On Dating--Getting to Know You

I'm going to venture here into the tricky realm of dating philosophy, especially as it concerns Christian parents of young women. This typically blunt post by Matt Walsh has been doing the rounds on Facebook, and I like it. I have one reservation about it, which I'll get to in due course.

First of all, what I like about it: Walsh is right that "hanging out" should not be a male-female relationship category. It is so vague as to be postmodern. It typifies the unfortunate and baffling paralysis that seems to have descended upon American young men, including even Christian young men who want marriage. It is insulting to a young woman for a young man to be unwilling to admit that he is even somewhat interested in her while at the same time it is obvious that he is interested in her. It puts her in the position of not knowing what is going on. "Hanging out" as a category in itself embodies this type of insult. It says, "I want to say that this girl and I have something, but God forbid I should say that I'm dating her, or even that we have gone on one single date. That would be way too committal."

Moreover, "hanging out" as a category is, in the secular world, tied sociologically to the hook-up culture, which is an abomination. You hang out in groups and then you have sex with strangers or near strangers. The ultimate anti-relationship. Walsh is, it goes without saying, right to deplore "hooking up."

Walsh is also right that marriage is a good thing and that both men and women should value marriage and should seek it, unless called to singleness or unable to marry for some overriding reason.

Walsh is also right in his tacit complementarianism. He implies the shockingly anti-feminist idea that the young man is responsible for the course of the relationship and should pursue the young woman, rather than vice versa.

My one hesitation about the post is this: Walsh implies that the men who are "hanging out" with women rather than dating them actually know what they want and should be actively courting one particular woman instead of "hanging out." Perhaps in some cases that is true, but in other cases, they may in fact need to get to know a girl better before they know if they should be, or want to be, courting her.

I'm certainly not going to say that there was some golden age of dating in which this was all perfect, but it does seem that a category is getting left out here. Unfortunately, it's a category that young men nowadays seem to be encouraged to leave out both by the secular crowd and by some in the Christian crowd, though for vastly different reasons. That category is the getting-to-know-you date. It's perfectly legitimate for either a man or a woman to be somewhat interested in a member of the opposite sex but to want to get to know the other person better before deepening their relationship. If you have regular group activities where you can just chat casually and be friends, that's great, and it doesn't need any special label. In fact, it would be (as implied above) insulting to a girl to tell her, "I'm a tiny little bit interested in you, but I just want to continue hanging out with you at church. I don't want to take you out, because I'm not sure I like you enough to take you out." If that's how you feel, and if you see her so frequently at church, then just be normal and friendly with her at church and make up your mind whether you want to take her out! But also, don't overlook the fact that you can take a girl out to dinner without putting a ring on her finger! Taking a lady out can be a way of getting to know her better. In fact, it seems that some such category is extremely useful, because it gives two people a chance to talk to each other in semi-privacy and find out more about one another without making others feel excluded. E-mail could serve that purpose to some extent as well, but it really is no substitute for face-to-face conversation.

What seems to have happened is that some Christians decided to emphasize extremely serious courtship rather than dating at an unfortunate time in social history. They decided to tell young men to get very serious very fast about a young woman, to talk to her father before so much as taking her out to dinner, to treat a date as an extremely heavy thing, just at the moment when the hedonistic secular world was also telling the young man that a date is an extremely heavy thing. But the secular world has a different agenda. The secular world's agenda is, "You don't need to have a relationship with a woman to have sex with her."

Good Christian young men are, by definition, not part of the hook-up culture. (If they were, they wouldn't be good.) But they can nonetheless hear and accept the message from the secular side of society that a date can't be used to get to know a girl and to admit merely some degree of interest, short of very serious interest. When that message is fully internalized (to use a bit of jargon), it contributes to a debilitating paralysis in the development of further relationships between the sexes. There are many factors at work, of course, including feminism. Feminism would teach that it isn't one person's role in a male-female relationship to ask the other out (or to pay) any more than the other's. So why not wait for the girl to ask you out? Then you don't risk rejection.

The fear of rejection has always been a difficulty to be gotten over for men asking women out, but now it seems to have grown to a monstrous size, aided and abetted by both secular and Christian attitudes that getting-to-know-you dating is out of fashion and is not an option.

Let me be clear: I am not saying, literally, that a date, even a casual date, has absolutely nothing to do with marriage. Such an extreme statement is false. If that were the case, there would be no problem with a married man's taking out a woman other than his wife on a date! Obviously, dating has, or ought to have, something to do with marriage, if only as a possibility "out there." That is why in my generation Christian girls were carefully enjoined not to date non-Christians--because dating has something to do with marriage.

The courtship idea in Christian circles developed in part as an understandable negative reaction to the complete divorce (if I may use that word) of dating from marriage. Young couples could be "dating," even "going steady," for five years without anyone's so much as breathing the m-word. Or worse, ten-year-old girls had "boyfriends" whom they thought of themselves as "dating." (And then the parents wondered, after years of encouraging early sexualization and childhood romance as cute, why their unmarried daughters became sexually active at fifteen!) In fact, I gather that both of these phenomena still go on as well, parallel to the secular hookup culture and the Christian courtship culture.

So, yes, it's important to be mature about dating and not to pretend it is nothing at all. But the opposite confusion is to bind burdens on men's backs by telling them, "You must never take a girl out until you are ready to court her seriously." My one caveat about Matt Walsh's post is that it might encourage that idea. I strongly support telling men to man up, but it's perfectly understandable for the best of young men to want a period of discernment in which to get to know a woman better. If we can restore the delicate, in-between category of the getting-to-know-you date, we give young people an additional tool for that purpose so that they can move by reasonable steps towards marriage and the formation of Christian families. That is a goal that all Christians should support.

Not weighing our merits, but pardoning our offenses

My title is taken from the prayer of consecration in the Book of Common Prayer. The context goes like this:

And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee; humbly beseeching thee, that we, and all others who shall be partakers of this Holy Communion, may worthily receive the most precious Body and Blood of thy Son Jesus Christ, be filled with thy grace and heavenly benediction, and made one body with him, that he may dwell in us, and we in him. And although we are unworthy, through our manifold sins, to offer unto thee any sacrifice; yet we beseech thee to accept this our bounden duty and service; not weighing our merits, but pardoning our offences, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

We are utterly unworthy of all that we have received, whether it be the gift of the Blessed Sacrament or what the Prayer Book elsewhere calls "all the blessings of this life."

We want to be duly grateful, and this raises an interesting dilemma for those of us who are, at the moment, not suffering and for whom things are going fairly well: On the one hand, if one says, "I am so grateful to God for all His many blessings," it could easily sound like one is implying that God has specially endowed one's precious self with good things that He has deliberately withheld from others. If I thank God for blessing me with a wonderful husband, for example, how might this sound to women who have not been blessed in that way? Might it sound proud or smug? It easily could. This is the tension that arises from the "feeling blessed" phrase (accompanied by smiley icon) one sees on Facebook so often. Does it sound smug? Or is it just the temptation to envy that makes one think so?

On the other hand, we must never fail to thank God. Scripture is adamant on this. We are told again and again to receive all things with thanksgiving and in particular to thank God for our earthly blessings. I could scarcely make a dent in all the passages enjoining thankfulness for our blessings if I listed twenty of them. Psalm 100, Psalm 136, I Timothy 4:4, Colossians 3:17, and on and on and on.

We as Christians must acknowledge God as the giver of all good things (James 1:17).

Interestingly, the Book of Common Prayer shows not the slightest squeamishness about thanking God for our material blessings. The general thanksgiving thanks God for "all the blessings of this life," though it adds that "above all" we give thanks for "thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory." In the section of the American Prayer Book called "Thanksgivings," we find the following:

Most gracious God, by whose knowledge the depths are broken up, and the clouds drop down the dew, we yield thee unfeigned thanks and praise for the return of seed-time and harvest, for the increase of the ground and the gathering in of the fruits thereof, and for all the other blessings of thy merciful providence bestowed upon this nation and people....

And this:

We give thee humble thanks for this thy special bounty; beseeching thee to continue thy loving-kindness unto us, that our land may yield us her fruits of increase, to thy glory and our comfort. 

For Rogation days:

Almighty God, Lord of heaven and earth; We beseech thee to pour forth thy blessing upon this land, and to give us a fruitful season; that we, constantly receiving thy bounty, may evermore give thanks unto thee in thy holy Church, through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.

