Why do people think it's selfish to have lots of kids?

Recently there was a bit of a dust-up in the combox at my sister's blog, Mama Says*, in which one commenter in particular charged that only selfish parents have big families. Having lots of kids (eight, in this case) allegedly is harmful to the older children in the family.

This is a mainstream attitude in modern American culture. Big families are viewed with scorn and derision, the parents accused of being selfish because either (a) they are dividing their love and attention among too many kids, (b) they are contributing to overpopulation, (c) they are using more than their share of natural resources, or (d) all of the above.

As a cradle Catholic, I have known a lot of big families. I even grew up in one, as the oldest of a brood of eight. But I have yet to meet a big family with selfish parents who are focused on fulfilling their own desires at the expense of either their family or our larger society.

I think this attitude stems from the discomfort people feel when they see large families. They cannot imagine themselves having a baseball team's worth of children, so they feel subconsciously threatened when they see one. That statement is not intended to be judgmental; it's human nature, and everyone experiences feelings like that when confronted with behavior that falls outside of social norms.

Why it is not selfish to have a big family

Let me present a picture of a typical big family. This fictional family has two parents and a startling number of kids. They have a strong religious faith, perhaps Catholic or Mormon or Evangelical. The parents at times feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of people underfoot. They know they could easily take steps to prevent themselves from having so many children, but they don't, because they have decided to trust God. They see each kid as a gift and have faith that God will provide for the kids he gave them. This is not a decision made lightly. This is radical, and they know it.

All the members of the family make a lot of sacrifices in order to follow this path. Maybe the kids aren't in as many organized activities, sports, and lessons as most of their peers. Maybe they go to restaurants less often, take fewer vacations, and share bedrooms. Maybe the younger kids rarely see a new article of clothing, being clad instead in hand-me-downs.

But they also have a lot of privileges that their peers will never know. They are never lonely. Their house is the neighborhood social hub for the 18-and-under set. They probably have a groupie or two, lonely children with no siblings whose parents work all day. They have a precocious understanding of the important things in life, like love and sharing. The older ones help their parents and learn child-care skills. They all learn practical life skills by doing chores, such as how to do laundry. They see what it is like to really live according to one's ideals and values.

They never have to hear their parents say that children are burdens, or that they are "so glad" they're done having kids.

And above all, they never, ever feel unloved. Big families like to repeat the saying that "love doesn't divide, it multiplies." It's more than a cute saying, it's literally true: the kids all love each other. Each new baby has a live-in fan club. Each older child has a crowd of younger devotees who think he is the coolest person on the planet.

The truth is, every parent of a crowd has no choice but to give of the deepest part of themselves, every single day. They are practically forced to be unselfish.

Selfish parents could not do this job.

* (cough cough) Which I helped design, by the way (ahem) not that I'm boasting or anything, but I have mad skillz don't I? Nevermind that I didn't do most of the work.

It's not often that the secular media get anything right about the meat of Catholic theology. Father Robert Barron gives us a splendidly reasoned exception with his argument for priestly celibacy, published on the CNN website. From the essay:

This is why, as G.K. Chesterton noted, there is a tension to Christian life. In accord with its affirmation of the world, the Church loves color, pageantry, music and rich decoration (as in the liturgy and papal ceremonials), even as, in accord with its detachment from the world, it loves the poverty of St. Francis and the simplicity of Mother Teresa.

To sum up Fr. Barron's argument, priests should be celibate because in so being, they become living models of the transcendent communion with God that we will experience in heaven.

He even mentioned G.K. Chesterton. I am pleased.

During this season of Lent, my parish is using custom-printed booklets for "worship aids" (which we use instead of missalettes). The booklets contain all the hymns for each Sunday, as well as the first two readings. Each Sunday is prefaced by a little meditation written by Father Paul Turner, a priest in Missouri who has created a large body of writing for this purpose.

Some of Fr. Turner's "bulletin inserts" are quite though-provoking and provide good food for meditation. The blurb for this past Sunday is another story. With my mad Google skilz, I found it online, at the top of page 2 of this parish's bulletin (PDF link). The subject is the first reading for March 1, Genesis 9:8-15, the end of the story of Noah's nautical adventure, in which God makes a covenant not to flood the earth again. Fr. Turner's commentary includes this:

So, what did God give up? God gave up global floods. “There shall not be another flood to devastate the earth.” God gave up giving up on people.

As I read these words, the catechist in me cringed. God did not give up giving up on people — because God has never given up on people. Though the Genesis account may make it sound as if God was intent on destroying his creation, our understanding of God makes it clear that nothing could be further from the truth. Old Testament stories like this are included in Scripture because they teach us something about humankind's relationship with God. It was sin that destroyed the earth, and God who saved it (through Noah). The covenant not to flood the earth is a prefigurement of the final covenant, when God sent Christ to save the earth from the flood of our sins.

The second reading for last Sunday is taken from the first Epistle of Peter. I rather think St. Peter had much more astute thoughts on the Noah story. From the reading:

[Christ] also went to preach to the spirits in prison,
who had once been disobedient
while God patiently waited in the days of Noah
during the building of the ark,
in which a few persons, eight in all,
were saved through water.
This prefigured baptism, which saves you now. (1 Peter 3:19-21)

The catechist in me was struck with wonder at this interpretation, which seems so obvious, but which had escaped my notice until now: The Great Flood, which symbolically cleansed and "purified" the world, prefigured our water baptism, in which our souls are really cleansed and purified from all original and personal sin. God did not give something up; he gave something to us.

This blog is not all philosophical, rational-Christianity heaviness. Inspired by a post on the blog Hacking Christianity, which I found via Entrecard (see my widget at right, under "Blog Love"), I thought I would post about this topic, which is deeply important to all children (including, as Hacking Christianity points out, Bart Simpson) — and not a few adults.

