Believing, just believing

The question of the day is: What is a justified belief? In other words, what are we entitled to believe? The answer of the day, and the subject of my analysis, is the properly basic belief, a central concept of foundationalist theories of knowledge and rationality. The conclusion of the day is that the so-called properly basic beliefs are deeply problematic, and that personally, I would not even use the term. Properly basic beliefs as an epistemic category are of special interest to the philosopher of religion, because they have been invoked as a means to defend the rationality of religious beliefs, or at least the belief in a God. This has been part of the strategy of reformed epistemologists, of whom Alvin Plantinga is probably most well-known. Before explaining the use of the concept in reformed epistemology, which represents a modest form of foundationalism, it is appropriate to lay out the principles of foundationalism in general.

Foundationalism originated as an early modern development in epistemology. After the long period of religiously grounded, modest confidence in human reason in the Middle Ages, philosophers, beginning with René Descartes (1596–1650), engaged in the search for absolutely certain knowledge. They found it, as it were, in various ideas, beliefs or categories that were seen as foundational or logically prior to all other knowledge in an individual human mind. Descartes had his ”clear and distinct ideas”; Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) discovered a priori categories of understanding. Generally, foundationalism treats human knowledge as consisting of two kinds of beliefs: basic ones and derived ones. The former, accepted without being supported by other beliefs, constitute the ground on which the structure of knowledge is built. Beliefs can be called ”properly” basic if it is reasonable to accept them independently of other beliefs. An example of improperness would be, for instance, believing that someone is guilty of a crime just because one dislikes that person.

Strong foundationalism is a notorious position where only self-evident or incorrigible beliefs can be accepted as properly basic. Such could be arithmetical truths and beliefs concerning one’s own, immediate experience, for example. It is deemed rational to hold them and beliefs logically derived from them. Strong foundationalism, however, has been met with devastating criticism, for it is actually self-referentially incoherent. The central requirement of strong foundationalism can hardly be a self-evident or incorrigible belief, and so it cannot provide a secure basis for rational beliefs. In other words, it is not rational for a strong foundationalist to be a strong foundationalist.

Reformed epistemology has been developed with the pitfalls of strong foundationalism in mind. Its advocates, such as Plantinga, accept a modest form of foundationalism. They do think that beliefs are either basic or derived, and that any system of rationally justified beliefs requires properly basic beliefs as its foundation. The difference to strong foundationalism is that we can consider any of our beliefs as properly basic if we don’t think we have derived them from other beliefs. The reformed epistemologist does not want to overproblematize knowledge: she is confident that human structures of belief and knowledge are basically in order, and that we do know most of those things that we think we know.

For Alvin Plantinga, this broad criterion means that the belief in God’s existence can be properly basic. He has been criticized for taking this stance – for example, Gary Gutting has objected that only such beliefs should be considered properly basic of which there is no widespread disagreement. Plantinga, however, rejects consensus as a criterion for proper basicality: ”[T]here is no reason to assume, in advance, that everyone will agree on the examples [of properly basic beliefs].” (Reason and religious belief, Peterson et al. 2003, p. 114) Why should a Christian conform to the examples of, say, an atheist? Basicality is affirmed or denied according to a belief’s provenance, not to its reception, and so everyone can legitimately have their own basic beliefs.

This person-relatedness inevitably paves the way for a kind of relativism. Philip Quinn has expressed concerns over this: in his view, it is problematic that anyone can claim even the most eccentric beliefs to be properly basic. Is one not, in defining proper basicality, dealing with matters of truth or even plausibility? This is a good question indeed. But in my view the big problem is that, in construing the notion of proper basicality, one limits the range of epistemology in a way that leaves us with a truncated, implausible, and not very interesting conception of what human knowledge is. I now move on to explicate what this means.

Reformed epistemologists and other foundationalists operate in a world of beliefs that are expressed as grammatically correct sentences. Consider the following example, given in Reason and religious belief: ”[Y]ou walk into a friend’s house and, because of what you are hearing, form the belief that someone is playing the saxophone in the next room. This is a basic belief, not inferred from other beliefs of yours … you just hear the sounds and find yourself with the belief that there is a saxophone in the next room.” (p. 113) Here, the foundationalist refuses to think further where it is both possible and necessary to do so. The belief in question does, in fact, logically entail a number of prior convictions. You have to believe that there is a musical instrument known as the saxophone, and that a player is required for the instrument to produce sounds, and even that the next room actually is there!

I stress that none of these prior convictions has to be part of a conscious process of reasoning that eventually produces the belief ”someone is playing the saxophone in the next room”. But logically, they have to be there. You do not form the belief exclusively ”because of what you are hearing”. If you did, probably any living creature capable of hearing and seeing could form the same belief as you do, given the same sensory input. But obviously, animals could not. Neither could all of your fellow human beings, especially not those who had never got to learn anything about the saxophone. The sensory input in question could not possibly cause such people to believe that someone is playing the saxophone. At best, they could believe that someone is playing a musical instrument. This I take to be self-evident, but the foundationalist seems unable to account for the fact that, even upon observing the same event, different people may form different beliefs.

A more detailed description of belief formation could be the following. What you are hearing interacts with your prior convictions, whether they be conscious or subconscious, and from this interaction emerges the belief – it is an interpreted experience, achieved through reference to some form of prior knowledge. In this case, reference is made to some things you have learned about the saxophone and the structure of your friend’s house. I label these things resources of interpretation. Or I could say they are implicit truth claims inherent in the explicit truth claim that is your belief. It is downright misleading to describe the situation as if the external stimuli had immediately caused the belief to appear in your mind as a grammatically correct sentence. It just does not happen.

Furthermore, it is far from self-evident that the sphere of correct language encompasses all human knowledge. No perfectly formed sentences pop out of nothing when a child learns to communicate. Prior to sentences, single words are uttered – how come they could not stand for knowledge, beliefs, or proto-beliefs if you like? It is entirely reasonable to maintain that, for instance, if a child utters the word ”mama” when approached by its mother, it is expressing knowledge of or belief in something. Neurologist Antonio Damasio has even argued that, in a conscious mind, there can be concepts even when there is no capacity for linguistic expression whatsoever, and that concepts logically precede words. It is, I understand, of reasons of convenience that philosophers like to discuss well-formed statements, but I wouldn’t deny that knowledge is manifest even elsewhere in human communication.

I maintain that beliefs necessarily come about as interpreted experiences, through reference to some resources of interpretation. Thus, if one wants to find out whether a belief is justified, one will have to inquire about the epistemic justification of the resources involved in the formation of that belief. For example, a person who believes in God could ask: ”Was it justified to possess the resources of interpretation that allowed me to form the belief that there is a God?” When the resulting belief is a basic one, the resources of interpretation have to be subconsciously held convictions, states of taking-something-to-exist, taking-some-conditions-to-prevail. They cannot be premises of a conscious deductive process, for if they were, the belief would not be a basic one. But is the question of justification even relevant when discussing those subconscious resources? Isn’t it so that one just happens to have certain resources, and that there is no inquiring about their justification at all?

If resources of interpretation were seen as implicit truth claims underlying an explicit one (i.e., the eventual belief), one could try to reconstruct belief formation as a deductive process. The resources of interpretation being turned into premises of deduction, their status as justified and reasonable beliefs could be discussed. In effect, though, this move would undermine the concept of basic belief, for the premises, as explicit truth claims, would be no more self-evident than the conclusion. One would have to find out what implicit truth claims lie hidden in them, and repeat the procedure. Logically, an infinite regress would follow – as a reconstruction of how the eventual belief came about! This all goes to show that the notion of basic beliefs implies an a priori confident attitude towards the subconscious resources involved in belief formation.

