§ In a recent lecture, popular science and philosophy communicator Curt Jaimungal presented an argument against the simulation hypothesis.

The Simulation Hypothesis: The idea that we are in a realistic computer-simulation like The Matrix.

Advocates argue that surprising features of reality, like false collective memories (“The Mandela Effect”), are what you would expect if the simulation hypothesis were true. Therefore, it probably is true.

But Jaimungal demonstrates that this argument rests on a logical fallacy. (Relevant clip: 16:42)

Consider its structure:

* If the simulation hypothesis were true, you would expect false collective memories.

* There are false collective memories.

* Therefore, the simulation hypothesis is probably true.

In other words,

* On hypothesis H, you would expect evidence E.

* There is evidence E.

* Therefore, E indicates the probability of H.

But this reasoning is precisely backwards.

In order to demonstrate the probability of H given E, we cannot use the probability of E given H. We want the probability of the hypothesis given the evidence, not the probability of the evidence given the hypothesis.

Logicians call this a “transposed conditional” or “the prosecutor’s fallacy.”

And several common Christian apologetic arguments commit the same logical fallacy.

§ Seven years ago, William Lane Craig met atheist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein in debate.

But this was not any ordinary atheist-theist debate, because also on stage was psychologist Jordan B. Peterson.

In his remarks, Craig argued that, given the hypothesis of atheism, we would not expect life to be meaningful or morality to be objectivity, and that given the hypothesis of theism, we would.

Yet both his interlocutors argued for moral realism (the objectivity of moral truth), independently of the God hypothesis. As a result, Craig was left trying to argue his opponents out of their moral realism, because it is not what you would expect on an atheistic worldview.

I recently listened to and reacted to the whole of debate and discussion. I’ll be posting my (very long) reaction to YouTube soon. Here’s the first clip from the video:

Why did Craig end up in this unenviable position? Because his argument, the “No meaning without God” argument, is—like the above simulation argument—backwards.

Consider its structure:

* On the God hypothesis, you would expect to find meaning (or morality or mind).

* Life is meaningful. We all want life to be meaningful.

* Therefore, if we want life to be meaningful, we need to adopt the God hypothesis.

It’s paired with the opposite argument about atheism (or naturalism):

* On naturalism, you would not expect to find meaning (or morality or mind).

* We do find meaning. It would be nice if life were meaningful.

* But, if you believe in naturalism, you should conclude—in order to be consistent—that life is not meaningful.

Like the argument for the simulation hypothesis, the reasoning proceeds by considering the probability of the evidence given the two hypotheses on offer.

If God exists, it is probable intuitively that he would create meaningful rather than meaningless forms of existence. But that’s not what needs demonstrating.

What needs demonstrating is that it is probable that God exists, given the evidence of meaning and morality.

We need to prove the probability of God given meaning/morality, not the probability of meaning/morality given God.

Therefore, we need first to demonstrate the existence of meaning, morality, or mind independently of either hypothesis.

And of course, that’s where we encounter another wrinkle.

§ Rather than admitting the independently-evident existence of meaning or morality, Christians often object to it.

As you may have noticed, I had to strike through the middle premise of each argument. Unlike in the simulation case, the evidence is not even granted.

Instead, when Christians encounter a non-believer who believes in morality or meaning, we pressure them to call this into question, given its improbability on an atheistic view.

But if there is no meaning or morality, then there is no reason to postulate God as the explanation of meaning and morality.

How do you explain morality on an atheistic worldview? Well, if there’s no morality or meaning, then there’s no explaining to do. Unless we grant that morality and meaning are demonstrable independently of one’s worldview, the argument cannot get started.

§ The proper order of natural theology is not to begin from a hypothesis and postulate what we would expect to find if it were true.

Rather, the first step of a natural-theological argument is to demonstrate the phenomenon that will serve as evidence, whether meaning, morality, or mind.

That means that, in this debate, Goldstein and Peterson are engaging in the appropriate first step of natural theology, demonstrating the relevant phenomenon independently of metaphysical hypotheses.

The second step is to demonstrate that the explanation of that phenomenon requires the existence of something else as its minimal, sufficient explanation.

But notice what Popular Christian Apologetics does instead. It fallaciously reverses step two, by considering the probability of the evidence on the hypothesis, instead of the hypothesis on the evidence. And it undermines nonbelievers’ confidence in the phenomenon of step one.

In effect, this is worse than the problem with the simulation argument. There, the evidence is granted. Here, the evidence is not even granted.

It’s as if the simulation people tried to argue everyone else into thinking that hallucinations and false collective memories don’t exist. But those phenomena were supposed to be your evidence for the simulation hypothesis!

Popular Christian Apologetics argues in just about the opposite direction it should argue.

§ What are the steps to demonstrate that meaning or morality—let’s pivot to morality—indicates the existence of God?

1. First, you must demonstrate the truth of moral realism, that moral statements express truths about reality. This is no easy feat. But let’s imagine you were able to do so.

(I think that page one of Mere Christianity, Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment,” and Jonathan Haidt’s moral psychology all do this work, in a certain way. By demonstrating that we all engage in moral thinking and can’t help but doing so, I think we are forced to recognize that we all are moral realists, whether we like it or not. See my video on natural law.)

2. Second, you must argue that moral realism cannot be explained naturalistically. My late professor Helen De Cruz carefully considers these arguments in her chapter on the moral argument for God’s existence. When it comes to moral psychology, there are many available evolutionary explanations of moral psychology, even if I would raise questions about them.

But for moral realism, evolutionary explanations tend to be “debunking.” We believe these things, not because they are true, but because they contribute to group survival. As a result, many thinkers—both religious and secular—think it is difficult to see how naturalism can account for the truth of moral statements. From scientific ‘is’ statements, you don’t arrive at any moral ‘ought’ statements. Hence, a moral argument against naturalism has good odds of success.

But what follows? Many folks who adopt moral realism “from below” adopt either a kind of Platonism or a kind of social constructivism (a non-reductionist one). For example, in analytic philosophy, Iris Murdoch proposed a kind of Platonism to explain the reality of the good and the truth of moral statements in contradiction to the ethical emotivism of the logical positivists. On the other hand, John Rawls resurrected moral philosophy by introducing a kind of constructivism, which many take to have realist implications. As a result, most secular analytic philosophers today are moral realists.

(Even Peter Singer recently came out as a moral realist.)

3. Step three is to argue for the minimal, sufficient non-naturalistic explanation of moral realism. This could be the Platonism or constructivism mentioned above, or true Kantianism, where moral statements express not truths of theoretical reason but of the form of practical reasoning.

Most Christians are not so chastened in their reasoning. Rather, we propose God as explanation and jump to the conclusion that we’ve hit the jackpot.

But given the Euthyphro dilemma, it is not at all clear that this is so. Trying to explain morality (or logic) by God rather than Platonism is suggestive of voluntarism.

In fact, I think that moral realism indicates either something like Platonism or something like Kantianism. Natural reality is an inadequate explanation of morality, so either a non-natural moral reality (vaguely akin to Platonic forms) is suggested, or something endemic to practical reasoning, a kind of logic of action introduces moral categoricity.

4. Step four is the one you’ve been waiting for. We ask what metaphysically explains the existence of this non-natural moral reality or what follows from Kantian practical reasoning. Only at this stage will we be led to appeal to God.

If we think moral realism requires a kind of Platonic moral reality in addition to nature, then we ask a causal question about what could explain and give rise to it. A naturalistic causal explanation is not even an option, since this reality is non-natural. A supernatural source of moral reality must, arguably, be postulated.

If moral realism leads to Kantianism, then, at least according to Kant, God arises not as a causal explanation of the world, of human beings, or of moral reality. No God himself is another postulate of practical reason, the being that must exist in order to bring about cosmic justice in accord with the categorical imperative.

But either way, there are more steps until we arrive at anything like God, and those steps are not obvious.

The Four (4) Steps of a Non-Fallacious Moral Argument for God’s Existence:

* Argue for moral realism.

* Rebut naturalistic explanations of moral realism.

* Determine the minimal, sufficient non-natural explanation of moral realism.

* Seek a metaphysical explanation of the non-natural explanation of moral realism.

§ My caution to Christians is that we stop making arguments that short-cut these steps.

The process of reasoning from a phenomenon to God is not something that can be done on the cheap.

Some of our arguments are fallacious, like the argument from the probability of the evidence on the hypothesis—a favorite of both presuppositional and evidential apologists.

Others are not fallacious but are far too quick. In the process, we jump to conclusions. And we are pressuring our interlocutors to jump to those conclusions with us.

This is not classical apologetics. It is a kind of fideistic metaphysics.

“Leap into my belief because it can quickly solve some of your philosophical and spiritual puzzlement!”

Now atheistic naturalists engage in this kind of reasoning as well. I fully admit that. But that doesn’t excuse the error on our part.

I’d like to see more Christian philosophers and apologists making careers out of steps one through three, rather than jumping to step four (and reversing its logical order).

But I don’t think you have to be a career philosopher or apologist to start putting these ideas into practice.

§ Instead of demolishing nonbelieving worldviews and jumping to conclusions, practice apologetics that are 1) constructive and 2) patient.

To be constructive, don’t undermine nonbelievers’ intuitions of things that are more than material. As human beings inhabiting God’s world, they are entitled to perceive the irreducible character of mind, meaning, and morality. Use this perception as common ground from which to reason in a Godward direction.

And take things slowly. You may, like William Lane Craig, want to push Jordan Peterson or a secular philosopher to metaphysically explain their moral realism. The answer is probably that they can’t.

But, as I suggested to someone this weekend, give these philosophers another forty years to think about it. Maybe they’ll go the way of Thomas Nagel or Antony Flew.

The equivalent for non-philosophers is a solid ten years, minimum. That’s how long an adult, intellectual conversion takes. (I wrote about this pattern in conversion stories here.)

Patient apologetics has time for people to consider these arguments, to follow steps one through four of the moral argument, rather than leaping all the way to the end, short-cutting and cheapening the conclusion.

For if our moral experience and awareness is an indication of the divine, then patient reflection, not suffering through an anxious sales-pitch, will reveal it to be so.

The Natural Theologian is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

§ Recently, one of the world’s most downloaded podcasts hosted a debate between a Christian, an atheist, and a psychologist.

Their topic?

The meaning of life.

Christian apologist Greg Koukl argued that, without belief in God, a materialist worldview holds no hope to provide meaning.

The atheist—young and dapper Alex O’Connor—countered that, even if there is a God, who’s to say he hasn’t given our lives a meaning that we find meaningless? Say, designing us so that our purpose in life was to produce paperclips?

However, at other points the Christian and the atheist seemed to be in complete agreement:

Koukl: “There either is meaning objectively, or not.”

O’Connor: “I think so too, to be clear.”

Meanwhile, a third participant, “Dr. K,” trained psychologist with a background in Eastern spirituality, had this to say:

Countering both sides of the metaphysical debate, Dr. K continued, “For me, finding meaning and purpose…is a very practical thing.”

Rather than answering the perennial questions of metaphysics and religion, Dr. K is concerned to intervene in a recent, acute crisis of loss of subjective meaning—the very crisis with which Steven Bartlett, host of The Diary, framed the discussion.

As Dr. K puts it, “If someone asks me, ‘What is the meaning of life?’ I don’t know. But if someone says, ‘I have no meaning. Can you help me with that?’ the answer is, ‘Absolutely, yes.’”

And in saying this, Dr. K exposed the deep failure of several decades of both Christian and atheist apologetics, a failure that comes down, in this case, to a single preposition.

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1. The Setup

§ The Diary of a CEO is one of today’s top podcasts. Host Steven Bartlett is a young, successful entrepreneur who interviews the best minds in a wide variety of areas, from psychology, to politics, to—more rarely—religion.

That is why it was exciting to see him host this discussion on meaning and religion with a Christian apologist among the participants.

Even secular audiences have become interested in religious questions as a result of what many term “the meaning crisis,” a combination of psychological down-turns that have prompted a resurgence of religious belief and participation.

And that is the setup with which Bartlett frames the podcast discussion:

The reason I wanted to speak to all three of you today is to discuss meaning and purpose. And there’s some stats that I wanted to share that kind of frame the discussion:

Three in five young Americans believe that their life lacks purpose. Nine in ten young people in the UK believe that their life is lacking purpose.

And to give some further stats, which I found really interesting around the rise of religiosity in the UK, a belief in God amongst 18-24 year-olds has risen from 18% in 2021, to 37% in 2025. According to YouGov and in the UK, monthly church attendance has risen from 4% up to 15% in 2025.

There is something going on, and that’s what I want to talk about today.

Bartlett identifies two trends.

First, there is an increase in the number of people in Western countries who report lacking purpose in their lives.

Second, in only the last couple years, there has been an increase both in religious belief and attendance.

What is interesting about this is that, for a long time, there have been intellectuals—from Friedrich Nietzsche to Francis Schaeffer—arguing that the decline of religious belief is the cause of contemporary purposelessness. This argument has ramped up in intellectual spaces in the last nine years, chiefly through the influence of Jordan Peterson.

However, until the last two years, there was little evidence that this had had an impact on the religious beliefs and practices of the population at large. This recent turn of events lends empirical, sociological credence to what was previously only a philosophical postulate.

But the connection between religious belief and felt purpose remains opaque. Does one need to resolve questions of religion in order to gain a sense of purpose in life? Or is religious conviction merely a psychological remedy that happens, sometimes, to be effective?

2. Team Metaphysics, Unite!

§ Over the course of the discussion, it is revealed that the Christian apologist and the atheist are strongly aligned in their answer to that question.

For both Greg Koukl and Alex O’Connor,

the questions of metaphysics are prior to those of psychology.

So Greg Koukl:

“I have no reason to believe that any naturalistic explanation can explain the consciousness’s hunger for meaning and significance.”

In other words, you need to decide between metaphysical naturalism and theism before you can satisfy the hunger for meaning and significance.

And Alex O’Connor:

“You asked, ‘Do I know my own purpose?’ That assumes that there is a purpose to know.”

On the other hand, they both throw bones to psychology, acknowledging its significance in measure.

Koukl rightly points out that, because God made the world with objective purpose:

“People can participate in that meaning and purpose even if they don’t know God.”

Effectively, Koukl acknowledges the doctrine of the natural law in a way I applaud.

For O’Connor, the New Atheists neglected the psychological dimension, and he acknowledges that religion serves an important role in strengthening us against the existential threat of death:

“The New Atheist movement was quite philosophically shallow. It didn’t seriously engage with the existential component of religious belief and why it exists in the first place.”

However, in spite of these concessions, when pushed, both Koukl and O’Connor express their view of meaning as 1) turning on questions of metaphysics, and 2) being all or nothing.

At one point, Greg Koukl bluntly says, “There either is meaning or there isn’t,” to which O’Connor responds, “I completely agree.”

In short, the atheist and the Christian have teamed up on team metaphysics.

Their program is this:

“Want meaning in life? First determine the meaning of life.”

But the psychologist is having none of it.

3. Psychologist: “I hard disagree.”

§ Several years ago, Christian philosopher and apologist William Lane Craig, who has long been YouTube-famous for rattling sabres with atheists in heated philosophical debates, was caught off-guard by the introduction of a third participant: Psychologist Jordan Peterson.

In debate with Peterson and atheist Rebecca Goldstein, Craig’s directly metaphysical approach to defending Christianity seemed preachy, dated, and out-of-touch.

Something similar occurs in this discussion.

While Koukl and O’Connor are clearly poised to engage in some classic atheist-theist exchanges, Dr. K presses a different question:

“If someone asks me, ‘What is the meaning of life?’ I don’t know.

But if someone says, ‘I have no meaning. Can you help me with that?’ the answer is, ‘Absolutely, yes.’”

At one point, Dr. K brings the discussion back to the statistics with which Bartlett framed the podcast:

Steven started this out with some really scary statistics that we’re seeing, right? There’s a mental health crisis. I think a lot of what we’re seeing is, while it may be perennial, I think it’s like seems more acute right now.

Dr. K also challenges Alex on an important point. Alex argues that the discussion they are having is a perennial one. People for all history have had existential questions, questions of meaning and metaphysics, and so these are the perennial questions which will not be answered in one conversation.

But Dr. K points out that their discussion is not framed by a perennial problem, but an acute one.

That acute problem is not the perennial problem of metaphysics: What is the meaning of life?

Instead, it is the personal problem: How can I find meaning in life?

The difference is but a preposition.

Because he thinks the problem of meaning is perennial, Alex emphasizes more than once that it will be impossible, in the course of one conversation, to settle the matter.

But Dr. K disagrees. He does think their conversation can provide an answer.

4. Incremental Improvement

§ Moments later, Dr. K reveals why he thinks the meaning crisis is manageable.

While, for the atheist and the theist, the problem of meaning is all-or-nothing, for Dr. K, meaning is measurable along a sliding scale. He describes how psychologists measure a sense of meaning or purpose in life. They give people a series of surveys that get responses to questions related to meaning, control, and purpose (all of which clump together psychometrically, suggesting that they measure the same psychological variable).

He surveys the debate participants on the spot, asking how they would rate their subjective sense of purpose on a scale of 1 to 10: Koukl offers 10, Bartlett 5, and Dr. K presses Alex to admit that he would score greater than five on such a scale.

But what is Dr. K’s goal in the conversation? Not to get people from zero to ten in a single conversation, but to help people move “some vague percentage points, I’m shooting for about 20%.”

Yes.

This is it.

Dr. K wants people to move some small percentage along a vague scale that he doesn’t understand, but that we kind of all know is there: More meaning and purpose, less meaning and purpose.

That’s what he’s going for. It’s incremental improvement.

Meaning in life is not a grand, metaphysical sense of the purpose of all existence.

Meaning can be as simple as moving from doing less well to doing a little bit better.

5. A New Apologetic

§ In much of popular Christian apologetics, a certain kind of argument predominates.

While I have previously made much of the presuppositionalist-classical distinction, this argument predominates on both sides, whatever the apologist’s professed methodology.

The argument:

* If there is no God, there can be no meaning.

* The atheistic worldview has no God.

* Therefore, people with an atheistic worldview have no meaning.

But the conclusion doesn’t follow.

My freshman year at Wheaton College, I remember being struck by the title of a book: The God Who Is There.

And that is the relevant point.

An improper inference is made from “The atheistic worldview has no God,” to atheists have no God.

But they do. People with an atheistic worldview live in a world where God is there—even though they don’t believe he is.

And what that means is that there is no one whose life does not have meaning.

Dr. K and Jordan Peterson are right, therefore, to help people find meaning in life well before they’ve figured out the meaning of life.

Team metaphysics—the atheist and the theist—say:

the questions of metaphysics are prior to those of psychology.

But the actual result of Christian realism—the belief that God is there whether we believe it or not—and if psychological pragmatism, like that of Dr. K and Jordan Peterson, is the opposite:

the questions of psychology—including that of meaning in life—are prior to those of metaphysics.

And so, I envision a new kind of Christian apologetics, one that moves in the following order:

* Help people find meaning in life. And only then,

* Help people discover the meaning of life.

Ludwig Wittgenstein once lamented the collective influence of both atheists and theists on ethical and philosophical development:

Russell and the parsons between them have done infinite harm, infinite harm.

To which his friend responded:

I was puzzled by his coupling Russell and the parsons in the one condemnation.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, M. O’C. Drury, “Conversations with Wittgenstein,” 117.

I think Wittgenstein’s condemnation applies not only to Russell and the parsons, in his day, but also to Dawkins and the apologists in our own.

In a rush to solve the question of the meaning of life, we neglected the question of meaning in life.

Fortunately, there’s still time to reverse course.

Watch the Video

“Secular.” It’s a word my teenage, Christian brain assumed had to be more or less synonymous with “sexual.”

Many people know better than that, but even highly-educated Christians still assume that “the secular” is intertwined with secularism. The category of the secular, they think, is a pillar of an anti-Christian worldview, or, at best, a purportedly neutral pluralism or liberalism that, in fact, crowds out religious faith.

But the secular is a category of the Christian worldview. It denotes the dimensions of life that are not specifically religious, but common to human beings in the present age. The distinction between “secular” and “religious” marks a divide, not between Christian and non-Christian people, but within every person.

In fact, I warrant that, prior to the rise of secularism, the word “secular” would not even have had negative connotations to Christian ears.

Let me explain.

Life in the Saeculum — This Age

The etymology of the word “secular” begins with the Latin word “saeculum,” meaning “generation,” “age,” or literally, “century.” From the adjectival form saecularis came the Old French seculer and, thence, the English “secular.”

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first use of “secular” is:

1. denoting attitudes, activities, or other things that have no religious or spiritual basis. [E.g.,] “secular buildings.”

Its synonyms include everything from “nonreligious,” “lay,” and “temporal,” to “worldly,” “earthly,” and “profane.” (Profane used to be much more innocuous as well.)

The second entry in the OED brings us to our first historical point of contact:

2. [Christian Church]

(of clergy) not subject to or bound by religious rule; not belonging to or living in a monastic or other order.

As reflected in this definition, Medieval Christendom distinguished between secular and religious clergy. The religious life was lived in monastic community or otherwise subject to a particular religious order. Those in the religious life vowed to follow Christ’s “counsels of perfection”: Celibacy, poverty, and obedience. These were the religious clergy.

Secular clergy, on the other hand, ministered in parishes amongst ordinary people. If, to our ears, “secular clergy” sounds like a contradiction, this simply demonstrates our distance from Medieval Christian understanding. For Medieval Christians, “secular” simply meant participation in common life.

Nevertheless, the Medieval distinction between religious and secular life and vocations reveals that Catholic Christianity did suffer from the temptation to escape the secular, to rise above it. The religious life was held to be higher than secular life. While society needed people to perform secular tasks, like government, warfare, and trading, those in the religious life purified themselves of these worldly enterprises. (I wrote about this tension in Catholic Christianity in Christian Realism: A Philosophy of Christian Action.) The Catholic Church even claimed to be above the jurisdiction of secular authorities.

Until a certain German friar took them down a few notches.

The Protestant Embrace of the Secular

Martin Luther, in his “Letter to the German Nobility,” criticized the Catholic Church for purporting to be above the realm of the secular.

Luther denied the Church’s claim to be free of the jurisdiction of secular, political authorities. He lambasted the artificial wall the Church had raised between “the spiritual estate” and “the temporal estate,” between religious and secular callings. He argued that all Christians were of the spiritual estate, even as they inhabited a variety of temporal professions:

“All Christians are truly of the ‘spiritual estate,’ and there is among them no difference at all but that of office.”

— Martin Luther, “An Open Letter to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation”

Luther’s word for these ordinary professions and callings was weltlich, literally, “worldly.” In English translation, it is primarily translated “temporal.”

The word translated “secular” also appears once in the letter: zeitlichen. (Zeit is time.) In that use, Luther jokes that, if the popes, bishops, priests, and monks are above secular life, then “the tailors, cobblers, masons, carpenters…and all the secular tradesmen, should also be prevented from providing [them] with shoes, clothing, house, meat and drink, and from paying them tribute” (p. 70).

In this polemic, Luther accomplished two things at once. First, he acknowledged the ordinariness and secularity of life: Even the pope needs someone to make his shoes.

Second: At the same time, he was dignifying secular life, even sanctifying it. Every Christian, simply in virtue of baptism, was of the spiritual estate, whether butcher, baker, or candlestick maker.

Now Luther did not take a secularist position. He did not say, “This whole ‘spiritual estate’ thing is balderdash. You’re all secular.” He said that all Christians are of the spiritual estate, in the variety of their secular and religious callings. The spiritual and the secular interpenetrate.

This is the actual content of Calvin and Luther’s doctrine of the two kingdoms. The spiritual and secular cut across all human lives. Even pastors need shoes and functioning plumbing. And even cobblers and barbers are priests who may approach God’s throne of grace, without the mediation of the Church. (I learned this lesson from the Davenant Institute and the writers at The Calvinist International.)

If I say, then, that “the secular is spiritual,” it must be recognized that is no less secular for all that. (I did write, and mean, those words in “Giving Up on the ‘Jesus Juke.’”)

Protestantism does not say, after all, that each Christian is part of a special religious order, holy and separated from secular things. No; Protestantism says that all Christians are of the spiritual estate, whether employed as preachers, politicos, or plumbers. And that preachers are as enmeshed in the secular world as politicos and plumbers.

Every Christian life is both spiritual and secular.

The Vibe Shift in a Secular Age

The history of how “secular” came to have negative connotations to Christian ears is one I’d like to know better. But I surmise that the rise of secularist and naturalist worldviews has a lot to do with it.

In response to the French Enlightenment and mid to late 19th-century thought – Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche – contemporary Christians were put on the defensive. They took solace in separating from secular life, spiritualizing their vision of Christian calling, and viewing the world as a source of temptation and godlessness.

In so doing, we left behind the classical Christian worldview in which the secular, the temporal, and even the worldly had their place.

In our time, it is easy for Christians still to remain on the defensive. After all, secularism has proceeded apace. The world has, in certain respects, gotten more hostile toward Christianity.

But even when the world, i.e., the contemporary culture, is hostile toward Christianity, the right posture is not a defensive one. Aaron M. Renn, coiner of “the negative world,” said recently that it is time for Christians to seek friendship with those of the world. Our religious majority is gone. A posture of assertive domination is completely counter-productive. We need to find friends and allies outside the fold. In Renn’s words: “How can we make more friends than enemies?”

At the same time, “the vibe shift” is leading some to ask whether our culture’s antipathy toward Christian faith is beginning to reverse. I think it, quite obviously, is. (At least in certain corners of the Internet, now breaking out into the real world.)

In this new context, it remains exceedingly important for Christians to offer our countrymen a faith free of anxiety, a faith that sees the world as revealing God, that doesn’t ask for unreasonable asceticism or parochial fundamentalist strictures — a world-embracing faith.

Several of us have been trying to describe this world-embracing faith. Paul Vanderklay calls it “metagelical.”

Nicholas McDonald, in his forthcoming book, The Light in Our Eyes, spells out a confident and beautiful vision of Christian faith free of the hangups of the American evangelical subculture.

And I, at The Natural Theologian, aim to offer a vision of the Christian faith that welcomes the influence of the world, created by God, with its secular sources of knowledge.

This is not an uncritical acceptance of the world in John’s sense: “Do not love the world or the things in the world” (1 John 2:15).

It is an embrace of everything in Paul’s sense: “For everything God has created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving” (1 Tim 4:4).

And while we remain in this age, everything includes a whole lot of secular things.

And that, it turns out, might not be such a bad thing.

The Natural Theologian is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Articulating This Vision in Video

I’ve begun to articulate this vision of the Christian faith through video. Check out my latest YouTube videos:

Wesley Huff Is WRONG About Jordan Peterson: Reaction

Is Natural Law Compatible with Scripture?

We’ve NARROWED the Gospel

All across the internet, and in the academic presses, pundits and philosophers place blame for secularization on Protestantism.

Scholars and streamers complain that the Reformation precipitated the disenchantment of the world.

Orthodox converts waft their smells and ring their bells before evangelical noses and ears. Catholics look on evangelicals with pity, beholding our strip-mall sanctuaries, as they find shade below their towering, ancient cathedrals.

And many Protestants feel the Roman nostalgia. I admit I’m among them.

More than just nostalgia, we admire the intellectual tradition, Christian humanism, and ethical guidance of the Catholic Church. But even that has its limits.

This morning, Anthony Bradley displayed the enduring appeal of the Catholic and Orthodox traditions to Protestant observers. In his article, “Orthodox, Catholic, and Evangelical Views of Marriage,” Bradley argues that Protestants’ theology of marriage, as symbol and secular creation ordinance, falls short of the Orthodox and Catholic view of marriage as distinctly sacred and spiritual.

I think Bradley is wrong about this. But let’s hear him out.

Orthodox and Catholic v. Protestant Views of Marriage

Bradley presents Orthodoxy and Catholicism as offering a high view of marriage as sacred and spiritual, and Protestantism as offering a low view of marriage, as secular and merely instrumental.

Orthodox and Catholics view marriage as sacred and even sacramental. They hold that civil marriage, while it ought to mirror Christian marriage, is less than the same thing. This added layer of sacrality reinforces the moral seriousness of the marriage bond, discouraging divorce.

The Catholic Church teaches that divorce is a metaphysical impossibility. It forbids divorce and remarriage, providing only for annulment. The practice of annulment depends on understanding that annulled “marriages” were never true marriages. The parties failed some condition of marriage, such as that both parties fully intend exclusive commitment for life, with an openness to children. By implication, many modern civil marriages are not true marriages at all.

Both traditions also emphasize the procreative purpose of marriage, without denying the primary significance of marriage as a conjugal union.

By contrast, Protestant theologies of marriage treat marriage, not as sacramental, but symbolic. Marriage is a secular institution, common to both believers and unbelievers. Civil marriage is no less marriage than ecclesiastical marriage. Many Protestant traditions permit divorce and remarriage, at least on conditions of adultery, abandonment, and abuse.

Some Protestant theologies of marriage, like that in Tim Kellers’ The Meaning of Marriage, neglect the procreative aspect of marriage. (Keller does not mention children, at least prominently, in his treatment of Christian marriage.)

Bradley writes that this Protestant understanding “primarily emphasizes marriage as a practical framework for serving God through procreation, intimacy, and social order, treating it as a functional institution rather than a sacred mystery or sacrament.”

He argues that “this view reduces marriage to a utilitarian role, overshadowing its deeper spiritual and mystical significance.” He knocks Protestantism for failing to “place marriage within the context of worship or liturgy,” separating it from “the Church’s sacramental life.”

Instead, on the dominant Protestant view, marriage is not sacred, but secular. Bradley concludes, this view “lacks the depth and theological richness found in the Orthodox and Catholic understandings.”

Marriage Is Secular

But Bradley is wrong; marriage is secular. And it has its sacred significance in virtue of being a secular ordinance.

When Martin Luther rejected clerical celibacy, it wasn’t because he wanted to add marriage to the list of holy callings. (The Catholic Church already considered it a sacrament.) He rejected clerical celibacy because he rejected the whole sacred-secular divide.

In his letter to the German nobility, Luther railed against the division between sacred and secular callings that Rome had taught:

It has been devised that the Pope, bishops, priests, and monks are called the spiritual estate; princes, lords, artificers, and peasants are the temporal estate. This is an artful lie and hypocritical device, but let no one be made afraid by it, and that for this reason: that all Christians are truly of the spiritual estate, and there is no difference among them, save of office alone.

- Luther, “Letter to the German Nobility”

As all men were of the spiritual estate, Christians who exercised temporal or secular callings were as holy as any pastor or priest.

But the ordinances of human life themselves remained secular. It was, therefore, as participants in secular life that Christians could fulfill their universal spiritual calling.

Accordingly, Christian and civil marriage do not differ in kind. Marriage is an ordinance of creation, not redemption. It is rightly administered by the civil magistrate as much as by a minister of the church.

The secularity of marriage also means that it is affected by the fall. In post-fall conditions, many marriages do not last. The misery of our present estate requires that we make permission for both husbands and wives to sue for divorce on grounds of, at least, adultery and abandonment, as Calvin introduced in Geneva.

The divorced should be permitted to remarry, since one does not receive a binding calling to life-long celibacy in virtue of adultery or abandonment by one’s spouse. To say that these permissions amount to the same as Ronald Reagan’s “no-fault divorce” laws is to confuse 20th-century secular liberalism with Protestant Puritanism.

Likewise, a complete Christian view of marriage must recognize that marriage is ordered to the bearing and rearing of children. Protestant theologians and pastors have sometimes neglected this to focus only on husband and wife. But Protestant theology is also correct not to overemphasize procreation, which risks making the marital union itself only a means to procreation. (See my natural law defense of contraception if you want to know what I really think, and also, my piece on “Pronatalism After the Fall.”)

A “Low” View of Marriage?

One of Bradley’s main criticisms is that the Protestant view of marriage is lower than Catholic and Orthodox views. This criticism presupposes the principle that it is always superior to think something sacred, rather than secular.

But this is precisely to take a “low view” of the secular, too low because God made the secular and natural realm. The natural realm is as such theonomic; it already displays God’s rule, through governance by his natural law. It does not need the superimposition of grace, of sacrality, to make it into something that gives us contact with the divine.

Is the Protestant View of Marriage Too Utilitarian?

Another of Bradley’s criticisms is that the Protestant view of marriage is functional, instrumental, and utilitarian.

While the three paragraphs in which he describes the Gospel Coalition’s statement on marriage do not seem utilitarian to me — “Marriage is a living picture of the gospel, showcasing Christ’s love for His Church” — Bradley is correct that Protestant theology views marriage as contributing to civil order. The civil institution of marriage is part of the second use of the law, to restrain sin in society.

But is that supposed to be a bad thing? Sixty years since no-fault divorce, the sociological results are in: Divorce is terrible for children. Having two married parents is essential for children’s greatest flourishing. Mothers and fathers make distinct and necessary contributions. Secular sociologists and psychologists, political conservatives, and advocates of cultural Christianity can all get behind these results. Marriage should be held in greater honor in our society than it currently is.

Christians should affirm the same. And some, like Brad Wilcox and Mark Regnerus, are doing so — at the forefront of sociological research. Christians can add to the sociological the theological. Marriage contributes to our sanctification; it typifies Christ and his church.

But we can’t think that we are above the sociological. The church needs to get in the business of giving good advice about secular life, something for which Aaron M. Renn has pled repeatedly. Relative to that end, adopting a sacramental view of marriage is a step in the wrong direction.

Secular Principles for Secular Marriages

For the longest time, I thought that the key to a good marriage lay in a few biblical texts about how marriage symbolizes Christ and his church. If I could just understand and practice “biblical headship and submission,” then marriage would work right.

This is just an epistemological variant on the view that marriage is sacred. If marriage is sacred, then theological teaching should hold the key to a good marriage. If marriage is secular, it might not be so.

Indeed, I’ve found that the secular advice of psychologists John and Julie Gottman has done more for my marriage than the Greek exegesis of kephalé. Their advice, in books like Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work and The Love Prescription, is based on decades of empirical research, including observation of couples in their “Love Lab.” (Couples book a weekend stay, during which they interact in a suite with hidden cameras and heart-rate monitors.) The Gottmans have found that almost all secular and religious marriage counsel, which reduces to “communicate better,” fails to improve marriages. Their insights, on the contrary, reliably save marriages (and predict divorce with almost mechanical accuracy).

If we want to improve our marriages, to prevent divorce, and to symbolize Christ and his church, we would do well to view marriage as secular. We should view our Christian marriages as relationships that work according to the same principles as everyone else’s. We shouldn’t think that being Christian will protect our marriage if we don’t abide by secular insights into how marriage works.

(For a “natural theological” take on the submission passages, among the most compelling I’ve seen, see Ross Byrd’s thoughtful take, “Wives Submit?”)

Marriage Is Temporary

Lastly, marriage is not only secular, but also temporal. It is passing away.

This is denied by at least one sect: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The LDS church views marriages as sacred and eternal bonds. Eternal salvation is not individual, but familial.

The LDS takes Bradley’s advice and more. With a highly sacramental view of marriage, it is, perhaps, unsurprising that Latter-Day Saints practice faithfulness in marriage and place “focus on the family” remarkably well.

However, their theology of marriage conflicts directly with Christ’s: “For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven” (Matt 22:30). Marriage exists only for this age, this saeculum.

(Saeculum, the Latin word for an age or, lit., “a century,” is the etymological origin of the word “secular.” If you’re asking why a theologian uses the word “secular” positively, read this.)

Recognition of the temporality of marriage has been urged by Christians in the Side B, chaste, gay community. They have argued from their experience that the Protestant church idolizes marriage. It often fails to recognize the legitimacy of celibacy and singleness as Christian callings. (It does this by implicitly, if not explicitly, treating marriage as the solution to sexual lust, and the only pathway to Christian maturity.) It fails to recognize that even marriage is a passing and temporary institution of this age.

If this means “lowering” our view of marriage, then we should lower it. Our view of marriage should not be higher than Christ’s.

But in viewing marriage as a secular institution rather than a sacred one, a creation ordinance rather than a sacrament, we elevate our view of God’s creative activity. God made us male and female, and he instituted marriage as a fitting, temporal fulfillment of our nature. What is more, in this very creation ordinance, he anticipated the union he would bring about through our happy fall (felix culpa) and, through Christ’s humiliation, our redemption.

Natural Marriage

If you want a perspective on marriage that can hold its own against the forces of secularism and liberalism, you don’t need to sacralize marriage. You need to recognize marriage as natural. And then, to recognize the natural as itself a symbol of the divine and as subject to God’s natural law.

Our spiritual calling is lived within the realm of the natural, the secular. And marriage, the ordinance that governs one of the great vocations of human life, is of the realm of the secular.

“For it is not the spiritual that is first, but the natural, then the spiritual.”

— 1 Corinthians 15:46

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A woman was interviewing for a philosophy professorship at a Catholic university. Though she respected the intellectual tradition of the university, she was not herself Catholic. She hoped to find there similar respect for her own thinking, whatever its metaphysical conclusions.

The interview began well. Potential future colleagues discussed her research and gave her an opportunity to display her considerable knowledge of epistemology and continental thought.

Then a new voice chimed in. A crotchety but not-yet-old Catholic man began to dig into her moral and political views. He settled on the topic of abortion. How could she condone the murder of innocent unborn children? What other wickedness would she countenance?

She tried to respond that, while she was not a Catholic herself, she admired the moral tradition of Catholic theologians and philosophers. Nevertheless, respectfully, she disagreed with it. That was not good enough for the crotchety Catholic philosopher.

While the interview was otherwise successful, its final phase sapped the woman of energy. It left her desiring to be employed as far from this university as possible.

In her place, the university hired a different pro-choice secular philosopher: My dissertation advisor, who fortunately was not subjected to the same treatment.

As a Christian philosopher, I struggle to comprehend why a secular analytic philosopher’s failure to be pro-life would be surprising. And anyway, why would we focus on our points of disagreement, rather than our points of agreement - the rigor of philosophical thought, the merits of the candidate’s research, and the mission of the philosophy department?

Yet often, we approach people who hold different views than us in exactly the way this professor approached the interviewee. In those moments, we are tempted to think that our ideological differences are so fundamental that there is no common ground between us.

But there is common ground, and we’re standing on some of it.

There Is No Common Ground

“There is no common ground between believer and unbeliever.”

That was a dictum of the seminary I attended. Its presuppositionalist philosophy held that Christians and non-Christians do not differ merely in our conclusions. We differ at every level of thinking down to the most fundamental presuppositions of thought - even on the principles of logic and mathematics themselves.

“No common ground” was intended as a pious affirmation of our commitment to have a distinctively Christian worldview. Yet in our zeal to be as Christian as possible, we ignored the deeply divisive and partisan effects of the statement.

Imagine if a progressive activist said, “There is no common ground between progressives and conservatives!” Would that person strike you as open-minded and willing to hear opposing perspectives? Would you be likely to feel comfortable having a conversation with them about matters moral or political?

Personally, I would fear being written off for my beliefs, or being thought evil or irredeemable.

But that’s what we Christians do if and when we say: “There is no common ground between believers and unbelievers.” And even if we don’t say those words, we often act like it.

I wrote about this a few months ago in “Berating the Godfearers.” My friend “Brent,” who is interested in Christianity, was dismissed and shouted at for not being a six-day creationist by a number of evangelical Christians on a Zoom meeting. What had happened? The evangelical guys found one point of disagreement and went hard at it. But that’s not the path to a productive conversation.

As I put it then, the evangelical guys pursued conversion rather than conversation. And ultimately, it was a poor means of persuasion, forget conversion.

Common Ground at F3: Fitness, Fellowship, and Faith

A couple weeks ago, I hosted a philosophy night with my friends from F3, “Fitness, Fellowship, and Faith.” I was especially excited to talk about common ground with them because F3 itself has been for me a major object lesson.

At the end of every workout, someone says, “F3 is not a religious organization. All we ask is that you believe in something higher than yourself. It could be Jesus, Buddha, Allah, or the man next to you.”

But then, if the person is a Christian, he continues, “But I am a Christ-follower, so I’m going to close us out in a Christian prayer. Join me or respect the time. Dear God…”

There’s something very remarkable about this. Americans think that any public display or mention of religion is an attempt to impose faith on others. And many religious Americans publicly express their faith in a very impositional way.

But at F3, I learned a different way of interacting with non-Christians. Our faith or religious commitments are known, but they are not imposed on others, and they are not the source of our commonality. Our commonality is that we just sweated and lifted a concrete block (“the coupon”) together for forty-five minutes. Our commonality is that we want to escape “sad-clown syndrome,” a problem which afflicts many American men. Our commonality is that we believe that there is something higher than ourselves – that living for self-gratification is the wrong goal.

This commonality clears enough ground actually to discuss both normal life and deeper things. We have weekly “QSource” discussions in which we touch on themes of faith, virtue, manliness, community, and more. These discussions go deeper and engage more men than any church men’s group you’ve seen. I even instituted approximately monthly “philosophy nights” when we discussed a book over beer.

The key is that F3 discussions place Christians and non-Christians on a level playing field; we enter conversation as equal partners in the search for truth and goodness. I have indeed seen people become Christian through this. I’ve seen other people at least soften their stance on religion. And at a bare minimum, we are able to be open and understanding of one another’s perspectives.

This is the religion-friendly pluralist ethic on which America was founded. These days, most have more of a more secularist understanding - that religion shouldn’t be brought into the public square. Much better to do it in the manner of that polis within the polis, “F3 Nation.”

Finding Common Ground in Philosophy

My studies in philosophy are another of my attempts to disprove, “There is no common ground between believers and unbelievers.” In the first place, I’m studying philosophy, so none of my arguments can start from Christian premises. We proceed by reason alone, as it were.

But in the second place, I sought out a non-Christian dissertation advisor as a test of the thesis that there can be common ground between believers and unbelievers.

Now, I first took a course on Plato’s ethics with Dr. B____. I detected that he took a very secular view of Socrates; Socrates was a purely secular guy, whom Plato had corrupted and spiritualized. Whatever seemed to point in a Christian direction could therefore be attributed to Plato, or to later Neo-Platonist interpretations, rather than to Socrates. Socrates was a utilitarian; he didn’t believe in an afterlife; and Platonism was and is consistent with a scientific worldview.

Almost the whole semester, my mind kept thinking of paper topics where I disagreed with Dr. B____. But finally, I realized that I would learn the most by writing about the one topic I’d discovered on which he and I agreed.

After that was a success, I asked him about advising my dissertation, and we followed the topic to the next point of agreement. Eventually, I realized that Dr. B____ and I agree primarily on one thing: Reality exists. We just disagree about what reality is like (i.e., everything else).

But I relish that point of agreement for this reason: I believe that the common ground between all of us, no matter what our different views, beliefs, convictions, faiths, is reality itself. Even the postmodernists who think that reality is nothing but a mental construct - we drive on the same streets, breathe the same air, encounter the same objects in our visual field and so on. No worldview, philosophy, belief, metaphysics, or any of it can obscure the fact that reality itself is the common ground between us.

The common ground between different worldviews is reality itself.

A Philosopher and an MS-13 Member Walk Into a Bar…

The process I went through with my professor can work with anyone. You may disagree with them about ten things, all of great importance, but you agree on one thing. Start there! Revel in that point of agreement.

Short of morality and politics, revel in all the other things you can share. Maybe you like the same food, root for the same sports team, or send your kids to the same school. You can always find points of commonality.

But aren’t there still limits? Some people are just so evil, we couldn’t have any common ground. Like an MS-13 gang member, right?

Well, I recently heard a story about a former member of the gang MS-13. He had become a rat, telling on other members, after reaching a moral line in the sand. Though he had previously murdered twenty people in cold blood, he happened upon several other gang members poised to murder a baby. “What are you doing, guys? It’s a baby!” Inside, he knew that there, he drew the line. It’s not right to murder an innocent baby!

Hey, I agree with that! It’s not right to murder an innocent baby. I just extend that courtesy also to grown-ups.

There it is. A point of common ground! It could be the starting point for a conversation. Even a philosophical dialogue.

If I can find common ground with an MS-13 murderer, then I’m pretty sure you can find common ground with your laptop-class interlocutor whose views differ slightly from yours.

My song “Common Ground” was inspired by seeing failures of people to do exactly that: “I heard that you don’t think like me/I bet that means I won’t like you.”

I even accidentally described the story at the beginning of this post about the pro-choice professor being taken to task: “I think you all should shut your lids/’cuz you think it’s cool to murder kids.”

Now here’s to extending a bit of courtesy to our ideological opponents. And if you ever forget, just give “Common Ground” another listen.

Dedication

I dedicate this post to my friends in F3 St. Charles and in New Town at St. Charles.

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Want to talk with me about any subject? Schedule a meeting below.

Know anyone who is into this style of music? Send them a link to my song, “Common Ground.”

Scripture is the only source of theology that evangelical Christians all accept. As a result, the methodology of evangelical theology is to argue deductively from premises of a single source: the Bible. Excluded from theology are philosophy, empirical science, and literary imagination. Accordingly, evangelical theology is functionally biblicist.

If a theologian introduces a premise that is not biblically-derived but is based in experience, that theologian invites suspicion that his premise is unbiblical. “The earth is 4.5 billion years old” - unbiblical. “Sexual orientation is a real feature of human psychology” - unbiblical. “Christianity is at least socially useful, even if this does not prove its truth” - unbiblical.

People who reject these “unbiblical premises” are led to specific theological conclusions: “The earth was created in six 24-hour days.” “A Christian may not describe himself as ‘gay.’” “We should believe in Christianity only because it’s true, independently of its fruits.” With a narrow range of theological sources, our theology itself narrows.

But theologians who utilize experience in addition to the Bible have a greater wealth of resources on which to draw in their thinking. What is more, their thinking takes into account human nature itself, resulting in a humane theology, rather than one that feels foreign and unsympathetic to who we are.

The eminent Oxford theologian Nigel Biggar is an example of a theologian whose theology draws on human experience in addition to the Bible.

In a perfect case study of theology from experience, Biggar questions the Christian pacifist conclusions of Richard Hays by transcending his Bible-only method, and introducing a premise from experience: Human violence is not always motivated by hatred, vengeance, and anger. A theology that takes into account the full breadth of human experience cannot condemn all violence.

Biggar’s argument is a perfect case-study in Christianity’s need of the theological source of experience.

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The Bible-Only Case for Pacifism

A long-time New Testament scholar at Duke Divinity School, Richard Hays made the case for Christian pacifism in his The Moral Vision of the New Testament. Hays argues that, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus lays out the ethic of a new kind of community, radically different from ordinary human communities. This radically new ethic is “one in which ‘anger is overcome through reconciliation … retaliation is renounced … and enemy-love replaces hate’. … In sum, ‘the transcendence of violence through loving the enemy is the most salient feature of this new model polis’” (36).

To this Hays adds Jesus' frequent refusal of political violence, desired by the zealots of his time, and his injunction to “turn the other cheek.” Hays also appeals to Jesus’ rebuke of Peter, when he draws a sword in Christ’s defense; Hays “takes [this] to be ‘an explicit refutation’ of the justifiability of the use of violence in defence of a third party” (36-37).

The Bible also condemns the motives that inspire violence. The rest of the New Testament “forbids anger, hatred, and retaliation–and the violence that issues from them” (47). Hays concludes, from appeal exclusively to the biblical text, that Christianity supports non-violence.

In the following section, Nigel Biggar introduces a premise from outside the Bible that calls Hays’ argument into question.

But even Bible-only interpreters have reason to question Hays’ Christian pacifism. Both Christ and the apostle Paul speak about soldiers without condemning their calling; Jesus’ words for soldiers are, “Do not take things from anyone by force, do not falsely accuse anyone, and be content with your wages.” Likewise, Paul in Romans 13 recognizes civil government as appointed by God and having the right to bear the sword against evil. Biggar raises these biblical counter-arguments.

Even if Hays’ biblical argument is not airtight, there is something appropriate about the Bible-only perspective being a pacifist one. Bible-only theology is a facet of what what Richard Niebuhr calls the “Christ Against Culture” perspective.

This school of Christian thought, which includes everyone from Tertullian (“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”) to Tolstoy, argues that the Bible brings a distinctive perspective from those of the world. The world frequently operates on the basis of power, hating one’s enemies, and retaliatory violence. But the New Testament introduces an antithetical principle into history - Christ’s New Commandment of love even for the enemy.

If you wanted a distinctively New Testament perspective on violence, one that stood at odds with the powers and principalities of this world, you might very well adopt Christian pacifism. Tertullian and Tolstoy both did. And so did the entire Anabaptist tradition - including Mennonites and the Amish.

Hays’ Christian pacifism claims to be the position that is most exclusively and distinctively biblical.

Is Violence Always Motivated by Hatred?

In In Defence of War, Nigel Biggar introduces a premise from experience that contravenes Hays’ conclusion. While Biggar also makes biblical arguments, it is his empirical argument that raises questions about theological methodology.

For instance, one of Hays’ arguments began from the New Testament’s prohibition of hatred, vengeance, and anger. Since these are the motives from which violence flows, violence itself is thereby also forbidden.

But, Biggar points out, Hays has just introduced an assumption about the motives for violence: That violence only flows from vindictive motives. If any violence does not flow from hatred, vengeance, or, as Biggar distinguishes, unloving anger, then such violence would not be prohibited. Indeed, if any violence flows from motives that are commanded, like love and justice, such violence may even be obligatory.

Biggar devotes the entire following chapter, “Love in War,” to demonstrating that many military actions are divorced from vindictive motivation. He summarizes, “Soldiers in battle are usually motivated by loyalty to their comrades and by fear of shame, rather than by hatred for the enemy” (56).

In fact, many soldiers would cross lines to shake hands with their opponents if given the chance, though during battle, they will need to fire at them, often lethally. Ernst Jünger wrote about the First World War:

Throughout the war…it was always my endeavour to view my opponent without animus, and to form an opinion of him as a man on the basis of the courage he showed. I would always try and seek him out in combat and kill him, and I expected nothing else from him. But never did I entertain mean thoughts of him. When prisoners fell into my hands, later on, I felt responsible for their safety, and would always do everything in my power for them. (78)

Biggar writes about the military preference for cold, dispassionate violence rather than “hot violence.” He quotes Vietnam vet Karl Marlantes:

Contrary to the popular conception, when one is in the fury of battle I don’t think one is very often in an irrational frenzy … I was usually in a white heat of total rationality, completely devoid of passion, to get the job done with minimal casualties to my side and stay alive doing it. (79)

Biggar surveys other examples and motives, “love for one’s comrades,” something than which Jesus said there was no greater love; love for one’s family; the desire to prove oneself, the desire to be worthy of the heritage of one’s regiment, and so on.

He acknowledges, however, that sometimes rage comes over soldiers. This motivation and the violence that flows from it, Biggar condemns. However, even there, “sometimes what inspires [rage] is the death of comrades.” But “what appears to anger combat soldiers most…is not the death of a comrade, but enemy conduct that breaks the rules…treachery, gratuitous sacrilege, wanton cruelty.”

Other times, soldiers’ rage has no justification and leads to great wrong; yet soldiers are often conscious of this moral danger. Marlantes wrote, “There is a deep savage joy in destruction … I loved this power. I love it still. And it scares the hell out of me.” Soldiers have a duty to control “the beast that lies within us all” (89).

The assumption, therefore, that all violence is motivated by hatred, vengeance, or anger turns out to be false. Biggar summarizes his conclusion:

It contradicts the charge that military violence is mainly and necessarily motivated by hatred. … It confirms the thesis that soldiers are usually motivated primarily by love for their comrades. And it supports the claim that they can regard their enemies with respect, solidarity, and even compassion–all which are forms of love.

Given this information from human experience, a crucial premise of Hays’ argument is overturned. The Bible does not condemn all violence. The Christian call to love our enemy is not incompatible with, and may sometimes require, killing him.

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Other Premises from Experience

Consider what occurred in the last section: A theologian’s exclusively biblical argument was undermined by a premise from human experience. And even for those of us who have never been pacifists, the Bible’s warnings about anger and Christ’s command to “turn the other cheek” often induce worries about the legitimacy of violence and war, even in self-defense.

Biggar’s examination of first-hand accounts from the frontlines reveals, however, that these worries cannot be absolutized. Not all violence is motivated by motives that the Bible proscribes.

Biggar introduces yet another premise from outside of the Bible: The doctrine of double effect. According to that ethical doctrine, we can distinguish the intended consequences of an action from side-effects that are foreseen, but unintended. For example, in a situation of self-defense, you might have the following thought: “I do not intend to kill you, only to protect myself, but I foresee that shooting you at close proximity is likely to leave you dead.”

Hays and others object that the doctrine of double effect is a speculative premise, foreign to the text. The doctrine of double effect is unbiblical.

Biggar concurs with his critics that he is not “aware of having first learned [the doctrine of double effect] from the Bible.” Still, it is “in [his] view, correct,” presumably on philosophical and empirical grounds. He counters that the doctrine may not be unbiblical, but only non-biblical.

Both with the doctrine of double effect and the evidence of soldiers’ motives for violence, Biggar is bringing the “fruits of experience” into his biblical interpretation and theological argumentation. 

Biggar is aware, however, that, “Some might find it suspect that I presume to take these fruits of experience into my reading of the New Testament.” In fact, Hays does not completely deny the role of experience as a theological source; he acknowledges “experience,” but defines it narrowly as subjective religious experience and limits its role to that of “confirming the truth of the teaching of Scripture.”

Biggar counters on both points. Experience is not just subjective religious encounter or emotion: “A far wider range of human experience of the world that God has created should come into play.” And experience can play a role, not only in confirming Scripture’s truth, but in informing our interpretations: “One of [experience’s] main roles should be to help determine the meaning of Scripture, and not merely to confirm its truth.”

On this latter point, Christians often try to argue that empirical sources should not affect our biblical interpretation; it should only call the empirical information into question. Others revise their biblical interpretation on the basis of uncritical acceptance of scientific consensus. Biggar points out that we may question the deliverances of experience in light of biblical witness, or we may be moved to change our interpretation of the Bible in light of experiential or empirical knowledge.

The Danger of Presuppositions

Biggar argues on the basis of experience, and not the Bible only. But, he alleges, so does everyone else, including Hays. As I have argued myself, those who deny the role of experience in theology are just as influenced by experience in their theological formulations, but in an undisciplined and accidental way.

Biggar writes, “Hays himself brings more empirical data–and brings it more deeply–into his exegetical and synthetic work than he himself recognizes.” After all, where did Hays get the assumption that all violence is motivated by hatred, vengeance, and anger if not from experience? The problem is not using experience in theology; the problem is not having enough of it. (In this case, insufficient reading of military histories and memoirs.)

