Fall 2014, Volume 9, Issue 1
featuring
also inside
Towards a Divine Understanding of Beauty
Reflections on the Writings of William Jewett Tucker A Christian Perspective on the Meaning of Freedom Can Science Replace God? A Fundamental Misunderstanding
“
V
A Letter from the Editor
ox clamantis in deserto.” Dartmouth’s Latin motto translates into English as “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: prepare the way of the Lord.” It comes from Isaiah 40:3, the start of one of the longest and most beautiful Messianic prophecies in Scripture. The passage anticipates the arrival of John the Baptist, who ushered in Christ’s ministry with a cautionary, yet hopeful message. He cautioned the people to “repent,” yet to also rejoice, “for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matt 3:2). The savior promised in Genesis 3:15 was about to arrive in the person of Jesus. This motto is fitting for Dartmouth when read in its literal sense: Dartmouth was founded as a voice in the wilderness. When Reverend Eleazar Wheelock established the college in 1769, the New Hampshire woods were on the wilderness frontier of Colonial America. One of the goals of the college was “the education and instruction of Youth of the Indian Tribes in this Land…and also of English Youth and any others,” bringing Latin, Greek, history, mathematics, and much else to an otherwise uneducated region. Dartmouth’s motto, though, also applies in its figurative sense: just as John the Baptist’s ministry prepared the way for Christ’s coming, so Wheelock saw Dartmouth as a means of preparing the minds of many for Christianity. The college was to provide an education “in reading, writing, and all parts of learning which shall appear necessary and expedient” for bringing Christianity to the youth of the area. It was a complete education that prepared its students’ minds to understand Scripture and worship God. Wheelock believed that faith and reason go hand in hand, for one of the goals of education is to help the mind understand the rationality, validity, truth, and desirability of the faith the heart professes. The Apologia stands in the shadow of Eleazar Wheelock, aspiring to capture and articulate the vision he held for life and academics. First, we believe God exists, the Bible is his revealed word, and Christianity is true. Since these are true, we, like the Israelites to whom John the Baptist preached, must not ignore the Bible’s call to repentance from sin. Second, we seek to engage campus in an academic discussion that recognizes the importance and validity of the Christian perspective. We at the Apologia hold that the Christian worldview—more than any other worldview existing or yet undreamt—best describes the world around us. The Christian view explains the narrative of history, provides a framework for understanding beauty, and can satisfy our deepest fears about the meaning and purpose of life. We seek to find the alignment between faith and reason, firmly believing that the only logically sound and emotionally satisfying union of the two is in Christianity. This is what we, imperfect though we are, seek to show in our writing. We ask that you read with an open mind.
Nathaniel Schmucker Editor-in-Chief
Submissions
We welcome the submission of any article, essay, or artwork for publication in The Dartmouth Apologia. Submissions should seek to promote respectful, thoughtful discussion in the community. We will consider submissions from any member of the community but reserve the right to publish only those that align with our mission statement and quality rubric. Email: The.Dartmouth.Apologia@Dartmouth.Edu Front cover image by Natalie Shell ’15
Letters to the Editor
We value your opinions and encourage thoughtful submissions expressing support, dissent, or other views. We will gladly consider any letter that is consistent with our mission statement’s focus on promoting intellectual discourse in the Dartmouth community.
Fall 2014, Volume 9, Issue 1
Editor-in-Chief Nathaniel Schmucker ’15 Managing Editor Macy Ferguson ’16 Editorial Board Chris D’Angelo ’16 Sandy Fox ’16 Jake Casale ’17 Steffen Eriksen ’17 Sara Holston ’17 Matthew West ’17 Business Manager Joshua Tseng-Tham ’17 Production Manager Janice Yip ’15 Production Staff Angela Seo ’17 Matthew West ’17 Chenchen Li ’18 Photography Natalie Shell ’15 Contributors Hannah Jung ’15 Marylynne Sitko ’16 Marissa Le Coz ’17 Advisory Board Richard Denton, Physics Gregg Fairbrothers Eric Hansen, Thayer James Murphy, Government Lindsay Whaley, Classics Leo Zacharski, DMS Special thanks to Council on Student Organizations The Eleazar Wheelock Society
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The opinions expressed in The Dartmouth Apologia are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the journal, its editors, or Dartmouth College. Copyright © 2014 The Dartmouth Apologia.
INTERVIEW: 2
Revisiting the Puritans: Recreation, Community, and the Christian Mind George K. McFarland
A RADICAL UNITY: 8
Reflections on the Writings of William Jewett Tucker Sara Holston ’17
THE UNIVERSE: 14
Magical, Meaningful, and Modern Marylynne Sitko ’16
TOWARDS A DIVINE 19 UNDERSTANDING OF BEAUTY Jake Casale ’17
FREEDOM REDEFINED: 25
A Christian Perspective on the Meaning of Freedom Marissa Le Coz ’17
A CHRISTIAN VIEW 29 OF HISTORY
Nathaniel Schmucker ’15
CAN SCIENCE REPLACE GOD? 35
A Fundamental Misunderstanding Joshua Tseng-Tham ’17
PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS 40 IN NORTH KOREA: A Perspective Hannah Jung ’15
T
he Dartmouth Apologia exists to articulate Christian perspectives in the academic community.
An interview with
GEORGE K. MCFARLAND Conducted by Nathaniel Schmucker
George K. McFarland is the Dean of Faculty at the Delaware County Christian School in Newtown Square, PA, where he has taught history for the past 37 years. He has also served as an AP Exam Leader and Reader for U.S. History for the past 23 years. After graduating from Taylor University with a B.S. Ed., he taught history at Salem Academy in Oregon. He has an M.A. in history from Temple University, an M.A. in history from Bryn Mawr College, and a Ph.D. in history from Bryn Mawr College. His dissertation was a social and cultural analysis of Boston and Albany from 1630 to 1750. He has written a number of book reviews for professional publications. He is a Ruling Elder and Adult Bible School teacher at Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia.
Revisiting the Puritans:
RECREATION, COMMUNITY, AND THE CHRISTIAN MIND
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How did you develop an interest in studying the Puritans?
My interest in the Puritans began chiefly because of my grandfather, who avidly read them, but I became extremely interested in the Puritans in graduate school, where I did my Ph.D. at Bryn Mawr College in American colonial religious history. My dissertation covered aspects of the Puritans, studying the cultural-social analysis of their community in Boston and the Dutch Reformed community in Albany between 1630 and 1750. Also, as a Christian myself, I have found these people to be very helpful, so, in addition to my professional interest, I have studied them as part of my devotional reading. What do most Americans think of Puritan culture, especially regarding their views on recreation?
Unfortunately, most Americans have a very low opinion of the Puritans. This has come mostly since the 1920s, when there developed a strong movement against the Puritans. People began to think they were “killjoys” and boring people. As a result, the culture of America since then has looked back upon the Puritans very cynically, often condemning these people unnecessarily, viewing them as very heavenly minded and consequentially of no earthly good. There is some truth in the stereotypes that have developed. They were very hard working people and did not have as much time for the music and the arts as
Jonathan Edwards
who tried to make ends meet in very difficult circumstances. This connotation comes even in light of the tremendous scholarship of Perry Miller in the 1930s and 40s.i Perry sought to redeem the Puritans. Even though he was certainly no sympathizer with their theological beliefs, he yet had great respect for them:
The Puritans were not despisers of the culture, but what they wanted was a proper balance in life. The mind, body, feelings, and emotions were all to be put in their proper, ordered places. we do today. But also, there is a lack of understanding of the differences between the Puritans in America and those in England. The Puritans that came in the 1630s were far more affluent and were much more a people of the arts than William Bradford and the other Pilgrims that had come on the Mayflower a decade earlier. Our connotation with all Puritans is sometimes shaped by those who came here in the 1620s with very little, and
for their minds, for what they did, and for the way they sought to deal with some of the crucial issues of life. In terms of recreation specifically, they did hold to the view that they could participate in recreational activities. The Puritans were not despisers of the culture, but what they wanted was a proper balance in life. The mind, body, feelings, and emotions were all to be put
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in their proper, ordered places. Moreover, the Puritans simply did not have the time benefits of this day. At that particular time. there were not the recreational levels that Americans had by the end of the nineteenth century, when people began working five days per week, rather than six. The Puritans were hard workers, working six days and worshipping on the seventh. So, they were cautious about their recreation both because of a desire to keep recreation in balance and because of the restraints on their leisure time. How much of the limit on recreation was due to their theological beliefs and keeping life in balance, and how much was due to time restraints connected with moving to America?
It was probably more the latter than the former, for they came to America under very adverse conditions. Regarding the former, to the Puritans, rest meant rest from their labors of work. They believed in the creation ordinance, “Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the LORD thy God,” and so it was their theological belief that ultimately steered them.ii But the chief obstacles to recreation facing them in America were not anything in the Scriptures themselves limiting such activities. Because of the obstacles they faced in settling a new world, creating a new government, establishing a church, and trying to create a society built upon their principles, they simply lacked the time to have recreation or rest. The Puritans certainly had more recreational activities in England than in America, though still not to any extent what we have today.
weddings and times of civic or church celebration, the Puritans did dance. Dancing was for a specific reason, and it was a good reason that had Scriptural support. become a debate. When a forum works well, it can be almost magical. It can be the kind of deep and personal engagement with important issues that most of us long for. If the Puritans were not musical Philistines, what types of music did they have?
Music was far more a part of life for the Puritans in England than in America. We have, for instance, the flute that John Bunyan carved while he was in prison. Although they had instruments, the Puritans brought few to America due primarily to the inconvenience of the journey. John Winthrop was a very affluent lawyer who lived in the southeast portion of England, but there were many things he could not bring to America but had to leave behind. When the Puritans came to America, they put together the Bay Psalm Book, which was their worship songbook with text set to music. Although they only had seven or eight melodies the Bay Psalm Book went through thirty editions, which was amazing in that time period. The Puritans were very cautious about the role of music, but it played a very integral role in their community and culture. Did the Puritans play sports?
In sports, the Puritans were balanced in the ways they participated. One Puritan author, Isaac Watts, said, “religion never was designed to make our plea-
Time to them was very precious, and they would look at our use of it as almost heathen or pagan in philosophy. Those that did have time engaged in what sort of recreational activities?
The Puritans had a number of recreational activities including archery, horseshoes, dancing, and taking walks. Jonathan Edwards would go on long horseback rides or walks in the forest where he had time alone to contemplate. Dancing, too, was a part of Puritan life; Oliver Cromwell even spoke about dancing until the wee hours of the morning at his daughter’s wedding. He and the Puritans as a whole did not have anything against dancing, but they did oppose mixed dancing. That to them was something they felt was inappropriate, for it could arouse sexual responses to the other partner. So, though they forbad mixed dancing, they did participate in square dancing and dancing of other sorts. Dancing was a part of Scripture, as even King David danced.iii On very joyful occasions such as
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sures less.”iv Sports were not forbidden in the Scriptures. If sports were forbidden the Puritans would not have participated, but since they were not forbidden the Puritans did participate. Yet, it was always to good balance; they sought to develop the mind, the heart, and the spiritual aspects of life without neglecting recreation and the enjoyment of one another. Square dances and individual sports of different sorts were part of life but were not overwhelming in their time. How do the Puritan and the contemporary American philosophy towards sport compare?
The way that the Puritans viewed sport is radically different from the way we view sport. Sport today is frequently an end in itself and is all consuming. They would see our culture as out of balance, having lost the perspective of the mind and having lost perspective of God’s commands for us to be whole persons
Seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony by Michael Hall, c. 1780
within his creation. They would not have approved of sport on Sunday or of professional sports where money is of great value. They would have disapproved of the amount of time we spend on sports. Time to them was very precious, and they would look at our use of it as almost heathen or pagan in philosophy. In contrast to our over emphasis of sport at every level, to them, the training of the mind from the youngest level was utmost, whether that be teaching the scriptures or teaching the liberal arts. Can you discuss their view towards alcohol? You mentioned earlier that the 1920s were a pivotal time in thinking about the Puritans. Did that mindset shift come due to the rise of teetotalism and the Prohibition?
Absolutely I think in that era Americans looked at the Puritans and saw a people that was rule-driven, too heavenly minded, legalistic, and of no earthly good. The stereotype developed that held that Puritans were teetotalers. This is not the case at all. There are references to the Puritans drinking beer and alcohol at carnival occasions. Oliver Cromwell, John Owen, and others did drink at times of celebration and of great joy. But they held to the scriptural injunction that they were not to overindulge and be drunk with alcohol. Paul writing to Timothy talks about taking a little bit of wine for the stomach’s sake.v Proverbs likewise speaks very clearly about drunkenness.vi Certainly drinking merely to consume one’s self in indulgence would never have been part of a Puritan community.
Paul Bunyan
What was the theology that formed the foundation of the Puritans’ understanding of leisure and work activities?
One of the most important things they held was that Scripture is a guide for and is authoritative for all of life. They held that if the Bible speaks about something and forbids doing it, then we are to not do it; if it does not address an area, we are given liberties, as Paul talks about in Romans, to participate in it with good judgment and good sense.vii Their foundation in all things was the Scriptures, which forbad some things specifically and for others gave liberty to participate with good balance and good sense. For their work ethic, they looked to verses like Colossians 3:23, which says, “Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men.”viii The Puritan work ethic believed that you did your work as unto the Lord: you did it honestly, diligently, and with integrity, serving the Lord rather than one another. Out of that came a notion that if you are working and doing well, that is good testimony to your own salvation. The Puritans saw society as rooted in Scripture and shaped towards doing what is Godly. How does this compare with contemporary American individualism, where we value pursuing our own desires and pleasures?
Individualism in America began chiefly at or around the time of 1776, where we begin to see talk of individual rights. Prior to that, people including the Puritans looked at life as built around communi-
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God for the betterment of the community. The Puritans sought to elevate the community in all areas. They sought to give greater honor to the Lord through their work in the community by being responsible to one another. How did the colonies transition from community-focused in 1630 to individual rights-focused in 1776?
