Personal Freedom Without Political Liberty

By R.R. Reno
First Things

Sometimes events conspire. In mid-May, the California Supreme Court decided that anything less than marriage for same-sex partners leads to a fundamental discrimination against homosexuals. A week or so later, the Texas courts opined that state officials who removed children from a polygamist Mormon sect may have been motivated by an illegitimate religious prejudice.

There is a great deal more political water that needs to go under the bridges in California and Texas. There will be a referendum on gay marriage in California in November. The Texas officials doubtless have other legal tools for harassing the unfortunate folks at Yearning for Zion Ranch. And I’m sure controversy over marriage will join other cultural issues as an important factor in the presidential election this fall.

But we needn’t speculate about electoral politics in order to read the signs of the times. We’re rapidly reaching the point where the spirit of postmodern, nonjudgmental moral minimalism now permits a man to have many wives–or a husband–if that’s what he prefers. Polling shows that among younger Americans the Yuck Factor has succumbed to the Seinfeld Sentiment: “Not that there’s anything wrong with that!”

At first glance, the Seinfeld Sentiment seems generous. Shouldn’t we allow for what John Stuart Mill called “experiments in living”? Isn’t an accommodation of differences in belief and behavior the essence of the American experiment: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? If Jim wants to pledge himself to John–or to Jane, Jill, and Jennifer–then why should we stand in the way?

There are many ways to answer these questions, but Douglas Farrow’s provocatively titled book Nation of Bastards: Essays on the End of Marriage provides an important insight that we do well to ponder. He sets aside the moral arguments against homosexual acts and concentrates on the lasting implications of gay marriage for our political culture.

A Canadian active in the recent failed efforts to block gay marriage there, Farrow looks at the legislation and its enabling amendments that made gay marriage possible in Canada in 2005. He finds an important shift. Where old laws spoke of husbands, wives, and children as “blood relations,” the new laws speak of “persons,” “legal parents,” and “legal parent-child relationships.”

In other words, in the old system, the state presumed the existence of a substantive, natural reality that required legal adumbration: the union of a man and a woman, and the children resulting from their sexual relations. Now the Canadian government sees that it must intervene and redefine marriage and parenthood in order to give fixed legal standing to otherwise fluid and uncertain social relations. When the gay friend donates his sperm to the surrogate mother hired by a lesbian couple, the resulting “family” is a purely legal construct, one that requires the power of state to enforce contracts and attach children to adoptive parents.

The result is the opposite of the libertarian dream of freedom. As Farrow observes, with gay marriage we are giving over the family to the state to define according to the needs of the moment. The upshot, he worries, will be a dangerous increase in the power of the state to define our lives in other realms once thought sacrosanct. “Remove religiously motivated restrictions on marriage,” he writes, “and it is much easier to remove religiously motivated restrictions on human behavior in general, and on the state’s power to order human society as it sees fit.” The libertarian dream turns into the totalitarian nightmare. Who can or cannot be a spouse? That’s for the state to decide. To whom do children belong? It’s up to the state to assign parents as its social workers and judges think best.

Plato’s plan of taking children from their parents so that the state can control their socialization has few contemporary proponents. (There are, however, many fellow travelers in the educational establishment and so-called helping professions.) Nonetheless, I think we can see the tyranny of the political in our times. Much like the current abortion regime and the slavery jurisprudence of the antebellum era, proponents of gay marriage imagine that they can redefine inconvenient, permanent realities and remove traditional barriers to the relentless human desire to get what we want. The idea that “bride” and “groom” are not gender specific is a current sign of the absolute triumph of the political will. When we accept that judges and legislators possess the power to define the meaning of marriage, then it’s hard to imagine what would limit the state’s power to redefine social reality other than “personal autonomy,” which turns out to be no limit at all, since everything is desired by somebody somewhere. For all we know, Leona Helmsley wanted to marry her dog.

In short, Farrow is concerned that our present culture of tolerance is quite capable of laying the foundations for the politicization of culture. It seems counterintuitive, but the worry has been central to modern conservatism. Edmund Burke saw that revolution motivated by the unattainable ideal of equality would destroy the deep, pre-political social mores that restrain the will, including the political will; and this restraint is essential for the preservation of liberty. Our contemporary cult of tolerance differs from older fantasies of equality, but the notion that we can accommodate everybody’s desires is just as unrealistic.