Biggar’s conclusion is apt:

It seems to me that the reason why [Hays] reads Jesus’ death on the cross as meaning the absolute repudiation of all violence everywhere is that he has imported empirical assumptions about anger and violence as necessarily vengeful and malevolent. I do not complain at all about the importation. I merely dissent from the assumptions.

Likewise with the use of philosophy in theology. Biggar’s grounds for adhering to the doctrine of double effect are philosophical. But someone who rejects the doctrine of double effect is not free of philosophical beliefs. Rather, Biggar points out that if you reject the doctrine of double effect, you are committed to an alternate philosophical doctrine: that “the moral quality of an act depends…primarily on its good or evil effects,” without regard to intention. Famously, that is a doctrine of consequentialism. Does Hays realize that he has imported a consequentialist philosophical doctrine into his reading?

When we encounter the Bible, all of us already have a panoply of empirical beliefs. We can’t help but think things from experience before our engagement with the text. Rather than thinking ourselves blank slates or trying to be free of empirical assumptions, we should discipline ourselves in the acquisition of knowledge from experience. We should cultivate our natural reason. We should read widely in (at least) history, science, and philosophy. That is what I call Christian empiricism. And Nigel Biggar is a great example.

Biblical Silences

One more point before we leave behind Biggar’s dispute with Hays. One of the biblical arguments Biggar makes has to do with an absence of condemnation from Jesus and Paul for the calling of soldiers. Biggar writes that that silence is “loaded.” 

But there is something else we could say, not only about this biblical silence, but about all biblical silences. Whatever we find the Bible has not clearly spoken on, we can read as an invitation to fill with premises from natural, non-scriptural revelation. In particular, from human experience and philosophy.

I think, for example, of the Christian discussion of contraception, which I entered last week. The Bible offers no unmistakably clear word. At the same time, its silence does not predetermine a permissive view. Instead, by leaving the question unanswered, it opens up a space for the empirical and philosophical discussion of contraception, appealing to biblical principle, but also human experience.

The Bible’s silences are an invitation to listen to other sources of information and even - as Christian tradition would have it - sources of divine revelation. Experience is a chapter in the book of nature.

Formation, Not Information

Biblicism arise from a faulty presupposition about the nature of redemption: That it is integrally concerned with apprising us of information about the nature of the world. Instead, redemption is focused on the formation of our character and the resurrection and transfiguration of our bodies themselves. Redemption assumes a world that is already in place and that is, in principle, already knowable by human beings.

The offer of redemption in the Bible assumes knowledge of the existence of God, our creation in his nature, our moral duties to him and one another, our failure with respect to those duties, and the suffering with which our world is replete from which we would seek deliverance. However much people may resist these truths, Christ comes into the world in which these are already true, and the gospel message presupposes these truths. Chiefly, the Law is prior to the Gospel.

Accordingly, the purpose of divine revelation is not to describe the structures of the world. The purpose of supernatural revelation is to enter into the already-existing world of human thought and experience and to tell us about certain actions of God within history. It is not to define human nature for us. It is to tell us that God has taken a human nature to himself, and that what he has assumed he is redeeming. It is not to make human knowledge as such possible; it is to provide us with some particular bits of knowledge and to direct us to higher wisdom.

In fact, Christ did not primarily come to deliver us from ignorance and provide us with knowledge at all. He came to save us from sin and to work in us love for God. Salvation is not primarily about information, but formation.

While Christ is the only source of our formation into God’s likeness, the Bible is not our only source of information about the world. To live faithfully, we must gather information from other sources. Not to do so is to squander our God-given capacities, reason, experience, and judgment.

Nigel Biggar is a prime example of a theologian honing just such natural capacities, without neglecting supernatural revelation. I commend his work to you.

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This article is the text of my presentation at a working group on theology and DEI hosted by the Princeton Initiative in Catholic Thought.

Today, there is a confusion of moral equality with mathematical equality. Ethicists and theologians are out; number-crunching nerds - empathic as they may be - are in.

Today it is held - especially by proponents of the doctrine of equity - that those most qualified to speak on the subject of human equality are social scientists: Whether human beings are equal turns on the mathematical outcome of social-scientific studies and a yet-incomplete human experiment.

I would like to reclaim equality as the terrain of ethicists and theologians. Why? Because equality is moral, not mathematical.

In particular, human equality is the claim that human beings, as people, are essentially and individually bearers of dignity, unaffected by accidental and empirical differences between them, at individual or group levels.

The doctrine of human equality is latent in ordinary moral discourse, in Christian and post-Christian societies. But its Christian foundation deserves reiteration. After justifying and exploring the claim that moral equality has been placed on the empirical and falsifiable foundation of mathematical equality, I will present a theological foundation for human equality, across five anthropological dimensions. By the end, I hope the presentation will prompt questions about whether and how the doctrine of human equality can be maintained in a secular society.

The Mathematical Doctrine of Equality

How can I say that the proponents of equity think that the doctrine of human equality depends on the empirical outcome of social-scientific studies and a yet-incomplete human experiment? Here’s how:

I once was trying to retrieve some artificial flowers at IKEA. As I searched, I asked a woman for help locating the flower section and made a quip about men not knowing where the flower section is. She responded, quite evangelically, that men can be interested in flowers too, so she wouldn’t assume my ignorance of the location of the flower section (though she did direct me there). In the hard edge of her comment, I heard her rationale, “Because humans are equal…you sexist.”

Human equality entails mathematical equality across group means on accidental features - like interest in flowers.

But if human equality is logically equivalent to mathematical equality, then social-scientific studies could determine whether human beings are equal. By putting the doctrine of human equality on an empirical basis, this IKEA-goer has made it falsifiable.

Now, if I gathered the relevant data and demonstrated to her that women are, on average, more interested in flowers than men, she would likely respond that this is due to cultural factors.

Once again, however, this puts the doctrine of human equality on an empirical and potentially falsifiable basis. But this time, it is on a basis that requires data to be gathered from a yet-incomplete human experiment: Raising a generation of boys and girls with an utter absence of stereotypes and cultural depictions of women having greater interest in flowers than men.

While technically falsifiable, this puts the mathematical doctrine of equality beyond the range of what will likely ever be tested. It is unlikely that society will purposefully carry out this experiment and gather the relevant data.

Now my claim is not that the difference of interest in flowers between men and women is biological; I lack the kind of expertise to adjudicate that claim.

My claim is that this entire discourse is irrelevant to the question of human equality.

Human equality does not, and should not be made to, depend on the outcome of social-scientific studies or yet-incomplete human experiments. That is too flimsy a basis for a claim as central to Western polities as the doctrine of human equality.

Likewise, the premise that moral equality is logically equivalent to mathematical equality is a premise that the cultural left shares with the racial right: Differences in group averages on accidental features are relevant to moral status.

I would have thought that the proper response to rejecting the racial right would be to reject that premise. Instead, the cultural left has assumed the truth of that premise and banked their moral worldview on a falsifiable empirical claim: That human beings, in a utopian, newly-reconstituted Rousseauian state of nature, would have equal group averages on accidental features.

I want to offer a distinct basis for the doctrine of human equality, one independent of the vagaries of empirical, mathematical observation.

The Doctrine of Moral Equality

First, we need a different gloss on human equality itself, the moral rather than the mathematical.

While the mathematical is about the outcome of social scientific studies, the moral is a normative claim about how human beings ought to be treated.

One way to cash out the moral doctrine of equality is by appeal to an old principle of law: “Treat like cases alike.”

Here’s a violation of that: “I would serve a white person in this situation, but I won’t serve this black person. After all, they are different.”

But are they in a morally relevant sense?

This provokes the question what forms of likeness are morally salient. And I would claim that race is not morally salient, but personhood.

Whether you treat them as a moral person possessing dignity and an equal claim on your esteem is determined by whether they are a person, which depends on nothing but membership in the human race.

From this example, I generalize a principle:

Accidental differences between human beings are irrelevant to moral status.

Just as race and sex are irrelevant to the moral status of personhood, more fine-grained differences between individuals and groups on accidental features are all the more irrelevant to moral status. This is not to claim that any particular group differences are natural or biological. It is to claim that no such differences are relevant to the doctrine of human equality.

It is a further and separate question what should be done to help those who suffer and are disadvantaged.

Recognizing that equality is a moral and not a mathematical claim, we see that it has to do with a status man has by nature and not accidental features. We reach contested questions of human nature, essentialism, and meta-ethics.

Contemporary discourse is divided primarily between postmodernists who do not believe in essences or natures at all, and naturalists who believe that nature is without moral significance and, by the way, that things do not have natures or essences.

Western moral intuitions still point to an implicit belief in human equality, but philosophy often conflicts with these intuitions. What can possibly ground the Western faith in human moral equality? A Christian theological anthropology.

Human Equality in Five Theological Dimensions

A Christian theological anthropology maintains the equality of human beings across five dimensions: Human Nature, Responsibility, Sin, Suffering, and Human Destiny.

Human Nature

First, all human beings are equal in possessing the same nature.

Biologically, Christianity teaches, or assumes, that all human beings are the same species. Population-differences, including purported race differences, are not just gradations from species-differences, like the distinction between humans and non-human apes. I’ll leave the details of making this claim concordant with science aside.

So far “equality” would apply to any species. The same, after all, would apply to dogs: All dogs are equally dogs.

To arrive at moral equality, we must introduce a category that is not merely biological but moral: “Person.” We determine membership in the kind person by virtue of membership in the kind human being. Persons are not some kind of advanced being with certain cognitive abilities; they are members of a species which is unique in its cognitive abilities and linguistic capacity, and upright stature, and distinction between feet and hands, and they reproduce facing each other. All of which are reflective of personhood.

The crowning feature of the Christian doctrine of human nature is that the human difference, call it rationality, personhood, or something else, is reflective of our being made in the image of God. All human beings are ultimately moral equals in that they are made in the image of God.

Responsibility

A particularly salient feature of the human difference, of our being in God’s image, is human responsibility. If a dog kills a person, we may put it down; but this is not punishment. If a person kills another person, we hold him responsible for his actions.

Human beings are also equal in responsibility. Equality in responsibility is contradicted by any ideology that frees some groups from responsibility while laying responsibility exclusively on another group’s shoulders.

This occurs in contemporary racial ideology, for example. As Shelby Steele argues, in “The Culture of Deference,” the effect of left-wing ideology and action since the 1960’s has been to put American whites in a relation of deference to American blacks. All moral responsibility is on the shoulders of whites; blacks have no responsibility. Whatever the wrongs of the past, it is the wrong response to treat a group that has suffered as now free from the responsibility that all humans are subject to, equally.

Sin

Human beings are also equal in being subject to the power of sin. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, whose theology inspired Martin Luther King Jr.’s activism, made the doctrine of sin the core of his “Christian realism.” He measured ideologies by whether they recognized human fallibility, error, and mixed motives as universal to human beings or limited to one’s outgroup.

For instance, he praised Marxism for recognizing that people’s beliefs could be motivated by economic factors. But he criticized Marxists for thinking themselves above such criticism:

“This is the truth in the Marxist theory of rationalization…that all culture is corrupted by an ideological taint. The unfortunate fact about the Marxist theory is that…the enemy is charged with this dishonesty, but the Marxist himself claims to be free of it. … This is, of course, merely to commit the final sin of self-righteousness and to imagine ourselves free of the sin which we discern in the enemy.”

Likewise, he praised activists who opposed racism for uncovering elements of human sin. But he criticized activists and African-Americans themselves for absolving themselves of this participation in human sinfulness and, chiefly, pride. The response to race-hatred cannot be race-pride:

“The sins that the white man has committed against the colored man cry to heaven. But might it not be well for the ultimate peace of society if intelligent white men and colored men studied and analyzed these sins not so much as the peculiarities of a race, but as the universal characteristics of Homo sapiens, so called?” (“The Confession of a Tired Radical,” in Love and Justice, Reinhold Niebuhr, 121).

We see strange versions in our own time. Robin DiAngelo teaches in White Fragility that whites are subject to a version of original sin to which blacks are not. Whites must constantly examine themselves for racism, but blacks do not have to. Reverse racism is “A-OK.” The same with the other contemporary race ideologues. Black people can’t be racist. Race pride is in.

Suffering

The Westminster Shorter Catechism asks, “Into what estate did the fall bring mankind? Into an estate of sin and misery.”

As with sin, people often do not believe in the universality of suffering and so, human equality as including conditions of suffering and misery.

There are many examples. Today, people think that suffering only happens to minorities, the “disadvantaged,” the oppressed. Another group can be classified as oppressors and is known to have no suffering (and all sin).

Instead, we need to see people as our equals, their suffering as our suffering, and it goes in both directions on these various scales of oppression or disadvantage. A lot of black people take a very negative view of white people, their lives are free of difficulty. A lot of poor people take a negative view of people who are well-off; they’ve got no problems. These are as much violations of recognizing human equality as are prejudicial views held by the wealthy and white.

Destiny

Nothing secures a belief in human equality like the belief that we will all share in a true, not merely hypothetical kingdom of heaven. The political struggle to realize it on earth is valuable - though whatever we achieve will remain imperfect - but we need a hope that this will be a reality one day. That should not undermine activity today to make it true. It should allow us to be realistic in our idealistic pursuits:

“There are…no solutions for the race problem on any level if it is not realized that there is no absolute solution for this problem. … It is not possible to purge man completely of the sinful concomitant of group pride in his collective life” (“The Race Problem,” Niebuhr, 130-131).

Not Equity, But Equality

The doctrine of human equality rests on the recognition that human beings are, morally, as persons, and theologically, as made in the image of God, equal in nature and status. Human equality is not an empirical claim about the sameness of human beings across groups on accidental features - and therefore, a falsifiable and unproven claim.

Admittedly, recognition of moral equality does not answer the further questions about assisting the poor, including members of previously excluded groups, and finding reconciliation after historical wrongs. Advocates of equity rightly draw attention to these questions.

But our contemporary political problems must be dealt with on the basis of a prior belief in and commitment to moral equality. That commitment to moral equality must not be confused with mathematical equality. Its ground is more certain than the shaky ground of falsifiable social science.

We need a moral doctrine that is a substantive alternative to that of proponents of DEI. And that doctrine should retain an “E.” The E should not be understood as implying a mathematical equality between groups, but a moral equality across races as members of the human species, as people.

Here’s to “E”: Not equity but equality.

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What I found most difficult about evangelism as a child was the disinterest of my audience. Those whom I was supposed to evangelize - secular liberals in an affluent society - saw no need of the message I peddled.

But today, secular ex-liberals approach me from every direction, desiring to talk about the failures and inadequacies of liberalism and secularism. Their minds are open to a word of wisdom from the Christian faith.

And some even have open hearts.

In Christian apologetics, the traditional arguments for God’s existence appeal to universal features of the world: Causality, design, beauty.

But in our moment, a new, historically-contingent theistic argument is made available: The argument from the failure of liberalism.

The political philosophy of John Lennon’s Imagine has been tried. Its outcome has been censorship, political tribalism, new forms of genital mutilation, sky-rocketing rates of anxiety and depression, and increasing racial division.

The victims of the liberal experiment are looking for a new paradigm. And the Christian paradigm, if we are willing to translate it anew, has a ready audience.

Which Liberalism Failed?

In 2018, Notre Dame professor of political science Patrick Deneen argued that liberalism had failed. Deneen identified liberalism with both the contemporary target of conservative sneers (“Liberals.”) and the classical liberalism of the American founding and contemporary American conservatives.

On this perspective, both “the rights of man” and “drag-queen story-hour” have their origins in the classical liberal political philosophy of John Locke and company.

But my target is not the classical liberalism of the 17th and 18th century, which, whatever its claims of philosophical paternity, was nothing like contemporary liberalism in its social application. My target is the mainstream cultural liberalism of American life in the late twentieth to early twenty-first century.

This cultural liberalism promised freedom and prosperity for all people regardless of skin color, political affiliation, religious beliefs, or sexual identity. It emphasized toleration, with an implicit intolerance for political conservatism or traditional religion. However, that intolerance was the - by today’s standards, innocuous - political correctness of the ’90s and ’00s.

This liberalism culminated in the presidency of Barack Obama, especially in the racial universalism of his first presidential campaign and term and the victories for the gay rights movement of his second term.

If we knew nothing about what had happened thereafter, we might think that the story of liberalism had had a happy ending.

How Liberalism Failed

Yet that is not what happened.

On February 26, 2012, a young black man, Trayvon Martin, was shot by a neighborhood watchman. That shooting, along with those of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, galvanized the “Black Lives Matter” movement. Martin’s shooting, occurring in the year of Obama’s second campaign, inspired his comments, “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.”

From what I understand, this shooting was correlated with a change in Obama’s rhetoric on racial matters. Whatever the causal story, Americans’ stated opinions of the health of race relations in the US have plummeted since that year, in spite of little evidence that trends toward racial equality have changed.

Since then, galvanized also by the perception of a white backlash in the Trump election and presidency, a large portion of liberal America has come to believe that America is a systemically racist country, that whites are congenitally racist, that so-called “anti-racist” ideology and training must be widely enforced, and that DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) departments must be instituted at universities and corporations.

This was further expedited with the 2020 death of George Floyd and widespread “Black Lives Matter” protests in response, this time with the participation and support of almost all the major institutions and corporations of American life.

It is now widely believed by liberal Americans that color-blindness is racism, that reverse discrimination is not only allowable but necessary, and that America is a country that is systemically racist against blacks and other dark-skinned, non-Asian minorities.

On June 26, 2015, the US Supreme Court, including two Obama appointees, decided that traditional marriage was unconstitutional and that gay marriage was the law of the land. The gay rights movement had won. An American majority supported gay marriage, and prejudice against gays and lesbians was only declining further.

But only two months before, in April 2015, Bruce Jenner had announced that he would henceforward be known as “Caitlyn.” Without much public opposition, one would have thought that the “T” might have been quietly smuggled in with the “L,” “G,” and “B.” But instead, a new civil rights struggle began, with fights over bathrooms, the normalization and popularization of manifold gender identities, and the pushing of gender ideology onto young children.

Men began to enter women’s sports, women’s colleges, and women’s prisons. In the UK, secular feminists began to raise alarm bells: The sex-based rights of women would not be defended if the definition of woman expanded to include a great number of men.

Across the Western world, stories of detransitioners who regretted their “sex-reassignment” surgeries - and having the irreparable wounds to prove it - began to speak up, often facing violent opposition from trans-activist groups, manned (literally) by “trans women” exhibiting characteristically masculine strength and force in favor of their ideology.

Again in the UK, the British gay rights group Stonewall was split over the issue of transgenderism, with defectors founding the LGB Alliance. They raised alarm bells over the conversion of young effeminate gay men and butch lesbians into heterosexual trans women and trans men - what gender transition effectively does.

While gender transition for minors became only more available in the US, the Nordic countries were already beginning to wind down gender clinics. Eventually, the UK Tavistock clinic was shut down given concerns about the scientifically untested character of hormone “therapies” and surgeries being offered to minors. Opposition to such medical abuses has begun to mount in the US, though it has only recently begun to be permitted on the mainstream left.

Liberalism had hoped to create a world in which a black man can be president and gays can marry one another. But it was unable to produce a successful, liberal end-state. What is less evident is why.

Why Liberalism Failed

There are two explanations: Some people say that we left liberalism behind and just need to return to it. Others argue that liberalism was the problem in the first place.

There was a phase from 2016 to 2019 in which public intellectuals mostly argued for a return to liberalism. Individuals from Dave Rubin to Jordan Peterson to Bari Weiss called themselves “classical liberals,” taking up the term of political philosophy or the British sense of “liberal.” The Intellectual Dark Web was the home of these liberal defectors from the left.

Classical liberal criticisms of wokeness focused on its departure from liberal norms. Woke censorship was undermining freedom of speech. Equity, i.e., equality of outcome, was undermining equality of opportunity. Racial tribalism, and even segregation, were replacing a focus on our common humanity.

Individuals often made appeal to what being a liberal or a Democrat had meant to them a decade or two before. This dovetailed with the critique of wokeness as a religion. Bill Maher had mocked religion in his documentary Religulous; he now found himself critiquing the religion of wokeness for these same qualities of tribalism and irrationality.

Even the religious elements of the Intellectual Dark Web argued that religion provided justification for classical liberalism. Peterson mainstreamed this argument, that the recognition of the image of God in each individual, mythologically represented in Christian teaching, was the foundation of Western liberalism. Ben Shapiro, himself a classical liberal in the sense of the American right, argued this same perspective in The Right Side of History. (I made it the central claim of an unpublished book I penned at the time, The New Idealism.)

For a variety of reasons, the defense of classical liberalism has not been able to hold a new political center. While there remain defenders of this liberal approach, public discussion has shifted in a new direction.

It was liberals and their moral intuitions, after all, that wokeness hijacked. Trans rights, for instance, appealed to liberals’ concern for oppressed minorities, just as gay rights had. Black Lives Matter tugged at the heartstrings of liberals, whose moral imagination is shaped by the black-white conflict of the civil rights movement. A return to liberalism would arguably be susceptible to the same problems all over again.

Also, liberalism has no tools to adjudicate the claims of competing minorities. Trans rights, for instance, have come into conflict with women’s rights and even gay rights. Being a good liberal does not tell you how to square that circle.

Some classical liberals want to use science to adjudicate those claims. For instance, instead of religious fundamentalists, today it is evolutionary biologists who defend the sex binary, not to mention the empirical differences in personality and behavior, on average, between the sexes.

But again, it was secular liberals who “believe in science” who fell for this ideology in the first place. This suggested that religious thinking was endemic to human beings. While a small number of professional scientists appear capable of being liberals but not woke, the masses are not.

This, in turn, suggests a new moral to be taken from the failure of liberalism and secularism alone: That only a religious alternative could withstand wokeness.

The problem with liberalism, on this view, is that it tries to do without religion, at least in public life. Yet it appears that without religion, human beings merely create their own, but without the time-tested character of traditional religion. Like communism and fascism before it, wokeness was a secular religion with an ideological fury.

The death of God left a vacuum. Political ideology backfills it with a vengeance.

Ex-Liberals’ Religious Hunger

The failure of liberalism has left politically-engaged and intellectually competent Westerners searching for a religious answer. What more substantive set of ideas and ways of being can fill the void at the heart of liberalism?

Strikingly, this group of thinking people, many of them ex-liberals themselves, are more interested in civilizational Christianity than the dogmatic claims of the faith. This is because recent events have revealed the civilizational consequences of abandoning Christianity for secular liberalism. But as ex-secular liberals, they still find it difficult to believe in the supernatural or to adopt an exclusivist religion.

This fact colored, for example, the evangelical reception of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s conversion. Her Unherd article about her conversion focused on the civilizational challenges to the West and the way in which a society needs a religious core. Evangelicals accused her of being a merely civilizational Christian, of advocating Christianity not because it is true, but merely because it is useful. (In fact, her conversion was also spiritual and personal.)

However, this ignores both the legitimate concerns of ex-liberals like Ali and the valid evidence the failure of liberalism provides of humanity’s need of God.

While the failure of liberalism does not show deductively that God exists, it suggests that the West’s hypothesis that society could survive without God is returning negative results. The West left God behind, and some of what has happened is exactly what Christianity would have predicted - a loss of moral direction and a susceptibility to political ideology.

What is more, if religion is useful, it raises the further question whether it is useful in spite of its falsity or because of its truth. This is why, once again, the obsession with whether Jordan Peterson really believes is beside the point. Jordan Peterson has argued for the goodness of Christianity and its pragmatic or psychological truth.

This conclusion raises the further question of why Christianity is so darn useful. Unsurprisingly, many of Peterson’s listeners, not to mention his wife and daughter, have gone further than Peterson, concluding that Christianity is not only useful, but also true.

Short of conversion, the failure of liberalism provides much common ground for conversation. It is this kind of unthreatening conversation that is preparatory to receptiveness to Christianity’s truth. The fact that this argument does not compel belief is one of its most powerful features.

Locating the Good Soil

When I first discovered the argument from the failure of liberalism, I set out looking for some of these ex-liberals, none of whom I knew personally.

Since then, I have found these individuals in ways I could not have planned. I found at least one through F3, the national men’s workout group named for fitness, fellowship, and (non-sectarian) faith.

The online community Other Life, where Justin Murphy’s course Indie Thinkers facilitated my starting this newsletter, sent me several more. Murphy himself is one such convert; I highly recommend reading his moving Easter reflection, “On the Unleavened.”

From there, my online interaction on Substack, writing on topics at the boundary of theology, philosophy, and the Jordan Peterson discourse has brought me into contact with even more.

While I once thought of evangelism as the duty to throw seed overhand at every passerby, I have come recently to see that evangelism is as much a matter of locating good soil that will be receptive to the seed. I credit fellow writer and subscriber Ross Byrd for contributing to my understanding of this dimension of evangelism.

The intersection of the theistic argument from the failure of liberalism and these disaffected ex-liberals is a nexus of good soil and Christian seed.

Now, the ex-liberals at that nexus have some associations: A penchant for culture war, resentment against liberal elites, and even a temptation toward harder right positions. This can tempt Christians to keep our distance. (Though Christians have many of the same associations and temptations.)

But this would be to miss an opportunity: A whole group of people whose minds are open to the possibility that Christianity might be good for the world.

Whether Christianity is true - acknowledging that will depend on the openness of their hearts.

And that, in turn, will depend, not on the rigor of our arguments, but on the openness of our hearts toward them.

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I’m currently deep in the weeds of writing chapter two of my dissertation, “Content Empiricism: The Case Against Content Rationalism.”

If I had to drop the jargon and say what I’m arguing for in English, I would say I’m against concepts.

Concepts. They’re like the curtains of the mind. Whenever I want to argue that our minds are related to the things of the world, my discussion partner mentions “concepts.” The opaque curtains of the mind are drawn, and the room darkens.

We only ever see the world through our concepts, they say. But I’m looking toward my curtains right now. I don’t see anything through them.

I object to concepts most strongly when they are appealed to as blocking our view of the world itself. This happens chiefly in postmodernist and social constructionist accounts, broadly, anti-realist accounts. The world as we see it is a construction out of our concepts, which are themselves constructs.

But I’ve come to object to concepts more broadly. In analytic philosophy, there is a strong tradition that combines adherence to concepts with realism. It views our access to the real world as mediated by concepts. Concepts do not occlude our view of the world but rather enable it.

It’s a nice thought. But I fear that no view of our access to the world as mediated by concepts will do the job. No set of curtains helps us see better out the window.

What are concepts supposed to be anyway?

I take it that a concept is supposed to serve several roles:

* Concepts are more fundamental than words.

* Concepts can be expressed in definitions.

* Concepts can exist even if what they refer to does not.

First, concepts are fundamental than words.

I and a Frenchman, say, have a completely different set of words, but we share many of the same concepts. I say, “snow,” and he says, “la neige,” but we’re utilizing the same concept. That’s why, if I learn French, I’m learning a new word, but not a new concept when I learn the French word for “snow.”

Of course, there’s a popular theory that concepts do differ across languages, such that Eskimo languages, with their multiple words for different kinds of snow, possess more concepts as well. Still, the idea is that the Eskimos don’t just have more words; they have more concepts - so concepts are a kind of thing deeper and more fundamental than words.

Still, so far, we seem to be identifying concepts as corresponding one-to-one with a language with words. But concepts are supposed to be expressible in different words within a language as well. For instance, “donkey” and “ass” would express the same concept, even though they are different words. Once again, concepts are distinct from and more fundamental than words.

Second, concepts are expressed in definitions. In popular discourse, experts are often asked to “define terms.” The expectation is that they will offer a brief verbal description that covers all and only the instances that fall under that term or concept.

If different individuals are working with different definitions of terms, we take it that they have different concepts. This impedes communication and leads to people talking past each other.

This search for definitions has a philosophical basis. Socrates sought for the essence of certain key terms of human life, like justice, truth, knowledge, and the like. He and his interlocutors would try out various verbal descriptions that look much like our idea of definitions. They would test these against counter-examples, usually finding some counter-examples to any purported essence or definition.

Third, concepts exists even if what they refer to does not. For example, this is how many atheists and agnostics view the term “God.” Even if God does not exist, there is a human concept of God, more fundamental than the mere word “God,” and expressible in various traditional definitions, “the greatest possible being,” “a transcendent person,” “the prime mover,” “the creator,” and so on.

If I had to utilize the term, I would say that, here, I have expressed the very concept of a concept.

The Conceptual Theory of Thought

Now the concept of a concept gives rise to a theory of thought:

Human beings think about the world by utilizing concepts. The concepts are human constructions, but they can refer to the world insofar as things in the world match the descriptions offered in the definitions of concepts.

Think of this as a set of criteria: A concept has a set of criteria for falling under it. Nothing is a cup, for instance, unless it is concave and designed for holding liquid. We think about the world by way of concepts that provide criteria for their own membership.

Now, an important feature of definitions or descriptions is that each of the terms in the definition itself expresses a concept, and so, when we determine whether something matches the description, we are ultimately making appeal to the application of other concepts.

For example, my definition of “cup” made appeal to “concave,” “designed,” “holding,” and “liquid.” (We’ll leave aside the semantics of the other words in the phrase.) Each of these words expresses a concept, which could be spelled out in a definition, which in turn, would utilize words that indicate concepts.

It is a key question of philosophy whether there are a fundamental set of concepts or whether there is a kind of perception of reality that is non-conceptual. This would provide a touchpoint, without which, it appears that we are trapped within a circle of concepts, of coherence rather than correspondence.

Many twentieth-century empiricists tried to provide this in terms of sense-data, the Given, or logically-proper names. (Bertrand Russell thought, or hoped, that we had “logically-proper names” that directly referred to something, though he thought we could only refer to sense-data.)

But even the chief twentieth-century empiricist, W. V. O. Quine concluded that we ultimately could not determine, nor did we need to, the reference of our words. Coherence was sufficient, so long as our conceptual scheme worked, pragmatically.

I think this demonstrates the degree to which even realist and empiricist philosophers have been beholden to concepts and the theory of thought they supply.

Frege and His Concepts as Case Study

In the dissertation chapter I’m currently working on, the object of my study is a quite different figure, the founding father of analytic philosophy, Gottlob Frege.

Frege was a realist who gave concepts a quite prominent place in his theory of thought. He held that concepts were objective, immaterial entities called “senses.” We successfully refer to objects in the world based on whether they match, or meet the criteria, of the senses we grasp.

While the immaterial aspect of Frege’s thought has been abandoned by many contemporary analytic philosophers, they are beholden to his picture of thought in other ways.

But examining Frege provides an important opportunity to put my theory to the test, that is not just postmodernist and social constructionist theories of concepts that are problematic. Concepts themselves are the problem.

If even Frege’s objectivist and realist account of concepts leads to subjectivist results, then concepts themselves turn out to be nothing but curtains, occluding the mind’s view of the world.

So far, that is what I’m finding.

Our theory of thought is due for a clean-out, and it’s concepts that have got to go.

“Against Concepts” is a distinct section of The Natural Theologian, in the pages of which I’ll be detailing and summarizing the content of my Ph.D. dissertation. You can subscribe or unsubscribe to it separately if you choose at the Substack “Settings” page.

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To evangelical ears, this title will seem to read as an attempt to revivify the spirit of Jerry Falwell. And it will be said that his spirit seems alive and very well - too well.

But I have a different audience in mind. In the intellectual circles of the political right, there are many open questions about the direction of the movement, chief among them whether and how religious the right ought to be.

You see, while the popular voting bloc of the Republican party is relatively religious, the intellectual elites of conservatism are less so, and the online avant-garde of the Right is even less so.

I am not arguing that Christians ought to take up the cause of the political right.

In this essay, I am arguing that the intellectual right ought to heed its religious impulse.

Why should the right be religious?

Without a religious impulse, the intellectual Right tends almost inevitably to become a racial movement. And if it is between a religious right and a racial right, then we should choose a religious right.

The Intellectual Right Is Not the Same as the American Political Right

Now this will all sound odd to American ears. The American right is a movement based on race-neutral, libertarian capitalism, plus a dose of American civil religion. It can avoid the charge of racism by appealing to the principles of classical liberalism: freedom of speech, freedom of association, and equality before the law.

In contemporary politics, of course, standing for classical liberalism has begun to code right, and many liberals who would formerly have identified themselves with the left have found themselves more aligned with the American right.

In fact, the alignment of classical liberalism with the Western right has been going on for a long time. Friedrich Hayek was a liberal. And the Neo-conservatives were liberals who had been mugged by reality. The Intellectual Dark Web’s defense of classical liberalism was but the latest iteration.

In contemporary politics, such people are considered to be on the political right.

But in philosophical discussion, someone whose fundamental moral appeals are to principles of classical liberalism is a liberal and not a conservative.

When I address the right, I am addressing those on the intellectual right, from conservatives right-ward, to the radical right. Their fundamental moral appeals are not to neutral, liberal principles but to something more substantive.

What Unifies the Intellectual Right?

Now what unifies the group I am identifying as the intellectual right?

The Right is unified by a commitment to the preservation of a culture, which it perceives as threatened by intentional actors committed to egalitarian and liberal ideologies and by cultural forces beyond human intention including technology and capitalism.

The deep debates on the intellectual right are about the identity and content of that cultural heritage. If we say, “Western civilization,” almost everyone on the intellectual right will be on board. But opinions divide about the relative priority of Christian, philosophical, and classical dimensions of Western civilization.

The deepest divide on the intellectual right is about whether Christianity is the cultural heritage we seek to preserve, or whether Christianity is a precursor to contemporary leftism and wokeism. Christians and their sympathizers, “god-fearers,” accept Christianity as the cultural heritage they seek to preserve. But a secular or neo-pagan, Nietzschean, vitalist right rejects Christianity as but a precursor to contemporary leftist decadence.

For more on the contrast, see Johann Kurtz’s essay, “Choose boldly between Christianity and Vitalism.”

The Christian and Classical Currents of Civilization

Now Christianity is not the whole of the cultural heritage that the Christian Right seeks to preserve. The classical heritage is there as well. Christians are the source of contemporary classical schools, for example.

But how to relate the Christian and the classical is another way to frame the Right’s debate. The vitalist Right favors the classical over the Christian. The Christian right seeks to integrate them.

(There are also facets of the Christian right that repudiate the classical, about which I’ve written elsewhere.)

The Nietzschean right wants to regain the virtues of classical, pre-Christian civilization. While Christianity valorized weakness and suffering, classical civilization celebrated strength and manliness.

In identifying a conflict between Christian and classical thought, Nietzscheans are not wrong. Christ says, for example, “Do you love those who love you? Even the Gentiles do that. But I say to you, love your enemies and do good to those who hate you.”

The Nietzschean right responds, “What is this leftist drivel? Our nations will break down if we do good to those who hate us! We need to insist on particularity and love those who love us and hate those who hate us.”

(It’s called, “the friend-enemy distinction.”)

The Nietzschean Right sees a direct through-line from Christ to contemporary leftism (and wokeism). It wants to depose these and return to the classical affirmation of strength, natural hierarchy, and inequality.

Christian Criteria

Now, while contemporary Christianity is indeed subject to some of the failings of leftism and of slave morality, the Christian Right believes that Christianity can avoid these criticisms. They believe that there are both resources within the Christian tradition for doing so and that Christianity can accept resources from the outside for doing so.

In these webpages, I have made both arguments: On the one hand, I have argued that some of the very features that make evangelicals evangelicals lead us to be ineffective in public action. Our preference for piety over competence is one example. I have pointed to Christ’s parable of the dishonest manager as an example of shrewdness as a Christian virtue.

At the same time, I have encouraged Christians to look outside of their own Scriptures for knowledge about the world, to science, philosophy, and common human experience. This will include recognition of the classical tradition, of Stoicism, Epicureanism, and even aspects of classical and contemporary vitalism as sources of wisdom.

One of the reasons I am able to adjudicate between different facets of the Christian tradition is that I am a Christian. When someone tells me that Christianity leads to x, I don my theologian cap and examine x as a Christian theologian. If I find it wanting, by the criteria of Christian theology, then no number of historical examples or arguments can persuade me that Christianity leads to x. X is a theological error.

For example, many - now from the left - will argue that Christianity leads to homophobia. Having considered a Christian theology of same-sex desire, I can argue strongly that Christianity does not teach homophobia, even if many Christians have taught it and exhibited it.

In fact, this is one of the main reasons why I think the right needs religion. It needs to utilize the resources of religious morality to distinguish between right and wrong. It needs to be able to follow in the path of a Bonhoeffer or a Niebuhr and say, “While many Christians defend x, x is incorrect by Christian criteria.”

If we conclude that the whole of Jewish and Christian religion has been a failure because its secularized step-children have, we strip ourselves of many of the resources of moral thought.

The Corruption of the Best Is the Worst

I want to appeal to philosopher Ivan Illich to make this point. (Not to be confused with Tolstoy’s character Ivan Ilyich.) Illich argued forcefully that contemporary society is a secularization of Christianity. The entire schooling system Illich identified as a secularization of the process of catechesis and discipleship, universalized to the whole society and backed up by force.

But Illich did not consider this to be evidence against Christianity. Rather, he thought it provided evidence of a principle: “The corruption of the best is the worst.” Christianity is the best thing. Modern secular progressivism is a step-child of Christianity, yes, but it is the worst thing for that very reason.

Likewise, the moral idealism and egalitarianism of Christianity is a beautiful thing. When stripped of love for the natural and fallen world, it becomes a deadly thing in the hands of idealists and communists. Their idealism justifies any wrong in the name of bringing heaven here upon earth. More deaths were committed in the name of this corruption of the best then had been by the evils of barbarism that Christianity itself replaced. The solution is not to throw away Christianity altogether but to return to it.

Dead Conservatism

Without Christianity, the Right is adrift. It appeals to classical civilization and to paganism, but it cannot claim truly to embody these either. These traditions are dead, and the secular Rightist cannot claim to believe in the classical gods of paganism any more than he can claim to believe in the Christian God.

As a result, the Right ends up arguing for the perpetuation of our tradition, our people, merely because they are ours. And who is this “we” who speaks? Ultimately, it must be identified with either a nation or an ethnicity, an existing political community or an underlying community of actual historical and biological relatives. And given the arbitrariness of nationhood, ethnicity is the natural conclusion.

By the experience of the twentieth-century and the promptings of Christian conscience, I do not believe that to be the correct path.

In short, for the Right to have a conscience, it must be, whether by remaining or becoming so, a religious right.

A Way Forward

Of course, there already is a religious right on a popular level. To that group, my counsel is to become philosophical and intellectual, to lose the moralism and to up its morality. But I have made and will make such arguments elsewhere.

What about for the intellectual right?

Return to and preserve the synthesis of classical and Christian civilization that we have inherited. America was founded on such a synthesis, the Republicanism and democracy of Rome and Athens, and the egalitarian promise of Christianity: “All men are created equal.”

Celebrate the valor of manly economic and military achievement but also the virtues of family, sexual restraint, and the domestic sphere.

Honor the poor and working class; believe also in the nobility and spirituality of intellectual, cultural, and religious activity.

But if I could emphasize one thing, it would be that the right become known for a quality that is, in Christianity, the chief virtue: Love.

Conservative philosopher Roger Scruton argued that love was core to a conservative vision, the love of family, the love of home, the love of one’s countrymen, the love of the foreigner, the love of beauty, the love of God.

Yet the right is often known for a kind of callousness. The poor deserve their fate. It’s every man for himself. Society should be organized by a strict system of merit, with winners at the top and losers at the bottom. (Meritocracy, it appears, reduces to Nietzscheanism.)

On the contrary, Scruton argued, we have duties to the least among us out of love. In Christian societies, this has been shown through personal and private charity. Scruton argued that a limited welfare state could actually express the love of a state for its people. While I leave the policy implications for another day - though I considered them here - a conservatism of love and mutual belonging would be an improvement on the conservatism of meritocracy, finger-wagging, and exclusion.

The resources of such a conservatism are in the Christian tradition. It is to there that I would encourage the right to return.

The Natural Theologian is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Further Reading on the Intellectual Right

For further reading on the secular radical right, please read Matthew Rose’s A World After Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right. For a brief introduction, read his recent First Things piece, “Suicide of the Radical Right.”

For a history of the American Right, see Matthew Continetti’s The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism.

For the greatest modern statement of intellectual conservatism, read Roger Scruton’s The Meaning of Conservatism.

For a history of one literary figure of the radical right, Ernst Jünger, see “Through Every Human Heart: A case study in morality via the life of Ernst Junger,” by Eusephus, also known as “Brent” from my “Berating the God-Fearers.”

For a catalog of the factions of the contemporary intellectual right, read John Arcto’s recent and ongoing series.

And for perspective from a former White Nationalist (no longer), now constructing an Alt Right 2.0 (make of that what you will), read Walt Bismarck’s “Why I’m No Longer a White Nationalist.”

For a contemporary full-throated embrace of pre-Christian classicism, read Imperium Press: “What On Earth Is Going On In This Blog? An Introduction to the Imperium Press Substack.”

For Richard Hanania’s own embrace of Nietzscheanism, see “Building a Mythos for the Non-Christian Right.”

I recently spent some time with Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Nature and Destiny of Man and Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Writings of Reinhold Niebuhr. This comes on the heels of my writing about Christian realism, a theology and philosophy indebted to Niebuhr.

Niebuhr reminds me of Jordan Peterson. Like Peterson, he brought the claims of Christianity to public and political debate. Also like Peterson, Niebuhr arouses suspicion for whether he was really a Christian, this in spite of him being the most influential American theologian of the 20th century.

Here are five ways that Reinhold Niebuhr is still relevant to contemporary Christianity.

1. Niebuhr Is Not an Evangelical

Thank God.

Niebuhr is, for me, the answer to the questions I began to raise in “The Evangelical Critics of the Evangelical Majority” and “Three Mindsets that Make Evangelicals Ineffective.” In the former essay, I registered the critique of the evangelical majority coming from believers disaffected with the subculture of evangelicalism and its alignment with partisan Republican politics. In writing it, I began to think that a sufficient Christian public theology must bridge this divide, rather than firmly take up the cause of majority evangelicalism.

In “Three Mindsets,” I began to detect that the cause of the problems with the evangelical majority was a mindset of pious and internally consistent virtue-signalling within the evangelical tribe. I contrast that with a hard-bitten realist approach concerned with prudence and effectiveness in public action.

People critique Niebuhr for being outside of that evangelical movement, and even for being a theological liberal. In fact, Niebuhr was among the foremost critics of theological liberalism, the others being the Neo-Orthodox theologians Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. However, Niebuhr and Barth were outside of the American movement of evangelicalism. I would argue that they were the most able critics of liberalism because they had been theological liberals, something few evangelicals could claim. As a result, their critique of theological liberalism was most persuasive and cutting to the liberal theological movement.

2. Niebuhr’s Historical Analysis Beats the Trad-Cath One

The Reformation did not lead to the downfall of Western Civilization.

When in the belly of presuppositionalism, I ran toward Catholic intellectuals to teach me about the natural law. I took several summer seminars at The Witherspoon Institute, with Robert George and the other authors of What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense. At that event and others like it, I was told that my conversion to Catholicism was imminent.

It was there that I also first heard the Catholic critique of the American founding, that its lack of religious establishment was, implicitly, secularism. From there, I learned that the Catholic critique went deeper: The Reformation was the ultimate cause of “drag queen story-hour.” Purveyors of this incredibly partisan and anti-American narrative are - strangely enough - some of the most well-respected religious public intellectuals in America today.

In Niebuhr, I read a better defense of the relationship of Protestantism to liberalism and modernity than I have seen even in contemporary attempts. (I applaud those of The Davenant Institute and associated intellectuals.) If we want to blame today’s optimistic humanism on an early modern movement, Niebuhr argues, the Renaissance would be the culprit, not the Reformation. What is more, the idea that a return to 13th-century conditions would heal our woes is another version of the kind of perfectionism and utopianism that Niebuhr critiques evangelicals, Marxists, and liberals for alike.

It’s time for a renewed Protestant public theology. And Niebuhr should be a guide and model.

3. Niebuhr Was a Public Theologian

And we should be public theologians too.

Reinhold Niebuhr is a striking example of the kind of theology I aim to offer and the kind of theologian I aspire to be. His theology avoids unprofitable intra-Christian debates and is focused on the engagement with fields of knowledge and human action beyond Christian circles.

The publicity of his theology was effective. Niebuhr had the role of American thought-leader as a theologian in the 1950s in a way we can no longer imagine. He was on the cover of Time Magazine. His theology moved and motivated key players in American history and politics at the time, chiefly, Martin Luther King, Jr.

No one perceived Niebuhr as a partisan Christian, only speaking in Christian-ese to other Christians. Rather, he spoke to all people, all Americans, by arguing on grounds that were commonly accessible. Even when he argued for the relevance of Christian doctrine to secular debates he presented Christian doctrines as empirically defensible and relevant. I had previously attributed the following quotation to G. K. Chesterton, but apparently it belongs to Niebuhr: “The doctrine of original sin is the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith.”

4. Niebuhr Was an Orthodox Peterson

And evangelicals still don’t think he was a Christian.

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about the way Jordan Peterson is perceived by evangelicals. This perception is due to the unique role Peterson plays in communicating Christianity to secular and Christian alike by arguing on publicly accessible grounds and not publicly professing faith but purely the pragmatic utility and psychological significance of Christianity.

Guess who played a similar role and was perceived in a similar way by evangelicals as a result? You guessed it: Niebuhr. To this day Niebuhr’s own faith has been called into question by Christians up to and including even Stanley Hauerwas. (Is Hauerwas even an evangelical?) Niebuhr made sufficient statements to make clear his departure from liberalism and adherence to orthodox Christian belief in the resurrection. Nevertheless, he often focused on and spoke about the Christian faith in terms of its philosophical significance and its status as true myth.Personally, I am struck by Niebuhr’s capacity to play the role of Peterson as a believing Christian. It inspires me that I and others might attempt to do the same.

5. Niebuhr Used Theological Doctrines Practically

Grrr… Liberal.

Much in the way I recommended in “The Post-Theology Nerd,” Niebuhr abides by the test of theological significance I proposed there: “A theological distinction is significant if it has implications for living out the Christian life.” For example, he avoids quibbles about predestination that are divorced from practical significance. Instead, he fronts a kind of Augustinianism that had deep implications for liberal philosophy, international politics, and a sober approach to racial justice.

For instance, Niebuhr takes the doctrine of sin to mean that no faction can take itself to be without conflicted motivations. In particular, he applies this to political radicals, whether of the economic or racial variety. These groups are inclined to apply a hermeneutic of suspicion to the actions of their political adversaries, but not themselves. Recognition of the universality of human sin undermines a kind of activist spirit and belligerence that is equally apparent on both sides of the political and religious aisle:

“This is the truth in the Marxist theory of rationalization…that all culture is corrupted by an ideological taint. The unfortunate fact about the Marxist theory is that…the enemy is charged with this dishonesty, but the Marxist himself claims to be free of it. … This is, of course, merely to commit the final sin of self-righteousness and to imagine ourselves free of the sin which we discern in the enemy.”

The Niebuhr Option

While Niebuhr’s ideas have been claimed by both right and left, Niebuhr’s own heritage is ecclesially homeless. He would certainly have been canceled from his own Union Theological Seminary had he been employed there today. But his views and his methods are outside the mainstream of American evangelicalism.

This might suggest a failure on Niebuhr’s part. His theology has not borne fruit. It hasn’t lead to a persisting Neo-Orthodox, Christian realist movement.

Rather, I would say that his theology clearly bore fruit, but in American public life rather than in the building of a religious tribe.

Likewise, a lack of followers today does not indicate the failure of Niebuhr’s theology. It indicates that his theology remains an option, but one - so far - not taken.

The evangelical takes on Jordan Peterson’s “We Who Wrestle With God” tour are coming out. Jake Meador attended Peterson’s lecture in Omaha and says that Peterson’s ideology is focused on excellence to the exclusion of mercy. Aaron Renn attended in Indianapolis and says that Peterson’s message is, at the end of the day, a New Age alternative to Christianity.

Anna and I attended on Valentine’s Day in St. Louis. It was a moving experience. Here are some of our reflections.

Anna’s Reflections

Going to hear Jordan Peterson was quite a life event for me. Like many others, I started listening to him in 2016 when he splashed onto the stage after protesting Bill C-16 in Canada. I spent much of 2017 struggling with depression, and the best help I found was in the hours I spent listening to him talk about meaning, mental health, and motivation for living. I still remember the streets I walked as I listened to his lectures and the puzzles I did as I listened to his debates with Sam Harris. 

Since then, I was greatly moved by his health issues and identified with much of his suffering and depression. I am also deeply grateful for the world of people to which he has introduced me: Jonathan Haidt, Camille Paglia, Douglas Murray, Dave Rubin, Sam Harris, Jonathan Pageau, Andrew Huberman, Abigail Shrier, Slavoj Zizek, and countless others. 

Going to see him was like going to meet my hero in real life, and even though I’d heard much of the material before, I was no less amazed by his talk. These days, I don’t get to listen to much undistracted. I struggle to get things from sermons because three kids clamor for my attention. Some of my euphoria probably came from sitting uninterrupted, just listening and thinking, for two hours straight. 

However, there was much more to my enamor with Peterson. I have never heard someone be able to “riff” on Genesis 2–3 for that long with that much insight. I’ve been in the evangelical world all my life, so I have heard countless sermons, read many books and articles, and taught on that passage many times. Yet I hear more new truths from Peterson than from anyone else. 

Peterson’s greatness comes from being one of our day’s greatest conversationalists. I don’t care for his writing (I won’t read his books) or Twitter habits, but he is incredible at leading you through a conversation, which is a skill that is sorely lacking today. Most pastors and professors talk at you, whereas Peterson helps lead you through truths, even when monologuing for 90 minutes. He is even better when having a conversation with someone like Camille Paglia, Sam Harris, or Douglas Murray.

“Wrestling with the truth” is how Peterson talks and thinks, and I am dismayed to hear criticisms of him from Christians that neglect this. They come from both the more conservative who don’t find him pure enough and from the more liberal who say he’s too capitalist or right-wing. But both miss the actual content and truth of what he is offering to millions of people. 

Peterson’s project to help others with the problem of pain is also my goal in counseling. Suffering in this life is our greatest issue and what keeps people from believing in God. And even as a Christian, I am not finding answers to suffering in the Christian world but in Peterson’s material and interviews. Jungianism, symbolism, and archetypes are all vehicles to get at the truth, not hindrances.

His interview with Pageau on suffering after his health scare was one of the greatest “how-to-talk-about-suffering” conversations I’ve ever heard. His interview with detransitioner Chloe Cole was an incredible window into how a great therapist can pull out someone’s story. His conversation with Camille Paglia opened my eyes to insights on postmodernism, gender, and other forms of feminism. In a Joe Rogan podcast, he offered an incredibly powerful take on Scripture.  

Lastly, Peterson’s words on, and example of, marriage and family seems better than anything I have heard taught on in the church. Because we attended on Valentine’s Day, (so romantic, I know,) there was a lot about love and marriage. I loved seeing him and his wife Tammy do the event together. Much of Christian teaching on Genesis 1–3 tends to get caught up in the submission-in-marriage debate, but Peterson transcended this.

The church is in crisis, especially because of how many marriages fail and a lack of integrity in leaders. In his own marriage and life, Peterson has displayed integrity, love, and honor to his wife, so I want to listen to him on the subject of marriage.

Given our appreciation of Peterson, Joel and I may end up like these guys:

Peterson’s Rebuke to Evangelicals

At the beginning of his lecture in St. Louis, Jordan Peterson addressed directly those who would have him confess Christian faith.

This is my own rendition of what he said, constructed out of things he has also said elsewhere:

“People ask me, ‘Do you believe in God?’

And it’s like, why do you want me to say that I do? And to say it publicly?

It’s like you’re asking me to stand on a street-corner and loudly proclaim my own righteousness, my alignment with the highest good. It’s like, I’m not going to do that.

And anyway, who are you to declare that you are on the side of the highest good? Who are you to claim the name of Christ or God and to say that you really and truly believe it?

Because if you really believed that God existed, you would act as though he did in every moment and every way. I’m not ready to claim that. Are you?

So my answer remains, ‘I act as though God exists, and I’m terrified that he might.’

Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord

Some criticize Peterson for his focus on Jungian and literary archetypes over literal truth. They say that he offers an alternative religion of self-help and New Age instead of Christianity.

But this is a failure to hear Peterson. Peterson is not offering a religion. He is exploring the universal dimensions of morality and myth, the psychological significance of religion, both what religious stories mean for everyone even if they aren’t literally true, and what they would mean for our behavior if they were true, if we truly acted as if God exists.

Let’s deal with the theological objection first: Evangelicals read Peterson as offering a Pelagian gospel of self-salvation.

But what Peterson is actually articulating is the content of the natural law and the moral teachings of Christ.

Of course, evangelical theology, especially of the more intellectual variety, has recently been neglecting these for a gospel of free grace. Jesus’s “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees” has been disemboweled:

“Unless your righteousness exceeds theirs - which it can’t and won’t by your power, so you need the righteousness of Christ! Then you can be justified even if your life is not exceptional.”

Peterson is raising the bar as high as Christ raised it. There is no salvation disconnected from bearing the fruit of righteousness.

One of the reasons we accuse Peterson is because we think that the content of revelation in Scripture is totally disconnected from God’s revelation in nature: The gospel story has no continuity with the rest of human religion, philosophy, and literature - all of which promote self-salvation. But Peterson’s message is that the biblical story is one that has resonance with all the rest of human religion, philosophy, and literature, and that is even built into biology.

This brings us back to the question of the allegorical, moral, and psychological reading of Scripture. If we think that this is just an attempt to avoid the literal meaning of Scripture, we place ourselves outside of the mainstream of Christian theology through the centuries.

The consensus of Medieval Christian theology was that Scripture had a four-fold sense, in addition to the literal, there were the allegorical, the tropological (moral), and the anagogical (eschatological). Contemporary Protestants, the Reformed Evangelical in particular, are inclined to speak as though we have left behind the allegorical and moral altogether. Our Christ-centered preaching is the literal sense combined with seeing how it points to Christ.

But…that’s what the Medievals called the allegorical. The way in which the Old Testament could be read as embodying “types” of Christ (typological), is in turn deeply connected to seeing Christ as an archetype through all of history and literature. The depth of meaning of Scripture should indicate to us the depth of meaning of all literature and prime us to see Christ as distantly as the places where Peterson sees him.

At Wheaton College, Leland Ryken taught his evangelical students about the literary and archetypal reading of Scripture. This was necessary because the evangelical populace does not read the Bible as literature, but only as either a book of isolated one-liners or a textbook of true doctrine.

In showing believers and non-believers alike biblical archetypes throughout culture, history, and biology, Peterson is preparing the way for openness to wrestling with Scripture and with God.

