Nathan Hawkins and I just finished a podcast recording (above) that I hope will contribute to amplifying the deeper notes that are still just barely audible beneath the surface noise of the culture war. We both agree that dialogue must replace partisan shouting, and that philosophy has an important public role to play in helping to bring such a shift about. We have both noticed the way that people are often not simply disagreeing about the specific issue at hand—eg, gender or gay marriage—but about deeper metaphysical issues. Our political disputes stem from divergent ways of imagining what reality is, what counts as evidence, and what it even means to be a human being.
Nathan’s recent philosophical intervention into the culture wars helpfully framed the way you can’t even really communicate across certain divides because the underlying metaphysics are so different. It can look like a fight about policy or identity, but the deeper conflict is about what kinds of things exist and how we derive meaning from them. Someone might say, “Denying my gender identity is literally erasing me,” and someone else, who assumes a biological essentialist, scientistic posture, hears nonsense or even a subtle kind of coercion. But if you assume a social constructivist view (where our linguistic categories are partially constitutive of reality), then non-recognition can feel like ontological deletion. If the category isn’t recognized, if there’s no acknowledgment, then “I” cease to exist in the public world that gives my life legibility. Meanwhile, the other side experiences that same claim as a denial of facts in favor of feelings.
A large portion of our cultural polarization, in other words, is downstream of metaphysical miscommunication. Nathan’s video reads Nietzsche as a kind of powder keg who exploded the old, pre-modern frame. The “death of God” is not just a theological claim but a civilizational shift in our image of the human being and of what kind of world we inhabit. Once the old transcendent guarantor fell away for lack of credibility, we were not left with a simple set of neutral options, much less a neutral procedure for rationally deciding among them. The culture wars reveal that our modern disputes remain just as absolutist as the old religious wars were.
In Nathan’s terms, the contemporary West is dominated by two major options: atheist scientism versus atheist subjectivism, with dogmatic theists scrambling for attention in a discursive arena wherein they can barely understand their own values anymore. From a philosophical point of view, the important thing about many of these fights is what the combatants share in common and tacitly take for granted. Scientism and subjectivism look like opposites on the surface, but they both operate as though the divine is simply no longer a live option, as though the only master categories worth thinking with are now either “mechanistic matter” or “individual selfhood.” One camp tries to anchor meaning in subpersonal physical processes, the other tries to anchor meaning in constructed narratives and networks of power. Each accuses the other of irrationality. Each suspects the other of bad faith. And both are haunted by the absence of any account of their own conditions of possibility. Theism is treated by both as a discarded stage of development from humanity’s childhood.
But what if, having grown out of dogmatic theism, we are now tasked with growing out of adolescent atheism?
Nathan and I take philosophy seriously not as a merely academic exercise but as care of the soul and cultivation of communal reason. The latter entails attempting to mediate conflicts at the level of their presuppositions. Not by splitting the difference, or arriving at some sort of a defanged compromise position, but by exposing deeper as yet inarticulate or tacit commitments and asking whether those commitments can bear the weight asked of them.
One of the turns in our conversation that I found fruitful was our shared critique of the dominant approach to apologetics, wherein God is treated as an abstract entity with a specific function as part of a theory of the world. Nathan brought up Graham Oppy’s set up, where we have one theory that includes an entity called God and another that does not, and we judge the two positions by their relative parsimony and explanatory power. If adding God gives no extra explanatory value, then Occam’s razor tells us to prefer the simpler ontology. Nathan’s point is that this sets up the question of God on a model that is basically that of physical theory choice. It turns the divine into a posited item within an explanatory inventory, a kind of cosmic hypothesis like “dark matter” or the “multiverse,” just with more existential pay off if we’re right. This might at first sound like exactly what my favorite metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead does with his rather complex God concept. But Whitehead is very clear about the mutual interplay he intends between his concept of God, on the one hand, and our moral lives and aesthetic feelings, our religious and mystical experiences, on the other. The concept is intended to elucidate the experience, and not to explain it away.
