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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: Purgatory: Final Straws - why do religious moderates keep the faith?
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Jason™
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# 9037
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Posted
leo, what's your point?
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Evensong
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# 14696
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by §Andrew:
quote:
Originally posted by Seb:
So who decides whether the Holy Spirit was with the councils and not with us today?
Are you saying he wasn't with the councils, but is with you today?
No. But ascribing the work of the Holy Spirit to a particular time/place/bunch of people and saying this is the bastion of Christianity is problematic.
No-one but God knows who the Spirit resides with, therefore I abhor the notion that one cannot be called a Christian if one doesn't agree with the creeds. ![[Disappointed]](graemlins/disappointed.gif)
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a theological scrapbook
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Galloping Granny
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# 13814
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Posted
In response to the OP, I ignore the philosophical complexities of previous discussion, which to me are irrelevant. I can only say why I am where I am, and consider how I got here. Isn’t this one of the values of the Boards: to make us examine what we may have taken for granted, and see ourselves more clearly?
I have always been ‘in the church’ and, I suppose, taken what I need from it; I haven’t made decisions about being Christian, being Presbyterian, but have made my own personal way within that framework.
Of childhood churchgoing and Sunday School I remember nothing. At boarding school I was uncomfortable when some of the girls in church services fidgeted and played; it was obviously a special time for me. Then there were years of Presbyterian Bible Class (we had great summer conferences – and I remember being woken in the morning to the strains of Bach on the loudspeakers) and the Student Christian Movement, which was proudly liberal in response to the piety of the Evangelical Union.
For the next half century it has been a matter of discarding what is unhelpful or unnecessary: accretions of dogma, assumptions about the status of scriptural writings and the times and cultures that produced them. It has often felt like peeling off the skins of an onion, to come closer to the mystery of God and to the realm of God as exemplified in the life and teaching of the Galilean.
Iona has had its influence, as has Taizé – for decades I’ve been a NZ contact for the Letter from Taizé, and I facilitate Taizé worship. Writers like Borg and Crossan have made sense to me. I’ve been blessed by belonging for more than 40 years to a congregation in the city, and a similar one when I’m at Matarangi that exemplifies Christian love and unity at the same time as being a place to follow one’s own personal path. Surely the Spirit is among us. It is saddening to read of experiences of spite, bullying, backbiting and self-service that some have come across in Christian churches. Yet we have such problems as the gay leadership issue in the institutional church, which makes me suspect that in the absence of congregations like ours we may finish up finding our own faith communities elsewhere. I’m a regular at the Sea of Faith conferences, at which a show of hands indicated that about 70% belong to a church, and atheist speakers tend to provoke muttering between friends of ‘I’ve never heard such a load of rubbish’. I’m also part of a long-standing discussion group in my own parish of older, liberal/radical faithful folk who have developed close ties of faith and friendship.
I know I’ll never get to the centre of the onion! But I trust in God (‘trust’ is a word that can often be used helpfully in place of ‘faith’).
What I don’t know is how this kind of trust would help me through vicissitudes that I haven’t had to experience.
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The Kingdom of Heaven is spread upon the earth, and men do not see it. Gospel of Thomas, 113
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Barnabas62
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# 9110
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by The Galloping Granny:
I know I’ll never get to the centre of the onion! But I trust in God (‘trust’ is a word that can often be used helpfully in place of ‘faith’).
What I don’t know is how this kind of trust would help me through vicissitudes that I haven’t had to experience.
Yes. That is a kind of sticking point in these discussions. It is very hard for anyone else to understand why we trust and who we put our trust in. They have not been through our vicissitudes.
I was at an extraordinary party at my local church last night, requested by a very good friend who has a terminal diagnosis and has not been given very long by medical advisors. He wanted to thank folks in our church, and family and friends, for the riches and value of their love and friendship. I guess there were about 200 of us there. It was a remarkable, poignant and happy occasion, heartwarming, funny and tearful all mixed up together. A Celebration with a capital C. As I said goodbye to my friend and his wife at the end, they both talked of trust and love.
It was a very human occasion, but it also seemed to be a lot more than that. I can describe it, but of course you don't know our friend and his wife, so it's hard for you to enter into its meaning for us all. A strange place where the very natural elements of life and the inexplicably mystical met and got kind of mixed up together. What the Iona community might refer to as a thin place.
Nigel M has just put up a really good post in Keryg here. Transcendence, immanence and thin places and how they work together in our lives. Getting to the heart of that is something we may explore in trust, or without trust, but cannot possibly exhaust.
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Who is it that you seek? How then shall we live? How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?
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Makepiece
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# 10454
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Posted
In response to the OP I disagree with most of the comments on the list but I am concerned that the OP seems to assume that there is a link between doctrine and faith. Jesus taught at one point that the pharisees teaching was often correct but it was the way they lived that was a bad example.
For example, I believe it's important to teach PSA because it is the theory most in line with the Bible and it simultaneously draws together three of the most important themes in the Bible: The evil of sin, the love of God and God's deliverance. These themes are seen throughout the Bible and corroborate PSA.
Nevertheless I do not think that the test of faith is whether or not someone agrees with PSA. I think that both conservatives and liberals are in danger of losing sight of God in a mist of intellectualism.
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Don't ask for whom the bell tolls...
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Dafyd
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# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Scot:
I think I follow you, but I'm not sure where you are going. Are you suggesting that God is the basis of our presumptions regarding the stability of reality?
Historically, I believe that's so.
It might be better to say that 'God' is historically the basis for taking the multiple experienced realities as one unified reality. 'God' is what draws experience into a whole.
I've just put '' round God because the personal God of Israel is only one basis: Greek, Indian, and Chinese philosophers also posited a basis of unity, which was not necessarily personal.
So, not exactly the stability of reality. More the unity of reality, although I think they amount to the same thing.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
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El Greco
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# 9313
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Seb:
No. But ascribing the work of the Holy Spirit to a particular time/place/bunch of people and saying this is the bastion of Christianity is problematic.
No-one but God knows who the Spirit resides with, therefore I abhor the notion that one cannot be called a Christian if one doesn't agree with the creeds.
So, no... but yes?
If the Holy Spirit speaks with those who anathematized the heretics of their times, or those who wrote the creed and thought everyone should abide by it, then he doesn't speak through those that say otherwise.
If he didn't speak through the ancient councils, then he might speak with those that say otherwise, but then one would have to ask oneself why he was silent when the ancient councils took place.
If we go down that road, we will end up with the Holy Spirit saying whatever we are saying in the present, and continuously re-evaluating the past so that Truths of the Faith (TM) of the past can now easily be ignored and changed because the Holy Spirit speaks to us today...
Anyway.
Off on vacation.
See you all in a couple of months!
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Ξέρω εγώ κάτι που μπορούσε, Καίσαρ, να σας σώσει.
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Scot
Deck hand
# 2095
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
It might be better to say that 'God' is historically the basis for taking the multiple experienced realities as one unified reality. 'God' is what draws experience into a whole.
Perception of a stable reality would offer significant advantages by allowing an organism to anticipate features of the world around it. Natural selection easily explains why we expect a certain consistency in the world. Since we are all interacting with the same stable reality, one would expect that our multiple experienced realities would be generally similar. That humans have a tendency to attribute this unity of reality to a deity might say more about human psychology than about the likelihood that God exists or that he makes the physical world work in a predictable way.
In other words, I think we can get to the same understanding of the importance of repeatable observations through a naturalistic process as through religious philosophy.
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“Here, we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.” - Thomas Jefferson
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Dafyd
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# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Scot:
Perception of a stable reality would offer significant advantages by allowing an organism to anticipate features of the world around it. Natural selection easily explains why we expect a certain consistency in the world. Since we are all interacting with the same stable reality, one would expect that our multiple experienced realities would be generally similar. That humans have a tendency to attribute this unity of reality to a deity might say more about human psychology than about the likelihood that God exists or that he makes the physical world work in a predictable way.
In other words, I think we can get to the same understanding of the importance of repeatable observations through a naturalistic process as through religious philosophy.
I think your argument falls down in three ways:
Firstly, the perception of a single unitary reality is not a human universal. It seems to have arisen semi-independently in a number of different places, in the middle of the first millennium BC, but it's a cultural achievement. The faculties behind it can be explained by natural selection, but cultural advances can't.
Secondly, you're confusing two things. The sense of sight has arisen through natural selection, but the reason sight is useful is not explained not by natural selection. It's explained by optics.
Given that there is a single unified reality, natural selection favours those entities that interact with it in that way - up to a point - and therefore explains why entities tend to see it in that way. So natural selection explains why our psychology is fitted to reality where it is fitted to reality. But that still leaves why reality is that way open to question.
If reality were not unified, natural selection would favour something different.
Thirdly, on any account natural selection gives rise to cognitive errors as well as cognitive achievements.
Unscientific thinking and other cognitive biases obviously offer significant advantages to organisms. If they didn't, organisms wouldn't continue to use them. So your naturalistic philosophy justifies the use of unscientific thinking and cognitive bias. If natural selection explains why we are interacting with the same stable reality, then it also explains the "tendency to attribute this unity of reality to a deity". If you're going to justify the unity of reality through natural selection, you're equally justifying belief in God through natural selection.
In fact, everything humans do is in some way a result of natural selection, so your argument would justify every human cognitive bias. Everything we are evolves through natural selection. So if natural selection justifies any way that we think, then it justifies every way that we think.
As cognitive biases and unscientific thinking are not justified, your argument does not work.
[ 21. June 2009, 20:22: Message edited by: Dafyd ]
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
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Jason™
Host emeritus
# 9037
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by leo:
quote:
Originally posted by Jason I. Am:
leo, what's your point?
That you have still not substantiated your claim that the bible says that people go tom hell if they don't believe in literal resurrection.
Also that you claim never to have said this - hence i quoted your entire post to prove that you did.
