More Schenck Philosophy

The truth doesn't care.

If something is an "objective" truth, it is true whether it is convenient to you or not. We do not know objective truth as it is objectively. We only know the world as it appears to us. But it "works" to posit that there are such truths. Reality exists, even if I only know it as it appears to me.

Only God is truly objective because He can hold all the Dinge an sich as they exist in relation to all other Dinge an sich. But it "works" to make the distinction between objective and subjective truth in practice.

Reality doesn't care. And if something really bad has happened, it can be expressed more colorfully. It doesn't matter what you believe about the consequences of jumping off the Empire State Building. The truth doesn't care. Say goodbye to life. I don't care what your perspective on getting hit by Mack trucks is. You're going to go splat.

On the other hand, all truth is God's truth.

Truth from one area of knowledge will not contradict truth from another area. Unless of course you're dealing with quantum physics where the truth is that everything is likely to contradict.

X usually marks the spot. If your construction of reality requires great feats of irrationality, it's probably wrong. It's at least not as good as someone else's.

If the evidence for God or Christianity largely did not point toward God or Christianity, then I think God would say just before He left the building, "I don't want you to believe in me if the evidence is that weak. Then I wouldn't be God." Obviously I think the evidence is quite reasonable enough to believe in God and Christianity, so the point is moot from a practical perspective.

When someone asks, "Why should I believe in God?," my first thought is, "Because He exists." If God exists, then it doesn't matter whether you are interested or benefited by His existence. It's irrelevant. If God exists objectively as a person, then He exists and your interest or disinterest in Him has nothing to do with it.

Many people, even many Christians, do not really operate their lives as if God really existed. Many Christians pray as if they are only talking to themselves or the others in the room. They are largely unaware that their god is largely a subjective contruct. The next step in Christian growth is to pray as if there is really a God out there listening and watching.

If we really understood what it means to be God, we would live our lives completely differently. For one thing, we would be scared a lot more of the time.

A lot of Christians hold beliefs on issues where the vast and overwhelming majority of those who are most informed and most intellectually capable of judging on that issue disagree with them. There's something wrong here. Someone's assumptions or emotions are at work here, and it isn't always the experts.

Most Christians use the Bible as the banner over whatever they already believe (insert Koran for Muslims or Tanakh for Jews). The Bible is a canvas on which many different meanings are painted. The idea of basing your beliefs or practices on the Bible alone is an impossibility of language. Let's acknowledge it and be conscious about the other factors rather than slipping them in unawares.

Meaning occurs in minds, not in texts.

The meaning of the Bible for humans is always a function of human minds and understandings. That is why there are over 20,000 different denominations who think they get their varying beliefs and practices from the Bible alone.

The movement of God in relation to our apprehension of it is best summarized by Gamaliel in Acts 5. If God is opposed to something that we are all saying is His will, then it doesn't matter ultimately that we are wrong. God's will be done.

Many Christians reflect their lack of trust in God by trying to monitor and catch the bad behavior or motives or others. If you really believe in God, then no one is fooling anyone. If you really believe in God, you don't have to catch the liars and "sneak-ers" for there to be consequences. Or is it that you don't actually believe there's a God there to do the repaying?

The world is big; I am small.

Travel the world, and you will see yourself better. If you have open eyes, you will realize how funny you are and how narrow your ideas.

Think the thoughts of others as they think them, not as you think them.

But the deepest things people believe usually aren't a matter of thought but of feeling. Most people will not change their viewpoints on family, religion, or politics even in the face of the most obvious evidence to the contrary.

A friend of mine once said, "People are stupid." I'm sure this is true of us all far more than we realize. "The more you know the less you know." Socrates put it well when he suggested that the wise person is the one that realizes he or she doesn't really understand much. The more you think you know, the better chance that you're really an idiot.

We are far more determined than most of us realize. If we have free will, it is a miracle of God. Are we in fact most god-like when we create "will" out of nothing.

A person is freer to believe what they believe after they know other options. You don't have to change your ideas, but you choose them more freely when you have considered others.

We find the noble and the wicked in all places and all religions. I would like to believe that God judges us all by the light we have and by our heart response. If I were God, I would give everyone a chance to choose Him. I would discard the uninterested by consigning them to oblivion, by not resurrecting them.

I am not God.

Protology and eschatology both require us to leave normal language and categories. We can discuss neither on a purely literal level.

The distance between God's thoughts and my thoughts is bound to be greater than anything I can imagine. Try to explain calculus to an ant and perhaps you'll begin to appreciate the problem.

God's revelation to humanity is baby talk. He must speak mostly by analogy.

There is probably a certain predictable amount of contradiction involved in theology, because we're talking about God. Systems that are intelligible are probably vastly wrong.

"Surely the judge of the earth will do what's right?" (Gen. 18:25). Yes, He will, even when I don't see how what's happening or will happen makes sense. Faith in the Christian God is ultimately faith that He is in control and that what He is doing or allowing to happen is right. This is the ultimate answer to the problem of evil.

You can be tolerant of the ideas of others and still believe you are more correct than they are. I can believe that other religions understand parts of God correctly without surrendering my belief that Christianity is correct.

All Christian denominations likely have some things correct and some things wrong.

One of my favorite examples of virtue from history is the Roman Cincinnatus. He was a farmer who was asked to lead the Romans into battle in the 400's BC. He led them to victory, disbanded his troops beyond the Tiber, and then went back to farming. He did the right thing as a servant of his people, then he resumed an unpretentious life of normalcy.