A Critical Review of Ian A. McFarland's In Adam's Fall: A Meditation on the Christian Doctrine of Original Sin, Part 7: There are limits to our responsibility for ourselves.

I am finally approaching the conclusion of this long series of posts. In the last two posts I dealt with McFarland's argument that any person's "sinfulness" is ultimately not caused by factors external to her personality and that as a result the responsibility for human "sinfulness" rests wholly with us, not with God. My primary goal in those posts was to demonstrate that McFarland is wrong about causation and human behavior. Ultimately, a person's behavior is caused by factors external to her personality. In the next few posts I intend to address McFarland's conclusion that human beings are wholly responsible for human "sinfulness."

In support of this conclusion McFarland employs two unique arguments. He deserves credit for at least attempting to find a more satisfying account of original sin from a relatively orthodox Christian viewpoint. The first argument was examined in the previous two posts; I will not repeat my criticisms of that argument here. The second argument attempts to distinguish between human responsibility and human guilt. Responsibility is an inherent characteristic of a human being, since we have a will and so do everything we do willingly. Guilt, on the other hand, applies to an individual to the degree that she acts against God's will intentionally. This means that we can legitimately distinguish between sins for which we can be blamed and sins for which we cannot. In contrast, we cannot avoid our responsibility for all our acts, intentional or accidental, conscious or unconscious, engaged in freely or under complusion.

The way McFarland employs the distinction between guilt and responsibility is certainly unusual, but I don't think it holds up under scrutiny. Via a critique of this distinction I hope to uncover a number of other deficiences in his account of human responsibility which, taken together, undermine his argument as surely as the problems we found with some of his other premisses in earlier posts. Let's allow McFarland to speak for himself here. He summarizes this part of his argument as follows: "Using the anthropology developed in Part II, I argue that it is possible to affirm a complicity in sin shared by all human bings as personal agents who cannot disown their actions, without reducing this complicity to a matter of choice for which the agent is appropriately blamed." (p. xii) In Chapter 7 McFarland lays out this argument in some detail. Interestingly, he uses as a test case people who have been severely victimized, and argues that in their victimization people become complicit with their persecutors in a way that reveals their sinfulness and for which they must repent in order to be healed. Here he is relying on prior work by Alistair McFadyen, which he sums up as follows:

Drawing in particular on feminist studies of abuse, McFadyen observes that an integral part of the dynamic of abusive relationships is the abuser's co-opting of the child's will (e.g., by persuading her that no one will believe her if she reports the abuse, or by offering material inducements in exchange for acquiescence), enmeshing it with the will of the abuser so that the child "consents" to her abuse. The effectiveness of this process is such that to ignore the entanglement of the will of the abused in such situations by labelling them as purely victims of another's sin can actually exacerbate the deleteriaous effects of the abuse on the child's sense of self:

Certainly, the abused need to be freed of inappropriate feelings of guilt, related to inaccurate senses of their power and agency in the situation ... But a description of abuse which suggests that because they are in no way the cause of abuse (being incapable of consenting), abused children exercised no agency or will renders them as powerless, passsive objects, not subjects -- of therapeutic processes as of abuse.

As McFadyen is careful to note, the point of drawing atention to the role of the will of the abused in situations of abuse is not to make the abused child feel bad about herself (in this his conclusions are entirely consistent with Park's worry about the damaging effects of ill-considered talk about sin). On the contrary, his claim is that an Augustinian understanding of the bondage of the will may provide a conceptual framework that is therapeutically more effective than any alternative when it comes to helping heal the child's distorted sense of self.

To clarify his point McFarland observes that the engagement of an abused child's will in her abuse does not imply that she intentionally went along with it: "Because human beings are irreducibly agents, their acts -- whether as perpetrators or survivors of personal violation -- always engage their wills, but they need not for that reaon be willful. Indeed, what makes sin so catastrophic in an Augustinian perspecive is the recognition that in sin (again, whether that sin is experienced from the perspective of the one who inflicts pain or the one who endures it) we so frequently will ways that run counter to what we want." McFarland knows that his readers are likely to question whether the abused child's enmeshment in the manipulations of her abuser should be categorized as sin at all, given that she is certainly not in a position in most cases to stop her abuser or escape from the situation. Here he refers to features of Jesus's ministry that indicate Jesus preached repentance and forgiveness of sin to people who were more victim than victimizer. He identifies the precise sin that the oppressed and abused commit and for which Jesus's call to repentance is the correct remedy:

When Jesus warns against causing someone to stumble (Matt. 18:6 and pars; cf. Mal 2:8), he implies that there is a category of sin that arises as a consequence of being actively sinned against. In other words, alongside the various forms of sin that result directly in the suffering of others, there is also sin that is produced by such suffering. The Gospel texts do not provide any explication of what Jesus has in mind, but the fact that the root of the word translated as "stumbling" used in these passages (skandalizesthai) connotes a trap or snare is suggestive of putting a person in a position where her freedom is impaired. Furthermore, since Jesus' explicit object of concern in these passages is the well-being of "these little ones who believe in me," it is natural to interpret this impairment as the result of some temptation or offense (both possible translations of skandalon) that undermines a person's capacity to believe. In other words, since trust requires confidence that the person trusted is well disposed toward you, one way to cause one of the "little ones" to stumble would be through words or actions that erode their sense of themselves as children of God and full members in God's convenant community.

In other words, the sin of the oppressed is their lack of trust in God that is a consequence of their victimization. He says,

If the sin of the oppressed is understood in this way, there is nothing implausible or unjust about seeing sin as a defining feature of their identity. To be sure, the unbelief that defines their sin is different in both origin and form than [sic] the sin of the oppressor, but given the variety of ways in which the term "sin" is applied in the Bible as a whole and the New Testament in particular, there is no reason not to call it sin. Indeed, insofar as it describes the kind of broken relationship with God that is a common feature across the various sorts of acts that are called sin in Scripture, there is good reason to insist on naming it just that way:

Prophetic language that rightly names perpetrators [of oppression] is necessary but not sufficient; and it tends toward atheism whenever it calls traumatic distrust something other than sin, as though "God" were merely a background source of rightly-made moral judgments, and not a living presence calling all to repentant turning across whatever sort of brokenness interferes with an ability to love and trust God above all else. (p. 180)

This excerpt ends with a citation from a paper delivered by Amy Carr to the American Academy of Religion in 2007.

Sensing that a modern reader will still be repelled by the implication that the abused are somehow guilty for failing to trust God implicitly after having undergone oppression, McFarland reaches for some distinctions. He says,

Even at this point, however, lingering doubts remain about whether "sin" is the best term to describe the situation of those whose lack of faith is caused by having been sinned against. After all, the remedy for sin is forgiveness, and to claim that the "little ones" need to be forgiven seems to imply that they are at fault -- an inference that Jesus' assertion that they have been caused (by someone else) to stumble seems explicitly designed to block (p. 180)

McFarland responds that Jesus still preached repentance and forgiveness of sins to everyone without distinction. Clearly, then, being caused to stumble still places one in the category of sinner, according to Jesus. On the other hand, Jesus handles the victims of oppression (e.g., prostitutes) and oppressors (e.g., Pharisees) very differently, which suggests the next distinction:

One way of accounting for this difference is to recognize a distinction between accountability and blame. Especially in the case of those who have been caused to stumble, to be guilty of sin is not necessarily to be counted worthy of blame; but neither is it to lose accountability for one's actions. In short, it is possible to be accountable and yet without blame. The difference is rooted in the nature of the two concepts. Blame is a moral category; a person becomes blameworthy because one is at fault for a particular act. By contrast, accountability is an ontological category: a person is accountable simply by virtue of being an agent.

Blame attaches to active forms of personal violation; one who commits such an act is blameworthy. (p. 181)

With this distinction in hand, all McFarland has left to do is explain precisely how an abused person's lack of faith fits in the category of blameless accountability:

... No less serious, however, is the legacy of her relationship with the abuser that undermines the victim's capacity to trust others -- both God and human beings. Here -- in sharp contrast to the abused person's mistaken sense of personal blameworthiness for the act(s) of abuse -- the effect can only be countered by accentuating the individual's accountability, not for the abuse itself (that would be to return to the language of blame), but for her continued survival and healing. To receive Christ's forgiveness in this context is not to accept blame for some incident or set of incidents for which one is blameless, but rather to confess that one's very self has been received and blessed by God notwithstanding one's own active resistance to God's love. It is to be given the capacity to trust God -- and to know oneself liberated by that capacity -- in spite of one's prior refusal to give God one's trust. (pp. 181-182)

So there you have it. An abused person who is not to be blamed for distrusting God as a result of her abuse hears the good news that through Jesus Christ her sins are forgiven and repents of her distrust of God. She now trusts God and takes responsibility for advancing her healing by following his will. Put that way it sounds very encouraging at first blush. Unfortunately, in the bowels of this argument lurks in a new disguise the same monster that haunts the pages of the Old Testament. Let's pull off the disguise.

To save the impatient reader some time, here is an outline of my argument. The full argument will take an additional one or two posts to complete. First, in his distinction between responsibility as an ontological category and blame as a moral category McFarland has committed the error of the excluded middle. Responsibility is also a legal category and in legal contexts is usually associated with moral fault or blame. Second, McFarland attempts to use the concept of "unintentional sin" as found in parts of the Hebrew Bible to call into question the modern idea that responsibility should be closely related with conscious choice. I will argue that modern legal doctrine is entirely correct to relate responsibility to conscious choice and will present arguments that call into question the justice of the concept of "unintentional sin." Third, I will argue that McFarland's attempt to identify victims of oppression as sinners for their lack of faith in God while at the same time claiming that they are without blame is incoherent. Fourth, I will demonstrate that if McFarland is correct that humans are responsible for original sin, then God is even more responsible for it. Therefore, McFarland's revision of the doctrine of original sin undermines rather than preserves the fundamentals of the orthodox Christian doctrine of redemption.

McFarland's distinction between accountability (responsibility) as an ontological category and blame as a moral category fails to help his broader argument because the meaning of responsibility he uses to sustain this distinction is the not the meaning he uses elsewhere. A fuller account of how the words "accountability," "responsibility," and "liability" are used in modern legal and moral contexts will expose McFarland's confusions. As a first step we will consider "responsibility" or "accountability" as an ontological category. In order to be accountable, a being must be capable of intentional action -- my preferred language for the legitimate referent of McFarland's "will" -- and language. The being must be motivated and able to act on given motives and must be self-conscious enough of her motives and competent enough in her language ability to be able to give an account of what motives led her to act in a particular way. In this sense accountability or responsibility is an ontological category. Another way to put it is that as an ontological category responsibility or accountability refers to a set of capacities.

Next we need to remember that these capacities do not come into play if there is no one else around to whom an account can be given or from whom an account can be demanded. Accountability or responsibility assumes relationships between people and is therefore also a legal -- and moral -- category. As a legal category, responsibility or accountability or liability has two distinct meanings. On the one hand, the term can refer to a person's legal status as the object of an investigation into whether that person should have a penalty applied to her due to her alleged involvement in a criminal or civil violation. On the other hand, the terms can refer to the result of such an investigation, when that result determines the person in question was involved and should have the penalty applied to her. To put it more simply, I can be called legally "responsible," "accountable," or "liable" in a potential sense when I am under suspicion of having broken the law and in the end be called in fact legally "responsible," "accountable," or "liable" because I did break the law.

