Six Points Against God
I hurled down a gauntlet at a reader named Mr Jones, asking him harshly if he could come up with factual and reality-based objections to Christianity rather than emotional objections. He was a man of honor (which I regret to report is a rare thing among atheists, and getting more rare) and responded immediately and forthrightly.
Here are the points he raises:
1) God as conceived by Christianity is not consistent with the evil of this world. You may say “free will”, but what has free will to do with a helpless baby being born deformed before dying a prolonged and painful death from an inadequately-formed heart over the course of several days? Then, assuming said baby was not baptized, being plunged into hell (or limbo) for the crime of inheriting original sin?
2) Partially a continuation, as a father I would never consider allowing my sons to juggle chainsaws if I were physically capable of stopping them. Yet juggling chainsaws is the smallest of small potatoes when compared to the infinity of fiery torture in hell, yet humanity’s Father seems perfectly content to allow naive children to stumble through life without even the vaguest awareness of what could await them at the end of it. This is inconsistent with the notion of a God who cares for us.
3) Christian doctrine promotes attitudes contrary to reality and prudence, such as the notion of pacifism being a desirable thing. Even if for largely pragmatic reasons a theory of “just war” has developed, the notion that pacifism – not peace, but pacifism – would ever be morally desirable is contrary to reality. If attacked, it is morally imperative to fight back if at all possible rather than submit to unjust violence. To fail to fight evil when one can is to reward it.
4) Christianity teaches submission to the civic authorities, not because of practicality, but because all of their authority derives from God. It maintains no doctrinal right of justified revolution. If Romanians thought like the Apostle Paul, we would still be ruled by a tyrant today. Instead, we rose up and shot him down like a dog, and thereby won our freedom.
5) The argument that the church is an eternal institution with immutable and infallible teachings runs contrary to reality, where it has made several dramatic about-faces over the centuries, then found weasel words to justify how doing the precise opposite of what it used to do somehow does not represent a change of church teachings. From the crusades to kissing a koran, for instance.
6) The inconsistencies in the Bible itself do not point to a book that is divinely inspired.
I promised I would reply when time permits, and it permits now.
A word before we begin: Please note that I am a Roman Catholic. Hence, I do not regard it as legitimate to quote to Bible to heathens. Biblical language includes parable, poetry, psalms, riddles, or in apocalyptic images. Catholics believe that the Church wrote the New Testament, and has sole authority to interpret it.
I myself, for that matter, do not believe any atheist or agnostic has the ability to read the Bible and understand what is being said. As well describe the rainbow to the man born blind. I will not argue with unbelievers over the meaning of Bible passages. I am not qualified to do so.
However, when some dispute in the paragraphs below arise concerning what is versus what is not official and traditional orthodox Christian teaching, the document we use for instructing children, heathens, and others unfamiliar with the faith is the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
In no case am I quoting the Catechism in order to show the truth of the matter. That is another argument for another day.
I here quote it only to show what is it Christians in general, and Catholics in particular, actually believe. I quote it to dispel the straw man argument forming the foundation of Mr Jones’ edifice of words.
The first point rejects the notion that a benevolent God could permit evil and suffering in this world.
I salute Mr Jones for offering a real augment here. His first point is manfully said, and is indeed an argument of reason and fact, not merely emotional, and hard one to answer. He has answered my challenge.
In fact, I cannot give the whole answer, because the whole answer is a person, not a sentence spoken in words. The whole answer is the Word of God. He is Christ. He knows your suffering and suffers with you: He solves the problem of pain.
But this mystical answer will satisfy no skeptic, so we must approach the point more carefully, precisely, and theologically.
I opine that Mr Jones does a disservice to the strength of the atheist argument here. He refers to “God as conceived by Christianity.” This raises the question of who is doing the conceiving and what, specifically, these conceptions are. Mr Jones, as am I, no doubt is short on time.
Allow me to restate the argument in clearer terms, and state explicitly the alleged logical contradiction Mr Jones alleges implicitly. If I am misstating his case, it is unintentional.
“God as conceived by Christianity is said to be omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent. Benevolent means God wishes no evil in the world. An omnipotent being cannot lack the power and resources needed to carry out His wish, and an omniscient being cannot lack the knowledge needed. Therefore if God exists, no evil ever could have existed in the world. Evil exists in the world. Therefore God does not. QED.”
