Andrew Sullivan takes another crack at the problem of evil

September 22, 2009 • 7:18 am

Over at The Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan responded to a reader by explaining what he really sees as the solution to “the problem of evil”:  (Note: see update at bottom).

Smart reader: Yet your dismissal of the argument [Russell Blackford’s argument that suffering long antedated the existence of humans] rested on your belief that “suffering is part of a fallen creation.”  My understanding of the Judeo-Christian “fallen creation” is that it did not occur until – and it occurred only with – the presence of human beings.  Therefore, your rejoinder had nothing to do with Blackford’s argument that you presented your readers.

It seems to me that the theodicy argument is an argument from reason.  Your argument is an argument from faith.  Therein lies the paradox: you cannot counter reason with faith.  As I learned this summer from reading Unamuno, the irresolvable conclusions arrived at through reason and through faith lead us to what he calls the tragic sense of life.

Sullivan: My notion of a fallen world is related to the fact of mortality, which embraces almost everything on our planet, and causes terrible suffering to animals as well as humans. The difference is that, so far as we know, only humans experience this suffering as a form of alienation; we feel somehow as if we belong elsewhere, as if this mortal coil is not something we simply accept, as if our home was from somewhere else.

This, in my view, is our intimation of God, nascent in the long march of human existence only in the last couple thousand years, and unleashed most amazingly in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Ni ange, ni bete. And from that disjuncture between what we sense of as our actual home and this vale of tears we perforce inhabit, comes our search for God. No reason can end that sense of dislocation because it is some kind of deep sense that is prior to reason.

That’s why I do not experience faith as some kind of rational choice or as some kind of irrational leap. I experience it merely as a condition of being human.

I’m starting to realize that theodicy is the soft underbelly of faith. And it’s the downfall of many smart people whose brains turn to oatmeal when they’re forced to take seriously the claims of their faith, and to defend some of the dumber ones.

Here Sullivan conveniently re-interpets “the Fall” as the moment when humans experienced alienation from our world.  Now, did that really happen?  Is it true that the mass of humanity suddenly felt all alienated when their brains got to a certain size? What’s the evidence for that? (It’s not something that I immediately say, “Yeah, that happened!”) Do a lot of people feel alienated from the world now, and feel like they belong elsewhere? If so, why are they so loath to die? (And where do we feel we belong, anyway? Heaven?)  What makes Sullivan think that our search for God came from that supposed sense of alienation from the world, rather than the other way around?  Why was Jesus, rather than Muhammad, the “most amazing” intimation of God?

There are many questions here, but Sullivan answers none of them; he just drapes his argument in a soothing veil of meaningless words. (He’s also fond of shopworn phrases like “mortal coil” and “vale of tears”.)  Look how he avoids the question of whether faith is rational or not: it’s “a condition of being human,” like hemorrhoids.  Does that mean that we can’t argue about whether the tenets of faith are correct? What is it about “being human” that forced Sullivan to accept the divinity of Jesus?

Sometimes I feel sorry for Sullivan.  He’s a smart guy, and a gay one, forced to embrace a faith that is at bottom inimical to his sexuality.   But my sympathy is hard to sustain when he broadcasts this kind of stuff all over his website.

To paraphrase Sir Walter Scott: “Oh what a tangled web we weave/When we must defend what we believe.”

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Update:  Andrew Sullivan has responded here, making the claim (I am getting so used to this) that I don’t understand his position. I’m not going to prolong the debate with new posts, but will respond briefly to Sullivan’s latest riposte, which includes this:

For me, the unique human capacity to somehow rise above such suffering, while experiencing it as vividly as any animal, is evidence of God’s love for us (and the divine spark within us), while it cannot, of course, resolve the ultimate mystery of why we are here at all in a fallen, mortal world. This Christian response to suffering merely offers a way in which to transcend this veil [sic] of tears a little.

