would have been interred alongside the pre-darwinian belief that organisms are generated spontaneously from decaying matter. Scientists who regard themselves as well beyond such beliefs nevertheless bolster them when they attempt to draw up criteria for what constitutes ‘life’. It would be a service to more than synthetic biology if we might now be permitted to dismiss the idea that life is a precise scientific concept.

Now, the final sentence of the above quote might be taken as “scientific humility.” In other words, that life is a philosophical and theological concept and so science cannot circumscribe it. That would be great to hear from a journal such as Nature. Unfortunately, this is not what they are saying. That much should be obvious from the rest of the quote. Rather, the editors clearly are philosophical materialists and seem to uncritically presuppose that modern science warrants such a philosophical leap of logic…but of course, it does not. In fact, it cannot because it does not have the tools to engage in such speculation. The editorial goes on to opine that the synthesis of artificial cells can present more than a benefit to knowledge and medicine. Synthetic biology can, for Nature, benefit the culture at large by helping it to extinguish troublesome ideas such as concerns over the significance of life:

One of the broader cultural benefits of attempts to make artificial cells is that they force us to confront the contextual contingency of this troublesome idea.

What benefits can this bring to our culture? Well, how about the annihilation of moral thresholds when it comes to life. In that way, we could do away with any religious arguments that would give any special status to the embryo. Now what would that be worth? Science without morality…imagine the possibilities… Nietzsche’s “The Gay Science” comes to mind here. Well, let’s let Nature speak for itself:

Synthetic biology’s view of life as a molecular process lacking moral thresholds at the level of the cell is a powerful one. And it can and perhaps should be invoked to challenge characterizations of life that are sometimes used to defend religious dogma about the embryo. If this view undermines the notion that a ‘divine spark’ abruptly gives value to a fertilized egg — recognizing as it does that the formation of a new being is gradual, contingent and precarious — then the role of the term ‘life’ in that debate might acquire the ambiguity that it has always warranted.

Nature clearly recognizes that empirical methods do not provide the ability to precisely define life. However, their problem is that they presume, therefore, that there is no other source of knowledge that can do so. This is called “scientism.” I have already pointed out Nature’s lack of recognition that they are, in fact, engaged in modes of thought which extend beyond the domain for which empirical science alone can authorize discussion. However, not realizing this and not being trained in these other modes of thinking and knowing, they do it very poorly. They presuppose answers to questions without even realizing it.

Because of their mechanistic materialism they are led to think that if one can understand how the material world is “mechanized” and how the mechanical sequence of events relate to one another, then this explains why things are the way they are. In other words, in explaining “the how” they hope to avoid having to answer the question why.

What I mean is that they are taking a philosophical question: “what is life?”, and trying to answer it solely with the tools of natural science. Since they apriori reduce knowledge to the empirical level they have no structures, no foundation for addressing the realm of knowledge beyond that to which empirical methods have access. Thus they find that they need to dismiss as non-questions those issues for which their tools do not apply…such as the question: “what is life.”There are many other errors at play here. Another I ought to point out is the presupposition about a faulty “God of the gaps” philosophy. For the editors, this theory implies for them that the only reason for believing in God’s existence is because we cannot explain “life” from a scientific point of view. Thus, if we make it occur mechanically, then obviously there is nothing to explain.

Of all of the reasons for believing in God one of these reasons has never been, in the entire history of Judeo-Christianity up until recently, the claim that we cannot explain the way the world works without Him. In fact, St. Thomas Aquinas suggested exactly the opposite. He thought that God was shown to be greater by being able to accomplish His will in a world that had a certain autonomy (not in terms of existence but in terms of efficient causality in which for every effect, God is the Primary Cause but there is always a created secondary efficient cause).

Those who reduce Thomas’ third proof on the order of the cosmos to the idea that there must be some gaps in secondary efficient causality if we are to find room for God as the source of the cosmic order, mistake his meaning. This is no doubt because they are influenced by Cartesian/Newtonian mechanism. It was not until Newton, who was not even a Christian, that this “God of the gaps” theory arose. Nevertheless, there are many reasons to recognize God as Necessary Existence. One of these arises from contingency, which underlies all of Thomas’ five proofs. None of these have anything to do with the assumption that God must “intervene” in the world in a way that cannot be accounted for by regular laws of nature.

Because of their reductionist presuppositions, the Nature editors also succumb to the logical fallacy of a false dichotomy. The false dichotomy goes like this: Since empirical science cannot account for life then it cannot be more than a mental construct. Thus, if synthetic biology shows that through material means alone, it can “create” a working cell from a synthesized genome then it will have proven that “life” is a purely material process. Besides being wrong, it is faulty logic because it is based upon a mechanistic philosophy. Hylomorphism implies that there should be a corresponding material process for every hylomorphic formal cause.