I still haven't been able to make heads or tails of what point you're trying to make in the context of this thread. If you're just hoping to engage me in a tangent hobbyhorse of yours, I'll gladly continue to (mostly) ignore you.
Posts: 4123 | From: Land of Mary | Registered: Feb 2005
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Jason™
Host emeritus
# 9037
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Firstly, the perception of a single unitary reality is not a human universal. It seems to have arisen semi-independently in a number of different places, in the middle of the first millennium BC, but it's a cultural achievement. The faculties behind it can be explained by natural selection, but cultural advances can't.
What do you mean by "single unitary reality"? I thought you were referring to the consistency of the universe, and the very things that allow us to say that what comes up must come down, etc. The laws of the universe, so to speak. And I'm not clear on your argument about why God is a better "reality unifier" than, well, than almost anything else, for that matter.
quote:
Secondly, you're confusing two things. The sense of sight has arisen through natural selection, but the reason sight is useful is not explained not by natural selection. It's explained by optics.
I disagree. Optics is about how sight works. Natural selection is precisely about the usefulness of things, so long as they are useful to survival in some way.
quote:
But that still leaves why reality is that way open to question.
Is this a variation of the "Science answers how, religion answers why" non-overlapping magisterium argument?
quote:
If natural selection explains why we are interacting with the same stable reality, then it also explains the "tendency to attribute this unity of reality to a deity". If you're going to justify the unity of reality through natural selection, you're equally justifying belief in God through natural selection.
In fact, everything humans do is in some way a result of natural selection, so your argument would justify every human cognitive bias. Everything we are evolves through natural selection. So if natural selection justifies any way that we think, then it justifies every way that we think.
As cognitive biases and unscientific thinking are not justified, your argument does not work.
But perhaps the tendency to attribute things to a deity was useful? Which is an argument people give all the time for remaining in faith -- what would we do about ethics? How would we appreciate art, music, or architecture? How would we know right from wrong, etc. etc. So maybe this kind of belief/faith/trust is a product of natural selection (quite obviously so, I'd say), which speaks nothing of its truth but only of its usefulness. And who's to say when it will stop being useful?
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Barnabas62
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# 9110
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Posted
Jason, this is a a long thread and I haven't digested all of it, but has there yet been any real discussion on the issue of the dimensions of truth. Facticity and meaning? For example, here.
"If you hold to my teaching, you really are my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free".
Or the simpler "Now that you know these things you will be blessed if you do them".
There are probably loads of examples like this. I think what they amount to is that following Christ is not essentially about the prior acceptance of truth statements as facticity. It is that their real meaningfulness (truth as meaning) is found in the following and the doing.
Now of course you may see that as just another way of me (and others) saying "we have found this useful". And that is undoubtedly true! But it does not go far enough. What actually happens is that we find this following to be meaningful - and if there is any sense at all to be found in the idea of truth as meaning we have found this to be a truth which has been both meaningful and liberating. Being an adult convert, I can say with complete truthfulness that being a Christian has given my life a vivid and purposeful meaning which it did not have before. Which I guess is why I find Russell's observation (and Macbeth's) so sterile and hopeless.
Where I think you are at is that the corpus of understanding and experience contained within Christianity no longer gives you that kind of meaning - and the struggle to preserve that became for you in the end a meaningless struggle. Am I right? For if I am, one of the reasons why you started this thread was to explore how and why "moderates" continued to find meaning to live by when you could not? Truth as meaning strikes me as very significant for you.
Maybe there is something to discuss there?
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Who is it that you seek? How then shall we live? How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?
Posts: 21397 | From: Norfolk UK | Registered: Feb 2005
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Scot
Deck hand
# 2095
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Firstly, the perception of a single unitary reality is not a human universal. It seems to have arisen semi-independently in a number of different places, in the middle of the first millennium BC, but it's a cultural achievement. The faculties behind it can be explained by natural selection, but cultural advances can't.
Human cultures don't operate independently of the physical, mental, and emotional characteristics of humans. Those characteristics are related to natural selection and so, by extension, are cultural advances related to natural selection.
One can easily imagine a process of memetic natural selection that parallels genetic natural selection. I don't see any reason to think that adaptive cultural features wouldn't be favored in some sense.
quote:
So natural selection explains why our psychology is fitted to reality where it is fitted to reality. But that still leaves why reality is that way open to question.
If reality were not unified, natural selection would favour something different.
If the fundamental parameters of the universe were different, then we wouldn't be here having this discussion. Our presence here shows only that the universe does feature a stable reality, not that there is some special reason why it is so. There is indeed an open question to be explored, but we don't need God to fill the gap in our knowledge.
quote:
If you're going to justify the unity of reality through natural selection, you're equally justifying belief in God through natural selection.
Perhaps, but that wouldn't make the belief accurate, only adaptive. A tendency to believe in a deity could also be a side effect of some other adaptive trait. Human children rely on parental example and instruction for learning survival skills. Maybe the traits that drive us to seek parental teaching hang on into adulthood in the form of god-seeking. Maybe not, but my point is that you don't need an actual god to explain why humans might want to believe in one.
quote:
In fact, everything humans do is in some way a result of natural selection, so your argument would justify every human cognitive bias. Everything we are evolves through natural selection. So if natural selection justifies any way that we think, then it justifies every way that we think.
As cognitive biases and unscientific thinking are not justified, your argument does not work.
Individuals and groups can have all sorts of traits that are not favored by natural selection. If the traits are neutral relative to reproductive sucess, then natural selection won't have anything to say about the matter. If the trait is detrimental to reproductive success, it will eventually become less common, but it won't necessarily vanish overnight. And, just because a trait improves reproductive success in one environment or at one time, it may not always be so. Magical thinking may have been adaptive sometime in our tribal past, but it isn't anymore.
I said it above, and Jason said it before me, but it's a critical point so I'm going to say it again. Just because natural selection generates a trait in humans that predisposes us to believe something, doesn't necessarily make the thing we want to believe true.
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“Here, we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.” - Thomas Jefferson
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Anselmina
Ship's barmaid
# 3032
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Seb:
quote:
Originally posted by §Andrew:
quote:
Originally posted by Seb:
So who decides whether the Holy Spirit was with the councils and not with us today?
Are you saying he wasn't with the councils, but is with you today?
No. But ascribing the work of the Holy Spirit to a particular time/place/bunch of people and saying this is the bastion of Christianity is problematic.
No-one but God knows who the Spirit resides with, therefore I abhor the notion that one cannot be called a Christian if one doesn't agree with the creeds.
I basically agree with this, myself. I don't see that every single word, doctrine, injunction, anathema etc, of the ancient councils or Churches, is guaranteed to have been the work of the Holy Spirit just because some of it was.
IMV, it's likely it was the same then as it is now. They got it right some of the time, and therefore they got it wrong some of the time. In the meantime, in the world of the real, we make do with what we believe is best and work with what we've got; while continuing to seek the ongoing revelation of God's Spirit.
Seb, I think we can be a little more optimistic about recognizing where the Spirit does reside, however. Scripture gives us a good list to identify the fruits of the Spirit - peaceable, persevering, loving, long-suffering, patient etc, etc. It would seem to me that where we see these things in evidence we can be sure the Spirit is at work.
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Irish dogs needing homes! http://www.dogactionwelfaregroup.ie/ Greyhounds and Lurchers are shipped over to England for rehoming too!
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Evensong
Shipmate
# 14696
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Anselmina:
Seb, I think we can be a little more optimistic about recognizing where the Spirit does reside, however. Scripture gives us a good list to identify the fruits of the Spirit - peaceable, persevering, loving, long-suffering, patient etc, etc. It would seem to me that where we see these things in evidence we can be sure the Spirit is at work.
Agreed to an extent. Was just baiting Andrew on a post modernist hermeneutic. ![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif) "Truth", even in a Christian sense is problematic.
But he's gone on holiday. Coward ![[Snigger]](graemlins/snigger.gif) No just kidding. He's a great bloke, deserves a holiday where he's not thinking.
I'm a big believer in the power of scripture to guide.
The only thing than niggled me about his post was that if the councils were wrong, why didn't the Holy Spirit intervene? Can't go down that road....where was the Holy Spirit during the Holocaust? (e.g)
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a theological scrapbook
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sanityman
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# 11598
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Posted
(I'm attempting to summarise rather than quote at length. Hope I don't sacrifice clarity..)
Dafyd, you said "the perception of a single unitary reality is not a human universal." I think our perception of it follows almost inevitably by its existence, via the sense organs that have evolved because they give us valuable data about that unified reality. You might as well say that gibbons "perceive unified reality" when they do the calculus necessary to catch the next branch! Cultural expressions come later.
Actually, I think your next point agreed with this, when you said "natural selection favours those entities that interact with [reality] in that way." Personally, I don't think anything like human cognition or reason could have evolved in a "non-unified" or non-causal universe. Such a reality would be non-rational, so could not give rise to rationality (who can say what it would have given rise to?).
I am wary about privileging the "rational universe" as being evidence of an external designer. We are a product of that universe, and our rationality grows out of it's rationality. To say that the universe is rational is like the puddle saying "see how the hole I'm in fits me exactly." As Scot said, "Our presence here shows only that the universe does feature a stable reality, not that there is some special reason why it is so." However, there is an argument here if you take the view that there's something transcendent about rationality, mathematics and logic. Is that what you're saying, Dafyd? I do think the " rational God => rational universe" position is reasonable, but saying that it demands a rational God seems to me to be a step too far. "Demands that any God be a rational one" seems to me to be closer to the mark.
quote:
Posted by Dafyd:
Unscientific thinking and other cognitive biases obviously offer significant advantages to organisms. If they didn't, organisms wouldn't continue to use them. So your naturalistic philosophy justifies the use of unscientific thinking and cognitive bias.
Explains is not the same as justifies! I think we're all agreed that cognitive biases are liable to give false results, and therefore should be countered. What we have to show is that a rational world could give rise to non-rational ways of thinking, and I believe natural selection does this.