Jones anticipates the response, which is to say that man’s free will, granted by God as a good, can be freely abused like any other good, and man can turn willfully away from God.
Man did this in Adam; and each of us, in lesser things and greater, does this every day.
By turning away from God, who is the source of good, we humans willfully and knowingly, without any excuse at all, reject good and embrace evil, reject life and embrace death, thereby willing evil to ourselves by willing it on our brethren.
Not even God can make a universe where the moral standard applied to others does not apply to oneself: so if Cain murders Abel, Cain embraces the shadow of death willingly. When that shadow comes for him, Cain cannot claim that the love of God for him has failed or fallen short. Cain freely willed evil upon himself by rejecting good and rejecting the source of good.
The shocking reality is that God has more respect for that divine, supernatural spark of light within us, that faculty called free will, than He has desire to prevent us from using it wrongly. He would rather have us fall and repent than have us be like animals or robots, unable to fall because unable to choose.
The good God seeks for us is love. Love cannot be compulsory, for that is the nature of love. If not compulsory, then freely willed.
Omnipotence means all things that are logically possible are within divine power; it does not mean God can divide by zero. Whatever is not logically possible cannot exist, because reality cannot contradict itself. So to speak of creatures who possess free will but who cannot freely fall is nonsense.
Jones anticipates this line of argument and dismisses it, saying “what has free will to do with a helpless baby being born deformed …?”
It is an odd question. As far as I can see, it has nothing to do with Church teaching.
No one is claiming that the baby’s free will causes his heart disease. The claim is that the exile of the human race from paradise into this valley of tears, and our continued exile here, was a result of the acts freely willed by our ancestors and by ourselves.
Here we see in Jones’ argument what will be a recurring theme: he is objecting, not to what the Church actually teaches on a topic, but to what he imagines the Church should teach if she taught what he said she should.
Odd or not, the question merits an answer.
The Fall of Man is what formed human nature. Human nature is such that men are mortal and die the death. Disease and disaster dog our each footstep, and death conquers all victors.
Death is not an individual punishment visited on each and every individual for individual sin. We do not live in the world where life expectancy is directly correlative to righteousness.
It is true that some sins in many cases lead to a decrease in health and happiness, it is also true that the Church does not teach that good men prosper in this life, that crime does not pay, and the sin is impractical. Of course it is practical. Of course wicked men get away with wicked crimes.
It is obvious to Job and to everyone else that in this life, there is no justice: the wealthy men grind the faces of the poor, the tyrant dies comfortably in bed, the pirates drink from the skulls of honest sailors, whose widows never learn their fate. Woe and horror shadow the footfalls of every man; trouble and misery afflict the innocent, and the wicked prosper.
I dare say that a cursory reading of the psalms would tell us that the Christians know this sad truth better than any. We certainly talk about it more.
The question is why. Why is there injustice in this life?
There are two types of evils in the world: the evils that men do, such as crimes and all injustices, where either one man does harm to another, or deprives him of something he needs; and then there are evils of nature, such as diseases, natural disasters, storms and crop failures, where natural forces work harm or deprivation.
The evils worked on the innocent by evil men are the result of the free will of the evil men, not of their victims. Blaming the victim for his suffering is an oriental philosophical notion, called Karma.
What of natural evils, though? No evil human placed a bad heart in the baby in our example.
The specific example of a dying baby is selected for its emotional appeal. Looking at the matter through dispassionate eyes, however, we can see that if an octogenarian dies comfortably in bed, surrounded by wives and concubines, fifty strong sons and fifty beauteous daughters, heaps of gold and books of lore, with all the princes and wise men of the earth weeping at his departure, it is still death. One is just as tragic as the other.
Emotionally, of course, the baby elicits more sympathy than the eighty-year-old. But as far as cool reason is concerned, nothing about the deformed baby makes him worthy of greater sorrow or anxiety than the dying octogenarian: if one is an outrage and a horror no benevolent God should ever allow, so is the other.
And, again, the question of why a benevolent God allows death to smite the innocent is no different from the question as to why a benevolent God allows natural evils.
