Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Acknowledgments

One thing I regret in relation to my book is that there was no “acknowledgments page” at the start. The effect of this is that some of those towards whom I am most indebted were not mentioned in the book. And so, I want to post my acknowledgments page here.

First, I would like to thank my wife, Tanya, who became something of an author’s widow during the months when I was most intensely engaged in writing, and who gamely took up the parenting slack on weekends so that I could go into the office to work. On game days when OSU football fans took over the university, including every available parking space within miles of the campus, Tanya would drive me within hailing distance of campus, our children in the back, so that I could hike through the throngs of fans to my office. And, when it was time for me to come home, she’d cruise up and down the major street just outside campus until I could make my way back through the orange revelry.

I would like to thank my department head, Doren Recker, for taking action to relieve me of my undergraduate advising duties so that I could devote my attention to writing. More broadly, I want to thank the members of my department for providing an atmosphere of intellectual encouragement and support.

I would like to thank my children for providing the emotional grounding that keeps me asking how my academic pursuits are relevant to the business of life. I would also like to thank my son for a particularly memorable exchange. One afternoon, while I was sitting at the kitchen table with the entire manuscript in front of me, proof reading, Evan sat down next to me and asked me what that HUGE pile of papers was (he was not quite five at the time).

“It’s the book I’m working on,” I said. And then, in a moment of pride: “One day soon, when you go to the bookstore, you might see Daddy’s book there.” My intent was to impress him, but he didn’t look impressed. Instead, he fingered one of the pages of the manuscript and asked, “Can I draw on these?”

Since then, of course, I’ve had some of the more extreme critics of my book all but say that its greatest value is as scrap paper. They might be pleased to know that my son agrees with them. Every writer should have an Evan around to jar them out of their pretensions of grandeur.

Finally, I would like to thank my intellectual mentors. I am, of course, indebted to my professors in college and graduate school who oversaw my early intellectual development, most notably Newton Garver who directed my dissertation on violence and Christian love, and who first introduced me to Simone Weil as well as to the essay on ideological violence by John Ladd which has so influenced my thinking over the years. I must also say that my understanding of science and its methods—which comes out in my book—was largely shaped during the semester Garver and I team-taught an epistemology course.

On a deeper and more abstract level, it is Garver who first introduced me to the Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP), which was born out of the collaboration of Quakers and prison inmates, and which offers experiential nonviolence/conflict resolution/community-building workshops in prisons as well as in various community settings. I cannot begin to understand how my involvement with AVP has shaped my personal and intellectual life, but I have no doubt that where I have succeeded in avoiding stridency in my philosophical arguments, I have AVP to thank. Where I have succeeded in being fair to my intellectual opponents, I have the listening skills taught in AVP to thank. And the spiritual impulse that lies at the heart of my book—to resist the urge to insist that all reasonable people must ascribe to the same worldview, to seek an intellectual space in which divergent perspectives can co-exist without insisting that those who disagree are either idiots or moral monsters—this is a spiritual impulse that has been nurtured in me through years of facilitating conversations about the meaning of life in prisons, addiction recovery groups, church youth groups, and other settings.

I am also indebted to a faculty member from the philosophy department at Ithaca College whose name, unfortunately, I cannot recall (nor can I recall what he looks like). What I do recall is that when I went to Ithaca College for a job interview during my final year in graduate school (a one-year position that I didn’t get), this philosopher was giving me a walking tour of campus—and said something about being interested in religious hope. We proceeded to have a conversation about the concept of hope (he rejected the idea that it involved expectation, since we can hope for things that we don’t expect to happen), as well as about what role hope played in religious faith and religious life. I remember sitting with him on a grassy hillside and talking about Martin Luther King, Jr., whose thought at the time was a central focus of my research.

Beyond that, I don’t remember much about the conversation. What I do remember is coming out of it convinced (in a way I hadn’t been before) that hope was really central to understanding religion—a conviction that eventually evolved (through my engagement with other thinkers, most notably William James) both into my functional definition of God as that whose existence would fulfill the “ethico-religious hope” and into my pragmatic understanding of religious faith as the decision to live as if a hoped-for possibility is true.

But my most significant intellectual mentor is a friend I first met in graduate school, who has done more to shape the course of my intellectual life than any other individual. John Kronen was the other “God guy” among the graduate students in a very secular philosophy department. He was a few years ahead of me in the program and so defended his dissertation after my second year at SUNY Buffalo, but we continued to maintain a close friendship over the years, one characterized by intense and lively philosophical conversations which have often culminated in collaborative articles.

