If Three North will Please Pardon this Indiscretion...

To Mrs. Professor in Defense of My Cat’s Honor and Not Only

My valiant helper, a small-sized tiger
Sleeps sweetly on my desk, by the computer,
Unaware that you insult his tribe.
 Cats play with a mouse or
with a half-dead mole.
You are wrong, though: it’s not out of cruelty.
They simply like a thing that moves.
For, after all, we know that only consciousness
Can for a moment move into the Other,
Empathize with the pain and panic of a mouse.
And such as cats are, all of Nature is.
Indifferent, alas, to the good and the evil.
Quite a problem for us, I am afraid.
Natural history has its museums,
But why should our children learn about monsters,
An earth of snakes and reptiles for millions of years?
Nature devouring, nature devoured,
Butchery day and night smoking with blood.

And who created it? Was it the good Lord?
Yes, undoubtedly, they are innocent,
Spiders, mantises, sharks, pythons.

We are the only ones who say: cruelty.
Our consciousness and our conscience
Alone in the pale anthill of galaxies
Put their hope in a humane God.
Who cannot but feel and think,

Who is kindred to us by his warmth and movement,

For we are, as he told us, similar to Him.
Yet if it is so, then He takes pity
On every mauled mouse, every wounded bird.
Then the universe for him is like a Crucifixion.
Such is the outcome of your attack on the cat:
A theological, Augustinian grimace,
Which makes difficult our walking on this earth.

–Czeslaw Milosz,¹
 translated by the author and Robert Hass

Gosh, Were Our Ancestors STUPID.

AL Daily linked to an interesting project over at Edge.org: a collection of now-disproven commonly held beliefs, scientific or otherwise.  It was a fun exercise to guess at some of the presuppositions and pet peeves of the contributors based on the paragraphs submitted.  There seems to be a wide range of respondents from many different disciplines, though there is certainly a bias toward standing aghast at some of the "scientifically driven" medical theories that were way, way off the mark.

One in particular caught my attention, not so much on account of its thinly veiled hostility to the influence of the churches on public policy (that sentiment was actually quite common, from what I found) but the preposterous inconsistency of his reasoning.  Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán had some strong words about the reprehensible practices of phrenology and lobotomy:

Epigenetics

A couple of recent articles at the New Atlantis and Time Magazine have caught my attention on the admittedly abstruse subject of molecular biology. 

What I understand this to be all about is that DNA is nowhere near as clear-cut as was originally supposed. The Human Genome Project meant to map the entirety of human genetic material and gain a complete understanding of what caused disease and dysfunction, as well as the processes that gave rise to organic diversity within the body. What has been discovered (and in fact was commonly known since the 1970s, but little attention was paid to it) is that the shape, arrangement, and cellular context of the DNA strands has as much to do with cellular function and genetic replication of proteins as the nucleotide bases of the DNA helix do. The level of complexity has been increased by several orders of magnitude--but what is most interesting is that it has provoked a re-evaluation of Lamarck's pre-Darwinian hypothesis, which insisted that species modification could happen in much less time than Darwin hypothesized (especially in times of stressful environmental factors). The giraffe could "stretch" its neck over the course of a few generations, whereas Darwin insisted (backing up his claim with strong scientific evidence) that such changes would take millions of years.  Needless to say, the word being tossed about is "paradigm shift".

A little teaser for you:

 When completed, the Human Epigenome Project (already under way in Europe) will make the Human Genome Project look like homework that 15th century kids did with an abacus. But the potential is staggering. For decades, we have stumbled around massive Darwinian roadblocks. DNA, we thought, was an ironclad code that we and our children and their children had to live by. Now we can imagine a world in which we can tinker with DNA, bend it to our will. It will take geneticists and ethicists many years to work out all the implications, but be assured: the age of epigenetics has arrived.

An admittedly popularized version of the concept, with the customary breathless predictions, but stirring nonetheless.

More on Human Evolution

 The Guardian has published of a book I'd like to check out at some point.  Basing his theories of human evolution on the influence technologies such as cooking and baby slings have upon physical structure (and therefore on the potential for larger brain capacity), British archaeologist Timothy Taylor offers some interesting hypotheses:

After the switch to an upright posture, probably the biggest single anatomical change on the journey from apes to humans was the weakening of the jaw. In apes, the jaw is large and protrudes way beyond the nose. It is attached by muscle to a bony ridge on the top of the skull and has a force many times that of a human jaw. Recent genomics research has shown that a large mutation about 2.4m years ago disabled the key muscle protein in human jaws. We still have the disabled protein today, and that weakened jaw enabled a raft of innovations. The ape brain could not grow because of the huge muscle load anchored to the skull's crest, and apes cannot articulate speech-like sounds because of the clumsy force of their jaws. This mutation allowed the increase in human brain size and the acquisition of language.

But why did it happen? Wrangham maintains that it was cooking that led to the change. Cooked food does not need strong jaws. In genetics a function that becomes redundant always leads to the gene being disabled by mutations. Around 2.4m years ago an ape switched to mostly cooked food. In the fossil record, a new proto-human appeared 1.8-1.9m years ago: Homo erectus had a much larger brain and no crest on the skull, indicating that the weakened jaw muscle was now standard.

Read the rest over at the Guardian.  I don't agree with all the author's conclusions, but I do find it of interest that many, many theories of human evolution are constantly being advanced.  Recent genetic research seems to be offering new avenues for helpful guesses at the prehistory of homo sapiens, and it is fun to stay in the discussion on terms other than one's own.  Thinking about things in a way different from my own certainly does assist in the ongoing task of broadening the mind.

h/t AL Daily

In other news, I've settled on the blog header that does the job right, and I'm sticking with it.  Possibly for months.

Back in the Saddle

Now that I've thoroughly alienated any regular readership I might have had, I figure it's time for a fresh start.  Things have settled into their established patterns here at the hospital, and I'm hoping to start blogging again.

In the personal realm, the ordination has changed things in many, many ways.  It really does "feel different" to be ordained a deacon, and I am pretty excited about the upcoming ordinations of my brother seminarians.  I'm enjoying CPE a great deal, having been thrown into a fairly intense ministerial situation and finding my way through the grace of God, day by day.  And I'm keeping up the reading, which I hope to share on the blog through another couple of entries in the Desk Chair Review of Books.

One recent article that called up memories of a recently read book was an interview with a British entomologist, Jeremy Nivens, on the NYT website.  I became interested due to my recent enjoyment of an anthology of J. Henri Fabre's classic works, The Insect World of J. Henri Fabre.  It seems that the possibilities for the advancement of human biology, the derivations of animal instinct, and the simple wonder at some of the most abundant (and complex) species on the planet was not retired with the passing of the wizened Frenchman nearly a century ago.  He offers some interesting perspectives on his most notable discoveries:

You know, there’s this pervasive idea in biology that I think is wrong. It goes: we humans are at the pinnacle of the evolutionary tree, and as you get up that tree, brain size must get bigger. But a fly is just as evolved as a human. It’s just evolved to a different niche. In fact, in evolution there’s no drive towards bigger brains. It’s perfectly possible that under the right circumstances, you could get animals evolving small brains.

