God created the universe a finite time ago, but there’s a question of whether we can prove this by reason alone.

Defenders of the Kalaam cosmological argument often claim that the universe cannot have an infinite history because “traversing an infinite” is impossible.

In his book Reasonable Faith (pp. 120-124), William Lane Craig puts the argument this way

1. The series of events in time is a collection formed by adding one member after another

2. A collection formed by adding one member after another cannot be actually infinite

3. Therefore, the series of events in time cannot be actually infinite.

The second premise of this argument is the one that deals with “traversing an infinite.” Craig writes:

Sometimes this problem is described as the impossibility of traversing the infinite.

Still a third way of describing it is saying that you can’t form infinity “by successive addition.”

Whatever expression you prefer, each of these expressions refer to the intuition people commonly have about infinity—that “you can’t get there from here.”

Where Is “Here”?

If you can’t get to infinity from here, where is “here”?

However you want to phrase the problem—getting there from here, traversing an infinite, or successive addition, this is a question that needs to be answered.

Let’s take another look at the second premise:

2. A collection formed by adding one member after another cannot be actually infinite

What does it mean to “form” a collection by adding one member after another?

Perhaps the most natural way to take this would be to form such a collection from nothing. That is, you start with zero elements in the collection (or maybe one element) and then successively add one new member after another.

And it’s quite true that, if you form a collection this way, you will never arrive at an infinite number of members. No matter how many elements you add to the collection, one at a time, the collection will always have a finite number of elements.

This can be seen through a simple counting exercise. If you start with 0 and then keep adding +1, you’ll get the standard number line:

0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 . . .

But no matter how many times you add +1, the resulting number will always be finite—just one unit larger than the previous finite number.

However, there is a problem . . .

The First-and-Last Fallacy

As I’ve discussed elsewhere, any string of natural numbers that has both a first and a last element is—by definition—finite.

Any time you specify a first natural number and a last natural number, the space between them is limited.

It thus would be fallacious reasoning to envision an infinite timeline with both first and last elements.

Yet it is very easy to let the idea of an infinite past having a beginning somewhere “infinitely far back” unintentionally sneak back into discussions of the Kalaam argument.

It can easily happen without people being aware of it, and often our language is to blame:

• The natural sense of the word “traverse” suggests going from one point to another, suggesting both a beginning point and an end point.
• So does the idea of “forming” an infinite collection. If we imagine forming a collection, we naturally envision starting with nothing (a collection with no members) and then adding things to it.
• And if we think of getting to infinity “from here,” we naturally think of a starting point in the finite realm (“here”) and an end point (“infinity”).

Without at all meaning to, it’s thus very easy to fall into the trap of subconsciously supposing both a starting point and an ending point in a supposedly infinite history.

This happens often enough that I’ve called it the First-and-Last Fallacy.

Taking No Beginning Seriously

In Reasonable Faith, Craig denies that this is how his argument should be understood. He writes:

Mackie and Sobel object that this sort of argument illicitly presupposes an infinitely distant starting point in the past and then pronounces it impossible to travel from that point to today. But if the past is infinite, they say, then there would be no starting point whatever, not even an infinitely distant one. Nevertheless, from any given point in the past, there is only a finite distance to the present, which is easily “traversed.” But in fact no proponent of the kalam argument of whom I am aware has assumed that there was an infinitely distant starting point in the past. The fact that there is no beginning at all, not even an infinitely distant one, seems only to make the problem worse, not better (boldface added).

Craig thus wishes us to understand his argument not as forming an infinite collection of past historical moments from an infinitely distant starting point—i.e., from a beginning.

It’s good that he is clear on this, because otherwise his second premise would commit the First-and-Last Fallacy.

But does this really make things worse rather than better?

It would seem not.

Formed from What?

If we are not to envision a collection being “formed” from nothing by successive addition, then it must obviously be formed from something. Namely, it must be formed from another, already existing collection.

For example, suppose I have a complete run of my favorite comic book, The Legion of Super-Heroes. Let’s say that, as of the current month, it consists of issue #1 to issue #236.

Then, next month, issue #237 comes out, so I purchase it and add it to my collection. I now have a new, larger collection that was “formed” by adding one new member to my previous collection.

Now let’s apply that to the situation of an infinite history. Suppose that the current moment—“now”—is the last element of an infinite collection of previous moments (with no beginning moment).

How was this collection formed?

Obviously, it was formed from a previous collection that included all of the past moments except the current one.

Let’s give these things some names:

• Let P be the collection of all the past moments
• Let 1 represent the current moment
• And let E represent the collection of all the moments that have ever existed

With those terms in place, it’s clear that:

P + 1 = E

We thus can form one collection (E) from another collection (P) by adding a member to it.

But Can It Be Infinite?

Now we come to Craig’s second premise, which said that you can’t form an actually infinite collection by adding one member after another.

If you imagine forming the collection from nothing—and thus commit the First-and-Last Fallacy—then this is true.

But it’s not true if you avoid the fallacy and imagine forming an actually infinite collection from a previous collection by adding to it.

The previous collection just needs to be actually infinite as well. If P is an actually infinite collection and you add 1 to it, E will be actually infinite as well.

And this is what we find in the case of an infinite past. Let us envision an infinite past as the set of all negative numbers, ending in the present, “0” moment:

. . . -7, -6, -5, -4, -3, -2, -1, 0.

The set of all the numbers below 0 is infinite, but so is the set of all numbers below -1, all the numbers below -2, and so on. Each of these collections is actually infinite, and so we can form a new, actually infinite set by taking one of them and adding a new member to it.

Understood this way, Craig’s second premise is simply false. You can form an actually infinite collection by adding new members to an actually infinite collection—which is what we would have in the case of a universe with an infinite past, one that really does not have a starting point.

Conclusion

What we make of Craig’s argument will depend on how we take its second premise.

Taken in what may be the most natural way (forming an infinite collection from nothing—or from any finite amount—by successive addition), will result in the argument committing the First-and-Last Fallacy.

But if we take it in the less obvious way (forming an infinite collection by adding to an already infinite collection), then the second premise is simply false.

There may be other grounds—other arguments—by which one might try to show that the universe cannot have an infinite past.

But the argument from “successive addition,” “traversing an infinite,” or “getting there from here” does not work.

Depending on how you interpret it, the argument either commits a fallacy or uses a false premise.

The heart and foundation of Christianity is belief in a God who is worthy of worship: in the words of Anselm, that being than which none greater can be conceived. And so, when the Bible depicts God as acting in a manner that appears to be less-than-perfect, this creates a challenge for the Christian reader. There is perhaps no more glaring an example of this problem than God’s command to the Israelites in Deuteronomy 20:16-17:

“16 However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. 17Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you.”

The problem, to put it bluntly, is that it looks like God is here commanding genocide. Needless to say, genocide is widely recognized to be an unconscionable evil, a crime against humanity. And no perfect being worthy of worship would command people to carry out an unconscionable evil.

Christians have offered many solutions to resolve this difficult issue but in this article I will focus on an approach that is currently quite popular: I call it the Just War Interpreter. According to this position, while the texts might appear at first blush to entail genocide, a closer reading warrants the conclusion that God was actually commanding actions consistent with just war.

Just War Interpreters offer several arguments for their position. For example, they claim that the language of Deuteronomy 20:16 -17 should be interpreted as hyperbolic. Further, they assert that the cities such as Jericho and Ai which are the primary targets for mass killing were, in fact military outposts serving a largely rural population. And finally, they argue that the primary directive within the text is not eradication but rather removal of that rural population: in other words, God’s primary intent was always to drive the Canaanites out of the land rather than to kill them en masse. In this article, I am going to offer a rebuttal to that third argument, the one that appeals to the theme of displacement. I will argue first that displacement still entails another war crime, that of ethnic cleansing. Second, I will argue that a closer consideration of the act suggests that it still qualifies as genocide even when the primacy of the language of displacement is taken into consideration.

Genocide and Driving Out

Let’s begin with a definition of genocide. The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide offers the following legal definition of the concept in Article II:

“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” (link)

It certainly appears that the command in Deuteronomy 20:16-17 to “completely destroy” these people groups such that no members are left alive would meet the first and most overt example of genocide, that of killing members of the target group on the basis of their identity as group members.

However, the Just war Interpreters offer a different view. As I noted, they argue that the language of total eradication in Deuteronomy 20:16-17 should be interpreted in light of the central theme of expulsion. For example, in his book God Behaving Badly, David Lamb writes that “the primary image to describe the Canaanite conquest is not of slaughter.” Rather, “Yahweh tells the Israelites that he will drive out the people of the land….”¹ Similarly, Paul Copan and Matthew Flannagan argue that the language of displacement is predominant in Deuteronomy and Joshua: “Israel’s chief responsibility was to dispossess or drive out the Canaanites rather than kill them.”² And as Joshua Ryan Butler observes, “Being ‘driven out’ is the language of eviction, not murder.”³ Underlying the entire account is an assumption that the Canaanites were illegitimate squatters who had no right to live on the land.

We should keep in mind that the question before us is whether the actions of the Israelites meet the above-cited definition of genocide which is operative in international law. With that in mind, we can set aside attempts to justify the action based on God’s command because divine commands are not relevant considerations in international law. To put it simply, whether or not you believe God commanded the action is not the issue: the issue, rather, is whether said action would be recognized as genocide by way of established definitions in international law. So do the Just War Interpreters succeed in recasting the directives as being actions consistent with international law?

Ethnic Cleansing

Let’s begin with the concept of ethnic cleansing. While this term has been much discussed in recent years, it only entered common usage in the early 1990s during the conflict in Yugoslavia. While the term as yet lacks a formally recognized legal definition equivalent to the definition of genocide cited above, Klejda Mulaj provides a helpful working definition:

“Ethnic cleansing is considered to be a deliberate policy designed by, and pursued under, the leadership of a nation/ethnic community or with its consent, with the view to removing an “undesirable” indigenous population of a given territory on the basis of its ethnic, national, or religious origin, or a combination of these by using systematically force and/or intimidation.”⁴

So here is our first question: does the Just War Interpreter’s account of driving out of the land satisfy Mulaj’s definition of ethnic cleansing?

