Cross-Pressuring within the Congregation

Something extraordinary still happens our time, a time characterized by an intellectual and cultural horizon that seems inimical to its occurrence. All throughout North America, people still draw together into communities to worship a god who putatively creates and sustains the entire universe. This gathering together does not happen in the numbers it did in the 1950s and 1960s, but it still does occur. On any given Sunday morning millions of people are in worship.  

Charles Taylor, in his magisterial A Secular Age, adroitly interprets the cultural and intellectual horizon of our time with its attendant social imaginaries. His major question in the book is this: How is it that in the sixteenth century not believing in God was generally unthinkable, while believing today is very difficult, even for those professing such belief? What has happened? 

His answer to this is actually quite complicated, and I won't summarize it here, except to say that Taylor is no fan of subtraction theories, a view that conceives humans as being largely able to know the world in which they live and how to act within that world. Subtraction theory claims that human beings have largely not achieved their potential as responsible epistemic and moral agents because they have inter alia lost themselves in religion and have, accordingly, not developed the potential that they have had all along. According to subtraction theory, secularization is a good thing because as religion wanes, human beings are increasingly fulfilling the dream of the Enlightenment: Aude sapere ("dare to know").  It is a captivating view: we humans can finally turn away from the superstitions of the past and attain genuine positive knowledge of things.  

Taylor claims that in the North Atlantic countries (North America and Europe), secularization tends to bring with it either a closed "take" or "spin" on the universe and our place within it. A spin or take is closed when it accepts a naturalism that excludes traditional views of the transcendent; when it holds that there is nothing that "goes beyond" the immanence of this world. He distinguishes a closed "spin" from a closed "take", pointing out that while people adopting a closed take hold that rejection of traditional transcendence might be reasonable, but that it is not wholly irrational to hold otherwise, those in a closed spin assert that holding to traditional transcendence is completely irrational, and thus one's rejection of a closed view is either due to the mendacity or the irrationality of the one doing the rejecting. 

Much of the intelligentsia, argues Taylor, simply assumes a closed spin on things. Scientific theory gives us the best causal map of the universe and such theory makes no appeal to supernatural forces of gods. In the cities, the young often understand their human sojourn in this way: 

• Human beings are the products of a long evolutionary process beginning with the Big Bang some 13.7 billion years ago.  
• The universe came into being in an explosion from a infinitely dense point that had no magnitude. 
• The subsequent history of the universe is due to natural events and processes developing as they did out of earlier conditions of the universe. There is no supernatural agency involved in the origin and development of the universe. 
• Explanations why there was an infinitely dense point at the beginning that subsequently exploded are mostly not something that science can rightfully provide, although theories of quantum cosmology recently sketched suggest the prior existence of a multi-verse of which the particular development of our universe is one possible actualized trajectory. There is yet not a theory of why there was at the beginning a multi-verse. 
• Why deterministic processes propel the universe forward into concrete actualization, there are throughout these processes the presence of "far from equilibrium" situations that allow for the introduction of novelty. Thus, the history of the universe, while basically deterministic, has some elements of chance within it. 
• Since human life is a natural product of the natural life of the universe, it must be understood naturalistically. 
• Understanding human life naturalistically means that complicated features of human life, e.g., intentionality, reason, etc., must be understood in natural ways: What are the natural processes that drive forward the development of our species? 
• Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory has wide acceptance as providing some explanation for why our species developed as it did: Genetic features are passed down from generation to generation, and the natural characteristics of the environment in which genetic mutation happens limits or excludes the development of some genetic variations while helping the development of other genetic variations.
• Accordingly, neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory makes no appeal to purpose or teleology, for the particular genetic variations that survive for later genetic variation are clearly caused by natural features of the environment. There is thus no pull (final causality) in neo-Darwinian genetic theory, only pushes (efficient causality). 
• Since human beings are natural products of natural processes, understanding them profoundly requires the casting of natural scientific theories, e.g., human characteristics like reason, love, empathy, etc., must be explained naturalistically.  
• To understand humans naturalistically, is to understand them in ways quite different from traditional great chain of being understandings. According to the great chain of being, human beings are created lower than the angels and higher than the beasts, and thus to understand what it is to be human is to look both above and below us: What are those features of human existence that clearly fall under the category of the imago dei, and what features are due to the fall into nature and flesh of those beings initially created in the imago dei?  
• Since human beings are fully natural beings developing as they have through natural processes since the beginning of the universe, the true key to understanding their existence is found by looking below ourselves and not above ourselves, e.g., what can the sexuality of orangutans teach us about our own sexuality? 
• Trying to look above ourselves for clues to our nature is the practice of idealism, and proceeding in this way is find putative answers in our own projections. While natural science can give us insight into our causal natures, traditional religion and philosophy obviates this causal nature by appeal to non-natural or supernatural processes and entities. In the words of Feuerbach, God did not create human beings, human beings created God. 
• Since we are natural beings, our sexuality should be understood along the lines of other natural beings, and our reason and communication should be understood in the way of other natural beings. Human beings do have a capacity to reason, communicate, and form sexual alliances, but these are not causa sui. Rather, it is a matter of degree, and not ultimate of kind, that separates our experience from that of the other higher primates. 
• The young living in vast urban areas who understand themselves naturalistically have, accordingly, very little motivation to either adopt religion or be open to it. Religious belief, they think rather confidently, does not track with our actual knowledge of the natural world in which we believe. It is thus a backward-looking movement motivated by wish and not knowledge. Religious people, they think, need a crutch to live in this naturalist world that is all around us. Thus, they think, religious people project views of the gods and pray their wishes to their gods. 
• The religious person is thus maladapted to the actual existing world. They don't have the courage to live in the actual world, and thus project upon the actual world a religious worldview that makes living easier. Religious people are thus more cowardly than those understanding themselves naturalistically, but also more dangerous, because in ignoring the causalities of the natural world and embracing superstition, those who could have been helped by the knowledge of natural processes are now not treated properly. Death that might have been avoided, now befalls the befuddled religious believer or those unlucky enough to take their advice and counsel. 
• Given that there is no God who cares or no ultimate metaphysics in which meaning and purpose are ingredient, human beings must simply create their own meaning in the limited days they have to live. 
• Since there are no objective structures corresponding to the good, the beautiful, and the true, human beings are free to develop in the ways that they might find pleasurable and useful. This does not mean that they act irrationally, but rather that they must assume the mantle of having to be their own law-givers. Reality does not come with moral structures. They must be sown and cultivated by human beings, and harvested only if the present situation is illuminated by them. 

