You may have noticed the Google Doodle today, a rocky-looking thing which turns out to be a reference to Blessed Nicholas Steno, a Danish priest (actually named Steensen) who did some pioneering work in geology. I was not aware of him before today, so I appreciate Google having brought him to my attention. And I'm glad they made note of someone who was not only a Catholic priest, and not only a scientist, but possibly a saint. 

One suspects, though, that Google, which generally avoids any religious significance for its Doodles, wasn't much interested in the Catholic aspect of Steno's life. When you click on the Doodle, you get (at least as of this writing) a series of articles praising him as a "mythbuster" and opponent of "creationsim." To say that this distorts his life is an understatement. It's curious that if you simply search for "Nicholas Steno", you get a somewhat different set of results, in which the "mythbuster" theme is less prominent. 

Try it. This is the URL which the Doodle uses:

 http://www.google.com/search?q=Nicolas+Steno&ct=steno12-hp&oi=ddle

And this is the one generated when you do a simple Google search:

http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=nicholas+steno&btnG=Google+Search

I don't know what those parameters ("ct=...") at the end of the Google URL mean. No, I don't think Google somehow engineered the "mythbuster" results. But it's odd. And certainly reflective of a widespread attitude: sure, he may have actually believed that Catholic stuff, but that's just because he wasn't far enough along in enlightenment; his real importance was that he was...like us.

One of my many, many unfinished projects is the conversion to blog posts of all the Sunday Night Journal entries that were published in hand-crafted HTML before I started this blog in 2006. Here's July 11, 2004, on the subject of the intelligent design movement.

Since I wrote that piece I've become considerably less hopeful that ID would have much effect on the evolution debate. Its opponents seem to have been able to deflect its attacks pretty easily, because the IDers can't produce any experimental evidence for their view. Strictly speaking, the materialists can't, either, but the burden of proof naturally falls on the challengers, and the materialists can always come up with some kind of explanation for any biological feature that the IDers hold to be irreducibly complex.

Yay!

Sunday Night Journal — June 12, 2011

I normally don't get involved in political or religious discussions on Facebook, because I'm "friends" with people who have strong views on all sides, and who needs more rancor in his life? I ventured into one a week or so ago, much against my better judgment, and then withdrew quickly when my remarks were not well received. (Not that the reception was rancorous; it was merely...unreceptive.) But I've wanted to say more about the question, which is an important one.

The post (a Facebook Note, similar to a blog post) argued, in essence, that the immensity of the universe makes Christian beliefs absurd, and much of it consisted of examples of just how very, very, very immense the universe is. It was not exactly the familiar argument that nothing so tiny as a human being could be significant in so vast a space, and that therefore if there is a God, then he, she, or it is not particularly interested in us. It was a variant: if there is a God, then he, she, or it could not possibly be identified with anything so tiny as a human being--that is, that there could be no human incarnation of God. ("Identified" doesn't strike me as the best term to use about the Incarnation, but that was the writer's word.) And it had a second component: that it would be even more absurd to hold that the salvation or damnation of every being in the universe could depend on whether he, she, or it believed in that incarnation. (The writer didn't specify, but presumably he meant conscious beings with the ability to make moral choices.)

That second component is at very best much too simplistic, as most people who read this blog will probably see at once. For one thing, the conditions, according to many of the most ancient Christian traditions, for the salvation of a human being are somewhat more complex than that. More importantly, there is nothing in Christianity which holds that any conjectured inhabitants of conjectured other planets would share our condition. Perhaps there are some who did not fall as we did, and do not need to be saved. Such things can only be the object of speculation. The Christian revelation was made to the inhabitants of this planet. We don't even know--one has to remind certain enthusiasts of this--that there are any others, all such speculations being just that, no matter how many statistics are cited in their support; even the relevance of the statistics depends on many unproven assumptions.

The first argument, though, rests mainly on the emotional force of what we know about the size of the universe. That force is indeed strong; surely anyone can feel it. We literally cannot imagine such vastness. We can formulate the ideas that measure it and state the numbers, but we cannot imagine it, in the sense of forming a real mental picture of it. I'm not sure we can really even do that very well with distances inside the solar system, which itself is not as much as a grain of sand in relation to the rest of the cosmos. It is difficult to imagine a God who created all that, and that he cares about us. But I think this difficulty rests partly on an inadequate idea of what infinity really means.

It does not mean "really big" or even "really really really big, way bigger than you can even begin to imagine."  Mathematics gives us a way of talking about it, even giving us a symbol to represent it so that it can be incorporated into the same apparatus that includes small and simple numbers, and maybe that also serves to tame it a little. I suspect that a lot of us see it as sitting at the top or bottom or end of a long sequence of numbers, and that we tend to view it, at some basic psychological level,  as being simply the very largest number. 

Similarly, when we think of God, we think of him as the very greatest being, an entity existing within some limit, some greater fundamental structure of space and time (or spaces and times). So when we ask a question like "Does God care about us?" and then take a look at the cosmos, we feel that the answer must be "no"--because how could he? How could any thing or person which is capable of creating and comprehending all that space and time and number possibly be concerned with us, when there are so very many things for him to be concerned with? 

When we do this, we are imagining God to be limited, to have a very very large but nevertheless limited amount of attention and care to dispose around the universe. But if there is a God, and if he is infinite, then things are really neither great nor small in relation to him, only in relation to each other. And he does not have to divide his attention, or run the risk of having something go amiss in Andromeda because he's busy in the Magellanic Cloud. Infinity means that he can devote infinite attention to every thing. Jesus said that every hair of our heads is numbered, and I suspect most of us probably take that as a poetic exaggeration. But if we take the concept of infinity seriously, it is not.

