Comments on: God

By: msg

msg — Wed, 18 Feb 2004 21:10:55 +0000

Biology is what’s at work in the most esoteric metaphysics around; biology drives religious intolerance and tolerance both. The moral codes of theistic dogma and humanist rationality are both only biological strategies. The presence of “spirits” is a biological phenomenon of perception regardless of the “origins” of those incorporate beings. The eradication of indigenous people was and is a biological triumph for the assaultive dominant culture. There’s nothing here but meat. Talking to itself, rubbing itself, running aghast from the mirror and its grotesque reflections. – I’ve never read Foucault or Schopenhauer so I can’t reply to that. – Identifying the causes, and the settings for those causes, of “imminent catastrophe” or the chronic attrition of the “natural” and its steady replacement with vicious artifice, would go some way toward “mediating” the “remediation” if not “ameliorating” or “averting” the catastrophe we agree seems imminent. There is guilt here, but it’s being shifted villainously onto the backs of the common people, where it does not belong. – Florid rhetoric doesn’t have a patch on concision and brevity, I’ll give you that, but it’s cathartic. And catharsis is sometimes all that will relieve a constipated mind. I recommend it.

By: john c. halasz

john c. halasz — Wed, 18 Feb 2004 10:09:07 +0000

Well, I’ll be damned, literally! I posted hours ago and got back a series of “template error” messages, gave up, transferred the post to MS Word, found the cut and paste option was precluded, had to delete some hundreds of messages, and just checked back to see someone else’s wording, and now I find out I’ve posted by accident multiple times. Apologies for that. Well, as to that last comment by Keith M. Ellis, I do not “know” what the “average” “theist” believes. I do not know any average people, only mediocre ones, amongst which I count myself one. I was supposed to have been brought up Roman Catholic, but it didn’t take with any of us 4 kids and I was the youngest, so it was collapsed almost before it could be taken in. To this day, I don’t know what Daddy believes or believed, except that it was highly split, expert only in calling others’ beliefs into question, as per the Church Militant, and largely a matter of narcissistic defense, bad faith, in other words. But actually, I come from 3/4 Calvinist ancestry and I tend in that direction, as may be at times evinced. So I perhaps lack exactly your antecdotal basis and and its contact with “in touch” reality. But I do dimly and inexpertly know that that is what Christian believers are doctrinally enjoined to believe- hence the animism comment. These traditions, after all, emerged and developed centuries ago amidst millenial conflicts of flesh and soul and spirit and, however nonrational they may seem to us secularized moderns, they do have a complexion and coherence of their own. As for actual, empirical “beliefs” nowdays, its an Emersonian free-for-all and nightmare. There are people who “believe” in astrology, or UFO abductions or Saddam’s WMD. For the sake of a basis in reasonable discussion, let alone sanity, I think it best to confine ourselves to at least broadly warranted beliefs, however merely conventionalistic such a criterion may end up being. Actually, I did post a while back on St. Anselm’s proof, saying that it was intended more in a hortatory and heuristic sense, differentiating and relating levels and kinds of belief, rather than as logically dispositive. I think I began the post: “Well, I’ll be a talking parrot.” But it got lost when my computer froze up just after I hit “preview”. I also made some comments about Searles. I think you and I have locked antlers once or twice before and clearly we do not think alike, but there are no hard feelings on my part. So I think that accusation of “simply false”, as per your own declared epistemology is in need of some amendment. (And who is being emotional now?) Actually, I think on this thread there has been some degree of latent paranoia, inspite of its avowedly rationalistic veneer, about religious believers and their beliefs, together with a refusal on the part of some to distinguish between genuine and reasonably intelligent believers, (who do struggle with their received or imposed orthodoxies and its impassibilities, though for many such there are better things to waste their anxieties upon)- admittedly a speculative proposition amongst us unbelievers- and the fear of the unruly mob- a classic bourgeois fear. Certainly, most all believers transact their affairs in a real, material world and raise ordinary cognitive validity claims in transacting their affairs very much as the rest of us do. And there is a large capacity, as Bill Carone has oddly been at pains to spell out, for extending such an acknowledgement of physical and material reality quite far afield, under the guise of “Christian Realism”. How else would Christian tradition have survived unto the present day, inspite of its impasses and atrocities? And do we really think that present-day religion is even more decadent than everything else? To be sure, in some fundamentalist manifestations, especially when politically mobilized, there