Experience, Nature, Morality, Evil

Life is often *experienced* as a difficult battle to pursue certain choices, to suppress certain urges, to make good on certain goals or ideals. In each case, forms of opposition are felt. When we try and do what we deeply feel to be good, competing urges and temptations toward bad things naturally arise. We have to fight them if we are successfully to pursue good. The so-called seven 'deadly' sins used to give many people a natural reference point here. When trying to be industrious, people had to fight sloth. When trying to be frugal and healthy, people had to fight avarice and gluttony. When trying to be sexually upstanding, they had to eschew lust and, I suppose, envy. Very little about our experience today has changed, except, that is, our tendency *not* to associate these oppositions with a deeper spiritual struggle - going on both within us and in the world at large.

Experience in the universe, with its (once abundant) cosmic forces 'unperceived,', 'unrecognised'' or 'disbelieved' by many is typically (and fittingly) now talked about in a suitably more banal way. We hesitate to say 'evil' - unless, that is, we write for the tabloid press and we're talking about a paedophile or a serial killer. We prefer 'bad', or 'not nice' or some overly used swear word which loses all serious force and content when applied both to the actions of rapists and killers - for the simple reason that we use the same words more lightly or humorously in conversation with our friends. Our language, I suggest, distortively suppresses the reality of the presence of 'evil' by not daring to speak its name. 'Criminal' or 'scum' might be the best we can do to describe certain perpetrators of seriously evil deeds. But when we resort to labelling a person in this way - as the tabloid press inevitably do - we fail to make the (very necessary) distinction which Christian thinkers have tended to try so hard to make between the 'sinner' and the 'sin'. The former is not essentially 'evil'. The latter is. (We should never believe, no matter how convinced we may be, that a person is completely or irretrievably evil. This may at times prove incredibly difficult. Evil may have infected their thoughts and motivations to such a great degree that we cannot discern the presence of anything we might think 'good' or any cause for optimism regarding the person's spiritual health. The point, though, is that we must believe God can cure even the most sick - those most spiritually barren and caught up in the mesh of evil - and must pray for him to release goodness once again in the person concerned. If the spirit can breathe life into the physically dead, he can breathe life into the spiritually dead. In time, we must pray, this will happen).

I acknowledge that all I have offered here is an argument for re-introducing a certain way of thinking, speaking and interpreting into our moral and experiential discourse. Why might it have any bearing on what it actually 'out there', what is true, what is real? Is there really an 'evil' agency in the universe - or at least our lives within it - which is attempting to have its say in our lives and which sometimes has its say and wins the day? Or is this simply a bizarre way of thinking about our lives which bears no relation to what's actually going on. There's no 'evil', we might think, in cancer or flooding waters. Only 'nature' taking its course and coming into conflict with our environment (and our lives) as it does so.

The physicalist-materialist-naturalist aspect of the enlightenment legacy our culture so deeply espouses - or believes it does in many of its more 'enlightened' circles - certainly thinks as much. This (often unspoken) paradigm, I think, fails a number of important litmus tests and I want briefly to mention one problem here as an example. (This, I expect, will feed into a further series of posts on this subject).

The first problem is simply this: I think the materialists are doing something bizarre when they refuse to attribute a moral dimension to what they'd call 'natural processes'. Why should I not refer to the tidal wave that killed thousands of people (or the 'natural processes' that gave rise to it) as an instance of evil. To me it's evil. The physical world 'acted' in an undeniably evil way. Does the physical world 'act'? Yes. All the time. But does it act in a 'moral' way - or, that is, with respect to moral agency? There's reason, I think, to suspect (at the very least) that it might.

