"When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion."
- David Hume
When an individual believes in nothing but the scientific method - they are saying that if something does not fit the scientific method, it cannot be proven. To this one must ask, did you come to that belief by the scientific method?
I would certainly think not. Perhaps the individual, after much testing and discovery through the scientific method, found it very plausible that this is a rock-solid method for discovering truth about the universe. However - the logical statement they have posited remains entirely unscientific. Therefore, if they reject an idea simply because it cannot fit the frame of the scientific method, they have left pure, practical reason and have embarked on an ideologically driven prejudice. The end result of such a leap has a few consequences -
1. An individual is hopelessly steeped in the circular reasoning of naturalism, i.e. the only relevant information is material, the only relevant methods are those which only factor in reasoning based on material things. This doesn't sound too bad, but the laws of logic themselves are non-material, which is a big problem.
2. The individual has created a bias, and excluded information in their evaluation. The reason certain sciences are referred to as "soft" sciences are because they cannot be entirely and fairly evaluated with the scientific method, i.e. Social sciences, psychology, etc. Science means more than the scientific method. Statistics taken from individuals often cannot be absolute, but provide tons of useful information that cannot be excluded without a loss of something valuable.
3. The scientific method provides no objective basis for ethics. Quoting Atheist Kai Nielsen:
"We have not been able to show that reason requires the moral point of view, or that all really rational persons should not be individual egoists or classical amoralists. Reason doesn't decide here. The picture I have painted for you is not a pleasant one. Reflection on it depresses me . . . . Pure practical reason, even with a good knowledge of the facts, will not take you to morality.
(Kai Nielsen, "Why Should I Be Moral?" American Philosophical Quarterly 21 (1984): 90.)
Should an idea be immediately thrown out because it is a "miracle," or defies natural law as presently understood? More on this and other random thoughts later.
2007-02-20
2007-02-17
Where is the power?
I will be using culture as a bridge to lead into a short monologue on Faith and Reason.
Look at how Sociologist Daniel Bell describes culture -
"Culture, for me, is the effort to provide a coherent set of answers to the existential predicaments that confront all human beings."
Is culture, then, a variable thing that is infinitely different depending on where one might venture? Certainly not, at least philosophically - the fact that all cultures must answers questions at all leads us to an absolute. All cultures must ultimately answer questions of origins, meaning, morality, and destiny. The fact that human beings have a common set of questions they must answer points to the common experience of humanity.
It is interesting that this set of answers must be coherent. Must what we believe be rationally defensible, non-contradictory set of beliefs which are applicable existentially? Or can it exist in a vacuum as our idee fixe and still have any meaning?
Hinduistic frameworks and certain cults claim that contradictions really do not affect our reality - we can sustain these contradictions with Dialetical Logic. Dialectical logic is the method of taking an antithesis and finding a synthesis, when it is logically applicable.
Example - Let us suppose that two men only had knowledge of the primary colors - Red, Yellow, and Blue. These two men have no knowledge of any other colors, and lets say they come across a wall. One man says that the wall is blue. Another man says that it is red. Can both be right? Perhaps the color is purple. In part, both men contained part of the truth, and since they did not have the terminology in their brains to adequately explain the reality, they both thought it was their limited concept of truth. Many would try to use this line of thinking to say that all religions can be true, and that mutually contradictory worldviews are sustainable (a Hindu ideal, i believe).
There is a problem though. Both of the men were partially wrong, as well. Purple is not blue, and Purple is not red. We certainly wouldnt call an axle a car, would we? Red and blue are each only part of the composite whole of purple. I guess philosophically the qualification is that i have used two monadic concepts to describe a composite concept.
Before i begin my next exposition, i define the human being as 3 parts - Body, Soul, Spirit. I can defend this biblically, but that is not here nor there. If i was to say that Mary is a soul, i am not incorrect. If i was also to say that Mary is a spirit, i am also correct. If i was to say that Mary is a body, i am also correct. If i say that Mary is only a soul, i am incorrect. What does that prove?
If i was to say God is a Spirit, God is Jesus, and God is the Yahweh of the Old Testament, under Christian thinking, this is a most rational statement. Since the composite nature of God is both singular (Deut. 6:4) and plural (use of Elohym, a plural hebrew form), a qualification is necessary to maintain monotheism. One might say, God is undefinable by our words because they merely cannot describe him adequately. They are only right if they accept a God other than the Bible, because God uses words to describe himself quite frequently. However, I have digressed.
