The Natural Theologian

I’m currently deep in the weeds of writing chapter two of my dissertation, “Content Empiricism: The Case Against Content Rationalism.”If I had to drop the jargon and say what I’m arguing for in English, I would say I’m against concepts.Concepts. They’re like the curtains of the mind. Whenever I want to argue that our minds are related to the things of the world, my discussion partner mentions “concepts.” The opaque curtains of the mind are drawn, and the room darkens.We only ever see the world through our concepts, they say. But I’m looking toward my curtains right now. I don’t see anything through them.I object to concepts most strongly when they are appealed to as blocking our view of the world itself. This happens chiefly in postmodernist and social constructionist accounts, broadly, anti-realist accounts. The world as we see it is a construction out of our concepts, which are themselves constructs.But I’ve come to object to concepts more broadly. In analytic philosophy, there is a strong tradition that combines adherence to concepts with realism. It views our access to the real world as mediated by concepts. Concepts do not occlude our view of the world but rather enable it.It’s a nice thought. But I fear that no view of our access to the world as mediated by concepts will do the job. No set of curtains helps us see better out the window.What are concepts supposed to be anyway?I take it that a concept is supposed to serve several roles:* Concepts are more fundamental than words.* Concepts can be expressed in definitions.* Concepts can exist even if what they refer to does not.First, concepts are fundamental than words.I and a Frenchman, say, have a completely different set of words, but we share many of the same concepts. I say, “snow,” and he says, “la neige,” but we’re utilizing the same concept. That’s why, if I learn French, I’m learning a new word, but not a new concept when I learn the French word for “snow.”Of course, there’s a popular theory that concepts do differ across languages, such that Eskimo languages, with their multiple words for different kinds of snow, possess more concepts as well. Still, the idea is that the Eskimos don’t just have more words; they have more concepts - so concepts are a kind of thing deeper and more fundamental than words.Still, so far, we seem to be identifying concepts as corresponding one-to-one with a language with words. But concepts are supposed to be expressible in different words within a language as well. For instance, “donkey” and “ass” would express the same concept, even though they are different words. Once again, concepts are distinct from and more fundamental than words.Second, concepts are expressed in definitions. In popular discourse, experts are often asked to “define terms.” The expectation is that they will offer a brief verbal description that covers all and only the instances that fall under that term or concept.If different individuals are working with different definitions of terms, we take it that they have different concepts. This impedes communication and leads to people talking past each other.This search for definitions has a philosophical basis. Socrates sought for the essence of certain key terms of human life, like justice, truth, knowledge, and the like. He and his interlocutors would try out various verbal descriptions that look much like our idea of definitions. They would test these against counter-examples, usually finding some counter-examples to any purported essence or definition.Third, concepts exists even if what they refer to does not. For example, this is how many atheists and agnostics view the term “God.” Even if God does not exist, there is a human concept of God, more fundamental than the mere word “God,” and expressible in various traditional definitions, “the greatest possible being,” “a transcendent person,” “the prime mover,” “the creator,” and so on.If I had to utilize the term, I would say that, here, I have expressed the very concept of a concept.The Conceptual Theory of ThoughtNow the concept of a concept gives rise to a theory of thought:Human beings think about the world by utilizing concepts. The concepts are human constructions, but they can refer to the world insofar as things in the world match the descriptions offered in the definitions of concepts.Think of this as a set of criteria: A concept has a set of criteria for falling under it. Nothing is a cup, for instance, unless it is concave and designed for holding liquid. We think about the world by way of concepts that provide criteria for their own membership.Now, an important feature of definitions or descriptions is that each of the terms in the definition itself expresses a concept, and so, when we determine whether something matches the description, we are ultimately making appeal to the application of other concepts.For example, my definition of “cup” made appeal to “concave,” “designed,” “holding,” and “liquid.” (We’ll leave aside the semantics of the other words in the phrase.) Each of these words expresses a concept, which could be spelled out in a definition, which in turn, would utilize words that indicate concepts.It is a key question of philosophy whether there are a fundamental set of concepts or whether there is a kind of perception of reality that is non-conceptual. This would provide a touchpoint, without which, it appears that we are trapped within a circle of concepts, of coherence rather than correspondence.Many twentieth-century empiricists tried to provide this in terms of sense-data, the Given, or logically-proper names. (Bertrand Russell thought, or hoped, that we had “logically-proper names” that directly referred to something, though he thought we could only refer to sense-data.)But even the chief twentieth-century empiricist, W. V. O. Quine concluded that we ultimately