Undeception

I realize this is a week old, which in the blogosophere can make something quite stale, but I had some thoughts on James K. A. Smith’s surprisingly negative review of Peter Enns’ recent The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn’t Say about Human Origins.

Smith’s criticism focuses on Enns’ methodology, which is based on the reasonable belief that we can’t decide what God may have meant by a passage until we know the immediate, contextual meaning of that passage.

On the contrary, says Smith, “The church has always staked its reading of the Bible on the conviction that Scripture’s meaning exceeds what the original human authors could have intended.” Smith expects the Church to derive the most appropriate and relevant interpretations of Scripture by basing our interpretation in “worship”, whatever that means, “which will generate meanings…that could never have been intended by [the] human authors,” meanings that are “intended as meanings to be unfolded ‘in front of the text’ by the divine Author.”

The notion that there may be meaning in Scripture above and beyond the original meaning may be a conceivably defensible position (a position I once espoused on this site), but he doesn’t stop there: Smith insists that Enns is wrong to try to recover the meaning of the authors for the original audiences because of the danger of it hindering us from extracting a more appropriate, divinely intended meaning for us. So in reading Genesis, Enns should not expend so much effort in recovering the Ancient Near Eastern context, including relevant literary and archaeological backgrounding. That sort of research is well and good, Smith allows, but it doesn’t tell us what the Bible really means now, because it doesn’t take into account the meaning intended for us as contextualized within the Christian canon:

First of all, the Christian church is not a recipient of the book of Genesis as a discrete unit; we receive the book of Genesis within the Bible and that Bible is received as a whole—as a “canon” of Scripture.  Second, internal to the canon is the conviction that meanings God intends are not constrained by what human authors intended.

Although he puts his preferred hermeneutic in terms of “recontextualizing” Scripture, in essence Smith is wanting to theologize the text before situating it in history, because we are apparently not allowed to come to any conclusions by examining individual texts like Genesis and Romans that make it hard for this recontextualization (which in practice looks like front-loading) to occur.

Because Jamie Smith is no fundamentalist, or even a Chicago style inerrantist, he concedes, “Enns is exactly right to push back on ‘conservative’ or ‘literal’ readings of the Bible that anachronistically impose a ‘journalistic’ sense of ‘history’ on ancient texts.” But in this review specifically he seems uncomfortable with Enns’ claim that Paul and the author Genesis might not have intended the same meaning in their passages on Adam and Eve: “In fact, if it becomes a contest between ‘the authors of Genesis’ [note the scare quotes, presumably to flag Enns' avoidance of "Moses"] and Paul, Enns sides with ‘the original meaning’ of Genesis as the determinative meaning.” Not having read the book but broadly being aware of Enns’ perspective, I doubt that Enns would actually say either is determinative to the subjugation of the other; instead, it is Smith who wants to subjugate the intended message of both “Moses” and Paul to the meaning of the “divine Author”…whatever that might be. (I presume by Smith’s objection to letting Genesis carry its own meaning that he expects that God’s intended meaning happens to correspond more closely to Paul’s.)

But what of Smith’s “divine Author”? Should we put so much energy into finding the original meaning that we miss the message God intended for the Church to receive? My understanding is that Enns would affirm divine authorship in some capacity, although he rightly cautions us to avoid the “priority of the divine” that Smith here advocates.

To put it bluntly, I am no longer of the opinion that Scripture is layered with a special coating of “what God meant” sauce; neither do I believe that the Bible is composed of the flesh of human words attached to a divinely crafted backbone. Nor am I enamored with Peter Enns’ incarnational model of Scripture as I understand it, which is built off of the belief that divine and human authorship overlaps. In short, I have seen no compelling, non-circular reason to maintain the belief that God should in any meaningful sense be considered the author of the Bible. To believe in God’s providential intentions for the Church in the production and canonization of the Bible is one thing; I can affirm as much myself. To credit Him as the publisher might even work. I have sometimes drawn the analogy of God’s purposing of Scripture to that of King James commissioning the translation of the Bible. It occurs to me now that my view of Scripture as the response of humans to divine revelation and inspiration strikes me as fairly well analogous to a Festschrift. But God as author? Hardly. And the contention that He was the kind of author who overlaid the glaringly human text with some esoteric meaning recoverable independently of the meaning it had to the original audiences and available only to subsequent theologians reminds me quite a lot of the infamous “Bible Codes” from a couple years back. It sounds even more like Gnosticism.

