MARILYN MCCORD ADAMS
There is a great difference between knowing creation and knowing creation as creation. Much depends on the conceptual lens through which knowledge of the world is acquired and the methods by which such knowledge is sought. The physical sciences know a lot about creation, but they do not know or seek to know the world as creation. They abstract from issues about metaphysical source to focus instead on matter and motion, mass-energy conversions, chemical elements and compounds and their constituents, space-time curvature, and the speed of light. The conceptualities of the physical sciences (their mathematical models, their experimental methods, and theoretical posits) have represented the material world as a site of both intelligibility and mystery—constructive mystery that provokes awe and wonder, the better to stimulate further inquiry and discovery. How can we not be impressed by and grateful for such results?
Many second-half-of-the-twentieth-century analytic philosophers went further. They proposed, if not insisted, that we take the physical sciences to be a theory of everything. Their posit carried with it the eschatological hope that sooner or later the physical sciences will be able to explain everything in the world as we know it, at least everything that is really real.1
Theories are supposed to fit the facts that they purport to explain. To be sure, all theories focus on some data while marginalizing or explaining away others. Abstraction can be theoretically advisable and legitimate insofar as different conceptualities and methods may be fruitful for investigating different aspects of the world. But the conceptuality of the physical sciences fails to capture some of the most prominent features of our experience—not only secondary qualities (e.g., the color purple, the sound of a trumpet, and the taste of chocolate) but also mind, meaning, and value. Philosophers who demanded that the physical sciences provide a theory of everything were forced to hold either that secondary qualities, such as mind, meaning, and value, are not real (eliminative materialism)2 or that these recalcitrant phenomena really are reducible to or constituted by what the physical sciences study directly (reductive or constitutive materialism).
The attempt to make good on such philosophical claims spawned energetic research programs to develop mostly reductive and constitutive theories of how secondary qualities and mental states can be seen to be material at bottom.3 Not only have materialist theories of the mind been the majority report in late-twentieth-century analytic philosophy, materialist theories easily became the default position among philosophers of biology, who maintain that vital functions are fundamentally to be explained in terms of physics and biochemistry.
More recently, prominent philosophers have urged us to think again.4 When assessing theoretical proposals, explanatory power and fruitfulness are not the only desiderata. There is also saving the phenomena. Mind, meaning, and value—and, more broadly, life itself—are the most important phenomena, and we should not be prepared to credit theories that marginalize or explain away the most important explananda. The conceptualities of physics and chemistry do not include mind, meaning, and value. That is why—if they are supposed to be theories of everything—the mental must be treated as unreal or as reducible to or constituted by what the physical sciences do traffic in. However much psychology may try to map correlations between mental states and brain activity, and no matter to what extent biochemists analyze the chemistry underlying vital functions, the physical sciences themselves cannot explain why any physical and chemical configurations should be correlated with any vital or mental states, and why with these rather than those—once again, because mental and vital properties do not fall within their conceptual scope. Observers who think the physical sciences are our only source of explanation must regard such correlations as brute facts and accidental side-effects of baseline material states and processes. The eschatology of Bolzano-thermodynamics is more pessimistic still: life and the mental are temporary and fleeting because the physical universe is headed for a state of equilibrium. Bertrand Russell sums up the human predicament this way in “A Free Man’s Worship” and counsels stoic resignation that enjoys life while it lasts.5
As privileged as he was, Russell was evidently abstracting from the worst aspects of the human condition, from the experiences of millions who lead lives of unrelieved misery. Evolutionary psychology adds to the grimness by explaining our cognitive capacities and motivations in terms of their contributions to individual or species survival (in terms of their prospects for increasing the probabilities of reproduction and gene pool transmission). Survival and reproductive success are the explanatory valuables. The resulting motivational structure breeds tribalism and in-group altruism, perhaps with a fragile overlay of outgroup altruism due to generalized instincts toward parental care.6 Put otherwise, morality is reduced to strategies for solving coordination problems in social groups that we depend on for survival.7
Protesting philosophers find this picture of human beings and our place in the cosmos altogether unacceptable. In reassessing, they locate the mistake not in the enterprise of the physical sciences but in the philosophical attempt to turn the physical sciences into a theory of everything. If mind, meaning, and value are reasserted as priorities, then the metaphysics of the world as we know it must be reworked to include teleology so that mind, meaning, and value emerge not as accidental side-effects but as preeminent values aimed at the processes of creation. The physical sciences and their discoveries will have to be recontextualized within that wider metaphysical frame. Just as the attempt to domesticate the mental and the vital into the physical required adjustments to our estimates of what the mental really is and which mental phenomena are really real, so the reverse process of domesticating the physical sciences may involve correcting, adjusting, and supplementing their results, while leaving most of their impressive achievements in place.