Do cats and dogs go to heaven?

The Catholic short answer is "No." Certainly they do not have free will nor immortal souls and therefore do not participate in God's plan for salvation. But the long answer seems a lot more complicated.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church has only a short section on animals (CCC 2415-8) which says little beyond the need to respect God's creation. Against Heresies, by the second-century church father St. Irenaeus, is sometimes quoted in the discussion of animals in heaven:

Neither the structure nor the substance of creation is destroyed. It is only the "outward form of the world" (I Corinthians 7:31) that passes away – and that is to say, the conditions produced by the fall. And when this "outward form" has passed away, man will be renewed and will flourish in a prime of life that is incorruptible, so that it is no longer possible for him to grow old any more.

The context here is a refutation of the Gnostic heresy, which held that creation and the material world are evil. Considering what Irenaeus' purpose was in writing the above, it is clear that he was not addressing the question of whether our pets go to heaven.

Being rational about pets in heaven

Let's assume that some animals do go to heaven. The animal kingdom contains a spectrum of complexity; some very simple organisms are included as "animals." Related to these are certain one-celled organisms as well as fungi. (In evolutionary terms, animals and fungi are more closely related to each other than either is to plants.) Unless one wants to argue that mushrooms and molds are in heaven, there must be some cut-off point, with creatures on one side enjoying heaven and creatures on the other side stuck with the final death. It seems like the cut-off would be arbitrary, but this cannot be, since nothing about God is arbitrary.

One might speculate that animals go to heaven by merit of having been loved by humans. In other words, our pets go to heaven, but wild creatures do not. The idea that human love confers some kind of immortality on animals is alien to Christian thought; you cannot "love" someone or something to heaven, be they human, animal, vegetable, or mineral.

That leaves only one final argument in favor of pets in heaven: that since we will be happy there, we will have everything we need to make us happy — including beloved pets. That's a nice thought, but a childish one. We already know that everyone we love will not necessarily be in heaven (Catholics believe in hell), so the happiness of paradise must be possible without the actual presence of loved ones. I tend to think that part of perfect happiness will be the peaceful acceptance of those things that bother us here on earth, such as separation from beloved humans and pets.

Always with us

In a way, our pets will always be with us. In heaven we will be united with God, and God exists outside of time, so in a mystical way I think we will be somehow reunited with the good of creation throughout time, including our pets. And, of course, our love and the memory of our pets' natural love will always stay with our intellects, even in heaven. But I cannot find room in Catholic teaching for the idea that pets will be physically present with us after the Resurrection of the Body, the article of faith enshrined in the Creeds.

The blog Science and Religion News, whose author Salman Hameed strongly favors science over religion, recently posted about two stories out of the Vatican. The post, entitled "Good Pope, Bad Pope," praised the pontiff for paying "tribute" to Galileo, but criticized him for the bioethics document Dignitas Personae.

"Good Pope": The Galileo Affair

In regard to the Galileo affair, it needs to be pointed out that the popular view — that Galileo was a noble pursuer of scientific truth against a scientifically backwards and rigid Church — is false. Galileo got in trouble for, in the words of Catholic apologist Jimmy Akin, being a jerk. Pope Urban VIII was actually sympathetic to Galileo's hypotheses about heliocentrism, despite being concerned that it would be difficult to work out the theological implications (which have since been reconciled with Scripture). He asked Galileo to explain, in Galileo's book Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, the competing hypotheses of geocentrism and heliocentrism but not to advocate heliocentrism. Instead, the book ridiculed geocentrism and the pope himself, though there is controversy as to whether the apparent insults were deliberate or unintentional. It was the perceived riducule that got Galileo in trouble, not heliocentrism per se.

"Bad Pope": Dignitas Personae

In regard to Dignitas Personae, Hameed warns that in upholding previous teaching on bioethics (which asserts that all humans, including embryos, have certain rights, one of which I explained here), the Catholic Church risks becoming "irrelevant."

In other words, Hameed says that society as a whole will collectively dismiss the Church if she fails to accede to fickle public opinion.

This is the same Church that allowed the Protestant Reformation to become permanently entrenched in England over the indissolubility of marriage (in the Henry VIII affair). The same Church that suffered 400 years of prosecution in the Roman Empire for "irrelevantly" teaching that there is one God, incarnated in Jesus Christ, and denying the existence of the Roman pantheon. The same Church that has unblinkingly held to the "irrelevant" teaching that artificial contraception is an affront against God and against one's own spouse (a teaching consistent with the sublime Theology of the Body of John Paul the Great).

I'm laying my bets one who will be considered more irrelevant by history: the Church or the supporters of indignities against the tiniest humans.

I recently had a conversation with science blogger Gumby the Cat, who said this in the comments:

I do think though, that either all religions (Islam, Judaism, Christianity and the non-Abrahamic religions) were originally inspired by God, or none of them are. I think the tendency of the adherents of one particular faith to ascribe "The One Truth" status to their religion is a man-made conceit. How could one possibly know that?

Is it logical to believe that there is only one true religion?

Let me first make some postulates:

1. God is perfect and unchanging. In another manner of speaking, he is self-consistent and non-contradictory.
2. Many of the world's religions contradict each other. For example, Islam and Christianity have different views of God, both of which are radically different from the Hindu view of God/gods, which in turn is different from Buddhist and Shinto views.

It follows, then, that all religions cannot be true. Therefore at least some of them must be at least partially false.

An atheist might conclude that no religions are true. This does not necessarily follow from my two postulates; they are equally consistent with the view that exactly one religion is completely true. I do not think it is logical to believe that more than one religion is completely true, though.

So either one religion is completely true, or none are. If God is truth, that means that either one religion is "the one" God wants us to follow, or none are. I believe that one is, and I believe this is more logical than believing that many religions are equal in God's eyes.

