tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6215077578479252542.post7909121921724408301..comments2024-03-15T17:06:31.642-05:00Comments on The Piety That Lies Between: A Progressive Christian Perspective: Divine Mystery and Divine GoodnessEric Reitanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06135739290199272992noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6215077578479252542.post-41530885338298658132010-12-23T15:30:28.663-06:002010-12-23T15:30:28.663-06:00Hi, Eric
I recently finished your book, and I tha...Hi, Eric<br /><br />I recently finished your book, and I thank you for your earnest insight into rational theism.<br /><br />I was raised Catholic, went through a period of charismatic Christianity, and then made a gradual transformation to agnosticism. I consider myself now to be an actively ever-seeking agnostic. I continue to open every door I find to look for God, and each time I find a beautiful aspect of Truth, but no God. I continue to believe and hope for Good, but I remain unconvinced that Good ultimately dominates Bad. <br /><br />Three years ago I began a concentrated endeavor to philosophically and pragmatically scrutinize theism. I read Dawkins, Hitchens, et al. I also read some of their critics. The precipitate of this scrutiny consisted most strongly in doubt.<br /><br />My philosophical musings abruptly materialized into a personal, agonizing questioning and reevaluation in light of personal tragedy. In one year's time, I suddenly lost my husband and all my dreams, my 4-year-old nephew drowned due to parental neglect, and my young children and I moment-by-moment watched and cared for my father as he suffered and died of bone cancer. <br /><br />My ensuing grief and suffering were wrought from hell. I opened myself up in desperation to divine comfort. I fell helplessly onto the compassionate arms of my family, friends, and community. Any inkling of comfort my soul received was from the certain knowledge that people so ardently cared and sympathized with me. The uncertainty and mystery of a good God gave me no consolation.<br /><br />I offer you my testimony in response to your assertion that "salvation" from life's horrors cannot come from us, that a disbelief in God can offer no comfort. Days after my father's death, I gave a speech about my personal journey with this issue. I invite you to watch the 3-part video of the speech, or read its transcript, found here: http://www.patrick.sawyersweb.com/<br /><br />I remain searching. I believe in the certainty of searching, because Truth seems to be, from all my experience and evidence, Infinite.Nancy Sawyerhttp://www.patrick.sawyersweb.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6215077578479252542.post-69187519398821369042010-01-15T21:53:20.688-06:002010-01-15T21:53:20.688-06:00Nice post.
I certainly agree that morality cannot...Nice post.<br /><br />I certainly agree that morality cannot be derived from studying naturalism, evolutionary theory, etc. Morality is a "leap" - a step forward based on values whose origins can perhaps be explained by evolution, but are not required to have by evolution (since natural selection, as a mechanism, has no foresight)<br /><br />But I don't think that a person who rejects "ultimate" meaning or transcendence, is morally nihilistic. That would imply that they believe that in the place of God there is a hole of despair or something. Rather, they don't think there is a God, so morality is very real and present now - even if the universe will end in a heat death billions of years in the future regardless of what we do.<br /><br />Of course, this view shares much in common with Universalism - in the end we end up the same, so morality is more about the present than some payout in the future. Suffering and pleasure are both very real regardless of our beliefs about God.<br /> <br />But I also agree with you that ignoring our direct experience of the world is no way to live and is not necessarily justified. I see no reason not to live in hope, in goodness as a quality. <br /><br />So I have a problem when atheists deny that they have indefensible, self-refuting first principles (which everyone does). But I have a problem with theists who claim that morality is dependent on an "ultimate" view of the universe.Steven Starkhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07677314285938844360noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6215077578479252542.post-16154750444677321472010-01-07T15:08:34.809-06:002010-01-07T15:08:34.809-06:00Enjoyed reading your excellent effort to wrestle k...Enjoyed reading your excellent effort to wrestle key issues to the ground.<br /><br />I would suggest that understanding issues of mystery and evil requires an understanding of our spiritual nature and our relationship to God.<br /><br />We too often denigrate subjective awareness (which is the only way we know anything) in an attempt to satisfy those who argue from the premises of naturalism. <br /><br />As Dianelos hints, the naturalists end up relying on blind faith more than theists, as their premise that matter exists prior to and independent of consciousness can never be observed or verified. (No consciousness means no observation means no verification.)<br /><br />In Taming the Wolf I address the problem of evil at a practical level within the context of conflict resolution.<br /><br />In conflict resolution we must assess whether or not we are dealing with evil. We consider how we might handle evil. In this model, free will plays a key role as the factor that allows evil to exist.