Debating Darwinian Liberalism (7): Wiker on Ant Slavery and Christian Sympathy

In his contribution to Dilley's book, Benjamin Wiker repeats his argument from previous writings that Darwinian science destroys morality.  I have written some responses to Wiker that can be found here and here.

One section of Wiker's chapter is devoted to Darwinism and slavery (39-42).  The longest chapter of my Darwinian Natural Right is on Darwinism and slavery (161-210).  Wiker is silent about what I argue there.

Wiker asserts that Darwin failed to see that his theory of evolution contradicted his personal hatred of slavery.  Wiker quotes a long passage from Darwin's account in The Origin of Species of the "slave-making instinct" among some species of ants.  Wiker then observes:

"The reader, I hope, can see the difficulty.  Human slavery has been, throughout history, an extraordinary wide-spread phenomenon.  Again, Darwin admits in his Descent, the 'great sin of Slavery has been almost universal, and slaves have often been treated in an infamous manner' (Darwin 1871, I.III, 94).  If ant-slave making can be perfectly described as the result of natural selection, and all human moral and social traits are likewise to be explained a the result of natural selection, it would appear that the human institution of slavery, wherever it exists, is just as natural among human beings as it is among ants.  Every widespread trait must have been beneficial or it would not have been widespread.  In what way can a particular evolved trait that has proven to be so beneficial be a 'great sin'?" (40)

Wiker concludes: "There can be no moral blame attached to slavery in the present precisely because, on Darwinian grounds, it must be the result of a naturally selected trait that contributed to survival in the past" (41).

Since Darwin emphasizes the importance of sympathy in the evolution of human morality, one might think that this moral trait would lead to the condemnation of slavery.  But Wiker will have none of this:

". . . Picking one nice moral trait--such as sympathy, or the present favorite among morally-minded Darwinists, altruism--that we might like to be more widespread receives no more special support from natural selection, than does any other malleable trait.  In fact--and it is a very important fact--the widespread development of what Darwin meant by sympathy, is actually historically due to the spread of Christianity.  Being kind to one's friends and kin is understandable as a natural principle; loving one's enemies and doing good to those one does not even know, who offer no hope for contributing to one's own survival, are explicit contradictions to Darwinism" (42).

In all of Dilley's book, in which most of the authors argue that it is only the "Judeo-Christian worldview" that saves us from the immorality of Darwinism, this is the only extended historical example of how Christianity supported a moral insight that otherwise would have been denied by Darwinian nihilism.

In my chapter on slavery in Darwinian Natural Right, I provide an extensive account of ant slavery considered in the context of the whole debate over slavery from Aristotle to Hume to Jefferson to Darwin to Lincoln.   I argue that considering the similarities and differences between ant slavery and human slavery illuminates the biological nature of slavery.  The similarities suggest that both for human beings and for ants, slavery is a form of social parasitism in which slave-makers exploit their slaves through coercion and manipulation.  The differences suggest that human beings resist the exploitation of slavery because it violates their natural moral sense.  That moral sense arises as a joint product of emotional capacities for feeling social passions such as anger and love and rational capacities for judging social principles such as kinship and reciprocity.  Since these emotional and rational capacities are part of human nature for all normal human beings, the moral sense as an expression of those capacities is a human universal, and no race of human beings is naturally adapted for slavery.  We should expect, therefore, that in every human society where slavery exists, slavery will produce moral conflict.  Unlike slave ants, human slaves will resist exploitation and demand social cooperation based on kinship and reciprocity.

Since Wiker has chosen to remain silent about my argument in this chapter, I have no way of knowing whether he has any response.

Wiker has also chosen to remain silent about the fact that the people pointing to ant slavery as justification for human slavery were devout Christians like Thomas Cobb in his Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery in the United States (1858).  Wiker is also silent about the fact that Cobb and many other Christian defenders of slavery were able to cite the Bible as supporting slavery, because the Bible (both Old Testament and New Testament) sanctions slavery.  For example, the book Slavery Ordained by God by the prominent minister Fred Ross shows that the Bible never condemns slavery and always supports it.  Those Christians who condemned slavery had to reinterpret the Bible by passing it through their naturally evolved moral sense of the evil of slavery.  And consequently, as Mark Noll has shown, the American Civil War became a theological crisis, because American Christians could not rely on the Bible to resolve their moral debate over slavery.  As Lincoln noted in his Second Inaugural, both sides in the Civil War thought they were fighting for God's cause: "Both sides read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other."

What this shows is that while the "Judeo-Christian worldview" is often helpful in illuminating our moral experience, it is often unreliable, and in many cases it must be corrected by our natural moral sense as rooted in our evolved human nature.

I have invited Wiker to write a response to this post.  He has responded with silence.

A few of the many blog posts I have written on Darwinism and slavery can be found here, here, here, here, and here.

The Lucretian Modernity of Darwinian Liberalism

Modern science, modern liberalism, and even the whole of modern culture began in January of 1417.  That's when Poggio Bracciolini was looking for old books in a monastic library in southern Germany, and he discovered a copy of Lucretius' ancient poem On the Nature of Things.

Written near the middle of the first century B.C., Lucretius' book was a poetic exposition of the philosophical atomism of Epicurus.  Although Epicurus and Lucretius professed to believe in the existence of gods, they argued that the gods were immortal but natural beings who had no care for human beings, and who never interfered with the natural order of the cosmos.  That natural cosmic order was explained as the product of atomic particles combining and dissolving by chance and material necessity.  As part of that natural motion of atoms, human beings were purely material beings--in their bodies and their minds--and as such they were mortal.  Religious beliefs in the immortality of the soul and an afterlife in which those immortal souls were to be eternally rewarded or punished should be recognized as delusions.  Indeed, those delusions based on religious fears were the primary source of human anxiety.  To be happy, to be able to enjoy the pleasures of mortal life, human beings needed to overcome their fear of death and of divine judgement.  They could do that, Epicurus and Lucretius believed, by understanding the way things really are as a product of the evolutionary history of the world as atoms in motion.

This materialist cosmology of Epicureanism was a radical alternative to the other views of cosmic order in the ancient Greek and Roman world--including Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism.  And while many of the early Christian theologians could accommodate modified forms of Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism as compatible with Christianity, they had to reject Epicurean materialism as utterly contrary to Christianity.  The Christian fear of the Satanic temptation of Epicureanism was so deep that the writings of Epicurus and Lucretius were hidden away and largely disappeared from medieval Christendom.

But then with the passionate revival of ancient learning in the European Renaissance, there was a curiosity, even among some devout Christians, about the long forgotten writings of Epicureanism.  As one of the greatest hunters of ancient books in the Renaissance, Poggio was elated to finally discover a copy of Lucretius' text in 1417.  But he had no idea that his discovery would lead to a renewal of Epicurean thought that would transform the culture of the Western world.  In fact, we can make a good argument that what makes the world modern is the materialist cosmology presented in Lucretius' On the Nature of Things.  We are all Epicureans now.

This story has recently been told in a most engaging way by Stephen Greenblatt in his book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (Norton, 2011), which has received the National Book Award for nonfiction for 2011.  The book is wonderfully well-written, perhaps reflecting the fact that Greenblatt is a professor of English literature at Harvard. 

It's surprising that Greenblatt never mentions another book published 10 years ago that covers much of the same ground as his book--Benjamin Wiker's Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists (InterVarsity Press, 2002).

Greenblatt and Wiker agree in their historical narrative of the modern world as a product of the turn away from the Christian cosmology of intelligent design to the Lucretian cosmology of evolutionary atomism.  They disagree, however, in their assessment of this historical turn:  Greenblatt celebrates it as moral progress, while Wiker laments it as moral degeneration.  Comparing the two books illuminates this fundamental cosmological debate, a debate that runs through much of my writing for this blog.

Wiker is a Fellow of the Discovery Institute, and he wrote his book with the financial support of the Discovery Institute as part of their "wedge strategy" for overturning the modern culture of Darwinian materialism and replacing it with a Christian culture of intelligent design.  The back cover of Wiker's book bears endorsements from many of the luminaries of the intelligent design movement, and the Foreword is written by William Dembski.

Dembski indicates the fundamental issue in declaring that Wiker's book poses the primary question between intelligent design and Darwinism:  "Is reality fundamentally mindful and purposive or mind-less and material?" (13).

Christians must see the world as intelligently designed by the divine Creator, who exercises providential care over human beings and who judges them in the afterlife as deserving heavenly rewards or hellish punishments for eternity.  Christians can interpret many of the ancient philosophers--Platonists, Aristotelians, and Stoics--as teaching that the world is "fundamentally mindful and purposive" and thus supporting a Christian cosmology.  But they can't do this with the atomistic cosmology of Epicurus and Lucretius, which must be seen as the fundamental rival to Christianity.