 I am not going to argue that it is easy for the human mind to grasp how it would be possible for the infinite God to be united with a human nature. Not only is it not easy, it is not possible. We don't believe it because we've figured out how it could work, but because we credit the testimony of those who knew this man-God. I do say, though, that the immensity of the universe has nothing much to do with whether it is credible or not. Suppose the entire created universe consisted only of this planet, and we believed that an infinite God had created it and was causing it to continue in being at every moment, and knew the precise location and behavior of everything in it, the minds of every human being, every molecule in the atmosphere and the oceans and the rocks and soil and living things, every subatomic particle in all of these. Would it make the idea of the Incarnation any easier to believe, much less to understand? I don't think so.  This planet alone is vast enough, from the human perspective, to make such belief difficult. That was in fact the position and perspective of the human race in Jesus's time (apart from the molecules etc.), and I don't see any reason to think that the Incarnation was any easier for them to believe than it is for us. Our greater knowledge may make this world seem smaller, but their lesser knowledge made it seem greater.  

That seems to be the rationale for the media attention paid to the latest bit of very ordinary religious speculation on the part of Stephen Hawking. It's a tribute to the authority and prestige of science and scientists--much of it deserved--that a scientist's views on almost anything, no matter how far removed from his area of competence, are usually given more weight than those of a non-scientist. Hawking's opinion on this is no more or less valuable than a janitor's. Actually I would give it less weight than that of the janitor I know best, the woman who cleans the building where I work, because I know she has a fair amount of native wisdom, and I don't know that about Hawking.

For something in the science line that's far more interesting--being actually in the science line--see Craig Burrell's review of The 4% Universe, a book that sounds truly fascinating. Wish I had time to read it.

Wired for Belief

We—my wife and I—subscribe to too many magazines. We don’t have time to read them all, and the time we do spend on them leaves too little for reading books. Magazines are by nature bound up with current events and therefore create a certain pressure on one to read them within a reasonable time after they’re received, so if you have more coming in than you can read, you’re perpetually behind and perpetually putting off something that will probably be of more lasting value, such as the Evelyn Waugh novels I got for Christmas and haven’t yet taken up.

A shakeout is needed, and now and then I think I’ve settled on a magazine that’s expendable. But then something appears in it that I would be sorry to have missed, so it gets a reprieve. This has happened a couple of times with The Atlantic. A typical issue has a few things of great interest to me, a few that I would consider a waste of time at best (like the food and travel columns), and a good many of relatively minor interest. But I’d hate to lose those few in the first category: Benjamin Schwarz and Christopher Hitchens on books, Caitlin Flanagan on men, women, marriage, and family. (Hitchens requires his own partitioning of really good from pretty bad stuff, owing to the weird assortment of ideas he holds, but that’s another story.)

And then there’s the occasional piece from which I learn something significant that I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise, such as Paul Bloom’s “Is God an Accident?” in the December 2005 issue. I expected this to be just another predictable materialist’s attempt to explain away religion, and it is that, or at least attempts to be. But Bloom, a professor of psychology and linguistics of Yale, instead offers some pretty impressive reasons why an atheist might want to reexamine his position.

The particular object of Bloom’s study is the psychology of religion—why do people believe? And although he comes at the question with a Darwinian materialist’s presuppositions, the research findings he presents give us a picture of religion as a much more peculiar and anomalous thing than traditional atheistic opinion (wishful thinking, primitive science, etc.) would have it. His argument is much too big and rich for me to summarize, but here’s the intro:

Despite the vast number of religions, nearly everyone in the world believes in the same things: the existence of a soul, an afterlife, miracles, and the divine creation of the universe. Recently psychologists doing research on the minds of infants have discovered two related facts that may account for this phenomenon. One: human beings come into the world with a predisposition to believe in supernatural phenomena. And two: this predisposition is an incidental by-product of cognitive functioning gone awry.

The whole piece is only online to subscribers, but if you’re not one it’s well worth your while to go find it at the library. The research and reasoning supporting his first point are fascinating for a believer. The assertions supporting the second point are pretty thin stuff for anyone who doesn’t already accept Darwinian doctrine. Let me quote his final statement:

But the universal themes of religion are not learned. They emerge as accidental by-products of our mental systems. They are part of human nature.

That’s a huge admission, because the second of those three sentences is by no means proved between the opening summary and the final sentence, and in fact is probably unprovable. Bloom does provide plausible arguments for religion being an error of the same type that leads us to infer social purpose and design where there is none, as in the famous case of the grilled cheese sandwich that was said to bear the image of Mary. But the fact that the intuition of purpose sometimes or even often goes awry doesn’t mean that it’s always or mostly wrong. And the perception of purpose is not the only important intuition Bloom discusses (you really should read the article). In the face of these universal intuitions, Bloom can offer little more than the assertion of materialist dogma.

I see no compelling reason, on the face of it, to pick that dogma over the religious one. There will never be a scientific proof for the existence or non-existence of God, so if you’re the sort of person who wants to appropriate consciously the fundamental axioms on which your world-view is based, you have to make a deliberate choice. You have to have faith. Bloom and his fellow researchers are actually making the case that religion is a reasonable choice, because it’s clear that they have no firm factual foundation for choosing materialism: it’s a doctrine they bring to the data, not something they derive from it. In this case the data actually suggest to me that they could be wrong.

Non-believers typically think of themselves as the questioners of convention, and in a provincial situation where most people are religious believers by default, this may indeed be true. But in scientific-industrial societies it really isn’t anymore. How many village atheists can there be before it becomes an atheist village, and the religious person the maverick? I like Professor Bloom: he’s a hard-headed fellow who’s instinctively impatient with dismissive and reductive explanations of mysterious phenomena, even as he tries to prop one up. If he continues to question the conventional wisdom he may find himself in a difficult position.

