Descartes' Meditation I: A Paraphrase

I'm hoping this fall to slowly paraphrase Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy, with Claude helping. After several months, here is finally a paraphrase of his first meditation. (I have the Synopsis paraphrased already too.)
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Meditation 1
Things We Can Doubt

1. It has been several years now since I first realized something unsettling. From the time I was young, I had been accepting all kinds of opinions as true without ever really checking whether they were. And if the foundations were wrong, then everything I built on top of them was probably wrong too.

So, I made a decision. At some point in my life, I was going to have to tear the whole thing down and start over. Not just fix a few mistakes here and there—that would be like patching a rotten wall instead of rebuilding it. I needed to go all the way down to the foundation and start fresh, if I ever wanted to build something I could actually trust.

But that’s a big project. So, I waited. I kept waiting until I was old enough and mature enough that I couldn’t keep telling myself I’d be better prepared later. That time is now. Today, I find myself with a quiet mind, free from distractions, with the time and the peace to actually do this. (Descartes was living in peaceful retirement when he wrote this—deliberately setting aside time for serious philosophical work.)

So, today I begin. I am going to systematically set aside every opinion I have ever held. All of it goes.

2. Now, I want to be clear about something. I’m not going to try to prove that all my former opinions are completely false. That might actually be impossible—and it isn’t necessary anyway.

Here’s why. If I find even one good reason to doubt something, that’s enough to set it aside. I don’t need to prove it’s wrong. I just need to show it isn’t completely certain. (Think of it this way: if you’re not sure whether the milk is bad, you don’t drink it. You don’t need to prove it’s definitely sour.)

And I’m not going to go through every single opinion one by one either. That would take forever. Instead, I’m going to do something much more efficient. I’m going to attack the foundations. If the foundations crumble, everything built on top of them crumbles too. So, the question is: what are my most basic beliefs built on?

3. Everything I have ever believed with complete confidence came to me through my senses—through seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling. My senses have always felt like my most reliable guide to what's real.

But here’s the problem. My senses have deceived me before. And if something has deceived you even once, it’s not wise to trust it completely.

4. But wait—someone might object here. Sure, our senses can mislead us about small things or distant things. Maybe I misjudge the size of something far away or miss a detail too tiny to see clearly. But what about the obvious stuff? Surely I can’t doubt that I am sitting here right now, by the fire, wearing my dressing gown, holding this piece of paper in my hands. Some things (“presentations”) are just too immediate and obvious to doubt.

And honestly, that’s a fair point. How could I seriously deny that I have hands? That I have a body? That I’m sitting exactly where I think I’m sitting? Only a madman would doubt something that obvious. (Descartes is thinking here of people who suffer from serious delusions.) I’m thinking of people who sincerely believe they are kings when they are penniless. Perhaps they think they are dressed in royal robes when they have no clothes at all or that their bodies are made of glass or clay. Or maybe they think they are a squash. (These weren’t just hypothetical examples to Descartes. Such delusions were documented in his day.)

To doubt something as obvious as my own hands would put me in the same category as those poor souls.

5. But here’s the thing. Even if doubting my own hands would make me sound like a madman, don’t I sleep? I am a human being, and human beings dream. Think about it. When I’m dreaming, I often experience things just as vividly as I do right now. Maybe I’m sitting by the fire, wearing my clothes, holding this paper. Dreams can feel completely real while they’re happening. How many times have I dreamed I was sitting exactly where I'm sitting now, only to wake up and find myself lying in bed?

Right now, in this moment, everything feels obviously real. My eyes are open. I’m moving my head. I’m consciously extending my hand and watching it move. Surely this is different from a dream. Dreams aren’t this clear and vivid, are they?

But wait. I’ve thought that before. And I was dreaming.

The more carefully I think about this, the more unsettling it becomes. I cannot find a single reliable test—not one—that would definitively prove I’m awake right now rather than dreaming. And that realization is genuinely shocking. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I start to wonder... Am I dreaming right now?

6. OK, let’s go with it. Suppose we’re actually dreaming right now. Let’s suppose that opening my eyes, moving my head, extending my hands— it’s all just part of the dream. Let’s even imagine that I don’t even really have a body or hands at all.

Even if that’s all true, here’s the interesting thing. Dreams have to be made of something. When we dream, we dream of things—faces, hands, rooms, fire. Those dream images had to come from somewhere.

They’re like paintings. And here’s the thing about paintings. Even the most imaginative painting—like a siren, a dragon, or a creature that has never existed—is still made up of parts taken from real things. A painter can combine a woman’s face with a fish’s tail, but she can’t invent something from absolutely nothing. Even if every element is rearranged into something new and fantastical, the colors themselves are real.

(Think of it this way. Even the most bizarre dream you’ve ever had was made up of things you’ve actually seen or experienced. Your mind doesn’t create from nothing. It recombines things you’ve experienced.)

So even if everything in my dreams is imaginary and unreal, the basic building blocks must be real. The simple, universal elements that dreams are constructed from are real, things like eyes, hands, and bodies.

And even more basically than that, there are things so fundamental that they are the assumptions that make all these other images in our minds possible. These are simple, universal concepts like shape, size, quantity, and the fact that things exist at all in space and time. This is true whether we are talking about real or imaginary things, whether we are awake or dreaming.

7. So, what kinds of concepts belong to this most basic level of reality? These are ideas like physical existence in general. The idea that things take up space, have shape and size. We can count them. We can locate them somewhere in space and time.

8. This leads to a surprising conclusion about the sciences. Take sciences like physics, astronomy, or medicine. They study complex, “composite” things (things made up of parts, not “simple” things). Our train of thought puts them on shaky ground. They depend on assumptions about the physical world that we’ve just called into question. If we are dreaming, we can’t fully trust what our senses tell us about the physical world. And those sciences overwhelmingly depend on our senses.

But subjects (Descartes calls them “sciences” too, as the people of his day did) that deal only with these simple, universal concepts are on much firmer ground. These are sciences like arithmetic and geometry. In fact, they might be the most certain knowledge we have!

Here’s why. Whether I’m awake or dreaming, two and three still make five. Whether I’m awake or dreaming, a square still has four sides. These truths don’t depend on whether the physical world is real or not. They don’t depend on our senses at all. They just are true, no matter what.

9. But wait. There’s something I’ve believed for a long time that complicates everything we just said about mathematics.

I believe in God. And not just any god. I believe in an all-powerful God who created me and everything about me. And if that’s true, it raises an uncomfortable question. What if God arranged things so that there is no earth, no sky, nothing that takes up space, no shapes or sizes or locations? What if he has only made me think those things are real? What if my entire experience of reality is just God feeding false perceptions directly into my mind?

And here’s where it gets even more unsettling. I sometimes notice that other people are completely confident they know something—when they’re completely wrong! What if that happens to me with math? What if every time I add two and three and get five, I’m actually wrong? What if I’m actually wrong to think a square has four sides? What if God is allowing me to be deceived even about something that simple?

Here’s where someone might object, “But God is supposed to be supremely good. Surely a good God wouldn’t deceive me like that?”

But think about it. If God’s goodness means he wouldn’t let me be deceived at all, then why does he allow me to get things wrong sometimes? Yet, clearly, he does.

Apparently, God’s goodness doesn’t protect me from being deceived or wrong. That means it might not protect me from being deceived on these basic things either.

10. Now, some people might try to escape this problem by simply denying that God exists. If there is no all-powerful God, then there’s no all-powerful deceiver either. Problem solved, right?

But let’s not get sidetracked by that debate right now. Let’s just grant it for the sake of argument. Let’s suppose that God doesn’t exist. Let’s suppose I got here by pure chance, or fate, or just an endless chain of causes and effects. Say one thing has led to another all the way back for eternity.

Here’s the problem with that. If a powerful, intelligent God didn’t create me, then whatever did create me was less perfect, less intelligent, less capable. And the less capable my creator, the more likely it is that I came out flawed—including flawed in my thinking.

In other words, ditching God doesn’t actually help my certainty. It makes things worse. The less impressive the cause of my existence, the more reason I have to doubt whether my mind works reliably at all.

So, here’s where I’ve landed. I cannot find a single thing I formerly believed with complete certainty that I can’t now find some reason to doubt. I’m not saying this carelessly or rashly. We have found some serious, carefully considered reasons to doubt everything.

From this point forward, if I want to find anything truly certain, I need to treat every belief I have with suspicion, including all the beliefs I was previously very confident about. I should give them exactly the same suspicion I would give to something I knew was completely false.

11. But recognizing all this isn’t enough. I also have to make sure I don’t slip back into my old ways of thinking.

Here’s the problem. Those old familiar beliefs don’t just sit quietly in the corner once I’ve decided to doubt them. They keep coming back. They’ve been with me my whole life. They feel natural and comfortable and reasonable—far more reasonable than doubting everything. And as long as I keep thinking of them as “probably true but slightly doubtful,” they’ll keep sneaking back in and taking over my thinking almost without my noticing.

So, I need a different strategy. Instead of just telling myself these beliefs are doubtful, I’m going to deliberately treat them as if they are completely false. Not because I actually think they’re false, but because that’s the only way to counteract the powerful pull they have on my mind. I’ll fight the old prejudices with a new, deliberate one going in the opposite direction. Only then will my judgment have a fighting chance of finding its way to actual truth.

And before anyone panics, this isn't dangerous. I’m not about to go out and act as if the world doesn’t exist. (That really would be madness.) I’m doing this purely as a thinking exercise. I’m not looking for a guide to action right now. I’m looking for knowledge. And in the search for knowledge, you can’t be too suspicious.

