This is the second part of a conversation begun on the post, Dr. Watson’s Woes.
Chris wrote,
I agree it is possible to feed selected evolutionary principles into a demonic mixer & come out with Nazi genocide. But a similar sort of appliance could take in bits of Christian thought & turn out the Crusades or the Inquisition. Added to which historic European anti-Semitism (which fanned at least some of the flames of the Holocaust) was not unconnected with the Christian contention that the Jews rejected Jesus and had him killed.
I am not saying that ‘therefore religion is bad’. But I’m doubtful that a ‘specifically Christian’ teaching about us being ‘all created in the image of God’ automatically entails a conclusion of universal human equality. The support the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa gave to apartheid until the 1980s is enough counter-evidence, without having to call in Southern Baptist opposition to US civil rights or go even further back in history.
The point is that individuals, whether they are believers or non-believers, evolutionary biologists or bricklayers, decide their ethics for themselves. For a believer this will no doubt include deciding which strands of teaching to accept and live by and which to reject. But it is impossible to draw a boundary round one set of statements (and interpretations of statements) and coherently declare that set to be (say) the ‘true Christian teaching’. Every Christian splinter group (if not every Christian) in history has done the same and come up with a different set.
And I’m not sure I can accept your ‘Cambridge’ implication yet. Are you saying that principles drawn from science (or more specifically from evolutionary biology) are too dangerous for the majority who have not been lucky enough to study philosophy at Cambridge? So this majority would be advised to take the safer Christian option, ie to believe the reason we should see all humans as equal is that we have all been created by God in the image of God?
A problem I have with this, apart from the lack of any independent evidence, is that it prompts a whole lot of further questions, and therefore choices between different possible interpretations. If God made us in his image, did he or did he not also make (eg) chimpanzees or springboks or dolphins – or even oak trees – in his own image?
If he did, then what is it about himself that he copied across to these various creatures? And does our principle of universal equality now have to apply to all of them?
If he did not, then that suggests a very ‘anthropomorphic’ concept of God. What right do we have to assume God is human-like? Is it that Jesus was human and he was the son of God, so therefore God must be human-like in some sense? Isn’t there a concern that rather than God having created us in his image we might, in our understandably anthropocentric way, have got it wrong & in fact made God in our image?
I think the orthodox interpretation is that God made humans in his image but not all other creatures – or at least not in the same way. But this then imposes a problematic dogma on a key area of science. All the available evidence supports the view that humans evolved from non-human ancestors – specifically, for example, that present-day humans and present-day gorillas, chimpanzees etc share common ancestors. If God made humans in his image but not chimpanzees, how did this copy-making come about? At what point did it happen? Was evolution (with all its random variation and cruel wasteful selection) the mechanism whereby an ethical God intentionally created humans? And so on and so on.
The point I’m trying to make is that if we construe the ‘God’s image’ principle literally then it doesn’t simplify or clarify things at all – certainly not enough to deduce an ethical position from. But if we construe it metaphorically then it wouldn’t be robust enough to deduce an ethical position from either – if ‘in God’s image’ is a metaphor then it could only be a summary label for an ethical position, not the foundation of it.
I think most of all I disagree with the idea that important ethical issues like universal equality boil down to a choice between evolution/science on the one hand and religious belief on the other. We can choose how much information we want to be open to, how much we want to absorb, and how much we want to analyse it. But it is a fallacy to think that we or anyone can deduce our ethical principles from any statement of what is the case. I think it is therefore wrong to assume that just because someone thinks such and such is factually the case (about evolution for example), then his or her ethical principles must be such and such.
Similarly we can choose whether or not to follow a religious faith, and if we choose to follow one we can choose which one & how we want to follow it. Part of that choice is itself an ethical choice. Even if we then abandon our ethical autonomy and deduce all our subsequent choices from the religious faith we have chosen, I cannot see how we can absolve ourselves from our original delegation or abnegation.
Chris,
Thanks for your comments!