Furthermore, it is a mistake to suppose that the legal contexts in which a person is found "responsible" or "accountable" can be easily separated from morality. While it is true that in all societies some laws are designed to promote the interests of those in power and even laws that are intended to enforce moral values may only enforce the moral values of those in power, in nearly all societies the bulk of the laws are a codification of a society's values in those cases in which it feels its values should be enforced by government power. We can summarize this analysis of the legal language of responsibility as follows:

1. One can in general be ontologically responsible for one's actions and yet in a particular case not legally responsible (i.e., innocent).
2. In nearly all cases in which one is legally responsible (guilty in the eyes of the law) but not morally responsible (i.e., innocent in the eyes of some moral code), either the law is unjust or the moral code is evil. The idea that one can be guilty of crime when judged against a good law while being faultless when judged against a good moral code is extremely unlikely if not nonsensical.

While the terms "responsibility," "accountability," and "liability" are not used very often in the Bible, it is clear that they fit in the legal and moral contexts of the Bible's discussions of sin. For one thing, there is a close relationship between sin and crime. For another, the consistent Biblical teaching on sin is that it is an offense to God, a violation of his laws, incurs his judgment, and brings upon the sinner judicial penalties. We even have a linguistic equivalent to "responsibility" or liability" in the expression "his blood will be on his own head" found most frequently in Leviticus and Ezekiel for both crimes and sins. McFarland himself uses this language often enough to prove that he intends "responsibility" or "accountability" or "liability" as a legal category. At appropriate points in all sections of the book he refers to the consequences of sin as "damnation," "conviction," "condemnation." He frequently asserts that human beings, even those who are not personally at fault in a particular instance, are nevertheless "implicated" in sin. As we all know, in our society this type of expression is most often used to indicate that someone is criminally guilty. Given orthodox Christian teachings about the consequences of being convicted of sin, claiming that someone who is not personally at fault is nevertheless implicated in sin is a serious charge. In one note, McFarland mentions briefly the doctrine of hell and although he appears not to be in favor of the idea that any human beings actually end up there, he never denies the traditional view that hell is a just consequence for human sin. It takes McFarland until a note on p. 140 to inform us that his talk of being implicated in sin is "(hopefully) neutral." Sorry, Dr. McFarland, you don't get to invent your own language. In a legal context, talk of being "implicated in sin" is hardly neutral. By this point in the book, not only will the poor reader find it extremely difficult to exorcize from his mind the impression that McFarland has been using the language of implication as a form of fault-finding or blaming, he will ultimately not be able to make sense of McFarland's insistence that being implicated in sin while not being personally at fault still renders a sinner guilty and liable to the penalties imposed by God's law.

We should now consider more closely the relationship between ontological responsibility and legal responsibility. One's actual legal "responsibility," "accountability," or "liability" can be determined by ontological considerations. According to modern legal doctrine, there are certain circumstances in which a human being is not capable of giving an account of her actions. In these cases, she is not to be held legally responsible either, regardless of whether her actions happen to violate laws. Examples abound: insanity, minority and mental disability are the most common instances in which a person's capacity (i.e., responsibility in the ontological sense) is so compromised that she is no longer held legally liable for committing acts for which others would be held legally liable. The legal definition of voluntary action outlines the criteria by which our justice system typically makes decisions about a person's legal responsibility (liability) in a particular case:

To constitute a voluntary act for which a person may be held criminally liable, the act must result from the person's conscious choice. The choice need not be the product of thorough deliberation but may stem from an impulse, as long as the person is physically and mentally capable of exercising restraint and discretion consistent with the requirements of the law. A person who suddenly slips on a mountain trail and reaches out to grab the arm of a bystander to avoid falling has acted voluntarily because his mind has quickly grasped the situation and dictated a response.

Acts over which a person has no physical or mental control are not voluntary. A muscle reflex driven by the autonomic nervous system, such as a knee jerk, is not considered voluntary under the law. Acts committed during seizures, convulsions, hypnosis, or unconscious mental states also lack sufficient volition and judgment needed to impose criminal liability. For the same reasons, acts committed during episodes of sleepwalking are not considered voluntary.

On the other hand, acts that are not fully the result of independent will but are committed with extreme indifference to human life are usually treated as voluntary. A conscious person who points a loaded gun at another, for example, will typically be held liable for any harm that results from its accidental discharge because the act of brandishing a loaded gun is treated as a voluntary choice manifesting a recklessness toward the safety of others. Similarly, an intoxicated person who passes out behind the wheel of a car cannot escape liability for any criminal acts that ensue, because they followed from the voluntary acts of drinking and driving. Persons who have a history of seizures, fainting spells, or blackouts may be held responsible for criminal acts that result during such episodes if a court finds that reasonable precautions could have been taken to avoid the dangers created by these physical and mental conditions.

Except for the last paragraph, this definition fits remarkably well with McFarland's summary of what he calls the modern consumer culture's view of responsibility, which he criticizes as too closely tied to the idea of autonomous, conscious choice.

That close fit exposes the superficiality of McFarland's analysis. According to him, accountability for one's actions is a fixed characteristic of being human. Modern legal doctrine denies this on the entirely reasonable basis that in some circumstances a human being cannot account for her actions. This view of human ontology has prima facie plausibility for the simple reason that we all know there are huge swaths of our lives (e.g., nearly the entirety of the time we spend sleeping) for which we cannot give any detailed account. The burden of proof to the contrary lies with McFarland. As I argued in an earlier post, McFarland's attempts to link activities such as sweating to the "will" fail. In fact, nothing in his argument in favor of viewing sweating as a willed act rules out other bodily events such as "acts committed during seizures, convulsions, hypnosis, or unconscious mental states." In all these cases, McFarland believes we are potentially "responsible" for our acts and so, if the acts happen to harm our relationship to God or neighbor, we are also actually responsible, i.e., guilty. To illustrate the foolishness of this account of responsibility, consider this short example.

George, is a married man with three children. His wife is a homemaker. Two of his children are identical twins and autistic. One night George quite unexpectedly has a heart attack in his sleep. His wife awakens to find George unresponsive and calls 911. George is revived by the EMTs who arrive on the scene and is rushed to the hospital, where he is admitted for observation. After a visit from the attending physician, George's wife begins complaining bitterly to George. If she had not awakened at just the right time, George would have died, leaving her to care for the children by herself and leaving the children without a father to provide for their needs. How could he abandon the family to such a catastrophe? While one can sympathize with George's wife, her accusations are obviously ridiculous. What could George possibly say to account for his heart attack? Is sweating a different kind of human activity from having a heart attack? In terms of intentionality, not really. If McFarland wants to deny that heart attacks are "willed," then neither is sweating or any other human action that takes place under the radar of consciousness. Since his account of responsibility depends on the link between "willed" activity and responsibility, it would appear that his view is caught in an irresolvable dilemma. McFarland attempts to wriggle out of this dilemma (unconsciously, I presume) by using "responsbility" in the sense of a settled legal declaration of guilt in cases in which he wants to stress the inevitability of sin or the justice of God's condemnation and then using it in the sense of a mere capacity to give an answer when he wants to stress the distinction between responsibility and moral fault.

In his early discussion of the Biblical material relating to sin language, McFarland advances Biblical teachings on "unintentional sin" to challenge the modern view that responsibility for our actions can be limited by intentionality or "conscious choice." He argues that "sin" is defined as "lawlessness," that someone who breaks God's laws unintentionally can be "convicted of sin," that those who committed "unintentional sins" were required to perform ritual expiation (pp. 6-8). All of this legal language should have made McFarland reflect back on the cogency of the concept of "unintentional sin." Instead, he swallows the Levitical conception whole and attempts to use it against modern the modern legal doctrine.

How much credit should we give to this ancient Hebrew conception of "unintentional sin" in the Mosaic law? First of all, we need to be clear about what counted as "unintentional sin." McFarland mentions specifically the cases of someone who fails to testify in a court of law about a matter with which she is familiar and someone who makes a "rash" vow. As McFarland points out, these sins are not unintentional in the sense that the person was unaware of what the law required. Instead, Leviticus says that the person did not know what she was doing at the time she did it. Somehow, the implications of her act escaped her until later on (pp. 6-7 and notes). Leviticus 5 also specifies that unknowing contact with anything that renders one unclean incurs guilt and requires a sin offering to obtain forgiveness (Lev. 5:1-6). Under what circumstances would a person come in contact with something that renders one unclean and not realize it until later? For a man, a nocturnal emission. For a woman, a period while asleep. Many other examples come to mind.

The similarities of these cases to the example of poor George above should have given McFarland pause. If the root of sin is hostility to God or unwillingness to trust him, how does a bodily act that takes place while one is asleep count as sin? How would rightly-ordered desires prevent someone from having a nocturnal emission or a period in her sleep? McFarland tells us that the sinlessness of Jesus demonstrates that sinfulness is not a necessary consequence of bodily existence in this world. Sinfulness is not caused by our bodily "fallenness." Does this mean, then, that Jesus could not have had a nocturnal emission, and that no biological modifications were needed in order for this to happen? McFarland could start backpedaling here. Nocturnal emissions are not the type of "sin" that renders one liable to God's judgment. I would agree with this move completely and then press McFarland to apply that conclusion to his evaluation of the concept of "unintentional sin." Why should a person who experiences one of these events be penalized with the requirement to make a sacrifice? Why should the priests get the leftovers of the offering? This whole arrangement looks like a scheme to provide more economic security to the priesthood. The "sin" language is simply a theological lever to use against a potentially reluctant audience. "Hey, if one of these events happens to you, you are guilty. God's wrath will fall on you unless you make a sacrifice."

In case McFarland has forgotten, let us remind him that the same law code systematically deprived women of equal protection and institutionalized slavery, trial by ordeal, genocide, and trans-generational vengeance. Most of this McFarland passes over in silence. Where he bothers to mention it, he fails miserably to deal with it responsibly. He makes a brief comment about Saul's failure to carry out the command to exterminate the Amalekites as an instance of sin without any apparent recognition that the entire narrative in 1 Samuel 15 is written to bury the question of the morality of the divine command in a pile of anti-Saulide propaganda. He attempts a weak interpretation of the confession that Yahweh visits the sins of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation -- it refers to the natural and unavoidable consequences of a parent's misbehavior on his descendants (p. 140) -- despite the abundant evidence in the Hebrew Bible that Israel was required to take action against the descendants of sinners when commanded to do so by Yahweh. Yes, the law told human judges that they were not allowed to punish children for the sins of the fathers and vice versa. But this is best explained as a restriction meant to preserve the society from plunging into a bloodbath of mutual vengeance. "Yahweh" reserved the right to impose trans-generational punishments to himself, or, more precisely, to his supposed representatives, i.e., the prophets and the priests. It was up to Yahweh to decide when bloodbaths were appropriate. How convenient.

With my analysis in mind, consider this part of McFarland's summary: "... the Old Testament suggests that sin be identified in terms of the character and quality of one's relationships with God and neighbor. One can, correspondingly, be convicted of sin when one's action damages those relationships, even where that damage was not freely chosen." (p. 7) This is just nuts. If something that happens while I am asleep hurts my relationship with Yahweh, it can only be because Yahweh is an unjust, unreasonable, and merciless monster. If God really had the type of character that McFarland's account of responsibility implies, there would be no relationship with him worth preserving. All of this evidence points one way: the ancient concept of "unintentional sin" is unjust and should be rejected. We are not responsible for unintentional acts.

