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The Many Splendored Blobs of Neurocentrism — Matthew Hutson

June 17, 2013

Neuroimaging isn’t the hard science we like to think it is. Our interpretations of those splotches of color depend upon multiple assumptions about the human mind, and applying fMRI insights outside the lab requires many more. To some degree, the blobs are a cultural construct, a useful fiction. In other words, they’re all in our heads.

A review of Brainwashed by Sally Satel and Scott O. Lilienfeld most recently in the WSJ. Yes, love IS a many splendored blob…

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Humanity is under attack by blobs. Nestled in our brains, they appear to control our emotions. These infiltrators remain invisible without sophisticated technology, but when discovered they often make headlines.

Actually, to say that we discover them isn’t quite right. We create them: They are the bits of color seen in brain scans, or “functional magnetic resonance imaging,” in the parlance of the scientists, doctors and marketers who conduct this research. By measuring, analyzing and making inferences, scientists can learn that one part of your brain lights up when you wrestle with a decision; that another is exercised when you shop online; or that a third part makes you fall in love. (One branding expert used fMRI data to claim that Apple users literally adore their devices.)

Such neuroscientific techniques — fMRI is one of many — provide plenty to be excited about. The authors of “Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience,” while sharing in this enthusiasm, offer a more skeptical take. At issue for psychiatrist Sally Satel and clinical psychologist Scott Lilienfeld is “neurocentrism,” or “the view that human experience and behavior can be best explained from the predominant or even exclusive perspective of the brain.” In their concise and well-researched book, they offer a reasonable and eloquent critique of this fashionable delusion, chiding the premature or unnecessary application of brain science to commerce, psychiatry, the law and ethics.

Brain scanning — at least as the technology stands today — suffers from a number of limitations. For starters, it often relies on a one-to-one mapping of cognitive function to brain area that simply doesn’t exist. Most thoughts are distributed, and “most neural real estate is zoned for mixed-use development,” as Dr. Satel and Mr. Lilienfeld write. So just knowing that disgust lights up your insula — a part of the cerebral cortex involved in attention, emotion and other functions — doesn’t imply that whenever the insula lights up you’re disgusted.

Despite such complexities, several firms have profited from selling, and perhaps overselling, fMRI’s capacity to peer into our souls. “Neuromarketers” try to suss out what drives us to buy one product rather than another. But there’s little public data to indicate that their methods work any better than the old standbys of surveys and focus groups. And they can blunder: In 2006, a neuroscientist declared a racy GoDaddy.com Super Bowl ad a flop after it failed to activate viewers’ pleasure centers. It had increased traffic to the site 16-fold.

If neurocentrism’s worst result were inspiring facile, gee-whiz headlines or bilking corporate advertisers out of cash, we could all go home with a good laugh over our obsession with Lite-Brite phrenology. But the neurocentric worldview has also crept into law enforcement and criminal justice. Predictably, defense attorneys try to use brain scans to prove that their clients lack rationality or impulse control and therefore can’t be held legally responsible. Companies such as No Lie MRI and Brain Fingerprinting Laboratories even claim to offer fMRI methods of lie detection.

One process looks for signs of recognition in a suspect’s brain as he views key evidence. This technique is fairly accurate in controlled conditions but requires evidence that has not been altered or leaked — i.e., details that the perpetrator and only the perpetrator would recognize. Another method looks for signs of neural conflict during questioning, indicating suppression of the truth. But no indicator is consistent across all liars or across all types of lies — spontaneous, rehearsed, remorseful, glib. The authors argue that fMRI lie detection is crummy legal evidence, and several courts have excluded such data because their accuracy outside the lab hasn’t been demonstrated.

Mr. Lilienfeld and Dr. Satel, who has worked in methadone clinics, spend a chapter confronting the popular model of addiction as a chronic brain disease. The trouble, they point out, is that most addicts eventually quit. In short, you can choose to stop using, but you can’t choose to stop having, say, Alzheimer’s. Those who promote the brain-disease model of addiction, including the National Institute on Drug Abuse, mean well when they strive to destigmatize addicts. But the authors say this model has distracted from behavioral therapies. Until a cocaine vaccine is available, they write, “the most effective interventions aim not at the brain but at the person.”

There are still more profound perils associated with the neurocentric vision. If the brain is just a biological machine, we have no free will and thus, strictly speaking, no claim to praise or blame. This violates both social norms and our own moral intuitions, and in the book’s final chapter the authors wade deeply into the philosophical debate about this new neurological determinism.

Moral responsibility, they argue, has practical benefits: “No society . . . can function and cohere unless its citizens exist within a system of personal accountability that stigmatizes some actions and praises others.” The position that Dr. Satel and Mr. Lilienfeld adopt is “compatibilism,” which holds that free will may not exist in an “ultimate” sense but exists in an “ordinary” sense, in that we feel free of constraints on our behavior. In everyday life, they argue, we should act as though the “ghost in the machine” were real.”

In a book that uses “mindless” accusatively in the subtitle, you might expect an excitable series of attacks on purveyors of what’s variously called neurohype, neurohubris and neurobollocks. But more often than not Dr. Satel and Mr. Lilienfeld stay fair and levelheaded. Good thing, because this is a topic that requires circumspection on all sides. Neuroimaging isn’t the hard science we like to think it is. Our interpretations of those splotches of color depend upon multiple assumptions about the human mind, and applying fMRI insights outside the lab requires many more. To some degree, the blobs are a cultural construct, a useful fiction. In other words, they’re all in our heads.

Posted in Science And Religion | Tagged functional magnetic resonance imaging, neurocentrism, Neuroimaging | 1 Comment »

God, Gods, and Fairies — David Bentley Hart

June 4, 2013

Beliefs regarding fairies concern a certain kind of object that may or may not exist within the world, and such beliefs have much the same sort of intentional and rational shape as beliefs regarding the neighbors over the hill or whether there are such things as black swans. Beliefs regarding God concern the source and end of all reality, the unity and existence of every particular thing and of the totality of all things, the ground of the possibility of anything at all.

This is a nice follow up to the reflections of Giorgio Buccellati on the Trinity Spermatiké we posted a short while ago. A reblog from First Things.

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One of the strangest claims often made by purveyors and consumers of today’s popular atheism is that disbelief in God involves no particular positive philosophy of reality, much less any kind of religion or creed, but consists merely in neutral incredulity toward a certain kind of factual asseveration [vocab: The solemn or emphatic declaration or statement of something: "a dogmatic outlook marks many of his asseverations"].

This is not something the atheists of earlier ages would have been very likely to say, if only because they still lived in a culture whose every dimension (artistic, philosophical, ethical, social, cosmological) was shaped by a religious vision of the world. More to the point, it is an utterly nonsensical claim — so nonsensical, in fact, that it is doubtful that those who make it can truly be considered atheists in any coherent sense.

Admittedly, I suppose, it is possible to mistake the word “God” for the name of some discrete object that might or might not be found within the fold of nature, if one just happens to be more or less ignorant of the entire history of theistic belief. But, really, the distinction between “God” — meaning the one God who is the transcendent source of all things — and any particular “god” — meaning one or another of a plurality of divine beings who inhabit the cosmos — is one that, in Western tradition, goes back at least as far as Xenophanes.

And it is a distinction not merely in numbering, between monotheism and polytheism, as though the issue were simply how many “divine entities” one thinks there are; rather, it is a distinction between two qualitatively incommensurable kinds of reality, belonging to two wholly disparate conceptual orders. In the words of the great Swami Prabhavananda, only the one transcendent God is “the uncreated”: “Gods, though supernatural, belong . . . among the creatures. Like the Christian angels, they are much nearer to man than to God.”

This should not be a particularly difficult distinction to grasp, truth be told. To speak of “God” properly — in a way, that is, consonant with the teachings of orthodox Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Vedantic and Bhaktic Hinduism, Bahá’í, much of antique paganism, and so forth — is to speak of the one infinite ground of all that is: eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, uncreated, uncaused, perfectly transcendent of all things and for that very reason absolutely immanent to all things.

God so understood is neither some particular thing posed over against the created universe, in addition to it, nor is he the universe itself. He is not a being, at least not in the way that a tree, a clock, or a god is; he is not one more object in the inventory of things that are. He is the infinite wellspring of all that is, in whom all things live and move and have their being. He may be said to be “beyond being,” if by “being” one means the totality of finite things, but also may be called “being itself,” in that he is the inexhaustible source of all reality, the absolute upon which the contingent is always utterly dependent, the unity underlying all things.

To speak of “gods,” by contrast, is to speak only of a higher or more powerful or more splendid dimension of immanent reality. Any gods who might be out there do not transcend nature but belong to it. Their theogonies can be recounted — how they arose out of the primal night, or were born of other, more titanic progenitors, and so on — and in many cases their eventual demises foreseen. Each of them is a distinct being rather than “being itself,” and it is they who are dependent upon the universe for their existence rather than the reverse. Of such gods there may be an endless diversity, while of God there can be only one. Or, better, God is not merely one — not merely singular or unique — but is oneness as such, the sole act of being by which any finite thing exists and by which all things exist together

Obviously, then, it is the transcendent God in whom it is ultimately meaningful not to believe. The possibility of gods or spirits or angels or demons, and so on, is all very interesting to contemplate, but remains a question not of metaphysics but only of the taxonomy of nature (terrestrial, celestial, and chthonic). To be an atheist in the best modern sense, and so to be a truly intellectually and emotionally fulfilled naturalist in philosophy, one must genuinely succeed in not believing in God, with all the logical consequences this entails.

And the question of God, thus understood, is one that is ineradicably present in the mystery of existence itself, or of consciousness, or of truth, goodness, and beauty. It is also the question that philosophical naturalism is supposed to have answered exhaustively in the negative, without any troubling explanatory lacunae, and that therefore any aspiring philosophical naturalist must understand in order to be an atheist in any intellectually significant way.

Well, as I say, this should not be all that difficult to grasp. And yet any speaker at one of those atheist revivalist meetings need only trot out either of two reliable witticisms — “I believe neither in God nor in the fairies at the bottom of my garden” or “Everyone today is a disbeliever in Thor or Zeus, but we simply believe in one god less” — to elicit warmly rippling palpitations of self-congratulatory laughter from the congregation. Admittedly, one ought not judge a movement by its jokes, but neither should one be overly patient with those who delight in their own ignorance of elementary conceptual categories. I suppose, though, that the charitable course is to state the obvious as clearly as possible.

So: Beliefs regarding fairies concern a certain kind of object that may or may not exist within the world, and such beliefs have much the same sort of intentional and rational shape as beliefs regarding the neighbors over the hill or whether there are such things as black swans.

Beliefs regarding God concern the source and end of all reality, the unity and existence of every particular thing and of the totality of all things, the ground of the possibility of anything at all. Fairies and gods, if they exist, occupy something of the same conceptual space as organic cells, photons, and the force of gravity, and so the sciences might perhaps have something to say about them, if a proper medium for investigating them could be found.

God, by contrast, is the infinite actuality that makes it possible for photons and (possibly) fairies to exist, and so can be “investigated” only, on the one hand, by acts of logical deduction and conjecture or, on the other, by contemplative or spiritual experiences. Belief or disbelief in fairies or gods could never be validated by philosophical arguments made from first principles; the existence or nonexistence of Zeus is not a matter that can be intelligibly discussed in the categories of modal logic or metaphysics, any more than the existence of tree frogs could be; if he is there at all, one must go on an expedition to find him.

The question of God, by contrast, is one that must be pursued in terms of the absolute and the contingent, the necessary and the fortuitous, act and potency, possibility and impossibility, being and nonbeing, transcendence and immanence. Evidence for or against the existence of Thor or King Oberon would consist only in local facts, not universal truths of reason; it would be entirely empirical, episodic, psychological, personal, and hence elusive. Evidence for or against the reality of God, if it is there, pervades every moment of the experience of existence, every employment of reason, every act of consciousness, every encounter with the world around us.