Jordan Peterson presents believers and unbelievers with the archetypal and moral dimensions of biblical teaching. He argues for the psychological import of what the Bible presents.

Now, does Christianity teach more than what Peterson teaches? Yes, but it does not teach less than what Peterson teaches.

Unfortunately, for decades, if not centuries, Christianity has been teaching less than Peterson teaches. The realm of imagination and archetype has been abandoned.

In the first half of the 20th century, Christians were at the forefront of the realm of imagination and archetype. J.R.R. Tolkien exercised a Christian imagination in his works. But importantly, Tolkien resisted attempts to read his writing as allegory. A work is not a true work of imagination, but propaganda, if a heavy-handed writer moralizes to his audience. While Lewis’s allegory was relatively transparent (not that this has prevented non-Christians from enjoying the Chronicles of Narnia), Tolkien wanted to write a work that stood on its own by resonating with our human nature and taste for the fantastic.

Tolkien resisted being a “Christian writer.” As a result, we can imagine the evangelicals coming after him today for not naming Aragorn “Christagorn.”

Andrew Klavan, Daily Wire pundit and novelist, said that, when he became a Christian, he prayed the following prayer:

“Lord, you made me a writer, and you have now made me a Christian.

“But please do not make me a Christian writer.”

Why? Because a Christian writer performs a parochial task, for the other faithful. He writes Christian things to a Christian audience.

But only a writer who remains in the realm of the purely human, the archetypal, the natural, in this case, the realm of imagination, can speak effectively to all people and prepare the way of the Lord. The realm of imagination is a preparatio evangelium, a preparation for the gospel.

Celebrity Conversions

When we expect or ask Jordan Peterson to become a card-carrying, and card-displaying evangelical, it’s as though we’re comparing him negatively with Justin Bieber’s or Kanye West’s professions of faith. Genuine as they may be (we don’t know), they lack sturdiness. We know that celebrity conversions are unreliable historically. They are also compromised by their publicity.

It’s more exciting to see seeds take root quickly and flower immediately so that we can reap the harvest rapidly. It’s less compelling to wait for a farmer to spend years preparing the soil or to watch a seed take deep root when the sprout has not yet broken ground.

Peterson’s work has, in fact, significantly affected the quality and condition of the soil. Justin Brierley, in The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, details how the atheist-Christian debates of yesteryear have been almost entirely eclipsed. That is the soil in which my interest in theology and philosophy was cultivated. It helped to grow certain kinds of atheists and certain kinds of Christians. They were predominantly male, rather abrasive in their tone and habits of speech, and they had a habit of talking past each other.

If we have yet to see Peterson’s faith flower, we have already seen the fruit borne of his work as a farmer. Does he acknowledge the owner of the farm as his Lord? It’s difficult to say. But he’s doing the Lord’s work. In fact, he’s using methods of cultivation of which professing evangelicals have been ignorant. But are we more concerned to see our own methods of cultivation be perpetuated or to see the work be done?

The Parable of the Two Sons

“What do you think?

A man had two sons.

And he went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’

And he answered, ‘I will not,’ but afterward he changed his mind and went.

And he went to the other son and said the same.

And he answered, ‘I go, sir,’ but did not go.

Which of the two did the will of his father?”

They said, “The first.”

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In A Natural History of Natural Theology, my late professor Helen De Cruz (1978-2025) and husband Johan De Smedt write that “most modern versions of the design argument do not take natural selection and its principle of cumulative selective retention into account as a viable explanation” (75).

Advocates of the design argument have not proven that the argument remains valid after Darwin; they—we—have simply ignored natural selection.

Dr. De Cruz, who served on the committee for my dissertation prospectus, died this June at the age of 46 of an aggressive illness. She left behind two children and a husband. Her work in philosophy was truly remarkable, not to mention her prior Ph.D. in art history, her fiction-writing, and lute-playing(!). While this article engages in criticism, it arises from deep respect for her amazing, cross-disciplinary scholarship.

However, while De Cruz and De Smedt argue that contemporary natural theologians ignore natural selection, their own description of natural selection is simplistic.

They illustrate the process with an example of Richard Dawkins’. And they begin with an important admission:

The likelihood that a computer program that generates random combinations of letters will produce by pure chance a phrase from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, such as METHINKSITISLIKEAWEASEL, is vanishingly small.

(I did the math; that’s less than 1 in 1032!)

But here’s how natural selection can overcome this probability threshold:

However, allowing the computer to retain the correct letters at each attempt will produce the sentence in no more than 23 × 26 = 598 runs.

Allowing the computer to retain the correct letters at each attempt?

That’s not natural selection. That’s cheating.

What I greatly respect about Dr. De Cruz’s work is its careful integration of science with philosophy and theology. For example:

But on this point, I find myself disappointed.

I had hoped for a robust analysis of wherein modern evolutionary science conflicts with the design argument. Instead, I find an inaccurate overestimate of the power of natural selection, with the assumption that natural selection is the sole causal source of biological evolution.

De Cruz and De Smedt are also dismissive toward Bill Dembski and the theory of Intelligent Design. (At least they are willing to cite Dembski!) As a result, I find myself craving more accurate analysis of the power and limits of modern evolutionary theory and the remaining viability of teleological thinking in science and philosophy.

In this article, I’ll argue that De Cruz and De Smedt’s analysis of natural selection assumes the presence of design and, citing Bill Dembski’s recent article on “the conservation of information,” argue that natural selection explains only a fraction of biological diversity.

While structural biologists, admitting the problem, propose additional mechanisms of evolution, I conclude that no naturalistic explanation of the origin of biological diversity yet exists. The design argument, therefore, remains as viable as ever.

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1. Natural Selection…Plus Additional Programming

In his analysis of the origin of biological forms, Aristotle discussed three kinds of cause: Chance, Necessity, and Purpose.

(This is distinct from his “four causes” idea.)

In his contemporary defense of the design inference, Dembski discusses the same three, calling them “chance, regularity, and design.”

But De Cruz and De Smedt argue that this is to ignore a fourth causal option that modern science has turned up: Natural selection.

Admittedly, natural selection is not independent of the other three causes. It is a combination of chance and regularity, and purportedly, it mimics or creates the appearance of design.

On this analysis, Aristotle’s trichotomy has been superseded by Darwin’s tetrachotomy. Hence, contemporary teleologists, including intelligent design theorists, are working with an outdated palette of options.

For pre-Darwinians like Aristotle and Cicero, and even William Paley, “natural selection was not in the pool of possible explanations,” De Cruz and De Smedt admit. But for modern advocates “of the design argument,” De Cruz and De Smedt allege that they “do not take natural selection and its principle of cumulative selective retention into account as a viable explanation” (75). Modern advocates of design are simply ignoring the advance made by Darwin’s discovery of natural selection.

But as revealed in the above example, De Cruz and De Smedt confuse natural selection’s combination of chance and regularity with the workings of a pre-programmed filter.

While the chance of producing METHINKSITISLIKEAWEASEL by chance is prohibitively low, they argue that, by the “principle of cumulative selective retention,” a computer could reduce the odds from <1 in 1032 to something that could be produced in less than 600 attempts:

Allowing the computer to retain the correct letters at each attempt will produce the sentence in no more than 23 × 26 = 598 runs.

But a computer program that “retained the correct letters at each attempt” would not be a combination only of chance and regularity, but of chance, regularity, and design.

Chance is involved in the mechanism of random-letter-generation.

Regularity governs the mechanical working of the computer’s selection mechanism.

But allowing, i.e., programming, a “computer to retain the correct letters at each attempt” would require design.

While De Cruz and De Smedt are confident that “Darwin…came up with natural selection as a naturalistic explanation of design,” their own description of its workings—even as highly-educated, scientifically-informed philosophers over a century and a half after the publication of On the Origin of Species—tacitly invokes design.

2. Information In, Information Out

This week, mathematician and philosopher Bill Dembski shared on his Substack an academic article he published earlier this month: “The Law of Conservation of Information: Search Processes Only Redistribute Existing Information.”

In that article, Dembski argues the following:

Conservation of information sparked scientific interest once a recurring pattern was noticed in the evolutionary computing literature. In grappling with the creation of information through evolutionary algorithms, this literature consistently revealed that the information outputted by such algorithms always needed first to be programmed into them.

Thus, the primary goal of this literature—to uncover how information could be created from scratch or de novo—was shown to be misconceived: the information was not created but instead shuffled around or smuggled in, implying that it already existed in some form or other.

Information output in these situations therefore always presupposed a counterbalancing input of prior information.

In other words, mechanistic processes are incapable of producing new information. The most a mechanistic process can do is shuffle it around or destroy it.

Accordingly, while natural selection was an important scientific discovery, it does not have the power to produce new biological information (or lines of Shakespeare). It can only reshuffle or destroy existing information.

Consider an example of biological evolution for which the mechanism of natural selection is adequate: The evolution of the polar bear.

Scientists believe that the polar bear shares a common ancestor with the brown bear and the North American black bear. The evidence of this is their shared genetic material, less two notable mutations.

One mutation is to a gene

involved in fat metabolism, which allows the polar bear to have a diet that ‘contains a very large proportion of fat (much higher than in the diet of brown bears)’ (Behe, Darwin Devolves, 16). The second gene “is associated with pigmentation, and changes in it are probably responsible for the blanching of the [polar bear] ancestors’ brown fur” (17).

(I wrote about this here.)

Yet both mutations, when they occur in other mammals, are damaging.

“When the same gene is mutated in humans or mice, studies show it frequently leads to high levels of cholesterol and heart disease” (Behe, 17).

Likewise, the loss of pigmentation in the fur was a loss of functional genetic material, not the creation of a new gene for white fur.

As I once summarized it,

“Scientists have reason to believe that both variations that occurred in polar bears [involved] a loss of genetic information that, as we saw, is shared by mammals, up to and including humans.”

In other words, in a scientifically demonstrable instance where biological evolution was caused by natural selection, no new information was created. Biological information was lost. And this loss of biological information was, by accident, beneficial. It was selectively retained without any pre-programming—without any design.

Importantly, however, while natural selection can explain how the polar bear evolved from the biological kind of bear that was the common ancestral population of the brown bear and the North American black bear, it cannot explain the origin of the biological information that gave rise to that ancestral kind of bear in the first place.

Natural selection explains the survival, but not the arrival of the fittest.

Natural selection explains the speciation of an off-shoot, whose differentiating mutations are damaging to existing functional genes.

But what natural selection cannot explain is the origin of biological kinds.

3. Evolutionists, Don’t Give Up!

In What Darwin Got Wrong, philosopher Jerry Fodor and cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini report that, among structural biologists, no one believes that natural selection is sufficient to explain biological diversity: “None of them is ‘that kind’ of Darwinist any more” (xiv).

However, Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini report that this admission from structural biologists has yet to influence “informed opinion in [other] fields,” including those they have worked in, like philosophy and cognitive science (xiv). “In all of these, neo-Darwinism is taken as axiomatic; it goes literally unquestioned.”

Neo-Darwinism: Random genetic mutation and chance-based natural selection suffice to explain the origin of biological diversity.

They include an entire appendix of scholars outside of “‘wet’ biology” assuming neo-Darwinism axiomatically to demonstrate this.

They could add to their list De Cruz and De Smedt’s axiomatic assumption of neo-Darwinism (or adaptationism).

While I am disappointed by De Cruz and De Smedt’s analysis of how modern evolutionary science affects the viability of the design argument, this does not mean that evolutionary science has not affected the design argument.

In the first place, natural selection has been shown to have the power to explain variations in the color of moths, the separate, convergent evolution of sub-varieties of Cichlids (a kind of African fish) in merely thousands of years, and the evolution of the polar bear from an ancestral kind of bear.

In the second place, as Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini describe—as well as Andreas Wagner in Arrival of the Fittest—contemporary structural and computational biologists are considering many other causal mechanisms that (may) contribute to biological evolution. Especially, they are considering non-random sources of variation from the internal structure of the organism and the possibility-space of biological forms.

Now, I don’t want to advocate a “God of the gaps” argument any more than the next guy. So bring on new mechanisms of evolution, evolutionists.

But let’s not pretend that anyone has yet demonstrated that there is a naturalistic mechanism that can produce the panoply of biological diversity and apparent design.

Because so far, the best of evolutionary science has explained only a fraction of biological adaptation.

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Further Reading:

This is our first joint post. Enjoy!

I (Anna) have been counseling many people who experience obsessive thoughts and actions due to OCD. Some of them experience a cognitive distortion where a person conflates the thought of doing something with actually having done it.

Psychologists call this “thought-action fusion.” The mind conflates the thought with the action. 

Meanwhile, I (Joel) have been writing about sexual desire and sin, mainly same-sex attraction. I have argued that same-sex attraction is not sin.

But in that discussion, many people argue that same-sex attraction is sin, on the basis of Matthew 5:27-28:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”

In this passage, Jesus says that lust is equivalent to adultery. Doesn’t that mean that thought is equivalent to action? If so, then Jesus exacerbates the OCD symptom of thought-action fusion.

But no: Equating thought and action is incorrect. Thought-action fusion is a cognitive distortion, and Jesus does not want us to commit it. This essay explains how Christianity can inadvertently promote thought-action fusion.

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What Is Thought-Action Fusion?

People who experience thought-action fusion (TAF), especially devout Christians, feel guilt and anxiety about their moral status, by equating thought and action.

Two types of thought-action fusion can occur:

Likelihood TAF: This is the belief that thinking about a negative event makes it more likely to occur.

Moral TAF: This is the belief that thinking about a negative event is morally equivalent to actually carrying out that event.

With “likelihood TAF,” an individual believes that thinking about their house catching fire makes it more likely for the fire to occur. With “moral TAF,” the individual believes that thinking about harming a loved one is as morally wrong as actually harming them.

TAF is especially associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder but can also be present in other anxiety-related disorders.

Logic cannot convince someone with OCD that they did not commit an act and quiet their anxiety. One woman I (Anna) have been counseling has been through medical school but is still convinced that if she walks past an abandoned band-aid (without touching it), she has been contaminated and needs to go through her cleaning rituals. 

A major category of TAF is intrusive thoughts of “unacceptable/taboo thoughts with mental/covert compulsions and reassurance-seeking.” Their most taboo thoughts tend to be centered around pedophilia, homosexual desires, blasphemy, and violent acts. 

Everyone experiences unwanted, intrusive, taboo thoughts of some kind. Individuals with thought-action fusion tend to attach excessive weight to these thoughts.

Another woman I’ve been counseling is convinced that she is a pedophile because she has intrusive images, thoughts, and fears of molesting children. 

“What if I ran this person over with my car?” 

Many people have thought of this. It’s actually not weird; it’s human to have some intrusive thoughts. Usually, we dismiss the thought and move on.

But someone struggling with thought-action fusion might say, “I wanted to kill that person; so, I must be a murderer.” They are overwhelmed by this. 

The same goes for unwanted sexual thoughts: “I had a thought of committing adultery with that person; so, I must be an adulterer because I wanted it.” Then the person will spiral into “cleansing rituals” of making sure that she did not want that thought.  

Christians place a lot of value on the character of our inner lives and thoughts. This makes us particularly susceptible to TAF. 

Christian scripture frequently refers to how we ought to think:

Philippians 4:8: “Whatever is true, … honorable …  just … pure … lovely … commendable, … think about these things.”

2 Corinthians 10:5: “Take every thought captive to obey Christ.”

We read these Scriptures and conclude that thought is as important as action. Christians who have obsessive thoughts find their thought-action fusion reinforced by Christ’s teaching.

Christianity provides rituals for those seeking reassurance: Confession and repentance. But treating TAF requires breaking the cycle of obsession (confession) and compulsion (repentance). When an OCD sufferer confesses thoughts as sins and repents, seeking reassurance, the thoughts can become more powerful and frequent. It is a vicious cycle.

But in treating OCD, counselees must stop the compulsions and rituals, which means not repenting of these thoughts.

In my experience working with clients, not repenting for thoughts has helped my OCD clients reduce the compulsive, unwanted thoughts. Saying “Stop doing this thing!” will terrify someone with OCD. But my job is to help the client see that these intrusive thoughts are not sins, and that they are experiencing the distortion of thought-action fusion.

Anyone Who Looks, Intentionally

In Matthew 5:28, Christ appears to teach that lusting after a woman is equivalent to committing adultery with her in your heart.

In this essay, I (Joel) argued that sexual attraction is NOT equivalent to committing adultery in the heart.

For example, if the young man in the above image merely felt attraction to the woman in the foreground, he wouldn’t have sinned.

Obviously, if he hops into bed with her, he has sinned.

Jesus says that the young man could also commit adultery with her in his heart. He would do that by an inward act of imagination and lust.

In the linked essay, I argued that Jesus is condemning inward action in addition to outward action, but not mere attraction.

But take a second look at the verse:

“Everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”

What does Jesus say is sin? In addition to committing adultery, intentionally looking at a woman to lust.

Hold on. Looking is an outward action. When a man looks, observers know it. Especially women. And that’s what the man in the “distracted boyfriend” meme is doing.

Jesus also says “with lustful intent.” Committing adultery in the heart is intentional.

Those who say same-sex attraction is a sin argue that unintentional and unchosen desires are sins. But Jesus doesn’t say that.

In Matthew 5:28, Jesus condemns intentional looking. He doesn’t condemn peoples’ unwanted desires, unbidden attractions, and unintended feelings or thoughts. He doesn’t encourage us to commit thought-action fusion.

I suggest a new translation:

“Anyone who intentionally looks at a woman to lust, but not everyone who experiences unwanted sexual attraction, has already committed adultery in his heart.”

Helping Those in Misery 

Pastor John Andrew Bryant writes powerfully about his OCD in A Quiet Mind to Suffer With. As he describes it, the thoughts he experiences are not his own:

“If they are mine, they are only mine in this way: that I am the one they are happening to. I am the one who has to see them.”

Key to Bryant’s being able to function well with OCD was recognizing that he is not his thoughts. They happen to him. 

Christians do more damage to these sufferers when we say, “your thoughts are sins.” “Your intrusive thoughts about violence or sex are sin.” “Your sexual orientation is sin.”

Jesus does speak about hating someone in your heart as “liable to judgment” (though not equivalent to murder). But hatred and lust in the heart still require intention.

It is not sin to have intrusive, unwanted thoughts in our minds. That’s a result of being in a fallen world and having broken bodies and minds. “The fall brought mankind into an estate of sin and misery.”

Those who focus on the sinfulness of sexual thoughts and temptations confuse thought and action. This causes Christians more shame and hiding:

“The anxiety and shame these irrational thoughts and sudden warnings create is tremendous. The content is unspeakable, the peril feels unmentionable, so you make sure you tell no one.”

The Book of Job is dedicated to warning us not to chalk it all up to sin in this miserable life. Job’s friends represent the voice of Satan when they keep telling Job to repent: “You’re suffering? You must have sinned!”

Had Job sinned? No.

When Christians tell people that their unwanted thoughts are sins, we are parroting Job’s friends.

Instead, let’s come to fellow sinners and sufferers with comfort and reassurance. Unwanted thoughts are part of the human condition; and some people experience it even worse, as OCD.

Those who are suffering from OCD and other mental disorders have a unique experience of life that we struggle to understand. However, God does understand our suffering completely: “He knows our frame; he knows that we are but dust.”

To those suffering from thought-action fusion, our message is not, repent of your thoughts. It’s, your thoughts are not sins.

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I’ve critiqued the evangelical subculture for some of its mindsets that lead to ineffectiveness in public action.

But during the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, when the Neo-Evangelical movement was just getting up and running, theologians like Emil Brunner, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Richard and Reinhold Niebuhr were articulating a compelling, non-partisan Christian political ethic known as Christian realism.

Christian realism provides key solutions to the problems of evangelical ineffectiveness and deserves to be revived and adopted by contemporary Christians, evangelical and otherwise.

What Is “Realism?”

“Realism” is related to but different than the philosophical view I argue for, (for example, in “Toward a Sophisticated Realism”) which basically defends the reality of a world external to our minds, and the possibility of direct knowledge of it, unmediated by presuppositions, worldviews, concepts, frameworks, and theories.

Here, “realism” refers to something that is best demonstrated: Not to pick on the Catholics, but consider Catholic teaching on contraception and marriage. While rigorous in its moral demands, to hold that contraception is inherently immoral in the modern day is just unrealistic. This is demonstrable from the small percentage of Catholics who abide by the teaching; it is clear from the fact that contraception can be used carefully, in order not to accidentally commit abortion, and from the fact that the needs and demands of particular couples may at times require its use. It is unrealistic to maintain a moral demand that is belied by the contemporary historical and material situation.

Realism is not relativism, however. It does not give license to reduce moral demands down to what people can, without difficulty, obey. For example, demanding that same-sex attracted Christians abide by the Christian sexual ethic is not necessarily unrealistic. But it is unrealistic to expect them to abide by it without cultivating a culture that welcomes them, encourages them, and supports them in celibacy or mixed-orientation marriage (and without quibbling about the adjective “gay”).

However, realism often does involve taking the risk of either not abiding by certain moral standards or appearing not to. For instance, Dietrich Bonhoeffer held strongly that one should obey the governing authorities, on the basis of Christian, and especially Lutheran teaching. However, when Nazism reached certain heights, he felt that to retain his purported moral purity at great cost to others’ lives would be, in the end, deeply wrong. That spurred his involvement in the plot to overthrow Hitler, which eventually led to his imprisonment and death.

Today, “realism” is most commonly spoken of in the realm of foreign policy, war, and international relations broadly. This kind of realism holds that moral evaluation breaks down at the level of international action. Even while we have created systems of international law, there is no neutral arbiter of such law. This means that nations that do not abide by international law can often only be corrected by other international action. If purportedly “good actors” restrain themselves by the code of international law, they may be hamstrung in bringing about the necessary ends for their own national interest as well as that of the international community.

Realism is really summed up in the idea that effective action in the world must risk the violation of conventional moral standards in order to accomplish real good and make a dent in the world.

Can Realism Be Christian?

Now, there are major forces in Christianity that push against realism, chiefly its high moral standards and sense of a divine law, and that no one is above that law.

While that element of anti-realism is universal in Christianity, the more strongly anti-realist elements are those found differently in Anabaptist and monastic traditions. In Anabaptist theology, there is a strong element of relinquishing the tools of earthly power, of monetary wealth, and of social status. Anabaptists, after an initial radical violent spell, were and are pacifists. They question Christian involvement in the military. To that extent, they question Christian involvement in politics, which is inherently tied to the use of violence and exercise of political authority. In a way that was later secularized by Marx, they found wealth-creation and money to be morally suspect.

The Anabaptist impulse was but the reincarnation of an impulse that had arisen within and been subsumed by Catholicism. In Protestantism, the Anabaptists and the Magisterial Reformers were separate movements, with the Magisterial Reformers taking a more affirming - realist - view of political and financial life. But within Catholicism, these two kinds of Christian approaches were brought under a single institution, in the distinction between the religious and the laity. The Catholic view of religious life, like Anabaptism, was that the life of poverty, non-violence, celibacy, and political disengagement is highest. However, because of its civilizational scale and universal claims, Catholicism also recognized the necessity of secular life, power, marriage, and violence. But in the recognition of necessity, one can see the seed of Christian realism.

Christian realism really comes into its own, however, when this necessity is recognized as endemic to human life. The necessity of dealing with human and natural reality as they are requires giving up the idea that righteousness is found in keeping one’s hands clean. This really comes in Christian history with the Magisterial Protestant (Reformed and Lutheran) reformation and its embrace of secular life. Luther famously married, had children, and drank - all recognitions that extra-biblical, ascetic constraints were not the standard of holiness. Both Lutheran and Calvinist reformations occurred in unison with political leaders, i.e., civil magistrates, hence, the “magisterial” reformation. This involved the embrace of political power, in its limit, capital punishment and waging war, as legitimate and useful to Christian ends. And finally, Calvinism famously became an economically productive engine, leading, for example, to the wealth of the Netherlands.

Note: The Reformation was the seed of a productive Christian view of secular life, not the beginning of the end, the inevitable seedbed of secularism, as the common, traditionalist anti-Protestant narrative would have it.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Realism’s Theological Foundation

Bonhoeffer articulates the Christian foundation of realism, grounding it in the doctrine of justification by faith. Effectively, he argues that the attempt to act always in a way that can be justified to oneself, others, and God by verbatim obedience to divine law is a kind of justification by works of the law, as well as a shrinking from radical individual responsibility. Given the complexity of reality and the demands it can put on you of competing duties, it is ultimately impossible ever to act in a way that can be wholly justified by religious and moral teaching, or secular or divine law. The one who acts must risk doing evil in order to do good. His actions cannot be justified beforehand. They must be done in faith and recognition that they may require repentance and forgiveness after the fact:

“Jesus took upon Himself the guilt of all men, and for that reason every man who acts responsibly becomes guilty. If any man tries to escape guilt in responsibility, … He sets his own personal innocence above his responsibility for men, and he is blind for the more irredeemable guilt which he incurs precisely in this.” (241)

For example, Immanuel Kant had famously argued that the right thing to do was never to lie, even to a murderer at the door. This was no abstract question for Bonhoeffer. He knew that to fail to lie bald-facedly to the Nazi at the door was to be complicit in all the atrocities of Nazism. Worse, it was to participate in Jew-murder while thinking oneself innocent and pure and better than the Nazis. To murder, one added the sin of Pharisaism and self-righteousness.

Responsible human action, Bonhoeffer argued, followed Christ in taking on guilt for the sake of others, entering the sin-soaked world and risking impurity.

Consider: Last week, I argued that the Reformed-cum-Lutheran view of justification by faith common in Reformed evangelical circles is nihilist, undermining the motive to good works. Bonhoeffer finds in the doctrine an opposite implication, a freedom to act effectively and responsibly, without fear.

Emil Brunner: Realism in Peacetime

Emil Brunner offered a different description of the problem and pointed to a solution more helpful in peacetime. In his theological ethics, The Divine Imperative, Brunner described what he called “Christian inwardness”: “The obvious tendency of many earnest Christians to shrink from all external action.” This desire is based in the intent to do directly spiritual and personal work, but the technical spheres of life require involvement in bureaucracy, filling out forms, jumping through hoops, or just doing one’s job well, all in order to have a very indirect effect on other people.

However, “Since God requires from us not merely volition but action, He requires us to enter into this ‘alien sphere,’ into this realm of the impersonal, and it is His will that we, as believers, shall prove ourselves within this sphere.” For, “It is here, in this borderland between technical action and ethics–in economics, in politics, in public life–that the great decisions are made.” Now, that is a philosophy for public Christian action in the world.

Part of the difficulty of acting as a Christian in these various spheres is that the Christian approach to economics or politics is underdetermined by Christian teaching. This means it involves accruing empirical knowledge of these fields and exercising human judgment in areas of controversy and disagreement, not only between Christians and non-Christians, but also among Christians.

For instance, while I see much to admire in urging Christians not to align with either party, as a general teaching, this exhibits a lack of realism. The non-partisan approach may work for a theologian or some pastors, but for politics, it won’t cut it. To run in America as a Christian politician, one has to make a judgment which of the parties is the best vehicle for the ends that one thinks represent the good. To join with any of the parties, per Bonhoeffer’s teaching, will not be above reproach. In taking political action, one shoulders responsibility for the sins of Republicans or Democrats, Libertarians or Independent anti-vaxxers. Failing to align with a party does not make one holier than those aligned with political parties. At the same time, taking on a public role arguing for civility and non-tribal thinking in a non-partisan way is also a completely legitimate course of action to take.

Or take a financial example. The investment criteria of a Christian investment firm recently came to my attention. Its criteria involve having Christian board members and a kingdom-mission. While it offered a few more specifics, this struck me as an incredibly empty Christian philosophy of financial investment. There is no concrete and controversial vision of the common good of the nation, informed by Christian principles, and only a requirement of an outward guise of Christian profession and morality. In fact, the very idea of a Christian investment firm suggests that Christians won’t have any substantive differences or specific judgments about the economic good of the country. I have heard of investment funds that invest in accord with Catholic social teaching. That at least has some level of specificity. What about an investment firm built on the principles of Protestant social teaching? Better yet, forming a substantive philosophy of financial investment for the common good and then discovering who is aligned with that vision, whether they are Christian themselves or not.

Biblical Realism

I am struck by the moral impurity of many of the greatest figures of the Old Testament. While I do not think this is to be imitated purposefully, whether through polygamy or murder, it is notable that personal morality is not the only standard of righteousness recognized in the Bible. Effectiveness in great tasks is quite prominent in the Old Testament. This has a lot more in common with the great men of classical antiquity.

Following this line of thought could certainly lead to downplaying and compromising personal morality for the sake of “winning.” That is a real error to be avoided. However, it is equally possible to be prudish about personal morality, and especially the appearance of morality, relative to taking effective action in the world. For example, many have criticized Elon Musk for not giving to charitable and environmental causes with his great wealth. Musk’s response is that he puts all his capital into things like Tesla, which is doing far more to make human economic life environmentally friendly than any charity. In that secular example, we see the same conflict that is present in Christian morality, whether to embrace the use of power and finance for good or to divest oneself of power and finances for the sake of moral purity.

Bonhoeffer’s warning is haunting: The attempt to keep our hands clean is in effect an attempt to evade responsibility. All human action, including in monasteries, in Amish communities, and in activist circles, is implicated in the complexity and messiness of human life. The worst thing to do is to think that one is righteous. The best protection against evil is recognizing that all our activity is impure. To take effective action in the world, we must not seek to hide behind the appearance of pure motives. We must exercise human judgment, take action with which some will disagree, and attempt to make a dent in the world.

Those good works prepared beforehand for us to do? Don’t think that those are acts of safe, uncontroversial, publicly-recognized moral virtue or charity. They are acts of love for human beings in the brokenness and complexity of our world, with a real risk of getting it wrong. God demands of us nothing less.

Seminar: Vintage Christian Realism

On an upcoming evening in February, I’ll be offering a one-off seminar on the philosophical and theological foundations of Christian Realism. Click the button below if you’re interested in getting updates about the seminar.

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Christianity too often leads to this view: Nothing we do here matters.

For some Christians, this is because of their “end-times” views: “It’s all going to end soon, and Jesus will return. There’s no time to do anything lasting, just to tell people urgently to get saved. Nothing else matters.”

For others, it’s their desire to answer in a moment the question of salvation. This can be through conversionism: The real action in Christianity is the initial moment of conversion. Or it can be through the doctrine of justification by faith: Jesus did it all, so we don’t have to do anything but look back to our justification. Either way, the idea is that the initial moment at the outset of Christianity is all that makes a difference. Nothing between here and the end really matters: Nihilism.

Nietzsche famously hurled the accusation of “nihilism” at Christianity:

[Paul] needed the belief in immortality in order to rob “the world” of its value, that the concept of “hell” would master Rome—that the notion of a “beyond” is the death of life...

Nihilist and Christian: they rhyme in German, and they do more than rhyme...

Does This Life Matter?

A question for Christians: Does this life matter?

While people don’t always come right out and say “no,” here are some signs of Christian nihilism:

Eschatologically, some say, “It’s all gonna burn anyway,” or “Jesus is coming back really soon.”

Theologically, Christians can dismiss the effect of human action on account of divine providence. Does anything we do really make a difference?

Politically, Christians can decide that it is indifferent whether good things in society are preserved and improved or eroded and destroyed.

Some Christians view the exhortation “not to love the world or the things in the world” as undermining love for the very order that God called good. They equate “the world” with worldliness.

And the doctrine of conversionism, mentioned above, amounts to a very limited view of the Christian life as primarily about “getting in,” and then leading others to join the fold. It lacks a vision of sanctification and the life of Christian obedience and progressive sanctification.

But in my own Reformed theological context, the source of a highly intellectual form of Christian nihilism is a narrow focus on the doctrine of justification by faith.

At the outset of their reflections, Reformed theologians correctly detect a problem with conversionism, that it can lead to uncertainty and obsession about whether one has truly converted. The Reformed theologians’ solution is the doctrine of justification by faith: Recognizing that justification is once-for-all and not dependent on anything one does produces, in principle, perfect assurance of salvation.

But that is just a more intellectually robust form of Christian nihilism.

Just like conversionism, only the initial moment of the Christian life matters. But now, the earnestness of determining whether one is truly converted - the redeeming feature of conversionism - is gone. The justified Christian is left with nothing to do except to float through life, trying not to forget that he is already justified.

Officially, being knowledgeable about theology, the Reformed types will insist that sanctification is supposed to follow justification. But the impression given is that the pursuit of holiness is more or less optional. This is chiefly revealed in what they consider to be heretical; any idea that we cannot have perfect assurance of salvation, that Christians might commit apostasy, or that there is a final justification in accordance with works is commonly treated as a departure from the Reformation and from the gospel.

In one radical example, a professor argued that any exhortation making use of “the third use of the law” needs to be followed up with a gospel promise that “Jesus already did that for us,” so that no Christian would feel bad about failing to live a holy life.

But the logical conclusion of this teaching is that nothing we do here matters.

Protestant Anti-Nihilism

True Reformed theology opposes this nihilism.

From the first, John Calvin argued that knowledge of whether one was justified by faith, or elect, could only be obtained on the basis of the evidence of a life of good works, Christian perseverance, and fruit-bearing: “You shall know them by their fruits” (Matt 7:16). While the Reformed did promise assurance of salvation as a real possibility, this promise was always tempered by the equally real possibility of apostasy by professing Christians and the impossibility of knowledge of the hidden divine decree.

This meant that, in practice, the difference between Catholic and Protestant doctrines of justification was not infinite, as contemporary Protestants sometimes allege. (Eucharistic theology was the point on which there was deepest division.) Yet many contemporary Protestants draw the distinction between Christianity and all other religions by way of the contrast between justification by works and justification by faith. On this telling, in all other religions, people work their way toward God - justification by works - but in the Christian religion, God gifts salvation apart from works. But this common Protestant account draws too sharp a distinction between works and faith, suggesting that Christianity leaves the life of good works as an optional addition to a salvation that costs us nothing.

The Apostle Paul, on the contrary, speaks of us “filling up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ” (Col 1:24). He writes in Romans 8:17 that we are “fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.” Even if you – as I do – distinguish the necessity of suffering as a condition of salvation from its merit, suffering and good works are not optional for the Christian, but necessary. Francis Turretin captured this by arguing that good works were, not the grounds, but the way and means of salvation, and a necessary way and means. What Jesus did for us, we must imitate as a condition of salvation. Obedience and the life of good works are not optional, but obligatory.

The Penultimate Things

The most trenchant critique of Protestant Christian nihilism is the one Bonhoeffer mounted in his critique of cheap grace. The Lutheran church had strongly taught that justification by faith is all that matters: To insist on a life of obedience was legalism. What is more, this teaching had the political implication of a “two kingdoms” doctrine that left the secular realm alone, staying out of politics completely. Yet as Hitler came to power, the mainstream German Lutheran church refrained from commenting or intervening, out of adherence to this principle. From a Nazi prison, Bonhoeffer articulated what was so wrong about this approach.

The Christian thinks that the only things that matter are ultimate things, like whether you’re saved or not, justified or not, and the spiritual things of the future kingdom of God. Everything in between is a potential source of idolatry or legalism. If we think that some form of secular human action is necessary, that merely shows that we are trying to work our way to God, instead of confessing our total human inability and sinfulness.

These in-between things Bonhoeffer calls the penultimate things. He agrees, yes, that these are not the ultimate things. But they are not for that reason nothing; they are penultimate, all but ultimate. They are not the last things, but they are what is right before the last. Nothing could be more important, except, of course, the ultimate things.

This is a different theological perspective. This side of eternity, ultimate things are not even attainable without attention to and cultivation of the penultimate. At the limit, if you refuse to speak up as Hitler takes over Germany and eventually the German church, the ultimate things will be lost as well. A church that won’t protect people physically from harm is not one that will ever have a chance to protect them from spiritual harm.

Some try to argue that what kind of government or policies the state enacts, or what kind of culture we are surrounded by, should make no difference to Christian witness to the ultimate things. But this is just false. It makes a world of difference. If you don’t attend to the penultimate things, you may not even have the right or the opportunity to speak about the ultimate things. But even if you do, the Christian message will receive a very different response depending on the audience: Does your audience accept the basic outlines of the Ten Commandments? Or does your audience think that Christianity itself is deeply immoral? You won’t be able to communicate the ultimate things without understanding your penultimate context.

What is more, the entire Christian life is one that is lived in the penultimate arena. The good works we are called to do may not immediately result in the salvation of souls, but they can improve the world for the better, and thereby prepare people for the gospel. This is why it is true to say that the unbelieving, secular humanism that often replaces Christianity in the West is Christian in origin. Sometimes it is more Christian than Christianity in its devotion to making a dent in this world, while the remaining religious communities become gnostic, insisting that minor differences in profession of faith make more of an ultimate difference than obedience and activity in the penultimate realm.

The Law Before the Gospel

“The sons of this world are more shrewd than the sons of light.”

When people question Jordan Peterson for not being a “true Christian” or they take it that he is teaching a false religion of works-righteousness, or when they critique Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s conversion for being motivated by political and civilizational concerns, they really miss the point. What Peterson has done is take the practical content of Christianity and spoken it in terms a broad range of people can accept (if not always understand), effectively urging our civilization to act as though God exists. Unfortunately, many a professing Christian does not act as though God exists. The idea that this minor, cheap, theoretical profession of faith makes more of a difference than acting as though God exists really has things backwards.

Even if the Protestants are right that all of us will fail to live up to the law of God, an absolutely necessary first step toward that recognition is to remind Westerners - Christian and non-Christian alike - that the law of God applies to them. No one who is not conscious of guilt for failing to live up to the practical demands of Christianity comes to Christ seeking forgiveness. No one who has not experienced the difficulty of trying to live righteously by human power alone seeks the Holy Spirit’s power. In the logic of Christianity, the law is prior to the gospel. Teaching the law is not legalism; it is Judaism - the first half of Christianity. It is the preparatio evangelium, the preparation for the gospel.

What is more, in the logic of Christianity, posterior to the gospel is again the law of God, which is to guide our living in obedience to the divine commands, which is nothing but living in accord with our divinely-designed human nature.

Christian Humanism

Now, one way to misunderstand the teaching of the penultimate things is to misread it as instrumental: The only reason what we do here matters is because of the afterlife. On the contrary, obeying the law of God has real material consequences here and now. If your mind is only set on the possibility of punishment or reward hereafter, it means you’ve already ignored the temporal consequences of your actions. Doing good for others physically and politically in this world really improves people’s lives. The world becomes a better place. There is nothing to discount about this. This world isn’t only good for what it can get us in the next.

The doctrine of creation is crucial here. The things God created are good. The Christian who can’t see that is less of a human for that fact. The heathen who enjoys the physical creation is more honoring to God than the puritan who doesn’t.

This also means that Christians are absolutely incorrect to say that, without God, nihilism is inevitable. On the contrary, non-Christians of all stripes can and should find meaning and goodness in this world. That meaning and goodness is a pointer to the divine, even if not all follow the trail. Christians who use the above apologetic line betray their own alienation from the created order and Christian nihilism. Our apology for Christian faith should move from the goodness and meaningfulness of created life to the reality of our creator and the human desire that created life continue beyond death - the desire for resurrection.

Idolatry of created things and indulgence in cheap pleasure is a real human temptation; it is true. But that path itself involves a devaluing of the created order, an attempt to instrumentalize everything around us egoistically for the sake of base pleasure, or narcissistic honor, or material gain. Following such a path reveals that we have already departed from the Epicurean path of enjoyment of the created order, with each thing in its proper place. We have ceased to live truly human lives; but the solution is not to live ghostly, inhuman lives, insisting that only the spiritual matters. No, this-worldly human life matters.

Christian nihilism is, I fear, a common offering from Christians to others. We tell them that nothing matters without God, hoping that they’ll come to God, after which they’ll have nothing to do, except to bring other people to God. This is so much less than what God himself offers and requires. God has made a world that matters, a world in which what we do matters. Christianity is supposed to draw us to more human lives, enmeshed in things that matter and hoping to see them continue on after death. Catch yourself when you are tempted to use those arguments. Eliminate them. Look at secular people who successfully live deeply human lives. Begin to live a more human life yourself.

Christianity is a humanism.

Why would I wait ’till I die to come alive?I’m ready now, I’m not waiting for the afterlife.I still believe we can live forever.You and I, we begin forever now.

Switchfoot, “Afterlife”

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I’m deeply interested in the idea that most thinking follows narrow, ideological ruts and that it takes real effort to escape these ruts and allow one’s thought to be shaped by the complexity and multiplicity of empirical inputs, by the reality of how things are.

From several quarters, I receive pressure to hold that ideology, worldviews, presuppositions, socially-constructed conceptual systems, and so on, always color our vision such that the aspiration to empirical reception of the real is a modernist fantasy, even a hubristic one, a naïve realism and brute empiricism.

At the same time, many of the same people recognize that allowing one’s thought to be held captive by ideology, or failing to recognize the socially-constructed nature of one’s concepts, is itself naïve and the cause of much error in our thinking. Partisanship and tribalism seem like predominant errors of our day that sharply contrast with the idea that we have modernized, secularized, and reached the height of scientific, empirical thought. Resigning ourselves to ideological thinking and partisanship does not seem viable, yet the thought that we could or even should rise above it is often swatted down, like a poppy that has grown taller than those around it.

I want to argue that the aspiration to empirical, non-ideological thinking is one to which we must succumb. The risk of thinking that we have arrived is real, but that is the same as the risk of succumbing to ideology. Empiricism is not hubristic; it is rather the thesis that we do not know and cannot be certain but must endeavor perpetually to discover how wrong we are. Likewise, realism is not the thesis that we have a good grasp on reality but that reality remains, always, distinct from our thought and the standard by which it must be judged and tested. Seeking empirical apprehension of the real is a human obligation.

The Limits of Ideology

Ideological thinking has several features. In the main, it involves shortcuts for thinking by adopting a raft of views of one’s tribe and seeking confirmation of those views, rather than disconfirmation.

It is quite understandable in the young, who have not had time to examine issues and topics on a case-by-case basis but must, on a practical level, make far-reaching decisions about how they will live and operate in the world. Our choices of religious and political affiliation, especially in high-school and college, almost inevitably operate in this way. Without time or capacity to exhaustively study each religious or political issue, we must rely on limited evidence and our gut to take the leap into one way of thinking or the other and to use it as a broad heuristic for a variety of issues.

However, these either-or and black-and-white framings must be seen, or come to be seen, as only rough approximations of the world. Otherwise, a kind of unjustified certainty sets in that precludes the gathering of further evidence, the testing of individual conclusions, and seeing the merits in the arguments and conclusions of “the other side.”

At some point, we also come to see the way in which these partisan, ideological framings are the result of considerations other than truth. In politics, the ability to mobilize masses to vote, especially in a two-party system, requires casting political questions as partisan in nature. There are two views, and to reject one is to adopt the other: It’s capitalism or socialism. There is nothing else. In religion, the need to offer the laity a clear set of beliefs that signify membership in the religious community - and the kingdom of heaven - requires simplifying and closing off certain questions that religious intellectuals might want to keep open. “The first chapters of the book of Genesis are literally true.” “Moses certainly wrote the Pentateuch.” “The four gospel accounts definitely harmonize.”

Once we recognize the ideological nature of the majority of human thought, it is tempting to conclude that, since we are all human and subject to the same kinds of cognitive distortion, that there is no escaping ideology, only a circumspect acceptance of this condition and adoption of a kind of agnosticism and skepticism that casts all truth-claims or pretensions to objective empirical thought as suspect.

But there is another way. Once we lose our epistemological naïveté, we can conclude, with writer Gurwinder Bhogal, that our starting point should be, “I am wrong.” Given my humanity and subjection to the cognitive distortions of human psychology, the forces of tribalism, partisanship, and ideology, I know that my current thinking has no chance of being adequate to how things are. The remaining questions are, “How wrong am I, and in what particular ways?” The attempt to answer those questions is what I call empirical thinking.

Five Strategies to Escape Ideology

Human psychology is not ordered to truth but to certain biological ends. If we are to overcome the forces of nature and direct our minds to truth, it will require effort and strategy. We cannot continue to seek truth in the way that we originally did, by the rough heuristics of ideological thinking. We cannot simply download truth from our senses either; the world is too complex, and we are aware of the biases and cognitive distortions by which we are tempted.

In fact, we will have, to a large degree, to utilize alternative heuristics and strategies, which are by no means infallible but which, rather, generally counteract the tendencies to black-and-white thinking, to tribalism, and to certainty.

1. Have Multiple Tribal Memberships

One of my strategies is to locate myself in multiple social and intellectual circles, in effect, to have multiple tribal memberships. (Not to be confused with multiple trial memberships, which one should curtail.) Recognizing that we tend to think in ways that justify our tribe, it is important to complicate one’s own tribal membership by locating oneself at the periphery of one tribe, and at its intersection with another tribe. For example, by being in academic philosophy, I feel the pull to belong to that tribe and to adopt its habits of thought and standards of intellectual respectability. Yet, as a member of the evangelical tribe, I have competing and conflicting allegiances which, I find, help me to filter out the tribal commitments of each group from the intellectually valid commitments and merits of each.

2. Seek Out Disagreement

Another strategy is to seek out disagreement. I have found this most effectively through writing, both academic and online. Views that you formulate in private and keep private never undergo testing. At the same time, in order to find disagreement, you have to avoid writing and speaking to an echo-chamber. Once again, having multiple tribal memberships or distancing oneself from one’s tribe in certain ways can cultivate a readership that is willing and able to offer pushback and critique.

3. Non-Ideological Content Consumption

Yet another strategy is to take in content primarily from thinkers who do not share your prior ideological and religious commitments. While, as a Christian theologian, I have indeed read deeply in the tradition and community of which I am a part, having come to embody the tradition, I rarely consult it anymore. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I don’t need to consult works of Christian theology frequently because I have read widely in that area and am capable of writing such works myself. When I read and listen to learn more about the world, I seek out sources that do not share my ideological predilections, even if I find them, as I often do, confirming some of my priors.

4. Cultivate Your Capacity for Empirical Thought

Another strategy is to cultivate one’s own capacity for empirical and, specifically, scientific thought. In response to my initial description of the contrast between empirical and ideological thought, my friend Mason Bruza raised the objection that the attempt to think scientifically often reduces down to deciding which tribe of scientists or people citing scientific studies to believe. While I would maintain that scientific and empirical disagreement does not undermine the validity of the scientific process, nevertheless I do think that the state of affairs obligates individuals to become capable in empirical and scientific thinking themselves.

As an example, I treated scientific matters most thoroughly in my series on the science of evolution. When I received pushback that cited a scientific response to Michael Behe’s Darwin Devolves, I felt momentarily daunted by the task of reading and responding to a scientific paper as a philosopher-theologian. However, as I read the paper, I found the empirical and scientific portion of my brain testing and responding to the empirical claims of the scientists. Instead of their claims going beyond my expertise and intellectual capacity, I found that, as in other forms of discourse, when the scientists made a claim, I was able to bring my reasoning powers to bear on that claim. I did not feel the need to defer to their intellectual authority but rather to join them in the process of empirical reasoning.

5. Look at Yourself Like One of Your Ideological Opponents

In addition to these strategies, there are heuristics to test one’s own thinking for biases and cognitive distortions. Gurwinder Bhogal describes the heuristic of writing a claim and then considering it as if it had been written by one’s ideological opponents. All of a sudden, our minds are able to recognize flaws and errors as we are prone to do when considering other people’s positions, but much less prone when considering our own.

At the core of each of these strategies and heuristics is Bhogal’s and my original recommendation of starting from, “I am wrong.” “I am tribal in my thinking.” “I tend to judge matters ideologically.” If you start from those premises, then you are less likely to impose your ideology on new evidence. You are more likely to cultivate intellectual habits and attitudes that lead to learning new things, seeking moments of surprise, rather than confirmation of one’s prior commitments.

Toward a Civilized Empiricism

In this posture, I do not see naïveté or dogmatism, two of the chief errors of realists and objectivists. There is no insistence that I know the objective truth of the real world. Rather, there is a keen sense that the real world and objectivity are the standard by which thought must be evaluated. This leads to an earnest attempt to discern where our thinking is controlled by subjective factors, and the aspiration to have it be shaped instead by the object of thought, how things are.

In this way, reality serves as the object and endpoint of empirical inquiry, not something we claim to have already within our grasp. The postmodern mood which denies this endpoint loses the standard by which our subjective and ideological ways of thinking are judged wanting. Thereby, they leave us open to the forces of tribalism, ideology, and atavism.

Likewise, empiricism is a process, not an accomplishment. Empiricism is not evidenced in rigid, doctrinaire holding to the claims of “Science,” but by engaging in the methods and means of empirical and scientific inquiry.

Elsewhere, contrary to the characterization of realism as “naïve,” I have argued for a sophisticated realism. Here, contrary to the characterization of empiricism as “brute,” I urge a civilized empiricism, one which recognizes the dependence of empirical inquiry on habits and virtues of social and moral life. It depends on the social achievement of academic and scientific cultures of inquiry and experiment. It depends on the cultivation of a kind of republican virtue that seeks to advocate for and to understand the many tribes within the polis, rather than to give voice to the rumblings of a single tribe. It also depends on the few who desire, have the capacity, and have the resources to devote themselves to this task to take it seriously as a noble calling.

Here’s to the cultivation of a civilized empiricism.

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Last week, a group of young men with shared interests in self-improvement, virtue, and masculinity gathered in a Zoom meeting for an evening discussion. While they found common ground on their shared interests, the discussion took a turn when a difference emerged between one of the members, Brent, and the rest of the group. While the leader of the group, and the majority with him, held to a six-day-creationist, literal reading of Genesis, Brent was a devotee of Jordan Peterson’s evolutionary path to the divine.

Quickly, discussion soured. Brent was cast as the resident believer in “Science,” a local Neil DeGrasse Tyson or Richard Dawkins. Voices were raised. Enraged, the six-day-creationist Christian leader muted Brent on Zoom. The night ended at a standstill.

The next morning, at a group writing session at Other Life, Brent (not his real name) told me about this unnerving experience. I shook my head, not in disbelief, but in quiet disappointment at a kind of behavior that did not surprise me in the least.

I am sure these young men meant well. In fact, I warrant that they meant to be “defending the faith.” But what they actually ended up doing was berating a Godfearer.

Rushing the Unprepared

According to the predominant evangelical theory, there are just a handful of worldviews out there, and the question is which worldview to adopt. In the simplest form, the only options are secular humanism and Christianity. The Christian argues that secular humanism actually reduces to atheistic nihilism, and this leads the humanist, in the face of the loss of meaning, to adopt conservative American evangelical Christianity wholesale.

In this worldview-thinking, there is a demand for consistency. But consistency is, first, rather inhuman; we’re all a little inconsistent. And second, the world is a complex place, and there is no guarantee that it is as consistent as our purest mental models of it.

This results in a kind of all-or-nothing mentality and an impatience with the human beings we encounter. Brent himself told me that it felt like his interlocutors were “immanentizing the eschaton”: “Become a six-day-creationist literalist Christian…right now!”

This mode of engagement is also sub-intellectual. I can illustrate this in relation to my studies in philosophy. In academic philosophy, there is, on the hand, a rigorous demand for consistency. But at the same time, there is a rigid, almost atomistic separation of one intellectual point from another. Five thoughts that most people hold together are revealed to be distinct doctrines that can come apart. In analytic philosophy, you’ll probably find people who hold any combination of these views. To the amateur, this is inconsistent. To the philosopher, this is interesting. Things we thought stood or fell together turn out to vary independently. Two things might be true together that we thought were mutually exclusive. Or an inference that we thought was obligatory turns out to be optional or even flatly fallacious.

Theologically, we are also neglecting the necessity of preparation in order to receive the gospel: in Latin, the preparatio evangelium. The fact is, the Christian message is not a worldview. The gospel is a message of salvation. It assumes or presupposes a certain picture of the world, and especially of God, creation, nature, the moral law, man, sin, and misery. Strikingly, that world-picture is shared to a great degree across Abrahamic religions, different Christian denominations, and even some of the Christian offshoots that evangelicals call “cults.” It was also shared, to a certain degree, with Platonic and Stoic philosophy. According to some of the church fathers, what the Old Testament was for the Jews, in preparing them for Christ, philosophy was for the Greeks and Romans, preparation for the gospel.

This means that we are not only permitted but even required to be patient with people as we discuss with them the deep questions that lead to Christianity. Furthermore, we are required to operate in a piecemeal manner. We cannot require people to adopt a whole worldview. We must be content to discuss a single truth at a time.

Help Egyptians Plunder the Christians

One unique aspect of the misunderstanding above is that the mental model of “atheists vs. Christians” just doesn’t work when you include people who, like Brent, are following the “Jordan Peterson path” to God. While conservative evangelical discourse had failed to appeal to Brent, Jordan Peterson used the language of evolutionary biology and empirical science to argue a great many otherwise secular folks to an appreciation of the moral necessity of religion.

According to the worldview-model, evolution is a tenet of a materialist worldview, an obstacle to Christian belief. But in this actual circumstance, the theory of evolution has been a tool for opening Brent’s mind to the way in which religion is baked into human nature. For him, evolution has been a stepping stone toward God.

While I have registered my own objections to the embrace of evolution by Christians, I have no objection to the embrace of God by evolutionists. After all, most of Jordan Peterson’s observations about human nature derive from biology and psychology, not the theory of evolution, per se. (The evolutionary story that is used to defuse the worry that biological complexity might indicate design is, as my friend Mason Bruza wrote, a “retcon.”)

Jordan Peterson’s approach to the presentation of Christianity is, unlike much Christian theology, “from below.” It meets contemporary secular Westerners where they are and builds from things they already believe to new (and old) things they may not yet have considered.

In this, Peterson’s words are able to get a grip on the minds of his audience in a way that most Christian discourse fails to do. Similar to instances of “Christianese,” much Christian discourse and even evangelism and apologetics serves less as a foundation for further thought and discussion and more a marker of tribal identity, one that leads outsiders to perceive a threat rather than be provoked to thought. (“Uh oh, I’m being proselytized,” or, “I see, you’re one of them. I guess I can tune you out.”)

Most of all, we should use this approach when the person in front of us has already shown an interest in learning more about Christianity. I understand that when a person is not interested in Christianity, there are fewer non-confrontational means to invite a discussion of “higher things.” But when someone approaches a discussion with Christians out of curiosity, to continue to use the combative approach of apologetics can only be read as indicting a larger mentality.

In the New Testament, these types of individuals might have been called “Godfearers.” In the Roman empire, these would have been Gentiles who were sympathetic to Judaism or had fully come to believe in Yahweh. In our time, the Godfearers, at least in one corner of the Internet, are fleeing from errors they have seen on the secular moral left and finding wisdom in both evolutionary science and psychological readings of Scripture, as exemplified best by Peterson, but also a few others.