is a level of resentment and malice that no religion can cure, least of all their own. But, lapsed Calvinist that I am, I ask, is anyone entirely immune from such aboriginal iniquity? Is such blessedness possible or is that equally an imaginary belief? And how do you all propose to allieviate this burden that is, if we are to be at all “authentic”, upon us? Now I want to finish off my last self-perceived item of business with Ophelia Benson: Yes, in that hurried, unfortunate post I did use the word “friends” for “lots of people” you know, whom you work with and edit, your milieu. I was drawing on memory rather than directly quoting, a lesson in technical procedure for me. But is the assumption that you would draw your friends, at least in part and in the loose American usage of the word, from your milieu all that much of a stretch? You live and work amongst like-minded souls, no? (So much for ditch-digging.) But the quote I did back track to find involved the claims that “epistomology” is central to your work- hence personal investment- and that it was central to most, if not all, issues embroiling the public realm, a large claim, indeed. This is not a matter of mere fact and in your last response you simply backtracked and evaded the issue. Now I am not familiar with the work of your colleagues, not “friends”, but, from my vantage point either they are doing epistemology as an antiquarian academic exercize, similarly to continuing to do scholastic theology,- and I know that academia provides opportunities for such, especially academic analytic philosophy- or they are doing the philosophy and history of science, a valid, valuable and informative ongoing enterprise, at least, in the hands of some of its practioners, or they are engaging in “cognitive science”, much of which, in my view, would largely amount to aself-referentially scientistic continuation of epistemology by other means. I simply put to you the same question I put to Laon: what do your special epistemological reasons add to your cognitive validity claims that is not already contained in the reasons and evidences by which you actually hold them? If you can not reasonably answer this question, then I would submit to you that “epistemology” is simply a name for a deflated, if historically influential, pretence. Back to Keith: I am not a pragmatist. In fact, I am something of a partisan of the lost Aristotelean distinction between theoretical and practical reason and I think that matters of religion are primarily to be argued on the level of practical reason. Since you did Great Books at St. John’s, I trust you know something of this. But in regard to your epistemological comment, I would quickly ask two questions. Do you really think that language can be so operationalized so as to meet the requirements of your proposal, since any language, no matter how formalized- (and at the far reaches of science this is excruciatingly difficult)- must meet requirements of translatability so as to be understood. And secondly, doesn’t your pre-occupation with epistemology contain something of a speculative hankering that no established body of knowledge, nor any epistemological theory could fulfill? Enthymeme: No, religious people do not have, nor necessarily experience, a burden of proof about their unrestrictedly existential belief in G-d. For them it is a matter of faith. The injunction upon them is to bear witness, to testify. It is how they sometimes do this that is the trouble with them. Msg: thoroughly conventionalistic deep ecology rapper friend: I do not understand your point about the biological imperative for human society. Are you proposing a return to the wild? Is this some sort of Schopenhauerian denial of the will, retracting the principle of individuation? Is this a referencing of Foucaultian “bio-power”? I am aware of the gathering threat of ecological catastrophe, the probability of which is ever increased by capitalist industrialism and militarism, since there effectively is no longer any other kind, and the burgeoning global population of mostly impoverished people. And I know as well as the next person that human identity is a contigent, fragile and limited affair with a vast reality beyond itself or anyone else. But how, pray tell, is such catastrophe to be averted, remedied or allieviated without recourse to the political and economic structures of human society, with the discursive culture that attends them, through programs for collective action which must inevitably be mediated through the dubious identities of social agents? If you have an answer to this question, other than declamations of florid rhetoric, I would be sincerely interested in hearing about it.

By: Keith M Ellis

Keith M Ellis — Wed, 18 Feb 2004 04:03:36 +0000

“ that G-D is not an empirical “entity” and no one involved in the matter takes it so, so arguments about unicorns are a bit beside the point. To take G-d as an empirical entity would, after all, amount to a regression to animism, not the sort of stuff believers are wont to fancy.—John Halasz

This is simply false. If you think that to the average theist God is necessarily not an “empirical entity”, you are wildly, remarkably out of touch with what believers actually believe.