Note first that at the time of the conquest, the Canaanites would have been resident in the land for several centuries. That would be sufficient to describe them as an indigenous population. Moreover, they are then targeted for expulsion because of their cultural-religious identity, and this expulsion comes through a military invasion that involves targeting population centers like Jericho and Ai, driving out the rural population (Deut. 7:1), and destroying their cultural products: “This is what you are to do to them: Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, cut down their Asherah poles and burn their idols in the fire.” (Deut. 7:5)

To conclude, this picture of driving out an indigenous population by force and destroying their remaining cultural products would indeed appear to be a textbook instance of ethnic cleansing by Mulaj’s definition. While ethnic cleansing may not be quite as morally problematic as genocide, it still is a war crime. And it still appears deeply problematic to construe a perfect God as commanding war crimes.

Genocide Revisited

Ethnic cleansing is bad enough, but a closer look suggests that the Just War Interpreter’s focus on expulsion fails to exempt the Israelite actions from qualifying as genocide. To see why we can begin by noting that the Just War Interpreters tend to avoid a very important question: what happened to the rural Canaanites who failed to outrun Israel’s advancing armies? The answer provided in texts like Deuteronomy 7:2 and Joshua 6:21 is that they would have been slaughtered.

With that grisly detail in mind, we can now put together the picture provided by the Just War Interpreters. While the Israelites did not enter the land intent on killing every single Canaanite, that intent is not required for an action to qualify as genocide. However, they did enter intent on forcibly driving out the Canaanites, slaughtering every Canaanite who remained, and destroying every manifestation of Canaanite culture to the end of destroying Canaanite identity as such. The assertions of the Just War Interpreters to the contrary notwithstanding, these actions clearly do conform to the definition of genocide in Article II (a-c). Just imagine a contemporary situation where one religious-ethnic-cultural group attacked another to the end of displacing the other group, killing members of that group based on group identity, and destroying all aspects of the target group’s culture. Would anyone seriously dispute that these actions would qualify as genocide?

There is one final point to note, a point that is regularly overlooked by Just War Interpreters. Ask yourself: in any given society, which residents are the least mobile? The answer is the poor, the elderly, the very young, and the mentally and physically handicapped. In other words, the Canaanites most likely to escape the advancing Israelite armies would be the rich, powerful, and influential while those most likely to be left behind to face mass slaughter at the hand of the Israelites would be the weakest and most vulnerable. Does that sound like a just, wise, and merciful policy from a perfect God?

Conclusion

To conclude, the Just War Interpreters offer some important caveats when reading the biblical text, not least of which is their attention to the primacy of the language of displacement over that of eradication. Nonetheless, it must be said that their argument ultimately fails to justify reclassifying the directives as being consistent with principles of just war. Rather, those actions continue to look very much like not one but two distinct war crimes: ethnic cleansing and genocide. That would suggest that a more radical approach to the problem may be required.

(This article is a brief synopsis of one topic I address in chapter 9 from my book Jesus Loves Canaanites: Biblical Genocide in the Light of Moral Intuition.)

There is a popular notion that doubt and skepticism are specially linked to atheism. But is that borne out by the evidence or is it just a bit of branding based on a limited selection of doubt?

It is also very common to find atheism being linked to skepticism. There is a popular narrative that traces the origins of skepticism back to ancient Greece when philosophers first began to doubt the existence of the gods as they had been popularly understood. One finds a reflection of the intimate link between skepticism and atheism in the fact that Jennifer Michael Hecht founds her book Doubt: A History on the theme of specifically religious doubt. She writes, “There are saints of doubt, martyrs of atheism, and sages of happy disbelief who have not been lined up as such, made visible by their relationships across time, and given the context of their story.”¹ This link between skepticism or doubt and atheism carries through in Hecht’s “Scale of Doubt Quiz” which is intended to chart the reader’s degree of skepticism in thirteen questions. Included in the list are questions about whether one believes a particular religious tradition includes correct information about the nature of ultimate reality (question 1), whether an intelligent being created the universe (question 2), whether prayer is effective (question 4), and whether the experience of love and morality points to a dimension of existence beyond biology, social patterns, and chance (question 11). Answering all the questions negatively places you at the high skeptical end of Hecht’s scale meaning that “you’re a hard-core atheist and of a certain variety: a rational materialist.”²

Note that Hecht’s quiz is structured so as to assume that assent to a robust system of religious doctrine is equivalent to “belief” while failure to accept the various doctrines that tend to comprise that system is equivalent to “doubt.” Insofar as people tend to equate a higher degree of skepticism with higher rationality, the result is to equate higher rationality with stronger doubt of religious doctrine and diminished rationality with stronger belief in religious doctrine.

Perhaps an even bigger problem here is that Hecht’s so-called “Scale of Doubt” fails to recognize that a negative answer to each of her questions counts as belief in what she calls rational materialism. In short, to answer “no” to particular beliefs entails a yes to other beliefs. For example, consider this entry on the Scale of Doubt: “Do you believe that the world is not completely knowable by science?”³ If one answers “no” here, then one is in effect saying yes to scientism by affirming that the world is completely knowable by science. But why doesn’t doubt of scientism count in placing one higher on the Scale of Doubt, particularly when the thesis is highly contentious among philosophers?⁴

Let’s put it another way. By simply rewriting Hecht’s questions, we could refashion the Scale of Doubt so that doubt counts when it is directed at materialist rather than theistic or religious claims. In that way, the atheist materialist would suddenly be labelled the credulous believer in such things as scientism while the theist would be considered the rational doubter because she doubts those same claims.

To be sure, neither one of these alternative scales is a fair measure of doubt, still less of rationality. And I would think that the ultimate goal of skepticism and doubt presumably is the pursuit of rationality. Skepticism and doubt are not ends in themselves. They are only of value insofar as they are part of what it means to believe in accord with reason. With that in mind, we need to appreciate that the most doubtful person is most certainly not the most rational person. To illustrate, picture the person who seeks to be maximally skeptical and so they doubt the testimony of every person they meet, they doubt the reliability of their memory, they doubt their sense perception, and their reasoning faculties. From there they could go on to doubt the existence of the external world, other minds and, if they were really keen, even their own existence.⁵ But there comes a point in all this doubting when you shift from being a paragon of rationality to being a person in need of professional counselling. Unremitting doubt of all things is not the path to rationality.

The lesson, as has oft been observed, is that while there is a place to believe our doubts and doubt our beliefs, reason also calls us to believe our beliefs and doubt our doubts. You see, rationality is not one-sidedly aligned with doubt. Rather it seeks the proper balance between the two. Philosopher Anthony Kenny describes reason well by understanding it in the terms of the Aristotelian concept of virtue as the balance between two vices: “The rational human being is the person who possesses the virtue that is in contrast with each of the opposing vices of credulity and skepticism.”⁶

Even if belief is a critical part of reason, the public perception remains that skepticism (and doubt) are closely linked to rationality and, even more importantly, to atheism. At a cultural level, this perception might seem to be vindicated by the fact that pro-skeptic organizations like the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry; (CSI; formerly CSICOP: Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal) and the Skeptics Society seem to have a close alliance with the atheistic community.

Since Paul Kurtz cofounded CSICOP in 1976 the organization has cultivated a well-earned reputation as a bastion of critical thinking. Key to CSI’s current mandate is to investigate and debunk various tendentious claims including those of faith healers and so-called prayer experiments which seek to validate the value of petitionary prayer. These endeavors have helped perpetuate the perception among many that skepticism is inimical to theistic belief.

As for the Skeptics Society and its flagship publication Skeptic magazine, these too are commonly associated not simply with skepticism but with outright atheism. Perhaps this isn’t surprising given that Richard Dawkins, widely reputed as the leading atheist in the world, is on the editorial board of Skeptic.⁷ And Dawkins himself certainly does see a tight connection between rationality and atheism. In addition, Michael Shermer, the founding publisher of Skeptic, has been an outspoken defender of atheism.

The way that skepticism seamlessly unites with atheism is evident in my atheist friend (and coauthor) Justin Schieber,⁸ who is described online as focusing on “promoting critical thought, more specifically, a friendly yet firm skepticism towards religious claims.”⁹ Note how Schieber links skepticism with an attitude toward explicitly religious claims, a casting of skepticism as specially directed toward religiously claims. This seems to echo Hecht’s Scale of Doubt.

While groups like CSI and the Skeptic Society might appear to bind atheism to skepticism, this association does not hold up to scrutiny. Where CSI is concerned, we can note the case of Martin Gardner. A mathematician, philosopher, and magician, Gardner committed much of his life to promoting the values of skepticism and critical thinking while deftly exposing instances of pseudoscience in the wider culture. He first rose to prominence in 1957 with the publication of the phenomenally popular book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science.¹⁰ Later, in 1976 Gardner joined Paul Kurtz as one of the founders of CSICOP.

While he was among the preeminent skeptic debunkers, Gardner also remained a theist throughout his life. To be sure, he rejected all religious traditions, so in that sense, his skepticism was well on display. Nonetheless, he maintained a belief in a supreme divine intelligence that governed the universe. Gardner described his views at some length in his book The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener.¹¹ And he readily acknowledged that some skeptics found his theism to be an idiosyncratic fit with his skepticism. He writes: “My atheist and agnostic friends never cease to be amazed and dismayed over how I manage to be such a thoroughgoing skeptic of the paranormal and still retain a belief in God. It’s as if they think that anyone who doubts Uri Geller’s ability to bend spoons with his mind must also doubt the existence of God!”¹² Gardner’s point is well taken. A person can be a wise skeptic of the spoon-bending showman who makes a fortune off his alleged telekinetic powers and at the same time one can find reason to believe in a necessary divine agent who created and sustains the universe. (Or, to put it another way, one might doubt both the magician who purports to bend spoons with his mind and the atheist who insists that the universe came to exist uncaused.)

Once we reject Hecht’s equation of skepticism and doubt with acceptance of one particular set of beliefs (e.g. those of the atheistic materialist) we are reminded that just as one skeptic can accept scientism (for better or for worse) so another skeptic like Gardner is free to accept theism. If I may take the liberty of reworking an oft-repeated quote from Stephen Roberts, the theist may reply to the skeptic, “I contend that we are both skeptics, I just believe in one more god than you do.”

Gardner may provide a visible reminder that CSI is not necessarily atheistic, but what about the Skeptics Society and Skeptic magazine? After all, as we saw, Richard Dawkins is on the board of Skeptic and he is certainly no friend of theism. And don’t forget Michael Shermer who has been a frequent critic of God and religion.

