Part 3: Signals of Transcendence

Believe it or not, I initially planned just one article covering the whole of James Sire’s visit and presentations, starting with my general impressions and culminating with analysis of the two bits of rhetoric I’ll (finally) cover in this article. Of course, I also planned to write this particular article right on the temporal heels of the other two, but papers intervened. In any case, my coursework and grading are both done for the quarter, so I can now pick up where I left off.

As you’ll recall, Sire’s recent reformulation of “worldview” heavily emphasizes emotional commitments, at the cost (in my opinion) of a rational and workable concept. Be that as it may, his primary application of these ideas does maintain the intellectual integrity and logical structure typical of much of his writing. A worldview, Sire argues, is “a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, [one] that can be expressed as a story and/or in a set of presuppositions” (Naming the Elephant 122). For the second part of his Saturday seminar (as well as a brief part of his Friday CGSA talk) Sire linked this frame with the notion of “signals of transcendence,” and gave both a history of major views on these signals and his own thoughts on the matter.

For those familiar with Sire’s previous work, it may be helpful to think of this change as more methodological than strictly philosophical. For instance, in How to Read Slowly Sire presents a method for “reading for comprehension”—or more precisely, reading for worldview. In the chapter there on reading nonfiction, Sire’s analysis follows in the footsteps of the New Critics—hurrah for close reading! After reproducing a short essay originally printed in The Chronicle of Higher Education (Major street cred there, Jimmy. Major.), Sire first seeks to “clarify the vocabulary” (31) and track down the primary text’s allusions. Only then, he contends, can we ask questions about genre, thesis, evidence, and possible objections (hmm, sounds like my freshman comp class!), and eventually about the author’s particular worldview. While close reading as an analytical practice may not necessarily require a rational approach (cf. Derrida’s Plato’s Pharmacy, if you must), I would argue that it is wholly consistent with Sire’s then-current view of worldview as “a set of presuppositions which we hold about the basic makeup of our world” (Universe 1997, p. 16). Although Sire models his reading method narratively rather than simply listing his conclusions, he follows the same logic in How to Read Slowly as in his early editions of Universe.

Within this context, Sire’s new emphasis on “signals of transcendence” (yes, yes, we’ll get to the actual definition eventually) can be seen as a similar demonstration of irrational (or more kindly, suprarational) worldview formation. Simply put, a signal of transcendence (not to be confused with singles of transcendence, which one may find on New Age dating sites) is a human impulse or reaction that can only be satisfactorily accounted for under a transcendent system. Generally, these signals appear in discourses not explicitly marked as “Christian” or even “religious,” though they interact with such discourses in significant ways. More importantly, they are equally outside rationalism or logic per se: they constitute evidence without being proof. Confused yet? Just wait—it gets, well, longer.

The actual term “signals of transcendence” originates not with Sire, actually, but with Peter Berger, a non-Christian sociologist. Interestingly, Berger denies the possibility of special revelation (personal, direct communication from a transcendent God), but views these signals as a type of natural revelation. In a book whose title I, alas, did not write in my notes, Berger thus proposes four arguments for transcendence. The “argument from ordering,” at least in Sire’s explanation, significantly highlights the irrationality of comfort: a mother, for instance, will tell her frightened or hurt child that “everything will be all right.” In the short term, perhaps, this simply means that, say, Gargamel (of The Smurfs) won’t actually jump out of the TV and chase you around, despite last night’s rather vivid nightmare. But no human mother, however well-meaning, can override or prevent real calamities: life, actually, is not all right. To claim the opposite, in both Berger’s and Sire’s view, indicates another world of permanent comfort.

Berger’s second example, the “argument from play,” likewise draws on childhood experience, but from the child’s perspective. Play, whether in the guise of make-believe, dress up, or online RPGs, creates a secondary world with its own rules and temporality. When my brother and I were kids, for instance, most of our backyard fantasies fell under the rubric of “The Adventures of Traagar and M’giah.” To this day I have no earthly idea where we got those names, but they seemed quite natural then. Of course, the bulk of our play concepts consisted of thinly veiled adaptations (or blatant plagiarisms; our liturgy for entering the play world was “It’s Morphin’ Time!”) of various TV shows and computer games, but the creative impulse fits in Berger’s model just the same. If our universe were a closed system, he argues, then serious play (no, it’s not a contradiction in terms) could not so readily—and so creatively—break the rules. For a more academic approach to this concept, Sire recommends Tolkien’s essay, “On Fairy Tales.” To this I would add Freud’s “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming” (1907), which though from a different viewpoint covers much of the same ground.

The third of Berger’s examples, the “argument from hope,” offers (alas) no such opportunity for random childhood anecdotes. As in the argument from ordering, Berger locates in hope an impulse contradictory to a mechanistic (i.e. naturalistic) universe. Here, though, the force seems to be more in ambiguity and even agnosticism, rather than in reassurance against all odds. For example, I may make any of these three statements: (1) I hope I get an A on my paper, (2) I hope the weather is nice for my drive home, and (3) I hope I get to talk more to that pretty flute major I met at CGSA. Granted, the syntax won’t always be strictly in the same form—or necessarily use the word “hope”—but the sentiment is. However, in each of these scenarios “hope” (I should say “Hope,” waxing Platonic, but that seems a bit too formal.) takes on a slightly different meaning. For the first, I may in flights of fancy and/or bribery think I can influence my profs’ respective grading processes, but realistically I’ve done all I can. Similarly, the weather ought to be (save any still-standing suns) determined already, whether by the proverbial chaotic butterfly wing (I blame Nabokov) or an old-fashioned cold front. But the third sentence, I think, brings out Berger’s notion more clearly: while certain empirical situations, such as riding the same bus home, certainly contribute to the stated goal, this type of hope actually transcends logical calculation. This same usage, for instance, appears in Thomas Paine’s Deistic Age of Reason: “I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.”