One of the early aspects was in 1648 when one of the members of the Massachusetts Bay Colony appealed to the English Parliament to have citizenship within the Puritan community while not having the then-required church membership. Even from the very beginning there was a breakdown of the Puritans’ vision of unified community, church membership, and family. At the same time there was the arrival in America of other people and communities influenced by the Enlightenment. These people emphasized man’s individual freedom as opposed to the responsibilities to the community as a whole. Augustus Saint-Gaudens Bequest of Jacob Ruppert, 1939
ties. Richard Sibbes (1577-1635) said at one particular point, “When once we are in Christ, we live for others, not for ourselves.”ix The Puritans certainly did that. Their founding document, the Mayflower Compact, was a compact for a community and not an individualistic item. What Bradford says in the Mayflower Compact is that if one of us suffers we all suffer; if one rejoices we all rejoice. When they looked at life, they
How do you think that we can form a balance between the Puritan value of the community and Enlightenment value of the individual?
First of all, Christians must commit to their respective churches. When we as Christians commit to our church we commit to its community. It is not that the things we have through civic freedoms are unimportant, but unfortunately I am afraid to say that we have probably overemphasized them to the exclusion of our responsibility to the community. As Christians,
When they looked at life, they did not think in terms of what they could do to their own enjoyment while not hurting others. Rather, they thought that if something does not hurt anyone and they were free to do it under the Scriptures, then they had certain allowances to do that in their recreation, food, or drink, provided it were done to the glory of God for the betterment of the community. did not think in terms of what they could do to their own enjoyment while not hurting others. Rather, they thought that if something does not hurt anyone and they were free to do it under the Scriptures, then they had certain allowances to do that in their recreation, food, or drink, provided it were done to the glory of
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we need an understanding of what it means to live within the body of Christ found in the church. So, if we are not members of a church or are not engaged in a church community, we lose what Christ wants for us within a body where we are praying for one another and hearing needs within the community.
I believe that if we are diligent there, then God will make us increasingly sensitive to the greater concerns within our community—to the poverty within our country as well as the great needs socially and economically within our cities. It begins with our heart for knowing Christ, following him, and being obedient to him. Then God, by his Spirit, works in us so that we are not islands to ourselves. And I honestly believe that is where we have missed it. We think that it is all about us to the exclusion of others, but rather it is about the work that God is doing within the world. We need to have that same vision that Christ has for the world. Are there any lessons that Americans today can learn from their Puritan predecessors?
One I have already alluded to is that the Bible needs to be our authority and be seen as sufficient for all of life, whatever that might be. Although many will affirm that they believe in the authority of the Bible, we need to move one step further in practice. As the Puritans did, we need to understand that the Bible is sufficient for all of life, and not only that, is necessary for all of life. So we do what the Bible says and in areas where the Bible is silent we are given latitude of freedom and good, wise judgment. Second, the Puritans believed that God is the creator of beauty, art, and culture. We need to see that the beauty of the arts, the beauty of culture, and the beauty of the written language represent the magnificence of the Creator. Christians should not be despisers of the culture. In that way, we may need to be people unlike the Puritans. There were instances where the Puritans were very cautious about participating in the arts, theater, and other aspects of the broader culture. We need to see these things as reflecting God’s creation and representing it. Not to worship the arts by any means, but rather to keep it in perspective. Ultimately, Christians exist to glorify God even through their recreational and artistic endeavors. Have the Puritans, despite the negative attitude toward them, left any lasting impact on American society?
Absolutely. One of the most significant things that they have left behind, I believe, is the emphasis on a liberal arts education. John Harvard gave his whole livelihood to Harvard College and ministers of early New England and certainly of England were well educated. They were not, as Arthur Miller has portrayed in The Crucible, a people who were indecisive and had a hard time making decisions. These were men of great education, and I cannot help but believe that one reason we have such a great educational system in America is because of this original vision of the Puritans. They sought to train the mind for Godly purposes, that is,
to train the mind to understand the world that God has created in order that we might know the Creator better. And I think that is one of the great legacies that we enjoy to this day.
Further reading Cotton Mather’s Diary Diary and Journal of David Brainard John Winthrop by Francis Bremer The Life and Times of Cotton Mather by Kenneth Silverman The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century by Perry Miller The Puritan Family by Edmund Morgan Puritans at Play: Leisure and Recreation in Colonial New England by Bruce Daniels Quest for Godliness by J.I. Packer Remarkable Providences by Increase Mather Roger Williams by Edmund Morgan Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were by Leland Ryken
See Perry Miller’s seminal book, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, first published in 1939. ii. Exodus 20:9-10 (KJV). iii. When the Ark of the Covenant returned to Jerusalem at the start of David’s kingship, II Samuel 6:14 (ESV) says, “David danced before the Lord with all his might.” iv. Isaac Watts was the great Puritan songwriter. This line comes from his hymn, “Marching to Zion.” See J. I. Packer, Hot Tub Religion (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1987) 71-2. v. I Timothy 5:23. vi. See Proverbs 23:19-21, 29-35. vii. See Romans 14. viii. Colossians 3:23 (ESV). ix. Richard Sibbes, “Christ is Best; or, St Paul’s Strait” in The Complete Works of Richard Sibbes, D.D., Master of Catherine Hall, Cambridge; Preacher of Gray’s Inn, London. vol 1, ed Rev. Alexander Balloch Grosart (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1862) 344. i.
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A RADICAL UNITY: Reflections on the Writings of
William Jewett Tucker
by Sara Holston
W
illiam Jewett Tucker holds a special place in Dartmouth College history as a graduate of the class of 1861 and as the College’s ninth president. His tenure as president encompassed many significant changes for Dartmouth. Not the least of these include almost tripling the student body, raising money for dormitories to create a community of spirit among the students, and starting “Dartmouth Night” to bring together students and alumni in celebration of the college, a tradition that has today been transformed into Homecoming. Before becoming president, Tucker worked as an orderly in the army and then a pastor, ultimately finding his way to Andover Theological Seminary. These two roles provided Tucker with a front row seat as the world changed at the time of the turn of the century. Acutely aware of how these changes were affecting people, Tucker developed a uniquely forward-thinking perspective, which at Dartmouth became most apparent in his founding of the Tuck School of Business. Recognizing long before
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the turn of the century that business would drive the economy of the 1900s, Tucker founded Tuck to provide Dartmouth students with the preparation needed to succeed in the business world. In bringing Tucker on as president, the “trustees knew full well that they were hiring a man who was looking toward the future… Tucker transformed Dartmouth…into a prestigious national university,” and helped make Dartmouth into the school we know and love today.i But Tucker’s ability to see how the changes in the world around him would shape the future applied not only to Dartmouth College, but also to the larger world. His understanding of the contemporary crises in Christianity and secularism extended beyond the controversies themselves into their ultimate capacity to unify traditional beliefs with emerging ideas stemming from scientific discoveries. Tucker’s forward-thinking perspective emerged when the world was facing a “period of theological reconstruction” in which once indisputable theology
became the new modern crisis.ii People were concerned with which authority they should trust in matters of spirituality. Tucker, in his reflections on the spiritual and moral authority of the church at the turn of the century, explained that the most prominent theological discussion point was the exploration of Scripture using historical criticism. The next most notable, and possibly more far-reaching, was the debate about evolution, with its particular challenge to divine creation and miracles.iii The two issues grew closely intertwined as focus on them increased at the end of the 1800s, since the debate about evolution versus creation was founded in the growing questions about the reliability of the Bible.iv There arose two major players in the debate. On one side were liberal Christians, who supported evolution and a shift towards a new interpretation of Scripture. This interpretation took into account the historical context of the writings but also read them through the lens of modern ideas and values. On the other side were evangelical and other conservative Christians, who maintained belief in the infallibility of the Bible and, by extension, belief in divine creation as described in Genesis. Historical biblical criticism, also known as higher criticism, arose in Germany when Johann Gottfried Eichhorn began exploring the factuality of the Pentateuch and the possibility that it was not written by Moses. This opened the door for further exploration into the historicity of the Old Testament, and then the New Testament.v As the movement grew, people began to accept the view that the Bible is a historical text influenced both by the religious, social, and political environments of the books’ respective time periods, and by the audience for which they were written. The theory held that understanding this historical context,
Johann Gottfried Eichhorn by Anton Graff, 1779
As increasing numbers of liberal Christians began to ascribe to higher criticism, the more conservative camps reasserted faith in the inerrancy of the Scriptures and the need for literal interpretation. These Christians became known as Fundamentalists for declaring that the inerrancy of Scripture is one of five beliefs fundamental to being a Christian. They felt that the alternative risked opening the door to doubt in the redemptive work of Christ; if the Bible contains errors, then it cannot have been divinely inspired, and a claim that the Bible is flawed places a human standard above God’s word. If the true meaning of the Old Testament differs from what it literally states, then Jesus and the apostles were mistaken in their demonstrated faith in
Tucker’s ability to see how the changes in the world around him would shape the future applied not only to Dartmouth College, but also to the larger world and to issues beyond education. and therefore any potential bias of the authors, would yield further understanding of the text’s meaning that may have been otherwise lost to modern readers. This was possible because “the historical consciousness of the higher critics separated the question of the meaning of the Bible from the question of its truth.”vi The higher critics believed that the Bible did not have to consist of entirely true histories to reveal God’s teachings. They felt that discovering the historical context around the stories, as well as which were most likely to be real, would give a better understanding of what the truth really was.
the literal meaning of the Old Testament teachings and stories. And if Jesus’ and the apostles’ faith in the Old Testament was wrong, then any trust Jesus’s teachings and the witness of the apostles to his miracles and his redemptive actions is undermined.vii The increasing evidence for evolution, one of the strongest contributing factors to the growing doubt about the Bible’s infallibility, became the subject of much debate itself. Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859, two years before Tucker’s graduation from Dartmouth College. By the time Tucker took over as Dartmouth’s new president almost
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William Jewett Tucker, 1923
twenty years later, there were only two prominent naturalists in North America who did not accept evolution in some form.viii Yet, while the scientific community, along with a good number of the more liberal Christians, was almost unanimously supportive of evolution based on the scientific evidence, the rest of the population, particularly in religious circles, was split. Fundamentalists retained their belief in Divine Creation as it is described in Genesis. The Bible gives a detailed description of God’s creation of the world in seven days; therefore, the claims of evolution, signifi-
as forming a new Christianity that, if accepted, would replace the old faith. Instead, Tucker believed that “the spirit of Christianity is not an improvable quality judged by any known ethical or spiritual standards.”xi As such, he was confident that despite the many changes Christianity would encounter as new historical and scientific discoveries were made or interpretations explored, the meaning of Christianity, which transcended the actual historical truth of the Bible or its component stories, would remain the most significant part of the religion. He believed that this meaning would withstand any changed understanding of it brought on by the Church’s adjusting its teachings to embrace new discoveries.xii While Tucker did support the new higher criticism that was taking the world by storm, he believed that it would increase the authority of the Bible as a text, thereby bolstering rather than undermining faith. He asserted that “it is as reverent a thing to reinvestigate the authenticity of Scripture in any of its parts as it is to re-examine and revise the text of Scripture. Indeed if textual criticism is justifiable, much more in every way is historical criticism.”xiii To Tucker, “the essential gain to faith, and therefore to the spiritual authority of the church, lies in the change of emphasis from the external to the internal authority of the Bible.”xiv As such, Tucker believed wholeheartedly that higher criticism of the Bible did not detract from the authority of the Bible, but merely changed its nature. This conviction contributed to his support of the movement towards higher criticism. Significantly, Tucker recognized that the growth of Protestantism was due in large part to the increased reliance on the Bible as the foundational source of spiritual truth, rather than the Pope or Church.xv To Tucker, the Bible that is spared any critique from a historical perspective cannot be trusted as authoritative
Tucker recognized the continuing value of the Old Testament and authority of Christ while still affirming the new criticism, bridging the two seemingly opposite perspectives. cantly different from those in the biblical account of creation, must be false. In response to evolution in the public debate, fundamentalists primarily relied on the argument that evolution was still just a hypothesis, and therefore not completely based on fact.ix This stemmed from the sense that many of the more liberal arguments were founded on unproven assumptions from naturalism.x Tucker himself took a more liberal perspective on the theological issues of his time, yet unlike both liberals and conservatives, he did not view the new ideas
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on the subject of interpretation of God’s teaching or on the historical truths of the time, and therefore is not reliable as the source of truth. He argued that “it is as necessary to ask what the Bible is, and how it came to be, as it is to ask what the Bible means.”xvi But Tucker went beyond merely thinking that the new higher criticism would increase belief in Christianity, he also believed that the controversy over the issue among Christians was not a problem for the church. Rather, he held that historical criticism of the Bible, contributed greatly to advancing
Christian unity by breaking down the literalism of denominational beliefs. He based this belief on the grounds that when read literally, the Bible was caught up in a myriad of controversial rules and inconsistencies, but that when understood historically and read with a focus on the true meaning behind the stories,
far negative.”xix But, Tucker also felt that the positive effects of the higher criticism, the increased focus on the true meaning of the Scriptures and revelation of their primary truth in the context of the modern world came over time. He firmly believed that they would continue to become clear as time progressed and that
To Tucker, the discovery of truth, even if it came at the expense of long held beliefs or traditions, would ultimately help Christians to be more confident in their own understanding of their faith. rather than the events themselves, it was able to carry God’s revelation and truth to mankind. In doing so it would build up the Church, as evidenced by the growth in faith of Christians at the time. Tucker took great joy in his perception that “the first result of [the] intellectual revival of Christianity has been the apprehension of Christianity in its wholeness. It has brought out the one aim and purpose of the Bible in true proportion.”xvii Other liberals at the time believed that Christ himself criticized the Old Testament and therefore historical criticism was not only justified but also encouraged.xviii This contrasted with much of what had been accepted up to this point, which had put the conservative camps who thought higher criticism undermined Christ at odds with the liberals who thought Christ himself was in favor of it. Tucker recognized the continuing value of the Old Testament and authority of Christ while still affirming the new criticism, bridging the two seemingly opposite perspectives. Tucker did acknowledge the early divisiveness of the higher criticism, recognizing that “doubtless the historical criticism of the Bible seemed at first to many to be needlessly destructive, and its results too
ultimately the new approach to faith would not replace the old one, but blend with it to form a more cohesive perspective. Tucker saw higher criticism as directly causing an increase in both respect for the church and Christians on an intellectual level, and an increase in faith among those who were already Christians themselves. To Tucker, the discovery of truth, even if it came at the expense of long held beliefs or traditions, would ultimately help Christians to be more confident in their own understanding of their faith. In fact, Tucker, who was greatly concerned with the status of spiritual authority at the time, saw the higher criticism as restoring authority to the church, rather than undermining it. In his view, proving that the truths of Christianity could withstand intellectual testing revitalized not only the Church itself, but also people’s confidence in its leadership as a spiritual authority. When it came to the question of evolution, a closely connected issue to that of historical biblical criticism, Tucker once again sided with the more liberal perspective, supporting the theory of evolution. He recognized that, as more discoveries were made in the field of astronomy, mankind gained a new
Evolution, c. 2010
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understanding of itself in relation to space, with an expanded view of the universe and earth’s place in it. Similarly, he saw that evolution “set forth a new relation of man to the universe of time.”xx Ultimately, he saw Christians settling into this “larger world of time” more naturally than into the world created by the expanded knowledge of space because, while the discoveries about space showed the “power and glory of a transcendent God,” the discoveries about time demonstrated the “nearness, the patience, the forethought of the immanent God.”xxi In claiming this, Tucker did not deny the supernatural, as did many of the liberals at the time. Instead, Tucker affirmed the traditional perception of God and the supernatural, which was a critical belief of the conservatives.xxii Once again, Tucker bridged the two opposing sides by embracing a new perspective in order to reaffirm and bolster his faith in the traditional God. Tucker not only believed that evolution was true and fit naturally with the Christian faith, but he also believed it played a role in proving Christianity’s truth. Rather than providing evidence against a Divine Creator, the theory of evolution seemed to Tucker “to let the human mind into the inmost secrets of the working of the Almighty.” Evolution details the tiny changes in a species that, over massive amounts of time, contribute to creating a new species. In Tucker’s mind, these factors pointed to the amount of patience and care that must have been involved in creating life on earth, and therefore to the role of an eternal, loving God in directing this process.xxiii In spite of the heated controversy among his peers at the time, Tucker was able to see beyond the debate about the legitimacy
on the issues, he took an incredibly radical one: that the advent of historical criticism of the Bible and the theory of evolution were not only positives for the church, but the defining factors in unifying the different sects of Christianity and strengthening the authority of the church over men. Tucker did not believe that either concept would play a very central a role in Christian Apologetics, but that even if they were to become widely accepted as such, they would not alone be able to sufficiently to convince anyone of the truth of Christianity. This type of conversion would have to come from the spiritual authority as a whole. Tucker argued that the spiritual authority, however, appeals not just to one’s reason, “but to the whole man.”xxv To Tucker, the intellectual revival in Christianity at the turn of the century was crucial for strengthening the faith, but he believed that it did merely that— strengthen it. Faith in Christ could not itself be built solely on reason and debate, for “the truths of Christianity were designed to be felt.”xxvi Whatever one argued the true meaning or lesson of the Scriptures might be, they are at their most foundational level “the story of the forgiveness, compassion, patience, and sacrificial love of God finding response in the gratitude devotion, trust, and sacrificial love of the human heart.”xxvii For this reason, historical biblical criticism and evolution were ideas that, though they sparked controversy, did not have the power to tear apart Christianity as Tucker’s contemporaries feared they did. Rather, the Church would emerge on the other side of the debate, having regained its moral authority in the lives of men, and able to touch them more personally. In fact, even as
Tucker does not deny the supernatural, as did many of the liberals at the time. Instead, Tucker affirms the traditional perception of God and the supernatural, which was a critical belief of the conservatives. Once again, Tucker bridged the two opposing sides by embracing a new perspective in order to reaffirm and bolster his faith in the traditional God. of evolution to the value of the theory in ultimately supporting faith, just as he was on the issue of higher criticism. Tucker similarly saw the positives to physical science on a broader scale. He was convinced that subsequent discoveries of physical science would point to God and ultimately serve as better evidence for the reasonableness of faith rather than for a completely materialistic worldview.xxiv William Jewett Tucker bridged the two sides of the modern crises over historical criticism of the Bible and the question of evolution at the turn of the twentieth century. More than adopting a liberal viewpoint
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Tucker recognized the weakness of a religion built solely on emotion and celebrated the return of intellectualism to the Church, he also admitted that his greatest fear was that a Christianity built solely in intellectualism would become a “dry religion.”xxvii The spiritual authority of Christianity could only appeal to the whole man, because the truest and most complete form of the Christian faith balanced intellectualism and emotion.
