Does the Moral Arc of the Universe Really Bend Toward Justice?

I like this quote:

What we must always be aware of are the deep ideological structures that bolster the myths by which we live, and to make sure that those myths exist for us, and not us for those myths.

It echoes the saying o Jesus about the sabbath being made for humans rather than vice versa, and Walter Wink's related observation that the Powers are similarly so made. I would say that, in a sense, this is also related since Myths are one of the existential underpinnings of many of the Powers. Corporisations are partly constituted by hopeful stories and mission statements which function mythologically. The thing is to learn to narrate myths which tell a truth which liberates and edifies.

One of the things that this underlines for me is that working to educate and to change minds towards peace and justice is important work. It can sometimes seem like learning and teaching are a bit weak compared with curing disease or building sewage systems. But there is value in helping people to think in ways that build and sustain human flourishing. There is value in challenging ideas that denigrate or diminish others.

The article itself is worth pondering, not least because it raises the question of how far this saying (picked up by Martin Luther King Jr) can be taken on without some kind of faith in providence. I guess that Marxist philosophy embeds the idea of providence in the dialectic of history and offers an interpretation of history which seems to found that view in a reading of the arc of history thus far. And Christian thought would tend to look to the working of God in and through human affairs. Both views have to be wary of inculcating a passivity which just waits for the process to work itself out. And in reality we need to remember that we are ourselves part of 'history' and caught up in providence. That if the arc of history does indeed bend towards justice, it is because 'we' make it so.

The real question, once the proposition is accepted (however tentatively), is why we think it might be so. In what some would argue is an indifferent universe, how come we think we can observe greater justice coming about? Is not 'justice' simply a human preference for arranging our affairs? Or is it something that ultimate reality 'cares' about? Why do we humans even have a sense that justice is better than cruelty and indifference? -which is a perfectly understandable reading of the way the universe appears to work, at least from some perspectives.

God has set eternity in the human heart (Eccl.3:11). Eternity is about love and justice. It is hard to make the statement about the arc of the universe veering towards justice without some kind of faith that there is an underlying reality which cares about such things and has embedded within the created order something that keeps pushing towards what is cared about. That underlying reality Christians name as 'God' and the something is the strange attractor of eschatological/ressurection life. This something is within the created order but points beyond; to a completion, to a wholeness, to a point of Rest; where hints and longings come to their fulness.

When we hope that it may be that the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice, we are hoping that 'God' really does care and that providence therefore will support our efforts in broad terms to make things more fair, loving and joyful -that indeed, our efforts to do so actually are eternally valuable, are worth something and work with the 'deep magic' of what is.

Does the Arc of the Moral Universe Really Bend Toward Justice? | Portside:

Love, lust and lying: can Christians respond without jerking their knees?

A recent THES publish and interview with the author of Love and Lies, Clancy Martin. I've put the book on my 'to get' list. Meantime there is the interview to go on and which has raised issues for me which I'd like to explore a bit more 'out loud' as it were. The article tells us that basically the book

"argues that the double-dealing at the core of every great swindle is also at the heart of erotic love. "

I think this means that loving people implies lying to them, necessarily. Of course, this is a hard idea for Christians (and others) to swallow. We are, ostensibly:

those who would rather believe Thomas Merton’s claim in Love and Living that “the beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image”

 Doubly so, because it is based in apparently good research and some extended thinking.

to confront with chilling clarity the sociopathy that silently underpins most of our average lives. “The sociologist Erving Goffman identified that in his famous book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life,” Martin says. “We are always playing roles. // So the good liar and the good lover “must be able – or must strive – to see her- or himself through the eyes of the person she or he will come to love”, Martin continues. “The kind of mind control they practise is the same: it’s not strictly coercion; it’s seduction. It’s convincing the person who is the object of the mental manipulation that he or she wants to participate in the illusion being created. Long-term committed erotic love will evolve into something different, something still more complex. But falling in love depends on these kinds of artistic illusions.””

I don't think that I see playing roles as negatively as that. I don't think that it is duplicitous. It's not duplicitous because, as I understand Goffman, the point is that there isn't some other 'real' us hiding behind the masks: we actually are the different roles we play: there's no neutral inner-self observer who hides a true identity by acting a part. We are the collection of roles. The task is for us to integrate them. Of course, this is a bit idealised: sometimes we do fake and lie and deceive. But what I'm saying is that such is not inherent in role playing. We can learn to 'play ourselves' in different situations. We should also recognise that we are who we are in relation to other people which means that we are formed in our relationships -with all that implies in terms of self-presentation; learning to trust, beginning to disclose more of ourselves etc. We do all of these processes a grave disservice if we interpret them simply as mendacious and therefore morally reprehensible. Or, alternatively, because there is a degree of less-than-full-disclosure that this means it is somehow okay not to attempt to be integrated and to strive for honesty and transparency.

Part of the problem, I suspect, is that the research as presented perhaps pays too little attention to what love actually is.  Surely the point of the quote from Merton, above, is to critique some versions of 'love' by reference to agapaic love. And so, I think that the point raised in the next quote is very interesting because it does seem to make that point to some degree.

Love allows us – requires us – to envision possibilities that at one point seemed impossible: the possibility of becoming a person who is capable of making promises that stick, the possibility of creating a lasting home of our own, the possibility of understanding another person’s inner life. But at the beginning of love, none of these possibilities has been actualised so we work together to create the illusion.

Is "illusion" fair? I'm not sure that it is. In other areas of scholarship we might talk about "shared imaginaries" which function to draw people together to create a different (hopefully better) future and in co-ordinating effort and desire to form us/them: change us to become more like what we would see to be desirable.

But my mother never harmed me or told me that she wanted to do so. Instead she lied to me. She told me, quite convincingly, that I was loved unconditionally, always. (“A very common, very useful lie that parents tell children,” Martin reassures me.) I lie to my daughter not out of some diabolical plan for her, or even a well-meaning paternalism. I lie because I want to maintain the story that we are somehow better, more patient, more loving, than we actually tend to be. Some things are better left unsaid.

I think that perhaps this does not give enough credit to both the desire to be and to become the loving person and the power of the story to achieve that to some degree. Of course Christian traditions also contain a strong critique of human love which would very much also want to say that we do fall short of our narrated ideals, that we do indulge in self-deception. But that, I contend is not quite the same as simply saying that we are lying. We are both trying and lying. We need to both continue and be self-suspicious. However, we need, the Christian tradition tends to contend, to bring together our narrative with that of the loving God in whom that faithful unconditional love finds fulfilment and source, embodiment and force.

Jack Lewis, meet Matt Fox for an original blessing

Jack Lewis meet Matt Fox ... Matt, this is Jack. Matt, you may recall Jack by his nom de plume: CS Lewis. Now, I've brought you two together because you have both influenced me in a congruent way. I know it may be hard to believe, one of you apparently defending a Christian tradition that the other has found deeply alienating. Yet, actually I learnt a particular something from both of you and I find myself wondering how best to tell a story of human corruption against that background.

