While Pope Benedict rocks New York in his own comparatively low-key fashion, a documentary adaptation of ex-priest James P. Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword, which takes a few jabs at B16, opens even more quietly in the Big Apple.
Your Decent Films guy is on the case. GET THE STORY.
P.S. YHT to Heart, Mind & Strength host Greg Popcak for the sound bite in the post title.
By, like, two days. Exactly two days, actually. Also, the greater danger would seem to have been from trampling rather than flying lead. But still.
Apparently, a Sunday afternoon of disorderly teen behavior at non–Mouse affiliated Orlando water park Wet ’n Wild ended in a shooting yesterday.
The gun used may or may not have been a .22 recovered at the scene; a leg wound, not serious, was sustained by a teen. (Writing this sentence, I’m reminded that Amanda Shaw at the First Things recently blogged excerpts from a style catalogue once given to Ernest Hemingway, recommendations from which include commending “He suffered a broken leg in a fall” over “he broke his leg in a fall,” in part on the grounds that “presumably the man has two legs” and so “a leg” is preferable to “his leg.” I tried to apply this logic here, with rather unsatisfactory results, since my sentence now fails to specify that the teen was shot, rather than, say, skinning his — er, a — knee in a fall. Suggestions for improvements are welcome.)
One or two shots were fired, and the shooting victim’s brother was also struck in the lip by something, but it could have been a rock. Also, “[e]veryone was running and people were trampled.”
Not ordinarily the sort of thing I would note at JA.o, except for one thing: My family and I were at Wet ’n Wild exactly 48 hours earlier — all Friday afternoon, in fact — on the last day of our week-long Orlando vacation (about which more later).
FWIW, I didn’t notice any rowdy teen behavior on Friday. As far as I know, the only noteworthy visitor phenomena that day was an Assemblies of God convention that had the park rented for private use after hours, but although I was actually in the park as much as 30 minutes after the official closing, I didn’t personally witness any rowdy charismatic phenomena such as slaying in the Spirit or anything.
In other brushes with amusement-park mayhem, my sister was at Six Flags Great Adventure on the very same day in 1984 as the fatal Haunted Castle fire that killed eight teenagers. (My father at work heard the news about the fatal fire on television and called home to make sure my sister was safe.)
On an earlier Six Flags outing, in the same Haunted Castle, I was mugged, but a friend was carrying my money and so I didn’t lose anything. Coincidentally, there was also an Assemblies of God youth group at Six Flags on that day — I remember because I was one of them. (Those A/G folks sure do like their amusement parks.)
Anyway, the Wet ’n Wild thing being a rather trivial incident, I didn’t feel as weird as I did having taken my (then smaller) family to the top of the Empire State Building and looking at the World Trade Center the week before 9/11.
Well, that’s all I have to say about that.
Get the story (or not).
P.S. Oh, incidentally, for those who may have missed it the first time around, here’s the (rather more exciting) excitement from our last family vacation: The Great Elevator Escape.
SDG here with a real Mystery Photo culled from the Internet. Who is pretty obvious, and When, judging from the directory path, is recent. Anyone have any insight into Where and What?
A few penetratingly insightful observations:
Wherever B-16 is sitting, it’s a darn huge space with a darn huge, um, wood or metal thing.
I would call it a reredo, if I knew the space were a church, and if I could see an altar anywhere.
The cleric on the right (our right) could be reading from a book of the gospels, so this could be Mass.
It looks to me like Christ, center top, is rising in triumph in the harrowing of hell, or something. Although theoretically he could be descending into hell.
Not entirely sure what’s going on around his head.
The figures around him presumably include denizens of hell.
But there may be other figures too.
Well, that’s all I’ve got to say about that. Any other thoughts, guesses, speculation, opinion, knowledge?
P.S. A friend found this at the Web clearinghouse site Digg. I scanned the comments there to see if anyone knew anything. They didn’t. Warning: Do not head over to Digg to read the comments unless you feel like being offended today. People can be unbelievably moronic/vitriolic/puerile. It actually makes you appreciate how thoughtful and smart combox discussion around here tends to be, odd trolls and all.
SDG here, at the beginning of my 17th year as a Catholic, with some thoughts in response to a combox post from a reader calling himself John:
My wife and kids and I joined the Catholic Church last Easter, went to mass fairly reliably for the first number of months, then less consistently over the ensuing months. My wife revealed to me a few months ago that she just can’t stand all the pageantry and symbolic acts of the mass; that it seems contrived and unnecessary, and that she doesn’t think she needs to attend confession, that she can simply bring her issues straight to Jesus. She and I agree the preaching (homily) is quite weak at all the services we’ve attended compared to nearly every other type of church we’ve attended, and we don’t get that same feeling leaving church like we did years ago while attending Lutheran services. Our kids are also bored to tears at Mass and really dislike going. We’ve started visiting other churches (baptist, free churches, etc.) but haven’t found one we like. I still feel some sort of attachement to the Catholic Church, but don’t know what to do…any suggestions?
John, you raise a lot of important and complicated issues in a few sentences. One thing that might help me (and others) as we try to offer responses would be to know more about what originally led your family to the Church in the first place. Did you have friends that were Catholic? Were you convinced by the stories and arguments of converts? Did you read books? Were you drawn by the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, or by the teaching authority of the Magisterium?
Since the issues you mention are significantly (though not entirely) experiential, for what it’s worth, I’d like to share something of my experiences over the last 16 years.
First of all, let me say that I understand and empathize with your experience of not getting what you want out of going to Mass. While that is very far from my present experience, it has been my experience for long stretches in my past.
My wife Suzanne and I were received into the Church on Easter Vigil 1992, the year after we were married, in what I would consider a far-from-great diocese in a far-from-great parish. (I remember one “homily” consisting solely of a dramatic reading of Dr. Seuss’s Oh, The Places You’ll Go!) Shortly afterwards, we moved to Philadelphia, where I entered the Religious Studies MA program at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary.
Our years in Philadelphia were in many ways a godsend. We had some solid priests, my studies at St. Charles were wonderful, and partly through St. Charles we connected with a vibrant community of Catholic young people in the area. Among other things, we met semi-regularly for Catholic movie nights in which we watched morally and spiritually rich films, prayed night prayer, and sang hymns. Once a month early on a Saturday morning, there was a pro-life prayer vigil that began with Mass followed by a rosary prayed outside a nearby abortion clinic, then back to the church for eucharistic exposition. Often afterwards a number of us would go out for brunch together.