What??? Humans do not have a unique capacity to “rise above suffering.” Every animal rises above suffering.  It has to, if it is to live and leave offspring.  It’s ADAPTIVE to be resilient!  Any dog who hobbles along on three legs after an accident is rising above suffering.  How are we humans different? We have big brains that can mentally come to terms with suffering, but that’s adaptive too. It’s certainly not evidence of “God’s love for us,” much less for a god itself.  It’s better evidence for evolution, for those individuals who couldn’t rise above suffering left no offspring.  Ergo we cope, both mentally and physically.

Sullivan goes on to talk about the terrible diseases that afflicted his loved ones, and for that he has my deepest sympathy. But even atheists recover from such traumas.

Andrew Sullivan’s mushy theodicy

September 21, 2009 • 8:56 am

Over at Metamagician, Russell Blackford gave a short disquisition on the problem of evil: why does a benevolent and powerful God allow so much apparently useless suffering in the world?

Andrew Sullivan, at The Daily Dish, didn’t like what Blackford said. Here’s how Sullivan responded, justifying the existence of suffering:

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“Russell Blackford argues that the paradox of suffering requires one to become an atheist. He writes that the “intellectually honest response, painful though it may be, is to stop believing in that God”:

[Blackford’s words] [M]ost of the supposed explanations of evil make sense only in a pre-scientific setting. They are now absurdly implausible even at face value. In particular, most of the suffering that there has been on this planet took place long before human beings even existed. An all-powerful God did not need any of this. It could have created the world in a desirable form without any of it just by thinking, “Let it be so!” That’s what being all-powerful is about, if we take it seriously.

I have never found the theodicy argument against faith convincing. My own faith teaches me that suffering is part of a fallen creation that lives and dies — how could it not be? But it also teaches me that suffering in itself can be a means of letting go to God, of allowing Him to take over, of recognizing one’s own mortality and limits. That to me is not some kind of crutch. It is simply the paradox of the cross.”

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Translation:  “the paradox of the cross” =  “I sure don’t understand, but I’m going to gussy up my ignorance with fancy words.”

When a tsunami sweeps away a bunch of Indonesians, when a baby dies of leukemia, when Jews were driven into the gas chambers of Auschwitz: how, exactly, are those ways of “letting go to God”?  Or of “recognizing one’s own mortality and limits”?  This is intellectual nonsense.  These are words without meaning. And they are insulting and infuriating to anybody with a brain.

I wonder what facts would make Sullivan find the argument convincing?  It can’t be the existence of yet more innocent people suffering needlessly, because, Lord knows, we’ve already seen enough of that.  In fact, I doubt that there is any evidence that would convince Sullivan that there’s a problem, which is why he has no intellectual credibility on the issue of faith. “His faith teaches him” means, of course, that somebody told him that suffering was part of God’s plan, and that’s why he believes it. For someone who’s supposedly an intellectual, Sullivan shows a distressing tendency to accept authority and avoid thinking for himself.

“How could it not be?”  Easy, if there’s no God.

Yay! WEIT in Texas school board hearings! Well, maybe not yay. . .

September 21, 2009 • 7:31 am

An alert reader sent me this video from the recent Texas school-board hearings on state science standards (read about the outcome here).   The pro-evolution guy testifying is Dr. James Westgate from the Texas Academy of Science, explaining how the fossil record documents evolution.  But the interlocutor uses WEIT as evidence that evolution isn’t true!

The madness begins at about 3:00. The unseen interlocutor (identified as “Miss Cargill”, apparently Barbara Cargill of the Texas Board of Education) brings up a point from my book (incorrectly pronouncing my name “Coin-ee”) that the vast majority of species that ever lived are not known to us as fossils. (She cites page 23 of WEIT, but that figure is on p. 22.  There is some confusion in  the video about whether the figure is the proportion of all species that have become extinct, or the proportion of all species that we know as fossils.)  This, of course, reflects the rarity of conditions for fossilization, preservation, and of finding a fossil once it is formed.  But for some reason Cargill thinks that this invalidates using the fossil record as evidence for evolution.  Westgate soldiers on gamely, and he’s good, but it’s clear the deck is stacked against him!  She says, “I’m just kind of questioning,” but what she’s doing is trying to hide her ignorance while dumping on evolution.

