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The Loss Of Religion – Roger Scruton

December 21, 2011

Beneath the loggias of the relics Bernini created huge niches which hold four colossal statues, almost 10 m. high, which are associated with the relics. In the first pier on the right is the statue of St. Longinus, the soldier who pierced the side of Jesus, from which "blood and water" flowed. It was carved by Bernini in 1643 from four blocks of marble.

In our civilization, religion is the force that has enabled us to bear our losses and so to face them as truly ours. The loss of religion makes real loss difficult to bear; hence people begin to flee from loss, to make light of it, or to expel from themselves the feelings that make it inevitable. They do not do this in the way of the Upanishads, which exhort us to an immense spiritual labor, whereby we free ourselves from the weight of Dharma and slowly ascend to the blessed state of Brahma. The path of renunciation presupposes, after all, that there is something to renounce.

Modern people pursue not penitence but pleasure, in the hope of achieving a condition in which renunciation is pointless since there is nothing to renounce. Renunciation of love is possible only when you have learned to love. This is why we see emerging a kind of contagious hardness of heart, an assumption on every side that there is no tragedy, no grief, no mourning, for there is nothing to mourn. There is neither love nor happiness — only fun. For us, one might be tempted to suggest, the loss of religion is the loss of loss.

Except that the loss need not occur. This is the lesson that I draw from my own experience, and that has caused me to revisit the Christianity of my youth. I was brought up in the England of the fifties, in which it was generally assumed that, with the exception of the Jewish minority, you were either Nonconformist or Church of England. On official documents that required you to state your religion you wrote `C of E’ regardless. And you could be confident that God was an Englishman, who had a quiet, dignified, low-key way of visiting the country each weekend while being careful never to outstay his welcome.

When Eliot addressed that God — the very God of the Anglican communion — with the cri de coeur of Ash Wednesday and the solemn psalmody of Four Quartets, we were shocked and also moved. Maybe, beneath those formal robes, there beat a real and living heart and one that cared for us! This possibility had not occurred to us before.

In the England of today God is a foreigner, an illegal immigrant, with aggressive manners and a violent way of intruding into every gathering, even in the middle of the working week. The Muslims in our midst do not share our impious attitude to absent generations. They come to us from the demographic infernos of North Africa and Pakistan, like Aeneas from the burning ruins of Troy, each with an old man on his shoulders, a child at his feet and his hands full of strange gods. They are manifestly in the business of social, as well as biological, reproduction. They show us what we really stand to lose, if we hold nothing sacred: namely, the future.

In the presence of this new religious spirit the voice of the English churches becomes ever weaker, ever more shy of doctrine, ever more conciliatory and ill at ease. The idea that the British should be re-evangelized would be dismissed by most of the official clergy as an act of aggression, even a racist affront to our Muslim minorities. The Church is not there to propagate the Christian faith, but to forgive those who reject it.

Now of course it is one of the great strengths of Christianity that it makes forgiveness a duty and freedom of conscience a religious ideal. But Christians recognize the duty of forgiveness because they seek forgiveness too. Those brought up in our post-religious society do not seek forgiveness, since they are by and large free from the belief that they need it. This does not mean they are happy. But it does mean that they put pleasure before commitment, and can neglect their duties without being crippled by guilt. Since religion is the balm for guilt, those brought up without religion seem, on the surface, to lose the need for it.

But only on the surface. You don’t have to be a believer to be conscious of a great religious deficit in our society. We saw its effect during the strange canonization of Princess Diana, when vast crowds of people congregated in places vaguely associated with the Princess’s name, to deposit wreaths, messages and teddy bears. The very same people whose pitiless prurience had caused Diana’s death now sought absolution from her ghost. Here was beauty, royalty, distinction punished for its fault, to become a sacrificial offering and therefore a saintly intercessor before the mysteries that govern the world.

Forget the gruesome kitsch and liturgical vagueness — necessary results, in any case, of the decline of organized religion. We were in the presence of a primordial yearning for the sacred, one reaching back to the very earliest dream-pictures of mankind and recorded in a thousand myths and rituals.

Many religions focus on such episodes of sacrificial offering, often, as in Christianity and Shi`ism, through a re-enacted martyrdom, in a collective ritual that purges the believer of his sins. So widespread is the phenomenon that Rene Girard has seen it as the fundamental secret of religion. In Girard’s view, the suffering of a victim is necessary if the accumulated violence of society is to be released and abjured. That is why we are moved by the story of Christ’s Passion. It is we ourselves who nailed this man to the Cross, and the compassion that we feel for him is also a purging of our guilt. This guilt arises from the experience of society; it is the residue of the aggressions through which we compete for our thrills. In our post-religious society these aggressions are no longer sublimated through acts of humility and worship. Hence the sadistic forms of entertainment that dominate our media in Europe. But, if we accept Girard’s view – and there is surely a lot to be said for it — we must also accept that Generation X is just as subject to the burden of religious guilt as the rest of us.

And indeed, as soon as we look at religion in that detached, anthropological way, we begin to discern its subterranean presence in European society. Although doctrine has no place in our public life, a fear of heresy is beginning to grip the countries of Europe — not heresy as defined by the Christian churches, but heresy as defined by a form of post-Christian political correctness. A remarkable system of semi-official labels has emerged to prevent the expression of dangerous points of view. And a point of view is identified as dangerous if it belongs to the old Judaeo-Christian culture, thereby reminding us of what we were when we actually believed something.

Those who confess to their Christianity are `Christian fundamentalists’ or even part of the `Christian fundamentalist right’, and therefore a recognized threat to free opinion; those who express concern over national identity are `far-right extremists’ — a label attached to Holland’s Pim Fortuyn, despite his impeccable left-wing credentials; those who question whether it is right to advocate homosexuality to schoolchildren are `homophobic’; defenders of the family are `right-wing authoritarians’, while a teacher who defends chastity rather than free contraception as the best response to teenage pregnancy, is not just `out of touch’ but `offensive’ to his pupils. To criticize popular culture, television or contemporary rock music, even to press for the teaching of grammatical English in English schools — all these are proofs of `elitism’, whereby a person disqualifies himself from the right to speak. It is as though our society is seeking to define itself as a religious community, whose very lack of faith has become a kind of orthodoxy.

There is nothing new in this. Jacobinism and Communism both began life as anti-religious movements, and both bear the marks of the Enlightenment. But they recruited people in just the way that religions recruit them, offering inviolable orthodoxies, mysterious rituals, witch-hunts and persecutions. And that is why they were successful. Living as we do in an age without certainties, we like to believe that we can finally dispense with the religious instinct and coexist in open dialogue with people who dissent from the premises on which we build our lives. But we too need orthodoxies, we too hunger for rituals, and we too are apt to confront the critic and the dissenter with persecution rather than argument.

We even have gods of a kind, flitting below the surface of our passions. You can glimpse Gaia, the earth goddess, in the crazier rhetoric of the environmentalists; Fox and Deer are totemic spirits for the defenders of animal rights, whose religion was shaped by the kitsch of Walt Disney; the human genome has a mystical standing in the eyes of many medical scientists. We have cults like football, sacrificial offerings like Princess Diana and improvised saints like Linda McCartney.

On the other hand, we have abandoned those aspects of religion that provide genuine guidance in a time of spiritual need. The instinctive awe and respect towards our own being that the Romans called pietas has more or less vanished from the public life of Europe. And nowhere is this more clearly noticeable than in the officially Roman Catholic countries of France and Italy. Now that the Church has ceased to be a public voice in those countries, the culture is being colonized by secular ways of thinking.

Discussions of embryo research, cloning, abortion and euthanasia — subjects that go to the heart of the religious conception of our destiny — proceed in once-Catholic Europe as though nothing were at stake beyond the expansion of human choices. Little now remains of the old Christian idea that life, its genesis and its terminus are sacred things, to be meddled with at our peril. The piety and humility that it was once natural to feel before the fact of creation have given way to a pleasure-seeking disregard for absent generations. The people of Europe are living as though the dead and the unborn had no say in their decisions.

The Romans warned against impiety not only because it would bring down judgment from heaven but because it was a repudiation of a fundamental human duty — the duty to ancestors and progeny. The ills of modern civilization have their origins in the loss of piety, and we should take a lesson from the Romans, who had such a clear perception of why piety matters. The important thing, in the ancient world, was not theological belief, which was hidden behind the plethora of gods, but the cult. Religion was first of all a practice, a habit of worship, a humble setting aside of self and a deep genuflection in the presence of the divine — as Apuleius, in The Golden Ass, finally bows down before Isis, and is reborn to the world. Faith may or may not step into the ensuing silence. But it is the silence itself that matters: the silence of the penitent soul. Regaining religion is a matter of preparation, a quiet waiting for grace.

Posted in Catholicism For Atheists, Roger Scruton | Tagged The Loss Of Religion, The Muslims in Europe | Leave a Comment »

Reading Selections from The God of the Mathematicians by David P. Goldman

May 13, 2011

Gödel and Einstein, 1954

Some of the religious beliefs that guided Kurt Gödel’s revolutionary ideas.

David P. Goldman is a senior editor at First Things. The following are reading selections from a piece that appeared last August

The Human Mind Cannot Be Reduced To A Machine
Kurt Gödel was a believer — or, at least, a knower — whose engagement with God included a reworking of the ontological proof of God’s existence. Born in 1906, Gödel was arguably the great mathematician of his time. Certainly no twentieth-century thinker did more to show that the human mind cannot be reduced to a machine. At twenty-five he ruined the positivist hope of making mathematics into a self-contained formal system with his incompleteness theorems, implying, as he noted, that machines never will be able to think, and computer algorithms never will replace intuition. To Gödel this implies that we cannot give a credible account of reality without God. But Gödel’s God is not the well-behaved deity of the old natural theology, or the happy harmonizer of the intelligent-design subculture. Gödel’s God hides his countenance and can be glimpsed only in paradox and intuition. God is not an abstraction but “can act as a person,” as Gödel once wrote, confronting those who seek him with paradox, uplifting man through glorious insights while guarding his infinitude from human grasp. Gödel’s investigations in number theory and general relativity suggest a similar theological result: that God cannot be reduced to a mere principle of the natural world. Gödel may have seen himself as a successor to Leibniz, whose critique of Spinoza’s atheism set a precedent for much of Gödel’s work.

The Difficulties In Ascertaining His Theological Intent
When we try to ascertain the theological intent underlying Gödel’s mathematical investigations, though, several difficulties arise.The first is Gödel’s reticence. “Although he did not go to church,” his wife Adele told the logician Hao Wang shortly after Gödel’s death in 1978, he “was religious and read the Bible in bed every Sunday morning.” But fear of ridicule and professional isolation made him reluctant to talk about his faith. “Ninety percent of contemporary philosophers see their principal task to be that of beating religion out of men’s heads,” he wrote to his mother in 1961.

A two-page draft of an ontological proof for God’s existence forms the whole of Gödel’s explicitly theological output. He showed his paper only to close friends, but word got out, and the clever young things on campus giggled behind his back. His biographer Rebecca Goldstein, who was a graduate student at Princeton during Gödel’s last years, snickers that she and her peers “found it hilarious” that Gödel “deluded himself into believing that God’s existence could be proved a priori.” The ambient hostility drove some of his best students out of the profession and may have worsened the eating disorder that hastened his death.

Another difficulty is that Gödel’s work extends across several demanding fields, each with a high threshold of preparation.

An Irrationalist Who Proved That Nothing Can Be Proved?
There is also the problem that scavengers have been at work on his legacy for decades. The postmodernists have tried to claim him as an irrationalist who proved that nothing can be proved — just the opposite of what he intended. Rebecca Goldstein rightly debunks the postmodern claim, but her biography of the great mathematician makes no mention of his religious faith except to ridicule it, ignoring key facets of his work with theological implications.

Nonetheless, the ontological proof provides a point of entry into Gödel’s work, linking intuitive theology with his mathematical investigation. The proof, in one form or another, has been known at least since the eleventh century, when St. Anselm of Canterbury paused to ask: If God is greater than we possibly can conceive, then how could God not exist?

In the best-known version of the argument, Anselm noted:

1. The definition of the word God is “that than which nothing greater can be conceived.”
2. God exists in the understanding, since we understand the word with that definition.
3. To exist in reality and in the understanding is greater than to exist in the understanding alone.
4. Therefore, God must exist in reality.

Versions of the argument, with key twists and turns, have been introduced in Western philosophy through the centuries by thinkers from Descartes and Leibniz down to the twentieth-century American philosopher Charles Hartshorne. And, from the monk Gaunilo in Anselm’s own time down through St. Thomas Aquinas, Immanuel Kant, and Bertrand Russell, these same centuries have seen philosophers who vehemently reject any form of the argument.

In all versions there exists a tension among premises. If God is “that than which nothing greater can be conceived,” how can we understand God? Whatever we might conceive, God must be greater. If this is so, then how can God exist in the understanding?

Barth’s Reading Of Anselm
In his 1930 book on Anselm, Karl Barth offers a theological rather than a philosophical answer: We understand God by calling on him by his proper name, “that which is greater than anything that can be conceived.” “It does not say,” writes Barth, “that God is, nor what he is, but rather, in the form of a prohibition that man can understand, who he is.” In effect, Barth says that “that than which nothing greater can be conceived” is something of an alternative appellation for YHWH, God’s personal name in the Bible.

In Barth’s reading, Anselm’s statement is not only proof, but also prayer. By asking us to attempt to conceive of that than which nothing greater can be conceived, Anselm restrains our impulse to worship, instead, a projection of ourselves. This intent, Barth adds, makes irrelevant the usual critique of Anselm. Thomas Aquinas objects that simply thinking something exists does not necessarily mean that it does exist. Kant jokes that the essence of a hundred imaginary thalers is the same as the essence of a hundred real thalers in my pocket, but their spending power is quite different.

Such refutations do not apply, Barth insists, for Anselm’s exercise presumes faith. But that move, in turn, raises up a theological problem. As the Jewish philosopher Michael Wyschogrod has noted, “If the ontological proof is successful, then God would be one of the things that have being. It would then be the case that the Empire State Building is, and the Eiffel Tower is, and God is.” Being would be an umbrella concept, covering God and many other things — which would make being our ruling concept. Naming God as “that which is greater than anything that can be conceived,” or “TTWNGCBC” rather than YHWH, gives us not a more refined faith but only a more refined atheism.

