The following essay is an early reflection written during the founding years of the Institute of Lutheran Theology. It was written and shared likely around 2008 or 2009, when many of us were first gathering to think together about the future of theological education and the church’s intellectual vocation. I had recently returned to academic theology after many years of parish ministry, and I found myself increasingly struck by a gap that seemed rarely acknowledged in the academy.
In graduate school we had been taught—almost as a matter of intellectual hygiene—that serious theology after Kant must avoid speaking of God as a causal agent within the world. The dominant assumption was what Ian Barbour called the “independence motif”: theological language and scientific language speak about different domains and cannot refer to the same reality. Once this presupposition is granted, much of modern theology becomes an exercise in reinterpretation—finding ways to translate traditional religious language so that it no longer implies divine agency within nature.
Yet my experience in congregations had been very different. The people in the pews did not speak this way. They prayed as though God could act. They believed that God could guide, heal, forgive, and intervene. They did not regard such claims as poetic expressions of existential commitment. They regarded them as statements about reality.
The tension between these two worlds—the academic assumption of divine causal quarantine and the lived faith of ordinary Christians—raised a question that seemed to me unavoidable: What difference do our metaphysical assumptions actually make for the ethical judgments Christians must render in concrete situations?
The essay below was an early attempt to explore that question. Its central claim is simple: ethical judgments are never made in a metaphysical vacuum. Whether we believe that God can act in the world, how we understand human agency, and how we conceive the relation between scientific explanation and divine purpose all shape the way we evaluate moral claims.
Looking back nearly two decades later, I can see that the argument is exploratory and incomplete. Much of my later work has tried to develop a more rigorous account of theological reference, intelligibility, and divine action. Still, the questions raised here remain important. If theology is to speak meaningfully within the church, it must reckon honestly with the metaphysical assumptions that underlie both academic theology and congregational faith.
What follows is therefore not a final position, but an early attempt to think through a problem that continues to shape the theological task.
I
I remember the response of
one of my professors thirty-five years ago when I had tried to connect theology to
science in one of my papers. "Ah,
but that's all precritical," he
snorted. In those graduate school days we learned early
on the Kantian truth that God could neither be a substance nor could causally
relate to objects within the universe. Only after understanding
this did we move on to the important business of studying the various
post-Kantian options, all of which presupposed what Ian Barbour has called the independence motif: theological and
scientific language cannot refer to a common reality.
While
the greatest theological expressions of the past two centuries presuppose this
Kantian-inspired “causal quarantine”
of God, I have become increasingly concerned about the disconnect between this presupposition
and the views of many who still occupy pews in the early twenty-first century. It seems that many faithful Christians actually believe that God is at
work in the world. One of the things I
like best about the science/theology discussion is the working assumption that
God need not be a causally impotent
being, that serious theological reflection can and should try to conceive how
it is that God might actually causally link to the universe. In other words, in important respects the
science/theology discussion is as precritical
as the views of those to whom I regularly preached on Sunday mornings in the
small rural congregations I once served. There is
something refreshingly honest about serious theological work undertaken that actually connects to beliefs of those in the
church.
I want to reflect today about how one's view of the causal relationship between God
and the universe can actually affect an important activity in which Christians are always engaged: ethical
decision-making. I shall argue that adherents
of the independence motif actually likely find that their ethical judgments are at odds with those in the pews because they adopt the assumption of
divine causal impotence. It turns out
that they may well judge certain propositions false that those rejecting that
motif would regard as true, and vice-versa. My point is simply this: In doing theological ethics, one must take into
consideration the metaphysical picture that one presupposes: The nature of the putative causal connection between God and world.
In
what follows I shall suggest that the ontological
question of the relation between what theology talks about and what science
talks about is critically important to the question of how the Church responds
to ethical issues. After discussing an
especially clear example of this, I shall examine three general issues in the
science/religion discussion that have great import at the congregational level
for theologically-informed ethical judgment and evaluation. While all are old issues in the
science/religion conversation, I suggest that the effect of each upon ethical
valuation has not been adequately appreciated.
II
Consider the example of Bob, a person engaged in homoerotic behavior who believes that these behaviors are genetically determined. I shall argue that Bob may
display a number of different ethical responses to his homosexuality depending
upon what he takes to be the causal connections between God and the world. For instance, imagine Sue says to Bob that he
should pray that "God change his homosexuality." I claim that the moral propriety of the
statement that "it is good to pray to God to have one's homosexuality
changed" is contingent upon what Bob takes the underlying ontological
situation to be regarding the causal link between God and world. Let us examine four positions that Bob might
adopt:
1)
Bob might be
convinced by the Kantian view that
God can neither be a substance (physical or otherwise), nor can God enter into
causal relations with other substances.
