Report: Division of Ethics

Dialogos edited by Kropf

 

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DIALOGOS:

An Interactive Journal of the Sciences, Philosophy, and Theology

 

Richard W. Kropf, Editor

 

Index of Issues:

 

Introduction to this Journal : Aim, Editorial Policies, Editorial Staff

 

Issue One: The End of Science? A Review with Reader's Comments

 

Issue Two: Life on Mars? Theological Implications and Responses

 

Issue Three: The Anthropic Principle: Yet Another Version?

 

Issue Four: Evolution and the Problem of Evil

 

Issue Five: Can Science Prove There Is a God? -- A Dialogue

 

Issue Six:  The Jesus of History and the Future of Faith

 

Issue Seven: Life After Death? Immortality and Evolution

 

Issue Eight: Cloning, Genetic Engineering, and Population Control

 

Issue Nine: The Universe, Open or Closed?

 

Issue Ten : The Future of Sexuality

 

Issue Eleven: Consilience and the Quest for Ultimate Meaning

 

Issue Twelve: Faith: Security or Risk?

 

Issue Thirteen: Darwin and Natural Law

 

Issue Fourteen: Abortion: Seeking a Sensible Solution

 

Issue Fifteen: The Creator's Software: Physics & Information Theory

 

 

 

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DIALOGOS

An Interactive Journal of the Sciences, Philosophy, and Theology

 

Richard W. Kropf, Editor

Introduction

The Purpose And Scope Of This Journal

 

Since its inception in October or 1996, the aim of DIALOGOS has been to be an on-line periodical promoting a conversation between the various sciences, philosophy, and theology in a way that would be readily accessible to all who might have an interest in these subjects, particularly as they relate to one another. More immediately, the intent is to close the gap that exists on the internet between the largely arcane and esoteric discussions carried out by members of a particular scientific or academic discipline, and the largely unmoderated, free-wheeling, and often fruitless exchanges that take place on "usenet" groups that are normally open to the general public.

The Name Of This Journal

 

While hardly unique (dialogos meaning "dialogue" in Greek), the title of this journal has been chosen carefully in terms of a triple play on the ancient term LOGOS or "word" with its connotations of a body of knowledge (the various sciences or "-ologies"), the rationality or "logic" of philosophical discourse, and the quest for meaning or purpose that remains the aim of religion. The guiding principle is the belief that it is only through ("DIA") courteous and respectful discourse with each other -- true "dialogue"-- can people make any real progress towards mutual understanding, harmony, and peace. As world events so amply illustrate, leave out any of these three essential elements -- knowledge, rationality, and a sense of meaning -- rational discourse, and with it, much of human society, like a defective tripod, totters on the brink of collapse. Instead, when working together, these three elements, while each remains distinct, should converge toward an apex of ultimate truth .

The Inspiration For This Journal

 

For those who have already read the first two issues, it will come as no surpise to find the name of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1883-1955) frequently invoked. This often controversial Jesuit priest and paleontologist was a co-discoverer of Peking man -- as well as one of those originally duped by claims for "Piltdown Man" (see "Teilhard and the UN" for more on this aspect of his life). Teilhard firmly believed that it is only in the convergence of all the sciences, including the "research" of religious experience or mysticism, that the human race can achieve its full destiny or as he often termed it, the "Omega-Point". While it is not the intention of the editor to make this journal exclusively into an organ of teilhardian thought, the inspiration provided by his vision (some have even gone so far as to say that he "predicted" the world wide web with his notion of the "noosphere") will still have a significant influence on the aim on this journal. For more about Teilhard, see the following sketch or two newly-formed websites devoted to his thought, one from a Teilhard Study Group headquartered in Caen, France using both French and English, and the other sponsored by the Dutch Foundation Teilhard de Chardin featuring a quarterly journal, GAMMA, currently available in both Dutch and English.

The Structure of this Journal

 

    *

      With these goals in mind, each issue of the journal consists of the following:

 

      - A feature article, essay, or book review, prefaced by an editor's introduction to the subject at hand.

      - A letter or "comments" section, moderated by the editor, giving feedback to the featured article.

      - An invitation for continued input on the featured subject.

 

      The index page contains a list of previous issues with the title of the featured article or the major subject of that issue. These back issues will be available through the DIALOGOS web-site for as long as possible.

 

Editorial Policies

 

While solicited feature articles may be occasionally longer, other contributions should be kept, if at all possible, to no more than three pages or about two thousand words in length. They are to be written in the English language in a style readily understandable to persons without special training in the discipline to which the writer belongs, as well as to the educated public. Special words or foreign phrases not generally found in an English language dictionary are to be translated or explained. "Footnotes" or other references are to be incorporated in the body of the text, "scientific style". Letters or comments should be retricted to five hundred words or less. Submission should be by e-mail attachments, either in plain ASCII/Dos format or in HTML format.

 

Some special cautions for prospective contributors from each discipline (in addition to the above general editorial comments):

 

First, scientists are requested to clearly distinguish between established data, generally accepted hypotheses, and more speculative theories. In other words, scientists are expected to follow scientific methodology and emphasize scientific truth. Similar distinctions should also apply within the realm of the social sciences (in which we might also include historical studies) even though they have their own methodology which may be not quite the same as that of "hard science".

 

Second, philosophers are to be reminded that it is the rationality of a philosophical approach that is most crucial for the success of this intended dialogue. Thus, while they are welcome to speculate on the perennially "big questions" of philosophy (e.g., Why is there something rather than nothing? Do humans have a "soul"? How ought we to live? Etc. etc.), it should be kept in mind that it will be their primary function, in this case, to be mediators between two very distinct ways of looking at reality and facilitators of dialogue between them.

 

Third, theologians and other religionists are expected to maintain an attitude of respect at all times for traditions other than their own, as well as for the empirical sciences and for the kind of philosophical reasoning which theology and interreligious dialogue must necessarily employ. References to or quotations from sources normative for particular traditions (the various sacred scriptures) may be used as illustrative of those traditions, but are not to be used in the mode of "proof texts" for purposes of proselytization.

 

These same guidelines will also apply to comments offered in response, but these will be confined to no more than one page in length.

 

A final reminder to all, and not just to believers: this dialogue requires a certain ability to "bracket" one's own views in order to understand that of another. Commitment to the Truth, whatever its means of discovery, must remain the underlying value that informs our effort. With these ground rules, we should have a constructive and forward-looking dialogue. (RWK, editor)

 

Editorial Staff

 

For more information on the instigator and chief editor of this journal and on those whom he frequently or occsaionally consults -- depending on their expertise -- see

Editorial Staff

 

 

 

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The End of Science? A Review with Commentary

Issue One of DIALOGOS:

An Interactive Journal of the Sciences, Philosophy, and Theology

 

Editor: Richard W. Kropf

 

First posted Mid-September, 1996. Revised for cross-indexing, Oct. 30, 1996. Up-dated Jan. 12, 1998.

Editor's remarks:

 

This issue begins with a review of a controversial book that appeared late this past spring. It will, I hope, start some spirited discussion among our first time readers. RWK

 

John Horgan of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN magazine seems to have deliberately gone out of his way to cause an uproar with his recently published book The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge In The Twilight of the Scientific Age (HelixBooks, 1996). His thesis is that having solved most of nature's great mysteries, the great age of scientific advancement is rapidly drawing to an end. So well established has become the evolutionary paradigm in explaining the origins and development of life, with physics so close to having reduced matter to its fundamental components, and with a "Big Bang" cosmology remaining just about the only feasible explanation of the universe, Horgan contends that although there are undoubtedly great discoveries yet to be made, still, for all intents and purposes, the greatest discoveries, those which have most changed the course of human thinking, are now in the past. All that scientists can reasonably hope to do in the future is to further confirm the evidence by filling in the gaps.

 

Such a thesis is sure to rouse a strong reaction, and already has. Lately hobbled by declining research funding and ridiculed by politicians whose constituents can see no useful purpose for super-colliders and sci-fi projects like SETI, scientists feel themselves to be an endangered species, with breakthroughs in genetic research and the spectacular results from the repaired Hubble Space Telescope being among the very few things to crow about. But beyond such fundamental research and the sinking feeling that we are merely busy learning more and more about less and less, Horgan touches an even rawer nerve when he points out that much of what passes for scientific thought today (like theoretical "cosmic strings", "multiple universes", "wormholes in space") are purely fanciful speculations far beyond the possibility of empirical science to either confirm or deny. In other words, while such theories may be interesting, they elude the methodology of science itself. They rightly belong to the realms of speculative philosophy, or even theology, hardly science as the word is now understood.

 

I would both agree and disagree. Despite the huge gap that still needs to be closed between physics and biology (regarding the origin of life) and the still unsolved mysteries of just how the human brain works, and despite the near-certainty, since the recent COBE satellite discoveries, of an inflationary Big Bang explanation of the universe, I believe that there is still one major discovery yet to be made that will qualify to stand with those others which forever change the course of human knowledge. It has to do with the fate of future of the universe and the implications it will have for human thought and conduct.

 

Look at it this way. No doubt that the sciences, especially physics and cosmology, have brought us back in startling new ways to the age-old philosophical (some might even say "sophistic") question: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" But this last, still unsolved, scientific problem brings humanity to a more threatening question and its implications: what if, after billions of years of something, we end up with nothing?

 

The evidence of the growing uneasiness with this riddle is all around us. Cosmologists keep insisting that there has to be all that still undiscovered "dark matter" out there. Why this fervent belief in what seems to be still more than 90% undiscovered? It is not to explain the universe that we can see -- less than 10% of the unseen dark matter would do that. The reason is pretty obvious to anyone who cares to think about it. It would be to assure us that the universe, still-expanding towards eventual extinction, will reverse its expansion and collapse (or "close") upon itself and possibly repeat the Big Bang process all over again. On the contrary, an "open" universe points to a fate that suggests that, if there is to be any future at all, that future must be beyond the realm of the physical sciences, or to phrase that literally, towards the "metaphysical"--the realm of philosophy and even theology, both of which were once also understood to be "sciences" in their own right. (Note: a recent issue of Sky & Telescope see "Weekly News Notes" for Jan 9, 1998, reports that no less than five papers were presented at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society that seem to confirm a growing consensus that the universe is "open". For more on this, watch for a future issue of this journal.)

 

But one need not even go that far. Another discipline, psychology, which also lays claim to the title of "science" today, could well have something to say about all this. A universe with no ultimate future is a universe without meaning, without purpose, without a goal. And without these, human life becomes intolerable. Or as the late paleontologist-philosopher (and some would say "mystic") Pierre Teilhard de Chardin pointed out, a half a century ago: "For what point can there be in living with eyes fixed constantly and laboriously upon the future, if this future...must finally become an absolute zero? Better surely to give up and die at once." (From "Le rebondissement humain d'evolution et ses consequences" in Revue des Questions Scientifiques, September 1947, as translated by Rene' Hague and republished inThe Future of Man, Harper and Row, 1964, pages 196-213.)

 

Brash words, no doubt. But they do point unerringly to the raw nerve that Horgan's book has again exposed. The empirical sciences are not about to roll over and play dead, nor should they. But it is becoming obvious that they are not equal to the whole challenge that awaits us. RWK 7/27/96

Comments from Readers

 

The following is from Joe Provenzano, a CalTech physicist working at Jet Propulsion Laboratories in California.

 

Although there is much that is controversial in Horgan's thesis, I believe that Kropf has correctly pointed out areas where major breakthroughs are possible. Rather than comment further on these areas, I will focus on an implicit assumption that Horgan makes that I feel is at the root of the whole issue. I am talking about "the greatest discoveries, those which have most changed the course of human thinking, are now in the past. "My point is that, it is actually the interpretation of these discoveries, not the discoveries themselves, that changed the course of human thinking. This apparently subtle distinction makes all the difference, and means that "minor" scientific discoveries in the future have the potential to greatly change the course of human thinking. Therefore, we must continue our scientific efforts as strong or stronger than ever, whether or not we expect major discoveries. I will try to justify this statement in the following paragraphs.

 

In the pre-Newton, pre-Darwin world, philosophy and theology were accepted as providing the explanation of reality -- we lived in a universe that was created by God with a purpose. With the tremendous successes of science, a purely materialistic understanding became accepted. These discoveries could have been interpreted to mean that God created our universe with a purpose, using the evolutionary paradigm. However, this did not happen, and most modern scientists today accept the purely materialistic interpretation.

 

Starting with Quantum Mechanics, and more recently with a series of discoveries that have come to be known as the Anthropic Principle, a number of new facts have been surfaced. The laws of physics, the basic physical constants, and the initial conditions of our universe seem to be perfectly tuned so as to permit matter, life and consciousness to develop. For example, if the ratio of the mass of the proton to the mass of the electron were only slightly different, then matter as we know it could not have evolved. In my opinion, the implications of these discoveries have not been adequately addressed. Many of the materialistic, atheistic school brush aside these discoveriesas a tautology, or say that we are in only one of "many universes." On the other hand, many from the theological school rush in to say this is proof that God designed the universe.

 

The point here is that I believe that "the course of human thinking" is at an unstable point at the present time. How are we to interpret the Big Bang, evolution, consciousness, the Anthropic Principle, etc? I believe that a few more minor discoveries about the "coincidences" leading to our existence could cause a complete reinterpretation of the purely materialistic paradigm. Therefore, this is not a time to be announcing "The End of Science."

 

I really appreciate your comments and analysis, even though I may have trimmed them a bit. But I think I recall at least one place (page ?) in his book where Horgan descibes the anthropic principle as being "notorious" or something like that -- apparently referring to the controversy it has generated. Perhaps in a future issue of DIALOGOS, you could sum up the debate over the AP for all of us. RWK

Additional Comments

 

Actually, the first response to the Horgan review was from Dave Beckman (a retired NADA engineer) who has also who comments regarding the possibility of the universe ending in a "zero" or "nothing":

 

This question has drifted through my mind on occasion as well. If we are confined to this planet that is held in captivity by a star that we fully expect will someday destroy the means of sustaining life, what has been accomplished? Or are we too naive in expecting that there is a purpose? (daveb@hal-pc.org)

 

Editor's Response

 

Philosophically speaking, this really is the big one. Admittedly,the word "nothing" in my essay (like Teilhard's use of the word "zero") does not need to be taken in an absolute sense. I mean it to be relative to what has gone before as measured by our human scale of values. In other words, I'm assuming some kind of notion of evolutionary "progress" -- let's say the appearance (and survival) of intelligent life. But if one is able to accept that the eventual fate of the whole universe is to end up merely as an infinitude of burned-out dwarf stars (or alternatively, in a "closed" universe scenario, something like one big, final, "black hole" -- this is where we could use some input from the astronomers) and nothing more, then it is pretty hard to see any "purpose" in the universe, other than possibly keeping the gods amused for awhile (something like the Hindu idea of the material universe being nothing but divine lila or "play"). I'm afraid I can't accept that. But neither does the idea that a closed universe just might initiate another Big Bang, or even a whole series of them, satisfy me. How many repeats could we expect? Joseph Silk, in his book on The Big Bang (Revised and Updated Edition, W.H. Freeman,1989, pages 390-91) says that at most there could only be a few. This isn't enough for me, or as Silk admits, probably for most of us. It seems to me that the Book of Ecclesiastes (or Qoheleth-- surely the most pessimistic book in the Hebrew Bible) put it well: "He [God] has set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end."(Ecc. 3:11.) So the question remains: is this all a cosmic joke (or even worse, the ultimate shaggy dog story) or is it something else? RWK

 

Recently (10/16/96), Ray Hoobler (rthcc@cunyvm.cuny.edu), a professor of mathematics at CUNY (City University of New York) sent in this comment:

 

I haven't read Horgan's book, but I regard his comment about wormholes as highly premature. What do you think a scientifically literate person living in 1910 would have said about the possibility of testing Einstein's General Theory of Relativity? And yet, just seven years later there was a test in Egypt. Current refinements of physical theories are more subtle than Einstein's refinment Newtonian mechanics so it is natural to expect testable consequences to be more subtle also.

 

It is a good thing Hoobler didn't read Horgan's book or he'd be even more upset. Horgan expends at least three pages deeming the whole theory of wormholes leading out to baby universes as "preposterous". Perhaps, if I had been writing in Horgan's place, I would have toned down his adjective to "implausible". Still, I think he raises a good question. Has anyone ever made a serious suggestion as to just how the existence of such other universes could be scientifically tested? Didn't Einstein predict that his theories, at least in part, could be either verified or falsified? Maybe I've got some of Hawking's ideas confused with speculations about multiple universes, but it seems to me that establishing the existence of such entities would be a lot like trying to prove the existence of heaven or hell. But maybe the same goes for disproving them! RWK

 

Those who have contributions to make regarding Horgan's book or its thesis, or the comments that have been made so far, can still add their comments to later editions of this issue. Please review our editorial policies and try to restrain your comments to 500 words or less. I also invite your suggestions regarding topics for future issues and encourage you to submit papers or reviews for consideration.

 

 

 

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Life on Mars? Some Theological Implications

 

Issue Two of DIALOGOS:

An Interactive Journal of the Sciences, Philosophy, and Theology

 

Richard W. Kropf: Editor

Editor's Remarks

 

Despite the claim made in the first issue of DIALOGOS that the only really "great" scientific discovery remaining is that concerning the eventual fate of the universe, the announcement made this past August by scientists at the Johnson Space Center would certainly seem close to rating that same rank, if by "great" we mean discoveries that forever change the course of human thinking . Not that this proposed discovery is for certain, as others, as reported in the October issue of Scientific American (Cf. "Bugs in the Data") are suggesting alternate explanations of the fossil-like fragments found in meteorites of presumed Martian origin. But what if the NASA report turns out to be true? In the following essay, which was written shortly after the announcement was made, I listed what I think are the three most immediate philosophical and theological implications of this presumed discovery. I would invite others to comment not only on what I wrote at that time but to add their own additional insights into what this discovery, if it proves correct, means for all of us.

 

Some Theological Implications of the Possible Discovery of Life on Mars

 

While the recent news of the possible confirmation of life having once existed on Mars, may be, as President Clinton said, "stunning" to the general public, it certainly comes as no big surprise to those who have been following closely the news of the various space probes that have been made in that direction over the past years. Despite the absence of any clear signs of life in the samples analyzed by the two robot space vehicles that actually landed on Mars nearly twenty years ago, the widespread signs of water once having been present in abundance on that planet continued to arouse suspicions that at least at one time life may have existed there. The evidence presented to the scientific community, based on electronic microscopic inspection of a meteorite found in Antarctica in 1984, would seem to confirm this suspicion. Unless the evidence is being read backwards (that the meteorite is a piece of our planet that somehow returned to earth) it appears that at least the beginnings of life on earth were duplicated on Mars as well. Either that, or life on earth itself was an import from Mars!

 

Overlooking that last possibility for now, I shall trust that the suspicions of the scientists shall be proved to be correct and, as a theologian, comment accordingly. Several theological implications would seem to follow.

 

The first of these is that, as the general standard model of evolutionary theory holds, life is most likely "spontaneously" generated when the conditions are favorable, that is, when a planet having the necessary components for life as we know it exists within a suitable distance of a star, life is apt to begin. Carbon-based life, in all probability, in some form or another, exists elsewhere in the universe, both within our own galaxy (where we have already begun to detect other solar systems), as well as in other galaxies (now estimated to be in the order of fifty billion in number). If God is held to be the "creator" of life, then it is because God is the creator of the evolution. In classical philosophical terms, this means that even if we hold that God is the "final cause" or reason for creation, or even the "formal cause" in that we are created in God's "image and likeness", still the "efficient" or "instrumental cause" is the evolutionary process itself. And this is probably true for human life (or any other form of intelligent life) as well. Theologians can no longer treat human evolution as an isolated phenomenon apart from the possibility of the occurence of other forms of intelligent life.

 

The second implication flows from the observation that, as in the case of this Mars discovery, not all beginnings of life necessarily progress towards the result of intelligent life. Perhaps there are a multiplicity of other planets, like Mars, that developed microscoptic forms of life that became arrested in development or else after even developing further, subsequently died out. In other words, even if one holds that there is a kind of "teleological" or God-given direction or "goal" to evolution, it is evident that chance plays a major role. And if this be so, then much of what we, as humans, consider to be tragic or even "evil" is part and parcel of the evolutionary process. Philosophically speaking, this means that the age-old problem of evil (or "theodicy") must be addressed in this light. Repeated failures (such as that implied by fossilized evidence rather than living specimens in the case of Mars) within the course of what may be a very large number of evolutionary attempts, suggests (much as did Teilhard de Chardin years ago) that even human failure has a certain statistical inevitability about it and that what western Christian theology has described as "original sin" may be seen as a form of evolutionary "baggage" predisposing us toward our own personal failures. But it also might suggest that chance itself is an evolutionary prerequisite for the emergence of human freedom.

 

The third theological implication, which is more specifically "christological" follows from what is already taken as implied by this discovery and what it seems to say about the proliferation of life in the universe on the one hand, and the ubiquity of failure on the other. A multiplicity of inhabited planets in the universe strains any claims made for Jesus as the universal "Redeemer" or "Savior" beyond almost any recognizable belief. Even an incarnational theology which lays stress upon a redemption accomplished more by simply the fact that in Jesus "God became man" rather than through his own preaching of the good news of God's coming "kingdom" or the subsequent preaching of the message of his having died and risen again, suffers in the face of the likelihood that other forms of intelligent life, which very well may need redemption as badly as ourselves, may have nothing else in common with us and most certainly will never hear the message which Christians consider so vital for salvation. Instead, it would seem that our vision of God, the Creator of the entire universe, has grown much too large to be encompassed by the figure of Jesus Christ.

 

What then? My own guess is that Teilhard de Chardin was also essentially on track when he suggested that in the future, while we here on earth might recognize Jesus as in some sense "definitive" (at least for ourselves), he may only have been one of many "unleashings" or self-revelations of the "Trans-Christ" - - in other words, merely a earthly, time-bound manifestation of the eternally creative Word which fills the universe with life and draws it back into a final unity with its divine Origin or Ground. RWK 8/9/96

 

Other links to information on the proposed discovery of life on Mars are: the Federation of American Scientists, the October issue of Sky & Telescope magazine and The Ames-NASA Research Center.

 

For the very latest news and photos on the Mars Pathfinder Mission from Jet Propulsion Laboratories.

Reader's Comments

 

The first response to come in is from Bill Bartlett (who describes himself as a "somewhat conservative skeptic"). It reads as follows:

 

Although I find RWK's essay interesting and provocative, I have problems with several of his assertions. The first has to do with his second "implication" or its correlary explanation of evil in the world. If God is taken to be an all-good creator who has set an ultimate goal or purpose for his creation, why should that necessarily entail the existence of as these kinds of disasters we call "evils" in this world. Do not the existence of such evils suggest that either there is no God or that if there is one, "he" is not necessarily good?

 

My second problem is with RWK's conjuring up some obscure speculation about a "trans-Christ" to somehow save Christian belief from what seems to be a losing battle against complete irrelevence. Granted that Jesus of Nazareth remains a revered examplar, for the human race (or at least a major part of it), of ethical perfection and love of God. But to try to continue to cast him in some role of some divinely "cosmic" redeemer seems to me to be an increasingly hopeless cause.

Editor's Response

 

Both of Bartlett's objections merit serious consideration. The first one, however, probably needs to be the subject of a whole issue (or two?) of DIALOGOS, and soon may be. The point I was trying to make is that the whole process of evolution seems to suggest that either it was in some way "designed" to bring about the existence of free creatures like ourselves, and that of its very nature, such a process will involve the play of chance in such a way that much of what we think of as "evil" is bound to occur. When you get down to it, there are at least two major topics for discussion here: first, the whole issue of "teleology" (which as of late has taken the form of speculation about a so-called "Anthropic Principle") and then the whole "problem of evil" itself.

 

As to the second objection that Bartlett has raised -- namely that speculations about a "trans-Christ" seem like a far-fetched attempt to rescue the Christian faith -- I'd say "perhaps", but I think there is a lot more to it than just that. Although Teilhard de Chardin was not particularly "into" the Johannine theology of the divine "Logos" or "Word" (he was much more attracted to the "pleromic" themes of the later Pauline epistles) we should recognize that both of these themes appear to have had their origin in the Stoic philosophy of ancient Greece as ways of describing the order and seeming purpose inherent in the universe. The "Logos" in particular was seen as a kind of "demiurge" or divine power bringing order and rationality to the universe, and as such, the term "Logos" was also used by the Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria (c.20 BC - c. 50AD) as being more or less the equivalent of divine "Wisdom" as personified in the so-called "Wisdom Books" of the Jewish Bible. It is pretty much acknowledged that the prologue to the Gospel of John borrowed this theme more or less directly from Philo to try to account for the divine "sonship" that Christianity had already accorded to its founder. In this sense, Jesus was seen as a manifestation or "incarnation" of God's eternal creative plan that permeates the entire universe from the very beginning. The Pauline use of the Stoic term pleroma (or "fullness" or "completion") functions in a similar way in respect to the end.

 

The problem, of course, is that the universe now appears to us as something infinitely more vast than it did to the ancient Stoics or to the first century Jewish or Christian world. But does this mean that the idea of a divine wisdom or purpose expressed within the workings of the universe is any less compelling now than it was back then? Nor was this whole line of thought peculiar to the mediterranean world. The whole idea of the Tao in Chinese thought has very similar overtones, especially when we think of the "Logos" in terms of the foundation of kind of "natural law". So too, in the Advaitic "trinity" where the Sat, the underlying Reality or Being of the Ultimate (Brahman) is experienced in Cit ("awareness" or "knowledge") leading to final Anada ("bliss" or "love"). As the Indian Christian theologian Raimundo Panikkar (The Trinity and the Religious Experience of Man, London, Darton, Longman, & Todd, 1973) has pointed out, there is nothing inherently Christian about a trinitarian concept of the absolute. Indeed, as the whole dynamic of Hegel's thought may prove, there may be something triadic about all human thought -- if not to all reality itself. I see Teilhard's question or suggestion (which I found in one of his unpublished notebooks), is not so much an effort to save belief in the divinity of Christ as to explain the particular role of Jesus of Nazareth in a process that envelops the entire universe. RWK 9/24/96

 

Note: for a fascinating article on why life may have appeared on Mars and then disappeared,see "Global Climate Changes on Mars" in the November 1996 Scientific American.

 

Also, a late-arriving (early Feb. 2000) news item from Sky & Telescope magazine's on line news service: Recently a meteorite collected some time ago in California has been tentatively identified as being of Martian origin. We've always suspected that the inhabitants of California must have come from some other planet! (ed.)

 

 

 

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The Anthropic Principle: Yet Another Version?

 

Issue Three of DIALOGOS:

An Interactive Journal of the Sciences, Philosophy, and Religion

 

First posted Oct 18, 1996: Most recent update 9/17/98

 

Editor's Remarks

 

One of the most controversial topics in the area to be covered by this journal is the so-called "Anthropic Principle" -- the idea that it is inevitable that intelligent life should occur in the universe, or indeed, that the universe has been somehow "designed" to produce creatures such as ourselves. Quite a number of variations of this speculation have been proposed in the last dozen years or so. The following essay proposes yet another one and is a recent reworking of an essay,"The Broken Vase" or "The Holistic Anthropic Principle" [Copyright 1996 Joseph P. and Dan R. Provenzano] which first appeared on the Provenzano & Sons website. Your comments or responses to this essay or the others recommended by this journal are welcome. RWK

The Holistic Anthropic Principle

 

 

Background

 

One of the most startling developments to come from modern physics is that the universe, in some very fundamental way, seems to have been "designed" or "tuned" to produce life and consciousness. Actually, what physicists have discovered is that there are a large number of "coincidences" inherent in the fundamental laws and constants of nature. Every one of these coincidences or specific relationships between fundamental physical parameters is needed, or the evolution of life and consciousness as we know it could not have happened. The collection of these coincidences is an undisputed fact, and collectively, have come to be known as the "Anthropic Principle."

 

The Anthropic Principle (AP)

 

An excellent and complete analysis and of this principle, its historical background, the physical evidence for its acceptance, and resulting implications are provided in the The Anthropic Cosmological Principle by John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler (Oxford University Press). In the introduction they state, "Most perturbations of the fundamental constants of Nature away from their actual numerical values lead to model worlds that are still-born, unable to generate observers and become cognizable. Usually, they allow neither nuclei, atoms nor stars to exist" (page 20). And from an earlier paragraph supporting the same point they cite P. Davies and M. Rees, "For example, if the relative strengths of the nuclear and electromagnetic forces were to be slightly different then carbon atoms could not exist in Nature (Davies) and human physicists would not have evolved. Likewise, many of the global properties of the Universe, for instance the ratio of the number of photons to protons (Rees), must be found to lie within a very narrow range if cosmic conditions are to allow carbon-based life to arise" (page 5). The book goes on to provide many detailed examples, discussions and implications of these "coincidences." Many other discussions on the specific instances of the Anthropic Principle can be found on the Internet and in the literature.

 

 

 

Current Variations

 

The barest statement of this fact is called the Weak Anthropic Principle (WAP), and essentially states that since we are here, the universe must have the properties, or coincidences, such that we could evolve. Although unquestioned and useful for making predictions about various aspects of the universe, the WAP offers no insight as to WHY the universe is this way. Some, based on their interpretation of quantum mechanics see a predominant role for the observer, and have gone so far as to suggest that observers are needed to bring the universe into existence. This version of the AP is called the Participatory Anthropic Principle (PAP). There are obviously some issues here that would have to be explained because the universe got along just fine before we came to exist, and also does so in areas where we can't make any observations. Others, seeking a more substantial answer to why, have gone on to postulate the Strong Anthropic Principle (SAP), which states that in order for the universe to exist at all, it is somehow necessary for it to have these special properties. In other words, the universe must have been "constructed" this way, and could not have come into existence any other way. The Final Anthropic Principle (FAP) goes a step beyond the SAP and says that not only MUST life come into existence, but once it does, it will last forever.

 

A Spectrum of Interpretations

 

Although essentially everyone who has studied the facts accepts at least the WAP, they interpret these facts in greatly differing ways. There is a spectrum of the interpretations is as follows:

 

(1) The AP has no real meaning or value (WAP only). This position comes in several variations. One claims that the AP is simply a tautology, and is, therefore, meaningless. We are here, so the universe must be such that we are here. A second comes from the "Many Worlds" school of thought. They believe that the best interpretation of quantum mechanics is that wave functions never collapse, and that there are infinitely "many worlds" that are inaccessible to us. New worlds are created with every particle interaction. With so many worlds (i.e., universes), it not unexpected that at least one would be ideally suited to life. We happen to live in the one that is, and have no access to the others. A third claims that physicists will someday derive enough information to explain WHY without having to resort to the WAP or any other explanation.

 

(2) Observers are needed to create the universe (PAP). Another interpretation of quantum mechanics put a premium on observers as part of the universe. This leads some to state that somehow, observers are involved in the very makeup of the universe and their existence (even when in the future) is necessary to bring the universe into existence.