Although we never found a parish where we felt deeply at home, those Philadelphia years were in many ways a blessed time for us, and helped us connect culturally and experientially with the Catholic faith we had originally come to embrace for scriptural, theological and historical reasons.
Then this blessed time ended, and whatever strength we gained was sorely put to the test after we moved to a diocese where we struggled in isolation and agony for years. During that time we visited nearly every Catholic church we could find within a thirty-minute radius. Almost uniformly, the liturgy was more or less miscarried, the music ranged from lame to unbearable, the preaching ranged from insipid to downright heretical, and the architecture was high-school gymnasium/auditorium by way of 1960s décor.
For the most part, we tended to alternate between two parishes with adequate pastors. One was a convert from Lutheranism, a staid and steady fellow with a canon-law background who wasn’t much of a people person but had the great virtue of doing the liturgy with punctilious correctness. It was a well-to-do parish of mostly older parishioners, which for a young family like us wasn’t great from a community perspective, but did have the virtue of bringing a certain dignity and traditionalism to the music and hymn choices, too. However, we never really connected with anyone at that parish, and always felt like visitors even though we were as involved as we could be (we taught seventh-grade CCD, among other things).
The other parish we frequented had a pastor with a lively faith and a good heart, but among other things had a hard time saying no to anyone, and one consequence of this was that the so-called music ministry was pretty oppressive: guitars, drums and aging hippies singing glory-and-praise songs off-key. I vividly recall one bleak Good Friday service with a younger guitarist enthusiastically drumming on his guitar during a rousing rendition of “We Come to Tell Our Story.” My only comfort in that dark moment was that I could dimly relate to Jesus’ Psalm 22 cry on the cross.
Incidentally, at that parish we were befriended by a lovely Catholic family who became our only local Catholic friends at that time in our lives. Shortly after that, they moved to Boston, and we were alone again.
This went on for five years. It was an arid, lonely, miserable time; looking back, I call it our years of wandering in the wilderness. In the grand scheme of things, we were blessed — two kids, a good job (mine) that allowed Suz to stay home with the kids, a house, family nearby, and toward the end the beginning of my work with Decent Films. Still, many, many times I prayed to God to deliver us.
And then, about six or seven years ago, He did.
It happened all at once: A third kid, a new job, a different commute, and suddenly we were looking at houses in a different neighborhood, a different diocese. Before long we became aware how different the diocese of Newark — to which Archbishop Myers was just moving at that time, same as we were — was from where we had been.
Before long, we found a parish home with solid priests and strong community that has gotten stronger over time. We worship in a magnificent 150-year-old French Gothic church with nearly all of its traditional accoutrements intact. We are surrounded by (generally large) Catholic families who love their church (local and universal) and take their faith seriously, Recently we began holding monthly men’s meetings and women’s meetings (we have to take turns because there’s way too many children for the men and women to regularly get together at the same time).
The music has been a great blessing. Our church is known for its Hook & Hastings pipe organ (Thomas Edison, who lived just down the road, did some work on it). Our former music director, a convert from Episcopalianism, was a treasure, and when he retired I was not sanguine about finding someone to fill his shoes. Glory to God, we did (another convert from Episcopalianism!). I’m just coming off four days of Triduum and Easter singing in the choir or cantoring at four Masses plus the Good Friday service, with Latin, polyphony, plainchant, traditional hymns, and not a glory-and-praise ditty in sight. On Easter Sunday we had a small brass orchestra and both children’s and adult choirs (on Christmas we had a small string orchestra). I can truly speak of praising God “with greater joy than ever” in this Easter season.
Our life here isn’t perfect, but it’s richly blessed in so many ways that I can’t begin to thank God for it all. I’m especially glad to be able to raise my children in this environment, to let them grow up in a church that looks like the church is meant to look. (Incidentally, we now have five children, and are expecting our sixth.)
Looking back now at our wilderness years, I believe we were being tested. A vibrant faith community of like-minded believers is a wonderful thing, and I’m profoundly grateful for what we have now. But it’s not something God owes us. Nor is it a sine quo non of the Christian life. We are called to be faithful in good times and in bad.
John, your wife talks about being able to bring her issues straight to Jesus. All right. But is that an argument for not going to a Catholic church? Or for not going to church at all? Why go to any church, since one can take one’s issues straight to Jesus?
Where would you go, anyway? Some evangelical church with 45 minutes of praise songs and/or an hour of Bible class? That might be rewarding (or not), as far as it goes. But it’s not church. I have an MA in religious studies; I’ve taken a lot of Bible classes, and I’m a big fan. But that’s not the historic pattern of Christian worship. And neither is 45 minutes of praise songs.
As regards the “pageantry and symbolism” of the Mass, John, I’d hazard a guess that your wife could possibly be reacting to the lousy way the ritual and ceremony of the Mass has been enacted in her experience. Just wondering, has she read Thomas Howard’s Evangelical is Not Enough? I highly recommend it. Of course it helps that I encountered that powerful little book at a time in my life when I was utterly ripe for it, when I was fed up with reductionist Protestant forms of Sunday gatherings and ready for something richer and fuller. For me, Howard crystalized a thousand and one things I had already begun to work my way toward on my own.
Ritual and ceremony are not contrived and unnecessary, except in the sense that all human culture and experience is contrived and unnecessary. Wedding rings, shaking hands, Christmas trees, birthday cakes, napkin on the left, pallbearers, tuck the children in at night, floral arrangements in church or at a wedding or a funeral, Easter eggs, “Hail to the Chief,” bride and groom cut the cake, stand up for the judge, mortar boards at graduation, hold the door for the lady, kiss each other hello and goodbye and good morning and good night — none of these are pragmatically necessary, and all of it is how we human beings order our lives — if not with these symbols, then with something else.
In ordinary life, what the particular symbols and gestures are often enough doesn’t matter. But to be Christian is to believe, first of all, that the Creator of the world happened to make contact with our race within the context of a specific cultural milieu, in a specific symbolic world sovereignly chosen and carefully shaped and guided for millennia by His Spirit. From circumcision to Passover, from the annual chanting of the psalms of ascents on the pilgrimage to Jerusalem to the vestments of the Aaronic priesthood, the world into which Jesus was born was full of pageantry and symbolism.