However, here too a closer look reveals the lines of demarcation are not quite as stark as many believe. Back in 1994 conservative talk radio host Laura Schlesinger was invited to join the board of Skeptic. The invitation was given before Dr. Laura converted to conservative (and later Orthodox) Judaism. However, the critical point to note is that her later religious conversion had no negative impact on her ability to serve on the board of Skeptic. But this is not to say that everyone was comfortable with the role of a theist on the board. In his book How We Believe Michael Shermer recalls how he received expressions of concern from supporters of the Skeptics Society about Schlesinger’s role with the magazine. One writer expressed concern based on the fact that Schlesinger regularly appealed to the Bible as an authority on her radio show: “I didn’t know that skeptics relied on authority to settle disagreements over morality.”¹³ Nor was that the only objection to Schlesinger. Shermer notes that he received several more letters, faxes and emails in 1996 and 1997 protesting Schlesinger’s continued membership on the board.

However, in a triumph of true intellectual freedom, Shermer steadfastly defended Schlesinger’s role on the board. As he put it,

We explained that membership or involvement in any capacity with the Skeptics Society and Skeptic magazine is not exclusionary. We could not care less what anyone’s religious beliefs are. In fact, at least two of our more prominent supporters—the comedian and songwriter Steve Allen and the mathematician and essayist Martin Gardner—are believers in God. Other members of the board may believe in God as well. I do not know. I have never asked.¹⁴

Shermer goes on to insist that the Skeptics Society and Skeptic magazine have no objection per se either to theism or to religious commitment. Rather, their concern arises only when individuals or groups make claims that are open to rational investigation whether the topic involves Uri Geller’s spoon-bending, climate change deniers, or a religious claim involving the Shroud of Turin, faith healing, or the young earth creationist’s reconstruction of earth history. As Shermer puts it, “If, in the process of learning how to think scientifically and critically, someone comes to the conclusion that there is no God, so be it—but it is not our goal to convert believers into nonbelievers.”¹⁵

Debates concerning the existence of God typically run aground on prior unresolved metaphysical questions. Any debate with a Thomist about the existence of God turns into an exposition of a number of metaphysical notions – potentiality, actuality, matter, form, essence, existence, motion, cause, and effect.

Skeptics tend to quickly recognize that they are not only being asked to accept the existence of God, but an entire metaphysics. Often enough, the effect is not only a continuing disbelief in God, but an even greater incredulity towards Thomist metaphysics.

If the skeptic is asked not only to believe in an ultimate ground of the universe (i.e., God), but also that the universe is explained by philosophers rather than scientists, they may rightfully decide that the theists premises are more absurd than their conclusions.

This article takes up the question just what metaphysical principles skeptics ought to be asked to accept in the context of arguments for God's existence. Our particular focus concerns the relation between Aristotelian-Thomist metaphysics and the modern empirical sciences. Our contention will be that the modern empirical sciences presuppose a latent Aristotelian-Thomist metaphysics, and that the history of science verifies the core contentions of Aristotle and St. Thomas. Our approach follows that of the great 20th century philosopher, Bernard Lonergan.

We grant, however, that certain forms of Aristotelian-Thomist metaphysics have put themselves in opposition to the sciences by supposing that in addition to the forms of physical things which the empirical sciences grasp, there are also intelligible forms grasped either by the metaphysician or by the ordinary person. For example, in addition to the form of the tulip grasped by the plant biologist, some would assert another form accessible either to the philosopher qua philosopher, or to human beings by virtue of common sense. However, we reject this view as both incompatible with the sciences and mistaking the nature of metaphysics.

We will conclude that matter, form, and existence; act and potency; substance and accident; and being are known tacitly (or operationally) by the empirical sciences and that one cannot be a scientific realist and reject these metaphysical notions.

1. Matter and Form

All human knowledge begins with something unknown to us. What are the celestial bodies? Why do things fall to the ground? How is it that plants grow? Why do we get sick? The empirical sciences provide answers to these "what", "how", and "why" questions.

The march of the sciences follows a predictable cycle.

Level 1: Experience. First, we encounter something we do not understand. This could be the experience of water freezing and melting, observations of retrograde motion, the distribution of prime numbers, or plotted data reported from a particle accelerator.

Level 2: Understanding. Second, we seek to understand by getting a better look, reframing the problem, performing thought experiments, proposing new theorems, etc. That is to say, we formulate possible explanations. We do not simply seek more facts, we seek more facts insofar as they may prompt a Eureka moment that explains a set of facts. We do not seek more data for its own sake, we are after an insight that may be suggested by the data.

Matter and form correspond to experience and understanding in the course of explaining the physical universe. That is, matter corresponds to what is known by scientific observation as needing explanation. Form corresponds to what the scientist articulates as a possible explanation of the data.

The positive role of metaphysics is not to establish particular scientific answers (forms), but primarily to reflect upon the regular, general structure of scientific knowledge, and secondarily on the history and discoveries of the sciences, in order to discover their universal structure and significance.

2. Common sense and scientific understanding

The distinctions between matter and form, representation and understanding demarcate the sensible and the intelligible. Insofar as something is visible or tangible, sensible or imaginable, it remains on the first level. Aristotle distinguishes sensible and intelligible form. Insofar as something may be sensed or imagined, it remains on the level of experience. Conversely, insofar as something is understood, it cannot be seen or imagined.

Take, for example, the triangle. Can one imagine a triangle? Although we can call to mind a triangular shape, one cannot actually imagine a triangle. For a triangle is composed of lines and vertices which have no breadth. But a line or point which has no breadth is visually indistinguishable from emptiness.

Or take mass. Weight corresponds to something feeling heavy or light. But how heavy or light something feels depends on the bodies around it. Mass is classically defined not in relation to the experience of heaviness or lightness, but in relation to force and acceleration. Were it defined in relation to an experienced quality such as heaviness or lightness it could not explain those qualities. That is to say, it is not a descriptive term, but an explanatory term. Explanatory terms are not directly related to any particular sensible experience, but to other terms in an abstract, theoretical framework such as classical mechanics or general relativity.

This distinction between descriptive and explanatory terms corresponds to the levels of experience and understanding. Insofar as a term is descriptive, it is defined in terms (at least partly) of what is sensed or experienced. Explanatory terms cannot presuppose the experiences they are supposed to explain, and so they are abstract. Heaviness is descriptive, mass is explanatory. "Hot" is descriptive; temperature is explanatory. "Fast" is a descriptive term, while acceleration and velocity are explanatory. Six feet tall is descriptive; a thing's coordinates in Minkowski space are explanatory.

The Aristotelian notion of intelligible form displaces the world of common sense. The things we thought most familiar to us become quite strange. The ability to pick out everyday objects such as water, trees, or cows does not grasp what these things really are. In the Aristotelian terminology, when we teach a child "this is the color red" or "this is a cow, and that a horse", we are offering merely nominal definitions. We are explaining the use of words, not the natures of things. We are merely associating words with sensible similarities or family resemblences, we are not understanding things as they are in themselves. Animals, after all, are able to distinguish roses from replicas. But the reality of things is hidden to them precisely because they cannot construct abstract explanatory schemas.

3. Essence and Existence

From the limitations of mere understanding enters the notion of existence. Early modern scientists proposed the existence of an aether to explain the propagation of light. It was a sensible enough idea – it was coherent and had explanatory power – but it turned out not to actually exist. The question of essence and existence, then, is the question of whether what possibly explains the data (i.e., concepts, theories) actually does so, or whether it can be supplanted by a better explanation. Thus, to use the Aristotelian terminology, essence (meaning primarily form) is related to existence as potency to act.

This leads to the notion of pure act – that is, God. If for limited minds essences relate to existence as potency to act (because there is the question whether a more comprehensive act of understanding could displace the current theory), it is possible to hypothesize a complete act of understanding which, as complete, cannot be revised. The primary content of that act of knowledge would be, by definition, purely actual. And that pure actuality is, of course, God. But as yet, this is merely a hypothetical limit case.

4. The full picture

The full picture, then, of the metaphysical elements looks like this

Were we to the complete scientific explanation of our universe, we have three distinct components: that which is grasped in the data as needing explanation (i.e., the matter), that which is grasped initially by an insight and articulated in an abstract theoretical framework which would explain the data (i.e., the form), and that the fact that possible explanation on the second level in fact does explain the data and will not be replaced by a more adequate explanation (i.e., existence).

This division is irrefutable. For insofar as scientists have something to inquire into, insofar as they hypothesize explanations, and insofar as they settle which explanations are sound, they operate on the level of experience, understanding, and judgment. Insofar as knowledge is empirical, scientists must engage all three levels. And insofar as scientific inquiry reaches its objective, there is a component to be known by experience (matter), understanding (form), and judgment (existence).

5. The Existence of God

We have seen that, in the empirical world, scientific realism commits us to the view that things are composed of matter, form, and existence. There is nothing to a thing above what is captured in these categories. The particular content that fills out each of these categories is to be determined by the relevant particular sciences.

Moreover, we have seen that the more general categories of potentiality and actuality apply to matter-form-act composites. If something is merely an aggregate of lower level events, if there is nothing that answers the question "why isn't this just an aggregate explained by lower-level categories?", then there is not a thing but an aggregate of things. Put differently, if there is nothing to understand, there is nothing. (Which is why there cannot be paranormal phenomena without an explanation.)

As matter is what is able to be explained by form, so form is what can explain underlying materials. But just because something could be an explanation does not mean that it is in fact an explanation. To do that, one must identify the conditions which, if satisfied, would render the explanation final. Grasping form as actual, not merely possible, is necessary for a complete act of knowledge. Thus, form, of itself, is in potentiality to existence.

Our purpose has been to show that the metaphysical categories employed by Thomists in arguing for the existence of God are not abstruse philosophical matters, but necessary if empirical sciences can get at the truth. Though their names are perhaps foreign, they are defined in relation to familiar cognitional operations.

To the objection that some Thomists have supposed that formal causes are not the provinces of the sciences, I will simply quote with approval Bernard Lonergan's assessment:

One takes the descriptive conception of sensible contents, and without any effort to understand them, on asks for their metaphysical equivalents. One bypasses the scientific theory of color or sound, for after all it is merely a theory and, at best, probable; one insists on the evidence of red, green, and blue, of shapr and flat; and one leaps to a set of objective forms without realizing that the meaning of form is what will be known when the informed object is understood.

Such blind leaping is inimical not only to science, but to understanding.

So the extent that Thomists wish to lecture scientists on to the "true" nature of time and space, I happily concede that they are not only not advancing understanding of the natural world, but they are misconceiving the nature and role of metaphysics.