So, what is that particular something? Well, from you, Matt, I became convinced that we really do need to make sure that we tell the story starting with original blessing rather than making original sin the main and key point in our thinking. I became convinced mainly because that is where the Hebrew and therefore Christian scriptures begin; with "And God saw that it was good". But this is also where you come in, Jack. Because I had learnt something from you already which, over time, I realised was deeply congruent with the idea of original blessing. From you I had learnt in my undergraduate reading, that we must understand evil as derived, unoriginal and merely parasitic on the Good. Evil cannot be thought of in a dualistic way as somehow 'being' an equal and opposite force to 'good'. Your reasoning convinced me that behind every evil is a perverted or misused good; that evil is, in a sense a parasite feeding off what is good and unable to exist without goodness.

In this, I think, you are both united. Reality is fundamentally good and we are called to participate in that fundamental goodness, and indeed to tend it and help multiply it. This is our human calling before any other calling: to be blessed and to bless in turn. I actually think both of you would probably agree with that, in broad terms, leaving aside quibbles about terminology or which metaphors might be most apt and resonant.

What I want to do with this conversation is think about where we go next in terms of accounting for what has tended in the Christian tradition to be called 'sin'. Though, to be sure, there have been and are other terms for it and a variety of images to think it through.

You see, I think that a further dimension of what I think Matt has got right in all this is to be critical of where the fall-redemption model, as he tends to call it, sometimes (indeed, often) pushes Christians and those influenced by that way of thinking. On the other hand, what you, Jack, do really well in so many of your books is explore the inner world of sinning in a way that helps us to see how sinning is a non-dualistic thing. It's not an alien force that takes us over so much as a directing of drives and desires that in other circumstances and dealt with differently would be simply an ordinary good. What you also do is help us to see that there is a fundamental surdity about it. These things would sit well enough, I suspect, with the fundamental right insight behind the idea of original blessing.

So, in future blog posts, I hope to try to tease this out a bit further: what is sin in a non-dualistic account, recognising that so much popular thinking about sin is at root dualistic, I think that may be what you were saying, Matt. I don't recall you saying that Jack, but as I indicate above, I think that your approach amounted to that.

Arthur C. Clarke's 31-Word Sci-Fi Story, "siseneG"

Read Arthur C. Clarke's Super Short, 31-Word Sci-Fi Story, "siseneG" | Open Culture: “siseneG,” a story story — a very short story indeed — Clarke sent in to Analog magazine in 1984:

And God said: DELETE lines One to Aleph. LOAD. RUN.
And the Universe ceased to exist.
Then he pondered for a few aeons, sighed, and added: ERASE.
It never had existed.

I liked this because it does imply some interesting philosophical reflections. Of course, it is hard to really imagine a being outside of time 'pondering for a few aeons' (what could that possibly mean?). But I warmed to the idea that we could perhaps think of the universe as fundamentally code. I think that's where I see a lot of physics thinking at the moment. And then, if code, then what of "In the beginning was the word"?

Learning Calm: Christians and mindfulness.

I was very recently asked by a Christian student at my university with regard to a set of meditation sessions I had just advertised under the title 'Learn Calm and Carry On'.  "May I ask based on what philosophy behind will the meditation be conducted?". This is the answer I quickly formulated, but it seemed to me that in brief it helped me to articulate why I do it. You may discern that I have answered more than the simple question as asked: coming from a Christian tradition which has sometimes been more wary of things like this, I judged that placing the answer within a broader context was needed.

The philosophy behind it, from my point of view, is slightly sophisticated. In overview; it is rooted in scientific research on exercises involving focus on breath and awareness of one's own consciousness. As the person who leads this particular package of exercises, and as a Christian I understand what I'm doing as in Christian terms. I think that self-awareness is an important discipline for Christians to develop in order for us to become aware of how we do and don't follow God's will (even into the recesses of our personal formation) and to help us to become more conscious of God's presence in our everyday life.

These exercises can help us to cultivate those awarenesses.

However, these sessions are open to people who don't necessarily share a Christian commitment because I think, based on the scientific evidence, that the exercises can help people develop better mental and emotional health and because I believe that Christian faith calls us to 'do good to all', offering something like this is part of a broader Christian outreach. I occasionally talk with people about how they link up with Christian faith. Within the sessions themselves, I just use exercises that can be accessed by a wide variety of people with no particular content that requires a specific faith commitment.

As a Christian I see mind-body wholism as a part of the heritage of our faith reaching back into Hebrew anthropology and exemplified in the philosophical commitments that the churches of the first four centuries recognised as consistent with Christian commitment. That mind-body wholism leads me to expect that by engaging in certain kinds of psycho-somatic exercises, people would gain some health benefits. It is no surprise, either, therefore, to discover that by engaging in exercises of this kind, Christians can also find things that can help to mature their own discipleship of Christ.

On a more personal note, my own engagement in these exercises came through recognising that the effects and some of the component parts were actually part of practice and experience of many Christians, myself included. It was just that taking them out of the familiar context of a specific spiritual tradition made them seem somewhat unfamiliar at first.

Now, of course, there are others who might lead a range of exercises such as I do who don't share a Christian faith. And, of course, they would have to work out for themselves how they square the scientific results with their own philosophies. In what I've written above, I hope I've given you an indication of how it seems to me that these exercises can fit within a Christian understanding of the world. 

Further comments

My response ended at the last paragraph, but a few further comments might be called for.  There is in this response an implicit view of the relationship between the philosophical entails of Christian commitments and the 'public square': I'm not an exclusivist in this respect: I think that because world-views are seeking to explain the world which is a common heritage, there are enormous overlaps of explanations. In fact, missionally, I see these as the reason we can, as Christians, engage in conversations about how we collectively 'do' society and expect that sometimes our views can gain some degree of collective acceptance -because there is common ground in the human experiences of ourselves, our bodies, minds and the world. But maybe that's another post ...

Annunciatory thoughts on incarnation

On Wednesday last, it fell to me to give a homily on the Annunciation at a lunchtime communion service, it being 9 months before Christmas day. I had two possible tacks suggesting themselves to me. One was 'safer' -a line of thought about Mary as prototypical disciple: the first Christian; someone from whom we can learn something about following Jesus. The other tack could have been to ponder the nature of incarnation, time and space. I went with the former because I wasn't sure, in the end, whether I could manage to do the latter justice and be coherent about it in five minutes without having tried to put my thoughts in order more fully beforehand.

So... well I'm sure you could guess where this is going ... This is me trying to put those thoughts in some kind of order. I'm going to start where I had been thinking of starting with the homily in the midst of the Annunciation passage in the Gospel of Luke. (BTW, I tend to think a homily is a mini-sermon).