If we berate the Godfearers, you have to ask what objective we have in mind. It sure looks like we are dogs marking our territory, rather than thoughtful Christians inviting further discussion.

Among those Christians who, like me, emphasize the truth that can be found outside of Christianity, we often speak about Augustine’s phrase “plundering the Egyptians.” This is certainly one of the tasks of “natural theology.”

However, it turns out that another task is that of helping the Gentile, or Egyptian Godfearers to plunder the Christians. What if we offered them nuggets of Christian truth, without asking them to “change religions” first?

Instead of waiting for Jordan Peterson, Tom Holland, or Leon Kass to offer a psychological reading of the Bible to secular people eagerly waiting to hear whether religion has anything of practical significance to say, we could simply embrace the earliest forms of biblical interpretation, the allegorical and moral interpretations of Scripture, and with Augustine, show that Scripture actually teaches things that even unbelievers can recognize as true.

Reclaiming Conversation

Let’s reclaim conversation.

Sherry Turkle wrote a bestselling book recently by that title, indicating the obstacles to conversation broadly in the present day. But for evangelicals, we introduce our own obstacles to conversation by conceptualizing discussion across religious boundaries in terms of either evangelism or apologetics. In doing so, we neglect the possibility and the promise of conversation.

Over the course of my education, I’ve been on a search for a better theory of how to interact with non-Christians. One of the things I’ve realized along this quest is that there are very few opportunities in general for conversation on a theological and philosophical level. There are also many preconditions for having such conversations. In academic philosophy, a system of complex social expectations and intellectual requirements makes interaction across religious division possible. In rare non-academic intellectual contexts, people choose to have conversations that potentially challenge their prior beliefs. And this is not to mention the obstacles to ordinary conversation on a broader societal level, the infrequency of having people at one’s dinner table, the elimination of time when we bump into strangers and aren’t looking at our phones, et cetera.

This obligates Christians to seek out and find and to foster the creation of spaces in which such conversation occurs. Currently, I have found this, to some degree, in the university in the discipline of philosophy. I have found it through the online community Other Life, where I recently, with Brent, hosted a philosophical salon discussing political philosophy. And I have found it through Substack, as writers and readers of different beliefs seek to broaden their minds and sharpen our thinking on the hard edge of other people’s thinking.

If I think of evangelical examples of this, the most prominent one is L’Abri, Francis Schaeffer’s center for intellectual conversation and communal living. In its early years, L’Abri was, if anything, at the forefront of the 1960’s counter-culture, in spite of Schaeffer’s adherence to evangelical or even “fundamentalist” Christianity. In a different way, Wheaton College, in spite of its predominantly evangelical make-up, facilitated conversation and allowed me to build friendships in a way that I, like most other college graduates, seek to replicate, with some difficulty.

Part of the difficulty with reclaiming conversation and finding space for it is that conversation is slow. The word “school,” as Josef Pieper once wrote, derives from the Greek word for “leisure.” In order to have patient and fruitful conversation, we need to make space outside of the daily grind. We need to decrease the urgency with which we urge people to convert. I linked it above, but watch this clip from the musical The Book of Mormon that illustrates the futility of this kind of urgency: [Buzzzzz] “Hello, would you like to change religions!? I have a free book written by Jesus!!!”

In fact, no one would like to change religions. It’s too destabilizing. How then do people - particularly, adults - change religions? Well, as a first approximation, they see something in the world that requires them to consider that their previous way of life is inadequate. A lot of time and experience leads them to begin to rethink what they once thought. After a decade or two, they find that they are Christians. See Molly Worthen’s conversion, Paul Kingsnorth’s, Tammy Peterson’s, Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s, Winston Marshall’s, Candace Vogler’s, Justin Murphy’s, Mary Harrington’s, Luke Smith’s, Abigail Favale’s, and archetypically for the modern intellectual conversion, C. S. Lewis’s.

Christians should seek the opportunity to be one of the patient conversation partners along that decade-long journey for the adult Godfearer. Instead of berating the Godfearer, invite him to have a conversation.

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Since 2014, changes in political ideology, toward cancel culture on the left, and political tribalism on the right, have been relatively obvious to observers. Conservative Christian concern is often focused on the cancel culture and the central place of sexual and gender ideology in it.

However, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, co-author with him of The Coddling of the American Mind, originally observed changes on college campuses at the psychological level, before things ever reached the political level. Lukianoff observed college student attitudes on free speech and censorship shifting strongly against free speech around 2014. Haidt and others later gathered psychological evidence of significant increases in anxiety and depression from college students at that time, changes which he argues are closely related to teenage social media use. This increased susceptibility to negative emotion by college-age students has led to an attempt by campus administrators to protect them from ideas they deem harmful.

At the same time, political and cultural changes were afoot to give elite approval to the ideas of cultural leftism. The Obergefell decision in 2015 was quickly followed by a strong push for transgender rights, a sharp change from when Obama, in 2008, opposed gay marriage, citing his own Christian religious tradition. Corporations began to host sensitivity training on sexual and racial matters. Stories of individuals being cancelled for running afoul of these ideas began to abound. A new movement of liberals disaffected from the cultural left arose; and then Jordan Peterson arose as the figure-head of a, for several years, politically non-partisan opposition to the cultural leftism that he called “Postmodern Neo-Marxism.”

On the political front, Trump arose as a kind of “middle-finger” to the cultural left, which further enraged the left, and probably strengthened its conviction, not to mention corporations’ intent to prove that they were not racist or otherwise bigoted. The country has continued to divide along the lines of people’s feelings about Trump on the one hand and cultural leftism (“wokeism”) on the other.

Is This the Negative World?

Several weeks ago, Aaron Renn noted that Jonathan Haidt’s analysis of a significant cultural change coincided with his identification of 2014 as the point of transition from the “neutral world” to the “negative world.” The neutral world was the phase of American culture from 1994-2014 in which being a Christian was seen as socially neutral, one lifestyle choice among others. The negative world is the period since 2014 in which being a Christian is decidedly a social negative, at least according to the prevailing zeitgeist.

However, rather than Haidt’s analysis supporting Renn’s, this observation made me wonder whether the “negative world” isn’t just the kind of psychological and political changes Haidt identified as commencing in 2014: the campus cancel culture, increased levels of anxiety and depression, and newly-ascendant cultural-leftist ideology. If so, this real change does not have Christianity per se as its target but rather particular heresies relative to its ideology, committed as often by Christians as by classical liberals, secular conservatives, and even old-school Marxists.

What is more, since 2014 - particularly since 2016 - I have also observed a new openness to Christianity that is just as distinctive of this cultural period, such that calling this phase the “negative world” misses out on the distinctive new openness to Christianity.

By viewing this cultural change in secular terms as a psychological and political phenomenon, Christians could avoid cultivating unnecessary fear and develop positive strategies effectively to engage this world, with its unique dangers and opportunities.

Christianity and Politics in the New World

In Aaron Renn’s analysis, this phase of American culture can be designated the “negative world,” because in it, being known as a Christian is a social negative, compared to previous eras in which it was socially positive or neutral. It should be said that Renn identifies these as three phases of the decline of American Christianity, at least in its cultural dominance.

But, is the post-2014 era best characterized as one in which being known as a Christian is a social negative, or rather one in which dissenting from cultural leftism is a social negative, because of the ascendancy of that ideology?

It is important to raise this question because evangelical churches and movements have themselves been divided along the lines of support of or opposition to Trump and opposition to or partial embrace of cultural leftism. This new divide is exactly the thing that Renn has sought to illuminate. I made my own contribution in my article, “The Evangelical Critics of the Evangelical Majority.” However, it reveals that the new era is not characterized by opposition to Christianity per se, but rather by devotion to a set of culturally leftist ideas and opposition to any dissent.

Among Christians who have merely moderate or moderately progressive sympathies, while retaining a Christian ethic, they often feel much more at home in that setting, even seeing it as an improvement. They don’t feel the “negative world.” In my own recent experience, I am thinking about folks in the Side B community and other “critical evangelicals,” who are at least temporarily aligned against the religious right.

Now, some of us, Renn and myself included, believe that those cultural dogmas are objectively contrary to Christian teaching (or at least many aspects of them are). But it is still not the Christianity per se that is the object of cultural scorn. It is, if anything, the political conservatism, sex-realism, or classical liberalism that opposes cultural leftist dogmas which is the object of scorn.

If you view things this way, the new left is actually less anti-religious. It is not primarily atheistic - famously, atheists have come into its cross-hairs - it is primarily culturally leftist and egalitarian.

Now Renn’s specific thesis is that elite (including corporate) culture has shifted from a kind of liberal neutrality toward Christianity to a position of moral criticism; I still believe that this is quite plausible, but the moral criticism is focused on areas, like sexual ethics, where Christians run afoul of the new dogmas. The atheism is less vocal, the progressive morality more vocal.

I also don’t want to ignore that there has been persecution of Christians in this context, but it always has to do with leftist dogma, like the refusal by some Christian bakers to bake cakes for gay weddings. The culture is actually welcoming of Christians to modify their views and teaching; they don’t care about most of our theological doctrines, only those points of divergence from cultural or moral leftism.

A New Positive World?

While the ascendant cultural left does not have an explicit stance toward Christianity, (of course, some of its academic counterparts do,) the new online, intellectual center-right does. In fact, it is more open to Christianity, recognizing Christianity’s key cultural and social role in Western, liberal civilization, even being the moral ancestor of progressivism. This was a change from the era of New Atheism, resulting in a set of “New New Atheists” (as Stephen Meyer calls them) who do not themselves believe but who do have a positive view of Christianity.

While many view the right’s response to the post-2014 changes as primarily socially negative, with Trump himself being representative, the online center-right has had much more nuance. Jordan Peterson and the “Intellectual Dark Web” were a politically and religiously diverse, sophisticated response to cultural leftism. Admittedly, Peterson’s work has taken a notable rightward turn in recent years, which subjects him to the temptations of political partisanship (to which he has sometimes succumbed). Nevertheless, the primary thrust of Peterson’s project has been an apolitical one, primarily psychological and even theological.

In this era, there has been a new openness to Christianity. This openness is often politically and intellectually motivated. An individual comes to believe that Western culture depends on Judeo-Christian foundations and then begins to explore whether he or she can embrace those religious foundations. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s conversion is emblematic. Peterson’s wife has recently been baptized Catholic, and his daughter Mikhaila has begun to attend an evangelical church, that of Mark Driscoll.

Evangelicals have sometimes been unnecessarily critical of Peterson and his ilk as not sufficiently Christian. In doing so, I think they have missed out on this spiritual moment, with some notable exceptions, like Paul VanderKlay. Justin Brierley has traced the “surprising rebirth of belief in God” in his new book and podcast by the same title. Reading and listening to that work provides a real challenge to the idea that our time is defined by a negative stance toward Christianity.

Rekindling the Religious Right?

Given that Renn’s intellectual work has actually been inspired by Jordan Peterson, I think Renn would acknowledge these features of the “negative world” which are actually quite positive for Christianity. Indeed, instead of embracing negativity and fear, Renn has cautioned against adopting the strategy of a Trumpian populist or of the religious right, Christian nationalism, and the culture war. In fact, he has argued that the culture war strategy is just as ineffective in the “negative world” as the cultural engager strategy. I think some of his readers misunderstand him, for example, those who do not think there is anything to avoid in fundamentalism.

Nevertheless, Renn’s rhetoric of the “negative world” ends up playing into the kinds of fears that motivate the religious right and culture war strategy. While Renn is simply more sophisticated and high-brow than pre-millennial dispensationalists, the story that ours is a world newly and uniquely hostile to Christianity plays into the evangelical fears that stop careful thought.

Nicholas McDonald recently argued the same about Carl Trueman’s book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, which attempted to give intellectual underpinning to conservative Christian concerns about the direction of culture, especially sexual and gender ideology. Opposite Trueman’s approach, McDonald sets Tom Holland’s monumental Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, a work that undoubtedly fits within the realm of the Intellectual Dark Web, the “New New Atheists,” and the recent openness to Christianity. In Holland’s narrative, even contemporary secular progressivism, with its cancel culture and Puritanism, is the fruit of the Christian revolution. Progressivism’s concern for the oppressed is the reversal of pagan attitudes that denigrated the weak and favored the strong.

While Holland himself has experienced cancellation from the cultural left, his narrative provides grounds to affirm elements of contemporary progressivism, at least in their intent. From this, McDonald develops a conversation strategy that takes shared features of Christian and progressive morality and uses them as a launchpad for gospel conversations. There is something remarkably constructive and win-win in such interactions, in contrast to the kind of conversations I criticized evangelicals for engaging in several weeks ago.

Another danger of Christians viewing the ascendant cultural left as an object of fear, and as something totally opposed to Christianity, is that they will fail to register legitimate critiques of evangelical attitudes and positions. I have found this particularly in the Side B discussion of the Christian sexual ethic. I know that many of the Christians who read Carl Trueman or Aaron Renn (like myself) are inclined to view Side B and Revoice as just an evangelical iteration of “woke ideology,” hence Rosaria Butterfield’s lumping of Side B together with Side A (gay-marriage affirming) as “Gay Christianity.”

Indeed, to the chagrin of many conservative Christians, Side B celibate, gay Christians view the LGBT rights movement in a relatively favorable way, at least for leading to a decrease in homophobia - the feeling of disgust toward people who are homosexual - and with it, an ability to be open about their sexual orientation, even if that is only to recognize it as fallen and disordered. On this view, the progressivism that motivated the LGBT rights movement included a proper Christian element of concern for the outcast, the societal leper.

On the other hand, it remains a question whether Christians who uphold a biblical sexual morality are just doing that, or are also expressing homophobic disgust and discrimination. This is a critique of the religious right and cultural conservatism that cannot be ignored. For example, we have to decide whether to take the path of Jerry Falwell or that of Francis Schaeffer in our approach to the same-sex attracted:

When Jerry Falwell in private brought up the issue of gay people with Francis Schaeffer, Schaeffer commented that it was a complicated issue. Falwell shot back a rejoinder: “If I had a dog that did what they do, I’d shoot it.” There was no humor in Falwell’s voice. Afterward Schaeffer said to his son, “That man is really disgusting.” (Greg Johnson, Still Time to Care, 13)

If Christians view all accusations of homophobia, sexism, and racism as baseless, they ignore the history of and temptation to prejudice in place of biblical faithfulness. Schaeffer was biblically faithful; Falwell was prejudiced. And which figure has been more influential in the popular, political evangelical movement since 1980?

Christian Strategies for Today

Where does this leave us? American culture has changed, post-2014, in unique and new ways, and Christian ministry and life has a new cultural context to which it must adjust. That cultural context cannot be singularly captured by the idea of the “negative world.”

Renn has written often about the need to develop new ministry strategies for the “negative world,” as opposed to the “culture warrior” strategy of the positive world, and the “cultural engager” strategy of the neutral world. What strategy is appropriate to our own new world?

To begin with, I think we need to understand the “material conditions” and psychological conditions of our context much better, with attention to Haidt’s descriptions, as well as those of other social and psychological researchers. In light of the progressivism of our moment, I think adopting Side B would be one method for being better received, recognizing the Christian source of concern for sexual minorities, not to mention the validity of Side B’s claims.

Likewise, embracing the new openness to Christianity, even if only on cultural and political grounds, would be advantageous for our intellectual and evangelistic approach. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s conversion, as well as that of Paul Kingsnorth, are two examples from different political and moral places of the way that secular appreciation of Christianity is leading people to embrace Christianity personally.

In his last public statement, Tim Keller quite directly defended his approach against Aaron Renn’s claim that it was designed for the “neutral world.” Keller argued that New York was already in the “negative world” a long time before. While I do think there is a legitimate critique of those aping Keller’s approach, Keller himself is a model of how to engage with a culture that is negative toward Christianity, especially on moral grounds. Avoiding fear, being intellectually open and curious, and pursuing effectiveness, I believe it is time to give winsome Christian witness, combined with prudence, another try.

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Several years ago, for one day, I was a conspiracy-theorist.

Changes were happening in the world that I could not understand. I sought an explanation, and I dove down an Internet rabbit-hole to find it.

The personality I heeded was a brand-new Christian; he was also a conservative, to say the least. After several hours of taking in his perspective, I was a believer in his brand of conspiracy.

But it was a dark place. It felt like the forces of evil had consolidated power; all these different changes were coordinated; and there was no hope of resistance.

While I soon left behind the specifics of that conspiracy-theory, the dark and pessimistic worldview stayed with me for a couple years. That episode and that season of my life have left me with the impression that much of Christian conservatism is motivated by fear.

If we’re honest, there is a special kind of fear engendered by the conservative Christian take on American culture. The world looks like a scary and declining place, getting more and more unfriendly to Christian believers.

But these fears are wrong, and they misguide us. They make us think that fear is justified; but fear is never justified, though often understandable. We should not fear the world.

Fear of Cultural Influence

But aren’t the cultural trends and forces around us evil, and evil for Christians in particular?

I don’t deny that we should use judgment, analyze the culture, and understand the times. But Christians exhibit fear - rather than careful judgment - when we come to exaggerated conclusions that don’t follow from the facts on the ground, construing the world in a predominantly negative way.

A classic, but still relevant example is the Christian approach to the world of media, music, and movies. Writing off whole musical genres, for example, is usually based in fear. Making informed decisions about what music to listen to requires actually giving it a listen and determining what is enjoyable and wholesome. Fear, on the other hand, promotes a kind of black-and-white thinking that doesn’t allow for complexity.

Fear also misses the fact that music and movies are primarily a form of entertainment, not moral instruction. And the fearful Christian approach to culture is often devoid of mirth. We try to play it safe, but we end up with a joyless and moralistic spirit that we shouldn’t be surprised young people desire to escape.

Fear of Secular Sources

Fear really shows up when it comes to sources of knowledge and information. The phrase “trusted sources” captures this. Partly from the limitations of time, but partly from fear, many Christians operate by finding a few (or one) “trusted sources” on a given topic, usually selected by their theological or political bona fides.

But there is a mismatch between the kind of expertise we use to vet our sources - theological profession - and the expertise we require of them, knowledge of some particular aspect of human psychology, financial markets, or international affairs. You might ask for a “confessional Presbyterian perspective on the Russia-Ukraine conflict,” for instance. What confessional Presbyterianism has to do with the Russia-Ukraine conflict is beyond me. What you need is a wide range of intelligent analysts of that conflict and of people personally affected by it. Their religious convictions are mostly beside the point.

Christian worldview discourse contributes to this pathology. There is a sense that only people who are expert in theology, and who agree with me on theology, are qualified to speak on anything. Everyone else will be corrupted by their non-Christian thinking and the noetic effects of sin.

But this fails to distinguish science and empirical knowledge from ideology. We certainly don’t want young Christian people to attend a sociology course and passively and uncritically imbibe postmodernism and critical theory. But to insist on remaining ignorant of the results of the social sciences is not a form of Christian faithfulness but of anti-intellectualism.

The same goes for psychology, which Christians often dismiss as non-Christian and Freudian. In fact, as psychology has gotten more empirical, it has left behind much of Freud (and Freudian ideology) and now provides invaluable knowledge of the human mind, essential for both understanding and mental health.

An Unduly Negative View of Culture

Perhaps the primary way we see conservative Christian fear is in our analysis of culture. You hear it when Christians talk about how bad things are getting for Christians in the culture. This talk often lacks specificity. We don’t discuss the specific social dynamics for Christians, which part of the culture is experiencing it, or where there are positive developments for Christians.

I once was at a dinner table with some friends, and I heard this kind of negativity, rooted in fear, being expressed. I pulled out an article from Richard Hanania as a counterpoint: “Conservatives Win All the Time.” Hanania - a great non-Christian source for rational political analysis - points out how political conservatives have had several major wins in the last forty years, usually when they did not engage in culture-warring and fear, but when they were politically strategic. (Hanania actually has a pretty negative view of the religious dimension of the right, partly because of these pathologies.)

In the last month or two, I’ve noticed that Christians are using Aaron Renn’s analysis of the “negative world” as a springboard for this same fear. While I think Renn’s socio-cultural analysis is much more sophisticated and specific than the standard evangelical fears, the phrasing still lends itself to this evangelical trope.

Lots of people in the “critical evangelical” camp warn us of the combination of political conservatism and Christianity. But I really see the danger when both political conservatism and Christianity contain a sense of decline and hopelessness. If political conservatism is on the decline and this is tied up with Christianity’s decline, and maybe the coming of the end times, then you’re really in for a heavy dose of fear.

An Unduly Negative View of Non-Christians

At times, like the day I was a conspiracy-theorist, I’ve allowed myself to slide into this kind of politico-religious fear, and I always notice that it engenders a fear of other people. People who are secular and/or liberal become enemies, and not only objects of fear, but also of anger, hatred, and disgust. You know you’ve slid into fear when your view of other people, and non-Christians particular (but also Christians of other political sympathies) becomes predominantly negative.

When you unplug from the media sources - often conservative political commentary - that engender this feeling, you’re able to talk to normal people and find that they don’t think about politics that much. Few of them are out to get anybody. The Twitter/politics world, with its elevated emotion and animosity, is more like a bad headspace that all of us are tempted to sometimes but in which none of us should really spend much time.

This is a place where I think a better philosophy, theology, and psychology of other people can really help. Other people shouldn’t be objects of fear; they are morally mixed. They have good motives, and their bad motives always come from a place of suffering or insecurity. Other people are driven by fear just like we are. And other people aren’t totally depraved, but often exhibit practical wisdom and what the theologian Francis Turretin called “civil righteousness.” (Not “common grace.”)

The Conflation of LGBTQ+ People with the “LGBTQ+ Rights” Movement

The conservative theological world’s response to the Side B movement of celibate, gay Christians and the Revoice conference has been particularly emblematic of this fear. It has become common to refer to Side B as no different from Side A, the gay marriage/sex-affirming side, and to call it all “Gay Christianity.” Rosaria Butterfield has been very explicit about this, including in her recent address at Liberty University and in her recent book, Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age, a book I do not recommend, and about which I am disappointed that Kevin DeYoung endorsed by writing the preface.

Given conservative political fear about the “LGBTQ movement,” it is understandable that conservative Christians would be wary when a Christian comes along using the vernacular and symbolism of that movement. However, the inability to distinguish celibate, gay Christians believing in and abiding by the traditional Christian sexual ethic from those not doing so is difficult to explain except due to fear.

This showcases one of the hallmark problems with conservative Christian fear. When your response to the culture is rooted in fear, you cease to be able to see the dangers on your own side. “The accusation of ‘homophobia’ can be nothing but a slur against Christians.” It couldn’t possibly be an accurate description of the selective fear and disgust Christians have toward a particular class of individuals.

Fear and Precaution

People may object that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Shouldn’t we be afraid of what God warns us of, like being influenced by the world?

No. The fear of God should lead us not to be afraid of anything or anyone else.

The conservative Christian fears I have described are fears of created things, other people, and cultural forces. All of these are subject to God’s will and power. None of them are worthy of our fear. That’s why God in Christ commands us not to fear. We are to have attitudes of joy and confidence, not anxiety or fear.

Many people will deny being motivated by fear, instead saying that they are taking reasonable precautions.

But where the conservative Christian approach becomes too narrow and its perception of the culture too negative, fear is arguably to blame. And whether or not you agree with a particular point of my analysis, fear is a real danger.

What is more, in feeling these fears, we neglect something else that perhaps we should fear: Committing the errors that Jesus condemned far more than he condemned the sins of the world: The sins of religious believers, the Pharisees. In fact, the fears I have described often reinforce a kind of Pharisaism. We create extra laws around sources of information, kinds of music, and who to befriend. We judge people by their purity per the rituals of conservative American evangelicalism. We cease to be a light to the nations and just become another traditionalist sub-culture. I dare say that most conservative Christians are not nearly fearful enough of committing that error.

The Beginning of Wisdom

What is the alternative to fear?

Rather than being fearful, we should be shrewd, prudent, wise.

Two weeks ago, I wrote about ways that evangelicals are ineffective, and the fears I have described could all be added to that list. But my conclusion was that Christians need to heed Christ’s words: “For the sons of this world are more shrewd than the sons of light.”

Fear leads us to a fight-or-flight reaction. Shrewdness leads to an accurate judgment of ours and others capacities so we know when and how to face the world, and what challenges are beyond our capacities. Fear leads us to black-and-white thinking. Prudence leads us to identify the shades in between. Fear leads us to suspect that some of our friends are actually our enemies. Prudence allows us to love even our enemies while remaining cunning as serpents and not naïve.

The result is a worldly kind of piety that is free of worldliness. Without fear, we can learn from, enjoy, and make friends for ourselves in the world God created. We can avoid the bad, but not at the cost of neglecting the good. Admittedly, this path is winding and dangerous, but it rejects the illusion that there is an alternative path, a shortcut to safety. Instead, Christian faithfulness must brave the world with its dangers and temptations, all while discerning and following the narrow path that leads to life.

“In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” - Jesus Christ (John 16:33 NIV)

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If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you subscribe to this newsletter, “The Natural Theologian.” Some of you subscribed very recently; others may not yet have subscribed. But all of you may be asking the question, “What is a natural theologian? And why does Joel describe himself as one?”

There is no reason to delay in answering your question: A natural theologian is a theologian who primarily explores what can be known of God, morality, and true religion from nature alone and apart from Scriptural revelation.

This task has fallen on hard times. Secular thinkers think that the project of natural theology, which they think of more narrowly as providing arguments for God’s existence, is futile and maybe impossible. Christian thinkers argue that it concedes too much to secularists and naturalists, who believe that nature is independent of God.

But I would argue that no task is more urgent than that of natural theology. If observation of the world yields no knowledge of God, morality, or true religion, then Christians have nothing to say to non-Christians to persuade them of the purportedly true religion. Worse, if nature does not reveal God, then what reason is there to think that God exists, much less that he became man and died for our sakes?

So, a natural theologian I aspire to be. And “The Natural Theologian” remains the title of this newsletter.

But so many questions remain: Working on a philosophy Ph.D., isn’t Joel a philosopher? Does this mean that Christianity can be known by reason alone? Is Joel denying the sufficiency and necessity of Scripture? In the rest of this post, I’ll answer these questions and lay the groundwork for the next season of “The Natural Theologian.” Thank you for reading.

Why “Theologian,” and not “Philosopher?”

In naming my newsletter, I chose a title that represents what I aspire to be as an intellectual. Even as I formulated the title, that aspiration came into focus. After my seminary degree, my academic focus shifted from theology to philosophy, and I began to aspire to be, not primarily a theologian, but a philosopher. I did not intend to abandon my Christian faith nor its centrality to my thinking, but only to shift my academic discipline from theology to philosophy.

However, in the public intellectual realm, where Substack lies, my role is best described, not as that of a philosopher, but of a theologian. The philosophers I admire and from whom I have learned most think in a way that is “bottom-up.” They do not begin with religious commitments but demonstrate their utility or attractiveness and gradually shift towards at least sympathy with the faithful. Among these, I think of Roger Scruton, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jordan Peterson, and Paul Kingsnorth, prior to his conversion. The theology in which I had been trained articulated well the content of Christian belief; but it was these thinkers who best recommended that belief to others.

But, as a Christian, I cannot serve the same intellectual role as these philosophers. These thinkers’ credibility comes from their intellectual independence of each religious tradition. If Jordan Peterson, for example, professed Christian faith today, he would continue to have intellectual influence outside of Christendom only briefly. For a couple of months, he would explain to the media his reasons for moving in a direction that guaranteed his own obsolescence. Within six months, he would be a fixture primarily of Christian media, detailing his conversion. After a year, he would be confined to Christian media and have ceased to be more broadly relevant. A version of this has already occurred with Peterson’s alliance with the American political right.

Accordingly, for better or worse, to the public, a Christian intellectual is a theologian and not a philosopher.

How then to describe my commitment to doing theology in a way that is informed by and continuous with philosophy?

The phrase that came to mind was, “The Natural Theologian.” Natural theology, traditionally, was the task of demonstrating the existence of God from nature. At times, it has included the attempt to have a religion within the bounds of reason alone, excluding so-called “supernatural theology.” But generally, it has been the task of stating and demonstrating what Thomas Aquinas called the “preambles of faith,” that which can be known of God and the Christian religion without special, Scriptural revelation.

The preambles of faith include the existence of God, the nature and goodness of the created order, the moral law, and the sin and misery of our condition. In a common theological schema, “Creation” and “Fall,” but not “Redemption” and “Consummation,” belong to the province of natural theology. These are presupposed by the specifically Christian message of the gospel, delivered by special, supernatural revelation.

Without recognition of the preambles of faith, in some manner, the Christian religion does not make sense. Apart from these truths, Christianity offers the love of God who is not known to exist, forgiveness for sins we do not believe we have committed, and escape from a condition we had not recognized to be as tragic as it is. The preambles of faith are preparatory to the gospel because they acquaint us with our need for salvation of the kind Christ offers.

I was recently interviewed about being a natural theologian on the podcast Communion and Shalom: Weigh and Consider the World: Joel Carini on Nature, Truth, and Side B.I was also recently interviewed by philosophy Samuel Barnes on theistic evolution: Mutually Assured Conversation #21: Theistic Evolution with Joel Carini.

The Method of Natural Theology

The task of a natural theologian is also differentiated by its method. Contemporary evangelical theology operates primarily by deduction from biblical premises, which are assumed to be indubitably true. The force of any statement in theological discourse is determined by the strength of its proof texts, even if these proof texts are lengthy and developed in a canonical, biblical-theological way, with attention to historical context, et cetera.

The natural theologian rejects this method of theology. First of all, such theology has nothing to say to those who do not accept the biblical text as true in every proposition it affirms. This includes not only all non-believers but also a number of believers. Accordingly, such theology is intellectually insular and lacking in apologetic value.

Second, this method assumes that, without any other recourse, we already fully comprehend the content of each biblical statement. This assumption has already been challenged by those who urge attention to the historical context, noting that the biblical text was delivered by human authors within a certain historical context, in which words had certain meanings, place-names certain referents, and so on.

But there is so much more that is assumed in our comprehension of biblical statements. Biblical statements assume the basic human understanding of the world with which each person is, in the ordinary course of things, equipped. When the Bible speaks of a “donkey,” for example, it assumes our familiarity with that species. (This also means that the Christian does not have a “distinctively Christian” concept of a donkey, as I argued last week in “Christians and Non-Christians Use the Same Concepts.”) More generally, it assumes our knowledge of the physical and human environment which only the strictest Cartesian skepticism calls into question. Such knowledge does not have the Bible as its foundation but is epistemically prior to our knowledge from the Bible.

Third, this method also assumes that biblical statements have a quasi-magical character. Such statements are supposed to be the only firm foundation of knowledge, indubitably true, and different in character from all other statements. However, on the contrary, biblical statements are not magical. They are just as accountable to empirical reality as any other statements because they are about reality. The Bible refers to real people and places, and to the extent that these are knowable or verifiable by other means, its accuracy is confirmed or disconfirmed. To render the Bible immune to falsification is effectively to deny that it is about this world.

The contents of the book of Proverbs, for instance, are found in other ancient texts. According to the magical view, when stated by ancient sages, these statements were fallible. When transcribed into an Israelite scroll, they were inspired and infallible. On the contrary, when they were originally written, by prophet or not, they expressed wisdom concerning human life. In God’s providence, they were included in the biblical canon, in which they continue to express wisdom concerning human life, wisdom which, by the way, is not best expressed as propositional truth following the law of non-contradiction: “Answer a fool; don’t answer a fool.”

Confidence in the Bible generally must rely on non-biblical confirmation. We must discover, to the extent we can, that the Bible conforms to and speaks truth concerning the world we inhabit.

The task of summarizing and deducing from the Bible the unique content of Christian theology remains a valid one. However, there are hundreds, if not thousands of such theologians throughout evangelical institutions of higher education, not to mention Christian pulpits.

But there is a dearth of theologians operating in the way that I have described, concerning themselves with the preambles of faith, asking whether the Bible conforms to experience, and using non-deductive methods of philosophy and empirical investigation to explore the preambles of faith and produce from it a kind of informal natural theology. And even those who do perform this task do not see it as a unified discipline of this character.

The Limits of Natural Theology

I remember, shortly after I began hanging out with my now-wife, looking over her philosophy homework about Thomas Aquinas. The subject was the difference between the preambles of faith and the articles of faith. (Technically, they’re called “preambles to the articles of faith” - assistant to the regional manager). At the time, I was a committed presuppositionalist and so, I denied this distinction. Every truth - every truth - was an article of faith, dependent on Scriptural or supernatural revelation.

(I wrote an eBook detailing the 50 Errors of Christian Presuppositionalism if you want to learn more about what is wrong with that way of thinking.)

I repent of that error. Chesterton captured it when he said that the doctrine of original sin is one that you can prove empirically. Lewis demonstrated it when he began Mere Christianity from common human moral experience. Aquinas formulated it when he argued that we could know that God exists and is one in being or substance from reason, but that God is a Trinity required supernatural revelation.

I was guilty of an unbiblical biblicism. The Bible itself says that the existence of God and his invisible attributes are clearly seen in the things that have been made. Also, the moral law of God is written upon the heart. (Presuppositionalists have forced workarounds for these passages.)

What became even clearer to me over time was that the distinctive truths of the Christian religion are summed up in the body of information we call “The Gospel,” that Christ died and rose for our justification, together with the doctrinal truths of the Trinity and Incarnation that are revealed in that salvific event. For any non-Christian to hear and respond to this gospel, he had to be already acquainted with several things: The existence of God, the law of God, the moral responsibility of man, the inevitability of death, and human sin and misery. If someone doesn’t grasp all of these truths then the gospel offers salvation by a non-entity from a non-problem.

Two related objections immediately come: Don’t unbelievers suppress the truth in unrighteousness? And isn’t it, therefore, necessary to learn all of these truths from the Bible in order to know them aright? This is a misunderstanding. Unbelievers couldn’t suppress this body of truths if they weren’t already publicly available to all humans living in God’s world. This means that we need unbelievers to come to see clearly truths that are available to them and with which they are at some level already acquainted.

The Bible, too, will have the function of pointing us to truths that are available elsewhere. When the Psalmist and Paul quoting him say that “None is righteous, no, not one,” they are observing something, not magically revealing something previously unknown. The Bible’s moral instruction coheres with and makes explicit the moral fabric of human life and the ethical and legal structures that are just. (See C.S. Lewis’s catalog of human laws exemplifying the Tao throughout human civilizations, at the end of The Abolition of Man.)

At the same time, I am not advocating a religion within the bounds of reason or arguing that natural human knowledge suffices to know the truth of Christianity. Quite the contrary. Natural human knowledge can essentially acquaint us with the truths summarized in Christian theology under the headings of Creation and Fall. But the truths of Redemption and Consummation are particular to the gospel and require supernatural revelation. In emphasizing natural theology, then, I am not downplaying supernatural theology, only correcting the overemphasis on special revelation and denigration of natural theology that I have encountered.

As it happens, I think that the majority of creative and innovative theological work has to be on the level of natural theology. After plumbing the depths and climbing the heights of scholastic Reformed theology, I can report that the content of the gospel remains just the same, “Repent and believe in Christ for salvation.” The real theological work is to persuade the natural man that this good news is the answer to his condition and that the content of Christianity coheres with what we can see around us, summarizing and fulfilling it.

A Natural Style

There is one more facet to being a “natural theologian” that bears mentioning. A natural theologian is to be contrasted with an academic one. A natural theologian is not a writer of journal articles, but rather of essays, comprehensible by and directed toward the general public. The language of a natural theologian should be ordinary human language, without unnecessary technical terminology, which I will attempt to avoid. A natural theologian is one who demonstrates the relevance of what he says to the one to whom he says it. After all, what use is it to say what is irrelevant? Readers, I ask you to hold me accountable on this and to ask for clarification or the removal of jargon as necessary.

What’s Next for the Natural Theologian?

In the coming months, I plan to continue to write on a variety of subjects, sexuality, economics, evolution, each of which requires engaging with extra-biblical sources of information. These are subjects that weren’t covered in seminary, on which expertise in biblical exegesis cannot settle matters. You can also expect continued discussion of knowledge (epistemology) and theological and philosophical method.

But I hope to cultivate something even more: A model of thoughtful Christian engagement that avoids the errors of dogmatism - which often comes with being a theology nerd - and skepticism - which often comes with questioning the narrowness of Christian sub-cultures. As you read, perhaps “The Natural Theologian” will become too narrow, and “The Natural Theologians” will replace it. A new breed of Christian humanists, able in both supernatural and natural theology, engaged with the world not only to save it, but also to learn from it: That is the goal. Would you join me?

The Natural Theologian is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

P.S. This newsletter owes its existence to Justin Murphy and his course “Indie Thinkers,” which taught me the path of an independent, Internet intellectual. I highly recommend Murphy’s latest eBook, “The Independent Scholar” and Other Life, the associated online community for independent intellectuals.

Since I first became aware of politics, one of the major criticisms of conservatives I heard was of their callousness to economic suffering, especially among the poor and working classes. If conservatives opposed the welfare state in favor of private charity and individual self-improvement, progressives prided themselves on a concern for the downtrodden, with a social safety net provided by the government. Of course, conservatives have not succeeded in dismantling the welfare state since the New Deal and the Great Society, but a continued conservative suspicion of government aid has fed the narrative that conservatives are callous to those suffering economic deprivation.

At the same time, conservatives were criticized for being on the side of large corporations, increasing the profits of the already very wealthy, and counting on “trickle-down economics” to take care of the less well-to-do. The free-marketeer argument is that GDP increases most as markets are left free to do their thing, and the whole population benefits from cheap consumer goods and a general rise in the standard of living.

In that light, those who criticize conservatives will be pleased to hear that political conservatives have begun to turn on capitalism. Conservatives have begun to question whether the Republican party is not too beholden to large corporate interests, whether government regulation might be necessary in a variety of areas of the economy, and even whether the New Deal order might have been the foundation of the widespread prosperity of the mid-twentieth-century.

Strikingly, the responsibility for this turn on the right is inescapably that of Donald J. Trump. While to many left and right and center, Trump represented a terrible turn for the American right, in terms of economic policy, Trump’s influence has been to moderate Republican economic thinking. Trump’s refusal to cut government benefits, his support of the American working class, and his questioning of free trade all have had the effect of making conservatives rethink whether economic liberalism (libertarianism) is really the central pillar of American conservatism.

In particular, Sohrab Ahmari’s recent Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty—and What to Do About It represents a reversal of conservative economic thought. While the central pillar of the Buckley-ite conservative movement was opposition to the New Deal, Ahmari’s critique of the American market and workplace leads him to propose a return to the New Deal order as a plank in a conservative platform.

Ahmari’s book launch yesterday featured Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), who recently authored a report, “The State of the Working (and Non-Working) Man.” (Aaron Renn summarizes and explains here.) I highly recommend several of Ahmari’s recent interviews in order to hear a summary of his main lines of thought and examples of real problems in the American market and workplace.

What I want to spend this post doing is articulating the philosophical shift from a conservatism founded on free-market individualism to a social-democratic conservatism, which is, to many ears, a contradiction in terms.

Conservatism Is Not Libertarianism

I was first made aware of the possibility that free-market thinking and conservatism could come apart on reading Roger Scruton’s The Meaning of Conservatism. While a staunch opponent of Soviet and Cold War Communism, Scruton had reservations about the free-market thinking of Margaret Thatcher (his own prime minister) and Ronald Reagan. Scruton spent much of the seventies and eighties intervening in Soviet-bloc states of Eastern Europe, teaching philosophy and the liberal arts in underground universities. However, he warned in his 1980 book that free-marketeer ideology was ultimately a form of liberalism, which in political philosophy is not a slogan for the political left, but for individualist ideology of either right or left.

Scruton argued in that book and throughout his work that conservatism was more about the individual finding a home within the world, including the natural environment, the aesthetic and architectural environment, and within a local and national community. His thinking has fed into the post-Trump intellectual movement of so-called “national conservatism,” which gives the nation and community importance as giving meaning to the individual. But he also questioned pure free-market thinking, focusing on things that are sacred that we keep out (or should keep out) of the marketplace (bodies and sexuality) and other places where “market solutions” fail. In The Meaning of Conservatism, he defended the welfare state not from justice but from care, arguing that relations of love and care among even the citizens and the state itself obligate and motivate such provision.

The Critique of Meritocracy

Another step in moving my mind on free-market thinking was the critique of meritocracy I found in two authors, Alain de Botton and Michael Sandel. Much of American free-market thought, especially at a popular level, holds up the ideal of the self-made man and judges each individual on the basis of their performance in the game of individual capitalist achievement in the marketplace. While this results in high praise for those who succeed by that standard, it results in the designation of “loser” for those who fail, without consideration for why they have a low level of economic attainment. A more merciful time considered such people “unfortunates,” revealing recognition of the role of fate or providence in human events. In a kind of denial of God and fate, Americanism considers each man’s fate to be in his own hands. This way of thinking can be inspiring, but it is also dispiriting to all of us when we face obstacles beyond our own control. Alain de Botton’s Status Anxiety is a beautiful antidote to the cruel judgment of meritocracy.

Sandel is a thinker of the left who recognized, after Trump’s election, the role that disregard for working people by elites played in the support of Trump. His book is The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? A moral philosopher, Sandel details how the two prominent philosophers of right and left on economic issues of the late twentieth century, liberal John Rawls and libertarian Robert Nozick, both denied that economic distribution should be or is based on merit. Rawls, reflecting a hold-over of his Barthian Calvinist days, denied that any of us merit our condition in life since even our quantity of willpower and motivation is the result of a distribution of natural qualities and abilities. Nozick argued for the justice of free markets and private property, not because of individual moral desert but efficiency and procedural justice.

As I was reading these thinkers, I found myself autobiographically in an intense status hierarchy, academia, which is also not a very lucrative one. I began to recognize that a perspective that views us as having merit to the degree that we climb certain status hierarchies or perform work that is economically profitable disregards a lot of what is most valuable in life, including philosophy and family. And while capitalism per se is not equivalent to the meritocratic view of people, in practice, the two are often tied together: “‘The American Idea,’ as [Paul] Ryan put it in a 2011 speech at the Heritage Foundation, is ‘that justice is done when we level the playing field at the starting line and rewards are proportionate to merit and effort.’”

Aristotle’s Conservative Anti-Capitalism

Another source of my turnabout on capitalism was the great Aristotle. During the years between my master's degree at the University of Chicago and my Ph.D. here at St. Louis University, I had the privilege of teaching a course called “Ethics of Cinema and Computer Games” at DePaul University. The students were mostly majoring in video game programming, animation, and film, and I began the course with a pretty dour view of these activities. However, wary of denigrating the way these students spent their time and energies, I opened my mind to the possibility that these activities, video games in particular, might be more than just a waste of time.

I found the key in Aristotle’s philosophy of work and leisure. Against the Puritanical work ethic of Plato’s utopian Republic, according to which all activities should be measured by their utility, Aristotle argued that work was a means to an end. All of life, according to Aristotle, could be divided into work and leisure. Work was a means, leisure an end. Work was instrumentally good, leisure good intrinsically. Accordingly, Aristotle lamented a life given entirely to work, getting money and sustenance, and doing activities that we don’t want to do only in order to continue to live. At the far end of the spectrum, such a person was a slave (and perhaps by nature). However, in our society, Aristotle would have found much labor, even middle and upper-middle-class work, to be purely instrumental and lamentably slavish.

On the other hand, Aristotle’s philosophy was designed for those who had the leisure, usually through wealth, to do with their time what was good for its own sake. The free man, according to Aristotle, was not one who was free to trade in the marketplace without government coercion, but rather one who was free to use his time to do acts of both private and public good, of intrinsic value.

Ironically, this meant that my students were most free when playing video games. For them, that was their break from the world of instrumental work, their opportunity to seek pure enjoyment and intrinsic good. The further question, of whether there was a better use of their leisure remained. But this Aristotelian judgment challenged some American and capitalistic priors.

The American capitalist vision, that freedom is found in work that is not politically coerced, turns out to fall short of the Aristotelian vision of freedom, happiness, and flourishing. All work that we do, not for its own sake, but in order to make money and provide for ourselves and others, is undertaken under necessity, physical and financial. This is not a knock against its value, but merely a recognition that the real questions of life lie in a further question: What are we to do with the means of life, with the fruits of our labor, and with the brief time afforded us when our work is complete?

The Way Forward

Where does all this leave conservative economic policy?

Unsettled. The sense of legitimacy of the outcome of the free market comes to a great degree from the idea of equality of opportunity and meritocracy. When we see that the good life is found in individuals and communities being free to do those things that are intrinsically good, and not entirely motivated by the need for sustenance, then meritocracy seems like a cruel game. While the economic objections to the strictest forms of socialism and communism remain, the basically libertarian sense that markets must be entirely left alone loses its legitimacy.

Of course, it will not be possible to make leisured aristocrats out of the entire population. What is needed is a healthy balance of work and leisure and of individual achievement with community participation. There are major policy questions about what actually will serve these ends, and conservatives remain skeptical of certain of the left’s solutions.

But interestingly, Sohrab Ahmari basically endorses the New Deal as contributing to the health of the American middle class and the strength of the family in - you guessed it - the 1950s. There is space for conservatives to embrace social-democratic economic policies in service to traditionalist and conservative ends, like the family and local community.

The contrast with the progressive solution that Ahmari identifies is that, while the left seeks for one side in the class warfare to win, conservatives are happy with what is called “class compromise.” Instead of trying to flatten the entire economic distribution, conservatives are happy with imperfect solutions that allow different economic classes to live side by side with a sense of belonging to a shared community, instead of merely being winners and losers of a cruel meritocratic game. While much more remains to be said, that seems like a goal worth pursuing.

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There is a new divide among evangelicals.

Over the course of the 2010s, a new division arose over matters, not of theology, but of culture, morality, and politics.

A major inflection point for that divide was the 2016 presidential election. The majority of evangelical Christians continued to vote Republican in that election, in spite of the Republican candidate’s low moral character and nativist political resonances. Many evangelical leaders even leaped to the candidate’s defense in ways that are, to say the least, distasteful.

While there has long been an evangelical left, a new group of evangelical leaders have joined in critiquing the evangelical majority for its support of Donald Trump. Like the “Never Trump” conservatives (and in David French’s case, being one of those), they did not break with the evangelical majority because of political progressivism but political and theological principle.

Table of Contents

* The New Evangelical Divide Is Cultural, Not Just Political

* The Evangelical Majority and Its Evangelical Critics

* The Psychology of the Other Side: Aaron Renn versus Russell Moore

* A Better Understanding of Our Fellow Evangelicals

* Questions for Discussion in the Comments

The New Evangelical Divide Is Cultural, Not Just Political

But the divide within evangelicalism was not solely or primarily about presidential politics. It coincides with several ecclesiastical and cultural divides, on which people often accept a whole set of views on one side or the other.

For example, another divide concerns the role of women in the church and in marriage. While evangelical complementarianism, of the kind associated with The Gospel Coalition, had always distinguished itself from traditionalist patriarchy, a new round of evangelical egalitarians began to arise out of the ranks of these complementarians and criticize them as, in principle, the same. Aimee Byrd is an example, with her Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. Rick Warren is another example, though not quite of the Gospel Coalition variety. Russell Moore is another. (Evangelical Twitter - I mean, “X” - is also full of these.)

Given people’s views on one or both of these two matters, it is often possible to predict their views on each of the following matters:

1) Abuse in the Church: Is the commission and cover-up of sexual abuse the most common problem, or are false accusations against men also a concern?

2) Race, Critical Race Theory, and Wokeness: Is the contemporary discourse on race reflective of progressive politics infiltrating institutions including the church, or are white evangelicals complicit with institutional racism?

3) Homosexuality: Is the “LGBTQ+ movement” coming for us, even under the guise of Revoice and Side B, or has the church indeed failed to serve Christians who are gay, failing to distinguish its adherence to a biblical ethic from homophobia?

4) Purity Culture: Has the church enforced an unhealthy legalism surrounding modesty and sexual purity, or are morays just continuing to unravel around us, and we are due for a new round of purity culture?

A good locus of this new evangelical-critical perspective is the podcast, “The Holy Post,” of Phil Vischer, Bob the Tomato himself. “The Holy Post” is a valuable example because, if there is one person who is unavoidably an evangelical, it is the founder and creator of VeggieTales. Nevertheless, as a creator of pop Christian culture for the evangelical majority, Vischer has had an evolution toward an evangelical-critical perspective.

The Evangelical Majority and Its Evangelical Critics

While, thanks to our politically partisan culture, this divide often tracks politics, it is not best conceived as between progressive and conservative evangelicals. In important part, it is between conservative evangelicals, with a faction of conservative evangelicals taking a line of critique that has historically been associated with the political left, both evangelical and non-evangelical.

The divide has to do with the alignment in the U.S. between evangelicals and cultural and political conservatism. The majority position in evangelicalism favors this alignment, while this new faction is critical of the alignment. For this reason, I dub the two camps “majority evangelicals” and “critical evangelicals.”

Currently, in evangelical public discourse, I primarily see critical and majority evangelicals engaging in the following ways. The critical evangelicals accuse the evangelical majority and its intellectual leaders and defenders for being morally judgmental and beholden to power, thereby compromising the church’s witness. On the other hand, defenders of the evangelical majority attack the critical evangelicals for throwing the majority under the bus and behaving in ways indistinguishable from the non-Christian critics of American evangelicals.

Neither of these positions seems completely compelling to me.

The best posture, it seems to me, would be one that accepted and learned from the critique of the critical evangelicals, modifying without abandoning the evangelical majority and its basic moral compass. Frankly, this will be unsatisfying to the intelligentsia on both sides. The critical evangelicals question whether the evangelical majority any longer has a moral compass. The majority evangelicals question whether the critical evangelicals are even evangelicals anymore (and not incipient “ex-vangelicals”). Both of these perspectives are one-sided.

The Psychology of the Other Side: Aaron Renn versus Russell Moore

Both sides of the evangelical divide have a mistaken psychology of the other side. The critical evangelicals accuse the majority evangelicals of having entirely ideologically capitulated to existing power structures and right-wing ideology. This capitulation is, in turn, controlled by bad motives, like a lack of concern for the oppressed and the desire for power and sexual control of women. The majority evangelicals, especially the majority evangelical intellectuals, accuse critical evangelicals of having ideologically capitulated to existing power structures and left-wing ideology. They also allege that this capitulation is controlled by bad motives, namely, lack of concern for and loyalty to the majority of evangelicals, desire for status, and conformity to the world.

As we will see, it is entirely possible that there are some on both sides of whom these descriptions are accurate. (In fact, there are such people on both sides.) But I warrant that the main defenders of each side are not those people. Among the intelligent and conscientious defenders of each view, the predominant source of their beliefs and commitments are experience and Christian teaching. In particular, on the points that differentiate each side from the other, it is experience that is the dominant distinguishing factor.

Russell Moore, for example, in his latest book, Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America, details his experience of being encouraged to assist in covering up sexual abuse within the Southern Baptist Convention. The same crop of leaders that were interested to cover up such abuse and maintain power were vocal defenders of Donald Trump, in spite of his moral failings. Accordingly, when Moore says that the evangelical defense of Donald Trump is morally compromised and arises from bad motives, he indeed has reason to think that that is the case. He is not making it up. We can question whether the mixed motives of these compromised leaders characterize the majority of evangelicals, or even just those evangelical intellectuals sympathetic to the political right. But Moore cannot be accused of being entirely wrong or of being motivated only by irrational partisanship.

Aaron Renn has recently critiqued Moore’s stance in Losing Our Religion. Renn writes:

The book is a fundamentalist style denunciation of his evangelical opponents along with a victimology about the way Moore says he was mistreated by them.

Somewhat unusually for a Christian book, Moore spends time describing the way he believes he was mistreated by others, as well as the shocking behavior he says he witnessed while in the SBC.

While I have appreciated Renn’s analysis of evangelicalism, including of the new divide within it, I find this critique disappointing, as several of his phrases discount Moore’s experiences.

The accusation that Moore’s account is a “victimology” discounts its accuracy. But the qualifications that Moore “says he was mistreated,” or “believes” things about what he “says he witnessed” discount what Moore experienced. While Renn goes on to admit that some (but not all) of what Moore says about conservative evangelicals is true, there is no need to qualify the stories Moore relates. It is not plausible that Moore made this up, which I do not think Renn would allege.

I agree with Renn that Moore’s conclusions on the basis of his experience are not entirely accurate. And I do not think that Moore came to these imperfect conclusions about the evangelical majority on account of false memories. Instead, Moore is guilty of generalizing from a certain segment of Republican-aligned evangelical leadership to the evangelical majority en masse. If the subtitle of his book read, “An Altar Call for a Plurality of Southern Baptist Leadership and the Laity who Trust Them,” it might be more accurate. I don’t mean that the error Moore diagnoses is limited to the SBC. But when generalized to all American evangelicals who have continued to vote Republican on the presidential ticket since 2016, it is inaccurate.

A Better Understanding of Our Fellow Evangelicals

Currently, the theory of how the other side gets things wrong is something like, they misunderstand their own experiences and compromise with biblical truth for embrace of an ideology. I think what happens much more often is that people base generalizations (ideology is a kind of generalization) on limited experience.

For example, I know many evangelicals who voted for Trump. Almost none of those I know did so without misgivings; some did not want to speak about whom they voted for. At the time, I was at the relatively apolitical, but theologically conservative Westminster Seminary. While almost no one expressed support for Trump, many were relieved after he had won.

Now, I think it would be unwarranted to generalize from my experience that all evangelicals who remained sympathetic to the Republican party or voted for Trump did so with the same misgivings, for purely prudential reasons, and with good consciences. But at least, I know from this experience that a generalization that casts all such evangelicals in a negative light would be unwarranted. The whole truth would require bringing together the experiences of Russell Moore and many like him with my experiences and many like mine in a systematic way.

The same can be said for each of the other matters that divide critical evangelicals from majority evangelicals. The scandal of sexual abuse of minors being covered up or even performed by church leaders has been tragic. No longer merely an issue of the Catholic priesthood, from Southern Baptist leaders to Bill Gothard to Ravi Zacharias, we can see a pattern of men in authority misusing that authority to do or hide evil.

However, it is possible for concern about abuse in the church to turn ideological - which is to say, the judgment that this terrible thing happened, or even happens a lot, becomes, “This is what happens.” Accordingly, accusations are taken as proof in themselves. I have known men who have been wrongly accused in these ways. That kind of story tends to be one heard on the political right and “manosphere” kinds of Internet spaces.