Interesting, no?  I certainly haven't thought out all the consequences of this, but it does give the lie to some perspectives on human evolution.  What "niche" is it that human beings have evolved to fill?  What biological need is there for a city-building, novel-writing mammal?  Food for thought.

It's good to be back.

Greatest Show on Earth

It's nice to see at least some finer distinctions being made in the popular culture (even as they're crafted in response to the precisionless rhetoric of that same culture). A great example of this is the review of Richard Dawkins' new book, written as a magnum opus of evolutionary argument, over at the Grey Lady:

Dawkins is aware that evolution is commonly called a theory but deems “theory” too wishy-washy a term because it connotes the idea of hypothesis. Evolution, in Dawkins’s view, is a concept as bulletproof as a mathematical theorem, even though it can’t be proved by rigorous logical proofs. He seems to have little appreciation for the cognitive structure of science. Philosophers of science, who are the arbiters of such issues, say science consists largely of facts, laws and theories. The facts are the facts, the laws summarize the regularities in the facts, and the theories explain the laws. Evolution can fall into only one of these categories, and it’s a theory.

Read the rest here.

Gathering Facts Without Abandoning Meaning

Their lives were too human for science, too beautiful for numbers, too sad for diagnosis and too immortal for bound journals.

There's a fascinating essay up on the Atlantic's website entitled "What Makes Us Happy?" It features a prominent behavioral scientist, Dr. George Vaillant, who has been the champion of a 72-year study on the lives of a group of 200 Harvard graduates. Known as a "longitudinal" approach, such studies select a relatively narrow segment of the population but track it over a much longer period of time--a sort of antithesis to the Gallup poll.

What I found so intriguing about the essay (and the man it featured) was that for all the empirical data, the lives of the men who were being studied had not been reduced to that data. It struck me as a good example of the sort of science that a Catholic Christian could embrace. There were no cries of exhaustive explanatory power for what constituted the fullness of human existence, nor declarations of the uselessness of all other approaches to understanding human beings. Just patient, intensely observant attention. Here was a man who seems to instantiate the openness to all the purview of reason, as described by Lewis, Chesterton, and more recently, Benedict (you can read more about their diagnosis of the contemporary self-limitation of reason here).

While there's no clear exposition of the philosophical outlook of study's champion, the tone I gathered was mostly favorable, and I would recommend reading the essay if you've got a half hour or so to spare.

Via Arts & Letters Daily.

A Startling Concession

Via the First Things blog, and the New York Times:

It is no secret that a lot of climate-change research is subject to opinion, that climate models sometimes disagree even on the signs of the future changes (e.g. drier vs. wetter future climate). The problem is, only sensational exaggeration makes the kind of story that will get politicians’—and readers’—attention. So, yes, climate scientists might exaggerate, but in today’s world, this is the only way to assure any political action and thus more federal financing to reduce the scientific uncertainty.

This admission from a Harvard Ph.D. candidate in applied mathematics and climatology is a really, really, really bad sign. We're witnessing the very subtle transition from "the facts demand action" to "the facts aren't demanding enough action". The tone of the first phrase is all concern, urgency, and instruction; that of the second is panic, irrationality, and fanaticism. It is the transition from teaching to manipulation; it's a corruption from being in service to a cause to enslavement to ideology.

It is also a consequence of the transition from print to visual media as the vehicle for transmitting information. Not too long ago, I drifted through Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death and his critique of television as a medium for public discourse came to mind as I ruminated over the quotation above. Postman claims that unlike printed media, which appealed to the structured, rational dimensions of the mind, television is image-based and therefore fundamentally oriented to the nonrational: emotions, dispositions, "the gut". This is, of course, fine for rhetorical persuasion, but his claim is that each medium carries within itself its own definition of what constitutes truth. A print-based culture, whose conversations were carried out verbally, considered the rational, linear, and ordered presentation of facts and arguments to be the standard for truth, however dressed up in elegant language they may have been. It measured its discourse by this rule.

An image-based media, however, operates by a different standard, and its truth-telling is not rigorous; it is "compelling" or "powerful" but not ultimately judged by its correspondence to reality. It is a truth primarily based upon its ability to persuade. The classic example is Richard Nixon's debate with JFK in the 1960 presidential race: many claim that Nixon's poor health and refusal to wear makeup to have been the deciding factor among the 70 million television viewers who decided Kennedy had bested Nixon (radio listeners pronounced in favor of Nixon). What is true is what persuades; can anyone be blamed, given such a milieu, for being persuasive at any cost?

Yet it is precisely the truth that disappears in such a milieu, for it is drowned by the voices straining to be heard over all others. Truth becomes a lie. It is a short road from "the facts aren't demanding enough action" to "the facts demand that we exaggerate the facts". Is there any question that this last idea is tantamount to "the facts demand that we lie about the facts"?

A very helpful point on this subject was made in an article by Joseph Bottum and Ryan T. Anderson on the political history of stem cells. You may be wondering, Stem cells have a political history? I thought this was a medical question, a scientific question. You'd be right to wonder, and I think Bottum & Anderson strike the perfect ironic tone in the title of their article. Unfortunately, global warming isn't the first time science has gotten itself mixed up with politics, and vice versa. Science and politics aren't nearly so separate as we might believe.

Until the discovery of viable techniques of manipulating adult stem cells (known as induced pluripotent stem cell research, or IPSC), the question of embryonic stem cell research was used as a political weapon. Incredibly, many scientists tolerated this because they thought it would help them do the research they were convinced would lead to cures.

The history of the stem-cell debate is a study of what happens when politics and science reach out to each other. The politicians were guilty, but the scientists were more guilty, for they allowed—no, they encouraged—politicians to make stem-cell research a tool in the public fights over abortion, public religion, and high finance.

In the small demagogueries of a political season, the science of stem-cell research became susceptible to the easy lie and the useful exaggeration. A little shading of truth, a little twisting of facts—yes, the politics corrupted the science, but the scientists willingly aided the corruption. And with this history in mind, who will believe America’s scientists the next time they tell us something that bears on an election?

We have learned something over these years: When science looks like politics, that’s because it is.

It's hard to believe that scientists would place their credibility in the hands of politicians, but we've been watching it happen it for years. IPSC research is an OMELETTE on the face of the scientific stooges of the political left. I'm always hearing about how exasperated the rest of the world is about the idiots who have dug their heels and refused to capitulate to global-warming dogmatics, but I never hear anyone talking about how it's not always wise to trust someone just because they have some letters after their name and a job at a big university. It seems to me that such skeptics are simply holding scientists accountable for their past willingness to be the political puppets of fanatics and ideologues, and their failure to extricate themselves from the awkward alliances they have created.