I enjoy Scientific American. I really do. So when it published an article on the newly issued document Dignitas Personae from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, I hesitated to comment here. It seems I so often criticize SciAm in this blog.

But then the secular pro-life blog Secondhand Smoke (hat tip to Der Wolfanwalt) made scathing remarks about the article, doing much of the job for me (and doing it better than I would have). So I really have no excuse not to make a few additions.

I am thunderstruck that when SciAm decided to interview an expert about a Vatican theological document, it chose a secular commentator, Josephine Johnston. This would be like interviewing an economist rather than a physician about a new recommendation by the FDA or the Surgeon General. And predictably, she makes both herself and SciAm look ridiculous by stating explicitly that she does not understand what she is talking about:

[The document] opposes IVF even if it doesn't involve embryo loss, because the Vatican is committed to conception that involves the conjugal act. This I don't really understand.

She does not understand it because she has no background in Catholic theology. But it stems from theological principles that underlie everything the magisterium has promulgated about sex and reproduction in the past 50 years. Dignitas Personae is completely consistent with Humanae Vitae, the landmark document that reaffirmed the church's opposition to artificial contraception, and John Paul the Great's theology of the body.

Johnston also sounds a little ridiculous at the end of the interview, when she says "I don't know enough about how Catholicism works in practice" and then implies that perhaps the Church should operate as a democracy when it comes to teaching. In theory and practice, Catholicism is not a democracy, but a Kingdom. Truth is objective regardless of fickle public opinion, and even if some members of the Body of Christ dissent, the whole of that Body will always be subject to his truth.

Earlier this week I wrote about science fiction author John C. Wright's conversion story. I was moved to read this story again because I am finishing up his excellent trilogy The Golden Age (The Golden Age, The Phoenix Exultant, and The Golden Transcendence). (Yes, though I am not the Sci Fi Catholic, I have always been a sci fi Catholic.)

The protagonist of The Golden Age is an engineer who calls himself Phaethon, after the mythical Greek character Phaëton. The future Phaethon's father is a solar engineer who has named himself Helion (the mythical Phaëton's father is Helios, the sun god). The novels take place in the Golden Oecumene, a far-future, solar-system spanning civilization. The Golden Oecumene is a near-utopia thanks to abundant energy and other resources, the advice of super-intelligent and benevolent artificial intelligences called Sophotechs ("wise machines"), and immortality of identity resulting from the technology to mechanically read and copy minds.

The Golden Age is a philosophical series. It was written while its author was still an atheist, and the world is entirely secular. Reason and logic are core themes. This series rests on the power of the mind, but unlike some science fiction in which "the power of the mind" means the discovery and development of paranormal abilities, the only power of the mind in the Golden Oecumene is the ability to think.

Using their reason, Helion and his son Phaethon (as well as the super-intelligent Sophotechs) have determined that there is an objective truth, and that it includes not only the laws of nature, but also the laws of morality. The ultimate conflict is between good and evil, with "good" characterized by existence, life, endeavor, and reality, and "evil" by nihilism, emptiness, and self-deception. Phaethon and his father live a philosophy called the Silver-Gray School by which they strive to discipline themselves to remain connected to reality and to comport themselves with honor and integrity.

I have never read a godless story so philosophically compatible with Christianity. While Wright reports that it required a series of miraculous experiences for him to acknowledge God's existence, after reading The Golden Age, I don't believe much of a miracle was required; he was a rational atheist ready to meet a rational God. (Perhaps this is why he calls his mystical experiences "overkill.")

For example, an ancient Judeo-Christian philosophy dating back to the book of Genesis is the idea that one's name is a relection or part of one's essence. Thus Abram had to be renamed "Abraham," meaning "father of nations," and his grandson Jacob was also called Israel, meaning "struggles with God" (which explains much about the Old Testament history of his descendants). God himself is named YHWH, variously translated as "I am," "I am who am," and "I am that I am": God's very name is the declaration of his perfect and infinite existence.

In the Golden Oecumene, individuals choose their own names, but nobody seems to choose a name just because they like how it sounds; one's name reflects one's identity. Thus Helion is the one person in the entire Oecumene who controls the sun for the good of everyone in the solar system. The meaning of Phaethon's name is left to the reader to discover.

The Golden Age is sort of a secular humanist's dream, a paradise based only on reason; but the rational conclusions that triumph in the end are so compatible with the Catholic faith that it makes my heart hum. In light of its author's conversion, I take it as an inspiration to explicitly reject the notion that religion is irrational, as well as the use of the irrational in religion.

I had the pleasure recently of re-reading science fiction author John C. Wright's conversion story, "Why I am not a Deist." Wright was an atheist who converted to Catholicism after a series of theophanies he describes as "totally humiliating" and "an embarrassment of evidence" of the truth of Christianity.

Christianity as rational

Certain atheists today have devolved into a kind of fundamentalist and evangelical atheism, notably the likes of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and the king clown of noxious atheist behavior, P.Z. Myers. Wright does not seem to have been that sort of atheist. His writing, both fiction and non-fiction, makes it clear he has always sought Truth over Ideology, objective reality over subjective belief.

The fundamentalist atheism movement prefers to charge religion with being irrational. (They confuse religionists, who frequently are irrational, with the religious ideals they strive toward but often fail to follow.) So it is refreshing to read Wright's story, in which he insists that Christianity is an utterly rational religion:

The Christian religion places an emphasis on Reason that other religions, with the exception of the Jewish, do not share, or not to the same degree. None of them mention LOGOS, the rational account, the word, issuing directly from the Father.

Catholicism has a long tradition of rational thought. The Church honors no fewer than 33 thinkers with the title "Doctor of the Church." (Three of them, about 9%, are women, which is quite remarkable considering that in Western history, probably many fewer than 9% of educated persons were women.)

