Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Egypt Issues Arrest Warrants for American Filmmaker and Others

According to the AP, Egyptian prosecutors have issued arrest warrants for several American citizens connected with the production and distribution of the YouTube video, “The Innocence of Muslims,” that has sparked violent protests in that country and throughout the Muslim world.  Egypt charges the defendants — who include the video’s maker and publicist, assorted Coptic Orthodox Christians, and Florida pastor Terry Jones — with “harming national unity, insulting and publicly attacking Islam, and spreading false information.” Some of the charges carry the death penalty.

What happens now? Some reports indicate that Egypt has contacted Interpol, the  international police cooperation organization in Lyon, France, for help in executing the warrants. In a press release, however, Interpol says  it has  not received any such request and that, in any case, its Constitution forbids it from undertakings “of a political, military, religious or racial character.” The strong implication: don’t expect us to help. The US and Egypt have an extradition treaty that dates back to Ottoman times, but, according to this unofficial version on the web, the treaty doesn’t cover offenses of the sort Egypt alleges here. Anyway, it’s inconceivable that the State Department would assist Egypt any more than Interpol, or that American courts would ever allow these defendants to be transferred to Cairo. Observers expect Egypt will end up trying them in absentia.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami · 2 Comments

Nagel on Plantinga

This is, it seemed to me, a very fair-minded and illuminating treatment of the philosopher Alvin Plantinga’s new book, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism, by the philosopher Thomas Nagel.  Nagel comes from an atheist and secular perspective, while Plantinga’s perspective is theistic.  Much of the evaluation (and likely the book itself) is far beyond my philosophical depth, treating issues of epistemology (though I did find the discussion of the issue of the derivation of “basic knowledge” interesting, and am not sure I understand the analogy that Nagel says Plantinga draws between the operation of faith and memory).  Here is a portion where Nagel is discussing Plantinga’s view of faith:

Faith, according to Plantinga, is another basic way of forming beliefs, distinct from but not in competition with reason, perception, memory, and the others. However, it is

a wholly different kettle of fish: according to the Christian tradition (including both Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin), faith is a special gift from God, not part of our ordinary epistemic equipment. Faith is a source of belief, a source that goes beyond the faculties included in reason.

God endows human beings with a sensus divinitatis that ordinarily leads them to believe in him. (In atheists the sensus divinitatis is either blocked or not functioning properly.) In addition, God acts in the world more selectively by “enabling Christians to see the truth of the central teachings of the Gospel.”

If all this is true, then by Plantinga’s standard of reliability and proper function, faith is a kind of cause that provides a warrant for theistic belief, even though it is a gift, and not a universal human faculty. (Plantinga recognizes that rational arguments have also been offered for the existence of God, but he thinks it is not necessary to rely on these, any more than it is necessary to rely on rational proofs of the existence of the external world to know just by looking that there is beer in the refrigerator.)

It is illuminating to have the starkness of the opposition between Plantinga’s theism and the secular outlook so clearly explained. My instinctively atheistic perspective implies that if I ever found myself flooded with the conviction that what the Nicene Creed says is true, the most likely explanation would be that I was losing my mind, not that I was being granted the gift of faith. From Plantinga’s point of view, by contrast, I suffer from a kind of spiritual blindness from which I am unwilling to be cured. This is a huge epistemological gulf, and it cannot be overcome by the cooperative employment of the cognitive faculties that we share, as is the hope with scientific disagreements.

Faith adds beliefs to the theist’s base of available evidence that are absent from the atheist’s, and unavailable to him without God’s special action. These differences make different beliefs reasonable given the same shared evidence. An atheist familiar with biology and medicine has no reason to believe the biblical story of the resurrection. But a Christian who believes it by faith should not, according to Plantinga, be dissuaded by general biological evidence. Plantinga compares the difference in justified beliefs to a case where you are accused of a crime on the basis of very convincing evidence, but you know that you didn’t do it. For you, the immediate evidence of your memory is not defeated by the public evidence against you, even though your memory is not available to others. Likewise, the Christian’s faith in the truth of the gospels, though unavailable to the atheist, is not defeated by the secular evidence against the possibility of resurrection.

Posted on by

Davidson, “Only Muslim”

In July, Cornell University Press published Only Muslim: Embodying Islam in Twentieth-Century France by Naomi Davidson (University of Ottawa).  The publisher’s description follows.