And then, when our Creator favored our race by taking on our flesh and offering us so great salvation, He left us with symbols and gestures chosen by Himself and not matters of human convention. He took bread and broke it, and wine, and pronounced them to be His body and blood. He commissioned His disciples to go about immersing people in water in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. When the Holy Spirit fell on Pentecost, He did not proceed to liberate the people from pageantry and symbolism: Three thousand people were ceremonially dunked in water on the first day alone, and they immediately proceeded to devote themselves to the business with the breaking of the bread, along with the apostles’ teaching, fellowship and the prayers (Acts 2:42), particularly on the first day of the week (Acts 20:7).
The Lord left His church in the care of apostles who went about laying their hands on chosen men and appointing them to continue the ministry of the church. The New Testament also mentions anointing with oil and laying on of hands for the sick. The Gospels record set words given by Jesus: This is my body; in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit; Our Father who art in Heaven. Given by Jesus, not made up by us.
The book of Revelation describes pageantry and symbolism even in the worship of Heaven itself: thrones, crowns, robes, antiphonal exclamations, prostration. Why should the twenty-four elders not only fall down before the throne of God, but also throw their crowns at His feet, of all things? Does God need or require such lavish outward gestures of worship and self-abnegation? No. But we creatures of bodies and senses and imagination find in such outward acts and symbols the crown and completion of the worship in our hearts.
From the outset the worship of the early church was structured and liturgical. St. Justin Martyr describes it in his mid-second century Apology, only decades after St. John’s death, and there are glimpses of it in the earlier Didache as well as the New Testament. As documented by St. Justin and other early sources, it’s the same basic structure the Church has followed for 2000 years. The brethren assemble on the first day of the week. First comes what we today call the liturgy of the word. There are readings from the Apostles’ memoirs and the prophets, followed by instruction and exhortation from the one presiding. Then comes what we today call the liturgy of the Eucharist. All rise for the prayers; bread and wine are brought; the one presiding offers prayers and thanksgiving, thanking God at length for our being counted worthy to receive the sacred things. Justin cites the words of Jesus at the Last Supper: This is My body; this is My blood. No ordinary food and drink these; they are the body and blood of Jesus Christ. All the people give their amen — what we today call the Great Amen — and the Eucharist is distributed (by deacons) only to the baptized. For those who are infirm and unable to be in attendance, the Eucharist is carried to them.
This is what Christian worship looks like. For some of us, it may come more naturally than others. For all of us, it is essential. I have great sympathy for those who struggle through services with “creative” priests, popcorn music and Protestantized architecture — and all the more for those struggling to raise Catholic kids in such an environment. It is hard to look past all that and see yourself surrounded by angels and archangels and all the company of heaven. And yet there it is: It is in the Eucharistic liturgy, as nowhere else on earth, that we when we lift up our hearts to the Lord we are actually caught up into the eternal worship of the heavenly liturgy.
For those who struggle with seeing it, I can only report that God is faithful and faithfulness is rewarded. Early in our journey to Catholic faith, Suzanne, as yet reluctant and unhappy, wanted to know what would be expected of her: Would she have to pray the rosary, or have statues in her house? No, I told her: Mary must be honored, but the rosary is not strictly obligatory, nor would she have to own statues. Today, Suzanne has sizable collections of rosaries and statues, and what began as her daily rosary with our eldest daughter has become an evening routine for our whole family.
John, I’m glad, truly, that your wife continues to value her faith in Jesus. Obviously I can’t in this post begin to touch on all the apologetical issues, but I do want to say that in what will be very soon forty years of following Christ, I have struggled through many issues, doubts and uncertainties — but one thing I have not found reason to doubt in going on 20 years as a Catholic, one thing I have come ever more firmly to hold as a fundamental conviction, is this: If there is any truth whatsoever to the whole Christian story — if Jesus is who He says He is, and if in this Easter week we can truly celebrate His victory over death — the fullness of that truth is nothing else than the Catholic Faith. Biblically, historically, theologically, Catholicism is Christianity, in its full and complete form. The Christianity that Jesus left on earth, the Christianity proclaimed by the apostles and those who received the faith from them and passed it on to others who then passed it on to others in turn, is a Christianity with a saving water baptism that washes away sins, a priesthood offering a eucharistic sacrifice in which Jesus is really present, an episcopal office reigning in place of the apostles.
Every other Christianity that has come along is truncated, fragmentary, partial in relation to Catholicism. The essence of heresy is to deny, to pick and choose, to pit one truth against another, affirming the part over the whole (“catholic” = pertaining to the whole). Heresy never adds to the whole. It always begins with subtraction. The Arians subtract Christ’s divinity; the Docetists, his humanity. Modernists subtract the divine authorship of scripture; fundamentalists, the human authorship. Pelagians detract from God’s grace and sovereignty; Calvinists (some at least) from human freedom and responsibility. Various monarchian, modalistic and monadic sects, from Islam to Jehovah’s Witnesses and even the Jewish people, deny God’s Triune nature; most Protestant communions subtract the efficacy of the sacraments as well as the authority of the ecumenical councils and of sacred tradition; even the Orthodox subtract the Petrine office of the bishop of Rome.
Of course many of these groups try to spin their denials as positives and Rome’s affirmations as negatives. But these efforts are transparent special pleading. Non-Trinitarians claim that Trinitarians “deny” the oneness of God, but of course we don’t: We affirm both that God is one being and also that He is three Persons. It is they who deny, not we. The Orthodox claim that Catholics effectively deny the principle of conciliarity, but in fact we affirm both conciliarity and also the Petrine office; the denial is theirs, not ours. Protestants say that Catholics deny sola scriptura and sola fide; but in fact it is the Protestant solas, the “onlys,” that constitute denials and fragment the faith; Catholics affirm both the authority of sacred scripture and also that of sacred tradition; both the sufficiency of Christ’s once-for-all sacrifice and also the efficacy of the sacraments in communicating the grace of that sacrifice to us, the salutary effects of that grace in our lives and works done in Christ, and so forth.
These are intellectual arguments, but for me there is something critical at the bottom of them that holds me fast to the Church, whether I am blessed with a good parish, as now, or suffer in the wilderness as formerly: I will not exchange or sacrifice any part of the historic Christian faith for whatever potential perks I might hope to get hanging my hat at a different church.
Indeed, having been brought by God to where I am now, I literally could not go elsewhere; there is nowhere else to go. Like St. Peter in John 6, I can only say to the Church that is our Lord’s Bride and Body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all: To whom would I go? You alone have the words of eternal life. It is here that Jesus gives us His flesh and blood to eat and drink, here that the whole Christ is really present, here that the teaching of Christ is proclaimed in its fullness. There is nowhere else to go.
