A must-read, if ever there was one …

… Guernica / A Common Faith. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I could quibble here and there, but that is all it would be — quibbling.  Here are some excerpts (fewer than I originally had, because you really should take the time to read the whole thing).

It is characteristic of these queries into human nature that everything exceptional about us and about the situation in the world we have created for ourselves is excluded from consideration. It is as if a realistic view of the hummingbird required the exclusion of small size and rapid metabolism, or as if bees could only be understood minus their hives and their interest in pollen. There is actually some reason to worry about this kind of throwaway scientism, however transparently flawed, because versions of it are everywhere and because, whatever else it is, it is almost always presented as learned hypothesis if not outright “information” about our kind, assumptions about human nature presented as if they were objective truth and a reasonable and necessary basis for understanding reality.

“[E]volutionary psychology… tries to explain the features of the human mind in terms of natural selection."

The above is from an article in The New York Times Magazine that Robinson quotes. To me, it is literal preposterous (which really means bassackwards). You should derive your theory from the observation of the human mind, not observe the human mind n terms of a theory. As Robinson points out:

If Homo sapiens sapiens is also Homo economicus, why all these deviations from the norm? If self-interest disciplines choice, why is society at every scale shot through with arrangements that seem to inhibit or defeat self-interest? One possible explanation might be that these arrangements actually describe human nature, mingled thing that it is. For this reason they are surely more to be credited as information on the subject than is any abstract theory. But no. There is instead the urge, driven by righteousness and indignation, to conform reality to theory.

What if we were to say that human beings are created in the image of God? It will certainly be objected that we have no secure definitions of major terms. How much do we know about God, after all? How are we to understand this word “created”? In what sense can we be said to share or participate in the divine image, since the Abrahamic traditions are generally of one mind in forbidding the thought that the being of God is resolvable to an image of any kind?

I have recently been reading a lot about contemporary cosmology, in particular about Unconditioned Reality, which is what we refer to when we speak of God. It turns out to be far more mysterious and awe-inspiring than anything any religion has managed to express. Only the mystics have come close, which is one reason they have often run afoul of the arbiters of orthodoxy.


(This post got screwed up by Blogger somehow, so I have reconstructed it as best I could.)