But rather than jump to partisan conclusions on either basis, it is better to say that both of these things happen in the world. The world is a complex place. Men in places of religious authority are well-positioned to abuse trust in disturbing ways, but women are also able to wield such accusations against men unfairly. The side of justice is not one of these two sides, but just and fair judgment on the basis of thorough investigation and knowledge.

I believe that the same can be done on each of the other issues that divide critical and majority evangelicals. The critiques of the critical evangelicals must be heard; majority evangelicals do not need to abandon their moral and political compass in order to hear these critiques, at least, not necessarily.

Finally, it is important to make friends and/or retain friends across this evangelical divide. I speak weekly with two friends. Over the course of the period in which this divide has arisen, our views have not varied in lockstep. Yet the bond of friendship and of shared Christian commitments has proven much stronger than our thoughts about political and ecclesial matters of the day.

I also had the joy of making several new friends, through writing on same-sex attraction and attending the Revoice conference this year. Their friendship persuaded me that the evangelical majority is simply wrong on at least one issue, their approach to homosexual desire. The evangelical church has placed “heavy burdens” on LGBTQ+ Christians, missing the mark in its counsel to seek orientation change (Side X), and now, to pretend not to be gay (by not “identifying as such”; Side Y). The spiritual care, rather than cure of gay Christians requires recognizing the reality of sexual orientation and encouraging all believers to bear the cross God has given them.

This experience, among others, has led me to be careful not to dismiss my fellow evangelical Christians and not to think that cultural or political affiliation is more significant than shared faith in Christ.

Questions for Discussion in the Comments:

* How does the distinction between critical evangelicals and majority evangelicals map onto your experience?

* What is one issue that you think the “other side” from you gets right?

* Do you have friendships across the evangelical divide, and what experiences led the other person to the view he or she has?

* What do you listen to or read that gives you access to the other side?

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In response to my recent post on J. Gresham Machen, readers offered thoughtful pushback on several fronts.

Some questioned whether Machen’s later turn away from “objective” methods wasn’t the right move after all.

Others raised concerns about the dangers of free inquiry, especially when it risks undermining Christian convictions.

Still others debated the wisdom of staying and reforming corrupt institutions rather than leaving them to act authentically.

Here are a few reflections in response to those critiques.

1. Should Christians Strive for Objectivity?

A common objection was:

“The theological modernists claimed objectivity, but they were, in fact, biased. Doesn’t that vindicate Machen’s later turn toward Christian perspectivalism?”

This strikes me as a category confusion.

The problem with theological modernists wasn’t that they tried to be objective. The problem was that they weren’t. They imported philosophical and theological assumptions while presenting their conclusions as neutral scholarship. Their failure wasn’t in aspiring to objectivity, but in failing to live up to it.

The right response isn’t to embrace perspectivalism as if all truth is merely a projection of our ideological priors. It’s to strive for greater objectivity, not less.

I’ve described this elsewhere as civilized empiricism—a pursuit of truth grounded in a recognition of one’s biases, tested through dialogue with dissenting voices and institutions designed to expose blind spots. This is distinct from a kind of naïve or “brute empiricism,” where a lone thinker imagines they can arrive at truth without community, history, or correction.

If our institutions are prone to dogma, the answer isn’t to surrender to subjectivity. It’s to lean more fully into practices that counterbalance our partiality.

That means that students of faith should study with secular professors and peers, and secular scholars should welcome religious students into their classrooms.

We need shared spaces of inquiry across disagreement, not echo chambers of our own convictions.

2. Should We Pursue Truth Before Christ?

Another objection was more spiritual in nature:

Is there not danger in pursuing truth wherever it leads, especially if that pursuit might lead us away from Christ?

I take this concern seriously. The fear isn’t just about what we might find out if we looked deeper. It’s about our own susceptibility to pride, to the allure of intellectual respectability, or to temptation masquerading as insight.

There is wisdom in spiritual caution. Not everyone is ready for every branch of philosophy or science.

But while maturity matters, I don’t believe the answer is to foreclose hard questions for fear of where they might lead. Christians often speak of the need for moral commitment to Christ prior to intellectual inquiry. But the New Testament seems to assume the reverse: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14). Our faith depends on something being true, and that truth is, in principle, open to examination.

Faith seeks understanding, yes, but it also rests on good reasons. We are not asked to believe blindly, but to weigh, inquire, and discern.

To do that well requires what I might call a “philosophic temper”—a posture of non-anxious, open-minded interest in truth. Some secular scholars model this better than many Christians.

(This is very different from the kind of student who learns a bit of textual criticism and suddenly becomes pro-abortion. That’s not inquiry; that’s reaction.)

One helpful way to cultivate a philosophic temper: Ask yourself what kind of worldview you’d hold if you lost your faith. Don’t just assume you’d become a Nietzschean or a nihilist. Perhaps you would continue to “act as though God exists,” like Jordan Peterson, or maintain the best insights of “religion for atheists,” like Alain de Botton. Thinking through those scenarios helps clarify what’s at stake, and what’s not, in our beliefs.

3. Should We Stay or Leave Broken Institutions?

Finally, some readers defended Machen’s own institutional departures, asking:

Wasn’t Machen right to leave the mainline Presbyterian church and Princeton Seminary? Aren’t some institutions working at cross-purposes with their founding principles?

In my earlier post, I only revealed my views on Machen’s decision to paid subscribers, but I will say this here: Burnett’s biography has me reconsider my Protestant impulse to take doctrinal purity as the deciding factor in favor of leaving corrupt institutions.

The question applies far beyond Machen’s choice to leave his denomination and academic home. Many of us wrestle with similar choices in our relationship to academia, to the church, or to legacy institutions in general. Should we remain, or break away and start afresh?

Often our conclusions reflect our own sociological positioning. Those outside academia often see only its ideological flaws and institutional failures. Those within it, especially those embedded in its better corners, see the benefits it still offers: peer review and intellectual collaboration and camaraderie.

I’m part of academia, though not at its center. I see both its value and its limitations. (See my “Don’t Let Academia Stop You Being an Intellectual.”) I envy the acknowledgements pages in academic books, in which top scholars credit tens, if not hundreds of other academics for conversations, criticisms, and challenges that shaped the final work. That kind of collaborative refinement can’t easily be replicated on Substack. Substack has its strengths, but it doesn’t yet foster the same kind of rigorous back-and-forth.

The same dynamic plays out in the church. Many evangelicals ask, “Why stay in a theologically liberal denomination?” But consider what was lost when evangelicals abandoned the mainline: beautiful buildings, central properties in every city, and a visible presence in the cultural square. By leaving, we may have preserved our theology, but at the cost of place, heritage, and public witness. There’s a kind of escapism in that.

Doctrinal purity matters, but it’s not the only thing that matters. Institutions do more than just preserve doctrine: they order life, preserve memory, and embody truth in social form. When they lose their way, leaving is tempting, but rebuilding outside the institution is costly. You lose the infrastructure, financial, intellectual, and even architectural, that once supported your mission.

Those supports aren’t ultimate, but they’re not irrelevant either. There’s a kind of radical Protestant, or Donatist, impulse in assuming we can do without them.

“Donatism was a schism from the Catholic Church from the fourth to the sixth centuries. Donatists argued that Christian clergy must be faultless for their ministry to be effective and their prayers and sacraments to be valid.”

from “Donatism,” Wikipedia

What Comes Next?

As I continue reflecting on Machen’s biography, I find myself drawn to an earlier generation of Christian leaders—those turn-of-the-century college presidents who pursued academic excellence while holding firm to the faith. There was a window of time when Christian intellectuals helped shape the modern university—before ideological conformity closed that door.

In one sense, you could see what I’m doing as reconsidering the idea that the seminary theologian is the ideal of the Christian intellectual. Perhaps the ideal of the Christian intellectual is somewhere closer to the interface of the modern research university, the Christian faced with the objective pursuit of truth in a whole variety of areas, with empirical research, with philosophy, and so on. It’s for such an individual that the conflicts between faith and reason are raised in an institutional calling.

I’ll be drawing attention to some of these figures in the near future.

This post was written with the editing help of ChatGPT.

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A number of readers have, in their comments, drawn my attention to critiques of Intelligent Design. I thoroughly agree with one reader’s encouragement to give attention to these:

I do think it’s important to engage with mainstream science’s responses to the ID crowd, many of which strike me as generally persuasive and sincere.

In particular, in response to my last post in my series “Why Not Theistic Evolution?” based on Michael Behe’s Darwin Devolves, I was directed to the following review of Behe’s book by Gregory Lang and Amber Rice, two of his own colleagues at Lehigh University, “Evolution unscathed: Darwin Devolves argues on weak reasoning that unguided evolution is a destructive force, incapable of innovation.”

While there is an entire website dedicated to cataloging the reviews of and responses to the reviews of Darwin Devolves, this review is exemplary of what two biologists, Behe’s own colleagues, think is an adequate rebuttal of his work.

In commenting on this as a philosopher, one accusation will be that I lack the scientific qualifications to be informed on these fundamental matters of biology. However, in reading this review of Behe’s book, I was struck by the consequences that a lack of philosophical training has for these evolutionary biologists. As biologists, they are well-equipped with empirical knowledge of biology and microbiology, in particular. But, in their evaluation of the kind of evidence necessary to determine whether unguided evolution is sufficient to account for all of life, a kind of philosophical naïveté is revealed.

The age-old question of whether the evidence of biology permits a materialist explanation cannot be decided by a handful of examples. As a result, the effect of Lang and Rice’s review is to showcase several examples of evolution right at Behe’s identified “edge of evolution.” What the review does not do is persuade that Neo-Darwinian evolution is capable of creative work and the generation of original genetic information. Likewise, while Lang and Rice persuade that not all mutation is degradative, they do not persuade that any mutation is truly generative. Evolution is shown to produce many neutral genetic changes, shuffling the existing genetic cards, but the deck itself is left unexplained.

In The Edge of Evolution and Darwin Devolves, Michael Behe proposes an eponymous “edge of evolution.” In “Evolution Unscathed,” Lang and Rice give that edge an almost imperceptible nudge. The line remains at the biological taxon of the family, and evolution remains a bounded and limited biological force, incapable of the generation of original forms of life.

Table of Contents:

* Neo-Darwinian Evolution: Degradative, Neutral, or Generative?

* The Evolution of Irreducible Complexity: Erasing or Nudging the Edge of Evolution?

* The Evidence of Evolution and the Need for Philosophy

1. Neo-Darwinian Evolution: Degradative, Neutral, or Generative?

Lang and Rice begin by critiquing an impression they suppose Darwin Devolves is designed to leave: That a majority of the genetic mutations that result from Neo-Darwinian processes are degradative or loss-of-function mutations. Over several paragraphs, they object that a great many mutations are neutral and do not involve loss-of-function, the deletion of functional genetic material. As a result, they at best correct an overemphasis on Behe’s part. But in so doing, they effectively concede that Neo-Darwinian processes have no positive, generative power.

One of Behe’s main points in Darwin Devolves is that Neo-Darwinian evolution, which has been demonstrated to occur at the level of species and genus, often works by providing a variation that is advantageous relative to the organism's environment, but which is the result of a loss of functional genetic material. A great example is the polar bear’s mutation of a gene that is shared by many (all?) mammals, up to and including humans. The APOB gene is involved in fat metabolism, and its loss in other species is shown to lead “to high levels of cholesterol and heart disease” (Behe, 17). The polar bear’s mutation of this gene proves advantageous under its extreme environmental conditions, allowing it to have a diet much higher in fat than its relative, the brown bear, with whom the polar bear shares a common (bear) ancestor. Again, in terms of genetic information, the mutation is a loss; but by the accident of the polar bear’s environment, the mutation is actually adaptive.

Lang and Rice point out that degradative mutations like this one are only predominant in cases of what is known as “experimental evolution.” Experimental evolution is what occurs “where selective pressures are high and conditions are constant, or nearly so.” I gather that the polar bear’s extreme, Arctic environment made for a paradigmatic case of experimental evolution.

However, most evolution does not occur under such constant and high-pressure conditions. In these other situations, “loss-of-function mutations account for only a small fraction of natural genetic variation”:

In humans only ∼3.5% of exonic and splice site variants are putatively loss-of-function, and a survey of 42 yeast strains found that only 242 of the nearly 6000 genes contain putative loss-of-function variants.

These distinctions, between different kinds of evolution and mutations, are helpful and provide a corrective to Behe’s apparent overemphasis on the degradative force of Neo-Darwinian evolution.

However, the rest of the mutations that Lang and Rice describe as much more prevalent than loss-of-function variations are, relative to the introduction of novel genetic material, merely neutral. The three they mention are “gene duplication, horizontal gene transfer, and introgression.” Gene duplication involves the introduction of an extra copy of an existing gene into the resulting genome. Horizontal gene transfer is the relocation of a gene to a different point in the genome. Introgression is the introduction of genetic material from a different species or population via inter-breeding.

About these three forms of genetic mutation, Lang and Rice say: “Gene duplication, horizontal gene transfer, and introgression balance out gene loss, providing a source of new genetic material.”

But this is a generous use of the term “new genetic material.” 

If I took a work of Shakespeare and duplicated or moved around its parts, or inserted portions from other works of Shakespeare, would any new, dramatic prose be produced? How we answer that question determines our verdict on the theory of universal common descent by Neo-Darwinian evolution.

Let’s imagine that a line of Shakespeare was duplicated and repeated successively. Even if it was copied without error, its unnecessary repetition might be thought to damage the flow and meaning of the text. Nevertheless, using Lang and Rice’s standard, we could admit that the text had not been degraded, just rearranged. And the same for moving a line “horizontally” within the text. Introducing text from another drama would certainly involve new, dramatic prose relative to this drama; but of course, that other line was equally the creative work of Shakespeare and is also likely to interrupt and damage the text.

Of course, it is possible that repeating a line of the drama, shifting a line to a different point in the text, or inserting a line from another drama could, on rare occasions, fit into and slightly change the plot or, at least, the dialogue. If this occurred, we could say that “new, dramatic prose” has been produced. But for other reasons, we might want to maintain that no new, dramatic prose had been produced, because the novelty arises merely by the (accidental) rearrangement of prose that required a human author in order to be produced in the first place.

At this point, we realize that we lack the categories to distinguish different levels or kinds of novelty and of dramatic prose. These processes are capable of producing new prose that is a permutation of existing prose. These permutations of Shakespeare’s text by a copying mechanism are limited and shaped by the original text the mechanism is given. So-called “artificial intelligence” might even be able to produce an imitation Shakespearean drama, by an advanced and not entirely random, but mechanical process. However, given the necessity of informational input to the mechanism or A.I., we must distinguish the kind of text such a mechanism can produce from that which it must be given.

The same goes for genetic information. The kind of genetic information on which Neo-Darwinian processes can work is categorically different than the kind of genetic information they can produce. Another theorist of Intelligent Design, William Dembski, has proposed and defended a theory of the kind of information that requires a designer: Information that is both specified and complex. (He elaborates the theory in his books The Design Inference and No Free Lunch.)  But even his theory fails to distinguish between the genetic information Neo-Darwinian processes can produce and that which they require to get started. (Fortunately, his theory indicates that both require design as an explanation.)

So, to the theory of Intelligent Design, I offer my own contribution, the distinction between original and mutative information. For Shakespearean text, a copying mechanism might be able to produce novel, mutative dramatic prose. But it will produce no original dramatic prose. Likewise, for genetic information, Neo-Darwinian processes are able to produce novel, mutative genetic information. But they are incapable of producing novel, original genetic information. The question is not, then, of novelty, but of originality.

Behe’s claim was that Neo-Darwinian processes are powerfully degradative to genetic information. Lang and Rice retort that, in most evolutionary circumstances, “Gene duplication, horizontal gene transfer, and introgression balance out gene loss, providing a source of new genetic material.” My response is that these processes indeed produce new mutative genetic material. But the question for evolution is really of the possibility of the production of original genetic information. Behe’s claim about the devolutionary power of Neo-Darwinism is, likewise, not primarily about the degradation of mutative genetic information, but of original genetic information, like that in the APOB gene, shared by many mammals, which the polar bear lost, on account of the unique diet its environment required.

Accordingly, concerning original genetic information, the verdict must be that Lang and Rice highlight processes that are, at best, neutral with respect to such information, neither degradative nor creative. But the verdict that Lang and Rice require is that: “the data (only some of which we present here) are more than sufficient to convince any open-minded skeptic that unguided evolution is capable of generating complex systems.” What Lang and Rice have actually shown is that, given complex, self-reproducing systems, unguided evolution is capable of producing non-degradative variations to such systems. They have not provided data that supports unguided evolution’s capacity to generate complex systems.

2. The Evolution of Irreducible Complexity: Erasing or Nudging the Edge of Evolution?

However, later in the piece, Lang and Rice attempt to do just that, to demonstrate evolution’s ability to generate complex systems. A hallmark of Behe’s original argument for Intelligent Design, from his book Darwin’s Black Box, is irreducible complexity, a feature of systems that require all their parts in order to function, like Behe’s famous mousetrap. A step-wise theory of the generation of systems must overcome the obstacle that function is not gradually improved by the accumulation of parts, but is absent until all the parts are present in the required arrangement.

The Neo-Darwinian response to Behe has always been that there are step-wise evolutionary paths to such systems, in which each individual part serves a function different from that of the eventual whole. The irreducibly complex system is an unforeseen, but happy result of independent adaptations, that previously served other functions (or may continue to do so). Lang and Rice provide just such an example.

But before looking at one of their examples, consider the significance of this design constraint from an engineering perspective. Imagine having to design an irreducibly complex mechanical system to serve a particular function. Then, you are told that each individual part of the system must serve a function on its own, a function distinct from, but not entirely unrelated to that of the whole system. (The parts of a molecular system may serve functions distinct from that of the molecular system, but still related to the functioning and health of the whole organism.) That alone would be a significant design constraint. I would be hard-pressed to think of any artificial system that has been produced according to this constraint.

But the evolutionary bar is actually much higher since the entire system must survive and propagate via natural selection. This means that a part that could serve a function but wasn’t necessary to the organism could very well be eradicated. And again, this all depends on parts of mechanisms arising more or less randomly, based on genetic mutations. (And the randomness of genetic mutations has, I think, been overstated; what mutations and variations are possible is constrained by the genetic code itself.)

For the theory of universal common descent by unguided evolution to be plausible, it must be demonstrated that all kinds of biological systems could arise, without intention, with these restrictive and demanding design constraints that human engineers would struggle to follow. And, it must be argued that it is not improbable that this did occur within the time allotted by the fossil record.

Do Lang and Rice do this? No. What they do offer is an example of a biomolecular system that requires four different protein variations in order to serve the function of binding a new kind of protein. Fortunately, each of the four proteins improves the existing function of the molecular system before enabling “in an all-or-none manner” the system to bind to a new protein, serving a new function. Lang and Rice conclude:

While adapting along a step-wise evolutionary path of improved binding to LamB, the J protein was able to acquire the ability to bind to a new receptor—to evolve a novel protein-protein interaction that was dependent upon four mutations acting in an all-or-none manner, well beyond Behe's “edge of evolution.”

This is an interesting example and indeed demonstrates the development of an irreducibly complex system by a step-wise, unguided evolutionary path. Along with one other example of a biomolecular system, Lang and Rice succeed in demonstrating that, at a rather low level of complexity, a system that is irreducibly complex may arise.

While they say that this is “well beyond Behe’s ‘edge of evolution,’” it barely moves the needle. We can remember Aristotle’s criterion for identifying events caused by chance: That they happen rarely. Likewise, these molecular examples exhibit a low level of complexity; their probability, while small, is not prohibitively so. Accordingly, rather than relocating Behe’s edge of evolution, they, at best, shift it imperceptibly.

Returning to the Shakespeare example, the evolution of this new interaction is like four mutations to the text leading to a new, mutative paragraph, that oddly makes sense. While unlikely, this is not so improbable as never to occur. But the fact that it did does not make it probable that an entirely new Shakespearean drama could be produced in that fashion; in fact, it does not even make it possible, on account of the distinction between original and mutative dramatic prose. Likewise, the fact that functioning, self-replicating bacteria can evolve novel functions in an unguided way does not indicate that bacteria itself could have come to be by Neo-Darwinian processes. It shows that bacteria may evolve (i.e., change), not that anything else could evolve into a bacterium.

3. The Evidence of Evolution and the Need for Philosophy

Earlier, I wrote that Lang and Rice show competence in the empirical work of biology, but they lack philosophical competence. Another way of saying this is that they are very competent to gather evidence; they lack the competence to determine what the evidence is evidence of.

This shows up in their review in a discussion of different standards of evidence: “Darwin Devolves accepts as evidence only de novo protein evolution, a restriction Behe uses to…claim that ‘Darwinian evolution is self-limiting.’” Given that they state in the review that their examples are examples of “novel genetic information,” it seems that they implicitly accept a distinction between the “novel” and the “de novo,” which presumably maps onto something more than the linguistic difference between English and Latin. In my terminology, this is the distinction between the merely new, and the original.

My question to Lang and Rice would be how they can be so confident “that unguided evolution is capable of generating complex systems,” if “de novo protein evolution” is too high a bar for them to demonstrate.

If Behe was inclined to overemphasize the degradative force of Neo-Darwinism, and if he overlooks some cases of the unguided arising of irreducibly, minimally-complex systems, then Lang and Rice have corrected those errors. What they have not done is met the correctly high evidential bar of demonstrating that it is not only possible but not improbable that all irreducibly complex systems arose by unguided, Neo-Darwinian processes. Instead of erasing the “edge of evolution,” Lang and Rice have helped Behe draw it a hair to one side: Not only can Neo-Darwinian processes diversify an existing biological kind into new genera and species, remaining within the same, existing biological family, it can also lead to new protein functions every now and then.

While Lang and Rice insist that “the data (only some of which we present here) are more than sufficient to convince any open-minded skeptic that unguided evolution is capable of generating complex systems,” I propose a different vision of open-mindedness: Our minds should be at best agnostic concerning the capacity of unguided evolution to generate complex systems. To decide between an unguided evolutionary, a teleological evolutionary, and a creationist view of biological origins requires much thought. Whether the unguided evolution of all biological organisms and systems is possible is at least an open question; at most, it is hardly imaginable, and adherence to the view that evolution is a closed question is based on scientistic gullibility and an ideological commitment to methodological naturalism in historical science.

But more on those next time.

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Imagine a machine that produces and reproduces video games. An internal mechanism replicates the digital code of an existing game and spits out a copy of that game. The mechanism is quite reliable, but not perfect. Every so often it will change a command or a letter of programming language.

The machine also has a computerized video game tester. Each copy is delivered to the game tester, which judges the copy by a single play-through. This means that many errors in the digital copy are overlooked, and others that are encountered either do not interfere significantly or derail the test. If they derail the test, then the copy is scrapped and is not reproduced. If a copy passes the test of a single play-through, it is copied, and the process repeats.

If I take, for example, Madden, and put it in the video game replicator, over several generations of copies, many variations to the original code will be introduced. Those that are destructive of gameplay to a certain degree are destroyed with a certain frequency. Others are not sufficient to warrant destruction or are overlooked, again, in the testing process. Some variations are actually found to improve gameplay; such variations, though rare, may make every field goal a success or a particular player untackleable. The computerized game tester does not notice a problem with these, as these actually make gameplay easier.

Over time, many variations on the game will be produced. Most variations will be deleterious and will be destroyed. But several will be produced that may be noticeably distinct from the original. Of course, there are limits to variation. Given the programming of the original game, particular features and elements of the programming can only change so much before the game becomes unplayable. Likewise, even though the variations are more or less random, which variations are possible and are eventually produced will be determined by the nature of the original game and will be finite. You might say that the possible variations are given with the nature of the game; certain segments of code can be deleted or changed without entirely hampering gameplay, but this was determinable, in principle, beforehand.

In the case of the video game replicator, I do not think it would be controversial to say that, while many variations on Madden will be produced, no variation will turn out to be the game FIFA. (Madden is American football, FIFA is soccer.) Likewise, we can be under no illusions that the video game replicator could be credited as the creator or programmer of the game Madden, even if it, rather than a programmer, could be credited as the mechanism that produced a particular variation of Madden. Rather, to begin the process we needed a programmed game, not to mention a mechanism capable of replicating the programmed game.

The mechanism of reproducing with a random amount of variation, followed by testing, and survival of, well, the funnest is only capable of producing variations on a pre-existing program. What is more, every variation it produces is a corruption of the original code, even though some of those variations are innocuous enough or even beneficial to the game. If by no other means, we could determine which lines of code were corrupt by means of comparison with the original game. Beneficial variations would not be any less corruptions of this original code; some of them could be even pre-programmed into the code to lead to beneficial variations.

This illustration, while enjoyable and humorous, is a quite straightforward illustration of the process of random mutation and natural selection. The limits to the mechanism of random variation and testing illustrate the very limits there are to change by Darwinian mechanism in the realm of life. It also illustrates the thesis of Michael Behe’s latest book on evolution and intelligent design, Darwin Devolves, that Darwin’s mechanism does produce variation in biology, but not by evolution but by devolution. Likewise, there are real limits to biological change by Darwinian mechanism, which Behe argues occur at the biological level, not of the species, but of the family. While this admits variation at the level of genus and species, a discovery of Darwinian evolutionary science, I will argue that what this points to is not universal common ancestry but original, created kinds which are such as to allow from a certain amount of variation and speciation.

Table of Contents:

1. Evolution Does Occur

Essentialists hold that all the species we now see were created as such with no evolution. I argue that, on the contrary, evolution has occurred, by the Neo-Darwinian mechanism. The question is whether there is a limit to this kind of evolution, and if so, what it is.

2. “The Family Line”

Michael Behe has demonstrated in Darwin Devolves, third in his intelligent design trilogy, that the limit of Neo-Darwinian evolution is the third-lowest taxonomic level, the family. This means that variation can only occur at the level of species and genus, at least by an unguided Neo-Darwinian mechanism.

3. Evolution Is Devolution

Behe has also shown that the Neo-Darwinian evolution that does occur is de-volution, that is, the degradation of functional and pre-existing genetic code. Thus, evolution can explain variation within a biological family, largely based on corrupting or deleting genetic code. It cannot explain the origin of the genetic code of a given biological family.

4. Is There Better and Worse in Biology?

A friend and reader asks how we can make a value-judgment in biology, that some change is de-volutionary. I show how biologists do it, revealing that there is a distinction between evaluating that genetic code is functional and evaluating whether genetic code leads to survival. In turn, this means that a species can be biologically fit in one of two ways, non-accidentally, due to functional genetic material, and accidentally, due to non-functional but accidentally advantageous variation.

5. The Evidence of Created Kinds

If biological genetic information and families, like video games, cannot be produced by a Neo-Darwinian mechanism, or any accidental mechanism, and biological variation can only occur within limits, then there is evidence of created kinds. Some of these may be as high taxonomically as the family, but such biological kinds and the genetic information necessary to code for them cannot be explained in terms of Neo-Darwinian or any material process. This leads to the postulation of original, created kinds.

1. Evolution Does Occur

In the intellectual discourse, the antithesis of Darwinian evolution is what philosophers call essentialism. Essentially, this is the view that things have an essence, a set of features that make it what it is, that are unchangeable and universal to that kind of thing. In the biological realm, Darwinism is held up as having defeated the idea that biological species have an essence and are therefore unchangeable. The most pure creationist or eternalist essentialism will hold that all of the species we see today were created as such or have eternally been what they are, without change.

In arguing against evolution, I do not mean to hold this kind of essentialism that denies the possibility of, well, evolution, that is, the biological change of kinds of organisms over time. The “evolution” that I oppose is universal common ancestry. But I do not deny what has been observed and what scientists have proof of, which is “microevolution.” Microevolution is change within a variety of organisms, including what scientists call “speciation,” the branching of a new species, but within certain biological limits that preclude universal common ancestry. The real question is whether there are such limits and, if so, what they are.

Let’s cut to the chase: Michael Behe, author of a foundational work of the Intelligent Design movement, Darwin’s Black Box, surveys the most recent evidence in Darwin Devolves, and argues that the limit is the biological taxonomic level of “family.” The taxonomic hierarchy begins with the species, then genus, family, order, class, phylum, kingdom, and finally, domain. As biologists currently classify living things, evolution has occurred at the species and genus levels. But no example of evolution at the level of family has been observed, and there is reason to think that that is the biological limit of evolutionary change. Accordingly, if there are created kinds, they are to be located no higher than at the taxonomic level of the biological family.

2. “The Family Line”

In Behe’s second book, The Edge of Evolution, he introduces this chart, which represents the limit of biological evolution by Neo-Darwinian processes of natural selection acting on random mutation:

Of special note are the levels of biological taxonomy listed: Species, genera, families, orders, classes, phyla, and biological kingdoms. Behe tentatively argues in the book that evolution by Darwinian processes ceases to be able to produce novel biological kinds at the level of genera, families, or orders.

However, by his most recent book, Darwin Devolves, in a chapter called “The Family Line,” Behe argues that the limit of evolution is the level of the family. New biological families cannot be produced by Darwinian evolution. Variation is confined to the “two lowest levels of classification,” genus and species (153).

Take, for example, the family Cichlidae, to which belong the wealth of species of Cichlid, a common variety of fish across the world. One of the most spectacular documented cases of evolution is that of the Cichlids of the African Lake Victoria, at the intersection of Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania (161). The lake is shallow and “completely evaporated…[it is estimated] seventeen thousand years ago, after which it subsequently refilled several thousand years later.” 

Until the past few decades…the lake was host to about five hundred species of fish that are found nowhere else in the world. Since they are unique to Lake Victoria, and since there was no lake until relatively recently, that means those species must have evolved in place in just the past fifteen thousand years! (Behe does not mean evolved from nothing or from something other than a Cichlid; how the Cichlids got there since Lake Victoria refilled is not his concern.)

Cichlids can vary in all sorts of features and dimensions. What is more, different populations of Cichlids converge on similar forms, suggesting a built-in and limited range of variation within the family.

At the same time, Behe will argue that the process of speciation and the equivalent at the genus-level are not the creation of novel genetic information or biological body-plans. Rather, these are divisions of ancestral biological species and genii that involve a loss of genetic information and limitations on further biological change. It is not that Darwinian processes can create novel body-plans and brand new genetic information. It is that it can lead to division into different isolated populations with variations on an original body-plan and stock of genetic information. Hence, this limited range of Darwinian evolution is actually devolution, rather than evolution, and it is certainly not a form of creation.

For example, the Galápagos finches are believed to have had a common ancestor, according to Behe, “thought to have been related to tanagers, which are in the same family of birds that contain Darwin’s finches” (154).

Behe continues:

As the work of the Grants shows so well, natural selection is relentless, brutally effective even in a single generation, seizing upon any variation however slight, cruelly separating the unfit from the fit. So for two million years the descendants of the original inhabitants of the Galápagos were constantly subjected to the most intense Darwinian selection. What amount of change in biological classification might have resulted from such searing selection? Some of the descendants might have differed from the ancestor in its domain of life or formed a new kingdom, or perhaps a novel phylum, class, or order. Yet none of those appeared. Instead, the descendants all remained even in the same family as the ancestor, differing only in the two very lowest levels of classification. (153)

The evolutionist may ask about the ancestor of this common ancestor. But Behe’s point is that our evidence for evolution tops out at the level of family. If two million years of evolution on Galápagos leads to novel species and genii within the same family, then we can only speculate that any ancestor of that tanager-related ancestor was also of the same biological family. Given the rate of appearance of other animal phyla, Behe writes, “Surely we should expect at least one crummy new phylum, class, or order to be conjured by Darwin’s vaunted mechanism in the time the finches have been on the Galápagos. But no, nothing. A surprising but compelling conclusion is that Darwin’s mechanism has been wildly overrated–it is incapable of producing much biological change at all” (155).

3. Evolution Is Devolution

Another of Behe’s examples is the polar bear. The polar bear, for example, is believed to share a common ancestor with the brown bear and the North American black bear, and biologists classify them under a common genus. According to Behe, “The earliest fossil of a polar bear is over one hundred thousand years old” (15). Only recently has it been possible for scientists to study the DNA of polar bears and their biological relatives to discern what mutation was responsible for the changes in their color and makeup that made them fit for an Arctic climate.

Two mutations are of particular note, one involved in fat metabolism, which allows the polar bear to have a diet that “contains a very large proportion of fat (much higher than in the diet of brown bears)” (16). The second gene “is associated with pigmentation, and changes in it are probably responsible for the blanching of the [polar bear] ancestors’ brown fur” (17). Beginning with the first, the mutation “occurred in a gene dubbed APOB,” which is shared by other “mammals, including humans” (16). As Behe explains: “When the same gene is mutated in humans or mice, studies show it frequently leads to high levels of cholesterol and heart disease” (17). Scientists have reason to believe that the variation in this gene that occurred in polar bears is also damaging - that is, in other circumstances, it would harm the health and vitality of the species, and it involves a loss of genetic information that, as we saw, is shared by mammals, up to and including humans.

For the second gene, “associated with pigmentation…computer analysis of the multiple mutations of the gene showed that they too were almost certainly damaging to its function.” To speculate, if the function of certain genes is to provide the bear with brown pigmentation, suited to its natural woodland habitat, mutations that lead to a lack of pigmentation involve damage to functional genes. However, and this is the surprise about how Darwin’s mechanism of random mutation and natural selection actually works:

It seems, then, that the magnificent Ursus maritimus has adjusted to its harsh environment mainly by degrading genes that its ancestors already possessed. Despite its impressive abilities, rather than evolving, it has adapted predominantly by devolving. (17)

Biological evolution within the genus Ursus has occurred by the degrading of functional genetic material. This leads to changes at the phenotypic level (the shape and structure of the organism, based on its genes) that, given an extreme habitat, are beneficial for survival, accidentally. Evolution occurs, but it would be better termed devolution.

4. Is There Better and Worse in Biology?

A friend and reader, Matthew Stanley of Samsara Diagnostics, objects to the judgment that some biological change is de-volutionary: “Why import the value judgment that change is a de-volution? Change is inherent to creation, and is not value-laden. An evolution would simply be the appearance of a new possible form of life. To say that the polar bear is somehow less than the bear is silly.”

How do biologists identify mutations as damaging? Or is biology really supposed to be, following Hume, value-free? Michael Behe isn’t even the scientist in question here: “They [the scientists who studied the polar bear’s genome] determined that the mutations were very likely to be damaging–that is, likely to degrade or destroy the function of the protein that the gene codes for.” (17) What is going on here? The judgment that a mutation is damaging is dependent on the recognition that a protein, for which a gene codes, serves a biological function, for instance, fat metabolism. Given that a protein, for which a gene codes, serves a biological function, one can judge whether a variation assists in serving that biological function or obstructs the performance of that function.

Leaving aside the entire philosophy of biological function (of which there are several accounts), we should recognize that biologists themselves have no problem acknowledging that proteins have functions. This is principally determined by simply recognizing what a protein does. In this case, the judgment is bolstered by the fact that the same gene is involved in other mammals, producing proteins that do the same kind of thing. Whatever one’s view of biological origins, it cannot be thought an accident that this protein serves that function across an entire biological class. Hence, the judgment that this is the protein’s function is unavoidable.

Accordingly, if a population, or even species, possesses a mutation to that gene that prevents the forming of that protein and the performance of that function, it is no leap to say that damage has occurred to the genetic code of the organism. However, there is another rubric for the evaluation of biological organisms, namely, fitness relative to environment. By that rubric, polar bears are, indeed, well-adapted to their environment. This multiplicity of biological rubrics introduces complexity, but it does not undermine the validity of evaluating in terms of biological function.

It does distinguish two paths to biological fitness. In the first kind, an organism is biologically fit by possessing functional genetic code. In the second kind, an organism is biologically fit accidentally by a convergence between the loss of some functional genetic code and a unique environment.

But Darwinian biology ultimately denies the distinction between non-accidental and accidental biological fitness. According to Darwinism, all biological fitness can be explained in the same accidental way as the polar bear’s accidental fitness. At this point, we can remember Aristotle, for it turns out to be impossible to explain all biological fitness accidentally. In fact, to understand the polar bear’s accidental fitness to its environment, we have to recognize the distinction between functional genetic code and damaged genetic code, and so between non-accidental biological fitness, which is the product of functional genetic code, and accidental biological fitness, which is sometimes the product of damaged genetic code. If there were no such thing as non-accidental biological functionality, then we wouldn’t even have a basis for variation.

This is where we return to the video game analogy. To imagine that all biological fitness is accidental is the same as imagining that every part of a given Madden-variation is simply a product of the video game reproduction system. On the contrary, the video game reproduction system is only capable of making variations on a given, programmed video game. The process of variation and testing couldn’t even get started without an existing video game. Accidental causation is dependent on non-accidental causation.

5. The Evidence of Created Kinds

Darwin, we may conclude, did indeed discover a mechanism of biological evolution, variation and natural selection. Further discoveries, especially of DNA, led to the updated version of Darwin’s theory, Neo-Darwinism, combining random genetic mutation with natural selection as the primary mechanism of biological evolution. But this mechanism, while legitimate in its place, can only explain diversification and speciation within a given biological family. The conclusion follows that the genetic information and biological design of organisms at the level of family or higher cannot be explained by Neo-Darwinian evolution.

Like the variations on Madden produced by our video-game reproduction mechanism, the whole process depends on an original video game, itself intelligently designed and programmed, in order to get started. The variations on the original are just that, and they are corruptions of the original digital information. The original digital information and game design require a designer.

Species essentialists may have been wrong to identify the initial biological program with the biological species (at least in particular cases). But the biological families that have diversified and speciated by Neo-Darwinian evolution must themselves be attributed to a designer. The genetic information that codes for an entire organism-worth of functional proteins must come from intelligent design, even as variations on and corruptions of that information and design can arise by an undirected, evolutionary process.

Now some theistic evolutionists may object that theirs is not an undirected process. (Others, in deference to “science,” will have held that it is, which turns out to be untenable.) However, for two reasons, our argument extends from undirected even to directed evolution. In the first place, the majority of the scientific argument that evolution did occur depends on the argument that undirected evolution of new biological kinds (families and higher taxonomic levels) can occur. If it cannot, then the evidence that evolution occurred dwindles to much less.

In the second place, our argument above points to a distinction between variation on a program and the program itself. Undirected processes can only produce variation on a pre-existing program. But the fact is that even directed processes can only produce variation on a program as well, if more purposefully and effectively. Compare the limited diversity of the Cichlids, produced by natural selection, with the amazing but limited diversity of canines, produced by artificial selection. Even the addition of intelligence and intention is not able to erase the distinction between changing features of a dog, like hair straightness or curliness, height, and color, and changing a non-dog into a dog.

And finally, if a theistic evolutionist wants to hold that evolution was a very intensive process, in which God inserted new genetic information at many points, leading to a new kind of organism, then this is not noticeably distinct from creationism. The only question would be whether such transitional species exist; and again, the fossil record does not support this, except in limited cases, and only at the lowest two taxonomic levels. Whether, for example, horse and human evolution, from ancestors already of their biological family, are possible may remain to be seen. But a thoroughly intelligently-designed and interve`ntionist story will have to be told about the origins of biological kingdoms, phyla, classes, and families.

Creationists sometimes speak of created kinds, the postulated original kinds that God made in the garden of Eden. As it turns out, the science surveyed here supports the existence of created kinds, and it points to the original, created kinds being at the taxonomic level of the family.

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In 1802, Anglican philosopher William Paley published his Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, an influential version of the argument for the existence of God from biological design. In the work, which featured many descriptions of biological features, like the eye, as evidence of divine design, Paley popularized the metaphor of God as watchmaker.

In 1986, British biologist Richard Dawkins published The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design, an influential work of biological theory but also a founding work of the “New Atheism.” As the title reveals, Paley’s Natural Theology was a direct target of Dawkins’ argument.

Here at “The Natural Theologian,” a major theme of the newsletter is that the category of “nature” should have a place in Christian theology. Likewise, I have argued that empirical sources of information, like the sciences, (but also philosophy,) are valid and important grounds of knowledge. Calling that source of knowledge into question inclines many toward the view of six-day creation, as I discussed here; but accepting science as a source of knowledge inclines many others toward a theistic evolutionary view of origins.

However, I believe that the scientific evidence for the intelligent design of biological organisms points toward limits to variation within biological kinds. This leads me to an old-earth creationist view, accepting a long geological and cosmological history, but requiring the creation of new biological kinds throughout that history.

This is the second post in my series on why I do not hold to theistic evolution. In the first, I explained the terms of debate and my motivation for writing. In this post, we’lll begin to consider the scientific evidence against evolution.

While some think appeals to evidence are fruitless, because we only see what our presuppositions, worldview, and cultural background incline us to see, there are evidential standards for deciding whether life and the variety of species are explained by an evolutionary process or direct creation. In this post, we consider the following standard: Creationist and evolutionary theories posit different trees of life, and a look at the evidence of both contemporary and ancient biology can confirm one or the other. In particular, evolution posits a tree of life that is gradual, including many transitional species, in order for natural processes to lead to the variety of species. A tree of life that has a typological pattern, where types are clearly distinct from one another and transitional species are absent, is only compatible with a creationist explanation, with the exception of micro-evolutionary change.

As I will argue, the evidence gathered by Michael Denton, in his Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, published in the same year as Dawkins’ Blind Watchmaker, 1986, points decisively to a typological shape to biology, and therefore, a creationist explanation.

The Typological Shape of Biology

Evolution: A Theory in Crisis is one of the earliest works of the Intelligent Design movement. Notably, the author, Michael Denton, is not a Christian believer, unlike the majority of Intelligent Design advocates. In his later work, Denton argues for a teleological evolutionary view, as per the book’s title, Nature’s Destiny. Nevertheless, he argues that biology does not reveal a gradual and transitional structure but rather a typological one.

Denton surveys multiple lines of evidence, but especially the morphological and biomolecular, in order to show that biology fits the typological pattern, in which organisms exhibit clear differentiation from one another and transitional species are not to be found. We’ll examine the fossil record in the next section, but in this section, we’ll focus on the evidence from morphology and biochemistry that reveals typological differentiation, rather than a gradual, evolutionary and developmental pattern of the tree of life.

While the theory of evolution introduced the idea of universal common ancestry, the same tree of life that Darwin proposed was already in use, but merely as a tool of taxonomy. Biologists who did not believe in universal common ancestry had never had any trouble classifying kinds of organisms in terms of their similarities and differences, treating groups as more or less related, not in terms of ancestry but biological organization. Homology, the study of similarities of biological organisms, preexisted Darwinian theory and was not perceived as giving evidence of common ancestry but of common design.

Nevertheless, non-evolutionary and evolutionary interpretations of taxonomy are not merely different interpretations of the same evidence. Each predicts and depends on different patterns of taxonomy. Non-evolutionary taxonomy depends on and predicts a typological organization of nature, on which, to quote Denton, “there were absolute discontinuities between each class of organisms, that life was therefore fundamentally a discontinuous phenomenon and that sequential arrangements, whereby different classes were linked together or approached gradually through series of transitional forms, should be completely absent from the entire realm of nature” (98). This perception and theory of nature was called “typology,” and as Denton continues, “Typology contrasted completely with the idea of organic evolution” (98).

This contrast results from the entirely different expectation of evolutionary theory with regard to taxonomy. Denton summarizes the kind of taxonomic patterns that give evidence of evolution: “Evidence for evolution exists in nature wherever a group of organisms can be arranged into a lineal or sequential pattern, in which case the idea of evolution becomes almost irresistible.” Evolution requires that thereby gradual and continuous sequences of intermediate forms, rather than discontinuities between types of organisms.

But which pattern does nature show? To summarize, while there are many particular sequences that may evidence evolution within a biological kind, and some that certainly do, there are great discontinuities among living things, especially at the higher taxonomic levels of life.

Some evolutionary sequences are historical and persuade many: “A classic case is the series of fossil horses. This series is nothing like a perfect continuum of forms, the breaks are distinct and clear, but the overall sequential pattern is so obvious that no one seriously doubts that the modern horse has evolved from the primitive horses of the Eocene era sixty million years ago.” (“No one seriously doubts” - I know of at least one counter-example.)

However, most clearly at higher levels of organization, as Denton puts it, “it can hardly be denied that there has always been massive empirical evidence for the typological model of nature within the existing realm of life.” He continues:

Admittedly, the axioms of typology have been shown to be inapplicable at the level of the species. Species can and do evolve and many can be linked to other species through clear sequences of intermediate subspecies; consequently, distinct demarcations cannot be drawn at the lowest taxonomic levels. But, at levels above the species, the typological model holds almost universally. Indeed, the isolation and distinctness of different types of organisms and the existence of clear discontinuities in nature have been self-evident for centuries, even to non-biologists. No one, for example, has any difficulty in recognizing a bird, whether it is an eagle, an ostrich or a penguin; or a cat, whether it is a domestic cat, a lynx or a tiger. Moreover, no one can name a bird or a cat which is in any sense not fully characteristic of its class. No bird is any less a bird than any other bird, nor is any cat any less a cat or any closer to a non-cat species than any other cat. (105)

At lengths to which I cannot here go, Denton details the way in which past, fossilized species also exhibit the same typological and discontinuous character as observation of nature reveals among organisms now living. After surveying the evidence of morphology (the structure of organisms), he surveys the biochemical level and finds the same typological differentiation. Except for variation at the lowest taxonomic levels, which are variations on an archetype, nature exhibits a discontinuous, typological structure, incompatible with universal common ancestry, not to mention neo-Darwinian mechanism.

Denton concludes:

All in all, the empirical pattern of existing nature conforms remarkably well to the typological model. The basic typological axioms – that classes are absolutely distinct, that classes possess unique diagnostic characters that these diagnostic characteristics are present in fundamentally invariant form in all the members of a class – apply almost universally throughout the entire realm of life. Consequently, the isolation of classes is invariably absolute and transitions to particular character transits are invariably abrupt and the phenomenon of discontinuity ubiquitous throughout the living kingdom. (117)

The Typological Structure of Paleontology

As with morphology and biochemistry, typology and evolutionary theory generate different expectations for and require different evidence of the fossil record. Typology alone merely generates the expectation that all the fossils discovered will conform to a type, rather than be transitional between types. With the general outlines of the fossil record, with its general progression in terms of body-plan across the ages, typology expects that the progression and appearance of life-forms on earth will be discontinuous.

By contrast, evolution - again, as the combination of universal common ancestry and neo-Darwinian unguided mechanism - would predict a gradual and sequential arrangement of transitional forms. In Darwin’s own day, archeology and paleontology were just getting their started, and the absence, at the time, of such evidence was attributed to the early stage of the work. Is the evidence any better in our own time?

Unfortunately for Darwinists, no. Denton tells the story of how the search for missing links took off in the years following the publication of The Origin of Species (158). Denton summarizes the results of the search for living species that could be transitional between existing types:

The seas and land have of course yielded many new species not known in Darwin’s time as zoologists and botanists have extended their explorations into regions unexamined one century ago. A number of deep sea fish species and many invertebrates, both terrestrial and aquatic, have been discovered over the past century but all of them have been very closely related to already known groups, and in the few exceptional cases, when a quite new group of organisms has been discovered, it has invariably proved to be isolated and distinct and in no sense intermediate or ancestral in the manner required by evolution. (159, Italics mine).

The search among fossils has continued apace since Darwin’s time. In fact, “probably 99.9% of all paleontological work has been carried out since 1860” (160). “But virtually all the new fossil species discovered since Darwin’s time have either been closely related to known forms or…strange unique types of unknown affinity” (161). Denton describes several findings of that latter sort, which have required entirely new phyla for their classification but are not even candidates to be transitional species between phyla.

Another important finding from the fossil record is this: “It is still, as it was in Darwin’s day, overwhelmingly true that the first representatives of all the major classes of organisms known to biology are already highly characteristic of their class when they make their initial appearance in the fossil record” (162).

The most telling example remains the event known as the “Cambrian explosion.” (Some have rebranded it the “Cambrian radiation,” or “the “Cambrian diversification.”) In the space of “13-25 million years,” “practically all major animal phyla started appearing in the fossil record” (Wikipedia, “Cambrian Explosion, link). Such discoveries have forced evolutionary theorists to abandon the Darwinian commitment to gradualism and to postulate that evolution happens in great leaps. It hardly needs to be said that, if evolution happens in such leaps, it cannot occur by neo-Darwinian mechanism, nor by any other mechanism known to be at play in biological variation.

The significance of the evidence is overlooked by those who show deference to evolutionary explanations. But it should be recognized that, if evolution occurred by the neo-Darwinian method and on the scale of universal common ancestry, the fossil record would have to look wildly different than it does. Without regard to doubts about the possibility of biological evolution of new types and between types which I will raise in the next post, the fossil record alone tells a story, quite straightforwardly, of the sudden appearance of new kinds, fully formed, and discontinuity between types both in the present and the past. If we ask whether the fossil evidence is that predicted by typology or by gradual evolution and common ancestry, the answer is clear: The fossil evidence points to typology.

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In my recent writing, I have argued that a Christian view of origins should incorporate scientific evidence by allowing for a long geological history. Many young-earth creationists may wonder why this doesn’t open the door to Neo-Darwinian evolution and universal common ancestry. On the other hand, many theistic evolutionists will also wonder why openness to science and an old earth does not lead me to their position.

I began to answer that in my last post, arguing that philosophical reasons alone tell against the merits of evolution as an explanation of the origins of life and species. I have also hinted at my acceptance of the research of Intelligent Design theorists, that there is scientific reason to question a naturalistic, chance-based evolutionary history.

However, some Intelligent Design theorists accept evolution in a fashion, but with a necessity of divine supervision or at least designing of initial conditions. For example, Michael Behe indicates in his latest book, Darwin Devolves, that he accepts common ancestry, without a chance-based mechanism. (I am not sure whether he means universal common ancestry or more limited common ancestry.) Michael Denton, an Intelligent Design theorist who is not to my knowledge a Christian, accepts a teleological evolutionary model where divine intervention is not necessary, but extensive divine design and setting of initial conditions was; his book arguing this is titled Nature’s Destiny. Therefore, arguments for design and teleology have not persuaded all who accept them to leave behind common ancestry and evolution.

But they have persuaded me. A suite of scientific arguments from Intelligent Design theorists and philosophical arguments from thinkers both contemporary and historical lead me to believe that the evolution of novel life-forms, leading to universal common ancestry, did not occur, not even as a divinely-guided process.

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In brief, my reasons for not accepting theistic evolution are that 1) philosophy and science show that there are limits to evolutionary change, requiring aboriginal, created kinds, and 2) the primary reason for accepting evolution is methodological naturalism, which is not a constraint on the science of origins.

In this first post, I will clarify the terms of debate, especially “evolution” and “theistic evolution,” and discuss the motivation for this series of posts, which is in no way to alienate theistic evolutionists or accuse them of biblical unfaithfulness. In the following several posts, I will introduce the scientific and philosophical arguments that lead me away from evolution. In perhaps the final post, I will consider the question of methodological naturalism, why the science of origins does not require it, and why theists and teleologists have no other reason to accept evolution than deference to it.

The Terms of Discussion

Before diving into the scientific evidence, it is important to be clear what thesis we are talking about when we mention evolution or theistic evolution.

“Evolution” is, to my mind, shorthand for the summary claim that the entire biological diversity of life developed by a natural process, whereby all living things share a common ancestry. Ordinarily, this is taken to require no divine intervention and, indeed, to be explicable by chance and natural processes alone. The main theory of how this occurs is Neo-Darwinism, that evolution occurs by random mutation of the genome and natural selection based on the resulting variations in living things.

Theistic evolution is the view that belief in God is compatible with belief in evolution. Some theistic evolutionists hold that evolution occurred without the necessity of divine intervention or guidance, as even atheistic Neo-Darwinists believe, and hence, that chance and Neo-Darwinian mechanism are sufficient to explain biological diversity. Others believe the process was divinely guided, whether or not that guidance is visible to human observation. If he holds that the necessity of divine guidance and design is visible to human beings, a theistic evolutionist may also be an advocate of intelligent design.

Intelligent design is the scientific and philosophical claim that the origin and diversification of life required the planning and design of an intelligent mind. It is compatible with different theories of the identity and nature of this intelligence, including whether it was an immanent intelligence (like an alien life-form, as even Richard Dawkins once proposed) or a transcendent intelligence. It is also compatible with different theories of how living things came about, and hence, how that intelligent design was implemented, whether discontinuous creation or intelligently-designed evolutionary processes.

In this discussion, there is also an important distinction between macro- and micro-evolution. While there is no precise, agreed-upon line between them, micro-evolution includes the kind of variation within a kind of organism that has been observed and so is undeniable. It may even include what biologists call “speciation,” where a particular population of living thing separates from its ancestral population, with shared characteristics, and even ceases to be able to interbreed with the parent population. Macro-evolution involves the production of new body plans and the kind of creative evolution required by the thesis of universal common ancestry, that is, that evolution can occur at every level of biological taxa. My argument will involve locating the line between micro-evolution, which does occur, and macro-evolution, which, I will argue, does not, has not, and never will occur.

The Motivation for This Discussion

Last week, I sent out an invitation for questions and concerns about my discussion of theistic evolution. One reader raised an important missional concern for Christians in the sciences:

What's at stake in this evaluation?

My main bent has been to mitigate concerns around Christians having to have a specific orthodox view on "evolution" in order to avoid turning away earnest Christians in the sciences who aren't actually believing grave heresies.

This concern is entirely legitimate. The practice of science by Christians requires that they have the intellectual freedom to raise questions at the boundary of science and faith. And while particular communions have a right to take a stand at different points, an open intellectual discussion of these matters must be as wide as the current Christian discourse. Theistic evolutionists certainly have a place in that discourse, and those concerned for theological orthodoxy regarding creation must be careful that they do not lay heavy burdens upon scientists who are open to faith.

My interest is to engage in a discussion among Christians who take science seriously. And within that discourse, which includes everyone from theistic evolutionists to Intelligent Design theorists to scientifically-minded 6-day creationists, to argue for a particular conclusion from the scientific evidence.

At the same time, I do believe that theistic evolution is a significant misstep. In Western thought, the theory of evolution is a core element of our secular culture. While explicit atheism remains a minority view, it is a predominant view in academia and media. In particular, the idea that evolution is settled science makes belief in God superfluous or intellectually suspect. When Christians essentially concede that the secular view of how we arrived here is correct, they give up an enormous amount of argumentative ground to a culture that denies God’s relevance to the world.

If, as I will argue, the evolution of life across biological kinds is impossible, then the daily experience of biological life is direct evidence for the existence of God. Giving any appearance that natural processes alone could produce life is, if this argument is correct, to downplay the radical necessity of “the God hypothesis” to explain the most common features of the world.

