All God's Creatures?

In The Philosopher’s Dog, Raimond Gaita relates the following story:

[M]y daughter Katie and I were watching a nature program on television. We saw baby rodents, more ugly even than baby rats, under the desert sand of Saudi Arabia. ‘Look at that,’ I said to Katie. ‘Aren’t they awful.’ With little hesitation, she replied that they were also God’s creatures.

I was humbled by her response, ashamed, in fact, that such simple words should show up the grossness of my attitude. I could think of no words that could express better and at the same time so simply this wonderful acceptance of all living creatures.

Gaita goes on to explain that it is nothing about theism as a metaphysical thesis (or the "God of the philosophers") that underwrites his response to Katie's remark, for he does not himself believe in God. I think I understand the idea that "God-talk" can be appropriate and meaningful even when not, as it were, "literal," but then I wonder about what the normative force is of the figurative God.

The idea that animals are all God's creatures would seem to express at least the following two ideas: (1) that there is goodness in the life of every creature (in Genesis, everything that God makes is found by God to be good) and (2) that animals are not "ours"--they do not belong to us.

Now it might be asked whether this "goodness" is non-instrumental or only instrumental (Genesis does not tell us), and what the practical implications of human non-ownership of animals are. But it might also be asked whether we have any reason to accept the overall picture of (1) + (2) if we are only able to speak figuratively--if we are able to speak at all--about God.

Those familiar with Gaita's (Wittgensteinian) approach to questions of normative grounding will know that he will ultimately accept that fundamental values are groundless but are at the same time bound up intimately with our particular form of life. Accepting the picture--and making use of the words--above is less (if at all) a matter of reason, but instead a question of one's fundamental attitude toward the world: say, whether one accepts the world as good and (as he discusses) whether one sees life as a gift for which to feel gratitude.

But I have found myself wondering still about the normative force of figurative (or some might say, "fictionalist") expressions invoking the divine, particularly in the context of animal and environmental ethics.

One might, for example, think of the idea of God as the idea of an "ideal observer" and adopt a dispositionalist theory of moral truth (or correctness) such that it doesn't matter whether there actually is an ideal observer (or a God). Rather, what matters is what judgment an ideal observer (a God) would make if there were one.  (Firth [1952] is the place to start looking into this idea.)

But before we even get to what judgments the ideal observer would make or how we could have epistemic access to this information, it seems like one might ask why we should care at all about the judgments that flow (or would flow) from an uninstantiated point of view. I suppose the response is these judgments would be the correct ones, and if we don't care about what the correct judgment is in ethical matters, then the conversation is simply over. (There are other worries about the coherence of the idea of an ideal observer, or similarly, the idea of God, but let that pass.)

The differences between the ideal observer and God the creator might matter here. For the ideal observer is not a creator (or an owner) of anything--only a judge. And if animals (and everything else) were not really created by God, then we cannot say that they (and everything else) belong to God. But this might emphasize the notion of ownership too strongly. "All God's creatures" might mean (A) that animals are all God's property, but it might instead mean (B) something roughly equivalent to the thought that we are all God's children. True, some will point out that only humans were "made in God's image," but then we would have to ask what it would take to live up to our divine lineage when it comes to our dealings with animals. And if the emphasis of "all God's creatures" should be fixed not on the notion of divine ownership, but rather of divine authorship, then we have to take into account the idea that animals (and everything else) was fashioned by divine hands. (Abusing and mistreating animals would be like defacing the ceilings of the Sistine Chapel.)

But then we run into the problem that if God is not really the author/creator of all creatures, which in fact evolved somewhat willy-nilly, there is no true divine origin that imbues the lives of animals (etc.) with the special significance that a work acquires when it is the work of a true master.

What now? Well, here's one thought: if we are so impressed that evolution led to us humans, then why should we not be as impressed by its other results, its other "innovations", etc.? (Some of them are harmful to us, but that was true on the other picture, too. Many of them are absolutely amazing and beautiful.) Those "awful" baby rodents are "also God's creatures" insofar as they sprang from the same primordial process as we did, whether that source is God or not.

(Obviously, these are all new thoughts on which I'm working, trying in part to figure out where the center is...)

Omnipotence & Evolution

I just got done going through some student homework responses on the argument from design. I posed the following: "True or False: Evolution is inconsistent with the existence of an intelligent designer of the universe." Mainly, I did this as a way of seeing what people know about evolution and where they are coming from.

Of note is that a considerable number of students conflate evolution with the theory of spontaneous generation (and so, as it were, run together cosmological and teleological issues). Keep that in mind (if you didn't already) the next time you discuss this.

