Peter Gomes and being human

I said a while ago that I wished everyone could have the privilege of hearing Peter Gomes, Harvard's Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church, speak. Well, today is your lucky day. The website big think now has 19 videos of nothing but Gomes talking.

One of them is particularly relevant to my last post, so I'll share it. (It's less than two minutes long, so go ahead and watch it.)



Key quote: "It seems to me that science can never explain such things as joy, or happiness, or sorrow, even though they try to find the little nodes in the brain in which these emotions are alleged to reside."

Contrast Gomes's thoughts with another quote from Pinker:

"I don’t believe there’s such a thing as free will in the sense of a ghost in the machine, a spirit or soul that somehow reads the TV screen of the senses and pushes buttons and pulls the levers of behavior. There’s no sense that we can make of that. I think we are . . . Our behavior is the product of physical processes in the brain. On the other hand, when you have a brain that consists of a hundred billion neurons connected by a hundred trillion synapses, there is a vast amount of complexity that means that human choices will not be predictable in any simple way from the stimuli that have impinged on it beforehand."

Elevating rhetoric.

Of course, if you conceptualize the soul as an anthropomorphic creature pushing buttons and pulling levers (which Pinker helpfully mimes in the video), the idea of the soul or of free will is going to sound silly and nonsensical. But an argument from parody isn't very convincing or, as Pinker would say, rational.

Does Pinker really believe that saying "there is a vast amount of complexity that means that human choices will not be predictable in any simple way from the stimuli that have impinged on it beforehand" really gets to the heart of what it means to be human? When you start talking like that with respect to one of the fundamental mysteries of human existence, I've got to wonder whether Pinker is human.

I don't wish to denigrate scientific advances or the mind-boggling complexity of the human brain. Science is a wonderful tool for understanding the natural world, and the human brain is without a doubt the most amazing physical specimen our universe has to offer. But all the scientists in all the world could study the human brain for the rest of time, until they had discovered literally everything there was to know about the brain, and they would still be no closer to understanding love, or laughter, or mourning, or mercy -- in short, all the things that make us human. You can trot out all the evolutionary, psychological, sociological, anthropological, and neuroscientific explanations you want, and they may be quite rational, but they're also always going to fall just a bit short, because they're always going to sound, to the normal person, just a little bit inhuman.

Say all our "behavior is the product of physical processes in the brain," which are simply the result of external stimuli. Say free will is an illusion. Fine. But everyone (with the exception of university professors) knows that we have free will. You don't have to have a Ph.D. to know it. You don't have to do laboratory studies to prove it. It's what we live, every moment of our lives. We know that there is more to us than our physical bodies. We know that we are not just parcels of matter unfolding inevitably in time. We know that we have souls.

And to miss that, because you're too caught up in your own materialistic explanations of human behavior, is to miss the whole point of what it means to be human.

Reason VS. Faith: The Ultimate Showdown!

There's a relatively new website called big think that styles itself as a sort of "YouTube for intellectuals." It consists largely of brief videos in which people talk about their views on a wide range of important topics. There are a decent number of entries from some rather prominent politicians, professors, and other public figures. These are supplemented by a multitude of videos featuring obscure writers, chefs, and (seriously) yoga masters.

I was interested to see that there were contributions from a number of familiar (to me, at least) Harvard professors, including Steven Pinker, Daniel Gilbert, Michael Sandel, and Peter Gomes. Now, when it comes to the latter two, I'll listen to pretty much anything they have to say. Sandel teaches one of the most popular courses in the history of Harvard -- Justice -- which I took as a freshman; and Gomes, the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church, is one of the most strangely captivating speakers I've ever heard. Pinker, an experimental psychologist, is one of the superstars of the Harvard faculty, and has written several bestselling books, including and The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works; and Gilbert, also a professor of psychology, recently wrote a bestseller of his own, Stumbling on Happiness.

So I started watching some of Pinker's and Gilbert's videos, and I found -- somewhat to my dismay, but certainly not to my surprise -- that they were both saying some pretty ridiculous things about the relationship between reason and faith, as so often happens when otherwise intelligent people start talking about the relationship between reason and faith. For example, here are Pinker's opening words from his discussion of the topic:

"I think my own personal philosophy -- one that I think offers a sounder basis for knowledge and wisdom than religion -- is based on reason. Now, as soon as soon as we’re having this conversation, as long as we are trying to persuade one another of why you should do something or should believe something, you are already committed to reason. We're not engaged in a fistfight. We’re not bribing each other to believe something. We’re trying to provide reasons. We’re trying to persuade, to convince. As long as you’re doing that in the first place, you’re not hitting someone with a chair, or putting a gun to their head, or bribing them to believe something, you’ve lost any argument you have against reason. You’ve already signed on to reason whether you like it or not. So the fact that we’re having this conversation shows that we are committed to reason."

