Last summer I had the pleasure of writing my first article for Strange Notions, on the topic of bodily resurrection. Some time later, I came across a discussion group on another blog that happened to be focused on my article! Naturally intrigued, I took a few minutes to look around and read what the readers there had to say. It was nothing good. Among the snarky remarks was this gem: "I had fish for lunch. I wonder which of us is going to get resurrected from our (now shared) atoms."

Today I'd like to address that topic. I mentioned it vaguely in my original article, when I noted that the bodies of the dry bones Ezekiel saw in his dream had been picked clean by the carrion birds, and that a human body's atoms might be dispersed by earthquakes, dynamite, or a hungry bears. But the question is a really intriguing one, and I think trying to answer it presents a rather daunting challenge. What follows is my attempt.

Recycle, Reuse, Reduce?

The problem here basically involves recycling. Dead bodies not only decompose but "spring to life" again in other forms. They are not raised up in their former forms, but their components are inevitably integrated into new living systems. Compost in the garden. A dead antelope feeding a lion (a lion whose body is composed, in part, of antelope meat). Imagine first century Romans feeding Christians to wild boars, and then feasting on the pigs themselves in a post-persecution barbecue. Thanks to the miracle of digestion, we could imagine someone's body becoming part of a pig's body, and then in turn becoming part of another person's body. As the particles composing the former pass on to nourish the latter, resurrection suddenly becomes a very messy business indeed.

My last article, again, suggested that quantum entanglement might (possibly) allow a continuity of experience to be preserved, maintaining one's identity beyond death and decomposition. But "recycling" makes things trickier; if the experiences of one body's parts were to become integrated into the experiences of some other body's parts, whose identity will be preserved when the day of resurrection comes?

Canadian Cannibals

In the eighteenth century Voltaire, cheeky as always, gleefully described such a problem when he proposed the following situation. He asked that we imagine a French soldier who has traveled to Quebec and finds himself lost in the woods far away from his station. Starving, he does the unthinkable: he kills and eats a native Iroquois whom he meets in the forest. One man has eaten another, but the problem is even greater than we realize. For Voltaire goes on to tell us, “The Iroquois had fed on Jesuits for two or three months, and a great part of his body [i.e., the Iroquois's body] had become Jesuit” (qtd. in Morley, 1901/2012, 5.2).

Because the Iroquois in Voltaire's example had been eating missionaries for such a long time, we can imagine our French soldier to have a body composed (in part) of the body of an Iroquois, whose own body had been composed (much more substantially) of Jesuit bodies (several of them!). Even if entanglement somehow preserves the subjective experiences of the dead Iroquois within the body of the French soldier (might we imagine two souls in one body?), what about the experiences and identities of those Jesuits whom the Iroquois had been eating? Are we to say that all these men live on in the French soldier’s body?

What a confusing mess!

An Old Question

But it turns out Voltaire’s question, as well as the one asked by the blog commentator whom I mentioned at the beginning, is nothing new. About 1,300 years before Voltaire wrote about his starving soldier, the question of "which is who?" had already been asked by St. Augustine in The City of God. Augustine suggested that if human flesh were ever eaten (directly via cannibalism or indirectly by an animal eaten by another human being), then that flesh would on the Day of Resurrection, “be restored to the man in whom it became human flesh” (Bk. XXII, Ch. 20). That is, whoever had it first will have it restored to him or herself when all the dead are raised up.

Not simply dismissing the question there, Augustine then goes on. He supposes that any recycled flesh “must be looked upon as borrowed by the other person, and, like a pecuniary loan, must be restored to the lender” (Ibid.). It is "owed" to him or her, in that case, and must be given back on the last day.

If this is correct, then even someone who was eaten, rather than buried, remains the true “owner” of the particles which had once composed his or her body!

A Closer Look

A second response to Voltaire comes from the seventeenth century, just twenty years before Voltaire’s birth.  In 1674, when the English scholar Humphrey Hody considered this recycling problem himself, he had another question to ask. How much of a living body actually becomes the body of the thing that eats it? According to Hody, the percentage of a body actually capable of nourishing the body of a cannibal (or other carnivore like a lion or bear) is negligible. Most of the structure comprising a human body is either inedible, or else not very nourishing. One cannot digest bones or tendons, for example, and these would not be part of the cannibal's meal even if he (or she!) were especially hungry. And if indeed none of these parts were eaten, even if by cannibals, then there is very little chance that one could ever have a body comprised entirely of someone else's body.

The dead may rest in peace, wherever their bits might be scattered.

Hody goes on to point out that there are a lot of examples of “indirect” cannibalism:  “from the bodies," he says, "of the dead springs up grass, this when eaten by the ox, is turned into flesh; this we eat, and the flesh of the ox becomes ours” (qtd. Kaufman, 2008, p. 202). Yet even when this happens, a very tiny bit of what was once "cow" (or "ox" ... only about 2% of the flesh that is actually eaten) makes it into the body of the person who eats it. Even if we were to imagine a carnivorous cow who was feeding directly on human bodies, this would make little difference. And especially since I have never heard of a carnivorous cow to begin with, I rest assured that little of such a cow would be formerly human, thus giving me little reason to worry about “second hand cannibalism” as preventing the bodies of the dead from being raised up.

Bringing the scattered parts back together is one thing (and a tall order for the skeptical!), but at least as far as the recycling problem is concerned, it would appear that Voltaire was exaggerating. When it comes to eternal life, we have nothing to fear from cannibals.

Sources

Augustine, The City of God from Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 2. Philip Schaff, ed., M. Dods, trans. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co. Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight., First edition published in 1887.

