Puddleglum's Wager

Anyone who has been around philosophical circles – or better yet, the apologetics movement – has heard of Pascal’s Wager. Pascal tells us that the consequences of rejecting Christ in this life are eternally dreadful, while the consequences of following Christ in this life are eternally favorable. God may or may not exist, but any wise person is going to bet on God.

There have been a number of criticisms of Pascal’s Wager over the years. Which God should we bet on? If we believe Pascal, then what do we do about Zeus, Apollo, and Mars? What about Allah? The wager cannot specify the Christian God. Perhaps most troubling, the wager makes the emphasis of the gospel lie in the some future existence. It strips Christianity of its implications for here and now.

That’s where Puddleglum comes in. In the Silver Chair, he and the children are in Underland. In a moment of inspiration, he says, "Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all of those things—trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones."

Puddleglum does not relegate faith in Aslan to a bet on the future life. He says belief in Aslan and the world above are not only a future hope, they make life worth living here and now. Belief has an enormous role in molding our behaviors right now, and can provide profound meaning and purpose to our lives.

Maybe the church has been spending too much time trying to get people to hedge their bets. Many have been far too good at presenting the gospel with all of the life sucked out of it, reducing it to a formula for entering a really cool afterlife. They have bought Pascal’s Wager.

Perhaps a more meaningful – and productive – move would be to focus not just on the “benefits” of following Christ (specifically as that relates to the afterlife), but on the power and life-changing effects Christ can have here and now. Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom of God. Jesus was never concerned about just getting people into heaven. He was always trying to help them enter the Kingdom of God. Maybe we should be more like Puddleglum – and Jesus.

Convergent Evolution and God’s Intent

A common objection to the theory of evolution, especially when it is combined with a materialistic view of human persons, is that it is directly antithetical to God and her purposes. It is thought to be a “gateway” to atheism and absolutely opposed to Christian belief, undermining the foundation of religious significance by (1) Moving God too far out of the frame of human creation, as the account of “special creation” by miraculous means is rejected and (2) Destroying human worth and dignity by rejecting the necessity of an immaterial substance, rendering us “mere machines.” For the sake of expediency, I will refer to these collectively as the “traditionalist view of human nature,” or more simply, the traditionalist view. In this post, I will explore why (1) and (2) are not significant threats to Christian belief, and may perhaps strengthen the reasonableness of faith. Last, I will examine the role convergent evolution may play in this.

To begin, a brief look into personhood is in order. A person is not merely a human being, although most human beings are, in fact, persons. Rather, persons are beings that possess specific person-making properties. The exact combination of properties required to make persons might be unsettled, but in the very least a person is a being that possesses the mental properties of both rationality and consciousness in such a way that self-consciousness is possible. The traditionalist view would state that some necessary component of these person-making properties must be ·miraculously created by God[1] and ·reside in some non-physical substance, whether it be an immaterial mind or the soul.[2] I would stand by those who say that a materialist account of human nature is adequate for explaining such properties.

First, I propose that the rejection of special creation in no way removes God from the human story in a manner that has a significantly negative impact on any possible relationship with him. In fact, the space between God’s direct actions in the creation of the universe and the biological evolution of Homo sapiens nearly 14 billion years later can be thought of as a necessary component in the creation of genuine persons. Again, the alleged problem is that the rejection of an act of “special creation” with miraculous intent results in a world that does not allow humans to have a relationship with God, as we are the mere products of deterministic natural causes. This is perceived to be one of the greatest threats to human dignity and value. The proposed solution is that human beings are the product of some indeterministic and miraculous cause. However, I think the above problem actual stems from a misguided sense of self-importance, along with a vague and distorted notion of what God’s intent is.

Let me posit a question now. If human parents had the ability to create a “designer baby” where they could choose each trait the child would have, should they exercise that ability? Would it be a loving choice to do so? I think the answer is clearly no. If the parents were to design their baby, the child would merely be an extension of their beliefs and desires. This is a problem if they desire a loving relationship – you need a separate person, not just an extension of yourself, if you truly desire a loving relationship that can be reciprocated.

Of course, this scenario can be applied to God’s creation of humankind. It seems that in trying to avoid the undesirable view that we are the result of deterministic natural laws, those who maintain the view that God must have created humans via miraculous causes have stumbled onto a much bigger problem. If God directly caused each and every aspect of human nature, we are not genuinely separate persons from God; we are merely extensions of his person. And the power God must possess would allow him to do this to a far greater extent than any human parent ever could. The implications of this are apparent, and I think they are anything but descriptive of the world as we understand it and experience it.

Can a satisfactory solution be reached? An indeterministic, miraculous cause seems to only raise more problems, and its counterpart – deterministic natural causes – is often juxtaposed against it as the only other (wholly unappealing) option in this dilemma. However, I think the answer lies within a third possibility that we have yet to explore. Let’s return to the human parent example to illustrate it.

How do human parents create new persons? The easy answer is sex – but the enticing details there had better wait for another time. The (less exciting) version of the story is that the fertilization of the female’s egg by the sperm of the male is an event that is filled with uncertainty, chance, and even randomness. First, each individual’s gametes undergo meiosis, which includes the crossing over of chromosomes, scrambling the DNA. If unfertilized eggs could mature, there would already be a great deal of variance from the mother. But fertilization adds a whole new level of uncertainty and chance. The scrambled DNA from both the mother and father combine to form one unique organism. In short, this whole process, directed by indeterministic and natural causes, results in a distinct individual with the right mental properties to be considered a person.

