The Church and the External Good

The fact that evil exists in the world and, more specifically, in the Church, has never posed much of an intellectual stumbling block for me. I say an intellectual stumbling block, because I suppose if I had suffered evil at the hands of a member of the Church, say a perverted priest, it might pose a significant practical stumbling block. But I haven't, so I am left with only the possible intellectual stumbling block.

The test for the true Church, it seems to me, is not so much the extent to which it excludes evil from itself, but the extent to which it avoids excluding good. All that is good has its ultimate source in God, and so a Church that excludes good is, to that extent, excluding God. We cannot expect the Church to be the sole source of good in the world, for God is larger than the Church even if the Church really is God's true Church. The true Church must therefore be open to the good that has its origin in the world external to it, since such work must finally be a work of God. I don't agree with Catholic apologists who feel they must trace the origin of everything good to Catholicism; it is historically false and philosophically unnecessary. John Paul II, typically, had it right when he acknowledged that the Enlightenment introduced some positive changes into history, among them modern liberal democracy, that have since been acknowledged by the Church. It's no insult to Catholicism that it absorbs good things it did not originate; in fact, the consistency with which it has done this over 2,000 years is powerful evidence of its peculiar and unprecedented origin, for I know of no other institution with a similar record. This goes all way back to the allegedly devastating skeptical point that Christmas is just a pagan holiday taken over by the Church. Yes, Dec. 25 was a pagan holiday, and the Church took it over because pagan holidays are good things, not bad things. The Church takes over what is good in the pagan world and renews it in Jesus Christ, so that it is the same yet reborn. New wine in new wineskins, but the wineskins are still recognizably similar to the old pagan wineskins.

The genius of the Catholic Church, and the reason the gates of Hell will never prevail against it, is that it absorbs whatever is good in its enemies (while, alas, sometimes absorbing their evil as well.) Evil in itself has no power; what is evil has power only the extent that it is good. The enemies of the Church are powerful only to the extent that they are good. The Roman Empire was originally an enemy of the Church, and was also the greatest human institution the world had ever seen. The Church defeated the Empire, not by crushing it, but by transforming it in its spirit, and in the process absorbing the good elements of the Empire - including its language, elements of the old pagan worship, and its hierarchical structure. The Pope is a Roman Emperor transformed in light of the Kingdom of God, and Bishops are Procurators. The Roman Empire is long gone but what was good in it survives in the Church. The Church performs a kind of spiritual jiu-jitsu, taking her enemies' strengths and making them her own, winning  the war without apparently fighting. 

The intellectual analog of the absorption of pagan worship and political structures was the absorption of pagan philosophy, first that of Plato and later that of Aristotle, and in this century, some Eastern philosophies as well (I am thinking of Thomas Merton and Zen Buddhism.) It takes tremendous confidence and faith for an institution to be open to new philosophies, for there is always the danger that it is the philosophy that will transform the institution rather than vice versa. This seems to be the more or less explicit aim of the many modern philosophical "innovators." Yet the success the Church has seen in absorbing Platonic philosophy and later Aristotelian philosophy is shown not merely in the fact that it remained itself after these exposures, but became more of itself in the process.

I find that the rivals to the Church, religious or secular, disqualify themselves by excluding some aspect of the good. The Mennonites of Pennsylvania, for example, live an admirable life of simplicity, and it is a good life, but it isn't the only good life. The life of the engineer and scientist can also be a good life. So while I admire the Mennonites, I do not think that their religion can constitute the fullness of faith. Secular philosophies that worship science and technology make the same mistake in the opposite direction. The true philosophy will find a way to embrace both alternatives, unifying them in a transcendent truth.  G.K. Chesterton:

"It is true that the Church told some men to fight and others not to fight; and it is true that those who fought were like thunderbolts and those who did not fight were like statues. All this simply means that the Church preferred to use its Supermen and to use its Tolstoyans. There must be some good in the life of battle, for so many good men have enjoyed being soldiers. There must be some good in the idea of non-resistance, for so many good men seem to enjoy being Quakers. All that the Church did (so far as that goes) was to prevent either of these good things from ousting the other. They existed side by side. The Tolstoyans, having all the scruples of monks, simple became monks. The Quakers became a club instead of a sect." 

Man, Nature and Religion

Man is a question that nature poses but does not answer.

This is the origin of religion and mythology. Religion and mythology are universal across human culture because nature is universal, and so the question of man is universally put. The more naive secularists miss this point. They think that religion poses the question that it answers, so if you rid the world of religion, you rid the world of the question to which religion is an answer. But it is nature, not religion, that poses the question of man, and it is for this reason that religion is ineradicable.