Kaufman, D. 2008 “The Resurrection of the Same Body and the Ontological Status of Organisms: What Locke Should Have (and Could Have) Told Stillingfleet” in Contemporary Perspectives on Early Modern Philosophy., P. Hoffman, et al., ed. Peterborough: Broadview Press.

Morley, J. 2014. The Works of Voltaire, a Contemporary Version. Adelaide: The University of Adelaide Library. First published 1901.
 
 
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As a young undergraduate at Florida State University, studying mathematics and engineering, I had no idea that one of the world's leading philosophers of science worked just a couple buildings away. Had I known about Dr. Michael Ruse then, I would have jumped at the chance to meet him. He's since become one of my favorite atheist writers, displaying a sharp mind and a good will, free of needless polemics. (He's also not afraid to tattoo extinct marine arthropods on his arm if dared.)

This past December we finally had the chance to meet. The occasion was a special colloquium on contemporary atheism, hosted by Dr. Ruse in Tallahassee. I joined fellow Strange Notions contributor Dr. Stephen Bullivant and several other philosophers and theologians to discuss current research on unbelief. The event also featured the launch of The Oxford Handbook of Atheism, the definitive tome co-edited by Stephen and Dr. Ruse.

As a philosopher, Dr. Ruse specializes in the philosophy of biology and is well known for his work on the relationship between science and religion, the creation-evolution controversy, and the demarcation problem in science. He was born in England, studied at the University of Bristol (1962), attained his master's degree at McMaster University (1964), and then returned to the University of Bristol for his Ph.D. (1970).

Dr. Ruse graciously agreed to answer a few questions about his experiences with faith, the debate between evolution and religion, and his favorite theologians.
 

Q: You once testified in court, under oath, that "I am not an expert on my own religious opinions." What did you mean by that?

Dr. Ruse: Basically, what I meant was that I would be very uncomfortable being pinned down to one clear statement about my own religious beliefs. It is certainly true that I do not accept Jesus as the son of God, and that, indeed, I have great deal of trouble with the whole notion of the Christian God. I think the Christian God is an uncomfortable amalgam of Jewish and Greek thought and does not withstand careful scrutiny. It does not stand up too well. I find the notion of necessary existence, which is an essential part of the Christian God, to be incoherent. I’m also very troubled by the problem of evil.

However, whether this means that I don’t believe in anything at all is something that puzzled me when I was in court and still puzzles me some 30 years later. I am inclined therefore say that existence, including humans and their consciousness, is something of a mystery. I don’t think this necessarily means that I’m going to enjoy eternal bliss. In fact, I don’t know what any of it means.

So in that sense, I’m not an expert on my own opinion. I suppose you could call me an agnostic or skeptic, who is atheistic about traditional religions. But I would not want to go much further than that.

Q: You were raised a Quaker, and often speak fondly of how that tradition influenced you. Some high-profile atheists today suggest that any religious upbringing is a form of child abuse. How does that jive with your experience?

Dr. Ruse: As I explained recently in a piece I wrote for the online journal Aeon, I feel very strongly that my Quaker background was incredibly important in forming my personality. I was shown love and attention by my parents and their coreligionists that has lasted me all of my life. In particular, I have been taught never to accept anything just because somebody told me.  I must always try to puzzle things out for myself.

At the same time I take very seriously the Quaker belief that God is in every person, interpreting this of course in a secular fashion. It has guided me through my life as a teacher, making me realize that even when I have not been particularly drawn towards certain students, nevertheless it is my obligation to treat them as being worthy of attention, no less than anyone else.

So clearly I don’t think all religious upbringing is a form of child abuse. At the same time I think sometimes it can be this.  To use an analogy, children who were brought up during the Nazi era were filled with views on Jews that I think makes this training akin to child abuse, just as much as if they had been beaten.  Analogously, I am inclined to think some views that children are taught in the name of religion are quite morally troublesome. I would include, for instance, views that homosexuality is in some sense evil, or if not evil in itself that the acts of homosexuals are evil. It seems to me that teaching this to a child is getting close to abuse. So yes I can think of some forms of religious training or indoctrination as forms of child abuse.

Q: One of your best known books is titled Can a Darwinian be a Christian? For those who haven't read it, what's your short answer to that question?

Dr. Ruse: As I say in my book, I think the Darwinian can be a Christian, but that it’s not easy. However, I also say that the more important things in life are never easy! I think one can find ways to reconcile Darwinism with Christian claims about Original Sin, the problem of evil, free will, and similar issues.

I think one of the biggest problems is the appearance of humans here on the Earth. I’m not sure that I solved the problem in my book. It seems to me that Christians have to accept that the appearance of humans was not pure chance, but that this was intended by God.  However I see a radical indeterminacy in evolutionary thinking and I am not sure that we can guarantee the appearance of any organism, including humans. I think now I would want to try to solve the problem by invoking the notion of a multiverse. Humans would eventually have evolved, if not in our universe then in some other.  Remember, God is outside space and time. So it is not as if he is waiting for any of this to happen.  Obviously this is all very speculative. As I said, I don’t think it is easy to reconcile Darwinism and Christianity.

I don’t think however that the only arguments pertinent to the truth of the Christian faith are those based on science. I think philosophy and theology also have a role.  I argue that when these are applied to Christianity, it can be seen that the overall position is not tenable.

An example of where I would see philosophy criticizing Christianity would be over the already-mentioned issue of necessary existence. I don’t think the idea of necessary existence makes sense. Hence, since it is so important for Christianity, I think Christianity has to be false. Notice, however, that an argument against the notion of necessary existence is not a scientific argument, but a philosophical argument. That is why I say that even if Christianity can be reconciled with science, it does not follow that Christianity is true.

Q: Many Christian theologians claim you as their favorite atheist philosopher. Who is your favorite Christian theologian?

