Those Pinheads Still Tantalize

Most of my close friends know that I'm pretty good at making mountains out of molehills, but I'm beginning to think that I'm something of an amateur in that department when compared to some. When I was a history major in college (yes, they did have colleges as long ago as all that, though we had to write our notes in the sand with sticks) my medieval history professor was fond of saying that most medieval theological speculation amounted to disputations about "how many angels could dance on the head of a pin". Although I'm not going to ask my alma mater for a refund of my tuition money, I found out later that the question was not about pin heads but about needle points, nor was it a genuine medieval debating point at all but a lampoon of such debates invented by Isaac D'Israeli in the 19th century (though based, no doubt, on the genuine question, posed by Saint Thomas Aquinas, whether several angels could occupy the same space at once). This is not to deny that some medieval scholars worried about some rather bizarre things. Whether Christ was a hermaphrodite, for example, or whether there be excrement in paradise, were both genuine "talking points" among medieval theologians. I am not a medieval theologian (though some who deny that I am a theologian might not be so quick to deny that I am certainly close to being medieval) but I have certainly wondered about some extremely finial details in my own line of work. In spite of some small training in languages, however, I find that grammatical questions have lost some of their luster for me. This lackluster state was brought into higher relief for me recently when I read the following comment on a friend's blog:

In Luke 18:14 we read, “I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other.” (From the parable of the publican and the pharisee.) Now what has happened here? Is the “justification” of the publican—a type for all sinners—a definitive act, or has he only entered into a process which is less than complete? If it is the latter, how do you account for the perfect tense of the participle “justified,” and indeed, what would be the point of the parable?

The question seems to be about justification: does it happen all at once, or is it a process? That is indeed an interesting question, in my opinion. Does the text from Luke, however, really support the assumption that one or the other possibility can be ruled out by means of an appeal to the grammar of the sentence used in the story? The author of Luke is a slightly better stylist than the authors of the other Gospels, but his attention to grammatical detail has never struck me as something to make a Really Big Fuss about. This question seems to make a rather bold claim about what the author of Luke might mean by employing a perfect tense rather than the imperfect. I'm not sure whether an aorist would have made things any clearer (in the sense of making the question less pressing, since the aorist would be pretty ambiguous by comparison, but see below), but the whole thing seems rather like claiming that an undergraduate is intentionally exploring new depths of existential angst by purposely employing both present and past tenses in a five page essay on the writings of Swift.

Well, OK, that was a dumb comparison, because the person who wrote the question is not an undergraduate and is indeed asking a good question. I'm just not convinced that the written Gospel narratives, which are arguably drawn from an oral tradition, make their theological claims in such delicate, if not cryptic, ways. Funky parables are bad enough--why complicate things with subtle points of grammar as well? Is there meant to be some kind of gnosis here that I'm missing?

The same Inquisitor posted another question to the same blog, along the same lines, about a passage drawn from Saint Paul:

In Romans 5:1-2, we read “since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand…” The Greek participle is not perfect but only aorist, I admit; but the results are clearly perfect: we have peace, we have obtained access, we stand. How do you interpret this verse?

I certainly do not dispute the fact that "How do you interpret this verse" could be an interesting question, but to make the point of the question hang upon this kind of point (get it? Point? Pin point? Come on, it's funny!) of grammar is, well, pointless--though it has helped untold numbers of academics earn their tenure in departments of religious studies I suppose, and that's no infinitesimal point these days.

These sorts of questions, to me, sound like sola scriptura on steroids--we must make careful sense out of every jot and tittle in the text, the question seems to say, else we utterly fail to make the case for our interpretation. My own experience with the Scriptures has been rather different. It seems to me that doing justice to the text must always move forward in the context of the tradition and the magisterial authority of the Church. This does not mean that we cannot pay close attention to textual questions, of course, but it does mean that sola grammatica is not a good interpretive principle. If it really is one: I don't want to attack a straw man here, and questions on blogs are not necessarily reflective of entire hermeneutic communities. But they might help to explain how at least some people approach their questions about things other than religion, and that could prove rather unfortunate, it seems to me.

Grumpy Conservative or Progressive Feminist--You Make the Call!

My daughter has been given an assignment in her physical education class (7th grade) that involves working out something called a "jump routine" with three other girls. A jump routine seems to be something like a cheerleading routine for people who don't like the connotations associated with the word "cheerleading". There is a very complicated set of scoring criteria. I can't remember how many categories of 1-10 point grades are to be awarded for this two minute drill, but they filled an entire page and gave me the impression that visitors from the Olympic Selection Committee will be secreted away in the audience somewhere. The girls must choose some music and work out the choreography of the routine as a group, and they will perform it in front of their class and their teacher.

"Choose some music". Seems benign enough, you say to yourself. I will be the first to admit that I have been a lazy, though not, I think, negligent, father in this case, because I did not know anything about this assignment until my daughter asked me to burn a CD for her with her group's dance music on it. That was when I first discovered that the tune to which they would be jumping around and giggling is Jason Derulo's "Talk Dirty to Me". Although the title did not inspire much confidence in me, I have already downloaded enough music for her on iTunes to know that titles often--if not usually, these days--bear little or no relation to the actual content of the song. If it can really be said that songs these days have any content. But some spark of Divine Illumination prompted me to check out the lyrics to this song before burning the CD. So I went to the website A-Z Lyrics, and after reading through the words to the song it was not surprising to me when I finally noticed that the way they were laid out on the screen made them look like a large erect phallus, because the song is mostly about phalluses. Erect phalluses. Erect phalluses being used in a variety of different ways, but mostly ways that are not really appropriate for 12 and 13 year old girls to be dancing to. Here is a sample of some of the lyrics:

Dos Cadenas, closed the genius
Sold out arenas, you can suck my penis
Gilbert Arenas, guns on deck
Chest to chest, tongue on neck
International oral sex
Every picture I take, I pose a threat
Boat or jet, what do you expect?
Her pussy so good I bought her a pet
Anyway, every day I'm trying to get to it
Got her saved in my phone under "Big Booty"

And so on, and so forth. When I asked my daughter what she liked about this song, she said "It's catchy, and I like the chorus." I wasn't really sure what the "chorus" of this song was supposed to be--there is a section where he says "Talk dirty to me" over and over again (hence the title, I suppose), but it didn't really stand out very much, and even if it did, well there's a song called "Hey Jude", but not one called "Nah nah nah nah nah nah nah".

So to make this short story even longer, I told my daughter that she could not use this song, and she complained that it is a group project and the choice is not up to her. "And besides", she pointed out, "The teacher approved it already."

What?

The teacher approved it?

I confess that my visage betrayed, somewhat, my skeptical attitude.

"Don't lie to me with that mouth," I said.

"She did, and anyway we have to do it on Thursday. It's all decided!"

I found it inconceivable that any teacher would approve this song for use in the classroom, so I decided to write to the teacher myself and let her know how I felt about the piece. In my email to her I pointed out that my daughter had told me that the song had been approved by a teacher, and that I thought this could only mean that the teacher had not noticed the lyrics, so I reproduced for her the ones you can read above. I then ranted for a while about the image this presents of women and young girls serving as mere instruments of male pleasure and that I did not think it salutary to have the public schools turn a blind eye to the degradation and objectification of women. The teacher wrote back to me, and I reproduce for you here the full text of her reply, completely unexpurgated:

Please just have her change it.

That's it. No "Dear Mr. Scrutator", no "Hi,", no name signed at the bottom. Just that one line exactly as you see it above. In response to my 603 word email (which I will happily make available to any interested party) explaining why I found it important that she intervene in this situation. (Well I'm Mr. Scrutator not Mr. Pithy.)

