Religions are like languages: If you know only your own, then you don't truly know it.
Category: Religion
Hitchens on Mother Teresa’s Dark Night of the Soul
In some measure one must admire that professional contrarian, Christopher Hitchens, whose mind is incandescent in its brilliance, and whose speech is preternatural in its articulateness, and who has the audacity to go after anyone, including Mother Teresa. In a piece in Newsweek he comments on her Dark Night of the Soul.
But what are his qualifications for such commentary?
Hitchens, like the other members of the 'Dawkins Gang' as I like to call them, does not have a religious bone in his body. He simply does not understand religion, and has no sympathy for it, so much so that he must dismiss it as nonsense.
Lack of religious sensibility is like lack of aesthetic sensibility. There are people who lack entirely any feel for poetry and music. They lack the 'spiritual organ' to appreciate them, and so their comments on them are of little interest except as indicative of the critics' own limitations. Others are bereft of philosophical sensibility. I have met mathematicians and scientists who have zero philosophical aptitude and sense and for whom philosophy cannot be anything other than empty verbiage. These people do not lack intelligence, they lack a certain 'spiritual organ,' a certain depth of personality. And of course there are those with no inkling of the austere beauty of mathematics and logic and (let's not leave out) chess. To speak of their beauty to such people would be a waste of time. They lack the requisite appreciative organs.
Hitchens, who remains a man of the Left in his total lack of understanding of religion, doesn't seem to appreciate that Teresa was a mystic and that her dark night of the soul was not a crisis of faith, where faith is construed as intellectual assent to certain dogmas, but an experiencing of the divine withdrawal, an experiencing of God as deus absconditus. A believing non-mystic might lose his faith after applying his reason to his religion's dogmatic content and then finding it impossible rationally to accept. Although I haven't read Teresa's letters, I suspect that this is not what happened in her case. After the fullness of her mystical experience, she experienced desolation when the mystical experiences subsided. So, contra Hitchens, it was not a realization of the "crushing unreasonableness" of Roman Catholic dogma that triggered Teresa's dark night, but her experience of the divine absence, an absence that is an expression of the divine transcendence.
I suggest that an atheist like Hitchens, for whom theism is simply not a live existential option, cannot understand the spititual life of a person like Mother Teresa. He can understand it only by caricaturing
it.
And the same goes for the whole gang (Dawkins,Dennett, Hitchens, Harris.)
A Farewell to the Philosophy of Religion? Why not a Farewell to Philosophy?
Steven Nemes informs me that Keith Parsons is giving up teaching and writing in the philosophy of religion. His reasons are stated in his post Goodbye to All That. The following appears to be his chief reason:
I have to confess that I now regard “the case for theism” as a fraud and I can no longer take it seriously enough to present it to a class as a respectable philosophical position—no more than I could present intelligent design as a legitimate biological theory. BTW, in saying that I now consider the case for theism to be a fraud, I do not mean to charge that the people making that case are frauds . . . . I just cannot take their arguments seriously any more, and if you cannot take something seriously, you should not try to devote serious academic attention to it.
John Beversluis is also quitting:
Keith [Parsons] and I have emailed about getting out of the philosophy of religion. I've made the same decision. I'm through wasting my time trying to convince people who don't want to be convinced of the irrationality of their beliefs. And I have had more than enough verbal abuse from the Richard Purtills, the Peter Kreefts, and the Thomas Talbotts. We are all getting older and I, for my part, would much rather read books I want to read (or reread) and listen to great music that I either don't know or want to know better. Not to mention, spending more time with my wife instead of constantly yielding to the lure of the computer to work on yet another project that will convince few, antagonize some, and be ignored by most. Interestingly, Keith and I came to this conclusion more or less simultaneously but independently.
Steven Nemes comments in his e-mail to me:
I don't imagine you think the case for theism is so bad . . . . Any arguments in particular you think are promising? Any anti-theistic arguments you think are particularly good, too? (It was Parsons who said that the case for atheism/naturalism has been presented about as well as it ever can be by philosophers like Michael Martin, Schellenberg, Oppy, Gale, et al.)
Or perhaps you don't think the issues are so clear and obvious one way or the other in the philosophy of religion? In fact, is such dismissive hand-waving like Parsons' and Beversluis' ever acceptable in philosophy? Are there any issues that are settled?
Steven has once again peppered me with some pertinent and challenging questions. Here is a quick response.
Of course, I don't consider the case for theism to be a "fraud," to use Parson's word. I also don't understand how the case could be called a fraud if the people who make it are not frauds. But let's not enter into an analysis of the concept fraud. We may charitably chalk up Parsons' use of 'fraud' to rhetorical overkill, which is certainly not a censurable offense in the blogosphere. And when Parsons tells us that he cannot take the theistic arguments seriously any more, he is presumably not making a merely autobiographical remark. He is not merely informing us about his present disgusted state of mind, although he is doing that. He is asserting that the case for theism is not intellectually respectable, while the case for atheism and naturalism (which Parsons in his post brackets together) are intellectually respectable. (It is worth noting that while nauralism entails atheism, atheism does not entail naturalism: McTaggart was an atheist but not a naturalist. But this nuance needn't concern us at present.)