But even if God did ordain a higher meaning upon the text, surely we can only hope to find it by first contextualizing and resituating each passage back in its original habitat and going from there. Otherwise the original meaning becomes completely incidental, despite the fact that something much closer to the original meaning than Smith’s canonical reading was the only one actually available to those who canonized it! They canonized the texts for what they were, not for some divine meaning that would override what they were after their canonization.

For these reasons, Jamie Smith’s canonical approach falls far short, and Enns’ approach – by no means uniquely his – of putting the effort into letting the original authors speak for themselves so that we can attempt to interact with each of them on a case-by-case basis handily continues to carry the day.

As I teased earlier, cosmologist Lawrence Krauss and astrophysicist Rodney Holder engaged in a conversation about cosmological origins on Unbelievable over the weekend. It was an entertaining though not altogether surprising debate, confirming my impression of Krauss’s book. I have not read it, but as I always say in these scenarios, reading the book is not a prerequisite for commenting on what the author says is the point and thrust of his own book. This is not a review of the book; it’s a review of some of Krauss’s ideas and his presentation of those ideas, which are presumably not that different from those argued in his book.

But I guess the point I’m trying to make is that the real, if you wish, miracle that people seem to think requires the existence of God is that you can create a universe full of stuff, full of stars, planets, humans, remarkable things out of nothing, literally where there were no stars, particle, space, etc. And that particular “miracle” is something that the laws of physics certainly has plausible explanations for.

If this summarized Lawrence Krauss’s book A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing as well as he claims it does, I doubt I would have any major problem with it. I like eliminating the god of the gaps as much as anyone. But Krauss and his New Atheist compadres have bigger ideas for his book than just that.

At one point in the interview he says, ”The key, fascinating thing to try to understand is how we got this amazing universe and how you don’t need a Creator; you don’t need someone to obviate the laws of physics to produce it.” In the book Krauss offers a few variations on how to answer the question of the universe’s origin. This would indeed problematize the cosmological argument, especially when the latter is being used as a proof rather than as a pointer; in science, the more plausible mundane explanations are available to contend with a counter-intuitive explanation, the less likely the counter-intuitive explanation (here, a divine miracle) appears. But Krauss’s interlocutor for this debate was less than convinced that his explanations were compelling enough to make natural theology an entirely superfluous supposition.

Holder, a former priest and a current astrophysicist, argues that in attempting to settle the philosopher’s quandary about the universe’s creation from nothing, Krauss does not properly begin with nothing. Indeed, in the interview, Krauss speaks of this or that conceived pre-Universe state as “approaching” the “philosophers’ nothing“. Holder is not convinced: ”He’s ontologized this nothing.” In one model under consideration, Holder points out that Krauss is not beginning with the absence of anything, but a quantum vaccuum. Krauss did not argue with this point.

Holder then noted that even under an alternative model discussed in the book beginning with an actual “absence of space,” Krauss speaks of this nothing as having properties, which would disqualify that lack of space from being the philosophers’ nothing: “…It has the property of being unstable; it has the property of being able to be acted upon by quantum fields and gravity and so on.”  Krauss objected that those things did not exist in that model: rather, there is a “metaverse” in which there is potential for those things to exist. Rejoined Holder, even the potential is not nothing. The existence of potential is still existence.

This prompted a pointed response from Krauss: “If the universe didn’t have the potential to exist, then how did God create it?” Krauss seemed similarly bothered by the “why? why? why?” question, to which he expected the answer, “turtles all the way down:” that is, if we persist on asking “why this created object?” until we get to an eternal object, we could still always ask “why that eternal object?” And like Dawkins, Krauss maintains that we could do this with the existence of God, as well.

Holder launched into an explanation of God as a necessary being, claiming that most scientists hold that the universe, on the other hand, is contingent. I consider that this difference in types of existence can conceivably be squared with apophatic theology of the Cappadocian variety, which despite on the surface maintaining that God Himself does not exist (and does exist) is really arguing that God has an existence of an altogether different kind than the way we can conceive of existence; He is the very basis for the kind of existence we are familiar with. Holder mentions Hawking’s discussion of what “breathes fire into equations.”

Another point in the book that Krauss wanted to point out is that the laws of physics creating and sustaining the universe could themselves be generated naturally. Holder didn’t repudiate the idea, but he apparently still wants to take it back one more step, asking why these particular laws exist: “So there can be the most wonderful theory, but why is this theory even instantiated?” They did not go far down this road in this discussion, but I wish they had had the time to!

One thing they did have the time to get into was the question of the value of philosophy.

