When Christians set out to deal with contradictions between, say, the Bible and science, or between doctrine and science, they are tempted to put their mind into reverse, and back away from science as fast as their arguments will take them. When they do this they look as stupid as Governor Perry of Texas, who, at a recent campaign event in New Hampshire — whose state motto, “Live Free or Die!”, I have some sympathy for — told a kid that evolution is just “a theory that’s out there,” and that he didn’t know, and he didn’t think anyone else did, how old the earth is. Here’s a little snippet from ABC News:
h/t Jerry Coyne
Now, that just looks stupid! And that’s what happens when you put your mind into reverse.
Is there a way of holding onto your beliefs and still give the appearance, anyway, of moving forward? Well, a lot of religious people, especially theologians, think there is, though not as many, I suspect, as is sometimes imagined. The problem with reinventing doctrine is that it takes an enormous degree of familiarity with the sources in the tradition even to make it sound plausible. I know, because I played the moving forward game for several years, and if you don’t know your stuff pretty well, then you won’t be able to convince others that reading the sources differently, metaphorically or figuratively, retains the really important stuff that gives religion its edge.
I knew an Anglican priest, fresh out of theological school, who said to me, shortly after he had moved to his first parish, “If I told the people here what I really believe they would think I’m not really a Christian.” The problem is to put what you really believe in words that are — well, let’s call a spade a bloody shovel! — evasive enough that people will think that, while you express it in a way that differs from anything they have ever heard, you still believe roughly what they believe. It’s really not that hard once you get the hang of it, though if you don’t know enough someone will be sure to trap you with one of those embarrassing “Aha!” moments, when it becomes crystal clear that you really do believe something different, and it isn’t what they’ve been taught all these years. It helps, of course, if you actually think you are unfolding the real meaning that is there, in the texts and the doctrines, and has been hidden all these years, and only became obvious over the last few decades.
In other words, I don’t think that most clergy and others who do this kind of thing are being insincere. I certainly wasn’t. I just thought that this was the way that theology was done, and there are plenty of books by eminent theologians that explain or depend upon this way of doing theology. Most conservative Christians call it liberal, but liberal theologians themselves don’t think of it as a disingenuous way of talking about their beliefs. A good example of this kind of theology is the theology of Gordon Kaufman, who actually wrote a fairly short book entitled An Essay on Theological Method, explaining how this kind of theology is done. It’s worth taking a look at a couple of things he has to say about it.
For example, Kaufman takes theology to be a constructive activity, and he explains:
To say theology is largely a constructive activity does not mean that it is empty or untrue or dealing with the unreal. A world which we create is no less real than one that is given us. [32]
You can see how he equivocates on the word ‘world’ here. Suppose we were to rewrite that last sentence as follows: ”A world which we create in imagination is no less real than the real world that is given us.” This is basically what he is saying, but if you write it out longhand, like this, it doesn’t seem so obvious any more, does it? The idea here is that human beings in fact create the world, and that, since we are all somehow “in” the world, there is no standpoint from “outside” the world that can distinguish absolutely between the different ways that people have of constructing their world(s).
Don Cupitt, a Cambridge theologian who has written more books than most of us have had hot dinners, describes our situation as outsidelessness, and thinks that, in terms of modern philosophy, there is not much to choose between Richard Dawkins and the Archbishop of Canterbury. In fact he says, in a Guardian Face to Faith piece, in 2007 that:
The upshot of all this is very severe; so severe that from the point of view of modern philosophy even Richard Dawkins believes in God. He has abandoned popular belief in God (Derrida’s “restricted theology”), but clings to what Derrida calls “general theology”, a belief in one ready-made truth of things out there, waiting to be copied into our language. Unfortunately, Dawkins’ god is now dead too.
Cupitt thinks that this means that Christian theology is in crisis and that both Rowan Williams and Joseph Ratzinger know that it is, and that the only resolution to the problem (at least for Christians) is a massive revision of Christian theology that acknowledges the outsidelessness of our situation. What he would suggest for Richard Dawkins and science is less clear. Indeed, the fact that he does not acknowledge that there is a significant difference between science and theology is, I think, a telling failure to understand, not only science, but the whole modern world, about which he is otherwise such a keen and accurate observer.