All of which is to say (to return to where I began) that it is absurd to think that one can profess atheism in any meaningful way without thereby assenting to an entire philosophy of being, however inchoate one’s sense of it may be. The philosophical naturalist’s view of reality is not one that merely fails to find some particular object within the world that the theist imagines can be descried there; it is a very particular representation of the nature of things, entailing a vast range of purely metaphysical commitments.

Principally, it requires that one believe that the physical order, which both experience and reason say is an ensemble of ontological contingencies, can exist entirely of itself, without any absolute source of actuality. It requires also that one resign oneself to an ultimate irrationalism: For the one reality that naturalism can never logically encompass is the very existence of nature (nature being, by definition, that which already exists); it is a philosophy, therefore, surrounded, permeated, and exceeded by a truth that is always already super naturam, and yet a philosophy that one cannot seriously entertain except by scrupulously refusing to recognize this.

It is the embrace of an infinite paradox: the universe understood as an “absolute contingency.” It may not amount to a metaphysics in the fullest sense, since strictly speaking it possesses no rational content — it is, after all, a belief that all things rest upon something like an original moment of magic — but it is certainly far more than the mere absence of faith.

Posted in Catholicism For Atheists, David B. Hart | Tagged gods vs. God, the question of God, the taxonomy of nature, today’s popular atheism | Leave a Comment »

Faith of the Fatherless – Meredith Rice

April 10, 2013

In a fallen world, every father fails in some degree to reflect and interpret the fatherhood of God, and yet many children implicitly or explicitly reconcile that gap with trust in the providence and faithfulness of God. Yet for many others the likely effect of the loss of the father is a distance from and doubt of God, which leads in many cases to profound atheism.

A review of Paul Vitz’ Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism, a reblogging of a article in Humanum. Ms Rice holds a B.A. and an M.A. in theology from the University of Dallas and The Catholic University of America, respectively.

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With the prevalence of divorce and the ever-rising rate of out-of-wedlock births in the US, sociologists have begun to study the effects of growing up without a father in the home. In seemingly every measurable category, the lack of a sustained, committed father-child relationship puts the child at a disadvantage: lower IQ, lower academic achievement, higher anxiety, higher rates of disruptive behavior, lower self-esteem, higher rates of drug use and violence, and an increased chance of child abuse have all been linked with the absence of fathers from their children.

In his 1999 book Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism, psychologist Paul Vitz proposes another likely effect of the loss of the father on children: a distance from and doubt of God, which leads in many cases to profound atheism. Vitz develops his proposal as an inverse to Freud’s projection theory of belief in God, which proposes “wish-fulfillment derived from childish needs for protection and security” as the major psychological factor leading to religious belief in God (p. 6).

Without giving credence to Freud’s conclusion that psychological factors in belief render the belief itself suspect or false, Vitz notes that the projection theory in fact offers just as plausible an explanation for unbelief as for belief. Taking up the insight that a child’s “psychological representation of his father is intimately connected to his understanding of God,” Vitz proposes to test a “defective father” hypothesis, in which an “atheist’s disappointment in and resentment of his own father unconsciously justifies his rejection of God” (p. 16). His method is a historical survey of the biographies of prominent atheists and theists, particularly major figures in the development of modern atheism and their interlocutors on the side of faith.

In the column of founders and major proponents of modern atheism, Vitz addresses nineteen cases, from Voltaire, Thomas Hobbes, and David Hume, to Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Joseph Stalin, and Sigmund Freud himself. In each case, the “defective father” hypothesis holds to some degree. Each of these men experienced a rift in his relationship with his father: whether the early death of his father, or abuse, neglect or abandonment at his hands, or an unattractive weakness or overbearing character in his father, which led to a personal break and rejection of the father’s values.

In a few cases, these men themselves draw a parallel between the absence of their fathers and the absence of God. Explaining his mother’s inability to impart her waning faith to him in the face of her husband’s careless neglect of the family, H.G. Wells relates: “My father was away at cricket, and I think she realized more and more as the years dragged on without material alleviation, that Our Father and Our Lord, on whom to begin with she had perhaps counted unduly, were also away – playing perhaps at their own sort of cricket in some remote quarter of the starry universe” (p. 51). The lack of stability from a father’s care appears to leave a void that a discredited God cannot fill, and that instead requires the search for a new principle of order and flourishing, e.g., mathematics (Russell), existential philosophy (Sartre), totalitarian political order (Stalin), and so on.

In his selection of a “control group” of theists, Vitz focuses on prominent intellectual defenders of faith against the atheism or skepticism of their times and reveals a more varied set of circumstances. Blaise Pascal’s father retired from the law on the death of his wife to devote himself to the education of his children, while Edmund Burke was separated from his father at a young age because of health, but was instead raised with the help of three maternal uncles who impressed him with their integrity, benevolence, and faith (p. 65).

G.K. Chesterton spent his childhood at his father’s side, imbibing his love of literature and beauty, while Martin Buber lost his mother and was separated from his father at an early age but was raised by grandparents who were attentive and loving. Albert Schweitzer was able to describe his father as “my dearest friend” (p. 86), while Abraham Heschel lost his father at the age of ten but felt himself from an early age to be following in the spiritual footsteps of several Hasidic rabbis whose example guided his growth.

In the examples of theists Vitz cites, the lives of those whose loss or estrangement from their fathers that would seem to locate them in the “defective fathers” category also included the secondary influence of some kind of substitute father figure. And although many of the theists were sons of devout, and even ordained, men (Paley, Schleiermacher, Schweitzer, and Barth were all ministers’ sons), Dietrich Bonhoeffer was raised by a devoted father who was himself agnostic and in a household whose Christian practice was mostly nominal. The commonality appears to be that a father or father-figure in each of these cases was able to provide a stability, affection, and attention that at the very least did not impede the development of faith in God.

The initial conclusion to be drawn from Vitz’s survey is that the historical evidence appears to support his hypothesis that the childhood experience of a “defective father” is a contributing psychological factor to the rejection of God in adulthood. Further, Vitz is able to contextualize this formative experience of the prominent atheists he identified with several further shared personal characteristics that appear to contribute to their skepticism regarding belief: high intelligence, overweening ambition, and the free choice to reject the strictures that belief in God might place on the realization of personal development.

Indeed, many of his examples would seem to share the understanding of God’s role in their lives that Sartre attributed to fatherhood in general: “‘Had my own father lived, he would have lain on me full length and crushed me’” (p. 30). In this way, the modern “romance of the autonomous self,” free from all restraint, plays directly into a rejection of belief in God (p. 136).

In substantiating his hypothesis of a projection theory of atheism based on the experience of a “defective” father, Vitz shows that the Freudian dismissal of religious belief based on psychological projection is illegitimate: the ultimate truth (or falsity) of religious belief cannot be determined by psychological factors (p. 145). However, for the general reader, Vitz might have strengthened his presentation by stepping outside this Freudian frame.

His discussion of the relationship between family dynamics and belief in God is interesting not primarily for polemical reasons, but insofar as it resonates with the experience and truth of the human person as such. In a fallen world, every father fails in some degree to reflect and interpret the fatherhood of God, and yet many children implicitly or explicitly reconcile that gap with trust in the providence and faithfulness of God. A discussion of this universal human experience would have added a greater depth and credibility to the selective historical survey of exceptional figures that forms the bulk of Vitz’s observations and argument.

Posted in Book Recommendations, Catholicism For Atheists, Commentary | Tagged atheism and the fatherless, growing up without a father, loss of the father on children, the fatherless and rejection of God | Leave a Comment »

God the Creator 2 –Benedict XVI

April 5, 2013

Staring across interstellar space, the Cat’s Eye Nebula lies three thousand light-years from Earth. One of the most famous planetary nebulae, NGC 6543 is over half a light-year across and represents a final, brief yet glorious phase in the life of a sun-like star… “We must not in our own day conceal our faith in creation. We may not conceal it, for only if it is true that the universe comes from freedom, love, and reason, and that these are the real underlying powers, can we trust one another, go forward into the future, and live as human beings. God is the Lord of all things because he is their creator, and only therefore can we pray to him. For this means that freedom and love are not ineffectual ideas but rather that they are sustaining forces of reality.”

The Unity of the Bible as a Criterion for Its Interpretation
[Continued from previous post...] So now we still have to ask: Is the distinction between the image and what is intended to be expressed only an evasion, because we can no longer rely on the text even though we still want to make something of it, or are there criteria from the Bible itself that attest to this distinction? Does it give us access to indications of this sort, and did the faith of the church know of these indications in the past and acknowledge them?

Let us look at Holy Scripture anew with these questions in mind. There we can determine first of all that the creation account in Genesis 1, which we have just heard, is not, from its very beginning, something that is closed in on itself. Indeed, Holy Scripture in its entirety was not written from beginning to end like a novel or a textbook.

It is, rather, the echo of God’s history with his people. It arose out of the struggles and the vagaries of this history, and all through it we can catch a glimpse of the rises and falls, the sufferings and hopes, and the greatness and failures of this history. The Bible is thus the story of God’s struggle with human beings to make himself understandable to them over the course of time; but it is also the story of their struggle to seize hold of God over the course of time.

Hence the theme of creation is not set down once for all in one place; rather, it accompanies Israel throughout its history, and, indeed, the whole Old Testament is a journeying with the Word of God. Only in the process of this journeying was the Bible’s real way of declaring itself formed, step by step.

Consequently we ourselves can only discover where this way is leading if we follow it to the end. In this respect — as a way — the Old and New Testaments belong together. For the Christian the Old Testament represents, in its totality, an advance toward Christ; only when it attains to him does its real meaning, which was gradually hinted at, become clear.

Thus every individual part derives its meaning from the whole, and the whole derives its meaning from its end — from Christ. Hence we only interpret an individual text theologically correctly (as the fathers of the church recognized and as the faith of the church in every age has recognized) when we see it as a way that is leading us ever forward, when we see in the text where this way is tending and what its inner direction is .

What significance, now, does this insight have for the understanding of the creation account? The first thing to be said is this: Israel always believed in the Creator God, and this faith it shared with all the great civilizations of the ancient world. For, even in the moments when monotheism was eclipsed, all the great civilizations always knew of the Creator of heaven and earth.

There is a surprising commonality here even between civilizations that could never have been in touch with one another. In this commonality we can get a good grasp of the profound and never altogether lost contact that human beings had with God’s truth. In Israel itself the creation theme went through several different stages. It was never completely absent, but it was not always equally important.

There were times when Israel was so preoccupied with the sufferings or the hopes of its own history, so fastened upon the here and now, that there was hardly any use in its looking back at creation; indeed, it hardly could. The moment when creation became a dominant theme occurred during the Babylonian Exile. It was then that the account that we have just heard — based, to be sure, on very ancient traditions — assumed its present form. Israel had lost its land and its temple.

According to the mentality of the time this was something incomprehensible, for it meant that the God of Israel was vanquished a God whose people, whose land, and whose worshipers could be snatched away from him. A God who could not defend his worshipers and his worship was seen to be, at the time, a weak God. Indeed, he was no God at all; he had abandoned his divinity. And so, being driven out of their own land and being erased from the map was for Israel a terrible trial: Has our God been vanquished, and is our faith void?

At this moment the prophets opened a new page and taught Israel that it was only then that the true face of God appeared and that he was not restricted to that particular piece of land. He had never been: He had promised this piece of land to Abraham before he settled there, and he had been able to bring his people out of Egypt. He could do both things because he was not the God of one place but had power over heaven and earth.