Finally, after three appeals to fond memories and vain future hopes, we reach Berger’s starkly realistic fourth signal: the argument from damnation. This one is particularly appropriate within the context of Christian apologetics, as many non-Christian detractors cite damnation as evidence against God’s goodness. Here as before, however, Berger is more concerned with human behavior: some particularly heinous agents of evil (Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Jack the Ripper, Barak Obama, et al) garner wishes of damnation even outside specifically theological contexts. Or, as Paul Laurence Dunbar puts it a bit more waggishly in “Theology” (1896):

There is a heaven, for ever, day by day,
The upward longing of my soul doth tell me so.
There is a hell, I’m quite as sure; for pray,
If there were not, where would my neighbors go?

Because this argument builds on a negative principle, which is to say it specifically prescribes punishment, Sire argues that it implies a converse positive principle: if we can recognize and condemn evil, then we should also be able to recognize and praise good. On a side note, C.S. Lewis uses a similar rhetorical structure in the early chapters of Mere Christianity, though he assumes an already-established moral law to do so.

As you’ve probably guessed by now, Sire applies Berger’s general observations to argue specifically for Christian theism, rather than a vague—and impersonal—“transcendence.” To do this, he draws in part on Calvin’s (the French theologian, not the Greatest Cartoon Character Ever™) sensus divinitatus thesis: that there is “an awareness or sense of God implanted in all people by nature.” However, while Calvin argues that this belief is universal, at the same time it is “rather minimal: there is a God, He is the Creator, and He ought to be worshipped.” Now, the term universal, particularly when spoken by a WASP or other dastardly Westerner, carries some rather unpleasant connotations these days in the proverbial ivory tower. What Calvin (or at least the commentary on him that Sire quotes) seems to mean, though, is not that every culture conceptualizes a personal God, but rather that they retain the concept of an all-powerful being—even by denying its actual existence. I’m not particularly fond of that last bit of logic, myself, but will let it stand for the moment.

The rest of Sire’s observations on this topic primarily deal with specific signals of transcendence in human knowledge and experience. Significantly, while in a previous talk Sire noted that reasons for belief are often formulated after the fact, signals of transcendence often appear before belief. For example, Sire cites a passage from Stephen Weinberg (a thoroughgoing atheist), which states among other things that “[i]t is almost irresistible for humans to believe that we have some special relation to the universe, that human life is not just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents…but that we were somehow built in from the beginning.” Weinberg, like his fellow naturalists Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan (and Harold Bloom, after a fashion), of course believes that such a belief is ultimately self-deceiving. But Sire’s point, which I think is a good one, is that even the impulse to regret that alleged delusion speaks to a reality not dreamed of in Weinberg’s philosophy.

Based on this structure, Sire spent the rest of his talk identifying strands of thought—and occasionally specific texts—that signal transcendence in a whole range of fields: biology, astronomy, math, physics, philosophy, ethics, social sciences, and of course aesthetics. I won’t get into the details of his argument for the sciences, but I do want to spend a little time on his examples from art before moving to my own two case studies. On this point the problem of universalism re-enters the picture: though Calvin dodges the diversity-enforcing bullet by weakening his claim to account for extreme cultural ranges, Sire does not. While Sire did not fully endorse Peter Kreeft’s syllogism (“There is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Therefore there must be a God. You either see this or you don’t.”), he located transcendence in equally narrow circles: Bach, some paintings, Shakespeare, and poets such as G.M. Hopkins. Now, we obviously cannot expect Sire to identify transcendence in styles or genres with which he is not familiar—or perhaps more simply, those he doesn’t like—but here again I find his formulation problematic. Much as I rage, rage, against the dying of aesthetic and stylistic standards for literature, the question here is not what is aesthetically pleasing but what is emotionally effective. Sire, perhaps, would run screaming from the room (mentally, if not physically) if I cranked Stryper or Alice Cooper up to eleven. Likewise, I daresay certain fans of those two bands would groan at the prospect of sitting through all four Brandenburg Concertos. But who’s to say, aside perhaps from a few writers about two houseplants, which signal is genuine? This seems to me the biggest weakness in Sire’s argument, and an ironic one: if a signal of transcendence, well, transcends cultural specificity (as Sire and I both believe God does), how then can we limit it to one set of cultural tastes? More to the point, how might we read (as Sire suggests!!) explicitly anti-Christian texts, like Weinberg’s above, for signposts to an “unknown God”? The world, Hopkins writes, is “charged with the grandeur of God”—not just a few galleries, novels, or radio stations.

