Category: Sophisticated Theology

Giles Fraser tries to pwn Stephen Fry by telling us what god is *really* like

February 4, 2015 • 1:24 pm

Do you want some Sophisticated Theology™ today? I thought not. But I have some new theology right here, and boy, is it sophisticated!

First you’ll have to recall (or watch) the Stephen Fry video in which, asked by interviewer Gay Byrne what he’d say if he met God, Fry (an atheist) answered that he’d query God about the pervasiveness of evil in the world (see my post here, or watch the video below). Why, he’d ask, do innocent children die of leukemia? In other words, Fry, assuming that God had some control over the existence and nature of bad stuff on Earth, would ask God for the truths that theodicy has been seeking for millennia.

Well, the Guardian has published a piece in which Giles Fraser rebukes Fry and rejects the kind of God that Fry envisions. The piece is called, “I don’t believe in the God that Stephen Fry believes in, either,” and the odd thing is that the writer who rejects Fry’s God is Giles Fraser, who happens to be not only a journalist, but the priest in charge at St Mary’s Newington in south London and the former canon chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral. In other words, he’s an Anglican bigwig.

So what, according to Fraser, were Fry’s big mistakes? There were two:

1. God doesn’t have that kind of power. He has, instead, the Power of Love! But how can God be powerless? Because, says Fraser, Jesus was powerless. Fraser:

Too many religious people actually worship power. They imagine the source of ultimate power, give it a name (God, Allah, Yahweh) etc, and then try and cosy up to it, aligning their interests with those of the boss. . .  the temptation is always to suck up to power.

This is why the Jesus story is, for me, the most theologically revolutionary story that there can be. Because it imagines God and power separated. God as a baby. God poor. God helpless on a cross. God with a mocking and ironic crown of thorns. In these scenes it is Caesar who has the power. And so the question posed is: which one will you follow when push comes to shove? You can follow what is right and get strung up for it. Or you can cosy up to power and do as you are told. By saying that he will stare ultimate power in the face and, without fear, call it by its real name, Fry has indicated he is on the side of the angels (even though he does not believe in them). Indeed, Fry is following in a long tradition of religious polemic, from Job to Blake and beyond.

Umm. . . .the last thing I heard, Anglicans—like their Catholic-Church ancestors—accepted the Trinity. That makes Jesus part of the Godhead, i.e., one with power!  And you are saved through your faith in Jesus. Is that power or what?

More important, Fry wasn’t asked to address Jesus, but to address God, or rather the part of the Trinity called God. And nobody doubts that God has power. Or, if Fraser is claiming that God simply can’t do anything beyond emitting Endless Love from above, let him be explicit about that.

What we see in the paragraphs above is simply a word salad that evades the big question: can God do anything about evil or not? And if he can, why doesn’t he? But Fraser goes on:

2. There is no such thing as the God that Fry imagines. That’s right—Fraser says so explicitly:

The other problem with Fry’s argument is philosophical. Simply put: there is no such thing as the God he imagines. It is the flying teapot orbiting a distant planet about which nothing can be said. Such a God doesn’t exist. Nilch. Nada. It’s a nonsense. Indeed, as no less an authority than Thomas Aquinas rightly insists, existence itself is a questionable predicate to use of God. For God is the story of human dreams and fears. God is the shape we try to make of our lives. God is the name of the respect we owe the planet. God is the poetry of our lives. Of course this is real. Frighteningly real. Real enough to live and die for even. But this is not the same as saying that God is a command and control astronaut responsible for some wicked hunger game experiment on planet earth. Such a being does not exist. And for the precisely the reasons Fry expounds, thank God for that.

Well, that settles that!  It’s comforting to know that at one human on this planet—Giles Fraser—knows exactly what kind of God there is. God isn’t a disembodied spirit with humanlike qualities, as many other Anglicans wrongly believe. No, he is a God who is really just the name that we give to our hopes and dreams and fears. But—he’s also REAL!

Of course Fraser cites Aquinas, who really did believe that God existed as a spirit with humanlike traits and could punish and reward people. And, indeed, no less an authority THAN NEARLY EVERY DAMN CHRISTIAN THEOLOGIAN IN THE UNIVERSE thinks that God does indeed have the power to punish and reward people—that he is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. If that weren’t the case, we wouldn’t even have the Problem of Evil and the discipline of theodicy that it spawned. But apparently only Fraser and possibly Aquinas knows that the three-O God doesn’t exist.