Dr. Ruse: Well that’s a very big question. I think that if you are going to dig back in history, I’d probably want to put St. Augustine up top as my favorite theologian. I do have, however, a great respect for St Anselm. I only exclude St. Thomas Aquinas from this list because, to be honest, I don’t know enough about his writings to make a full judgment. Notice that I’m a philosopher and not a theologian so I’m not really at fault here.

If we take Christian theology closer to the present than I would certainly say I have great admiration for the English theologian of the 19^th century, John Henry Newman. I think his ideas about the gradual revealing of Christianity is a most valuable tool of understanding. If you were to ask me about contemporary theologians, I was personally fond of Langdon Gilkey and much in sympathy with the kind of science-and-religion-separate view that he endorsed, often known as neo-orthodoxy.

Amongst living theologians, I am proud to call John Haught (the Catholic theologian, recently retired from Georgetown University) a good friend. I don’t think I endorse his evolutionary view of theology, influenced as he has been by Teilhard de Chardin and perhaps earlier by Alfred North Whitehead. But as an individual I like John a great deal and I find altogether admirable his determined effort to integrate evolutionary thinking into Christian theology.

Another theologian of today, of whom I am personally fond and for whom I have great admiration, is John Schneider, who used to teach at Calvin College. He lost his job for suggesting that Adam and Eve are not true and that therefore we need to reinterpret or rethink the Augustinian position on Original Sin. I think John is right about the nonexistence of Adam and Eve and I greatly admire his moral courage in asserting this, even to the point where he was dismissed from Calvin College.

Q: Let's talk about The Oxford Handbook of Atheism, which you co-edited with Strange Notions contributor Dr. Stephen Bullivant. The book is a 46-chapter, 750+ page compendium of contemporary scholarship on all kinds of topics relating to unbelief. How did the book come about?

Dr. Ruse: The Oxford Handbook of Atheism is easy to explain. I was approached by Stephen Bullivant, who was looking for a co-editor, perhaps one who was rather more established than he and who did not share his deep Christian faith. I don’t know how Stephen feels about me, but I can say that, from my perspective, it was a truly wonderful experience working with him. Stephen was an ideal editor, he knew far more about the topic than I, and we always worked harmoniously together. He did the bulk of the work, but I hope Stephen would agree that I did my share as and when required. I simply could not have done this book on my own, and I feel very privileged to have been allowed to work alongside Stephen on this project.

Q: You're very well-informed about the history and philosophy of atheism, but what new insights did you learn while compiling the Handbook?

Dr. Ruse: I’m not sure whether the real insights came from compiling the Handbook alone or more from a subsequent project that I have just completed, namely writing a single-author work for Oxford University Press entitled Atheism: What Everyone Needs to Know. (This is part of a general series “what everyone needs to know.”)

The thing which came through to me most strongly was that the atheism debate is not just a matter of epistemology, that is to say of factually right and wrong. It is and always has been an intensely moral issue. People who argue for or against atheism are deeply committed to the moral worth of what they claim. Obviously this comes through with religious believers defending their faith against atheism. But it’s equally true of atheists. One sees this most clearly in the writings of the New Atheists. A work like The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins as much a moral sermon as anything one might get from Jonathan Edwards. After all, anyone who says Christian education is child abuse is hardly stating brute empirical facts.

So I would say, as I bring this interview to an end, it is the moral dimension to the debate about atheism which strikes me most forcibly. I can also say, quite honestly, that before I started in on the Oxford Handbook and on the book I have subsequently written, I had no idea any of this would be so. I always say that the first person for whom I write is myself and never has this been truer than in the case of my writings and editing on and around the topic of atheism.
 
 
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One of the most common observations made by opponents of religion is that we don't need God in order to have a coherent and integral morality. Atheists and agnostics are extremely sensitive to the charge that the rejection of God will conduce automatically to moral chaos. Consequently, they argue that a robust sense of ethics can be grounded in the consensus of the human community over time or in the intuitions and sensibilities of decent people.

​What I would like to do is lay out, in very brief compass, the Catholic understanding of the relationship between morality and the existence of God and to show, thereby, why it is indispensably important for a society that wishes to maintain its moral integrity to maintain, at the same time, a vibrant belief in God.

​Why do we do the things that we do? What motivates us ethically? Right now, I am typing words on my keyboard. Why am I doing that? Well, I want to finish my weekly column. Why do I want to do that? I want to communicate the truth as I see it to an audience who might benefit from it. Why would I want that? Well, I'm convinced that the truth is good in itself. Do you see what we've uncovered by this simple exercise? By searching out the motivation for the act of typing words, we have come to a basic or fundamental good, a value that is worthwhile for its own sake. My acts of typing, writing, and communicating are subordinate, finally, to the intrinsic value of the truth. Take another example.

Just before composing that last sentence, I took a swig of water from a plastic bottle on my desk. Why did I do that? Well, I was thirsty and wanted to slake my thirst. But why did I want to do that? Hydrating my system is healthy. Why is health important? Because it sustains my life. Why is life worth pursuing? Well, because life is good in itself. Once more, this analysis of desire has revealed a basic or irreducible good. Catholic moral philosophy recognizes, besides truth and life, other basic values, including friendship, justice, and beauty, and it sees them as the structuring elements of the moral life.

​When Pope Benedict XVI complained about a "dictatorship of relativism" and when Catholic philosophers worry over the triumph of the subjective in our culture, they are expressing their concerns that these irreducible values have been forgotten or occluded. In her great meditations on the sovereignty of the good, the Irish philosopher Iris Murdoch strenuously insists that the authentic good legitimately imposes itself on the human will and is not a creation of that will. At the limit, contemporary subjectivism apotheosizes the will so that it becomes the source of value, but this puffing up of our freedom is actually ruinous, for it prevents the appropriation of the objective values that will truly benefit us.

