Biologists Gone Wild

For those interested, here are a few more clips from David B. Hart's review of Breaking the Spell entitled Daniel Dennett Hunts the Snark (available in the current First Things). To take Dennett's cue of the biological analogy, reading Hart is one way of developing immunity to the new atheism's very old line or reasoning - a mental virus called materialism.

Continue...

The essential vaccine can be obtained in these two paragraphs:

"Of course religion is a natural phenomenon. Who would be so foolish to deny that? Religion is ubiquitous in human culture and obviously constitutes an essential element in the evolution of society, and obviously has itself evolved. It is as natural to humanity as language or song or mating rituals. Dennett may imagine that such a suggestion is provocative and novel, and he may believe that there are legions of sincere souls out there desperately committed to the notion that religion itself is some sore of miraculous exception to the rule of nature, but, in either case he is deceived.

For one thing, it does not follow that, simply because religion as such is a natural phenomenon, it cannot become the vehicle of divine truth, or that it is not is some sense oriented toward a transcendent reality. To imagine it does is to fall prey to a version of the genetic fallacy, the belief that one need only determine the causal sequence by which something comes into being in order to understand its nature, meaning, content, uses, or value."

Then there is the claim that Dennett is himself quite religious:

"When Dennett proposes statistical analyses of different kinds of religion, to find out which are more evolutionarily perdurable, he exhibits a trust in the power of unprejudiced science to demarcate and define items of thought and culture like species of flora that verges on magical thinking. It is as if he imagines that by imitating the outward forms of scientific method, and by applying an assortment of superficially empirical theories to nonempirical realities, and by tirelessly gathering information, and by asserting the validity of his methods with an incantatory repetitiveness, and by invoking invisible agencies such as memes, and be fiercely believing in the efficacy of all that he is doing, he can summon for the actual hard clinical results, as from the treasure house of the gods."

The review is also not without a few ripostes:

"Using The Bellman's maxim, 'What I tell you three times is true,' is not alien to Dennett's method. He seems to work on the supposition that an assertion made with sufficient force and frequency is soon transformed, by some subtle alchemy, into a settled principle. And there are rather too many instances when Dennett seems either to clumsily to miss or willfully to ignore pertinent objections to his views and so races past them with a perfunctory wave in what he takes to be their general direction - though usually in another direction altogether.

There is his silly tendency to feign mental decrepitude when it serves his purposes, as when he pretends that the concept of God possesses too many variations for him to keep track of, or as when he acts scandalized by the revelation that academic theology sometimes lapses into a technical jargon full of obscure Greek terms like apophatic and ontic. And there are the historical errors, such as his ludicrous assertion that the early Christians regarded apostasy as a capital offense.

In the book's insufferably prolonged overture, he repeatedly tells his imaginary religious readers - in a tenderly hectoring tone, as if talking to small children or idiots - that they will probably not read his book to the end, that they may well think it immoral even to consider doing so, and that they are not courageous enough to entertain the doubts it will induce in them. Actually, there is nothing in the book that could possibly shake anyone's faith, and the only thing likely to dissuade religious readers from finishing it is its author's interminable proleptic effort to overcome their reluctance."

Finally, and most importantly perhaps, there is Hart's parting advice:

"If Dennett really wishes to undertake a scientific investigation of faith, he should promptly abandon his efforts to describe religion in the abstract and attempt instead to enter the actual world of belief in order to weigh its claims from within. As a first step, he should certainly - purely in the interest of sound scientific method and empirical rigor - begin praying. This is a drastic and implausible prescription, no doubt, but it is the only means by which he could possibly begin to acquire any knowledge of what belief is or what it is not."