Christianity is not only a proponent of rational philosophy; it is a promoter of rational science. Indeed, Wright points out,

...Christendom invented science.... The Christian world-view is not only NOT incompatible with the scientific and logical one, they reinforce each other. You must imagine my befuddlement when I see science presented as somehow being the enemy of religion. Science is the enemy of Taoism or Buddhism, perhaps, but not the enemy of a religion that combines the rationalism of Athens with the mysticism of Jerusalem. We invented the University, for God's sake.

Taoism and Buddhism as irrational

My previous (and largely disastrous) attempts to study kung fu exposed me to Taoism and Buddhism, particularly Chan Buddhism, the Chinese ancestor of Zen Buddhism. Taoism is the philosophy behind the art of tai chi and emphasizes the use of chi (ki in Japanese), an utterly unscientific force. The belief in chi is a form of vitalism. It is inherently unscientific in the same sense that the theory of intelligent design is unscientific: it attempts to explain natural observations by appealing to a force that is supernatural.*

Both Taoism and Buddhism include elements that are at once impersonal and supernatural. The idea of a force both supernatural (that is, outside or above the laws of nature) and impersonal (that is, not a person or being nor arising from one) is irrational itself. Any force that exists independent of a person begs an explanation. If it acts on nature, it must be a law of nature — or (if one accepts the existence of supernatural beings) it must arise from a supernatural being.

*Of course, rational Christianity recognizes personal supernatural forces and the possibility of their acting on the natural. An appeal to the supernatural is not necessarily irrational, but it is unscientific, because by definition science can only be concerned with the natural world. Thus elements of intelligent design may be true, but it will always be an unscientific theory.

Today is the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed, also known as All Souls Day. The church consists of all baptized people who have ever existed except for those now in hell; the rest of us are here on earth (the Church Militant), in heaven (the Church Triumphant), or in Purgatory (the Church Penitent).

"All baptized people" includes most Protestants, of course, but Protestants generally do not believe in Purgatory. And as a result, they don't pray for their dead. I find it poignant to consider people in the Church Penitent whose loved ones on earth do not pray for their purification to be complete. Here is a prayer for the forgotten souls in Purgatory:

Lord, hear the forgotten souls in Purgatory. Purify them and bring them to your side to sing your praises forever. Amen.

Michael Dowd, the self-proclaimed "evangelist of evolution," wants religious people to discard their beliefs while keeping their religious language, which he would like to redefine to refer to concepts from the scientific theory of evolution and speculations of evolutionary psychology.

This is a pretty big horse pill to swallow. Dowd knows this, so he markets his ideas with his Seven Reasons for the Gospel of Evolution. And here they are, seven reasons Dowd thinks people of faith should come around to his way of thinking:

1. The gospel of evolution would give us a common creation myth. Since Christians and Jews already share a common creation myth, I assume Dowd must mean to use the gospel of evolution for a sort of universal ecumenism, in which all religions — Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, and Christianity among them — acknowledge one and only one story of origins: naturalistic evolution.
   
2. It validates both scientific and religious ways of speaking. Of course, religious ways of speaking are already "validated" in the religious community. Dowd must mean therefore that religious ways of speaking will be validated among the atheistic community. Indeed, throughout his interviews, Dowd comes across as desperate for the approval of atheists.
   
3. It is a key to understanding and alleviating suffering, which comes from not living "integrously" with the flow of evolution. History, with its lessons on the eugenics movement and on Nazi genocide, teaches a far different lesson on what happens when humans try to base their ethics on the theory of evolution.
   
4. Religious language can be interpreted in a way that's universally true. By this, Dowd means it can be interpreted naturalistically. He says, "I don't have to wait to die to go to a place called heaven. When I'm in a place, integrity, love, compassion, generosity, care, consideration, I'm in heaven now, and so are you. It's true for everybody." But obviously, it's not true for those whose earthly lives are full of suffering, whether from loneliness, physical or mental illness, drug addiction, or other causes of grief. It seems cruel of Dowd to be so eager to steal the hope of a happy afterlife from people who are far from experiencing "heaven" on earth.
   
5. Only by knowing how we really got here and the trajectory we're on can we respond to problems like terrorism without making things worse. "It is impossible to know how to move into a healthy sustainable future" without understanding evolution, says Dowd. I agree that understanding evolution is important, but there is no reason religious beliefs should be discarded at the same time.
   
6. It unmasks the powers of manipulations. "We are so easily led around like a nose-ring (sic)." Here I assume Dowd is giving in to the frequent atheistic criticism of religion, that organized religion exists to manipulate the masses. Yet people of faith like myself believe we are more free in many ways than are people without faith.
   
7. "It gives us the tools for understanding how to have a great life and thriving relationships no matter what hand life deals us." That's funny; my Catholic faith also gives me those tools, and much more explicitly. I imagine that the Gospel of Religion has no sacraments, for example.

Michael Dowd Series:

• Part 1: Demoting the sacred
• Part 2: Original sin
• Part 3: Seven false reasons for the gospel of evolution
• Part 4: The compatibility of science and religion

Evangelist of evolution Michael Dowd is not content to promote a worldview devoid of the supernatural using the language of atheism. His mission is to appropriate religious language and redefine it.

He calls the words related to faith — words like reverence and holiness, and theological terms like living in Christ — "night language," apparently because they obscure what sees as the truth. (His truth is that there is no supernatural order; he even prefers the term "unnatural" to "supernatural.") The goal, which he states explicitly, is to redefine "night language" in purely secular terms.

Original sin

In one of the two Point of Inquiry interviews, Dowd explains how and why he redefines one particular theological term, original sin. (The orthodox Christian definition of original sin is that first human sin committed by Adam and Eve. This sin is inherited by all humans, and its effects include separation from God, which is healed at baptism, and a "fallen nature" or tendency toward sin, also known as concupiscence.) Dowd does not believe in a spiritual world and thus not in a universal spiritual wound; he would like to redefine original sin to be merely an artifact of human evolution.