There is much more to say in criticism of McFarland's account of responsibility, but it will have to wait for another post.

A Critical Review of Ian A. McFarland's In Adam's Fall: A Meditation on the Christian Doctrine of Original Sin, Part 6: Human desire is caused by a set of non-personal factors.

This post is a continuation of an argument I began here. In that post I laid out McFarland's argument that human "sinfulness" is not caused by our natural condition as created by God and began to critique it by questioning his use of a distinction between "nature" and "hypostasis." In this post I will turn to his presentation of cause/effect and show that the type of cause/effect relationship he says does not apply to the relationship between our natures and our character as individuals is also not the type of cause/effect relationship scientists actually posit between them. In other words, although he apparently intends to correct any and all arguments that external factors cause our desires and/or behaviors he ends up passing right over the most convincing arguments. Second, McFarland employs the case of Jesus Christ's "will" to show that human nature cannot cause us to sin because Jesus had a nature just as damaged as ours yet he did not. This argument trades on a basic misunderstanding of multi-factor causation and so fails to accomplish its intended purpose.

Both of McFarland's arguments share a basic misrepresentation of what scientists mean by causality in the case of complex biological systems like human beings. Most of these passages relate to the traditional orthodox Protestant views of original sin as a result of the sin of Adam. In the context of pointing out that modern biology has made the doctrine of monogenesis highly doubtful, he adds, "This inconsistency with the best current scientific knowledge, however, is itself rooted in their common -- and theologically problematic -- commitment to an explanatory framework of cause and effect: Adam sinned (cause) and therefore all humanity is burdened with original sin (effect)." (p. 153) McFarland is entirely correct about this flaw in the traditional Federalist and Realist views of original sin. Modern theories of human behavior agree with this criticism in the sense that one person's actions do not directly, by themselves, cause another person's actions. In fact, the same can be said of almost any biological organism. All external stimuli get filtered through internal chemical and sensory mechanisms, and the combination of prior internal states and internal processing of external stimuli are the actual, direct causal factors for subsequent behavior. Had McFarland limited his criticism of the use of cause/effect categories to its use in traditional accounts of original sin, he could have come out OK. But, as I pointed out in my previous post, McFarland is haunted -- correctly -- by the fear that admitting cause/effect categories into a discussion of the origin of human sin will lead to the conclusion that God created us sinners, and since his commitment to traditional orthodoxy forbids this conclusion, he has contracted a severe allergy to causation.

We can see this in the way that he transfers the idea of sin being the effect of a single, discrete cause from the case of traditional theories of original sin to any theory that asserts human behavior is caused by external factors, no matter how sophisticated its view of causation. Consider this statement:

...because those distorted desires are also ineluctably within us, sin's being "original" does not preclude it being ours. We can, of course, reason that we received our wills in this damaged state as part of our natures, and thus that we "inheritied" them from our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents and so on, back up the human family tree. But because the will is the faculty in and through which I recognize my own agency, I can never coherently dissociate any defect in my willing from my agency. Consequently, "Adam" can only be regarded as the first in a series of sinners and not as the unique "cause" of subsequent human sin. The language of causation is simply inadequate here: original sin is not a force that radiates forward or outawrd from a single point in a manner that would justify blaming our sinfulness on others."

In one sense, McFarland is right; we can't deny that we have desires that we know are bad and harmful and that we often act on them. Knowing that certainly rules out "blaming our sinfulness on others." On the other hand, it in no way rules out that our actions and desires are caused and that one key factor is our genetic inheritance. Modern theories never claim that the scientific equivalent of "original sin" radiates out from a single point. McFarland uses this simple, single-cause analogy elsewhere as well. In one place he uses billiard balls hitting each other as an example of how causation is inedequate to explain the relationship between "damage" to nature and human sinfulness. In another place, he says,

This point may be illustrated by contrasting two models of the damaged will. The first conceives it on analogy with a physical wound that I can isolate as a well-defined feature of my being with an assignable, external cause.[emphasis mine] Where this imagery prevails, original sin is fundamentally an individual affliction, however widespread it may be: others may have it, but that does not bear materially on my sin, except in the very restricted sense that it was caused by a common ancestor. In the second, original sin is conceived more along the lines of the kind of damage that afflict the members of a radically co-dependent household. Here every individual's sin is intimately bound up with others' (in the sense that it can only be understood by reference to what everyone else is doing in the system), and yet the unity of the system is such as to preclude isolating any one member as the unique "cause" of anyone else's sin, let alone the oldest member of the family as the cause of everyone else's sin (even though that person will have been temporally the first sinner). It will not do to make any one person the scapegoat: none is a sinner apart from the others -- and none can be healed fully apart from the others. (p. 159)

In this quote McFarland is guilty of the fallacy of the excluded middle. What is worse, he clearly has not kept up with psychological research. In fact, most serious psychologists would argue that the desires and behaviors of members of a radically co-dependent household are caused, just not caused directly by the behavior of the other members. If the reader doubts this, a few minutes worth of Google searches for "co-dependency and causation" should clear things up. What McFarland left out completely is the view, not just that we have genetic predispositions that give rise to "sinful" behaviors, but that these predispositions interact with our environment, both physical and social, and other features of our developing body and personality in highly complex ways that in total fully account for our resulting behavior. In regard to causation we are not billiard balls. We are massively-complex biological feedback loops. As a result, psychologists and neurologists are often reserved about the use of cause/effect language when studying the relationship between various factors that affect human behavior. It is much easier to find correlations than cause/effect relationships. But psychologists use the language of correlation as a matter of caution. When research provides sufficient evidence for it, psychologists use the language of causation. For McFarland, the exclusive use of "correlation" to describe the relationship between a damaged nature and a sinful individual is the result of a prior theological commitment to avoid at all costs the conclusion that God made us sinners, no matter what the evidence to the contrary might suggest. This may seem unfair to him, but how else are we to explain that he provides nothing more than cursory and uninformed arguments against modern theories of human behavior?

As I mentioned above McFarland's other major argument against causation is the case of Jesus. He spends chapter 5 of his book arguing that Jesus's human nature included a "fallen will," the traditional confession that Jesus was sinless is valid, and the reason Jesus was sinless despite having a "fallen will" is that his "hypostasis" was the Second Person of the Trinity. Since Jesus is the divine Son, the sinlessness of his divine nature overrules his fallen will. As a human, he was fully exposed to the love and knowledge of God and so followed God's will perfectly at every point. This made him uniquely unable to sin, unlike the rest of the human race, which is unable not to sin.

McFarland is notably cagey about relating this argument directly to the relationship between human nature and individual character. He does not assert explicitly that the case of Jesus rules out a causal relationship until this passage late in the book:

In light of this proposal, it might seem to follow that original sin is simply a way of referring to the effects of the fall as it applies to the will in particular, since the fallenness of all the other components of human nature does not (and, indeed, cannot) produce sin apart from the will. But if (as argued in Chapter 5) Christ assumed a fallen nature and yet was free from all sin, this interpretation evidently cannot be accepted. To do so would be to conflate nature and hypostasis, as though the quality of the latter were determined [emphasis mine] by the characteristics of the former. ... Consequently, though it is right to speak of human desires as distorted by virtue of a vitium inherent in postlapsarian human nature, this cannot be understood as a causal explanation of why fallen human beings are in fact sinners. (p. 184)

A sceptic could ask McFarland for evidence that the historical Jesus possessed a divine nature of the type orthodox Christianity posits. She could also point out that the incomprehensibility of a union of two natures with contradictory characteristics in the same individual makes it impossible for us to come up with a sensible account of such a person's internal states.

As it turns out, there is no need for such scepticism in order to see the flaw in McFarland's argument. In both customary usage and technical language just about everyone besides McFarland would use the language of causation to explain the difference between the case of Jesus and the case of other human beings when it comes to sin. Jesus was not able to sin because the force of his knowledge of God's will so moved his human nature that he invariably desired to follow it more than anything else. In terms of the rest of humanity, that has to mean that his internal experience of the qualities of the divine character continuously stimulated brain circuitry in such a way that his emotional state and patterns of thought always led directly to actions in accord with the will of the Father. This is a causal relationship, pure and simple. To generalize, human behavior is the result of multi-factor causation. In the case of Jesus, McFarland introduces a dominating factor that is absent for all other human beings, namely Jesus's divine nature. Remove that dominating factor and the remaining factors interact as they would otherwise, leading to a different effect. It is ridiculous to assert that the changed effect in the presence of the dominating factor proves that there is no cause/effect relationship between the effect and any of the factors. If I get rid of strep throat by taking an antibiotic, I can't then claim that bacteria do not cause strep throat.

Finally, McFarland's theory is apparently not very convincing even to him. Despite his rejection of every variant of the theory of an historical fall, he ends up using language that only makes sense if some kind of historical fall has taken place or does take place. Consider this: "As created, the will is that feature of human nature by which human beings are freely (i.e., as self-conscious agents) empowered to desire God. When the will is damaged, therefore, its desire is no longer for God -- and desire that is not oriented to God is by definition sinful." (p. 183) Really, "no longer?" When did/does this damage take place? Since he is talking about "damage" he is referring to human nature, not an individual human hypostasis, meaning that something else besides God's creation damaged human nature. Who or what did it? What evidence does McFarland have that any human being -- Jesus Christ excepted, as McFarland so often puts it -- ever exhibited a desire for the Trinitarian God of orthodox Christianity above all else without being explicitly taught to do so? While there may be a genetic component to religiosity, there is no genetic component to Christian faith. We are not born with a desire for God above all else and there is no good evidence anywhere to suppose that any previous human beings were born with such a desire.

What conclusions can we draw? First, assuming that that the God of Christian orthodoxy exists and evolution is true, God created human beings to be sinners. It is true that God can't commit sins for his human creations, but he certainly did arrange for everything necessary to ensure that they would sin. He certainly had the time and power to produce a different outcome, and he didn't. The only reasonable conclusion is that the state of humanity and progress of human history as we have seen it so far is precisely what God wanted. See upcoming posts for the implications of this conclusion for McFarland's account of human responsibility. There are several alternative views that could avoid this conclusion. Most of these views deny something about God that orthodox Christianity asserts, such as his role in the creation of the universe, his sovereign control over it, his goodness (in any sense that we would normally use the word), his personhood, or his existence. Adopting any of these views is anathema to most Christians. Consequently, they regard evolution as the source of the trouble and reject it as inherently incompatible with Christian faith. Obviously, they would not agree with McFarland's use of the nature/"hypostasis" distinction to separate human sinfulness from the web of cause/effect. Second, given that evolution is so well supported by existing evidence and that human "sinfulness" is caused by a combination of factors external to human self-consciousness, orthodox Christianity is false, and modifications around the edges will not be sufficient to save it. If McFarland truly wishes to bring Christian faith closer to the truth, he will need to set aside the pruning shears and get out his axe.

McFarland, if he ever responds to this sort of criticism, is likely to object that my view is inconsistent with our intuitive awareness that we are responsible for our actions. If I am right, McFarland will object, human beings can't be held accountable. This is a serious objection and needs to be addressed. The next set of posts will answer this objection in the context of a larger examination of McFarland's account of human responsibility and his lack of an account of divine responsibility.

