Against the Stream

Misunderstanding Tyrion Lannister

 

Recently, Jonathan Ryan at the Christianity Today blog offered up an analysis of George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones from a Christian perspective, comparing Martin's world to that of J. R. R. Tolkien. His verdict:

Martin is missing Tolkien's sense of "eucatastrophe," the word Tolkien famously coined in his essay On Fairy Stories: "The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous "turn"…. In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief."

Ryan argues that "Martin's relentlessly grim view of human beings is far from realistic. He is looking at the world with just one jaundiced, damaged eye."

On the one hand, Ryan is certainly right that Martin's view of the world is much darker than Tolkien's, but it's a rather strange to criticize Martin for writing a different kind of story than Tolkien. What's more, I think the key difference between their stories is precisely the one that Ryan overlooks, namely, that Martin isn't writing a "fairy story" in Tolkien's sense. Rather, Martin is writing the historical fiction of an imaginary world, and as such, he is trying to convey as realistically as possible the human limitations and failings of a world that runs according to the principles of "real-world" power politics, and not according to an idealistic assessment of how the world ought to work. The underlying moral question for Martin is whether there is still any place for honor or morality in such a world. The answer to that question, it seems to me, is still very much in doubt for Martin.

But there are many characters in Martin's universe who still attempt to embody principles of nobility and honor, even in the midst of their tragic and fallen circumstances. Ryan's biggest misstep, as Amanda McInnis points out at Cheesewearing Theology, is in his reading of Tyrion Lannister. In comparing Tyrion to Gollum, he demonstrates how little he knows about the character:

Martin paints this grimness in the portrait of Tyrion Lannister. Tyrion is a small and deformed figure born to a powerful and noble family in Westeros. Years of poor treatment and outright abuse leads Tyrion to drink more and more deeply from the corruption around him.

If you've read Lord of the Rings, you can't help but compare Tyrion to Smeagol, the hobbit who becomes Gollum after becoming corrupted by Sauron's ring The difference comes in Frodo's attempt to redeem Gollum. That attempt has no parallel in Martin's world, nor is there anything like Gandalf's admonition to treat Gollum with kindness. Tyrion has no Frodo, and he never will. No one reaches out to him; no one tries to save or redeem him.

Amanda notes how wrong-headed this reading is:

Ryan fundamentally misunderstands and misconstrues the character of Tyrion. In fact, I would argue that Tyrion is in fact one of the most honourable characters in Westeros, with the understanding that the rules of morality in A Song of Ice and Fire are very, very distinct from the rules of morality in something like The Lord of the Rings. Indeed, it is this honour-in- spite-of-all-he’s-been-through that makes Tyrion one of the more beloved characters to readers (and viewers). The same endearment cannot be said of Gollum.

In trying to compare Tyrion to Gollum, the author overlooks all the good things that Tyrion has done.

Tyrion befriends Jon Snow. He rescues Sansa from a fate worse than death if she were to stay in King’s Landing. He protects the kingdom from Joffrey, by reining him in as best he can.

There is nothing comparable to be found in Tolkien's treatment of Smeagol, who is utterly corrupted by the ring and ultimately serves only the Ring, and subordinately himself. When Tyrion is raised, against all expectations, to be the Hand of the King, and asked what he intends to do, his first response is: "Justice."

And by and large he does this. As Amanda notes, he also does other, quite horrible things, most of which are understandable in the context of the character and his sufferings (Amanda says that "while they are not inexcusable, they are understandable," but I think she means that they actually aren't in themselves, actually excusable). But no matter what evil Tyrion does along the way, it is clear that at almost every point, at least to the end of A Storm of Swords, he is acting to keep his head above the waters of corruption in which he's immersed, to hold on to a sliver of morality, while still doing what's necessary to stay alive in the context of the deathtrap that is Westerosi political life.