Let’s Get Religion Out of the Biology Textbooks

I’ve been thinking a lot—“brooding” might be an applicable term—about evolution, materialism, and the nature of science. It seems plain that materialists, in their eagerness to suborn science in aid of their views, have drawn conclusions that aren’t supported by the physical facts. And it occurs to me that the almost violent objection of the scientific establishment, which I think can fairly be called predominantly materialistic in philosophy, to the concept of intelligent design may be a tactical mistake.

The charge against intelligent design is that it is not science. As I wrote here a couple of weeks ago, if “science” means laboratory or experimental science, it is indeed hard to see how ID qualifies. But the same objection applies with the same force to the materialistic conclusions drawn from facts by doctrinaire evolutionists.

One need not be a scientist to see this. It requires only common sense and open eyes. A week or so ago I ran across a brief article describing the relationship between the chromosomes of chimpanzees and humans, which was presented as a vindication of Darwinism. But what struck me was that it was nothing of the sort. It did not even touch on the Darwinian mechanism—common descent by means of chance variation and random selection. It illustrated a resemblance: a striking and fascinating resemblance, and an even more striking difference which nevertheless emphasized the connection between the two. But it was only evidence of common descent if you brought that assumption to the data. (My apologies for not citing the piece; I ran across it on the net, failed to bookmark it, and now can’t remember where it was.)

I’m not particularly concerned to deny common descent. Once you’ve conceded ground on the literal interpretation of Genesis, which I’m willing to do, there’s no particular difficulty in accepting the idea that the human body has as its ancestor some sort of ape body—no problem in the idea that God used, so to speak, existing material with a long developmental history to receive the first human soul. Granting this, and granting that the transition from ape body to human body was gradual, the facts do not supply any reason whatsoever to believe that the changes were the result of the Darwinian mechanism or any other array of purely material causes. Let me emphasize that: no reason whatsoever. The facts can tell us at most only that a very complex transition seems to have occurred; they tell us nothing at all about how it occurred.

If scientists want to take material causes as a working assumption for further investigation, that’s fine. That indeed is what they are supposed to do. But when they go beyond this and declare their certainty that purely physical forces have produced the unimaginably complex structures which fill the cosmos, still more when they imagine that they have disproved the existence of God, yet more, absurdly and unacceptably more, when they declare the question closed, they have stepped far beyond the facts and beyond science, and are pretenders to knowledge which they do not have.

I think the time is ripe for theists of all stripes—and for that matter rationalists who can see the question of intellectual integrity at stake—to press the attack here. It is no more tolerable in a secular biology textbook to state materialist conclusions on these questions than to state religious ones. If science, and, more to the point, spokesmen for science, would get out of the philosophy and theology business, the level of acrimony in this controversy could be greatly reduced. Unfortunately the tactic which comes immediately to mind for this effort is the very acrimonious one of the lawsuit. But that battle is already under way. The scientific establishment is making legal war on any attempt to include the idea of purposeful design in scientific education, and that, as I mentioned above, may be a tactical mistake. Darwinism and Intelligent Design are both attempts to fill in the gaps in our knowledge of origins. Neither has been proved or is, in my opinion, likely to be proved, by physical evidence alone. We are constantly being told that science textbooks are no place for religion. Very well; let’s get all the religion out of them.

Is Evolutionism Science?

The indignant charge I keep hearing against the theory of intelligent design is that it isn’t science. As best I can tell this complaint can mean one of two things: either that ID allows for the possible existence of non-material reality, or that it is not an experimental science. The first of these is just materialist philosophy trying to pass itself off as science. But the second, I suppose, is true. I’ve always thought that the function of ID is necessarily only negative. It seems to me that the term itself might involve a bit of over-reach, because it can only hope to show that the theory of development by accident is inadequate to explain the facts, not to prove positively that any other mechanism is operative.

The Darwinist antagonists of ID say that it is non-testable and non-falsifiable, and has no predictive power. How could one test it, they say?—wait around for God to create something? And they seem to find this a very witty and telling question.

But it strikes me, as a layman, that this charge can just as easily be made against materialistic evolutionism—let’s call it evolutionism, for convenience. The simplest claims of evolutionism are not, as far as I know, contested by any one, even the young-earth creationists: everyone agrees that organisms undergo modifications which are passed on to their progeny, and that if conditions favor the survival of individuals with a certain modification it will eventually become a characteristic feature. This sort of evolutionary theory has been understood and put to practical use for millennia, although, obviously, no one had any idea of the mechanisms involved. What is only predicted by the theory, and in principle can never be verified experimentally, is that chemical and genetic events are sufficient to account for the entire development of the cosmos, including the presumed evolution of our planet from lifeless rock to the home of millions (billions?) of species, including one which has the ability to ask how it came to be here. How could one test this?—wait around for evolution to create life on a bare rock?

There are three great transitions which, I think, are likely always to remain mysterious: that from nothing to something, from non-life to life, and from life to consciousness. The first of these is inherently unknowable, and evolutionists seem content to ignore it—understandably enough, because it shakes their whole edifice. As for the second, I’m aware that some scientists claim to have produced in the laboratory minute changes in both non-living and living materials of a sort that they believe might be involved in the evolution of life on the grand scale. Although I’m not remotely qualified to pass judgment on their real significance, I think I’m entitled to say, as a reasonable person exercising reasonable judgment, that they do not constitute anything approaching a proof of the dogma that no causes other than material and accidental ones are required to produce everything we know, up to and including human consciousness. And as for that third transition, well, I can’t think of any bigger leap of credulity than that taken by those who assume that consciousness is a by-product of the activity of the brain. There is no evidence whatsoever for this; it is a logical deduction from materialist premises, but no more.