In the interview, Dowd seems at times desperate to gain the atheist host's approval. He brags about his secular "street cred," obtained when he and his wife had a polyamorous relationship with another woman. Being disfellowshipped from the United Church of Christ (one of the most liberal Protestant denominations) was not enough for him to change his ways, but he is now in a strictly monogamous relationship because (I'm not making this up) he is afraid of papparazzi.

So "living integrously" for Dowd does not require monogamy, but it does seem to require honesty; in his worldview, adultery is only wrong if your spouse disapproves.

This is the evolution evangelist's explanation of original sin:

When a person's social status changes dramatically for the better, such as upon being promoted or elected into office, Dowd says one experiences a boost in testosterone. (I'll take his word for it.) A high level of testosterone leads to a preoccupation with sex. He says that an orthodox Christian's response to this experience is to assume that "sex on the brain" means that it is God's will for him to commit adultery. It would be a sorry understatement to call this statement disingenuous.

Recognizing that a preoccupation with sex in this situation is just a natural response related to human evolution, rather than a result of a spiritual fall, gives a person the "tools" to live "integrously" by not acting on those urges, while a spiritual view of original sin does not do so, says Dowd.

It is true that a purely spiritual view of original sin does not by itself give one all the "tools" they need to avoid actual sin. Catholics and most Protestants agree that people cannot avoid sin entirely by relying on themselves. God's grace always a necessary weapon in the war against concupiscence.

Still, there is no denying that insight into one's psyche helps one make good choices. But it is not necessary at all to believe in human evolution in order to understand how hormones affect thinking. Psychobiology is not the same as evolution; this example would be better suited to a "gospel of psychiatry" rather than a "gospel of evolution."


Michael Dowd Series:

• Part 1: Demoting the sacred
• Part 2: Original sin
• Part 3: Seven false reasons for the gospel of evolution
• Part 4: The compatibility of science and religion

The recent post about this blog's position on evolution has attracted a lot of attention. Perhaps I should have added that I believe evolution is "only a theory" in the sense that it is nothing more than an idea of secular science and is not at all a sacred thing. I say this to make a contrast with the position of Michael Dowd, a self-described "evangelist of the gospel of evolution."

Dowd, previously a Catholic and then a fundamentalist Protestant, is now the inventor of "evolutionary theology" and the author of Thank God for Evolution: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World. He was recently interviewed in two parts on the secular humanist radio program "Point of Inquiry," where he explained his naturalized religion.

There is a lot to Dowd's message, parts of which will be addressed in future posts. But his ideas all boil down to one central thesis: God is not a supernatural, personal being, but a personification of reality. In other words, God is the "proper name" we give to all of nature. His term "Religion 2.0" seems to refer to a hybridization between pantheism and the philosophy of Spinoza, both descendants of Eastern philosophy.

Though he calls it a "personification," Dowd's thesis about religious thought actually makes God into a non-person. In other words, God's personhood is merely symbolic.

Dowd explicitly rejects all private revelation (what Catholics would call "the deposit of faith") in favor of the revelation uncovered by science. He says that scientific facts are "God's native language." This idea echoes the beliefs of the Deists, who accepted "natural theology" but rejected the revealed theology that is central to the claims of Christianity. Interestingly, in the radio interviews at least, he makes no attempt to refute the idea that revelation contains truth, but merely denounces it.

The Catholic Church holds that while doctrine can develop in the same way a flower unfolds, its core content never changes. The original deposit of faith was completed with the writing of the books now included in the Bible. The Church is so careful on this point that she uses a dead language as the official tongue of faith, lest the natural evolution of living languages distort the unchanging contents of revelation.

Nature likewise never changes (except, the Christian would maintain, through the rare interventions of God known as miracles), but our understanding and description of nature — in other words, science — changes frequently and often dramatically. For example, consider how the uncertainties of quantum mechanics (a model which even has a postulate called the Uncertainty Principle) compare with the clockwork universe of Newton. Even the theory of evolution, the scientific nucleus of Dowd's philosophy, may in principle be one day replaced or drastically modified as the central unifying theory of biology.

And much of Dowd's message draws not on the overall theory of evolution, which is a very strong model with overwhelming scientific consensus, but on the much more speculative field known as evolutionary psychology. To derive our behavioral "integrity," as Dowd recommends, from such a controversial discipline is to build our morals on a foundation of sand.

I subscribe instead to the Cartesian (and fully Catholic-compatible) view that science, as the study of nature, is subordinate to supernatural truth. By removing the supernatural from reality and calling the remnants "God," Dowd has made himself into an evangelist of nonsense. A commenter on the Point of Inquiry website put it well with these insightful remarks: "If the universe is god is the metaphor, then doesn’t god lose all meaning? ... An impersonal and unknowable god seems like no god at all, at least from a teleological point of view."

Michael Dowd Series:

• Part 1: Demoting the sacred
• Part 2: Original sin
• Part 3: Seven false reasons for the gospel of evolution
• Part 4: The compatibility of science and religion

I just wrote about some interesting Eucharistic oddments, as this sacrament is fascinating to me and one of my favorite devotions. Yet somehow (despite subscribing to some of the blogs that discussed it) I completely missed "Crackergate" until now.

Background: The whole thing started when a Florida student took a consecrated host home instead of consuming it at Mass. Perhaps he acted out of ignorance (but also defiance, as he was there was something of a showdown in which parish officials asked him to return the host before he went home).

Enter biologist PZ Myers. He is rather evangelical about his beliefs, which include equating "atheism," "science," and "truth." I won't link to his blog "Pharyngula," not wanting to encourage his juvenile attention-seeking, but he gleefully documented all his actions there. (If you really want to read it, let Google help you.)