12. So here is my plan. Instead of worrying about whether God might be deceiving me, I’m going to imagine something even more extreme. I’m going to suppose that there exists an evil demon, one massively powerful and completely dedicated to deceiving me in every possible way.

This demon has constructed the entire world I experience as an elaborate illusion. The sky, the air, the earth, colors, shapes, sounds—all of it is just a trap he has set for my mind. I don’t actually have hands, eyes, flesh, or blood. I just think I do because the demon is feeding these false impressions directly into my mind.

I’m going to hold onto this assumption as firmly as I can. And even if this exercise doesn’t lead me to truth, it will at least accomplish something important. It will keep me from being fooled. As long as I maintain this radical suspicion, the demon—whatever his power—cannot get me to agree to something false.

But I’ll be honest. This is hard. There’s a part of me that just wants to go back to my comfortable old beliefs. It’s like being a prisoner who is having a wonderful dream about being free. When he starts to suspect it might just be a dream, he doesn’t want to wake up. He’d rather stay in the comfortable illusion than face the cold reality of his cell.

That’s me right now. I can feel myself wanting to slip back into my old familiar way of seeing the world. Waking up from this comfortable sleep is going to be hard work. And I’m not even sure the effort will pay off. But I have to try.

6.1 The State is Never the Kingdom. (philosophy)

Last night the next group of philosophers in training started social and political philosophy. We primarily went through Niebuhr's five ways Christians have engaged culture. But since I am going beyond my classes in this blog series, I thought I would start with some fundamentals.
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1. One of the basic principles of theology--the study of God--is that any earthly, visible church is not the same as the invisible, spiritual church. Your local church may be great. The denomination to which you belong may be great. But it is not the same as the one, true, invisible church. This is one of the most basic things you learn in Christian theology.

Protestants especially believe this. But it is true even for Roman Catholics. The Roman Catholic Church openly admits that not all of its popes have been godly. The church has had periods of great corruption. No earthly church is ever the same as the true church. 

Even when you dig into the earliest councils of the church, you will find huge instances of all-too-human politics and ungodliness. The church erased a council in 449 that would have likely changed what we believe about Christ for all time. At that council, a bishop was beaten to death and those present were forced to sign a blank document that was filled in later. 

Afterwards, the emperor's horse tripped and killed him. Because that emperor died, there came a different emperor who backed a different position--the one we believe today about Christ being one person with two natures. They had another council two years later (Chalcedon) and erased the first one. Chalcedon established what almost all Christians believe today about Christ being fully human and fully divine.

The one, true church is invisible. No earthly, visible church is equivalent to it.

2. If this is true of the church, it is absolutely true of any earthly, visible state or country. Think about it, is the state more likely to be holy than the church? It's really an absurd thought. If the visible church is never the same as the true church then the state absolutely is never the same as the kingdom of God.

It's important to point out that this is a major blind spot for some Christians at times. We have recognized the dangers of civil religion for as long as people have confused patriotism for worship. Various forms of religious nationalism can't tell the difference between fervor for a particular vision of a country and the worship of God. 

And those infected can't see it. In fact, they are more zealous for the state than they ever were for God. At its worse, they are ready to kill those who do not bend to their vision of the state. They become hard hearted, and anyone whose loyalty to their vision is in question becomes the worst of evil.

In our times, Nazi Germany is of course the classic example, where loyalty to Hitler's Germany became indistinguishable from state Christianity. When German Christians in the 1930s tried to merge Christianity with nationalism, the true church responded with something called the Barmen Declaration. 

This statement pointed out that "Jesus Christ [that is, not Hitler or Germany] is the one Word of God whom we must hear and obey in life and in death." When the state insisted that it was God's kingdom on earth, they rejected "the false doctrine that the church could recognize other powers as God’s revelation."

Whenever our love of nation takes on a fervor that should only be reserved for God, we have begun to lose sight of the real God and our vision for the state has become an idol. The state has become a god for us.

The kingdom of this world is never the same as the kingdom of our God.

3. There may be times when an earthly state aligns more or less with the kingdom than at other times, but we should always be clear. No earthly kingdom is ever identical to the kingdom of God.

It is essential that we never confuse or blur the two.

A theocracy is allegedly a state ruled by God. But apart from the days of Moses, there has never been one and will never be one till Christ actually returns. The book of the Judges, when Israel was allegedly a theocracy, was one of the most godless periods of Israel's history, when everyone did what was right in their own eyes.

In so-called theocracies, there is always a group of priests or a Pope or an Ayatollah interpreting what God says. Theocracies are thus really monarchies (rule by one) or something called an oligarchy (rule by a few) in disguise. 

Sure, someone might say they are only letting the Bible rule--but it is always their interpretation of the Bible. In Calvin's Geneva, the rule of the Bible was the rule of John Calvin's interpretation of the Bible. And in Puritan England and Puritan New England when they were in charge, it was their interpretation of the Bible that ruled. If you were a Mary Dyer or Roger Williams, you were either ousted or put to death.

No earthly state--even if it claims to be a theocracy--can be equivalent to the kingdom of God because humans are involved. A human has to tell the people what God says. A human has to implement what they think God says. A human has to interpret the Bible. 

And people are sinful. "There is none righteous, no not one" (Rom. 3:10). The Founding Fathers of the United States thoroughly took that into account. They put extensive "checks and balances" into the Constitution so that the evil, sinful nature of one person or group was counteracted by other individuals and groups in the government.

This is part of why Jesus, Paul, and the rest of the New Testament strongly distinguished between the church and the state. Jesus told his questioners to "Give back to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's" (Mark 12:17). And Paul told the Philippians--living in a Roman colony--that they were citizens of heaven (Phil. 3:20). 

The implication was that their political identity did not lie with Rome but with God in heaven. Hebrews and 1 Peter imply the same when they call citizens exiles and aliens (Heb. 11:13; 1 Pet. 1:17).

The Founding Fathers were thus wise to dictate that "Congress shall establish no religion." Thomas Jefferson called this a "wall of separation" between the state and religion. It was all too clear to the Founding Fathers that, if there were a state religion, it would end up oppressing the people like the Puritans had in New England or like the kings, queens, and Puritans of England had in the 1500s and 1600s.

3. Lord Acton put the principle wisely: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." [1] For this reason, it is best for the church to always be distinct from the state and for there to be more than one church at that. There is surely a correlation between the amount of power someone has and the danger of corruption and corrupt impact. 

It is not an absolute correlation, but it is a general one.

And since wealth brings power, the same correlation is in play there. The more wealthy a person is, the more powerful a person is. And the more powerful a person is, the greater the potential for corruption and corrupt impact. 1 Timothy 6:10 was not lying when it said that "the love of money is a root of all evils."

At times, Western culture has at least given some appearances of resisting these trends. But the more you dig into history, the more you realize that corruption has never been far away from any period of rulers. We celebrate the apparent exceptions. Yet even here the public doesn't always know what has happened behind the scenes.

These are not absolutes. They are tendencies and warnings with serious implications about how society would ideally be structured. The main take aways are 1) keep power from being concentrated in the hands of the few and 2) keep religion separate from the state with the state as a neutral zone. 

Of course, at any given time, most of us don't have a choice about these things. We are born in a particular place and time, and the state is a given.

[1] In an 1887 letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton

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Introduction
1.1 What is philosophy?
1.2 Is philosophy Christian?
1.3 Unexamined assumptions
1.4 Socrates and the Unexamined Life
1.5 The Natural Philosophers 

Logic
2.1 The Structure of Thinking 
2.2 When Thinking Goes Wrong
2.3 Three Tests for Truth
2.4 Knowing the Bible
2.5 Plato and Aristotle
2.6 The Story of Logic 
2.7 Hellenistic Philosophy

Philosophy of Religion
3.1 Faith and Reason
3.2 How can we know that God exists?
3.3 God as First Cause 
3.4 God as Intelligent Designer
3.5 God as Necessary Being (including ontological argument)
3.6 God and Morality
3.7 God and Miracles
3.8 The Problem of Evil
3.9 Augustine and Aquinas

Philosophy of the Person
4.1 What is a human being?
4.2 A Body and a Soul?
4.3 What is the meaning of life? (including existentialism)
4.4 Are we free or fated? 

Ethics

Social and Political Philosophy
6.1 The State is Never the Kingdom (this post)
6.2 How to Structure Government 
6.3 Kingdom Values for Society
6.4 Christ and Culture
6.5 The Social Contract (equal rights and utilitarianism)
6.6 Adam Smith vs Karl Marx

Epistemology
7.1 Beyond Binary Thinking
7.2 Plato's Allegory of the Cave
7.3 Reason vs. Experience
7.4 Kant Breaks the Tie
7.5 The Bible as Object of Knowledge
7.6 Wittgenstein and Language
7.7 Kuhn and Paradigms
7.8 Foucault and Power
7.9 A Pragmatic Epistemology

Metaphysics
8.1 Hard Times for Metaphysics
8.2 A Brief Story of Metaphysics

8.3 A Plug for Critical Realism  

4.2 A Body and Soul? (philosophy series)

My spring philosophy class has been going now for almost eight weeks, so my live sessions have resumed. The idea of this series was to slowly fill in a rough sense of the journey through philosophy that I take semester after of semester. These posts of course go well beyond what we have time to talk about in our live sessions. For example, I am being more forthright here in what I actually think.

This post is in the section on what a human being is. My last post in this stretch was here. See the bottom for the overall shape.
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1. I think it's clear that we human types have a body. I've never met a person yet who didn't. (At least not that I know of.)

I seem to remember my mother resisting the notion that we are animals. I wasn't saying that we are only animals. But this seems difficult to deny short of some grunt of irrationality. I am much more than a mammal, but by every defining characteristic of a mammal, I am one.