Evolutionary Bi-ALL-ogy

The humanities are doomed. Hence I've decided to forego a career in art history. Hitherto my training has been a waste. Instead I will surrender the discipline to biologists, clearly the only field capable of commenting with authority on any subject. If, as the new atheism so persuasively claims, evolutionary biology is able to make perfect sense of a subject as complex as religion (explaining it by inventing the idea of "meme" which, because it's scientific, must be incontestible), how far away can biology be from explaining all facets of human experience and aspiration? The only smart thing to do is to abandon future biological sub-fields now. I eagerly anticipate forthcoming works that will account for masterpieces by genetic necessity alone, providing the long overdue biological take on Raphael, Rembrandt and Matisse.

But just as I was about to sign away my humanities graduate stipend to the biology department - what seemed the only honest option - I ran across David Bentley Hart's review of Dennet's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon that gave me doubts about what seemed an inevitable course of action.
Continue... Hart writes (in the current First Things),

Evolutionary biology is a science that investigates chains of physical causation and the development of organic life, and these are all it can investigate with any certainty. The moment its principles are extended into areas to which they are not properly applicable, it begins to cross the line from the scientific to speculative. This is fine, perhaps, so long as one is conscious from the first that one is proceeding in stochastic fashion and by analogy, and that one's conclusions will always be unable to command anyone's assent. When, though, those principles are translated into a universal account of things that are not in any definable way biological or physically causal, they have been absorbed into a kind of impressionistic mythology, or perhaps into a kind of metaphysics, one whose guiding premises are entirely unverifiable...

In the end, the most scientists of religion can do is to use biological metaphors to support (or, really, to illustrate) an essentially unfounded philosophical materialism. When they do this however, they are not investigating or explaining anything. They are merely describing a personal vision and will never arrive anywhere but where they began...

If one proceeds in that fashion, all one can ever really prove is that, with theories that are sufficiently vacuous, one can account for everything (which is to say, of nothing).

And so I began to wonder if perhaps I should stay in my chosen field after all. Maybe science explains some things well, and other things poorly. If the new atheism's account of religion was suspect, perhaps their pending account of the rest of the humanities was suspect as well. I kept reading:

The [new atheism's] task of delinieating the phenomenon of religion in the abstract becomes perfectly hopeless as soon as one begins to examine what particular traditions of faith actually claim, believe, or do...

Dennett is conscious of this 'hermeneutical objecton,' but he truculently dismisses it as an expression of territorial anxiety on the part of scholars in the humanities who hear the invasion of their discipline by little gray men in lab coats. His only actual reply to the objection, in fact, is simply to assert yet more stridently that human culture's 'webs of significance' (in Clifford Geertz's phrase) can be analyzed by methods that critically involve experiments and the disciplined methods of the natural sciences.

Well, if Dennett going to resort to italics (that most devastatingly persuasive weapon in the dialectician's arsenal), I can do little more than shamelessly lift a page from his rhetorical portfolio and reply: No, they cannot. This is not a matter of territoriality or of resistance to the most recent research but of simple logic. There can be no science of any hard empirical variety when the very act of identifying one's object of study is already an act of interpretation, contingent on a collection of purely arbitrary reductions, dubious categorizations, and biased observations. There can be no meaningful application of experimental method. There can be no correlation established between biological and cultural data. It will always be impossible to verify either one's evidence or one's conclusions - indeed, impossible even to determine what the conditions of verification should be.

Does Hart mean that success in a laboratory does not instantly translate into success in all cultural, anthropological, and spiritual fields of inquiry? Maybe there is a reason to stay in the humanities after all. Furthermore, how nice to see the hermeneutical complexities of postmodern theory marshaled to unmask the new atheistm's conceit.

Guess I'll stick with art history. Maybe, taking a cue from the new atheists, I'll even begin to use its methods to account for science, interpreting molecular structures based on what we know of 14th century German altarpieces!

No, that would be inane.

Who's Afraid of the Analogia Entis?

For those wondering what the analogia entis is (the "analogy of being"), allow me to explain in a way that probably won't satisfy full-time theologians (whom I respectfully don't intend to satisfy), but hopefully will satisfy newcomers to the term: It is the notion that the very being (entis) of the created world offers an analogy by which we can (in a very limited way) comprehend God. For example, if you've looked at a sunset and wondered that perhaps God is similarly beautiful, you've intuitively employed what theologians call the analogia entis.