My faculties of moral reasoning are, as far as the materialists would have it, themselves part of the 'natural' order - as, of course, are theirs. Why, though, should we delimit the presence of 'moral' agency to the context of human (and possibly 'animal') minds - 'natural' as they are - and deny this quality to other 'physical' phenomena? Why couldn't the universe itself (a universe, after all, which gives rise to these 'physical' human minds) actually have a 'moral' aspect to it as well as - or even, perhaps, instead of - what we customarily label its 'natural' aspect? If human existence is 'moral' existence, and moral existence is undeniably 'natural' too, why is it safe to assume that non-human 'natural' things do not havea moral aspect to them? They, like us, are present in the 'natural' world. As are the 'forces' which shape them - which, as we know, are underneath it all (from the perspective of particle physics) very much like the forces which shape our human lives. The moral versus natural dichotomy has to be on some level false and unsustainable - at least, that is, when we consider the case of humans as simultaneously 'moral' and 'natural' (where does the one 'start' and the other 'end'?). I think the materialist would have to concede this. Having done so, why should it be possible to suggest that 'nature' dictates, governs and/or circumscribes morality? Couldn't the reverse be true? Couldn't it be, that is to say, that 'moral' forces dictate, govern and determine 'nature'? That, certainly, is what most of us feel, I think, at the level of our human experience of reality - insofar as we insist, that is, on using the terms 'moral' and 'natural' to describe it. It's our moral natures that matter most to us, surely, not our 'natural' ones. In our lives we're bothered primarily with questions of what we should do, and only secondarily - and in relation to this - with questions concerning what the 'natural' features of ourselves and our world are like.

If this seems a fair description, and if it rings true in respect of one part of 'nature', (our lives) who's to say there's no merit in the proposition when we come to consider the phenomenal existence of other worldly things?

A Sermon I gave [1]

I post here, in case anyone wants to read it, the text of a sermon I recently gave in my college chapel. It's rather long, but I hope not too rambling, and was a joy but also a challenge to write. I have split it up into 4 posts.

Revelation 3:1-6, 14-end; Luke 19:1-10
May I speak to you tonight in the name of the Father, the son and of the holy spirit. Please have a seat.

A fact which often escapes the notice of those who bemoan the celebrity obsessed culture which we 21st century westerners live in today is that people have always had their icons, their heroes, their gods; fellow human beings whom we can look upon, compare ourselves to, admire and venerate. A recently published book argues not altogether unconvincingly that what we now call celebrity culture was a very familiar theme a very long time ago in the ancient Graeco-Roman world – one of the few significant differences between the mental landscape of their world and ours being that we today are perhaps a little more particular about the dividing line between human and divine than they were back then. David and Victoria Beckham may look or seem divine to some of us today, just as Alexander the Great and the emperor Augustus seemed to many back then, but in our wisdom we know better to think of David and Victoria as gods in any serious sense of the word. That seems about right. They aren’t immortal or omniscient or anything else we customarily ascribe to divinity. But even if we’re hesitant to invoke the language of divinity too readily when we refer to the likes of the Beckhams, it is nonetheless certainly true that for many of us they play the role of objects of intrigue: beautiful (perhaps), fascinating (to some), removed (on occasion); glamorous (in the eyes of many), stylish (to a degree), even mysterious (when they aren’t talking). Something about them, at any rate, captivates rather a lot of us. And yet we know better – or so we think – than seriously to think of David and Victoria as ‘gods’. If pushed, we might remark that they’re far too fraught, human, unintelligent and even boring truly to deserve the label. And that we know this is evidence, I think, of at least some idea on our part of what we think – and perhaps implicitly understand – God is really like: not so fraught, not so human, not so unintelligent, and not so boring.

And yet. In other ways, it seems to me that the ways in which we talk about the Beckhams and other celebrity figures whom our culture produces, celebrates and critiques is less obviously suggestive of sophisticated theological awareness. For it’s not uncommon, after all, to hear people bandying about phrases like ‘he or she is a god’, or ‘he’s my god’ or ‘he’s God’s gift’ or – more popularly still – ‘he’s a legend’ when talking of such people or even in respect of lesser lights still in these blasphemous days of ours. Certainly one accepts that when people use these phrases, they are not meaning to subscribe to their full and complete sense: when we talk of ‘playing God’, for example, a pejorative meaning is still possible. But our intellectual alarm bells might nonetheless ring when we hear this language: since it’s certainly the case that the boundary between the words we use to express ourselves and the thoughts we think and the feelings we feel is not in every context an obvious and altogether secure one. By speaking in a certain way, that is to say, we may open up a space for ourselves to think and feel in precisely that way. And in the concrete example I have mentioned, that may mean that if I say to myself and others every Saturday afternoon that David Beckham or some other human is a God or a legend, it may be that I am opening a space in which such propositions become in a sense true both for myself and for others around me. And this would be at the very least ironic, and at the most tragic, if at heart I know better than to subscribe to such a crude idea of divinity.