The French state has long had a troubled relationship with its diverse Muslim populations. In Only Muslim, Naomi Davidson traces this turbulence to the 1920s and 1930s, when North Africans first immigrated to French cities in significant numbers. Drawing on police reports, architectural blueprints, posters, propaganda films, and documentation from metropolitan and colonial officials as well as anticolonial nationalists, she reveals the ways in which French politicians and social scientists created a distinctly French vision of Islam that would inform public policy and political attitudes toward Muslims for the rest of the century—Islam français. French Muslims were cast into a permanent “otherness” that functioned in the same way as racial difference. This notion that one was only and forever Muslim was attributed to all immigrants from North Africa, though in time “Muslim” came to function as a synonym for Algerian, despite the diversity of the North and West African population.

Davidson grounds her narrative in the history of the Mosquée de Paris, which was inaugurated in 1926 and epitomized the concept of Islam français. Built in official gratitude to the tens of thousands of Muslim subjects of France who fought and were killed in World War I, the site also provided the state with a means to regulate Muslim life throughout the metropole beginning during the interwar period. Later chapters turn to the consequences of the state’s essentialized view of Muslims in the Vichy years and during the Algerian War. Davidson concludes with current debates over plans to build a Muslim cultural institute in the middle of a Parisian immigrant neighborhood, showing how Islam remains today a marker of an unassimilable difference.

Posted on by

Levine, “Politics, Religion, & Society in Latin America”

This month, Lynne Rienner Publishers will publish Politics, Religion, and Society in Latin America by Daniel H. Levine (University of Michigan). The publisher’s description follows.

Long assumed to be an unchanging and unquestioned bulwark of established power and privilege, religion in Latin America has diversified and flourished, while taking on new social and political roles in more open societies. How did this change occur? Why did churches in the region embrace new ideas about rights, sponsor social movements, and become advocates for democracy? Are further changes on the horizon? Daniel Levine explores these issues, uniquely situating the Latin American experience in a rich theoretical and comparative context.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Justice Thomas on Faith and the Court

In the New York Times, Adam Liptak reports on a recent appearance by Justice Clarence Thomas at the National Archives. In an interview conducted there by Yale law professor Akhil Amar, Thomas reflected, among other things, on the religious makeup of the Court and on his own faith. About the former, Thomas downplayed the importance of the fact that, for the first time in history, the Court contains no Protestants. (The current lineup is six Catholics, including Thomas himself, and three Jews). “We’re all from the Ivy League,” he observed. “That seems to be more relevant than what faith we are.” About the latter, he said that he grew up in a religious environment and still believed in God. “And I thank God I believe in God,” he said —  a theologically interesting proposition, itself — “or I would probably be enormously angry right now.”

I always feel a little uncomfortable focusing on the religious identity of the Justices.  It’s naive, I know, to think that Presidents select Justices without regard to such things – for years, there were “Catholic” and “Jewish” seats on the Court – but, in a religiously diverse society, focusing on the Justices’ religion can easily lead to recriminations. (“He’s only ruling that way because he’s Jewish”).  Perhaps that’s why Justice Thomas changed the subject to education. Besides, if the Justices are anything like other Americans, religious identity in itself suggests little about what results they would favor. Religion is an important predictor in American politics, influencing the policies and candidates people support. But it is the degree of religiosity, not the particular religion, that seems to matter. So, the interesting question would be, “How often does a Justice attend religious services?” not “To what religion does the Justice belong?” And that’s assuming that the Justices don’t filter their religious commitments when deciding cases.

To my mind, though, Justice Thomas’s second observation is the really interesting one, at least on a personal level. About what, exactly, is he so bitter that only divine grace can keep him from being “enormously angry?” You’d think that being a Supreme Court Justice would soothe most public annoyances. Liptak reminds readers, by way of explanation, of Thomas’s infamous confirmation hearings, when Thomas had to defend himself against allegations of sexual harassment. But that was more than 20 years ago. Maybe it’s something else the Justice addressed in the interview, the continuing criticisms that he doesn’t care about his African-American identity. Whatever it is, the hurt is apparently very deep.

Posted on by ddrakeman

Things I Thought I Knew — Part 1: Supreme Court Facts

When I was teaching an undergraduate research class on the Constitution, I would sometimes give the students this assignment:  Find a Supreme Court opinion making a constitutional argument that relies on a factual statement.  Then go do the research and see if the facts that are necessary to the argument are accurately stated.  At the outset, I thought the Court’s batting average would be pretty high, but that wasn’t necessarily the case.

Take, for example, the Everson case where Justice Rutledge read the establishment clause in light of James Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance because of Madison’s “authorship” of the religion clauses and the fact that the First Amendment was the “direct culmination” of the struggle for religious freedom in Virginia.

Does the documentary record support Rutledge’s factual claims about the religion clauses?  The answer, at least in my view, is somewhere between “no” and “not really.”  But this isn’t just an academic research exercise or a chance to say, “Gotcha.”  It’s a question about what makes a persuasive constitutional argument.