This way of thinking is well expressed in contemporary idiom in addresses like this, but because of its heyday in the Medieval world, the analogia entis is best articulated by Medieval theologians such as Bonaventure: (continue...)

"All created things of the sensible world lead the mind of the contemplator and wise man to eternal God... They are the shades, the resonances, the pictures of that efficient, exemplifying, and ordering art; they are the tracks, simulacra, and spectacles; they are divinely given signs set before us for the purpose of seeing God. They are exemplifications set before our still unrefined and sense-oriented minds, so that by the sensible things which they see they might be transferred to the intelligible which they cannot see, as if by signs to the signified" (Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, 2.11, as quoted p. 165).

For those pleased by the preceding passage, it may surprise you that the analogia entis comes under severe Protestant attack. Why? Because of the dangers of abuse.

The 20th century Protestant theologian Karl Barth, in an overstatement that recalls Luther's remarks on the Mass below, called the analogia entis the "invention of the antichrist"(x). I imagine he did so because of its potential to obscure the mediating role that belongs to Christ alone. Instead Barth proposed the analogia fidei, (the "analogy of faith"), meaning the only link between ourselves and God is one of faith in Christ, recalling of course the Reformation's sola fide. In so doing, Barth burned all bridges but one, remembering that there is "one mediator" and "one foundation."

And in this Barth was right.

But consider the words of Pope Benedict in his recent Regensburg address, which, were they paying attention might have upset world Barthians as much as Muslims:

"The faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason, there exists a real analogy, in which - as the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 stated - unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language. God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf" (9/12/06).

Benedict, speaking for the largest Christian tradition on the globe, makes three essential moves that when properly understood reasonably alleviates the fear of abusing the analogy of being:

1. First, he recalls the words of the Fourth Lateran Council ("maior dissimulitudo in tanta similitudine"), explaining that the church has for quite some time been on record saying that the world's dissimilarity to God is somewhat greater than the similarity to God. Woops - did I say somewhat? I misquoted. Let me start again: He said "unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness." This is, after all, a fallen world. Anyone therefore fearing that the analogia entis obscures God's transcendence, or leaves no room for apophatic (negative) theology, needs to run by Benedict's statement again.

2. Secondly, in words that could be addressed directly to postmodern reductionists, Benedict shows that the analogia entis is important because it's easy to overdose on negative theology (a danger especially near to wounded ex-evangelicals on a positivist hangover who just discovered that negative theology exists). Benedict says that "God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism," by which I take him to mean that the analogia entis safeguards us from the dangers of mysticism and subjectivism, thereby indirectly securing the essential benefits of both.

3. Finally, and most importantly, Benedict explains that the analogia entis is related to the logos - the ordering principle by which God created all that is. And this logos is none other than the Logos, Jesus Christ. The reason the analogy of being makes sense, even after God has definitively revealed himself in Jesus Christ, is because Christ is the one "through whom all things were made" and in whom "all things hold together." Therefore to contemplate an analogy between the being of the created world and the being of God is, properly understood, not something done independently of the Logos, Jesus Christ.

So, who'll it be? Bonaventure, Barth or Benedict? I'll take 'em all, the Barthian insight being wonderfully framed by the wider perspectives of Bonaventure and Benedict. All shed important light on an enormous truth. What cannot be accepted is Barth's (or Luther's) hyperbolic desertions of large swaths of the tradition. Just as Protestant condemnations of the Mass cannot reasonably be sustained in light of the Catholic Church's emphatic clarification (see pt. 1367) that the Mass is not a repeated sacrifice (which was the basis of the original protest), so Protestant condemnations of the analogia entis cannot in my judgment be sustained in light of Benedict's qualifications without running on the fumes of anti-Catholic prejudice (of which there is plenty).