A different example - Perhaps two men are testifying in court, and one says the particular defendant was waiting at a bus stop at 5:30 pm on thursday. Another witness, without knowledge of the other witnesses' testimony, claims that the man was with him at a local pub at 5:30 pm on thursday. Let's say for the sake of argument that these locations are 5 miles apart. It is easy to say that these are mutually contradictory - only one of them can be true. Both witnesses may believe in their testimony with their whole heart, and to their knowledge are not testifying incorrectly, but ultimately those two ideas cannot both be true. They are unreconcilable.
Ultimately this brings us to define a contradiction. A contradiction (although its common use may vary) is defined in logical terms as a necessarily false statement - i.e. "This book is written completely in English" and "This book is written completely in Amharic." It is a statement with two absolutes that do not possess a valid qualification. There is no logical statement that could vindicate these statements of their mutual contradiction. There are some contradictions, however, that can be qualified and thus are justifiable.
The example of the witnesses possesses no valid justification or explanation that would allow both statements to retain their logical weight. The example about the color of the wall does. So certain kinds of contradictions are qualifiable, while others are clearly incontrovertible. With the statements that are made by religious systems throughout the world - and when someone honestly evaluates the veracity of each of their claims, it is clear that the claims are too different to be validated. At least some of these systems of thought must be false, and at least some of their cosmologies must be false.
Faith and Reason. These are both very loaded concepts. I am going to define them as best i can.
Faith is a trust in a specific source for a specific end. This trust is one that leads to actions.
Note that this is not the same as "blind faith," which is kind of a misnomer. Why? Because blind faith requires that you know absolutely nothing about that which you are trusting, which is impossible. If you do not know anything about God, period, it is impossible to put your trust in him because the issue doesn't even come up in your mind. If you do not know anything about banking, you cannot trust a bank to keep your money safe, because you do not even have any sense of their existence, not even to think about the word "bank." Blind faith, therefore, is kind of a contradiction in terms, because we have to know at least something about the sources which we place our trust in.
Reason is a process of thought by which information is compared with other information to form a conclusion. It is not objective. It has the requirement of previous knowledge which comes with an inherent bias, because if one knows absolutely nothing, there is nothing to reason about. Reason requires more than one statement in order to be coherent.
Example :
People who are intelligent plan ahead.
This is a statement in a vacuum. There is nothing to reason about, there is no argument being presented. This is not reason, because there is no comparison, analogically or otherwise.
Intelligent people plan ahead.
Mary is an intelligent woman.
The process of reason takes two individual pieces of information and compares them. It is by nature something that requires a person to take information or concepts or truths they already possess and to use those to acquire new or undiscovered truths. Any attempt to use one piece of information to show anything else logically betrays a veiled truth that is being used to say something.
Example :
God exists.
Therefore, I should believe God exists.
Immediately the individual would be giving away the underlying assumption that :
"If something exists, i should believe it exists."
All this shows us that reason by definition requires previous knowledge. It is not objective - that is, it is subject to previously accepted truths.
One might say that reason holds the power to check all currently held beliefs and can show objectively whether or not they are true. This gives away an inherent bias.
Let's say that we have a room full of clocks. All have different times. The only way to figure out which one is right is by appealling to an accurate standard. Reason alone could not tell us which time was correct, if any of them. One might reason that they could consult the official time indicator on the internet, and this would be valid, but that comes from the rational belief that this standard is correct, and one has left reason alone and now consulted a standard in addition to that reason.
So reason itself is not the arbiter of truth - reason requires an objective standard in order to understand life. So we could actually create a new definition for reason that is refined by this parable.
Reason is the process by which new questions are answered based on a previously proven or accepted standard.
Note that this definition says nothing about the standard itself, because if the standard is wrong, regardless how well one has reasoned, they are still wrong.
Faith, therefore, is trust based on some measure of previous knowledge concerning some subject. For example, i could say the following:
I have faith that the next time i flip the light switch, that light switch will turn the light on, because the last time i flipped the switch, the light came on.
Likewise, one might posit the following:
I have faith that reason produces good in society, because reason has produced technology, saved lives, and increases our knowledge.
What this brings us two is how these concepts are related, and how they might be different. Let us ask the following: Why is reason good? Let's try it this way:
Reason is good because it allows us to come to conclusions we believe to be correct concerning the world around us.
If the standard used in the course of reason is wrong, it may or may not bring us to correct conclusions. Therefore, reason relies on faith in that reason requires a standard. Faith provides an objective and absolute standard, because if we only accepted that which we can 100% prove, we would accept nothing and therefore could not reason about anything.
Faith itself becomes ultimately superstitious without reason as a method of taking pieces of information and comparing them with each other, because it may fail to differentiate the source of what has occurred.