Christian theology knows creation as creation. Knowing creation as creation requires a conceptual lens that prioritizes persons and purposive action. The Bible features personality as the heart of the universe because God is personal. God’s existence cannot help being permanent and requires no explanation. Divine agency cannot help being personal because God essentially acts through intellect and will. God acts personally to make the material world on purpose and for a purpose. We are all caught up in God’s purpose in creation. We enter into divine purposes by stages through a process of initiation.
Most obviously, God makes this material world because God loves it. Theologically, this is trivially true: out of all possible choices, this material world (with the possible addition of immaterial angels) is the world that God has made. God is Spirit. But like good parents and their offspring, God wants material creation to be as godlike as possible while still being itself. Because God is active, God makes matter dynamic. Because God is life, God nudges matter to evolve the structures that can host life. Because God is personal, God nudges matter again to evolve structures that can host personal life. Divine purpose for material creation finds focus in material persons because in material persons matter becomes as godlike as possible while still being itself.
Moreover, God makes material creation because God wants to inhabit it. Metaphysically, this is also trivial, for God is present to whatever God produces. As creator and conserver of everything else, God is present to anything and everything, wherever and whenever it is. What is more, created causal power cannot be exercised apart from God’s general concurrence. Necessarily, God must act together with creatures, whenever and wherever and if ever they do anything. Where creatures are concerned, God is really present to their being and really present in their action.
Concurrence takes a special form with material persons because personhood is essentially perichoretic. It is impossible to be personal alone. The Godhead is not an isolated ego but three persons, each of whom indwells the others by reaching out in love and appreciation, by knowing even as they are known. Trinitarian friendship, their reciprocal identity-conferring relationships of self-giving love, proceeds in such harmony of outlook and valuation that the Trinity express themselves in one action, one will ad extra.
Because human beings are material persons, the human psyche is tied to an animal life cycle. Developmental psychologists agree that personhood is essentially perichoretic. They explain that human beings are born full of personal potential but that such capacities have to be evoked and developed in a personal surrounding. Many take a page from Kantian ethics to suggest that autonomy is the goal of human development, something we grow into if all goes well.8 Various scales are offered to map and norm the individual’s progress. According to psychoanalytic versions, the human infant begins as a booming, buzzing confusion of inputs and impulses, but by the age of three months or earlier has the cognitive capacity to differentiate and center its psychic field on a human face. A few months later, its cognitive skills progress enough to recognize that the face goes away, and this realization launches the long process of ego development over the course of which the ego deploys a variety of self-management strategies that organize, structure, and restructure the personality. Therapy assists the ego in consciously identifying, sorting, and discarding dysfunctional defenses and—when successful—brings the individual to the goal of rational self-government.9
Once again, theology recontextualizes. From the beginning, whether recognized or unnoticed, the omnipresent Godhead is really present to all levels of human personality, interacting constantly in many and various ways to enable normal human development, working to foster creativity, nudging the human psyche with “aha” insights, and precipitating seismic shifts towards “out of the box” thinking (say, to invent Riemannian geometry or to put two and two together to get sixteen)! Material persons are no more made for solo action than the divine persons essentially are. Autonomous ego management is not the ultimate goal of human development. A further stage builds on its achievements and capacities but moves beyond them into conscious recognition and intentional cooperation with indwelling Godhead, into a restructuring of personality that puts friendship with God at its functional center so that more and more everything that the human person says and does flows from that lived partnership.10 John’s Gospel speaks of this as being “born again” “from above.” John’s Jesus declares that all that he says and does comes out of his relationship with the Father. John’s Gospel presents Jesus in his human nature as the paradigm of mature perichoretic human personality.
