Apologia Winter 2011

Winter 2011, Volume 5, Issue 1

also inside featuring

Quantum Mechanics and Divine Action

God in the Gulag How to Take the Bible Seriously A Proof for the Existence of God

A Letter from the Editor

B

y the numbers, Dartmouth students are some of the brightest and most talented people of our generation. We excel in academics: on tests, papers, quizzes, and projects. And yet, despite all our manifest intelligence, I think we rarely take the time to reflect deeply and honestly on our worldviews. Each of us looks at the world in a certain way, and this lens informs how we interact with and understand the world. As the Christian novelist Flannery O’Connor wrote, “Your beliefs [are] the light by which you see.”

The Dartmouth Apologia invites all Dartmouth students to engage in the process of reflecting on our worldviews. We at the Apologia subscribe to a particular worldview that springs from and is nourished by Christian beliefs and practices. We aim to put that worldview before the Dartmouth campus, and we hope that those students who encounter it will be moved to examine their own beliefs more rigorously and systematically.

The intellectual Christian tradition, consisting of the writings and thoughts of numerous men and woman who understood and loved their worldview, is both broad and deep.

Through this journal, we hope to convey some of the richness of this tradition, not proselytizing, but to contributing to the ongoing process of critical intellectual discussion that has characterized the Academy since its founding. We believe that all Dartmouth students, regardless of religious beliefs, can benefit from exposure to the Christian tradition, which is passionate, rigorous, and critical.

In this journal you will find articles on subjects as varied as ancient philosophy, the Russian gulag, and quantum mechanics. This diversity reflects in miniature the diversity of the Christian worldview, and it demonstrates the relevance of the Christian worldview to all of life and thought. In this issue’s guest piece, Dr. Johnson argues for the importance of taking the Bible seriously. He writes, “The highest standards of critical thinking and the deepest loyalty to the voice of Scripture are not thought to be incompatible but rather mutually dependent.” These words capture the spirit of the Christian intellectual tradition, which is characterized both by fidelity to the teachings and practices of the Christian faith and by a commitment to critical reflection and rational exploration.

This harmony between fidelity and reasonable examination so well exemplified in the Christian intellectual tradition is a model not only for contemporary Christians but to all people who wish to fully understand their own beliefs. It is our sincere hope that, by reading this journal, you may be inspired to undertake a serious and rigorous exploration of your own worldview.

Peter Blair

Winter 2011, Volume 5, Issue 1

Editor-in-Chief Peter Blair ‘12 Managing Editor Sarah White ‘11 Editorial Board Charles Clark ‘11 Emily DeBaun ‘12 Lee Farnsworth ‘12 Business Manager Brady Kelly ‘12 Production Elli Kim ‘13 Minae Seog ‘14 Jessica Yu ‘14 Edward Talmage ‘12 Photography Kelsey Carter ‘12 Contributors Alexandra Heywood ‘11 Grace Nauman ‘11 Anna Lynn Doster ‘12 Brendan Woods ‘13 Luke Timothy Johnson Peter Kreeft Faculty Advisory Board Gregg Fairbrothers, Tuck Richard Denton, Physics Eric Hansen, Thayer Eric Johnson, Tuck James Murphy, Government Leo Zacharski, DMS Special thanks to Council on Student Organizations The Eleazar Wheelock Society Robert Cousins ‘09

Editor-in-Chief

Submissions

Letters to the Editor

We welcome the submission of any article, essay, or artwork for publication in The Dartmouth Apologia.

Submissions should seek to promote respectful, thoughtful discussion in the community. We will consider submissions from any member of the community but reserve the right to publish only those that are in line with our mission statement and quality rubric. Blitz “Apologia.”

We value your opinions and encourage thoughtful submissions expressing support, dissent, or other views.

We will gladly consider any letter that is consistent with our mission statement’s focus on promoting intellectual discourse in the Dartmouth community.

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by Jen Freise ‘12

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The opinions expressed in The Dartmouth Apologia are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the journal, its editors, or Dartmouth College. Copyright © 2011 The Dartmouth Apologia.

EUTHYPHRO’S DILEMMA AND 2 THE GOODNESS OF GOD Brendan Woods ‘13

INTERVIEW 7 Peter Kreeft, Ph.D., Boston College and King’s College

TAKING THE BIBLE SERIOUSLY 10 Luke Timothy Johnson, Ph.D., Emory University

SCIENCE AND ORTHODOXY: 15 The Faith of Galileo and Kepler Grace Nauman ‘11

QUANTUM MECHANICS 19 AND DIVINE ACTION Emily DeBaun ‘12

A PROOF FOR THE 24 EXISTENCE OF GOD Peter Blair ‘12

GOD IN THE GULAG: 30 Christianity’s Survival in Soviet Russia Alexandra Heywood ‘11

FREE WILL, PREDESTINATION, 36 AND THE VALUE OF CHRISTIAN DEBATE Anna Lynn Doster ‘12

T

he Dartmouth Apologia exists to articulate Christian perspectives in the academic community.

EUTHYPHRO’S DILEMMA &the Goodness of God

by Brendan Woods

O

ne of the most persistent issues in the philosophy of religion has been the origin of our concept of “moral good.” While most theists would agree that God has some influence on our standard of good, there is disagreement as to the nature of his involvement. The conflict generally goes like this: in setting moral standards, is God reinforcing the objective facts of what is right, facts determinable through the processes of logic and experience, or is he setting down standards that need not have any logical or intuitive basis for us?

This apparent conflict, known as Euthyphro’s dilemma, has occupied philosophers and theologians since Plato first described it in his Dialogues. Both positions come with their own difficulties: If one takes the stance known as the “first horn”—that God determines what is good because he knows that it really is good—he must acknowledge that there is a force beyond God. This position seems to limit God and implies that his will is constrained by some external logical or moral law, thereby rendering false the classical Christian conception of an all-powerful God. Taking the second horn, that God determines our notions of right and good and morality, would be problematic as well. To borrow a phrase from seventeenth-century philosopher Ralph Cudworth, implying that God arbitrarily lays down what is right and good carries with it a set of “unpalatable implications.”1 For one, it would seem to mean that if God commanded us to murder or blaspheme, we would be bound to do so. Furthermore, for

Painting of a statue of Plato

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School of Athens by Raphael, circa 1510-12

God to command such seemingly horrific acts would not be inconsistent with God’s essential nature; since his will is arbitrary anyway, it makes no difference whether God’s actions match up with our intuitions or his previous commands. Additionally, the second horn would take away the moral obligation of following God’s will; if morality is not really objective, then God’s will would be no better than other moral systems. He would then simply be one among others who could, by virtue of his power, enforce His own subjective will.

At first this may appear to be a fruitless philosophic exercise. It attempts to make sense out of the definitions we have given to truly indefinable concepts. The dilemma also ignores the Christian idea that goodness is an essential aspect of God’s nature and that everything he commands is therefore in keeping with this essential nature. And of course, this sort of logic is specious at best. It assumes that there are two distinct conditions (being morally good and being willed by God) and that one condition must necessarily be a result of the other. In doing so, this style of reasoning ignores a host of other alternatives, including that the two conditions are really the same thing, that they are both two equal parts of a larger whole, and that the conflict is really just due to limitations in the precision of language.

To see this weakness in the Euthyphro argument, we must only apply the reasoning to other situations. For instance, it may be true that I enjoy a certain movie.

One could ask the question, “Do you enjoy the movie

because it is enjoyable to you, or is it enjoyable to you because you enjoy it?” Clearly, this is a ridiculous question. If we apply the dilemma’s style of reasoning to situations like these, we find that it does not disprove the existence of God any more than it disproves the fact that I like a certain film.

Given the ancient origin of Euthyphro’s dilemma, many Christian and non-Christian thinkers have offered solutions. There have been three main positions taken by theologians. The first possible solution to the dilemma is to take the first horn, a stance that has been supported by Aquinas,2 the Cambridge Platonists like Ralph Cudworth, and several modern philosophers like Richard Swinburne. There are several nuances that can characterize the first horn approach and address the difficulties inherent in it. For example, the Muslim philosopher Averroes offered an insightful analogy that shows how objective morality still needs God. For Averroes, God can be compared to a doctor whose aim is “to preserve the health and cure the diseases of all the people, by prescribing for them rules which can be commonly accepted… He is unable to make them all doctors, because a doctor is one who knows by demonstrative methods the things which preserve health and cure disease.”3 Averroes’s analogy refutes the major atheist claim that the first horn does not require God for objective morality. While it may be true that a moral logic exists and can be theoretically determined by the process of reason, there is no basis for believing that we would

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be capable of finding it or even bound to it if we did.

As mentioned above, the major objection to the We would be forced to arrive at moral truths through second horn—and the reason some philosophers see empirical reasoning, a process that many philosophers Euthyphro’s dilemma as a refutation of the moral argubelieve to be misleading. G.E. Moore’s concept of the ment—is that it makes morality entirely arbitrary and “naturalistic fallacy” highlights the unreliability of contingent on the whims of God. For many, it encourthis line of reasoning. To summarize, the naturalistic ages an image of a flippant and ungrounded God, a fallacy points out that it is impossible to draw nor- deity who decides what is right without regard to an mative “ought” statements from Without the idea of a God, we would have no reason to empirical “is” statements; just believe that our logical conclusions about morality have because the world any bearing on the truth of their moral content. is a certain way does not mean that it should be.4 Without the idea of independent standard of goodness. Under the second a God, we would have no reason to believe that our horn, we cannot call God good, the objection goes, logical conclusions about morality have any bearing because whatever he does we would be forced to call on the truth of their moral content. After all, humans good by definition. If God suddenly commanded us to throughout history have differed on the content of worship a different deity, or if he had given in to Satan true morality, and history provides us with no shortage in the desert, we would have to accept it as morally of instances that demonstrate the fallibility of human correct. Indeed, some see this horn as implying that reason. Because logic on its own cannot be guaranteed if we were in Jesus’ shoes in the desert, we would not to provide us with a reliable—if still objective—moral- have any reason to stay true to God at all, for his comity, God is necessary to act like the doctor and provide mands would carry just as much weight as Satan’s.8 It us with the reasons to accept the logical conclusions of is important to note that these objections refer to our morality. So, in answer to the atheist’s claim that the intuitive and emotional conceptions of God. They do first horn denies the necessity of God for an objective not necessarily disprove the possibility that God could morality, the theist can reply that God is still necessary be behind our morals, just that he is arbitrary in doing for the proper functioning of objective morality. Kant so. It could very well be that God really is arbitrary in offers a moral argument that has been slightly altered his standards. to accommodate this change:5 1. It is rationally and morally necessary to attain the perfect good (i.e., for Kant, happiness arising out of complete virtue).

2. What we are obliged to attain, it must be possible for us to attain.

3. Attaining the perfect good is only possible if natural order and causality are part of an overarching moral order and causality.

4. Moral order and causality are only possible if we postulate a God as their source.

Theists have been able to make a reasonable case for the second horn, as well. Figures like Martin Luther and John Calvin have focused on the logical impossibility of having a standard higher than God. As Calvin pointed out, “If his will has any cause, there must be something antecedent to it, and to which it is annexed; this it were impious to imagine.”6 Luther agreed, identifying God as the “rule” that the first horn advocates appeal to: “He is God, and for his will there is no cause or reason that can be laid down as a rule or measure for it, since there is nothing equal or superior to it, but it is itself the rule of all things.”7

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Illustration of Averroes from an illuminated manuscript

However, I would make the case that taking the second horn does not necessarily imply that God is a fickle moralist. For one, the second horn would not make morality any more arbitrary under God than it

would be under the first horn. If God is not behind morality, then logic or culture or some other motivation must create it. A morality based on culture, logic, or another potential first horn cause would be just as random as one based off of God’s will; when we consider that man’s flawed skills of interpretation will determine moral conclusions, we can see that a morality coming from a “first horn” source cannot be considered any less arbitrary than the second horn’s explanation of a morality determined by God. However, it is not clear that the God of the second horn truly fits what we think of as arbitrary. To call God an arbitrary moralist would indicate that he picks moral rules on a whim and sets moral standards without any regard to the concerns of his people. This is not the case. Biblical morality is largely in keeping with our logical, cultural, and intuitive moral conclusions. The moral values advocated by Jesus Christ are largely in line with both major historical moral tenets like generosity, honesty, and piety and with the conclusions of utilitarianism and other attempts at a purely logical morality. Additionally, to borrow the language of utilitarians, a case could be made that Christian morality provides for human flourishing more completely than do other moral systems. There is no doubt that the world would be a much better place if everyone followed the Ten Commandments: murder and theft would end, more families would remain intact, and people would enjoy the increase in longevity and happiness that comes with regular church attendance.9 We can hardly call a second horn morality arbitrary

If we define “good” differently than Plato does, then Euthyphro’s dilemma must be seen as false. given our standard usage of the word. If we assume the second horn, then we can also acknowledge that the Christian God has created a consistent and accessible morality that corresponds to our intuitions and logic and which provides for our common benefit.

The two classical horns are therefore not as much of a problem for Christian ethics as some atheists claim.

Nevertheless, there is a third possibility that would make the choice between these horns unnecessary. The rise of analytic philosophy, with its emphasis on rigorous and formal reasoning, has shed doubt on the logic behind Euthyphro’s dilemma. Many philosophers now see it as a false dilemma dependent on Plato’s own particular definition of good and either recognize that there are other possibilities beyond the two horns or

Engraving of St. Thomas Aquinas by Philips Galle 1578

see a problem with the logical foundations underlying the issue.

To see the fallacy behind Euthyphro’s dilemma, we must consider what it is we mean when we call something “good.” In the Euthyphro dialogue, Plato assumes good to be an abstract and independent state, a quality that is either inherent in something or else not at all present. For the dilemma to work as Plato describes it, the concept “good” must be defined to (1) exist outside of the concept “God,” and (2) exist at a rank either above or below him. This is where the “dilemma” seems to arise: if “good” exists at a higher level than God, it limits his power (i.e., the first horn), whereas if it exists beneath God it would be an arbitrary product of his will and would also be inapplicable to God himself (i.e., the second horn). This twopronged definition of good is the only one that can produce a dilemma like Euthyphro’s.