As much as Ryan misreads Tyrion though, I suspect he also fundamentally misreads real-world politics, at least in the context of the Medieval setting that Martin is attempting to emulate. While modern politics tends to publicly eschew the kinds of cloak and dagger assassination that is part of life in Westeros, one only needs to pick up any reasonable history of ancient Rome, or Medici Italy, or the English War of the Roses (Martin's historical inspiration for the series), to understand that the maliciousness and brutality of political life was indeed part and parcel of a particular time and place. 

Even today, the realities of war and politics are far less subject to moral constraint than Ryan seems to acknowledge. Surely he recognizes that in many war zones around the world, the tactics used by Gregor "The Mountain that Rides" Clegane are nothing new. Surely he's read about Vladimir Putin's penchant for eliminating his political foes through the creative use of applied nuclear physics. Surely he's aware of the damage done to the "small folk" around the world by our own projection of military power, whether via the repeated invasions we've undertaken over the last decade or via the "death from above" approach to drone warfare we've embraced in the last few years. While we may like to comfort ourselves with the illusion that political life and war-making in the 21st century are less brutal than in the past, or that Martin doesn't accurately represent the "real world" of violence in his fantasy setting, I suspect that Martin understands what those circumstances are like from the inside with far more perspicacity than Ryan does.

None of which is to say that there is not room for honor, nobility, bravery and morality in either Martin's world or our own, but what Tyrion Lannister (as well as Ned Stark, Jon Snow, Jeor Mormont, Robb Stark, and Brienne of Tarth) reveals as a character is that those characteristics, when they are displayed, put one at great risk in a world where those traits are viewed as weakness. and thus one's survival in such a setting requires one to be "wise as a serpent" if one wishes to strive toward being "innocent as a dove."

Christian Realism and "A Game of Thrones"

 

At Religion Dispatches, George Schmidt offers an analysis of the morality in George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones, looking in particular at what Reinhold Niebuhr can tell us about the differences in leadership style between Eddard Stark and Tyrion Lannister:

Placing traditional theodicy aside for a moment, the question after all this misery is simple: Why did Eddard die? At the outset, identifying Eddard’s death as a simple tragedy misses an important point that is often made by Christian realists. Tragedy, as Reinhold Niebuhr observed in The Irony of American History, elicits “admiration as well as pity” for a man like Eddard. We pity him for such a terrible finality while we admire his conviction and compassion for Cersei and her children.

However, tragedy does not account for the way in which, to quote Niebuhr once again, “virtues are vices.” This lack of dialectical thinking, according to which human agency is essentially either virtuous or sinful, is unthinkable in Christian realism. An idealist who quickly classifies an event as tragic fails to take into account the evil that is an “inevitable consequence of the exercise of human creativity”: the evil that is in the good.

Irony, however, notes that the very quality that made Eddard worthy of praise ultimately led to his downfall. For Niebuhr, irony is fundamentally a religious category, presupposing a divine judge who “laughs at human pretensions without being hostile to human aspirations.” The Christian realist interpretatively locates irony in spaces of “hidden meaning” that “elicit not merely laughter but a knowing smile.” This “knowing smile” in turn acknowledges the failings in the virtues themselves by revealing absurd juxtapositions of “strength and weakness; of wisdom through foolishness; or foolishness as the fruit of wisdom; of guilt arising from the pretensions of innocency; or innocency hiding behind ostensible guilt.”

By contrast, Tyrion does not trust in the nobility of others:

Upon the execution of Eddard Stark, in perhaps the major juxtaposition of the series thus far, Tyrion Lannister is then appointed to the newly vacant office of Hand of the King. Eddard’s moral sentimentalism prompts his trusting of those who would ultimately betray him, whereas Tyrion devises elaborate ruses to trick would-be enemies. Unlike Eddard, Tyrion is not deluded by moral illusions and therefore capable of predicting the direction of self-interest in the pursuits of those around him.