Fully to know creation as creation requires cultic categories. The creation narrative of Genesis 1 gives us the clue with its liturgical rhythms and punctuating refrain: “and God saw that it was good,” “and there was evening, and there was morning, the nth day.” In the Bible and in Christian theology, cultic categories presuppose personal agency and purposive action, while recontextualizing them. For cult is about trafficking with the holy. In the Bible and in Christian theology, holiness is rooted in a personal God. Cultically conceived, God’s purpose in making us in a material world such as this is nothing less than the sanctification of matter. God is out to make the whole of material creation holy and to do so in ways that enlist us.
As the holiness code (Leviticus 17–27) insists, sacred and profane do not mix. A holy God cannot dwell with an unholy people or inhabit an unclean place.11 This seems to be an obstacle to divine-human life together in a material world such as this. The Synoptic Gospels proclaim the revolutionary solution to this problem: it is not defilement but holiness that is “catching.”12 Metaphysically, it is trivially true then that God cannot help but take the sanctifying initiative when creating. Divine omnipresence and general concurrence already make the whole material world God’s temple, whatever state it is in. The fact that all material creatures are essentially godlike to some degree makes them reflections of the glory of God. In fact, the cosmos that God creates is “a moving likeness.”13 God sets up a cosmic frame ripe for development. Once again, because the probabilities would otherwise be so low, it seems reasonable to suppose that God nudges cosmic evolution to produce apt environments and material structures to host life and that God nudges biological evolution to produce bodies with brains to host personal life.
God is holy and the source of all holiness. Material creation cannot help being holy because of divine omnipresence and general concurrence. But where creatures are concerned, manifest holiness comes in degrees. Of all the sites in the material world, the possibilities for transparency to divine presence and purposes reach their peak in material persons. Cultically conceived, God appoints human beings, material persons, as a royal priesthood.14 Through the stages of human development, God works with us to grow our personal capacities through the various stages of ego development to structure and restructure human personality and eventually to ordain us into mature perichoresis. Material persons “catch” and “carry” holiness, not by magic, not merely by metaphysical necessity and unwittingly, but by the increasingly conscious intention of making lived partnership with God the functional center of our personalities—by allowing our relationship with the indwelling Godhead to be the relationship from which our thoughts, words, and deeds flow.
As chosen priests, our cultic work is to cooperate with God to make the holiness of material creation ever more manifest. We do this by growing into the knowledge and love of God and one another, by coming more and more to experience the Creator as Creator, by owning God’s purposes as our purposes, by exercising camaraderie toward our fellow priests, and by showing courtesy toward God’s nonpersonal creatures. Unsurprisingly, the human vocation to cooperate with God in the sanctification of matter “begins at home,” with the material persons that we are. It is foundational to our calling that we slog through the stages of human development culminating in perichoretic restructuring. Because growing up is a messy process and because with us perichoresis will remain unstable this side of the grave, we work with God toward the sanctification of matter when we acknowledge our mistakes and brokenness and ask God’s help.
We work with God to manifest the holiness of material creation by showing courtesy to God’s nonhuman creatures. This task requires discernment to strike the right balance between permission and restraint. For material creation is by nature cannibalistic. Lions eat lambs. Swallows eat bugs. Even larger molecules gobble up smaller ones. Material creatures “run interference” with one another so that the flourishing of one is bought at the expense of others. Courtesy honors the godlikeness of creatures by allowing them room to “do their thing,” while restraint quarantines and infringes the better to make room for other creatures to be themselves. We need food and shelter. We have to eat something. (Even vegans do violence to carrots.) Freud was right: eating is a hostile act because we destroy what we eat. Tricky decisions get made about whose lives and flourishing are more important. Isn’t courtesy to the Ebola virus trumped by the sacred worth of human beings? A royal priesthood working for the sanctification of matter will repeatedly turn to God for wisdom and for insight into the subtleties of divine purposes. At the very least courtesy calls on us not to waste food or to rape the environment!