At the same time that Tucker recognized both the weaknesses of a religion built solely on emotion and his excitement at the return of intellectualism to the Church, Tucker admitted that his greatest fear was that a Christianity built solely in intellectualism would become a “dry religion.” N. Brooks Clark, “A Lifetime of Total Recall: The Biography of Charlotte Cushwa Clark,” 17-20. ii. William Jewett Tucker, On the Function of the Church in Modern Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1911) 3. i.
Tucker, 14. Arthur McCalla, “Creationism,” Religion Compass 5 (2007): 547-560. v. Michael L Kamen, “The Science of the Bible in Nineteenth-Century America: From ‘Common Sense’ to Controversy, 1820-1900,” (University of Notre Dame, 2004).vi. Paul, xiv-xv. vi. McCalla, 547. vii. McCalla, 549. viii. Ronald L. Numbers, “Creationism in 20thCentury America” Science Magazine (1982): 538. ix. Numbers, 539. x. Mark A. Noll, Between Faith and Criticism: Evangelicals, Scholarship, and the Bible in America (Vancouver, British Columbia: Regent College Publishing, 1991) 20. xi. Tucker, 51. xii. Tucker, 50-51. xiii. Tucker, 20. xiv. Tucker, 22. iii. iv.
Tucker, 11. Tucker, 19-20. xvii. Tucker, 20. xviii. Jerry Wayne Brown, The Rise of Biblical Criticism in America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1969) 125-7. xiv. Tucker, 26. xv. Tucker, 49. vi. Tucker, 50. xv.
xvi.
Noll, 146. Tucker 49. xix. Tucker, 42. xx. Tucker, 52. xvii.
xviii.
Sara Holston ’17 is from Wayne, PA. She is a prospective double major in Biology and English.
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The Universe: Magical, Meaningful, and Modern by Marylynne Sitko
F
amously, in God is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens claims, “The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.”i The Christian has been caricaturized by moderns like Hitchens as not skeptical enough. The Christian is the infant of the human species who lacks the curiosity of the child. In some sense Hitchens is right. Quite often there comes a point when a believer encounters dogmatic truth claims that are unexplainable testaments of faith. For example, can one really prove the divinity of Christ though “historical” texts? Or is it possible to explain the mystery of the trinity in terms of mathematical equations or proofs? The Christian often finds herself placing faith in revelation not in human logic. This article will argue that despite scientific claims of skepticism and neutrality, science and those who defend the validity of the scientific enterprise as a means toward progress make their own existential truth claims. This paper will argue that despite the post-Enlightenment rebellion against the metaphysical view of the universe, moderns, particularly Bertrand Russell, still seek to locate themselves in a universe that is meaningful and magical and make science a religion in and of itself. To clarify, this article is not by any means an attack
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on science. However, it is an exposition on the human experience, a human experience of presuppositions of truth and meaningfulness in the universe. In The Sacred Canopy, Peter Berger argues that human beings rely on social institutions and postulations of an orderly universe in order to protect themselves from the terror of meaninglessness. Without the comfort of meaningful order man is faced with the ultimate separation—“a nightmare in which the individual is submerged in a world of disorder, senselessness and madness.”ii Religion becomes the sacred canopy— “the cosmization in a sacred mode.” Religion both “transcends and includes man” whilst emerging from the chaos that is created by mankind.iii The following paragraphs will focus on the religious world-making agenda of Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) and how he sought to establish a sacred, magical, and religious universe. Russell’s universe, although absent of superhuman beings, replaces hope derived from a theistic reality with hope which rests in the ability of mankind to see the world for what it is and conquer it though the mysterious and awesome power of science. Before one examines how certain philosophies of science have attempted to replace traditional conceptions of Christian religion, one must understand the
of these seemingly evil occurrences are simply speed bumps in the monadic progression towards the kingdom of God. Russell thus attempts to find a way to understand his place in the world amongst the chaos externalized by man. Subsequently, Russell would create his own sacred canopy to give meaning and order to the chaos of the twentieth century. Russell could not accept a metaphysical theodicy of medieval scholastics. The common explanations that evil was merely the absence of good or that mankind, although presently in a state of sin, was teleologically destined to perfection, were not sufficient. Russell, however, did not leave his audience void of another explanation. To Russell, if mankind could not ground its existence in a benevolent creator, abstract science could act as a replacement. Despite Russell’s rejection of a superhuman being, he still sought to place mankind in an orderly universe—an anthropomorphic magical reality where man is at center stage, united in the mystical dance macabre. Russell expresses:
Honourable Bertrand Russell, 1916
United with his fellow man by the strongest of
origins of the rebellion. Theodicy, or the explanation of evil, is key. This theological quagmire was particular troublesome for Bertrand Russell. As the adolescent Russell discerned a vocation to the priesthood, he could not see divine harmony amidst the suffering of his war-torn, twentieth century world.iv It was difficult to see God’s hand when, “Civilized states spend more than half their revenue on killing each others’ citizens.”v Russell lived in a time of wholesale extermination by poisonous gas, trench warfare and the atomic bomb. To Russell, religion, or at least Christian religion in the traditional sense, could not give man the
all ties, the tie of a common doom, the free man finds that a new vision is with him always, shedding over every daily task the light of love. The life of man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, toward a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which our happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to she’d sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of never-tiring affection, to
Human beings rely on social institutions and postulations of an orderly universe in order to protect themselves from the terror of meaninglessness. power to change the world in light of contemporary chaos. Russell thus took extreme issue with the argument of design. In Why I’m Not a Christian, one of his most influential essays, Russell sarcastically comments, “Do you think that if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience, and millions of years to protect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan and fascists?”vi Furthermore, if one believes God is the origin of all things, according to Russell, one must therefore conclude that God himself is the reason for the existence of the Ku Klux Klan, fascists, and the holocaust—all
strengthen failing courage, to instill faith in hours of despair. Let us not weigh in grudging scales their merits and their demerits, but let us think only of their need—of their sorrows, the difficulties, perhaps the blindness, that make the misery of their lives; let us remember that they are fellow sufferers in the same darkness, actors in the same tragedy with ourselves.vii Despite his rejection of abstract notions of love or sorrow as typified in Christianity, Russell brings meaning to his nihilistic universe by anthropomorphizing it.
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Although he believed “life of man is but a small thing in comparison with the forces of nature,” Russell still desperately clung to magical reasons for existence.viii Russell spoke of abstract notions of “happiness,” “misery,” “sorrows,” and “sympathy” without exactly explaining how the physics or reductionism can explain these feelings. Further, in using this language of optimism in the face of hopelessness, Russell used these abstract terms to somehow give meaning to the
craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generation.”xv Man is not trapped but rather has the reigns of the world and has the ability to understand it. In Russell’s reality this magic is the essence of science. How beautiful it is that the human being, being a sole product of science, can master science and create a utopian reality. Science can rid the world of all jealousy and envy. According to Russell, “Intelligence, artistic capacity, and benevolence—all these things no doubt
Russell would create his own sacred canopy to give meaning and order to the chaos of the twentieth century. emptiness of life of which he is afraid. He refused to believe the love he had for his children or his romantic interests can be included in a reductionist theory of reality. The idealist in Russell still held tight to the neo-Hegelian idealism popular during his early days in Cambridge.ix Furthermore, to combat the fear of cosmic nihilism Russell presents an alternative worldview—the ability of man to conquer nature. Russell believed in the magic of “the capacity of the universe to generate organisms with minds capable of understanding the universe itself.”x Russell ends Why I am not a Christian with his very own message of “What We Must Do.”xi He urges us as members of mankind “to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world— its good facts, its bad facts, it beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is and be not afraid of it.”xii He urges us to “conquer the world by free intelligence” instead of being enslaved by the “oriental despotisms” that come from religion.xiii He tells us that through the power of our “knowledge, kindliness, and courage” we have the power to make the world “the best.”xix Russell succinctly states, “Science can help us to get over this
Bertrand Russell
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could be increased by science.”xvi Furthermore, “science can, if it chooses, enable our grandchildren to live the good life, by giving them the knowledge, self control and characters productive of harmony rather than strife.”xvii Therefore, it is through science that mankind can end all war, all starvation, and all other hardship. Science provides a goal through which mankind can find meaning. A further agenda of the scientific outlook of Russell is to replace Christian dogmatism and faith with scientific curiosity. According to Russell, “a man with a scientific outlook on life cannot let himself be introduced by texts of scripture or by teaching of the church. He will not be content to say ‘such and such an act is sinful, and that ends the matter.’”xviii Instead, an intelligent man with a scientific mindset will inquisitively challenge moral standards. Yet, one cannot help but wonder how science, at least as understood by Russell, can become in itself dogma. Indeed, according to H. Allen, “But plenty of scientific truths are counterintuitive (does anyone find it intuitive that we’re hurtling around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour?), and a scientific education is, to a considerable extent, an exercise in taming the authority of one’s intuition.”xix Russell states, “What really moves people to believe in God is not any intellectual argument at all. Most people believe in God because they have been taught to from early infancy to do it.”xx If a child is told to believe in the magical form of science that Russell seems to subscribe to, it seems nothing will hinder a future critic to simply replace “science” with “God” in the sentence above. Furthermore, one must wonder if Russell really has the authority to speak of the importance of science if he does not precisely know what it is? It is a known fact that Russell was not a scholar of any of the natural sciences. He studied mathematics and philosophy at Cambridge. Russell in essence is setting up a straw man argument against religion in favor of an abstract notion of science. He is guilty of imposing the same “vast forces of superstition,” which he accuses
Christianity of utilizing, onto the scientific universe he seeks to create.xxi Russell’s explications on science correspond to sociologist Emile Durkheim’s definition of religion and church. The science of Russell becomes a religion or “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things… beliefs and practices that unite into one single moral community called a church who adhere to them.”xxii This church becomes the community of mankind who come together to form a social structure that preserves scientific reality. Further, one could argue the science that will end all fear and bring man to his fullest intellectual capacity becomes abstract reality that is similar to a superhuman being. To paraphrase the popular passage from the book of Revelation, “Science will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” Science will usher in a new world order analogous to the Christian idea of the “City of God.” Man can put his faith into science. Whether one refers to religion as “myth,” “cosmopolis,” or “sacred canopy” one will realize that religion is a system man uses to make sense of the world around him. Russell seeks to categorize his experiences and his thoughts into abstract realities and definitions in order to make sense of the their respective worlds. Whether it be because man is part of a pantheistic divine being or whether man exists to master the natural world though science, there is reason for why man exists. One can thus conclude even if we live in a world of superhuman beings or not one still must recognize
Saint Thomas Aquinas by Carlo Crivelli c. 15th Century
still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith
in science rests—even we seekers after knowledge today, we godless anti-metaphysicians still take our fire from the flame that was lit by a faith thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine.xxiv
Despite Russell’s rejection of a superhuman being, he still sought to place mankind in an orderly universe—an anthropomorphic magical reality where man is at center stage, united in the mystical dance macabre. the inherent desire of man to make sense of and give meaning to his existence. Man wants to feel at home in the universe—man wants to be a material object that matters.xxiii In The Gay Science, Nietzsche states that science is
Science, as we have seen in the philosophy of Bertrand Russell, thrives on presuppositions of an orderly universe and many counterintuitive statements. Furthermore, like Christianity, science relies on a dogmatic claim that there is indeed some metaphysical
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What we must realize is that we as human beings thrive in religion. Religion is not just defined as traditional conceptions of Judaism, Islam, or Christianity. No matter how anomalous or distasteful it sounds, science too is a “religion.” truth that we as human beings can discover in order to make our existence in the world more worthwhile. Why is truth so divine and why do we need to give meaning to our existence? Whether this meaning is found in science or religion there still exists a desire in mankind to determine his or her meaning in this vast universe. What we must realize is that we as human beings thrive in religion. Religion is not just defined as traditional conceptions of Judaism, Islam, or Christianity. No matter how anomalous or distasteful it sounds, science too is a “religion.” From this I pose the question, who am I to judge, and who are you to judge? What is the standard by which we judge science as superior to Christianity? Conversely, by what standard do we judge Christianity as superior to science? Can a materialistic, physicalist account of the universe answer the fundamental questions of our existence—what does it mean to be human? What does it mean to have a meaningful life? As we have seen, despite the modern attempt to rid the world of metaphysics, science itself becomes a metaphysical belief system when one uses it as a guiding philosophy of life and progress. Perhaps, it is unwarranted for criticizing the Christian as not skeptical enough. The scientific worldview of the universe places a significantly large emphasis on dogmatic truth claims. It seems to be unfair to criticize the Christian as not introspectively critical when the modern philosopher imposes similar doctrinal language in their discussions of science. I am not seeking to prove whether one belief system is inherently superior to the other, however. What I encourage the reader to examine are the outcomes and the applied existential systems. Whether one’s creed is the one constructed at the Council of Nicaea or the scientific method, he or she makes basic assumptions about the universe that expound the language abstraction. These abstractions provide much grey area that can prove toxic to kind and considerate interactions among people. This is why this publication fights the temptation to lapse into dogmatism and seeks to stimulate discussion about Christianity and belief. It is important to provide spaces where Christians and non-Christians alike can freely debate life’s toughest questions.
