Stephen R.L. Clark is a philosopher I never quite warmed to, until now. His work is in the Christian Platonist vein of some of the Radical Orthodoxy folks I studied under at Nottingham. I suppose I’m still too modern and Protestant to consider myself a Christian Platonist, but I do agree with that school of thought that modern theology and philosophy need to recover some things from Platonist substance metaphysics and Aristotelian causality. In any event, Clark’s Can We Believe in People?: Human Significance in an Interconnected Cosmos (Brooklyn: Angelico Press 2020) is a delightful and accessible study of human significance and purpose in our vast, evolving cosmos. With endorsements ranging from David Bentley Hart to Simon Conway Morris, you can be sure you’re in for an eclectic treat.
Clark presents an argument against scientism that I make in some of my own work and that I find inescapable: popular advocates of scientism argue like moral realists even though their position must reject moral realism. They’re convinced they are right about the world-as-it-is, and they argue as if it’s morally blameworthy to believe otherwise. But in claiming to be right about the world-as-it-is, they claim more knowledge than their reductive origin story would allow. As Clark notes,
Darwinian selection does not produce what would probably, in the abstract, be ‘the best’ or most successful outcome: the very point of the theory is that the competing variations have been thrown up at random. . . . We are, perhaps, fairly well adapted as wandering primates in and between Ice Ages: how should we expect that our talents are well suited to discovering the powers and principles that rule the world at large? Why should we expect any congruity between those principles and those that govern human thought? (Can We Believe in People, 21.)
The “atheistical cases against God and against ‘religion,'” Clark notes, “must chiefly be founded on moral indignation of a kind that only makes sense if there indisputably are Absolute Moral Norms which we can at once discern, which are more than maxims drawing their strength from the likely consequences of obeying or disobeying them, and if things could, somehow or other, be otherwise.” (Can We Believe in People, 52.) But if this is so, then the argument against God and religion is self-contradictory.
Clark acknowledges that this epistemological argument has been hashed out endlessly without resolution since it was advanced in the literature by Plantinga, but in fact, I think Plantinga’s version of it is mistaken. Plantinga, as I read him, argues for the plausibility of some kind of intelligent design theory based on the claim that human knowledge capacity shows that the theory of evolution by natural selection must in some basic way be false or incomplete. Plantinga’s overall project ends up looking like a kind of ontotheology — even though, within his Reformed Epistemology, Plantinga offers a non-naturalistic basis for knowledge of God — because Plantinga’s view of causality is flat. This is where a Christian Platonist / Aristotelian like Clark can do better: even though the efficient cause of the structure of the human brain and mind is natural selection (or more accurately, biological evolution, including by natural selection), the formal cause is the “form” of the human and the final cause is the human end in God, both of which transcend matter by participation in God. Or, in Thomistic terms, the primary cause of human knowledge is God while the secondary cause is our physical, evolved capacities.
In a marvelous chapter titled “Is Human Kind a Natural Kind,” Clark does do better. There’s a persistent myth that Plato, Aristotle, and their early Christian heirs rejected the possibility of change in nature because they were chary of difference. By the time of the Medieval Synthesis, the story goes, Christian / Western thought was rigidly wedded to a static kind of Aristotelianism, which impeded the development of science, art, and culture, until the Renaissance weakened the glue that ultimately came apart at the seams in the Enlightenment. It’s not that this story is completely false, but it’s become a lazy way to dismiss the past. In fact, as Clark notes, “the classical Greek philosophers were much more open, in principle, to the thought that one creature can change into another, or beget creatures of another sort than itself, than is usually supposed.” (Can We Believe in People, 78.)
Clark’s argument is not, however, yet another tiresome, absolutist diatribe by a right-wing apologist against The Evil Atheists. It’s a much more subtle and beautiful celebration of truth within difference, or maybe better put, the truth of difference. As Clark says, “[d]ifferences are not diseases. And variations are always variations on a theme.” (Can We Believe in People, 89.) More to the point of the book, Clark argues, “[d]ifferences need not be defects, and there is no one right way of being human (or canine or what you will).” (Can We Believe in People, 91.) Later, discussing the possibility of other non-human intelligence in the Universe, Clark notes that “[i]t is after all a primary claim of Christians both that one and the same Logos makes creatures ‘logikoi‘ and that “to all who have yielded him their allegiance he gave the right to become children of God, not born of any human stock, or by the fleshly desire of any human father, but the offspring of God himself (Jn 1:12-13).” (Can We Believe in People, 99.) The various kinds of creatures, not least human creatures, proceeding from God’s creative Word and returning to their source in God, are the dance of creative difference united in the plenitude of the One infinite God. (That is my gloss on what Clark is saying, in the Christian Platonist key, which I find compelling).
There are places where I disagree with the direction of Clark’s thought. Clark is an important philosopher of animal rights and correctly, I think, emphasizes and ethic of creation care. At times, though, I’m not sure he thinks humans are unique enough. I’ll say something quite unpopular in the area of modern Christian ecological ethics, but I do think the material creation, at least the Earth we inhabit, is in part given to us humans for our thoughtful, curated use. Even if you’re a vegetarian or vegan (I’m not either), I think you have to agree, or give up eating altogether — along with wearing clothes and living in any sort of constructed dwelling. And, as I suggested at the outset, I find Christian Platonism helpful in small doses, as a path to reflection, a set of insights, subject to the reminder from Protestant thought (not least from Barth) that God remains completely Other and that the Word is always surprising. But I’ll leave those qualms aside and suggest that this is one of the most winsome “theology and science” books I’ve read in a very long time.