Former NASA Climatology Chief Puts the Chill on Global Warming

I realize my posts have been more news-related lately, which is definitely not where I plan to continue going with this blog, but there has been some juicy stuff of late that just screams to be shared.

The latest is a public rebuke of James Hansen, the NASA scientist first responsible for breaking the man-made climate change scenario to Congress in 1988, by Dr. John Theon, his former supervisor. Hansen has been very radical and very vocal in his advocacy, but some inconvenient developments have begun to swing the prevailing winds in another direction.

“I appreciate the opportunity to add my name to those who disagree that global warming is man made,” Theon wrote to the Minority Office at the Environment and Public Works Committee on January 15, 2009. “I was, in effect, Hansen’s supervisor because I had to justify his funding, allocate his resources, and evaluate his results.”
...
Theon declared “climate models are useless.” “My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit,” Theon explained. “Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it. They have resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists. This is clearly contrary to how science should be done. Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy,” he added.

Hansen was a noted authority in Gore's acclaimed film, "An Inconvenient Truth."

Gore faces a much different scientific climate in 2009 than the one he faced in 2006 when his film was released. According to satellite data, the Earth has cooled since Gore’s film was released, Antarctic sea ice extent has grown to record levels, sea level rise has slowed, ocean temperatures have failed to warm, and more and more scientists have publicly declared their dissent from man-made climate fears as peer-reviewed studies continue to man-made counter warming fears.

Read all this and more over at Watts Up With That.

Various and Sundry Engagements With Matters of Enlightenment

A few hours of desultory reading on the web can either be fuel for contemplation or a complete waste of time that calls into question one's character and sanity. Happily, this morning can be declared the former.

First Things has been on a roll with the daily article of late. R.R. Reno discusses some thoughts on how scientific discoveries are received by ordinary people, and sheds a tear of compassion for the well-funded, highly educated army of researchers whose labors do little to influence public opinion on matters that touch on basic human experience. The matter in question? Brain science, and the conviction among researchers that impending discoveries will put the last nail in the coffin of freedom (and hence moral responsibility). A recent study from the University of Utah suggests that regardless of the scientific consensus, certain basic convictions just won't be eradicated. Reno does a fine job of reining in our view that science has the last word on the humanum.

When a scientist reports that action x can occur if and only if there is an antecedent brain state y, which in turn requires brain state z, then he is identifying y and z as necessary condition for and not the causes of x. We all know that what counts as a free choice is not a mental moment suspended in ether, unconnected and uninfluenced by emotions, habits, and intuitions. The ability of science to explain and illuminate the webs of interconnection does not dislodge our deeper intuition that our deeply embedded, highly influenced, and profoundly physical mental lives are somehow genuinely our own—and somehow our responsibility to discipline and cultivate.

Reno's appraisal of the general reluctance to swallow massively counterintuitive scientific claims sits well with the perspectives of another FT contributor (and a favorite author of mine) Stephen Barr. I plowed through his Modern Physics and Ancient Faith on the exercise bike this summer, which I highly recommend to enthusiasts in the field of the philosophy of science. Dabblers might be more suited to print out an article that presents the thesis of the book in summary form, entitled "Retelling the Story of Science", and park themselves in an easy chair on a winter morning with a cup of hot coffee and a pencil. In it, Barr nails down five areas of scientific progress that have actually undermined the Enlightenment aspirations to eradicate religious perspectives on the world. The fourth and fifth these areas of discovery touch on the issues outlined by Reno above, but in a very different light. Barr takes up the favorite activity of ideological materialism, "debunking myths," and turns it back on its practitioners:

Here the scientist debunks himself. Here all the grand intellectual adventure of science ends with the statement that there is no intellectual adventure. For the mind of man has looked into itself and seen nothing there except complex chemistry, nerve impulses, and synapses firing. That, at least, is what the materialist tells us that science has seen. However, the story is really not so simple. Here again the plot has twisted. Two of the greatest discoveries of the twentieth century cast considerable doubt upon, and some would say refute, the contention that the mind of man can be explained as a mere biochemical machine.

What might those discoveries be? Read the article and find out.

On a note related to some thoughts on relativism earlier, I came across this interesting video of Penn Gillette's reaction to the gift of a Bible from one of his fans after a show (link via Creative Minority Report). A short encounter with a genuinely good Christian man had an obviously powerful effect upon him.

What is most interesting is the way he countextualized the simple gift of a small Gideon Bible. "How much do you have to hate someone to believe everlasting life is possible, and not tell them that?" Contra the popular conception of evangelism as judgment and condemnation, this self-proclaimed atheist accepted what this man was offering: the gift of God's love, despite the personal discomfort making such an offer would probably bring him. That offer worked on a level more profoundly than the merely intellectual:

I know there's no God, and one polite person living his life well doesn't change that. But I'll tell you, he was a very, very, very good man.

We have here something akin to what made Christianity such a popular religion in the first place. Benedict has said that

the conversion of the ancient world to Christianity was not the result of any planned activity on the part of the Church but the fruit of the proof of the faith as it became visible in the life of Christians and of the community of the Church … The Church’s community of life invited people to share in this life in which was revealed the truth from which this kind of life arose. On the other hand the apostasy of the modern age rests on the disappearance of the verification of faith in the life of Christians. In this is to be seen the great responsibility of Christians today. They should be reference points of faith as people who know about God, should in their lives demonstrate faith as truth, and should thus become signposts for others.

We have, in this short, unpolished video, an account of just what effect a life lived in fidelity to truth can have on unbelievers.

Perhaps it also gives the lie to a common saying that, in my opinion, is much abused: preach the Gospel always; when necessary, use words. A true statement in itself, but perhaps it's necessary more often than we've led ourselves to believe.

Little Demagogueries If Unchecked Will One Day Embarass You

The history of the stem-cell debate is a study of what happens when politics and science reach out to each other. The politicians were guilty, but the scientists were more guilty, for they allowed—no, they encouraged—politicians to make stem-cell research a tool in the public fights over abortion, public religion, and high finance.

In the small demagogueries of a political season, the science of stem-cell research became susceptible to the easy lie and the useful exaggeration. A little shading of truth, a little twisting of facts—yes, the politics corrupted the science, but the scientists willingly aided the corruption. And with this history in mind, who will believe America’s scientists the next time they tell us something that bears on an election? We have learned something over these years: When science looks like politics, that’s because it is.

[From the latest First Things]

Do Yourself a Favor

... and read this article from the First Things daily posting.

The Regime of Science

It's outstanding.

