Open theism and the Incarnation

Here is a very plausible pair of claims:

1. The Son could have become incarnate as a different human being.

2. God foreknew many centuries ahead of time which human being the Son would become incarnate as.

Regarding 1, of course, the Son could not have been a different person—the person the Son is and was and ever shall be is the second person of the Trinity. But Son could have been a different human being.

Here is a sketch of an argument for 1:

1. If the identity of a human being depends on the body, then if the Son became incarnate as a 3rd century BC woman in India, this would be a different human being from Jesus (albeit the same person).

2. If the identity of a human being depends on the soul, then God could have created a different soul for the Son’s incarnation.

3. The identity of a human being depends on either the body or the soul.

I don’t have as good an argument for 2 as I do for 1, but I think 2 is quite plausible given what Scripture says about God’s having planned out the mission of Jesus from of old.

Now add:

3. If the Son could have become incarnate as a different human being, which human being he became incarnate as depends on a number of free human choices in the century preceding the incarnation.

Now, 1, 2 and 3 leads to an immediate problem for an open theist Christian (my thinking on this is inspired by a paper of David Alexander, though his argument is different) who thinks God doesn’t foreknow human free choices.

Why is 3 true? Well, if the identity of a human being even partly depends on the body (as is plausible), given that (plausibly) Mary was truly a biological mother of Jesus, then if Mary’s parents had not had any children, the body that Jesus actually had would not have existed, and an incarnation would have happened with a different body and hence a different human being.

Objection: God could have created Mary—or the body for the incarnation—directly ex nihilo in such a case, or God could have overridden human free will if some human were about to make a decision that would lead to Mary not existing.

Response: If essentiality of origins is true, then it is logically impossible for the same body to be created ex nihilo as actually had a partial non-divine cause. But I don’t want the argument to depend on essentiality of origins. Instead, I want to argue as follows. Both of the solutions in the objection require God to foreknow that he would in fact engage in such intervention if human free choices didn’t cooperate with his plan. God’s own interventions would be free choices, and so on open theism God wouldn’t know that he would thus intervene. One might respond that God could resolve to ensure that a certain body would become available, and a morally perfect being always keeps his resolutions. But while perhaps a morally perfect being always keeps his promises, I think it is false that a morally perfect being always keeps his resolutions. Unless one is resolving to do something that one is already obligated to do, it is not wrong to change one’s mind in a revolution. I suppose God could have promised someone that he would ensure the existence of a certain specific body, but we have no evidence of such a specific promise in Scripture, and it seems an odd maneouver for God to have to make in order to know ahead of time who the human that would save the world is.

What if the identity of a human depends solely on the soul? But then the identity of the human being that the Son would become incarnate as would depend on God’s free decision which soul to create for that human being, and the same remarks as I made about resolutions in the previous paragraph would apply.

Sexual symmetry and asymmetry

I want to think a bit about conservative Christian views of sex and gender, but before that I want to offer two stories to motivate a crucial distinction.

Electrons and Positrons

Electrons and positrons (a positron is a positively charged anti-particle to the electron) are very different in one way but not so much in another. If you take some system of electrons and positrons, and swap in a positron for an electron, the system will behave very differently—it will be attracted to the things that the electron was repelled by and vice versa. But if you replace all the electrons by positrons and all the positrons by electrons, it won’t make a significant difference (technically, there may be some difference due to the weak force, but that’s dominated by electromagnetic interaction). Similarly, a cloud of electrons behaves pretty much like a cloud of positrons, but a mixed cloud of electrons and positrons will behave very differently (electrons and positrons will collide releasing energy).

Electrons and positrons are significantly pairwise non-interchangeable, but globally approximately interchangeable.

We might conclude: electrons and positrons significantly differ relationally but do not differ much intrinsically.

On the other hand, if you have a system made of photons and electrons, and you swap out a photon and replace it by an electron, it will make a significant difference, but likewise typically if you swap out all the photons and electrons, it will also make a significant difference (unless the system was in a rare symmetric configuration). Thus, photons and electrons are significantly pairwise and globally interchangeable, and hence significantly differ both relationally and intrinsically.

Heterothallic Isogamous Organisms

Isogamous sexually-reproducing organisms have equally sized gametes among their sexes, and hence cannot be labeled as “female” and “male” (biologists define “female” and “male” in terms of larger and smaller gametes, respectively). Instead these sexes get arbitrarily labeled as plus and minus (I will assume there are only two mating types for simplicity). In heterothallic organisms, the sexes are located in different individuals, so two are needed for reproduction. Humans are heterothallic but not isogamous. But there are many species (mostly unicellular, I believe) that are heterothallic and isogamous.

We can now suppose a heterothallic and isogamous species with pretty symmetric mating roles. In such a species, again, we have significant individual non-interchangeability in a system. If Alice is a plus and Bob is a minus, they can reproduce, but if you swap out Bob for a plus, you get a non-reproductive pair. But if the mating roles are sufficiently similar, you can have global approximate interchangeability: if in some system you put pluses for the minuses and minuses for the pluses, things could go on much as before. A group of pluses may behave very much like a group of minuses (namely, over time the population will decrease to zero), but a mixed group of pluses and minuses is apt to behave very differently. We thus have pairwise non-interchangeability but approximate global interchangeability.

We might similarly say: pluses and minuses in our heterothallic and isogamous species significantly differ relationally but do not differ much intrinsically. On the other hand, cats and dogs significantly differ both relationally and intrinsically.