This leads him to a consideration of Niebuhr's The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, in which Niebuhr reflects on the way in which niavety about the role of self-interest in political life has hobbled the ability of Christians to effectively and sucessfully fight for social justice:

It’s the charge of the transcendent that differentiates Christian realism from pure realism. Which is to say that Christian realism’s emphasis upon transcendence, provides an enduring, critical judgment, centered on the Gospel, upon any accommodation of the ideal in politics. In Simon Critchley’s formulation, this imperative is experienced as an “infinite demand” that interrupts the politics of accommodation that so often weigh down realist efforts. Christian realism, in other words, finds its fulfillment in a synthesis between the two Hands of the King, Eddard Stark and Tyrion Lannister.

In the main, I agree with Schmidt's analysis, though I still have cause to wonder whether or not Martin has any such transcendent moral vision in store for us at the end of his story. Thus far he's been fairly scornful of the idea that the end result of the political struggle is the establishment of social justice, and seems to be suggesting that, in the end, all succumbs to dust and entropy, or that on the whole those willing to give themselves wholly over to their will to power will ultimately prevail.

How he ends his story will tell us much about the moral world in which he dwells.

Metaphysical Materialism and the "Noble Lie"

 

In a discussion of Thomas Nagel's new book, Mind and Cosmos, Andrew Ferguson offers up an analysis of the key problem confronting metaphysical materialism as a way of describing the world:

The neo-Darwinian materialist account offers a picture of the world that is unrecognizable to us—a world without color or sound, and also a world without free will or consciousness or good and evil or selves or, when it comes to that, selflessness. “It flies in the face of common sense,” he says. Materialism is an explanation for a world we don’t live in.

Nagel dissents from the materialist fold, which includes such luminaries as Daniel Dennet and Richard Dawkins, in that he argues for an account of consciousness in which there is a reality outside of the chemical and physical processes of matter in motion, and that it is possible for us to grasp that reality. For this thoughtcrime, Fergusen notes, he has been pilloried by many contemporary materialist philosophers. The alternative offered by this particular brand of materialism:

The most famous, most succinct, and most pitiless summary of the manifest image’s fraudulence was written nearly 20 years ago by the geneticist Francis Crick: “ ‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.” 

This view is the “naturalism” that the workshoppers in the Berkshires were trying to move forward. Naturalism is also called “materialism,” the view that only matter exists; or “reductionism,” the view that all life, from tables to daydreams, is ultimately reducible to pure physics; or “determinism,” the view that every phenomenon, including our own actions, is determined by a preexisting cause, which was itself determined by another cause, and so on back to the Big Bang. The naturalistic project has been greatly aided by neo-Darwinism, the application of Darwin’s theory of natural selection to human behavior, including areas of life once assumed to be nonmaterial: emotions and thoughts and habits and perceptions. At the workshop the philosophers and scientists each added his own gloss to neo-Darwinian reductive naturalism or materialistic neo-Darwinian reductionism or naturalistic materialism or reductive determinism. They were unanimous in their solid certainty that materialism—as we’ll call it here, to limit the number of isms—is the all-purpose explanation for life as we know it. 

As Daniel Dennet puts it, we are "moist robots." Based on the reaction that Nagel has provoked, one might think that he's crossed over to the other side along with religious types like me. But no, he has not reenacted the apostasy of Anthony Flew. Would that he had. It would make it much easier for his critics to dismiss him. He has simply called into question the metaphysical claims that materialists want to make on the basis of what scientists can tell us about the world:

Materialism, then, is fine as far as it goes. It just doesn’t go as far as materialists want it to. It is a premise of science, not a finding. Scientists do their work by assuming that every phenomenon can be reduced to a material, mechanistic cause and by excluding any possibility of nonmaterial explanations. And the materialist assumption works really, really well—in detecting and quantifying things that have a material or mechanistic explanation. Materialism has allowed us to predict and control what happens in nature with astonishing success. The jaw-dropping edifice of modern science, from space probes to nanosurgery, is the result. 

But the success has gone to the materialists’ heads. From a fruitful method, materialism becomes an axiom: If science can’t quantify something, it doesn’t exist, and so the subjective, unquantifiable, immaterial “manifest image” of our mental life is proved to be an illusion.