Of course, we don’t actually accommodate–and we can’t. As we deconstruct social norms for personal life (and sexual relations are just part of this process), other, more violent and crueler forces take their place. Thus our current situation: a raw system of economic reward and punishment keeps most moving in a socially productive direction, with therapeutic professionals to help manage the occasional dysfunctions. For the rest we have well-armed police forces, prisons, and court-administered “family law.” This shouldn’t surprise us. Human beings cannot live together without a felt force of restraint. What should worry us is the migration of that force outward and into the hands of political actors.

In my experience, most conservatives see the genuine moral importance of tolerance in a free, pluralistic society. But the opposite is not true. Liberals and self-styled progressives are often arrogantly and culpably blind to the importance of settled social mores for a liberal society. They are a counterweight to the political will, which has sought omnipotence in the modern era because it has fancied itself omni-competent.

Maybe we can have gay marriage, even polygamy, and retain a felt sense of social restraint based on some sort of shared sexual mores–an ethic of “sincere commitment” or something of that sort. Yet, as Douglas Farrow points out, from Rousseau to the present, the left has sought to use the power of the state to destroy the influence of traditional norms for marriage and family. In so doing, the left imagines itself expanding the scope of freedom for all. It seems all gain and no loss. In California, homosexuals can get married, and nobody is prohibiting heterosexual marriage. Everybody seems to be getting what he or she wants. But what seems is not necessarily so. When the state can rise up to redefine marriage, then the counterweight of tradition is diminished, the political instruments of power are emboldened, and our collective liberty is at peril.

Christianity Produces a Sound Soul and Sound Body

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

Science does a wonderful job making my body healthy.

That is good, but religion does something better. Christianity cures my soul so that I can live well.

After all, bad men are not blessed when they have good health. Sound bodies just give them greater chance to harm others and deeply harm their own souls. As many great saints demonstrate, cure the soul and a man or woman can make a great life out of very trying physical circumstances.

Jesus Christ made my sick soul well.

What is more important than that?

America fixates on physical health, but a man with a fit body and a bad heart is worse than a winning smile that comes with fetid breath. The beauty of the one is spoilt by the grossness of the other.

A sound body with a sick soul does not profit a person. Not surprisingly generally a sound soul will produce a healthier body. The two are closely interrelated.

Christianity is good for you physically. Except for those whose secular fundamentalism limits their perspective, there is sufficient evidence that miracles of physical healing occur as well, something I have personally experienced.

However, spiritual formation is not primarily about physical wellness. Fixing the body is temporary while healing the soul is forever.

You and I are going to sicken and physically die. Given the way things are (due to bad human choices) that is a very good thing and is a major part of God’s severe mercy on humankind. As we are, living forever would grow stale and tedious. As Tennyson puts it:

The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

Death is coming and pretending otherwise is the ignorant cowardice of childish minds.

Part of that preparation is sacrifice for others, doing one’s duty in difficult circumstances, and even being willing to lay down life itself for others. Health bought at the cost of dishonor or betrayal of family, country, or God is worthless. A bad man living is worse off than a good man dead. A coward in the peak of health is disgusting to himself and all decent folk, but a hero’s injuries are an honor to himself, his family, his nation, and his God. Every mother’s labor pains remind us that nothing great can be produced in this life without difficulty and sacrifice.

Avoiding all physical difficulty may be attractive, but it is spiritually destructive. A sedated mind that is pain free may, or may not, be less good than a clear mind suffering pain that teaches depth and charity. Science, limited to is, can never tell us what ought to be done. Our medical doctors need our pastors in order to help with these broader human questions.

Medical science gives religion useful tools, but it is the ethicist and the pastor, experts in human things, that tell us what to do with them. This is as true in medicine as it is in any other area. The medical doctor can tell us how to heal the sick, but only the priest can tell the doctor that he should or should not do so.

Most important of all is religion’s role in making a man fit for the world to come. If this life is a preparation for further life to come, as thinkers from Plato, to Aquinas, to C.S. Lewis believed it to be, then paying attention to the demands of that future life is important.

Good physical fitness produces health in the body, just as ethical fitness produces health in the soul. Too many Americans ignore nutrition and exercise and then damn their luck when they get ill. Quite a few of us may ignore our spiritual health only to find ourselves simply damned.

