Cold Comfort

As I’d already noticed, Philip Kitcher seems to want to be the Good Cop, or the Good Atheist, to Richard Dawkins’s Bad Cop/Atheist. “See,” he’s saying, “I’m not one of those mean, inhumane atheists who want to take away all your hope… well, actually, I do, but I feel really bad about it.” Like most would-be conquerors, he promises liberation -- in the form of the “enlightenment case”:

Despite its scope, this is not a war against all religion. For there are other kinds of religion, “spiritual religions,” as I shall call them, that don’t require the literal truth of any doctrines about supernatural beings. Some professing Christians and professing Jews have heard the dispatches from the enlightenment front, and responded by abandoning commitment to the literal truth of virtually all the sentences in their respective Bibles [Living with Darwin, 132].

Spiritual Christians abandon all of the standard stories of the life of Jesus. They give up on the extraordinary birth, the miracles, the literal resurrection. What survive are the teachings, the precepts and parables, and the eventual journey to Jerusalem and the culminating moment of the Crucifixion. That moment of suffering and sacrifice is seen, not as the prelude to some triumphant return and the promise of eternal salvation – all that, to repeat, is literally false – but as a symbolic presentation of the importance of compassion and of love without limits. We are to recognize our own predicament, the human predicament, through the lens of the man on the cross.

Spiritual Christians place the value of the stories of the scriptures not in their literal truth but in their deliverances for self-understanding, for improving ourselves and for shaping our attitudes and actions toward others [152f].

Kitcher seems not to have explored religion very widely or deeply, or he’d know that his “spiritual religion” is familiar as the liberal Protestantism and reform Judaism of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. These movements also thought they could escape superstition and found an enlightened religion by eliminating the supernatural from the Bible. But they never had much success among most believers, scoring only with the relative few who already had “heard the dispatches from the enlightenment front”. Ernest Renan’s Life of Jesus (1864), Adolf von Harnack’s What Is Christianity? (1901), and others attempted to recover a historical Jesus compatible with Euro-American post-Enlightenment culture, free of miracle, apocalypticism, and other embarrassments. The critical Biblical scholarship that emerged in Europe along with liberal Protestantism quickly found that Jesus could not be separated from supernaturalism. Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest for the Historical Jesus (1906) put Jesus back into his apocalyptic matrix, and later scholars reluctantly accepted that whatever else he may have been, the historical Jesus was probably an exorcist and faith-healer, and a preacher of salvation (and damnation) if not a self-proclaimed Savior.

“The teachings, the precepts and parables” that remain after Kitcher’s enlightenment supernaturalectomy of the New Testament aren’t much help either. I presume that among “the teachings” he doesn’t include Jesus’ prediction that the supernatural Kingdom of God would be established on earth within the lifetime of his followers, a theme that runs through the gospels, nor the threats of damnation and the promises of salvation. “All that, to repeat, is literally false.” Nor, I suppose, does Kitcher want to keep Jesus' hostility to family and to marriage and the flesh. Those Christians I’ve encountered who claim that they simply follow Jesus’ teaching quickly make it clear that they mean only those teachings that they like.

The parables are even less help. Some of them are merely sermon illustrations, edifying little fables like the one about the good Samaritan (Luke 10:30ff). Others are not so edifying, like the one where a king kills everyone who refuses to come to his son’s wedding, throwing it open instead to beggars and pariahs (Matthew 22.1ff / Luke 14:16ff). But among the meanings of the word “parable” is “riddle,” and many of the parables are so obscure that it’s plausible that Jesus meant them not to be understood. In Mark 4:12, Jesus even says that he taught in parables deliberately so that “those outside” would not understand and so would not find salvation, while he explained the parables’ meaning only to his disciples. There’s certainly nothing supernatural about this teaching; would Kitcher accept it as part of his “spiritual religion”? Scholars and other interpreters disagree widely as to how to understand Jesus’ teachings. Wikipedia has a good essay on the complexities of the parable of the Wicked Husbandmen, showing how difficult it is to distinguish what Jesus taught from what the gospel writers put into his mouth; it’s not untypical.

As for the crucifixion of Jesus, it’s true that it at least is historical and not supernatural: after two millennia, it’s easy for forget that Jesus’ humiliating and scandalous death was a stumbling block for belief, and I agree with the scholars who don’t think the early Christians would have invented it. But what does it mean? Kitcher assumes that it’s a “moment of suffering and sacrifice [which] is seen … as a symbolic presentation of the importance of compassion and of love without limits.” Death by crucifixion was more than a “moment of suffering” (more like hours or days), and was Jesus’ death in particular a “sacrifice” or “a symbolic representation” of anything? “Sacrifice” in this context carries all sorts of supernaturalist baggage anyway, from its context in Judaism and other religions of offerings to gods. Does Kitcher still want to see Jesus as the Lamb of God, whose sacrificial death atoned for the sins of the world? I suspect he has not really thought this through very well.

I recently discussed one Christian’s explication of Jesus as a political rebel executed by the Romans for threatening their rule in Judea. In this view, Jesus’ death was neither more nor less a sacrifice than that of any other insurgent, from Spartacus to Che Guevara. Most insurgents, however courageous, are not very suitable to build a religion on, for they tend to dish out violence as well as take it. They may endorse “compassion and love without limits”, but “Kill ‘em all, let God sort ‘em out” is usually there as well, and expressed in practice as well as theory. Somehow I don’t think Kitcher wants to see Jesus as Rambo of Nazareth either.

Kitcher concedes that his notion of “spiritual religion” is vulnerable to attack from “two directions”: “those who have grown up in a more substantial [!] faith, who have not appreciated the force of the enlightenment case and who see no need to abandon supernatural religion”, and “secular humanists [who] will see spiritual religion as a last desperate attempt to claim a privilege for traditions whose credentials have been decisively refuted.” He’s transparently trying to present himself as a nice middle-of-the-roader here, moderating between two extremes; it’s a dubious ploy, because there are usually more than two or even three alternative viewpoints in any controversy. The examples I’ve given, which could be multiplied, should show that even on his own terms, Kitcher’s “spiritual religion” has some serious flaws.

A thread that runs through discussions like Kitcher’s is the “enlightened” elite versus the superstitious masses. Of course it’s those elites who call themselves enlightened, and of course they take for granted that in a better world they will be calling the shots. Kitcher keeps referring to “the enlightenment case” against traditional religion, though he wants his secular buddhas to preach enlightenment to the mob humanely, with compassion and hope. (Hope for what, I can’t quite make out.) Susan Jacoby structures her book The Age of American Unreason around the conflict between a tiny few enlightened “freethinkers” like Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the ignorant armies of the majority, with their video games, horoscopes, junk science, and literal Bibles. “Junk science” is a sticking point there, since much of the ruling class, like Larry Summers of Harvard, don’t meet her high standards of freethought. I suppose she dreams of a posse of philosopher-philosophers, independent of the corridors of power, who will guide the nation and ultimately the world into Utopia. But I wouldn’t trust Kitcher or Jacoby – or myself -- let alone Dawkins or Harris or Dennett, to run or even supervise a society. If religion, “supernatural” or “spiritual,” ever goes away, it won’t be imposed from above, it’ll have to be from below. To impose it (say, by requiring schools to teach that “God is dead” as Sam Harris reportedly advocates, or by “quarantine” of those who believe in supernatural religion as Dennett fantasizes), would be the opposite of freethought, a violation of the very Enlightenment ideals these guys claim to embrace.