If Cupitt’s (and Kaufman’s) point were true, then Rick Perry’s world is as valid a world picture as Richard Dawkins’, but this simply can’t be right. You can’t protect theology by undermining science. This doesn’t mean, I hasten to add, that the theological imagination can contribute nothing to our self-understanding. I think this is just wrong, but the stress here on imagination is vital. Richard Holloway, for instance, a former bishop of Edinburgh in the Scottish Episcopal Church, and one-time Primus of that church, has written a number of subtle, imaginative works which take Christian theology as their point of departure, though I believe that he would describe himself now as an agnostic. The Wikepedia entry under Richard Holloway states that:
His own theological position has become increasingly radical and he has recently described himself as an “after-religionist”.
That, at least, seems obscure enough to be vaguely theological.
So far, this has all been preamble, since when I set out what I wanted to do was to consider the last paragraph of David Lose’s HuffPo piece on “Adam, Eve and the Bible,” which Jerry Coyne quotes in the post linked above. Here it is:
If, however, we look to Genesis not for [an] historical datum from which to construct a pseudo-scientific cosmology we find a different story all together. It’s a story about the insecurity that is endemic to humanity and the ever-present temptation to refuse the identity that comes from the vulnerability of authentic relationship in favor of defining themselves over and against each other. Read this way, the story of Eden is the history of humanity writ small, and Adam and Eve are, indeed, the parents of us all. It’s a more complicated story, for sure, than we’ve sometimes been offered, but it is also more interesting and compelling and, ultimately, one I’m inclined to believe.
Now, I think Jerry is exaggerating when he says that he “has no idea what he is talking about.” It is fairly clear that Lose wants to reinterpret the Adam and Eve story as telling us figuratively about the nature of being human, and how that nature is, in some sense, intrinsically destructive. To understand what Lose is saying here you have to remember that Christian faith in God is all about relationship. God, through Jesus, restores the relationship between God and humanity that was broken by the sin of Adam and Eve. This is what Christians call redemption or salvation. Lose is trying to tell us that, rather than see this as something that is derivable from a particular historical event — Adam, Eve, the garden, and eating the forbidden fruit — we should see this mythical event as descriptive of the human situation in which human beings give way to the temptation to avoid vulnerability in personal relationship by defining ourselves over against each other. And this failure of relationship is something, in Lose’s view, that demands resolution, and this resolution, presumably, is found in Jesus’ death on the cross, und so wieder.
Now, doubtless, from a liberal theological point of view this makes sense. We find something in our world and experience that answers to something that is called temptation and fall in the Bible, and then we put this in the place of the myth as a theological explication of the story. The trouble is, however, that even if that makes some kind of sense, it simply begs the question. The story is supposed to account for the need of the sacrificial death of Jesus on the cross. Through that sacrifice — “by his stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53.5 – the suffering servant passage that is interpreted by Christians as prefiguring the Passion of Christ – as Mel Gibson tried to show in sadomasochistic detail in his movie — … anyway, through that sacrifice we, who have been estranged (see how this plays into Lose’s interpretation), have been reconciled with God. However, while it might have made some kind of sense to say that there was a particular event in the past through which humanity became in some sense irrevocably estranged from God, it is not obvious at all that it makes sense to take a particular aspect of the human situation — that we tend to think in terms of them and us, for instance — something that we can probably explain in terms of evolution – and say that this shows that we need reconciliation with God. This just begs the question, and Lose, who is inclined to believe the story as he has retold it, doesn’t notice that it equivocates over precisely the point that is at issue: namely, whether we are estranged from God, or, for evolutionary psycho-social reasons, just from each other. Only in the former case is the reconciling action of Christ necessary — if, that is, it is necessary, because the Fall describes a great cosmic event – and this we might well be inclined not to believe. Which just goes to show that you can’t eat your theological cake and still keep it for elevensies tomorrow.