It seems to me that the secret to feeling blessed without feeling smug must lie somewhere in that phrase "humble thanks." If you simply hold the Prayer Book in your hands and flip through it and read at random, the atmosphere of (in the best sense) piety and true humility arises like incense. Most of the prayers in the "Thanksgivings" section are fairly specific: "For a child's recovery from sickness," "For a safe return from a journey," "The thanksgiving of women after childbirth," "For rain," and so forth. The picture is not of ease and comfort but rather of human life, fraught with all its pains and perils. The one who prays these thanksgivings is one who has turned to God in his deepest need and now turns to God with due relief and gratitude in the time of deliverance. And the very next section after the thanksgivings is the Litany:

O God the Father, Creator of heaven and earth,
Have mercy upon us.
O God the Son, Redeemer of the world,
Have mercy upon us.
O God the Holy Ghost, Sanctifier of the faithful,
Have mercy upon us....
Remember not, Lord, our offences, nor the offences of our forefathers; neither take thou vengeance of ours sins: Spare us, good Lord, spare thy people, whom thou hast redeemed with thy most precious blood, and be not angry with us forever.

Than which nothing less smug can be conceived.

Part of the trouble with conveying due gratitude to God for one's personal blessings lies in the poverty of language, and especially the poverty of personal language. The first person plural is more dignified than the first person singular. To say, especially in the course of corporate or family prayer, that we have been blessed beyond our power to express and far beyond our deserving has a ring of solemnity to it that simply cannot come through if one replaces "we" with "I." And it is difficult, with a straight face, to associate solemnity with Facebook updates. Unless, perhaps, one simply quotes the BCP on one's Facebook status, which isn't such a bad idea.

My life is a gift. It would be a gift, I must acknowledge, even if it were nasty, brutish, and short. For God would still be God in that case and would still love all men, including my unworthy self. But it is much easier as a weak human to see that my life is a gift when it is filled with gifts, with specific gifts.

Somehow, it must be possible to express humble gratitude without being shallow, sentimental, and maudlin. Until we have the power of our own language to do that, we could do far worse than to start with the language of the Prayer Book, which reminds us, in all our gratitude for the blessings of this life, of that which is eternal:

O God, the protector of all that trust in thee, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy; Increase and multiply upon us thy mercy; that, thou being our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we finally lose not the things eternal. Grant this, O heavenly Father, for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Daniel Dennett on disarming and caging

This is a quotation that I thought I had posted on this blog years ago. Since I apparently didn't (according to Google), and since I just went to the trouble to look it up, partially type it in from Google books, and send it to a friend, here it is for posterity:

Save the Baptists! Yes, of course, but not by all means. Not if it means tolerating the deliberate misinforming of children about the natural world. According to a recent poll, 48 percent of the people in the United States today believe that the book of Genesis is literally true. And 70 percent believe that "creation science" should be taught in school alongside evolution. Some recent writers recommend a policy in which parents would be able to "opt out" of materials they didn't want their children taught. Should evolution be taught in the schools? Should arithmetic be taught? Should history? Misinforming a child is a terrible offense.

A faith, like a species, must evolve or go extinct when the environment changes. It is not a gentle process in either case. ... It's nice to have grizzly bears and wolves living in the wild. They are no longer a menace; we can peacefully co-exist, with a little wisdom. The same policy can be discerned in our political tolerance, in religious freedom. You are free to preserve or create any religious creed you wish, so long as it does not become a public menace. We're all on the Earth together, and we have to learn some accommodation. The Hutterite memes are "clever" not to include any memes about the virtue of destroying outsiders. If they did, we would have to combat them. We tolerate the Hutterites because they harm only themselves–though we may well insist that we have the right to impose some further openness on their schooling of their own children. Other religious memes are not so benign. The message is clear: those who will not accommodate, who will not temper, who insist on keeping only the purest and wildest strain of their heritage alive, we will be obliged, reluctantly, to cage or disarm, and we will do our best to disable the memes they fight for.

Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, p. 516, Simon & Schuster, 1995.

Those naturalists are real sweet guys.

The Head That Once Was Crowned With Thorns

If you search this site for posts on the Ascension, you will find quite a few. It's a holy day that I rarely miss at least mentioning, even if I fit a post only into the octave (as in this case). The feast of the Ascension has always seemed to me one of the most unqualifiedly joyful of the church feasts. It's like the great ending to a story. The author of the epistle of the Hebrews says,

Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high. (Hebrews 1:4)

And then there is the Psalmist:

Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in. (Psalm 24:7)

St. Paul:

Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:9-11)

We all know that, in terms of the history of God's work here on earth, there is a lot more to the story. But every story has chapters or sections, and when Jesus ascends to heaven to sit down at the right hand of the Father, to take up His place in His human body as the king of glory, that is a good ending to a huge and important section.

It occurred to me today to wonder what exactly it looked like when Jesus entered into heaven at His ascension. I mean to be precise here: As far as we know, the second Person of the Godhead is now permanently incarnate. That seems to have been the point of Jesus' resurrection in a glorified body. It seems to be an implication of Paul's teaching about Christ as the firstfruits of the resurrection of the dead (I Corinthians 15).

If this is correct, this means that Jesus continues to exist in some sense in time. (Naturally this question occurred to me given my recent work on God and the philosophy of time.) If one has a body, one is automatically in time. We don't know for sure whether angels are strictly disembodied. I gather Christian tradition has varied on whether angels are always disembodied except when they take on bodies to carry messages to human beings and do other work on earth for which a body is required, or whether they always have bodies. But Scripture is clear that angels can have bodies, if only temporarily. So now we have Our Lord incarnate, in a body, and merely created beings, the angels, capable of being embodied. And we also have the holy dead from the time up to Jesus' ascension. They would not be embodied, because the resurrection has not yet taken place for them. But they would be temporal creatures who naturally experience sequentially by way of the senses, and it is entirely reasonable to think of their existence as having some sort of form and sequence to it. Indeed, Jesus seems to allude to Abraham's knowledge of the Son prior to Jesus' incarnation when He says, "Abraham rejoiced to see my day, and he saw it, and was glad."

We can even take it that there must be some place where Jesus, incarnate, now exists and reigns, though in an important sense it must be "another world," a different space-time realm, from our own.

Putting all of this together, one can conjecture, though it is only a conjecture, that there may have been some sort of grand coronation scene at the Ascension, involving angels, the souls of the blessed dead, and Our Lord Himself in His incarnate body. I would love to have been there.

As usual, it is impossible to find a really strong choral version of some of the greatest hymns, but here are a couple of "The Head That Once Was Crowned With Thorns."

Even though it's only forty-five seconds long and doesn't include the first verse, I am charmed by the whole idea of a group's getting up at seven a.m. to go to the top of a tower in London and sing this hymn in honor of the Feast of the Ascension. So kudos to this British church choir:



Here is a fuller version:



And here are the wonderful words by Thomas Kelly:

1 The head that once was crowned with thorns
is crowned with glory now;
a royal diadem adorns
the mighty Victor’s brow.

2 The highest place that heav'n affords
is his, is his by right,
the King of kings and Lord of lords,
and heav'n’s eternal light--

3 the joy of all who dwell above,
the joy of all below,
to whom he manifests his love,
and grants his name to know.

4 To them the cross with all its shame,
with all its grace, is giv'n,
their name, an everlasting name,
their joy, the joy of heav'n.

5 They suffer with their Lord below,
they reign with him above,
their profit and their joy to know
the mystery of his love.

6 The cross he bore is life and health,
though shame and death to him;
his people's hope, his people's wealth,
their everlasting theme!

C.S. Lewis on personalism and God

This talk of "meeting" is, no doubt, anthropomorphic; as if God and I could be face to face, like two fellow-creatures, when in reality He is above me and within me and below me and all about me. That is why it must be balanced by all manner of metaphysical and theological abstractions. But never, here or anywhere else, let us think that while anthropomorphic images are a concession to our weakness, the abstractions are the literal truth. Both are equally concessions; each singly misleading, and the two together mutually corrective. Unless you sit to it very tightly, continually murmuring "Not thus, not thus, neither is this Thou," the abstraction is fatal. It will make the life of lives inanimate and the love of loves impersonal. The naif image is mischievous chiefly in so far as it holds unbelievers back from conversion. It does believers, even at its crudest, no harm. What soul ever perished for believing that God the Father really has a beard?

Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer, pp. 21-22.

Special agent intention as an explanation

In the course of my discussion with Ed Feser, below, and also in the course of re-reading this old thread from What's Wrong With the World, it's occurred to me that the following points might be useful:

All Christians believe that God made the universe and sustains the universe. All Christians also believe that God sometimes does things that in some sense "go beyond" making and sustaining the universe. We usually call those miracles. Some have argued that, if a particular "going beyond" was "front-loaded" into the initial conditions of the Big Bang, it shouldn't be considered a miracle. I'm rather against front-loading talk, because I'm inclined to think that it would look like an intervention whenever it came up anyway. ("Hey, God front-loaded the change from water to wine at Cana into the Big Bang so that it happened at the very moment that Jesus intended it to!") But either way, Christians are committed to believing that there are things that God does by special intention that goes beyond, "God continually sustains everything at every moment" or "God made the whole world, somehow."