I have not addressed the actual arguments for the existence of God. Those arguments have not been made here. However, the basic categories which they suppose cannot be rejected without rejecting science as knowledge. The validity of the basic terms have been established. Physical things are composed of matter, form, and actuality. Immaterial things, if they exist, lack the material component. Non-divine immaterial things can be understood via distinct acts of understanding and judgment, and so they are composed of form and actuality. God, on the other hand, is the primary content of a single act of unrestricted act of understanding, which – it turns out – cannot be distinguished from that act of understanding.

In a Pentecost sermon that was later published as the essay “Transposition,” C.S. Lewis posed a serious objection to the gift of “speaking in tongues,” sometimes called glossolalia. But the objection he makes (as we’ll soon see) applies to everything from miracles to love. First, here’s the dilemma Lewis finds:

The difficulty I feel is this. On the one hand, glossolalia has remained an intermittent “variety of religious experience” down to the present day. Every now and then we hear that in some revivalist meeting one or more of those present has burst into a torrent of what appears to be gibberish. The thing does not seem to be edifying, and all non-Christian opinion would regard it as a kind of hysteria, an involuntary discharge of nervous excitement. A good deal even of Christian opinion would explain most instances of it in exactly the same way; and I must confess that it would be very hard to believe that in all instances of it the Holy Ghost is operating. We suspect, even if we cannot be sure, that it is usually an affair of the nerves. That is one horn of the dilemma.

The other horn of the dilemma is that there’s at least one instance – the original Pentecost (Acts 2) – in which the gift of tongues is described by the authors of Scripture as quite real, and St. Paul makes enough statements in his first letter to the Corinthians that it doesn’t seem to be only a one-time event. So the Christian is not free, as a skeptic is, to say that therefore none of the supposed instances of glossolalia are real. Lewis recognized the apparent weakness of this position:

The sceptic will certainly seize this opportunity to talk to us about Occam’s razor, to accuse us of multiplying hypotheses. If most instances of glossolalia are covered by hysteria, is it not (he will ask) extremely probable that that explanation covers the remaining instances too?

Another way of formulating this objection would be like this: you say that A is spiritual and B isn’t, but A and B look identical. The point here is much bigger than speaking in tongues. Speaking in tongues looks like nervous energy. But it is also true that the miraculous healing often looks like the natural healing. The couple in love and the couple in lust may look the same. And indeed, even thinking looks like it’s just atoms moving around in the brain! So why believe in miracles, or in romantic love, or in thought? Lewis points out that this leads us to the absurd conclusion that we have to reject truth and falsity:

We are certain that, in this life at any rate, thought is intimately connected with the brain. The theory that thought therefore is merely a movement in the brain is, in my opinion, nonsense; for if so, that theory itself would be merely a movement, an event among atoms, which may have speed and direction but of which it would be meaningless to use the words “true” or “false”.

Atoms move in the brain when you think, but that doesn’t mean that “atoms moving in my brain” and “I think a thought” are the same thing. Expressing a thought in writing moves ink onto the page, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no difference between an ink spill and a letter. Likewise, to reduce “thinking” to a certain set of atomic movements within the brain renders any talk of a thought being “true” or “false” nonsensical (how could any one movement of atoms be any more or less “true” than any other?). And indeed, Lewis notes that on a merely physical level, even extreme joy and anguish look the same – the tightening in the chest, the racing of the heart, and so on. He concludes that “if I were to judge simply by sensations I should come to the absurd conclusion that joy and anguish are the same thing, that what I most dread is the same with what I most desire.”

So there seems to be something obviously wrong with the skeptic’s objection. But there’s still something confusing: why is it that supernatural things look like natural things, if they are (in reality) different? Lewis points out that we would expect them to look much the same, because it’s a richer system (spiritual phenomena) being expressed in the limited language of the body. He calls this theory “correspondence” or “transposition.” And we find it anytime you try to express something in a richer language in a more limited one. For instance, spoken English has something like 19 and 22 distinct vowel sounds. But written English only has A, E, I, O, and U (and sometimes Y or W). And so there’s a limitation, which is how you end up with “take a bow” and “violin bow,” or the bizarre case of “boy,” “cow,” “lot,” and “toe,” in which the “o” is pronounced differently each time. But Lewis gives another example that might be clearer:

The most familiar example of all is the art of drawing. The problem here is to represent a three-dimensional world on a flat sheet of paper. The solution is perspective, and perspective means that we must give more than one value to a two-dimensional shape. Thus in a drawing of a cube we use an acute angle to represent what is a right angle in the real world. But elsewhere an acute angle on the paper may represent what was already an acute angle in the real world: for example, the point of a spear on the gable of a house. The very same shape which you must draw to give the illusion of a straight road receding from the spectator is also the shape you draw for a dunces’ cap.

Because you’ve seen houses in real life, you can tell where the artist means the slanted lines to represent that one thing is higher than another, or whether it simply means that one thing is further away. But imagine a “Flatlander,” who only knew the world of drawings, and you can see where skepticism might come in:

If we can imagine a creature who perceived only two dimensions and yet could somehow be aware of the lines as he crawled over them on the paper, we shall easily see how impossible it would be for him to understand. At first he might be prepared to accept on authority our assurance that there was a world in three dimensions. But when we pointed to the lines on the paper and tried to explain, say, that “This is a road,” would he not reply that the shape which we were asking him to accept as a revelation of our mysterious other world was the very same shape which, on our own showing, elsewhere meant nothing but a triangle. And soon, I think, he would say, “You keep on telling me of this other world and its unimaginable shapes which you call solid. But isn’t it very suspicious that all the shapes which you offer me as images or reflections of the solid ones turn out on inspection to be simply the old two-dimensional shapes of my own world as I have always known it? Is it not obvious that your vaunted other world, so far from being the archetype, is a dream which borrows all its elements from this one?”

Lewis calls this perspective the “view from below.” If all you know of English is written English, you’re going to be skeptical and confused when someone tells you about the myriad sounds than an “o” can make. If you’ve never seen life in 3-D, it’s going to be nearly impossible to understand what’s going on in a drawing of a house. And if you know nothing of the spiritual life, and think that there’s nothing outside of chemicals and animal passions and swirling atoms, you lack the framework to make any sense of higher phenomena, like miracles, or even love or thought. Lewis’ point is that this skepticism is both perfectly reasonable and completely wrong. But it’s wrong because there’s more evidence that the skeptic doesn’t see, or perhaps doesn’t even have:

The sceptic’s conclusion that the so-called spiritual is really derived from the natural, that it is a mirage or projection or imaginary extension of the natural, is also exactly what we should expect; for, as we have seen, this is the mistake which an observer who knew only the lower medium would be bound to make in every case of Transposition. The brutal man never can by analysis find anything but lust in love; the Flatlander never can find anything but flat shapes in a picture; physiology never can find anything in thought except twitchings of the grey matter. It is no good browbeating the critic who approaches a Transposition from below. On the evidence available to him his conclusion is the only one possible.

The solution, in each of these cases, is to approach the question instead “from above.” From that perspective, it’s clear how love and lust can differ so dramatically, even if some of the same external actions are involved in both; it’s likewise clear how thinking differs from the mere sloshing around of parts of the brain; and it’s clear how God can intervene in the order of nature in a way distinct from the ordinary course of events, or how the Holy Spirit can give particular charisms to people… even if each of these things looks virtually indistinguishable from its “lower” cousin on an external level.

Two men might appear to be identical, if you look only at the shape of their shoes. And from that perspective, they may in fact be indistinguishable. But that doesn’t actually mean that they’re the same. It just means that you need to approach things from a different angle… from higher up.

Now, Lewis’ argument doesn’t prove that the view from above is therefore right. Certainly, it’s likely to sound absurd to a Flatlander or a brute, who views everything from below. Nor does it mean that every purported miracle or supernatural gift is authentic, or that everyone with a furrowed brow is deep in thought, or that every declaration of love is the real deal. Instead, it’s simply to say that the Flatlander’s objective, which sounded so persuasive at first, is really just a reflection of his own limited perspective, and that if we’re ever going to have any luck telling what’s real or what isn’t, we’re going to have to approach it with the “view from above.”

This essay is drawn from Dr. Logan Gage's new video course, How Science Became a Religion, available at NewPolity.com—and free for a limited time! The first lesson is below:

Christians and non-Christians alike tend to value the language of natural science as the most appropriate and authoritative language to speak within the "public square" of liberal nation states. An argument from theology will get you nowhere; an argument from one's personal experience is moot; but an argument of science stirs us to assent. Nowhere is this more clear than during an election, in which the degree to which a candidate "believes in science" is seen as a crucial marker of his ability to lead the country toward good ends.

This makes sense, because liberalism (often considered Classical Liberalism, which is the reigning modern worldview and not another term for Democrat), is predicated on neutrality. Liberal states have no state churches, official belief systems, philosophies or theologies. Such opinions are the private quirks of individual minds, the truth or falsity of which is irrelevant to a primary "public" knowledge about matters of law, policy, public interest, and the like. This public knowledge is neutral, in the sense that it is objective, applying to everyone, and if one is going to make headway in a liberal state, one must check one's private, opinionated language at the door.  

The language of science fits well into this schema, because it has, likewise, taken up what appears to be a neutral, objective, dispassionate stance of determining the cold, hard facts. The person who speaks from the perspective of science is able to speak apart from any merely private opinion, club, faction or denomination of belief. He speaks as a qualified expert, a position which indicates his disinterested removal from the moods and paradigms of the moment, and his unique ability to access the objective, unvarnished truth.  

But is this really how the scientific community operates? In 1962, Thomas Kuhn wrote his ground-breaking book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which he argues that scientific consensus is not neutral and disinterested, but emerges out of paradigms held by factions and in-groups devoted to their own survival. It is, hands down, the single most influential work of philosophy of science in the last century.  It’s core message, however, has not filtered down to popular culture, because questioning the disinterested status of science is, peripherally, to question the disinterested neutrality of liberal nation states. The rest of the essay proceeds from his insights.

Science Textbooks

Think about the textbooks from which we all learn about science and how they form our minds. The image of science they present is as glossed over as a tourist brochure.¹ Textbooks tend to praise the achievements of great lone scientists and downplay science as a communal, cultural enterprise.  Perhaps most perniciously, because of their aim of getting novices up to speed so that they can understand (and even practice in) today’s scientific landscape, they select episodes in the history of science and arrange them in a seamless narrative all leading to…us, scientific modernity.  Inevitably, it makes science look like a straight line of progress, only opposed by the forces of superstition.

If you look at the actual revolutions of thought in the history of science this isn’t what you’ll see.  Science is done by real human beings.  Its history is a history of fights between groups of scientists not only over particular facts but over method and what counts as science at all.  There is a historical and sociological aspect to science that is essential to seeing what this modern project really is.