Evolution didn't set out to make us right-thinking animals, it just selects for better survivability. As I understand it, the two traits that are very evident in human thought and behaviour are- cause-and-effect reasoning, and
- pattern matching.
Cause-and-effect reasoning is only valuable in a causal universe, of course. But our minds seem hard-wired to look for cause and effect everywhere, even where it isn't. Hence the little child's "It's raining because I'm sad." Hence rain dances and cargo cults. The defect is not in the way of thinking, it's that we have a hammer and want everything to look like a nail.
Pattern-matching is a great strength, as people who recognise sabre-toothed tigers tend to be less likely to get eaten ![[Biased]](wink.gif) . It was an advantage to run away from a pattern that might be a tiger, rather than concluding that it was unlikely (the downsides were looking stupid and being out of breath, and being dead, respectively). However, the evolutionary bias in favour of false positives has left us with a legacy of seeing faces on Mars and the Virgin Mary on a toasted sandwich, not to mention conspiracy theories and a very bad intuition of probability.
These both posit humans evolving in a rational, unified and causal universe, yet explain how humankind claim to be blessed with a couple of big non-rational ways of thinking. I believe similar arguments can be made for other cognitive biases.
Scot, I'm not replying to your points as we seem in broad agreement here. Please forgive me if I go over the same ground as your last answer! I would comment on quote:
Just because natural selection generates a trait in humans that predisposes us to believe something, doesn't necessarily make the thing we want to believe true.
I wonder if you put too much weight on this argument that it will break, and take our ability to make any valid truth claims with it. "Just because natural selection produced rationality, doesn't mean that rationality is valid" seem to be the reductio ad absurdum here. If it were true, we'd never know it, and all discussions are futile.
Barnabas62, I'm interested in your last point. In reminded me of CS Lewis' Meditation in a Tool Shed, where he made the distinction between looking at and looking 'along.' Have I understood you right? If so, I'd like to ask how you think "finding meaning" in the process corresponds to finding objective truth.
Best wishes,
- Chris.
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Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only the wind will listen - TS Eliot
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Barnabas62
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# 9110
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by sanityman:
Barnabas62, I'm interested in your last point. In reminded me of CS Lewis' Meditation in a Tool Shed, where he made the distinction between looking at and looking 'along.' Have I understood you right? If so, I'd like to ask how you think "finding meaning" in the process corresponds to finding objective truth.
- Chris.
Pretty close, I think. I'd never seen that bit of Lewis before. Something Pirsig wrote in "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" seems relevant here. In his semi-autobiographical appreciation of the word quality, he points to our tendency to analyse and categorise experiences so quickly that the analysis becomes the experience. Of course it's very subjective to say that one has to allow the experience to happen to us in its appreciation. But then I think that's what we do first of all. That phrase "looking along" kind of embraces Pirsig's insight as well.
I think it may be too facile to say, for example, that meaning is something we choose. So far as Christianity is concerned, I think meaning was something I found, or it found me. I'm not all that smart about how meaning becomes for us truth. I see the postmodernism in my own personal journey! But Pomo doesn't capture it either!
[Spello]
[ 22. June 2009, 16:12: Message edited by: Barnabas62 ]
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Who is it that you seek? How then shall we live? How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?
Posts: 21397 | From: Norfolk UK | Registered: Feb 2005
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leo
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# 1458
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Jason I. Am:
quote:
Originally posted by leo:
quote:
Originally posted by Jason I. Am:
leo, what's your point?
That you have still not substantiated your claim that the bible says that people go tom hell if they don't believe in literal resurrection.
Also that you claim never to have said this - hence i quoted your entire post to prove that you did.
I still haven't been able to make heads or tails of what point you're trying to make in the context of this thread. If you're just hoping to engage me in a tangent hobbyhorse of yours, I'll gladly continue to (mostly) ignore you.
In which case you haven't 'been able to make head or tails' of something that YOU wrote.
Fundamentalists often preface dogmatic staements like 'The Bible says....' and then misquote scripture.
So it is no surprise that when their belief system begins to unravel they cannot see anything left in which to believe.
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Jason I. Am:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Firstly, the perception of a single unitary reality is not a human universal. It seems to have arisen semi-independently in a number of different places, in the middle of the first millennium BC, but it's a cultural achievement.
What do you mean by "single unitary reality"? I thought you were referring to the consistency of the universe, and the very things that allow us to say that what comes up must come down, etc. The laws of the universe, so to speak. And I'm not clear on your argument about why God is a better "reality unifier" than, well, than almost anything else, for that matter.
I'm not referring to the laws of the universe. That's an even later development. It's a drive towards the thought that explanations of one phenomenon ought to be consistent with all other explanations of other phenemena. It's a belief that the world as a whole makes sense. Or to put it another way, that we can meaningfully talk about the world or the universe as a whole.
I'm not arguing that the Judeo-Christian God is a better reality unifier. All I'm arguing is that it's a candidate.
In fact, I think I said quite explicitly in an earlier post that I'm using 'God' to cover a variety of quasi-entities found in Greek, Indian, and Chinese thought, none of which quite count as personal.
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Secondly, you're confusing two things. The sense of sight has arisen through natural selection, but the reason sight is useful is not explained not by natural selection. It's explained by optics.
I disagree. Optics is about how sight works. Natural selection is precisely about the usefulness of things, so long as they are useful to survival in some way.
I think that's just restating my point in a different way.
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But that still leaves why reality is that way open to question.
Is this a variation of the "Science answers how, religion answers why" non-overlapping magisterium argument?
I don't think so. Certainly, I'm not attributing any purpose to the universe.
The distinction is between science and philosophy, with science embedded in philosophy. Philosophy is asking what is presupposed about the universe granted that science is getting under way successfully. In this case, I'm saying that the philosophy in question has to become theologised.
(An analogy for the type of reasoning I'm putting forward: suppose someone offers to prove that we have no reason to suppose space and time exist. We can't observe them. We have no reason to suppose that what we can't observe exists.
Counterargument: true, we can't observe space. But if space didn't exist, all our observations of objects would be collapsed together and we couldn't make sense of them. Space and time are the necessary presuppositions of all our observations, even though we cannot observe them ourselves.)
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In fact, everything humans do is in some way a result of natural selection, so your argument would justify every human cognitive bias. Everything we are evolves through natural selection. So if natural selection justifies any way that we think, then it justifies every way that we think.
But perhaps the tendency to attribute things to a deity was useful?
Well, yes, but the point of the argument is that natural selection only explains whether a thought pattern has been useful in the past. It can't explain whether it's useful because true or useful for some other reason.
Yes, you (or Scot) can easily get off the hook of my third counterargument by this way. But, as far as I can see, you only do so by impaling yourself firmly on the second counterargument.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Scot:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Firstly, the perception of a single unitary reality is not a human universal. It seems to have arisen semi-independently in a number of different places, in the middle of the first millennium BC, but it's a cultural achievement. The faculties behind it can be explained by natural selection, but cultural advances can't.
Human cultures don't operate independently of the physical, mental, and emotional characteristics of humans. Those characteristics are related to natural selection and so, by extension, are cultural advances related to natural selection.
One can easily imagine a process of memetic natural selection that parallels genetic natural selection. I don't see any reason to think that adaptive cultural features wouldn't be favored in some sense.
Yes, I said all of what you're saying in the first paragraph.
Example: Orchestral music develops in Western Europe. It doesn't develop in India or China. That humans have the capacity to develop orchestral music at all must be somehow explained through natural selection. That Western Europeans develop orchestral music and Indians don't cannot be explained through natural selection.
I don't regard memetic selection as anything other than a poorly thought out metaphor. If you're arguing that societies with a unified perception of reality tend to do better (for some sense of 'better') than societies that didn't, then up to a point it's true. The perception of a unified reality arises to some extent with the first age of empire building across Asia and the Mediterranean. But the explanation would lie more in the affinity with a unified and centralized government than any direct veridical link. And even then, it's a bit shaky.
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If reality were not unified, natural selection would favour something different.
If the fundamental parameters of the universe were different, then we wouldn't be here having this discussion. Our presence here shows only that the universe does feature a stable reality, not that there is some special reason why it is so. There is indeed an open question to be explored, but we don't need God to fill the gap in our knowledge.
Let me see if I've understood you? There is an open question to be explored. Just so long as any hypothesised answer isn't 'a special reason', and just so long as any hypothesised answer is Anything But God.
Anyway, you've misunderstood me slightly. The idea that 'the' universe that either features a stable reality or an unstable reality already presupposes that there is such a thing as the universe. And that's the move that really needs justifying. You can produce all sorts of logical errors by treating 'everything' as the name of a logical singular: without further justification, 'the universe' is just such a logical error.
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If you're going to justify the unity of reality through natural selection, you're equally justifying belief in God through natural selection.
Perhaps, but that wouldn't make the belief accurate, only adaptive.
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Just because natural selection generates a trait in humans that predisposes us to believe something, doesn't necessarily make the thing we want to believe true.
Yes. That was my point.
Your attempt to explain belief in a unified reality through natural selection only works if you assume that because natural selection predisposes us to believe in a unified reality that must necessarily make belief in a unified reality true. You admit it doesn't. Pop goes your argument.
[ 22. June 2009, 15:14: Message edited by: Dafyd ]
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by sanityman:
Dafyd, you said "the perception of a single unitary reality is not a human universal." I think our perception of it follows almost inevitably by its existence, via the sense organs that have evolved because they give us valuable data about that unified reality. You might as well say that gibbons "perceive unified reality" when they do the calculus necessary to catch the next branch! Cultural expressions come later.
I am pretty sure gibbons don't consciously do calculus, and I suspect that their unconscious system uses rules of thumb instead.
Anyway, I'm not talking about the persistence of observed physical objects. However, I think it's pretty obvious that human beings have evolved to use a number of heuristic rules in our thinking that don't square with rationality. For example, our intuitions on probability are pretty much unreliable. And of course we come up with all kinds of beliefs that within the context of belief in unified reality must be labelled superstition. You yourself refer to these below in your post. The presence of superstition, and the difficulty of science, show that it's not really a cultural universal.
