Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
What “a miracle of love and creativity” is Homo sapiens!! Or so we’re told by this BioLogos flak in a video describing the organization’s new and super secret Big Project (possibly funded by Templeton). All we know from this teaser is the following (from the flak’s quote):
“What if we told that Grand Biblical narrative with the scientific knowledge of the origins of the Universe that the ancients did not have? What would it be like? Let’s call it The Big Story.”
I call it The Big Steaming Pile of Accommodationist Excreta—another pathetic and futile attempt to get evangelical Christians to buy biological evolution. But perhaps readers can guess about what lies in store here:
I reported earlier (see here and here), that the Templeton World Charity Foundation (TWCF), as well as two seemingly reputable philosophical societies (the Analysis Trust and the Aristotelian Society), are sponsoring a conference in Oxford next March on “The Metaphysics of the Trinity: New Directions“. This is part of a larger TWCF project on “Metaphysics of Entanglement,” which of course to refers to a concept in physics, and thus mixes science and superstition.
Note that although the TWCF is not identical to the John Templeton Foundation, both are funded by Sir John Templeton’s huge mutual-fund legacy, both aim at answering (!) the Big Questions of human purpose and meaning, and both want to see how science can produce new “spiritual information.”
The philosopher and atheist Anthony Grayling, Master of the New College of the Humanities and a supernumerary fellow at Oxford, didn’t like this conference at all, and expressed his displeasure in a letter to the director of the Aristotelian Society, which I reproduce with permission.
Dr R. Madden
The Hon Director
Aristotelian Society
Dear Rory (if I may)
I write to you as one who had the privilege and pleasure of being the Society’s Hon Secretary (when your office was so described) for ten years, to express a concern. I note that the Society is supporting a conference in Oxford next year entitled ‘The Metaphysics of the Trinity.’ My concern is twofold. First, I do not think that the principal British philosophical society should be supporting a partisan religious event: I explain what I mean by this shortly. Second, a major supporter of this conference is the Templeton Foundation, which has offered a significant money prize for an essay on the conference topic. This Foundation has specific interests in promoting religion and religious ideas – which it is of course entitled to do – but alas it does so in ways that are often deliberately and seriously compromising to other and arguably more intellectually serious endeavours, not just philosophy but physics, cosmology and biology. I return to this point shortly also.
On the first point: the concept of a ‘Trinity’ is one that is discussed in certain specifically Christian religious settings – not in all: think Unitarians, Hussites, Quakers, and more – and is therefore a component of one particular parti pris position in one particular religion. I think the Aristotleian Society has been misled by the word ‘metaphysics’ in the conference title: the conference is a partisan religion event, and should not be benefitting from funds dedicated to responsible philosophical discussion. The conference is, in its partisan character, no different from (say) a Conservative Party conference or a conference on why Shi’ite beliefs are superior to Sunni beliefs: I would sincerely hope that the Society would not see its role as giving money to support any such.
On the second point: Templeton does its best (and alas too often successfully) to insinuate religious beliefs, notions, terminology and attitudes into discussion of science and philosophy. It offers an extremely large prize to anyone who will make friendly noises to religion – witness the £1,000,000 prize awarded to Lord Rees, Astronomer Royal, Master of Trinity College Cambridge, and President of the Royal Society, for doing precisely that; given Rees’s credentials, his doing so is a dream ticket for Templeton, and with so substantial an inducement to offer they are not without takers. But I should not, I hope, have to explain to fellow-philosophers in any detail why, given the deep disparity between the assumptions, methods, aims and principles of religious ideologies, on the one hand, and those of responsible intellectual enquiry in the sciences and philosophy, on the other hand, that the two domains should be kept as separate as we keep astrology and astronomy—this comparison is acutely apt—and that it should therefore refuse to associate with a foundation whose well-known purpose is to muddy these waters as much as it can.