The history of science is more than the history of ideas; it is also a history of real people, with all their flaws and foibles. There is more to science than facts simply presenting themselves to great minds. It is a history of genius and innovation, sure. But it is also a history of cliques defending theories despite counter-evidence, scientists hitting dead-end after dead-end. But these never make it into the textbooks, both because it would undermine the progressive, liberal narrative that is meant to attract new scientists to the discipline, and also because stories of dead ends don’t help students learn current scientific theories. Any history that includes successes but never failures is bound to look linear and progressive.²  Yet the effect is painting a picture of science that is pure science fiction.

Normal vs. Revolutionary Science

Most science is not revolutionary. That is, it doesn’t set out to answer groundbreaking questions but to slightly extend our knowledge in some very limited domain.  Normal science doesn’t question its foundations but, rather, works within a paradigm or large set of settled assumptions about its subject matter.³  Now, paradigms can sound very negative, because their job is to be settled and dogmatic, to force us to view nature in preconceived categories and rigidly indoctrinate students. However, the advantage of paradigms is that the scientist doesn’t have to constantly justify her basic outlook but can treat some things as settled and dive deeper into nature on those assumptions.  Kuhn likens it to a settled judicial decision.⁴  In this way, real but limited progress is made.

But there are also periods of science where there is a sense of unease and dissatisfaction with the reigning paradigm - particularly the baroque Ptolemaic model of the solar system.  In these revolutionary periods, fundamental assumptions are challenged. 

Importantly, this is not a dispassionate process by which the evidence is obvious to all and the best theory automatically wins out. New paradigms are created not by seasoned veterans of the field but by the young or those new to the field who haven’t had their minds ossified by years of thinking in the old paradigm.⁵ Instead of convincing the old guard, advocates of the new paradigm simply attract more young scientists to their research program (e.g., they attract more graduate students with an exciting new way of thinking).

And the minute the new paradigm wins out, say, the Copernican model, its rivals are ridiculed as “non-scientific.”  The old guard is shunned, their work ignored.⁶  The revolution does not take place because the old guard become convinced by overwhelming evidence, see the light, and recant. (That is to say, the scientists do not actually behave scientifically, disinterestedly following the evidence wherever it leads.)  Rather, the revolution happens when they die off.  The historical record challenges the positivist narrative of science as uniquely rational and automatically progressive.  Science isn’t populated by Spock-like, neutral, open-minded observers following the evidence wherever it leads.  It is populated by actual humans.

There is a chaotic and competitive pre-paradigm period where the field has no consensus and competing theories jockey for dominance; then a breakthrough that establishes a new paradigm; followed by a long period of normal science; until anomalies with that paradigm build up; a crisis occurs; and we get the next revolutionary event, the new paradigm, and a period of normal science again. 

No paradigm can solve all problems.  In fact, if it did, there would be no normal science to do.  So new paradigms have unsolved problems for which they issue promissory notes; it is only a matter of time, it insists, until the problems are solved.  These puzzles may or may not fester and come to be seen as problems.  Whether puzzles become problems and create a “crisis” has much to do with the particular psychological and sociological facts about the research community.  As Thomas Kuhn says, “every problem that normal science sees as a puzzle can be seen, from another viewpoint, as a counterinstance and thus as a source of crisis.”⁷

In cases as diverse as the Copernican revolution in astronomy, Lavoisier’s oxygen theory of combustion in chemistry, and the emergence of Einsteinian relativity theory in physics, puzzles had to seem like problems—like a crisis—before radically new thinking could emerge.  And what feels like a crisis is highly dependent on the particular personalities involved.⁸  For instance, some astronomers began to see Ptolemaic epicycles (circles upon circles) as clunky and aesthetically displeasing while others did not.  There were also social factors like the need for a new calendar, the growing dislike of medieval Aristotelianism, and the rise of Renaissance Platonism. 

New theories are responses to a felt crisis, a personal and social phenomenon—perhaps caused by the evidence but certainly not necessitated by it.  Aristarchus, for instance, anticipated Copernicus by almost two millennia.  But the social setting was not ready for the new theory.  Leading thinkers felt no dissatisfaction with the Ptolemaic model.  This evidences against the simple positivist view of science as a slow ratcheting up of observations leading to the formation of obviously true theories to account for the data.  The right scientific theory does not emerge automatically.

Paradigms: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Scientists prize being objective and rigorous; but they’re people, not robots. People are those that explore and all people have a particular paradigm with which they explore nature. Paradigms can distort our vision, but they also make vision possible by organizing a sea of chaotic data into a pattern. None of us are free from having one because all of us need one. Without one, we would be impersonal actors without the ability to relate and to love.

The late 20th Century saw an increasing recognition that the modern scientific view of facts and theories was too simple.  From the Scientific Revolution to the Logical Positivists it was claimed that rational scientists must be presuppositionless machines who go around collecting pure facts until theories emerge pristine from the data. In other words, scientists could be dispassionate observers of nature. We all sympathize with this view, since we want our theories to be responsive to facts rather than our hopes and wishes. 

But philosophers began to notice that we don’t just see the world but that we see under a description.  We don’t just see, but we see as.⁹  If you’ve seen a Magic Eye drawing and then suddenly your mind recognizes a pattern and you see the unified image of a car in what had previously appeared as a bunch of colors, then you’ve noticed this yourself.  Or perhaps you’ve had this experience with one of the famous Gestalt images like the drawing that is simultaneously a young lady and an old lady, or Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit.  You tend to see the image one way at first, but then with effort you can see the image the other way.  But once you lock on to the second image, it becomes difficult to see the original one.  Your shift in perspective, it is important to notice, is not simply caused by new evidence or data.  It has to do with how the existing data is imagined, conceptualized, or interpreted.

Rather than thinking our prior beliefs and expectations “pollute” our pure experiences, we should thank God that they do.  We’d be stuck in a world of sensations rather than objects if we couldn’t bring concepts to bear in our visual processing.  We don’t infer all our theories from sensations.  Aristotle and Aquinas recognized this long ago.  They didn’t build their epistemology on animal sensations but on our ability to perceive natures and thereby populate our minds with ordinary concepts like humans, apples, and cats.

Still, paradigms do restrict our vision.  They limit our focus.  But this is not all bad, even claiming that it is “essential to the development of science.”¹⁰  Paradigms give us a kind of mental stability:  they are fixed points of reference.  It is a fully rational thing not to give up your old point of view for a new one at every turn.  If everything was up for grabs at all times, we’d never make any headway.  Paradigms allow scientists to stop arguing about fundamental issues and start solving puzzles from within the paradigm.  The paradigm tells them what questions are significant enough to explore and how to go about answering them (i.e., via paradigmatic experiments).  Half of the work is already done for the scientist by the paradigm.

Consensus

It is often  argued that science is, unlike religion and philosophy, characterized by consensus and wide-spread agreement.  Therefore, it uniquely promises to make progress and solve problems.  However, with the notion of paradigms, I hope we can see that modern science is characterized by consensus because scientists are taught the same paradigm in graduate school and the community enforces a rather rigid orthodoxy.  Vocal questioners of the paradigm, no matter how credentialed, have trouble publishing in mainstream journals and presses, are unlikely to receive tenure, and are effectively excommunicated by being labeled science deniers or pseudo-scientists. 

I saw this happen with a friend who holds two excellent Ph.D.s and held a joint appointment between the NIH and the Smithsonian.  When it became suspected that he harbored scientific doubts about the power of the neo-Darwinian selection-mutation mechanism and might even be open to an intelligent design explanation for features of the living world, he was harassed by his colleagues who even hid his specimens so that he could not continue his research.  This is highly ironic in light of the positivist narrative of medieval orthodoxy enforced by the Inquisition. 

Science and Metaphysics

At any rate, paradigms are larger than just a certain explanation for how this or that natural thing functions.  The paradigm sets rules about which scientific laws hold, which methods are truly scientific, and even contains the “quasi-metaphysical commitments that the historical study [of science] so regularly displays.”¹¹  Consider  the corpuscular theory of matter, which supposed all matter to be composed of minute particles.  This was not just pure “science.” This was a metaphysical commitment that thinkers like Hobbes, Descartes and Newton called “scientific” and which served to guide their research and the solutions they deemed acceptable.  They went about looking for laws specifying corpuscular motion and corpuscular interaction; those were the only explanations deemed properly scientific.  Or think of Einstein’s development of four-dimensionalism, where space and time are part of a single manifold. Surely this is both a scientific and metaphysical theory.¹²

So when Catholic intellectuals make a hard and fast (and, frankly, positivist) distinction between what is science and what is metaphysics, I hope you can understand why people like me get uneasy.  It isn’t because we think there is no difference in general.  Metaphysicians don’t normally put things in test tubes.  But there is far more overlap than the rigid distinction recognizes.¹³  The reason is that scientists are trying, just like philosophers, to tell us what reality is really like.  As Einstein understood, “every true theorist is a kind of tamed metaphysicist, no matter how pure a ‘positivist’ he may fancy himself.”¹⁴

Doubt and questioning are a part of the Christian faith. In Randal Rauser's new book, Conversations with My Inner Atheist, the Christian theologian and apologist explores his own doubts and questions by way of an internal conversation with his own inner atheist, Mia (i.e., "My Inner Atheist.") This article is a chapter drawn from the book in which Randal and Mia explore the question of how one can identify the God of the philosophers with the God described in the Bible.

Mia: I have a feeling you just danced around that last question but fine, whatever: here’s another problem. And this one goes to the heart of what Christians say about God.

Randal: Sounds good, I’m ready.

Mia: Okay, here goes. The God of the Bible is a being who has emotions (John 3:16; Psalm 5:5), he grows angry (Psalm 106:40), learns (Genesis 18:21), changes his mind (Jonah 3:10), has regrets (Genesis 6:6), has a body and face (Exodus 33:18-20), and sits on a throne (Psalm 103:19). That’s how the Bible describes God.

But then theologians and philosophers come along and say, oh, no, wait, God doesn’t actually have emotions, he doesn’t really grow angry. He doesn’t learn or change his mind; in fact, he has no regrets, no body, face or throne on which he sits. Instead, here’s what God really is: he is an impassible, eternal, non-physical, omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent being. Yeah, that’s it!

In other words, he’s completely different from the being actually described in the Bible.

Forgive me, but it looks like you’re trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. When you have two completely different descriptions the only conclusion is that these aren’t the same being at all.

How can the God of the Bible be the same being as this God of the Philosophers? You need to choose!

