Filter Failure Flawed Focus

A recent radio interview featured an author who affirmed he was a Christian. He then went on to say that religion wasn’t the answer to the problem of the random evil in life and the meaninglessness of the universe.

His views are common, and spring from a common failure in religious formation. Too often Christian teaching in the modern era has tried so hard to be honest and open to “the real world” that it has promulgated a lie. 

That lie is simple; that the more you accumulate knowledge of the good and the bad, the more different historical facts and anecdotes you assemble, then the more you know about the moral nature of reality. Almost inevitably this uncurated collection of facts leads to the conclusion that evil is random and the universe has no meaning or direction. 

The conclusion is nonsense because the method of randomly assembling “facts” is nonsensical. Reality reveals its nature only when we apply both lenses and filters to the vast inflow of sensory data coming into our minds. Until we focus on some things and filter out others we actually don’t know anything. And that isn’t just a philosophical observation. It is based on a hard-headed scientific account of how the intellect evolved along with the brain. 

We are alive today because we evolved to separate the signals relevant to survival from the noise of mere experience. And we can and should draw a conclusion from this: The world is a place where humans (and a lot of other creatures) may be able to survive. At the very least it is meaningful (at least for us) in that sense and generates an ethical imperative. As the Talmud teaches, survival is a mitzvoth. 

But go deeper than short-term survival in terms of the nature of reality. Think about gravity. If we watch everything that falls we’ll readily conclude that there is no pattern to whatever makes things fall. Some things fall fast, others slowly, some rise, or both rise and fall. This is baffling unless you begin by selecting only objects of similar shape. 

For example: 20 one inch diameter balls will fall at the same speed regardless of their weight. Turns out that if you filter out differences in size and shape and you begin to learn something about gravity. Then you can filter out the air factor and put all objects in a vacuum. Now objects of any size, shape, or weight all fall at the same speed. Two filters and you actually know a lot about gravity that unfiltered data will never tell you.

Now apply focus by measuring the speed at which the objects fall. You can do this by measuring distance and dividing by time. Apply more focus by measuring their speed falling different distances. It becomes clear they have not only speed, but acceleration. They go faster and faster. Now you can actually state a rule that tells you a lot about gravity. It causes objects to accelerate downward at an acceleration of 32 feet per second / per second. 

All scientific knowing depends on this process of focus and filter that allows scientists to discern what they regard as data from the “noise” of mere experience. 

Yet somehow when it comes to understanding the moral nature of the universe many modern Christians embrace the noise and assert that seeking underlying patterns by using focus and filters is being naive. And the last thing we Christians want to be seen as naive. So we rather ironically believe that when we randomly collect incidents of evil and meaninglessness that we are being “realistic.” 

That’s crazy. It's like saying that the 14th century peasant who concludes from watching feathers and canon balls that gravity affects them differently is being “realistic” while Galileo was naive. 

The unfortunate result is Christians like the interviewee I heard. They see the church as a kind of private refuge where they seek to construct whatever sense they make of their own lives.  They may inscribe that meaning into some public expression, whether political or artistic. But they make no claim to public truth; just a possible connection with others on a similar journey.

Of course there is a reason for our reticence to claim to know anything. For a long time popular Christianity made foolish assertions about moral cause and effect, formulating moral laws that could easily be shown to be naive. It is the “the hurricane hit New Orleans because its a sinful city” effect created when a day later a tornado then destroys the church. 

But the church is no more responsible for backing down in its assertions of a moral order because that order has been mischaracterized than scientists are obliged to answer for von Daniken’s bizarre science in Chariots of the Gods. 

Rather, in reality the purpose of the church is to offer just that public witness that provides the filters and focus that separate meaningful information regarding the moral purpose of the universe from noise. Only in this way can the Church show the world how to grasp the moral trajectory of the universe.

In doing so the church faces the same problem as science: determining the filters and focus that actually cut through the noise to the patterns that help us understand the forces shaping our moral universe. Good ethics, like good science, begins by separating the data from the noise. And like good science it must also account for the noise. 

What made Galileo and his successors brilliant is that they not only explained gravity, they explained why feathers fall more slowly that canon balls. Christian ethics must not only explain the moral structure of the universe, but how apparently random evil is part of that structure. As importantly, given that Christian claims about God and morality extend to a vastly larger and more diverse universe than could be imagined only a couple of hundred years ago, we must offer filters and focus that aren’t limited to explaining human moral agency and relatively infrequent natural disasters. Climate change and astrophysics have placed before us the possibility of our own extinction along side the near inevitability of life outside our world with nearly universal inhospitality to life. 

And yet, just as there is a natural order which science can discern so there is a universal moral order beneath the noise that Christians can discern under the guidance of scripture. It is an order based on creaturely freedom, creaturely stewardship, and the gift of Divine love to and among God’s creatures. At its root is the gift of survival, of life’s capability to emerge and and face the challenges of an ever changing environment through evolution. That gift is written into the cosmological constant as an observable fact characteristic of our universe. And it results in a corollary, that diversity is good, because it is good for survival.

Here we see what is critical for a credible Christian ethic, the intersection of scientific observation and scripture. Cosmologists call it the anthropic principle. Christians call it the doctrine of creation. What it means is that this universe we live in is uniquely suited to support the evolution and survival of sentient beings such as ourselves.

Order emerges as this gift unfolds in the myriad forms of life we know and those we do not yet know. It then takes new shape as conscious creatures make decisions that either enhance the survival and diversity of life or diminish it. In theological terms order emerges as conscious creatures work with or against God’s will expressed in the particular creation defined by the natural laws governing our universe and revealed in scripture. 

The task of the church is to witness to that order in the orderliness of its own life, but equally in showing that the fundamentals of creaturely freedom, creaturely stewardship, and Divine love offer us the filters and focus necessary to see the moral order of the universe while understanding the disorder that is its natural and reasonable compliment.