If we define “good” differently than Plato does, then Euthyphro’s dilemma must be seen as false. And indeed, the common conception of good is not the abstract and independent state that Plato imagined it to be. Instead, we use the word good—or holy or pious, words that are used in place of good in some translations of Euthyphro—in a relational way. We do a good job of something when we do it as it was intended to be done; someone does good by us when they act out of

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respect and love for us; a person is a good person when they act like a person is meant to act.10 For Christians, good (or holy or pious) describes one very important relationship: that between a person and God. When we act out of concern and respect and love for God, we become good. Likewise, we call God good because he does the same for us. It is because God always acts out of love that we look to him as the standard of good.11 Christian ethics recognizes this difference between good as a state and good as a description. Christians are not deontologists and so do not pursue a set of “good actions” that defines their moral system.

Instead, the basis for Christian morality is love of God and neighbor. As a Dominican priest stated in a lecture he gave at Dartmouth College, the saints do not follow the Commandments; the saints love God. It is from this love that they do the things they do and—either consciously or unconsciously—follow the Commandments. We apply the word “good” to the saints because they were experts at their relationship with God. They had a relationship with God that was more in harmony with how we were intended to live before the fall.

This is a very different conception of good from what Plato assumed, and it is one that does not fit with Euthyphro’s dilemma. The Christian conception of good sees it as both an objective and a normative idea: it describes something objective because it tells us that the “good” person is living in harmony with how God intended for him or her to live—i.e., by “loving God with all one’s heart, and loving one’s neighbor as one loves oneself ”—and it is normative because this is the way we ought to live.

I would posit that if we conceive of good as having an objective element—as describing how someone is— in addition to its normative element, then Euthyphro’s dilemma becomes irrelevant. Euthyphro’s dilemma depends on there being exactly two alternatives: that either God’s actions flow from the concept of good or that good comes from God. The Christian response to Euthyphro’s dilemma should start by rejecting the second horn statement that good comes from God’s will. However, this approach is not as limiting for God as the first horn view is because it does not see good as a concept outside of God. Instead, good is a descriptor attached both to him and to us, not something apart from God that must necessarily exist at a rank above or below him. Good is simply a word that we apply to describe the proper functioning of our relationship with God and is thus not applicable in the way Plato uses it in the Euthyphro dialogue.

When we approach Euthyphro’s dilemma with a different conception of good—such as the definition used by Christians—the dilemma falls apart. As we

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struggle to achieve the love and respect for God and neighbor that is in keeping with our intended nature and which, if successful, will result in us being called “good” people, God executes his relationship with us perfectly. Euthyphro’s dilemma is no longer a dilemma, but rather a tautology. When we ask why it is that we call God good, we must answer simply, because God is good.

Ralph Cudworth, A Treatise Convening True and Immutable Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 19-22.

2 “For the Divine law commands certain things because they are good, and forbids others, because they are evil, while others are good because they are prescribed, and others evil because they are forbidden.” Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 2a2ae 57.2.

3 Averroes, On the Harmony of Religion and Philosophy, trans. George Hourani (London: Messrs.

Luzac & Co., 1976) ch. 3 line 174.

4 G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) § 11.

5 Peter Byrne, “Moral Arguments for the Existence of God” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-argumentsgod/>.

6 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Boston: Hendrickson Publishers, 2008) 626.

7 Martin Luther, “On the Bondage of Will,” Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation, ed. E. Gordon Rupp and Philip S. Watson (Louisville: The Westminster Press, 1969) 236.

8 William Wainwright, Religion and Morality (Aldershot, England: Ashgate Publishing House, 2005) 76.

9 Donald E. Hall, “Religious Attendance: More Cost-Effective Than Lipitor?” Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine (2006) 19: 103109. SK Lutgendorf, et. al., “Religious participation, interleukin-6, and mortality in older adults,” Health Psychology (Sep. 23 2004): 465-475.

10 Some may say this assumes an Aristotelian approach to metaphysical issues. However, I believe that this is an appropriate assumption to make in a discussion of Christian approaches to philosophy.

11 See Mark 10:18-21.

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Brendan Woods ‘13 is from Glastonbury, Connecticut.

He is an Economics and Philosophy double major.

An interview with

DR. PETER KREEFT Conducted by Peter Blair

Dr. Peter Kreeft is a Professor of Philosophy at Boston College and King’s College. He is famous for his work on “Twenty Arguments for the Existence of God” and is the author of numerous books on philosophy, theology, and spirituality, including Socrates Meets Jesus and Between Heaven and Hell. Dr. Kreeft is noted for his work as a Christian apologist and is a highly sought-after speaker, as well as a member of the Advisory Board of the Catholic Education Resource Center. He received his BA from Calvin College and his MA and PhD in Philosophy from Fordham University.

You have stated [in Handbook to Christian Apologetics] that God’s existence can be proved. What do you think is the best argument for his existence and why?

The saints. That’s not a proof; it’s a direct perception. But we’re talking about arguments. There are two kinds of arguments; one kind works better for one certain type of person, the other works better for another type of person. There are the exterior and the interior arguments. There are the cosmological arguments, including the argument from first cause and the argument from design, and there are the psychological arguments, like the moral argument and the argument from desire. I think they both work, but you have to have a firm grasp of the premises before you can start to the conclusion. And the way arguments are usually attacked is by attacking the premises. So whichever of those two sets of premises is stronger will be for you the stronger argument for God. For you personally what do you find, besides the saints, to be the most compelling?

The argument from desire. We all have Augustinian restless hearts. And if there is no God, life is meaningless, because there is no object of our deepest desire, because nothing in this world quite satisfies it. So it doesn’t quite prove the existence of God with absolute certainty, but what it does do is that it brings you to the point where it’s either God or nothingness. And there’s no practical reason for opting for nothingness… I think a thousand years from now, if people still remember C.S. Lewis it will be for that argument.

Because he is, I think, the very best writer in Christian history, maybe next to Augustine, on the argument from desire.

Even if you can establish the existence of a creator, how does one get to Christianity from there?

One looks at history. One asks, “If there is a creator, has he acted in history?” He could. He acted to create the world; he could act to reveal himself in the world.

And if he’s a person with a consciousness, it’s reasonable to at least hope that he wants to get in touch with us as persons with consciousness. So you look at the historical record, and you find that there are many claims that God or the gods have intervened in history and tried to communicate themselves to us. And of all these historical religions, Christianity is the one with the most arresting claim, the most interesting claim: That God himself came down personally and uniquely in Christ and demonstrated his love and saved us. So if you’re a total agnostic and you’re just shopping for a religion, I think you’d start with Christianity simply because it’s the most interesting one and either the most outrageous claim or the most compelling claim.

And then once you look at the historical evidence, once you look at the question of who Jesus is, things like the Lord/Liar/Lunatic argument, the evidence

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moves you very close to it… All non-Christians, except maybe Nietzsche, think that Jesus is a wise and good man, but not God. And as Lewis famously argued, that’s the only thing he couldn’t possibly be. Because a man who claims to be God and wants you to trust your eternal soul to him and isn’t God is not a wise or good man. He’s either a liar or a lunatic.

Chesterton had a variant of this argument, too, in Orthodoxy, where he talked about how he never read Christian thinkers; he only read atheist thinkers, and it was reading the atheist thinkers that got him believing Christianity, because he found that they all attacked the Christian church for different things, so it either is a complex of all the diseases possible in the world or it is true.

I’ve always been struck, too, by Genesis. It’s always what people say contradicts evolution, but even in Genesis there’s the idea of the progression of creatures ending in man, which is exactly what we find in evolution.

It’s exactly the same progression as evolution. And furthermore, Genesis suggests evolution even of the human body when it says that God formed Adam out of the dust of the ground rather than just created him, and then he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, the soul which came directly from God. So we have a double origin.

Yes. The man who some thought was too fat and some too thin, some too tall and some too short, most likely it was they who were the wrong size.

I think that’s the point John Paul II made. He said even if you can’t pinpoint the exact point at which man’s physical shape became distinct from other elements of creation, assuming evolution, there’s still ensoulment, which would be considered creation.

What do you think about the alleged conflict between science and religion? Does evolutionary science rule out God and make a materialist perspective obligatory?

Yes, it’s like boiling water. At one point there’s no gas and at 212 degrees Fahrenheit there is a gas. So the stuff that was ape became man at some definite point, consciousness reflected back on itself and said “I,” and at that point you have a human soul.

This is a total red herring. There is no such conflict; there can’t in principle be, since God wrote two books, nature and Scripture, and he doesn’t contradict himself. The historical record of the relationship between religious claims and scientific claims is enormously impressive. There has never been in the history of the world a single real contradiction between any of the doctrines of Christianity and any discovery of science. So it’s a trumped up charge; it’s based on a lot of misunderstandings and stubbornness. For instance, the bishop vs. Galileo—they were both stubborn, but there was no real conflict. And today’s creation vs.

Another common scientific challenge to Christianity is this idea of brain science ruling out the idea of a mind independent of the brain, or any sort of soul.

Which is exactly like the claim that counting the letters in the Summa Theologica and mapping their geographic position and their permutations and combinations in relation to each other proves that there is no author, it just happened. No matter how much you explore the material cause of a thing, that doesn’t still give you the formal cause. Bergson, the nineteenth-

There has never been in the history of the world a single real contradiction between any of the doctrines of Christianity and any discovery of science. evolution conflict is similar, there’s no contradiction: whether evolution is true or not, it doesn’t contradict creation. God, after banging out the Big Bang, could very well have done what Augustine said, planted seeds in the world, potentialities, which gradually emerge by natural selection. In fact, evolution is very useful for theology. It’s evidence for design. If you see a species emerging gradually into more complexity and more consciousness so that they become more and more human, it looks as if there is a plot to produce us.

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century French philosopher, has a parable of a race of mathematical bees who claim to be able to explain everything mathematically. And a painter shows them a great painting and says to the bees, “Explain this.” They buzzed around the painting for a while and reduced it to a mathematical formula, which took something like three hundred pages. And the painter laughed, and the bees said, “Did we forget something?” and the painter said, “You forgot everything.”

William Buckley wrote an essay for “This I Believe” on NPR and he said, “I find it easier to believe in God than to believe that Hamlet was deduced from the structure of a mutton chop.”

Or that the Summa Theologica happened because of an explosion in a print factory.

The most compelling argument against theism seems to be the problem of evil. What is the proper Christian response to this, as you see it?

Well, the problem of evil is first of all a real, lived, practical problem, and therefore the response has to be a real, lived, practical response, namely to work with God against evil in this world as his soldiers. We’re first of all in a war, and only secondarily do we strategize and map the war and think about it. But as an argument against Christianity, the problem of evil works only on a theoretical level, not on the practical level.

That is, we are in fact in a war between good and evil whether there’s a God or not, and we have to choose sides. But evil counts intellectually against God because you would think that if there’s a God who has all power and all goodness, he would wipe out all evil.

And I think that conclusion does logically follow from the premises, but it doesn’t tell you how he does it. He could do it very patiently, with great respect for human freedom and with a mysterious plan which triumphs only in the end rather than by instant “MacDonald’s” [Editor’s Note: “fast food,” or instant gratification] solutions, which is what Christianity says he does. So I respect very much the argument from evil. There are two kinds of atheists: the unhappy atheists, like Camus or Sartre, who worry most about the problem of evil, and then there are the happy atheists, like Hitchens and Dennett and the rest, who don’t worry that much about the problem of evil but say there’s a conflict between Christianity and science. That’s nonsense, but the problem of evil is a serious problem.

I have always been struck by the approach that John Paul II took in On the Christian Meaning of Human Suffering: basically suffering is going to be true in your life no matter what you believe; as an atheist or a Christian you are going to have to suffer. So the question is, for me at least, Christianity gives you a chance of making that suffering meaningful in some way, whereas if you don’t have that world view, suffering is all there is to life.

And God could, but doesn’t, give us all the answers as to the why. Job, the all-time classic about suffering, ends not with God explaining himself to Job, but simply inviting Job to trust him, which is what lovers do.

Lovers don’t propose in syllogisms, they invite trust.

You have talked about morality being the basis of society. How do you understand this moral basis and how do you see it playing out today?

It’s what the Catholic tradition calls natural law. It’s not based on any one religion. It’s found in all religions; it’s found outside religion; it’s what Paul talks about in Romans 1 and 2, that God has left a witness of himself in the human conscience and we all have the power of conscience. The fact that all human beings throughout time, place, and culture basically agree about what things are good and what things are evil shows that moral principles are much less controversial than moral conclusions or applications. This is a very impressive piece of witness. We don’t have that in theology. We don’t have a common argument about who God is, whether he is good, whether he is one or many.

We have serious theological disagreements. But despite those serious theological disagreements, we don’t have serious moral disagreements. Whether you are an atheist or a Buddhist or a Catholic or a Protestant, you know the Ten Commandments.

And this universal argument, the natural law, is what society has traditionally been predicated upon.

Yes, and we are now living in Western civilization, in the first society in the history of the world which has officially repudiated natural law, at least among its intellectuals. So that is an unmitigated disaster.

How do you see the consequences of that?

Death. Society cannot live without that. No society lives forever, the United States of America or Western civilization will not live forever any more than any other society did. So I see only three possibilities. Either we repent of our denial of natural law morality and we’ll be revived, or we’ll persist in denying it and die, or we’ll refute one of the best-know laws of history that no society without the natural law can survive.

I think Matthew Arnold had this theory of culture, and he talked about the anarchists and the loyalists. The loyalists are those who stick to these universal principles and the anarchists are those engaged in trying to subvert those norms and create a society based on anarchy, which is untenable.

The thing that’s new—there’s always been anarchists—is that anarchy has become a philosophy.

We’ve always been bad at obeying our principles, but to glorify disobedience of our principles by means of philosophy, that’s the new radicalism.

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Taking the Bible

Seriously

by Luke Timothy Johnson

A

mong religion’s educated (and semi-educated) despisers, the charge that someone “takes the Bible seriously” serves these days to remove the person from serious intellectual consideration. The pious reading of the Bible is considered to be pretty much on a par with studying tea leaves, analyzing astrological tables, or even reciting the Qur’an: a form of intellectual stagnation and/or emotional regression.