How can evolutionism ever conceivably be anything more than an hypothesis? Its adherents insist that science in general would be retarded significantly if it could not proceed on the assumption that evolution works more or less as they describe it. I don’t see why this should be true: why it is necessary to make so many hypothetical postulates about the origins of things in order to study them as they presently are? As a matter of pure logic, the fact that all living things share fundamental building blocks, and that they can be grouped into smaller categories on the basis of more specialized components (e.g. bones), doesn’t imply common descent from the more simple to the more complex any more strongly than it implies the sort of design that we practice every day—i.e., variations on certain basic ideas and features. (I understand that there are other reasons for believing in common descent, but the existence of common features has never struck me as very persuasive one way or the other.)

Would it really damage science so badly to admit that we simply don’t know, and probably never will know, exactly how things came to be? What drives someone like Richard Dawkins to venture so far beyond any knowable facts in insisting that evolutionism is proven? And whose is the real offense against the method and spirit of scientific investigation?

The Storms that Herald the End?

The subject of the end times came up at dinner the other night, apropos of the recent hurricanes: it seems that one of my daughter’s teachers suggested that they might be a sign of the end. I doubt that, myself. For one thing, hurricanes of this strength are far from unheard of, although it’s true that these have been unusually close together in time, were unusually strong at least while they were still well out at sea, and have struck in unusually close proximity to each other. Ivan, Dennis, Katrina, and Rita were all very strong storms, and they all struck a section of coastline from the Texas-Louisiana border on the west to the Alabama-Florida border on the east, a span of roughly four hundred miles, perhaps an eighth (I’m looking at a map and guessing) of the coastline bordering the Gulf of Mexico. I think those of us who live in that area can be forgiven for wondering if there is some design at work here. Still, if the events have been unusual, they can’t be said to have been so improbable as to be anomalous, and the fact is that more and more severe hurricanes struck the United States in the decade of the 1940s.

There’s a simple reason why Americans are engaging in apocalyptic speculation: these hurricanes have affected us dramatically. I don’t remember hearing any of us talk this way in 1998, when Hurricane Mitch, a late-season (October 29) monster, struck Nicaragua and killed some 11,000 people.

I’m a resolute agnostic as regards the end of the world, and in fact tend to believe that the more widespread the belief that it is near, the less likely it is to be so. Sooner or later, of course, someone is going to be right in predicting it, but every age has provided ample reason for those living in it to believe that wickedness is so widespread that it meets the criteria of prophecy, that the end must be soon or else the world will be utterly given over to evil, and so I neither make nor believe any very specific predictions.

There is, however, one thing that gives me pause. The old familiar wickedness of the human race we know very well: the wars, the tortures, the oppression, the lust and the lying. C. S. Lewis once speculated that the quantity of good and evil in the world remains more or less constant, but gets distributed differently in every age: so (for example) our age is horrified by the brutality and cruelty of punishments once handed out for very minor crimes, but has positively encouraged people to abandon on a whim marriage vows made before God, and to throw over the whole concept of sexual morality. Perhaps it all adds up to equal measures of virtue and vice.

But we have invented a new crime. We propose to meddle with the very substance of human life. We propose to destroy human embryos in order to improve our own health. We propose to tinker with the genes of the newly conceived so that when they grow up they will look like we want them to look and behave as we want them to behave. We propose to grow duplicates of living people in a laboratory for purposes of our own.

Once, back in the 1970s when I was more or less testing the waters of Christianity after a long absence, I had a conversation with an Episcopal priest known for his “liberal” views. I had the feeling that he was trying to impress me, under the mistaken impression that I was looking for a modernized and contemporary religion, long on secular enlightenment and short on revelations and commandments. I only remember one specific thing from the conversation; as best I remember, he said something like this: “We (the Episcopal Church) don’t hold the sort of only-God-can-make-a-tree position that the Roman Catholics do. We would see nothing wrong, for instance, in genetically engineering people with gills so that we could mine the bottom of the sea.”

I was dumbstruck and horrified by this, not yet being aware of the apostasy happening within every Christian community at the time. Ten years or so later I related the conversation to a great-aunt of mine, who as far as I know had no religion and was in her late 80s at the time. She considered what I had said for a moment, then replied simply “Well, I suppose people will always want to have slaves.” She saw plainly what the Christian bien-pensant could not.

Perhaps our experiments with cloning and genetic engineering and all the rest of it will prove to be unfeasible. Perhaps they are just slavery under a new name, and perhaps God will let us get away with it, as he has let us, individually and collectively, get away with so much. But it seems to me that they have the potential to distort beyond recognition the elementals of human life: the bond between parent and child, husband and wife, brother and sister, one generation and the next. And I find myself hoping, if not expecting, that God himself will put an end to these obscenities, since it seems unlikely that we will voluntarily turn aside from this path, those of us who oppose it being, apparently, in the minority.

A Christmas Meditation

I spent the time I would normally have spent writing a journal entry locating and re-typing this Christmas piece which I wrote many years ago for the National Catholic Register.

But a note in passing: two recent news stories related to some of the themes I touch upon in that piece, and which you may have noticed are dear to my heart, have appeared in the past week or two. One is an intriguing entry on Touchstone’s blog —scroll down to the December 15 entry entitled “Second Spring and Who's Your Brain?”— in which a philosopher named Jerry Fodor, whose research specialty seems to be cognitive science, is quoted as saying:

Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea about how anything material could be conscious.

