Category Archives: Christianity

The God hypothesis

07 Sunday Feb 2010

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Biology, Christianity, Consciousness, Deity, Free Will, Islam, Vedānta

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In my intro religious studies course last semester, I taught a unit on theism and evolution. This was the first time it really hit me that God had once been considered a verifiable – and confirmed – scientific hypothesis. Until he made his famous voyage, Charles Darwin, just like so many medieval philosophers, had looked at organisms’ suitability for their environments and concluded it must have been the work of an intelligent designer. The particular theory that had best fit the available empirical evidence, Darwin and most of his contemporaries thought, was Charles Lyell‘s view that there were “centres of creation,” different places on earth where divine creative activity had been focused. In an era of rapid-discovery science like our own, that had been the best available hypothesis.

Then, the HMS Beagle made its famous voyage to the Galàpagos Islands, where Darwin observed his famous finches. A huge variety of birds, each on different islands and looking dramatically different, each well suited to the conditions of its own island – but they all turned out biologically to be finches, closely related to each other and to the finches of distant South America. It seemed needlessly complex to suggest that God would create so many different birds in so many different places and yet make them all part of the same family. A more straightforward hypothesis was that the different finches had evolved from a common ancestor, by natural selection. God was no longer needed as a scientific hypothesis – and hasn’t been needed since.

In retrospect, the point that God was once a legitimate hypothesis seems obvious to me now. But when I encountered it, it came to me as something of a surprise, because I’m so used to living in a world where any attempt to find empirical evidence for God’s existence looks like a desperate grasping at straws. Continue reading →

Why worry about contradictions?

27 Wednesday Jan 2010

Posted by in Buddhism, Christianity, Epistemology, Greek and Roman Tradition, Honesty, Logic, Metaphilosophy, Monasticism, Philosophy of Science, Social Science, South Asia

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Stanley Fish, self-proclaimed “contemporary sophist,” recently weighed in on the “religion and science” question in the New York Times. For him, the chief problem we have in this area is that we’re too bothered by contradictions: “The potential for logical conflict, however, exists only under the assumption that all our beliefs should hang together, an assumption forced upon us not by the world, but by the polemical context of the culture wars.”

As a historical claim, the latter part of the sentence is laughable and merits no consideration: it takes very little research indeed to find that the drive for logical consistency far predates any modern culture wars. It can be found not only in Plato, its most famous advocate, but also in Augustine, in Aquinas, in Śaṅkara and Kumārila. One might be tempted to find an exception in Nāgārjuna and his Madhyamaka school, which try to avoid having any position whatsoever; but even Nāgārjuna relies in his arguments on the assumption that our positions should not contradict each other – should make logical sense. Fish is smart enough to know this point; the claim that the drive for consistency is a product of the contemporary culture wars can only be understood as a deliberate falsehood, a lie.

More interesting is the normative claim, the view that we shouldn’t be bothered by contradictions. After all, if that’s true, Fish may be entirely justified in lying. Continue reading →

Brit Hume on Buddhism

06 Wednesday Jan 2010

Posted by in Anger, Buddhism, Christianity, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Patient Endurance

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Brit Hume of Fox News has been lighting up the Buddhist blogosphere lately, with this criticism of adulterous golfer Tiger Woods:

“The extent to which he can recover, seems to me, depends on his faith. He’s said to be a Buddhist. I don’t think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. So, my message to Tiger would be, ‘Tiger, turn your faith, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.”

Shortly afterwards, in an appearance on The O’Reilly Factor, Hume attempted to defend his comments with the claim that his point was about Christianity rather than about Buddhism: Continue reading →

Freud the chastened intellectualist

03 Sunday Jan 2010

Posted by in Christianity, Confucianism, Flourishing, German Tradition, Human Nature, Psychology, Therapy, Unconscious Mind

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A little while ago I blogged about Aaron Stalnaker’s concept of chastened intellectualism. Chastened intellectualism, for Stalnaker, is a central feature of the thought of Augustine and Xunzi, across their very different cultural contexts. Their ideas are “intellectual” in that one needs to learn (directly or indirectly) from texts and reflect intellectually on them in order to live a good human life; but “chastened” in that our own reflection is insufficient to allow us to reach this good life. We unconsciously sabotage our efforts to reach the good; we need help from others to get there, likely involving some sort of practice that will transform us.