But all is not lost, even in my severely under-caffeinated curmudgeon of a universe. Just as Sire’s definition of a worldview works better as a comparatively minimal frame (as in Lewis’ hallway image in Mere Christianity) for purposes of classification and discussion, his signals of transcendence thesis functions best at the more basic level Berger describes. Specifically, I would argue, we can more usefully trace such signals as signposts at the basic levels of language and cognition, rather than as specific cultural expressions. Mikhail Bakhtin, a 20th-century Russian philosopher and literary critic, argues correctly that all human language is a dialogue: none of us speaks completely autonomously, but rather we all reflect and refract previous discourse (conversation) to carve out our own speaking identities. For instance, my phrase “a few writers about two houseplants” in the previous paragraph alludes to “The Houseplant Song” by Audio Adrenaline, which in turn pokes fun at the idea that certain genres of music by definition cannot be Christian: “It doesn’t really matter if it’s ‘Christian’ or not/ If it’s syncopated rhythm then your soul is gonna rot.” While both references in this case are intentional and conscious, however, Bakhtin locates the dialogic impulse on a precognitive (not to be confused with Agatha the Pre-Cog) level—or more precisely, in the unconscious. In other words, while I may dialogue (yes, Virginia, verbing does weird language) with Audio Adrenaline to be clever or aesthetically interesting, I enter into dialogue in the first place precisely because I have no other choice.

Now, to my knowledge, Bakhtin and his intellectual descendents explicitly limit this dialogue to the human domain: the Underground Man may chat with his actuarial (if not actual) “gentlemen,” but not with God. However, to apply dialogism to signals of transcendence we must necessarily break down that barrier. To that end, I suggest that the processes Berger, Sire, and Calvin describe all assume and indeed rely on a God-breathed—and perhaps physically implanted—awareness of a transcendent prime reality. Now, I do not wish to minimize the specifically human intertextuality dominant in religious discourse. James Baldwin, for instance, weaves much “Christianese” into his novel Go Tell it on the Mountain, even though he denies the final transcendent step from “Our Father, who art in heaven” to God. But as a counterbalance, consider these words from Flannery O’Connor’s 1962 preface to Wise Blood:

That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers who prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence. For them Hazel Motes’ [the novel’s main character] integrity lies in his trying with such vigor to get rid of the ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of his mind. For the author Hazel’s integrity lies in his not being able to (5).

I move now to analysis of two recent quotes whose respective speakers have much in common with the readers O’Connor describes. Neither, perhaps, points tidily to a linguistic “God gene,” but both, I will argue, share a cognitive affinity with what Sire calls “God-haunted poetry.” The first quote comes from Dr. H., my theory professor this past quarter. In the midst of a lecture—appropriately—on cognitive aspects of narrative expectations, he remarked that a certain narrative style was jarring because “that’s not how we’re designed…evolutionarily.” As this was a spoken lecture the ellipses here represent an actual pause, not elided words. In fact, the presence and timing of this pause is as much a signal of transcendence as the rather striking connotative disjunction between “designed” and “evolutionarily.”

Let us first consider this sentence from the audience’s standpoint, specifically in terms of chronology. Since the pause comes after “designed,” and since the words to that point represent a logically complete English construction, we can distinguish two interpretive units—and thus two possible interpretations—in the whole utterance. The first, “that’s not how we’re designed,” does not necessarily conjure up a personal (let alone loving) Designer, but it does identify a method in our otherwise maddening (and maddened, if you ask Freud) minds. More to the point, it identifies two distinct models for this design: the incorrect model associated with the narrative style Dr. H. was describing, and the correct model separate from it. Granted, this conversational snippet does not speculate on the character of this correct model, but implies its existence (ala Berger) nonetheless.

To add “evolutionarily,” however, creates a new interpretive unit that affects both how we read/hear our initial interpretation and the sentence as a whole. In fact, I would argue, the logical completeness of “that’s not how we’re designed,” and perhaps also some uneasiness with the epistemological foundations of such a statement, motivated the supplementary adverb. “Evolutionarily,” then, does double duty—it sanitizes the potential political unpleasantness stemming from “designed,” and simultaneously transforms the statement from metaphysical speculation to confirmation of accepted “scientific fact.” If we view this interpretive duality as a conflict between theism and naturalism, as Sire perhaps would, then Dr. H’s attempt to make one statement of two handily weakens his naturalistic bias. We’ve seen this before, actually, in Stephen Weinberg’s epistemologically similar statements recorded above. Weinberg’s prefatory disclaimer that “[i]t is almost irresistible for humans to believe [theism],” though syntactically smoother (it comes from a written text) than Dr. H’s “evolutionarily,” aims at the same goal: to subsume what one cannot believe under the banner of what one may safely say.

On this point Dr. H’s pause proves particularly interesting. I, of course, cannot say with certainty just went through his mind during that pause, but as we’ve learned from Berger one may broadcast signals of transcendence without even knowing the radio’s on. Just such a process is at work in Dr. H’s pause. If evolution were really akin to natural law, as his adverbial band-aid tries hard to convince us, then the phrase “that’s not how we’re designed” would be both nonsensical and ultimately superfluous. In other words, if design did not exist—only random complexity that we haven’t figured out yet, as Richard Dawkins argues—then Dr. H’s line would likely have been something like “we haven’t evolved that way.” That he, like Hazel Motes, tries to shrug “designed” off as a linguistic remnant of an unenlightened past ironically requires the very designer he doesn’t want to meet. Men of Athens, it seems, still build altars.