The angel said to her, ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God. [Luke 1:36]

That phrase "the power of the Most High will overshadow you" is evocative of Genesis 1:2. "Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters." It's not the words so much as the imagery. It makes an imaginal connection between creation and new creation. The conception of Jesus in Mary is being told in a way that alludes to the making of the cosmos. The creation of Jesus in her womb is presented in a way that invites us to think of it a bit like the creation of a world in the formless emptiness preceding the creative declaration "Let there be light": in the emptiness of a 'barren' womb the unformed is divided into form.

And yet, actually perhaps we should see the flow of analogy going the other way. We should rather see the creation in the light of the incarnation. This is built on the proposal that we should, with Barth and others, see God's intention from eternity to become part of creation, to be incarnate and share community with What God has made.
If this is so, and I have increasingly become convinced that it is, then we need to deliver ourselves from our instinctive ways of thinking about time. Because in this way of thinking about creation, incarnation is the first and primary 'cause'. In a sense, in the mind of God, the incarnation is the beginning of creation. This relativises time. We tend to think about time in terms of our experience of sequence: things follow on from one another and we tend to think about time as an absolute progress of sequence to which we are all subject and which is the same through all things. Sometimes we even think, in effect, that God too is subject to time, is within time.

Since Albert Einstein, over a century ago, we have understood that time is relative and not absolute. Time and space are dimensions of the same reality and are capable of affecting one another. In other words time is not some kind of absolute medium through which all else passes, it is itself a created 'thing' like (though not entirely like) space. So when we consider the creation of the world, we need to consider it being created with time rather than in time (I think that Augustine of Hippo said similarly). Time is a property of the created order, part of its way of being.

So we don't have to be committed to only thinking about the cosmos in terms of a sequentially-timely process flowing from big bang to whatever the end might be. We could consider a Beginning in the centre of spacetime (in as far as 'centre' means something in such a cosmos).
If we granted for the sake of argument and understanding for a moment, that the idea of multiple universes has something to it: that every time there is a decision or an 'it could go either way' moment, both/all possibilities are realised each in its own universe. The multiverse, then, would be a huge field of divergent possible-universes. If you imaiened them all laid out like a mosaic, and then traced a line over them to show/follow a particular storyline (timeline, perhaps) ... well that's what is being used in the plot of this Star Trek Voyager set of episodes, which has been edited into a synopsis here:

The plot of this group of episodes involves a particular race who have some ability to shift timelines. But they have to keep trying because different shifts may produce a relatively good outcome in their terms, but there are always downsides -sometimes catastrophic for their purposes. They aim to get a perfect outcome, but each time there is some 'fly in the ointment' and so they keep trying (and Voyager gets caught up in it). Watch for the screen on the ship showing a schematic of the timelines. What this race are doing, in effect, is starting with a teleology (aiming for a desired state of affairs [DSA] in the universe) and shifting timelines until it is achieved. In a sense this is a model of what I'm proposing in that the DSA becomes determinative, in a sense, of the storyline followed through the possible universes. It could be said that the desired state of affairs attracts the timeline to it

So we could start in what seems to us to be the middle. with the  incarnation and resurrection as the desired outcomes on God's part.Because, in this way of looking at things, God, who is outside of and determinative of spacetime, creates with the desired state of affairs at the heart of the creation, with the inflowing and outflowing time~ and storylines determined by that at-heart desired state of affairs. Of course, that DSA involves the creator becoming part of the storyline and inhabiting it, experiencing it from the 'inside', in an appropriate way. The historically tiny incarnation/resurrection timeline, although relatively short, actually has the effect of selecting the historical, evolutionary and archaeontological timelines that lead to itself.

I guess this comes out, philosophically, as some version of the best of all possible universes theory. It does, however, allow us to conceive of that theory in terms made possible and somewhat plausible by current scientific knowledge and theorising.

There are further avenues to explore on this. Among them are what this implies about agency and determinism and the eschatological implications if we are also seeing the incarnation/resurraction timelinette as in some way an inbreaking of God's future. I hope to return to these questions on this blog at a later date.

I'm sorry for the late running of this service

I've noticed a few times in the last year or three that announcements at some rail stations and on some trains have surprised me a little with their automated announcements which apologise for delays or other inconveniences in the service. I guess I have tended to expect -because it would be what i'd do- that they might say things like, "Broad Acres Railways regrets any inconvenience ..." but what catches me by suprise is the first person singular: "I apologise" or "I am sorry ....".

Perhaps it doesn't strike you as odd, but for me there are two questions spring to mind. One question is, knowing that it is an automated announcement, who is this 'I'? And the second question is, assuming that somehow it is the company being represented, how seriously can we take expressions of regret, remorse or penitence on the part of a company?

With regard to  who the 'I' might be, the recording carries the trace of a real human 'I' who is/was the voice actor who recorded the various components that the computer algorithm uses to assemble the panoply of announcements. Clearly that person is not apologising, it is merely their voice that has been rented to express some other's messages. However, what their voice does is to give an illusion of a human subject making the apology (or whatever else it might be) and presumably the company is interested in the sense of rapport that this creates in their customers, establishing a friendly, humane, presence in our psyches.

So the literal or direct referent for the 'I' could be the algorithm that generates the messages in response to whatever inputs to the computer system that is running the program that the algorithm is part of. The "I' in this case is the output of data processing -though that might, in a wider context, be too reductionistic a statement: just because this 'I' is produced most proximately by loudspeakers driven by electrical signals which are patterned in turn by a computer algorithm, does not mean that the 'I' so produced is meaningless in the sense of there being no person 'behind' it. If we adhere too strongly to that, then we risk denying personal meaningfulness behind the output of the voice synthesiser used by Stephen Hawking. Come to that, we could notice that our own voice production is in many ways a biological reflex of the electro-mechanical systems just mentioned: we have neuronal patterns which perform a similar function to the computer algorithm in respect of producing syntactically and phonologically (though often not prosodically) well-formed utterances and translate those into speech.

Now, thinking about the corporate expressing regret etc, it is tempting to deny personal meaningfulness to the train or station announcement on behalf of Broad Acres Railway Company but we might want to pause. Is it possible that a company could desire, intend, regret? And could it do those things at least in part in relation to human persons?

We readily acknowledge, of course, that those who lead the company may have desires, intents and relational-motives in common. We can acknowledge that more lowly members of the company might also do those things on a one-to-one level (though it's an interesting question to wonder how far they might do so in their own persons and how for as representative persons -or if that is a meaningful distinction). And the question is whether that is all that there is to say: a bunch of individual humans happen to agree that it is regrettable that the train is late or whatever. Or is it possible that it is more than an aggregated, collective, emotion? That, at least sometimes, the company is a collective being-in-itself and capable of something analogous to human emotions like desire, fear, anger, loyalty?