Dawkins Speaks For Himself

Richard Dawkins recently published an editorial in the LA Times, accusing the makers of Expelled of twisting his words regarding his apparent belief that life on earth was "seeded" by highly developed extraterrestrials. You can find the story here. He claims elsewhere that the question he was answering with this statement was "under what conditions would 'Intelligent Design' be a valid theory?"

Honestly, I can't imagine any other explanation for why Dawkins would say such a thing as he did, on film, with prepared questions. If this is so, the filmmakers are guilty of grave dishonesty. This sort of conduct is not helpful for the ongoing public conversation about these issues, which the film claims to desire. Given the producer's juvenile behavior towards PZ Myers in the past (he told reporters he wanted Myers to have to pay to see the movie), regardless of how arrogant and condescending the man can be (he certainly can), it does not justify these sorts of moves.

Apart from the moral component, there is a rhetorical one as well. This strategy is known as the "straw man" argument, in which one sets up a weak summary of a position in order to demolish it utterly with one's own more carefully formulated argument. This would seem to be an effective strategy to convince the untutored and unreflective, but we should keep in mind the example of St. Thomas, who strengthened his own arguments by doing his utmost to formulate his opponent's position before refuting it. If what Dawkins and Myers claim is true (even if we take their perspectives with a grain of salt), I would not support the makers of this film in their actions. Such attacks only give those who disagree a license to be dismissive and flippant, something all too common already.

If we're not prepared to fight fair on this issue, there isn't much point in fighting at all.

All the Facts, None of the Meaning

I’ve looked over my last post after doing some reading this past week, and I’m convinced I could be a bit more specific about what exactly is at stake with the “science and faith” controversy as it’s being presented in the public square. Specifically, towards the end of the post, I allude to the Regensburg address and Benedict’s insistence that the contemporary self-limitation of reason is a disastrous move. Allow me to quote briefly from the address to make clear the point to which I refer:

… [to the modern mind] only the kind of certainty resulting from the interplay of mathematical and empirical elements can be considered scientific. Anything that would claim to be science must be measured against this criterion. Hence the human sciences, such as history, psychology, sociology and philosophy, attempt to conform themselves to this canon of scientificity. A second point, which is important for our reflections, is that by its very nature this method excludes the question of God, making it appear an unscientific or pre-scientific question. Consequently, we are faced with a reduction of the radius of science and reason, one which needs to be questioned.

In this post, I’d like to take a closer look at what this “reduction in radius” feels like in more specific terms. Over the last few days, I had a feeling that I should be able to explain just what Benedict (and countless other thinkers) mean by this self-limitation language. It was in this mindset that I came across an old favorite: Lewis’ essay on what he calls “transposition,” published in a collection of some of his best addresses entitled The Weight of Glory. Lewis managed to do in this essay exactly what I wanted to convey, so what follows is more or less a summary of this lucid little piece, with comments and reformulations of my own interspersed throughout. If what you read here is of the least interest to you, I advise you to run to the nearest bookstore and purchase a copy. It makes for fantastic (and quite relevant) reading.

The occasion of his remarks is Pentecost Sunday, and he chooses to highlight an odd theme to preach upon: the gift of speaking in tongues. It is a case that is quite difficult for the Christian to explain in supernatural terms, for while we must accept the miraculous nature of the apostles’ preaching in languages unknown to them on that day in Jerusalem so long ago, nevertheless most contemporary instances of this strike many of us as embarrassing and unrelated to the real substance of our faith. No doubt there are true movements of the Holy Spirit in this charismatic gift, but it is also likely that sometimes it is nothing more than a bad case of nervous energy being spontaneously discharged. 

At this point, the skeptic steps forward to invoke Occam’s razor. “Why,” he intones, “would it be reasonable to accept multiple explanations for one phenomenon—namely, the pronunciation of gibberish while in a state of ecstasy? Would it not be much more reasonable to say that a purely physical explanation which holds in most cases holds in all of them? Can we not dispense with the supernatural entirely?” Caught between the given of revelation and the plausible reductionism of the skeptic, the Christian may start to feel a little warm under the collar and start asking himself how important is this speaking in tongues stuff is, anyway.

Well, regardless of what you think about speaking in tongues, this difficulty can apply to any number of different things within the Christian worldview, for it is one case in a whole class of similar difficulties. Certainly the sacraments, being the use of natural signs to signify and effect supernatural realities, would be susceptible to this objection. Christian language about heaven is filled with references to purely natural, physical realities. The seven "infused" virtues have the same names and descriptions as their natural counterparts. We hear this language in other circles as well, such as among those who conjecture about the place of humanity in the cosmos: when all is said and done, isn’t human existence just a particularly refined and complex animal existence? Isn’t all this talk of a soul and of spiritual existence just a poetic and metaphorical way of describing our highly developed powers of tool making and communication, which we share with the animals?

Lewis summarizes,

Put in its most general terms, our problem is that of the obvious continuity between things which are admittedly natural and things which, it is claimed, are spiritual; the reappearance in what professes to be our supernatural life of all the same old elements which make up our natural life and (it would seem) of no others.

To refute the skeptic, Lewis seeks a case in which all would recognize that the simple explanation, which is plausible at first glance, is false. Lewis finds his case within the emotions and their physical manifestations, a realm common to the experience of all. Most would acknowledge that one and the same physical reaction may result from different emotional states: that unsettled feeling in the chest is present not only after successfully asking a girl out on a date but also after receiving a piece of horrible news about a loved one or getting caught in telling a boldfaced lie. The one physical reaction is both delightful and anguishing depending upon the emotional state that accompanies and gives rise to it.

Furthermore, the physical sensation is not merely a sign of the emotion, but is wrapped up in the emotion itself, truly becoming what it signifies. There is not only continuity between them but an overlap, a mingling. Here, then, we have a similar situation to our class of difficulties listed above in which the natural and (allegedly) supernatural are very closely tied, indeed so closely tied that it is quite reasonable to dismiss the supernatural as a figment. Yet in our present case, no one would deny that while emotional states are of a higher order than physical sensations (in the sense that the emotions are a more complex and richly varied phenomenon than the physical sensations that carry them), they are nonetheless real. What conclusions can we draw from this example?

In the emotional life, a more complex system (emotion) must be expressed through a less complex medium (the nervous system). Because there cannot be a one-to-one correspondence between elements of the two systems, linking every emotional state with its own peculiar nervous reaction in the body, multiple emotions must be associated with one and the same physical sensation. Hence, the same tight feeling in the chest I described above accompanies both delight and anguish. It is this “expression” of a more complex, “higher” system in a lower one that Lewis calls transposition.

A few examples might be of assistance here. When a language with 22 vowel sounds has only 5 vowel characters available to it, multiple sounds must be assigned to each character in order for the spoken language to be fully represented in writing. In an orchestral composition that is transposed for the piano, the notes originally played by flutes, violins, and oboes must be the notes of only one instrument in its transposed form. 