Therefore he could drive his faithless people into another land in order to make himself known there. And so it came to be understood that this God of Israel was not a God like the other gods, but that he was the God who held sway over every land and people. He could do this, however, because he himself had created everything in heaven and on earth. It was in exile and in the seeming defeat of Israel that there occurred an opening to the awareness of the God who holds every people and all of history in his hands, who holds everything because he is the creator of everything and the source of all power.

This faith now had to find its own contours, and it had to do so precisely vis-a-vis the seemingly victorious religion of Babylon, which was displayed in splendid liturgies, like that of the New Year, in which the re-creation of the world was celebrated and brought to its fulfillment. It had to find its contours vis-a-vis the great Babylonian creation account of Enuma Elish, which depicted the origin of the world in its own fashion.

There it is said that the world was produced out of a struggle between opposing powers and that it assumed its form when Marduk, the god of light, appeared and split in two the body of the primordial dragon. From this sundered body heaven and earth came to be. Thus the firmament and the earth were produced from the sundered body of the dead dragon, but from its blood Marduk fashioned human beings.

It is a foreboding picture of the world and of humankind that we encounter here: The world is a dragon’s body, and human beings have dragon’s blood in them. At the very origin of the world lurks something sinister, and in the deepest part of humankind there lies something rebellious, demonic, and evil. In this view of things only a dictator, the king of Babylon, who is the representative of Marduk, can repress the demonic and restore the world to order.

Such views were not simply fairy tales. They expressed the discomfiting realities that human beings experienced in the world and among themselves. For often enough it looks as if the world is a dragon’s lair and human blood is dragon’s blood. But despite all oppressive experiences the scriptural account says that it was not so. The whole tale of these sinister powers melts away in a few words: “The earth was without form and void.”

Behind these Hebrew words lie the dragon and the demonic powers that are spoken of elsewhere. Now it is the void that alone remains and that stands as the sole power over against God. And in the face of any fear of these demonic forces we are told that God alone, who is the eternal Reason that is eternal love, created the world, and that it rests in his hands. Only with this in mind can we appreciate the dramatic confrontation implicit in this biblical text, in which all these confused myths were rejected and the world was given its origin in God’s Reason and in his Word.

This could be shown almost word for word in the present text — as, for example, when the sun and the moon are referred to as lamps that God has hung in the sky for the measurement of time. To the people of that age it must have seemed a terrible sacrilege to designate the great gods sun and moon as lamps for measuring time. Here we see the audacity and the temperateness of the faith that, in confronting the pagan myths, made the light of truth appear by showing that the world was not a demonic contest but that it arose from God’s Reason and reposes on God’s Word.

Hence this creation account may be seen as the decisive “enlightenment” of history and as a breakthrough out of the fears that had oppressed humankind. It placed the world in the context of reason and recognized the world’s reasonableness and freedom. But it may also be seen as the true enlightenment from the fact that it put human reason firmly on the primordial basis of God’s creating Reason, in order to establish it in truth and in love, without which an “enlightenment” would be exorbitant and ultimately foolish.

To this something further must be added. I just said how, gradually, in confronting its pagan environment and its own heart, the people of Israel experienced what “creation” was. Implicit here is the fact that the classic creation account is not the only creation text of sacred Scripture. Immediately after it there follows another one, composed earlier and containing other imagery.

In the Psalms there are still others, and there the movement to clarify the faith concerning creation is carried further: In its confrontation with Hellenistic civilization, Wisdom literature reworks the theme without sticking to the old images such as the seven days. Thus we can see how the Bible itself constantly readapts its images to a continually developing way of thinking, how it changes time and again in order to bear witness, time and again, to the one thing that has come to it, in truth, from God’s Word, which is the message of his creating act.

In the Bible itself the images are free and they correct themselves ongoingly. In this way they show, by means of a gradual and interactive process, that they are only images, which reveal something deeper and greater.

Christology as a Criterion
One decisive fact must still be mentioned at this point: The Old Testament is not the end of the road. What is worked out in the so-called Wisdom literature is the final bridge on a long road that leads to the message of Jesus Christ and to the New Testament. Only there do we find the conclusive and normative scriptural creation account, which reads: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made” (John 1:1, 3).

John quite consciously took up here once again the first words of the Bible and read the creation account anew, with Christ, in order to tell us definitively what the Word is which appears throughout the Bible and with which God desires to shake our hearts. Thus it becomes clear to us that we Christians do not read the Old Testament for its own sake but always with Christ and through Christ. Consequently the law of Moses, the rituals of purification, the regulations concerning food, and all other such things are not to be carried out by us; otherwise the biblical Word would be senseless and meaningless.

We read all of this not as if it were something complete in itself. We read it with him in whom all things have been fulfilled and in whom all of its validity and truth are revealed. Therefore we read the law, like the creation account, with him; and from him (and not from some subsequently discovered trick) we know what God wished over the course of centuries to have gradually penetrate the human heart and soul. Christ frees us from the slavery of the letter, and precisely thus does he give back to us, renewed, the truth of the images.

The ancient church and the church of the Middle Ages also knew this. They knew that the Bible is a whole and that we only understand its truth when we understand it with Christ in mind — with the freedom that he bestowed on us and with the profundity whereby he reveals what is enduring through images.

Only at the beginning of the modern era was this dynamic forgotten — this dynamic that is the living unity of Scripture, which we can only understand with Christ in the freedom that he gives us and in the certitude that comes from that freedom. The new historical thinking wanted to read every text in itself, in its bare literalness. Its interest lay only in the exact explanation of particulars, but meanwhile it forgot the Bible as a whole.

In a word, it no longer read the texts forward but backward — that is, with a view not to Christ but to the probable origins of those texts. People were no longer concerned with understanding what a text said or what a thing was from the aspect of its fulfillment, but from that of its beginning, its source.

As a result of this isolation from the whole and of this literal-mindedness with respect to particulars, which contradicts the entire inner nature of the Bible but which was now considered to be the truly scientific approach, there arose that conflict between the natural sciences and theology which has been, up to our own day, a burden for the faith.

This did not have to be the case, because the faith was, from its very beginnings, greater, broader, and deeper. Even today faith in creation is not unreal; even today it is reasonable; even from the perspective of the data of the natural sciences it is the “better hypothesis,” offering a fuller and better explanation than any of the other theories. Faith is reasonable. The reasonableness of creation derives from God’s Reason, and there is no other really convincing explanation. What the pagan Aristotle said four hundred years before Christ — when he opposed those who asserted that everything has come to exist through chance, even though he said what he did without the knowledge that our faith in creation gives us — is still valid today.

The reasonableness of the universe provides us with access to God’s Reason, and the Bible is and continues to be the true “enlightenment,” which has given the world over to human reason and not to exploitation by human beings, because it opened reason to God’s truth and love. Therefore we must not in our own day conceal our faith in creation. We may not conceal it, for only if it is true that the universe comes from freedom, love, and reason, and that these are the real underlying powers, can we trust one another, go forward into the future, and live as human beings. God is the Lord of all things because he is their creator, and only therefore can we pray to him. For this means that freedom and love are not ineffectual ideas but rather that they are sustaining forces of reality.

And so we wish to cite today, in thankfulness and joy, the church’s creed: “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.” Amen.

Posted in Creation and Evolution, Pope Benedict XVI, Science And Religion | Tagged Biblical Unity, Christology and the Old Testament, God's Reason and His Word, Marduk, the King of Babylon, The reasonableness of creation | Leave a Comment »

More On Divine Hiddeness — Daniel Howard-Snyder and Paul K. Moser

December 6, 2012

Our Expectations Regarding God
We have suggested that the argument from divine hiddenness is rooted in our expectations regarding God, specifically how a perfectly loving being would reveal Himself. Different expectations may be motivated by different analogies. People who emphasize that God would do whatever it takes to prevent inculpable non-belief frequently regard God’s love on analogy with parents who wish to comfort their young children in distress.

Others, however, see God’s love by analogy with familiar adult love, where the lover primarily wants certain attitudes and behavior to accompany any reciprocation of love on the part of the beloved. Any old reciprocation won’t do. Those pushing the latter analogy will focus on different kinds of human attitudes and motivations that God, in His unsurpassable love, might wish to promote or to prevent prior to bringing the nonbeliever to belief.

On this view, it is not belief that God exists per se that is primarily important but rather the attitudes and motivations that accompany belief. On this view, the loving thing for God to do is to bring the nonbeliever to belief in such a way that serves these ulterior divine purposes. If their fulfillment is not in the offing now, God may patiently wait until they are before bringing the nonbeliever to belief.

God As A Benevolent Reconstructive Surgeon
Another analogy sees God as a benevolent reconstructive surgeon. As such God will not aim to bring one to belief unless one’s volitions are in line with God’s purposes in one’s believing in the first place. Specifically, God seeks a human’s willingness to obey, to serve, and to trust Him, as seems fitting for His being the Lord of all. Mere curiosity, or double-mindedness on the matter of giving oneself humbly and obediently, will not do. Only those prepared to respond appropriately to personal divine revelation are its genuine recipients.

For all that, God may well give general revelation sufficient to move people to query about one’s relationship with God, but even here volitional matters enter into the picture. The unduly skeptical as well as the modestly indifferent may not appreciate what divine light is given them, owing to their resistance or apathy. Passionate striving and setting aside all else for the pursuit of available divine light are mandatory. God will not trivialize the supreme value of divine light.

In reply, those emphasizing the parent analogy will submit that a perfectly loving God would empathize with the plight of those who seek Him but who through no fault of their own come up empty-handed. Would it not be in the very context of an ongoing, developmental relationship with the seeker that God’s redemptive purposes are best fulfilled, as in the case of a mother and child? At any rate, we can see that one’s operative analogies can make a big difference in what one expects of a perfectly loving being.

What Do You Mean God Is Hidden?
We have suggested that a response to the argument from inculpable non-belief might deny that God has failed to make Himself sufficiently known. “What do you mean God is hidden? Just look around you and at yourself. What more could you want?” This response might seek inspiration from some biblical sources. “The heavens are telling the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims his handiwork,” declares the psalmist (Psalm 19:1, NRSV).

The apostle Paul remarks: “Ever since the creation of the world [God's] eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made” (Romans 1:20, NRSV). Aside from what the psalmist and Paul actually had in mind (itself a matter of ongoing debate), if God is evident through creation, we need an explanation of why many normal people fail to believe that God exists. Some theists recommend their theism with arguments to the best explanation that have to do with historical events, like the history of Israel or the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Still others insist that God makes Himself sufficiently well-known through more internal means, such as one’s conscience.

Why People Fail To Believe
If God is sufficiently well-known in any of the ways suggested, we need an explanation of why so many people fail to believe. A traditional answer is that, generally, failure to appreciate the evidence of creation and history or to hear the internal witness of conscience is a consequence of a person’s sinfulness. This could be taken as a denial of the premise of the argument from hiddenness implying that some people fail to believe inculpably. The thesis would be that every (normal adult) nonbeliever culpably fails to believe. Exactly how sin enters the explanatory picture here will vary, some emphasizing volitional vices, others cognitive. An explanation emphasizing one thing may apply to one person but not to another. In addition, different explanations may apply to the same person at different times, and several explanations may apply to one person at one time. Naturally enough, those who find such explanations unconvincing think charges of culpability are best laid elsewhere.

Another suggestion is that every human being can believe that God exists, by implicitly believing in Him, even though one does not know that this is what one is doing. This can be done by pursuing a moral life and thus relating to God by way of relating to His chief attribute, goodness. Alternatively, one can implicitly believe by acting as one would if one were explicitly to believe in Him. In these ways, one can enter into a developmental relationship with God that will become more fully realized and explicit in the future.