Now I'm sure gym teachers are very busy and can't be bothered with minor administrative decisions like keeping pornography out of their classrooms, so I wrote back and pointed out that my daughter had expressed the opinion that she didn't really need my approval because the teacher had already said it was OK. Kids can be so charming when they are in the grip of adolescent hormones. I also took the liberty of pointing out that, at least in my own opinion, it was hard to see why a teacher would approve of this song. I speculated a little: the teacher might not have known the lyrics and omitted to vet them, which is not very good oversight, but at least it's not as bad as knowing about the lyrics and not giving a shit, either because you don't think they're pornographic or you don't care that they are. That's much more worrisome, and I said so. Which prompted her to write to me and say:

Those are some serious accusations please feel free to come in anytime.

So I guess I'm supposed to chaperone my daughter's gym class if I want some reassurance that they're not dancing around to pornographic music. I guess the teacher's job ends once the lesson plan is finished.

In the end my daughter's group picked a different song. She could not remember either the name of the song or any of its lyrics, interestingly, but she did say that it was something by Justin Timberlake. I suppose there's some small consolation in that--his songs are disgusting too but for different reasons.

So here I am wondering whether I overreacted. For what it's worth, my wife did not think that I overreacted, and she even likes Robin Thick's "Blurred Lines" INCLUDING the video. But it's difficult for me to escape the worry that I'm just being an old conservative fuddy-duddy. I took up the matter with one of my colleagues who is both a woman and a progressive, and she also thought I was fully within bounds to react the way I did. But I'm still wondering about this.

When I was 12 (in MY day...) I was listening to music by such groups as the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Fleetwood Mac, and the like. The Stones are probably the edgiest of the three, but they're arguably not very edgy. But they were certainly edgier than, say, Elvis Presley. When I compare

Wise men say
Only fools rush in
But I can't help
Falling in love with you

to

I met a gin-soaked bar room queen in Memphis
She tried to take me upstairs for a ride
She had to heave me right across her shoulder
Cause I just can't seem to drink you off my mind

I'm left with a feeling that, although things had "moved on", as it were, they were still arguably in the same ball park. But I can't help thinking that some sort of line has been crossed, that we're not only not in the same ball park any more, we're not even playing the same kind of game. I've been looking around at lyrics for a while now and "Talk Dirty To Me" is just the tip of a very disgusting and vile iceberg, an iceberg in which women and young girls are treated as literally nothing more than blowjob machines for young men who want lots of money and lots of visceral pleasure in their nether regions or they won't be satisfied. (They can't get no satisfaction, it seems.) And their lyrics attest to their attitude that this is what women "really want" anyway, so why not make them do it when they pretend otherwise. This is the world that my daughter wants to aurally immerse herself in, and I find it rather disturbing.

There are rumors about our middle school--rumors that are believed by students, parents, and teachers--to the effect that oral sex is also just the tip of the iceberg there. There is a lot of sex of other kinds, and lots of experimentation with drugs. This middle school is not one in which deprivation has driven kids to find bizarre forms of escape, it is one in which the students are mostly suffering from affluenza. So I'm putting my foot down and I'm not letting her listen to this kind of stuff. I am a grumpy conservative, but I'm also enough of a progressive feminist to think that young girls can do better things with their minds than listen to this crap. And there's certainly no point in putting money into the pockets of vile, self-styled artists who promote a worldview in which women are not persons but tools and whose contribution to culture is not merely negligible but downright negative.

Pragmatic Truth

I recently heard a lecture by a renowned philosopher of science on pragmatic approaches to truth, and it raised some interesting questions for me. On his account, which is grounded in his reading of Peirce, James, and Dewey, "truth" as a predicate has different meanings depending upon the "domain of discourse" in which it is applied. He takes as basic what he calls the "scientific" or "factual" domain, in which "truth" basically means correspondence in Tarski's sense.

But he identifies three other domains in which that sort of correspondence conception of "truth" will not work. For example, we can say that it is "true" that Sherlock Holmes lives at 221B Baker Street even though it is not a fact in Tarski's sense. This is dubbed "literary truth", and we are told that it is the overall literary context that determines which sentences are "true" or "false" in this sense.

So the literary domain is one area in which we need a different notion of truth from "scientific" or "factual" correspondence. This seems fair enough to me, though I would add that it seems as if one might be able to find another route for defending the acceptability of sentences like "Sherlock Holmes lives at 221B Baker Street" without actually proposing a model of truth in which the sentence is regarded as "true" in a technical sense. But literary truth is not the domain that I found most interesting.

The other two domains, ethics and religion, caught my attention to a much higher degree. In ethics, he suggested that "truth" be understood in a progressive sense. "Weak ethical truth" he ascribes to those propositions that are universally, or nearly universally, accepted by all human communities, with the proviso that these be propositions that have to do with the enhancement of human involvement with social projects regarded as fundamental. I will add that the talk that I heard was just a popularized presentation of a much more sophisticated argument made in a book-length treatment of the matter, and that is why this definition of "ethical truth" seems so thin and cartoonish. A fuller case is made for it in the book.

In addition to "weakly ethically true", however, propositions can be "strongly ethically true" if they lead to a progressive enhancement of the body of propositions that are successful and enhancing human involvement in fundamental social projects. One can imagine any number of objections to this notion of strong ethical truth, starting with what it is even supposed to mean. But although I was interested in the ethical domain more than in the so-called "fictional" domain, I confess that it was really the fourth domain that I found most interesting.

The religious domain has its own conception of truth drawn from the sociology of religion, in which the stories told by religious movements are described not as propositions that can be either true or false but as "myths", stories that have some underlying message or instruction or exhortation. I am not an expert in the sociology of religion, but my own (limited) familiarity with the literature suggests to me that "myth" is an invented category devised precisely in order to give some account of why religious sentiment is as widespread as it is given the implausibility of the literal truth of its claims. In short, my impression has been that saying something like "Myths are neither true nor false in the literal sense" is simply shorthand for saying "The claims of religion are obviously not factually true, but they guide the lives of millions of people and communicate deeply held values and foster important practices, so we may regard propositions within the religious community as not open to factual dispute in any important sense." Whether this view is adopted for paternalistic or diplomatic reasons seems hardly relevant: the important thing, it seems to me, is that the factual claims of religions are never taken seriously as factual claims, because those who study the sociology of religion are, usually, not theists themselves and so take it for granted that any claim about a deity that presents itself as a factual claim will necessarily be false.

But along comes the pragmatist, who says that we should go farther than calling the claims of religions "myths", we should define a domain of discourse within which the claims of religion are actually true, though "true" in the technical sense that is specific to this particular domain of religious discourse. So the pragmatist proposes a definition of "religious truth" that runs parallel to the definition of "ethical truth" sketched above, but that is clearly intended to be quite distinct from the correspondence version of truth found in the "scientific" or "factual" domain. On the pragmatist conception of truth, a proposition P is "weakly religiously true" just in case there is a community with a religious practice R and an extension of that practice, R*, such that R* involves the affirmation of P and the transition from R to R* would be religiously progressive. A proposition P is "strongly religiously true" just in case P is weakly religiously true and the practice of affirming P would be retained in any indefinite sequence of of religiously progressive modifications of R*. Although this project may sound anti-realist in its orientation, the pragmatist argues that it is really a realist view of truth and one is prepared to believe it in this case because, frankly, the "scientific" or "factual" domain is explicitly treated as fundamental. That's where "real" truth lies.

So as I think about this proposal I have, on the one hand, great admiration for the adroitness on display, not just in the talk but in the book version of the argument. Indeed, the book version makes for fascinating and compelling reading, and I would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone interested in contemporary pragmatism. I think that this particular pragmatist has done about as good a job as could reasonably be expected of anyone trying to defend this point of view. On the other hand, I also found myself wondering about the precise motivation for this conceptual scheme, given the pride of place given to the so-called "factual" domain. I wondered, for example, why it wouldn't just be a lot simpler to say "Look, Jesus did not literally rise from the dead. That proposition is literally false. The people who believe it have false beliefs, and false beliefs cannot count as knowledge. Nor does it help matters to say 'The Resurrection is a metaphor for sacrifice, redemption, and kenotic love, and it is successful primarily because it is such a very powerful and motivating metaphor, so we ought to keep the image in our religious culture', because that is tantamount to saying that false belief and ignorance are useful tools for the common involvement of humans in their social projects. Instead, we should just abandon these propositions--indeed, we ought to abandon religion altogether and replace it with something else."