Exactly. Far too many thinkers and researchers in fields ranging from evolution to artificial intelligence operate on the assumption that consciousness is a by-product of brain activity and is basically a computational function, inevitable when the computations become sufficiently complex. I have never understood what makes them think they can assume this. On the basis of mere intution and common-sense I have always thought it far (far, far) from obvious that it is true. For the sake of argument, I’m willing to suppose that it might be true, but its mere assertion is based on materialist assumptions, nothing more. And I’m glad to have my intuition confirmed by someone who has been studying the theoretical basis of consciousness for decades.

The other story is the news that formerly atheistic British philosopher Anthony Flew has changed his mind and now believes that the world we know is too complex to have developed by chance. Now of course people move back and forth between belief and unbelief all the time, and Flew is at pains to say that he is not postulating the God of Christians and Jews. Nevertheless, it’s encouraging to me that this certifiably very bright man now believes it is more reasonable to assert the hypothesis of intelligent design than the hypothesis of evolution by chance.

The grip of materialism on the Western mind is loosening. Happy Fourth Sunday of Advent, and Merry Christmas.

Some Kind of Artist

A few weeks before the recent election the arts section of our local paper featured a discussion of the fact that so many artists are on the political left, sometimes the fairly radical left. The editor put the question to a number of local artists, and the unsurprising answer that many of them gave was a variation on the theme that artists are superior people who naturally embrace superior ideas. This of course brings to mind Orwell’s “herd of independent minds,” and I can think of several less flattering explanations for the phenomenon under discussion.

But I’m really more interested in the underlying assumption: that “creative people” are fundamentally different from everyone else. I consider this idea not just false but pernicious, doing an injustice to the vast majority of the human race and considerable harm to art, artists, and culture. Among other things, it carries an implication which is pretty much insane: that the definition of art is “what an artist does.” Some twenty-five or so years ago I heard on NPR an interview with an artist which made clear both the madness of this idea and its grip on the world of the visual arts (at least—it doesn’t seem to have the same hold on literature and music). This disturbed fellow’s art included cutting himself with razor blades before an audience. The interviewer, a nice intelligent liberal fellow, was obviously appalled, but, not wishing to appear a Philistine, seemed to be trying not to show it and to treat this sick stunt as just the latest manifestation of the same gifts and intentions that were exercised by Leonardo. But at one point he couldn’t resist asking the question “Is this really art?” The “artist” of course pounced on this; I remember thinking that he had been waiting for just such an opening: “Yes, it is. I am an artist, and therefore what I do is art.” I wanted to reply “No, you are a nut, and therefore what you do is nuts.”

The truth, I think, is that every person is a creative person. The artist—by which I mean one whose primary vocation is one of the arts—may be more creative than most people, and he really must be more skilled in some particular craft than most people, but I deny with every fiber of my being the idea that he is intrinsically different from, still less superior to, them. It’s hard to see that the term “creativity” can mean anything more than the manifestation or expression of the interplay between a unique self and the rest of the world, which of course is always subjectively unique. In that fundamental sense almost everything we do, unless it is a strict and mechanical obedience to the orders of another, has in it some tincture of creativity. We all, for starters, have our own way of talking. We have our characteristic ways of constructing sentences, turns of phrase, witticisms, the occasional simile of our own invention, and so forth. Language in fact is a torrent of mostly anonymous creativity: the other day, listening to a sports talk show, I heard a football coach describe a thin player as having “a neck like a roll of dimes.” Various schools whose football programs are not doing very well have been described as being under attack by the terrorist duo of bin Losin’ and bin Cryin’.

Going a step further into what we more typically mean by “creativity,” we see it in much of our everyday work: a woman rearranging the furniture in her living room or decorating a cake, a bricklayer fitting the pieces of a paved path, a software developer designing a more efficient algorithm, all are exercising a degree of creativity. Our technological civilization in fact surrounds us with the work of engineers, product designers, and advertisers of all sorts who are extremely creative; although we may not consider what they do to be art and don’t credit them with being members of the fragile and superior class of creative persons, I don’t know how one could reasonably define creativity in such a way as to deny that they possess it.

A number of 19^th and 20^th century thinkers, such as the Catholic artist, typographer, and sculptor Eric Gill, railed against the factory system precisely because it removed the element of creativity from work, making the worker an inhuman automaton. Indeed we are now seeing the replacement of traditional assembly line workers by robots and if this did not involve unemployment we would have to consider it a good thing.

I certainly would not deny that there is a distinction between the fine arts, in which the object is made and valued principally for itself, and the useful arts, in which the object has some function outside itself. But the distinction is not hard and fast and I don’t believe there is any qualitative difference in the human impulses and gifts exercised in either case.

And when I say that everyone is creative in some way, I don’t mean to imply that there is no hierarchy of quality in the arts, or that everyone should be encouraged to write or paint or make music, whether or not they have any talent, on the grounds that creativity is only real if exercised in those arts. I’d have us understand Eric Gill’s aphorism: “The artist is not a special kind of man, but every man is a special kind of artist.” I might even go so far as to say that the term “creative person” is redundant, although the addition of an adjective such as “more” or “less” can make it useful.