By accepting an evolutionary framework and a materialistic view of human nature, we create space for beings to come into existence; beings that can be thought of as distinct persons. Much of the work done so far can now come to bear on problem (2); that is, if the special creation by God of our mental properties is not only unnecessary but also detrimental to the outlook on human value and worth,[3] then how much more detrimental is appealing to some immaterial substance that absolutely must be created by God and is immutable in substance?[4] In short, the special creation of human beings does not guard against the degradation of the value of human nature--it creates the problem!

Of theological concern here is God’s intent. The traditionalist view wishes to hold onto the idea that God specifically intended for human beings to exist as they are now. However, as I demonstrated earlier, this leads to a situation where God cannot reasonably create distinct persons from himself. A solution might be to remove God from the causes that directly influence the makeup of each person, while maintaining that God is in control of the process as the initiator of those processes. The use of indeterministic, natural laws with a deterministic range of possibilities would be an intuitive way of envisioning this. In this way, intent is not removed from God, but rather intent is generalized. Instead of God intending to make each person exactly as they are, planning every detail of their physical and psychological make-up, God broadly intended that a person-producing universe should come to exist.

Here an analogy to sex can be drawn again. Loving human parents realize their love with the intent of creating new life to share in their love, initiating processes that lead to new life, and they do so in an indeterministic manner that preserves the distinctiveness of their child. The loving parents do not know exactly what kind of child they will have, but they choose to love the child regardless. God has intent and realizes her love as well – and thus initiates indeterministic processes that yield persons. God may not know exactly what specific kinds of creatures the universe will produce, but in the deterministic range of possibilities, sentient life is probably nearly inevitable.

Luckily, we have an example in the natural world of an indeterministic process that leads to a surprisingly deterministic outcome: convergent evolution. The phenomenon of convergent evolution occurs when two or more unrelated organisms gain traits that are similar in function, but are achieved through very different evolutionary pathways. Desert plants are a classic example of convergent evolution at work. Many desert plants in many different parts of the world have independently evolved structures like reduced leaves or photosynthetic stems. Another example would be the independent evolution of fish fins and the flippers of marine mammals. Additionally, flight evolved independently in insects, reptiles, birds, and mammals. There seems to be little variability on the best structure for each environment, but evolution explores many different ways of getting to that structure.

It is no small coincidence that we ourselves are products of evolution, and thus the possibility that we are acted upon by these same forces is wide open. Furthermore, after bidding the immaterial ghost in the machine farewell, the human mind is free to be acted upon by physical forces. Perhaps the "cultural niche" was bound to be exploited. My grand question is this: What if sentient life and personhood are extremely favorable ends according to the laws of the universe? I think convergent evolution lends support to a view of the universe in which God ensures that some sentient life would form through indeterminate processes, while allowing enough space in the creative process for these beings to be novel persons that God could enter into a genuine and loving relationship with. We may not be as special as we once thought, and that is the best news we may ever hear.

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[1] Note the relationship to problem (1)

[2] Note the relationship to problem (2)

[3] As human beings would actually be extensions of God rather than distinct persons

[4] As it cannot be affected by biological processes or the laws of nature.

Immanuel Kant, John Piper, and Rob Bell

While discussing Kant in Modern Philosophy, we touched on a few of his thoughts on both a perfect being theology, as well as a glory-based perception of God. The first half is interesting in its own right, and relates to what I studied last spring in Medieval Philosophy, but the second half concerning a glory-oriented being seems to be crafted specifically for a thread that has been running through our conversation in class: What is the nature of God? Our good friend John Piper is a well-known and outspoken proponent of the sort of glory-based theology that Kant addresses here.

I would do a bit more work myself, but Kant just says it well, so I’ll go ahead and quote him at length:

“Nevertheless, this [perfect being theology] is better than (2b) the theological concept, which derives morality from a most perfect divine will. There are two reasons for the inferiority of the theological concept; or, more accurately, they are two halves of a single reason which constitutes a dilemma confronting the theological approach to morality. The perfection of the divine will is not something that is given to us in intuition analogous to how items are given to us through the senses; so we have to derive it from our own concepts. Foremost among these is our concept of morality; if we let this generate our concept of God’s perfection, and then use the latter as a basis for morality, we are guilty of a flagrantly circular explanation. And if we don’t get at God’s perfection in that way, our only remaining concept of it is made up of the attributes of desire for glory and dominion, combined with the awe-inspiring conceptions of power and vengefulness; and any system of ethics based on these would be directly opposed to morality.” (Groundworks, pp. 38-39)

The first problem Kant raises is the apparently cyclic nature of the relationship between a divine being and morality. Kant is, of course, the father of deontology, and claims that morality is actually a metaphysically significant thing. As such, he notes that we often constrain our picture of God’s nature to that which is morally good, thus using morality to construct out picture of God’s nature. But then we turn around and say God is the author of the moral law. Kant realizes that something is suspect with this line of reasoning.

The second, and much more interesting and pertinent problem with the theological concept of morality arises when we reject the first move from before – starting with the moral law. And if we cannot begin by assigning morality to a most powerful being, we are bound to ascribe glory and dominion – Piper-esque sovereignty – to this being. But that ultimately results in a being that is an absolute moral monster who will achieve his end of self-glorification by any means possible. Hence the dilemma.

Maybe John Piper was doing Rob Bell a favor when he wished him “farewell.” I certainly would not want to be associated with a God like that!

And ultimately, Rob seems to offer up a picture of God that rejects parts of both Kant and Piper's views. God isn't obsessed with his glory, but he is no pure logician, either. Rather, God is seen as loving. I think Bell tries to give us a more holistic picture of both God and human nature.

Is Bell a virtue ethicist? That's a good question, but I'll save it for another time.