I really think the core of Adam and Eve is that human suffering is due to the first disobedience of God by our ancestors, who were initially in a state of perfection and peace beforehand. And I think that component of the story is completely and utterly destroyed by evolution, since there was never a time without death, predation, and suffering in our long evolution from the first living things. The whole point of Adam and Eve is that our suffering is our own fault, and I think that natural science has really buried that idea, since there was no perfect time in the past, and really, we’ve gotten better since the bronze age. So, what exactly is Jesus redeeming us from? If people believe that God guided evolution, Jesus is redeeming us from the very state that God made us in, rather than some thing we did wrong. Which of course, begs the question of why make us that way in the first place.
But ultimately, I think all of the Adam and Eve and Jesus stuff is just sad, because it leads back to the saddest story ever told, that Jesus died, and his followers couldn’t accept that, and pretended that he did not die. And then went and made up a variety of reasons why he would need to do things this way.
Back when I was inclined to analyze bible stories for their meanings, I used to think the story of the Fall was really a commentary on consciousness. Before the fall, men and women were like beasts. They lived in a natural state: unclothed, unaware, amoral. But once they ate the fruit of tree of knowledge of good and evil, they acquired consciousness. The “curse,” therefore, was self awareness. As sentient beings, we can foresee the death of ourselves and our loved ones. We understand the consequences of our behaviors and are therefore subject to moral judgement. In other words, we gained knowledge but also the burdens of responsibility and foresight.
There’s always a way to spin they stories so they appear to hold meaning. They are ink blot tests that way. You can see whatever you wish in them.
So, let’s let Lose have his mythological Adam and Eve. No sin-fruit, no talking snake, no angel with a flaming sword holding potential returnees at bay. We agree, it’s a myth. I’m sure the 40% of American Christians who believe in the literal truth of the story will be slightly miffed — but that’s not our worry, it’s his.
OK. Fine. But then, the “estrangement” from god isn’t our fault … it’s god’s.
By being conspicuously absent, god has created this estrangement. He’s like Willy Lomax, only even less present in his family’s life. He went away 2000+ years ago on an extended sales trip, and hasn’t even bothered to telephone home once.
And doesn’t this directly contradict any semblance of “omni” in god as well? An omnipotent god wouldn’t have allowed an evolutionary process to create a special species like ours only to have it so estranged from god that it has to resort to theatrical demonstrations of “love”.
An omnibenevolent god would have no need to send Jesus in the first place — he would never let himself be estranged from his special children. And his forgiveness would not be conditional on our believing in a bloody, showy, gruesome human sacrifice. How omnibenevolence has come to be an attribute of the Christian god is far beyond my ken. It’s right there in front of you — he certainly wasn’t benevolent to Jesus!
And an omniscient god would obviously know all this and have found a better demonstration of both his presence and his love for mankind. I’m a mere mortal, and I can think of dozens of more-appropriate demonstrations of both my existence and my love of mankind. Which in no way, for what it’s worth, interfere with the concept of “free will”. (Free will is a bogus argument anyway; after all, Satan was allegedly at god’s right hand and still rejected him. Why should humans have less a right to reject a present god versus an absent one?)
When you look at the New Testament through modern eyes, you see primitive “solutions” to an alleged theological problem. Today, one might suppose the almighty creator of everything would only need a Twitter account to set things right between him and us.
Of course, the Old Testament is even worse! Why should god send plagues to Egypt when a good old-fashioned transporter beam would send each and every Jew and their possessions to the promised land in an instant?
No, a bible that can’t keep up with our science fiction is certainly not the inspired word of any sort of deity. And as far as what’s “true” and what’s “myth”…well, it’s turtles all the way down, I’m afraid.
Yeah, I never really understood why people were always harping so much about our need to have faith, but all the stories were about people that had direct, speaking relationships with God. Moses never had to go on faith, Jesus never had to go on faith. The only reason *we* have to do so is because its clear that God isn’t talking and isn’t doing any more miracles. Some people just assume that everything is a miracle, while others wise up and realize that the people who claim great powers in the past but can’t show them now are likely to have never had them.
No more miracles?! But but but, that puppy survived the earthquake!! How could that happen without it being a miracle?
Quite amazing the level theists sink to to declare a miracle these days. The miracle of incomplete devastation is the most popular, naturally.