My second quote, while not so linguistically complex as Dr. H’s declaration, still demonstrates an important and widespread linguistic signal: euphemistic substitution. This one appears in a freshman composition paper; the author, A., was one of my students last quarter. In this paper, A. looks at the role of humor in several spoof advertisements and speculates a bit on the rhetoric of humor in the ads. To conclude, he remarks that “[the ads] play upon one of our most natural responses in life, humor, which in turn responds to itself as laughter. Laughter makes us live longer which is why nature gave us humor to keep us sane.” The syntax of the first sentence is admittedly rather awkward—a peril, alas, of being 18 and trying to write—but I’ve included it here to heighten the irony of the culminating claim. Indeed, this tension runs throughout A’s paper: on one hand, he argues that spoofs appeal to “a basic intuitive hilarity” in their audience; on the other, he swerves away from identifying this intuition with anything but happenstance.

Just as Dr. H’s “evolutionarily” blinds the Deistic clockmaker, A’s repeated use of “natural” here and throughout his paper locates humor in a closed, naturalistic universe. Within the context of the paper, of course, this move allows A. (or so he thinks) to sidestep questions of rhetorical audience: if humor is natural, then it need not be explained. But even this impulse puts an interesting spin on his final sentence. Frankly, the naturalistic sociology that A. attempts in this paper has no coherent definition for the “human nature” to which he appeals. At best, it claims that certain elements of human behavior “keep us sane,” but does not—indeed, cannot—explain any extra-societal source of those elements. And yet, it retains the unifying idea of “nature,” even if not as baldly as A. does here. In my previous article (yea verily, heap big moons ago) about Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, I explored a similar move: an abstracted “nature,” like the Divine Butler and/or Cosmic Therapist, offers agency and—dare I say it?—design without human responsibility. Incidentally, this same student later wrote a term paper arguing for illegal drug use on the basis of personal choice, so I somehow doubt he invests this nature with any significant degree of transcendent morality.

The height of the ironic substitution—and also, it seems to me, the height of the signal strength—lies in the conclusion: “Laughter makes us live longer which is why nature gave us humor to keep us sane.” Sire’s method of analysis once again proves helpful here. While the terms of A’s syllogism do not precisely match up (long life does not follow from sanity), they do reveal an embedded worldview. While earlier in the paper A. primarily argued (however dubiously) for humor’s rhetorical effectiveness as a means to an economic end. Here, though, he steps outside the economic context: humor in itself is valuable because it prolongs human life. Moreover, this consequence forms the sole motivation for the creative agent-that-is-not-one he calls “nature” here. Anthropomorphism as a stylistic practice may not be terribly popular with certain elements of the high school English teacher population, but here it makes an important—and I would argue strategic—statement about naturalism and transcendence. One aspect of prime reality, according to Sire’s model in Universe, is being the “prime existent,” (23) beyond which we need not trace morality, truth, beauty, etc. At first glance, it may seem that A. has simply substituted “nature” for “God.” However, I don’t think his statement is quite that simple. Just as Dr. H’s remark substitutes the naturalistic reading (i.e. adding “evolutionarily”) for the potentially theistic one, A’s first privileges laughter as an inborn and practically created characteristic, then tries to backpedal by crediting nature (ala Emerson) for that creativity. But neither cover-up fully does the job: each reveals what it so desperately wants to forget. To return to O’Connor’s metaphor, the “ragged figure” may well stay in the rhetorical shadows, but he never fully disappears. And that, it seems to me, is the real point of any signal of transcendence: to show substance by shadow, even when we’re unwilling to look straight on.

Well, folks, that’s all I have for you—thanks for reading! I hope you have enjoyed my comments and profited from them. Now don’t just sit there: go to your local library, bookshelf, Amazon.com, or IV staff worker and buy/read James Sire’s books. Then come back here and argue with me, or even fill another blog with equally expansive comments. And if you happen to be the aforementioned pretty flute major, I’ll be on the 8AM shuttle. Hope to see you there.

Part 2: Belief and the Butler

Between Friday (11/10) night’s CGSA talk and an additional seminar Saturday morning at a church in the Columbus suburbs, James Sire covered three specific topics: (1) how to “pick your battles” in the context of apologetics, (2) reasons for belief, and (3) the idea of “signals of transcendence.” Each individual topic, of course, at least touched on his basic argument about worldviews (which I covered last post): that a worldview transcends any individual argument or issue and in fact forms the base from which we argue—and the reason we can argue in the first place. As Sire puts it, “it is only the assumption of a worldview—however basic or simple—that allows us to think at all” (Universe 16). Accordingly, Sire organizes his analysis of belief around two premises: first, that any given belief (or non-belief) flows from an individual’s worldview, and second, that apologetics (or more broadly, debate) represents worldviews in conflict. For more on this concept, see my last post—or better yet, just read The Universe Next Door.

Because much of Sire’s second talk, on reasons for belief, dovetails with material from my last post, I’ll cover it first. Based on anecdotal survey data, Sire classifies reasons for belief among university students (his primary audience and sample group) based on five broad—and often overlapping—categories. For specific analysis of these categories, see chapters 3-6 of Why Should Anyone Believe Anything at All?; my summary draws both on Sire’s outline and chapter 2 of the same work. It should be noted that while Sire’s work focuses primarily on religious belief (the second half of Believe is entitled “Why Should Anyone Believe Christianity?”), as we will see his framework also attends more generally to larger questions of authority and evidence.