Alvin Plantinga has exemplified this central role of confidence in a specific case: supposing God exists, it would be reasonable to think that the cognitive mechanisms producing the belief in God work reliably. Plantinga posits the sensus divinitatis (sense of the divine) as a component in human cognitive makeup intended to produce in us the belief in God. In doing this, he wants to show that under certain conditions, which actually might prevail – since the existence of God has not been disproved – the belief in God could be warranted, i.e., point to a fact. But he admits that if there is no God, then we have no sensus divinitatis and the belief in God is probably not warranted. So it seems that, at least in the God-case, the resources of interpretation are considered reliable on the assumption that the eventual belief points to a fact. The belief is justified insofar as it points to a fact. But since you can’t know whether it does, you can’t know whether the belief is justified. You are believing, just believing – you are something like a fideist, are you not?

The problematics discussed above makes it evident that foundationalism in its different forms has to be a clearly demarcated epistemology, focusing exclusively on beliefs expressed as truth claims. Any other forms of knowledge, such as subconscious resources of interpretation, are outside its scope. But it is clear that other forms of knowledge are also epistemically relevant. If foundationalist theories can handle only a specific kind of knowledge, how relevant are they really when considering human knowledge in its full diversity? Do they explain anything – do they justify anything? I have figured out two attempts to justify the information which, of necessity, precedes the formation of any belief, even a ”basic” one. The first way led to postulating an infinite series of underlying beliefs for any actual belief, and the second one to justifying a belief on the sheer assumption that it is true. Neither one of the solutions is satisfying. But can the problem of justification hereby be declared a non-issue? I will continue on this in a further post, perhaps even the next one.

Further readings:

Peterson, Michael et al.: Reason and religious belief. 2003, Oxford University Press.
(Specifically chapter 6, Knowing God without arguments: Does theism need a basis?)

Imagination and free will

Today, I would like to present my interpretation of the central philosophical concept of free will. I argue for a view that stresses the role of imagination in all decision making, even so much that the concept of will as uncoupled from imagination will be deemed nonsense. I am not interested in denying free will in the sense that freedom would be an absolute quality, either present or absent in a living thing. Instead, I will define freedom as a property or state of all organisms, with some of them, such as most humans, enjoying greater freedom than others. References to traditional theories of freedom have decidedly been left out, for this post is not primarily meant as a critique of any of them. It is my analysis of the concept of free will, and as such it might contradict with, or bear resemblance to, ideas previously developed by others.

Let me first lay out the crucial role of imagination. Regardless of the existence or degree of our freedom, imagination is a necessary factor in decision making. One cannot choose a course of action beforehand if one is unable to imagine the action itself and, perhaps, some of its consequences as well. Human beings often see their actions as goal-directed: they aim at certain results. The ability to imagine ends and means was central already in Aristotle’s account on practical reason, and clearly visible in his practical syllogisms. There, for example, the act of eating could result from a person’s actual sensation of hunger and her belief that eating cures hunger. Such a belief entails envisioning a potential state of not being hungry: imagination, case in point. But Aristotle did not, as far as I know, pay much attention to the question whether humans make free choices.

Now, let’s assume that we indeed choose our actions freely. Imagination generates or comprises mental images that, in each given situation, represent different optional courses of action. Some of them are more realistic than others. When confronted by a dangerous terrestrial animal, for instance, one could envision both running away and flying away, but obviously the latter wouldn’t be a realistic escape plan. (It is nevertheless a remarkable capacity that we can imaginatively combine things that have not occurred together in our previous experience, and thus envision a human flying like a bird). In any case, the course of action one opts for is chosen from the set of mental images offered by imagination. The choice-making instance, I suppose, is what the concept of will refers to. Then, the chosen mental images are more or less successfully turned into action.

The crucial question here is: if actions are chosen by will, and will is provided with options by imagination, what is the instance that imagination is dependent upon? What determines exactly which kinds of mental images are generated?

Suppose that your imagination was free from all constraints. That means it could generate an unlimited mass of mental images, for example to represent an unlimited selection of different actions in a given situation. But to speak of an ”unlimited selection” is folly: in a temporally restricted situation, such as any situation you may encounter in your earthly life, no choice could be made from an unlimited range of options. No matter how free the will is, it simply has not got the time to go through an endless array of mental images. It is implied that, for you to be able to make choices at all, the range of options generated by imagination has to be restricted by something. But what would that something be?

Might it be called human intellect or rationality? Let me explore this possibility: I, as a subject, control the formation of images in my mind rationally. Such a view seems to imply that I should be able to anticipate what to think of next. But as hard as I try, I cannot run ahead of my thoughts. At the very moment I ”decide” what to think of next, the thought – a mental image or representation – is already there. It is not ”next”, it is now. I cannot anticipatively decide what to think. My thoughts come and go, and I guess the same is true of yours as well. What we call deciding what to do is thought A anticipating action α, and that is pretty conceivable. But I see no way my thought Α could anticipate my thought B, without B already being experienced in the present. Thoughts are always present, never anticipated, just like a certain action is never done first ”anticipatively” and then ”really”.

Even if I refuse to rely upon my own experience on this, the subjective, rational control of imagination would be hard to explain. For what else could the formation of mental images consist of than making choices between options? Intellect is very much about associating things with each other, and in order to construct mental images, one would have to choose which things to associate with which. By positing ”intellect” as the controlling instance of human imagination, I would merely make a replica of the choice-making instance of will and place it before the ultimate mental images. Obviously, this replica of the will generates the need to posit further replicas ad infinitum. It starts to seem like mental images were being pushed into our consciousness by something or someone outside our conscious mind.

If that is the case, the products of our conscious imagination probably represent a selection extracted from a greater, unconscious set of images. There has to be an instance doing this selective work and sending certain images up to the ”surface” so that they can be consciously reflected upon. This mysterious instance appears to be nothing but a separate meta-will, operating in the subconscious sphere. What else could account for the limited set of imagined possibilities emerging in the human mind before a free choice? Here, the theory starts going wild.

It is not the only problem with the subconscious meta-will that you could not be held responsible for the material provided to your conscious imagination, but it is a significant one. Look at it from an ethical point of view: it might actually hinder you from making good decisions in your life. Should you opt for an ethically unsound mode of conduct in a given situation, you would not necessarily be responsible for it. The ethically sound options just might not have been provided to your conscious mind by the meta-will. Who should we blame for that? People are usually not held responsible for actions committed in an unconscious state of mind.

In fact, this is only the beginning to a whole chain of problems. For the meta-will to be able to make choices, there has to be a subconscious meta-imagination as well. It is quite obvious: if the conscious will chooses from certain imagined actions, the meta-will also has to have some material at its disposal. And when we accept this, there is every reason to posit further meta-levels of choice-making instances (will) and instances providing options to them (imagination). Any set of options has to result from preceding choices, and the choices themselves have to be a selection out of a preceding set of options. This is a ridiculous thought, utter nonsense that does not offer the slightest help in understanding how human minds work.

What else, if not an endless chain of metacognitive apparatus, could account for a limited set of imagined options? An alternative is to think of human imagination as a contingent process. That is, the possible courses of action envisioned in an individual mind emerge without a single steering instance such as will or meta-will. There are many factors that are likely to influence an individual’s imagination: previous experiences, cultural background, natural surroundings and genetic makeup, for instance. This view resembles the point made by theologian Joel Green in Conversations On Human Nature (Fuentes & Visala 2015, p. 289):

”Decisions determine other decisions; relationships shape what is possible for us to even think. Our relatedness actually constrains our free will, not in the sense that it keeps you from making decisions, but in the sense that it shapes the way you even think what decisions are possible.”