I once had someone declare their fealty to the Catholic church because it had only certified 12 “real” miracles at Lourdes. I looked it up … some 20 million people have gone there seeking cures. 12 out of 20 million is WAY worse than the spontaneous remission rate for most deadly diseases. In other words, if you want to be “cured” without the benefit of modern medicine, the odds for you would be far better if you stayed away from Lourdes.
Some miracle.
Eric, I was just wondering, since we’re talking here about interpreting myths to help us understand the human condition (which I gather is Lose’s intent?), what are your thoughts on Joseph Campbell? It seems that Campbell was able to do all the exegesis, all the theology, without dragging in the superstitious. Maybe Campbell’s outlook is what the David Loses of the world really hold in private?
I always understood the Adam and Eve mythos as centered on the god-given gift of free will, the freedom to choose right and wrong, god from no god (It’s difficult to disentangle all the other things entailed, such as mortality and materialism) and In theory, the ability to choose implies imperfection. Evil was always one bad decision away, whereas before The Fall it was not even an option. It’s unclear whether someone like Mary who had free will and still lead a sinless life was a more better creation than pre-lapsarian man. Considering the fact that his mother was sinless, it was certainly easy for god the son to lead an equally sinless life by dint of genetics or nurture. God definitely stacked the deck here.
Presumably, God, in allowing humans to choose, foresaw the estrangement to come but considered this path better than not granting us the ability…a necessary evil. That seems somewhat reasonable. He even sacrificed Himself to himself to allow himself to forgive us (love is complicated).
In other words, God put himself into a real quandary with this free will thing and found the limits of his power. How is this resolved?
I’ll stop before descend into Battlestar Galactica parallels.
Ah, I’m sorry Jason, I really know nothing about Joseph Campbell, so I just don’t know.
I’m a hardened atheist, and I really enjoy Campbell’s stuff. He tried to find the common themes underlying world religion, and it’s very interesting, even if I think he sometimes stretched things a bit. He did a series of lectures where he talks about these ideas, which are slowly being turned into a documentary series called “Mythos”, so that might be a low-investment introduction to his style before you decide if you want to spend a lot of time looking into his stuff.
Argh, forgot to subscribe to the comments. Sorry.
Cupitt wrote, “But since Kant, and especially through the philosophies of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida, the old western metaphysics has now been radically destabilised, deconstructed. The old west has gone.”
Why would anyone believe that? Who seriously thinks that Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida knew what they were talking about? The fact that Cupitt takes them on faith is the weirdest part of that article.
When trying to interpret ancient myths like the Fall, I think many modern people* fail to put themselves mentally in the position of the people who created the myth. Ever-greater divisions of labor between people have led fewer and fewer people to think about basic biological facts that their ancestors would have been intimately familiar with. What proportion of modern Americans or Canadians have regularly witnessed, up close and in person, the births of both livestock and humans? Not many. We’ve lost touch with many basic rhythms and patterns and truths in nature, which creates artificial difficulty in seeing how such truths might be reflected in mythology.
In contrast to many of us, the farmers and herders who eventually came to identify themselves as the tribes of Israel were surely intimately familiar with the natural processes of pregnancy and birth in their livestock as well as among their own people. The disproportionate head-to-body ratio of human infants is hardly subtle, and the fact that lambs and calves do not have such disproportionately large heads is equally obvious. So too is it obvious that the size of a baby’s head is the primary problem in childbirth. And even the most primitive understanding of the body’s workings could very well — not necessarily would, but easily could — locate the source of thinking/intelligence in the head, since people knocked on the head can become disoriented and unable to think for a time, and the occasional person who survives a serious head injury might show long-term mental impairment. (These sorts of medical observations are obviously not as universal as basic familiarity with livestock and human birthing processes, but they have been made by so-called “primitive” people even when more “advanced” people had stranger and less clearly justifiable notions, such as Aristotle’s proposal that the brain’s purpose was cooling the body. Hippocrates, a keen observer of injuries and their consequences, knew better.)