Moreover, Wiker argues, one must defend Christian cosmology if one wants to defend Christian morality.  As a comprehensive account of the universe, every cosmology implies a morality, because every account of nature as a whole implies an account of human nature--the moral and intellectual life of human beings--as part of cosmic nature.

With this in mind, Wiker argues that "the culture wars are cosmological wars" (314).  The current debates over the morality of abortion, gay marriage, sexual conduct generally, biotechnology, and the teaching of evolution in public schools are all ultimately rooted in an irreconcilable choice between intelligent-design cosmology and materialist cosmology.  The cosmology of intelligent-design provides cosmic support for Christian morality.  The cosmology of materialist atomism promotes an individualistic hedonism free from any absolute standards of right and wrong.

Wiker would seem to agree with Greenblatt's summary of the 20 fundamental propositions of Lucretius' account of "the way things are" (182-202):

1.  Everything is made of invisible particles.
2.  The elementary particles of matter--"the seeds of the things"--are eternal.
3.  The elementary particles are infinite in number but limited in shape and size.
4.  All particles are in motion in an infinite void.
5.  The universe has no creator or designer.
6.  Everything comes into being as a result of a swerve.
7.  The swerve is the source of free will.
8.  Nature ceaselessly experiments.
9.  The universe was not created for or about humans.
10. Humans are not unique.
11. Human society began not in a Golden Age of tranquillity and plenty, but in a primitive battle for survival.
12. The soul dies.
13. There is no afterlife.
14. Death is nothing to us.
15. All organized religions are superstitious delusions.
16. Religions are invariably cruel.
17. There are no angels, demons, or ghosts.
18. The highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain.
19. The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion.
20. Understanding the nature of things generates deep wonder.

Greenblatt and Wiker show how these Lucretian ideas shaped the leading modern thinkers in philosophy and science--including Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, Locke, Newton, Hume, Spinoza, and Darwin.  

The one person overlooked here, I think, is Nietzsche.  Particularly, in his middle writings--Human, All Too Human, Dawn, and the first four books of The Gay Science--Nietzsche develops one of the most elaborate modern statements of Epicurean and Darwinian Enlightenment.  In his earlier and later writings, however, Nietzsche essentially agrees with Wiker that human beings cannot live well as Darwinian Epicureans without a redemptive cosmology, and we see Nietzsche striving for a cosmology of atheistic religiosity.  The agreement between Wiker and Nietzsche is most evident in their scorn for David Friedrich Strauss in his failing to see the nihilistic consequences of Darwinian science.  Some of my posts on this point can be found here, here, and here.

Although there is no evidence that Darwin read Epicurus or Lucretius, one can clearly see the fundamental ideas of Darwinian evolution in Book 5 (see lines 837-877) of De rerum natura, although one does not see a clear account of the gradual transmutation of one species into another.  Moreover, one sees the fundamental agreement between Lucretius and Darwin in their general cosmology of a world in which complex order arises through a natural evolutionary process that does not require miraculous interventions by an intelligent designer.

Although I find Wiker's intellectual history illuminating, we fundamentally disagree in that I don't share his apocalyptic fear of what he sees as the moral nihilism of the Lucretian/Darwinian cosmology.  The disagreement was evident some years ago when Wiker and I had an exchange in the pages of First Things.  In the November 2000 issue of First Things, I wrote an article defending "Darwinian Conservatism," which was followed by critical responses from Michael Behe and Bill Dembski, and then my response to them.  A year later, Wiker wrote an article in First Things attacking me, and much of his argument was incorporated into his book (see pp. 245-46).  There was then a brief exchange between us in a later issue of First Things.

Our disagreement comes at two levels.  At the first level, Wiker refuses to see--as I do--that a purposeful human nature can arise within a purposeless cosmic nature.  I believe that we can judge the moral and intellectual virtues as contributing to the flourishing of evolved human nature, even when we think those virtues have no correspondence to any cosmic order of intelligent design.  Thus we can recognize that there is a natural law for human beings rooted in their evolved natural inclinations without any need to see this natural human order as the fulfilment of some intentionally designed cosmic order.

At the second level of our disagreement, I find Wiker sophistical in his writing.  By that, I mean that he intentionally suppresses evidence and arguments that counter his case for Epicurean Darwinism as morally degrading.  For example, in trying to cite evidence in Darwin's Descent of Man that he promoted the eugenics that would lead to Hitler's eugenics, Wiker carefully omits any passages that would contradict his interpretation.  One illustration of this is how he selectively quotes from a paragraph near the end of Descent (1871, 2:402-403).  In his book (252-53), Wiker quotes the following:  "Man scans with scrupulous care the character and pedigree of his horses, cattle, and dogs before he matches them; but when he comes to his own marriage he rarely, or never, takes such care. . . . Both sexes ought to refrain from marriage if in any marked degree inferior in body or mind; but such hopes are Utopian and will never be even partially realised until the laws of inheritance are thoroughly known.  All do good service who aid towards this end."  Wiker says this last sentence is a "most damning remark" showing his endorsement of eugenics. 

But Wiker is quoting here from one paragraph that concludes with this one sentence that he fails to quote: "When the principles of breeding and of inheritance are better understood, we shall not hear ignorant members of our legislature rejecting with scorn a plan of ascertaining by an easy method whether or not consanguineous marriages are injurious to man."  This makes it clear that Darwin's concern here was to study the possibly injurious effects of incest.  In particular, he had proposed that the British Parliament should sponsor a study of the effects of first-cousin marriages to see if they had a high rate of physical and mental birth defects in their children.  Darwin had a personal interest in this, since his wife Emma was his first cousin, and he worried about whether the ill health of some of his children might be a consequence of inbreeding.  Eventually, Darwin's son George carried out the research Darwin sought, and George concluded that the danger of inherited defects from first-cousin marriages was very low. 

Here then is an example of what I have called "good eugenics," the kind of eugenics that almost all of us would support.  For instance, many Ashkenazi Jews have voluntarily organized genetic testing of their children, so that when they want to marry, they can investigate the probability of birth defects in their children (such as Tay Sachs disease), and then decide whether they want to marry and have children.  This is eugenics.  Indeed, all the laws that prohibit incestuous marriages are based on eugenics--trying to promote "good births."  But this is good eugenics.  Wiker hides this from his reader because it would weaken his moral denunciation of Darwin.

Similarly, Wiker strengthens his case for the moral superiority of Christian cosmology by carefully refusing to mention any Christian teachings or practices that his readers might find troublesome.  For instance, in presenting the moral teachings of the Bible, Wiker never mentions the fact that the Bible endorses slavery and genocide.  He speaks of infanticide as a moral abomination.  But he never mentions the troublesome story of Abraham being commanded by God to kill Isaac.  Nor does he mention Jeptha's murdering of his daughter as a sacrifice to God.  As I have noted in some recent posts, even Pope John II and Pope Benedict XVI have asked foregiveness for Christian traditions of violence.  Wiker is silent about all of this.

Moreover, Wiker is also silent about the Epicurean books of the Bible--Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs--both of which teach the goodness of pleasure. The Song of Songs celebrating erotic love without reference to marriage or reproduction contradicts Wiker's claim that sexual pleasure must always to directed to producing children.  The Epicureanism of Ecclesiastes was noted by Thomas Aquinas (Summa Contra Gentiles, III.27.11).

Wiker accuses Darwin of racism, but never mentions that much of the argument for the unity of the human species in the Descent of Man was part of Darwin's argument against slavery.

Another troubling part of Wiker's writing is how he warns against the "secularization" of the modern world as the source of our moral degradation, and thus implies that what we need is a "sacralization" of the world, but he never explains what this would mean.  Would he have us revert to the world of medieval Christendom based on its intelligent-design cosmology?  He mentions those Epicurean Christians--like Giordano Bruno--who were burned at the stake for their Epicureanism.  He doesn't condemn this.  So would he want to bring back such executions? 

Similarly, Wiker condemns homosexuality as evil because it goes against Christian cosmology and Biblical teaching.  He doesn't mention that the Bible commands the killing of homosexuals.  For centuries, homosexuality was a capital crime.  Would he endorse this?  If not, would that mean that he doesn't really want to enforce Christian cosmology and abolish Epicurean cosmology?

Furthermore, Wiker assumes that intelligent design reasoning is not only morally but also scientifically superior to evolutionary reasoning, because the evolutionists cannot explain exactly the step-by-step pathway by which all complex forms have evolved.  But then he never offers any account of how the intelligent design proponents would explain exactly when, where, and how the Intelligent Designer did this.

And while Wiker criticizes Darwinism as based on faith rather than demonstration, he never demonstrates the truth of the anthropomorphic analogy behind all intelligent design reasoning--the idea that we can infer divine intelligent agency from what we know about human intelligent agency.  As I have argued in some previous posts, this is dubious assumption that needs to be proven.