But it certainly sounds familiar, doesn’t it? There’s a powerful Manichaean streak in the thought of these secularists, even Kitcher. On one side, there’s light and wisdom; on the other, darkness and foolishness. On one hand, the road that leads to life; on the other, the way to perdition. But which is which? I’m not entirely sure myself, because I’m not much of a Manichaean, and I don’t think that right and wrong, truth and falsehood, light and darkness, knowledge and ignorance, are distinct substances which can be separated easily. For now I’ll end with this verse of Dorothy Parker’s:

Partial Comfort

Whose love is given over well
Shall gaze on Helen’s face in Hell.
Whilst they whose love is thin and wise
Shall view John Knox in Paradise.

Cold Comfort

As I’d already noticed, Philip Kitcher seems to want to be the Good Cop, or the Good Atheist, to Richard Dawkins’s Bad Cop/Atheist. “See,” he’s saying, “I’m not one of those mean, inhumane atheists who want to take away all your hope… well, actually, I do, but I feel really bad about it.” Like most would-be conquerors, he promises liberation -- in the form of the “enlightenment case”:

Despite its scope, this is not a war against all religion. For there are other kinds of religion, “spiritual religions,” as I shall call them, that don’t require the literal truth of any doctrines about supernatural beings. Some professing Christians and professing Jews have heard the dispatches from the enlightenment front, and responded by abandoning commitment to the literal truth of virtually all the sentences in their respective Bibles [Living with Darwin, 132].

Spiritual Christians abandon all of the standard stories of the life of Jesus. They give up on the extraordinary birth, the miracles, the literal resurrection. What survive are the teachings, the precepts and parables, and the eventual journey to Jerusalem and the culminating moment of the Crucifixion. That moment of suffering and sacrifice is seen, not as the prelude to some triumphant return and the promise of eternal salvation – all that, to repeat, is literally false – but as a symbolic presentation of the importance of compassion and of love without limits. We are to recognize our own predicament, the human predicament, through the lens of the man on the cross.

Spiritual Christians place the value of the stories of the scriptures not in their literal truth but in their deliverances for self-understanding, for improving ourselves and for shaping our attitudes and actions toward others [152f].

Kitcher seems not to have explored religion very widely or deeply, or he’d know that his “spiritual religion” is familiar as the liberal Protestantism and reform Judaism of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. These movements also thought they could escape superstition and found an enlightened religion by eliminating the supernatural from the Bible. But they never had much success among most believers, scoring only with the relative few who already had “heard the dispatches from the enlightenment front”. Ernest Renan’s Life of Jesus (1864), Adolf von Harnack’s What Is Christianity? (1901), and others attempted to recover a historical Jesus compatible with Euro-American post-Enlightenment culture, free of miracle, apocalypticism, and other embarrassments. The critical Biblical scholarship that emerged in Europe along with liberal Protestantism quickly found that Jesus could not be separated from supernaturalism. Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest for the Historical Jesus (1906) put Jesus back into his apocalyptic matrix, and later scholars reluctantly accepted that whatever else he may have been, the historical Jesus was probably an exorcist and faith-healer, and a preacher of salvation (and damnation) if not a self-proclaimed Savior.

“The teachings, the precepts and parables” that remain after Kitcher’s enlightenment supernaturalectomy of the New Testament aren’t much help either. I presume that among “the teachings” he doesn’t include Jesus’ prediction that the supernatural Kingdom of God would be established on earth within the lifetime of his followers, a theme that runs through the gospels, nor the threats of damnation and the promises of salvation. “All that, to repeat, is literally false.” Nor, I suppose, does Kitcher want to keep Jesus' hostility to family and to marriage and the flesh. Those Christians I’ve encountered who claim that they simply follow Jesus’ teaching quickly make it clear that they mean only those teachings that they like.

The parables are even less help. Some of them are merely sermon illustrations, edifying little fables like the one about the good Samaritan (Luke 10:30ff). Others are not so edifying, like the one where a king kills everyone who refuses to come to his son’s wedding, throwing it open instead to beggars and pariahs (Matthew 22.1ff / Luke 14:16ff). But among the meanings of the word “parable” is “riddle,” and many of the parables are so obscure that it’s plausible that Jesus meant them not to be understood. In Mark 4:12, Jesus even says that he taught in parables deliberately so that “those outside” would not understand and so would not find salvation, while he explained the parables’ meaning only to his disciples. There’s certainly nothing supernatural about this teaching; would Kitcher accept it as part of his “spiritual religion”? Scholars and other interpreters disagree widely as to how to understand Jesus’ teachings. Wikipedia has a good essay on the complexities of the parable of the Wicked Husbandmen, showing how difficult it is to distinguish what Jesus taught from what the gospel writers put into his mouth; it’s not untypical.

As for the crucifixion of Jesus, it’s true that it at least is historical and not supernatural: after two millennia, it’s easy for forget that Jesus’ humiliating and scandalous death was a stumbling block for belief, and I agree with the scholars who don’t think the early Christians would have invented it. But what does it mean? Kitcher assumes that it’s a “moment of suffering and sacrifice [which] is seen … as a symbolic presentation of the importance of compassion and of love without limits.” Death by crucifixion was more than a “moment of suffering” (more like hours or days), and was Jesus’ death in particular a “sacrifice” or “a symbolic representation” of anything? “Sacrifice” in this context carries all sorts of supernaturalist baggage anyway, from its context in Judaism and other religions of offerings to gods. Does Kitcher still want to see Jesus as the Lamb of God, whose sacrificial death atoned for the sins of the world? I suspect he has not really thought this through very well.

I recently discussed one Christian’s explication of Jesus as a political rebel executed by the Romans for threatening their rule in Judea. In this view, Jesus’ death was neither more nor less a sacrifice than that of any other insurgent, from Spartacus to Che Guevara. Most insurgents, however courageous, are not very suitable to build a religion on, for they tend to dish out violence as well as take it. They may endorse “compassion and love without limits”, but “Kill ‘em all, let God sort ‘em out” is usually there as well, and expressed in practice as well as theory. Somehow I don’t think Kitcher wants to see Jesus as Rambo of Nazareth either.

Kitcher concedes that his notion of “spiritual religion” is vulnerable to attack from “two directions”: “those who have grown up in a more substantial [!] faith, who have not appreciated the force of the enlightenment case and who see no need to abandon supernatural religion”, and “secular humanists [who] will see spiritual religion as a last desperate attempt to claim a privilege for traditions whose credentials have been decisively refuted.” He’s transparently trying to present himself as a nice middle-of-the-roader here, moderating between two extremes; it’s a dubious ploy, because there are usually more than two or even three alternative viewpoints in any controversy. The examples I’ve given, which could be multiplied, should show that even on his own terms, Kitcher’s “spiritual religion” has some serious flaws.