This is why all Christians that I know of have some notion of the natural order or of what are usually called secondary causes. There is some sense in which it is true to say that the weather in my town today is probably not the result of special divine intention but rather of the secondary causes according to which God has built the world but that the voice from the sky at Jesus' baptism was definitely the result of special divine intention.

When someone promoting an ID argument says that it is probable that such-and-such a particular phenomenon (say, the visual biochemical cascade in some animals) was the result of intelligent design, he need not be saying that the cosmological argument (or some other version of the teleological argument) doesn't work, that God isn't a necessary being, that it is not the case that everything in the universe depends on God for its existence, that God doesn't sustain the whole world, that God didn't create the whole universe, or anything of the kind. He can be prescinding from addressing all of those heavier metaphysical questions. What he is saying is that it is probable that this particular phenomenon (not everything in the universe indiscriminately) was the result of special agent intention. And special agent intention just isn't what we mean by any of those other things. It isn't included in God's sustaining the universe or God's being the Ultimate Cause or any of that. Suppose that a philosopher claims that, even if only one electron existed in the universe, it would have teleology and would necessarily require that God sustain that teleology. Whatever force that claim or an argument for that claim has, that argument isn't an argument for special agent intention. The old Gilbert and Sullivan song says, "If everybody's somebody, then no one's anybody." If we restrict ourselves to some sense in which everything is, of necessity, "the result of" God, then we just aren't talking about God's special intention, and ID arguments proceed from particular noticed facts and the explanation of special intention for those particular facts.

However one parses God's ways of working out His special intentions, Christians have to have a distinction between God's creating and sustaining everything and God's acts of special intention, because without it, we can't talk about miracles.

So when someone making an intelligent design argument says that it is probable that x was the result of intelligent design, he is saying that it is probable that x was the result of special agent intention. And whatever one believes about God as the Necessary First Cause and so forth, one is completely free to regard it as merely probable that some given phenomenon in the world is a result of God's special intention and special act to bring about that intention.

Hence, an ID argument does not involve postulating a God who is not the necessary ground of being or anything of the kind. As I said, the ID arguments just don't have to enter into those ultimate metaphysical questions at all. An ID argument involves postulating that we can examine probabilistically whether some given phenomenon is the result of special agent intention--which, if God is in fact the Agent in question, means special divine intention. What is being treated as merely probable is not God's relationship to Everything That Is but some agent's (or Agent's) special intention, and acting to bring about that special intention, with regard to this particular arrangement or event.

It will be observed that in making these last two points I am explicitly rejecting any hermetic seal or wall between the creation of, say, animals and Biblical miracles. That is correct. I do emphatically reject any absolute claim to the effect that "creation is different." Our conclusions about whether some animal or aspect of biological life is a result of special divine intention should be drawn on the basis of all available evidence, and in many cases (as discussed in the voice in the sky example in the previous post) that evidence will be similar in kind to the evidence that allows us to conclude special divine intention and action in the case of miracles within human history. The "creating parts of nature, such as animals, in the distant past has to be special" insistence is simply not, in my view, supportable. People often attempt to say that it must be different on the basis of various philosophical assumptions, but I simply do not find those arguments convincing. Evidence is evidence, and is all of a piece.

In any event, from a metaphysical point of view, I think it is enlightening to hold that in some sense special agent intention and action constitute the merely probable explanation in ID arguments. This should lay to rest any objection that ID is rejecting a God who necessarily is the Cause of all things.

Things God can do to reveal Himself

As my vast readership already knows, I've been researching the issue of God and time lately, coming down squarely on the Boethian side according to which God is strictly timeless.

I'm not sure precisely where that places me vis a vis the category of "theistic personalism," against which philosopher Edward Feser has written so much, but it is certainly a move in the "perfect being" direction and away from the idea that God must be fully comprehensible or that God's mode of existence is like that of a super-being or demigod.

If you also have read What's Wrong With the World for a few years, you know that Ed was my blog colleague there for a time and that he and I had many bouts there over the theory of intelligent design (here is just one) and whether it is contrary to right philosophy and theology and to be rejected out of hand, aside from a consideration of the empirical facts discussed by ID theorists. (Digression: Let it be said right here that I have great respect for Ed and for that reason even hesitated to write this post or to bring up the issue yet again myself. I've done so for three reasons. 1) My work on God and time over the last few months has made me appreciate more some of Ed's own concerns about theistic personalism. 2) I've noticed that Ed is making quite a few comments against ID recently. 3) I just now thought of the argument contained in this post.) As I understand Ed's position, he does reject intelligent design arguments in just exactly that way, because he holds that Thomism and classical theism are demonstrably true and are in irreconcilable conflict with the nature and premises of the arguments brought by intelligent design theorists.

Now, without rehashing all of that, I want to address here just one part of that controversy--namely, the concept of God. Ed has written:

[W]e are necessarily left with a designer conceived of in anthropomorphic terms – essentially a human being, or at least a Cartesian immaterial substance, with the limitations abstracted away. The result is the “theistic personalism” (as Brian Davies has labeled it) which has displaced classical theism in the thinking of many contemporary philosophers of religion. [Snip]

Suppose you are a Christian, and suppose I gave you a powerful argument for the existence of Zeus, or of Quetzalcoatl. Would you run out and wave it defiantly in the faces of your New Atheist friends? Presumably not; it would be less a vindication than an embarrassment. To be sure, such an argument wouldn’t necessarily be incompatible with Christianity. You could always interpret Zeus or Quetzalcoatl as merely an unusually impressive created being – a demon, say, or an extraterrestrial. Indeed, that’s how you should interpret them if they are real, because whatever Zeus or Quetzalcoatl would be if they existed, they would not be divine in the classical theistic sense of “divine.” On classical theism, there doesn’t simply happen to be one God, as if only one applicant bothered responding to the "Creator needed; long hours but good benefits" job ad; there couldn’t possibly be more than one God, given what God is. Anything less than Being Itself or Pure Act, anything less than That Than Which No Greater Can Be Conceived, anything less than that which is absolute divine simplicity, absolutely incomparable, would simply not be God. There is no such thing as “almost” being God; it’s all or nothing. But precisely for that reason, while to prove the existence of Zeus or Quetzalcoatl would not be to disprove God’s existence, neither would it advance you one inch to proving it. It would be completely irrelevant.

In some recent posts he again takes swipes at intelligent design on similar grounds. For example, here he facetiously envisages a semi-blasphemous movie about God that includes treating God as the designer:

Fade in: We meet God, a divine person who’s at the top of the game. Think Olivier in Clash of the Titans, but invisible and with something even cooler than the Kraken: we call it ‘maximal greatness.’ I think we can get Anthony Hopkins, though maybe he’ll worry about typecasting after the Thor movies. Anyway, God’s an Intelligent Designer too, like Downey, Jr. in Iron Man but with angels. We’ll show him making bacterial flagella and stuff -- CGI’s pretty good now, so it’ll look realistic.

I want to argue that an argument parallel in form to Ed's argument against ID from classical theism could be made against using several of the actions attributed to God in Scripture to conclude that in fact God was speaking and that the events did not arise from natural (secondary) causes. I consider this to be a real problem for the accusation that ID must be based on a faulty concept of God, since Christians are bound to accept that God did in fact engage in these revelatory actions in Scripture and that people were supposed to take those events for signs. Note that the value of these events as signs would have been completely lost if one concluded that they were like the weather and that God's only relationship to them was the same as God's relationship to everything in nature--e.g., that of First Cause and sustainer. The whole point was supposed to be that these events stood out from the background, that they were not like the weather, not like the existence of a rock, not like "nature in general."

Now, the interesting thing is that these events reveal the actions of God in ways that it is logically possible were the result of the action of some being who was not God and therefore, by definition, less than God. I want to stress that by "it is logically possible" I do not mean "would have been reasonable to conclude." It would have been unreasonable to conclude that these events were caused by a demigod or an angel or alien. The point merely is that that possibility is not excluded, by the nature of the event itself, as an absolute logical impossibility.

Moreover, part of the argument that these events were caused specially by God passes through premises such as that they were not the result of secondary causes, that they were done intentionally and for a purpose against the background of a regular order of nature, that they were the acts of an Intelligence. An intelligent agent. And it just is the case that at any point where we start referring to an "intelligent agent," a "mind," and the like, we will end up using terms like "a being" and "a person." It is nearly unavoidable. Now, these are exactly the terms and concepts that Ed Feser objects to in the ID arguments. He considers that they smack of, or even entail, the theistic personalism that he considers wrong-headed. If  ID involves arguing that God is an "intelligent agent," a "designer" who makes things by deliberate acts that involve "tinkering" within nature, why then, according to Ed, ID entails a concept of God that is just wrong, wrong, wrong.

