Western culture has increasingly
followed an anti-natural trajectory. If Modernity ruthlessly sought
answers in science—or what it thought was ‘scientific’ (as in its imaginative
constructions in the humanities)—an alternative anti-naturalism has come into
ascendency in postmodern times. This is not an ivory tower debate.
It plays out in children’s classrooms, adoption agencies, public policies,
university campuses, denominations, views on immigration, hiring policies, and
on and on the list goes. The rejection of nature is the definitive
characteristic of our age—despite all the contradictory worries about climate
change and the environment.
The French existentialist
philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, argued for an authentic existence that did not
fall entirely to the side of facticity or, alternatively, to the side of
transcendence. One should acknowledge the facts while not being bound by
them (Being and Nothingness). As an existentialist, his primary concern
was to deny that we, as humans, have an ‘essence.’ Rather, we are thrown
into existence and have to create our identity out of the choices and actions
that we make. Yet even Sartre believed that there were certain facts.
Perhaps the illogicality of his
position has evolved existentialism into postmodernity. If, indeed,
existence precedes essence, then why should we acknowledge facts as though they
are unchangeable? Why should we not live in transcendence, in
nothingness? Admittedly, Sartre’s own examples of ‘being’ or facts were
not in nature but in the realities of one’s existence: the waiter who does not
accept that he is a waiter but imagines himself to be something else; the woman
who denies that she is being touched; and so forth. Remarkably,
Sartre could not acknowledge the reality of evil; all that matters is that one
chooses to act (and so create being), not what one chooses.
This denial of nature and the
emphasis on personal choice stands as the antithesis of Stoic philosophy.
Stoicism rejected imaginary constructs and called on people to content
themselves with who they were and what they were. Are you a slave?
Then be a slave, and a good one at that. They spoke of what was ‘natural’
and opposed those who lived ‘against nature’ (para physin) a phrase that was
often used for homosexuals in antiquity because they lived against their
biologically defined sex (so, e.g., Romans 1.26). In the postmodern West
in our day, the Stoics have been trounced. Two hundred and fifty years of
promoting ‘freedom’ as a cardinal virtue has finally come to define our
worldview: we lean into nothingness and away from being.
This plays out in various ways in
the halls of academia and in everyday life. Already in the 19th century,
David Friedrich Strauss could argue that myth was the true kernel of belief
wrapped in discardable, historical garb—i.e., imagined, made-up history (The
Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, 1846). Thus, according to Strauss,
one should read the Gospels not for what they state about the historical Jesus
but for what they claim for the Christ of faith. In the same vein, the
existentialist New Testament scholar in the following century, Rudolf Bultmann,
insisted that history did not support theology. One did not need to
believe in the physical, historical resurrection of Jesus from the dead in
order to preach a message about transcendent existence to a congregation.
On his view, Jesus’ resurrection was a faith claim apart from any
reference to a physical resurrection. In our day, it is a given that
mainline denominational ministers will reject the claim that Jesus rose from
the dead physically on the third day. The elephant in the room for this
constructed Christianity is the simple fact that the early Church was founded
on the claim that Jesus had been raised physically from the dead: ‘And if
Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in
vain’ (1 Corinthians 15.14).
Our culture’s experiment with
transcendence over facticity finds any number of peculiar denials. The
common language for this in postmodern thought is ‘deconstruction.’ If
some reality has been constructed, it is arbitrary. Its value is purely
in terms of whether it is functional, not in, as the Stoics would have said,
because we find contentment in living according to nature. If existence
is constructed, then it can also be deconstructed. A good example might
be the denial of borders and immigrants entering the country. Borders are,
after all, human lines in the sand, and people should not be categorized in
terms of ‘immigrant’ or ‘citizen’ status, the argument goes.
The denial of reality is not
always a question of nature. It plays out in the refusal to have a
serious conversation about Islam in the west. Islamic terrorism is not
simply terrorism by people who happen to be Muslims; there is such a thing as
an Islam (there are varieties!) that, by definition, leads to terrorism—as any
Islamic terrorist would agree (although the word would be jihad and
it would be considered just and holy, not what we think of when we use the word
‘terrorism’). It is a legitimate interpretation of Islam. Western
public discourse has, however, typically preferred to remain ignorant of the
theological discussion in Islam and the teaching of parts of the Koran that
advocate killing or subjugating non-Muslims. What is the basis for
this? The answer, inevitably, is a culture that desires to discuss things
in terms of what one wants to believe—a politically correct view of
Islam—rather than to discuss the facts—what the Koran actually says and how it
has actually been interpreted and lived by certain groups throughout many
centuries.
The current interest in
euthanasia, led by the Netherlands, offers an example of anti-naturalism.
Why should one, to use language introduced above, treat existence as a
facticity, as a fact that defines a person? Why should people not be able
to choose to terminate their own existence? Indeed, it would be the
ultimate act of transcendency to deny the facticity of life. Instead of
addressing the facts of one’s life, such as a difficult illness, pain, or
depression, why not resist all external definitiveness by choosing to act
against the facts? The most creative self-definition, on such a view, is
the act that denies the fact of existence itself.