A thread that runs through discussions like Kitcher’s is the “enlightened” elite versus the superstitious masses. Of course it’s those elites who call themselves enlightened, and of course they take for granted that in a better world they will be calling the shots. Kitcher keeps referring to “the enlightenment case” against traditional religion, though he wants his secular buddhas to preach enlightenment to the mob humanely, with compassion and hope. (Hope for what, I can’t quite make out.) Susan Jacoby structures her book The Age of American Unreason around the conflict between a tiny few enlightened “freethinkers” like Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the ignorant armies of the majority, with their video games, horoscopes, junk science, and literal Bibles. “Junk science” is a sticking point there, since much of the ruling class, like Larry Summers of Harvard, don’t meet her high standards of freethought. I suppose she dreams of a posse of philosopher-philosophers, independent of the corridors of power, who will guide the nation and ultimately the world into Utopia. But I wouldn’t trust Kitcher or Jacoby – or myself -- let alone Dawkins or Harris or Dennett, to run or even supervise a society. If religion, “supernatural” or “spiritual,” ever goes away, it won’t be imposed from above, it’ll have to be from below. To impose it (say, by requiring schools to teach that “God is dead” as Sam Harris reportedly advocates, or by “quarantine” of those who believe in supernatural religion as Dennett fantasizes), would be the opposite of freethought, a violation of the very Enlightenment ideals these guys claim to embrace.

But it certainly sounds familiar, doesn’t it? There’s a powerful Manichaean streak in the thought of these secularists, even Kitcher. On one side, there’s light and wisdom; on the other, darkness and foolishness. On one hand, the road that leads to life; on the other, the way to perdition. But which is which? I’m not entirely sure myself, because I’m not much of a Manichaean, and I don’t think that right and wrong, truth and falsehood, light and darkness, knowledge and ignorance, are distinct substances which can be separated easily. For now I’ll end with this verse of Dorothy Parker’s:

Partial Comfort

Whose love is given over well
Shall gaze on Helen’s face in Hell.
Whilst they whose love is thin and wise
Shall view John Knox in Paradise.

Wishin’ and Hopin’ and Thinkin’ and Prayin’

(Sorry for the visual distortion in this clip; I couldn’t embed the letterboxed version. The wedding imagery reminds us that the Church is the Bride of Christ, and if you imagine the third-person pronouns with initial capitals [“Wear your hair just for Him … You won’t get Him thinkin’ and a-prayin’ …] you have quite a kinky little hymn on your hands.)

My text today, dearly beloved, is from H. Allen Orr’s review of Philip Kitcher’s Living with Darwin, on marketing strategies for atheists:

Too often, the New Atheism forgets to make its humanism humane.

Wow. Where did Orr (or Kitcher) get the idea that religion is humane? One objection I have to Dawkins and the other “New Atheists” (as I’ve said before, I’m always suspicious of talk about “New” anything) is that they are basically secular avatars of the old-fashioned hellfire and brimstone preachers. Orr quotes Kitcher from Living with Darwin:

Often, the voices of reason I hear in contemporary discussions of religion are hectoring, almost exultant that comfort is being stripped away and faith undermined; frequently, they are without charity. And they are always without hope.

Orr agrees with Kitcher in criticizing the New Atheists for the lack of hope in their message, for their apparent glee in, as they imagine, stripping away other people’s illusions; but such has always been the method of revivalist religion, and these boys are revivalists. Theoretically there is hope of salvation for those who heed the Christian message, but the congregation members who reportedly fainted on hearing Jonathan Edwards’s 1741 sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” don’t seem to have been reassured. The gospels’ Jesus taught (Matthew 7:13-14) that only a few would find the narrow path to salvation, so the overwhelming majority of humanity would be damned, and there is no hope for those who die unsaved. The parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) is striking in its callousness toward the damned. I think it was the historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith who wrote somewhere that the Good News of Christ was, and is, Bad News for most people.

Christianity, the religion I know the most about, has never been concerned with the tender feelings of believers in competing sects. Whether the competition was Jews, pagans, or (ever since the beginnings of the cult, as the New Testament shows) other Christians, the rhetoric has been vitriolic and unforgiving. Hatefulness is endemic to Christianity, though not specific to it, and the New Atheists tend to come across as reincarnations of the ancient Christian heresiarchs, seeking out and denouncing those who wickedly stray from their version of truth, only with the sectarian elements (and learning) stripped away. I see little to choose between Jonathan Edwards and a sodden, bleary-eyed Christopher Hitchens.

Kitcher is evidently trying to play the Good Atheist Cop to Dawkins’s, Harris’s, Dennett’s, and Hitchens’s Bad Atheist Cop. I doubt it will work, since despite his Christian upbringing Kitcher doesn’t seem to understand or really empathize with religious believers any more than the Bad Cops do, nor does he really offer any hope. Maybe he thinks that someday, someone will come up with some from somewhere. Maybe they’ll cook it up in a lab, a newer genetically-modified Enlightenment^TM hope that will enable people to get over the death of a loved one or the diagnosis of a painful terminal disease without the troublesome, addictive side effects of the old pre-scientific religious hope.

I’m not saying that I understand religious folk either. I’d think it would be easier for atheists like Kitcher, who were raised in religious families and only later broke away. I had no religious upbringing, and realized fairly early in life that I felt no need to believe in gods. I suspect that some of my attitude is temperamental (meaning that I have no idea where it comes from). Somewhere I read about a movie, Pete’n’Tillie, based on a Peter DeVries novel, in which a married couple (played by Carol Burnett and Walter Matthau) suffer through their child’s death of leukemia. One of the parents says something to the effect that it’s less painful to believe that there is no god, that no one is watching Up There, than to believe that Someone is watching but does nothing. That's exactly what I think, but I know that many other people, perhaps most, would rather believe that Someone is up there, weeping great salt tears over our pain and feeling it with us. (And no, I'm not talking about this guy.)

Yet religion is not synonymous with hope. Many atheists have died without fear, and many theists have died in terror of what might await them. Nor does every religion even offer the hope of an afterlife. Judaism, for one, has never been much concerned with the idea; reincarnation, while it promises some kind of survival, doesn’t offer the happy dream of reunion with one’s loved ones in an eternal Sunday afternoon. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in his Tractatus Logico-philosophicus (6.4312), and again I agree:

Not only is there no guarantee of the temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say of its eternal survival after death; but, in any case, this assumption completely fails to accomplish the purpose for which it has always been intended. Or is some riddle solved by my surviving for ever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life?

Wishin’ and Hopin’ and Thinkin’ and Prayin’

(Sorry for the visual distortion in this clip; I couldn’t embed the letterboxed version. The wedding imagery reminds us that the Church is the Bride of Christ, and if you imagine the third-person pronouns with initial capitals [“Wear your hair just for Him … You won’t get Him thinkin’ and a-prayin’ …] you have quite a kinky little hymn on your hands.)

My text today, dearly beloved, is from H. Allen Orr’s review of Philip Kitcher’s Living with Darwin, on marketing strategies for atheists:

Too often, the New Atheism forgets to make its humanism humane.

Wow. Where did Orr (or Kitcher) get the idea that religion is humane? One objection I have to Dawkins and the other “New Atheists” (as I’ve said before, I’m always suspicious of talk about “New” anything) is that they are basically secular avatars of the old-fashioned hellfire and brimstone preachers. Orr quotes Kitcher from Living with Darwin:

Often, the voices of reason I hear in contemporary discussions of religion are hectoring, almost exultant that comfort is being stripped away and faith undermined; frequently, they are without charity. And they are always without hope.

