The return of final causality

I commend to you the late historian of philosophy Paul Hoffman’s paper “Does Efficient Causation Presuppose Final Causation?  Aquinas vs. Early Modern Mechanism.”  The paper appeared in the 2009 volume Metaphysics and the Good: Themes from the Philosophy of Robert Merrihew Adams, edited by Samuel Newlands and Larry Jorgensen, and I am pleased to find that it is available online.  It is part of a growing number of works by contemporary thinkers outside the Thomistic orbit which sympathetically reconsider or even defend (as Hoffman does) something like an Aristotelian conception of teleology.
 

Other examples include John Hawthorne and Daniel Nolan’s paper “What Would Teleological Causation Be?”; Thomas Nagel’s book Mind and Cosmos; the idea of “physical intentionality” in the work of causal powers theorists like George Molnar, John Heil, and U. T. Place; Monte Ransome Johnson’s book Aristotle on Teleology; and J. Scott Turner’s The Tinkerer’s Accomplice.  And then of course there are defenses by self-consciously Thomistic writers, like David Oderberg’s “Teleology: Inorganic and Organic”; and my own books and articles, such as “Teleology: A Shopper’s Guide” and “Between Aristotle and William Paley: Aquinas’s Fifth Way” (the latter forthcoming in Nova et Vetera). 

In Hoffman’s case the focus is on what he usefully characterizes as the “stripped-down core notion” of final causality operating in Aquinas’s analysis of efficient causation.  This is to be distinguished from more “full-bodied” kinds of finality or teleology, such as the sort we see in biological phenomena.  The stripped-down notion involves mere directedness toward an end.  Aquinas defends what later Scholastic writers call the principle of finality, according to which “every agent acts for an end.”  (See e.g. Summa Contra Gentiles III.2)  That is to say, if A is the efficient cause of B, that is because generating B is the final cause of A, the end toward which A points.  If A were not so directed, there would be no reason why it is B that A generates rather than some other effect or no effect at all.  This thesis is essentially what causal powers theorists like Molnar, Heil, and Place have rediscovered, and Hoffman defends it in the article.

Notice that, contrary to a common fallacious inference, this basic thesis is in no way undermined by the fact that some illustrations of the idea of finality or directedness toward an end involve scientific errors or simplifications.  For example, Aristotle and his medieval followers held that heavy objects naturally tend to fall down to the earth, specifically.  Of course, that is not correct, for there is nothing special about the gravitational pull of the earth per se.  I’ve given examples like the way ice tends to cool the environment surrounding it, or the way the phosphorus in the head of a match tends to generate flame and heat when the match is struck, or the way the moon tends to orbit the earth rather than flying off into deep space.  Obviously the scientific facts underlying these phenomena are far more complicated than these simple descriptions let on.

Do such errors and simplifications cast doubt on the principle of finality (as is sometimes claimed)?  Not in the least.  To see the fallacy, suppose I said that there are such things as murders and gave as examples of murderers Dr. Sam Sheppard and Charles Manson.  You reply: “Your claim is falsified by the fact that Sheppard was actually innocent, and Manson only gave orders to accomplices, who actually carried out the killings.”  Obviously this would be a silly reply.  That a particular claim about a certain murder turns out to be false, and that certain other murders are more complicated than merely postulating a single murderer who directly kills the victim, in no way casts doubt on the reality of murder per se.

But it is no less silly to say “Aristotle was wrong about the natural motion of sublunar bodies, therefore there are no final causes” or “The moon’s orbit has to do with the Earth’s gravity well, therefore there is no final causality here” or “What happens when ice is in water involves a complex exchange of energy among the molecules in the liquid water and the molecules in the ice, therefore there is no final causality here.”  For whatever the scientific details concerning gravitation, cooling, burning, etc. turn out to be, they will involve patterns of efficient causation (gravitational attraction, molecular interaction, etc.).  And these, Aquinas argues, will necessarily presuppose finality. 