On this view, God-talk must be analyzed so that it makes no commitment
to substance or causality. Thus,
"God changes homosexuality" cannot mean that some divine entity
actually brings about a change in the natural order. Instead, an alternate analysis of the
statement must be given, an analysis that does not vitiate one's ontological
scruples. Accordingly, the statement
might be construed as an expression
of existential attitudes, a donation
of courage in the face of future, or a moral recommendation or valuation. For example, prayer to God that God might
"change one's homosexuality" might be regarded as an expression of one's inability to accept
oneself. Many who accept the
independence thesis would no doubt wince at such a prayer and regard it as
wrongheaded or morally-corrupt precisely because they do not suppose it
possible for God to cause events in the natural order. Because they understand the proposition to be
an expression of or statement about Bob's lack of acceptance of his own
condition, they can quite plausibly claim that "it is good to pray to God
to have one's homosexuality changed" is false. Why?
If it is true that Bob's homosexuality is genetic and cannot be altered
by God, then on utilitarian grounds his greatest happiness (and the happiness
of those around him) is perhaps best realized by his accepting his genetic
situation. To not accept what cannot be
changed is a prescription for unhappiness.
The fact that one might argue deontologically to another conclusion does
not concern me here. I merely want to
indicate that on utilitarian grounds the statement "it is good to pray to
God to have one's homosexuality changed" is plausibly false, given the
underlying Kantian ontology.
2)
Bob might hold
some variety of Thomism (or
God-universe interactionistic dualism), and assert minimally that God is a
substance, albeit not a natural one, and that God is causally related to the
universe through primary causality
and through supernatural intervention.
Leaving aside the theological question of why God would need to
interrupt his continuous activity of bringing about actualizations in a primary
causal way to intervene directly, we ask if the proposition "it is good to
pray to God to have one's homosexuality changed" is false on a Thomistic
ontology. It is plausible to argue that
this different ontology affects the ethical evaluation of the proposition, for
presumably the ontology of Thomism does allow that God hears prayer and can act
in accordance with that prayer. Moreover,
God's direct intervention is sufficient for the event of Bob's genetic
predisposition being changed. Given the
challenges homosexuals continue to face in our society, it is credible to argue
on utilitarian grounds that it now might be true
that "it is good to pray to God to have one's homosexuality
changed." If God turns out not to
do anything about Bob’s homosexuality, Bob can always subsequently accept his
homosexuality by considering it to be God's will. After all, if God is a real causal agent who
can immediately bring about anything God desires, then if he does not change
Bob's genetic predisposition, that predisposition must be regarded as passively
willed by God.
3)
Bob might believe
that God acts in the world, but not through direct supernatural
intervention. Instead of violating the
causal closure of the physical, God works at the quantum level in being part of
the necessary cause of every particular quantum actualization. While the philosophical difficulties with
bottom-up approaches to divine agency are legion, we will not examine them
here. We are interested in determining
how such divine efficacy might affect
the utilitarian evaluation of the statement that "it is good to pray to
God to have one's homosexuality changed."
Unfortunately, the matter is not at all clear. Much depends upon what is physically possible
and not possible for a God working at the quantum level to do regarding the
change in genetic dispositions. The
factual question of how much divine action at the micro-physical level can
percolate up into the macro-physical level is all important. If one holds that God's action at the
micro-physical level is basically consistent with macro-physical determinism,
then it might seem that "it is good to pray to God to have one's
homosexuality changed" is again false on utilitarian grounds. However, another evaluation is possible. Perhaps while "bottom-up” divine action
cannot change Bob's genetic dispositions, such action is causally relevant in
allowing Bob to act in accordance or at variance with those dispositions. One might hold some version of Roger
Penrose’s thesis that quantum gravitational effects in the brain make free-will
or contra-causal agency possible. If so,
then perhaps "it is good to pray to have one's homosexuality changed"
is true after all.
4)
Finally, we might
ask how the statement fares if Bob holds that God works as a top-down causal
agent. Here things become murkier. The crucial question is this: What effects
would top-down constraints have upon the causal story of Bob's genetic homosexual
disposition? While there is much that
is not clear, it is plausible to hold that those top-down constraints, however
specified, would not be of the kind to allow divine intervention or special providence. Furthermore, they do not
seem to be capable of providing resources for the contra-causal free act of
acting in accordance or at variance with one's genetic disposition. Although God would act in the world on the
top-down approach, it seems unclear that He could act specifically enough to
grant Bob freedom from his homosexual genetic leash. If this is so, then it seems reasonable to
conclude again that the proposition "it is good to pray to God to have
one's homosexuality changed" is false.