This "basic goods" theory also grounds the keen Catholic sense that there are certain acts which are intrinsically evil—that is, wrong no matter the circumstances of the act or the motivations of the agent. Slavery, the sexual abuse of children, adultery, racism, murder, etc. are intrinsically evil precisely because they involve direct attacks on basic goods. The moment we unmoor a moral system from these objective values, no act can be designated as intrinsically evil and from that state of affairs moral chaos follows.

​So far we have determined the objectivity of the ethical enterprise, but how does God figure into the system? Couldn't an honest secularist hold to objective moral goods but not hold to God's existence? Let's return to our analysis of the will in action. As we saw, the will is motivated, even in its simplest moves, by some sense, perhaps inchoate, of a moral value: truth, life, beauty, justice, etc. But having achieved some worldly good -- say of writing this column, or slaking a thirst, or educating a child -- the will is only incompletely satisfied. In point of fact, the achievement of some finite good tends to spur the will to want more of that good.

Every scientist or philosopher knows that the answering of one question tends to open a hundred new ones; every social activist knows that righting one wrong awakens a desire to right a hundred more. Indeed, no achievement of truth, justice, life, or beauty in this world can satisfy the will, for the will is ordered to each of those goods in its properly unconditioned form. As Bernard Lonergan said, "the mind wants to know everything about everything." And as St. Augustine said, "Lord, you have made us for yourself; therefore our heart is restless until it rests in thee." You've noticed that I've slipped God somewhat slyly into the discussion! But I haven't done so illegitimately, for in the Catholic philosophical tradition, "God" is the name that we give to absolute or unconditioned goodness, justice, truth, and life.

​Now we can see the relationship between God and the basic goods that ground the moral life: the latter are reflections of and participations in the former. As C.S. Lewis points out in Mere Christianity, the moral absolutes are, therefore, signposts of God. And this is precisely why the negation of God leads by a short route to the negation of moral absolutes and finally to a crass subjectivism.

Removing God is tantamount to removing the ground for the basic goods, and once the basic goods have been eliminated, all that is left is the self-legislating and self-creating will. Thus, we should be wary indeed when atheists and agnostics blithely suggest that morality can endure apart from God. Much truer is Dostoyevsky's observation that once God is removed, anything is permissible.
 
 
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In the course of a discussion on my personal blog about the existence of God and of the miraculous, an unbelieving reader (who strikes me as open to reasonable discussion) wrote me to say:

"All I’m saying is that people everywhere demonstrate a powerful desire to believe that there is intervention in the material universe from outside the material universe."

Except that’s not true.  Lots of people also demonstrate a powerful desire to believe there is no intervention in the material universe.  Even many people who believe in some sort of God do this, because they are deists.

The notion that the existence of God provides nothing but unalloyed consolation—and does not also give reason to have deep fear—entirely overlooks the doctrine of judgment in this life and of hell in the next.  It’s just as easy and plausible to say that atheism is the wish fulfillment fantasy.  It’s also just as useless in getting at the question of whether God exists.  Instead of cheap psychoanalysis of philosophical opponents, I think the smarter approach is to look at the philosophical arguments for the existence of God.

"The problem is, even with that open mind, one still has to continue living a life based on some assumptions about the nature of the universe. Do you stake everything on the possibility it was a god, or do you not? The gaps have to be filled with something."

Actually, here’s the funny thing.  Although Catholic thinkers like Thomas Aquinas (and I) certainly accept the reality of miracles, Thomas doesn’t argue for the existence of God from the gaps.  He doesn’t say, “Here’s some exception to the course of nature (like the Resurrection) or some natural process I can’t explain, therefore God.”  He doesn’t argue for the existence of God from the exceptions to the rules.  Instead, he argues from the Rules.  In short, Thomas doesn’t say, “I don’t know how lightning works, so God.”  He says, “Why are there rules?  Why is there anything?  How is it that reality is intelligible at all?”

Notably, Paul does the same thing.  He doesn't say, "I can't explain the Resurrection, so there must be a God."  He argues for the existence of God just as Thomas does, from the ordinary course of nature, not from the extraordinary exceptions of miracles or inexplicable natural phenomena.  Just like Thomas and the Church, Paul doesn't appeal to amazing esoteric events vouchsafed to the few who see Lazarus raised, but to the many who saw him born.  It is daily bread and the underlying laws of time, space, matter and energy that hold it in being—not multiplied loaves and fishes—that Paul says cannot explain itself.  And it is our refusal to consider that which Paul regards as blameworthy, not for mystics who close their eyes to the Miracles of the Sun, but for ordinary people close their eyes to the implications of broad daylight:

"For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of men who by their wickedness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made." (Romans 1:18-20)

The temptation of our age is to say, “Sure.  We can’t answer those questions yet.  But with sufficient advances in science we will someday.”

But no conceivable advance in science will ever answer the questions, “Why are there rules?  Why is there anything?  How is it that reality is intelligible at all?” Those questions are, by their very nature, not “scientific” questions.  Science (as moderns mean it) is the measurement of the metric properties of time, space, matter and energy.  All such science presupposes a metaphysic that is essentially theistic.  That is, it begins with the assumption that the universe has rules intelligible to our minds. You can no more “scientifically” get behind those rules to their source than you can prove that there is no such thing as proof.

But, of course, when you start talking a universe that is fundamentally ordered by rules and of our mysterious power to intellect (read between the lines) of those rules, you inexorably start talking as though the universe is the creation of Mind.  Thomas says, “Yes, because it and we are the product of Mind.”  If you don’t make that presupposition, you can’t do science at all since there is no reason—there can be no reason—to suppose that the universe and your mind correspond to Reason.