Parsons' metaphilosophical assertion does not impress me. I make a different assertion: There are intellectually respectable cases to be made both for theism/anti-naturalism and for atheism/naturalism. I don't think there are any 'knock-down' arguments on either side. There are arguments for the existence of God, but no proofs of the existence of God. And there are arguments for the nonexistence of God, but no proofs of the nonexistence of God. But of course it depends on what is meant by 'proof.'
I suggest that a proof is a deductive argument, free of informal fallacy, valid in point of logical form, all of the premises of which are objectively self-evident. I will illustrate what I mean by 'objectively self-evident' with an anecdote. In a discussion with a Thomist a while back I mentioned that the first premise of his reconstruction of Aquinas' argument from motion (the First of the Five Ways) was not (objectively) self-evident, and that therefore the First Way did not amount to a proof. The premise in the reconstruction was to the effect that it is evident to the senses that the reduction of potency to act is a real feature of the world.
I granted to my interlocutor that what Thomas calls motion, i.e., change, is evident to the senses as a real feature of the world. But I pointed out that it is not evident to the senses that the actualization of potency is a real feature of the world. That change is the reduction of potency to act is a theoretical claim that goes beyond what is given to sense perception. For this reason, the first premise of the reconstruction of the First Way, though plausible and indeed reasonable, is not objectively self-evident. One can of course give many logically correct arguments for the Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics, but we can ask with respect to the premises of these arguments whether they are objectively self-evident. If they are not, then they do not amount to proofs given my stringent definition of 'proof.'
It is equally true, however, that one cannot prove the nonexistence of God, from evil say.
But it is no different outside the philosophy of religion. God and the soul are meta-physical in the sense of supersensible. But there is nothing supersensible about the bust of Beethoven sitting atop my CD player. It is a material object, a middle-sized artifact, open to unaided perception. But such a humble object inspires interminable and seemingly intractable debate among the most brilliant philosophers. I am currently exploring some of these issues in other threads, and so I won't go into details here. But consider Peter van Inwagen's denial of the existence of artifacts (which is part of a broader denial of the existence of all nonliving composite objects). You could say, very loosely, that van Inwagen is an 'atheist' about artifacts. Other philosophers, equally brilliant and well-informed, deny his denial.
Now it would take an excess of chutzpah to label van Inwagen's carefully argued denial of artifacts as intellectually unrespectable. I suggest that it takes an equal excess of chutzpah to label the case for theism intellectually unrespectable.
Steven asked me whether the dismissive attitude of Parsons and Beversluis is acceptable. I would say no. It is no more acceptable in the philosophy of religion than it is in other branches of philosophy where there are equally genuine but equally difficult and interminably discussable problems.
Let me end with this question: If one's reason for abandoning the philosophy of religion is that one cannot convince those on the other side — "I'm through wasting my time trying to convince people who don't want to be convinced of the irrationality of their beliefs." (Beversluis) — then is this not also a reason for abandoning philosophy tout court? After all, the brilliant van Inwagen did not convince the brilliant David Lewis that the latter was wrong about Composition as Identity — and this is a very well-defined and mundane and ideology-free question.
How Far Does Religious Toleration Extend?
Suppose that there were a religion whose aim was to dominate the world and suppress every other religion. Would we who value toleration be under any obligation to tolerate such a religion? Of course not. Toleration does not extend to the toleration of the intolerant. Is there such a religion? According to Farhad Khosrokhavar, Inside Jihadism: Understanding Jihadi Movements Worldwide (Paradigm 2009, p. 22):
In the twentieth century, one of the first to insist that Islam entails its imposition on humanity was Seyed Qutb, one of the modern forefathers of Jihadism . . . . He stated that Islam summons to worship no one else but Allah . . . . This implies the relentless fight against all idols until Allah's reign is set up on earth [ . . .]
The war on idolatry (taqut) is, in his interpretation, the most important part of Islam, taking precedence over the other principles. From this view, all of modernity is based on the worship of idols and, therefore, illegitimate, necessitating that Jihad wipe out its idolatrous tendencies.
Jihad is not one of the five pillars of Islam. But recent jihadists interpret the first pillar in a manner to require jihad. "For them [recent jihadist intellectuals] the first Islamic pillar, the Unity of Allah (Tawhid) makes it compulsory for Muslims to wage the Jihad against infidels." (p. 21)
I will be told that not all who identify as Muslims take this radical view. True, but they are not the problem. The Jihadists are the problem. And we have reason to think that they represent the essence of Islam with the so-called 'moderates' being simply those who do not take the core message with full seriousness. To the extent that Islam takes on Jihadist contours, to the extent that Islam entails its imposition on humanity, it cannot and ought not be tolerated by the West. Indeed, no religion that attempts to suppress other religions can or ought to be tolerated, including Christianity. We in the West do, or at least should, believe that competition among religions in a free marketplace of ideas is a good thing.
My own view is that no extant religion can legitimately claim to be the true religion; the true religion has yet to be worked out. In pursuit of that goal we need to make use of all available materials from all the best traditions. Perhaps even Islam, as crude as it is, has something to teach us.
Pope Benedict’s Regensburg Speech and Muslim Oversensitivity
This is a slightly redacted version of a piece first posted on 18 September 2006 at the old PowerBlogs site. I repost it not only to save it for my files, but also because it it important to remember not only the successful and unsuccessful acts of Islamist terrorism worldwide, but also the many incidents which betray the illiberal and anti-Enlightenment values of our Islamist opponents (e.g., the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the Danish cartoon 'caper,' etc. etc. The analog to the fatwa would be the Pope putting a price on the head of Andres Serrano, the 'artist' famous notorious for his 'Piss Christ.')