This would mean that in some way the confluence of legal instruments, financial flows, contracts, mission statements, human affectivity (of a variety of 'stakeholders') become synchronised and feedback-reinforced such that while the machinery, software and human agents which form the infrastructure are in place 'performing' the company, then the company is real and has some degree of agency. It impinges on the human social world as an actor with analogues to personality (ethos?), intentions (mission statement and other direction-setting instruments) and a certain degree of vulnerability to what others 'think' of it (reputation, image, brand etc).

What makes it hard for us to go with that is often that we are tripped up by the fact that a company (or whatever) is made up of human beings and we are by instinct and habit disposed to relate to other humans. We can accommodate, usually by analogy, 'lesser' creatures into our relating or we can treat things as mere instruments of our will. What we are less equipped to do is to relate to something that is made from us and which might use our intelligence and affectivity as part of its own life -a little like our brains use the electro-chemical and biological capabilities of the cells we call neurons which go about their own business but collectively help create a mind. And of course, such a thing is so alien to what we are disposed to relate to and we have few everyday experiences on which to draw to give analogues which could help us.

So, I think it is possible that the 'I' can refer, at least sometimes, to a real entity which has agency and a 'self' to refer to within human language-games. We actually do refer to companies in an agentive way at times: "the college should know..."; "that company thinks it can ..." etc are all acceptable clause openings. The issue in interpreting them is more to do with whether the company or the college or the organisation is being personified or whether there is something more to it than merely a way of speaking.

I started writing this thinking I might be producing something that might send-up the companies' affectation. I've ended by thinking it may be an affectation at the level of the commissioning group and the PR departments but that it might actually be accurate in a way.

Presence, space and relating mind

In a previous post, Presence, space and mind, I wrote about how presence need not always imply physical proximity but could be mediated by tokens such as letters, or electronic signals and that the crucial thing was that the tokens enabled and carried forward a relationship. At the end of that previous post I noted that there was still some exploration of the idea to be done:  

to think about the way that relationship can be mediated by tokens and the conditions for successful mediation of relationship which might be relevant to the Eucharist.

So it seems that presence need not be equated to physical proximity. However, we should note that this is not to imply that God is not present. Some of what we need to explore is that God is always and everywhere present so eucharistic presence is not a presence in distinction to absence, but it is rather the kind of presence being mediated. God's 'normal' or 'ordinary' ubiquity is supplemented or interpreted by the communicative tokens of bread and wine in the eucharist. God is present anyway and in the eucharist that presence is 'enhanced' by a collection of inter-related signifiers in a communicative economy based in narratives of Divine-human interaction.

So this is beyond merely 'physical' presence (that is presence alongside, over or through the physical universe rather than of a physical body). It is a storied presence invoked upon and by broken bread and outpoured wine and their place in the stories so invoked. So the presence is not only physical but it is collectively-mental; a presence within the minds and affectivities of disciples. This is a 'place' where the normal and ordinary presence of God does not automatically exist: it can only be there by some degree of welcome and acknowledgement. Which welcome and acknowledgement are called forth and substantiated by the rite. Perhaps, then, this gives a further credence to the notion of "transsignification" as a way of understanding the eucharist.

There is a real presence of Christ in the social-mindscape of the congregation. 'Real' in the sense that it is not merely a subjective construction of the human congregants but it is a presence-in-sign whereby the self-giving of Christ is appropriated subjectively within the social-mindscape as the physical rite is enacted. Just as word or gesture is needed to convey a personal and relational presence so is the rite important in conveying the Christ presence into the social-mindscape. The reality of the presence beyond the subjectivity of the congregants derives from the given-ness of the sign/s by God. As a letter conveys a real presence by virtue of it being sent by the author to renew or to keep alive a relationship, so this rite conveys a real presence by virtue of being 'sent' by God.

And what is communicated is particularly signified as not simply presence or availability but more precisely the given-ness-unto-death of the God-man Jesus. The tokens communicating the real presence-in-social-mindscape are more precisely communicating the self-donation of the Word of God through deathly passion and 'resurrascension'. This too goes beyond mere presence and interprets presence as 'for us' and solidary as well as committed and saving. This is God conveying commitment to relating positively to us by re-presenting to us what God has been doing to create a positive relationship with the implication of inviting us to respond in kind. The presentation and the response come together in the co-ordinating signs that make up the rite: the actions of taking, blessing, breaking and consuming the bread and the wine,

And such presence involves both time and space.It is in the rite that the communication takes place -as the rite is 'read' by the congregants, the relationship via the deathly passion and resurrascension is renewed as a real presence in the mindscape. a real presence that becomes us at the very least by changing and reinforcing our neuronal patterns and their connections with the various aspects of our lives over time.

I think there's a little more to unpack ... watch this space.

Presence, space and mind

Where is cyberspace? Where is our conversation when I'm sending signals and receiving them in a spot in north east England whereas you might be holding up your end of the conversation in ... well ... it could be Antarctica. So where is the conversation? Presumably in both places and in the medium of signal-travel. More precisely 'in' our minds mediated by sound and light waves, radio waves, electronic processing, bio-neural processing ... a conversation isn't such a simple thing and nor is presence. We all know of times when someone (perhaps we ourselves) have been present physically but not personally or relationally. And we can, to some extent, be present relationally /personally  but not physically -though some way of linking minds/persons is needed as it is hard to conceive of relating without some exchange of information but that can be done at a distance. Physical mediation cannot be entirely withdrawn.

And so I found myself musing on a sentence from John M Hull's article in the last Church times (non-subscribers won't be able to see the whole article for a couple of weeks or so). "The Reformers, in opposing transubstantiation, insisted that the real presence of the body of Christ could not be on earth, because it was already in heaven, at the right hand of God." And of course, the Roman Catholic antecedent is a very physical understanding of the presence tied as it was to the 'accidents' of particular pieces of bread and wine. And as I read the paragraphs in which that sentence appears, I felt that the whole argument was misconceived and missing an important dimension.

Perhaps the main difficulty was not exploring more fully what presence might mean beyond physical proximity. To be fair it was probably hard to conceive of relating or personal presence aside from physical presence when technologies for extending communicative reach were relatively unsophisticated. Our technologies enable us to experience and so to conceive of relating at a distance and so can help us to reframe the way we think about 'the real presence of Christ'.

By that I'm not suggesting that we should have a technological understanding, but to take hold of the conceptual space opened up by ICTs to recognise presence not merely in physical terms. So we can take seriously the idea that God is all about relating and that relational presence is not fully dependent on physical presence so much as personal presence and that personal and relational presence isn't always dependent on a bodily presence. Physical and bodily need not be the same thing, we now understand.

Once we understand relational presence as more to do with signalling -that is exchange of information having a bearing on the maintenance and development of a relationship- than with simply the medium, it reframes the whole issue. For example, a note or letter, or email can be a relational presence. (And let's just pause briefly to note that these are in a sense more tactile and permanent forms of signalling than speech, gesture or expression, but essentially the same sort of thing in respect of relational mediation). In appropriate circumstances a token can be a relational presence. A prearranged signal can mediate a presence and sometimes more -the song 'Tie a Yellow Ribbon round the Old Oak Tree' illustrates just such a token.

So, I'm proposing that we don't need to try to conceive of the presence of Christ in the Eucharist in physical terms (and therefore we don't need to get into discussion about whether Christ's body can be in two 'places' at once and how heavenly placement might co-ordinate with earthly placement and so forth). What might be more useful is to think about the way that relationship can be mediated by tokens and the conditions for successful mediation of relationship which might be relevant to the Eucharist.

That's the exploration of the next post on this topic -which I hope to do in a little while. This one was about laying down a re-framing of the issue in principle.

Dear tokens of his Passion

Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson (who wrote Gilead ) has written a thoughtful crituque of reductionist accounts of the mind. The title could be a bit misleading as if it is making a case for disposing of inwardness when in fact it is more an expose of the way that inwardness is dispelled and why that is problematic. I enjoyed the cultural and historical contextualisation of some of the protaganists of reductionist ideas. I didn't find this examination as lucid as some others I've come across; it is written in an academic style -which reflects the genesis of the book as a series of lectures. Nonetheless, a helpful resource in considering the issues around how we understand the mind in a culture informed by science and popular mis-understandings of the scientific enterprise and results of it.

Notes and quotes

 primary assertions make other information either irrelevant or subordinate to kinds of explanation that serve the favored theory. What is art? It is a means of attracting mates, even though artists may have felt that it was an exploration of experience, of the possibilities of communication, and of the extraordinary collaboration of eye and hand. location 141

here—the emperors presided over a remarkably brutal society, brilliant as it was. As is usual, Russell blames Christian violence on the traditions of Jewish monotheism, not on the norms of the pagan civilization in which the faith took root. location 260

religion is indisputably a central factor in any account of the character and workings of the human mind. Does religion manifest a capacity for deep insight, or an extraordinary proneness to delusion? Both, perhaps, like the mind itself. location 275

The Gilgamesh epic was found in various forms throughout the ancient Near East. It is absurd to imagine that the most dramatic part of it could simply be atched into the Hebrew Genesis and no one would notice the plagiarism. To retell their story with changes would be to defend against its pagan theological implications, and also to address what are, after all, questions of very great interest. All this assumes that these ancients had an intellectual life, that they had meaningful awareness of surrounding cultures. location 416

Whoever controls the definition of mind controls the definition of humankind itself, and culture, and history. location 467

I would argue that the absence of mind and subjectivity from parascientific literature is in some part a consequence of the fact that the literature arose and took its form in part as a polemic against religion. And it has persisted, consciously or not, in a strategy for excluding thought of the kind hospitable to religion from the possibility of speaking in its own terms, making its own case. Metaphysics in general has been excluded at the same time, even from philosophy, which since Comte has been associated with this same project of exclusion. The arts have been radically marginalized. In its treatment of human nature the diversity of cultures is left out of account, perhaps to facilitate the making of analogies between our living selves and our hypothetical primitive ancestors, so central to their argument, who can only have been culturally very remote from us indeed. When history is mentioned, it is usually to point to its follies and errors, which persist to the degree that the light of science has not yet fallen over the whole of human affairs. location 514

At this point, the parascientific genre feels like a rear-guard action, a nostalgia for the lost certitudes of positivism. location 538

Darwin, famously influenced by Malthus, made the competition for limited resources an elemental, universal principle of life, and, in The Descent of Man, folded tribal warfare into the processes of evolution, a notion which meshed nicely with colonialism and with the high esteem in which Europeans of the period held themselves. location 558

My point being that another proper context for the interpretation of Phineas Gage might be others who have sufered gross insult to the body, especially those who have been disfigured by it. And in justice to Gage, the touching fact is that he was employed continually until his final illness. No one considers what might have been the reaction of other people to him when his moving from job to job—his only sin besides cursing and irritability—attracts learned disapprobation. location 654

The meme is not a notion I can dismiss out of hand. It seems to me to describe as well as anything does the obdurate persistence and influence of the genre of writing I have called parascientific. This piece of evidence for its reality might not please its originators, who always seem to assume their own immunity from the illusions and distractions that plague the rest of us. location 833

have come to the conclusion that the random, the accidental, have a strong attraction for many writers because they simplify by delimiting. Why is there something rather than nothing? Accident. Accident narrows the range of appropriate strategies of interpretation, while intention very much broadens it. Accident closes on itself, while intention implies that, in and beyond any particular fact or circumstance, there is vastly more to be understood. Intention is implicitly communicative, because an actor is described in any intentional act. Why is the human brain the most complex object known to exist in the universe? Because the elaborations of the mammalian brain that promoted the survival of the organism overshot the mark in our case. Or because it is intrinsic to our role in the universe as thinkers and perceivers, participants in a singular capacity for wonder as well as for comprehension. location 889

 philosopher John Searle objects to the commonly held conception that “suggests that science names a specific kind of ontology, as if there were a scientific reality that is different from, for example, the reality of common sense.” He says, “I think that is profoundly mistaken.” And he says, “There is no such thing as the scientific world. There is, rather, just the world, and what we are trying to do is describe how it works and describe our situation location 903

little that is modern departs as cleanly from its precursors as myth would have us believe. location 924

Rereading Freud, I have come to the conclusion that his essays, and therefore very central features of his thought, most notably the murder of the primal father with all its consequences, were meant to confute theories of race and nation that were becoming increasingly predominant as he wrote. location 1007

Freud’s highly polished, deeply troubled Vienna, for many years seeming to sustain a perilous equilibrium between the strict imperatives of social order and the raw frictions of group conflict, bears more than a little resemblance to the Freudian self. To hope for more, for something to compare with the rootedness and authenticity for which the racial nationalists yearned, would risk destabilizing the very fragile equilibrium that for Freud is the closest approach human beings can make to their natural condition. location 1105

we come upon a contention which is so astonishing that we must dwell upon it. This contention holds that what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions. I call this contention astonishing because, in whatever way we may define the concept of civilization, it is a certain fact that all the things with which we seek to protect ourselves against the threats that emanate from the sources of suffering are part of that very civilization. location 1159

If there is one thing Freud asserts consistently, from which every theory proceeds and to which every conclusion returns, it is just this—that the mind is not to be trusted. The conversation in the larger culture to which I have referred, the variously lamented loss of spiritual authenticity, assumes that civilization has alienated Europeans from their essential selves and corrupted their experience. location 1228

 There are physicists and philosophers who would correct me. They would say, if there are an infinite number of universes, as in theory there could be, then creatures like us would be very likely to emerge at some time in one of them. But to say this is only to state the fact of our improbability in other terms. location 1260

 According to E. O. Wilson, “The brain and its satellite glands have now been probed to the point where no particular site remains that can reasonably be supposed to harbor a nonphysical mind.” Perhaps this statement is to be taken as tongue-in-cheek. But to prove a negative, or to treat it as having been proved, is, oddly enough, an old and essential strategy of positivism. So I do feel obliged to point out that if such a site could be found in the brain, then the mind would be physical in the same sense that anything else with a locus in the brain is physical. To define the mind as nonphysical in the first place clearly prejudices his conclusion. location 1273

the human brain as case in point. How strange it would be, then, that this accident, this excess, should feel a tropism toward what Pinker himself calls “the truth.”

Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (The Terry Lectures Series) Marilynne Robinson

The Library of Babel

What an intriguing short story. From the pen of Jorge Luis Borges. Story might be the wrong word: more an almost science-fictioney thought experiment or comment-scene which touches on and invites the reader to think about infinity and knowledge and probabilities. All very contemporary somehow. I found that it really helped me somehow to grasp inifinity -or near infinity- at more of a gut level than normally I manage and as such just to feel the edge of the intellectual vertigo of contemplating it. Kind of the literary equivalent of lying at night on the ground and looking at the stars.
The Library of Babel

Should we judge people of past eras for moral failings?

Whether it's to do with governments or organisations apologising for misdemeaners of previous eras, or debates about the moral record of  churches or other relgious organisations (for example -is God immoral to have got Mary pregnant at age 13 -if that particular speculation were to be correct?). So this article has a number of things worth thinking about. First up commenting on the idea that we can't judge people of other cultures or times:

 The philosopher Miranda Fricker is not a moral relativist, but she thinks the test for blameworthiness is whether the person could have known any different. "The proper standards by which to judge people are the best standards that were available to them at the time".BBC News - Should we judge people of past eras for moral failings?

 Now I think there's something to that, but on the face of it, it doesn't get us out of the hole. 'Best standards available' sounds fair enough but is actually a hostage to interpretation of 'best'. Who defines best? Is that not simply re-immersing us in the problem we started off with? - Best standards in 1700's in Europe seemed to be that slave-holding was fine provided they were treated well. There were people arguing slavery was simply wrong, but how were people of that age to know that we, their descendants, would consider that the 'best' position? After all, it was considered that the humane slavery argued for was a civilising institution for primitive people whose lives were being improved by being slaves. A position not dissimilar from the arguments for apartheid, interestingly. It's obvious to us now what the best standards were/are but I'm not convinced that it is obvious within the situation. As the article says at the end:

just as we judge Kant's century, and identify its moral defects, so it is inevitable that the people of the 23rd Century will detect flaws in ours, the 21st.
What might these flaws be? Our treatment of the environment? Our tolerance of poverty?
... the way that we, in the early part of the 21st Century, still treat animals.

 There's a really helpful perspective discussed in the article involving distinguishing between blame and responsibility using an idea called 'moral luck'.

20th Century British philosopher, Bernard Williams, tried to tease apart a distinction between blame and responsibility. He did so by writing about what he called "moral luck".

Take the following example. Imagine that while a lorry driver is on the road a child suddenly runs out in front of him. Through tragic bad luck the child is hit by the vehicle and dies.

The man is blameless, for the accident has happened through no fault of his. In this sense he has nothing to reproach himself for, and has done nothing wrong. And yet, writes Williams, surely this man is now enmeshed in a set of moral responsibilities that, for example, a bystander, who is equally blameless, is not. It makes a moral difference that it was him at the wheel. As the driver, he might have an obligation to meet the parents or attend the funeral

 This in turn helps us to think about whether and how corporate entities might be blameworthy or responsible and, in a sense, whether they can let alone should apologise for past wrongs. So ...

[Australian] Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, who finally made the formal apology on behalf of the state in 2008, against the wishes of a significant minority of the Australian people. Here is an example where, arguably, the current state might be blameless, yet somehow responsible

 It seems to be an emerging consensus that institutions and organisations can be held responsible as corporates even if the individuals involved are now different.

"It seems to me to be a measure of civilisation that our institutions have full accountability, in much the way that individuals do," says Fricker. "An apology is an incredibly important act that our institutions should increasingly become capable of - people who have been wronged by the state are owed an apology by the state, even if the individuals in government are different from those at the time."

 What needs to be done beyond this, of course, is to weigh up the responsibility and blameworthiness of individuals concerned. How far are some people caught up in corporate wrongdoing blameworthy or responsible. Are they more like the lorry-driver mentioned above or a drunk-driver or even some other position on a scale of blame and responsibility.

Evil is suffering passed along

In the series of posts the lattermost of which is on forgiveness-centred atonement, I propose that we understand forgiveness in terms of "to refuse counter-mimesis, to deny the recirculation of detriment into human affairs". And I'm interested to note that in a Quora piece by Diane Meriwether, Why do certain people derive pleasure from doing cruel things...- Quora:  there is, by implication, a congruent proposal about suffering and human response to it.

 When suffering is upon us we have two options. We can process and digest it or we can pass it on. Processing emotional pain can be as silent as pressing our hands to our chest and rocking back and forth, or it can be as loud as a scream that starts in your throat and tunnels down through your gut, through your knees, and tears a channel into the earth. Working through pain can happen in an instant, when you finally stop running, drop your hands and invite what's been chasing you to kill you if it must. Or the process can last years, playing hide and seek with the sweetness of a memory. In time, the processed suffering may transform into wisdom or compassion. My definition of evil is suffering passed along to someone else. In the process, whatever started the pain is lost and the energy moves as revenge or cruelty until someone else can bring it to ground.

For me, the thing to take away is is explitising the corollary of the proposition tha forgiveness is forbearing to pass on suffering, that is that to pass on suffering is a definition of evil. Now it's not all you would want to say and it leaves unexplored what internal mechanisms might be involved (which I try to do in the earlier posts to the one I link to), but it is a helpful starting point, not least because  it gives a way into consideration of forgiveness and therefore of God and atonement. interestingly, of course, it also relates to the idea of karma in south Asian thinking and perhaps the intriguing thought here is that speaking of karma and speaking of atonement become plausibly compatible language games.

Eternity in a span (of four days) -JFK flame went out

I found this (You're fired! Ireland's eternal flame for JFK goes out after four days | World news | guardian.co.uk got my slightly amused interest.

An Irish eternal flame honouring John F Kennedy petered out four days after the assassinated US president's closest relatives and Ireland's prime minister lit it near the Kennedys' ancestral home.

 I found it interesting because of what happened after. To put some context, the flame had been brought over from the USA to light the flame in Ireland. Now I kind of think that if you've gone to the trouble to treat the flame as, in some way, a continuance of the USAmerican one ("An Irish honour guard ferried the flame in an Olympics-style lantern across the Atlantic by aircraft, then by Irish naval vessel to the riverside town of New Ross for last Saturday's ceremony.") then if it goes out at the new location, you have to repeat the whole process of bringing it over again. But apparently not: "New Ross council said it went out Wednesday night, but was relit within minutes."
So, by having it lit there in the USA and, without being unlit, transferred to light a new fuel source which sustains the flame brought over from then on, they have made a big thing of the continuity which seems to me to be undermined by simply relighting it when it goes out (unless they kept the 'olympic style' lamp lit for just such contigency).

Of course this is all dependent on a fiction that somehow a flame is the same flame through all these transformations. However, what is it that constitutes the identity of a flame in the USA with one in Ireland? The constituents have all changed, the context has, no molecules are in common, no photons are the same. The only continuity is the combustion flashpoint for the 'daughter' flame is the parent flame and the maintainance of combustion from that flashpoint.

Why would I make such a big thing of this? Simply because there is something of a reflection on identity here that has some analogues to human beings. I don't have any molecules in common with my babyhood. There is a basic structure that's the same -like the flame itself- but really about the only thing that gives continuity is a history linking through a chain of events so that this body-mind complex traces back to that one and no other.

The Buddhist saying that you never enter the same river twice is apposite to precisely this issue. The point is that we are not stable entities, we are constantly changing. Our identity lies in our genetic and phenotypical patterning, our history, memory, social nexus and relationships. Who we are is formed out of all of this stuff, but all of this stuff is not constant when you examine it minutely. We are a statistical probability constantly arising/emerging and sustained by all of this stuff. But, there is something else to say.

In New Ross, we might just argue that there is a continuity beyond the flame not having gone out since flashpoint even though the fuel sources and housing have varied. The continuity is one of human intention, meaning and function. Because the point is to honour JFK by use of a flame which was originally lit from one in the USA, it could be argued that there is continuity even if it goes out because the human context wills it and since most of it is about a human artefact with human meanins and communicative intent, then those things constitute the main thing of which the actual flame is an emblem but that its emblematic quality is primary not any other kind of continuity which are merely temporary and contingent.

And humans? Are we not in an analogous position in God's remembrance, purposes and 'meaning'? Not to mention that God is able to reconstitute the essential structuring and remembering that makes us indentifiably 'us'. This is resurrection.

For the flame eternity is in a span and resurrection was emblemised before us.

Neuroscience and consciousness

I think that this is pretty much the same argument as John Searle makes against reductionism of mind to brain.

Even if neuroscience one day tracks every single neuron firing in real time, you won't be watching consciousness. You'll have more precise correlations to play with, yes. But people will still experience pain and say "Ouch!", not "Oh, no worries: it's just neuron cluster 148 lighting up." Face to faith: When we meditate or use our powers of perception, we call on more than just a brain :

 And the article notes that the hard problem remains -the insideness of what we experience  isn't merely physical. This leaves -in terms of options for philosophical approaches- dualism or emergent monism. I still tend towards the latter.

Rants to Revelations: a review

I hadn't taken in when I got this for review, that it is written by a 'Unity' minister; a term I was not familiar with. The Author Ogun Holder, we discover through reading the chapters of the book, was brought up a fairly traditional conservative Christian in the Carribean and later moved to the USA and following something of a crisis of faith (though not the kind that typically goes under that label) found himself in a Unity church. As we read the book, those who haven't ever encountered 'Unity' churches or people discover that it is a New Thought movement expression, so an essentially monist philosophy with a penchant for the actualisation of thought into reality -which is a way of thinking that tends to inform Prosperity teaching, and indeed one of the chapters deals with that facet of the teaching.

However, it would be very unfair to let you think that Prosperity teaching and monism as usually understood in Christian circles characterises well the writing in this book. I have had some of my preconceptions disarmed and have come to an appreciation through Ogun's writing that many 'put downs' of this kind of thought are just too simplistic: there are people who inhabit this kind of thought-world who do so with nuance, understanding of the hard realities and pastoral grace. In addition, it seems to me that in nuancing and grappling with hard realities, Ogun shows that sometimes we come closer to one another's ways of thinking than the set-piece standard positioning might have us think.

I enjoyed the style this is written in. It's down to earth and conversational and a kind of theological reflection on aspects of life. So there's an often-witty telling of an incident and then an unpacking of what this might mean and the implications and 'theology' that might help understand it helpfully. You almost don't notice that there's some really good quality thinking going on at the back of it all! Each chapter is a different incident, so rather than being a long argument, this is a series of cameos which makes it easy to read in short chunks.

Two things were particularly interesting, for me. One was the prosperity thing and the other was the personhood of God in a monistic view. The chapter on the manifesting of ones desire which is also called in the Unity Movement 'prosperity' is written with some very interesting caveats about how we are embedded in a larger reality than just ourselves; this is no solipsist text and so there is a useful nuance about responsible and 'realistic' desire in this respect. I still felt that the really hard issue about people in regions of starvation didn't get a helping hand from the reflection, though I thought that what was said was potentially amenable to some kind of parallel reflection to that which I give in a chapter in Praying the Pattern where I note that a lot of prosperity gospellers don't really take account of the faithfulness of those in famine areas who pray for food and don't get it and they forget that the planet is only so big and that consumption at USAmerican levels would require about five Earths. I get the sense that Ogun could deal with that.

I was interested to note the philosophical way that he deals with the issue of personhood, and while still maintaining an ultimate non-personal reality (I think) he manages to deal with the immanence of the Divine in such a way as to make personhood more 'necessary' than monism usually does, although I suspect it probably still comes down to a necessary human-interface in some way. That said, I would also have to note that in Christian theology, God transcends personhood as well, so it's not a clear-blue-water division.

This is a book I wouldn't have chosen to read were it not for reviewing it: I would have shied away from the New Thought basis. However, I'm happy to have read it and to have had some preconceptions challenged and to have food for thought.

  Rants to Revelations: Unabashedly Honest Reflections on Life, Spirituality, and the Meaning of God

Reviewing Evolutions Purpose

 Steve MacIntosh has done us a service in writing this book. It's not a Christian book but it is a book that Christians interested in the philosophical implications of the theory of evolution should read. The author aims to write a book that might be helpful to people of many life-stances, spiritualities and religious outlook.