Spinoza And Leibniz
And that is just how the secular Enlightenment proceeded. Atheism in its modern form began with a revision of the ontological argument at the outset of Spinoza’s Ethics. It could not have been otherwise, for to make sense of a world without God, atheism first had to usurp the attributes of God and assign them to nature. Something “than which nothing greater can be conceived” within the natural world gives us Spinoza’s “infinite substance.”

Spinoza begins his Ethics with an ontological argument: “God, or substance, consisting of infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality, necessarily exists” because “if this be denied, conceive, if possible, that God does not exist: then his essence does not involve existence. But this is absurd. Therefore God necessarily exists.” In Spinoza’s words, “By God, I mean a being absolutely infinite — that is, a substance consisting in infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality.” God is reduced to the “substance” of nature.

But the ontological argument turned out to be a cuckoo’s egg in the nest of atheism. Spinoza abducts Anselm’s TTWNGCBC from heaven and locks him up inside the natural world. The trouble is that once inside nature, TTWNGCBC consumes everything else and becomes all that there is in nature. If God is inside nature, then there can be nothing in nature outside of God. Spinoza concludes: “As God is a being absolutely infinite . . . and he necessarily exists; if any substance besides God were granted it would have to be explained by some attribute of God, and thus two substances with the same attribute would exist, which is absurd; therefore, besides God no substance can be granted, or consequently, be conceived.” If we actually can conceive of TTWNGCBC within the natural world, then we can conceive of nothing else at all.

Hegel quipped that the cause of Spinoza’s death “was consumption, from which he had long been a sufferer; this was in harmony with his system of philosophy, according to which all particularity and individuality pass away in the one substance.” Spinoza’s younger contemporary Leibniz pounced on this vulnerability, turning Spinoza’s system inside out: Instead of an “infinite substance,” Leibniz postulated a “pre-established harmony” controlling an infinite number of independent monads. Leibniz added a purely theistic premise: By the law of sufficient reason, he argued, God does not do anything superfluous and therefore does not create anything twice.

In a purely formal sense, the systems of Spinoza and Leibniz seem to be mirror images: Spinoza’s single substance cannot explain individuality, and Leibniz’ individual monads cannot communicate with each other; “pre-established harmony” has the same function as “infinite self-generating substance.”

Undergraduate courses misleadingly lump the two together under the rubric of “rationalism.” But there is a fundamental difference: By inverting Spinoza’s metaphysics, Leibniz makes room for God to return from his Babylonian captivity in natura naturans, [vocab: Natura naturans is a Latin term coined during the Middle Ages, meaning "Nature naturing", or more loosely, "nature doing what nature does".] to lordship over being. “Sufficient reason” is a theistic premise, to be sure, but it explains the world as we perceive it, rather than the single monistic glob implied by Spinoza.

If Spinoza tries to capture the ontological proof for atheism, Leibniz sets out to restore it to theism, suitably corrected to answer the objections of Thomas Aquinas. If we suppose that God possesses all positive properties, Leibniz argues, then necessary existence is a positive property and must pertain to God. If we agree that it is logically possible for a perfect being to exist because “all perfections are compatible with each other,” then we must conclude that a being possessing all positive properties must exist: “There is, or can be understood, the subject of all perfections, or a most perfect being.”

Gödel And Leibniz
Kurt Gödel was a lifelong student of Leibniz; during his four decades in Princeton at the Institute for Advanced Study he checked out every book on Leibniz in the university library. In an answer to a questionnaire found in his posthumous papers, he wrote, “My belief is theistic, not pantheistic, following Leibniz rather than Spinoza.” He reworked Leibniz’ version of the ontological proof in 1941, using the notation of modern mathematical logic (although he showed it to no one until 1970). I doubt Gödel believed he had found the ultimate and irrefutable proof of the existence of God. His deep interest in the ontological proof, rather, was one facet of his commitment to defend Leibniz’ theism against the new Spinozans of mathematics and physics.

Gödel’s proof is written in logical notation. Like its Leibnizian model it turns on the notion of “necessary existence,” although it contains additional intermediate steps. Gödel begins by asserting that “positive” properties may be distinguished from properties in general. “Positive means positive in the moral aesthetic sense (independently of the accidental structure of the world),” he explains. The property that conjoins all positive properties also must be a positive property; and because “necessary existence” is a positive property, this property-of-all-positive-properties must include necessary existence; Gödel defines it as the “God-like property.” God therefore possesses all positive properties, and, because non-positive properties are the negation of positive properties, God cannot have any non-positive properties. Moreover, because “necessary existence” is one of these positive properties, God must exist in all possible worlds.

The objection of circularity might be raised because “positive properties” may be called positive because they are Godlike to begin with. It is not clear either that all positive properties are logically compatible, as in the paradox of divine omniscience and omnipotence.

Objections To Gödel’s Argument
Other objections have been raised to Gödel’s argument. It seems to imply, for example, that every positive property also must exist, for all positive properties belong to the God whom the argument proves to exist. The modern philosopher Jonathan Sobel argues that we are thus driven back to Spinoza’s problem, in which God is in everything and everything is in God, because we cannot distinguish between necessary existence and contingent existence. (Dean Koons has suggested a possible if problematic repair of Gödel’s proof in which only the cosmos itself is considered to have necessary existence.)

Gödel’s proof is best understood as an exercise within his broader Leibnizian program. If we attempt to speak in purely natural terms of “that than which greater cannot be conceived,” we cannot help but refer to the mathematical concept of infinity. That is just how Spinoza thought of his infinite substance, and to embed the infinite, an attribute of God, within natura naturans was a pantheist credo. Leibniz, the co-inventor of calculus, knew that an infinite number of infinitely small quantities can have a finite sum, and his infinity of infinitesimals, therefore, does not upset the finite character of created nature. But already, with Leibniz’ refutation of Spinoza, mathematics was emerging as the laboratory for ontological investigation. Whether that should be the case is a source of perpetual debate, but it is hard to imagine how it could have happened otherwise in the seventeenth century.

To treat mathematical objects as the proper subject of ontological investigation requires a grand assumption, to be sure, that, in Gödel’s words, “mathematical objects exist independently of our constructions.” Gödel worked for years, for example, on an unpublished essay refuting Rudolf Carnap’s view that mathematics was no more than a syntax to manipulate man-made symbols.

The meta-mathematical debate continues to this day, and how it will be resolved has not yet come clear. Nonetheless, it is perhaps telling that Leibniz, the philosopher who offered the most logical rejoinder to Spinoza, was able to do so because, coincidentally, he was the mathematician who formulated the modern concept of infinitesimals.

Leibniz’ infinitesimals led to another Gödel discovery with deep theological implications. In the nineteenth century, mathematicians learned that the calculus discovered by Leibniz and Newton could not integrate or differentiate some classes of functions. The calculus began with the insight that an infinite series whose terms grew infinitely small might have a positive sum. But some functions resisted the calculus. These include “spiky” functions in which changes in sign, for example, occurred in arbitrarily small intervals. From the study of such functions came the disturbing insight that some infinities are “bigger,” that is, more densely packed with numbers, than other infinities. And this inspired one of the nineteenth century’s greatest mathematicians to attempt to treat the different orders of infinity as if they were just another kind of number — the “transfinite numbers” — and thus to domesticate infinity.

Georg Cantor
Georg Cantor was the discoverer of these transfinite numbers in the early 1870s, when he showed that some infinite collections were “larger” than others. There is a one-to-one correspondence between the integers and the rational numbers, such that the rational numbers may be thought of as a “countable” infinity. But there is no such correspondence between the integers and the real numbers, conceived of as a continuum line.

That was an insight of historic importance. But it did not satisfy Cantor, who believed that he had solved the problem that had eluded Spinoza — namely, to preserve the differentiation of individual objects within natura naturans. By bringing God’s infinitude into the natural world, Spinoza was left with nothing but his single substance. At least in the realm of numbers, Cantor believed, infinity itself could be ordered with a new series of “transfinite numbers,” each representing a different order of infinity. He envisioned a new kind of cardinal numbers denoting infinite sets of numbers.

The infinitesimal monads of Leibniz thus would no longer require God and the principle of sufficient reason to differentiate themselves because infinite series of numbers would arrange themselves naturally into Cantor’s transfinite ordering. Cantor’s theology was confused — he also hoped to reconcile his views with those of Thomas Aquinas and the Church Fathers — but his belief that he had solved not only a mathematical problem but also an ontological mystery is well documented. A draft in his letter book states, “I have examined all objections that have ever been made against the infinite numbers, and above all because I have followed its roots, so to speak, to the first infallible cause of all created things.”

Cantor asserted that the infinity of the integers and rational numbers was the first transfinite number, and he named it “Aleph-zero.” What, then, was the second transfinite number, or “Aleph-one”? He had proven that the infinity of the continuum of real numbers was “denser” than that of the integers; unlike that of the rational numbers, it could not be counted. He assumed that if the first transfinite number contained the integers, the second transfinite number would contain the continuum, and that no other transfinite number could be discovered between these two.

That is Cantor’s “continuum hypothesis,” which attempts to identify a first and second transfinite cardinal number. From there, he believed, all the possible orders of infinity could be counted, the same way the integers count groups of one, two, three, and so forth. He not only recognized, but was driven by, the ontological implications of this assertion: If the continuum hypothesis turned out to be true, Spinoza would be vindicated because God’s infinity could be packaged into a neat series of numbers. Cantor spent the last thirty-five years of his life in a vain effort to prove this. He died in 1918 in a mental hospital.

Gödel And Cantor
It was Gödel and, later, Paul Cohen who demonstrated respectively that Cantor’s continuum hypothesis could be neither proved nor disproved within existing set theory. Indeed, Cantor’s hypothesis remains maddeningly undecidable. Intuition, added Gödel, strongly suggests that Cantor’s hypothesis is wrong: Among the infinite number of transfinite numbers, there are an infinite number of cardinalities between the integers and the points on the continuum line, and mathematical investigation of the infinite will remain infinitely fruitful. God’s infinitude remains safe in heaven. Mathematicians have proven that an infinite number of transfinite numbers exist but cannot tell what they are or in what order they should be arranged.

Gödel noted drily that this represents a problem for philosophy and epistemology rather than for mathematics, which can continue its investigations without ever exhausting the subject. Gödel’s result shows that not even in terms of numbers, the simplest objects we can specify, can natura naturans explain the individuality that we observe. The parallel between Gödel’s attack on the continuum hypothesis and Leibniz’ critique of Spinoza is very strong, and it is remarkable that both hinged on foundational insights into number theory.

Whether or not we believe, as did Gödel, in Leibniz’ God, we cannot construct an ontology that makes God dispensable. Secularists can dismiss this as a mere exercise within predefined rules of the game of mathematical logic, but that is sour grapes, for it was the secular side that hoped to substitute logic for God in the first place. Gödel’s critique of the continuum hypothesis has the same implication as his incompleteness theorems: Mathematics never will create the sort of closed system that sorts reality into neat boxes.

Gödel’s Critique Of General Relativity
There is yet a third place where Kurt Gödel’s mathematical work has theological purchase: in Einstein’s failure to reconcile the deterministic world of general relativity with the probabilistic world of quantum mechanics. Einstein famously declared his belief in “Spinoza’s God”: a god, that is, who is indistinguishable from nature and who reveals himself through natural harmonies. Einstein, we might say, was a “strong Platonist” who actually believed that if one discovers the eternal forms to which natural phenomena correspond, all the world’s mystery will yield itself up to science.

The often noted problem is that the intuitively intelligible world Einstein created with the deterministic equations of general relativity jars with the probabilistic world of modern quantum mechanics. Einstein and Gödel were close friends, but they disagreed profoundly on religious and philosophical matters. As Gödel told Hao Wang, “Einstein’s religion [was] more abstract, like Spinoza and Indian philosophy. Spinoza’s god is less than a person; mine is more than a person; because God can play the role of a person.”

Gödel’s personal God is under no obligation to behave in a predictable orderly fashion, and Gödel produced what may be the most damaging critique of general relativity. In a Festschrift for Einstein’s seventieth birthday in 1949, Gödel demonstrated the possibility of a special case in which, as Palle Yourgrau described the result, “the large-scale geometry of the world is so warped that there exist space-time curves that bend back on themselves so far that they close; that is, they return to their starting point.” This means that “a highly accelerated spaceship journey along such a closed path, or world line, could only be described as time travel.” In fact, “Gödel worked out the length and time for the journey, as well as the exact speed and fuel requirements.”

Gödel, of course, did not actually believe in time travel, but he understood his paper to undermine the Einsteinian worldview from within. Yourgrau observes, “The very fact that this inconceivably fast spaceship would return its passengers to the past demonstrated, by Gödel’s lights, that time itself — hence speed and motion — is but an illusion.” Stephen Hawking so abhorred the implications of Gödel’s demonstration that he proposed an ad hoc bylaw for general relativity, the “chronology protection conjecture,” simply to exclude it. Like Einstein, Hawking then believed that a grand theory of the universe would allow humankind to see into the “mind of God.” In recent years, though, Hawking has come closer to Gödel’s point of view, going so far as to conjecture that a sort of Gödelian “incompleteness principle” might exist in physics as well as in mathematics.

Summary
Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, critique of the continuum hypothesis, and examination of time in general relativity all have theological implications. After reviewing them, is it appropriate for us to speak of a theology? Gödel evidently thought so. In 1961 he made notes for a lecture in which he ranked the contending worldviews in contemporary science “according to the degree and the manner of their affinity to or, respectively, turning away from metaphysics (or religion).” “Skepticism, materialism, and positivism stand on one side; spiritualism, idealism, and theology on the other.” He dismisses “idealism, e.g., in its pantheistic form,” as “a weakened form of theology in the proper sense.”