My chief present point, however, is that the Society has made a mistake in supporting a partisan religious conference, and I hope the sum offered can be recovered and put to the proper use to which the Society’s resources are pledged.
With my very good wishes,
Anthony
I strongly suspect that this letter will be futile, but of course we must raise our voices when serious intellectual inquiry is polluted by both Templeton’s cash and by its mission to find evidence, via such inquiry, for God.
If it weren’t so saddening, I’d be greatly amused at those who, as a solution to religiously-based warfare and terrorism, promote the application of more religion. This goes along with the assertion that religion itself plays at best a tiny role in the barbarity of groups like ISIS. Rabbi Sacks has said this in his new book, Miroslav Volf said it in a Washington Post column (see my post from yesterday), and now conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks has joined the chorus.
In his Wednesday NYT piece, “Finding peace within the holy texts,” Brooks unloads a farrago of religious osculation, secularity blaming, and claims about what a “proper religion” is. What he’s trying to say isn’t quite clear, except that he’s trying to be nice to religion and to Rabbi Sacks, and to argue that somehow the cure for inter-religous strife is the application of Moar Religion—”properly understood” religion. To me this sounds supiciously like political homeopathy. (It’s worth nothing that Brooks appears to be a pious Christian.) I don’t want to go into depth about his piece, so I’ll just highlight a few of Brooks’s claims (in bold, with his words indented) and finish up with an analysis of the piece that Steve Pinker sent me.
The meaninglessness inflicting people, and the inability of secularism to dispel it, drives people to religious violence.
Humans also are meaning-seeking animals. We live, as Sacks writes, in a century that “has left us with a maximum of choice and a minimum of meaning.” The secular substitutes for religion — nationalism, racism and political ideology — have all led to disaster. So many flock to religion, sometimes — especially within Islam — to extremist forms.
I’m not sure he’s quite right about what constitute the secular substitutes for religion. . . .
Religion isn’t a cause of violence because not many wars are religious.
Sacks emphasizes that it is not religion itself that causes violence. In their book Encyclopedia of Wars, Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod surveyed 1,800 conflicts and found that less than 10 percent had any religious component at all.
Even if Phillips and Axelrod’s analysis is correct, a figure of 10% of conflicts inspired by religion doesn’t mean that religion is exculpated from violence. As Pinker wrote me:
The atrocitologist Matthew White also gives an estimate of around 10% for both the number of multicides (wars and genocides) in history directly attributable to religion and for the number of deaths. However, he does agree with Anthony [Grayling] that religion figured prominently in many of the others, even if it’s not listed as the primary cause. Even one war that he excluded – America’s bloodiest war, the Civil War, with an unbelievable 650,000 deaths — had an important religious component, as both sides thought they were safeguarding the true religious mission of the US as a divinely inspired city on the hill.
And, of course, the main “war” we’re concerned with now is the war of extremist Islam against Western values, as well as Islam against all nonbelievers, including Sunnis versus Shiites. Only an apologist like Glenn Greenwald would argue that this has nothing to do with religion. The Sunni/Shia division, after all, didn’t derive from Western colonialism, and the groups are ethnically the same. They differ only in who they see as Muhammed’s rightful successors. (For more discussion of religion’s role in ISIS, see this piece at Quartz.)
Religion isn’t implicated in terrorism—it’s “groupishness”.
[Brooks says this right after claiming that only 10% of wars have a religious component.] Rather, religion fosters groupishness, and the downside of groupishness is conflict with people outside the group. Religion can lead to thick moral communities, but in extreme forms it can also lead to what Sacks calls pathological dualism, a mentality that divides the world between those who are unimpeachably good and those who are irredeemably bad.
The pathological dualist can’t reconcile his humiliated place in the world with his own moral superiority. He embraces a politicized religion — restoring the caliphate — and seeks to destroy those outside his group by apocalyptic force. This leads to acts of what Sacks calls altruistic evil, or acts of terror in which the self-sacrifice involved somehow is thought to confer the right to be merciless and unfathomably cruel.