And it isn't. Anthropologists studying other cultures have come up with all kinds of claims that are incomprehensible if you try to make sense within a unified belief framework.
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Actually, I think your next point agreed with this, when you said "natural selection favours those entities that interact with [reality] in that way." Personally, I don't think anything like human cognition or reason could have evolved in a "non-unified" or non-causal universe. Such a reality would be non-rational, so could not give rise to rationality (who can say what it would have given rise to?).
I put forward three separate counterarguments against Scot's argument. They're not supposed to be compatible. The third, as you noticed, was pretty much a reductio ad absurdum: I didn't agree with the premise at all. The second was granting something I only partly believe.
Anyway, I think that the argument that rationality couldn't have evolved in a universe without a unified rationality would only apply in a universe with unified rationality.
As has been mentioned earlier in this thread, there are people developing non-standard logics that include things like the possibility of affirming two contradictory statements. But even they're systematised.
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I am wary about privileging the "rational universe" as being evidence of an external designer.
I'm not talking about evidence for an external designer, and I'm deeply unhappy with the fine-tuning argument, which is flawed in any number of ways. (Although the puddle counterexample seems to me to miss the point.)
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However, there is an argument here if you take the view that there's something transcendent about rationality, mathematics and logic. Is that what you're saying, Dafyd? I do think the " rational God => rational universe" position is reasonable, but saying that it demands a rational God seems to me to be a step too far. "Demands that any God be a rational one" seems to me to be closer to the mark.
Well, I do think that mathematics and rationality are transcendent for some sense of that word. Whether that's the sense you're using I'm not sure.
I think it might be better to characterise my argument as something along the lines that 'what it is for there to be a rational universe, or something we can meaningfully call a universe, will turn out to involve positing God'.
I'm also aware that I'm so far arguing only that there's a hole where something needs to be put, so that 'God' is just a label for what goes in that whole. I'm more arguing that classical theism thinks of God far more as what belongs under that kind of label rather than as the external designer of Paleyite thought or young-earth creationism.
The Elvis and large diamond arguments only work at all against the designer argument (and even then they work best if the designer isn't external).
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Scot, I'm not replying to your points as we seem in broad agreement here. Please forgive me if I go over the same ground as your last answer! I would comment on quote:
Just because natural selection generates a trait in humans that predisposes us to believe something, doesn't necessarily make the thing we want to believe true.
I wonder if you put too much weight on this argument that it will break, and take our ability to make any valid truth claims with it. "Just because natural selection produced rationality, doesn't mean that rationality is valid" seem to be the reductio ad absurdum here. If it were true, we'd never know it, and all discussions are futile.
Absolutely.
[ 22. June 2009, 15:50: Message edited by: Dafyd ]
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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WearyPilgrim
Shipmate
# 14593
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Posted
I'm just rejoining the Board after a weekend away. It will take me all evening to read through all the previous posts. For now, however: a couple of you rightly challenged my belief in Jesus' Resurrection as appearing overlygh subjective (I had quoted the old Gospel song "He Lives": "You ask me how I know He lives? He lives within my heart!").
I believe in the Incarnation because I believe in the Resurrection. It is a subjective belief in so far as it has transformed my life. Jesus Christ is a living presence to me. That having been said, it is also an objective belief: I hold that Christ was actually, literally, bodily raised from the dead --- that His post-Resurrection appearances were not merely subjective psychological or spiritual phenomena, but that they really happened. Paul certainly attests to this, as does Peter, and Paul further maintains that Christ appeared to five hundred people at once. The Book of Acts purports to be basically historically factual. It's clear that SOMETHING extraordinary happened, and that there was corroborative evidence of it.
Bultmann's demythologization of the Resurrection, which seems to have set in motion all kinds of woolly-headed ideas about what did or didn't happen on and after the day of the Resurrection, just doesn't wash with me. If I alone were to say that a deceased man appeared to me fully alive, you would have ample reason to doubt the veracity of my claim, as well as my sanity. But if a whole GROUP of people --- and a large group at that --- were to make a similar claim, and that that experience engendered a 180-degree spiritual transformation, you'd have to wonder.
There are some things in the New Testament about which I have some doubts. The Resurrection is not one of them. No Resurrection, no Church. It's as simple as that.
Posts: 383 | From: Sedgwick, Maine USA | Registered: Feb 2009
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Jason™
Host emeritus
# 9037
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
...natural selection only explains whether a thought pattern has been useful in the past. It can't explain whether it's useful because true or useful for some other reason.
Yes, you (or Scot) can easily get off the hook of my third counterargument by this way. But, as far as I can see, you only do so by impaling yourself firmly on the second counterargument.
What I think I'm really confused about is why you want this "unified reality" premise to be taken as given and definitively explained. If instead we said something more simple, like: "From what we've seen, there is some consistency to the way things work, so we therefore expect that other consistencies might exist, and we look for them." -- of course the 'theory of unified reality' wouldn't have arisen until people began to make testable observations about their surroundings, and until they had the tools/intelligence/idea to test them.
If Newton had dropped an apple a second time and it had gone straight up into the air, science either wouldn't exist at all, or it'd be completely different, and we'd have very little sense of any unified reality, consistency, testability, trust in observable, repeatable tests, etc.
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Anyway, you've misunderstood me slightly. The idea that 'the' universe that either features a stable reality or an unstable reality already presupposes that there is such a thing as the universe. And that's the move that really needs justifying.
You lost me here. Because the universe might not exist? Because there might be more than one universe? We observe that certain things are consistent, so we accept the consistency that we see and test if/how it applies to other situations.
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Your attempt to explain belief in a unified reality through natural selection only works if you assume that because natural selection predisposes us to believe in a unified reality that must necessarily make belief in a unified reality true. You admit it doesn't. Pop goes your argument.
I know you're responding to Scot, but I'm trying to follow along and I'm lost again. I don't know why we need to be concerned about whether unified reality is ultimately true or not. Again: we observe, we process, we repeat, we make guesses about how consistency works.
If natural selection led to our belief in unified reality, it was because the ability to predict events based on our assumptions about consistency was extremely useful for our survival. And it continues to be!
[ 22. June 2009, 17:11: Message edited by: Jason I. Am ]
Posts: 4123 | From: Land of Mary | Registered: Feb 2005
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saysay
Ship's Praying Mantis
# 6645
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Jason I. Am:
First, you keep making broad, sweeping assumptions about the circles I run in, when I haven't said anything about any circles.
I apologize. But we're obviously having trouble communicating, and I'm trying to figure out why; it seems like you're making assertions of the 'if you believe x, then logically you must believe y' sort which wind up putting words in other people's mouths. But I'm out after this...
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I agree. The point isn't to just blindly get rid of Christianity, it's to be reasonable when it's appropriate to be reasonable.
Funny, I didn't get that from you asking why, if you accept certain liberal premises, you stay Christian at all. It seemed to me that you were pretty much saying the opposite.
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But when answering why people should retain those beliefs, you said it was because they need the checks.
One reason is that they need the checks; it's not the only one, just one that seems significant in my life right now.
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We've now both agreed that this isn't a good reason, because the checks aren't monopolized by the Church.
We have not agreed that this isn't a good reason. That's like saying that there's no sense going to a business that's been around for a long time and tends to be very good at what they do because they don't have a monopoly, or that there's no point being a democracy because it's not the only viable form of government.
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And yet, those experiences still exist. They don't stop or go away just because people don't describe them as "from God" or "religious" or using any specific words, necessarily.
Erm, yes. I don't think anyone has ever claimed that they don't. But the point is that in order to communicate about them, we have to have some sort of shared vocabulary; this vocabulary frequently comes from a shared religious or spiritual framework, and a lack of a shared framework leads to more miscommunication etc...
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"It's been a long day without you, my friend
I'll tell you all about it when I see you again"
"'Oh sweet baby purple Jesus' - that's a direct quote from a 9 year old - shoutout to purple Jesus."
Posts: 2943 | From: The Wire | Registered: May 2004
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sanityman
Shipmate
# 11598
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by WearyPilgrim:
I hold that Christ was actually, literally, bodily raised from the dead --- that His post-Resurrection appearances were not merely subjective psychological or spiritual phenomena, but that they really happened. Paul certainly attests to this, as does Peter, and Paul further maintains that Christ appeared to five hundred people at once. The Book of Acts purports to be basically historically factual. It's clear that SOMETHING extraordinary happened, and that there was corroborative evidence of it.
WearyPilgrim, I hope you'll excuse me if I use your post as a springboard. From a purely historical perspective, ISTM that the change of heart of the disciples after the crucifixion does require an explanation. If one doesn't take WearyPilgrim's view, one is left with- The events in the gospels/acts are not historical - it never happened;
- Something else inspired them to found a movement.
Given that the early church is historical, and something got it started, it strikes me that the sceptics have a case to answer. If the former, how did the church get started at all? If the latter, what was responsible for their change of heart?
Cheers,
- Chris.
PS: Dafyd, Thanks for your replies - I admire the amount of work you're doing replying to 3 separate people about the same posts!
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Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only the wind will listen - TS Eliot
Posts: 1453 | From: London, UK | Registered: Jun 2006
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matthew_dixon
Shipmate
# 12278
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Posted
Please may I interrupt this discussion just to respond to the OP myself? Cheers.
"The Bible isn't necessarily infallible or inerrant. It may be divinely inspired, but it was still written and compiled by humans."
I'd agree with that, to an extent. It's not literally true, but is very definitely divinely inspired
"PSA isn't the only way to understand Christianity, and it's probably not the best way either. In fact, it might do more damage than good."
I don't like PSA as a simplistic concept - in the sense of Jesus died purely to save a subset of the population and not to save the others. There's so much MORE to Christianity than PSA!