Explaining Inculpable Non-Belief
Some people grant that God fails to make Himself sufficiently well-known, and that non-belief cannot be written off to human sinfulness – non-belief is at least frequently inculpable. The goal, then, is to explain inculpable non-belief, the fact that many fail to believe through no fault of their own. The general strategy here is to articulate the benefits of God’s causing or permitting inculpable non-belief, as against the benefits of belief that God exists and the attendant availability of a personal relationship with Him. Variations on this strategy include developing and defending one or more of the following:

God hides and thus permits inculpable nonbelief (at least in principle) in order to enable people freely to love, trust and obey Him; otherwise, we would be coerced in a manner incompatible with love.
God hides and thus permits inculpable nonbelief (at least in principle) in order to prevent a human response based on improper motives (such as fear of punishment).
God hides and thus permits inculpable nonbelief because, if He were not hidden, humans would relate to God and to their knowledge of God in presumptuous ways and the possibility of developing the inner attitudes essential to a proper relationship with Him would be ipso facto ruled out.
God hides and thus permits inculpable nonbelief because this hiding prompts us to recognize the wretchedness of life on our own, without God, and thereby stimulates us to search for Him contritely and humbly.
God hides and thus permits inculpable nonbelief because if He made His existence clear enough to prevent inculpable nonbelief, then the sense of risk required for a passionate faith would be objectionably reduced.
God hides and thus permits inculpable nonbelief because if He made His existence clear enough to prevent inculpable nonbelief, temptation to doubt His existence would not be possible, religious diversity would be objectionably reduced, and believers would not have as much opportunity to assist others in starting personal relationships with God.
Inculpable nonbelievers are either well-disposed to love God upon believing or they are not. The well-disposed either are responsible for being so disposed or not. If not, God lets them confirm their good disposition through choices in the face of contrary temptations before making Himself known. If so, they are well-disposed for unfitting reasons and He waits for them to confirm their good disposition in a purer source before making Himself known. Inculpable nonbelievers who are not well-disposed to love God upon believing and who are not responsible for failing to be well-disposed are given the opportunity by God to change before He makes Himself known.

No Single Explanation
One theme that has emerged is that no single explanation may be the whole explanation of divine hiddenness. Different people, given their different stances toward God, might call for different explanations. Moreover, all of the explanations might fail individually for any particular individual and yet, to some extent, apply to a single individual, totaling up to a complete explanation. It thus won’t do to object to an explanation that it does not apply to certain kinds of people; nor will it do to object that each explanation fails to apply to each candidate for inculpable nonbelief.

An objection to such explanations must invoke something like the claim that they fail, collectively as well as individually, to account for what we take to be, at first glance, inculpable nonbelief. Here a distinctively epistemic problem for the proponent of the argument from hiddenness arises. Human beings are enormously complicated, and it is no easy task to tell whether any particular candidate for inculpable nonbelief possesses or fails to possess those motivations, attitudes, and dispositions that putatively explain their inculpable nonbelief.

Posted in Catholicism For Atheists | Tagged divine hiddenness, Inculpable Non-Belief, Why People Fail To Believe | Leave a Comment »

Reading Selections On Divine Hiddenness by Daniel Howard-Snyder and Paul K. Moser

November 29, 2012

Red Admiral Butterfly On Lilac Tree

A Source Of Existential Concern
Many people are perplexed, even troubled, by the fact that God (if such there be) has not made His existence sufficiently clear. This fact — the fact of divine hiddenness — is a source of existential concern for many people. That is, it raises problems about their very existence, particularly its value and purpose. The fact of divine hiddenness is also, according to some people, a source of good evidence against the existence of God. That is, it allegedly poses a cognitive problem for theism, in the form of evidence challenging the assumption that God exists. (Here and throughout we speak of “God” as broadly represented in the historic Jewish and Christian theistic traditions.)

Provoking A Crisis Of Faith
The existential problem often takes the form of a crisis of faith, sometimes leading to a collapse of trust in God. Jewish and Christian theists have committed themselves to the God who, they believe, loves them perfectly. They expect to find their greatest good, their ultimate fulfillment, in personal and social relationship with God. In the Jewish tradition, this general idea finds elaboration in God’s entering into a covenant relationship with the people of Israel, who are to respond to God in faithful obedience. In the Christian tradition, the idea sometimes takes a more individualistic turn.

To be sure, God enters into covenant relationship with a “people” — namely, the Church inaugurated by Jesus Christ — but Christians often emphasize the importance of each person’s entering into a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ. There are, of course, differences in interpretation and emphasis between and within the distinctive traditions of Judaism and Christianity. Nonetheless, the general initial expectation remains the same: God’s reality, including His love for people, will be made sufficiently well known precisely because He loves them, and their flourishing as persons created in the image of God depends on their relationship with Him.

An Uncaring, Inhospitable Place With A God Who Doesn’t Care?
The potential for crisis arises here. Jewish and Christian theists believe that their flourishing as persons depends on their being in a personal/social relationship with God. For many such theists, however, there is no such discernible relationship. God is hidden, if not in fact at least in their experience. Perhaps their existence has no personal guidance from God after all. Perhaps their lives simply blow with the winds of an impersonal nature. If God exists, God seems not to care for them. God seems too hidden to care at all. So the world appears as an uncaring, inhospitable place. Despair over life itself is, then, a natural result of divine hiddenness.

The Psalms
The Hebrew psalmists lament as follows:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?….I cry by day, but you do not answer…. (Psalm 22:1-2, NRSV).

But I, O Lord, cry out to you; in the morning my prayer comes before you. O Lord, why do you cast me off? Why do you hide your face from me? (Psalm 88:13-14, NRSV).

Psalm 10 complains about God’s hiding, as follows: “Why, O Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?” (Psalm 10:1, NRSV; cf. Job 13:24). Psalm 30 laments God’s hiding after a time when the psalmist had confident security. “When I felt secure, I said, ‘I will never be shaken.’ O Lord, when you favored me, you made my mountain stand firm; but when you hid your face, I was dismayed” (Psalm 30:7, NIV; cf. Psalm 104:27-29). Psalm 44 expresses outright annoyance at God’s hiding, suggesting that God’s hiding is actually morally irresponsible. “Rouse yourself! Why do you sleep, O Lord? Awake, do not cast us off forever! Why do you hide your face? Why do you forget our affliction and oppression?” (Psalm 44:23-24, NRSV).

The subject of God’s hiding is no merely theoretical matter in the Hebrew Psalms. It cuts to the core of the psalmists’ understanding of God and of themselves. Thus at times it prompts sincere lament from God’s people. Isaiah 45:15 likewise sums up a central Jewish view of God: “Truly you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior.” God’s hiding is sometimes a response to human disobedience and moral indifference toward God (Deuteronomy 31:16-19, 32:19-20; Psalm 89:46; Isaiah 59:2; Micah 3:4), but this is not the full story behind divine hiding. The Jewish-Christian God hides at times for a range of reasons, not all of which seem clear to humans.

Saint Anselm’s Complaint
Saint Anselm, eleventh-century Archbishop of Canterbury and author of the famous ontological argument for God’s existence, complains to God as follows:

I have never seen thee, O Lord my God; I do not know thy form. What, O most high Lord, shall this man do, an exile far from thee? What shall thy servant do, anxious in his love of thee, and cast out afar from thy face? He pants to see thee, and thy face is too far from him. He longs to come to thee, and thy dwelling place is inaccessible. He is eager to find thee, and knows not thy place. He desires to seek thee, and does not know thy face. Lord, thou art my God, and thou art my Lord, yet never have I seen thee. It is thou that hast made me, and hast made me anew, and hast bestowed upon me all the blessings I enjoy; and not yet do I know thee. Finally, I was created to see thee and not yet have I done that for which I was made.

Anselm continues:

Why did he shut us away from the light, and cover us over with darkness?…. From a native country into exile, from the vision of God into our present blindness, from the joy of immortality into the bitterness and horror of death. Miserable exchange of how great a good, for how great an evil! Heavy loss, heavy grief, heavy all our fate!
(Proslogion, sect. 1).

Anselm believes he gets a divine answer to his prayer of complaint: the famous ontological argument. Even if it is a sound proof, however, it is a far cry from the explicit personal love from God for which he longs. It is as though panting for water he receives a stone.

Saint John of the Cross
For many theists, the sense of God’s hiding is no fleeting affair. Even devout mystics of Jewish and Christian persuasions languish in what Saint John of the Cross (d. 1591) called “the dark night” of the soul. In a similar vein, many post-Holocaust Jewish writers speak intensely of “the silence of God,” something their biblical ancestors experienced painfully. (See, for instance, the Hebrew prophetic literature, particularly Isaiah, on divine elusiveness.)

For many Christians, the difficulty is exacerbated by the fact that their Lord has promised, “Seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you” (Matthew 7:7). Having sought and knocked (and knocked again and again), they still fail to find, and no one answers the door for them. Resisting the natural slide into despair, priests and pastors counsel, “The Lord did indeed promise us, but we must….”

Well-intentioned counselors promptly fill in the blank with various provisos: for instance, we must wait patiently, or we must be more attentive in a certain manner, or we must change certain questionable conduct. Even so, attempts to fill in the blank often seem lame, if not contrived. Sometimes they lead to further frustration and, eventually, to bitterness and despair.

Trust in God then crumbles, along with any hope anchored in God’s providence. Giving up the struggle to trust the hidden God often seems the only reasonable option as well as the only avenue to psychological well-being. Hence, even devout theists can face an existential crisis from divine hiddenness.

Nietzsche and Evidence Against God’s Existence?
Many nontheists regard the hiddenness of God as salient evidence that the Jewish-Christian God does not actually exist. Friedrich Nietzsche considered the matter in the following light:

A god who is all-knowing and all-powerful and who does not even make sure his creatures understand his intentions – could that be a god of goodness? Who allows countless doubts and dubieties to persist, for thousands of years, as though the salvation of mankind were unaffected by them, and who on the other hand holds out frightful consequences if any mistake is made as to the nature of truth? Would he not be a cruel god if he possessed the truth and could behold mankind miserably tormenting itself over the truth?… All religions exhibit traces of the fact that they owe their origin to an early, immature intellectuality in man – they all take astonishingly lightly the duty to tell the truth: they as yet know nothing of a Duty of God to be truthful towards mankind and clear in the manner of his communications.Nietzsche, Daybreak

Divine hiddenness, Nietzsche suggests, warrants the conclusion that theistic religion arises from an “immature intellectuality” in people. In addition, his opening rhetorical questions in the quotation suggest that, given the reality of divine hiddenness, God could not be good. So it follows from the reality of divine hiddenness, according to Nietzsche, that the perfectly good God of Jewish-Christian theism does not exist. We thus have an inference from divine hiddenness to atheism about the Jewish-Christian God.

Atheism On The Basis Of Divine Hiddenness
A recent, detailed defense of atheism on the basis of divine hiddenness is J.L. Schellenberg’s Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason (Cornell University Press, 1993). His core argument is straightforward. If there were a perfectly loving God, He would see to it that each person capable of a personal relationship with Him reasonably believes that He exists, unless a person culpably lacks such belief. But there are capable, inculpable nonbelievers. Therefore, there is no perfectly loving God.

Schellenberg does not demand an undeniable proof that God exists. His demand is more lenient :

…the reasons for Divine self-disclosure suggested by reflection on the nature of love are not reasons for God to provide us with some incontrovertible proof or overwhelm us with a display of Divine glory. Rather, what a loving God has reason to do is provide us with evidence sufficient for belief. One of the consequences of this is that moral freedom … need not be infringed in order for God to be disclosed in the relevant sense.
Schellenberg, Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason

The demand, then, is that a perfectly loving God provide evidence that removes reasonable non-belief toward God’s reality. This is not a demand for either a compelling proof or a disarming sign of God’s existence. Assuming that reasonable non-belief persists, Schellenberg concludes that a perfectly loving God does not exist.

