In a comment to yesterday's post, Craig writes:
"I'm curious to know what characterizations you think are straw men, and what you think are the difficult questions that can't be answered by his brand of common sense."
Many of Budziszewski's straw men are built from words he places into his atheist's mouth. For example, he portrays the atheist's acceptance of genetic enginnering as follows:
"But our atheist will ask: What exactly is the objection to abolishing our nature? Why not abolish it? We won’t be around to mind. Our descendants won’t mind either, because we can build into their natures that they are satisfied with the natures they get. If we like, we can make an entire graded set of natures, along the lines of Huxley’s Brave New World. “I’m glad I’m a Beta,” say his Betas. So why should we reap the consequences that the tales of old foretold? Why should the pig–men use the story of our generation to teach a moral to their frightened litters? Why should these litters be frightened by what, to them, would be the story of Genesis?"
Like many genetic engineering opponents, Budziszewski is ignorant of the true nature of genetic engineering--or, if he isn't, he doesn't let that knowledge interfere with his rhetoric. Implanting human genetic material from the nucleus of an aneuploid cell--which is chromosonally defective and therefore not viable outside of a petri dish--does not amount to "successfully crossing a human being with a pig." Rather than contemplate the possibility of growing new organs for humans in non-human hosts, which sounds freakish but would eventually save thousands upon thousands of lives every year, Budziszewski chooses to envision a mutant pig-headed servant class.
Like the spectre of porcine slaves, Budziszewski's atheist is a creation of his frightened imagination, a person with no ethos beyond the total exercise of human capability in all things and uncritical acceptance of all human technological advances. I could be mistaken, but I think that Budziszewski would be hard-pressed to actually find a thoughtful atheist who believes that creating a race of pig-men or a Huxleyan utopia is just dandy, and if he did, such belief would be representative of a failure of that person's critical thought processes in general, rather than a direct result of that person's atheism in particular.
He later writes,
"Trying to understand the nature of man without recognizing him as the imago Dei is like trying to understand a bas–relief without recognizing it as a carving of a lion."
Which suggests what, exactly, about God? Ten fingers and ten toes? Bilateral symmetry? Of course not; that is too anthropormorphic an interpretation of imago. Then it must not be the physicality of humanity which is in His likeness, but something about our ephemeral consciousness and conscience...which, in turn, defeats Budziszewski's arguments against genetic engineering, which can only affect the physicality of humanity. We don't engineer minds, we don't engineer souls, yet Budziszewski warns that genetic engineering will change the nature of man. The two arguments contradict each other.
Of the "sophisticated atheist," he writes:
"But if he is to be a sort of Platonist, then what does he make of Plato’s problem? There are a great many patterns, not just one. This raises the question of what organizes them, what binds them all together, in a unity, a Design. We know of only one thing that is capable of Design, and that is mind—intelligent agency. It is not enough for the universe to resemble a mind in having design; let us have no tricks, like calling the patterns “ideas” when we have not earned the right to do so. Behind the universe there must be a real mind that is capable of the things that real minds do, like designing. That brings us back to God—God as the theist means God, God with a mind, God in the personal sense.
If our atheist accepts this implication, then he is back in the fold; he is no longer an atheist. But if he denies it—then it will not help him even if Pattern really is the deepest reality, because in that case “Pattern” is merely a fancy name for “patterns,” and plurality of patterns without Design is merely chaos; “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
I believe that the key phrase here is "This raises the question of what organizes them, what binds them all together, in a unity, a Design." Getting from "all together" to "unity" to "Design" with a capital "D" is a tremendous leap to make, albeit a very convenient one for Budziszewski. It does not follow that a "plurality of patterns without Design" is "merely chaos;" that's simply fallacious. Budziszewski's argument is: 'no chaos' requires Design; Design requires Intelligent Agent (it's the standard argument from design, like Paley's "watchmaker" argument). The argument is valid in form, but works only if you accept the premise that apparent order requires intentional ordering by some agent. A theist's sympathetic treatment of Hume's refutation of the argument from design can be found here, and an atheist's hostile treatment can be found here.
There is no reason to assume that some Agent has to deliberately bring a group of things into unity for it to be unified and appear orderly. His conclusion "Behind the universe there must be a real mind that is capable of the things that real minds do, like designing," is entirely unsupported by his argument, and simply insisting that this is true doesn't make it so. His hypothetical atheist is therefore quite able to go on being a Platonist, whether he's "earned" the right to call patterns ideas or not.