Such practice seems at first to involve the kind of thing we might normally count as “religion”: meditation, prayer, ritual. But it seems to me that there’s another thinker, not religious except in the broadest stretching of the word, whose worldview also counts as chastened intellectualism: namely, Sigmund Freud. Freud’s message, it seems to me, is very similar to Augustine’s and Xunzi’s: the ego is not the master of its own house. To be saved from oneself, one needs some understanding of the textual learning that Freud saw himself as beginning; but simply reading Freud isn’t going to be enough to understand yourself. Our repression, our defences, are too strong. You need to engage in the practice of therapy (or analysis) at someone else’s guidance.

I tend to suspect that a chastened intellectualist view of humans is correct. I rather wish it weren’t, because its conclusions never seem pleasant. Augustine slams the very idea of human flourishing – because we are weak we cannot live a good life in this world, only in the next. Freud says a very similar thing – but denies that there is a better world to come. All we can do is be slightly less neurotic. Of the three, it’s Xunzi who seems to allow that a life in this world could be good – but only if restrained by the kind of hierarchies that would now seem tyrannical to us.

Could we please stop talking about the “problem of evil”?

27 Sunday Dec 2009

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Christianity, Deity, Free Will

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When you teach at a small Catholic school, theodicy is a question it’s relatively easy to get students excited about: how can God permit the world to be so full of suffering? The problem is finding a good reading to engage students’ interest, one that isn’t full of formal logic’s technical jargon. (We’re talking first-year non-majors taking a required class.) So far, alas, when I’ve found such jargon-free readings, they tend to be exclusively about the “problem of evil.” Which makes them useless.

Evil, per se, is something of a red herring when it comes to theodicy. Evil is what we think of first, after the human-inflicted horrors of the twentieth century. And yet evil is the easy part. Why is there evil? Because human beings have free will, of course, and it’s good for them to have free will. Now, there are some problems with the free-will defence, questions that Augustine grapples with in On Free Choice of the Will – why is it good for humans to have free will, if it leads to all these evil acts? But the answers to those problems are pretty well thought out – determinate good is just not as good as freely chosen good.

The tougher part of the problem is those sufferings for which free will is no defence. I think people understood this part better before the twentieth century, when human-caused suffering was lesser than the suffering of natural disasters – when, as Susan Neiman notes, the one-word reply to claims of God’s goodness was not Auschwitz but Lisbon. Young children, too young to have committed any serious wrong, die in earthquakes, in hurricanes and tsunamis, from tuberculosis. Old people get afflicted by ALS, a cruel degenerative disease that makes people prisoners in their own bodies. This is “evil” only in the old sense, where “evil” just meant “bad” – this isn’t something that we did, a bad action, it’s just a bad thing that happens. Some theologians have tried to come up with justifications for this as well; but it’s much harder to justify these natural sufferings. Can we really say that the torturous drowning of innocent children is justified as part of a larger plan?

People smarter than I am have answered yes. Maybe we can still legitimately believe in God in the face of natural suffering. But let’s not distract ourselves from the real issue by calling it the “problem of evil,” and allowing believers to get out of it with the far-too-easy answer of free will. Call it the problem of pain, as C.S. Lewis did; or call it the problem of suffering, a more common answer. But don’t weasel out of the problem by claiming it’s all about evil. There’s no point in explaining how God could permit Auschwitz if you can’t also explain how he could permit – or cause – Lisbon.

The three basic ways of life

20 Sunday Dec 2009

Posted by in Aesthetics, Cārvāka-Lokāyata, Christianity, Confucianism, Early and Theravāda, East Asia, Epics, Epicureanism, Epistemology, Family, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, German Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Jainism, Judaism, Metaphysics, Monasticism, Pleasure, Roman Catholicism, South Asia, Vedānta, Work

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One reason I turn back to premodern philosophies so much is that they often show us questions larger than those generally asked in philosophy today. Especially important among these: “what kind of life should I live?” What sorts of major life decisions should I make? It still surprises me how rarely academic philosophers concern themselves with these questions, when we spend so much time teaching people in their late teens and early twenties – for whom these questions are in the foreground.