Allegedly, then, divine hiddenness underwrites atheism about the God of Jewish-Christian theism. Some non-theists would stop short of atheism and recommend agnosticism on the basis of divine hiddenness. This, of course, would be no real consolation for theists. On either option, atheism or agnosticism, their theism is under cognitive stress owing to divine hiddenness.

The constellation of attitudes, passions, and actions comprising the existential problem of hiddenness differs from the ingredients of the cognitive problem. The existential problem calls for the sort of expertise found in a skilled and experienced pastor, priest, or spiritual director, one well-acquainted with the turbulent ups and downs of the spiritual life. The cognitive problem calls for the sort of expertise one finds in a skilled and knowledgeable philosopher or theologian, one acquainted with the complex ins and outs of assessing evidence and implications.

While recognizing the difference between these two problems, we also acknowledge that they often come together in the life of a single individual. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine what it would be like for one to feel frustrated in one’s attempt to find God unless one expected certain things of Him and reflected on the reasonableness and implications of those expectations. Those expectations are the main premises of arguments against theism from divine hiddenness, and those reflections are implicit assessments of those arguments. Hence, the existential problem seems naturally rooted in the cognitive problem. This book focuses largely on the cognitive problem.

The cognitive problem prompts examination of whether a certain sort of argument against theism succeeds. It is sometimes helpful to describe the allegedly problematic phenomenon – divine hiddenness — in terms that do not presuppose the existence of God. Talk of “inculpable nonbelief,” for instance, is useful at times. The idea is that there are people who lack belief that God exists and do so through no fault of their own.

It is perhaps noncontroversial that infants and certain mentally impaired adults, for example, fall into this category. Some philosophers contend that a large number of normal adults are included as well. The latter claim is, however, controversial among philosophers of religion. Our talk of “inculpable nonbelief” does not presume that this controversy has been settled.

Posted in Catholicism For Atheists | Tagged A Crisis Of Faith, A God Who Doesn’t Care, Atheism and Divine Hiddeness, divine hiddenness, Nietzsche, psalmists' lament, Saint Anselm’s Complaint | Leave a Comment »

The Ineffable Mystery of God – Fr. Robert Barron

August 21, 2012

The cloister yard of Santa Sabina where it is reputed St. Thomas walked and pondered.

After many years of exile from the courts of Egypt where he had been raised, a Hebrew man named Moses, while tending the flock of his father-in-law on the slopes of Mount Sinai, saw an extraordinary sight: a bush that was on fire but was not being consumed. He resolved to take a closer look. As he approached, he heard a voice: “Moses! Moses! … Come no nearer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place where you stand is holy ground” (Exodus 3:5). Then the speaker identified himself as “the God of your father … the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob” (Exodus 3:6), and he gave Moses a mission to liberate his people enslaved in Egypt.

When Moses asked for the name of this mysterious speaker, he received the following answer: “I am who am” (Exodus 3:14). Moses was asking a reasonable enough question. He was wondering which of the many gods — deities of the river, the mountain, the various nations — this was. He was seeking to define and specify the nature of this particular heavenly power.

But the answer he received frustrated him. For the divine speaker was implying that he was not one god among many, not this deity rather than that, not a reality that could, even in principle, be captured or delimited by a name. In a certain sense, God’s response amounted to the undermining of the very type of question Moses posed. His name was simply “to be,” and therefore he could never be mastered. The ancient Israelites honored this essential mysteriousness of God by designating him with the unpronounceable name of YHWH.

Following the prompting of this conversation between Moses and God, the mainstream of the Catholic theological tradition has tended not to refer to God as a being, however supreme, among many. Thomas Aquinas, arguably the greatest theologian in the Catholic tradition, rarely designates God as ens summum (the highest being); rather he prefers the names ipsum esse (to be itself) or qui est (the one who is). In fact, Aquinas goes so far as to say that God cannot be defined or situated within any genus, even the genus of “being.” This means that it is wrong to say that trees, planets, automobiles, computers, and God — despite the obvious differences among them — have at least in common their status as beings. Aquinas expresses the difference that obtains between God and creatures through the technical language of essence and existence.

In everything that is not God there is a real distinction between essence (what the thing is) and existence (that the thing is); but in God no such distinction holds, for God’s act of existence is not received, delimited, or defined by anything extraneous to itself. A human being is the act of existence poured, as it were, into the receptacle of humanity, and a podium is the act of existence poured into the form of podium-ness, but God’s act of existence is not poured into any receiving element. To be God, therefore, is to be to be.

Saint Anselm of Canterbury, one of the greatest of the early medieval theologians, described God as “that than which nothing greater can be thought.” At first blush this seems straightforward enough: God is the highest conceivable thing. But the longer one meditates on Anselm’s description, the stranger it becomes. If God were simply the supreme being — the biggest reality among many — then God plus the world would be greater than God alone. But in that case he would not be that than which nothing greater can be thought. Zeus, for example, was, in ancient mythology, the supreme deity, but clearly Zeus plus the other gods, or Zeus plus the world of nature, would be greater than Zeus alone. Thus the God whom Anselm is describing is not like this at all. Though it is a very high paradox, the God whom Anselm describes added to the world as we know it is not greater than God alone.

This means that the true God exceeds all of our concepts, all of our language, all of our loftiest ideas. God (YHWH) is essentially mysterious, a term, by the way, derived from the Greek muein (to shut one’s mouth). How often the prophets and mystics of the Old Testament rail against idolatry, which is nothing other than reducing the true God to some creaturely object that we can know and hence try to control. The twentieth century theologian Karl Rahner commented that “God” is the last sound we should make before falling silent, and Saint Augustine, long ago, said, “si comprehendis, non est Deus” (if you understand, that isn’t God), All of this formal theologizing is but commentary on that elusive and confounding voice from the burning bush: “I am who am.”

Arguments For God’s Existence
I have firmly fended off the tendency to turn God into an idol, but have I left us thereby in an intellectual lurch, doomed simply to remain silent about God? If God cannot be in any sense defined, how do we explain the plethora of theological books and arguments? After all, the same Thomas Aquinas who said that God cannot be placed in any genus also wrote millions of words about God. Chapter 33 of Exodus gives us a clue to the resolution of this dilemma. Moses passionately asks God to reveal his glory to him, and Yahweh acquiesces. But the Lord specifies, “I will make all my beauty pass before you … But my face you cannot see, for no man sees me and still lives” (Exodus 33:19-20). God then tells Moses that while the divine glory passes by, God will place his servant in the cleft of a rock and cover Moses’s eyes. “Then I will remove my hand, so that you may see my back; but my face is not to be seen” (Exodus 33:22-23). God can indeed be seen in this life, but only indirectly, through his creatures and effects. We can understand him to a degree, but only obliquely, glimpsing him, as it were, out of the corners of our eyes. We see his “back” as it is disclosed in the beauty, the intelligibility, and the contingency of the world that he has made.

Following this principle of indirection, Thomas Aquinas formulated five arguments for God’s existence, each one of which begins from some feature of the created order. I will develop here the one that I consider the most elemental, the demonstration that commences with the contingency of the world. Though the term is technically philosophical, “contingency” actually names something with which we are all immediately familiar: the fact that things come into being and pass out of being. Consider a majestic summer cloud that billows up and then fades away in the course of a lazy August afternoon, coming into existence and then evanescing.

Now think of all of the plants and flowers that have grown up and subsequently withered away, and then of all the animals that have come into being, roamed the face of the earth, and then faded into dust. And ponder the numberless human beings who have come and gone, confirming the Psalmist’s intuition that “our years end like a sigh” (Psalms 90:9). Even those things that seem most permanent — mountain ranges, the continents themselves, the oceans — have in fact emerged and will in fact fade. Indeed, if a time-lapse camera could record the entire life span of the Rocky Mountains, from the moment they began to emerge to the moment when they finally wear away, and if we could play that film at high speed, those mountains would look for all the world like that summer cloud.

The contingency of earthly things is the starting point of Aquinas’s proof, for it indicates something of great moment, namely, that such things do not contain within themselves the reason for their own existence. If they did, they would exist, simply and absolutely; they would not come and go so fleetingly. Therefore, in regard to contingent things, we have to look outside of them, to an extrinsic cause, or set of causes, in order to explain their existence. So let’s go back to that summer cloud. Instinctually, we know that it doesn’t exist through its own essence, and we therefore look for explanations. We say that it is caused by the moisture in the atmosphere, by the temperature, by the intensity of the winds, and so on, and as far as it goes, that explanation is adequate.

But as any meteorologist will tell us, those factors are altogether contingent, coming into being and passing out of being. Thus we go a step further and say that these factors in turn are caused by the jet stream, which is grounded in the movement of the planet. But a moment’s reflection reveals that the jet stream comes and goes, ebbs and flows, and that the earth itself is contingent, having emerged into existence four billion years ago and being destined one day to be incinerated by the expanding sun.

And so we go further, appealing to the solar system and events within the galaxy and finally perhaps to the very structures inherent in the universe. But contemporary astrophysics has disclosed to us the fundamental contingency of all of those realities, and indeed of the universe itself, which came into existence at the Big Bang some thirteen billion years ago. In our attempt to explain a contingent reality — that evanescent summer cloud — we have appealed simply to a whole series of similarly contingent realities, each one of which requires a further explanation.

Thomas Aquinas argues that if we are to avoid an infinite regress of contingent causes, which finally explain nothing at all, we must come finally to some “necessary” reality, something that exists simply through the power of its own essence. This, he concludes, is what people mean when they use the word “God.” With Aquinas’s demonstration in mind, reconsider that strange answer God gives to Moses’s question: “I am who am.” The biblical God is not one contingent reality among many; he is that whose very nature it is to exist, that power through which and because of which all other things have being.

Some contemporary theologians have translated Aquinas’s abstract metaphysical language into more experiential language. The Protestant theologian Paul Tillich said that “finitude in awareness is anxiety.” He means that when we know in our bones how contingent we are, we become afraid. We exist in time, and this means that we are moving, ineluctably, toward death; we have been “thrown” into being, and this means that one day we will be thrown out of being; and this state of affairs produces fear and trembling. In the grip of this anxiety, Tillich argues, we tend to thrash about, looking for something to reassure us, searching for some firm ground on which to stand.

We seek to alleviate our fears through the piling up of pleasure, wealth, power, or honor, but we discover, soon enough, that all of these worldly realities are as contingent as we are and hence cannot finally soothe us. It is at this point that the scriptural word “My soul rests in God alone” (Psalms 62:1) is heard in its deepest resonance. Our fear — born of contingency — will be assuaged only by that which is not contingent. Our shaken and fragile existence will be stabilized only when placed in relation to the eternal and necessary existence of God. Tillich is, in many ways, a contemporary disciple of Saint Augustine, who said, “Lord, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee.”

In 1968 a young theology professor at the University of Tubingen formulated a neat argument for God’s existence that owed a good deal to Thomas Aquinas but that also drew on more contemporary sources. The theologian’s name was Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. Ratzinger commences with the observation that finite being, as we experience it, is marked, through and through, by intelligibility, that is to say, by a formal structure that makes it understandable to an inquiring mind. In point of fact, all of the sciences — physics, chemistry, psychology, astronomy, biology, and so forth — rest on the assumption that at all levels, microscopic and macrocosmic, being can be known. The same principle was acknowledged in ancient times by Pythagoras, who said that all existing things correspond to a numeric value, and in medieval times by the scholastic philosophers who formulated the dictum omne ens est scibile (all being is knowable).