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Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, (New York: Twelve, 2007) 11. ii. Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy, (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1969) 22. i.
Berger, 27. Berger, 68-70. v. Bertrand Russell, Why I’m Not a Christian, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957) 93. vi. Russell, 10. vii. Russell, 115. viii. Russell, 114. ix. For further information see Fredrick Copleston SJ, “Bertrand Russell,” 426-427. x. Thomas Negel, The Last Word (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) 132. xi. Negel, 23 xii. Negel, 23. xiii. Negel, 23. xiv. Negel, 23. xv. Russell, 22. xvi. Russell 82. xvii. Russell, 87. xviii. Russell, 67. xiv. H. Allen Orr, “Awaiting a New Darwin” New York Review of Books (2013). xv. Russell, 16 . vi. Russell, 67. xvii. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, (New York: The Free Press, 1954) 47. xviii. Material and matter language is taken from Smith, “God, approximately,” 220-221. xix. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 201. iii. iv.
Marylynne Sitko ’16 is from Baltimore, MD. She is a double major in Religion and Government.
Towards a Divine Understanding of Beauty by Jake Casale
A
dappled sunset sends streaks of pink across the sky, set against a matrix of orange and red that emanates from that inestimable division of earth and sky known as the horizon. Such an image can be described using any number of vocabularies: plain descriptive, scientific, or poetic, just to name a few. Yet to the casual observer, each of these linguistic representations would prove woefully inadequate if no comment were made on the beauty of the display—on the serene power and awesome splendor that radiates forth from the majestic scene, tugging at once lightly and forcefully on some intractable hook deep within the human heart. The concept of beauty is both highly intuitive and perpetually elusive to the human spirit. Though all people can identify objects, scenes, stories, and ideas that they would describe as beautiful, it is far more difficult to explain what beauty actually is—a dilemma compounded by the reality that identification of the beautiful is highly bound, at least in modern culture’s eyes, by human subjectivity. No two people will categorize the exact same set of phenomena as beautiful. However, though the vehicles that express beauty may shift depending on the observer, there do exist shared
traits among the varied human experiences of beauty that, when culled together, reveal some working facts about beauty itself. Put simply, the quality of beauty is something that we as humans find appealing (often, but not always, in the realm of aesthetics). From this involuntary notion of fancy, there emerge twin senses toward the object of appeal: appreciation and awe. Appreciation, naturally, is the process by which the intrinsic value of something is recognized and affirmed, while awe is a sense of wonderment that is induced by an encounter with something greater than, as well as outside of, our human selves. The most illuminating characteristic of beauty, though, is also its most fundamental reality: its attractiveness. Modern philosopher and natural theologian Alister McGrath notes that beauty “seem[s to have] the capacity to attract, bypassing the faculty of reason (why should we be attracted to this?) on account of the intrinsic loveliness of the beautiful.”i Beauty holds the power to draw attention and elicit appreciation and awe prior to any logical exploration of the attractive factor itself. After all, a young child recognizes the loveliness in a sunset the first time she sees it, years before she learns to appreciate the
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physics of light scattering. Moreover, beyond simply recognizing this loveliness, she finds herself drawn to it. The universality of beauty’s ability to draw people to itself indicates that humans have a desire for beauty— and moreover, this desire is woven into our essential identity as human beings. Of course, all basic desires harbored within the human consciousness have been fodder for centuries of philosophical thought, religious discourse, and more recently, scientific study. All of these fields have
struggles in locating beauty within God’s design for creation. Indeed, beauty is a question that consistently plagued some of the most influential Christian thinkers in the early centuries of the church (St. Augustine was fascinated and perplexed by the subject in his youth). Eventually, a dominant strain of thought emerged in theological discourse: beauty is a direct reflection of God himself. This strain of thought provides a unifying framework, undergirded by the foundations of the Christian faith, that addresses the key
The universality of beauty’s ability to draw people to itself indicates that humans have a desire for beauty—and moreover, this desire is woven into our essential identity as human beings. attempted to give shape, explanation, and purpose to complications surrounding beauty and identifies its humanity’s basic desires, as well as their various objects. purpose as a messenger, meant to deliver an ephemeral Beauty and the desire for it have been no exception. sense of God—his character, goodness, grandeur, and Indeed, the field of neuroaesthetics is just beginning perfection—to humanity. Experiencing beauty kindles to emerge as a specialized desire for that which is concern of neuroscience perfect and greater than and evolutionary anything seen on earth, psychology.ii While a desire only realized in this venture certainly God. The fact that all of springs from a materialist humanity nurtures this worldview, as opposed to desire is evidence for what the philosophical theories mankind was designed that shaped Plato’s fourth for: relationship with its century BC writings on Creator. In the absence of beauty, both exercises this relationship, beauty are driven by the same triggers a subconscious causal factor: a nagging intuition that something curiosity about beauty, crucial to human a dissatisfaction with existence is missing; leaving the experiences it within this relationship, imparts uninvestigated. beauty continually Ultimately, humanity is refines humanity’s ability on a constant quest to to recognize God’s uncover the source of its presence in the world. To own desire for beauty and understand both of these to grasp exactly what the assertions, it is imperative object of this desire is, to understand the premise and the multiplicity of that beauty is meant attempted explanations to point towards God, indicates just how which requires careful Knysna, South Africa by Gerald Browne, c. 2007 challenging it is to lasso discernment of the specific beauty and drag it into the realm of comprehensibility. ways in which beauty touches, stirs, and agitates the Do we, as humans supposedly bound by individual human soul. subjectivities, have the capacity to understand beauty Indeed, when beauty arrives, it does not bring as more than just an ineffably lovely something, and peace—at least, not in any permanent sense. An does any framework satisfactorily deliver such an experience of beauty is never an guarantor of lasting understanding? satisfaction, but instead serves to gradually inflame The Christian worldview has seen its share of the pangs of what is lacking. McGrath develops this
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idea by claiming that “an appreciation of the beauty of nature can be interpreted as a transitory intuition of what is eternal, an experience signifying yet not delivering something of immense and transformative importance, and thus creating a sense of absence […] in the human soul.”iii This idea is evident in the inability of beautiful objects to satisfy the yearnings they elicit. Vehicles for beauty are impermanent; a piece of art once seen as gorgeous can lose its spark with time, natural scenes erode and fade away—even the allure of a significant other can wane with age and familiarity. Desire for beauty is the expression of a deeper desire for something that is lovely, pure, and true in the fullest sense of those words. Indeed, it expresses the desire for perfection, though beauty is often sought in things that are imperfect. Yet if beauty is understood as a glimpse of God’s glory, the distinction between beautiful objects and beauty itself becomes clear. While God did intend to use creation to reveal his glory to humanity, he remains fundamentally separate from his earthly vessels.vi God is infinite; creation is not. Indeed, for something to be perfect necessarily implies that it must be transcendent, above and beyond the finite limitations of the universe observable by humans. Beauty is responsible for delivering faint glimmers of that transcendence to the finite world, but it is imperative that beauty’s earthly vessels are not mistaken for the real transcendent entity to which beauty points. The beautiful things in this earth are not ultimate, but “the scent of a flower we
have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”v The more humans become acquainted with earthly things, the more apparent it becomes that these things cannot sustain beauty forever. Instead, they are temporary caretakers of beauty, which is itself a signpost pointing to the one Being who never loses his energy, vibrancy, and loveliness. But what of the nature of the desire that this signpost prompts? In twenty-first-century Western society, the term “desire” is loaded with a messy mixture of positive and negative connotations. The word often evokes the notion of a self-centered impulse to possess an object, which generally indicates that the possessor sees the object as less valuable than herself—a mindset that is not inherently problematic if the object is, for example, a sandwich, but becomes morally complicated if it is directed towards a significant other. Yet, desire can also refer to a longing that appreciates the object of desire for its intrinsic value and worth. This longing does not seek to possess, but instead yearns for a deep level of connection and interaction. The desire for beauty has this latter character; it is concerned with the appreciation of beauty as its own entity. Careful discernment reveals this reality when one considers how humans wish to interact with beauty. C.S. Lewis, in his extensive writings on beauty’s central role in human life, addresses this abstract concept: “We do not merely want to see beauty…we want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united
Hopetoun Falls, Victoria, Australia, by David Liff
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with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”vi Essentially, we long for union with beauty—the absence of distance, the deepest level of connection. Yet this longing is inherently paradoxical, because distance itself is what allows people to glimpse the fundamental otherness of beauty. When a single human observer beholds beauty, it is only in distance that he
this framework, the desire to unite with beauty is, in actuality, a yearning to fulfill humanity’s design for relationship with the Creator—a design that originated with that same Creator. So, if relationship with God is the beginning and end of human existence, then naturally it will feel as if a crucial piece of ourselves is missing until that relationship is restored. Moreover, God, in His original intent for humanity’s design, is
Essentially, we long for union with beauty—the absence of distance, the deepest level of connection. Yet this is inherently paradoxical, because distance itself is what allows people to glimpse the fundamental otherness of beauty. comprehends all the glorious ways in which beauty is different from himself.vii This distance is primarily categorical rather than physical; beauty, as all things, is identified relative to a reference point. That reference point is the human observer. If the observer entered into a complete union with beauty, the boundaries between beauty and the reference point would fade; they would become the same. The unique otherness that allowed the observer to recognize beauty as beauty would be gone—as would his own unique sense of self. This is clearly undesirable. So, humanity has a conundrum: the desire to unite with beauty in the absence of distance, yet with it and us both retaining our unique qualities and identifications. Christianity resolves this conundrum by understanding beauty as a glimpse of God’s glory on earth, which reframes the desire for beauty as an expression of desire for relationship with God. In
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able to resolve the paradox of a relationship founded on complete union without the erasure of both parties’ unique identities. Indeed, His solution perfectly fulfills all the nuanced yearning contained in the desire for this particular relationship. The solution is simple: love. While this solution may seem trite, it is necessary to distinguish divine love from the broken human understanding of love. It is nearly impossible to give an exhaustive account of all human conceptions of love, but an underlying theme is present in the majority: human love is always imperfect. Even in its most beautiful expressions, something is lacking—the ideals of consistent selflessness, unbroken adoration, and perpetual satisfaction never quite fully manifest in reallife scenarios. The type of love that exists in the mind of God, however, lacks nothing. It achieves the balance that human love cannot, embodying “eros and agape at
Flowers Path, by David Liff, 2013
once: a desire for the other that delights in the distance of otherness.”viii Though a full treatment of the doctrine of the Trinity is beyond the scope of this discussion, it is significant to note that God has existed since time immemorial as the Three-in-One: a triumvirate that is at once a singular entity and three entities, forever delighting in one another while retaining their distinct identifications. This is the divine template from which God derived his design for the love that is meant to flow between himself and humans—a design that was broken at the Fall, yet continues to manifest itself,
of vessels. Such an arrangement is possible because the shards of beauty on earth point to the absolute beauty of God—a kind of beauty that is eternal and unchanging, because it is contained within a God that is likewise eternal and unchanging.ix Yet a reflection of this absolute beauty is not the same as absolute beauty itself; it must be lesser, just as an image in a mirror must be lesser than what it reflects, for it does not contain all the substance of the thing itself. Thus, the beauty seen on earth is not absolute; it is relative to the absolute beauty that is contained in God, a beauty that is fully
The pangs elicited by beauty are the pangs of a love that sleeps within the soul, a love that humans cannot properly express nor receive. It is presently unfulfilled, yet perpetually felt. Beauty and love are conjoined.
