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13. After my dissertation was submitted, I had a little time in the summer to finish out my time as a
residential (or what they used to call a "moral") tutor. Principal Day had hatched a writing project that would draw on several of us in the neighborhood.
(I don't think I have mentioned that Robert Song had come to Cranmer by then. I believe he had replaced Michael Vasey for theology/ethics. He would go on to marry Margaret Masson, who would eventually become the Principal of St. Chads. Robert would go on to teach for the university faculty of theology.)
The project was to create something like a dictionary with an apologetics flavor. I can't remember all the details (probably never knew them). The book never happened in the end.
I took three entries: Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Foucault. I had never really read much of any of them. I'd talked a fair amount about Foucault with David Mossley (philosophy PhD student) and was quite intrigued with his work. I of course knew the stereotypical version of Nietzsche.
There was no Google. There was no AI. I would spend the better part of the summer reading Nietzsche.
14. Thus Spake Zarathustra. What a horrible novel, I thought. A madman comes to the marketplace. Everyone is celebrating because God is dead. But the madman sees the implications. The death of God means that morality is up for grabs. It is no surprise to me that Nietzsche is sometimes thought to be a prophet of the Holocaust.
Some of Nietzsche built on those before him. Dostoevsky seems to have presented the morality of a world without God. But he stepped back from the precipice. In Crime and Punishment -- which I would make myself read the year after my PhD -- Raskolnikov can't live with himself after murdering someone for a greater good. He confesses.
(In two years, I would show my philosophy classes at IWU a clip from Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors. In that echo of Dostoevsky, a man commits a murder. Is initially troubled. But he gets over it. Typical Woody Allen. By the way, in those early days of my teaching, I often showed clips like that from movies -- on VHS -- to raise the philosophical issue of the day.)
In this novel, he also presents his idea of the "superman," the person who can create morality out of the ashes of a world without God. It didn't matter too much for him what that morality was as long as it was strong, the morality of a master -- not like Christianity with its weak slave morality.
15. Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morals. In these classic works of ethics, Nietzsche develops his concept of Christianity as a "slave morality." A line from his preface has always stuck with me. Going from memory, it's something like "As a young person, I early realized that if you were going to give God credit for the good in the world, you would also have to give him credit for the evil."
Certainly I think this is a problem for the Calvinist, less so for the Arminian (and even less so for Tom Oord.) In any case, Nietzsche basically treats Christianity as a classic, "You can't hit me because I'm wearing glasses" argument. The weak invent a system where you'll go to hell if you oppress me, even though you have the power to do so. It's a tool that a slave might use to try to manipulate his or her master into treating them well.
But Nietzsche basically says, "No, you should hit him whether he has glasses or not." The superman doesn't worry about the made-up rules of the weak.
I might point out here that MAGA Christianity is basically Nietzschian "Christianity." It is an anti-Christian philosophy. The way of Christ is the way of the cross, which Nietzsche and Trump vehemently reject.
16. At that time, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche resonated with my sense of a world without God. If there is no God, then I had trouble seeing a transcendent basis for morality. There could be social bases. There could be evolutionary bases. But what absolute basis would there be beyond advantage?
For this reason, I have not resonated with the moral argument for the existence of God. I believe morality objectively exists because of God. But it's existence does not seem obvious to me apart from prior belief in God's existence. God's existence is a tremendous boon for morality.
But, from an evidentiary perspective, I find no obvious, intrinsic morality in the world that points to a transcendent goodness. We have a deep longing for one and perhaps that is the "God-shaped vacuum" talking.
This of course was the basis for C. S. Lewis and Francis Collins' conversion. We can be thankful that God is good, believed by faith, nonetheless!
For a long time, I had trouble seeing what the point was for individuals who diverted to some unorthodox conception of God. If God is not God, what's the point? In more recent years, I have at least wondered if there could be non-theistic reasons why people would believe in a spiritual dimension.
Probably some time during my second year, I noticed that a student had put a discussion question on her door: "If evolution is true, then animals matter just as much as humans. Discuss." I was tempted to write a response: "If atheistic evolution is true, then humans matter just as little as animals."
