This post was written by Patrick Rist on November 8, 2007
“Agency” is one of those words (like “hegemony”) that tend to identify one as either an academic or an intellectual wannabe. Here I mean it to be the ability to act, or perhaps the origin of action. It often refers to personal decision as the origin of one’s actions.
Agency has been under attack in academic circles for much of the late modern age. These attacks have come from both the “nature” and “nurture” camps. “Nurture” was the first to take a stab. Thirty or forty years ago the public first became aware of the debate concerning whether one’s upbringing exerted such an influence upon one’s behavior that personal responsibility was questionable. Skinner’s behaviorism was both an originator and the terminal point of such speculation.
More recently, “nature” has made the strongest arguments against agency. With the advent of neuroscience, the mapping of the human genome, and the rise of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, hardly a week goes by that another impetus for human action is not supposedly found “in the genes,” or located in a part of the brain.
What has driven this impulse to debunk agency and its sibling, free will? It is difficult to ascribe merely scientific curiosity, particularly when one sees the highly reductionistic explanations for behavior, and the equally irresponsible speculations about the social implications of some “findings.”
It is curious that a society so obsessed with personal autonomy and expressive individualism would embrace explanations that essentially negate both choice and achievement. One suspects that our fellow citizens would only accept such opinions from those in lab coats, the vestments of our new priests.
How are Christians to view agency? Here are some ideas that may be worth contemplation:
1. The biblical picture of the person simply assumes that agency is real. We are personally responsible for our decisions; we are culpable for our sins. Calvinists and conservative Arminians find common ground here.
2. At the same time, though, we do not sacrifice agency and responsibility by acknowledging that environmental factors play a part in our choices, or that biological factors in the brain and our genes influence behavior.
3. The crucial point that must be maintained, however, is that ultimately neither nature nor nurture fully explain (or excuse) human moral choices.
I’ll have a few more thoughts along these lines in my next entry.
This post was written by Patrick Rist on August 23, 2007
Recently I watched a PBS program on the ongoing “water wars” in the American West. Specifically, this program was about the burgeoning growth of Las Vegas, NV, its voracious appetite for water, and its push to acquire water from the sparsely populated, and mostly agricultural northern part of the state.
One northern Nevada citizen expressed a view that was simultaneously commonsensical and naïve: he said that a city like Las Vegas should limit its growth to its available water resources.
On one hand, this would make sense (putting aside for the moment the obvious fact that by that standard, there really shouldn’t be a city where Las Vegas is). But on the other hand, it struck me that there was nothing so antithetical to the “American Creed” than the idea that we might somehow be limited by our natural surroundings.
When I say the “American Creed,” I’m being a bit facetious. But I think we know intuitively that there are certain ideas or concepts that are either broadly true of American life and history, or that we like to believe about ourselves. These are largely unexamined, widely-accepted values or goods – notions like “success,” “individualism,” “progress,” and the like.
As with any creed, along with the things we believe, there are also a number of things we cannot abide – and I would argue that the possibility of “limits” is one of them. It seems too negative to Americans to suggest that there might be or should be a limit to economic expansion, to individual choice, to personal success. We live in a nation that was founded on the principles of self-government, unbridled by inherited privilege, and on edge of a seemingly limitless wilderness waiting to be settled. We come by our abhorrence of limits honestly.
So far in the history of our nation, science and technology has enabled us to ignore limits – particularly in the natural environment. Another part of the American Creed is the “can-do attitude.” The call of President Kennedy to put a man on the moon may have led directly to the automatic response of “We will rebuild!” in New Orleans after Katrina. It would have been seen as “un-American” to ask, “Wait a minute – do we really want a city this far under sea level?” It would have certainly been politically suicidal.
Now we see the momentum of science encouraging the idea that limits simply don’t exist, particularly in the realm of genetics. If it can be done, it should be. To call this into question is like the Pope refusing to look through Galileo’s telescope.
And yet if we are interested in being Christian before being American, we need to look carefully at the concept of limits from a biblical perspective. The story of the Fall would seem to imply that we will inevitably encounter limits in our lives; the story of the Tower of Babel would seem make it explicit.
God’s law is rife with limits, which is why it is so hateful to the unregenerate. What could be more limiting, for example, than to be told that you should only have sex with one person in your entire life? But if God’s law is a major clue to his very character, then what does it tell us about how he views the concept of limits?
Nor are limits unknown in the New Testament. There is “no other name” but that of Jesus by which we can be saved; an inconvenient truth if there ever was one.
All this is merely prologue – it doesn’t answer the specifics of what limits are appropriate and which aren’t. My point is that Christians should not be allergic to entertaining the idea of limits in the personal and public spheres.
· If you’re like me, you may view those who openly talk about limits (particularly environmentalists) as having unrealistic and even anti-human political agendas. Is this always true, though?
· How might the American dislike of limits affect how we hear the gospel?
· How do we balance a legitimate concern about limits with political freedom?