……………
People need to face the fact that Western civilization is under serious threat from militant Islamic fanaticism. (And it may be coming to a theater near you.) Yet another recent indication of the threat is the unreasoning umbrage taken by many in the Islamic world over a mere QUOTATION Pope Benedict XVI employs in his address at the University of Regensburg entitled, "The Best of Greek Thought is an Integral Part of Christian Faith."
Benedict's talk is only tangentially about Islam; it is primarily about the role of reason in the posing and answering of the God question, and about whether Christianity should be dehellenized. The Pope begins by mentioning a dialogue "by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both." Then comes the 'offending' passage (bolding added):
Continue reading “Pope Benedict’s Regensburg Speech and Muslim Oversensitivity”
Does Sincere Belief in an Afterlife Entail Religious Zealotry?
Spencer Case e-mails:
Greetings from Afghanistan. I’d very much like to hear your response to a sketch of an argument I’m developing. It goes as follows:
1. Suppose an afterlife is obtainable based on one’s performance in this life. If this afterlife is as I understand it, it must have an infinite value while all the goods in this life have only finite values. In fact, the value of afterlife goods (as I clumsily name them) must be infinite on two planes: quantitative and qualitative; quantitative because the duration of the reward is infinite, qualitative because, I assume—and I think, based on some recent blog posts of yours I’ve read, you would agree—no mortal goods, or accumulation of them, can be qualitatively better than the eternal goods to be found in the afterlife, even when we do not consider duration (this not the case with Islamic fundamentalists, who are promised virgins. But let that pass). Perhaps there is even a punitive afterlife with similar disvalue.
I agree with this conception of the afterlife. To put it in a slightly different way, the goods of this life are vanishing quantities axiologically speaking as compared to the goods of the afterlife as portrayed in sophisticated conceptions. (We agree to set aside crude conceptions such as we find in popular Islam: endless disporting with black-eyed virgins, getting to do there all the sensual things that are forbidden here, etc.)
2. If this ranking system is correct, it is hard to see how it could ever be rational for one to pursue any set of mortal goods—no matter how well they rank on the finite scale—when one could spend the same time and resources in the pursuit of the afterlife goods or avoiding afterlife evils, which are both endless in duration and of infinitely great quality. If extreme fasts are pleasing to God, and increase my chances of obtaining salvation by a tiny bit, then the rational thing for me to do is to live in such an ascetic state for as long as possible, unless it prevents me from doing other activities that could do even more to promote my own salvation.
Well, Spencer, you have put your finger on a genuine and serious problem, a problem I will rephrase in my own way. If (i) this world and its finite goods is soon to pass away, and if (ii) one sincerely believes that there is a world to come the value of whose goods infinitely surpasses the values of the goods here below, and if (iii) whether or not one participates in this Higher Life or is excluded from it (either by being sent to the Other Place or by being simply annihilated at death) depends on how one lives in this world, then how can it be rational to pursue mortal goods beyond what is necessary for living in accordance with the precepts of one's religion? The rational course would be to orient all one's activities to the achievement of the afterlife goal.
For example, if a young person is a Roman Catholic and sincerely believes the teachings of his church, especially as regards what are called the Last Things, and this person is free of such encumbrances as children or aged parents to care for, and has the health and other qualifications necessary to join a monastery, then why doesn't the person do so, and join the most rigorous monastery to be found? Wouldn't that be the most rational course of action given (i) the end in view, (ii) one's beliefs about this end, and (iii) one's beliefs about the means for securing this end?
Converts often follow this course. Unlike those who have been brought up in a faith, they are seldom lukewarm. They have found the truth with a majuscule 'T' (they think) and their authenticity demands that they act on it. Thomas Merton, for example, after renouncing his worldly life and joining the RC church was not content to be a good practicing Catholic, or become a parish priest even; no, he had to go all the way and join not just any monastic order but the Trappists! One can appreciate the 'logic' to it. And then there is Edith Stein, the brilliant Jewish assistant of Edmund Husserl. She was not content to convert to Catholicism; she abandoned her academic career and all the usual worldly blandishments (sex, love, children, travel, etc.) to spend the rest of life behind the walls of a strict Carmelite convent until the Nazis murdered her at Auschwitz.
I hope the conversion 'logic' is clear: if in a few short years we will be pitched head first into Kingdom Come, then pursuing and fretting over the baubles of this life is like re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Let's note en passant that the same 'logic' is found in the thinking of adherents to nonreligious ideologies. Thousands of young people, some of them among the best and the brightest, sacrificed their lives to the Communist illusion in the 20th century. They wasted their lives in pursuit of a fata morgana, while at the same time contributing unintentionally and indirectly to the murder of over 100 million people.
3. Anyone who pursues only afterlife goods in this way is a paradigm case of a religious zealot.
This formulation needs improvement. Merton and Stein did not pursue ONLY afterlife goods. They pursued this-worldly goods too but only insofar as they were instrumental to the achievement of afterlife goods. (I ignore Merton's lapses.) A better formulation is as follows:
3*. Anyone who pursues afterlife goods primarily, and this-worldy goods only insofar as they are instrumental in the achievement of afterlife goods, is a religious zealot.