 

(3) There must be some (as yet undiscovered) purpose to the universe (SAP). This position is supported by those who do not accept any variation of the first position or the second position. They argue that the tautology argument simply begs the question of WHY, that the Many Worlds argument is a nonsense solution dreamed up by physicists who refuse to admit that they don't understand the physics of wavefunction collapse, that any solution derived by physics will not explain why it had to be this way, and that our future existence in one part of one galaxy can not be the ultimate cause of the universe being the way it is. (They often add that it would make more sense to simply postulate a pre-existing God that we can't observe as to postulate, for example, infinitely many worlds that we can't observe.) In summary, those favoring this position argue that we really only have this universe to consider, and the only honest thing to do is to admit that it seems to be somehow "tuned" to allow life and consciousness to appear.

 

(4) There is a designer-God. (SAP/FAP). This position is supported by those who extend the third position to what they feel is its logical conclusion. This type of argument for the existence of God has been around for centuries, and the discovery of the AP has given rise to it in this latest form.

 

Notice that although these four positions disagree on how they answer the why question, they are really part of a spectrum of positions that all share the common view that the universe came into being with the capability and tendency to evolve life, conscious and even self-conscious creatures. None of these positions say or suggest anything about the possibility that the energy of our universe could have been in some preexistent state before the Big Bang (or however our universe began), and that this could somehow shed light on the question of why. Rather than argue for or against any of these positions, we will introduce another possibility, a possibility that does not lie somewhere on this spectrum of positions, but instead, offers a completely new way to interpret the AP.

 

(5) Holistic Anthropic Principle (HAP)

 

Consider the following analogy: Suppose that we found several pieces of glass scattered on the floor. Upon examination, we found that many these pieces fit together to form a closed, smooth, curved surface. Without considering how they could have existed in some preexistence, we could use the four approaches listed above. First: (we could say that) the fact that they fit together is simply due to several coincidences (WAP). Second: there is something about the way that we observe the pieces that causes them to fit together (PAP). Third: there is something fundamental about the glass fragments which requires that they must have properties which allow them to fit together (SAP). Fourth: somebody must have designed each piece separately so that they would fit together. If we want to get out of this spectrum of solutions, we could speculate on how they could have preexisted, and simply say: the pieces of glass are fragments of something that was already "together" or holistic in some sense. Perhaps somebody dropped a vase and it shattered!

 

Using the notion that energy can transform between radiation and matter, we can consider that consciousness may itself be another form of energy that has emerged through evolution. Conversely, the energy of the universe could have been completely in the form of consciousness priori to transforming into radiation and matter in the early universe. We call this idea the "Holistic Anthropic Principle" (HAP).

 

Of course, the broken vase is only an analogy and proves nothing about the universe in general. However, it is a thought worth pursing. Perhaps consciousness is another "higher," more ordered form or state of energy, and suppose that the Big Bang was a "shattering" or "fragmenting" of energy in this higher state. Then the inherent properties of matter and energy which allow life and consciousness to appear are fundamental as remnants of a previous existence in an earlier state. Viewed in this light, we get a completely new insight into the why question by explaining how the universe could have come into being with the tendency to produce life and consciousness. Furthermore, when you consider that, in general, it is very difficult to recover much of an original completeness or beauty when something shatters, the HAP even sheds some light on why we would expect consciousness to be so rare, vulnerable and subject to so many problems (or evils). None of the other versions of the AP sheds light on all of these aspects.

 

Incidentally, the idea that we are somehow the result of a "playfulness," an "experiment," or even a "fall" from God and/or the spiritual world, and that we are groping to find our way back is an ancient and common idea to both Eastern and Western religions. (As submitted by Joe and Dan Provenzano and posted in DIALOGOS, 10/18/96)

 

 

 

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Theodicy in an Evolutionary Perspective

Issue Four of DIALOGOS:

An Interactive Journal of the Sciences, Philosophy, and Theology

 

First posted Nov. 21, 1996. Most recent update Aug. 1, 2000

 

Introduction

 

The following essay is a summary of the principal argument presented in the book Evil & Evolution: A Theodicy, originally published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press in 1984, and now available on the author's website. In this book, the author (who also edits this journal) alleges that it is only within the context of an evolutionary understanding of creation that the classic problem of "theodicy" -- reconciling the existence of evil with a supposedly all-good creator -- can be solved.

Theodicy Within an Evolutionary Perspective

 

 

By Richard W. Kropf

 

While seldom accused of minimizing the problem of moral evil or "sin", religion has often been justly accused of trivializing natural disasters and other causes of human suffering in this world. It is not as if theologians haven't tried to do better. As far back as the fifth century, St. Augustine rightly summed up the situation. It seems that "either God cannot abolish evil or He will not. If He cannot, He is not all-powerful; if He will not, then He is not all-good." But from there Augustine went on to blame all evils, whether real or perceived (including death itself) on our first parents in their exercise of free-will or what came to be known as the doctrine of "original sin."

 

If Augustine's analysis of the dilemma was correct, his answer to the dilemma -- if the history of Christian theology is any indication -- remains problematic. Today, at the end of the twentieth century, it is even less adequate. The sheer immensity of horrors like the Holocaust, the suffering of untold millions of civilians caught in the great wars of this past century and the on-going campaigns of genocide (all of them traceable to human malice) test nearly everyone's ability to blame it all on Adam and Eve, or even less their excuse that Satan made them do it! But even more than that, the continued capacity of nature itself to destroy human life without discrimination between the good and the bad confirms the suspicion that we live in a totally indifferent and uncaring universe that cannot possibly be the work of an benevolent and omnipotent God.

 

But just suppose that evolution, as it is commonly understood, both on the inorganic but even more on the organic level, might be the only way that God "creates" or indeed even can create. Thus, as the evidence indicates, the Creator seems to have had to begin with the disordered state of energy in which the universe appears at its very beginning. And then suppose, in addition, that the aim or goal for creation is the eventual appearance of intelligent, free creatures, beings who, to some extent, are able to share God's own attributes. If so, then several basic conclusions may very well follow.

 

First, it must be that the randomness which has been discovered at the most basic level of matter (quantum uncertainty) and the subsequent play of chance that we see at work not only on the inorganic level but perhaps even more strikingly apparent in organic evolution, is also in some fundamental way connected to the appearance of the human species -- as well as any other intelligent creatures that have appeared or still might appear elsewhere in the universe.

 

Second, if the above is true, then just as what we call "human intelligence" must be a product of evolution (most likely the result of the development of the neo-cortex in the human brain), so too that dimension of intelligence which is the human capacity to exercise what we call "free will." Thus the key to our capacity as humans to exercise our freedom -- or at least like to think of as self-determination -- is not some mysterious power that has come to us "from out of the blue" but instead is a ramification of our ability to recognize and set limits to the forces that otherwise would blindly influence our actions. We have here not simply a case of awareness, but on the human level, self-reflective awareness and with it, as a result, a capacity for true self-determination. Thus the basic randomness of nature must be seen as a basic precondition of human freedom. In this universe, without chance there can be no real "choice" -- much less "free will"!

 

Third, nevertheless, all determinisms, whether statistical or even volitional, have to operate within and largely depend upon the fundamental randomness of the evolutionary process. Given these preconditions, much of what we humans consider to be "evils" (like death) must remain a real factor in evolution, and because of this, they will always be operative in this world. So while it very well may be seen as part of a divine plan that our human struggle to overcome as many of them as possible (like famine, disease, floods, etc.) may be essential to our own evolution, still, we must recognize the continued existence of some of them (earthquakes, threats from asteroids, meteors, or various cosmic catastrophes) and the human tragedies connected with them are inevitable and a necessary part of an on-going creative process. (So too, perhaps, but in a way obscure to all but faith, the eventual collapse or expiration of the universe itself.)

 

Fourth: the same holds, but with one big difference, when it comes to moral evil. It may be, like other evils, at least statistically speaking, inevitable. But this does not mean it is to be altogether condoned or excused. Quite the contrary, from the perspective of human accountability, moral evils are really the greatest tragedies, because, in any given instance, at least theoretically, things could have been different. Genocide, war, injustice, and betrayals of all sorts need not be. And for this same reason, a truly human evolution depends, more than anything else, in our own ethical or moral progress.

 

In sum, it is my thesis that only when we begin with an evolutionary view of the universe with an equally an evolutionary view of the origins of human intelligence and the power to choose, that we can arrive at a theodicy that is capable of explaining the co-existence of evil in the world with a God who is essentially good. Otherwise, as in the case of "creationism" as it is commonly understood, we are forced to ascribe the elementary disorder and chaos of the universe either more or less directly on God or else blame the whole mess on the misbehavior of creatures who were to appear on one small planet only sometime around ten billion years after the process began. Neither of these other explanations reflect very favorably on a supposedly intelligent and loving God.

 

(First posted, Nov. 21, 1996)

Comments and Responses

 

Comment 1: Has not the author side-stepped the most significant conclusion which might be drawn from his postulation? He states that "evolution might be the only way...that God can create...Science has demonstrated that chance is a dominant factor in the evolutionary process." Combining these two thoughts, a person is led to the conclusion that God does not have absolute control of the details of evolution. God has had to "sit and twiddle his thumbs" until mankind accidentally developed. The implications of the concept are endless. For example, since God cannot control detailed functioning of the universe, He cannot answer the requests of prayer. Did God have a choice between homo sapiens and Neanderthal Man about thirty thousand years ago or did God accept the choice of nature? Do we have to revise our concepts of a loving God? (from Lowell Hasel -- retired NASA research engineer)

 

Response: Some really good questions with a lot of real "down-to-earth" implications!

 

First, to answer what seems to be implied about the emphasis on the claim that "evolution might be the ONLY way that God can create", I'm now tempted to change that "might be" to is --at least in respect to the universe in which we find ourselves. Otherwise, if we are not careful, we could find ourselves led to realms of interminable speculation about "multiple universes" not unlike the late medieval debates about the "best possible world". Yet aside from some mathematical theorizing, what real evidence do we have of any universe other than the one we experience? By now, I think that science has shown we can only make sense of that universe in evolutionary terms. Perhaps C.S.Lewis summed up the situation best when he wrote something to the effect that not only do we have the best possible universe, but that in view of what God seems to have had in mind, we also have the only possible one!

 

Second: there seems to be no doubt in the view proposed here, that God, contrary to what Einstein thought, does indeed "play dice" with the universe. But does not "creationism" also have God doing much the same when it comes to human freedom? Yet, this does not necessary imply that the appearance of humankind (or any other form of intelligent life elsewhere) is altogether "accidental". There could be (according to the concept of the "Anthropic Principle" discussed in issue three of DIALOGOS) some kind of guiding influence or "aim" to the evolutionary process that incorporates quantum uncertainty and numerous other forms of chance occurrence. From this point of view, the "image" or "likeness" to God is to be found more in the eventual product rather than in the means employed. That such a process would necessarily take a huge amount of time to occur is without question. But what is time to an eternal (non-temporal) Being?

 

Third, as to prayer: who is to say that God cannot intervene in the course of nature from time-to-time? Or who is to say that human desire (as often expressed in heart-felt prayer) cannot itself have a even a natural effect on the outcome of events as even some recent medical research seems to claim? Still, it must be cautioned that in the opinion of even some of the most traditional theologians (like Thomas Aquinas) prayer is probably best seen as disposing us to accept what is most likely to be rather than to change the outcome of events in themselves -- although it could be that certain outcomes do in fact depend on our prayer.

 

Finally, I would not necessarily see any of this as threatening the idea of a "loving God". Do parents give up loving their children when they give them their freedom to determine their own future?

 

Comment 2: (From Bill Bartlett) The approach that the author takes may protect God's presumed goodness, but it certainly seems to present God as something less that all-powerful. Can't an omnipotent creator make whatever kind of universe he/she/it wants?

 

Response: Theoretically, yes -- that is true, but the result might be something like the effort to create a square circle. IF God wants a universe containing free creatures, then it would appear, at least from the scientific evidence we have, that we have to suppose that God is constrained to begin with a matter/energy that apart from sharing the attribute of existence (reflecting God's immanence in the universe), displays a certain fundamental randomness or indeterminacy that makes it as unlike God as anything could be (reflecting God's transcendence above or beyond nature). From that initial state matter/energy evolves slowly and painfully through a process of convergence and emerging consciousness towards a God-like freedom.

 

Comment 3: Augustine and Aquinas, following Aristotle, both took the position that evil in fact does not exist, because what we consider to be evil is in fact the absence or lack of due order or something that should be present. But what is absent or lacking really can't be said to "exist". Therefore can it not be said that evil really doesn't exist -- much as was realized by mystics like those cited by Bill McKee in his book Is Objectivity Faith?.

 

Reply: Metaphysically or more exactly "ontologically" speaking, there is a lot of truth in that observation. The essence of evil is in the deprivation of being where being should exist. This is one reason why we, as humans, think of death as evil. But it is evil simply just that? (Again, just try giving that explanation to any survivor of the Holocaust!) Do not some things, in a certain sense, seem to "embody" or "incarnate" evil as it were? Certainly, some of the evils that are endemic in this world are very concrete in their manifestation. No doubt this at least partly explains belief in a "devil" -- especially when humans refuse to take responsibility for these evils upon themselves.

 

Comment 4:: (Speaking of the devil) could not a large part of the inherent disorder in creation more easily be blamed on diabolic influence, a kind of "angelic fall or "angelic original sin" that long predated the sin of the first humans?

 

Reply: While such a suggestion, which has a long pedigree in Christian thought and has been recently revived by Joseph Provenzano's proposal of "Angelic Fragmentation Scenario" seems feasible, and even seems to harmonize with a subsequent, "second creation" by way of evolution, I believe that it also harbors some serious difficulties. For one, it seems to suggest that God really did have a choice on how creation came about -- either instant creation or "emanation" of a purely spiritual world, or else a long laborious evolutionary process from which "spirit" or intelligence and free will could only emerge after billions upon billions of years. Why would God choose the latter way over the former the second time around? As a kind of punishment? -- but punishment for whom?

 

Or if, on the other hand, God is somehow "constrained" to re- create things from the degraded or materialized "fragments" of what was a purely spiritual creation, then it raises the question as to the basic "goodness" of material creation, raising the specter of other ancient mythologies which held the material world to be the work of the devil or even the "body" of an evil god.

 

So while no one doubts that theoretically speaking God's "omnipotence" would seem to leave God free to choose between various means of creation, THE problem of theodicy is how justify all the concomitant suffering that seems to be inherent in creation, even apart from human misbehavior, if God can just as easily produce intelligent free creatures simply by willing them to be? Thus, while the AFS and other related theories (such as that proposed by the Indian evolutionary philosopher, Sri Aurobindo) seem to harmonize such ancient beliefs with the latest in evolutionary theory, in terms of theodicy they only seem -- at least to my mind -- to complicate the problem rather than solve it.

 

(Note: For Provenzano's answer to at least some of these objections, see his own replies.)

 

 

 

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Can Science Prove -- or Disprove -- God?

Issue #5 of  DIALOGOS:

An Interactive Journal of Science, Philosophy, and Theology

 

Updated and expanded Mar. 16, 1999

 

Richard W. Kropf, editor

 

Introductory Remarks:

 

Since the first appearance (February 1997) of this issue , which originally consisted of a number of questions asked of two authors, not only have individual comments been sent in, but also a number of replies by way of whole essays on the subject .  While these essays merit reading, one in particular advances the dialogue in a particularly provocative way.  Accordingly, this issue has been reorganized as follows:

 

First; the interview (immediately below) with Kitty Ferguson, author of Fire in the Equations: Science, Religion, and the Search for God (Eerdmans, 1994), and with Fred Heeren, author of Show Me God: What the Message from Space Is Telling Us About God (Searchlight Publications, 1995).  For continuing comments on this interview, click here.

 

Second, a paper by British microbiologist Richard Thornhill, a British microbiologist prestnly living in Japan, who takes issue with the positions held by biologist Richard Dawkins, one of the foremost exponents of Darwinism today. (To proceed directly to Thornhill's paper, click here)

 

It should be noted, that three different positions come out of these three authors: Heeren believes that science, particularly cosmology, tends to prove the existence of God. Ferguson believs that science can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God, and Thornhill seems to believe that science, particularly Dawkin's science, cannot disprove it.  To me this raises an interesting question in terms of Popper's thesis that only ideas that are "falsifiable" in terms of scientific method can be said to be scientific.  Applied to the positions voiced here, can belief (or disbelief) in God be "scientific"? Send your comments to Dialogos .

 

INTERVIEW as follows:

 

Question #1:

Both of you seem to give somewhat contrasting verdicts (as your titles seem to indicate, Heeren being most positive, Ferguson less so) to our main question: "Can Science Prove God?" Ferguson remarked that as long as God was not thought of as a "person", most scientists seem to have little problem with the idea. So suppose we distinguish between the existence of God and the essence or "nature" of God: would this distinction cause you to qualify your answers?

 

Ferguson: No, sorry, but I would not qualify my answer. I don't believe that anyone taking an unbiased look at science could say that science proves (by scientific standards) either the existence or the essence or nature of God. It does not uphold atheism. if one chooses to be an atheist one must find another reason besides science.

 

God does, certainly, reach out to us through nature and science. If we already believe in God, as I do, then science and nature make us feel worshipful, can draw us closer to God, can become a celebration of the glory of God, can fill us with immense awe -- cause us to fall to our knees, can make us feel tremendous elation as we gain better understanding through science of God's magnificent, clever mind manifested in His Creation. Those who don't believe are sometimes surely led nearer to belief by an experience of nature. But science in no case that I know of offers independent proof of the existence of God.

 

In fact, in many instances in history where we thought we had found proof in science (the argument from design, for example), science turned right around and pulled the rug out from under our feet. Belief in God (or unbelief) because of supposed proof from science turns out to be terribly slippery footing, because science is a shifting body of knowledge, insisting on the "right to be wrong" and to change its mind frequently. Even before Darwin, theologians warned that using the "argument from nature" even as "secondary evidence" tended to give it too much importance and detract from more profound reasons for belief. Most who believe in God do so because they have experienced God's love and power and presence in their own lives and have seen it at work among those around them, not because of independent proof from science.

 

One might argue (on behalf of there being scientific proof) that St. Paul wrote (in Romans 1:20) "For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities -- his eternal power and divine nature -- have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse." But Paul was talking about a common sense response to what we see in this universe, not about scientific proof as we insist on it today...

 

Heeren: My book certainly does not claim that "science can prove God." Since the scientific method cannot be applied to such an entity, God is clearly outside the domain of science. However, different scientific expectations about our universe arise according to one's personal view about the existence of a Creator, and these expectations can be met or disproved, in the spirit of putting the Creator's handiwork under the microscope rather than the Creator Himself. An atheist, to make his case most clear, would like to make discoveries about our universe to show that its development can best be attributed to random processes. A God-believer would predict that we should find clear evidence of care and precision, for our benefit, in the way that the universe is set up. What cosmologists find, of course, are carefully chosen values in nature's constants, adjusted to a degree that makes the odd too great to be explained by blind chance.

 

Most scientists acknowledge the evidence for some kind of organizing principle. And perhaps this is as far as science can take us. In Show Me God, however, I examine all the alternatives for various types of Creators. All can be summed up in three fundamental categories: God is the universe, God is us, or God is "other." By "other" I mean that God is not part of or one with the universe, but is of a distinctly different substance, independent of the physical universe we observe. My conclusion is that this century's greatest discoveries about our cosmos strongly support this latter view of the Creator: an entity beyond time, beyond space, a causeless cause, an infinite, all-knowing being, whose care and purpose show that this Creator of persons has at least as much attributes of thought, consciousness, will -- in short, "personhood" -- as we do.

 

Question #2:

I was particularly struck by your reactions to the whole idea of an "Anthropic Principle" (Heeren in particular seems very much put off by the whole idea, Ferguson remaining rather ambivalent). As a theologian, my own reaction has been much more positive, seeing in the AP a certain vindication of what seems to come very close to the teleological proof of the existence of God. Granted that some who have tried to advance the principle have gone to great lengths to avoid its theological implications, still, would you not both be encouraged by interest in the subject?

 

Heeren: Yes, I certainly would be encouraged by interest in the anthropic principle -- or anything else that draws people's attention to the amazing-but-not-so-well-known fact that our universe has been put together, against incredible odds, in a way that makes it look like it was designed for our benefit. As a matter of fact, in a recent video I did man-on-the-street interviews on Michigan Avenue in Chicago and on the U.of C.'s Berkeley campus, asking people what they knew about the fine- tuning of the universe -- and no one had ever heard of such a thing!

 

Cosmology, apparently, is not taught in high schools. But everyone takes a high school biology course, in which they are taught that evolution works without a goal -- its randomness is its essential feature. My book and my new magazine, Cosmic Pursuit, have as their core purpose the spreading of the word on the sort of discoveries that have given us our anthropic principle.

 

I'm only "put off" by the idea of taking too seriously the strong anthropic principle (esp. in its "multiple universes" and "participatory" variations) or by non-theists who misuse the general principle to say it "explains" the finely tuned physical constants as [simply] a "brute fact".

 

Ferguson: I think we can be encouraged by the questions that have led to the invention of the anthropic principle; for example, How is it that the universe is so remarkably fine-tuned to allow for our existence? However, the anthropic principle itself is (simply put) the statement that we find things fine- tuned for our existence because if they weren't we wouldn't be here to wonder why they are fine-tuned. Of course, the definition gets more sophisticated, but that remains the bottom line. The theological implications of this answer are that we don't necessarily need God in order to explain the fine-tuning. But I don't think we should be particularly discouraged. No one, not even scientists who don't believe in God, such as Stephen Hawking, claims that the anthropic principle has to be the correct explanation. In fact, most would rather find a better one.

 

Question #3:

One of my own areas of concern has been in "theodicy" or the problem of evil in this world. It seems to me that the whole process of evolution, with its inherent randomness or play of chance, for the first time gives us a rational insight into why so much suffering can coexist with a God that is inherently good. Would you care to comment?

 

Ferguson: I appreciate your point, and you have stated it eloquently in your piece "Evolution and the Problem of Evil, " but I am sorry to say that this is not an insight that I personally find very satisfying. It is my belief that God does have absolutely free choice as to whether and how to create, and it is not limited by any pre-existing standards or conditions. I don't even accept the notion that God is limited by the fact that He by nature is good and has no power to be anything but good. To me, that is a meaningless statement, since it is God Himself who is the very definition of good. In other words, God limits what "good" is. There is no reason or opportunity for "good" to limit what God is.

 

Be that as it may, if God chose to create the process of evolution as a way of allowing the universe to develop and eventually produce creatures such as ourselves who could exercise self-reflective awareness, seek God, and decide whether or not to respond to God, He chose a remarkably ingenious process but one in which there is immense suffering, and He is, then, wouldn't you say, responsible for that suffering? I don't think this contributes much to solving the problem of evil. We are right back with Augustine.

 

In defense of Augustine, I submit that one problem with discarding the Adam, Eve, and original sin explanation for evil is that, despite its flaws and woeful inadequacy (for example, it doesn't explain why the possibility of evil had to exist at all, and it seems incompatible with some of the evidence for evolution that we have discovered), and old-fashioned ring, nobody has managed to come up with a significantly more helpful explanation. Even if it is a metaphor or a parable (which to my mind does NOT downgrade its essential truth and power) it gives us very deep understanding of ourselves, God, and our estrangement from God.

 

May I add that I do not see God as perched up there in heaven ignoring our pain and suffering. I believe that God suffers intensely with his creation ... that whatever the root cause of evil and pain, God is in this with us all the way. Someone once suggested to me that we should get our priorities right, stop sniveling about unimportant things, and pray that our hearts would be broken by things that "break the heart of God." I could not pray for that. Not that my heart shouldn't be more like the heart of God for his creation, but I don't think I could bear to remain alive or maintain my sanity for a minute if I really had a heart for the suffering of this world like the heart of God -- if I really felt the world's suffering as God must do. Only God can bear to love us as He does and at the same time know and share our suffering without avoidance. Why, then, does He not put an immediate stop to it? I've heard lots of attempts to explain that, but I don't think any of us knows.

 

Heeren: The problem that Kropf is addressing is well worth the efforts he has made to explore it. I find his ideas intriguing. In reading his essay, I see that he has come to his solution on the basis of supposing that certain physical restrictions may be placed on the Creator, a solution that is only possible for a limited God.

 

Here's another solution to consider. This one is based on the idea that there is a logical, not a physical, restriction placed on the Creator, which is possible even for an infinite, unlimited God (consistent with Spinoza's First Cause, which could not be limited by anything, in order to be truly independent of His creation).

 

The solution is the necessity of free will, which Kropf and others so quickly dismiss. Now hear me out. Most people think it is good that we have moral choices. But then we have a problem with God allowing evil. You can't have it both ways. It's contradictory to have a morally free creature who can't choose wrong, thereby messing up the Creator's otherwise perfect universe. It's not a matter of God's lack of power: it's just a logical contradiction. It's like the old question: If God can do anything, then can God create a rock so big He can't lift it? It's just a logical contradiction. It doesn't say anything about God's physical limitation.

 

The questions, however, are so worthwhile because they lead us to good reasons for hope: How could a good God allow all the evil and suffering? Would He really just ignite the big bang and then sit back to watch us make a mess of things? Or would He have a plan? The answer, I believe, is wrapped up in the very essence of the good news of the Christian faith. No, the Creator who showed such initial care and purpose wouldn't sit back, powerless or unwilling to cure the evil that we do. And yes, being omniscient, He would have a plan from the beginning to do something about it. What He would do is spelled out in my book ...and in His. (See esp. "Seven Cosmic Histories" in Show Me God , pp 247-249.)

 

Kropf: I want to thank both of you for the time you have taken to contribute to "DIALOGOS". Although I do differ with both of you on several points. For example, I'm inclined to think, that with the advent of the Big Bang hypothesis, the argument for the existence of God is considerably strengthened, even if it hardly gives us much of clue as the nature of God, other than simply as an "uncaused cause". But of course, science could be wrong about the Big Bang.

 

As for my own attempt to solve the "problem of evil", I would like to point out that I do see (contrary to Heeren's impression) the existence of human freedom as THE key to understanding evil, but in a way that stresses the necessity of the chance and randomness of nature as causes of human tragedy and suffering, but (again) not in a way that all of this can be traced to human sinfulness. Of course, I realize, as both of you point out (and object to), that my approach assumes that God is in some way constrained to create this way, although I do not see this constraint so much as a "physical limitation" (God could create an entirely "perfect" world) as it is a logical one, as such a perfect world would be a world of robots. In other words, in some way I do put a limit to God's power just as did Rabbi Harold Kuschner in his best-selling book When Bad Things Happen to Good People. You might even say that my book Evil & Evolution attempts to replace the "WHEN" in Kuschner's title with WHY (For a summary of the book's main thesis, see Dialogos Issue #4.)

 

But as for God's ultimate answer to this whole problem, I strongly agree with both of you. God identifies with our suffering completely, whether that suffering be part of the "growing pains" of the universe or somehow "atoning" for the all the evils committed by humankind. This is the essence of the Christian belief in the redemption, so much so that Ignatius of Antioch, one of the earliest of the "Church Fathers" (died about 110 CE/AD) could write boldly, without qualification, of "the passion [or suffering] of my God." (See Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Romans 6:3.) Perhaps the three of us can at least agree on that. Again, you have my thanks!

 

Notes:

 

Kitty Ferguson's book The Fire in the Equations: Science, Religion & the Search for God was published in 1994 and is available from William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 255 Jefferson Ave. S.E., Grand Rapids, MI 49503.

 

Fred Heeren's book Show Me God: What the Message from Space Is Telling Us About God was published in 1995 and can be ordered directly from Searchlight Publications, 326 S. Wille Ave., Wheeling IL 60090.

 

Richard Kropf's book Evil & Evolution: A Theodicy was published by Fairleigh Dickenson University Press in 1984 and can be ordered from Associated University Presses, 440 Forsgate Dr., Cranbury, NJ 08512.

 

Harold Kuschner's When Bad Things Happen to Good People was first published by Schocken Books in 1983.

 

 

 

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The Jesus of History and The Future of Faith

Issue #6 of DIALOGOS:

An Interactive Journal of the Sciences, Philosophy, and Theology

 

First posted June 5, 1997. Updated, Jan 25, 1998.

 

Introduction:

 

Among the "sciences" which must be taken seriously today is the study of history. An inexact science to be sure, yet with its foundations in archeology, archival research, and a host of other related disciplines, many of which were practically unknown until modern times, the role of the historian has become increasingly critical in many fields, not the least of which is religion. For Christianity, in particular, which stakes its claims on the facticity of the life, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, the verdict of history seems crucial in a way that seems to go beyond the requirements of any other of the world's religious faiths. Hence the following article which was written in the spring of 1996 and which after further editing is represented below. DIALOGOS invites your comments.

The Jesus of History and the Future of Faith

 

Perhaps there were periods like this before, but 1996 was surely a banner year in terms of the number of articles appearing in the popular media devoted to the historical truth of the Bible, the life and teachings of Jesus, and the belief in his resurrection, and even the personalities of the writers and experts involved in this debate. Maybe it is one of those proverbial "signs of the times", but it seems to me that the Christian world is undergoing more than ever before a crisis of faith.

 

The phenomenon itself is hardly new. In its present form, it goes back at least several centuries to Reimarus, the German scholar who, imbued with the growing sense of historical perspective that was sweeping much of European thinking, made the first tentative steps toward separating "the Jesus of History" (the figure of Jesus of Nazareth as revealed, as accurately as possible according to the canons of historical scholarship) from the "Christ of Faith" (the Savior, "Son of God", as defined in Christian belief). The effort to separate the two continued for most of the 19th. Century, then was apparently abandoned for awhile -- especially after the great scholar, Albert Schweitzer, concluded the effort was hopeless. Yet the effort was soon to be taken up again in the "New Quest for the Historical Jesus" that has dominated much of 20th. century biblical scholarship and which seems to have even undergone a revival as of late. How can we account for this latest phase of this old debate?

 

To begin with, there is the vast input of the latest techniques (enhanced by modern technology) in archeology, linguistic, historical, and even sociological analysis. The last of the undeciphered "Dead Sea Scrolls" are finally being reconstructed and translated. And perhaps most of all, scholars both Christian and Jewish, whether believers or skeptics, have brought a renewed enthusiasm and sense of urgency to the task. Perhaps it is part of a renewed interest in the importance of religion in human culture -- whether for good or for ill. In any case, it is safe to say that there has lately been a real rebirth of interest in that figure whose short life has so marked the passage of time these past two-thousand years. Who really was Jesus of Nazareth? How account for nearly a third of humanity's belief that he was, or still is, the definitive self- revelation of God? And if he was (or still remains) that, at least for those who call themselves "Christians", how are we to account for or justify this belief?

 

Taking Sides

 

As has been the case from the beginning of this debate, there are two major camps representing diametrically opposed views. On the one hand we have today's "historicists", who like the periodically assembled members of the so-called "Jesus Seminar", are very much determined to separate the actual words and deeds of the Nazarene from their incrustation of myths, legends, and beliefs in hopes of getting down to the bed-rock of a historically reconstructed picture of Jesus -- one would hope leading to a better grasp of what he really intended to bring to the human race.

 

At the other end of this spectrum are all those Christians who, agree in taking the scriptures, or at least the four Gospels in their "received" form, as divinely inspired, and hence as equally reliable, in all aspects, as the foundation for Christian faith. Fundamentalists and other "evangelicals" may differ from traditionalists in claiming that somehow the truth of the scriptures is independent of the tradition or handing-on process that brought them to us in the first place, but they seem united with the traditionalists in believing that once given to us, these scriptures are an inerrant and or infallible guide. For such as these, the idea that these core documents, like any ancient writings, should be scrutinized according to the rules of historical-critical scholarship seems not only impertinent, but highly dangerous to the faith.