“One would, for example, say that apriorism belongs in principle on the right and empiricism on the left side.” But, he adds, “On the other hand, however, there are also such mixed forms as an empiristically grounded theology.” Gödel was at least a weak Platonist — he considered mathematical objects to be real and his research therefore to be empirical. He thought his theology thus to be an empirical one, founded on man’s experience of the infinite fecundity of the creator’s mind. That is why Gödel’s religious thinking is so rich and also why it is so challenging: One must actually follow the work to make sense of the conclusions, an unusual challenge for theologians, and one they have shirked for too long.

Posted in Science And Religion | Tagged Gödel’s God, Leibniz, Spinoza’s atheism | Leave a Comment »

Reading Selections from Can We Know What We Know?

May 2, 2011

Chichen Itza's Pyramid of Kukulcan marks the Summer Solstice. Although its the light of the afternoon sun on the Spring Equinox that causes the shadowy appearance of a huge serpent descending from the sky on the Summer Solstice there is also some precise shadow play going on, as the South and West sides of the pyramid stay in total darkness between 7 and 7:30 AM. This pyramid is a stunning combination of function, religion, philosophy, mathematics and geometry.

A review of Mathematics and Religion Our Languages of Sign and Symbol by David P. Goldman who is senior editor of First Things. The book purports to be a study of the historical development of mathematical language and its influence on the evolution of metaphysical and theological languages. Leach traces three historical moments of change in this evolution: the introduction of the deductive method in Greece, the use of mathematics as a language of science in modern times, and the formalization of mathematical languages in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As he unfolds this history, Leach notes the differences and interrelations between the two languages of science and religion. Until now there has been little reflection on these similarities and differences, or about how both languages can complement and enrich each other.

Dr. Goldman takes issue with a lot of Leach’s conclusions. Some reviews contain far more interesting stuff in their refutation of the book at hand than their introduction of the book itself. I captured some of Dr. Goldman’s asides here rather than his issues with Fr. Leach:

Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems
Fr. Javier Leach, S.J., informs us that mathematics is pluralistic, and so are religion and philosophy. All three fields are ways of not arriving at the truth, and thus are like each other. And since the twentieth-century revolution in logic, in particular Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems, proves that we cannot know the full truth, we must content ourselves with whatever partial truth seems best to us. Leach is Catholic (“Jesus is my companion in the journey between the Absolute and nothing”), but he insists that others are just as entitled to their own truths.

Mainstream research has long abandoned the conceit of the 1960s that Gödel showed that we cannot know anything for certain. On the contrary, Gödel — a deeply religious man — set out to demonstrate we cannot prove with formal logic everything that we know to be true in mathematics. The nub of his Incompleteness Theorems is that there are things that we can define to be true in a mathematical system, but which we cannot capture in a formal proof. If we concede that mathematical objects are in some way real, Gödel requires us to concede as well the existence of some higher source for the intuition which sees a mathematical truth that transcends formal logic.

Leach willfully interprets Gödel’s results to mean quite the opposite. “One other way to think of incompleteness,” he declares, “is the fact [sic] that the human mind is creating many of our mathematical systems ad hoc. Mathematics is not outside the mind, as Platonism and the classical tradition [in mathematics] have held.” That is not a “fact” at all, but an opinion, and one he shares with the positivists and the New Atheists.

Debating “Real” Existence
Philosophers have debated whether ideas in our mind have a “real” existence simply because we can define them mentally, or whether we must first instantiate such ideas in order to establish their reality, since fifth-century b.c. Athens. But classical mathematics did not simply rake over Plato’s ancient arguments. The problem is more difficult, and more disconcerting….

What Gödel sought to show is that there are truths that exist in our mind that we cannot “prove.” What Aristotle called an “actual infinity” may be imagined, but cannot be comprehended empirically, for we never can finish counting it. The great nineteenth-century mathematician George Cantor introduced infinite collections, or sets. But Cantor, as Leach observers, failed to convince a minority of Aristotelian realists in the mathematics profession, the Constructivists, who “argue that the actual infinite cannot be constructed by finite means in a finite process.”

Physical reality thrust the problem of the infinite upon the mathematicians. Aquinas dismissed Plato with the quip that knowing the essence of the mythical Phoenix does not mean that such a bird actually exists. Mathematics, though, presents problems of a different kind: objects that exist in the mind but cannot possibly derive from the senses, and yet have a manifest relationship to the real world.

That is why we distinguish “strong Platonism” (the claim that essence implies existence) from “weak Platonism,” that is, the far more restricted claim that certain kinds of ideas are real, notably well-ordered mathematical concepts. The ancients and the Scholastics fought about abstractions. After the fifteenth century, though, metaphysics was compelled to respond to physics.

Aristotle’s “Actual Infinity”
The “actual infinite” that Aristotle eschewed forced itself upon the philosophers. Curiously, the first intimation of the actual infinite appeared in music. During the 1430s, musicians began tempering musical intervals, using string lengths that corresponded to irrational numbers. Because the results were audibly harmonious, Nicholas of Cusa asserted that irrational numbers therefore must be real, after the fashion of Augustine’s “numbers in the mind of God” that were “too simple” for us to grasp directly.

This provoked a crisis in mathematics as well as metaphysics. Aristotle knew that an irrational number could be represented as an infinite series of rational numbers, and that the irrationals therefore implied the existence of an actual infinite, which of course could not be grasped by the senses. He rejected the concept, and under his influence, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century mathematicians and music theorists agonized over whether to admit the irrationals into musical tuning.

The discovery of the calculus in the second half of the seventeenth century, though, introduced a new kind of “real” object in the mind that was not derived from the senses. The calculus gives us the exact sum of an infinite number of infinitesimal quantities, which by definition are imperceptible. We cannot perceive vanishingly small quantities, yet in the calculus their sum is a definite number. The physics that issued from the work of Newton and Leibniz transformed the world. That made it more difficult (if not quite impossible) to dismiss infinitesimals as the mere imaginings of mathematicians. At issue was not a mythical bird, but rather the precise calculation of ballistic trajectories and planetary orbits. Leibniz embraced the “actual infinite” that Aristotle abhorred.

Leibniz
Leibniz is Gödel’s most important influence. He proposed an alternative to the pantheistic ontology of his older contemporary Baruch Spinoza, whose “single self-generating substance” erased all individuation in the universe. If God is nature, there can be nothing in nature except God, and individual objects cannot exist. Leibniz removed God from nature and re-situated Him outside it, where He creates an endless multiplicity of infinitesimal monads that comprise a coherent world through a pre-established harmony.

Leibniz did not “prove” the existence of an actual infinite in the form of infinitesimals, for there is no proof that mathematical objects “exist” in the same way that thistles and marmalade exist… There still are dissenters among mathematicians. But the revolution in mathematical physics and physics made for a different sort of debate than had occurred among the ancients or the Schoolmen. Plato’s theory of species, with its borrowings (for example in Timaeus) from Pythagorean mysticism, was speculation, not physics. The infinitesimals, by contrast, were not simply a new sort of Platonic number mysticism, but rather a working principle that transformed the world.

The new mathematics of the sixteenth century roused the philosophers to explain the existence of objects in the mind that were not in the senses. There is nothing entirely new under the sun, to be sure: Descartes’ “innate ideas” looked back to Augustine’s theory of Divine Illumination. Immanuel Kant, by contrast, proposed an inborn (“a priori”) capacity for transcendental reason — reason that transcends sense perception — in order to do what Augustine proposed without the inconvenient presence of God.

Philosophy And The Birth Of Modern Science
The philosophy that attended the first stirrings of modern science came from Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant, all of whom shared the premise that some faculty of the mind must transcend the senses.That is why Kant triumphed over the Scholastics and empiricists: His followers quickly learned how to use his theory to explain Newtonian natural science. The neo-Kantian school that dominated Continental academic philosophy from the last quarter of the nineteenth century through the first quarter of the twentieth hung its hat on the problem of infinitesimals. “The infinitesimal magnitude, thought of as reality, becomes the idealistic lever of all knowledge of nature,” wrote its founder Hermann Cohen in 1883.

And it got stranger still. Leibniz’ troublesome infinitesimals turned out to be only one among an infinity of “actual infinities.” Georg Cantor’s theory of infinite sets responded to anomalies in the calculus. By the early-nineteenth century mathematicians had learned that “spiky” functions, for example functions that shift sign at arbitrarily small intervals, cannot be analyzed with Leibniz’ infinitesimals. Somehow the infinitely small intervals that the calculus integrates into a finite sum were not quite “small” enough to capture such functions. There was the infinitely small, and the infinitely smaller still — and that is what Cantor proved: Different orders, or densities, of infinity do in fact exist. That is why infinite sets became so important — not because mathematicians sat around starting at the ceiling and thinking of the infinite. Cantor named the different infinities “transfinite numbers.”

Aristotelian Realism
Since then mathematicians have proved that there exists an infinite number of transfinite numbers. Thanks to the work of Gödel and Paul Cohen on the independence of the Continuum Hypothesis, we know that we cannot know how dense they are, or in what order they should be arranged — not at least within any existing framework of mathematical logic. Whereas Aquinas had argued that there are things we can imagine, but do not exist, Gödel proved, rather, that there are things that exist that we cannot imagine. The latter seems rather more interesting.

What Gödel could not prove was the “reality” of mathematical objects; there is no decisive refutation of the view that mathematics is merely a man-made syntax. “Aristotelian realism,” the insistence that nothing is real that we cannot instantiate empirically, cannot be disproven. But this opinion (not “fact” as Leach tendentiously states) places us on a slippery slope. As Leach shows, it can be construed to imply that all truths are equally valid. And that is just what Leach concludes: “Metaphysical and religious formulations seem true to us when they offer an intuitive veracity and coherence in the context of the personal values that a group of people share.”

One is entitled, to be sure, to believe that truth is to be found neither in religion nor mathematics. Both realms exist, though, because our antecedents believed they were pursuing the truth. That much is a matter of fact, and to it is wrong to suppress it in an account of the relationship of religion and mathematics.

Posted in Reflections, Science And Religion | Tagged David P. Goldman, Gödel | Leave a Comment »

Reconciling Science and Religion by Britton Johnston

April 6, 2011

William Blake, The Body of Abel Found by Adam and Eve

Another reading selection from the article titled “How Girard’s Mimetic Theory Can Help Us Understand the Relationship Between Science and Religion” by Britton Johnston, a Presbyterian minister who lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The complete article is at Metanexus: The Online Forum on Religion and Science.

It might be helpful here to give an example or two of how mimetic theory can reconcile the claims of science and religion. Let’s explore the issue of creation, and the question of the existence of spiritual beings.

The question of Creation is fundamentally a question of the distinction between culture and cosmos. Archaic cultures, being unable to distinguish the two, use material realities to express cultural ones. The creation story in the first chapter of Genesis, is not a text about physics or biology, but about cultural origins — one that stands in contrast to pagan creation myths.

For example, in the ancient Babylonian creation myth known as the Enuma Elish, the warrior God Marduk forms the world from the dead body of his mother Tiamat after he has slain her. He hews her body into two pieces, and with the upper half of her body he forms the heavens, and with the lower half he forms the earth. For the ancient Babylonians, this is the story of the foundation of the world.

From the point of view of Girard’s mimetic theory, this myth is a disguised account of an actual murder (or, more precisely, of a series of ritual murders). The murder would have taken place as Babylonian culture was forming for the first time. There was a mimetic crisis, which was resolved only when one or more people were killed by the mob, bringing order out of the social madness.

This originary murder rescued these Proto Babylonians from a state of acute mass psychosis. As they emerged from the psychosis, it appeared to them as though the cosmos itself had been re-created. They described the event as best they could, given that they were emerging from a condition of total delusion; so what amounted in actuality to a lynching, came to be described as a divine event, a divine drama playing itself out in the heavens. Historically, there were probably more than one of these collective murders. This lynching was reproduced in sacrificial rituals. These ritual sacrifices came to be understood as re-enactments of the original divine event, enriching and refining the narrative into a creation myth.

All creation myths seem on the surface to be about the creation of the material world; but they are really about the origin of human culture. It would be natural to ask at this point, why cultures don’t just describe their origin literally and factually? Why don’t the Babylonians simply say, “we were in a crisis and we saved ourselves by lynching a member of our community.” Why the elaborate narrative? Why the obfuscation?

There are two reasons for this: first of all, as I indicated above, these events are generated on the boundary between psychotic delusion and sane reality; therefore, myths have a dreamlike, semi-delusional quality. Secondly, the culture has a stake in disguising the original murder. Every culture knows that murder must not be spoken of approvingly, because murder invites revenge and revenge escalates, plunging the whole society into bloody madness. Therefore the society must pretend that it is innocent of murder. Yet still the original murder must be remembered, because it brought the benefits of social order. Myths have this dreamlike quality because they are the result of a double-bind: they must simultaneously recall and hide the crime they trace.

The creation story in the first chapter of Genesis is not a literal description of the origin of species or of the origin of the planets; rather, this is a story which uses the concept of species and the image of the planets as symbols to describe something which was much more pressing to the ancient Israelites than the matter of scientific explanations. This is a story of the origins of human culture and consciousness. In this way it is not unlike the creation myth of the Babylonians. Yet it also differs sharply from the Babylonian story (and virtually every other creation story from ancient culture): it contains no sign of a murder!

In fact, scholarship has revealed that the first chapter of Genesis was composed while the people of Judea were in exile in Babylon. The first chapter of Genesis was the Jews’ response to what their captors insisted was the origin of the world. In their refusal to go along with the idea of a founding murder, the Jews became the first culture in the history of the world to claim that violence is not essential to the cosmic order.

There is no murder in the first chapter of Genesis. There is only a powerful God working hard to establish a place for everything and to put everything in its place. The language of creation in the first chapter of Genesis is the language of establishing boundaries. There’s a boundary between the light and the dark. There is a boundary between the dry land and the sea, there is a boundary between the different kinds of plants and animals. The story has the quality of the storekeeper taking care of his inventory, or of a housekeeper picking up clutter. Instead of a warrior God carrying out the sacred execution, the Jews revealed to history a worker God who establishes order not by killing somebody, but by cleaning house.

The principle of creation in the beginning of the Bible is the principle of difference. In the first chapter of Genesis, we do not have a description of a creatio ex nihilo, but an account of the imposition of difference on the primordial waters of chaos. The day is separated from the night; boundaries are set between the sea and dry land; the plants and animals are separated out, “each according to its kind.” The original creation was the ordering of chaos through the establishment of differences.