I don't have any particular axe to grind on these issues, except that I am, as its called, an accomodationist. That is, it seems silly to me to think that evolution necessarily (logically) crowds out any sort of divine hand. Whether there is a divine hand (or whatever) is a different issue. I personally think it's silly to pit one's religions against science, and to be a strict literalist about creation. So here's a new sort of response I've hit upon, to challenge those caught up in literalism to re-think what they're doing: I ask, "In saying that evolution and intelligent design are incompatible, are you saying that there's something God can't do, namely, create things through a process of evolution?" I think this is a useful Socratic move because it uses their assumption that God can do anything to reconsider their resistance. Whether it works, we'll have to wait and see.

No doubt, Dawkins wouldn't like this kind of thing, since he would say that there's no need to posit the divine hand if random mutations can fully explain the origin of various species (etc.). But again, that's a separate issue. I just want them to think about the logical compatibility issue. Thoughts about the strategy above?

Certainly, one could say: but that isn't how God did it; haven't you read your Genesis? (And of course, there's not enough time to talk about that theological issue in the philosophy classroom, in all its various permutations. I do point out that, whatever the motivation for literalism, there were plenty of saints who weren't literalists, like Augustine.)

Bobby Knight Is Better at Theology than Color Commentary

And presumably better at coaching basketball than the other two. But here's something he said at Southern Methodist University the other day, in response to remarks suggesting that God helped the Texas Rangers beat the Tampa Bay Rays. As reported in the Dallas Morning News:

Knight jumped in before his speech officially started - heck, before lunch was even served - after the Rangers' series win over Tampa Bay was mentioned in the invocation.

"I think Cliff Lee had a hell of a lot more to do with it than the Almighty," Knight said, after grabbing the microphone at the podium unexpectedly. "If in fact the Almighty was involved in the game, what he ended up doing was screwing the other team. And I don't think he works that way.

"You've got to get up there and throw the ball over the plate and swing at good pitches. You know, He doesn't give a damn about that."

In case you don't keep up, Cliff Lee pitches for the Rangers, pitched twice in this five game series against the Rays, and was transcendent in his dominance. At any rate, good for Bobby, setting those Methodists straight.

The Face of God

I'm about to start discussing philosophy of religion in my introductory philosophy classes. I'm tempted to start with the following passage from the Sufi mystic Ruzbihan Baqli's The Unveiling of Secrets:

The face of God most high, transcending the indication of thought, was unveiled to me. I hid [from] the faces of the Living, the Substantial One, who is most high and holy. He manifested himself within me, and from the vision of his face came the sweetness of longing, the melting of the spirit, the agitation of the inner consciousness, the shattering of the heart, and the annihilation of intellect. If an atom of this befell the mountains of the earth, they would melt from sweetness. I was sighing, weeping, turning, and sobbing. God took me into the angelic realm, and he placed me at the door of eternity. Then he manifested himself to me as greatness and magnificence. I saw light upon light, glory upon glory, power upon power, and I cannot describe it. I was unable to proceed a step closer because of his majesty and power. If I looked at it forever, I would be unable to understand an atom in the likeness of any of his pre-eternal qualities. But God is beyond anyone's description. (Sec. 124, "The Face of God")

I read this book years ago as an undergraduate, and recently remembered it. The line, "If an atom of this befell the mountains of the earth, they would melt from sweetness," was one of my working epigrams for "The Difficulty of Experience," and I think it is an amazing sentence (which may, since I don't read Arabic, owe as much to the translation as to the original). But I have to figure out how to get from Baqli to Aquinas without being droll, or saying something too much in the positivist tenor of, "This is fine poetry, but does it express any true propositions?" (Or better, I have to figure out how to ask that question without sounding like an ass.)

At the same time, students often like to asks questions like, "What was he smoking?" in response to thinkers like Descartes and Derek Parfit. And so maybe that points to an angle into the question: "Look, (many) people have powerful, overwhelming experiences of something beyond themselves. But it's fair to ask whether that points to something deep within us or something that's actually beyond us. And one way of doing that is to ask whether, putting poetic expression (and appeals to authority) aside, we can establish that there is (or must be) a particular sort of being, God, which answers more or less to our poetic descriptions." I find that if I just launch into the "proofs," many students think the exercise is pointless, since "it's all about faith." Not that using Baqli will help with that. I wonder--and have no predictions--what percentage of my students have had something they might recognize as a religious experience. Perhaps I'll find out when I see either yawns or looks of recognition when I show them the Baqli passage.