Against the Stream

Anti-War Hatred

Conor Friedersdorf draws our attention back to the days before the beginning of the Iraq war, when there was a massive, global anti-war movement that was essentially over-ridden and ignored by the administration in the rush toward war. Indeed, I can recall President Bush arguing that the protests were irrelevant because he couldn't "govern by opinion polls."

But what's often forgotten retrospectively is how viciously the anti-war movement was mocked and made the target of irrational hatred. I remember it vividly, but Conor performs a valuable service by collecting some of the classic expressions of anti-war hatred from the beginning of the war. Here are a few of the gems he recalls:

Glen Reynolds: "the 'anti-war' movement is objectively on [Saddm's] side, and not neutral ... When your movement is the key tool of a nasty dictator it should give you pause, shouldn't it?"

Andrew Sullivan (who also referred to the anti-war movement as "objectively pro-terrorist"): "Almost the whole academic class, the media elites, the college-educated urbanites, the entertainment industry and so on are now reflexively anti-war. Worse in fact: there is very little argument or debate going on in these sub-populations, simply an assumption that war against Saddam is wrong, and that all right-thinking people agree about this."

Jonah Goldberg: "what's so damning about the knee-jerk opposition of so many anti-war liberals -- it's based in animus, not logic. Almost every week I have to debate some opponent of the war on CNN or radio, and most of the time, I get the sense that their reasons for opposing Bush are echoed in McGrory's sentiments. They don't like war for vague, emotional reasons." As Conor notes: as though being emotionally averse to war was a character flaw.

Brenden O'Neill: "Most of the new antiwar groups express an entirely personal opposition to war, one based more on moral revulsion than effective political opposition ... Protesters voice a personal distaste for violent conflict, rather than organizing a collective stand against it. And when opposing war is about making pompous moral statements about me, myself, and I, you can count me out." Again, as Conor notes, the strange accusation that taking a moral stand against war is some kind of personal failing.

Conor goes on to note several more examples, and remarks that he could easily multiply examples exponentially. But the point is clear: It wasn't enough for those in favor of the war to believe that the anti-war movement was wrong. They went out of their way to vilify the movement as being pro-Saddam, pro-terrorist, pro-American capitulation, anti-Israel, spineless, effete, and cowardly.

And please bear in mind: After all was said and done, the backers of the war were proved to be totally wrong. The anti-war movement was shown to have been completely right, and yet ... as Chris Hayes noted the other night, the rewards have continued to flow for the past decade toward those who backed the war, and the opponents of the war are still treated like patchouli aroma-ed, hackeysacking, drum-circling hippies, despite having had the better arguments at the time, and despite having been vindicated by history.

Tom Friedman, David Brooks, Max Boot, and even the liberal Hawks like Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein who were all in favor of the war have either maintained their standing or gone on to more and more prominent platforms. And in many cases, I don't begrudge them that. But it remains worth asking: Is there any price to be paid for having been so totally wrong? And will an apology ever be forthcoming from many of those -- apart from Andrew Sullivan --  who were wrong at the time and engaged in this kind of vituperation? Doubtful. Being pro-war means never having to say you're sorry.

But for the rest of us, I hope that the lesson of the past decade has been that it is always better to begin from a place of deep skepticism about war in general, and about the necessity for any particular war. While it should be possible to overcome that skepticism in the rarest of circumstances, it should never be easy to do so. And while refusing to support war as a matter of principle in the vast majority of cases may mean that there are places and times where we could fight and perhaps should fight but don't, it is, I think, better than fighting in places and at times when would should not and must not, as was the case in Iraq.

Settlements and the Prospects of Peace

At Politial Animal, Samuel Knight makes a good argument a propos of Secretary of State John Kerry's renewed push for a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

Obama might be right that “there’s no point to negotiations if the expectation is that everything must be figured out in advance,” as the AP reported. But it’s hard for one party to negotiate when its counterpart refuses to stop — even temporarily — actively encroaching on its territory. Unless President Obama was able to privately convince Benjamin Netanyahu to agree to a settlement freeze — recent criticism Obama offered in public has been very mild, that he doesn’t consider the settlements to be “constructive” — and was able to convey that to Abbas, it doesn’t seem likely that the talks will go anywhere. In other words, Kerry is wasting his time.