While my professors in graduate school introduced me to the most recognized figures in the history of philosophy, it was John who first introduced me to Schleiermacher and Hermann Lotze. It was John who first suggested that I read Plutarch’s essay, “On Superstition,” which he called “very wise.” I think that it was John who, more than a decade ago when I was putting together a course on ideological justifications for violence, suggested Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew as an ideal text to include in such a course. It was John who bought me Zaehner’s The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism and encouraged me to read it. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if up to a third of my theological library is comprised of books that John bought for me as birthday or Christmas presents.

I’ve learned that if John says, “Read this,” I will find it worth reading. Unfortunately, being a very slow reader, I cannot keep up with the list of works he recommends. But his track record of guiding me towards works that have influenced and inspired me is so remarkable that his recommendations (and gifts) consistently end up higher in the queue than do others.

John is one of the few individuals who read the entire manuscript of Is God a Delusion? as it was being produced. And while he (good-naturedly) bemoans the fact that I did not change the book in light of his criticisms, the reason for this is clear: So much of who I am intellectually is already shaped by John’s influence that, where we disagree (on such matters as intelligent design, for example), the disagreement represents one of those places where years of arguments and reading recommendations have failed to convince me.

Every scholar should, I think, have a friend like that.

9 comments:

  1. "We proceeded to have a conversation about the concept of hope (he rejected the idea that it involved expectation, since we can hope for things that we don’t expect to happen), as well as about what role hope played in religious faith and religious life."

    I identify with this a lot. It reminds me of Puddleglum's speech in The Silver Chair, the fourth in the Narnia series by CS Lewis:

    Puddleglum: "Suppose... suppose we have only dreamed and made up these things like sun, sky, stars, and moon, and Aslan himself. In that case, it seems to me that the made-up things are a good deal better than the real ones. And if this black pit of a kingdom is the best you can make, then it's a poor world. And we four can make a dream world to lick your real one hollow.

    Green Lady: How dare you threaten me!

    Puddleglum: As for me, I shall live like a Narnian even if there isn't any Narnia. So thank you very much for supper. We're going to leave your court at once and make our way across your great darkness to search for our land above!"

    There's always a danger in viewing the world around us in a nihilistic manner. But a true hope and faith extends to this world and, if it's a good hope and faith, it will enrich our experience here and now. I prefer the term "deeper experience" to "transcendent" as I don't want to transcend the world, but rather to dive in more fully.

    thanks! Steven

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  2. "I prefer the term 'deeper experience' to 'transcendent' as I don't want to transcend the world, but rather to dive in more fully."

    At some point I ought to write something about my understanding of the concept of transcendence. As I understand that term, it is *roughly* a synonym for what Kant means by the noumenal.

    For Kant, there is the thing as we experience it (the phenomenon) and the thing as it is in itself (the noumenon). The world of phenomena is what he refers to as empirical reality--it is the world OF experience. But the relation between this *world of experience* and *reality as it is in itself* can never be an object of knowledge for Kant, because Kant is convinced that knowledge is necessarily limited to the empirical realm.

    Where things get interesting, for Kant, is when he reflect on human beings as agents who act in the world. Just as there is a distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal with respect to the ordinary objects we engage with, there is also such a distinction to be drawn in relation to the SELF. There is who we ARE, in ourselves--the noumenal self; and then there is how we appear TO ourselves when we try to experience ourselves. This noumenal self cannot be an object of experience, and hence cannot be an object of knowledge--but it is who we most essentially ARE, and hence we are IMMEDIATELY living the life of a noumenal self (so to speak). It is in the business of living, rather than the business of investigation and inquiry, that we come into true contact with ourselves.

    For this reason, it is in connection with his moral philosophy that Kant has the most to say about the noumenal self--but what he has to say does not take the form of claims that can be known, but rather the form of claims that must be postulated in order for moral agency to be possible (for example, that we are beings who can act on the basis of abstract reasons as opposed to being causally determined to behave as we do by prior empirical conditions and the laws that regulate the empirical world).

    For some reason, your metaphor of "diving in" to the world resonated with this Kantian perspective. We "dive in" to who we essentially are in the business of living, as opposed to distancing ourselves FROM ourselves in order to make OF ourselves objects of experience and hence knowledge.

    But if this is right, then it is when we are most in touch with our "transcendent self"--in the sense of "transcendent" that I intend--that we are most deeply connected with reality. Likewise for being in touch with God.

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  3. I like the Kantian idea quite a bit. We do not experience the world itself, but rather the filter of the world that our mind creates. I think most people would agree with this although there is probably variation in the interpretation. And if we cannot access the "real" world from our filter of it, it is difficult to speculate about. I suppose here is where faith can allow us to let go and not worry too much - just do our best.