Sadly, there are know-nothings in our culture who care only for medical technology, but then ignore the wisdom of Christianity in what to do with it. Like television’s Doctor House, they may be brilliant scientists, but bad men. They ignore the words of Jesus and happily save the body and lose their souls. Their error is not in their veneration of medical science, but in the narrowness of their education and concern.

A world without science would be less comfortable. A world without religion would be without meaning. Plato was right when he argued that people with healthy souls live healthier lives both now and in the world to come. The reasonable person cares for both, but prioritizes paradise. Only when he can say “it is well with my soul” can he truly be said to be healthy.

Is Climate Change the World’s Most Important Problem?

By Indur Goklany
Cato@Liberty

A 2005 review article in Nature on the health impacts of climate change provided an estimate of 166,000 deaths as the annual global death toll “attributable” to climate change. This estimate, based on global vital statistics for the year 2000, was derived from a study sponsored by the World Health Organization (WHO) that even the study’s authors acknowledge may not “accord with the canons of empirical science” (see here). Let’s, nevertheless, accept this flawed estimate as gospel, for the sake of argument.

Where would this rank climate change in the list of global threats to mortality?

In the year 2000, there were a total of 55.8 million deaths worldwide. Thus, climate change may be responsible for less than 0.3% of all deaths globally (based on data for the year 2000). In fact, it would place climate change no higher than 13th among mortality risk factors related to food, nutrition and environment, as shown in the following table taken from pages 355-356 of the book, The Improving State of the World.

[Notably, all extreme weather events (whether due to climate change or the normally abnormal climatic variability) contribute all of 0.03% of global deaths on average. See Table 2, here.]

Specifically, climate change is easily outranked by threats such as hunger, malnutrition and other nutrition-related problems, lack of access to safe water and sanitation, indoor air pollution, malaria, urban air pollution.

With respect biodiversity and ecosystems, today the greatest threat is what it always has been — the conversion of land and water habitat to human uses, i.e., agriculture, forestry, and human habitation and infrastructure. See,e.g., here.

Climate change, contrary to claims, is clearly not the most important environmental, let alone public health, problem facing the world today.

But is it possible that in the foreseeable future, the impact of climate change on public health could outweigh that of other factors?

I’ll get to this question in subsequent blogs over the next couple of weeks, but for those who can’t wait, the answer can be found here.

Before Socrates: the Tension Between Personal and Impersonal Causes

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

It is good to know the origin of ideas so we can critically examine our own assumptions.

The pre-Socratics philosophers who lived in the ancient Greek world helped invent philosophy. Any civilized person owes them a debt of gratitude.

They also were fumbling to discover new ways to think about the world. They did not, however, simply sit under a tree and speculate about the nature of the cosmos. They tried to develop theories to “cover” the observations collected by Greek citizens. Why do seasons change? Why does the coast line crumble here and advance over there? The ideas of men like Anaximander fit at least some of the data available at the time. Given the initial Greek worldview, the theories of Anaximander seemed to fit the facts. After all, as the coastline near a city advances, the water retreats. Further down the beach, the water might be washing away the walls of yet another city. The Law of Opposites “covers” this observed phenomenon. New data would produce new ideas. The Greeks were quite open to changing their views in light of further evidence.

A less productive development in the thinking of these pre-Socratics was the rise of naturalism and a preference for naturalistic explanations. Naturalism, the belief that there is no “supernatural,” must have seemed an improvement on the chaotic religion of the Homeric sagas. Why did a thing happen? More and more the pre-Socratics shifted from personal or theological explanations, to naturalistic ones. A god or hero did not do a thing; some basic force of nature did it. This had a major advantage. If everything that happens in the natural world is given a natural explanation, then the gods and the danger of their unpredictable personalities have been removed.

The difficulty is that this methodology might be very fruitful in one area, but less helpful in another. Humans have personality. It is not obvious that their actions can be reduced to “naturalistic” explanations. Anyone with children knows how impossible it is to predict exactly what ice cream a child will order when confronted with fifty some flavors! Personality plays a role in many normal events in the world. That is not true of every kind of change. The change of seasons seems regular without being personal. Some types of phenomena, behavior in free will beings for example, seem to resist naturalistic “covering” stories. Other types of behavior, leaves falling from trees, seem suited to these solutions.