This is right, I think. And it needs to be said more frequently in the United States, particularly with regard to the situation on the West Bank. Gaza is it's own, mostly separate, issue. But in the West Bank the key problem with the peace process is the contining construction and expansion of the settlements. Knight goes on to quote an Amnesty International official:

The villagers say that the expanding Israeli settlement of Halamish has blocked their access to a nearby source of water, a spring. For holding weekly protests against this settlement, they have suffered greatly at the hands of the Israeli Defense Forces.

Israeli military law imposed in the occupied West Bank places sweeping and arbitrary restrictions on freedom of expression and assembly. This makes any unauthorized peaceful protest by Palestinians a criminal offence. Palestinians engaging in such protests face arrest and excessive force from the Israeli military on a regular basis.

Authorities keep wanting to treat the settlements as though they are extraneous to peace. They're not; they're essential. Until they are removed, no peace is possible.

Murdered Children Deserve to Have a Future

Last week's mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT, has produced a great deal of commentary, particularly around the issues of gun control and mental health care. Those conversations are important, and I am very hopeful that out of this horror may come a saner set of laws pertaining to the sale and possession of firearms and a genuine increase in mental health services for those in need.

Unfortunately, at the same time, it led to some genuinely awful theological yammering from the usual suspects on the religious right. Perhaps the most egregious, or at least the one that was quickest out of the gate with its egregiousness, was Mike Huckabee's statement:

"We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools," Huckabee said on Fox News, discussing the murder spree that took the lives of 20 children and 6 adults in Newtown, CT that morning. "Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?"

Of course, Huckabee was hardly alone. James Dobson very quickly climbed aboard the "massacre as God's judgement" train:

Our country really does seem in complete disarray. I’m not talking politically, I’m not talking about the result of the November 6 election; I am saying that something has gone wrong in America and that we have turned our back on God.

I mean millions of people have decided that either God doesn’t exist, or he’s irrelevant to me. And we have killed 54 million babies and the institution of marriage is right on the verge of a complete redefinition. Believe me, that is going to have consequences, too.

And a lot of these things are happening around us, and somebody is going to get mad at me for saying what I am about to say right now, but I am going to give you my honest opinion: I think we have turned our back on the scripture and on God Almighty, and I think he has allowed judgment to fall upon us. I think that’s what’s going on.

Meanwhile, other pastors and theologians have gotten about the difficult work of trying to make sense of the killing to their congregations and readers. I was particularly gratified by Rachel Held Evens' response to the Huckabee:

You might have heard the rumor from Bryan Fischer, from Mike Hucakbee or a friend on Facebook, saying that God abandoned the children at Sandy Hook because, though children have every right to pray in public schools, those schools cannot sponsor prayer events out of deference to religious freedom. When asked where God was on that awful Friday morning, these Christians have said that God did not show up at Sandy Hook because “God is not allowed in public schools,” because “ we have systematically removed God” from that place. 

Brothers and sisters, let’s call this one for what it is: bullshit.  

God can be wherever God wants to be. God needs no formal invitation. We couldn’t “systematically remove” God if we tried. (Emphasis in original)

Bullshit indeed. As the same time, Diana Butler Bass was the first person I read who had a constructive theological reaction to the killing, which in the Christian tradition relates to the biblical story of Herod's massacre of the innocents:

"A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more." (Jeremiah 31:15/Matthew 2:18)

Tony Jones meanwhile offers some biblical criticism for those who want to downplay the "truth" of that story:

You see, that’s exactly what happens when you dismiss the terrifying texts of the Bible as non-literal myths. YOU SILENCE THE VICTIMS!

It’s true that we don’t know how many infant boys Herod murdered. We don’t know if it was just the sons of a couple families, a village, or a whole territory. But does it matter?!? Innocent infants were killed. They were not myths. They were not fables. They were babies!

For my part, I've been a bit too rattled to write much of anything for several days. I've needed to sit on my reactions and think things through. But Tony's post got me thinking.

I have many religious friends, who are struggling with this tragedy with the resources provided to them by their faiths, and I also have many non-religious friends, who are also struggling to find meaning in senseless death and destruction.

Being the kind of guy I am, I enjoy engaging my non-religious friends (at least the ones who are interested) in conversations about the possible existence or non-existence of God. It is, as they say, all academic. But on an existential level, I think some of my non-religious friends, for whom the non-existence or irrelevance of God is self-evident, find my faith perplexing.