Some people think they can get around that by positing a multiverse in which our universe is part of some larger universe that give it its rules and being.  But, of course, that just pushes the question back: Why is there a multiverse? Why is there anything?  And why is the Everything we see contingent and dependent on something else?  How do beings that are always totally contingent (dependent on something else) come into existence?

Sooner or later that points us back to something that is not merely a being but is Being itself: something that simply Is. All created contingent beings participate in and are sustained by the God who is Being.  As Mike Flynn has pointed out, if such self-existent Being could talk, it would say, "I AM."  And by a strange coincidence, that is exactly how the God of some seriously philosophically-unsophisticated semitic Bronze Age shepherds introduced himself to them in Exodus 3.

Now, such a God can, if he chooses, operate outside the normal laws of nature he has created.  And the evidence does, indeed, suggest that he has done so at times.  But Thomas does not look to such evidence to demonstrate God’s existence.  On the contrary, Thomas takes a remarkably evolutionary view of creation:

"Nature is nothing but the plan of some art, namely a divine one, put into things themselves, by which those things move towards a concrete end: as if the man who builds up a ship could give to the pieces of wood that they could move by themselves to produce the form of the ship."

—Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Physics II.8, lecture 14, no. 268

In that, he is following Augustine who also sees creation, not as a series of deus ex machina interferences in nature from a God who tinkers, but as a continuous unfolding of properties invested in nature from the start:

"It is therefore causally that Scripture has said that earth brought forth the crops and trees, in the sense that it received the power of bringing them forth.  In the earth from the beginning, in what I might call the roots of time, God created what was to be in times to come."  [Emph. added]

On the literal meanings of Genesis, Book V Ch. 4:11

So there are really two questions here.  The first—Does God exist?—can be and has been answered by natural reason and does not require special revelation or faith.  Aristotle was able to work it out and lots of others have done so apart from the Christian revelation.

The question of whether that God does miracles is separate and requires faith and openness to revelation.  Like all points of supernatural revelation, it cannot be proven, but all arguments against it can be disproven.
 
 
Originally posted at National Catholic Register. Used with author's permission.
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The appearance of an art house film on the philosopher Hannah Arendt has sparked renewed interest in an old controversy.

In 1961, Arendt went to Jerusalem as a correspondent for the New Yorker magazine to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the notorious Nazi colonel accused of masterminding the transportation of millions of Jews to the death camps. Arendt was herself a Jew who had managed to escape from Nazi Germany and who had been, years before, something of an ardent Zionist. But she had since grown suspicious of the Israeli state, seeing it as un-self-critical and indifferent to the legitimate concerns of the Palestinians. I think it is fair to say, therefore, that she came to the trial with a complicated set of assumptions and a good deal of conflicting feelings.

As the trial unfolded, Arendt was massively put off by what she saw as the grandstanding of the prosecutors. Their irresponsible, even clownish, antics were, she concluded, the public face of the Israeli state, which had determined to make of the Eichmann proceedings a show trial. But what struck her most of all was Eichmann himself. Sequestered in a glass box for his own protection, squinting behind owlish spectacles, screwing up his mouth in an odd, nervous tic, trading in homespun expressions, pleading that he was just a middle-level bureaucrat following orders, Eichmann was neither impressive nor frightening nor sinister. Arendt never doubted that Eichmann was guilty of great wickedness, but she saw the Nazi functionary as the very incarnation of what she famously called "the banality of evil."

One of the distinctive marks of this banality Arendt characterized as Gedankenlosigkeit, which could be superficially rendered in English as "thoughtlessness," but which carries more accurately the sense of "the inability to think." Eichmann couldn't rise above his own petty concerns about his career and he couldn't begin to "think" along with another, to see what he was doing from the standpoint of his victims. This very Gedankenlosigkeit is what enabled him to say, probably with honesty, that he didn't feel as though he had committed any crimes.

The film to which I referred at the outset very effectively portrays the firestorm of protest that followed Arendt's account of the Eichmann trial. Many Jews, both in Israel and America, thought by characterizing Eichmann the way she did, she had exonerated him and effectively blamed his victims. I won't descend into the complexity of that argument, which rages to some degree to the present day. But I will say that I believe Arendt's critics missed the rather profound metaphysical significance of what the philosopher was saying about the Nazi bureaucrat.

In a text written during the heat of bitter controversy surrounding her book, Arendt tried to explain in greater detail what she meant by calling evil banal: "Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension, yet —and this is its horror!—it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world."

The young Hannah Arendt had written her doctoral dissertation under the great German philosopher Karl Jaspers, and the topic of her work was the concept of love in the writings of Saint Augustine. One of the most significant intellectual breakthroughs of Augustine's life was the insight that evil is not something substantial, but rather a type of non-being, a lack of some perfection that ought to be present. Thus, a cancer is evil in the measure that it compromises the proper functioning of a bodily organ, and a sin is evil in the measure that it represents a distortion or twisting of a rightly functioning will. Accordingly, evil does not stand over and against the good as a kind of co-equal metaphysical force, as the Manichees would have it. Rather, it is invariably parasitic upon the good, existing only as a sort of shadow.

J.R.R. Tolkien gave visual expression to this Augustinian notion in his portrayal of the Nazgul in The Lord of the Rings. Those terrible and terrifying threats, flying through the air on fearsome beasts, are revealed, once their capes and hoods are pulled away, to be precisely nothing, emptiness. And this is exactly why, to return to Arendt's description, evil can never be radical. It can never sink down into the roots of being; it can never stand on its own; it has no integrity, no real depth or substance. To be sure, it can be extreme and it can, as Arendt's image suggests, spread far and wide, doing enormous damage. But it can never truly be. And this is why, when it shows up in raw form, it looks, not like Goethe's Mephistopheles or Milton's Satan, but rather like a little twerp in a glass box.