For a more heavyweight discussion of this issue, consider how Hans Urs von Balthasar (p. 163) suggested that he could subsume Barth's analogia fidei into the Catholic analogia entis, or how David Bentley Hart (see p. 242) playfully turns the tables on Barth (a move which was debated at a recent session covered here and here), but as stated above, that may be more interesting to full-time theologians.

The matter is not whether there is more than one mediator or more than one foundation, but just how big that mediator and foundation is. The question is not which of the two analogies is true. They both are (with priority, I would submit, going to the analogia fidei). The question is in which can we afford to neglect. The answer is neither.

update: Since 2006, this conversation continued far longer than you'll care to keep up with, but Keith Johnson's book, the conference volume, Stephen Long's and now the finally completed translation are the places to go.

liturgy links

Thanks to Dave's question I said I would post about liturgy - so here is my list of resources to help get that beautiful building revved up to capacity.

It is a shame that neither Dave nor I got any real training in historic liturgy in three years of Seminary (unless I missed that day), but I suppose that's the nature of Reformed Seminaries. Yet in light of the 20th century's Liturgical Movement, one wishes it were different, if only for ecumenical reasons.

Apparently the key text of the Liturgical Movement is Dix's The Shape of the Liturgy (or Casel), but for introducing Protestant congregations to liturgy, aside from lifting chunks from the Book of Common Prayer (which was updated in 1979 to include insights from the Liturgical Movement), there is Bob Webber's helpful series, not a bad investment for a church's book fund.

For web resources, this blog provides some nice one-stop-shopping, but is definitely more on the Catholic/Orthodox side of things. Peter Jeffery also put together a list of links... and yet another.

And although there's the online Breviary, being Protestant I prefer Mission St. Clare for the round of daily prayer.

If anyone has other/better suggestions please leave a comment.

Scripture's home

Our liturgy class went to a Medieval Latin Mass in NYC on Friday, and on Sunday we went to an Ethiopian Orthodox service followed by an Armenian Orthodox one. Because both of the last two are non-Chalcedonian break-offs from mainstream Orthodoxy, call Sunday my "Monophysite Morning." That may also be a new breakfast cereal.

I was unexpectedly floored by Friday's Medieval Latin Mass. Put simply, when Luther called it "such an abomination that I don't believe it could be sufficiently punished on earth if it rained pure fire from heaven" (The Abomination of the Secret Mass Luther's Works Vol. 36, p. 320), his judgment was off. And please don't give me the "that's just Reformation rhetoric" line. Luther was on more than I'll ever be, but at that point he was off.

On Sunday there was an extraordinary contrast between the less wealthy and more vibrant Ethiopians (power-point icons, a church basement's fluorescent lights, a hanging disco ball engulfed in incense, lively singing and drums, no web site), and the more established but still friendly Armenians (massive church, easy to follow translated liturgy, nice gift shop, good web site), but both congregations were more than worth the visit, and were deep confirmations of faith.

When Peter Jeffery (who embarrasses biblical scholars in his spare time) began this class he announced that understanding liturgy is as essential to the study of the Middle Ages as understanding advertising is to studying our own age. Like advertising today, liturgy spoke to people's deepest desires and needs, shaped their world, and was everywhere. But in addition to its indisputable value for studying the past, it is becoming increasingly clear to me that Christianity without the pricless historical deposit of liturgy is woefully and needlessly impoverished.

To put it in Protestant terms, liturgy is simply Scripture's home

Advent

It's our fourth Advent here at millinerd.com, and it's become a tradition to link to this site as well as some music recommendations.

The Mrs. and I have been tempted this year to go for Sufjan's Christmas album, but five CD's (it's a box set) is a lot of Sufjan. I can however unhesitatingly recommend Rick's free Euro-Christmas video-podcast. I'm quite serious (and clearly getting soft in my old age).

For posts of adventine substance, I temporarily defer to last year's meditations.