I’ll begin my response by saying that I whole-heartedly agree that “important ethical issues like universal equality” should not “boil down to a choice between evolution/science on the one hand and religious belief on the other,” and I would add that there appear to be many scientists (such as Francis Collins, author of The Language of God) who also are of the same mind.
Christianity ought to be a patron of the sciences (as it has been in the past – with a few notable exceptions, of course), rather than an enemy. Unfortunately, due to ignorance and fear (mostly on the part of the Church) there now exists an unnecessary divide between the two “camps,” a divide which really has been blown out of proportion (evidenced by the large number of scientists – maybe even a silent majority – who still hold to some kind of theistic position). The burden is really on believers to put their faith to the test by supporting scientific research and trusting that, whatever discoveries are made, God will not be disproved.
The antithesis of Christianity is not science, but rather, by definition, atheism. However, this doesn’t mean that we must burn one another at the stake. If we’ve learned anything in the last thousand years it’s that people can and must seek to coexist peacefully – despite profoundly different perspectives about reality.
I disagree with the idea that “it is impossible to draw a boundary round one set of statements (and interpretations of statements) and coherently declare that set to be (say) the ‘true Christian teaching’.” Perhaps on a very small scale this is true, but otherwise, how would we distinguish one religion from another? Christianity is clearly distinct from Islam in that it teaches that Jesus is the second person of the Trinity, “born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried, and the third day rose from the dead.” Sure, there are Calvinists, Arminians, pre-millenialists, Pentecostals, “Anabaptists”, those who believe in transubstantiation and those who hold to consubstantiation, etc., but 99 percent of the two billion plus Christians in the world are in agreement about the “essentials”, which are found in the creeds of the early Church.
And that same 99 percent would also agree that all men, being created in the image of God, are equal in value and ought to be treated with dignity.
So how do we explain the slave trade or racial discrimination (or the Inquisition or the Crusades)? The same way we explain how Christians can be guilty of adultery, homicide, theft, perjury, etc. Disobedience. It’s not so much a problem of interpretation as it is of convenient disregard for the teachings of Jesus. Paul wrote that “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils.” And it is evident that many nominal Christians throughout history have proven this maxim.
Regarding the orthodox interpretation of the imago dei, you’re right in your understanding that it is man alone who is created in God’s image. As to when and how this came about, it is surely a mystery, but that doesn’t mean we cannot deduce an ethical position from what we know.
For what it’s worth, I’ll give you two common interpretations of the imago dei that compliment one another quite well. The first is that we somehow resemble God in our immaterial being. There is a huge gap between the rational and creative capacities and the moral responsibilities of man and those of the animals. Dolphins have yet to discover trigonometry. Gorillas still have not produced a Rembrandt. And lions are not expected to keep the Ten Commandments (particularly the ones about murdering and stealing). We have a soul and/or spirit that somehow sets us apart from all other earthly creatures.
The second is that we bear God’s image in our role as stewards of the earth. Genesis 1:26 says, “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’” There seems to be a direct relationship between being made in God’s image and having dominion over all the earth. In a very real sense, we are God’s viceregents of the earth.
As to our physical nature, we can mostly speculate. Though God is spirit, unlimited by a fleshly body, perhaps there is something in our corporeal design that somehow reflects God’s beauty or symmetry or something.
In a sense, I agree that the statement “men are created in the image of God” is insufficient for deducing an ethic of equality. For, what kind of God is he? Is he capricious, spiteful and deceptive? If that were the case, then dignity and love are irrelevant. But it is not. He is good. He is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in kindness and truth. In a word, He is love. And because of his moral beauty and his position as sovereign King, He is infinitely valuable and deserving of our undivided devotion.
Therefore, if God is worthy of our respect and love, then it should follow that our fellow humans, created in His image, are also worthy of a similar type of respect and love. And this is exactly what Jesus teaches: the first and greatest command is to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and the second is to love our neighbor as ourselves. And who is our neighbor? Everyone – even the religiously, culturally, and racially “inferior” Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37).