But at the heart of my faith is belief in a God for whom murders like the one in Sandy Hook are not the end of the story, a God who stands in solidarity with the victims of violence, who became incarnate in a human being and suffered every sorrow of human life, and whose death revealed the rotten core of the cycle of violence that sustains our civilization.

The God I worship is one who will not let the murder of innocents be the last word, but who promises to bring justice to the victims and justification to the perpetrator. In the end, despite all of my doubts, I am a Christian because I believe that murdered children deserve a future; and I believe that we are entitled to hope for one on their behalf. Without hope for the victims, there is no hope at all.

This is a theme that Jurgen Moltmann has discussed repeatedly throughout his work, particularly in dialogue with Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin, for both of whom the question of hope in a godless world was a difficult and important question. For Moltmann, ultimatley it is through Christ that God enters into solidarity with the victims, and through his solidarity both redeems their suffering and opens up an eschatological future for them.

Does the suffering which Christ suffers in solidarity with the victims in humanity's history of violence have any significance for the victims themselves? If he were only one victim more, his suffering would have no special meaning or importance. But if God himself is in Christ (II Cor. 5.19), then through his passion Christ brings into the passion history of this world the eternal fellowship of God, and the divine justice and righteousness that creates life; and he identifies God with the victims of violence. But the revearse is then also true; for this means the identification of the victims with God, so that they are put under God's protection and with him are given the rights of which they have been deprived by human beings. Not least, in this way these 'accursed of the earth' have a determining part in the divine judgment of the world: 'As you did it to one of the least of these my bretheren, you did it to me.' (Jurgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Life, 131).

This future remains unrealized in history, which is why the martyrs beneath the throne in Revelation repeatedly beseach God: "How long?"

Of course, we don't know the answer to that question, and no doubt my non-religious friends would suggest that one possible answer is "never." But Christian hope defies that possibility, while still recognizing it as a constant threat. True, the suffering of the innocent may never be redeemed, in which case there is no justice in the world and Qoheleth is right, that all is vanity. But even if true, it remains the case that those murdered children deserve a future, and if nothing else, my faith is testimony to the possibility that, through the redemptive action of a loving God, they may get one. We owe such faith to the victims of violence.

Obama's Niebuhrian Foreign Policy vs. Romney's Neoconservatism

Kevin Mattson offers a good analysis of the core difference in foreign policy philosophy between Obama and Romney in the wake of Monday's debate:

For all their seeming consensus, the two candidates represent two distinct political and intellectual traditions that were carved out during our post-World War II past. Obama’s foreign policy touchstone is the work of the Cold War liberal Reinhold Niebuhr.  In “The Irony of American History” (1952), Niebuhr presented a vision of America’s role in the world tempered by his doctrine of sin and his deep sense of tragedy.  Niebuhr’s central paradox, as his biographer Richard Fox points out, was that “human beings bore responsibility for their actions despite the inevitability of the sins they would commit.”  Holding an ironic disposition could force Americans to battle the spread of communism while rejecting naive optimism in favor of a sense of humility and circumspection. It probably comes as no surprise that Niebuhr became an early critic of America’s entry into Vietnam.  Overextension of American power was just as dangerous to Niebuhr as denying that we had enemies in the world.  Such was the lesson of Niebuhr’s Christian realism.

Obama has ingested his Niebuhr, and it shows in various foreign policy areas.  It animates the so-called “lead from behind” doctrine (a term an Obama adviser used in an interview with the New Yorker) and his continued faith that we must hold open discussions even with enemies like Iran.  It animates his belief that America should not act alone in the world but build alliances – the sort of alliances his predecessor George W. Bush eschewed.  The resultant view of American power is: Yes, America can stand for good abroad but must be cautious and act with a sense of humility.  Obama has channeled his inner-Niebuhr ever since he made ending the Iraq War so central to his foreign policy.

Mitt Romney, on the other hand, projects a dangerous philosophy that America can reshape history to its liking.  Throughout the campaign, Romney has tried to depict Obama as tentative and almost embarrassed by American power.  Last night, he reiterated his bizarre charge that Obama went on an “apology tour” in the Middle East.  Romney last night talked more about “peace” than about war, but in his key statement on foreign policy, an Oct. 8 address at the Virginia Military Institute, he talked up a president’s right and duty “to use America’s great power to shape history,” and cited the need for “confidence in our cause” and “resolve in our might.”