 

One cannot help wonder if there can be a middle ground, a "third way" between these two extremes, even a compromise of sorts. Can there be, on the one hand, an accurate historical reconstruction of the Jesus of history that serves, at the same time, as a reliable foundation for the Christ of Faith? We might hope so, and judging from all the serious New Testament scholarship emanating from the pens (or word- processors) of scholars identified with the "mainline' churches, both Catholic and Protestant, apparently these experts think so too. But the problem still remains: how much scaling back the claims of historical accuracy can take place before credibility is fatally compromised? For example, if one ends up, as did Schweitzer, by concluding that whatever else he may have done, the historical Jesus of Nazareth really was an eschatological prophet who forecasted an immediate or immanent end of the world, then what else in Jesus' teachings can be taken seriously? How can someone who was so obviously wrong about that be trusted to have been correct about everything else? Or even if one holds, with the new questers of the "Jesus Seminar", that this mistaken apocalypticism was the product not of Jesus but of his followers, one is still faced with the problem of which parts of the scriptures to take as a foundation for faith.

 

Levels of Tradition?

 

As if in answer to this dilemma, the Vatican's own Biblical Commission some years ago recommended an approach that distinguishes between three levels or stages of tradition that combined to form the Gospels as they now exist. The first level or stage consists of the remembrance or recovery of the actual words and deeds of Jesus -- the goal of much of today's scholarship. The second level consists of the proclamation of the "Good News", the "kerygma" or saving message that forms the core or essence of Christian belief -- the most central of these being the belief in the Resurrection of Christ. Finally, there exists a third level reflecting the particular writer's (or school of writers') socio-cultural and theological outlook -- for example, the very obvious attempt by the compilers of the Gospel According to Matthew (at least in its present form) to show that Jesus was the Messiah by means of their particular readings of certain passages deriving from the Hebrew scriptures.

 

As reasonable as this approach appears, however, it has one serious drawback. How can we distinguish, in any unanimous way, to what level or stage this or that particular passage (or even a whole book, like John's Gospel) belongs? Do we leave it to a vote among scholars (which is what the whole "Jesus Seminar" is about), the decisions of a Biblical Commission, or to just the "gut feelings" of believers? Is there, in some sense, a kind of recognizable criterion by which we might be led? Otherwise, we seem left with the same dilemma: how much in the Gospels is trustworthy as history and thus as a foundation for Christian belief? If so, then do we not end being caught up, like so many of the traditionalists and fundamentalists, in a circular argument where the promise of the Holy Spirit is used to justify the claim that all scripture -- including those parts that promise the Holy Spirit -- is inspired? Or else, like the Pentecostalists, feeling that Holy Spirit is already guiding us, do we not we end up claiming divine authority for whatever other "inspiration" passes through our minds?

 

However, there may be a better way out of all of this. The kerygmatic core of the Gospel must be seen as operating on quite another level than either the one sought by historical-critical scholarship or that which depends on theological elaboration and or which reflects literary form. This kerygmatic meaning is primarily neither historical nor metaphysical (or even theological) in content. Instead, (as the philosopher Berdayev claimed about the Resurrection) it is "meta- historical" -- or if you will, is primarily "existential" in content. As such, it is a truth that transcends all other categories of time and existence, depending primarily on one's own personal commitment or relationship to the ultimate. Thus, whatever it was that happened to Jesus after his death and became the source of a whole new faith -- the growth of which is a phenomenon that no historian can deny -- yet that core "metahistorical" reality is itself something remaining accessible to faith alone.

 

But if that is the case, must not the resurrection of Jesus be in some way itself the product of faith? For those who are closed to the possibility of faith -- which as we will see, is something quite distinct from a particular set of beliefs -- there can not only be no objective proof of Jesus having risen from the dead, but the very possibility is itself unthinkable. Thus, in contrast to the first level perspective, even if the empty tomb stories are true, and the zeal of the disciples is unexplainable in any other terms, there still can be no historical "proof" of the Resurrection. Trying to establish the validity of faith on the basis of first level historical-critical scholarship is what can be called a "category mistake", or in other words, it is simply to be barking up the wrong tree.

 

Likewise, on the other hand, would be the mistake of trying to found faith on the third-level or stage of the Gospel tradition, that of theological expression or beliefs. To begin, it would certainly seem that the use of such terms as "Christ", the "Son of God", should be read first of all as third level doxological statements proclaiming the status of Jesus who is "raised" (by God the Father). Only later, almost as a second sub-stage within this final level of tradition, did these statements become metaphysical statements defining his ontological nature and in light of which it is Jesus himself who "rises", by his own divine power, from the dead. In addition, might not the fact that these kind of metaphysical statements are cast primarily in terms of pre-existence or atemporality, or else in terms of an eternity yet to be fully realized, be seen as a clue of their intent? So too, we should note the striking difference of approaches to achieve the same end, for example, the Pauline and Johannine use of personified Wisdom recast in Stoic and even Platonic philosophical terms, as compared to the Matthean and Lukan infancy narratives, no matter how much they have been joined together in Christian doctrine. Aside from this, even if these latter are accepted as inspired statements of belief, we must be on our guard lest we confuse our agreement with them (however they be understood) as the essence of faith.

 

Faith vs. Belief(s)

 

There is little doubt that for those who are unused to such distinctions, even if only hinted by such bastions of tradition as the Vatican, such hair-splitting in itself can precipitate a crisis of faith. But religion is not alone in facing such a crisis. Writing in the 1930s about the "foundational crises" -- today we'd call them "paradigm shifts" -- undergone by the various sciences (just think of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, for instance) the philosopher Martin Heidegger observed, after commenting on the effect of modern historical consciousness on contemporary thought, that theology was also undergoing its own crisis. This crisis is one in which theology is, according to Heidegger, "slowly beginning to understand again Luther's insight that its system of dogma rests on a 'foundation' that does not stem from a questioning in which faith is primary and whose conceptual apparatus is not only insufficient for the range of problems in theology but rather covers them up and distorts them." (From Time and Being, emphasis mine.)

 

What Luther stumbled upon, and what I think Heidegger was referring to, can be understood in light of the analysis provided by Wilfred C. Smith's (Faith and Belief, Princeton Univ. Press 1979) distinction between faith (in its biblical sense of a loving trust in God) and belief (in the sense of the mind's assent to a set of doctrines or "beliefs"). Although closely connected in our minds, in the end there is a world of difference between the two. The first has to do with our unconditional sense of trust. The other, with its incessant demand for "proofs" (be they signs, miracles, or intellectual arguments) may often be seen as an attempt to articulate faith but often, in terms of faith's inner dynamic, ends up being the very opposite of faith. (For more on this important distinction, see DiaLogos Issue #12.)

 

What Rudolph Bultmann, foremost among those who turned aside from the "quest for the historical Jesus" (after Schweitzer's giving up the task as hopeless) was doing, by way of his systematic attempt to "demythologize" the scriptures, was to lay the groundwork for a return to the kind of existential commitment of faith that Heidegger seems to have described. Unfortunately, Bultmann's critics, of whom there are still many, only saw the first part of his agenda and largely have overlooked the rest.

 

Ironically, and perhaps just as unconsciously, the new questers carry on the task in a way that Bultmann never saw possible, because when all is said and done, the results of this new quest will be not unlike that of the old -- an impasse of sorts. We will end up with as accurate a picture of Jesus of Nazareth as can ever be known and yet it, in itself, will never be enough to ground "faith" -- particularly as it is misunderstood by the traditionalists and, oddly enough, even by the fundamentalists who have, in their unending quest for rock-bottom certainty, seem to forgotten what faith is all about.

 

The Faith of Jesus

 

So what then? Will this renewed quest for the "Jesus of History" end up destroying the "Christ of Faith"? Perhaps so, at least in the estimation of some. But this need not be so, providing we grasp the crucial "missing link" that binds the two poles -- which is the faith of Jesus himself. In other words, it is Jesus' own trust or "faith" in his Father, expressed in his own belief in the resurrection of the dead that is the existential foundation of the Christian belief that death is not the end. From this perspective Christian faith is not so much a belief in the historical accuracy of the stories relating Christ's post-resurrection appearances as it is a share in the self-transforming experience born from confidence (literally a faith lived in union with) the death-defying faith of Jesus himself.

 

Unfortunately, in the development of Christian teaching, this point seems to have been lost rather early on. Nevertheless, a remnant of it can still be found as late as the Epistle to the Hebrews, where despite this document's clear proclamation of Christ's divinity, Jesus is nevertheless characterized (in 12:2) both as our "leader" (archegon in Greek -- usually translated, though inaccurately in view of the context, as "author") as well as the "finisher" (teleioten) in what is described through much of the epistle as a contest or ordeal of faith.

 

Instead, in its hurry to divinize the figure of Jesus, Christianity seems to have, almost from the start, begun to dehumanize him, to the extent that despite the insistence of the early theologians that Jesus possessed a complete human nature (or as they were wont to say "What was not assumed was not redeemed") the figure of the nearly wholly divine Christ in the end prevailed, so much so that by the early 5th. century, Augustine was able to reprimand a lesser theologian who dared speak of Jesus's own faith in God being tempted, as being seriously mistaken, and nary a word was raised in his defense.

 

That shortly after, in 451, the Council of Chalcedon did define Jesus as having a complete human nature as well as a fully divine one seems to have not changed the judgement on our hapless heretic. Mainstream Christianity, from that time forward began to be, despite its best intentions and definitions to the contrary, technically "monophysite". The human Jesus was all but completely swallowed up by the divine Christ for whom a faith that may have included specific beliefs of any sort was a virtual impossibility because, of course, according to such views, he would have already known all the answers.

 

In the face of all of this, it would seem that instead of ranting and railing about the deconstruction of the divine Christ, we should be applauding the work of The Jesus Seminar and the other scholars, some of whom claim to be more conservative, but really aren't all that different from the rest, for doing their level best. Sure, no doubt most of them have their own special biases. Who on earth doesn't? But what I think will emerge ever more clearly out of this whole movement is, in the end, a much more balanced view of Jesus, and most of all a portrait of Jesus who as a paragon of faith who committed himself unreservedly to carrying out God's will as he understood it and who called others to follow in the same path of total commitment and trust in God. And if so, this will happen regardless of our uncertainty over the time-table of ultimate events or our admission that Jesus' own particular estimate may have been mistaken -- a long-accepted "liberal" view that, paradoxically, the Jesus Seminar categorically denies.

 

Yet aside from this and his belief in angels and most of all, his belief in the resurrection of the dead, what other doctrines or dogmas did Jesus teach that marked him as any different from the rest of Jews? Nothing really, than a call to universal love and service to God and our fellow human beings in supreme confidence in the face of suffering, that in God we all shall live.

 

Does all this mean that the follower of Jesus will have to give up his or her belief in the divinity of Christ? No doubt some will, but that need not necessarily follow. Granted that it is difficult to fit the two pictures together -- was it any easier for the theologians at Chalcedon? And no doubt this "christological problem" will keep us theologians busily, if not gainfully, occupied till kingdom come. (More on this in a future issue of DIALOGOS, to be sure.)

 

Meanwhile, what should characterize the committed follower of Jesus most of all: a trusting faith in God like that of Jesus or a set of formal beliefs about who he really was? I'm not saying that the latter can't follow the former -- as they did and is amply illustrated by that third level of tradition in the Gospels and in the New Testament that grew up almost immediately with the rest. But what I am saying is that until the second kerygmatic level of the tradition is grasped and appropriated into our existence, first of all by a life lived in the pattern of the Jesus of History, a life of loving trust in God in the face of doubt and despair, we almost invariably will end up by missing the whole point, and, in the process, distorting the foundations of Christian faith. It was Christ's own, unconditional faith or trust in God that is the key that ultimately reveals him to be, for us, the Son who through the power of God's Spirit, brings us a share in divine, thus immortal, life

 

So if nothing else, the new quest for the Jesus of history may bring us back to this necessary fundamental or foundational shift. If it doesn't, then Christianity, the movement that began as a way of hope and salvation through the faith manifested by Jesus, is in deeper trouble than we realized.

 

(R.W. Kropf, as emended, June 5, 1997)

 

Note: the author/editor is currently in the process of making his book,

The Faith of Jesus: The Jesus of History and the Stages of Faith, available on the internet.

 

 

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Life After Death? --Immortality within an Evolutionary World-view

Issue #7 of DIALOGOS:

An Interactive Journal of the Sciences, Philosophy, and Theology

 

First posted, Aug. 17, 1997; updated Jan 14, 1998

 

Opening Remarks:

According to a recent (1996) Gallup poll, although about 94% of U.S. citizens say that they believe in God, only 71% believe in some form of life after death, figures that are, given a +/- 3% sampling error, virtually identical with a similar poll taken in 1948, this despite the recent rash of supposed empirical evidence ("near-death experiences", etc.) held up as warrant for such belief. In this issue of DIALOGOS the editor intends to take quite a different approach, philosophically exploring the subject in the context of differing paradigms within which this belief or hope has been conceptualized, and suggesting that a new paradigm is sorely needed. Your input is invited.

The Possibility of Immortality Within an Evolutionary World-View

 

"Immortality", strictly speaking, means immunity from death. Except for some apocalyptic beliefs, very few philosophies or religions have ever suggested that any form of life beyond this one is really possible apart from first undergoing physical death. Yet at the same time, such a concept implies a great deal more than simply some kind of recycled existence, whether it be by means of ancient beliefs in "reincarnation" or modern scenarios of a "resurrection" based on cybernetic theories or even hopes based on cryonic technology. Instead, without getting into any involved discussion as to what the nature of such a life might be, this essay, after attempting to shed some light on the confusion caused by the collision of old paradigms, seeks to explore the possibility of conceiving of an after-life in terms that might make more sense within the framework of an evolutionary world-view.

 

 

 

The Old World-views and Their Associated Beliefs

 

According to the philosopher of science, Thomas S. Kuhn, a paradigm is "an entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on, shared by members of an entire community" -- and which, we may presume, affects a given people's approach to thinking about any subject and makes them resistant to any new way of looking at things. Historically speaking, among those peoples where there has been a belief in life after death, this conviction has generally taken one or another of two approaches, each associated with a distinct world-view or paradigm of reality, although ingenious, and sometimes confusing, combinations of both types of belief continues, and still continue, to coexist.

 

The FIRST of these approaches, which might be called "soul- belief", has been generally associated with a cyclical view of time, usually seen as a constant flux within a non-created, everlasting, and, so it would seem, ultimately spiritual universe. Affording a permanent point of reference in this world of "eternal return", the human "soul" or "spirit", while it may inhabit and animate successive bodies, will ultimately pass on to exist in a separate, non-material or completely "spiritual" realm. Apparently having its origin in ancient shamanistic practices, this may well be the oldest, and perhaps the most universal form of belief in the possibility of life after death.

 

Such a belief in an immortal and immaterial "soul" also is the core element of a whole philosophical mode of thinking, known in the West as "platonism" (as derived from Plato's account of the teaching of Socrates) but which is duplicated in many forms of "idealist" thought in which ideas, forms, or patterns, or (as in the case of the various Gnostic religions) "spirit" is seen as a more fundamental and permanent reality than physical phenomena. Adopted, at least in part, by many Christian thinkers, this philosophical stance also permeates most of Eastern (especially Hindu) religious thought, and through it, much of "New Age" spirituality and most contemporary concepts of "heaven" or some kind of afterlife.

 

The SECOND basic form of hope in the possibility of life after death, which we shall term "resurrection-belief", has its origins in a completely different view of reality, one that generally been associated a more "linear" view of time. This view, which many scholars believe originated in Persian (especially Zoroastrian) thought, from there passing into the biblical account of creation, takes the physical world at face value and holds that the biological functioning of the human body is the basic condition for the psychological activities of human existence. When such physical or biological life ceases, so does all the rest. Such thinking has had great difficulty with any ideas of the existence of anything a like a naturally immortal "soul" or with any ideas of personal reincarnation. Like creation itself, each human life was seen to have had it distinct beginning in time, and by implication, its definite end. According to this pattern of thinking, if humans can be said to have a "soul" (in fact, there was not even a distinct word for such a concept in the Hebrew language) this is merely a manner of speaking or a description of the sum of our mental processes, having no natural qualities that can somehow survive death.

 

In many ways, despite its religious origins, -- as witnessed by the anatta or (literally) "no-soul" doctrine as it is understood in the oldest form of Buddhism, i.e. theraveda -- we can see in this view something much more akin to the modern scientific- materialist mentality, in which the human mind or consciousness is characterized, as it was by the philosopher David Hume, as "a bundle of sensations". But in fact it is a view that also had its counterparts among the "atomist" philosophers in the ancient Greek world. So it seems that even here "there is nothing new under the sun."

 

Given this very down-to-earth viewpoint, it should come as no surprise that when Jewish ideas of any possibility of life after death first began to take shape (notably after the time of the Babylonian captivity and its Persian aftermath), such hopes generally took the rather radical form of belief in a physicial resurrection. (The famous vision of the "dry bones" coming back to life in Chapter 37 of the Book of Ezekiel was taken quite literally by many belivers.) Within this kind of mind-set, so impossible is a "natural" concept of life after death that it was believed that only God's own life-giving "wind" or "spirit" (the Ru'ah Yahweh) was capable of breathing new life into a dead body (bashar or corpse, enabling it to become a "nephesh" -- the word that is generally mistranslated as "soul" in most English versions of the Hebrew scriptures but which actually means a "living being", or alternately "self". Thus it was, as hopes increased for the future coming of a mashiach ("Messiah"), so too did the belief in a relatively soon-to-come resurrection of the dead, a belief held, it seems, by both the reform-minded Pharisees as well as by Jesus and, in turn, by his followers who became convinced that their martyred Master had indeed already risen from the dead.

 

Nevertheless, given Christianity's early dispersal into the non-Jewish world where Greek-platonist thought was widespread, its theology tried to somehow combine this resurrection-belief with platonist views, thus confusing paradigms or more often, trying to reinterpret the former in terms of the latter. No doubt the fact that the New Testament was written in Greek (thus frequently using the familiar term psyche or "soul" -- even if not in the platonic sense) and that many converts found the resurrection belief, when taken too literally, somewhat ridiculous, perhaps even repugnant, was an incentive towards this amalgamation of views or prompted attempts to further spiritualize the concept of the resurrection. Yet the more Christian beliefs moved in this spiritualizing direction, the paradoxical result was to undercut its own insistence on the importance of the bodily resurrection of Jesus, not just as a "proof" or vindication of faith in Jesus, but also in the future resurrection of the all the "saved" as an essential component of eternal destiny for human nature as a whole. In more recent times, this same ambivalence and the confusion it has caused was eventually to lead to a kind radical dualism, as well as the various reactions (such as Hume's) taken by modern philosophy, to Decartes' view of the soul as a kind of "ghost in a machine". In light of this situation, can anyone be surprised that doubt, whether open or suppressed, is endemic regarding the likelihood of an after-life?

 

 

 

A New Paradigm

 

If Kuhn is correct about a paradigm involving a whole "constellation" of beliefs, values, etc., then it is high time that we begin to rethink our approach to the subject. Neither of the ancient paradigms, based as they are on pre-scientific world-views, nor their associated ideas of an after-life, at least when taken at face value, any longer make much sense. Instead, in their place, we would propose that three insights, all of them suggested by contemporary science, might lead us to a radical reconceptualization and reassessment of our chances, if any, of surviving death. But it should be understood that these ideas are presented not as any kind of "proof" but rather more as questions by way of "extrapolation", that is to say, by way of theoretical projections or estimates prompted by certain patterns emerging from contemporary thought.

 

FIRST, if, as particle physics would have it, matter and energy are not only convertible but even more fundamentally, matter is really energy in a kind of "crystallized" or "congealed" form, then it would seem to follow that much of the simplistically "atomistic" understanding of nature, both in its structure and development, needs to be completely rethought. Rather than in terms of mere arrangement of "atoms" or bits of "matter", it is the dynamic relationship or patterns or alternately, the "quanta", of energy that most likely explain both the existence of matter as well as the phenomenon of consciousness.

 

But if this be so, then should not human thought or awareness, from this point of view, be seen more as a kind of a special self-reflective energy "field" -- which like other energy fields, once propagated, just might continue to some extent exist beyond the initial event (e.g. the "Big Bang") from which they took their origin? In this view, what philosophy and theology has long considered to be "spirit" may not be so much the opposite of "matter" but instead a dimension or potential rooted within the nature of matter or energy itself. Seen this way, philosophical dualism or the battle between a spiritual vs. material interpretation of reality and with them, the dichotomy that characterizes the two most ancient paradigms, would be radically undercut.

 

SECOND, despite more recent claims to the contrary, suppose that biological evolution, at least broadly speaking, can still be described, much as it was by the scientists at the 1959 Darwin Centennial, as a "one-way, irreversible process in time which during its course generates novelty, diversity, and higher levels of organization." For even if this supposed "irreversibility" remains a matter of contention, still the fact of evolution is almost impossible to describe, much more explain, except in terms of some kind of law of complexity- consciousness, in which greater biological complexity provides the infrastructure for higher degrees of consciousness.

 

Yet it is it is equally obvious that such complexity cannot occur unless the death of individuals (as well as, in many instances, the death of whole species) enables the characteristics of past generations to be passed (ontology recapitulating phylogeny) in new combinations leading to more complex forms of life. Thus we see energy continually reorganizing itself, not only in terms of fundamental physical states, but even more in terms of its organic (living) structures, including those exhibiting rudimentary as well as more highly developed states of consciousness. In fact, it would appear that the it is the very randomness of nature, the "play of chance", is itself the prerequisite for the emergence of human freedom and which, in turn, might explain the necessity or at least of the inevitability of much that we, from our human perspective, consider to be evil or tragic in life. (See DIALOGOS, issue #4 for more on this subject.) So too, might it not follow then that the kind of change of state represented by death (which seems to be the ultimate evil in the eyes of most humans) instead of representing the cessation of all consciousness, is a precondition for the reorganization of the human energy field that may lead not only to its prolongation but even towards a higher stage -- perhaps an even more intensive form of human freedom and the awareness on which it depends, one that, much like our genetic "memory", somehow survives or is even enhanced by death? So instead of representing a cessation of all consciousness, might not the dissolution of the biological organism serve as the threshold of a even higher freedom and consciousness? Admittedly, this seems like a "long shot" of questionable probability, especially in view of more contemporary views of biological evolution which increasingly question the old Darwinian dogmas of "the survival of the fittest" or the whole concept of evolutionary "advance". But on the other hand, given the increasing doubt (as explained below) that anything of consequence might survive a collapse of the evolutionary process, then this "long shot" could well turn out to be the only one we have. Thus...

 

THIRD, it is becoming increasingly clear that cosmology, overwhelmingly dominated by the "Big Bang" theory, predicts exactly that -- that is, either an eventual "heat death" or else a final "big crunch" will eventually make evolution, or at least this present line of it in the universe as we know it, utterly impossible. If we are persuaded, that, despite occasional setbacks, evolution truly is "irreversible" over the long run, then some kind of transformation of energy into a state of permanent consciousness beyond the confines of space-time would seem to be the only logical alternative. Either some, even if not all, human consciousness, or that of other intelligent creatures, must somehow survive or else nothing -- at least nothing of any great consequence to us -- will survive. Thus, when understood within the evolutionary paradigm, we may have no choice between belief in "irreversibility" as realized in some kind of personal immortality on the one hand, or else having to ultimately confront what amounts to philosophical "nihilism" on the other.

 

 

 

A Final Caution or Condition

 

Nevertheless, especially in view of the tentativeness of the above approach, it might be prudent to suggest that some additional causal element may be necessary, not just for the sake of the survival of our individual consciousness but for the sake of any lasting outcome of evolution itself. However strong the evidence may be, it falls far short of any guaranteed permanence for either the evolutionary process or its final outcome. For despite the faith of the Darwinians in evolution's over-all irreversibility "in time", the poor survival rate of any one species within this evolutionary process, plus the long-term cosmological outlook, gives us little natural support for any belief in survival beyond time. Accordingly, it is highly unlikely that such a transformation or change of state, even if it could occur, would be automatic or within the natural possibilities of the process as we understand it. Something more may well be required -- certainly something more than some vague evolutionary imperative or even simply our wish that it might be so.

 

Not that human ambition does not play its role. Indeed, human evolution, manifested as individual striving or desire may very well be absolutely essential. Once evolution has proceeded to the stage of self-reflective consciousness, as in the case of the human species, it seems highly unlikely that individual humans could expect to somehow retain a state of reflective awareness beyond death without careful attention to its cultivation in this life. The evolution of a higher, more permanent state consciousness could hardly be the reward of indifference. But still, such striving may be, at most, a necessary but ultimately insufficient preconditionfor the transformation of energy-matter into any lasting form of consciousness.

 

Nor should the impression be given that this interpretation of the evolutionary paradigm, with its emphasis on the responsibility for our own individual spiritual evolution, totally discounts much of the wisdom and insights of the spiritual teachers of bygone times. Not only must the actual possibility of life after death be seen as a divine gift or "grace" -- or as some of the pre-socratic myths saw it, as a prize stolen from the gods -- but so too we must heed their warnings about the dangers of the quest. Thus while the logic of evolution would seem to indicate that our individual consciousness might somehow survive death, the experience (i.e., experimental knowledge) of most of these visionaries and mystics seems to indicate that the closer we come to this goal, the more that the kind of individual consciousness, particularly that all-to-often self-centered consciousness that we're so keen on preserving, matters less and less, and in fact may stand as a barrier to its full realization.

 

If this be true, then it just may be that learning to live with the lack of intellectual certainty, and especially any empirical "proof" regarding the possibility of life after death, and yet living life in such a way that we transcend self and our inborn ego-centricity, is itself the key that corresponds what the highest religious wisdom has called "faith". To live by faith is not so much to stubbornly hold to some list of presumed certainties, but instead to live in an attitude of loving trust in the providence of that Source of all being that gives ultimate meaning of the universe. In fact, it just may be that the highest law of spiritual evolution can only be expressed in what amounts to paradox: that "it is only in dying to self -- including, to our own egotistic drive to survive at all costs and to master all mysteries -- that we live." (R.W. Kropf, as emended 8/22/1997)

 

 

 

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Cloning, Genetic Engineering, and Population Control

 

or "Playing God in the Third Millennium?"

 

Issue #8 of

 

DIALOGOS:

An Interactive Journal of the Sciences, Philosophy, & Theology

 

First Appearance of this Issue: February, 1998; updated 12/1/2001

 

Richard W. Kropf, editor

 

The recent announcement by a Massachusetts firm that they were determined to press ahead in the cloning of human stem cells for medical research is just the lastest development in a story that has been unfolding since the cloning of "Dolly" (or more accurately of Dolly's mother) the sheep, at a research lob in Scotland just a few years ago.

 

Then, a year or two later, there was the announcement of the Chicago physicist, Dr. Richard Seed, that he would seek to clone a human being as quickly as possible in light of what he sees to be a divinely willed destiny for the human race, can only raise profound misgivings. We can see this only as one facet of a much more complex set of questions facing the future of the human species.

 

Some fifty years ago, the Jesuit paleontologist and evolutionary philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, surveying the rapid increase in the world's population, wrote:

 

    This demographic explosion, so closely connected with the development of a relatively unified and industrialized Earth, clearly gives rise to entirely new necessities and problems, both quantitative and qualitative. From the palaeolithic age onwards, and still more after the neolithic age, Man has always lived in a state of expansion: to him progress and increase have been one and the same thing. But now we see the saturation point ahead of us, and approaching at a dizzy speed. How are we to prevent this compression of Mankind on the closed surface of the planet (a thing that is good in itself, as we have seen, since it promotes social unification) from passing that critical point beyond which any increase in numbers will mean famine and suffocation? Above all, how are we to ensure that the maximum population, when it is reached, shall be composed only of elements harmonious in themselves and blended as harmoniously as possible together? Individual eugenics (breeding and education designed to produce only the best individual types) and racial eugenics (the grouping or intermixing of different racial types being not left to chance but effected as a controlled process in the proportions most beneficial to humanity as a whole), both, as I well know, present apparently insuperable difficulties, administrative and psychological. But this does not alter the fact that the problem of building a healthy Mankind already stares us in the face and is growing more acute every day. With the help of science, and sustained by a renewed sense of our species, shall we be able to round this dangerous corner? ("The Directions and Conditions of the Future", June 30, 1948, as translated and published in THE FUTURE OF MAN, New York, Harper & Row, 1959.)

 

In view of these recent developments, and with Teilhard's reflections in mind, I have asked a number of DIALOGOS consultants, especially those most apt to be familiar with the latest developments in medicine, to share their own reflections on the subject. I suggested that they particularly address three questions:

 

    * 1st. What technological developments along these lines to you see as inevitable, especially within the next century or even within the next decade?

    * 2nd. What do you see to be the moral or ethical consequences of such technological developments and how would you suggest they be dealt with?

    * 3rd. Do you have any particular philosophical or theological beliefs that particularly inform or motivate the above responses?

 

The answers given (so far) are as follows:

 

Jacques Severin Abbatucci, M.D. (Oncologist, Caen, France)

 

First, as to what technological developments along these lines I see as inevitable, genetic control is evidently going to progress in the next decades. That means that we will be probably able to treat or even to prevent many diseases where gene dysfunctions play a specific role. Will it be possible to act upon psychological troubles and induce a more sociable behavior in some individuals, that is still very conjectural.

 

But as regards to Teilhard's statements, I think that the best "eugenism" is to be expected through widely extended education programs. Educated people will find more easily the way of population self-control.

 

Human cloning is a different thing. In the hypothesis of a complete technical mastery of the procedure, I don't see what positive contribution it will bring to the future of humanity. To use organs of the clone to make transplantations? We will probably find other ways to face the problem without such ethical provocation. To duplicate only "good" individuals? This is a highly disputable outlook.

 

Second, as to the moral or ethical consequences of such technological developments and how I would suggest they be dealt with, genetic prevention and treatment can be dealt with respect for the human being. They can even be considered as able to allow significant moral progress in medical behavior. For example, it seems definitely better to prevent, through a gene manipulation, the occurrence of grave fetus abnormalities rather than to make an abortion i.e. to kill the offspring .

 

The very difficult problem is that of cloning. To create a fake copy of the human without all its attributes seems to be out of moral limits. The problem is actually to fix the limits. To replace an organ can be done without attempting [to duplicate] the human person. To cut off a limb do not decrease the value of the individual submitted to such a diminution. The touchstone is the spirit. If a man is "duplicated", what about his spirit? Is the clone to be considered as a true human person or as an object? What about human rights as far as the clone is considered? Our civilization would be shattered and probably disappear if humankind was wandering that way.

