Harry Marks wrote:If I remember right, I had distinguished between faith entirely seen in terms of "beliefs in spite of incomplete evidence" and faith conceived of as entailing a values-based commitment at least as important as the cognitive component.
Catching up with this earlier comment from Nov 13 at
http://www.booktalk.org/post159029.html#p159029
This distinction that you describe between different meanings of the concept of faith is central to analysis of the relationship between faith and reason. Atheist critiques of religion, such as Richard Dawkins’ argument that faith is a blind vice, rest entirely on the definition of faith as uncertain belief lacking evidence. However, when we look at the Biblical definition of faith from Hebrews 11:1
http://biblehub.com/hebrews/11-1.htm as “the confident hope in things unseen”, the moral value of faith is more important than the cognitive component. The hope structures the belief about what the unseen things must be. The nub of Dawkins’ critique is that when the cognitive component contains factual errors, such as in young earth creationism, or postulating God as a finite entity, the moral structure built upon this error will be like a house built upon sand, as Jesus famously indicated at Matt 7:26
http://biblehub.com/matthew/7-26.htm .
Harry Marks wrote:
Horatio Alger does not fit well with either one - it is primarily cognitive, involving a sense that the universe will respond positively to effort without the need for prior social standing. But it functions as a replacement story for one narrative about society, in which one cannot trust the "arriviste", with another one, in which pluck (with luck) pays large returns based on intrinsic merit alone.
I have not read any of the Horatio Alger novels, so am just responding in terms of the American Dream as a relevant framework of modern secular faith. The American myths of Providence, Manifest Destiny and One Nation Under God reflect the vision of a departure from a stagnant dogmatic stultified sclerotic Old World in which success was barred to the new arrival, into a dynamic free abundant exciting New World where anything is possible, where the man of talent and vision and daring can exploit the fecund abundance of a virgin continent. Of course the American meritocracy is somewhat corrupted, and the virgin purity of the new world is more than touched, but the ideal of the city upon a hill from Matt 5:14
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_upon_a_Hill remains a vision of capitalist liberty and prosperity based on equal rights to the pursuit of happiness.
The rival narratives of faith that produced the contrasting cultures in Europe and America reflect these conflicting views on liberty, in terms of ability to trust the arriviste.
Harry Marks wrote:
Robert Tulip wrote: The ability of people to get rich in America through force of will and talent is a good example of how faith can be rational.
Sure, but so is the distrust of the arriviste.
Interbane has also commented on this point about faith and wealth. I have just read a book called
New World Ronin by Victor Pride, setting out his ideas of business magnate as shogun, in which he argues for faith as rational self-belief as a basis for success in the world. This question of the relation between success and reason is an excellent one regarding the meaning of reason. ‘Rational’ does not just mean “based on evidence”. Successful people tend to be more instrumental, using reason as an instrument to achieve a goal, assessing whether the means they have in mind will achieve their desired end. Instrumental means-end rationality contrasts with principled approaches where the primary question is whether the ends are intrinsically good.
Harry Marks wrote: Deciding which one will dominate is a matter for the marketplace of ideas, and under some conditions one will be "more" rational than the other.
Reminds me of Humpty Dumpty’s comment about glory.
https://philosophynow.org/issues/13/A_N ... n_Argument
Harry Marks wrote:Robert Tulip wrote: recasting the myth of the fall from grace against a rational philosophy where meaning comes from poetic connection to the holy.
Works for me, but I imagine the average Evangelical would immediately dismiss this as liberal elitism.
For “the average Evangelical”, meaning comes from a literal faith in Biblical Christianity, generally including belief in the actual truth of the mythology of Genesis. Unfortunately the average Evangelical does not have a rational faith, and that is why religion is regarded with such disdain by much of the modern secular world.
The problem of finding rational meaning within obscure myths such as the fall from grace requires that we start from a scientific world view. I just don’t accept that any belief, such as original sin, which seems to conflict blatantly with scientific evidence, can be regarded as at all rational, except potentially in allegorical poetical ways.
Harry Marks wrote: the problem of theodicy arises from notions of omnipotence and omniscience, which are eliminated in viewing God as the spirit of interpersonal caring.
Theodicy is the logical problem of how evil can be allowed by a good God. I think theodicy can be answered by observing that it makes little sense to postulate God as an intentional entity. That error, reifying God as making deliberate intentional decisions, seems to me to be the start of the problem of theodicy. If we falsely imagine divinity, which is intrinsically infinite and eternal, on the model of a finite temporal entity, we thereby turn God into an idol. Imagining God as a personal being who is omniscient involves groundless projection of human imagination, attempting to worship a being whom we create in our minds, rather than honestly becoming open to what is really there. The method of openness to what being may disclose enables a rational existential faith.