I can accept (3*), but I would add that being a zealot is not necessarily bad, despite the fact that the word generally carries a pejorative connotation. Aren't we all legitimately zealous when it comes to the preservation of our lives and the lives of those animals and humans in our care? Suppose Al Gore is right, and global warming is about to do us all in, then GW zealotry would be justified would it not?
4. So, accepting these very basic religious propositions makes one rationally committed to religious zealotry and denying our normal reasons for acting.
I don't think your conclusion follows in quite the way you intend it. For one thing, you seem to be assuming that zealotry as such is bad. But surely not all zealotry is bad. To modify a saying of Barry Goldwater: Zealotry in the defense of liberty is no vice! (He had 'extremism' where I have 'zealotry.') You may also be assuming that the religious claims are false. Suppose they are true. Then one would have a good reason for denying/modifying our normal reasons for acting. (The same would hold in the case of nonreligious ideologies.) A 'normal' person, if if he is a practicing adherent of a religion, pursues all sorts of pleasures and diversions which do not advance him toward his spiritual goal, but rather, in many cases, impede his realization of it. The 'normal' Buddhist, for example, does not carry the precept "Conquer desire and aversion!" to the point where he eats whatever is put on his plate. (If a fly lands in his soup he does not practice nondiscrimination and eat the fly with the same relish or lack thereof with which he eats the rest of the soup.) But if our Buddhist really believed Buddhist teachings would it not be rational for him to modify 'normal' behavior and bend every effort towards achieving enlightenment?
What I hope this shows is that religious belief (at least in the religions you and I are most likely to debate about) disallows moderation, which I take it, is a bad thing. What I especially like about this argument is it seems to be an argument that appeals to conservatives, because conservatives are most likely to have strong intuitions against ideologies that tell us to ignore our ordinary reasons for acting.
I think you are right that religious belief, if sincerely professed and lived, disallows moderation of the sort that the average worldly person displays. But it is not just religious belief that has this property. So do many ideologies or action-guiding worldviews. I gave the example of Communism above. Other examples readily come to mind.
You are assuming that moderation of the sort displayed by 'normal' worldly people is a good thing. But if Communism or Catholicism were true, then moderation of that sort would not be good! True-blue reds devoted all their energies to their chimerical Revolution just as true Christians consecrate their lives, without reservation, to Christ. They don't 'hedge their bets' they way most people do. Whether that singlemindedness is good or bad depends on whether the underlying beliefs are true or false. Of course we now know that Communism is a god that failed, but the religious God is safely insulated in a Beyond beyond our ken.
So if your thesis is that sincere belief in an afterlife entails (or maybe only leads to) religious zealotry, and is for that reason objectionable, then I don't think you have made your case. Genuine belief in an afterlife will lead to behavior that is 'abnormal' and 'immoderate' as measured by the standards of the worldly. But this won''t cut any ice unless worldly standards can be shown to be correct and truly normative, not just statistically 'normal.'
Of course, as you’ve no doubt noticed, this argument does not take into account epistemic uncertainty. Uncertainty about the existence of the afterlife might make it more rational for us to go ahead and pursue other goods. I haven’t yet done the research in probability theory, but I’d be willing to guess our levels of epistemic confidence in religious propositions would have to be very low in order for it to be rational to pursue anything else.
This is another important side to the problem of balancing the claims of this world with the claims of the next. People fool themselves into thinking they KNOW all sorts of thinks they merely BELIEVE. Now it seems to me that no imtellectually honest person can claim to KNOW (using this word strictly) that there is an afterlife: the evidence from parapsychology, though abundant, is not conclusive, and the philosophical arguments, though some of them impressive, are not compelling. But I do KNOW the pleasures of good food, and strong coffee, and fine cigars, and chess, and good conversation, and scribbling away as I am now doing, all of them activities which are not necessary for my salvation, and perhaps stand in the way of it. (Not to mention disporting with ladies of the evening, etc.)
So what is the rational thing to do given my epistemic predicament in which what I KNOW is confined to this ephemeral world which cannot be worth much, and my access to the other is via mere belief and the occasional religious/mystical experience whose veridicality is easily called into question?
A difficult question. I don't know that there is an afterlife, and I don't know that there isn't. It strikes me as highly irrational to live for this life alone since it is nasty, brutish, short, miserable, full of natural and moral evil, and of scant value if it doesn't lead to anything beyond it. It also seems irrational to forego every positive value in this world which is not conducive to otherworldly salvation on the strength of mere belief in that otherworldly possibility.
So my tentative answer is that the rational course is to inquire ceaselessly into the matter in a critical, exploratory and tentative spirit; avoid being bamboozled by the dogmas of churches and sects which claim to have the Truth; enjoy the limited goods of this life in a measured way while realizing that, in and of themselves, they are of no ultimate value.
In short, be neither a worldling nor a monk. Be a philosopher! (Not to be confused with being a paid professor of it.)
East Versus West on the Trinity: The Filioque Controversy
Our meeting with the affable and stimulating Dale Tuggy on June 20th at St. Anthony's Greek Orthodox monastery a little south of Florence, Arizona, got me thinking about the Trinity again. So I pulled Timothy Ware's The Orthodox Church off the shelf wherein I found a discussion of the differences between the Eastern Orthodox and Roman approaches to the doctrine. Let's take a look. Earlier this year, in January and February, we had a stimulating and deep-going discussion of Trinitarian topics which the interested reader can find here. But there was no discussion of the Orthodox line. It is high time to fill that lacuna. (Image credit.)