 

Third, as to my own philosophical or theological beliefs, in my mind, evolution of universe has a meaning. As Teilhard often stressed, it follows a way toward complexity, bringing the matter to life and finally to thought. The whole process leads to the spiritualization of the matter. We are only a link in that process and we must behave in avoiding the worst fault : to act only by pride, seeking a "divine" power. To create a new type of man without a soul (that is to say, a transcendent spirit) appears to me as the absolute sin. Jacques S. Abbatucci <abbat@baclesse.fr>

 

George Gericke, M.D. (Neurologist and genetic researcher, Pretoria, S. Africa)

 

I tend to be attracted to longer term scenarios. This may be less accurate, but I think sometimes puts current issues in a different light. Further developments that I see as inevitable are:

 

1) Eventual full knowledge of the interactive functioning of genes, not only in terms of the Human Genome Programme, but of all the genes in the single informational system, the same basic genetic code as distributed amongst many plant and animal species, and the ability to manipulate system architectural changes in these informational networks and, if necessary, to integrate useful sequences. (Useful in terms of the improved survival value it affords the new host). An Earth Genome Project is required to ascertain and rescue the most valuable genetic sequences (vide infra).

 

2) Expansion of man-machine integration, with artificial intelligence assisting us with management of the information as contained in the biological programme. As to what I see to be the moral or ethical consequences of such technological developments and how we would dealt with them: Various experts have been warning that earth has a finite lifespan much shorter than the universe in which it exists. The "saturation point" that Teilhard de Chardin refers to, may necessitate a "Noah Project" whereby representative DNA samples may require the contained Life information to be sent to various places in outer space. The quest for Eternal Life may be considered not only in relation to the individual, but perhaps rather to "Life as a phenomenon", and I guess we have a responsibility and will have to do everything in our power to protect that in the very long term. Perhaps cloned individuals could assist with enough reserve material for successful establishment of human life at various space habitats? Perhaps human DNA sequences adequate for the "resurrection" of complex humans/humanoids will have to be carried to faraway destinations by more hardy transgenic organisms, currently regarded as "lower" life forms. Some think that this could even be how we got "here". I am however uncomfortable with the notion of our claimed ability to be able to "improve the genome with cloning. While diversification allows better responses to survival threats, we do not know, and may never know what a "good" genome is. In a limited sense we will be able to define this in the short term, in relation to the absence of disfigurement or disease, but in view of the immense repertoire of the information responsible for "normal variation" contained within the genome, we are totally ignorant.

 

Also, the context within which a genome functions, is important - "one person's noise is another person's information". A DNA - informational based global ethics will protect all life, may be taken up by Greenpeace, and may form the basis for a future total lack of discrimination concerning race, colour or creed eg the bio-information in a prostitute's DNA is of no less value than that of a sports star or a politician. As for my particular philosophical outlook on these matters, I would say that since the genetic code can be seen as a unity dispersed through many species, in a sense we have begun something which has already implicated ourselves, even though we may superficially consider ourselves as being on a different end of the spectrum as the famous Dolly.

 

Teilhard de Chardin saw evolution as the "hand of God drawing us nearer to Himself" - in any informational system there is an "apobetics" or desired outcome. We thus have to consider not only the fate of the next few generations, but the ultimate fate of the DNA informational system itself. The required time range is beyond the scope of current human capability, but virtual evolutionary outcomes may perhaps be modelled with future artificial intelligence means.I suggest we cautiously proceed to treat Life with the utmost caution lest we move away from where we should be going - "missing the mark" or "hamartia" could be the ultimate sin. This means a careful consideration of the religious issues at stake, especially in terms of such potentially very long term outcomes of what we are playing with now. George Gericke <GGERICKE@hoopoo.mrc.ac.za>

 

Charles Radey, M.D. (General Practitioner, medical ethicist, and author, Palo Cedro, California)

 

The next five to ten years will witness the full expression of the techno-medical culture along with the increasing realization that art, philosophy, religion, and prudence are mere blips in front of a juggernaut fueled by hubris. Cloning of human beings will occur, not because this is a wise or necessary thing to do, but simply because it can be done. It will represent the full flowering of the infertility business which preys on the extraordinary vulnerabilities of childless couples and leads to riches for the purveyors and manipulators of our genetic heritage.

 

The driving force behind all this is money and power, and, in our media drenched culture, fame. All are familiar nemeses of the human condition. The medical scientists who regard their work as something outside of any moral context will be given opportunities to go on live with Tom Brokaw or talk things over with Oprah and surely will have their own web page. People like Dr. Richard (could this be a hoax?) Seed will generate praise, derision, and foreboding as well as cell cultures. The novelist John Updike described celebrity as "a mask that eats into the face." The face of medical science will in the end be damaged by the process of overreaching its right ends and overestimating itself. "One can either see or be seen," Updike concludes.

 

Governments, universities, and medical research organizations must give more than lip service to the insights and cautions of bioethics. Citizens of the modern world must come to some realizations of their own that recognize limits in the human adventure and tolerance for our own very real imperfections that no science will ever "cure" or abolish. Only nourishing some sense of the inner life will check the brutal gods of science.

Charles Radey , MD

 

Next, Eric Sotnak, a philosopher at the University of Akron, Akron, Ohio:

 

Having little expertise in biotechnology, I venture these remarks with little authority. However, it seems likely that the ability to manipulate human and animal genes will improve. As this happens, there will come demands from some quarters that these technologies be applied, and there will come demands from other quarters that they not be applied. For example, suppose genetic engineering procedures become available for curing male pattern baldness, or graying hair. There will surely be high consumer demand for such procedures, and thus substantial money to be made through providing them. At the same time, however, there will certainly be those who will oppose such tinkering with human genes on the grounds that doing so would constitute an unacceptable form of "playing God.". However, it is likely that many genetic engineering procedures will have more clearly therapeutic applications - such as curing hemophilia. To deny hemophiliacs access to potentially life-saving genetic engineering technologies will seem grossly unethical to many.

 

As for the moral or ethical consequences, there are sure to be many people who will be very uncomfortable with these developing technologies. One source of such discomfort is the religiously-grounded conviction that God made things as they are for a purpose. To take control of our own genetic destiny is, from this perspective, to commit a sin of disobedience. To obey God is to allow nature to take its course as God has intended. This sort of viewpoint is already being expressed in popular discussions of the ethics of cloning. Many people have little problem with the notion of cloning or genetically engineering animals, since animals were created by God (on this view) simply as a resource for promoting human good. Non-human animals have only instrumental value to begin with. But human beings are another story.

 

One option, of course, is to abandon altogether the notion of a supernatural teleology. One who rejects both creationism and theistically-guided evolution in favor of a thoroughly naturalistic evolutionary history of life will have no worries that tampering with human genes constitutes a frustration of divine plans. Another option is to attempt to carve out a set of criteria for biological normalcy in such a way that genetic engineering techniques would be considered justifiable only if used to correct biological abnormalities. There is potential, I think, for much ink to be spilt by ethicists regarding this last option.

 

Another source of discomfort is concern over the long-term consequences of genetic manipulation technologies. Some people are worried that there may be unforseen consequences of tampering with human genes. Various worst-case scenarios (or at least, very-bad-case scenarios) can be conceived which spell out doom for the human species in one horrible way or another. Then, too, there are concerns that genetically enhancing human beings in one way or another will create yet another ground for social inequalities (this specter is raised, for example, in the recent movie Gattaca).

 

Returning to the impact of these technologies on non-human animals, many proponents of improving our treatment of animals will worry that genetic enhancement technologies will serve only to increase the exploitation of these animals. If a procedure can be devised for increasing the milk production of a dairy cow, then that procedure will most likely be implemented even if the consequences for the cow are extremely unpleasant, or even horrific. While it is true that many people worry about the impact on humans resulting from applying genetically enhancement technologies to animals, many people think the impact on the animals, themselves, also requires ethical assessment.

 

As for how these problems should be dealt with, the answer, I think, must be "Lots of hard thought and careful discussion." Although this answer may seem like a "cop-out", it is, I think, the only reasonable answer. The task of making ethical decisions is never completed.

 

"Skepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom." - C. Darrow

 

Eric Sotnak, Ph.D.

 

The above comments were made back in 1998. Yet the subject continues to vex many, not just lawmakers and ethicists, but even the proverbial man and woman on the street. For the editor's own contribution to the discussion, see the short piece :"The Stem Cell Dilemma"

 

 

 

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The Universe, Open or Closed?

Philosophical and Theological Implications

 

Issue #9 of DIALOGOS: An Interactive Journal of the Sciences, Philosophy, and Theology

 

(First Posted May 6, 1998: Updated Nov. 10, 1998)

 

Richard W. Kropf, Editor

 

With this issue we return to the observation made in the very first issue of DIALOGOS, which took exception to science writer John Horgan's opinion in his book, The End of Science, that all the major questions addressed by science in recent times have been already solved. It remains the opinion of this writer (and editor of this journal) that the "open" vs. "closed" universe issue looms as the single, and perhaps ultimately most important question yet to be resolved, one that shall equal the importance of the "Big Bang" theory itself. In the year and a half since that first issue of DIALOGOS was posted, events have moved very quickly towards a resolution.

 

Accordingly, what we intend to accomplish in this issue is to first of all summarize, in as simple terms as possible, with the help of experts in the field, the present scientific data and its scientific implications. Then, this article (in Part II) will go on to attempt to outline what this editor sees as the major philosophical and theological questions which are raised by the scientific issue and its possible resolution. As new data (and comments) come in, the article will be periodically updated.

 

We also wish, at this point, to give special thanks to DIALOGOS science consultant and oftimes respondent Patrick Stonehouse, for his help in preparing this issue, and congratulate him on his discovery of a new comet (C/1998 H1). (See NASA Comet Homepage  and  The Harvard-Smithsonian Center For Astrophysics .)

 

The Philosophical and Theological Implications of An Open Universe

 

When the initial draft of this essay was begun in October of 1997, the issue as to whether or not the universe was open or closed was still considered to be pretty much an open question. Even though the search for enough "dark matter" to cause the Big Bang to eventually reverse itself -- thus to "close" or recollapse the universe upon itself -- seemed to be becoming more and more like the proverbial search for the needle in the haystack, many cosmologists still held out for the possibility of such an outcome. Then, early in January of this year, at the conclusion of the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Association, it was announced that no less than five independnet studies, each approaching the issue from a different angle, had all come to the conclusion that the universe is almost without question "open", or as one follow-up report put it "destined to expand forever." (See Astronomy Magazine : News reports of Feb. 17, 1998: see also the feature article "The Future of the Universe" in the August 1998 issue of Sky & Telescope magazine, pages 32-39 by Fred Adams [U. of Michigan] and Gregory Laughlin [U. of California, Berkeley]).

 

Then, on the last day in February, the American Academy of Science in it's Science Online version of Science Magazine, reported further details of one of those studies, that conducted by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, which studied fourteen different supernovas in galaxies ranging from 7 to 10 billion light years in distance. This study turned out to indicate that not only are the galaxies in which these supernovas are located are not gradually slowing down, as almost all astrophysicists assumed they were, but to the contrary, these latest measurements seem to indicate that the rate of expansion, as dated from the Big Bang, may even be accelerating . Or, as another study, that of certain radio galaxies by two teams at Princeton University, indicated, if the expansion rate is not actually accelerating now, it may very well begin to do so in the future.

 

All this would be the opposite of what one might expect if there were any possibility of a future closure of the observable universe. Or as the Feb. 27 CNN summary put it, the news has left cosmologists and astronomers absolutely "stunned." Why and how could this be?

 

 

 

The Cosmological Question -- and Present Answers

 

To appreciate the degree of shock all this has caused, we first need to take a quick look at the general outlines of modern cosmology -- understood as the science that studies the large scale structure and evolution of the universe. The fate of the universe, particularly in terms of the "Big Bang" theory first proposed by Georges Lemaitre and gradually adopted in one form or another by nearly all cosmologists today, depends on several factors or parameters. The most important of these is the so-called "Hubble Constant" or expansion rate named after the astronomer Edmund Hubble who was the first to prove (others before him had only guessed at it) that a lot of those fuzzy objects they were seeing through telescopes were not just clouds ("nebulas") of gas but actually other galaxies like our own Milky Way. Not only that, but that, Hubble's observations, when interpreted in terms of "red-shift" or the so-called "Doppler effect", indicated that most of them are speeding away from us at a dizzying rate that seems to be increasing the farther away they are.

 

Nevertheless, this expanding universe poses some very difficult problems. Not the least of them being philosophical -- as like "what caused the Big Bang?" But even in strictly scientific terms there are other problems as well. One of them is that given not enough speed (too low an expansion rate) the Big Bang would have collapsed, as a result of its own gravitational forces, into nothing of consequence right from the start. Yet given too much speed, it is highly unlikely that galaxies and stars would never have formed before whatever matter there was would be spread so thin that nothing could have begun to coalesce. Therefore, the actual expansion rate has to fall within a very critical range for the universe to have been around long enough for we observers of the universe to have evolved. While the most widely accepted version of the Big Bang theory, Guth's "inflationary universe", holds for an initial expansion rate faster than the speed of light, the present expansion rate has rate has been estimated to be anywhere from 50 to 80 kilometers per second per megaparsecs of distance -- which translates to anywhere from about 364,000 to 583,000 mph for every light year in distance from us! Nevertheless it has been taken more or less for granted up to now that despite this increase of speed in terms of distance, that in terms of time, the more this expansion rate slows down. After all, what would cause it to speed up again? It is this latter estimate that has been now upset -- but we'll come back to the meaning of that after we look at the other two factors and the additional problems they pose.

 

First, for this expansion rate to fall within this critical range, it is generally assumed that the universe must also have a certain "critical density" -- that to say, to have had enough matter in it for the expansion to be counter-balanced by gravitational force. Then by comparing the first (the speed or expansion rate) and the present density, we should not only be able to calculate not just how old the universe is, but also how long it is destined to keep expanding, or even if it might not just stop expanding and end up reversing itself, collapsing into a state where it might just start a whole new Big Bang. In other words, a "closed" universe giving birth to whole new universe once this one finally wears out.

 

But the second problem has been that most estimates of the expansion rate have not jibed very well with estimates of the density of the universe in a way that would indicate that the "critical mass" thought best to insure the future longevity of the universe. This density factor, is usually expressed under the symbol of the Greek letter Omega and assigned the numerical value of 1. But compared to this hypothetical value, visible matter in the universe is more like .01, while all the matter necessary to explain the observed movements of the galaxies would still amount to about .1, with .2  being given as the higher end estimate for argument's sake. In fact, all the efforts to add up the total amount of matter that we are sure exists only comes to somewhere between 1/10 to 1/5 of the amount that would be needed to keep the universe stable enough to last like this more or less forever -- even less than to cause it to collapse in hopes of creating a new one!

 

The proposed solutions to this quandary so far have taken several directions. One, quite actively pursued over the past decade, has been to spend an awful lot of time and money trying to find "dark matter" convinced that it just had to be out there someplace, even though no one seemed very sure just in what form this unseen or even unseeable stuff might be. Some suggested multitudes of brown and red dwarfs -- the burnt-out remains of dead stars that are so small that they remain largely invisible even within our own galaxy. Others postulate various forms of matter -- particles so minute as to remain undetectable, yet in such great numbers as to tip the balance in favor of the universe being closed. The mysterious "neutrino" particle, in particular, has been a prime candidate. Recent evidence presented at a meeting held in conjunction with work being done in Takayama, Japan, suggests that neutrinos do in fact possess some mass -- reportedly about 1/500,000 th. of that an electron -- and even given this infinitesmal amount may be numerous enough to outweigh the rest of the whole universe. Still even doubling the previously estimated mass of the universe seems hardly enough mass to reverse its expansion.  Perhaps so-called "Black Holes" remain a feasible alternative. Yet for some reason or other, astrophysicists seem to no longer to have much hope of solving the problem, even with their help.

 

Another tactic, quite prominent in the past few years, has been to drastically readjust the expansion rate estimates, as well as the age estimates of the universe, radically downwards, because, if one has less matter to work with, a slower expansion rate translates into a lower figure to reach "critical mass". Not that this was being done arbitrarily. Some of the distance estimates of supernovas in galaxies just outside our local group seem to indicate their host galaxies are closer than once thought. But these new calculations were giving us age and expansion rates so low that we were being told that the whole universe might be several billion years younger than some of the oldest nearer stars, like some of those found in globular clusters only a couple of thousand light-years away. So something was obviously wrong with that approach..

 

Yet there is still another strategy that could be employed, although most cosmologists have been hesitant to employ it, and that is to invoke a "Cosmological Constant" like that proposed by Einstein who originally, like others at his time, thought the universe was more or less static -- that it always existed and always would exist. But Einstein could only account for this presumed stability by postulating a repulsive force to counter-act gravity in order to keep the universe from collapsing upon itself. While Eddington's, Lemaitre's and Friedmann's calculations all took exception to the conclusions Einstein was drawing from his own theories, it was only later on, finally convinced by Hubble's discovery of the redshift of most of the other galaxies that the universe was in fact expanding, that Einstein abandoned his "constant" as having been the greatest blunder of his career.

 

Nevertheless, in the face of this latest speculation about an accelerating universe, some are again talking about a revival of the cosmological constant, but so far it is not clear in what sense. Is it to explain an accelerating expansion rate if further studies turn out to show that this in fact the case? Or will it be invoked to in hopes that there might be something to counteract the expansion and to reassure us that the universe might some day be persuaded to slow down and even reverse itself? If this be the case, with the cosmological constant envisioned as a kind of "virtual mass", then we have the constant being invoked in a way that is quite the opposite from that employed by Einstein -- which was to keep the universe from collapsing, not to insure that some day it would do so. Instead, those who would reintroduce this constant presumably see it as an anti-expansion force. In this case they could end up with more than what they bargained for, as according to an article titled "Cosmic Puffery" that appeared in Scientific American's web-site about a year ago, some particle physicists have recently been touting the idea of a "vacuum energy" so powerful that if Einstein had used it for his constant, the universe would have collapsed on the spot!

 

It was partly to try to resolve these problems that all these new studies, made possible by the Hubble Space Telescope as well as the bevy of recently constructed huge earth-based telescopes, were commissioned and undertaken. But other than resulting in a slight downward estimate of the ages of some of the oldest stars, from 14 billion to about 13 billion years old, plus reasserting with new confidence that the universe is at least 14 to 15 billion years old, what seems to have really emerged from this latest flurry of activity is a growing, almost overwhelming, conviction among astronomers and astrophysicists (95% certainty according to Peter Garnavich of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) that the universe is indeed "open" and that the long cherished dream of a universe that somehow can last forever is now almost completely gone.

 

In the second part of this essay, we will look at the philosophical and theological implications of this turn of events.

 

 

 

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Philosophical Implications of an Open Universe

 

Despite all these more recent indications, why the long-standing reluctance to see the universe as "open" rather than "closed"? Could it be that despite the usual nuances of these two terms, it is really an "open" universe that most seems to close off the future, where is a "closed" universe that paradoxically appears to offer some hope for the long-term future despite the fiery cataclysm such a "Big Crunch" scenario implies? No doubt about, or as one astronomer who was interviewed recently on a PBS documentary put it, a "closed" universe, is "more philosophically satisfying" -- apparently because many seem to assume it offers hope of a self-rejuvenating universe, by means of repeated big bangs. However, not all physicists would agree that it would, at least for more than a few repeats at most (see Joseph Silk, The Big Bang, revised and updated edition, W.H. Freeman & Co., 1989, pages 390-91. Martin Rees of Cambridge University and who is also Great Britain's official "Astronomer Royal", despite his entertainment of the possibility of other parallel universes, appears to be rather doubtful about the possibility of such successive big bangs. See Before the Beginning: Our Universe and Others, Helix Books/Addison Wesley, 1997, esp. pages 194-95.)

 

Nevertheless, the idea of a closed universe somehow retains that aura of an eternal universe, captured so well by the late Carl Sagan who began the first chapter of his book Cosmos (New York, Random House, 1980 -- see page 4) with the capital(ized) statement that "THE COSMOS IS ALL THAT IS OR EVER WAS OR EVER WILL BE."  But it seems that where Sagan was simply trying to describe everything we know about the physical universe that science can describe, others, instead, are looking for something more. Once you go beyond that, from physics to meta-physics, you have passed into the realm of philosophy, the science of  ontology or of being-as-such.

 

Although in all probablility the universe last another 15 billion years or more, it is no wonder that, no matter how vast a time scale we're talking about, there should be a deep uneasiness with the vision of a Big Bang universe that is a one-shot deal, a flash in the pan of space (in its original sense -- that of a complete void) or of a movement of time that will come to a definitive end. If it is true that the most basic philosophical question of all is "why is their something rather than nothing?", then perhaps the most disturbing answer would be to say that the answer to that question won't make any difference as there will be nothing left in the end. Philosophically speaking, such an answer appears to raise the spectre of nihilism -- at least in the more radical meaning of the term.

 

While there seems to be enough in life to keep most of us busy or distracted from such disturbing questions most of the time, it seems to have been more or less taken for granted by most people, down through history, that the universe -- even if it had a creator of some sort -- was always there and would always be. If this seems illogical, one must take a a closer look at the philosophical notions of "cause" as we shall see shortly. But as Leon Lederman's whimsical question in the subtitle to his altogether serious book on particle physics,The God Particle (Houghton Mifflin, 1993), put it: "If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question?" The problem with the open universe scenario is that the universe isn't the answer. Indeed, it would seem that in the case of an "open universe" its existence, both now and in the future, poses the biggest question of all!

 

To answer this question, several other tactics have recently been employed. One has been to suggest that the coming to be of the universe may have been due to nothing more than initial quantum fluctuation of some sort. In other words,  while the universe as we know it had a beginning, still there may always have been an unknown something -- a "primal atom" or "singularity" of some sort -- which, at the beginning of time, underwent some radical transition. Curiously, this suggestion uses much the same kind of language as that used by Lemaitre when he first proposed his theory -- before Hoyle dubbed it as "the Big Bang" -- apparently out of fear that the former's religious convictions were influencing his physics. Perhaps they were, but Lemaitre seems to have gone out of his way to avoid assigning them any specific theological content. But either way, whatever interpretation is given to this sort of language, philosophically speaking , such answer only seems to beg the question, as if assigning a matter-energy source alone could supply all the answers to the full range of philosophical understanding of the concept of causality.

 

Another alternative tactic would be, even if the prospects now look dim for any kind of scenario involving a succession of "universes", would be to assume the existence of more or less simultaneous universes.  After all, if up until only seventy years ago (the time of Hubble's discoveries) most people thought the whole universe consisted of our own Milky Way galaxy, could we not be repeating the same mistake, assuming that the observable universe is the whole universe or the only one? 

 

Nevertheless there are some real problems to any such approach.  One of them is a very practical as far as science goes -- the limits of the "observable universe". It is not only possible but even probable that we'll never see all of the one universe in which we find ourselve, no matter how big our telescopes or how far we travel in space. The "event horizon" -- the farther we see in space the further back in time, the present always eluding us the farther out we look -- prevents us from ever seeing it all, even all of our own universe, quite aside from any other "universes".

 

But there are still other problems, even on the theoretical side. While the possibility of other universes lie within the realm of imagination, or are even calculable in terms of "topological" matehmatics, their existence would always remain, at best, theoretical. For if the totality of this universe remains unobservable because of the "event horizon", even more the existence of another universe remains "unfalsifiable", which is to say, in terms of scientific methodology, unverifiable. So it would seem that such speculations, at best, fall into the category of "ironic science" as described Horgan in his aforementioned book, The End of Science, (reviewed in the intial issue of Dialogos) -- interesting ideas to play with, providing great plots for science fiction, but in terms of scientific method, "unscientific".

 

But still, supposing there actually are other "universes" -- couldn't they explain something? Perhaps, in a very limited sense, something like the way a lot of eggs can explain a lot of chickens. But given the fact that the whole hen-house full that we know (our universe) can be traced back to one big egg (the Big Bang) what would other eggs (or other hen-houses) really explain? In other words, the old problem of infinite regression. If the universe we know is contingent, revealing itself to be even more dependent than we once thought on something else, be it the quantum fluctuation of a "singularity" as some theorists put it, then what makes us think that any other universes are any less contingent on similar singularities, or that all together they would not be dependent on one such singularity, one which always was and when everything is gone, still will be?

 

In the face of all this the only logical thing to do is to invoke what is generally known in both scientific as well as philosophical circles as "Occam's Razor" -- the maxim that the simplist explanation for any phenomenon must remain the preferred one. Approached in this way, what all this seems to come down to is that this "singularity" would have to possess that attribute which by any other philosophical mode of reasoning would be tantamount to describing "Being-as-such" -- or what the philosophers of old were not adverse to calling "God". True, neither is the "God Hypothesis" verifiable in terms of scientific methodology or falsifiable for that matter. (See also the discussion of "Can Science Prove There Is A God?" in DIALOGOS, Issue #5 .) But given the logical alternative to an eternal universe or succession of "universes" -- both of which possibilities now seem less likely -- the "God hypothesis" appears to remain the most obvious explanation, even if, for many, not the most comfortable or pleasing one. That scientists like Hoyle are now able to admit that it was partially a fear of such a conclusion that attracted them to other theories is now to their credit. Nevertheless, most philosophers today seem to back away from such conclusions, perhaps frightened off by the example of theologians, who having been repeatedly burned by backfires of the old "God-of-the-gaps" strategy, seem equally reluctant to look to nature or science for the confirmation of their opinions or beliefs.

 

 

 

Theological Implications

 

When it comes to theology as such, we find a somewhat different situation. Whereas philosophers try to depend on sheer reason or logic to establish their claims, theologians generally claim to work from the "data" of revelation, only depending on reason to better explicate or defend their beliefs. It was Pascal who reminded us that "the God of the philosophers is not the God of the prophets" -- thus reassurring the theologians that they have a corner on the market for eternal verities. But this does not excuse the theologian from the task of keeping up with science. Indeed, it is because the philosophical tools employed by the theologian depend, to a marked degree on the world-view or cosmology assumed by a particular philosophy, that it becomes all the more vital that the theologian be fully aware of the latest findings of science -- much less be distainful of scientists who seem to be increasingly venturing into theology themselves.

 

Thus, no matter how the theologians may wince at seeming flippancies as Lederman's "God Particle" or are perhaps are put off by those who would describe higher mathematics as revealing "The Mind of God" (the title of a 1992 book by mathematical physicist Paul Davies, who also wrote "God and the New Physics" and "The Cosmic Blueprint"), still, they would do well to play close attention to what is happening in the world of science, particularly cosmology. After all, despite Einstein's refusal to believe in a God who plays dice with the universe, the seeming contradiction between quantum-level fluctuations (chance) and the seeming transformation such chaos into large scale events describable with mathematical precision could give theologians some powerful clues. But this is only if they would read the book of nature as assiduously as they read the book of revelation -- which one would think they would do if believe it is the same God who wrote them both.

 

In this case, what would an "open" universe tell them? For one, rather fortuitously, it would seem to confirm the intuition of the Western world-view , with its roots in the biblical sense of history, that things happen once for all, and that this world, despite occasional impressions to the contrary, is not primarily a cyclical or endlessly self-repetitious phenomenon. But if this is true regarding the fate of the universe, what about its beginnings?

 

It would also seem that now, for the first time in history, theologians need not find themselves in the old position held by Aquinas, who held that the idea of the creation of the universe by God from nothing was strictly a revealed truth. That otherwise there really was nothing in nature that could prove that the universe did not always exist -- at least in some form or another -- despite the contingent nature of all phenomena as presently observed. (Contrary to widespread misconceptions of the matter, Aquinas' celebrated five arguments as found in the Summa Theologica I, Q2, were probably never meant to be proofs of God's existence but more demonstrations of how the observed contingency of various aspects of the universe both suggest the existence of a Creator as well as explicitate the fundamental meaning of the word "God".) On the other hand, unlike in Aquinas' time, most biblical scholars to day would admit that neither does the Bible teach "creation from nothing" in the strict philosophical sense, which is to say, without a "material cause", as assumed for so long by Christian theologians. (The book of Genesis speaks of creation from tohu wa bohu, a kind of chaotic emptiness. Two other biblical but much younger deuterocanonical books, give conflicting formulas. II Maccabees 7:28 speaks of God making the "heavens and earth out of what did not exist" whereas Wisdom 11:15 says quite the opposite, that God created the world "from formless matter".)

 

So, in the same way , it might be argued now that neither does our ignorance of what lies behind the Big Bang necessarily prove the existence of God. But again, particularly in light of the fact that the universe seems headed toward some form of final self-destruction, we find ourselves in a position that is strongly suggestive of a renewed or newly heightened sense of the radical contingency of the universe -- at both ends of its existence. If nothing else, modern attempts to import a more ancient or cyclical world-view, even if revamped in terms of an alternative cosmology, much like Nietzsche's attempt to revive the myth of "eternal return", seem doomed.

 

Secondly, the same intuition, backed even more strongly by what we know of biological evolution, is probably true of human beings. Basic elements may be recycled, even "life" in a certain sense replenishes itself, but individual lives, particular persons, do not. Each is unique in time, never to be repeated in exactly the same way. The dream of reincarnation, like that of a closed universe endlessly repeating itself is nothing more than a fanciful pipe-dream, at best a pleasant myth. When the cosmic party is over, the chips will have fallen where they may.

 

This note of finality might be a good place to say a few words about biblical apocalypticism. Often wrongly confused with classical prophecy (as in Hal Lindsay's biblical pot-boiler, The Great Late Planet Earth), this kind of cosmic doomsday style writing, found especially in the Book of Daniel (which is incidentally not placed among the prophetic books in the Hebrew Bible but among the "other writings") and the New Testament Book of Revelation, represents a distinct genre' representing a period in which the people's own destiny had gone completely out of their own control. It also seems to have a special appeal today for those who feel much the same, with Harold Bloom, an expert in gnostic religious movements, who ( in The American Religion, Simon & Schuster, 1993) describes apocalypticism as "failed prophecy".  In any case, the likelihood of a cosmic "heat death" in an open universe seems to be quite the opposite scenario from that envisioned by literalistic interpretations of the biblical texts. Maybe the more immediate predicted demise of the earth when the sun reaches its "red giant" stage does superficially resemble some of the apocalyptic imagery, but in terms of its ultimate destiny, the final material state of the universe will, oddly enough, turn out to be a cosmic version of the inner circle of Dante's Inferno -- which is pictured not in terms of fire and brimstone, but instead (surpise) as a vast frozen waste!

 

But on the other hand, how can this finality be squared with the God of the prophets who is more often than not, unlike with the apocalyptic writers, still pictured as a loving, caring God who always seems ready to give people another chance? This is where I see the greatest challenge that cosmology presents to theology to today. But it is also an opportunity for Christianity and Western religion in general to reaffirm itself. If this universe is once-for all event (or even a series of once for all and otherwise disconnected events) then to what end or purpose? For a creator's play or amusement? Is it a case of a divine Gardener who watches his seedlings sprout forth, flower, bloom and die, then maybe repeat operation again the next year, or years later, depending on his whim? Thus, from this viewpoint at least, the main difficulty that still has to be faced by theologians (or anyone else for that matter) is not proving the existence of God or some kind of initial Prime Mover or "Ground of Being", but rather in convincing people that the God of evolution is a God who cares. The principal task of theology today must be to answer those who, like the agnostic writer and philosopher Albert Camus, question as to whether or not the Universe can have a "heart".

 

Might not an "open" universe seem even more heartless than a closed one? Certainly, from an evolutionary viewpoint, if we conceive of evolution as having any purpose or aim -- even if it only be the production of creatures who can successfully survive -- then it would seem that an "open" universe, with its closure of any prospects for a recycling of life, is largely pointless in the end . But if, instead, in the face of an open universe, theology can present a vision that opens the way up for a more permanent sharing of existence, one which makes all the cosmic cataclysms, evolutionary twistings, and human failure and triumphs of lasting significance, then it will have made a real contribution to the furture evolution of the human race. And in having done so, it would also contribute to a final outcome that enhances the total Plenitude of Being, both Evolver and the evolved forever, beyond all time.