I'm not sure to whom, exactly, this valiant defense of reason is addressed. I don't know who these people are that Pinker thinks are trying to put forth "argument[s] . . . against reason." I've never heard anyone disparage, deny, or downplay the importance of reason. And yet Pinker speaks as if all religious people were an angry mob mindlessly chanting "Down with reason! Down with reason!"

Pinker's logic makes sense, however, once he explains his definition of faith:

"I think that the alternative [to reason] that many people appeal to, namely faith, is . . . immediately refutes itself. Faith means believing something with no good reason to do it."

Pinker's thinking is entirely self-consistent. Unfortunately, it's completely divorced from reality. I don't know a single person of faith who would say that there is no good reason for their beliefs. Of course, Pinker might interject with some definition of what constitutes a "good reason," but then he'd be verging on dogmatism, another thing that Pinker is adamantly against. (Of course, Pinker is just like everyone else who speaks out against dogmatism. It's not really dogmas that he hates, just other people's dogmas.)

Gilbert also chimes in with his explanation of what religion is:

"By religion we usually mean deism. We mean belief in something we absolutely can't see for which there's no evidence."

(Let's set aside the fact that, in reality, when we talk about religion these days we generally mean theism, not deism.)

Now, I subscribe to the Catholic Christian faith because I think that there are good reasons to do so. I think there is good reason to believe that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead three days after dying on a cross, thereby giving pretty good evidence that His claims of divinity were true. I can't rationally explain why His tomb was empty, or why His apostles would suddenly be willing to die proclaiming Jesus' Resurrection and divinity, unless Jesus really rose from the dead. So I rationally deduce that Jesus did rise from the dead, and based on that rationally arrived-upon conclusion, I put my faith in Him as the Lord and Savior of the world. If someone claims to be God, and is willing to undergo an incredibly painful and humiliating execution rather than recant that claim, and then rises from the dead to back that claim up, I'm going to take that claim, and that person, pretty seriously. It would be entirely irrational not to.

Faith and reason are not, as Pinker and Gilbert suggest, competing "alternatives." They are, as Pope John Paul II wrote in his encyclical Fides et ratio, "like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth." Without reason, faith would be just groping in the dark, and without faith (say, in the legitimacy of reason), reason itself would never get off the ground.

The Gnostic Gospels

I've been reading a rather well-known book called The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels, who is a professor of religion at Princeton University. The book is based on a large batch of so-called "gnostic gospels" that were discovered in the Egyptian desert in 1945. The writings include texts from groups that were considered heretical by the orthodox Christian Church during the 2nd and 3rd centuries. In her book, Pagels explores the theological differences between the orthodox and "gnostic" groups and the apparent reasons for them.

The book has been interesting so far. I do disagree, however, with some of Pagels's argumentation. For example, she believes that ulterior political motives were behind the development of much of orthodox Christian doctrine. Though she does not seem to base this conclusion on anything more than speculation and coincidence, she asserts it as plain fact.

Though this assumption of bad faith is irritating, The Gnostic Gospels is valuable for -- if nothing else (which is not the case) -- the window it occasionally provides into the breathtaking world of early Christianity. An excerpt from "The Martyrdom of Saint Polycarp" brought tears to my eyes. Polycarp, a 2nd-century bishop, was faced with certain execution unless he renounced Christianity and honored the Roman gods:

"The governor persisted and said, 'Swear and I will let you go. Curse Christ!' But Polycarp answered, 'For eighty-six years I have been his servant, and he has done me no wrong . . . If you delude yourself into think that I will swear by the emperor's genius, as you say, and if you pretend not to know who I am, listen and I will tell you plainly: I am a Christian.'"

"Polycarp was burned alive in the public arena," Pagels adds.

What a badass. What a faith.

A journey through John - 11:5-6

"Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So when he heard that he was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was."

Jesus is just maddening sometimes, isn't He? What is He waiting around for? What on earth is He doing where He is while His friend is dying?

Why does Jesus stay two days longer in the place where He was? Precisely because He loved Lazarus and his sisters, John insists. That little So has got to be one of the most perplexing, frustrating conjunctions in all of Scripture. Jesus took His sweet time going to see Lazarus because he loved him! Jesus loved Lazarus; therefore He couldn't be bothered to lift a finger to help him! It doesn't make any sense!