If it were eventually possible to make a working cell from assembling constituent parts, it still would do nothing to undermine the existence of God. In fact, just as with cloning in which a human soul could be infused when the matter (the zygotic structure) was ready to accept it, so hylomorphic theory would surely say that a vegetative “soul” would be infused into the cell when the structure of the matter was ready to receive it.

The point is that scientism, though they do not admit it, bears the burden of proof when they want to limit existence to the material world. They have this burden because they are making a universally negative assertion with no proof. In the end, they are also left with the burden of defending the incoherent philosophy of mechanistic materialism rather than presupposing its validity simply because they refuse to admit the coherence of other modes of knowledge. However, I suppose that until scientists masquerading as philosophers come to terms with the fact that they are being self-contradicting by simultaneously doing philosophy and denying its legitimacy and also presupposing an incoherent philosophy for which “science” gives them no warrant, they will continue be, as philosophers, solely good technicians of the empirical method.

This is the title of a summer institute and conference that is jointly sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Nature and the Institute of Catholic Thought, and is being held at St. John’s Catholic Newman Center in Champaign, IL. The summer institute will begin on Monday, June 11th and end with a conference on Friday and Saturday, June 15th and 16th.

Here is a description of the one week institute:

What:Four days of study and dialog on questions of science, natural philosophy, and their intersection. The questions and issues will be far-ranging, from anti-reductionism, emergentism, and structuralism in science, to “anti-realism” and “pluralism” in philosophy of science, to the continuing relevance of Aristotle’s understanding of nature.

The readings, lectures, and discussions will be organized around the theme of teleology in natural things. Teleology, even in the limited sense of “self-directness” or “intrinsic purposiveness,” has long been a source of controversy in philosophical reflections on nature and science. Using primarily texts and examples from modern chemistry, we will attempt to show that intrinsic teleology is neither a scary “ghostly cause” nor a “science-stopper,” but a common-sense conclusion from the data of modern science, and one that neither undermines the modern scientific edifice, nor remains irrelevant to it.

In order to maximize the value of week, students will be expected to read approximately 300 pages of materials from scientific, philosophical, modern, and classical sources in the month leading up to the Summer Institute. Those readings will be posted for download on this page about a month beforehand.

Here is a description of the conference that is entitled: The Nature of Nature:

What: A one and one-half day academic conference with one or two keynote addresses, and the presentation of 10-15 academic papers. Papers are encouraged on topics ranging from anti-reductionism/holism in science to self-organization, systems theory, and complexity, to papers in natural philosophy in the neo-Aristotelian or phenomenological traditions. See the ISN “articles, essays, and books” page to get a sense of the range or relevant topics.

Go here to read more about the institute and conference. If you are interested or know anyone who might be, I would encourage you to look into attending. It is sure to be a very interesting time.

A quasi scientific study sponsored by the theologically inept John Templeton Foundation allegedly found that those who were prayed for actually had more complications from heart surgery than those who were not. Are we to assume that God either ignores/hates Christians or there is no God?

Maybe it’s just the devil in the details.

I love the title of this book, The Dawkins Delusion. Richard Dawkins is a vociferous “anti-evangelist” who is intent on spreading his message that anyone who believes in God is a nut case. One of his Oxford colleagues has decided to take Dawkins to task for his pseudo-intellectualism in this book. Zenit ran an interview recently with the Oxford author, Alister McGrath, who is one of the book’s co-authors.

McGrath had begun on the same route as Dawkins. In the 1960s he was an atheist with a doctorate in molecular biophysics; however, he eventually corrected the mistaken aspects of his thinking that led him to his atheistic conclusions. In this book, he points out Dawkins’s errors.

Dawkins is an “expert” in evolutionary biology, though apparently he no longer has time to publish in this area since he is all consumed with his constant rehashing of the same old canards in book after book. In his latest book, the God Delusion, Dawkins reveals he is not an expert in philosophy, religion, or sound thinking. He seems to think that the louder he talks and more emphatic his rhetoric, the more convincing he will be. Here are some snippets of what McGrath has to say about Dawkins in the former’s Zenit interview:

McGrath declares himself disappointed with the level of argument in Dawkins’ book, which he describes as “the atheist equivalent of slick hellfire preaching, substituting turbo-charged rhetoric and highly selective manipulation of facts for careful, evidence-based thinking.” He adds: “Dawkins preaches to his god-hating choirs,” relying on pseudoscientific speculation and aggregating convenient factoids.