That question cannot be answered in the secular world. The secular mind sees only the natural world, and, like Mr A Square of Flatland, does not conceive of a supernatural.
These evils afflict men because of sin. We men rebelled against God. Nature rebelled against us.
We Christians have only one known example of what a sinless man can be like and can do: he is Christ.
If we are to believe the reports of miracles (and, if we do not, there is no point in being Christian) then we have a report of what man lives like when nature is obedient to him.
There are also reports of saints and miracle workers from that day to this exercising power over nature, healing the sick, calming storms, and works mightier than these.
As I said, had we humans not rebelled against God, nature would not have rebelled against us.
But the real answer is that we humans as a race are not in the correct situation with God, and that is what causes the evils mentioned.
In prelapsarian Eden, or the paradise of the New Jerusalem, any child’s sickness, if such a thing can be imagined, would be abolished at his mother’s first prayer, since all women in paradise have the power and authority of saints.
Again, the sick child is not being punished as an individual for some individual sin. He is human. He has inherited human nature from Adam, who is the father who defined human nature.
To be human is to be mortal, which is, to be subject to random accidents, disease or disaster, which can kill the innocent.
Logically, the only possible solution to inheriting a corrupt human nature from the corrupt progenitor of the race is to substitute, by adoption, a new nature, from a new Adam. That is precisely what Christ proposes, and that precisely is what Christ did.
So, in effect, the objection in point one, that God would not permit evil, turns out to be a judgment that it were better not to exist than to have free will and hence run the possibility of doing sin.
Obviously, no animal nor robot can make that judgment: only a creature with free will can judge the value of free will. To judge it as less valuable than robothood is a logical contradiction.
If the objection is that God should have make the world such that men could sin but suffer no consequences, this is also a logical contradiction: it is saying ‘A is not A’.
We humans see the act and the consequences of the act at different periods in time: one comes before the other. This is because we are creatures that exist in time. As a matter of logic, act and consequence are merely two names for one event that exists in the continuum of timespace: my son calls me ‘father’ and my father calls me ‘son’, but I am one person, despite having two names.
So the argument here is reduced to the idea that if man creates evil for himself by disobeying God, God should provide some mechanism or method for saving man.
That method is Christ.
But the argument runs that we should disbelieve in the very existence of Christ because the problem Christ solves would not have existed in the first place had Christ already solved it.
The answer is that the problem exists because we humans, jointly and severally, through Adam and in our daily lives, create the problem. Death is part of human nature, and so is the lack of command over nature.
But surely an omnipotent and omniscient God could design a world where only the evil men could afflict evils on other evil men? Why should the innocent suffer?
The second point, albeit indirectly, speaks to this. Jones makes two arguments in Point Two. First, that a loving father would not permit his children to juggle chainsaws, or commit any other acts of harm or self harm, if he could physically prevent them.
Second, God has not informed men of spiritual reality. The Father “seems perfectly content to allow naive children to stumble through life without even the vaguest awareness of what could await them at the end of it.” This is inconsistent with divine benevolence.
Let us not overlook the comment capping Point One, which ties better into this argument than into the last: is it benevolent or just that the fate of our baby born deformed “assuming said baby was not baptized, being plunged into hell (or limbo) for the crime of inheriting original sin”?
Let us address each in order.
Jones says he would not let his children come to harm juggling chainsaws if he could prevent it. Neither would I. But then again, I have not the power to close wounds, reconnect severed limbs, and raise the dead to life again.
Had I that power, the calculation of what risk I would permit my children to embrace becomes very different.
To accuse God of exposing us to dangers whose effects God can undo is a weightless accusation. It is to accuse God of failing to be a ‘helicopter mom’ so overprotective that the child never grows.
The universe Jones proposes God should have made, is, in effect, a world where men are born, live, and die, in the womb, without ever being exposed to the dangers of breathing air.
Now, God has created creatures who suffer from no moral dangers. These are animals: they never suffer from the problems associated with free will, such as making an agonizing decision between principle and practicality.
God has also created creatures who suffer no physical dangers. These are angels: they are made of pure and intellectual substance incapable of wounds or death, and the appearances they put on when manifesting to the eyes of man are merely appearances.
So God has, in effect, created worlds where creatures suffer different dangers than man.
