Leader Guide | Created Order and Disorder Module 2 | Order, Disorder, and Freedom

Leader prompts:

• In armed conflicts (Ukraine, Israel, Sudan and others) there may be a violation of the international order, the agreed set of norms according to which nations interact with each other (see Friedrichs).
• The disruption of supply chains or collapse of businesses may put strain on the economic order (see Halliday).
• Social orders may be disrupted through disinformation and social media algorithms which fuel polarisation.
• Experiencing trauma may create a sense of disorder within the self (see Mahan).
• Discrimination, violence, and other forms of social injustice can cause disorder or harm to people’s health and well-being (see VanderWeele).
• Global warming may disrupt the equilibrium of ecosystems.

Leader prompts:

• Biggar claims that western cultures are less likely to value order than eastern, and particularly Chinese cultures. He identifies the experience of war or anarchy as leading to a preference for order, and having fought for freedom or against oppression or restrictive laws as leading to a preference for freedom. Discuss whether this aligns with your group’s experience or perception of the world.
• Encourage participants to compare their own reactions to the topic of order to those of their colleagues, or the default perspectives assumed within your discipline.

Leader prompts:

• Scientists and mathematicians are perhaps the most likely to discern orders which are inherent in physical creation (e.g. biological taxonomies, physical laws, chemical equations, mathematical principles). In the sciences, order is a way of conceptualising or describing the predictability and regularity of nature. Alexander argues that the assumption of order within the universe is essential for science: scientific discoveries ‘depend on an empirical search for truth that in turn depends on the coherent and rational structure of the created order.’
• Social scientists caution that orders in nature and social orders are of a different quality, as social orders are much more constructed by humans and thus subject to error (see Bell). The social sciences see orders as a set of conventions or laws which regulate society, with the aim of promoting flourishing. The social sciences also seek to identify and challenge parts of existent social structures which lead to injustice or other negative outcomes. For example, in economics: ‘The market economy is an example of a human order in civil society which arises from the desire and willingness of economic actors to trade with each other in goods, services, (etc.) … but there is no presumption either that the order is always stable and well-functioning, or that the outcomes are always just’ (Hay and Menzies).
• Some disciplines, such as medicine, public health, and some social sciences, try to create structures which bring order and thereby flourishing to the world. VanderWeele: the discipline of public health tries to understand, supplement and support the capacity for healing which God has given the human body. He writes that the task of caring for the environment operates similarly.
• Engineers and architects seek to apply knowledge of the natural order to construct new objects, systems, and orders, which are used by humans and support their flourishing.
• According to VanderWeele, the humanities ‘discern the nature of human well-being and the spiritual ends of human society.’ Philosophy may be seen as an attempt to discern the nature of reality, or at least deconstruct previous attempts to explain reality. Within the humanities, scholars use critical theory and feminist and post-colonial methodologies to challenge the social orders assumed by previous generations. They may see appeals to the created order as attempts to justify unjust power structures; in the past, inequities between genders and races have been understood as ‘natural’. See Biggar’s comments on this topic, which your group may want to critique.
• Mahan writes that art depicts the order and disorder within the world, causing people to see what they would usually turn away from, and helping ‘us appreciate how deeply disordered we humans are’. In some forms of art, structure or order (such as poetic meter, musical form, the use of ratios and proportion within visual art) is very important. Other artistic movements resist the strictures of these kinds of order.

Leader prompts:

• Biggar claims that there is an objective moral standard, whereas it is more common today to assume that morality is relative and socially constructed.
• According to Biggar’s vision, the priorities and goals of our fields are held accountable to a set of values given by God. This has implications for the way we conduct research (e.g. how we approach the ethical impact of our research methodology, for example considering the environmental impact of scientific experiments) as well as the contents and goals of the research (e.g. social scientific work will be framed by a Christian vision of human flourishing).
• Biggar argues that this higher moral standard is why we can critique international law, which is the highest form of human law in our world. He describes NATO’s military intervention in Kosovo in 1999, which occurred despite UN opposition, making it ‘formally illegal [but] morally necessary’.
• Halliday shows how a created moral order will critique legal or social systems: ‘When the created order comes into contact with a legal or social order, the friction of the two, perhaps always, will produce disorder in extant legal orders. If a current legal order is held accountable to the norms of the created order, it will be subject to “prophetic criticism.” The assumptions, veneers and practices of a given legal order will be exposed, revealing its moral inadequacies and ethical shortcomings. The sociolegal scholar attuned to the ideals of God’s moral order will point to mismatches between those ideals and the law on the books and law in action. That scholar will consistently ask: does the law produce the practices consistent with the created order? This stance of accountability therefore introduces moral disturbance to legal orders and thus acts as a motor of legal change.’
• Wolterstorff on art: ‘There are some writers who hold that there is no embodied goodness, no objective worth or praiseworthiness in things. Things have value because we human beings value them. Biggar rightly insists that fundamental in the Christian understanding of reality is the affirmation of objective embodied goodness. … The things God made are not of worth because we value them; when things go well, we value them because we discern their objective worth.’
• Mahan on literature: ‘First, in proposing the possibility of a God’s eye view of evil, though severely limited by our finiteness and corrupted vision, we find a tacit recognition of divine order, that there is goodness which evil has disfigured. Indeed, I would argue that the dissonance we experience when confronting evil inspires a longing for goodness in the face of that disruption. A second related point, which is more germane to my consideration of literature in particular, is the unique capacity of art to help us appreciate how deeply disordered we humans are.’
• Hastings writes that the created order raises complex questions about weapons manufacturing: ‘I would like to know as an engineer who does research how it guides me with respect to the choices of research, in particular, research on weapons and what classes of weapons. Is all weapons research acceptable if it helps sustain the created order within the context of natural law or, better, just war?’

Leader prompts:

• Biggar argues that this way of thinking is out of fashion in an academy which regards such an appeal to order as a power play.
• Hutchinson: ‘Academic Vocation these days is rarely articulated as being "the discovery of the truth of reality", let alone "as given by God". Christians might therefore be regarded as quaintly old fashioned to say so.’
• Alexander argues that this assumption is basic to the natural sciences: ‘If one believes in God as author of creation, the one whose will and purposes underlies and sustains all that exists, then it is a perfectly rational step towards believing that we live in a rational universe with properties that can be described using some very rational and elegant mathematics, as well as some very convincing laws.’ He argues that the move away from belief in a creator God has, in some cases, also undermined belief in universal scientific laws.
• Bell cautions against viewing social or political orders as being given by God in the same way that the natural order is. In the social sciences, the way God intends things to be (moral order) is often a challenge or disruption to existent social orders ‘as they are impelled to conform to a higher good’ (Halliday, international law). Halliday describes the discovery of the kinds of social orders which reflect God’s will/promote flourishing as a complex task requiring dialogue between social scientists and theologians.
• Mahan observes a trend in literary studies to reject any sense of divine order or metanarrative. However, he argues that in depicting evil, art creates a longing for the good, or divine order.
• Your group might want to explore the degree to which we can know ‘the truth of reality’. Does the academic project entail that our discernment of truth will always be provisional and approximate? Distinguishing between ontology (what is) and epistemology (what we can know) may be helpful for this conversation.

Leader prompts:

• You might find it helpful to use the structure of discerning, constructing, or resisting order from question_3 as you respond to this question.
• Record these observations and take them forward into the next sessions as we explore the topic further.