Even the most primitive mythology is truer than the modern scientistic, materialist understanding of man. For mythology faces the truth that man is an anomaly, an "outlier", a being whose nature demands an account different in kind from everything else in the universe. Modern man prides himself on his universalism, but it was really ancient man who was universal, for he universally agreed on the nature of the question of himself. The ancient pagan could construct a pantheon with doors that were always open to new Gods, for he was certain of the question but not the finality of the answer.

Modern conflict has an inhuman aspect to it that pre-modern conflict lacked. Pre-modern man universally agreed on the "first nature" of man, that is, that the question of man has no immediate answer in nature.*  A bear or a bee can be understood directly as an immediate part of nature. The "first nature" of bears and bees is the nature of bears and bees complete. But the immediate nature of man is a question that points beyond nature; on this pre-modern man universally agreed. The "second nature" of man, the nature found in mythology and religion that answers the question of the first nature, was the pre-modern basis of disagreement. The Moslem and the Christian, battling for Jerusalem in the twelfth century, fought over whether the Koran or the New Testament was the true account of the second nature of man, but this conflict hid their more basic agreement on the first nature of man. In the first nature of man the Moslem and the Christian recognized each other's humanity. The proof of this is that the Moslem and the Christian could make his enemy his friend by the simple act of converting to his enemy's faith. 

The modern world may be defined as the attempt to "naturalize" man. Since history shows that man cannot agree on his second nature, perhaps there is no second nature, and man is really just a creature with a first nature like every other animal. Or so modern man has thought. The various modern ideologies are the variety of attempts to reveal the true first nature of man that is complete in itself, rather than a question that points to a second nature. But this means that ideological disagreements are no longer disagreements about the second nature of man grounded in a shared understanding of man's first nature, but disagreements about man's first nature itself. An ideological enemy is, then, in his very being, on the wrong side of human nature and history, and there is no way for him to get on the right side. A Jew could save himself from the Crusader by converting to Christianity, or from the Saracen by converting to Islam, but he could never save himself from the Nazi by converting to Nazism, for the Nazi views the Jew as an enemy in his first nature. He does not recognize humanity in the Jew the way Moslems and Christians recognized humanity in each other, despite the atrocities they committed against each other. Neither could the French nobleman save himself from the guillotine by converting to the Revolution, for he is by first nature an enemy of the Revolution, or the kulak save himself from the Red Army by converting to Leninism. This is why the modern attempt to rid the world of religion, the alleged source of conflict, has led to wars of a ferocity and inhumanity that was unimaginable to ancient man, for it turned conflicts over second nature into conflicts over first nature, or, in other words, it eliminated what had been the universally recognizable human.

Modern thought attempts to naturalize man through a theoretical reconstruction of him. Of course the project is absurd because what makes something "natural" is the fact that its nature is immediately available to the intellect, and therefore needs no theoretical reconstruction to be known. Bees and bears can be understood directly by observing bees and bears; no theoretical mediation is required. We don't need to hypothesize a grizzly bear "state of nature" that is somehow more fundamental to the bear than its manifest nature, or a class history of bees, to understand either. The bear we immediately see is in the state of nature (the circus and the zoo not withstanding) and the class distinction between queen and worker bees is a simple manifestation of the nature of bees. Dian Fossey could thoroughly understand gorillas by living among them as a gorilla because gorillas are directly knowable. But the evolutionist can only understand man by reconstructing his evolutionary past, and interpreting the present in light of that historical reconstruction. He cannot simply live as a man among men and understand him - or so the modern thinking goes. 

Marx reconstructed man in terms of his theoretical economic history. Nazism reconstructed man in terms of a theoretical racial history. The goal of both was to reveal the first nature of man in such a way that he is completely naturalized. This means that the first nature of man is simply knowable, and not a question that points to a second nature of man. Ideology does not answer the question of man but eliminates the question itself. The attempt cannot succeed, and the question of man persists, posing a scandal to ideology. Ideology cannot respond to the scandal by answering the question of man, for an answer concedes that the question is legitimate in the first place; the only alternative is to eliminate the question by destroying the questioner, and here we have the origin of the horrors of modern totalitarianism, horrors unknown to pre-modern man for the simple reason that he could not imagine them. John Paul II, incidentally, understood that merely posing the question of man constitutes a mortal threat to secular ideologies, and he used that weakness to bring down Communism in Eastern Europe.

Darwinian evolution, whatever its empirical merits, is an attempt to theoretically reconstruct man through the organic, and thereby naturalize him. The evolution of the lower creatures is really incidental to the point of evolutionary theory because every creature but man can be understood directly. Spiders are understood by studying spiders, not by puzzling out a theoretical organic history of pre-spiderian creatures culminating in the spider. Were man truly a natural creature like all other animals, no one would be interested in evolutionary history or see any point in thinking about it.