Snowy Mountain by Azzer Cronin, 2010
however fleetingly, when humans interact with beauty. The pangs elicited by beauty are the pangs of a love that sleeps within the soul, a love that humans cannot properly express or receive. It is presently unfulfilled, yet perpetually felt. Beauty and love are conjoined. There remains one final question for the Christian perspective of beauty to address: the apparent subjectivity at work in perception of beauty. This concern is resolved through the distinction between relative and absolute beauty. It has been established that the beauty seen on earth is a reflection of God. This reflection is made apparent through a wide variety
of him, the Source of all things.x The beauty of earthly things is not truly of those things, but it is relative to the Source from which it springs. Because the Source is not directly expressing this beauty, instead revealing it through broken and finite vessels, this beauty cannot be experienced as absolute. Thus, each instance of earthly beauty is not a summative reflection of God’s absolute beauty. God’s reflection is scattered throughout a multiplicity of earthly vessels, a number that is only limited by God’s creativity—which is, by definition, limitless. Moreover, as people are also products of that boundless creativity, different individuals are more
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receptive to certain vessels of beauty than others. This receptiveness is by no means rigidly defined; just as beauty can seem to fade from objects with time, it can also appear where previously absent. This reveals that perception of beauty can be cultivated throughout life, a reality that indicates beauty’s intended function in
a yearning that exerts such a palpable effect within the human heart and consciousness that it must have a source and an object; the Christian God fills both roles simultaneously. Beauty evades definition on its own terms but becomes intelligible when related to the divine. The power of the sunset to enthrall is no longer
The beauty seen on earth is not absolute; it is relative to the absolute beauty that is contained in God, a beauty that is fully of Himself, the Source of all things. human life once its link to God has been realized.xi Though beauty is the focus of perpetual human desire, it is often overshadowed in the world by ugliness, decay, and violence. The effects of the Fall permeate human sight and arrest it, creating a blindness to the staggering depth of beauty that is present in the created order. Moreover, this blindness obscures the full measure of God’s presence within creation, actively working to maintain and redeem what has been eroded. Once an individual’s relationship with God is restored and beauty’s nature is realized, beauty maintains an active role in growing that relationship by revealing the depth and breadth of God’s redemptive presence in the world. Creation is suffused with beauty—it is expressed through nature, literature, science, art, and everything in between. Though the human sense of beauty may be initially limited, “to come to see the world as beauty is the moral education of desire, the redemption of vision.”xii To see beauty is to experience the goodness of God that humanity was created to experience, to love, and to delight in. As humanity grows in its ability to sense beauty, so too does it grow in its ability to sense and love God in accordance with His original design for relationship. While this growth will never be completed on earth, neither will it ever be exhausted, for beauty is infinite within an infinite God. Thus, the “redemption of vision” is an ever-occurring process, one in which there will always be more beauty to glimpse, more goodness to encounter, and more love to cultivate. Meditating on beauty is an exercise in preparation for fully living humanity’s original design for love of God when the gift of unity with Him— complete unity that preserves the individual identities of the unified parties—is perfectly realized in heaven. Beauty’s existence in the realm of intangible feeling often makes it a difficult subject for critical thought, but the Christian worldview provides a cohesive framework that synthesizes the seemingly disparate elements of the human experience of beauty into a unified whole. The innumerable forms of beauty apparent on earth are connected through the shared yearning they elicit,
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an inexplicable mystery, but the call of the Creator to a host of listening hearts, including those that do not recognize the caller. The desire for beauty is evident within the human race. The fact that it cannot be sated on this earth is powerful evidence for the existence of a transcendent glory that humanity was designed to know and love.
Alister McGrath, The Open Secret: A New Vision for Natural Theology (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2008) 283. ii. Anjan Chatterjee, The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014) xiii. iii. McGrath, 282. iv. Romans 1:20 (NIV). v. C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory: and Other Addresses (New York: HarperCollins, 2001) 31. vi. Lewis, 42. vii. David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans, 2003) xxxv. viii. Hart, xxxvi. ix. Hebrews 13:8 (NIV). x. Habip Turker, Sharing Poetic Expressions: Beauty, Sublime, Mysticism in Islamic and Occidental Cultures, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011) 76. xi. Hart, xxxvi. xii. Hart, 221. i.
Jake Casale ’17 is from Redmond, WA. He is a prospective major in Psychology, with a double minor in Theater and International Studies.
Freedom Redefined:
A CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVE ON THE MEANING OF FREEDOM by Marissa Le Coz
C
onsider, for a moment, a child at a drug store. He eyes the candy bar his mother told him she would not buy. His mother and the store clerk are not looking right now, and his jacket has deep pockets. He is faced with a choice: steal the candy bar or leave the store empty-handed. The boy’s ability to choose between stealing and not stealing constitutes, in the modern sense of the word, that which we call “freedom.” In his latetwentieth-century book, The Sources of Christian Ethics, Belgian theologian and Catholic priest, Servais Pinckaers, calls this concept “freedom of indifference.”i The boy is free to choose between doing what is good and doing what is bad. In other words, this concept of freedom is indifferent to the morality of the actions in question. Christianity, however, offers a very different view on what it means to be truly free. Christian freedom, or “freedom for excellence,” as Pinckaers calls it, refers to “the power to act freely with excellence and perfection.”ii In other words, a person is only truly free if he or she chooses to act in the way that is upright and good. Therefore, if the boy in our example chooses to steal the candy bar, his choice to do what is wrong actually indicates a lack of freedom in the Christian sense.iii Because we commonly think of freedom as the ability to do what we want, it may seem counterintuitive that freedom for excellence can be considered freedom at all. Later, however, we will examine how
Servais Pinckaers from University of Fribourg, Archive Servais Pinckaers
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freedom for excellence harmonizes with our natural inclinations as human beings, leading to a unique inner liberation. For now, though, let us simply view freedom for excellence through the lens of the basic spirit of Christianity. Christian doctrine asserts that we are called to become more Christ-like every day, and the concept of freedom for excellence encourages exactly this. The concept of Christian freedom expects humanity to live to its full potential while at the same time advocating true internal liberation. Freedom for Excellence “…one could very well describe Christianity as a philosophy of freedom.”iv ~ Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI Pinckaers explains freedom for excellence by using the analogy of a student learning a foreign language.v Initially, the student must endure seemingly tedious grammar exercises if she ever aspires to be fluent in the new language. She may feel like these exercises place constraints on her time; there may be other activities she would rather be doing. Additionally, she must follow the constructs of the language itself, which at times may feel like a burden. If the student wants to become fluent, however, she must do her exercises and follow grammatical and syntactical rules. Eventually, after becoming fluent as a result of her hard work and perseverance, she possesses freedom for excellence in the language. She can speak freely, spontaneously
does not consciously have to work to avoid error, so too does the truly free individual not consciously have to work to avoid sin. He or she is free to be excellent and consequently experiences a profound sense of internal liberation. Deeper Look at Christian Freedom “The will, of course, is ordered to that which is truly good. But if by reason of passion or some evil habit or disposition a man is turned away from that which is truly good, he acts slavishly, in that he is diverted by some extraneous thing, if we consider the natural orientation of the will.” ix ~ St. Thomas Aquinas
In order to properly study human freedom, we must first examine human nature. What it means to be human will give us insight into what it means for humans to be free. According to the thirteenth-century theologian and philosopher, St. Thomas Aquinas, human beings naturally seek truth and goodness.x The human sense that “good is desirable” and that “evil is detestable” is called synderesis in philosophy and theology.xi Codes of law throughout space and time reveal humanity’s natural affinity for goodness. Whether Christian or non-Christian, Eastern or Western, ancient or modern, societies have condemned murder, stealing, and other fundamental wrongs. Humanity is linked by a common and inherent impulse to condone what is
Christians believe that, through the power of Christ conquering sin and death, we can be freed from the slavery of sin by the grace, or divine help, of God. expressing any thought that enters her mind while avoiding grammatical errors, all “without conscious effort.”vi Analogously, Christians are supposed to do their best to follow the moral teachings of Christianity, even if they seem inconvenient or tedious at times. According to Pinckaers, the practice of proper actions gradually leads to the development of virtues in the individual, such as courage, humility, and patience.vii In time, the individual discovers “a joy very different from pleasure, because it is the result of…actions and character rather than of external events.”viii The individual begins to love virtue for its own sake. He or she does not practice virtue merely for the sake of avoiding punishment or meriting praise. The individual is moved to do what is morally right because of a profound love of God and neighbor that has developed in his or her heart. Just as the fluent language learner
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good and to condemn what is bad. (For more information on the commonality of laws in different societies throughout time, including many comparative examples, see the appendix of C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man.xii) Christian freedom, or the freedom to be morally excellent, requires goodness. At the same time, people have an innate desire for this goodness. Hence, freedom for excellence is united with our natural inclinations.xiii In a certain sense, this is why freedom for excellence makes us free; when we perform morally excellent actions, sin does not constrain us from doing what we naturally seek to do.xiv Ultimately, freedom for excellence means both that we joyfully serve others and that we find a sense of internal liberation in pursuing our natural inclination, which is goodness. Despite this natural inclination toward goodness, we still sin due to the fallen nature of humankind. St.
Paul demonstrates in his epistle to the Romans that the desire to do what is good is very different from actually doing what is good. He writes: “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.”xv This “slavery under sin,” as St. Paul calls it, is a clear impediment to our freedom for excellence.xvi Christianity offers a solution to this problem: Christians believe that the power of Christ conquering, which conquered sin and death, we can be freed from the slavery of sin by the grace, or divine help, of God. The Paradox of Liberating Laws “But strange as it may seem, everything that exists or ever did exist in this world, of freedom… could never have flourished without the tyranny of these ‘arbitrary laws.’ And I say this in all seriousness: as far as I can see it is restraint that is ‘nature,’ is ‘natural’—not ‘freedom to do your own thing.’” xvii ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
Let us recall the analogy of the language learner. The student who desires to be fluent in a new language must follow rules; she must tend to her studies and follow the conventions of the language if she ever wants to be free to speak the language with excellence. Likewise, the Christian must follow the moral law in order to be free to be morally excellent. While it is paradoxical that something so rigid-sounding as “law” results in freedom, Christianity asserts this bold claim. G. K. Chesterton, a twentieth-century Christian apologist, explains through analogy how moral law results in freedom in his book Orthodoxy. He writes: ...doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground…We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff’s edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries.xviii
(freedom of indifference). Moral law, however, would contribute immensely to the boy’s freedom for excellence. By following the moral law, the boy would act in unison with his natural inclination toward goodness, liberating him from the bondage of sin and allowing him to behave with moral excellence. Moral law need not be viewed as a set of thoushalt-nots. Instead, it can be viewed as one big “Thou shalt be all thou were meant to be.” Christian teachings comprise “a morality of attraction, not obligation,” according to Pinckaers.xix Moral law attracts us because it “resonates within us, revealing a hidden, vigorous harmony with our intimate sense of truth and goodness at the root of our freedom.”xx Far from being oppressive, moral law is liberating in the deepest sense of the word. The Role of Grace in Freedom “…the more docile we are to the inner promptings of grace, the more we grow in inner freedom and confidence during trials, such as those we face in the pressures and constraints of the outer world.” xxi ~ Catechism of the Catholic Church
As discussed earlier, desiring to do what is good and actually doing it are two very different matters. In order to be free to be morally excellent, we must overcome our slavery to sin and do what is good by following moral law. We know from experience, however, that doing what is good is not easy. Christians believe that the grace of God remedies this issue. With God’s freely-given help, or grace, people are capable of more than they ever dreamed they could be. By the grace of God, the greatest sinner can be transformed into the greatest saint. Because of humanity’s
Within the safe confines of moral law, we can be truly free. The protective walls do not prohibit fun on the cliff-island; instead, they are the precise reason why fun can be had at all on such a dangerous precipice. Likewise, moral law does not vanquish our joy; instead, it brings us the joy that accompanies freedom for excellence. At face value, moral law can sometimes seem oppressive. For example, while the young boy in our earlier example wants to steal the candy bar, moral law would prohibit him from doing this. Moral law would indeed inhibit his freedom to choose what is wrong
Chesterton, by Herbert Lambert, c. 1920s
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sinful nature, true freedom for excellence, which requires goodness, is only completely possible through cooperation with the grace of God. Indeed, St. Paul writes in his second letter to the Corinthians, “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.”xxii The grace of God is not forceful. Aquinas writes that grace “causes us to act voluntarily…out of love, not slavishly out of fear.”xxiii Hence, our free choice is not limited by grace. Instead, our actions still ultimately result from our own choices, and these decisions either aid us or hurt us in our pursuit of freedom for excellence. The grace of God simply inspires us to act on our desire for goodness. Aquinas explains that freedom for excellence is feasible because the grace of God “removes both the servitude whereby man, infected by sin, follows his passion and acts contrary to the natural ordering of his will, and the slavery whereby he acts in accordance with the law but against his will, being the law’s slave, not its friend.”xxiv In other words, the grace of God contributes to our freedom for excellence in two general ways. First, grace prompts us to overcome sin and to seek the good. Second, grace helps us to love goodness, virtue, and the moral law, giving us the freedom to act in a morally excellent manner. Conclusion: A Religion of Freedom Far from being oppressive, Christianity offers a freedom of internal liberation and joy. By choosing to follow Christ, we do our best to act in accordance with the will of God as expressed through moral law, aided by His gift of grace. Christ leads us to the truth and goodness we naturally seek as human beings, bringing us closer to true liberation, or freedom for excellence. This freedom is not indifferent to the morality of our choices. Instead, Christian freedom means being free to act with moral excellence by becoming increasingly resilient to sin. As we follow our natural, Godgiven inclination toward the good, we become all that we were meant to be. Freedom for excellence is part of the central message of Christianity. In the words of St. Paul in his letter to the Galatians, “For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”xxv Servais Pinckaers, O.P., The Sources of Christian Ethics, trans. Sister Mary Thomas Noble, O.P. (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995) 375. ii. Pinckaers, 375. iii. So far, I have associated freedom of indifference with secularism and freedom for excellence with Christianity. This, however, is a simplified view. While freedom of indifference does accurately
describe how moderns generally think of freedom, Pinckaers attributed this concept of freedom to William of Ockham, a fourteenth-century Christian philosopher and theologian. Pinckaers, however, viewed freedom for excellence as more applicable to Christian theology, calling it “richer and more adequate than freedom of indifference” (Sources, 329). Pinckaers attributed the idea of freedom for excellence to St. Thomas Aquinas, who is a more prominent voice in Christian philosophy and theology than Ockham. For these reasons, I have chosen to categorize freedom of indifference as a modern view and freedom for excellence as a Christian view for the purposes of this essay. iv. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, trans. J. R. Foster (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004) 158. v. Pinckaers, 355-356. vi. Pinckaers, 356. vii. Pinckaers, 363. viii. Pinckaers, 363. ix. Pinckaers, 369-370; See also Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles (4.22). x. Pinckaers, 407. xi. Pinckaers, 384. xii. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man: How Education Develops Man’s Sense of Morality (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1947) 95121. xiii. Pinckaers, 358. xiv. Pinckaers, 369-370 xv. Romans 7:18-19 (NRSVCE). xvi. Romans 7:14 (NRSVCE). xvii. Pinckaers, 361; See also Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (Chicago, 1955) 93. xviii. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: Doubleday, 1936) 153. xix. Pinckaers, 359. xx. Pinckaers, 362. xxi. Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (New York: Doubleday, 1994) 1742. xxii. 2 Corinthians 3:17 (NRSVCE). xxiii. Pinckaers, 369; See also Aquinas (4.22). xxiv. Pinckaers, 370; See also Aquinas (4.22). xxv. Galatians 5:1 (NRSVCE).
i.