Come to find out--as the expression around here goes--our present pragmatist actually does make that very recommendation, in a sense. He does not endorse the elimination of religion in the sense that Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris do. He thinks that religion does play a valuable role in society, a role not unlike the roll played by beautiful art and literature. It expresses humanity's deepest longings in a metaphorical and artistic way, and that is a function worth retaining. The rub is that he thinks that, in an ideal world, that function will be gradually taken over by institutions other than religion. Institutions such as art and literature, for example. And he thinks that religion is "progressive" just in case it makes clear to its adherents that its claims are not to be taken literally and are to be used only for humanistic unitive purposes. Presumably that sort of thing could indeed be accomplished by plenty of institutions other than religion, and our present pragmatist thinks that, if all goes well, religion will indeed not so much disappear after the manner of extinction called for by Dawkins but will, rather, evolve in a Darwinian way into something really quite different from religion as we know it today. And that will be a Good Thing.

For the theist, I suppose, all of this will seem somewhat paternalistic. The Christian believes in the literal truth of the Resurrection, not some metaphorical kind of analogous truth. Indeed, St. Paul famously argued in defense of the literal truth of the Resurrection, claiming that if it were not literally true Christians would be the most wretched people on earth. So clearly the theists themselves take these propositions to be literally true, and importantly so. What good does it do to pat them on the head and say "There there, your beliefs are 'true', don't worry" when what you really mean is "Your belief is false, but we're going to let you hang on to it for a while because it makes you useful to society, docile, and pleasant to be around, but as soon as I can find a way to make you useful, docile, and pleasant without you committing yourself to falsehoods we're going to go that way instead"? Having dealt with the problem myself I can imagine being a little nervous about "literalism" in religion, especially when the context is something like creationism, so I'm not saying that I don't sympathize with someone who wants to find a way to parse the propositional content of religions into what ought, and what ought not, to be taken as literally true. But I would stop short of claiming that none of the propositions can be taken as literally true, if only because that would open me up, quite rightly, to the charges of question begging and special pleading.

So my puzzlement consists in a picture of truth in which everybody knows that "factual" truth is fundamental, and that the pragmatic model of "truth" in these other domains--fiction, ethics, and religion--is not really what anybody really means by "true" but we're supposed to hang on to this model anyway rather than coming right out and saying that the claims of religion are false or that ethical judgments are relative to the cultures that make them or something along those lines. In short, I'm not sure what the philosophical payoff is supposed to be in seeing truth in this way, short of finding some way of not coming off looking as obnoxious as Dawkins or as uninformed as Harris when talking about religion. The model is an elegant one, but its central component--the retention of the word "true" as the predicate for consistency, usefulness, or success within a domain--strikes me as useless. I've been wrong about this sort of thing before, though, so I stand ready to be corrected.

The Present Pope

Thirty years ago, when I first entered the Catholic Church, I frequently had conversations with folks who liked to characterize themselves as "progressive Catholics". As a convert who had chosen to enter the Church precisely because I found her teachings attractive, I was sometimes mystified at their willingness to remain connected to an institution with which they seemed (to me, at least) to have so little in common, especially when one considers the fact that there are over 30,000 Protestant sects in the United States alone, and surely some one of them (or perhaps some combination of them--in some cases it may not require an exclusive membership) could have met their needs better. John Paul II had been elected Pope prior to my conversion (indeed, I was not even a Christian in 1978, let alone a Catholic one), but I found him and his style very congenial, so I was also a little mystified when these same folks would insist on referring to him only as "the present pope", never as "the pope" or "the Holy Father" or what have you. Based on the context and contents of these conversations it was very clear to me that by "present pope" they intended to suggest that, as far as they were concerned, this rather conservative little fellow from Eastern Europe was just an anomaly, a bump on the otherwise smooth road from Vatican II to a more liberal and progressive Catholic church that would meet all of their needs, hence their willingness to stick it out and remain in the Church.

John Paul II's lengthy and serene reign as Supreme Pontiff managed to cool their jets somewhat over the years, and in spite of feeling intense sympathy for his sufferings I couldn't help but rejoice in his longevity. When his successor proved to be the very person whom I myself would have nominated to take his place, I couldn't help but feel just a tiny bit of Schadenfreude, though I no longer knew anyone who used the expression "the present pope" by that time--it seemed they had just given up on that.

Well. Today, the Jesuit magazine America published an interview with the present pope that has caused something of a stir among Catholics and non-Catholics alike, even though Francis said nothing extraordinary or unusual in the interview, at least with respect to what the Catholic Church teaches. This fact may come as a surprise to anyone who relies for their information about the interview on such sources as CBS News, the New York Times, or the editor of the Jesuit magazine America, all portraying the content of this interview as "unprecedented" and "revolutionary".

To cut to the chase, the part of the interview that is supposed to be so extraordinary is the pope's declaration that the Church has, in recent years, been "obsessed" with certain "technical" and "minor" issues and has thereby missed out on certain opportunities to be more welcoming, compassionate, and forgiving. These minor technical issues are, at least to judge from what CBS News and the New York Times have to say about it, such things as abortion, homosexuality, and contraception. I did not catch any reference to the whole pedophilia thing, so I don't know whether that sort of sexual peccadillo is going to count, from now on, as just minor and technical, or whether it's still something we should worry about. Apparently, the Church is not really able to walk and chew gum at the same time, because somehow, in preaching against abortion, we are neglecting to be compassionate and welcoming, so this is a Big Problem. Indeed, the whole of the Church's moral authority is in danger of falling like a "house of cards", because there is no way that we can continue to obsess over these minor technical issues and still preach love, forgiveness, and compassion. To say that we can do both of these things is like saying that a quarterback has to be able to run and pass the ball, and we all know that you can't really be good at doing both of those things. Certainly any quarterback who chooses to pass the ball when he needs to is basically showing the whole world that he's not interested in running with it. Ever.

Now, let's be perfectly clear about what Francis is not saying. Everyone, including the otherwise Catholic-blind New York Times, is reporting that Francis is not changing any of the Church's teachings, that he is a "son of the Church" (which, for you progressives out there, means that he actually accepts those teachings about abortion, homosexuality, and contraception). So, even the New York Times is willing to admit (probably with some reluctance) that these teachings are not going to change; they may even understand (though I doubt it) that they are not going to change because they cannot be changed. But we should certainly see this as a "change of emphasis", a kind of "new direction"--after the Dark Ages of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, we are finally in the time of the New Enlightenment. Those other popes are dead (one of them literally, the other metaphorically), long live the pope!

So since the Church is not going to be ordaining women, marrying homosexuals, or sending money to Planned Parenthood just what, precisely, is this "change of emphasis" supposed to consist in that is so different from what Those Other Gloomy Popes were up to with all of their reactionary skulduggery? Benedict XVI, in particular, has said precisely the same things about welcoming homosexuals that Francis is now being praised for, so there is no change of emphasis there. John Paul II, rather famously, said precisely the same sorts of things about having a preferential option for the poor that Francis is now being praised for saying, so there is no change of emphasis there either. And the world itself --in the form of scientific studies--has said precisely the same sorts of things about HIV, contraception, and other such issues, as Benedict XVI has said, so if there is change of emphasis here it is in a direction away from both the traditional teaching and modern science, so congratulations: if it is a change of emphasis, it's a stupid one.

But is it really even a change of emphasis? This, unfortunately, is a question that has two aspects. On the one hand, there is the question of whether it is, in fact, a change of emphasis; on the other hand, there is the question of whether Francis believes that it is a change of emphasis. I say this double aspect is "unfortunate" because the fact of the matter is clear: it is not. Which means that if Francis really believes that it is, he is mistaken. But that's OK--although popes are protected from error in faith and morals, nobody said their methodological orientations were always spot-on. So Francis thinks this is all new--well, welcome aboard, Holy Father, but we've been on this train for quite some time already; glad you could join us.