Ratzinger argues that the only finally satisfying explanation for this universal objective intelligibility is a great Intelligence who has thought the universe into being. Our language provides an intriguing clue in this regard, for we speak of our acts of knowledge as moments of “recognition,” literally a re-cognition, a thinking again what has already been thought. Ratzinger cites Einstein in support of this connection: “in the laws of nature, a mind so superior is revealed that in comparison, our minds are as something worthless.”

The prologue to the Gospel of John states, “In the beginning was the Word,” and specifies that all things came to be through this divine Logos, implying thereby that the being of the universe is not dumbly there, but rather intelligently there, imbued by a creative mind with intelligible structure. The argument presented by Joseph Ratzinger is but a specification of that great revelation.

One of the particular strengths of this argument is that it shows the deep compatibility between religion and science, two disciplines that so often today are seen as implacable enemies. Ratzinger shows that the physical sciences rest upon the finally mystical intuition that reality has been thought into existence and hence can be known. I say it is mystical because it cannot itself be the product of empirical or experimental investigation, but is instead the very condition for the possibility of analyzing and experimenting in the first place. This is why many theorists have speculated that the emergence of the modern sciences in the context of a Christian intellectual milieu, in which the doctrine of creation through the power of an intelligent Creator is affirmed, is not the least bit accidental.

Posted in Fr. Robert Barron, Pope Benedict XVI, Science And Religion, St. Thomas Aquinas, Theology | Tagged a "necessary" reality, argument from the contingency of the world, explaining a contingent reality, I am who am, Joseph Ratzinger, non est Deus, Saint Anselm of Canterbury, si comprehendis, Thomas Aquinas | 2 Comments »

The Abolition of Man Part One – C.S. Lewis

May 24, 2012

National Review ranked the1943 book #7 in its 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of the 20th Century list. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute ranked the book as the second best book of the 20th century. In a lecture on Walker Percy, Professor Peter Kreeft of Boston College listed the book as one of five “books to read to save Western Civilization,” alongside Lost in the Cosmos by Walker Percy, Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, The Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton, and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

After the posts of the past couple weeks on pornography, I recalled a Woody Allen line about being on the losing side of the sexual revolution which dovetailed to this classic C.S. Lewis piece that concerns Man’s somewhat questionable conquest of Nature. If you have never read it, please do. A simple but depressing message: We have been sold for slaves.

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It came burning hot into my mind, whatever he said and however he flattered, when he got me home to his house, he would sell me for a slave.
John Bunyan

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`Man’s conquest of Nature’ is an expression often used to describe the progress of applied science. `Man has Nature whacked,’ said someone to a friend of mine not long ago. In their context the words had a certain tragic beauty, for the speaker was dying of tuberculosis. `No matter’ he said, `I know I’m one of the casualties. Of course there are casualties on the winning as well as on the losing side. But that doesn’t alter the fact that it is winning.’

I have chosen this story as my point of departure in order to make it clear that I do not wish to disparage all that is really beneficial in the process described as `Man’s conquest’, much less all the real devotion and self-sacrifice that has gone to make it possible. But having done so I must proceed to analyse this conception a little more closely. In what sense is Man the possessor of increasing power over Nature?

Let us consider three typical examples: the airplane, the wireless, and the contraceptive. In a civilized community, in peace-time, anyone who can pay for them may use these things. But it cannot strictly be said that when he does so he is exercising his own proper or individual power over Nature. If I pay you to carry me, I am not therefore myself a strong man.

Any or all of the three things I have mentioned can be withheld from some men by other men — by those who sell, or those who allow the sale, or those who own the sources of production, or those who make the goods. What we call Man’s power is, in reality, a power possessed by some men which they may, or may not, allow other men to profit by. Again, as regards the powers manifested in the airplane or the wireless, Man is as much the patient or subject as the possessor, since he is the target both for bombs and for propaganda.

And as regards contraceptives, there is a paradoxical, negative sense in which all possible future generations are the patients or subjects of a power wielded by those already alive. By contraception simply, they are denied existence; by contraception used as a means of selective breeding, they are, without their concurring voice, made to be what one generation, for its own reasons, may choose to prefer. From this point of view, what we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

It is, of course, a commonplace to complain that men have hitherto used badly, and against their fellows, the powers that science has given them, But that is not the point I am trying to make. I am not speaking of particular corruptions and abuses which an increase of moral virtue would cure: I am considering what the thing called `Man’s power over Nature’ must always and essentially be. No doubt, the picture could be modified by public ownership of raw materials and factories and public control of scientific research. But unless we have a world state this will still mean the power of one nation over others. And even within the world state or the nation it will mean (in principle) the power of majorities over minorities, and (in the concrete) of a government over the people. And all long-term exercises of power, especially in breeding, must mean the power of earlier generations over later ones.

The latter point is not always sufficiently emphasized, because those who write on social matters have not yet learned to imitate the physicists by always including Time among the dimensions. In order to understand fully what Man’s power over Nature, and therefore the power of some men over other men, really means, we must picture the race extended in time from the date of its emergence to that of its extinction. Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors. This modifies the picture which is sometimes painted of a progressive emancipation from tradition and a progressive control of natural processes resulting in a continual increase of human power.

In reality, of course, if any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power. They are weaker, not stronger: for though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands we have pre-ordained how they are to use them. And if, as is almost certain, the age which had thus attained maximum power over posterity were also the age most emancipated from tradition, it would be engaged in reducing the power of its predecessors almost as drastically as that of its successors. And we must also remember that, quite apart from this, the later a generation comes — the nearer it lives to that date at which the species becomes extinct — the less power it will have in the forward direction, because its subjects will be so few.

There is therefore no question of a power vested in the race as a whole steadily growing as long as the race survives. The last men, far from being the heirs of power, will be of all men most subject to the dead hand of the great planners and conditioners and will themselves exercise least power upon the future.

The real picture is that of one dominant age — let us suppose the hundredth century A.D. — which resists all previous ages most successfully and dominates all subsequent ages most irresistibly, and thus is the real master of the human species. But then within this master generation (itself an infinitesimal minority of the species) the power will be exercised by a minority smaller still. Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man’s side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger. In every victory, besides being the general who triumphs, he is also the prisoner who follows the triumphal car.

I am not yet considering whether the total result of such ambivalent victories is a good thing or a bad. I am only making clear what Man’s conquest of Nature really means and especially that final stage in the conquest, which, perhaps, is not far off. The final stage is come when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won. We shall have `taken the thread of life out of the hand of Clotho’ [One of the three fates, the daughter of Zeus and Themis {"divine law"}, who spins the thread of human life.]and be henceforth free to make our species whatever we wish it to be. The battle will indeed be won. But who, precisely, will have won it?

For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please. In all ages, no doubt, nurture and instruction have, in some sense, attempted to exercise this power. But the situation to which we must look forward will be novel in two respects. In the first place, the power will be enormously increased. Hitherto the plans of educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted and indeed, when we read them — how Plato would have every infant “a bastard nursed in a bureau”, and Elyot would have the boy see no men before the age of seven and, after that, no women, and how Locke wants children to have leaky shoes and no turn for poetry — we may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still possesses. But the man-moulders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique: we shall get at last a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity in what shape they please.

The second difference is even more important. In the older systems both the kind of man the teachers wished to produce and their motives for producing him were prescribed by the Tao — a norm to which the teachers themselves were subject and from which they claimed no liberty to depart. They did not cut men to some pattern they had chosen. They handed on what they had received: they initiated the young neophyte into the mystery of humanity which over-arched him and them alike. It was but old birds teaching young birds to fly. This will be changed.

Values are now mere natural phenomena. Judgements of value are to be produced in the pupil as part of the conditioning. Whatever Tao there is will be the product, not the motive, of education. The conditioners have been emancipated from all that. It is one more part of Nature which they have conquered. The ultimate springs of human action are no longer, for them, something given. They have surrendered — like electricity: it is the function of the Conditioners to control, not to obey them. They know how to produce conscience and decide what kind of conscience they will produce. They themselves are outside, above. For we are assuming the last stage of Man’s struggle with Nature. The final victory has been won. Human nature has been conquered — and, of course, has conquered, in whatever sense those words may now bear.

The Conditioners, then, are to choose what kind of artificial Tao they will, for their own good reasons, produce in the Human race. They are the motivators, the creators of motives. But how are they going to be motivated themselves?

For a time, perhaps, by survivals, within their own minds, of the old `natural’ Tao. Thus at first they may look upon themselves as servants and guardians of humanity and conceive that they have a `duty’ to do it `good’. But it is only by confusion that they can remain in this state. They recognize the concept of duty as the result of certain processes which they can now control. Their victory has consisted precisely in emerging from the state in which they were acted upon by those processes to the state in which they use them as tools. One of the things they now have to decide is whether they will, or will not, so condition the rest of us that we can go on having the old idea of duty and the old reactions to it. How can duty help them to decide that? Duty itself is up for trial: it cannot also be the judge. And `good’ fares no better. They know quite well how to produce a dozen different conceptions of good in us. The question is which, if any, they should produce. No conception of good can help them to decide. It is absurd to fix on one of the things they are comparing and make it the standard of comparison.

To some it will appear that I am inventing a factitious difficulty for my Conditioners. Other, more simple-minded, critics may ask, `Why should you suppose they will be such bad men?’ But I am not supposing them to be bad men. They are, rather, not men (in the old sense) at all. They are, if you like, men who have sacrificed their own share in traditional humanity in order to devote themselves to the task of deciding what `Humanity’ shall henceforth mean.

`Good’ and `bad’, applied to them, are words without content: for it is from them that the content of these words is henceforward to be derived. Nor is their difficulty factitious, “We might suppose that it was possible to say `After all, most of us want more or less the same things — food and drink and sexual intercourse, amusement, art, science, and the longest possible life for individuals and for the species.

Let them simply say, This is what we happen to like, and go on to condition men in the way most likely to produce it. Where’s the trouble?’ But this will not answer. In the first place, it is false that we all really like the same things. But even if we did, what motive is to impel the Conditioners to scorn delights and live laborious days in order that we, and posterity, may have what we like? Their duty?

But that is only the Tao, which they may decide to impose on us, but which cannot be valid for them. If they accept it, then they are no longer the makers of conscience but still its subjects, and their final conquest over Nature has not really happened. The preservation of the species? But why should the species be preserved? One of the questions before them is whether this feeling for posterity (they know well how it is produced) shall be continued or not. However far they go back, or down, they can find no ground to stand on. Every motive they try to act on becomes at once petitio. It is not that they are bad men. They are not men at all. Stepping outside the Tao, they have stepped into the void. Nor are their subjects necessarily unhappy men. They are not men at all: they are artifacts. Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man.

Posted in C. S. Lewis, Science And Religion | Tagged Man's conquest of Nature, the Conditioners, the power of Man to make himself, the Tao | Leave a Comment »

A History of Water — Karl W. Giberson

April 18, 2012

And God said, “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so. God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.
And God said, “Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.
Genesis 1: 6-10

The Long And Winding Stream
The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities. If they are not there, science cannot create them.
Rachel Carson

Water gets even more interesting when we look at the history of how it got to the earth. The story begins with the big bang, the cosmic fireball we met earlier.

Popular views of the big bang picture all the matter in the universe exploding outward like something blowing up in an action movie. This original matter then combined into the cosmic structures we find in the universe today. This picture is way too simple.

The big bang produced no matter. Only unimaginably high energies emerged from that mysterious and transcendent event. Picture the energy released as an atomic bomb explodes; now multiply this many times over. These energies were so high that matter simply could not exist. Of course, there was no such thing as matter in the universe then, so this statement is a bit odd.

A universe with no matter in it would remain quite uninteresting, but fortunately the universe was born with a set of remarkable physical laws. One of the most basic of those laws was discovered by Albert Einstein in 1905: E=MC².