The example of drawing was especially helpful to me. In order to represent a three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional piece of paper, one must use what artists call “perspective,” which means that one and the same shape must be able to represent multiple realities; a triangle must be able to represent both a dunce cap and a straight road receding into the distance. 

What if you tried to explain to someone who had never heard English spoken that each written character a, e, i, o, and u could refer to multiple sounds? There’s no reason to think otherwise based on the characters on the page. What if someone listening to a piano piece originally composed for an orchestra had never heard an instrument other than the piano, and doubted the existence of other instruments? All the talk in the world would never convince her that the performance on piano was merely a hint of the symphony it imitated. And if one could imagine a creature that existed entirely in two dimensions examining the lines of a drawing (if you’re having trouble, it was wonderfully imagined by the author of Flatland, from which this blog takes its name), even an initial openness to the idea of third dimension would soon be deflated when all the evidence for it was just the same old lines and shapes. Lewis steps into this perspective for a moment and speaks convincingly from the skeptic’s corner:

You keep telling me of this other world and its unimaginable shapes which you call solid. But isn’t it very suspicious that all the shapes which you offer me as images or reflections of the solid ones turn out on inspection to be simply the old two-dimensional shapes of my own world as I have always known it? Is it not obvious that your vaunted other world, so far from being the archetype, is a dream which borrows all its elements from this one?

In short, one can never understand the higher system when one approaches it from below. It is only when one understands the higher system or medium that its expressions in the lower one make sense; it is a prior acquaintance with them from the inside that renders them intelligible in their less complex expressions. It is only because we live in a three-dimensional world that two-dimensional drawings make sense to us.

Hence, the skepticism we encountered with regard to speaking in tongues makes sense, and is exactly what one would expect when approaching a supernatural reality “from below.” For confining oneself to the lower system or medium prevents one from ever moving beyond the most simplistic, reductionistic explanations from the outset.

Of course, none of this is to argue for the existence of the supernatural; the point is merely that the sorts of objections we do get from contemporary materialists are just the sort we should expect to get, for by consciously limiting themselves to the material, materialists render themselves unable to move beyond the material. We should not be surprised, then, when we hear claims (such as the one above) which insisted that humans are nothing more than highly developed beasts. For, when considering the expression of a highly complex system (the mind) in its less complex physical substrate (the brain), it will always—ALWAYS—be possible to deny that there is any real difference between the two as long as a purely naturalistic explanation is the criterion for all truth.

It is as if a man falls in love with a woman and suffers terribly after a stormy breakup. In his grief, be begins to look over the relationship and start to pick it apart. Though the love was real enough while he was in the midst of it, his examination in hindsight started to reveal her flaws and selfishness as well as his own imperfect motives. These, too, were real; yet if in order to dull the pain of his loss he chooses to ignore what was good about their love and dwell only upon what was shameful, soon enough that’s all his memories will contain, no matter what the reality of the situation might have been. His mistake is to consider the results of his analysis as truer than his experience.

Here we have the crux of the “self-limitation of reason” of which Benedict speaks. In a conscious effort to understand the world, it is possible to temporarily bracket all cumulative knowledge and start afresh with the plan to consider only what can be verified by experiment—that is, to look at reality from below, from within the framework of material existence. This is a perfectly valid way to approach the world; it is the scientific method. If, in the course of a long process of discovery that illuminates a great deal about reality, one forgets that this method is only a tool and not an end in itself, and begins insisting that there is nothing more to understand than what this method reveals, well, there isn’t much that can be done, for to him it will always be perfectly reasonable. As Lewis notes, “It is no good browbeating the critic who approaches a Transposition from below. On the evidence available to him his conclusion is the only one possible.” He has locked himself in a prison of his own making and thrown away the key. 

I will leave you with the author’s final analogy. It is a powerful one, and accurately diagnoses the impasse at which we find ourselves in the current exchanges over science versus faith. Perhaps you have tried to point out to a dog a piece of food lying out of his sight. Instead of looking where you point, he sniffs your finger. The world of the dog is all fact and no meaning, and it is precisely this habit of mind that a significant and vocal portion of the world induces upon itself. What does this mean for our continuing dialogue between faith and reason?

As long as this deliberate refusal to understand things from above, even when such understanding is possible, continues, it is idle to talk of any final victory over materialism. The critique of every experience from below, the voluntary ignoring of meaning and concentration on fact, will always have the same plausibility. There will always be evidence, and every month fresh evidence, to show that religion is only psychological, justice only self-protection, politics only economics, love only lust, and thought itself only cerebral biochemistry.

Chesterton, too, was an articulate defender of the power of reason to plumb the depths of reality when set free from the restrictive boundaries set by modernity upon itself. Disgusted with the reductive and impoverished anthropology and cosmology that sprung from the loins of the scientific revolution, he sought to portray for the materialist the real mistakes he was making.

He understands everything, and everything does not seem worth understanding. His cosmos is smaller than our world. Somehow his scheme, like the lucid scheme of the madman, seems unconscious of the alien energies and the large indifference of the earth; it is not thinking of the real things of the earth, of fighting peoples or proud mothers, or first love, or fear upon the sea. (Orthodoxy)

We are very much accustomed to accepting explanations for things that are far removed from our experience. We all believe our planet is spinning at a high rate of speed and hurtling through space at tens of thousands of miles per hour despite having no perception of this motion whatsoever. Few of us understand the principles at work when we flip on a lightswitch or a computer. Daily we are offered the most preposterous and counterintuitive explanations for such ordinary, simple things as the colors in a sunset or the propulsion of a sailboat into the wind, and we swallow them whole … which is not to say that we should not. They are, after all, true, so far as they go. 

But if it is demanded that we ignore our spontaneous wonder at the beauty of the setting sun or our delight in mastering the wild air using the work of our hands, it is time to politely end the conversation and get back to placating proud mothers and savoring first love.

Ben Stein's "Expelled" and the Reason I Don't Watch PBS

A passing comment from a certain learned Jesuit some months ago prompted me to dive into a subject of significant importance in the public square these days. After following through on his suggestion to pick up a copy of Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, the issues at stake were placed within the context of the larger debate over faith and reason within the long intellectual history that extends to the very roots of western civilization. This had the remarkable result of justifying my (vicious) inclination to buy books I have no immediate intention of reading, for when I came across a copy of Moral Darwinism sitting on my pile of untouched purchases, I experienced the temptation to read it, and gave in. It was written by Ben Wiker, a former professor of mine from Thomas Aquinas College, back when I didn’t have no clue ‘bout nothin’. He led me through 2400 years of intellectual history in a way that recast the way I discerned the principles (explicit or otherwise) that lay below the troubled waters of the “culture war.”