The evolutionary past is the medium in which present organisms are reconstructed in terms of present organisms. More to the point, the evolutionary past is the medium in which man is reconstructed in terms of present organisms. Since there is very little evidence beyond a few bone fragments concerning mans pre-human and quasi-human ancestors, and we certainly have no experience of such creatures, in whatever ways those creatures were unlike present organisms we can know absolutely nothing about them. In a similar way, the alien creatures in science fiction always bear some similarity to terrestrial creatures (e.g. the monster in Alien is a kind of giant bug), since we can't possibly imagine creatures utterly unlike any we have experienced. So our pre-human ancestors are imagined in terms of present creatures, as quasi-chimps or quasi-bears or a compromise between chimps and man. Man is then reconstructed in terms of these hypothetical ancestors, completing the return to his present nature, the ancestors serving merely as the medium of reconstruction. Again, the very attempt at the evolutionary reconstruction of man is proof that man is not natural like other creatures, since natural creatures stand in no need of reconstruction.

John Paul II, as he did with Communism, went right to the philosophical heart of evolution by granting Darwinism all the empirical laurels it wished - "The convergence in the results of these independent studies - which was neither planned nor sought - constitutes in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory" - but denied the only prize Darwinists have ever really wanted, which is the final elimination of the question of man: "Theories of evolution, which, because of the philosophies which inspire them, regard the spirit either as emerging from the forces of living matter, or as a simple epiphenomenon of that matter, are incompatible with the truth about man."

* The terms "first nature" and "second nature" typically refer to, first, man's uneducated nature and, secondly, man's nature after it has been educated into virtue and/or remade through divine grace. I am using the same terms with a different meaning. Here, "first nature" means man's nature as immediately known, and "second nature" means the hidden nature of man as revealed by the answer to the question posed by man's first nature.

God, Prayer and Making a Difference III

The third part of this thread, the first two parts being here and here.

In this third part, I consider the proposition "The future of our society as one of honor, decency and virtue does not depend on religious faith." The more detailed version, from the Secular Right blog, is:

"We take for granted that parents will teach children manners, or assume that if they don't, schools will act as a back-stop. But what if neither the family nor schools perform the duty? I see no connection between belief in a supernatural being and public etiquette. Rather, the cultivation of manners rests on an understanding of how fragile social order is, and how it needs to be constantly buttressed by instruction and correction."

How will this cultivation of manners take place? It must be the instruction of those without manners, by those who do have manners. But why should the unmannered take instruction from the mannered? The ill-mannered are, at least in that respect, poorly educated. So the question resolves itself into the general question of why the uneducated should submit to an education by the educated. Now even the uneducated can see the value of a technical education, for the products of our empirical sciences are manifest to the ignorant, but technical education is not at issue; the question is one of the education of manners and morals, or what was once the point of education classically understood. It is only the wise, however, who understand the value of wisdom. The most serious aspect of ignorance is that it is ignorant of the evil of ignorance - which is why the Socratic breakthrough, which involved not only the knowledge of Socrates' own ignorance, but his understanding of its deep significance, was necessary to the founding of true education.

There can be only one reason why the uneducated should submit to education: faith. If they could see and understand the benefits of education, see the connection between manners and the fragility of society, to that extent they would not be ignorant. Heather MacDonald has it backwards. It is not the cultivation of manners that rests on an understanding of the fragility of the social order, but the understanding of the fragility of the social order that rests on the the cultivation of manners.

Faith is a virtue. I am not here speaking of the supernatural virtue of Faith with which we may be infused by the grace of God, but of the ordinary, mundane virtue of faith. Faith is not an intellectual conclusion, or an arbitrary act of the will, but a virtue - a quality of character that contributes to the fulfillment of our nature. Faith is necessary to education because the ignorant cannot see the value of education prior to being educated. So they must believe that education is worthwhile until the point comes that they can see that it is worthwhile. Faith, even faith bordering on or passing over to religious faith, was the keystone of classical education. When Socrates heard that the Oracle of Delphi had proclaimed him the wisest of men, he was puzzled because he knew himself to possess no wisdom. Were he a man of no faith, he would have simply dismissed the Oracle as mistaken and forgotten about it. But his faith - his belief that the Oracle would not speak falsely - led him to hold in tension the Oracle's prophecy and the knowledge of his own ignorance. He embarked on a quest to resolve the tension by finding a man wiser than himself. Of course, the result of his quest was the discovery that the supposed wise men thought they knew many things they did not, while Socrates was not subject to this vice, this being the basis for the Oracle's proclamation. The faith of Socrates was not a consequence of the self-education that occurred on his quest, but a pre-condition of it.