SDG here with sad news: Paul Scofield, who brilliantly portrayed St. Thomas More in Fred Zinneman’s A Man for All Seasons, has died.
Scofield originated the role of Robert Bolt’s stage play, adapted by Bolt himself for the screen. He knew the role intimately, and his performance is magnificently layered and sensitive.
Primarily a stage actor, Scofield’s filmography also included Quiz Show, Branagh’s Henry V and the Mel Gibson Hamlet.
Few actors could make decency and integrity as convincing and appealing as Scofield. If his Thomas More isn’t enough for you, check him out as Ralph Fiennes’ father in Quiz Show. He embodies a character for whom principles are not just abstract theories, but concrete realities taken for granted as matter-of-factly as gravity.
He does the same thing as More in A Man for All Seasons, although with more worldly-wisdom about the weaknesses of other men. In that film, the principles he stands for include the indissolubility of matrimony, the Petrine primacy of the Bishop of Rome, the inviolability of an oath, and (perhaps most importantly for Bolt) the binding authority of conscience.
He could also do villains, e.g., the Nazi colonel opposite Burt Lancaster in The Train. But even there he brought traces of corrupted idealism and nobility to the role.
A Man for All Seasons is one of the Vatican film list‘s 15 films in the category of Religion. Bolt’s language, based as much as possible on More’s own words, strives to create what Bolt called "a bold and beautiful verbal architecture." For the rest, Bolt added, "my concern was to match with these as best I could so that the theft should not be too obvious." I my book, as noted in my review, he succeeded.
I first saw this film nearly twenty years ago, before I became a Catholic, and it had an enormous impact on me. It was one of the first films I reviewed, and while my skills as a critic were still in an early stage of development, I don’t think it’s a bad review (though I would write it differently today).
For those who have not lately seen A Man for All Seasons, More’s via dolorosa would make ideal viewing during Triduum.
Well, just to inform those who can’t get enough of my yammering in Jimmy’s combox, I have done gone and started my OWN BLOG.
I have had flit across my mind a number of topics lately on which I might have put together a decent post, but I haven’t. For one thing, my work recently has kept me from blogging much at all here at JA.O.. Responding in the combox comes fairly easily (Jason, for instance, might agree that it doesn’t tax my brain that much), but putting together what I consider to be even a moderately interesting original post requires more thought and time. I’m not a writer, and it can take a couple of hours for me to polish up even a fairly brief post, if I don’t want to embarrass myself.
In addition, I am very aware of the audience that Jimmy has earned here, and I personally feel that when people visit the blog of a professional apologist, they should expect a certain quality of discourse. Normally, I don’t think that my tossing in the odd, innocuous post can do much harm, but with Jimmy not posting much lately – as some have noted and Jimmy has acknowledged – the tendency for my work to change or dilute the character of the blog has been more likely. Steven Greydanus is much more capable, in terms of real theology, of contributing meatier posts (as his recent sterling series on the moral argument for Theism demonstrated) that are more in keeping with what I see as Jimmy’s main audience. I would rather see more sparse, quality posting on JA.O than have it padded out with my stuff.
And then, I have had a few ideas that I think would just be better addressed on my own blog. Not everyone is intensely interested in art, for instance, or home brewing. I fully expect to hear mainly the sound of crickets in my combox, and that’s okay.
I’m heartened to hear that Jimmy will be back to blogging at full tilt again soon, and I intend to continue haunting the combox as usual, as well as contributing the occasional post. I might also cross-pollinate a bit, duplicating some of my personal blog posts here at Jimmy’s in an act of shameless and desperate self-promotion.
Anyway, I would be delighted to see some of you JA.O regulars drop in at Old World Swine and give me a shout now and again (okay… I happen to be partial to Old World culture, and Old World Swine also happens to be an esoteric term for what is called here in Arkansas a "razorback". I’m not a huge sports fan like my brother, but I enjoy watching the Hogs play – mostly).
MILLIONTH VISITOR WILL BE INVITED FOR HOME-MADE BREAD, CHEESE & BEER!
Sorry for the lack of blogging, but I’ve been out of town the last week with basically no Internet access.
I’m driving back today, though.
SDG here (still not Jimmy) with one more response to the first round of reader comments on the materialism posts.
[Reader 1] This is well presented so far, SDG. In my experience, the ultimate move tht materialists will make in the face of the sort of argument you’re developing is to bite the bullet and say, in essence, "Fine. If it turns out that the basic moral intuitions we start with turn out to be illusions and all we’re ultimately left with is subjective preference, then we’ll just have to accept that. What you can’t do is use this sort of argument to prove the existence of a God, because the structure of such an argument would be that if God does not exist then the moral situation would be intolerably bad. But that’s a fallacious structure. We have to follow the evidence, and if it turns out that there is no God, and if it turns out that in the absence of a God we have no objective ground for our moral notions, then I guess we have no objective ground for our moral notions." I actually think this is a fair response by the materialist. I believe there are, in fact, good reasons for theism (and Christian theism, in particular), but I’m not sure it’s fair to argue for theism based upon the need to ground morality.
[Reader 2] My point is – suppose that you are right about the consequences of naturalism. Suppose that our moral judgments have a naturalistic origin, this would render them meaningless. All we know about the real world is that we *think* our judgments are meaningful. So this argument that naturalism ultimately undermines these judgments is not really an argument for God’s existence because under both theories – the theory that God gave us morality and the theory that morality evolved naturally we might *think* our judgments were meaningful. It just turns out that if you’re correct about the consequences of naturalism, we would be mistaken in some deep sense in thinking that our lives have meaning (let me again point out that I don’t think this is the case!).
I think we can say something stronger than "we *think* our judgments are meaningful." I think that our apprehension of morality is itself a kind of evidence — not evidence that can be empirically tested or proved, but still evidence of a real sort.
I do think it’s important to accept the limitations of human knowledge — of all kinds. We are finite beings; with the arguable exception of Cogito ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am,") there are very few things we know so immediately that our knowledge excludes all logical possibility of doubt. To that we might also add apprehension of self-evident truths or logical axioms, such as "X = X" and "If A = B and B = C, then A = C.".
Even in those cases, though, there are schools of, um, thought, that essentially deny that consciousness itself has any real existence, that behavior alone is real, and that even the most universal of axioms are really only expressions of how our brains happen to work rather than any sort of meaningful insight.