The popular atheist v. theist debate set up always assumes the intellectualist framing, as though faith in God were the sort of thing that ought to be settled by logical proof or refutation. For Nathan and I, these arguments feel spiritually beside the point. As Nathan put it, for any such “proof” to work as a proof, you have to be more certain of the premises than of the conclusion. But many of us know, existentially, that our openness to the divine is not the product of a logical argument. God is not merely the endpoint of a system of reasoning. At best, these proofs can function as a reductio, a way of showing that certain minimalist conceptions of reality cannot be self-contained. But as a source of faith, they risk the replacement of God with some kind of intellectual idol, a conceptual surrogate mistaken for the source.
I introduced a different sense of theism in our dialogue. Not dogmatic, not belief-based in the narrow propositional sense, but participatory. A participatory theism is not simply the view that God is a social construct (eg, a Durkheimian collective coordination device), nor is it a literalist belief in God as a “man in the sky” we might petition for favors. Participation here signals my desire to come back into relationship with the divine as a reality, not just an idea—a reality that inevitably exceeds our intellectual grasp and certainly our volitional control and yet which makes moral demands on us in a way intimately bound up with our very sense of selfhood. I mean to say that God’s reality is not that of an external law-giving authority who commands us to obey, but that of an intimate partner and fellow sufferer whose companionship in my inmost experience provides me with the sense of an ideal by which I judge myself, my inclinations and actions, and without which I would have no sense of even the possibility of my own moral freedom much less a sense of whether my inclinations and actions were good or bad. Philosophy, for me, naturally flows into an inquiry into this ground, whether we call it “God” or something else. My “faith” in this ground, this ultimate goodness latent in the nature of things, will always outrun my ability to justify it propositionally. But it nonetheless compels me morally, aesthetically, existentially, and yes, intellectually. Though I cannot prove it, it does feel to me as though the very possibility of rational justification of anything else in some sense depends on it.
My faith does lead me to feel that this divine ground places a certain kind of “demand” on me. This is not the same thing as coercion or divine authoritarianism. It is a relation to something better thought of as a lure: an inward call, whispered in each moment, that offers an ideal possibility of alignment with what might contribute most to enhancing the beauty of a situation, including the beauty of others’ lives, not only my own.
Nathan’s own way into this was to speak about truth, goodness, and beauty as lived normativities, ideals which draws us. Truth as the normative demand in thinking; goodness as the normative demand in willing and acting; beauty as the normative demand in feeling. It follows from this that our philosophical outlooks are never merely intellectual. They are always already ethical and aesthetic. Even science, when it presents itself as value-neutral, presupposes a posture toward intelligibility, it assumes the unity of nature, and the meaningfulness and worthiness of truth-seeking.
Scientistic atheists often forget that modern science emerged in 17th century Europe out of a whole suite of theological assumptions. The intelligibility of nature, the mathematical form of the world, the idea that there are lawful regularities worth discovering—these were historically linked to deist assumptions (nature designed by a rational God; the human mind furnished with innate ideas adequate to that rationality). At some point, certainly by the time of Darwin, science began to defend its epistemology without reference to those theological roots. It learned to forget what it had presupposed. And then scientism, itself a metaphysical extrapolation reaching far beyond what the scientific method justifies, began to get away with eliding the deeper conditions of its own possibility, thus denying its own metaphysical overreach.
My point is not that we ought to make science theological again. The old theological foundation of science was precisely the dogmatic theology that has lost credibility. The Cartesian-Newtonian world-picture, with God as an external designer of a mechanistic nature, is a picture that deserves critique from within theology as well as from without. So I do not want a regression to Paley-style natural theology any more than I want the Darwinian naturalism that merely replaces Paley’s external designer with “nature” as an impersonal “selector.” In both cases, the metaphysical imagination remains mechanistic (even if Darwin’s emphasis on variation would end up undermining the mechanical philosophy he still explicitly professed allegiance to). Whether God or nature, only the name of the external designer changes.