I guess I’m sounding a bit grouchy, what with the capslock and all, but this kind of pronouncement angers me. How the hell does Fraser know what kind of God there is? What gives him the authority to pronounce that Fry’s God is a phantasm? How does he know what he claims to know?

Fraser, in fact, shouldn’t be addressing his remarks to Fry. He should be addressing them to all his Christian coreligionists—Protestant, Anglican and Catholic alike—letting them know that all of them are wrong about God.

h/t: Lenny

Lawrence Krauss rebuts “Science increasingly makes the case for God”

January 25, 2015 • 1:25 pm

On Christmas Day of last year, the Wall Street Journal published a short piece by Eric Metaxas called “Science increasingly makes the case for God” (The subtitle is “The odds of life existing on another planet grow ever longer. Intelligent design, anyone?”). If the WSJ link takes you to the subscription page, just Google the author’s name and the article’s title, and you’ll find a link that’s free.

Metaxas’s piece was wildly popular. It got about 400,000 Facebook shares and likes, and as of this morning there were 7,008 comments! Metaxas, described by Wikipedia as “An American author, speaker, and TV host” appears to be a believer, for there’s also this: “On February 2, 2012, Metaxas was the keynote speaker for the 2012 National Prayer Breakfast.”

Given its message, it’s not surprising that Metaxas’s article went viral, for it purported to give scientific evidence for God’s existence. Or rather, it claimed that science could not explain the existence of life on Earth in any convincing way, and so the only option must have been God’s creation. A few quotes will give the tenor of his piece; it’s all based on the supposed improbability of life coming into being:

Today there are more than 200 known parameters necessary for a planet to support life—every single one of which must be perfectly met, or the whole thing falls apart. Without a massive planet like Jupiter nearby, whose gravity will draw away asteroids, a thousand times as many would hit Earth’s surface. The odds against life in the universe are simply astonishing.

. . . Yet here we are, not only existing, but talking about existing. What can account for it? Can every one of those many parameters have been perfect by accident? At what point is it fair to admit that science suggests that we cannot be the result of random forces? Doesn’t assuming that an intelligence created these perfect conditions require far less faith than believing that a life-sustaining Earth just happened to beat the inconceivable odds to come into being?

Metaxas then raises the “fine-tuning” argument—the supposed improbability of the universe having the right physical constants in place to allow life, and finishes off like this:

The greatest miracle of all time, without any close seconds, is the universe. It is the miracle of all miracles, one that ineluctably points with the combined brightness of every star to something—or Someone—beyond itself.

Notice that “Someone” is capitalized, and of course what Metaxas means, and what accounts for the article going viral, is that “something or Someone” simply has to be God—preferably the Abrahamic God.

The article’s popularity also shows that although many believers claim that they don’t need evidence for God, when something that seems to be evidence crops up, they seize on it avidly. Religious claims are claims about reality, and thus could conceivably be supported or refuted by evidence. If anybody says otherwise, just show them how many people liked Metaxas’s piece.

Well, I can imagine what I’d feel if I were Lawrence Krauss reading it. Along with Sean Carroll, Krauss has spent a lot of time showing that we can explain the universe without invoking God, something that is a major theme of Krauss’s most recent book, A Universe from Nothing. So Krauss, who isn’t timid, sat down and wrote a rebuttal to Metaxas’s piece. It appeared in yesterday’s online New Yorker under the title, “No, astrobiology has not made the case for God“; I’m surprised, given the magazine’s penchant for coddling faith, that it appeared at all.

But good for Krauss. He takes apart every probabilistic argument given by Metaxas, and cites new work showing that the origin of life may have been nearly certain given the chemical conditions on early Earth. I still haven’t been able to get through the arcane paper describing that work, but Krauss summarizes it nicely:

Furthermore, a recent interesting, if speculative, proposal suggests that, when driven by an external source of energy,matter will rearrange itself to dissipate this energy most efficiently. Living systems allow greater dissipation, which means that the laws of physics might suggest that life is, in some sense, inevitable.

Maybe Krauss will write a sequel to his book called A Biosphere from Nothing. He adds this:

Beyond this, two exciting scientific advances in recent decades have identified new ways in which life can evolve, and new locales where it can do so. First, we have discovered a surprisingly diverse group of new solar systems. And we now understand that, even in our solar system, there are a host of possible sites where life might have evolved that were long considered unlikely. Moons of Jupiter and Saturn may have vast oceans of liquid water, underneath ice covers, which are heated by gravitational tidal friction associated with their giant hosts. On Earth, scientists have had to revise old rules about where and how life can survive. The discovery of so-called extremophiles—life forms that can live in extreme acids, or under extreme heat or pressure—has vastly increased the set of conditions under which we can imagine life existing on this planet.