In the following post, we will turn to the scientific evidence, beginning with Michael Denton’s argument, in Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, that biology bears a typological structure inconsistent, not only with gradual, chance-based Neo-Darwinian evolution, but even with divinely-guided macro-evolution.

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1. Philosophy and Evolution

The claim that the theory of evolution is settled science has never sat well with me. My reservation is not primarily that the scientific support of evolution can be contested, though it can. Instead, my reservation has been that the question of evolution is not purely, or even primarily, a scientific one.

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Some hallmarks of a scientific question are its being resolvable by experiment and observation, its definite and technical nature, and its amoral and non-metaphysical character. But when scientific prose begins to wax metaphysical, you know that science has been left behind, as when Neil deGrasse Tyson or Carl Sagan contemplate with wonder the vastness of the universe. When scientists treat a traditionally philosophical question and write a New York Times bestseller, you know that science has been left behind, as Sam Harris has done with free will or others with the nature of consciousness.

The question of evolution oversteps the boundaries of science in these same ways. It is the linchpin of atheistic metaphysics, to quote Richard Dawkins: “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” It serves as the foundation of many a philosophical theory, for example, the entire corpus of Daniel Dennett. Instead of being of a limited, dry, and technical character, it purports to determine whether human beings were made in the image of God or are rather merely “apes with ego trips.” And what is more, it is impossible to resolve entirely by experiment and observation, both in that it is relegated to the distant past, and in that macro-evolution has yet to be observed in the present.

In my Wednesday post, I came down rather hard on the doctrine of a certain Christian sub-culture, of six, twenty-four-hour day creation. My chief objection was its attempt to settle matters of origins from the Bible alone, as opposed to allowing for other sources of knowledge. In this post, I want to do something more positive, and in particular, to show how another source of knowledge provides evidence on the question of origins. That source is not science, but philosophy.

In my own intellectual history, it was as I was detecting the other-than-scientific character of the question of evolution that I also became aware that several great philosophers in the history of thought have commented on the question of evolution on philosophical grounds alone. Now, if evolution were a question of purely scientific character, one would expect that a philosopher would not have much to go on. Or one would expect that a philosopher’s answer would have been superseded by science, in the way that some ancient thinker’s beliefs about physics were surpassed by the observations of Renaissance and Enlightenment scientists. Instead, one observes in these philosophers cogent philosophical arguments that transcend time, place, and state of scientific progress.

Two such philosophers are of note: Aristotle and Hegel. Hegel was in many ways a modern Aristotelian, attempting to resuscitate the teachings of Aristotle in the aftermath of the Enlightenment. Hence, Aristotle is the source of this tradition of thought, and so, it is to him that we turn.

2. Aristotle and Ancient Materialism

In Aristotle, we find a philosophical argument against evolution that is as powerful today as when it was written, perhaps more powerful in that it has stood the test of time and reveals modern evolutionary theory to be but the latest version of an ancient materialist metaphysics. In brief, Aristotle’s argument is that chance and necessity are insufficient explanations of the organization of biological life. Biological life requires a unique explanation, nature, that shares with intelligence a teleological, or purposive character.

The background of Aristotle’s argument is the history of pre-Socratic physical thought. The earliest philosophers of Greece - Thales, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Democritus - focused on offering quasi-scientific explanations of the physical universe. They were as much the progenitors of science as of philosophy. Philosophy as we know it, being concerned with a wider array of questions, especially those more pertinent to humanity, like questions of knowledge and ethics, arose with Socrates, who turned attention from the physical world to the human world, with rather dire social, legal, and physical consequences for himself.

The predecessors of Socrates were largely materialists. They sought to explain the existence of the material world in terms of material causes. Their theories read much like early attempts at a very short table of elements: water, air, fire, etc. (Not to mention love, strife, etc.) It was the coming of Socrates, followed by Plato and Aristotle, that gave rise to a worldview that gave more prominence to mind than matter. (Hence, today’s materialism is really a return to the most primitive kind of philosophy.)

Unsurprisingly, among these pre-Socratic thinkers, there arose theories of living things that depended on chance and necessity and material causes rather than purpose or intelligence. A prominent such theory was that of Empedocles, which Aristotle himself cites. Empedocles proposed that in the primordial state, different organs and parts of animals were separate and mixed up but began to combine randomly in different configurations. Those configurations which were most fitting survived, while others perished.

Here is Empedocles:

From it [the earth] blossomed many faces without necks,

Naked arms wandered about, bereft of shoulders,

And eyes roamed about alone, deprived of brows.

Many grew double of face and double of chest,

Races of man-prowed cattle, while others sprang up inversely,

Creatures of cattle-headed men, mixed here from men,

There creatures of women fitted with shadowy genitals.

And here is Aristotle’s summary:

“Wherever then all the parts came about just what they would have been if they had come to be for an end, such things survived, being organized spontaneously in a fitting way; whereas those which grew otherwise perished and continue to perish, as Empedocles says his ‘man-faced ox-progeny’ did.” (Physics, II. 8 198b 29-33)

Proponents of evolution will argue that, while this theory displays the idea of survival of the fittest or natural selection in a very primitive way, it lacks the sophistication of evolutionary theory with its gradualism and its idea of environmental constraints and of random mutation. However, this is where philosophy is important, because the philosopher observes that, no matter how sophisticated one makes the theory of random mutation and natural selection, it is the same theory.

Aristotle puts the point by identifying Empedocles’ theory as reducing down to the explanation of living or natural things in terms of chance and necessity. In other words, whether the chance takes the form of an original array of detached body parts or random genetic mutations, and whether the necessity is in terms of ancient materialist understanding or modern physical and chemical theory, the idea is the same: Living things, the parts of which appear to be united for a purpose, can ultimately be explained without reference to purpose but only in terms of chance and necessity.

Modern opponents of evolution, or at least of neo-Darwinism with its constraint of randomness, take pains to rebut each particular theory of evolution or abiogenesis with scientific detail. Aristotle is unaware of each of these particular theories which postdate him significantly. But that is no matter, because Aristotle’s philosophical arguments are of a general character: They look at what is common to all explanations in terms of merely chance and necessity and point out their insufficiency.

3. Aristotle’s Argument

The argument comes in the second book of Aristotle’s Physics. In that book, he discusses the different causes that play a role in nature. In particular, he focuses on the causes chance, necessity, nature, and intelligence. (Note: These are not Aristotle’s famous “four causes,” which are the formal, material, final, and efficient causes. How these interrelate is another question.) Aristotle seeks to determine whether each of these should count as a cause, what its characteristics are, and by how it may be identified.

Importantly, he determines that chance is what he calls an incidental cause, as opposed to a proper cause. For instance, if two people run into each other in the marketplace who were not intending to meet, their meeting is due to chance. Of course, the reason that each person is in the marketplace is not simply chance. One is there to buy some bread, the other some vegetables.

Chance is also to be identified as a cause only of things that happen relatively infrequently. If something happens always, we rather attribute it to necessity. If something happens almost always, or for the most part, we also cannot attribute it to chance but, as he will argue, to nature.

Things that happen always we attribute to necessity as, for example, the sun rising daily.

Things that happen, as Aristotle says, “always, or for the most part,” we attribute not to chance, nor to necessity, but to nature. For instance, if crape myrtles blossom in June, we attribute it to nature, even if some of them fail to do so.

Now with that background, here is Aristotle. Referring to the above arguments that living things can arise from chance and necessity:

“Such are the arguments (and others of the kind) which may cause difficulty on this point. Yet it is impossible that this should be the true view. For teeth and all other natural things either invariably or normally come about in a given way; but of not one of the results of chance or spontaneity is this true. We do not ascribe to chance or mere coincidence the frequency of rain in winter, but frequent rain in summer we do; nor heat in the dog-days, but only if we have it in winter. If then, it is agreed that things are either the result of coincidence or for an end, and these cannot be the result of coincidence or spontaneity, it follows that they must be for an end; and that such things are all due to nature even the champions of the theory which is before us would agree. Therefore action for an end is present in things which come to be and are by nature.”

The argument is, like all of Aristotle’s arguments, dense. Put another way, we have already determined the means of identifying roughly what is due to chance, what necessity, and what nature. Chance can explain what happens infrequently and by coincidence; necessity can explain what happens always and invariably; and nature explains what happens always or for the most part. Taking any of the aspects of a living thing, we find that they happen not infrequently. Humans having 32 teeth, for example, happens not infrequently. On the other hand, it does not happen always, and hence by necessity. Rather, it happens “for the most part” and “normally.” Thus, it is due to nature, rather than to chance or necessity.

But Aristotle’s further claim is that it happens “for an end.” What does he mean? Aristotle does not mean that to refer to a further end, external to the organism, like a purpose God had in mind in giving human beings 32 teeth. Rather, Aristotle famously holds that living things exhibit intrinsic teleology. Most basically, human beings have 32 teeth because having 32 teeth is an end or purpose of their nature. In modern terms, we could point out that having 32 teeth is part of the human body-plan, encoded in human DNA. It is, therefore, no coincidence when a new human pops out with the tendency to grow - count ‘em - thirty-two teeth.

Now the evolutionist may reply, “I’m not saying that it’s a mere coincidence that each human being has the same body plan. I’m saying that the human body-plan along with all others arose through a complex process of chance and necessity, constrained by the needs of survival. I’m not saying the human beings aren’t well-fitted to survive and reproduce (including by having 32 teeth), but that this fitness arose without intention or purpose.”

The evolutionary argument, put another way, is that the appearance of design, evidenced by the fitness of things for survival, can be explained in terms of chance and necessity. On this view, if there is such a thing as nature and at least apparent purpose, these causes are posterior to the more fundamental and prior causes of chance and necessity.

However, Aristotle has already shown that chance in particular depends on end-oriented action, whether intelligent action, like that of the two men meeting in the marketplace, or natural activity. Chance, coincidence, and spontaneity occur as incidental effects of the interactions between things that are caused by nature, intelligent action, or even, necessity. Aristotle had put it this way, in an earlier paragraph:

Spontaneity and chance are causes of effects which, though they might result from intelligence or nature, have in fact been caused by something incidentally. Now since nothing which is incidental is prior to what is per se, it is clear that no incidental cause can be prior to a cause per se. Spontaneity and chance, therefore, are posterior to intelligence and nature. Hence, however true it may be that the heavens are due to spontaneity, it will still be true that intelligence and nature will be prior causes of this All and of many things in it besides.

In other words, it is not chance that is prior to nature or intelligence, but nature and intelligence (and necessity) that are prior to chance.

Let me give an example of merely apparent purposiveness that Aristotle would accept. Let’s imagine that a Native American is searching for an arrowhead. By a brook, he finds many stones that could be shaped into an arrowhead, but then one that already has an almost perfect shape, as if it were purposely shaped to be an arrowhead (though it was not).

Notice: This example of merely apparent design has the markings of a chance-based event. It does not happen always or for the most part, but rather infrequently. It depends on other things that are occurring by necessity and nature, the shaping of stones by water.

What this means is that the ordering of the organs of a living thing could only be attributed to chance and necessity alone if it was as infrequent as this. Imagine Empedocles’ primordial zoo of animal parts. Without inquiring into the great complexity and orderedness of the parts and organs of animals, but just taking them for granted, very rarely some parts would combine in a way that resembles a functioning organism. But most would not. If we encountered a world like that, we could indeed say that those rare apparent organisms were due to chance and necessity alone.

However, our world is not at all like the world Empedocles imagined. Instead, we encounter a world replete with bodies that have a highly complex but ordered and functional arrangement of their parts. What is more, each of these bodies is self-reproducing, by a system that itself is highly complex but ordered and functional. Even more, these bodies exhibit engineering down to the molecular level, with parts so exquisitely ordered to a purpose that they easily surpass the best of engineering done by humans.

The details are best left for a post dealing with the evidence of intelligent design, but I’ll leave you with this example from Michael Behe’s Darwin Devolves:

These are the leg gears of the planthopper. The planthopper surpasses the grasshopper in being able to jump to heights hundreds of times its body length. In order to facilitate this, its legs must move “in synchrony very quickly, more quickly than it takes for a full nerve impulse to reach the legs.”

Behe continues:

“If one leg is triggered before the other, the insect would lose power and tumble erratically. With the gear teeth engaged and the gears spinning at an astonishing fifty thousand teeth per second, as one leg starts to move, the gear rotation starts the other leg moving as well, and the bug gets maximum power and coordination for its efforts.”

While much more detail can and must be filled in, this is the core of Aristotle’s argument against the explanation of nature in terms of chance and necessity, the modern version of which is neo-Darwinian evolution. As scientists propose further versions of evolution, what they always bump up against is the limit, identifiable by philosophy alone, of chance and necessity to explain what is ordered and purposeful.

Once again, Aristotle sums it up well:

“Spontaneity and chance, therefore, are posterior to intelligence and nature. Hence, however true it may be that the heavens are due to spontaneity, it will still be true that intelligence and nature will be prior causes of this All and of many things in it besides.”

A year or so ago, I walked into a local coffee shop and noticed that the young man in front of me was carrying works of Heidegger and other philosophers under his arm. I engaged him in conversation, and our conversation over the next two hours reminded me why I needed to be a Christian voice in philosophy.

As it turned out, my conversation partner was a graduate of Calvin College, who had studied philosophy under James K. A. Smith. From Smith, among others, he had learned the Christian postmodernist line, that since Kant, we have all just known that you can’t directly experience the world. Therefore, Christianity cannot be the one truth about the world because objective knowledge is not possible. We cannot get objective truth because concepts come in between us and the world. These concepts are merely socially constructed and thus do not show us the objective world.

Under the influence of these ideas, my conversation partner had ceased himself to believe in Christianity over the course of several years during which he had been an admissions counselor to Calvin College, advertising a Christian education to its incoming students. In fact, this is how I had seen things go before. The philosophy professor on campus introduces the benighted evangelical kids to postmodernity, and they no longer believe that objectivity, knowledge, or truth are possible. They briefly adopt Christian postmodernism before lapsing into unbelief.

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Having studied philosophy and Kant himself in some depth, I had reason to question some of the philosophical conclusions this man had come to in an undergraduate degree. He was basing his life on conclusions about philosophy he had been taught by someone else. There was a faux-sophistication in his dress, his way of speaking, and the confidence with which he spoke. In particular, he thought that realism - the idea that there is a reality that we can know - was a naïve view, naïve like the evangelical Christians from among whom he hailed, while his postmodernist view - that our minds cannot know the world because our socially constructed concepts get in the way - he took to be sophisticated.

My arguments were to no avail. The certainty with which he claimed that there was no such thing as certainty irked me, but my own rhetoric was powerless to overcome it. It is this kind of conversation that I have in mind as I discuss realism here.

Naïve Realism?

My discussions of realism began as I, in this post, laid out the argument of my dissertation, that the objects of human thought are not our own concepts but the real objects of the world. I called this view Christian direct realism. A reader responded by recommending what he called the critical realist view, that we know the real world but mediated by our own concepts and frameworks, which may be due to our social conditions.

I think I may have given the wrong impression by arguing for “direct realism,” which sounds approximately like “uncritical” or “naïve realism.” (The Stanford Encyclopedia calls direct realism “naïve realism.”) On the contrary, I have viewed my reflections on knowledge as attempting to achieve sophistication but in a particular way.

There is indeed a kind of realism that is uncritical or naïve and, I would add, dogmatic. This kind of realism assumes that it is already correct without further levels of critical examination and sophistication.

Here’s an example: Against third-wave feminism, a Christian guy asserts that the biblical teaching is that the man should work outside the home to provide for his family and a woman should do home-making. He cites a couple of choice verses, and it seems to him like mere disobedience to do otherwise. He believes that biblical revelation tells us the real moral obligations we are under and the structure of the universe. He is a realist: It is not just his subjective, religious perspective that the division of labor among the sexes should be organized a certain way, but a divine command.

However, examination of the history of household economy reveals that this stark division of labor has been quite rare in history, being noticeable in Victorian England and 1950s America, while elsewhere households have taken on many different divisions of labor, often with different tasks for man and wife, but not as stark as the 1950s division of labor would suggest. As this Christian is an American evangelical, whose grandparents were raising children in the 1950s, this era appears to be a golden age of morality, hence, he has imbibed the assumption that this is what God commanded.

In this example, there is a clear movement from naïveté to a more critical perspective. So long as the revelation of social conditions shaping one’s thinking and biblical interpretation does not destabilize belief altogether, this would lead to a “critical” realism.

But in my experience, this revelation often does destabilize belief. If this belief turned out to be socially conditioned, how many of my other beliefs are? Is it even possible to hear the voice of God in Scripture if we always interpret it through our own cultural lenses? This is a form of skepticism. The very class of things introduced to bring sophistication as mediating reality to us, socially-inherited conceptions, worldviews, frameworks, etc., now seem to obscure it altogether.

Now, here is my more sophisticated objection to critical realism: If sophistication is supposed to lie in the recognition of how our conceptions and presuppositions interpret reality to us, then the skeptic and the critical realist are equally sophisticated, and there is no clear reason in the philosophical position itself to avoid the skeptical view.

Even among the dogmatists, like the Reformed presuppositionalists at Westminster Seminary, it is the recognition of the mediating role of worldviews, conceptions, and presuppositions that is taken to provide sophistication. Accordingly, evidentialist apologists are taken to be singularly naïve, and presuppositionalism to be a source of sophistication. “We presuppositionalists wisely recognize the role presuppositions play in knowledge. You can only get to Christian conclusions from Christian premises. Knowledge comes by deduction from the original-language propositions of the biblical autographs. Thus, we would never argue with an unbeliever on common ground or objective evidence. In fact, we don’t think that there are any shareable, common human, objective methods of knowledge-acquisition.” Note: With biblical dogmatism comes utter skepticism about all common human knowledge.

This is why I do not think that the step of recognizing the role that presuppositions, social conditions, human conceptions, and so on play in knowledge is the step at which a sophisticated epistemology is reached, certainly not a sophisticated realism. This may be one moment in the path toward knowledge, but it is actually a negative moment and a skeptical one. We recognize our original epistemic position as not the knowledge we thought it was, but as a complex form of ignorance. This is a necessary step in the acquisition of knowledge, but it is not itself the attaining of knowledge, but the recognition of ignorance. It is also not the linchpin of realism but of skepticism (even if a skeptical moment turns out to be a necessary moment in the development of knowledge).

However, the recognition that we could be wrong is essential to realism. What is realism, after all? It is certainly not the idea that whatever I currently think is certainly correct. That is a form of dogmatism. Realism is ultimately the idea that there is a reality to which our thought is accountable. There is a standard by which my thoughts can and should be judged, and it comes from outside me, from the reality which is the object of my thought and the criterion by which its accuracy must be judged. This means that the possibility of error is essential to realism. Recognition of the possibility of error need not lead to skepticism. Instead, error is possible because there is a reality to which our thought is accountable.

This means that skepticism itself actually breaks down. Skepticism notices that I could be wrong about any particular thing that I think. But then it calls into question the very possibility of knowledge and of the existence of a reality external to thinking itself. But if this were so, then none of my thinking could be said to be so much as wrong. And then skepticism could never get started.

On the contrary, realism is compatible with doubt about many (if not every) particular belief I have. To doubt our beliefs is to acknowledge that reality is external to our beliefs and so could prove to be otherwise than we thought it was. In short, the possibility of error does not lead to the impossibility of knowledge; rather, the possibility of error is an indication that there is such a thing as reality which, if we could apprehend it, would give us knowledge.

Objective Experience

The real question is now, do we have any method of apprehending this reality that is external to our beliefs? And the answer is, yes, experience. In the traditional philosophical division of intellectual faculties, the mind has the faculties of reason and experience. Reason can check for the coherence of existing beliefs by the application of logical canons and can deduce logical conclusions from given premises. But this requires experience in order for there to be such beliefs and premises.

Now, various kinds of rationalism argue that reason alone can provide us with at least some beliefs and premises. While rationalism is a common position in the history of thought, I think it can be passed over relatively quickly in this discussion, because reason does not seem like the best candidate to put us in touch with a reality distinct from our own minds and beliefs. While many analytic philosophers, for example, will argue that reason alone puts us in touch with such abstract entities as numbers, sets, and possible worlds, by a kind of intellectual intuition, this position will make little sense outside of analytic philosophy. Experience is the primary candidate for putting us in touch with a reality beyond our heads.

But the main objection to treating experience as a source of knowledge of reality is a renewed skepticism that says that experience is subjective. It tells us about something that is going on with us but not with the world. In its most extreme form, Cartesian skepticism and Berkeleyan idealism suggest that our experience does not acquaint us with the objects of the world, but only with a veil of ideas, subjective representations which are entirely compatible with the non-existence of the objects they purport to represent. More popularly, we encounter the idea that experience is subjective and does not tell us about the objective world but about the meaning-making dimensions of ourselves.

When experience is treated as subjective, people commonly treat it as therefore unquestionable. In one way, this makes sense; given that it is subjective and does not even purport to represent the objective world as being a certain way, there is no standard or criterion by which it could be evaluated negatively. On the other hand, when people speak of “my truth” and “your truth,” treating experience as making truth-claims that are simply not subject to evaluation, they are being inconsistent. If experience is reductively subjective, then it doesn’t even represent “my truth” or “your truth.” It just says something about me or you. It says nothing about how the world is, not even how “my world” or “your world” is.

When people adopt this subjectivist way of thinking, they often insist on hearing and respecting other people’s “subjective experiences.” But one wonders why. If what is true for them may not be true for me, why bother learning what other people subjectively project things to look like? I believe there is a lingering recognition of an alternative objective structure to experience. One reason to recognize the subjectivity of experience is to recognize the limitations of any of our vantage points on the world. Given the way I am shaped, the concepts and frameworks that I bring to experience, I will see certain things and not others. I want to learn from others because they see the world from a different vantage point and have information and perspective that I lack. As I hear from them what the world looks like from their vantage points, I update and expand my map of the world. In other words, the experience of individuals is important because it provides information about the objective world.

The subjectivity of experience can be accounted for in something like the way of physical position. If I am physically positioned in a certain location, I can see some things and not others. By speaking to other people who are otherwise positioned, I can gain information about the layout of things without having to be in each position. And in the realm of life experience, unlike physical position, it is not even possible to inhabit each location. Each person has unique experiences and information to which I cannot have direct access, not because experience is reductively subjective and unquestionable, but because experience is situated in a world in which we each inhabit a particular position that cannot be completely replicated or experienced by another.

How do we achieve sophistication, then, in our realism and in our methods of knowing the world? Once again, I do not believe that sophistication comes in recognizing the role of concepts, worldviews, etc. in knowledge. Rather, I believe that sophistication comes with an openness to the breadth of experience, both broad human experience (not just my own experience) and systematic experiential knowledge (including modern science), as opposed to unsystematic observation. The recognition of concepts, social conditions, etc. as shaping our knowledge can indicate to us that our own individual experience will not suffice and that experiential knowledge that is unsystematic and lacking verification and correction for cognitive biases will also be insufficient. Instead, we need means of expanding the range and quality of experiential knowledge available to us. That is sophistication.

How would sophisticated Christian realism play out in the example above? The Christian who realizes that the 1950s have shaped his expectations and not the Bible alone can open himself up to further biblical knowledge, further historical knowledge, further philosophical reflection, further empirical knowledge about the sexes, and the wisdom of the men and women around him who have navigated this before. Biblically, he might reread Proverbs 31, noting the significant economic productivity and autonomy of the wife. Historically, he might learn about the significant sociological changes between societies in which wives did not own property and those in which a husband and wife are both owners of their joint assets. Philosophically, he might learn about the idea of the productive household, the way in which the household itself has been at times understood as the unit of productivity, with husband and wife and even children each playing a role in economic production. Empirically, he might recognize the psychological distinctions in the bell curves of personality across the sexes, as well as the significant overlap between male and female personalities; he may recognize that psychological differences account for much of the division of labor across time and place, but that there are variations and exceptions. Finally, he may learn from the experience of Christian couples he meets and see the variations in how they handle the division of labor in and outside the home. At the end of this, he will have neither a strict, biblical division of labor nor an idea that it is all socially constructed and anything goes. Rather, prudence will reign, the difference between the sexes will be acknowledged, and significant freedom in how their differences play out will be allowed. God did say certain things in the Bible, but he also made us and our natures, and attention to nature and history is essential.

Sophistication, True and Merely Apparent

In the West, Bible-believing Christianity has gained the reputation of a lack of sophistication. In a way, all my own studies and those of other evangelical intellectuals are an attempt to achieve some of that sophistication, whether it will ever be recognized as such or not. But in my experience, there is a shortcut to the appearance of sophistication, and it is the adoption of a postmodernist and implicitly skeptical line of thought. Some people manage to adopt this posture while retaining living personal faith, but as often as not, it leads people to doubt God and to doubt the claims of Christianity.

Nevertheless, sophistication is not optional, at least for those of us cursed with the desire for knowledge, with which comes much vexation. As a Christian, I cannot help but want to see that, however foolish the world thinks us, it is not foolish to believe and follow Christ.

In my own academic studies, I have come to the conclusion that postmodernism is not the path to sophistication, as is proposed in many (even Christian) college humanities departments; nor presuppositionalism, as at Reformed seminaries like Westminster; nor the methods of analytic philosophy, as in some of the Christian philosophy departments I have encountered. Rather, sophistication comes with openness to the breadth of human experience and knowledge, a (not exclusively) Christian empiricism and humanism, of the kind I was offered at the University of Chicago,  the one non-Christian institution I attended. As I have mentioned before, engraved in stone above the reading room there, is the following quote from Francis Bacon, which sums up this approach to reading and knowledge: “Read, neither to believe nor to contradict, but to weigh and consider.” This posture of humble openness to the breadth of human experience is what I recommend and what I consider to be the mark of true, and not merely apparent, sophistication.

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In my post, “What Is My Dissertation About? Bertrand Russell and the Objects of Thought,” I laid out my argument for what I called “Christian direct realism,” as opposed to indirect realism. According to Christian direct realism, human beings know the world without concepts, frameworks, or presuppositions functioning as intermediaries. Accordingly, Christian thinking does not require putting on Christian conceptual glasses, the fabled “Christian worldview,” but viewing the world directly and finding Christ in it.

In many corners, “direct realism” is known as “naive realism,” and this reflects how many people view it, simply naively ignoring the way that human beings actually think, shaped by their cultural context, their flawed psychology, and their presuppositions. One of my readers gave helpful expression to an alternative view to mine, Critical realism, which acknowledges that we can know the world but argues that it is always through our conceptual frameworks. I responded in the comments, but I republish our exchange here, lightly edited:

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Esteemed Reader:

Joel - I would love to talk with you more about this topic someday, specifically regarding "Christian direct realism". As I have mentioned in our previous conversation, I am a social scientist and I have been operating under the assumption that social scientific research broadly makes "direct realism" an infeasible position to take. I myself base my work on critical realism which I learned from Catholic sociologist, Christian Smith (I would recommend his book What is a Person? to you; it also lays out much of his critical realist account); one central pillar of critical realism is that people use mediating conceptions, frames, codes, etc. to interpret the world even as critical realism agrees that they are interpreting a common world in contrast to "anti-realist" social scientific views. This seems to make sense with social scientific/historical understandings that have documented wide-ranging beliefs about the world and the nature of basic human things (i.e. reproduction, knowledge, sex, food, etc.) among various different human communities throughout history. I think that critical realism also comes under your critique, and I would be interested to learn more about why you think direct realism is the answer.

Yours Truly:

Thanks for this! Let me give it a go.

In your statement of critical realism, "mediating conceptions, frames, codes, etc." are what people use to interpret the world, and there is a common world - we're not just constructing our own subjective world. Let me summarize these mediating terms as concepts. In short, we interpret the world through our concepts.

In short, my argument is that our concepts must be themselves received from and reflective of the world, or they are not just incorrect but empty or meaningless.

Commonly, people think of knowledge as divided into an active side, our concepts, and a passive side, our experience of the world. And the critical realist line, also called neo-Kantianism by many, is that we view the world through our concepts, we interpret the world through our concepts. However, if this way of thinking is followed to its logical conclusion, then our concepts are imposed upon the world, and they don't help us to interpret the world, but occlude the world from our view. People shift from a neo-Kantian insight to saying things like, "You can only view the world through your own concepts."

But this assumes that the only way for us to know the world would have to be without all concepts, pure experience, brute empiricism. In short, it's realism with brute empiricism or critical realism (or worse) with our concepts interpreting experience to us. I think that this is a dichotomy to escape, rather than something to embrace one side of. (Maybe I would want to avoid the term "direct realism" in the future because it sounds too much like brute empiricism.)

There's only so much I can say right now, so let me focus on one way of escaping this dichotomy. In analytic philosophy, it's called meaning externalism. Meaning externalism is that the meaning of our words or concepts is not determined by what's in our mind or head, whereas meaning internalism would say that they are. For example, some people (following Thomas Kuhn) say that Newton's concept of force differed from Einstein's concept of force. After all, Newton said that Force = mass times acceleration, whereas Einstein said that ... something more complicated. :) But this assumes that the meaning of a word is determined by what a person thinks about it. Therefore, Einstein didn't really disagree with Newton about force; he introduced a different concept, Einsteinian force as opposed to Newtonian force. Then, they viewed the world through these different concepts; what they see are almost two different worlds. (This is the neo-Kantian, almost social constructionist idea.)

But a variety of figures - chiefly Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam - cogently argued since the seventies that "concepts" that express what are called natural kinds, everything in the natural world from "horse" to "force," do not have a meaning that is "internal" but rather give expression to a kind of thing that must be empirically discovered. Accordingly, what we take to be definitions of our concepts are accountable to reality and empirical discovery. This means that Newton and Einstein were both speaking about force, a phenomenon encountered in the natural world, and saying different things about it.

How does critical realism or neo-Kantianism fare, given meaning externalism? Well, we can't think of (at least certain) concepts as being imposed on reality, because they are received, however imperfectly, from reality via sense experience. Now, what is true is that our understanding of the world is not just one direct sense experience after another. Rather, we generalize and expect to find the same again. We could think of Newton's theory as arising from certain kinds of experiences (and experiments), and Newton and Newtonians taking those to be completely general. But Einstein comes along and shows that other experiences (and experiments) require a somewhat different general theory. And of course, at the periphery even today, there are questions about whether Einstein's theory can account for everything. In short, it is true that we understand the world in general frameworks, but these general frameworks are themselves received from experience, are accountable to experience, and change by further experience.

This view is strongly empirical and realist, but it does not insist, "We know reality!" (Fist hitting table to prove that the world exists.) Instead, it allows for all sorts of complexity and possibility of error in our knowing the world. But it avoids the implicit idea of concepts being imposed on reality that comes in even critical realism. Let me know what of that made sense, and what I should explain further in a future post!

The same goes for my readers. Let me know what made sense and what I should explain further! And while my article on my dissertation topic discusses realism, you may be interested to also read this post on Christian empiricism:

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Richard Niebuhr’s classic Christ and Culture has long been on my reading list. It is a book I remembered for its title, and the title summarizes a major topic of debate in Christian circles and beyond. As I understand, the question of how Christ relates to culture is closely related to that of how grace is related to nature, the major question of this newsletter. It is broached every day in a Christian’s life, as we find ourselves doing things other than praying and reading the Bible. What is the status of this cultural work, and how does it relate to Christian faith?

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Niebuhr and his brother Reinhold Niebuhr were Protestant theologians of the mid-twentieth century. They operated in mainline Protestant denominations and were influenced by the neo-Orthodox theological movement, Karl Barth being its main proponent. Theological liberalism denied the supernatural and gutted Christianity of its distinctive teachings, leaving only the moral teachings of Jesus. Neo-orthodox theologians, like Barth, the Niebuhrs, and Emil Brunner argued for a minimal Christian orthodoxy that made room for the supernatural while accepting critical biblical scholarship and other results of modern scholarship.

As an evangelical Christian myself, the Niebuhrs have never been my go-to trusted sources. I knew, for instance, that Barack Obama had cited Reinhold Niebuhr as an influence, and I had never thought of myself as theologically akin to Obama. (Obama actually says that Reinhold Niebuhr is his favorite philosopher and theologian.) But even this suspicion is emblematic of the kind of difference in approach that Richard Niebuhr describes in Christ and Culture. My theological priors led me to a more wary approach to culture than did Niebuhr’s.

But this only illustrates the need for a helpful exploration of the different Christian approaches to culture. While I may not end up agreeing with Niebuhr’s approach, his taxonomy of Christian views may be quite helpful. (Niebuhr refrains from quite endorsing an approach in the book.) And this is indeed what I found.

The Perennial Approaches

Niebuhr summarizes the different Christian approaches to culture that are perennial, reappearing over time but also over space. In a different theological context, I might put different names to each approach, but Niebuhr’s framework remains helpful. Most importantly, it reveals that our own current debates are but the latest phase of a debate that has continued for two millennia.

Niebuhr’s taxonomy of Christian approaches to culture includes five views: Christ against culture, Christ in culture, Christ above culture, Christ and culture in paradox, and Christ the transformer of culture. “Christ against culture” sounded familiar, as emblematic of fundamentalist and evangelical worries about secular culture. “Christ the transformer of culture” is familiar to me from a prominent Reformed view, which gets called “transformationalist,” is attributed to Abraham Kuyper, and was influential at Wheaton College. But the views in the middle sounded less familiar.

Christ Against Culture

If “Christ against culture” represents the fundamentalist and conservative evangelical approach, then the mainline Niebuhr will be expected to argue against it. But Niebuhr is remarkably fair to the “Christ against culture” view. He describes it as a necessary moment in the Christian response to culture. 1 John is emblematic: “Do not love the world or the things in the world.” The church father Tertullian took this approach in intellectual matters: “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” In being a Christian, one must leave behind that which is contrary to Christ.

But among the “Christ against culture” folks, Niebuhr also includes Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy was, theologically, a theological liberal. He held to the moral teachings of Jesus but entirely separated them from the teaching that Jesus is divine and a savior. In taking a pacifist view about war and cautioning against the use of power, Tolstoy positions himself within a strand of Christian teaching that is preceded by monasticism and the Anabaptist movement (including the Mennonites and the Amish). This inclusion of Tolstoy and a politically radical strand of Christianity in the “Christ against culture” view makes things more complex, in a way to which we will return.

Christ In Culture

“Christ in culture” is at the opposite end of the spectrum. On the “Christ in culture” view, culture is seen positively, and Christ is seen as the apex of human culture. In particular, Niebuhr has in view the liberal Protestantism of his day, which did not reject human culture but, if anything, reduced Christ down to the cultural level.

However, Niebuhr also makes this view more complex by reflecting that the “Christ in culture” view can be found in Christianized cultures, where Christians think that the culture reflects Christianity. Likewise, Christians who react against their current culture sometimes argue for movement or return to some era of a more Christian culture. Even if such people view themselves as embodying “Christ against culture,” they may turn out to be cultural Christians nonetheless.

Even here, Niebuhr offers a thorough defense of cultural Christianity, whether of the theologically liberal or conservative variety. As he says, Christianity must take cultural form wherever it is. As a result, a purely negative view of human culture cannot be maintained, and we must view cultural Christianity as the inevitable fruit of Christian conversion.

The Mediating Views

To this point, “Christ against culture” and “Christ in culture” appear to be the two poles of Christian approaches to culture, both valid as moments that must occur. At some point, a Christian has to say “no” to culture; at another point, “yes.” But a pure version of either fails to recognize the validity of the other. So, Niebuhr’s remaining three views are meant to be the only ones that are viable for a Christian. They are the attempts to mediate between extremes, which every Christian must do.

Briefly, “Christ above culture” is the most positive toward culture, while retaining that Christ is supernatural and distinct from the products of culture and is represented by medieval Catholic theologian-philosopher Thomas Aquinas. “Christ and culture in paradox” is the most negative toward culture, while retaining the necessity and unavoidability of culture, and represented by Luther. “Christ the transformer of culture” is somewhere in the middle, accepting a negative judgment of culture, while taking an optimistic view of the possibility of Christian cultural transformation, represented by Augustine.

Christ Above Culture

“Christ above culture” is Niebuhr’s title for this view because, while taking a largely positive view toward human culture and philosophy, Christ is held to be distinct from and superior to human culture. Aquinas, for example, thought that the best of culture and philosophy of his time would lead toward, not away, from Christ. However, Christ was nevertheless distinct from, and above the realm of culture and nature. Reason could teach us a certain amount about the world, man, and even God; but revelation was necessary for the knowledge of salvation.

While expressing some sympathy for the view, Niebuhr ultimately lobs a critique at it: The positive view of culture it expresses is nothing more than a positive view of thirteenth-century European culture. Niebuhr is taking twentieth-century Catholic neo-Thomists as his target here; this may have been a fair critique for them. But this seems too harsh a judgment, and more can (and will) be said for the “Christ above culture” view.

Christ and Culture in Paradox

“Christ and culture in paradox”: This view sounded the least familiar as I began to read, though I eventually got my mind around it. On this view, culture is viewed relatively negatively, but ultimately as necessary and appointed by God. For example, Luther, in reaction to Catholicism, defended secular institutions like marriage and the state without wanting their Christian transformation. But the state is taken to have the role merely of preventing evil in society. There is no program of transformation for the Christian statesman, or lawyer, or barber, but these secular vocations are allowed.

Niebuhr also calls the “paradox” view “dualism,” and in it, I see the contemporary Reformed theological view defended by David VanDrunen as the “two kingdoms” view. This view allows a place for the state and other secular institutions but puts no hope in them beyond their minimal role of maintaining order. D. G. Hart, another proponent, is representative in arguing for a kind of secularism, in his book A Secular Faith: Why Christianity Favors the Separation of Church and State. Both Thomists and transformationalists are more ambitious for the secular sphere, though for different reasons.

Christ the Transformer of Culture

“Christ the transformer of culture” is the view that, while secular culture is sinful, Christianity can build a distinctively Christian culture, transforming each of the dimensions of society for the good. Niebuhr probably expresses the most sympathy for this view, positioning it as the moderate and final view, though stopping short of endorsement. He offers Augustine as representative, as well as Calvin. These figures had quite negative judgments of human culture without Christ but did not view this as preventing the possibility of positive and transformative cultural work by Christians.

An Eclectic Approach

Niebuhr finishes the book by arguing that Christians will need to take an eclectic approach, depending on where they find themselves. Sometimes it is more necessary to be against culture, sometimes in, and so on. He also points out that an approach to Christ and culture is not merely theoretical, but displayed in action. We cannot adopt a completely consistent approach from the get-go, but rather, we respond in particular situations to the claims of Christ and the culture. While this eclecticism prevents us from taking a pure “Christ against culture” or “Christ in culture” view, our moderation of these two moments of Christian relation to culture, the positive and the negative, may look like any of the three moderating views at a given time.

So far, my summary of Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture. In my next post, I’ll reflect and offer my conclusions on the book.

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This week, I’ll be presenting at a philosophy conference, called Collaborations, which features collaborative efforts of professors with graduate students. My professor was invited to participate, and he kindly chose to present on the topic of my forthcoming dissertation. He and I have been working together for over a year now to settle on and understand the issue I’ll be considering in my dissertation: The question of the objects of thought.

Given that my dissertation prospectus is also due this month, I have a lot on my plate. But I’m going to try, in this post, to summarize what my dissertation will be about, pending committee-approval. A friend and reader quizzed me on this over the weekend, and it was very helpful to explain it to him. I’ll try to recreate here what I said to him.

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Presuppositionalism and Mediated Knowing

Let’s start from a topic about which I’ve written and which is central to this newsletter. According to Christian presuppositionalism, there is no ideologically neutral and conceptually-unfiltered way to apprehend the world. As a result, non-Christians apprehend it through an interpretive and conceptual lens of one or another philosophy, while Christians apprehend it through the framework of Christian dogmatic theology. What we see is a product of our conceptual framework.

By that same token, Christian and non-Christians have different concepts. We do not merely say different propositions about man, for example. We have different concepts of “man.” As a result, we really have no common ground, epistemologically, with unbelievers. We can’t even agree on the meanings of our terms.

Knowledge of the world, according to Christian presuppositionalism, comes by adopting the proper Christian conceptual framework, downloaded from the inerrant Bible, and looking at the world through those glasses.

Now, there can be no doubt that Christian presuppositionalists believe in truth, Absolute truth. They are realists, in that sense. But we know the real world by a process that is mediated, rather than direct and unmediated. We think or cognize or perceive objects by way of a conceptual framework that is not simply given in the objects themselves or by sense-experience. Picture this as an indirect process with three nodes: Subjects, concepts, objects.

(Once again, Christian presuppositionalists claim to be above and beyond all philosophy, but in simply recounting their view, we have had to attribute to them several philosophical views: What is commonly known as Kantianism (we only apprehend the world through a conceptual lens), realism, and indirect realism in particular, and mediational epistemology. See my eBook, 50 Errors of Christian Presuppositionalism, for more.)

According to my dissertation, presuppositionalists are thereby subject to a philosophy that is the target of my dissertation, Neo-Fregeanism. I will say more about this, but one of its tenets is the mediational epistemology of indirect realism.

In the realm of theological epistemology, I have wanted to argue that this is the wrong epistemology for a realist orthodox Christianity. We should prefer an empiricism that is direct realist. On that view, all human beings have cognitive access to the world, man, and God, and the world, man, and God are the objects of our theological disagreements. We do not have different “concepts” of these things. We say different things, or “propositions,” about the same objects, with which we are all acquainted. We do have common ground with unbelievers, and it is only in virtue of that common ground that we can communicate with one another, and that any of us can be accountable to God. Direct realism provides the “point of contact,” “common ground with unbelievers,” and all of the other fabled categories of mid-twentieth-century theological epistemology (the discourse in which Bavinck, Kuyper, Barth, Brunner, Van Til, and Clark all had their place).

Analytic Philosophy’s Immaterial Objects

From the realm of theological epistemology, we move to Christian analytic philosophy. As my dissent from Christian presuppositionalism became more confirmed, my interest in Christian philosophy blossomed. As it happens, there is in academic philosophy a received way in which Christians can participate in philosophy. It is inherited from Alvin Plantinga and is Christian analytic philosophy. As it happens, Christian analytic philosophy is far from reliably orthodox and is beholden to a whole range of dogmas peculiar to its practitioners. I have detailed those in the article below, but let me highlight the relevant ones here.

American academic philosophy in the 1950’s was quite secular, more so than today. That was the heyday of logical positivism, but the academy has expanded since, though many of its quarters are still quite secular. In that context, Alvin Plantinga entered academic philosophy (along with fellow travelers like Nicholas Wolterstorff). Bringing with them a soft form of Kuyperian Christian presuppositionalism, they pioneered an approach to academic philosophy that question secular dogmas while adopting a certain logical and linguistic approach to fit in with the analytic philosophical milieu.

Much of secular analytic philosophy prides itself on possessing a scientific worldview. But the analytic philosopher’s scientific worldview is not your atheist uncle’s worldview. Most notably, it almost invariably includes a great number of immaterial objects. Because of these philosophers’ interests in logic, language, and mathematics, they introduce a number of entities that are not the material objects of science. (The material objects of science have already been superseded by space-time worms, by the way.) These include propositions, meanings, numbers, sets, and possible worlds.

Now Plantinga viewed this openness to the immaterial as an opening for supernaturalism. Secular analytic philosophy isn’t rigidly materialist, so who can really object if we bring in God as well? As a result, Christian analytic philosophy introduces God as yet another immaterial object to add to one’s “ontology” (the things one believes exist).

Of course, in doing so, one accepts the secular philosopher’s account of these many immaterial entities which had no settled place in Christian thought or theology. As a result, one gets a kind of syncretism, adding the Christian God to the pantheon of the analytic philosopher’s immaterial entities.

There are several problems with this. One is that God is not really at all like the immaterial entities that analytic philosophers countenance. In the main, the immaterial entities analytic philosophers countenance are what are called “abstract objects.” This is little more than a marker that such objects are not really objects, or not in the same way as what G.E. Moore called “middle-sized dry goods,” the chairs and tables and glasses and shoes that surround us.

By contrast, Christians do not take God to be an abstract object, but a concrete, though immaterial entity. This means both that secular philosophers should not think that God is just more of the same: “We already believe in propositions and properties - why not believe in God?” and that Christians have no reason to be especially interested in abstract objects as Plantinga and Co. are. In short, atheists shouldn’t be our guide to the immaterial.

But more to the point of my dissertation is the question of why secular philosophers accept such abstract and immaterial entities as propositions, possible worlds, properties, meanings, sets, and numbers. And the answer is that it is part of their theory of semantics, that is, of the meaning of words. For instance, given that mathematics is a significant and ineradicable kind of human discourse, its terms must be meaningful, chiefly its numerals must designate numbers. If there weren’t any numbers to designate, mathematics could hardly be stating truths about numbers and their relations.

Likewise, we talk about things like what someone said, what he meant, what she is thinking, and so on. We say that, “Snow is white,” “La neige est blanc,” and “Schnee ist weiss,” all say the same thing, just in different languages. What kind of thing is that? A proposition, analytic philosophers say. And similarly for other kinds of abstract semantic objects. We come to identify these objects as already present in our discourse about our own language and ineradicable from it.

But in a new way, this account of the meaning of words introduces a theory of indirect realism, with the same three nodes. We think about objects in the world only via these tertiary, intermediate things. We are never in direct cognitive relation to the world and its objects.

Plato, Russell, and the Philosophers of Language

That brings me to my dissertation prospectus. But first, a story.

The first course I took with my advisor, Scott Berman, was a course on Plato’s ethics. As I prepared to write a paper for Scott, I was reading through several papers on Plato by a scholar who happened to have been Scott’s dissertation supervisor, Terry Penner. Penner in several papers referenced an unpublished manuscript in which he would give a critique of contemporary analytic philosophy from the perspective of Platonic thought: Plato and the Philosophers of Language.

I was intrigued and asked Scott more about this. Scott thought he might have a copy of the manuscript in his office, though that has yet to surface. Instead, he found a file of the first chapter and sent it to me, and we contacted Penner himself, now in his nineties. Penner is still editing, and no, we haven’t received a manuscript yet!

Regardless, the thesis of the manuscript is one that Scott inherited and took up himself and transmitted to me. Combined with a reading of the single chapter, a dialogue between the founder of analytic philosophy, Gottlob Frege, and Plato, I had an understanding of where the critique was headed.

The critique was that there were some hidden assumptions of contemporary analytic philosophers inherited specifically from Frege that conflicted with the ancient realism (thought can know the world) of Plato. Chiefly, the problem was these intermediate objects that were taken to be essential intermediaries between thought and the world, providing the meaning of words and the content of thought. By contrast, a theory of meaning and thought inspired by Plato would take it that thought can have direct cognition of the objects of the world, and that some of our words mean the objects themselves, without intermediary.

This view is called direct realism, that the mind can know the world without an intermediary, or by its detractors, naïve realism. But the theory of word-meaning, that some words mean simply the object or kind of object to which they refer, is inspired by another of the founders of analytic philosophy, Bertrand Russell. And that is a name with which my readers may already be familiar.

Russell wanted a theory of thought and meaning that grounded the ideas of objective truth and the possibility of knowledge. This separated him from anyone who took it that our thought could never be more than our own subjective perspective, which had its representatives in the early twentieth-century as it does now. Russell’s stand for objective truth reminds me of how Richard Dawkins once said something to the effect that, if someone doesn’t believe in objective truth, you really don’t want them as, for example, the pilot in the cockpit. Objective truth is quite important to a certain class of British atheists.

An Experiment in Christian Realism

This brings me back to my initial discussion of Christian presuppositionalism. My professor is also not a Christian, though not an atheist per se. But for me, this Ph.D. is a test of the thesis that there can be common ground between believers and unbelievers. One of those points of common ground is the reality of objective truth. Both my professor and I believe that what we are talking about when we talk philosophy is how things really are in the world. We can’t each have our own subjective perspective and simply go our separate ways. Our words bear on reality, and where they differ, we disagree, and someone is wrong, and, at best, only one of us can be right.

Admittedly, there are many who don’t share this concern for objective truth. Presuppositionalists will use this to say, “See, there’s no common ground with unbelievers!” As if Christians didn’t think they were wrong! We don’t have to grant that unbelievers have no awareness of truth just because a group of them pretend not to believe in the possibility of objective truth. Because there is objective truth, these subjectivists and postmodernists are simply wrong about it. The objectivist atheist is admitting the reality of objective truth and the common ground that there is between us all. “Common ground” between believers and unbelievers doesn’t mean that unbelievers hold the right positions on a bunch of issues. It means that they are in touch with the same worldly reality that we are, such that at least some, through the practice of philosophy, are able to admit the truth of some of what the Bible says about the world.

And this is really the point of my doing this Ph.D. on this topic. Christianity is something that is true of the world, the world that we are all in, that we all share as common ground. Christianity is not just another subjective perspective among others that you can only know if you simply assume Christian presuppositions. I want Christians to think and talk this way. It results in a less anxious mode of interaction with the world. I don’t have to worry that people will inevitably head in a godless direction if they think for themselves or experience the world in an unfiltered way. In fact, I want people to come into contact with reality more fully in order to be led to the creator of reality: Christian direct realism.

As I began to write this Substack, I did not know what direction my writing would take. Following the directions of my own interests, I found that the convergence of my interests in philosophy and theology and in the relationship between the two was captured in the theological problem of “nature and grace.”

The questions that drive me have to do with the relationship between natural human life and eternal, spiritual things. In a parallel way, there is the question of the relationship between secular forms of knowledge, chiefly science and philosophy, and religious forms, revelation and theology.

As I see it, both our secular culture and our Christian discourse suffer from a lack of appreciation of nature. “Nature” describes the world as we find it, created by God, broken by the fall, exhibiting both stability and change. It is denied in different ways by postmodernists, progressives, evolutionary naturalists, technologists, and transhumanists, but also by Christian fundamentalists and ideologues who fail to recognize the goodness of creation and the possibility and necessity of natural, human knowledge.

The secular and religious alike could use a greater appreciation and understanding of nature. And in fact, grace itself can only be understood and received in light of nature itself. It is our common human nature that the Son took to himself; it is nature that groans, longing for our redemption. And it is a new Creation and a new nature for which we long.

About Me:

I am a philosopher and theologian, pursuing a Ph.D. in philosophy at Saint Louis University. Previously, I got an MA in Philosophy at the University of Chicago (by far, the best educational experience I ever had) and an MDiv at Westminster Theological Seminary (PA). I studied music and philosophy at Wheaton College (IL) and continue to write and perform music today. I am married to Anna Carini and have three young children.

To learn more about me, listen to my interview with Will Jackson on his podcast Conversations about Life.

Posts:

For an intro to my writing and thinking, read the first article on any of the following topics:

Common Grace and Nature:

* CGT: Common Grace Theology and the Theology of Nature

* Can’t We Just Say “Common Grace,” Even if We Mean Nature?

* Christians, Atheists, and Gnostics: Christian Co-Belligerency and the Possibility of Based Belief

* Nature: Fallen, but not Destroyed: An Exchange on the Doctrine of Total Depravity

* Nature Destroyed: The Doctrine of Total Depravity

* Why Aaron Renn Is Right about Common Grace

* Three More Reasons Aaron Renn Is Right about Common Grace

* Common Grace, Nature, and Our Most Fundamental Identity

* Biblical Political Theology: What I Learned from 1 Timothy 2:1-4

Living Out a Theology of Nature and Grace:

* On the Idea of a Christian Village

* Whatever Happened to Reformed Theology?

* In Defense of Christian Stoicism

* Why You Should Leave Your Church

Christian Coherentism and Empiricism:

* Based Belief: On the Possibility of Christian Empiricism

* Why I’m Not Going to Read “Biblical Critical Theory”

* Abigail Favale’s The Genesis of Gender

* Delano Squires and Glenn Loury Talk Gay Marriage

The Sexes, Sex, and Sexuality:

* Same-Sex Attraction and the Misery of Our Condition

* Is the Divine Dictionary View of Language as Bad as Postmodernism?

* Abigail Favale’s The Genesis of Gender

* Side B Celebrates Same-Sex Attraction. What Could Be More Controversial?

The Philosophy of Language:

* Is the “Divine Dictionary” View of Language as Bad as Postmodernism?

* Based Academia, Part 1: Words and the World

* Based Academia, Part 2: The Assumptions of Analytic Philosophers

* Based Academia, Part 3: Christian Analytic Philosophy

* Based Academia, Part 4: The Perennial Philosophy of Language

Free EBook:

50 Errors of Christian Presuppositionalism, by Gordon Van Clark III

Nature and Grace is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Books:

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics

Emil Brunner’s Man in Revolt, The Divine Imperative, and Revelation and Reason.

Karl Barth and Emil Brunner’s Natural Theology: “Nature and Grace” and “Nein!”

Steven Long’s Natura Pura: On the Recovery of Nature in the Doctrine of Grace

Lawrence Feingold’s The Natural Desire to See God

Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option

Christian Empiricist Writers:

Aaron Renn:

Paul Kingsnorth:

Mary Harrington:

Alastair Roberts and Susannah Black Roberts:

Eric Brende:

The lovely Anna Carini:

Nature and Grace is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

My theological education took place at Westminster Seminary, the bastion of presuppositionalism.

Presuppositionalism: Christian thinking must begin from all and only Christian presuppositions.

And this thesis had a noticeable effect on our studies.

95% of the time we would read people who already agreed with us in order to believe what they said.

5% of the time, we would go find somebody we disagreed with and be assigned to go figure out what was wrong with them.

But after Westminster, I did a program in philosophy at the University of Chicago. In this beautiful, gothic reading room, etched in stone over one of the doorways was this quotation:

“Read, neither to believe nor to contradict, but to understand.”

And those words summed up what had been wrong with my experience at a presuppositional seminary, and what was so right about my experience at the University of Chicago.

Now, my Christian perspective is not just based on Christian presuppositions.

Now, my Christian perspective suggests that even if I’m not looking at the Bible, I see indications of the Divine.

Readers, last week, I argued that the theology nerd mindset is that of a closed system, a self-reinforcing circle of Bible and theology, with no outside inputs.

While much evangelical theology makes this error implicitly, presuppositionalism endorses and radicalizes this error explicitly.

The presuppositionalist avows that theology should utilize circular arguments, beginning all and only from Christian presuppositions.

And even if you haven’t encountered presuppositionalism, I think you’ll recognize the tendency to ideological thinking that refuses to be challenged and protects its ideas from outside interference.

Not so the Christian humanist. Outside interference, from reality, is what the humanist desires.

That’s why the story of how I stopped being a presuppositionalist is also the story of how I became a Christian humanist.

In the rest of this post (originally a YouTube video I made in February), I tell the story of how I stopped being a presuppositionalist. Thank you for reading.

If you want to learn more about transcending the theology nerd mindset, sign up for my upcoming (July-August) course, From Theology Nerd to Christian Humanist.

