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.