Why is this important? According to Girard’s mimetic theory, the primordial waters are an archetypical image representing the pre-cultural mimetic sacrificial crisis. The (pre)human community is in a state of crisis brought about by the imitation of everyone by everyone. This has produced a confusing maelstrom of desire, rivalry, hostility and violence within which life is impossible. Like a swimmer tossed in the chaos of a riptide, everyone finds it impossible to distinguish up from down, left from right, light from dark.

According to Girard, the first strategy to resolve this crisis is human sacrifice. But in the Hebrew scriptures, humanity begins to move away from human sacrifice. In order to defer the sacrificial crisis, the Hebrew strategy is to put in place a strong system of sacred difference.

Difference defers or delays the sacrifice by blocking the development of mimetic rivalry. It works because when boundaries are drawn between people, they tend to imitate each other less strongly. We are most strongly mimetic toward those whom we perceive to be like us. If we see the other as different, we are less likely to want what they want, return their insults, and so forth. Thus we are less likely to come into mimetic rivalry with people who are different (violence against those who are of a different ethnicity or who are differently abled is not technically mimetic rivalry; it is a kind of scapegoating that discharges mimetic rivalry and unifies the community).

Consider an ice cube tray, the kind that has the removable dividers. If you fill it with water without the dividers and try to carry it across the kitchen, chances are that the water will spill. But if you insert the dividers into the water before carrying it, you find it is much easier to carry it without spilling. Differences in culture are analogous to this. They prevent the free flow of mimetic rivalry from building up to a chaotic loss of control.

The first chapter of Genesis is a projection onto nature of precisely this concern for difference. As a subtle anti-Babylonian polemic, Genesis 1 substitutes a structure of differences for the violent structures built on human sacrifice. This is an enormous advance in human consciousness. The fact that it retains the archaic confusion between culture and cosmos should not be grounds to dismiss it. After all, we owe our very awareness of that difference to documents such as this.

Science still has some things to learn from Genesis 1. The theory of natural selection itself depends on the notion of the selfish competition for survival as essentially a “creative principle of the cosmos.” Numerous critics have pointed out that this idea is far too much like the Malthusianism and “social Darwinism” (which is misnamed – Darwin borrowed it from Malthus and Spencer and applied it to biology) to be entirely independent of cultural bias. Even in our scientific endeavors, we may be too susceptible to the tendency to project our culture onto nature. Perhaps science should stay a little closer to the insights of the Bible after all.

A Theory of Spirits
Mimetic theory opens up a new category for describing reality that hasn’t been available until now: “mimetic forces.” Such forces are recognized by every culture, but they are not described, merely named – spirits, angels, ghosts, demons, etc. These are forces with real power but that are unseen and hard to measure. Mimetic theory gives us the means to actually describe them.

A “mimetic force” exists in the relationships between people. A simple desire is a mimetic force. According to Girard, if one person makes an acquisitive gesture toward an object, another person nearby will tend to focus on the same object, with an impulse to make a similar acquisitive gesture. The original gesture, by stimulating a mimetic response in the neighbor, could be said to be a kind of “force.” The force draws people under its influence. They in turn add their own energy to the mimetic force, causing it to strengthen. One person wants the object, generating a weak mimetic force in the next person, who likewise comes to desire the object; now the mimetic force is twice as strong, so that a third person will desire the object even more readily than the first two people. The force propagates through the population, gaining power to affect individuals as each additional individual is affected.

If the desire so propagated is a desire for the well-being of others, it could be called an “angel”; on the other hand, if the mimetic force is a spirit of resentment, it will be called a “demon” – that is, after its violent denoument is done.

The definition of demons, spirits and angels as mimetic forces accounts for all the characteristics attributed to them. They are invisible, more “felt” than seen. They are personal, yet not contained within a body; they affect people to the point of taking over the human will; and they can be invoked or exorcised by ritual and prayer.

Such mimetic forces doubtless play a huge role in illness and disease. They can affect the functioning of the body and mind in profound ways. The “science” of managing such forces exists almost exclusively within religious traditions. It could be an extremely important advance in medical technology if we were to begin to explore the means by which such forces can be managed. If scientists are to learn how to do this, however, they will have to become students of religion.

Mimetic theory, if it is correct, offers a fresh and clear path for us to understand how science and religion are radically interdependent. I hope that those who read this article will be motivated to explore this new and potentially fruitful avenue of inquiry into the relationship between the two.

Posted in Science And Religion, Understanding Violence | Tagged Mimetic Theory, The Original Murder | Leave a Comment »

Reading Selections From Girard’s Mimetic Theory And The Relationship Between Science And Religion by Britton W. Johnston

April 1, 2011

René Girard

This is from an article titled “How Girard’s Mimetic Theory Can Help Us Understand the Relationship Between Science and Religion” by Britton Johnston, a Presbyterian minister who lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Rev. Johnson earned his Masters of Divinity at the McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago, class of 1990 and organized the annual meeting of the Girardian Colloquium on Violence and Religion in June, 2004. The complete article is at Metanexus: The Online Forum on Religion and Science. I add this to my little collection of Girardian articles and summaries.

Culture And Truth
The question of the relationship between science and religion, like many other leading concerns of theologians today, has to do with the relationship between culture and truth. It therefore seems appropriate to approach these theological issues anthropologically. Unfortunately, the field of Anthropology tends to be dominated by a “politically correct” suspicion of religion in general, and of theology in particular.

Fortunately, there is a new anthropological theory emerging. This new theory is congenial to theology, promising to give us powerful new concepts and tools to finally resolve these vexing theological questions. This theory is the “mimetic theory” of René Girard. It has been around for about 30 years, though it has made little progress among theologians and anthropologists until recently. What I would like to do with this essay is to introduce the basics of Girard’s theory, and to suggest how this theory might supply us with a fruitful new approach for reconciling science and religion.

Who Is René Girard
René Girard is what you might call a “literary” anthropologist — this despite the fact that his formal education was in neither literature nor anthropology. His Ph.D. is in history. His doctoral dissertation was on the subject of Franco-American relations after World War II. Although his “outsider” status might lead us to question the validity of his theories, in fact a lack of official credentials is common among those who bring revolutionary new ideas to a field of study.

Girard was born in France in 1923. He came to the United States in 1947, working on his doctoral dissertation at Indiana University. They put him to work teaching French literature, something for which he had little training beyond the fact that he was a Frenchman. In fact, he was often just barely ahead of his students, reading some of the novels for the first time, two chapters ahead of the class assignments. In the process of teaching literature, he began to notice certain patterns in the great novels, in their treatment of human desire

Deceit, Desire, and the Novel
His first book, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, was published in French (with the title Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque) in 1961, after he had become a professor at Johns Hopkins University. In that book he argues that great literature reflects awareness that human beings get their desires from one another. We are “mimetic” creatures, meaning that we internalize one another through imitation. A crucial aspect of the mimetic process is that it is the means by which we acquire our desires. Human desire therefore is not innate; rather, we “borrow” our desires from those we imitate. This brings us into conflict with those others. The person who is our model also becomes for us the greatest obstacle to getting what we want. Great literature, Girard argued, depicts its protagonists’ entanglement in these mimetic webs of desire and rivalry — but often with liberation at the moment of the hero’s death or expulsion.

Patterns Of Expulsion
Girard continued to examine the theme of expulsion, in ancient literature and primal myths. He found that every ancient myth contained traces of a pattern of expulsion. Every ancient myth, that is, except for the Bible. In 1972, he published La Violence et le Sacré, in which he argued that all religious myths are disguised accounts of actual historical events, specifically expulsions, the sacrifice of scapegoats.Even the Bible follows this same pattern, but with one important difference: the Bible is the first narrative to present the expulsion from the point of view of the scapegoat.

Girard went on to develop his mimetic theory in subsequent books, such as Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (English edition, 1987), The Scapegoat (1986), To Double Business Bound (1978), and I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (English edition 2001). In these books and others, Girard and his followers have demonstrated that his theory has amazing power to clarify issues in anthropology, theology, biblical interpretation, psychology, political science, economics, linguistics, and on and on. It is truly a “grand theory,” simple yet powerful. Such theories are not in fashion in these postmodern and multicultural times; they are in fact regarded with suspicion. So far, there have been no grand theories that have worked. So far.

A Sketch Of Mimetic Theory
The preeminent characteristic of human beings is that we imitate each other (thus the term “Mimetic Theory”). This mimesis is not mere mimicry, but an instinctive and preconscious impulse. Even our desires–especially our desires–come from the imitation of others. Because we want the same things that others want, we come into conflict over who will possess the desired object. This rivalry is in turn imitated so that it escalates into violence. The rivalry does not remain limited to the first individuals involved, but others imitate it until it spreads to the entire community, generating a mimetic crisis. Violence threatens to destroy everyone involved, unless a solution is found.

The solution that our species stumbled upon was the mechanism of sacrifice. One individual is singled out by the community as the scapegoat whose death absorbs the violence in the community, delivering the community from this threat. The community mistakenly believes that the scapegoat was at once the cause as well as the all-powerful cure for the chaos of the mimetic crisis. The pagan concept of the gods emerges from this misrecognition. The deliverance brought about by sacrificial violence is the basis for the primitive sacred. It is also the basis of archaic religion and the foundation of human culture.

Human culture extends the power of sacrifice by creating myths and idols, which remind the people of the sacred event of the sacrifice, damping down the fires of the mimetic crisis. The function of a myth is to preserve and obscure the historical event of the sacrifice. By preserving the experience of the sacrifice, a myth reduces the need for frequent repetitions of it. But it is also important that myths obscure the murderous reality of the sacrifice, because to speak openly of murder is to risk triggering a new mimetic crisis.

Human culture inhibits the development of the mimetic crisis by also putting in place taboos, laws, and other forms of sacred differentiation so that the effects of mimesis are reduced, thus slowing the development of mimetic crises.

The biblical revelation (in both the Old and the New Testaments) breaks the power of this sacred violence by revealing it for what it is, the collective murder of an innocent victim. The voices of the prophets, and especially the revelation of Christ on the cross, demythologize human culture by forcing us to acknowledge our sacred sin. Because the sacred depends upon denial, the biblical revelation renders sacred murder unworkable. The Bible brings the workings of the sacred to an end. This is why Jesus is described in the Gospel of John as “the lamb of God who takes away the sin [singular] of the world.” (John 1:29)

The loss of the sacrificial mechanism would result in our self-destruction, if some alternate form of functioning were not provided. Fortunately, the Gospel also gives us new means to avoid mimetic rivalry, supplanting the old taboo systems, by calling us to imitate Christ. When we imitate Christ (“Set your minds on things that are above” Col 3:2), we are possessed by a desire for the well-being of our neighbors, in place of the old desire to have what the neighbor wants. This process of acquiring new desires transforms humanity and leads to a new and better non-sacrificial culture.

The Difficulty of the Sacred
One of the things that are hard to get used to with this theory is the idea that the “sacred” is a bad thing. It’s not as bad as the mimetic crisis, but it is nevertheless fundamentally bloody and violent. Violence seems to inhere in the sacred object like an electrical charge. Whoever draws too near runs the risk of inciting the crowd to attack.

Girard argues that without religion human beings could not exist. The greatest threat to our existence has never been starvation or predation, but our own violence. The origin and purpose of religion is to save us from this threat.

A Clear And Simple Scientific Hypothesis For The Origin Of Culture And Religion
The advantage of Girard’s theory is that it gives us a clear and simple scientific hypothesis for the origin of culture and religion. With this as an analytical tool, we can unpack theological problems in fresh ways, when they have to do with culture and violence. Most of the really difficult theological problems can now be taken apart in a few quick steps, like an encoded message that becomes easily readable once the key for the code is discovered.

Science and Religion
According to René Girard, the sacred is inseparable from the practice of sacrifice. In fact, the word “sacrifice” literally means to “make sacred.” This is “sacrifice” in the ancient sense, meaning taking someone (a person or an animal) and ritually killing them. The sacred comes into being with the spilling of reconciling blood.

For example, belief in witches is typical of the workings of the sacred in society. In virtually every primitive culture in the world, there is a belief in witches. Whenever things seem to be going wrong, when resentments build between people, and sickness seems to be everywhere, the primitive culture will posit that a witch is at work causing problems. The community sets to work identifying the witch. When they identify someone (usually whoever has the fewest friends in the community) in such a way that everyone believes the accusation, they put the witch to death. Upon the killing of the witch, the buildup of hostility in the community is discharged, and things seem to return to normal. It seems obvious that therefore the witch indeed was the cause of the problem. This in turn reinforces the belief in witches. This scenario could never function without a fundamental misrecognition of the situation. The “plague” that the witch supposedly caused was really a mimetic crisis. The witch was only a scapegoat, blamed and punished to help the community regain its harmony.

This cycle of crisis, execution, and renewal tends to reinforce the superstitious belief in witches, because experience seems to show that it works. People feel “deep down” that it is obviously true; that the world is filled with magical powers and that witches are a grave danger to society.

Jesus as Witch
The biblical narrative deconstructs these superstitions by presenting the familiar story of the witch from the point of view of the “witch.” Jesus occupies the same cultural location as the witch; but the narrative reveals that it is the crowd that is guilty, rather than the innocent – (and forgiving!) victim. As a result of this revelation, humanity begins (dimly at first) to realize that the founding “Truth” of culture is in fact a lie.

The historical and cultural project known as modernity, building on the influence of the gospel, is designed to demolish superstitious worldviews. Modernity begins with the assumption that what is purely cultural or purely a matter of what people feel “deep down” is not sufficiently trustworthy. Modernity applies principles of truth that it considers beyond culture, i.e., what one can observe in nature or what is consistent with the principles of logical reasoning.

Modern science is the result of the discovery that there is a difference between “culture” and “cosmos.” All archaic or “primal” cultures assume that the natural world is an extension or expression of their culture. They make no distinction between “culture” and “nature.” Animistic religions believe that every rock, tree and stream has its own “spirit” with its own will and power, and that this spirit must be treated with respect, even awe. The belief in spirits comes from cultural and religious experiences. These concepts are projected onto the natural world, so that the primal culture considers them intrinsic to nature. This is a confusion between culture and nature.