Occasionally, in the course of the liturgical year, Catholics are asked to renew their baptismal promises. One of the questions, to which the answer "I do" is expected, is this: "Do you reject the glamor of evil and refuse to be mastered by sin?" Evil can never truly be beautiful, for beauty is a property of being; it can only be "glamorous" or superficially attractive. The great moral lesson—articulated by both Augustine and Hannah Arendt—is that we must refuse to be beguiled by the glittering banality of wickedness and we must consistently choose the substance over the shadow.
 
 
Originally posted at Word on Fire. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Forever Young News)

EDITOR'S NOTE: Today begins a three-part series on the morality of lying. Our first post comes from Jim Russell, a Catholic deacon. Tomorrow, we'll hear from Patheos atheist blogger James Croft. And Thursday, Catholic blogger Leah Libresco will wrap it up.

 
Have you seen the newest Star Trek film, the second of the “re-boot” of the franchise? In it, Mr. Spock reminds Captain Kirk of a particular Vulcan trait—that Vulcans may never under any circumstances tell a lie—and then, by movie’s end, we witness the same Mr. Spock engage in a masterful bit of deception against a key villain, a deception that, of course, doesn’t involve any spoken falsehood, but one that proves just as effectively deceptive as any blatant lie.
Is this a contradiction? Can Vulcans be masters of deception just as long as they don’t say anything untrue?

Well, if you think Vulcans have an interesting perspective on what lying is and isn’t, wait till you consider how we humans have dealt with this issue for the last couple millennia or so.

Back in the day, long before followers of “The Way” (Christianity) came upon the scene, the morality of lying was a topic debated by ancient philosophers and left largely unresolved. Was it ever okay to lie? What really is a lie? One might have thought that, with the advent of the Catholic Church—and with it the “Magisterium” (the Church's official and Holy-Spirit-guided teaching authority)—such a debate might have been settled long ago—at least for Catholics, that is.

But sometimes the truth is indeed stranger than (science) fiction. And here is the truth: For two thousand years, the Catholic Church has left this question somewhat unsettled: whether or not all falsehoods spoken with the intention to deceive are immoral acts of “lying."

This in-house Catholic concern remains a legitimate theological debate, and it flares up occasionally in the Wild West of the Catholic blogosphere. Before we get into the details of the Catholic view of lying, though, let’s take a moment to mention a couple aspects of this issue that make it interesting to both atheists and Catholics.

First, the “societal” or “common-good” aspect of truth-telling is incontestable. Thus prohibitions against lying transcend anything religious or sectarian. The stability of human society really depends on the good will that ought to exist among individuals, and that common good can only be realized by truthfulness. Having said that, many questions remain about how this pursuit plays out among so many people with diverse moral perspectives.

Second, there is an “apologetic” aspect to this issue that really cuts both ways, relative to atheists, Catholics, and morality. The usual claims made—which I've seen several times in the Strange Notions comboxes—focus on the contrast between a moral system built upon moral “absolutes” (such as is found in the Catholic faith) and a moral system devoid of moral “absolutes” (such as is found among many, though not all, atheists).

Catholics often claim the moral “high ground” because the Catholic morality builds upon the foundation of the moral absolute. But, as we will see regarding lying, the Catholic system does not, in fact, pin everything down for us, put it in a box, wrap it in a bow, and leave it on our Catholic doorsteps merely to open up and “repeat as often as is necessary.” Far from it. Indeed, on many moral issues, such as lying, we Catholics find ourselves in a place similar to that of a “non-moral-absolute” non-believer: we’ve got to use our best individual judgement when making particular moral choices about truth-telling. In such a case, the moral “absolute” doesn’t give us a ready-made answer regarding how to behave in specific instances.

However, this also must mean that the atheist ought to concede that we Catholics are really not taught by Mother Church to merely check our intellects at the door and do whatever the moral checklist says we should (or should not) do. The truth is, from the Catholic view, the moral “absolute” is only part of the moral equation. Another part of that equation is all about properly forming conscience and then acting on that properly formed conscience. At the end of the day, we Catholics—just like our atheist friends—are called upon to apply concretely in our own lives what we have come to believe about right or wrong. The Church completely recognizes and respects the rights of conscience of its Catholic members.

So What Does the Church Really Teach About Lying?

 
The briefest of thumbnail sketches on the history of lying and Church teaching would go like this. The early Church’s embrace of the Ten Commandments yielded for us the “moral absolute” of the Eighth Commandment: Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. This is bedrock. But, like another Commandment (Thou shalt not kill), it leaves much for us to reflect upon and properly interpret. The Early Church Fathers were not unanimous in their treatment of what it meant to “lie” and whether all “lying” was sinful. But St. Augustine wrote an important treatise on the subject titled “On Lying” in which he opined that all spoken falsehood with intention to deceive is immoral. Over time, many (but not all) theologians gravitated toward the Augustinian view—and his definition of lying. As did St. Thomas Aquinas, whose definition of lying, “speech at variance with the mind,” is a bit different but consonant with Augustine. What then emerges in the Church is what is known as the “common teaching of Catholic theologians” on the subject of lying.