Aristotle typically begins his works with a review of the history of thought on the question he is addressing. This is a testimony of faith, a record of the fact that Aristotle, like Socrates, researched all the wise men he could find in the belief that they had something to teach him, before assuming the audacity to add his own novel contributions. St. Thomas Aquinas, the apex of the the tradition of classical thought, began his career in an act of faith in a vow of obedience to the Dominican Order. He spent his life absorbing everything anyone could teach him, not just from Christian teachers like Albert the Great or Duns Scotus, but also from pagans like Aristotle, Jews like Maimonides, and Moslems like Avicenna and Averroes. In expanding and correcting the tradition, he spoke as the voice of tradition, a result of his original act of faith.

The modern world, which I will arbitrarily take as beginning in the sixteenth century, self-consciously removed the central place of faith in intellectual life, and, eventually, in life in general. In fact, it has come close to making faithlessness (for which it misuses the word "skepticism") its supreme virtue. Descartes can be compared to Socrates on this score. After receiving a modest education, Descartes, as a young man, concluded it was all drivel and dismissed the intellectual tradition at a stroke, an act of breathtaking intellectual pride. Instead he searched for a principle on which he could hang his life and thought with absolute certainty; in other words, in complete independence and without a scintilla of faith. Socrates embarked on a quest for the wise man, Descartes on a quest for the indubitable first principle of philosophy that would relieve him of any need for wise men. The result, of course, was the cogito ergo sum and, more significantly, the establishment of faithlessness at the heart of philosophy.

Descartes did not succeed in constructing his philosophy of certainty, as thinkers after him were soon to point out. But instead of concluding that Descartes was mistaken in his original act of faithlessness, they joined him in it, concluding only that Descartes had not been faithless enough. Since then, the story of modern philosophy has been the story of philosophers undermining each other, with each proclaiming a newly discovered set of "first principles" that undermine all prior philosophers, with succeeding philosophers returning the favor by dismissing that philosopher as "naive." Thus Kant undermines both Descartes and Hume, Hegel undermines Kant, and Nietzsche undermines everyone. Hobbes proclaims the sure foundation of civil order in the discovery of the "state of nature", only to be told by Rousseau that he didn't really discover the state of nature - a feat that Rousseau, naturally, feels he himself accomplished. What they all have in common is the original Cartesian principle that philosophy starts in faithlessness. Albert Camus distilled the modern tradition (if a tradition that is defined as a continual undermining of itself can really be thought of as a tradition) when he proclaimed in The Myth of Sisyphus:

After so many centuries of inquiries, so many abdications among thinkers, we are well aware that this is true for all our knowledge. With the exception of the professional rationalists, today people despair of true knowledge. If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences.

Camus, like Descartes, wrote this as a young man. This was how he started his career, not how he ended it. Socrates began his philosophical career by asserting his own ignorance and searching for the wise man;  the modern man asserts the ignorance of anyone who might teach him, and like Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, and the rest of the dreary train, sets out to "revolutionize" thought by reconstructing Thought from the ground up, in his own image. Finally we reach Camus who does not attempt to reconstruct Thought - having surveyed the wreckage - and simply tries to find a way to live without thought. The modern thinker prides himself on his "skepticism", but he is not at all skeptical of the one thing needful - himself. Socrates is the philosopher so desperately needed by the modern world. 

It is easy to see the effect of all this on education and the transmission of manners and civility. It has taken a long time to play out, but destructive ideas held initially by an intellectual elite eventually filter down and through society as a whole. Finally we reach the point where the average person absorbs the faithlessness that was once an intellectual vice restricted to a few intellectual "pioneers", and massive cultural damage ensues. Everyone is a Cartesian ego now, a self-subsisting intellectual principle that demands that everything submit to it on its own terms. The decrease of civility is only a symptom for which modern philosophy is the disease; the cure is a return to faith at the center of culture.

We have lost the virtue of faith that is vital to education. Why should a student put faith in a teacher, when the teacher holds faithlessness as a first principle? A student will place faith in a teacher to the extent that the teacher has faith, and for that the teacher must relate himself to a being worthy of faith; for a grown man, that can only be God. That is the connection between belief in a supernatural being and public etiquette.

"Criton, we owe a cock to Asclepios; pay it without fail."

 - the dying words of Socrates.

God, Prayer and Making a Difference II

This is the second part of this thread.

Here I consider the proposition: If there is a God, there might as well not be as far as this world is concerned. God might make a discernible difference in the hereafter, but makes no apparent difference in this one.