Whenever I think of Gill’s words, I remember a poem by James Seay, whose writing classes I took in college. The poem was called, if I remember correctly, “Kelly Dug a Hole,” and although I don’t remember much of the poem itself I remember Jim’s account of its subject, a man who could dig a hole with perfectly square corners and perfectly straight sides. As I remember, Jim said he thought Kelly could have been, in the right circumstances, an artist of some kind. But that’s only half-right: he was an artist of some kind—as was my uncle Jimmy, who was a bookkeeper (or something) by trade but painted the walls and ceiling of his children’s playroom with vertical stripes that tapered perfectly from a foot or so wide at the baseboard to a point where they met at a light fixture in the ceiling. When I expressed my astonishment (not too strong a word) at the skill involved, he just laughed, as if to say it wasn’t that big a deal. And in a sense he was right: the skill was unusual, but the impulse and some ability, however slight or mundane, to exercise skill and imagination belong to us all.

Sunday Night Journal — July 11, 2004

The new issue of Touchstone arrived a week or so ago. Touchstone, which subtitles itself “A Journal of Mere Christianity,” does a marvelous job of serving as a platform for what has been called “ecumenically orthodox” Christianity. I like it better than the somewhat similar First Things, partly because it is less academic and partly because it is more focused on spiritual life and less on political and social questions.

This issue is devoted to the emerging attack on atheistic evolutionism known as the Intelligent Design (ID) movement. I haven’t yet read the featured articles and am greatly looking forward to them. There have always been philosophical problems with atheistic evolutionism, but that didn’t matter because its proponents were able to stigmatize any dissent as unscientific. I am unqualified to judge the scientific arguments, but it seems that ID is making progress in providing a scientifically respectable alternative to the crypto-religion of evolutionism. (I use the latter term as shorthand for the insistence that Darwin and his heirs have proven that no cause beyond the physical is required or indeed acceptable to account for the physical world.) The premise of ID is the fundamentally commonsensical one that living things are so complex that they must be the work of an intelligent designer; this of course is easy enough, and often enough, said, but the ID movement attempts to support common sense with scientific evidence.

What is so frustrating about the argument between theism and evolutionism is that adherents of the latter refuse to admit that their philosophical system is a philosophical system, insisting that it is a matter of pure fact and that any challenge to it is by definition irrational. One need not read very much at all in evolutionists like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennet to recognize that they have a very intense emotional attachment to atheism, which is (one supposes) both cause and effect of their evolutionism.

Opinions on this question arise from a pre- or sub-rational sense of what is plausible. There was a time when I felt a great deal of tension between my conscious belief in God and an underlying sense that the idea of a lifeless, meaningless, purely material universe was fundamentally more believable or at least more likely than the idea of a conscious Creator. As the years went by and I lived with and meditated upon the latter idea, my attitude slowly shifted, and I now regard the notion of creation by chance as little short of preposterous. And I lean toward the belief that at some point in the future people will wonder how we could have believed such a thing, much as we wonder at the superstitions of our ancestors.

To the evolutionist, of course, it is the concept of an active intelligence acting upon the physical materials of the universe that is absurd on its face. Rational argument alone will not change many minds on this subject, certainly not the minds of doctrinaire evolutionists. What, then, can the ID movement hope to do?

It can present, to minds not already given over to materialist axioms, a scientifically respectable alternative to evolutionism. It can deal a serious blow to the pretensions of scientific materialism. It can buttress the confidence of theists who are troubled by evolutionists’ contemptuous dismissal of their beliefs but who have not the knowledge and credentials to challenge evolutionism in the scientific arena. (Anyone, of course, can challenge the basic logic of evolutionism, but this is generally fruitless; the significance of the fact that evolutionist doctrines merely push the fundamental question of causation backward without resolving it simply does not register on them, or does not strike them as worth thinking about. In this respect evolutionists are much like those who reject any transcendent source of morality and naively accept their own moral axioms as self-evident, requiring no source, authority, or justification.)

What ID cannot do is provide direct support for the Christian faith. More specifically, it cannot resolve the apparent discrepancy between the history told in the Bible and the history told by science. The Christian story of salvation requires a state of innocent perfection, a fall into sin, and redemption. It is extremely difficult to fit this story onto the framework which science gives us for the development of life, and this is true whether or not the scientific account assumes the absence of God. I am always a little taken aback by Christians who do not see this difficulty. The usual response, of which George Sim Johnston, in his generally excellent Did Darwin Get It Right? provides a good example, is to take the very long periods of time and the gradual development postulated by science as the problem, and to say that these don’t matter, that the seven days of Genesis may be considered symbolic, and that the important thing is that God created all things, not the time he spent doing it or the mechanisms he used.

Well and good, but the problem is not, at bottom, the millions of years and the gradualness. The problem is how creatures lived during those years. The problem, as my sister-in-law Christy put it succinctly some years ago, is death.

Not only Genesis but the Gospels and the letters of Paul tell us that death entered the world because of sin, and that sin entered the world through the first man and the first woman. The current scientific consensus, on the other hand, shows us a period of millions of years in which animals destroyed each other in blood and pain, and a period of at least tens of thousands of years in which man (as far as we know) did the same, not only to the animals but to his brethren.

I have never come up with, or heard, a persuasive reconciliation of this conflict, and it troubles my faith. It does not seriously disturb my faith, because I am persuaded by many other evidences that Christianity is the most plausible account of the world in which I live, but it does trouble it. I make do with two responses. The first is to conjecture (I can’t call it much more than that) that the innocence and the fall described by Genesis are not just more but far more subtle and mystical than they are portrayed there, that the fall took place not along the timeline on which we live but on another ontological level altogether (no, I am not entirely sure what I mean by that), and that the world we know, including the very long and death-full past we think we know, actually somehow came into existence with that fall. Or that the past fell along with the present when the first man and woman sinned. But although I sometimes think I see a glimmer of truth in these conjectures they are hardly coherent enough to put into words.