I — I, I say — I have no use for such lines of thought. I can’t prove empirically that I exist, since anything empirical is merely a form of behavior. And the unprovability of axioms is itself, if not axiomatic, at least proverbial.
Yet this is not because the self or self-evident truths are too dubious for proof, but because "proof" and "evidence" are remote and clumsy ways of approaching knowledge less immediately accessible to us than knowledge of self or of self-evident truths. Empirical evidence is a secondary form of knowledge compared to self-awareness. I am more directly aware of my own self than I am of anything my senses apprehend. The phenomenon of consciousness is the one phenomenon I experience most directly and immediately.
I can’t prove, over against the skeptical epistomologist or even over against the wiseacre who says "I don’t get it," that "If A = B and B = C, then A = C" represents a meaningful insight rather than an arbitrary convention. I can’t prove that the words being formed as I type represent thoughts (true or false is another question entirely), that there is anything going on here other than twitching fingers on a keyboard and patterns of digital information of a certain complexity level being organized, stored and transmitted electronically.
Even to talk about "proving" such things is meaningless, if there is any sense in which any speech is more or less meaningless than any other. Any discussion of "proof" or "proving," even (I think) in the most abstract mathematical sense, by definition at least presupposes the reality of mind and thought and the validity of reasoning, if not the possibility of meaningful knowledge of reality through sense experience and inference and insight. These principles are antecedent to all possible proofs.
I suppose someone might say that mind, thought and reason are postulates that lead to useful conclusions, but I’m not sure that’s the most helpful way of putting it. It seems to me more meaningful to say that we are finite beings whose apprehension of reality is finite and imperfect, but real. Self-awareness, sensory perception, and logical insights are all finite and imperfect but real ways of knowing and exploring reality.
Then there’s the problem of other minds. As a self-aware being, I (substitute yourself here, if you are a self-aware being) am directly aware of myself; I am not directly aware of other selves, nor can I empirically prove their existence. It is possible to build a solipsistic philosophy that explains the whole world in relation to oneself, and this cannot be empirically disproved, for the same reason that I can’t produce an empirical proof that I myself exist.
This, in my view, is not reason to doubt that other selves exist; it is reason to regard empiricism as a limited and imperfect tool for understanding the world. To know other selves, to have relationships with other persons, does involve what could be called a leap of faith, but it’s a warranted leap, as nearly everyone recognizes.
It’s worth noting that solipsism, i.e., skepticism in regard to the existence of other selves, is not the default from which we escape into community only if we can satisfy ourselves by proof or argument that the leap is justified. Proof and argument mean nothing to a two-year-old, but if his mother loves him, the two-year-old implicitly knows it, and her. He has a knowledge of her reality that escapes the empiricist and solipsist who look only at behavior.
In regard to the knowledge of other selves, the leap of faith by which enter into relationships with one other, by which we love and are loved, is a more valid means of knowing the truth of one another than empirical squinting and tally sheets of what we can and can’t prove. No, I can’t prove it. I don’t think "proof" is the right measure here.
In my last post I quoted Lewis on the incompatibility of loving a girl and believing the totality of her being to be reducible to the movement of atoms. To know another person is a form of knowledge that exceeds the scientific method — either that, or else as Lewis says it is merely "a sort of psychic phosphorescence arising from the behaviour of your genes."
I can’t prove scientifically that Suzanne loves me — or, for that matter, that I love her. I can’t prove scientifically that "I love you" is a meaningful statement, apart from a very imprecise adducement of certain behavioral characteristics and physiological events that tend to correlate with accepted declarations of love.
Even if we reduce love to physiology and make it subject to rigorously scientific examination, no one in fact has that kind of scientific evidence regarding even the behavior of his or her beloved. We take love on trust; we go above and beyond the available evidence, rather than, say, hiring a private investigator to tail our beloved 24/7 (to say nothing of lab tests to check our beloved’s physiological responses). Hiring a P.I. or getting a lab test might provide us with more data; it could not increase the knowledge of the beloved that we have on faith and love.
Having said that, it must be acknowledged that the knowledge of others that we come to by making this leap of faith can be in error in particular cases. The beloved we believed loved us in return did not; the one we thought faithful was not. In the Internet age, we may be deluded as to the sex, age, race and other characteristics of the persons we think we know. Someday I expect they may succeed in inventing computer programs capable of passing the Turing test, programs that can "pass" for sentient beings in conversation. (So far that hasn’t happened.)
Yes. We may be mistaken in what we think we know. Welcome to being a finite creature with imperfect apprehension of reality. On the other hand, the impossibility of logically excluding error doesn’t warrant refusing to make any leap. There are worse things than risking the possibility of error. A passenger on a sinking ship cannot then and there establish beyond doubt that the lifeboat will or even can successfully bear him to safety. A castaway on a desert island cannot do lab tests on the stream he finds to establish beyond doubt that the water is safe. That’s life. Do the best you can, pay your money and take your chances.
We apprehend logical axioms, such as "X = X" and "If A = B and B = C, then A = C," by a faculty we call reason, and we take these apprehensions for meaningful insights rather than just how our brains happen to work. We also have the experience of apprehending fundamental moral precepts such as "Do good and avoid evil" and "Be fair to others" by a faculty we call conscience, and take these also for meaningful insights rather than how our brains happen to work.
We don’t experience awareness of good and evil as emotive impulses like any other that may be indulged or ignored as we see fit. Nor do we experience conscience as something we accept purely on the authority of those who taught us. We experience it as binding, as obligatory, as authoritative. We are free to decide to ignore other impulses without regret; when we go against conscience, or even when we find that we have gone against what our conscience now tells us we should have done, we experience various forms of inner conflict such as guilt or regret.
I am convinced, and in the preceding posts I have argued, that if materialism is true, these seeming insights are fundamentally illusory; just as if solipsism is true, then knowledge of other selves is an illusion. If materialism is true, there is self-interest, there is instinct, there are irrationally conditioned feelings, and that’s all. None of these gets us to a moral worldview properly so called. Sometimes it will make sense to follow one or another of them, but none of them is finally binding.
To affirm materialism seems to me akin to proposing in effect that the human race lives in a black-and-white world, yet we all dream in color; we have a shared sense of a dimension of reality that corresponds to nothing real. As another reader put it, "If the universe really is meaningless, how is that we crave meaning? It’s as extraordinary as expecting sight in a universe without light."