The reason that primal cultures have this confusion relates to what might be termed the “mythological imperative”: the sacrifice of the victim must be remembered (for its reconciling benefits), but it must also be forgotten (so that speaking directly of collective murder doesn’t generate violence). The description of the victim’s death is forgotten, but the spiritual power of the sacrifice is remembered, because the victim is said still to be present in the rocks, trees, or streams.

Or the stars. Many cultures, especially agrarian ones, put a lot of effort into the contemplation of the stars. This is useful because observation of the movements of celestial bodies is the best means of timing the changing of the seasons. The timing of the seasons is important especially in agricultural societies as the means of assuring a good harvest; an early thaw is less likely to tempt you to plant too early, if you know how to watch for the spring equinox.

It seemed as though the stars controlled the seasons. Did they control other things as well? The product of the sacrificial altar came to be projected onto the stars. The planets and constellations were said to contain the spirits of sacred beings — gods, monsters, and the hero-priests who killed them. These figures in the sky came to be seen as guiding life in society. The culture was written in the sky by people who believed that somehow the sky was writing itself into their culture. Thus did astrology — that entertaining but pathetic superstition — come into being. This confusion of culture with cosmos is common to all archaic cultures (and to a large extent it is found in Western modernity, even Western science, as well).

The biblical revelation is the force in human history that has made humanity aware that there is a difference between cosmos and culture. It has brought about this change by revealing that the sacrificial victim is not the cause of the society’s problems. Jesus, the crucified victim of the crowd, is revealed to be innocent. It is the crowd that is guilty. As the sacrificial myth is thereby demolished, the other myths and superstitions of the culture begin to follow one by one. We realize that we can’t trust ourselves to be right about what causes the rain to fall or how the stars influence our lives. So we begin to explore ways to know things apart from the influence of culture. Science, the effort to insulate our inquiry from cultural influence, is born. The rest of modernity emerges at the same time. Modernity challenges and tests our cultural assumptions about our world. Culture is regarded with a considerable amount of suspicion. Culture and cosmos begin to separate in our thinking. As René Girard has said, “We didn’t stop burning witches because we invented science; we invented science because we stopped burning witches.”

Biblical Revelation as the Source of Science
The apparent conflict between science and faith is the result of our discovery that culture and nature are not necessarily the same. Such an endeavor as modern science would be unthinkable without the insight that our culture may be a source of falsehood. This is precisely the insight that the biblical revelation brought into the world. Without the Bible, Western science would never have been possible.

Although science is the product of biblical faith, science in turn contributes to biblical faith, by accelerating the process of demythologization. Science acts as a powerful solvent to wash away the sacred superstitions that still cling to biblical religion. Science has put an end to our belief in the power of witches’ magic, for example. This is a good thing, because it removes one of the falsehoods that distract us from the message of mercy in the Bible.

Science has confirmed the biblical insight that illness is not necessarily a punishment from God, but a condition that has nothing to do with our moral standing. By helping to lift the moral stigma of disease, science has helped us to be more faithful to the revelation of Christ who calls us to be merciful toward those who are sick.

The scientific worldview made possible the “historical-critical” reading of the Bible, which in turn has liberated our reading of scripture from all sorts of violent superstition.

But science must be careful not to be arrogant in this. The insight that culture can be wrong is a tremendous advance. It has led us to find ways to explore the truth in things that are not influenced by cultural biases and superstitions. We know that an experiment well-constructed can lead us to solid insight. But we must be careful not to conclude therefore that religion is never to be trusted. The rituals, moral standards and narratives of religion contain real wisdom that has controlled human violence for millennia.

God As A Mimetic Force
Scientists should not assume that because the term “god” cannot be separated from its cultural fabric, then the notion of a god is purely false. Mimetic theory suggests that indeed gods are very real, along with demons, spirits, and souls. But mimetic theory would describe them as mimetic forces, rather than metaphysical or supernatural beings. Science should be working on ways to describe gods scientifically, rather than dismissing the notion of a god as superstitious.

Posted in Science And Religion, Understanding Violence | Tagged Culture And Religion, Rene Girard, Science And Religion | Leave a Comment »

On Masters of Suspicion

March 29, 2011

Lorenzo Albacete

Lorenzo Albacete was born in Puerto Rico and is a physicist by training. He holds a degree in Space Science and Applied Physics as well as a Master’s degree in Sacred Theology from the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. He further holds a doctorate in Sacred Theology from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas in Rome. He has taught at the John Paul II Institute in Washington, D.C., and the St. Joseph Seminary in Yonkers, N.Y., and from 1996 to 1997 served as President of Catholic University of Puerto Rico in Ponce. He has been advisor on Hispanic Affairs to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. A convert in later life, at twenty seven he read then Joseph Ratzinger’s “Introduction to Christianity” and found himself moved from atheism to faith. He is a columnist for the Italian weekly Tempi, has written for The New Yorker, and has appeared or has been interviewed on CNN, The Charlie Rose Show, PBS, EWTN, Slate, The New Republic, and Godspy, where he is the theological advisor.

He is the author of God at the Ritz: Attraction to Infinity (Crossroad Publishing Company), a book in which as priest-physicist he talks about science, sex, politics, and religion. He begins with the common enough understanding of the existence of God (of which there are twenty some odd proofs or theories) as being that from desire. The latter argument from desire really springs from two realizations and one universal experience: For those fortunate enough to live in the infinite power of God, it is to realize that we need nothing other, that we crave nothing more, that we can let go of everything else. This is yin/yang of experiencing or realizing Augustine’s concupiscentia, or errant desire.

For Augustine, all of us have been wired for God (“you have made us for yourself”) and therefore we are satisfied with nothing less than God (“our hearts are restless until they rest in you”). Thus to become focused on something less than God (anything created, including our own lives) is therefore to place ourselves in spiritual danger and desperately to frustrate our natural will to be in harmony with God’s divine will or to know the freedom and fullness of detachment from the worldly pull of concupiscentia.

The freedom and fullness of detachment is probably no better expressed than in John of the Cross’s beautiful mantra: “To reach satisfaction in all, desire satisfaction in nothing; to come to the knowledge of all, desire the knowledge of nothing; to come to possess all, desire the possession of nothing; to arrive at being all, desire to be nothing.” This fourfold nada is not a negation but the deepest affirmation, since it is a “no” to a “no.” Desiring to possess all, desiring to be all is the nonbeing of attachment, the misery of addiction; desiring to possess nothing, desiring to be nothing is, accordingly, freedom and being. It is finally to see the world as it is, and not through the distorting lens of cupidity and egotism. It is the view from the center.
Fr. Robert Barron, The Strangest Way

Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete tells us that this longing we have for God has been part of the human heart since the beginning of time, but that it does not flourish without our work to fulfill it. He also points out that that longing has not always been nurtured. In fact quite recently we could point to an entire century (if not modernity itself) where removing the deeply embedded religious impulse from the human heart and killing off the conviction that the meaning of this life lies somewhere beyond it became man’s chief preoccupation. Nurturiing, needless to say, is the work of being Catholic. The alternative is to fall into skepticism and suspicion. He nominates Freud, Marx and Nietzsche as “Masters Of Suspicion, philosophers and thinkers who sought to unmask this inherent religious impulse as merely the expression of some profound alienation such as sexual conflict, or an economic injustice, or just plain fear.

For example, one of Freud’s most influential theories, for example, was that religion is an external projection of an unresolved psychosexual problem. Indeed, the relationship between the religious and sexual drives is obvious. Repressed sexual conflicts touch the very bases of the human experience of the world, especially relationships with other humans. All life is about survival, and given the way we are made, survival requires sexuality. You don’t have to be a Freudian to hold this.
Lorenzo Albacete, God at the Ritz: Attraction to Infinity

In fact, Albacete notes that Pope John Paul II demonstrates this in his writings:

In his experiential analysis of the creation accounts in Genesis, the pope (John Paul II) argues that human sexuality is inseparable from the human drive to develop the resources of nature. The Bible introduces the subject of gender only after “Adam” — which in the early part of the creation story does not mean the male specifically but more generally the human — is shown exercising his dominion over creation by “naming” the animals; he gives them a place in the human project of self-development.

In this experience of the relation between the self and the universe, Adam is said to be “alone.” He is incomplete. The pope calls this the experience of “original solitude.” It is not that the lonely individual Adam needs others to assist him physically or accompany him psychologically. His solitude is much deeper, much more fundamental. It is a wound in his very experience as a person, a need that must be fulfilled if the human creature is to achieve its potential.

At that moment, God moves to complete the creation of the human creature. Adam falls asleep. This sleep is not an ordinary nap with amazing consequences; it is not the anesthesia necessary for a rib-cage operation. The “sleep” is more precisely a state of stupor, an over whelming ecstasy that accompanies the experience of the power of the sacred. It is a religious experience. When the human awakens, the human creature has become a couple. “Adam” (now meaning specifically the male)) encounters the female, Eve.

Adam’s reaction confirms what has happened. It is not that a male went to sleep and awakened to find a female. If that were so, Adam would not have grasped first his equality with the woman! Surely he would have noticed the physical difference and wondered just what kind of creature she was. Instead, it is the experience of equality — or better, the experience of the equality of difference — that comes first. Adam recognizes that the different creature is “flesh of my flesh and bone of my bones.” The author of that creation account therefore did not need Freud to discover a relation between the religious and the sexual experience.
Lorenzo Albacete, God at the Ritz: Attraction to Infinity

And ditto the same with Marx:

“Neither did the author need Marx to discover a relation between religion and work, or economics. As we saw, the issue of gender emerges while the human is setting up the first economic system, the first arrangement and distribution of resources to meet human needs and desires. The woman is above all presented as the “helper” of the man in this project. The religious experience that serves as the occasion for her creation (the sleep/stupor before the sacred)) is tied to this enterprise, tied to ‘work.’”
Lorenzo Albacete, God at the Ritz: Attraction to Infinity

And ditto the same with Nietzsche:

As for Nietzsche, traces of his “discovery” can also be found in the Genesis accounts of the “beginning” of human history. Isn’t the big issue upon which everything depends the human’s approach to power? The human future is seen to depend on the “knowledge of good and evil,” and on Adam and Eve’s willingness to trust their religious experience of the Creator, an experience that contains a warning upon which life and death will depend. Adam and Eve had been ignorant about what is good and what is evil, so how did they know what God was talking about? Moreover, death is said to be a consequence of their disobedience, but when they hear God’s warning they haven’t disobeyed yet. How come they don’t ask, as Bill Cosby’s Noah does in his standup routine about Noah’s ark and the flood: “What’s good? What’s evil? What’s death?” They don’t ask because the difference between good and evil as well as the possibility for nonexistence are part of that religious experience — even if they are not consciously aware of it.

Their “innocence” has nothing to do with ignorance or with immaturity. It is not an expression of mental and psychological underdevelopment. If that were so, the serpent would be absolutely correct in his critique of creation, and humans could be free only by disobeying the Creator’s imposed limitations. It is precisely because Adam and Eve see it that way that they are compelled to follow the serpent’s advice. That is, their act follows a change in how they perceive their religious experience, in their perception of the sacred. The stupor is gone. They now see religious experience as an obstacle to the human power for self-development.

We see in Adam and Eve the potent force known as — in the words Nietzsche would use — the “will to power.” It was, then, at the very beginning of human history (instead of much later in the nineteenth century) that religion was first seen as the expression of a slave mentality that fears human power.
Lorenzo Albacete, God at the Ritz: Attraction to Infinity

As Albacete points out, the consequence of humankind’s decision to disobey the demands of the Holy was a profound alienation in those three areas of sexuality, work (economics), and power — the very alienation that we credit Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche “discovering” is, in fact all part of Genesis, lying there for all with the intelligence to discern it. So these discoveries, while not totally unfounded, they are useful in understanding our individual and collective situations. But the problem is that each of the “discoverers” made each one of them his insight for the all-embracing explanation of reality:

“All human experiences were supposed to be evaluated according to only one insight — that of Freud, Marx, or Nietzsche. As good modernists, they held that the human mind creates the only reality we can ever know. Whatever did not fit their mentally constructed theories simply did not exist. Ironically, the failure of the masters of suspicion — these theoreticians and lovers of humankind lies not in the fact that their theories embraced too much, but that they embraced too little.

Each one of these thinkers reduced the religious experience — which really includes everything, since it is the experience of the purpose and possibilities of life in its totality — to a mere projection of deep conflicts in the areas of sexuality, economics, and sociology. Instead, we should look at the religious experience as a thing in itself, as irreducible, as having a deep and meaningful reality of its own.”
Lorenzo Albacete, God at the Ritz: Attraction to Infinity

Our atheist brothers scorn the religious while not realizing its true scope and import. Sometimes the deepest and truest efforts we can make to understand our natures is to take the lessons of economics, psychology and philosophy back to scripture and finish our search there. It is, after all, the divine word. The least we can do is regard it as the last word.

Posted in Catholicism For Atheists | Tagged Lorenzo Albacete, God at the Ritz: Attraction to Infinity, Masters Of Suspicion | Leave a Comment »

Aquinas Proves Atheists Are Closer To God Than They Think

February 14, 2011

MASTER of Pratovecchio, Madonna and Child with Six Angels circa 1440s

I was zipping about the web recently and came across this little piece written back in 2007 by Brian Davies. I’ve been reading a lot of his stuff recently and preparing several pieces for posting on Paying Attention to the Sky. This is pithy and gives the atheists something to think about, which, God only knows, the poor souls need. Brian Davies is an English Dominican. He is Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, New York.

Atheists make a great fuss about how God does not exist. This claim, they think, is at odds with what those who believe in God hold. But is it? What kind of God do the atheists have in mind? And can someone who believes in God not actually feel happy to say that God does not exist?

Ordinarily, of course, we think that something either exists or does not exist. So we say that the Eiffel Tower exists while the Colossus of Rhodes does not. And if, like some, we presume that belief in God is a scientific hypothesis, or that God is a top, invisible person, a celestial consciousness (with or without a beard) living alongside the Universe in time while learning about it from on high, then, presumably, He, too, either exists or does not exist, just like you and I. But there are other, and more traditional, ways of thinking about God.