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Marissa Le Coz ’17 is from Essex Junction, VT. She is a Computer Science major with a minor in Philosophy.
a Christian view of history by Nathaniel Schmucker
If
we want an analogy with history we must think of something like a Beethoven
symphony—the point of it is not saved up until the end,
the whole of it is not a mere preparation for a beauty that is only to be achieved in the last bar. And though in a sense the end may lie in the architecture of the whole, still in another sense each moment of it is its own self-justification, each note in its particular context as valuable as any other note.i
Herbert Butterfield Christianity and History
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T
he intellectual leaders of the Nazi party, the Marxist-Leninist Communist movement, and the Enlightenment each developed a framework for understanding their movement’s position in the grand framework of history. Each of these positions developed a fundamentally similar historical metanarrative, namely, one of gradual change brought about by the efforts of the people, bringing salvation from their era’s greatest societal evils. By comparison, a contemporary American metanarrative shares the same underlying philosophy. Though all of these metanarratives promise salvation, they ultimately lead to pessimism and a burdened life. Moreover, they are fundamentally flawed in that they minimize the pervasiveness of evil and place an over-confidence in human nature. By contrast, the Christian metanarrative of sin, redemption, judgment, and glorification gives hope, purpose, and meaning to life while properly describing evil and human nature. One of the most easily identifiable historical metanarratives in the past century is that of the Nazi Party. Produced by Leni Riefenstahl in 1935 after the Nazi Party had achieved total political dominance and popular support in Germany, the classic propaganda film, Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will) provides an excellent summary of Nazi ideology.ii The film’s opening prologue contains the only direct commentary in the film: On 5 September 1934, 20 years after the outbreak of the world war, 16 years after the beginning of our suffering, and 19 months after the beginning of the German renaissance, Adolf Hitler flew to Nuremberg again to review the columns of his faithful followers.iii A long aerial flyover of the German countryside follows, in which the camera tracks the shadow of an airplane as it passes over Nuremberg. Crowds of people wait for the Nazi Party Congress to begin. The shadow
Leni Riefenstahl with Heinrich Himmler in Nuremberg, from the German Federal Archive, c.1934
to close the Party Congress, Hitler promises that Nazi leadership will usher in a beautiful future for Germany. He argues, further, that this future will only occur if the German people make four commitments. They must first be committed “body and soul” to the Reich. Second, they must be dedicated to action: “the mere pledge, ‘I believe,’ is not enough; instead, [the most dedicated Germans] will swear to the oath, ‘I will fight.’” Third, they must pursue total order and discipline, for the Party “will be unchangeable in its doctrine, hard as steel in its organization.” And fourth, they must “do the mustering out and the discarding of what has proven to be bad and, therefore, inwardly alien to us.”v In summary, the establishment of the Reich relied on the German people and would be the ultimate triumph of their wills. In the Nazi metanarrative of history, Germany saw an unjust period of disgrace in the 1920s and 1930s. At the same time, Germany saw that both unity built upon religious loyalty to the Nazi party and a purging of the weaker members of the nation would cause the Reich to “endure for millenniums to come.”vi The people, through the Nazi Party, would bring an end to Germany’s economic, social, and political ruin
Many Americans today believe that humanity is progressing, gradually ridding the world of its greatest evils through the triumph of the will. bears a striking similarity to the outline of a cross and echoes strong subliminal biblical themes of salvation and redemption. The message is clear: Hitler and the Nazi Party bring salvation to the German people.iv Hitler makes this implied salvific imagery explicit in his speech towards the end of the film, in which he articulates a metanarrative of salvation from worldly struggles through progressive change. In this speech
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and would restore the country to its deserved place at the center of the world stage. At the opposite end of the political spectrum, Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin pushed a fundamentally similar worldview. A Marxist-Leninist view sees history leading towards revolution and the emancipation of the proletariat, the working class. The bourgeoisie currently sit at the top of society by controlling
capital, technology, and other means of production. This system puts the bourgeoisie at odds with the proletariat, for, to satisfy their own economic needs, the bourgeoisie rely on the constant subjugation of the proletariat and an exploitation of their labor. Subjugation and exploitation make the capitalist system inherently unstable, for they will incite the proletariat to revolution and to their liberation through the establishment of a communist society. In the Marxist-Leninist view, the salvation and liberation of the working class will come when it is sufficiently dedicated to revolution of the existing social order.vii In this metanarrative, as in the Nazis’, the pivotal aspect is the people’s united will. Other, less radical ideologies have a similar underlying narrative of gradual progress bringing salvation. During the Enlightenment, French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857) posited that there are three stages to life. He wrote: The law is this, that each of our leading conceptions—each branch of our knowledge— passes successively through three different theoretical conditions: the Theological, or fictitious; the Metaphysical, or abstract; and the Scientific, or positive.viii As life progresses from one stage to the next, it slowly rids itself of intellectual errors. In the Theological stage, societies believed all natural phenomena were caused by direct action from one or more supernatural beings. In the Metaphysical stage, society replaced the idea of a concrete God with metaphysical constructs. In the Scientific stage, society began to examine the world through logical inquiry, developing mathematics, astronomy, physics, biology, and the other sciences to give full explanation
Auguste Comte, c. 19th century
to what society had previously attributed to religion or metaphysical concepts. Sociology, which Comte saw as the Queen of the Sciences, could remedy all human ills. At its core, this metanarrative is of gradual progress driven by improvements in the human mind and will.ix In a similar fashion, many Americans today believe that humanity is progressing, gradually ridding the world of its greatest evils through the triumph of the will. Consider a common perception of American social history. The Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Thirteenth Amendment worked to abolish slavery. The following Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were part of a long struggle to give the emancipated slaves full civil rights and suffrage. The Nineteenth Amendment established women’s suffrage and is part of an ongoing movement for women’s rights. Now, eyes have turned toward the topics of immigration reform and sexual freedom. There are debates about green energy, healthcare, alleviating poverty in third world countries, stopping human trafficking, and much else. This is the story of the power of the human will. The fight today takes many forms—legal action, government intervention, non-profit work, enhanced engineering design—but the goal is always the same. We are trying to build a better world around us through the triumph of our wills. Although this narrative appears convincing and even desirable, for it says the future is ours to shape into something great, under more critical examination, it has three grave weaknesses. First, the triumph of the will narrative can lead to a pessimistic and hopeless outlook on life. If history is the story of attempted progress, the contemporary world may appear to have the glory of ushering in the future, but one or two centuries henceforth, today’s economic, social, political, religious, and intellectual state may appear stale and outdated. The truly extraordinary individuals may be remembered, but human life otherwise is destined to someday be perceived as backward. Secondly, this narrative of history places an overwhelming burden on the current generation. If the future is ours to create, it is our responsibility to prevent making errors that leave a negative impact on society. Likewise, it is our responsibility to prepare the next generation to preserve what we have built, and we are to blame if it does not perform well. Just as the once-glorious Roman Empire fell in 476 AD, what one generation left as a powerful society could, in the space of a few generations, see utter ruin. Life is a
A portrait of Karl Marx, c. 1875
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perpetual struggle to improve, or, at least, to prevent collapse. Thirdly, and most importantly, the validity of this narrative comes into question upon further scrutiny, for human nature itself prevents humanity’s progress, preventing our wills from ever triumphing. Shortly after the My Lai massacre in 1968, Time published an essay, written from a secular perspective, that spoke of “a dark underside” to human nature.x “Today’s young radicals,” it reads, are almost painfully sensitive to these and other wrongs of their society, and denounce them violently. But at the same time they are typically American in that they fail to place evil in its historical perspective. To them, evil is not an irreducible component of man, an inescapable fact of life but something committed by the older generation, attributable to a particular class or the “Establishment,” and eradicable through love and revolution.xi While the “young radicals” had high hopes of improving society, they fundamentally misunderstood the problem. According to Time, evil is not a problem man faces but a part of man himself. The Pennsylvania Gazette published an article with a similar theme in 1974. In response to a theologian who published a book offering hope for humanity if it returned to the purity of the “inner world” of the imagination, Robert Lucid wrote that this hope in the purity of the human soul was foolish: Three generations of American literary artists, however, have testified that the cruelty, the viciousness, and indeed the insanity rampant in our society are things which came exactly out of our own ‘interiority;’ that our institutions were not flown in from the moon but are in fact projections of structures envisioned deep in the pits of our imagination.xii This understanding of human nature adds a deeper pessimism to the triumph of the will metanarrative. It leads to hopelessness regarding change and it thoroughly undermines the worldview. Contemporary America, a generation separated from the Vietnam War, may not as a whole have as pessimistic a view of human nature as set forth by Time and the Pennsylvania Gazette, but perhaps we are overly optimistic. Current estimates by the International Labor Organization place the number of victims of forced labor at 21 million men, women, and children worldwide. While we can praise ourselves for ending
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chattel slavery in America, forced labor, human trafficking, and other forms of modern slavery continue in many countries across the globe including our own.xiii One can try to blame “the system” for fostering an environment that breeds corruption, but ultimately, the system simply provides room for individuals with evil intent to pursue their desires. Unless human nature improves or every opportunity to do evil is removed, eradicating forced labor or any other social evil will be difficult, if not impossible. Time may cause the current generation to reflect on modern day slavery, on the Rwandan Genocide, on the conflict in the Middle East, on the Great Recession, and on much else, reminding us again that human nature is not as pure as we think, and that history is not marching forward as triumphantly as we hope. The strength of the metanarrative of progress and the triumph of the will falls short under examination. It robs life of any lasting purpose and meaning; it places an overwhelming burden on each successive generation to perform well, and it does not properly describe the complexity of progress and the persistence of evil. American journalist H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) once wrote, “There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.”xiv The suggestion that human nature triumphs over social ills to build a better world is just that—neat, plausible, and wrong. To the story of history that appears to accurately describe the state of the world, relieve the burden of each generation to prevent regress, and imbue each person’s life with meaning and purpose, Christianity provides an alternative proposition. A Christian reading the articles in Time and Pennsylvania Gazette finds no surprise in their description of human nature, for it strongly echoes some of the aspects of the biblical narrative of history, which includes four core principles. First is sin. The world, though created as perfect, became corrupted in the Fall. Christians believe that when Adam first disobeyed the law of God by eating the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden, sin entered the world, marring the natures of all people and inclining their hearts away from the good. In the words of Scripture, which sound not too different from the Time and Pennsylvania Gazette quotes, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?”xv The late pastor-theologian, Dr. James Montgomery Boice called sin the “essential problem of the human race.”xvi In describing the effect sin has on our ability to pursue the good and move society forward, Dr. Boice said, “It’s one thing to plan how things should be—it’s one thing to envision a utopia— but it’s quite another thing, quite an impossible thing,
Tenth Presbyterian Church, by FaithStreet
The renewal of the Christian’s nature not only frees him from the judgment resulting from sin but also frees him to pursue the good in a way that his nature would otherwise prevent him from doing. to actually get men and women in their sinful state into that utopia.”xvii While we may fantasize about the future and devise grand plans, the Christian view of history is that sin will inevitably frustrate those plans. From generation to generation we do not see a gradual improvement of human nature; rather, each generation starts with the same corrupt nature and faces the same barriers to progress. Beyond merely frustrating the plans of men, sin incurs God’s judgment. The Apostle Paul, in his New Testament letter to the church in Rome, wrote that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”xviii Sin is a transgression against God’s law and, like any transgression of human law, incurs judgment.xix In God’s judgment, sinners are subject to his wrath. To the church in Ephesus Paul expounded, “We all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.”xx God promises that at the end of history, he will act as judge over all people from all times, punishing those who break his commands.xxi This, then, is the second principle in the Christian narrative of history: God’s judgment on all people as sinners.xxii If the Christian narrative of history were only the tale of sinful natures bringing judgment and punishment, it would certainly be the ultimate pessimistic worldview, much more pessimistic than the secular position outlined above. In this narrative, however, between sin and judgment sits an offer of redemption. The third principle, then, is redemption. The Bible recounts that because of his love for his people, Jesus Christ came to earth and entered our historical framework to die, in order to remove the
guilt of our sins. He intercedes for us before God’s judgment throne.xxiii He is a “propitiation” of the wrath of God “to be received by faith.”xxiv Christianity teaches that through faith in Christ, we are saved—not from poverty or oppression but from the wrath of God.xxv As part of Christ’s salvific work, he sends the Holy Spirit to renew our natures in order that we can pursue the good. In the words of the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel, God says, “I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.”xxvi With renewed natures, we can fulfill the commands to “love your neighbor as yourself,” to “give justice to the weak and the fatherless [and] maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute,” and to “continue to remember the poor.”xxvii The renewal of the Christian’s nature not only frees him from the judgment resulting from sin but also frees him to pursue the good in a way that his nature would otherwise prevent him from doing. Christianity thus both affirms our desire to see progress over social evils and provides the ability to pursue such change. Finally, the fourth principle in the Christian narrative of history is the glorification of those who are saved. When the Bible speaks of glorification, it does so in promise of a future where God “will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”xxviii This will be the final end to sin as the perfection of God’s Kingdom. It is the ultimate satisfaction of our desire to see an end to the evils of this world. From these principles of the Christian narrative of history, we can draw three conclusions. First,
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The proper framework for understanding history is not the triumph of humanity but the story of sin, redemption, and judgment. the Christian view affirms our desire to see the improvement of society. It commands that we help the economically and spiritually poor in this world and anticipates a world in which all pain and sorrow are gone. Second, the Christian view of history is inherently optimistic and indeed truly hopeful in that it, unlike any other worldview, both recognizes the evil of sin and provides a solution to it. Third, it says that all lives are meaningful. Whereas the secular view places the greatest value on lives and cultures that actively advance society, Christianity teaches that it does not matter what era of history in which we live or what our net benefit to society is. Although it is certainly of value to eliminate injustice and improve society, what is of infinitely more value is how we respond to Christ’s work on the cross. The proper framework for understanding history is not the triumph of humanity but the story of sin, redemption, and judgment. The great question of life is how we respond to the offer of redemption and where we will stand after the final judgment. All people thus live in a critically important time in history. No matter where a person stands in the economic, political, technological, social, or intellectual course of history, he stands on equal footing regarding his own salvation and the way he acts towards those around him. In the words of twentiethcentury Cambridge historian Sir Herbert Butterfield, the Christian narrative of history is not like a train, which travels toward a particular station and can be judged based on how close to the station it is, how quickly it is approaching that station, and whether it will arrive on time. Instead, the Christian narrative of history is like a symphonic masterpiece, for “though in a sense the end may lie in the architecture of the whole, still in another sense each moment of it is its own self-justification, each note in its particular context as valuable as any other note.”xxix The harmony of the Christian metanarrative is more beautiful than that of the greatest symphony. In a way that no other metanarrative does, it gives life meaning, value, and hope for renewal of the broken world around us. Herbert Butterfield, Christianity and History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950) 67. ii. Richard Meran Barsam, Filmguide to Triumph of the Will (London: Indiana University Press, 1975) 14. iii. Barsam, 5. i.