Now, for my part, I find this totally uncontroversial and indeed obvious, but it is remarkable to read an account of the degree to which it has escaped a certain brand of philosopher, who one might expect to have at least considered the matter. I've been making (and earlier hearing from others) this argument for a very long time. I'm simply glad that others have picked up on it as well.

The core problem of materialism is not only that it engages in a sort of question-begging conflation of ontic and noetic categories, but also that it utterly fails to account of human life or experience. Having opted to describe the world according to the very strictest interpretations of their materialist premise, they've managed to destroy any coherent account of the world as something which we perceive and in which we dwell. What's more, they've rendered any means of determinging how to live in such a world utterly impossible. As Ferguson notes:

As a philosophy of everything it is an undeniable drag. As a way of life it would be even worse. Fortunately, materialism is never translated into life as it’s lived. As colleagues and friends, husbands and mothers, wives and fathers, sons and daughters, materialists never put their money where their mouth is. Nobody thinks his daughter is just molecules in motion and nothing but; nobody thinks the Holocaust was evil, but only in a relative, provisional sense. A materialist who lived his life according to his professed convictions—understanding himself to have no moral agency at all, seeing his friends and enemies and family as genetically determined robots—wouldn’t just be a materialist: He’d be a psychopath. Say what you will about Leiter and Weisberg and the workshoppers in the Berkshires. From what I can tell, none of them is a psychopath. Not even close. 

It would be impossible, Ferguson argues, to attempt to live a human life on the basis of the presumptions of metaphysical materialism. He points out that this is a matter of some heated debate among the materialists, some of whom want to embrace the full implications of their philsophical presuppositions (which they treat as conclusions), and others of whom want to perpetrate a version of Plato's "noble lie," allowing the masses to continue to delude themselves by believing in such concepts as "self" and "morality," while allowing the cogniscenti to know better (while, apparently, not behaving any differently).

But this is a fundamental problem with materialism as a philosophy: If it can give us no account of beauty, or truth, or goodness, and allows us no resources that we can use to understand our lives and the world in which we dwell, then it's a poor kind of philosophy at the end of the day. And its failure is rooted precisely in its inability to understand that the epistemic presuppositions of scientific materialism are not the metaphysical premises of the world-in-itself. Whatever the contours of that reality may be, they aren't accessed in any uniquely authoritative way by the tools of materialist analysis, which simply provides one candidate among many for the description of underlying reality.

And, as Ferguson notes, since a thoroughgoing materialism would render us ethically monstrous, even materialists should be comforted by the shaky foundations on which they've built their metaphysical world.

In the Service of God, whose Son was Exceedingly Unwarlike

I was surprised to come across this in a letter written by Kurt Vonnegut:

This attitude toward killing is a matter between my God and me. I do not participate much in organized religion. I have read the Bible a lot. I preach, after a fashion. I write books which express my disgust for people who find it easy and reasonable to kill. 

We say grace at meals, taking turns. Every member of my family has been called upon often to thank God for blessings which have been ours. What Mark is doing now is in the service of God, Whose Son was exceedingly un-warlike. 

This came as some surprise to me, as it expresses a religious perspective that I had not expected to find in Kurt Vonnegut. I've always admired the wit and compassion embodied in his writing, and his attitude towards war and violence is manifest to anyone who has read Slaughterhouse Five.

I guess it serves to demonstrate that there are always dimensions of others' lives that remain hidden from us, until something offers us a glimpse inside.

And so it goes.

The General's Son

Today in Religion Dispatches Ira Chernus posts a review of Miko Peled's The General's Son, a memoir of his life as both an Israeli peace activist and the son of one of Israel's most renowned generals.

Although Peled’s autobiography offers these valuable lessons in history, his main message is the story of his own growing friendships with Palestinian activists struggling for independence. The latter chapters of his book, which detail these friendships, offer a rich three-dimensional picture of Palestinian life.