The Distinction

We thus have a distinction between two kinds of differences, which we can label as relational and intrinsic. I am not happy with the labels, but when I use them, please think of my two examples: particles and isogamous organisms. These two kinds of differences can be thought of as denying different symmetries: intrinsic differences are opposed to global interchange of the types of all individuals; relational differences are opposed to pairwise interchange of the types of a pair of individuals.

Conservative Christian Views of Sex and Gender

Conservative Christians tend to think that there are significant differences between men and women. In addition to cultural traits, there are two main theological reasons for thinking this:

1. Marriage asymmetry: Men and women can marry, but men cannot marry men and women cannot marry women.

2. Liturgical asymmetry: Only men can serve in certain liturgical “clerical” roles.

Of these, the marriage asymmetry is probably a bit more widely accepted than the liturgical asymmetry. (Some also think there is an authority asymmetry in the family where husbands have a special authority over wives. This is even more controversial among conservative Christians than the liturgical asymmetry, so I won’t say more about it.)

We could suppose an arbitrary divine rule behind both asymmetries. But this is theologically problematic: a really plausible way of reading the difference between the Law of Moses and the Law of the Gospel is at that in the Law of the Gospel, we no longer have arbitrary rules whose primary benefit is obedience, such as the prohibition on eating pork.

If we are to avoid supposing an arbitrary divine rule, we need to suppose differences between men and women to explain the theologically grounded asymmetries. And this is apt to lead conservative Christians to philosophical and theological theorizing about normative differences such as women being called more to “receptivity” and men more to “givingness”, or searching through sociological, psychological and biological data for relevant differences between the behavior and abilities of men and women. The empirical differences tend to lie on continua with wide areas of overlap between the sexes, however, and the normative differences are either implausible or likewise involve continua with wide areas of overlap (men, too, are called to receptivity).

But I think we are now in a position to see that there is a logical shortcoming behind the focus of this search. For differences between men and women can be relational or intrinsic, and the search has tended to focus on the intrinsic.

However, I submit, purely relational differences are sufficient to explain both the marriage and liturgical asymmetries. One way to see this is to pretend that we are a heterothallic isogamous species (rather than heterothallic anisogamous species that we actually are), consisting of pluses and minuses rather than females and males.

Then, if marriage has an ordering to procreation, that would neatly explain why pluses and minuses can marry each other, but pluses can’t marry pluses and minuses can’t marry minuses. No intrinsic difference between pluses and minuses is needed to explain this. Thus, as soon as we accept that marriage has an ordering to procreation, we have a way to explain the marriage asymmetry without any supposition of intrinsic differences.

Likewise, if there is going to be an incarnation, and only one, and the incarnate God is going to be incarnate as a typical organism of our species, then this incarnation must happen as a plus or a minus. And if married love is a deep and passionate love that is a wonderful symbol for the love between God and God’s people, then if the incarnation is as an individual of one of the sexes, God’s Church would then symbolically have the opposite sex. And then those whose liturgical role it is to stand in for the incarnate God in the marriage-like relationship to the Church would most fittingly have the sex opposite to that of the Church. Thus, if the incarnate God is incarnate as a plus, the Church would be figured as a minus, one can explain why it is fitting that the clergy in the relevant liturgical roles would be pluses; if the incarnate God is incarnate as a minus, we have an explanation of why the clergy in these roles would be minuses as well. (Interestingly, on this story, it’s not that the clergy are directly supposed to be like the incarnate God in respect of sex, but that their sex is supposed to be the opposite to that of the Church, and given that in the species there are only two sexes, this forces them to have the same sex as the incarnate God: the clergy need to have a sex opposed to the sex opposed to that of the incarnate God.)

Now, we are not isogamous, and we have female and male, not plus and minus. But we can still give exactly the same explanations. Even though in an anisogamous species there are significant intrinsic biological differences between the sexes, we need not advert to any of them to explain either the marriage or the liturgical asymmetry. The marriage asymmetry is tied to the pairwise non-interchangeability of the sexes and explained by the procreative role of marriage. The liturgical asymemtry is tied to the marriage asymmetry together with the symmetry-breaking event of God becoming incarnate in one of the sexes.

As far as this story goes, there need not be any morally significant intrinsic differences between male and female to explain the marital and liturgical asymmetries. The relational difference, that you need male and female for a mating pair, is morally significant on this story, but in a way that is entirely symmetric between male and female. And then we have one symmetry-breaking event: God becomes incarnate as a male. We need not think that there is any special reason why God becomes incarnate as a male or a female—it could equally well have been as a female. The decision whether to become incarnate as a male or a female could be as arbitrary as the decision about the exact eye color of the incarnate God (though, of course, eye color does not ground either significant intrinsic or significant relational differences). But if it were an incarnation as a female, other changes would be fitting: the clergy who symbolize the nuptial role of the incarnate God would fitting be female, in the exodus story it would fitting be female lambs and goats that would be sacrificed, and it would be fitting that Sarah be asked to sacrifice her first-born daughter.

I am not saying that there are no morally significant intrinsic differences between male and female. There may be. We are, after all, not only heterothallic but also anisogamous, and so there could turn out to be such intrinsic differences. But we need not suppose any such to explain the two asymmetries, and it is safer to be agnostic on the existence of these intrinsic differences.