This law is the most well-known equation in all of science. Most people don’t know any equations at all, but if they do know one, it is E=MC². It has graced the covers of magazines, T-shirts and posters. It inspired the atomic bomb, nuclear reactors and dreams of unlimited free energy from seawater. And most important, it was the door through which matter entered our universe.

As the early universe expanded, it cooled, following the same laws of physics running your refrigerator. Cooling is simply the name we give to a decrease in the energy content of a region of space, whether it is your freezer, a Canadian winter or the entire universe. Any quantity of energy will have to decrease in temperature if it spreads out to fill a larger volume. This is why opening your door in the winter cools your house — some of the heat energy flows out the door, futilely trying to warm up the front yard.

As the early universe expanded and cooled it reached critical temperatures where interesting things happened, like when water cools and freezes. If you were swim‑ming under water that was about to freeze — hopefully in a wetsuit to keep you from also freezing — you would see ice crystals suddenly appearing, seemingly out of nowhere. Small bits of water would suddenly be transformed into slivers of ice. Liquid would have become solid. This is what water does as it cools. In the same way, as the early universe cooled, matter popped into existence.

Matter first appeared in two forms — the familiar electrons, with negative electrical charges, and the less familiar quarks with electrical charges of 2/3 and –1/3. Quarks are odd particles conceived in the 1960s to explain the peculiar behavior of other particles. One of their many odd properties is that — like teenagers at the mall — they are never found alone. As soon as they appear, they immediately combine with each other. But they don’t just combine — they form specific particles that have total electrical charges of either 1 or 0.

The most familiar examples of particles with these charges are the proton and neutron, respectively, but there are others. One curious result of this rule of combination is that we never encounter particles with fractional charges, even though we know that both protons and neutrons are composed of particles with fractional charges. In the early days, before this odd rule was understood, heroic efforts were mounted to find a fractionally charged quark hanging out by itself, but none were discovered. Eventually the theory came to include a rule precluding lone-ranger quarks.

After the quarks combine in the early universe, the newly minted matter consists of protons, neutrons and electrons buzzing about in a chaotic but steadily cooling mix. The particles move at great speeds but gradually slow down as the universe expands and cools. Positively charged protons attract negatively charged electrons. As soon as the speeds get low enough — which occurs at a specific temperature — the electron drops into an orbit about a proton, like a child leaping onto a spinning merry-go-round when it slows down enough. The neutrons occasionally bang into protons and stick there, forming the combination still found today in the nucleus of a hydrogen atom. The universe is now full of hydrogen atoms, with a few helium atoms leavening the mixture.

All the particles in the universe are now electrically neutral atoms — their negatively charged electrons• balance their positively charged protons. The powerful electrical forces of attraction and repulsion no longer dominate, and the much weaker gravitational force takes over. The brand new hydrogen atoms float freely about but gravity gathers them ever so slowly together. Clouds of hydrogen gradually form, growing ever larger, and as they get larger they pull with more gravitational force on other atoms. Eventually much of the hydrogen is collected into huge steadily growing clouds that surpass the size of the moon, then the earth, then a large planet like Jupiter. As the clouds get larger they become more compressed, their gravity growing ever stronger.

Nothing limits how strong gravity can become. Eventually another threshold is crossed and the hydrogen atoms become so densely compacted they actually fuse together in a nuclear reaction. This fusion ignites the gigantic balls of hydrogen and, like a slow-motion fireworks display, great spheres of hydrogen turn into stars. Unfortunately, there are no life forms in the universe to witness this extraordinary display, especially since this turns out be a critical step in preparing the universe for life. But amazingly the images of these fireworks end up traveling for billions of years across the universe and are eventually observed, long after the events have faded into history.

The gravity within these newly born stars crushes the hydrogen nuclei, fusing them into helium nuclei and giving off great quantities of light and heat. The process begins to fill the blanks on the periodic table of the elements. Two hydrogens make helium. Add one more and we have lithium. Two helium make beryllium. Add another and we have carbon. Other combinations make nitrogen, oxygen, neon, sodium and on down the periodic table.

At this point the universe is billions of years old and still without an isolated drop of water anywhere. No stars have planets orbiting them, and no solid surfaces exist anywhere on which one could stand. The raw materials out of which planets and people will eventually be constructed are buried deep inside brightly shining stars, and if this were where it ended, there would be nobody to lament our brightly glowing but failed and stillborn universe. But there are more chapters to the story, as you might have anticipated, based on the simple fact that you exist.

Going Out With A Bang
Amazed, and as if astonished and stupefied, I stood still, gazing for a certain length of time with my eyes fixed intently upon it and noticing that same star placed close to the stars which antiquity attributed to Cassiopeia. When I had satisfied myself that no star of that kind had ever shone forth before, I was led into such perplexity by the unbelievability of the thing that I began to doubt the faith of my own eyes.
Tycho Brahe

Large stars near the end of their lives regularly explode as a matter of course. With the force of a billion atomic bombs they strew their contents over unimaginably vast regions of space. It is, of course, a once-in-a-lifetime event for the star — a literal going out with a bang. And even though recorded history is just a few thousand years long — and stars live for billions of years — we have some examples of such explosions that were noted by careful observers.

In A.D. 1054 what is now the Crab Nebula exploded in a flash of light bright enough to be seen in daylight for weeks. Observers in Korea, China, Japan, North America and the Middle East all recorded the supernova, as it is now called, although Europeans did not. It seems that Europeans, convinced that the heavens were perfect and unchanging, managed to delude themselves into not seeing this new star, which must surely have been quite visible.

The great Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe witnessed another supernova in 1572. Like his predecessors, he could not believe that such a dramatic change in the heavens was possible, but, apparently unlike his predecessors, he had enough confidence in his observations to know that he was seeing something remarkable. Brahe’s protege, Johannes Kepler, witnessed another supernova in 1604, and then there were no more visible from earth until 1987, when a star exploded in a nearby galaxy known as the Large Magellanic Cloud.

A supernova explosion fills a massive region of space with the elements created inside the star; the powerful explosion, though, follows known laws of physics as it distributes its contents about the universe. A vast cloud of chemically enriched material, trillions of miles in diameter, results from the event — an event absolutely critical for enabling life.

The grand cloud that results from the supernova resembles the original cloud out of which the star formed in the first place, with one important difference — it contains a substantial roster of different materials, and not just hydrogen and helium. This time around gravity has more to work with, beginning again to gather the material in the huge cloud back into balls. The largest chunk at the center becomes another star — one that starts out with heavier elements, in addition to hydrogen. It is the ultimate recycling project, but unlike recycling on earth, the atoms getting recycled remain in mint condition, no matter how many times they are used.

Some of the smaller balls end up orbiting about the second-generation star. These smaller balls contain many different atoms, and some of them have a curious molecular combination of hydrogen and oxygen. In most parts of the universe these molecules are in the form of a solid. In the others they are a gas. But on balls that are exactly the right distance from the central star, the molecules are liquid, an all-purpose, seemingly magical liquid called water.

Water is found in several places in our solar system. Hydrogen is, of course, the most common element in the universe, and while oxygen is less common it is readily available to combine with hydrogen and form water. Water in the form of ice is a major component in comets and can be found in trace quantities in the atmosphere of Venus, under the surface of Mars and possibly even on some of Jupiter’s moons.

(We have to keep in mind, however, that more than 99 percent of the mass of the solar system is in the sun, so the distribution of elements elsewhere is almost irrelevant from the perspective of the solar system as a whole. The earth has a lot of water, but the earth is a tiny, insignificant speck compared to the sun. And because the water tends to cover so much of the surface, it is easy to overestimate the total amount. Astronomers are not sure exactly where the water on the earth came from. Constructing the early history of our solar system is an enormous challenge.)

From a purely scientific point of view, water is a molecule like any other — and there are lots of molecules. The laws of physics and chemistry describe its behavior, and there are no deep mysteries embedded in its familiar structure. But the laws of physics and chemistry conspire to make water unusual in ways that are critically important for life. Most peculiarly, water expands rather than contracts when it freezes. This makes ice lighter than water, so it floats. Floating ice insulates the water beneath it from the cold temperatures of winter.

Absent this layer of insulation bodies of water all over the earth would freeze solid. If ice were heavier than water, the layer of ice that formed on the top would sink to the bottom and another layer would freeze on top and sink until the entire body of water was a solid piece of ice. This would kill almost every life form in the water.

Water is also an effective solvent. Waste products from our bodies dissolve readily in water and can then easily be expelled. But wait — as they say on television — there is more. Water is also a remarkable coolant capable of absorbing heat and carrying it away from our bodies in the form of sweat. And water stores heat in our bodies, helping keep us warm in cold weather. Magical.

The Gathering Of The Waters
If anyone gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones because he is my disciple, I tell you the truth, he will certainly not lose his reward.
MATTHEW 10:42

The creation story in Genesis records that God gathered the waters. In the King James Version that I read as a child it says, “God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.” In ways that the original readers of Genesis could never have imagined, the gathering of the waters was a cosmic process that took billions of years and involved all the laws of physics and chemistry. The water that we take for granted that covers so much of our planet and makes up so much of our bodies was forged in the nuclear furnace of a star that exploded in the suburbs of the Milky Way galaxy billions of years ago.

That water now cycles endlessly through the life process here on earth — cooling, cleansing and nurturing us. It irrigates our crops, nourishes our livestock, cleans our clothes and gets turned into snow at ski resorts. In those parts of the world where it is plentiful, clean and fresh, we take it for granted and play with it. In Quebec City they construct a hotel out of ice every winter to attract tourists and invite hardy souls to hold their weddings there, wearing parkas and snow boots. We think nothing of using thousands of gallons so our lawns will be green rather than brown in the heat of summer. Water is like air — plentiful and useful.

In parts of the world where fresh water is rare, its value is more apparent. There is a school in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, where children used to walk a quarter mile during their breaks to get a drink of water. I used to walk to the hallway to get a drink when I was in school. World Vision, one of many organizations helping with water problems around the world, installed a well near the school that the children now use to get water. On school days a group of laughing, happy children can be seen working the oversized pump that takes several of them to manage. The water that emerges from its modest faucet is welcomed in ways that few North Americans can appreciate.

For those schoolchildren the water is simply a welcome part of their diet and lifestyle now. Some of the children that stay in school and go on to university will eventually discover that the precious fluid summoned from beneath the earth by a few children cranking on a lever was created billions of years ago, deep in the heart of a star, via processes of unimaginable subtlety. Those that have learned to worship God will no doubt marvel and give thanks.

Water exists because the universe has a set of laws that guide its steady development from the big bang into the present. If we suppose that water and the life it enables are of no consequence, then we can dismiss these laws as irrelevant. On the other hand, if we believe that God is the Creator of life and that life has a purpose, then these laws take on a new character. If God is the Creator, then these laws exist because God created them. And these laws work because God upholds them from moment to moment. Viewed by these lights, the origin of water and life are creation events, intentionally enabled by the Creator of the universe.

Posted in Science And Religion | Tagged A supernova explosion, E=MC2, quarks, the Big Bang, The Gathering Of The Waters, water and life | Leave a Comment »

Living On A Goldilocks Planet – Karl W. Giberson

April 17, 2012

A mere 20 light-years away in the constellation Libra, red dwarf star Gliese 581 has received much scrutiny by astronomers in recent years. Earthbound telescopes had detected the signatures of multiple planets orbiting the cool sun, two at least close to the system's habitable zone -- the region where an Earth-like planet can have liquid water on its surface. Now a team headed by Steven Vogt (UCO Lick), and Paul Butler (DTM Carnagie Inst.) has announced the detection of another planet, this one squarely in the system's habitable zone. Based on 11 years of data, their work offers a very compelling case for the first potentially habitable planet found around a very nearby star. Shown in this artist's illustration of the inner part of the exoplanetary system, the planet is designated Gliese 581g, but Vogt's more personal name is Zarmina's World, after his wife. The best fit to the data indicates the planet has a circular 37 day orbit, an orbital radius of only 0.15 AU, and a mass 3.1 times the Earth's. Modeling includes estimates of a planet radius of 1.5, and gravity at the planet's surface of 1.1 to 1.7 in Earth units. Finding a habitable planet so close by suggests there are many others in our Milky Way galaxy.