By: john c. halasz

john c. halasz — Wed, 18 Feb 2004 02:17:05 +0000

Well, the bad boy is awake again and returns to the underworld. I will admit that flat Enlightenment, positivistic, militant atheism has always just bugged me, and I myself am more or less an atheist. I put myself in the odd position of defending the point of view of beliefs I personally do not hold, which is almost, but not quite, a deliberate assumption of bad faith. And I am surrounded on this thread by unbelievers, some of whom seem to take offense at religious matters- (“Blessed is he who taketh not offence in me”)- and others who are blythely ignorant of them. (I had thought initially Mr. Carone was writing from a religious believer’s perpsective, but was soon disabused of the notion; at any rate, to some extent I agreed with what he persisted in posting and any demurrals did not rate a dissent.) In my first post, I sought to make plain to the imaginative, semantic and rhetorical understanding of anyone who would bother to read it something of the nature and complexion of the point of view of religious believers, not as a matter of mere empathy, though religious believers are my fellow creatures as well as my fellow citizens, but as a matter of doing hermeneutic justice to the matter and its discussion, a maximal rather than a minimal ethics of “truth”. And I did this out of a sense of growing disturbance at the rise and currency of religious fundamentalism in politics and the public sphere,-(though religious fundamentalism is not the only reigning kind of fundamentalism)- and the damage it inflicts on any hope for a rational, progressive politics, however dim, which I believe to be in the interests of believers and unbelievers alike, with many of the former, I would take it, to be allies in such a project. (Unlike many on the secular left, I do have more of a communitarian than individualist bent, but that is a whole other tangle of issues. Being a communitarian on the internet is a bit like being a spider who constructs his web above a manure heap: one just sits there and collects far more libertarian flies than one could possibly digest.) Perhaps a citation of the moneylenders in the temple would be a propos here. (As I put it in a post that got destroyed by my computer freezing up last night- Ms. Benson sighs with relief and glee-: “Not only does religion need to be de-mythologized, as some purveyors of self-referential hooey put it, but it needs to be stripped of its ideological functionality, for the sake of religious believers, as well as the rest of us.”) I actually sensed that there was a latent consensus about the dangers and damages of religious fundamentalism and its politico-economic instrumentalization among the contributors to this thread and it is in this context that I took issue with Ms. Benson’s argument/intervention in the matter as injudicious, obtuse and wrong-headed. Positivistic militant atheism of the kind that Richard Dawkins routinely peddles partakes of the very literalism it attacks. (It is a bit like the dispute between Northern capitalists and Southern slave-owners over the Civil War: both were right about the other and wrong about themselves.) Recycling this sterile and outmoded polemic merely re-enforces the battle-lines, with all the attendant collateral casualties among the innocent between them, and compounds the problem rather than seeking out a dialogue aimed at reaching a real accomodation and modus vivendi between science and religion within the civic order and public-political realm, to which both have something of value to contribute and, at any rate, in which both will inevitably persist and intervene in that realm with their tangled and problematic relationship to it. It was perhaps because he sensed this that Gould chose to devote some of his little remaining time to writing a book intervening in the matter, however wanting its rhetoric and argument may be, though I haven’t read it. (Hannah Arendt once wrote a peculiarly wrong-headed essay about the Arkansas school crisis, in which she wondered why school children were being used as proxies in this fight- a foreigner’s misunderstanding-, but in which she made the fundamental point that any genuine politics involves “plurality”, which means that there will be opposed postions with a complexion and “integrity” of their own, which can not simply be suppressed by violent or coercive means, which would be, in her book, anti-politics). Religion and science are two profoundly different, perhaps incommensurable, modes of constructing being-in-the-world within the minds and immaginations of human communities and of exercising care and vigilance for that world and its human communities. They can and historically have come into conflict, but they do not