Surely only stupidity or superstitious fear could allow people to take seriously the shabby pretensions of these ancient writings that have been shown, over and over again, to be historically inaccurate, cosmologically ignorant, and morally deficient.

How, they ask, could people in the early twentyfirst century who routinely floss their teeth, use the Internet, and take vitamins look for personal and societal norms in stories, laws, and poetry composed for people who lived in tents, thought moss was leprosy, and spared no rod lest they spoil a child—compositions, by the way, that prescribed for these advanced readers that they kill witches, adulterers, and children who curse their parents? For the educated elite, “taking the Bible seriously” means not being taken seriously.

From the opposite side, and in neat symmetry, fundamentalist Christians use the charge of “not taking the Bible seriously” as a way of dismissing the claim of others to be Christian while not agreeing with the fundamentalists’ particular construal of the religion.

Serious Christianity, such believers claim, is biblical Christianity. The Bible is not only the inspired Word of God—in every jot and tittle—but normative for

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every aspect of life. It is, furthermore, a perspicuous norm: what it demands of humans is plainly stated and requires no interpretation, only the obedient will to do it.

People who want to pass as Christians—who consider themselves liberal Christians and appeal to other norms such as experience and intellect—are poseurs who do not “take the Bible seriously” as guides for their life. They are actually more dangerous than Christianity’s public detractors, for they sap the faith from within. There is some clear inconsistency on both sides. The cultured despisers reject taking the Bible seriously as a norm for life, but they take it very seriously indeed as a threat to their own vision of a religionfree, or at least Christianity-free, universe. The Biblethumping Christians, in turn, claim to take the Bible with utter seriousness as a guide to life, but in practice rely much less on the careful reading of the Bible than on general appeals to its authority, and their lives starkly fail to reflect some central biblical norms.

More remarkably, though, biblical defenders and detractors have more in common than they might think. They share, for example, a narrow referential understanding of truth: if an ancient narrative does not correspond to the historical facts, it is false and unworthy of consideration; if an ancient mandate is not carried out in practice, it loses all value. The biblicist, to be sure, insists that such non-verification does not apply, and that therefore the Bible is “true,” whereas the critic delights in pointing out the many ways in

Engraving of Origen working near an open Bible by Johan Sadeler Fecit

which the Bible errs in its description of the world and human events, concluding that it is therefore “untrue.”

Both parties are also selective in what they choose to read: the defenders of the Bible focus only on its positive aspects and suppress all the embarrassments presented by the ancient writings, while the critics fixate on the toxic elements in the text, ignoring all the ways the Bible has been life-enhancing. Neither side assesses the whole range of biblical evidence when considering what it might have to say about any subject. Neither side weighs the implications of the disparity between contemporary concern and ancient witness: Biblicists obsess over the relatively small amount of attention the Bible gives to sex but conveniently ignore (or distort) the abundant testimony it provides with regard to the

What the

statements within that context. By original context, I mean not only the historical and social circumstances addressed by the compositions but, at an even more basic level, the linguistic constraints of the ancient languages of composition, the literary context of statements in their narrative or discursive settings, and the conventions of ancient rhetoric and poetics. As a result, metaphors are literalized (and killed), argument is ignored, and the subtleties of ancient narrative techniques are missed entirely.

In short, neither those today who are dismissive of the Bible as intellectually serious while fearful of it as religiously toxic, nor those today who embrace the Bible as religiously true and morally uplifting, are actually serious readers of the Bible. They resemble lovers and despisers is lacking in the conversation is a sense of “taking of Shakespeare who quote lines at random, Bible seriously” that has any real intellectual rigor. completely removed from Elizabethan culuse of material possessions; intellectual critics, oddly, ture and literary conventions, to show how the Bard share the same obsessive attention to the issues of sexu- is either good or bad as an influence on culture today. ality. Neither side ponders the even more interesting What is lacking in the conversation is a sense of “takfact that the Bible does not directly address many of ing the Bible seriously” that has any real intellectual the questions that readers would like to put to it. rigor.

Corresponding to the narrow understanding of Because the extreme positions are so sharply and truth, finally, both sides share a manner of reading that shrilly stated, they draw attention to themselves and might be termed primitively and resolutely literalis- (much to the delight of the ideologues advancing tic: the text is read in its English translation as a set them) manage to appear as the only available options. of propositions or declarations; little or no attention But they are not. In fact, there has been a long trais given to the original context or to the function of dition of intellectually rigorous reading of the Bible within Christianity, a tradition that long predates

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the phenomenon of fundamentalism (which is actually a reaction to modernism defined by the terms of modernism). It extends from Origen of Alexandria in the third century to Rudolf Bultmann in the twentieth century and embraces such figures as Augustine, Theodore of Mospuestia, John Chrysostom, Thomas Aquinas, Erasmus, Luther, and Calvin. It continues today especially in schools of theology, where the highest standards of critical thinking and the deepest loyalty to the voice of Scripture are not thought to be incompat-

that, especially when read so rigorously, the Bible continues to enhance more than hurt the minds and hearts of readers. In contrast to both the extremes, this tradition of reading is above all a tradition of serious and sustained reading, and it is precisely in the seriousness of that endeavor that it “takes the Bible seriously.”

The first great figure in this tradition exemplifies its characteristics. Origen of Alexandria (184-254) was raised as a Christian during a time of persecution (his father was a martyr and he himself died as a result of

In contrast to both the extremes, this tradition of reading is above all a tradition of serious and sustained reading, and it is precisely in the seriousness of that endeavor that it “takes the Bible seriously.” ible but rather mutually dependent.

This ancient and continuing tradition is distinguished from Christianity’s cultured despisers by its positive embrace of Scripture as authoritative, but it shares with the intellectual critics the conviction that the Bible requires as rigorous an intellectual examination as any other cultural claimant. It is distinguished from fundamentalism by its willingness to read all the Bible’s texts with intellectual honesty and appreciation for context, but it shares with Biblicists the conviction

Medieval illustration of Origen from a book of homilies, circa 1160

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torture) in the most intellectually alive and culturally diverse city of antiquity. Alexandria, with its great library and museum, was the home of philosophers, scientists, mathematicians, and artists. The several schools of ancient philosophy competed for attention and allegiance. In addition to the still-thriving forms of Greco-Roman religion, Alexandria was home to a large Jewish community, which produced the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible in 250 B.C. and an extensive apologetic literature based on that translation, as well as several competing versions of Christianity, including the Valentinian Gnostics.

Origen grew up with the best available education in philosophy and rhetoric, and his writings show wide reading and first-hand knowledge of the writings of philosophers such as Plato. Origen’s fierce devotion to his Christian faith was joined to a first-rate mind that was also remarkably fearless and open to the truth, however it might make itself known. He once declared that it mattered little whether a truth was spoken by Jesus or the apostles or Moses or one of the philosophers; if it was true, it was true, no matter its source.

As a teacher in the Catechetical School at Alexandria, Origen found himself in the middle of competing currents that are not entirely dissimilar to those swirling around present-day Christianity. Within the Alexandrian church, there was a sharp division between the intellectual sophistication of the Gnostics, who despised simple believers and sought higher truths for the enlightened, and those simple believers who clung to a literalism that led them to believe things of God, Origen saw, that they would not have attributed even to a wicked human being. Outside the Christian community, Origen felt the still-vibrant tug of Judaism and Greco-Roman religion, the appeal from each still strong and more convincing than the claims of the upstart and already divided Christian movement. Most challenging was the attack on Christianity

Alexander the Great founding Alexandria, Egypt in 332 B.C.

by a leading intellectual, the philosopher Celsus, who shortly before Origen’s birth wrote a sustained polemic called The True Word against a sect that he saw as intellectually inferior, superstitious, and attractive mainly to the dregs of society who didn’t know better. Sound familiar?

The greatest portion of Origen’s astonishing literary output has been lost. However, what remains, above all his apology, Against Celsus, and his First Principles (the

areas. From this starting point, Origen developed one of the most adventurous and intellectually ambitious visions of how the interplay of human freedom and God’s goodness might interact with the origin and destiny of souls to bring about a final triumph over evil and the restoration of all things in God. Origen’s influence is most powerful, however, on those who have sought to bring both faith and intelligence to the reading of the Bible, for no interpreter has ever exhibited both qualities so emphatically or dialectically. On one side, Origen was convinced not only that the Bible was divinely inspired, but that God spoke to humans through these texts in the present as well as in the past. On the other side, he saw the actual texts of the Bible as far from perspicuous. As human compositions of the past, they present complex difficulties to the one trying to discern in them what God wanted to say. The task of reading is therefore impelled by faith but also demands of the reader every critical skill available. The urgency of reading is connected to the desire to attend to what God speaks; the need to read critically is connected to the specific difficulties presented to specific texts. What makes Origen the model for all faithful biblical interpretation is his refusal ever to take the easy way out, his insistence on reading the texts as they were in all their difficulty and ambiguity in order to ferret out the meaning that God may have intended.

Origen himself displayed a formidable array of critical abilities. He brought to the text of the Old

The urgency of reading is connected to the desire to attend to what God speaks; the need to read critically is connected to the specific difficulties presented to specific texts. pioneering effort at Christian theology that contains his explicit hermeneutical reflections), and a number of smaller treatises and sermons, are enough to show how fruitful was his distinctive combination of heart and mind. A steadfast commitment to the faith of the church (including the conviction that Scripture was divinely inspired) and an equally strong commitment to the most stringent sort of critical thought turned precisely on that faith and that Scripture. With regard to the faith, for example, Origen affirmed the shape of the creed that came from the apostles. But he saw that the creed left much undefined and that the role of philosophical inquiry was to examine and extend those

Testament the science of text-criticism learned from the interpreters of Homer in order to establish as closely as possible the original text. All subsequent text-criticism of the Old and New Testament simply elaborates and refines the steps first taken by Origen. He practiced a form of literary criticism that demonstrated in great detail, for example, the differences between the Gospel accounts concerning Jesus. He displayed an acute linguistic sensitivity; page after page of his commentary on the Gospel of John is devoted to a consideration of the multiple meanings available for the phrase with which John begins, namely, “in the beginning.” Origen is remarkably modern in his appreciation for the limits

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of historical knowledge; indeed, he comes close to a post-modern position in his insistence that what really counts is not “what happened” but “what is written” in Scripture: it is the text that is the subject of inquiry and God’s instrument for transforming readers. Origen regarded a quest for the actual events behind the texts as fruitless and foolish.

Above all, Origen brought a critical perspective to the religious and moral adequacy of the biblical compositions. Schooled both by the moral sensitivity of Greco-Roman philosophy and the religious perspective given by developed Jewish interpretation of the Bible as a whole—not to mention his immersion in the Gospels and letters of Paul—Origen saw clearly that, when taken literally, the Bible makes statements that are impossible, improbable, and morally objectionable. An important aspect of his serious reading of the Bible, then, was working through such textual aporiae, seeking to discover the wisdom that God might have hidden within the scandal of the all-too-human text. Origen’s development of anagogical (“transposed”) readings was a function of the seriousness with which he took the task of reading; if the literal sense of the text was historical, cosmological, moral, or religious nonsense, then the text must be made to yield a meaning consonant with the nature of the God who seeks the salvation, not the destruction, of the human soul. The point of reading for Origen was not information but transformation, a process that required of the reader an intellectual and moral effort consistent with the urgency of engaging the word of the living God. Not all of Origen’s successors have had his great learning, his acute intelligence, his moral integrity, or his clear conception of the interpretive task. But there has been within Christianity from Origen’s time to our own a continuous tradition of readers who have shared his loyalty to the faith and his willingness to engage it critically. I have already mentioned names that would appear on any “hit-parade” of great theological interpreters, but it is important to recognize that their practice was not exceptional so much as illustrative.

They stood within a deep and broad stream of critical interpretation that both affirmed the power of the Bible and recognized its potential for harm as well as for good. Such readers have understood that neither a simplistic affirmation nor a simplistic rejection of the Bible is intellectually responsible and that only a vigorous and critical engagement with the specific language of the ancient compositions in all their specificity will enable readers to resist what was (and remains) toxic within them, as well as celebrate what was (and remains) positively transforming in them.

It is a great pity that the skills and insights of this reading tradition are so little known or appreciated

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by those whose shrill voices dominate contemporary polemics. Who is to blame? Those who practice these skills today may be criticized for restricting their efforts mostly to the safe world of the academy, leaving public discourse on such matters to the charlatans who are all too willing to parody true scholarship in their “shocking” publications. Even more deserving of criticism, though, are the Christians who claim to revere the Bible yet have waged war against the use of critical intelligence in the interpretation of the Bible, fearfully and ferociously purging seminary faculties and pulpits alike of anything that looks suspiciously like brilliance or imagination. Their insistence on reading the Bible

Neither a simplistic affirmation nor a simplistic rejection of the Bible is intellectually responsible. as though it were as transparent as a daily newspaper is a form of childishness; their willful ignoring of the long history of faithful readers who struggled with the intellectual and moral challenges of Scripture before them reveals a desperate religious immaturity.

Most depressing, perhaps, is the abysmal ignorance of religion generally, of Christianity specifically, and of the Bible monumentally, exhibited by the noisy contemporary critics of all three. Present-day members of the cultured elite are remarkable for the superficiality of their knowledge of religious wisdom in any form. At least the ancient critic Celsus made the effort to know something about what he criticized and wrote from a coherent philosophical perspective. In terms of genuine learning, rigorous argument, and moral passion, both Celsus and Origen make present-day disputants on the Bible appear as mere children whose moral obtuseness, sadly, is matched by ignorance.

Dr. Luke Timothy Johnson is the R. W. Woodruff Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Candler School of Theology at Emory University and a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at the university. He is known for his critique of the Jesus Seminar and its stances on the “historical Jesus” and has debated its members on several occasions. He is the author of numerous volumes of biblical commentary, as well as a well-known speaker and lecturer. Dr. Johnson received his BA from Notre Dame Seminary, an MA from Indiana University, and a PhD from Yale. He also holds a Masters in Divinity from the Saint Meinrad School of Theology.