Greek religion was so irrational that it made early Greek philosophers resist any but naturalistic gods. Gods that were no better than humans could not explain or provide a basis for the cosmic order one could see in looking at the stars. Anaximander, like Thales before him, reduced god to a source of motion.

The lack of personal god or intelligent mind designing the cosmos made it impossible for pre-Socratics like Anaximander to explain regular phenomena in nature that resisted naturalistic explanations. Living things, even with the crude observations then available, seemed too elegantly constructed for crude mechanisms like Anaximander. Anaximander had humans spring out of cruder, fish-like ancestors in a primordial slime. How could such a complex set of changes occur? Did simple opposition explain this magical development? The later Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, would recognize this difficulty and rectify it with better theology and explanations of personal agency.

The problem of the origin of complex, living things was coupled with the problem of “teleology” in nature. Many things look made for a purpose. This purpose is the “telos” of the thing. Eyes are for seeing. They seem made for seeing. They seem perfectly suited for the task of seeing when fully functional. Most living things, and many non-living things, seem to be part of pattern or plan. For good or bad, it is nearly impossible for humans not to say, “The sun is as it is to produce energy so that life can exist.” Fully naturalistic systems cannot speak meaningfully in this way. Things can not have a reason for what they are, beyond the mere accident. “Telos” is gone.

To the Greek, this seemed dangerously close to a return to the chaos and meaninglessness of traditional religion. Each of the pre-Socratics, like Anaximander, brings the “divine” back into the cosmic scene. The god-principle is reduced to some part of nature, but it never disappears. To remove it entirely, would be to lose the possibility of meaning or an explanation of apparent purposefulness in natural things.

This created a fundamental tension in Greek pre-Socratic thought. Gods had to be thrown out of the cosmos at the fundamental level. A physical arche, water for Thales and the indefinite for Anaximander, was substituted. Some “divine” principle was reintroduced, however, to allow for purpose and meaning. Eventually, the Greeks would split into two camps. The atomists would carry reductionism to its logical extreme and banish the divine entirely. The last great pre-Socratic Anaxagoras would postulate a divine Mind apart from the cosmos.

Modern Forgetfulness: Naturalism and Personality Today

The ancient Greeks had a problem that was never fully solved in their time. How could purpose be preserved without introducing the chaos of personality? The need was for a god who was at once eternal, good, rational, and all-powerful. Such a god did not exist in Greek religious thought. Plato postulated a “divine craftsman” and anticipated Intelligent Design arguments in his Laws.

Aristotle further advanced science and metaphysics by allowing his “unmoved mover” a role, however limited, in his cosmology. Greeks still had difficulty motivating “gentlemen” to view matter as worthy of study and keeping personal and impersonal explanations in proper tension.

The coming of Christ was, therefore, good news for science and philosophy.

The Christian church would eventually fill the gap between the two extremes of Greek thought. Christian theology, with a God outside of nature, would allow for both natural and personal cosmic cause. Some things could be recognized as divine action, the creation of life for example. Other things, such as the cycle of seasons, could be given natural explanations in the context of an overarching divine purpose. Only Plato and Aristotle would come close to grasping this elegant solution. As we shall see, neither fully grasped it and only with the coming of Christianity were the necessary philosophical distinctions to be made. Christianity allowed for the final birth of a truly modern science.

Why is the current generation of scientists so hostile to religious thinking? Why do even some Christian scientists allow for only naturalistic explanations and methods in science?

The answer is quite simple. For a long time, the philosophical foundations for science were taken for granted. Eventually they were forgotten or deemed unimportant. Christianity was often recognized as being necessary to birth modern science, but now could be discarded. Purpose and the action of any rational beings other than humans could safely be ignored. Scientists and philosophers now knew enough about the world to assume that such a decision was a safe one.

This mistake was due to the success of chemistry and physics in explaining so many things in a naturalistic manner. Of course, this success was simply a continuation of the prediction that non-living things would be best explained in this manner. It is interesting to note that psychology, sociology, and some areas of biology have not had comparative success.

Some things may be the products of intelligence or intelligences (the mind) are not reducible to purely material or physical explanations.