I said Myers "entered," but "barged in hollering 'Look at me, look at me!'" is more descriptive. He requested his followers readers send him consecrated hosts, which he pledged to treat to profane as foully — and publicly — as possible. They complied, and he published a photograph of a host in the trash can, with a rusty nail driven through it, along with pages from the Qu'ran and Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion.

The blog "The Big Stick" wrote eloquently about Myers' attention-seeking actions.

Myeres does not understand people's love of the Eucharist, so instead he insults them. He is guilty of a number of rhetorical sins, most prominently argument by sneer. Myers has described those upset by Eucharistic sacrilege to be "demented [unprintable]s" in the throes of "mass lunacy" and "astonishing ... insanity." (As you can see, he also plies the trade of perpetuating the stigma on mental illness.)

Myers says his e-mail bag is overflowing with death threats toward him and his family, and he proves it by publishing some of them. The nastiness of the hate mail he has received is enough to make me queasy. I think it is proof that you can have faith without forming your conscience to it, as I asserted in this post.

Elsewhere in his blog, Myers mentions secular humanism as "a good alternative" to Catholicism. If Myers really is a secular humanist, than his conscience seems not to be formed by his beliefs either. "Good will" and "tolerance," tenets of secular humanism's ideal of building a better world, are sorely lacking in Myers' actions.

Myers does not understand his opponents' outrage. Mark Shea remarked, "One gets the impression that both he and his followers, having nothing but contempt for Catholics, have no real grasp of the interior contours of Catholic faith and belief and therefore no grasp whatever of the hierarchy of values at work in Catholic life." Some out-of-context quotes (you would think Myers, who loudly deplores "quote-mining," would know better) led me to believe that Shea also does not understand Myers' motivation, but the whole of his writing shows that he does.

Some of the Catholic responders to Myers, though, do not understand his motivation. Myers does not intend to insult the person of Jesus Christ. How can he, when he views belief in God being as nonsensical as believing in the Tooth Fairy? He wants to demonstrate that "it's only a cracker." He doesn't even believe in such a thing as sacrilege, so he can hardly commit it. His sin is not of sacrilege, but just of being a jerk.

Every Catholic making a First Communion learns that the Eucharist is the Body and Blood of Christ, that he is really present (a concept descriptively called the Real Presence), and that the host and wine invisibly change into his literal Body and Blood through something called "transubstantiation."

To the curious and practical minded, that leaves a lot of questions still to be answered. And, never fear, when you have a strange theological question, the Church has always thought of it first. Here are answers to some of those questions you may have been too embarrassed to ask:

1. Is it okay if I take only the host or only the cup? Or do I need both to get the "whole Jesus"?

The consecrated host is called the "Body of Christ" and the cup is called the "Blood of Christ," but that refers to their superficial resemblance; the solid bread is analogous to Christ's solid Body and the liquid wine is analogous to Christ's liquid Blood. The fact that one is solid and one is liquid reminds us that we receive both Body and Blood. The answer to the question, however, is that the host and the cup each contain the fullness of Christ's Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity. Thus, you can receive either one and get the "whole Jesus."

The belief that one must receive both forms to get the "whole Jesus" is a heresy called Utraquism. To paraphrase the Catholic Encyclopedia, we do not believe that Christ limits his real presence, or holds back part of the spiritual nutrition of the Eucharist, based only on the physical appearance of the sacred species. Since transubstantiation means that the bread and wine are completely transformed, it does not make sense that there should be a limitation on what they turn into.

2. Why is the Eucharist not the same as cannibalism?

Given that Christ is human and that he is really present in the Eucharist, it does sound a bit like cannibalism. And that concern may be what drove away some of his disciples at the end of the Bread of Life discourse in John 6. But when we consume the Eucharist, we eat Jesus in a sacramental way, not in the mundane way that would be eating a person's physical flesh.

Consider what it means to eat meat. You don't take the animal's substance into you; you don't contain "cow-ness" or "pig-ness" afterward. You contain only the physical molecules that made up its flesh. The same happens in cannibalism. Cannibals do not contain the personhood or "human-ness" of their victims, only their meat.

In the Eucharist, on the other hand, the faithful receive the personhood of Jesus. They contain his soul and divinity in a real, mystical way.

Cannibalism is an offense against the dignity of the human person. Because he offered it to us, because in fact it exists solely for us, eating and drinking the Eucharist can never offend the dignity of Christ.

3. What if I throw up after Communion?

Eww. But it's an important question; after all, the Eucharist is often given to sick people, and even people who feel healthy may vomit unexpectedly at times. The main principle is that the real presence of Jesus remains as long as the sacred species retains the physical characteristics of bread and wine. The Eucharist can theoretically be contaminated not only by being vomited from a recipient, but also by becoming dirty, by being poisoned, or by suffering other potential sacrileges. And Christ surely does not expect us to consume a contaminated Eucharist.

In these cases, a priest will, in a dignified and respectful way, remove the appearance of bread or wine; then the contaminated stuff won't be the Eucharist anymore. The content of the cup, the former wine, is diluted with pure water until it no longer resembles wine. A poisoned host is disposed of the same way. A vomited Eucharist, on the other hand, is "gathered up and disposed of in some decent place." No further elaboration is given, but I have heard of it being buried in the ground (surely more dignified than being flushed down the toilet).

More information on these and other Eucharistic mishaps can be found in the papal bull De Defectibus ("On Defects").

Bonus question: Why do you keep saying "host" and "cup"? Why not use the less confusing words "bread" and "wine" in this post?

Because after the consecration, there is no bread or wine anymore. It's gone except for looks — "accidents" in philosophical parlance. It's all Jesus. So it would be inaccurate to call the Eucharist "bread" or "wine" (despite the words used in many modern Eucharistic hymns). And the words "host" and "cup" are more succinct than "appearance of bread" and "appearance of wine," terms which are often used for the Eucharist.