East and West agree that there is exactly one God in three divine persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They also agree that the Father is neither born of anything nor proceeds from anything, that the Son is born of the Father but does not proceed from the Father, and that the Holy Spirit proceeds but is not born. Bear in mind that 'born' and 'proceeds' in this context refer to relations that are internal to the triune Godhead, and are therefore eternal relations. I hope it is also clear that neither of these relations is one of creation. Each of the persons is eternal and uncreated.
The main difference between East and West concerns that from which the Holy Spirit proceeds. The West says that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son (filioque), whereas the East says that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone. One can of course question whether this dispute has any clear sense, but let's assume that it does for the space of this post. I don't reckon there are any Stovian or other positivists hanging around this site. (If there are, I pronounce my anathema upon them.)
The question is whether there is any reason to prefer the one view over the other. Ware naturally thinks the Orthodox view superior (pp. 219-222). He thinks it is superior because it is able to account for the unity of the three persons without making of this unity something impersonal. His reasoning is as follows. The tripersonal God is one God, not three Gods. So the question arises as to the unity of the Godhead. What is the ground of God's unity? There is one God because there is one Father, the Father being the 'cause' or 'source' of Godhead, the principle (arche) of unity among the three. The Orthodox speak of the "monarchy of the Father." The other two persons originate from the Father. Because the principle of unity is the Father, and the Father is one of the divine persons, the principle of unity is personal in nature. So although there are three persons in one God, the unity of these three persons is itself a person, namely, the Father.
The Western view, however, issues in the result that the principle of unity is impersonal. The reasoning is along the following lines. If the Holy Spirit proceeds eternally from the Father and the Son, then "the Father ceases to be the unique source of Godhead, since the Son is also a source." (219) Consequently, "…Rome finds its principle of unity in the substance or essence which all three persons share." (219) This implies that, on the Roman Catholic view, the principle of unity is impersonal. (I am merely reporting Ware's reasoning here, not endorsing it.)
And that, Ware maintains, is not good. "Late Scholastic theology, emphasizing as it does the essence at the expense of the persons, comes near to turning God into an abstract idea." (222) The concrete and personal God with whom one can have a direct and living encounter gets transmogrified into a God of the philosophers (as opposed to the living God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob), an impersonal being whose existence needs to be proved by metaphysical arguments.
And so the Orthodox "regard the filioque as dangerous and heretical. Filioquism confuses the persons, and destroys the proper balance between unity and diversity in the Godhead." (222) God is stripped of concrete personality and made into an abstract essence. And that's not all. The Roman view gives the Holy Spirit short shrift with the result that his role in the church and in the lives of believers is downplayed. What's more, this subordination of the Holy Spirit, together with an overemphasis on the divine unity, has deleterious consequences for ecclesiology. As a result of filioquism, the church in the West has become too worldly an institution, and the excessive emphasis on divine unity has led to too much centralization and too great an emphasis on papal authority. It is worth noting in this connection that the Orthodox reject papal infallibility while accepting the infallibility of the church.
You can see, then, that for the Orthodox the filioque is quite a big deal: it is not a mere theological Spitzfindigkeit.
Ware's exposition — which I assume is a faithful representation of the Orthodox position — saddles filioquism with a nasty dilemma: either ditheism or semi-Sabellianism. For if the Son as well as the Father is an arche, a principle of unity in the Godhead, then the upshot is ditheism, two-God-ism. But if it is said that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son tamquam ex/ab uno principio, 'as from one principle,' then, as the Orthodox see it, the Father and the Son are confused and semi-Sabellianism is the upshot. (221)
Sabellianism or modalism is the view that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are modes or aspects of the deity. The East sees semi-Sabellianism in the West insofar as the Western view, in avoiding ditheism, merges Father and Son into one principle so that they become mere modes or aspect of that one principle.
That's the lay of the land as seen from the East. I have been concerned in this post with exposition only. Adjudication can wait for later. (He said magisterially.)
John Hick on Religious and Naturalistic Definitions of Religion
Defining 'religion' is not easy. John Hick sees a major division running through the welter of competing definitions:
The major division, as we have already noted, is between religious and naturalistic definitions. According to the former, religion (or a particular religious tradition) centres upon an awareness of and response to a reality that transcends ourselves and our world, whether the 'direction' of transcendence be beyond or within or both. Such definitions presuppose the reality of the intentional object of religious thought and experience; and they are broader or narrower according as this object is characterised more generally, for example as a cosmic power, or more specifically, for example as a personal God. Naturalistic definitions on the other hand describe religion as a purely human activity of state of mind. Such definitions have been phenomenological, psychological and sociological. (An Interpretation of Religion, Yale 1989, p. 3, footnotes omitted, bolding added.)
There is certainly a difference between a religious approach to religion and a naturalistic approach. And Hick is right that it is a major difference. But I suggest that the bolded passage needs correction. It is not that religious definitions of religion presuppose the reality of the intentional object of religious thought and experience, it is rather that they do not foreclose on the possibility of the reality of the intentional object.