Hold on there, Carson, you're thinking. Why is everyone saying that this is a new emphasis if it isn't? Why aren't you the one who is mistaken in saying that it is not a new emphasis? What do you know that the pope himself doesn't even know?

Fortunately, my assessment of the situation doesn't depend upon any secret or arcane knowledge that only I have access to. In fact, never having been to Argentina, I have no idea what it's like there. For all I know, abortion is not a problem at all in that country, and homosexuals are not pressing for marriage rights there, and contraception isn't being forced on Catholic health care providers there. So from the point of view of your average Argentinian, it may well seem mysterious to discover that there are elements in the Church that are concerned with these issues because they are really important issues in other places. Like here, for example. Are these issues more important than being compassionate, welcoming and forgiving? Duh. Have you stopped beating your wife yet?

In the increasingly secular world of Europe and North America, we have witnessed incredible social changes in the last fifty years, and many of these social changes revolve around the minor, technical issues of sexual morality. Just to take one of these minor technical issues as an example, abortion is fully legal almost everywhere in these areas, and if we bear in mind that abortion is the unjustifiable killing of an innocent human being it might be a little easier to regard it as somewhat less minor and technical than, say, whether kids should be allowed to purchase cigarettes. One way to help reduce the number of abortions, of course, is to provide lots of helpful resources to women who are tempted to have them, and that means exercising--you guessed it--compassion, forgiveness, and charitable acceptance. In fact, I don't see how it would even be possible to preach against abortion without making it very clear that the Church is the place to turn to when you are tempted to have one, precisely because the Church is the place that welcomes you with compassion and forgiveness. The problem is not that the Church in American neglects to be compassionate, welcoming, and forgiving--the problem is that in America people would rather turn to the government for help than to the Church, and the government says there's nothing wrong with killing your own child in the womb. A similar story can be told, of course, tying the Church's teachings on homosexual marriage, contraception, and women's ordination to the need for welcoming, compassionate forgiveness, but that story gets drowned out in media accounts that are one sided because the folks who write those accounts are already predisposed to see the Church's teachings on these sexual issues as misguided if not outright wrong. So when someone comes along talking about the flip side of that same coin they see it as revolutionary, as though the coin really only has one side and the Church has finally discovered it after looking too long for the non-existent other side.

The present pope has blundered. He did not blunder by saying something false, he blundered by not saying what is true: that the Church has always emphasized the Gospel of love, and that the teachings on abortion and the rest flow from that very Gospel. It is simply a mistake to interpret the preaching of the last 30 years in any other way. This is not to say that a pope ought not to call for even more compassion, forgiveness, and welcoming. To make that kind of call would be salutary. But the right way to call for that is to say something like "The Church should always reach out to the dispossessed, to the poor, to the oppressed, to the suffering, to the excluded, to the other: the Church should welcome all with love and compassion." If you say something like that, you are saying pretty much what every pope has always said, including Francis, and you are not implying that the Church has ever acted otherwise. But Francis prefaced it by saying that the Church has also been obsessed with minor technical issues, and then he specifically mentioned several issues that are neither minor nor merely technical, and so of course anyone listening to him is going to think that he sees these things as standing in some sort of contrast, some sort of tension, rather than as two things that flow logically from each other.

This blunder is a purely rhetorical one. He did not say anything that will bring about any actual changes in what the Church does or teaches, but he opened a real can of worms in terms of what some people are going to start looking forward to and expecting from the Church. In this sense he has invited misunderstanding and misinterpretation, which may not cause much harm in the long run but it certainly cannot bring about any good. Francis said that the Church should not be reduced to a tiny core of True Believers, and many are contrasting this with Benedict XVI's famous remark that a smaller Church would not necessarily be a poorer Church. It seems to me, however, that one can agree with Francis that the Church ought to welcome all while not agreeing with his implication that the Church does not already welcome all with open arms. The sad fact of the matter is that people are not turning away from the Church because the Church is not welcoming them, they are turning away from the Church because they don't agree with what the Church teaches and expects of them. As any true Son of the Church knows very well, accepting the Church's teachings is not simply a matter of mere rule-following, it is an inner conversion of one's very self, a turning away from one's own needs and desires toward absolute self-negation as the only authentic form of genuine love. Self-negation entails very many things that the secular West cannot abide, and that the secular West always interprets as Mean Old Rules That Make Life Less Fun. To act as though this characterization of self-negation is correct or fair, even if only for rhetorical purposes, is to do a real disservice to the Church.

The Road to Damascus

Last night I began my Aspirancy program with an overnight retreat at the St. Teresa Retreat Center in Columbus. The Aspirancy program is the first step in the (rather long) road to the Permanent Deaconate. The Aspirancy year is spent in formation and discernment, with monthly meetings like the one I had this weekend, in which one listens to talks about prayer and discernment, gets to know one's fellow Aspirants and their wives, and begins the hard work of introspection and prayer that one hopes will lead to spiritual growth.

I didn't have any trouble getting to the general neighborhood of the Retreat Center, because I had been to that area several times last year for follow-ups to two surgeries for a torn and detached retina in my left eye. My familiarity with the area didn't keep me from turning into the wrong parking lot when I got there, however. The place seemed right to me: it was a large, churchy-looking building, with cars in the lot and people milling around and going in. So imagine my surprise when I got to the door and a friendly woman greeted me with "Happy Shabbat!" Temple Israel, it seems, is right next door to St. Teresa's.

I might not have made that mistake if the lot had been better lighted, but since my surgeries I just can't read signs in the dark as well as I used to, so even though there was a large sign right at the entrance to the lot, I couldn't make out what it said. I suppose I convinced myself, mentally, that there was enough writing on it to say St. Teresa's Retreat Center, or something. This is something that I will have to get used to, and it was bound to happen whether or not I had a torn retina: old people simply cannot see all that well at night. Aging is hard, kiddies, so don't get cocky while you're still young: be humble and help out old geezers like me when they get lost, like the nice lady at Temple Israel did when I remarked, in response to her greeting, "I think I'm in the wrong place." She smiled. "Yes," she said, "I thought you had that look."

It is definitely a little difficult not to be grumpy about the gradual decay of my eyesight, but there is one aspect of it that I try to keep in view (get it?) on the days when things look particularly blurry. When I was getting prepped for my first surgery I was was literally terrified. I remember thinking to myself, "This is what it is like to be really scared." I thought I had been scared of other things, of course: I was nervous about the birth of my first child and the implications it might have for my life; I was nervous about getting tenure; one is almost always nervous, these days, about money. But being nervous is not really the same thing as being scared, even though at the time those things did seem kind of scary in their own way. Now that I have experienced real fear, however, I know that they were not really scary at all. I'm not saying that what I went through last year was anything like the kinds of really terrifying things that many people have to go through every day: military personel, ghetto kids, cancer patients, people in Syria--these people have it far worse than I ever have or will have it. But, for what it's worth, getting prepped for eye surgery was the scariest thing I've been through in my life. What made it bearable was the presence of competent and reassuring people. The nurses, the anesthesiologist, my surgeon: they were all very professional, soothing, and in several instances they did their job best simply by being there. When you're signing forms explaining that you acknowledge that you might die, the presence of a calm woman with obvious expertise and compassion is a remarkable balm for the soul. My surgeon, too, although he constantly put off my compliments with remarks about "just doing my job", was such a remarkable combination of care and technical excellence that I was sure that I would come through everything OK. And indeed, I did.

What has been most remarkable to me about the whole experience is not just the fact that it seems like just about anything can be fixed these days, but also the extent to which we need each other. Not just for technical reasons (such as, I can't operate on my own eye): we need each other just to be there, to care and make manifest the bond of humanity that ties us all together. The growing awareness in me of this deep and essential connectedness to others, a sense of community that increased as I underwent my recovery, was what motivated me to make my application to the Permanent Deaconate Program. This is my chance to be there for others who need someone, anyone, to be living signs of God's love for them. I had considered applying four years ago, when the first Deaconate class began, but I missed the deadline. That turns out not to have been a bad thing: for various reasons, four years ago was not the best time for me to embark upon this journey. For one thing, both of my children were much younger. Now they are in very different places, and so am I.