 

It is not that a theology that found itself situated with "closed" universe could not do the same. Would not repetition, the opportunity to eternally reenact the evolutionary process, add even more weight to its significance? Perhaps so, but apparently this is not in the cards. Despite what Einstein said, the Divine Gambler appears to be playing for keeps.

(R.W.Kropf  5/6/98)

 

 

 

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The Future of Sexuality

 

Issue #10 of DIALOGOS : An Interactive Journal of the Sciences, Philosophy, and Theology

 

First posting of this issue, Aug. 17, 1998

 

To see the most recent comments on this issue, go to comments (current up-date Dec. 31, 1998)

 

Richard W. Kropf, Editor

 

Editor's Introduction: In this issue of DIALOGOS, we are presenting, with the permission of its author, a paper delivered at the 14th World Congress of THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION which met in Montreal, Quebec on July 26-August 1, 1998. A biologist, as well as a past-president of the American Teilhard Association, Robert T. Francoeur, Ph.D., is a Professor of Human Sexuality and Embryology at Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, NJ. He is also editor of the newly published International Encyclopedia of Sexuality. In this paper, which we have divided into two sections to facilitate easy down-loading, Dr. Francoeur first (in Part I) explores the combined results of the sexual revolution, along with many other demographic phenomena, such as improved health care, on the whole area of human behaviour, and then (Part II) prognosticates from a futurist's perspective what he believes will be the coming patterns of and roles played by sexuaity in the next millenium. As usual, we will be looking for readers' comments and reflections.

 

Human Relationships in the 21st Century: Labor Pains of a New Integration

 

By Robert T. Francoeur, Ph.D.

 

Back in 1972, when I started teaching a college course in human sexuality, we were still experiencing the aftershock of the 60s sexual revolution. I wanted to make my class on lifestyles and relationships personal and real for these 20 year-olds. So I invited some friends who were living a variety of alternative lifestyles to share their stories. The students listened politely, hid their smirks, and muttered "WEIRD RADICALS" (definitely sick perverts).

 

The implications of what these older adults were going through, and how they were adapting their marriages and relationships to life in the 1970s were too frightening for my students to hear or think about in their own lives. I had to switch my educational strategy. Forget the direct confrontation with their personal daily lives. I would try a more philosophical, indirect questions.

 

"What happened to the dinosaurs?"

"They died out."

"Why?"

"Ah, I guess they couldn't adapt to their changing environment."

"Good. Now, I want you to help me list all the many changes that have radically altered intimate relationships, courtship, marriage, and sex in this century. Tell me what has changed since 1900, when your great-grandparents were teenagers, dating, getting married, and raising a family. You have grown©up in a different world, with the birth control pill, AIDS, MTV, gay liberation, and the like. I want you to help me list all these changes, and then I want to talk about Deeper Questions, like the evolution and future of intimate relations, sex, marriage, and family. I want to talk about the Deeper Question of how you will have to adapt to all the changes we have made in our ecosystem in this century, the radical changes you will be forced to make in your sexual lives and relationships if you want to survive and thrive in this brave new world."

 

My new approach seemed to work, but I wonder. Older, non-traditional students definitely get the point about how male-female relationships, marriage, and family have, and are, changing because of our radically changed environment. For the 20 year-olds the issue is sex and long-term intimacy in our radically changed world because they were born after the pill, after the sixties, after Ozzie and Harriet Nelson left television. They know the sex and marriage stuff. And because they see sex as perfectly natural, it isn't really much of a big deal for them, what with contra-ceptives and the freedom of college dorms and living away from home. They want to find someone to love, a dependable, stable, mature partner, with a pleasing personality. In the American spirit of tolerance, alternative patterns of marriage, creative singlehood, open or closed marriages, divorce and remarriage, step-parents and step-families, comarital relations, swingers, man-sharing, gay couples, "un hombre completo" and "la casa chica" are okay for others, if that's what they want. But when I get married, it will be forever, and no affairs or divorce. They are more concerned about finding a good paying, interesting job. For women, sex and gender may enter the job concern as they become aware of the "glass ceiling" and the murky domain of sexual harassment. But, in general, it takes some years of personally experiencing the social changes around before they will start asking Deeper Questions about the future of sex, marriage, and family.

 

Having recently edited a three-volume International Encyclopedia of Sexuality with in-depth reports on sexual attitudes and behavior in 32 countries on six continents, I would like to speculate about the extent to which the Daily Concerns and Deeper Questions of Americans about the future of sex, marriage and family and the changes we have experienced this century may echo around the world.

 

Our Radically Changed and Changing World

 

Before I sketch out what I believe is a fair prognosis for the future, let me share with you the world my American students desribe every semester.

 

1. AVERAGE LIFE EXPECTANCY

Americans came close to doubling our average human life expectancy in this century. In the Middle Ages, the average life expectancy was 30 something. In 1900, 47 years; 1920, 53 to 54 years; in 1995, 73 for men and 79 years for women. An infant born today has an estimated average life expectancy of 90 to 110 years. My students immediately gasp, when they think about the impact of this change on "until death do us part." Modern medicine has been a major factor in similar dramatic increases in average life expectancies around the world. In more developed regions, the average life expectancy at birth in 1993 was 77 years; in less developed regions, 63 years, and the least developed countries, 51 years. Of course, the AIDS epidemic is having a serious negative impact on life expectancy in Africa and Southeast Asian countries.

 

2. INFANT AND MATERNAL MORTALITY

In the 1800s, one in five infants died in its first year. In 1940, one in 20 infants died. Black infant mortality was twice that of whites. In 1995, only one in 200 newborns did not survive its first year. Maternal mortality rates have also plummeted from the 1850s when one in five women died of puerperal fever.

 

3. NUMBER OF CHILDREN

The colonial American Family had 8, 10, or more children. The Victorian family averaged between 6 to 8 children. In 1970, one in ten American families had four or more children. In 1996, only 3 percent of our families had 4 or more children while 51.2 percent had no children. In colonial America, women spent most of their adult life rearing children. Not so today!

 

Worldwide, fertility rates have dropped significantly since the 1970s. The Dutch total fertility rate dropped from 3.2 children per woman in 1962 to a stable 1.5 rate since 1976. The former East Germany birth and marriage rates dropped 60 percent in the four years following the collapse of Communism. Between 1978 and 1992, the Czech and Slovak birthrates dropped by 50 percent. Brazil's birthrate went from 6.3 in the 1960s to a current 2.2, and Ireland from 7.4 in 1973 to 1.8 in 1995. China went from 5.68 in the 1960s to 1.8 in 1995. Italy recently became the first nation in history with more people over age 60 than under the age of 20; Italy's total fertility rate is 1.1, and in the city of Bologna a stunning 0.8 children per woman. Spanish women are having an average of 1.2 children, while the fertility rates for Germany, Portugal, Switzerland, Russia, Ukraine, Rumania, Japan, Hungary, Hong Kong, Austria, the Baltic states, and Greece are all under 1.5. Today, the populations of Africa and Europe (including Russia) are about equal. If the present trends hold for the next fifty years, Africans will outnumber their northern neighbors three to one. And while half of all Italians will be over the age of 50, half of the residents of Iraq will be under age 25 (Specter 1998).

 

4. CONTRACEPTION

In a brief 150 years, Euro-Americans have gone from ineffective and inconvenient contraceptives that were generally available only to the affluent to effective, inexpensive, and fairly convenient long-term contraceptives. The time table:

Antiquity-1850s Crocodile dung, lemon halves, and sheep intestines

1850s Latex condoms

1880s The cervical diaphragm becomes popular

1882 The first birth control clinic (Dutch) opens.

1890s Male surgical sterilization

1909 IUDs developed

1962 The PILL

1966 U.S. Supreme Court declares unconstitutional all state laws limiting the right of married women to purchase contraceptives

1972 State laws limiting contraceptive sales to single women declared unconstitutional

1985 Long-term contraceptive implants.

 

The effects of modern contraception are obvious in many countries where the total fertility rate has dropped significantly in recent years, even though the affordability of contraception is a major problem in countries racked by HIV and negligible per capital monies for health care and disease prevention.

 

5. MEDICAL ADVANCES

In addition to increasing our life expectancy, reducing infant and maternal mortality with the 1864 discovery of antiseptics, improving the effectiveness and variety of contraceptives, and increasing the safety of abortion, medical research has made other contributions to our rapidly and radically changing social environment. These include advent of Planned Parenthood clinics starting in 1916, the use of surplus World War I cellulose wadding in menstrual padding in 1920, the discovery of penicillin which provided an effective cure for bacterial sexually transmissible diseases during World War II, and, of course, the pill. And yet, despite it medical prowess, puritanic Americans have refused to deal with sexually related diseases. The U.S. has the highest rates of sexually transmissible diseases in the developed world, rates 50 to 100 times higher than in other industrialized nations (Eng and Butler 1997). The U.S. also has the highest rates of teenage pregnancy and abortion in the developed world.

 

Since the world's first test-tube baby in 1978, there has been an explosion in new infertility treatments, which create new forms of parenthood, and new treatments for all kinds of sexual dysfunctions, including Viagra and other medications for male erectile problems. Even as worldwide television coverage of Viagra led to black markets in many countries, public pressure, stirred by European and North American television documentaries on female genital mutilation, have produced serious efforts by the World Health Organization, United Nations, and international physicians' groups to eliminate this dangerous practice (Francoeur and Taverner 1998:134-153).

 

6. PUBERTY AND ADOLESCENCE

Between the Middle Ages and today, the age of menarche has remained fairly stable between age 12 and 14 years, depending of food supply. What has changed is that stage of life we call adolescence. In the Middle Ages and Shakespeare's time children were considered immature adults when they attained the use of reason about age 7. Like Juliet they married about age 14. "Childhood," as we know it, did not exist until the Victorian period, while "adolescence" did not exist until the 1950s or thereabouts. The emergence of childhood and adolescence, combined with increasing later age of first marriage, has given us a new species of human, sexually mature single young adults! While the age of menarche has remained stable, a puzzling phenomenon has recently been documented. A nationwide study by Hermans-Giddens (1997) found that 50 percent of African-American girls and 15 percent of White girls in the U.S. begin puberty by the age of 8. This major drop in the onset of puberty has thus far only been reported among American girls, suggesting a possible environmental estrogen causation.

 

In the least developed nations where urban migration deprives adolescents of traditional sex education by their elders, there is a frightening rise in teen pregnancies and disease. In cultures where the prevailing philosophy holds that parents should be the primary source of sexual information, today's teenagers obtain most of their sexuality information from peers and the media, not from their parents. In most cultures, from the least developed to the most industrialized, there is little effective formal education and social support to help children and adolescents deal with their sexuality.

 

7. THE ECONOMIC AND PSYCHOLOGICAL EMANCIPATION OF WOMEN

A hundred twenty-five years after the first women's rights meeting in Seneca Falls, New York, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963. With the near simultaneous advent of the hormonal birth control pill, for the first time in millions of years of human history, women could now eliminate unwanted pregnancies. We could now separate sex for making babies from sex for pleasure, friendship, fun, exploration, love.... Women increasingly entered the work force, politics, the military, and other "male professions" in mass. Women also begin redefining sexual satisfaction in their own terms, challenging the traditional male phallic coital paradigm. Women in many countries are increasingly challenging the inability or unwillingness of males to accommodate more gender equal roles. Many Thai women today, especially those who have attained some socioeconomic status on their own, are choosing to live alone rather than try to cope with the domination of a traditional Thai male partner. The popularity of "Narita divorces" among Japanese brides returning from a disastrous honeymoon is another example of women taking control of their own lives once they are educated and can support themselves (Francoeur 1997:788-789; for a similar phenomenon in Russia, see page 1050). In many European and other countries, non-marital cohabitation is increasingly popular and common. With the growing emphasis on individual expectations and needs, I wonder whether the new phenomenon of Dutch couples "living apart together" (LAT) will be adopted in other developed countries as an adaptation to the social ecosystem of the new millennium (Francoeur, 1997:912).

 

8. RELIGION

From colonial America through the 1800s, our religious institutions exercised a strong control over our sexual attitudes and behavior. By the 1990s, that influence had definitely weakened; the percentage of Catholics ignoring the Pope's condemnation of artificial contraceptives exceeds the percentage of other Americans using birth control. Even as the mainline American churches debate whether or not to openly accept premarital sex, to recognize gay marriages and ordain gay clergy, many local congregations and church members find their official church teachings on sexual morality out of touch with their real lives and go their own way. At the same time, they search for the connection between sexuality and spirituality in natural and Eastern religions.

 

Around the world, in Sweden, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Ireland, Poland, and Puerto Rico, mainstream church authorities tend to avoid preaching on sexual morality or are widely ignored when they do.

 

9. LEGAL CHANGES

As mentioned above, the right of American women to purchase contraceptives was recognized in 1966 and 1972 Supreme Court decisions. Abortion was made legal by Roe v. Wade in 1973. The repressive Comstock laws were gradually rescinded, with the first Consenting Adult Laws adopted by Illinois in 1961. In the years that followed, premarital sex with affection became a quietly accepted if not endorsed social standard. With divorce socially, economically, and legally more available, half of American marriages end in divorce. Serial polygamy is easily our dominant form of marriage. Major changes in our definitions of pornography and obscenity came with Roth v. U.S. in 1957 and Miller v. U.S. in 1973. The 1960s civil rights movement inspired a few gays and lesbians to rebel against police harassment in the 1969 Stonewall Inn Riot, bringing their culture to the attention of the heterosexual majority. Thirty years later Americans are still counterpointing gay rights parades, the ordination of gay/lesbian ministers, and adoption of domestic partnership laws, with conservative churches boycotting Disney and leading politicians condemning homosexuality as the mortal enemy of heterosexual marriage and the family. Other changes have come with our recognition, prevention, and treatment of child sexual abuse, incest, sexual harassment, and marital and date rape.

 

Around the world, the availability of sexual materials on cheap videocassettes, satellite-access television, and the internet has greatly reduced the control and censorship governments were able to maintain in the past with print media. Although the concept of sexual harassment is scarcely acknowledged outside northern Europe, the U.S., and Canada, awareness of women's rights in this regard is spreading, mainly because of media coverage and emerging women's rights movements in the less and least developed countries including Eastern Europe (Francoeur 1997:974, 1065, 1158-1159).

 

10. INCREASING SOCIAL MOBILITY AND ANONYMITY

Everywhere in American rural villages and farm lands of the 1800s, social conformity was expected and unavoidable. Then mobility by foot and horse was augmented by urban mass transit, trains, and steamships. In the 1870s, human-powered bicycles and tricycles were challenged,Ôrite de passage for teenage boys in the 1960s and beyond (Bailey, 1988). For the youth of the 1960s, the Vietnam war marked a generation split by rebellion that quickly spread into the courtship and dating rituals of young Americans. The generations have become increasingly split ever since. As the car became ubiquitous, mobile middle class Americans demanded lodgings away from home. As simple roadside cabins of the 1930s evolved into ubiquitous posh motels for traveling businessmen and vacationing families, they also quietly became convenient places for adult affairs, In more recent years, small privately owned motels have struggled to survive the competition of nationwide motel chains often by offering reduced hourly rates many adolescents can afford. Many major motels also offer hourly and day rates.

 

How might this increasing mobility affect the lives and relationships of men and women in other nations outside the Euro-American sphere? In India and African where most goods are moved by truck, wives are often at high risk of HIV infection because their husbands frequently have sex with prostitutes and what are called minor or traveling wives while on the road. In many areas African and Indian wives are pressing for regulation of prostitution and changes in the social acceptance of minor/traveling wives (Francoeur 1997: 596-597).

 

11. LEISURE AND AFFLUENCE

Colonial Americans were burdened by hard manual labor, from sun-up-to-sun-down, 6 or 7 days a week, as long they had the strength. There was no retirement or pensions plans. In 1935, Social Security gave some support for the 95 percent of elderly Americans who then lived in poverty. With increasing mechanization, unionization, and an expanding economy, half of the U.S. work force adopted a 40 hour work week in the late 1940s. The number of DINKS, couples with double income and no kids, continues to increase significantly. While older American men may enjoy increased leisure, their wives frequently cannot escape their dual commitment to home and workplace. The younger generation, on the other hand, appears to be more flexible and sensitive to balancing home and work commitments for both husbands and wives, and parenting for both sexes.

 

12. SEA CHANGES IN THE VISUAL ARTS

(The following technological developments were quickly adapted to satisfy the age-old male interest in pornography.)

1276 - First European paper mill;

1455 - Guttenberg's Bible;

1477 - William Claxton prints the first books of popular literature;

1837 - Practical photography;

1903 - First full-length movie;

1906 - First radio program broadcast;

1927 - First talking movie;

1940s, 1950s - Television full-time broadcasting;

1953 - Playboy and Penthouse magazines;

1970s to present  - Cable TV, videocassettes and cam corders allow convenient and private        viewing of sexually explicit material in home.

 

In the past 50 years, print media, radio, and television have responded to the growing public interest in sexual titillation and information. Since the 1960s, unconventional lifestyles have provided grist of the tabloids and talk©shows, but there is also an educational function. Media presentations of the sex research of Kinsey (1948, 1953) and Masters and Johnson (1960s) increasingly legitimized public discussion of previously taboo sexual topics and issues. In recent months, media treatment of the White House sex allegations and Viagra have also increased public discussion of oral sex, impotence, and extramarital and comarital affairs at the family dinner table and the work©place. American day-time soaps, Jerry Springer, and others present a constant diet of sex and infidelity. In advertising, the breakthrough was probably Proscar, with its actual PICTURE of where the prostate gland is in relation to the penis and testes. Cornog and Perper (1996) have documented a sharp increase in all forms of sexuality publications, but especially in mass market trade books designed for audiences ranging from conservative Christian to radical New Age readers. They propose that diversity of viewpoint and opinion, NOT uniformity, is the hallmark of this increase. Although conservative institutions, such as many public libraries, have been slow to recognize this upsurge in publication of books about sexuality, the large chain bookstores, and, more recently, the web bookstores, have been very quick to recognize that "the self-help sex book" is a hot-selling genre in publishing.

 

And then there is the WWW, the World Wide Web, and CyberSex on the Net. In Iran, Islamic fundamentalists have tried to limit access to cable television. But Baywatch, Wrestlemania, Dynasty, Moonlighting, American and European talk shows dealing with sex, soft pornography from Turkey, and an Asian version of MTV still reach many Iranian homes via Hong-Kong-based Star TV satellite broadcasts (Francoeur 1997, 633-634). In India, traditionalists denounce romantic films, which promote new male/female gender roles and marriages based on love rather than parental arrangements (Francoeur 1997, 580). In Afghanistan, the Taliban militia smash television sets. Meanwhile American Southern Baptists boycott Disney productions for promoting homosexuality and anti-family values, But how effective are these reactionary campaigns in this age of satellite communication, faxes, e-mails, and the WWW?

 

13. MUSIC AND DANCE

For centuries, traveling and local actors and musicians, religious rituals, community festivals, and amateur artists in the family.

 

14. CONSERVATIVE COUNTER TRENDS

Along with these many ecosystem changes and the adaptations they are triggering, there are several realities that work against any change. First and foremost are the epidemics of AIDS and hepatitis C. And, on the religious side, the Moral Majority in the 1970s and more recently, the Christian Coalition, Promise Keepers, and other religious conservatives who opt for literal interpretations of St. Paul's two-thousand year old teaching on the wife's servant submission to her husband. And a religious and social backlash against feminism and homosexuals driven by fears that all these social changes are the warning of the Second Coming, the Apocalyptic End of this World, and the impending Rapture of a chosen few. These counter-trends have had to adopt modern techniques to reach their audiences -- especially televangelism. By doing so, they have entered a television marketplace as one more channel, one more talk show, one more item in the massive variety of voices that besiege us all. The religious conservatives no longer have a special pulpit, which used to be the Sunday preacher entertaining all and sundry in a farm-town with apocalyptic prophecies. Now the televangelist has to compete with World Cup Soccer, Jerry Springer, the RuPaul show, the Weather Channel, and whatever your local news channel is. In this, the religious voice has been displaced from a Sacred Place to being only one more television show. The voice of God is no longer special, nor, for many people, very entertaining. The love story in "Titanic" may have more appeal than the Sermon on the Mount. THAT is what the new media have done.

 

(End of Part I) -- Proceed to Part II

 

 

 

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In Part II of his paper, Dr. Francoeur recasts his observations (Part I) in terms of a question based on the concept of "noogensis" -- a term coined by the paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin to describe the evolution of human consciousness, within which the first major transition would have come about when humans became sufficiently concentrated in certain localities that became the so-called "cradles of civilization", most of them arising at what others have called "the First Axial Period" in human history. Are we at the threshold of a new axial period?  And if so, why? And what is the changing role of sexuality in this period? Is it a major cause of or is a result of this transition -- or is it both?

 

Part II:  An Apocalypse, or Second Major Transition in Noogenesis?

 

These historical changes surround us all, sometimes rather too noisily. They contain both Daily Concerns and Deeper Questions. So let me ask one of those deeper questions. Is it possible that the changes we have seen, and will continue to see, are merely minor shifts and readjustments of an essentially stable system? In this view, little is genuinely new in television, birth control, the world wide web, Princess Diana's affair, or even international corporate mergers. On the other hand, it is possible that these changes represent a truly "radical" shift in the history and future of human life and society?

 

In the remainder of my talk, I will argue for the second view -- that we are in the midst of genuinely deep shifts in human society. Such things have occurred before. The agricultural revolution comes to mind immediately, as does the birth of the town and city. Abbreviating a long and complex history, we see that the birth of agriculture and urban centers five-thousand years ago -- the First Axial Period -- marked a pivotal revolution in the structure of societies, reflected in new patriarchal hierarchies in civil and religious life, as well as marriage and family, that have endured to the present century. Today these patriarchal hierarchies are being challenged everywhere, in the family, in politics, and religious institutions. The Second Axial Transition is well underway. The changes I described above, the changes our grandparents, parents, we and our children have experienced in this century are not only well under way, but are, barring a nuclear holocaust, irreversible. I suggest that the changes described above are just as radical as those symbolized in the earliest myth of Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Holy Whore, the Priestess of Ishtar (Rojcewicz 1993; Rosten 1993) and documented by many archeologists, most notably the controversial Marija Gimbutas (1= 989) and futurist Riane Eisler (1988).

 

The First Axial Transition, from what historian Karl Jaspers (1953) calls the "Pre-axial Era" to the early Axial Period urban cultures, was centered in the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia, in Central America, the Niger River valley of Africa, the Indus River valley, and China's Yellow River valley. It took a couple of thousand years to flower into urban civilizations of ancient Sumer, Ur, Babylon, and Assyria. Our current Second Axial Transition is off to a very fast, exponential start that is taking us into a new orbit within a couple of generations.

 

The First Axial Transition was powered by analog alphabets and words inscribed on clay tablets. Our Second Axial Transition is being powered by the visual images of television, the computer's binary digital alphabet sent into cyberspace, and decoding the four-letter DNA language written in our genes.

 

Are we in the midst of a Second Axial Transition, similar in magnitude to the First Axial Transition five thousand years ago? Or can we continue "business as usual" in the brave new world described above?

 

The answer is No, and it's a clear No.

 

Remember female controlled birth control, which makes it impossible to return to a life style in which the wife is pregnant every second year. Remember that religious institutions, once unchallenged in their control over sexual morality, no longer have a privileged pulpit, but must now compete on television for audiences. What we see among the affluent, in the "developed world" is spreading through television itself, as hundreds of millions of women in the "developing world" see, literally see, a way to live that they desire for themselves.

 

But what about HIV/AIDS? The latest United Nations report tells us that HIV/AIDS now equals the greatest plagues in human history, the Black Death and the 1918 influenza epidemic. Two-thirds of the 30 million persons living with the HIV virus are in Sub-Saharan Africa where one in four adults is affected. How will this affect our views of sexual intimacy in the next century? Most likely, the outcome will be massive deaths. No mechanism is now in place worldwide that can deal with AIDS. So we have our next major dimension of collapse vs. cohesion. The issue of medical care will prove crucial. In the "developed countries," the issue is how to allocate medical care to a population that wants and can pay for some care, but not all. Triage is inevitable, and with it comes a demand for a decent way to die, not in the county old-folks' home, but with dignity and in peace.

 

For "developing countries," the issue is not terminal care for the elderly, but care for women, for children, and for men and women in the work force.That in turn requires more medical personal, more equipment, more pharmaceuticals, and social policies about payment. Basically, the only two choices are forms of socialized medicine or forms of privatized health insurance. But no country can choose one or the other in isolation: medical information comes to Mozambique from the outside, and so Mozambique is connected to the rest of the world. We are facing "international medicalization" -- and it too acts for cohesion of the world's nations, not their splintering apart. The spur to medicalization will be fear, plain old fear. Most nations, developed or developing, are experimenting with medicalization -- and no one knows the right answers. Yet. it will cost millions of lives before we do figure it out. But the more people die, the greater the fear and urgency.

 

Will the flood of environmental changes in our Axial Transition make it easier or harder for men and women to find financial and emotional security in a world that otherwise seems to be going berserk? One key factor in determining this outcome will be the still evolving relation-ship between the multicultural mega-corporations, individuals, and their families. A second factor will be the way we deal with our changing awareness of our sexuality. Life in a world of impersonal mega-corporations is very different from life on the rural frontier farm. A lot more is demanded of men and women in a prefigurative society with considerable gender role fluidity than in the Victorian age where limited alternatives left most people locked in clear, rigid gender roles and limited sexual expectations.

 

In the United States, gender role fluidity is associated with being straight or gay. In other countries, it is associated with women working, women being educated, women taking positions of greater power in political systems. We can see the world too easily through American eyes, and imagine that everyone is worked up about homosexuality or cross-dressers and transsexuals. After all, WE are. But that's because we have settled some more basic issues of day-to-day concern, like where the next meal is coming from. The major issues of gender in the world center on women's status not in bed, but in the world of politics and finance. As long as women have babies, and men don't, there will be irresistible forces behind women seeking access to the economic system. Individual women may trust to being sexy or seductive to obtain the wherewithal of life (this is David Buss's alleged "evolutionary" claim about women), but as a group, women will try to obtain direct access to finances. The reason is that they must do so; their own lives and the lives of their children depend on doing so. As a group, women cannot rely solely on men to get money. In some societies, this will mean that women will hold onto land for farming and horticulture, and hang on to it for dear life. In other societies, it will mean that women form women's cooperatives for making trade goods -- anything from baskets to clothing. In other societies, it will mean education for women, because education is the only way into the security that employment in the world corporations offers. In still other societies, it will mean changing the nature of the family, about which more below. But in all cases, women must enter the domains of men, because that is where the money is, not for luxury items, but for food, medical care, and child support.

 

 

 

A Cautious Prognosis for an Evolving, Converging World

 

Based on my study of sexual attitudes and behavior in 32 nations on six continents as compiled by 135 experts for The International Encyclopedia of Sexuality (Francoeur 1997), I anticipate the following developments in the next century. No one can say for sure whether Euro-American moral-erotic issues are of cutting edge significance to the rest of the world. So my my projections are limited. My projections are also fragile because I must frame them within the dual dimension of the future of the family and marriage and the future of sexual-erotic feelings and behavior.

 

Families, especially outside the Euro-American world, are basically economic arrangements, or, more accurately, have powerful economic roles. This refocuses our attention not so much on women's (or men's) sexual feelings and disappointments, but on women's financial expectations and needs. The family, as an institution, is stable only as long as it functions economically -- otherwise, people quickly invent other forms of relationship that do function economically. To be sure, families are supported by a superstructure of religious and traditional belief -- supernatural sanctions and so on -- but those can change very quickly if money and food aren't coming in. So I see a gradient of concerns here -- some active in North America and Europe and others active elsewhere in the world.

 

For centuries, the family has been both an economic institution and a pair-bonded erotic unit, like two sides of the same coin. During most of our evolutionary history, these functions were identical, because we lived in hunter-gatherer systems. But in the modern world, economics and erotics have been sundered. All other things being equal, as economic stress increases, the erotic components of the family dwindle and become less significant, and as economic stresses decrease, the erotic component becomes more important.

 

Furthermore, the modern world has taken economic decision-making power away from the family, as an inevitable result of corporatization. But corporatization has not thereby made the economic problems of the family any easier -- the family still bears the brunt of economic necessity. For example, when land is taken up with cash-cropping, the family loses its family plot and the labor they once devoted to growing their own food. Yet they still must eat -- and so the economic issues grow more and more important at the day-in, day-out level.

 

Can marriage and the family -- however defined -- survive such a challenge? My argument basically says No. It will change towards becoming increasingly eroticized, together with various polyamourous supplements. But my argument also needs to incorporate the "intervening variable" of economic stress.

 

For example, one of the major issues confronting women moving into the corporate world outside of the U.S.is sexual harassment. For the corporation, the most functional solution is to deprive women of access to the corporation, thereby creating all-male economic enclaves. But, if women's economic status worsens -- as it must if they depend solely or primarily on men for money -- then women must, and will, try to enter the corporate world. The result is inevitable -- the assumption that such women are sexually available to the higher-echelon males. But even in a polygynous society, such alleged availability puts splinteringly great stress on the family -- the man who treats the women employees as his own private harem does not "respect the sanctity" of the family, in whatever way "respect" and "sanctity" may be defined in his culture. The women, we may assume, would be much happier to work in their homes and on the land, where they have networks of female relatives and friends, but they need to work in this damned job. That situation is not stable, not in Iran, Iraq, Sub-Saharan Africa, China, Japan, India, or Indonesia, in brief, for 75 percent of the world's population.

 

Once upon a time, maybe men could work on the land and make their craft things like farm tools and the women could raise the children and harvest the fruit and grain and milk the goats. But that world has vanished or is vanishing, thanks to industrialization, international development agencies, and corporatization.

 

So where are the major social changes described above taking us?

 

As a "prefigurative culture," a culture whose patriarchal myths and archetypes handed down from ancient times are no longer meaningful or supportive of the male-defined sexual codes of the Axial period, we are being forced to create new myths, new superstories to inspire us in coping with the changes that bombard us from all sides. The power of our traditional myths and archetypes has faded because Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, and Einstein have pushed us out of the ancient fixed world view with its unchanging hierarchy of the Great Chain of Being into a world of process and evolution. Fears of the ever-accelerating, radical changes in our social environment have in this century made it possible to argue that we are self-destructing. A careful reading of the ecosystem, and my optimistic bias, suggest that we are in fact moving into a new global culture that will require a radically new awareness and consciousness of self and the individual facilitated by the instant communications of our electronic world. Our relationship with ourselves, with others, with society, and with the world that is our nurturing womb are all affected by this new ecosystem (Abraham 1994; Eisler 1988; Ehrenreich 1987; Francoeur 1973, 1996; Groff 1996; Jaspers 1953; LaChapelle 1988, Teilhard de Chardin, 1959, 1964, 1970).

 

1. Our new myths will have to deal with the fact that women have sexual rights and needs equal to the male. And that they are increasingly entering men's domains, the salaried work force, dealing with men on their own level, and regaining some of the power they enjoyed in the pre-axial era.