Debating Darwinian Liberalism: Dilley's Syllogism

How many evil consequences of Darwinian science can you imagine? 

Until recently, I could imagine quite a few.  But now that I have read an essay by Bruce Gordon, I can think of hundreds of evils coming from Darwinism.  I don't have room here for Gordon's complete list.  So I'll give you a short sample.  According to Gordon, the "cultural poison of Darwinian philosophy" leads to the following:  hedonism, narcissism, totalitarianism, eco-terrorism, fetal farming, state-enforced active euthanasia, Marxism, fascism, nihilism, "hollow men," "ceding national sovereignty to effete international bureaucracies," multiculturalism, affirmative action, "central government planning of all aspects of life," "cultural guilt and self-loathing," and "a Hegelian religion of the state as the immanent unfolding of the Absolute Spirit."  The final outcome of all this is "that the noonday sun of Western strength is spent and will fade into the twilight of an ignoble dissolution . . . our hope must fade, and night descend" (175-83). 

Wow.  If you're like me, you had never imagined that so much evil stuff could come from the idea of Darwinian evolution.

So how exactly does Darwinian science bring the descent of human civilization into a night without hope and rule by "effete international bureaucracies"?  To answer that question, you'll need to read the book in which Gordon's essay appears--Darwinian Evolution and Classical Liberalism: Theories in Tension, edited by Stephen Dilley and newly published by Lexington Books. 

Most of this book is a criticism of my argument that Darwinian evolutionary science supports classical liberalism.  Of the thirteen contributors to the book, eleven criticize my position, one supports one part of my position, and one generally supports my position.  Here are the eleven critics: Stephen Dilley, Benjamin Wiker, Peter Augustine Lawler, Jay Richards, Angus Menuge, John G. West, Logan Paul Gage, Bruce Gordon, Richard Weikart, Roger Masters, and Michael White.  Shawn Klein agrees with me only partially. Timothy Sandefur is the one hero who generally (but maybe not totally) agrees with me.

This post is the first in a series of posts in which I will respond to this book.  I begin with the argument that seems to be embraced by the first nine critics in the above list, and I will call the argument Dilley's Syllogism, because it's stated by Dilley in his introductory chapter.

Although Dilley does not state it in exactly this way, his argument seems to be this:

Classical (Lockean) liberalism is founded on Christianity.

Darwinism denies Christianity.

Therefore, Darwinism denies classical (Lockean) liberalism.

Consequently, the nine critics are proponents of what they call "Christian classical liberalism" or "theistic classical liberalism" (19, 23,158-59).  They also identify this with the liberal political thought of the American founders, and so they defend "the rich theistic classical liberalism embodied in the American founding" (159).  I have inserted "Lockean" into the syllogism because the first nine critics generally appeal to John Locke as "the quintessential classical liberal" (198), although they also often identify Adam Smith as a paradigmatic classical liberal (9-10, 13-14, 158).

The nine critics say that they are attacking "Darwinian conservatism," which "integrates a Darwinian conception of human nature with the essentials of classical liberalism, drawing on the work of Locke, Smith, Hayek, and others" (10).  They identify the most prominent proponents of Darwinian conservatism as me, Thomas Sowell, Robert McShea, James Q. Wilson, Michael Shermer, and Francis Fukuyama.  Most of their attacks, however, are directed at me.

The nine critics don't explain clearly what they mean by Christianity or how exactly specific doctrines of Christianity lead to classical liberalism.  They sometimes refer to the "God of the Bible," the "biblical worldview," or "Judeo-Christian orthodoxy," which suggests they are embracing both the Old Testament and the New Testament, both Judaism and Christianity (19-20, 26, 154, 158-60, 171, 189, 193, 198).  Does this exclude Islam?  Gordon argues that the "Christian worldview" in its purity excludes "Islamic religious identity" (196).

The only doctrinal teaching of the Judeo-Christian tradition that they mention is the idea of imago Dei: "In very broad strokes, this interpretation emphasizes both the dignity of human beings--as creatures fashioned in the imago Dei--and their depravity, having been subject to Adam's Fall" (11).  It is the equal dignity of all human beings as created in God's image that they see as the foundation of classical liberalism, and so if Darwinism denies this imago Dei doctrine by teaching that human beings were "created from animals," Darwinism thereby denies classical liberalism (198) and promotes all the evils listed by Gordon that are bringing about the complete collapse of Western civilization. 

This summarizes the famous "Wedge Document" of the Discovery Institute in Seattle, which laid out the plan for attacking Darwinian evolution and advancing "intelligent design theory" as a way of saving Western culture from the corrosion of scientific materialism.  Most of these nine critics have been associated with the Discovery Institute.

Although the nine critics generally agree that Christianity dictates the classical liberalism of Locke, they sometimes contradict themselves on this point.  For example, Benjamin Wiker refers to Locke as a Deist and implies that Locke appealed to Christianity only for the sake of persuading "the less enlightened" (44).  Wiker also identifies Hobbes as the true "father of modern liberalism" and explains: "In Hobbes we see the shift from morality rooted in natural law as defined by God and embedded in a teleological view of nature in which human moral goodness is defined by the perfection of our God-given nature, to morality entirely rooted in this-worldly passion and self-preservation embedded in an entirely non-teleological view of nature and human nature."  Moreover, he indicates, "this seems a great anticipation of, and hence entirely compatible with, Darwin's account of the evolution of morality" (45-46). 

In his book Moral Darwinism, Wiker argues that Locke was a Epicurean materialist who promoted a science of hedonism that would later be fulfilled by Darwin.  He also argues that insofar as Locke's ideas crept into the American founding, they became the seeds of moral corruption in American political life.  Oddly, Wiker doesn't mention this in his contribution to Dilley's book.

Do the nine critics really agree on Dilley's Syllogism?  I am not sure.  But I will assume that they do, because this gives me a coherent line of reasoning to which I can respond in my forthcoming posts.

Although I disagree with the nine critics in many ways, I agree with some of their points.  Peter Lawler and I are not far apart.  And I will indicate my agreement with Jay Richards, who shows that I have been wrong in suggesting that it's inconsistent to affirm free markets and deny Darwinian evolution.

Dilley's book should be read alongside Darwinian Conservatism: A Disputed Question, edited by Ken Blanchard (2009).  This book reprints the text of Darwinian Conservatism, followed by critical responses from eight authors, including three of the authors in Dilley's book (Lawler, West, and Sandefur).  This book concludes with a response from me and a good essay by Ken Blanchard on the Aristotelian character of Darwinian conservatism ("Natural Right and Natural Selection").

Does the New Testament Teach Classical Liberalism?

The second half of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (Parts 3 and 4) is devoted to the interpretation of the Bible.  For many readers today, this seems odd, because giving so much attention to biblical theology seems out of place in a treatise of political philosophy.  When the Leviathan is used as a text in undergraduate political science classes, it's common for the teacher not to assign any reading from the second half of the book.  Some editions of the Leviathan reprint only the first half of the book.  But having just completed another reading of the whole of the Leviathan in my graduate seminar on Hobbes, I am reminded of how important the interpretation of the Bible has been for the history of political philosophy, and particularly for the history of liberal political philosophy.

A new book that has helped me to see this is Politicizing the Bible: The Roots of Historical Criticism and the Secularization of Scripture, 1300-1700 by Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker (Crossroad Publishing Company, 2013).  Hahn and Wiker show how the "historical-critical method" in the scholarly study of the Bible arose in the 19th century as the culmination of a political interpretation of the Bible that began with Marsilius of Padua and continued with Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke.  The purpose of that political interpretation of the Bible was to secularize politics and privatize religious belief so that the aim of politics would be securing the peace and security of the body rather than the salvation of the soul.  (Hahn has summarized the argument of his book in a YouTube video lecture.)

Hahn and Wiker repeatedly quote a remark by Jon Levenson that "historical criticism is the form of biblical studies that corresponds to the classical liberal political ideal," and they say that Levenson "has hit the bull's-eye" (7-9, 11, 296, 364, 388).  Their book is an elaborate argument to demonstrate this claim--that the historical-critical method for studying the Bible was developed to advance classical liberal politics.  That's their explicit argument.  Their implicit argument is that this liberal bias requires a distorted interpretation of the Bible.

I am persuaded by their explicit argument but not by their implicit argument.  I agree with them that some of the early modern political philosophers initiated a tradition of Biblical interpretation that would support classical liberalism by radically separating Church and State, doing this in such a way as to promote the liberal principles of political secularism, religious liberty, and the privatization of religious life.  I don't agree, however, with their implied claim that this liberal interpretation of the Bible is clearly contrary to the true teaching of the Bible (see, for example, 11, 364, 445, 484).  I would argue that the secularization of politics through the liberal principles of religious toleration and privatization of religious belief is largely a product of New Testament Christianity.  In other words, the liberal reading of the Bible is a plausible reading.  Indeed, it's so plausible that most Christians today--including the Catholic Church--have embraced this liberal interpretation of the Bible.  I suspect that even Hahn and Wiker ultimately accept Biblical liberalism.