Krauss stated his belief that physics has begun to answer the questions that used to be the domain of theology and philosophy. He argues that the philosophers’ distinction between something and nothing have been shown to be irrelevant distinctions under science’s microscope (note that in answer to the question of why there is something rather than nothing, Krauss in effect wants to deny the premise of the question). Although he occasionally equivocates on this, it certainly appears as though Krauss wants to bookend Sam Harris’s The End of Faith with The End of Philosophy.

Many philosophers are up at arms against Krauss for dismissing philosophy as increasingly irrelevant in his empiricist’s world of logical positivism, as he does in this interview (he admits that he “discounted” a recent scathing NY Times review because it was by a philosopher rather than a cosmologist). But this is not just some unfortunate parasite intruding on Krauss’s project. As fellow scientist (and atheist) Sean Carroll judiciously pointed out, this is at the core of Krauss’s project: as stated explicitly in this debate, Krauss believes that physics has demonstrated that the question of why is no longer more scientifically interesting than the question of why flowers differ in color. What Krauss is saying is that answering how, i.e. mechanical explanations, make irrelevant the question why, i.e. the question of meaning or purpose.

We can see the folly of approaching why as a how question in much smaller endeavors. If a man presented to his wife a beautiful oil painting he had created out of a spontaneous act of devotion to her, he would be wronged if she dismissed it as the ultimately meaningless result of oil smeared across canvas. In fact, the more brilliant and beautiful the painting, the more poignant its higher purpose would be to her.

More to the point, if my son were to ask me, “Why do I have to get a painful shot?” and I answered, “Because the needle triggers the pain receptors in your arm,” I have misheard his question as “what makes a shot painful?” rather than “why do I need to undergo this painful shot?” Similarly, answering “why does the universe exist?” as Krauss does is no different than if he had heard the question as “what makes the universe exist?” which of course an entirely different question than the one memorably posed by Leibnitz. Answering how manifestly does not render the question of why irrelevant. It is on this point that I agree with Gould’s NOMA principle: science seeks to answer how where philosophy and theology seek to answer why, and despite all of the efforts of Krauss and special creationists, both disciplines are ill-equipped to answer the other’s question.

This is why I’d be happy enough for Krauss’s book to completely decimate the cosmological argument. I don’t need it. I don’t need God to stand in that gap. But don’t try to tell me that knowing how something is accomplished in any way abolishes any attached purpose or meaning behind it, no matter how brilliantly or exhaustively you explain the how‘s.

There have been a few recent discussions in the blogosphere tangentially related to Lawrence Krauss’s recent book, A Universe from Nothing, including an off-handed post by me and a short one by Eric Reitan. Today’s episode of the Unbelievable radio show promises to be interesting. You can probably expect me to give my thoughts on it once I have a chance to listen to it at the beginning of the week. For now, here’s the episode summary:

Lawrence Krauss is a Cosmologist at Arizona State University who describes himself as an “anti-theist”.  His latest book “A Universe from Nothing“ has received both acclaim and criticism for its attempt to answer the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

Debating the issue with Krauss is Rodney Holder, Course director at the Faraday Institute, Cambridge. An astrophysicist and priest by background.

In a lively exchange they debate whether Krauss’ “nothing” is “nothing”, fine tuning and multiverses, scientific knowledge, miracles and the usefulness of theology and philosophy.

Most people are familiar with Carl Sagan’s famous declaration that “We are made of star stuff,” if only because of that song from a decade ago. It is often referenced to prove that even stereotypically stodgy, lab-coated scientists can have a sense of awe, an appreciation for intangible aesthetics like beauty, and even the occasional turtleneck sweater. The implication of our unity - solidarity sounds a little too punny – with the building blocks of our material universe on the basis of our common heritage from the Big Bang is a strangely resonating notion that science popularist Lawrence Krauss has recently capitalized on.

Krauss’s version of the motif, now a famous infographic, has gained a lot of recent attention for its having caused an Evangelical backlash against Miley Cyrus when she revealed on Twitter that she found it “Beautiful,” despite Krauss’s snarky materialistic send-up of one of the central ideas of Christianity.

There is indeed undeniable poetry in this. And one mark of a good poet is the ability to find beauty even in the sewage.