I am in a very new and, I believe, very good place, because of my surgeries. The concept of God's providence was always one that mystified me in the past, though I thought I understood it intellectually. Now I think I understand it experientially as well as intellectually, and that makes a big difference. Indeed, for me, it has made all the difference: something very good can, indeed, come about as the result of something very bad.

I am very grateful that I did not have to go through what St. Paul went through on the road to Damascus: I am not going to go blind, thanks to some wonderful doctors and nurses in Columbus. But I had my own little Damascus journey last year, and if God is willing, I hope to follow a path not unlike the one followed by St. Paul, at least in the sense of finding a way to see with great clarity even though my eyes are not what they once were.

Alvin Plantinga Receives Rescher Prize

David Theroux of The Independent Institute reports that Alvin Plantinga, the Jellema Chair in Philosophy at Calvin College, has won the Nicolas Rescher Prize for Contributions to Systematic Philosophy, awarded by the University of Pittsburgh's Department of Philosophy. You can read David's announcement here.

Plantinga has been very active in philosophical discussions of the rationality of religious belief, and has participated in public forums with some well-known skeptics. Some of his arguments seem rather strange to me (for example, he has argued that if evolutionary theory is true, it is a disaster for naturalism), but his work on the so-called "ontological proof" for the existence of God has kept an otherwise arcane logical problem on the front burner for many years now, and has prompted a wide variety of responses from the philosophical community. He has written extensively on the concept of epistemic warrant, and has deployed his version of it in defense of the rationality of religious belief. You can find links to many of his papers and books at The Independent Institute's announcement of the prize linked to above.

Our New Dark Ages

Recently I had the opportunity to listen to part of a debate between candidates for public office, and the topic of cap and trade was on their agenda. I was struck by something one of the candidates said about global warming. He claimed that not only is the question of whether global warming is driven by human activity a myth (so-called "anthropogenic climate change"), but that the very fact of global warming is a myth ("myth" was the very word he used). I was struck by this for two reasons. First, while it is true that no scientific theory is literally irreformable and, hence, the question of the causal mechanisms behind climate change must remain an open one, nevertheless the interpretation of the actual data involved in climate change is actually rather straightforward, in spite of what some rather excitable folks tried to make out of the data collection and interpretation methodologies revealed in the whole kerfuffle over the hacked emails from Phil Jones and other involved with the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. I say this in spite of my own decidedly anti-realist leanings in the philosophy of science: all data are multiply interpretable, but usually only a very few interpretations are intellectually warranted, and in this particular case the scandal had to do not with the meaning of the data but the manner in which it was disseminated. Charges of "cooking" the data have been made, but usually only by folks who do not fully understand the nature of scientific inquiry in the first place.

Second, and more importantly from a philosophical perspective, I was struck by the attitude towards climate research that was revealed by this particular candidate's characterization of the work being done. The word "myth" is not necessarily, in my opinion, a pejorative one per se. For example, I believe that much of what can be read in the Scriptures is mythological, but that does not mean that it is not true, and importantly so. But for this particular candidate the word "myth" clearly means "falsehood" or perhaps even "lie". But even if we assume that he means only something benign, perhaps something along the lines of "an unwarranted fantasy foolishly endorsed by certain useful idiots in the climate research lobby", the attitude is nevertheless striking because of what it says about the long Western tradition of interpretations of nature as a fundamental component of our epistemological growth and self-understanding.

The candidate actually said, explicitly, "I'm not going to believe in this myth", and then there was an exchange between him and his opponent in which "believing" in climate change was compared to believing in the tooth fairy. (I am not making this up.) The first thing that should be noted, I think, is that there is an interesting tension here. On the one hand, the candidate is asserting that there are reasons to think that climate change is not happening at all. He does not say what those reasons are, he merely asserts that the whole theory is a "myth" and leaves it at that. Now, ordinarily, I would have to agree: in every empirical study the data underdetermine the available theories, so there is always a possibility that any given theoretical interpretation of the data is mistaken. However, usually when one wants to plump for one theory over another, there is an intellectual burden to say what reasons one has for thinking that Theory One is preferable to Theory Two. However, this candidate seemed to be suggesting that it is not merely that there are reasons for thinking that climate change is not happening, he seemed to suggest that there are no reasons to think that climate change is happening, just as there are no reasons (or no rationally warranted reasons) to think that there is such a thing as a tooth fairy. This is a much stronger position than mere underdetermination would warrant. It is, in fact, an irrational position to the extent that it outright denies the very thing that it sets out to assert: that empirical data are multiply interpretable.

But there is a much more worrisome aspect to this whole thing. The candidate made it clear that he actually has a criterion of warrant that justifies his position. He said quite explicitly that the reason why it is warranted to say that climate change is a "myth" is because there is no "consensus" among scientists about the causal mechanisms of climate change. In other words, it is his belief that unless there is unanimity of opinion among scientists (he made it clear that by "consensus" he means "unanimity of opinion") that Theory X is true, we are warranted in thinking that Theory X is actually false. As I remarked above, there is a viable anti-realist view that would be consistent with a moderate version of this--namely, one would be warranted in thinking that theories of climate change are always reformable--but the candidate clearly is endorsing something much stronger than mere anti-realism with respect to scientific theories. Now, let's be honest here: the guy's a political candidate, not a rocket scientist or a philosopher of science, so perhaps we should cut him some slack. What does he know about underdetermination or anti-realism? In fact, I suspect that most folks who challenge climate science would find anti-realism rather unpalatable, but that is just one of the many delicious ironies of the political age in which we live.

What is it about this that I find worrisome? Principally it is the idea that we are justified in turning a blind eye to scientific inquiry when scientific inquiry does not present us with absolute certainty of interpretation. Indeed, in the present case we are told that it is not enough to turn a blind eye: we are being told that to accept certain interpretations is tantamount to believing in the tooth fairy. Well, speaking of believing in the tooth fairy, I recently noticed that Bob Sungenis and some of his cronies have started plumping for the Ptolemaic geocentric model of the solar system (see his website here). Since at least some PhDs in physics claim to find this view worthy of attention (or perhaps it would be more correct to say that Sungenis claims that they claim to think this), are we then warranted in thinking that there is no real "consensus" on the Copernican heliocentric model? Because if so, our political candidate would appear to be committed to the proposition that believing that the earth revolves around the sun is tantamount to believing in the tooth fairy. On the other hand, if our candidate were to respond that he did not mean to suggest that kooks like Sungenis constitute a viable alternative to "real" science, so there still is a "consensus" on heliocentrism, he would be opening himself to similar charges: just who are the people who challenge the science behind climate change, and why should we take them seriously? But as I mentioned above, he does not actually give us any reasons for thinking that climate change is just a myth, he merely asserts that it is.

The difficulty here should be obvious. Science is, by its very nature, an open inquiry. No scientific theory can ever reasonably be held to be an established, irreformable fact (contrary to what Richard Dawkins says about evolutionary theory--evolutionary theory is one of the most robustly confirmed scientific theories in the history of science, but it is nevertheless still not an irreformable "fact" that is indisputably "true" in a realist sense). All data are multiply interpretable, and this includes theoretical claims. Indeed, it is difficult to see in what sense it would even be meaningful to claim that a scientific theory, which is by its very nature a model of something else, is a "fact". By claiming that science is not to be trusted or even "believed" unless it can establish "facts" by means of a "consensus" of unanimity, our candidate endorses a belief about science which is tantamount to believing in the tooth fairy. Science is no more the sort of thing our candidate believes it to be than is the tooth fairy a real live fairy who leaves children money in exchange for their teeth.

