A Week to Use in Weeks Ahead

A strange week, this one.

It seems the older I get the more life oscillates rapidly between light and darkness. I don't mean that it all happens to me, or that it all occurs in the same degree, but rather I simply observe, and hear about, and am provoked by so much more.

On my birthday,  friends leave kind wishes with charitable hopes, at the same time that I am of necessity doing some of the most backbreaking and psychologically challenging work I have ever done -- in intense heat.

A successful musician I admire and correspond with socially undergoes brain surgery, calling forth images of my own late mother's similar procedure, while the same day a good friend endorses me most generously to his former employer; veritable gold in a time of some scarcity of opportunity.

The week overall brings reports from friends of great successes, and also revelations of deep cynicism. At home my family receive regularly sequenced acts of generosity from siblings, aunts, uncles and in-laws, and serendipitous kindness from strangers. Sometimes these displace moments of self-doubt. Sometimes they evoke new ones.

My children bring joy, and contemplation of their development and their natural beauty.

But also there is weariness, and sadness. Weltschmertz even.

One day this week I sat on a dock in Lloyd Harbor, overlooking a magnificently beautiful vista of rippling waters and anchored sailboats. Based on all past experience I should have enjoyed it deeply. But, beaten down by fatigue, no matter which way I looked on that water, all I could feel was what I was missing. There was no consolation or contemplation. I simply hoped to cool off my body a bit before stumbling back up the hill to work for several more hours in the heat. Feeling more than my age and more than a little off course from the destiny that seemed so clearly plotted in my youth. "Where is that benevolent, guiding force?" I wondered. Is it more subtle and sublime than I can imagine? Was it ever there?

Yet as all the impressions of these moments drift into the past and settle down in the memory, with the passage of time, they are refined into the raw material of "experience." To fuel the soul through another day, or week, or year to follow.

With hope, those will be better ones. But hopes like these have been had before.

Is Facebook a Prefigurement of the Afterlife?

Growing up Christian, one becomes familiar with the concept of "prefigurement." The Old Testament, for example, is said to contains signs that "prefigure" the coming of Jesus Christ. After Christ, Thomas Aquinas would argue that the glories of accomplishment in this world are but prefigurements of the extreme glory to be found in the kingdom of heaven.

You get the idea. One thing is the sign of something greater to come.

Implicit in much of this is the Platonic idea of the world as an imperfect reflection of some higher, transcendent super-good.

Any good of the world is subject to this same kind of argument.

I can't help but think about prefigurement, then, when contemplating the good of "ambient awareness" generated by social networking.

For some of us, at least, social media's capability to provide frequent updates on the status of our friends and acquaintances makes us happy. We are the open books who long for a deeper connection with others; to have our inner life heard and validated, and do likewise for others.

Will the afterlife be the ultimate form of ambient awareness?

According to Thomas Aquinas, yes, but only insofar as that is an "overflowing" result or side benefit of knowledge of God. Call Him the Ultimate "Friend." Once God has gratuitously "friended" you, all your other friendships are perfected. (The notion of such an "overflow" is explained in St. Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica, First Part of the Second Part, "Treatise on the Last End," Question 3.)

Here's why:

For Christians, no natural longing is ever the same after Plato. "Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee" is the most haunting line of Christianity - written by the neo-Platonist, Doctor of the Church, St. Augustine. Augustine posits that natural goods can never satisfy us. We seek the transcendent God. This is rooted in a long series of arguments from Plato, and finds stirring literary exposition in St. Augustine's "Confessions."

Thomas Aquinas would later explain this argument in great, although more boring, detail, borrowing also from Plato's student, Aristotle.

Following Aristotle, Aquinas argued that we seek knowledge through causes. However, knowledge of secondary causes (all the things of the world) is imperfect. There is always more to know.

Happiness consists primarily of knowledge of the First Cause, Aristotle's Unmoved Mover, a.k.a., Plato and Augustine's ultimate, transcendent good.

When we are granted Knowledge of the First Cause, God, by His sheer gift, it will provide beatific insight into all the other causes. This is sometimes called Thomas Aquinas's "intellectualist" vision of perfect happiness.

The reason it is called "intellectualist" is because it places happiness primarily in the exercise of reason, which is most essential to human beings. But, the overflow comes when all else that we experience as human beings is perfected by this primary form of knowledge.

Social media doesn't prove anything theological. It only underscores a human need, the solution to which is always moving into a better state thanks to science and technology. (Why we must exist in an imperfect state at all is a very unsatisfying mystery of religion.)