The proposition is often said in the context of petitionary prayer. One man prayers for his cancer to be cured, and the cancer disappears. Another man (or, perhaps, even the same man at another time) prays for a cure to his cancer and he dies. It looks like cancer sometimes takes life and sometimes it doesn't, and God doesn't make much difference either way.

I would first like to say something about the alleged results of petitionary prayer somehow proving that God is good. No one prays to God unless he already believes that God is good. That is why I pray to God and not Lucifer. We might say that some consequence of prayer reveals the glory of God, but the idea that the goodness of God is held in suspense pending our judgement of the results of prayer is, well, impious. It's like telling my wife that I will withhold judgement concerning her goodness pending what she gives me for Christmas. 

Atheists tend to think of prayer in a magical manner. You recite the words as an incantation, and the results should automatically follow, as though prayer involves a magic power to dominate the will of God. Petitionary prayer is exactly that, petitionary, as in we petition the King on some issue. Whether the King chooses to grant our petition is entirely up to him.

Anyway, to the main point: The proposition in question has it exactly backwards. Whether God makes a difference in the hereafter is a matter of faith and, admittedly, it is hard to discern what is going on in that realm. That God makes a difference in this world is clearly manifest. If God made no difference in this world, why would atheists bother about Him? Let us be clear: God must be something rather than nothing. If God were absolutely nothing, we would not be able to talk about him. Now it may be that God is only a fantasy, or an idea, or a meme, rather than the supernatural Ground of Being, but that is still something rather than nothing. The atheist says that Allah is but a fantasy, but that doesn't change the fact that the fantastical Allah seems to be having real effects in the real world, not the fantasy world. Santa Claus may be a fantasy but pointing it out does not change the fact that presents show up on Christmas morning. 

Similarly, Jesus Christ may be just a fantasy of Christians, but this fantasy has underwritten an institutional Church that has survived persecutions, the fall of the Roman Empire, inspired Catholic Knights to toss Moslems out of Europe, spread the Gospel to every corner of the world, and produced a Pope who brought down Communism. I am inclined to think that a fantasy so powerful may be more than just a fantasy, but that is neither here nor there at the moment. The point is that it is possible to deny that God is a substantial supernatural being, but ridiculous to claim that God has no effects in this world. Again, why would atheists care about God if God had little effect in the world? 

Western civilization was inspired by Christianity for most of its two thousand year history, only recently giving up on God and trying to make it on its own. Most everyone, atheists included, admit that Western civilization is in decline, not only politically, but morally and economically as well. How will that decline be arrested? We have already seen the power of the Christian God (fantasy or not) in the extraordinary growth of European civilization from 500 A.D. to 1900 A.D. What is the secular replacement for Him?

At the Secular Right blog, John Derbyshire describes the joys and motivations of his secular philosophy that he describes as Mysterian:

Naturalism has boundless pleasures for anyone with an inquiring mind and a sense of wonder... We're content to marvel at the truths that science uncovers, hope to understand more this year than we did last year, and... perhaps even writing books about them, if we can find a publisher willing to take us on.

The natural world's enough to keep my mind fully engaged; and I find I can live decently, honorably, and contentedly without any dependence on stories about improbable historical evens - miraculous impregnations and the like.

The Derb is famous for his pessimism about the future of Western civilization, and that pessimism, combined with the attitudes above, indicates that Derbyshire is essentially an Epicurean. He would fit right in at the late end of the Roman Empire, retiring to his villa to tend his garden and lament the manner in which the Empire has gone to pot. And here is the problem with atheism: It absurdly proclaims that God has no effects in the world, and is then impotent to reproduce the effects that God has obviously had.  Heather MacDonald writes that:

As for what will get us out of the economic crisis, believers will work out for themselves, why, if God is assurance of a brighter future, he didn't do something before hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs. I'll bank on the powerful drive to trade, build enterprises, and the enjoy the fruits of human ingenuity.

Actually, God has done plenty. Two thousand years ago he suffered, died, and rose from the dead, and instituted a Church that persists to this day, a Church in which individuals may obtain the grace and learn the virtues that would underwrite a sound economy. That we do not avail ourselves of God's grace is our choice, not His. As we have turned our back on God, our government has become increasingly venal, self-serving and contemptuous of the people, and the people themselves all too willing to surrender their freedom and become slaves of the government. A free republic, as Adam Smith and our Founding Fathers understood, only works if men maintain the virtue to support a life of free men; lose the virtue, and slavery will return in some form or another, for men are natural slaves. We have seen how God supported freedom; how will atheism do it?