Sire’s five categories are as follows: sociology, psychology, religion/authority, philosophy (truth value), and biology. Broadly conceived, sociology encompasses parental, peer, cultural, and societal influence; it also covers what Sire calls “limited social context.” Within Christian discourse, we might most readily identify this with “growing up in a Christian home” or “church culture” in general: belief for these reasons arises primarily from outside influences. Psychology is of course closely related to sociological factors; here, Sire distinguishes “modern” (for which read “Enlightenment”) and “postmodern” approaches. In modern contexts, he argues, belief gives “meaning and purpose to life,” a “sense of identity,” “relief from guilt and fear of a future in Hell,” belief “feels good,” and it functions as a “crutch” to avoid reality. (On this last point, I feel compelled to share a memorable Sire quote: “Christian belief is a crutch. The question is, do you have a broken leg?”) Postmodernism, on the other hand, sees belief as a relativistic extension of individual autonomy (“one should believe only what one wants to believe”), views belief as its own justification, and in fact defines reality solely on the basis of belief. While in my opinion these two divisions are helpful insofar as they link up attitudes with specific worldviews, personally I often see arguments that combine both “modern” and “postmodern” views.

The final three categories, which according to Sire do not appear as often in his survey data, are more straightforward. Religious reasons center on authority, both local (i.e. a pastor or other religious authority) and global (i.e. the Pope in Catholicism); but they also include miracles and “direct experience of God.” On a related front, philosophical reasons focus on truth and reason (which can draw on personal experience), empirical evidence, and a given system being the “best explanation for all the data/experiences of life.” Finally, biological reasons posit a so-called “God gene,” in which belief is “a biological mechanism for the survival of the human race.” To explain the relative scarcity of these last three reasons in undergraduate accounts—and indeed, in much of philosophy, Christian philosophy included—Sire returns to his idea that “worldviews are commitments of the heart, not just a set of ideas.” Accordingly, he links certain trends in belief (and approaches to it, more importantly) with certain worldviews: postmodernism, for example, applies notions of “intellectual and religious pluralism” to posit an ultimately relativistic basis for belief of any sort. As I spent much of last post critiquing Sire’s definition of a worldview I won’t rehash it here, but it’s important that it informs (or perhaps determines) how he looks at belief. Notably, Sire points out that reasons given for one’s belief are “much more likely to be post-factual (‘after the fact of belief’) [and] perhaps even rationalizations.”

Thus for Sire’s second presentation—as I’ve said, see Believe for more details. Moving back slightly, I now want to turn to his Friday night presentation on “picking your battles” in apologetics, which was specifically aimed at graduate students. Within the context of CGSA, this particular message was well-timed: another of our recent speakers, a biologist, talked about her own approaches to debates about science vs. religion (in fact, she organized just such a debate/panel on campus this quarter) and gave her own views on evolution, a topic Sire also addressed. Thus, although logistically Sire’s talk did not in my view completely succeed (partly because he took a long detour to debate an audience member, which rather derailed the flow of his larger argument) its content was both interesting and valuable.

Sire began by speaking briefly about the “frustrating social context” in which we, as Christian graduate students, must “do” apologetics: besides the general leftist hostility toward Christianity pervasive in the ivory tower, department politics often make direct witness/apologetics difficult. Thus, Sire posited with tongue firmly in cheek, “whenever you find a person with a Ph.D., in addition to finding a basically intelligent and studious person, you find a person with a high degree of tolerance for absurdity.” At the same time, however, he emphasized the crucial role an integration of faith and learning plays in mental (and thus spiritual, for the Christian) development: one’s approach to witness in graduate school, he pointed out, sets the tenor for future interaction between one’s faith and one’s career. Specifically, he argues, the most pressing danger is compartmentalization. Particularly in fields that engage Christianity (or worldviews, more generally) obliquely rather than directly—such as engineering, as opposed to the humanities—it’s easy to cordon off “church life” from “work life,” and never the twain shall meet. And lest we humanities majors think we’re getting off easy, remember that nearly the entire canon of 20th-century critical thought hinges on relativism and decentered Truth; thus, it’s perhaps even easier to reduce Christianity mentally to just another ism.

Within this context, Sire identifies four major worldviews prevalent in academia—both in undergraduate students and academic professionals. Though in my view he spent too much time doing a close reading of each view’s individual tenets (particularly Christian theism, which all of us in the audience knew firsthand), the structure remains useful for thinking about campus apologetics. In addition to Christian theism, Sire highlights naturalism (divided into “optimistic” and “nihilistic postmodern” varieties) and “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.” Naturalism and Christian theism are of course covered quite extensively in Universe, as is historical “clockwork” Deism, but the addition of “therapeutic morality” adds an interesting and significant twist—not to mention an intriguing case study of a postmodern pastiche of worldviews.

For instance, while Ben Franklin—a handy historical embodiment of Deistic thought—acknowledged Christianity’s influence by including “Imitate Jesus and Socrates” in his “Catalogue” of “moral Virtues” (cf. The Autobiography, part 2), he, like Thomas Paine, located both religion and morality explicitly in individual human effort. By contrast, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (hereafter “MTD”), derived from (and original with?) Christian Smith and Melinda Denton in Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford UP, 2005), maps linguistic and epistemological structures from Christianity onto ideas inherited from 18th-century Deism. To quote Sire’s handout, under this system God is a “vaguely personal, beneficent Creator. His job is to arrange things so we can be happy. A ‘combination of a Divine Butler and a Cosmic Therapist.’”