Not surprisingly, another of the
much debated issues of recent decades fits this philosophical debate as well:
abortion. Different cultures have put forward different arguments to
defend the morality of killing the unborn. China has put forward a social
argument: abortion as a way to control population growth for the supposed good
of society. Some have advocated abortion on eugenic grounds—killing those
with Downs Syndrome or some terminal illness or defect, for example, or those
wanting a boy and not a girl. Yet the West’s fundamental argument in
favour of abortion has been based on the ideology of freedom: women (not men or
the unborn) should have the freedom to choose whether they want to bring a
pregnancy to term or not. On such an ethic, what makes abortion moral is
the denial of the facts of what a foetus is—a growing human being—in favour of
a value: freedom of choice. This, too, is an example of the West’s
anti-naturalism.
The denial of facticity even
reached the halls of government this past year as people tried to deny that
Donald Trump was actually president. Others have tried to destroy his
presidency by creating false ‘facts’. Lying, denials, and fake news define
much of Washington D.C., as well as other institutions of power in our culture,
such as news agencies. No wonder that young, university students oppose
free speech, prefer safe spaces to reality, need trigger warnings to alert them
that something uncomfortable might be in their assigned reading, and, in one
way or another, can be helped to create their own bubble of reality.
Most destructively, biological
sex and gender identity have been subjected to the philosophy of
transcendency. Ryan Anderson, author of When Harry Became Sally,[1] cites
an example in the constructed reality of Dr. Deanna Adkins, director of the
Duke Center for Child and Adolescent Gender Care. She says [trigger
warning!] that gender identity is the only medically supported determinant of
sex…. It is counter to medical science to use chromosomes, hormones,
internal reproductive organs, external genitalia, or secondary sex
characteristics to override gender identity for purposes of classifying someone
as male or female.
One of the recent attempts by
transgender activists to define gender includes the categories of identity,
expression, physical attraction, and emotional attraction (the Gender
Unicorn)—not biology.[2]
Yet transgender activists cannot let go the idea of facticity. Having rid
themselves of biology as determinative, some, such as Adkins, nonetheless want
to insist that gender is either innate or fixed at an early age.
(‘Insist’ appears to be the appropriate word: we live in a world that
deconstructs nature and insists on the validity of its own construction of
reality.) Anderson asks, in response, if the proper dosage of medicine
will be based on a person’s biological sex or on one’s gender identity—indeed.
Anderson further avers that
transgender activists “promote a highly subjective and incoherent worldview.”
He accuses them of promoting their agenda without care for logical consistency
and outlines their contradictions on several matters:
On the one hand, they claim
that the real self is something other than the physical body, in a new form of
Gnostic dualism, yet at the same time they embrace a materialist philosophy in
which only the material world exists. They say that gender is purely a social
construct, while asserting that a person can be “trapped” in the wrong gender.
They say that there are no meaningful differences between man and woman, yet
they rely on rigid sex stereotypes to argue that “gender identity” is real,
while human embodiment is not. They claim that truth is whatever a person says
it is, yet they believe there’s a real self to be discovered inside
that person. They promote a radical expressive individualism in which people
are free to do whatever they want and define the truth however they wish, yet
they try ruthlessly to enforce acceptance of transgender ideology.[3]
The underlying, philosophical
failure of these transgender activists is their concern to affirm the reality
of a particular thing—transgenderism—and their postmodern belief that reality
is constructed. Incredulously, even biological sex is not arrant naturally
but assigned, as the phrase, ‘assigned sex’ is now to be understood. It
is not, allegedly, assigned by God or nature but by a doctor or parents.
The logic of this position ought to press transgender advocates not to add
‘other’ to the binary ‘male’ and ‘female’ but to question whether there is any
such thing as ‘male’ and ‘female’ aside from social constructs. The
category, ‘other,’ still has ‘male’ and ‘female’ as references.
In all this nonsense, the
fundamental question keeps arising: ‘Can we say that there is anything
‘natural,’ or is everything simply a matter of perception, construction, and
choice of identity?’ The Stoics simply called on people to be content
with living according to nature; they did not have to try to explain to their
culture, confused as it was, that there was such a thing as nature. Their
counterparts, the Cynics, took living according to nature to an extreme,
casting off all authority and living anti-socially and naturally (in some
cases, at least, nude, unwashed, and uncouth behaviour). Even the
Epicureans, who denied the existence or at least the relevance of, and
therefore the authority of, the gods and believed in the mutability of reality
(as periods in time offered different constructions of reality), acknowledged
being part of a natural reality.
Some, searching for some
connection between today’s imaginations with ancient philosophy, have suggested
Gnosticism. Gnosticism was a second-century hodge-podge of various views,
including some Christian language that consequently confused some of the
churches. It had more in common with certain eastern religious
views. At its heart was a conviction that the material world was a
wrongful creation of a demigod, and that reality was really found in non-material
spirituality. The more fully explored version of this type of worldview
will, however, be found in Hinduism. What is different, however, is that
any contemporary, Western versions of this type of anti-naturalism will not
reject materialism. Therein lies the logical contradiction that fills the
daily news: the conviction that reality is constructed, not natural, and that
this constructed reality is essential.
To all this, the Church rightly
and necessarily affirms:
We believe in one God, the Father
Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of
all things visible and invisible (Nicene Creed).
We believe that God created the
world, that the world is good, and that human sin is a rejection of God’s good
creation and Law. The good life is the life lived in conformity with
God’s good creation. Eve’s and Adam’s sin, definitive of all human sin
against God, was their choice to construct their own existence, to deny the Law
of God and act like God by determining good and evil for themselves. Our
culture’s version of this, anti-naturalism, is not too different. As we
say, ‘the apple has not fallen far from the tree.’
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