"Other religions contain elements of truth"
Yes, I'd agree. I'd go so far as to say that I feel Christianity is largely right, and that in general the "elements of truth" in other faiths are where they coincide with Christianity.
"Hell might not exist or it might end up being empty, but the idea that people will be cast into Hell for believing the wrong things about God is rather absurd"
Absolutely agreed.
"Evolution is most likely true, and Creationism is an embarrassing byproduct of over-literal Christianity"
Agreed there as well.
"Issues like homosexuality, abortion, and other morality issues are a lot more complicated and nuanced than many more literal Christians try to make them sound"
Also agreed there.
So, why am I still a Christian? Well, because I feel there's something so much deeper to faith than the literal reading of the bible that is suggested.
Back to your discussions...
Posts: 321 | From: Cardiff | Registered: Jan 2007
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Jason I. Am:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
...natural selection only explains whether a thought pattern has been useful in the past. It can't explain whether it's useful because true or useful for some other reason.
Yes, you (or Scot) can easily get off the hook of my third counterargument by this way. But, as far as I can see, you only do so by impaling yourself firmly on the second counterargument.
What I think I'm really confused about is why you want this "unified reality" premise to be taken as given and definitively explained. If instead we said something more simple, like: "From what we've seen, there is some consistency to the way things work, so we therefore expect that other consistencies might exist, and we look for them." -- of course the 'theory of unified reality' wouldn't have arisen until people began to make testable observations about their surroundings, and until they had the tools/intelligence/idea to test them.
I'm thinking of a category of traditional religion as expounded by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz (originally from Max Weber).
Traditional religion here refers to polytheistic religions and even less formalised systems. The idea is that in traditional religions we have a variety of concepts of gods, spirits, witchcraft, sorcery, and so on. Whenever we come across an event out of the ordinary, or that provokes questions of meaning (an unexplained death, a birth, suffering, or good luck) we draw on whatever of the above concepts seems most appropriate to the case. Whether we'd use the same concept in a different circumstance is entirely irrelevant: the concept comes out, does it's job, and goes back in. In one case, someone dies, and it's because his enemy is a witch. In another case, a spirit dislikes him.
In one such society, an anthropologist noticed that witchcraft was said to be hereditary (Evans-Pritchard, studying the Azande). It's passed on father to son. But the idea that if one man was a witch then his brothers were witches was just not accepted.
The point is that traditional societies can get on quite happily for thousands of years with just these kinds of explanation. And they still continue in the West. Some of the older strata behind the Bible must date from this kind of period.
But traditional religion also includes seeds of what we might call are also elements of rationalized theology, which in Judea takes the form of Jewish monotheism, and in Greece philosophy. (And in China and India we have developments that aren't easily categorised as either philosophy or religion.) This isn't happy with singular one-off explanations. Explanations are no longer ad hoc. If you use an explanation, you have to reuse it or drop it. You have to be consistent in the way you use explanations. The one-off explanations now come to require their own explanations.
If we're finding an explanation that will tie together two things we need to develop a concept that will tie together those two things, an abstraction from them both, that because an abstraction isn't directly observable. And if we want to tie together everything, we need some single transcendental abstraction that will license tying everything together. The point is that the single transcendental abstraction, whether Brahma, the Dao, YHWH, or the Greek logos or form of the Good, guarantees the possibility of stretching explanations from one area to another. Everything falls under the single domain. Because there's a structured set of abstractions organising everything, everything forms a coherent whole which we can talk about as a whole.
(See below about the difference between seeing everything as a mere aggregation and seeing everything as a universe.)
It's helpful here to note that while the identification of God with one of the Greek gods such as Zeus/Jupiter was always strenuously resisted by Jews and Christians, the identification with the philosophical logos or neoplatonic One was frequently accepted. Greek philosophical terms were readily taken up and used especially in Christianity. Rationalization was only an ongoing work and imperfectly done in the Biblical documents, but the pressure of belief in one God pushes beyond the Biblical categories and calls for the adoption of philosophical categories in all three monotheistic religions.
The process of making guesses and checking for consistency doesn't really make sense until we expect there to be consistency. And that doesn't really arise until we have generated the set of abstractions around a unified philosophical theology. On the one hand, we had people trying out ad hoc practical solutions to practical problems and sticking with what worked; on the other, we had people trying to explain reality using philosophy/theology. Science didn't really develop until the two united, as they did in Reformation Europe.
quote:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Anyway, you've misunderstood me slightly. The idea that 'the' universe that either features a stable reality or an unstable reality already presupposes that there is such a thing as the universe. And that's the move that really needs justifying.
You lost me here. Because the universe might not exist? Because there might be more than one universe?
Let's consider two sets. One of them consists of Mars, Earth, Venus and Mercury. The other consists of Mars, the star Algebaran, George Bush's left kneecap, and a dead lemur in Madagascar. The first set is united by similar properties. The second is just an arbitrary aggregation.
The universe is the set of everything that exists. The thing is that by calling it the universe we're suggesting that it's more than just an arbitrary aggregation. We're suggesting that everything has some similarity to everything else; we're suggesting that there's some kind of structure and order to it that makes it into a whole and not just the most arbitrary of arbitrary aggregations.
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Your attempt to explain belief in a unified reality through natural selection only works if you assume that because natural selection predisposes us to believe in a unified reality that must necessarily make belief in a unified reality true. You admit it doesn't. Pop goes your argument.
I don't know why we need to be concerned about whether unified reality is ultimately true or not. Again: we observe, we process, we repeat, we make guesses about how consistency works.
The thing is, if you aren't concerned about whether something is ultimately true or not, you've lost the distinction you've made between modes of thinking ('science') that work because they reflect how reality is, and modes of thinking ('cognitive bias') that work only because they're adaptive for some other reason. You've just got one category of things that are adaptive.
You need the idea of truth to say that some things are adaptive because true and some things are adaptive despite being not true.
I'm also dubious about the motivation for adopting a program of observing, processing, repetition that has any grand universal claims that doesn't rest in an aspiration to discover the truth of things. Mere practical utility doesn't set its sights so high.
(Entirely by coincidence there's an article in last Friday's Church Times by a formerly atheist scientist arguing for belief in God for reasons closely related to the last paragraph.)
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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Timothy the Obscure
Mostly Friendly
# 292
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Posted
I'm not sure I see the connection with Geertz's view of religion (I've no doubt he's spinning in his grave at hearing that he got it from Weber):
quote:
A system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting motivations in men[sic] by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods an motivations seem uniquely realistic.
For the Azande, part of the "general order of existence" is that there are no accidents; for many conservative Christians, it is that everything you really need to know is in the Bible (probably the KJV). The problem is how you represent this in a public, symbolic way (and for Geertz, thought is public, mediated in shared symbols--the creed, the shape of a gothic cathedral, the melody of "Shine Jesus Shine") that establishes those mood and motivations most effectively.
The problems arise when we encounter someone whose symbols formulate a different (and noncommensurate) general order of existence--which is what the OP is all about.
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When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.
- C. P. Snow
Posts: 6114 | From: PDX | Registered: May 2001
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Evensong
Shipmate
# 14696
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by leo:
Fundamentalists often preface dogmatic staements like 'The Bible says....' and then misquote scripture.
So it is no surprise that when their belief system begins to unravel they cannot see anything left in which to believe.
Well said leo ![[Overused]](graemlins/notworthy.gif)
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a theological scrapbook
Posts: 9481 | From: Australia | Registered: Apr 2009
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Galloping Granny
Shipmate
# 13814
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Posted
Standing with matthew_dixon (hello.Brother) I admit I've enjoyed reading the deep thoughts of other contributors – grateful for mental stimulation.
I belong in the fellowship of those to whom God and the life in the Spirit matters.
[Tangent] But I suddenly felt the need to take out my beloved Omar Khayyŕm:
Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same Door as in I went.
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The Kingdom of Heaven is spread upon the earth, and men do not see it. Gospel of Thomas, 113
Posts: 2629 | From: Matarangi | Registered: Jun 2008
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Barnabas62
Shipmate
# 9110
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by The Galloping Granny:
But I suddenly felt the need to take out my beloved Omar Khayyŕm:
Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same Door as in I went.
"There was a Door to which I found no Key:
There was a Veil past which I could not see:
Some little Talk awhile of ME and THEE
There seemed--and then no more of THEE and ME."
That seems to me to be how he came in! There are different doors of course.
But I've always loved it, too.
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Who is it that you seek? How then shall we live? How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?
Posts: 21397 | From: Norfolk UK | Registered: Feb 2005
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Timothy the Obscure:
I'm not sure I see the connection with Geertz's view of religion (I've no doubt he's spinning in his grave at hearing that he got it from Weber)
You're thinking of the definition Geertz gave in 'Religion as a Cultural System'. I'm thinking of his description at the beginning of his essay '"Internal Conversion" in Contemporary Bali'. RaaCS is no doubt his own formulation, but he explicitly attributes his distinction at the beginning of ICiCB to Weber.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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The Great Gumby
Ship's Brain Surgeon
# 10989
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by sanityman:
WearyPilgrim, I hope you'll excuse me if I use your post as a springboard. From a purely historical perspective, ISTM that the change of heart of the disciples after the crucifixion does require an explanation. If one doesn't take WearyPilgrim's view, one is left with- The events in the gospels/acts are not historical - it never happened;
- Something else inspired them to found a movement.
Given that the early church is historical, and something got it started, it strikes me that the sceptics have a case to answer. If the former, how did the church get started at all? If the latter, what was responsible for their change of heart?
I'm not exactly a sceptic, but ISTM that this is a question which could be answered any number of ways. For a start, I could observe that any number of churches, movements and the like have got started over the years, all with mutually contradictory messages. They clearly can't all be right. Care to apply your logic to (for example) Islam? How do you think the origins of Scientology will be reported in 2,000 years?
And of course, you appear to assume without justification that either every word of the gospels/acts is true, or none of it, leaving no room for pious misunderstandings, well-meaning hagiography, wishful thinking and any number of potential ways the truth could have become obscured. All of which brings us back to the point of the thread.