It might seem odd, however, to put Hobbes in the tradition of Biblical liberalism.  After all, much of what Hobbes says about church-state relations seems illiberal in that he argues for the absolute power of the political sovereign over an established church, which includes the right of the sovereign to interpret the Bible, so that the sovereign acts as the "supreme pastor," who "ought indeed to direct his civil commands to the salvation of souls" (ch. 33, 254-55 [268-69]; ch. 36, 283-85 [298-300]; ch. 39, 306 [321-22]; ch. 43, 355-56 [372-73], 379 [396]).

And yet one should notice that Hobbes's illiberal argument for the political regulation of an established church is based on his interpretation of the Hebrew theocratic state in the Old Testament, and as he moves into the New Testament, he begins to move towards a separation of church and state.  Critical for Hobbes's political interpretation of the New Testament is the declaration of Jesus that "my kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36) and that Christ's kingdom will not begin until his second coming.  During the first three centuries of Christianity, the Christian churches were voluntary organizations that enforced doctrinal orthodoxy through the threat of excommunication from the church but without any coercive force or violent persecution of heretics or infidels.  Hobbes concludes that among the early Christians, "there was then no government by coercion, but only by doctrine, and persuading" (ch. 42, 348 [365]).  The political enforcement of church authority did not arise until the conversion of the Emperor Constantine in 312 AD (ch. 42, 322 [338], 342-44 [359-61]).

By the time he reaches the end of Leviathan, Hobbes is ready to endorse the position of the Independents in Parliament, who wanted no politically enforced church at all and free toleration of religious diversity.  "And so we are reduced to the Independency of the primitive Christians, to follow Paul, or Cephas, or Apollos, every man as he liketh best," and if this promotes religious peace, it is "perhaps the best" (ch. 47, 456 [479-80]).

Thus does Hobbes move towards complete religious toleration and the privatization of religious belief as rooted in the New Testament as the best way to secure peace.  In effect, Hobbes adopts the interpretation of the Bible advanced by Roger Williams, who argued that while the Old Testament teaches theocratic enforcement of religious belief, the New Testament teaches religious toleration.  As I have argued in a previous post, Williams was right in interpreting the New Testament as supporting a classical liberal conception of religious toleration and liberty.

We should realize, however, that Hobbes was right in arguing that no matter how much religious liberty might be allowed, even in a state that practices toleration, the sovereign must have the ultimate power to rule against religious doctrines that promote violence, and in that way the sovereign is still the "supreme pastor." 

Consider, for example, what happened after the terrorist attack on the United States on September 11, 2001.  When it was discovered that the terrorists were members of al-Qaida, who believed they were obeying the teaching of the Koran in commanding holy war against infidels, this provoked a political debate over whether Islam was a threat to the peace of the world, which would make it impossible to tolerate Islam in a liberal regime that must suppress religious violence. 

In his speech to a Joint Session of Congress, nine days after the terrorist attack, George Bush had to offer his own authoritative interpretation of the Koran.  He said that the terrorists "practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics; a fringe movement that perverts the peaceful teachings of Islam."  He declared that the teachings of Islam "are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah." 

Bush is a Christian who interprets the New Testament as teaching that religious belief is a voluntary activity of private individuals that can be properly protected from coercive persecution.  But any religious belief that promotes unjustified violence cannot be tolerated by any government that aims to secure peace and liberty.  Consequently, Bush believes that government can rightly interpret religious doctrines to protect the peace while generally tolerating religious beliefs and practices that are non-violent.

This is the Christian understanding of liberal toleration that emerged in the English Civil War and in the writings of Roger Williams.  It was later elaborated by Spinoza, Locke, and others.

Do Hahn and Wiker agree with this interpretation of the Bible as supporting liberal toleration?  They are strangely evasive about this.  They generally present the liberal interpretation of the Bible as driven by a liberal bias that is not really true to the Biblical text.  But then they sometimes speak of liberal toleration as something that "may appear quite ordinary to us," as if they endorse it (446).  Moreover, they often concede that the liberal interpretation of the Bible was an understandable reaction against the brutal violence and moral corruption of the Catholic Church in its exercise of authority over politics (15, 390-91).  And yet they never explicitly concede that the liberal reading of the Bible is plausible.

Hahn and Wiker claim to be following the recommendation of then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, who called for "a criticism of criticism" in Biblical interpretation (8).  But they are oddly silent about the statements of Pope Benedict XVI that support the liberal interpretation of the Bible, particularly the liberal argument that the violent persecution and brutality of the Old Testament must be seen as morally inferior to the peaceful toleration and love of the New Testament.

In his Apostolic Exhortation Verbum Domini (November 11, 2010), Benedict XVI indicated that the Old Testament had "dark passages" containing "violence and immorality" (sec. 42).  We must remember, he advised, that "biblical revelation is deeply rooted in history."  He explained: "Revelation is suited to the cultural and moral level of distant times and thus describes facts and customs, such as cheating and trickery, and acts of violence and massacre, without explicitly denouncing the immorality of such things."  Notice the implication here that "the cultural and moral level" of the Old Testament was lower than that of the New Testament, because the God of the Old Testament did not explicitly denounce the immorality of the unjust violence perpetrated by the Hebrew people.

Moreover, Hahn and Wiker are silent about the actions of both John Paul II and Benedict XVI in asking forgiveness for the history of religious violence condoned by the Catholic Church.

They are also silent about how the Catholic Church endorsed liberal toleration as rooted in the New Testament in the "Declaration of Religious Liberty" (1965) at Vatican II.

Would Hahn and Wiker agree with these moves of the Catholic Church towards liberal toleration?  Hahn seems to agree with this in his book Reasons to Believe: How to Understand, Explain, and Defend the Catholic Faith (Doubleday, 2007).  Throughout this book, he uses persuasion to try to convert his readers to Catholicism, but he never suggests that violent persecution or coercion would ever be justified by the Catholic Church.  He writes: "We cannot impose orthodox conclusions on our unbelieving friends.  To borrow words from Benjamin Franklin: The mind changed against the will is of the same opinion still.  God endowed every human being with freedom, and we are always free to choose unbelief" (39).  So here he seems to accept Franklin's argument for toleration and conversion only through peaceful persuasion.

And yet I can't be completely sure about this, however, because of what Hahn says about papal infallibility.  He says that although the popes have made some mistakes, they are infallible in matters of Christian faith and morals.  "God has never permitted even the scoundrels to teach error in matters of faith and morals" (130).

This is disturbing.  Does he really mean to say that all the popes who authorized the persecution of heretics--for example,  Innocent IV in his Bull Ad Extirpanda--were infallible?  If so, then were John Paul II and Benedict XVI fallible in asking forgiveness for such religious violence?  Does Hahn agree with Thomas Aquinas that the Church can even authorize the execution of heretics (ST, II-II, q. 11, a. 3)?

I have elaborated some of these points in previous posts here, here, here, here, and here.

Does the Search for Extraterrestrial Life Deny Christianity?

 

                              Jupiter's Four Galilean Moons--Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto

                 The European Space Agency Launches the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE)

JUICE's Journey to Jupiter with Gravity Assist Flybys at the Sun, the Earth, and Venus

On April 14th, the European Space Agency (ESA) launched the "Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer" (JUICE) spacecraft on its way to Jupiter to explore three of the major moons of Jupiter--Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto--including a prolonged orbit around Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system.  Because Jupiter is so far away from the Earth, and because of the need for gravity assist flybys of the Sun, Earth, and Venus, the spacecraft will not reach Jupiter until July of 2031.  In the fall of 2024, NASA will launch the Europa Clipper to explore Jupiter's Europa.  Clipper will launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, which is a more powerful launch vehicle than ESA's, and consequently Clipper will actually reach Jupiter in April 2030, a year ahead of JUICE.  

One of the primary reasons for these exploratory missions to the moons of Jupiter--and particularly, Europa and Ganymede--is to look for signs of extraterrestrial life.  We might wonder why human beings want to search for extraterrestrial life.  Is this a foolish pursuit?  What difference would it make for us if life were discovered on these moons?  

Can Christians accept this?  Or must Christians insist that we know from the Bible that the only form of extraterrestrial life is angels (supernatural spirits without bodies), and so extraterrestrial embodied life is impossible?  Or could the discovery of extraterrestrial material life beyond the Earth be understood as compatible with the central doctrines of Christianity?