In short, science can tell us whether a particular exampleof finality is a good one, but it cannot tell us whether or not there is such a thing as finality in the first place.  That is a topic for philosophy of nature and metaphysics, because it has to do with the nature of efficient causality as such, not the specific details of this or that instance of efficient causality.  (And no, that does not make claims about final causality “unfalsifiable” in the sense of being immune to rational evaluation and criticism.  For the methods of physics, chemistry, etc. are simply not the only methods of rational evaluation and criticism.  Claims about basic arithmetic and logic are susceptible of rational evaluation and criticism despite not being the sort of thing we can evaluate in the specific ways we evaluate claims of chemistry or physics; scientism itself is susceptible of rational evaluation and criticism despite its also not being the sort of thing we can evaluate in the specific ways we evaluate claims of chemistry or physics; and so forth.)

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Churchland on dualism, Part V

Paul Churchland has just published a third edition of Matter and Consciousness, his widely used introductory textbook on the philosophy of mind.  The blog Philosophy of Brains has posted a symposium on the book, with contributions from Amy Kind, William Ramsey, and Pete Mandik.  Prof. Kind, who deals with Churchland’s discussion of dualism, is kind to him indeed -- a little too kind, as it happens.  Longtime readers will recall a series of posts I did several years ago on the previous edition of Churchland’s book, in which I showed how extremely superficial, misleading, and frankly incompetent is its treatment of dualism.  Prof. Kind commends Churchland’s “clear writing style and incisive argumentation” as “a model for us all.”  While I agree with her about the clarity of Churchland’s style, I cannot concur with her judgment of the quality of the book’s argumentation, for at least with respect to dualism, this new edition is as bad as the old. 

    

As a public service for those hapless undergrads, grad students, and general readers whose knowledge of dualism might otherwise come entirely from Churchland’s inept treatment, I post below links to (and descriptions of the contents of) the four installments of my series on Churchland’s critique of dualism.  I will also make some brief remarks about the new material in the latest edition of the book.
 

Here are the original posts:

Part I: In this post I discuss how Churchland misrepresents the content of dualism, ignores the main arguments in its favor defended by dualists past and present, and overemphasizes weaker arguments that dualists themselves do not put much stock in in the first place.

Part II: Here I discuss how Churchland’s response to the argument from introspection is utterly fallacious, and indeed unwittingly gives support to dualism rather than undermining it.  His response to the argument from irreducibility is also fallacious, and superficial too, completely ignoring a rather obvious retort that has been raised by prominent philosophers.

Part III: Here I show how Churchland’s positive arguments against dualism are entirely without force, directed as they are at a crude straw man, and either completely miss the point of the key arguments for dualism or simply beg the question against them.  

Part IV: Here I discuss Churchland’s response (in some later papers reprinted in his book A Neurocomputational Perspective) to Frank Jackson’s “knowledge argument,” in which he attacks the same straw man version of dualism that was his target in Matter and Consciousness.  

Though Kind is complimentary toward Churchland, she does offer some criticism of the book.  She too laments the “misleading impression” Churchland is bound to give the unwary reader about the role religion plays in philosophical arguments for dualism.  She also laments Churchland’s failure to convey the force of more recent arguments for dualism, and his neglect of questions raised by recent philosophers of mind about whether we have a clear understanding of matter (never mind mind), and of views like Russellian monism which aim to present an alternative to both dualism and materialism.

Kind also allows that “one might well have hoped for greater updating” in Churchland’s recommendations for further reading.  That is putting it mildly.  One will find in Churchland’s book no passing reference even to the works, much less the ideas and arguments, of prominent dualist philosophers like John Foster, Richard Swinburne, W. D. Hart, Howard Robinson, E. J. Lowe, William Hasker, and Brie Gertler.  Not to mention the Aristotelian and Thomistic arguments of philosophers like David Oderberg, William Jaworski, and James Ross.

As Kind notes, “much of the argumentation of the chapter [discussing dualism] is retained from the previous edition.”  In other words, the old caricatures and fallacies remain.  Churchland does add some material on David Chalmers’ “zombie argument” and on the argument of Thomas Nagel’s famous article “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” but it is as superficial as the existing material was.  Indeed, the response to Nagel is just a rehash of the same straw man argument from A Neurocomputational Perspective that I discussed in Part IV on my series of posts on Churchland, linked to above.  And the response to Chalmers commits essentially the same fallacy as the response to the argument from introspection that I discussed in Part II.