<br /><br />Free will must be explored within the context of our essential nature and the nature of our relationship with God. <br /><br />When one takes this perspective the idea of a God as puppet-master who determines all events without our involvement fades in importance. <br /><br />Hope that suggests another line of thought you may wish to add to your analysis.Author Greghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09251087160722264433noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6215077578479252542.post-16781906125193556232010-01-06T06:07:49.179-06:002010-01-06T06:07:49.179-06:00Now let us compare this state of affairs with thei...Now let us compare this state of affairs with theism’s view of God. This view is expressed using concepts such as personal being, freedom of will, perception, thought, knowledge, intentionality, love, beauty, power, personal relationships, joy, suffering, justice, morality, value, action, etc. – which are all concepts we can imagine very well, indeed intimately understand, because they are the concepts we would use to express ourselves. Of course there comes a point in our knowledge of God where our cognitive powers are spent up, simply because God is a limitless object of knowledge whereas our minds are limited. But this point comes long after one has knowledge of God with a clarity that does not start to compare with the mysteriousness of the ontological nature of the naturalistic apple, let alone of the naturalistic universe and its propensity to produce conscious experience without which there would be no knowledge of apples whatsoever. <br /><br />In any case I do agree that theists’ propensity to talk about the mysteriousness of God does not produce good fruit because it misleads both atheists who get the impression that God is therefore not a proper object of knowledge and must be believed “on blind faith”, and also misleads theists who get the impression that it’s OK for them to accept claims about God that make no sense whatsoever. Incidentally, mysterianism has gained some ground in naturalism too, and I am not just thinking of Collin McGinn’s response to naturalism’s mind-body problem. Rather I have found that when discussing with naturalists the many conceptual problems entailed by their worldview they sometimes end up suggesting that our little brains have not evolved to understand the ontology of the vast physical universe, and that it is therefore to be expected that physical reality strikes us as so mysterious. Actually I’d like to use an implication of Plantinga’s argument against naturalism and suggest that it is more reasonable for a naturalist to claim some kind of mysterianism as a last resort response to naturalism’s problems, than for a theist to do the same for theism’s problems. For, it seems to me, a perfectly good God would not create us lacking the cognitive capacity to understand what is useful to understand in our current condition.Dianelos Georgoudishttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09925591703967774000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6215077578479252542.post-55272585366786582772010-01-06T06:04:35.930-06:002010-01-06T06:04:35.930-06:00Eric:
I don’t think that it is proper to use “emp...Eric:<br /><br />I don’t think that it is proper to use “empirical” in the sense of “amenable to scientific measurement”. Websters dictionary defines “empirical” as “derived from experiment and observation rather than theory”. Suppose then I have heard people speak of how apples taste but have never tried one myself; if I then make the experiment and bite into an apple I will learn empirical data about how apples taste like. But how apples taste like cannot be measured with scientific instruments. <br /><br />In my discussion with naturalists I have observed that they tend to conflate “existence” with “physical existence”, “evidence” with “physical evidence”, and so on. But this use of words impoverishes language and indeed represents a hidden begging of the question. A theist might suggest that using language in the same truncated way that naturalists use it will make it easier for them to understand theism, but I think the opposite is the case. Indeed this semantic issue may deny us theists useful insights. Take for example the much maligned logical positivism. The way I understand it, it makes the plausible point that only propositions that have some empirical relevance are meaningful. Indeed I don’t see why one should think about propositions whose truth value can make no difference whatsoever, not even indirectly or in principle, to one’s experience of life. Now whether the rape of a child is objectively evil or not can make such a difference. After all, arguably, the existence of objective moral truths implies the existence of God, and that existence has of course huge relevance to our experience of life (e.g. to the existence of the afterlife), indeed to the very choices we make in life. <br /><br />In your article you say that God is mysterious because God defies the imagination, and you define imagination as what we can conceptualize using concepts and ideas out of our experience of the physical world. Well it’s obviously true that God, not being a physical thing, does defy imagination defined in this way. But why define imagination in this way? Language about God is metaphysical language, i.e. language that refers to the reality in which we exist and which produces our experience of life. In this context what defies imagination is what is supposed to be real but which cannot be described using concepts we understand. So, metaphysically speaking, it is the naturalistic idea of, say, an apple which defies imagination. After all, how would one conceptualize what an apple is in a naturalistic reality? Naturalists claim it is an agglomeration within spacetime of more primitive physical things, namely elementary particles such as electrons. So what are electrons? We have no experience whatsoever of them, indeed cannot even imagine how it would be like to experience them. But what’s more relevant the ontological description of electrons defies not only imagination but also credulity. They are supposed to have properties such as mass and electric charge, but no naturalist actually defines what these are in reality. What’s more, primitive electrons without any internal parts or access to computing machinery are supposed to display highly computationally complex behavior, which is as much a “magical” claim as I have ever come across. But if the parts of an apple defy imagination so does the entire apple. Those who think that an apple is easily imaginable simply confuse the ontological with the phenomenal natures of the apple. [continued in the next post]Dianelos Georgoudishttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09925591703967774000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6215077578479252542.post-64503725706466432252009-12-12T21:49:37.604-06:002009-12-12T21:49:37.604-06:00Thank you for one of the most profound things I...Thank you for one of the most profound things I've ever read. It's like you found the right words to say what it was I was thinkng and didn't know how to say.Holly Swifthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02941538403051725579noreply@blogger.com