One other brief note about causal factors for human behavior. While the view I am advocating for is deterministic, it is not a secularized version of the doctrine of "total depravity." The causes of human behavior are multiple, complex, and operate at various levels. For instance, for all we know some of our thoughts and moods are stimulated, even if ever so briefly, by "random" events at the biochemical or even quantum level. There is no overarching psychological evil genie that twists every firing neuron pattern to yield results only matching its design specs. Creativity is one key phenomenon in support of this view. In contrast, McFarland asserts that while we may be able to control specific behaviors we have no control over our ability to commit sin. Since the root of sin is disordered desire and we cannot control our desires, absolutely everything we do is sinful. This is really just one more example of orthodox Christians holding human beings to unrealistic and impossible standards (as mentioned above, we have no good reason to suppose that the type of desire for God that McFarland describes as true to our created nature ever did or could evolve in the environments in which our pre-human ancestors lived) in order to promote their scheme of a God justified in condemning us all, given a free pass to rage through history murdering and mauling -- we deserve worse than anything we've seen yet --, and punishing his own Son for our "sins" and demanding that we believe in him or else. Wait until you see how McFarland defends this pernicious bullying in his account of human responsibility. Don't miss it!

A Critical Review of Ian A. McFarland's In Adam's Fall: A Meditation on the Christian Doctrine of Original Sin, Part 5: Misleading distinctions

This is the fifth post in a series. Please use the navigation guide if you want to check out previous posts. In this post we will explore the relationships between human nature, the individual, desire, and causation. This may seem like an odd combination of topics, but we must examine them together in order to evaluate a key argument of McFarland's properly.

In the previous post I laid out what I believe is a more adequate account of human desire than that presented in McFarland's book. The final implication of that account is that an individual human's desires are caused by complex interactions between her genes, environment, development, perceptions, and prior brain and body states. McFarland, on the other hand, attempts to detach human "willing" and desire from the web of cause/effect. In fact, this is one of the key goals of the book. If he fails, his entire theory crashes to the ground. In this post I intend to prove that he fails, but first we must understand his argument more precisely.

Throughout the book McFarland describes the current human condition as "fallen." It needs to be pointed out immediately this and related expressions are nothing more than a dead holdover of traditional theological language. McFarland does not believe in an historical fall, collective or individual, even though he knows that by giving up on an historical fall he is boxing himself into a tight corner. As he points out, traditional theology about the fall served an important theodical purpose, namely, it protected God from the charge that he made us sinners. According to the traditional approach, God created us good, but we ended up as sinners due to a primordial act of sin by our first parents. Even though we all now sin because we are sinners, we all ended up as sinners because at one point a non-sinner committed the first sin and by some mechanism we all share in the resulting guilt, alienation from God, corruption of character, suffering, and death. McFarland rejects this approach. He raises objections against every variant of the theory of an historical fall. Traditional views that original sin is the result of an act of "Adam" and/or "Eve's" are made unbelievable by modern discoveries about evolution and the internal inconsistencies of each variant approach (pp. 35-39, 148-153). His criticism of these views strikes not only against many traditional theologies but also against a straightforward reading of Biblical texts such as Genesis 2-3 and Romans 5. He proposes no alternative reading of the texts or doctrine of Scripture. I find that odd, given that he often treats Biblical texts elsewhere in the book with the respect -- or naivete -- of a fundamentalist. Be that as it may, he has no more sympathy for modern theories of original sin that suggest the "fall" is an individual experience brought about by nature and/or nurture. These fall short either because they fail to take account of the universality and inevitability of sin or end up identifying the created order as the source of human sinfulness. (See especially pp. 39-48, as well as 144, 154). Although he does not say so explicitly, it is fairly clear from his failure to advance an alternative view of an historical fall that he believes there never was a time when human beings, individually or collectively, were not sinners. Therefore, on McFarland's theory human beings are not "fallen," strictly speaking, because there was nothing to "fall" from. He is well aware that taking this approach appears to expose him even more to the criticism that his theory of original sin makes God the origin of human sinfulness, as in, we sin because God created us sinners. McFarland spends the better part of chapters 4-6 advancing an argument to resist this conclusion.

Here I will try my level best to give a fair outline of his argument. It starts with a three-sided distinction between "nature" and "hypostasis." They differ as type to example, innate characteristics to developed character, and structure to mode. Human nature is that set of characteristics that all human beings share in common, whereas hypostasis refers to each human being's individuality, that which sets her apart from every other human being, that which makes her an "I." Human nature refers to that set of qualities with which we are born and so have no role in producing or developing ourselves, whereas "hypostasis" refers to the individual as an agent who plays an active role in everything she experiences. Finally, nature refers to the invariant structure of each individual being's bodily and psychic existence, whereas "hypostasis" refers to a specific way of expressing that nature, much as each chemical element has a (relatively) invariant atomic structure but can exist in various states depending on the temperature of its immediate surroundings. The facility or capacity to act on desires, which we commonly call "will" is part of human nature. But it is also that part of human nature that expresses each person's individuality and by which each of us comes to own and take responsibility for our actions. In regard to original sin, "damage" is applicable to human nature but "sinfulness" is only applicable to a human person ("hypostasis"). In other words our human nature is "damaged" in such a way that when an individual with this damaged nature exercises her will, she inevitably commits sin. But it is wrong to conclude that damage to human nature causes an individual to sin. Rather, since the individual has a will her acts are voluntary. Even though she cannot help but sin, all her sins are performed willingly and therefore she must take responsibility for them. To put it another way, humans act wrongly because our desires are perverse, and our desires are perverse because we are the kinds of people who have perverse desires, namely sinners. How we came to have these perverse desires is a mystery, an unanswerable question that is really beside the point anyway. Since we are responsible for our own deeds, we can never fully explain them by reference to any combination of external factors. Ultimately, each of us does what she does because she wants to do it.

McFarland repeats this argument in whole or in part on pp. 126-131, 144-147, 154-161, and 184-187. Each of these sections is meant to stress a specific part of his overall argument and adds some detailed observations in support of his position, especially the middle two sections. Also, it is important to note that McFarland's overall framework is derived from his analysis of the implications of the dyothelite Christology of the third Council of Constantinople as expounded by Maximus the Confessor. He argues that Jesus himself had a fallen human nature and yet was sinless because as an individual (his "hypostasis") he was none other than the second person of the Trinity. Being at once God and human, his human will was "deified" or "glorified" (perfected by direct exposure to the fullness of God) and so conformed perfectly to the divine will. McFarland uses this framework to separate "damage" to human nature from "sin" by human individuals. Jesus was as damaged as we are, yet he committed no sin. Therefore, there is no causal relationship between the damaged nature and the sinful individual. Of course, we are not divine persons and do not have "deified" wills. Lacking that direct communion with God we as individuals express what is in our damaged human nature and so we inevitably sin (See chapters 4 and 5).

I have much to say in criticism of this argument, but first I would like to give McFarland a chance to explain himself in some detail. Here is one version of McFarland's argument in full. It occurs in the context of his discussion of Jesus Christ's having a deified human will:

In order to see how this understanding of Christ's person does not fall into a Docetism according to which his material existence was only a sort of divine play-acting, it is necessary to attend to the peculiarity of the will among all the components of human nature. The deification of the body involves transformation of its physical properties in order to render it incapable of suffering and death. By contrast (and as Maximus takes pains to insist), to speak of Christ's will as deified does not imply any such structural alteration: as a piece of human nature, the deified will differs from the non-deified will only in its relationship to God (i.e., in its mode of operation). This difference reflects the ontologically odd status of the will as the feature of human nature that gives this nature a kind of open-ended indeterminacy. This is not because our wills allow us to determine or to override our natures. To argue that way would be precisely to succumb to the Pelagian understanding of the will as some sort of ontological reserve standing over against human nature rather than as part of it. The will is not a power we have over our natures (since we will what we desire, and we do not control what we desire), but rather identifies the fact that we live out our nature as agents who (and to be an agent is precisely to be a "who") are always implicated in our nature in a way that makes it impossible to view it as simply given. In short, human nature's open-endedness is a function of the fact that a human being is someone rather than something, and thus not adequately or fully described in terms of what she is.

The phenomenon of sin further displays the ontological oddity of the will. As both Maximus and Thomas agree, human beings hunger, grow tired, experience fear in the face of danger, and the like because these phenomena are natural consequences of material embodiment that cannot be altered except by the wholesale transformation of human bodies through the resurrection. They are, in other words, ontologically determinate features of human being under conditions of earthly existence prior to glory and, as such, constitute the determinate "whatness" of our nature in time and space. By contrast (and following the Augustinian insight that human willing follows desire), the reason human beings sin is that their desires are perverse. But when it comes to explaining why those desires are perverse, the only answer that can be given is, "Because we are sinners" -- that is, in terms of the "whoness" (or, in the language of classical theology, the individual hypostasis) -- that is the mark of a created nature with a will. In this way (and as a further example of the correlation of will with human nature's open-endedness), the will, as that aspect of my nature (i.e., my whatness) where my status as agent (i.e., my whoness) is revealed, discloses a limit on all attempts to account for my being solely in terms of what I am (i.e., my nature). (pp. 126-127)

This excerpt illustrates two fundamental problems with McFarland's argument. First, with his distinction between "nature" and "hypostasis" he employs a false conception of individuation. Second, his attempts to exempt "willing" human action from the web of cause/effect -- outside of a person's own inner desires -- all fail. I will address the first problem in the rest of this post and tackle the second in my next post.

McFarland tells us that "nature" and "hypostasis" are "Chalcedonian categories," which I guess means that he intends the terms in accordance with their use by the theologians of that and immediately following generations. (For those who may not know, the Council of Chalcedon was a church council formed to settle a dispute over the relation between the divinity and humanity of Jesus. It issued a confession in 451 CE. that Jesus has both a divine and human nature united in one "hypostasis" (person) without mixture or compromise of the attributes of either nature.) I do not have enough knowledge of how 4th and 5th century theologians used these terms (more precisely their Greek and Latin equivalents) to make any comments about that. Instead, given that McFarland is working with concepts that arise in a very unfamiliar intellectual environment, I will try to map his use of them to what appear to me to be equivalent modern concepts employed in the sciences and see how his argument holds up under that light. We can start by acknowledging that each of McFarland's distinctions has at least some validity. The genetic code all humans are born with marks us out as a distinct species and structures our bodies and minds. This common code accounts for the the common set of characteristics that gets the label "human nature." But we are also born with variations in our genetic code that distinguish us from other human beings, some of which we may share with others, such as "females," "pygmies," and "people carrying the recessive gene for type 1 diabetes." As we add up these genetic variations in the genome of a single human being, the number of others who share the same combination of variations shrinks until we have a list of variations so specific that it matches only one human being. Clearly, then, each of us is born not just with a given human nature, but with a nature specific to ourselves. Some of these variations are known or very likely to be a major or even the dominant or sole factor in the development of a characteristic that will profoundly shape our personality and relationships without dramatic post-natal inverventions. Clinical depression and psychopathic personality come to mind almost immediately. This is hardly news and wouldn't need to be mentioned except that McFarland underplays it.