Science & Orthodoxy: The Faith of

Galileo & Kepler

by Grace Nauman

C

ontributors to The Dartmouth Apologia have frequently examined the relationship between faith and science; in particular they have explored what is known as the conflict thesis, the idea that science and religion are inherently at odds.

One major way the Apologia has approached this issue has been by looking at historical scientists and the ease with which they balanced their faith and their scientific inquiry.1 Nancy Frankenberry questions the validity of such an approach, however, in the introduction to her new book, The Faith of Scientists. Although she emphasizes “how seamlessly the historical titans of the scientific revolution – Galileo, Kepler, Bacon, Pascal, and Newton… could interrelate their Christian faith and their scientific discoveries,”2 she also argues that it “will strike even the casual reader” that “pockets of perplexity, elements of eccentricity, and unconventional forms within conventional Christian faith stand out.”3 She suggests that though scientific figures such as Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler may have been devout believers, they may not have been “conventionally Christian.”4 Frankenberry’s assertion, if true, could challenge much of the past work published in the Apologia on this subject. If these scientists were not “conventionally” Christian, not orthodox in their beliefs, can the Apologia’s writers use them as evidence

Oil painting of Johannes Kepler, circa 1610

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for the compatibility of religion and science? If these great scientists were not orthodox Christians, does that challenge the journal’s thesis that the claims of science and faith are reconcilable?

Surely Frankenberry’s assertion would not contradict the Apologia’s argument entirely, since much of it is based on the separate goals of the two intellectual endeavors. Science empirically examines the world’s physical properties, while religion addresses questions of meaning, morality, and teleology. It is widely held that the jurisdictions of these two fields do not overlap and that one cannot say anything useful about the other. Frankenberry, paraphrasing Stephen Jay Gould, puts it this way: “Scientific truth and religious faith do not belong to the same dimension of meaning, so science has no right or power to pronounce on faith, and faith no right to interfere with science.”5 She points out that this “view of science and religion… has almost become the default position in the current cultural debates”6 and that this distinction has been recognized since before Galileo’s time. In other words, both sides of the debate conventionally agree that religion and science address completely different spheres of information.

Since the two do not overlap, there is no reason why a scientist cannot believe that Christianity holds the answers to the questions science cannot satisfactorily address. However, Frankenberry’s observation could still challenge the idea that science and Christianity are compatible. Even if it were theoretically possible

Portrait of Galileo Galilei by Justus Suttermans circa 1636

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to be both a scientist and an orthodox Christian, it would be hard to argue that science and orthodoxy are particularly compatible if few people ever found combining the two to be intellectually satisfying. Indeed, Frankenberry almost suggests that scientific genius goes along with religious eccentricity. What if true

Even at his most controversial and “eccentric,” Galileo’s beliefs and practices were compatible with basic Christian orthodoxy. scientific advancement is incompatible with orthodox Christian faith? Fortunately, further examination of Frankenberry’s examples indicates that many “historical titans of the scientific revolution” were much more conventional and orthodox in their beliefs than she implies.

Of course, all of this depends on our definition of conventional and orthodox faith. The definition that the Apologia has used since its inception and that has been recognized by many Christians throughout time is assent to the propositions outlined in either the Apostle’s Creed or the Nicene Creed, which is found on the last page of this journal. Frankenberry appears to use a much narrower definition, seeming to view “convention” as compliance with the specific doctrine of the specific denomination with which the particular scientist was associated. This is an appropriate methodology to her purpose, which is interested in teasing out exactly what each scientist believed from an outsider’s perspective, but it is an unhelpful approach for determining whether or not the scientists found orthodox Christianity to be compatible with their scientific pursuits. Using the broader definition of orthodoxy recognized by this journal reveals that many of Frankenberry’s examples of “unconventional forms” of Christianity were actually quite conventional.

For instance, although Galileo’s approach to theology sometimes conflicted with the proscriptions of the Catholic Church, his beliefs were quite compatible with orthodox conventions. Galileo mainly conflicted with the Catholic Church over who had the authority to engage in biblical hermeneutics. In the Catholic tradition, only the Church Fathers had the authority to interpret scripture, so conflict arose when Galileo personally began interpreting Scripture in light of his scientific discoveries. Although Galileo’s attempts to reinterpret Scripture himself were not compatible with contemporary Catholicism, Galileo’s belief that, as Frankenberry explains, “the Bible was intentionally simplified by the Church so that lay people could

Accommodation, that it was acceptable for “scientific truths … [to] help guide biblical exegesis,”11 since the Bible was not written merely for a scientific audience. If Galileo’s efforts to engage in biblical hermeneutics himself did not fit into the conventional Catholic paradigm of his time, his willingness to let science inform scriptural interpretation did.

Galileo’s engagement in hermeneutics conflicted with the Catholic tradition, but at the time the individual’s authority to interpret the Bible for him or herself was a question that divided Christianity. Indeed, it was one of the most divisive issues of the Reformation.

Since the most traditional statements of orthodoxy like the Apostle’s Creed and the Nicene Creed do not address this issue, no final answer has been reached, and Protestants and Catholics have ultimately agreed to disagree.12 However, Galileo’s attempts at indiJoshua halts the sun access its meaning”7 was a conventional Catholic doc- vidual interpretation of the Bible are compatible with and moon through trine even in Galileo’s time. The idea she describes, that conventional Protestant orthodoxy and so can hardly prayer during a be described as outstanding “elements of eccentricity.” battle against the the Bible is written in simplified and sometimes even Amorites allegorical terms to be generally comprehensible, is Though it may have been unconventional in Galileo’s called the doctrine of Accommodation. This belief had particular religious climate, the ability of the individubeen established doctrine since the time of Augustine.8 al to interpret Scripture is an orthodox belief in much For Galileo, the doctrine of Accommodation meant of Christianity. Even at his most controversial and “ecthat scientific understanding could be used to inform centric,” Galileo’s beliefs and practices were compatible one’s understanding of scriptural passages, which ex- with basic Christian orthodoxy. plained the fact that there were passages in the Bible Frankenberry’s second example of an eccentric bethat seemed to contradict the heliocentric model of the liever is Johannes Kepler. Indeed, Kepler was considuniverse. The most famous example of this is Joshua ered a heretic in his lifetime, largely because his under10:12, where Joshua asks God to make the sun “stand standing of the presence of God during the Eucharist still over Gibeon,”9 suggesting a sun that orbits the earth conflicted with that of contemporary Lutheran theology;13 accordIt was Keplar’s study of the Gospels and traditional ing to Maximilian this was Christianity that prevented him from accepting the Lanzinner, the only part of doctrines espoused by the contemporary Lutheran Church. Lutheran orthodoxy that “Kepler and that, some said, must be part of a geocentric solar could not accept in good conscience.”14 Although system. According to the doctrine of Accommodation, Frankenberry claims that Kepler’s beliefs about the this was not a problem, because a Bible written to be Eucharist “fell through the widening cracks” of oraccessible to all would not necessarily have to be con- thodoxy,15 other scholars present a very different sistent with the astronomical discoveries of the distant perspective. future. Galileo firmly believed that truth was revealed Kepler was in conflict with the Lutheran church both in the Holy Scriptures and through science, and specifically because he refused to accept the doctrine that, in Frankenberry’s own words, “neither one can of the ubiquity of Christ, that is, the omnipresence of ever be fundamentally in conflict with the other.”10 Christ’s body, which was central to the contemporary He also believed, in accordance with the doctrine of Lutheran understanding of communion. According

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to Max Caspar, Kepler’s most definitive biographer, Martin Luther created this doctrine when he broke from the Catholic Church. Although Luther “repudiated Mass and rejected transubstantiation,” the actual “sacramental permeation” of the bread “by the substance of the body of Christ,” he still wished to allow for the substantial presence of Christ in Communion.16 Luther did not believe that the bread became the body of Christ during the Eucharist service, but he still wished to provide a doctrinal way for the bread to be Christ’s actual body. Kepler’s studies of the Bible led him to the conclusion that, as Caspar explains, “this remarkable doctrine of ubiquity” is “untenable on the grounds of the traditional Christology” because it required Christ to be physically present everywhere at all times, a seeming impossibility for a Christ who was still fully human.17 According to Lanzinner, “in [Kepler’s] understanding of the wording of the Gospel, the body of Christ was in Heaven—at the right hand of God.”18 If Christ was fully human, his body could not be in more than one place at once, and the Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation was wrong.

Studying the Church Fathers and other Christian writers confirmed Kepler’s rejection of the doctrine of ubiquity. He was especially affected by the discovery that the doctrine of ubiquity was never held by the Church Fathers or in any other branch of Christianity, that “our aforementioned conflict was something new.”19 The doctrine was unconventional as well as unbiblical. Here we see that it was not Kepler’s religious eccentricity but rather his study of the Gospels and traditional Christianity that prevented him from accepting the doctrines espoused by the contemporary Lutheran Church. Indeed, later Lutheran theologians would come to agree with Kepler—the doctrine of ubiquity was soon dropped.20 This explanation presents not a Kepler of novel spirituality, but rather a Kepler who held fast to orthodox beliefs in the face of a Lutheran church that proscribed doctrines “untenable on the grounds of traditional Christology.” Indeed, it appears that it was not Kepler, but rather sixteenthcentury Lutheran theology, that was “eccentric.”

We see that it is still safe to say that some of the most celebrated scientists of all time found orthodox Christianity to be a satisfying worldview that complimented, rather than hindered, their scientific endeavors. Galileo and Kepler join the ranks of many other important scientists who found the orthodox Christian faith to compatible with their scientific work, which stretches from Michael Faraday to Georges Cuvier to Francis Collins. Each of these men and women illustrates that the Christian faith can go alongside scientific endeavor not only hypothetically and theoretically, but also practically and personally. This by itself is not

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a compelling argument for or against Christianity; the fact that a few celebrated individuals believed a certain thing does not make it true. However, each of these men and women is a case study refuting the sometimes-popular perception that science and religion are insurmountably incompatible. Each provides another data point suggesting that science and faith are not natural enemies.

See Andrew Schuman and Robert Cousins, “Galileo Revisited: Part I: From Copernicus to the Inquisition,” The Dartmouth Apologia 1.1 (2007): 8-10; Peter Blair “The Naturalist Dilemma and Why Christianity Supports a Better Science,” The Dartmouth Apologia 3.1 (2009) 6-9.

2 Nancy Frankenberry, ed., The Faith of Scientists in Their Own Words (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008) ix.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid. xiv.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid.

8 Schuman and Cousins 10.

9 Joshua 10:12.

10 Frankenberry 4.

11 Ibid. 5.

12 David B. Wilson, “Galileo’s Religion Versus the Church’s Science? Rethinking the History of Science and Religion,” Physics in Perspective 1 (1999): 65-84, 68.

13 Frankenberry 38.

14 Maximilian Lanzinner, “Johannes Kepler: A Man Without Confession in the Age of Confessionalization?” Central European History 36.4 (2003): 531-45, 535.

15 Frankberry ix.

16 Max Caspar, Kepler (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc, 1993), 25-26.

17 Ibid.

18 Lanzinner 537.

19 Kepler, qtd. in Caspar 49.

20 Caspar, 25-26.

1

Grace Nauman ’11 is from Lebanon, Oregon. She is a Molecular Biology Major and an English Minor.

Quantum Mechanics and

Divine Action

by Emily DeBaun

by Jennifer Freise

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oes God act in the physical world? If so, how? An atheist might say that if science can explain an event, God is not a necessary explanation for that event’s occurrence, and therefore God neither acts in the physical world nor exists. On the opposite end of the spectrum, a Christian might say that if God is supernatural, he can operate outside of physical means, and therefore his actions in the world will necessarily violate physical laws. The philosophical implications of quantum physics, however, give a different perspective. Quantum mechanics allows for a type of divine action that does not violate the laws of physics and yet accords with scriptural accounts of God’s providence and miracles.

This article concerns itself with how God operates within the laws of nature, or, as Robert Russell refers to it, “noninterventionist divine action.”1 This piece does not seek to prove definitively that such action occurs or that it is the only way in which God operates; rather, it shows that scientifically speaking, the door is open for its possibility. Furthermore, this possibility can be supported by biblical theology. To demonstrate how quantum mechanics makes noninterventionist divine action possible, we begin with the way in which classical physics rules out its possibility.

Classical physics, generally speaking, refers to physics formulated prior to the development of theories about relativity and quantum mechanics. It includes the work of Newton, Kepler, and Galileo, among others. Classical mechanics is founded upon several fundamental principles. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy identifies these as “the principle of space and time, the principle of causality, the principle of determination, the principle of continuity, and the principle of conservation of energy.”2 Essentially, classical events occur in space and time; the state of a classical system flows continuously from previous states through a chain of causes governed by conservation of energy. Classical physics poses a problem for noninterventionist divine action because it is by nature deterministic. If a system’s state is entirely controlled by previous states and a future state can be precisely predicted based on the forces that influence the current system, then the operation of the physical world is simply a giant, deterministic causal chain.3 In such a system, God could act in a way to alter forces or change patterns of causation, but he would necessarily violate physical laws in tampering with the classical causal chain. This would constitute divine action, but not noninterventionist divine action. The

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The Wedding at Cana

by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, painted c. 1820, depicting Jesus turning water into wine

deterministic nature of classical physics supports the notion that God is not a necessary explanation for the occurrence of physical events. Quantum mechanics, however, paints a strikingly different picture.