My observation of human behavior is that we behave far more like animals than we would like to admit. I have noted that the roosters in my yard seem preoccupied with fighting each other and mounting hens. So it would seem with a quite large portion of the human men in the world. Very little going on upstairs. A lot of fighting and mounting.

When I'm having this train of thought, I sometimes think of the 1968 movie, The Planet of the Apes. Interestingly, that was a time of American history not unlike our own. The movie is of course a parable of humanity. The sentient apes of the movie mirror human society. There are virtuous apes. There are intelligent apes. But they had better watch out because there are militant, violent apes too.

2. As I observe humanity, the difficulty is not seeing that we are animal as well as human. Strictly from observation, the difficulty is in seeing how we are more than animal. So few humans seem self-reflective. Rather, we seem driven and tossed by our urges.

B. F. Skinner long ago demonstrated that we can be manipulated using behavior modification, just like animals. In one episode of The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon humorously trains Penny to stop talking when he offers her a chocolate. Most of us are just as easily manipulated.

What might be defining characteristics of humans that rise above other animals? Is it our self-consciousness? The majority of humans are barely self-aware, it seems to me. We are elephants that go where we want, with our riders rationalizing our actions after the fact. [1]

We are herd animals. We do whatever our tribe does, and say what our tribe says. Nowhere is this clearer at the moment than in politics, where the official line of the government is so obviously false it is excruciatingly painful. And yet a third of the population mindlessly parrots insanities. Ironically (or perhaps revealingly), a predominant part of that third are evangelicals.

Is it our ability to tell the difference between right and wrong? I have long been disabused of any sense that humans come with a universal conscience. I have never found C. S. Lewis' moral argument persuasive. Our consciences seem in large part culturally conditioned and psychologically formed, apart from some basic instincts.

Theologians call what I am describing "Sin." If you were beginning to get nervous, I am simply describing what we Christians call "fallennesss." Our failure was to think that we were somehow immune. Yes, the other side is fallen, but we have our act together. No, we are all human, all too human.

2. Do we have a soul? Is there a spiritual dimension to us as well? From a Christian perspective, we are image-bearers regardless. We are intrinsically valuable one way or another because God says so. [2]

There is a stream of Christian thought that might be described as "non-reductive physicalist." It does not believe in a detachable soul or a true spiritual ontology, but does not believe that humans can merely be described in terms of our bodies. Our minds may be based in our brains, but it would not be adequate merely to equate them with our brains. The mind is "more than" our brains in some sense.

I would put Joel Green in this category. [3] I'm not sure that N. T. Wright exactly fits this category but his work on the resurrection has emphasized that resurrection in Scripture is an embodied existence. [4] These books, which came out around the same time, were pushing back on the popular Christian narrative that "you die and go to heaven or hell" and that's it.

Rather, resurrection in the New Testament is overwhelmingly physical. It involves a body. The tomb is empty because Jesus' resurrection self is in continuity with his body. It was not a merely spiritual resurrection, as so many in the church seem to imagine the afterlife. 1 Corinthians 15 is emphatic about the corporeal nature of resurrection, as we would expect from an ex-Pharisee.

This is not a new observation although popular Christianity is often disconnected from common scholarly knowledge. Oscar Cullmann, while no doubt oversimplifying the categories, pointed out in 1955 that the notion of the immortality of the soul was far more Greek than biblical. [5]

Nevertheless, I believe these scholars have created too sharp a distinction. There are places in the New Testament that use imagery of the soul or spirit as a detachable part of our identity, not least the pre-resurrected souls under the altar in Revelation 6:9. Paul speaks of the "unclothed" dead (2 Cor. 5:3) and to be absent from the body (2 Cor. 5:8). In what way might the thief be with Jesus in Paradise before the resurrection (Luke 23:43)?

It would thus seem easily that many biblical authors had some notion of a disembodied intermediate state between death and resurrection. Despite what we are often told, embodied resurrection was not the only Jewish tradition around the time of Christ. I and others have argued that the Dead Sea Scrolls, which reflect one stream of Jewish thought in the century before Christ, would far more accurately be characterized as looking to a disembodied future existence in the afterlife even if you can find a few fragments that assume a different position. [6]

3. I should emphasize that these are pictures. The Bible gives us incarnated revelation, revelation that comes to us in the clothing of ancient paradigms. It is the reality to which these images point that we are to look. The clothing is ancient, reflective of the categories of the day. The clothing can change even withinn the pages of the Bible itself. 

So, the point is that we survive death. We survive death not only when God resurrects us in the future. We survive death immediately. In my opinion, the form of that survival is above our paygrade. The Bible uses ancient images drawn from its world to picture that survival. But those images are not the point. Paul can express these uncertainties: "Whether in the body or out of the body, God knows" (2 Cor. 12:2).

4. Even from an empirical perspective, I do believe it is plausible that humans have a spiritual dimension to their identity that "goes beyond" what we can see. Let me use a modern image that is also an attempt to give clothing to a timeless truth.

Science fiction has given us a sense that there may be other "dimensions" to existence beyond the three (or four) that are most obvious to us. In 1884, Edwin Abbott published his novella, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. In it, a three dimensional creature terrifies a two dimensional one. He seems to be able to walk through walls by simply stepping in and out of the third dimension.

It seems to me that there have been countless instances of events that seem to go beyond what can be observed physically. Someone wakes up in the night with an urge to pray for someone who, at exactly that moment, is undergoing some kind of a crisis. [7] A person seems to effect spiritual power both good and evil.

As a Christian, we nest these sorts of events within a larger spiritual framework--a personal one at that. God and the Devil are personal agents, as are angels and demons.

5. The ontological existence of the soul would be incredibly convenient philosophically. Here are just a few examples:

• It would account for continuity of identity between this life and the next. If God merely recreates us in the resurrection, how is that anything more than cloning some version of our bodies and giving that new person our memories?
• It could anchor human identity at the moment of conception.
• It could ground a notion of human free will outside the cause-effect flow of the material world.
• It might account for human identity beyond the memory and personality functions of the brain.

This last possibility is fascinating. What if, for example, Alzheimer's was an interface problem? What if, the person is in there but unable to connect with us through the brain, like a defunct computer screen on a computer that still works? You can't see what the computer is doing because the screen isn't working, but all the functions are still being performed.

Of course, the advantages of a concept are not in themselves an argument for the truth of the concept. That would be the fallacy of subjectivism--wanting something to be true doesn't make it true. Nevertheless, faith in the existence of a detachable soul would seem to cohere well with Christian faith and biblical faith.

6. The brain does correlate well to many functions we like to attribute to our identity. When a rod blew through Phineas Gage's frontal lobe, his personality changed. The same is of course true for those in the past who were forced to undergo a frontal lobotomy. Alzheimer's involves the tangling of physical neurons in our brains, leading to a loss of memory and self. Biochemistry clearly affects our moods and behavior.

Years ago, a colleague at Indiana Wesleyan University (Michael Boivin) presented a paper showing that certain parts of our brains "light up" when we are undergoing a spiritual experience. That is to say, it is at least theoretically possible that someone could counterfeit religious experiences by targeting those parts of our cerebral cortex.

However, these data points are not proofs that the brain is all there is to human identity. They merely indicate that the brain is significantly involved in human identity. They do not disprove the existence of a soul. 

[1] An image from Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon, 2012).

[2] I realize my statement borders on incoherence. I am using "intrinsically" in a questionable way. What I am trying to say is that our value cannot be detached or dislodged from us. Yet all created value is derivative. It derives from God. I do not see it as "ontological" in the sense that it inheres in us in some metaphysical way. It is ascribed value--undetachable, inalienable--but solely based on God's assignment. "Good is good because God says so." It is permanent and thus "essential," but it is not truly intrinsic.

[3] Joel Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible (Baker, 2008).

[4] N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (HarperOne, 2008).

[5] Oscar Cullmann, The Immortality of the Soul or the Resurrection of the Dead (Epworth, 1958).

[6] See John J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination: Death and Afterlife in the Second Temple Period and in several other works.

[7] It is tempting to invoke some sense of quantum entanglement here, although any literal reference would no doubt expose a quantum incompetence on my part. I am simply wondering if there is such a thing as a "spiritual" quantum entanglement.

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Introduction
1.1 What is philosophy?
1.2 Is philosophy Christian?
1.3 Unexamined assumptions
1.4 Socrates and the Unexamined Life
1.5 The Natural Philosophers 

Logic
2.1 The Structure of Thinking 
2.2 When Thinking Goes Wrong
2.3 Three Tests for Truth
2.4 Knowing the Bible
2.5 Plato and Aristotle
2.6 The Story of Logic 
2.7 Hellenistic Philosophy

Philosophy of Religion
3.1 Faith and Reason
3.2 How can we know that God exists?
3.3 God as First Cause 
3.4 God as Intelligent Designer
3.5 God as Necessary Being (including ontological argument)
3.6 God and Morality
3.7 God and Miracles
3.8 The Problem of Evil
3.9 Augustine and Aquinas

Philosophy of the Person
4.1 What is a human being?
4.2 A Body and a Soul?
4.3 What is the meaning of life? (including existentialism)
4.4 Are we free or fated?