The four largest moons of Jupiter were first discovered in January of 1610 by Galileo when he turned his newly invented telescope towards the night sky.  In March of that year, he published his discoveries in The Starry Messenger.  For many reasons, this was one of the most important discoveries in the history of science.  One reason was that it seemed to be clear evidence against the geocentric model of the universe and for the heliocentric Copernican model, because Jupiter's moons were orbiting around Jupiter and not around the Earth.  Another reason for the importance of this discovery is that some people saw it as suggesting the possibility of extraterrestrial life.  Johannes Kepler published a letter to Galileo, which included his claim that Galileo's discovery of the four moons made it probable that there was life on Jupiter.  After all, if Jupiter with four moons is so similar to the Earth with one moon, then why shouldn't Jupiter have living inhabitants just as the Earth does?  Galileo himself, however, cautiously resisted Kepler's suggestion.  

But despite Galileo's caution on this point, the telescopic discoveries in astronomy, beginning in the 17th century, renewed a debate over the possibility of extraterrestrial life that had begun in ancient Greece and then reappeared in the late 13th century as a debate among Christians over whether extraterrestrial life was compatible with Christianity.  The documents in this debate have been conveniently collected in one volume by Michael J. Crowe in The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, Antiquity to 1915: A Source Book (University of Notre Dame Press, 2008).  

An assessment of this debate from the perspective of a conservative Catholic has been written by Benjamin Wiker--"Alien Ideas: Christianity and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life" (Crisis Magazine, November 4, 2002).  Wiker argues that the search for extraterrestrial life is an anti-Christian attack on religion rooted in the atomistic materialism of Epicureans like Lucretius.  I have already challenged Wiker's stance in a series of posts.

Against Wiker are those Jesuit astronomers who work for the Vatican Observatory, who see no conflict between the possibility of extraterrestrial life and Christianity.  Some years ago, Jack Hitt wrote a long article on how these Catholic scientists think about this debate--"Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial?" (The New York Times Magazine, May 29, 1994).

In his didactic philosophical poem--On the Nature of Things--Lucretius defends the Epicurean understanding of nature as arising from the spontaneous, random, and purposeless motions of atoms, without any need for intelligent design by the gods.  From this atomistic conception of nature, he infers that "it is in the highest degree unlikely that this earth and sky is the only one to have been created and that all those particles of matter outside are accomplishing nothing," and that we are bound "to acknowledge that in other regions there are other earths and various tribes of men and breeds of beasts" (2.1056, 2.1078).  He thus affirmed the plurality of worlds and extraterrestrial life.

In this way, he was opposed to Plato (particularly in the Timaeus) and Aristotle (particularly in On the Heavens and the Metaphysics), who argued that the cosmos was governed by a divine mind (Plato's Demiurge, Aristotle's Prime Mover) according to a divinely purposeful design.  They inferred from this that there was no plurality of worlds.  As Aristotle said: "the unmovable first mover is one both in definition and in number; so too, therefore, is that which is moved always and continuously; therefore, there is one heaven alone" (Metaphysics 1074a37-39).  (I have written some posts contesting these popular interpretations of Plato and Aristotle as proponents of cosmic divine teleology as opposed to the natural immanent teleology of Darwinian natural right.)

From the beginning of Christianity, many Christian theologians have embraced Christian versions of this popular interpretation of this Platonic and Aristotelian theological cosmology as opposed to Epicurean atomism, and this has led them to deny a plurality of worlds with extraterrestrial embodied life.  But beginning in the late 13th century, some Christians have seen a plurality of life-worlds in one cosmos as compatible with Christianity.

The debate here is over whether the plurality of worlds can be reconciled with the central doctrines of Christianity--particularly, the Story of Creation and the Story of Salvation.

THE STORY OF CREATION

The key Biblical text for the Story of Creation is the opening chapters of Genesis with its account of the six days of creation.  

"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1). On the first day, God created light and separated it from darkness.  

On the second day, God created the vault that He called "sky" to separate the water above the vault from the water below the vault. 

On the third day, God gathered the water under the sky to one place, so that the dry ground appeared.  He called the dry ground "land," and the gathered waters "seas."  He then allowed the land to produce vegetation--seed-bearing plants and trees.

On the fourth day, God let there be two great lights in the sky to separate day from night on the Earth.  The greater light (the Sun) would govern the day.  The lesser light (the Moon) would govern the night.  He also made the stars in the vault of the sky to give light on the Earth.

On the fifth day, God allowed the seas to teem with marine animals, and he allowed birds to fly above the Earth across the vault of the sky.

On the sixth day, God allowed the Earth to produce the land animals.  And then, God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the Earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the Earth" (Genesis 1:26).

The first problem for any reader of this first chapter of Genesis is deciding how much of this was intended to be interpreted as literal history and how much of it is figurative poetry.  Deciding that question is crucial for determining whether this Biblical account of Creation can be compatible with the natural sciences of cosmology, astronomy, geology, and evolutionary biology.  As I have indicated in previous posts, Christians cannot reach any agreement on this issue, which is most evident in how revelation through the Holy Spirit has failed to resolve the creation/evolution debate among Christians.

Consider what a literal reading of this first chapter would teach us.  God created everything in the Universe in six days.  The Universe is geocentric in that the Earth is at the center.  (Wiker observes that "early Christians held to a geocentric universe.")  Above the Earth, the sky is a solid vault that separates the waters above from the waters below, which is the boundary between heaven and earth.  This cosmic geography saw the sky as having a form and function similar to what was found in the ancient Near East.  Most people believed that the sky was solid.

In that solid sky, there were the Sun, the Moon, and the stars.  The Earth was the only planet in the Universe.  And the Moon was the only moon in the Universe.  The stars did not have any planets orbiting around them.

All life was found on or a little above the Earth.  So, there was no extraterrestrial life.  There were, however, divinities or spiritual beings (angels?) who lived in the heavens.  Notice that when God speaks of creating human beings, He speaks in the plural ("Let us make man in our image").  The Bible often has God speaking in the plural (for example, Gen. 3:22; 11:7; Deut. 32:8; Job 1:6; 2:1; Isa. 6:8.  Sometimes, God sits on a throne and meets in a council with "all the multitudes of heaven standing around Him" (1 Kings 22:19-23; Job 1:6; 2:1).  So, there was no extraterrestrial bodily life beyond the Earth.  Christians who believe this will have to say that the search for extraterrestrial life is foolish and anti-Christian.

Notice that if we accept the literal reading of the Bible's cosmology, we will have to say that modern science has shown that the Bible's teaching is false.  So, for example, if we think the Bible is teaching that the universe is geocentric, then this is denied by modern astronomy.

But then Christian scientists (like Francis Collins and Deborah Haarsma) will say that much of the Bible uses figurative stories of the sort that would have been comprehensible to the people of the ancient Near East that were not intended to be taken as literal history.  The Bible, therefore, is not a science textbook but rather a book that tells us what we need to know about salvation.  Or, as Galileo put it, the Bible tells us "not how the heavens go," but "how to get to heaven."  The scientific study of the Book of Nature must be separated from the religious study of the Book of Scripture, although the two books should ultimately be compatible.  Many scientists (like Galileo and Darwin) and many Christian theologians (like Pope John Paul II) agree on this conception of God speaking through two books.

Moreover, Christians need not read the Book of Scripture as denying the possibility of extraterrestrial life.  For example, Thomas Chalmers was one of the leaders of Scottish evangelical Christianity in the 19th century; and he wrote extensively about how the Christian Revelation could be harmonized with the enlarged cosmos of modern astronomy that might include extraterrestrial life in many worlds beyond the Earth.  In one text, he began by quoting from the book of Psalms:

"When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou has ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man, that thou visitest him?" (Psalm 8:3-4)

Chalmers saw here a suggestion that God's universe is so vast and varied, extending far beyond what is visible to the naked eye, that we should see the Earth as only "one paltry and insignificant portion of it," and "how minute is the place, and how secondary is the importance of our world, amid the glories of such a surrounding magnificence."  And so, "to an eye which could spread itself over the whole, the mansion which accommodates our species might be so small as to lie wrapped in microscopical concealment; and, in reference to the only Being who possesses this universal eye, well might we say, 'What is man that thou art mindful of him, or the son of man that thou shouldest deign to visit him'" (Crowe, 245, 250, 253, 268-69).

Chalmers suggests that we can see this expansiveness of God's universe confirmed by what modern astronomy tells us about the many stars that are suns with planets orbiting around them just as our Earth orbits around its star.  And we can imagine that "worlds roll in these distant regions; and these worlds must be the mansions of life and of intelligence."  In the remote future, we can foresee that our Sun will die or the Earth will fall into it, and then our world will disappear.  But the many other worlds of life and intelligence orbiting other stars will survive.  This shows that what God did in the first chapter of Genesis to create the human world on Earth, He has done for other distant planets to create other worlds of intelligent life.  The Bible does not explicitly recognize these other worlds, but we should not assume that the Bible's silence is a denial of their existence.