This is a distinction without a difference. What, exactly, is the source of the feeling that you are “unimpeachably good” and others are “irredeemably bad”? What inspires the “moral communities”? Could it be religion? After all, religion’s toxic and tripartite combination of the claimed possession of absolute truth, the promulgation of a divinely-given moral code, and the promise of heaven and threat of hell for violating that code, are things we don’t see in other forms of groupishness, like sports or Sunday Assemblies.
And why, exactly, does what Brooks say above support his notion that “religion itself doesn’t cause violence”? It seems to me that, especially by invoking the return of the Caliphate, he’s just proven what he denies. Further, “self-sacrifice” is intimately connected with martyrdom and Paradise for jihadists.
Finally, the cure for religious strife is to read the texts “properly”. (My bolding in what’s below.)
Secular thought or moral relativism are unlikely to offer any effective rebuttal. Among religious people, mental shifts will be found by reinterpreting the holy texts themselves. There has to be a Theology of the Other: a complex biblical understanding of how to see God’s face in strangers. That’s what Sacks sets out to do.
. . . Read simplistically, the Bible’s sibling rivalries [Brooks cites Isaac and Ishamel] seem merely like stories of victory or defeat — Isaac over Ishmael. But all three Abrahamic religions have sophisticated, multilayered interpretive traditions that undercut fundamentalist readings.
. . . The reconciliation between love and justice is not simple, but for believers the texts, read properly, point the way. Sacks’s great contribution is to point out that the answer to religious violence is probably going to be found within religion itself, among those who understand that religion gains influence when it renounces power.
The big question, of course, is this: who is the arbiter of what is a “proper” reading of scripture? Apparently both Rabbi Sacks and David Brooks think that they are. But others, of course, disagree: even among Christians there is huge divergence about how to interpret scripture, and, as we all know, that often involves making things up. Scripture is easily malleable, and can be effortless stretched into the Procrustean bed of your own beliefs.
But the question at issue is not how to interpret the Bible, but how to intepret the Qur’an. Some, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Maajid Nawaz, argue that a more benign interpretation of that book is essential to curb extremist Islam. Maybe they’re right, too, but given the propensity of Muslims to read the Qur’an literally, that will be a long slog. Here, for instance, are some results from the recent Pew Poll on worldwide Muslim belief. Unfortunately, the data on adherence to the Qur’an was taken only from sub-Saharan Africa, but I’ve no doubt that the figures would be even higher for the Middle East:
Given this, can you really reinterpret “Smite the infidels” as “Don’t smite the infidels!”??
In email discussion of this column with a few people, Steve Pinker offered up his take on this column, which I reproduce with his permission. Note too the allusion in point 4 to his next book, which will come out in 2017.
A few observations on Brooks [by Pinker]:
1. It’s a bizarre boast that only 10% of history’s wars have been religious. Given the claimed aspirations of religion, shouldn’t the appropriate percentage be 0? The claim shows a common logical confusion among religious apologists between the observation that religion causes violence and the claim that religion is the only thing that causes violence.
2. The equally bizarre boast that religion is ascendant because religious people have more unprotected sex than nonreligious people may not be projectable into the future. Birthrates can change quickly, for obscure reasons. The US used to be an outlier among Western democracies in its high birthrate, presumably related to its religiosity, but that is becoming less true: its birthrate is falling, not to Western European levels yet, but it could happen. Even more amazingly, the Islamic birthrate has recently crashed, far more than what one would predict given rises in economic development (see here).
3. “The secular substitutes for religion…have all led to disaster. … Secular thought [is] unlikely to offer any effective rebuttal.”
So secular thought has doubled human lifespan, wiped out smallpox and cattle plague, decimated dozens of other horrible diseases, reduced extreme poverty worldwide from 85% to 10%, increased basic education from 17% to 82%, and wiped out human sacrifice, cannibalism, chattel slavery, heretic-burning, torture-executions, harems, and soon, interstate war. Bo-ring!