Jen at "Et tu?" posted a response to Annie, a commenter in her blog, who wrote,

To me, it's scary to think I live in the world with people who believe this way. To think only your belief in God is what keeps you from being a bad person? You have no human decency? You have no compassion? You only have your belief in a man in the sky to keep you from doing wrong?

That's scary to the rest of us who live on secular humanism and empathy, based in something much stronger and much more sound.

This quote illustrates the great conceptual divide that believers and atheists face. I could have written almost the same thing:

To think only your belief in secular humanism is what keeps you from being a bad person? You have no human decency? You have no compassion? You only have your belief in some abstract bit of sophism to keep you from doing wrong?

That's scary to the rest of us who live in service to God and our faith, based on something much stronger and much more sound.

If I were to say that, I would just be talking past Annie, the same way she is just talking past me. The real truth is that both of us try to do good because they are internalized values.

The handy-dandy behavioral template

When I make one of my dozens of mundane moral decisions, I don't stop to think consciously, "What would be the best way to serve God? What does the man in the sky want me to do?" Anybody who did this would be paralyzed in pondering, unable to make decisions when they need to.

Instead, like everybody else, when I make a decision I just consult my conscience (as I discussed in this post). That's my internal set of moral values, and it provides quick answers. When Annie makes a moral decision, I daresay she also just consults her conscience.

That's what the conscience is there for — making quick moral decisions.

My faith is not going anywhere, but if it were to falter, I would not suddenly begin operating amorally, because my faith is not directly the source of my decisions. It's what shaped and formed that behavioral template, my conscience, and the conscience does not change shape as easily or quickly as mere belief can. Likewise, were Anna to abandon secular humanism, she would likely not suddenly begin acting like Machiavelli. Her philosophy formed her conscience.

Based on her blog, I suspect that Annie, like most of us, has met Christians who do not behave as Christians are "supposed" to behave. This contradiction does not happen because the bad actors do not "really" believe in God. It's because they have not shaped their "motivators," their consciences, according to their belief in God.

Probably a great number of them have done little to shape their consciences at all. A conscience is like a computer — you have to make sure you feed it well. Garbage in? Garbage out.

A wealth of new questions and speculations have occurred to me. Non-intelligent alien life would be theologically no more remarkable than life on earth. The really important question applies to another race or species of intelligent aliens.

Angels: Known aliens

Some theological background is called for here. In Catholicism, there is a difference between creatures with immortal spirits and creatures without. The two known "races" of creatures with spirits are angels, which are pure spirit with no body, and humans, which are both bodily and spiritual creatures. Each human's spirit is called a soul. All other known creatures are animals, and are entirely mortal.

Angels are intelligent, rational beings. In a sense, as a wholly separate race of thinking beings, they are aliens. When most people think of another intelligent race, they usually think of creatures with bodies, not pure spirits like angels. Nevertheless, angels can give us some insight into what God's relationship with a race of thinking, breathing aliens might be like.

Angels' and humans' relationships with God have a central theme in common: both have free will, so each individual can choose whether to serve God or to reject him. In fact, in all of known creation, free will, the ability to reason, and immortality are a package deal. Assuming God stayed with that pattern another intelligent race would have the same attributes, and thus aliens may have immortal souls.

The fall of man, the fall of angels, the fall of aliens?

Both humans and angels were subjected to a fall, an opportunity to decide whether to follow or to reject God. In angels, the fall was individual, while in humans it is collective. In both cases, however, it results the from the free will of the creatures in question, not from divine imposition. So it is possible that a theoretical race of aliens might not have fallen. They might, essentially, exist in their version of Eden.

But perhaps there is a race, or even many races, of fallen aliens. If their fall was collective like ours, it is a sure bet that God would redeem them, as he did for humans. This thought leads to some wild speculation and fanciful theology about whether God's Son could have been sent (and incarnated) separately for each race, or whether Jesus, the human incarnation, was meant to redeem aliens as well as humans. The potential for accidental heresy is high here, so I will desist from speculating at this point.

Rational but soulless beings?

Earlier I mentioned that free will, rationality, and immortality are always tied together in that part of creation known to humans. It may be, though, that God has created rational beings without immortal souls. They may be able to perform feats of logic, to speak and understand language, and to solve problems even better than humans can, yet may be entirely mortal. In that case, aliens would be nothing more than clever animals. Their ability to out-think humans would be analogous to a horses' ability to outrun us, or fishes' ability to outswim us.

A final note

All this speculation is nothing more than a mental exercise. While Catholics are certainly permitted to believe in intelligent aliens, they are not required to do so. In the case that aliens exist only in human imagination, it is an entirely moot point.

Read the whole Aliens and Origins series here. Make sure you don't miss upcoming posts by subscribing.

Jennifer F. of "Et tu?" has started a new series called "Half Baked Thought Thursday," which in effect consists of a weekly thought experiment for her readers. For the inaugural post of the series, she wrote:

What about fearing other people's suffering (or potential suffering) on their behalf -- how can we be deeply compassionate and helpful without falling into the dangerous "your life isn't worth living" territory?

I see two motives for the desire to prevent the suffering of others: the belief that suffering is an affront to the dignity of the human person, and the belief that suffering is evil. Superficially, they don't sound very different, but there is actually all the difference in the world.

If suffering is evil, then suffering should be avoided at all costs. If another person is suffering, then ending that suffering is the highest priority. Healing is the best option, but if that is not possible, other options should be considered -- drugging the sufferer into oblivion, drastic permanent treatments, even euthanasia. The trouble with this view is that it is unbalanced; if suffering is evil, then all other possibilities -- even killing! -- are on the table.