In short, our candidate's view about science is an instance of ignorance about science, and yet it is being put forward as a rational, detached, and objective view about science, one that is allegedly free from the sort of ideological dogmatism that our candidate believes has beguiled those poor benighted folks who still "believe" in climate change. This man wants to hold a position of public trust and authority; he wants to shape science policy. And yet he knows nothing about science. Voting for this man would be like letting witch doctors set the curricula in our medical schools. And this view is no longer a minority view: many other political candidates are joining this throng, based partly on the perception that the public at large tends to agree with them.

Does the public, in fact, accept this view of science? The real fear here is that, yes, by and large folks are becoming ever more irrational about the nature of the scientific enterprise. Because many people have been persuaded that science is already politicized, they are becoming ever more receptive to charges of politicization in just about every scientific arena. I do not deny that scientists are human beings with political aspirations, nor do I deny that much scientific research receives funding and other means of support on the basis of political considerations. To deny these things would be as irrational as adopting the view of science adopted by our candidate. I agree with those who worry that many policy decisions that accept and appeal to the data of climate scientists are politically motivated and often unwarranted, but this does not mean that I think that every and all scientific interpretations of climate data are equally rationally warranted. In spite of the fact that there is no "consensus" of the sort our candidate demands, it would be irrational to claim that it is not the case that the majority of experts in the field of climate research think that the climate is, indeed, changing. Many of these same experts think that the climate is changing because of causal mechanisms set into play by human activity. This latter claim is much more difficult to establish, of course, but it is not irrational to believe it--believing in anthropogenic climate change is not the same thing as believing in the tooth fairy, nor would it be even if it were the minority view among climate scientists. It is one possible interpretation among many, and to deny this is mere political posturing. Putting political power ahead of genuine epistemic progress and knowledge of the natural ordering of things is just one sign among many that we are living in an age characterized by willful ignorance and indifference to intellectual achievement and the nature of scientific expertise. In short, we are living in a new dark age.

The Rightward Turn

In the late 1950s and early 1960s William F. Buckley, Russell Kirk, and other prominent conservative intellectuals pulled off a kind of Velvet Revolution. By means of a series of thoughtful and thought-provoking publications and other media appearances they managed to separate mainstream conservatism from the far-right kooks such as the John Birch Society, Fr. Coughlin, and others who represented the know-nothing, knee-jerk fringe. The effect of this little coup was salutary, because it resulted in a period of nearly thirty years during which the conservative voice carried moral weight in the public square.

Of course, the culture at large was rather different in those days. The PBS television network had room for such middle-brow intellectual fare as Buckley's Firing Line, Sir Kenneth Clark's Civilisation, and Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man, and there were only two or three "major" conservative publications, National Review and The American Spectator being the ones with the largest circulation. Our culture has since, shall we say, "moved on".

I first began to notice the change quite some time ago--back when Buckley retired from editing National Review, in fact. Slowly but surely the writing in that forum grew less interesting and far from intellectually stimulating. But other publications arrived to fill its place, or so I thought: I began reading the Weekly Standard, and found that it sometimes rose to level of the National Review of the late 60s and early 70s. At about the same time, Rush Limbaugh was growing in popularity with radio audiences across the country, and for a little while he even had a television show.

Today, as I look through the sources of "conservative thought" available on the Internet, TV, and radio, I find that the likes of Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Andrew Breitbard make the John Birch Society look like Plato's Academy by comparison. The capacity to communicate the conservative stance by means of intellectual disquisition and rational argumentation has vanished, only to be replaced by the same sort of shrill, knee-jerk bigotry that characterizes so much of the left. While it is true that even Glenn Beck will, on occasion, say something that I find congenial, one must sadly note that even a broken clock is right twice a day, and as any reader of Plato's Theaetetus will know (hence, none of the current "conservative" pundits), getting something right once in a while is not a sufficient condition for knowledge or even intelligence.

This is unfortunate for many reasons, not the least of them being that (a) genuine conservative values will stand less of a chance of making any headway in the public square and (b) our culture, as a whole, is now "slouching towards Gomorrah" at twice the rate it was when this sort of behavior was largely confined to the left. Among these reasons, however, the genuine conservative must surely include the painful irony of a movement in which the noble and the good, construed as the end of man, are at the heart of what it means to be a member of that movement, winds up pillorying itself by stooping to the very tactics of its opposition in an appeal to the vulgar prejudices and bigotries of populism.

Nothing is new under the sun, of course, and while one may lament the present state of things, one comforts oneself with the thought that we have been here before and somehow managed to survive. The history of political discourse in the United States, contrary to the current wisdom, has not suddenly arrived at an unprecedented nadir, but has rather always been characterized by the sort of stuff that one might find flowing forth from the Cloaca Maxima. It is only our short institutional memory that prompts us to characterize our own situation as the End Time. But as new media and new cultural trends multiply ever more quickly with the aid of modern technology, it begins to seem as though the likelihood of another Velvet Revolution in conservative thought is very small, and that, perhaps, is to be lamented even more than the present situation.

Facile Inferences

In my previous post I suggested that some misunderstandings about intellectual history are due to a lack of literary experience and reading comprehension. Many of the misunderstandings I had in mind were misunderstandings by non-scientists about science. In this post I will suggest that this sort of misunderstanding also occurs among scientists about non-science, specifically about value theory and theology--domains that are arguably quite removed from the "hard" sciences, which may serve to explain, in part, why some scientists might be liable to this sort of misunderstanding.

I was reminded of this sort of misunderstanding among scientists by an opinion piece in the August 2010 issue of Scientific American (not available online, which is probably just as well), which I continue to read in spite of the increasing presence in it of opinion pieces of this sort. The essay, called "Faith and Foolishness", was written by Lawrence Krauss, who is presently the Director of an outfit called the "Origins Initiative" at Arizona State University, which appears to be some sort of popularizing "think tank" directed at what they describe as "deep and foundational questions ranging across the entire spectrum of scholarship at ASU" (see the website here). The essay itself begins by pondering "the sad fact that U. S. adults are less willing to accept evolution and the big bang as factual than adults in other industrial countries." Evolution and other Big Ticket scientific theories appear to be the principle focus of the "deep and foundational questions" of interest to the folks at the Origins Institute. It would be easy, at this point, to focus in on the mistake of conflating the notion of "fact" with the notion of an explanatory theory, however robustly confirmed, but that would be rather like shooting fish in a barrel, and I certainly have no beef against evolutionary theory or any particular cosmological theory as such. This sort of mistake is made quite often on both sides, by both scientists and non-scientists, and there isn't much point in belaboring it here. I was more interested in something Krauss said later in his essay:

Last May I attended a conference on science and public policy at which a representative of the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences gave a keynote address. When I questioned how he reconciled his own reasonable views about science with the sometimes absurd and unjust activities of the Church--from false claims about condoms and AIDS in Africa to pedophilia among the clergy--I was denounced by one speaker after another for my intolerance.

It probably goes without saying that Krauss is not complaining about his martyrdom to the truth, in fact he is reveling in it. Of greater interest is his strange opinion that there is something difficult to reconcile here.

Look carefully at the point where he thinks he has caught his interlocutor out. The Catholic Church, he avers, makes false claims about condoms and AIDS in Africa, and there are some priests who are pedophiles. These, I take it, are intended as specific examples of cases where the Church has engaged in "absurd and unjust activities", and these particular cases are then supposed to make it difficult to "reconcile" having, at the same time, "reasonable views about science". We may put aside, for the moment, the fact that his own asseveration about condoms and AIDS in Africa is actually contradicted by the empirical evidence, which rather supports the Church's view; we may also lay aside the fact that the church does not actually support pedophilia, but rather condemns it (though perhaps not fast enough to suit Krauss, but that is irrelevant). These are, perhaps, satisfying rejoinders if one is out to win debating points, but what is more important here is not the refutation of Krauss but the "sad fact" that he thinks he has made some sort of clever inference that establishes the general point he is trying to make.