The whole thing is well worth reading.

Pussy Riot and "Orthodox Christianity"

At Martin Marty's "Sightings," Lariza Resnick points to an aspect of the judge's ruling in the Russian Pussy Riot case that I hadn't seen reported elsewhere:

For Pussy Riot, the "punk prayer" aimed to undo the identification between "normal Russian personhood," Putin's regime, and the Orthodox Church. The mutual constitution of a unified "Russian people" and a unified "Orthodox Christianity" reinforce the legitimacy of Putin's sovereignty along with that of his former KGB colleague Patriarch Kirill Gundyayev. On trial, then, was also the possibility of religious contestation—i.e. that one might be critical of a religious tradition and nonetheless speak for it rather than hatefully against it. As one blogger for Women in Theology notes, the language of Judge Marina Syrova's ruling pits Pussy Riot's feminist commitments against the "antifeminism" of Christianity. Judge Syrova explains that "The court does find a religious hatred motive in the actions of the defendants by way of them being feminists who consider men and women to be equal. Now gender equally [sic] is asserted, maintained by the Russian constitution [...] At the same time, Orthodox Christianity, and Catholic Christianity and other denominations do not agree with feminism and their own values are not in line with feminists."

Playing a theologian or a historian, the Judge publicly establishes a uniform "Orthodox Christianity," whose constitutive feature is an opposition to equality between men and women, so much so that any challenge to this inequality constitutes an act of hatred. (emphasis added)

This is, as Resnick points out, really quite remarkable. Even granted that the relationship between church and state, and between Christianity and society is quite different in Russia than in the United States, it's hard to conceive of the idea that a judge would rule as a matter of law that Pussy Riot's protest represented an "act of hatred" solely on the basis of the principle that it advocates feminism! The idea that it is definitionally impossible to be both "feminist" and "orthodox" (in either the large or small "O" sense of the word) is, on theological grounds, patently absurd. So how much more absurd must it be to see that assertion given the force of law, and then used in order to jail someone?

Catholic Progressives and the Democratic Party

In the New York Times Sunday Review Molly Worthen offers up some words of wisdom, of a sort, for the Democratic Party regarding their relationship with the progressive Catholic social tradition:

Allowing Republicans to claim the mantle of Catholicism might cost the Democrats the election. As commentators have noted, Catholics may be the nation’s most numerous swing voters. Over the past few decades, Democratic leaders have alienated voters in one of the party’s historically strong constituencies. Through a series of ideological moves and cultural misjudgments, they have also cut themselves off from a rich tradition of liberal Catholic thought at a time when American culture requires politicians to articulate a mission that inspires religious and secular voters alike.

The Catholicism of Sister Campbell and Mr. Biden is a natural fit for Democrats. It is the faith of social justice activists like Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton, the church whose pope pleaded for relief of the “misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class” in an 1891 encyclical.

Here, I'm wholly agreed. There is a great deal in the Catholic tradition that is far, far more amenable to the Democratic party than the Republican. However, the obvious caveat is then offered:

The Democratic Party has marginalized progressive Catholic intellectuals for the same reason that Rome has: because they habitually challenge sacred doctrines. In the days of John F. Kennedy, American Catholics voted Democrat by default. But things got rocky as Richard M. Nixon capitalized on the resentments of many “white ethnic” (often Catholic) voters in the wake of the civil rights movement. At the same time, Democrats began to take a harder line on abortion. By the late 1980s, they had transformed Roe v. Wade into a non-negotiable symbol of gender equality and lost interest in dialogue with abortion opponents.

Now, for the record: This is nonsense, as anyone who has paid attention to the way the Democratic party has treated the politics of abortion over the past several decades knows. Even among non-Catholic Democrats, abortion has often been treated as an unfortunate though legally necessary reality of modern life, rather than a fundamental right. You can see this reflected in the Clinton rhetoric (which, by the way, I endorse) that abortion should be "safe, legal, and rare." The same senitment was reflected in Obama's position on abortion in the 2008 campaign. Few, if any, prominant Democrats have spoken out strongly in favor of abortion rights over the past twenty years at least.

That said, there is no doubt that Democrats have maintained, rightly in my view, the position that abortion, even if tragic in many cases, and even if morally sub-optimal in other cases, should remain a legal right, and that the decision should be between a woman and her doctor.