In fact, when understood as above, imagination and freedom should not be thought as belonging to humans only. Our imagination obviously tends to be much more complex and our freedom, consequently, wider than that of other organisms. More images, more associations and therefore more options occur to humans than to others. But it is likely that some human mental images, associations and options are really special in the sense that they emerge through unique neurological mechanisms that no other animals exhibit. For example, human language could be a result of such mechanisms. Further speculations must wait for a more appropriate occasion.

To conclude with, I repeat my argument in a step-by-step format:

1 For a human subject, making a choice entails envisioning options in the form of mental representations.

2 In a temporally restricted situation, any choice must be made from a limited set of options.

3 The subject cannot plan any mental representations before actually experiencing them, because to plan X is to experience a mental representation of X.

4 This means that the subject cannot produce a limited set of options out of nowhere while still controlling the outcome.

5 Therefore, in a temporally restricted situation, the subject can only produce a limited set of options by deriving it from a preceding limited set of options.

6 If such limited sets are produced by the human subject herself, her every choice is dependent upon an endless regressive series of her own deliberative acts, deriving limited sets from previous limited sets.

7 An endless series is, given the context of a temporally restricted situation, impossible.

8 If such a series is not postulated, there has to be, at some level, a given set of options underlying the final choice made by the subject.

9 These options, being given, are outside the control of the subject.

10 The subject is not free to decide what occurs to her as possible.

11 In that case, the final choice can be free only inasmuch as the subject chooses freely from the given options.

I have here tentatively defined individual freedom as the range of possible mental representations and actions open to an individual organism. I do not believe it is an absolute property or quality of human mind or human will. In my view, the explanatory power of free will is zero unless one takes into account imagination, which obviously is not controlled by a single subject, but instead is a contingent stream, drawing influence from numerous tributaries.

Because it is a hare, because...?

And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky.” So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems and that moves about in it, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the fifth day. 

And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind.” And it was so. God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.

Genesis 1:20-25 (my italics)

In my introductory post, I mentioned the persistent Biblical idea in Christian thought that God has defined what constitutes proper, natural behavior for his creatures, animals and men alike. Moreover, as is obvious in the Genesis passage cited above, the creatures are thought of as representing different kinds, each of which belongs to a kind-specific habitat and is expected to behave in a kind-specific way. I will now turn to the concept of kind in animal kingdom and analyze it as used in a Thomistic context. There are several assumptions there that come out as problematic, most importantly the following:

We can objectively define an individual animal as representative of a certain kind.
We can deduce the natural ends of the individual from its representing a given kind of thing.
What is unnatural for the individual we can likewise deduce from its kind.

A useful starting point for the analysis is provided by the Aristotelian-Thomistic philosopher Edward Feser, who touched upon the issue of naturalness in his blog article Whose nature? Which law? It is probably best to quote the text directly, because it does not get much clearer than this:

"[D]ifferent kinds of material things have their own distinctive natures that determine distinctive kinds of flourishing. Darting about is something a squirrel needs to be able to do in order to flourish as the kind of thing it is, but it is not the sort of thing a tree or grass needs to do in order to flourish as the kinds of thing they are." 

"[No one would] raise silly objections to the effect that if a certain squirrel is born without a leg, then it must be natural for that squirrel to lack four legs, or that if a certain sickly tree fails to sink roots into the ground and ends up falling over or drying out, then it must be natural for that tree to fail to sink roots. For though these circumstances are 'natural' in the sense that they sometimes occur in the ordinary course of nature and arise from factors internal to the things in question rather than from human action or some other external factor, they are nevertheless unnatural in the relevant sense. For a squirrel’s being born without a leg or a tree’s having weak roots constitute failures to realize the ends that define the flourishing of these sorts of thing, and thus are failures fully to realize a thing’s nature. That is why we call them defects in a thing."

My purpose in this post is to ask questions about the explanatory power of such a philosophy of nature. Does it help me, or you for that matter, in conceptualizing observable phenomena in nature? In the Aristotelian-Thomistic scheme of Feser it is the "sort of thing" an individual represents that dictates what is good for it. Thus, a properly natural life is presented as a more or less unilateral relationship in which an individual (subject) acts in accordance to its nature in a specific habitat (object). For example, a squirrel lives darting around in a forest. No attention, however, is being paid to the obvious reverse: that the forest also lives in the squirrel.

I say "the obvious reverse", because it is obvious in the era of evolutionary understanding of organic nature. It certainly was not for Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas, and they are not to blame for this. As much as they placed value on observing nature empirically, their observations were lacking for both volume and precision when compared to ours. They saw around themselves a world of living things that could be organized in categories based on observable similarities between individuals. There were certain characteristics by which one could determine "squirrels" as opposed to other things, and the lack of some characteristic in an individual squirrel could be labeled a "defect". They had a synchronic conception of nature, based on what things looked like at a certain moment in history.

(N.B. I am fully aware that Aristotelian Thomism is not the same as Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas put together. I rather use these men as examples of a premodern scientific approach to nature.)

The rise of evolutionary biology from 19th century onwards has led to a new kind of understanding nature. The process can not be separated from the all-encompassing revolution in Western science, the revolution of history. As a result, we now have a diachronic conception of nature. It is based on what things have looked like during a long period of time in which different moments can be compared to each other. We definitely know that phenotypes of organisms gradually change over time, and this change is brought about by genetic mutations, some of which are advantageous for individuals in their respective habitats and therefore persist in populations. There was a time when ancestors of modern squirrels were quite different, both phenotypically and behaviorally, from modern squirrels, and when there were no beings we would label squirrels. What's more, we cannot tell what the future descendants of modern squirrels will look like and how they will cope in their respective habitats.

To an extent, this kind of understanding has undermined the relevance of synchronic analysis. The results of the latter can be questioned by the very method applied by classical and medieval scientists: making observations and comparing them. The basic difference is that modern observations and comparisons are diachronic rather than synchronic. The results they yield have implications for philosophy of nature and for concepts such as "natural", "kind", "flourishing" and "defect".

Consider the mountain hare. The color of its pelage tends to shift between summer and winter, becoming white to camouflage the hare in snowy conditions. Then, the color shifts back to brown again during springtime. One would probably say that this tendency is beneficial for the hare, for it reduces the risk of falling prey to predators. Avoiding predators surely is one of the ends that, in the Aristotelian-Thomistic idiom, define the flourishing of a mountain hare. A hare with an all-year-round brown pelage is more vulnerable; thus, its inability to shift color constitutes a failure to realize the ends that define its flourishing. It is natural and beneficial for that sort of thing to develop a white winter pelage. Luckily for them, most mountain hares have no problem doing this.

And yet I would not be so sure the hares possessing that ability are so lucky any more. In many parts of the mountain hare range, snowy winters are becoming rare and in any case shorter than before. In southern Sweden, coastal Norway and Finland, or the Baltic countries, one cannot really count on getting snow cover for periods longer than a week at a time. Suddenly, a white hare bouncing around sticks out and becomes an easy prey. A quality that once enabled the hare to reach its natural ends has become a burden. The habitat, in my language, no longer lives in the hare. And then it's probably time for the hare to cease to live in the habitat.