· Is the notion of limits something that we can introduce into our classrooms? How would it interact with notions of personal responsibility and agency?
This post was written by Mark Hansard on July 9, 2007
In my last post on Julie Reuben’s The Making of the Modern University, I described Reuben’s view that the 19th century belief academics held in the “unity of truth” was obliterated by the advent of Darwinism and the subsequent demise of natural theology. In chapter 2 of her book, “Science and Religion Reconceived,” Reuben explores the effort, in the 30 years after Darwin’s Origin of Species, to harmonize Darwinism with Christian theology in order to maintain the unity of truth and the integration between science and theology that had reigned in natural theology for so many decades.
What is fascinating about Reuben’s account is that the unity of truth was not immediately abandoned, nor was it believed that science and theology were irreconcilable. Instead, an eventual failure to harmonize the two to the satisfaction of both parties eventually led to the abandonment of theology in favor of teaching religion in universities instead.
According to Reuben, Darwinism brought with it a new, revolutionary view of science that viewed scientific knowledge as imperfect but progressive, always seeking to correct itself through further research and experiment. The new science relied on hypotheses, theories, even imagination as it attempted to explain the world, and a good scientific theory would have practical, measurable results. This was opposed to the previous Baconian view of science that viewed the scientific enterprise as purely inductive, generalizing from meticulous observation to scientific laws. Scientific truths under Baconianism consisted of the certainty of memorized lists of static classifications. Baconian science fit well with natural theology because the scientific laws implied a law-giver. Thus, when theologians attacked Darwinism, they often did so on the basis that it was unscientific because it did not follow Baconian method. But the new view of science eventually won out, and by the 1890’s, very few scientists were Baconians.
The triumph of this new philosophy of science precipitated a crisis regarding how to reconcile Christian theology with Darwinism and thus maintain the unity of truth that the old natural theology had held together. Scholars struggled to reconcile Darwinism and Christianity in a way that would maintain the authority and value of both. Some argued for “separate spheres” of knowledge, in which scientists studied the natural world and theologians studied the supernatural world (sound familiar?). In order to maintain this distinction, some argued that much of the Bible was figurative and not literal, thus it expressed spiritual truths through myth. Others claimed that if theologians would just “give up their dogmatism” and adopt an “openness of scientific inquiry,” the conflict between science and theology would go away. The growing number of agnostics argued that theology dealt with an “unknowable, mysterious power” that science could not study. But few scholars on either side bought into the separate spheres talk. Conservative theologians thought it denigrated traditional theology, while scientists thought it unnecessarily treated scientific theories which dealt with unobservable phenomena as out of bounds.
Eventually scientists came to view theology as a meddlesome interloper who made a priori pronouncements about truth that simply got in the way of free inquiry and scientific advancement. Theology would have to be abandoned if the new, modern university founded upon the progressive philosophy of science would be allowed to pursue scientific research unfettered. But how could this be done, while maintaining the importance of Christianity? According to Reuben, the solution of scholars and administrators “was to distinguish theology, defined as a mode of inquiry and a set of doctrines, from religion, which was left largely undefined as sentiment, experiences, ritual, and ethical values” (57). Thus, universities abandoned the teaching of theology in favor of religion in an attempt to allow science unrestricted horizons to pursue, while allowing Christianity to maintain its importance in university life. Curiously, it was thought that applying the scientific method to the study of religion would strengthen, not weaken, Christian thought and moral virtue.
But exactly the opposite occurred. Notice what had been lost. Theology is a knowledge tradition, which purportedly carries authority because it consists of truth claims that carry weight in describing the real world. However, in teaching religion, the knowledge conveyed was not about doctrines of God, man and salvation, but instead a set of propositions about what religious people believed, how they worshipped. In short the study of religion conveyed knowledge about how religious people acted apart from asking the question of whether their beliefs were true. Theological knowledge, and with it moral knowledge, was permanently lost. Instead of strengthening Christianity with science, the new religious studies departments actually weakened Christianity by taking away its authority, an authority that is based upon knowledge. Not surprisingly, administrators could not get students to be interested in their new religion classes.
What can we learn from this? While this is an obviously complex subject, in my view at least two observations are in order. First, it is imperative that we view theology as a knowledge tradition if the secularization of the modern university is to be reversed. We can help bring this about simply by treating theology as if it constitutes knowledge, and pursuing our research accordingly. Second, we need to understand that when we advocate the integration of theology with research on the modern campus, some scholars familiar with the history of science will bridle, assuming that we are advocating a return to ignorant 19th century views of science and outdated models of how universities ought to be run. We need to reassure such colleagues that we are not advocating an overthrow of the research model of the university, nor are we advocating a return to now discredited scientific views. Instead, we are simply asserting that, in the modern research university, there ought to be room for Christian scholarship which views theology as knowledge, and even allows moral wisdom to have the authority of knowledge behind it.
Part 1 Part 3
|