Jason, I'm still pondering your question about why, once Occam's out of his box, he should be put away again. I think the difficulty is in assessing the probabilities of metaphysical claims. Is it unnecessarily multiplying entities to posit a Prime Mover as a reason why anything exists at all? (Serious question - I don't have a clue)
My guess is that experience is the primary driver in both any move towards liberalism and keeping liberals* within the church. Experience of the world suggests to liberals* that life's more complex than a simple, literal, black-and-white view held by some conservatives* (I don't know if this is strictly Occam at work, or just new information), but experience of the divine (however you define it) tells them that nevertheless, there's something in it.
If that's the case, it makes no sense to ask them why, having rejected conservative* beliefs, they remain in the church, as they remain in the church for the same reasons why they rejected conservative* beliefs - to adopt a position in line with their experience. (I'm aware that I'm in danger of conflating different types of "experience", but I think it's justified as the common thread in the thought process, due to the interpretation step between observation and conclusion. Feel free to disagree.)
* - For want of a better word
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The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool. - Richard Feynman
A letter to my son about death
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Jason™
Host emeritus
# 9037
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by The Great Gumby:
Jason, I'm still pondering your question about why, once Occam's out of his box, he should be put away again. I think the difficulty is in assessing the probabilities of metaphysical claims. Is it unnecessarily multiplying entities to posit a Prime Mover as a reason why anything exists at all? (Serious question - I don't have a clue)
My guess is that experience is the primary driver in both any move towards liberalism and keeping liberals* within the church. Experience of the world suggests to liberals* that life's more complex than a simple, literal, black-and-white view held by some conservatives* (I don't know if this is strictly Occam at work, or just new information), but experience of the divine (however you define it) tells them that nevertheless, there's something in it.
If that's the case, it makes no sense to ask them why, having rejected conservative* beliefs, they remain in the church, as they remain in the church for the same reasons why they rejected conservative* beliefs - to adopt a position in line with their experience. (I'm aware that I'm in danger of conflating different types of "experience", but I think it's justified as the common thread in the thought process, due to the interpretation step between observation and conclusion. Feel free to disagree.)
* - For want of a better word
Gumby, this is probably the best answer I've heard to this question, not just on this thread, but ever in my life, especially the part I bolded.
For me, at least, it explains a lot about why I moved toward the beliefs I did, away from inerrancy, away from hell, etc. -- they simply didn't match with any experience I had ever had or could conceive of with the type of god that I supposedly believed in.
For me, this led to me going to church and remaining in Christian community for a number of reasons: friendships, community, a place I could play music, involvement in various philanthropies, and a place to think and talk about metaphysical things.
But when I realized that I was constantly limited in how I could talk about those metaphysical things, that all the philanthropies were mixed with evangelistic desire, that music was limited by traditional morals, that community and friendships weren't monopolized by the church, and that my involvement in the church implied an agreement with some fairly arbitrary ethical positions -- it all came apart for me.
To put it in your words, Gumby, my experience became such that I found no use for the church. Which is really a lot of what my question was in the beginning. Because it seems that when you take away Hell, and the uniqueness of Christianity, and the supremacy of the Bible that inerrancy provides, etc., that you sort of lose a lot of the urgency or "big-dealness" of being a Christian. Those who hold those beliefs are able to easily describe why it's so important for you to stay in the church and to keep the faith.
So when I lost that urgency, I was left with just the usefulness (or lack) of those beliefs. I've loved this thread because it's extremely fascinating to me why so many people, when facing similar circumstances, have stuck with it. (Fascinating in a way that the "Why do conservatives believe in Hell?" question just isn't anymore.)
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Jason™
Host emeritus
# 9037
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
The process of making guesses and checking for consistency doesn't really make sense until we expect there to be consistency. And that doesn't really arise until we have generated the set of abstractions around a unified philosophical theology.
That seems like quite a causal jump. I haven't seen anything to make me doubt that expectation of consistency arose when people started noticing consistency around them. Which seems like a far simpler, more likely explanation than going the lonnnnnnnng way around to say it was because they came up with "unified philosophical theology" and that led to people expecting consistency in the natural world around them.
quote:
The universe is the set of everything that exists. The thing is that by calling it the universe we're suggesting that it's more than just an arbitrary aggregation. We're suggesting that everything has some similarity to everything else; we're suggesting that there's some kind of structure and order to it that makes it into a whole and not just the most arbitrary of arbitrary aggregations.
Well it's a working assumption. And so long as it provides solid groundwork for the millions of things that we can test and understand, it continues to be a good working assumption. (It's with this type of working assumption that Occam really shines, in my opinion.)
quote:
The thing is, if you aren't concerned about whether something is ultimately true or not, you've lost the distinction you've made between modes of thinking ('science') that work because they reflect how reality is, and modes of thinking ('cognitive bias') that work only because they're adaptive for some other reason. You've just got one category of things that are adaptive.
You need the idea of truth to say that some things are adaptive because true and some things are adaptive despite being not true.
I think it's a micro/macro distinction though, as I explain below.
quote:
I'm also dubious about the motivation for adopting a program of observing, processing, repetition that has any grand universal claims that doesn't rest in an aspiration to discover the truth of things. Mere practical utility doesn't set its sights so high.
I think this is a uniquely theological problem, that you can't be concerned with the truth of anything if you're not concerned with the Truth of All Things. On the contrary, you can be very concerned about the truth of whether things fall to the ground when dropped without being too worried about the truth of whether ultimate reality is unified. I doubt it would have done much good if you had been there when Newton presented his findings to say, "That's all well and good, Isaac, but until we determine definitively whether or not ultimate reality is truly unified or not, your findings are just not that impressive or conclusive."
So maybe "God" is one explanation for the ultimate unification of all reality. Maybe it's a good explanation, maybe it isn't. Until we're able to test that proposition, I think the scientific position is to shrug and say, "So what?" and to get on with trying to understand what we can.
(Which, incidentally, has a lot to do with why I'm in the process of giving up a lot of Christian beliefs. At some point while wondering about the literal resurrection and the incarnation and whether God was ultimately true or not I suddenly asked myself, "So what? How about we get on with trying to understand what we can?")
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Dave Marshall
Shipmate
# 7533
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Jason I. Am:
when I realized that I was constantly limited in how I could talk about those metaphysical things, that all the philanthropies were mixed with evangelistic desire, that music was limited by traditional morals, that community and friendships weren't monopolized by the church, and that my involvement in the church implied an agreement with some fairly arbitrary ethical positions -- it all came apart for me.
I suppose the question is, can there be a community that doesn't imply some kind of identification with positions we don't personally
endorse?
I'm probably in a similar place to you as regards preference. There's certainly some church stuff as espoused by conservatives all across the evangelical, catholic, and middle-of-the-road traditions that I do not wish to associate with. But without a community of some kind through which to express both interests and dissatifactions, we're only ever going to be on the sidelines of public debate. Without the constraint of having to consider the effect of what we say on the rest of a community, we can let rip at the stupidity of some of the worst excesses of Christianity but we're eminently ignorable. However valid our criticism, its expression needs the lift of a recognised body of support in order to even be noticed above the noise of the traffic.
But I happen to have come across a community within the Church that includes people I feel I have something in common with and to which I can make a contribution. Without that, I don't know how long I'd bother with Church.
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Scot
Deck hand
# 2095
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Posted
I apologize in advance for the length of this post. There have been a number of interesting points and hard questions that I really want to discuss. I've just been too busy today until now.
quote:
Originally posted by sanityman:
quote:
Just because natural selection generates a trait in humans that predisposes us to believe something, doesn't necessarily make the thing we want to believe true.
I wonder if you put too much weight on this argument that it will break, and take our ability to make any valid truth claims with it. "Just because natural selection produced rationality, doesn't mean that rationality is valid" seem to be the reductio ad absurdum here. If it were true, we'd never know it, and all discussions are futile.
I would agree that rationality is not valid because natural selection produced it. Rationality is valid because it works. A rational approach, such as science, can be used to accurately and repeatably predict phenomena of the world in which we live. That rational thinking was favored by natural selection is a result, not a cause, of the validity of rationality.
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
quote:
If the fundamental parameters of the universe were different, then we wouldn't be here having this discussion. Our presence here shows only that the universe does feature a stable reality, not that there is some special reason why it is so. There is indeed an open question to be explored, but we don't need God to fill the gap in our knowledge.
Let me see if I've understood you? There is an open question to be explored. Just so long as any hypothesised answer isn't 'a special reason', and just so long as any hypothesised answer is Anything But God.
No, not what I meant at all. I'll rephrase my statement to say that there is an open question to be explored, but we don't need to assert the presence of some unverifiable and untestable "other" outside of nature simply because science hasn't worked out a complete answer yet.
quote:
The idea that 'the' universe that either features a stable reality or an unstable reality already presupposes that there is such a thing as the universe. And that's the move that really needs justifying. You can produce all sorts of logical errors by treating 'everything' as the name of a logical singular: without further justification, 'the universe' is just such a logical error.
Would you prefer "a universe" or "this universe"? In any case, as far as we can observe the universe in which we exist does feature a stable reality.
quote:
Your attempt to explain belief in a unified reality through natural selection only works if you assume that because natural selection predisposes us to believe in a unified reality that must necessarily make belief in a unified reality true. You admit it doesn't. Pop goes your argument.
See my above response to sanityman regarding rationality.
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd in response to sanityman:
I'm also aware that I'm so far arguing only that there's a hole where something needs to be put, so that 'God' is just a label for what goes in that whole. I'm more arguing that classical theism thinks of God far more as what belongs under that kind of label rather than as the external designer of Paleyite thought or young-earth creationism.
How is this not just another "God of the gaps" argument?
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd in response to Jason I. Am:
The process of making guesses and checking for consistency doesn't really make sense until we expect there to be consistency. And that doesn't really arise until we have generated the set of abstractions around a unified philosophical theology.