Heather writes that "the cultivation of manners rests on an understanding of how fragile social order is and how it needs to be constantly buttressed by instruction and correction." Well, no. More than an understanding of the problem is necessary. In addition the virtue, energy, and inspiration to effect instruction and correction is required - the kind of energy and inspiration that sent Catholic missionaries across the Atlantic to risk their lives in preaching the Gospel to the Iroquois Indians in the eighteenth century. Where is such drive and energy in atheism? It's nowhere; the atheists have retired to their dens to ponder nature and write books. Atheism is plenty real but ineffective. Allah may be a fantasy but is terribly effective. I'm betting an Allah in that contest. 

God, Prayer and Making a Difference

The Secular Right has three recent posts about which I wish to comment.  The posts are Civility and Order, New Mysterian Plants Marker, and Please Explain.

The posts can be summarized in three propositions:

1. Good things that happen do not prove God's beneficence, because bad things also sometimes happen that God could have stopped. If you are going to count one, you've got to count the other.

2. If there is a God, there might as well not be as far as this world is concerned. God might make a discernible difference in the hereafter, but makes no apparent difference in this one.

3. The future of our society as one of honor, decency and virtue does not depend on religious faith.

First, let us take the first proposition, drawn from the post Please Explain. If Bill O'Reilly thinks that the safe landing of Flight 1549 was due to miraculous intervention (I don't know that he does, I only know what the Secular Right has written), then he is simply a fool. The safe landing of Flight 1549 was obviously due to the training, experience and coolness of the crew. No miraculous intervention needed. God was not the immediate cause of the safe landing of the plane.

But God can be considered a remote cause of the safe landing of the plane (taking it for granted that God exists.) God created a world in which people like pilot Sullenberger are born, grow to be outstanding pilots through training and the development of virtues like courage, prudence and decisiveness, and so are on hand at a critical moment like the emergency on Flight 1549. So we can say it illustrates God's beneficence in the sense that God was a remote, though perhaps not an immediate, cause of the safe landing of the aircraft.

I was careful not to write that the safe landing of the plane "proves" that God is good. The conclusion that God is good comes from a consideration of being and creation as a whole, not a utilitarian toting up of atomized events, as though we conclude that God is good because N+1 good events have happened in the universe and only N bad events. This is what the secularist seems to want to do; she wants to put God on trial and serve as the prosecutor, and the religious believer as defense counsel. She calls her witnesses and we call ours. 

God created the world and saw that it was good. This means it is better that Flight 1549 and the crew and passengers existed than that they were never born. This is true whether or not pilot Sullenberger succeeded in making a safe landing. It is on the basis of the existential goodness of Creation that we proclaim that God is good. Flight 3407 ended in tragedy, but the only reason it is a tragedy is because something existentially good - the crew and passengers - perished in the crash. We lament the tragedy of Flight 3407, but does it make sense to conclude that God is not good as a result? If God is not good, then His works are not good, including Creation. It follows that existence is an evil, should be fled and, perversely, that tragedies like Flight 3407 are really good things since they release people from the horror of existence.

If that sounds like a horrible thing to say, the thought is not original with me, and pessimistic philosophies throughout history have drawn similar conclusions. The medieval Cathars, for example, held that material Creation is an evil, and therefore considered procreation a sin and suicide a moral example to be followed. Many of the modern existentialists like Sartre have found existence to be repulsive, although they can't quite bring themselves to commit suicide.

Life is good despite the evil things that befall us. I say this as a matter of natural knowledge, not faith. I can praise God for the safe landing of Flight 1549 because God is the remote cause of airplanes and courageous flight crews. What about Flight 3407? To denounce God as evil because of this tragedy is self-contradictory, because it is a tragedy only on condition that God's works (in the form of airplanes, crews and passengers) are good things and should be preserved. We live in a world that is fundamentally good but in which some evil is allowed to occur.

Why does God allow evil? I will risk the wrath of Heather MacDonald by saying this is a mystery. What is not a mystery is that the existence of evil does not constitute a refutation of the goodness of God, which was the point of the above. It should be remembered that all thoroughly thought-through philosophies - religious, atheist, or otherwise - necessarily have elements of mystery to them. If someone tells you that she has no elements of mystery in her thinking, that everything is clear as daylight, or even potentially clear as daylight, they are at best confused. Probably the most serious attempt to generate a philosophy of pure clarity was that of Descartes in his bid to ground philosophy on the indubitable truth of his own thinking - cogito ergo sum. Despite what he thought he was doing, what Descartes actually did was to turn his own mind into an impenetrable mystery, a mystery that haunts the philosophy and sciences of the mind to this day. Descartes simply transplanted the essential mystery from God to his own ego. 