In turn, an inability to change color, being brown all year round, becomes a beneficial feature, even though it was supposed to be a defect for this sort of thing. Some mutation might produce, and probably does produce, mountain hares without a white winter pelage.* These are the hares the new habitat lives in, which lets them continue living in that habitat. Seen from an evolutionary perspective, defects in a thing are not necessarily to be defined by referring to the "sort of thing" in question. In the case of the hare, it is more adequate to speak of defects in a certain individual in relation to its surroundings. Conditions change, therefore the prerequisites for flourishing also change. Perhaps the kind, if there is one, changes as well.

But let us examine some possible objections to this. One could, for example, claim that there are some ends the hare must always be able to reach to flourish, such that remain stable no matter how the habitat changes over time. A mutation constituting a hinder to reach those ends would thus be a defect not just on the individual level but on the kind level as well. Lacking a leg would indeed be a good example: an effective camouflage would not make a big difference if the hare could not run in the first place.

However, the ability to flee from predators seems not to be something a hare would need because it is a hare. Rather, it is a useful ability common to many different animals not occupying an apex predator position in the food chain. It is not being a hare that determines the more stable ends of the creature, but rather – again – the position it takes in relation to other things. Which, in turn, is mutable over time. We need not consider the possibility of a Monty-Pythonian killer rabbit evolving in the distant future. Suffice it to keep in mind how the lousy and weak ancient hominids eventually became superb killers with no natural enemies: modern men.

A more radical means to invalidate my evolutionary argument questioning the existence of kind-specific ends could be denying the kinds themselves to be subject to empirical, scientific inquiry. This would mean that the existence of a kind, the mountain hare for instance, is independent of the individuals we can observe and study. Metaphysical facts concerning kinds of things could not be altered by scientific observations, but they would provide a suitable context for interpreting those observations. More importantly, one could claim, there are no natural sciences without an underlying philosophy of nature: thus, it cannot be science that dictates our choice of philosophical approach, whether it be Thomistic or something else.

I proceed not by rejecting this immunity of philosophy. On the contrary, I might accept it, at least for a while. For even if philosophy cannot be corrected by science, any given philosophy could still face major difficulties processing the scientific data we have. I suspect that will be the case with the approach illustrated by quotes from Prof. Feser. If some facts established by scientific research are not intelligible in a certain metaphysical framework, that framework probably has to be modified, even if one fancies to grant philosophy an epistemological position superior to science.

Feser explicitly refers to an individual, actual squirrel as a "kind of thing". A simple question would be: Since when have squirrels been the kind of thing they are? Should some animals be identified as the supposedly first squirrels in history, one might ask why not consider their immediate ancestors squirrels as well. It would be impossible to provide an unquestionable answer, because there is no objective "squirrelness" that scientists could detect. It does not read in the DNA of any creature that it is a squirrel. Thus, one could entertain the thought that such creatures we call squirrels are not necessarily squirrels, i.e. do not represent a specific kind of thing. They might lack a kind-identity altogether or share it with all of their ancestors, down to the first I-don't-know-what. Does that kind of a philosophy add anything to our understanding of what's going on in the natural world – that is, going on independently of our conceptual schemes? Speaking for myself, I think it does not.

While nothing said so far disproves the existence of natural kinds or essences, a significant epistemological problem has been pointed out, and it comes with ethical consequences. For as long as we cannot identify objectively the kind of an individual creature, we are not entitled to make strong claims as to what natural, given ends it should realize. We don't really get to taste the normative, teleological fruits that the Thomistic concept of kind seeks to deliver. Without them, the latter's nutritional value seems rather meager: it's like a hollow apple without peel, yet it "is there".

Professor Sarah Coakley was challenged in a similar manner as she applied, in a decidedly Aristotelian-Thomistic fashion, the concepts of "kind" and "flourishing" in her Gifford Lectures 2012 (see the 1st May lecture). She agreed that the difficulty of splitting actual evolutionary continua according to conventional taxonomy does pose problems for thinking in terms of kinds, but did not abandon the notion straight away. Instead, she suggested that we could allow for evolutionary transitional phases between different kinds. Perhaps, then, a kind would be an essentially social thing, becoming manifest not in a single individual but in a population with a relatively stable ecological niche, and thus relatively stable "goals" or "virtues". Supposing this, however, does not seem to solve the problem of reliable identification. What's more, it opens up the possibility that our own kind will enter a transitional phase, eventually becoming something else.

Even if we are no clearly definable kind, we at least do have some changing ends dictated by the conditions we live in. What makes this interesting is the tendency of our surroundings to become more and more constructed and conditioned by ourselves. This has been an ongoing trend for a very long period of time, probably millions of years. The more we create the challenges we face and must adapt to, the more it is we who also define what constitutes human flourishing. This is a subject I am definitely going to take up in a future post, now having considered animals in general.


The Bible quote is from biblegateway.com

* The Irish mountain hare population actually already exhibits a brown pelage all year round. Currently, biologists discuss its possible status as a different species. But would such a status make it a different kind of thing? 

What's so special about life?

I doubt there is anyone out there who has not at some point been wondering: ”How come this world exists at all?” Consider all the things we perceive around us: the sun, rain and wind, plants, animals, and other people, to name but a few. There is so much variability, so many different parts and entities, and many see in them a convenient, intelligible system of interactions and hierarchical structures. Furthermore, most of us surely have come to ask whether such a universe would be possible without a creative and, more than that, intelligent and very powerful agent constructing or at least initiating and regulating it. And many have answered: no, it would not be possible. This is an age-old line of reasoning and as such convincing to many Christians. The universe exists, therefore God the Creator must exist. There are also more detailed versions of this argument, paying special attention to certain aspects in the universe, and today I am going to take a look at one of those: the so-called Anthropic Argument.

Even though it has, to my knowledge, been demonstrated in modern physics that it is possible for the universe to have come about randomly, some note that even a seemingly random beginning could reasonably be attributed to initial divine agency and will. In fact, they might add, even more than reasonably: the beginning would best be explained through God. This is due to the peculiar qualities of this very universe. Here, it has been possible for life as a biological phenomenon to come about. We have organic nature, and that is, in a sense, remarkable.

Judging by what we know about the initial conditions of our universe, they were just about the only possible ones that could have led to a universe suitable for life. A bunch of interesting facts can be found, for example, in the 2003 book Reason & Religious Belief (p. 93):

”[H]ad ’the Big Bang expanded at a different rate, life would not have evolved. A reduction by one part in a million million at an initial stage would have led to recollapse before temperatures could fall below ten thousand degrees. An early increase by one part in a million would have prevented the growth of galaxies, stars and planets.’ Or had the gravitational force been slightly greater, all the stars would be blue giants whose life span is too short to allow intelligent life to evolve. But had it been slightly less, the universe would be devoid of many elements essential to life.”

The list continues, showing that many intricate details in the cosmic dawn were absolutely necessary preconditions for the much later emergence of organisms. Thus, the argument goes, one could think that the cosmos at its earliest stage was perfectly tuned for the purpose of eventually letting this organic nature come into being. Without those optimal initial ”settings”, we would certainly not exist! According to some, it is best for a rational observer to suppose a divine agent to be responsible for initiating this most unlikely line of development.