    "for example, that we are beings who can act on the basis of abstract reasons as opposed to being causally determined to behave as we do by prior empirical conditions and the laws that regulate the empirical world)."

    I don't find these two ideas to be contradictory. I think they may be true at once.

    "We "dive in" to who we essentially are in the business of living, as opposed to distancing ourselves FROM ourselves in order to make OF ourselves objects of experience and hence knowledge. "

    Well said! This reminds me of the somewhat Buddhist idea of direct experience vs. the thinking mind


    In my latest blog, I tried to write, very succinctly, my definition of faith.

    Faith is a recognition of human limitation followed by an attitude of openness and trust towards the unknown. I do not define it as intellectual submission to a specific dogma.

    I do not think it is far from yours.

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  4. Steven:

    With regard to the following. "...I don't find these two ideas to be contradictory. I think they may be true at once."

    There's an important sense in which this was also Kant's view. One of his chief aims in the Critique of Pure Reason was to resolve various "antinomies," and one of the strategies he invoked to do so was the introduction of the phenomenal/noumenal distinction. And a key antinomy that he dealt with using this distinction was that between causal determinism and free agency. Causal determinism, for Kant, is an empirical truth. Free agency is a noumenal one. When we look at human activity as a phenomenon, it accords with the causal determinist account. But if we consider the necessary postulates of morality, we must say that it is a noumenal truth that selves are agents who act on reasons.

    What Kant would deny here, however, is that there is room for free agency if we treat the phenomenal picture of humanity as the whole story.

    --Eric

    P.S. Yes--your definition of faith resonates with me.

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  5. Eric Reitan said: “ What I do remember is coming out of it convinced (in a way I hadn’t been before) that hope was really central to understanding religion

    This was for me the best part in your book. Before reading it I thought that to interpret “faith” as “belief without sufficient evidence” was a strawman that atheists used, but you showed that this is entailed in a valid meaning of “faith”, which may be the central meaning in the religious life of many people. In some ways this is the most beautiful kind of religious belief because it grows from an interior goodness, rather than be moved by reason or by revelation or by mystical experience. And it helped me understand John 20:29: “Jesus said to him, Because you have seen me, Thomas, you have believed; happy those not having seen, and having believed.”

    What I don’t quite understand though is why you explained the idea using the concept of “hope” rather than the concepts of “choice” or of “commitment”. As I see it, it goes like this: For many people it’s not clear from their experience of life whether reality is just a mechanism blindly churning away (with at bottom “no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference” to use Richard Dawkins’s words) as naturalism has it, or whether reality does have purpose, does have good and evil in it, and stands squarely on the side of what’s good - as religion has it. Given that they don’t see enough evidence for accepting either one or the other worldview they choose *on faith* the latter one, and commit themselves to that belief.

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  6. Eric,

    Thanks for elaborating on this subject. I agree in spirit, and I have no problem even seeing it paradoxically.

    Even if my decision was physically determined, I still had to make the decision. Perhaps Kant's dualist idea can also be applied simply to the fact that looking backwards reveals determinism, while looking forward does not.

    thanks!

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  7. On reviewing this acknowledgments page, I see one glaring omission: I should have thanked my editor at Wiley-Blackwell, Jeff Dean, for three things: first, his support for this project from the very beginning (a support that is all the more admirable because his own philosophical commitments are so different from my own); second, for asking me during our first phone conversation what kind of book I most wanted to write (thereby helping to focus a project which was initially trying to be too many things); third, for the suggestion (early in the book's genesis) to look beyond Dawkins to the recent wave of "new atheist" writers, and to expand my critical discussion to include them.

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  8. Dianelos--

    Thanks for the thoughtful remarks. The view of faith I endorse *features* hope but is more fully articulated as follows: faith is the decision to live as if a hoped-for possibility is true.

    Here, the element of decision or choice is included, as is the element of pragmatic belief (you believe X in the sense that you behave as if X is the case) as well as the demand for a rational standard (it must be a possibility in the sense of being an interpretation of experience that fits with reason and the substance of experience even if it goes beyond them).

    But the motivating impulse that gives rise to the choice or decision is the hope that goodness is in some way the most fundamental truth. This is a moral hope that springs from one's moral character, and it is religious in that it motivates a pragmatic belief in God--hence, "the ethico-religious hope."

    --Eric

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  9. Thanks for the thanks, Eric. You're a great author to work with, and I enjoy stopping by your blog on occasion!

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