Much like the Tower of Babel myth (also in Genesis) is very clearly a story that explains an obvious natural phenomenon (the diversity of human languages), I think it’s not merely plausible but fairly obvious that the Fall myth is a story that explains the obvious natural phenomena referred to above. That is, it seems to me quite reasonable to suppose that the storytellers who invented this myth could see the connection between human intelligence — the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil — and big-headed babies which create very difficult childbirth compared to other creatures — the Curse of Eve. More broadly, the whole myth seems to be a story that explains human difference, for good and ill: We are (at least to our own minds) quite obviously very different from other creatures: Why? God made us this way Himself. What’s the first task given to Adam? Naming things, because one of the most obvious difference between humans and other creatures is language. If God made us, why are our lives so difficult? Why is reproduction so painful and fraught with danger, such that many mothers die in childbirth? Well our Creator wouldn’t do that to us if we didn’t deserve it, so maybe it’s punishment for something. Punishment for what? Well since the pain of childbirth is from having such proportionately big-headed babies, maybe the problem is that we got too smart for our own good.
Of course, stories take on a life of their own, and are often multi-faceted. Just as the Tower of Babel story does more than explain language diversity, but also contains a heavy-handed moral about human arrogance and unsubtle criticisms of the pyramid-building city-states of the ancient Near East, there are many elements of the Fall myth that seem to be about matters other than explaining human nature and human difference from other creatures. The introduction of the tempting serpent has all sorts of possible origins and meanings, so many that I don’t care to speculate. The special blame placed on Eve has often been attributed to the ancient Hebrews’ patriarchal social organization, but I think the fact that the above-mentioned “punishment” falls primarily on women might also be an important factor. And so on and so forth.
I’m not engaging in this exercise in interpreting the meaning of a particular Biblical myth for its own sake. Rather, I wanted to illustrate by example the difference between actually searching for some of the plausible meanings of an ancient myth (my modest attempt above) and the mental gymnastics gone through by someone like Lose, who imposes a wildly implausible and extremely vague interpretation on the same myth in a desperate attempt to defend some “deeper truth” that is itself just another myth. Theology is rationalization, always and entirely. The more intellectually honest a theologian is, like Cupitt or Spong, the further the theologian gets from religion. If they were fully intellectually honest, they would go just that much further and leave religion behind entirely — at which point they would stop rationalizing, and therefore stop being theologians altogether and become genuine philosophers. (Not that some philosophers don’t rationalize in defense of pre-conceived opinions, but in our profession it’s a vice rather than the primary methodology and standard operating procedure.)
I don’t know why any philosopher takes Heidegger seriously, and I just plain don’t know *any* working philosophers who take Derrida seriously. But the consensus of the philosophical community seems to be (and I agree) that Nietzsche was a great critic of philosophy in spite of the confused and flawed nature of his attempts to advance positive arguments, and that he did destabilize many established ideas that were held too uncritically by too many philosophers in his day (and after). However, the response of the community of philosophers to the challenges to old metaphysical assumptions by Nietzsche and others has never resembled the shrugging, throwing-up-of-hands, anything goes attitude of postmodernists and other flakes who say the word “Theory” with that irritating special emphasis that lets you hear the capital ‘T’. Rather, philosophers have replaced shoddy metaphysical positions like Kantian Idealism (or worse, Platonic Idealism) and what is now called “naive realism” with more subtle theories supported by better arguments that are not vulnerable to those criticisms.
I wouldn’t say Cupitt is taking the criticisms of the figures he cites as a matter of faith, exactly, but he is certainly more than a little disingenuous to imply that their critiques are all equally respected and respectable; they definitely are not. And he is even more disingenuous to imply without argument that such challenges to traditional metaphysics have no legitimate and widely accepted answers. In marked contrast with theology, philosophy actually makes progress over time: Discredited arguments are not simply repeated ad infinitum with minor variations. Rather, arguments are refined and positions which were once considered plausible are discarded or substantially modified in response to legitimate criticisms — which includes not just criticisms from other philosophers, but also criticisms based on findings from the sciences. (Anyone who does metaphysics without paying close attention to physics is simply doing it wrong, period.) Theologians, in contrast, will cling to whatever metaphysical positions they believe best reinforce their starting assumptions, from the tired and long-rejected metaphysical theories of Plato or (Aquinas’ misunderstandings of) Aristotle to the self-refuting absurdist anti-metaphysics of the postmodernists, often switching between contradictory alternatives in the same line of argument.