Nothing in this post is meant as an argument for either the marriage asymmetry and the liturgical asymmetry. I have argued for the marriage asymmetry elsewhere, but here I am just saying that it could be explained if we grant the procreative ordering of marriage. And my arguments for the liturgical asymmetry are based on fittingness. But fittingness considerations do not constrain God. While we can explain why the clergy are of the same sex as the incarnate God by the nuptial imagery story that I gave above, God could instead have chosen to make the clergy be of the opposite sex as the incarnate God, in order to nuptially signify the people with the clergy, or God could chosen to make the clergy be of both sexes, to emphasize the fact that salvation is tied to the humanity (see St. Athanasius on this) and not the sex of the incarnate God. But when many things are fitting, God can choose one, and we can then cite its fittingness as a non-deterministic explanation.

Though, I suppose, I have at least refuted this argument:

3. The only way to explain the marriage and liturgical asymmetries is by supposing morally significant intrinsic differences between female and male.

4. There are no such intrinsic differences.

5. So, probably, the asymmetries don’t exist either.

I have refuted it by showing that (3) is false.

From love of neighbor to Christianity

Start with this argument:

1. It’s not wrong for me to love my friend as if they were in the image and likeness of God.

2. If someone is not God and not in the image and likeness of God, then to love them as if they were in the image and likeness of God is excessive.

3. Excessive love is wrong.

4. My friend is not God.

5. So, my friend is in the image and likeness of God.

6. So, God exists.

I think there may be some other variants on this argument that are worth considering. Replace being in the image and likeness of God, for instance, with (a) being so loved by God that God became incarnate out of love for them, or with (b) having the Spirit of God living in them. Then the conclusion is that God become incarnate or that the Spirit of God lives in our neighbor.

The general point is this. Christianity gives us an admirable aspiration as to how much we should love our neighbor. But that much love of our neighbor is inappropriate unless something like Christianity is true.

I think there is a way in which this argument is far from new. One of the great arguments for Christianity has always been those Christians who loved their neighbor as God called them to do. The immense attractiveness of their lives showed that their love was not wrong, and knoweldge of these lives showed that they were indeed loving their neighbor in the ways the above arguments talk about.

From theism to something like Christianity

The Gospel message—the account of the infinite and perfect God becoming one of us in order to suffer and die in atonement of our sins—is immensely beautiful. Even abstracting from the truth of the message, it is more beautiful than the beauties of nature around us. Suppose, now, that God exists and the Gospel message is false. Then a human (or demonic) falsehood has exceeded the beauty of God’s created nature around us. That does not seem plausible. Thus, it is likely that:

1. If God exists, the Gospel message is true.

Furthermore, it seems unlikely that God would allow us to come up with a falsehood about what he has done where the content of that falsehood exceeds in beauty and goodness what God has in fact done. If so, then:

2. If God exists, something at least as beautiful and good as the Gospel message is true.

Humanity and humans

From childhood, I remember the Polish Christmas carol “Amidst the Silence of Night” from around the beginning of the 19th century, and I remember being particularly impressed by the lines:

Ahh, welcome, Savior, longed for of old,
four thousand years awaited.
For you, kings, prophets waited,
and you this night to us appeared.

I have lately found troubling the question: Why did God wait over a hundred thousand years from the beginning of the human race to send us his Son and give us the Gospel?

The standard answer is that God needed to prepare humankind. The carol’s version of this answer suggests that this preparation intensified our longings for salvation through millenia of waiting. A variant is that we need a lot of time to fully realize our moral depravity in the absence of God. Or one might emphasize that moral teaching is a slow and gradual process, and millenia are needed to make us ready to receive the Gospel.

I think there is something to all the answers, but they do not fully satisfy as they stand. After all, a human child from 100,000 years ago is presumably roughly as capable of moral development as a modern child. If we had time travel, it seems plausible that missionaries would be just as effective 100,000 years ago as they were 1000 years ago. The intensification of longings and the realization of social moral depravity are, indeed, important considerations, but human memory, even aided by writing, only goes back a few thousand years. Thus, two thousand years of waiting and learning about moral depravity would likely have had basically the same result for the individuals in the time of the Incarnation as a hundred thousand years did.

I am starting to think that this problem cannot be fully resolved simply by considering individual goods. It is important, I think, to consider humankind as a whole, with goods attached to the human community as a whole. The good of moral development can be considered on an individual level, and that good needs a few decade rather than millenia. But the good of moral development can also be considered on the level of humankind as well, and there millenia are fitting for the development not to ride roughshod over nature. Similarly, the good of longing for and anticipation of a great good only needs at most a few decades in an individual, but there is a value in humankind as a whole longing for and anticipating on a species timescale rather an individual timescale.

In other words, reflection on the waiting for Christ pushes us away from an overly individualistic view. As do, of course, other aspects of Christian theology, such as reflection on the Fall, the Church, the atonement, etc.

Am I fully satisfied? Not quite. Is the value of humankind’s more organic development worth sacrificing the goods of thousands of generations of ordinary humans who did not hear the Gospel? God seems to think so, and I am willing to trust him. There is doubtless a lot more to be said. But it helps me to think that this is yet another one of those many things where one needs to view a community (broadly understood) as having a moral significance going beyond the provision of more individualistic goods.

Two more remarks. First, a graduate student pointed out to me (if I understood them right) that perhaps we should measure individual moral achievement relative to the state of social development. If so, then perhaps there was not so great a loss to individuals, since what might matter for their moral wellbeing is this relative moral achievement.