After seeing who’s in charge of their education, I feel even sorrier for the schoolchildren of Texas, one of my favorite states.

Kudos to the National Center for Science Education for putting up these videos, and for their tenacious defense of evolution in Texas.  The NCSE has a website for the Texas videos and many others bearing on the evolution/creation debate.

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Fig. 1.  We have the fossils: WE WIN!

h/t: Scott

From God’s mouth to Eagleton’s ear

September 20, 2009 • 5:08 pm

I’m not calling for censorship here, but I would be so happy if Terry Eagleton would just put a sock in it. In his latest interview, in the Monthly Review, he shows some disturbing tendencies.

The first is his implicit claim that he alone is the proper interpreter of scripture:

NS: (Interviewer):Though of course the Christianity you present doesn’t sound like a lot of the Christianity one hears in the public sphere, especially in the United States.

TE: I think partly that’s because a lot the authentic meanings of the New Testament have become ideologized or mythologized away. Religion has become a very comfortable ideology for a dollar-worshipping culture. The scandal of the New Testament — the fact that it backs what America calls the losers, that it thinks the dispossessed will inherit the kingdom of God before the respectable bourgeois — all of that has been replaced, particularly in the States, by an idolatrous version. I’m presently at a university campus where we proudly proclaim the slogan “God, Country, and Notre Dame.” I think they have to be told, and indeed I have told them, that God actually takes little interest in countries. Yahweh is presented in the Jewish Bible as stateless and nationless. He can’t be used as a totem or fetish in that way. He slips out of your grasp if you try to do so. His concern is with universal humanity, not with one particular section of it. Such ideologies make it very hard to get a traditional version of Christianity across.

I’m always amazed at how people who claim that God is nebulous and ungrasp-able are nevertheless so sure about what God is really like, or what he wants.

And then Eagleton once again shows either a failure or a deliberate refusal to grasp popular faith:

. . . These new atheists, and, indeed, the great majority of believers, have been conned rather falsely into a positivist or dogmatic theology, into believing that religion consists in signing on for a set of propositions.

Has Eagleton heard of the Nicene creed? Or any of the other statements of belief of popular churches?

But the scariest thing is this:

NS: There are so many competing claims for supernatural revelation; some people say they adjudicate truth by the Bible, or by papal authority. How do you know one reliable supernatural tradition from another?

TE: Well, you have to argue about it on the basis of reason, and evidence, and analysis, and historical research. In that sense, theology is like any other intellectual discipline. You don’t know intuitively, and you certainly can’t claim to know dogmatically. You can’t simply, in a sectarian way, assert one tradition over another. I don’t think there’s any one template, any one set of guidelines, which will magically identity the correct view. Theology, like any other intellectual discipline, is a potentially endless process of argument. But that’s not to say that anything goes.

and this:

NS: Back to issues of faith and reason — your position reminds me of Stephen Jay Gould’s model of “non-overlapping magisteria.” Gould himself was not a believer, though he wrote about religion and science, and sometimes he has been accused of having a position that is only possible if you’re not really taking belief seriously.

TE: I think that Gould was right in that particular position. What is interesting is why it makes people like Dawkins so nervous. They misinterpret that position to mean that theology doesn’t have to conform to the rules and demands of reason. Then theologians can say anything they like. They don’t have to produce evidence, and they don’t have to engage in reasonable argument. They’re now released from the tenets of science. Traditionally, this is the Christian heresy known as fideism. But all kinds of rationalities, theology included, have been non-scientific for a very long time and yet still have to conform to the procedures of reason. The new atheists think this because they falsely identify the rules of reason with the rules of scientific reason. Therefore if something is outside the purview of science, it follows for them that it is outside the purview of reason itself. But that’s a false way of arguing. Dawkins won’t entertain either the idea that faith must engage reason or that the very idea of what rationality is is to be debated.