If we consider the idea of God honestly, recognizing that science is fundamental to reality, the idea that God will prevent evil is absurd. The laws of physics do not prevent human freedom and cruelty, or the evolution of entities such as germs and disease that cause human suffering.
When we look at what is really omnipotent and omnipresent, we find that the laws of physics provide the universally consistent structuring principles of reality. The laws of physics, in gravity, motion and relativity, are actually all-powerful and are consistent across the whole universe as far as we can tell. So these traditional imagined attributes of an eternal and infinite God, omnipotence and omnipresence, are actually present as the structuring principles of scientifically observed reality.
Picking up on how a scientific worldview answers the questions of traditional metaphysics, it makes sense to consider the universe in its structured orderly laws as the object of awe and wonder, even reverence. However, it does not make scientific sense to claim that the universe is omniscient, and that is where the religious vision of human qualities in God starts to look like psychological projection, imagining God as a greater version of humanity.
The idea that God is omnibenevolent, all good, has some evolutionary merit, in that the goodness of nature can be understood as the fact that the universe enabled human evolution. It makes metaphorical sense to say the universe cares about humanity, since earth provides a place where we are safe, but the idea of a God who can deliberately intervene in the world to prevent evil is just idolatry.
The only thing that can prevent evil is the strong application of human values, and this can involve the mythical construction of a God as the projected object of transcendental imagination, as we see in Christianity.
Harry Marks wrote: I told one correspondent, a scholar of Blake, that I felt that Plato had led theology down the path of the wrong infinity: the infinitely many and large, rather than the infinitely dense microcosm of Cantor and Zeno, in which the cosmos appears in a grain of sand (as Blake put it).
Infinite density is the principle of integration in calculus, from Newton and Leibniz. I have not studied Cantor’s set theory in any depth, but Zeno’s paradox of the arrow and the continuity of time provides the logical basis of calculus. I don’t get your reading of Plato here about the infinitely many and large. I thought Plato’s views on infinity centered more on ideas, that universal ethical ideas such as the good, love, equality, truth, justice and beauty are not finite entities, but are real, and therefore are infinite and eternal.
Harry Marks wrote:
The idea [of eternal values] is supposed to be that our relation to the matter is unconditioned by temporal factors.
This is one of those metaphysical statements that give me a sore brain. I cannot imagine relating to anything that is not conditioned by temporal factors. We can only relate to things in time, and use them to imagine things outside time. It does not make clear sense to say we relate to our imagination as a matter, since our imagination is speculative fantastic construction to the extent it is not temporal.
Harry Marks wrote: If we pursue truth for its own sake, that pursuit transcends time.
I would be interested to explore a practical example of what you mean by this assertion, since I fear that a pursuit that transcends time will turn out to be a meaningless and empty concept. For example Einstein pursued the theory of relativity as ‘truth for its own sake’ but the only sense in which this ‘transcends time’ is that relativity is permanently true.
Harry Marks wrote: If we pursue truth for the instrumental ability to, say, save lives, then the pursuit is temporal.
Defining temporal as instrumental is not ringing true to me. Much intrinsic and useless truth is temporal.
Harry Marks wrote: The essential proposition of theology is that the eternal (the things we encounter for their own sake) dominates the temporal.
Here you appear to define intrinsic value as eternal truth. As I have discussed here previously, my view is that a primary candidate as a proposition containing intrinsic value is that human flourishing is good. This is a claim which cannot be tested by evidence, and yet has important value as an axiom that serves to provide value to other claims as a basis of rational faith.
Harry Marks wrote: So, for example, the ethical value of saving lives, which we encounter for its own sake, gives meaning to the temporal quest for such instrumental value.
I like to consider such claims against a consequentialist moral logic, looking at the utility of belief rather than seeing ‘saving lives’ as a sacred principle. So for example this idea that saving lives is an eternal ethical value keys into debates about euthanasia and abortion and road safety, where differing attitudes about the value of life produce quite different ethical stances. If we make saving life an absolute principle it can lead us to permit harmful suffering.
Harry Marks wrote:
Christianity was the first religion, I believe, to assert that the eternal inheres in the temporal, which is the doctrine of incarnation (though some ancient Hindu/Buddhist thought could be read to support such an idea).