If suffering is an affront to human dignity, then it is only one entry on a list of affronts. The list includes mutilation, murder, and sedation. The list can be ranked in order of offensiveness, with murder at the top; the other items on the list can be balanced against each other for each individual case. For an epileptic not responding to medication, perhaps "mutilation" by brain surgery is less offensive to human dignity than the suffering caused by the seizures. For a person in chronic pain, perhaps drug sedation is less of an affront than the suffering caused by constant agony.

In either case, a spiritual view of suffering allows good to be drawn from the evil. A person may even volunteer to suffer or accept involuntary suffering heroically in order to accomplish that good. Christ certainly did. But it should not be forgotten that suffering is still an objectively bad thing.

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Ben Stein has an impressive curriculum vitae: presidential speechwriter, actor, comedian, social commentator, game show host, attorney, author. Now he has added "filmmaker" to that list with his documentary film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Its central premise is that the theory of intelligent design (ID) is better than the theory of Darwinian evolution, but "Big Science" refuses acknowledge that fact. Like the medieval Church, it excommunicates any academic who questions Darwinian dogma or advocates for ID.

I have not had the opportunity to see the film (it isn't playing in my city), so I will base my commentary on reviews and materials from the Expelled website. I'll start with the two-minute "Super Trailer," which opens with this dialogue between a teacher and Stein, who is sitting in the back of the classroom:

Teacher: Moving through history in an unguided and undesigned way, the theory of evolution --
Stein: Excuse me!
Teacher: Yes, Ben.
Stein: How did life begin in the first place?
Teacher: Mr. Stein. You have the same question every time.
Stein: Well, you never answer it, sir.
Teacher: (sputtering) You know, we've been through this so many times, you have been so --
Stein: Could there have been an intelligent designer? (cue electric guitar solo)

The film has been accused of being propaganda rather than a documentary by the site "Expelled Exposed," and this conversation between a cool, collected Stein and a caricature of a hapless teacher certainly supports that assertion.

The trailer continues with interview snippets from what are presumably supposed to be academics disgraced by their belief in ID, and then a choppy bit of an interview about the origin of life that reeks of out-of-context editing. It ends with some indignant comments about those people, including (heaven forfend!) the National Academy of Sciences, who insist on the separation of religious and scientific thought. Stein complains, "There are people out there who want to keep science in a little box, where it can't possibly touch a higher power, cannot possibly touch God."

This trailer has two main themes -- that scientists can't answer questions about the origin of life, and that science and religion are improperly kept separate -- both of which I strenuously disagree with. (Lest I be accused of taking things out of context, feel free to peruse the official overview of the film.)

I'll start with the second theme about the separation of science and faith. Religion and science have both different methods and different ends. Since both seek truth, they can never contradict each other when conducted properly, but neither do they answer the same question. Religion is ordered to learning about God and his relationship with us, and about sanctification -- ultimately, about all things supernatural. Science is ordered to learning about Creation -- all things natural. The scope and methodology of science is such that it is impossible for it to make conclusions about religious topics. If science attempts to explain a miracle -- a supernatural suspension of natural law -- it cannot call that event a miracle, only declare it "unexplained so far."

So yes, science absolutely should be kept in a little box where it can't touch supernatural things. That is its proper place. And religion properly should touch on only those aspects of the natural world that affect our relationship with God, and leave the rest to science.

The exact historical process by which the first living DNA cells originated is one of those events that belong to science. Religion can tell us only that God was the ultimate cause; science alone can (possibly) discover the method. And in only the last few years, new discoveries have begun to shed light on this method. We may someday (soon, even) have a pretty good idea of the nitty-gritty chemistry that sparked the first DNA life.

But there is another issue that begs to be addressed. Regardless of how the first life came into being, whether a natural process or an ex nihilo fiat, the origin of life actually has no bearing at all on Darwinian evolution. Evolution is concerned with what happens to life that already exists. In other words, even if the origin of life can never be explained naturalistically, evolution by natural selection is not thereby invalidated.

The information available to me about this film does not make me hopeful that it contains much scientific investigation. I rather suspect it will follow the fallacy that if you say something loudly and often enough, it will come true.

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Ascension Healthcare is a non-profit, Catholic health insurer. Its definition of "Healthcare Ethics" succinctly states an answer to the question, "Is there a right to health care?"

From the perspective of Catholic moral teaching, the "right to health care" for all is not an optional stance. Rather, the right to health care is a human right founded on human dignity and the common good. Considered as such, health care is more than a commodity in so far as it is an essential safeguard of human life and dignity that ought to be provided for and to everyone. This absolute right to health care, however, should not be understood as an unlimited entitlement, but as a right that carries with it corresponding duties regarding justice, stewardship and the common good.

According to this stance, there is a right to health care that aims to preserve human life and dignity. I understand this statement as saying that there is also a duty of patients to cooperate with their health care, which answers Mile Hi Mama's concerns about noncompliance.

Years ago, I read a newspaper story about the undue feeling of entitlement shared by many Americans. The author wrote about a woman she had met who was being treated for infertility. She felt the health care establishment should do whatever it took for her to get pregnant, because that is what she needed to be happy, and the Declaration of Independence gives Americans the right to happiness.

Of course, there is no right to happiness in this world. The Declaration of Independence asserts a right to pursuit of happiness. And theologically, complete happiness is a privilege bought with Christ's blood and available only after death.

Similarly, a right to health care should not be confused with a right to health at all costs, as the Vatican's Pontifical Academy for Life pointed out three years ago. There cannot be a right to health at all costs because such a right would be at times contrary to the rights of others and to the common good. For example, a person needing a kidney transplant does not have a right to the kidney of a healthy person; it must be freely donated.

I am adopting Ascension Health's statement as my position on the right to health care. It is balanced by considerations of stewardship over available resources and the common good, and it makes good use of Catholic moral reasoning.

Do you agree with Ascension Health's statement? If not, what do you think is wrong with it?

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