4. Speaking of which, Brooks and Sacks may have a point that liberal, enlightenment secular humanism has been poor at advertising its own successes. In the 1950s and 1960s there was considerable idealistic energy behind international liberal movements such as the UN, Peace Corps, disease eradication projects, etc., which got sapped by a number of developments, not least cynicism by intellectuals on the left and right. Nowadays the Gates, Clinton, Carter, and other Foundations are capturing some, but not enough, of this enthusiasm. We do need a PR campaign to trumpet these astonishing successes. That will be a theme of my next book.
If you’ve read the Old Testament, a grueling task that I actually accomplished, you’ll know about the many genocides ordered by Yahweh. Many were the tribes slain by the Israelits on God’s command, including, besides the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites. Theologians have spent a lot of time trying to justify why God wiped out innocent children (and even animals), and of course they’ve succeeded. Today we’ll occupy ourselves with the wholesale slaughter of the Canaanites, described in Deuteronomy 7:1-2 and 20:16-18.
As God said in Deuteronomy 20:16, “But of the cities of these peoples which the Lord your God gives you as an inheritance, you shall let nothing that breathes remain alive. . ” That could imply that not only were all the Canaanites (including women and children) slaughtered en masse, but so were their animals. Or at least so some theologians have argued, forcing them to then justify why God would commit genocide of animals. But theologians are up to the task!
First, here are a few explanations for the mass slaughter of humans:
Reader John sent me this video made by the disgraced (just out of prison for tax evasion and other crimes) but still active young-earth creationist Kent Hovind. While the 35-minute video includes Hovind’s usual blather about evolution and creationism, the reader wanted us to see Hovind’s justification for the Canaanite genocide. His/her email:
“Dr.” Kent Hovind has recently been released from prison and is back online, answering emails from the public in a daily Youtube broadcast.
In his November 5th 2015 video, he put his own spin–the most monstrous I’ve yet encountered–on the fictional Yahweh’s proclivity for genocide: apparently, mass murder of the Canaanites by Yahweh’s servant Joshua was a necessary public health response to the population’s bestiality-induced infectious disease burden! According to Hovind, the extermination of the Canaanites, innocent children included, can be considered entirely analogous to a physician prescribing an antibiotic to eradicate bacterial infection!
Imagine if you or Richard Dawkins or Peter Singer said such a thing!
The relevant excerpt of the video–amongst a half-hour of inane blather–begins at 6:30 minutes in:
The following is my [John’s] transcript (verbatim by intention, or, at least, as close to verbatim as I can manage):
“As far as God telling ’em to wipe out the Midianites, well, there were nations that were so full of diseases and things like that … that God said, “Yes, they need to all be wiped out, especially, like, the Canaanites in that land”. God told Joshua, “When you go into the land, utterly annihilate them! Kill ’em all!” Well, one of the things the Canaanites did was sex with animals, and had all kinds of diseases … and … and … just endemic in the civilization, and God said, “Wipe ’em all out!” No different than a doctor saying, “Take this pill that’s gonna kill every bacteria [sic], even the little baby ones that haven’t done anything wrong. Yeah, we’re gonna kill ’em all, ’cause if you leave onebehind or one resistant one behind, the disease can come back with a vengeance!”
Well, Hovind isn’t the only one to justify the murder of all the Canaanites, including their children AND the animals that they had sex with. William Lane Craig famously justified the human genocide; you can see some of his disgusting apologetics here. An excerpt:
So the problem isn’t that God ended the Canaanites’ lives. The problem is that He commanded the Israeli soldiers to end them. Isn’t that like commanding someone to commit murder? No, it’s not. Rather, since our moral duties are determined by God’s commands, it is commanding someone to do something which, in the absence of a divine command, would have been murder. The act was morally obligatory for the Israeli soldiers in virtue of God’s command, even though, had they undertaken it on their on initiative, it would have been wrong.