When I study religion 'religiously,' what I do is take seriously religion's claim to be about something transcendent of our ordinary experience. Thus when I study Christianity religiously, I take seriously its claim to be a divine revelation both in and through its Scripture and in and through the person of Jesus of Nazareth. I hold myself open to the possibility of divine revelation. But this is not to say that I presuppose the reality of the triune God. I simply do not rule out the possibility of the existence and self-revelation of this God in the manner of the naturalist who, from the outset, assumes that religion is and can be nothing but a natural phenomenon, and therefore cannot be revelatory of anything beyond nature.
To put it another way, when I study religion 'religiously' as opposed to 'naturalistically,' I take seriously its claim to be in some measure true. I don't view it merely as just another natural or cultural phenomenon, which of course it also is. To study religion religiously is to study it in a manner analogous to the way we study science. I can of course concern myself with the sociology of scientific knowledge, with the psychology of scientists, and even with the phenomenology of scientific experience. But few think of natural science as merely a cultural artifact or a psychological product. For most of us, much of (current) science is either true, or a very good approximation to truth. We take physics, for example, to be revelatory of something beyond man and his physics, namely, the natural world which is what it is and has the properties it has whether or not we exist and whether or not we theorize about it. Few would get it into their heads to try to debunk science by explaining it genetically in terms of human fears and interests, the need for some to develop an arcane language-game whereby they can exclude and dominate others, etc. Few would claim that it is nothing but a human product. It is a human product, of course, but it is more: it is knowledge of the natural world.
To study religion religiously is then like studying science scientifically: it is to take the respective truth-claims seriously. But there is an important difference. In the case of science it does seem to be the case that when we study it scientifically (as opposed to viewing it as just another symbolic form or cultural product) we do presuppose the reality of nature. For one thing, nature is massively given to the senses — hyperskeptical worries aside. How could we not presuppose it? But "a reality that transcends ourselves and our world," in Hick's phrase, is not given or at least it is not unambiguously given. (Mystical givenness is an ambiguous givenness.) This is why I say that when we study religion religiously we do not presuppose the reality of the intentional object of religious thought and experience; rather, we do not foreclose on the possibility of the reality of the intentional object.
Is Atheism Intellectually Respectable? On Romans 1:18-20
Joe Carter over at First Things argues that "We have to abandon the politically correct notion that atheism is intellectually respectable." My own view is that theism and atheism are both intellectually respectable. Carter makes his case by invoking St. Paul:
In Romans, St. Paul is clear that atheism is a case of vincible ignorance: “For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.” Acknowledging the existence of God is just the beginning—we must also recognize several of his divine attributes. Atheists that deny this reality are, as St. Paul said, without excuse. They are vincibly ignorant.
Rather than quote the whole of the Pauline passage at Romans 1: 18-20, I'll summarize it. Men are godless and wicked and suppress the truth. What may be known about God is plain to them because God has made it plain to them. Human beings have no excuse for their unbelief. "For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities — his eternal power and divine nature — have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made . . . ."
Paul's claim here is that the existence and nature of God are evident from creation and that unbelief is a result of a willful turning away from the truth. There is no excuse for unbelief because it is a plain fact that the natural world is divine handiwork. Now I am a theist and I am sympathetic to Christianity. But although I have one foot in Jerusalem, the other is planted firmly in Athens (philosophy, the autonomy of reason). And so I must point out that to characterize the natural world as 'made' or 'created' begs the question in favor of theism. As begging the question, the Pauline claim about the evidentness of the world's being created offers no support for theism. It is an analytic proposition that there is no creation without a creator. So if the heavens and the earth are a creation, then it follows straightaway that a creator exists.
But is the world a divine creation? This is the question, and the answer is not obvious. That the natural world is a divine artifact is not evident to the senses, or to the heart, or to reason. Of course, one can argue for the existence of God from the existence and order of the natural world. I have done it myself. But those who reject theistic arguments, and construct anti-theistic arguments, have their reasons too, and it cannot fairly be said that what animates the best of them is a stubborn and prideful refusal to submit to a truth that is evident. It is not evident to the senses that the natural world is a divine artifact.
I may be moved to marvel at "the starry skies above me" (Kant). But seeing is not seeing as. If you see the starry skies as divine handiwork, then this is an interpretation from within a theistic framework. But the datum seen can just as easily be given a nontheistic interpretation.
At the end of the day you must decide which of these interpretations to accept. You will not find some plain fact that will decide it for you. There is no fact you can point to, or argument you can give, that definitively rules out theism or rules it in.
If the atheism of some has its origin in pride, stubborness and a willful refusal to recognize any power or authority beyond oneself, or beyond the human, as is plainly the case with many of the cyberpunks over at Internet Infidels and similar sites, not to mention such luminaries as Russell and Sartre, it does not follow that the atheism of all has this origin.
It is all-too-human to suspect in our opponents moral depravity when we cannot convince them. The Pauline passage smacks of that all-too-humanity. There are sincere and decent atheists, and they have plenty of excuse for their unbelief. The best of them, if wrong in the end, are excusably wrong.
Paul appears to be doing what ideologues regularly do when pushed to the wall in debate: they resort to ad hominem attacks and psychologizing: you are willful and stubborn and blinded by pride and lust; or you are a shill for corporate interests; or you are 'homophobic' or 'Islamophobic' or xenophobic; or you are a fear-monger and a hater; or you are a liar or insincere or stupid; or you are a racist, etc.