Of course, it's understandable that for those Catholics for whom abortion is the central moral issue of American society, this is an unsatisfactory position. But to suggest that Democrats haven't tried, repeatedly, to accomodate anti-abortion position and politicans over the years is to miss both the rhetorical and practical aspects of how Democrats have governed when the've had the opportunity.

Just because anti-abortion Catholics don't win the argument doesn't mean that they're being excluded from the conversation. 

Yet, abortion cannard aside, I think that there is much to agree with in this essay, and the conclusion is also very much on the money:

If the Democratic Party is not listening to liberal Catholics, it is partly because they are not in a position to speak very loudly. They are dodging the sights of a Roman hierarchy more preoccupied with smoking out left-leaning nuns than nurturing critical thinking. “Is liberal Catholicism dead?” Time wondered a few years back. The answer is no: in some regards, liberal Catholic intellectuals are flourishing. They are writing and teaching, running social justice initiatives at the church’s great universities, ensconced in professorships around the Ivy League. Yet a cozy academic subculture can be as isolating as it is empowering. The handful of nationally known Catholic political thinkers who might be called progressive, or at least compassionate and cosmopolitan — like the journalist-scholars Garry Wills and E. J. Dionne Jr., blogmeister Andrew Sullivan, or the feminist nun and blogger Sister Joan Chittister — are far outnumbered by the ranks of prominent Catholic conservatives in the trenches of activism and policy making.

Defending Ayn Rand

Not me! God, no. But Cathy Young has a piece in The Boston Globe defending Rand's philosophy, sort of. Her argument basically boils down to this: If you pretend that Ayn Rand's ideas weren't as repellant as they actually are, then her philosophy is defensible. For example:

Was Rand’s individualism too radical? Yes. Her hostility to the idea of any moral obligation to others led her to argue that, while helping a friend in need is fine, doing so at the expense of something it hurts you to give up is “immoral.” In her fiction, even private charity as a vocation is despised; so, mostly, is family. Rand made little allowance for the fact that some people cannot help themselves through no fault of theirs, or that much individual achievement is enabled by support networks.

Yet great insights can come from flawed thinkers. Rand’s anti-altruism tirades often turn their target into a straw man, but she is right that the knee-jerk habit of treating altruistic goals as noble has aided evil — for instance, blinding well-meaning Westerners to communism’s monstrosity. When pundits alarmed by Rand-style individualism scoff at the “myth” of individual autonomy, we should remember that this “myth” gave us freedom and human rights, and unleashed creative energies that raised humanity’s welfare to once-unthinkable levels. Rand’s work offers a powerful defense of freedom’s moral foundation — and a perceptive analysis of the kinship between “progressive” and “traditionalist” anti-freedom ideologies.

Got it: So Rand made overblown arguments and attacked strawmen, but if you treat her arguments as though they weren't overblown, interpret them in such a way that they don't say what they actually say, and pretend that her strawman arguments were valid, then she's got a point ... of ... some ... kind.

After all, it's not like there were any more reasonable figures, using better arguments and more careful analysis making a more moderate defense of liberal society, individual autonomy, and creativity during the same period, right?

Young concludes thusly:

Rand is best viewed as a brilliant maverick. But there are reasons this woman attracted hordes of followers, influenced many others, and impressed smart people from journalist Mike Wallace to philosopher John Hospers. Those who treat Rand as a liberal bogeyman will forever be blindsided by her appeal.

On the contrary, I suspect that Rand's liberal detractors understand her appeal quite well: She appeals to the inner 15-year old boy in each of us (at least each of us males), who want what we want now, and don't want to be told what to do by anybody. I can truly understand the appeal, and as a 15-year old boy, had my own torrid love affair with Ayn Rand (or at least, her philosophy). But like most 15-year old boys of a philosophical bent, I grew out of it, and found better and deeper resources for my philosophical reflections.

But there will always be a subset of 15-year boys who never quite get over their love for Rand. That's OK, unless that is you become a 42-year old man who is running for Vice President. Then it might be a problem.