Second, the specifically Christian theological problem that this post addresses has an analogue to a subspecies of the problem of evil that somehow has particularly bothered me for a long time: the evils caused by lack of knowledge, and especially lack of medical knowledge. Think of the millenia of people suffering and dying of in ways that could have been averted had people only known more, say, about boiling water, washing hands or making vaccines. I think there is a value in humankind’s organic epistemic development. But to employ that as an answer one has to be willing to say that such global goods of humankind as a whole can trump individual goods.

(Note that all that I say is meant to be compatible with a metaphysics of value on which the loci of value are always individuals. For an individual’s well-being can include external facts about humankind. Thus the good of humankind as a whole might be metaphysically housed in the members. The important thing, however, is that these goods are goods the human has qua part of humanity.)

On monkeys and exemplar theories of salvation

On “exemplar” theories of salvation, Christ’s work of the cross saves us by providing a deeply inspiring example of love, sacrifice, or the like.

Such theories of salvation have the following unsavory consequence: they imply that it would be possible for us to be saved by a monkey.

For imagine that a monkey typing on a typerwriter at random wrote a fictitious story of a life in morally relevant respects like that of Christ, and people started believing that story. If Christ saves us by providing an inspiring example, then we could have gotten the very same effect by reading that fictitious story typed at random by a monkey and erroneously thinking the story to be true.

Of course, that’s just a particularly vivid way of putting the standard objection against exemplar theories that they are Pelagian. I have nothing against monkeys except that they are creatures, and so that if it is possible to be saved by a monkey, then it is possible to be saved by creatures, which is Pelagianism.

Christian panpsychism

I’ve just realized that there is something rather attractive about panpsychism from a Christian point of view. All things God has created are in the image of God. Panpsychism allows them to be in the image of God in a very concrete way: by being minded. There seems to be something fitting about all things having an awareness of reality. And there is Luke 19:40. See also this paper.

That said, I think this falls in the general category of speculative arguments about what God would be expected to create, alongside such arguments as that we would expect God to create a multiverse, or Leibniz’s idea that we would expect a world that is infinitely nested in both the macro and the micro directions. Such arguments need to be extremely tentative.

Theism and emotional attitudes to adversity

Here are two three possible emotional attitudes towards great adversity:

1. Judaeo-Christian: hope

2. Stoic: calm

3. Russellian: anger/despair.

Now consider this argument:

1. The appropriate attitude towards great adversity is Judaeo-Christian or Stoic.

2. If naturalism is true, the appropriate attitude towards great adversity is Russellian.

3. So, naturalism is false.

The reason for (1) is the obvious attractiveness of the hopeful-to-calm part of the emotional spectrum as a way of dealing with diversity.

The reason for (2) is that emotions should fit with reality. But as Russell argues, a naturalist reality does not care about us: we came from the nebula and we will go back to the nebula, and the darkness of our life makes Greek tragedy the supreme form of human art. The most we can do shake our fist at the injustice of it all.

In defense of a changing beatific vision

It is widely taken in the Thomistic tradition that:

1. Different people in heaven have the beatific vision to different degrees, corresponding to the saints’ different levels of holiness.

2. The beatific vision does not change with time for a given individual.

I think there is a tension between these two claims which is best resolved by dropping the no-change thesis (2). Dropping the difference thesis (1) is not an option for Catholics at least, since it’s a dogma taught by the Council of Florence.

To see the tension, note that the fact that different saints have holiness to different degrees implies that those saints who have a lesser holiness have not maxed out what human nature makes possible. And holiness is attractive to the holy, and infectious. If one saint is less holy than another, it seems likely that given a sufficient amount of time, we would expect the second saint’s greater holiness to inspire the first to even greater holiness. And then we would expect the beatific vision to increase.

We also have one New Testament case where it seems likely that a person’s level of beatific vision has increased. In 2 Corinthians, Paul writes of knowing someone who, fourteen years ago, was caught up to the third heaven. It is common to take that to be a modest reference to Paul himself, and the “third heaven” to be a reference to the beatific vision. Now, eventually Paul died and experienced the beatific vision again. It seems very implausible to think that the significant number of years between Paul’s first experience of heaven and his final experience of heaven did not result in Christian maturation and growth in virtue. Thus, it seems quite plausible that Paul had greater holiness when he died than when he was first caught up to heaven, and hence by the correspondence thesis (1), he had a greater degree of beatific vision at death than at the earlier incident.

Note, too, that a Catholic cannot say that the level of holiness is fixed at the time of death, since then purgatory wouldn’t make sense. And, intuitively, we would expect heaven to be inspiring of growth in holiness!

Now, one could insist that the level of holiness is fixed at the time of entry to heaven. But if so, then we couldn’t really say that the death of a saint is always something to rejoice at. Imagine that Paul had died at the time of his first experience of the beatific vision. Then on the no-change view of the beatific vision, he would eternally have had a lesser beatific vision than in actual world where he continued to grow in holiness for over decades more.

A picture of continual growth in holiness and the beatific vision fits better with our temporality. One may worry, however, that it takes away from the picture of resting in God. However, rest is compatible with change. One of the best ways to rest is to read a good book. But as one reads the book, one grows in knowledge of its content. And if one worries that the thought that one will come to have a greater happiness should induce in one a present sorrow of longing, I think it is plausible that with perfect virtue one would no more find the expectation of greater future happiness to be a source of sorrow than a lesser saint would find the observation of greater saints a source of envy. And, coming back to the book analogy, when one reads a good book, there need be no unhappiness at the fact that there is more of the book yet to come—on the contrary, one can rejoice that there is more to come. (In some cases, there may be a weak negative emotion as one longs for the author to reveal something—say, the solution of a mystery. But not every genre will generate that.)