Compare this to the following statement found on p. 187:

Hypostasis is irreducible to nature, as the mode (tropos) in which the nature subsists. In this context, it is important to remember that the constitutive features of human nature (whatever these may be supposed to include) are by definition those features that all human beings have in common. As that dimension of human being that is irreducible to nature, hypostasis is an anomalous category: all human beings are hypostases, yet because the hypostasis refers precisely to the distinctiveness of each individual human being, it is misleading to speak of it as something common to all human beings. On the contrary, it refers to that which cannot be defined (e.g., in terms of its properties or capacities), but only named as an unrepeatable particular.

Here McFarland's distinctions come into conflict with one another. If "nature" is what each of us is born with, then it cannot be defined merely as "human nature," because that is just an abstraction for the characteristics we share in common. Since we are also born with characteristics that distinguish us from other humans, these inborn characteristics must be ... part of our "hypostasis?" But then, how can McFarland say the hypostasis is indefinable? OK, then, these unique inborn characteristics must be part of our nature, which conforms with my observations above. McFarland errs, then, by failing to account for the specificity of our inborn nature.

Furthermore, McFarland's description of human nature as "open-ended" in the first quote above is problematic. This characterization is based on a passage earlier in the book in which he reflects on the nature of Jesus's obedience to the will of God expressed in his prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, "not my will but yours be done." On pp. 98-99 he says, "...Maximus' answer rests on making a distinction between what is natural to human will (in this case, avoidance of death) and the movement of the same will inasmuch as it is 'wholly deified' and thus fixed immovably on God. ...the movement from rejection of the cup to its acceptance illustrates a progression from human nature as it operates according to its own powers and nature that, as enabled to transcend those powers through grace, fulfils [sic] the particular calling of the individual within God's wider plan for deified humanity." McFarland concludes from Maximus' interpretation that via the will's obedience to God's call, an individual human being can perform acts that go beyond her natural capacities (i.e., without God's grace she would never do them.) In that sense, human nature is "open-ended." And if a person can go beyond her natural capacities in obedience to the call of God, we cannot say that human nature causes our behavior. Let's leave aside for the moment doubts about the historical veracity of the temptation in the garden and focus on Maximus's claim that Jesus's willingness to go to his death went beyond the natural capacities of human beings. How does he know this? Given the number of people over the course of human history who have gone to their deaths willingly to save others' lives or in defense of an ideal, it seems that McFarland will have to engage in some special pleading to defend Maximus's definition of human nature. Of course, McFarland can always claim that all these instances were in response to the action of God's gracious calling. On what basis can he make this claim?

What can we say about our "hypostases?" Obviously a great deal, and most of us are more than happy to elaborate! Given the fact that each of us is born to a specific pair of human parents at a specific time and place and go on to trace a unique history on the universe in which we live, it is hard to see how any of us "cannot be defined." On the contrary, we would need a massive library to contain a complete description of a single human being. Of course, no human being has ever been fully defined in this way; it is simply beyond our capabilities. McFarland could point out that if we live eternally it will be impossible to ever complete the definition anyway. But I don't think that's what McFarland had in mind in the first place. He really needs an indefinable "hypostasis," because indefinable is also indeterminate, i.e., outside the realm of cause/effect. This is in contrast with the "determinate 'whatness' of our nature" that he mentions in the first quote above and in comparison with the "open-endedness" due to our having a "will." By the way, on p. 139, note 52, McFarland tells us that "hypostasis" refers to "the whole human being, body and soul," not just the aspects of a human being that make her unique. I bring this up merely to illustrate that in order to keep the formation and exercise of individual character clear of cause/effect relationships with the rest of the natural world McFarland can't hew consistently to his own definitions.

What else can we say about our "hypostases?" Being an individual human being does not, in and of itself, implicate one's "will" in everything that happens to her. This is an implication of the fact that the fundamental distinguishing mark of an individual is her body. This is also so obvious that it hardly needs mentioning, except that McFarland downplays it. On p. 106 he acknowledges that our individuality is also marked out by our bodies (and minds), but this observation bears no fruit in his broader argument. McFarland might say in response that he focuses on the "will" because it marks each of us out as an individual agent, which is critical for his argument about our responsibility for "original sin." Trouble is, he ends up confusing individual experience with individual responsibility. To illustrate, consider this more correct analysis of McFarland's sweating example. When I say, "I am sweating" I am not implicitly confessing a crime, even if as a result I feel embarassed or guilty. Rather, I am simply acknowledging that the body that is sweating is the same body that noticed the sweating. I own my sweating because the sweat droplets formed on my skin, and as they cooled and dropped the temperature on my skin, they kicked off nervous impulses that reached my brain and generated the sensuous experience of coolness and wetness which I virtually instantaneously recognize as a part of the experience of my body's sweating. When other bodies sweat, my body, i.e., I, do not have these experiences. Not only is my body what I am, without remainder -- to borrow a phrase that appears later in McFarland's book -- it is also for the most part who I am. My thoughts are mine because they occur in my brain, which is located in my head. When other people think, I do not experience their thoughts as occurring in my head, and so on. None of this self-identifying language logically implies that I, that is, my body, desires or "wills" to have these experiences, even experiences I, that is, my body, actively contributed to having. Furthermore, this conclusion is not only not compromised by phenomena such as split personality or the "alien hand" syndrome experienced by some individuals with brain injuries, they underscore it. We know that our experience of a unified consciousness, an "I," is not only more fragile than our bodies but can and has been manipulated and disrupted by brain injuries, sickness, medications, and artificial stimulation. When a person experiencing "alien hand" syndrome sees her hand moving without consciously intending to make it move, she does not say, "That's not my hand." She says, "Someone else is moving my hand!" McFarland may object that the physical damage to such an individual's brain says nothing about the situation of the "will" in a normal individual, but I respectfully disagree. For one thing the experience of this type of person simply underlines the primacy of body awareness for our sense of self. Second, the experience of alien hand is a "canary in the coal mine" type of phenomenon. How many other activities in which we are engaged appear to our conscious minds to be motivated by some conscious desire or decision but in fact are motivated by an entirely unconscious process?

It is ironic that McFarland works so hard to separate "hypostasis" from causality; when you think of it, of all the places to look for cause/effect activity the first place we would pick is a concrete situation. After all, no abstract concept causes another abstract concept to do anything. Causation takes place on the level of individual real objects in the world, not between concepts in our brains, or at least that is what we intend by the language. To speak of causation operating on the level of human nature but not on the level of an "hypostasis" is absurd. In response McFarland may concede the point when it comes to events affecting an individual's body, but claim that at the core of her personality the fact that she has a "will" prevents us from ascribing her behavior solely to external causes. Part of McFarland's justification for this claim is his view that humans are basically "rational," which I refuted here. The other key part of this claim is an argument from human experience. McFarland states it most clearly and succinctly here: "... because the will is the faculty in and through which I recognize my own agency, I can never coherently dissociate any defect in my willing from my agency." (p. 160) Since the "will" is intimately linked to desire, it further follows that I can't dissociate any defect in my desires from my agency. Finally, this experience of agency rules out the possibility that any of my desires can be caused exclusively by factors external to my "will." McFarland never justifies this last claim. It is true that our experience of ourselves as agents leads many of us to conclude that external causes cannot fully account for our behavior/desires, etc, but our experience could be misleading. I already suggested the evolutionary value of this belief; that in no way implies that it is a correct belief. We are not self-conscious all the way down. As McFarland himself acknowledges, it is adaptive for us not to have exhaustive knowledge of our own body's functioning. Our own motives are also partly hidden from us. What is more, it is not just our motives that are partly hidden from us; it is also the bodily and external events that give rise to these motives that are often at least partly hidden from us. For that reason, our experience of ourselves as agents is not a sufficient basis upon which to rule out that our desires, even those that we consciously experience and base our decisions upon, are caused by one or more non-personal factors.

Pardon me, reader, for going on at such length on this issue. In the next post we will examine McFarland's account of causation in detail.

A Critical Review of Ian A. McFarland's In Adam's Fall: A Meditation on the Christian Doctrine of Original Sin, Part 4. A better account of human desire.

For the fourth post in this series we will begin an examination in some detail Dr. McFarland's concept of "desire" and how it relates to the "will." The previous posts can be found here, here, and here. At several points in the book McFarland advocates for the proposition that "the will follows desire." In the last post I pointed out that "will" is an analytically useless concept; while the same cannot be said of "desire," I will argue that McFarland fails to make important distinctions between types of desires and how they interact with conscious processes. As a result, he draws incorrect conclusions about how the human personality works. Furthermore, McFarland worded the proposition to avoid two alternatives he regards as errors. First, he rejects the "Pelagian" concept of the "will" as a control center in human consciousness. The "will" simply acts according to a given desire. Second, he rejects the position of many non-Christian compatibilists and hard determinists that human decisions can be fully explained by any combination of "non-personal" causes, such as the state of brain chemistry, sensory input, and other environmental conditions. The will "follows" desire, but it is not "caused" to move in a particular direction in the sense that would entail that God created human beings such that they would be caused to sin. I will argue that he is at least partly wrong about a "control center" function of consciousness and completely wrong about human choices being uncaused by non-personal forces. This is an ambitious counter-program and will take at least a couple of posts to complete. Fasten your seat belts!

In the end, McFarland and I agree on a couple of fundamental points: All human action is motivated and for the most part we do not have a say in what motivates us. Our basic disagreement lies in the implications of these points for human responsibility, which I will address in a future post. In order to build my case against McFarland's account of responsibility, it will be necessary to lay out a better account of the role of "desire" in human decision-making. Some of what I will argue here summarizes points made by William Irvine in On Desire: Why We Want What We Want. For much of the rest I am relying on arguments and evidence presented by Robert Wright in The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology, Steven Pinker in How the Mind Works, and E. O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Don't expect page references. I'm too lazy and pressed for time right now to provide chapter and verse. Besides, every one of these books is worth a complete read. Alright, enough excuses for myself.

My first objection to McFarland's presentation of "desire" is that, while he wants to deal with desire "broadly-conceived" he nevertheless excludes a specific class of desires. As an example, consider what he says here:

For a sweating person to say he does not want to sweat is in this sense analogous to an alcoholic who falls off the wagon saying he does not want to drink: neither event would take place unless there was an underlying desire, and the expression "not wanting" is simply a wish that the desire were not present. Certainly any talk of a nervous person "desiring" to sweat must include the recognition that such "desire" is very different even from the desire for a drink on the part of an alcoholic whose drinking is ruining his life (not to mention from a parent's desire for the well-being of her child); but to completely depersonalize such functions is to risk falling into an anthropological dualism, in which it is somehow more correct to say, This body is sweating," than "I am sweating." (p. 85)

He never explains why the "wish" not to sweat is not a desire, which leaves me to provide an explanation. If he admits that such "wishes" are real desires it threatens his thesis that "will" simply follows desire." It is odd, to say the least, that the automatic sweating response expresses a desire but the very conscious embarassment that may accompany sweating somehow doesn't express a desire! There is nothing wrong with McFarland's claim that the autonomic nervous system's reaction to indications that the body is overheating expresses a desire, broadly-conceived. He errs in refusing to use that language for desires that go unfulfilled either because someone can't counteract opposing, unconscious desires or because she chooses to let the desire go unfulfilled. McFarland's problem is made even more obvious by the way he describes the opposite situation, in which a person's conscious decision processes determine to frustrate a specific desire:

The idea of the impotence of the will to free itself from sin should not be read in terms of a psychological description of the dynamics of temptation, as though the affirmation of original sin were an empirical statement about the ability of the will to engage in or refrain from a particular behavior [emphasis mine] (e.g., an alcoholic's ability to stay on the wagon). To confess the reality of original sin is not to claim that people cannot resist giving in to particular impulses [emphasis mine] (which they quite evidently can), but rather to reject the conceptual reduction of sin to the choice of evil over good.