Orr agrees with Kitcher in criticizing the New Atheists for the lack of hope in their message, for their apparent glee in, as they imagine, stripping away other people’s illusions; but such has always been the method of revivalist religion, and these boys are revivalists. Theoretically there is hope of salvation for those who heed the Christian message, but the congregation members who reportedly fainted on hearing Jonathan Edwards’s 1741 sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” don’t seem to have been reassured. The gospels’ Jesus taught (Matthew 7:13-14) that only a few would find the narrow path to salvation, so the overwhelming majority of humanity would be damned, and there is no hope for those who die unsaved. The parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) is striking in its callousness toward the damned. I think it was the historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith who wrote somewhere that the Good News of Christ was, and is, Bad News for most people.

Christianity, the religion I know the most about, has never been concerned with the tender feelings of believers in competing sects. Whether the competition was Jews, pagans, or (ever since the beginnings of the cult, as the New Testament shows) other Christians, the rhetoric has been vitriolic and unforgiving. Hatefulness is endemic to Christianity, though not specific to it, and the New Atheists tend to come across as reincarnations of the ancient Christian heresiarchs, seeking out and denouncing those who wickedly stray from their version of truth, only with the sectarian elements (and learning) stripped away. I see little to choose between Jonathan Edwards and a sodden, bleary-eyed Christopher Hitchens.

Kitcher is evidently trying to play the Good Atheist Cop to Dawkins’s, Harris’s, Dennett’s, and Hitchens’s Bad Atheist Cop. I doubt it will work, since despite his Christian upbringing Kitcher doesn’t seem to understand or really empathize with religious believers any more than the Bad Cops do, nor does he really offer any hope. Maybe he thinks that someday, someone will come up with some from somewhere. Maybe they’ll cook it up in a lab, a newer genetically-modified Enlightenment^TM hope that will enable people to get over the death of a loved one or the diagnosis of a painful terminal disease without the troublesome, addictive side effects of the old pre-scientific religious hope.

I’m not saying that I understand religious folk either. I’d think it would be easier for atheists like Kitcher, who were raised in religious families and only later broke away. I had no religious upbringing, and realized fairly early in life that I felt no need to believe in gods. I suspect that some of my attitude is temperamental (meaning that I have no idea where it comes from). Somewhere I read about a movie, Pete’n’Tillie, based on a Peter DeVries novel, in which a married couple (played by Carol Burnett and Walter Matthau) suffer through their child’s death of leukemia. One of the parents says something to the effect that it’s less painful to believe that there is no god, that no one is watching Up There, than to believe that Someone is watching but does nothing. That's exactly what I think, but I know that many other people, perhaps most, would rather believe that Someone is up there, weeping great salt tears over our pain and feeling it with us. (And no, I'm not talking about this guy.)

Yet religion is not synonymous with hope. Many atheists have died without fear, and many theists have died in terror of what might await them. Nor does every religion even offer the hope of an afterlife. Judaism, for one, has never been much concerned with the idea; reincarnation, while it promises some kind of survival, doesn’t offer the happy dream of reunion with one’s loved ones in an eternal Sunday afternoon. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in his Tractatus Logico-philosophicus (6.4312), and again I agree:

Not only is there no guarantee of the temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say of its eternal survival after death; but, in any case, this assumption completely fails to accomplish the purpose for which it has always been intended. Or is some riddle solved by my surviving for ever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life?

It's Literally Turtles All The Way Down

(Cartoon from Baldo, via Literally, A Web Log)

But back to literalism. I’ve finished reading Philip Kitcher’s little book Living with Darwin, and he has it all wrong. The Book of Genesis has him in a tizzy, but fundamentalists and creationists don’t even take Genesis literally.

I mentioned before that there are two different creation stories in the first two chapters of Genesis. In chapter one, the sequence of creation goes roughly like this: on the first day God creates light and darkness; on the second day, he creates a dome called the sky; on the third day he creates the dry land by separating the waters into the sea, then creates vegetation; on the fourth day, he creates lights in the sky, the sun and the moon. (How did he create light and day without the sun, I hear you ask? Don’t ask.*) On the fifth day he creates the animal kingdom: birds, fishes, and sea monsters; on the sixth day, he creates land animals, and finally human beings, both male and female, in his own image, and gives them dominion over all other living things. On the seventh day, famously, he rested.

Chapter two recounts that in the day when Yahweh created the heavens and the earth, before he created the plants, he formed Adam from the dust of the earth and breathed life into his nostrils. Then Yahweh created a garden in Eden, with the trees of Life and of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in it and a river flowing out of it. Then Yahweh, deciding that Adam should not be alone, decided to create the animals, and brought them to Adam to see if any was a suitable companion for him. None was, so he put Adam to sleep and, famously, created Eve from his rib. They were both naked, and were not ashamed. No passage of time is specified here, and since it’s clearly a fable (notice the allegorical Trees), it’s possible that the writer supposed that everything here happened in one day.

Now, these two stories are completely different in sequence. Serious fundamentalists know full well that a literal reading won’t work, so they have to work pretty hard to harmonize them. Non-fundamentalist scholars have concluded, on the basis of this and other evidence in the Biblical text, that Genesis is actually the product of pasting together different source materials into a literary patchwork. (Richard E. Friedman’s Who Wrote the Bible? is a good introduction to this approach.) Kitcher never addresses this matter; perhaps he doesn’t consider it important, though I think that if you want to address fundamentalist positions, it’s more relevant than throwing Darwin at them. At one point Kitcher complains that the creationist and Intelligent Design positions consist more of trying to find flaws in evolutionary theory than in presenting an alternative; so why not play their own game, and show the problems in their own reading of the Bible? But that would be, like, hard. In any case, this example alone is evidence that “literalism” is not really the issue.

But wait -- there’s more in Genesis 3. The usual Christian interpretation, common to fundamentalists and less conservative Christians, of the events leading up to Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden is that Satan, in the form of a serpent, teased Adam and Eve into eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Yahweh had warned them that if they did so, they would die. Satan told Adam and Eve that they would not die but become as gods, knowing good and evil – absurd, of course: how could mere humans become like God? But they ate the fruit, and immediately felt the shame of their nakedness. For their disobedience, Yahweh threw them out of Eden and cursed them to labor and suffering, and sentenced Satan the serpent to crawl on his belly forever.

This is not what Genesis 3 actually says, however. A literal reading is instructive. There’s no hint that the crafty serpent is Satan, a figure who doesn’t show up until much later in the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament, as Christians call it); it takes a nonliteral reading to find Satan here. Then, when Adam and Eve have eaten the forbidden fruit and are cowering in shame, and after Yahweh has cursed them to dirt and suffering and enmity with the serpent’s tribe, Yahweh reflects: “See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and live forever” – and only then does he drive Adam and Eve from Eden. The text is clear that Yahweh had lied, for they didn’t die when they ate from the forbidden tree; and it is explicit that by doing so, they had become as gods. For some reason Yahweh feared this, so he cut them off from the tree of life. This is more like, say, Greek mythology, where the gods try to keep knowledge from human beings; Yahweh is not a moral figure in this tale. Again, non-fundamentalist biblical scholars generally recognize this, but anyone reading the text can see it. A literal reading produces unacceptable results, so most Christians (apart from scholars) ignore the literal meaning of the story and understand it differently. Conservative Christians seem not to have minded, or even noticed, the departures from Scripture of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of The Christ; the letter of the text is not all that important to them, except when it becomes an excuse to draw a line in the sand over some other issue.