 

2. Our new myths, religious and civil, will have to deal with new challenges to the phallocentric, coital male model of sex and a growing shift to a holistic model, described by women, that emphasizes sensual pleasure, ecstasy, and transcendence as well as orgasm, with orgasm not limited to coital penetration (Ehrenreich 1987; Ogden 1994).

 

3. The value of pair-bonding, often long-term despite the availability of divorce and our increasing life expectancy, will continue to be important in our emotions and sexual codes. Will our pair-bonding be dominated by nuclear marital couples, by divorce and remarriage, by adults cohabiting, living alone together (LAT) and maintaining two households while in a long-term intimate relationship, or other dyadic arrangements? More likely, as blood kinships shrink in the nomadic life of the 1990s and beyond, their role in supporting a stable and dynamic society will be increasingly replaced by intentional families and intimate networks created by pair-bonding individuals who openly or quietly accept and include emotional and sexual intimacies within a fluid matrix or network of more or less intimate friendships that increasingly cut across the spectra of married and single, ages, and gender orientations. The monogamous pair-bonding expectation may remain for some generations as a fading but still powerful, guilt-producing myth, but that will not stop men and women from quietly exercising their polyamorous nature, especially in a world of increasing life expectancies, mobility, contraception, etc. The developed nations already have a rich mosaic of different lifestyles, and individuals choosing this or that style at different periods of their lives. The common response of the British people, Americans, and Frenchmen to media reports of Princess Diana's extramarital quests for love, President Clinton's alleged philanderings with a variety of young women, and the presence of the wife, daughter, and mistress and her daughter at the state funeral of President Mitterand suggests this more flexible view of marriage. "We understand. And we and the world love her." "More power to him. Besides, who cares; he's doing a good job." And as for Mitterand, "What's new? We French are realistic and mature when it comes to love and marriage." (Koch and Weis, 1998:3-5).

 

4. Sexual morality will increasingly be based on qualities like mutual responsibility, growth, love, joy, and transcendence developed in the relationships whatever the gender of the parties involved rather than on the nature of genital acts motivated by procreation and licensed by marriage. (Koch and Weiss 1998:18-29; Kosnick et al. 1977; United Presbyterian Church, 1970).

 

5. The sexual codes of the future are already breaking out of the clear gender dichotomy that has dominated our axial cultures. The rigidity of the male/female sexual dichotomy, in which physicians routinely performed surgery to assign the roughly 4 percent of babies born in the developed countries with hermaphrodite and pseudohermaphrodite status to either the male or female sex, is being challenged by the affected individuals and their advocates who increasingly demand to be left in their intersex status and accepted as such (Fausto-Sterling, 1993; Lebacqz 1997). Here Euro-American can learn some reality from the recognition of "third-gendered persons" have in many non-Euro-American cultures, the hijra in India, xanith and kaneeth in the Middle East, berdach among Native Americans, kathoey in Thailand, and mahu and shark women in Hawaii and Polynesia, among others.

 

6. More obvious in recent decades has been the social, legal, and religious recognition of the gender orientation spectrum or rainbow of flavors in homosexualities, heterosexualities, and bisexualities, including the civil rights and legal recognition of domestic partnerships and gay unions. Similarly, we are experiencing an increasing fluidity in our gender role behaviors, the near infinite varied spectrum of masculine, androgynous, and feminine, which exists in each of us, no matter where we find ourselves on the sexual orientation and gender identity scales. At the same time, recent research suggests ever more evidence will be uncovered for biological tendencies behind our gender identities, roles, and orientations originating in our genes, chromosomes, hormones, family pedigrees, and neural anatomy. This knowledge will in the end overthrow the male-female dichotomous thinking that has dominated Western culture from the days of Socrates and Plato.

 

7. One final prognosis, based on cultural multiplicity. The face of any large country today has been shaped by large and varied waves of immigration. The 1991 Canadian census, for instance, describes the face of Canada as follows:

British (UK) = 28 percent

French or Quebecois = 23 percent

British and French = 4 percent

British, French and other = 14 percent

Other European = 15 percent

Asian = 6 percent

First Nation (aboriginal) =4 percent

Other = 6 percent.

Overall, close to a third of all Canadians reported ethnic origins other than French or British (Francoeur 1997: 226). This diversity holds true for the faces of most nations today. Yet, we are only beginning to recognize and appreciate the cultural multiplicity of our nations. And we know even less and appreciate even less the diversity of sexual attitudes and behaviors that are part of and enrich the many ethnic traditions that are the faces of our nations. So the new millennium will likely bring even greater diversity in our sexual attitudes and behavior.

 

At this point in human history, we have only faint hints of how our consciousness of our sexuality and our individuality, our experience of marriage and family, will change in the next decade or two. We can hope, and work to preserve the best of what has been achieved in the pre-axial and axial periods the benefits those cultures have brought us and incorporate these into our new world.

 

To sum up my exploration of sexuality in the twenty-first century let me quote two aphorisms from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. First, "Tout ce qui monte' converge." --Everything that rises [to higher levels of complexity in the process of evolution] converges [in a new level of consciousness]. And "Union differentiates" --The true union of individuals promotes diversity, not uniformity (Francoeur 1973).**

 

** Readers can find a detailed analysis of the evolutionary premises underlying this paper, as originally articulated by Teilhard de Chardin early in this century along with my critique of what I believe is his faulty and contradictory projection of a future virginal universe in R.T. Francoeur (1973). "Conflict, Cooperation, and the Collectivization of Man." In: G.O.Browning, J.L. Alioto, and S.M. Farber, eds. Teilhard de Chardin: In Quest of the Perfection of Man, Madison NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. pp.226-244.

 

 

 

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Consilience and Ultimate Meaning:

Reflections on E.O. Wilson's Search for the Unity of Knowledge

 

Issue # 11 of DIALOGOS:

An Interactive Journal of the Sciences, Philosophy, and Theology

 

(First Posted Oct. 5, 1998, most recent update 2/2/99)

 

Richard W. Kropf, editor

 

Since its beginning in October of 1996, this journal has been sought to bring together the insights of science, philosophy, and theology in an effort to foster greater understanding and coherence between these disciples. Since then, probably no other book has appeared that addresses this same challenge more directly, at least from a scientist's point of view, than Edward O. Wilson's Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York, Knopf, 1998). The following review essay will serve, it is hoped, as the beginning of continued a DIALOGOS conversation based on this book.

 

CONSILIENCE & ULTIMATE MEANING

 

In his latest book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, (New York, Knopf, 1998) Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson seeks to extend his efforts far beyond those proposed by his groundbreaking 1975 work Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Harvard University Press) -- which itself was considered a very bold proposition at the time. While that earlier work sought to heal the division that still exists between the "hard science" of biology and the "soft sciences" like sociology and psychology, this work proposes to unify all knowledge, including even the fine arts, under the canons of science, which Wilson suggests, especially when it comes to the task of determining "where we came from and why we are here", might be seen as "religion liberated and writ large." (page 6)

 

Not that this hasn't been tried before. In this attempt, Wilson harks back to the efforts of the Ionian philosophers of ancient Greece to discover the ultimate reality, followed by a fast-forward to the encyclopedists of the Enlightenment and their attempts to sum up all human knowledge in an orderly fashion, who if not quite so ambitious as to expect to explain all reality, sought to reproduce an updated version of renaissance man. Either way, one great problem soon arises. As the sheer bulk of scientific knowledge increases, so does the need for specialization, with the resulting fragmentation of human knowledge, so much so that even the top-rated universities of the world have become at most a collection of specialists who "know more and more about less and less" and who are increasingly unable to intelligently communicate with other scholars except those who share the same narrowly defined specialty. It is this situation that Wilson most of all wishes to remedy, with evolutionary theory, a virtual "Ariadne's Thread", providing the only scientifically plausible connection between the ever-growing mountains of data, the mere foothills of which could otherwise prove overwhelming to the mere taxonomist.

 

Of course, this discipline-bridging effort isn't new. Even Darwin himself tried his hand at it, speculating on the biological underpinning of human moral instincts, only to be followed by a host of others, ranging from those, who like Wilson, have attempted to carry on Darwin's venture into sociology, psychology, and a few other disciplines, to the full-blown evolutionary theorists and philosophers, each of whom seemed to have his own agenda or overriding vision of the purpose of human life. So what would seem to distinguish Wilson's aim in this latest book is not simply to extend the approach of his earlier effort to all aspects of human knowledge, not on the basis of some grand philosophical theory, but strictly in terms of the empirical evidence. Even more, he remains confident that "good science" -- that which follows the stipulations of scientific methodology, with its insistence on repeatability, economy, mensuration (i.e., measurability), heuristics (the ability to forecast) -- will almost inevitably lead to consilience, which he defines as being not just coherence between one branch of science and another, but as an "interlocking of causal explanation across disciplines."

 

Certainly this is a laudable aim. But is it possible? Although Wilson argues for many other cross-disciplinary possibilities, those which seem to most preoccupy him are nearly all involved with the seat of all our knowledge, hence the mystery of the human mind. For a biologist, of course, this means we must begin with a study of the brain and its neural networks. Only from that sure footing in the hard sciences can we proceed with any confidence into the soft sciences be they sociology, psychology, or even economics. All this seems reasonable, but when extended even further, into the humanities, the arts, or even religion and ethics, does it even come close to being adequate?

 

Nowhere does this question of the adequacy of Wilson's methodology become more critical than when he attempts to deal with the mystery or problem of free will. While Wilson ingeniously suggests that "confidence in free will is a biological adaptation" that "in every operational sense applies to the knowable self", that nevertheless we must realize that this sense of freedom can be traced back to "the principles of mathematical chaos" where "[the] noisy legions of cells ... bombarded at every instant by outside stimuli ... entrain a cascade of microscopic episodes leading to new neural patterns." In other words, if I read him correctly, on the microscopic level, we can say with great scientific confidence -- although the complexities involved will probably forever elude full human analysis -- that our freedom is, in at its very root, determined by chance. Nevertheless, Wilson insists that it is not contradictory to say that "in organismic time and space, in every operational sense that applies to the knowable self, the mind does have free will." Any loss of this conviction would be fatal for the human race. (See pages 118-20.)

 

Although I find this an attractive theory myself (see Dialogos Issue #4 ) I wonder how many will be comfortable with it? I ask this question because I suspect that unless the reader can accept such a paradox, his or her discomfort will become even more acute when it comes to Wilson's next-to-last chapter on "Ethics and Religion" where, as he says, he "puts all his cards on the table." So although he begins this chapter with a somewhat contrived debate between "theistic transcendentalist" and a "skeptical empiricist" (himself), here again, much as he does with the question of free will, he would seem to want to have it both ways. Thus he ends up admitting a certain evolutionary advantage to transcendental beliefs yet at the same time holds to his convictions that all this, be it moral codes, claims of revelation, as well as all claims of mystical experience, will eventually be explainable in much the same strictly empirical terms as our experience of free will. Yet, somehow, the sense of transcendent foundations for religion and ethics, as well as the possibility of a transcendent future must in some way remain. Just as a pessimistic fatalism would be deadly for human evolution unless counterbalanced by a belief in human freedom, so too a life without a sense of ultimate meaning.

 

All of which brings us "To What End?" (the title of the last chapter of Wilson's book). Although Wilson's analysis of the grim ecological choices facing us are highly sobering, one can only wonder why they appear here, and not earlier in the book, perhaps at the very beginning as the prime example of where fragmented thinking has led us. The reason that the subject comes up here, I suspect, is that for Wilson, like for many others, ecological concerns have become the ethical expression of the new religion, the particular permutation of that "ultimate concern" that theologian Paul Tillich once used to describe faith. But this is where Wilson's own "empiricism" -- which he expounds in contrast to his nostalgic but somewhat unflattering characterization of his own religious past -- seems to have failed him. Lamenting the demise of the confidence once supplied by the old faiths, he calls for a "new sacred story" yet predicts the "secularization" not only of the human epic but of religion itself. But need it be so?

 

I think not. Wilson has already admitted (in the previous chapter) that in light of the findings of astrophysics he finds himself leaning toward a kind of "deism", flavored perhaps with bit of "process theology" and culminating with its scientific complement in some all-embracing "Theory of Everything". Does not all this (if not dismissed so quickly, almost as a kind of afterthought) contain some promise of something more? If astrophysics seems to be leading us back more and more towards ultimately theological questions, then logic would also appear to lead us to the conclusion that there may be a theos behind or beneath or more importantly, (especially in light of predictions of an "open" universe) beyond it all. Yet Wilson remains skeptical, even pessimistic.

 

But suppose if one were to take an approach to this ultimate question quite similar to that taken by Wilson regarding the problem or mystery of free will. For example, suppose we were to maintain, strictly on the empirical level of the "hard" sciences, that the universe appears to be entirely self-explanatory and self-sufficient, still, might we not also admit a kind of mysterious or uncanny congruence of "coincidences" that taken all together suggest that there is something more at work here, some kind of plan or intentionality, not unlike that which we experience as human subjects, as "persons" possessing free will? If so, then it would seem to be the same kind of intuition that figures in the debate over some kind of "anthropic principle" at work in the universe, or alternately, what surfaces in the beliefs of some "deep ecologists" regarding a so- called "Gaia theory" or what others, following the lead of Adam Smith, might speak of it as "an invisible hand" guiding the outcome of things.

 

But could there not be even more in the parallel than just a comparative application of levels of perception? Might there not be a real consilience or causal connection between the differing levels that are perceived? Take again the case of human freedom. One might ask as to how or even where free choice might operate if the universe were constructed entirely according to a cosmic blueprint that allowed for no randomness or variation. Even more, how could we conceive of the evolution of free beings like ourselves except through a natural process that balances quantum uncertainty with statistical probability, or which mitigates genotypical predictability with an almost infinite variety of individual traits? All told, there would seem to be more than just a literary paradox in Sartre's complaint that "we are condemned to be free"!

 

Similarly, might there not be more than just contrasting or opposing views regarding the origin and evolution of the universe? Need a purely mechanistic explanation on the level of empirical science necessarily be seen as a contradiction of a deistic or even outright theistic view of evolution as suggested by some forms of the anthropic principle -- especially, if on the one hand, contemporary cosmology seems to be raising theological questions (see especially issue #9 of Dialogos ), while on the other hand, theological problems, like those raised by theodicy or the problem of evil in the world seem to be driven more and more toward evolutionary perspectives? If so, then I would suggest that rather than undercutting belief in transcendence, empirical science, rightly understood, can end up reinforcing it. Contrary to Einstein's fear of the uncertainty principle destroying his faith in Spinozan deism ("I cannot believe God plays dice with the universe") there are others (like the paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin) who have felt quite comfortable with a God who "plays creatively with chance."

 

So if Wilson is correct about the relationship between determinism and free will, might there not also be a similar relationship between the mechanism of evolution, with its interplay of chance and necessity, and the existence of another, higher, transcending purpose or meaning, not just one that we humans create, but an end or purpose that was there from the from the very beginning? I believe so and hope that Wilson might agree. Otherwise I'm afraid that his new "liberated" religion of science will be hardly "writ large" enough.

 

R.W.Kropf 10/5/98

 

For further discussion centered around this book, see The Atlantic Monthy interview with E.O. Wilson, as well as The Wilson Quarterly (no relation) sponsored debate, especially the article "Against Unity" by philosopher Richard Rorty.

 

Some comments from Hugo Blasdel -- who has a doctorate in architecture using research methods from mathematical psychology:

 

While science can provide (at least provisionally) facts, it cannot provide purpose. E.O. Wilson’s science in Consilience is no exception. I do not want to counter any of the well-deserved praise the book has received. I do however have a sense of “waiting for the other shoe to drop” with the book in the end falling short of its implied reach. One might say, quoting appropriate authority, that life’s purpose is to “have life and have it more abundantly”, but that, and any, purpose comes from a shared perception outside of science.

 

Any use of science to accomplish some goal, normally called engineering, is predicated on having explicit (or implied) goals. Having the human genome gives us the backbone of the nature side of the nature/nurture and allows us to explore more fully and clearly the nurture side, but that does not say to what end. The genome will indeed support knowledge of the relationship of man to society, arts, and religion, removing some things from the realm of mystery, but it does not touch central mysteries of “why” and “now what.”

 

Consilience somewhat belies its intent (showing common theoretical models) with regard to complex (or chaotic) systems. Randomness in input through a complex system is said to allow room for free will, freeing us from determinism. Chris Langton of the Sante Fe Institute puts the contrary “The edge of chaos is where information gets its foot in the door of the physical world, where it gets the upper hand over energy.” It is in the face of randomness, the mind (or s/Spirit, or just life) exercises its dominion over the world to make a new order. Life, and life through s/Spirit, makes “information” (meaning) out of the raw “data” of its inputs including as input the paradigms, theories, and facts of science. The science suggested in Consilience can help us cherish the diversity of purpose while finding more in common as the variations due to nature and nurture are identified. The ability of the science of complex systems to find common paradigm across biology, computing, chemistry, sociology, and physics is not of interest to Professor Wilson, who has seen it all in biology “But as an evolutionary biologist familiar with genetics, I have learned little from them” (page 89). While that is unarguable, the paradigms may be useful to those unschooled in the mysteries and legends of evolutionary biology. I would have expected him to be more, well, conciliatory.

 

Life, and choice, rest in several implementations of adaptive order over chaos, the ordering of chaotic chemical reactions in a cell which allows life at that level to persist. At a second level the ordering of vast numbers of cells into a creature that exhibits more complex behavior to maintain life but with consistency that preserves the whole so that it can persist and breed. The third level brings neurons and complex processing of complex information to aid in survival, and before we can talk about it we are at a fourth level of language and asynchronous behaviors (information stored for delivery later). Each level builds on the prior although the behavior emergent is not directly derived from it or even predictable. There is a nagging thought that the net is not larger than life but naturally (at the level of information), and gradually, organizing us all in a manner quite unlike Wilson’s ants. The net may be in concert with the same larger-than-life (as we know it) purpose as those ants, creating an integrative entity, but this phenomenology seems not in the realm of sociobiology however driven it may be by the many individual decisions of its surfers. Outside of Consilience and science, we may even find that things organize themselves and find purpose drawn not out of the past or controlled by the present, but drawn by a future that we cannot see clearly but can approach as heuristically(learning by doing) as we have been doing (See John F. Haught, CTNS Bulletin, Winter 1998).

 

By emphasizing the genome and common paradigms, Wilson may be missing what is common to life and its enterprise which I call the “generic heuristic”, which is simply “try again”. An aspect of this process, for life and its abundance, is that small changes do not make big differences but that living systems are self-stabilizing and self-improving. Life tames chaos, within limits. The genome, art, science and theology are buckets for putting the resulting bits. In this sense theology, treated all to lightly by Wilson as contingent, is the highest expression of shared goals, carefully expressed so as to preclude no good or favor any wrong. Theology draws on the sciences to consider goals and to avoid considering contingencies as ultimate, but in dealing with science, theology, and any humanity expressing purpose, [theology] is at no risk of being another discipline merged in consilience. Science, even Wilson’s marvelously integrated science, is a metaphorical donut to theology’s (w)hole, the better the defined the surroundings, the more apparent the boundary and the clearer the need for a ultimate core.

 

(With the permission of Hugo G. Blasdel-- who retains the right to publish his remarks in whole or part, elsewhere)

 

 

 

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FAITH: SECURITY or RISK? -- The Psychodynamics of Belief

 

Issue #12 of  DIALOGOS:

An Interactive Journal of the Sciences, Philosophy, and Theology

 

Richard W. Kropf, editor

 

Editor's note: In seeking to explore possible avenues of convergence between the sciences, philosophy, and theology, this issue of DIALOGOS ventures into the area of psychology, and more specifically, the psychology of religion. In several past issues of this journal, but most particularly in issue #6, ("The Jesus of History and the Future of Faith") there has been either a distinction made between "faith" and "belief(s)" with possible other references made to this editor's book, FAITH: SECURITY & RISK  (Paulist Press, 1990) . After conferring with several of the DIALOGOS editorial consultants, it has been decided that it might be good to present a synopsis or summary of it's main points although in a manner focused less on spiritual growth and more on the varieties of belief -- as well as non-belief. Or one might see this article as an "abstract" of the book itself, which is written in a more concrete style, and is now available at the author's personal website. (To access the book directly, click here .)

 

Faith: Security or Risk?

 

An author's retrospective view of  his own book, by Richard W. Kropf

 

The approach presented by the book represents a synthesis of an number of themes drawn from several authors, each of which addresses a specific aspect of either psychological theory -- developmental psychology on the one hand, and existential "logotherapy" on the other -- or in the case of the distinction between faith and belief, what might be seen as a kind of philosophical "linguistic analysis" between these two closely related terms. We will begin with this latter element.

 

A Key Distinction: Faith vs. Belief

 

The core insight in this regard is taken from Wilfrid Cantwell Smith's insightful study, Faith and Belief (Princeton University Press, 1979). While admittedly taking advantage of the dual terminology afforded by the English language, Smith, perhaps rather arbitrarily considering the way meanings change, made a semantic distinction to more clearly separate two related aspects of religious faith or belief. To Smith, "faith" is more an attitude of mind or disposition, or as some have put it, more properly a verb ("faithing"?) than it is a noun. Or as theologians, backed by a multitude of scripture scholars and historians of religion would generally admit today, despite a variety of meanings attached to the word down through the ages, "faith" can best be described in terms of "a loving trust".

 

"Belief", on the other hand, while it could simply serve as the Anglo-Saxon cognate of the Latin-derived "faith", has come to mean, particularly when spoken of in the plural ("beliefs"), a series of mental concepts or formulated propositions that are held to be true, at least in various degrees of certainty, yet none of them "provable" in the contemporary scientific sense. Some may be questions of historical "fact" others of what we call "scientific law" or simply accepted common-sense interpretations of repeated human experience. Thus, strictly speaking, I can say I "believe" that the sun will make its reappearance tomorrow morning, but unless I belong to one of the ancient sun-worshiping religions, it couldn't really be said I have "faith" that this is so. Thus it should be noted that even some of the most fundamental presuppositions of modern science, such (as Einstein noted) the universe making sense, or that the laws of physics are everywhere uniform, or that our scientific methods of ascertaining reality are, on a whole, reliable indicators of what is, in fact, the case -- all these are also matters of belief in much the same way. So when it comes down to it, much of what we understand as being "science" is as much a matter of belief as is many a religion.

 

While the importance of this faith vs. belief distinction may not be evident to begin with, it is nevertheless extremely important to keep in mind. The rest of this article (as does the book itself) attempts to adhere to this terminology.

 

The Stages of Faith

 

The second major element in this synthesis is derived from the work of theologian and religious psychologist James W. Fowler, whose monumental study The Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest For Meaning (Harper & Row, 1981) drew on the pioneering work of the developmental psychologists Jean Piaget and the Lawrence Kohlberg, who documented distinct stages of both cognitive (Piaget) and moral (Kohlberg) reasoning as they unfolded in children and adolescents. Fowler then correlated the results of these studies to the model of life-stage development presented in the work Erik Erikson, one in which each stage draws to a conclusion precipitated by a crisis of some sort out of which a new resolution or synthesis needs to occur if development is not to cease or become distorted by unresolved problems left over from an earlier stage.

 

Using both the cognitive indicators (such as degrees of abstraction, etc) as well as moral indicators (as revealed by motivational factors) Fowler conclude that there are at least seven distinct stages of faith development possible -- if one goes back far enough into the origins of human trust. These stages are as follows (with Fowler's terms in italics, and my own preferred terms underlined) along with a brief description of each:

 

    1st. Undifferentiated or Primal or Instinctive Faith:

    the fundamental attitude of trust found in an infant, but lacking any distinct cognitive or moral reasoning.

 

    2nd. Intuitive-Projective Faith:

    characterized by magical thinking and moral(?) behavior based on punishment and reward.

 

    3rd. Mythic-Literal Faith:

    conceptualized in terms of concrete examples (stories) and literal understanding of myth; moral reasoning could be described as "instrumental hedonism" -- much as the above but a long-term perspective (e.g., heaven vs. hell).

 

    4th. Synthetic-Conventional Faith:

    tacit acceptance of multidimensional symbolic meaning; emphasis on peer group behavior with a "law and order" perspective on morality.

 

    5th. Individuative-Reflexive or Personal Faith:

    explicit reconceptualization, tendency to reject mythological symbolism;

    individualistic and relativistic "ethics" replacing inherited moral imperatives.

 

    6th. Paradoxical-Consolidative or Conjunctive Faith:

    polymorphic recovery of symbol and the power of myth; rediscovery of a universal ethic expressed within various moral systems.

 

    7th. Universalizing or Unitive Faith:

    characterized by more or less complete "transparency" of belief with a sense of universal identification with Being and dedication to its universal fulfillment.

 

Of course, there are apt to be people who reject the whole idea of stages of faith to begin with. For them you either have faith or you don't. But subsequent sampling carried out by the Gallup Organization for the Religious Education Association of the United States and Canada revealed the basic accuracy of these patterns as established by Fowler in a much smaller but much more detailed study. But even then, certain comments are in order.

 

One result, that a very large proportion of people seem to fall into the fourth or "conventional" faith stage is hardly surprising (one reason for calling it "conventional" surely) considering that both Piaget and Kohlberg's earlier studies revealed that most people's cogitative potential and moral reasoning generally cease to develop beyond this stage -- usually reached sometime during mid-adolescence - - even though Fowler himself claimed there could be no strict correlation between these stages and chronological age.

 

If that is often true beyond adolescence, at the same time it throws (I think) some light on one troubling phenomenon that does not seem to fit, and that is why so many people who seem to have advanced beyond a purely conventional faith into a more personal commitment, at the same time seem to revert to a style of believing (namely literal, one-dimensional "fundamentalism") that appears outright childish and naive. Or to take another and clearly opposite example, why is it that, again, so many people who appear to have moved beyond conventional religiosity, end up stuck in a personal stance that is clearly anti-religious? (Notice that I don't say anti-belief. In fact, one of biggest ironies here, as G.K. Chesterton noted years ago, is that a very common result of people losing their faith is not that they end without any beliefs but rather that they end up believing almost anything at all -- how else explain some of New Age manias?)

 

Finally, why is it that even those who seem to have progressed into a more reintegrated and universal perspective such as that found in "conjunctive faith" so often seem to lack the inner peace or energy found in those very few persons (Fowler found only one among to some eighty people he interviewed) who seem to have reached the final "unitive" stage? This is a particularly vexing question, because in terms of their cognitive and moral-ethic reasoning, these last two stages are almost indistinguishable?

 

One easy answer to this last question is that such persons are probably those rarest of people that we tend to call "living saints". But that conclusion only reiterates the more basic question: why do people tend to stop at one any particular stage in development, more or less frozen or paralyzed in place for the rest of their years?

 

Answering this question leads us to the third, and most important factor or element in the synthesis.

 

The Security Catch

 

I believe the recently deceased psychotherapist-philosopher Viktor Frankl is the one who can give us the best key to understanding this whole phenomenon. In the best-selling book ever to emerge from the horrors of the Nazi-driven holocaust, Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy (New York, Pocket Books, 1959) enunciated a principle that is clear for all to see -- that human happiness or fulfillment cannot come as a result of the pursuit of pleasure or power or whatever, but only as by-product of a life lived within the context of meaning, a purpose that transcends the individual self. As Frankl never tired repeating to his audiences (but especially his American ones) you can "pursue" happiness, but you'll never find it that way. Happiness can only "ensues" that is, come as a "spin-off" of something much greater than the quest for our own fulfillment.

 

In this radically "existential" (some say that Frankl coined this term that was to take over much of the post-war philosophical world) departure from both the Freudian and Adlerian schools of psychotherapy, Frankl also started his own school of "logogtherapy" that is, a psychotherapeutic technique based on the conviction that most cases of neuroses (if not of outright psychosis) are either directly due to a loss of sense of meaning (hence the Greek term logos or "word" connoting "reason", "purpose" and "meaning") in life, and that even much of neurotic behavior can be explained as unconscious attempts to avoid facing that fact.

 

Now how does that principle translate into the subject of faith? We don't have to look far, as one of Frankl's first books, The Unconscious God: Psychotherapy and Theology (Simon & Schuster, 1979 -- actually his first book after he emerged from the death camps, but translated into English only many years later) puts it quite succinctly. Religion, according to Frankl, is "the search for ultimate meaning." and "belief and faith as trust in ultimate meaning." But notice -- and would I particularly urge one to reread this statement in light of Smith's distinction between faith and belief -- that faith in this case would not mean that one is absolutely sure of just what this ultimate meaning is -- only that one trusts that there is one. In fact, to miss this fine point and assume that one has to know, and be able to prove, down to the last detail, exactly what this meaning or purpose to life really is, is not only to demand something that is contrary to the "loving trust" that stands at the heart of faith, but it is also explains, at least in most cases, why any further growth in faith becomes impossible.

 

The reason? It is simply that need for security (for the absolute assurance that one is "saved", or that "God loves me", or that I already know all the answers or know where to find them -- e.g. in a Bible, or in infallible church teachings, or in personal revelations of the Spirit) has become the be-all and end-all of the whole religious quest. Like the pursuit of pleasure (sensual or otherwise) or of power or success for its own sake, faith that seeks assurance above all is a faith that is doomed to stop in its tracks. It is not that such an assurance, if it were possible, is wrong. It is rather that when pursued as the goal of religious commitment, it is apt to become only a disguise for the pursuit of one's own self. Faith is, above all, a risk, the gamble of committing the meaning of one's whole life on something that is ultimately a matter not of certain knowledge, but of trust. Or to put it another way, when one's own need to be absolutely right or correct about everything has replaced all willingness to risk trusting ourselves to something greater than we can understand, we have made an idol of our own need for certainty.

 

But as they say, what is sauce for the goose is good for the gander. Seen in this light, lack of faith is not all that different from a distorted faith. Regardless of what one believes or refuses to believe, the root problem is the refusal to let go of the need to make oneself (whether consciously, or unconsciously in terms of one's inner compulsions) the measure of all things. So even for those who have reached something of integrated, "conjunctive" stage of faith, the lingering distrust, the unwillingness to let go of the last vestige of self-assurance, of self-justification, remains the proverbial thread that tethers the bird, and thus remains, however willing, unable to fly.

 

A Concluding Question: Stages of Disbelief?

 

If the synthesis presented in the book is correct, might there not also be a similar or parallel phenomenon indicating stages of disbelief? Might lack of faith have its genesis in problems of "trust" arising in early childhood? What might be the role of society and/or peer pressure in sowing the seeds of doubt? Can a dogmatic atheism "mature" into a kind of "reverent agnosticism"? What is the role of so-called "apophatic" or "negative" theology? These and many other questions, if not fully exhausted by this book, are surely bound to be provoked by the approach it suggests.

 

R.W.Kropf

March, 1998

 

Comments and Questions:

 

The following question comes from Manitoba:

 

You wrote,"Faith is, above all, a risk, the gamble of committing the meaning of one's whole life on something that is ultimately a matter not of certain knowledge, but of trust." If the implied risk of religious faith is that my trust is misplaced and that there isn't a hereafter, then isn't it true that there is no risk at all since it is impossible that I will ever know that I was wrong? That seems a contradiction to me.