It seems to me that it can hardly serve to increase public respect for scientists and their powers of reasoning if people like Krauss are the ones put up for consideration. Here, in particular, we have an astonishingly stupid assertion made by someone who is not merely blissfully ignorant of how silly he is making himself look, but quite the contrary, he appears to think he has scored quite a point, and one gets the impression from looking at his personal website that he is unlikely to benefit from training in critical reasoning (it would be unfair to laugh at his belief that he was somehow responsible for the "reevaluation of the Catholic Church's position on evolution", so I will leave it to the reader to explore the many howlers he claims as his own; indeed, an exploration of his website will be a salutary exercise for anyone who worries that they have too high an opinion of themselves--no matter how prideful one may feel, it is always nice to find someone else with an even bigger ego).

Let us take the most obvious mistake here: the claim that a disagreement over an empirical question entails a difficult-to-reconcile attitude towards science and religion. So Krauss happens to accept one set of studies regarding condoms and AIDS in Africa, and some folks in the Church accept another. Again, putting aside the fact that most empirical studies support the Church's view, it is enough to merely point out that scientists disagree among themselves all the time about empirical facts, and it ought to go without saying that scientists differ amongst themselves even more frequently regarding what sort of social policy ought to be enacted given the empirical facts. So there is nothing at all absurd about both having "reasonable views about science" and agreeing with the Church regarding condoms and AIDS in Africa (indeed, given the empirical evidence, it appears rather as though it is Krauss who has a problem with reconciling the facts with his ideology). In short, theoretical questions cannot be settled by observational data alone, the classic problem of underdetermination. This is not unrelated to Krauss's earlier mistake of conflating the notion of a fact with the notion of an explanation: every explanation is theoretical, including explanations that appeal to, say, natural selection or quantum physics. Hence every explanation is in principle falsifiable, but facts are not falsifiable even in principle.

I suspect that the bit about condoms is supposed to be the "absurd" activity of the Church, while the bit about pedophilia is supposed to be the "unjust" activity, but really it is the claim that the Church is unjust when it comes to pedophilia that ought to count as something absurd. What on earth does this even mean? I take it that his central claim here is really nothing more than "the Church has not acted in the way (or, perhaps, as quickly) as I myself would act if I were in charge". That is, of course, the standard of justice held by many people, but it would be pointless to undertake a proof of how ridiculous it is to accuse someone of injustice on grounds of that sort, because those at whom the proof would be directed would be unlikely to benefit from it. It is enough to merely point out that it comes as no surprise that someone whose expertise is physics but who has an ego to match his MIT PhD in physics should be so willing to air his sophomoric views about value theory in a public forum. Putting aside the obvious facts (the Church does oppose pedophilia among the clergy, the Church is taking action against clergy who are pedophiles, etc.) the broader issue is really why we ought to take seriously someone who actually believes this to be a major point in favor of the claim that anyone who agrees with the Church and has "reasonable views about science" has something difficult to reconcile on his hands. One begins to think that when Krauss uses the expression "reasonable views about science" what he really means is "views that are consistent with my own opinions."

Krauss goes on to criticize Bishop Thomas Olmsted, who somehow "excommunicated" Sr. Margaret McBride for her decision in support of an abortion at St. Joseph's Hospital in Phoenix (for a slightly better informed analysis of that, check out my own earlier post on the topic). Again, we may pass over the erroneous details, which are probably due to the fact that Krauss knows nothing about Catholicism (for example, the Bishop did not "excommunicate" her, she excommunicated herself by her action). We may even pass over the fact that in the space of just two sentences Krauss forgets McBride's name, calling her first "Sister Margaret McBride" and then in the very next sentence "Sister Mary". These are, again, just debating points. More important is the glibness with which such ignorance is passed off as magisterial scientific authority, or at the very least as the voice of someone who represents the voice of "reason" in the face of "faith and foolishness".

Krause concludes his condemnation of Bishop Olmsted by saying

Ordinarily, a man who would callously let a woman die and orphan her children would be called a monster; this should not change just because he is a cleric.

This particular sophism is so outrageous as to border on being intellectually offensive. Note, first of all, the deliberate rhetorical re-description of what has happened. A woman with a dangerous condition needed an abortion in order to alleviate the danger to her own health (and possibly to her very life). This set of facts can be described in a lot of different ways, depending upon the particular values one might happen to want to emphasize. One could say that a woman was about to deliberately kill her own innocent child, or that a doctor was about to kill one human being in order to save another one, or that a terribly difficult situation was being faced with great bravery by all around--the way one describes it will be a function of what one happens to think is going on. Krauss casts the situation in terms of the Bishop deliberately letting a woman die, which clearly reflects his own values, but he asserts his view as though it were not a value judgment but a set of facts. Again, one could note that an innocent child was about to be killed, but Krauss chooses instead to talk about the orphaning of children (which ones--the ones that are already safely outside the womb, perhaps?). I suppose that from Krauss's point of view the "facts" are all rather obvious, and this is why he feels no need to address possible arguments that might be directed against him. Indeed, he may describe any attempt to re-describe this situation in a way other than his own way as something "monstrous". But what he has done here is pure sophistry, and it is the sort of sophistry that one could only engage in if one were already in the grips of a theory about what abortion is. Although Krauss continually portrays himself as the voice of reason acting to protect the rest of us from the "irrationality" of the foolish faithful, what we get instead is a pompous rant grounded in nothing more than Krauss's own prejudices. Rather than discuss the difficult moral complexity of the situation, he acts as though it is clear cut: a woman is about to die--there are no other variables at play here. As simplistic and simple-minded as this is, it is not enough for him: he must also paint anyone who disagrees with him as a "monster", because of course when the argument does not go his way invective is the next best thing.

Why on earth should anyone, scientist or non-scientist, take this man seriously once he has made such a spectacle of himself? It seems to me essential, if we are to correct the "sad fact" of scientific illiteracy in the U.S., to put forward thoughtful and intelligent advocates for science. I suppose it is not impossible for an ideologue to be thoughtful and intelligent, but if that conjunction has occurred in Krauss he has done a remarkably good job of hiding it: all one can see here is the blind adherence to ideology, and poorly argued (if argued at all) ideology at that.

The "sad fact" is that there are plenty of well-informed, thoughtful, and intelligent scientists out there who know plenty about value theory, philosophy of science, theology, and related areas, but none of them writes for Scientific American. They are out there (one thinks of Stephen Barr, for example, or Kenneth Miller), but they are in need of a larger public forum. Sadly, many of the popular venues, such as Scientific American, appear to prefer the strident and ideological to the thoughtful and the intelligent.

The tag line of Krauss's essay, "Religious leaders should be held accountable when their irrational ideas turn harmful", is one of those delightful instances of unintentional irony that are happily becoming ever more common in writers of this sort. The good news is that most people don't pay much attention to this sort of thing; the bad news is that some people, including many who ought to know better, find it exhilarating reading. I'm not sure what the prognosis is at this point, but the prescription ought to include wider reading in the relevant literature: philosophy, value theory, intellectual history, theology. The bigger egos won't have room for all those extra books on their shelves, but the honest scholars will, and that ought to give everyone hope.

Science, History, Literature

When I teach introductory level courses in the philosophy of science I find that many students approach the material with a few historical misconceptions that are rather revealing. One of the most common misconception, mentioned by at least one student in every class I have taught on this subject, is the belief that many people believed that the earth was literally flat until the voyages of Columbus. The reason why this is often mentioned in my classes is because one of our discussion topics has to do with the way in which even well-entrenched scientific theories can be replaced by utterly new ones, given the right sort of evidence. So some students think that this belief illustrates that point. "It was once universally (or widely) believed that the earth was flat, but now we know it to be round" is how it usually goes.

In fact there was never any time in Western intellectual history when this was true. There may have been a few individuals here or there who thought that the earth is flat, but the vast majority of scientists, philosophers, theologians, and other interested parties all knew that the earth is roughly spherical. Why do so many students think otherwise? One reason might be because the myth has been repeated by some people who ought to know better. For example, Daniel Boorstin repeats it in his 1983 book The Discoverers, and Boise Penrose mentions it in his 1955 book Travel and Discovery in the Renaissance. So where did this idea come from in the first place? Lesley Cormack has traced it back to a biography of Christopher Columbus written by Washingon Irving (of "Rip Van Winkle" fame). According to Cormack, Irving was trying to portray Columbus as a landmark figure, rather like Copernicus, who by virtue of his voyage of discovery put to rest one more vestige of the so-called "dark ages". In short, it was a piece of propaganda.