In this last sentence, apparently taken directly from Smith and Denton, historical and contemporary Deism come together in interesting ways. 18th-century Deist rhetoric often identified God as a “clockmaker,” thereby allowing for creativity and perhaps personality, but crucially disassociates the source of that personality from any future revelation or interaction. After all, the logic goes, a clock is both stable/unchanging and self-sufficient (see also, say, a certain Declaration from 1776 or so), and thus requires nothing further from its maker. Though Marx’s arguments about alienated labor did not appear until several decades after Deism’s heyday, I would argue that this clockmaker metaphor relies on a similar relationship between product and producer. For a Deist, God says creation is “good” based on pride in His craftsmanship, while unfallen creation justifies that assessment because it is a product of a perfect Creator. But once the creation is finished, so too must the interaction stop: pride can never become a relationship. (Of course, the notion that God literally breathed life into Adam throws a wrench into this argument’s spokes, but the Deists were not particularly known for close attention to Scripture!) Thus, the clockmaker metaphor starts with a comparison to human activity (implying personality) but immediately replaces it with materiality and independence.

MTD picks up on this structure particularly well in the dual figures of “Divine Butler” and “Cosmic Therapist.” Though I suspect the authors picked this metaphor partly for its comic thrust, it too feints divine agency only to reduce it to (figurative) materiality. In fact, I would argue, MTD represents a more pernicious theology precisely in its new (and highly paternalist, I might add) view of agency divorced from material reality. To be sure, no contemporary practitioner of MTD would literally deny that either the butler or the therapist lack agency per se: though unlike the clockmaker they do not typically produce material goods, they both offer their services as uniquely qualified individuals. (Of course, sometimes these services involve material goods, such as therapist-prescribed medication, but even there the therapist is associated discursively with a non-material “session.”) I want to dwell on this point for a moment, because I think the distinction is central to understanding MTD’s role in contemporary thought.

With the clockmaker of 18th-century Deism, God’s relation to humanity specifically halted at the moment of materiality: the clock may bear the maker’s mark, but once it is reified (that is, made into a thing—and a commodity!) the mark becomes insignificant at best. More to the point, perhaps, the clock can imitate the maker neither literally nor figuratively. Interestingly, MTD departs from this strictly materialist model in favor of its service-based counterpart. Both the butler and the therapist earn their keep by doing, not by creating. We expect both figures, simply put, to be there when we require them: answer my doorbell, fetch my morning newspaper, soothe my repressed guilt, and cure my Oedipal complex in 50 minutes or less. For our purposes neither butler nor therapist need actually exist independently of those tasks, but in those periods we grant them conditional agency and, notably, a measure of authority. It is in this temporariness that I find the most continuity between historical and contemporary Deism. For once my doorbell is answered, newspaper fetched, guilt soothed (or re-repressed, at least), and complex simplified, I’m back precisely to the absent clockmaker: despite the different planes in which the two Deisms imagine God, His authority necessarily vanishes at the point where man “can take it from here, thanks.”

Though MTD eventually philosophically reduces to classical Deism, I find the motif of service helpful for understanding its semi-phenomenal/nearly-cosmic version of God. For instance, Sire summarizes MTD morality thus: “God wants us to be nice, to get along with others. No one is required to be righteous.” As in the butler/therapist image, this imagining constructs intentionality without authority, and thus morality without righteousness. This idea dovetails nicely with the notion that “Jesus was a great moral teacher,” which while not limited to MTD fits well within it. The teacher (at least the one who doesn’t give you grades!), like the therapist, offers a service—information, or perhaps “guidance” for those more attached to spirituality—but makes no real claim on your life or sustained attention. Therefore, God can want us to follow a vague set of standards for public behavior (Matthew 5:27-8, anyone?), thus preserving the linguistic trappings of agency/personality without impinging on individual rights. If under classical Deism the created man feels a vague responsibility to God for the fact of his (the man’s) very material existence, MTD reassigns all power to the individual by divesting God of any material results. A mere “thank you, Jeeves” will be quite sufficient payment.

Within this context of worldviews in conflict, Sire claims (yes, yes, it sure took me long enough to get back to Sire) that apologetics functions best not as a well-constructed and rhetorically convincing argument but rather as an extra-rational testimony to truth. In his words, “Christian apologetics lays before the watching world such a winsome [i.e. pleasant] embodiment of the Christian faith that for any and all who are willing to observe there will be an intellectually and emotionally credible witness to its fundamental truth” (A Little Primer of Humble Apologetics 20). Frankly, I’m surprised—and a bit dismayed—to see someone so clearly capable of good, rational argumentation so unevenly privilege an “emotionally credible witness” over Logos-driven (and Biblically-modeled, I would argue) explanation. The crux of the difference, I think, lies in the intensely psychological (and thus potentially irrational) definition of “worldview” that I critiqued last post: if, as Sire puts it, a worldview is a set of “pretheoretical commitments” with “its root in the heart,” then no rational argument can truly reach the root of the difference. Thus, Sire went on to claim, arguing for creationism over evolution not only fails to address the fundamental worldview conflict (theism vs. naturalism) but also claims absolute certainty where none can be had. Notably, Sire describes his own position on that particular issue as “Christian theistic evolutionary agnosticism,” meaning that he simply doesn’t know how God’s sovereignty and evolution interacted; thus he refuses to argue the specifics.