But surely it is better that man exists as man than not ever to exist at all.
The problem in logic with this line of reasoning is the same as the problem of objecting to free will: the man making the objection saws off the tree branch he and his arguments sit upon.
Jones is himself a man; and if his wish were granted, he could not exist, much less make the argument that is were better for no man to ever exist.
In the next point, Jones says God has not informed man of the conditions of life after death. That is merely a falsehood.
Every man knows the difference between right and wrong, and every society in history, everywhere on earth, has known that a supernatural judgment awaits them after death, even if, among some tribesmen, they have but crude and incomplete images of what that great judge is like. This is no objection; the Christian notion is also crude and incomplete. Ours is but less incomplete than theirs.
Even if some pagans think the punishment is reincarnation as a toad rather than the eternal flame, no matter. All men have been put on notice. One cannot blame God for failing to inform man of something all men know.
And if Mr Jones, or any other reader, actually fear that the pagan’s notion of God is too incomplete for the pagan to make an informed decision between good and evil, please go and become a missionary.
In any case, not only is this point based on a falsehood, is it illogical.
If the Church taught that men ought to obey God because and only because the threat of hellfire awaited the disobedient, then this argument might have some teeth.
That is not what the Church teaches.
She teaches man should be good because it is good to be good.
All men know this already: the faculty of the conscience (which Freud, an atheist, took such pains to explain away as a an illusion imposed by society, the old liar) is in reality the very voice of God in man, and it speaks to each and every man in a whisper he cannot, try as he might, entirely smother.
As for the fate of unbaptized children, once again, Jones argues not with what real and orthodox Christian believe, but with what he imagines they should believe, if we believed what Jones believes we believe.
This is from paragraph 1261 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It is the authoritative and apostolic voice of true and uncorrupted Christian teaching. (What heretics say is partial truth; the curious reader must approach them to explain their errors. I am not qualified).
“As regards children who have died without Baptism, the Church can only entrust them to the mercy of God, as she does in her funeral rites for them. Indeed, the great mercy of God who desires that all men should be saved, and Jesus’ tenderness toward children which caused him to say: “Let the children come to me, do not hinder them,” allow us to hope that there is a way of salvation for children who have died without Baptism. All the more urgent is the Church’s call not to prevent little children coming to Christ through the gift of holy Baptism.”
So we do not believe unbaptized babies go to hell. Who told you that we believe that?
Before writing a denunciation that what we believe as Christian to be impractical and imprudent, it would have behooved Mr Jones to discover precisely what it is that we Christians believe and teach.
We Christians have taken the trouble to announce our teachings through trumpets from the tops of steeples, loud as churchbells, throughout all the ages. Here it is, written in black and white.
Let me at this point tell my readers one of the several reasons why I became a Catholic, rather than joining with any other denomination, when I converted.
It had been my experience, back when I was an atheist, after many long years of debating philosophical and political topics of all sorts, and with all sort of men, that there were two types of arguments, and two types of men who argued: the honorable and the dishonorable.
The honorable argument, as I have done with Mr Jones, takes the opposing question seriously; so seriously that, indeed, if possible, even a stronger question than the one asked is answered.
Aquinas routinely does this. His objections to Christian orthodoxy recited in the Summa Theologica are routinely tighter, clearer, stronger and harder to rebut than the sloppy meanderings of atheist champions.
The dishonorable argument answers opposing questions frivolously or contemptuously by answering only a weaker version of the question, or not at all.
This type of argument consists of trying to convince onlookers that one’s opponent does not actually believe what he says he believes, and did not actually say what he said, but instead says and believes some foolish proposition easily dismissed, often the opposite of what he said.
Marx routinely does this, as does Nietzsche, and all Leftwing writers. It is their stock in trade and sole means of argumentation.
So having been made most sensitive to this hallmark of weak and dishonorable argument, when I was studying the disputes between the various religions and denominations, I listened carefully to what the Protestants said about the Catholic teaching, and to what the Catholics said about the Protestant teaching.
Then I compared what I was told the source documents said with the source documents themselves.
In every case, without exception, for whatever reason, all of the Protestants I read or heard mischaracterized the Catholic teaching, either leaving out parts or stating the opposite of the teaching; whereas, for whatever reason, none of the Catholics I read or heard mischaracterized the Protestants.