Today, quantum mechanics centers on the notion of a wave function, a mathematical formulation relating the time and position of an object. This wave function must satisfy Schrodinger’s Equation, a differential equation regulating the evolution of the system in time. These mathematical formulations constrain the system; different observable quantities can only take on certain discrete (or quantized) values. The general interpretation of the wave function itself is that it can be used to determine the probability of a particle existing in a certain state. Essentially, the mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics shows the possibilities and probabilities for a particular quantum state but fails to predict, in the deterministic way typical of classical physics, what a scientist will measure if he or she attempts to extract information from the system.4 This limitation suggests a strange relationship between a quantum system and its observer. According to the widely accepted Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, a system is in an indeterminate state comprised of a superposition of all possible states until a measurement is made upon it, at which point the wave function is “collapsed,” and the system

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is forced to take on the measured value.5 A common thought experiment to describe this is “Schrodinger’s Cat.” If a cat is placed in a closed box with a quantum device that has a fifty percent chance of releasing cyanide to kill the cat, the cat will be in a strange, superimposed state of both life and death until the box is opened. When the system is plainly observed, the cat is forced to be either dead or alive, as the wave function is collapsed and the system takes on one of the two possibilities.6 Generally, a quantum system is indeterminate until a measurement is taken, at which point the system takes on the measured value, which is one of several possibilities whose probabilities are determined using the wave function.7 This fundamental indeterminacy at the root of quantum events is scientifically inexplicable. Though the possibilities and probabilities of quantum events can be determined, the choice of which possibility occurs appears to be entirely random. This makes noninterventionist divine action possible. According to Nicholas Saunders, there are four potential ways in which God could intervene in this situation. The first possibility is that God “alters the wave function between measurements” by adding new possibilities to the superposition of potential outcomes. Saunders rejects this explanation on the grounds that for God to introduce new possibilities would be interventionist

because between measurements, Schrodinger’s Equation deterministically dictates the progress of the possibilities of the system.8 Saunders next mentions the idea that God could himself “make measurements on a quantum system”; this notion is also dismissed as interventionist because it would require God to somehow set up the physical experiment and laboratory in the first place.9 A third possibility is that God changes the probability of different event outcomes. Saunders, again, calls this interventionist because to alter the probabilities would require changes to be made to the wave function.10 The final possibility holds the most promise: God may simply “determine the outcome of a measurement,” choosing which possibility is manifested out of those given in the superposition prior to measurement.11 This is a reasonable proposition, since for God to choose the outcome of a measurement would not require him to violate any law of physics, but rather to determine a path from among several natural possibilities. Philosopher Nancey Murphy supports this idea, stating that the timing of a quantum event cannot be “internally or externally determined” without “sufficient reason to act.”12 This means that a quantum event will not occur for no reason; there must be a way to distinguish between possibilities in order to give an event a “sufficient reason” to choose one possibility over another. She concludes that if quantum processes are either entirely random or divinely determined, only divine action could provide sufficient reason for the event to occur. This is because God could externally evaluate and select one of the possibilities, while a random process would have no “reason” to choose one possibility over another and therefore would be incapable of acting.13 Robert Russell also endorses the idea that God determines the result of measurements taken in quan-

that the quantum event is “ontologically indeterminate.”15 From all of this he concludes that it is possible for God to uphold quantum processes through “direct, noninterventionist action.”16 Saunders argues against the idea of God determining the outcome of a quantum measurement, but not on the grounds that it is interventionist. Rather, he claims that for God to “ignore the probabilities predicted” and to “control” what happens is to say that the probabilities we obtain from experiment determine, rather than confirm, the probabilities predicted by the wave function.17 Saunders writes, “…the probability laws simply reform around whatever actual measurement results have been obtained… this approach is characterized by an assertion that individual events are ontologically superior to laws.”18 This rejection, however, is a rather unfair evaluation of the fourth quantum possibility for noninterventionist divine action. As Thomas Tracy writes in his review of Saunders’ book, A theologian interested in noninterventionist special divine action will not say that God ignores the probability distributions predicted by quantum theory. Rather, the thesis would be that God might act in the world by determining quantum events within the ordinary probability patterns, which do, after all, permit wide variation in particular outcomes from instance to instance.19

It seems Saunders overlooks an important premise of statistics; though certain outcomes have low probabilities, they are still possible. According to statistics, the “law of averages” does not exist, meaning the aggregation of numerous event outcomes does not have to match the predicted probability density, though it will most likely come close. God would not be required to “ignore” probabilities but could choose freely within the possibilities without violating or invalidating probability distributions offered by the wave function. He

If quantum processes are either entirely random or divinely determined, only divine action could provide sufficient reason for the event to occur. tum systems. He defines measurements as “irreversible interactions” with a quantum system that render the Schrodinger Equation incapable of describing the system.14 Russell explains that when no measurement is being taken, the Schrodinger Equation gives the “formal cause,” or arrangement, of the system, and the potential energy provides the “efficient cause,” or source, of the evolution of the system. During a measurement, the equation is no longer relevant, so Russell concludes that there are indeed “material causes,” or physical means by which the measurement is taken, but there are not “efficient causes” of the interaction. From this, he concludes, as does the Copenhagen interpretation,

could do this in a way that is purposeful, even if it appears random to scientists. For these reasons, Saunders’ critique of noninterventionist divine action at the level of the quantum event measurement is unsuccessful.

This idea that God chooses the outcome of the measurement falls within a “bottom to top” description of how God can interact with the world without violating laws of nature. By altering fundamental quantum events, he is also able to control the macroscopic events they give rise to without breaking the laws of physics.20 Both Russell21 and Murphy support this concept.

Murphy goes so far as to say that “top to bottom” models of divine action, where a person experiences God’s

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intervention in a macroscopic way or in the form of He cites Psalm 104:14, “You cause the grass to grow direct revelation, can also be explained by this “bottom for the livestock and plants for man to cultivate.”27 to top” notion. For example, a sudden spiritual real- Here it is clearly seen that God often provides for man ization or remembrance which a person experiences through natural processes, such as feeding him by could be a product of a manipulation on the quan- causing food to grow. In the “preservation” component tum mechanical level that impacts neurons that affect of God’s providence, Grudem cites Hebrews 1:3, “he brain function and therefore meaning perceived by the upholds the universe by the word of his power,”28 and mind. She uses this as an explanatory tool for religious Nehemiah 9:6, “You have made… earth and all that experience and thus extends quantum-level divine ac- is on it, the seas and all that is in them; and you pretion to human experience and everyday events.22 serve all of them.”29 Again, God is seen as preserving Some may argue that this quantum possibility for and providing for his creation in an intimately physical divine action is a “God of the gaps” argument, that way. One means by which God manifests his power is is to say, an argument where divine action is used to through natural processes. explain unknown gaps The idea of miracles as in a physical process Scripture teaches that such “an exception to a natural that one day will be law” may cause Christians to filled in by a scientific divine direction can happen question the idea of noninexplanation.

Russell terventionist divine action.30 through natural causes. distinguishes strongly Nancey Murphy addresses between his argument for divine action in quantum this issue, writing, “I prefer not to use the term ‘mirmechanics and “God in the gaps.”23 He writes, acle’ because it is now so closely associated with the idea of a violation of the laws of nature. I believe it An epistemic gaps argument is based on what could be shown that the primary reason for current you don’t know. It invokes God to explain things rejection of miracles, in fact, has been this very defithat we don’t yet understand but that science will nition.”31 Murphy contends for a notion of the “mieventually explain. Our approach is based upon raculous” that includes incredible occurrences that do what we do know about nature, assuming that not violate nature. Noninterventionist divine action in quantum physics is the correct theory and that quantum mechanics producing awe-inspiring macroit can be interpreted philosophically as telling us that nature is ontologically indeterministic.24 scopic results could, indeed, be explained by natural 32 Russell refutes this accusation by emphasizing that his causes. However, the occurrence of such an unlikely approach is an interpretation of known information, event, influenced by divine action, places it in “mirarather than a postulation about a gap in knowledge. cle” category.

Grudem also endorses the classification of such an Since the Copenhagen interpretation is widely acoccurrence as a miracle. He defines a miracle as “a less cepted, and it states that quantum systems are “ontocommon kind of God’s activity in which he arouses logically indeterministic,” Russell can argue that the people’s awe and wonder and bears witness to himquestion of how the wave function collapse “chooses” a 33 particular measured value is not one that can or will be self.” Grudem defends this definition by pointing to solved scientifically, and it can therefore be approached three biblical words associated with God’s “less comphilosophically.25 Additionally, all these claims about mon activity”—“signs,” “wonders,” and “miracles” or divine action in quantum mechanics are not attempt- “mighty works.” Grudem says “signs,” biblically, are that draw attention to “God’s activity or powing to be “proofs” for God, but rather, to show the things 34 er.”

In referring to Jesus’ transformation of water into plausibility of a higher power’s influence over such wine, John 2:11 supports this definition: “This, the first circumstances. did at Cana in Galilee, and maniHaving established that quantum mechanics pro- of his signs, Jesus 35 fested his glory.”

Here, a sign is directly linked to the vides an opportunity for God to noninterventionally “manifestation” of Christ’s “glory”; God’s “activity” and act in the world, we proceed to a few scriptural ex“power” are manifested in Christ’s action. Grudem says amples to support how the Christian can accept non36 “wonders” are awe-inspiring acts; this is supported by interventionist divine action as one aspect of the way Exodus 15:11, which says, “Who is like you, O LORD, God works. The first such example is described by Wayne Grudem in his Systematic Theology as the “con- among the gods? Who is like you, majestic in holiness, 37 currence” component of God’s providence. Grudem awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders?” Here, defines concurrence as God’s “cooperation with” and God’s ability to perform “wonders” elicits the speaker’s “direction of ” creation.26 Scripture teaches that such awe and praise as he remarks on God’s uniqueness divine direction can happen through natural causes. in power and “deed.” Finally, “miracles,” or “mighty

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works” are occurrences displaying “divine power.”38 This use of “miracles” is seen in 1 Chronicles 16:11-12, “Seek the LORD and his strength; seek his presence continually! Remember the wondrous works that he has done, his miracles and the judgments he uttered.”39 Here, God’s “wondrous works” and “miracles” are, indeed, associated with his power (“strength”) and his intercession (“presence”). These biblically informed definitions of “signs,” “wonders,” and “miracles” certainly do not exclude events with natural explanations.

Rather, any unusually amazing action performed by God that elicits praise or awe or thanksgiving towards God may be considered a miracle.40 Grudem says the idea of miracles as only events that violate physical laws is insufficient because it does not require God as the causer of the event, limits the extent to which God can intervene in the physical world, and reduces attention to many “actual miracles” leading to an “increase in skepticism.”41 In general, miracles, biblically defined, do not require a violation of physical laws, so Christians can view noninterventionist divine action as one potential cause of miracles.

The ontological indeterminism that the Copenhagen interpretation ascribes to measurements taken on quantum mechanical systems allows for divine action that does not violate the laws of nature. It provides the opportunity for God to intervene in the physical world and combats the idea that a scientifically explained process can have no supernatural influence. At the same time, this noninterventionist divine action accords with biblical notions of God’s providence and miracles. In essence, the indeterminism at the root of quantum mechanics, the most fundamental description of the physical world, reveals to both nonChristians and believers how God could intimately influence, without being bound or proved false by, the laws of nature.

Ibid. 151-52.

Ibid. 152-53.

11 Ibid. 156.

12 Nancey Murphy, “Divine Action in the Natural Order,” Philosophy, Science, and Divine Action, ed. F. LeRon Shults, Nancey Murphy, and Robert J. Russell (Boston: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2009) 283.

Russell 369.

13 Ibid.

14 Russell 369.

15 Ibid. 371-72.

16 Ibid. 374-75.

17 Saunders 154-55.

18 Ibid.

19 Thomas Tracy, “Divine Action and Modern Science (review),” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, <http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=1319>.

20 Murphy 285-86.

21 Russell 360-62.

22 Murphy 293- 94.

23 Russell 354.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid.

26 Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology (Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 2001) 317.

27 Psalm 104:14.

28 Hebrews 1:3.

29 Nehemiah 9:6.

30 Grudem 356.

31 Murphy 271.

32 Ibid.

33 Grudem 355.

34 Ibid. 356.

35 John 2:11.

36 Grudem 356.

37 Exodus 15:11.

38 Grudem 356.

39 1 Chronicles 16:11-12.

40 Grudem 358.

41 Ibid. 356.

9

10

Robert Russell, “Divine Action and Quantum Mechanics,” Philosophy, Science, and Divine Action, ed. F. LeRon Shults, Nancey Murphy, and Robert J. Russell (Boston: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2009) 354.

2 “Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-copenhagen/>.

3 Ibid.

4 David J. Griffiths, Introduction to Quantum Mechanics (Prentice Hall, 2004) 1-5.

5 Ibid. 3-5.

6 Paul Davies, God and the New Physics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983) 114.

7 Nicholas Saunders, Divine Action and Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 142.

8 Ibid. 149-50.

1

Emily DeBaun ‘12 is from Sandown, New Hampshire.

She is a Physics and English double major.

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A Proof for the Existence of God

by Peter Blair

F

or many people today, the classical Christian claim that God’s existence can be proven through the exercise of reason is odd, if not absurd. Nevertheless, within the rich Christian intellectual tradition, there are several arguments that have been offered for God’s existence. Probably the most famous type of these arguments is all of the varied proofs that fall under the heading of “the cosmological argument.” The general form of the cosmological argument usually starts with some fact about the world, whether it be that change occurs or that all observable entities are contingent (that is, dependent) upon something else. From this kind of fact, the argument proceeds to conclude that, since every cause or every dependent entity relies on a further cause or further entity, there must exist a non-caused cause or a non-dependent entity which causes everything else or on which everything else is dependent.

There are an extraordinarily large number of versions of the cosmological argument, starting with the arguments of Plato and Aristotle and continuing up

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to today, but the First Way of Thomas Aquinas stands out as the classic, albeit poorly understood, example.1 In his Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas offers what he calls his “five ways,” which are five ways he believes God’s existence can be established by rational investigation into the nature of the world. Aquinas’s five ways are merely brief summaries of the arguments; his proofs rest on metaphysical doctrines that are explained and defended in his other works. Consequently, if his five ways are to be understood properly, they need to be read in light of the rest of his work. Today, however, many people have fallen prey to the unfortunate habit of simply reading a short paragraph extracted from the Summa and assuming they can understand his argument perfectly from simply that. This often leads people to think that Aquinas’s First Way is easily refuted.

In reality, when it is presented correctly, Aquinas’s cosmological argument succeeds in proving that God exists.