The problem is that we have several biblical examples that, if analyzed, would incline us to use very much the same types of "theistic personalist" terms Ed objects to. Note that by this I am not saying that theistic personalism is just plain right, that God really is a person just like ourselves with the exception of being bigger, better, and stronger. What I am pointing out, rather, is that if we are Christians and believe that God has revealed Himself in the ways recorded in Scripture, we have to be willing to accept this fact: God sometimes reveals Himself in ways such that, when the argument is spelled out, it is very difficult to eliminate inferring that the event was done by "a person," because it is by thinking of the act as being performed by a person, or at a minimum, by someone relevantly like the persons we are acquainted with, that we infer that it was not the result of natural causes but rather a deliberate act. It appears that God reveals Himself in these ways because we are persons, because God is personal, and because this is a way, perhaps the only way, in which our minds are able to understand that we are receiving a message, a revelation, a Word, a sign. For the Infinite to give us a sign, He must reveal Himself insofar as He is sufficiently like ourselves for us to hear Him. It is therefore not wrong to make arguments for special divine action that pass through premises about God's doing things such as using language, purposely making things happen that would not otherwise have happened by natural causes, deliberately arranging things in a pattern, acting like a person rather than only acting as the Sustainer of All Things, Being Itself, etc. And the ID arguments fit this description.

Let's look at some of the examples from Scripture. When Elijah challenges the prophets of Baal to a contest, each side has a sacrifice and prays for the sacrifice to be consumed by fire from heaven. Every Sunday School child knows what happened: The prophets of Baal ran around their altar for hours freaking out and slashing themselves with knives and other interesting behaviors while Elijah sat back and made fun of them and nothing happened. Then Elijah prayed, and God sent down fire from heaven that consumed Elijah's sacrifice and all the water that Elijah (just to make it more fun) had poured on and all around the altar. Then Elijah killed the prophets. There was also a major rainstorm, but that came a little later.

Think about this for a minute: Sending fire from heaven is the kind of thing that one can easily conceive it to be possible for a mere demigod to do. There is nothing per se about sending down fire from heaven that reveals that God is Being Itself or is "not a person" but rather "beyond personality," etc. In fact, the prophets of Baal had some reason to hope, since they believed that Baal was real, that Baal would send down fire and consume their sacrifice. It didn't happen because there is no real god Baal, not because sending fire out of the sky is the kind of thing that is logically impossible for a mere god (small g), a mere super-being, to do.

Could we not then say that the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal "portrays" God as a mere super-being? Should we get facetious and scoff at the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal by envisaging a movie portraying God as a Zeus-like being who hurls fire from heaven? Well, no. If we believe that in fact God is not a mere super-being, and if the story was in fact true and was a true revelation of God, then presumably it doesn't teach that God is a mere super-being. Nor are we to conclude from the story that an angel or other finite being, rather than the true God, sent the fire. Of course we are supposed to conclude that God Himself sent the fire! Presumably someone who holds to the kind of extremely transcendent concept of God that Ed Feser holds can readily reconcile this story with his theology by saying that here God was revealing merely part of the truth about Himself, revealing His power, revealing that He is the only true God, that Baal is not a true God, and so forth. All of which is completely correct. But the exact same thing could be said about ID: If we believe that God is indeed the designer, we are not therefore concluding that God is merely a being like ourselves, only stronger and greater. We are using an argument in which, we think, it looks like God did something that could in strict logical principle have been done by a lesser being or finite designer, just as fire from heaven could in strict logic possibility be sent down by some lesser being. But that doesn't make it reasonable to conclude that the one who sent down fire or made the intricate workings of the cell is a mere demigod. God sometimes reveals Himself by doing things that a lesser being could in strict logic do. He does them in such a way and in such an historical context that it would not be reasonable to conclude that they were in fact done by anyone other than God.

In the evidence pointed to by ID theorists, it seems that the One True God reveals characteristics such as His wisdom, His glory, and the awesomeness of His thoughts. At that point, if our philosophy or theology, or other parts of Scripture, tell us all these other transcendent things about the nature of the One True God, we will conclude that it was that transcendent God who designed the living organism.

O Lord, how manifold are thy works! In wisdom thou hast made them all. The earth is full of thy riches! (Psalm 104:24)

I will praise thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Marvellous are thy works, and that my soul knoweth right well. (Psalm 139:14)

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge. (Psalm 19:1-2)

Another type of example, perhaps even better: In the New Testament, God the Father several times uses human language to speak from above, from the sky, to convey a message. God the Father does this to endorse Jesus Christ, the Son. At Jesus' baptism, the Father spoke and said, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." At Jesus' Transfiguration, the Father said, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Hear him." Shortly before Jesus' death (John 12:28ff) Jesus said, "Father, glorify thy name." In response a voice came from above saying, "I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again." Jesus explicitly tells the people (vs. 30) that the voice came for their sake.

Let's be clear: It would be caviling (and false) to say that such events of God's speaking from the heavens provided evidence for God's existence and activity only in the same sense that and to the same extent that the existence of the wind, weather, and rocks provide evidence. Clearly, God intended to show that He was acting right there in a special way that goes beyond His activity in sustaining all of creation. God wanted to communicate a message, and to do that, God used human language in the form of an audible voice. Among other things, the people who heard the voice inferred, probably without thinking twice about it, that this was not a merely natural event and that an Intelligent Being was communicating meaningful content by arranging linguistic units (morphemes, words, etc.) deliberately according to patterns known to human beings. This provided a special type of evidence for a special type of activity by God--communicating to mankind.

But now see what language I ended up using, just there, or that we would normally use to discuss what people could know when they heard the voice from heaven: An intelligent being. A mind. Even a person, a personal being, an agent. The type of being who is capable of using language! What, then? Should we say that it is wrong or was wrong for those present to infer that God spoke from the heavens and endorsed Jesus as His beloved Son? (Note that if God spoke from the heavens, then God must exist. There is no hermetic seal that separates evidence for God's existence from evidence for God's actions. Evidence for God's actions is ipso facto evidence for God's existence.) Such an inference was precisely what God intended people to make! And God justified that inference by acting like a person, by acting in ways that only a personal being acts, and by doing things that nature does not do on its own. He did it, moreover, despite the "danger" (if we must call it that) that people would, in describing what they thought, say things like, "A person spoke from the sky." Oh, no! They might call God a person in thinking about what happened that day! They might think of Him as a person! But God is not (so we are told) a person. To think of Him as such is to succumb to theistic personalism, to have a wrong concept of God! Etc., etc. It seems undeniable that the argument to God's actions from a voice in the sky "encourages" such a picture of God. Hence, isn't there a problem? To argue from God's use of language to the existence of God could be thought, just as much as the ID argument, to be teaching us or encouraging or implying a wrong concept of God. If one took the Feser approach to this event, it seems that one ought to say that the argument from the voice would lead to the conclusion that some mere demigod or angel, someone other than the true God, spoke from heaven. Why? Because that argument must pass through a fairly strong analogy to the actions of a person, of a being in some fairly important ways like ourselves. But evidently God Himself didn't think that this was a problem. To put it bluntly, Christians are committed to believing that God really did speak aloud, just like A Person In the Sky, in order to reveal Himself and give man a specific message.

One can go farther: in the case in John some of the bystanders actually thought that an angel was talking with Jesus (vs. 29). Indeed, from Luke we know that on the night of Jesus' birth angels did speak from the sky. It is by no means logically impossible that a voice coming out of the sky giving audible words should come from a lesser being than God, from an angel or some other finite but super-powerful being. As a matter of fact, sometimes apparently angels do speak out of the sky! Hence, should we not be concerned that, by revealing Himself in this way, God was risking being thought of as a mere super-being? But that doesn't seem to have bothered God.

In these incidents, God revealed Himself as one who speaks from the heavens. In the intricate design of the cell (for example) or the DNA code (for example), or a million other incredible examples, God reveals Himself as a designer. It is true that He is more than one who speaks from the heavens and more than a designer, but just as God did not disdain to reveal Himself as one who speaks in language from the heavens, so we are not bound to think that it would be impossible for God to reveal Himself as a designer.

Let me emphasize that I do not consider these to be mere analogies. I would say that for us to find the kind of computer code and nano-technology that we do find in the cell and in organisms is as much a signature of the Divine Mind as it would be for us to find written language in the cell. Indeed, much that we do find in living organisms is far more astounding and epistemically powerful a revelation of the activity of a real Intelligence than a piece of natural language would be.