The only thing more outrageous than Churchland’s persistence in superficiality and caricature would be the continued widespread use of his book as a main text for introductory courses in philosophy of mind -- at least if it were not heavily supplemented with readings that correct his errors, and actually bother to present the main arguments for dualism.  

[Some further relevant reading: Links to other posts on dualism, materialism, the mind-body problem, etc. are collected here.  Churchland is by no means alone among materialists in responding only superficially to Nagel’s argument, as we saw in my series of posts on Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos.  Churchland is also a proponent of eliminative materialism, a view I criticized in great detail in a series of posts on Alex Rosenberg’s paper “Eliminativism without Tears,” and in an earlier series on Rosenberg’s book The Atheist’s Guide to Reality.]

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A gigantic book royalty check from nothing

Robert Lawrence Kuhn and John Leslie have written up a gracious and substantive reply to my recent First Things commentary on their anthology The Mystery of Existence: Why Is There Anything At All?  It will appear at the First Things website soon, as will my response.

In the meantime, a reader asks about a less serious contribution to the debate: some remarks made recently by Lawrence Krauss in a video over at Big Think.  I’ve commented on Krauss in a review of his book A Universe from Nothing for First Things and in a couple of earlier posts, hereand here.  Is there anything new to be said?  Well, not by Krauss, that’s for sure.  It’s the same superficial stuff, presented with the same arrogant and uninformed confidence, and as usual barely acknowledging, much less seriously answering, the objections that have been leveled against him by atheists and theists alike.  But for that reason alone it is worthwhile exposing his errors now and again, as long as there’s a single benighted reader out there still inclined to take him seriously.

So let’s take a look.  And in good Lawrence Krauss fashion, he doesn’t hide his fallacies under a bushel but puts them on a pedestal for all to see.  This makes refutation not only easy but quick.  Consider, then, his very first sentence -- wherein, after urging us to be “careful” in our thinking he immediately flings carefulness violently to the ground and starts pummeling it.  Krauss asserts: 

[N]othing is a physical concept because it's the absence of something, and something is a physical concept. 

The trouble with this, of course, is that “something” is not a physical concept.  “Something” is what Scholastic philosophers call a transcendental, a notion that applies to every kind of being whatsoever, whether physical or non-physical -- to tables and chairs, rocks and trees, animals and people, substances and accidents, numbers, universals, and other abstract objects, souls, angels, and God.  Of course, Krauss doesn’t believe in some of these things, but that’s not to the point.  Whether or not numbers, universals, souls, angels or God actually exist, none of them would be physical if they existed.  But each would still be a “something” if it existed.  So the concept of “something” is broader than the concept “physical,” and would remain so even if it turned out that the only things that actually exist are physical.

No atheist philosopher would disagree with me about that much, because it’s really just an obvious conceptual point.  But since Krauss and his fans have an extremely tenuous grasp of philosophy -- or, indeed, of the obvious -- I suppose it is worth adding that even if it were a matter of controversy whether “something” is a physical concept, Krauss’s “argument” here would simply have begged the question against one side of that controversy, rather than refuted it.  For obviously, Krauss’s critics would not agree that “something is a physical concept.”  Hence, confidently to assert this as a premise intended to convince someone who doesn’t already agree with him is just to commit a textbook fallacy of circular reasoning.

Dutifully fulfilling his solemn pledge to give his readers “A fallacy in every sentence!”, Krauss goes on to say: 

And what we've learned over the last hundred years is that nothing is much more complicated than we would've imagined otherwise. 

So, “nothing” is complicated.  That implies that it has diverse parts, elements, aspects, or some such.  At the very least, a part or aspect A that is distinct from a part or aspect B.  But if A is different from B, then there must be something about it by virtue of which it is different.  In which case it isn’t true to say that there is nothing.  Indeed, Krauss goes on to describe “a kind of nothing” that might seem a “void” or an “infinite empty space,” when in fact “due to the laws of quantum mechanics and relativity, we now know that empty space is a boiling bubbling brew of virtual particles that are popping in and out of existence at every moment.”  Hence “nothing” is really “full of stuff.”