And so, once Jesus actually decides to get going and finally arrives at the home of Mary and Martha, Lazarus is already dead. His sisters betray some of the same frustration that we feel at His tardiness: "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died," they both tell him (11:21, 32).

But Jesus has a plan in all this. As He said upon hearing the news of Lazarus' sickness, "This illness . . . is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified by means of it" (11:4). Jesus allows His friend Lazarus to die so that, in the presence of all the mourners, He can demonstrate His power and divinity by raising Lazarus from death to life, so that they might all have faith in Him. Before Jesus commands Lazarus to come out of his tomb, He prays, "Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me. I knew that thou hearest me always, but I have said this on account of the people standing by, that they may believe that thou didst send me" (11:42).

Indeed, it is because Jesus loves Lazarus and his sisters that He does wait to answer Mary's and Martha's plea to help their brother. He loves them so much that He wishes to reveal to them His power over death, so that they might believe that He is the Son of God and lay claim to the new and everlasting life He offers to everyone: "I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die" (11:25-26).

G. K. Chesterton's blind faith

What little I've read of G. K. Chesterton's writings, I've always loved. Here's the opening line of his autobiography:

"Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment or private judgment, I am firmly of the opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1873, on Campden Hill, Kensington; and baptised according to the formularies of the Church of England in the little church of St. George opposite the large Waterworks Tower that dominated that ridge."

Think about it.

A journey through John - 2:5

"His mother said to the servants, 'Do whatever he tells you.'"

This verse comes from the story of Jesus' famous water-into-wine miracle at the wedding feast at Cana, and it has a lot to teach us about the Christian life. Mary's words, "Do whatever he tells you," are not just for the servants. As the Navarre commentary notes, "These words of our Lady can be seen as a permanent invitation to each of us: 'in that all Christian holiness consists: for perfect holiness is obeying Christ in all things' (St Thomas Aquinas, Comm. on St John, in loc.)." If we truly believe that Jesus is the Son of God, how can we possibly do any less than to follow and obey Him? And yet, how often do I completely ignore His call? I'm a long way from perfect holiness, and clearly a long way from perfect faith.

Religion and science

The October issue of First Things contains an article entitled "God and Evolution" in which Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J. presents an admirably balanced assessment of the relationship between religion and science. While the cardinal sees no conflict between Christian faith and evolution, he does critique what he sees as the overreaching of materialistic Darwinists who draw philosophical and theological conclusions from scientific data. A representative passage:

"Science can cast a brilliant light on the processes of nature and can vastly increase human power over the environment. Rightly used, it can notably improve the conditions of life here on earth. Future scientific discoveries about evolution will presumably enrich religion and theology, since God reveals himself through the book of nature as well as through redemptive history. Science, however, performs a disservice when it claims to be the only valid form of knowledge, displacing the aesthetic, the interpersonal, the philosophical, and the religious."

Why I am a Catholic, part 2 - Faith

We all have to believe in something. We all have to have faith in something. It's inescapable. If you are a normally functioning human being, you have faith in something, whether you think you do or not. Even if the very idea of faith makes you laugh or cringe, you've still got it.

To be clear, I'm talking about faith here as it is defined by Merriam-Webster Online in definition 2 B (1), which is, I believe, most relevant to this conversation and which defines faith as "firm belief in something for which there is no proof."

Now, the two things I most frequently see cited by non-religious people as being opposed to faith (by which they typically mean religious faith) are science and reason. (This is, I believe, a false dichotomy -- I see no real conflict between religious faith on the one hand and science and reason on the other -- but I'll accept it for the time being.) But my argument is that even those who claim to live and see only by the lights of science and reason -- even the most hardcore -- still have faith.

They have faith precisely in science and reason. Now remember, faith here is a "firm belief in something for which there is no proof." Is it possible to prove -- prove -- that either science or reason works? Is it possible without resorting to a circular argument? Can you demonstrate that the scientific method is reliable without running more experiments? Can you defend any line of reasoning without resorting to further reasoning? Eventually you have to believe in something that can't be proven. And that's faith.

Please understand that this is not me railing against science and reason -- I love science and reason. My point is simply that we all have to have faith in something, whether we like it or not, and that having faith is not only not irrational, it's necessary.

As for me, I've chosen to put my faith not only in science and reason, but ultimately in Jesus Christ as He has revealed Himself through His Church on earth. And I'll get more into some of the reasons why I've decided to put my faith in Him a little later.