All that can seem quite impressive until one starts wondering why we think of organic nature as something remarkable. To start with, I make a guess: in any possible universe, there would probably be some natural phenomenon that could not occur in any other universe. Its presence would be a consequence of the unique initial conditions of that universe. In the universe we live in, there happens to be organic nature, but in other possible ones there would be different ”nearly impossible” phenomena. In a recent public debate in Helsinki, Dr. Peter Payne from the Institute for Credible Christianity maintained that there could be no ”complex structures”, whatever that means (I stress that it was me, not him, who was lacking for learning on astrophysical issues). That being said, it seems unreasonable to think that all the other possible initial conditions would have produced a cosmos with every natural phenomenon we have – except for one: organic nature.

Now what is it that makes organic nature so special? What sets it apart from other unlikely phenomena and supposedly makes it a proof for the existence of God? I dare say there is nothing special about this phenomenon, except for the fact that we are ourselves part of it. That is why we attach meaning to it; would we do so if we were not organisms? Probably not!

Could we even think of existing in a completely non-organic sense? More important: are we (human beings) nothing but organisms? This is quite another debate, but it is sufficient for my present purposes to sketch three basic answers to the question:

Materialist: We are nothing but organisms.

Epiphenomenalist: We are organisms with a mind or a soul that is dependent on organic matter.

Dualist: We are organisms with a mind or a soul that is independent of organic matter.

Of these three, the materialist and epiphenomenalist (from gre. επιφαινομενον, ”above-phenomenon”) would affirm that we owe our existence to the existence of organic nature. The dualist need not do this. My readers might remember, for instance, the Aristotelian Thomistic conception of human beings, where it is held that we possess divinely infused rational souls that function in union with our material bodies. Such souls are necessary for all properly human (as opposed to animal or vegetative) life, and they do not depend on organic matter. Although it is not often articulated in detail, dualism of body and soul is far more common among Christians than is materialism or epiphenomenalism. Even more evident is that God is thought to be a non-organic being, a spirit. And yet he is a living, thinking, perceiving, acting and communicating being.


Imagine for a while that the existing cosmos was totally unsuitable for organic nature: a chaotic, miserable sea of useless matter. Then imagine us two as non-material beings, floating around and discussing the existence of God. Upon observing the material world, I would say: ”I find it hard to believe in a creator God when looking at that mess.” And then you would go: ”Yeah, me too. If there were such a being, matter would certainly be in a nice and intelligible order.” Why wouldn't we then use our own existence as an argument for God's existence? Of course we would, and that's what the Anthropic Argument is doing as well, even though it might be presented as relying purely on technical information about the universe.

If there can be such life – human souls and God, angels, whatnot – independent of organisms, in some spiritual realm, why would the existence of organic nature hint to a divine origin for our universe? In bringing forth living beings capable of thinking and acting, God would have no more use for organic nature than for any other peculiar phenomenon of material character. To suggest that life as a biological phenomenon supports the case for God’s existence is to imply that life as a feature of created things is fundamentally organic, and basically that we could not exist as non-organic beings.

Thus, it is hard for me to see why a strict body-soul dualist would argue from the unlikely existence of organic nature to a nearly certain existence of God the Creator. This is not to say that she has to be a kind of gnostic, declaring material universe absolutely worthless; but it should make no sense to her to present organic nature as something God necessarily makes use of when bringing about life. In her view, life could exist without there being any organisms.

What can we say of the materialist and epiphenomenalist, then? Their position is different to a degree: they see us wholly or primarily as organisms, and thus hold that organic nature is needed for beings like us to exist. If they believe in God the Creator who interacts with living beings, they surely see organic nature as a proof for his existence. If a thinker is not preoccupied with such a religious view, it may be brought about in her mind by an urgent need to explain our existence as organisms. That is what the Anthropic Argument aims at. But the very conviction that life is something ”miraculous” or ”unbelievable”, or indeed anything that cries out for explanation, will remain a subjective, sentimental judgement. My own gut-feeling is that our existence, even though it is full of highly interesting and complicated phenomena, is in itself just a given fact.

Baruch Spinoza once wrote that if a falling stone could reason, it would think, ”I want to fall at the rate of thirty-two feet per second”. I deem it highly probable that the stone would go on reasoning: ”Somebody must have dropped me intentionally.”


Further readings:

Peterson, Michael L. Reason & Religious Belief: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion. 3rd ed. New York (NY): Oxford University Press, 2003.

No philanthropy without anthropology

I recently told a friend of mine about my interests in systematic theology: making sense of Christian language in terms of history and the sciences. "That's a dangerous way to take", she said, implying that it would turn out that claims and concepts of religion can't be explained. Trying to do that would eventually make one frustrated. This friend is nowhere near to a fanatic, as far as I know, and you don't actually have to be one to embrace such an attitude.

It is precisely that what bothers me. Even thoughtful people do not seem to realise that in practice, one has to take the concepts of religion as referring to concrete things: people as agents, the methods and instruments they make use of, and their objects. If the concepts had no referents outside themselves, they could not have any bearing on how people actually live in this world. But the (perhaps sole) function of religious concepts is to guide, steer and limit people in their relations to their surroundings. Were this function to be taken away, not much would be left of religion.

Thus, my message to all believers is this: if you refuse to point out the referents of religious concepts, you won't know what you are supposed to make out of religion in your life, in relating yourself to others and the world. And if you won't interpret religious language, someone else is going to do that for you. I recommend trying, even though it might turn out to be in vain.

Let us now turn to basic Christian ethics for the sake of demonstration. See, for example, this well-known passage of the Bible (New King James Version):

Therefore, whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets. (Matthew 7:12)

This so called Golden Rule is one of the most cited teachings of Jesus and is included independently in perhaps most ethical traditions around the world. Even for non-religious people, the Golden Rule usually seems reasonable and worth obeying to. It is sometimes cited as the tiny but yet so significant common denominator of the world religions, and taken as representing some kind of inherent universal philanthropy in them. One might ask, is this interpretation valid?

It all comes down to anthropology, the way of conceiving humanity, defining "our kind". Like most contemporary Finns, I presume, I have been brought up to appreciating a great many living things as beings of my kind. There are about seven billion of them at the moment. I have been told that all of them are human, regardless of their phenotype (so-called race), language, sexual orientation or religious beliefs. Even if they for some reason cannot speak at all or lack some other typically human capacities, they are still human. And by virtue of being human, they have certain common rights and duties: for example the right to be treated in accordance with the Golden Rule. Now this is amazing. But as you may have noticed, there was no clue to actually identifying beings of my kind.

In fact, I still today can't claim to know who are to be labeled "human beings"! For my whole life, I have learned to identify them through ostension, that is, pointing out beings and naming them. Acts of ostension have mostly been implicit, as when people in my vicinity have related to one another in ways that suggests them to be of the same kind. I used to observe my mom and dad back when I was a child, and see them relating to certain other beings in a roughly similar way they would relate to me: they would talk, listen, make certain facial expressions, touch the other and so on. They would not point to the ground and command "sit down!" They would not whistle to those beings to make them follow, nor would they walk them on a leash. When observing patterns of behavior between myself and my nearest, and then between my nearest and others, I learned a lot of categories – such as "my kind" and "not my kind".

As a fact of the matter, those categories are culturally conditioned and can be shaped in very different ways. Consider, for instance, a wealthy landowner's son being brought up in southern United States sometime before the Civil War (1861–1865). In his surroundings, he would be in contact with living things who shared some characteristics with him: the basic shape of their body and the ability to communicate using language, perhaps the use of certain religious concepts as well. They would differ from him only in their skin color, theirs being dark and his light, and maybe some facial traits. And they definitely would have been labeled "human" by me and, I dare suppose, by most of you reading this blog. But back then, the landowner's son did not have enough in common with those other beings to identify them as "his kind".