In another forum, "Archie the bright," responding to Lewis’s comments about the impossibility of what we call love in a materialist universe, wrote:
Does a flower look any less pretty if you understand the chemistry of anthocyanins? Does a biochemist dislike the taste of filet mignon? And when I am near an attractive girl, I know that my olfactory centres are responding to her perfume and pheromones, but that doesn’t stop my heart beating faster just the same! Sure, that too is perfectly explicable, but explanation does not diminish the pleasure in the slightest!
Leave aside the fact that "Archie" seems to be describing precisely what Lewis meant by the "lowest animal sense" of love. The fact that a man’s hear beats faster in the presence of a pretty girl, while it is not the same as what Lewis meant by love, is still a notable fact in itself. It is evidence about what sort of species we are. As Lewis himself elsewhere wrote, it would be an odd thing if the phenemonon of "falling in love" (or even ordinary animal arousal) happened in a sexless world.
Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search For Meaning went so far as to argue, against Freud, that meaning, not the pleasure principle, represents man’s most fundamental need and desire. Frankl was in Auschwitz, and he has described his time in Auschwitz as an experience of the most ignoble and noble of humanity. On the ignoble side, the camp guards hustling prisoners into the gas chambers; on the noble side, prisoners going to their deaths with their heads held high, the words of the Paternoster or Shema on their lips.
I’ve indicated in previous discussion that belief in life after death is no sine quo non of my outlook on morality and meaning. But when I read Frankl’s description of the prisoners going to their deaths, something in me responds to that — something that I believe, I cannot prove, exceeds Darwinian calculations. My heart says: Yes. A philosophy that does not give one the wherewithal to die like that, if it comes to the point, is unworthy of the human heart.
It seems to me that the leap of my heart at Frankl’s anecdote is also evidence about what sort of species we are. The first movement of the heart is sexual; the second is spiritual.
Like falling in love with a girl, it is not a thing that can be reductionistically explained away to those who have experienced it. If the thing is real at all, it is real about something more than bio-electrical-chemical flutters in our brains.
I respect the consistency of a materialist who says that it is all an illusion, that morality, dignity and meaning are really only emotive reactions of aversion or attraction mistaken for truth-claims about reality. I respect the humanism of a materialist who says that morality, dignity and meaning really mean something. I cannot see that it is possible for a materialist to have both consistency and humanism.
Our apprehension of morality and meaning is immediate enough that even if we hold a philosophy that logically excludes objective morality, willy-nilly we find ourselves talking and behaving as if morality were real anyway (cf. Dawkins’ outrage and Hitchens’ frequent moralizing).
I can’t empirically disprove emotivism, any more than I can disprove solipsism, or any more than I can disprove the views of those who deny the existence of the self and the truth of logical axioms. That doesn’t make me distrust my apprehensions on any of these points. The apprehension itself seems to me a more persuasive indication of reality than the arguments or explanations of its illusory nature.
SDG here (still not Jimmy) with a roundup of some responses to reader comments from the four preceding posts (one two three four).
I found this post quite interesting. … I tend to wince a little bit every time a paragraph begins "From the materialist perspective" and then goes on to assert something as if it is obvious that every materialist must believe it ("From the Christian perspective, the only important thing in life is to treat others well so you can go to heaven" – your reaction to this probably parallels my reaction to the "From the materialist perspective" paragraphs).
Fair enough. I am doing my best to describe how materialism looks to me, and how I think I would necessarily look at the world if I were a materialist. At least some of my observations are meant to describe conclusions that I do think logically follow from materialism itself and would logically be acknowledged by all consistent materialists, which, if I am right, would mean that materialists who don’t accept the conclusions must be missing a logical step somewhere. Of course I cheerfully admit that I can make mistakes too.
I don’t think it’s really coherent to talk about a meaningless universe since meaning seems to be a property we attribute to certain inclinations we have. On the other hand, it’s perfectly coherent to talk about a universe without God which I think is telling for the argument that Godlessness implies meaninglessness…
I think you’re confusing coherence with plausibility. A meaningless universe is at least as coherent a concept as a universe without God, just not one that most of us find plausible. Alternatively, it may be that if we ever hash out the metaphysics to a sufficient degree, the concept of a universe without God might turn out to be truly incoherent, but that’s an argument even I don’t have the wind to make.
I think it’s important to distinguish between two issues: 1) Is there a naturalistic explanation for our moral intuitions? and 2) As reflective beings who must decide how to live, are we being arbitrary if we insist on privileging our moral judgments over our other inclinations? (like our sex drive or our desire for self-advancement).
I would answer "yes" and "no" respectively – that is, there is a naturalistic explanation for our moral intuitions and we are not being arbitrary in assigning them the priority and importance that we do – but I think the distinction between 1) and 2) is critical in discussing the moral argument for the existence of God.
The burden of my series has been that "Yes" is not an entirely satisfactory answer to 1), and "No" is a far from satisfactory answer to 2).
Moral intuitions are partly related to naturalistic factors; but some moral intuitions, particularly the intuition that we are always morally bound to do the right thing, cannot reasonably be explained naturalistically, certainly not in a way that suggests that this intuition itself ought to be followed.
It seems to me, and I’ve argued, that on a naturalistic worldview, it just makes sense sometimes to ignore one’s conscience given sufficient justification in the other direction, just as we sometimes ignore every other affective response, whether aversive or attractive, given sufficient justification.
And yet those who clearly hear their own conscience know this is not true. We are always morally bound to do the right thing (and avoid the wrong thing); we cannot consider "right" and "wrong to be relative incentivizing factors among many others which many or many not tip the balance as to what we will eventually choose. And this is something that just does not make sense in a materialistic worldview.
This is because only point 1) actually relates to God’s existence. If there were reason to think that a naturalistic explanation of our moral intuitions was impossible, this would suggest that a supernatural explanation was necessary. However, if there were a naturalistic explanation for our moral intuitions but it was one that made them seem unjustified or on a par with our other emotions and inclinations, then there would be no basis for the inference that a supernatural explanation is necessary.
I disagree. I think the absolutist claim of conscience is itself an indication that our moral affections are not rooted in instinctive or affective responses. Instinctive and affective responses do not demand always to be obeyed.
Even the instinct for self-preservation is not absolute. The voice of conscience is. No materialist ethic I have ever encountered can account for this.
Now, you might reply – OK – but why do we then say, "I *should* help that drowning child rather than continue on my way to work"? I think a satisfactory response is simply, creating brains with this kind of feeling was the best way for evolution to actually get us to behave in this way.