And, finally, Krauss takes apart the fine-tuning argument for God, something that Sean Carroll has also been attacking. Here’s Krauss:

The constants of the universe indeed allow the existence of life as we know it. However, it is much more likely that life is tuned to the universe rather than the other way around. We survive on Earth in part because Earth’s gravity keeps us from floating off. But the strength of gravity selects a planet like Earth, among the variety of planets, to be habitable for life forms like us. Reversing the sense of cause and effect in this statement, as Metaxas does in cosmology, is like saying that it’s a miracle that everyone’s legs are exactly long enough to reach the ground.

Krauss doesn’t discuss two other explanations for fine-tuning (the one above seems to presume that the constants were simply a given that we don’t understand, perhaps just a matter of “luck”). Those two are 1.) there could be a deeper physical principle showing that the constants more or less had to be pretty close to what they are, but we don’t yet understand that principle (this may be implied in Krauss’s emphasis on the progress of cosmology), and 2.) there might be multiple universes that (according to physical theory) have different physical constants, and life happened to have arisen in one universe that had the right constants. The “multiverse” idea isn’t just something cooked up by physicists determined to kick God out of the picture, as it arises naturally from some theories of physics; and there is evidence for some of the conditions conducive to a multiverse.

But the real flaw in Metaxas’s piece is that it’s a big fat God-of-the-gaps argument, claiming that if science doesn’t understand something by now, God must have done it. That is, of course, a dreadful way to argue in view of all the “gaps” in our understanding (most notably the origin of species) that over the centuries have been caulked not with God, but with science. And so Krauss pwns Metaxas in his final paragraph:

In the meantime, both believers and non-believers are done a huge disservice when people promulgate biased and disingenuous claims that distort what current science implies and can imply about the universe. In a society in which the understanding of science is already marginal—and where, at the same time, the continued health of modern society as it meets the challenges of the twenty-first century depends, in some sense, on our ability to utilize our scientific knowledge, both to create new technologies and to help guide rational public policies—this is the last thing we need.

Another thing we don’t need is people claiming that when science encounters a hard problem that it hasn’t yet solved, God is peeking out of that lacuna.

Alvin Plantinga savages Philip Kitcher’s new book, but makes dumb philosophical errors

January 14, 2015 • 1:14 pm

My friend Philip Kitcher (a philosophy professor at Columbia who also teaches courses on James Joyce!) has written a new book, Life After Faith: the Case for Secular Humanism, based on his Terry Lectures at Yale. After dismissing religions as fairy tales (not his language. for he’s a gentleman), Kitcher gets down to his real issue: how can atheists fulfill the human needs that are met by religion?

I read Kitcher’s book in galleys and thought it was quite good, though I don’t necessarily agree that it’s incumbent on nonbelievers to outline a program for replacing the so-called spiritual needs of humans. It’s my view that those needs, insofar as they exist, will find their outlet naturally, as rivers find the fastest course downhill. That, at least, has been the case in Scandinavia, where the many nonbelievers seem to have their needs met without the “Sunday Meetings” that atheists attend in the US. But I don’t fault Philip for trying, and at least it defuses the theists who accuse us of always destroying and never building.

But I digress. What I want to report is that Kitcher’s book has been reviewed by, of all people, Calvinist philosopher and theologian Alvin Plantinga, who has spent his dotage (and much of his active life as a Notre Dame professor) defending religion and arguing that it’s rational to believe in God. (I have a few choice words about Plantinga in The Albatross.) And Plantinga’s review, in the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, is more or less what you’d expect.  In short, Alvin doesn’t go after the book’s main message—how nonbelievers can find the comfort that others find in faith—but tries instead to refute Kitcher’s dismissal of religion as fiction.

The existence and work of Plantinga is the best argument I know against teaching the philosophy of religion. Here we have a distinguished scholar of religion, one recognized for his work on philosophy alone, at least judging by the fact that he was a regional president of the American Philosophical Association. Yet Plantinga’s work on religion, though couched in academic-y prose, modular logic, and symbolic logic, is thin, tendentious, and easily refuted by anyone with two neurons to rub together.