From Pastor to Atheist

The New York Times had an interesting and in many ways sad profile of a former pastor in the Bible Belt who, having lost his faith, reoriented his ministry to helping others who also do not believe. Turns out he's had a very hard go of it: 

DeWitt refuses to leave DeRidder, a place where religion, politics and family pride are indivisible. Six months after he was “outed” as an atheist he lost his job and his wife — both, he says, as a direct consequence. Only a handful of his 100-plus relatives from DeRidder still speak to him. When I visited him, in late June, his house was in foreclosure, and he was contemplating moving into his 2007 Chrysler PT Cruiser. This is the kind of environment where godlessness remains a real struggle and raises questions that could ramify across the rest of the country. Is the “new atheism” part of a much broader secularizing trend, like the one that started emptying out the churches in European towns and villages a century ago? Or is it just a ticket out of town?

The saddness of this story is the way in which the community that used to embrace DeWitt has now largely abandoned him because he refuses to conform to their conception of what he should believe. What's more, he's public about it, and so he's made a paraiah. That is deeply sad, and reflects poorly on the Christianity from which DeWitt seems to have escaped.

Of course, as the story notes, if he had simply stayed in the closet regarding his unbelief, he probably could have continued to live a very comfortable life in DeRidder. But his conscience drove him to speak out.

For my part, I've offered plenty of criticism of the neo-atheists, and I can see some of the same problems I have with them in the way DeWitt presents himself in the article. Yet, I can't comprehend a Christianity that would so forcefully expell someone from their community, issue death threats, and basically make his life miserable for the sake of enforcing their purported orthodoxy. As much as I might disagree with DeWitt on the theological merits, I have great respect for his willingness to take the heat for his principles.

And, once more, I find myself as a Christian returning to the truth that the biggest problem that Christianity faces in the world today is the quality of Christian it's saddled with (including me).

God and the God Particle

The big science news over the last several days has been the discovery of the Higgs Boson, or at least something that has many of the Characteristics of the Higgs Boson (sometimes called the "God particle," to the annoyance of many scientists and theologians!).

So, if you're not a physicist, the first question you may be asking yourself at this point is "what's a Higgs Boson?" Perhaps this will help:

 

However, it should be noted that, whatever it is that's been discovered at CERN, there are still many, many unanswered questions that remain in light of this discovery. And even the question of what's been discovered is very much up in the air:

If you were to say July 4, 2012 was the day the Higgs boson was officially discovered, you wouldn't really be wrong. As CERN Director General Rolf Heuer put it, "As a layman, I think we have it." That's about as unequivocal a statement as you're likely to get from CERN, which is understandably conservative when it comes to announcing possible physics-shattering discoveries. But then, there's a second half to Heuer's quote, one that probably won't get as much attention: "But as a scientist, I have to say, 'What do we have?'" That's a huge question, one that won't be answered today, maybe not this year. Today's announcement is just the beginning of the Higgs story, definitely not the end. (emphasis added)

That hasn't stopped a great deal of speculation on the implications of the Higgs Boson for religion, which is I suppose inevitable when you dub something "The God Particle." I think there is some suggestion that, once the Higgs has been discovered the last nail in the coffin of religion as a rational way of understanding the world will have been placed, but really there is no reason to believe that this is the case.

The central problem from my perspective is in the poor understanding that most people have of what is being discussed when the word "God" is deployed. As Frank Schaeffer noted in the video I posted yesterday, the deepest wells of the theistic tradition, at least in the Christian framework, understand that whatever we may say about God, we are confronted with a reality that is beyond our capacity to comprehend in any kind of adequate way. So any statement about the divine is an attempt to understand an impenetrable mystery.

Now, I think many people, both of a religious and an anti-religious persuasion, think that this is a cop-out. I can remember an old George Carlin routine where he complained that, whenver he asked the local priest some deep theological question about God, or the incarnation, or the Trinity, he'd be met with "It's a mystery!" Which seems like a wholly inadequate answer when coming from someone who's supposed to be in on the mysteries. And of course, many religious people seem to think that believing in something innately mysterious is leaving too many questions about their own state of salvation up for grabs, and so they prefer their religion to come prepackaged with all of the answers included.

But this is a misunderstanding of what is meant by the word "mystery" here. A mystery isn't a puzzle of which we haven't put the pieces together yet, and it's not simply anothe way of saying "I don't know, quit asking so many questions." To say that something is a mystery in the religious sense is to say that we are confronted with a dimension of existence that is in principle beyond our capacity to totally comprehend. We may catch a glimpse of it out of the corner of our eye, or we may come to understand it partially in terms that make some sense to us, but we never get the whole picture, or really much more than the tiniest fragment that can fit into our consciousness. This is a very different thing than simply not knowing something. As in the novel Flatland, it is as though we were a two-dimensional figure trying to explain the concept of three-dimensions to a two-dimensional world.