Conversely, a good satirist is able to expose a common perception of beauty as hardly more than a misidentification of sewage. To me, this comic from SMBC does a good job of approximating philosophical naturalists’ attempts to synthesize from pure matter the persistent human conviction that the universe has transcendent value, which has traditionally been explained by the belief that reality is comprised of more than merely conveniently-yet-coincidentally arranged atoms:

Today ScienceDaily has an article up called ”Distinct ‘God spot’ in the brain does not exist, study shows“:

“We have found a neuropsychological basis for spirituality, but it’s not isolated to one specific area of the brain,” said Brick Johnstone, professor of health psychology in the School of Health Professions. “Spirituality is a much more dynamic concept that uses many parts of the brain. Certain parts of the brain play more predominant roles, but they all work together to facilitate individuals’ spiritual experiences.”

What does this mean? Not too much. Being able to blame spirituality on a particular mass of cells in the brain could possibly have been a convenient, if sloppy, way to explain it away as just the result of an aberration originating in the brain of one of our ancestors. But those who insist that a physical explanation for a phenomenon robs it of any possible transcendent meaning will nonetheless hang on the words, “We have found a neuropsychological basis for spirituality…”

I found the most interesting part of the ScienceDaily article to be the following quote:

“Neuropsychology researchers consistently have shown that impairment on the right side of the brain decreases one’s focus on the self,” Johnstone said. “Since our research shows that people with this impairment are more spiritual, this suggests spiritual experiences are associated with a decreased focus on the self. This is consistent with many religious texts that suggest people should concentrate on the well-being of others rather than on themselves.”

I wonder how “many” religious texts actually do preach the well-being of one’s fellow man. No doubt the preponderance of religious traditions that have existed in human history have not only not taught such things but have prescribed the opposite. It seems that only certain religious convictions would actually correlate with the right side of the brain, whereas people from certain other religious traditions, ranging from those institutionalizing human sacrifice and holy wars to those Christian traditions that place more emphasis on believing the right stuff rather than integrating Christ’s teachings in their action, would conceivably show significantly less right brain activity in a brain scan.

But remember, just because certain brain functions normally take place in a given region of the brain doesn’t mean that they’re rooted there: it seems neurologists are finding that the rule rather than the exception is that functions associated with a given area of the brain can be taken up by another area when the original area is damaged.

Is there anything of real interest in this story that I have missed?

When I first heard a description of Dawkins’ latest book, The Magic of Reality, I thought it sounded intriguing, if not promising. However, I certainly don’t like the way this review paints the book.

…Dawkins’ volume is as accessible as it is illuminating, covering a remarkable spectrum of subjects and natural phenomena — from who the very first person was to how earthquakes work to what dark matter is — in a way that infuses reality with the kind of fascination and whimsy we’re used to finding in myth and folklore. Each chapter begins with a famous myth from one of the world’s religions or folklore traditions, which Dawkins proceeds to myth-bust by examining the actual scientific processes and phenomena that these stories try to explain.

Does Dawkins expect this book to teach children “to fight myth with science”, as that article’s subtitle asserts?

I haven’t read the book, but I hadn’t previously gotten the impression that it attempts to “replace” myth with science before this review. Now, I have all ideas that Dawkins really does want to do just that, but is that what this book intends to do? If so, for all the good this book does in promoting science among the young, it’s a poisoned well from which I’d be wary of letting my kids drink.

Please bear in mind that from here on I’m critiquing the review’s understanding of Dawkins’ book, and the view of those who agree with that interpretation.

Perhaps the most delightful aspect of Dawkins’ atheism is his a-rational, perhaps even ir-rational, curiosity about nature and his boundless enthusiasm for science (or is it his enthusiasm for his own curiosity about science?). It’s a worthy exercise to try to infuse wonder and even “whimsy” into scientific inquiry about the natural world since those things often seem to be the domain only of the intangible, in constructed narratives and philosophical/theological explanations of the abstract. But here it sounds as though Dawkins wants, at worst, to replace a healthy appreciation for mythology with a love of science or, at best, to downplay the ongoing insight of myth and narrative into the human experience that cultural anthropologists and comparative mythologists have been teaching us for decades. I have grave misgivings about claims that science can (and especially should) trump those sorts of non-scientific insights into meaning, purpose, and wonder made by people like Joseph Campbell by treating myths as nonsense stories entertaining to only people who don’t care to know better and need justifications for flying planes into buildings.

I’m not even speaking here as a Christian, but as someone who values the role myths play in human society. I’m doing my best to instill in my children an appreciation for the mythologies of other cultures, and I don’t find it necessary to give them an appreciation for science by myth-busting the cosmology of the Sumerians or (still less) by denigrating non-industrialized societies’ methods of grappling with bigger questions of the universe. I just don’t think it’s a great idea to make a campaign of “debunking” or subjugating myths to a pursuit of scientific understanding as though it were the apex of human achievement. It’s not, and shouldn’t be. I live my life for much more than that.