Aquinas’s First Way starts with an observation of motion in the world. Motion in scholastic terminology

The lights of a city in motion

does not mean only physical motion but every kind of change. Aquinas, therefore, begins with the idea that things in the world change. The concept of change, however, has a particular meaning for Aquinas. In traditional Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics, every material thing possesses both actuality and potentiality.2 Actuality is what a thing is or the properties it has, whereas potentiality is what a thing could be or what properties a thing could have. For example, a young student who hasn’t learned much is in fact not knowledgeable, but he has the potential to become very knowledgeable. However, in order to become so the student would need some kind of outside agent, like a good teacher or a book, aiding him to change his scholarly potential into actual intelligence or knowledge (that is, to actualize his potential). The student could not reach his potential by himself; somebody or something else who or which already possesses knowledge must help him.

This example illustrates the basic Thomistic analysis of change, which is necessary background information for understanding the First Way. Change, Aquinas argued, is simply the raising of some potential to actuality.3 Change occurs when something that is possible or potential for a material thing becomes actual.

However, nothing can make itself actual, for potential “cannot raise itself to act.”4 Rather, something or someone else already in actuality has to act on, with, or for the material thing in question in order to cause

the transformation of the material thing’s potential into actuality. Water has the potential to boil, but heat must first be applied. The digestive tract has the potential to digest food, but first food needs to be eaten.

All change is therefore the transformation of a certain potential to actuality (or act) caused by some external, already actual agent.

With this background, Aquinas’s argument proceeds from a single observation of change in the present world. Take the example of making tea. The tea bag in the boiling water raises the potentiality of the tea to diffuse to actuality, the heat raises the potentiality of the water to boil to actuality, turning on the stove raises the potentiality of the stove to make fire to actuality, etc. Everything that is changed—that becomes actual—is itself changed by something else that, as a combination of actuality and potentiality, was itself raised to actuality by something else. This is true for each individual change that occurs in the world today.

The First Way then makes the standard observation of the cosmological argument, namely that for any one change there could not be an infinite regress of causes.

Something that is changed is changed by something else, which is changed by something else, which is changed by something else, and so on: Every material agent of change was itself changed. This chain of causation cannot, however, go on indefinitely; it must end somewhere. If it did not end, there would be no explanation for how change occurs at all. If everything in the causal chain is itself changed and there was no

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Apotheosis of Saint Thomas Aquinas

by Francisco Zurbaran, c. 1598

first agent of change in the sequence, then no change would be possible. Father Thomas Crean gives a helpful analogy here: There cannot be an indefinite line of intermediary causes with no first cause, just as a nail cannot be knocked into a wall by an unending series of hammers, each knocking against the next. There must be a first hammer wielded by some free agent. There must be a beginning of the line who gives the impulse that is ultimately responsible for the movement of the nail.5

Each agent of change can only change something else because it itself has already been raised to actuality by a prior person or object. Therefore, if there were no first agent of change, then no further change could happen. Each link in the chain derives its causal power from the previous link. Therefore, without a first link none of the rest of the chain could have causal power, because there would be no original actuality to impart its causal power to the rest of the chain.

Here it is necessary to distinguish between two different types of causal series, those Aquinas calls per accidens and per se.6 Per se causal series are, like the example of the hammer and the nails above, causal series in

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which each link in the chain is dependent on the previous link, such that each link could not occur unless the previous one did. This would be true even if the causes happened simultaneously with each other. Each link is totally and essentially dependent on the previous one, so much so that it would cease to have any causal power at all once the previous link was removed.

On the other hand, per accidens series are linear and temporal and contain links which are not essentially dependent on the previous link. For instance, if two parents have a child, the child becomes independent of them when he grows older; his causal powers (to have children himself, for example) are not dependent upon his parents once he has matured. This distinction is important because Aquinas at least theoretically allows that a per accidens series could regress to infinity, since each member of the series has independence from the previous ones. But it would be impossible for a per se series to do so, because “since the lower members of a causal series ordered per se have no causal powers on their own but derive it entirely from a first cause, which (as it were) uses them as instruments, there is no sense to be made of such a series not having a first member.”7 So for every per se series that exists in the

world—and certainly we see many examples of series where each cause needs the previous one—there must be a first agent in that sequence.

It is clear that the first agent in the per se causal sequence must itself be changeless. If it were to change, it would require an explanation or cause of its change outside itself, and the regress would continue until it terminated in something that did not change. There has to be a hammer hitting all of the other hammers, and that hammer must itself not be hit by another hammer. If the first agent is itself changed, it would no longer be first. Saying the first cause is changeless, furthermore, is just another way of saying that it is not a composition of potentiality and actuality; it must be pure act, as least as regards its existence and its causative power.8 For if it was not pure actuality, but rather a combination of potency and act, then something else in act would have had to raise it to act from potency, and then it, again, would no longer be changeless or first.

It is precisely because the first cause must be pure act that nothing material or natural can be the first cause. Everything material that we observe is contingent, which is to say, a combination of potency and act. It changes and dies, and because it might never have existed, its potential for existence (or, more precisely, for example, the egg’s potential to be fertilized) is only actualized by something else external to it. All these considerations make it impossible for anything

of tea) to the first cause. Because every change that happens at every moment—from the first change to the present day—is subject to the same analysis, every single change is traceable to this being of pure act. This means that this unmoved mover is keeping the world in existence at every moment. If it ceased its preserving activity even for a second, the world would collapse into nothingness.10 Second, as the distinction between per accidens and per se shows, this argument does not depend upon any spatio-temporal premises or speculation (unlike, for example, the Kalam cosmological argument). It works even if the universe is eternal, for the same reasons stated above. The argument does not trace back the series of causes to some initial temporal event, like the Big Bang. It traces the series of causes of a particular change that is happening here and now to a changeless first cause.

Third, this argument establishes that there can only be one such ultimate first cause. One common critique of natural theology is that all the various arguments for God’s existence could be pointing toward different beings. However, the first way demonstrates that the being who is the start of all changes must be immaterial and pure actuality and must have necessary existence.

There could not, however, be more than one such being, for there would no way to distinguish between them.11 One can only distinguish between beings when one has some feature or quality that the other

The first cause must be a changeless pure act. Its existence must also be necessary, for if it was contingent, it would, like everything natural, have to be raised to the actuality of existence by something else. in the universe to be the first cause.9 The first cause must be a changeless pure act. Its existence must also be necessary, for if it was contingent, it would, like everything natural, have to be raised to the actuality of existence by something else. Clearly nothing in the universe meets these standards; nothing we observe is either changeless, or pure act, or necessary. There must therefore be some immaterial force or being outside the universe that possesses these qualities. This, Aquinas says, is the being we call God, and his argument clearly affirms that God exists.

There are a few things to note about this argument in order to clarify exactly how it works and what it proves. First, the primary cause established by the conclusion is not simply some force that set the universe into being at the start of time and then stepped back to let it develop as it would. Instead, the causative agent of Aquinas’s first way is a sustaining cause. The first way proceeds from a single change (such as the making

lacks. Since there could be no distinguishing physical features between immaterial beings, the only possible differentiating factor would involve some power or goodness or perfection that one of the “gods” lacks and the other one has. But a being who is pure act cannot lack anything and therefore would be indistinguishable in principle from another “god.”

Fourth, this argument does not attempt to prove that God is loving or merciful or just, or that God is a trinity, or anything of the sort. It only seeks to demonstrate that there must exist a unique changeless being of pure act and necessary existence. If it can get that far, it has done its job. Further Thomistic metaphysical doctrines would, when applied to this argument, also prove that the being of the first cause is good and intelligent, but there isn’t space to address them here.

The above argument, as clarified, is probably the strongest cosmological argument there is. Part of its great strength lies in its ability to refute many of the

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common objections brought against cosmological arguments in general. The first objection rests on what is called the “fallacy of composition.” This objection states that it does not follow that because everything in the universe needs a cause, the universe as a whole needs a cause. As should be clear from above, even if that objection is fatal to some versions of the cosmological argument, it is irrelevant to Aquinas’s First Way, because the First Way traces the causal series of a single, particular instance of change. It does not seek to account for the whole universe’s initial coming into existence (again, Aquinas did not think one could prove using pure reason that the universe had a beginning), but rather for the ability of a particular change to occur.

The second objection is usually phrased as a question: “Who caused God?” Aquinas would answer, “Nothing.” If something caused God, then that something would actually be God. The very conclusion of the First Way is that there must be some changeless being of pure act and necessary existence that ends the chain of change; it demonstrates that the first mover (i.e., agent of change) must itself be unmoved (unchanged). God, according to this argument, is changeless, and it is the fact of change that Aquinas is seeking to account for with the First Way, so it makes no sense to try to apply the premises of the arguments to God. God is changeless, so there is no need to regress a further step on the chain to explain how God changed. Nor does this mean that the argument contradicts itself, though some very basic cosmological arguments may have a first premise that contradicts

Illustration of the Big Bang

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its conclusion. For instance, if the first premise is that everything has a cause and the conclusion is that something without a cause exists, then there might arguably be a contradiction between that argument’s premises and its conclusion. Aquinas’s First Way, however, if it is to be expressed syllogistically, might be something like this (this is only one among many possible ways to formulate it): 1. Some things change.

2. Something is caused to change only by something else.

3. There cannot be an infinite metaphysical regress of causes. If there was no first agent of change, there could be no further change.

4. Therefore, there is a first agent of change, which could also be called a first mover.

There is clearly no contradiction here between the premises and the conclusion. Therefore, the question “Who caused God?” fails as a relevant objection to Aquinas’ first way.

A variation of the above objection appears in Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion. Dawkins writes: “A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right... God may not have a brain made of neurons, or a CPU made of silicon, but if he has the powers attributed to him he must have something far more elaborately and non-randomly constructed than the largest brain or computer we know.”12 Basically, Dawkins is asking, “Who designed the designer?”

If the complexity of the universe demands an explanation, so must the complexity of God. Really this argument is better aimed at some modern version of the argument from design, but Dawkins believes it to be a decisive counter-argument to any proof of God’s existence. As such a panacea to natural theology, however, Dawkins’ argument does not succeed. Even if God actually were complex, this argument would still suffer from several flaws. In fact, however, one need not even address the flaws of the argument because it is the understanding of classical Christian philosophy that God

actually is very simple. There are two main reasons for this. The first is that God has no “parts.” As immaterial, he is obviously without physical body parts, but in addition he has no “metaphysical parts.”

For Aquinas, the statement, “God is a necessary being” means that in God essence and existence is the same thing. For all created, and thus contingent, things, their essence and their existence are distinct;

and the more powers you exercise, the more complex you must be. But for an immaterial intellect whose simple acts of will preserve the universe in being, there is no reason to suppose the same correlation between power and complexity would hold.

When it is presented correctly and with all the appropriate clarifications and explanations, Aquinas’ First Way emerges as a successful argument for God’s

For Aquinas, the statement, “God is a necessary being” means that in God essence and existence is the same thing. one can picture the essence of a unicorn without knowing whether a unicorn exists. Aquinas, however, argues that if in a contingent being one’s essence and existence are separate, then in a necessary being they must be identical. Therefore, a necessary being’s existence is his essence so that God is “nowise composite.”13 Aquinas also argues that though we can distinguish in thought between God’s goodness, His truth, His power, His intellect, His will, His existence, etc., in God himself there actually is no distinction between these things.

God’s goodness is his truth, which is his will, which is his power, and so on. God is a simple unity.

The second reason for God’s simplicity is that the immaterial and the intellectual is always more simple than the material and the physical. For instance, the idea of something such as a cathedral is much simpler than the thing itself, the physical cathedral. An idea has no direction, size, shape, weight, or any spatiotemporal characteristics. It has no parts and no constituent material. In all these ways, it is simpler than that which it represents. As Father Crean writes,

existence. Not only has Aquinas shown that God exists, he has also vindicated the complementary model of faith and reason. Aquinas’ argument shows that natural theology is indeed a rational science, and while it cannot prove the entire content of Christian revelation, it can nevertheless arrive at certain definite conclusions about God’s existence and his nature.

See William Lane Craig’s The Cosmological Argument from Plato to Leibniz (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1980).

2 Edward Feser, Aquinas: A Beginners’ Guide (Oxford: Oneworld Books, 2009) 10.

3 Ibid. 11.

4 Ibid.

5 Thomas Crean, God Is No Delusion: A Refutation of Richard Dawkins (Oxford: Family Publications, 2007) 38.

6 Feser 70.

7 Ibid. 71.

8 This comes from Aristotle, but it dovetails very nicely with the Bible (see Exodus 3:14, John 8:58).

9 Feser 80.

10 Another congruence of Aristo-Thomistic philosophy and the Bible (see Colossians 1:17).

11 Feser 121.

12 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006) 109.

13 Feser 127.

14 Crean 16.

1

A designer, so to speak, is just a being with a design. So since a design is something very simple, as the example of the cathedral shows, a designer is just a being with something very simple. So there is no reason why he himself should be complicated... the designer must be at least as “rich in reality” as the thing he designs, because before he produces it he must have it in himself in a certain way. He must “have” it in an intellectual way, in order to cause it to exist in the world. In this sense, a designer must have the same richness as what he makes.

But he need not have the same complexity.14

Just as an idea is simple, so is an act of the will. A single act of the will (as in, I will myself to think about math now) is a very simple, uncomplicated thing. There is nothing complex about it. As God is an immaterial being possessed of an intellect and a will, but not of a body or any physical parts, there is every reason to think he would be simple. It is certainly the case for physical beings that the more tasks you must perform

Peter Blair ‘12 is from Newton Square, Pennsylvania. He is a Government and Classics double major.

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God in the Gulag: Christianity’s Survival in Soviet Russia

by Alexandra Heywood

I

n 64 A.D., approximately thirty years after Christ’s death and resurrection, a raging fire swept through the city of Rome. As rumors spread that the fire had been started by the Emperor Nero, the emperor chose as his scapegoat a small group of believers who called themselves Christians. Nero announced that the Christians had started the fire that destroyed Rome and decreed that all Christians in the city should be arrested and executed. According to Dr. Sophie Lunn-Rockcliffe, lecturer at King’s College in London, “Some were torn apart by dogs, others burnt alive as human torches.”1 Christianity endured sporadic persecution by the Roman authorities, alternating with several periods of more intensive oppression like Nero’s, until the fourth century. Yet the Christian population during these years increased dramatically.