Science is no way out here. Science explains mysteries by positing other mysteries. Newton, for example, explained the motions of the heavens in terms of mass, force and acceleration, three elements no one had heard of before, at least the way Newton used them. Newton never explained what exactly mass or force is, and how it is that a force can act on a mass and produce yet a third type of thing called an acceleration. What he showed convincingly is that these three mysterious elements do interact the way he said they do. Newton transferred the mystery from the solar system to his mechanical elements, and is rightly renowned as a genius for doing so. We have benefitted greatly as a result. Unfortunately, the exchange didn't work out so well in the case of Cartesian philosophy, which has made man an alien in his own world.

The point is that mystery is always the terminus of human thought, whatever it is. Condemning a philosophy because it ends up in mystery is, in the end, a refusal to think things through to their end.

I will take up the other two propositions in coming posts...

Darwin Day and Man as Special

It's Darwin Day, and this gives me a chance to sound-off about some of the silly reasoning associated with Darwinism. One common claim, repeated to the point that it is nearly a cliche, is that Darwin supposedly de-throned man, and showed that he is "not special."

Sorry, but the fact that man is special has nothing to do with religion, or even whether or not Darwinism is true. That man is special is an obvious fact of nature. Man is the only creature on Earth who can destroy any other creature if he so chooses, or even the Earth itself if he so chooses. He is the only creature who pursues knowledge for its own sake, love for its own sake, art for its own sake, and develops theories of origins like Darwinism over which he argues. Man is the only creature who self-consciously transcends his environment, not only physically in his trips to the Moon, but intellectually as well. Alone among creatures, he wonders about his place in nature. The argument between Darwinists and creationists is not how peculiar man is, but how this peculiar creature called man came about.

One of the reasons put forward for the fact that man is "not special" is that Darwin showed that species are not discrete, but blend into each other over time. I say: So what? The chain of being remains nonetheless. We may discover that the chain holding the bell in a tower is actually a rope, and so is continuous rather than discrete. But the rope still has a top and a bottom, a beginning and an end. We can still distinguish two feet from the top of the rope from two feet from the bottom of the rope, just as we could various places on the chain. Really, the difference between the Darwinists and the traditional view is that the Darwinists claim the chain has many more links, to the point that it becomes continuous (as in calculus), and that the higher links arose from the lower. All that is besides the point regarding the nature of the chain, or rope if you like, as we immediately encounter it. Saying that Darwinian gradualism proves that we cannot draw a metaphysical distinction between man and lower animals, is like saying that we can't draw a metaphysical distinction between noon and midnight because of analog clocks.

I will be scolded by the more metaphysically hardcore Darwinists for using terms like "higher" and "lower." Darwin, you see, showed that life is just a blind, materialist game of survival, and man is not "better" or "worse", "higher" or "lower", or "more important" than any other creature. But Darwinism does give a scale of values; its whole point is that life is a game of survival, as in "survival of the fittest." Games by their nature have winners and losers, unless they are held in post-modern elementary schools, and I am confident the Darwinists will approve of my saying that Darwinism is anything but post-modern. And there is no doubt that man has won this game, to the point every other creature only survives at his whim. The lack of a sense of irony in Darwinists is demonstrated by enviro-Darwinists, who say we shouldn't wipe out other species because Darwin showed we are just another animal, no better or worse than others. The very fact that we can decide whether or not to wipe out other species proves that we are not just another animal. It's the king who decides whether or not someone will be executed.

The more Darwinists insist that the distinction between men and animals is trivial, the more trivial they make Darwinism. The genius of Darwin was supposed to be that he explained how the glorious diversity of life on Earth, with its intricate designs, strange symbiotic relationships, and astounding range of beings, from the simple amoeba to the staggeringly complex and scientific man, the species that includes geniuses like Darwin himself, all resulted from the simple combination of chance and natural selection. My point here is not to argue with that conclusion; it is to point out that, the more we denigrate the powers of man compared to the lower organisms, the less impressive becomes Darwinism. If conducting science is but a trivial improvement on apes probing anthills with sticks, then the process that changed the ant-hunting ape into the Darwinist scientist is of trivial significance.

And the real target of the man-isn't-special Darwinists isn't the ancient conception of man, but the early modern conception of man, despite what Darwinists think. The ancient conception of organic life was based on the three-way division of the soul into vegetative, locomotive and intellectual aspects. All living things had a soul, plants relatively poverty-stricken with only a vegetative soul, animals a little richer with a locomotive as well as a vegetative soul, and man fully loaded with a vegetative, locomotive and intellectual soul. Our soul is the same soul as plants and animals but with an intellectual aspect as well. The difference, then, between Darwinists and Thomas Aquinas is that St. Thomas thinks the soul of man recapitulates the hierarchy of organic life in its being, whereas the Darwinist thinks the soul of man recapitulates the hierarchy of organic life in time (as the current temporal culmination of an historical process.) So both St. Thomas and Darwinists see a continuity between man and the rest of organic life, although they differ profoundly (of course) concerning the nature of that continuity.