I therefore completely disagree with Ed Feser's claim that the design argument cannot get you one whit closer to the existence of the true God, that in the nature of the case it cannot be positively relevant, evidentially, to the existence of the true God. In the quotation above, he literally likens it to an argument for the existence of Zeus. This claim is apparently based on the premise that the design argument as made by ID must be arguing for someone who could not be the real God. But the above comparisons to God's speaking from the sky (or from a burning bush) or to God's sending fire from heaven show that this claim is incorrect. God can reveal Himself in actions that could be attributed to a "mere being," someone less than God, but it does not follow that arguments from those results must be arguments for a being who must be someone other than the real God. And this is true even though those arguments rely on a strong analogy between the one who carried out those actions and ourselves. This is true even though parts of those arguments, in the nature of the case, are most naturally going to be expressed by saying that the one who did the action is "a person." There is nothing about the ID argument that requires theistic personalism in any way that could not equally be said about the voice from heaven argument.

Consider how it would go if some foolish skeptic, hearing the voice from the sky, tried to claim in all seriousness that the event was merely the result of natural processes and did not convey any actual message, was not deliberate, was not a self-revelation of a personal being of any kind. It would be completely correct to point out that thunder doesn't sound like language, that natural explanations are woefully inadequate, and, furthermore, that the arrangement of sound waves in syllables, words, and sentences that sound exactly like meaningful portions of the Aramaic or Greek language (or whatever language the Voice used) is far better explained by the deliberate action of a personal being than by natural causes. Note, too (again), that this argument is different from saying that God sustains all things and underlies all causal processes, including the wind. That's all very well and good, but the point about the voice from the sky was that it was not the wind nor the thunder nor any other natural process, that the Speaker's relation to the sounds in the air was something more than or other than God's relation to everything else in the whole world, and that this special organization of (dare I say "tinkering with"?) the sound waves, going beyond the mere behavior of natural processes, was what made the sounds convey meaning.

This would be a good argument, a rational argument, and the only possible response to make to someone who was such a fool as to try to attribute the language from the sky to secondary causes. And it would not be an "argument for the existence of Zeus" merely because one did not take care at every moment and every point to say "personal being (who really is Being itself, so let's be super-duper careful here)" instead of "a person." Nor would it be tantamount to an argument for the existence of Zeus if one admitted that Zeus, if he existed, or an angel, or an alien, could in principle cause a voice from the sky. The nature of the argument itself requires one to make a strong analogy between the One who caused the voice and persons that we know around us and their arrangement of parts (in this case, the sounds and syllables) for certain ends (in this case, the conveyance of meaning). It would not follow that one was arguing for the existence of a being that could not be the true God, Being itself, etc. The fact of the matter is that God deliberately chose to reveal Himself in exactly that way--by using language, by going against what would otherwise have happened by natural law, and even by in some sense looking like a Big Man in the Sky speaking loudly so that people could hear His message! Christians have to deal with this fact, whether or not they are Thomists or classical theists. Apparently it is possible for an argument for a Person Who Talks From the Sky to be an argument for the action (and therefore ipso facto the existence) of the true God. And if the true God is indeed Being Itself and all those other things the Thomist says He is, then that's just the way it is--an argument for the can indeed be an argument for the other. Therefore, an argument for God's action that depends on a strong analogy with finite persons need not thereby be an argument that limits the One whose existence the argument supports to being a mere finite person.

If one is a Christian, one doesn't have the option of sticking to a God who doesn't do things like that, because the Christian God does do things like that.

I contend that any analysis of the evidential force of the evidence of divine self-revelation using natural language uttered by apparently supernatural means (e.g., a voice from the sky or from a burning bush) will in the nature of the case be similar to an analysis of the evidential force of the argument from design. Since the classical theist who is also a Christian must accept that God does reveal Himself in these ways that might seem crude, that can be said to make Him look like "a person," and that depend for their force upon a comparison between the actions of the Being involved and finite persons, the Christian classical theist should not claim that the argument from design supports the existence of a being who cannot be the true God.

I say all of this as someone at least somewhat sympathetic to aspects of classical theism. While doing research lately on God and time, I have frequently reflected that it is a mistake to insist that we must know what it is like to be God. Heck, many philosophers seriously doubt that we even know what it is like to be a bat, so why should we assume that we must know what it is like to be God! I think Christians should take seriously the Scriptural statement that God's ways are not our ways. I think that God's causality is not related to time in the same way that our causality is related to time. I think that God's mode of being is probably to a large extent not imaginable or visualizable by us. I think that a lot of harm has been done by a theological approach that insists that we must be able to tell the history of God, as it were, and get a clear and distinct idea of what that means at every step. It is no wonder that so many of that bent have ended up as open theists. (Though I give credit to William Lane Craig for not being an open theist.) We should be willing to admit that in many cases we are using analogical language when we compare God's consciousness, knowledge, love, will, planning, etc., to the parallel properties of finite creatures. I can't, for that matter, think of any reason to resist the proposition that we are using analogical language when we speak of God as being like ourselves.

All of this doesn't necessarily make me a card-carrying classical theist, but it does clear me of any suspicion of being a card-carrying theistic personalist. But classical theism should not become a straitjacket that blocks us from admitting the force of evidence. Evidence is evidence. If I can put it this way, evidence doesn't care about labels. And the evidence from design, particularly in biology, is what it is, just as the evidence of the voices and fire from heaven were what they were. If our theory keeps us from looking through the telescope, our theory is too rigid and is at fault. Our concept of God must be able to handle God's own choices as to how to reveal Himself. If those appear crude or likely to lead to faulty concepts of God according to your theory, take it up with God. Meanwhile, I say: Take or leave the personal self-revelations of God, but you can't pick and choose. God has revealed Himself personally, by audible language, in incidents in Scripture. We know that. There is therefore no reason in principle why God could not reveal Himself personally, by the language of programmed code and intricate nanotechnology, in biology.

Theory must accommodate fact, or it is bad theory. It is my hope that classical theism can rise to the occasion.

Happy Easter!

This year, my esteemed blog colleague Sage McLaughlin has written the Easter post at What's Wrong With the World. Having written a fairly substantial Good Friday post at W4, I'm taking it somewhat easy with this post.

The resurrection is the center of the Christian faith because it is the vindication of Jesus Christ. In another sense, one might argue that the cross is the center of Christianity, and far be it from me to say anything against the centrality of the cross of Christ! However, had Jesus died and not risen from the dead, then Jesus' death would have no power to save. This is St. Paul's argument in I Corinthians 15: If Christ is not raised, you are still in your sins.

Over the past eight years or so, as regular readers know, my husband and I (he even more than I) have become increasingly involved in arguing for the historicity of the gospels and Acts as part of the argument that Jesus indeed rose from the dead. Here I am simply going to encourage you, if you have not done so already, to listen to some of Tim's videos and podcasts or to read some posts on this subject. Here is the Apologetics315 page where several of these are helpfully collected. Here is a post of mine on undesigned coincidences in Acts, with links to a series of posts Tim wrote on the intersections between Acts and the Pauline epistles. There is more where that came from, if you are interested.

We have not followed cunningly devised fables. Oh, I know, a resurrection? Miracles? Do we also believe in little green men?

Whether you presently consider yourself a Christian, an agnostic, an atheist, a wavering Christian, or any other variety on the spectrum of belief and unbelief: Christianity offers you an invitation to be a believer without being credulous. Christianity offers you faith founded on fact. Christianity offers you religious propositions so well-supported that, in accepting them, you are not accepting low standards. Christianity does not ask you to become willing to believe just anything. Christianity does not ask you to take its truth on the barest assertion of authority. ("It's in the Bible, so it must be true, and if you don't believe that, your life is meaningless, so believe whatever is in the Bible if you don't want your life to be meaningless.") Christianity offers you the unity of the heart and mind.

Not an easy life, but a hope that endures for all time.

Christ the Lord is risen today. Alleluia!

Now, for some music. The group is Glad, with "Christus Dominus Hodie Resurrexit."



The Gaither Vocal Band, "Because He Lives."



Handel--"Worthy is the Lamb"

Good Friday

I have a long Good Friday post up at What's Wrong With the World. If you want to read a post of mine for Good Friday, please do go and read it. It contains both a little bit of poetry (by a poet who is new to me) and a little bit of apologetics.

If you just want a short non-post, I sincerely wish all of my readers here a blessed Good Friday, remembering our Lord's death for our sins. The collect for the Wednesday in Holy Week has always seemed to me particularly good for all of Holy Week:

Assist us mercifully with thy help, O Lord God of our salvation; that we may enter with joy upon the meditation of those mighty acts, whereby thou has given unto us life and immortality; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Mighty acts. A man dying by crucifixion. I can write about it for a long time, but I don't claim fully to understand it. That's a good thing. Because if I could understand it fully, it wouldn't be one of those mighty acts, whereby God has given unto us life and immortality.

Blessed Good Friday.

Yet more in answer to Presentism

After a discussion on Facebook (c'mon, guys, put these great comments here and give my poor little personal blog a bit o' traffic), I've decided to say a bit more about the "Jesus is forever hanging on the cross" criticism of the B theory of time.