Take, for example, what we find in the writings of St Thomas Aquinas. He never thought of God as an entity seriously comparable to what we find in the Universe. He took God to be the cause of everything real and imaginable to us, the cause of all natural kinds and their members, the reason why there is something rather than nothing. Aquinas, of course, realized that when we talk of God we are forced to make use of words we have come up with to name and describe what we find in the world in which we live.

And since he took people to be higher forms of being than anything else around us, he naturally ascribed to God what we most value in ourselves — such as intelligence. But Aquinas was equally keen to emphasize that God is not a creature, not a member of the world, not a being among beings, not, in this sense, an existing thing. God, he says, “is to be thought of as existing outside the realm of existents, as a cause from which pours forth everything that exists in all its variant forms”. For Aquinas, there is a serious sense in which it is true to assert that God does not exist. He would readily have agreed with Kierkegaard’s statement: “God does not exist, he is eternal.”

Or we can put it another way. There is a sense in which Aquinas holds that only God really exists. Creatures are there, right enough, but, for Aquinas, their being is derived or dependent. All that they are and do is God’s work in them. They have no reality from themselves. Creatures are temporal, finite, and caused to exist, while God is none of these things. Aquinas puts all this by saying that God’s existing does not differ from his substance, that God, and only God, exists by nature, that God is “subsistent being” while everything else “has” being — has it as given to it. You can find a similar line of thinking coming from St Anselm of Canterbury. God, he declares, is “the being who exists in a strict and absolute sense” since with Him there is nothing temporal and nothing received.

Traditionally speaking, therefore, it makes sense to say both that God does not exist and that only God exists, which means we should be careful when it comes to what we mean when we declare ourselves atheists or not. And there is surely a further sense in which all Jews, Muslims, and Christians can be thought of as atheists. For they do not believe there are any gods. They believe there is a Creator of all things visible and invisible, not that there is a class of gods to which the Creator belongs.

The first of the Ten Commandments tells us to have no gods. It effectively tells us to be atheists, to stop being interested in extremely powerful creatures and to focus instead on the unfathomable mystery behind and within the world that we can, to some extent, fathom. God the maker of all things cannot be a part of what He brings forth. He belongs to no category. He is not a god. There are no gods.

Seems you folks were right all along. My apologies …

Posted in Apologetics, Brian Davies, Catholicism For Atheists, St. Thomas Aquinas | Tagged God And Creation, St. Thomas Aquinas | Leave a Comment »

Reading Selections: Aristotelian Metaphysics by THOMAS E. TAHKO (Ph.D., Durham University)

November 29, 2010

A close-up of Aristotle and Plato in the Raphael masterpiece shown in the previous post.

Recently I’ve been drawn into a discussion of essences and universals, so I decided to go straight to the source of these issues in this article on Aristotelian Metaphysics. Dr. Tahko explains and contrasts Aristotelian Metaphysics with modern metaphysics and science.

The Universal/Particular Distinction
Spoken sounds are symbols of affections in the soul, and written marks symbols of spoken sounds. And just as written marks are not the same for all men, neither are spoken sounds. But what these are in the first place signs of – affections of the soul – are the same for all; and what these affections are likenesses of – actual things – are also the same.
(Aristotle 1963: 16a1.)

We must not let the rather mystical sounding phrasing ‘affections of the soul’ confuse us. Quite simply, ‘affections of the soul’ are thoughts, or, if you like, propositions, whether or not they have been uttered. So, Aristotle suggests that while these propositions can be uttered in a number of ways, say in different languages, the correspondence relation from ‘affections of the soul’ to the actual things always holds between the same terms. Direct correspondence like this surely has its problems, but I think that Aristotle’s account is no less tenable than any of its modern alternatives.

It is not our task here to argue for this, nor do we need to look at all the details of Aristotle’s account, but we ought to keep this background in mind when we examine the Aristotelian method. Aristotle seems to be foremost interested in the organization of actual things, and what he presents in De Interpretatione is the method by which we discuss them and some restrictions that apply, for example, to the introduction of modalities.

Actual things, according to Aristotle, include particulars and universals. It is clear that in Aristotle’s ontology, particulars and universals are mind independent categories in the world, and we refer to them whenever we make affirmations such as ‘every man is white.’ This would be an example of stating something universally of a universal (i.e. ‘man’), as Aristotle puts it. This is, very roughly, the connection between his ontology and our language. The importance of De Interpretatione to us is just this: whenever Aristotle mentions a problem in the terms that he introduces in De Interpretatione, we know that he wants to say something about the actual things in the world. This is especially important if one wants to make any sense of his Physics.

Common Grounds For All (Material) Existence
As we noted above, Aristotle starts Physics by reminding us about the universal/particular distinction and suggests that we should approach the problems at hand from universals to particulars (contrary to what Plato suggested). It should be quite uncontentious that Physics is deeply involved in what we would certainly call metaphysics. For instance, one of Aristotle’s initial concerns is the number of basic principles that govern different kinds of objects. He dismisses the possibility of there being only one and concludes that there must be three of them.

The fact that Aristotle’s predecessors thought that the principal elements could include water, fire, air and earth, should not mislead us, although it might render parts of the discussion obsolete. The importance of this passage lies in the attempt to find common grounds for all (material) existence. The suggested explanations might not be correct, but they are logically sound. So, already on the opening pages of Aristotle’s Physics we are very deeply involved with metaphysical questions of the most fundamental sort.

There is an obvious explanation for this metaphysical tendency in Aristotle’s discussion of natural science. As Aristotle puts it in his Metaphysics, natural science is not the first philosophy. There is something prior, an immovable substance, which has to be examined before natural science, which is concerned with movable things, can be pursued. However, natural science would be the first philosophy without the immovable substance.

The motive behind this is of course Aristotle’s account of tracking movement into the immovable first mover – a view that might be logically sound, but which perhaps seems problematic in the light of modern physics. Aristotle’s Metaphysics is especially interesting for us because there he considers a number of fundamental questions about the nature of metaphysics as a discipline: what are its tasks, method and basis.

Metaphysics Is The Study Of The Essence Of Being
For Aristotle, metaphysics is the study of the essence of being, being as it is in itself. This is strongly contrasted with something like the Quinean idea that metaphysics should make a complete list of what there is. Rather, Aristotle is interested in what grounds the existence of different kinds of entities, why are they what they are?

Furthermore, as Vasilis Politis notes, we must be careful to correctly appreciate what kind of questions Aristotle considers to be relevant for metaphysics: In general, we must not confuse questions of the type, (1) ‘Why are there things that are F?’, with questions of the type (2) ‘Why are the things that are F F?’ The basic question in the Metaphysics, ‘What is it for something, anything, to be?’, is associated with questions of type 2, not type 1.

Aristotle’s view is that natural science is concerned with material, moveable entities.

Mathematics, on the other hand, concerns abstract objects. However, neither of these disciplines can be said to be universal, as they are restricted to certain categories of being. It will then be the task of metaphysics to pursue being qua being, to examine what kinds of metaphysical constraints govern different kinds of entities. Aristotle proceeds to investigate what being qua being might involve and is convinced that the most important category in this investigation is that of substance. Of the possible ways of how substance relates to entities, Aristotle notes four: essence, the related universal, genus and substartum. What follows is a detailed account of these features of being.

Aristotle’s Account Of Essence
Perhaps of the greatest interest to the modern reader is Aristotle’s account of essence, which is clearly the predecessor of the contemporary essentialist views: ‘The essence of each thing is what it is said to be in virtue of itself’. It is through the essences of things, and only them, that we can acquire further knowledge about the reality. To be able to determine, for instance, how many objects there are, we must first know what the essences of the objects in question are. It is no surprise then, that essence is what Aristotle calls ‘the primary being’ (ousia). It must be noted here though that Aristotle’s account, that of metaphysics as the science of essence, is itself a metaphysical answer to the question about the nature of metaphysics. He does consider other possible answers to the question as well, namely that the primary being is either the particular or the universal (and indeed, in the Categories, he proposed a different answer).

But even if one disagrees with Aristotle about essences being at the centre of metaphysics (which I do not), his method is still very much worth attention. Furthermore, it should be made clear that there are a number of different ways to understand essences. Aristotle’s conception is no doubt what could be called ‘metaphysical’ as opposed to ‘semantic’ essentialism: essences are not analytic; they are ‘what is expressed by a complete account of what it is to be for a certain kind of thing.’ . So much about the object of inquiry of the first philosophy.

This quick overview hardly does justice to Aristotle, but an exhaustive account of Aristotelian essentialism is not necessary for our purposes. We will now turn to the relationship between Aristotelian metaphysics and other disciplines, most notably natural science. Before the inquiry into the second philosophy, i.e. natural science, can start, we must already have done some work in metaphysics. Nevertheless, the topics discussed in Physics are of great importance for Aristotle and it is only because natural science is dependent on some more fundamental principles that we have to focus on metaphysics first.

Contemporary Metaphysics And Aristotle
We certainly do not have to agree with Aristotle on the details of these principles, although it seems that much of what he contributed to the discussion about essences and universals still survives in contemporary metaphysics. In terms of the relationship between the first philosophy and special sciences we have the following situation: There is a science which investigates being as being and the attributes which belong to this in virtue of its own nature. Now this is not the same as any of the so-called special sciences; for none of these others deals generally with being as being. They cut off a part of being and investigate the attributes of this part – this is what mathematical sciences for instance do.

Now since we are seeking the first principles and the highest causes, clearly there must be some thing to which these belong in virtue of its own nature. The above passage is perhaps even more accurate now than it was when Aristotle wrote it. Special sciences in Aristotle’s time were certainly fewer and a lot closer to what Aristotle himself was doing than special sciences and philosophy are now. However, it is not that the special sciences would be entirely separate from the first philosophy; rather, they concentrate on parts of being that have been cut off from the complete list of entities. Aristotle’s example is mathematics – certainly a part of the science of being, but only concentrating on a small section of it.

Once the limitations of special sciences are admitted and it is acknowledged that even sciences like physics lack the ability to deal ‘generally with being as being’, we then have the possibility to effectively combine our results in metaphysics and special sciences. But how should this be done? Well, in the lines of the Aristotelian method, we should first focus on the most general principles that govern all being and proceed into the details of these principles, such as particular essences and universal attributes of different kinds of entities. After these ontological matters have been settled, we have the tools to interpret the perceptible reality accordingly, i.e. to make sense of the results that we reach in special sciences.

Metaphysics As An Unavoidable, Primary Discipline
Note that something very important is being said about the basis of metaphysics itself here as well. The way that Aristotle approaches metaphysical topics is in the form of aporiai (vocab: a difficulty, as in a philosophical or literary text, caused by an indeterminacy of meaning for which no resolution seems possible) , philosophical puzzles. While metaphysics is about the question ‘What is being qua being’, it is also about the very nature of this question, the possibility of metaphysics. As Politis notes, it would be a mistake to think that these questions are genuinely separate in Aristotle. For if they were, this would seem to suggest that one can somehow step outside metaphysics, which is not what Aristotle thinks.

The importance of this cannot be stressed excessively: Aristotle sees metaphysics as an unavoidable, primary discipline; the questions about the nature of metaphysics are metaphysical themselves and should be treated accordingly. No other discipline – physics, semantics, or even logic – can accommodate the most fundamental questions about the nature of metaphysics, as this would imply going outside the framework of metaphysics.

The Principle Of Non-Contradiction
This has numerous important ramifications, for instance, Aristotle’s defense of the principle of non-contradiction (PNC) respects this framework, as it is his claim that PNC is the most secure statement about how things are in the world. In other words, it is not a statement about how we think about things or how we talk about them, that is, it is not a logical principle, but a metaphysical one. The upshot of this is that according to Aristotle, logic is grounded in metaphysics, in the ways that things are in the world. Indeed, Aristotle’s line of thought suggests that the link that is often taken to be between language or grammar, and logic, is really between reality and our thoughts: Aristotle argues that if PNC were not true of things, then we could not use thoughts and words to signify things, and in general we could not think and speak about things. He concludes that if PNC were not true of things, then thought and language about things would be impossible.

Metaphysics, then, is indeed the first science or the universal science. Yet it is worth emphasizing that although metaphysics concerns all that is and is universal in this sense, it does not mean that its goal is to reach complete descriptions about all things. The universality of metaphysics is based on the fundamental nature of it, it examines being qua being, the preconditions of all being and the governing principles, such as PNC, which affect all being. It is the task of special sciences to complete the descriptions, each in their respective field – metaphysics is the study about the common features that range across all disciplines. The question at hand here concerns ‘the metaphysics of metaphysics’; it is about the nature of the question ‘what is being’. Only after this question has been settled can Aristotle offer his answer to the original question of metaphysics, ‘what is being’.

Metaphysics Is The Science Of Essences
His answer to the latter question is of course that metaphysics is the science of essences. This is the distinction between the Aristotelian method and Aristotelian metaphysics – often we are referring to the previous although we talk about Aristotelian metaphysics. For my purposes this does not have very serious implications, as I happen to agree both with the Aristotelian method and with the particular answer to the question ‘what is being’ that Aristotelian metaphysics proposes.

Reconciling Aristotelian Metaphysics With Contemporary Metaphysics
But it is fair to ask, what kind of a bearing does the method described above have on contemporary metaphysics? And what about the level of detail that modern physics has reached, could it not be said that all that is left to do is perhaps to establish the complete, final theory of physics, which would arguably reach the general level of being qua being? I think not. For one thing, I believe that a final theory of any kind is an impossibility. That is not how science – or metaphysics, for that matter – works. In fact, the whole concept of a final theory is contradictory. A theory is never final, as it should always be open for revision. I should not need to add that in the history of science we have seen plenty of ‘final’ theories which proved out not to be quite so final.

Secondly, even if the best approximation of a final theory in physics would be reached, it would in no way render metaphysics redundant. There are two reasons for this: on one hand metaphysics is necessary for interpreting any results reached in special sciences, as some kind of categorization of the results is needed. On the other hand, metaphysics is and must also be the starting point of any such theory, because surely a theory that claims the title ‘final’ must deal with being qua being on the most general level possible, i.e. on the level of the essences of entities rather than on the level of their observable features.