Bob Greenhalgh, Lockport, Manitoba, Canada

 

Response: I guess the risk would be if one went so far as to "living one's life in a way that makes no sense unless God exists" -- but in having done so in vain. Something more drastic than what Pascal envisioned in his famous "wager", where he figured that even if you were mistaken in your beliefs and living a moral life, people would consider you a fine fellow. Today people would criticize you for expecting a heavenly reward! RWK

 

For some further thoughts on this subject, see Patrick Dillon's musings from the "Old Sod".

 

See also Tony Morse's review of Patrick Glynn's recent book.

 

 

 

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Darwin and Natural Law

 

Issue #13 of DIALOGOS: An Interactive Journay of Science, Philosophy, and Theology

 

Introduction:

 

In this issue of Dialogos, we enter into the realm of "sociobiology", a subject greatly popularized in the writings of E.O.Wilson (see Issue #11 of Dialogos) but here discussed with a object of recovering something of the approach to ethical reasoning that has become generally known (and greatly criticized) as the appeal to "natural law".  In the article that follows, which first appeared in Science & Spirit  Magazine, Prof. Arnhart attempts to show how Darwin's own approach to what he considered to be the moral or ethical implications of his thought, which in many ways was similar to that of Aristotle and the later Stoic philosophers, was largely cast aside by his followers who were under the spell of Hobbesian and Kantian currents of thought.

 

While Arnhart's article is written primarily from a historical perspective, we hope that our readers will not hesitate to share their insights as to what this approach might imply in various issues presently facing us -- for example, those raised in Issue #10 regarding the future of sexuality. (R.W. Kropf, ed.)

 

The Search for a Darwinian Science of Ethics

 

By Larry Arnhart

 

The sciences of inanimate nature -- such as physics and chemistry - - would seem to contribute little directly to our understanding of ethics. The life sciences, however, might have more to offer. After all, biology includes the study of human conduct as animal behavior. Indeed, Charles Darwin, in his book on human biology, The Descent of Man, argued for a biological theory of ethics as manifesting what Darwin called "the moral sense."

 

The question of whether there can be a Darwinian ethics is controversial. In the Darwinian tradition of biology, there have been at least two opposing positions. One group I would identify as the Aristotelian Darwinians, and the other as the Hobbesian Darwinians. The Aristotelian Darwinians agree with Aristotle in believing that human beings are, by nature, social animals, and therefore ethics is ultimately rooted in the natural desires of human beings as social animals. The Hobbesian Darwinians, by contrast, agree with Thomas Hobbes in believing that human beings are naturally asocial animals, and therefore ethics arises as a cultural artifice necessary for conquering the naturally selfish desires of human beings.

 

I believe the Aristotelian Darwinians are closer to the truth. They are also closer to Darwin himself.

 

The Moral Debate About Darwinism

 

In 1836, Charles Darwin was 27 years old and had just returned to England after his long voyage around the world on HMS Beagle. He began to record his ideas about natural history in a series of note- books. These note-books, which were intended only for his own private use, show the character of his mind at work more clearly than any of his writing that was written for publication. We see him struggling to formulate for the first time his idea of natural selection. We also see that his intense interest in the moral implications of his biological ideas led him to read widely in ethical philosophy.

 

Darwin was particularly influenced by his reading of James Mackintosh's Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy, which had just been published in 1836. According to Mackintosh, all of the fundamental controversies in modern ethical philosophy were initiated by Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) in his book Leviathon (1651). While Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.) had claimed that human beings are by nature social and political animals, Hobbes had argued against Aristotle that human beings are by nature asocial and amoral beings. Mackintosh criticized Hobbes and insisted that human beings are endowed by nature with a moral sense that approves certain actions without regard to their consequences, although the essential tendency of such actions is to promote the common advantage or general happiness.

 

When Darwin developed his biological theory of human sociality and morality, first sketched in his notebooks and then published later in The Descent of Man, he was decisively influenced by Mackintosh's reasoning. He went beyond Mackintosh, however, in showing how the moral sense could have arisen in human nature as a product of natural selection. Darwin's general claim was that any social animal with natural capacities for speech and reasoning comparable to those of human beings would develop a moral sense. This has led one Darwinian scholar (Robert Richards) to conclude: "Aristotle believed that men were by nature moral creatures. Darwin demonstrated it."

 

Darwin's ethical naturalism revived an Aristotelian tradition that Hobbes had challenged in his denial that human beings were by nature political animals. Against Aristotle, Hobbes had insisted that morality and politics could not be rooted in the animal nature of human beings because of the radical gulf between animal instinct and human learning. Despite the monism of Hobbes's materialism, his moral and political teaching presupposes a dualistic opposition between animal nature and human will: in creating political order, human beings must transcend and conquer their nature. This Hobbesian dualism was elaborated by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) in formulating the modern concept of culture. Culture is that uniquely human realm of artifice in which human beings escape their natural animality to express their rational humanity as the only beings who have a "supersensible faculty" for moral freedom. Through culture, human beings free themselves from the laws of nature. This Hobbesian and Kantian concept of culture supports the common view today that the ideas and methods of the natural sciences can never explain human conduct, because human beings transcend nature through cultural learning.

 

Darwin's argument for the continuity between human beings and other animals denies the concept of culture by denying the dichotomies on which it rests: biology versus culture, nature versus nurture, instinct versus learning, animality versus humanity, facts versus values. As soon as Darwin published his naturalistic theory of morality in The Descent of Man in 1871, he was attacked by some religious thinkers, who insisted on a Kantian separation between nature and morality. Although the human body could be explained as a natural product of biological evolution, in this view, the human soul was a supernatural product of divine creation. As an expression of the soul's transcendence of nature, human morality manifested a uniquely human freedom from natural causality.

 

Biologist Thomas Huxley (1825-1895) defended Darwin against this attack when The Descent of Man was first published. But later in his life, particularly in his famous lecture on "Evolution and Ethics," Huxley tended toward a dualistic theory of ethics. Huxley adopted the Hobbesian-Kantian view that since human beings in their natural state were selfish and asocial, the moral improvement of humanity required a self-abnegating denial of human nature. Because of the "moral indifference of nature," Huxley claimed, one could never derive moral values from natural facts. Interpreting Darwin's "struggle for existence" as a Hobbesian war of all against all, so that there was no natural ground for social cooperation or moral concern, Huxley concluded that "the thief and the murderer follow nature just as much as the philanthropist." Social progress could arise, therefore, only from a checking of the "cosmic process" by the "ethical process," and thus building "an artificial world within the cosmos." This understanding of ethics as an "artificial world" built up through a human conquest of nature showed the influence of the Kantian concept of culture.

 

Thus did Huxley become, in his later years, the founder of what I have identified as the Hobbesian tradition of Darwinism. Like Huxley, the Hobbesian Darwinians assume that the biological nature of human beings inclines them to selfishness and violence, and therefore ethics requires a human conquest of nature through culture. Recently, two of the most influential exponents of this position have been biologists Richard Dawkins and George Williams. Williams, for example, hopes that ethics as a cultural invention can provide "the humane artifice that can save humanity from human nature." Like Huxley, Williams insists that ethics cannot be rooted in human nature because of the unbridgeable gulf between the selfishness of our natural inclinations and the selflessness of our moral duties.

 

Reviving Aristotelian Ethics

 

Aristotelian Darwinians deny this claim that morality must be a cultural construction with no roots in biological nature. Adhering to Darwin's original position, these new Aristotelians argue for investigating the natural history of value and morality, in which the good would be understood as the satisfaction of anima] desires. To some extent, this satisfaction of natural desires is controlled by rigid instincts; but many animals, to varying degrees, satisfy their desires through social learning and flexible behavior. In the complexity of their learning and behavior, human beings differ in degree but not in kind from other animals. Human beings are surely unique in being able to deliberately shape their moral habits and beliefs to conform to some general conception of a good life well lived. But even this capacity for deliberation can be understood as an elaboration of cognitive capacities shared with other animals that have complex nervous systems.

 

Against the assertion that human beings are naturally amoral or immoral, contemporary zoologist Frans de Waal has argued that morality is rooted in our primate ancestry. The view of human beings as innately depraved is not supported by the biological evidence, but rather reflects a Calvinist doctrine of original sin. De Waal explains: Evolution has produced the requisites for morality: a tendency to develop social norms and enforce them, the capacities of empathy and sympathy, mutual aid and a sense of fairness, the mechanisms of conflict resolution, and so on. Evolution has also produced the unalterable needs and desires of our species: the need of the young for care, a desire for high status, the need to belong to a group, and so forth.

 

the biological understanding of ethics as rooted in human nature is Aristotelian because it belongs to the tradition of ethical naturalism that began with Aristotle. For Aristotle, the aim of ethics and politics is to shape moral character to satisfy the natural desires of human beings. In the Nicomachean Ethics, he studies the ethical and intellectual virtues necessary for human happiness. In the Politics, he shows how the social and governmental structures of various political regimes can foster or impede the virtues of human character. Judging human virtues and political regimes cannot be determined by universal rules, he insists, because the diversity in the individual and social circumstances of life requires prudence or practical wisdom, which cannot be reduced to abstract rules. Nevertheless, human nature does provide a universal standard of judgment: human beings are by nature social and political animals who use their natural capacity for reasoning to deliberate about the conditions of their social and political life. Therefore, we can judge political communities by how well they conform to the nature of human beings as political animals and rational animals. We thus appeal to what Aristotle called "natural right."

 

Aristotle was a biologist, and his view of human beings as political and rational animals manifests his biological understanding of human nature. His ethical writings incorporate ideas drawn from his of biological writings. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle compares human beings with other social animals, particularly in explaining the biological basis for parent-child bonding and other forms of affiliation or friendship (philia). In the Politics, he explains the political nature of human beings by comparing them with other political animals such as the social insects.

 

Some of the scholars studying Aristotle have come to recognize the importance of Aristotle's biology for all of his philosophic writing. Some of this new scholarship now suggests that for Aristotle, as Stephen Salkever has said, "ethics and politics are in a way biological sciences." And at the same time, some biologists have shown new respect for Aristotle's contributions to the history of biology. "All of biology," biologist John Moore has declared, "is a footnote to Aristotle."

 

Aristotle's idea of natural right as rooted in biology is fundamentally compatible with Darwin's account of human nature. Like Aristotle, Darwin claimed that human beings are by nature social animals -- coming together first in families and then in larger social groups. He also agreed with Aristotle in deriving morality from human nature. From David Hume Darwin adopted the idea that morality was founded on a natural moral sense, and he explained this moral sense as a natural adaptation of human beings shaped by their evolutionary history. In contrast to Kant's dualistic separation between morality and nature, Hume's idea of the moral sense as rooted in natural human desires is close to Aristotle's position.

 

I would argue for a conception of "Darwinian natural right" as including Aristotle's idea of natural right, Hume's idea of the natural moral sense, and Darwin's idea of the moral sense as shaped by natural selection. In a new book, I defend ten propositions that state this new Aristotelian view of Darwinian evolution and human ethics.

 

( 1 ) The good is the desirable, because all animals capable of voluntary movement pursue the satisfaction of their desires as guided by their information about the world.

 

(2) Only human beings, however, can pursue happiness as a deliberate conception of the fullest satisfaction of their desires over a whole life, because only they have the cognitive capacities for reason and language that allow them to formulate a plan of life, so that they can judge present actions in the light of past experience and future expectations.

 

(3) Human beings are by nature social and political animals, because the species-specific behavioral repertoire of Homo sapiens includes inborn desires and cognitive capacities that are fulfilled in social and political life.

 

(4) The fulfillment of these natural potentials requires social learning and moral habituation. Although the specific content of this learning and habituation will vary according to the social and physical circumstances of each human group, the natural repertoire of desires and cognitive capacities will structure this variability.

 

(5) We can judge divergent ways of life by how well they nurture the natural desires and cognitive capacities of human beings in different circumstances, but deciding what should be done in particular cases requires prudent judgments that respect the social practices of the group.

 

(6) Rather than identifying morality with altruistic selflessness, we should see that human beings are moved by self-love, and as social animals they are moved to love others with whom they are bonded as extensions of themselves.

 

(7) Two of the primary forms of human sociality are the familial bond between parents and children and the conjugal bond between husband and wife.

 

(8) Human beings have a natural moral sense that emerges as a joint product of moral emotions such as sympathy, guilt, and indignation, and moral principles such as kinship, mutuality, and reciprocity.

 

(9) Modern Darwinian biology supports this understanding of the ethical and social nature of human beings by showing how it could have arisen by natural selection through evolutionary history.

 

(14) Consequently, a Darwinian understanding of human nature supports a modern version of Aristotelian natural right.

 

Nature and Nature's God

 

Some religious believers might worry that this Darwinian view of ethics ignores the importance of religion. On the contrary, Darwinian natural right confirms the ethical teaching of religion, at least so far as religious ethics is rooted in human nature.

 

I agree with Sir John Templeton that science and religion ultimately converge, because the ethical "laws of life" taught by religion can be confirmed by modern natural science. He established The John Templeton Foundation to promote research in the natural sciences for the study of those ethical laws. And it would seem that the clearest scientific support for Templeton's "laws of life" would be found in a Darwinian view of ethics.

 

The observational and logical methods of science are founded on our natural human experience of the world. Therefore, the common ground on which science and religion can meet is the natural study of natural law by natural reason. The only kind of religion that can be studied by natural science is natural religion.

 

Templeton believes that the scientific probing of the mysteries of nature should cause us "to pause humbly before the majesty and infinity of what Jefferson called "nature and nature's God." The God who legislated the "laws of life" as laws of nature is the God of nature. And thus the religion that would support belief in and obedience to those laws is a natural religion. Those religious conceptions that are rooted in natural human experience can reinforce the natural moral inclinations of human beings. If there is to be an "experimental theology," as Templeton proposes, it must be a natural theology of human nature as studied by natural science. And the most promising area of science for that purpose is the Darwinian biology of human nature.

 

When Templeton argues that there are universal "laws of life" that determine human happiness -- laws that are confirmed by religious teaching, scientific study, and ordinary experience of the world -- he takes a position similar to that of Thomas Aquinas ( 1225-1274) in his teaching about natural law. Aquinas looked for the common ground between Christian theology and Aristotelian philosophy. As part of that project, he concluded that there is a natural moral law conforming to the natural inclinations or desires of human beings in their striving for happiness. And although this natural law is ultimately a product of God's creative activity, this natural law can be known by natural reason even without religious belief. As distinguished from natural law, divine law depends on belief in God's revelation through the Bible. While natural law suffices for the earthly happiness of human beings, divine law is necessary for their eternal happiness in Heaven. Earthly happiness requires only a natural knowledge of the natural conditions of life on earth, which comes from natural law. Eternal happiness requires a supernatural knowledge of the supernatural conditions for eternal salvation, which comes from divine law. Aquinas's natural law can be understood as a law of human biology. Aquinas sometimes explains natural law in the light of Aristotle's biology. And Aquinas likes to quote the remark of Ulpian, a Roman jurist, that "natural right is that which nature has taught all animals."

 

Insofar as the moral sense is rooted in human nature, it can be understood by reflection on the lessons of natural human experience without any need for religious doctrine. That is what Aquinas means when he separates natural law and divine law. By natural law, human beings need the moral and intellectual virtues to satisfy their natural desires as they strive for earthly happiness. The need for these virtues becomes evident to anyone who thinks clearly about the conditions of human life on earth. This natural understanding of morality does not require religious belief. Nevertheless, belief in divine law can reinforce this natural morality by strengthening the religious believer's devotion to the natural virtues. The ultimate purpose of divine law, however, is not to strengthen the natural virtues but to instill the supernatural virtues, because the aim of divine law is not the temporal happiness of human beings as mortal creatures adapted for life on earth, but the eternal happiness of human beings as spiritual creatures who long for union with their Creator.

 

If we really do yearn to transcend the limits of our natural mortality and attain a perfect happiness beyond death, the pursuit of that happiness must be by faith in revealed religion. But however that may be, we can rest assured that our earthly happiness is securely founded in our nature as mortal animals endowed with a moral sense that serves our natural desires.

 

Larry Arnhart is a political scientist at Northern Illinois University. He is the author of books on Aristotle and the history of political philosophy. His latest book is Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature (State University of New York Press, 1998). His mailing address is 1015 Ashley Drive, DeKalb, IL 60115, USA.

Email: arnhart@aol.com

 

See also the exchange between Arnhart and Michael J. Behe and William A. Dembski in "Conservatives, Darwin & Design: An Exchange" in First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, Number 107 (November 2000, pp. 23-31)

 

For another insight into the understanding of "natural law" as well as the consequences of it's being discarded, see the linked file " The Implications of George Grant's Rejection of Natural Law" by Kenneth Russell.

 

 

 

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Abortion Reconsidered

 

 

 

Note: The following article originally appeared under the title "Abortion: Seeking for a Sensible Solution" as issue #14 of Dialogos: An Interactive Journal of the Sciences, Philosophy, and Theology at the beginning of the year 2000. It has brought, needless to say, rather sharp responses. I have reproduced it here in a new expanded form taking many of the original critism in mind, complete with the original introduction below. I would ask the reader to keep the content of this preface very much in mind, particularly the disclaimers in the third paragraph.

 

No single issue has divided the American public in recent years quite the way that has the topic of abortion. Indeed, since the U.S. Supreme Court decision known as "Wade versus Roe" some thirty years ago, there has been only increasing public polarization over the issue, with a marked increase of partisanship and incivility within our political institutions, and even outright violence. The same has been true even to some extent in Canada, and the issue continues to be a highly volatile one in many other places in the world, especially in those which claim to be heirs of Christian civilization. Yet all efforts to find a logical, moderate, or even simply sensible solution seem to flounder. If there is any growing consensus at all, it seems to be that there is no solution -- other than to agree to disagree and then try to ignore the matter altogether.

 

In face of the most recent advances in both contraceptive as well as reproductive technology, as well as medical experimentation involving things like "stem cells" taken from so-called "pre-embryos", such a state of affairs must not be allowed to continue indefinitely. So this issue of DIALOGOS is going to suggest a philosophically rational approach, which includes a firm grounding in contemporary science as well as a healthy respect for the human values which religion has attempted to defend, in hopes that we might possibly find a sensible solution, or at least one that could guide public policy in a way that might allow some workable compromise.

 

It is not expected that everyone will agree with what will be proposed here. Nor am I suggesting that this proposal represents any position other than those of the editor perhaps modified somewhat by feedback from others, especially those who have agreed to serve on this web-site's editorial consultants staff. Nor should this paper be taken as in any way representing those institutions to which the editor or his consultants may belong. We would also encourage reader's comments -- but with the caution that they review the DIALOGOS editorial policies before they respond.   (R.W. Kropf, editor)

 

Abortion: Seeking a Sensible Solution

 

The Situation Today

 

When one surveys a good part of the literature on abortion, one cannot be but struck by the extremes which this subject inspires, particularly on the part of those who are against abortion in any form. We hear voices raised against what they call "baby-killers", "murderers" and ready comparisons with Auschwitz and the Holocaust. If the rhetoric simply stopped there, it would be bad enough. But open invitations, even exhortations, have even been made by some abortion opponents to incite violence, even leading to outright assassination or homicide in the name of defending innocent life.

 

On the other hand, on the "pro-choice" side (often unjustly termed "pro-abortion" by their opponents -- another breach of civility undermining any attempt to understand a varying point of view) we typically find an emphasis entirely on women's rights, the right to privacy, etc., with a tendency to avoid what is most fundamentally at stake, which is the beginning of another human's life. In other words, while the anti-abortion group tends to simply beg the question, the pro-choice advocates appear to avoid it. And that question is, of course, the actual status of the embryo or fetus -- is it really, truly a "human being" or not?

 

Not that there are not other, even much broader issues at stake, but we think that until this one crucial issue is faced in all its complexity, that the other issues, or at least the complete range of ethical or moral dimensions of this issue cannot be adequately addressed.

 

A: The Role of Philosophy

 

One of the strange things about this whole issue is how little attention is paid to philosophical analysis. Pro-choice people often complain about how the anti-abortion people are seeking to impose their religious beliefs on the rest of society, while the latter, no doubt sincerely, seem to think that their opposition to abortion should no more be seen as a specifically "religious" doctrine than are our criminal laws against murder and homicide or for that matter, against child-abuse. The fact is that almost all these ethical concepts show quite a spectrum or variation of understanding -- as for example what constitutes "abuse" or even "murder", which may even be seen as a form of rough "justice" in some societies, while in contrast, in most modern countries, capital punishment is considered a particularly barbaric form of revenge left over from a more primitive time. So too whether one considers an unborn child as a human "person" or not has deep philosophical underpinnings, even though these opinions may (or may not) take the form of religious beliefs.

 

One way of looking at this phenomenon is to see the anti-abortion or "pro-life" people as "essentialists". For an essentialist, while an acorn may not be exactly the same as an oak, nevertheless they both are seen as belonging to the same species, and therefore an acorn is seen as essentially the same -- a potential oak tree. It has the same DNA or genetic make-up, and given the right conditions, soil, water (and not being eaten by a squirrel) will eventually, even inevitably, become an oak, and not a maple, or a pine, or some other species of tree.

 

On the other hand, the "pro-choice" people are, in contrast, predominantly "existentialists" in their thinking, at least in one sense of the term. Unless something is manifestly existing or functioning according to the specific characteristics of its species, they are inclined to classify it as something quite a bit less than the object, or in the case of human beings, the subject, in mind. Thus when it comes to oak trees, they would certainly insist that they must have trunks and branches, and perhaps produce acorns themselves, before whatever is growing there can be classified as a "tree". And while they may admit that acorns, when left unmolested eventually become oaks, they are hard-put to explain how it is or when it precisely is that the transition takes place that distinguishes the acorn become seedling, become sapling, become tree.

 

Yet another way of understanding this conflict is to look at it from the viewpoint of the history of western philosophy and its influence on our religious and ethical thought. Two philosophical approaches in particular have been combined in Western civilization in various ways to form our attitudes regarding abortion today.

 

One of these -- perhaps the most obvious influence when one looks at the literature and rhetoric of the pro-life movement -- has been the platonic view of the "soul" as an immortal, immaterial "substance", a kind of spiritual "double" of the self that is destined to continue to live on after death simply because it is what it is, and which is something that can exist independently of the body and thus is destined (according to the prevalent Christian version of this understanding) to an eternity in either heaven or hell -- or in the case of unbaptized babies, to a kind of "limbo" in between. There seems to be little awareness among Christians that such a belief in its original form also included a belief in the pre-existence of the soul which was to be reincarnated in a whole succession of lives, not unlike the belief the transmigration of souls still widely held in Asia today.

 

But even aside from reincarnational beliefs, a similar idea that the soul in some sense gives rise to the development of the body (the "preformation" theory) seems to have been held by Hippocrates, the ancient Greek physician whose ethical prohibitions against physicians doing any harm to their patients included a prohibition against administering abortificants. Thus the oath that bears his name was endorsed by early Christianity and became the basis of the traditional ethical code of Western medicine.

 

The other major influence on our Western ideas on the subject was that of Aristotle, who while he also spoke of the "soul", seems to have had quite different ideas about it than Plato or his mentor Socrates. For Aristotle, the soul was not a kind of spiritual "substance" but rather an abstract principle or "form" that gives shape (i.e. "informs") the prime matter or stuff out of which something is made. From this point of view, all living beings were once thought to possess "souls" -- though few of them were necessarily thought to be immortal. Thus plants had plant souls and animals possessed animal souls, each of which gave each organism its species characteristics, while its numerical individuality came from the particular hunk of matter which was so informed or as the medieval scholastics said, in the case of humans, "ensouled".

 

What is most interesting about this Aristotelian understanding, particularly from a modern biological point of view, is that each stage in an organism's development was seen as preparatory to and necessary for the succeeding stage. Thus the first stage of gestation was described as being "vegetative" and could not pass on to becoming "animate" until nature worked through the stage of purely vegetative growth. So too, in the case of human pregnancy, a truly human being, or at least distinctively human fetus, could not be present until the "animate" level of development had been accomplished, which, back then, was thought to take somewhere between 40 to 80 days. Until this middle stage of development was complete, there was, in the opinion of such theologians as Thomas Aquinas, not a enough developed biological infrastructure to support the presence of a distinctively human level soul.

 

Certainly, the science of human embryology, as well as biology in general, has advanced a great deal from the time of Aristotle (4th. century BC) but one cannot but be surprised by the continuing relevance and influence of his views (as in the Roe versus Wade decision of the US supreme Court and the continued furor especially about "late term abortions"). The reasons are obvious. It certainly seems to represent a fundamentally more "scientific" approach -- in the sense of being empirical, i.e., beginning with observation of nature rather than with philosophical presuppositions. It is also, surprisingly (but really no great surprise if one goes back some into the history of Western philosophy) an approach that greatly influenced the views of Christian theology for a long time. It is not that medieval Christians had a lax view of the seriousness of abortion. In fact, all forms of deliberate interference with the natural processes of reproduction (including all forms of contraception) were thought of as serious "sins". But they did not naively think of all abortions, as morally serious as they might be, as equal to murder or infanticide. Robert T. Francoeur, a Catholic biologist and embryologist, drawing on more extensive studies, has summed up the situation in an article published by C.C. Harris and F. Snowden in the volume Bioethical Frontiers in Perinatal Intensive Care (pp. 19-37).

 

    For 400 years, Christian theologians followed Hippocrates' preformation theory and condemned any interference with fetal life. Then, after toying with the idea of a human being preformed in the semen, Augustine adopted Aristotle's view of a series of animating life principles or souls. In the Middle Ages Thomas Aquinas added his authority to Aristotle's view. Between the fifth century and the close of the Middle Ages, terminating the life of a fetus in the first trimester or before "quickening" was not considered abortion or homicide, though it might be an immoral interference with a natural process that could lead to a human being (J. Donceel, Philosophical Psychology, 2nd. ed., and E. Messenger, Evolution & Theology, Sands, 1949. (Op.cit. p. 23)

 

Current embryological research has become much more exact. Were Aquinas and his colleagues around today, undoubtedly they would revise their estimate as to the possibility of "ensoulment" to something as early as between the fifteenth and twentieth weeks of gestation, or in other words, between the fourth and five months of pregnancy. But even dividing the whole process roughly into two, like this, would mean a major change from the kind of all-or-nothing simplistic thinking that seems so prevalent on both sides of the argument today.

 

In the light of this philosophical history, how the widespread opinion, common among religious people -- that there is an immortal human soul present from the moment of conception -- became official dogma, is something of a mystery. Some have suggested that it began with the first experiments with crude microscopes a few centuries ago, when some researchers swore they could actually see tiny little people ("homunculi") in samples of human sperm. Francoeur goes on to recount the story:

 

    As the Renaissance dawned with its emphasis on observation, the idea of a sequence of life principles and the acceptance of early abortion was challenged. At Louvain University, Fienus reported a fully formed human three-day old embryo. Around 1670 the human egg and sperm were first observed in primitive microscopes, opening a century of debate. From all over Europe, professors of medicine announced startling observations of human forms all curled up in the head of the sperm or in the egg, or starting to unfold in embryos only a few days old. If preformed humans could actually be seen in the egg or sperm, then a revolutionary conclusion became logical and inescapable: The soul and the human person must be present from the first moment of conception. Any interference with this fully human person from the moment of conception and even before conception, then, has to be immoral. One theologian even advocated mandatory polygamy to give as many preformed human sperm as possible the chance to develop.

 

    As new observations came in, Pope Sixtus V outlawed all interference with fetuses after conception to save the preformed humans. Three years later, Gregory XIV reaffirmed Aristotle's position and again allowed first trimester abortions, only to be reversed by a later Pope. A century later, in 1775, Fr. Spallanzani experimented with artificial insemination, proving there was no preformed matter in either egg or sperm and that both were essential for conception. Still the preformation theory triumphed in Catholic circles while many Protestant reformers followed Aristotle and scientists with better microscopes and less imagination. (Ibid.)

 

Thus the loss of the fine distinctions made by medieval theology -- no matter how crude their biology -- gave way, despite the advent of modern science, to a return to a platonic view of the soul that was oddly enough never fully compatible with Christian belief. How can this be explained? Certainly there seems to have been a lot of confusion among the early scientists. But perhaps the most obvious answer is that the more "spiritual" view of the soul held by Socrates and Plato never really lost its fascination and grip over human thought. Indeed, the "enlightenment" era which brought the advent of modern science was partly an outgrowth of the Renaissance which, along with its return to ancient Rome and Greece for artistic and literary inspiration, had sparked a revival of platonic thought and neo-platonist philosophy. So it was that the platonic view of the soul which had been taken over (after being purged of its reincarnational ideas) wholesale by the earliest Christian theologians and "read" into Christianity's understanding of the Bible, returned full-force, this time with help of imagined evidence gleaned from microscopic examination.

 

Despite the modifications introduced by the revival of Aristotle's thought, the platonic doctrine of the naturally immortal soul has continued to shape most Christians' thought on the subject and even today, despite brave attempts to rethink the subject (see for example, the attached list of articles that have appeared in the American Jesuit- sponsored quarterly, Theological Studies, over the past fifteen years) continues to haunt the debate. The result has been that religious people today, while thinking of themselves as traditionalists, or even as "fundamentalists" on this issue, have, in reality bought into a philosophical tradition that in reality, may have very little to do with what the scriptures actually say.

 

B: Scriptural Confusions

 

A word count of English translations of the Bible turns up 156 instances (according to the topical index supplied with the Catholic version of the New Revised Standard Bible -- which includes the so-called "Apocrypha") where the word "soul" appears. But in fact, of the five different words in the Hebrew bible that are sometimes translated as "soul", few if any even come at all close to what Socrates and Plato meant when they used the word "psyche". Typically, the Hebrew word "nephesh", which by far and large is the word most often so translated and which seems to have been derived from the word which meant "throat", should be more accurately translated as denoting a "living being" and by extension, in a self- referential way, to one's own life or "self". Three of the other terms sometimes translated as "soul" also refer to various parts of the anatomy, most often derived from the Hebrew k-b-d root, which has to do with the heart, liver, or entrails in general, but which in the form kabod, while it generally means "glory", "honor" and even "riches", is also occasionally translated as "soul", especially when the reference is to the most valuable or expressive aspect of one's self.

 

So how was it that the Hebrew word "nephesh" became so commonly translated as "soul"? This tradition clearly goes back to the Greek Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Scriptures -- so-called because tradition holds that it was the product of seventy Jewish scholars working in Alexandria, then (second century BCE) the cultural center of the "diaspora" (and mostly Greek-speaking) Judaism. This translation is noteworthy for its tendency to modify the more concrete expressions characteristic of Hebrew idiom to more abstract terms provided by Greek vocabulary. Certainly the Greek word "psyche" falls into this latter category, even when it does not necessarily mean what Socrates or Plato meant by the term.

 

It is only when we come to the Book of Wisdom, one of the deuterocanonical books (considered as one of the "apocrypha" by most of the Reformation churches) that was included in the Septuagint, but which instead of being translated, seems to have been originally written in Greek, that we find the psyche and its potential for immortality described in terms vaguely reminiscent of platonic thought. Here we find a description of the soul as escaping from the body to live on in another more etherial realm at death. But overall, despite this fleeting Jewish flirtation with the siren of platonic thinking, the biblical view of the possibility of immortality is NOT predicated upon the existence of some sort of naturally "immortal soul", but instead on the idea of a "new creation" or re-creation effected by the Holy Spirit breathing new life or spirit into the mortal body, in other words, by some sort of "resurrection" at the end of time.