But once you read Plato, you are next inclined to ask whether social media and other solutions to the problem of life's imperfections can reach a state of "perfection." And if so, how? Christianity volunteers a compelling answer.

Image used under Creative Commons license courtesy of ewen and donabel.

Another One Page Refutation of Unbelief (Yawn)

I like the publication First Things. I respect the life's work of the theologian and philosopher Michael Novak. But, damn, and yawn, if I don't see simplistic, dismissive, curriculum vitae-padding arguments against unbelievers, like Novak's latest, too often in First Things and elsewhere on the Christian Right.

In a drive-by article, majestically titled "Atheism and Evil," Novak engages a friendly audience of First Things readers to quickly dismiss atheists and agnostics for their struggles with belief.

A good percentage of these unbelievers, according to a recent poll, have allowed the problem of evil to drive them away from the notion of a personal God. But, surprisingly, many of them cling to some notion of an ultimate force.

In the most insulting statement of the entire piece, Novak accuses all of them of possessing a "morose delectation" for the reality of evil. In other words, they should just get over their perverse hang-up with suffering. (Now break out the brandy.)

Novak reminds us, yawn, that Thomas Aquinas posited that evil was not a co-equal reality with good. Evil tends toward non-being rather than being. (Ah, how did millions of human beings miss that? It's all explained now!)

And, without the possibility of moral evil, the world could never reach its current heights of goodness.

Excuse me if I yawn, again. These arguments are repeated endlessly against modern unbelief like a Thomistic spell. And yet, unbelief doesn't seem to go away. Curious.

Of course, the reality of physical evil (hurricanes, cancers, etc.) is not addressed here. That would have required at least another page of strenuous quoting of the Church Fathers.

Or perhaps it is, encrusted within Novak's brief, metaphorical reference to the world as a "tapestry of human experience." Or in his sweeping notion that "[a]ll the stuff of a good story depends on creation being not just a world of iron logic and inflexible arithmetic, but also a world of immense crisscrossing variation and 'blooming, buzzing profusion.'”

There you have it. The whole thing, from Krakatoa to Katrina, is just another "good story," and "blooming, buzzing profusion." What?

I know that Michael Novak means better. Perhaps Christopher Hitchens' delectations have gotten too much under his skin.

But I think that if one were actually concerned with these issues, in a spirit of genuine solidarity with non-First Things subscribers, it might help to acknowledge the serious concerns of "unbelievers" -- and perhaps more "believers" than one might care to acknowledge -- with moral evil, physical evil, and even metaphysical evil -- where one grinds daily against the limits of one's own being.

In a media-mad world in which human beings are buffeted daily by images of untold suffering and cruelty, and even levels of human success and honor that they will never achieve, it will require more than a series of dusty syllogisms to ease the suffering and dissension caused by the "immense crisscrossing" within the human spirit of the problems of moral, natural and metaphysical evil.

Short Film: God is a DJ

Who says you can't make a fun short film with a philosophical theme? This is a beautifully conceived work of art. (Although, the DJ strikes me as a demigod rather than the full deity.)

"Darwin's God" Raises Troubling Questions for All

Darwin's God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil

I have finally completed Darwin's God by Cornelius Hunter. A very interesting read. Basically, quoting from the writings of Darwin and his disciples, Hunter argues that Darwinism is a kind of theodicy. The reason: nature is too violent and wasteful to attribute to God, so the scientists and other thinkers of the Victorian age attributed such imperfection to the workings of secondary causes.

Hunter identifies this as a kind of gnosticism, because of its dualistic overtones. The imperfections of the material order must remain separated from the perfection of the spiritual.

Such labelling sounds ominous, as if a great heresy has resurfaced, but it simply underscores the point that Christianity, in whatever age, must struggle with how the problem of evil affects the credibility of its claims about the benevolence of the Creator.

(People today are powerfully aware of evil in all its forms, from natural evil to the evil sometimes manifested in the workings of the church. See this interesting article from Christianity Today on Starbucks Spirituality, which highlights the level of distrust Christians face from historically conscious, cosmopolitan coffee lovers.)

Anyway, getting back to the book, quoting from "The Descent of Man," Hunter notes that Darwin's stated primary objective was to disprove the theory of "special creation" of each and every species by God. Secondarily he was out to prove the theory of natural selection.

Read or listen to any number of Darwinists, such as Richard Dawkins, and you will find repeated references to God, and attempts to discredit theories of special divine creation. Abstain from references to God, Hunter argues, all of the guesswork and speculation about vestigial organs, homologies, etc. would be glaring, and would never be accepted as "scientific."