Furthermore, there is good reason to think that change is not incompatible with rest. Since we will have bodies in heaven, and we will flourish in body and soul, while bodily flourishing involves change, heavenly rest must be compatible with change. And plausibly some of the bodily activities we will engage in will involve a variation in the level of happiness at least in some respects. Thus, eating is an episodic joy, and music, I take it, involves much in the way of anticipation and change.

A horizontal aspect to transsubstantiation

The Eucharist has the vertical dimension of our union with Christ and a horizontal dimension of our union with our fellow Christians. The doctrine of transsubstantiation ensures the vertical dimension in an obvious way. But yesterday, while at a Thomistic Institute retreat on the Eucharist, I was struck by the way that transsubstantiation also deeply enhances the horizontal dimension of the Eucharist as a common meal.

Normally, in a common meal we eat together. Sometimes we eat portions cut from one loaf or carved from one animal, and that makes the meal even more unifying. But according to transsubstantiation, in the Eucharist we have a common meal where miraculously we each eat not just a portion of the same food, but the numerically very same portion: the whole of Christ. That is as deep a unity as we can have in eating.

Consider how there is less unity on the main alternatives to transsubstantiation:

• On symbolic views, we eat and drink different portions of bread and wine with the same symbolism.

• On consubstantiation, we eat the same Christ along with different portions of bread and wine.

• On Leibnizian views (where the bread and wine becomes a part of Christ), we eat different parts of the same Christ.

The transsubstantiation view has as much substantial unity in what is eaten as is logically possible. (Though there is some accidental disunity, in that the accidents—shape, color, position—are different for different communicants.)

Virtue ethics and peer disagreement

Aristotelian ethics is committed to the claim that the virtuous person knows what actions and habits are virtuous and is justified in holding on to that knowledge, and indeed should hold on to it. There is a deep stability to virtue. This means that an Aristotelian virtuous person ought not adopt a conciliationist response to those who disagree as to what is virtuous, suspending judgment over the disagreed-upon items.

Indeed, one imagines that Aristotle’s virtuous person could say of those who disagree: “They are not virtuous, and hence do not see the truth about moral matters.” Aristotle’s virtuous person would reject the idea that someone who disagrees with them about virtue could be an epistemic peer. Virtuous habits give epistemic access to moral (and not only moral) truth.

Of course, the disagreer may think themselves virtuous as well, and may think the same thing about the virtuous person as the virtuous person thinks about them. But that does not shake the Aristotelian virtuous person.

This means that if Aristotelian virtue ethics is correct, there is a clear thing that a Christian can say about religious disagreement. The Christian thinks faith is a virtue, albeit an infused rather than natural one. As such, faith gives epistemic access, and someone lacking faith is simply not an epistemic peer, since they lack a source of truth. The fact that a person lacking faith thinks they have the virtue of faith should not move the person who actually has the virtue.

Of course, one might turn all this around and use it as an argument against virtue ethics. But I think Aristotle’s picture seems exactly correct as to the kind of firmness of moral knowledge that the virtuous person exhibits, the kind of spine that lets them say, without pride or vanity, to vast numbers of others that they are simply wrong.

A Christian argument against divine suffering

Some Christians think that God changes and is capable of changing emotions such as suffering. Now, if God is capable of suffering, then God feels empathetic suffering whenever an evil befalls us, and does so to the extent of how bad he understand the evil to be.

The worst evil that can happen to us is to sin. God knows how bad our sin is better than any human being can. Thus, if God can suffer, he suffers compassionately for our sins. He suffers this qua God and independently of any Incarnation, more intensely than any human being can.

But if so, that undercuts one of the central points of the Incarnation, which is to allow the Second Person of the Trinity to suffer for our sins.

A view on which God is capable of emotions such as suffering makes the Incarnation and Christ’s sacrifice of the Cross rather underwhelming: God’s divine suffering would be greater than Christ’s suffering on the Cross. This is theologically unacceptable.

Abortion, contraception and Christian tradition

It is traditional Christian teaching, as far back as we can trace it, that:

1. Abortion is always wrong.

Nonetheless, historically many Christian theologians, such as Thomas Aquinas, accepted the best science and philosophy of the day (Aristotle!) which held that:

2. Human existence starts about a month and a half after conception.

Our science no longer teaches (2), of course: it is scientifically clear that we have the same organism at conception—or at very latest at implantation—as at birth.

However, for those of us who think that Christian tradition carries significant epistemic weight, it is interesting to ask why it was that historically Christian teaching stalwartly affirmed (1) despite many Christian thinkers accepting (2). I see two hypotheses each of which may explain this puzzle. Both hypotheses may be true (and indeed I think they are).

The first hypothesis is that (1) is simply a datum of the apostolic teaching of the early Church (it is after all found in the first-century Didache). The Church’s stalwart acceptance of the prohibition of abortion notwithstanding the tension between this prohibition and the best science of the day is a sign that the prohibition of abortion was grounded in divine revelation rather than philosophical speculation.