All right, Mr. Eagleton, can you tell us whether, on the basis of reason, evidence, and analysis, Muhammed was the prophet of God? Or whether Jesus was the son of God? Or whether, indeed, there is a God? Please enlighten us with the data.

And when “rational” theologians disagree, Mr. Eagleton, is there any way to settle the issue, as there is in science (or indeed, in any dispute that can be settled by evidence)?

The lights are on chez Eagleton, but nobody’s home.

h/t: Butterflies and Wheels

James Wood: great literary critic, not-so-great evolutionary biologist

September 20, 2009 • 9:26 am

James Wood is a well known literary critic, based at Harvard, who writes for The New Yorker. A while back I went after one of his articles, which was a critique of both the “new atheists” and the faithful. I was distressed that Wood not only criticized atheists unfairly (raising the usual canard that our view of theology is unsophisticated), but also proposed a middle-of-the-road “solution” that was both smug and ineffectual. As he said:

What is needed is neither the overweening rationalist atheism of a Dawkins nor the rarefied religious belief of an Eagleton but a theologically engaged atheism that resembles disappointed belief.

Professor Wood kindly responded on this site, defending his own atheism but getting deeper into the mire by saying things like this:

As I made quite clear in the piece, I am on the side of Dawkins and Hitchens if I have to be, but I dislike their tone, their contempt for all religious belief, and their general tendency to treat all religious belief as if it were identical to Christian fundamentalism. Dawkins always sounds as if he wouldn’t mind too much if the European cathedrals were razed. For anyone, like myself, who loves literature and music, so saturated in religious belief and disbelief, one can’t simply dismiss this history it as if it were at the level of astrology or Gypsy Rose Lee.

I discussed Wood’s views with a friend in the humanities, who assured me that Wood was not only a good literary critic, but perhaps our nation’s preeminent literary critic. That intrigued me, and so I read one of Wood’s better-known books of criticism, How Fiction Works (2008; see reviews here, here, and here).

I’m a passionate reader of fiction — granted, hardly as passionate as Wood, who seems to have read everything — but not an analytical one. I am moved by novels, but often can’t articulate why. For those like me, Wood’s book is great. In this short (194-page) volume, he takes apart many of the world’s novels, making the case (I hope I’m accurate here) that the merit of fiction is not so much in conveying truth about the world as in conveying what it feels like to be on the inside of a situation. And he analyzes the various devices writers use to convey those feelings, telling us why some devices succeed more than others. It’s a fascinating read that will make you go back to the novel with renewed vigor. (Wood provides a four-page appendix of all the novels he cites, and I intend to essay many of these. He even mentions Make Way for Ducklings, by Robert McLoskey!) And it’s a fascinating look at the mind of a man who apparently lives for literature.

That said, I have one plaint, for near the end of the book Wood decides to go after evolutionary biologists.

On page 129, he mentions a “quaintly antique” notion of the municipal president of Neza, a crime-ridden area of Mexico City. In 2006, the president gave his police a reading list of great novels to expand their knowledge of the world and promote their morals. Wood notes, “One does not have to be as morally prescriptive as the Mexican police chief to feel that he has taxonomized three aspects of the experience of reading fiction: language; the world; the extension of our sympathies towards other selves.” And then Wood adds a footnote:

We don’t read in order to benefit in this way from fiction. We read fiction because it pleases us, moves us, is beautiful, and so on — because it is alive and we are alive. It is amusing to watch evolutionary biology tie itself up in circularities when trying to answer the question, ‘why do humans spend so much time reading fiction when this yields no obvious evolutionary benefits?’ The answer tend either to be utilitarian — we read in order to find out about our fellow citizens, and this has a Darwinian utility — or circular: we read because fiction pushes certain ‘pleasure buttons.’