This is an example of the "theistic common sense" which Budziszewski uses and assumes on the part of his readers. Every theist knows that there's a Designer, and that the apparent order of the world demands it. Therefore Budziszewski feels justified in making statements like, "Behind the universe there must be a real mind" without really presenting a solid argument in support of the assertion. It simply makes sense to him, and he is is blind to its flaws. His "brand of common sense," as Craig calls it, is not akin to the colloquial "horse sense" or ordinary "common sense." It is a particular brand of theism, which like any other -ism has its own set of axioms and a position from which all of its arguments flow. Granted, Budziszewski is not engaged in an evangelical endevor here; he's preaching to the choir (except for me, of course--I'm in the vestibule). But this "common sense" is what allows him to write, with perfect aplomb:
"...I have suggested that one of the things about reality and goodness that we know perfectly well is the reality and goodness of God. Biblical tradition agrees: when Psalm 14 remarks, “The fool says in his heart ‘There is no God,’” it doesn’t call him a fool for thinking it, but for saying it even though yet deeper in his mind he knows it isn’t true. From this point of view, the reason it is so difficult to argue with an atheist is that he is not being honest with himself. He knows that there is a God; he only tells himself that he doesn’t."
His subsequent claim that we "need not take this from a theist like" him is disingenuous; in quoting biologist Richard Lewontin as an example of an atheist who admits "there is something not quite honest in their rejection of Him," he is really claiming the truth not of a god, but of the God. Budziszewski's portrayal of the person who is crushed by a full view of the moral law, and who "cannot escape the awareness of a debt that exceeds anything he can pay," is a reflection of his "common sense" knowledge that man will always fall short of the glory of God, and that redemption is required, which is received by the grace of God through Christ. Budziszewski is not just making the case for the innate and natural knowledge of God--a peculiar theological tic created by theologians of good conscience who were uncomfortable with condemning all of the !Kung bushmen and Hottentots of the world to hell because they had not been exposed to the Gospel--he is making the case for the innate and natural knowledge of the one true God, the God of Abraham, Issac and Jacob, the God of Moses, the progenitor of Christ who is the Redeemer of us all.
Those who do not believe in this God are only "pretending" to be good. They are lying to themselves. It is this idea--the objective reality of the Monogod and His Book--that is at the very heart of the recent chaos and destruction we've finally been full witness to in the West. If the Arab culture had more fully mixed with Christianity instead of Judaism, we would be watching videotapes of Osama bin Laden exhorting his followers to Jihad in the name of Isa al Masih instead of Allah.
This actually forms the core of my objection to Budziszewski's claims about the impossibility of achieving any sort of "true" morality without the one, true God. If you followed the link above to the fractal image, you saw a brightly colored, orderly pattern that is graphical representation of an equation, executed by a computer program. It is true that the program has a designer. It is also true that the computer itself was designed. The whole process was set in motion by a series of keystrokes, but, once started, the visible organization of the pattern was a result of the equation's initial parameters. No further input is necessary; the patterns are self-organizing, and their unity is not a reflection of design in and of itself, but is visible because of design. Even if the universe itself was created by God; even if our innate sense of Him and His moral Law is an integral part of that design--sort of an equation the solutions to which are displayed on the computer of physical reality--there is nothing about that truth that in turn necessitates YHWH's existence in particular, or interventionist redemption through Christ, or a conscience based upon a moral law revealed on the firey mountaintop of Sinai, or the truth of the divine revelation contained in Scripture.
Budziszewski clearly believes in the need for redemption, which necessitates Christ, and of the validity of divine revelation as contained in the Old and New Testaments. He's not a Deist, or even a general theist. He's a Christian, and when he argues for the natural necessity of a moral law that is God's, and an innate conscience created by that God, he is arguing for Christianity.
That, in a nutshell, is the most difficult question that cannot be answered by Budziszewski's brand of common sense. Why Christianity? Why are the Buddhists wrong, and the Muslims misguided, and the Jews obstinate? Why this God as Designer, and not that god? Why this particular moral law, and not that one over there?
I don't expect to ever find an argument that will convince me of the true reality and nature of God, because in my opinion any such argument, framed in frail human language and circumscribed by the bounds of the human cerebrum, simply cannot approach what lies beyond human understanding. If there is a God, I am rather impatiently waiting for Him to come on down, tug on my ear and draw me to Him, to unheart and unself me, to be planted in His heart and soul.
As I said: hasn't happened yet.