Ethics

Social and Political Philosophy
6.1 How to Structure Government
6.2 Christ and Culture

Epistemology
7.1 Beyond Binary Thinking
7.2 Plato's Allegory of the Cave
7.3 Reason vs. Experience
7.4 Kant Breaks the Tie
7.5 The Bible as Object of Knowledge
7.6 Wittgenstein and Language
7.7 Kuhn and Paradigms
7.8 Foucault and Power
7.9 A Pragmatic Epistemology

Metaphysics
8.1 Hard Times for Metaphysics
8.2 A Brief Story of Metaphysics 

8.3 A Plug for Critical Realism 

3.3 God as First Cause

It's Thursday, philosophy journey day. Previous posts in my philosophical journey are at the bottom.
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1. One of the oldest and best known arguments for the existence of God has to do with the cause of the world. In the 300s BC, Aristotle (384-322BC) wrote about the "Prime Mover." [1] His argument was that everything that moves is pushed -- and of course the world is in motion. He did not believe this pushing could go back infinitely, so there must have been a first Mover that itself is unmoved. [2]

In the 1200s, Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) picked up this argument from motion and expanded it. God is not only the first Mover, but the first and last Cause, the only necessary Being. From our perspective today, some of his arguments make more sense than others. But the core argument stands.

Galileo effectively eliminated any simplistic version of the motion argument, discovering that a body in motion wants to stay in motion, and a body at rest wants to stay at rest. Bodies need pushed because of friction and gravity. Their natural disposition is to stay in motion forever.

2. The arguments from the need for a Cause and a Necessary Being continue to make sense. In fact, in a very real sense, they are more powerful arguments than ever.

William Lane Craig (b. 1949) has put the "efficient cause" argument like this. An efficient cause is that which brings about an effect. [3]

1. Everything that has a beginning has a cause.
2. The universe had a beginning.
3. Therefore, the universe had a cause.

This argument from cause is called the cosmological argument.

Modern physics has greatly helped us out here because it is currently the consensus among cosmologists that the universe had a beginning in time. Indeed, the current physics understanding of the beginning is so distinct that it fits very nicely with the argument above.

3. The biggest objection to the cosmological argument has always been the counterproposal that causes might go back in time infinitely. For example, David Hume (1711-76) famously made this countersuggestion in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779).

In twentieth century physics, this showdown played out in the debate over the "big bang" versus "steady state" theories of the universe's origins. The "steady state" theory was quite popular among those who wanted to see the universe as infinitely old. [4] Yet others recognized that Einstein's equations of general relativity might also point to the universe having a distinct beginning in time. [5] 

This theory was derisively called the "big bang" theory. Indeed, it is ironic that many Christians today associate the Big Bang theory with atheism. This is a huge misunderstanding -- indeed, one that demonstrates great ignorance. Some of the key early proponents of the so called "big bang theory" were Christians who saw how well it supported the cosmological argument. By the same token, some of its most vocal opponents despised it for that same reason.

The "Big Bang" theory won the day. It is now the consensus of modern cosmology that the universe's existence goes back to 13.7 years ago when the entire universe was, effectively, a point. [6] For a few decades, a counter suggestion known as the "oscillating Big Bang" was proposed -- it allowed the universe to be infinitely old by a recurring expansion and collapse of the universe. But for several decades now it has been acknowledged that there is not enough matter in the universe to suppose such an infnite cycle.

William Lane Craig has given a more philosophical counterargument to the "infinite regress" counterargument. He has argued that there is no true infinite in this universe. The idea of infinity is a valid mathematical concept, but it does not seem to exist in the observable universe. Quantum theory has eliminated any sense that matter or energy can be infinitely divided. And cosmological theory does not hold the universe to be infinite in scope. Thus, Craig argues, an infinite regression in time would break all known precedence in this universe.

4. So we have strong support currently from science that the universe had a beginning. Why then, did it begin? The supposition of an Intelligent Creator remains the easiest answer -- especially after we consider the fine tuning of the universe (the next article). However, other options have been suggested.

The strongest counterproposal, it seems to me, is the multiverse proposal. It basically proposes -- with no evidence, mind you, that our universe is only one of an infinite number of universes, each with its own laws and physics. You are here reading this because our universe works. [7] But, for these universes to arise mindlessly, the overwhelming majority of them must be chance failures. We are just the extraordinarily, fantastically lucky ones.

Stephen Hawking advanced a version of this proposal that I call the "Hail Mary" proposal. What if, just maybe, something is possible in the quantum universe that we don't know about, something that makes universes popping out of nowhere possible. You might call this an "atheist of the gaps" argument. [8]

5. To be sure, a First Cause is not yet the Christian God. Perhaps we could assert omnipotence. After the next article we might assert omni-intelligence. Nor am I arguing that this is a definitive argument -- our own fallibility must surely keep us a little shy of absolute proof. I have been a little rhetorically sharp to have fun.

I don't consider this argument definitive. (God may in his infinite knowledge and understanding.) But I do find it very persuasive.

[1] Metaphysics XII.6-10.

[2] I am probably skewing Aristotle and Aquinas a little. They were probably thinking more in terms of potentiality and actuality rather than time.

[3] This is his formulation of the Islamic version of this argument, called the Kalam cosmological argument. William Lane Craig, The Kalām Cosmological Argument (Macmillan, 1979).

Aristotle identified four different types of causes in his Physics (II.194b16–195a3): 1) the material cause, which is simply the material of something, 2) the efficient cause or the direct cause -- this is what we most think of as a cause, 3) the formal cause or essence of something, and 4) the final cause, which we think of more as the purpose of something. 

[4] Notably, the charismatic scientist Fred Hoyle argued for this position in the 1950s. The idea is that, as the universe expands, a tiny bit o matter is generated to fill the new space.

[5] Einstein himself was repulsed by this possibility and even added a constant to his equations to try to stop them from suggesting it.

[6] The decisive moment in this debate was when a cosmic microwave background (CMB) was discovered in 1965. This radiation, steadily decreasing, is thought to come from the early universe. If the universe were infinitely old, not only would it not exist, but the amount of time would have likely dissipated such a decreasing radiation to zero long ago.

[7] This is the so-called "anthropic principle." Whatever the unlikelihood of us being here, we are here. So we must just be the lucky ones. This proposal is circular and very unsatisfying philosophically.

[8] Here I'm mimicking the well-known warning called the "God of the gaps." God is used to explain some gap in our current knowledge. The problem is when science fills in those gaps. Does that mean our faith now goes away? My quip about the "atheist of the gaps" is that Hawking supposes that we will one day find a non-theist explanation for the universe's existence that he does not currently have. Of course, theoretically, we may.

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Introduction
1.1 What is philosophy?
1.2 Is philosophy Christian?
1.3 Unexamined assumptions
1.4 Socrates and the Unexamined Life

Logic
2.1 The Structure of Thinking 
2.2 When Thinking Goes Wrong
2.3 Three Tests for Truth
2.4 Knowing the Bible
2.5 Plato and Aristotle
2.6 The Story of Logic 

Philosophy of Religion
3.1 Faith and Reason
3.2 How can we know that God exists?
3.3 God as First Cause

3.2 How can we know that God exists?

1. As many as 80% of individuals in the United States would claim to believe in God or a higher power of some sort. We at least qualify for Paul's words in Acts 17:22 -- "I see that in every way you are very religious." What that number doesn't tell us is how many of us believe God is a person (or three), whether our concepts of him are at least in the ballpark, and whether we give our allegiance to him.

From a Christian standpoint, God is three persons (although one God). God is the almighty Creator of everything that exists, seen and unseen. He is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-present, all-loving. He is self-sufficient and sovereign -- the only, exclusive self-standing authority. Any other authority in this universe is by his allowance.

2. But how do we know this? That is both a theological and potentially a philosophical question. Here is where philosophy can get a little sticky for some -- what right do we have to question whether God exists?

We've already asked this question. My basic answer is that it depends on how you ask the question. The primary determinant of morality is intention. Do you ask the question to challenge God or to oppose him? Do you ask the question honestly as a truth-seeker? That is where the answer to this question lies. Let's assume we are asking it as truth-seekers.

How can we know that God exists?

3. One answer is that we only know if he tells us. We cannot find our way to him. He only brings us to him.

To some extent, this is the Christian answer. Officially, Christians believe that we cannot come to God unless he draws us to himself.

Yet there are at least two camps here. There are those who believe that our will does not really have anything to do with this "draw-ing." This is the Calvinist position. It is God's work alone -- monergism or "one work" done by God. Either God chooses you or he doesn't. If he choses you, you will believe and know that he exists.

In my opinion, however, this position leads to unsolvable problems with regard to evil. If God predetermines everything, then God predetermines evil. God commands rapists, serial killers, and child molesters. In short, it empties the biblical claims regarding God's love to ridiculousness and absurdity. God becomes the author of evil in a more or less direct way.

The other camp are those who believe God empowers our wills to participate in a movement toward him. It is a dual work or "synergism" of God's will and our wills. God draws us, but we must respond, empowered by his Spirit.

We return to the original question: how can we know that God exists? The first part of the answer is that he draws us to him. He reaches out to us so that we can come to him.

4. How does he reach out to us? 

He reaches out through his Spirit. The form this takes can vary with each individual. It is rarely a matter of apologetic reasoning, but it can be. There are the C. S. Lewises, the Josh McDowells, and the Francis Collinses. However, we should not think that reason was the ultimate basis. The Spirit was the ultimate basis using reason in their instances.

For far more people, the pathway is affective. "You ask me how I know he lives," the hymn says, "he lives within my heart." Yes, in itself this may seem a flimsy basis for faith. I had a professor in seminary who hated this line to the hymn. "No," Dr. Robert Lyon insisted, "we know because of the testimony of the apostles."

But faith is in part subjective. We believe it is objective too -- God exists whether I believe in him or not. But it is not my faith unless I believe. And the Spirit can lead me to faith on the basis of my feelings just as well has he can do so using my reason as the path.

The answer to the question, "How does God reach out to us?" is thus "in many and various ways." The sine qua non is God's reaching. Our response is also a requisite. But how God connects with our choice can be cognitive, affective, relational, or as many pathways as exist.