On divine command theory, then, God has the right to command an act, which, in the absence of a divine command, would have been sin, but which is now morally obligatory in virtue of that command.
. . . By setting such strong, harsh dichotomies God taught Israel that any assimilation to pagan idolatry is intolerable. It was His way of preserving Israel’s spiritual health and posterity. God knew that if these Canaanite children were allowed to live, they would spell the undoing of Israel. The killing of the Canaanite children not only served to prevent assimilation to Canaanite identity but also served as a shattering, tangible illustration of Israel’s being set exclusively apart for God.
Moreover, if we believe, as I do, that God’s grace is extended to those who die in infancy or as small children, the death of these children was actually their salvation. We are so wedded to an earthly, naturalistic perspective that we forget that those who die are happy to quit this earth for heaven’s incomparable joy. Therefore, God does these children no wrong in taking their lives.
Talk about making a virtue of necessity! The children had to die because God said so, because they’d grow up to worship pagan idols and so had to be extirpated, and because it wasn’t so bad after all because the children would reap their reward in Heaven. (Why, I wonder, would these children even go to Heaven, since that’s not an Old-Testament concept?) It is a fact universally acknowledged that there is no act of cruelty that cannot be justified by theologians as an aspect of God’s beneficence. Craig’s apologetics are monstrous.
But why destroy the Canaanites’ animals, too: the passive and probably unwilling victims of bestiality? Well, Clay Jones, Associate Professor of Christian Apologetics at Biola University, has explained that away on his website:
The Lord ordered that those who have sex with animals should be put to death along with the animal (Lev. 20:15). Atheist Richard Dawkins objects that it adds “injury to insult” that “the unfortunate beast is to be killed too.” ([Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton, 2006),248.]) But, what Dawkins and others don’t grasp is that only the depraved would want to have animals around who were used to having sex with humans.
Jones goes on to describe a story by Robert Yerkes about a female gorilla who tried to press her genitals against his feet, and intimates that she had either had sex with a human or, if she hadn’t but might have in principle (although there were no gorillas in the Mideast), she’d be even more sexually demanding. That would be not only “embarrassing,” but even dangerous! And that’s why the Canaanites’ animals had to die—they were rape victims who became sluttish. It was honor killing! Jones:
Now the objection could be made that some of the animals may not have been subject to such abuse, but that’s not something that an Israelite would be able to know. Thus they all had to die.
Major takeaway: sometimes beings innocent of committing sin can be harmed and corrupted by others who misuse their free will, as seems to be the case with animals involved in bestiality. It is a tragedy that these animals had to be killed but that’s one of the big lessons about sin: Sinful beings can hurt the innocent sometimes permanently.
Can you imagine a grown person being paid to utter such idiocy? But such is theology: the post hoc rationalization of things you want to believe. The argument that God killed the Canaanites’ animals because the poor beasts were sexually abused is simply an example of theologians making stuff up. After all, we don’t even know (if the Bible were true) that the animals were even killed. And the argument is no sillier than Edward Feser’s claim that dogs and cats won’t be admitted to Heaven.
The proper response to such arguments is not respect, but mockery.
Right Wing Watchreproduces a conversation between former (thank G*d!) Representative Michele Bachmann and Family Research Council (FRC) president Tony Perkins. Both were in Israel for an FRC tour. Click on the screenshot below to hear the brief, four-minute segment in which Bachmann
“We recognize the shortness of the hour,” she said, “and that’s why we as a remnant want to be faithful in these days and do what it is that the Holy Spirit is speaking to each one of us, to be faithful in the Kingdom and to help bring in as many as we can — even among the Jews — share Jesus Christ with everyone that we possibly can because, again, He’s coming soon.”
I wonder how soon? And why is she so sure, given the abysmal record of predictions about Jesus’s return. Remember, Jesus himself predicted that he’d return before his contemporaries were dead:
Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom. (Matthew 16:28).