But as regards the Higgs and God, it should be said that, however much the Higgs winds up being able to tell us about the physical characteristics of the world around us, no one should realistically believe that it will provide all answers or dispell all mysteries. And from a theological perspective, it ought to be made clear that there is no knowledge of the natural world that can stand, in itself as a refutation of the existence of a transcendent and omnipotent God.

This is what I mean when I say we need to use the word "God" properly in this context. Properly understood, God in the theistic tradition (for the most part, there are certainly some exceptions, such as some brands of process thought) is not a being within the universe. Rather, God, understood as creator, is understood to be a) a necessary being and b) therefore necessarily existing outside of the universe of created things. By "necessary being" here, I mean a being whose existence is not contingent or dependent on any other thing. All things within the universe -- from trees to people to duckbilled platypuses to the Higgs boson -- are contingent and dependent. In other words, it is possible for them to not exist. But God refers to a being whose existence is not contingent and (if you buy Anselm's ontological argument) is not capable of not being.

What this means is that any new knowledge about the nature of the universe of created things, while it will increase the overall fund of human knowledge about the world, and thereby glorify God, cannot give us new insight in its own right about the nature and character of God.

This is not to say that scientific discoveries cannot raise genuine questions about the nature and character of God as implications of their findings. Thus, darwinian evolution raises genuine questions about God's goodness and omnipotence, if in fact nature is "red in tooth and claw" and evolution is an undirected process. Similarly, our knowledge about the size and age of the universe raises substantial questions about divine providence and the place of human beings in God's plan. But in themselves, these issues do not serve as refutations of any particular theological principle, though they do raise substantial theological questions that theologians ought to be both willing and eager to explore as a part of their work.

From that perspective then, the Higgs offers a wealth of new material for theologians to consider, and no doubt as we learn more about how it functions and what we can learn about the nature of the world through our study of it, it will continue to offer new challenges for theologians and philosophers, as well as physicists and cosmologists.

Who To Argue With

Sarah Posner has an article in today's Religion Dispatches about the debate taking place at The National Review between David Yerushalmi, an advocate of "anti-Shariah" laws, and conservatives who believe that this is bad policy for any number of reasons. The article is worth reading for a sense of the nature of this particular, very strange debate.

But I was struck by this passage in particular:

As Matt Duss notes, Yerushalmi has lamented the absence of "'a discussion of Islam as an evil religion, or of blacks as the most murderous of peoples (at least in New York City), or of illegal immigrants as deserving of no rights.' He also wrote that the American founders were on to something when they limited the vote to white men. 'There is a reason the founding fathers did not give women or black slaves the right to vote.'" (emphasis added) Yet Yerushalmi brought his fear-mongering about shari'ah to Capitol Hill staffers in 2010,claiming it threatened the Constitution. 

Once upon a time, I thought that there was intellectual integrity to being willing to debate all comers, to take on in rational discourse anyone who was interested in the discussion. The amount of time wasted in my mid-20s to the kind of internet flame wars that used to set AOL ablaze once upon a time causes me to blush to this day (and truth be told, I am still horribly susceptible to being drawn into those kinds of fights).

But over time, I've begun to realize that not everyone or every idea is worthy of such engagement. Trying to "debate" the Westborough Baptist Church on homosexuality is pointless. Trying to debate the Ku Klux Klan on race is fruitless. At the end of the day, some opponents just aren't worthy of debate.

Which raises the question to me: Why does someone who subscribes to views as vile as Yerushalmi's deserve a forum in a widely respected conservative journal to peddle garbage? It's not that I have any particular brief on behalf of The National Review, but the fact that a bigot of Yerushalmi's stature isn't driven from the realm of rational discourse and given a soap box to occupy in Central Park is evidence of the moral bankruptcy of much of what passes for conservative discourse today.

There were many things to dislike intensely about William F. Buckley, but one thing he did right was to drive the John Birch conspiracists out of the conservative movement in the 1950s. They weren't worthy of engagement. In similar vein, bigotry of the kind endorsed by Yerushalmi, and often celebrated today on the right, even by elected officials and prominant commentators, should be driven from the discourse, so that some kind of real engagement about the issues confronting the world can take place, both within conservative circles, and between conservatives and liberals.