While much more needs to be said about the specifics of this example, I think that the general moral is clear enough: How we view the underlying ontological situation, and thus the reference of our theological language, has an effect on the evaluation of our ethical judgments. Armed with this insight, I now shall talk directly about the reference of theological language in terms of three basic questions in the religion/science conversation. These three are critically important, in my opinion, if we are somehow to find a place for divine (and even human) activity in our world. They are all very old questions, questions oftentimes not taken seriously enough in the current religion/science dialogue.
1)
Can one really reconcile the standard efficient causal
account of evolution with the teleology implicit in talk of creation?
2) Can one
really reconcile the teleology of personal agency and spirit-talk with
efficient causal explanations assumed by current nonreductive physicalist
proposals of mind?
3) Can one
really make sense out of a connection linking God and the universe, and if not,
can one make sense out of the notion that divine emergent properties causally
influence the complex configurations from which they putatively arise?
While I cannot say much about
any of these, my hope is to at least raise the questions and indicate the
effects their resolution might have at
the congregational level upon ethical issues.
III
The
first topic is evolution. While some
would say that there is no conflict between science and theology on the issue,
that really is true only if one adopts the independence
thesis. In my opinion, there remains considerable
difficulty in relating talk of God’s creation to evolutionary accounts. The problem is that the neo-Darwinian
evolutionary synthesis seems to allow no place for telos or purpose, yet such telos
is necessary if God is to be somehow causally at work in the evolutionary
process.
Teleology
has traditionally been concerned with purpose in nature, purpose not
predominantly resulting from conscious human intent. Characteristic of teleology is talk of functions and goals. For instance, one
might say that the heart functions to pump blood or that the goal of the rabbit
whose fur turns to white in the winter is to avoid predators. Aristotle, of course, invested all of nature
with goals, claiming bodies travel in perfect circles because it is their
nature, and bodies tend to fall because that too is their nature. Prior to the nineteenth century, natural
theology commonly assumed that God created the world such that each entity in
it tended to realize its God-given nature. The eye was designed such that it
functioned to allow sight. Purpose was
thought to be immanent in all that was.
Darwinian theory offered an account whereby organismic
functions and goals were no longer understood as due to conscious design. In the last century, work in population
genetics helped shed light on the process of the inheritance of variations. Mutations and gene recombinations introduce
variation in a seemingly random way, apparently unrelated to the requirements
of the organism. Natural forces
subsequently act upon the diversity in population introduced through these
mutations and genetic recombinations such that particular mutations survive in
particular environmental contexts.
Subsequent generations of selected mutations produce complex
higher-order life that, while appearing to be something towards which the
universe is striving, is actually only the result of past events. Higher-order complex life is what happens to
survive within a given environmental context.
If environmental pressures were different (e.g., if radiation bathed us)
then perhaps cockroaches would appear to be a goal of the universe’s evolution.
What must be noticed in this story is the rejection of
final cause in favor of the category of efficient causality. Mutations and genetic recombinations occur
and are subsequently selected. While the
mutations and recombinations are caused by antecedent events at the biochemical
level, the natural selection is caused by antecedent events at the
macro-physical level. The result is that
the movement to increasing complexity is a function of past events, not any
teleological “lure” implicit in nature.
Richard Dawkins’ The Blind
Watchmaker forcefully represents this view, claiming that “the only
watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very
special way” (Dawkins 1987, p. 15).
While there are any number of ways to respond to the
challenge of reconciling divine creation with mechanistic evolution, I shall
not pursue them here. What I am
critically interested in is how one’s intuitions about whether an
efficient-causal or teleological explanation is deeper can influence his or her evaluation of ethical issues. For instance, Suzy the good Lutheran,
believes that God created and continually creates the universe. She holds that everything that God creates is
good and that God has a purpose in creating everything. On the other hand, she is a biochemist and
knows full well the processes of genetic variation and determination. After learning that her three-month old fetus
has Downs Syndrome, she considers an abortion.
While she knows theologically
that everything that God creates is good, she realizes scientifically that her fetus results from a most unlikely
chance-like combination of genetic material.