of necessity do so. This is not fudging the issue, but rather recognizing the reality of the matter, without claiming to having a monopoly on the understanding of “reality”. Carefully distinguishing different types of validity claims and their spheres of applicability within an order of political and social rights is very much germane to the issue and is work that needs doing with respect to mediating and resolving such conflicts in both their valid and invalid manifestations. Why should religion have unique authority over matters of meaning and value? Well, the obvious answer is that it shouldn’t and doesn’t, but that questions of meaning are fundamental, questions of value are not negligible and that science itself has no competence per se on questions of value and only limited and specialized competence on questions of meaning. But certainly, conflicts over these matters can not be resolved by suppressing, de-legitimating or disqualifying the perspectives of religious believers from their social and political rights to participation in the public realm simply because their prejudices fail to accord with the prejudices of some others, which could only be inflammatory and counter-productive. It is a matter of establishing the boundary conditions of those rights and criticizing and adjudicating the usurpation of those boundary conditions, not quite an “epistemological” matter. (if anyone would wish to proffer a more specific and practical proposal on this matter, I would welcome it.) So, yes, Gould, whatever his inadequacies, is basically right and Dawkins is wrong-headed and foolish. Ms. Benson’s argument struck me as obtuse, because it rested on two basic category mistakes. The first one was noted in the original CT post: that G-D is not an empirical “entity” and no one involved in the matter takes it so, so arguments about unicorns are a bit beside the point. To take G-d as an empirical entity would, after all, amount to a regression to animism, not the sort of stuff believers are wont to fancy. (As for why the physical universe is contingent, well, events are contingent and, as a first order of approximation, we take in the statistical regularities of distributions of events, on which the so-called laws of nature are, in turn, based, where locally, e.g. on earth, or universally, as far as we can detect background radiation. As for G-d being a necessary “entity”, if this is not a causal or metaphysical claim, I am not sure off hand what the word “necessary” would mean. I think religious believers view G-d as needful and as a Being to which they somehow relate.) The second category mistake was a failure to recognize any differentiation between types of validity claims, privileging solely that of cognitive truth, and the damaging and counterproductive effort, (from the standpoint of elucidating and understanding the matter and its stakes), to apply norms and criteria from one type of validity claim in the domain of completely different sorts of claims, which I was at pains to spell out, but which Ms. Benson refused to take up. At which point she claimed that the basis of her argumentative claim was epistemology, so that the ground shifted to the status, validity and authority of “epistemology”. So it emerged that her claim that religious perspectives, expressions and claims were essentially empty and nonsensical rested on the alleged authority of epistemology. Now understanding the limits of validity claims and thus understanding the basis of that validity precisely from its limits is basic to the fundamental intention of Kant, who seminally got this whole enterprise rolling, though perhaps something of this is a much older and more basic philosophical thought. But it turns out that one does not need to construct the whole conceptual apparatus of epistemology to accomplish this understanding: the constraints of human language and human finitude suffice to sustain such an understanding. This is where Wittgenstein supervenes upon and sublates Kant. Of course, one can choose to view religion as empty and nonsensical and I do not begrudge anyone such a choice, but there is no “necessity”, no “necessarily so”, in the matter- it is simply a choice for which one is responsible before the differing choices of others. Making plain that religion is a free existential choice, available to some, indifferent to others, without necessarily puffing up the matter of human choice in all the pretensions to human autonomy, is, I think, at the crux of the matter. This is what religious people need to be made to understand in their dealings with us secular folk and the secularized world, and perhaps vice versa. Iknow this screed needs to be paragraphed, but I need to go out and fetch me some dinner now, so I will resume later.