Sociologist Rodney Stark estimates that in the year 40 A.D., there were no more than one thousand professing Christians in the world. By 180 A.D., the one thousand had grown to one hundred thousand, and by the year 300 to six million.2 Nor did the persecution of Christians end in the fourth century; although the Roman Empire and other nations subsequently

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adopted Christianity as their official religion, on many other occasions Christianity has clashed with state power. The French Revolution of 1789 sparked a period of dechristianization in France which included the banning of religious holidays, the destruction of crosses and bells, the seizure of church lands, and the arrest, imprisonment, and execution of priests. Christianity remains a persecuted religion today, as Brendan Woods illustrates in his article “Christianity and Culture, Lessons from China” in the Spring 2010 issue of The Dartmouth Apologia. Even amid these examples, the Soviet Union’s effort to eradicate Christianity through persecution stand out as one of the most determined.

Yet just as in Nero’s Roman Empire, Christianity in the Soviet Union neither disappeared, nor was it significantly weakened, by decades of persecution. The character, loyal community, and sincere belief of Russian Christians enabled them to maintain their faith and even to gain additional followers despite all the efforts of the Soviet government to eliminate them.

The Soviet attitude toward religion, and toward Christianity in particular, was unceasingly hostile.

Karl Marx, the founder of Communism, saw religion

Anti-religious poster depicting a Christian stealing a Russian child.

as “the opiate of the masses,” believing that religion was used by the ruling class to promise lower classes a good life after death. Marx thought such promises were invented to prevent the lower classes from seeking to establish a better life on earth through revolution. This outlook was wholeheartedly adopted by the Russian Bolsheviks who came to power in the October Revolution of 1917; they passionately pledged to “destroy all churches and prisons.”3 At least regarding churches, this attitude persisted in Soviet policy until the fall of the Soviet Union.4 Josef Stalin stated flatly in the 1930s that, “God must be out of Russia in five years.”5 Even as late as 1984, Soviet premier Konstantin Chernenko vowed to “protect the ideological purity of young people against the pernicious taint of religion.”6 The reasons for the Soviet leaders’ unrelenting war on religion were both ideological and symbolic.

Beginning with Marx, the Communist movement had rejected religious ideologies as inimical to their own. If the Russian Communists were to succeed in establishing a perfect society on earth, they needed to eradicate a faith that believed this to be impossible. Christianity teaches that God alone is free from imperfection and

that the redemption and perfection of the world is to be realized only in the resurrection. The Christian doctrine of original sin remained in stark opposition to the view championed by the Soviet government that, with appropriate direction, humanity could right itself.

Furthermore, Christians believed God’s law to be higher than the demands of the socialist cause; they opposed the Soviet ideology that glorified the common good over the individual at any cost.

Metropolitan Sergii, who was imprisoned throughout the 1920s, declared, “Far from promising reconciliation of that which is irreconcilable and from pretending to adapt our faith to communism, we will remain from the religious point of view what we are, i.e., members of the traditional Church.”7 This traditional Church was also symbolically offensive to the Communist Party, to whom it represented the old, hierarchical world of the tsars.

To eliminate such a compromising element in society, the Soviet government organized attacks that infiltrated every layer of religious life. Even as the Bolsheviks were still consolidating their power, churches were closed, priests were ridiculed, and believers were arrested. The Soviet government used law, intimidation, and propaganda to suppress Orthodox beliefs and practices. The first legal blow to the established body of religion was an act passed in 1918 which, among other things, removed the legal entity of churches and forbade them from completing monetary transactions and holding property. The Law on Religious Associations followed in 1929 and placed more restrictions on Christians. The law forbade evangelism, the printing of religious literature, making donations to religious causes, and the attendance of children at religious meetings. Religious organizations could not sponsor or host any community events,8 and people were only allowed to attend religious meetings within a certain distance of their homes. Christians faced regular “harassment, investigations, interrogations, demotion and dismissal jobs, expulsion from universities, and interference with worship,”9 and atheist education for all young people was compulsory.

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The chief weapons of the Soviet propaganda machine were the schools, Communist Party meetings that enforced political indoctrination, and the press.

Newspapers often reported on clerics who had recanted—usually under duress—and ridiculed the religious as stupid or pathetic. For instance, one newspaper named a girl, Gunta Kieksts, as a Christian and printed her address underneath a caricature of her falling to her knees and grabbing the robes of a priest.10 Believers were regularly defamed and accused of blackmarketing, perverting minors, homosexual activity, and other crimes under the Soviet code. Children were the easiest targets for propaganda, since they had to attend state-run schools where teachers were fired if found to be religious. Schools had outings on Sunday mornings,11 and children who admitted to attending church received poorer marks.12 Because of the anti-religious tone of education, students frequently mocked their believing peers. All children were taught to have a higher loyalty to the state than to their families and encouraged to denounce their parents for anti-Soviet activities like attending church.

The punishment for being a Christian in the Soviet Union was just as severe as the punishment for murder.

Drawing from the journal of Eufrosinia Kernovskaya, a prisoner in the Norilsk labor camp for ten years, depicting the overcrowding of cells.

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There were two groups of laws under which believers were prosecuted. The first was for religious activity specifically, such as breaking one of the anti-religious laws.

The second was for political or civil crimes, including “parasitism,” “hooliganism,” “slandering the Soviet system,” and “anti-Soviet propaganda.”13 Christians had to endure frequent searches and fines, harassment that was made serious by repetition and by the low incomes of those harassed. They were often fired from their jobs, demoted to menial positions, and exiled or banished, usually to northeastern Russia. Those who were arrested could be held up to one year before a trial as the State “gathered evidence.” They waited in overcrowded cells infested with rats, lice, and bedbugs, sometimes in filthy water up to their ankles. Many Christians endured interrogations and torture by the KGB, including threats of castration, the electric chair, prison, confinement to a psychiatric hospital, and harm of family members.14 Christianity in the Soviet Union was forced to endure under the hostile and often deadly conditions of the Gulag, a Russian acronym for The Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies. Suffering itself did not come as a surprise to Russian Christians; Christ taught that, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it,”15 and again, “You will be hated by all for my name’s sake. But he who endures to the end will be saved.”16 The promises of support in suffering that are found in Scripture sustained many in the Church through difficult trials and decades of persecution. In prison, interrogators often tried to persuade Christian prisoners to recant or to betray one another. Solzhenitsyn recounts the story of an old woman in the Butyrki prison who was interrogated night after night to reveal the location of a priest. She told her tormenters: “There is nothing you can do with me even if you cut me into pieces. After all, you are afraid of your bosses, and you are afraid of each other, and you are even afraid of killing me… But I am not afraid of anything.

I would be glad to be judged by God right this minute.”17 Solzhenitsyn does not tell his readers what happened to this old woman, but like her, many Christians found the courage to resist

New inmates forced to strip naked while entering labor camp, from the journal of Eufroinia Kersnovskaya.

interrogation and refused to give up their faith or betray their fellow Christians.

Solzhenitsyn, himself a prisoner in the Gulag, observed that, No camp can corrupt those who have a stable nucleus, who do not accept that pitiful ideology which holds that “human beings are created for happiness,” an ideology which is done in by the first blow of the work assigner’s cudgel…

Tatyana Falike writes: “Observation of people convinced me that no man could become a scoundrel in camp if he had not been one before.”18

Christians, Solzhenitsyn declared, “knew very well for what they were serving time, and they were unwavering in their convictions! They were the only ones, perhaps, to whom the camp philosophy did not stick.”19 It is impossible to underestimate the significance of a prisoner comprehending and accepting the reason for his own imprisonment. The man who sees his imprisonment as a trial of faith or as an opportunity to serve has a far stronger defense against the dehumanization and scheming cruelty that often accompanied ten, fifteen, or twenty-five years behind barbed wire. Father Tavrion Batozsky, who had been in various prisons and camps for around thirty years, exclaimed, “If you only knew how grateful I am God for my wonderful life!”20 Solzhenitsyn describes the Christians’ “self-confident procession through the Archipelago—a sort of silent religious procession with invisible candles… A

steadfastness unheard of in the twentieth century!”21 The Gulag could not touch these people who were sustained by their faith that they were loved by God. Indeed, it would seem as though they truly lived out Jesus’ statement that man does not live by bread alone, for in refusing to cheat their fellow prisoners, to collaborate with the guards, or to bully their way to a needed bowl of oatmeal, they did not receive enough bread to live on. Their faith subjected them to other dangers, as well; nuns were often held with prostitutes and thieves, suffering sexual abuse from guards and prisoners alike.

Camp officials would frequently focus their attentions on and harass religious prisoners with greater frequency and cruelty through various punishments, tortures, and sexual assaults intended to dehumanize their victims.22 Nevertheless, these believers were not dehumanized, for they saw their worth in Christ, not in the sadistic treatment they received at the hands of the guards; they looked at the world from Christ’s perspective and found their strength in forgiveness.

Upon being asked how he survived months of torture without becoming embittered, Father Roman Braga said, “God bless [the torturers], if there are still alive some of them. I forgave them at that time… Jesus on the Cross forgave them… they don’t know what they do… We forgive them because we want them to come to God and become people.”23 Priests, monks, and other Orthodox Christians reached out to criminals in many ways, sometimes even at the behest of camp officials. Because it made the guards’ jobs easier, priests

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Watchtower by the fence of a gulag compound.

and monks were permitted and even encouraged in the 1930s to “reeducate” non-believing prisoners by introducing literature to them and discussing morality.24 Furthermore, the ministry of Christians was not limited to these sponsored activities. Priests would often nurse sick men, sometimes criminals, back to health. Ivan Alexandrovich Sazikov, a criminal who was cared for by Father Arseny, told the priest: “I don’t trust people in general. I believe priests even less. But you, Pyotr Andreyevich, I trust. I know you won’t turn your back on me. You live in your God, you do good not for your own benefit, but for the sake of others.”25

Christian comrades had strength in their faith and yearned to share in that hope and comfort.

Instead of the mass exodus away from the Church that the Soviet government expected to result from the persecutions that were heaped on Christians, men and women continued to flock together to devote their lives to God. In 1923 a secret census undertaken by the Bolshevik government reported 3,126,541 people were involved in religious organizations, compared to the 1,737,053 in 1910. One must take into account the fact that these numbers represent only the believers who were not afraid to reveal their religious participation

Many prisoners observed that their Christian comrades had strength in their faith and yearned to share in that hope and comfort.

Sazikov eventually became a Christian upon witnessing this same priest successfully halt a violent fight between criminals in the name of God.26 This kindness, courage, and power—which stood out so starkly in the labor camps—won the attention and respect of many criminal prisoners who had never witnessed such traits while they were free. Intellectual dissidents who were imprisoned alongside Christians also started to engage in religious dialogues with them, often impressed by the education and intelligence of priests. Alexander writes, “It seemed that for many the concepts of God, science, and ‘intelligentsia’ were becoming more closely related.”27 Many prisoners observed that their

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to an atheist government census.28 As the population aged and as children were forbidden to attend church services and were educated in an atheist school system, these numbers cannot be explained by a merely cultural adherence to Christianity. Historian Dmitry Pospielovsky concluded that by the 1980s, the percentage of believers had either very marginally declined or was in fact higher than during the years 1915-1917, when the tsar was still in power.29 The church in Russia had not survived as a relic but as a strong community of believers.

The growth of Christianity in the Soviet Union is evidenced by first-hand testimony, by historians, and

by the preservation of the Christian population in Russia through seventy years of determined persecution. Christianity withstood the trials of those years, as it has many other times of suffering, because the believers in the Soviet Union knew that the suffering inflicted on them because of their faith was no more than Jesus had predicted and undergone himself. In the prisons and camps, non-believing prisoners observed the indomitable faith held by the Christians, and many began to seek God themselves. As it has for the last two millennia, Christianity withstood state persecutions and has re-emerged in Russia after decades of public suppression; the number of Christians is still small, but growing.

Articles 70, 190:1, 206, and 209 of the RSRSR Criminal Code. “Parasitism” effectively meant unemployment, as it is expressed in Article 209.

“Hooliganism,” found in Article 206, was applied to resistance to searches. The more serious charges of “slandering the Soviet system” and “anti-Soviet propaganda” carried prison terms, not fines.

14 Buss 112.

15 Matthew 13:12-13.

16 Mark 13:12-13.

Aleksandr I Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, vol. 1, trans. Thomas P. Whitney, (New York: Harper & Row, 1974) 131.

17

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, vol.

2, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 626.

19 Ibid. 310.

20 Jennifer Jean Wynot, Keeping the Faith: Russian Orthodox Monasticism in the Soviet Union, 1917-1939 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004) 138.

21 Solzhenitsyn, vol. 2, 623.

22 Wynot 136.

18

Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe, “Christianity and the Roman Empire,” BBC, 6 June 2010 <http:// www.bbc.co.uk/history/ ancient/romans/ christianityromanempire_article_01.shtml>.

2 Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) 6-9.

3 Gerald Buss, The Bear’s Hug: Christian Belief and the Soviet State, 1917-1986 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987) 137.

1

Beyond Torture: The Gulag of Pitesti, Romania, DVD (Worchester, Pennsylvania: Vision Video,

23

During the Second World War, the government declared an armistice with the church in order to unify and strengthen the country as much as possible while fighting against the Nazis. The state also sponsored initiatives to infiltrate and control the 4

2007).

24 Wynot 138.

25 Alexander and Vera Bouteneff, Father Arseny, 1893-1973: Priest, Prisoner, Spiritual Father, trans. Vera Bouteneff (Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary, 1998) 21.

26 Ibid. 23.

27 Ibid. 20.

Orthodox Church that met with some success.

Karl Tobien, Dancing under the Red Star (Colorado Springs: WaterBrook, 2006) 7.

6 Philip Walters, “The Russian Orthodox Church and the Soviet State,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 483 (1986): 143.

7 William C. Fletcher, A Study in Survival: The Church in Russia 1917-1943 (New York: Macmillan, 1965) 25.

5

Wynot 95.