Indeed, when many Darwinists argue that the theory is a "fact," what they mean is their interpretation of certain pieces of the physical record apparently falsify a particular account of creation. This despite the fact, as Hunter points out amply, that almost nothing in the physical record can falsify Darwinism. What Karl Popper would say is the mark of pseudo-science.

Indeed, the handwriting was on the wall when Darwin said about the complexity of the human eye that all he needed was to be able to conceive of a possible way, rather than show actual proof for, an evolution from less complex structures, and you see evidence of something other than science taking place here.

(My interpretation of this is that once "supernaturalism" is discarded as falsified by any one of millions of potential physical phenomena, a gestalt shift takes place and there is no choice but to interpret all physical phenomena through the lens of naturalism.)

This is exactly what I noted was troubling to me in a comment by eminent physicist Leonard Susskind's on Fora.tv, who blithely accepted such a speculative approach in response to questions about Paley's Watchmaker analogy and the "irreducible complexity" argument put forward by the "Intelligent Design" camp.

What do I take away from this work? An interesting, historically rich overview of Darwinism as attempted falsification of another theory, and/or a theodicy, full of insights into how the problem of evil vexed the Victorians.

But more importantly, Hunter's book, by its omission, painfully underscores the most pressing issue of modern Christianity. For if, as Hunter argues, Darwinism simply attempts to "falsify" one particular account of creation popular in a particular time, what is the alternative, more rational theory of creation, which can overcome the link between creation's irrationality and the Creator, without drifting into heretical dualism? Hunter doesn't answer that question.

Can anyone?

Can One Laugh (Be Angry) at God?

Okay, so after watching God, Inc. and Mr. Deity, the old Catholic guilt kicked in, along with my stand-up comedian's sense that comedy is often rooted in anger. So, I decided to check in with my tradition, more specifically the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Here's what it says about blasphemy:

"2148 Blasphemy is directly opposed to the second commandment. It consists in uttering against God - inwardly or outwardly - words of hatred, reproach, or defiance; in speaking ill of God; in failing in respect toward him in one's speech; in misusing God's name. St. James condemns those 'who blaspheme that honorable name [of Jesus] by which you are called.' The prohibition of blasphemy extends to language against Christ's Church, the saints, and sacred things. It is also blasphemous to make use of God's name to cover up criminal practices, to reduce peoples to servitude, to torture persons or put them to death. The misuse of God's name to commit a crime can provoke others to repudiate religion.

Blasphemy is contrary to the respect due God and his holy name. It is in itself a grave sin."

Aside from a swear here or there, I think these shows are off the hook on any blasphemy rap.

What this made me think of, immediately, was Osama bin Laden and much of the Middle Ages. (I'm still waiting to learn if there is a manifesto from scientists declaring totalitarian killing in the name of science, progress or freedom from religion to be a serious evil.)

Secondarily, but more importantly, it made me wonder about those of us who wonder about God's plan, and get a little peeved, in thought or word, about the whole thing. I have not found to date a lot of discussion about this issue, but I will be researching it more. Perhaps you have something to offer from your own tradition or experience.

Mr. Deity

Okay, I am laughing with a great sense of guilt, but laughing all the same at Mr. Deity, another hilarious new web series looking at God's plan as seen through the eyes of man.

Or is it man's plan, as seen through the eyes of God? I'm not sure.

Similar in spirit to God, Inc. which I described in a previous post, Mr. Deity portrays the workings of universe as organized by a trinity of all-too-human individuals resembling the staff of a showbiz startup. (Which is what they really are!)

Mr. Deity is an aging, absent-minded hipster, "Jesse" (a.k.a. "Jesus") is a dim-witted metrosexual, and Larry a nebbishy administrative type.

And then there is Lucy, Mr. Deity's bitchy ex.

How am I, a critical-minded believer, supposed to feel about this? Is this show truly a guilty pleasure?

Surely some religious people will be swearing a fatwa out on Mr. Deity. And some atheist/skeptic types, such as Michael Shermer, are already happily endorsing the series for their own reasons.

But if you read the FAQs on the series from its producer and director Brian Keith Dalton, you will see it is decidedly middle-of-the-road, and humor-focused:

"I am a formerly religious person (non-bitter), and as such, have great sympathies for the beliefs and feelings of religious people. I love the fact that they are concerned with the big issues like Good and Evil, Existence, Creation, etc... I don't always agree with the answers they provide to these questions, but I deeply respect their concern. Our goal here is not to mock religion, but to use it as a foundation for the humor. I'm thrilled that so many religious people have written to tell me that they love the episodes. In future episodes, I intend to turn the tables a bit and poke fun at what I call the "angry atheists" (of whom I am not fond). We'll see if they take it so well."