(I did then and still now find this shocking, because, as best I can tell, none of the Protestants are knowingly arguing in bad faith.)
Perhaps this is because America is a Protestant nation, and so Catholics raised here would know the majority doctrines easily, whereas the minority of Catholics rarely get their word spread. Perhaps.
But my suspicions were roused. Earlier in life, I had seen the Protestants treated the exact same way by the Atheists, whose “argument” consisted of pretending the Protestants worshiped psychopathic sky-giant with a beard who sent homos to hell, meanwhile ignoring everything Protestants actually said about the object of their worship.
I strongly suggest adopting the same rule of thumb that has served me. Heed both sides of the argument, and pay particular attention to whether one party is consistently misstating the position of the other.
I do not know about tiny heretical cults like the Quakers or Amish. Orthodox, apostolic, mainstream Christianity does not now and never did preach pacifism. Jesus’ teaching about turning the other cheek, read in context, clearly deals with how to answer personal affronts and insults.
In those days, if a man slapped you with his right hand, and you turned and presented your cheek to his left hand, he would not dare slap you again, because the left hand, which was used for bathroom use, was also the hand used when masters slapped slaves, high born slapped low, or Romans slapped Jew.
Again, quoting the Catechism at 2264:
Love toward oneself remains a fundamental principle of morality. Therefore it is legitimate to insist on respect for one’s own right to life. Someone who defends his life is not guilty of murder even if he is forced to deal his aggressor a lethal blow.
As for Mr Jones’ point 3, he here dismisses the Christian love of peace as being akin to pacifism. This denunciation continues on into point 4 with his dismissal of the Pauline doctrine of nonresistance to unjust but lawful authority. He regards the Church teaching in both cases as impractical.
But what does the Church actually teach? Here again is the Catechism again at paragraph 2265
Legitimate defense can be not only a right but a grave duty for one who is responsible for the lives of others. The defense of the common good requires that an unjust aggressor be rendered unable to cause harm.
For this reason, those who legitimately hold authority also have the right to use arms to repel aggressors against the civil community entrusted to their responsibility.
And, again, at 2309:
The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration. The gravity of such a decision makes it subject to rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy. At one and the same time:
- the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
- all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
- there must be serious prospects of success;
- the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modem means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.
These are the traditional elements enumerated in what is called the “just war” doctrine.
The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good.
As for an alleged right to rebellion, that is illogical. The Communist dictators ruling in Eastern Europe, including the one in Jones’ own nation, came to power because and only because the Communists in Russia held a rebellion and successfully overthrew the legitimate government there.
If rebellion conveyed legitimate authority to govern, rebellion against the powers instilled by rebellion is illegitimate. If, on the other hand, rebellion conveys no such legitimacy, then it is merely an act of violence like any other, excused, if at all, only on certain precise grounds.
Here is the Catechism 2243, listing those grounds:
Armed resistance to oppression by political authority is not legitimate, unless all the following conditions are met: 1) there is certain, grave, and prolonged violation of fundamental rights; 2) all other means of redress have been exhausted; 3) such resistance will not provoke worse disorders; 4) there is well-founded hope of success; and 5) it is impossible reasonably to foresee any better solution.
The grounds for legitimate rebellion parallel the grounds for just war, and, for that matter, the grounds for using lethal force in personal self defense.
I am not Romanian, but, looking on as a disinterested outsider, my assessment is that the overthrow of the inhuman Communist tyrant ruling there fulfills all these criteria, and hence would be legitimate under Christian moral teaching.
Which means that Jones’ objection evaporates. What the Church actually teaches in both cases is what prudence also dictates.
Jones offers Christian pacifism and submission to authority as two examples of an unspecified number of “attitudes contrary to reality and prudence.” Unfortunately, neither example is true. Christians do not teach pacifism, nor do we teach an absolute submission to authority.
In point five, Jones alleged some unnamed and unspecified number of reversals and about-faces in Christian teaching through the ages. He offers only one example of an alleged contradiction: the Pope kissing the Koran contradicts the Crusades.