Dimitry V. Pospielovsky, Soviet Studies on the Church and the Believer’s Response to Atheism, vol. 3 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1988) 223.

28 29

Howard L. Parsons, Christianity Today in the USSR (New York: International, 1987) 161.

9 Ibid. 162.

10 Alexander Veinbergs, “Lutherism and Other Denominations,” Aspects of Religion in the Soviet Union 1917-1967, ed. Richard H Marshall, Jr, Thomas E Bird, and Andrew Q Blaine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971) 410.

11 Ibid.

8

12

Alexandra Heywood ‘11 is from Potomac, Maryland.

She is a Russian Language and Literature major.

Buss 104.

Ibid. 144. Religious activity charges are found under Articles 142 and 227 of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic (RSRSR) Criminal Code.

The civil and political charges are found under 13

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FREE WILL, PREDESTINATION,

AND THE VALUE OF CHRISTIAN DEBATE

by Anna Lynn Doster

T

hough debates within the church can sometimes be harmful and divisive, the benefits of such debates are often overlooked. One example of this is the perennial debate about the relationship between the concepts of free will and predestination and their relation to the doctrine of salvation. This debate is not a recent one; disagreement over the extent to which our salvation is foreordained by God played a large role in the Protestant Reformation.

During this time, the corruption and abuse of certain church practices, particularly the sale of indulgences, prompted European theologians to question both their views on theology and the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. Approaching the question from different angles, scholar Desiderius Erasmus and monk Martin Luther each argued fiercely for his interpretation of the doctrine of salvation. Though their arguments were inconclusive, their resulting letters and publications provided incentive for others to turn to Scripture for a better understanding of God. During the seventeenth century, there were several competing views within the Catholic Church on the relationship between these two concepts. Perhaps the most prominent of these theories originated in the writings of St. Augustine in the fourth century and was expressed most fully by St. Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas believed that God worked in men through the mode of

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their being, which in men is free. That is, since a stone is not free and has no will, it does not cooperate with divine direction, whose a person, who possesses both freedom and will, does cooperate with the justifying grace which God bestows on him or her. Essentially, St. Thomas believed both that God efficaciously saves a person and that each person freely chooses to cooperate with God. Once a person freely chooses to accept the grace given him or her by God, he or she receives salvation. This salvation is then “work[ed] out… with fear and trembling”1 for the rest of his or her life in the process of sanctification and perfection.

Perfection occurs through the three theological virtues, faith, hope, and charity. The virtue of charity in particular is perfected through the performance of good works. The Catholic Church teaches that one cannot enter into heaven until one has reached perfection, because nothing imperfect can enter the sight of God. Therefore, if one were to die in a state of imperfection, one must be purified of those imperfections before entering Heaven; these imperfections are cleansed in Purgatory. According to Catholic doctrine, every sin carries both temporal and eternal punishment.

The eternal punishment of Hell is remitted through salvation, but temporal punishment is not. Therefore, Purgatory also functions as a place for the saved to suffer temporal punishment for their sins. During the

Portrait of a young Martin Luther.

eleventh century, the practice of granting indulgences became more widespread. Indulgences are penances, activities such as pilgrimages, or charitable donations to the Church or to the poor which are undertaken in order to lessen the temporal punishment due to sin.

However, by the sixteenth century this practice had become corrupted and many people saw indulgences as a way to buy salvation, a misconception which was abused by some members of the Catholic clergy.

During the turn of the sixteenth century, the spread

Oct. 31, 1517. By criticizing the practice of indulgences, Luther called into question the nature of Purgatory and, in turn, led him to consider the question of how salvation is effected.

Most troubling to Luther was the Church’s perception of God. During his monastic studies, Luther struggled to accept the perception of God shared by many clergy of the time. He increasingly focused on God’s anger towards sin and his own imperfection, feeling that he would be unable to meet the standard of perfection required for salvation. He found the concept of free will as it was being taught to be overwhelming, because it portrayed God as an implacable judge upholding unattainable standards of perfection for mankind.

Luther found an answer to his dilemma in the book of Romans and in particular Romans 1:17, “For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: ‘The righteousness will live by faith.’” From this, Luther came to the conclusion that justification came from faith alone.

Luther’s conviction that humans are justified by grace through faith alone rather than by good deeds and life without sin led to his adoption of the concept of predestination. Rejecting the Thomistic view as it was taught by his contemporaries, Luther maintained that God simply selects, or predestines, certain people who are set aside for salvation. Therefore, rather than gaining justification and perfection through the practice of virtue, Luther believed that only faith is necessary to gain salvation.

Instead, “he who hesitates not to depend wholly upon the good-will of God, he totally despairs in himself, chooses nothing for himself, but waits for God to work in him; and such an one, is the nearest unto grace, that he might be saved.”3 Luther disagreed with the

St. Thomas believed both that God efficaciously saves a person and that each person freely chooses to cooperate with God. of these abuses led many Renaissance thinkers to re-evaluate their understanding of this doctrine. At the time, “religion was so much a part of all aspects of life in medieval Europe that it is difficult to view it as a separate element in itself.”2 Therefore, turbulence within the church resonated throughout society at large. Revelation of security in God’s grace as a result of his faith led Renaissance thinker and monk Martin Luther to doubt the practice of indulgences and prompted his Ninety-Five Theses. The NinetyFive Theses were Luther’s catalogue of disagreements with current practices of indulgence, which he posted on the castle church in Wittenberg, Germany, on

notion of salvation through any means of human will, even when that will is efficaciously acted upon by the grace of God. Instead, he believed that God is willing to preserve the immortal soul of people who remain susceptible to recurrent sin.4 Above all, Luther believed that God should be seen as a loving father, rather than as an angry judge. He did not wish to radically challenge the Church’s position on the mechanics of life after death, but rather to bring about a change in the contemporary perception of God. Around the same time that Luther was developing his views on predestination, another thinker, Desiderius Erasmus, also desired to change perceptions

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within the Catholic Church. Erasmus shared Luther’s dislike of the current practice of indulgences and published several works expressing his views and desire for reform. However, while Luther eventually began to criticize many aspects of the Catholic Church, including its doctrine, sacraments, priesthood, and hierarchy, Erasmus limited himself to recommending methods of reforming Church practices. The sentiments published in his Praise of Folly are identical to the desires of Luther himself; namely for the church to be “cleansed not destroyed.”5 Initially, Luther viewed Erasmus as a potential ally, sympathetic to his views. However, as Luther’s relations with the Church grew more heated and eventually led to a decisive split, Erasmus chose to maintain a position of neutrality while remaining a Roman Catholic. He wrote that his position arose from dislike of dissension, “because it goes both against the teachings of Christ and against a secret inclination of nature. I doubt that either side in the dispute can be suppressed without grave loss.”6 Ironically, his impartiality earned him accusations on both sides, with insults from Luther and censorship of his writings by the Catholic Church. However, regardless of his disagreements with the church’s practices and ad hoc treatment, Erasmus held fast to Catholic doctrine.

His desire for reform stemmed from his wish for the church to return to greater orthodoxy.

Though he shared Luther’s desire for reform, Erasmus nevertheless disagreed with the position he took on the doctrine on salvation; his essay On Free Will became an instigator of debate through a series of letters and essays. While the two never met in person, their private correspondence throughout the years gradually grew into the public debate through a series of essays published between 1524 and 1526. Luther responded to On Free Will with an essay entitled On the Bondage of the Will; later, Erasmus continued the debate in Hyperaspistes. Though unfortunately detrimental to the friendship of Luther and Erasmus, their debates exposed abuses in the Church’s practices and helped to bring about reform.

In On Free Will, Erasmus elaborates upon the Catholic stance that when a Christian is born again, the “will is changed, and being gently breathed upon by the Spirit of God, it again wills and acts from pure willingness and inclination and of its own accord.”7

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Portrait of Desiderius Erasmus by Hans Holbein the Younger 1497

That is, those who willingly accept God’s grace and receive the Holy Spirit into their lives thereby gain the will to freely serve and love God. To illustrate his belief, Erasmus points to II Timothy 2: 24-26: And the Lord servant must not quarrel; instead, he must be kind to everyone, able to teach, not resentful. Those who oppose him he must gently instruct, in the hope that God will grant them repentance leading them to a knowledge of the truth, and that they will come to their senses and escape from the trap of the devil, who has taken them captive to do his will.

Erasmus pointed to the disobedient’s “[coming] to their senses and escape from the trap of the devil” as proof of man’s freedom of choice once they have received proper education and God’s gift of repentance.

With education, Erasmus believed, came a logical acceptance of the forgiveness of God. Man was therefore redeemable through realizing the need for and desiring salvation, along with the acceptance of God’s grace through Christ Jesus. Therefore, in his opinion, deeper instruction of classical principles, rather than deep theological revision, was needed to restore the Church.

Luther strongly opposed Erasmus’s views on free will and the methods he proposed for reforming the Church. In response to Erasmus, he compares free will to “a beast of burden that either God or Satan rides.

The will is powerless to choose which rider will mount it, ‘but the riders themselves contend for the possession and control of it,’”8 and he believed God’s strength to be far greater than Satan’s. However, this view leaves no room for people to freely choose to accept the will of God. Peter Thuesen writes in his book Predestination that, to Luther, “predestination offered ‘beautiful,

of the reformed Lutheran Church. Erasmus’ writings raised awareness within the Catholic Church of the need to examine and clarify doctrinal views, thus contributing to the convocation of the Council of Trent, which lasted from 1545 to 1563. During these years, the Catholic Church evaluated and published their theological stances, including those on free will, election, and indulgences. To this day, the church maintains its stance on the freedom of the human will under God’s grace. In both the Catholic Church and in Luther’s new church, the debate over this issue led to a renewed in-

In both the Catholic Church and in Luther’s new church, the debate over this issue led to a renewed interest in examining theological truths. wonderful comfort’ because it relieved humans of the burden of saving themselves through their own merit. The salvation of the elect was affected through the merit of Christ.”9 Christians therefore had every reason to serve God out of love and gratitude rather than fear of temporal or eternal punishment. Luther believed that free will gave individuals the choice to obey or disobey God in their daily lives but had no influence over their salvation. This view of salvation as an undeserved gift fit with Luther’s conception of a God who would sooner love his people than condemn their faults. Luther turned to Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, which contains the longest discussion of election in the New Testament, to stress his belief in God’s complete control. In his defense to Erasmus, Luther takes special note of Romans 9: 19-21,

terest in examining theological truths. Though Luther and Erasmus’s thoughts on predestination and free will contributed to the division between the Catholic and Lutheran churches, their arguments did help to shed light on corrupt practices within the church, as well as stimulating the intellectual life of the church. Their example shows that while disagreements in the church can lead to division, such debates are also essential for maintaining the orthodoxy of the church both in doctrine and in practice.

Philippians 2:12.

William Estep, Renaissance and Reformation, (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1986) 105.

3 Martin Luther and Henry Cole, The Bondage of the Will (Lexington, KY: Feather Trail Press, 2009) 29.

4 Peter Thuesen, Predestination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) 224.

5 Estep 112.

6 Mark Galli, 131 Christians Everyone Should Know (B&H Publishing Group, 2000) 344.

7 Martin Luther, Ernest Gordon Rupp, Desiderius Erasmus, and Philip Watson, Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1969) 140.

8 Thuesen, 224.

9 Ibid. 151.

1 2

One of you will say to me: “Then why does God still blame us? For who resists his will?”

But who are you, O man, to talk back to God? Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, “Why did you make me like this?” Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for noble purposes and some for common use?

Because God is represented as the potter and man as the clay, Luther reasoned that man can do nothing outside of the abilities imparted to him by God. This doctrinal issue was of utmost importance to Luther; he saw refusal to accept God’s complete control over mankind as equivalent to denying God entirely. His beliefs rendered reconciliation with any differing line of thought impossible, and this obstinacy eventually led Luther and his followers to leave the Roman Catholic Church completely.

Both Luther and Erasmus’ writings influenced contemporary views of doctrine and led to reform in the Church and a gradual weeding out of corrupt practices. Luther’s growing number of sympathizers soon led to the Protestant Reformation and establishment

Anna Lynn Doster ‘12 is from Cameron, South Carolina.

She is an Asian Studies major and Linguistics minor.

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A Prayer for Dartmouth This prayer by professor of religion Lucius Waterman appears on a plaque hanging outside Parkhurst Hall.

O Lord God Almighty, well-spring of wisdom, master of power, guide of all growth, giver of all gain. We make our prayer to thee, this day, for Dartmouth College. Earnestly entreating thy favour for its people. For its work, and for all its life. Let thy hand be upon its officers of administration to make them strong and wise, and let thy word make known to them the hiding-place of power. Give to its teachers the gift of teaching, and make them to be men right-minded and high-hearted. Give to its students the spirit of vision, and fill them with a just ambition to be strong and well-furnished, and to have understanding of the times in which they live. Save the men of Dartmouth from the allurements of self-indulgence, from the assaults of evil foes, from pride of success, from false ambitions, from hardness, from shallowness, from laziness, from heedlessness, from carelessness of opportunity, and from ingratitude for sacrifices out of which their opportunity has grown. Make, we beseech thee, this society of scholars to be a fountain of true knowledge, a temple of sacred service, a fortress for the defense of things just and right, and fill the Dartmouth spirit with thy spirit, to make it a name and a praise that shall not fail, but stand before thee forever. We ask in the name in which alone is salvation, even through Jesus Christ our Lord, amen.

The Reverend Lucius Waterman, D.D.

The Nicene Creed We, the members of The Dartmouth Apologia, affirm that the Bible is inspired by God, that faith in Jesus Christ is necessary for salvation, and that God has called us to live by the moral principles of the New Testament. We also affirm the Nicene Creed, with the understanding that views may differ on baptism and the meaning of the word “catholic.”

We [I] believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.

We [I] believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father. Through him all things were made.

For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried.

On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.

We [I] believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father [and the Son]. With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified. He has spoken through the Prophets. We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

40 • The Dartmouth Apologia • Winter 2011 ]

Photo byKelsey Carter â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;12