Does the "No Meaning Without God" argument rest on a mistake?
Tuesday, November 4, 2025 • Duration 16:48
§ 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.
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.
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, practiceapologetics 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.
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Before You Discover the Meaning OF Life, Try Finding Meaning IN Life
Tuesday, October 28, 2025 • Duration 15:15
§ 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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"Secular" Is a Christian Category
Wednesday, January 29, 2025 • Duration 11:38
“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.)
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Marriage Is Secular
Tuesday, January 21, 2025 • Duration 16:19
All across the internet, and in theacademicpresses, 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.
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There IS Common Ground Between Believers and Unbelievers
Tuesday, July 2, 2024 • Duration 13:31
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
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Check Your Sources: Theology from the Bible and Experience
Tuesday, May 21, 2024 • Duration 21:01
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.
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.
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 , 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.”
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The Theistic Argument from the Failure of Liberalism
Monday, April 15, 2024 • Duration 19:05
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.
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Why I'm Against Concepts
Thursday, March 28, 2024 • Duration 09:39
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, 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.”
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Toward a Religious Right
Tuesday, March 26, 2024 • Duration 14:39
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.
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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.
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 agrand, 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.
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 secularthings.
And that, it turns out, might not be such a bad thing.
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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
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.
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. Rennhas 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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“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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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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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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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.
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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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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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.
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 byChristian 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.
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.”
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