I. What Is a Presuppositionalist?

The story of how I stopped being a presuppositionalist begins back when I was one.

A presuppositionalist is someone who believes that, to have a consistently Christian worldview, you need to start from all and only Christian presuppositions.

The underlying theory is that people of different worldviews all start from their own presuppositions. If you’re a materialist atheist, you start from those presuppositions. If you’re a Christian, you start from a Christian set of presuppositions, and never the twain shall meet.

Nobody really bases their beliefs on just an objective look at the evidence. We all bring a set of lenses, interpretive schemes to the world, and a Christian ought to make the Bible their interpretive scheme.

Now for me, this was compelling as I was first taking my faith seriously. I’d had a lot of time where I just was a Christian on Sunday, and I didn’t know how to apply my faith to the other days of the week. That’s a lot of people.

But as I was trying to take that faith more seriously, reading the Bible more, studying theology—the idea of having Christian presuppositions for all that you do sounds really compelling.

I was also getting into the Reformed theology space where there’s an argument put forward that presuppositionalism is the consistent Calvinist or Reformed approach to apologetics, instead of classical or evidential apologetics, where you start from common ground and evidence to argue to a Christian worldview.

Now I remember going off to college, at a Christian college. I thought, “Hey, I can get a Christian perspective on things!”

And my now wife showed me her homework from a philosophy class, and it was about Thomas Aquinas, who is the opposite of a presuppositionalist. He’s a natural theologian. And he was arguing that there’s a distinction between the preambles of faith, the things you can know apart from faith or revelation, and the articles of faith, the things that are taught by faith.

Aquinas would say that the Trinity, the Incarnation, and redemption you can only get from the Bible. But that God exists, that there is a moral law, and that we’ve sinned, these things can be known apart from Scripture. They might be even what gets you interested in Scripture. If you start to think, “I think there’s a God out there. Maybe I should read this Bible people keep talking about.” That’s the preambles versus the articles.

But I denied that. I remember at the time thinking: “No, everything’s got to start from the Bible. That’s how you’re going to have a consistently Christian perspective on things in the world.”

II. The Turning Point: Moral Attitudes in P. F. Strawson

But there was a time in a final philosophy class I took at that college, we were reading about free will and moral responsibility.

And there’s an important essay by Peter Strawson, British philosopher from the mid-20th century—“Freedom and Resentment.”

In it, Strawson was arguing against the hard determinists. These are philosophers who think that free will and determinism are incompatible, that determinism is true and that therefore free will is false.

And the hard determinists thought that therefore, we should rid ourselves of all emotions that assume that other people are moral response morally responsible. Think, e.g., resentment, from the title, that assumes that the other person has free will and purposefully did something to you. Or gratitude on the positive side: to be grateful towards somebody assumes that they were free, deserving of praise for what they did, and not just, “Well, they were pre-programmed to do it.”

And Strawson’s argument took an interesting form, because Strawson was not a Christian. He was not somebody who argued that we have a soul or a metaphysical basis for free will, that we're not physically determined by our psychology or something.

No, he just said, “There’s no way that we’re going to rid ourselves of these emotions of resentment and gratitude, blame and praise. These are part of being human, that we are equipped with the ability to make these evaluations.”

And so from there, he said, no metaphysical thesis that pointy-headed philosophers or physicists come up with in the lab is going to affect this practice and its validity. If you bump into me, what decides whether I should be mad or forgiving is whether you intended to do so, not whether physicists have figured out whether quantum mechanics is true.

So that idea, I didn’t realize it, but that was already incompatible with presuppositionalism.

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How? you say. How was Strawson’s idea incompatible with presuppositionalism?

Well, let’s take an example of a presuppositionalist argument. A prominent one was the way Doug Wilson debated Christopher Hitchens in their recorded debates.

Wilson is officially a presuppositionalist. (He’s got some other C. S. Lewis, natural law influences that we’ll leave aside for the moment.)

But Wilson kept pressing Hitchens on Hitchens’ morally fervent critiques of the God of the Old Testament and the New. He would say, “Where do you get this morality by which you can judge—by what standard can you judge that God is evil, for having the Israelites go and kill the Canaanites? By what standard can you judge that penal substitutionary atonement is morally repugnant? You must be assuming a moral standard that has no place in an atheistic, materialist universe.”

Now there are two ways you can go with an argument like that. The presuppositionalist essentially says:

“You, atheist, have no basis for morality. Stop it. You need to be consistent. Go become a nihilist and go kill other people or yourself.”

That’s the extreme version, but that’s essentially, “Go take your presuppositions to their logical conclusion.”

But that’s not the direction that Strawson goes.

Strawson is not a Christian, but he’s saying there’s something else beyond metaphysical inklings (i.e., do you believe in God or materialism).

There’s our ingrained human ability to evaluate things on a moral level and to feel the emotions that are part and parcel of that.

And that’s not going away.

To read and understand Peter Strawson’s article, sign up for From Theology Nerd to Christian Humanist. I’m adding it to the syllabus for “philosophy week.” Grab a copy of the syllabus by clicking this link.

III. C. S. Lewis and my Agnostic Professor

And that’s actually where C. S. Lewis starts his argument for Christianity, in the very opening pages of Mere Christianity.

C. S. Lewis says people are doing this all the time. They’re saying, “That’s mine!” “Don’t take that.” “You pushed me.” “I didn’t mean to!” They’re arguing in these moral terms based on these practices of praise and blame that we all already participate in.

And C. S. Lewis says, “We all already know about that, but that thing is a clue to the meaning of the universe.”

So both the presuppositionalist and the natural theologian hold that you can’t make sense of morality without God, but they do different things with this claim.

The presuppositionalist says, “You need to be consistent and give up on morality.”

The natural theologian says, “You need to be consistent with what you already know—that morality exists—and adopt a worldview that explains why the world is more than just material.”

The presuppositionalist says, “There’s no common ground between believer and unbeliever; there’s nothing we have in common. All that morality you’ve got is, at best, stolen capital. You don’t have a right to it.

The natural theologian says, “Of course, you have a right to that. That is your birthright as a human being.”

And now we’ve got common ground together, and we can look at the world, given our shared morality and say: “Well, what makes the best sense of this? Does evolution explain morality, or does it just explain why it's advantageous for weaker people to obey morality? Would it make better sense to believe that God is at the foundation of morality, or would that make morality arbitrary, as if God could command something different?”

These are the philosophical questions that morality and theology raise, but the natural theologian acknowledges that there is common ground between believers and non-believers on that basis.

Now, if we fast-forward, I’m in a position with my dissertation advisor, in a philosophy program, where he’s an atheist, or an agnostic rather. But he’s also a moral realist. He really does believe in morality.

Do I want him to be consistent with his atheism and be more amoral and nihilistic?

No, I’d like him to be consistent with that morality. I think he’s absolutely correct about what he’s seen in the world that gives him this sense of morality. I just think his evolutionary explanations of it fall short.

There’s more to this world than that in order to explain morality. The normative cannot be reduced to or explained by the natural.

IV. Westminster: Presuppositionalist Seminary

Now, from Wheaton College, I went on to Westminster Seminary, the bastion of presuppositionalism, where Cornelius Van Til taught of old, the chief presuppositionalist thinker.

And there I learned a lot. There was a robust curriculum, so much to be thankful for. But there was also presuppositionalism in almost every class.

And presuppositionalism, starting only from your own presuppositions, had an interesting effect on our studies.

It meant that if you wanted to learn something about any topic, you wanted to read something from someone who shared your worldview. So if you want to learn about mathematics, you need to go read a book like Redeeming Mathematics by one of our professors. You need to read a book from your worldview. If you want to think about laundry, you need to read a Reformed theology of laundry, and so on, to reach the absurd.

But leaving that aside, there was a tendency to just read our own perspectives.

95% of the time, we would read people who already agreed with us in order to believe what they said.

5% of the time, we would go find somebody we disagreed with and be assigned to go figure out what was wrong with them.

And I got dissatisfied with this at a certain point. I thought, “I already know that the people who agree with me agree with me. I’d like to learn from people who disagree with me. In fact, I’d really like to know whether anybody out there who isn’t a Christian thinks that some of the things we’re saying are true, or do they think we’re just totally crazy. They don’t have to agree with us on every point, but do they see some of what we’re saying about moral reality, about right and wrong, about the importance of faith and religion, the limits of science and so on?”

And in my own studies, I began to find that there were such people. The philosopher Roger Scruton was one I discovered. Jordan Peterson was coming on the scene. I saw him doing the same thing.

V. The University of Chicago: Humane Academy

And so, from Westminster, I decided to go get a master’s in philosophy.

I did a program at the University of Chicago, which was a 180 from Westminster. It was people of all different beliefs studying together in a much different way. There was no assumption that people shared their points of view. There were good ideas, bad ideas, but it was an open environment to think things through and come to your own conclusions.

In this beautiful, Gothic reading room at the University of Chicago, etched in stone over one of the doorways was this quotation:

“Read, neither to believe nor to contradict, but to understand.”

—words of Francis Bacon, the great Christian scientist-philosopher.

And those words summed up what had been wrong with my experience at a presuppositionalist seminary, and what was so right about my experience at the University of Chicago.

At the University of Chicago, no one told me what to think. At the University of Chicago, I was reading people who didn’t share my presuppositions, and yet finding them making cogent and coherent arguments, and not in an exclusively atheistic or materialist direction, but carefully navigating the terrain of human thought, the merits of a more moral view of the world, the limits of a scientistic view of the world.

And I thought this experience was beautiful, and the real result of it was that now my worldview was not just based on the Word of people who agreed with me. In fact, now it was confirmed by people from outside the fold, if you will.

But more than that, I now had things that I could say to people outside my faith that built common ground, but that pointed in the direction of belief. I had arguments that didn’t just sound like an apologetics argument, that there’s a truth to morality that take the philosopher John McDowell, that there’s limits to the purely scientific worldview, that you start to lose our grip on ourselves as beings with minds and moral knowledge.

And all of those things could be said without asking somebody first to adopt an entire biblical worldview.

VI. Conclusion: Christian Humanism and Empiricism

And so what was the result of this change of heart and change of mind?

Well, it led to me taking a perspective that I now call either empiricist or humanist.

Humanism is often the bad thing in a kind of Christian worldview discourse. “Watch out for secular humanism!”

But there’s a long tradition of Christian humanism, of which C. S. Lewis was a part, Thomas Aquinas, many of the Protestant Reformers who were humanists, following Erasmus (like Zwingli!), and they believe that there’s a lot in secular learning that we can take. We can plunder the Egyptians, as Augustine says. Philosophy can be a preparation for the gospel, as Clement of Alexandria and Justin Martyr among the Church Fathers said.

And empiricist, in that now, I believed that the human faculties of our senses and our reason could get things from the world and learn new things. We didn’t just need to download biblical presuppositions, put on our Christian goggles and see the world through that.

We could see the world. Unmediated information from the outside gets in, because God made us to know this world. (See my “Toward a Sophisticated Realism.”

What that’s done is it’s strengthened my Christian perspective. Now my Christian perspective is not just based on Christian presuppositions. Now my Christian perspective suggests that, even if I’m not looking at the Bible, I see indications of the Divine. I see reason to believe that there’s a moral reality to life.

I learned that from Christian thinkers who are natural theologians; and I learned it from contemporary thinkers like Jordan Peterson and Louise Perry, who see truth to moral to the moral claims of Christianity. I am not just stuck in my self-enclosed Christian circle of circular arguments.

I think this shift in perspective can really develop our ability to talk with people outside the faith. We need, in this day and age, to be able to talk to people we don’t agree with on the basis of the things we do have in common.

There’s a kind of parallel between presuppositionalism and radical forms of ideology, where, if you don’t agree with everything, I say, we’re in total disagreement.

No, your neighbor, whatever they think, you and they should be able to find some common ground. And from that you can build towards truth together through common truth seeking and a common good that you share.

(I wrote and recorded a pop-punk song about it:)

I’d like to see Christians be more an example of that and and that is part of the reason why I stopped being a presuppositionalist.

Feel free to add a comment if you disagree. I’d love to hear why people still find presuppositionalism compelling, or why you’ve left it behind perhaps, or never held it.

But for now, I’m Joel Carini, the Natural Theologian. Until next time.

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As I have begun to write about the relationship between theology and politics, one Scriptural lesson I learned long ago keeps returning to my mind.

The lesson provided an answer to a long-standing, truly perennial debate: Should Christians prefer that the socio-political order disintegrate, or that it prosper? Following the first route, the disintegration of the socio-political order might provoke a sort of spiritual desperation that would lead people to seek hope outside of this life. Following the second route, we do wish temporal good for our neighbors, even if we also want them to seek and find eternal good.

In my ears, the voices of the proponents of disintegration were louder. They warned that cultural prosperity would lead to self-sufficiency, even among professing believers. The church is more genuine in following Christ when it is beset by persecution. The result of a church that lives in an intact social order will be hypocrisy, and those around it will not only be satisfied with their temporal lives but see little of value in the church.

My good college friend and I would go back and forth on this topic, and I realize now, it was partly because this was a topic on which there was little teaching. Politics was beyond the scope of the theologians. The question we were discussing was too specialized on the one hand and too broad on the other.

In fact, I think this question holds the key to the Christian life. A theology that does not speak to it is hardly a theology at all.

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Timothean Thoughts

The passage from which I learned my political-theological lesson was 1 Timothy 2:1-4. It reads:

First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.

While there are interpretive questions, I read the passage as straightforwardly endorsing the preservation and prospering of the socio-political order, and for the sake of spiritual and eternal ends.

This is seen in both the object and content of Paul’s political prayer. Paul specifically encourages prayer, not only for all people but for political leaders, the civil magistrate. But the content of Paul’s prayer is instructive. Notably, it is not directly for the highest and ultimate end, the salvation of the king himself. The prayer is merely that the king would bring it about that Christians can lead “peaceful and quiet [lives], godly and dignified in every way.”

The prayer is modest. Too modest. I dare say that many Christians would think that Paul is thinking very small here. To live peaceful and quiet lives? Where is the warfare with the world and the breaking in of Christ’s kingdom? Where is the ultimate end of salvation for people and active evangelization on Christians’ part?

We could add the worry that, if Christians were able to live peaceful and quiet lives, they might grow self-satisfied and not see the need to share the news of salvation. Likewise, their countrymen, not Christian, may find themselves also able to live peaceful and quiet lives, and in their temporal happiness see no need of eternal salvation.

But in this passage, no such anxiety is present. In fact, Paul goes further. “This is good, and it is pleasing in the eyes of God our Savior.” Admittedly, talk of salvation is coming. But I want to observe when and where we see God’s blessing; when in this passage does God say what he said of creation at the end of each creation day, “It is good”? He says it of Christians simply living peaceful and quiet lives under political conditions that do not include persecution, prior to the salvation of anyone new.

Here, we see the general theological question of the relation between nature and grace arising. How can fallen nature, and fallen political orders, be good, even as, without any further action on God’s part, they end merely in damnation?

Much depends on the relationship of the following part of the passage concerning salvation. Perhaps Paul is really only endorsing fallen political order insofar as it is instrumental to salvation.

But that would be to ignore the order of Paul’s concern. He does not say that there is really only one thing that is good, namely, the ultimate thing, the salvation of people. Quite on the contrary, he says that there is something else that is good, namely, a penultimate thing, the functioning and flourishing of human social order in this life.

I remember learning the word “penultimate” from Lemony Snicket in the, yes, penultimate book of his A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Penultimate Peril. But I learned its theological use from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his discussion of “the penultimate things,” in his theological Ethics, written from prison in a Nazi concentration camp.

Bonhoeffer distinguishes the realm of ultimate things, and the ultimate end of human life, from the realm of penultimate things, and a penultimate end of human life. The ultimate end of human life is union with God in eternal life through Christ’s redemption of man, and the realm of ultimate things is the realm of salvation and the seeking of eternal life. The penultimate end of human life is our temporal good, a functioning and flourishing human existence in our temporal and natural state, the penultimate realm of the created, natural order.

But Bonhoeffer observes a temptation among Christians not only to subordinate the temporal to the eternal but to denigrate the temporal in order to exalt the eternal.

In a time of incredible social unrest, moral breakdown, and persecution, Bonhoeffer observed that the temporal realm seems merely instrumental until it is taken to a concentration camp, enslaved, and gassed. It’s when you’re walking into a gas chamber that you begin to think there might be some value in life this side of eternity. Perhaps there is a better social order than one that involves sending innocent people into gas chambers alive. Perhaps.

As Bonhoeffer explains, the temporal order does indeed serve the eternal. The penultimate is ordered to the ultimate. But this is not at the expense of the penultimate. In fact, it is by acknowledging fully the goodness of the temporal that the temporal serves the eternal.

Practical Penultimacy

What do the different understandings of the penultimate and the ultimate look like in practice?

Take, for example, education. One common Christian strategy with regard to education is to send children to public schools in order to be “salt and light.” Participating in the existing educational institutions is taken to be a means of evangelism, and concern about the quality or the content of public schooling is likely to lead to Christians hiding their light under a bushel.

However, in practice, this means that Christians don’t have a hand in directing the educational process itself. It is as if Christians have nothing to say on this penultimate thing. The non-Christians have that covered. The Christians are there merely to add some evangelism on top, along with some good deeds designed to elicit the question, “What is the hope you have within you?”

The same pattern is seen in Christian approaches to culture generally. The Christian’s role in the workplace is to do his job, do random acts of kindness, and take opportunities to evangelize as they present themselves. The Christian role in music is to make music that evangelizes by being explicitly Christian. A good Christian neighbor is one who evangelizes his neighbors. And so on.

In each case, there is a lack of interest in the penultimate things and a sort of jumping to the ultimate things, instrumentalizing the penultimate, doing a sort of “Jesus juke” in every area of culture and common human interaction. On this view, Christians are literally to be so heavenly-minded that they don’t believe there’s even such a thing as “earthly good.”

On the contrary, says the apostle Paul, the penultimate things are “good” and “pleasing in the eyes of God our Savior.”

Among these penultimate things is, or perhaps the sum of these penultimate things is, the socio-political order. If we imagined Christians doing their duty in each of the autonomous domains of human life, the sum of that would be a functioning and flourishing polis. Not necessarily a Christian nation, but a good and righteous city of man.

Now we are prepared to talk about the ultimate things. For indeed, Paul goes on to say, “This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” The ultimate end is not lost from view. This is not a Christian quietism or secularism that has no interest in ultimate and spiritual things. Rather, the penultimate serves the ultimate in its integrity and autonomy.

Preparatio Evangelium

It is by preserving and playing their role in a functioning and flourishing socio-political order that Christians provide a crucial preparatio evangelium. The doctrine of the preparatio evangelium derives from ancient Christian thought. For the Jews, the revelation to Israel, the Old Covenant, served as preparation for the gospel. For the Greeks and Romans, philosophy served as preparation for the gospel.

On the latter point, some will object, citing 1 Corinthians: “The Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, foolishness to the Greeks.” But of course, we could make the same objection for the Jews. They had the Old Covenant, but many of them rejected Christ, preferring Pharisaical adherence to the Old Covenant to acceptance of the New.

Yet we know that Christ’s condemnation of the Pharisees was that, if they had listened to Moses, they would listen to him. The Old Covenant was, as such, preparation to hear Christ’s message and understand that he would die and rise again after three days. But hardness of heart prevented the most fervent “professors” of the Old Covenant from being so prepared. The same was arguably true of philosophy. The Greek seeking of wisdom that Paul condemns was like the Pharisaical adherence to the Old Covenant that Jesus condemned. True philosophy, true wisdom, led to Christ, as Justin Martyr and Augustine found (and many others since).

In the same way, a functioning and flourishing political order is a preparation for the gospel for the many people who benefit from it. Will some reject the gospel in self-satisfaction, on account of their ingratitude for the blessings of their socio-political conditions? Indeed. They are secular Pharisees, and woe to them! But objectively, functioning and flourishing socio-political community is a preparatio evangelium, one without which Christian witness is greatly hampered.

Christian Secular Conservatism

The implications of this approach to the penultimate and the ultimate things (which is, in principle, the proper approach to nature and grace) are many. They include many of the matters on which I have begun to advocate, but which are not always found together. On the one hand, they include an insistence on the value of the natural, the this-worldly, the secular, and in particular, of philosophy. On the other, they include social and political conservatism, of the sort that appreciates and understands the moral order of society and plays its part in preserving its fundamental institutions, the family, local community, just economic trade, and political authority.

Often, advocacy for the value of the secular and this-worldly action against Christian heavenly-mindedness comes from the Christian left. However, because of its inattention to nature and the foundational institutions of political society, the Christian left ends up ceding the public realm to philosophies that are destructive of political order, as when they argue that Christian morality on sex and family should not be imposed on the public square. Au contraire, Christian morality is not exclusively Christian morality, but as the natural law, it is binding upon and should be imposed, within prudential limits, on the public square.

Contrapositively, as I never tire of arguing, conservative Christians too often present their conservatism as exclusively biblical and distinctively Christian, and not often enough as reflective of the natural order. Instead, I urge a Christian, secular conservatism.

Christian conservatism, of course, is often criticized for putting a stumbling block to the gospel before our contemporaries. By tying Christianity to conservatism or the Republican party, Christian conservatives make it more difficult for people to hear the gospel free of baggage.

While there are situations in which that allegation may be correct, in general, I want to argue a thesis approximately opposite that one.

The preservation and maintenance of the social order, social and political conservatism in that sense, is a necessary preparation for the gospel. It is when people receive the benefits of the socio-political order and recognize their accountability to the natural moral law that it reflects that they are best prepared for the message of salvation from the curse of the law through the grace of Jesus Christ.

In fact, it is the disintegration of this moral order that proves a stumbling block to unbelievers, who now think that any god who does not abide by secular, liberal morality is evil. They are not better served by the suggestion that God is compatible with secular, liberal morality, except where secular, liberal morality is reflective of the natural law itself. Were they not beholden to such a flawed morality, they might recognize that they are not righteous lawgivers but unrighteous sinners, in need of grace.

Should Christians pray for and pursue the disintegration of the social order or its preservation? I have argued the latter. And this answer leads to an expansive Christian ethic: Secular good works in the many autonomous spheres of human activity; preservation, revitalization, and improvement of the socio-political order; and evangelism in the context of a world so prepared for the gospel. Go and do likewise.

Yesterday, I watched this enjoyable discussion between Glenn Loury, an esteemed professor of sociology at Brown University, and prominent black conservative, and Delano Squires, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a black, Christian conservative.

Over the course of the interview, Squires had the opportunity to express and defend a Christian view of marriage and the family to Loury, who was at one time an evangelical Christian but retains sympathy for Christian morality.

This is what I heard as I listened: Delano Squires eloquently expressed the Christian position, but he failed adequately to defend it.

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In the terminology I have been introducing, Squires adopted the rhetorical posture of a Christian coherentist, expressing the self-consistent doctrine of Christianity from Christian presuppositions, but failing to provide independent reasons to adopt those Christian conclusions or presuppositions.

Now, I want to maintain that Squires himself is based; but his defense of the Christian position hides the basis of his position in empirical and natural reality.

As a result, Loury objects, “But lots of people in our country don’t hold your Christian presuppositions. How can you impose your private religious views on the public?” In short, Loury is asking that laws over the common square be based on public reasons, reasons that all people can, in principle, know and accept.

Loury is correct to ask this. And Squires, by only defending conservative positions on strictly biblical bases, effectively concedes that Christianity is based on private judgment, rather than public reason. That is not a concession that should be made.

The listener may observe, as Squires launches into his expression of the biblical view, that it’s as if he’s not talking to Loury, but rather presenting him with a doctrinal statement of Christianity that he can take or leave. “This is what Christians think.” His words don’t have a grip on Loury’s mind, but depend on Loury having independent, public reasons to sympathize. Loury in fact has such reasons and argues sociologically and philosophically for social conservatism.

Why cannot Squires, the Christian conservative in the room, express the reasons why anyone should sympathize with the conclusions of a “biblical worldview?”

Rawlsian Liberalism and Public Reason

Loury’s request for public reasons for laws that will be imposed on the public has two potential philosophical bases. One, very probably at work, is Rawlsian liberalism. According to John Rawls, not only all religious views but all substantive moral views go beyond the purview of the state and of our public life. They are private. There is a neutral zone of reason, of public rationality in a liberal society that is not based on these private moral views but creates the framework within which people of different views can operate and live together.

Loury reacts to Squires’ presentation in a Rawlsian manner. “That’s your religious view, and it’s fine if you do that in private; but in the public arena, you need to have laws that are based on criteria all people accept, because they will apply to people who don’t share those views.”

Squires then rejects Rawlsianism in part, but accepts it in another part. He says, “Every state will impose a morality; the question is only which one.” Squires is correct. There is no independent sphere of right interaction between people of opposed moral views, at least when the moral differences include such things as who is a person, who has rights, what rights they have, and whether those rights include the denial of reality.

On the other hand, Squires implicitly concedes that Christianity is a private truth, especially that the moral claims Christianity makes are private truths. They cannot meet the bar of public reason. Everything Christianity claims is privately, specially revealed truth.

But this is false to the teaching of Christianity itself, which claims in general to be publicly epistemically accessible; more specifically, which claims that the morality it testifies to is a natural and generally epistemically accessible morality, available without the aid of special revelation.

Therefore, Squires is correct that some morality will be imposed, but he agrees with Rawlsian liberalism that reason, common human intellectual activity, cannot discern goodness and badness.

The Promulgation Principle

This is because there is another potential philosophical basis for the appeal for public rationality, one that Christianity should meet, rather than reject. That is a perennial principle of law, that a citizen of a polity cannot be held accountable for a law that has not been promulgated. If the moral law of God, of which Christianity speaks, has not been promulgated for all mankind, then they are not accountable for it. If the moral law of God is only available in principle but has been made epistemically inaccessible by the “noetic effects of sin,” then men are not accountable for it any longer.

The “noetic effects of sin” is one of the chief doctrines of Christian presuppositionalism, i.e., Christian coherentism, or of Common Grace Theology. It is the basis of “Christian worldview” thinking.

The way Christians engage in public discussion and debate reveals their theology of nature. If Christians believe that the moral law of God is private, like a private corporate Slack channel, they reveal a sort of gnosticism and denial of natural revelation. This is so even if, out of the other side of their mouth, they affirm the existence of general revelation. If all you can say to Glenn Loury about traditional marriage is, “The designer is the definer,” or “It says here in the Bible…,” you deny the general revelation of God, his natural law, written upon the heart. Thereby, you deny general moral accountability and leave Glenn Loury with an excuse.

The Christian approach to public reason rejects the Rawlsian basis for it, that religious and moral views are private, in favor of the Ancient and Christian legal basis, that laws must be promulgated. Rather than rejecting the standard that arguments should be acceptable to public reason, Christianity accepts the standard, and then, Christian morality meets the standard.

Christian Nominalism

Squires makes another Christian coherentist argument, but one that bleeds into even voluntarism and nominalism, the view that things have their nature by divine fiat and definition. As Squires summarizes concerning traditional marriage and the distinction between the sexes, “The designer is the definer.”

To which I say, “No! God is not the definer. He is, once again, the designer!”

In the creation narrative, there is no mention of God doing the work of Merriam-Webster. The mention of words and speech in Genesis involves God creating by speech, but Adam naming. Adam named the animals, not God. Things’ natures are evident in the things that have been made. God did not have to provide Adam with a divine dictionary.

Calling God a “definer” gives too much credit to the nominalism and postmodernism of our day. Again, on the basis of the doctrine of the “noetic effects of sin,” Christians deny the integrity and knowability of nature.

Based Belief: Jordan Peterson Against Cohabitation

As I survey the realm of public discourse, I find a dearth of Christian empirical engagement. As I described before, this drives me to look for a model in the secular sympathizers with Christianity, chief among them, Jordan Peterson.

By contrast with Delano Squires’ accurate statement but inadequate defense of Christian morality, Peterson stockpiles public reasons for avoiding cohabitation before marriage, in this clip:

The listener will observe that the full Christian conclusion at which Squires wants to arrive goes beyond Peterson’s argument. However, Peterson’s arguments are aimed to persuade, and not simply in terms of rhetorical strategy. They actually do persuade because they are based in reality, both social science and philosophy.

The Christian coherentist view paints a picture of a far-off mountaintop, the full height of supernaturalist Christian belief. But it does not guide people to or on the path up the mountain. Peterson’s arguments do not betray, for they do not assume, their destination. But they walk the listener along a path from a worse place to a better one.

Christian public engagement too often displays a sort of anxiety that careful, tempered thought and argumentation may not lead to the right conclusion. But would someone think this unless he were himself uncertain that thinking carefully and at length led to Christian conclusions? There is a sort of anti-intellectual pietism at work here, and it is not the best public witness to Christianity or the moral law of God.

The people of Israel were supposed to be a light to the nations. By any account, they ended up keeping the law of God for themselves. The work of Christianity was, largely, the spreading of the knowledge of God to the Gentiles, to the rest of the world. We must avoid a new Pharisaism that keeps Christianity for the Christians. If we deny a common starting-point for human thought, we deny the world any sort of on-ramp to Christianity. We pull up the ladder behind us, as if no public reasons had a role in persuading us to be Christians. We ought to display a greater intellectual generosity as Christians. What we have received, let us give to others.

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1. Against Christian Coherentism

My intellectual nemesis, to a certain extent, is Christian coherentism. Christian coherentism argues that what Christianity teaches can only be defended by appeal to other things Christianity teaches. To argue for Christian conclusions, you must start from Christian premises. You say, “But that’s circular,” and they say, “Everyone argues in a circle.” Thus, they really do take the position of coherentism as the best account of human knowledge in general, not just of Christian doctrine in particular. The atheist they accuse of assuming certain atheistic premises in his argument for atheistic conclusions, contrary to the pretense of starting from common, empirically observable facts and science. Au contraire, all thought is circular and has as its only test, coherence. The Christian worldview is more coherent than the atheist and the postmodern worldviews, so it should be preferred. But there is no common evidence to which we can appeal, no premises on which Christian and non-Christian can agree.

But Christian coherentism actually makes shocking concessions to both empiricist atheist and progressive postmodernist worldviews. To the empiricist atheist, the Christian coherentist concedes, “Yes, we have no empirical evidence for the truth of any doctrine of Christianity.” To the postmodernist, the Christian coherentist concedes, “We can only perceive the world from our own partisan standpoint; there is no objective point of view from which to adjudicate competing conceptions of the world. Can such concessions to the predominant worldviews of the day be the appropriate Christian response, truly reflective of a “Christian worldview?”

Absolutely not. In principle, Christian coherentism renders Christian truth claims subjective, “our truth,” true for the Christian community, and them only. In fact, Christianity claims that it is the truth, publicly accessible and ready to be proclaimed to all peoples and nations. Christianity does not simply claim to be internally coherent; it claims to be true of the empirically observable world in which we all find ourselves.

Christian empiricism, by contrast, claims that Christianity is true of the common world in which we found ourselves, and may be known from the world in which we find ourselves. In the broadest terms, Christian empiricism claims that certain fundamental truths that serve as preparation for the gospel - the existence of God, the moral law, the natural order, and human dignity - may be known from created things themselves by experience and reflection. And Christian empiricism claims that the specific claims of the gospel concerning the life, death, and resurrection of Christ are and were publicly available and accessible to common human knowledge.

Today, Christian empiricism is particularly potent because a great experiment in denying the empirically accessible world and the moral order has been underway for at least decades, if not centuries. A failure to recognize the publicly available evidence, which many non-Christians already acknowledge, is an inexcusable oversight on Christians’ part. The best testimony in our day to the truth of Christianity comes from those who have encountered its truth by experience, and often, experience in trying to live apart from that truth. If we give up this evidence and testimony for Christianity, we give up the objectivity of the claims of Christianity and hide our light under a bushel. To which, I say, “No! I’m gonna let it shine.”

2. Wheaton College: Postmodernism

My claims may sound abstract and polemical. But I have seen Christian coherentism play out in real life in the settings of academic institutions, with the real-life consequences that result.

The first of these settings was Wheaton College: At Wheaton, the postmodern subjectivism of our contemporary culture was afoot, subjectivizing the claims of Christianity quite unapologetically. Meanwhile, those of us who were more orthodox or conservative really had nothing to fall back upon but Christian coherentism itself, arguing with the postmodern Christians that it was inconsistent with the premises, i.e., doctrines, of Christianity. Let’s just say, this didn’t really work.

We heard quite often that making objective truth claims was inherently arrogant and prideful. Humility required us to hold Christian doctrine very lightly and to acknowledge the doubt we all, purportedly, experienced.

As an aside, I want to register that I have never really doubted the truth of Christianity. I tried, but the problem is, the upside of Christianity being false would be so directly the freedom to indulge in sin and sensual pleasure that it would be impossible for me to take myself seriously as a truth seeker if I were to abandon the truth claims of Christianity.

And humility, I noticed, could also be displayed in accepting the truth of Christian revelation and submitting to it in obedience.

Because of this postmodernism, no effort was made to test or verify the truth claims of Christianity. I found this odd as the height of my intellectual life in high school had been the study of works of apologetics, like those of Lee Strobel and of Intelligent Design theorists. I found my faith bolstered by this careful intellectual verification of the truth claims of Christianity. Knowledge is not faith, mind you, but it is a prerequisite to faith. In point of fact, my own experience of conversion was subsequent to my reading of these works of apologetics, and not immediately so. I had no illusion that reading apologetics amounted to living faith.

In response to the postmodernism around us, those of us who were orthodox and conservative largely argued against postmodernism from our still fledgling knowledge of the truth claims of Christianity. Many of us were trying to learn the breadth of Christian doctrine and teaching; we were not ourselves in the game of verifying these truth claims. We believed them, and we saw that postmodernism undermined them.

However, there was something ineffectual about our arguments against the postmodernists. We would tell them that their philosophy was incompatible with Christian doctrine. But to them, that was the point. The objectivity of Christian truth claims was the hard edge of Christianity they were trying to soften.

Likewise, as postmodernists, they themselves argued that our Christianity was something like a subjective perspective on the world, not something that could be imposed on others as true. Our strategy of understanding better the coherent web of belief that was the system of Christian doctrine was not effective at proving otherwise. Without external evidence, a cognitive starting place from outside the web, Christianity did appear to be just what the postmodernists said it was.

By the end of my time at Wheaton, I saw the problem with Christian postmodernism; but I was only beginning to see the problem with a competing, conservative Christian coherentism. As a result, I found myself in my next educational setting in a hotbed of the strongest form of Christian coherentism: Westminster Theological Seminary, with its “Oatmeal Stout” Van Tillianism.

3. Westminster Seminary: Dogmatism

I went to Westminster Seminary because of my affinity for its Reformed theology. While Van Tillianism claims to be the apologetic or epistemological approach of Reformed theology, I had myself started to leave it behind due to some of my more advanced philosophy courses at Wheaton. I thought the Reformed theology of Westminster would be the overwhelming thing I received attending there and not the Van Tillianism that I, now, could take or, preferably, leave.

Unfortunately, Van Tillianism was the main offering of Westminster. It predominated in systematic theology classes, of course in apologetics courses, and even in hermeneutics and biblical studies. There were noteworthy exceptions, but they were clearly exceptions to the rule.

Van Tillianism claims that Christianity cannot be proven or intellectually supported by premises that are commonly accessible or knowable, but only by specifically Christian premises. To arrive at Christian conclusions, our only hope is to start from Christian premises. To do otherwise is to allow space to “autonomous reason,” which will inevitably head in one godless direction or another. The only arguments Van Tillianism permits are those that are “transcendental,” that is, that argue from the incoherence of a non-Christian worldview to the Christian worldview being the only consistent and coherent alternative.

What was striking was that we never discussed even any of these purported transcendental arguments; we never actually did Van Tillian apologetics. Instead, we argued meta-apologetically. We spent our time denying the validity of empirical and rational proof of Christian truth, and denying it, not as inaccurate, but as morally impermissible. It was not that Thomas Aquinas’s proofs of God’s existence were false, but that they were not permitted. (Note the assumption of what analytic philosophers call “doxastic voluntarism,” acts of the intellect actually being acts of the will which we can choose to exercise or not.)

We were policing the boundaries of a self-enclosed circular argument. We were there to make sure that no one actually used neutral, publicly available evidence, or common human experience to argue for the truth of Christianity. We were there to ensure that Christianity remained the subjective and private worldview of a contingent of backward inhabitants of a liberal society.

4. Roger Scruton: Christian Empiricist?

Through these experiences, I realized that the goal and the method of the Christian intellectual had to be something other than one of these two: 1) to put to rest the arrogance of the fundamentalist youth by introducing them to postmodern philosophy (one of the main methods of the faculty of evangelical colleges, like other colleges), or 2) to run around inside the circle of Christian truth claims that derive from premises that only Christians accept, often an accepted method of Christian theology.

No, the Christian intellectual, at the most basic level, had to be a person who had encountered the world and its many challenges to Christian belief but found Christianity confirmed rather than disproven by experience. Otherwise, what was the point of having smart Christians around? To corrupt the youth or fight internal battles? Not to defend and propagate Christianity intellectually?

It was around this time that I began to encounter and be influenced by a number of intellectuals who were not themselves Christian, but who were being led, by experience and reflection (philosophy) toward particular Christian truth claims. The first of these, whom I encountered in my personal reading during seminary, was Roger Scruton. Scruton was unique among academic analytic philosophers for being politically conservative. I had long seen that Christianity was not unrelated to political and moral conservatism, of a sort, this in spite of the endless pressure among highly-educated evangelical Christians to separate Christianity from conservatism and the Republican party. But the most compelling argument for conservatism, to me, had to come from someone who wasn’t himself a Christian. Otherwise, I would be admitting that progressivism was the inherently compelling idea; it was merely my parochial and doctrinaire creed that led me to conservatism.

Roger Scruton’s conservatism arose from direct experience of the political world and of the upheaval of the 1960’s. He was not conservative because, born of evangelical parents in the 1990’s, of course he would be conservative (like myself), but because the world didn’t bear out the utopianism of progressivism nor the moral self-congratulation of left-wing activism. Like the neo-cons before him, Scruton was a liberal who had been mugged by reality.

As it happened, Scruton was also on a spiritual journey. He saw the poverty of a materialistic perspective on the world. His primary study of aesthetics reveals that the dimension of life that is most human, the beautiful, is also the most resistant to material and scientistic reduction. He was led to an account of human nature that sees the person as a transcendent perspective on the world, not merely an entity within the world. He embraced the church of England as his own, especially by patrimony, but also by the spiritual core of society that it provides. His final theological position was likely still a form of theological liberalism, recognition of Christianity as mythical and allegorical truth. However, like the early church fathers with the Greek philosophers, I hope that this is enough for God to accept his faith as the best one of his intellectual background could offer. His own cancellation and the sullying of his name shortly before his death places him, for me, in the pantheon of philosophical martyrs.

Scruton, though never an orthodox Christian, gives better testimony than most orthodox Christians to the adequacy of Christian theology to the world of common human experience. He is not saying what he says because he knows the theological conclusion he must reach and is backfilling with evidence and argumentation. Rather, he sees in the world and in moral experience reason to question his own naturally secular assumptions.

5. Jordan Peterson: Christian Empiricist?

The second such secular appreciator of Christianity is probably easy to guess: Jordan B. Peterson. Peterson embodies what I mean by Christian empiricism. Like Scruton, his secular intellectual starting point prevents him from an orthodox confession of faith. Nevertheless, his resistance to such confession is, at once, based in conscience, and is a reason that he receives such a wide hearing. Peterson says that he can’t say that he believes in God largely because, to say this would require that one’s actions bear out one’s recognition of such a reality. In short, Peterson recognizes the gravity of acknowledging God as creator, lawgiver, and judge, something from which many a professing Christian could learn.

Likewise, if Peterson straightforwardly confessed the Christian faith, he would lose a lot of his broad credibility and appeal. It is a fact of our society that direct advocacy of Christian metaphysics and morality very nearly limits one’s audience to professing Christians. The greatest effect of Peterson’s public career has been to earn a hearing from many who would otherwise be New Atheists; a whole intellectual space has been opened up in which it is possible to sympathize with Christianity, to recognize what is lost without it, without explicitly becoming a Christian. Christians should welcome this openness to Christianity, rather than denigrate it as only incompletely Christian.

Peterson’s Christian empiricism is most obvious in that he grounds everything he says about Christianity in empirical science: psychology, social science, and the history of religions. By doing so, he appeals to sources of knowledge that everyone can acknowledge. He does not argue from Christian premises to Christian conclusions, but rather, from secular, empirical premises to Christian premises and some Christian conclusions. In doing so, Peterson makes his arguments epistemically accessible to all his listeners, whatever the condition of their religious perspective.

Even some of the recent critiques of Peterson confirm this. Peterson has taken a more decidedly politically conservative turn, marked by his joining with The Daily Wire. As with claiming Christianity, claiming conservatism narrows one’s audience. It was Peterson’s perception and actual behavior as a neutral, empirical observer, recommending some Christian conclusions and a mix of conservative and liberal political conclusions, that originally gave him such broad appeal.

Several others I will mention only briefly. Leon Kass’s book The Beginning of Wisdom captured for me the psychological and philosophical reading of Genesis, of the kind Peterson also practiced. Kass’s own activities as a scientist and philosopher at the University of Chicago eventually led him to a less secular worldview. Likewise, his reading of Genesis speaks to the human condition and treats Genesis as a philosophical text speaking to all of humanity, not believers only. I wish Kass had been included among Peterson’s interlocutors in his latest Exodus series, in light of second commentary, on Exodus, Founding God’s Nation.

In the realm of political commentary, I have largely lost interest in commentary that is specifically from my own worldview: Albert Mohler’s The Briefing was this for me for several years, Christian coherentist political commentary, without actual secular expertise in political analysis. I have been most interested, in the last several years, in commentators who come to Christian and conservative conclusions (though not exclusively) from a secular liberal starting point. These include Douglas Murray, Dave Rubin, Carl Benjamin, James Lindsay, David Fuller, Ayishat Akanbi, Konstantin Kisin, and Freddie Sayers. Their sympathies for Christian and conservative perspectives come from journalistic observation, political activity, and generally, experience in life that puts their secularism and liberalism to the test.

While some Christians test their media intake by rigorous standards of orthodoxy, I am much better informed as a Christian for hearing the commentary of people who didn’t have to affirm what they affirm. I have also been challenged in the details of my understanding of political and moral matters; it is not as though I am merely seeking confirmation of what I already believe. On the contrary, I am putting my beliefs to an empirical test and finding some of them confirmed.

6. Paul Kingsnorth: Christian Empiricist

Most recently, I have benefited from commentators and writers who have, unlike Scruton and Peterson, converted to full-bore orthodox - well, I should admit, Orthodox - Christianity. Chief among these has been Paul Kingsnorth. Kingsnorth’s was an intellectual conversion, like that of C. S. Lewis. Yet in Kingsnorth I see a full affirmation of orthodoxy alongside of an empirical and experiential basis for his Christianity, as well as the retention of a non-Christian readership. In this I see an example of what Christian empiricist writing and thinking can be.

Kingsnorth was a writer and spiritual seeker long before his Christian conversion. He attracted a readership because he was attentive to the world, as an advocate for the natural environment but more an appreciator and lover of the created order. Throughout his spiritual seeking, reflected in the three novels of his Buckmaster Trilogy, and his other collected writings, readers could detect a genuine interest in truth.

When he converted to Christianity, to his own surprise and against his own will, while he lost some readers, (he also gained others,) no one could doubt that he had retained his interest in truth and his attention to nature and experience. As David Fuller’s interview with Kingsnorth demonstrated, Kingsnorth has the attention of non-Christians, and he articulates his Christian conversion as an appropriate end to his spiritual seeking, though not an end to his truth-seeking, and an answer to the problems of the time.

As Kingsnorth has continued to write, his writing has not become merely an elaboration of what Christians believe, but an extension of those beliefs to an analysis of the world as it is and the relation between its technological and natural orders. Significantly, Kingsnorth is not, like some of the other writers I have discussed, a man of the right, but more naturally of the left, an environmentalist and anti-capitalist. In reading him, my own conception of politics has broadened (though these themes were present from the start in Roger Scruton’s own form of conservatism).

I am reminded too of the words Andrew Klavan reports that he prayed upon his conversion: “Lord, I am a writer, and I have become Christian. But please, do not make me a Christian writer.” There is something very significant here. A Christian writer, we imagine, would frame everything he wrote in terms of Christianity. All would begin from Christian premises or presuppositions. In so doing, his audience would narrow to only those who are themselves Christians, whether intentionally or not.

But the other implication is that the writing itself, the observation of the world that one’s writing expresses, and so on, would actually lose something of its genuineness. The novelist who is a truth-seeker does not know what moral his story ought to prove. His story arises from observation of the world, and he does not know how it will end. The Christian novelist knows how every story will end and shoehorns each story into the model of the gospel story.

Now J.R.R. Tolkien argued that every fairy story ultimately reflects the truth of the Christian story, but as we know from his opposition to allegory and denial that his own stories were allegory, this is not a prescription but merely a description. If being a Christian means that creative work can no longer reflect the world as it is and reveal that the Christian is true of the world, but must instead entail an obligation to force everything into a single, evangelical form, then Christians are incapable of testifying to others that the Christian religion is true of the common world we all inhabit.

Paul Kingsnorth, not to mention J. R. R. Tolkien (and Andrew Klavan), show that this is not the only path for the Christian novelist or intellectual. Even Christians can write about the common world, in terms all people can understand, and without presupposing the truth of the Christian faith. Christian coherentism is not the only option. Christian empiricism is, at least, possible.

7. Based Belief

Many think that human speech can be nothing but an imposition on reality. There are competing ideologies, and all human speech involves a taking up of one ideology or another and an imposition upon or construction of reality in line with that ideology. But if some human speech can be based in reality, then this is not always the case. It is possible to use one’s words to simply reflect and express the reality that is before one’s eyes. Perhaps this is even the model of how we should use our words.

My unique recommendation is that Christians, even Christians, can and should use their words in this way, in political discourse, in intellectual activity, and in creative endeavor. Christianity, I hope, is not an ideology. In the face of moral and metaphysical confusion, I hope that Christians are not reduced to appealing to Bible verses in ways that only believing Christians will appreciate.

As a concluding thought, even the Bible should be given more credit than this. What if the Bible itself is not just supernatural revelation but is also the fruit of human and divine witness to the observable nature of the world around us?

Down with Christian Coherentism! Up with Christian Empiricism!

Today, I have made available an eBook on the strictest form of Christian coherentism, titled, “50 Errors of Christian Presuppositionalism.” Follow this link to download.

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Abigail Favale’s The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory is the best book I have read in a long time. As a baseline, this is because of its timeliness. The matter of transgenderism, as it has been called, is the heart of the present culture war. It is where a voice of clarity and truth is most needed and needed now.

However, The Genesis of Gender is not a culture-war kind of book. It is a book that is philosophical and theological in the highest senses. It is concerned with timeless truths of the human condition, addressed at a particular time and place when they most need articulation.

But The Genesis of Gender is also a book that is beautifully written, that speaks truth in love, and unites the form and matter of what it says. I myself am a student of analytic philosophy. Analytic philosophy actually has great matter; it addresses many of the timeless difficulties and confusions of human thought. But it has a terrible form: Endless acronyms, numbered premises, and scrupulous attention to minute details to prove trivial conclusions.

Where I have seen the matter of philosophy united with its form is in the works of Roger Scruton. Works like The Meaning of Conservatism, Sexual Desire (a better comparison for this book), Beauty, or Human Nature - these books present philosophy as a form of literature. These remain my model, and I search far and wide for philosophy, and even more rarely, theology, that attains this unity of form and matter. (Other examples include books by Wendell Berry, Alain de Botton, and Tom Hodgkinson, to name a few.)

The Genesis of Gender is such a book. Favale’s knowledge of the specific disciplines of sexuality and gender studies, philosophy, and theology, and her apt literary and mythological references reflect the fruit of the kind of bookish wisdom we partisans of the liberal arts continue to believe in.

Consider her reference to Ovid’s Metamorphoses:

We are living in the Age of Pygmalion, that master artist from Ovid’s Metamorphoses who wants a wife but despises real women. He picks up his hammer and chisel and constructs his ideal out of stone. He lusts after her; his image of woman is more desirable than the reality. In the original myth, Pygmalion wants to marry her, to bring her to his bed; in our time, Pygmalion wants to be her. Instead of a sculptor’s tools, he works with scalpel and syringe. Instead of stone, he carves his fantasy into his own flesh. (159)

I am speechless. We are living out errors that were adequately addressed and cautioned against by ancient mythology, and not only the secular public but even the Christian church is ignorant.

In places, Favale summarizes the history of gender theory, some of which was already familiar to me - I remember googling John Money back in high school. But because of the comprehensiveness of her summary, she included things, for example about Margaret Sanger, that I have simply never heard. To see Sanger’s philosophy, her role in introducing the idea that the standard of female freedom is maleness and that contraception and abortion are what will facilitate this liberation, lays bare the origins of both feminism and gender theory. The description of the difference between the first recipient of gender-reassignment surgery in the 1930’s and the next in the 1950’s - the first wanted to give birth to children, the latter simply to physically appear female - makes Favale’s point without her having to say much else: The vision of gender that we have received is separate from reproductive function and purely aesthetic.

As a work of Christian thought and theology, The Genesis of Gender stands out for its combination of orthodoxy and depth of Christian theology and engagement in history, philosophy, and science. This is what I call Christian empiricism. Unlike a form of theology I have often encountered, call it Christian coherentism, that treats Christianity like a self-enclosed bubble, an orthodoxy that must be maintained but can hardly be propagated, Favale’s approach shows the Christian account to be deeply adequate to and rooted in empirical reality.

One of the main examples of this comes toward the end of the book, as Favale recounts several stories of de-transitioners. I too have watched many of these stories and interviews. I have primarily heard these interviews on shows run by interviewers who are not Christian but cannot deny what they see and hear from these individuals.

By comparison, my own Christian training at a Christian college and as a seminarian did not involve this sort of empirical knowledge; it treated it as a matter of parochial Christian doctrine that we believe that there are men and women, sexual dimorphism. But this way of approaching things suggests that there is no conformity between the world of common human experience and what the Bible teaches. In doing so, it forfeits many of the strongest means of preparation for the gospel, which are rooted in God’s revelation through nature, the natural law, and common human reason.

The stories of de-transitioners reveal very directly that men are not women and women are not men. The scars, incisions, continuing bleeding, and irreversible hormonal change are the proof. It has been said before, but the Church needs to be ready with a message of hope for those harmed by this denial of nature, and it needs to make appeal to commonly understandable experiences like these as evidence of the accuracy and power of, for example, the biblical creation narrative.

My own dissertation will, I hope, be on the philosophy of language, so let us turn there briefly as well. Favale discusses how the reality of sexual dimorphism is often undermined by the possibility of exceptions to any purported “definition” of man or woman. After all, some women do not have uteruses, some (many) women do not ever give birth, and so on. Nevertheless, Favale attempts a definition in terms of the ordering of the body to the production of either small or large gametes, itself a valiant effort.

I would simply offer two interventions from analytic philosophy of language. The first is that the natures of natural kinds, existing divisions in nature, are not representable in verbal definitions summarizing essential properties. This I gather from Saul Kripke’s Naming and Neccessity, and I have explained further here. But the short of it is that the meaning of a term like “woman” is the natural kind that are women. We can proceed to offer properties that women have, but our use of “woman” is not dependent on confirming that individual beings have the relevant properties. Things are the other way around; we observe a natural classification, a natural kind, and then we try to express verbally what holds of it, to quote Aristotle, “always, or for the most part.”

The second intervention is on that last point. This is less known, but comes from the philosopher Michael Thompson’s essay, “The Representation of Life.” He discusses there the logic of generic sentences, sentences about kinds of things, especially kinds of living things. He notes that when we speak about a kind or a species, we speak in generalities. We do not intend what philosophers call “a universal generalization,” a statement that holds for every last one. Instead we speak about what happens to an individual of that kind when things proceed normally. For some species this is very rare: “Although ‘the mayfly’ breeds shortly before dying, most mayflies die long before breeding” (Thompson, Life and Action, 68). In fact, our culture’s entire difficulty with stereotypes stems from a failure to comprehend this point about generic sentences.

These two points from the philosophy of language would go a long way in the gender debate.

Still on the topic of language, Favale’s approach to trans-identified individuals and pronoun use is particularly careful, thoughtful, conscientious, and loving. Favale’s reticence to use preferred pronouns is explained in autobiographical detail. Compassion has compelled her to do everything she can to interact well with trans-identified individuals. However, her Christian conscience forbids her from misrepresenting reality in her speech. My conscience commands the same, though I cannot claim to have had opportunity for this to be much of a live issue. The combination of truth and love about which she speaks eloquently, she truly exemplifies in the book’s final chapters.

There is much more to talk about from Favale’s book, and I hope to dig into matters of postmodernism, sexual dimorphism, scientific studies and more in the future, in developing a Christian approach to these matters. But Favale has done the legwork, and she is the right person to write the book. In my Christian life, I have grown to trust most on intellectual matters converts, not those, like myself, who are and have always (more or less) been conservative, orthodox Christians. While coming from an evangelical background, Favale studied gender theory and followed it as far as she could, testing its limits by experience. Nevertheless, while not doctrinaire, her book is orthodox, not by any policing of doctrinal boundaries, but by tasting and seeing that the Lord is good. Having put the claims of Christianity with regard to human sexuality to the test, she discovers for herself and testifies to us that they are good, true, and beautiful.

I’ll finish simply by saying that The Genesis of Gender is the kind of book I would hope to write. Its unity of philosophy, theology, social science, literature, and history certainly goes beyond my capacity. Nevertheless, I have the ambition to complete a book I have outlined and begun to draft, under the working title of Marriage for Millennials. I hope to present an understanding of marriage as rooted in nature and in sexual dimorphism as a perennial possibility for human living and a human birthright, not a parochial religious distinctive. If I can write with a fraction of Favale’s grace and ability, I would be pleased.

The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory will stand as a great and timely Christian account of the human condition. May it strengthen Christians, instruct the ignorant, and convert the confused. I wholeheartedly recommend The Genesis of Gender.

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Hello, readers! The last several weeks, I’ve been deep in work on my Ph.D. dissertation. I’m excited to share some of the fruits of that research here. I’ll begin with my reflections on why I’m getting a Ph.D. in philosophy in the first place. Thanks for reading.

Hey, I’m Joel Carini, the Natural Theologian.

And in this post, I’m going to talk about why I’m getting a PhD in philosophy and not theology.