Eventually, scientists themselves would come to forget their own heritage in this area. A rejection of certain mistaken forms of “teleological” thinking developed in the Middle Ages, then turned into a wholesale denial of purpose, design, and intelligent agency in the cosmos. Scientists and many philosophers refused on principal to allow for a God who did things that were part of the picture. These thinkers saw the growth of naturalistic explanations as without any end. Science would eventually have a naturalistic explanation, with matter and energy in mindless motion, for everything in the cosmos. God was left with nothing to do. The attempt to squeeze him into the shrinking gaps in human scientific knowledge was futile. Better to get it over with and declare God dead. Most of the academic mainstream has gone slowly in this direction.

Certain religious thinkers, attempting to rescue cherished childhood beliefs from the “march of science,” agreed with this naturalistic methodology. It was hoped that accepting naturalism in science would allow for supernatural activity in other areas. Such people forgot that science was claiming every area of the cosmos as its domain. These theistic naturalists relegated God’s actions to areas like salvation history, ethics, and life after death. God was thereby kept far distant from their day to day work in the lab. Jesus could live in their heart and help them be good, but He had nothing to say about biology.

To avoid the charge that this is the “God” of a practical atheism, these persons suggest God is constantly involved in a mysterious “sustaining” of the cosmos. This sustaining work is, of course, invisible to science. It is something for God to do as long as no one can detect it, but it is never clear what that something is. How could God be what makes a thing exist, without this essential function being subject to scientific investigation? No one ever says. The function of such a belief is to obscure, not illuminate. The Christian believer can trumpet his belief in God’s action, without ever worrying about his secular colleagues studying it. Such a tamed god is even less worrisome to secular science than the god of Thales.

The immediate result of this historical forgetfulness has been the wounding of religion. It is possible, as with Thales and Anaximander, to put a sort of impersonal god-force into a fully naturalistic scheme. One could even, if one wished, decide to worship him. It simply is not clear why anyone should. Such a god, invisible on any practical level, is unworthy of daily worship. Most humans are not tempted to worship electricity or a gasoline engine in their car. In the same way, a pre-Socratic god disappears from practical, daily consideration.

Eventually the greatest blow suffered will be in the sciences. This seems like an odd suggestion, given the continuing advances in science today. How is this possible if naturalistic science and philosophy have ruled God out of their practical deliberations? Such a blind retreat from the history of science has been possible in the short term, because most scientists continued to use teleology anyway. The change in thinking has been slow and uneven. In many parts of the world, it has not gone very far even yet. While proclaiming allegiance to natural methodology in principle, many scientists see and write of design and intelligence all the time.

This puts many scientists and philosophers of science in an odd position. They use the language of purpose and design while exiling the author and Designer. DNA experts cannot help but speak of “libraries” of data. Doctors devise cures to help humans function “the way they are supposed to.” Things in nature that look designed, like the workings of the interior of the living cell, are often studied as if they were in fact machines. No one tries to explain their naturalistic origins. Science has often been better than its stated methodology. Naturalists, some of whom mouth a Sunday-go-to-meeting theism, have had it both ways. This has allowed science to keep growing, but is also allowing intellectual dishonesty.

This is changing, however. Post-modern skeptics have revealed the flaws in a purely naturalistic science. If humans are simply part of the vast cosmic scheme, like Thales god, how can they see objectively what that scheme is? If there is no purpose, no being providing order, then why assume there is any order to find. Western science is under assault by these critics. Western science is “white male” science. It is after all just the way that white males have happened to see the world. There is no “truth” out there to find. So perhaps, there could be a woman’s science or a Latino mathematics. The modern scientist has no response. He or she should have given up on the search for meaning and objective truth in their discipline when science banished the supernatural. They could not and do science. Therefore, the modern tried to have both. The post-modern critics attack this sort of “science” for its philosophical inconsistencies.

Another group of scientists and philosophers has recognized that the only hope for science and philosophy is in a return to the Christian view. What are they up to? They are building again on the old Greek tension between the teleological (or personal) explanation and the naturalistic one. Such thinkers will allow both personal and natural explanations for events. Science and philosophy need both types of approach. It is not always clear which approach is best, though progress has surely been made in that area.

The tension is wholesome and any attempt to get rid of it (by making everything theological or naturalistic) is simplistic and counterproductive.