Well, the first part is fine, but really, Professor Wood, we evolutionary biologists hardly tie ourselves up in knots about this question. Although I’m a professional in the field, I have never encountered a discussion of the adaptive significance of reading fiction, even from those evolutionary psychologists who love to masticate ideas like this. No respectable evolutionist would bother with the question, “What was the adaptive value of ‘novel-reading’ genes?” In contrast, Wood implies that this kind of story-telling is a major preoccupation of our field. Perhaps he’ll supply us with an extensive list of evolutionary studies of fiction-reading.

Reading is a recent innovation: it appeared about 5000 years ago, 0.07% of the time since we branched off from the lineage that lead to our closest living relatives. Fiction is even younger: many regard the first novel as The Tale of Genji, written about a millenium ago.

That’s not enough time for a “fiction-reading module” to evolve. (And would those who read novels really have more offspring than those who ignore the printed page in favor of seeking mates?) Further, diligent novel-reading is hardly a fixed trait in the human species. Even when novels are available, few people “spend so much time” reading them. The average American, for example, reads four books per year (not all fiction!), and one person in four reads none. With this much variation in the human species, no evolutionist save a bored evolutionary psychologist would even ask the question of adaptive significance. One gets the impression that Wood is talking about his own voracious reading, not that of our species as a whole

It seems likely that, as Wood states, reading fiction does push certain “pleasure buttons” in our evolved brains. It may, in that respect, resemble drinking alcohol, smoking, masturbating, or doing sudoku: things that we like to do (and obviously stimulate something in our brain), but need not be regarded as direct adaptations instilled by natural selection. They’re spandrels. (And, by the way, this is not a circular explanation, since in some cases we can, at least theoretically, find out which pleasure centers are being stimulated, and perhaps understand how they evolved in the first place. It is not circular to say that we masturbate because natural selection built in a system of getting extreme pleasure from copulating, and we’ve learned how to short-circuit the system.)

Why do I spend so much time on a footnote? Because Wood’s readers are not likely to know a lot about evolutionary biology, and so might very well conclude that we’re all a pack of morons who waste our time trying to explain the unexplainable. With this gratuitious swipe, Wood gives a bad — and false — impression of our field. And then, of course, there are the supercilous words “amusing” and “tie itself up in circularities,” as if Wood sees himself superior to those of us who muck about in the swamps of science. Right when I was getting all amiable toward Wood, he goes and ruins it with another display of hauteur.

The fruits of enlightenment

September 19, 2009 • 11:05 am

I’m worn out from the Robert Wright contretemps, so here’s some fun.  A Chinese farmer has created molds that, when placed around growing pears, turn them into baby Buddhas.

Plucky farmer Gao Xianzhang has created 10,000 of the mini marvels this season and he plans to take the fruits of his labour to the UK and Europe.

Britain could soon see the arrival of the pears, which are shaped like mini buddhas.

If the idea catches on, sales of the mini pears could hit the profits of British farmers who are already struggling to fend off sales of cheaper foreign produce in recession-hit Britain.

‘People seem to think they are cute or lucky and will buy them as soon as they’re off the tree,’ Gao explained.

Gao spent six years perfecting the intricate baby-shaped pears, carefully crafting each one which grows inside an individual mould.

Despite their hefty cost of £5 each, locals in his home village of Hexia, in Hebia, northern China, have reportedly been snapping them up.

An alert reader has suggested that, by uniting the scientific and the spiritual, Gao Xianzhang should be nominated for the Templeton Prize.  The creation of Buddha-shaped pears certainly fulfills the Prize’s aim of honoring “a living person who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery or practical works.”

The deadline for this year’s nominations is October 1.

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The French, who apparenty lack all spirituality in favor of carnality, can do only this:

pearbottleFPear brandy6c1fc2d_o



h/t: Otter