{"id":3706,"date":"2014-09-30T12:27:42","date_gmt":"2014-09-30T19:27:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newcoolthang.com\/?p=3706"},"modified":"2020-01-09T04:16:59","modified_gmt":"2020-01-09T11:16:59","slug":"neo-pragmatism-and-a-young-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.newcoolthang.com\/index.php\/2014\/09\/neo-pragmatism-and-a-young-earth\/3706\/","title":{"rendered":"Neo-Pragmatism and a Young Earth"},"content":{"rendered":"

Neo-pragmatism (at least as Richard Rorty understands it) is committed to the position that, in some sense, the earth did not exist until there was a community of people to conceptualize and categorize it as such.\u00a0 To be sure, there are obviously ways of reading this which do not do justice to the neo-pragmatists.\u00a0 The main point at issue lies in the question, \u201cIn what sense <\/em>did the earth not exist until relatively recently?\u201d \u00a0I think this question is especially interesting within the context of a Mormon worldview that \u2013 in some sense<\/em> \u2013 believes in a very young earth.\u00a0 In this post I want to sketch out some (very) rough interpretations and possibilities of how neo-pragmatism might(!) link up with LDS claims.\u00a0 (Warning: rampant speculation ahead!)<\/p>\n

Before I move on to the Mormon version of the young earth, I will first address the neo-pragmatic version of the young earth that Rorty defends.\u00a0 The first, and least surprising thing to keep in mind, is that Rorty frames the issue in humanistic terms which do not presuppose God or spiritual existence outside of our mortal realm.\u00a0 Thus, until communities of mortal men were able to conceptualize and categorize the earth, there was no person at all that was doing so.\u00a0 Second, Rorty is not claiming that the thing that we now conceptualize as the earth in its unconceptualized self<\/em> did not exist until humans came along.\u00a0 Instead, the claim is that that thing did not exist as the earth<\/em> until there was some linguistic community to categorize and construe that thing as the earth<\/em>.\u00a0 \u201cThe earth\u201d and its pre-human past \u2013 as we now understand it \u2013 is a set of interpretations and categories which we now retroactively project onto the earth and its pre-human past.\u00a0 This position can profitably be understood as a clear rejection of the reductionism that is built into most forms of naturalism (especially scientism) in that what makes an object does not solely depend upon its internal make-up, but also upon its relationship to those linguistic beings that interact with, categorize and conceptualize it.<\/p>\n

At this point, it probably looks like we are needlessly splitting irrelevant hairs (I don\u2019t totally disagree with that), but I think the point that\u2019s being made here can be better articulated if we trade out our example of the earth for that of a rabbit.\u00a0 One way of conceptualizing a rabbit is to not see it as a rabbit at all, but as a particular region in which various kinds of matter are in motion.\u00a0 More concretely, if we choose to see in the world purely in terms of physics and chemistry, rabbits do not exist, since that is not a physical or chemical category within such a vocabulary.\u00a0 In other words, we can quite easily imagine a linguistic community for which rabbits do not exist as rabbits (such a community would not see itself as a linguistic community either).\u00a0 Yes, the things that we in our linguistic community call rabbits do exist for that community as well\u2026 but not as rabbits.\u00a0 It is in a similar sense that the earth did exist before mortal humans\u2026 but not as the earth.\u00a0 From Rorty\u2019s perspective, the earth, rabbits and mankind did not come into existence as the earth, rabbits and mankind until there was a linguistic community which could construe such things as the earth, rabbits and mankind.\u00a0 Until such a community existed that could talk about such things in that way, such things did not yet exist in that way.\u00a0 And this way of talking about such things did not come about until quite recently – I would say about 10,000 years ago if I had to venture a largely uninformed guess.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s now move on to the Mormon view of creation.\u00a0 The first, and least surprising difference between the Mormon position and Rorty\u2019s neo-pragmatism is that the former insist that before mortal man ever began to conceptualize or speak of anything at all, God and all His spiritual children already existed. \u00a0In other words, I think that \u2013 regardless of one\u2019s inclinations toward neo-pragmatism \u2013 Mormons are fully committed to the idea that the earth, rabbits and mankind were all conceptualized as the earth, rabbits and mankind long before it was ever done within any mortal community. \u00a0A second point about the Mormon view of creation is that \u2013 in some sense \u2013 it happened relatively recently \u2013 about 10,000 years ago. \u00a0Third, Mormons also believe that \u2013 again, in some sense \u2013 there was a spiritual creation that came prior to the physical creation of things and while the physical creation seems to have happened about 10,000 years ago, it\u2019s not clear how long ago the spiritual creation is supposed to have happened.<\/p>\n