1. Biblical Exegesis Is Not Enough

My first intellectual love has been theology, the study of Christian doctrine and what the faith teaches. That led me to take an interest in studying at seminary where we would study the sources of Christian theology in the Bible and the history of Christian interpretation of the Bible and the systematization of that into systematic theology. A whole coalition of disciplines that explore the contours of what Christianity teaches. And by attending seminary, you become competent. You can learn the original languages of the Bible. You can learn how to use the Bible in theological debate, what are the main arguments for and against different positions, and how to ground one's own position in those texts.

(For background, see my post, “Why You Shouldn’t Go to Seminary.”)

But what I realized over the course of my seminary studies was that the resources of biblical exegesis alone are not enough to do Christian theology.

I noticed this in each of the main evangelical debates.

Take the debate over complementarianism and egalitarianism, the relationship between men and women in the home and the church.

Now both of these arguments were presented as if they were purely exegetical arguments. They rested on the meanings of certain Greek words like kephalé, for head, the husband is the head of the wife (Eph 5:23). What does this mean, authority, source, or what? The “helpmeet,” the “companion” in the book of Genesis (Gen 2:18). These Hebrew and Greek words were supposed to be the linchpin of theological arguments.

Yet it wasn’t plausible to me that biblical exegesis alone was even the reason people held the positions they held. Did the evangelical feminist really hold their view just because of a dictionary definition of kephalé? Or was something more going on? (And the same applied to the complementarians, by the way.)

No, I started to think people get their ideas from outside the Bible. They’re shaped by the Bible, but their reading of the Bible is also shaped by what they already think.

And so we’re kind of thrown back on ourselves to actually examine the fundamental assumptions that we hold and the reasons for and against those, in conversation with the Bible, but not with the Bible alone.

Specifically, I started to see the way that different theological debates reduced down to philosophical debates.

The feminist one remains a simple example. If someone thinks that the reason churches, certain churches, ordain only men and not women is because of the patriarchy, we’re not dealing with a specifically Christian argument. That’s not a knock against it, but it is to say that this is an argument that shows up elsewhere.

To actually understand the merits of a key feminist argument like that, you have to go into feminist philosophy, look at the history of that argument. What is the sociological evidence for it? What is the philosophical grounding of it? And what are the contrary claims of the other side? Well, this would enmesh you in philosophy, that universal human discipline, rather than the parochial Christian theology of adherence of the Christian faith.

And so, I began to think in that, as in so many other debates, what we really need to do is get down to the philosophical arguments that are at the heart of things.

And this just dovetailed with the fact that, as many people criticize evangelicals for, debating from Bible verses actually doesn’t solve our problems. There are contested interpretations. There are different interpretations on completely opposite sides. There are views on completely opposite sides that both claim a basis in the Bible.

Now, this isn’t to say that there’s no way to read the Bible aright, but it is to say that the idea that you can do it all from the Bible is a bit shallow and narrow.

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2. Attending to Reality

Now another reason to go outside the Bible in order to understand Christian teaching is because the message of the Bible is actually about those things themselves. It’s a message to human beings about human beings. It addresses the various aspects of their lives. It addresses the world, the natural world, the human world.

And if you don’t understand those things on their own terms, as it were, you're liable to ignore them or misunderstand them or not even to comprehend how the Christian faith speaks to them. If you try to speak about those things just from the Bible and theology, you’re likely to be missing a lot of the relevant information.

An obvious one is politics. Whoever claims that their view of politics comes directly from the Bible immediately invites suspicion. Because there are people who can argue the exact contrary position and claim that it’s from the Bible.

And more importantly, because politics is a complex and messy subject in the real world. We have to use our eyes and our senses to gather empirical information about how the world works. And this is done in political science, political philosophy, sociology, history, and many other disciplines. The idea that we can do this from the Bible alone, get that sort of magic shortcut to the right answers, is deeply misguided.

There are other areas as well. Broadly, we could think about anthropology, the study of human beings. Can human beings be understood through science? Can we understand ourselves through the disciplines of psychology? What are the limits of that scientific understanding? Are there ways that human beings cannot be reduced to their scientific and natural substrate?

We see debates about counseling and psychology and their legitimacy for Christians. Can we use this information that’s gathered, not from the Bible, but by secular study and by secular psychotherapy to understand the human mind, to help people? Can we differentiate spiritual problems from psychological problems and properly relate these? Again, you can’t do that if you just say everything's going to come from the Bible, as some do. You’re liable to to mistake psychological problems for spiritual ones. (See “Are Thoughts Sin?” by Anna Carini and myself.)

If the Bible is to help human beings live human lives, we actually have to pay attention to human beings, how they work, how their minds work. We can’t just look at the Bible.

Now that’s not to say that the Bible can’t correct secular understandings. It’s not to say that the Bible can’t, for instance, emphasize human responsibility in ways that a kind of determinist psychology ignores. We should emphasize human moral responsibility. In fact, when you don't people become helpless, and science can even confirm that. (See discussion of “learned helplessness.”) But you need a healthy discussion and dialogue between between faith and science to even get that right.

There are other areas. In the church, when we try to reduce everything to theology, we often ignore power dynamics, ways that people are driven by narcissism or fame, psychological motivations. If we understand the church as another human institution, trying to exemplify something greater, but still subject to those infirmities and patterns, we're going to be on a lot better footing.

We can pay attention to how social media is shaping the Christian life, shaping online Christian personalities. We get a better sense of what’s really going on.

Example: Homosexual Orientation

Maybe more controversially, same-sex attraction is an important topic for the contemporary church. It’s where the church is frequently accused of homophobia, of misunderstanding and lacking sympathy with one particular human experience. And the church can easily do this. We can say, we’ve got our answers straight from the Bible. There's no mention of a homosexual orientation. Our desires are themselves sin. We can make these blanket proclamations.

This is an area of theology where I think the church needs to really grapple with reality that we can learn through philosophy and empirical science. We can learn from people’s experience and from scientific study that some people have a sexual orientation that is ordered contrary to how the Bible says we ought to direct our sexual activity. (See my “Sexual Orientation Is Not a Social Construct.”)

If that’s the case, that presents a real obstacle to just stating the Christian truth simply.

If there’s a fact that some people are same-sex attracted or gay, then we cannot simply assume that every desire is sin. We cannot simply assume that the Christian message of sexual fidelity in male-female marriage is easy for everyone. We must understand that it is more costly for some than others because of the way some people’s nature has been made, even though that's affected by the fall.

Empirical reality, things that are known from outside the Bible have to be allowed in if we are to be sympathetic to human nature, to the human beings that are around us as we know that Jesus Christ himself is.

3. Openness to Experience and Thought

We’ve moved further afield than just philosophy. Why does this explain that I'm getting a philosophy Ph.D. instead of a theology Ph.D.?

Well, it's because of this openness to other fields of learning. Now, philosophy itself acts as a kind of bridge between all these fields. It’s been remarked before that philosophy doesn't really have its own subject area. It studies all phenomena. There’s a philosophy of biology. There’s a philosophy of language. There’s a philosophy of man, and so on.

Philosophy stands at the boundary of these disciplines and often adjudicates how they are related. With respect to theology, philosophy has been called the handmaiden of theology because it helps theology understand the phenomena it’s working with. And that’s the role that philosophy has taken on for me.

Philosophy also uses tools other than the appeal to authoritative texts. That’s essentially what doing theology by biblical exegesis is. Now there was a time when the authoritative texts were not the Bible only. Thomas Aquinas, for instance, would use a statement of Aristotle almost as authoritatively as a scriptural text. Not actually as unquestionably authoritative, but there were many people thought to be trusted sources, who could quote from.

But when you engage in philosophy, you have to use a different mode of reasoning. You have to offer all the reasons for and against. You have to answer all the counterexamples. You have to answer the objections. And there’s a thorough plumbing of the depths of a certain phenomena that is so important to be able to do.

It’s one thing to have all the Christian Bible arguments for and against. It’s another to answer the objection of the non-Christian. It’s another to answer the objection of empirical evidence and to say, wait a second, that looks contrary. How does it fit? And philosophy equips one to begin to address all of this.

4. Philosophy Before Theology

Now, I’ve come to think even more that philosophy is actually at the intellectual foundation of theology. This is backwards from how most Christians would want me to frame this. But what I mean is this:

Take an argument in theology, for example, about whether we can interpret the Bible directly or do we need a sort of magisterial authority to adjudicate interpretations. Is it possible to read the Bible and honestly discover what it says? Or are we going to be projecting our subjective interpretation onto it?

Well, as you may recognize, this is not just a Christian debate. This is the core debate of the disciplines of hermeneutics and of kind metaphysical realism. Do we all project, in a neo-Kantian way, our concepts onto the world, or can we receive the world without a veil of interpretation?

This is a philosophical debate fundamentally. There’s not a specifically Christian way to go about this. There are arguments for and against this that have been offered by continental and analytic philosophers.

And so if I want to deal with this argument faithfully, I actually need to look into, Gadamer on the one hand as the founder of the discipline of hermeneutics, or the philosophers of language over an analytic philosophy like Frege, Russell, Kaplan, Strawson, and so on. I need to deal with the phenomena of language.

How does language refer to the world? Do we project our concepts onto reality? Do our concepts get their content from our own definitions of words or from the things in the world?

These are debates in philosophy and their outcome determines whether the argument that we only know things through an interpretation holds water. As I've come to think it doesn't.

But the question for me in all this is:

Do I just want to perpetuate the evangelical discourse? People on one side have their Bible verses; people on the other side have their Bible verses. We just throw back and forth the Bible verses, and the same tired old positions get hashed out again and again and again.

Or do I want to go to another discipline, bring its resources, and intervene into the debates of evangelical theology?

I’d rather do the latter. I’d rather bring something new. I’d rather show how we’ve been arguing on this level, but there’s something down here that we’ve totally missed. And so that’s what I’m hoping to do in getting a philosophy PhD, even as someone who calls himself, and aspires to be, a theologian.

5. Communicating to Non-Christians

There’s a last, perhaps obvious reason why I would get a philosophy PhD instead of a theology one. And that is that I don’t just want to talk to other Christians. I don’t just want to communicate the Christian faith to people who already believe it and argue within the sort of circular argument of its beliefs.

No, I’d like to become equipped in universal human language reasons for and against different beliefs. I’d like to be able to articulate Christian beliefs in ways that are accessible broadly. And I’d like to be able to offer reasons to believe this or that doctrine of the Christian faith independently of scripture. equips a person to do that in a way that biblical and Christian theology just doesn’t.

And so, in getting a philosophy PhD, I’m really trying to not just be Christian, but to be human.

I’m trying to admit that the way we get our beliefs isn’t just by downloading them from the Bible. Evidence, human experience, philosophical assumptions, and even philosophical argument persuade us as often as do appeals to texts we believe authoritative.

And I want to communicate these things in ways that are accessible to all people, whether they believe what I believe, something else, or nothing at all.

And after all, that’s what I’m up to here at The Natural Theologian.

So thank you for watching and listening. I’m Joel Carini. Until next time.

Watch the Video:

Yes, that’s right — “defence,” with a ‘c.’

That’s because my guest on this episode is an Anglican priest and Substacker Father Thomas Plant (Fr Thomas Plant).

Father Plant recently responded to Paul Kingsnorth’s lecture “Against Christian Civilization” with his well-titled reply, “Kingsnorth’s Radical Protestantism: In Defence of Christian Civilisation.”

Fr. Plant writes:

“Do we want civilization,” he asks, “or do we want Christ? What if we can have only the one or the other?” The question is rhetorical, the presumed answer clear. Christ and civilisation are antitheses. To follow one is to reject the other. They are rival masters, and woe on him who tries to serve the two.

This dualistic principle governs Kingsnorth’s recent diatribe for First Things, Against Christian Civilisation. It is an ascetic principle of sorts, grounding Kingsnorth’s quietist distaste for politics and technology. But despite his newfound profession of Orthodoxy, it is a principle closer to the Puritans and Levellers than to the Hesychasts and Stilites he admires.

Read the whole thing.

Given my own take on Kingsnorth’s talk, I had to have Fr. Plant on the podcast. Here is our conversation.

For the video version, watch our interview on YouTube. (And be sure to subscribe to The Natural Theologian YouTube channel.)

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

01:57 Kingsnorth's Mistake

07:03 The Puritan Error?

11:00 Contemporary Radical Protestantism

16:50 Kingsnorth's Critique of Jordan Peterson

26:42 Good without God?

33:01 Pastoral Implications

37:00 How to be a Christian in abundance?

44:35 Christian culture v. civilization?

Fr. Plant’s Article: “Kingsnorth’s Radical Protestantism.”

Paul Kingsnorth’s Address and Article: “Against Christian Civilization.”

More from Father Plant

Book: The Lost Way to the Good: Dionysian Platonism, Shin Buddhism, and the Shared Quest to Reconnect a Divided World

Substack:

Recently, Jordan Peterson spoke at ARC, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, his organization for international leadership. This article contains the transcript of his talk and my reaction to it, taken my from most recent YouTube video.

Hey! I’m Joel Carini, the Natural Theologian.

In this post, I'm going to react to Jordan Peterson’s speech at ARC 2025, the text of which is transcribed below.

The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship is Jordan Peterson’s sort of global policy and vision network, kind of an antidote to Davos and the elite culture. And he’s been casting his culturally Christian, conservative/classical liberal vision over last year’s and now this year’s conference.

This video just came out, so I’m gonna react and see what we can say about the philosophical and theological significance of his talk.

Jordan Peterson:

What is the defining characteristic of this civilizational moment? I would say that what lies in front of us, perhaps for the first time, is the opportunity to make the foundational principles of our civilization, conscious, explicit and propositional, and in so doing, to pave the way for a genuine and mutually appreciative union of traditional conservatism and classic liberalism.

To undertake such a venture, the first question that we must address is the nature of motivation, for life, for being and becoming. And I think we've proceeded far enough in our philosophical, theological, and psychological, biological investigations to provide an answer to that.

The default drives that motivate us, or personalities that possess us might be regarded as those that foster a narrow and self absorbed hedonism. And I would say that that's the default state that characterizes human immaturity.

That possession by implicit, fragmented whim must be transcended by a more sophisticated, uniting principle in order for the psyche to be integrated and to be sustainable across time in an iterated manner, and for community itself to exist. Hedonistic pleasure, seeking the gratification of immediate desire, the simple avoidance of pain or displeasure is not a principle that can improve when it's implemented, or unite people in productive cooperation and competition, so that a society can be established.

The dominance of the personality by local, narrow and self serving whim is not a playable or noble game, and it allies itself necessarily with the force that cynics, like the postmodernists, like the Neo-Marxists, believe is the only viable uniting force, that of power. If you're motivated by nothing but the pursuit of your own subjective desire in the moment, or your desire to avoid the necessary pain that mature conduct involves, you have to turn to power to impose your narrow will on others; because if you're dominated by the immature longing for your immediate self gratification, then it's all about you in the narrowest sense, and the only option you have in terms of your relationship with others is to turn to the force and compulsion that make them involuntary servants of your will.

We've seen forever, the dynamic between immature hedonism that fragments and that degenerates as it's played out, and the demand for the power that subjugates others to the will of the moment.

Hey, let’s stop there for a second.

Refounding Our Civilization

So the setup is giving an intellectual foundation to our civilization. And it’s really interesting because all the questions about, “Is this Christianity just cultural?” come to the fore as well as just like, “What is Jordan Peterson's project?”

He isn't bringing us back to religion kind of for its own sake in a a pietist way, to just get us close to God. It's not even narrowly psychological, for us to sort ourselves out, though that's obviously part of Peterson's program. It's for our civilization. If you think about the foundational questions that have driven Peterson, it was the Cold War. It was ideological conflict and the ability of human beings to do collective evil.

And part of that is to say that those two – psychology and politics – are connected. Like tyranny, a tyrannical state is one in which everyone is lying all the time, as Peterson says. And so very much the way that Socrates and Plato spoke in the Republic, the soul of the individual and the soul of a community are connected.

And I think that's important for those on the kind of religious side who really want Peterson to profess to be a Christian and to get other people to profess Christianity from the heart, with true piety, kind of à la Billy Graham. That's not what Peterson is about, but I think it's also a corrective that, “Isn't that too narrow a goal?”

You could think, as many do, that Peterson is instrumentalizing Christianity to political and social ends. But on the other hand, he's saying Christianity has at least to be something that can give foundation to society. Maybe it's more. Maybe it can bring you into the kingdom to come. But if it has nothing to say to the life here and now, in our political situation, what worth really is that?

Now he's really spelling out the poverty of what you could call “metaphysical liberalism.” So John Rawls is supposed to be a theorist really of classical liberalism. Rawls's liberalism was the idea that we're going to choose a society where you don't know what religion you're going to be. You don't know what your social or economic position is going to be. We're behind this veil of ignorance and we want to choose something fair for everyone.

And so it's not going to be based on any partisan doctrine. It's going to be metaphysically agnostic as to those things. And it's also going to be generally egalitarian social safety net, because if you don't know if you're going to become a poor person, you're going to want to be cared for. You're not going to want to just be blamed. We allow the kind of inequality that actually benefits everyone and especially the least well off.

Now, Rawls, early in his life was a Christian. He left behind that faith to be kind of this ethical figure spelling out political liberalism. But he never intended for [his theory of liberalism] to be metaphysical agnosticism. In response to critiques of his view, he argued that he was just after political liberalism, which is just a principle of pluralism. “Here's how we're all going to operate together, even though we don't agree on every point.” He's like, “If you can get there by thinking about natural law, as a Christian or a Muslim or a Jew. Great. That's not my foundation. If you can get there and you’re postmodernist, if you can just get there by mutual respect for other beings, great.”

But as it's played out, the lack of a coherent vision of the good or metaphysics has allowed society to become more about everyone seeking pleasure, with side constraints on your action so that you just don't hurt other people or inhibit their pursuit of pleasure. It's basically become organized hedonism, hedonism with maybe a little bit of Kantianism to respect other people's right to pursue their own hedonism.

And as Peterson is saying, that's just not adequate. We need a deeper foundation for society than that. Even the principles of classical liberalism that Rawls was for, those need a metaphysical foundation. We need to truly believe that people are ends in themselves, that humans have dignity. We need at least the mythical mythological version of the doctrine of the Image of God that Peterson is so famous for. So I want to see where he keeps going now.

He's going to have an argument against hedonism but let's just think about that setup. That seems like a very legitimate thing to be after and very necessary, especially the idea that it's time to become self-conscious as a civilization about our foundational principles.

For a long time, religious societies were very self-conscious about their foundational principles. They just thought of it as doctrine, though. They didn't think, “Well, we need this to be the foundation of civilization.” Maybe the kings and princes were thinking that way.

But there's something interesting about a society that has left that behind now saying, “Well, hold on, what do we actually need, simply in a political or pragmatic sense?” There’s a possibility for a civilization to become self-conscious of its own intellectual foundations. I'm excited for that.

Friends, my publication, The Natural Theologian, is supported by readers like you. If you want to receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you.

Let’s hear what Peterson has to say about hedonism:

Why is hedonism wrong? Why is power wrong? Technically, I think it's because both of those motivating forces, or sets of motivating forces, degenerate when they're iterated. You can't go through life like an immature two year old, because you can't sustain your own existence while pursuing immediate gratification in the present, and you can't sustain a society in a productive and abundant manner over the medium to long run if you use power to subordinate the will of others involuntarily to your desires. The reason that the hedonistic proclivity the fractionated, hedonistic proclivity and the drive to power are immoral is because they degenerate when they're implemented and iterated.

The skeptics, that's particularly true of the post modernists – this is the definition of post modernism. Literally, the skeptics proclaim that there's no uniting metanarrative other than that of power, and that's wrong. There is a uniting metanarrative, and as I intimated at the beginning of this discussion, I believe we're now in a position where we can explicitly understand it; and that explicit understanding, in principle, could allow us to regain the necessary faith in the self-evident…axioms in which our liberal democracies are nested.

The biblical library, that lays out the narrative principles upon which free, Western societies are founded, is an elaborated exploration of the theme of sacrifice.

Taken at face value, the dramas of sacrifice that are portrayed in our foundational texts have a impenetrable and opaque quality. What does it mean to offer something of value to the divine? It's a drama that's predicated on the realization that sacrifice is by necessity the foundation of civilization.

Civilization is social and future-oriented, and that means, since it’s social, that the individuals who come together to constitute society have to sacrifice their narrow pleasure, seeking individuality, demanding gratification in the moment, for the sake of their mutual, reciprocal relationships with others, locally, first in marriage, in family, in town, in city, expanding to province and state and country, nested all under the auspices, let's say, of the Divine. That's a sacrificial process. It means forgoing the narrowly immediate, for the sake of the community.

It means, equally, a sacrificial process in relationship to time, the distinguishing characteristic of maturity as opposed to immaturity, and wisdom as opposed to folly, is the ability to sacrifice the immediate demands of the present for the future. To think before you act. To act with Caution so you don't have to repent at leisure. It's a sacrificial process.

When a child learns to make a friend, he learns necessarily, the principle of sacrificial reciprocity. “I have a turn, then you have a turn.” “I have a turn, then you have a turn.” The sacrifice there is that it's not always my turn. And that sacrificial reciprocity is the…foundational principle, of the reciprocity upon which even the most primordial forms of society, friendship in childhood, let's say, are predicated.

The foundational texts of Western civilization, the biblical texts in particular, are an extended study in the intricacies of sacrifice, predicated on the emergent discovery or realization that the sacrifice most pleasing to God, that sets the world right, that creates the order that is good or very good is the sacrifice that tends towards the ultimate.

The Christian drama portrays the sacrificial process in its arguably ultimate form. It’s no chance occurrence that the sacrificial altar is at the center of the church and the church is at the center of the town, and the town is at the center of the state, and the state, organized under the Divine principle of sacrifice that constitutes our proper association with the divine spirit, that establishes the state that leads the desert to bloom and the land to abundance. [Light Applause]

Is Reciprocal Self-Sacrifice Enough?

Let's think about this thing about sacrifice.

In a recent video, I was listening to the Diary of a CEO interview, this clip that Ruslan KD had pulled out.

And Peterson wants to say that the Christian story is true in the sense that sacrifice, voluntary self-sacrifice is the ethical key to the saving of the world. Essentially, that is what we need to solve the problems of the world.

And I want to think about how that relates to Christian teaching, of course, in the full metaphysical sense, but then narrowing down to the ethical teaching of Christ.

And what it comes down to is a dichotomy in Christ's teaching between:

* The way of the world, the kind of reciprocity and justice that you find there, and

* This higher righteousness that Christ himself is calling for.

There’s a kind of give and take that is part of the natural human way.

And there’s a kind of giving without asking in return that goes beyond that.

Now, let's look at an example of that.

So Peterson is talking about the first beginnings of sacrifice are when a child and another child accept that they must sacrifice some of their time with a toy in order to allow the other child time with a toy so that the relationship of play can continue. It's just going to end if I don't share it all. So the price of getting to play is that I sacrifice the toy some of the time.

Now, is that “sacrifice” in the unique sense of Christ’s offering of himself unto us? I don't think so, but I don't know that Peterson is wrong to draw the connection.

So let's look at the key passage for this.

“If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners expecting to be repaid in full.

But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked.”

— Luke 6:32-35

So looking at that, if you love those who love you, you will engage in some of these initial forms of sacrifice. You're no longer just about yourself. You have a circle of love that's wider than just yourself it's a circle of love governed by a principle of mutuality and your circle of who you do good to similarly is—it's tit-for-tat; it's I do good for those who do good for me.

In another passage (Matt 5:46-48), it talks about who you greet. Well, I'm going to greet on the street people who I know are going to say “hello” to me as well. I don't want to be in one of those situations where I'm like, “Hey!” and they ignore me (as I've often been).

And then the same for lending. Look at verse 34: “If you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you?” Well, if there's any argument that civilization is founded on something, it would be that: If you have a society that can't even have the level of trust to do lending, you don't have civilization yet. You've got some stage of barbarism.

And to get to the level of Western civilization and modernization, you need a society to reach the point where you can lend money and expect repayment. You can have give and take. You can have what Aristotle might call natural justice.

OK, there's nothing supernatural here yet. There's nothing supererogatory going beyond the demands of justice. We don't have this new thing, which is lending without expecting to get anything back. And that's what gets you heavenly reward according to Christ.

So there’s a kind of sacrifice built into mutual love that goes beyond barbarism and hedonism. It founds civilization, but it's not yet the distinctively—it's not the kind of sacrifice that Christ brings into the world.

This is where you get something like Paul Kingsnorth’s critique of Peterson. Because Kingsnorth is going to say, “Mutual justice? No, it's fully self-sacrificing and making a bad business deal.” It's not capitalism that is the sign of Christianity, but this very terrible business practice of lending something without expecting to get anything in return.

Is Peterson flattening the distinction between those two?

Potentially. There's evidence that he is.

But he would probably argue that the one paves the way for the other.

The ability to love those who love you precipitates this extension of the circle of love even to those who do not yet deserve it. Verse 36: “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” This is an extension.

ButI think the question remains. Are these the same in kind: the self-sacrifice of “I'll give you a little bit of time if if I get more time with the toy as well” — or is Christ teaching radical and something brand new – not something that founds a civilization, but something that might actually challenge the foundation of a civilization, as Paul Kingsnorth and others have argued?

But let’s continue listening:

And it's not just sacrifice; it’s voluntary self-sacrifice towards the highest possible end. That’s the foundation of civilization, the post-modernists be damned, which is virtually a certainty, by the way. Now understanding this, I think, in a more explicit sense, to see that what we've been wrestling with for millennia is the movement towards the explicit formulation of the principle of voluntary upward self sacrifice as the foundation of the community, as the foundation of abundance itself, as the precondition for the trust and reciprocity that enables us to compete and to cooperate so that We can produce societies that are endlessly productive. The explicit understanding of the centrality of that principle, in my estimation, allows for the intelligent union of the traditional Western conservative with the traditional Western classic liberal. The hypothesis being that the stage is set for the emergence of a liberal of the liberal individualism that we associate with the free Western world. The stage is set for the emergence of that ethos when the bedrock of reciprocal, voluntary self sacrifices, established and firm. And the Conservatives stand for the self evident foundation of Western civilization. And the classic rebel liberals stand for its manifestation at the level of the individual, a manifestation which only maintains its validity when the underlying presumption of voluntary self sacrifice is serves as the proper foundation.

Okay, so let’s stop there.

Socrates and Christ: Martyr and Messiah

All of a sudden, I’m hearing a duality emerge in that Peterson is trying to capture something from both philosophical conservatism and classic Western liberalism.

You see the duality here between:

* the firm foundation of Western civilization, the foundation on which community can be built, and

* the free individual who steps out and has the ability and the will and the wherewithal to stand against the community as necessary.

And I still don’t know if that is quite this Christian self-sacrificial love that asks nothing in return, but it might be.

The type of individual Peterson is talking about goes back before Christ, to Socrates, to a philosophical martyr, someone who’s willing to stand against the crowd.

He’s not an opponent of society or civilization, but someone who calls it to account, who articulates the foundations of society. Socrates is figuring out what is justice. He's not assuming that there’s no justice anywhere, though he does think current society is unjust in many ways.

But he's articulating those foundational principles on which society works and saying, we now need to hold to those. And because I’m holding you to that standard, I become a martyr.

Christ, in many ways, does the same with respect to Roman society, Jewish society, the Pharisees and so on.

In both cases, it manifests as the willingness of the individual to sacrifice their own well-being for the sake of the good of the community in an elevated way, not just the tit-for-tat exchange of, I’m trying to make the community a better place, but I’m willing to be the sacrificial goat in this case. It won’t be mutuality. I’m not pitching in and everyone else is pitching in. It’s, “If I am the gadfly, which this society needs to hold us to account, I might be what gets sacrificed along the way, but that’ll be good for the community.”

And it’s hard to argue with the fact that Christ is embodying that archetype and that pattern. The idea is that he’s doing it on an even higher level. Christ goes even beyond Socrates. He's not less than Socrates. He is an individual holding a community to account and being martyred as a result.

But is Socrates still operating say on a natural level or is Socrates operating on this level where I’m sacrificing my own good and, I hope, for heavenly reward?

If you look at Socrates’ dialogues, if you look at the end of the Republic, there’s an argument that it’s the latter. Perhaps self-sacrificial love is anticipated with Socrates and other philosophical martyrs for their community, which Jordan Peterson also embodies in the slings and arrows he's willing to take to stand up for what is right. I’m open to that possibility.

But there in that duality between the conservative and the classical liberal, I see something of the duality between reciprocal sacrifice and true self-sacrificial love, the natural law and the New Commandment, that I see in Christ’s teaching.

Stay tuned next week for a post dedicated to explaining the distinction between the natural law and the New Commandment! I think it’s at the heart of our political and theological divides. And almost no one knows about it.

Let’s listen to the last section:

So what's this civilizational moment?

This civilizational moment is the opportunity that we have in front of us to wake up and to realize, consciously and explicitly the nature of the dream that has enveloped us for the thousands of years of Judeo-Christian civilization. That dream is the celebration, the worship, the divin- the deification of the principle of reciprocal, voluntary self sacrifice, the sacrifice of self to the future, the sacrifice of self to the community As the necessary, inevitable and revolutionary foundation of the civilization that makes us free and abundant.

And so, it’s a core part of our mission to get our story straight. And in the free West, the destination of the oppressed across the world, we've acted out the appropriate story and benefited in consequence, and now we have the opportunity to understand that story explicitly and to unite our understanding with our mythos with our drama, and to fortify ourselves with the reunion of our cynical and skeptical mind and the bedrock foundation stone, the cornerstone rejected by the builder, that constitutes the true basis for civilization. And so that’s what we’re doing.

Okay. Interesting. I love the material and there's so much there to think about.

Peterson and the Penultimate Things

What I come back to from a Christian perspective is, Do we not think that this stuff is important?

Peterson is not talking about how to get saved. That is not his topic.

His topic is, How can human society work?

And I think you could argue that maybe, he’s actually not talking about the distinctively Christian stuff. Maybe he's talking about the natural law and natural justice and the reciprocity that that includes. Maybe it's the stuff Jesus said, “The Gentiles do that.”

Well, these days, the Gentiles aren’t doing it. And so we're having to be called back to that that simple level of natural human justice, which isn’t so simple. It does require an ethical dimension. It requires virtue. It is certainly fed by Christian virtue, even if Christian virtue isn’t necessarily required to exhibit natural virtue.

But I think we can’t deny the goodness of natural justice and civic righteousness.

Bonhoeffer called these the penultimate things.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his Ethics, written from a Nazi prison, basically argued against a bunch of Christians who just think it's about getting people saved. They think it's only about the ultimate things. He said, “Sure looks like how politics goes and how society goes matters!” It has some dire consequences if we get it wrong.

And these are the penultimate things. They’re not the ultimate things; they don't get people saved.

But as James said, “Don’t just say to somebody, ‘Here's the gospel. Be warm and well fed.’ Actually feed them.” Actually do good to people in their physical being.

The political too is about people’s physical being. Are people free? Are people materially abundant? Are they cared for? Are they safe?

These things matter.

They’re not the ultimate things, but they are the penultimate things.

And Peterson is calling us back to those things and opening up questions that I admit are still open: How does this relate to the distinctive content of the Christian faith and the unique call Christ has upon us, that we live out the New Commandment, to love even our enemies, not just to love those who love us?

Well, I’ve been Joel Carini, the Natural Theologian.

Until next time.

Watch the Video:

And if you want to see more of my video content, subscribe to The Natural Theologian YouTube channel.

Dear readers, the following article is taken from the transcript of my latest YouTube video. I hope you enjoy!

I've learned many things from Jordan Peterson since he came on the public scene in 2016. I've learned things about psychology, morality, philosophy and even about Scripture and the Christian faith, things that have bolstered my understanding as a Christian philosopher and theologian.

So without further ado, ten things I learned from Jordan Peterson.

1. The Reality and Importance of Personality

Jordan Peterson is a personality psychologist. Following Carl Jung, he believes in the divisions between different personality traits that can be discovered through empirical study. He’s an advocate, in particular, of the recent Big Five model of personality. In the Big Five, there are five traits along which human beings can vary, openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, assertiveness and neuroticism.

Now, I used to be a bit of a skeptic about psychology in general, but personality in particular. Anytime someone tried to put me in a psychological box, I would resist it. I would hear about the Myers Briggs scale and be put into a category, whatever it was, INTJ, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It never made any sense to me. It never felt accurate to me.

The interesting thing is, the Big Five is not about putting people in personality types. It's about traits that vary independently.

And so since I've learned about this, you start to see it everywhere. Some people are more extroverted, some less so and more introverted. Some people are more assertive than others. Some people more open to intellectual experience and ideas and so on.

And I think a lot of us resist this out of a sense that it puts us, of course, in a box or that it limits what we can change, what we can become. But there's also a deep reality to this. Not everything about human personality is malleable, and more importantly, some things in human personality are given.

What was even cooler to understand about personality was that so many other aspects of human differences can reduce down to personality differences, differences of ideology, whether that’s in theology or politics.

Try to tell me with a straight face that the difference between a Pentecostal and a Presbyterian isn't a difference of personality!

The same goes for liberals and conservatives. These are very much personality types. People who are extremely high in the trait of compassion, are strongly inclined to be liberal. It doesn't mean they're automatically more moral or righteous for doing so that compassion can lead them astray. It can lead them to be compassionate when it's time for judgment or boundaries.

But it really helps to understand that people don't get their ideas out of nowhere. We can also lower the temperature of ideological disagreements when we realize that we're all mostly just expressing our existing personalities.

2. The Psychology of Evil

Now this is one I'm still processing, but Jordan Peterson, following other psychologists, identifies the dark triad traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy, as the psychological causes of evil behavior.

And I used to think that it was just liberals, in the fundamentalist Christian sense, that believed that there were psychological causes of evil. Isn't evil just caused by sin, just by doing the wrong thing. “BAH — I want to do evil!” Isn't that how evil is explained?

But when you think about it, people vary greatly in their capacities and tendencies to do evil. Not everyone is evil in the same degree, and that creates a kind of catch-22, which is that if some people are more violent by nature, aren't they to that extent, off the hook? Isn't there a sense in which, by explaining their behavioral tendencies, we no longer view them in an explicitly moral sense.

Now you might just say this is the problem of free will, and to some extent it is, but I think it's a problem we all have to wrestle with.

No one does evil without a cause.

No one does evil without some kind of explanation or backstory.

It's not all Freudian backstories about how we were brought up.

Many of them are naturally existing differences in personality traits and tendencies, including the dark triad.

3. The Interest of Allegorical, Moral and Psychological Readings of Scripture

Now, throughout my theological education in a Christian seminary, I was taught to be wary of moral and even allegorical interpretations of Scripture.

Scripture has a literal sense. It says this is what happened, and that's what it means.

If it has a moral application, we risk the idea of moralism, of trying to justify ourselves before God or save ourselves through our own moral action, rather than by accepting the grace of God. All the Old Testament stories, which we might interpret as morality tales, actually foreshadow Jesus Christ and everything that he did for us. So we shouldn't try to be like David fighting our giants, we should accept that Jesus was the David who fought Goliath for us.

But now I've seen that this is very narrow, and it gives up an extremely appealing and compelling dimension of the scriptures.

Jordan Peterson, contrary to all those Protestant Christian theologians, packed auditoriums by talking about the allegorical and moral and psychological dimensions of Scripture, the things that these could mean and the ways they could apply to our lives even caveat if they weren't true.

And now I see more and more the poverty of trying to do with just the story of what Jesus did for us. One recent author calls it “The Abridged Gospel.” (Check out Jordan Raynor’s The Sacredness of Secular Work.)

And Jordan Peterson, while we don't actually know if he believes that specific part of the gospel, believes in the further dimensions of the scriptures, both those that precede Christ's coming, the moral teaching, the Old Testament, law and those that come after it, the third use of the law, the application of the Christian scriptures, the Christian message to our life, the life of self, sacrifice and denial that Christ called us to.

That I think should transform Christians view of what our preaching and our message and our evangelism ought to look like.

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4. The Existentialist Argument for the Limits of Materialism

Now I wouldn't be surprised if you had no idea what I was talking about here, but this is actually something from the very earliest lectures that I heard of Jordan Peterson, and from the opening pages of his book, Maps of Meaning.

Jordan Peterson, philosophically, is a Heideggerian, and Heidegger was an opponent of anyone who reduced human life and metaphysics down to the material, to pure science. And he did so not on the basis of a kind of Cartesian or spiritual dualism or an argument that mind was more than matter.

He did so on the basis of the idea that human beings fundamental orientation to the world, our fundamental way of knowing the world, is not scientific or theoretical. Our fundamental mode of being in the world is practical. It is to see things as ripe for action, to see the value in things, the valence, to see affordances for our action.

And Jordan Peterson put it this way:

It’s not only matter that exists; what matters also exists.

— Jordan Peterson (somewhere)

Other Heideggerian philosophers have echoed this, like John Haugeland and Hubert Dreyfus. John Haugeland’s festschrift is called Giving a Damn, because if you give a damn about things, then you're not a materialist. You believe that there is value and disvalue.

And so by that alone, Jordan Peterson disproved materialism.

5. Wisdom and Morality Don’t Have to Come from the Bible (especially wisdom)

Now, as a Christian by background, there's a tendency for Christians to think that all moral truth comes from the Bible. There's no other source for it. You can't get it from just human reflection or philosophy or reading books of ethics by secular philosophers. Now, instead, you've got to go straight to the Bible and find out what God directly commanded us.

But this is a very narrow view of morality. As CS Lewis said in the opening pages of Mere Christianity, everyone's making moral claims all the time. You took a bit of my orange. Now, give me a piece of yours. The smallest little moral attitudes we have that we give expression to show that we actually all believe in morality. We can't get rid of it.

Now Jordan Peterson doesn't get his morality, ultimately, from the Bible, or even what he does get from the Bible, he confirms, through psychology, science and biology. And this is important because it's very narrow to try to get all your morality from the Bible. We also have the book of nature. We have the world itself and human nature laid out before us. Why can't we use our eyes and observe it and gain good things from it?

Otherwise, we try to force Bible verses to give us the details of how we should live every part of our lives. We assume things like I've assumed that our problems in marriage are going to be solved by really understanding Ephesians 5 or some Greek word like kephalé — that's not going to solve our marriage problems.

Meanwhile, Jordan Peterson, looking at the sciences and psychology and the personality bell curves for men and women, can give you much better advice and wisdom about life. He can recognize, on the one hand, the complementarity of the sexes, that they really do vary in their distribution of personality traits. At the same time, he can tell you that the best relationship between a man and a woman, as between any two mammals, is one that is controlled by the spirit of play, by a kind of give and take, not by a command and subservience.

And that is this great wisdom about how man and woman can complement each other in marriage that does more than Bible verses do.

6. The Superiority of Empirical Knowledge of Human Nature and Morality to Biblical Knowledge of the Same

Now this follows from the previous one.

So Christians would tend to think that, Oh, maybe you can kind of pick up the pieces from just observing human nature, kind of figure out how humans ought to behave, but it would be better to just be told in the Bible and then just go do it.

But through understanding Jordan Peterson's ideas and his psychology, I've come to disagree with my fellow Christians on this one": I think it is better to understand how the world works on the basis of how the world works.

It's when we can look at the world and see, “These are its workings. This is the way God made things. Now I'm going to act in accord with that” — that is the best way to know and understand the world and to then live in accordance with it.

The Bible can give us clues and indicators. It can tell us things, but if we don't actually see those in the world, then it's like artificially pretending that the Bible is true instead of knowing that it is true.

And for example, the book of Proverbs is actually full of this. It's all about human wisdom, accumulated experience over time. It takes time to really understand ourselves and to live in accord with the warp and woof of the world, and that's something you can't acquire by three years studying in seminary, studying the Bible. It's something that takes decades and decades of experience and then learning from others, even more decades of experience.

That's the kind of Christian maturity and wisdom that Christians and human beings alike all ought to pursue.

7. The Pharisaism of the Evangelical Demand for Confession of Faith

Now this one is also very novel to me as an Evangelical, but I heard it directly from Jordan Peterson's lips.

I attended one of his lectures on the “We Who Wrestle with God” tour, and he opened with a salvo against evangelicals and Catholics who wish for him to confess the Christian faith, to explicitly say, “I believe in God, no if’s, and’s, or but’s.”

And Peterson said, “You don't realize this, but what you're asking for is actually what is actually what Jesus condemns the Pharisees for” — of praying on the street corner, of doing their good deeds before men in order to be seen by them.

For Jordan Peterson to come out as a Christian, specifically saying it, that would be this public thing. He would be lauded by Christians. We would praise Him for it, but he would also say it would be a claim to almost be worthy of saying that he believes in God.

I mean, if you say that you believe in God, but you scroll the internet mindlessly, or look at pornography, or ignore other people when you ought to be concerned for them, isn't that to be a practical atheist, as our Christian forefathers spoke of?

Well, Jordan Peterson is concerned about that. Wouldn't it be better that I act as though God exists, and you can tell what I believe by my action?

Sounds like something Jesus said in his Parable of the Two Sons (Matt 21:28-32). One son says he will do what his father asks him to do and doesn't do it. The other brother says that he will not do it, but then he does.

Who does Jesus praise?

The one who professed obedience or the one who actually obeyed?

8. The Prudential Argument for Morality Is Superior to the Moral One

Now, morality is the idea that some things are right and wrong: You can't do them…because they're wrong.

Prudence is this other dimension of human action, where we think about what's good for us, where we think about how to get the things we desire.

Now, if you tell people to do the right thing just because it's right, you'll get Immanuel Kant's praise, a lot of Christians will applaud, but not very many people will actually do what you said.

Now, there's another argument for doing what is moral that goes back to Socrates, the great founder of philosophy, and it is that the just life is actually the best life in terms of prudence as well.

And Jordan Peterson is actually a modern day Socrates, in this respect. He features, not the argument that you should just do what's right because it's right, but that you should do what's right because it is good for you…

…and it is good for your family

…and it is good for your community

…and it is good for the world.

And so he's compelling to people because he speaks about the way in which living a just life is actually in our self-interest, yes, but also honorable and desirable and praiseworthy, and something that we can sleep well at night as a result of.

And while you could critique that as not acting from a pure will in a Kantian sense, it is what human beings actually care about. It's actually much more compelling and inspiring to be told that this is the best life for a human being.

Christians often fail to communicate to people because our arguments are just moralistic. We need to cop Jordan Peterson and start making the same argument.

9. The Problem of Evil Assumes Moral Nihilism

Now this one's a deep cut towards the end of Jordan Peterson's groundbreaking Maps of Meaning. He deals with the problem of evil, which is one of the main reasons that our contemporaries do not believe in God. And in that section of his book, he talks about a premise that often goes unnoticed for the problem of evil.

The problem of evil says that given human suffering, God cannot exist.

What is assumed in it, though, is that the human suffering of life outweighs the good of existence.

And to actually believe that, to believe that it would be better if this world had never existed, is to adopt a nihilistic view of life. And this is a premise that has led many people to actually destroy the world. It is a premise that is held by school shooters, tyrants and psychopaths.

Let me read just a little bit from that book.

Should the world exist? Are the preconditions of experience so terrible that the whole game should be called off?

There is never any shortage of people working diligently toward this end.

It seems to me that we answer this question implicitly but profoundly. When we lose someone we loved and grieve, we cry not because they existed, but because they are lost.

This presupposes a judgment rendered at a very fundamental level, grief presupposes having loved presupposes the judgment that this person's specific, bounded existence was valuable, was something that should have been even in its inevitably imperfect and vulnerable form.

— Jordan Peterson, Maps of Meaning, p. 453 (“Conclusion: The Divinity of Interest”)

And I think what Jordan Peterson says here and in the rest of this section says more than what a generation of analytic Christian philosophers have said in response to the problem of evil.

It is not human—it is not it is not the right psychological frame to be in to think that it would have been better if this world had not existed.

It is a sign of psychological health to see the good in the world as outweighing the evil, that life is worth continuing on, overcoming suffering through valor, honor, sacrifice, and love.

10. The Need to Act as though God Exists

Christians are often suspicious of Jordan Peterson for saying that he acts as though God exists, but not saying that he just believes that God exists.

But which is more important: To believe that God exists or to act as though he does?

Peterson himself rejects the dichotomy. In his own terms, to act as though God exists is to prove that one does believe that God exists. Merely to believe that God exists, or to profess that one believes, is not worth anything at all.

Now I myself, I don't reject the question. As the Bible says, even the demons believe and shudder, and yet their belief does not amount to saving faith. It doesn't amount to acting in a righteous and upright way. It is intellectual, but they view God as an enemy, as something of which they are afraid.

Instead, I answer the question directly.

It is more important to act as though God exists, than to profess to believe that he does.

I take this from Jesus own words: “Many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord.’ And I will say to them, ‘I never knew you” (Matt 7:21-24).

It is those who act as though God exists, whose faith is shown by their works, who truly have faith.

It is the brother in the parable who did what his father asked who is justified, not the brother who said he would do it but did nothing.

And so from Jordan Peterson, I’ve learned lessons that go to the heart of ethics, politics, philosophy, psychology, theology and so much more.

While some people view Jordan Peterson merely as a guru, another fad, an influencer, I view him as a philosopher, and possibly even more, a prophet.

What I definitely view him as is as one who prepares the way. Like John the Baptist crying in the wilderness, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord.”

And I think by following what Jordan Peterson teaches, we are brought to the threshold of the Christian faith.

The only question is whether we will step through the door.

I'm Joel Carini, The Natural Theologian. Until next time.

The Video:

[Doorbell buzzes]

“Hello! Would you like to change religions? I have a free book written by DJEE-ZUS!”

While the Broadway show from which that line comes is not about evangelicals but Latter-Day Saints, it fits.

The average evangelical is liable to think that their free afternoons and weekends ought to be spent engaged in similarly abrupt evangelistic conversations.

After all, people are dying! If we don’t act quickly, they’ll soon face God’s throne of judgment; and then they’ll go to hell.

But our Christian forefathers would have had us behave with more circumspection and preparation. Since the second century, Christian theologians have recognized the reality and even necessity of what Francis Schaeffer called pre-evangelism. The Church Fathers called it praeparatio evangelica, preparation for the gospel.

But since the 19th century, American Christianity has been shaped more by tent revivals than patristic treatises. We have cultivated an urgency to share the gospel as soon as possible, to drive the unbeliever toward conversion, to immanentize the personal eschaton.

Theological theories have sometimes reinforced this. Cornelius Van Til criticized Francis Schaeffer for holding that there was a work of pre-evangelism prior to the acceptance of a Christian worldview. This was to concede too much to autonomous man and his felt need of proof or persuasion.

However, in the absence of Christian pre-evangelists, God gave us a non-Christian one. Theaters fill to hear Jordan Peterson lecture about the Bible. Secular podcast hosts press him on his Christology. And just as the wokeness Peterson opposed was experiencing defeat in last year’s election, the long ebb of the sea of faith began to reverse.

Rather than asking whether Peterson is a Christian, we should understand Peterson’s work as a praeparatio evangelica. In doing so, we join a long tradition of Christians who hold that non-Christian philosophers can and do prepare the way of the Lord.

This Just In: Justin Martyr Finds Seeds of the Word Among the Greeks

Justin Martyr (c. 100 – c. 165 AD) was a Gentile and a pagan who took up the study of philosophy in pursuit of truth and spiritual guidance. He found himself dissatisfied first with his Stoic tutors, then with a Peripatetic philosopher, and then the Pythagoreans. He adopted Platonism as a result of this search.

But, encountering a Syrian Christian while walking on the beach, the old man told him of the ancient prophets and “spoke of the testimony of the prophets as being more reliable than the reasoning of philosophers.” Justin was converted. He came to regard Christianity as “the true philosophy.”

However, Justin did not therefore conclude that all he had learned before was for nought, that all the rest of philosophy was falsehood. Rather, he concluded that the transcendent God in whom he had believed as a Platonist was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The God who was the very form of goodness was he who had taken on the form of a man.

In his First Apology, Justin wrote that the philosophers before Christ had happened upon seeds of the Word, logos spermatikos, which led them along a path whose fruition was Christ himself.

Justin concluded that many before Christ who had followed these seeds of the Word, living in accord with God’s Logos, were proto-Christians: “Those who have lived reasonably are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists.”

Justin speculated that Plato may have had access to the writings of Moses. And he lauded Socrates as a martyr pre-figuring Christ.

Rather than becoming an evangelist, Justin dressed as a philosopher. Like Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus and others before him, Justin founded a school of philosophy. While he believed that Christianity was the true philosophy, he led others toward its truth by instructing them to detect the logos spermatikos in the great philosophers before Christ.

Justin was first in a long line of Christian theologians recognizing philosophy and secular wisdom as preparation for the gospel.

What the Old Testament was to the Hebrews: Clement of Alexandria on Greek Philosophy

Clement of Alexandria (c. 150 – c. 215 AD) was, like Justin before him, a convert to the faith. Born a pagan, he rejected paganism “for its perceived moral corruption.” He traveled across Greece, searching for religious training, eventually studying Christian doctrine at the Catechetical School of Alexandria.

In his writings, Clement rejected the Greek mystery religions of his upbringing. But in his Stromata, Clement argued just as fervently for the preparatory value of Greek philosophy. Philosophy was for the Greeks what the Law had been for the Hebrews, argued Clement. It was a propaedeutic, or “schoolmaster to bring the Hellenic mind to Christ” (See Gal. 3:24).

Clement described the benefit of philosophy both before and after the advent of Christ:

“Before the advent of the Lord, philosophy was necessary to the Greeks for righteousness. And now it becomes conducive to piety; being a kind of preparatory training to those who attain to faith through demonstration. … For God is the cause of all good things; but of some primarily, as of the Old and the New Testament; and of others by consequence, as philosophy. Perchance, too, philosophy was given to the Greeks directly and primarily, till the Lord should call the Greeks. For this was a schoolmaster to bring the Hellenic mind, as the law, the Hebrews, to Christ. Philosophy, therefore, was a preparation, paving the way for him who is perfected in Christ.” (Clement, Stromata, Book 1, Chap. 5)

Christian critics of philosophy fear that we will study it uncritically, or hail one figure as having the whole truth. But Clement denied that Christian appreciation of philosophy should be either uncritical or partisan:

“The Greek preparatory culture, therefore, with philosophy itself, is shown to have come down from God to men, not with a definite direction but in the way in which showers fall down on the good land, and on the dunghill, and on the houses.…And philosophy — I do not mean the Stoic, or the Platonic, or the Epicurean, or the Aristotelian, but whatever has been well said by each of those sects, which teach righteousness along with a science pervaded by piety — this eclectic whole I call philosophy.” Sophistry is dangerous, not philosophy.” (Stromata, Book 1, Chap. 7)

The Christian approach to philosophy should be critical and eclectic.

Clement also criticized the folly of Christians denigrating philosophical study for bare faith:

“Some, who think themselves naturally gifted, do not wish to touch either philosophy or logic; nay more, they do not wish to learn natural science. They demand bare faith alone, as if they wished, without bestowing any care on the vine, straightway to gather clusters from the first. … So also here, I call him truly learned who brings everything to bear on the truth; so that, from geometry, and music, and grammar, and philosophy itself, culling what is useful, he guards the faith against assault.” (Stromata, Book 1, Chap. 9)

The Christian thinker and apologist must prune the vine and till the soil, rather than trying to gather the harvest immediately and without sufficient preparation.

Contemporary Christians need to hear Clement’s exhortation for preparation for the gospel.

Eusebius: Van Til of the Fourth Century?

The phrase praeparatio evangelica, however, is best known as the title of a work by the 4th century theologian Eusebius (c. 260/265 – 339 AD). In Praeparatio Evangelica, Eusebius actually disputed the idea that Greek philosophy was a preparation for the gospel. In fact, he argued that it was Hebrew wisdom and Scripture that was a preparation for Greek philosophy.

Now, Justin had, of course, toyed with the same idea, suggesting that Socrates had taken a page from Moses. Yet even Eusebius’ counter-argument was only necessary on account of the Church Fathers’ shared sense that Greek philosophy contained truths whose source could only be the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

In Eusebius, I detect more than a hint of Van Til’s 20th century claim that non-Christian thinkers operate, at best, on “borrowed capital.” But, if the evidence for Socrates’ and Plato’s access to Moses is slim, the evidence that all non-Christian thinkers operate only on borrowed capital — rather than the light of nature or the seeds of the Logos — is even slimmer.

The Necessity of Pre-Evangelism

Over Van Til’s protests, Francis Schaeffer urged the necessity of pre-evangelism. He argued that the first things the unbeliever needs to comprehend are the truths already displayed in reality itself:

The truth that we let in first is not a dogmatic statement of the truth of the Scriptures, but the truth of the external world and the truth of what man himself is. This is what shows him his need. The Scriptures then show him the real nature of his lostness and the answer to it. This, I am convinced, is the true order for our apologetics in the second half of the twentieth century for people living under the line of despair.

— Francis Schaeffer, The God Who Is There.

While Schaeffer argued for this method from his contemporary intellectual situation, he had the support of Justin and Clement from a very different time. We, in turn, are in yet another cultural and intellectual moment, yet the necessity of pre-evangelism remains.

In Schaeffer’s time, a confident logical positivism was ascendant in certain quarters. Yet simultaneously, existentialist philosophers pointed to the meaningless of a reductively material philosophy. At that time, the Christian apologist, perhaps, had an obligation to direct unbelievers from positivism to existentialism.

In recent times, New Atheism was ascendant; and yet, following the division of the atheist movement over social justice ideology, Jordan Peterson and the Intellectual Dark Web stepped in to explain the inevitability of religious and ideological thought. On this basis, Peterson urged us to find a deeper ground for our psyche than shifting ideological winds. He directed the Western world to an archetypal and psychological reading of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures.

Today, Bible sales are up, and religiosity is on the rise. Ross Douthat, after sixteen years in the New York Times opinion pages, is simply saying it outright: Belief is the proper attitude for an intellectual. (His book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious came out today.)

But the work of Peterson and others as a praeparatio evangelica does not absolve us of the same duty. In our conversations with those at and outside the boundary of faith, it is not our only work to harvest the fruit. We must first till the soil, water the seedling, and prune the vine. If God wills, we may have the opportunity of planting a seed or, even, of harvesting the fruit.

We are often too impatient to do so. But our Lord is not.

“He is not slow as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (2 Pet 3:9).

If God is patient, then we can be too.

Share the gospel when the time is right, but before then and always, be preparing the way of the Lord.

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Further Reading

Read Ross Byrd’s contribution on Christ as the master soil-tiller, which served as the foundation for our podcast conversation, “Don’t Share the Gospel…Yet.”

And read my and Anna’s take on Jordan Peterson after attending the We Who Wrestle with God Tour: