Theology and its mojo

I noted previously that the great materialist project that dominated thinking about who we are as persons (and much else) may be, in Mary Midgely’s word, “fraying”(Midgley 2014, 14). This is seen specifically in avowedly materialist attempts, emanating from the neurosciences, to give a rigorously physical/material account of our conscious, internal, subjective, first-person states (i.e. mental states), within a materialist metaphysical framework that claims that not only is this doable, but once done there will be nothing left to say about who/what we are. The problem is, the science is basically confused and the metaphysical claims seem suffused with overreach (for reasons discussed here). But might theology (leaving to one side for the moment what is meant by theology) have something to offer in this space?

First, a step back to what seems like a different time (i.e. the last quarter of the twentieth century). Within the broadly evangelical camp, some, like theologian Joel Green and philosopher Nancy Murphy (both influential voices from Fuller Seminary), viewed science, specifically neuroscience (and explicitly in Green’s case Churchlandian neurophilosophy) as having a role in framing their views of human ontology, requiring a degree of reinterpretation of classic theological texts and teaching (Green 2008, 16). Now it is clearly true that neuroscience has an important contribution to make to our self-understanding (particularly with regard to our present embodied state), but they appeared to hand to neuroscience (or particular implications that were argued to flow from it) an overarching authority, allowing it to be an arbiter of what can, and what cannot, be said. This seems to be complimentary to the approach of other materialists/physicalists who went much further and argued that science in general, and with regards to human human ontology that neuroscience in particular, were able to provide, by themselves, a full understanding of who we are, what the universe is, and what our place in it is. Outside theology, there was a reaction to such claims, which were criticised in the general case as scientism, and in the specific case of neuroscience as “neurohype” and “neuromania” (Midgley 1994, 108; 2014, 5; Tallis 2011; Lilienfeld et al. 2017). Another aspect of the reaction is the claim that in the twenty-first century “[w]e are witnessing a resurgence in substance dualism” partly because “promissory materialism” has not delivered an explanation of everything, including consciousness (Rickabaugh and Moreland 2024, 5–6). Given these observations and the “fraying” described by Midgley, might it be that far from being irrelevant and to be eliminated by the materialist project (claims that emanated from scientists like Crick on one hand, and philosophers like the Churchlands on the other), theology is in a position to make a positive contribution?

If theology is to make such a contribution then “it cannot allow its agenda and suppositions to be determined by current theories of mind or brain any more than than by the prevalent sociological, philosophical, or cultural analyses of personhood”; there needs to be clarity “about what is proper to the theological and scientific fields of enquiry respectively” (Torrance 2004, 213,214). This is a view obviously at odds with, among others, Crick, summarised in the final chapter of “The Astonishing Hypothesis” which had the intriguing title of “Dr Crick’s Sunday Morning Service” (Crick 1994, 255–63). Writing of religious beliefs, rather than theology (but in Crick’s view they surely amounted to the same thing), he asserted that “by scientific standards, they are based on evidence so flimsy that only an act of blind faith can make them acceptable”; “true answers are usually far from those of conventional religions. If revealed religions have revealed anything it is that they are usually wrong” (Crick 1994, 258). Hardly a recipe for a fruitful dialogue. But some thirty plus years after this was written neither should it be assumed to be representative (e.g. see Rodzeń and Polak 2025 and the various contributions in the Special Issue they introduce).

Theological anthropology developed in a number of ways during the twentieth century and in one interesting respect it is Karl Barth who figures predominantly and whose influence continues to be important (Anderson 1982, 18; Torrance 2004, 207). Barth grounded his anthropology in christology, a move he characterised himself as “deviating from tradition” (see Skaff 2019, 186). Cortez, who examined the mind/brain debate (including Murphy’s non-reductive physicalism) in detail, claimed that “the significance of this christological shift … cannot be overstated. Indeed a growing number of Christian theologians locate modernity’s inability to understand human nature in the fundamentally misguided attempt to derive a complete picture of the human person independently of the perspective provided by the person of Jesus Christ” (Cortez 2008, 4). With regard to Murphy, Cortez notes that there was a movement in the opposite direction, explicitly working from the implications of the mind/brain debate (configured within a framework provided by neuroscience) to christology, with no consideration of movement from christology to anthropology (Cortez 2008, 5; quoting from Murphy 1998, 23).

Christology is, of course, a theological construct, not a scientific or neuroscientific one. It is examined and developed using theological tools and methods. It can of course all become very technical. But this is just as true of modern science. The relative inaccessibility of the cutting edge of where science is at any one time is not taken to provide a reason for it to be dismissed as untrue or unbelievable just because it is only truly accessible to professional practitioners. For those whose expertise is not theological to make claims about theological constructs being intrinsically unbelievable or irrelevant (essentially claims like Crick’s) out of ignorance about appropriate tools, methods, data, history and so on, would be just as ridiculous. But this is what has been going on for a while and has had far more credibility as an approach than it ever deserved.

For those wedded to the conflict metaphor for the interaction between science and theology, as representing inevitably conflicting ways of looking at reality, such developments within theology (like christological anthropology) will simply be taken to indicate the continuation of the conflict. But the conflict metaphor has long been acknowledged by historians of science as a polemical Victorian myth, albeit with some recent popular proponents (Russell 1985; Harrison 2017). Precisely because christological anthropologies spring from theology doing a theological task using appropriate theological methods, the categories involved are distinct from those of neuroscience. But this also means that they can be related to contemporary debates which are usually configured exclusively in terms of neuroscience and brain functions in interesting ways. It is significant that the incarnation (a thoroughly theological concept) has been argued to be compatible with both physicalism and dualism (two very different approaches to the mind/brain problem) by different proponents in the mind/brain debate (Cortez 2008, 5; see footnote 12). But it takes careful work and thought to relate the incarnational and the neural, and much of this work remains to be done. There are other intriguing convergences between christologcial anthropology and developments in neuroscience. In his discussion of “personhood”, Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas argued for the fundamental ontological importance of “a movement of communion”, where ontological identity is to be found “only in a being which is free from the boundaries of the ‘self’”(Zizioulas 1975). This strongly relational view, which both looks back to Barth and is consistent with the work of a long list of key figures in recent theological anthropology, parallels and potentially compliments developments in neuroscience represented by research into “theory of mind” and social cognition both of which stress the relational (Torrance 2004, 208; Brüne and Brüne-Cohrs 2006; Frith 2008). How deep this convergence goes, also requires work and thought.

In gaining a rounded understanding of ourselves, there is clearly an important role for neuroscience to play. It is able provide information from a third-person perspective about the physical brain mechanisms involved in the generation of human experience (now explicitly including conscious experience), how these mechanisms develop, the ways in which they change as we age and about aspects of what happens when eventually our embodied existence fades. But this information is partial not exhaustive, it generates a particular kind of map guiding our self-understanding. Theology has the role of providing another kind of map for some of the same terrain. The challenge is in aligning the different maps, not assuming a priori that one is right and one is wrong (Midgley 2005).

Materialism is fraying, theology is perhaps getting its mojo back. Just as well. There’s work to do.

Anderson, Ray S. 1982. On Being Human: Essays in Theological Anthropology. Eerdmans.

Brüne, Martin, and Ute Brüne-Cohrs. 2006. “Theory of Mind—Evolution, Ontogeny, Brain Mechanisms and Psychopathology.” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 30 (4): 437–55. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2005.08.001.

Cortez, Marc. 2008. Embodies Souls, Ensouled Bodies. T&T Clark Studies in Systematic Theology. T &T Clark.

Crick, F. H. C. 1994. The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. Macmillan.

Frith, Chris D. 2008. “Social Cognition.” Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 363: 2033–39.

Harrison, Peter. 2017. The Territories of Science and Religion. Paperback edition. University of Chicago Press.

Lilienfeld, Scott O, Elizabeth Aslinger, Julia Marshall, and Sally Satel. 2017. “Neurohype: A Field Guide to Exaggerated Brain-Based Claims.” In The Routledge Handbook of Neuroethics. Routledge.

Midgley, M. 2014. Are You an Illusion? Heretics (Durham, England). Acumen. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6hHtnQEACAAJ.

Midgley, Mary. 1994. Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and It Meaning. Paperback edition. Routledge.

Midgley, Mary. 2005. “Mapping Science: In Memory of John Ziman.” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 30 (3): 195–97.

Murphy, Nancey. 1998. “Human Nature: Historical, Scientific, and Religious Issues.” In Whatever Happened to the Soul. Fortress Press.

Rickabaugh, Brandon, and J.P. Moreland. 2024. The Substance of Consciousness: A Comprehensive Defense of Contrmporary Substance Dualism. John Wiley and Sons.

Rodzeń, Jacek, and Paweł Polak. 2025. “Introduction to This Religions Special Issue: Natural Sciences as a Contemporary Locus Theologicus.” Religions 16 (8). https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16081020.

Russell, Colin R. 1985. Crosscurrents: Interactions Between Science and Faith. IVP.

Skaff, Jeffrey. 2019. “Barth on Theological Anthropology.” The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth and Dogmatics, 185–96.

Tallis, Raymond. 2011. Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity. Acumen Publishing.

Torrance, Alan J. 2004. “What Is a Person?” In From Cells to Souls and Beyond. Eerdmans.

Zizioulas, John D. 1975. “Human Capacity and Human Incapacity: A Theological Exploration of Personhood.” Scottish Journal of Theology 28 (5): 401–47

Barely conscious(ness)

You may not have been conscious of it, but big arguments have been swirling around the issue of consciousness (for the example that prompted this post see here). Science had, then didn’t have and now again has big problems with consciousness. You know an argument is in trouble when its starting point is the denial of probably the one thing we are all aware of (at least when we are awake and healthy) – our consciousness. Descartes was so sure of his that he based his philosophy on it (the famous “I think [doubt] therefore I am”). But you might be surprised to learn that for a good chunk of the 20^th century in science, a good chunk of scientists were convinced that either it did it not exist or if it did, it didn’t “do” anything. They were the behaviourists, represented by B. F. Skinner (he of the infamous box). Consciousness was “nothing but” (ie reducible to) behaviour (by which they primarily meant movement) or propensities to behave. Don’t feel any need to understand any this (a notion which clearly assumes some degree of consciousness on your part!), because such views didn’t last long into the second half of the twentieth century. Behaviourist schemes clearly didn’t work, and the starting point was in any case fatally flawed.

But historically there had been an ongoing struggle to accommodate subjective, first-person, mental states (consciousness) within a thoroughly empirical (scientific) approach to our understanding of ourselves. Those devoted to the nineteenth century theory/myth of the conflict between science (good) and theology (bad), didn’t want to provide any space for the immaterial (whether soul or mind – for current purposes assume that both words name the same thing). But not having a satisfying material explanation for what we are all most aware of was a bit of a problem. If claiming that things like mental states did not exist was not viable, what to do? Well, assuming there was a thoroughly material explanation for our private interior self (potentially another fatally flawed assumption), given the powerful new tools of neuroscience such phenomena had to be explicable in terms of what was going on in the brain (that clearly material lump of stuff inside our heads). So there arose an empirical subdiscipline within neuroscience, that of “consciousness studies”.

Writing 10 years ago in the inaugural editorial of the journal “Neuroscience of Consciousness” the editors credited a 1990 paper by Crick and Koch as marking “the rebirth of consciousness science as a serious exercise”(Seth et al. 2015; Crick and Koch 1990). The publication of the new journal reflected “the maturity of this rigorous and empirically grounded approach to the science of subjective experience”. While they themselves made no claim that this was necessarily the only available approach to subjective experience, such a claim had already appeared in Crick’s book, published the previous year (Crick 1994). Crick and Koch claimed in their paper that “Everyone has a rough idea of what is meant by consciousness” and avoided a “precise definition”. This, along with other knotty issues, was left to one side “otherwise much time can be frittered away in fruitless argument”, implicitly a criticism of what had gone before. Philosophy (and certainly theology) had had its day. It was now over to science to explain the previously inexplicable, even consciousness (see Chemero and Silberstein 2008). This particular body swerve would prove to be costly.

Now, thirty five years on from the “rebirth of consciousness science”, where stands the project that had reached “maturity” ten years ago? Franken and colleagues recently published the results of a survey of consciousness researchers who attended two consecutive annual meetings of the Association of the Scientific Study of Consciousness (established in 1994 and later the sponsor of Neuroscience of Consciousness) to investigate “the theoretical and methodological foundations, common assumptions, and the current state of the field of consciousness research” (Francken et al. 2022). Among the issues they found “a lack of consensus regarding the definition and most promising theory of consciousness” and “that many views and opinions currently coexist in the consciousness community. Moreover, individual respondents appear to hold views that are not always completely consistent from a theoretical point of view”. Lest it be felt that this is a rather slim basis on which to form a view as to the current state of the field, Seth and Bayne (2022) reported in a recent extensive review that “in the case of consciousness, it is unclear how current theories relate to each other, or whether they can be empirically distinguished”. They recommended “the iterative development, testing and comparison of theories of consciousness” . Franken et al (2022) used ten different theoretical constructs in their survey, Seth and Bayne (2022) identified a “selection” of twenty-two “theories of consciousness” (see their Table 1) which they grouped into four broad categories and Kuhn (limiting himself to “materialism” theories) identified fourteen neurobiological theories, to which he added lists of philosophical (N=12), electromagnetic (7) and computational/informational (4) theories (Kuhn 2024). Confused? Well, it turns out the field of consciousness studies is.

An attempt to follow Seth and Bayne’s advice, using a “large-scale adversarial collaboration” to experimentally compare predictions made by two of the major competing theories of consciousness (“global neuronal workspace theory”, GNWT vs “integrated informational theory”, IIT) recently reported results in Nature (Ferrante et al. 2025; see also the accompanying Nature Editorial). The evidence that emerged partially supported and partially challenged both theories. However, the aftermath is more revealing. In response to the preprint and media coverage of the paper (the actual Nature paper was submitted for publication in June 2023, accepted for publication in March 2025 and published in April 2025) a long list of researchers (including recognised leaders in neuroscience) put their names to an open letter on the PsyArXiv preprint server condemning the exercise as flawed, calling IIT “pseudoscience” and objecting to its characterisation as a leading candidate theory for explaining consciousness at all (Fleming, et al. 2023). Proponents of GNWT also called into question the discussion of the results and the conclusions drawn (Naccache et al. 2025). All of this suggests that what flowed from Crick and Koch’s avoidance of a definition of consciousness was basic conceptual confusion. But many had claimed that this was the problem at the time; this was precisely the charge made against the field by the philosopher Peter Hacker not long after its “rebirth” (Bennett and Hacker 2003, 239–44; see also Hacker 2012). Nobody is sure what it is they’re talking about, and even those who do claim to know what they mean usually agree that the have no way of measuring the “it” they are clear about. So the next time you read a headline about “understanding” consciousness, just be aware – we don’t.

It’s not just the state of the specific scientific sub-field of consciousness research that appears to have problems and confusions. Concerns have emerged from within the wider materialist camp. Some more history is in order. The philosopher Thomas Nagel is perhaps best known for his classic paper “What is it like to be a bat?”; with regard to the problem of consciousness, the philosopher Patricia Churchland called this paper a “watershed articulation” (Nagel 1974; Churchland 1996). The problem which Nagel drew attention to was the one left by the demise of the behaviourists; the “subjective character of experience” (the what-is-it-like-to-be-ness) was not captured “by any of the familiar, recently devised reductive analyses of the mental”. Materialist accounts of thinking people left something vital out of the account. So he suggested that what was needed were new studies of the subjective and the mental partially answered in subsequent development of consciousness studies described above.

But that was then, what about now? Advances in neuroscience have definitely occurred. With all that  we know now (all those lovely coloured brain scans, snapshots of what goes on while people think), surely a thoroughly materialist account of us, which leaves the concept of the immaterial (be it mind or soul) lying redundant in its wake, is possible? Or at least given such progress, we should be in a position to see clearly how in principal it might be possible. Writing in 2012, Nagel was, if anything, more concerned than he was in the 70’s. Consciousness remained one of the major sticking points causing his concern: “The fundamental elements and laws of physics and chemistry have been inferred to explain the behaviours of the inanimate world. Something more is needed to explain how there can be conscious, thinking creatures..” (Nagel 2012, 20). And yet his concerns went beyond the existence of (as yet unexplained) consciousness to the wider materialist project: “The inadequacies of the naturalistic and reductionist world picture seem to me to be real”(Nagel 2012, 22). He did not find theism (the “polar opposite” of materialism) “any more credible than materialism as a comprehensive world view”, but was having a problem trying to imagine naturalistic accounts that were able to accommodate previously excluded elements like consciousness (or purpose, belief, love and the like). He concluded by accepting as conceivable that “the truth is beyond our reach, in virtue of our intrinsic cognitive limitations” (Nagel 2012, 128). The philosopher Mary Midgley took Nagel’s argument (along with those made by others) to provide evidence that the “credo of materialism” was “beginning to fray around the edges” (Midgley 2014, 14). Things haven’t improved since.

Does any of this matter? On one level, not really. You are still you, even although there is no scientific explanation for you in material terms. At least no one is now claiming that because of the lack of that explanation “you” don’t exist. Fundamentally, of course, I would be argue that science with its third-party, observational statements, which necessarily leave out of the account things like purpose, hope, love, agency and the like (ie things that really matter to us), can only ever provide a partial account of what we are as “persons” (something most scientist are clear about – usually). As Midgley and many others have argued the argument that only science defines or explains important stuff, including what we are as persons, is a monstrous overreach. Such claims are still occasionally made, but this view too is “fraying”.

But there are of course other sources of data, other (complimentary) ways of reasoning, other views of who and what we are as persons (something I touched on previously). If the materialist program is faltering, these need to be heard again. Wonder what (the decidedly immaterial) God thinks?

[PS: I don't normally provide references to the literature in these posts, but as I happened to have them to hand, I thought it would be churlish not to....]

Bennett, Maxwell R, and Peter Michael Stephan Hacker. 2003. Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Blackwell.

Chemero, Anthony, and Michael Silberstein. 2008. “After the Philosophy of Mind: Replacing Scholasticism with Science*.” Philosophy of Science 75 (1): 1–27. JSTOR. https://doi.org/10.1086/587820.

Churchland, Patricia S. 1996. “The Hornswoggle Problem.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 3 (5–6): 402–8.

Crick, F. H. C. 1994. The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. Macmillan.

Crick, Francis, and Christof Koch. 1990. “Towards a Neurobiological Theory of Consciousness.” 2 (263–275): 203.

Ferrante, Oscar, Urszula Gorska-Klimowska, Simon Henin, et al. 2025. “Adversarial Testing of Global Neuronal Workspace and Integrated Information Theories of Consciousness.” Nature 642 (8066): 133–42. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08888-1.

Fleming, S.M, Chris D Frith, M Goodale, et al. 2023. “The Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness as Pseudoscience.” Preprint, PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/zsr78.

Francken, Jolien C, Lola Beerendonk, Dylan Molenaar, et al. 2022. “An Academic Survey on Theoretical Foundations, Common Assumptions and the Current State of Consciousness Science.” Neuroscience of Consciousness 2022 (1): niac011. https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niac011.

Hacker, P. M. S. 2012. “The Sad and Sorry History of Consciousness: Being, among Other Things, a Challenge to the ‘Consciousness-Studies Community.’” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements 70: 149–68.

Kuhn, Robert Lawrence. 2024. “A Landscape of Consciousness: Toward a Taxonomy of Explanations and Implications.” Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (August): 28–169. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2023.12.003.

Midgley, M. 2014. Are You an Illusion? Heretics (Durham, England). Acumen. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6hHtnQEACAAJ.

Naccache, Lionel, Claire Sergent, Stanislas Dehaene, Xia-Jing Wang, Michele Farisco, and Jean-Pierre Changeux. 2025. “GNW Theoretical Framework and the ‘Adversarial Testing of Global Neuronal Workspace and Integrated Information Theories of Consciousness.’” Neuroscience of Consciousness 2025 (1): niaf037. https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niaf037.

Nagel, Thomas. 1974. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review 83: 435–50.

Nagel, Thomas. 2012. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Oxford University Press.

Seth, Anil K., and Tim Bayne. 2022. “Theories of Consciousness.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 23 (7): 439–52. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-022-00587-4.

Seth, Anil K., Biyu J. He, and Jakob Hohwy. 2015. “Editorial.” Neuroscience of Consciousness 2015 (1): niv001. https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niv001

On different types of screwdrivers...

 

I am not what you would call a DIY aficionado, as my family can (and often do) testify. Yet even I know that there are different types of screws. Mind you, I didn’t realise there were quite so many types as I discovered when I went looking. So it turns out the world of screws is much more complicated and varied than I had thought. And this means there are a fascinatingly large number of screwdrivers required to deal with all these different screws. And of course different screws have different uses. The tiny screws (and their appropriate screwdrivers) that are used in watches, would be entirely inappropriate for holding my bookshelves together. Should we ever decide to down-size, and should I have to dismantle my rather well-made bookshelves, I will be thoroughly stuck if all I have to hand is a watchmaker’s screwdriver. If I were stupid (or distraught) enough to attempt to dismantle my bookshelves with a watchmaker’s screwdriver, all that I would succeed in doing would be to ruin the screwdriver. You need the right tools for the right job.

As with screws (and screwdrivers) so with the universe. It’s complicated and multi-layered. It is composed of different sorts of things that belong to different classes of things (and some that probably aren’t “things” at all). Asteroids, planets and stars are at the same time different and similar. While asteroids (or at least many of them) are composed of rocks of various compositions, stars (according to NASA) are “giant balls of hot gas”. Some planets are made of rock, some are mainly gases and fluids. So far, so different. But at a certain level of abstraction they are all composed of atoms organised in certain ways. Stars are composed of hydrogen and helium (at least for the most part). In the case of our own planet, which we obviously know best, it is composed of atoms of iron and nickel (in alternating solid and liquid layers) surrounded by silicate rocks (rich in iron and magnesium) topped off by a solid crust. What sort of tool could be used to study such things? Well, much of this particular type of stuff (at least of Earth) can be observed directly or indirectly. It can be measured, poked and prodded. Different bits can be collected and compared. So, at a basic level, this kind of stuff here on Earth, and what turns out to be the fairly similar stuff beyond Earth, can be studied using the tools of the physical sciences. But problems arise when we apply these tools inappropriately.

What kind of thing is a beetle or a chihuahua or an elephant? Clearly, just like a planet or a star, all of these can be thought of as material objects, and as such are composed of atoms. And yet it turns out that certain atoms, organised in a certain way, give rise to new types of things, or at least new types of properties, that don’t seen to be well suited to study by the physical sciences. So if you took the beetle, ground it up, did a chemical analysis, and worked out the proportions of different types of atoms, would you know everything there was to know about the beetle? Of course not. And arguably you will have missed all the really important things. Because the tools of the physical sciences aren’t enough. You need the tools of the life sciences. And you need a whole new array of concepts, like the concept of information to explain what that was encoded in the atoms of the beetle’s DNA, and with it concepts like replication, protein synthesis, ion transfer, let alone concepts like homeostasis, locomotion and reproduction. All of these, and whole new sets of tools, are needed to study beetles (and chihuahuas etc).

But what about persons? Think about a single individual human being. We could again simply grind them up, and work out their chemical constituents (65% oxygen, 18% carbon and so on; see here). As far as atoms go, these are exactly the same sort as those encountered in planets and beetles. And yet this is perhaps an even less satisfactory account than that of the chemical constitution of the beetle. So we could apply all those additional tools of the life sciences. And yet would we really want to claim we understood that particular person? Because we would still be missing a number of their vital aspects. Assuming the individual we have selected is just like you and me, then we know that as well as being an object (a thing made of stuff that can be prodded and poked), they are a subject. They have an interior life and a personal perspective, the have motives, desires and beliefs; we know this, because it is true of us. They (and we) will come to a time when this ceases to be the case (i.e. when they are dead). At that time our physical analysis will largely still stand (at least for a short period). But we all know that in a real sense they (and we when it happens to us) will be fundamentally different from how they were in life. Something that was present will at that time no longer be present. So it looks like we now need a further and distinct set of tools and concepts, including those of neurology and psychology. But what about all that first-person, personal perspective stuff? What is a motive, purpose, desire or belief? What kind of tools do we need to study these?

It gets more complicated still. Because the the odd thing about people is that usually they do not exist in isolation and only function as individual specimens. All the healthy human individuals ever encountered, have existed and do exist within a dense network of relationships with other human individuals (and occasionally non-human ones). If we don’t study this aspect of being, with yet another set of appropriate tools, we will miss something vital. And emerging from and produced by these networks comes lots of stuff we haven’t classified yet. Things like football scores, paper money, political manifestos and poems. What kind of things are these? What sort of tools do we need to investigate them? It’s clear that the tool of the physical sciences that we started off with have little or no purchase on these “things”.

Which of these various levels is the most important? Which type of description and set of tools is the most useful. The real answer is that it depends. One could probably make an argument for each one of them in turn. But if the experts at any one level were to claim that only their descriptions and explanations, generated by the tools appropriate for their level of analysis, were the true ones, and all the others were somehow wrong, or illusions, or were so unimportant that they could be ignored, we would quietly smile and assume they were after a big pay rise. What we wouldn’t do is take this type of claim seriously. It would be as bizarre as insisting I can tackle any type of screw with a watchmaker's screwdriver.

And we haven’t got to arguably the most interesting and important level of all yet and its appropriate  tools. Theology will have to wait for a different post.

On “Losing my religion”….

I am a mandolin player. Or perhaps more accurately I should say that I play the mandolin. On this side of the Anglo-Saxon Atlantic, mandolin playing is mainly limited to folk music, although across the Chanel it has long been known as a classical instrument (Vivaldi wrote at least two mandolin concertos). In the US the mandolin has a long and treasured place in country and bluegrass music. But as far as I know there is only one rock/pop mandolin riff that is widely known. Back in the ‘90’s R.E.M. had a hit with the song “Losing My Religion” which starts with it. The song and the accompanying video went on to win multiple awards. You might think that the song had something to do with religion. Perhaps a celebratory atheistic anthem of its newly recognised irrelevance or a wistful retrospective of a now forgotten childhood heritage. But apparently not. R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe who wrote the lyric has said that it was actually about unrequited love: “..what I was pulling from was being the shy wallflower who hangs back at the party or at the dance and doesn’t go up to the person that you’re madly in love with and say ‘I’ve kind of got a crush on you, how do you feel about me?’”. Doesn’t take away from the brilliant mandolin riff of course. In any case it turns out religion isn't quite what you might think.

That’s interesting because it often isn’t. The meanings given to the word have changed over time, as often happens. And even if there really is a thing being labelled (in the sense that we also give names to non-things like purple spotted unicorns) this is also likely to change through time and and over space (i.e. being different in different places and spaces). So it is sometimes genuinely difficult to know what is meant when we talk (or even sing) about religion, lost or otherwise. There is nothing new or unique in this; try looking up the etymological history of “nice” – you’ll be surprised. Even broad categories used to identify obvious and necessary boundaries turn out in some important cases to be recent innovations that are neither obvious nor necessary. The rhetorical drawing of contrasts is therefore also tricky. The idea that the categories of “natural” and “supernatural” have always been with us, and we’ve always been clear about what these categories are, crops up in many debates. Indeed it is the supernatural, as distinct from religion or God, that was Dawkins’ main target in “The God Delusion”. He clearly thought he knew what he meant, and that his readers did too.

But the categories of natural and supernatural are relatively recent. And around them there has been more than a little myth-making particularly once they transformed into “-isms” claimed to competing with each other. This particular framing (although not the words themselves) appeared late on in the 19^th century promoted by, among others, T.H. Huxley. Huxley and his ilk then read these categories back into history. Promising (in their terms) pre-Socratic philosophers were identified as being early stalwarts taking their plucky stance against surrounding supernatural beliefs and religious practices. A line of heroes was then traced through that most influential of ancient philosophers, Aristotle. And so down to contemporary debates where science, rationality and naturalism were pitted against religion, faith and supernaturalism, with the implication that we all know which side of the line we (and the intellectual greats of the past) must stand. Except it was never thus and is not so now.

The Greek philosophers, of all schools and stages, were clear that the divine was involved with all aspects of human life and thought, whether for good or ill. For them, “natural” inevitably implied, among other things, divine activity. And Greek science (a much wider activity than what is meant in English by the word today) showed little sign of progress or development away from such notions. Arguably it was actually the rise of Christianity which in some of its forms began to remove the divine from many of the areas of life it was formerly thought to inhabit. Many of the innovators who began to give science the form it has today, from Bacon on, made no great distinction between their thinking as scientists (not a word they would have understood in our sense) and theological thinking. Investigating the world with the tools available was an investigation of the works of God. The success of science  was, to many, not the success of naturalism in the face of supernatural resistance, but actually progress in illuminating and understanding the works of the Creator. No contest here. But something does thereafter seem to have been lost.

A broadly Biblical understanding of everything there was and is was what led to (or at least was the context of) the development of science as we know it today. But a catastrophic narrowing of science seems to have taken place, particularly as it became professionalised and institutionalised. The historian Peter Harrison recently put it like this “Whereas the sciences are sometimes said to be based in curiosity, from the mid-twentieth century that curiously rarely extended to fundamental questions about the metaphysical foundations of science or the intelligibility of the natural world” (Some New World, p328). As a matter of history those “metaphysical” foundations were thought to be Biblical by the majority of the practitioners from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. It was Huxley and others, relatively recently, who set up various false antitheses. And they were then highly successful in evangelising for this particular view of our intellectual and scientific history. Once constructed in their terms, loosing the supernatural, indeed losing religion, was not the loss of anything of value. Indeed, it was seen as a necessary and progressive step.

The problem is that we are now living with the consequences of this loss of “who knows what”. And it actually turns out that the most serious consequences are not for religion (in the modern sense) as much for science, politics and culture. Religion appears to be going from strength to strength all over the world. But particularly in Western Europe and the US, wistful noises are now being made in the oddest of corners for what has been lost. And science itself seems particularly to be suffering. 

So if you thought REM was celebrating the loss of religion in the sense of losing the religious, think again. And even if you had been right, it would probably not be something worth celebrating.

Words, texts and their mattering….

I like words. Sometimes it’s just the sound of individual words that I’m drawn to (like ‘flibbertigibbet’). You may well have your own favourites. But more often it’s words strung into sentences, usually with the aim of communicating something. Hence I’m sitting here typing. And, presumably, that’s why you’re sitting where you are, reading. You like words too. Mind you, spoken words and written words are not identical (I don’t know what ‘flibbertigibbet’ sounds like inside your head). But they do serve the same sort of purposes, the main one being to communicate meaning. But meaning is a word, and slippery one too. Linguists, philosophers, theologians and scientists have all tacked the issue of what meaning “is”, and have not always arrived at compatible definitions. Some have therefore concluded that there is no such thing as meaning. But that would seem to subvert the whole business of communicating with one another, something humans have actually been doing for a very long time, and with a fairly high degree of success (an observation I’ve commented on before). And it is a view that is, basically, self-refuting.

But what this does highlight is that in using words, whether as a sender or receiver, thought and care are often required. When precision is needed, we can usually achieve it. It does complicate matters and tends to slow communication down. And sometimes we can all get a bit impatient with this. But there is something here that is familiar from many areas of life and behaviour - a speed accuracy trade-off. So when I’m speaking quickly, without much thought, the precision I am communicating with is reduced. A similar thing happens when I sit down at a keyboard and with little thought I just begin to type. Stringing words together isn’t particularly difficult. But stringing them together coherently is a different matter. And of course prior to the words are the concepts that the words are supposed to convey. If I haven’t given these much thought, then prior to the lack of clarity in the words, will be a lack of clarity in the thoughts. The net effect will be ambiguity and uncertainty. This is sometimes a thoughtful intention, but that is probably the exception rather than the rule, and carries its own meaning.

On the other side of the communication process, the same sort of considerations must apply. A whole series of processes are going on in your head right now. Some of them are fairly low-level and not under your control (at least to any great extent) – things like resolving the words on the screen you’re looking at so they are clear enough to read, or extracting meaning from individual words. But at a higher level, implicitly or explicitly, you will have to decide how much work you’re going to put into understanding what I’ve written. If you’re not particularly interested, you will probably merely skim the text, perhaps alighting on the odd word here or there, following the narrative or the argument (such as it is) at a superficial level. If I were to write something obviously crazy at this point (like “raspberry”) you might notice. But then again you might not (in which case the entire point of what I’ve just written will be lost on you!). But if I’ve succeeded in catching your attention, and you’re interested in the meaning of meaning, or the meaning of words, or the business of communication, you’ll be working to understand both what is written and what is meant. That will take time on your part, time that you could have spent doing something else. That implies a price that you either will, or will not be prepared to pay.

To be sure, there are lots of reasons why you might not want to pay a particularly high price to extract the meaning from this particular text. It is after all, merely a blog post, one of many on this blog (this is #152), and there are of course many blogs (plus books, magazines etc). But we all have an innate idea that some texts are much more important than others. And with these we have a sense that it will pay to do the work. And there are those texts which claim (or are claimed) to be potentially life changing (not something I’d claim for my blog I hasten to add). If you are persuaded that this is the case, the words (and the sentences and paragraphs they make up) will matter a lot and you’ll want to do the work to get at the meaning. While such claims may be spurious, Benjamin Franklin (among others), he of “Give me 26 lead soldiers and I will conquer the world” certainly thought that words could matter.

Part of the human condition is that our time and resources are finite, so choices have to made. Given the slipperiness of words, the question arises as to how best to spend our finite resources. Because we know that some words matter more than others we direct variable degrees of attention towards the text of adverts, comic strips, headlines in tabloid newspapers and captions on TikTok compared to those in a textbook we need to study to pass an exam or a philosophy book making an argument that we really want to get to the bottom of. Experience, our own and that of others, can also be a guide. Where we know that others have claimed to find particular words truly transformative (sometimes transformations we ourselves may have witnessed), these will be the ones we really want to pay attention to and work at to understand.

There is a particular text in mind (of course). It is one of the most critically scrutinised in history. It has been pilloried and banned in some jurisdictions. It has been lauded and literally worshipped in others. This wide range of responses and attitudes itself is evidence (of a sort) that here is something worth exposing oneself to, reading, reflecting on and responding to. Given the range of reactions to it, and conflicting claims about it, it is clearly likely to have its complexities. This can’t all be down to the vagaries of the readers and hearers of it. So it is likely that work will indeed be required. But at least there is a prima facie case that here indeed are words that should be encountered first hand, as opposed to depending on second-hand, necessarily filtered accounts of it. And there does appear to be a coherent core meaning that both historically and now millions have extracted from it (as well as some crazy conclusions and consequently crazy behaviour).

If the Bible is what it and many of its previous readers have claimed, then here are words that matter. And perhaps they matter more than anything else.

One hundred and fifty years (and counting)

Just as we have done for the last few years at this point in the summer, we decamped to Keswick in the English Lake District. It’s a shortish hop for us (about two and a half hours north up the M6 – when open). There are lots of reasons to come to Keswick, most famously the majestic surrounding hills, the beautiful lake, the ice cream. But as readers of this blog will know (and apparently there are a few of you), these are but chocolate sprinkles on a very chocolaty chocolate cake. The real reason we’re here is the Keswick Convention which this year is 150 years old. I’ve written about the Convention before (in 2018, 2019 – the others are easy enough to find). Clearly, to last 150 years, it must be getting something right. But I wonder what it is?

Longevity is, of course, no necessary indication of value. Where human institutions are concerned, more than a few have lasted a long time. Those that do tend to be the ones that continue to meet some basic need or perform some useful function. But they do this by doing two apparently contradictory things successfully. First of all they remain the same to the degree that continuity through time can be observed, remaining identifiably a single institution rather than a succession of different ones. Yet life is change, so they must also change, grow or evolve as needs (either perceived or real) change. If there’s no change, then fossilisation and irrelevance develop. Too much change, and it begins to look like the particular institution in question doesn’t really qualify as such or that it has neither firm foundation or core of any value. It strikes me that Keswick has negotiated this conundrum rather well. The world (in both sacred and secular aspects) has changed over the the last 150 years. And so has the Keswick Convention. Yet it has a distinguishable DNA that has been constant.

The original aim of the Keswick Convention (which began with a tent for 1000 in Thomas Dundas Hartford-Battersby’s vicarage garden) was essentially to get serious about living out the Christian life. At the centre of it was Bible teaching. It’s worthwhile reflecting in what today is considered a “secular” culture, that the notion of taking the text of Scripture as being both authoritative and transforming seemed as odd to many in the final part of the nineteenth century as it does today. Although 19^th century Britain was well-churched, belief was beginning to become as shallow as it was broad. David Bebbington identifies the early 1870’s with the beginning of the ebb of evangelicalism on this side of the Atlantic. In the established Church of England there were many who rather looked down on taking Scripture and its call to transformed living too seriously. According to the historian Mark Noll there was a growth in “Broad Church opinion and the progress of High Church practices”. Classic evangelical views (i.e. historical, biblically orthodox belief) were increasing seen as out-of-date and in need of radical revision, and there were those in professional theology (who prepared the men who would fill the pulpits) who were only too eager to carry the revision out. The Robertson Smith case and Charles Briggs paper defending “Critical theories” (both in 1881) were harbingers of what was to come. Outside the Church of England, the theological drift that would soon engage Spurgeon in the “Downgrade” was well and truly underway among “independents”.

In contrast the post-enlightenment “inevitable progress” narrative (which could point to real advances in science, technology and medicine) gathered steam. And it was portrayed as the antithesis of classic, orthodox Christian belief; a competing, more successful and more “adult” narrative. Christianity (and Christian theology) was merely one superstition among many which was on the cusp of being banished for good. Human reason and its products were all that were needed. Long before the bloody 20^th century put paid to the myth of inevitable progress (although the odd still-twitching digit is occasionally  encountered today) Hartford-Battersby discovered for himself that true transformation occurred from the inside out, effected by the Word of God, through the Spirit of God. This is what he wanted to share with others. And so the Keswick Convention was born.

Of course, he and his friends had rediscovered something that had always been true. But truth has a way of sinking out of sight (or being obscured) before reappearing again (as it must). There is always a need for transforming truth. To use some jargon, the transformation that occurs when someone comes to faith in Christ (i.e. is converted, saved, becomes a Christian), while fundamental is not final in the sense that no further change is necessary or possible. There is a need to hear that we all begin in desperate need of rescuing (the kind of language used by Paul at the beginning of Galatians). Having been rescued, utterly and completely, in way that can only be accomplished by God Himself, a new life of gratitude begins. Our position is secure in Christ; our thinking and behaviour now have to change to be in conformity with this new position. And this needs to be shaped and directed. The motivation may be gratitude marked by changed appetites and attitudes, but it’s tempting to feel that it’s all then “over to us” to work out how we navigate our new way in a world and culture that now seems (and is) threatening and hostile. Fortunately, the needed help is on hand.

God’s great plan for His people does not end with their rescue any more than it begins with it. Thereafter he provides the resources required to lead the new life that has been inaugurated. And He is not somehow removed from this part of the struggle but is right in the thick of it. Hence the idea, taught by Jesus, and amplified by Paul, that He not only rescues us, but then resides in us, to provide the heft to swim against the tide. He resides in us to help us avail ourselves of His presence mediated by His Word (and vice versa). The much maligned Bible, the most heavily criticised and attacked of books, continues to be a means of not merely way-finding but of continued transformation as it is read, explained, heard and responded too. This continuing need was always at the heart of Keswick.

It remains so. In placing Scripture at the heart of what goes on for three weeks at the Convention each summer, it continues to meet what turns out to be the deepest of human needs. In presenting the Gospel, the good news of God’s rescue plan (that dead, cold, stony hearts can be made alive again) is presented to a culture which needs to know that such transformation (literally from death to life) is still possible. But for those that are newly alive, direction and instruction in the new life that follows is also made available. This explains the longevity of the convention. Real needs being met. Needs that are as old as fallen humanity and that will persist until God calls time on the world as it is. But many things about the Convention have observably changed. It has gone from one week to three, and from a tent for 1000 to one that holds nearer 3000. The location of the tent has moved around too. The number and style of talks has altered. Victorians were made of much sterner stuff compared to 21^st century Christians; substantial back to back sermons of some length were not unusual. Now there’s a single morning “Bible reading” and an evening “Celebration” (with added additional seminars and other types of session). The style and content of worship (though not its object) have changed. What were once innovations, like the separate youth programme, have continued to evolve. Inclusiveness and accessibility for those with disabilities or particular additional needs is receiving the attention it deserves. But important as all of this is, it is peripheral (though not trivial). At the centre is something as simple as it is profound. God is a speaking God. He speaks though His word and in His speaking accomplishes the impossible transformations that are our basic need.

Here’s to the next 150 years.

“Who does He think He is”?

This is a question that occurs to most of us at some point. It is usually unspoken, occasionally spluttered in indignation. It is most often prompted by the sayings or doings of someone else. Sometimes these sayings and doing only concern themselves. Occasionally they directly relate to us. Usually this question is rhetorical, prompting no great in-depth analysis. But I can think of one prime example of where this question has and is often asked, where analysis is possible and may even be a necessity for each and every one of us.

It is worth noting that the question asked above is first-cousin to another question: who is He? These are not identical. But in the case of the example I have in mind there is an important interplay between the two. The “He” is question is of course Jesus. Jesus, who although an historical figure, is being remembered today (“good” Friday) as having some continuing relevance to at least the billions of His (at least) nominal followers. That in itself is remarkable. Precisely because He is an historical figure, He can be investigated and has been. Indeed there have been concerted scholarly efforts to do so, often subsumed until the title “the quest for the historical Jesus”. Talk of “the” quest is, however, misleading. There’s an old quest that some argue was instigated by Reimarus in the eighteenth century. However, this produced a Jesus who sounded suspiciously exactly as you would expect him to depending on the philosophical convictions of whichever author you happened to be reading. The end result was a rather anaemic and a-historical Jesus. This quest was finally put out of its misery by Schweitzer in 1906 with the publication of his “The Quest of the Historical Jesus”. But while the “old” quest came to an end, the questing continued, suggesting that there was something important about these questions.

Just how one might parse the new questing that continued in the twentieth century, as a renewed quest, second quest, quest 1a, 1, etc is a matter of debate. But the continual interest in the question of who Jesus is, is remarkable given the view in some circles that we could know nothing directly of Him at all. In this popular mid-twentieth century view, what Jesus actually did and said had been lost entirely. The gospels were all slanted and mythological accounts that had little to do with history. They might tells us about the early church and the issues that were then current, but they could tell us little or nothing about Jesus Himself. Non-canonical writing about Jesus (ie writing outside the books of the New Testament) tended to be fragmentary or even less historically reliable, and much of this writing dated from well after the time of Jesus’ death. However, this turned out to be unsustainable because it simply ran counter to so much of the evidence. And there were two really big elephants in the room. The world was turned upside down by the events of around 30AD when Jesus died (so something remarkable was going on), and their was the multiply attested fact that Jesus continued to have real impacts on people’s lives right up to today.

Many will again have have found themselves contemplating Jesus’ death at the start of this Easter weekend. But many a great teacher has died a noble death (and arguably Jesus’ death was far from that). The classic example in the ancient world was Socrates, who accepted his death sentence, drank hemlock and died rather than live inconsistently with what he had taught. It is true that he has had a profound influence on Western thought (albeit mediated by Plato and others). Yet mention Socrates today, and many a mind will tend to remember a Brazilian footballer instead (“widely regarded as one of the greatest midfielders of all time”). In contrast, Jesus’ death was particularly cruel and appalling, and yet has been invested with such significance that many of us will have its instrument as an item of jewellery secreted about our person. And he steps right out of history in the story of contemporary men and women who claim not merely to know about Him, but to know Him. There is something in this that is more relevant to us than mere fascinating history.

And that’s where we come to the question that we actually started with. Given that there was an historical Jesus, is it possible to know who He thought He was? Well, it turns it out that what N.T. Wright calls “an impressive catalogue” of sayings are attributed to Jesus in the Gospels. Many of these are only explicable if they were actually originally said by Jesus. And it’s not just what He says, it’s what He does. The Gospel writers (and others such as Paul) are clear that they are communicating what was said and what was done. Do they do it as a twenty-first century journalist or historian would? Of course not (that would be a sure sign of something dodgy going on). They are clear and up front (in a way their critics are often not) that they are selecting from a much wider range of material that was available to them. They are organising their material to best effect. While all that academic questing was (or was not) going on, people continued to engage with their material, and found themselves engaging with Jesus Himself. And it turns out He was clear and consistent about who He thought He was. And so were the Gospel writers.

As an aside, I am not claiming that reading the Bible in general, or the Gospels in particular, can be done in some value free way such that some transparent meaning of the words on the page immediately moves into the mind of the reader. Reading doesn’t work like that. Text always has to be interpreted. And indeed, if the New Testament is being read in English, then the actual documents have already been interpreted once (by the translators). But by being aware of a few simple rules of thumb, many of which are known to us implicitly already, the question asked at the outset becomes clearly answerable from the Gospel accounts.

So who did Jesus think He was? In a very knowing way He speaks about His relationship with God the Father (whose name His original Jewish audience knew well), and does the sorts of things that they all knew only God could do. While distinct from God the Father, He also claims identity with Him. This so outrages His original audience, that they get ready to stone Him for blasphemy there and then (in part this is also the charge on which they eventually do get Him). He eventually heads to what looks like a very deliberate confrontation with both religious and political authority, knowing full well what this will entail for Him. But He apparently also believes that this is inevitable and necessary, and that His death will be the means by which life is secured for those who will align with Him, and only with Him. All because of who He is. If this is in any way near the historical reality, then only two response are left to us. One is the incredulous version of the question we started with, because He is clearly a crackpot or worse. He thinks He is someone He cannot possibly be. It doesn’t matter if He’s well-meaning if it turns out He’s just flat wrong about His own identity. But the second response is to take the question seriously, and look at the evidence in the round. But here it gets really interesting; that evidence does not end in His death.

If He only died, then He is simply another version of Socrates (or the Buddha, or Mohammed). All great and influential men in their way. But their most fervent admirers and supporters would all agree that they are dead. They didn’t make exactly the claims that Jesus made, and they didn’t die the death that Jesus died, but so far, so same. But that’s what makes Easter special. On Friday all is confusion. But Sunday’s coming, and with it clarity.