could not determine, nor did we need to, the reference of our words. Coherence was sufficient, so long as our conceptual scheme worked, pragmatically.I think this demonstrates the degree to which even realist and empiricist philosophers have been beholden to concepts and the theory of thought they supply.Frege and His Concepts as Case StudyIn the dissertation chapter I’m currently working on, the object of my study is a quite different figure, the founding father of analytic philosophy, Gottlob Frege.Frege was a realist who gave concepts a quite prominent place in his theory of thought. He held that concepts were objective, immaterial entities called “senses.” We successfully refer to objects in the world based on whether they match, or meet the criteria, of the senses we grasp.While the immaterial aspect of Frege’s thought has been abandoned by many contemporary analytic philosophers, they are beholden to his picture of thought in other ways.But examining Frege provides an important opportunity to put my theory to the test, that is not just postmodernist and social constructionist theories of concepts that are problematic. Concepts themselves are the problem.If even Frege’s objectivist and realist account of concepts leads to subjectivist results, then concepts themselves turn out to be nothing but curtains, occluding the mind’s view of the world.So far, that is what I’m finding.Our theory of thought is due for a clean-out, and it’s concepts that have got to go.“Against Concepts” is a distinct section of The Natural Theologian, in the pages of which I’ll be detailing and summarizing the content of my Ph.D. dissertation. You can subscribe or unsubscribe to it separately if you choose at the Substack “Settings” page.The Natural Theologian is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Joel Carini at joelcarini.substack.com/subscribe

I (Anna) have been counseling many people who experience obsessive thoughts and actions due to OCD. Some of them experience a cognitive distortion where a person conflates the thought of doing something with actually having done it.Psychologists call this “thought-action fusion.” The mind conflates the thought with the action. Meanwhile, I (Joel) have been writing about sexual desire and sin, mainly same-sex attraction. I have argued that same-sex attraction is not sin.But in that discussion, many people argue that same-sex attraction is sin, on the basis of Matthew 5:27-28:“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”In this passage, Jesus says that lust is equivalent to adultery. Doesn’t that mean that thought is equivalent to action? If so, then Jesus exacerbates the OCD symptom of thought-action fusion.But no: Equating thought and action is incorrect. Thought-action fusion is a cognitive distortion, and Jesus does not want us to commit it. This essay explains how Christianity can inadvertently promote thought-action fusion.The Natural Theologian and Reading Religiously are reader-supported publications. To support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.What Is Thought-Action Fusion?People who experience thought-action fusion (TAF), especially devout Christians, feel guilt and anxiety about their moral status, by equating thought and action.Two types of thought-action fusion can occur:Likelihood TAF: This is the belief that thinking about a negative event makes it more likely to occur.Moral TAF: This is the belief that thinking about a negative event is morally equivalent to actually carrying out that event.With “likelihood TAF,” an individual believes that thinking about their house catching fire makes it more likely for the fire to occur. With “moral TAF,” the individual believes that thinking about harming a loved one is as morally wrong as actually harming them.TAF is especially associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder but can also be present in other anxiety-related disorders.Logic cannot convince someone with OCD that they did not commit an act and quiet their anxiety. One woman I (Anna) have been counseling has been through medical school but is still convinced that if she walks past an abandoned band-aid (without touching it), she has been contaminated and needs to go through her cleaning rituals. A major category of TAF is intrusive thoughts of “unacceptable/taboo thoughts with mental/covert compulsions and reassurance-seeking.” Their most taboo thoughts tend to be centered around pedophilia, homosexual desires, blasphemy, and violent acts. Everyone experiences unwanted, intrusive, taboo thoughts of some kind. Individuals with thought-action fusion tend to attach excessive weight to these thoughts.Another woman I’ve been counseling is convinced that she is a pedophile because she has intrusive images, thoughts, and fears of molesting children. “What if I ran this person over with my car?” Many people have thought of this. It’s actually not weird; it’s human to have some intrusive thoughts. Usually, we dismiss the thought and move on.But someone struggling with thought-action fusion might say, “I wanted to kill that person; so, I must be a murderer.” They are overwhelmed by this. The same goes for unwanted sexual thoughts: “I had a thought of committing adultery with that person; so, I must be an adulterer because I wanted it.” Then the person will spiral into “cleansing rituals” of making sure that she did not want that thought.  