They’re full of vivid details that stick in the mind precisely because they are such ordinary day-to-day occurrences under military occupation: the mother who cannot go out to get water for her six-year-old daughter to drink, and is told by a soldier to let the kid drink dirty dishwater; the resistance leader who is released after years in Israeli prisons, then picked up the very same day and “detained” without charges for another full year; the little girl walking hand in hand with her sister, when her sister suddenly flies away, killed by an Israeli bullet in the head. The girl’s father has become “known for his dedication to reconciliation,” Miko adds, just like Miko’s brother, whose own daughter was killed, and hundreds of other Israelis and Palestinians in the Bereaved Families Forum.

The whole review is well worth reading, and I'm now hoping to pick up the book at my earliest opportunity.

Theology and Science Fiction

Charlie Jane Anders at io9 has written an article on the big theological questions that should be tackled in science fiction. Fred Clark at Slacktivist offers his perspective:

I would like to see science fiction used to explore what it would mean if Calvinism were true. I’m talking predestination. TULIP. The works.

For those unfamiliar with the acronym, TULIP — outlined indelibly by the great George C. Scott here — stands for total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and perseverance of the saints.

That framework is only sustainable, I think, because our knowledge is incomplete and imperfect. Calvinists know that some few are among the elect, and that Jesus’ atonement is not for all/most. But Calvinists have no way of knowing, with certainty,who the elect might be.

If that knowledge were available — if it were obvious and certain — then Calvinism would not last another generation. It would collapse partly due to ethical incoherence and partly due to ethical horror.

Fred of course has been dealing for years with the pain of inept world-building in his massive review of Left Behind (a task for which there really should be an award of some kind). So the idea of asking how the world would be different if you tweak one dimension of reality is a genuinely interesting prospect.

The best science fiction of course is great because it creates a compelling world in which its characters can dwell. Tweaking it in a theological dimension could yeild some very interesting results.

In Dust and Ashes

Remember this story?

When Chad Holtz lost his old belief in hell, he also lost his job.

The pastor of a rural United Methodist church in North Carolina wrote a note on his Facebook page supporting a new book by Rob Bell, a prominent young evangelical pastor and critic of the traditional view of hell as a place of eternal torment for billions of damned souls.

Two days later, Holtz was told complaints from church members prompted his dismissal from Marrow's Chapel in Henderson.

Via Tony Jones, I learned today that Holtz has, apparently "repented" of his view that God will not necessary torture and torment some, perhaps most, of us for all eternity. Here is an excerpt from his statment of "repentance":

I repent of my past denial of hell or that a person could ever be eternally seperated from a holy God.   I know now that I had no fear of God.  Therefore, I had no knowledge of God (Prov. 1:7).   I was a fool with an MDiv.   I was wrong.

Marrow’s Chapel United Methodist Church was right to ask me to leave.  It was God’s mercy.   I am so sorry for the pain I caused them through that entire ordeal last year and I ask their forgiveness.  I have wept many tears over the last many months, pleading with God that no one would be lost for my prideful and blind confident assertions (1 Tim. 1:7).   Love doesn’t win.  God wins.  And it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of a holy, living God (Heb. 10.31).  I lost sight of this and God, in His mercy, granted me a chance to repent.  

The post in its entirety paints a very tragic picture of a man who was confused and tormented as many of us are, and although I'm sure for him there is a deep connection between his personal struggles and both his repudiation of hell and his recantation of that position, the there is no necessary connection between the two.

For the record, here's what he said at the time he was removed from his position:

"I think justice comes and judgment will happen, but I don't think that means an eternity of torment,

And here's the preview video for Rob Bell's Love Wins which Holtz was supporting:

That position -- that there is judgdment but not eternal torment --  is controversial in some quarters, but it has always struck me as a perfectly cogent and completely Christian position to take. And while I tend to subscribe to the view that one can hope for universal salvation, believe in a God who could offer universal salvation, and pray for the salvation of all, I do not believe that one can declare universal salvation as a matter of fundamental Christian doctrine. Judgement and Grace are interconnected, and the nature of God's judgement may be as mysterious as the nature of God's grace, and we cannot declare on God's behalf in advance what that judgment may be.