As for science’s ability to inspire wonder, whimsy, and mystery, let me just say that those atheists who believe that they know for relatively certain that nothing exists outside of what’s already known about the universe (its physicality, etc.) are guilty of “established science of the gaps” thinking, which can’t help but cordon off a whole realm of inquiry that has been part and parcel of humanity’s descent from the trees and, if you’ll pardon the triumphalist teleology, its subsequent ascent up the evolutionary tree, ending up as organisms that can do science. My point is that dyed-in-the-wool materialists have decidedly less opportunity for wonder than those a little less confident about the prevailing scientific understanding of the universe. If I see a face on the surface of Mars, there is undoubtedly more wonder and room for curiosity in, “What could that be? Might it really be an artifact of alien life?” than in, “Well, aliens probably don’t exist, so it’s got to be a natural formation of some kind.”

My biggest beef is this: if someone wants to substitute reductive materialism for all alternative forms of meaning, wonder, etc., well and good for them. But do we want self-laudatory science’s “materialism of the gaps ” taught to our kids? I sincerely hope this book is not trying to make claims about how much qualitatively better hard science is than cultural metanarratives, religion, and probably even philosophy itself (Dawkins always, a little too contently, refuses the label “philosopher”, perhaps for this reason). “Kids, you can read and even permit yourself to enjoy your silly little fabricated stories, but if it’s not actual science, it’s not reality and hence a waste of your time and potential as a human being.”

Hogwash.

Berenbaum: “Everything about insects is fascinating. They are truly remarkable creatures. So beautiful and so honest.”

Mulder: “‘Honest’?”

Berenbaum: “Eat, sleep, defecate, procreate. That’s all they do. That’s all we do, but at least insects don’t kid themselves that it’s anything more than that.”

from “War of the Coprophages”, episode 3×12 of The X-Files

This exchange (penned by the brilliant Darin Morgan), may be less eloquent but is certainly no less “honest” than Dawkins’ famous conclusion that the universe has “at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”

In fact, it’s quite arguably more honest than those who share Dawkins’ assessment but go on to declare that we can go on living lives of meaning and purpose without the constant awareness that such constructs are anything other than protracted exercises in kidding ourselves. Every value and guiding principle we expect one another to live by – everything we do and believe in - pertains somehow to eating, sleeping, defecating, or procreating and not a whit more, because there is nothing else. What you call “loving” your significant other is purely driven by your animal instinct to preserve society and ensure the survival of your community’s gene pool. Sure, it feels like more, thank heavens, so that we at least can enjoy going about our ultimately pointless activities and following our arbitrary ethical guidelines. Societally constrained hedonism is the only real reason to go on living life.

If you believe this, suspending this realization is just an understandably desperate act of self-delusion. I mean, who wants to live like organic robots? If there is no fundamental principle of meaning and value other than our own derivative ones, pretending that what we believe and do in our lifetimes has any importance is merely playing out the actions of Deckard and Rachel at the end of Blade Runner (I’m trying to avoid spoiling anyone).

I don’t think the typically negative reactions to such reductionistic understandings of the universe are merely the result of human minds working overtime to avoid acknowledging a depressing reality; there’s also the fact that these lines of thought quickly take us to conclusions that are disturbingly, I would say suggestively, counter-intuitive. Killing deformed or retarded babies for fun is not just inconvenient to the survival of our species (in fact, it probably isn’t even that); it’s wrong. Isn’t it? That is, maybe things appear to have absolute meaning, value, and purpose because…they do.

Regardless, since I disagree with Dawkins that everything in the physical universe eliminates any evidence for a deeper purpose or meaning behind it all, I’ve chosen to live under the assumption that there is such greater significance to my life. Lacking conclusive evidence either way, to choose that possible understanding of the universe despite a realization of its conjectural nature is not a bit more of a delusion than the atheists’ willful suspension of disbelief in choosing their values and guiding principles.

In fact, when those who deny all but contrived, artificial meaning in the universe live as though there were any absolute importance or significance to how we live our lives, they are doing so in blatant contradiction to what they believe they know, consciously carrying on with their eyes closed. When we who believe in a deeper meaning for the universe live out our convictions based on that belief, we’re at least doing something that we truly do not believe contradicts reality. Personally, I’d rather be accidentally mistaken than knowingly embrace what I recognize are mistakes.

Christians may turn out to have been deluded, but at least we’re not the ones kidding ourselves.