This child would observe how his father and other family members would interact with individuals of light skin. It would more or less resemble the way they interacted with him. Those other beings, of similar shape but different pigment, however, would not so much be interacted with as acted upon. The landowner and his friends would command them to sit down and fetch things in pretty similar manner as they would do to dogs – and those beings would obey. If they wouldn't, they could be punished in any way their master saw appropriate, even put to death right away. They would be expected to approach or follow on a whistle. They would be walked on a leash, led to a marketplace, bought and sold. The landowner's son definitely would not learn that those beings were "his kind", quite the opposite. Presumably he would be told even explicitly that niggers – for that was the name of the dark beings – were not comparable to white people, for they were so different. And we, when reflecting upon this history, think it was wrong it went like that. Why?

It is not through ostension alone that human beings can come to be known. I have also been told that we all belong to same species, called Homo sapiens. Now, this insight provides no unquestionable means of pointing out humans among all living things. To this day, we have not found any single empirically observable common denominator by which to identify a Homo sapiens individual. Philosopher of science John Dupré was quoted thus in Conversations on Human Nature (p. 28):

”What has become increasingly clear to post-Darwinian biologists is that there can be no necessary and sufficient condition for being an organism of a certain species, and the characteristic properties of members of a species are, first, almost always typical rather than universal in the species and, second, to be explained in various different ways rather than by appeal to any simple or homogeneous underlying property.”

We don’t have any biological human component to separate all of us from all the rest of Animalia. The idea of this species-identity is that we have descended from the same stock, the same population somewhere way back in time. How have we come to know this? It actually cannot have been before the days of the landowner family discussed above. Such methods of genetical research that allow us to track our ancestry beyond the scope of historical genealogy have been developed quite recently, almost completely from the 20th century onwards.

Of course, it was widely thought even before that all humans had common ancestors: in the Abrahamic religions it was the Biblical primordial pair, Adam and Eve, described in the Book of Genesis. Their story was although of little use as an anthropology with ethical implications, for there was no way to find out if different populations actually had them as their common first parents. One could freely claim one's own group of identification (e.g. white people) to represent actual human beings, and speculate that others (e.g. "niggers") were merely some kind of outwardly human-like beasts. Such claims were disapproved by some, who indeed had wider intuitive or culturally conditioned definitions of humanity than, say, your average American slave-owner. But back in the early 19th century, they were just differing intuitions with no more support from empirical studies than the narrow, racist ones.

Next, let us consider the aforementioned Golden Rule cited from a different edition of the Bible, New International Version:

So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. (Matthew 7:12)

If we are to claim that common ancestors make us beings of the same kind (which is not obvious philosophically!), and thus ethically responsible for each other's well-being, contemporary genetics lets us identify people of all continents, countries and phenotypes as beings of our kind. But in fact, it does more than this. It blurs the culturally drawn lines between different kinds of beings by presenting evidence for a common ancestry of all forms of life, not merely all Homo sapiens individuals. It seems that, when doing to "others" what we would have them do to us, we may have to consider not only humans but also whales, bees, oaks and so forth. They share common ancestors with us, very far back in time, but nevertheless – does not that make them beings of "our kind"?

In my previous post, I discussed an Aristotelian Thomistic approach to anthropological problems, one where human beings were defined by them possessing a rational soul, a feature that other living things allegedly lacked. It could be seen as one possible way of narrowing the notion of "our kind", but I had my reasons for not finding it particularly convincing. Judging by common ancestry, it seems that all living things are our kind and that the Golden Rule applies to them all as "others". And if we don't want to judge by common ancestry in the strict sense, are we not going to lack an ethically binding definition of our kind? Where are, then, the preconditions for establishing and enforcing universal human rights, for example? Perhaps it would be okay not to have them... Maybe universal race rights or merely local kin rights would do?

The conceptions of "human" and "our kind" that steer Christian philanthropy in practice have their sources mostly, if not totally, outside the Bible. (One could disagree pointing to the concept of the "people of God", which I will analyze separately in the future). Yet some take it for granted that it is a post-Enlightenment universalist egalitarian humanity that God always stands for. But if we found ourselves in a fundamentally different culture, in which there were no "neighbors" outside our own clan, or perhaps no "humans" outside our own "race" – what would happen to the philanthropic obligations of Biblical teachings? They wouldn't be as wide as they seem to me or you, would they? After all, the scripture has little to say when it comes to discussing human beings in any other terms than their relation to God. It is up to everyone, even Christian believers, to define the "neighbors" or "others" that are supposed to be loved. In practice the task is going to be collective rather than subjective, but it is time to recognize that no unquestionable authority has set the definition for us.

To close with, take a look at this Biblical confrontation, again from the Gospel of Matthew (NIV):

A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is demon-possessed and suffering terribly.” Jesus did not answer a word. So his disciples came to him and urged him, “Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.” He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.” The woman came and knelt before him. “Lord, help me!” she said. He replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.” “Yes it is, Lord,” she said. “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” Then Jesus said to her, “Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.”And her daughter was healed at that moment. (Matthew 7:22–28)

Who was this Jesus who, even though he eventually had mercy on the woman, decidedly implied that she was not as much a human being as were the Israelites? Apparently it was the same man from whom we got the Golden Rule.

All Bible quotes from biblegateway.com

Further readings:

Fuentes, Agustín; Visala, Aku: Conversations on Human Nature. 2016, Left Coast Press.

Divinely ensouled ex-apes?

I’d like to start my project on theological anthropology and science by looking briefly at perhaps the most thoroughgoing theory of humanity found within the Christian world. It is rooted in the Thomistic philosophical tradition and intimately linked with the Catholic church, which makes it quite influential. To be more accurate, my sources are the Catholic Encyclopedia and two blog articles by Professor Edward Feser, a philosopher of the Aristotelian-Thomistic school. Of course, one has to hold in mind the immense variability of Catholic thinking – it is, after all, a truly global community of faith with over a billion members and a long philosophical tradition we are talking about. This is by no means going to be an exhaustive analysis of the anthropological views present there. What I am describing might best be understood as a moderately conservative standard Catholic approach to the questions of human origins and of human nature as well.

Generally speaking, there has been in the Catholic church a tradition of seeking harmony between theology and science, between faith and reason. Unlike in some other brands of Christianity, different categories of information and different fields of study are taken as having implications on one another. Well-established scientific facts have been accepted, although not always initially welcomed, in the Catholic teaching. Thus, when discussing human origins, the Catholic church has not resorted to a crude ”literalism” with regard to the Book of Genesis which contains the Biblical accounts of how humans, among other things, came to exist. As far as I’m concerned, it has been relatively easy for Catholics to admit that there is, as results in modern biology affirm, a gradually evolved component in what we in everyday speech call humans.

It is important to stress that we talk about a mere ”component” here. In his message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1996, Pope John Paul II said:

In his encyclical Humani Generis (1950), my predecessor Pius XII has already affirmed that there is no conflict between evolution and the doctrine of the faith regarding man and his vocation, provided that we do not lose sight of certain fixed points…

Today, more than a half-century after the appearance of that encyclical, some new findings lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than an hypothesis. In fact it is remarkable that this theory has had progressively greater influence on the spirit of researchers, following a series of discoveries in different scholarly disciplines. The convergence in the results of these independent studies – which was neither planned nor sought – constitutes in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory…

[T]he elaboration of a theory such as that of evolution, while obedient to the need for consistency with the observed data, must also involve importing some ideas from the philosophy of nature.