What better way to get some perspective on the silliness of life than to pretend you are divine. It makes perfect sense.

My own feeling about this, and I might be wrong, is that you really can't get offended by too many jokes using a limited view of the deity unless your own view of the deity is rather limited. What do you think?

From Crackle: Mr. Deity and the Messages - Episode 4

Darwin, God and Evil

If you look through the content of this blog, you might say that I am "vexed" by the question of God and evil. Funny then, that I happened to stumble across Darwin's God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil by Cornelius G. Hunter.

It's a fascinating read, about non-scientific influences upon the theory of evolution - particularly, the theological assumptions about what God would and would not do in the often violent, bloody world of nature.

These assumptions, Hunter argues, stand behind the science of Darwinism, which Hunter also argues, is quite "speculative" in the areas of phylogeny, homology, molecular clocks, etc.

Although "Darwin's God" is accessible, it's not exactly light summer reading. That's okay -- except for my brief Tom Clancy jag back in college and grad school, I've never been much for that anyway.

I'll have more to say about this book once I've finished it off.

No Easy Answer for Evil

Another interesting talk from Ted.com. This one by Tom Honey, an English clergyman, who addresses the issue of how God can allow devastating tsunamis. I won't spoil the surprise of his answer. But I will say that I think the strongest part of his argument is that so long as we view God as outside our world when explaining evil, as puppet master, powerless, uncaring, etc. we have something unsatisfying and even offensive. The best case: find God with us, suffering right along with us. The question is: "Why?"

God, Inc.

God, Inc. wonders what would happen if the afterlife were run like a modern corporation. The fact that it might be run so irrationally would perhaps make this world make more sense. (Kind of reminds me of David Hume's observation that the world seems to have been made by a committee of gods.) The series features very short, cleverly written and crisply acted episodes. I think you'll enjoy it. Check out this first episode here, and then try the rest on YouTube.

The Final Explanation of Everything . . . Not!

As discussed in the previous post, numbers seem to be at the bottom of everything in physics. As Stephen Hawking noted, "a physical theory is a mathematical model."

Father Stanley Jaki has been arguing for years that Kurt Gödel's famous mathematical theorem says something very important about such physical theories, and their ability to provide a complete explanation of reality.

By complete, I mean one that says there is nothing more, and what is has to be here and behave in a fixed, deterministic manner. And that because it is necessarily this way, it is not contingent upon God.

"It should also be obvious," notes Jaki in an important essay entitled "A Late Awakening to Gödel in Physics," "that the more advanced is a physical theory the more mathematics it contains and the more advanced is the mathematics. From this the ground for connecting Gödel's theorem with physics readily follows.

"For insofar as Gödel's theorem states that no non-trivial system of arithmetic propositions can have its proof of consistency within itself, all systems of mathematics fall under this restriction, because all embody higher mathematics that ultimately rests on plain arithmetic. Then it follows that there can be no final physical theory which would necessarily be true at least in its mathematic part."

You may have a physical theory, but because it is based upon mathematics, you cannot know that it is final, and you can never show that the universe is a certain way "necessarily."

The essay goes on to bemoan the fact that many prominent physicists have not picked up on this little inconvenience to their search for a final answer to the universe.

Particularly ironic, as Jaki notes, the close relationship between Einstein - who searched for a unified field theory -- and Gödel, whose work showed he'd fail.

As Jaki notes in another essay entitled "Reflection on Einstein's Theories," "the application of Gödel's theorem to cosmology shows that a disproof of the contingency of the universe is impossible. The mental road to the extracosmic Absolute remains therefore fully open."

Interesting to ponder.

Thoughts on Gary Numan

British industrial rocker Gary Numan fascinates me. Not only do I love his deeply engaging and original sound, but some of his works are thought-provoking and powerful.

His "Prayer for the Unborn" (below) is a remarkable statement of dissatisfaction with God, who didn't intervene in the death by miscarriage of Numan's unborn child. Whether you are an atheist (as he is) or not, you can understand the frustration he expresses here. In fact, as this song demonstrates, Numan's atheism seems to be directed at a God who is hearing, but not answering him.



Critics note that Numan, who in his early career struggled with some very derivative work, has finally discovered a unique voice and vision as he wrestles with darker themes.

Gary Numan's official website