And so it is with his dismissal of Kitcher’s atheism. I’ll single out just one or two of Plantinga’s philosophical missteps.

Plantinga first goes after Kitcher’s claim that the diversity of religions in the world, many having absolutely incompatible doctrines with others, is an argument against the truth of religious claims. Here’s how Plantinga (somewhat accurately) characterizes Kitcher’s claims:

As far as I can make out, Kitcher’s argument is two-fold. First, Kitcher is impressed by the fact that “we find an astounding variety in religious doctrines. Impersonal forces, sacred places, ancestors, ghosts, spirits, demons and a wide variety of deities have all figured as supposed manifestations of the transcendent” (p. 7). So the first point seems to be that there is great religious diversity: there are very many different religions, and they frequently contradict each other. He is also impressed by the fact that religion is apparently culture-bound in a significant way. What religious opinions a person has seems to depend, at least in part, on when and where that person is brought up: “To face it clearly is to recognize that if, by some accident of early childhood, he had been transported to some distinct culture, brought up among aboriginal Australians, for example, he would now affirm a radically different set of doctrines” (p. 8).

And here’s Plantinga’s “refutation” of that argument:

True, if I had been brought up as an Australian aboriginal, I would probably not hold the religious beliefs I do hold; no doubt I would not so much as have heard of those beliefs. But, once more, isn’t the same true for Kitcher? If he had been brought up as an Australian aborigine, he would not have held the philosophical and religious beliefs he does hold — including his skeptical beliefs about religion. But what follows from that? Surely not that the beliefs he does hold are almost certainly false. And doesn’t the same go for the religious believer? If she had been brought up as an Australian aborigine, she would not have believed in God; but why should she conclude that her present beliefs are false and that there is no such person as God?

So first, neither the variety of religious opinion nor their relativity to cultural circumstance shows that these opinions are all almost certainly false.

Now you don’t have to be a sophisticated thinker to see the problem with Plantinga’s “rebuttal”. Kitcher is not making a claim about reality, but raising doubts toward other people’s claims about reality. Yes, if Kitcher had been raised in Saudi Arabia, he’d likely be a Muslim and not an atheist (there’s strong artificial selection against nonbelievers on the peninsula). But there’s no parity between holding a belief because you were brainwashed by the locals, and doubting beliefs because you’re rational.

The important thing, though, is that it’s more than the diversity of conflicting arguments that shows one’s faith to be false. It’s the point that John Loftus made with his Outsider Test for Faith: the diversity of faiths, and the fact that one’s religion is almost always the dominant religion in one’s birthplace, means that one should be suspicious of the criteria used to uphold one’s faith. If you think your faith is right and other faiths are wrong, Loftus argues, then you should apply to your own beliefs the same scrutiny you apply to other peoples’. When you do that, you must perforce see that the evidence for the veracity of your beliefs is as nonexistent as is the evidence for the many religions you reject. In other words, you must reject all faith until some evidence accrues that points to one religion as being more truthful than the others.  And that—not simply the diversity of faiths and their dependence on geography—is why one should reject all religions. This is the argument Kitcher is making.

Plantinga pulls the same stunt for philosophy:

Kitcher’s book is an exercise in philosophy. The variety of philosophical belief rivals that of religion: there are Platonists, nominalists, Aristotelians, Thomists, pragmatists, naturalists, theists, continental philosophers, existentialists, analytic philosophers (who also come in many varieties), and many other philosophical positions. Should we conclude that philosophical positions, including Kitcher’s low opinion of religious belief, are all almost certainly false? I should think not. But then wouldn’t the same be true for religious beliefs? The fact that others hold religious opinions incompatible with mine is not a good reason, just in itself, for supposing my beliefs false. After all, if I were to suppose my views false, I would once more be in the very same position: there would be very many others who held views incompatible with mine.

The problem is that a lot of the philosophy limned above does not make empirical claims about reality. Existentialism, for instance, is a worldview, not a claim about what is real. Likewise for many ethical systems, like utilitarianism or Rawls’s ideal contractarianism. You can’t say that they can be dismissed simply because some conflict with others, for evidence cannot be brought to bear on the issues. And those philosophical positions that do make such claims (i.e., naturalism), should be subject to evidential scrutiny; and if they fail, they should either be shelved or considered unverified.