Maybe. But once we realize that rationally the child’s death is an event of no greater cosmic significance than the drowning of a dog or a hedgehog, if we would not risk our life to save a drowning dog or hedgehog, why should we choose to listen to that feeling rather than getting on with enjoying our own lives?
Put it another way. Granted that you yourself would choose to save the child, suppose you met a man who cheerfully admitted that he allowed a child to drown rather than stepping in to rescue him because he decided to listen to his instinct for self-preservation rather than his altruism-instinct. Would you feel disgust or outrage? And if so, would this be any different from the flutter in your gorge if you saw him eating haggis (or whatever)?
As a practical matter in almost any situation imaginable in present society, the harm done by the adultery due to the violation of trust in the relationship (and the difficulty of trusting again) would exceed any benefits from improved skill as a lover.
But what is the object of "trust"? As long as the husband comes back to his family and continues responsibly addressing the practical interests of his wife and children, empirically speaking, what "trust" has been violated? Only a "trust" that is bound up in notions of fidelity and betrayal that exceed rational calculation, that go beyond empirical considerations.
My assertion so far is that "morality" results from a desire to not be ostracized from the group.
And yet one of the most celebrated heroic traits is the conviction and integrity of sticking to one’s principles even at the cost of ostracization, opposition, sanction, banishment, even execution.
Part 1 of SDG’s post, and the thread that followed, was involved with the sources of these criteria. But as far as enforcing is concerned, personal preferences follow the same rule as moral beliefs, or any other kind of belief: they are exactly as strong as the power of the people holding them.
FWIW, I wasn’t concerned with enforcement per se, only with the moral basis for enforcement. If the basis is "We’re strong and we can impose our will on you," that’s fine, but let’s not flatter ourselves that this is somehow fundamentally different from the bully’s basis for imposing his own will on the bullied.
It seems the whole series, except for a few gems (and SDG, in his brilliance, always produces at least a few), has failed in that it is the same over-simplistic argument about why materialists can’t have morals. Epicurous covered these points quite will during his life, and answered most questions quite excellently. Kant’s system, though he uses it to argue for God, would still work just as well without One, for Kant’s God is not the originator of morals. Not all materialists are utilitarians. Some are deontological, some follow a virtue ethics, some suggest an emotive ethics, and some are pragmatic.
Killing people, for the materialist, can be wrong because of social consequences (pragmatism), because it feels wrong (emotive ethics), because it corrupts the character, and so reduces happiness (virtue), because it causes pain and pain is definitively wrong (utilitarianism), or because it is wrong in the sense of being a moral imperative (deontology). All these can be justified from a materialist framework.
Ethics doesn’t lead to God, and definitely not the the Christian God.
I wasn’t trying to argue for God, much less the Christian God. I’m only trying to refute materialism, or rather to outline the consequences I believe necessarily follow on a materialist outlook.
I never said, and indeed explicitly denied saying, that materialists cannot have morals. They can. Materialists have consciences just like everyone else, and they can and do listen to them. They may even think that they have reasons why why they must listen to their consciences even though they are materialists, and they may be satisfied with their reasons.
What I’m saying is: I’m not satisfied with their reasons. I think their reasons are full of holes. I probably agree in principle with the bulk of their moral judgments. I just don’t think they’ve thought through the metaphysical implications of their morals, or conversely the moral implications of their materialism. That’s how I see it.
Not all materialists are utilitarians. Nor are they all emotivists. Only the consistent ones.
The moral systems you refer to based on pragmatism, emotivism and utilitarianism all fail to provide an adequate basis for a truly moral system. Some of the reasons have been explored in my earlier posts. You say you find my analysis lacking, but you don’t take issue with specific arguments, so I can’t really respond further.
The "character" that is corrupted on your "virtue" theory is an abstraction of behavioral traits on a materialist system, and I think I’ve shown that morality does not always correlate with maximal "happiness" where happiness is reductionistically understood in terms of gratification of present and future desires and avoidance of pain, etc. Certainly a moral system that is based on avoidance of character corruption for the sake of avoiding unhappiness cannot give us the moral wherewithal to sacrifice our lives in a just cause. If character corruption is dangerous only insofar as it limits my prospects for future happiness, on a materialist outlook I’ll risk the character corruption and stay alive, thank you very much, just like I would rather get cancer and live than stay cancer-free and die.
Some interesting problems raised. But God doesn’t solve any of them.
Why does God’s existing make any difference? Why should I care what He says? Because he’s always good? What does good mean?
If good is simply defined as "what God is", it doesn’t justify why I should desire it.
So far I’ve been concerned with the moral implications of materialism. Grounding morals and meaning in theism is a subject for another post. I will try to get to that soon.
First, though, I have a pair of comments to respond to which call for a more in-depth response than the ones above…
SDG here (still not Jimmy) with more on materialism and the moral argument (continued from Part 3).
The ethical approach sketched in the preceding posts is neither a rhetorical conceit nor a straw man. There are ethicists and moralists who really advocate this kind of thinking, who advocate extramarital flings, for instance.
One school of moral philosophy — the only thing that makes any kind of sense to me on a materialist outlook, variously called emotivism, nihilism or "boo-hurrah" — explicitly reduces moral valuations to emotional expressions of aaversion or attraction.
I respect the consistency of materialists who grasp the nettle and agree that what we call moral valuations are merely flutters of aversion or attraction, no more (or less) important or normative than other such flutters, from our appetitive response to haggis to our favorite or least favorite colors.
I respect the humanity, or if you like the humanism, of those who, despite professing a materialist outlook, find "boo-hurrah" emotivism unconvincing and try to make a case for more rigorous or normative moral obligations. I find their efforts wholly unpersuasive.
I do not see that consistency and moral humanism can ever be successfully combined in a materialist outlook. (In other words, to borrow a well-known construction, you can be a materialist, or a moral humanist, or consistent, or any two of the three, but not all three.)
The gap between the empirical pluses and minuses of what we call moral or immoral behavior and the level of responsibility that human beings feel to keep the moral code as they understand it is simply too wide. What impels us to do good and shun evil is not simply an appetitive flutter that we are free to disregard whenever it is convenient to do so, or when the empirical pluses and minuses don’t seem to warrant it.
On one level, I can certainly understand a materialist who says something like: "Look, it’s very simple: I love my partner, and no incentive could induce me to betray her/him, or even entertain the notion. Our relationship makes me happy, and anything else would only harm my happiness, not add to it."