The model of the universe in the Hebrew Bible, with its domed sky hung with lights, is, from what I’ve read, not “supernatural” at all but based on ancient, mostly Babylonian, astronomy. The New Testament borrows from the astronomy of its own time, with the planets moving in concentric spheres or heavens. (“Seventh” heaven is the highest of these.) To insist on thinking of the universe in this way is not so much believing in the supernatural as in outdated science, like believing in humors or phlogiston. But then, popular astronomy books today contain pictures of the planets strung like beads on circular lines around the sun, called “orbits.”

Notice that the importance of a literal reading of Genesis 1-3 has nothing to do with the “supernatural” (another of Kitcher’s buzzwords, along with “spiritual religion” and “the enlightenment case”), though there are supernatural elements here and elsewhere in the Bible. The inconsistency of Genesis 1 and 2, or of the different accounts of Jesus’ birth in the gospels of Matthew and Luke (which Kitcher does discuss), is not due to the supernatural; it’s due to different, irreconcilable story lines.

Even when ordinary believers believe in the supernatural, it doesn’t mean they don’t also believe in an everyday material world where the supernatural doesn’t usually intrude. They know that if you jump off a tall building you’ll probably die. They know that virgins do not usually become pregnant, and if one of their single daughters were to try to claim the Holy Spirit as the father of her unborn child, they would become extremely hard-headed skeptics. Stanley Tambiah says that the anthropologist Meyer Fortes “once invited a rainmaker to perform the ceremony for him for an attractive fee, and the officiant in question replied ‘Don't be a fool, whoever makes a rain-making ceremony in the dry season?’” (Magic, science, religion, and the scope of rationality, Cambridge 1990, p 54). It seems that often it’s the modern, scientific rationalist who takes such things literally, while the believers think about them differently. The actual function of the supernatural in human belief is still being studied, and while it may be comforting to dismiss the “superstitions” of those who believe in different foolish things than we do, it’s not a sign of wisdom.

Things are not so different in the present-day secular world. For example, a lot of American women believe in the existence of “snuff films,” in which a woman is actually killed on camera during or after performing sexual acts, and that such films are available under the counter at adult video stores everywhere. There is no evidence that such films have ever existed, but the arguments to show that they do exist (as well as the vehemence with which the arguments are made) are reminiscent of arguments made by fundamentalists to preserve the inerrancy of the Bible.

What I find chilling is that the people who make this case would rather believe that thousands of women are being killed every year to make snuff porn, than that they aren’t. I’d say the same about other people who want to believe that thousands of children are kidnapped each year in shopping malls and sold into sex slavery. There are many other similar legends / fantasies in circulation today, from the "Paul Is Dead" scare to the claims that the Bush administration executed the 9/11 attacks, to the belief that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks, to “blood libel” legends which accuse Jews of sacrificing Gentile children and using their blood to make Passover matzos. These have nothing to do with the supernatural, nor with literalism. As with magical rituals, it’s interesting to speculate about the personal and social functions of such beliefs, but they shouldn’t be taken literally. (There’s an interesting discussion of this issue in Pamela Donovan, No way of knowing: crime, urban legends, and the Internet, Routledge, 2004). I suspect that the “supernatural” is a secondary issue here, not the real crux of the problem.

All of this swoops under Kitcher’s radar. I think that if we secularists don’t stop imposing our own misunderstandings on the religious and if we believe that by rejecting religion we are somehow immune to the lure of the legendary, we’re going to get nowhere in a hurry.

More later on Kitcher’s notion of “spiritual” religion as a superior alternative to “supernatural” religion.

*There's an old joke about the seeker who asks someone (St. Augustine, maybe?) what God did in the eons before he created the heavens and the earth. The old teacher snaps: He made Hell for people who ask questions like that!

It's Literally Turtles All The Way Down

(Cartoon from Baldo, via Literally, A Web Log)

But back to literalism. I’ve finished reading Philip Kitcher’s little book Living with Darwin, and he has it all wrong. The Book of Genesis has him in a tizzy, but fundamentalists and creationists don’t even take Genesis literally.

I mentioned before that there are two different creation stories in the first two chapters of Genesis. In chapter one, the sequence of creation goes roughly like this: on the first day God creates light and darkness; on the second day, he creates a dome called the sky; on the third day he creates the dry land by separating the waters into the sea, then creates vegetation; on the fourth day, he creates lights in the sky, the sun and the moon. (How did he create light and day without the sun, I hear you ask? Don’t ask.*) On the fifth day he creates the animal kingdom: birds, fishes, and sea monsters; on the sixth day, he creates land animals, and finally human beings, both male and female, in his own image, and gives them dominion over all other living things. On the seventh day, famously, he rested.

Chapter two recounts that in the day when Yahweh created the heavens and the earth, before he created the plants, he formed Adam from the dust of the earth and breathed life into his nostrils. Then Yahweh created a garden in Eden, with the trees of Life and of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in it and a river flowing out of it. Then Yahweh, deciding that Adam should not be alone, decided to create the animals, and brought them to Adam to see if any was a suitable companion for him. None was, so he put Adam to sleep and, famously, created Eve from his rib. They were both naked, and were not ashamed. No passage of time is specified here, and since it’s clearly a fable (notice the allegorical Trees), it’s possible that the writer supposed that everything here happened in one day.

Now, these two stories are completely different in sequence. Serious fundamentalists know full well that a literal reading won’t work, so they have to work pretty hard to harmonize them. Non-fundamentalist scholars have concluded, on the basis of this and other evidence in the Biblical text, that Genesis is actually the product of pasting together different source materials into a literary patchwork. (Richard E. Friedman’s Who Wrote the Bible? is a good introduction to this approach.) Kitcher never addresses this matter; perhaps he doesn’t consider it important, though I think that if you want to address fundamentalist positions, it’s more relevant than throwing Darwin at them. At one point Kitcher complains that the creationist and Intelligent Design positions consist more of trying to find flaws in evolutionary theory than in presenting an alternative; so why not play their own game, and show the problems in their own reading of the Bible? But that would be, like, hard. In any case, this example alone is evidence that “literalism” is not really the issue.

But wait -- there’s more in Genesis 3. The usual Christian interpretation, common to fundamentalists and less conservative Christians, of the events leading up to Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden is that Satan, in the form of a serpent, teased Adam and Eve into eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Yahweh had warned them that if they did so, they would die. Satan told Adam and Eve that they would not die but become as gods, knowing good and evil – absurd, of course: how could mere humans become like God? But they ate the fruit, and immediately felt the shame of their nakedness. For their disobedience, Yahweh threw them out of Eden and cursed them to labor and suffering, and sentenced Satan the serpent to crawl on his belly forever.