The second hypothesis is that the reasons for the traditional prohibition of abortion are logically independent of the moral status of the embryo or early fetus. We also know that the early Church forbade contraception. If the embryo or early fetus is not a human being, the an early abortion may not be morally very different from contraception. But the Church was opposed to contraception. Via this second hypothesis, the apparent tension between the blanket prohibition on abortion and the philosophical and scientific views on the beginning of human life is further evidence for an apostolic prohibition of contraception.

Should we see Christian division as a scandal?

[I am now thinking that the main point of this post may be mistaken for the reasons I state my in 11:58 AM October 5, 2020 comment. Nonetheless, I think the Bayesian stuff at the bottom of the post may be correct, and so perhaps the disunity between Christians should not as such count as evidence against the truth of Christianity.]

It is often said that the fact that Christianity is divided into multiple denominations is a scandal and a tragedy. Now, in one sense the question of scandal is empirical: are people led away from the truth by this division? I don’t know the answer to the empirical question. On the one hand, it seems likely that some are. On the other hand, if all Christians had exactly the same doctrine, I suspect many would be suspicious of whether this unity is produced by the strength of the evidence or by social control.

But in any case, the question I want to address is not empirical, but rather whether it makes sense to be intellectually scandalized by the division of Christianity into multiple denominations and whether we should see it as a tragedy. And here there is a point that I have never seen address: when we discuss Christian division, we need to get clear on what we are comparing it to.

For the sake of argument (but not contrary to fact!) let’s suppose that if there is a true version of Christianity, it is the Catholic one. My argument will if anything be more compeling if a smaller denomination is singled out as the best candidate for the truth. Then, rounding to the nearest billion, we live in this world:

• w₁: 8 billion people, of whom 2 billion are Christians, of whom 1 billion are Catholic and the other billion are divided among multiple
  denominations.

But now compare to this world:

• w₂: 8 billion people, of whom 1 billion are Christians, all of whom are Catholic.

This is a world with no religious division. But from the Christian point of view is there reason to think this is a better world? Assuming the true version of Christianity is Catholicism, in w₁ and w₂ we have an equal number of people who identify with the true version of Christianity. But in w₁ there is another billion people who identify with other versions of Christianity. If Catholicism is the true version of Christianity, still these other versions are closer to the truth that not being a Christian is. (And a Christian who thinks Catholicism is not the true version of Christianity will presumably think that w₁ is much better than w₂.)

If the the relevant contrast to our denominationally divided world w₁ is w₂, then there is no tragedy and no one should be scandalized by the denominational division.

I suppose that when one thinks of the denominational division as a tragedy and a scandal, one is comparing w₁ to something like:

• w₃: 8 billion people, of whom 2 billion are Christians, all of whom are Catholic.

And, indeed, if Christianity is correct and the right version of Christianity is Catholicism, then as far as these numbers go, w₃ is better than w₁.

So, it all depends on what we are comparing the denominational division scenario to: are we comparing it to a scenario where the actual world’s non-Catholics (still assuming arguendo that the normative form of Christianity is Catholicism) aren’t Christian or to a scenario where they are Catholic?

Moreover, it is clear that even if a Catholic says that it is a tragedy that a billion Christians aren’t Catholic, it is a much greater tragedy that 7 billion humans aren’t Catholic, and 6 billion of them aren’t even Christian.

What if we don’t care about numbers, and just care about the fact of division? Suppose, abstractly, that there is a theistic religion R. Should we see significant division between adherents of R as evidence for R, against R or neutral? From a Bayesian point of view, one question to pose seems to be:

1. Given that R is the true religion, would we expect to see significant division or unity among the adherents of R?

Here is an argument for the unity answer. If God exists, he wants people to know the truth, so we would expect that everyone or nearly everyone should subscribe to the correct form of R, call that form R₁, and if that’s true, then of course nearly all adherents of R will be adherents of R₁.

But thinking about it this way mixes up two different arguments against Christianity: the argument from disunity and the argument from the fact that most people aren’t Christian. It’s the argument from disunity that we want to evaluate. To that end, instead of asking (1), I think we should ask:

2. Given that R is the true religion and yet the majority of human beings does not subscribe to R, would we expect to see significant division or unity among the adherents of R?

But now I don’t think we have much reason to say that we should expect unity. Let’s say that abstractly we have versions R₁, ..., R_n of religion R, that R₁ is in fact the correct one, and that all the versions agree on some fundamental claims F definitive of R as such. So, should we expect that all those who accept F should accept R₁ as well?

I see one main reason to think this: God wants us to know the truth. But it is already a part of the background assumptions in (2) that God’s desire that we know the truth does not result in the majority of humans subscribing to R, much less R₁. Given this part of the background, why should we expect the majority of those humans who subscribe to F to accept R₁?

Now, it may be that some religions are obviously logically interwoven, such that if one accepts the fundamental claims, the rest follows with sufficient obviousness that we would expect the vast majority of people who accept the fundamental claims to accept the less fundamental ones. But it seems to me that there is little reason a priori to think that the true religion should have such obvious logical interweaving.

So, I don’t think that given both that R is the true religion and that the majority of people do not accept R, I do not think we have reason to expect unity among the adherents of R. Indeed, we might reasonably expect that if there is a true version R₁ of R, there will be a significant core of people who accept R₁ and then a penumbra of people who accept some parts of R₁ but reject others, thereby landing themselves in some other version R_i of R.

In light of this, it seems to me that once we have evidentially taken into account the fact that the majority of people are not Christians, the further fact that the Christians are denominationally divided does not seem to be significant evidence against Christianity.