In the Bible, God’s aims are social. God wants to showcase the holiness of material creation by forming a holy nation,15 by building a holy city.16 The eschatological goal is not Bolzano-equilibrium that does away with all complex macrostructures, but the “more than subtle” organization of a just society, a utopia in which individuals need not compete to flourish because the good of each is harmonized with the common good. Certainly, human beings are political animals, and yet human beings are socially challenged. The competitive, cannibalistic dynamics of material creation run right through us. Limited imagination combines with the fear of death and resource shortages to guarantee that human societies and institutions spawn systemic evils, which are structures of cruelty that privilege some while degrading others. Perichoretic restructuring of human personality is what holds out hope that a society of material persons could ever be otherwise. To the extent that we are reborn into living partnership with indwelling Godhead, the fear of death and shortages will fade because we will know and feel God as our life source. We will come to believe that life is a gift God will keep giving forever. Not all at once but eventually we will become thoroughly convinced that we have nothing to gain by denying the necessities of life to others, and so we will find it increasingly easier to embrace and advocate for the root and branch social reforms needed to make God’s dream of a holy society come true. In the meantime, our cultic work is to take out our brooms and cleanse the temple, to take out our shovels and uproot systemic evils. Everywhere, we can bear witness to society’s need for restructuring in order to honor the sacred worth of every human being.
1. Early proponents of this position included Professor John Anderson, an influential teacher of David M. Armstrong (see his A Materialist Theory of Mind [New York: Routledge, Kegan & Paul, 1968]). Another early player was J. J. C. Smart (see his “Sensations and Brain Processes,” The Philosophical Review 68 [1959]: 141–56; “Materialism,” The Journal of Philosophy 60 [1963]: 651–62; and “Colours,” Philosophy 36 [1961]: 126–42).
2. Eliminative materialism was argued for by the Churchlands. See P. M. Churchland, “Eliminative Materialism and Propositional Attitudes,” The Journal of Philosophy 78, no. 2 (February 1981): 67–90, and Matter and Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988). See also P. S. Churchland, Neurophilosophy: Towards a Unified Science of Mind/Brain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986).
3. For a recent and sympathetic assessment of the various moves to develop the materialist research program, see Derk Pereboom, Consciousness and the Prospects of Physicalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
4. For a particularly cogent articulation of this critique, see Thomas Nagel, Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Much earlier, Saul Kripke gave proponents of mind-body dualism a boost in his Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). Mind-body dualism has been championed by Richard Swinburne (see his books The Evolution of the Soul [Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1986] and Mind, Brain, & Free Will [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012]), and is now the majority report in the Society of Christian Philosophers.
5. Bertrand Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship,” Mysticism and Logic (Garden City, NY: Doubleday-Anchor, 1957), 44–54.
6. For the latter thesis, see C. Daniel Batson, Altruism in Humans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
7. See Benjamin Fraser and Kim Sterelny, “Evolution and Moral Realism,” British Journal of the Philosophy of Science (2016), https://doi.org/10.1093/bjps/axv060, which stakes out a reductive position while providing very helpful methodological remarks.
8. E.g., Lawrence Kohlberg, The Philosophy of Moral Development: Essays on Moral Development 2 vols. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981, 1984).
9. For an explanation and critique, see James E. Loder, The Transforming Moment: Understanding Convictional Experiences (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981).
10. Once again, see James E. Loder, The Transforming Moment. James W. Fowler draws on work by Piaget, Kohlberg, and others to chart stages of faith in Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning (New York: Harper Collins, 1981).
11. See, e.g., Lev 11:44–45; 19:2.
12. Jesus heals ritually unclean lepers (Mk 1:40–46; Lk 17:11–19) and bleeding women (Mk 5:25–34) by touch.
13. Plato, Timaeus 37d, as trans. by F. M. Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology (New York: Humanities, 1952), 99.
14. See 1 Pet 2:9.
15. Exod 19:6; Deut 14:2; 24:19; 1 Pet 2:9.
16. Heb 11:10; Rev 21:2–27.