THE STORY OF SALVATION

If the purpose of the Bible is to teach us "how to get to heaven"--rather than "how the heavens go"--then we must consider whether the Bible's story of salvation--based on the doctrines of Adam's Fall, the Incarnation of Christ, and the redemption of humanity through Christ's sacrifice--is compatible with extraterrestrial life.  Nicholas of Cusa in 1440 seems to have been the first thinker in Latin Christianity to affirm a plurality of inhabited worlds in space.  Remarkably, despite his radical views, the Church made him a cardinal in 1448 (Crowe, 27-34).  But then a few years later, the Franciscan philosopher and theologian William Vorilong became the first Christian author to raise the question of whether the idea of a plurality of worlds could be reconciled with the Christian doctrines of divine incarnation and redemption.  

Did the people who live on other worlds beyond the Earth sin just as Adam sinned?  If they did, would Christ have to be incarnated in each world and then die in that world to redeem them?  Or would the redemptive life of Christ on Earth be enough to universally redeem those sinners in the other worlds?  Or is it possible that the people on those other worlds did not make Adam's mistake, and so they were sinless and did not need redemption?  Chalmers implied that he could not decide between these alternatives (Crowe, 26-27, 37, 220-21, 224, 229, 242, 256-58, 325-332).

Jack Hitt reports interviewing some of the Jesuit astronomers affiliated with the Vatican Observatory and asking them about the theological implications of discovering extraterrestrial intelligent life.  Would you baptize an extraterrestrial?  One priest answered, "only if he asked for it."

The Rev. George Coyne, S.J., identified himself as a Jesuit astrophysicist.  He was a close associate of Pope John Paul II and the director of the Vatican Observatory.  Hitt reports Coyne's answer to the question: "'O.K., so I meet this 'person.'  I would ask him: 'Are you intelligent?  Self-reflexive?  In the traditional sense do you have what we can call a soul?'  Good.  'Nice to meet you.'"  He says he would then find out if their civilization sinned, then if it was redeemed, then if the redeemer was a man named Jesus, and then: 'If they say, Oh yes, now you have a theological problem.  How could Jesus Christ be our redeemer on earth and of another planet and still be the one Son of God?  Could he have had several incarnations?  That's a pretty ticklish theological problem, and I don't know the answer.'"

Wiker, however, thinks the answer is clear: "we find no evidence of speculation about extraterrestrials among the early Christians.  Not only did such speculation run directly against the central doctrinal claims of Christianity, but it also smacked of Epicureanism (which entailed, among other things, the denial of the immortal, immaterial soul, heaven, and hell).  Small wonder the early Christians tossed the Epicurean package, extraterrestrials and all, into the abyss of doctrinal errors."

Furthermore, Wiker insists, not only is extraterrestrial life a doctrinal error, there is no scientific evidence for it despite many years of scientific searching for it.  But is that correct?

ABSENCE OF EVIDENCE?  EVIDENCE OF ABSENCE?

Wiker argues:

"By the end of the 20th century, scientists had demonstrated to all but the most zealously intransigent that--humble Earth excepted--our solar system was devoid of intelligent life and most likely devoid of any life.  Further, as biologists discovered the ever-greater complexity of living organisms and the delicate balance of conditions that make them possible, it became clearer and clearer that fewer and fewer places in the universe could meet the conditions required for even the most rudimentary forms of life."

"Yet the dismal result of the high-tech search for extraterrestrials only stirred advocates all the more, resulting in the optimistic but defensive battle cry: 'The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.'  While this might warm the dwindling fires in the enthusiast's heart, it pays little service to reason.  To be blunt, since it was the negative result of a century-long search for aliens, the absence of evidence is the evidence for absence.  What else could it be?"

But it's not quite right to speak of "the negative result of a century-long search for aliens" for three reasons.  First, it ignores the fact that the first evidence for exoplanets (planets outside the solar system) appeared only in 1996; but now, as of today, there are 5,346 confirmed exoplanets in 3,943 planetary systems with 855 having more than one planet.  There are now some estimates that there are at least 20 billion Earth-like habitable planets in the Milky Way Galaxy alone.  So, the search for extraterrestrial life on those planets has just begun within the last 25 years.

The second problem with Wiker's dismissal of the search for extraterrestrial life as a failure is that he ignores the recent intensity in the exploration of the solar system, which began in the 1970s with the first robotic exploration spacecraft, starting with the Pioneer 10 mission to Jupiter.  For example, there is plenty of evidence that the icy moons of Jupiter have liquid water oceans on them, and some of them could have geothermal and water-rock interactions on the bottom.  Europa is an ocean world entirely covered by sea ice.  Europa actually has more liquid water than does Earth!  In the 1980s, oceanographers discovered deep-sea life with a food chain based not on photosynthesis but on chemosynthesis linked to hot vents on the seafloor.  The subsurface ocean on Europa is kept liquid by heating due to tidal interaction with Jupiter. Everywhere on Earth that has these conditions gets colonized by microbial life.  Wiker says nothing about this.

That points to the third problem for Wiker.  Even though he is right that the exploration of the solar system has not found any clear evidence of extraterrestrial intelligent life, there is growing evidence for the likelihood of finding extraterrestrial microbial life (or perhaps fossil evidence of its past existence).  Increasingly, astrobiologists are concluding that microbes are the most likely forms of extraterrestrial life because the necessary conditions for such life are so much more common in the universe than the necessary conditions for intelligent life.

Wiker's insistence that we are unlikely to ever find any evidence for "even the most rudimentary forms of life" beyond the Earth is implausible, because he is silent about the growing evidence for likely conditions favorable to microbial life in places like the oceans of Europa.  Does Wiker believe that if we were to find microbes on one of the icy moons of Jupiter, that would deny the central doctrines of Christianity?

Finding microbes in the Solar System beyond the Earth or on exoplanets might not seem spectacular.  But consider the implications.  This would show that the processes that lead to the origin of life are not peculiar to the Earth, and they might be common in the Universe.  The history of life on Earth has been one of continual development from the simplest forms of life to the most complex, with every increasing degrees of living sensitivity and intelligence.  If life is a general phenomenon in the cosmos, then so is intelligence.

And with the evolutionary development of symbolic intelligence, there will be minds capable of asking questions about the intellectual and spiritual meaning of it all, and about whether their extraterrestrial souls need to be saved.

The Evolutionary Lucretian Liberalism of Spontaneous Order: A Liberty Fund Conference

The Liberty Fund conference in Tucson last week on "Lucretius, Evolutionary Morality, and Spontaneous Order" helped me to think through the idea of evolutionary Lucretian liberalism.

The question for this conference was whether an evolutionary study of cosmic history--from the origin of the universe to the present and into the distant future--supports the claim of classical liberalism that order emerges best from the bottom up through spontaneous evolution rather than from the top down through intelligent design and planning.

The fundamental thought is conveyed in one passage of Lucretius's On the Nature of Things: "Nature is seen, free at once, and quit of her proud rulers, doing all things by herself spontaneously [per se sponte omnia], without control of gods" (2.1090-93).  Matt Ridley sees this Lucretian teaching as a general theory of evolution that applies the classical liberal principle of spontaneous order to everything in the universe: "the physical world, the living world, human society, and the morality by which we live all emerged as spontaneous phenomena, requiring no divine intervention nor a benign monarch or nanny state to explain them" (The Evolution of Everything, 8).  The French physiocrats expressed this thought in a motto: Laissez faire et laissez passer, le monde va de lui meme! (Let do and let pass, the world goes on by itself!)  The alternative position is the Platonic teaching that all natural and social order requires intelligently designed planning from the top down.

With selected readings from Lucretius, Ridley, and Christian, Brown, and Benjamin's Big History, we talked about a wide range of topics over six sessions:

1. The Evolution of the Origin of the Universe
2. The Evolution of Life, Mind, and Culture
3. The Evolution of Morality
4. The Evolution of Religion
5. The Evolution of the Economy and Government
6. The Evolution of the Future

There were at least four kinds of criticism of the idea of Lucretian evolutionary liberalism.  The first criticism arose from the Straussian interpretation of Lucretius as an "ancient" philosopher, who therefore cannot rightly be identified as a "modern" liberal thinker.  I have responded to this criticism in my previous post.  After thinking more about this, I now believe that a crucial issue here is whether one can see Lucretius as drawing from an ancient Greek tradition of liberalism, as set forth by Eric Havelock in his Liberal Temper in Greek Politics, or whether Strauss was right in arguing that Havelock failed to identify any Greek thinker as a true liberal.  It seems to me that Havelock did identify in some of the pre-Socratic philosophers the evolutionary liberal idea of spontaneous order that was developed by Lucretius.