Randal: Yes, many people have sensed that tension. Your framing is well chosen, too: the great French philosopher Pascal famously attributed a mystical experience he had to “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not the God of the Philosophers.”

Mia: Great minds think alike.

I’ll level with you here: it seems to me that the reason theologians and philosophers gravitate to the God of the Philosophers is because they are embarrassed by the God of the Bible. They don’t know what to do with him. He isn’t sophisticated and respectable.

He appears capricious, mean, and unpredictable. He’s a finite being, located in spacetime and he has a body and learns and has regrets: in other words, he is little more than a glorified human being, no different in that respect than the gods of ancient Greece.

Randal: I understand that that may be your perception, but maybe I can help you with your incredulity. Imagine, for a moment the response of an average man when he first learns that according to the scientists, the heavy oak chair on which he is sitting is composed of vibrating packets of energy in empty space. Picture his incredulity. No doubt, he’d be thinking how can you possibly hope to unify these two utterly incompatible pictures of reality? A heavy oak chair that is somehow also vibrating packets of energy in empty space? It makes no sense. Obviously these are really just two different things, right?

But of course, it does make sense if one can understand that these are both legitimate descriptions and that they operate at different explanatory levels. The description of a heavy oak chair captures the everyday experience while the description of vibrating packets of energy provides the physicist’s description of that same reality.

By analogy, the God who acts in history, who learns, changes his mind, grows angry and the like may capture the perception of the everyday Christian. At the same time, the theologian describes God as having particular attributes such as eternality, impassibility, and omnipresence.

Mia: I have no problem with the basic idea of how a physicist arrives at her description of the oak chair. But how do you justify moving from the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to that abstraction debated by theologians and philosophers?

Randal: The first thing you need to recognize is that theology is not simply a product of reading the Bible and counting up the verses that support your view. Rather, it is a matter of reading the Bible in a complex process of reflective equilibrium.

Mia: Reflective what?

Randal: You reflect on Scripture in light of your rational and moral intuitions and reasoning, the reading traditions of your background community—like the priority of John 3:16 in understanding salvation— and personal and communal experience. All of these sources inform theological reasoning and together we can see how they bring a theologian stepwise from the experience of the person in the pew to the technical description of God employed by the professional theologian or philosopher.

Mia: That all sounds nice, but unless you can fill in the details, I’m going to suspect you are merely trying to justify the fact that you want to ignore all the Bible’s embarrassing details.

Randal: Pardon me, but can you fill in all the details from the quantum description of the chair to the experience of the man sitting in it?

Mia: Who’s askin’?

Randal: Yeah, I didn’t think so. So maybe you could cut me some slack.

Mia: I don’t claim to be a physicist. But, uh, you do claim to be a theologian.

Randal: Touché. Okay, perhaps I can say a bit more about one specific topic of theology: metaphysics.

Mia: ‘Metaphysics’ as in crystals and gurus and auras?

Randal: Goodness no, I mean metaphysics as in the area of philosophy that concerns our basic convictions about the structure and nature of the world. Just as everyone engages in philosophical reflection so everyone has a metaphysic, a set of beliefs about the nature of ultimate reality. A very basic part of philosophical reflection involves turning our drive for conceptual clarification toward our basic metaphysical commitments. As I said, the fact is that everyone has a philosophy and a metaphysic whether we recognize it or not, and it is important to become aware of what our philosophical views are and how they shape our thinking. As Fergus Kerr observes,

“If theologians proceed in the belief that they need neither examine nor acknowledge their inherited metaphysical commitments, they will simply remain prisoners of whatever philosophical school was in the ascendant 30 years earlier, when they were first year students.” (Theology After Wittgenstein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 3.)

So it’s not like I’m reading the Bible through my philosophy and metaphysic while the guy who believes God literally experiences emotion and changes his mind is free of philosophy and metaphysics.

Rather, we’re both interpreting the text and engaging in theological and philosophical reflection as we go. As Alister McGrath puts it, philosophical theology is simply concerned with “the clarification of ideas.” (Christian Theology: An Introduction, 6th ed. (Wiley Blackwell, 2017), 91.) And we could all use more clarity in our thinking about God. So the question is not whether we shall think theologically and philosophically about these issues but rather whether we will do it well.

Mia: But I’m still not clear how you actually get to that philosopher’s abstraction based on the earthy and very human depiction of God in the Bible.

Randal: It might help to consider how we get to one big metaphysical claim in particular—the claim that God is perfect—because a lot flows from that one claim. The great medieval philosopher Anselm argued that when you reflect on the concept of God you arrive at a definition like this: God is that being than which none greater can be conceived.

Mia: Huh? What’s that even supposed to mean?

Randal: Put simply, it means that God is the greatest possible being, there is none greater. Now I have surveyed seminary students for almost twenty years by asking them “Do you think God is the most perfect being there could be?” Time and again, they agree.

In all that time, I’ve never had a single student say that God would be anything less than perfect. They might question our grasp of perfection, but they don’t question that God is perfect.

I think their intuitions in that regard are spot on. And that means that if we encounter passages in the Bible that depict God acting in ways that appear to be very far from perfect, we have one of two options: we can either revise our understanding of perfection or we can revise our reading of the passage in question.

So for example, the Bible depicts God changing his mind, having regrets, learning, growing angry, hating people, lashing out in rage, and so on.

Are these behaviors consistent with perfection? Christian theologians will disagree. But what I would hope we can appreciate is that when a theologian ends up with an understanding of God that looks rather different from some of the depictions in the Bible, she did not arrive at that picture by plucking it arbitrarily out of thin air. Rather, she reasoned to it carefully, informed by several factors including a basic intuitive conception of perfection read in critical dialogue with Scripture and informed by tradition, personal experience, and reason.

Thus, we can conclude that the one God that exists necessarily is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Just as the heavy oak chair is the same object as that particular collection of vibrating packets of energy so the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is the same perfect being as is described by the philosophers.

The next step in each case is to explore various models to justify these identity claims and reconcile any tension between them. And that’s what systematic theology is all about.

Admittedly, that was a very quick summary, but hopefully you can at least get a sense of how one can unite these two seemingly incompatible conceptions of God.

Pick up your copy of Conversations with My Inner Atheist: A Christian Apologist Explores Questions that Keep People Up at Night.

Unlike many other articles dealing with miracles, this one is not actually expected to change minds about the reality of such phenomena. Rather, it is intended to show why miracles are believed and should be believed by believers as well as why miracles are not believed and likely will not be believed by unbelievers. The focus here is less on the extraordinary events themselves and more on the reasons why some people believe the reports about them, while others do not.

The extraordinary phenomena at issue include both preternatural and supernatural events. By the term, “preternatural, is meant events that exceed the common order of nature, although given other conditions, such events might be explained naturally. For example, while humans can fly in airplanes, such flight would be beyond their unaided natural powers.

The term, “supernatural,” is reserved for those events that cannot be explained by natural forces under any conditions whatever. They require the infinite power possessed by the God of classical theism alone, for example, causing the resurrection of a truly dead person. Strictly speaking, the term, “miracle,” pertains exclusively to supernatural events.

Preternatural events stand in an intermediate position between the purely natural and those that are supernatural.

I include preternatural phenomena in this essay, since such realities belong to many reports which natural science cannot explain, and hence, would challenge the metaphysical assumptions of many modern materialists. I realize that naturalists would claim to be impressed by genuine miracles alone.

The Reports

Many reports of miracles are dismissed because things like cancer cures can be explained as mere remissions. Yet, the resurrection of Christ is hotly contested as to fact, since it clearly entails a genuine miracle. Remarkably, there exists a book, Saints Who Raise the Dead: True Stories of 400 Resurrection Miracles by Albert J. Hebert, which presents details of many claimed actual resurrections of the dead down through history. Most appear to be found in the biographies of major saints of the Catholic Church.

Yet, how do we know that the “dead” in these alleged resurrections were actually even really dead? In most cases, absolute verification of death before the resurrection takes place could hardly be expected – especially in past centuries, since who would anticipate ahead of time that someone would be resurrected – thereby causing subsequent need to prove actual prior death?

Nonetheless, a rather strong indication of death is reported in a resurrection attributed to St. Vincent Ferrer (1350-1419). A woman became insane, slit her small son’s throat, dismembered his body, and roasted a portion, which she then tried to serve to her husband. St. Vincent prayed over the remains and the reassembled pieces arose as the living boy. This case was part of the saint’s canonization process.¹ In many other cases, the deceased was dead for days, hanged by the neck for days, suffered violent deaths, or even sealed in a coffin for long periods.² Undoubtable death was evident in most cases. Testimony affirming resurrections was recorded by responsible authorities in many cases, such as in a formal canonization process.

An oddly different set of extraordinary events is the reported appearances of dead persons to living ones in the form of souls allegedly coming from Purgatory or, rarely, even from Hell itself. These apparitions were predominantly visible phenomena or even fully physical presences as “living” human beings. Here again we have another work listing literally hundreds of such instances in Purgatory by F.X. Schouppe. Like the book on cases of reported resurrections, these accounts are assembled from many earlier books, records, canonical investigations, historical testimonies, and so forth.

And then, not surprisingly, we have a number of “encounters” recorded between Padre Pio and souls from Purgatory appearing before him, sometimes so physically present that others could see them.

I will add here a rather curious case of private revelation which is of interest both because it is relatively recent and because of the large number of attesting witnesses. The Miraculous Crucifix of Limpias is found in a church in Santander, Spain. During the period around WWI, thousands of eyewitnesses saw Christ’s body on the crucifix “come alive” and show powerful signs of emotion and suffering, including evident breathing and physical motions.

“The multiple albums that are found in the sacristy of the church of Limpias contain well over 8,000 testimonies of people who had seen the wonderful apparitions. Of these, 2,500 were sworn on oath. Among these witnesses were members of religious orders, priests, doctors, lawyers, professors, and governors of universities, officers, merchants, workmen, country folk, unbelievers and even atheists.”

What is the Point?

I am not trying to produce some kind of direct evidence to prove to the readers the truth of all these reports of preternatural or supernatural events described above. Rather, my focus is on the difference in the reaction of believers and non-believers to these reports.

Many believers are not familiar with all these reported “miraculous” events, but on hearing of them, tend to believe, especially when they realize that such reports have recurred often though history. But, why is there such natural sympathy on the part of believers, especially Catholics?

And why do non-believers express instant skepticism by offering various rationales for dismissing the credibility of such reports? Is it merely pure prejudice, as G.K. Chesterton seems to suggest?