Pedant: that should be und so weiter unless you actually mean “and so again”.
Yup noticed that some time ago and changed it.
I shouldn’t have said “on faith”, but there is something odd when you talk to people in the Humanities (outside Philosophy) where they just assume that Post-Modernism or Antirepresentationalism or some such nonsense has won the day. When you point out that it hasn’t, they just look at you disbelievingly. When you say that Rorty’s arguments are bad and he attacks strawmen, it’s like they’ve never considered the possibility before. It’s really bizarre.
Oh, I know the bizarre phenomenon you’re talking about, Daniel. These days, I think I understand it better than I used to. While the absurd extremes to which many have pushed deconstruction make the theoretical foundations of postmodernism (and its many cousins) self-refuting, it turns out that deconstruction can be a useful tool when used with reason and restraint. It’s a great remedy for whiggish history, for example. For another example, I have a friend (a psychology professor) who does admirable and rigorous qualitative research on identity formation and change, and I don’t think her work would be nearly as good as it is if she didn’t pay attention to the roles played by dominant social narratives and power relations and so on.
Many people in the humanities and social sciences make good use of the tools provided by postmodernism without necessarily adopting the incoherent theories advanced by postmodernists wholeheartedly, and they don’t know enough about philosophy to understand why philosophers have largely rejected and discarded those theories as rubbish. As for philosophers, we already had all the genuinely useful insights of postmodernism floating around our discipline from other, less polluted sources — Nietzsche has already come up, but Wittgenstein’s arguments about language games are also relevant here.
Theologians, however, are another matter. They don’t just apply deconstruction as a useful tool for analyzing culture and rooting out biases, they accept postmodernism wholesale — when it’s useful to do so. They adopt the theoretically self-refuting anti-metaphysics and anti-epistemology of postmodernism — all truth claims are equally valid/equally invalid power games, and there is no “real” reality to which we can appeal to differentiate among them — primarily as an excuse to reject criticisms of faith. But by and large (radicals like Cupitt and Spong being the exception), theologians’ commitment to postmodern anti-metaphysics and anti-epistemology is skin deep, and it certainly doesn’t prevent them from making unsupportable and extremely strong metaphysical and epistemological claims of their own — like the claim that God exists, and that they can not only know that He exists, but know His nature and His will.
Sorry.
A bookstore in Berkeley which also sold used records had a bin labeled “Leider” (worse) instead of “Lieder” (songs). Every fan of Schubert and Schumann must have pointed out the error, but they never changed it.
Can anyone actually provide a translation for this incredible sentence from David Lose?’
“It’s a story about the insecurity that is endemic to humanity and the ever-present temptation to refuse the identity that comes from the vulnerability of authentic relationship in favor of defining themselves over and against each other.”
???? I suppose Eric has teased some of the meaning out of the surrounding context, but really, I don’t think Coyne exaggerated; this sentence is mystifying. I think “in favor of defining themselves over and against each other” is the real clincher that throws the sentence over the cliff into the void of meaningless word combinations.
Well, Jeff, I agree its puffery, but it’s just a long way of saying a simple thing. You see, Lose has to find something to say about Adam and Eve, but he knows they can’t be historical figures, so … They have to be figurative.
But what in human nature do they represent? Well, says, Lose, what’s wrong with the human situation? Ah! I know? Entering into relationship is being open and vulnerable, and takes trust and sincerity. That’s hard work, and its risky. So, instead of that people decide to face of against each other, divide up into us and them.
Its pretty flaky, because, while Adam and Eve were supposed to represent generally simply everything that was wrong with humanity, when you try to pin it down, and say, as Lose wants to, that just this is what is wrong, you end up saying something silly.
Sure, people are careful around each other, for good reasons. They’re not ready to trust just anyone. And this kind of care is not only sensible, but it probably is partly inbuilt in our nature. So, Lose ends up saying something pretty stupid, and then saying, with a big sweep of the arm, “Yeah, I think I can believe something like this.” What nonsense! To suppose he could sum up, in something like this, an evil which it would take (in the Christian myth) the death of God’s son to rectify?! The man’s got to get a life!