Mystery and religion

Given what we have learned from science and philosophy, fundamental aspects of the world are mysterious and verge on contradiction: photons are waves and particles; light from the headlamp on a fast train goes at the same speed relative to the train and relative to the ground; objects persist while changing; we should not murder but we should redirect trolleys; etc. Basically, when we think deeper, things start looking strange, and that’s not a sign of us going right. There are two explanations of this, both of which are likely a part of the truth: reality is strange and our minds are weak.

It seems not unreasonable to expect that if there were a definitive revelation of God, that revelation would also be mysterious and verge on contradiction. Of the three great monotheistic religions, Christianity with the mystery of the Trinity is the one that fits best with this expectation. At the same time, I doubt that this provides much of an argument for Christianity. For while it is not unreasonable to expect that God’s revelation would be paradoxical, it is a priori a serious possibility that God’s revelation might be so limited that what was revealed would not be paradoxical. And it would also be a priori a serious possibility that while creation is paradoxical, God is not, though this last option is a posteriori unlikely given what we learn from the mystical experience traditions found in all the three monotheistic religions.

So, I am not convinced that there is a strong argument for Christianity and against the other two great monotheistic religions on the grounds that Christianity is more mysterious. But at least there is no argument against Christianity on the basis of its embodying mysteries.

Three levels of theological models

There are three kinds of metaphysical models of a theological mystery—say, Trinity, Incarnation or Transubstantiation:

• realistic model: a metaphysical story that is meant to be a true account of what makes the mysterious doctrine be true

• potential model: a metaphysical story that is meant to be an epistemically possible account of what makes the mysterious doctrine be true

• analogical model: a story that is meant to be an epistemically possible account of what makes something analogous to the mysterious doctrine be true.

For instance, Aquinas’s accounts of the Trinity, Incarnation and Transubstantiation are realistic models: they are meant to be accounts of what indeed makes the doctrines true. Van Inwagen’s relative identity account of the Trinity or his body-snatching account of the resurrection, on the other hand, are only potential models: van Inwagen does not affirm they are true. And the history of the Church is filled with analogical models.

A crucial test of any of these models is this: Imagine that you believe the story to be true, and see if the traditional things that one says about the mystery (in the case of a realistic or potential model), or analogues of them (in the case of an analogical model), sound like reasonable things to say given what one believes.

For instance, consider a time-travel model of the Incarnation. Alice, currently a successful ultramarathoner and brilliant geologist, will live a long and fruitful life. Near the end of her life, she has lost most of her physical and mental powers, and all her knowledge of geology. She uses a time machine to go back to 2020 when she is in her prime. If we thought this story was true, it would be reasonable to find ourselves saying things like:

• Alice is a successful ultramarathoner and barely able to walk

• Alice understands continental drift and does not not know what magma is

• Alice is young and old

• Alice is in the pink of health and dying.

These things would sound like a contradiction, but the time-travel story shows they are not. However, these claims are also analogous to claims that constitute an especially mysterious part of the mystery of the Incarnation (and I suppose a mysterious part of a mystery is itself a mystery): Christ suffers and is impassible; Christ is omniscient and does not know everything; Christ is timeless and born around 4 BC.

Of course nobody should think that it’s literally true that the Incarnation is to be accounted for in terms of time travel. But what the analogical model does show is that there are contexts in which it is reasonable to describe a non-contradictory reality in terms that are very similar to the apparently contradictory incarnational claims.

Presentism and the Cross

1. It is important for Christian life that one unite one’s daily sacrifices with Christ’s sufferings on the cross.

2. Uniting one’s sufferings with something non-existent is not important for Christian life.

3. So, Christ’s sufferings on the cross are a part of reality.

4. So, presentism is false.

The Trinity, sexual ethics and liberal Christianity

Many Christians deny traditional Christian doctrines regarding sexual ethics while accepting traditional Christian Trinitarian doctrine. This seems to me to be a rationally suspect combination because:

1. The arguments against traditional Christian sexual ethics are weaker than the arguments against the doctrine of the Trinity.

2. A number of the controversial parts of traditional Christian sexual ethics are grounded
   at least as well in Tradition and Scripture as the doctrine of the Trinity is.

Let me offer some backing for claims 1 and 2.

The strongest arguments against traditional Christian sexual ethics are primarily critiques of the arguments for traditional Christian sexual ethics (such as the arguments from the natural law tradition). As such, these arguments do not establish the falsity of traditional Christian sexual ethics, but at best show that it has a weak philosophical foundation. On the other hand, the best arguments against the doctrine of the Trinity come very close to showing that the doctrine of the Trinity taken on its own terms is logically contradictory. The typical Christian theologian is the one who is on the defensive here, offering ways to resolve the apparent contradiction rather than giving rational arguments for the truth of the doctrine.

There are, admittedly, some arguments against traditional Christian sexual ethics on the basis of intuitions widely shared in our society. But we know that these intuitions are very much shaped by a changing culture, insofar as prior to the 20th century, one could run intuition-based arguments for opposite conclusions. Hence, we should not consider the arguments based on current social intuitions to be particularly strong.
But the intuition that there is something contradictory about the doctrine of the Trinity does not seem to be as dependent on changing social intuitions. The merely socially counterintuitive is rationally preferable to the apparently contradictory.