And to tell the truth, rather than speaking about the theory of evolution, it is more accurate to speak of the theories of evolution. The use of the plural is required here – in part because of the diversity of explanations regarding the mechanism of evolution, and in part because of the diversity of philosophies involved. There are materialist and reductionist theories, as well as spiritualist theories. Here the final judgment is within the competence of philosophy and, beyond that, of theology…

Pius XII underlined the essential point: if the origin of the human body comes through living matter which existed previously, the spiritual soul is created directly by God…

As a result, the theories of evolution which, because of the philosophies which inspire them, regard the spirit either as emerging from the forces of living matter, or as a simple epiphenomenon of that matter, are incompatible with the truth about man.*

The solution opted for by the Catholic church is to see humans as products of both evolution and direct divine act of creation. In Thomistic anthropology, the fundamental trait that makes this move possible is the dualism of body and soul, that is, the view that humans are both bodily and spiritual beings. In a theological or metaphysical sense, humans are human souls, spiritual beings temporarily infused in material bodies – and in Catholic view it is the spiritual being that counts, for it is everlasting and directly created by God. The bodies, known to biology as members of Homo sapiens populations, are by no means a necessary prerequisite for human existence.

Now, this theological anthropology has been considered in relation to both evolutionary biology and the Book of Genesis, as can rightly be expected. The authentic Catholic teaching affirms that all humans are ultimately descendants of a single couple, referred to in the Bible as Adam and Eve. It was to them God gave the very first human souls, and they were thus the first properly human beings on Earth. In reaction to problems posed by the evolutionary history of mankind, it has been suggested that these individuals probably belonged to some larger biologically human-like population, but nevertheless it was exclusively them who received human souls straight from God. Ever since, God has infused into each of their descendants a new human soul. This is known as the Flynn-Kemp proposal.

Being a soul-bearer and thus metaphysically human is not a genetically transmitted property, but is instead grounded in a sovereign decision of the Creator. Every descendant of Adam and Eve apparently gets a human soul, despite the possibility that there might still have been some of those non-soul-bearing pre-humans involved early in the lineage. For God, it is being a child of the first, chosen pair that matters. The metaphysically non-human part of our ancestral population is supposed to have died out eventually, leaving only hominids with human souls. The Flynn-Kemp proposal is not meant to be taken as a verified account of what actually happened in human prehistory: it is a hypothetical scenario used to point out that human evolution does not necessarily contradict the (Catholically interpreted) story of Adam and Eve – and the Original Sin, of which I shall not say more for now.

Metaphysically human and biologically human – in authentic Catholic view they are not quite the same thing, but it seems that the historically known Homo sapiens populations are considered human in both senses. Why would they be that? In Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy, it is held that human souls are manifest in certain intellectual powers that only humans among all animals possess. Rationality is a property of those with a rational (human) soul, and a suitable material platform for it is a Homo sapiens brain. The soul is in union with the brain, which in turn makes rationality manifest through bodily organs in human speech and agency. In proper Aristotelian-Thomistic terms, the organic body is matter and the soul is its form, making it a human body instead of bare matter.

There has, of course, been a lot of philosophical debate over the very concept of soul. Some hold that rational thinking can be shown to be immaterial, thus implying a soul, on purely philosophical grounds. Even if we assumed that souls are real and an integral part of a properly human being, one critical question could be raised at this point. Should only those members of Homo sapiens populations with manifest rationality be considered properly, metaphysically human? This is not necessarily what Aristotelian-Thomistic anthropology suggests. I at least see an option of insisting that, by virtue of being descendants of Adam and Eve, all modern human beings are granted human souls by God. In the case of severely mentally disabled and thus manifestly non-rational people it might just be something wrong with the neural system, for example, that inhibits the soul from manifesting rationality in the way it could were it united with a properly functioning material body. Similarly, one could speak of infants whose brains have not yet reached a stage of development sufficient to manifest their rational souls, or something like that.

But the possibilities of detecting rational souls empirically are still unclear, and that makes me suspicious. Consider the following arguments:

If a human soul necessarily manifests itself in outwardly observable rationality when in union with a Homo sapiens body, some of the members in modern Homo sapiens populations have no human souls.

If a human soul does not, when in union with certain bodies of matter, necessarily manifest itself in outwardly observable rationality, any natural object might have a human soul.

It is integral for at least the Aristotelian brand of Thomism that humans are clearly distinct from other creatures by virtue of their rational souls. The above counterarguments could apparently be refuted only by verifying that the modern biologically human populations are in fact descendants of one single couple somewhere back in time. (Preferably, they should have been of a distinctively hominid kind; I think a pair of some Cretaceous proto-mammals wouldn’t suit the purposes of Catholic teaching). It would also be required that these first parents were chosen by God as the first bearers of rational human souls, and that God had committed himself to ensouling the descendants of that couple and not any other creatures or objects in nature. If these truth claims can’t be verified, one is left uncertain about where human souls are located in the observable reality – which, of course, has implications on who shall be granted the privilege of being called humans.

What about the Book of Genesis, then? So far, I am a bit unaware of where exactly it is stated there that the first human beings were ensouled by God. There are two accounts of creating humans. In Genesis 1 (New International Version) it reads:

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

And in Genesis 2:

Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

Some interpretation of the first passage might imply that ”in his [Gods] own image” means ”with a rational soul”, for it is indeed held in Catholic teaching that God is a spiritual, rational being. As for the other one, it might be suggested that ”the breath of life” is in fact the human soul. The version of the text found in Catholic Encyclopedia has ”living soul” instead of a ”living being” – clearly an exegetic problem there, which I shall leave for others to address. Even if we assumed that the passage speaks of a living soul, we would be left with a problem, since there is no mention in Genesis of anything being breathed into the woman, created soon afterwards.

The Bible clearly does not necessarily support the view that two pre-human animals were given rational souls and thus made the only human beings in their population. The Catholic readiness to ignore the part where man as a bodily creature is actually shaped from dust seems like a mere ad hoc -rationalization of the passages to fit the overwhelming scientific evidence for the evolutionary origins of humanity. But I have in principle no problem with such moves. At least this kind of a Catholic interpretation takes different fields of study seriously, and that is basically what I am trying to do as well.

I will not make any strong conclusions as to the credibility of the Thomistic anthropology described here, for I am not really that familiar with its underlying philosophy. Suffice it to say that so far, this approach to the concept of humanity has not convinced me, and further investigations need to be made. In the meantime, I have several different topics to discuss, so I’m not sure how soon exactly I might be getting back to this one.

*The original message to the Academy can be found here in French, Italian and Spanish. The English translation is from Edward Fesers blog. 