Nevertheless, it has often been the nature of philosophy to focus on the rational arguments. The next few articles will look at the primary arguments used in favor of God's existence: 1) arguments from cause, 2) arguments from order, 3) arguments from being and necessity, 4) arguments from morality, and 5) arguments from miracles. In this latter category, we will include arguments for the resurrection as well as personal experience.

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Introduction
1.1 What is philosophy?
1.2 Is philosophy Christian?
1.3 Unexamined assumptions
1.4 Socrates and the Unexamined Life

Logic
2.1 The Structure of Thinking 
2.2 When Thinking Goes Wrong
2.3 Three Tests for Truth
2.4 Knowing the Bible
2.5 Plato and Aristotle
2.6 The Story of Logic 

Philosophy of Religion
3.1 Faith and Reason
3.2 How can we know that God exists (this post)
3.3 God as First Cause

2.1 The Structure of Thinking

My philosophy meetings are done for the semester, but in honor of Thursday night, here is another post on my philosophical journey.
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1. There is a structure to the way we reason, a structure whose basic contours have been discussed at least since Aristotle in the 300s BC.

From one point of view, there are three basic components of reasoning. 

• There are assumptions. 
• There are relationships between assumptions. 
• And there are conclusions.

2. The relationships between assumptions are logic. There are no exceptions in this universe to the way logic works. Yes, it can take different forms. For example, logic can be expressed in stories. But the analysis that Aristotle and others abstracted always works as an analysis of good reasoning.

I want to emphasize this point because the late twentieth century had its share of detractors from logic as it historically has been used. I do not wish to argue that logic must be expressed in an Aristotelian way. However, I know of no approach that is as precise and reliable in its analysis of human reasoning. Other forms are far more prone to misdirection. They are, as it were, less mathematical.

Meanwhile, propositional logic -- as we might call it -- is always correct when it is formulated according to the rules. This makes it one of the most certain aspects of creation, closely related to math.

3. Aristotle laid out the fundamental pattern of logic in terms of what is called the syllogism. A syllogism has the form of 1) premise, 2) premise, 3) conclusion. The logic of a syllogism is valid if it works -- if the relationships between premises and conclusions work.

For example, take the following syllogism:

• All unmarried individuals are single.
• Jill is unmarried.
• Therefore, Jill is single.

Here we have 1) a general statement, 2) a subset of that general statement, 3) a connecting of the general statement with one example of it. The logic of this argument is valid. The conclusion must follow.

This is an example of deductive reasoning. The conclusion, as it were, is contained in the premises. You might think of deductive reasoning as an upside down V. It starts with an assumption and expands to the conclusions that follow from it.

The other kind of reasoning is inductive reasoning. It's like a regular V. With it, you start with evidence and then draw a conclusion from there. We will look at inductive reasoning in a later section.

4. It's important to note that, just because the logic of a syllogism is valid doesn't mean it's true. It is true only if both of the premises are true.

For example, it is true by definition that "All unmarried individuals are single." But what if Jill is actually married? Then the conclusion is false even though the logic of the argument works. 

5. As mentioned, the assumptions in logic are called premises. If the premises of an argument are true and the logic of an argument is "valid," then the conclusion of the argument is certainly true, without exception, and without any valid counter-argument. 

Why then do we diagree? The primary weak point of our arguments comes from faulty or debatable premises. That is, debatable assumptions. 

So there are two places where an argument may fail. It may fail because its logic isn't valid. And it may fail because one or more of its premises are false.

6. Where do our assumptions come from? First, sometimes they are wrong. Sometimes they come because we haven't interpreted the evidence correctly, as we will see. Perhaps we don't have all the evidence -- we rarely do. Perhaps we make a "hasty generalization" because we don't have all the evidence or we "connect the dots" in the wrong way.

Some of our assumptions are "unexamined," as we have seen. You may have heard the colorful saying that, "When we ASSUME, we make an A** out of U and ME." Jumping to conclusions when we don't have the facts or seeing what we want to see are major causes of bad thinking and faulty conclusions.

And here let me agree with some of the voices that have pushed back on logic in recent years. Mastery of logical reasoning does not guarantee moral clarity or correct conclusions. You can be an outstanding logician and hold troubling moral views or ridiculous perspectives. 

For example, Gottlob Frege (1848–1925), as we will see, was a brilliant logician. He is one of the most important figures in the history of logic. Yet in his later writings he expressed horrible views about Jews. Logical rigor doesn't mean your conclusions are correct -- especially if your premises are off. 

7. You no doubt have experienced or heard of the child that continues to ask "But why" until the parent finally responds in frustration, "Because I said so." This is a parable of all logic. 

Let's say we have a premise in an argument. We might support that premise with other premises. We might have an assumption that is a conclusion from another argument. And so on, and so on.

Eventually, however, all thinking comes down to what we might call axioms or assumptions that are not provable or disprovable. They are necessary for us to make any arguments. In geometry, you might remember that "two points make a line." This isn't something to prove. It's an assumption. 

In what is called Euclidean geometry, an assumption is that two parallel lines never meet. There are other geometries that don't make this assumption, but in everyday geometry, this is an assumption that is never proved. It's just assumed.

Later on our journey, we'll talk about some of our core assumptions. They might include premises like "The world outside me is real and distinct from me." How about "When an event would not have happened without the event before it, we say that the one event caused the other event"? What about "Time is the succession of one moment after another" and "Space is the potential for my movement beyond the extension of my body"?

The philosopher Alvin Plantinga (b.1932) has spoken of warranted and properly basic belief. He would argue that belief in God is "properly basic," meaning that it is foundational enough to our reality that God's existence doesn't necessarily have to be argued for. It is a reasonable assumption. Interestingly, he has also offered many arguments for the existence of God. [1]  

8. Another word for an assumption in logic is a presupposition. In particular, a presupposition tends to be an assumption that more foundational or significant. Some schools of thought relate presuppositions to what they might call a worldview. Sometimes, worldviews are seen as large systems of assumptions.

I would argue that there are more and less helpful ways of thinking about worldviews, as we will see eventually. If a worldview is seen as a collection of related perspectives, it can be a useful construct. However, some treat worldviews as inevitable systems. Or, worse, they might see an element of a worldview and conclude a person then has a host of other positions they may not actually have.

We will explore this "bad logic" later on.

9. I've mentioned that logic has had its detractors in recent decades. I had a student once -- now a professor himself -- who went to Princeton Seminary, which has a fair amount of what might be called "post-liberal" thinking. Post-liberal thinking tends to be anti-evidentiary thinking.

We had an interesting conversation after his first year. Clearly, the significance of Reason was being called into question. In Christian circles, we often find faith and reason pitted against each other.

I remember making a distinction between what we might call "macro-reason" -- that is, large systems of assumptions and conclusions -- and what I called "micro-reason." In that conversation, micro-reason referred to the simple logic that we have been exploring in this post.

You cannot avoid this logic if you have any thoughts at all. You cannot argue against Reason without using logic. You cannot interpret the Bible without logic. Let that sink in.

The concept of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral has reason as one of the four sides. But in reality, it is unavoidable at the center. We use reason to interpret Scripture, experience, and tradition.

We cannot escape it. As soon as we form a sentence, we have used reason. Reason thus is the unescapable foundation of all truth, at least in this universe.

[1] Captured in the book by Jerry Walls and Trent Dougherty, Two Dozen (or so) Arguments for God (Oxford University, 2018). 

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Introduction
1.1 What is philosophy?
1.2 Is philosophy Christian?
1.3 Unexamined assumptions
1.4 Socrates and the Unexamined Life

Logic
2.1 The Structure of Thinking (this post)
2.2 When Thinking Goes Wrong
2.3 Three Tests for Truth
2.4 Knowing the Bible
2.5 Plato and Aristotle
2.6 The Story of Logic

4.1 What is a human being?

Last night I had a final meeting with another group of philosophy students. We were filling in some gaps. We principally talked about what a human being is. Here are my own musings, going beyond the class to what I think.
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1. What is a human being? There are a couple obvious answers, I think, as a Christian.

First, I involve a body. Whatever else I am, I have a material component. Some of course would say that a body is all we are.

We are, at the very least, highly complex animals. I hear that my DNA is about 98% the same as the DNA of a chimpanzee (yours too -- it's not just me). It's alarmingly 60% the same as a chicken's -- again, not just me. Yours too.

The behaviorist B. F. Skinner (1904-1990) famously pointed out that humans can be manipulated using the same techniques as you can use to train a dog. [1] "Chocolate?" Sheldon asks Penny on Big Bang Theory as he "conditions" her not to talk when he gives her sweets. 

Nevertheless, Skinner assumed that we were only animals. I don't think a Christian should have a problem with a sense that we are animals. [2] It seems undeniable from any objective point of view. The question is whether that is only what we are. 

Are we just roadkill waiting to happen? Christianity says a resounding "NO!"

2. There is a second answer that Christians give to this question, and it is more important, I think. Maybe it is more important because it has deep implications for how we treat other people. It is a distinguishing belief -- or at least should be.

That is the belief that humans are created in the image of God (Gen. 1:26-27). I have found that it is very easy to say this. It is much harder to parse its implications. I don't think it should be hard. It just is because a large number of people -- including people who call themselves Christians -- don't want to follow its implications out in society and the world.

There is an "egalitarianism" of sorts that follows from this belief because there are no gradations in the image of God. Egalitarianism in this context means that you and I are equally valuable qua human beings. [3] You are not "more" of the image of God than I am, and I am not "more" of the image of God than you are. It is a statement of "ontology" or "being." That is, it is a statement of who we are.