God is infinite, so His universe must be too. Thus is the excellence of God magnified and the greatness of His kingdom made manifest; He is glorified not in one, but in countless suns; not in a single earth, a single world, but in a thousand thousand, I say in an infinity of worlds.
Giordano Bruno, 1582

Giordano Bruno (1548 – February 17, 1600), (Latin: Iordanus Brunus Nolanus) was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician and astronomer. His cosmological theories went beyond the Copernican model in proposing that the Sun was essentially a star, and moreover, that the universe contained an infinite number of inhabited worlds populated by other intelligent beings.

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About twenty light years — 120 trillion miles — from earth, in the constellation Libra, a planet named Gliese 581g orbits a star resembling our sun. It’s the fourth planet out from the star, which can only be seen from earth with a telescope. Not far from the middle of its solar system, comfortably situated in what astronomers call the “Goldilocks Zone,” the planet is not too hot and not too cold, but “just right,” like the porridge in the fairy tale. Its gravity is also not too strong and not too weak, so it could have a stable atmosphere like earth. And its star is not too bright and not too dim.

Gliese 581g orbits about its sun in the middle of what astronomers call the habitable zone. Five hundred other planets have been discovered to date outside our solar system, and this is the first one that might be habitable. It is also nearby — at least by astronomical standards — being located in our galactic neighborhood. A huge spaceship traveling over the lifetime of many generations of astronauts could conceivably get there, although the expense would be so great as to essentially render the project impossible.

Astronomers have waxed eloquent about Gliese 581g. One of the discovers called it “Zarmina’s World,” after his wife, convinced that such a “beautiful planet” deserves a more interesting name than Gliese 581g. A Penn State astronomer, enthused at the prospects of extraterrestrial life, says Zarmina’s World is the “first one I’m truly excited about.” After decades, of finding uninhabitable sterile orbs, this discovery has finally provided a license to think seriously — or at least scientifically — about the prospects that we are not alone in the universe.

The hypothetical citizens on Zarmina’s World have already been embraced by the Catholic Church as “children of God.” [This curious fact was left unfootnoted by Giberson and a Google Search didn’t reveal his source for the statement. Unless of course “official Vatican astronomers” double as the Magisterium…Ah well, makes for good reading by the uneducated secularists in our midst.]An official Vatican astronomer, Jesuit priest Jose Gabriel Funes, finds nothing surprising in the prospects of extraterrestrial life: “Just as there is a multiplicity of creatures on Earth, so there could be other beings created God.” Another Vatican astronomer-priest assures us that the Zarminians would have souls, and says he would be happy to baptize them, they asked.

Theologically conservative Protestant Ken Ham, head of the creationist organization Answers in Genesis, disagrees. He claims that Vatican astronomers’ offers to baptize the Zarminians shows that they “can’t truly understand the gospel.,, “The Bible,” says Ham, “makes clear that Adam’s sin affected the whole universe. This means that a aliens would also be affected by Adam’s sin, but they can’t have salvation…. [T]o suggest that aliens could respond to the gospel is just totally wrong.”

All this fussing and fretting about aliens might lead one to believe that some sort of signal had been received — an unmistakably intelligent message like what Jodie Foster’s character, astronomer Ellie Artoway, deciphered in the move Contact. The great distance to the planet rules out the possibility of actual alien Zarminians being among us, but a mere twenty light years is no barrier to radio transmission. If the Zarminians started twenty years ago broadcasting messages to earth, or even generically in all directions, we would be receiving them by now. Radio waves have, in fact, been emanating from earth in all directions for almost a century and could be detected by any extraterrestrial civilization with the appropriate technology. But we are receiving no radio messages from 581g or any other planet in the universe. So why all the excitement about the Zarminians?

Hope Springs Eternal
Our Moon exists for us on the earth, not for the other globes. Those four little moons exist for Jupiter, not for us…. From this line of reason we deduce with the highest degree of probability that Jupiter is inhabited.
Johannes Kepler

Zarmina’s World, as near as we can tell, is not like the earth. Astronomers have not “beamed down” on a planet with breathable air, familiar gravity and comfortable temperatures, as Captain Kirk and the crew of the Starship Enterprise were constantly doing on Star Trek. We now know that the vast majority of planets are nothing like those convenient Hollywood fantasies.

Zarmina’s World is three times the mass of the earth but only slightly larger, so gravity would be much stronger there, due to the greatly increased density. Upon being beamed onto that surface Captain Kirk would find himself weighing over 500 pounds, posing challenges for his trademark brawls with the local aliens. In fact, he would have trouble even standing upright, seriously compromising the charismatic persona that always seemed so appealing to the local alien females.

Zarmina’s World is much closer to its star than our earth is to the sun-14 million miles compared to 93 million for the earth. Its “year” is just 37 days long. It rotates so slowly that one side almost always faces the sun, creating temperatures as hot as 160 degrees — beyond even the most dreadful spots on the surface of the earth. The dark side is like the Canadian winters I enjoyed as a boy: -25°F (that’s below zero!). In the literal twilight zone between the unbearable heat and the Canadian cold would be some pleasant temperatures, where creatures like us could certainly make ourselves at home. Zarminians, if they exist, would have to move every so often as the planet slowly turned, to remain in the temperate zone where water could easily be maintained in liquid form.

The hopeful, even confident, speculations that there might be life on Zarmina’s World reveal just how eager astronomers — and many other members of our species — are to discover that we are not the only life in this big universe. Vogt, co-discoverer of the planet, and the earthling Zarmina’s husband — Mr. Zarmina — believes that “chances for life on this planet are 100 percent.” Vogt’s speculation, alas, is one part science and ninety-nine parts wishful thinking: Zarmina’s World has some surface area between 32°F and 212°F (0°-100° C). So, in the event that water exists in those regions — which we don’t know — it would be liquid. And water is essential for life. Therefore, there could be life on Zarmina’s World — which is more than you can say for the hundreds of other planets that have been discovered outside our solar system.

We don’t know if Zarmina’s World actually has any water, but the chances are reasonable based on what we know about water in the universe in general. Whether that water has contributed to the formation of life is an entirely different question. What these speculations about life in Zarminian waters remind us is how critically important and unusual our water supply is here on the earth — a cosmic quirk that we take for granted. There is an inextricable link between liquid water and life, both here on the earth and anywhere else in the universe we hope life might exist.

Water, Water, Everywhere — Or Not
And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm, in the heart of the furnace roar; And he wore a smile you could see a mile, and he said: “Please close that door. Its fine in here, but I greatly fear you’ll let in the cold and storm — Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it’s the first time I’ve been warm.
Robert Service, The Cremation Of Sam Mcgee

Almost three-fourths of the surface of the earth is covered with water, and virtually all of the world’s cities are on a body of water. Most people live near rivers, lakes and oceans. And water even makes up 60 percent of the human body, a fact readily apparent when one is sweating in the hot sun or desperately thirsty.

Water, in many parts of the world, seems almost magically available. It pours from our taps on demand, falls from the sky, bubbles up in springs, cascades down the sides of mountains and over cliffs. We swim in it, bathe in it, run it through hoses to water our lawns or entertain our children. We make ice from it to put in our drinks. We skate on it. Even beavers use it freely and recklessly, creating gigantic ponds in which to raise their families. In those many parts of the world blessed with an abundance of water, we take it for granted.

In the larger universe, however, water is rare. In some ways the universe seems so inhospitable to liquid water that one might infer that water is not welcome.

For starters, the temperatures don’t cooperate. All but an insignificant fraction of the volume of space is essentially empty. The volume taken up by stars, planets, moons, comets and other bodies where water might possibly be found is quite insignificant. And all this empty space is cold — really cold.

Growing up in Canada I learned a lot about cold. In the midst of winter, during my teen years, I arose before dawn to deliver my village’s only daily newspaper, the Telegraph Journal. The thermometer outside our kitchen window was a stark and skinny messenger framed against the darkness, feebly illuminated by light from inside the house. The mercury on many mornings all but vanished into the little ball at the bottom of the thermometer, with temperatures reading -40°F (Canada had not yet gone metric). The weather report on the radio would warn that additional chilling from the wind had reduced that temperature even further, sometimes to more than -60°F. Dressed warmly by my thoroughly Canadian mother and with one of her hand-knit woolen scarves about my mouth, I would head out into the pitch-black frigid morning to deliver the news to the good citizens of the little village of Bath, New Brunswick. I would return an hour later, an icicle several inches long hanging from the scarf in front of my mouth, where my breath had condensed and frozen in the cold air.

A decade later I found myself studying at Rice University in Houston, Texas, where thermometers had no need for negative numbers. I arrived in the middle of August and was greeted by temperatures that routinely exceeded 100 degrees, a dreadful situation made even worse by high humidity and requiring the continuous use of air conditioners. In between the extremes of New Brunswick and Texas lie the narrow temperatures that humans enjoy — 85 degrees at the beach, 72 in our offices, 65 on a pleasant evening as we turn in for the night.

The temperature ranges experienced by humans seem extreme but that is simply our limited and parochial view. Those cold temperatures that greeted me as I headed out on frosty Canadian mornings are positively balmy compared to the average temperature of the universe, which is more than 400 degrees cooler. If you took a space voyage to another star system, the temperature outside your window for most of the long journey would be -454°F. A cold Canadian winter would be a welcome relief from such unimaginable cold. On the other hand, the temperature on the stars runs as high as 70,000 degrees, an inferno capable of melting just about anything. You would be incinerated just by getting too close, never mind actually making physical contact.

‘The temperature range where humans feel comfortable is thus extremely narrow compared to the universe as a whole. And even the larger range where humans can exist the habitable zone — is very narrow.

Water seems even more remarkable when we note that only 5 percent of the total matter in the universe is the ordinary familiar stuff made up of atoms and molecules. The other 95 percent consists of largely unknown stuff called, for lack of better terms, dark matter and dark energy. All the elements on the chemists’ periodic table, all the vast collection of atoms and molecules that comprise the earth, the sun and the other planets, all the stars in the Milky Way galaxy — all this matter is less than 5 percent of the total stuff in the universe. And this small percentage is itself composed almost entirely of hydrogen, with water making up but a small fraction. Water thus comprises much less than 1 percent of the universe. Given that water accounts for two-thirds of the matter in our bodies, we can see that we are most unusual from a purely chemical point of view, not to mention our more remarkable characteristics.

Posted in Science And Religion | Tagged Gliese 581g, the "Goldilocks Zone", water, Zarmina's World | Leave a Comment »

Paying Attention To The Sky

Archive for the ‘Catholicism For Atheists’ Category

The Many Splendored Blobs of Neurocentrism — Matthew Hutson

God, Gods, and Fairies — David Bentley Hart

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Faith of the Fatherless – Meredith Rice

God the Creator 2 –Benedict XVI

More On Divine Hiddeness — Daniel Howard-Snyder and Paul K. Moser

Reading Selections On Divine Hiddenness by Daniel Howard-Snyder and Paul K. Moser

The Ineffable Mystery of God – Fr. Robert Barron

The Abolition of Man Part One – C.S. Lewis

A History of Water — Karl W. Giberson

Living On A Goldilocks Planet – Karl W. Giberson

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