My other response is to put the whole question aside as having, in the present state of both faith and science, no good answer. I can live with this. I can tolerate this puzzle—I am obliged to tolerate a great many—and anyway am more like Chesterton’s poet, who wanted to get his head into the heavens, than like his lunatic, who wanted to get the heavens into his head.

Neither response is terribly satisfactory. I am not a seven-day, six-thousand-year creationist, because I cannot, without the support of some very good authority, depart so far from what the best investigators seem to have established. But sometimes I wish I were. Try for a while the thought experiment of looking at the world as if you were a six-thousand-year, literal-Genesis, Adam-and-Eve creationist and you will see what I mean: the entire Christian story leaps immediately to a level of simple and immediate plausibility that it simply does not have for most of us most of the time.

Sunday Night Journal — March 14, 2004

Although I have pretty strong political convictions and opinions, I have not wanted to spend much time expressing them here. (If you want to classify my politics, I’m a conservative of more traditionalist than libertarian bent, and Russell Kirk’sTen Conservative Principles are more or less my own.) This is not because of any reluctance on my part to say what I think, but because the Internet is filled with intelligent commentary on all sides of every possible question and I don’t generally think I have much to contribute to these debates.

Consider, for instance, the question of homosexual marriage. It really should go without saying, although of course it does not, that a Christian is opposed to this strange attempt to deny and defy reality. I spent a little while earlier today trying to come up with an analogy for the sheer scope of the revolution embodied in the attempt to redefine the word “marriage” to include persons of the same sex, and I couldn’t come up with anything more striking than the thing itself. I consider this proposal to be preposterous on its face as an idea and probably catastrophic as a fact, if it were to be ordained, as seems entirely possible, by the courts. Yet I don’t want or intend to put a lot of effort into trying to articulate the case against it, because other people are doing that better than I could.

Before saying anything else on this subject I want to point out that I have a great deal of sympathy for those who feel sexual and romantic attraction only toward those of their own sex. I have no wish to make their difficult situation any more so. The Vatican was denounced by many homosexuals some years ago when it described homosexual desire as “intrinsically disordered.” But I thought, and think, this was actually a fairly kind way to put it. As I understand it the phrase would include any sexual desire not in keeping with God’s will, which would mean any desire for anyone other than one’s wedded wife or husband. Accordingly, I dare say there is no man (I don’t think I’ll attempt to speak for women) who has never felt sexual desire that was intrinsically disordered—that is, directed toward a woman to whom he is not married. (I include the period before marriage as well. I suppose there is a distinction to be made between lust and the romantic attraction which includes sexual desire, and between lust and a pure appreciation of female beauty that does not quite turn the corner of desire—otherwise how would anyone ever fall in love? But I’ll leave these fine points to theologians and confessors.) To be so constituted (and the nature vs. nurture controversy is irrelevant here) as to feel only illicit desire must be a heavy burden indeed. But to attempt to ameliorate it by redefining the concept of marriage is a mistake.

One very capable participant in this debate is Stanley Kurtz of National Review. A couple of weeks ago Mr. Kurtz provided, in a comment posted on “The Corner”, NR’s blog, a link to a story [sorry, this link is no longer valid -mh 6/22/2010] upon which I cannot resist commenting. It is by Lisa Duggan, a “professor of Queer Studies” at New York University, and appears in the March 15 issue of The Nation. Mr. Kurtz is of the opinion that to redefine marriage so as to include same-sex relationships will prove destructive to the institution, which as everyone knows is already pretty shaky. In answer to those who say it will have no such effect he adduces several spokesmen for homosexuality who share his opinion, except that they view the administering of the death blow to “’traditional’ marriage” and “its privileged status” as a good thing. Notice those quotes; they are Ms. Duggan’s, and seem to indicate a hostility to marriage so fierce as to be willing to doubt that marriage as the union of male and female is in fact traditional.

I could spend a long time arguing with much of what Ms. Duggan says, but it hardly seems worth the effort. I think both sides of this disagreement recognize that argument is almost beside the point, that the disagreement is too deep and too fundamental for that. But she makes a proposal that seems to warrant exhibition as an example of just how deep the disagreement is. She sees no reason why we should not scrap marriage as we know it for “a flexible menu of choices for forms of household and partnership recognition open to all citizens, depending on specific and varying needs.”

These words provoked an instant and deep revulsion in me, and I suggest that they ought to do the same to anybody with any affection for the poor benighted human race, and any knowledge of human nature. I am less shocked by the proposal for homosexual marriage itself than I am by the cold and bloodless view of love and community that are displayed here. Is this to be our future? Does Ms. Duggan really believe that the torrent of passion that flows through all we know of the history of the human race will end finally in the chilled, shallow, and stagnant puddles of “a flexible menu” for “partnership recognition?”

This is the voice of someone who could read Brave New World as a hopeful sketch for a happy future (except of course that the class system would not be acceptable). It would be a world with no more declarations of undying love, no more vows, no more “in sickness and in health,” no more till “death do us part,” but also a world with no truly deep connections between persons, just a series of convenient liasons. It is of course not a world that could ever exist—human nature would see to that. But it’s hard for me to see how anyone would even think it desirable. For the first time in my literary life I am sympathetic to Blake’s proverb of Hell: “Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.” A society which could operate happily on Ms. Duggan’s scheme would not be fit for real men and women to live in. Better the agony and ecstacy of all the doomed lovers of fact and fiction—Helen and Paris, Tristan and Isolde, Heloise and Abelarde, Romeo and Juliet, Dante and Beatrice, Scarlett and Rhett, all the glory and pain of families happy and unhappy—than “a flexible menu of choices for partnership recognition.”