The subtitle helps us to understand what he's up to in this book: An Integral Interpretation of the Scientific Story of Our Origins
All of those words are important: 'Scientific Story' recognises that the theoretical interpretation of the emergence of life -indeed of the emergence of stuff, suns, planets and the rest- tells a story. The interesting thing, of course, is that 'story' implies an audience, and that is part of what the book explores too. Part of what Steve is doing is to try to make a case for seeing evolution as purposeful. Those readers who are aware of the scientific debates will realise that this counters the idea of what Dawkins has famously analogised as 'the blind watchmaker' -precisely that evolution has no teleology it is simply the next adaptation after the last fitness-selection followed by the next survival and the next reproduction.

'An integral interpretation' seems to have two referents: one is (it seems to me) a nod towards the turn to wholism and hospitality to monistic philosophy; the other is working philosophically with emergence. It is the latter that has most prominence and importance, the fact that it can play nicely with the former is interesting but not core to the argument.

A big part of Steve's argument revolves around observing that there is an inherant 'local' teleology in the world when emergence is considered: at each new level, the purpose of the constituent antecedants for the emerged level has also developed. I think that this means that molecules give purpose to subatomic particles and atoms and so on 'up' through the levels. The other part of the argument is that meaning is not either transcendant or immanent but actually dialogical (and emergent?) or rather dialectical. The latter is the term that Steve uses and does indeed hark back to Hegel, Marx and the like and recognises that meaning-making is something that arises from the inter-relating of things.

I was reminded of a good and under-known theological book Ross Thompson's Holy Ground - the spirituality of matter. where the creational characteristic of dialogical/dialectical process is recognised and developed under the term diousia which I think is probably a word Steve MacIntosh would have employed had he known it.

What these things do in Steve's argument is lay the foundations for viewing reality as we know it as modestly purposeful as opposed to 'blind' and for a progressive interpretation of evolution where evolution is understood broadly to include the whole development of the universe and including human cultural development. Sometimes this feels a bit Marxian but isn't because materialism is eclipsed by integral philosophy, sometimes it feels a bit Newagey but it is actually more careful and hardheaded and indeed modest than many New Age philosophies though sharing something of their optimism.

I'm not entirely convinced that Steve has pulled the rabbit out of the hat in terms of grounding teleology in the scientifically-accessible universe, but I do think that (along with Ross Thompson as mentiond above) this is a way of thinking that deserves more consideration and discussion and could be helpful.

Evolution's Purpose: An Integral Interpretation of the Scientific Story of Our Origins

Marriage, sexuality and the CofE

Mark Vernon has written a very helpful piece responding to the new CofE report on marriage (engendered by the recent debates around marriage equality). The piece is here: Where's the good news? - Philosophy and Life:
In it Dr Vernon outlines the main thesis and critques it ...

...that marriage is a 'creation ordinance', defined as between a man and a woman, as apparently implied in Genesis. This is either making the norm the rule or reducing the rich myths of Genesis to a formula. If it's the former, it's simply a category error. If it's the latter, it's an appallingly reductive reading of scripture that strips it of life.  ...  The idea that Genesis sanctions the nuclear family is, actually, a modern idea: I believe it can be traced to John Locke's 1690 Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent and End of Civil Government. Then, a legal definition of marriage was required because before, committed relationships had gained their social sanction by being made before God. Also, before then, families rarely looked like Adam and Eve under the fig tree because people died too often: hodgepodge families seem far more likely to have been the norm.

The first point in the quote above is what I too recently came to understand: that the 'traditional' Evangelical scriptural argument is a category error -making the norm a rule (as I try to say here and note that Steve Chalke realised).

It's important to be reminded that this argument is essentially a modern one, though I think that we should note that marriage liturgies for a long time have referenced Adam and Eve. It is important however to note the variation that has constituted marriages historically. Such accepted variation makes it hard to sustain an argument that traditional marriage is being defended: whose 'tradition' and why is it defended? We should also note that the Bible is replete with counter-examples to the Genesis ideal as latterly interpreted. If we avoid making the norm the rule, then scripture seems to 'sanction' a wide variety of patterns.

Neurophysiology and spirituality

For those of us who follow Christ, and for others with an interest in the possibility of God, the up-and-coming field of research into the neurology of religious and spiritual experience is one to watch. It will be (actually is) a playground for those disposed to nothing-buttery, and it behoves us as Christ followers to look properly at the results emerging from the research and at the interpretations offered. We should recall that it is unlikely to offer us proof or otherwise of God or afterlife or whatever. However, it will be interesting to compare and contrast reductionist explanations with emergentist ones. The starting point, as Sacks points out is:

The tendency to spiritual feeling and religious belief lies deep in human nature and seems to have its own neurological basis, though it may be very strong in some people and less developed in others.

Remember though that the frame can interpret very differently. Is the spiritual tendency simply an evolutionary quirk or is it sign of a spacetime centred round the strange attractor of an Incarnation? Both readings could make sense.

Seeing God in the Third Millennium - Oliver Sacks - The Atlantic

Evil, context and responsibility

Clare Carlisle has produced a very helpful series of articles about Evil. I'm aware that work on corporisations involves considering the way that evil works in and through humans individually, aggregatedly and corporately. In this respect this article Evil, part 7: the trial of Adolf Eichmann (2) | Clare Carlisle | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk is important taking up Hannah Arendt's examination of Adolf Eichmann's role in the Shoah. Carlisle notes:

Eichmann's evasiveness seems to be characterised by what Kierkegaard called "a dialectical interplay between knowing and willing". Kierkegaard argued that, on the question of evil, the key difference between ancient Greek philosophy and Christianity was that the Greeks (Plato in particular) equated immorality with ignorance, whereas Christians insist that this is a matter of the will.

Certainly I recognise the decisive importance of willedness in defining what is truly evil and distinguishing such from what is merely 'unfortunate' or simply suffering unhappy eventualities. Suffering chance or unavoidable harms is different from suffering malicious or malevolent harms which are of a greater degree of evil than ignorant or  insouciant harms. They may all hurt 'as much' on the level of pain felt through the sensorium interacting with the brain -though I suspect that is a theoretical construct for the sake of argument rather than an actuality because (and this is the second point) pain is mitigated or exacerbated by the social dimensions of others' attitudes which affects how much we suffer the pain. By that I am drawing on an insight which I draw from what I understand of some Buddhist reflection that pain and suffering are not the same thing. The former is done to us, so to speak, the latter is centrally about our response to and internalisation /representation /construal of pain.

But I'm left at this point asking a question: what are the NT (indeed scriptural) understandings of evil in these more philosophical terms -rather would early Christians have recognised Augustine's thinking and indeed ours. Or would they have held a greater place for what Carlisle characterises as the Greek view. it seems to me that atonement theories indicate the latter, perhaps.

The other thing I'm considering in the light of these reflections is that even the 'willed-evil' truistic view has its ecology altered by  the idea that corporisations have a life and will of their own; that they could be responsible for evil in this voluntarist sense.