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Barsam, 31-3. Barsam, 62-63. vi. Barsam, 63. vii. Hans Heinz Holz, “Downfall and Future of Socialism” in Nature, Society and Thought, 3 (1992). viii. Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy, vol. 1, trans. and ed. by Harriet Martineau (Batoche Books, 2000) 27 <http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/econ/ ugcm/3ll3/comte/>. ix. Harriet Martineau, trans. The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte (New York: Appleton, 1853). x. “On Evil: the Inescapable Fact,” Time, (5 December 1969): 27. xi. “On Evil,” 27. xii. Robert F. Lucid, “People’s Religion,” Pennsylvania Gazette, (March 1974): 7. xiii. “Forced labour, human trafficking and slavery,” International Labour Organization, 28 June 2014, <http://www.ilo.org/global/topics/forced-labour/>. xiv. H. L. Mencken, “The Divine Afflatus,” New York Evening Mail (16 November 1917). xv. Jeremiah 17:9 (ESV). xvi. James Montgomery Boice, “The March of Time” (lecture in the series, A Christian View of History, by the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals and the Bible Study Hour). Much of the content of this lecture is paralleled in James Montgomery Boice, “The March of Time,” in Foundations of the Christian Faith: a Complete and Readable Theology (Downers Grover, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1968). xvii. Boice, lecture. xviii. Romans 3:23 (ESV). xix. For a classic exposition on the nature of divine law, see questions 90-108 of the Prima Secundæ of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, which comprise his “Treatise on Law.” xx. Ephesians 2:3 (ESV). xxi. See Acts 10:42; I Peter 4:5; II Timothy 4:1. xxii. Boice, lecture. xxiii. See Romans 8:34. xxiv. Romans 3:25 (ESV). xxv. Boice, lecture. xxvi. Ezekiel 26:36-7 (ESV). xxvii. Mark 12:31; Psalm 82:3; Galatians 2:10 (ESV). xxviii. Revelation 21:4 (ESV). xxix. Butterfield, 67. iv. v.
Nathaniel Schmucker ’15 is from Wayne, PA. He is a double major in History and Economics modified with Math.
v CAN SCIENCE REPLACE GOD? a fundamental misunderstanding by Joshua Tseng-Tham
In the Beginning, by Victor Victori, c. 2010
M
uch of modern debate between atheists and theists has centered on a purported conflict between science and religion. One of the more prominent claims made by skeptics is the idea that science can disprove God, or at the very least, can make his existence extremely unlikely. Bertrand Russell, in his famous teapot analogy, claimed that if there exists a teapot revolving around the sun too small to be revealed by telescope or any other method, it is nonsensical to believe in the existence of that teapot even though its existence is impossible to disprove.i In the same way, he claimed that while God is impossible to disprove, our belief in his existence should not be the default position. Thus he argued that the burden of proof is on the theist to show why God exists. God, like the teapot, is a hypothesis that requires evidence. To many modern secular thinkers, the advances of science have eliminated the need for God as a necessary hypothesis. Douglas Adams, in his book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, asked the question, “Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without
having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”ii He believed that God was not necessary to explain the rational order of the universe. Adams not only rejected God’s existence, but also saw the question of God as an unnecessary afterthought. Whether God exists or not is irrelevant—one can recognize the intricacies and beauty of nature without evoking God as an explanation. This paradigm has expanded its reach beyond the realms of philosophers and creative artists and into the thinking of some in the scientific community. For many Christians one of the strongest arguments for God’s existence is the argument from creation, often titled the cosmological argument. While the argument takes on many forms, it is centered on the idea that the universe requires an explanation for its existence. If God did not exist, it seems unfathomable that something (the universe) would come from nothing. Despite the cosmological argument’s enduring persistence in philosophical circles, recent developments in quantum physics have put this paradigm of creation
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under new scrutiny. In 2010, physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow published a book titled The Grand Design. In the book, they argue that the combination of quantum mechanics and general relativity explain how the universe could have formed from nothing: Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.iii
Hubble Extreme Deep Field by NASA, 2012
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While a full exposition of the novel is beyond the scope of this article, it is important to realize the philosophical point they proposed. To Hawking, Mlodinow, and many other atheistic scientists, the existence of the universe is entirely self-contained and the universe is self-perpetuating. The fundamental laws of physics are sufficient to account for the existence of the universe. God does not light the touch paper because he does not have to. The environment allows the blue touch paper to light itself. The biggest problem with this argument is not an issue with Hawking’s physics, but that Hawking and Mlodinow are arguing against the wrong god. In fact, the entire conception of God that many modern atheists such as Russell, Adams, Hawking, and Mlodinow hold is vastly different from the conception of God espoused in classical Christian theism. Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart, in his book, The Experience of God, describes the god of these modern atheists as a “demiurge.” Hart defines demiurge as a “benevolent intermediary between the realm of eternal forms and the realm of mutability; he [the demiurge] looks to the ideal universe—the eternal paradigm of the cosmos—and then fashions lower reality in as close a conformity to the higher as the intractable resources of material nature allow.”iv This definition of God is restricted to a divine worldmaker, an intelligent designer that uses pre-existing materials and laws to fashion an ideal world. This god is an immensely powerful and intelligent being, but is ultimately still finite and operates within the laws of nature. The arguments given by Hawking and Mlodinow presuppose a “god-of-the-gaps” scenario in which, when current scientific knowledge is unable to account for a particular phenomenon, God is given as the explanation. Hawking and Mlodinow are not arguing against the God of Christianity, but against a “demiurge-of-the-gaps,” a mere replacement for the scientific laws that have not yet been discovered. In
doing so, these scientists set up a straw man of the Christian God that is startlingly misinformed. Often, this line of thinking implies that God is contingent, that is, a being whose existence is dependent on a set of circumstances. The modern secular view of God is that of a contingent God. If God were contingent, however, he would be no different from the many deities found, for example, in Greek mythology. These deities are immensely powerful and watch over the world they create, but have limits on their power. The modern atheists’ redefinition of God leads to a belief system that is conceptually indistinguishable from polytheism and is a far cry from
foundation, which brings the logic back full circle. By assuming that the creation of the universe can only be achieved through material causes, skeptics inadvertently substitute God with an unknown material explanation, oblivious to the fact that they have defined a “god,” not “God.” In order to have a proper conception of God, one must abandon materialism as a method and a philosophy. The failure to do so leads one to miss the beauty of God as depicted in the classical Christian context. In Christian theism, God is not a discrete object that may or may not exist; rather, God is the ultimate explanation for the question of being itself.
The modern atheists’ redefinition of God leads to a belief system that is conceptually indistinguishable from polytheism and is a far cry from the Christian God, who is transcendent over all things. the Christian God, who is transcendent over all things. This atheistic conception of God is also built on a materialist foundation filled with contradiction and circular reasoning. Materialism denies that anything exists apart from matter and material interaction.v Many secular thinkers assume this deficient view of God due to their own belief in a materialistic philosophy that attempts to account for the universe’s existence. Hart argues that materialism is fundamentally irrational, since it relies on circular reasoning to justify its claims: We tend to presume that if one can discover the temporally prior physical causes of some object—the world, an organism, a behavior, a religion, a mental event, an experience, or anything else—one has thereby eliminated all other possible causal explanations of that object. But this is a principle that is true only if materialism is true, and materialism is true only if this principle is true, and logical circles should not set the rules for our thinking.vi Materialism relies on certain assumptions that cannot be proven within the context of materialistic thinking. Materialism states that the only way to determine truth is through empirical means. Hart argues that this narrow view of reality removes all other causal possibilities if an explanation is found using the scientific method. That is, only things that can be determined with the scientific method exist, and supernatural explanations are meaningless. A skeptic, however, would immediately question the legitimacy of that statement itself. For that principle is only true if one holds the ideology that only physical causes exist (i.e. materialism). On the other hand, materialism is only true if one can reduce every object to its physical
The question of being asks why anything exists at all. American philosopher Richard Taylor illustrated the mystery of existence through his forest analogy. He posed a scenario of a man walking through a forest and unexpectedly finding a large translucent sphere.vii He would naturally and rightly suppose that the sphere could not have inexplicitly appeared without a cause. What Taylor argues is that, devoid of any cultural bias, the man is equally justified to ask the same question about every other object in the forest. In the same way, whether the sphere were the size of a pebble or the size of the universe is irrelevant to the question of why it is there. The question is not about the object’s nature, but about the very fabric of its existence.viii Any attempt to understand what God is must be done with this consideration in mind. The question of existence does not only apply to the universe, but also to all contingent realities. Like the translucent sphere, nothing exists necessarily or inherently in and of itself, and thus must have an explanation that transcends itself. Surprisingly, it does not matter whether the universe was created out of nothing, from the laws of gravity, or if it existed eternally. Contingent objects may cause other contingent objects, but a non-contingent reality must be the cause of all contingent entities. Christians hold that this non-contingent reality is God, and is qualitatively different from the universe. Hart explains that whereas contingent objects rely on a foundation for their existence, God “is beyond all mere finite being, and is himself that ultimate ground upon which any foundations must rest.”ix God is independent of nature and exists unconditionally, but nature depends on God and could not exist apart from him. In essence, this was God’s revelation to Moses when he declared his name as being, “I am who I am.”x In other words,
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God is the only self-existent One. All others get their existence from Him. One implication of the truth that all things are contingent on God is that the traditional deist conception of God as a cosmic craftsman that creates the universe and then retreats outside the cosmos is just as deficient as the atheist conception. By deducing God from the contingency of the universe, Hart claims that God is the creator “not as the first temporal agent in cosmic history…but as the eternal reality in which all things live, and move, and have their being.”xi Thus, it is impossible to separate God from his creation because the very existence of creation implies that God is present. This is not a pantheistic god identical to his creation, but a God that transcends his creation. If God is the necessary condition for existence, then creation is not just the product of divine power, but also a reflection of God’s eternal nature.xii In fact, Hart writes that because God transcends contingent reality, he does not “exist” in the same way we do. Rather,
Zeus, a fresco from the Naples National Archaelogical Museum
He may be said to be ‘beyond being,’ if by ‘being’ one means the totality of finite things, but also may be called ‘being itself,’ in that he is the inexhaustible source of all reality, the absolute upon which the contingent is always utterly dependent, the unity underlying all things.xiii While this appears abstract, it is analogous to describing a God that is ultimately beyond full human comprehension. We say that God is the source of all reality from logic and reason, and we can know him personally through divine revelation and Scripture, but some things, such as the ways by which God forms and sustains the existence of nature, are ultimately unknown to us. By adopting the classical Christian conception of God, one would see that recent developments in science pose no threat to the rationality of God’s existence. Both Russell’s teapot analogy and Adam’s comparison to fairies fail to understand the concept of what God is in relation to creation. Both fairies and teapots are contingent objects that may or may not exist. When Richard Dawkins quips that “We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further,” he is not talking about the God of Christianity, but a contingent, polytheistic god like that of the Greeks.xiv Rather than a god that uses the laws of nature to fashion the world, God is “the infinite actuality that makes it possible for photons and (possibly) fairies to exist, and so can be ‘investigated’ only, on the one hand, by acts of logical deduction and conjecture or, on the other, by
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contemplative or spiritual experiences.”xv While we can deduce God from logical reasoning, we can use science to determine the existence of revolving teapots. It is not a quantitative difference but a qualitative one—a god that can be compared to fairies and teapots occupies a conceptually different framework of reality compared to a God that is the infinite source of all being. It is clear then that the attempts of some in the atheistic scientific community to explain away God’s connection to creation using quantum mechanics can never be successful. If science were to somehow prove an eternal universe, it would still be consistent with the principle of a necessary creator. For God’s act of creation should not be thought of as a moment in time, but an eternal act where he continuously sustains the existence of his creation. If the Big Bang did precede the universe, theories explaining the Big Bang would fail to disprove God. For example, if Hawking and Mlodinow’s theories were correct, the ultimate question would then be how the laws of physics and mathematics came to exist. In fact, Hart argues that if the laws of mathematics and physics alone created the universe, it would actually point towards God:
The moment one ascribes to mathematical functions and laws a rational and ontological power to create, one is talking no longer about nature (in the naturalist sense) at all, but about a metaphysical force capable of generating the physical out of the intellectual…In short, one is talking about the mind of God.xvi It is beyond the scope of science to provide an answer to the question of being. Nature is a closed system—to attempt to use science to explain the existence of nature is circular and self-refuting. By recognizing and defining God as the infinite source of being, Christians are not treating God as a substitute for mechanisms that they do not know. Rather, they are making a deduction of known facts about the universe and recognizing what God could not be. Without God, existence is fundamentally irrational. With God, creation is logical and beautiful. Bertrand Russell, The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, Vol. 11: Last Philosophical Testament, 194368, ed. John G. Slater and Peter Kollner (New York: Routledge, 1997) 547–548. ii. Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy (London: Macmillan, 2009) 105. iii. Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (New York: Bantam Books, 2010) 180. iv. David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013) 35. v. Daniel Stoljar, “Physicalism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, 9 September 2009, <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ fall2009/entries/physicalism/>. vi. Hart, Experience, 68. vii. Hart, Experience, 91. viii. Hart, Experience, 91. ix. Hart, Experience, 95. x. Exodus 3:14 (NIV). xi. Hart, Experience, 106-107. xii. Hart, Experience, 59. xiii. David Bentley Hart, “God, Gods, and Fairies,” First Things (June 2013). xiv Richard Dawkins, “The God Delusion,” The Root of All Evil? Television, dir. Russell Barnes, United Kingdom: Channel 4, 2006. xv Hart, Fairies. xvi Hart, Experience, 112-113. i.