 

As a result, when it comes to the Greek New Testament, where we would expect to find the Greek word psyche, we still have situate the thought of Jesus (who we can assume spoke in Aramaic -- the contemporary equivalent to Hebrew for Palestinian Jews of his time) as being squarely within this continuing Jewish tradition. It is clear that Jesus, apparently siding with the Pharisees (for a change) and contrary to the hellenized Sadducees, insisted on belief in the resurrection. So while the term psyche may appear fifteen times in the four Gospels, it makes little or no sense to translate it in a way that makes Jesus sound like a Greek platonist discoursing on the immortal "soul".

 

Next, if we turn to the epistles of St. Paul as the predominant source of theological understanding in the New Testament, the term psyche is found only at most a dozen times and only then if we count the Epistle to the Hebrews (see Darton's Modern Concordance to the New Testament, Doubleday, 1976). But very few commentators or exegetes think Hebrews was actually written by Paul, and was more likely composed by a disciple with a command of more elegant Greek. That leaves us with only the six indisputable instances of psyche being used by Paul himself, and three of them are usually translated (depending on the context) as "heart" or "mind". In one of the three remaining instances, Paul speaks of "body" (soma), "soul" (psyche), and "spirit" (pneuma), while in some other places where we might expect Paul to speak of the psyche he uses the word nous or "mind" instead. Hence there is good reason to think that by psyche Paul could have meant little more than the sum of our thoughts and emotions, as contrasted to the divinely imparted pneuma or "spirit", which is the real source of eternal life. Otherwise, the whole promise of "resurrection", so central to the New Testament message, whatever it actually means, appears quite superfluous. (For more on this, see The Jerome Biblical Commentary, 1968, Nos. 34:12; 48:29; 77:66.)

 

Nevertheless, despite such a complex philosophical and theological history (or perhaps because of it) pro-life or anti-abortion advocates take a much more cut and dried approach. For them, the essence that makes all the difference between seed and organism, between human and mere animal, is to be found in the presence of the human "soul". Abortion is, in their eyes, "murder", because it is destruction of the life of an organism that no matter how underdeveloped it be, is the bearer of an immortal soul. The question of legal personhood or even of psychological "selfhood" has nothing to do with it. For them, the deliberate termination of a pregnancy represents the taking of a human life which is all the more heinous in that it is a completely innocent and defenseless one. But were the case really that simple. Unfortunately it is not.

 

C: New Problems with Old Arguments

 

As of late, these various ancient ideas (which never did completely agree with each other) have run into a whole new set of problems.

 

For one, the old idea that a "soul" is somehow infused by God into an organism (or alternately, created by the parents themselves) at the moment of its conception, raises a number a serious complications, both biologically and philosophically speaking. The fertilization of the ovum by the sperm is itself a fairly complex process involving a series of stages lasting about 24 hours during which any number of malfunctions might occur. (See Keith L. Moore and T.V.N. Persaud, The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology, 6th. edition, W.B. Saunders Co., 1968, pp.34-36). Thus "conception" is really more of a philosophical concept than a medical one, and which attempts to pin-point an exact moment (when human life begins) while medicine can only point to a division of cells which occasionally may not even result in anything like human life (e.g, the phenomenon of "hydatidiform moles"). Even more, the phenomenon of twinning -- when an additional cell division suddenly begins, sometimes several days after "conception", to divide into distinct individual embryos -- certainly presents great difficulties for the belief in the simultaneous creation of the "soul" upon conception. Were there really two souls to begin with? Or was another soul later created to "inform" this new twin? That this situation persists and can even be reversed during the first two weeks of pregnancy with the possibility that this "pre-embryo" (prior to the appearance of the primitive neural cord), may even be reabsorbed into the reproductive system, makes the idea of a human "person" being present at this early stage highly unlikely.

 

Secondly, we have to face the hard fact of life that far from all conceptions result in pregnancies that can be carried to term. According to authorities cited by Moore and Persaud (Ibid. pp 57-58) large numbers of embryos, perhaps even many as half, are spontaneously aborted, entirely apart from any deliberate abortion. And there are other authorities who would see even these figures as being rather conservative -- some even claiming an embryonic survival rate as low as 16% or less! So if we were to actually hold to the theological opinion that God sees to it that a "soul" somehow comes into existence for every child that is conceived, then we are faced with the mind-boggling possibility that God seems as much interested in populating heaven with the souls of aborted babies as in seeing children born here on earth. And if that were the case, then how could abortion be considered immoral -- particularly when God apparently allows it to happen naturally on a scale that can only be considered wholesale in its extent?

 

Mark Johnson (see article in Theological Studies, No. 56, as noted below) objects that such an argument is more properly a theological objection or a matter for philosophical theodicy rather than a medical or biological one (see Dialogos Issue #4) and would also be weakened by comparison with the rate of infant mortality in past ages. But it could be countered that it is precisely because of the theological difficulty that all these spontaneous abortions presented to Christian consciousness that the doctrine regarding "limbo" (a state of natural happiness apart from heaven) took root. Could a merciful God permit the souls all these unborn children to suffer forever in hell? In any case, the belief that the souls of children (whether born or unborn) are relegated to some kind of eternal fate (whether happy or not) in a way that is entirely divorced from any conscious choice on their part remains problematic to say the least.

 

Third, there is still the philosophical conundrum as to just exactly what is the function of this supposed "soul". We have already seen that philosophically speaking (according to the refinements of Aristotle's thought on the subject) that the soul was thought of as the "form" of the body as contrasted the still unformed "matter" from which the body was shaped. In other words, it was the soul that gave the organism its particular shape or unique characteristics. Today, we assign that role to DNA and the resulting genetic make-up which is distinct for every individual -- except in the case of identical twins or, more recently, clones.

 

Perhaps it is only here, in this latter case, that a distinct "soul" would might be seen as possessing a differentiating function. But again -- if we return to Aristotle here -- it would be not the form (or DNA) that imparts individuality but the "matter" as such. This is why Aristotle seems to have thought that upon death, individual immortality was problematic, and that the human soul, if it continued to exist after death at all, did so only as part of a kind of collective "world soul". This view is also a clue as to why certain medieval Christian theologians, like Aquinas, stressed the need for some kind of a physical resurrection of the dead to insure their immortality as individuals.

 

Nevertheless, despite all these problems and inconsistencies, many good Christians and other religious people seem to have gotten themselves into an impossible bind in this matter, fearing lest backing down on their misreading of both the Bible and of their only half-remembered theological traditions, they destroy or jeopardize the "seamless garment" they have attempted to construct around the very real and vital necessity to revere and protect human life at all stages of development. Certainly this is a worthy cause. But can it be advanced by arguments which avoid the crucial issue that has been addressed here so far?

 

This is not to say that all those who advance this broader agenda are unaware of the problem. Pope John-Paul II in his wide-ranging encyclical Evangelium Vitae ("The Gospel of Life") admits in sections #60 and #61 of this lengthy document that there are those who may have philosophical as well as scientific doubts as to the presence of "a personal human life" for a certain number of days after conception, but counters that "from the time the ovum is fertilized, a life has begun which is neither that of the father nor the mother; it is rather the life of a new human being with its own growth."

 

But while no one can dispute that this new growth is distinct from that of the parents, with its own genetic code and its own dynamic pattern of growth, still there remains a question that the pope attempts to answer by quoting an earlier document, in which this difficulty is dealt with by a rhetorical question. Thus "even if the presence of a spirtitual soul cannot be ascertained by empirical data, the results themselves of scientific research on the human embyo provide 'a valuable indication for discerning by the use of reason a personal presence at the first appearance of human life: how could a human individual not be a human person?'" So as to half admit that we really don't have an absolute answer to this question, the pope goes on to say that "from the standpoint of moral obligation, the mere probability that a human person is involved would suffice to justify an absolutely clear prohibition of any intervention aimed at killing a human embryo." (Emphasis added.) Then, as if to further emphasize this moral obligation in the face of this uncertainty, the pope goes on, again quoting from an earlier statement on the subject.

 

    Precisely for this reason, over and above all scientific debates and those philosophical affirmations to which the Magisterium [i.e., the Church's official teaching] has not expressly commited itself, the Church has alway taught and continues to teach that the result of human procreation, from the first moment of its existence, must be guaranteed that unconditional respect which is morally due to the human being in his or her totality and unity as body and spirit: "the human being is to be respected and treated as a person from the moment of conception: and therefore from that same moment his rights as a person must be recognized, among which in the first place is the inviolable right of every innocent human being to life."

 

From this point on (in section #61) the pope goes on to show how even if "the texts of Sacred Scripture never address the question of deliberate abortion, and so do not directly and specifically condemn it", still, Christian tradition from the very earliest days has never had any doubts about the fundamental immorality of abortion, claiming that "even scientific and philosophical discussions about the precise moment of the infusion of the spiritual soul have never given rise to any hesitation about the moral condemnation of abortion."

 

So here we have it: the clearest possible statements of exactly why it is that the Church not only condemns abortion at any stage, but (as section #63 goes on to specifiy) even goes on to condemn any form of experimentation with embryos which would involve the killing of those embryos, would forbid in vitro conception (which would involve the discarding of surplus embryos), the growth of embryos for the production of "biological material" (such as "stem cells") and expresses grave doubts about the use of prenatal diagnostic techniques used with "a eugenic intention which accepts selective abortion in order to prevent the birth of children affected by various forms of anomalies." Finally, it is this "eugenic intention" that the pope sees as particularly "shameful and utterly reprehensible, since it presumes to measure the value of a human life only within the parameters of 'normality' and physical well-being. thus opening the way to legitimizing infanticide and euthanasia as well."

 

If, in the just-quoted passage we see the pope "upping the ante" so to speak, it is not just because the next section of the encyclical goes on to "end-of-life" issues like euthansia and assisted suicide, but because he sees abortion as particularly heinous, yet still only one of the life-or-death issues facing humanity today. Among other life-threatening issues mentioned early-on in this encyclical (Section #10) are poverty, malnutrition and hunger, and "the unjust distribution of resources between peoples and between social classes". So too, war, the arms trade, "reckless tampering with the world's ecological balance", "the criminal spread of drugs", or "the promotion of certain kinds of sexual activity which, besides being morally unacceptable, also involve grave risks to life". Later on, the pope also questions the legitmacy of the continued use of capital punishment (Section #56 ) . All of these issues play a critical role as to whether or not the over-all climate will be one of a "culture of life" or a "culture of death".

 

Given this whole range of "hot button" issues, many of which even divide various Christian denominations, how can American society ever expect to reach some degree of consensus over the issue of abortion? For if the Bible does not specifically address the question of abortion and and we have to rely on a Christian tradition which, although unwavering in its condemnation of abortion, nevertheless has seen a long history of debate over precisely the nature of and/or degree of the humanity of the embryo at its various stages, how can we possibly expect to find a practical solution in a society such as ours in which religious beliefs and a philosophical approaches vary so widely?

 

D: Finding a New Solution

 

Any new solution to this very ancient problem needs to be approached through the one medium that people of all backgrounds might possibly agree upon, which is to say, through up-to-date science. For despite the importance of situating the issue of abortion within the whole spectrum of life and death issues that face society, reliable and accurate data is a prerequisite of any informed decision.

 

Indeed, this was part the genius of medieval Christendom when it turned to Aristotle to revolutionize its approach to philosophy and theology. Aristotle (the son of physician) had begun his reasoning on the basis of the empirical science of his day. The problem with the medievals was that they neglected to reinvestigate the scientific data that Aristotle had used, and instead simply took him as the authority on most questions of physics and biology. It wasn't until centuries later, with the invention of instruments like the telescope and microscope, that it occurred to anyone that Aristotle's observations might have been inaccurate or in some cases simply wrong. Even the long-accepted division of the normal pregnancy into three "trimesters" used by the US Supreme Court in its controversial 1973 "Roe v. Wade" decision bears close reexamination in light of more contemporary science -- especially as medical technology is able to push back the point of "viability" (the point at which a prematurely-born child can be saved) towards the beginning of the fifth month on the one hand, and experimentation with in vitro conceived "pre-embryos" raises the troubling prospect of science-fiction scenarios of cloned humans or fetuses raised in artificial wombs someday becoming a reality!

 

Nevertheless, despite the scary possibilities that science may hold, the fundamental principle that all our human reasoning begins with what we are able to observe -- which needs to be confirmed up with rigorous testing by means of the scientific method -- is the necessary starting point if we are to come to any reasoned consensus as to what we are actually dealing with. Without that scientific foundation, we are at best only trading guesses or opinions.

 

This is not to say that religious beliefs should not play an important role. Science can only attempt to explain the what and how of things as it best can, and has done so brilliantly as of late. But only rarely can it suggest the why -- a realm that is more properly the province of philosophy and religion. However, this being said, it is necessary that religious beliefs be understood as a method of expressing these "whys", these higher meanings and values that should not be confused with the often poetic and unscientific language in which these values and meanings are expressed. But it is also noteworthy that serious biblical scholarship has shown us that the ancient Hebrew outlook, when rightly understood, taken at face value with its very down-to-earth views of human nature (Adam or "man[kind]" so-called because he was fashioned from adamah or "the earth") in many ways had a lot more in common with modern scientific views than did our later reinterpretations of scripture under the sway of the platonic doctrine of the immortal "soul". This is not to say that the biblical idea of immortality through "resurrection" is any more scientific, but at least it makes it clear that any eternal life must be a result of God's saving intervention and not some imagined naturally eternal self.

 

Yet, this is still not a reason to overlook the role platonic "idealism" or similar ideas of the spirit in the development of human culture and values. It is noteworthy that the Buddhist doctrine of anatta (literally, "no soul") attributed to Gautama and still stressed by Theraveda Buddhists, appears to repudiate the Vedic Hindu doctrine of the immortal atman (soul) even more strongly than the biblical viewpoint contradicts the platonic view. Still, the much more popular Mahayana Buddhism seems to have adapted itself to reincarnational views prevalent in many pre-buddhist societies, much like the way Christianity adopted platonic ideas of the soul. As a result, Gautama's doctrine seems to have been largely "psychologized" into an emphasis on selflessness as a means to the eventual attainment of nirvana. In this way the doctrine of the "soul" and its ascent to the Ultimate (with its counterparts in Hindu and Buddhist teachings) continues to serve an evolutionary function in its own right -- which is to set a goal for human striving that transcends the humility of our origins and the limitations of our life.

 

Indeed, modern psychological theories, not just those of Freud, but more especially the researches of Jung and many others have shown us that realm of such mythic thinking has played a vital role not only in the development of civilization but even in our future as individuals. Our "soul" (our "Self" to put it in Jungian terms) is a projection not so much of what we are but what we can truly become to be. Or as the ancient Church Fathers so often dared to put it, as they tapped into the insights of the neo-platonist philosophers, "God became man that man might become God!" If we are not naturally immortal, still our destiny is an immortal one. The tragedy of an abortion is not that of a soul cut off from the chance of ever living a human life as it is the denial of the chance of an embryonic or fetal life ever becoming fully human with the potential that, in turn, holds for ever becoming an immortal spirit or soul.

 

Looked at in this combined light of science, philosophy and faith, it certainly seems that the Catholic Church and all those other concerned Christians, as well as those Jews and Muslims and all those of other faiths who are concerned about the erosion of human values and respect for life at all stages, would do well to remember that life is a biological process that has many phases, not all of them as clearly distinguishable as we might like. Indeed, it is precisely because of this gradualist view of human development that we must be doubly cautious about assuming that abortion, even at early stages, can be anything but a very serious matter demanding equally serious reasons before it can be justified. Recently, even the Dalai Lama, the esteemed representative of the third great branch of Buddhism -- the "tantric" Buddhism of Tibet -- has weighed in with his opinion that abortion directly violates the Buddhist doctrine of the sacredness of all "sentient beings".

 

Still, as difficult as it may be to make clear distinctions, critical decisions must nevertheless be made, especially at life's beginning and end. But sweepingly dogmatic prohibitions will seldom prove to work. While the "slippery slope" that we all fear is very real, simplistic solutions cannot adequately address complex situations. Just as we are forced to agonize as to whether or not to terminate a life-saving procedure that has turned into a useless prolongation of what appears to be a semi-human or even only a quasi-vegetative level of existence, so too we be forced to agonize over whether or not to bring to an end a pregnancy that appears to promise, at best, a only semi-human existence for the fetus, should it be brought to term.

 

In this regard, recent reports from China and India indicating a higher percentage of abortions of female fetuses than of males should be viewed with alarm. This report, should it be accurate, can only underline the seriousness of the situation, particularly when ancient prejudices are allowed to combine with modern technology. So too, the issues raised by in-vitro fertilization, embryo transplantation, etc. All of these developments demand that we develop a much more sophisticated understanding and approach to the question of what exactly constitutes a human being.

 

To simply say that fetus has an "immortal soul", and therefore must not be aborted, is not a really adequate answer. Indeed, theologically speaking, IF that were true there would really be nothing to worry about. Instead, taking the life of a being that might possibly develop a capacity for immortality, were it allowed to be born, is a much more serious matter! In other words, in adopting an evolutionary view of the emergence of the "soul" would make abortion an even more difficult -- even if it allowed, especially in the early stages, for more exceptions.

 

Taking all this into account then, must we not all work together to find a common sense solution to the abortion problem? Must we not allow, even if reluctantly, the termination of a pregnancy if and when it is deemed necessary, but with increasing restrictions (as well as safeguards) the later into pregnancy the procedure is to take place? For instance, while any truly serious reason (certainly the mere determination of sex would not seem to be one of them) might be sufficient to terminate a the development of the "pre-embryo" during the first two weeks of its development, at the other end of the fetal development scale -- from twenty weeks on (the period after the appearance of the essentially human characteristics of the neurological system) -- only the most grave danger to the mother's life would seem to justify any procedure that was not designed as much as possible to save the child's life as well -- just the same as if it were born prematurely. So while the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision upheld the right of any state to legislate against third trimester abortions "except where necessary, in appropriate medical judgement, for the presevation of the life or health of the mother", the clear intent of the court's decision was to affirm the right of the state to protect the life of the unborn child once it had reached the point of viability. Yet as medical knowledge improves and techniques of saving premature infants move the point of "viability" further into the latter part of the second trimester, that the Roe v. Wade decision particularly needs to be rethought.

 

But legislating regarding the earlier stages is even more difficult. While Roe v. Wade affirms a woman's "qualified right to terminate her pregnancy" and leaves the decision and its "effectuation" during the first trimester to the "medical judgement of the pregnant woman's attending physician", serious questions about the safety of the newly introduced abortificant RU-486 would certainly seem to indicate that the same Roe v. Wade decision, which gave the states the power, during the second trimester, to "regulate the abortion procedure in ways that are reasonably related to maternal health" maybe needs to be applied to the first trimester as well, considering that this new drug is considered to be most likely used between the third and ninth weeks of pregnancy.

 

In fact, it is the whole eighteen-week period of extremely rapid embryonic development (that which follows what is now termed the pre-embryonic stage) -- that same period being when most abortions take place -- that remains philosophically, and thus ethically, the most problematic. For some, especially those who find the concept of the embryo as this stage being in any sense a "person" highly unlikely, any serious reason, particular those relating to any well-founded doubt as to the normalcy of the developing fetus, may seem sufficient reason to bring such a pregnancy to a halt. Yet the psychic scars suffered from even this, especially by a woman -- regardless of her religious persuasion -- can be considerable. It comes far too close to the very roots of our human existence!

 

Still, after everything in our society that can be done to make abortions unnecessary has been done, should not the procedure itself must be decriminalized -- providing that everything possible has been done to minimize the practice? The ordering of society in terms of what is considered a crime or not is one thing and is, based on its effects on that same society, is admittedly a very difficult matter. It must not be confused with what we or someone else thinks sinful -- which is ultimately a matter of one's personal relationship with God.

 

But we must realize that such a distinction (between what is criminal and what is sinful) is largely lost on many people, and that typically what may be "legal" is confused with what is "right". (See Dialogos issue #12 on Faith and Belief, and especially Chapter 4, Part 3, on "Faith and Morality" in the linked book Faith: Security & Risk) Thus the "liberalization" of anti-abortion laws will almost inevitably lead to moral or ethical laxity, while a tightening of restrictions will tend to underline the seriousness of the issue -- yet almost as certainly lead to more attempts to circumvent the law. It is a difficult matter for any society to decide -- even when all the facts are known. Nevertheless, we must begin with the facts if we are going to arrive at any consensus.

 

REFERENCES:

 

J. Donceel, Philosophical Psychology, 2nd. ed., New York, Sheed & Ward, 1961.

 

C.C. Harris and F. Snowden, eds., Bioethical Frontiers in Perinatal Intensive Care. Natchitoches LA: Northwestern State University Press, 1985.

 

Modern Concordance to the New Testament, Michael Darton, ed., Darton, Longman & Todd, Ldt. and Doubleday & Company, 1976.

 

The Jerome Biblical Commentary, Prentice-Hall, 1968.

 

John-Paul II, "Evangelium Vitae", Vatican, 1995.

 

E. Messenger, Evolution & Theology, London, Sands, 1949.

 

Keith L. Moore and T.V.N. Persaud, The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology, 6th. edition, W.B. Saunders Co., 1968

 

Plus the following articles appearing in Theological Studies over the past fifteen years (listed in order of publication):

 

Tauer, Carol A., "The Tradition of Probabilism and the Moral Status of the Early Embryo", TS 45, No.1 (Mar. 1984) pp. 3-33.

 

Shannon, Thomas A. & Wolter, Allan B., "Reflections on the Moral Status of the Pre-Embryo", TS 51, No.4 (Dec. 1990) pp. 603-26.

 

Cahill, Lisa Sowle, "The Embryo and the Fetus: New Moral Contexts", TS 54, No.1 (Mar. 1993), pp. 124-42.

 

Johnson, Mark & Porter, Jean, "Delayed Hominization", TS 56, No.4 (Dec. 1995), pp. 743-770.

 

Shannon, Thomas A., "Delayed Hominization: A Response to Mark Johnson", TS 57, No.4 (Dec. 1996), pp. 731-34.

 

 

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DiaLogos issue #15

 

The Creator's Software:

An Extensive Interpretation of Information

in Natural Science and Philosophy

 

by Peter Thoma

 

Editor's Note: In keeping with the conviction that any realistic philosophy and, consequently, any viable theology largely depend on an accurate view of the universe, this issue of DiaLogos features a paper by a German physicist who has devoted his retirement years to the the field of "information theory". In this paper, Peter Thoma explores the implications of an overreaching source of "information" or guidance existing beyond the "speed-limits" of data transfer imposed by the conditions of space-time. For those of us who may be thrown off balance by Thoma' s opening statement, let it be known that the Greek word "lemma" generally means any assumption, but especially, in mathematics and logic, one invoked to facilitate the development of a hypothesis -- in this case, a universal set of laws or conditions governing the entire cosmos, including those portions of which are likely to remain beyond the bounds of empirical investigation. (RWK, editor)

 

Under the lemmatic assumption that the entirety of nature obeys a conservation law (it does not change and does not vanish) it is proposed to designate this complete set of laws of nature as the "primary information density" or "Ip" . In this way a discrimination between a higher order information controlling nature and the conventional data transfer information carried by energy is achieved.

 

1. Physical aspects.

 

W.Heisenberg (Gesammelte Werke, Band 3, Piper Verlag, 1985) had first explained the key role of symmetries for all processes in the phase spaces of physics (a closed space of thermodynamical variables) and led his student Weizsaecker to describe symmetry as the basic element of information in nature. (.C.F.v.Weizsaecker: Aufbau der Physik, DTV Verlag 1988).

 

H.Lyre, one of Weizsaecker's students, recently has formulated a quantum theory of information (H. Lyre: Quantentheorie der Information. Zur Naturphilosophie der Theorie der Ur-Alternativen und einer abstrakten Theorie der Information, Springer Verlag, Wien 1998) using Weizsaecker's Ur theory ( "Ur" is translated here as "prime"). He shows that the symmetries of nature are built up by prime alternatives or "yes-no" decisions (primes) and that such a prime is the unit of quantum information or a quantum bit. This is probably the first complete description of quantum information in nature. The primes are nonlocalizable; they do not carry energy, but gauge symmetry per unit volume (1/m3). Using a different approach Collier (J.Collier: Information originates in Symmetry Breaking, Science and Culture 7, 247 (1996)) affirms these results.

 

Following these conclusions this work proposes to include the basic laws of nature into a more general conception of information and to introduce in this way the primary information density Ip as one of three constituents of nature. The other two are the total energy H represented by a multitude of elementary particles and Einstein's space-time tR . Ip contains all (known and unknown) laws of nature including evolution and autopoiesis (self-organization) and controls nature by means of its four basic forces and it has a sequential priority, since the process follows the program. The probable "first" control commands in the moment of the Big Bang "create symmetries and evolute" ("fiat lux") which do not exclude the antisymmetric, but rare, command "devolute", tempting the observer to attribute a vectorial property to Ip, but this is speculative. Independently of the expansion speed of the universe it extends throughout its space. Here tR is a differential operator in the set of equations governing the four basic forces with a (preset) array of initial conditions.

 

Looking at physics we note that Ip does not need H for its availability and conservation and looking at biology we note that we know only a very small part of the valid laws of nature within our own living environment of very weak gravity. The larger, unknown part of Ip governs nature under strong and extreme gravity. The elementary particles interacting in the first seconds of the universe and the particles in the present universe are identical or, in other words, there is no evolution of elementary particles and therefore no evolution of the interactions between them.

 

Not excluding evolutive processes in highly organized substances this underlines the priority claim of Ip; it should be regarded as the Creator's "software" -- in today's language -- or as spiritual energy. Since we know only an extremely small part of the existing nature, we spiritually see only a small section of the reality or "truth". As the reality we understand the entirety of the universe including all its known and unknown properties. Life is the most enigmatic part of the reality; it is based on unknown parts of Ip and it is characterized by two essential properties:

 

a) it is connected with a structurally higher order organization of matter;

 

b) autopoiesis leads to an adaptive evolutive optimization of living ensembles within their environment.

 

This self-organization as an evolutive and directional process is a part of Ip, thus evolution is a prime determined adaption and optimization process. Living organisms exchange information by means of emission and absorption of energy. This energy carried information we designate as secondary information Is.

 

All important religions including the pre-Christian ones agree with us Christians that God is the source of the spiritual energy. The greater part of scientists and thinkers including religiously indifferent ones speak of a creating spirit, whom they sometimes call the "great programmer", who does not play dice. Especially the biologists like it to speak of "creatures and concreatures".

 

2. Valuation of information between philosophy and natural science.

 

Information theory conventionally describes entropy (J/K) as an amount of energy carried information. Questions of its purpose and origin, however, cannot be answered. The most convincing description of the present understanding of information has been given by W.T.Grandy in his Resource Letter ITP1 (Information Theory in Physics. American Journal of Physics, June 1997) :

 

    " It has long been understood that physics and the notion of information are intimetely related -- indeed, information is the lifeblood of all science. In a very real sense the differential equations of physics are simply algorithms for processing the information contained in ini tial conditions. Data obtained by experiment and observation, sense perceptions, and communication either are, or contain information forming the basis of our understanding of nature, Yet, an unambiguous clear-cut definition of information remains as slippery as that of randomness, say, or complexity. Is it merely a set of data? Or is it itself physical? If the latter, as Einstein once commented upon the ether, it has no definite spacetime coordinates. While most physicists would agree that the only valid means of knowing the physical world is by obtaining information through observation and measurement, a general definition of the term is elusive, even though much effort has been devoted to the task without reaching any definite conclusions" .

 

The proposed "primary information" is not a new kind of information as such; it is only the consequence of an extension of existing but incomplete definitions. The primary command "create symmetries" generates Ip and thus the entirety of all primes; this model requires the dimension primes/m3 or symmetry Quanta per cubic meter, if the universe is to be seen as a closed system. The proposed priority feature of Ip does not include the condition tR = 0 physically, but philosophically, and here exactly begins the faith, attributing a divine nature to Ip.

 

Writing this should not all give the impression of hubris, but the inclusion of the basic laws themselves into a generalized system of symmetry density -- a higher order information density -- is plausible, since the natural laws should not be bound to the propagation of light. Solid state science sees an ideal crystal consisting of a rigid lattice of particles whose free and bound electrons are coupled by probability density functions (wave functions). Analogously we may see the (finite) universe as a "soft" crystal with an expanding lattice of galaxies; the interactions of its free and bound particles are controlled by symmetry density functions. Thus Ip has a spatially general availability and controls energy transformation and propagation and thus Is.

 

According to Weizsaecker, evolution is sufficiently described by information increase. The increase of Is thus achieves adaptive optimization. A living creature with consciousness can intuitively perceive Ip and interact with it, at least by recognizing it. Its consciousness (C) may be related philosophically to three states of mind: information (I), knowledge (K), and wisdom (W). Since C is based on I we may define an information chain I - C - K - W and this again reminds one of a directionality within an universal information field. The chain however has a serious limitation : Light signals of living creatures propagate with the very small (as compared to the present size of the universe) velocity c =300000 km/s. For a living individual this means a serious limitation of Is.

 

Thinking of information exchange with extraterrestrial intelligences, TV signals emitted in 1950 from earth nowadays reach perhaps the planets of the nearest two neigbouring stars (J.Achenbach, National Geographic; millennium issue, January 2000, p.30). Let us thus define a sphere of human information range with a diameter of 20 light years around earth (roughly half of a human working lifetime) and insert it into the computer drawn scheme of concentric time spheres (Kathy Sawyer, National Geographic, Oct.99 p.30) : we see that a "conversation" with aliens is practically impossible, not to speak of more distant parts of the Milky Way or even the nearest neigbour galaxy, whereas a reception of alien signals seems to be posssible, at least in principle. Sawyers drawing, however, may been seen as a proof that we are living within our own past.

 

3. Conclusions

 

Comprising the basic laws of nature into the primary information density Ip includes the following conditions and consequences:

 

a) The two other basic constituents of the universe H and tR are not depending on a propagation of Ip.

 

b) Ip controls H and tR and not vice versa.

 

c) Ip controls the energy carried secondary information Is which propagates at light velocity c

(at maximum).

 

Compared to the size of only our own galaxy, c is extremely small, tempting an observer to see this as an intended property to limit the information sum being accessible for a single individual with conscience during a lifetime. It underlines , however, the independence of Ip from H and tR and its dominance as a kind of controlling program. In fact c is so small on a cosmic scale that light is meaningless for the general availability of control information. This affirms the discrimination between the higher order control information Ip and the conventional data tranfer information Is. Moreover the metric of a single individual on earth is limited by its gravity determined lifetime and this determines the human information sum during a lifetime. The discrimination between Ip and Is allows us to refrain from any discussion of a propagation velocity of the natural laws after the Big Bang. The priority claim of Ip is based on a logical conclusion only, not on a physical one.

 

After his retirement as a solid state physicist with the German civil service in 1995, the author has devoted his time to information theory. He especially appreciates valuable discussions held on the subject with G. Krocker, N. Knoepffler, O.Lechner and C.F.v. Weizsaecker.

 

Thoma can be contacted at the following addresses:

 

Peter Andreas Thoma

Noerdliche Auffahrtsallee 23

80638 Munchen, Germany

e-mail: peter.thoma@planet-interkom.de

homepage: http://www.planet-interkom.de/peter.thoma/homepage.htm

 

 

 

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