That is why the creationism v. evolution culture war flashpoint is, in my view, a symptom of deep metaphysical confusion on both sides. Evolution, in some sense, is a fact. But how we interpret that fact remains an open a metaphysical question.
Nathan, from his idealist perspective, offered a compelling reframing of the Biblical story of Genesis that I am familiar with from a different lineage (anthroposophy). Genesis is best read not as a historical/causal account in competition with the scientific theory of evolution but as a symbolic account of the emergence of consciousness—an allegory of developmental psychology, an origin story of subjectivity. The “tohu vavohu” as the undifferentiated chaos of an infant’s experience (William James’ “blooming, buzzing confusion”); the gradual emergence of differentiation (day/night, self/other); the dawning of moral conscience alongside self-awareness after eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
I reject the false choice between taking our evolutionary history seriously and finding spiritual meaning in our origins as human beings. That said, I do think reconciling the two requires that we reject a purely naturalistic, “blind mechanism” interpretation of evolution. Like the co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russell Wallace, I believe a coherent account of conscious agency and moral personhood is impossible on a classical materialist reading of evolution. So while I affirm our evolutionary emergence, I don’t think of evolution as an aimless mechanism. If by “naturalism” we mean nature is just a bunch of dead stuff colliding under the strict rule of apparently eternal laws (whose origin science is embarrassed to ask about), I am not a naturalist. I think evolution has always had an inside, that there is an experiential dimension latent throughout nature. It is no surprise that physics has missed this aspect of nature because it simply is not legible to a geometrical analysis of the physical world. When Whitehead and even Russell later gesture toward panpsychism or panexperientialism, they are trying to say something like this: there never was a time in the history of the universe when it was only matter. There has always also been an interior or psychic dimension, what Teilhard de Chardin called a “within of things.”
This new form of participatory, evolutionary theism is as different from dogmatic theism as it is from modern atheism. It is not a compromise between scientism and subjectivism. It is a different metaphysical posture altogether, one that honors the truths of natural science without succumbing to the temptation to imagine those truths might provide a reductive explanation of personhood. It also honors the constructive, interpretive, open-ended meaning-making task of human life without collapsing reality into social construction.
Before discursive debates about -isms, there’s a more basic distinction—existential rather than doctrinal: do we treat the universe as something to which we can relate, intimately, reverently, responsively; or do we treat it as inert material to be manipulated and utilized? Is the universe ultimately hostile, or is it the kind of place we can feel at home in? William James suggested something similar at the beginning of A Pluralistic Universe, that our basic emotional orientation to the universe has shaped our philosophy before we even consider rational arguments. We discover rational justifications after we’ve already formed our core cosmic postures.
I do not mean that atheists cannot relate to reality reverently, or that theists cannot instrumentalize reality. Obviously both happen. What I mean is that, in our cultural moment, a certain popular atheism (especially the “new atheist” style, now thankfully less fashionable) often smuggles in a quasi-theological structure while claiming to have escaped theology. There is something rather Calvinist about the way Dawkins frames the moral drama of humanity’s response to evolutionary theory. Nature is a bloodbath; we inherit selfish genes; but we, uniquely, can “rebel” against our genetic programming. Replace “sin” with “selfish genes,” replace “angry God” with “pitiless nature,” and all the dramatis personae of the Bibical narrative are there: guilt, struggle, redemption. It is a barely secularized unconscious theology.
Likewise, dogmatic theism often projects an idolatrous image of God as Caesar or Pharaoh who weilds coercive power from the top of the pyramid. Many atheists are, quite understandably, rebelling against that idol. I am rebelling against it, too. The God I can take seriously is not a large and in charge dictator barking orders, orchestrating every detail, designing everything in advance. The God I can take seriously is a fellow sufferer, a lure toward the good, present in herbs and pebbles more so than in lofty abstractions. The incarnation, for me, means that God and world are no longer separable. They depend on one another, creator needing creation to be a creator, and so in that sense becoming a co-creator alongside us. I reject the pyramid scheme. God is not only at the top. God is also at the bottom. That is not meant as a flattening all value hierarchy in the moral sense but a dialectical and incarnational reconfiguration of hierarchy. “The stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” The divine is immanent in the smallest among us, and that immanence places moral demands on us.