Plato wrote in
The Timaeus that time is the moving image of eternity. Plato held that the properties of things instantiate ideas, albeit imperfectly. This teaching, in my reading, provided the Gnostic origins of what then evolved into the Christian myth of the incarnation. The combination of Platonic philosophy with Egyptian pharaoh worship, Babylonian cosmology and Jewish prophetic mysticism produced the Gnostic Christian doctrine of incarnation, which gave political force to earlier ideas about the eternal inhering in the temporal.
Harry Marks wrote:
A rather clumsy example would be that we cannot encounter Hamlet in the same way that we can encounter our next door neighbor - abstraction lacks something essential about the eternal.
There is a fine book called
Hamlet’s Mill which explores the origins of Shakespeare’s play in gnostic cosmology.
Harry Marks wrote:
Robert Tulip wrote:Yes, this idea of unifying time and eternity is the core of rational Christology as a purely logical exercise of transcendental imagination. The transformative ethical basis of Christianity is that the things in the world that seem least important to men are the most important to God, expressed in the Biblical ideas that the last will be first in the Kingdom of God, and the meek shall inherit the earth.
I think this is very helpful.
The theme of Transcendental Imagination is one that I first encountered in Heidegger’s great but difficult book
Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. German idealism, from Kant through Hegel and Heidegger, and in the ideas of Ernst Bloch, places imagination as a core theme in messianic thought. The messianism emerges in the vision of the eternal within the temporal, seeing the least as first.
http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/55128-ernst-blo ... essianism/ describes how messianic imagination is an ethical driver in the modern philosophy of Bloch’s German secular Judaism.
Harry Marks wrote:
There is a movement in progressive Christianity, focused around the anthropology of Rene Girard, arguing that penal substitionary Atonement is inherently scapegoat theology, and that its propagation is antithetical to the Kingdom of God. I find it very persuasive.
Ransom theology is certainly antithetical to messianic liberation theology. The idea that Jesus died as a ransom paid by God for our sins places Jesus as a substitute providing a sacrifice in our place for our salvation through belief. That was the foundation myth of Christendom, based on securing the alliance of throne and altar as a strategic idea, washed in the blood of the lamb. In penal theology Jesus is the scapegoat, killed to save the community, whereas in liberation theology Jesus is the transformative pioneering model of human excellence whose death shows the depraved evil of the world, and whose path of integrity is the way to life in truth.
Harry Marks wrote:
Robert Tulip wrote: Unfortunately it is difficult to maintain a redemptive sense of the mandate of heaven when might is right becomes too explicit as a state ideology of legitimacy. That moral problem seems to me to be a big reason why the Roman pantheon eventually collapsed before the call of conscience presented by the gospels.
Interesting. The key here is "legitimacy." If legitimacy is conceived of in eternal terms, that is, not merely instrumental, then might cannot possibly make right.
The distinction here is between legitimacy of rule conceived, on one hand, as the mandate of eternal heaven and, on the other, the legal legitimacy of the modern secular state, separate from the church. The idea that God has blessed the king as the one social channel of divine order was the foundation of pre-democratic monarchic politics. The union of throne and altar in Christendom was claimed to provide eternal legitimacy for the state and king. This divine right of kings doctrine actually was a ‘might is right’ theory though, since the conquest by a stronger king demonstrated that the old mandate had been lost in favour of a new dynasty.
Harry Marks wrote: Robert Tulip wrote:
Mandate of Heaven is just a way of saying that corruption loses moral legitimacy, whereas disciplined forces have the right to take state power from effete groups who are using their position badly.
Well, okay, sometimes it was used that way. But the ideas were primarily applied to times of either warring factions or flooding, and the two (not surprisingly) sometimes went together. Now, if you see flooding as due to failure to manage the channel work and dikes, there is some sense to this. But more often it was due to large-scale climate disturbances and there was no role of "effeteness".
In the world conquests of Chinggis Khan, emperor of the Mongols, the belief that the eternal blue sky justified the success of the Mongols in crushing weak enemies created a doctrine of rule of the strong, known as Tengrism, described at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tengrism.
The theory of dynastic cycle is described at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynastic_cycle : “There is a famous Chinese proverb expressed in the 16th century novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms that says "After a long split, a union will occur; after a long union, a split will occur" (分久必合,合久必分). Each of these rulers would claim the Mandate of Heaven to legitimize their rule.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_of_Heaven states “Since the winner is the one who determines who has obtained the Mandate of Heaven and who has lost it, some Chinese scholars consider it to be a sort of Victor's justice, best characterized in the popular Chinese saying "The winner becomes king, the loser becomes outlaw".