Following this, a thorough search through the First Things archive produced a 130-page collection of articles going back to the mid-nineties that I printed and read on an exercise bike during this ninth-circle-of-hell winter we’ve been having in Chicagoland. A recent exchange in that periodical between Cardinal Schönborn and Stephen Barr of the U. of Delaware has been particularly helpful. Other papers and theses by friends have made their way onto my desk since then, and it’s been a real joy to engage in the pressing philosophical issues of the day with the consciousness that a growth in competence will serve me very well in the mission to present the long tradition of the Church’s teaching on human reason to the faithful.

It’s certainly given me cause to approach the public dialogue with a heftier measure of cynicism than is my natural disposition; these are times that try men’s patience, after all. Without question it’s instilled in me a deference for minds far more capable than my own, on both sides of the issues. While I don’t feel my grasp of the questions would permit me to lay them out for others, I feel a greater confidence in filtering through the great deal of noise that various public figures continue to emit in one another’s general direction.

One thing in common among the authors that I found most compelling was their tendency to distance themselves from the parameters of the debate as it is presented in the media. It’s with this in mind that I’d like to weigh in with a few thoughts on Ben Stein’s new film “Expelled,” which will be released sometime next month, I believe.

I was given the chance to view a pre-production version of this film at the 2008 FOCUS National conference back in January. It is a film you must go watch on opening weekend (which, if the release date isn’t postponed again, happens to coincide with the papal visit). It is a well-done film that wins some points for the Intelligent Design movement, and clarifies some issues with the neo-Darwinian perspective that need to be clarified. It gets into some heavy matter when tracing out the potential consequences of rigorous Darwinism (eugenics, genocide) and its contemporary instantiation in organizations such as Planned Parenthood, while managing to not come across as wacky conspiracy theory. Stein, after all, in addition to being rather erudite, is Jewish, and while this doesn’t give him a license to brand his opponents an anti-Semite on a whim, it does allow the filmmakers to broach the subject convincingly. A visit to the Charles Darwin museum allows Ben to gaze upon a life-size statue of Darwin as if putting a question to him: “Did you see what we would do with your discoveries?” It is one of the most powerful moments of the film, all the more so for its subdued and earnest tone. There is some mockery of figures such as Dawkins in the film, which I could have done without, but overall the approach is civil and measured.

One exception to this is a conversation at the end of the film in which Richard Dawkins, with no real effort necessary on the producers, makes himself look like a deluded scientologist grasping at straws. I watched this conversation with great pleasure (and a new reluctance to acknowledge among the popular atheists even a thimbleful of good faith—which felt more like a wound than a victory). It would not be surprising if the popular scientific culture never takes him seriously again after his willingness to hypothesize that highly developed extraterrestrials are responsible for the beginning of life on earth.

At the very same conference, however, only a day or two before a talk was delivered to about eighty students by a certain Mark Ryland of the Institute for the Study of Nature, in which he laid out a critical perspective of the evolution / ID debate. Alluding to a number of different addresses and articles by Benedict XVI and Cardinal Schönborn, Ryland made it clear that both sides have succumbed to what is known formally as “scientism”: the refusal to acknowledge any form of knowing as valid other than the empirically verifiable. It can at times be referred to in terms of “materialism” or “positivism.” Whatever its specific form, its fundamental attitude is best summed up in the words of one of its foremost representatives, the geneticist Richard Lewontin:

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

This sort of talk simplifies things greatly, for it allows people of religious belief to take issue not with those who work within the reductive bounds of science but those who claim that knowledge so gained is exhaustive. With this distinction in hand, we can let the scientists do their work without feeling threatened by their explorations and conclusions, though always conscious that it will be necessary at times to make corrections.

What does this look like? Ideally, science and religion—reason and faith—work to mutually encourage and purify one another. John Paul the Great succinctly noted in his 1988 address to the Pontifical Academy of the Sciences that “science can purify religion from error and superstition, [just as] religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes …” The operative word here is “ideally.” Stephen Jay Gould famously outlined this relationship as between “non-overlapping magisterial authorities,” in which reason and faith, science and religion, exercise sole authority over their respective domains. Only at the point of intersection will any wrist-slapping be necessary, with the net effect that by and large the two realms of science and religion can leave one another alone.

While this bifurcation seems reasonable, there is a catch. When science names itself the arbiter of what is empirical and verifiable, it is in effect denying any possibility for religion to make truth claims by confining the consideration of facts to science alone. What is left to religion (and other non-empirical disciplines, for that matter) are the fuzzy and ultimately unimportant questions of personal meaning, responsibility, and identity. Truth, then, is reduced to what can be verified by experiment—that is, by the scientific method.

This is the “self-limitation of reason” to which Benedict XVI referred so ominously in his highly misunderstood Regensburg address. The effect of this restriction is momentous. As he explains,

... if science as a whole is this and this alone, then it is man himself who ends up being reduced, for the specifically human questions about our origin and destiny, the questions raised by religion and ethics, then have no place within the purview of collective reason as defined by ‘science’ so understood, and must thus be relegated to the realm of the subjective.

Since the secularist wonks were busy trying to pin the explosive backlash of Islamic jihadists on the passing remark of this theologian to a university faculty, very few of the pope’s substantial remarks were able to gain a hearing much beyond his immediate listeners present with him that day. This is very unfortunate, because what he had to say was crucial. With regard to what's been said above, it makes clear that the NOMA principle of Stephen Jay Gould (non-overlapping magisteria), one that has been thoroughly internalized by the West, is unsatisfactory.

What is unsatisfactory about it is that it is ultimately a compromise of the human. The secular paradigm of “rational” public debate devoid of any reference to what cannot be assented to by all “reasonable” persons is nothing less than a dehumanized society that is ignorant of where it is headed and which has forgotten where it’s come from.

Just what needs to be done in the face of this situation will be taken up in a later post—perhaps even my next one. (Hint: Benedict has some interesting suggestions.) What’s of interest to me now is what the Intelligent Design movement in general and Ben Stein’s movie in particular can mean for us. Critics of ID point out that agency is never invoked in scientific explanations; the goal of science is to provide explanations of phenomena solely with reference to natural causes. Intelligent design, they claim, is not science, but something else masking itself as science in order to find an audience within our scientifically-minded culture—a Trojan horse of sorts. This seems to be a valid criticism.

However, to accept this does not render ID useless: I believe a particular example of this is Expelled. While it was produced by advocates of ID, the movie prescinds from much explicit endorsement of ID beyond whatever is necessary to establish a basic rapport with the audience over its viewpoint. It consciously restricts itself to two goals: pointing out the holes in Darwinian theory as it now stands, and loosening the deathgrip Darwinists hold over the scientific community that stifles the principled exchange characteristic of good science. This bears a remarkable similarity to JPII’s clarification of religion’s competence to “purify science from idolatry and false absolutes” quoted above.

