I didn’t have a Halloween theme in mind today, but for anyone who has ever been in our shoes, there is something genuinely frightening about my present topic. Everyone who has asked it has asked whether we’ve found a church yet. After all (as I assume the reasoning goes), it’s been nearly three months since we moved to Extortiana, or, as it is commonly known, Illinois. For my part, I have been attending a Catholic university, and often found myself meditating upon theological subjects; Katie has not found this particularly satisfying for her own spiritual life, especially as she is not also attending a Catholic university.
So yesterday we hied on down to an Evangelical Free church in Deerfield that Katie found in the phone book. She remarked that its ad (yes, it had an ad) employed certain catchwords of the so-called Emergent church, such as “relationship” and “authenticity.” I with my usual celerity took up an ironic stance with respect to the whole church-search project, dubbing our first object of investigation the “Emergent Church of Deerfield,” and off we went.
We knew we were in trouble during the first worship song. The lyrics were projected onto two large screens on either side the stage. Fair enough. But behind the lyrics ran video footage that may or may not have been lifted from a mystical yoga video, variously treating us to the soothing sights of rushing water, blowing trees, and time-lapse-rolling clouds. Oooh-kay...
Of course everyone who spoke spoke too much, but that is true of just about everyone I know, so I couldn’t in good conscience hold that against them. The worship leader stood alone at a podium, holding a mic, before a band admirably representing high school through late middle age persons, and smiled kindly and sympathetically—that is to say, with grating condescension. The pastor then got up and, not unlike a parody of a Baptist minister, sought to make us feel the profundity of his brief message by forcing it out through his gleaming teeth while pulling his lips unnaturally back toward his ears so to stretch them to a paleness even as his cheeks turned red under the compression. Happy Halloween.
Okay, so I didn’t enjoy the Emerging Church of Deerfield, which I didn’t think had emerged very far, or, if it did, was coming out backward with its head still below ground. Katie was not a big fan, either. In fact, if it could have an enlivening effect, I’d just as soon the place were submerged, demerged, unmerged or dismerged as the case required.
Oh ye powers of positivity, aid me now in my insufferable cynicism!
No doubt many, no doubt most, of the congregants deeply believe on Christ and have felt his hand on them. Indeed, three teens testified to that effect during a brief baptism service, and the crowd was so enthusiastic it clapped after anything anyone said: “We’re over half-way to our third-quarter goal of $400,000!” (clap clap clap) “Please be seated.” (clap clap clap).
Our overwhelming sense was that these weren’t our people. Brothers and sisters in faith, okay, but different still as the hand from the...femur. We may just have to get used to that until we get to know a congregation well enough to understand in what ways we are united. But I doubt it could be this congregation, and unfortunately it is because I can’t take the pastor or worship leader seriously. Just sing. Just preach. Please, please, don’t smile at me as though you think you have to convince me that I, too, feel abnormal accesses of bliss and wellbeing. Please, please, don’t grin at me as though you don’t think we’ll take your words seriously unless you demonstrate how good they ought to make us feel. The most authentic acting can never be authenticity when it comes to faith, and even children can perceive the difference.
Not to get dramatic, but let me just get dramatic and say there’s a heresy infecting many Protestant congregations that takes the form of the faith of feeling, the belief that God makes us feel good. Sola fides, yes, sola scriptura, sure, but if you don’t feel good, you’re doing something wrong. Christ suffered so we don’t have to.
One of my professors argues that after Vatican II Catholicism lost its sense of limitation and therefore its sense of tragedy. I tried to hide my consternation as I tried to think of the last time I’d seen the true pathos of tragedy in a Protestant church. What would it look like for us to imagine God not as an on-call handyman, but as the life behind and in the finite world before us, as the Father awaiting us on the other side of the too-real pain and weakness that we otherwise sell off to our careers and TVs?
And yet, I wonder if I could even handle it myself.
If you've read this far, now go to publicintellectual for October 26, 2005, where my friend takes on some similar ideas. We totally came to this topic independently--really.
31 October 2005
03 October 2005
On the Origin of Man...sort of
I found you can play with the publish date and make it look like you published a thing earlier than you did. This piece I wrote in response to a Chicago Tribune article. I threw it together in a hurry because I wanted to be au courant, but they didn't want it anyway. Sorry for the tiny print, but it's kinda long.
Origin Debate Overlooks its Origin
It is perhaps too much of a truism nowadays to suggest that finding answers depends on asking the right questions, but the notion goes at least as far back as Aristotle, who spent a great deal of time in his works laying foundations on the belief that finding the origin gets one well on the way to the answer.
Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne’s recent Perspectives piece (September 18, 2005) on the place of intelligent design in the science classroom typifies the kind of misunderstanding of origins that has stagnated this and so many other debates. Their brief article covers most of the standard arguments against intelligent design, which tend to take the line that ID is not good science: it is not scientific because it is not a testable theory; it critiques but offers no positive proof; it is really a means to sneak the supernatural into science class.