McFarland's claim that the affirmation of original sin is not an empirical statement raises some problems that I hope to address in a later post. Notice how the alcoholic's desire to drink in the first quote has been suddenly transformed into a "behavior" or an "impulse" in the second quote. Why the different language? Because when a person successfully resists an impulse she is following a desire. Since McFarland's position is that the will follows desire and if there are conflicting desires it appears to make the will an independent arbiter between desires (and hence cut free from an intelligible account of human actions), one must deny that humans really ever have conflicting desires. McFarland never explicitly denies that humans have conflicting desires, but he does render a rather odd diagnosis of the "divided will" that underscores my point:

The problem -- the point of existential crisis that undergirds Augustine's analysis -- is that human beings can't want what they want. It is this incapacity that is the source of the experience of the divided will: we do what we desire, invariably -- but what we desire remains beyond our control. (p 75)

Yet it is a common human perception that "you can't always get what you want" and one of the reasons you can't is that you often have to choose between conflicting desires. It's not that you "wish" your desires were different; you don't have that wish at all. It's that you want to satisfy both desires and can't pull it off. One or the other will have to go unfulfilled. McFarland's theory leaves no room for this common human dilemma, and for that reason alone it is cruelly inhumane.

Underlying this misdiagnosis of the "divided will" is an oversimplified understanding of how human desiring works. According to most theorists, the brain acts like a fractious committee. The committee members represent various mental modules responsible for some facet of organismic function. Some of these modules are "stupid whiners" that, given the right sensory inputs, bombard some other set of brain circuits with requests to satisfy a given desire. In the committee analogy, these whiners harass their neighboring committee members or the chairperson with demands for more food, more drink, more sex, etc. The mental modules are constantly at work on sensory input from inside and outside the body, exchanging information with each other and with brain circuits that contribute to conscious thought and sending to other parts of the nervous system, including -- sometimes -- consciousness the results of their processing. Some of the results produced by "whiner" modules end up in control centers that process the results through a decision tree and send instructions to other parts of the body about an action to take in order to satisfy the "whiners." The activity stimulated by these control centers produces new input for the "whiner" modules that either dampens or inflames their demands. Some of these control centers are not in consciousness; others are. The unconscious control centers are like an independently-minded subcommittee that decides to take action without the knowledge or consent of the committee as a whole, and if they bother to report their decision to the committee at all, they do so after the decision has been taken. In many cases the committee as a whole only finds out about it after the consequences of the decision come in. At the conscious level, where our experiences are relatively integrated, surprising, unexpected, and unwelcome interruptions from these "whiners" can break into awareness, interrupting the flow of our thoughts, rearranging our sensory perceptions, and raising or lowering our emotions. It is currently a matter of controversy as to whether our conscious minds ever really "make" a reasoned decision about the demands of the "whiners." Many theorists believe that our decisions are delivered to consciousness whole by unconscious control centers and our conscious thought processes simply come up with rationalizations for a decision already made for reasons unknown. Personally, I doubt this is always true and submit the development of modern science as a counter-example. There is no reason to suppose that any unconscious control center shaped by natural selection would prefer humans to study quarks and the history of life over the study of how to produce more offspring. Nevertheless, it has been demonstrated experimentally that sometimes people who have no idea why they are motivated to take a particular action will, in the absence of an identifiable reason, invent totally false explanations. I hope to expand on this point in the upcoming post on responsibility.

For our present purposes it is sufficient to notice that several mental modules may be stimulating other parts of the brain to satisfy desires at the same time. Consider all the functions performed simultaneously by the autonomic nervous system, such as regulating breathing, heartbeat, and body temperature. Since each of these feedback systems operates at least partly independently of the others, that makes for three separate "desires" the human person is satisfying at one time. McFarland does not discuss the idea of simultaneous, harmonious desires, but I see no reason why he could not have incorporated them into his theory as it stands. Where his theory runs into trouble is in the case of conflicting simultaneous desires. Consider, for example, the case of an antelope approaching a drinking hole on the African savannah. The desire for water drives the antelope to the drinking hole, but before drinking the antelope carefully studies the surroundings for signs of a predator. A scent, the sound of movement in the grass, or the sight of a sudden movement will cause a panicked flight response and the antelope's desire for water will go unsatisfied for the time being. The flight response is instinctive in many species, human beings included. In other words, via natural selection many species' brains include prioritization functions which reorder desires based on predetermined criteria so that satisfaction of the desire most likely to promote the reproductive success of the animal gets the highest priority.

Irvine develops this idea in more detail in his book On Desire: Why We Want What We Want with the concept of a "biological incentive system." This incentive system is a result of natural selection's fine-tuning of the nervous system in many species to produce in the brains of individuals emotions that reward them when they act in ways that promote reproduction and punish them when they are in situations that threaten their ability to reproduce. This incentive system predates human beings by tens of millions of years at least. In mammals the flight response, for example, is accompanied by the fear emotion, in response to which the reflexive flight response is amplified by "intentional" movement to escape from danger or mount a defense. The incentive system also provides us with a ready-made framework for prioritizing desires. As a result, when we encounter situations in which multiple desires are clamoring for satisfaction but we are not able to satisfy them all at the same time, one or more control centers in the brain have prebuilt decision trees that help us prioritize the desires and attempt to satisfy the highest-priority desire first. Since this incentive system was built to promote reproductive success, not human happiness, in an environment far different from that in which most modern humans find themselves, it sometimes works against our long-term personal interests. Classic examples include disastrous male philandering and persistent overeating.

Clearly, then, our actions and decisions are all motivated. They are all aimed to fulfill a "desire." In that regard, admitting that we have conflicting desires and sometimes intentionally leave desires unfulfilled is no real threat to McFarland's claim that "will follows desire." Leaving aside for a moment our criticism of McFarland's use of the word "will," we must yet ask, "Which desire?" The process of natural selection, which shaped the biological incentive system, has as a final goal the maximized reproductive success of the individual possessing a given set of genes. In the end, it is the spread of the genes which measures success. Humans, however, are usually not consciously motivated by their success at spreading their genes. What moves them to action are emotions. In the end, what measures success is satisfaction, happiness, joy. Irvine calls these feelings "final desires." They are intrinsically motivating. In contrast, instrumental desires are desires for things that will satisfy final desires. Although our brains have been adapted to reward us with satisfying emotions when we perform acts that promote our ability to reproduce, that doesn't always work to our benefit. Sometimes we are driven to pursue counterproductive instrumental desires because in our ancestral environment getting these things yielded reproductive success and mutations that increased a sense of pleasure when obtaining those things yielded even more reproductive success. Maybe getting those things no longer increases reproductive success and so our sense of pleasure is dashed by bad consequences or maybe getting those things produces reproductive success at the cost of making us miserable because the environment has changed in some fundamental way.

"Virtuous" features of human nature, such as altruism, empathy, conscience, and even the sensus divinitatus have also been shaped by natural selection. Each of these characteristics has been calibrated in our long pre-history to reward our genes with increased reproductive success. There is debate about whether and/or which current cultural expressions of these characteristics are adaptations or by-products, especially in the case of the sensus divinitatus. At root, however, human "virtuous" desires arose by essentially the same processes as human "vicious" desires in the course of evolutionary history.

This brief account of the evolutionary origins of desire leads to a couple of observations about McFarland's arguments. First is the matter of control. McFarland asserts that we cannot help but "sin" even after conceding that humans can exercise some control over behaviors motivated by sinful desires, such as alcoholics abstaining from drinks. His thesis is that although human beings can exercise some control over their behaviors they have no way of controlling their desires. This is partially false. A classic case is addictions. Changes in the body's biochemistry brought about by the introduction of an addictive foreign substance can be reversed. Among these changes is the reduction or elimination of the craving response that occurs when the level of the foreign substance in the blood drops. These cravings certainly count as "desires" by McFarland's definition and in fact are final desires by Irvine's definition, since satisfying this type of desire is intrinsically motivating. On the other hand, changing final desires that are genetically-programmed is much more difficult. By the use of drugs and/or surgery it is possible to temporarily or even permanently suppress sexual desire. Other final desires, such as hunger or thirst, are at least as difficult to modify even temporarily. Instrumental desires springing from these, such as the desire to have sex with one particular individual tonight or a desire to drink a second cup of water after a morning jog are usually much easier to modify by various physical and/or mental operations. In our ongoing battle with our own maladjusted desires humans have been slowly but surely gaining more control over not only how our desires are expressed but the desires themselves. Nevertheless, these techniques do not change the fundamental structure of human desiring. In that sense, McFarland is correct that we are not in control of our desires. On the other hand, the discovery of the human genome is a potential game-changer. It is conceivable that at some point in the not too distant future humans will have learned enough about the human genome to introduce mutations that could stimulate the development of entirely new desires or the entire elimination of existing desires. Whether either of these outcomes is desirable or beneficial is beside the point.

Gaining increased control over human desires by itself does not necessarily threaten McFarland's conception of original sin. For one thing, all of these methods of controlling desire can be ascribed to the operation of God's grace. Human discoveries about the biological basis of human desiring and techniques that can be used to inflame or suppress desire would be consequences of God's common grace, according to traditional Reformed doctrine. Even the modification of the structure of human desiring via manipulations of the human genome and/or drug therapy in early development, for example, could be described as operations of God's common grace. In fact, everything good done by human beings who are not (yet) born again into the community of God's people is a consequence of God's common grace. This classical understanding of the relationship between God's grace and human "goodness" lies behind the assertion of Henri Blocher, whom McFarland mistakenly targets for criticism on this score, that humans sin when they can and as much as they can. Blocher's assessment assumes the operations of God's common grace in the lives of non-Christian sinners. Left completely to themselves, human beings would quickly devolve into utter wickedness. At every point it is God's gracious operations that restrain, resist, and channel human sinfulness and stimulate human virtue in the non-elect. It is by this means alone that we are not "as bad as we can be." McFarland's implied universalism could rule out the existence of a separate, "common" grace and classify all grace as "saving" grace. Regardless, McFarland would no doubt also ascribe any true human goodness exhibited by any human being whatsoever as a consequence of God's gracious operations, rather than some innate human power to pursue the good. On the other hand, I doubt very strongly that McFarland would be happy to classify genome manipulation or drug therapy as operations of God's grace.

The evolutionary shaping of human desires also leads me to ask some pointed questions about desiring God above all else. What kind of desire is this? What stimulates it? What brain structures are involved in its expression? What role does evolution play in producing it? McFarland attempts answers to none of these questions. It seems to me that he needs to.

I reserve discussion of desire and causation for the next post.

A Critical Review of Ian A. McFarland's In Adam's Fall: A Meditation on the Christian Doctrine of Original Sin, Part 3. The "will" is an analytically useless concept.