Well, somebody’s sure full of stuff here, but it isn’t “nothing.”  Because “stuff,” “space,” laws,” “particles,” and the like are each something.  In which case, what could it possibly mean to describe these things as aspects of “nothing”?  Have you ever heard such self-contradictory gibberish before?  Of course you have, because you’ve read Lawrence Krauss before.   

The rest is another rehash of the same brazen bait-and-switch Krauss has been repeatedly called out on by friend and foe alike for almost two years now.  Here’s how physics gives you something from nothing, where for “nothing” read “the laws of quantum mechanics,” which are, of course, not nothing but pay no attention to that sophist behind the curtain… 

Yet Krauss does think he’s got an answer to this problem.  The laws aren’t nothing, you say, but something?  Well, try this on for size: 

But even there, it turns out physics potentially has an answer because we now have good reason to believe that even the laws of physics themselves are kind of arbitrary.

There may be an infinite number of universes, and in each universe that's been created, the laws of physics are different. It's completely random. And the laws themselves come into existence when the universe comes into existence. So there's no pre-existing fundamental law. Anything that can happen, does happen. And therefore, you got no laws, no space, no time, no particles, no radiation. That's a pretty good definition of nothing. 

End quote.  What Krauss is referring to here is, of course, his preferred variation on the currently faddish “multiverse” idea, as set out in A Universe from Nothing.  But on the multiverse scenario, it is not precisely correct to say that “there’s no pre-existing fundamental law.”  By “not precisely correct” I mean “false.”  For as Krauss himself says at pp. 176-77 of A Universe from Nothing, a multiverse might exist “in the form of a landscape of universes existing in a host of extra dimensions,” or it might instead take “the form of a possibly infinitely replicating set of universes in a three-dimensional space.”  It would be governed by “the general principle that anything that is not forbidden is allowed.”  Though “we don’t currently have a fundamental theory that explains the detailed character of the landscape of a multiverse,” to make progress in such theorizing “we generally assume that certain properties, like quantum mechanics, permeate all possibilities.”  And it could turn out that there are “millions of layers” of laws.   

Needless to say, “extra dimensions,” “three-dimensional space,” “general principles,” “the detailed character of a landscape,” “properties,” “quantum mechanics,” and “millions of layers of laws” are not nothing, but a whole helluva lot of something.

Recently we had the wood floors in one of the rooms of our house redone.  Naturally we had to empty the room before work could start.  Suppose that when the wood floor guy showed up to begin, everything had been moved out except for one large bookcase.  Annoyed, he asks me why I didn’t empty the room as I had agreed to do.  Suppose I haughtily replied: 

No beds, no floor rugs, no chairs, no lamps, no bookcases.  That’s a pretty good definition of an empty room.   

My wood floor guy would no doubt reply: “No it’s not, dumbass.  You have, by your own admission, still got one bookcase in there.  Therefore it’s not empty.  I thought you taught logic?”   

Of course, the room might be close enough to “empty” for some purposes.  We might even speak loosely of there being “nothing” in it.  That’s fine for most everyday contexts, where we needn’t always use terms precisely.  But of course, it’s not good enough for every context, as the wood floor example shows.  And it certainly isn’t good enough for philosophical and scientific contexts, where we need precision.  Krauss, a prominent physicist whose work drips with contempt for the philosophers and theologians he regards as sloppy thinkers, and who urges us to be “careful” in our use of language, can’t see what the wood floor guy can.   

The reason, of course, is that the wood floor guy doesn’t have a vested interest in denying the obvious.  He hasn’t spent two years loudly shooting his mouth off about how stupid people are who think that a room with a bookcase in it isn’t really empty, and he doesn’t have a New York Times bestseller, lectures, debates, or a Big Think video devoted to confidently promoting the view that a room with a bookcase in it is empty.  Ergo he doesn’t face the utterly humiliating prospect of having to admit that since a room with a bookcase in it isn’tstrictly empty, the people he’s derided as stupid actually have a point, and the book, lectures, video, etc. have all been a waste of time.   