Yet Holtz's "repentance" of his willingness to be open to the possibility of universal salvation, irrespective of what follows, and irrespective of the personal demons he may be exorcising in the process of offering this testimony, smacks in a very scary way of the kinds of kinds of confessions and "self-criticisms" that one would be more wont to see in a communist show trial than within the Christian church.

Plantinga, Nagel, and the Heart's Reasons

 

Alvin Plantinga's new book Where the Conflict Really Lies has gotten some attention in the lat few days, since being reviewed sympathetically by Thomas Nagel in the New York Review of Books. Alas, despite the nature of the argument that Plantinga appears to be making, and that Nagel views appreciatively, the response has fallen along predictable lines.

Plantinga's argument, at least as summarized by Nagel and reflected in the clip above, is fairly straightforward: There is not any innate conflict between religion and science, and that properly understood the two disciplines can inform one another. The real culprit, he argues, is a form of metaphysical naturalism and materialism which is, he argues, ultimately self-contradictory.

The main thrust of his argument in the clip above is intriguing. He argues that metaphysical naturalism takes as its principle that evolution produces creatures that are well-adapted to their environment. But if that is so, he claims, then there is no necessary connection between being well-adapted to the environment and having the capacity to form true propositions about the environment. In other words, if it is evolutionarily advantageous for us to view the world in a way that does not reflect its "true" nature, then this is what evolution will select for. If the frog who "believes" that the fly he grabs with his tongue is gift from the Frog God is more effective at catching flies than the one who "believes" that both he and the fly are simply matter in motion, then the evolutionary argument is that the "religious" frog will have a survival advantage.

Plantinga's point, which Nagel appears to endorse, is that there is no way, from within a materialist metaphysical framework, to determine with any certainty that our beliefs about the world do in fact reflect the way that the world really is. This is not to say that we aren't quite well justified in behaving as though we had such certainty, but we can't establish it with certainty in the way that metaphysical materialist might like.

This is important in the ongoing science/religion debate because those scientists who view metaphysical materialism as the only rationally legitimate starting point for conversations about the nature of the world do so on the basis of the claim that their approach to naturalism operates within the context of things that we already "know" to be true. But Plantinga's point is that we only "know" them to be true in the sense that, on materialist terms, we are well-adapted to view the world as though it corresponded to materialist principles. The problem isn't that, as far as we know, they do in fact correspond to those principles. The problem is that we can say that only so far as we know, which is to say, not very far at all. The kind of certainty that the materialist wants to start with is no more available to him or her than the certainty that there is a God who exists. The materialst, just as much as the theist, argues from within an epistemic framework that he or she then works out from, rather than beginning from an epistemic blank slate and establishing unvarnished truths.

All of which is to say, in the hoary language of contemporary philosophy, that all of our knowledge about the world, both religious and scientific, is "theory-laden." We don't begin with a view from nowhere, but rather we begin from a framework, which is not itself subject to rational question. Or at least, to the extent that it is, it is so only to the degree that our questioning serves to establish enough grounds to proceed onto other questions with. Otherwise we'd spend all of our time questioning first principles and never get beyond the state that Descartes finds himself in at the beginnings of his Meditations on First Philosophy, a state of radical doubt from which we cannot escape. Descartes attempts to escape by establishing what he thinks he can know for certain. But these days many philosophers, myself included, would say that we proceed, necessarily, in the absence of any form of definitive certainty.