The Declaration of Independence put it in a secular way: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [and women] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights." We'll talk about rights (vs. graces or privileges) at another time. The point is that, no matter what an individual human being's instrumental value might be -- our usefulness. All human beings as human beings have intrinsic value.

3. It's worth expanding a little on this point. If you have to choose between saving my life and saving the life of a president, you should save the president. He or she plays an immensely important role in the world. Me? I'm a blogger. The instrumental or useful value of a president is immensely greater than my instrumental value.

When we say that a human being is intrinsically valuable, we are saying that human beings have worth whether they do anything or not. We will get into the details of when human existence begins in a person life and when if ever it ends. But assuming a body is a human being -- a "person," as it were -- that individual has intrinsic value and worth.

This was the great offense to humanity that was Joseph Mengele, who experimented on those who were in the concentration camps of the Nazi regime. He did not consider Jews to be human beings. For that reason, he did not consider it immoral to cause them great pain by experimenting on them. Ironically, his experiments intrinsically assumed that they were of the same species as he was -- he was experimenting on them to learn about the human body, I presume.

4. When we get to the fifth section of this journey, we will pick up this train of thought as we launch a discussion of ethics. Although ethics is bigger than human to human interaction, it is understable that we focus mostly on how we should treat other human beings when we think of ethics. 

From a biblical and Christian standpoint, we have a responsibility to give all human beings a certain dignity as bearers of the image of God. The image of God is not conditional. It is a fundamental aspect of human identity. This is why, from a Christian perspective, even a serial killer should be treated with some fundamental dignity -- indeed, the nature of their crime is that they did not treat their victims in that way. To treat them as they treated others is to come down to their level. [4]

We should emphasize again that, as a fundamental value, human dignity is not dependent on what a person does. In the current debates over immigration, human dignity is not dependent on whether a person is "legal" or "illegal." This is true even from a secular, Constitutional perspective -- the Constitution ascribes certain core rights to people regardless of what they have done. And it is even moreso the case from a Christian perspective.

Disregard for the "rights" (or privileges, if you would prefer) of a human being is thus anti-Christian and anti-American.

5. Human value is thus part of our "ontology" -- it is part of who every human being. Even the dead should be treated with respect. 

I suppose that there is a sense in which human value is derivative. To speak of the "image" of God suggests that we mirror God. We reflect God. If God did not exist, our value would cease to exist.

However, God's not going anywhere. In fact, God is a necessary Being. All existence is contingent on God's existence. In that sense, the value of all creation is derivative from God.

For this reason, while our value (and existence) is derivative from God, it is "inalienable." We can go ahead and say that it is intrinsic to our ontology. It is part of who we are and cannot be removed or detatched from us.

6. Throughout the centuries, there have been varied perspectives on what the image of God might be. I find almost all the suggestions to capture a truth about who we are as humans.

In Genesis, it is a political image. God rules over the creation; humanity "rules" over the creation. The image of God in Genesis has to do thus with our position or status in relation to the world.

However, theologians have also spoken of the "natural" and "moral" image of God. [5] To use these terms in my own way, we can reason at least analogously to God reasoning. And we can make moral decisions analogously to God making moral judgments.

There is some level of reasoning in a chicken or chimpanzee, but it does not come close to the capacity of an average human being. So Christians believe that God is supreme intelligence. Our ability to think comes nowhere close to God's, but there is a meaningful resemblance all the same.

I would suggest that humans are the only species that makes moral judgments. Perhaps I would almost make this claim by definition, although I hope there is an empirical basis for the claim as well. 

To put it another way, killer whales and vicious dogs don't sin even though they can seem quite "mean" from an anthropomorphic perspective. But we are simply ascribing human characteristics to them. [6]

That is to say, we might suggest that humans have a moral image of God that an orangutan does not.

7. I suppose from a non-theist perspective, some of these latter claims might seem disputable. Is human rationality and moral thinking simply a more developed version of the capacities of less complex animals? Perhaps such debates are not outside the bounds of Christian debate as well.

The core point is what seems essential, namely, that all human beings should be given a fundamental dignity and value qua human beings. From a secular standpoint, such value can be seen as part of a social contract -- I agree to assign value to other human beings under the agreement that they will assign such value to me.

Hopefully, we will be able to convince AGI to respect us under some similar agreement. But that's a topic for another time.

[1] B. F. Skinner, The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental Analysis (Cambridge, 1938).

[2] Although I seem to remember my mother resisting this idea in some random conversation we had.

[3] I thought I'd work in the Latin qua for fun here. It means "as." We are equally valuable as human beings. What's philosophy without a little Latin here and there?

[4] Many in the modern world -- Christians and non-Christians alike -- take this principle to imply that the death penalty should not be a punishment. The question becomes whether it can be administered humanely, in my opinion, and under what circumstances.

[5] John Wesley's classic treatment of the image of God can be found in his sermon on "The New Birth." Of course, Wesley was largely premodern and didn't interpret biblical texts in context. That doesn't mean, however, that his theology was necessarily wrong at those points. The truth of an inference is not dependent on the strength of one's exegesis (a.k.a. the genetic fallacy).

[6] We have brainstormed the thought experiment in a Science and Scripture class I have taught whether it would make sense to hypothesize that homo sapiens before Adam and Eve did not sin because they were not yet fully "human" in a moral sense. What do you think?

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1.1 What is philosophy?
1.2 Is philosophy Christian?
1.3 Unexamined assumptions
1.4 Socrates and the Unexamined Life

2.1 The Structure of Thinking
2.2 Three Tests for Truth
2.3 Plato and Aristotle

3.1 Faith and Reason
3.2 Arguments for God's Existence
3.3 Suffering and Evil
3.4 Augustine and Aquinas

4.2 Beginnings and Endings
4.3 Free or Fated?
4.4 The Soul
4.5 Existentialism

5.1 Human Value (graces)

1.4 Socrates and the Unexamined Life

I had a brief philosophy meetup tonight as the last one for one group. I'll use it as an excuse to plug up the last hole in my introductory unit.

1.1 What is philosophy?
1.2 Is philosophy Christian?
1.3 Unexamined assumptions
1.4 Socrates and the Unexamined Life (this post)
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1. If I were to lead you on a journey through the primary sources of philosophy, I would probably start by having you read Plato's Apology. I always feel a little guilty about this because Socrates stands at the heart of the so-called "Western canon" of philosophical thought. What about China? For that matter, what about Proverbs?

Then again, the ancient Greeks were not Europeans. That's a historical paradigm of much later making. To me, Socrates is a great place to begin because of what he said at the time of his trial, not because he was Greek or "Western."

2. You may know the story. For decades, Socrates had made enemies of the rich and powerful in Athens. How? By embarrassing them in public. And how did he do that? By asking them questions they couldn't seem to answer and making them look like fools.

He was accused of subverting the youth by questioning the gods. In fact, he questioned everything. To be honest, I'm not sure his arguments were actually very good much of the time. He often committed the fallacy of equivocation by changing the meaning of words mid-argument. 

His philosophy was that there actually weren't answers to most of the questions he asked. [1] He reminds me of a friend I had in high school who always took the opposite side of any argument. I don't think it was always because they disagreed. They just liked to argue.

Socrates strikes me that way sometimes.

3. It is also difficult for me not to hear arrogance disguised as false humility in Socrates. It seems all too familiar. A friend goes to the Oracle at Delphi. She was the prophetess that everyone in Greece went to in order to get insight into the present and future. His friend asks, "Is Socrates the wisest man alive?"

It seems like a safe enough question for her. She often gave ambiguous answers like "Go to war and a nation will be overthrown." Of course, in a sense that would be true no matter who won. It reminds me of my parents' generation trying to follow a movie. "Who's that?" "What's happening there?" In the old days, they had to show a plane traveling on a map for the viewers to understand a change of setting, as the Indiana Jones movies mimic.

Socrates' response has always struck me as "What? Little ol' me? The wisest man? I'd better find out if this is true."

So, without really believing in the gods -- at least not the conventional gods of Athens -- he now considers himself to have a divinely-given directive to embarass all the leaders in Athens by showing them they're not really as smart as they think they are.

They probably had it coming to them. But it does make Socrates look like, well, let's say a very annoying person.

In the end, he says, "Well, what do you know? I must be the wisest person in town because I at least know that I'm not wise."

Despite questions over Socrates' sincerity, that is a key takeaway from The Apology -- true wisdom usually involves what I might call epistemic humility, a great awareness of what you don't know, not a strong sense of what you think you know.

4. Plato's Apology is also a great place to start a philosophical journey because of Socrates' great dictum that "The unexamined life is not worth living." I think that's a little bit much. There's also truth in the saying that "Ignorance is bliss." I suspect I would be a lot happier person if my life wasn't so self-examined.

However, all the same, I wouldn't trade my supposed self-awareness for obliviousness. So two caveats. I think it's acceptable for someone to say, "I'm not sure I could handle complete awareness. I think I'll just keep doing my thing over here." However, maybe don't try to make any important decisions for others, and don't post your opinions on Facebook. "The unexamined life is not worth posting."

The second is that I think I would rather live all the same, even if my life were unexamined. Socrates was found guilty of corrupting the youth and not believing in the gods. His enemies proposed death. He was allowed to offer a counter-proposal. The stubborn old git, did he counter-propose a fine? No. He proposed they give him a stipend to keep doing the very thing he was found guilty of. Idiot.

Of course, his proposal was rejected. So he has friends who offer to smuggle him out of Athens. "No, he stubbornly says. I've been found guilty. I must obey the law." He drinks the hemlock. It is sometimes said that he becomes the first martyr of philosophy. Nevermind that it's really his own fault in the end. It nevertheless secures his place in the pantheon of human philosophy -- with a lot of help from Plato.