Here is a foundation for a principle of equality that crosses racial, economic, and every other sociological boundary. It is an imperative (the golden rule) born out of a proposition (the imago dei). Whether or not we choose to live by it is another matter.
Yours,
George
[...] http://amateuraficionado.com/2009/11/23/the-scientific-determination-of-value/ and http://amateuraficionado.com/2009/12/01/human-dignity-derived-from-christian-teaching/. Chimpanzee Beetle Cheetah James D Watson Jared Diamond: Guns Germs and Steel South African Dutch [...]
Thank you again George for your very comprehensive response. It has helped me enormously to clarify my own thinking about what I was & wasn’t trying to say.
I agree there may be no necessary conflict between science in general and religious faith. Indeed there are definite strands in modern theology which take comfort in the counter-intuitive weirdness of today’s physics and cosmology, as it seems to leave a lot of leeway for theism. I am not convinced though that the kind of cosmological God who might have been responsible for fine-tuning the values of a handful of fundamental constants has any obvious connection to the successive and parallel concepts of the Abrahamic God whose principal relationship to human beings is ethical. If there is a ‘God of the physicists & cosmologists’ he is ethically neutral at best.
I agree also that there have been periods in history when science and religious faith were staunch allies. One is mediaeval Islam in Spain & North Africa. Perhaps even more significant was the explosion of western science from the Renaissance through to the Enlightenment and beyond. Descartes, Pascal, Kepler, Copernicus and Newton all saw themselves as researching and revealing the underlying rationality of God’s creation. For a good few hundred years it was commonly believed that science was putting God’s existence beyond doubt.
But I think it is no accident that one of the strongest science-based attacks on religious belief in recent years should have come from evolutionary biology. Before the modern evolutionary synthesis of the 1930s it was still possible to see the origin and diversity of life in terms of divine creation. But as the thinking of Julian Huxley, RA Fisher, Theodosius Dobzhansky, JBS Haldane and their colleagues and successors began to permeate biology a viable alternative to divine creation emerged and strengthened.
I think it is fair to say that the position today is something like this: although it would be misguided and indeed unscientific to claim that evolutionary theory has disproved God, the burden of proof lies on those who claim divine creation rather than the inheritance of cumulative random variation under the influence of natural selection as the more likely explanation for the diversity of life.
It is not that evolutionary theory has disproved God, but more that the two potential explanations are incompatible. For myself, opting for the God hypothesis would mean throwing out too much baby with the bathwater.
It is just possible to force the two pictures together, but the resulting marriage is not a happy one. A creator God which deliberately kicked off evolution by natural selection is a cruel and callous God which immediately disqualifies itself as a source of moral goodness.
(See Touched by an angel #2 for more on this. Yes I have read Francis Collins’s The Language of God. I don’t have it with me at the moment but I can remember being very unconvinced by his arguments.)
As far as the bounded set of Christian statements is concerned, you will notice I carefully included ‘and interpretations of statements’. I wasn’t denying there might be a minimum set of statements which all Christians would agree with. There may well be. But I doubt if that minimum set would be substantive enough to qualify as the ‘true Christian teaching’.
In regard to your suggested core beliefs, I wasn’t aware that Christianity was Trinitarian by definition – which your ‘Jesus is the second person of the Trinity’ would imply. Do Unitarians or those followers of Jesus before the First Council of Nicaea not count as Christians? The phrase ‘born of the virgin Mary’ could also be a bit doubtful, considering the view that the gospel references to Mary’s virginity could have been an attempt to link Jesus with an interpretation of a prophesy in Isaiah which is itself ambiguous as to whether literal virginity was intended in the original Hebrew. Does someone not count as a Christian who is a follower of Jesus’s teachings but who does not accept (perhaps because he or she sees as irrelevant) Jesus’s miraculous birth? Must a Christian accept the resurrection as a literal historical fact rather than as a powerful spiritual & ethical metaphor?