“If we say miracles are theoretically possible, they say, “Yes, but there is no evidence for them.” When we take all the records of the human race and say, “Here is your evidence,” they say, “But these people were superstitious, they believed in impossible things.”

In fairness, I suggest that the Catholic mentality about such accounts of religious prodigies is received with greater acceptance for the simple reason that Catholics understand the nature of the Catholic faith. Now, what I just said is easily misunderstood, since I am not saying that belief in these reports is simply a matter of blind faith. On the contrary, there is a rational process going on here – but one that would, doubtless, not sound equally rational to the skeptic, agnostic, atheist, or unbeliever.

For Catholics, the persons offering these reports are seen to be very holy people for the most part -- indeed, saints! As such, it is expected that they will tell the truth. It is essentially as simple as that.

Moreover, all Catholics know that to tell a deliberate lie in a serious matter -- such as falsely claiming a miracle – is a mortal sin and matter for Confession. That hundreds of committed Catholics would tell such lies separately, and yet, en masse is a moral impossibility. While those who are not practicing Catholics may not understand this simple truth, those who are practicing Catholics will easily see that such uncoordinated mass deception over many centuries could never occur.

Oh yes, some will allege that the witnesses affirming these reports might be hallucinating, mentally obsessed or even psychotic, suffering delusions, or otherwise incapacitated from having normal observational objectivity. The difficulty with those sorts of explanations is the great number of such witnesses and the even greater number of such reports. A few cases may be explained in this skeptical fashion, but surely not in such vast numbers. Moreover, the psychological stability of those witnesses later declared as saints have withstood the careful evaluations of the canonization process.

Even a single authentic report of an apparition or miracle is sufficient to establish beyond question an entire order of reality generally rejected out of hand by skeptics. Unfortunately, for the skeptic, his corresponding task is to refute every single report – a task obviously impossible on its face. Even for the more nuanced position of naturalism, a single authentically-supernatural event (miracle) would constitute absolute refutation.

On the other hand, to the skeptic or agnostic, the entire order of such claims is instantly suspect, since they are not first attending to the standard of holiness and/or veracity demanded of the consciences of ordinary Catholics, say nothing of saints! Rather, what impresses their view is the seeming absurdity or impossibility of the claims themselves – claims which, on their very face, seem to demand incredulity.

Paradoxically, the very practice of his own faith enables the believer to see with conviction the essential truthfulness of all this devout witness testimony – something that is inherently obscure or unbelievable to the skeptic. St. Anselm of Canterbury’s insight, which reveals the inherent connection between true faith and rational intelligibility, now becomes clearly evident: Credo ut intelligam. I believe in order that I may understand.

Fatima: God's "Assist" for Skeptics

Almost as if God chose to answer the skeptics who complained that no easily verifiable major public miracles had occurred in modern times, the twentieth century witnessed the most public miracle of all time.

At Fatima, Portugal, on October 13, 1917, God dramatically removed many of the objections to belief that skeptics raise against the sorts of extraordinary phenomena treated earlier in this essay. As if to answer those who doubt events from hundreds of years ago, this massive “miracle of the sun” occurred in the early twentieth century, when modern means of photography, major newspaper coverage, and electronic communication were available – as well as having testimony taken nearly half a century later when many eyewitnesses were still alive.

Rather than an event observed by a single person or relatively few (except in the case of the Limpias Crucifix cited above), this miracle was witnessed by at least forty and, perhaps, as many as one hundred thousand persons. It was not a genuine motion of the sun itself, since that would have been observed by astronomers and drastically shaken the earth as well. It was some sort of massive visual experience that was not identically, and yet was largely similarly, experienced by huge numbers of those present – an experience that defies natural explanation by various skeptical hypotheses.

What many also do not understand is that the fact that all present did not see the exact same thing is, rather than a cause for skepticism, clear proof that it was a massive set of apparitions following the same theme, but with enough variation to show that no common external physical cause could be responsible. Some failed to see anything. Whatever caused this phenomenon was able to create a generally common subjective experience in tens of thousands of persons simultaneously, but also could make variations therein or even fail to cause any experience whatever in some.

Worse yet for skeptics, the event entails three distinct aspects – any of which by itself could be described as a miracle, but all three variables at once are decisive. They were: (1) the prediction of a stupendous miracle ahead of time (so that both believers and skeptics and reporters came by the tens of thousands from all over Portugal), (2) the visual phenomenon itself, and (3) the simultaneous sudden and complete drying of the people and the muddy ground, which had been rain soaked all morning. Some may try to explain one or another aspect, but the three simultaneously-joined, objectively verifiable, psychic, visual, and physical phenomena present an extraordinary event not seen in human memory.

So, the Fatima miracle stands by itself.

"Thank You, Father"

The following incident took place recently in an American diocese whose locale includes cemeteries dating back to the Civil War.

There is a house in the country on the top of a hill well off a main road with a long driveway from the road to the house. A mother and her son living there appear at their local Catholic pastor’s rectory, clearly upset and shaken – reporting certain disturbing “experiences” occurring in that house. These include such things as lights turning on and off by themselves, a child’s hand prints suddenly appearing on a clean metal door, and the father having an unseen force suddenly thrust him face first into a wall so hard that it dents the wall.

Having related these incidents, the mother and son convince their priest to go out to the house and say Mass and bless everything, which he does – first, by saying Mass and blessing the house, and then, by blessing a cemetery behind the house. The father then led the priest down a side trail -- maybe seventy yards -- to the foundations of an old house, where a thirteen year old girl had lived long ago. Three men had raped the poor girl and then hanged her in a tree next to that second house. They then buried her in a shallow grave right by a creek at that location.

And so, the priest also blessed the murdered girl’s grave.

After all this, having taken his leave, the priest is driving down the long driveway from the top of the hill where the main house is located. He reaches the bottom where it joins a country road. His car’s windows are shut with both heater and radio off. All is dead silence.

At this point, the priest hears clearly the voice of a young woman in his left ear, who says to him, “Thank you, Father.”

Since the reader does not know this priest, it is easy to be skeptical of the whole report. That is the reason, I suspect, that most skeptics and agnostics dismiss stories of Catholic and other miracles or preternatural experiences with a grain of salt – especially, since they know such things are impossible (as Chesterton noted).

Personally, I find absolutely credible the facts as related to me directly by the priest involved. This one incident, all by itself, is sufficient reason for me to believe that Catholic priests do have real powers. And this, in turn, tells me all I really need to know about the truth of the Catholic Church.

The reason I am convinced that the events happened exactly as related is because I have been a personal friend of the priest involved for nearly half a century. I know he is a good priest, who takes his obligations to the Faith and to tell the truth dead seriously. I know he is sane, sober, and has never told me of another similar experience. In a word, I am perfectly confident in his competence and veracity for reasons personally known to me -- reasons which the readers of this essay in no way share.

Conclusion

So it is with the general reaction of believers to the extensive reports of Catholic and other Christian miracles and extraordinary events. Believers know the moral rectitude of the vast majority of those in their faith who experience these things, report them to superiors, and the superiors themselves who conduct such serious matters as canonical investigations. Even if one doubted a few such reports in specific instances, the mere fact that hundreds of such extraordinary religious phenomena have been recorded in history constitutes powerful reason for believers to accept the reality of such preternatural and supernatural phenomena.

That is why believers believe in such reported miracles. Perhaps, also, it is this mechanism of “referred eyewitness certitude” that explains the vivid faith of early Christians that Christ truly rose from the dead. Indeed, this finally makes perfect sense of St. Paul’s unique report that the risen Christ “was seen by over five hundred brethren at once” (1 Corinthians 15:6, New King James Version), since such widespread eyewitness foundation would easily have convinced others that the Resurrection was a fact beyond all doubting.

To the contrary, it is the corresponding lack of confidence in devout witnesses and ecclesiastical investigations and historical records which probably causes unbelieving skeptics to dismiss the whole matter with total incredulity, while they spend their time and energy engaging in speculative disputations about the historicity of Scripture and the existence and coherence of the God of classical theism.

This is also probably why each side, from its own perspective, is so thoroughly convinced that the other side is dead wrong.

“Atheism, we’ll say, for all we know may come at the beginning of religion rather than the end.” (173)

That is not the kind of quote you’d expect to find in a typical book defending an atheistic perspective. But then again, J.L. Schellenberg did not write a typical atheistic book. Progressive Atheism: How Moral Evolution Changes the God Debate (Bloomsbury, 2019) is a manifesto of innovative and iconoclastic atheist thought in the manner of Ronald Dworkin’s Religion without God. 

Practically speaking, this means that Schellenberg is dissatisfied with many conventional atheistic positions. New atheism receives short shrift (and rightly so) as “an activist’s strategy” rather than “an intellectually serious option” (26). And naturalism, while a venerable and intellectually serious position, is nonetheless one which outruns the available evidence:

“Naturalism is an orthodoxy of intellectual culture today, and it is in the spirit of science to resist being constricted by it in our intellectual endeavors. Of course, it’s a huge compliment to science to insist that all of reality can be understood by means of scientific inquiry. But true science is humble, and will refuse the compliment.” (55-6)

Schellenberg’s atheism is, as the title suggests, “progressive”. But what is that supposed to mean, exactly? At the heart of the book lies a conviction that human beings have made enormous progress in scientific, moral, and prudential thinking over the centuries. And this should shape how we think about the God question. The first thing it helps us to see is that the common ways of framing the issue of metaphysical absolutes from within the categories of western monotheism is a historical accident and threatens “spiritual ethnocentrism” (54). We need to dare to think bigger.

But to get to those brighter pastures, we first need to hone the insights of our recent cultural evolution to drive home just how problematic is the traditional concept of God. Over three chapters, Schellenberg launches a series of arguments against the perfect God of western monotheism, i.e. a personal being that is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good. This God cannot be reconciled to the data of experience including the problem of divine hiddenness (chapter 6), the existence of moral horrors (chapter 7) and the ubiquity of violence (chapter 8). A God who is truly the perfect embodiment of the virtues we admire would allow none of these things in the quantity and quality that we find them in the universe. And so, we have a good reason to conclude that this God does not exist.

But then what does exist? The final (and tenth) chapter, “Atheism’s Brave New World” seeks to survey a range of options. We begin with ietsisme, a Dutch term that may be translated “somethingism” (159). In short, while western monotheism may face critical objections, there still must be some ultimate reality. The search for that something more begins by recognizing that this reality would transcend the mundane domain of every day human experience. Furthermore, this reality must be important for human flourishing. Schellenberg suggests calling it “vital transmundanity” (161), a term that I suspect is too unwieldy to ever go viral.