Now, like this argument or not, it is a philosophically important statement about the nature of both religious and scientific knowledge that calls into question some basic epistemic claims that materialists make in favor of their own positions. This appears to be what Nagel appreciates about the argument, as he notes here:

I say this as someone who cannot imagine believing what he believes. But even those who cannot accept the theist alternative should admit that Plantinga’s criticisms of naturalism are directed at the deepest problem with that view—how it can account for the appearance, through the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry, of conscious beings like ourselves, capable of discovering those laws and understanding the universe that they govern. Defenders of naturalism have not ignored this problem, but I believe that so far, even with the aid of evolutionary theory, they have not proposed a credible solution. Perhaps theism and materialist naturalism are not the only alternatives.

Now what Nagel is saying here is a restatement of Plantinga's point, namely that a naturalistic or materialistic account of the world cannot, in principle, step outside of its metaphysical presuppositions in order to establish with certainty that it is saying something true about the world. The way he phrases it, however, makes it sound as though he is saying that we lack a particular data point or set of data points that, as a result of our lacking it, makes a religious perspective justifyable. At this point, Jerry Coyne jumps in to accuse Nagel of falling for a classic "God-of-the-gaps" arguement:

Nagel has fallen for the God-of-the-gap trap. The credible solution is to do more work to find out how the structure of the mind produces consciousness, and how natural selection might have acted to promote that feature. Does Nagel think that science has used all its resources on this problem, and failed? Does he not know how relatively primitive neurobiology is right now? Nagel has just thrown up his hands and said, “You people haven’t explained it, therefore perhaps Plantinga is right.”  Or there might be “another alternative.” Curious that Nagel doesn’t propose what that alternative might be. I guess he’s purveying a Philosophy of the Gaps.

The problem is that this is not what Plantinga appears to be arguing, nor what Nagel appears to be endorsing. The issue is not that we, as of now, lack a scientific account for how a certain kind of knowledge arises in the world, or that this account can be explained within the parameters of a certain kind of neurobiology. Coyne thinks that this is a question that is subject to scientific resolution. Plantinga and Nagel think it is not -- it is a philosophical quandry rooted in a philosophical position, vis., naturalistic materialism. If Plantinga's point is wrong, then it's wrong on the basis of some flaw in his argument, not on the basis of the development of more sophisticated tools for analysis of the natural world.

In a similar vein, Sean Carroll argues against Plantinga's understanding of the idea of "faith":

So what about faith? Even if your faith is extremely strong in some particular proposition, e.g. that God loves you, it’s important to recognize that there’s a chance you are mistaken. That should be an important part of any respectable road to knowledge. So you are faced with (at least) two alternative ideas: first, that God exists and really does love you and has put that belief into your mind via the road of faith, and second, that God doesn’t exist and that you have just made a mistake.

The problem is that you haven’t given yourself any way to legitimately decide between these two alternatives. Once you say that you have faith, and that it comes directly from God, there is no self-correction mechanism. You can justify essentially any belief at all by claiming that God gave it to you directly, despite any logical or evidence-based arguments to the contrary. This isn’t just nit-picking; it’s precisely what you see in many religious believers. An evidence-based person might reason, “I am becoming skeptical that there exists an all-powerful and all-loving deity, given how much random suffering exists in the world.” But a faith-based person can always think, “I have faith that God exists, so when I see suffering, I need to think of a reason why God would let it happen.”

Now, it may very well be that Plantinga's view of the nature of faith includes such certainty. His statements about the nature of what he calls "properly basic" beliefs might give one grounds for making that argument. But that is by no means a necessity. It is entirely possible to hold a proposition by faith while also being simultaneously completely aware of the possibility that it is wrong. This seems to me to be a mischaracterization of faith based, is is the god-of-the-gaps arguement, on a misunderstanding of the kind of claims that Plantinga is making, and that are supported within the broader field of the philosophy of religion.

The work of "saving the appearances" in a loving and all-powerful God in the face of the reality of suffering can take place within the context of the recognition that one may be wrong, and even within the context of grave doubts about the goodness and power of God. And here again the analogy to the work of science is a propos, because science too operates within the framework of accepted theories that have to find ways to maintain themselves in the face of counter-evidence.