I have no wish to question Dawkins and Coyne on their position from the viewpoint of science itself. In fact, so far as I understand the theoretical underpinnings of empirical, positivist science, I have to agree with them that intelligent design does not meet the criteria for a scientific theory. But I think something else is at the heart of the debate, which becomes clearer in the ways Dawkins and Coyne identify intelligent design with creationism. That is, they bring the discussion back around to religion, which is to recognize the connection of the evolution debate with fundamental explanations of life and, more specifically, suffering. The Tribune itself emphasizes this relationship by placing the article in a series alongside a piece on the implications of Hurricane Katrina on American civilization.
But this is not as self-evident an association as one might think. Creationism is a theory about the origins of life; Darwin, on the other hand, entitled his book The Origin of Species. Whatever Darwin did or did not say, it is clear that many have applied his theory to a story about the origins of life itself, and then gone on to oppose that story to religious stories as the fact behind the fictions. This has understandably irked (and still irks) the religiously minded. Enlightenment science began as a practice independent of theology and its claims, but with Darwin it seemed to overstep its bounds.
In the November 2004 National Geographic, David Quammen tried to reinforce this opposition by crafting a sort of Enlightenment myth of awakening from supernaturalism to naturalism in the life of Charles Darwin, making him a sort of Buddha (since enlightened), or Christ (since crucified), for evolutionists. At the same time he inserted, in a nod to the lofty humanist values of understanding, compassion, and political correctness, patronizing remarks about those religious people who still disbelieve evolution, seemingly blissfully ignorant of the offensive character of his words.
Dawkins and Coyne unhelpfully follow in this tradition, though I think quite consciously. At their most generous, they allow intelligent design a place in a history of ideas classroom, or shove it back to the church with a sneer. At their most condescending, they consign it to “a philosophy class on popular logical fallacies,” comparing the teaching of intelligent design to teaching alchemy in a chemistry class or “the stork theory in a sex education class.” “Opposition to intelligent design is laughable to all who are acquainted with even a fraction of the published date,” they go on to say.
It seems clear to me that the debate about intelligent design is really about theological (or, rather, anti-theological) claims made by science, and about scientific (or, again, anti-scientific) claims made by theology. And it seems further clear that this has to do with the fundamental structure of both areas of study. Science observes and attempts to account for the visible; its methods are thus suited to this study. Theology observes and attempts to account for the invisible inhering in the visible; its methods are thus suited to this study. Each has its own sort of evidence—sacred texts or observable, natural phenomena—and it is usually when one denounces the evidence of the other that problems arise.
Because theology’s object includes in some part science’s, we can understand how theology might conflict with science, for the one will make explanations based on human desire, will and frailty, while the other will make explanations based on impartial laws of matter and energy. And insofar as the theologians are right in attributing something like a soul to the human being, we can understand how science might conflict with theology, for whatever the soul may be, it must be something that resists material reductionism, and even a reductionistic story of our origins is still a story, and all stories by their nature reach beyond the material in search for a higher unity: animals do not tell stories.
I have not been able to spend the time to find parallel examples in religious opinion of the kind of condescending and disrespectful rhetoric Quammen, Dawkins and Coyne use against their opponents, but I do not at all doubt they are out there, because the debate hits close to home for both science and religion. Both seem intent on holding their ground in opposition to the other, and this is probably due to the fact that, though individuals here and there have tried, no one has yet compellingly reconciled them—at least, not in a way comprehensible to the American public. But this is precisely what is required if my locating of the origin be at all accurate. Theology and science each need to establish for themselves and the rest of us just what kinds of claims they are capable of making, and avoid making other kinds.
This will not be an easy task(indeed, has not been, for again, many have been working on it for ages, and I in no way want to be glib or simplistic) because neither can simply draw a circle around itself and forbid the other cross, for, as we saw with Katrina, both must at times wrestle with understanding the same phenomenon—they are not mutually distinct, which may very well be a clue to the importance of each. Room will have to be made in the one for the other, and in such a way so as to respect the valid claims the other has to make, and so that the collaborative data reveal what neither alone could. The theologian declaiming vice, overlooking the fact that the sun shines, and the rain falls, on the good and the wicked alike, does not take us very far toward understanding how to better prepare for the terrifying powers of nature. Nor does the scientist describing the impassive and destructive forces at work in Katrina take us very far toward understanding why it hurts us so much to see the suffering of strangers on our TVs. As the third article in the Tribune’s series points out, there are also things we are doing to nature that will come back to bite us and which must therefore be attended to. As an illustration of the way I imagine this reconciliation may work, I suggest that the Judeo-Christian tradition has within its origin story perhaps the most powerful and helpful image the scientist could ask for in encouraging people how to interact with the earth: that of the garden.
Origin Debate Overlooks its Origin
It is perhaps too much of a truism nowadays to suggest that finding answers depends on asking the right questions, but the notion goes at least as far back as Aristotle, who spent a great deal of time in his works laying foundations on the belief that finding the origin gets one well on the way to the answer.
Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne’s recent Perspectives piece (September 18, 2005) on the place of intelligent design in the science classroom typifies the kind of misunderstanding of origins that has stagnated this and so many other debates. Their brief article covers most of the standard arguments against intelligent design, which tend to take the line that ID is not good science: it is not scientific because it is not a testable theory; it critiques but offers no positive proof; it is really a means to sneak the supernatural into science class.
I have no wish to question Dawkins and Coyne on their position from the viewpoint of science itself. In fact, so far as I understand the theoretical underpinnings of empirical, positivist science, I have to agree with them that intelligent design does not meet the criteria for a scientific theory. But I think something else is at the heart of the debate, which becomes clearer in the ways Dawkins and Coyne identify intelligent design with creationism. That is, they bring the discussion back around to religion, which is to recognize the connection of the evolution debate with fundamental explanations of life and, more specifically, suffering. The Tribune itself emphasizes this relationship by placing the article in a series alongside a piece on the implications of Hurricane Katrina on American civilization.
But this is not as self-evident an association as one might think. Creationism is a theory about the origins of life; Darwin, on the other hand, entitled his book The Origin of Species. Whatever Darwin did or did not say, it is clear that many have applied his theory to a story about the origins of life itself, and then gone on to oppose that story to religious stories as the fact behind the fictions. This has understandably irked (and still irks) the religiously minded. Enlightenment science began as a practice independent of theology and its claims, but with Darwin it seemed to overstep its bounds.
In the November 2004 National Geographic, David Quammen tried to reinforce this opposition by crafting a sort of Enlightenment myth of awakening from supernaturalism to naturalism in the life of Charles Darwin, making him a sort of Buddha (since enlightened), or Christ (since crucified), for evolutionists. At the same time he inserted, in a nod to the lofty humanist values of understanding, compassion, and political correctness, patronizing remarks about those religious people who still disbelieve evolution, seemingly blissfully ignorant of the offensive character of his words.
Dawkins and Coyne unhelpfully follow in this tradition, though I think quite consciously. At their most generous, they allow intelligent design a place in a history of ideas classroom, or shove it back to the church with a sneer. At their most condescending, they consign it to “a philosophy class on popular logical fallacies,” comparing the teaching of intelligent design to teaching alchemy in a chemistry class or “the stork theory in a sex education class.” “Opposition to intelligent design is laughable to all who are acquainted with even a fraction of the published date,” they go on to say.
It seems clear to me that the debate about intelligent design is really about theological (or, rather, anti-theological) claims made by science, and about scientific (or, again, anti-scientific) claims made by theology. And it seems further clear that this has to do with the fundamental structure of both areas of study. Science observes and attempts to account for the visible; its methods are thus suited to this study. Theology observes and attempts to account for the invisible inhering in the visible; its methods are thus suited to this study. Each has its own sort of evidence—sacred texts or observable, natural phenomena—and it is usually when one denounces the evidence of the other that problems arise.
Because theology’s object includes in some part science’s, we can understand how theology might conflict with science, for the one will make explanations based on human desire, will and frailty, while the other will make explanations based on impartial laws of matter and energy. And insofar as the theologians are right in attributing something like a soul to the human being, we can understand how science might conflict with theology, for whatever the soul may be, it must be something that resists material reductionism, and even a reductionistic story of our origins is still a story, and all stories by their nature reach beyond the material in search for a higher unity: animals do not tell stories.
I have not been able to spend the time to find parallel examples in religious opinion of the kind of condescending and disrespectful rhetoric Quammen, Dawkins and Coyne use against their opponents, but I do not at all doubt they are out there, because the debate hits close to home for both science and religion. Both seem intent on holding their ground in opposition to the other, and this is probably due to the fact that, though individuals here and there have tried, no one has yet compellingly reconciled them—at least, not in a way comprehensible to the American public. But this is precisely what is required if my locating of the origin be at all accurate. Theology and science each need to establish for themselves and the rest of us just what kinds of claims they are capable of making, and avoid making other kinds.
This will not be an easy task(indeed, has not been, for again, many have been working on it for ages, and I in no way want to be glib or simplistic) because neither can simply draw a circle around itself and forbid the other cross, for, as we saw with Katrina, both must at times wrestle with understanding the same phenomenon—they are not mutually distinct, which may very well be a clue to the importance of each. Room will have to be made in the one for the other, and in such a way so as to respect the valid claims the other has to make, and so that the collaborative data reveal what neither alone could. The theologian declaiming vice, overlooking the fact that the sun shines, and the rain falls, on the good and the wicked alike, does not take us very far toward understanding how to better prepare for the terrifying powers of nature. Nor does the scientist describing the impassive and destructive forces at work in Katrina take us very far toward understanding why it hurts us so much to see the suffering of strangers on our TVs. As the third article in the Tribune’s series points out, there are also things we are doing to nature that will come back to bite us and which must therefore be attended to. As an illustration of the way I imagine this reconciliation may work, I suggest that the Judeo-Christian tradition has within its origin story perhaps the most powerful and helpful image the scientist could ask for in encouraging people how to interact with the earth: that of the garden.
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