And even if it was the case that all Christians do accept your outline (including at least two miracles) as literal historical fact, it is surely the ethical implications which matter? Without the ethical implications it is just a story about magic. What matters is what people believe are the attributes of the God Jesus is the son of, what Jesus’s teachings were, and what they mean for people living today. That’s what I meant by the interpretations of statements.
Even if it is the case that 99% of Christians do believe in the literal truth of the statement that ‘Jesus is the second person of the Trinity, [who was] born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried, and the third day rose from the dead’, believing that statement is surely not enough to qualify someone as a Christian? Even if it is necessary it is not sufficient. I cannot see how the statement is enough to qualify as ‘the true Christian teaching’.
As far as the imago dei is concerned I’m afraid we’ll have to agree to disagree – profoundly and respectfully.
Because I am looking at belief from the outside your arguments seem circular to me. To say something is a mystery is another way of saying we cannot give a coherent account of it. So I cannot see how we can give ourselves the right to infer anything from it, let alone something as important as ethics.
The factual content in your paragraph about our somehow resembling God in our immaterial being would equally support the view that we have invented a God to be like us. Perhaps we can tell that dolphins do not know trigonometry. I cannot see how we could be sure that dolphins do not have their own dolphin God. As I tried to argue before with my examples of whales and slime moulds, I really cannot see what is specially unique about our own uniqueness that is convincing proof that we and only we have been made in God’s image. Yes I can understand that because of the particular features we have we may be the only organisms who would want to think we have been made in God’s image, but that is a very different matter.
I also reject as anthropocentric the notion that we have dominion over the earth and its other inhabitants. If that is an implication of being made in God’s image then that would be good enough reason in itself for rejecting the doctrine. One of the many reasons for our current ecological disaster is the pernicious idea that the world is somehow ‘ours’. Yes it is possible to give the dominion idea a positive spin as in: we have a duty to look after the world because we have dominion over it as God’s vice-regents, and up to now we have discharged that duty very badly. But that is very new thinking, and very different from the kind of exploitation and disregard Genesis 1:26 would have supported in the past. Far better surely to think that we have the duty to look after the world because we have both the power to despoil it and the ability to amend our behaviour, not because we have any rights over the poor place?
As for ‘something in our corporeal design that somehow reflects God’s beauty or symmetry’ – again this seems both circular and selective. If this is so then our entire corporeal design should reflect God’s beauty – but what of the parts that don’t? Does our decay and death reflect God’s own decay and death? Even when we are in the prime of our lives our bodies contain elements of dreadful architecture which a designer, divine or otherwise, would be ashamed of. Our backs are mostly evolved to suit walking on four legs, not two – hence the prevalence of back trouble. The internal human female anatomy is a cruel bodge – very few animals suffer in childbirth the way women do – but evolutionary explanations are straightforward and convincing.
I see no evidence for, or ethical value in, thinking we have been created by God in God’s image, and far more reason for thinking we have made God in our image (eg by extrapolating and universalising what we see as the best in ourselves at any particular time).
The idea that we can deduce an ethical imperative, an ought, from a statement about what is the case (the imago dei theory) does not, I think, circumvent the naturalistic fallacy. This is because there is an unstated ethical premise in the imago dei concept. You have defined God as an entity who deserves our devotion, respect and love.
The inference is therefore not:
1.1 All people are made in the image of God (an is); ergo
1.2 All people are worthy of devotion, respect and love (an ought); ergo
1.3 You should treat all people as equal (an ought)
The inference from 1.1 to 1.2 would be fallacious, so the whole is fallacious.
But the inference is actually more like:
2.1 All people are made in the image of God (an is) AND
2.2 God is infinitely worthy of devotion, respect and love (an ought); ergo
2.3 All people are worthy of devotion, respect and love (an ought); ergo
2.4 You should treat all people as equal (an ought)
The inference is from the combination of 2.1 and 2.2 to 2.3, so it does not contravene the naturalistic fallacy. We are not deducing an ought from an is.