The second kind of criticism of evolutionary liberalism came from the traditionalist conservatives, who complained that this view of the world was morally, intellectually, and spiritually degrading--that it led to Nietzsche's "last man," who lives a comfortable life without any aspiration for anything high or noble.  The "Big History" of evolution that we were studying, one discussant observed, is actually a "small history" of small people in a soulless world with no transcendent longings.  This discussant also noted that in all of our reading nothing was said about the "regime"--Aristotle's politeia understood as the political community devoted to forming the human soul to achieve its highest virtues.

This is the conservatism of the Counter-Enlightenment with its scorn for the bourgeois liberalism and the scientific materialism that create a life of mediocrity without excellence.  In previous posts, I have responded to this Counter-Enlightenment attack on liberalism in my comments on Steven Smith (here), Roger Scruton (here), Patrick Deneen (here), and Benjamin Wiker (here).  I have also responded to the common appeal to Nietzsche's "last man" image by pointing out that the Nietzsche of Human, All Too Human defends an Epicurean evolutionary liberalism that recognizes the moral dignity of the bourgeois virtues (here and here).  Moreover, I have argued that those who sneer at the mediocrity of the bourgeois life need to confront Deirdre McCloskey's argument for the bourgeois virtues as including all of the moral, intellectual, and spiritual virtues (here).

As I have indicated in some of these posts, this debate over the virtues and vices of evolutionary liberalism ultimately comes down to an empirical question about the facts of human history: Has life in the illiberal regimes been generally more or less civilized than life in the liberal regimes?  As summarized by Ridley (28-33), people like Steven Pinker and Norbert Elias have presented historical evidence that the move from the illiberal social orders of the European Middle Ages to the liberal social orders of modern Europe was a "civilizing process," in which the moral standards of life improved.  The conservative critics of classical liberalism would have to prove that the factual evidence of history does not support this claim.  They would also have to recommend illiberal alternatives to liberalism.

A third criticism coming from the traditionalist conservatives was that evolutionary liberalism seems to assume a naïve progressivism that is denied by the fact that the cosmic and cultural evolution of history does not show inevitable and linear progress.  The authors of Big History present the entire history of the universe from the Big Bang to the present as a movement from simplicity to complexity through eight thresholds of increasing complexity.  Although they never mention Herbert Spencer, he also argued for a cosmic evolution from simplicity to complexity, from homogeneity to heterogeneity.  The authors of Big History rely on astronomer Eric Chaisson's claim that the cosmic history of increasing complexity can be studied through the measurable matrix of increasing flows of energy required to sustain more complicated structures against the entropy of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

But eventually, according to the common view of many scientists, the universe must end in "heat death," because entropy will win.  Life on Earth will become impossible.  In 4 to 5 billion years, the Sun will die.  Over hundreds of billions of years, all the stars will fade out.  And with no stars, there will be no planets, and thus no biospheres to support life anywhere.  The universe will continue to expand forever into eternal darkness.  Entropy will have finally destroyed all structure and order.  For those scientists who believe our universe is part of a larger multiverse, other universes might continue to evolve.

Similarly, Lucretius offers four proofs that while the universe of atoms and the void--the "sum of sums" (summarum summa)--is eternal, our "world" (mundus) is mortal (5.235-415).  Our world as constituted by the Earth, all life on Earth, the Sun, the moon, and the stars will endure for a long time, but eventually it must all die.  New worlds can then arise out of atoms and the void.

Lucretius says that most human beings are afraid of this teaching that the world is mortal.  Earthquakes are especially fearful because they suggest the possibility that the Earth could be destroyed.  And "men fear to believe that a time of destruction and ruin awaits the nature of the great world, even when they see so great a mass of earth bowing to its fall" (6.565-68).

Leo Strauss quoted this as showing "fear of the most terrible truth"--the terrible truth that "nothing lovable is eternal or sempiternal or deathless, or that the eternal is not lovable" (Liberalism Ancient and Modern, viii, 135).  Strauss believed that only the few human beings capable of living the philosophic life can calmly accept this most terrible truth; and so in any healthy social order, this terrible truth would have to be hidden from the great multitude of human beings who cannot bear it.

Since Big History was written as a textbook for high school and college students, the authors must disagree with Strauss's claim that most human beings cannot bear the truth about the mortality of the world.  The authors admit that their view of the remote future as the "eternal death" of the universe is a "bleak picture."  And yet they try to see this as a "quite satisfying" picture for human beings, because it indicates that humanity has been lucky enough to live in "the springtime of the universe," the brief time when the universe has had all of the conditions for producing the wondrous world in which life and human beings could exist (304).

But rather than worrying about cosmic history many billions of years into the future, most human beings are surely more inclined to worry about the near future--the next hundred years or so--because they might imagine what the world will be like for their children and grandchildren.  With this in mind, our discussion turned to a consideration of whether we should be hopeful or gloomy about how well human beings in the near future will handle environmental problems such as global warming and the scarcity of natural resources and the threats from destructive technologies such as nuclear and biological weapons.

The authors of Big History sketch two alternative scenarios for "ominous trends" and "hopeful trends."  For the "ominous trends," they rely on gloomy predictions about the "limits to growth" by people like Lester Brown.  This kind of thinking has led people like Naomi Klein to argue that the only solution to our environmental problems as created by unregulated capitalism is to have "managed degrowth" to drastically reduce global production and consumption and then to execute a global plan for spending at least 10% of our global economic output on building renewable sources of energy to replace all high-carbon sources.

Against this sort of thinking, Ridley is clearly on the side of the "hopeful trends" scenario, because he believes that as long as there are free market incentives for solving environmental problems, there are likely to be innovative technological changes that will protect human beings from catastrophe. (I have written a post on the debate between Klein and Ridley here.)  As always, the key for Ridley is to allow for spontaneous cultural evolution:  "It is a fair bet that the twenty-first century will be dominated mostly by shocks of bad news, but will experience mostly invisible progress of good things.  Incremental, inexorable, inevitable changes will bring us material and spiritual improvements that will make the lives of our grandchildren wealthier, healthier, happier, cleverer, cleaner, kinder, freer, more peaceful and more equal--almost entirely as a serendipitous by-product of cultural evolution.  But the people with grand plans will cause pain and suffering along the way" (319-20).

Some of the discussants at the Liberty Fund conference agreed with this--thinking that as long as people were free to cooperate in spontaneously ordered groups, they could find imperfect solutions to their problems.  For example, one discussant spoke about Elinor Ostrom's studies of how neighbors cooperate to enforce social norms for managing common pool resources in ways that solve the "tragedy of the commons."

But at this point, some discussants brought up a fourth criticism of evolutionary liberalism--the fanaticism of Ridley's claim that everything good comes from bottom-up evolution, and everything bad comes from top-down planning.  Ridley declares: "bad news is man-made, top-down, purposed stuff, imposed on history.  Good news is accidental, unplanned, emergent stuff that gradually evolves.  The things that go well are largely unintended; the things that go badly are largely intended. . . . Letting good evolve, while doing bad, has been the dominant theme of history" (317-18).

While agreeing with Hayek about the importance of spontaneous order, Ridley ignores Hayek's claim that good order often does emerge top-down by design in deliberate organizations.  Families, firms, governments, military organizations--these are all deliberately designed forms of order.  And particularly in time of war, Hayek thought, a society might need to be centrally planned for warfare.

As I have indicated in a previous post (here), Ridley's version of evolutionary liberalism suffers from one fundamental flaw--an almost anarchistic scorn for government.  Unlike Hume, Smith, Darwin, and Hayek, Ridley fails to see that although governmental power is dangerous when it is unlimited and undivided, the spontaneous order of human civilization can arise only within a framework of general rules deliberately designed and enforced by government. 
Although Ridley has a short section on the evolution of marriage (85-90), he says nothing about the Hayekian account of the family as a deliberate organization rather than a spontaneous order.  I have written about that here and here.

Like Hayek, Ridley points to the evolution of the common law as an example of spontaneous order that shows how law can emerge without any need to be invented by lawmakers (33-36).  But Ridley is silent about Hayek's argument that the common law as "grown law" often needs correction by legislation as "made law" (Law, Legislation, and Liberty, vol. 1, 88-89).

I now regret that at this Liberty Fund conference we did not talk about the evolution of government, legislation, and the family as deliberate orders. We should have thought more about how the evolution of a free society requires both spontaneous order and deliberate order.

Some discussants suggested that good things can come either bottom-up or top-down.  One discussant pointed to Ridley's account of how Hong Kong became a place of free trade.  Sir Harry Pottinger, Hong Kong's first Governor in 1843, promoted free trade.  Then, in the 1960s, Sir John Cowperthwaite, the Financial Secretary of Hong Kong, resumed this experiment in free trade (233-34).  So here we see how top-down administrators can create the open space for bottom-up emergence of order.