Sunday Night Journal — January 25, 2004

When President Bush announced recently that he wants to revitalize our space exploration program with projects for establishing a permanent base on the moon and sending men to Mars, my immediate reaction was excitement. I find it, in fact, a bit surprising that anyone would react otherwise, but then I remind myself that I grew up more or less simultaneously with the space program. Those of us who were born in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s were just old enough to understand the basic principles of space travel as they were presented to us by the team of Walt Disney and Werner von Braun, and at just the right age to expect that the development of space travel would recapitulate that of atmospheric flight in nice synchrony with our own lives.

My grandfather, born in the late 1870s, had seen, by the time I was born in 1948, flight develop from a disputed possibility to a fact so pervasive and influential as to have wrought fundamental changes throughout society. Of course I would witness a similar progress in space flight during my life. Why not? The physical principles were well understood and by the time I was twelve years old the basic engineering had been proven. All that remained was technological refinement: bigger, more powerful, and cheaper rockets. Then would come the expansion of infrastructure, so that the word “spaceport” would enter the dictionary just as “airport” had done, and by the time I was fifty or sixty years old people might well be vacationing on the moon.

This expectation was of course all the stronger in someone who read a lot of science fiction, as I did for several years in my teens. In these stories the inevitability of space flight was assumed: not only flight to our immediate neighborhood in the solar system, which was (and is) perfectly plausible within the limits of our current knowledge and at least somewhat so within the limits of our technology, but also interstellar travel, which requires, for useful fictional purposes, the postulation of a theoretical breakthrough that would eliminate the light-speed barrier, not to mention an as-yet-unimaginable technology to exploit this knowledge. It is very easy for a storyteller to set down terms like “hyperspace” and “warp drive” and hold them sufficient to explain convenient travel over distances of hundreds or thousands of light-years. It is so easy that we can easily overlook the lack of evidence that such a thing will ever be possible, and assume not only the inevitable progress of rocket flight toward routine near-space flight, but the equally inevitable supplanting of rockets by something capable of transcending the laws of physics as we presently know them.

The movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (which, by the way, I consider the best science-fiction movie ever made, or at any rate the best one I’ve ever seen) perfectly captures the expected earlier stages of this progression. The earth-to-moon shuttle is like an airliner. The space station is somewhere between a military installation and a hotel. The first outpost on the moon is under construction. Plans are under way to visit the other planets. (The quasi-miraculous transition to interstellar flight is delegated to god-like aliens who are never seen and don’t have to explain themselves.)

Of course it hasn’t exactly worked out that way. We landed on the moon a year or so after 2001, but space travel has been fundamentally stagnant since then. It’s as if in 1957, thirty years after Lindbergh’s flight, air travel had still been something engaged in only by pilots, and at considerable risk. Some argue that this is due to a failure of will, but I suspect the difficulties are more fundamental: the amount of energy necessary to lift a useful object into space is prodigious and still beyond our ability to generate safely and inexpensively. Satellite launches are somewhat routine, but every trip of a human being into space remains an extremely risky business and so costly that the only economic justification for it is the possibility that it may lead to something else.

What keeps us wanting to do it? What (besides reflexes left over from my youth) accounts for my instant sense of excitement at the idea of a Mars mission? The single biggest factor is the question of whether there is life out there. To judge by the news stories about the mobile probes in place on Mars right now, the interest in this question is obsessive on the part of both the public and at least some of the scientists pursuing it. I suppose the scientists may emphasize it because they know that that is where public interest lies, and thus the continuing support of their research. But it is perfectly understandable. We can hardly conceive of a planet without life, and if we manage to do so we are likely to lose interest in it at once. The human mind that can muster a great deal of interest in pure inorganic matter for its own sake is rare. In the end most of us have only two questions about Mars: is there life there? And if there is not, is there mineral wealth? If the answer to both those questions is “no,” then only those who care about pure research into the nature of the solar system will have further inquiries, and they will find it hard to convince the rest of us that such inquiries warrant the enormous expenditures required to complete them.

I look at the pictures of Mars sent back by the rovers and find them thrilling. But the thrill derives mainly from the fact that I know they are of Mars, and that never before in human history have we been able to look upon this landscape. Its desolation is appalling. As I ponder it I find that I cannot help assuming that over those hills, or beyond that horizon, there is something green. There must be at least a bit of water and a little scrub or cactus. There must be. If not nearby, then perhaps a hundred miles away, or a thousand. If I try to imagine that no matter how far or in what direction I traveled on this world I would encounter nothing but more dust, rock, and, at the poles, sterile ice, I falter. And to the extent that I can conceive of this dead world the idea induces anxiety. To imagine myself standing on its surface is a little like imagining myself under water, unable to survive without artificial support, but with an edge of panic arising from the fact that the nearest breathable air, liquid water, and vegetation are millions of miles away.

Perhaps next week we will learn something different, but as far as we now know the red planet consists of millions of square miles of absolutely pure desert. Put that way, it seems nightmarish. And it makes the fantasies of hundreds of science fiction writers only the same sort of fancy that the mind of man has always raised up for its own entertainment, only composed of materials available in a technological culture.

What, then, of President Bush’s proposal? In spite of all I have just written, I would, given a chance, vote for it. It is a challenge and an adventure we shouldn’t refuse. And something utterly unforeseeable may come of it. There are those, like the Mars Society, who believe we could introduce life to Mars and create conditions under which it could sustain itself permanently. But this dream (a stirring one, I admit) strikes me as very unlikely, a serious underestimation of the complexity of nature and overestimation of ourselves. I think it most likely that after a century or two of exploring as best we can as much of interplanetary space as we can reach, we will face the fact that God has provided us with one world only, and that we are quarantined upon it.