Joe Carter does the same thing.
Objection: "You are ignoring the deleterious noetic consequences of original sin. Because our faculties have been corrupted by it, we fail to find evident what is in itself evident, namely, that the world is a divine artifact. And it is because of this original sin that unbelief is inexcusable."
This response raises its own difficulties. First, how can one be morally responsible for a sin that one has not oneself committed but has somehow inherited? Second, if our faculties have been so corrupted by original sin that we can no longer reliably distinguish between the evident and the non-evident, then this corruption will extend to all our cognitive operations including Paul's theological reasoning, which we therefore should not trust either.
For a different take on Carter's piece, see Michael Liccione's Why Atheism Can Be Respectable.
The Right to Ridicule Religion
Mike Valle over at Fists in the Wind writes:
I support the absolute right of all of these people to ridicule religion all that they want. I don't think the government should fund any of it, but I do believe in this fundamental principle: The right to ridicule religious beliefs absolutely trumps the so-called "right" not to have one's religious beliefs ridiculed.
I basically agree with Mike's post. In particular, I agree that there is no 'right' not to have one's religious beliefs ridiculed, and I also agree that if one is going to violate people's beliefs in the manner of that 'artist' Andres Serrano then one ought to do it on one's own time and with one's own dime, as the saying goes. Adolescent purveyors of schlock who delight in offending the sensibilities of the 'bourgeoisie' or the 'booboisie' in H. L. Mencken's phrase have no right to taxpayer money. Dumb notions are rampant on the Left, and one of the dumbest is that a refusal of sponsorship amounts to censorship. This notion is beneath refutation, so I will say no more about it.
But I do have one minor bone to pick with Mike. He speaks of the right to ridicule religion as 'absolute.' I wonder what he means by this term. Does he mean that there are no conceivable circumstances in which the exercise of the right in question could not be justifiably limited or prevented? If that is what he means, then I disagree.
Consider property rights. Absolute? Are there no conceivable circumstances in which a man's right to property cannot be justifiably limited or infringed? Suppose I own half of Montana, and the federal government needs a few acres for a defense installation. It forces me to sell those acres at fair market value. I say that's a legitimate exercise of eminent domain. Or how about free speech? It is widely recognized that one cannot justifiably say just anything anywhere to anybody. The right to free speech is not the right to speech that incites violence in a situation in which an outbreak of violence can be reasonably expected to occur if the speech is delivered.
Same goes for the ridiculing of religion via speech, gestures, placards, and Serrano style 'art.' Suppose Marilyn Manson is burning Bibles on stage at some venue in Los Angeles near Biola. Some Biola students and there and are recognizable as such. Suppose the ridicule is ramped up to the point that the Christians in the audience are in danger of grave bodily harm. Then I say the right to ridicule meets its limit. But that is to say that the right is not absolute. It is relative to the circumstances.
More on Scriptural Revelation
Joshua Orsak e-mails,
I really enjoyed your recent post on various ways to approach revelation. I, too, opt for something like option C. It is similar to Karl Barth's position: that the Bible is NOT the revelation of God, but a record of God's revelation to mankind. I find that shift to be vital. Many Christians engage in a kind of biblolatry, they seek to have a relationship with a book. I don't want to have a relationship with a book, I want to have a relationship with God. I am a minister, I love the Bible, I study it every day and I find it to be an important part OF my relationship with God, but it is NOT the sum total of that relationship.
Let me see if I understand the shift. You seem to be distinguishing between the (human) record of God's revelation of certain truths to man and God's revelation of these truths. That is a good distinction and I accept it. You may also be distinguishing between God's revelation of certain truths to mankind and God's revelation of himself. It could be that God reveals little or nothing about himself while revealing certain truths to mankind. (In the same way that an anonymous caller to the police could reveal the whereabouts of a bank robber without revealing anything about himself.) The phrase 'revelation of God' can be interpreted as either an objective or a subjective genitive. Thus one could deny that the Bible is the revelation of God (objective genitive) while maintaining that the Bible is the revelation of God (subjective genitive). Putting the two distinctions together, I interpret you to be saying that the Bible is the human record of the revelation by God to mankind of certain truths. If that is what you mean, then I agree. This allows us to rule out two notions that ought to be ruled out, namely, scriptural inerrancy and the notion that the Biblical revelation is final. Once we admit that the Bible is a human product, though not merely a human product, we will give up preposterous claims to inerrancy. And if we grant that God does not primarily reveal himself in the Bible, then we will have much less reason to think that there cannot be any further divine-to-human communications.
I think that 'finding God' within scripture takes place because we have access to revelation that is outside scripture. We find some passage, some moment that 'links up' to an experience we have in our own lives, and we say 'yes, this matches, this fits'. It is because the Bible deepens and enlightens my own encounter with God's revelation that it has the weight it does with me. Peter Berger talks about a 'nexus' forming between our own experiences and scripture.
So thank you for your thoughts on this matter. I think they are spot on. Peace and Blessings.