But what is “common teaching”? It’s the common theological opinion (note “opinion” and not official magisterial teaching) of Catholic theologians and is most often taught in Church catechesis as the “safe” opinion upon which Catholics may form their consciences. In fact, the Augustinian view (the view shared by “Vulcans”) is that one must never “lie” under any circumstances. And it’s the “common teaching” of the Augustine/Aquinas perspective that is found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church today:
 

"A lie consists in speaking a falsehood with the intention of deceiving...By its very nature, lying is to be condemned. It is a profanation of speech, whereas the purpose of speech is to communicate known truth to others. The deliberate intention of leading a neighbor into error by saying things contrary to the truth constitutes a failure in justice and charity." (CCC 2482, 2485)

 
But for Catholics, the “common teaching” is not the only option for us. It’s definitely a “safe” way to live—never speaking a falsehood with intention to deceive under any circumstances. But the many cases in which we would seek, in defense of self or others, to employ deception against unjust aggressors, have caused others to take less rigorous views. One need only read Cardinal John Henry Newman’s essay on “Lying and Equivocation” to see that this debate retained nearly all its force well into the nineteenth century despite the existence of the Catholic “common teaching.” Even G.K. Chesterton famously said, “Every sane man knows he would tell a lie to save a child from Chinese torturers.”

So the debate over what is and isn’t lying continues among Catholic theologians (and bloggers) in our own time. The “common teaching” leaves Catholics with a safe alternative for most cases, but once we begin to consider how we should act when confronted with the famous “Nazi-at-the-door” or the “save-the-Starship-Enterprise-with-a-well-placed-falsehood” or the “undercover-narcotics-cop-infiltrating-the-drug-ring” or the “covert-spy-fighting-the-totalitarian-regime” or “future-pope-letting-a-fugitive-assume-his-priestly-identity-to-escape-the-country”—fill in the blank. We begin to see that the Catholic “common teaching” on lying is ultimately a work in progress.

Now, I do believe there is a future, thoroughly “Catholic” solution worth proposing (and I will propose one of my own in an upcoming book, God willing). But in the meantime, much may be gained and learned in opening up this subject to the many voices in the Strange Notions comboxes.

Is there something of value in the Catholic understanding of truth, the meaning and purpose of speech, the desire to form a trusting society built on the avoidance of the lie?

What might the atheist have to say about the nature of truth apart from God and what we might owe our fellow neighbors and friends when it comes to truth-telling?

Can Mr. Spock and St. Augustine come to a place of mutual agreement regarding what we should never do—speak a deceptive falsehood—from very different starting points? Or does Spock's deception via an artful "truth-telling" still constitute at lie at its core? What do you think of the Catholic “common teaching”? What non-theistic moral framework might suffice for helping guide us regarding when we might speak a falsehood, or not?

The questions abound and perhaps the answers will as well. Maybe the Catholic and the atheist will turn out to be not so very far apart on this one!
 
 
(Image credit: Demotivateur)

I’ve been a baseball fan since I was six years old, when my father took my brother and me to a Detroit Tigers game in the summer of 1966. I’ll never forget the beauty of the intensely, almost garishly, green field and the crisp white uniforms of the home-team players under the bright lights that night. I started with tee-ball when I was seven and moved through many years of little-league and Babe-Ruth league, becoming in time a pretty good hitter and shortstop.

When I was nine, in 1969, I moved with my family to Chicago and became (God help me) a Cubs fan and learned very quickly what it was like to move from giddy hope to blackest despair. And I’ve always been an admirer of the great players that I’ve been privileged to see: Roberto Clemente, Ernie Banks, Brooks Robinson, Cal Ripken, Ryne Sandberg, Pete Rose, Greg Maddux, and many others.

In the summer of 1999, I was in Seattle, attending the first Mass of a student I had taught at Mundelein Seminary in Chicago. Knowing my love for baseball, he had arranged to take me to a Mariner’s game, and the player I was most looking forward to seeing was Alex Rodriguez, A-Rod. He didn’t disappoint. That night, he got, as I remember, three hits, but what has stayed in my mind was actually a strikeout, for as he swung at the third strike, he exhibited one of the most beautiful, balanced, and elegant swings I had ever seen.

I’ve been thinking of that night a good deal as the revelations about Rodriguez’s steroid use have come forth. By his own admission, the great A-Rod has joined the sad ranks of Ken Caminiti, Rafael Palmiero, John Rocker, Mark McGwire, Roger Clemens, and of course Barry Bonds.

Now there are any number of rather obvious moral observations that one can make concerning this scandal. One could say that these players have undermined the integrity of the game, that they have damaged their own bodies, that they have set a terrible example to young players, that they have lied under oath or pathetically ducked the question (“I’m not here to talk about the past”), that they have egregiously cheated on their fellow competitors, etc. And these observations would be absolutely valid.

But when I look at the two most prominent players in this scandal—A-Rod and Barry Bonds—something else strikes me with particular power. These two figures began using steroids—Bonds in 1998 and Rodriguez in 2001—when they were at the top of their games, when they were generally regarded as the best players in baseball. By 1998, Bonds was already a three time MVP winner, and by 2001, A-Rod had been awarded the biggest contract in the history of professional sports. They both had sterling records, both were guaranteed a place in the Hall of Fame, both had more money than they could spend in ten lifetimes, both could out-hit, out-run, and out-play practically any player in the game. If they had been minor leaguers, desperately trying to break into the majors, or .250 hitters hoping for that extra boost that would keep them competitive for a few more years, we might understand.

But why would these gods of baseball, these men who were, without artificial help, dominating their respective leagues, turn to steroids? It has been suggested that Bonds was jealous of the national frenzy around the McGwire-Sosa homerun race in 1998 and that Rodriguez felt the pressure of living up to the expectations generated by his unprecedented contract. Fair enough. But I think that things go deeper than that.