I could continue with a description of what seems plausible to the urban young. It is important to see all of this under the category of a closed spin. To many of our urban youth, what I have sketched above is simply settled. Just as it is true that the earth revolves around the sun, so is it true that human beings are natural beings who must develop their science, societies and families ultimately without appeal to heavenly beings. To give up on what I have articulated is, for them, to descend into irrationality. There simply is no other option for them not to believe this. There is a new social imaginary at work, a communal way of seeing that can imagine a fulfilling life without gods, prayers, divine laws, or even transcendence itself. While earlier generations hoped for life out beyond our physical deaths, this new way of imagining existence is one where death is not a problem. In fact, death is part of the circle of life, and this circle of life can be understood naturalistically. 

people participating in congregational life in the North Atlantic countries today are sons and daughters of their age. While they may be attending Christian congregations, their intellectual and cultural ethos is likely one wherein naturalism makes sense. They have learned from their teachers about the difference between facts and values, and they believe that natural science somehow is concerned with the facts, while perhaps their religion deals with the values of those whom are at some level aware of these facts. People in Christian congregations today in the North Atlantic countries are thus decidedly cross-pressured. They participate in Christian life, even though their deepest understanding of the world provides little rational justification for that participation. 

Preaching to men and women today must take into account the cross-pressuring felt by those in the pews. While their participation in congregational life probably points to them not holding a closed spin, such a participation is entirely congruent with them assuming a closed take. While it seems like materialism or physicalism is true, there are some features of our experience that does not fit a closed spin on the universe. Perhaps it is because of these features that certain people become congregational members. Maybe they sense that the naturalism that they ought to believe is inadequate to their experience in its totality. 

Most of the time we leading Christian congregations underestimate, I think, the cross-pressuring that our members are likely experiencing. Yes, clearly many are waiting to hear the saving Word proclaimed in the sermon and celebrated in the sacrament. But in their desire to hear that Word, they remain deeply conflicted. As twenty-first century men and women, they cannot easily affirm the views of their sixteenth century ancestors. The naturalism everywhere regnant today was not known to Luther and his contemporaries. Luther had the advantage of having a metaphysical view of things that was consonant with his theological accents and innovations. 

But this is not the case today. Contemporary Lutherans who wish to retain Luther's theology must now do so in a culture whose dominant social imaginaries reject the metaphysical underpinnings Luther simply presupposed. So how does Lutheran theology play now in congregations whose members have little understanding of how God could truly be possible and relevant? It is to this question that we shall turn in the next post. 

Thinking about Causation

I have recently written a paper entitled 'Creatio ex Nihilo in Luther's Genesis Commentary and the Causal Question'.  The paper argues, inter alia, that the most straightforward way of reading Luther in the Genesis Commentary is to claim that he holds: 'God causally brought about the creation of matter from nothing'. 