This post is third in a series. See here and here for the previous posts. In this post I want to elaborate on my second criticism of the book. McFarland's thesis touches on several areas of anthropology that have been subjects of extensive research, and yet he employs almost none of it. Had he done so, either he would have modified his thesis significantly, or he would have plunged into self-defeating apologetical moves designed to cast doubt on the legitimacy or standard interpretation of the science.

First, a quick review of the book's Bibliography and reference notes reveals that McFarland has exactly one reference to a contemporary work of scientific research, the paper "Y Chromosome Sequence Variation and the History of Human Populations" in Nature Genetics 26:3 (Nov., 2000), 358-61 by Underhill, Peidong-Shen, Lin, et. al. This includes secondary works or even popular overviews. Since the fact of biological evolution counts heavily in his argument that the doctrine of original sin needs to be reconceptualized, you would think that he would have made more use of it. He does refer to a secondary work by Philip Hefner, the Human Factor: Evolution, Culture, and Religion, who apparently did try to incorporate some contemporary evolutionary science into a discussion of the sources of human behavior, but McFarland dismisses that work in a footnote without addressing any of the science behind it. In fact, according to McFarland Hefner argued that the experience of a divided will is a consequence of the conflict between genetically "hard-wired," "selfish" behaviors and cultural demands for cooperation and altruism. I don't know who is responsible for this way of framing the conclusions of evolutionary theory, Hefner or McFarland (see my comments here about McFarland's generally accurate summaries of others' views), but either way it is inaccurate. There are no "hard-wired" behaviors. What is hard-wired is brain circuitry that under a normal process of development will produce a predictable pattern of behavior. Furthermore, the "demand" for altruism and cooperation is not ultimately a product of culture but of genes. The particular form in which cooperation and altruism occur is shaped by culture, but being cooperative and altruistic comes about by "prepared learning," i.e., we are hard-wired to learn these behaviors, at least to some degree. McFarland's dismissal of Hefner is telling: "The theological problem with this line of argument is that it makes original sin part of humanity's nature as created and thus not a result of any defect in willing." (p. 162) OK, so McFarland is going to explain how the findings of sociobiologists, evolutionary psychologists and brain scientists can be interpreted so that original sin is not part of humanity's nature as created? What about sexual selection, kin selection, reciprocal altruism, "cheater-detection?" Not mentioned anywhere. No citations of the work of Hamilton, Trivers, Williams, Cosmides and Tooby, de Waal. This is especially noteworthy for de Waal, who is a colleague of McFarland's at Emory University! So much for collegiality! Seriously? Whether this is due to ignorance or a decision that this body of work is irrelevant to his thesis hardly matters. He should have known about it and should have addressed it.

Now to tackle some specifics. Much of McFarland's book is taken up with the status and powers of the human "will" and its relationship to other features of human nature. In short, to borrow a criticism E. O. Wilson leveled against economists, McFarland assumes the validity of a particular brand of folk psychology. This particular brand has a very long and distinguished career, reaching back into antiquity. Trouble is, it is not science and relying on it leads McFarland into some serious errors. His first error is to argue that all human activity is "willed." Many times in the book McFarland provides a brief definition of what he means by "will." Typical is the following summary of Augustine's view of the "will," with which he basically agrees: "for Augustine the will is a comparatively unproblematic and not especially mysterious entity. It simply marks out human beings as the particular kind of creatures they are: personal agents. Agents are beings whose actions are naturally mediated by their wills.... For Augustine to say that humans will whatever they do is imply to affirm that I, as a human being, naturally describe my acts as what I do, even when I have no ability to choose otherwise (e.g., 'I hear the car alarm outside the window,' or to cite a favorite example of Augustine's, 'I wish to be happy.'" (pp. 63-4)

This view of "will" is so expansive that it includes "involuntary" actions, such as events in the autonomic nervous system. As McFarland explains in his assessment of Augustine's views:

There are a number of problems that accompany Augustine's analysis of human sexuality, but one of the most obvious is the way in which he treats the will's lack of control over sexual function as somehow, exceptional, ignoring the fact it is but one of an enormous range of human biological processes that are equally removed from the realm of conscious choice: hunger, fatigue, sweating, immune response, and the like. Particularly, from an evolutionary perspective, it would be strange indeed to follow Augustine in viewing the "involuntary" status of such processes as evidence of declension from an original (and putatively more ideal) state of conscious control over them. Their "automatic" character has positive survival value, since (for example) it is much more efficient if the body's ability to cool itself does not depend on a conscious decision to open one's pores. More importantly, however, the fact that such processes are not subject to conscious control need not be seen as making them any less matters of will, if the latter is understood simply as the mode by which human beings experience themselves as agents. After all, individuals naturally say, "I hungered," or "I'm sweating," using the first-person pronoun just as they do when saying things like, "I picked up the shovel," or "I'm going to the ballgame today." The degree to which these various actions are "voluntary" (i.e., matters of conscious choice) varies widely, but all remain ineluctably part of one's identity (i.e., who I am). (pp. 72-73)

Before we rip into these claims, let's acknowledge McFarland's appropriation of the evolution of the autonomic nervous system. And yes, this fact raises the issue of what other human activities take place "under the radar" of human consciousness and hence, beyond conscious control. In this regard McFarland is on the right track. In chapter 4, he pulls in the views of Maximus the Confessor to correct problems he sees in Augustine's approach to the "will." In particular, McFarland criticizes Augustine for retaining the Pelagian idea that the human "will" ever could or was meant to act as a control center over desires. He says Augustine would have been better off sticking with his insight that the "will" follows desire consistently. Maximus helps out with his distinction between the "natural will" and the "gnomic will." McFarland notes that Maximus developed this distinction in the context of the monothelite controversy. While the germ of the distinction can be found in his earlier writings, his desire to defend the position that Christ had both a human and a divine "will" drove him to distinguish clearly between the "natural will" and "gnomic will." All human beings except Christ have both types, Christ had only the "natural" human will. "Given that Maximus explicitly associates the gnomic will with the powers of deliberation and decision -- effectively with the ability to choose between options -- his defense of Jesus' consubstantiality with the human race risks being subverted from the outset, since the significance of Jesus' solidarity with us in possessing a natural will seems inconsistent with the denial that his willing is marked by those features connected with choice that we are inclined to view as most central to human freedom." (pp. 93-94). Indeed. Nevertheless, McFarland believes that Maximus works his way out of this apparent dilemma. Since Maximus's views are central to McFarland's own position, I will risk an extended citation and reserve comment until the end:

In order to address these concerns, it is necessary to explore in greater detail why Maximus introducted the distinction between natural and gnomic wills. Prior to the monothelite controversy, Maximus treats thelēma and gnomē as synonyms and, correspondingly, has no difficulty in ascribing a gnomē to Christ. Already in one of his earliest extant writings, however, there is a foreshadowing of the later distinction. Maximus describes humanity's end as "to have one gnomē and one thelēma with God and with one another," while at the same time noting that the fall has blocked this process by introducing a division within the will that causes us "to turn from the natural movement ... to what is forbidden." This contrast between the will's "natural movement" on the one hand and its capacity to turn from nature on the other parallels the later distinction between the natural and gnomic wills. It was only in confronting the monothelite identification of Christ's will with his divine hypostasis, however, that Maximus found it necessary to cast this distinction in technical terminology.

As already noted, Maximus' immediate theological concern in confronting monothelitism was to affirm the theological principle that Christ could only redeem the will if the will were part of the nature that he assumed in the incarnation. This correlation of the will with nature is the basis for the category of the natural will. And through the claim that will was a constitutive feature of human nature had the effect of reducing the will to one among many such faculties, no diminishement of the will's significance was thereby intended. On the contrary, Maximus is quite clear that the natural will is the most significant of humanity's faculties, since it "holds everything together," and "we exist in and through it" in a way that is not true of other aspects of our nature. Indeed, the supreme importance of the natural will in Maximus' anthropology is illustrated by its persistent identification with human agency. Nevertheless, Maximus' analysis of the natural will suggests that such agency is distinct from freedom of choice. For Maximus the primary manifestation of the natural will is in our natural appetites:

For by this power [of the will] alone we naturally desire being, life, movement, understanding, speech, perception, nourishment, sleep, refreshment, as well as not to suffer pain or to die -- quite simply to possess fully everything that sustains the nature and to lack whatever harms it."

Clearly, we do not desire sleep or food because we choose to do so; on the contrary, Maximus' whole point is that such desires are natural. The do not need the presence of a will to manifest themselves, as is clear from the fact that animals, too, naturally seek life and avoid death. What is distinctive about human beings is what it means for them to desire something naturally. For whereas other sentient beings desire rest or flee pain by instinct (and thus by compulsion), human beings do so "in and through" the will (and therefore freely):

For that which is rational by nature has a natural power that is a rational appetite [logikēn orexin], which is also called the will [thelēsis] of the intellective soul. And by this power we reason willingly [thelontes logizometha]; and when we have reasoned, we desire willingly [thelontes boulometha].

In short, for Maximus the natural will is that property whereby we do whatever we do as responsible agents rather than mechanically or by instinct. It follows that if Christ is confessed as fully human (i.e., a genuinely human agent rather than a divine ghost in a biochemical machine), he must have a human natural will.

What then of the gnomic will? In line with description of the fall in his early letter to John the Cubicularius, Maximus understands sin as the product of a gnomē that has turned from what is natural; yet it would be a mistake to conclude that he simply identifies the gnomic will with fallenness, since he has no difficulty acknowledging that it can conform to God's will. Yet if the gnomic will is not inherently sinful, it is intimately connected with the possibility of sin, for it is understood in terms of the capacity to choose between options -- including especially good and evil. Maximus assssociates this capacity with a will that does not enjoy the eschatological state of immediate conformity to God's will, arguing that short of this state willing is a complex process that moves from desire (boulēsis) through deliberation (boulē or bouleusis) to the actualization of the results of deliberation in choice (prohairesis)

Deliberation is crucial to Maximus' understanding of the gnomic will. It is correlated with the ignorance and doubt that are characteristic of the will that has not yet been deified: we deliberate about those things which are within the scope of our will, but the implications of which are unclear to us -- and under the conditions of history, that includes everything that we will. Because our deliberation can go either well or badly, we have the capacity to deviate from our natural end, and our willing is, correspondingly, mutable. Though inseparable from our nature as responsible agents, the gnomic character of our willing under conditions of historical existence leaves open the possibility of deviating from nature. In the fall this possibility was actualized in a way that continues to render human beings disposed to sin. Whether or not we sin in any particular instance, however, our status as pilgrims dictates that our earthly actions are invariably characterized by the process of gnomic deliberation and choice.