I strongly disagree. The expectation of consistency arises from the observation that there is consistency. The search for a unified theory results from both the observation and the expectation of consistency. You've got the causality backward.
quote:
Originally posted by The Great Gumby:
Is it unnecessarily multiplying entities to posit a Prime Mover as a reason why anything exists at all?
I see it, not so much as unnecessarily multiplying entities, as either engaging in an endless regression or abandoning rational investigation. If the former, then you have to explain where God came from and why. If the latter, then you have no good reason not to accept God as the direct cause of all sorts of things rather than placing him at arm's length.
quote:
I'm aware that I'm in danger of conflating different types of "experience", but I think it's justified as the common thread in the thought process, due to the interpretation step between observation and conclusion. Feel free to disagree.
Experience of the world can be explained, verified, and shown to others as evidence. Experience of the divine cannot be verified or shown to others. You use the two interchangably, but they aren't the same thing at all, and certainly not to someone not starting from a position of belief in the divine.
quote:
Originally posted by Jason I. Am:
To put it in your words, Gumby, my experience became such that I found no use for the church. Which is really a lot of what my question was in the beginning. Because it seems that when you take away Hell, and the uniqueness of Christianity, and the supremacy of the Bible that inerrancy provides, etc., that you sort of lose a lot of the urgency or "big-dealness" of being a Christian. Those who hold those beliefs are able to easily describe why it's so important for you to stay in the church and to keep the faith.
So when I lost that urgency, I was left with just the usefulness (or lack) of those beliefs. I've loved this thread because it's extremely fascinating to me why so many people, when facing similar circumstances, have stuck with it.
Good explanation. I went through much the same process. I would add that, once you are no longer compelled to stay Christian by those conservative beliefs, you have to decide what to do with destructive features of the church. To be fair, some of the harm I saw done in conservative churches may be less common in moderate or liberal churches. I just couldn't come up with a good reason to stick around long enough to find out. I had momentum.
quote:
Originally posted by Dave Marshall:
But without a community of some kind through which to express both interests and dissatifactions, we're only ever going to be on the sidelines of public debate. Without the constraint of having to consider the effect of what we say on the rest of a community, we can let rip at the stupidity of some of the worst excesses of Christianity but we're eminently ignorable. However valid our criticism, its expression needs the lift of a recognised body of support in order to even be noticed above the noise of the traffic.
This assumes that public debate is the same as debate within the church community. I realize that I'm speaking from a US perspective, but I strongly believe not only that the two are different, but that they should be kept separate. There are plenty of communities with legitimate voices in the public debate through which I can be heard.
If you mean to say that one must be within the church community to influence it positively, that may be true. I have to question, however, whether I'm entitled to influence discussion within the church if I don't identify as Christian.
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“Here, we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.” - Thomas Jefferson
Posts: 9515 | From: Southern California | Registered: Jan 2002
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Laurie17
Shipmate
# 14889
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Posted
Why do religious moderates keep the faith ?
I think that 'religious moderation' is an expression oroutcome of keeping faith, and the faith for many of us.
For me, it's that way round I've just realised...
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when thee touched my heart
I were undone like dropped blossom
Daw'r ffordd yn glir yn araf deg.
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Evensong
Shipmate
# 14696
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Jason I. Am:
To put it in your words, Gumby, my experience became such that I found no use for the church. Which is really a lot of what my question was in the beginning. Because it seems that when you take away Hell, and the uniqueness of Christianity, and the supremacy of the Bible that inerrancy provides, etc., that you sort of lose a lot of the urgency or "big-dealness" of being a Christian. Those who hold those beliefs are able to easily describe why it's so important for you to stay in the church and to keep the faith.
So when I lost that urgency, I was left with just the usefulness (or lack) of those beliefs. I've loved this thread because it's extremely fascinating to me why so many people, when facing similar circumstances, have stuck with it.
Religion with compulsion is no religion at all. You're just going through the motions because someone told you to or out of fear.
When that goes, then you get mature faith.
I think the "sticking" with it bit depends alot on if you make friends with the people at Church or not. We are very social animals unfortunately....
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a theological scrapbook
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Jason™
Host emeritus
# 9037
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Seb:
Religion with compulsion is no religion at all. You're just going through the motions because someone told you to or out of fear.
When that goes, then you get mature faith.
Ah, the patronizing pat on the head of "if you had stuck with it, you would've matured". I suppose the question that any of us who are concerned with such "maturation" is really whether or not the maturest faith of all is abandoning faith altogether.
Not that I or anyone else can definitely say that it is, but it has to be considered.
Posts: 4123 | From: Land of Mary | Registered: Feb 2005
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
Ah, an accusation of being patronizing. Finally.
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This is the last sig I'll ever write for you...
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Evensong
Shipmate
# 14696
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Jason I. Am:
quote:
Originally posted by Seb:
Religion with compulsion is no religion at all. You're just going through the motions because someone told you to or out of fear.
When that goes, then you get mature faith.
Ah, the patronizing pat on the head of "if you had stuck with it, you would've matured".
I didn't say that. I said once you follow faith for your OWN reasons, not anybody elses (or society or culture or fear), then it becomes real faith.
I'm not into beating dead horses either.
quote:
I suppose the question that any of us who are concerned with such "maturation" is really whether or not the maturest faith of all is abandoning faith altogether.
Yes, I often wonder this too. Is faith just a crutch?
But I've realized, its actually much harder to have faith in many ways, than not to. So its not a crutch.
I also think abandoning faith altogether can sometimes be a good thing. Start again. Find god in a different way. This only works if you ask for God's help to lead you into a new journey of faith.
Mousethief ![[Confused]](confused.gif)
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a theological scrapbook
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Barnabas62
Shipmate
# 9110
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Scot:
I would add that, once you are no longer compelled to stay Christian by those conservative beliefs, you have to decide what to do with destructive features of the church. To be fair, some of the harm I saw done in conservative churches may be less common in moderate or liberal churches. I just couldn't come up with a good reason to stick around long enough to find out. I had momentum.
Do conservative beliefs compel folks to stay in church? I know a number of examples to the contrary; normally involving folks of perfectionist views who could not cope with the scruffiness they found in the visible church. You find a lot of church-hoppers with conservative views, looking for a perfect non-"liberal" environment. Of course they consider themselves to be Christian, which may be what you mean, but they don't seem to be very good at either belonging or tolerance.
Destructive features of the church. Maybe you and I could compare notes? I tend to think Philip Yancey nailed it by coining the term "ungrace". Ungrace can be very destructive.
Actually, I think ungrace is not at all a feature of any particular theological outlook - you can find it anywhere. It does make folks want to run away. I've met plenty of others with momentum (including me from time to time) but it doesn't have to be unstoppable.
The problem of belonging anywhere is that after a while rubbing up against folks the veneer wears off and you see the chipboard more clearly. That's a real issue of belonging anywhere. Familiarity doesn't always breed contempt; boredom can also be an issue. It's a genuine issue. Does it have anything to do with the universals of faith? I'm inclined to think that it does, given that faith has both individual and corporate dimensions.
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Who is it that you seek? How then shall we live? How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?
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sanityman
Shipmate
# 11598
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Scot:
quote:
Originally posted by sanityman:
quote:
Just because natural selection generates a trait in humans that predisposes us to believe something, doesn't necessarily make the thing we want to believe true.
I wonder if you put too much weight on this argument that it will break, and take our ability to make any valid truth claims with it. "Just because natural selection produced rationality, doesn't mean that rationality is valid" seem to be the reductio ad absurdum here. If it were true, we'd never know it, and all discussions are futile.
I would agree that rationality is not valid because natural selection produced it. Rationality is valid because it works. A rational approach, such as science, can be used to accurately and repeatably predict phenomena of the world in which we live. That rational thinking was favored by natural selection is a result, not a cause, of the validity of rationality.
Thanks for your reply, Scot. I'm pretty much in agreement with you here - I suppose what I was driving at was that natural selection enables us to live in the universe as it is, but does not in itself prove or disprove anything. Both rationality and belief must be justified by other means, not by examining their origins. That means it's not an argument against belief, of course (not that you were saying it was).
quote:
Originally posted by Scot:
quote:
Originally posted by The Great Gumby:
Is it unnecessarily multiplying entities to posit a Prime Mover as a reason why anything exists at all?
I see it, not so much as unnecessarily multiplying entities, as either engaging in an endless regression or abandoning rational investigation. If the former, then you have to explain where God came from and why. If the latter, then you have no good reason not to accept God as the direct cause of all sorts of things rather than placing him at arm's length.
But don't you get this problem even if you leave God out of it? Either you have to explain the universe, or you abandon rational enquiry and say it 'just is.' At least God is posited to be eternal, and therefore not needing a cause!
Regarding The Great Gumby and Jason I. Am's point about Occam's Razor: I think the word "necessity" is pivotal, as one person's definition of a wholly necessary belief to explain their personal experience may be another's unnecessary encumbrance, which will be discarded when they start thinking honestly. If everyone lived by Occam's razor I think we'd still have theists: it seems that a belief in God is necessary for some people to make sense of the world. I don't mean as a crutch, just that their experience makes more sense that way (subjective, of course). I'm inevitably reminded of Ellie Arroway in Contact where the following dialog takes place: quote:
Michael Kitz: [standing, angrily] Then why don't you simply withdraw your testimony, and concede that this "journey to the center of the galaxy," in fact, never took place!
Ellie Arroway: Because I can't. I... had an experience... I can't prove it, I can't even explain it, but everything that I know as a human being, everything that I am tells me that it was real!
I can understand faith as a valid response to that sort of experience. Parsimony will get you the bare bones of reality, the physics, and get them with a pleasing amount of objective certainty. But if you want to imbue reality - and ourselves - with some layers of meaning beyond the dance of subatomic particles, you might have to look elsewhere. As Barnabas62 said, experience can provide a difference sort of meaning.
I just have no idea how.
- Chris.