This pursuit of that which transcends the mundane brings us to the concept of “triple ultimacy,” a reality that is the ultimate in terms of its facticity, its inherent value, and its depth of goodness (169). And that brings us back to the quote with which I began this review. It is a mere historical accident that religiosity is linked to western monotheistic religions. In Schellenberg’s vision, a rejection of monotheism may be the first step toward a truer, deeper religiosity as one pursues a greater understanding of the ultimate (non-personal? impersonal?) nature of that which is real.

J.L. Schellenberg is one of the leading intellectuals of contemporary atheistic philosophy. That should hardly be surprising given the ambition and originality of his vision in Progressive Atheism. No surprise, as a Christian theologian there is much with which I disagree in this book. In particular, I find his three arguments for atheism (hiddenness, moral horrors, violence) to be far from persuasive. Nor am I particularly moved by his critique of contemporary theistic philosophy in chapter 9.

But in fairness, Progressive Atheism is not intended as a rigorous and in-depth presentation of argument. Rather, as I said above, I take it as a sort of manifesto, a terse and focused introduction to and defense of a new program, one brimming with ambition and alive with new ideas. When I was doing my doctorate twenty years ago, the analytic philosopher W.V. Quine still dominated conversations. His famous essay “On What There Is,” (The Review of Metaphysics, 2(1) (1948), 21–38) treated metaphysics as analogous to packing for a two-week hike in the Himalayas: only pack what you need. It would be wrong to say Schellenberg has abandoned the basic commitment: after all, ideas still need to pay rent. Nonetheless, the distressingly austere Quinean universe dissolves here into a refreshing openness for a world far more ontologically rich than we can imagine.

I am grateful for Schellenberg’s well-placed critiques of the new atheism, antitheism, and naturalism. And even if I remain unpersuaded by his critique of theism, he definitely lands some punches and provides a valuable catalyst for deeper thinking. But what excites me most about Progressive Atheism is the possibility of dialogue between philosophers — theistic, atheistic and otherwise — who are together committed to pursuing a greater understanding of a world-transcendent reality. It may be too soon to speak of building ecumenical bridges, but Schellenberg’s expansive vision offers far more space for meaningful dialogue with the Christian philosopher than the snarky condescension of new atheism and the Quinean austerity of contemporary naturalism. And for that, I’m grateful.

“Too much religion is bad for a country,” asserts Max Boot in a recent Washington Post op-ed. Boot cites a number of indicators—average GDP per capita, unemployment rates, poverty rates, homicide rates, life expectancy, infant mortality, education, and degree of political liberties—that suggest that “less religious nations are much better off.” Indeed, Australia, Sweden, Belgium, the United Kingdom, and Japan, some of the least religious nations in the world, rank best in the aforementioned categories, while many of the most religious nations in the world (the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Pakistan, Thailand, India, Nigeria) are among the worst. America represents a unique case in this regard, being both wealthy and developed, but more religious than her Western counterparts. Would she be better off if her religious practice were to decline to levels found elsewhere in the developed world?

An Incomplete Narrative regarding Developed Countries

At first glance, given the stats cited above, one might be inclined to think that religion represents yet one more archaic element of society worthy of being cast off into the dustbin of history. Generally speaking, the most developed, successful, and prosperous nations on earth are the least religious. Moreover, in many areas—such as life expectancy, the rate of children living in single-parent households, and the rate of homicides by firearms—the United States, whose church attendance rates are similar to what they were in 1940, is doing worse than other developed nations that are less religious.

Yet such comparisons need to account for other factors as well. For example, almost every developed country cited as an exemplar for America to follow is suffering from catastrophically low birth rates that endanger each country’s economic viability and socio-cultural stability. And low birth rates are attributed to lifestyle choices associated with economic affluence, accessibility to contraception, and a lack of religious observance (practicing religious families tend to have more children). Those who argue that immigration can solve the economic problem find that it can further aggravate the socio-cultural stability problem, and that once immigrants settle, their birth rates soon decline to that of their host country. This in turn can become a serious political and security issue, as rising violence and radicalism in the United Kingdom, France, and Sweden demonstrate. Having high life expectancy and low unemployment and poverty doesn’t do a nation much good if it’s on the way to a population collapse.

Besides a demographic crisis, developed countries are experiencing unprecedented levels of social isolation, depression, and loneliness. South Korea, Belgium, and Japan have some of the highest suicide rates in the world. In contrast, some of the most religious countries rank as some of the least suicidal in the world: Papua New Guinea (119th), the Philippines (159th), and Pakistan (169th), for example. In Japan, in turn, there is an increasing phenomenon of “Kodokushi,” where elderly people die alone and remain undiscovered for long periods of time. Elsewhere, former British Prime Minister Theresa May in 2018 established a “minister for loneliness,” because more than 9 million people in the UK—about 14 percent of the population—“often or always feel lonely.” Government research found that about 200,000 older people in Britain “had not had a conversation with a friend or relative in more than a month.”

These trends are compounded by the proliferation of socially isolating, addicting forms of entertainment like pornography, video games, social media, and smartphones that affect rising numbers of Westerners. Between 5 to 8 percent of the adult population in the United States is either addicted to pornography or engages in what the medical community assesses as excessive porn use. Numbers are estimated to be similar in the United Kingdom. Millions of Americans are classified as having compulsive video-game behavior, while there is increasing scientific consensus that handheld digital technology is similarly dangerous in its addictive qualities. Being well-educated and living longer may not be so great if one lives depressed and suffering from compulsive addictions, then dies alone and forgotten.

Religion Isn’t Just Good for the Soul

Many are familiar with the plethora of scientific research that demonstrates that those who engage in religious or spiritual activities have better health than those who do not. As researchers at the Mayo Clinic concluded: “Most studies have shown that religious involvement and spirituality are associated with better health outcomes, including greater longevity, coping skills, and health-related quality of life (even during terminal illness) and less anxiety, depression, and suicide. Several studies have shown that addressing the spiritual needs of the patient may enhance recovery from illness.”

Yet religious observance also has significant beneficial effects across a host of sociological categories. University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox has argued:

On average, religion is a clear force for good when it comes to family unity and the welfare of children—the most important aspects of our day-to-day lives. Research, some of it my own, indicates that, on average, Americans who regularly attend services at a church, synagogue, temple, or mosque are less likely to cheat on their partners; less likely to abuse them; more likely to enjoy happier marriages; and less likely to have been divorced.

Data collected by the National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Survey, in turn, demonstrate that Americans who regularly attend religious services are more likely to report that they are “very happy” in their marriages when compared to those who rarely or never attend.

Research also indicates that religious parents spend more time with their children, including eating dinner with their children, doing chores together, and attending events with their children. Religious parents also more frequently praise and show affection to their school-aged children. Children from religious families, presumably as a consequence, are “rated by both parents and teachers as having better self-control, social skills, and approaches to learning than kids with non-religious parents,” according to a nationally representative study of more than 16,000 American children.

It’s likely that these many positive indicators have something to do with the nature of much religious teaching itself, which promotes faithfulness, sacrifice, and care for one’s family. It’s also just as reasonable to conclude that religious experience acts as a social adhesive, binding people to one another both in families and in larger social networks and communities. Indeed, scientific research indicates that those who are involved in social activities, regardless of whether or not those activities are explicitly religious in nature, have longer lives, better physical and mental health, and a lower risk of dementia. One study, which examined data from more than 309,000 people, found that a lack of strong relationships increased the risk of premature death from all causes by 50 percent. This is comparable to the increased mortality risk caused by smoking up to fifteen cigarettes a day. It’s no real surprise, then, that those whose piety possesses a social component are generally healthier, happier, and better contributors to positive familial and social outcomes.

A Successful West Was Not Always Areligious

The secularization of the developed world must also be placed within a broader historical narrative. For centuries before the Enlightenment, anti-clericalism, modernity, and postmodernity took their toll on Western religious faith and practice, European nations were both highly pious and successful across many indicators. Beginning in the medieval era and quickening after the Renaissance, medical, educational, and technological developments in the West outpaced those in the rest of the world by significant margins. Indeed, the European colonial powers that dominated the globe beginning in the sixteenth century—England, France, Spain, and Portugal—all aggressively sought to extend their faiths to the peoples they conquered. Moreover, church attendance and explicitly Christian political movements remained strong in many Western countries (e.g. Germany, Canada, Ireland) into the post–World War II era.

Certainly the West has become less religious since the Enlightenment, though that narrative can obscure significant periods of religious revival in the West since the French Revolution. There were revivals in Victorian England, in Le Réveil and the post-Napoleonic revival of German Catholicism on the European continent, and in the Second and Third Great Awakenings in the United States. It is more accurate to speak of the acceleration of that secularization process across the West in the last two generations, which is several centuries after Western nations and their culture came to dominate the globe.

Rather than perceive some Western nations as increasingly better off as they shed the last vestiges of religious practice, I propose an alternative perspective. Increasingly secularized Western nations continue to enjoy the many benefits of their religious inheritance, such as consciences informed by Judeo-Christian beliefs about justice and atonement, and civic participation informed by Judeo-Christian teachings about personal obligation. Counter-intuitively, these transcendent qualities of faith, which eschew utilitarian aims for a greater purpose, are what create the circumstances for greater material well-being. Yet the West is exhausting that religio-socio-political capital, rejecting transcendent reality in favor of materialistic decadence and self-absorption, as Ross Douthat has argued in his recent book.

This is the great irony of the Jewish and Christian faith traditions. One must be willing to accept suffering and sacrifice for a greater purpose that transcends one’s particular material and sensual needs and desires. As Christ declared: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (John 12:24–25). Dostoevsky begins his literary masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov—a tale of suffering, sacrifice, and repentance—with this verse precisely because he perceived in its promise a mysterious redemptive power capable of changing the world.

Driven by the popular chant “Hey, hey, Western Civ has got to go!” Americans have increasingly forgotten that it was the Church that fostered the very best of our civilization and culture. This includes its greatest art, architecture, and music; its economic and civic vitality; its intellectual curiosity and scientific method. Moreover, as Fulton J. Sheen argued, “Religion’s service to democracy is secondary and indirect; that is, by concentrating on spiritualizing the souls of men, it will diffuse through political society an increased service of justice and charity rooted in God.” Only a return to the “First Things” of religious faith and practice can prevent the West—and especially America—from confronting the same dilemmas that face less religious Western nations.

Originally appeared at The Public Discourse. Reposted with permission.