To me the deep connection between science and religion isn't that they ultimately confirm or must support the same picture of reality, but that they are in many ways analogous approaches to thinking about how we know and what we know about the world, which run on parallel tracks with one another. They may view the same phenomena, and come to different conclusions, but they both operate with the context of human attempts to reason about and make sense of the world within which we dwell. And in that regard both are valuable and necessary.

The Singularity is Where?

At Religion Dispatches, Andrew Aghapour discusses Ray Kurzweil's evangelizing on behalf of the emergence of "the singularity" as evocative of new religious movements:

Over the last 15 years a brilliant and charismatic self-made man has been campaigning across the United States, describing a near-future event that will deliver human salvation, immortality, and unlimited creative potential. After this event, he claims, the trappings of earthly life will no longer plague us: we will no longer age or get sick; we will be able to create our own worlds to our exact preferences; and we will no longer be restricted to our current physical forms. 

This man’s vision has become the center of a growing movement that already has tens of thousands of adherents, dozens of shared texts, and its own non-profit school that aims to “assemble, educate, and inspire a cadre of leaders” to one day “address humanity’s grand challenges.”

This might sound like a run-of-the-mill new religious movement, but what makes Ray Kurzweil’s “Singularity” movement unique is that it doesn’t consider itself religious at all. Singularity Theory holds that technology will continue to grow exponentially until “human” and “digital” forms combine seamlessly.

There are of course a great many parallels between singularity theory and religion, but is singluarlarity theory best understood in terms of religious categories? That's unclear to me. It's an interesting experiment in futurism, and certainly applies well to our strange technological age. Whatever light the theory of religion may shed on the topic, the underlying question of our reliance on technology deserves to me carefully explored from religious, moral, and sociological points of view.

Margaret Farley's "Instruction"

The news last week that the Vatican, after six years of study, had issued an "instruction" on Margaret Farley's book on sexual ethics, Just Love , resulted, hilarously, in the book becoming the number one seller in religion and spirituality on Amazon.com. And in case you're interested in buying the book, here's a link to it. I strongly urge you to go get yourself a copy.

Today, Mary Hunt at Religion Dispatches discusses the book and offers some analysis of what the Vatican crackdown on Farley and other women religious means. Here's a snippet of her take:

Dr. Farley’s scholarly work is characterized by a careful, reasoned realism about the human condition. She brings a thorough grounding in the Christian tradition with an emphasis on Catholic thought to her books on commitment, embodiment, respect, and, the most recent and controversial one, on love. Rather than embrace her project and explore, as she does, the range of ways that good people try to love—with an emphasis on the demands of justice in every intimate relationship—the CDF theologians boiled down her opus into five cherry-picked nuggets on sex and marriage that reflect their priorities, not hers. They missed the forest for the trees. Their statement is deeply insulting, not to mention morally suspect, in that such a stellar scholar’s reputation is impugned. As my mother would say, “Consider the source.”

Given the Bishops' record on sexual matters over the last several decades, and the strange battles on which they choose to take their stands, consider the source seems like excellent advice.

EDIT: Let me just add a brief P.S. to note this week's Sightings, published by Martin Martin, which treds similar ground. A relevant passage, referencing the latest issue of Commonweal:

Let me lift out some summary sentences by the writers and editors. “There are compelling reasons within modern states to carve out a protected space for dissenting moral voices. But in the end, the tensions between the laws of the state and the demands of faith cannot be fully resolved.” Amen. We’ve long argued that there is no way to draw lines between “religion and the civil authorities” (James Madison’s term) in ways that can satisfy all legitimate but necessarily conflicting interests. William A. Galston, Michael P. Moreland, Cathleen Kaveny, Douglas Laycock, Mark Silk, and Peter Steinfels, authors whose names will be familiar to anyone who reads “church-state” arguments, have sympathy for the bishops, but find their present arguments of no help. Thus the “bishops cannot base their teachings on opinion polls, but if they intend to argue effectively for religious liberty, they need to acknowledge the difficult ground on which they stand.”