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Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only the wind will listen - TS Eliot
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The Great Gumby
Ship's Brain Surgeon
# 10989
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Scot:
quote:
Originally posted by The Great Gumby:
Is it unnecessarily multiplying entities to posit a Prime Mover as a reason why anything exists at all?
I see it, not so much as unnecessarily multiplying entities, as either engaging in an endless regression or abandoning rational investigation. If the former, then you have to explain where God came from and why. If the latter, then you have no good reason not to accept God as the direct cause of all sorts of things rather than placing him at arm's length.
I don't see it as either of those, but I'm prepared to be convinced. I certainly don't see it as abandoning rational investigation. However far we go back - to the Big Bang, supercharged particles, or whatever - the question of why anything exists at all appears to me to be outside the scope of even our potential knowledge. We can try to trace it all the way back, but it just displaces the question.
The infinite regression argument is a strong one, but I don't believe it's insurmountable. We look for a first cause because the universe, as we understand it, follows cause and effect, and sequential time. Everything has a beginning and an end. It seems natural that this should also apply to the universe itself, and if so, it must have been caused by something outside the universe. That first cause, being outside the universe, isn't bound by the same constraints of time, cause and effect as the universe itself, so looking for a cause of the first cause is unnecessary. (If you argue that the universe just is, and always will be, you end up defining the universe in exactly the same terms as the prime mover you reject.)
I'm not necessarily advocating this line of thought, although I find it interesting when I want to mess with my head, but I use it as an illustration of religious enquiry going beyond the limits of what Occam's Razor is equipped to deal with. Once we move into unverifiable metaphysical realms, it's a big stretch to say that it's much help in getting at the facts. This is a tangent, though.
quote:
Originally posted by Scot:
quote:
I'm aware that I'm in danger of conflating different types of "experience", but I think it's justified as the common thread in the thought process, due to the interpretation step between observation and conclusion. Feel free to disagree.
Experience of the world can be explained, verified, and shown to others as evidence. Experience of the divine cannot be verified or shown to others. You use the two interchangably, but they aren't the same thing at all, and certainly not to someone not starting from a position of belief in the divine.
Yes, of course experience of the divine can't be verified, but I think there's a common thread running through both types of experience. Maybe "interpretation of experience" is more accurate, albeit less succinct. I'll try to explain my somewhat confused thought processes a little better, using the analogy of homosexuality (please forgive the lack of precision, but the fine points of that argument belong in Another Place).
Everyone accepts that there are people who self-identify as homosexual, and that they say it's how they are, and they can't change. That much isn't in doubt, but different people within the church will react to that in different ways. If they stick to the conservative line, they'll say such people are lying, evil or misguided sinners, because the Bible says so. If they're liberal, they'll say there's nothing wrong with gay sex, because it's ridiculous and cruel to condemn people for how they were created, and the Bible only sort of condemns it, a bit. The experience is the same, but the interpretation differs, with liberals allowing their interpretation to overrule the Bible where appropriate, while for conservatives, the Bible trumps everything. No one can prove objectively that one interpretation is better than the other.
So liberals base their theological position in large part on their personal interpretation of experience, and place a lot of weight on that. I think the same may well be true of why they stay - they get a feeling of peace, they have a feeling that there's something in it, and suchlike. They have some sort of experience, and give that experience a lot of weight when attempting to interpret it and determine its significance. If they have no such feeling, on the other hand, there probably isn't much to keep them where they are.
I'm sure I'm grossly oversimplifying here, and I can easily think of examples of liberal types staying within the church for quite different reasons, but I think this is a reasonable starting point for the sort of person Jason seems to have had in mind.
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The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool. - Richard Feynman
A letter to my son about death
Posts: 5382 | From: Home for shot clergy spouses | Registered: Feb 2006
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Jason™
Host emeritus
# 9037
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
Ah, an accusation of being patronizing. Finally.
Yeah, finally. It only took 340 posts and somebody actually being extremely patronizing, too.
quote:
Originally posted by Seb:
I didn't say that. I said once you follow faith for your OWN reasons, not anybody elses (or society or culture or fear), then it becomes real faith.
Yes, that's what you said. It's really quite magical how you can be so sure of something like that.
quote:
Yes, I often wonder this too. Is faith just a crutch?
But I've realized, its actually much harder to have faith in many ways, than not to. So its not a crutch.
Oh! Well that settles it then.
quote:
I also think abandoning faith altogether can sometimes be a good thing. Start again. Find god in a different way. This only works if you ask for God's help to lead you into a new journey of faith.
Well, asking for God's help to lead me anywhere isn't exactly what I would call "abandoning faith".
Posts: 4123 | From: Land of Mary | Registered: Feb 2005
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
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Originally posted by The Great Gumby:
We look for a first cause because the universe, as we understand it, follows cause and effect, and sequential time. Everything has a beginning and an end. It seems natural that this should also apply to the universe itself, and if so, it must have been caused by something outside the universe. That first cause, being outside the universe, isn't bound by the same constraints of time, cause and effect as the universe itself, so looking for a cause of the first cause is unnecessary. (If you argue that the universe just is, and always will be, you end up defining the universe in exactly the same terms as the prime mover you reject.)
I haven't got round to replying to Jason.I.Am and Scot's objections just yet. It's going to take some time, and it's hard to make the point I'm trying to make clear.
But I would like to say that I think the above line of reasoning is a mistake.
We can extend causal reasoning about each of the entities that make up the universe backwards within the universe in time. But the universe itself doesn't have a beginning within time. Time-based causal reasoning doesn't apply to the universe as a whole any more than it applies to God.
Now I think it's true that we can only understand the relationship of God to the universe by analogy with our understanding of cause and effect. But it's still an analogy. It can't be viewed as an extension of our cause and effect reasoning. Or at least, if we do view it that way, it's a very special way of viewing cause and effect that requires comment.
Just some thoughts about 'the universe', for Scot.
Consider the following argument:
Every street leads to a place.
Therefore, there is a place (call it Rome) that every street leads to.
That's invalid.
Here's another invalid argument:
Every thing has a cause.
Therefore, there is a cause (call it God) of everything.
Again, an invalid argument as such.
A third invalid argument:
Every thing is made of some substance.
Therefore, there is some substance (call it matter) that everything is made of.
The reasons that the above arguments are invalid is that they're treating 'every x' in the premise as the name of a singular. But that's not equivalent. 'Every thing' is just a way of summarising a whole lot of separate statements. 'Everything' takes all the subjects of all the separate statements as being a subject we can talk about in its own right. It is, without further premises, a logical mistake.
'The universe' means exactly the same as 'everything'. It is a logical mistake. So does 'a universe', and 'this universe'. They're all, without further explanation, logical errors.
Note, however, that as soon as we take materialism as a principle of operation, we're committing that logical error. So we need to justify the logical move from 'every thing' to 'everything' somehow. Note that the justification has to be logical, not empirical.
Can non-empirical arguments tell us anything about the real world? Apparently. We don't arrive at the rules of arithmetic or geometry by induction from repeatable experiments.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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Dave Marshall
Shipmate
# 7533
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Posted
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Originally posted by Scot:
there is an open question to be explored, but we don't need to assert the presence of some unverifiable and untestable "other" outside of nature simply because science hasn't worked out a complete answer yet.
I don't see a need to assert God as a presence. As far as I'm aware it's not what classical theism does. God when separated from all the religious artifacts is by definition simply the cause of becoming, no more and no less. That's a philosophical statement that says nothing about what science does not yet know, but it is I suspect a necessary part of any comprehensive metaphysical framework for science.
quote:
This assumes that public debate is the same as debate within the church community. I realize that I'm speaking from a US perspective, but I strongly believe not only that the two are different, but that they should be kept separate. There are plenty of communities with legitimate voices in the public debate through which I can be heard.
Over here it's probably fair to say that religion still has a monopoly on informed and considered contribution to public debate in the area of practical metaphysics (for want of a better term). As individuals we have local and national politics, and there's plenty of private religious/spiritual interest groups, but still nothing I can think of with the institutional clout and access to public consciousness to match mainstream religion.
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If you mean to say that one must be within the church community to influence it positively, that may be true. I have to question, however, whether I'm entitled to influence discussion within the church if I don't identify as Christian.
I think Christian identity is distraction. Christian is so broad a label as to be useless without qualification. But identifying with a particular institution rather than a set of beliefs inherently provides a separation between the personal and the corporate. It is if we choose for us as individuals to work out our corporate expression, not the other way round. Within the Church of England there are those who value a search for truth and whose company I would like to keep and learn from. So I self-identify as Church of England.
That the institution is largely a shambolic mess is something I doubt anyone is happy about. It's like the house of a busy family where tidying up just never seems important enough to miss doing more interesting and rewarding things. But for as long as there are real relationships, real debates, and the possibility of real change, it still feels like a viable framework.
Posts: 4763 | From: Derbyshire Dales | Registered: Jun 2004
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Scot
Deck hand
# 2095
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Posted
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Originally posted by sanityman:
quote:
Originally posted by Scot:
quote:
Originally posted by The Great Gumby:
Is it unnecessarily multiplying entities to posit a Prime Mover as a reason why anything exists at all?
I see it, not so much as unnecessarily multiplying entities, as either engaging in an endless regression or abandoning rational investigation. If the former, then you have to explain where God came from and why. If the latter, then you have no good reason not to accept God as the direct cause of all sorts of things rather than placing him at arm's length.
But don't you get this problem even if you leave God out of it? Either you have to explain the universe, or you abandon rational enquiry and say it 'just is.' At least God is posited to be eternal, and therefore not needing a cause!
Yes, we want to explain the universe! Just because we don't know part of the explanation doesn't mean we can't know. Unless, of course, we punt and attribute the mysterious part to an unknowable God. History has shown time and again that such a "God of the gaps" explanation is doomed to eventually be undone by advancing science.
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“Here, we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.” - Thomas Jefferson
Posts: 9515 | From: Southern California | Registered: Jan 2002
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