By: john c. halasz

john c. halasz — Wed, 18 Feb 2004 02:17:03 +0000

By: john c. halasz

john c. halasz — Wed, 18 Feb 2004 02:03:56 +0000

By: john c. halasz

john c. halasz — Wed, 18 Feb 2004 01:39:36 +0000

By: john c. halasz

john c. halasz — Wed, 18 Feb 2004 01:38:38 +0000

By: john c. halasz

john c. halasz — Wed, 18 Feb 2004 01:25:31 +0000

By: john c. halasz

john c. halasz — Wed, 18 Feb 2004 01:23:53 +0000

By: john c. halasz

john c. halasz — Wed, 18 Feb 2004 01:22:06 +0000

By: Keith M Ellis

Keith M Ellis — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 22:51:12 +0000

“I suspect the philosophers of knowledge think that “knowledge” is objective. In other words, beliefs are subjective, existing only in the minds of each believer, while knowledge is not just in the mind of a believer but … well, I am not a philosopher.“—Bill Carone

Some do, some don’t. Probably not many nowadays. Plato asserted the above view. A contemporary scientist would assert the above view. (See the discussion I participated in the comments thread for Mumbo Jumbo.) I doubt many contemporary philosophers would assert this view. This conflict of worldviews is implicit in this conversation. Even assuming the posturing and such weren’t extent in this thread, it would still be very difficult for anything productive to come from it. It’s because there are too many ideas in play. The waters are very muddy. And, if you go to the intellectually rarefied heights that this conversation has meandered through, you go somewhere such that it no longer has relevance to almost anyone. The appropriate context for this discussion is not epistemology, as much as it would seem that it is. Here are the questions I’d like to ask and discuss: * Is Gould’s “Non-Overlapping Magisteria” the dominant view among contemporary western theists? If it’s the majority view, I submit that it would necessarily be a practical position and should therefore be discussed in that context. If it is a minority view, then we might ask who it is that hold to this view and what it is that they have in common. * If this is a practical view, what is it, exactly, that’s being practiced? That is, do people who hold this view consistently apply it across all their activities and beliefs? If they do not, then is it possible that this belief serves some practical purpose other than what it seems? * There is clear conflict and hard-feelings among many when attempting to engage in this discussion. Why? What do people have emotionally at stake; and, more importantly, are they falsely assuming that everyone else’s stake in this matter is similar? I don’t ask this question because I think this is group therapy; I ask it because I think it is essential to identify this dynamic in order to move beyond it. * What is the historical context for Gould’s “NOMA”? Now, allow me to digress for a moment. Epistemology is for me a vital concern because I, for one, do not think its questions have been sufficiently answered. It is also, for me, a practical matter because my epistemology is, in a sense, deeply pragmatic. I claim that we can only say meaningful things about something at “an appropriate level of description for a given purpose”. I regret that I have not worked through Gödel’s “On Formally Undecidable Propositions” myself (per Mr. Lapite’s criticism of me), but I have followed its outline and read quite a few commentaries on it. So I will use it as an example. There is in most people’s minds a presumption of the possibility of Knowledge, a “God’s eye” view. Gödel’s Theorem is sort of an example: various people assert that our supposed ability to recognize the truth of the Gödel statement is this sort of transcendent comprehension. I say not. There is a level (or levels) of description at which we can understand the statement as true, and a level (or levels) of description at which we cannot. Everywhere we try to completely reconcile holism with reductionism there is paradox. I suggest we stop trying to do this. There is a similar hubristic yearning for omniscience present in most of the views in this thread. People are trying to ask and answer questions that are just too big to be meaningful. For this reason, and for the sake of simple practicality, I make my plea to restrict this conversation to a relatively narrow context in which shared comprehension and shared points of reference are possible, and work from there. At a hundred-odd messages, it may be too late for this. But maybe not.

By: Keith M Ellis

Keith M Ellis — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 22:48:22 +0000

“I suspect the philosophers of knowledge think that “knowledge” is objective. In other words, beliefs are subjective, existing only in the minds of each believer, while knowledge is not just in the mind of a believer but … well, I am not a philosopher.“—Bill Carone

By: bill carone

bill carone — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 22:09:53 +0000

“The problem is that revelatory experiences do not necessarily entail the claims that religious people make. They may be deceived, they may have been hallucinatory . . . so the sceptic who has no access to these experiences can claim, I think, that one doesn’t really know EVEN when one has had such experiences.” I agree; I don’t understand how anyone can come to have faith when hallucination / indoctrination / deception / etc. all are much more plausible that revelation (which makes it different from science and philsophy, where hallucination et. al. are much less likely). My claim was not that revelation works, it is that you can’t base arguments against it on “You have to be able to prove it, or else it isn’t real knowledge like we have.” I gave an example where something clearly was knowledge, and yet couldn’t be proved or disproved. I concluded that you only have the burden of proof when you try to transmit knowledge to someone else, change their beliefs, advise their actions. This works equally both ways: theist to non-theist, and non-theist to theist. The one doing the convincing has the burden of proof. You then say, “Claims that a (Judeo-Christian?) God exists is an unrestricted existential claim – it is claimed that he exists – and I would think, exists for all time? And could have a physical presence anywhere in the universe should He so choose?” I don’t understand; which part of this defines “unrestricted existential claim”? Just that something exists, that something exists for all time, or that something exists for all time covering all of space? BTW, the philosopher’s God is immaterial (outside space), eternal (outside time), and infinite, which is slightly different that what you say (I don’t know if it is relevant to your argument). I don’t know about the Judeo-Christian God, but I suspect it is the same. “That is the reason why the burden of proof is on the theist. ” Under any of the above definitions, I don’t see why my burden of proof argument fails; can you walk me through it a little? Perhaps give me an example where the “burden” crushes the theist more obviously? :-) “those restricted existential claims weren’t what I was looking to the theist to prove.” So you wouldn’t ask a theist to prove these, only the bigger “God exists” kind of claims? I think if you believe the Bible is a source of revealed experience, then “an immaterial, eternal, infinite God exists” isn’t that much of a stretch, is it? For example, is God’s creation of the universe a “one-off”? If so, then God must be immaterial (no material existed :-). So revelation implies the existence of an immaterial God, and you wouldn’t ask the faithful to prove this, right? Am I just really, really confused?

By: enthymeme

enthymeme — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 22:05:05 +0000

Mr Ellis, I find that I rarely learn anything from a debate. I sometimes learn that I am wrong.