5. Nevertheless, the unexamined life is often harmful to yourself and others. It can be very harmful if you live in a place where you get to vote on your country's future. In the end, I want to believe that a life oriented around the truth is a better life than one centered in ignorance. I want to believe that a life of self-awareness is a better life for those around you than obliviousness. Perhaps there are exceptions, but I would like to think that they are exactly that -- exceptions.

If you disagree, stop reading now. Go watch that entertaining Tic Tok or YouTube short. But try not to make any decisions that affect anyone but yourself.

[1] Like Jesus, Socrates never wrote anything down. We only know his teaching through the eyes of his followers. In The Apology, we probably come close to hearing the real Socrates. But we should also keep in mind that we are hearing Socrates through Plato's eyes. The further we go into Plato's writings, the more we are likely hearing Plato's ideas rather than Socrates'.
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1.1 What is philosophy?
1.2 Is philosophy Christian?
1.3 Unexamined assumptions
1.4 Socrates and the Unexamined Life (this post)

8.1 Hard Times for Metaphysics

I have another philosophy class tonight. The module is on metaphysics or the question of what is real. Here is a fuller version of what the conversation will likely be. Previous posts at bottom.
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1. From the time of Thales in the 500s BC to Kant around 1800, metaphysics was one of the three great preoccupations of philosophy. There was of course ethics -- very practical most of the time. Then there was epistemology -- very foundational.

Then there was metaphysics, the question of what is real. 

I'll go through a brief history of "Western" metaphysics in the next section. Let's just say that a lot of that story seems like a lot of made up stuff. With the dawn of the scientific age, the conversation changed substantially to things like atoms and particles.

But before Kant around 1800, the conversation largely wavered between matter and ideas as the ultimate basis of reality. We've already wandered near this conversation in the last section. We talked about the long standing debate over whether our minds or our experiences were the surest path to knowledge.

That debate of the rationalists versus the empiricists maps to some degree to the core debate of metaphysics -- are ideas most real, or is matter most real? The rationalists leaned toward ideas, and the empiricists leaned toward matter. [1]

In the previous unit, we learned that Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) broke this tie with regard to how we know what we know. He suggested that the content of our thinking came through our senses, but the organization of that content was a matter of our minds. We thus do not know the world as it is (das Ding an sich). We only know it as our minds process that input from our senses.

2. That moment was one of the biggest turning points in the history of philosophy. It was not a point of skepticism for Kant because he believed God guaranteed the general truthfulness of the way our minds process the world. But he nevertheless thought it implied that we only know the world as it appears to us, not as it actually is.

This conclusion led him to write, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysic. It is basically a warning -- it puts a real damper on classical metaphysics when we stipulate that you can't really know the answers to questions about what reality is apart from us observing it.

Accordingly, metaphysics has fallen on somewhat hard times these last two centuries. There have remained those who have continued either as idealists (Hegel) or materialists (Marx). But the key question has much more shifted to what we can know for certain at all and whether we can speak of reality at all.

In a couple sections, I'll put in a word for a version of critical realism. It goes hand in hand with the "pragmatic epistemology" I suggested at the end of Unit 7. Critical realism holds that the world I experience (which can include the spiritual realm) is real. However, my apprehension of that world is always limited by the finitude of my understanding and my fallen potential to misapprehend it. 

Similarly, as we have argued, my organization of the world involves paradigms and pictures. Some paradigms and pictures "work" better than others.

3. Most of us as Christians would probably characterize ourselves as something like dualists. That is to say, we believe that matter is real, and we believe there is a spiritual realm as well -- two realities and two realms. This "works" at least as a construct. We can say with the Gospel of John that "that which is born of flesh is flesh, and that which is born of spirit is spirit" (John 3:6).

But we don't necessarily have to take this imagery as a literal metaphysic. It's a picture. It works. It gets us "around town." It expresses reality without necessarily committing us to it as the actual science of reality. We can see it as a kind of figurative way of talking about reality that captures fundamental truths about the world. The literal of reality is a mystery.

Body/soul was one way one slice of the ancient world formulated its metaphysic. And some New Testament authors drew on it to picture reality. But there are arguably other metaphyical models in Scripture too, such as the Old Testament's dust/breath. All of these work as true expressions of mysteries.

[1] As we saw back in 7.3 and will see again in the next section, George Berkeley (1685-1753) was the big exception. He saw our senses as the truest path to truth, and he believed that ideas were the most real thing.
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1.1 What is philosophy?
1.2 Is philosophy Christian?
1.3 Unexamined assumptions
1.4 Socrates and the Unexamined Life

2.1 The Structure of Thinking?
2.2 Three Tests for Truth

3.1 Faith and Reason

7.1 Beyond Binary Thinking
7.2 Plato's Allegory of the Cave
7.3 Reason vs. Experience
7.4 Kant Breaks the Tie
7.5 The Bible as Object of Knowledge
7.6 Wittgenstein and Language
7.7 Kuhn and Paradigms
7.8 Foucault and Power
7.9 A Pragmatic Epistemology

8.1 Hard Times for Metaphysics (this post)
8.2 A Brief Story of Metaphysics
8.3 A Plug for Critical Realism

1.2 Is philosophy Christian?

I didn't have my normal Thursday night philosophy class, but I'll use the gap to fill in a topic we usually disucss in our first live session. See series at bottom.
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1. Philosophy can have a fairly bad reputation in some contexts among Christians. A few years ago, there was even a movie called God's Not Dead where the antagonist was a philosophy professor who was strongly hostile to Christian faith. Although the character was quite flat, there is probably some truth hiding in the presentation. [1]

Philosophy classes aren't always known for being friendly to faith. After all, if philosophy is about asking questions, then it's going to have a natural tendency to expose blind spots in the way you think. As such, it can have a tendency to facilitate changes in perspective. Since the very existence of Christian colleges often centered on providing an environment that protects the traditions of a sponsoring church, you can see the potential for tension here! 

Accordingly, philosophy is sometimes taught as more of a worldview class. Rather than raise questions, philosophy becomes about giving the right answers. It becomes a preparation for thought war. It leans heavily into apologetics or the defense of the faith. "Here's why the skeptic is wrong."

2. I would argue that, whichever approach you take, philosophy at least can be approached Christianly. I am quite fond of the motto, "faith seeking understanding." [2] The idea is that we start our pursuit of truth with faith. We "believe in order to understand" [3] 

Decades ago, I had a philosophy student come to my office, stimulated by some of the things we were talking about in philosophy. He said, "I'm going to throw out everything I believe and start from scratch." I urged him not to do it. For one, it's not practical. But it also risks throwing the baby out with the bath water. And there are all sorts of cliffs to fall off of in the process. Few of us are geniuses and, even if you are, geniuses can easily lack perspective.

No, it's best to stand on the shoulders of thousands of years of thinking. You won't live long enough to reconstruct all that! If you want to climb down a little or change some shoulders, it's best to do that on a journey that is more careful in its questioning. There's too much to know, too many different options. "Start with the faith you have." Or as the father of the possessed son put it, "I believe. Help my unbelief" (Mark 9:24).

3. Just in case, Colossians 2:8 wasn't talking about what we're talking about. "Look that there will not be someone taking you hostage by philosophy and empty deception." In fact, even translating this verse with the word philosophy is misleading. As you continue to read, it is clear that it is a religious option that Colossians has in view, not a philosophical one. It involves the observance of certain festivals and abstaining from certain foods (2:16). It involves worshiping with angels (2:18). In short, it refers to a Jewish sect, not a philosophy as we think of one.

4. So, what kind of approach to philosophy might assure us that it is done Christianly? Here we get into some questions that we will explore in more detail soon enough. Good thinking is largly structured with two key elements -- assumptions and logic. 

Logic has rules that have been thoroughly explored for over two thousand years. There are no exceptions to them working! This is an important fact to point out. In the history of the world, the rules of logic are as certain as math. They have never failed -- not even once. This may seem like a crazy claim, but it is true. I personally have to think that God has built the rules of logic into the structure of the universe.

Then why is there so much disagreement? Let's assume that two people who disagree are both using logic. Why would they then disagree?

First, they may not have structured their logic quite right. For logic to work, each assumption or "premise" needs to connect to the next and to the conclusion in a tight, crisp way. 

Even more likely, they may differ in their assumptions and premises. We might connect these premises also back to more fundamental "presuppositions." Presuppositions are your fundamental assumptions. They are the assumptions that stand behind the premises that logic works with.

So I would argue that it is in the domain of assumptions that philosophy either is or is not Christian. For example, if our logic assumes the claims of the Nicene Creed and core biblical claims, then you could argue that philosophical argument stands squarely without the domains of Christian faith.

There is also, however, an approach that sees faith and reason sufficiently in harmony that it focuses on the heart of faith in pursuit of truth. The heart of this philosopher "wants" Christian faith to be true, "expects" Christian faith to be vindicated. All options are on the table in full expectation that good reason and evidence will point in the direction of faith -- or at least allow for faith. It is not afraid of asking questions, convinced that the answers will cohere with faith or leave space for faith.

5. Accordingly, what are some ways in which philosophy might not cohere with Christian faith. Here are some ways:

• When a person asks questions with a heart that wants to undermine faith. The goal is not truth or faith but is antifaith.
• When a person rejects out of hand the presuppositions or assumptions of faith. If faith is not even an option, then it will difficult to arrive at faith conclusions. It is possible -- if you end up with non sequiturs in your other reasonings.
• When you are not equipped to think philosophically. Not everyone is wired to do philosophy in a "meta" kind of way. Some who fear that they will only be easily misled may opt for blind faith on their part. This is a coherent choice too.