This is not what Genesis 3 actually says, however. A literal reading is instructive. There’s no hint that the crafty serpent is Satan, a figure who doesn’t show up until much later in the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament, as Christians call it); it takes a nonliteral reading to find Satan here. Then, when Adam and Eve have eaten the forbidden fruit and are cowering in shame, and after Yahweh has cursed them to dirt and suffering and enmity with the serpent’s tribe, Yahweh reflects: “See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and live forever” – and only then does he drive Adam and Eve from Eden. The text is clear that Yahweh had lied, for they didn’t die when they ate from the forbidden tree; and it is explicit that by doing so, they had become as gods. For some reason Yahweh feared this, so he cut them off from the tree of life. This is more like, say, Greek mythology, where the gods try to keep knowledge from human beings; Yahweh is not a moral figure in this tale. Again, non-fundamentalist biblical scholars generally recognize this, but anyone reading the text can see it. A literal reading produces unacceptable results, so most Christians (apart from scholars) ignore the literal meaning of the story and understand it differently. Conservative Christians seem not to have minded, or even noticed, the departures from Scripture of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of The Christ; the letter of the text is not all that important to them, except when it becomes an excuse to draw a line in the sand over some other issue.

The model of the universe in the Hebrew Bible, with its domed sky hung with lights, is, from what I’ve read, not “supernatural” at all but based on ancient, mostly Babylonian, astronomy. The New Testament borrows from the astronomy of its own time, with the planets moving in concentric spheres or heavens. (“Seventh” heaven is the highest of these.) To insist on thinking of the universe in this way is not so much believing in the supernatural as in outdated science, like believing in humors or phlogiston. But then, popular astronomy books today contain pictures of the planets strung like beads on circular lines around the sun, called “orbits.”

Notice that the importance of a literal reading of Genesis 1-3 has nothing to do with the “supernatural” (another of Kitcher’s buzzwords, along with “spiritual religion” and “the enlightenment case”), though there are supernatural elements here and elsewhere in the Bible. The inconsistency of Genesis 1 and 2, or of the different accounts of Jesus’ birth in the gospels of Matthew and Luke (which Kitcher does discuss), is not due to the supernatural; it’s due to different, irreconcilable story lines.

Even when ordinary believers believe in the supernatural, it doesn’t mean they don’t also believe in an everyday material world where the supernatural doesn’t usually intrude. They know that if you jump off a tall building you’ll probably die. They know that virgins do not usually become pregnant, and if one of their single daughters were to try to claim the Holy Spirit as the father of her unborn child, they would become extremely hard-headed skeptics. Stanley Tambiah says that the anthropologist Meyer Fortes “once invited a rainmaker to perform the ceremony for him for an attractive fee, and the officiant in question replied ‘Don't be a fool, whoever makes a rain-making ceremony in the dry season?’” (Magic, science, religion, and the scope of rationality, Cambridge 1990, p 54). It seems that often it’s the modern, scientific rationalist who takes such things literally, while the believers think about them differently. The actual function of the supernatural in human belief is still being studied, and while it may be comforting to dismiss the “superstitions” of those who believe in different foolish things than we do, it’s not a sign of wisdom.

Things are not so different in the present-day secular world. For example, a lot of American women believe in the existence of “snuff films,” in which a woman is actually killed on camera during or after performing sexual acts, and that such films are available under the counter at adult video stores everywhere. There is no evidence that such films have ever existed, but the arguments to show that they do exist (as well as the vehemence with which the arguments are made) are reminiscent of arguments made by fundamentalists to preserve the inerrancy of the Bible.

What I find chilling is that the people who make this case would rather believe that thousands of women are being killed every year to make snuff porn, than that they aren’t. I’d say the same about other people who want to believe that thousands of children are kidnapped each year in shopping malls and sold into sex slavery. There are many other similar legends / fantasies in circulation today, from the "Paul Is Dead" scare to the claims that the Bush administration executed the 9/11 attacks, to the belief that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks, to “blood libel” legends which accuse Jews of sacrificing Gentile children and using their blood to make Passover matzos. These have nothing to do with the supernatural, nor with literalism. As with magical rituals, it’s interesting to speculate about the personal and social functions of such beliefs, but they shouldn’t be taken literally. (There’s an interesting discussion of this issue in Pamela Donovan, No way of knowing: crime, urban legends, and the Internet, Routledge, 2004). I suspect that the “supernatural” is a secondary issue here, not the real crux of the problem.

All of this swoops under Kitcher’s radar. I think that if we secularists don’t stop imposing our own misunderstandings on the religious and if we believe that by rejecting religion we are somehow immune to the lure of the legendary, we’re going to get nowhere in a hurry.

More later on Kitcher’s notion of “spiritual” religion as a superior alternative to “supernatural” religion.

*There's an old joke about the seeker who asks someone (St. Augustine, maybe?) what God did in the eons before he created the heavens and the earth. The old teacher snaps: He made Hell for people who ask questions like that!

Living With Literalism

Philip Kitcher’s Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith (Oxford, 2007) is a nice little book. Kitcher, a philosopher who’s written a well-known critique of creationism and a well-known critique of sociobiology, now takes on Intelligent Design. He does a good job of explaining why natural selection is the best theory we have for the origin and extinction of species, and he’s even decently modest in the claims he makes for science as a mode of knowing. Despite the help he acknowledges from various philosophers and other scholars, though, he gets into trouble on the religious issues. My main beef is his reliance on the straw man of “biblical literalism.”

He tries to hedge just a little: “For many of those who want an alternative to Darwinism, however, novelty creationism is not enough. They would remain shocked by a science curriculum that implied that any (nonpoetic) part of the Bible cannot be taken as literal truth” (page 20). “Nonpoetic” won’t quite cut it, especially since Kitcher doesn’t explain which parts of the Bible are poetic and which are non. Is the Sermon on the Mount poetic? The Nativity Stories? The killing of Goliath by David? The book of Acts? The letters of Paul? Only 20 pages in, and poor Professor Kitcher is already over his head and sinking fast.

He backs himself up with an endnote (page 170, note 19):

As I have discovered, some well-educated people find this statement incredible. They suppose that nobody takes all the (nonpoetic) parts of the Bible as literal truth. Their reaction is surely based on the fact that all the religious people they know adopt nonliteralist strategies of reading the scriptures. In fact, as any survey of evangelical Christian literature reveals, literalism is extremely important to many Christians. This is apparent not only in the books written in support of “scientific creationism” … but also in the King James Study Bible (Nashville, TN: Nelson, 1983). The Study Bible begins its section on interpretation by reminding the reader that “the Bible is God’s infallible, inerrantly inspired Word (p. xxiiii), and concludes a note on the opening of Genesis with the declaration that “the biblical account of Creation clearly indicates that God created the world in six literal days” (p. 6).

Kitcher seems to think that “infallible, inerrantly inspired” means “literally true.” He’s wrong. Yes, the King James Study Bible declares its belief that Genesis describes “six literal days” of creation – but that is not anywhere close to taking all “the (nonpoetic) parts of the Bible as literal truth.” I think it’s revealing that this is the best – at any rate, it’s the only -- evidence Kitcher provides to support his claim.