She must decide whether this statement is true or false: “It is morally
permissible to terminate the pregnancy.”
How will she decide?
Let us imagine that Suzy thinks clearly, and realizes
that the same set of events cannot simply be both mechanistic and teleological
at the same time. Let us assume further that
Suzy reads the philosophy journals and decides that the efficient causal
explanation is the deeper one - - though she knows that one can allow
teleological explanations for certain purposes.
Let us also assume that Suzy dislikes utilitarianism and is committed to
a deontological approach to ethics. Now
consider Suzy’s “duty” to her fetus. If
she believes her fetus results from the teleology of divine creation, she is
apt to regard it as a full-member of the kingdom of ends, for its purpose is to have a rational
nature. Arguably, she will thus be
constrained so as to act upon it as an end rather than a means. Consequently, she is likely to regard the
ethical sentence “it is morally permissible in this instance to have an
abortion” as false.
Now
let us imagine that while loving and using theological and religious language
Suzy knows that the deepest explanation of her fetus’ Downs Syndrome is
biochemical; it is a matter of chance-like recombinations of genetic
materials. It is plausible that even
though Suzy understands the expressive
and donational power of religious
language, she will nonetheless be less inclined because of her understanding of
the deep nature of the genetic explanation to regard her fetus as a full member
of the Kantian kingdom of ends. In
short, she will be more prone to abort her pregnancy. Consequently, she may on deontological
grounds regard the proposition “it is morally permissible in this instance to
have an abortion” as true. The question
of who belongs to the kingdom of ends seems here to be at least partially
dependent upon what explanation really “carves the beast of reality at its causal
joints.”
IV
The
same problem between the efficient causal and the teleological explanation
concerns our view of the self. Recently,
Nancey Murphy has adopted nonreductive
physicalism with hopes of saving human agency from a reduction to brain states, or outright elimination in favor of neurostate description. On this view, one can talk meaningfully about
human freedom and rationality while at the same time affirming that all mental
events are identical with some physical events or other. Again it is important to get clear on the
problem for theology.
Study
of the human brain proceeds methodologically like the study of other physical
entities. One attempts to understand
brain behavior by uncovering the causal antecedents of that behavior. This can be done by isolating the “general
laws” at work in brain processes and understanding the underlying conditions
that realize those general laws. To
understand the brain is to explain and predict how one neural event is related
to another event, and how such events are related to causal inputs and
outputs. Thus, brain research seems to
presuppose what philosophers call event-event
causality.
Our
experience of self is not an
experience of one constituted by event-event causal chains, however. We experience a unity of our various
awarenesses, and we make normative judgments concerning all matters of
things. We experience ourselves as
comprised of an agent who acts in the world. The standard question in the philosophy of
mind is how to reconcile our experience of agent-act
causality with an underlying physicalist paradigm assuming event-event causality. How can we reconcile our experience of one
who acts from reasons with the fact
that talk of “reasons” cannot arise in brain state description? Furthermore, how can we square our talk of
agency (particularly “free agency”) and “spirit” with the seeming determinism
of brain processes?
Asking
these questions is, of course, standard fare in any philosophy of mind
course. Nancy Murphy’s particular
contribution is to claim that nonreductive
physicalism, one of the standard positions in the current literature, can
square with Christian anthropology. Freedom and rationality can somehow be made consistent with their
realization in wholly physical systems.
She rejects any mind/body dualism, claiming implicitly that the notion
of downward causation can do the work
once reserved for the immortal soul. The
idea is that human agency while realized in brain processes can somehow affect those brain processes such that
they are actualized differently than they otherwise would have been actualized
in the absence of that agency.
I
have written quite a bit on the problem of downward
causality and the related problems of supervenience and mental causation,
generally claiming that there is much less to downward causality than meets the
eye. I cannot enter here into that
technical discussion, but will move immediately ahead to consideration of how
one’s ontological commitments to event-event or agent-action explanation can
influence one’s ethical reasoning.
Imagine
the scenario where Meg must decide whether or not to pull the plug on Aunt
Mavis who has been comatose in her bed for weeks. Brain activity has virtually ceased. Imagine now that Meg is a nonreductive physicalist holding that
all mental events are token identical to some brain events. Now if Meg really is a nonreductive
physicalist, she realizes that pulling the plug on Mavis really does kill her,
for no self, no center of Mavis’ being can remain after the plug is
pulled. This view is clearly entailed by
mind/brain token identity.