If the culture war is downstream of the death of traditional images of God, then one of the main casualties is not merely belief, but trust: trust in intelligibility, trust in value, in institutions, and in a world that can be more than a consequence of blind mechanisms of power, whether natural or social. Scientism wants intelligibility without acknowledging the ground that makes intelligibility meaningful. Subjectivism wants freedom without acknowledging the ground that makes freedom more than arbitrary self-assertion. Dogmatic theism wants authority without acknowledging the participatory authenticity required to make divine love non-coercive. We are, in different ways, trying to find our way back to a world where truth, beauty, and goodness are not severed from one another.
Nathan and I both reject the slogan “facts don’t care about your feelings.” This is not because feelings trump facts, but because it assumes an ultimate disconnection between truth, beauty, and goodness that can’t actually be lived or consistently practiced in real inquiry. Ultimately, if truth is not good and not beautiful, why would we be devoted to it? And if goodness has no truth, how could it guide action without collapsing into sentimentalism? And if beauty is unmoored from truth and goodness, how could it not devolve into spectacle? You get the idea.
And yet the allurement of these Big Ideas of truth, beauty, and goodness has not yet convinced me to adopt an idealist stance. I can’t shake my realist impulse, perhaps because I am fearful of allowing metaphysical optimism to become an evasion of suffering. I’m deeply sympathetic to the idealist orientation, and I do find it morally and intellectually superior to materialism as classically understood. As Nathan put it, to be an idealist means to begin with personhood, with the value of consciousness, and with the true, the good, and the beautiful as archetypal values that structure human life, or ought to. The very organization of our experience suggests their reality. In our thinking life we’re driven toward intellectual satisfaction, and we name that pull “truth.” In our willing we sense a demand we didn’t invent, and we name that “goodness.” We feel, and we’re drawn, sometimes against our best judgment, toward a certain kind of radiance, a fittingness, a harmony, and we name that “beauty.” This isn’t just a psychological structure, it is physiological (in anthroposophic terms, the thinking, feeling, willing threefold is mirrored in the threefold nerve-sense system, rhythmic system, and limb-metabolism). Our whole embodied orientation seems shaped as if in response to these three transcendental ideas.
And yet, what do we do with the weight of the world’s suffering, and with our own lack of complete knowledge? The realist side of me wants to wrestle with natural science, not as a rival to value or meaning but as a way of being honest about the facts. I’m an optimist by temperament, but some regions of existence are just unbearable. There’s senseless pain, there’s rank injustice, there’s an obscene surplus of misery in the world that can’t be tidied up with nice sounding ideas. And so theodicy, the meaning of evil, keeps pressing on me.
My realism isn’t disbelief. It’s more like a resistance to premature closure. It’s a desire to keep open my attempt to account for my own, others, and the world’s existence long enough for the full gravity of evil to register, without rushing to translate it into the convenience of a metaphysical privation.
I’m deeply influenced by Carl Jung. His critique of Christianity is relevant here because it’s not a cheap, external dismissal. It’s an internal probing of the symbolic structure, what it includes, and what it excludes. His Answer to Job has stuck with me as a crucial spiritual provocation. Jung doesn’t think Christianity, as traditionally configured, offers a fully adequate answer to the problem of evil. The Trinity, he says, is incomplete, because it leaves out Satan, the serpent, the shadow. But also matter, embodiment, the darkness of the real that refuses to be spiritualized away.
So my realism stems from my unwillingness to tidy the world too quickly. It is bound up with the incompleteness of my understanding, and of the world itself. It’s William James’ sense of the “moreness” of reality, the excess that outruns every conceptual net.
Footnotes2Plato 
What do you think?