I am unable to reword this point into a stronger argument, or into any argument at all. Christians have already taught and practiced that a certain degree of courtesy toward pagans and enemies is forgivable or even necessary, so long as it does not cause a weak brother to stumble in his faith. (See 1 Corinthians 8:1-11).
Nothing in any orthodox Christian teaching forbids courteous gestures, such doffing hat or shoes when entering their false heathen shrines or temples of devil worship, showing politeness toward pagans and enemies.
Nor is it contrary in theory or practice to making war upon the heathen for the recapture of Christian lands, and the salvation of Christians in bondage. See the Just War theory recited above.
As best I can tell, Jones here has both a wrong idea about what the gesture of kissing the Koran means, and what the Crusades were. It is not an error to which I can speak, because I cannot imagine what it is.
If the other “dramatic about-faces” alleged of the Church are like examples, it is sufficient to say that they are not.
The Church doctrine grew organically out of the deposit of faith over centuries, and later refinements do not contradict earlier (if simpler) statements of teaching.
One thing the ignorant often ignore is how the Church works. Nothing is declared heretical until after a heresiarch publishes it.
There was no need, for example, to define carefully the exact languages used to explain the human and divine nature of Christ, because no one in the previous generations before Nestor and Arius, and, later, Mahound, called the divinity or humanity of Christ into question.
It is commonplace these days to pretend that the heretics coexisted with orthodox doctrines from the beginning, in a myriad of freewheeling early Church teachings, and that only after the orthodox party gained political power did they pretend to be the sole guardians of the original apostolic teaching.
This is bogus libel meant to undermine the Church. One need not even be an historian to detect the fraud. Orthodoxy has always vehemently rejected unorthodox ideas. The harshest possible language is directed against Gnostics and Nicolaitans even in the New Testament, not to mention the surviving epistles and homilies of early Church fathers.
So the fact that, in the First Century, no surviving written documents utter any defense of Trinitarianism, whereas in the Fourth Century this was all the rage, does not imply an about face on this issue, nor does it imply that Trinitarianism was not latent in New Testament teaching from the beginning.
We cannot see the shape of the oak leaf in the acorn underground, but this is not an about face. The leaf shape exists in potential even when the acorn is planted, and no seedling yet sprouts. Alien ideas grafted onto the trunk produce leaf and fruit of no shape the parent tree would naturally produce.
So the criticism claiming that the Church has changed her teaching is refuted merely by asking for proof of the claim, and noting that none is forthcoming. Calling a reconciliation between an apparent paradox “weasel words” is itself an example of weasel words, that is, verbiage without content.
Jones makes final point. “The inconsistencies in the Bible itself do not point to a book that is divinely inspired.”
Unlike the problem of evil, which is a serious question meriting a serious answer, this is a flippant question meriting a flip answer.
I challenge Mr Jones to produce a divinely inspired book to compare to the various books in the Bible in order to show me precisely how consistent a divinely inspired book must be to be divinely inspired?
I note, by way of closing remark, that Mr. Jones is attempting the same tired trick that most or all modern atheists are prone to attempt: merely to attribute to Christians the beliefs, attitudes, and practices of our deadly enemies, the Mohammedans.
For example, we can kiss their Koran as a courtesy, even if their rules forbid kissing a Bible; our Crusades must and do fit the definition of a just war, even if their Jihad must and does fit the definition of unjust, always being meant to convert the unwilling by the sword.
Likewise, it is they, not we, who say their Holy Book is divine and without error.
We do not hold and never have held that the Holy Spirit inspiring the various writers of the Bible somehow should have or could have prevented each writer from using any phrase or metaphor or figurative speech which might be misinterpreted by a sufficiently diligent and eagle eyed faultfinder to contradict, or seem to contradict, any other phrase in any of the various books of the Bible. These books were written by different men in different lands and generations in different languages.
It is the unity of the Biblical message, despite the millennia separating writing the Book of Job from the Book of the Apocalypse, that is the miracle.
It is the fact that the Gospel writers do not agree on every trivial detail of the Passion narrative, but do agree on its core meaning, that should offer the skeptic the best reassurance that we are reading eyewitness accounts.
Finally, let me again laud Mr Jones for raising serious questions rather than emotional ones, and treating the topic seriously. That is rare these days, and must be cherished.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