Biblical inerrancy is quite another doctrine. It’s a fairly mainstream belief, which conservative evangelicals share with the Roman Catholic Church. And in order to preserve the Bible from error, it’s necessary to interpret the Bible quite non-literally – in one famous example, by interpreting the six “days” of creation as epochs running to thousands or millions of years.

Some basic points:

1. I’ve never heard of a Christian denomination that claimed to take the entire Bible literally. I did once encounter an individual Christian who claimed she did, but when I asked her what she did with passages like Matthew 19.12 (become a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven), Matthew 5:29 (if your eye leads you to sin, pluck it out), or Mark 10:21 (sell all you have and give to the poor), she backtracked immediately: well, of course you can’t take the whole Bible literally! I didn’t mean you should take those verses literally!

2. At the other end of the spectrum, the most loudly non-literalist Christians known to me believe that Jesus literally lived in Galilee in the first century, roamed around teaching and gathering disciples, and finally died on a cross in Jerusalem. A few maverick scholars have argued that Jesus was really a mythical figure with no literal existence; Kitcher should look at the scholarly reaction to their work to see how important “literalism” is to non-evangelical, even quite liberal Christians.

Where Christians differ is in which parts of the Bible to take literally and which to interpret figuratively. Once again we see someone distorting a difference of degree into a degree of kind, opening up a gulf between people who are not really that different from each other. A philosopher should know better than this.

3. Non-literal interpretations are not necessarily correct. Often they’re used to get around passages that are false or otherwise embarrassing. For example, three of the gospels report that Jesus predicted he would return with power before the generation then living had died. Since this is false, it can’t mean what it says, so Christians have found various ways to interpret it in such a way that it is no longer false. Albert Schweitzer, who was not only a humanitarian doctor (the Mother Teresa of his day) and a Bach specialist but a New Testament scholar, argued in in The Quest for the Historical Jesus (first edition 1906; first English translation 1910), that Jesus expected the Kingdom to come right away, and so was mistaken. In the mid-20^th century, an Anglican scholar, C. H. Dodd, developed a theory of “realized eschatology” in The Parables of the Kingdom (1935; revised edition 1961) which reinterpreted Jesus’ teachings to say that the Kingdom of God had already arrived, so no Second Coming was necessary and Jesus was right. Understandably, a number of respectable theologians who didn’t like to think of Jesus as a wild-eyed apocalyptic preacher liked Dodd’s interpretation, but it doesn’t seem to have held up well. Schweitzer’s general argument remains strong, but it’s a stumbling block for many Christians who want Jesus to be inerrant, so scholars continue to try to find ways around it.

Or consider Jesus’ teachings about the family. Though he opposed divorce, he didn’t mind if his followers abandoned their families to follow him, and the gospels show him at odds with his own family. When his mother and brothers came to see him in Mark 3, they couldn’t get through the crowds around him, and Jesus brushed them off. Who are my mother and brothers? he asked rhetorically. These (meaning his disciples and other followers) are my mother and brothers; whoever does the will of God is my mother and brothers. On another occasion (Matthew 8:21f) Jesus forbade a disciple to return home for his father’s funeral, ordering him to leave the dead to bury the dead. He also said (Matthew 10:34ff) that he had come not to bring peace, but to bring division, to set people against their families and their families against them, and that anyone who came to him and did not hate his family was no disciple of his (Luke 14:26).

This was reasonable (if not particularly attractive) behavior for an apocalyptic cult, or for any new cult that needs to lure converts away from established religions to build up its own numbers. So some interpreters borrow Schweitzer’s arguments just long enough to get rid of (or at least explain away) Jesus’ anti-family teaching: well, Jesus thought the world was about to end, so of course he had a sense of eschatological urgency and thought people had to get rid of anything that might interfere with their salvation. Of course Jesus was mistaken in thinking that the world was about to end, but these sayings express Jesus’ sublime sense of eschatological urgency and trust in God – but that was then and this is now, so of course you shouldn’t hate your family! These, again, are non-fundamentalist Christian arguments, the kind of thing I found in the work of distinguished theologians like Rudolf Bultmann.

I suspect that the reason Kitcher wants to brush aside the importance of Biblical inerrancy among fundamentalists is that he wants to draw a sharp line between bad, low-class literalist Bible-thumpers and good (or at least not-so-bad) decent non-literalists. (He even thinks the Gospel of Thomas is the neatest thing since sliced bread. Very trendy!) So far (I’m about halfway through Living with Darwin), Kitcher doesn’t mention that there are two different creation stories in Genesis, which, if read literally, contradict each other thoroughly. (There are also different versions of Noah and the Flood, which differ on many points.) Fundamentalists nowadays try to harmonize them by putting the verbs in Genesis 2 into the past perfect tense, so that it describes God creating Adam and then, in a flashback, describes the other things he had created before. It doesn’t work very well, and the only English translation I’ve ever seen that supports this interpretation is the New International Version, a fundamentalist-friendly translation that often distorts its translations for theological-apologetic reasons.

I’m not sure that Kitcher’s distortion of this basic issue hurts much of his argument. Does it really matter if someone takes all the Bible literally, or just some of it? Maybe not for the purposes of a discussion of evolutionary theory, but still, it grates on me every time Kitcher talks about “literalism,” which he does fairly often. It may matter more when I read the rest of the book, in which he’s going to address the role of religion in a scientific world. He’s trying to be nice, to distance himself from angry cranks like Richard Dawkins, but if he can so fundamentally misunderstand the people he’s trying to talk to, he’s not going to reach them. But I suspect too that this book is, in this respect, like early Christian defenses of the faith which were ostensibly addressed to Roman rulers: it’s highly unlikely that anyone but Christians ever read them at the time, so they mainly made Christians feel good, but didn’t have much effect on non-Christians who were skeptical about the new cult. Similarly, Living with Darwin seems unlikely to reach conservative evangelicals. Judging from the customer reviews on Amazon, it’s being read mainly by non-believers who want to feel good about rejecting Intelligent Design, and can then say, Take that, you superstitious literalists, you!

More on this, I hope, after I finish the book. I'll try to add some links later, too, with more information for those who want it.

Living With Literalism

Philip Kitcher’s Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith (Oxford, 2007) is a nice little book. Kitcher, a philosopher who’s written a well-known critique of creationism and a well-known critique of sociobiology, now takes on Intelligent Design. He does a good job of explaining why natural selection is the best theory we have for the origin and extinction of species, and he’s even decently modest in the claims he makes for science as a mode of knowing. Despite the help he acknowledges from various philosophers and other scholars, though, he gets into trouble on the religious issues. My main beef is his reliance on the straw man of “biblical literalism.”

He tries to hedge just a little: “For many of those who want an alternative to Darwinism, however, novelty creationism is not enough. They would remain shocked by a science curriculum that implied that any (nonpoetic) part of the Bible cannot be taken as literal truth” (page 20). “Nonpoetic” won’t quite cut it, especially since Kitcher doesn’t explain which parts of the Bible are poetic and which are non. Is the Sermon on the Mount poetic? The Nativity Stories? The killing of Goliath by David? The book of Acts? The letters of Paul? Only 20 pages in, and poor Professor Kitcher is already over his head and sinking fast.