The irony is that admitting the pickle Krauss has gotten himself into would be the one thing that might save him.  For Krauss has managed to parlay a set of completely worthless ideas into fame and fortune.  He’s gotten a big chunk of the “reality-based community” to swallow the notion that a book-length exercise in committing the fallacies of equivocation and red herring counts as Big Thinking.  He’s gotten an army of Dawkins Youth seriously to believe that while the rigorously worked out metaphysical demonstrations of an Aquinas or a Leibniz are really just loose “god of the gaps” speculations, the “multiverse” theory that is notoriously untestable and which Krauss himself admits lacks a “fundamental theory” is hard-headed empirical science.  Krauss might present his own recent career as the surest proof of his thesis: “You think something can’t come from nothing?  Just look at me!” 

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Hitting Bottum

By now you may have heard that Joseph Bottum, reputedly conservative Catholic and former editor of First Things, has assimilated to the hive mind.  People have been asking me for a while now to write more on “same-sex marriage,” though I’ve been waiting for the publication of the full-length version of my new article on natural law and sexual morality -- of which the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly recently published an excerpt -- before doing so.  The reason is that I don’t think there’s much point in discussing the marriage issue without situating it within the context of the traditional natural law approach to sexual morality in general.  And all the usual, stupid objections to that approach are dealt with in the forthcoming piece.  Best to have it to refer to, then, when commenting on current events, so that time need not be wasted endlessly repeating myself answering the same tired canards. 

But I can’t help commenting briefly on the subject anyway, because Bottum’s article is just too much.  And it’s too much because there’s nothing there.  Or rather, while the article is verbose in the extreme, what’s there is almost entirely stuff that completely undermines Bottum’s conclusion.  Yet he draws it anyway.  Matthew Franck at First Things nails it:

At one point in this bloated, interminable essay, meandering hither and yon, Bottum allows as how the authors of the Manhattan Declaration were chiefly thinkers and not writers.  Never was it more obvious that the reverse is true of Bottum.

Though Bottum’s conclusion is entirely un-Catholic, un-conservative, and contrary to natural law, what is most remarkable is just how very thoroughly he still accepts the substance of the Catholic, conservative, and natural law positions on this issue.  To be sure, when you see that he starts the article with some personal remarks about his bluegrass-playin’ gay friend Jim, your eyes cannot help but swivel back in their sockets.  You expect at first that it’s going to be yet another of those ghastly conversion stories, long on celebration and short on cerebration, that have become a staple of the “strange new respect” literature.  “Yes, fellow right-wingers, I too once opposed gay marriage -- until a long heart-to-heart over lattes with my central-casting gay [son, dentist, fellow bluegrass aficionado] convinced me that deep down we’re all just folks.”  The conservative as the dad in Heathers.

Yet that isn’t quite how it goes.  For one thing, by the end of the piece, Jim comes across not as a patient dispenser of homespun, tolerant wisdom, but as a thoroughly repulsive ideologue -- humorless, paranoid, intellectually dishonest, seething with hatred, and even totalitarian in his desire juridically to force the Catholic Church to take on board his pseudo-moral prejudices.  For another, Bottum never quite affirms “same-sex marriage” as per se a good thing -- though he does make a half-hearted attempt to see the empty glass as half-full -- but mainly as a fait accompli he thinks it is counterproductive to oppose anymore.

Hence Bottum acknowledges that there is an argument from principle for opposing “same-sex marriage” however dismal are the prospects for success and the political repercussions of such opposition.   He agrees that opposition to “same-sex marriage” does not necessarily reflect hatred of homosexuals, and that the accusations of bigotry flung against those who oppose it are often politically calculated.  He affirms that advocates of “same-sex marriage” can be “insipid,” “self-righteous,” “uncritical,” and ignorant of the law and of the relevant arguments.  He also allows that some of these advocates of are driven by hatred of Christianity, and of Catholicism in particular.  Indeed, he admits that “one Catholic fear about same-sex marriage with force [is] the fear that the movement is essentially disingenuous,” less about allowing homosexuals to “marry” than it is an excuse to curtail the free practice of traditional religion.