A more serious problem in any attempt to reconcile Aristotelian metaphysics with contemporary metaphysics is perhaps his idea of the immovable substance. Other details of his ontology and organization of categories that we might not like can easily be dismissed in favor of something else, but the immovable substance seems to be Aristotle’s motivation to pursue these topics in the first place and abandoning it would appear to introduce some problems.

Motion and Modern Physics
Perhaps a quick look into the reasons of why Aristotle postulates the immovable substance will help. Clearly, Aristotle is puzzled by motion and one of his basic principles is that there must be a cause for all motion: ‘Everything that is in motion must be moved by something.’ Now, this is a very problematic assumption and very hard to establish in terms of modern physics. Nevertheless, this assumption combined with the assumption that we cannot have an infinite line of movers, which Aristotle argues for in some length, produces the conclusion that there must be an immobile first mover. Perhaps this line of thought seems quite untenable now, but I do not think that we can blame Aristotle, for as far off as his line of thought appears to be, modern physics might not do much better. For consider: how does motion emerge according to modern physics?

Well, surely, all kinds of motion can be tracked to material entities. Our current knowledge of all material entities is based on quantum particles: quarks and leptons. Motion enters the picture via forces which are manifested by certain exchange particles. There are four fundamental forces: nuclear strong force, electromagnetic force, nuclear weak force and gravity. For example, the electromagnetic force is manifested through the exchange of photons. A thorough introduction to quantum motion is not required here, but quite generally, all the fundamental forces are exchange forces, as they are manifested through the exchange of one or more particles. And this of course implies motion. But what exactly is the cause of motion according to this theory?

There does not seem to be a very straightforward answer. If we were to look into the details we would find out that there are some dubious coverups in effect here. For instance, the exchange particles are ‘virtual’, as they only exist in the exchange process, and in the case of gravity the exchange particle, called ‘graviton’, has not even been directly observed (and it has a rest mass of zero!). Curiously, as sophisticated and accurate as our current understanding of motion might be, it is blatantly incapable of answering the question that Aristotle asked: how does motion originate?

Modern physics provides a number of interesting observations; in the case of motion originating from the electromagnetic force, the motion occurs because there are electrically charged particles present; in the case of motion originating from gravity, the cause of movement is the presence of a body of matter which attracts other bodies of matter nearby. But these are not explanations; they are descriptive accounts about our perceptible surroundings. As far as physics is concerned, there might very well be an immovable first mover which is the one common cause for all motion.

What I am saying is that physics does not even try to answer the kind of questions that Aristotle puts forward. And this is as it should be, because natural science is, after all, only the second philosophy. There are at least two reasons why one might be unable to grasp this. Firstly, the Kantian tradition has made us too skeptical about the possibility of ever answering these kinds of questions. Secondly, modern science has a peculiar tendency of avoiding questions – it is not the why that scientists are concerned with, but rather what can be observed and what sort of applications it has. However, I think that there cannot be any doubt as to whether we should ask fundamental questions or not. Answering them is the task of metaphysics.

The Gap Between Metaphysics And The Special Sciences
This sidestep to modern physics demonstrates the gap between metaphysics and the special sciences and should help us to see what motivated Aristotle in his judgment that metaphysics deserves a primary status. His method, based on the aporiai, philosophical puzzles, is revealing in this regard: special sciences do not raise general questions about being as such; instead they presuppose that there are different kinds of things ordered in a certain manner. A scientist makes inductive inferences based on perceptual evidence, but by doing so she relies on the orderly nature of reality, she assumes that by certain methods she can come up with veridical judgments about the world.

But a metaphysician starts with an abstract puzzle, not an observation – a metaphysician is puzzled about how the scientist can reach knowledge in the first place, how can we know anything about being qua being? This is one of the key questions of metaphysics, and we have seen Aristotle’s solution above; his defense of the principle of non-contradiction is especially important in this regard. So, the type of the questions raised in special sciences and metaphysics are radically different. But this is not strictly a difference in their status in regard to the a priori/a posteriori distinction, as one might think.

In fact, it would be a mistake to think either that metaphysics is fully in the realm of a priori knowledge or that special sciences are thoroughly a posteriori. Aristotle seems to think that metaphysics and special sciences are fundamentally linked, for metaphysics is the study about the a priori principles that special sciences presuppose. Furthermore, although metaphysics as a discipline is ‘furthest from the senses,’ it is nevertheless continuous with special sciences, and could not operate exclusively in the realm of a priori knowledge.

The Relativist Challenge
We are now in the position to see how the Aristotelian method and Aristotelian metaphysics copes with the contemporary challenges to metaphysical realism. Aristotle’s central concern is the relativist challenge to fundamental metaphysical principles, such as the principle of non-contradiction. As we saw above, Aristotle thinks that PNC is indeed a metaphysical principle, not a logical principle. What this means is that PNC is one of the constraints that govern the mind-independent reality.

For Aristotle, reality is unitary, yet there are different kinds of entities with different essences in the world. PNC is perhaps the most general constraint for the organization of these different kinds of entities. Plausibly, PNC rules out certain combinations of properties that an entity might have, for instance, no entity can be both green and red all over at the same time, or solid and liquid. The relativist challenges this essentialist, unitary view of the reality by questioning PNC.

The modern roots of the relativist challenge can be found in Kant, but Aristotle was well aware of the possibility of such a challenge. Aristotle’s defense of PNC against the relativist is, as he puts it, a ‘negative’ one: he demonstrates that the opponent’s view is inconsistent. In fact, he goes on to show that the opponent must be committed to PNC at least in the sense that it is true of our thoughts and language. This is, of course, not enough as such. What needs to be added is that if PNC is true of our thoughts and language, it is also true about the world. Furthermore, the opponent can challenge PNC by pointing out that it often appears, appears to the senses, that is, that the orderly nature of the world required by PNC is violated. To these concerns Aristotle replies as follows:

[I]f only the sensible exists, there would be nothing if animate things were not; for these would be no faculty of sense. The view that neither the objects of sensation nor the sensations would exist is doubtless true (for they are affections of the perceiver), but that the substrata which cause the sensation should not exist even apart from sensation is impossible. For sensation is surely not the sensation of itself, but there is something beyond the sensation, which must be prior to the sensation; for that which moves is prior in nature to that which is moved, and if they are correlative terms, this is no less the case.
(Aristotle 1984b: 1010b301011a2.)

This is a very dense passage and it is impossible to analyze it thoroughly here. But, clearly, Aristotle is here advocating a realist, causal theory of perception. He also adds that in fact we never observe a direct violation of PNC in the senses. This is a crucial qualification, for Aristotle can now justifiably ask, even if the opponent denies the theory of perception that he proposed: how does the relativist explain the orderliness in the world, that is, the observed validity of PNC, which is experienced and apparently true?

We must appreciate the weight of this challenge given the context in which Aristotle raises it, for he has argued in length that metaphysics, the science of being qua being, is first and foremost concerned with this very question. Now, if the relativist is to give any kind of a response to Aristotle’s challenge, as he must do if he is to avoid being compared to plants, then he is already involved in metaphysics.

This is indeed a master argument, for Aristotle has shown here that the only way for the relativist to be involved in a philosophical discussion of any kind is to accept the Aristotelian method and engage in metaphysics. Regardless of what we might think about his particular answers to some metaphysical questions, the Aristotelian method certainly prevails.

Posted in Science And Religion | Tagged Aristotle's Account Of Essence, Contemporary Metaphysics And Aristotle, Motion and Modern Physics, The Essence Of Being, The Principle Of Non-Contradiction, The Universal/Particular Distinction | Leave a Comment »

Michael Behe and Stephen Barr Debate

November 19, 2010

Steven Barr (on the left) and Michael Behe

In the video/audio at the following links, you can watch Catholic scientists Michael Behe and Stephen Barr debate whether Intelligent Design should be taught in science classes. Barr is a physicist, and you will recognize his writings in First Things and such books as Modern Physics and Ancient Faith. Behe is a biochemist and a leading voice in ID, writing such books as Darwin’s Black Box and The Edge of Evolution.

Audio/Video links here: http://www.isi.org/lectures/lectures.aspx?SBy=lecture&SFor=18fdfd28-e682-421f-9acf-2940402af8e3

The video is 72 minutes but captivating.

Posted in Science And Religion | Tagged Intelligent Design Debate, Michael Behe, Stephen Barr | Leave a Comment »

The Sacred and the Human by Roger Scruton

September 30, 2010

Religion is not primarily about God, but about the sacred, and that the experience of the sacred can be suppressed, ignored and even desecrated but never destroyed.

This essay first appeared in Prospect Magazine, August 2007 and has some of the thoughts included in Professor Scruton’s 2010 Gifford Lectures. An overview of the role of religion and a meditation on Girardian theory, the essay gives us much to reflect on, particularly for those who might wish to dismiss Religion as if it were some disproven theory.

A System Of Unfounded Beliefs?
It is understandable that decent, skeptical people, observing the widespread revival in our time of superstitious cults, the emerging conflict between secular freedoms and religious edicts, and the murderous insanity of radical Islam, should be receptive to the anti-religious polemics of Dawkins, Dennett and Hitchens. The ‘sleep of reason’ has brought forth monsters, just as Goya foretold in his wonderful engraving. How are we to rectify this, except through a wake-up call to reason, of the kind that the evangelical atheists are now shouting from their pulpits?

Goya's The Sleep of Reason

Nor is it surprising that decent, skeptical people should regard last-ditch attempts to retain the belief in God’s temporal concern for us (such as the theory of ‘intelligent design’), as testifying merely to the miraculous ability to believe in the miraculous. Either we leave the field to science, or we take refuge in the inexplicable – which is no refuge from science. For the skeptical observer of the human scene, there is nothing that religion can add to scientific explanation other than the invocation of a transcendental causa sui which, by its very nature, eludes human comprehension.

Somewhat more surprising is the extent to which religion is caricatured by its current opponents, who seem to see in it nothing more than a system of unfounded beliefs about the cosmos – beliefs which, to the extent that they conflict with the scientific worldview, are heading straight for refutation. Thus Christopher Hitchens, in his relentlessly one-sided diatribe, writes as follows:

One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody – not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made of atoms – had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs). (God Is Not Great, p. 64)

Now Hitchens is an intelligent and widely read man, who recognizes that the arguments that are most useful to him were already well-known two hundred years ago. His book takes us through territory already charted by Hume, Voltaire, Diderot and Kant, and nobody who is familiar with the Enlightenment can really believe that anything has been added to its stance against religion by our contemporary imitators, whatever new examples they can add to the list of religiously-motivated crimes.

The Origin of Religion
However, the thinkers of the Enlightenment, having argued the claims of faith to be without rational foundation, did not then dismiss religion, as one might dismiss a refuted theory. Many of them went on to draw the conclusion that religion must therefore have some other origin than the pursuit of scientific knowledge, and some other psychic function than providing a world-view that consoles those who subscribe to it. The ease with which the common doctrines of religion could be refuted alerted thinkers like Jacobi, Schiller and Schelling to the thought that religion is not, in its essence, a matter of doctrine, but of something else. And they set out to discover what that something else might be.

Thus was born the anthropology of religion. For thinkers in the immediate aftermath of the Enlightenment it was not faith but faiths, in the plural, that composed the primary subject-matter of theology. Hence the appearance of books with titles like Origine de tous les cultes; ou, Religion universelle (C.F. Dupuis, 1795), and hence the busy decipherment of oriental religions by the Bengal Asiatic Society, whose proceedings began to appear in Calcutta in 1788. For post-Enlightenment thinkers the monotheistic belief-systems were not related to the ancient myths and rituals as science to superstition, or logic to magic. They were crystallizations of the emotional need which found equal expression in the myths and rituals of antiquity and in the Vedas and Upanishads of the Hindus.

Myth And The Human Psyche
This thought led Georg Creuzer, whose Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker appeared between 1810 and 1812, to represent myth as a distinctive operation of the human psyche. A myth does not describe what happened in some obscure period before human reckoning, but what happens always and repeatedly. It does not explain the causal origins of our world but rehearses its permanent spiritual significance. Myth is a way of understanding deep processes of the human psyche, which cannot be easily described except through imaginative stories.

If you look at ancient religion in that way then inevitably your vision of the Judaeo-Christian canon will change. The Genesis story of the creation is easily refuted as an account of historical events: how can there be days without a sun, man without a woman, life without death? Read it as a myth, however, which recounts the concealed and repeatable meaning of events that we live through every day, and this naïve-seeming text reveals itself as a profound study of the human condition.

The story of the fall is, Hegel wrote, ‘not just a contingent history but the eternal and necessary history of humanity’. (Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 1827.) It conveys truths about freedom, about guilt, about man, woman and their relationship; about our relation to nature and mortality. A skeptical and scientific mind, such as that of Leon Kass in his The Beginning of Wisdom: The Story of Genesis, can use this text to explore moral and psychological truths that are nowhere else so vividly or succinctly evoked.

Hermeneutics
Not surprisingly, therefore, among the first effects of the Enlightenment were new ways of reading scripture, and new attempts to square the scriptures with the demands of the rational intellect. Thus was born the science, or at any rate the art, of hermeneutics, whose first conscious proponent, Friedrich Schleiermacher, saw religion as a distinctive activity of the rational soul, rooted in feeling rather than intellect.

For Schleiermacher’s contemporary Hegel, the Biblical stories had to be cleared of their merely imagistic nature, and construed as ventures of the spirit, on the path to self-knowledge. Religion, as he put it, is spirit that realizes itself in consciousness – it is the spirit coming to know itself, through the successive forms of human worship. The religions of mankind (which Hegel, spurred on by Creuzer, avidly collected and brilliantly analyzed) represent ‘determinations’ of the abstract idea of divinity. But we approach this idea through the path of alienation, and among religious concepts we should include not only those of God, creation, and design, but also those of guilt, unhappiness, atonement and reconciliation – features of the human condition which lead us to see the world from a position outside it, and to search it for the places and times in which freedom can enter the otherwise incomprehensible flow of events.