Such a retreat from rationality is disappointing, but to be fair Sire does propose a new model of apologetics centered on the concept of “signals of transcendence.” That concept-- to which Sire devoted considerable time both Friday night and Saturday morning-- will be the topic of my third (and final?) article on the subject, both as Sire presents it and as it applies to two illustrative rhetorical moves I’ve come across in recent weeks. Stay tuned, and don’t think too hard in the meantime.

Part 1: Defining Worldview

Last week, I got the chance to meet and study under James Sire, one of the few contemporary authors whose work I enjoy and whose ideas have been particularly formative in my own thought. Sire, the former senior editor at Intervarsity Press, is best known for The Universe Next Door (1976, rev. 1988, 1997, & 2004), which according to the cover is “a basic worldview catalog.” Along the way, of course, it defines just what a worldview is—more on that later—and presents a brief apologia for studying them in the first place. A good number of Sire’s other books build on Universe’s foundational ideas, which is to say they tend to repeat its first chapter at various lengths, but he has plenty of other original material as well. On my shelf at the moment are, in addition to my now-autographed Universe, Habits of the Mind, Discipleship of the Mind, Why Should Anyone Believe Anything at All?, and of course How to Read Slowly. The only other book of his I’ve read in recent memory is Chris Chrisman Goes to College, which is essentially a rehash of Universe in pseudo-novelistic form: it intersperses an allegorical narrative about—wait for it—Chris Chrisman’s experience at college with chapters on the various worldviews and philosophical ideas entrenched in the story. As prose, it’s passable and certainly beats the pants off of Josh McDowell’s similar attempts (but then, so do my students’ papers), but Sire’s writing talents are definitely stronger on the philosophical end of things. His more recent work (which I’ve not read) tends to be more about apologetics, though I believe he’s also dabbled in biography and philosophy along the way.

As you might expect from Sire’s rather lengthy publication list, his background’s in literature—and boy, is he ever an English major! I got the chance to talk with him about English for a few minutes before CGSA’s large group meeting—he spoke there, and gave a seminar in the suburbs the next day—and he was remarkably up-to-date for a scholar past seventy. Of course the bulk of his formal academic training was in the 1960s and 70s, so he knows scholarship from that era best (I believe his area was Renaissance, particularly Milton studies): he’s the only serious scholar I’ve ever known who admits to being, at least partly, a New Critic. Still, though, both in our conversation and his lectures he made plentiful reference (in ideas more than by name) to most of the major critical movements of the past three centuries, and fielded my question about Foucault and Judith Butler with no problems whatsoever.

If anything, actually, his philosophical knowledge actually hurt his presentation a bit: most of the CGSA folks are engineers and scientists by trade, and thus are not as well versed in the humanities. In any case, I enjoyed it—unlike most CGSA (and, frankly, IV in general) lectures, in which I have to work fairly hard to connect the speaker’s ideas to my academic work, this one pretty much matched point for point. I knew the concept of worldview fairly well already, having read Universe sometime in high school. (In fact, I used it as the centerpiece of my first American lit term paper, which prompted my TA to remark that I “shouldn’t use religious texts in [my] papers.” Something tells me The First Church of Saint Karl was exempt.) But for all the headaches and less-sleep (if not precisely sleepless) nights my theory class has engendered (take that, Butler) this quarter, it has made me think long and hard about the big questions concerning epistemology, language, identity, and the like. So, this time around when Sire trotted out his seven-question boilerplate for delineating worldviews, I could trace the non-theistic tenets more concretely to specific texts and critical trends. Actually, we had a brief discussion in class today about authorial attribution vs. Zeitgeist, so I suppose I should take back that bit about specific attribution. Must be that nagging logocentrism in my fundamentalist brain, eh?

In any case, Sire’s talks were as remarkable for their departures from the definition of “worldview” that I’d learned (in Universe, 3rd. ed.) as for their actual content. Sire’s 1997 definition runs like this: “A worldview is a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true, or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic makeup of our world.” In practice, or at least the type of practice that involves handouts with reference charts (as our CGSA talk did), this amounts to a set of answers to seven questions:

1. What is prime reality—the really real?
2. What is the nature of external reality, that is, the world around us?
3. What is a human being?
4. What happens to a person at death?
5. Why is it possible to know anything at all?
6. How do we know what is right and wrong?
7. What is the meaning of human history?
(Universe 17-18.)

We could, of course, point to a couple rhetorical moves in the list itself that stack the deck against poststructuralist answers—i.e. “why is it possible to know” as opposed to “is it possible”—but by and large the list works fairly well in my experience. Now, once you get past modernism to, say, 99% of contemporary academic doublespeak, the answer to all seven questions is “discourse,” but Sire puts it rather more eloquently than that. And speaking of doublespeak, there are definite affinities between Sire’s concept of worldview and Marxist ideas of ideology, though Marx et al tend to see ideology (ideally) as “those silly bourgeois delusions under which everyone except Marxists suffer” rather than an inescapable and supra-rational mindset.

This brings me to Sire’s revisions, which in my opinion change the tenor of his argument considerably. According to Naming the Elephant, one of his recent books, the new version runs thus: “A worldview is a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, that can be expressed as a story and/or in a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously; consistently or inconsistently) about the basic constitution of reality and upon whose foundation we live and move and have our being” (122). Now, this doesn’t necessarily kibosh the logical model outlined above; Sire in fact still used it in both presentations. But the language itself indicates a move away from epistemology (knowledge) to ontology (existence), which (to mix my metaphors like so much dinnertime leftover-surprise) is a whole other ballgame of a different color.