Two more points. Plantinga also tries to refute Kitcher’s variety-of-beliefs argument by saying that, well, maybe the details of religions vary, but they all believe in a God, so isn’t that some sort of evidence for the divine?:

Here we should distinguish particular religious beliefs, for example belief in God, from whole systems of religious belief, for example the 39 articles of Anglicanism or the Heidelberg Catechism. Such whole systems are incompatible with each other; but many such whole systems agree on some very important points — the existence of the God of theism, for example. At that level there is vastly less diversity. So Kitcher’s first argument wouldn’t apply to belief in God.

Well, it’s questionable whether polytheism is evidence for God, since it has more than one God, and clearly for Plantinga the monotheistic view is the right one. (Also, whether you’re a monotheist or a polytheist still depends on geography. If you’re raised in south India, you’re likely to believe in many gods.) Further, even for God alone one still requires evidence—evidence that we atheists simply don’t see.

But Plantinga tries to get around that, too, by invoking his infamous sensus divinitatis (“sense of the divine”) that he’s always used as evidence for God. That is, because many people feel that there is a God, that counts as at least some evidence that there really is one. Here’s what Alvin says about that—it’s his classic argument that it is not irrational to be religious:

Apprised of the apparent relativity of her religious and philosophical beliefs to her circumstances of place, time and culture, [the religous person] carefully reconsiders them. It seems to her that she is sometimes in contact with God when she prays; she can’t see how there could be genuine right and wrong apart from God; on many occasions it has seemed to her that there must be such a person as God and that she is in God’s presence. Of course she might be mistaken; but isn’t she entirely rational, entirely within her epistemic rights in continuing to believe?

It seems. . . it seems. . . it seems. It seems, therefore it is. Is that rational? I don’t think so. For one’s desire to believe in God, which comes from brainwashing by others when one is young, doesn’t count as evidence. Those religious feelings aren’t independent, as Plantinga seems to think, of one’s desires. As Voltaire pointed out in 1763, “The interest I have in believing in something is not a proof that the something exists.” And what, for crying out loud, are the “epistemic rights” that Plantinga touts? The right to believe whatever nonsense you want? Fine, let people so believe. But that doesn’t mean that those beliefs are rational, or should be respected by those of us who feel that strong beliefs should be supported by strong evidence.

I’m afraid that the score of this bout is Kitcher 7, Plantinga 0.

alvin-alvin-and-the-chipmunks-3-chip-wrecked-27096005-993-1400
AL-vinnn!!!!

h/t: Mark

Krista Tippett: Oy!

January 11, 2015 • 9:50 am

One of the downsides of doing grocery shopping at 7 a.m. on Sunday is that, if you’re listening to National Public Radio (NPR), as I’m wont to do, you’ll probably have to hear the unctuous Krista Tippett and her “On Being” show.  The American version of a less scholarly Karen Armstrong, Tippett never met a religion she didn’t like, often making a warm and fuzzy conflation of religion and spirituality. In other words, Tippett is in love with the numinous, particularly if it’s expressed in deepities that make the listener feel smart.  On today’s show, God help me, I heard her say something like this, quoting someone whose name I can’t recall:

“____________ once said ‘The soul is composed of attentiveness.’ I think we need to make a space for that.”

Jebus in a chicken basket! What does that mean? If ever there was a deepity, that is one. And Tippett makes a good living from deepities: her show, formerly called “Speaking of Faith” (I suspect the name change reflects her realization that many Americans are turning away from faith), is quite popular, and she’s even garnered a National Humanities Medal and a Peabody Award for broadcasting. Such are the accolades that accrue to those who coddle faith, defanging it for public petting.

But does any reader actually like this show? I can’t imagine why. It’s like a mental massage: you may feel good as your mind is soothed by Tippett’s warm and oily lucubrations, but an hour later the effects have worn off.

I would love for National Public Radio to have a show focusing on rationalism and secularism. But that’s unlikely given that some of its funds come from the U.S. government, and NPR has already been accused of extreme liberalism by members of Congress. I fear that it will be a cold day in hell when you hear an NPR show called “On Rationality.”

I was going to have a contest asking readers to explain why the soul is made of attentiveness, but that’s like shooting fish in a barrel.

The Nativity: when theology strikes

December 24, 2014 • 7:00 am

by Grania

Most people who grew up with a Christian background are somewhat familiar with the Nativity story. It is one of the more famous bits thanks in no small part to the runaway commercial success of the Solstice festival it attached itself to, and the rest, so to say, is history. Most people find it somewhat charming: it has plenty of drama, it has gift-giving ceremonies, it has visits from supernatural entities, it has long journeys, and there is even a murderous king.