And that’s just for starters.  Bottum laments “the turn against any deep, metaphysical meaning for sex in the West,” sees the push for “same-sex marriage” as part of the general collapse of sexual morality and of the sanctity of marriage, and regards its juridical victories as the “logical conclusion [of] the great modern project of disenchantment” that also led to legalized abortion.  While he criticizes the “new natural law” arguments of Grisez, Finnis, and George, he does so because he regards them (quite correctly, in my view) as metaphysically desiccated, too deferential to modern assumptions, and unconvincing.  Instead he affirms “the thicker natural law of the medievals,” characterizing Aquinas’s natural law theory in particular as “a grand, beautiful, and extremely delicate structure of rationality.”

On the theological side, Bottum acknowledges that Catholic teaching, including that of Pope Francis, “grants the faithful Catholic little room to maneuver on same-sex marriage.”  He agrees that “we should not accept without a fight an essentially un-Catholic retreat from the public square to a lifeboat theology and the small communities of the saved.”  He tells us -- exactly on the money as far as I am concerned -- that “the goal of the church today must primarily be the re-enchantment of reality” (i.e. a defense of the traditional metaphysics underlying natural law) and that it must thereby “start rebuilding the thick natural law.”  And he respects the conservative worry about the unforeseen consequences of radical social experiments like “same-sex marriage.”  Though it’s obviously not what he has chosen to emphasize in this piece, it seems pretty clear that Bottum has for the most part not given up the conservative, Catholic, and natural law moraland metaphysical objections to “same-sex marriage.” 

Yet for all that he recommends that Catholics drop their opposition to “same-sex marriage” as a civil institution.  Why?  As far as I can tell he has four reasons.  They’re all bad.

First, Bottum seems to think there is no common, non-theological intellectual ground on which the opponents of “same-sex marriage” can conduct their arguments with its proponents.   For despite his praise for the natural law tradition represented by Aquinas, he says that its “premises may not be provable, but they are visible to faith.”  That is precisely the reverse of what Aquinas and other traditional natural law theorists maintain, the reverse of what the Catholic Church teaches, the reverse of what scripture teaches, and the reverse of the truth.  A natural law that rests on “faith” is not the natural law.  Natural law arguments rest essentially on what can be known from a purely philosophical analysis of reality in general and human nature in particular -- not a popular philosophical analysis these days, to be sure, but certainly one that need make no reference to divine revelation or ecclesiastical authority.  What Plato and Aristotle knew without revelation, desiccated modern liberals can also come to know without revelation, albeit with a lot more work.  

And as I have shown at length in The Last Superstition, Aquinas, and elsewhere, the most basic metaphysical ingredients of the classical, “enchanted” metaphysical picture of the world, and even some of the moral ones, are in fact already being rediscovered by contemporary secular philosophers.  Anyone who thinks that the moderns cannot be brought around by rational argument to reconsider essentialism, teleology, the notion of the good as what fulfills our nature, and other elements of traditional metaphysics simply hasn’t been paying attention.

Like David Bentley Hart, Bottum seems to be conflating philosophy with theology, and the natural with the supernatural.  That is not a position consistent with Catholicism, given the Church’s condemnation of fideism.  Nor is it consistent with scripture, given St. Paul’s teaching in Romans 1 that those without divine revelation are “without excuse” -- not only for their idolatry, but also for what Paul specifically refers to as their departure from what is “natural” vis-à-vis sexual relations.

I am well aware, of course, that the liberal proponent of “same-sex marriage” does not accept natural law, Catholic teaching, or scripture in the first place.  The point, though, is that Bottum still accepts them -- and that since he does, he hasn’t a philosophical or theological leg to stand on in abandoning the fight against “same-sex marriage” on grounds of fideism.

Bottum’s second reason for recommending acquiescence to “same-sex marriage” is juridical.  He writes:

[U]nder any principle of governmental fairness available today, the equities are all on the side of same-sex marriage.  There is no coherent jurisprudential argument against it—no principled legal view that can resist it.

If what Bottum means here is that the jurisprudential arguments that have won the day in recent decisions are obviously compelling ones, then as Matthew Franck says, this is simply a “howler.”  But perhaps what Bottum means -- given the qualifier “available today” -- is that the despotic legislating-from-the-bench that has become the trump card of even “conservative” justices like Robertsand Kennedyessentially makes a victory for opponents of “same-sex marriage” impossible.  Maybe so, and maybe not.  But such an argument would in any case prove too much.  It would “justify” caving in not only on “same-sex marriage,” but also on abortion, health care policy, and pretty much everything else.  It amounts to a recommendation that judicial despotism not be resisted if the despots are sufficiently ruthless.  What is conservative, Catholic, or even remotely sane about that? 