First, Sire moves from “a set of presuppositions,” which we might associate with logical proofs or legal discourse, to “a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart.” In practice, of course, this is the same thing: as Sire develops further throughout Universe, though worldview charts articulate their respective values in a mathematical fashion (i.e. God is all-knowing and man is made in God’s image, therefore man can know) they rarely appear that way in human expression—particularly creative expression. Granted, occasionally we get fortunate nuggets like Carl Sagan’s “The cosmos is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be,” but more often we have to read deeper—that’s Sire’s point in How to Read Slowly—to get at the underlying worldview. For instance, I saw a pro-abortion bumper sticker the other day that said “If you can’t trust me with a choice, how can you trust me with a child?” Under Sire’s system, we could trace this back to notions of human autonomy and eventually to naturalism, but that entails considerably more interpretive work. But my point, which is to say Sire’s point, is that a worldview does not necessarily reside only in the conscious, rational mind but also (and more vitally) flows from the heart (soul, unconscious, essence—pick your poison). I’m not entirely satisfied with the wording “orientation of the heart,” which seems to minimize the psychical mechanisms involved in worldview change, but given Sire’s ontological focus I can’t think of a better phrase just now.

Secondly, where before Sire defined a worldview generically (that is, in terms of genre) as only “a set of presuppositions…which we hold” he now clarifies that it “can be expressed as a story” as well/instead. This, actually, I find a more fruitful alteration. To go back to How to Read Slowly, worldview appears quite often in narrative form, both in the sense that formal narrative choices speak to authorial worldview and in the sense that narration is a common vehicle for expressing (or revealing!) our inner priorities. Put another way, we as humans often narrate—tell stories—where we cannot or don’t want to explain our beliefs.

Let me give an example from my own experience. When I was pursuing Crystal, my first college almost-girlfriend, I wrote a long letter to her parents to introduce myself and explain why I (Big-Scary-Internet-Guy) wanted to meet their daughter. (Yes, I know I’m a nerd. Keep reading anyway.) I filled a good deal of the twelve pages with biography and logistics, where logic unquestionably dominated. However, when I got to the parts where I told them how I felt about Crystal, the pendulum swung the other way back toward storytelling. Now, I suppose I could have given them a tidy bulleted list of my and Crystal’s alleged twenty-nine dimensions of compatibility (no, eHarmony.com was not involved). But besides being rhetorically atrocious and not at all likely to garner parental permission to visit, such a move simply felt wrong: in my then slightly less cynical mind, the depth of my commitment (to use Sire’s word) could best, if not exclusively, shine forth in narrative. Thus is it with worldview in its most crucial (and most human, I would add) representations. In our more systematic modes of expression, we may be able to answer Sire’s seven questions in tidy tabular format. But at least in my experience, behind each answer lies not just flannelgraph theology but actual narrated stories, whether we articulate them in lists or anecdotes.

Sire’s final change in the new edition is a bit more problematic: he anthropomorphizes the “set of propositions” into a personality “upon whose foundation we live and move and have our being.” The latter part, which admittedly is quite poetic, derives from Acts 17:28—appropriately so, as the passage (Paul’s “Men of Athens” sermon) is a central text in Biblical apologetics. But does a worldview really have a personality? To be fair, Sire does distinguish between the actual view and its “foundation”—that is to say, its prime reality—but as a whole the change still troubles me. As I understand it, Sire’s original purpose in Universe was not simply to present a defense of Christian theism (though it does of course do that, with which I have no quarrel) but to establish a discursive framework—a way to define and talk about worldviews. And by and large, the 3rd edition definition (I’ve not read the first two editions, but I assume they use similar language) does just that, particularly in an academic context far friendlier to logic than “orientation[s] of the heart.” In my opinion, it leaves sufficient room to explore questions of conscious intention and articulation without necessarily requiring (or more mildly, hinting at) certain answers. Now, don’t get me wrong—I fully support Sire’s theological goals insofar as his new rhetoric nudges people toward Christianity. But to map Christian language and strictures (i.e. prime reality must be personal if we can “live and move and have our being” in it) onto an academic discourse seems not only counterproductive but potentially alienating to outsiders—and not at all conducive to dialogue, which must be the first step in both apologetics and evangelism.

In my next couple posts, I’ll talk about Sire’s specific arguments from last week’s seminars: picking one’s apologetics battles and the idea of “signals of transcendence,” and apply them to two interesting rhetorical examples I came across recently. But I want to leave you with the passage in Acts that Sire quotes, and let you make up your mind: how does the Bible model this balance between sets of knowledge and commitments too deep for words?

Acts 17:16-34 (NIV) 16While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. 17So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there. 18A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to dispute with him. Some of them asked, "What is this babbler trying to say?" Others remarked, "He seems to be advocating foreign gods." They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection. 19Then they took him and brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus, where they said to him, "May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? 20You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we want to know what they mean." 21(All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.)

22Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: "Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. 23For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you.

24"The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. 25And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. 26From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. 27God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. 28'For in him we live and move and have our being.' As some of your own poets have said, 'We are his offspring.'

29"Therefore since we are God's offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by man's design and skill. 30In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. 31For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead."

32When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, "We want to hear you again on this subject." 33At that, Paul left the Council. 34A few men became followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others.