Humanly speaking, I well understand how he feels. Certainly it’s how I feel, blissfully married to a goddess as I am. But then my marital bliss is substantially rooted in a trans-materialistic perception of what love is, and who and what Suzanne is, in a way that I for one can’t imagine sustaining if I personally were thoroughly persuaded of materialism.
My usage of "goddess," of course, is neither literal nor cultic. Like "louse" feelings, "goddess" is here a figure of speech, a hyperbolic metaphor. In my case, though, this figure of speech is at least intended by me to express something real about her — not just something about the state of my emotions or feelings. I can hardly put it better than C. S. Lewis did:
You can’t, except in the lowest animal sense, be in love with a girl if you know (and keep on remembering) that all the beauties both of her person and of her character are a momentary and accidental pattern produced by the collision of atoms, and that your own feelings are just a sort of psychic phosphorescence arising from the behaviour of your genes. ("On Living in an Atomic Age")
Some materialists (not all) will no doubt dissent from this. I understand how they feel; I don’t understand what they are thinking.
If persons are no more than the sorts of bio-electrical-chemical processes we’ve been discussing until now, all our gas about morality, as well as human dignity, personal rights, love, respect, honor and so forth, are very much the same sorts of delusions that Dawkins says God himself is. Lewis again:
Animism, apparently, begins at home. We, who have personified all other things, turn out to be ourselves mere personifications. Man is indeed akin to the gods: that is, he is no less phantasmal than they … Almost nobody has been making linguistic mistakes about almost nothing. By and large, this is the only thing that has ever happened. ("The Empty Universe")
I won’t deny that we might try to contrive, even as materialists, to enjoy the illusions of personhood and dignity as if they were real, at least for a while. Maybe. But give it time. Odds are, eventually that ex-Fundamentalist will get over his hangup about the evils of cards and see them for what they are: little rectangular bits of heavily coated, colored paper, no more and no less.
Likewise, live long enough with the belief that other persons are merely bio-electrical-chemical processes, let it sink into the depths of what men of another age would have called your soul, and see whether in the long run you consistently treat them as if the concept of personal dignity really meant anything, or how worked up you are able to get about such bio-electrical-chemical processes as murder or rape.
For the time being, Archie, I think you’re living in the shadow of a transcendent worldview you’ve abandoned without fully walking away from it. In the end, on your accounting, "boo-hurrah" is all there is to it. If you say you see things differently, at this point I can only shrug and agree that we see things differently.
As it happens, shrugging and disagreeing may be all we can do regarding a whole host of varying perceptions, values, choices, motivations and behaviors.
Many of us would agree that an adult whose sexual preferences include or focus on young children is a danger to the children and to society. The molester might (or might not) have a different point of view; society’s point of view is widely but not universally accepted. Kinsey argued for the normalization of adult-child sexual interactions, and others since him have followed suit. Most of society would brush this aside without a second thought; I would agree (from my supernaturalist perspective) that this is basic moral sanity, but is is at least questionable forensics.
Recently in New York hooligans set a homeless man on fire. Ten days later, he died in a hospital.
When you hear that, Archie, as a materialist, do you feel outrage? If so, which of the following do you feel is more outrageous? That
a lost soul (speaking of course strictly poetically) who was in all likelihood a drag on society rather than an asset was subjected to a harsh exercise in survival of the fittest? Or that
millions of dollars of shared social assets that could have gone to productive uses were spent in a futile effort to care for this useless man, rather than simply finishing the job and using the money in some socially beneficial fashion?
I know, caring for the man makes us all feel better about ourselves, right? But couldn’t we just as easily have gotten our warm fuzzies using the money to help other people who weren’t going to die anyway? How greatly were the herd-interests of the human race, or even of one particular borough, ever invested in this particular situation?
Christopher Hitchens, debating Doug Wilson, described sociopaths and psychopaths as "part of our haphazard evolution and our kinship with a nature that often favors the predator." Yet he also said "I find I have no alternative" to calling them "evil."
Wilson’s reply: "But you surely do have an alternative. Why not just call them ‘different’?"
To that, I would add a second question: Evil. Different. In a materialist universe, aren’t those just two different ways of saying the same thing?
Hitchens’ humanism outstrips his philosophy here. He knows deep down that right and wrong are not simply a matter of individual taste or perception, yet his philosophy will not allow him to formulate an understanding of right and wrong that is truly normative for all persons.
Here is a thought-experiment reportedly posed by Richard Dawkins to a theist:
You are on a deserted beach with a rifle, an elephant and a baby. This is the last elephant on earth and it is charging the baby. Do you shoot the elephant, knowing the species would become extinct?
Bracket the obvious difficulties inherent in the situation as posed (which for all I know might not have been reported exactly as originally framed), such as the vanishingly small chances of a species with only a single surviving specimen ever making a comeback.
Bracket, too, the case for or against the answer given by the theist, who felt that the question was "a no-brainer" and hoped only that she "would shoot straight enough to kill the beast." (A theist myself, and thoroughly committed to human exceptionalism, I think a case can be made that the question is more interesting than its original hearer felt.)
The point here is Dawkins’ reported response. Apparently, Dawkins was outraged that anyone would dissent from the priority he placed on preserving the endangered species. Presumably he would not have been outraged to learn that the theist differed from him regarding the palatability of haggis, but I’ve already made that point. Here I have a different question.
The point of Dawkins’ thought experiment was to assert the fundamental equivalence of one species with another. There is nothing fundamentally different about man that sets him qualitatively apart from the rest of the animal kingdom.
Very well, then. Under what circumstances might Dawkins be moved to outrage at the elephant?
Many behaviors that in the human world are subject to the harshest moral censure exist in the animal kingdom as mere behaviors, nothing more. Animals haven’t developed the capacity for large-scale atrocities that humans have, but certainly behaviors that in humans we would call rape and cannibalism and murder and bullying occur in the animal kingdom.
If we happen to witness such an event, we might feel pangs of pity for those on the receiving end of such behavior, but we don’t feel outrage at the aggressors.
Even Dawkins doesn’t, I suspect.
Yet, like Hitchens having "no alternative" but to call evil evil, Dawkins does feel outrage at human beings who deviate from what he obviously feels is a standard that somehow has some bearing on other human beings, a standard that is not solely a function of his own bio-electrical-chemical processes.
Coming soon: Round-up of responses to reader comments to date.