This what-are-the-real-facts issue might seem to be narrowly focused on originalist arguments, since they need to cite the historical record showing the Constitution’s original meaning (whether they are “Old” Originalist arguments focused on the framers or “New” Originalist ones about the “public meaning” of the text).  But even non-originalist justices sometimes rely on economics, sociology, psychology and other academic fields.  In those cases, we can ask whether the justices are fairly representing the state of scholarship, or are they engaging in a bit of “law office social science.”

So what if the Court is wrong, or if, perhaps, it over-interprets a bit?  That’s a deeper question, but I tend to side with the distinguished Princeton professor, Edward Corwin, who said (in 1951) in connection with the Supreme Court’s landmark church-state cases, “the Court has the right to make history [but] it has no right to make it up.

Don Drakeman

Posted on by

Jacobs, “Reason, Religion, and Natural Law: From Plato to Spinoza”

This month, Oxford University Press published Reason, Religion, and Natural Law: From Plato to Spinoza (OUP Sept. 2012) by Jonathan A. Jacobs (Institute for Criminal Justice Ethics). The publisher’s description follows.

This edited volume examines the realizations between theological considerations and natural law theorizing, from Plato to Spinoza.

Theological considerations have long had a pronounced role in Catholic natural law theories, but have not been as thoroughly examined from a wider perspective. The contributors to this volume take a more inclusive view of the relation between conceptions of natural law and theistic claims and principles. They do not jointly defend one particular thematic claim, but articulate diverse ways in which natural law has both been understood and related to theistic claims.

In addition to exploring Plato and the Stoics, the volume also looks at medieval Jewish thought, the thought of Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham, and the ways in which Spinoza’s thought includes resonances of earlier views and intimations of later developments. Taken as a whole, these essays enlarge the scope of the discussion of natural law through study of how the naturalness of natural law has often been related to theses about the divine. The latter are often crucial elements of natural law theorizing, having an integral role in accounting for the metaethical status and ethical bindingness of natural law. At the same time, the question of the relation between natural law and God-and the relation between natural law and divine command-has been addressed in a multiplicity of ways by key figures throughout the history of natural law theorizing, and these essays accord them the explanatory significance they deserve.

Posted on by ddrakeman · 3 Comments

Getting Out of Our Grooves — Part 3: Where Does Religious Liberty Come From?

The canonical view of American religious liberty was set out in Justice Hugo Black’s opinion in the Everson case (1947):  A “large proportion” of the “early settlers of this country . . . came from Europe to escape the bondage of laws which compelled them to support and attend government favored churches.”  Religious persecution “shocked the freedom-loving colonials into a feeling of abhorrence,” a feeling, he noted “which found expression in the First Amendment.”  Ultimately, the leadership for our national commitment to religious liberty came from Virginia, since Jefferson’s Bill for Establishing Religion Freedom and the First Amendment “had the same objective and were intended to provide the same protection . . . .”

This classic statement of the Jeffersonian origins of the religion clauses basically says that “ideas have consequences.”  And it’s hard to disagree with that principle in the abstract.  But it is also worth looking at some more pragmatic concerns that led Revolutionary America to embrace a greater level of religious freedom.  As discussed in my earlier blog, religious liberty, in addition to being a good idea, can be a useful strategy for governments seeking to expand or consolidate their power.

Scholars have suggested, for example, that the War itself may have had a beneficial trickle down effect on religious liberty.  Most recently, John Ragosta’s Wellspring of Liberty (2010) shows how Virginia’s dissenters, particularly the Baptists and Presbyterians, negotiated for greater religious liberty from the Anglican-dominated state in return for their support of the war effort.

Meanwhile, Charles Hanson’s Necessary Virtue: The Pragmatic Origins of Religious Liberty in New England (1998) shows how events in Massachusetts, where anti-Catholicism had been ingrained for a very long time, led to a “wartime accommodation” of Catholic France.  Hanson’s story touches in part on the oldest endowed university lecture in America, Harvard’s Dudleian Lecture.  Donor Dudley’s carefully drawn will required that, at least once every four years, the distinguished lecturer would be required to address the following topic:  “The detecting and convicting and exposing the idolatry of the Romish Church, their tyranny, usurpations, damnable heresies, fatal errors, abominable superstitions, and other crying wickedness in their high places.”

And so, while New Englanders had blasted the 1774 Quebec Act guarantying Canadian Catholics the “free exercise of religion,” the colonists’ formal alliance with Catholic France in 1788 led to wartime “accommodations,” including far milder Dudleian Lectures during the war years.  Old prejudices tend to die hard, however, and Harvard didn’t look seriously at changing the anti-Catholic focus of the lectures until the end of the 19th century, a move that we may choose to applaud for its liberalness or to criticize for its violation of the principle of upholding donor intent in charitable giving.

Don Drakeman