The two approaches are like two different tools in a kit. One uses the appropriate tool at the appropriate time. An archaeologist examines a stone. Is the stone the product of intelligent design or a natural occurrence? She has learned to recognize the purposeful products of human civilization. Her field has studied this question for years. Guidelines have been set. She can, after examining the stone, classify it as “designed” or “natural.” Either philosophical tool can be taken out of her mental kit and used to classify and scientifically examine the rock. If it is an intelligently designed object, she looks for purpose. If it turns out to be just a stone, then she looks for a naturalistic account of its odd shape and structure. She will not be content until she finds it. No one claims when she declares a shaped rock is a tool that she “has given up science.” No fool stands up to claim that seeing design and purpose in the world must lead to the death of science. If that were the case, archeology could not be science.

The pre-Socratic Greeks knew this almost instinctively. Modern researchers know it from practical experience. The data under their microscopes demand it. One cannot simply reduce all of nature to its component parts and demonstrate how it came to be without reference to intelligence. Intelligence itself is resisting simplistic naturalistic explanations. There is a growing need for a philosophy of science that include words off limits to a pure naturalist.

Human Persons and Equal Rights

By JP Moreland
Scriptorium Daily

It is a cherished belief of most people that human beings simply as such have equal value and rights and that they have significantly greater value than animals. However, this claim is difficult if not impossible to justify given a naturalist worldview. For many naturalists, the best, perhaps only, way to justify the belief that all humans have equal and unique value simply as such is in light of the metaphysical grounding of the Judeo-Christian doctrine of the image of God. Such a view depicts humans as substances (a particular thing like a dog that is a simple, indivisible unity of parts and attributes at a time, that remains the same through change, and that has a nature (being a human, being a carbon atom, being a dog) that provides an answer to the question “What kind of thing is this particular object?”) with a human nature, and for at least two reasons, naturalists claim that this framework must be abandoned.

For one thing, the progress of science has regularly shifted entities (e.g., heat) from the category of substance (heat was once viewed as the substance caloric that flowed into or out of objects) to the category of quality (heat is an attribute of warmth, not a thing like caloric), or quantity (heat is not the attribute of being warm, it is the mathematical quantity of mean kinetic energy). Since natures are the essences of substances, if there really are no substances (and, instead, there are just collections or aggregates of atoms and molecules), then we should reject the existence of natures. Thus, there most likely is no such thing as a human nature, and talk of such should be understood solely within the categories of biology, chemistry, and physics and with a view of humans as mere ordered aggregates of parts.

Second, Darwin’s theory of evolution has made belief in human nature, though logically possible, nevertheless, quite implausible. As E. Mayr has said:

The concepts of unchanging essences and of complete discontinuities between every eidos (type) and all others make genuine evolutionary thinking impossible. I agree with those who claim that the essentialist philosophies of Aristotle and Plato are incompatible with evolutionary thinking.

This belief has, in turn, lead thinkers like David Hull to make the following observation:

The implications of moving species from the metaphysical category that can appropriately be characterized in terms of “natures” to a category for which such characterizations are inappropriate are extensive and fundamental. If species evolve in anything like the way that Darwin thought they did, then they cannot possibly have the sort of natures that traditional philosophers claimed they did. If species in general lack natures, then so does Homo sapiens as a biological species. If Homo sapiens lacks a nature, then no reference to biology can be made to support one’s claims about “human nature.” Perhaps all people are persons,” share the same “personhood,” etc., but such claims must be explicated and defended with no reference to biology. Because so many moral, ethical, and political theories depend on some notion or other of human nature, Darwin’s theory brought into question all these theories. The implications are not entailments. One can always dissociate “Homo sapiens” from “human being,” but the result is a much less plausible position.

Finally, this observation has lead a number of thinkers to claim that the traditional sanctity-of-life view of human beings is guilty of speciesism (a racist, unjustified bias towards one’s own biological classification) and to settle on personhood, and not simply on being human, as constituting our locus of value. Thus, value resides in personhood, not humanness. What is a person? A person is anything that satisfies the right list of criteria, e.g., has a self concept, can form meaningful relations with God or others, can use language, can formulate goals and plans, etc.

There are two key implications of this view: 1) There can be human non-persons (e.g., defective newborns, people in comas) and personal non-humans (e.g., orangutans) and the latter have more value than the former. 2) Since the features that constitute personhood can be possessed to a greater or lesser degree, then some individuals can be more of a person and, thus, have more rights and value than other individuals. In my view, 1) is false. Being a person is to being a human as being a color is to being red. There can be non-human persons (angels) but there can be no human non-persons just as there can be colored non-red things (blue things) but no red non-colored things. Proposition 2) is one that naturalists have worked hard, and in my view, unsuccessfully, to avoid. In any case, it should be clear that the high intrinsic and equal value of all human beings is easy to justify given Christian theism, but they are hard to square with naturalism.