So, yes, philosophy can be Christian! If it is done in a way that is open to faith and allows faith assumptions into the conversation. 

[1] In literature, a flat character is one that is fairly stereotypical and predictable rather than dynamic the way most human beings are. Most real world villains are complex, as are most real world heroes.

[2] The saying goes back to Anselm (ca 1033-1109), building on an idea that was also expressed by Augustine (354-430).

[3] Also from Anselm in his Proslogion.

1.1 What is philosophy?
1.2 Is philosophy Christian? (this post)
1.3 Unexamined assumptions
1.4 Socrates and the Unexamined Life

2.1 The Structure of Thinking?
2.2 Three Tests for Truth

3.1 Faith and Reason

7.1 Beyond Binary Thinking
7.2 Plato's Allegory of the Cave
7.3 Reason vs. Experience
7.4 Kant Breaks the Tie.
7.5 The Bible as Object of Knowledge
7.6 Wittgenstein and Language
7.7 Kuhn and Paradigms
7.8 Foucault and Power
7.9 A Pragmatic Epistemology

3.1 Faith and Reason

I had another philosophy live session with a group tonight. Tonight's session was on the philosophy of religion -- arguments for the existence of God and potential answers to the problem of evil and suffering.

This post is part of a series of pieces from my philosophy classes that I've decided to post whenever I have a live session of some sort, which is often. So far I've posted on some introductory topics and an epistemology one. The posts here on the blog will go well beyond class discussion, since I try to play more of a facilitator role there.
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3.1 Faith and Reason
1. The third leg of our philosophical journey is the philosophy of religion. Assuming that God exists, God is the most important Being -- in fact the only truly essential Being. There are some who have a lesser sense of God, of course. But the historic, Christian sense of God sees God as the ground of all existence, without whom nothing would or could exist. 

Classic Christian theology speaks of God's "aseity," meaning God's full self-sufficiency. This means that God has no need of anything outside of Godself. Everything else has a sort of "contingent" existence. Nothing else must exist. But God must exist, and nothing else could exist without God's existence.

So, it makes sense to turn directly to the philosophy of religion on our pilgrimage toward reflectivity. If God exists, we should assume it affects everything. If God did not exist, it seems that it would effect everything else on our journey as well.

It makes sense to get these options out on the table before we go any further.

2. In the first segment of this journey, we talked about the fact that we all have unexamined assumptions about reality and the world. This is certainly true when it comes to religion no differently from other key issues. 

For example, I can imagine someone saying, "Why should I believe in God?" "What's in it for me?" so to speak. 

On one level, this is a quite peculiar question. God's existence -- and the nature of God's existence -- is not dependent in any way on you or me. God either exists "out there" or God doesn't. 

When it has this flavor, the question may reveal an unexamined assumption that God's existence is subjective -- a matter of my opinion. But think about this assumption. Would you come up to me and ask, "Why should I believe you exist?" You might, if you were high on something or suspected I was a holograph or an illusion.

But on a normal day, it doesn't matter "what's in it for you" to believe I exist. You sit there pondering, and I'll go have some lunch.

3. There was actually a philosopher in the twentieth century who suggested that God's existence was a matter of the personal and social "games" we play based on the belief that God exists. So, my belief that God exists might keep me from running someone over with my car. In a sense, it doesn't matter whether God really exists objectively. My belief that God exists changes the world through the impact it has on my actions.

Ludwig Wittgenstein -- the philosopher in question --believed that God existed in these "language games" that we play. God is real, he thought, because the idea has a serious effect on the world. We call those who see the existence of God in such terms "Wittgensteinian fideists." [1]

As a historic Christian, I believe that God exists outside of human discourse -- "out there," so to speak. However, I also suspect that Wittgenstein is right about a lot of people who claim to believe in God, including many people in the church. I suspect there are many prayers that are really monologs, and the person praying isn't even self-aware of it. [2]

I suspect that many a person who would say, "Why should I believe in God?" are more asking "what's in such belief for me?" They are implicitly indicating that they do not truly think of God as an objective Being but as a matter of subjective opinion. That is to say, they don't believe in the real God in the first place. They are discussing the concept of God. [3]

4. There are other unexamined assumptions we might have in relation to the proper relationship between faith and reason. That is to say, we are "unitary" thinkers on this question -- by which I mean we only know one way to think of the issue. We don't really know that there are even other options.

So, one person assumes that Christian beliefs are thoroughly provable by argument. "The evidence demands a verdict," as Josh McDowell put it. C. S. Lewis felt this way. Lee Strobel feels this way. If you come from this kind of Christian culture, you will assume that apologetics is an obvious endeavor in which to participate.

Then consider those whose unexamined assumption is that faith is blind ("blind faith"). This person may see faith as a gift. Some people have it. Others don't. It has nothing to do with reason. Some people just believe and that's that. For others, faith seems ridiculous to believe, absurd.

Then there is the vast middle ground. Their assumptions might be a little more examined because they might find some aspects of faith as very reasonable, and others rather more difficult to understand.

A related issue, it seems to me, is the extent to which faith should be evaluated by reason. We hinted at this question earlier when we asked if philosophy was even Christian. From one perspective, to evaluate faith is to stand over it and, thus, to put yourself in the position of a god over the God. From another perspective, such questioning can be an honest pursuit of truth from human beings whose minds are fallen and finite.

5. Let's start with one end of the spectrum. This view sees most claims of faith as nearly provable. It implicitly has a high view of the human ability to reason. We think of Thomas Aquinas in the 1200s as well as the other thinkers I mentioned above.

On the one hand, it makes perfect sense to think that all matters of faith are perfectly provable from God's standpoint. If we knew what God knows, if we could reason as God reasons, we would see that faith is totally provable.

However, our minds are finite and fallen. We do not have full knowledge. We do not reason perfectly. We do not know what we do not know. We are stuck in our heads.

It seems to me that there is sometimes an unexamined assumption that proving faith is the same as saving faith. But faith in Christ is not merely intellectual. In fact, it is far more a matter of heart commitment than mere cognitive assent. "The demons also believe and tremble" (Jas. 2:19). Head belief is far from sufficient for salvation.

So, you cannot argue someone to faith. Faith is a matter of the will and choice. If you believe in predestination, then faith is entirely a matter of the Lord's action with no real human action. In this case, any intellectual element would be entirely orchestrated by God himself. It is no cause of salvation.

If you believe that the Spirit empowers some choice, as my theological tradition does, then intellect still remains an insufficient basis for faith. Argument can remove obstacles to faith. There do seem to be some individuals who reluctantly come to faith as a result of their reasoning. But, again, reason seems to set up fruitful conditions for faith rather than being the actual cause of faith.

6. Still, the opposite extreme does not seem a better option. Is faith believable because it is impossible, a Tertullian suggested? Is faith a blind leap of faith, as Soren Kierkegaard held?

Karl Barth in the twentieth century promoted a faith that hung in mid-air without rational argument. "Dogmatics," he called it. Still, every sentence of his multivolume magnum opus uses reason. It is inevitable. 

It seems to me that there's some serious inconsistencies among these "presuppositionalists," as I call them. A presupposition is an assumption, as we saw earlier. Those who are borderline anti-reason sequester certain beliefs from evaluation but then use normal reason in every sentence of their arguments and claims.

My personal sense is that this is a dodge, a cop out. In some instances, it might actually be a lack of faith. What was the soil out of which Barth's theology grew but a sense that all the reason in play went against faith? What was the soil out of which "post-liberalism" grew in the late twentieth century? Was it not a sense that faith couldn't survive the normal reasoning that had led to liberalism?

Please excuse me for thinking that these are approaches born of defeat. We can't cut the mustard on the playing field of reason, so we will downshift into an argument that brackets the truth from reason.

7. In my own personal struggles, I concluded that faith should be reasonable although probably not provable given our current fallen and finite state. Faith is generally rational rather than irrational -- although there may be some instances where we simply need to exercise faith when the evidence seems against us. But we can be honest about those situations if and when they arise.

To some degree, this was Blaise Pascal's approach. If God made everything completely clear, then the nature of our will, our choice, would be less clear. But Pascal also believed that faith was reasonable.

I would like to think that God created reason. God created math, which is related to reason. While our reason may be clouded at times, I would like to think that its general structure was created and blessed by God.

I do not think that God is intimidated by human reason. God is not sitting in heaven nervous about his own existence. Rather, he is absolutely confident that he exists.

God is not insecure like a father who blows up at his children if they question his authority. That's a father who needs some therapy. God is not threatened by us. God is not insecure. The pictures of God as wrathul in Scripture are anthropomorphic. After all, anger involves response, and God has known every event that would happen since the foundation of the world.

This leads me to an absurd thought experiment. What if you could sit down with God and prove to him that he did not exist? How would he react? He would say, "Fair enough," and disappear.

Of course, that is a ridiculous thought experiment. The point is that God is not afraid of our questions or our search for truth. Rather, he supports it if it is truly seeking understanding. Remember "faith seeking understanding"? God and good reasoning are in complete alignment.

He also knows that the search is fake for many of us. He also knows that great caution is often necessary because of how easily deceived we are.

But I would like to think that God is very much on board with the pursuit of truth using both reason and evidence. Faith is reasonable, but usually not provable from a human standpoint.

[1] Kai Nelson, "Wittgensteinian Fideism," Journal of Philosophical Studies 42:161 (1967): 191-209.

[2] See D. Z. Phillips' application of Wittgenstein's thoughts on God to prayer in The Concept of Prayer (Routledge, 1965).

[3] On the other hand, there are those who would ask this question with a genuine question of why a person should conclude there is a God. For them, it is a question of truth while the other group I mentioned are asking, "What's in it for me in such belief?"