I’m not sure how theologians have explained that one away, but informed readers should tell us. At any rate, a 2010 Pew Poll found this:
By the year 2050, 41% of Americans believe that Jesus Christ definitely (23%) or probably (18%) will have returned to earth. However, a 46%-plurality of the public does not believe Christ will return during the next 40 years. Fully 58% of white evangelical Christians say Christ will return to earth in this period, by far the highest percentage in any religious group.
Why do they think that? What’s the evidence? Don’t these people realize that such predictions of Jesus’s imminent return have been made for centuries? Why now?
Such a belief is, of course, disasterious for environmentalism and conservation, for why bother to take care of the planet if the End Times are coming within four decades?
If you want to talk about the “regressive Left,” the poster child would be Britain’s university Student Unions, which have a shameful record of suppressing free speech, especially when that speech criticizes Islam. Their latest shenanigan, as reported in The Independent, The Spectator and The Tab, is banning a speech by someone who battled against ISIS:
A university and its students’ union have been accused of displaying ‘horrible prejudice against the Kurdish cause, human rights and the freedom of speech’ after an officer banned a former student from speaking about his experiences fighting Isis in the Middle East.
Head of the Kurdish Society at University College London (UCL), Kavar Kurda, issued a statement online saying he was ‘angered’ and ‘deeply offended and disgusted’ after University College London Union’s (UCLU) activities and events officer, Asad Khan, blocked Macer Gifford from speaking at an event which was being organised by Kurda.
Speaking with online student publication The Tab, Kurda claimed he was told ‘one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist’ and that Khan further defended his decision by saying there were concerns an event with a person speaking about their experiences fighting in Syria ‘could lead to others going and fighting in the conflict’.
The Tab reports more reasons given by Khan:
[Khan] said in an email: “In every conflict there are two sides, and at UCLU we want to avoid taking sides in conflicts.”
. . . Asad said the Syrian crisis is a “contentious topic” and defended his decision to block the speaker.
He told The Tab: “It is important to note the rooms these activities take place in belong to UCL rather than UCLU and we liaised with UCL, who in turn wanted to seek advice from the police.
“When they didn’t get a reply, to stay on the side of caution, UCL also leant towards not providing a platform.
“The Syrian crisis is a very contentious topic with many different groups, and although I understand YPG are fighting against ISIS the situation is far too complex to understand in black and white as expected by the student.”
Why is it “taking sides” to present someone who criticizes ISIS? Isn’t a good university one that presents several sides, and lets students decide for themselves? According to Khan, however, that’s not the way it works at University College London: these issues are simply “too complex” to be understood by students. Clearly, though, Khan understands them, and what he really understands is that ideas critical of extremist Islam are simply to be kept from students.
Khan is someone who’s clearly lost his moral compass. Seriously—equating ISIS with those who fight against them? And banning a speaker out of fear that it may inspire someone to go and fight ISIS? Let’s hope that UCL changes its mind, and that university unions across Britain stop trying to censor speakers so that students are presented with only a sanitized and approved set of views.
I love it when theologians fight with each other, especially Sophisticated Ones™. And when they argue about reality, as Catholic philosopher Edward Feser does with Orthodox philosopher David Bentley Hart in Feser’s post on the conservative Witherspoon Institute’s Public Discourse site, the results are hilarious. For when contesting faith-based claims about reality, there’s no way to decide, using evidence, who’s right.
The topic of this particular fracas is one that’s engaged us all: “Do animals go to Heaven?”
Hart says “yes,” Feser “Hell, no!”. Leaving aside the small matter that neither of these gentlemen has any evidence that Heaven exists, the discourse must perforce be based on word-parsing, philosophy, and making stuff up. And both Feser and Hart are good at that, with Feser throwing in his patented requirement that one must read all of Thomas Aquinas (the founder of “Thomism”), study many other philosophers, and especially read Feser’s own books and articles before one can even have a say in this issue. Also, given his thin skin, this post will undoubtedly prompt Feser to reply on his own site, accusing me of theological ignorance. That’s like being accused of ignorance about the biology of unicorns. All I will add is that one cannot make assertions about reality based on philosophy alone.