It appears to me that, by bringing the activities of the autonomic nervous system under the category of "willing," McFarland has gone beyond what both Augustine and Maximus intended and has landed himself in contradictions. He never qualifies his repeated assertion that "willing" includes involuntary actions such as sweating, leaving me at least to conclude that he means by this not only activities that take place while we are aware of them -- but can't control them -- but also activities that take place without our awareness, or even without our consciousness. Thus, a nocturnal emission is "willed," as is the heartbeat of a person in a coma. As his summary and criticism of Augustine's view on the relationship between sexual desire and "will" makes clear, for Augustine sexual desire is present in human beings apart from their "willing" it. Presumably, for Augustine, a nocturnal emission is not a sin because the will did not consent to having the desire or carrying out the action, whereas, apparently, for McFarland it would be a "willed" act. His citation from Maximus indicates that Maximus' idea of the "natural will" involved a transition from a "willing" reasoning to a "willing" desire. The involvement of "reasoning" in this process appears to exclude events that take place "under the radar" of consciousness, since we have no opportunity to reason about them. And in fact, McFarland provides no citations from Maximus that indicate how he would have classified events in the autonomic nervous system. The best we can get from McFarland's book on this matter is Maximus' apparent reliance on the views of that eminent psychologist, Cyril of Alexandria, who said, "nothing natural is involuntary in a rational creature." Unfortunately, Cyril's statement is an analytic, not empirical, claim. When McFarland meets one of these "rational creatures" I would love to be introduced. Cyril's definition certainly does not apply to human beings. Most of what happens in our bodies and minds takes place without our conscious awareness and therefore without any "reasoning." This is such a basic finding of psychology that it is shocking McFarland did not explicitly introduce it into his discussion of Maximus's idea of the "natural will." Either Maximus was operating from a seriously defective understanding of human nature or his conception of the extent of the operations of the "natural will" was far more restricted than McFarland supposes. And this is where McFarland (or Maximus, if McFarland represents him fairly) really steps in it. Notice the end of the last citation: "Whether or not we sin in any particular instance, however, our status as pilgrims dictates that our earthly actions are invariably characterized by the process of gnomic deliberation and choice." Wait a minute, what about sweating? Didn't McFarland assert that sweating is an act of "will," and didn't he furthermore insist that this type of "willing" involves no conscious control and hence no choice, and doesn't that make this type of willing an example of the "natural will" that Maximus now denies ever takes place among humans in this world?

However McFarland chooses to resolve this dilemma, he needs to consider carefully another issue raised by his insistence that events in the autonomic nervous system are "willed." Modern psychology has largely dispensed with the "will" as a descriptive term for human mental activity, except as a simplification for popular audiences. As a technical term, "will" is useless. In its place psychologists have arrayed a whole series of mental processes that involve relatively more or less conscious thought and/or "control." The terminology used to describe these various processes varies, but it is generally the case that they are conceived as roughly running along a continuum from totally unconscious to almost entirely conscious and self-aware. McFarland would certainly concede this point. Where he would disagree with modern psychologists is over their assessment of how these various processes relate to "agency" and the concept of "responsibility." Psychologists generally tend to locate "agency" and "responsibility" at the fully conscious and self-aware end of the continuum. McFarland wants these concepts to cover the entire continuum. In a later post I will discuss in fuller detail the whole issue of McFarland's use of "responsibility." For now it suffices to point out that there are good reasons for psychologists to do this, McFarland's nearly slanderous accusation that their concept of the "will" is derived from consumer culture notwithstanding. As I pointed out in an earlier post, popular consumer culture does not necessarily promote the idea of an "autonomous" will, free from constraints of desire or other unconscious influence. No, the idea that volition or decision-making is most properly understood to take place with an awareness of all the factors influencing one's decision is an outgrowth of modern legal and psychological thought. In other words, McFarland did not take seriously modern approaches to the relationship between genetics, development, neurobiology, and adult brain function in his assessment of what should count as "volitional" activity. Given that his views run against a virtual consensus, it behooved him to contrast his views explicitly with those of a representative, well-qualified scientist so that the reader could weigh his objections to the consensus more fairly.

McFarland employs a traditional distinction between the activity of humans and other animals. Since we have "wills" our natural activities are performed "freely," whereas other animals exhibiting the same behaviors are doing so under the compulsion of instinct. Nowhere does McFarland qualify this distinction. In this he is in accord with the long list of thinkers who believed in human exceptionalism. We are a unique species by virtue of our rationality, language abilities, sensus divinitatus, etc. For those in this group who accept evolutionary theory, humans have managed to escape the grip of natural selection. As a consequence, our mental faculties, cultures, societies, religions, laws, etc., cannot be understood from an evolutionary standpoint. We do little or nothing on the basis of inborn tendencies (instincts). Instead, nearly everything distinctive about human beings is a result of enculturation -- to put it simply -- learning. Extreme forms of this view virtually deny that there is a fixed human nature. While McFarland is not this radical his reliance on the distinction between "instinct" and "will" puts him decisively in the exceptionalist camp. In recent decades this view has come under sustained criticism as evidence for instinctual features of human nature has mounted. The human genome retains, in common with its mammalian relatives, numerous genes that encode proteins which in turn, under normal developmental conditions, catalyze the growth of specific brain structures. These brain structures, interacting with the rest of the developing body, bias our emotional and intellectual development so that we generally end up with a distinctive set of common characteristics. These common characteristics include relatively simple emotional reactions such as laughing and crying as well as complicated perceptive and language tasks.

It is hard to see how McFarland could fit these discoveries into his scheme. Instead, his hard and fast distinction between "instinct" and "will" lumps the social behavior of chimpanzees and ants into one category and that of humans into a different category. Given the shared evolutionary history of chimpanzees and humans, their similarities in body structure and particularly brain structure and function, emotions, and social organization, it is hard to see on what basis he can call chimpanzee social hierarchies, for example, purely a consequence of "instinct" and human social hierarchies purely a consequence of "will." Of course, human brains have adapted much more fully than chimpanzee brains into the "cognitive niche" and humans alone of existing species use language, which is certainly a huge differentiator. Nevertheless, it is fairly clear now that human beings and chimpanzees perform similar behaviors in response to similar environmental conditions and accompanied by similar mental processes, that these behaviors originated in a common ancestral species, and that these behaviors continue to be practiced because of developmental biases (instincts) passed down to us in our genes. Given that McFarland wants the "will" to be implicated in even the events in the autonomic nervous system, it is hard to see how he can avoid ascribing a "will" to chimpanzees, any more than he can deny humans have instincts, unless he himself also believes that human consciousness is "a divine ghost in a biochemical machine," as he charges against Pelagianism.

McFarland's adoption of Maximus' "gnomic will" is intended to show that decision-making is something humans engage in to resolve conflicts between desires and so settle on the action most likely to satisfy our (inherently distorted) desires. But decision-making evolved as a survival mechanism not a pleasure principle. Over the long period of human prehistory decision-making often involved choosing between outcomes, not desires. Over the course of eons mammals' emotions have evolved to stimulate the mammalian brain to take actions that will increase chance of successful reproduction. We experience "happiness" or "pleasure" when we achieve states that have been associated with increased reproductive success in our evolutionary past. In this way "desires" move us to action, but in the "cognitive niche" motives are insufficient to promote survival and so humans have needed a capacity weigh and select among alternative courses of action. By adapting to life in the "cognitive niche," humans have the capacity to imagine the possible future consequences of different responses to environmental challenges. The capacity to weigh those consequences against an ideal future scenario and then to select the course of action most likely to bring about the ideal future is what enabled us to break out of the African savannah and settle new, unfamiliar environments in a heartbeat of evolutionary time. It is in this limited regard that we have "escaped" natural selection. Natural selection has no way to determine what kinds of mutations will occur in a species. The process simply eliminates mutations that do not promote reproductive success. Whatever series of mutations enabled us to combine symbols imaginatively and conceive alternative futures, natural selection could not stop us from being able to reflect back on its own activities, discover them, and then attempt to seize control of them for our own purposes. Whether we are really capable of successfully manipulating the process of natural selection in order to achieve our own goals (say, increased individual human happiness or the elimination of overpopulation) remains to be seen. If we fail, the evidence of that failure will be human extinction, possibly by a catastrophic die-off and/or replacement by a closely-related anthropoid species. If we succeed, it is no sign that we have "escaped" natural selection, only that we have learned how to manipulate the process so that its results align more closely with conscious human desires.

This evolutionary account of the rise of human decision-making provides an adequate explanation for the near universal human preference for being "free to choose" courses of action. As E. O. Wilson put it, loss of one's sense of being able to exercise options at need leads to a deadly passivity in the face of danger. Natural selection tends to produce in humans emotions that promote behaviors leading to increased reproduction. A person who delights in proactively deciding about her own future and becomes angry when deprived of this opportunity can thank the millions of successful human ancestors whose decisions preserved the lives of their descendants. This account raises doubts about Maximus' idea that the "gnomic will" will disappear in the "deified" state of human existence. According to McFarland, "gnomic will" is just the mode under which human wills act when confronted with ignorance and doubt. In the deified state human beings will no longer desire to have "freedom to choose" or miss the opportunity to make a conscious, reasoned choice because all room for doubt or uncertainty will be removed. Maximus seemed to think that God's will would flow into the consciousness of glorified humans sufficiently to remove any cause of doubt about what God wished for them to do at any moment, for eternity. If this is correct, the whole course of human evolution was largely a waste of time. Our bodies and minds were shaped into their present form because they succeeded in enabling us to overcome perplexing environmental challenges. If in the "deified" state our ignorance and doubt disappear, human beings in the "deified" state will be either a quite different kind of being from what they have been up until now or exceedingly unhappy. And we have to ask, what made Maximus so certain that finite human beings would not encounter ignorance and doubt in their "deified" state? It is quite easy to imagine God introducing glorified human beings to some new type of being he has created and withholding from the glorified human beings crucial knowledge about how to make this new creature flourish. Furthermore, he could easily choose to withhold knowledge of his own will for the new creature from glorified humans, leaving them in a state of suspended action, waiting for further instruction from God himself about what to do. He could then instruct the human beings to choose from a number of courses of action designed to promote the new creature's well being and intentionally withhold from the glorified human beings which of those courses he wants them to choose. And is there any good reason to suppose that glorified humans would find being left to solve the puzzle on their own anything less than exhilirating? Perhaps McFarland would like to explain why such a scenario is impossible in the future state.

In what appears to be in McFarland's favor we must concede that the capacity to make decisions has significant costs as well as benefits. Maximus and McFarland focus on the cost of "choosing poorly" in the ethical sense. Though this is a critical issue, it is only one cost of decision-making. Given that we are a social species, a mistaken decision, regardless of the motives, regarding when to pull up stakes and migrate can cost one's entire band their lives. For that reason alone human cultures quickly developed protocols to decrease the likelihood that choices would go wrong. One way to do this is to increase the number of situations in which one can simply replay past decisions that were successful. Furthermore, conscious choice consumes precious time and energy. For these reasons, conscious decision-making is an anxiety-fused exercise. Humans take all kinds of steps to reduce the number of decisions we have to make. Habit formation, morals, laws, traditions all play a role in limiting choice and with it the likelihood that a choice will go wrong. These limitations on choice, even when they grate on us, are ultimately designed not to eliminate choices but only to increase the likelihood that choices will lead to successful outcomes. Of course, natural selection has favored mutations that increase our chances of making choices that lead to reproductive success, whereas in our concious minds we tend to want to increase the chance that our choices will make us happy. I reserve comment on the fact that these two outcomes are not always compatible for the next post in this series. For now it is enough to note that decision-making is not just a mode of a presumed "hypostasis" but a fundamental feature of human nature built into us over our long evolutionary history and indispensable to our survival and happiness.

I have much more to say about McFarland's failure to deal with modern discoveries about humans when we discuss his handling of the relationship between "will" and "desire" in the next post.