First and Second Nature

When I woke up this morning, I didn’t expect to be thinking about the notion of free will, one of the great philosophical/theological questions. But a NY Times article about the so-called housewives reality shows that plague the contemporary television landscape nudged me in that direction.

Critic Neil Genzlinger wrote, “’One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on,’ the great religious scholar P. J. O’Rourke wrote in Rolling Stone in November 1989. ‘And when you do find somebody, it’s remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver’s license.’

“We are faced with two possibilities. One is that there is no free will, which means that God actually planned for there to be a 'Real Housewives of New Jersey ' and for people to watch it. Contemplating a universe built on that premise can lead only to collective insanity, and therefore the notion must be rejected.

“Thus we must embrace the other possibility: that there is free will, and that the enablers who make “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” possible could transform the show from the lame caricature it is, if only they — in Mr. O’Rourke’s formulation — looked at their driver’s licenses. That they have not done so suggests a need for some forcible action.”

Though tongue-in-cheek, this article led me down the Unitarian Universalist path of freedom and responsibility.

Personally, I don’t put God into the free-will equation. I am a Religious Naturalist and frame my musings by the insights of evolutionary biology and neuroscience. From these perspectives, I see both determinism and free will. For some years, I’ve mused about a First Nature and a Second Nature.

Our First Nature is our creatureliness—what has evolved over billions of years to become the Human Species that bends us toward generally shared behaviors that seem determined. (Anyone sexually attracted to another knows how powerful First Nature influences are.)

Our Second Nature emerges from the workings of our incredible, highly evolved mind—its consciousness and self-consciousness. Through reason, we make choices that counter our First Nature instincts, and can be called a result of free will. (Though sexually attracted to another person, we might choose not to act on the urge for a variety of reasons, including a vow of exclusivity to another.)

Metaphorically, human nature describes a realm somewhere between angels and animals. The phrase “angels of our better nature,” speaks to what I understand as our Second Nature possibilities.

In the end, I maintain that each of us is responsible for her or his actions. O’Rourke has it right. When we begin to assess the source of our problems, the place to begin is one’s self. Look at the face on your driver’s license. Or remember Michael Jackson’s reflections on “Man in the Mirror.”

I'm starting with the man in the mirror
(Ooh!)
I'm asking him to change his ways
(Change his ways-Ooh!)
And no message could've been any clearer
If you wanna make the world a better place
(If you wanna make the world a better place)
Take a look at yourself and then make that...
(Take a look at yourself and then make that...)
Change!

Bin Laden in Hell?

One of those manufactured for the news cycle polls, conducted a few days ago by CNN asked whether Osama bin Laden was going to Hell. Sixty-one percent of those surveyed said they thought he was in hell with 24 percent saying they didn't know and 10 percent saying no, they didn't think so. Five percent of respondents did not believe in hell.

To be fair, the poll responded to an incendiary Daily News front page that screamed "Rot in Hell" alongside Bin Laden's photo, the day after his killing by Navy Seals.

Hell's getting a lot of interest these days, as a new universalism seeps into the Evangelical community. Ross Douthat, a NY Times opiner, wrote an April 24 piece about "A Case for Hell." I responded in an unpublished letter to the editor:

Full disclosure: I’ve been a Unitarian Universalist minister since 1977, and I interned at an historic Universalist church in 1976-77 in Syracuse New York, so I have a bona fide Universalist identity.

I’m amused by the contemporary brouhaha over the doctrine of universal salvation that my thoroughly liberal faith tradition resolved in the first few decades of the 19^th century. And I’m also amused by Ross Douthat’s recent op-ed piece “A Case for Hell,” in which he seems to argue that moral choice and its consequence of heaven or hell makes us more fully human.

His reasoning is thin from the perspective of traditional theology, which for the old Universalists turned on a doctrine of the Atonement along with the notion of a loving Father. For them, free will mattered and their choices responded to God’s overarching Love. Therefore, it can be argued, in contrast to Mr. Douthat’s reasoning, that choice can operate in a system of universal salvation through the agency of love.

Such nuances of theology seem so antique and irrelevant, relative to a progressing understanding of the human condition increasingly grounded in the sciences, especially neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and moral psychology. Mr. Douthat dismisses this sort of scientific materialism along with universal salvation as forms of determinism that steal our free will. He appears to be defending a higher notion of the human condition by declaring, “The doctrine of hell… assumes that our choices are real, and, indeed, that we are the choices that we make.”

Rather than resorting to time-worn theologies of universal salvation and hell to get his point across , I’d love for Mr. Douthat to deal directly with the deep issues, the notion of free will and doctrine of the human condition, from a contemporary point of view.

Actually, the question of the CNN poll offers an opportunity for serious religious conversation. Poll a group of Muslims, say in Saudi Arabia, if bin Laden is in Heaven and you'd probably have an overwhelming majority giving a resounding "yes!"

Which point of view is true in an absolute sense? Neither. Heaven and Hell are irrelevant, and such partisan doctrines only cause grief in the world, because it leads to belief that God is partisan, too.

Back in the day Bob Dylan sang, "And you don't count the dead when God's on your side."