He backs himself up with an endnote (page 170, note 19):

As I have discovered, some well-educated people find this statement incredible. They suppose that nobody takes all the (nonpoetic) parts of the Bible as literal truth. Their reaction is surely based on the fact that all the religious people they know adopt nonliteralist strategies of reading the scriptures. In fact, as any survey of evangelical Christian literature reveals, literalism is extremely important to many Christians. This is apparent not only in the books written in support of “scientific creationism” … but also in the King James Study Bible (Nashville, TN: Nelson, 1983). The Study Bible begins its section on interpretation by reminding the reader that “the Bible is God’s infallible, inerrantly inspired Word (p. xxiiii), and concludes a note on the opening of Genesis with the declaration that “the biblical account of Creation clearly indicates that God created the world in six literal days” (p. 6).

Kitcher seems to think that “infallible, inerrantly inspired” means “literally true.” He’s wrong. Yes, the King James Study Bible declares its belief that Genesis describes “six literal days” of creation – but that is not anywhere close to taking all “the (nonpoetic) parts of the Bible as literal truth.” I think it’s revealing that this is the best – at any rate, it’s the only -- evidence Kitcher provides to support his claim.

Biblical inerrancy is quite another doctrine. It’s a fairly mainstream belief, which conservative evangelicals share with the Roman Catholic Church. And in order to preserve the Bible from error, it’s necessary to interpret the Bible quite non-literally – in one famous example, by interpreting the six “days” of creation as epochs running to thousands or millions of years.

Some basic points:

1. I’ve never heard of a Christian denomination that claimed to take the entire Bible literally. I did once encounter an individual Christian who claimed she did, but when I asked her what she did with passages like Matthew 19.12 (become a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven), Matthew 5:29 (if your eye leads you to sin, pluck it out), or Mark 10:21 (sell all you have and give to the poor), she backtracked immediately: well, of course you can’t take the whole Bible literally! I didn’t mean you should take those verses literally!

2. At the other end of the spectrum, the most loudly non-literalist Christians known to me believe that Jesus literally lived in Galilee in the first century, roamed around teaching and gathering disciples, and finally died on a cross in Jerusalem. A few maverick scholars have argued that Jesus was really a mythical figure with no literal existence; Kitcher should look at the scholarly reaction to their work to see how important “literalism” is to non-evangelical, even quite liberal Christians.

Where Christians differ is in which parts of the Bible to take literally and which to interpret figuratively. Once again we see someone distorting a difference of degree into a degree of kind, opening up a gulf between people who are not really that different from each other. A philosopher should know better than this.

3. Non-literal interpretations are not necessarily correct. Often they’re used to get around passages that are false or otherwise embarrassing. For example, three of the gospels report that Jesus predicted he would return with power before the generation then living had died. Since this is false, it can’t mean what it says, so Christians have found various ways to interpret it in such a way that it is no longer false. Albert Schweitzer, who was not only a humanitarian doctor (the Mother Teresa of his day) and a Bach specialist but a New Testament scholar, argued in in The Quest for the Historical Jesus (first edition 1906; first English translation 1910), that Jesus expected the Kingdom to come right away, and so was mistaken. In the mid-20^th century, an Anglican scholar, C. H. Dodd, developed a theory of “realized eschatology” in The Parables of the Kingdom (1935; revised edition 1961) which reinterpreted Jesus’ teachings to say that the Kingdom of God had already arrived, so no Second Coming was necessary and Jesus was right. Understandably, a number of respectable theologians who didn’t like to think of Jesus as a wild-eyed apocalyptic preacher liked Dodd’s interpretation, but it doesn’t seem to have held up well. Schweitzer’s general argument remains strong, but it’s a stumbling block for many Christians who want Jesus to be inerrant, so scholars continue to try to find ways around it.

Or consider Jesus’ teachings about the family. Though he opposed divorce, he didn’t mind if his followers abandoned their families to follow him, and the gospels show him at odds with his own family. When his mother and brothers came to see him in Mark 3, they couldn’t get through the crowds around him, and Jesus brushed them off. Who are my mother and brothers? he asked rhetorically. These (meaning his disciples and other followers) are my mother and brothers; whoever does the will of God is my mother and brothers. On another occasion (Matthew 8:21f) Jesus forbade a disciple to return home for his father’s funeral, ordering him to leave the dead to bury the dead. He also said (Matthew 10:34ff) that he had come not to bring peace, but to bring division, to set people against their families and their families against them, and that anyone who came to him and did not hate his family was no disciple of his (Luke 14:26).

This was reasonable (if not particularly attractive) behavior for an apocalyptic cult, or for any new cult that needs to lure converts away from established religions to build up its own numbers. So some interpreters borrow Schweitzer’s arguments just long enough to get rid of (or at least explain away) Jesus’ anti-family teaching: well, Jesus thought the world was about to end, so of course he had a sense of eschatological urgency and thought people had to get rid of anything that might interfere with their salvation. Of course Jesus was mistaken in thinking that the world was about to end, but these sayings express Jesus’ sublime sense of eschatological urgency and trust in God – but that was then and this is now, so of course you shouldn’t hate your family! These, again, are non-fundamentalist Christian arguments, the kind of thing I found in the work of distinguished theologians like Rudolf Bultmann.

I suspect that the reason Kitcher wants to brush aside the importance of Biblical inerrancy among fundamentalists is that he wants to draw a sharp line between bad, low-class literalist Bible-thumpers and good (or at least not-so-bad) decent non-literalists. (He even thinks the Gospel of Thomas is the neatest thing since sliced bread. Very trendy!) So far (I’m about halfway through Living with Darwin), Kitcher doesn’t mention that there are two different creation stories in Genesis, which, if read literally, contradict each other thoroughly. (There are also different versions of Noah and the Flood, which differ on many points.) Fundamentalists nowadays try to harmonize them by putting the verbs in Genesis 2 into the past perfect tense, so that it describes God creating Adam and then, in a flashback, describes the other things he had created before. It doesn’t work very well, and the only English translation I’ve ever seen that supports this interpretation is the New International Version, a fundamentalist-friendly translation that often distorts its translations for theological-apologetic reasons.

I’m not sure that Kitcher’s distortion of this basic issue hurts much of his argument. Does it really matter if someone takes all the Bible literally, or just some of it? Maybe not for the purposes of a discussion of evolutionary theory, but still, it grates on me every time Kitcher talks about “literalism,” which he does fairly often. It may matter more when I read the rest of the book, in which he’s going to address the role of religion in a scientific world. He’s trying to be nice, to distance himself from angry cranks like Richard Dawkins, but if he can so fundamentally misunderstand the people he’s trying to talk to, he’s not going to reach them. But I suspect too that this book is, in this respect, like early Christian defenses of the faith which were ostensibly addressed to Roman rulers: it’s highly unlikely that anyone but Christians ever read them at the time, so they mainly made Christians feel good, but didn’t have much effect on non-Christians who were skeptical about the new cult. Similarly, Living with Darwin seems unlikely to reach conservative evangelicals. Judging from the customer reviews on Amazon, it’s being read mainly by non-believers who want to feel good about rejecting Intelligent Design, and can then say, Take that, you superstitious literalists, you!

More on this, I hope, after I finish the book. I'll try to add some links later, too, with more information for those who want it.