I am certainly not saying that Expelled is at heart a religious film, doing religious work. What I am saying—nothing more than an echo of Schönborn, Benedict, and others—is that it is neither a scientific nor religious issue, but a philosophical one. This is their critique of the debate: no one wants to acknowledge that it will continue to go nowhere as long as materialists are allowed to determine its parameters through a restriction of the object of reason to matter. Philosophy, and indeed the Church, finds it(her)self in the unique position of having to defend human reason from those who would deny its applicability to the realm of purpose, meaning, and all things human. Expelled does a fine job of raising the question in a compelling way, and in that sense, religion finds its philosophical perspective a welcome bedfellow.

If there’s some back and forth on these questions, so much the better. After all, if it’s a matter of survival of the fittest, we wouldn’t want those Darwinists getting fat and happy, would we?

(By the way, if you are interested in that compilation of articles from First Things, which includes the relevant correspondence generated after each article or series of articles was published, post a comment indicating your desire and I’ll send it to you via email. This does, of course, presume you are not posting anonymously.)

Fractal Xylem

It's midterm week so my planned posting will have to wait. Until then, I thought I'd put this photo up. It was taken hiking down from a peak this August, just outside of Aspen; I had gotten tired of the sweeping landscapes (doesn't take long) and started getting down on my hands and knees. This was one of those photos that seemed interesting at the time, and I still like the wood grain and the edges of the outer layer of bark flowing in over an old wound. Compositionally it's not much to speak of but it struck me just this evening that the very same phenomenon I have repeatedly noticed in silhouetted trees was present here. Being from the plains, it's common to see large, isolated oaks or elms black against the winter sky, and without any leaves on it's much easier to see the tree's skeletal structure. Ever since I looked at a live chicken embryo under a microscope, the obvious similarities to microscopic vein structure in the macroscopic branching of trees has captivated me ever since.

What is so fascinating about this photo is that if you have ever looked at an alpine lake from 30,000 feet, you have seen basically the same thing as what you see here; only now, it is carved by the very tree itself into its own flesh on a thousandth of the scale.

Though the tree/blood vessel similarity is more clearly an example of one physical law at work on vastly different scales, and this is more of a coincidence than anything, nonetheless it is a marvelous phenomenon.

Myopic Natural History, Continued

By way of follow-up, an excerpt from this recent article by Cardinal Schönborn sums up the key ideas of my post on A Short History of Nearly Everything:

As the philosopher Hans Jonas was writing his important work The Imperative of Responsibility (1979), it became clear to him that it makes no sense to speak of ethics and responsibility if there is no such thing as the spirit, the soul, reason, and free will. Genes do not assume responsibility. After all, they are not subject to judgment when they produce cancer cells. Animals also are not answerable to responsibility. Only human beings carry responsibility and must (finally before the judgment of God) give an account for their deeds.

Myopic Natural History

A Short History of Nearly Everything, a recent release by the prolific travel writer Bill Bryson, is the fruit of three years of research into the cumulative discoveries of the scientific world, with the hope of re-presenting them in layman's terms to the general public. It began, as he tells in the introduction, during a flight over the Pacific, in which he was staring out the window of the jet down at that vast ocean and realized he knew nothing about it. At that point, he resolved to do something about it, and I rather enjoyed his efforts to remedy his ignorance.

Coming from the pen of a man accustomed to pleasing his readers, the book manages to hold one's attention throughout long periods of academic history in which aristocratic gentlemen in powdery wigs debate with great vigor the suitability of certain botanical categories or the possibility that our noses evolved downward-pointing nostrils to ward off the hordes of contagion that dropped onto our planet from outer space. Scientific history is one long list of characters, some immediately recognizable, and many others whose names were forgotten as I turned the page; some were noble, others shady; some were possessed of a broad mastery of numerous disciplines, and others were content to whittle away at some miniscule corner of the scientific edifice with no apparent concern for what was transpiring around them. All seem driven by some desire for recognition; few seem to have received what they deserve. Each of them stands out in a remarkable way as beloved forebears of a rich and massive heritage.

While the certainties of yesterday are almost always laughable, Bryson manages for the most part not to condescend when surveying the progress of human knowledge--a progress that has been slow and painful since the dawn of the modern scientific method. Consequently, the most consistent reaction this book produced in me was surprise. Of course, the "incomprehensibles" such as astronomical distances, the subatomic particles, the probabilities of life, and the age of the earth and of the universe never fail to impress; yet more than once I found myself swimming in a morass of incoherent hypotheses and data, only to be told by the author that my confusion was not unusual, as the experts themselves really had no idea, either. Apparently, the only thing more astounding than what we know about the universe is what we do not know, and how likely it is that some discovery will come along that will up-end whatever certainties the establishment operates upon. Bryson makes much of the conclusion of the scientific world at the turn of the twentieth century that very little additional investigation was necessary before a complete, airtight account of the universe would be well within its grasp.

It becomes abundantly clear that the history of science is one long story of "back to the drawing board." Theories about cataclysmic impacts from a prehistoric comet driving the dinosaurs to extinction circulate among incredulous geologists, full of disdain for such preposterous conjecture; it's a small but gratifying delight to look back with a knowing smile and think, "Just you wait." Being myself a student of Scripture, which in certain forms is to the neophyte the very province of uncertainty and hypothesis, it was a small consolation to discover that I have some unlikely comrades who share my pain.

Indeed, it is striking to note how the human mind is driven to reduce complex systems to simple ones and summarize them in an elegant whole. Human discovery has been almost exclusively powered by the conviction that given enough time, we will be able to sort the world out neatly and publish our findings in a sort of almanac. Experts almost to a man regarded theories that did not have concise and simple expressions as less compelling than those that did, and new theories were required when data arose that did not fit with existing formulae, thus rendering them incomplete. As I read and reflected on this point, there appeared a subtle correspondence with medieval thinkers on the beauty of truth. These thinkers saw a deep identity between what are called the “transcendentals”: the forms of truth, goodness, unity, and beauty, which are beyond any particular category of being, and for that reason can refer equally to all subjects in which they are found. This is to say, the truth is good, beautiful, and one; so also, the beautiful is one, good, and true. Beauty itself is the presence of integrity, harmony, and clarity within a creature; and, it might be said, any scientific theory that lacked these would have been dismissed out of hand as, in all probability, untrue.