Of course, one cannot expect your average undergraduate to be so well-versed in these matters, and so it is perhaps unsurprising that they simply accept whatever they hear along these lines. Unsurprising, but still disappointing, since so many undergraduates these days like to portray themselves as skeptical inquirers after the truth who are not willing to blindly accept everything they are told. It turns out they are just like the rest of us in that regard.

So what sort of remedy is there for this kind of situation? I would like to suggest that one step in the right direction would be to re-integrate the study of the sciences with the study of intellectual history. Many of the best contemporary science writers are people who not only know a lot about science, they know a lot about the history and philosophy of science as well. More importantly, they are sensitive readers who are able to ferret out important details that can aid in the formation of more subtle interpretations of that intellectual history.

There is an interesting illustrative example early on in Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People. In I.3 he writes, in part:

Ireland is far more favored than Britain by latitude, and by its mild and healthy climate. Snow rarely lies longer than three days, so that there is no need to store hay in summer for winter use or to build stables for beasts. There are no reptiles, and no snake can enter there; for although often brought over from Britain, as soon as the ship nears land, they breathe the scent of its air, and die. In fact, almost everything in this isle confers immunity to poison, and I have seen that folk suffering from snake-bite have drunk water in which scrapings from the leaves of books from Ireland have been steeped, and that this remedy checked the spreading poison and reduced the swelling.

The last sentence of this report, in particular, is apt to make one roll one's eyes at the credulity of an earlier age, but H. Mayr-Harting, in his book The Coming of Christianity, has argued at some length that in fact this passage is not meant to be taken seriously, but is rather a parody, by Bede, of the sort of pseudo-scientific writing common in his day. Seeing this requires knowing, first of all, that Bede was a rather witty writer not above making jokes or parodies, and also knowing about the pseudo-scientific literature that he would have had access to. Again, this is not the sort of thing that we can expect just anybody to know off-hand, but clearly knowledge of this sort of thing would make a difference in how one interprets this passage of Bede.

I suspect that there are many such misapprehensions abroad. I think that much contemporary discussion of the conflict between Galileo and the Church, for example, suffers from a lack of full information on both sides, and that even when it comes to such obvious non-problems as the "conflict" between evolution and intelligent design, or anthropogenic climate change, the clearer heads are the ones who understand fully what sorts of issues are at stake on all sides and who, more importantly, are careful enough to know the difference between principled arguments and ideological scrums. This requires wide reading, and a careful assessment of merits of the arguments on all sides. The intellectual acumen required to accomplish this ranges more widely, I am afraid, than the typical training either in the sciences or the humanities can give. A broader education is required, and those who are fluent in both will have the best chance of making an accurate assessment of the situation.

Ectopic Pregnancy and Double Effect

Last month Sr. Margaret McBride, an ethical consultant at St. Joseph's Hospital in Phoenix, Arizona, was declared excommunicate by Bishop Thomas Olmsted on the grounds that she had cooperated in the procurement of abortion (apparently by giving the procedure her approval as ethical consultant). McBride defended her decision on the grounds that the life of the mother was at risk (she suffered from pulmonary hypertension, which put her at risk for eclampsia; her condition is sometimes referred to as pre-eclampsia. Eclampsia can be life-threatening, though pre-eclampsia rarely is--unless, of course, it leads to eclampsia). She appealed to the Church's teaching that only direct abortion is gravely sinful; indirect abortion (abortion in which the death of the fetus is not intended, though it may be foreseen) is regarded as, at least in principle, something that can be morally licit under the right conditions.

The basic idea here is to appeal to the principle of double effect, but it is not at all clear that pre-eclampsia constitutes a sufficient condition for invoking that principle. For one thing, pre-eclampsia, in itself, simply isn't as life-threatening as the principle would require. Second, even if the condition were life-threatening, it isn't clear that the principle would apply to this sort of case.

In a statement released in late June, the United States Bishops' Committee on Doctrine drew a distinction between kinds of cases based upon the nature of the threat to the mother's life. They gave the following examples to illustrate the distinction. In one sort of case, we are to imagine a woman whose organs are experiencing problems as a consequence of the added burden of pregnancy; in the other sort of case, we are to imagine a woman with cancer of the uterus. According to the document, the former case is not sufficient to render licit an abortion to save the life of the mother, because to remove the fetus in order to save the mother's life is a direct killing of a human being in order to save the life of another, and this is not permitted by Catholic moral theory: we may not do wrong in order to bring about good. In the latter case, the removal of the cancerous uterus is what is directly intended, and the death of the fetus, though foreseeable, is not intended, so the principle of double effect applies. It is difficult to avoid drawing the inference that, when it is the mother's own organs that threaten her life, they may be removed even if doing so kills another human being who is lurking therein; but when it is another human being who threatens the mother's life, that human being may not be killed, even if it is hiding in one of the mother's organs.

The case of ectopic pregnancy, in light of the directive from the Committee on Doctrine, is particularly interesting. Some Catholics have thought that an ectopic pregnancy is a clear case in which abortion to save the life of the mother would be licit under the principle of double-effect. But clearly not, if the distinction drawn by the Bishops' Committee is correct. In the case of ectopic pregnancy there is nothing organically wrong with the fallopian tube, so it is not analogous to the case of the cancerous utuerus. Instead, the fetus has become lodged in the fallopian tube, and the only way to save the life of the mother is to either (a) remove the fetus from the fallopian tube, which would be a clear case of a direct abortion and hence illicit; or (b) remove the entire fallopian tube, with the fetus in it. It is this latter scenario, (b), that those Catholics who defend this procedure as licit point to as the case covered by the principle of double effect. Their thinking is that the intention is to save the life of the mother, not to kill the fetus, and they save the life of the mother by removing, not the fetus, but the fallopian tube. The death of the fetus is, of course, foreseeable in this scenario, but since it is not intended, these folk reason, it is licit because covered by double effect. But according to the distinction drawn by the Bishops the removal of the fallopian tube cannot be seen as anything other than the removal of the fetus, since the fallopian tube itself is in no need of being removed, and certainly would not need to be removed if there were not a fetus lodged in it. If a stone had become lodged in the fallopian tube there is little doubt that the procedure would be referred to as the removal of the stone and not as the removal of a fallopian tube that just happened to have a stone in it.

Fortunately ectopic pregnancy is extremely rare, occurring in less than 2% of all pregnancies, though it is, apparently, on the rise: it has increased sixfold since 1970. Most patients that present with ectopic pregnancy have no identifiable risk factor, so the temptation to blame the rise of the condition on increasing use of fertility treatments (also frowned upon by Catholic moral theory) must be resisted. However, I won't resist the temptation to report the following (from MedScape):

One study has demonstrated that infertility patients with luteal phase defects have a statistically higher ectopic pregnancy rate than patients whose infertility is caused by anovulation. The risk of ectopic pregnancy and heterotopic pregnancy (ie, pregnancies occurring simultaneously in different body sites) dramatically increases when a patient has used assisted reproductive techniques to conceive, such as in vitro fertilization (IVF) or gamete intrafallopian transfer (GIFT). In a study of 3000 clinical pregnancies achieved through in vitro fertilization, the ectopic pregnancy rate was 4.5%, which is more than double the background incidence. Furthermore, studies have demonstrated that up to 1% of pregnancies achieved through IVF or GIFT can result in a heterotopic gestation, compared to an incidence of 1 in 30,000 pregnancies for spontaneous conceptions.

So apparently the only method of saving the life of the mother in the case of an ectopic pregnancy is not actually morally licit, according to the most recent statement by the United States Bishops. Not all Catholics commentators have argued that it is licit, but those who have will now have to rethink their arguments.