Christians place a lot of value on the character of our inner lives and thoughts. This makes us particularly susceptible to TAF. Christian scripture frequently refers to how we ought to think:Philippians 4:8: “Whatever is true, … honorable …  just … pure … lovely … commendable, … think about these things.”2 Corinthians 10:5: “Take every thought captive to obey Christ.”We read these Scriptures and conclude that thought is as important as action. Christians who have obsessive thoughts find their thought-action fusion reinforced by Christ’s teaching.Christianity provides rituals for those seeking reassurance: Confession and repentance. But treating TAF requires breaking the cycle of obsession (confession) and compulsion (repentance). When an OCD sufferer confesses thoughts as sins and repents, seeking reassurance, the thoughts can become more powerful and frequent. It is a vicious cycle.But in treating OCD, counselees must stop the compulsions and rituals, which means not repenting of these thoughts.In my experience working with clients, not repenting for thoughts has helped my OCD clients reduce the compulsive, unwanted thoughts. Saying “Stop doing this thing!” will terrify someone with OCD. But my job is to help the client see that these intrusive thoughts are not sins, and that they are experiencing the distortion of thought-action fusion.Anyone Who Looks, IntentionallyIn Matthew 5:28, Christ appears to teach that lusting after a woman is equivalent to committing adultery with her in your heart.In this essay, I (Joel) argued that sexual attraction is NOT equivalent to committing adultery in the heart.For example, if the young man in the above image merely felt attraction to the woman in the foreground, he wouldn’t have sinned.Obviously, if he hops into bed with her, he has sinned.Jesus says that the young man could also commit adultery with her in his heart. He would do that by an inward act of imagination and lust.In the linked essay, I argued that Jesus is condemning inward action in addition to outward action, but not mere attraction.But take a second look at the verse:“Everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”What does Jesus say is sin? In addition to committing adultery, intentionally looking at a woman to lust.Hold on. Looking is an outward action. When a man looks, observers know it. Especially women. And that’s what the man in the “distracted boyfriend” meme is doing.Jesus also says “with lustful intent.” Committing adultery in the heart is intentional.Those who say same-sex attraction is a sin argue that unintentional and unchosen desires are sins. But Jesus doesn’t say that.In Matthew 5:28, Jesus condemns intentional looking. He doesn’t condemn peoples’ unwanted desires, unbidden attractions, and unintended feelings or thoughts. He doesn’t encourage us to commit thought-action fusion.I suggest a new translation:“Anyone who intentionally looks at a woman to lust, but not everyone who experiences unwanted sexual attraction, has already committed adultery in his heart.”Helping Those in Misery Pastor John Andrew Bryant writes powerfully about his OCD in A Quiet Mind to Suffer With. As he describes it, the thoughts he experiences are not his own:“If they are mine, they are only mine in this way: that I am the one they are happening to. I am the one who has to see them.”Key to Bryant’s being able to function well with OCD was recognizing that he is not his thoughts. They happen to him. Christians do more damage to these sufferers when we say, “your thoughts are sins.” “Your intrusive thoughts about violence or sex are sin.” “Your sexual orientation is sin.”Jesus does speak about hating someone in your heart as “liable to judgment” (though not equivalent to murder). But hatred and lust in the heart still require intention.It is not sin to have intrusive, unwanted thoughts in our minds. That’s a result of being in a fallen world and having broken bodies and minds. “The fall brought mankind into an estate of sin and misery.”Those who focus on the sinfulness of sexual thoughts and temptations confuse thought and action. This causes Christians more … Get full access to Joel Carini at joelcarini.substack.com/subscribe

I’m deeply interested in the idea that most thinking follows narrow, ideological ruts and that it takes real effort to escape these ruts and allow one’s thought to be shaped by the complexity and multiplicity of empirical inputs, by the reality of how things are.From several quarters, I receive pressure to hold that ideology, worldviews, presuppositions, socially-constructed conceptual systems, and so on, always color our vision such that the aspiration to empirical reception of the real is a modernist fantasy, even a hubristic one, a naïve realism and brute empiricism.At the same time, many of the same people recognize that allowing one’s thought to be held captive by ideology, or failing to recognize the socially-constructed nature of one’s concepts, is itself naïve and the cause of much error in our thinking. Partisanship and tribalism seem like predominant errors of our day that sharply contrast with the idea that we have modernized, secularized, and reached the height of scientific, empirical thought. Resigning ourselves to ideological thinking and partisanship does not seem viable, yet the thought that we could or even should rise above it is often swatted down, like a poppy that has grown taller than those around it.I want to argue that the aspiration to empirical, non-ideological thinking is one to which we must succumb. The risk of thinking that we have arrived is real, but that is the same as the risk of succumbing to ideology. Empiricism is not hubristic; it is rather the thesis that we do not know and cannot be certain but must endeavor perpetually to discover how wrong we are. Likewise, realism is not the thesis that we have a good grasp on reality but that reality remains, always, distinct from our thought and the standard by which it must be judged and tested. Seeking empirical apprehension of the real is a human obligation.The Limits of IdeologyIdeological thinking has several features. In the main, it involves shortcuts for thinking by adopting a raft of views of one’s tribe and seeking confirmation of those views, rather than disconfirmation.It is quite understandable in