Four Slants on Scripture
Suppose you are a theist (classically defined) and are also open to the possibility of divine revelation. Suppose further that you are open to the possibility of a written revelation. Call the scripture of a religion its 'Book.' The three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, sometimes called 'religions of the Book,' each have their Book. Let's not worry about overlap, or translation, or influence, or sectarian squabbles over the canonicity or otherwise of certain writings. Let's think like philosophers in terms of big broad possibilities of interpretation. A philosopher worth his salt goes for the big picture. He is out to reconnoitre the conceptual landscape, not get lost in details. Off the top of my head, there are four main possible slants on scripture. These interpretations can be arranged on a spectrum from the radically transcendent to the utterly immanent.*
Can a Faith Commitment be Tentative?
Ed Farrell writes,
I greatly enjoy your blog and read it often.
I think your latest post (Mature Religion: More Quest than Conclusions) misses the mark. For the believer of a revealed religion (I'm a Christian) the issue is not so much quest or conclusions as commitment. It's true we can't know God in the sense you're speaking of but we can have faith that the biblical revelations are true as far as they go, which is to say in defining our relations to God and the terms of our reconciliation with Him. The faith that's required here is not tentative but committed, because it will require action and probably sacrifice. In this arena quest is put behind although theology may remain a kind of quest, for elucidation if not for the meaning supplied by faith.
Thanks for all your thought-provoking posts.
Thank you for writing, Mr. Farrell. You too have a very interesting website.
You are right to point out the important role of faith. I agree that faith, if it is genuine, must manifest itself in action and sacrifice. Faith is not merely a verbal assent to certain propositions but a commitment to live in a certain way. Where we seem to disagree is on the question whether a commitment can be tentative. You write as if commitment excludes tentativeness, whereas I tend to think that a faith-commitment can and indeed must be tentative. A living faith, one that is not a mere convenience, or merely a source of comfort or psychological security, is one that regularly examines itself and is open to question. A living faith is one that needs ongoing examination and renewal, with the possibility left open that the faith-commitment be modified or even abandoned. But that does not imply that one does not act on one's commitments while they are in place.
The point of my post was that religion needs to be rescued from both the despisers and the dogmatists. I expect that you'll agree that the nincompoops of the New Atheism with their flying spaghetti monsters and celestial teapots have no understanding of religion. But neither can religion be reduced to doctrinal formulae that finitize the Infinite. The spirit of my post is adumbrated in these sentences from Simone Weil's Gravity and Grace in the chapter, "Atheism as a Purification": "Of two men who have no experience of God, he who denies him is perhaps nearer to him than the others." (103) "Religion in so far as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith: in this sense atheism is a purification."
Mature Religion: More Quest than Conclusions
All genuine religion involves a quest since God must remain largely unknown, and this by his very nature. He must remain latens Deitas in Aquinas' phrase:
Adoro te devote, latens Deitas, Quæ sub his figuris vere latitas;
Tibi se cor meum totum subjicit, Quia te contemplans totum deficit.
Godhead here in hiding, whom I do adore, Masked by these bare shadows, shape and nothing more, See, Lord, at Thy service low lies here a heart Lost, all lost in wonder at the God thou art.
(tr. Gerard Manley Hopkins, here.)
But as religion becomes established in the world in the form of churches, sects, and denominations with worldly interests, it becomes less of a quest and more of a worldly hustle. Dogmatics displaces inquiry, and fund-raising faith. The once alive become ossified.
Mature religion must be more quest than conclusions. It is vastly more a seeking than a finding. More a cleansing of windows and a polishing of mirrors than a glimpsing. And certainly more a glimpsing than a comfortable resting upon dogmas. Perhaps when religion and philosophy are viewed as quests they merge into one another. (But compare Leo Strauss on the tension between Athens and Jerusalem!)
The critic of religion wants to pin it down, reducing it to dogmatic contents, so as to attack it where it is weakest. Paradoxically, the atheist 'knows' more about God than the sophisticated theist — he knows so much that he knows no such thing could exist. He 'knows' the divine nature and knows that it is incompatible with the existence of evil — to mention one line of attack. Aquinas, by contrast, held that the existence of God is far better known than God's nature — which remains shrouded in a cloud of unknowing.
The religionist also wants religion pinned down and dogmatically spelled out for purposes of self-definition, doxastic security, other-exclusion, worldly promotion and political leverage. This is a reason why reformers like Jesus are met with a cold shoulder — or worse.
Incarnation: A Mystical Approach?
I have been, and will continue, discussing Trinity and Incarnation objectively, that is, in an objectifying manner. Now what do I mean by that? Well, with respect to the Trinity, the central conundrum, to put it in a very crude and quick way is this: How can three things be one thing? With respect to the Incarnation, how can the Second Person of the Trinity, the eternal and impassible Logos, be identical to a particular mortal man? These puzzles get us thinking about identity and difference and set us hunting for analogies and models from the domain of ordinary experience. We seek intelligibility by an objective route. We ought to consider that this objectifying approach might be wrongheaded and that we ought to examine a mystical and subjective approach, a 'Platonic' approach as opposed to an 'Aristotelian' one. See my earlier quotation of Heinrich Heine.
1. The essence of Christianity is contained in the distinct but related doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. Josef Pieper (Belief and Faith, p. 103) cites the following passages from the doctor angelicus: Duo nobis credenda proponuntur: scil. occultum Divinitatis . . . et mysterium humanitatis Christi. II, II, 1, 8. Fides nostra in duobus principaliter consistit: primo quidem in vera Dei cognitione . . . ; secundo in mysterio incarnationis Christi. II, II, 174, 6.