In itself this does not seem a particularly controversial claim.  However, when understood within the dominant theological paradigm since Kant, this statement seems highly suspect.   "Of course," the paradigm claims, "God created the heavens and the earth.  Everyone believes that.  It is just that God did not cause the earth to be.  To claim that would be a pernicious category mistake!"

But why should this be?  Why would it be problematical to claim that God causally brought about the universe from nothing?   Is this not straightforward?

It is only straightforward, it seems, if one does not think too deeply about the notion of causality.  Prior to the Enlightenement, it seems, philosophers often mistook reasons and causes.   Within and after the Enlightenment, philosophers have tended to understand causality empirically.  Physical things causally bring about other physical things.  This is the causal game properly played.   To say that the game itself was caused is to violate the rules of the game.  

Thinking about causality has tended to cluster around three views:  1)  Regular theories of causation, 2) Subjunctive and countracausal theories of causation, and 3) Intrinsic relational theories of causation. 

Accordingly, (1) claims 'A causes B' is analyzable into 'A precedes B', 'A-things are constantly conjoined to B-things' and some other conditions about which there is disagreement.  (2) holds that 'A causes B' is analyzable into 'if A were not to occur, B would not occur', or many other candidates.   Finally, (3) holds that there is some intrisic connection between A and B such B is directly produced from A.  (Let us not attend to the air of circularity at this point.) 

Clearly, if one were to want to claim that the universe was brought about by God, they could not hold a regularity theory of divine causation because the production of the universe is a singular event.  This leaves only option (2), (3) or some hybrid thereof.   Now the question arises as to what general tactic is better:  Is divine creatio ex nihilo best understood counterfactually or intrinsically?   My purpose in this blog is to explore a bit the notion of an intrinsic causal relation and ask whether it is possible for it to be utilized as the best analysis of divine causality creatio ex nihilo.  I will leave discussion of counterfactual divine causation to another time. 

The notion of an intrinsic causal relation takes aim at any Humean account of causation claiming that causality must be understood in terms of constant conjunction, temporal priority and spatio contiguity.   Accordingly, such an "externalist" account presupposes a widespread patterns of occurances.  In contravention to this, an intrinsic view of causality holds that cause is an intrinsic relation of power, energy or necessary connection.  I believe that the distinction between intrinsic/extrinsic relationality matter maps well to the distinction between singular causal statements versus "non-singularist" proposals.

According to a singularist approach the truthmaker for a single causal claim is a local relation holding between singular instances.   On this reading, the causal relation does not depend upon occurence of events in the neighborhood of the event in question; the causal relation is intrinsic to the relata and their connecting processes.  Instead of regularities as the truth makers of singular causal statements, local connections are.

The critical point in thinking about an intrinsic relation is this:  'A is intrinsically related to B' if and only if 'the relation is wholly determined by A and B'.   Over and against accounts that would unpack a relationship between A and B as determined by the regularities among a wide set of events and processes, the intrinsic connection of A and B supposes that there is something in A and something in B such that 'A causes B' cannot help but obtain.  

But now let us think about 'God causally brings about the existence of the universe'.   What properties of God and the universe obtain such that it is indeed necessary that 'God causally produces the universe'?

The obvious answer, of course, is that God has as God's very nature -- one might say His natural property -- a production of initial matter/energy and the subsequent formation thereof.  One might then say of the universe that is has its natural property of being produced by divine agency.   Accordingly, 'God creates the universe' is true because there is a being that is God whose nature it is to create, and a universe whose nature it is to be created.  To claim that 'God creates the universe ex nihilo' is simply to claim that there is a being that is God whose nature it is to create all things from absolute nothing, and a universe whose nature it is to be causally produced by the divine from absolute nothing. 

Now all this at one level might seem trivial.   Have we not simply performed some crude semantic joke?  Is it not the cause that we simply have moved the causal problem of divine/universe interaction from relations and placed it in entities having properties? 

At this point one must remember what the point is.   The point is to try to give an account of causality that is philosophically defensible.   Clearly if cause is an extrinsic relation, then we cannot give an account of the singular causal statement 'God creates the universe.'   What I have suggested is that this singular causal statement is captured by appeal to an intrinsic relation which itself is captured by the natural properties of the relata.  

The question whether or not their are any philosophical grounds for asserting the truth of the single causal statement is not one I wish to entertain here.   I take it that theology has always claimed that 'God creates the heavens and the earth'.  My point here is simply to show that it is conceptually coherent to think such divine/universe causality.   As it turns out, it is no category mistake.