It seems that Dawkins has little appreciation for the beliefs that he tries to condemn; nor does he have the capability for reasoned argumentation (which would demand that one knows what he is talking about):

McGrath devotes a chapter to explaining why God is not a delusion, as Dawkins maintained. He observes that the definitions used by Dawkins to describe faith, such as a “process of non-thinking,” are foreign to a Christian definition of faith.

Apparently Dawkins’s major concern is that he believes that religion and God are evil:

Another argument used by Dawkins is that God and religion are evil, being responsible for all sorts of violence and abuses in mankind’s history. McGrath readily admits that violence which draws its inspiration from religion is clearly something to be rejected.

McGrath, who grew up in Northern Ireland, had plenty of experience with religious violence. Nevertheless, he points out that it is an entirely different proposition to argue that violence is an inherent element of religion. Dawkins also errs in making out atheism to be a universally benign influence. A look at 20th-century history readily provides abundant examples of politically motivated violence, not least of which was that committed by the atheistic regime of the Soviet Union.

Clearly, people are capable of both violence and moral excellence, McGrath points out, and both of these qualities may be provoked by worldviews, religious or otherwise. It is true that religion can turn human conflicts into battles of good and evil. At the same time, a society that rejects God then tends to hold up as an absolute other realities or concepts. Thus, the French Revolution in its effort to replace Christianity with secular ideals carried out violent repression as it sought to impose its principles.

In the youtube interview below, Dawkins provides helpful insights into his acumen for critical thought. He points to religion as the source of suicide bombers and terrorists. He counters this with the fact that neither he nor any other atheist he knows is anything but a peace loving person. As McGrath points out above, Dawkins conveniently avoids the fact that many (if not all) of history’s greatest atrocities were foisted by atheists and that the same claim about peace loving believers could by made by 99.9% of those who hold religious convictions.

In a related topic, CNN recently did a piece on atheists as an oppressed minority. Someone in the atheist “anti-evangelical” movement, I think has figured out that since their arguments have proven to be generally ineffective, perhaps playing the victim card will bring them more success. After CNN’s “heart wrenching” piece about the fear in which atheists live in the US, they had a panel discussion. Well, they forgot to invite an atheist. The atheist community clamored for equal time and so CNN did an interview with Dawkins. I find this interview rather insightful. Take a look:

Here he appears to have been coached that it is time to play the victim card. Dawkins’s responses seem to me to reveal his disingenuousness. He admits that atheism is a belief… an opinion, rather than the ironclad, scientific fact that he tries to claim in his books. He claims that atheists do not want anything from anyone else except to pursue their beliefs and live in peace. He is pleading for tolerance for his “belief” all the while attacking as delusional the beliefs of others. This is justified I suppose because “they are in the habit of always having it their way.” This hypocrisy is a common feature of “victim-ality” (those who erroneously hold themselves to be victims of some sort of oppression).

At the end of the clip, he says concludes that atheism is better than belief in God because atheists believe that this is the only life they have to live so they have to live it properly, happily, and to the full. Whereas, those who believe in God think that they are going to have another life so, apparently by definition, they cannot live this one properly, happily, or to the full. This he says is a very negative way to live.

First, it is interesting that without God he can make the absurd statement that there even exists a proper way to live one’s life. If we are all just historical accidents, then isn’t the existential dogma the correct one? In other words, the meaning of life is simply that which each person gives it. If so, then Dawkins’s message is contradictory. If believers create their own meaning of life and it makes them happy then on what basis does Dawkins’s criticize it if his goal is happiness through “proper” living? It seems like he wants to start getting it all his way.

It is not clear what religion he is thinking about when he claims that believers in God can’t live “properly” because they think they will get another life. However, even if he is thinking about reincarnation, I do not think that he would find many who hold to incarnation that would agree that they think they can misuse this life because they get another chance. Certainly, this is not the view of Christians who do not see eternal life as a “second chance.” Is Dawkins really this ignorant of those systems of belief with which he finds fault?

I’m not a psychiatrist but I do play one here on this blog. As such, let me say that Dawkins seems to exhibit the common behavior of those who hold tenuous positions on issues of grave importance. They subliminally realize their precarious situations and, therefore, they require continuous reaffirmation that “they are o.k.” from everyone else.  Moreover, they cannot bear to hear anyone else tell them that they are wrong. This, by the way, I think is much the same phenomenon we see from those who suffer from and simultaneously embrace the SSA disorder. It is no wonder that rational argument is not possible with personalities such as Dawkins.