Despite these four lines of criticism, it seemed that most of the discussants at this Liberty Fund agreed that the evolutionary science of the cosmos, culture, and mind can support classical liberalism.

Budziszewski's Critique of Darwinian Natural Law

J. Budziszewski (pronounced "Boojee-shef-skee") is a professor in the Departments of Government and Philosophy at the University of Texas.  He is a prolific author best known for his writings on his Christian interpretation of natural moral law, which he finds in the work of Thomas Aquinas. His most recent book is a commentary on Aquinas's "Treatise on Law."

In a series of papers, Budziszewski has criticized my defense of natural law or natural right as grounded in a Darwinian account of human nature.  He criticizes me for my "determined attempt to make natural law safe for atheists."  For "natural law," he argues, one must "regard nature as the design of a supernatural intelligence."  By contrast, for "naturalism," one must "regard nature (in a physical or material sense as all there is."  What I defend, he says, is not "natural law" but "naturalism," and thus atheism.

I have responded to his criticisms in previous posts (here and here).

I was reminded of this debate while attending the recent meeting (October 28-29) of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  There was a special panel on Budziszewski's interpretation of natural law. 

As some of the panelists indicated, one of Budziszewski's main ideas is to oppose what he calls "the Second Table Project."  It is said that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai Ten Commandments on two tablets of stone.  Traditionally, the first four commandments are identified as the first tablet or table, and they concern the worship of God; the last six commandments (beginning with honoring father and mother) are identified as the second table, and they concern moral laws.  Some Christians (Roger Williams, for example) have seen here a separation of Church and State, in that the Church enforces the first table of theological law, while the State enforces only the second table of moral law.  The first table requires religious faith.  But the second table can be known by natural reason.  The first table corresponds to divine law that can be known only by those who are believers in the Bible as divine revelation.  The second table corresponds to natural law that can be known by all human beings, even those who are not biblical believers, because it depends on natural human experience.  The second table can stand on its own natural ground without any necessary dependence on the supernatural.  But this is exactly what Budziszewski denies, because, he insists, there cannot be a natural law if there is no divine lawgiver.

I have argued that if we see what Aquinas calls natural law as corresponding to what Darwin calls the natural moral sense rooted in evolved human nature, then those people who have been infused with religious faith can understand that evolved human nature as the product of God's creative design working through the natural history of evolution, while those people who lack such faith can understand that evolved human nature as the product of an unguided natural history of evolution. 

Darwin leaves open the possibility of theistic evolution by employing Aquinas's idea of "dual causality"--the religious believer can see natural causes as secondary causes, as distinguished from divine causes as primary causes (the subject of a previous post).  (I have also written posts on the Catholic Church's acceptance of Darwinian evolution.) 

Whether we have faith or not, whether we are on the side of revelation or on the side of reason, we can all recognize the common morality of natural law or natural right.  Religious belief can reinforce that natural morality for those who are religious believers.  But those who lack any religious belief can still recognize that natural morality as dictated by our natural experience and natural reason.

Some of my critics--not only Budziszewski, but also Craig Boyd, C. Stephen Evans, John Hare, Carson Holloway, Matthew Levering, Stephen Pope, Richard Sherlock, John West, and Benjamin Wiker--have complained that this distorts Aquinas's teaching by ignoring the ways in which Aquinas makes natural law dependent on God as the creator of that law.  After all, Aquinas indicates that natural law belongs to God's eternal law, because a human being as a rational creature "has a natural inclination to his proper act and end, and this participation of the eternal law in the rational creature is called the natural law" (ST, I-II, q. 91. a. 2).  Moreover, Aquinas indicates that human beings are directed to eternal happiness in Heaven as their final end, and for this they need divine law--the divinely revealed Biblical law of the Old and New Testaments--to instruct them how to achieve that eternal happiness (ST, I-II, q. 91, aa. 4-5).

But doesn't this confirm my claim about the autonomy of natural law as separated from divine law?  By natural law, Aquinas says, human beings are directed to their natural end of earthly happiness, which is "in proportion to the capacity of human nature."  Human beings cannot recognize their supernatural end--eternal happiness in Heaven--unless they believe in the divine law of the Bible (ST, I-II, q. 91, a. 4, ad 1).  The need for divine law to reveal supernatural ends shows that natural law by itself is directed to purely natural ends that can be known by natural experience without any belief in God or His commands.

Moreover, it is only by recognizing the autonomy of natural law that allows us to use the natural law to correct the divine law of the Bible.  Budziszewski's denial of natural law's autonomy makes this impossible.  Consider three examples of how natural law can correct the moral mistakes in the Bible.

First, Budziszewski says that recognizing "the wrong of deliberately taking innocent human life" is part of the natural law.  And yet, according to the Bible (Genesis 22), Abraham showed his faith in God by being willing to obey God's commandment to murder his innocent son Isaac.  Some Christians like Soren Kierkegaard have seen this Biblical story as teaching us "the suspension of the ethical" in our faith in God.  We must obey God's commands even when they are unethical.  But most people see this Biblical teaching as wrong, because we recognize that wrongness of killing innocent children, and thus our natural moral sense corrects the Bible.

Aquinas explains: "that which is done miraculously by the Divine power is not contrary to nature, though it be contrary to the usual course of nature. Therefore, . . . Abraham did not sin in being willing to slay his innocent son, because he obeyed God, although considered in itself, it was contrary to right human reason" (ST, II-II, q. 154, a. 2, ad 2).  Here Aquinas shows us a direct contradiction between reason and revelation, natural law and divine law, and if we take the side of revelation and divine law, we must allow--even honor--the killing of innocent people whenever we think God has commanded it, even though this is "contrary to the usual course of nature" and "contrary to right human reason."

For Aquinas, there is no way of escaping this shocking contradiction between natural moral law and arbitrary divine command, because if he appeals to natural law to correct the Biblical story, he will be exposed to persecution from church authorities.  In fact, the Bishop of Paris had condemned faculty at the University of Paris who were accused of teaching pagan natural philosophy that was contrary to the Christian faith, and there were suspicions about Aquinas being one of that group.  We might consider the possibility that this forced Aquinas to engage in esoteric writing.

A second example of how natural law might correct the Bible is in correcting the religious violence of the Old Testament.  The last three popes--John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis--have all acknowledged that the Church needs to ask forgiveness for the religious violence practiced by the Church and endorsed by the Bible, including violence against heretics and apostates.  As Cardinal Ratzinger, and Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Pope Benedict XVI endorsed a remarkable statement of the International Theological Commission in 1999 on "The Church and the Faults of the Past."  This statement indicates that we must recognize that the Bible is mistaken when it reports God as commanding unjust violence.  This is said to require a "paradigm change"--"a transition from a sacral society to a pluralist society, or, as occurred in a few cases, to a secular society." 

So now, it seems that the Catholic Church has embraced liberalism in accepting the move from a premodern "sacral society," in which violence could be used to enforce religion, to a "pluralist society" or "secular society," based on religious toleration and nonviolence. (This has been the subject of a previous post.) 

At the conference at Aquinas College, conservative Catholics argued that the only escape from the morally corrupting relativism of America's liberal culture was to restore faithfulness to the moral teaching of the Catholic Church's Magisterium.  But they were largely silent about how the Church (beginning with Vatican II) has accepted the liberalism of toleration and pluralism as a correction of the illiberal religious violence endorsed by the Bible and by the premodern Church.  Until recently, the Church saw Protestant Christians as heretics who could be properly persecuted and even executed (see Robert Bellarmine, On Temporal and Spiritual Authority [Liberty Fund, 2012], 79-120).  Aquinas endorsed the Inquisition (ST, II-II, q. 10, aa. 8, 11; q. 11, a. 3). Now, even conservative Catholics like Budziszewski recognize that this was wrong in violating natural law.

A third example of natural law correcting the Bible is recognizing the wrongness of the Bible's endorsement of slavery.  While the Bible sanctions slavery (see my post here, which includes links to other posts), Budziszewski knows by natural law that this is wrong, and therefore he looks for some way to correct the Bible to conform to his natural moral knowledge that slavery is wrong.  He writes: "Consider how many centuries it took natural law thinkers even in the Christian tradition to work out the implications of the brotherhood of master and slave.  At least they did eventually.  Outside of the biblical orbit, no one ever did--not spontaneously" (The Line Through the Heart, 36).  The explicit teaching of the Bible is that the "brotherhood of master and slave" is consistent with preserving slavery as a moral good, and this was the understanding of many Christians in the American South before the Civil War.  But Budziszewski rightly judges that Christians had to correct the Bible by seeing that human brotherhood demands the abolition of slavery as a great moral wrong.

As I have argued in Darwinian Natural Right, Darwin and others were able to see the wrongness of slavery as a violation of evolved human nature, and particularly of the natural desire for justice as reciprocity.