One day my daughter, Ashley, came home from sixth grade with a Martin Luther King, Jr. flier that said “All human beings should have equal rights and be treated as having equal value.” I asked her if she believed this statement, and when she answered in the affirmative, I asked her why. Thinking she could get rid of me by giving an answer I wanted, she said it was because of God.

I responded by inviting her to pretend that there was no God. I pointed to a beautiful painting on the wall over our sofa and to a piece of trash on the coffee table I forgot to throw away the night before. I then asked that if the house were burning down and she could save only one of these objects, would she be obligated to save one, or would the two objects be on a par so she could decide which to save by flipping a coin. She responded that the painting should be saved because it was of more value than the trash. I asked the same question about the piece of trash and our dog, KC. Irritated, she affirmed that the dog should be saved, not the trash, because KC is precious.

I then pointed out that we had learned a lesson: Equals ought to be treated equally, and unequals ought to be treated unequally. It would be wrong to flip a coin to decide between the trash and our dog, because that would be to treat two unequal things as though they were of equal value. I then noted that human beings have nothing in common that is equal: some are beautiful, some ugly, some smart, some not, some athletic, some not, some socially useful, some not, and so on. Ashley responded by pointing out that there was, in fact, something we all have in common: belly buttons.

I then noted that some have large and some have small belly buttons. “Should the people with large ones be given greater rights?” I asked. Moreover, if it were in virtue of having a belly button that we had value, if we removed someone’s belly button, could we now use that person as a door stop (since he/she had lost his/her source of value)?

I concluded that if equal rights and value were to be justified, two things were required: (1) We had to have something in common that was equal. (2) Whatever that “something” was, it had to be deep, weighty and important, not silly and trivial like a belly button. If we are made in the image of God as Dr. King argued, then equal rights/value is easy to justify. If not, it may well be impossible to justify. That’s something to ponder, isn’t it?

On Human Things in Education

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

It is easy to forget that science is not the only way, or even the most important way, to learn. Shakespeare can teach us as much as any physics text and on subjects of greater importance.

Knowing what a thing is made of, after all, does not tell us what it is.

Scientists, even those who are Christian can fall into the dangerous trap of worshiping science. If such men can account for the visible world, then they rest content. Monstrous evils done in scientific experimentation, such as human cloning, are justified simply because they are scientific.

Literature, the fine arts, theater, and music teach humans what it is to be good, true, and beautiful. They point to meaning. What does it profit a man to learn all mysteries of matter and energy if he does not have love? Science can only simulate or stimulate the feelings of love, but they cannot create one real passion.

Without the humanities, a queen is just a woman, a husband is just a man, and romance just procreation. Meaning is created by persons, gods and men, and cannot arise like a swamp gas from mindless matter.

Philosophy has always been tempted by two extremes: idealism and materialism. Some thinkers wish to make everything an ideal. Matter is but a dream.

So fundamental is the sense of personhood and meaning, that it is easier to believe that matter and energy are the product of mind than that mind is the product of matter.

Study of the classics, required of all the first scientists in places like Victorian England, is a waste of time. They assume the philosophy of the Bible is somehow self-authenticating. Some even go as far as to believe that only scientific authentication is important. Fortunately, parallel to the Intelligent Design movement has been resurgence in the practice of classical philosophy and apologetics led by scholars such as J.P. Moreland, William Lane Craig, and Craig Hazen.

Because the crisis with science has been so pronounced, few apologists and philosophers have failed to account for the relationship of Christianity with the visible world. Sadly, the education of those working in science has not kept pace in the area of humanities. The philosophers of early Greece and Rome used to be the common intellectual property of all college graduates. This is no longer the case, but scientists do not know what they are missing. Shakespeare may be unknown to a scientist, but he feels no sense of shame. However, he would rightly feel distressed by a “well educated” person who had no idea of the history or methods of science.

Nor is it simply that the classical philosophical and literary education will make one a “better person” in some way distinct from the work of science. Better philosophers are better scientists. How many brilliant scientific ideas have been cut short by the ugly and unreflective scientism picked up in graduate school by scientists? One shudders to think. Of course, it is also not a small thing that philosophy and the humanities can make a better citizen. In a republic like the United States, it is not a good thing when influential voters are almost entirely ignorant of soul work.