Most of us are also aware that the four Gospels are very inconsistent in their telling of the Nativity, in fact, only Matthew and Luke even mention it, and they don’t appear to be able to even agree on the year. Moreover, Augustus Caesar did not order a census and even if he had, they certainly didn’t expect people to travel back to their ancestral homes for the sake of being counted.

So it’s not a huge surprise that theologian Rev Ian Paul is reported in The Guardian to be arguing that the well-loved stable scene may in fact not be real either. (TL;DR it was the living area of a normal house, he claims.)

Was it more like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nativity_of_Jesus_in_art#mediaviewer/File:BruynAltar01.jpg
Bartholomäus Bruyn Altarpiece, St. Johann Baptist Essen

Or more like this:

Folk painting, 17th century, by Mikael Toppelius

 

The stable scene is a staple part of a thousand school nativity plays, as is the preceding”no room at the Inn” setup. It is also a fundamental part of a thousand Christmas Day sermons that have put much stock in being able to show the holy family to be humble and poor, and therefore somehow a lesson in the virtue of poverty and humility. For these reasons, I don’t expect that what Sophisticated Theologians ™ have to say on the subject is going to make a blind bit of difference to the faithful. Let’s face it, the donkey is probably the highlight of any nativity play, and there is not a lot of mileage to be had from a sermon about a baby being born in the comfort of home (not that there’s anything comfortable about having a baby).

Theologians. Next they’ll be telling us that the angels didn’t have tinsel halos either.

h/t: Ant

The Pope’s views on animals and heaven go viral

December 13, 2014 • 8:52 am

With my post on “The Dog Delusion“, I was ahead of the curve, though I thought of it as a humorous Papal remark that wouldn’t go anywhere. I was wrong: the Pope’s implication that all animals go to Heaven (implying they have souls), as well as the discovery of an earlier and similar statement by Pope Paul VI*, have unleashed a frenzy of theological speculation, as well as musings by meat producers and vegetarians about the implications for eating animals. What all this shows is how intellectually depauperate religion is, and how believers fervently discuss questions that have no hope of ever being resolved. Theologians, and even the New York Times, think that the Pope’s remarks, and the uproar they’ve caused, are both serious and newsworthy.

In fact, Pope Francis’s pronouncements on animals and the afterlife made the front page of yesterday’s New York Times, in a piece called “Dogs in Heaven? Pope Francis leaves pearly gates open.” And the controversy was on the evening news last night as well. The Times article raises many questions (quotes from the piece are indented):

Does this cause a theological ferment? Yes. 

Charles Camosy, an author and professor of Christian ethics at Fordham University, said it was difficult to know precisely what Francis meant, since he spoke “in pastoral language that is not really meant to be dissected by academics.” But asked whether the remarks had caused a new debate on whether animals have souls, suffer and go to heaven, Mr. Camosy said, “In a word: absolutely.”

Did the Pope really mean it? No, it was meant “casually” (i.e., metaphorically).

In his remarks, as reported by Vatican Radio, Francis said of paradise: “It’s lovely to think of this, to think we will find ourselves up there. All of us in heaven. It’s good, it gives strength to our soul.

“At the same time, the Holy Scripture teaches us that the fulfillment of this wonderful design also affects everything around us, and that came out of the thought and the heart of God.”

Theologians cautioned that Francis had spoken casually, not made a doctrinal statement.

Did the Pope mean it? Yes.

The Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and editor at large of America, the Catholic magazine, said he believed that Francis was at least asserting that “God loves and Christ redeems all of creation,” even though conservative theologians have said paradise is not for animals.

“He said paradise is open to all creatures,” Father Martin said. “That sounds pretty clear to me.”

NOTE: That last sentence, which was there yesterday, has mysteriously disappeared from the article this morning. It may be because Martin learned that “paradise is open to all creatures” came not from Pope Francis, but from Pope Paul VI (see below).  But a Pope is a Pope. And Martin is quoted later in the article saying this:

Father Martin said he did not believe the pope’s remarks could be construed as a comment on vegetarianism. But, he said, “he’s reminding us that all creation is holy and that in his mind, paradise is open to all creatures, and frankly, I agree with him.”

Do all the Popes agree that animals have souls? No.