St. Augustine, one of Catholicism's greatest philosophers, spoke of “concupiscent desire,” by which he meant a perversion of the will. We have, Augustine said, been wired for God (“Lord, you have made us for yourself”), and therefore, nothing in this world will ever be able finally to satisfy us (“our hearts are restless until they rest in thee”). When we hook our infinite desire for God onto something less than God—pleasure, money, power, success, honor, victory—we fall into a perverted and ultimately self-destructive pattern. When money isn’t enough (and it never is), we convince ourselves we need more and more of it; when honor isn’t enough (and it never is), we seek honor desperately, obsessively; when athletic success isn’t enough (and it never is), we will go to any extreme to assure more and more of it.

This awful and frustrating rhythm, which Augustine called “concupiscent,” we would call today “addictive.” Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez were not addicted to steroids per se; they were addicted to success, and we know this because they were at the pinnacle of success and still didn’t think it was enough.

One of the most liberating and salutary things that we can know is that we are not meant to be perfectly happy in this life. When we convince ourselves otherwise, we, necessarily, fall into one or more forms of addiction. Bonds and Rodriguez still felt, at the height of their success, a nagging sense of incompleteness. That was not an invitation to take desperate measures; it was the invasion of grace.
 
 
Originally posted at Word on Fire. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Boston Herald)

EDITOR'S NOTE: Today's post is in response to yesterday's article by atheist blogger Qu Quine, titled "Straw Man Scientism". Be sure to read Qu's article first.

Qu Quine has written a brief but clear description of methodological naturalism (MN), explaining the difference between this scientific approach to knowing and the blind “faith” of Scientism, the idea that only science is capable of putting us in touch with reality.  The difference between the two is simple enough: the latter is an ideological stance, the former is a method, a way of knowing.  Quine asserts that embracing the former does not require embracing the latter, and celebrates the power of MN to demonstrate falsehoods and to create a dependable path for attaining new and more certain knowledge.

To which I say, with profound conviction and no irony, “Vere!” and “Amen!”  In knowing the material world as such, including the living things within it, methodological naturalism is the only useful method of which I am aware. And any attempt to restrain its practitioners on religious grounds or to discard it as scientism would be intellectual violence.  As a theologian I do not want to quell Quine’s celebration of MN, but offer it an appreciative biography.

MN was born when the idea of Nature was born, when Greek philosophers began to discover “the regularity of phenomena as inhering in the natures of things and in the nature of the whole.”  At the very same time was born the pagan critique of religion, best summarized by Cicero’s Cotta in his dialogue “On the Nature of the Gods”: “...the system's coherence and persistence is due to nature's forces and not to divine power.”  This critique had developed over 800 years by the time of St. Augustine of Hippo, who adopted it entirely, as we can see in Book V of the Confessions, where we learn that it was the bad astronomy that the Manichees taught “as spiritual doctrine” that ended his long adherence to their sect.  His words ring with MN as he notes the achievements of the (non-Manichee) astronomers, who
 

“With the mind and intellect...investigate these matters. They have found out much. Many years beforehand they have predicted eclipses of sun and moon, foretelling the day, the hour, and whether total or partial. And their calculation has not been wrong. It has turned out just as they predicted… On this basis prediction can be made of the year, the month of the year, the day of the month, the hour of the day, and what proportion of light will be eclipsed in the case of either sun or moon; and it happens exactly as predicted.”

 
In fact the Confessions breathes naturalism. Even while Augustine recounts his life to God and questions or thanks him for nearly every life-event he remembers, not once does Augustine invoke a miraculous intervention or direct divine activity.  At one point he tells us that he moved to Rome for a career advantage; at another that he went there because God wanted him to meet Ambrose who leads him toward Christian baptism.  Augustine narrates his life “in such a way that the sequence of events related is adequately accounted for, and yet...in such a way that those events are not adequately accounted for.”  God is the reason for everything, but the direct cause of no specific thing.  The message is clear:
 

“The divine action is not an action by a worldly agent, it does not insert itself into the sequence of motives and causes, it does not fill a gap in the account of Augustine's life.  No event related in the Confessions is brought about by a situation inexplicable in terms of natural causes.  Nature is a self-enclosed whole, not independent in its being from God, but a whole whose course is adequately explainable in terms of immanent natural causes.”¹

 
Yet Augustine the naturalist becomes a member of the Catholic Church.  Why did he find no obstacle there like the one he confronted in Manicheanism?  Because the integrity of the natural world is a doctrine of the Catholic Church.  This is why Augustine, as genius theologian and bishop, refuses to accept a literalist account of creation, why he posits a rudimentary version of evolution for the emergence of life forms from “the texture of the elements, com[ing] forth when they get the opportunity” (De Trinitate 3.9.16), and why his medieval disciple Thomas Aquinas will teach, paradoxically enough, the “hiddenness of divinity” as one of the two objects of God’s self-revelation (Summa Theologiae II-II.1.8).

God is not one among the things that exists.  Rather, he gives the universe its free existence, and so MN must be the method of observing and knowing the world.  Christian faith need not be invoked to use it, as Quine rightly notes.  But neither is it an impediment to it; indeed, historically it has always been a progenitor of it.

As a final note, the “hiddenness of divinity” is only one of two things God has revealed to us.  The other is the mystery of the humanity of Christ, in which God reveals himself as a human being to recreate the world, “not a mere appearance of a god in the likeness of men but fully present in history as a man, not a divine being peering out through a cloak of flesh, but a man.”² Here, in the fulfillment of all things, resides the Resurrection, an event not historical in the same way as Augustine’s fateful decision to go to Rome, and the miracles of Christ and the saints, all of which foreshadow and prepare a new creation rather than replacing MN as an approach to this universe.  Quine is right to reject a six-day formation of the earth, but putting the Resurrection in the same category is like putting the chicken back in the egg.
 
 
(Image credit: Timothy Webb)