Joshua Tseng-Tham ’17 is from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He is a prospective double major in Economics and Philosophy.
God Above All, by Christopher Michel, c. 2008
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FROM DANDONG A CITY IN CHINA THAT BORDERS NORTH KOREA PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS: A PERSPECTIVE by Hannah Jung
I
saw the land of nothingness across the Yalu River.
It was the week of Christmas. The land looked frozen in time, locked within a regressive history since 1950, when Kim Il-Sung founded the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Devoid of vegetation, the view was barren, as if it were a frameless black-and-white photograph. I had paid little attention to the world’s most closed nation neighboring my home country. Unlike my grandparents’ time when the Korean peninsula was an undivided whole, I was born into the generation of two Koreas, already separated, already othered. The maps defined for me this geographical dichotomy. I grew up with a kind of normalized indifference to the other side of the Demilitarized Zone. My education in the States eventually distanced me physically away from it all. And what’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with not having to care about two dozen million people, not one of whom I had met before nor will ever meet?
Marching in front of the Juche tower, by Joseph A Ferris, 2012
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This question was left unvisited until the summer after my sophomore year, when some things my mother told me distressed me deeply. She had returned from a trip to the border region of China and North Korea, and what I heard from her half a world away would shake my own. I was on campus at the time but the distance within, which held an ocean between us, strangely shrunk to a phone line as I listened to her speak of the people in the northern land. I would not believe what I heard. I did not want to—what did she mean that people are starving to death in the twenty-first century? But as I researched what is really going on—what has been going on—in North Korea, I could no longer deny but learn of the violations of human rights that amount to crimes against humanity. That summer, upon reading Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, North Korean human rights became my newfound passion. An American journalist’s compilation of interviews with North Korean defectors living in South Korea, the nonfiction work of oral history showed me a world to which I had blinded myself. I was at once drawn to the defectors’ stories and repelled by the government that allowed them to happen. The common thread that holds these defectors’ stories together is the famine in the mid-1990s, which drove so many hungry North Koreans out of their homes into China. The violation of the right to food has been well noted by the United Nations World Food Programme. Special Rapporteur to the DPRK Marzuki Darusman writes on the prolonged food crisis following the famine that “the root causes are manmade.”i The government has been withholding from its citizens the right to food, by denying economic and physical access to food. The class system called songbun continues to prevent the majority of people from feeding themselves, and the state ideology of self-reliance, that is, undivided reliance on the People’s Party, necessitates dependence on government rations, whose distribution began to stop as early as the late 80s. North Korea still struggles to recover from the aftermath of this euphemized ‘Arduous March,’ which
Amnesty International show the expansion of political prison camps, none of whose existence the North Korean government acknowledges. There are as many as 200,000 prisoners held captive for committing ‘political crimes’ in these facilities.iii Even those who are themselves innocent but have close relatives who committed crimes are sent to the camps according to the principle of guilt by association. Practicing a religion is the most atrocious political crime that a North Korean dare commit against its fatherland; to believe in something other than the self-deified Kim Il-Sung and his successors is to threaten the regime’s power. It is not difficult to perceive that North Korea is a fear-gripped country. To understand how North Korea operates on fear is to try and comprehend how the regime indoctrinates its people to worship Kim IlSung and Kim Jong-Il. It is a kind of sanctified fear. The ideology that Kim Il-Sung founded his country upon is called Juche, translated as ‘self-sufficiency.’ Kim Il-Sung made himself a god and, naturally, his son Kim Jong-Il became the son of god; this Juche ideology, or more appropriately, theology, then, is the spirit which helps and comforts the people. This trinity is not unfamiliar. It is analogous to the Trinity in Christianity—of God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It is not surprising that Kim Il-Sung grew up in a Christian household; his power, based in Juche, is the resulting application of Christianity, distorted for his purpose of self-fashioned divinity. Juche borrows the concept of fear as in Christianity to create deep loyalty to the regime. For example, North Korea’s legal system is based on ten principles, whose original model is the Ten Commandments. The only major difference is that Kim Il-Sung appears instead at every mention of God. Evidence of idolatry is everywhere, as the North Korean people must bow before statues of Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il. No other decoration is allowed in civilian homes— which are state property—except the framed pictures of the Kims. Images of the Kims, along with other representational forms such as newspaper articles and
Practicing a religion is the most atrocious political crime that a North Korean dare commit against its fatherland. starved to death a government estimate of at least a million and up to a more accurate estimate of three million North Koreans.ii This ongoing phenomenon of persistent hunger and chronic malnutrition is a painful contrast when juxtaposed with the immense prosperity we encounter everyday in grocery stores. In presenting ‘ordinary lives,’ Demick also discusses the inordinate ones. Satellite images taken by
their statues, are deemed holy and must not be dirtied. What began as self-worship built up to the national scale such that Juche can be called a state religion. This ‘self-sufficiency’ is symptomatic of the greater disease of self-worship. While some may argue that North Korea has a political problem, it is in fact interlocked with the spiritual. From the perspective of an outsider, the North
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North Korea sits in the center of the image. The Demilitarized Zone is clearly visible as a winding line of light. By NASA, 2014
Koreans’ gullibility may be outrageously laughable. But of course, anything could happen in a world where, as observed by an educated elite defector, its totalitarianism is akin to George Orwell’s 1984 dystopia. Instead of Big Brother, here is father Kim Il-Sung who watches over his people. Considering that North Koreans have been brainwashed from birth, that the indoctrination of Juche is drilled into them repeatedly so as to be cemented as an unobjectionable given, no longer funny is their susceptibility to their social norms. North Koreans are embedded in a selfcontained society where propaganda is found in the songs they sing from childhood (“We have nothing to envy in the world”), in the math problems they solve at school (how many enemy [American, Japanese, and South Korean] soldiers were killed by the North
the title suggests, the defector testimonies demonstrate just how closely Christianity relates to North Korea’s control of its followers. Because North Korean authorities fear that the introduction of Christianity will enlighten the people to the truth, the religion that must be eradicated is Christianity. In other words, if North Korea opens its doors to the outside world, Christianity will inevitably enter and the people will discern the truth from its verisimilitude. Accordingly, its believers must be eliminated because they have betrayed their fatherland by accepting the existence of a god other than Kim Il-Sung. In North Korea, possession of a Bible is illegal, and those who know of its owner must report such cases to the police. (When I asked the founding director—and North Korean defector—of the human rights NGO
While some may argue that North Korea has a political problem, it is in fact interlocked with the spiritual. Korean army?), and in every article, TV news report, and radio broadcast. Given that the fundamental cornerstones were borrowed directly from Christianity so as to institutionalize religious loyalty to the regime, it is not difficult to see that among numerous human rights violations in North Korea the biggest is that of the freedom of religion.iv Belief in Christianity especially endangers maintaining the divine power of the Kim regime as incontrovertible. David Hawk, a world-renown human rights activist and scholar, published in 2005 a report specifically on North Korea’s violation of the freedom of religion. Titled “Thank You Father Kim Il-Sung,” the report is an account of interviews with forty defectors, and, as
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I was working for at the time, what is the good that comes out of reporting, he replied that if one does not report, the consequences are too crushing.) The Bible is regarded as “a tool of cultural and ideological intrusion” to North Korea.v Because there is no freedom of assembly, it is customary to keep an eye on each other in a meeting as small as of two; to gather as a church is out of the question. In his study Hawk shows a case in which an interviewee recounts an unusual form of public execution of five North Korean Christians. Interviewee 17 at the time was working for the People’s Army; his unit was assigned a project to widen the highway between Pyongyang and a nearby city called Nampo.
When they were demolishing a vacated house, they found in the basement a Bible and a notebook in which the names of five church leaders and those of twenty church members were written. Below illustrates the persecution: In November 1996, the 25 were brought to the road construction site. Four concentric rectangular rows of spectators were assembled to watch the execution. Interviewee 17 was in the first row. The five leaders to be executed— the pastor, two assistant pastors, and two elders—were bound hand and foot and made to lie down in front of a steam roller. This steam roller was a large construction vehicle imported from Japan with a heavy, huge, and wide steel roller mounted on the front to crush and level the roadway prior to pouring concrete. The other twenty persons were held just to the side. The condemned were accused of being Kiddokyo (Protestant Christian) spies and conspiring to engage in subversive activities. Nevertheless, they were told “If you abandon religion and serve only Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, you will not be killed.” None of the five said a word. Some of the fellow parishioners assembled to watch the execution cried, screamed out, or fainted when the skulls made a popping sound as they were crushed beneath the steam roller.vi When I first encountered this testimony, I was already crying. I could not read further, as though the knowledge paralyzed my capacity to receive or process. I was struck by the steadfast faith until death. I know
that I have taken so many things for granted, but this right to religious freedom I began to appreciate at a different depth. Though before I had largely considered visible freedoms such as those pertaining to food, education, and health, I had overlooked the fact that I can sing in church, pray with friends, read the Bible without breaking the law—that I can live out my faith. Though this freedom regards faith that is “invisible,” it is constantly reified in my life. I contemplate the brutality against Christians in Paul’s time of the first century, of the early churches. Paul writes: “Some faced jeers and flogging, while still others were chained and put in prison. They were stoned; they were sawed in two; they were put to death by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated— the world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, and in caves and holes in the ground.”vii As outdated such forms of persecution may appear, this past is repeating itself today in North Korea, and other parts of the world, where believers are physically oppressed. While I have lived with and on my religious freedom, there are Christians elsewhere who live—and die—for it. “Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Marzuki Darusman,” United Nations General Assembly, Human Rights Council, Twentysecond session (February 2013), A/HRC/22/57. ii Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland, “Hunger and Human Rights: the Politics of Famine in North Korea,” U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (2005). iii “World Report 2013: North Korea,” Human Rights Watch, 15 September 2014, <www.hrw.org/ world-report/2013/country-chapters/north-korea>. iv Other violations of human rights include that of right to life, restrictions on freedom of movement, arbitrary detention, and inhumane treatment. v Thomas J. Belke, Juche: A Christian Study of North Korea’s State Religion (Bartlesville, OK: Living Sacrifice Book, 1999). vi David Hawk, “Thank You Father Kim Il Sung: Eyewitness Accounts of Severe Violations of Freedom of Thought, Conscience, and Religion in North Korea,” U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (2005). vii Hebrews 11:36-38 (NIV). i
Hannah Jung ’15 is from South Korea. She is a Creative Writing major with a minor in Sociology.
The statues of Kim Il-Sung (left) and Kim Jong-Il (right) in Pyongyang. The Korean caption below reads: “the great comrades Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il are forever with us,” evocative of the meaning of Emmanuel, “God is with us.” By JA de Roo, 2012.
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A Prayer for Dartmouth This prayer by professor of religion Lucius Waterman appears on a plaque hanging outside Parkhurst Hall. O Lord God Almighty, well-spring of wisdom, master of power, guide of all growth, giver of all gain. We make our prayer to thee, this day, for Dartmouth College. Earnestly entreating thy favour for its people. For its work, and for all its life. Let thy hand be upon its officers of administration to make them strong and wise, and let thy word make known to them the hiding-place of power. Give to its teachers the gift of teaching, and make them to be men right-minded and high-hearted. Give to its students the spirit of vision, and fill them with a just ambition to be strong and well-furnished, and to have understanding of the times in which they live. Save the men of Dartmouth from the allurements of self-indulgence, from the assaults of evil foes, from pride of success, from false ambitions, from hardness, from shallowness, from laziness, from heedlessness, from carelessness of opportunity, and from ingratitude for sacrifices out of which their opportunity has grown. Make, we beseech thee, this society of scholars to be a fountain of true knowledge, a temple of sacred service, a fortress for the defense of things just and right, and fill the Dartmouth spirit with thy spirit, to make it a name and a praise that shall not fail, but stand before thee forever. We ask in the name in which alone is salvation, even through Jesus Christ our Lord, amen. The Reverend Lucius Waterman, D.D.
The Nicene Creed The Dartmouth Apologia invites people from all intellectual, philosophical, religious, and spiritual backgrounds to join in our discussion as we search for truth and authenticity. We do, however, reserve the right to publish only that which aligns with our statement of belief. We, the members of The Dartmouth Apologia, affirm that the Bible is inspired by God, that faith in Jesus Christ is necessary for salvation, and that God has called us to live by the moral principles of the New Testament. We also affirm the Nicene Creed, with the understanding that views may differ on baptism and the meaning of the word “catholic.”
We [I] believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen. We [I] believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father. Through him all things were made. For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried. On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end. We [I] believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father [and the Son]. With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified. He has spoken through the Prophets. We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.
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Image by Natalie Shell â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;15