But to the fray. Hart, says Feser, is dead wrong when he says that animals go to heaven, and Feser calls him out with some lame snark:
Hart’s beef with Thomists this time around is that they deny that non-human animals possess “characteristics that are irreducibly personal,” that they deny that “many beasts command certain rational skills,” and that accordingly—and worst of all, for Hart—Thomists deny that there will be “puppies in paradise.” Hart, by contrast, affirms the “real participation of animal creation . . . in the final blessedness of the Kingdom,” asserting that Heaven will be “positively teeming with fauna.” To make his case, he insists on “the intelligence, cognitive and social” of the humpback whale, the bottlenose dolphin, and the orca. Alas, Hart failed to mention the shark. Perhaps he was too busy jumping it.
Yes, that’s Feser’s link, put there to direct pious Christians to a phrase they might not understand. But why does Feser think that Hart is wrong? Why don’t animals go to heaven?
Well, Feser first contends that Hart doesn’t understand the Thomist argument about why you won’t find Fido playing a harp. Hart, says Feser, claims it’s because Thomists think that animals are basically like pieces of wood, lacking intentionality, affection, pleasure, sentience, or sensation. But, says Feser, Thomists don’t think that! They agree that animals have these qualities and feelings, but lack something more important—the Key to Heaven that only humans have: rationality, abstract thought, and the ability to conceptualize which is embodied in language. Here’s the meat of Feser’s argument:
Hence, like other animals, we have sensory awareness. But unlike other animals, we can conceptualize what we perceive and feel, and this fundamentally alters the character of our perceptual experiences and appetites. A dog can see a tree and we can see a tree, but the “seeing” we do is very different from that of which a dog is capable. For the dog cannot see a tree as a tree—it cannot conceptualize or understand what it is seeing by putting it within the general class “tree”; cannot infer that since this class is itself part of the larger class “plant,” to see a tree is also to see a plant; and cannot grasp that to be a thing of the sort that is seen entails taking in nutrients, going through a growth cycle, etc. A dog can feel pain and we can feel pain, but the “pain” we feel is very different from that of which a dog is capable. For we can conceptualize the pain as indicative of injury or bodily disorder, can infer that long-term health or even life might be in jeopardy, and so forth.
Feser contends (see below) that such conceptualization cannot rest solely on our more complex brains, but is indicative of a nonmaterial soul. He continues.
Think of it this way: animals and plants both need water, will flourish if they get it and atrophy if they don’t, and behave in ways that facilitate their getting it—plants by sinking roots, animals by searching for a stream, pond, or dog dish. But it doesn’t follow that plants, like animals, know anything like the pangs of thirst or the satisfaction of quenching that thirst. Similarly, that a dog will snuggle up to a child or wag its tail when its master arrives does not entail that its “love” is comparable to the highly conceptualized love that a rational animal feels for his child, friend, spouse, country, or God.
Indeed, for it’s that “conceptualized love” that gives humans the privilege of sitting with the angels, while Fido—well, I’m not sure where Feser thinks Fido goes. But surely a large part of love that humans feel is unconceptualized love: pure animal passion triggered by hormones. We may embroider it with our evolved big brains, but that doesn’t mean it differs in some fundamental, non-material way from animal “love.”
Indeed, Feser goes on to espouse a nonmaterial aspect of humans that gives us our ability to conceptualize—our nonmaterial soul. And here he’s just making stuff up, like his hero Aquinas:
So, the reason Thomists deny that non-human animals are destined for Heaven has nothing to do with a Cartesian or “mechanistic” conception of animals. What is the reason, then?