What worries me about trying to base an ethical principle on descriptions of divine entities – no matter how much weight we place on the pedigree of those descriptions – is that the descriptions could be wrong or incomplete. The theological response to this problem is generally to embed indefiniteness, neverendingness, apophasis into the concept of the deity. So for example we can never know what the absolutely best thing to do is, because only God knows that, and we are only finite. We can only do our best.
But the God of the theologians is very rarely the God of ordinary mortals. Church sermons are more often about what God is like & what he wants of people, than they are confessions of the preacher’s fundamental ignorance.
Is the apophatic tradition completely wrong? If not, then if there is rationality in the idea that we cannot say what God is like, only what he is not like, what do we mean by saying we are made in the image of God?
For my money we are better off keeping the indefiniteness and neverendingness inside the ethical imperatives themselves. The idea that I have been made in God’s image is for me just a metaphor. If for example it gives me an easy answer why I should not apply the Golden Rule to a chimpanzee then I would say the metaphor is misguided.
Thanks again!
Chris
thinking makes it so
[...] made in the image of God is actually very obscure and baffling for a non-believer. (See for example Human Dignity Derived from Christian Teaching.) In a different context ‘secularists’ very probably would scratch their heads. But [...]
Chris,
I will begin by addressing something you wrote in the discussion, “The Scientific Determination of Value”. You wrote:
Believers indeed knew what he meant: apartheid is wrong and should not be practiced (an ought) exactly because all human beings are made in the image of God (an is). To assume that Rev. TuTu meant something else is unfounded conjecture. It is safer to assume that he was merely affirming what the majority of orthodox Christians and possibly even Jews and Muslims believe.
Yes, we also approach ethics deontologically. The reason we love our neighbor as ourself is because God commands us to. But it’s not an either/or situation. In fact, it’s highly probable that the reason God prohibits murder, but allows the killing and eating of animals is precisely because man is made in His image while animals are not.
Below is conclusive evidence demonstrating that the belief that the imago dei doctrine has ethical consequences is the common Christian and possibly even Jewish and Muslim position.
The Roman Catholic Position
New Advent – Justice
New Advent.org – Instruction on Certain Aspects of “Theology of Liberation”
Note: New Advent is the online version of the Catholic Encyclopedia.
-
The Eastern Orthodox Position (The primary proponents of apophatic theology)
The Russian Orthodox Church – Official Web Site of the Department for External Church Relations
-
The Position of the World Council of Churches (Protestantism)
The World Council of Churches Website (which represents almost all Mainline Protestant churches)
-
And here’s a summary of the “general Christian view” by your own BBC:
BBC.co.uk – Euthanasia – General Christian View
Between Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Mainline Protestantism, we have covered 99% of Christendom, and what could be described as normative Christian beliefs–at least on this issue. Generally, where these three traditions overlap would be the core (or kerygma) of “true” Christianity. Groups that reject these essentials (such as Unitarians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, the Jesus Seminar, etc.) could be classified as either non-Christian, heretical, or sectarian cults. The essentials are determined primarily by Scripture, and secondarily by the Creeds and Councils.
Here’s what some Jewish and Muslim traditions think about the imago dei:
Rabbis for Human Rights–North America – Kvod Ha-Briot: Human Dignity in Jewish Sources…
-
The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine – Spirituality, Religious Wisdom, and the Care of the Patient
-
I think it’s pretty clear that Christianity and possibly two more of the world’s major religions believe that man’s dignity is derived from the fact that he is created in the image of God. And it also seems evident that most theologians make the “illogical” jump from this “is” to the “ought” of the Golden Rule.
In response to your critique of the applicability of the “incomprehensible” doctrine of the imago dei (You wrote, ” I cannot see how we can give ourselves the right to infer anything from it, let alone something as important as ethics.”), I ask you, “By what law or principal do we have the right to give ourselves the right to do anything?”
Thanks for the challenging thoughts,
George