William Lane Craig's discussion of this alleged problem is worded very strongly indeed. Here is the most pertinent passage:

[T]he idea that God and creation tenselessly co-exist seems to negate God's triumph over evil. On the static theory of time, evil is never really vanquished from the world: It exists just as sturdily as ever at its various locations in space-time, even if those locations are all earlier than some point in cosmic time (for example, Judgement Day). Creation is never really purged of evil on this view; at most it can be said that evil only infects those parts of creation which are earlier than certain other events. But the stain is indelible. What this implies for events such as the crucifixion and the resurrection of Christ is very troubling. In a sense Christ hangs permanently on the cross, for the dreadful events of A.D. 30 never fade away or transpire. The victory of the resurrection becomes a hollow triumph, for the spatio-temporal parts of Jesus that were crucified and buried remain dying and dead and are never raised to new life. It is unclear how we can say with Paul, “Death is swallowed up in victory!” (I Cor. 15:54) when, on a static theory of time, death is never really done away with. Time and Eternity, p. 214.

I already discussed in the previous entry the fact that the language here seems to suggest, erroneously, that the B theorist holds all times to be present tense. Evil "exists just as sturdily as ever at its various locations in space-time." That is a misunderstanding of the B theory. To say that there are tenseless truths about the past is not to say that the events those truths describe are happening now.

Another possible interpretation of the passage is that Craig is treating the B series block as if it exists within some higher-order time. If that were the case, then one might accuse the B theorist of holding that our B series is eternal (endures infinitely in both the past and the future) within this higher-order time. But that, of course, is not what the B theory says at all. An event on the B series that takes one hour takes one hour. The fact that the event does not become strictly unreal and nonexistent as some reality-creating Now moves past it (a concept that is extraordinarily hard to give meaning to, as I argued in the previous post) does not mean that the event takes more than one hour. There is no sense in which the B theory says that Jesus literally endures his sufferings through an eternity of time. The whole point about tenseless truths is that they are tenseless, not that they make the things they describe go on forever! Temporary events do not "last forever" on the B theory. That would be a complete misunderstanding of the B series.

Further: Ponder for a minute what Craig is asserting here about the alleged superiority of his own presentist view. He is saying that evil is really "vanquished from the world" on his view, but not on the B theory, why? Because evil events, such as the crucifixion, "fade away or transpire" on his view but do not "fade away or transpire" in the sense he wishes to assert (whatever exactly his sense means) on a different theory of time such as the B theory. But that is not victory anyway! The alleged superiority of presentism suggested here is that evil is annihilated from the world by the mere passage of time. The presentism Craig is promoting here would make Jesus' crucifixion just as much gone, done away with, no longer part of reality, even if Jesus had never risen from the dead! Pace Craig's Biblical language about death swallowed up in victory and evil purged and vanquished, presentism as a position in the philosophy of time tells us nothing whatsoever about such triumphal goings on.

Consider: Suppose that an evil man tortures a child for one hour, grows bored, stops, and never does it again. Now suppose, instead, that a good man comes along after an hour, finds the evil man torturing the child, and fights and kills him. In the latter case we could rightly say that evil has been vanquished. In the former case, not. But presentism tells us that the evil of the torture passes into unreality as it becomes past just the same in both cases. Presentism doesn't give us a glorious rescue any more than any other theory of time. Glorious rescues either happen or don't happen contingently within history. On presentism, the events of that hour "fade away or transpire" in some strong metaphysical sense whether evil is vanquished or not.

Given that sort of "victory," evil could be just as surely "vanquished" if evil men went on doing evil unopposed throughout human history, the sun went nova, and (if we are the only intelligent life in the universe) all intelligent life ceased to exist (except for God). The end. Maybe all souls are annihilated in this scenario, or maybe they go on existing in some vague and boring mental state throughout all eternity. Whatever. But no more actual evil acts occur. And the evil acts that have already occurred, according to presentism, have become utterly nonexistent in virtue of being past.

Given that notion of "victory," God could be "victorious" over evil simply by deliberately killing all rational beings, good and evil alike. Salvation of souls, redemption, and heaven, which is what Christians usually have in mind when they talk about God's ultimate victory over evil, need not enter the picture at all.

Craig seems to be confusing the unreality of the past, given presentism, which is not in itself what anyone means by "victory over evil," with actual victory over evil, which comes from victorious events themselves and their causal effects. But of course the B theorist can affirm the reality of such victorious events and of their effects just as strongly as the presentist. If anything, the B theorist can affirm the reality of victorious events and their effects even more strongly, since many wonderful and victorious events (such as Jesus' resurrection) are now in our own past, and the B theorist does not have to say that those events, along with the evils they overcame, have passed into unreality as the Now moves inexorably onward.

This criticism, worded eloquently as Craig words it, may seem to have some rhetorical pull, but it simply does not stand up upon philosophical scrutiny.

How do I rebut Presentism? Let me count the ways.

This post is a spin-off, to use an old TV metaphor, of a paper I have been working on, hopefully to appear in The Christendom Review. I found that I had more to say about some of the issues than fit easily into an article that was already getting long. Hence, this post.

Since one of my complaints will be that I find it difficult to give a meaning to the position that I am attacking, it would perhaps be unfair for me to try to summarize it. I will therefore let William Lane Craig, who advocates the view, explain it:

Sharp-sighted critics of McTaggart...have insisted almost from the beginning that a dynamic or tensed theory of time implies a commitment to presentism, the doctrine that the only temporal entities that exist are present entities. According to presentism, past and future entities do not exist. Thus, there really are no past or future events, except in the sense that there have been certain events and there will be certain others; the only real events are present events...Temporal becoming is not the exchange of tense on the part of tenselessly existing events but the coming into and going out of existence of the entities themselves. (Time and Eternity, p. 148)

For reasons that mostly elude me, quite a few great Christian philosophy graduate students I hang out with (cheers, gentlemen!), both in person and on-line, find this position in the philosophy of time intuitively plausible. I find it utterly unattractive--in fact, almost self-evidently false. But it would be more useful for me to spell out some of the problems that occur to me. I make no claim that this is an exhaustive list. In fact, one reason I'm writing this post is because more kept occurring to me, and I didn't want to clutter the paper with too many endnotes mentioning them.

The first question I have about this position is simply: What does it mean? Let me be clear. I have some idea of what people mean (they are sometimes called "openists" or "open futurists") who say that future entities do not exist. What they mean is that statements about the future have no truth value. The statement that it will rain tomorrow, or even a tenseless version of this ("It [tenselessly] rains on April 11, 2014") simply is neither true nor false when uttered before April 11, 2014. Often one motive for openism is related to human freedom, the idea being that it blocks human free will if statements about what I will do tomorrow are already true today. However, I've never heard of an openist about the past! On the contrary, the whole concern regarding freedom is to make the future unlike the past, to assert a strong asymmetry between them; the past, on openism, is fixed and unchangeable, but the future is still unmade.

But that can't be what the presentist means, and especially not what Craig means, by saying that past and future entities do not exist. The presentist is asserting that both past and future entities are strictly non-existent. On this point, he is asserting a symmetry rather than an asymmetry between the past and the future. Moreover, Craig isn't an openist! He has written at length against open theism, the position in the philosophy of religion that goes hand in hand with openism in the philosophy of time and that postulates limitations on the concept of divine foreknowledge.

Craig clearly believes that statements about the past and the future are true. But if the tenseless proposition "Socrates exists in 405 B.C." is true, then what does it mean to say that Socrates doesn't exist in any sense? Can we not say that Socrates exists just in the sense that to assert his existence relative to 405 B.C. is to make a true statement? Similarly, to assert my existence relative to A.D. 2014 is also to make a true statement. Thus we can explain a fairly simple and straightforward sense in which both Socrates and I exist in the grand scheme of things, each of us existing relative to particular points in time. We can explain this in terms of the truth of propositions about the existence of me and Socrates.

At this point I can hear all the frustrated temporal A theorists jumping up and down and telling me why there has to be a Real Now and why the B theory of time, which denies the existence of an objective and Real Now, must be wrong.

But just at this point in the post I am objecting to presentism, not to all A theories of time. (I'll get later to some considerations that tell against all A theories of time.) According to the B theory of time (to give a wildly and irresponsibly brief version), all points in time have an equal claim to be "now," except relative to the experiences of conscious beings. There is no objective or Real Now that lies in 2014 rather than in 405 B.C. Relative to some of Lydia's conscious experiences, 2014 is now. Relative to some of Socrates' conscious experiences, 405 B.C. can be thought of as now, but neither of these perspectives is "more right" than the other. There is no Real Now that has kept moving and has now "gotten" to 2014. But I am asking what presentism means, specifically. I am asking about presentism as opposed not only to the B theory of time but also as opposed to what is known as a "growing block" view, according to which past entities and events are real but future ones are not. Or an "illuminated present" view according to which past and future events are real but only one slice of time is "now." Both of these, along with presentism, have a Real Now, but not all of them are presentism. What does presentism mean, especially in denying the existence of past entities?