Neither the whole of the doctrine of the Trinity nor the whole of traditional Christian sexual ethics is explicit in Scripture. But particularly controversial portions of each are explicit in Scripture: the Prologue of John tells us that Christ is God, while both Mark and Luke tell us that remarriage after divorce is a form of adultery, and Paul is clear on the wrongfulness of same-sex sexual activity. And the early Christian tradition is at least as clear, and probably more so, sexual ethics as on the doctrine of the Trinity.

I am not saying, of course, that it is not rational accept the doctrine of the Trinity. I think the arguments against the doctrine have successful responses. All I am saying is that traditional Christian sexual ethics fares (even) better.

Junia/Junias and the base rate fallacy

I think it would be useful to apply more Bayesian analyses to textual scholarship.

In Romans 16:7, Junia or Junias is described as “famous among the apostles”. Without accent marks (which were not present in the original manuscript) it is not possible to tell purely textually if it’s Junia, a woman, or Junias, a man. Moreover, “among the apostles” can mean “as being an apostle” or “to the apostles”. There seems to be, however, some reason to think that the name Junia is more common than Junias in the early Christian population, and the reading of “among” as implying membership seems more natural, and so the text gets used as support for women’s ordination.

This post is an example of how one might go about analyzing this claim in a Bayesian way. However, since I am not a Biblical scholar, I will work with some made-up numbers. A scholarly contribution would need to replace these with numbers better based in data (and I invite any reader who knows more Biblical scholarship to write such a contribution). Nonetheless, this schematic analysis will suggest that even assuming that there really were female apostles, it is more likely than not that Junia/s is one.

Let’s grant that in the early Christian population, “Junia” outnumbers “Junias” by a factor of 9:1. Let’s also generously grant that the uses of “famous among” where the individual is implied to be a member of the group outnumber the uses where the individual is merely known to the group by a factor of 9:1. One might think that this yields a probably of 0.9 × 0.9 = 0.81 that the text affirms Junia/s to be an apostle.

But that would be to commit the infamous base rate fallacy in statistical reasoning. We should think of a text that praises a Junia/s as “famous among the apostles” as like a positive medical test result for the hypothesis that the individual praised is a female apostle. The false positive rate on that test is about 0.19 given the above data. For to get a true positive, two things have to happen: we have to have Junia, probability 0.9, and we have to use “among” in the membership-implying sense, probability 0.9, with an overall probability of 0.81 assuming independence. So the false positive rate on the test is 1 − 0.81 = 0.19. In other words, of people who are not female apostles, 19 percent of them will score positive on tests like this.

But we have very good reason to think that even if there were any female apostles in the early church, they are quite rare. Our initial sample of apostles includes the 12 apostles chosen by Jesus, and then one more chosen to replace Judas, and none of these were women. Thus, we have reason to think that fewer than 1/13 of the apostles were women. So let’s assume that about 1/13 of the apostles were female. If there were any female apostles, they were unlikely to be much more common than that, since then that would probably have been more widely noted in the early Church.

Moreover, not everyone that Paul praises are apostles. “Apostle” is a very special position of authority for Paul, as is clear from the force of his emphases on his own status as one. Let’s say that apostles are the subjects of 1/3 of Pauline praises (this is something that it would be moderately easy to get a more precise number on).

Thus, the chance that a randomly chosen person that Paul praises is a female apostle even given the existence of female apostles is only about (1/13)×(1/3) or about three percent.

If we imagine Paul writing lots and lots of such praises, there will be a lot of Junia/s mentioned as “famous among the apostles”, some of whom will be male, some female, and some of whom will be apostles and some not.
All of these are the “positive test results”. Of these positive test results, the 97% percent of people praised by Paul who aren’t female apostles will contribute a proportion of 0.19 × 97%=18% of the positive test results. These will be false positives. The 3% people who are female apostles will contribute at most 3% of the positive test results. These will be true positives. In other words, among the positive test results, approximately the ratio 18:3 obtains between the false and true positives, or 6:1.

In other words, even assuming that some apostles are female, the probability that Junia/s is a female apostle is at most about 14%, once one takes into account the low base rate of women among apostles and apostles among those mentioned by Paul.

But the numbers above are made-up. Someone should re-do the analysis with real data. We need four data points:

• Relative prevalence of Junia vs. Junias in the early Christian population.

• Relative prevalence of the two senses of “famous among” in Greek texts of the period.

• Reasonable bounds on the prevalence of women among apostles.

• Prevalence of apostles among the subjects of Pauline praise.

And without such numbers and Bayesian analysis, I think scholarly discussion is apt to fall into the base rate fallacy.

Religions as "faiths"

It is common in our culture to see religion as a matter of faith. Indeed, religions are sometimes even called “faiths”.

Here is a reason why one should be cautious with conceptualizing things in this way. Faith is a specifically Christian concept, with Christianity being centrally conceptualized as a matter of faith in Jesus Christ. To think about all religions in terms of faith is to presuppose that the Christian understanding of what is central to Christianity yields a correct way of understanding the life of other religions.

Either Christianity is or is not basically true.

If Christianity is basically true, then its self-understanding in terms of faith is likely correct. However, the truth of Christianity does not give one good reason to think other religions, with the possible exception of Judaism, would be rightly understood in terms of the concept of faith.

If Christianity is not basically true, then we should be cautious even about its own self-characterization. Self-understanding is an epistemic achievement, and if Christianity is not basically true, then we should not take it for granted that faith has the central role it is claimed to have. And we should certainly not expect that the self-characterization of a religion that is not true should also apply to other religions.