Bottum’s third reason also involves capitulation, this time to secular culture.  He opines that:

Campaigns against same-sex marriage are hurting the church, offering the opportunity to make Catholicism a byword for repression in a generation that, even among young Catholics, just doesn’t think that same-sex activity is worth fighting about.

He adds that the clergy sex scandals have undermined the Church’s moral authority on matters of sex anyway.  Perhaps Bottum would also have advised the early Christians to just lighten up and offer a little incense to Caesar -- the young people, after all, couldn’t see what the big deal was, and anyway all that martyrdom stuff was just making Christians look like fanatics.  Perhaps he would have told Athanasius to knock it off already with the Trinitarianism, since it was just alienating the smart set.  Besides, most of the bishops had caved in to Arianism, so that the Church lacked any moral authority on the subject.  And maybe Bottum would have advised the Christian warriors at Spain, Vienna, and Lepanto to get real and learn to accept a Muslim Europe.  After all, these various desperate Catholic efforts were, as history shows, a waste of time -- the Roman persecutors, Arians, and invading Muslims all won out in the end, right? 

But to be fair, those analogies aren’t quite right.  A better analogy would be Bottum suggesting that a little emperor worship might actually serve the causeof monotheism; or that giving Arianism free reign might advance recognition of the divinity of Christ; or that submitting to dhimmitude might be a good way of restoringChristendom.  For here is what Joseph Bottum, prophet of a re-enchanted reality and rebuilder of Aquinas’s natural law, sees, if only murkily, in his crystal ball:

In fact, same-sex marriage might prove a small advance in chastity in a culture that has lost much sense of chastity. Same-sex marriage might prove a small advance in love in a civilization that no longer seems to know what love is for. Same-sex marriage might prove a small advance in the coherence of family life in a society in which the family is dissolving.

I don’t know that it will, of course…

No, of course the level-headed Bottum wouldn’t claim to know that it will.  Just like we couldn’t, you know, have been absolutely sureat the time that offering incense to the emperor might somehow undermine idolatry, or that denying Christ’s divinity would lead people to embrace His divinity, or that ceding lands to the Jihad would lead to new church construction therein.  Hey, it’s all a crap shoot, but we can hope!

If this sounds like good old-fashioned American optimism ad absurdum, that’s only natural given the fourth, and apparently main, reason for Bottum’s surrender:

 We are now at the point where, I believe, American Catholics should accept state recognition of same-sex marriage simply because they are Americans.

It’s all about “old-timey Americana, the stuff we all still share.”   Good sportsmanship.  Consensus.  Compromise.  Tolerance.  Affability.  The things that can bring a Catholic Republican together with his gay buddy Jim for a burger and some bluegrass in Gramercy Park.  You know, the stuff that really matters at the end of the day. 

Uptight teachers of the faithful are always setting father against son and mother against daughter, but that’s no way to win over the youth demographic.  The modern Catholic will find a surer guide in Modern Family.  If the kids aren’t down with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, let’s try William James’s Gospel of Relaxation.  So take it easy, fellow Catholics.  Go with the flow.  Chill out.  It’s all good.  Not exactly the Beatitudes, but mind you it is all so very American.  I would say that Bottum isn’t being true to his religion, except that I suspect that he is. 

Anyway, as a famous non-American once said, no man can serve two masters.  And by Bottum’s own admission, people like his pal Jim aren’t likely to be satisfied with back-slapping bonhomie, or with the Church being a good loser.  They don’t want Catholics merely to quit the field.  They want them to obey -- to pay for contraceptives, to photograph same-sex “weddings,” to keep their opinions about sexual morality to themselves if they know what’s good for them.  If you’ll forgive more pop culture references -- perhaps the only “stuff we all still share” any more in this One Nation Under Compulsory Genial Tolerance -- Bottum starts by channeling Sally Field, but will end up on the floor alongside Kevin Bacon. 

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