Christianity is congenial to both the sciences and the humanities without making a god of one or the other. Christianity unites the two parts of the University. It cares about and makes claims about the visible world. Christians are not religious neo-Platonists. This is a philosophy the best of the Fathers rejected, after serious consideration, as sub-Christian. On the other hand, Christians are not mystical Epicureans. The Fathers believe in an invisible world even more important than the visible. Traditional Christianity must unite the sciences and the humanities.

Can science sustain itself without traditional Christianity? In individual cases, it certainly can, but culturally it is unlikely. If a new dark age comes, it will be because barbarians no longer can practice the virtues or understand the humanities that make scientific men and the culture that sustains them possible.

Christopher Hitchens, or any of the new atheists who attack Christianity with more heat than light, is not the main opponent of Christian civilization. Instead, it is the loss of the imagination and hope for something better that infected the church long before Hitchens was born. If we were doing our job, then Hitchens would have no force.

The combination of science and the humanities in the ancient Christian university came from the love of God. If a man loved God, then he had to love the men and the cosmos God made.

Poets like Dante presented the best science of their day in the greatest poetry written up to that point. The failure of Christendom was to maintain that balance. The result was horrific.

On the Middle Ages: Building For Future Greatness

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

When religion, especially Christianity, was dominant didn’t we live in a Dark Age?

Americans are not very good at history. We are a young country where Disneyland’s fiftieth anniversary was marked as an historical event. Safe to say, many of my students’ main ideas about the Middle Ages are like those in Monty Python’s classic movie, Search for the Holy Grail.

What is the secular myth of the Medieval?

As Christianity spread, culture and civilization declined from the secular glories of Greece and Rome to a dark age dominated by priestcraft and superstition. This is the story that secularists tell themselves, but it is false.

Christians did not gain control in Rome until the libertine and spendthrift leadership class had bankrupted the Western Empire morally and financially. In the East, where financially and culturally, the Empire was strongest and where the Christian emperors were most often found, the Empire gained one thousand years of civilization and glory by adopting Christianity. In the West, non-Christian barbarians and semi-Christian heretics destroyed the Empire, which was a shell of its former glory in any case.

Popes, bishops, and missionaries began the hard work of restoring civilization in the West. Monasteries saved what they could and founded the colleges and universities that provided the intellectual space for the birth of the modern world.

This was hard work with many defeats and false starts. Human sin destroyed many promising starts, but the Middle Ages were a time of recovery and development that by the end of the thousand years had surpassed the Romans. Dante, Aquinas, and the universities of Italy, France, and England were ready for even greater things.

Despite constant pressure from Islam, the Eastern Christian Roman Empire (commonly called the Byzantine) maintained a strong educational system and rich cultural heritage. From the great cathedral of the Church of the Holy Wisdom to the marvelous art of the iconographers, it enriched human civilization. Byzantium preserved Hellenistic learning, including the best of paganism, from the ravages of the barbarians. Even at the very end of the Byzantine Empire, when it was tiny and under siege by Moslems, it was educating the Western world and doing interesting intellectual work.

When Constantinople, the great city of Byzantium, fell, the scholars of Byzantium fled with their texts to Christian Italy. There the combination of Eastern and Western Christian learning helped produce the “Renaissance.”

These centuries were not Utopia, especially from a Christian perspective. They were the early stages in the development of Christian civilization. The people living in them did the hard work that developed the basic ideas that allowed for modern science, from physics to physicians to exist, but this was hard labor. They made mistakes along the way. Some of those mistakes had some justification, like the Crusades, and others produced some good, like the Inquisition which helped shape international law, but they were still errors.

The sadistic inquisitor and the greedy and brutal crusader were real. They were great hypocrites, doing evil in the name of the religion of love. Pointing out these moral lepers is perhaps the most effective attack secularists make, but it also demonstrates the success of Christianity in producing civilization.

Hypocrisy is a disease of morality and of success. The only movement that does not attract hypocrites is a failure. Hypocrites are drawn to the great things, because they use them for their own ends. Christians themselves, from the time of the New Testament to the writings of Chaucer, exposed such hypocrites when they could. Perversely the very success of moral men tempts the immoral to try to gain the benefits of virtue without the work. (more)