I hope that by now the direction I\u2019m heading in is pretty obvious.\u00a0 I think that Rorty\u2019s idea that a rabbit does not exist as a rabbit until it is conceptualized as such by some linguistic community can be a useful way for Mormons to understand the creation.\u00a0 To be sure, this idea is utterly speculative and by no means doctrine to be defended as such, but that doesn\u2019t mean that it might not be helpful for some.\u00a0 So here we go:\u00a0 Whatever else the spiritual creation of the earth, rabbits and mankind involved, it also involved the conceptualization by spiritual beings of those things as<\/em> the earth, rabbits and mankind.\u00a0 Without this conceptualization on the part of spiritual beings, such things might(!) have spiritually existed in some sense, but they would not have spiritually existed as the earth, rabbits and mankind.\u00a0 Then, approximately 10,000 years ago a community of linguistic mortals (and this community already spiritually existed as mortal men) began to conceptualize the earth, rabbits and themselves as the earth, rabbits and mankind.\u00a0 This was the physical creation of the earth, rabbits and mankind.\u00a0 Yes, such things had already spiritually existed before as the earth, rabbits and mankind, but until that point they did not physically exist as such until physical and mortal beings conceptualized them as such.\u00a0 From this perspective, most of the long, long history of the earth\u2019s creation and evolution are not really the physical creation at all, but can instead be seen as the spiritual creation.\u00a0 (As a side note, I also think this idea pairs pretty well with the idea that all spirit matter is material in some sense.)<\/p>\n

Now for the potential problems, and there are quite a few to be sure.\u00a0 First, I\u2019m not so sure that the terms physical and spiritual creation can consistently be applied in this way.\u00a0 After all, the scriptures never say in any non-tendentious way that the earth did not exist as the earth<\/em> before some point even though it did exist in some sense before that.\u00a0 We might interpret, \u201cthe earth was without form and void\u201d in this way, but it\u2019s not clear that we ought to.\u00a0 Second, it raises other questions which would not otherwise exist, such as: How involved was God in that extended spiritual creation?\u00a0 Does this in some way minimize God\u2019s contribution to the creation of that unconceptualized aspect of the world \u2013 I mean, that part of it that exists in some way prior to its conceptualization as the earth, etc.?\u00a0 Third, I\u2019m not sure how well the timelines actually match up, nor am I sure how important this timeline actually is.\u00a0 Fourth, I\u2019m not at all clear on what ramifications follow from the existence of different linguistic communities which conceptualize the earth and mankind differently.\u00a0 In other words, I\u2019m not sure that this historicism is fully compatible with the universality to which Mormonism lays claim.\u00a0 Fifth, I\u2019m not at all clear on how consistent these ideas are with the Mormon doctrine of the fall.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure there are other problems that might come up, but to be honest, I don\u2019t really plan on address these or any other objections to this view anytime soon.\u00a0 Again, my intention is not to put forward any kind of doctrine or systematic theology \u2013I am very suspicious of all such things.\u00a0 Rather, I simply wanted to put forward one potentially helpful way of diffusing the tensions that might arise within some readers between faith and science.