Further readings:

http://www.catholic.org/encyclopedia/view.php?id=7463

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.fi/2014/12/knowing-ape-from-adam.html

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.fi/2011/09/modern-biology-and-original-sin-part-i.html

Introduction

Welcome to Uniting Lines! This is a blog site exploring possible meaningful relations between traditional concepts and truth claims of Christian theology and modern scientific understanding of human beings and the natural world. There could be numerous grounds for such an intellectual quest, and I’d like to make my starting point clear. Actually, Professor Wesley Wildman might as well do that for me:

Too many theologians have not exerted themselves to learn what they need to learn from the sciences of cognition and culture. Just think of Augustine or Thomas within the Christian tradition, or Maimonides in the Jewish tradition; these were cutting-edge thinkers who were masters of the sciences of their time. But most contemporary theologians have wound up resorting to very useful, but tired, categories such as sin to talk about the human condition; then use those words as if they had a stable meaning, and do not need to be rearticulated for our time, in relation to the various other insights we now possess into human behavior … Theology has not been agile enough to rearticulate its fundamental pathways in relation to the rapidly changing understanding of human nature created by the sciences of cognition and culture. As theologians, we have not followed in the footsteps of Augustine and Thomas, Maimonides, and Sankara, and all the rest of our luminous-genius forebears. I take the fundamental theological categories themselves to contain priceless insights, but those insights are profoundly obscured when the anthropology in which they are expressed is 1,500 years out of date.*

There you’ve got it. Christian believers already have the means to defend theism against evidentialist atheist attacks: there are videos on YouTube where this is done by witty theologians. Basically everybody knows that religious beliefs can’t be absolutely refuted on rational grounds. Yet for a decent apologist this could be nothing more than a beginning. If indeed her beliefs contained ”priceless insights”, should she really be happy thinking: ”Brilliant! At least I’m not totally denied epistemological justification for my theological propositions! Too bad there are more and more people who really can’t comprehend what I mean by them.” No, she would have to consider the propositions separately, critically, and constantly asking herself: ”What do I mean by this? Is this belief a justified truth-claim when articulated this way?”

As for me, I am not a practicing Christian at the moment. I do occasionally pray and might even attend a service once in a while, but I don’t feel any urge to engage in religious activities or to formulate a solid Christian worldview that I could promote. My interests in writing about theology are more intellectual than apologetic, even though the views and arguments presented here might have some apologetic value. Having said this, I do not wish to alienate anybody from core Christian beliefs and concepts: I am deeply interested in, sometimes even obsessed with, making sense of them where it seems problematic. I have, however, no hurry in this project, and if there be no point where everything ”starts making sense” then so be it.

My religious background is ambiguous. A belief in the existence of some kind of God or at least in the meaningfulness of that concept has virtually always been part of my worldview, but there are very few if any dogmatic statements about God I’d always have embraced. I very much like the way Ludwig Wittgenstein spoke of religious beliefs as resembling not propositions but images, thus being immune to propositional counterarguments and mutable only through the complex and capricious set of experiences we call life.

God is such a ”wittgensteinian image” in my mind, and its characteristics have undergone wild changes over the years. I feel very strongly that my conception of God has always been shaped by theological interpretations of my own life and circumstances, rather than by any dogmatic Christian theology taught to me. I have been brought up by agnostic parents, in no way hostile to religion but not especially concerned in it either. Then again I live in a historically overwhelmingly Christian country and my ”theology of life” has been full of Christian – although very arbitrarily applied! – ideas, most prominent of which have been the omnipotence of God, divine violence and God as the source of love.

My congregational activities have exclusively taken place in liberal Protestant surroundings. In my teens I have been an active member of the Töölö congregation in Helsinki, where I used to attend service regularly and assist in confirmation school (see link for the Finnish definition). It was partly my background in the congregation, partly another impromptu theological interpretation of my life that led me to apply to the University Of Helsinki to study theology in 2013.

The questions I find especially interesting, concerning the relationship between Christian theological anthropologies and scientific understanding of humans, as well as between the ”will of God” and the dynamics of nature, have not always been that important to me. In fact, I first had more interest in history of religion outside Christian contexts: my Bachelor’s Thesis dealt with Iranian (Zoroastrian) mythical dualism and its possible roots in cultural interaction between Indo-Iranian and Uralic speaking prehistoric populations. At the same time, though, certain events in my personal life were a strong incentive for me to keep thinking about theological and philosophical issues, and to explicitly formulate problems that, in my view, needed to be solved. Soon after completing my thesis last spring, these problems became my foremost scientific concern.

Questions to which I am eager to seek answers can be presented as follows:

Who/what is a human being?

Can the functioning of the natural world be seen as manifesting divine moral preferences?

Is there a universally meaningful use of the theological concepts ”sin” and ”Fall”?

All the possible answers need to be grounded on theological, scientific and philosophical considerations, with disregard to none of the fields. A merely theological answer will not be enough, nor can it suffice to address a problem in scientific or philosophical terms alone. My starting point is the conviction that different kinds of truth claims should fit together and form a coherent system of some kind. If we are to assume that theological truth claims have some bearing on realities that are understood and discussed in other terms (biological, for example), then we need to challenge ourselves to seek meaningful relations between the discourses concerned. This involves analyzing and comparing the truth claims and, of course, the very concepts that are used to describe reality in them.

My basic assumptions allow me to ask questions like ”what does it mean that God created man when we know that even the very first Homo sapiens was a product of evolution and had non-human ancestors?” Some, say, Barthian thinker could claim that the two categories of information, revelational and scientific, are so totally different that it will not be worth it trying to form a meaningful relationship between them. Revelation-based truth claims are not claims about the reality observed in science, but about something that is true in a whole different way. Science can’t and shouldn’t be used to ground or rationalize this kind of propositions: they have to be accepted by faith instead.

But then again theological statements are often presented as having some bearing on the ”natural” world, the one that we can observe empirically and describe scientifically. We learn our theological concepts and form our religious beliefs through narratives. They describe, at least superficially, events in comprehensible social situations, with humans surrounded by other humans, various natural objects and creatures, and often supernatural agents as well. The narratives, whether they be Biblical or part of some folk tradition, present human actions and circumstances as something that can be interpreted and evaluated in religious terms. Insofar as such narratives are dominant in a community, the individual members are indeed encouraged to make interpretations of the world they inhabit. They learn to associate things and events with theological concepts, which in turn derive their content from narratives and the way the narratives are discussed in the community.

At least it is seldom clearly spelled out whether a claim is supposed to be true merely in theology or in other contexts as well. There are Biblical beliefs about God creating the world, about him stating what is proper conduct for creatures, about human beings doing something God is unhappy with, and so on. There are traditional beliefs about a specifically human condition, sin, which implies opposing God’s will; and finally about salvation, in which this harmful condition is miraculously overcome by the Son of God, Jesus Christ. Indeed, it is claimed that Jesus saves human beings from sin. These are beliefs about us and our surroundings, but then what are we and what are our surroundings?

The most general answer one can give is that we as living things are very complex and variable, and the world we inhabit is not very simple either. There is thus a vast array of different perspectives one needs to take into account in order to fully appreciate the richness of being human. We are members of Homo sapiens populations, shaped by evolution – which is a system of a great many variables and definitely not just a simple cycle of adaptation and natural selection. We are brains, neurally connected to certain kinds of bodily organs, sorting out an unbelievable amount of information and producing a unique experience of the world. We are persons, living creatures with a first-person perspective, usually possessing means to conceive of ourselves in the first person, that is, language. We are deeply social beings. Most of the capacities we’re born with are of no use without a human social context: the company of other humans and intense communication with them is the kind of environment we definitely have adapted to. We are also axiological beings: we ascribe value to situations and actions, and this is articulated in language, for example when talking about moral issues.

And then, of course we might be images of God. We are probably sinners, and if so, we can also be redeemed. For me, these propositions are best understood as synthesizing and making sense of everything mentioned above plus a lot more, making sense of it in a deeply human way, in a religious way. Similarly, I presume, the religious claims can be made sense of in other discourses. Just how exactly one is supposed to do this is the big question that fascinates me. I am already grateful for all the people I’ve encountered with whom I share this interest, and I invite all of you reading this post to participate in the search for a rich and up-to-date understanding of humanity, world and Christian theology.

*Quote from an interview published in Conversations on Human Nature (Agustin Fuentes & Aku Visala, 2016)