The early moderns, mesmerized by the new advances in science (especially physics), leapt to the conclusion that animals are really organic machines, most famously stated in the philosophy of Descartes. But a machine doesn't know anything, a fact that the early moderns didn't forget even if many philosophers forget it today, so Descartes supposed a radical division in the nature of man between the material, mechanical body and an immaterial knowing substance - the soul. The Cartesian soul is essentially the ancient soul stripped of its vegetative and locomotive natures, a pure knowing substance absurdly attached to a body, marking a radical break in being between man and the rest of nature, and turning man into a monster wandering in an alien world of natural creatures. Of course man so conceived is "special" only in the unfortunate sense that Frankenstein's monster was special, and the Darwinists are to be applauded for finally chasing this conception of man into a windmill and burning him alive.

But the Thomistic soul did not perish in the windmill, because it was never a monster that drew the ire of a mob of pitchfork wielding villagers. Thomistic man is special for the same reason Darwinian man is - he is the culmination of nature.

Kant, Math and Perennial Questions of Philosophy

Philosophy addresses questions that flow from the fundamental human condition, and so are relevant to all times and places. These are the questions that lie behind all other questions; a great philosopher is one who identifies and addresses these fundamental questions. The great philosopher is validated in his intuitions by the fact that, over time, men keep returning to the very same questions originally asked by the great philosopher. 

An example of this is found in the Ideas section of this Sunday's Boston Globe. The article starts this way:

Mario Livio is an astrophysicist, a man whose work and worldview are inextricably intertwined with mathematics. Like most scientists, he depends on math and an underlying faith in its incredible power to explain the universe. But over the years, he has been nagged by a bewildering thought. Scientific progress, in everything from economics to neurobiology to physics, depends on math's ability. But what is math? Why should its abstract concepts be so uncannily good at explaining reality?

The question may seem irrelevant. As long as math works, why not just go with it? But Livio felt himself pulled into a deep question that reaches into the very foundation of science - and of reality itself. The language of the universe appears to be mathematics: Formulas describe how our planet revolves around the sun, how a boat floats, how light glints off the water. But is mathematics a human tool, or is reality, in some fundamental way, mathematics?

What's funny about the contemporary world is that, after dismissing philosophy as an anachronistic waste of time, when we finally discover truly philosophical questions, we believe in all innocence that we are the first to ask them. Then we breathlessly announce our bold quest to answer these novel questions, in which we think we are blazing a new trail of human knowledge, but in reality are only retracing the footsteps of the philosophers of old, usually doing a much poorer job than they did. Here is Immanuel Kant writing in the eighteenth century in his Critique of Pure Reason:

In the solution of the above problem there is at the same time contained the possibility of the pure use of reason in the grounding and execution of all sciences that contain a theoretical a priori cognition of objects, i.e., the answer to the questions:

How is pure mathematics possible?

How is pure natural science possible?

About these sciences, since they are actually given, it can appropriately be asked how they are possible; for that they must be possible is proved through their actuality.

The Globe interview goes on to say the following:

Livio, an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, concludes that math has to be thought of, at least in part, as a human invention. That's a profoundly weird notion in a world where math has always had a special status, untainted by people's opinions and biases. Religion, politics, and picking a great work of art can all incite vigorous debate, while 2+2=4 has always seemed like a cold, hard fact. Math isn't a figment of our imagination, but perhaps it isn't quite as far from great art as we thought.

It's only a "profoundly weird notion", or a novel notion, for someone who has never read Kant. Kant proposed that math is a human invention insofar as it reflects the structural nature of human cognition. "Time" and "Space" are the forms under which man experiences reality according to his nature; geometry has the certainty it does because its conclusions are a necessary consequence of the nature of man.  Now we may agree or disagree with Kant, but there is nothing new in these ideas.

It follows, of course, that other intelligent creatures who do not share the cognitive apparatus of man may not develop math and science the way we do. Our "time" and "space" may mean nothing to them, let alone the geometry and physics we develop from them. Kant made these points in his Critique. Livio uses the example of a jellyfish. Would jellyfish develop the natural numbers - 1,2,3,4, etc. - when perhaps their entire experience is purely analog, e.g. the pressure temperature, and motion of water? Maybe not, but again, this is not a new point, only an old point - stated clearly and profoundly by Kant - presented as new.