There is one way that I can think of to give presentism meaning, but it involves paying a pretty steep price, and it is not a position that Craig argues for anywhere that I have seen: One could deny that there are any tenseless propositions. All A theorists are committed to arguing that there are irreducible tensed  facts, such as "It is now 3 p.m." I disagree with them, and I discuss how a B theorist can reduce such facts to tenseless truths in the paper. But my point here is this: While an A theorist like Craig will argue, and Craig does argue, that there are irreducible tensed facts, it is a much stronger position that there are no tenseless facts. Craig argues that a proposition like "The meeting is [tenseless] at 3 p.m. on April 14, 2014" does not fully give the content of a belief like, "The meeting is now" or "The meeting is today." But he never denies the possibility of tenseless propositions. If he did do so, this could give "cash value" to his denial of the existence of any past or future entities. In that case, "Socrates exists in 405 B.C." would simply be false if uttered now, because it is not now 405 B.C. and because there literally is no way to use verbs tenselessly.

Such a view would not be ipso facto openist, because one could still say that "I will mow the lawn tomorrow" has a truth value. But such a view would deny that there is any tenseless proposition, "Lydia mows the lawn on April 12, 2014" that is true or false. Everything has to be tensed.

Tenseless propositions are pretty standard fare for philosophers. They explain the way in which two people at different times, or the same person at different times, can believe the same content. There is some sense in which, if my historical beliefs are correct, I believe the same thing about Napoleon's losing the Battle of Waterloo as someone living twenty-five years ago or even someone living at the time of the battle. It is generally considered quite useful, philosophically, to be able to translate "Napoleon lost the Battle of Waterloo in 1815" into a tenseless proposition that can be the same proposition and be believed at different times. I think it would be a big mistake for presentists to reject tenseless propositions just in order to give their presentism meaning. It would be better for them to cease to be presentists and become, at least, growing block theorists. (I am not denying that growing block theories can be criticized as well--from both the presentist perspective and the B theory perspective.)

Craig would have even more difficulty accepting into his system the view that there are no tenseless propositions, or that tenseless propositions are meaningless, or anything of that kind, because he holds that God is "outside of time sans creation." So what would God know sans creation? Presumably, for God to be omniscient about Napoleon at the "stage" (for want of a better word) of God's life in which God "was" (for want of a better word) not in time, God would have to know tenseless facts about Napoleon and the Battle of Waterloo. So a further epicycle would have to be added to the effect that tenseless propositions became meaningless at the first moment of creation.

I doubt that this is a direction that most presentists will want to go, and I stress again that Craig never attacks tenseless propositions uberhaupt. I bring it up only as a possible way to give meaning to the presentist's denial of existence to past and future entities and events.

Consider, too, the fact that what Craig is saying in advocating presentism gives the distinct impression that past entities are unreal. After all, he says that they don't exist, apparently not in any sense at all. But past entities, including ourselves at past moments, leave causal traces. The "me" of an hour ago must have some place in the schema of reality, taken as a whole, because there are bar cookies sitting on the counter right now that were made by the "me" of an hour ago! To say that the past is strictly unreal makes no sense of the causal relationship between present entities and past entities.

Another consideration: Craig alleges that there are special theological problems with the B theory of time. One of the most common of these, and the kind of thing that seems to resonate with those influenced by Craig's view, is the "Jesus is still on the cross" accusation. Craig says that, on a B theory of time, God can never be victorious over sin, because the B theorist refuses to postulate a Real Now and the strict and absolute nonexistence of past entities and events. Craig says that it follows from this that "Christ hangs permanently on the cross" on a B theory of time and God never triumphs over evil. (Time and Eternity, p. 214)

First of all, this is not true, because the word "still" is a tensed term as is the word "permanently." The B theorist can give a perfectly good account of the sense in which Jesus is not still on the cross now, which is to say, simultaneous with Lydia's existence in history, with Lydia's mental experience, and with April 11, 2014. Once we are dealing with tensed terms like "still" and "permanently," the B theorist has no problem explaining that some events have already happened on the B series line and are over prior to such-and-such a moment (which is the moment of a certain experience of mine) on the B timeline, the moment at which I am speaking. So, no, Jesus is not still on the cross.

Beyond that, if we are just going to try to use ordinary language and toss around alleged theological problems, two can play at that game: If there is no timeless truth that Jesus dies, tenseless, on the cross for our sins, how does God save us? If the past is nonexistent, then Jesus' death on the cross is nonexistent. So on what basis are our sins forgiven?

And then there's that pesky verse (Revelation 13:8) about the "Lamb slain from the foundation of the world." To put it mildly, such a statement is far more consonant with a view on which there really are tenseless truths that are always true and that these include truths about Jesus' death.

Probably it would be better for neither side to try to allege such theological problems, though I think the biblical reference to Revelation 13:8 is a prima facie conundrum for either the presentist or the openist. In general, though, it would be better for the presentist to acknowledge that the B theorist does not hold that "Jesus is permanently on the cross" or that "I am both five years old and my present age forever" or anything else of the kind, and for the B theorist to grant that the presentist can have God forgiving us on the grounds that Jesus did die for our sins, even though the past is, according to the presentist, nonexistent. My point here is that, once we get going, there are as many things that the B theorist can say with some plausibility about alleged "theological problems" with presentism as vice versa.

One other point about the "Jesus is still on the cross" allegation, or, as one philosophy student put it to me, criticizing the B theory, "According to your view, I'm still five years old": In bringing that criticism, the presentist attacks the growing block theorist and the illuminated block theorist as well as the B theorist. This is because, even though both of those theories do hold that there is an absolute Now, they do not say, like the presentist, that the past is strictly and absolutely non-existent. Hence, perhaps the presentist should ask other A theorists why they don't think that "Jesus is still on the cross," since they do hold that the past is part of reality.

More problems for presentism: This one is a problem for all A theories, including openism. All theories with an Absolute Now are forced to take a view of the meaning of physics and relativity theory that is anti-Einsteinian. If you have one Absolute Now, you must deny relativity theory as usually construed and hold that there is absolute time which yields a preferred frame of reference. Now, I'm not going to press this as an insuperable problem. I myself am a realist in the face of quantum mechanics and hence deny the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics as meaning that reality is merely probabilistic at bottom, so I'm in no position to throw stones about non-standard metaphysical interpretations of physics. But is it really a bullet that the A theorist or openist wants to bite to say that there is one absolute, preferred, inertial frame of reference?

Craig does bite this bullet. He has quite a few pages on the subject. He actually accepts that measuring instruments extend and contract in the direction of motion relative to the absolute frame of reference. (Time and Eternity, p. 54.) Craig implies repeatedly that the only reason for rejecting this Lorenzian perspective is verificationism, because the Lorenz solution is empirically equivalent to the Einsteinian interpretation. But it is by no means true in the philosophy of science that only verificationism can lead us to prefer what seems to be the simpler explanation to save the phenomena! Whether the long-standing interpretation of relativity theory as meaning that there is no preferred space-time frame of reference is indeed simpler than the idea that measuring instruments lengthen and contract relative to a preferred frame of reference is not a question on which I am going to make dogmatic pronouncements. I merely point out that saying "verificationism" does not settle the matter. Indeed, if scientists always got stuck as between empirically equivalent theories, science could not proceed at all. The use of simplicity considerations, leading a scientist to accept only such entities as he has empirical evidence for, should not be taken to be equivalent to verificationist philosophy.


Another drawback both to presentism and to the growing block view is that they unreasonably limit our options in responding to the problem of induction by limiting reality either to the present only or to the past and present only. Readers will find my husband's and my response to the problem of induction in Chapter 7 of our book on metaepistemology. The connection to the philosophy of time, briefly, is this: We can apply certain mathematical theorems about sampling and representativeness to solve the problem of induction, but only if we take ourselves to be sampling out of a set of entities with particular statistical properties. So, for example, if I have eaten watermelon many times and found it sweet, this can be rationally connected to the proposition that the next piece of watermelon I eat will be sweet. But the connection runs through a proposition about the proportion of sweet watermelons to all the watermelons. This set should be thought of as existing not only across space but also across time. In fact, if this set could not include either past or future entities, the whole notion of sampling from a set (of watermelons) as part of making a rational induction about what will happen in the future based on the past becomes meaningless. Even if we restrict the set just to "watermelons sold at such-and-such a store" rather than all watermelons throughout the history of the universe, the set still must include both past and future watermelons, or else I cannot relate watermelons I have eaten in the past to the watermelon I will eat tomorrow. The B theory, which denies that reality literally "grows" as a Real Now moves along, has no problem at all with the idea of sampling reality across time. The B theorist takes me to be sampling from a set of watermelons that are part of reality taken as a whole, and this includes both past and future watermelons. As seen above, this does not mean that watermelons that will grow in 2015 "exist now," simultaneous on the timeline with April, 2014. They are 2015 watermelons. But the B theory denies that either the past or the future (or both, per presentism) are literally not part of reality in any sense whatsoever. The presentist position would seem to mean that past and future watermelons cannot in any sense be thought of as part of the same set which I am sampling when I eat a watermelon.