Now
consider that Meg is an idealist or dualist somehow claiming that an agent-act
description is the deepest description of the mental. Because dualism or idealism
rejects the token identity of brain states and mental states, Meg might more
easily pull Mavis’ plug and usher her agency into another modality of
existence. The statement “it is morally
permissible to disconnect Mavis from life support” may thus have different
evaluations due to the different entailments of “disconnect” on the different
views. If “disconnect” entails “allows to die” as in
the nonreductive physicalist scenario, then the truth of the ethical
proposition seems different than if it means “aids in ushering into another
mode of existence” as on the dualistic assumption.
Consider now Freda’s freedom. It seems that saying that Freda has freedom
is much different for the nonreductive physicalist than for the dualist. We are interested in determining whether or
not this statement is true: “Freda is morally responsible for her inveterate
extramarital activity.” Notice that if
the agent-act explanation is the deepest and one can make profound sense of
reasons causing action, then it is possible that Freda could have done other
than what Freda did in fact do, and that thus Freda is responsible for her
dalliances. If, however, the event-event
description is the deepest, and if all mental events are somehow token
identical to physical events, then it seems to follow that nature being what it
is, Freda cannot be held morally responsible for her clandestine trysts. What is necessary in the case of Freda would
then be good psychological and physiological treatment, not ethical and moral judgment.
We are confronted with the same scenario in this case. Our ethical judgments about what we should do
are influenced by our prior assumptions about the nature of God’s connection to
the universe. My point is simply this:
Many of those in our pews will be faced with judgments of the kind I have
presented. They hear our theological
language, they listen to talk of God’s “mighty acts in history and nature”;
they listen to the church’s language about the importance of the human person or spirit. Consequently, when
they are forced to evaluate an ethical situation, they will take the words
seriously and assume that the words have a particular meaning. What they assume
that meaning to be is, I argue, critically important for the task of applying their
ethical standard to the concrete situation.
It makes a difference to Meg’s application of a deontological yardstick
to Mavis, what Mavis really is.
V
Finally, let us consider the general relationship between
the domain of the divine and that of the universe. I suggest that how we evaluate ethical claims
depends in part on how we conceive this relationship. A standard way of thinking the transcendent
relation of God to the universe has been asserted by ontological dualism, the claim that there are two fundamentally
different orders of reality: divine being and physical being. Not surprisingly, such a God/universe dualism
shares many of the same problems as its mind/body counterpart. Firstly, there is the causal joint question: How can one kind of stuff causally affect
another kind of thing? What cosmic
“pineal gland” can link the humors of the infinite and the finite?
What of the question of conservation of energy? How
can something not in space and having no mass, momentum, and energy, bring
about events in space with mass, momentum, and energy? Moreover, how can a God located outside the
domain of the physical causally influence events within the physical order
without violating the causal closure of
the physical? These questions arise
on standard mind/body dualism accounts, and have been thought to be so
fundamental there that dualism has been largely abandoned. So if dualism is so problematic
philosophically, how about nondualism?
One could perhaps claim that irreducible divine
properties somehow emerge at
higher-levels of complexity and attain causal powers of their own that are in
principle irreducible to the causal powers of the entities from which they
arose. On this view the human agent with
her reasons and actions constitutes an emergent reality arising out of neural
complexity. Once emergent, however, the
agent takes on a causal life of its own.
Similarly, God might be conceived to be an emergent, causally-efficacious
reality arising out of extremely complex physical systems.
My purpose in talking about these two general positions
is again ethical. Returning to our first
example of Bob, I would say that the truth-value of “it is good to pray to have one’s
homosexuality changed” depends upon whether we embrace dualism, monistic divine
emergence, or deny any God/universe causal connection. My reasoning should be apparent. As before, the moral propriety of the prayer
seems to increase as a function of the degree to which God can actually bring
about effects in the natural order.
If you are like I am and studied theology in graduate school, you likely spent most of your time learning the various post-Kantian options for doing theology without a causal connection between God and the world. One typically begins with the presupposition that God and the universe cannot be causally connected, and that theological or religious language appearing to assert such a connection must therefore be reinterpreted. Because we generally agreed upon this paradigm of independence, our ethical judgments could proceed with at least some level of consensus.
What I wish to suggest, however, is that at the congregational level there has never been—nor will there likely ever be—any comparable agreement regarding the impossibility of a causal connection between God and the world. This fact complicates the task of doing theological ethics. Can those of us who function as theological elites responsibly advocate a definite ethical program when the people in the pews do not share the very presuppositions from which that program flows?
No comments:
Post a Comment