Thankfully, Bryson waits to hammer home the obligatory moral until the last few pages of the book; it was brief enough that wasn't clear to me whether he thought it through or if it was tacked on to make sure it had a chance to get on the bestseller list. Human beings, he opines, are in a unique position to "make a considered difference" given our rapid rise to the top of the list of complex beings. This injunction makes its way onto the page after a long catalog of the species that scientists conjecture we may (or may not) have driven to extinction along the way. There seems to be an implicit appeal to a sort of "species-pride" that seeks to evoke vague sentiments of compassion for all the helpless animals that may (or may not) be crushed beneath the juggernaut of human success. Yet everything that precedes this appeal militates against it. Repeatedly, Bryson marvels at the precarious path life had to travel in order to arrive at its present state of rich variety, noting how tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of species have come and gone without our ever knowing it. If the planet is bountiful in its opportunities for life, it seems equally willing to rub out life forms with the impunity of a bored child. The forms now present happen to be well-suited to their environment and to their fellow creatures, and as the history of the earth has demonstrated, it is entirely possible that changes in climate, geography, the ocean temperatures or even the magnetic fields generated by the molten metal core may be disastrous to life as it exists now, just as such changes were disastrous to life as it has existed in the past.

My reaction to these conclusions is, so what? If man is nothing more than the latest, most successful instantiation of protein conglomeration, what justification is there to minimize our ecological footprint? If (as the argument goes) our presence on the planet has resulted in a significant loss in biodiversity, what ethics pronounces judgment upon it? What tribunal will decide our innocence or guilt, if not the Court of the Fittest? What, other than a howl of victory, could be its verdict upon the proliferation of the human species to the detriment of all others? What, other than a resigned shrug, could be its verdict upon the self-destruction that follows? Is there any warrant for the demand that the long history of life’s self-preservation should cease and desist?

This is why the sentimentalism of the environmentalist cause rings so hollow. It parades the long, loveless history of the universe before us, ever to remind us that we are dust, to dust we shall return, being no more than a blip on the cosmic radar. Yet when a nameless beetle may (or may not) have disappeared without ever having been known to science, there is an equally earnest appeal made to the "responsibility" humans have to care for this planet and the potential for its rapid and disastrous deterioration, an appeal that parades an equally long and much more lovely history (quite in contradiction to the first) in the hope that this panoply of variety and marvelous complexity in harmony with itself could provoke a middle-class American to “think globally, act locally”—or at least act in his own self-interest.

The question then arises of whether it is even possible to rise above an enlightened self-interest, given the parameters of the issue. It's not clear that these apocalyptic prophecies will come true in our own lifetime, or in the lifetime of the youngest of our children. Is it for the good of the human species, as such, that sacrifice is necessary? Or is it for some unknown future generation that may (or may not) benefit? Entreaties in behalf of abstractions or faceless non-beings are hardly the most compelling imaginable. In fact, they are nonsensical, as Henri de Lubac lays out in a pointed refutation of humanitarian optimism:

... it is not really for humanity [itself] that sacrifice is made; it is still, despite assertion to the contrary, for other individuals, who in their transitory outward form contain nothing that is absolute and do not stand for any essentially higher value than those who are sacrificed to them; in the last resort, it is all for one generation of humanity—the last—which is yet no greater than the others, and which will pass away like the others.*

Erazim Kohak skewers this perspective even more pithily, saying, “Only in a most myopic perspective does life become meaningful by virtue of being used as a means to something whose value is in turn solely instrumental.”** Sustained reflection gives the lie to environmentalist importunities. Yet they are, I believe, indications of a deep-seated disorder awaiting diagnosis.

Before delving into what that diagnosis might be, it is necessary to clarify that we have long ago left behind Mr. Bryson in his own right; his well-researched, thoughtful, and informative book have served as a springboard for further reflection. My comments are not directed at him, nor do I wish to burn him in effigy. Furthermore, I should mention that in no way do I mean to be dismissive of the importance of ecological responsibility. Humankind has certainly been a destructive influence upon the integrity of this planet. That something must be done is clear; what we are not agreed upon is why it must be done, and my hope is to shed a little light upon that chain of reasoning.

What, then, permits the environmentalist movement to make such groundless and self-contradictory demands, and what conclusions can we draw regarding them? I suggest that it is fundamentally a profound discomfort with the truth of who man is and his flight from God. These two are tightly interwoven. As a professor of mine puts it, to turn one’s back on God is to assume God’s stance towards reality. Thus, any rejection of one’s own identity demands a turning of one’s back upon the ground of all identity, and to turn away from that ground is to reject one’s own identity and deepest source of meaning. In place of them, a surrogate destiny must be found, one that reaches into the depths of one’s being and makes the sort of practical demands on one’s life that the innate desire for the infinite requires. In a series of retreats he gave before being elevated to the papacy, a certain German theologian captured the essence of this attitude as it is exemplified in the ecological movements:

Man sees himself as the enemy of life and of the balance of creation, as the great disturber of the peace of nature (which would be better off if he did not exist), as the creature that went wrong. His salvation and the salvation of the world would, on this view, consist of disappearing, of his life and soul being taken back from him, of what is specifically human vanishing so that nature could return to its unconscious perfection, in its own rhythm and with its own wisdom of dying and coming into being.***

Trace the contemporary green movements to their roots, and this is what you will find. There once was a time when it was believed that we could harmonize our presence in nature; one is hard-pressed to find such hopes among the die-hard today. Eradication of the human footprint is the only way we know how to convey respect.

Ratzinger goes on to uncover the foundations of this desire to disappear, and discovers there a circular paradox not unrelated to the discomfort with man’s identity described above. Originating in the desire “to be like God” and become his own creator, man refuses to acknowledge his dependence on God and asserts his freedom from him; man claims to rule in God’s place. Yet this is a rejection not of God’s dominion, but of his life, and soon the fascination with death supplants the fresh acquaintance with liberty. Soon, this liberty is consumed with the“flight from God, the wish to be alone with oneself and one’s finiteness and not to be disturbed by the presence of God.” **** What an accurate description of the clamor of secularism, anxious above all to be rid of this inescapable presence.

What is the antidote to this malady? At the risk of being facile, it must be an acceptance of true identity. With respect to the created world, this identity has long been spoken of as ‘the recipient of a gift’. By gratuitously bringing into existence all that is in a free act of good will, the Creator gives to each creature the gift of itself, a gift that is constrained by no one and surpassed by no one. Humanity, moreover, is the recipient of all else that is, and is situated within an ordered cosmos. Man has power and authority over this cosmos, given by the one who is its maker. A gift given so freely and with such perfect and unselfish correspondence to our good can only be called ‘love,’ and the only proper response to love is love itself. Neither paralyzed by sentimentality nor greedy with the possibilities for exploitation, as stewards we must step boldly forward into our position of responsibility. With love comes vulnerability, and in our stewardship we will find it necessary to execute the bitter works love at times requires.

Perhaps we will also ask ourselves if we have not settled for too simple a solution; yet, perhaps it also takes courage not to dismiss what satisfies that desire for the integrity, harmony, and clarity of the beautiful--ultimately, for the truth.

* Christ and the Common Destiny of Man, p. 353
** The Embers and The Stars, p. 101
*** The Yes of Jesus Christ, Josef Cardinal Ratzinger, p. 74
**** Ibid., p. 75