Lately in my mind I’ve been tossing around the hypothesis that the answers to the question “What kind of life should I live?” roughly boil down to three – and that each of the three is tied to some sort of metaphysics, a theoretical as well as a practical philosophy: Continue reading →

Omniscience and manipulation

09 Wednesday Dec 2009

Posted by in Certainty and Doubt, Christianity, Deity, Early and Theravāda, Honesty, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Morality, Truth

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Andrew Moon of the Prosblogion (probably the leading blog in the philosophy of Abrahamic traditions) was recently rereading Robert Adams’s The Virtue of Faith, and was intrigued by a passage that I also found intriguing. Adams is arguing that uncertainty is a central part of a good personal relationship:

Well, suppose we always saw what people were like, and particularly what they would do in any situation in which we might have to do with them. How would we relate to people if we had such knowledge of them? I think we would manipulate them. I do not mean that we would necessarily treat people in a selfish or immoral way, but I think we could not help having an attitude of control toward them. And I think the necessity we would be under, to have such an attitude, would be conceptual and not merely causal. If I pursued my own ends in relation to you, knowing exactly how you would respond to every move, I would be manipulating you as much as I manipulate a typewriter or any other inanimate object. Continue reading →

Advaita theodicy and the goodness of existence

06 Sunday Dec 2009

Posted by in Christianity, Early and Theravāda, Islam, Judaism, Metaphysics, Truth, Vedānta

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An anonymous friend recently suggested an intriguing equivalence to me: the problem of ignorance in Advaita Vedānta is effectively an Indian form of theodicy.

Let’s back up a bit for those who aren’t familiar with Advaita Vedānta (or theodicy). Vedānta is philosophy based on the “end of the Vedas,” the Upaniṣads – sacred Indian texts often considered “Hindu” (although there are a lot of problems with that term). The Sanskrit advaita means “non-dual”; Advaita Vedānta, associated above all with the philosophical teacher Śaṅkara, is the kind of Vedānta that says everything is really one, and not two (or more). Especially, there is no duality between subject and object. The universe is all one, and each of us ultimately is that one. We seem to perceive multiplicity in the world, but only because of our ignorance. Multiplicity is an illusion; really, all is one. This one is expressed with the word sat, meaning existence, truth, even goodness.

But the difficult question for an Advaitin to answer is: where does that ignorance come from? Continue reading →

Christmas in North American life

02 Wednesday Dec 2009

Posted by in Christianity, Food, Judaism, Modern Hinduism, Politics, Rites

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Every year around this time, the United States is subject to increasingly acrimonious “Christmas wars,” over whether the time of year should be called Christmas as it used to be, or a more generic “holidays.” Canada has not escaped these battles, but they seem to be a much smaller issue there, which I think is a very good thing.

Many people in the United States, of course, do not celebrate Christmas. Most often, such people are Jews, and perhaps sometimes Muslims and followers of Asian traditions. It is the rare atheist or agnostic who refuses to celebrate Christmas – a fact I find somewhat telling. In my own Canadian childhood I found that refusal somewhat bizarre. My family never went to church, my parents never believed or taught any ideas they recognized as Christian; but we nevertheless celebrated Christmas, as North Americans in North America, and nobody thought that was weird. When we went to India we always celebrated Diwali and Holi without thinking of ourselves as Hindus, and nobody seemed to think that was weird either.

The first people to challenge my non-Christian celebration of Christmas were Jewish friends during my undergrad days at McGill. Continue reading →

E.O. Wilson and the limits of empiricism

29 Sunday Nov 2009

Posted by in Christianity, Epistemology, Foundations of Ethics, Free Will, German Tradition, Philosophy of Science

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Browsing in the library I recently stumbled across Edward O. Wilson‘s ambitious book Consilience, in which the famous biologist tries to propose a unified account of knowledge – one in which the natural sciences take a supreme role. I have a certain sympathy with Wilson’s project – his attempt to unite the different realms of human knowing is not so different from my own long-term goal of constructing a philosophy that draws from many (and preferably all) traditions of inquiry. It’s unfortunate, then, that Wilson’s attempt falls flat in a wide variety of ways – but they can, at least, be highly instructive ways. They do very well, especially, at illustrating the limits of an empiricist account of knowledge. Continue reading →