I haven't mentioned Will yet. Will was a bright atheist who came as a fresher my first year in Durham. I remember asking him that first term what I thought was an innocent question. "So, are you a Christian?" I wasn't trying to proselytize or evangelize. St. John's was an evangelical Anglican college. There was a fair chance he identified as a Christian.
The answer was strong. "No. I'm an atheist--the thinking kind."
I would like to think that we were friends that whole time, although perhaps I have disappointed some of my Durham friends since.
17. I didn't spend much time on Feuerbach. His argument was basically that God is a projection of all the ideal human traits. Take our best traits: wisdom, knowledge, goodness. Now imagine the perfect version of them. That, he argued, was where the idea of God came from.
I've tried to think of what a naturalist hypothesis of God's origins might be. Were many ancient beliefs in a non-personal spiritual dimension? Animism? A longing to be able to manipulate that which is beyond human control? I do think that the ancient Greeks and that layer of human history often personified various abstract categories like war, wisdom, or love.
Monotheism developed slowly, it would seem, but significant movement seems to have taken place around the sixth century BC. Scholastic conceptions of God in the middle age perhaps come closest to Feuerbach's ideas.
Still, I like to start with creation. If we assume God is the creator of the universe out of nothing, what conception of God results? I would say it comes very close to the classic view, which is also my own.
18. I found Foucault to be very enlightening, although I don't share his ultimate framework. I give credit to David Mossley for cluing me into him, although I imagine I had heard of him before.
What I find helpful is to think of Foucault as an extension of Kuhn. Paradigms are always changing. Power is inevitably associated with the dominant paradigms. This all seems overwhelmingly obvious to me. Where I would differ is his apparent sense that there is no ultimate reality or truth behind these shifting sands. I am a critical realist.
Foucault wrote a series of historical studies -- on madness, on crime and punishment, on sexuality. I bought them all. I tried to read his three volume history of sexuality -- you'd think they'd be enaging. Not so. The French seem to obfuscate deliberately as a matter of principle.
But I can give you the comic book version. We do not have the same conception of these things as the generations before us. For example, punishment had a primary function of shaming. You behead in public so everyone can see. But in the 20th century, it became a tribute to absolute justice, held in a private ceremony.
Madness in ancient times could be a sign of interaction with the gods. "Whom the gods love, they first make mad." Then there was the concept of the Ship of Fools. The minds of these individuals are seeking their place and need to be free to find it. In the twentieth century, insanity becomes a disease and we hide such individuals away in "cuckoo's nests."
Sexuality as a category of being did not exist until the 1800s. "What orientation are you?" In older times, it was something people did on the side as a deviant activity. They were likely married and had children, but some did this activity "on the down low."
Then it became a sickness. It was put in the DSM. Now it's an orientation.
I found this deep paradigm framework helpful in analyzing biblical culture. I was always enamored with Mary Douglas' "Dirt is matter out of place." The explanatory power of such understandings unlocked a much more profound sense of the biblical worlds to me. And I really couldn't see much to object to in these frameworks.
19. I believe it was also in my third year that I devised the following soul thought experiment, although I'm sure others have thought the same. I remember coming up with it while walking up the Bailey to Neil's flat.
Let's say that we have no soul. What then would the resurrection be? It is presumbly a re-creation of a body -- using whatever remnants of my previous body as a starting point. Then, that body would be given my memories and personality.
Now consider the possibility that you might make a 3-D scan of my brain. I do not know the particulars of how the brain "stores" memory and personality, but let's say you could re-create the physical and chemical structures of my brain at a certain point in time within some appropriate set of Ken parameters.
Next, let's say we could clone my body and, at an appropriate time, reformat its brain structures to the 3-D scan of my current brain. The resultant Ken would have my body, my memories, my personality. It would think itself Ken in the same way that I think myself Ken.
Yet, we could, in theory, both exist at the same time. Our stories could from that point diverge.
In short, that Ken is not me. It is a copy of me. I came first.
20. If there is no soul, then how would a resurrected Ken be any different? And here is the point. "Existence without continuity is not identity." (You'll recognize this as a similar question to the Ship of Theseus, although my experiment is clearer.)
This is not a proof of the soul, but it does display--I think--why the existence of something like the soul is very important for the notion of afterlife to be coherent.
After I wrote a philosophy textbook on philosophy, I pre-tended this thought experiment on the soul, but it can wait till a post many months from now.