For Hegel, myths and rituals are forms of self-discovery, through which we understand the place of the subject in a world of objects, and the inner freedom which conditions all that we do. The emergence of monotheism from the polytheistic religions of antiquity is not so much an observation of the world as a form of self-knowledge, through which the spirit learns to recognize itself in the whole of things, and to overcome its finitude.

That idealist approach inspired Feuerbach to give a materialist rejoinder. Gods, angels, devils and the rest are, he argued, human creations, projections of the moral life, whose doings in the stratosphere reflect the moral tensions which animate the world below. The only reality here is the ‘species being’ of humanity, which creates these figments out of the raw material of human need. And the downside of religion is that it encourages our complacency, enabling us to place our virtues at an impassable distance from ourselves, by projecting them into that higher, and illusory, realm from which they can never thereafter be recuperated.

Nietzsche and Wagner
Between those early ventures into the anthropology of religion and the studies of Sir James Frazer, Emile Durkheim and the Freudians, two thinkers stand out as setting the agenda for a new intellectual enterprise – an enterprise which seems not to have been noticed by Hitchens, Dawkins or Dennett, but which is nevertheless of some importance to us today. The thinkers to whom I refer are Nietzsche and Wagner, and the intellectual enterprise is that of showing the place of the sacred in human life, and the kind of knowledge and understanding that comes to us, through the encounter with sacred things.

Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, and Wagner in Tristan, The Ring and Parsifal as well as in his writings on tragedy and religion, painted a picture that, while rooted in the post-Enlightenment tradition and owing much to Feuerbach, placed the concept of the sacred at the centre of the anthropology of religion. The lesson that both thinkers took from the Greeks was that you could subtract the gods and their stories from Greek religion, and still the most important thing would remain. This thing had its primary reality not in myths but in rituals, in moments that stand outside time, in which the deep loneliness and anxiety of the human individual is confronted and overcome.

By calling these moments ‘sacred’ we recognize both their complex social meaning and also the respite that they offer from alienation. Forget theology, forget doctrine and belief, forget all the ideas about an after-life – for none of these have the importance in Homer or in tragedy that attaches to the moment of ritual sacrifice, when the human world is suddenly irradiated from a point beyond it.

Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy was dismissed as an unscholarly fantasy, and cost him his career as a philologist. Wagner’s artistic proof of his own insights remained accessible only to those with ears. While most anthropologists recognized that religion belongs to another category of thought than science, and that it should not be dismissed (as Hitchens dismisses it) merely as a residue of animal fears and childish yearnings, the attempt to understand the concept of the sacred remained where Nietzsche and Wagner had left it.

Girardian Theory
It was not anthropologists but theologians and critics who took the matter forward – Rudolf Otto in Das Heilige, 1917, Georges Bataille in L’Érotisme, 1952, Mircea Eliade in The Sacred and the Profane, 1957, and, most explicitly and also shockingly, René Girard in La violence et le sacré, 1972. It is Girard’s theory, it seems to me, that most urgently needs to be debated, now that atheist triumphalism is sweeping all nuances away.

Girard begins from an observation that no impartial reader of the Hebrew Bible or the Koran can fail to make, which is that religion may promise peace, but is also deeply implicated in violence. The God presented in those writings is frequently angry, given to insane fits of destruction and seldom deserving of the epithets bestowed upon him in the Koran – al-raHmân al-raHîm, ‘the compassionate, the merciful’. He makes outrageous and bloodthirsty demands – such as the demand that Abraham sacrifice his son Isaac. He is obsessed with the genitals and adamant that they should be mutilated in his honor – a theme that has been interestingly explored by Jack Miles in his riveting book God: A Biography.

Thinkers like Dawkins and Hitchens leap at once to the conclusion that religion is the cause of this violence and sexual obsession, and that all the crimes committed in the name of religion can be seen as the definitive disproof of it. Not so, argues Girard. Religion is not the cause of violence but the solution to it. The violence itself comes from another source, and there is no society without it since it is engendered by the very attempt of human beings to live together. The same can be said, too, of the obsession with sexuality: religion is not the cause of this, but an attempt to resolve it.

Girard’s theory is best understood as a kind of inversion of an idea of Nietzsche’s. In his later writings, Nietzsche expounded a kind of creation myth, by way of accounting for the structure of modern society. On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) envisages a primeval human society, reduced to near universal slavery by the ‘beasts of prey’ – namely the strong, self-affirming, healthy egoists who impose their desires on others by the force of their nature. The master race maintains its position by punishing all deviation on the part of the slaves – just as we punish a disobedient horse.

The slave, too timid and demoralized to rebel, receives this punishment as a retribution. Because he cannot exact revenge the slave expends his resentment on himself, coming to think of his condition as in some way deserved, a just recompense for his inner transgressions. Thus is born the sense of guilt and the idea of sin. The ressentiment of the slave explains, for Nietzsche, the entire theological and moral vision of Christianity. Christianity owes its power to the resentment upon which it feeds: resentment which, because it cannot express itself in violence, remains turned against itself. Thus arises the ethic of compassion, the mortification of the flesh, and the life-denying routines of the ‘slave morality’. Christianity is a form of self-directed violence, which conceals a deep resentment against every form of human mastery.

That ‘genealogy’ of Christian morals was effectively exploded by Max Scheler, in his book Ressentiment: as Scheler argues, the Christian ethic of agape and forgiveness is not an expression of resentment but rather the only known way of overcoming it. Nevertheless there is surely an important truth concealed within Nietzsche’s wild generalizations. Resentment is a fundamental component in our social emotions; it is widely prevalent in modern societies; and there is surely no way in which we might explain either the durability of egalitarian politics or such local phenomena as Islamist violence, if we do not see resentment as a major part of the cause.

We may suppose religion to make an input into social violence. But it is surely evident to any observer of the 20th century that you can take away religion, and the violence will usually remain. And the 20th century is the century of resentment. How else do you explain the mass murders of the communists and the Nazis, the seething animosities of Lenin and Hitler, the genocides of Mao and Pol Pot? The ideas and emotions behind the totalitarian movements of the 20th century are targeted: they identify a class of enemy, whose privileges and property have been unjustly acquired and at the expense of their victims. And this class must be destroyed. Religion plays no real part in the ensuing destruction, and indeed is usually included among the targets.

Girard’s theory, like Nietzsche’s, is expressed as a genealogy, or rather a ‘creation myth’: a fanciful description of the origins of human society, from which to derive an account of its present structure. (It is significant that Girard came to the anthropology of religion from his work as a literary critic, a student of Shakespeare, Cervantes and Stendhal.) And like Nietzsche Girard sees the primeval condition of society as one of conflict. It is in the effort to resolve this conflict that the experience of the sacred is born. This experience comes to us in many forms – in religious ritual, in prayer, in tragedy – but its true origin is in an act of communal violence.

Primitive societies are invaded by ‘mimetic desire’, as rivals struggle to match each other’s social and material acquisitions, so heightening antagonism and precipitating the cycle of revenge. The solution is to identify a victim, one marked by fate as ‘outside’ the community and therefore not entitled to vengeance against it, who can be the target of the accumulated blood-lust, and who can bring the chain of retribution to an end. Scapegoating is society’s way of recreating ‘difference’ and so restoring itself. By uniting against the scapegoat people are released from their rivalries and reconciled. Through his death the scapegoat purges society of its accumulated violence. His resulting sanctity is the long-term echo of the awe, relief and visceral re-attachment to the community that was experienced at his death.

According to Girard, therefore, the need for sacrificial scapegoating is deeply implanted in the human psyche, arising from the very attempt to form a durable community in which the moral life can be successfully pursued. One purpose of the theatre is to provide fictional substitutes for the original crime, and so to obtain the benefit of moral renewal without the horrific cost. In Girard’s view, we should see a tragedy like Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus as a re-telling of what was originally a ritual sacrifice, in which the victim is chosen so as to focus and confine the need for violence. Through incest, kingship, or worldly hubris the victim marks himself out as the outsider, the one who is not with us, and whom we can therefore sacrifice without renewing the cycle of revenge. The victim is thus both sacrificed and sacred, the source of the city’s plagues and their cure.

In many of the Old Testament stories we see the ancient Israelites wrestling with this sacrificial urge. The stories of Cain and Abel, of Abraham and Isaac, of Sodom and Gomorrah, are residues of extended conflicts, by which ritual was diverted from the human victim, and attached first to animal sacrifices, and finally to sacred words. By this process a viable morality emerged from competition and conflict, and from the visceral rivalries of sexual predation. Religion is not the source of violence but the solution to it – the overcoming of mimetic desire and the transcending of the resentments and jealousies into which human communities are tempted by their competitive dynamic.

And it is in just this way, Girard argues, that we should see the achievement of the Christian religion. In his study of the scapegoat (Le Bouc émissaire, 1982) Girard identifies Christ as a new kind of victim – one who offers himself for sacrifice, and who, in doing so, shows that he understands what is going on. The words ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do’ are pivotal for Girard. They involve both a recognition of the necessity for sacrifice, if the guilt and resentment of community is to be appeased and transcended, and the added recognition that this function must be concealed. Only those who are ignorant of the source of their hatred can be healed by its expression, for only they can proceed with a clear conscience towards the tragic climax.

The climax, however, is not the death of the scapegoat, but the experience of sacred awe, as the victim, at the moment of death, forgives his tormentors. This is the moment of transcendence, in which even the most cruel of persecutors can learn both to humble himself and to renounce his vengeful passion. Through his willing acceptance of his sacrificial role Christ made the ‘love of neighbor’ – which had featured from the oldest books of the Hebrew bible as the standard to which humanity should aspire – into a reality in the hearts of those who rehearse or meditate upon his gesture. Christ’s submission purified religion of the need for sacrificial murder: his conscious self-sacrifice is therefore, Girard suggests, rightly thought of as a redemption, and we should not be surprised if, when we turn away from our Christian legacy as the Nazis and the Communists did, the hecatombs of victims reappear.

Girard’s account of the Passion is amplified by many learned asides, by a vigorous and ongoing engagement with Freud and Lévi-Strauss, and by a conviction that religion and tragedy are (as Nietzsche argued) adjacent in the human psyche, comparable receptacles for the experience of sacred awe. The experience of the sacred is not an irrational residue of primitive fears, nor is it a form of superstition that will one day be chased away by science. According to Girard, it is a solution to the accumulated aggression which lies in the heart of human communities. That is how he explains the peace and celebration that attends the ritual of communion – the sense of renewal which must always itself be renewed.

Girard’s Vision Of The Eucharist
Girard’s vision of the Eucharist is anticipated in Parsifal, and in particular in the sublimely tranquil Good Friday music of Act III. It is anticipated too by Hegel, who writes that ‘in the sacraments reconciliation is brought into feeling, into the here and now of present and sensible consciousness; and all the manifold actions are embraced under the aspect of sacrifice.’ (Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion.) Girard, like Hegel, takes himself to be describing deep features of the human condition, which can be observed as well in the mystery cults of antiquity and the local shrines of Hinduism as in the everyday ‘miracle’ of the Eucharist.

Girard Theory Criticisms
There are many criticisms that might be leveled against Girard’s theory – not least, against the idea that human institutions can be explained through genealogies and creation myths. The alleged ‘mimetic’ nature of human competition is underdescribed and underjustified; there are other and more plausible explanations of the ancient ritual of animal sacrifice than that offered by Girard; and the success of the Christian ethic has many other causes besides the mystical reversal that allegedly occurred on the Cross. But those criticisms do not, it seems to me, account for the comparative neglect of Girard’s ideas. Girard’s thesis has been received with the same dismissive indifference as Nietzsche’s in The Birth of Tragedy, and though he has been honored with a siège at the Académie Française, the honor has come only now, as Girard approaches his ninetieth year.

I suspect that, like Nietzsche, Girard has reminded us of truths that we would rather forget – in particular, the truth, which is anathema to the evangelical atheists, that religion is not primarily about God, but about the sacred, and that the experience of the sacred can be suppressed, ignored and even desecrated (which is the routine tribute paid to it in modern societies) but never destroyed. Always the need for it will arise, for it is in the nature of rational beings like us to live at the edge of things, experiencing our alienation and longing for the sudden reversal that will once again join us to the centre. For Girard that sudden reversal is a kind of self-forgiveness, as the concealed aggressions of our social life are abruptly transcended – washed in the blood of the lamb.

Girard’s genealogy casts an anthropological light on the Christian ethic and on the meaning of the Eucharist; but it is not just an anthropological theory. Girard himself treats it as a piece of theology. For him the theory is a kind of proof of the Christian religion and of the divinity of Jesus. And in a striking article in the Stanford Italian Review (1986) he suggests that the path that has led him from the inner meaning of the Eucharist to the truth of Christianity was one followed by Wagner in Parsifal, and one along which even Nietzsche reluctantly strayed, under the influence of Wagner’s masterpiece.

Of course, you don’t have to follow Girard into those obscure and controversial regions in order to endorse his view of the sacred as a human universal. Nor do you have to accept the cosmology of monotheism in order to understand why it is that this experience should attach itself to the three great transitions – the three rites of passage – which mark the cyclical continuity of human societies. Birth, copulation and death are the moments when time stands still, when we look on the world from a point at its edge, when we experience our dependence and contingency, and when we are apt to be filled with an entirely reasonable awe. It is from such moments, replete with emotional knowledge, that religion begins, and the rational person is not the one who scoffs at all religions, but the one who tries to discover which of them, if any, can make sense of those things, and, while doing so, draw the poison of resentment.

Posted in Science And Religion | Tagged Hegel, moral and psychological truth, religion, Roger Scruton, the Enlightenment | Leave a Comment »

Paying Attention To The Sky

Archive for the ‘Catholicism For Atheists’ Category

The Loss Of Religion – Roger Scruton

Reading Selections from The God of the Mathematicians by David P. Goldman

Reading Selections from Can We Know What We Know?

Reconciling Science and Religion by Britton Johnston

Reading Selections From Girard’s Mimetic Theory And The Relationship Between Science And Religion by Britton W. Johnston

On Masters of Suspicion

Aquinas Proves Atheists Are Closer To God Than They Think

Reading Selections: Aristotelian Metaphysics by THOMAS E. TAHKO (Ph.D., Durham University)

Michael Behe and Stephen Barr Debate

The Sacred and the Human by Roger Scruton

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