Last but not least, I want to hit what seems to me a gigantic problem for presentism: What is the duration of the Real Now? It should be clear right away that this question is a vital one for the presentist, because his entire ontology depends on the present moment. The presentist's entire theory of time depends on the insistence that there really is a Real Now. And only what exists in that present moment is real at all!

Craig admits quite candidly that this is a difficult issue for presentism. He considers and rejects two views: First, he rejects the view that the present moment has zero measure, that it is durationless. He points out that it seems quite impossible to "make up" temporal duration out of strictly durationless moments--the temporal equivalent of geometric points (which take up no space). And on presentism, that is exactly what the present moment has to do: The Now has to be the constituent entity from which all of time is made, because only what is real in the present is real at all. Second, he rejects the view that time can be quantized into smallest possible units--temporal atoms known in the philosophy of time as chronons. Craig explains that the chronon view has hugely problematic consequences. One such consequence would be that motion itself would be discontinuous! The idea that things move in a smooth and continuous fashion through space would have to be an illusion. Everything would have to jump. Your blood would jump jerkily through your veins, cars would really be jumping down the road in discontinuous spatial frames. Here, too (though Craig does not bring it up), I want to mention that the chronon idea would seem to revive the famous Zeno's paradox that it is impossible ever to cross a room. The solution to that paradox depends on there being no smallest unit of time. So Craig rightly rejects the idea that the Real Now has a duration of a single smallest "time atom." But what is left? Any larger, technically divisible, unit of time chosen for the Real Now would be chosen arbitrarily. Why make it a second when it could be a half-second?

What Craig decides, in the face of these difficulties, is that the duration of the present moment is not an objective matter but is relative to the universe of discourse!

On this view, to ask, "What is the extent of the present?" is a malformed question. In order for the question to be meaningful, one must stipulate what it is we are talking about: the present vibration of an atomic clock, the present session of Congress, the present war, or what have you? There is no such metric interval as "the present," period; we must speak of "the present _____," where the blank is filled by a reference to some event or thing....Such a view is admittedly strange because it implies that there is no such thing as the present time. Rather what is present depends on the the universe of discourse: Are we talking about seconds, or minutes, or hours, or what? (Time and Eternity, pp. 159-160)

This easy-going view of the meaning of "the present" would be all very well for a B theorist. In fact, it seems quite sensible to me. It is a kind of nominalism about the phrase "the present." What Craig is saying here implies that there is no essence of "the present" but that we can use the phrase in various ways depending on what we want to talk about. Well and good, but it seems to me flatly impossible for a presentist to accept this view. To quote, again, from Craig's summary, presentism is

the doctrine that the only temporal entities that exist are present entities. According to presentism, past and future entities do not exist. Thus, there really are no past or future events, except in the sense that there have been certain events and there will be certain others; the only real events are present events.

Craig's nominalist view about the duration of the present would imply that, if I choose to make "sessions of Congress" or "wars" my universe of discourse, the entirety of a session of Congress or of a war, with all the events that entails, over a period of years, can be in existence (for me?), can be the Real Now. Then again, someone else (e.g., a presentist insisting staunchly in philosophical conversation that entities of two years ago do not exist) may make his universe of discourse range only over individual seconds. For him, most of the events of the present session of Congress are excluded from the Now, and therefore the vast majority of those entities and events are non-existent.

This makes no sense whatsoever. This view could not be right if presentism were true. If one is a presentist, one cannot simply punt like this on the duration of the Real Now. Unless, perhaps, one wants to be a postmodernist, which I am quite sure Craig does not want to be!

The trouble for the presentist is that there is really no good solution to the question of the duration of the Real Now. It has been invested with enormous metaphysical importance but left undefined. Craig does a good and careful job surveying the options for defining it, and my conclusion is that his discussion shows the problem to be insoluble, though of course that is not the conclusion he draws.

I think that presentism is simply untenable as a position in the philosophy of time. To some degree, this should make people more friendly to the B theory, depending on what one thinks of the objections (which I don't have time to go into) to other A theories. Moreover, it should clear away certain obstacles to accepting God's timelessness. Craig himself places an enormous amount of weight in the case for putting God in time on the philosophy of time itself and, specifically, on the alleged superiority of presentism as a theory in the philosophy of time. In fact, he seems to imply that divine timelessness would be an attractive position if it were not for the fact that (he holds) the B theory is wrong and presentism is right. (Time and Eternity, pp. 111-112.) By that reckoning, if presentism is wrong, perhaps it isn't such a great idea to regard God as in time after all.

That, however, is a subject for another day.

The loneliness at the heart

I have become convinced of late that there is one major driver for social media and many other uses of the Internet: Loneliness.

That isn't necessarily a bad thing. When I am old, perhaps physically infirm, and many of my nearest and dearest have passed away or moved away, I earnestly hope that I have Internet access, because it will leave me less isolated than I otherwise would be. If my children are married and living far away, perhaps I can see my grandchildren's pictures electronically, or talk to them on Skype or whatever equivalent has sprung into being by then. I've actually tried to do a little research to see if nursing homes are getting with the program and getting Internet for their residents. (Answer: Not very widely yet, but some are. Hopefully the practice will spread.)

There is nothing wrong with using the Internet to keep in touch with family and friends who are far away, to read up on what is happening in the world, to participate in discussions with people you would otherwise never meet. This can actually be a healthy thing.

But it isn't enough. Since man left the Garden, he has essentially been a lonely creature. Those of us blessed enough to be happily married have communion with our best beloved, but that only mitigates the essential human loneliness. It does not entirely take it away. This may well be the phenomenon that Augustine describes when he says, to God, "Our hearts are restless till they find their rest in thee." But what it feels like is something more ordinary and human, less mystical.

The Internet simultaneously (partially) relieves human loneliness and exacerbates it. If one spends a lot of time on blogs or on Facebook, one gets used to an extremely high level of interaction. At any time one can get on-line and agree or disagree with someone, somewhere in the world. One doesn't have to stop and face a sense of loss or of lack, a sense that nothing else will fill. One doesn't have to listen to the clock tick. If one never stops to listen, if one always turns to the Internet so as not to hear the silence, then that is a bad thing. That is an addiction. And it is well known that addictions do not satisfy; they only produce more craving. In this case, the craving is for communication, especially with people who agree and are kind, for happiness and a sense of friendliness and community, even if only a virtual community. Therein lies part of the problem. A virtual community neither makes the demands nor offers the satisfactions of hands-on friendship. And, while it may seem that virtual friendships are easier to lose (because we get so many more opportunities to annoy one another and to disagree on the Internet), there are other ways in which virtual friendships are easier to keep. We can put our best foot forward, not be annoyed by each others' in-person habits, and nobody moves away from Facebook. Thus we think (at least for a moment) that we are being satisfied by something that is, at best, a shadow of the incarnate, in-person presence of those we love.

Loss--by death, by moving, or by a falling out--forces us to realize that nothing and no one can take the place of those who are gone. Loss is a fact of reality. The Internet encourages us to forget or ignore that reality.

In the end, in this life, we each go on alone. At some level, despite the dearness of our dear ones, despite friendship, despite the fellowship of Christian love, despite the Communion of the Saints, and, God knows, despite Facebook, we live alone. Even more: We die alone. There is only One, whom we love without having seen, who is with us always, even unto the ends of the earth. That promise, however, gives less comfort for human loss than one might think.

People talk as if grief were just a feeling--as if it weren't the continually renewed shock of setting out again and again on familiar roads and being brought up short by the grim frontier post that now blocks them. I, to be sure, believe there is something beyond it: but the moment one tries to use that as a consolation (that is not its function) the belief crumbles. It is quite useless knocking at the door of Heaven for earthly comfort: it's not the sort of comfort they supply there. (Letters of C.S. Lewis, 3 December, 1959)

We await a day when there will be no more loneliness and no more loss, when we will be forever with Christ and with those others whom we love in heaven. We cannot have it now, and to try to mimic it is almost certainly a mistake. Listen, then, to the ticking clock, listen to the silence, submit with patience and without bitterness to Time and Change, the reapers, and live in quiet hope of the day when death itself shall die, when we ourselves shall be changed, and when we will be alone no more.