the young, who have not had time to examine issues and topics on a case-by-case basis but must, on a practical level, make far-reaching decisions about how they will live and operate in the world. Our choices of religious and political affiliation, especially in high-school and college, almost inevitably operate in this way. Without time or capacity to exhaustively study each religious or political issue, we must rely on limited evidence and our gut to take the leap into one way of thinking or the other and to use it as a broad heuristic for a variety of issues.However, these either-or and black-and-white framings must be seen, or come to be seen, as only rough approximations of the world. Otherwise, a kind of unjustified certainty sets in that precludes the gathering of further evidence, the testing of individual conclusions, and seeing the merits in the arguments and conclusions of “the other side.”At some point, we also come to see the way in which these partisan, ideological framings are the result of considerations other than truth. In politics, the ability to mobilize masses to vote, especially in a two-party system, requires casting political questions as partisan in nature. There are two views, and to reject one is to adopt the other: It’s capitalism or socialism. There is nothing else. In religion, the need to offer the laity a clear set of beliefs that signify membership in the religious community - and the kingdom of heaven - requires simplifying and closing off certain questions that religious intellectuals might want to keep open. “The first chapters of the book of Genesis are literally true.” “Moses certainly wrote the Pentateuch.” “The four gospel accounts definitely harmonize.”Once we recognize the ideological nature of the majority of human thought, it is tempting to conclude that, since we are all human and subject to the same kinds of cognitive distortion, that there is no escaping ideology, only a circumspect acceptance of this condition and adoption of a kind of agnosticism and skepticism that casts all truth-claims or pretensions to objective empirical thought as suspect.But there is another way. Once we lose our epistemological naïveté, we can conclude, with writer Gurwinder Bhogal, that our starting point should be, “I am wrong.” Given my humanity and subjection to the cognitive distortions of human psychology, the forces of tribalism, partisanship, and ideology, I know that my current thinking has no chance of being adequate to how things are. The remaining questions are, “How wrong am I, and in what particular ways?” The attempt to answer those questions is what I call empirical thinking.Five Strategies to Escape IdeologyHuman psychology is not ordered to truth but to certain biological ends. If we are to overcome the forces of nature and direct our minds to truth, it will require effort and strategy. We cannot continue to seek truth in the way that we originally did, by the rough heuristics of ideological thinking. We cannot simply download truth from our senses either; the world is too complex, and we are aware of the biases and cognitive distortions by which we are tempted.In fact, we will have, to a large degree, to utilize alternative heuristics and strategies, which are by no means infallible but which, rather, generally counteract the tendencies to black-and-white thinking, to tribalism, and to certainty.1. Have Multiple Tribal MembershipsOne of my strategies is to locate myself in multiple social and intellectual circles, in effect, to have multiple tribal memberships. (Not to be confused with multiple trial memberships, which one should curtail.) Recognizing that we tend to think in ways that justify our tribe, it is important to complicate one’s own tribal membership by locating oneself at the periphery of one tribe, and at its intersection with another tribe. For example, by being in academic philosophy, I feel the pull to belong to that tribe and to adopt its habits of thought and standards of intellectual respectability. Yet, as a member of the evangelical tribe, I have competing and conflicting allegiances which, I find, help me to filter out the tribal commitments of each group from the intellectually valid commitments and merits of each.2. Seek Out DisagreementAnother strategy is to seek out disagreement. I have found this most effectively through writing, both academic and online. Views that you formulate in private and keep private never undergo testing. At the same time, in order to find disagreement, you have to avoid writing and speaking to an echo-chamber. Once again, having multiple tribal memberships or distancing oneself from one’s tribe in certain ways can cultivate a readership that is willing and able to offer pushback and critique.3. Non-Ideological Content ConsumptionYet another strategy is to take in content primarily from thinkers who do not share your prior ideological and religious commitments. While, as a Christian theologian, I have indeed read deeply in the tradition and community of which I am a part, having come to embody the tradition, I rarely consult it anymore. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I don’t need to consult works of Christian theology frequently because I have read widely in that area and am capable of writing such works myself. When I read and listen to learn more about the world, I seek out sources that do not share my ideological predilections, even if I find them, as I often do, confirming some of my priors.4. Cultivate Your Capacity for Empirical ThoughtAnother strategy is to cultivate one’s own capacity for empirical and, specifically, scientific thought. In response to my initial description of the contrast between empirical and ideological thought, my friend Mason Bruza raised the objection that the… Get full access to Joel Carini at joelcarini.substack.com/subscribe