The reason is that non-human animals are entirely corporeal creatures, all matter and no spirit. To be sure, the matter of which they are composed is not the bloodlessly mechanical, mathematical Cartesian kind. Non-human animals are not machines; they really are conscious, really do feel pain and pleasure, really do show affection and anger. But these conscious states are nevertheless entirely dependent on bodily organs, as is everything else non-human animals do. Hence, when their bodies die, there is nothing left that might carry on into an afterlife. Fido’s death is thus the end of Fido.
If human beings were entirely corporeal creatures, the same would be true of us. But, the Thomist argues, human beings are not entirely corporeal. We are largely corporeal—as with Fido, our ability to take in nutrients, to grow and reproduce, to see, hear, imagine, and move about, depends on our having bodily organs. But our distinctively intellectual activities—our capacity to grasp abstract concepts, to reason logically, and so forth—are different. They could not be entirely corporeal.
What? WHY couldn’t our ability to grasp abstract concepts and reason be entirely corporeal? After all, many “corporeal” animals have signs of such things. Animals can show reason and seem to take an intentional stance, as when birds will dig up and re-bury an acorn if they see another bird watching them. Ravens, as I’ll write about soon, refuse to cooperate further with other ravens who don’t pull their weight in a joint task; they have a concept of “cheating.” Animals can reason, too, as with corvids or chimps that can put together tools to master a complex task, something that would seem to require abstract thought.
And there’s every sign that our intellect is intimately connected to our brain. You can damage the intellect in predictable ways by damaging certain portions of the brain, and extinguish your intellect with chemicals like anesthetics. There are diseases like Cotard’s Syndrome in which patients entirely lose their sense of self. And you can produce conscious intentions to do something, like licking your lips, by stimulating certain parts of the brain.
The more we learn about the brain, the more we realize that its workings, and the things that appear to make us different from other animals, are embedded in that gray matrix of neurons. There is no evidence for a “soul” that is not simply something attached to that matrix, and which doesn’t die when the matrix dies. Feser has not a whit of evidence for the soul, or for a complete and unbridgeable evolutionary discontinuity in mentation between humans and animals. He’s simply making stuff up to ensure that only members of our species will get past Saint Peter.
Of course Feser has other reasons to assume a soul, but here he pulls a Fermat:
There are several reasons why [our intellect cannot be entirely corporeal], though spelling them out adequately requires complex philosophical argumentation that is beyond the scope of this essay. For example, some Thomists argue that thoughts can have a precise or unambiguous content, whereas no purely material representation could have such a content — in which case thinking is not reducible to the having of material representations encoded in the brain. (I have defended this line of argument at length elsewhere.)
If you have $20, you can purchase that article from The American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly. I have no wish to, for which Feser will undoubtedly excoriate me. But until he gives me evidence for a soul or an afterlife, I needn’t pursue the matter.
And in the end Feser begs the question:
If human beings do have, in addition to their bodily or corporeal activities, an activity that is essentially incorporeal—namely, intellectual activity or thought in the strict sense—then when the corporeal side of human nature is destroyed, it doesn’t follow that the human being as a whole is destroyed. There is an aspect to our nature—the intellect—that can carry on beyond the death of the body, precisely because even before death it was never entirely dependent on the body. This is why there is such a thing as an afterlife for human beings, as there is not for non-human animals.
He’s again making stuff up: arguing that because we have an incorporeal intellect (which he hasn’t shown), and because by definition an incorporeal intellect lives on after the body dies, then we get to have an afterlife (for which he’s adduced no evidence). And of course that afterlife could simply be a bundle of thoughts floating around the cosmos, not a chair next to Jesus. Where’s the evidence for a Biblical heaven?
The only rational reaction to this type of confabulation is ridicule and utter contempt. Can you imagine grown men arguing about whether dogs, cats, sheep, and cows go to heaven? Yet Feser gets paid for this, and is regarded as one of the most influential philosophers of religion. It all goes to show how intellectually depauperate that discipline is.