The question of whether animals go to heaven has been debated for much of the church’s history. Pope Pius IX, who led the church from 1846 to 1878, longer than any other pope, strongly supported the doctrine that dogs and other animals have no consciousness. He even sought to thwart the founding of an Italian chapter of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

Pope John Paul II appeared to reverse Pius in 1990 when he proclaimed that animals do have souls and are “as near to God as men are.” But the Vatican did not widely publicize his assertion, perhaps because it so directly contradicted Pius, who was the first to declare the doctrine of papal infallibility in 1854.

John Paul’s successor, Benedict, seemed to emphatically reject his view in a 2008 sermon in which he asserted that when an animal dies, it “just means the end of existence on earth.”

But were these Popes speaking ex cathedra, the only time when they’re infallible (or, as Archie Bunker once said, “inflammable”)?

Is it good news for animal lovers? Yes! Not only will you see your pets in heaven, but there are other beneficial results:

Ms. Gutleben of the Humane Society said Francis’ apparent reversal of Benedict’s view could be enormous. “If the pope did mean that all animals go to heaven, then the implication is that animals have a soul,” she said. “And if that’s true, then we ought to seriously consider how we treat them. We have to admit that these are sentient beings, and they mean something to God.”

Sarah Withrow King, director of Christian outreach and engagement at PETA, one of the most activist anti-slaughterhouse groups, said the pope’s remarks vindicated the biblical portrayal of heaven as peaceful and loving, and could influence eating habits, moving Catholics away from consuming meat — which she asserted had already been happening anyway. “It’s a vegan world, life over death and peace between species,” she said. “I’m not a Catholic historian, but PETA’s motto is that animals aren’t ours, and Christians agree. Animals aren’t ours, they’re God’s.”

It’s interesting that in the last sentence PETA, which I haven’t thought of as a religious organization, suddenly buys into faith. They will in fact say anything that helps their cause. (I have mixed feelings about PETA, but think they’ve done some good things by calling attention to the horrendous mistreatment of animals raised for consumption or their eggs or milk.)

Is it bad news for meat producers? It would seem so, for killing something with a soul is murder. But the purveyors of meat don’t think so, and, as always, can cherry-pick the Bible to support their views:

“As on quite a few other things Pope Francis has said, his recent comments on all animals going to heaven have been misinterpreted,” Dave Warner, a spokesman for the National Pork Producers Council, said in an email. “They certainly do not mean that slaughtering and eating animals is a sin.” Mr. Warner quoted passages from Genesis that say man is given “dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on earth.”

“While that ‘dominion’ means use for human benefit, it also requires stewardship — humane care and feeding — something all farmers who raise animals practice every day of every year,” Mr. Warner said.

It’s news to me that “all farmers” practice humane care and feeding every day of the year. Tell that to those who confine pigs or calves in small stalls, or cut off the beaks of battery chickens.

Is this whole debate insane? Yes! 

Laura Hobgood-Oster, professor of religion and environmental studies at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Tex., and an expert on the history of dog-human interaction, said she believed that there would be a backlash from religious conservatives, but that it would take time.

“The Catholic Church has never been clear on this question; it’s all over the place, because it begs so many other questions,” she said. “Where do mosquitoes go, for God’s sake?”

Indeed! I await the Vatican’s pronouncement about which animals get to go to Heaven, and which are Left Behind. Which species have souls, and which don’t? It reminds me of the barminology debate about how many “kinds” of animals there are.

This kerfuffle simply demonstrates what Andrew Bernstein said in an article about the uselessness of religion during the Dark Ages (a quote that I reproduce in The Albatross; reference below):

Here is the tragedy of theology in its distilled essence: The employment of high-powered human intellect, of genius, of profoundly rigorous logical deduction—studying nothing. In the Middle Ages, the great minds capable of transforming the world did not study the world; and so, for most of a millennium, as human beings screamed in agony—decaying from starvation, eaten by leprosy and plague, dying in droves in their twenties—the men of the mind, who could have provided their earthly salvation, abandoned them for otherworldly fantasies.

___________

Bernstein, A. A. 2006. “The Tragedy of Theology: How Religion Caused and Extended the Dark Ages.” Objective Standard 1:11–37.

*Pope Paul VI’s statement, made to a child distraught over the loss of his dog: “One day, we will see our animals again in the eternity of Christ. Paradise is open to all of God’s creatures.’’

As an update, reader Pliny the In Between contributed a cartoon:

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