Example :
I have faith that whenever i walk on my tiptoes for the first 2 minutes i am up every morning that i will have a good day. I may indeed have a good day, but it may not necessarily be because i walked on my tiptoes for 2 minutes in the morning.
What i believe is starting to substantiate is that faith and reason are conclusively linked. Reason requires faith that reason itself is effective, whereas faith requires reason to give itself substance and sustainability as a way of approaching reality.
I have done this at length because i see few scholars approach this subject beyond typical antithetical treatises, often loaded with anti-theistic polemic based on the supremacy of reason. It is interesting that what humans divide is often meant to be united, and what humans unite is often meant to be divided.
Look at how Sociologist Daniel Bell describes culture -
"Culture, for me, is the effort to provide a coherent set of answers to the existential predicaments that confront all human beings."
Is culture, then, a variable thing that is infinitely different depending on where one might venture? Certainly not, at least philosophically - the fact that all cultures must answers questions at all leads us to an absolute. All cultures must ultimately answer questions of origins, meaning, morality, and destiny. The fact that human beings have a common set of questions they must answer points to the common experience of humanity.
It is interesting that this set of answers must be coherent. Must what we believe be rationally defensible, non-contradictory set of beliefs which are applicable existentially? Or can it exist in a vacuum as our idee fixe and still have any meaning?
Hinduistic frameworks and certain cults claim that contradictions really do not affect our reality - we can sustain these contradictions with Dialetical Logic. Dialectical logic is the method of taking an antithesis and finding a synthesis, when it is logically applicable.
Example - Let us suppose that two men only had knowledge of the primary colors - Red, Yellow, and Blue. These two men have no knowledge of any other colors, and lets say they come across a wall. One man says that the wall is blue. Another man says that it is red. Can both be right? Perhaps the color is purple. In part, both men contained part of the truth, and since they did not have the terminology in their brains to adequately explain the reality, they both thought it was their limited concept of truth. Many would try to use this line of thinking to say that all religions can be true, and that mutually contradictory worldviews are sustainable (a Hindu ideal, i believe).
There is a problem though. Both of the men were partially wrong, as well. Purple is not blue, and Purple is not red. We certainly wouldnt call an axle a car, would we? Red and blue are each only part of the composite whole of purple. I guess philosophically the qualification is that i have used two monadic concepts to describe a composite concept.
Before i begin my next exposition, i define the human being as 3 parts - Body, Soul, Spirit. I can defend this biblically, but that is not here nor there. If i was to say that Mary is a soul, i am not incorrect. If i was also to say that Mary is a spirit, i am also correct. If i was to say that Mary is a body, i am also correct. If i say that Mary is only a soul, i am incorrect. What does that prove?
If i was to say God is a Spirit, God is Jesus, and God is the Yahweh of the Old Testament, under Christian thinking, this is a most rational statement. Since the composite nature of God is both singular (Deut. 6:4) and plural (use of Elohym, a plural hebrew form), a qualification is necessary to maintain monotheism. One might say, God is undefinable by our words because they merely cannot describe him adequately. They are only right if they accept a God other than the Bible, because God uses words to describe himself quite frequently. However, I have digressed.
A different example - Perhaps two men are testifying in court, and one says the particular defendant was waiting at a bus stop at 5:30 pm on thursday. Another witness, without knowledge of the other witnesses' testimony, claims that the man was with him at a local pub at 5:30 pm on thursday. Let's say for the sake of argument that these locations are 5 miles apart. It is easy to say that these are mutually contradictory - only one of them can be true. Both witnesses may believe in their testimony with their whole heart, and to their knowledge are not testifying incorrectly, but ultimately those two ideas cannot both be true. They are unreconcilable.
Ultimately this brings us to define a contradiction. A contradiction (although its common use may vary) is defined in logical terms as a necessarily false statement - i.e. "This book is written completely in English" and "This book is written completely in Amharic." It is a statement with two absolutes that do not possess a valid qualification. There is no logical statement that could vindicate these statements of their mutual contradiction. There are some contradictions, however, that can be qualified and thus are justifiable.
The example of the witnesses possesses no valid justification or explanation that would allow both statements to retain their logical weight. The example about the color of the wall does. So certain kinds of contradictions are qualifiable, while others are clearly incontrovertible. With the statements that are made by religious systems throughout the world - and when someone honestly evaluates the veracity of each of their claims, it is clear that the claims are too different to be validated. At least some of these systems of thought must be false, and at least some of their cosmologies must be false.
Faith and Reason. These are both very loaded concepts. I am going to define them as best i can.
Faith is a trust in a specific source for a specific end. This trust is one that leads to actions.
Note that this is not the same as "blind faith," which is kind of a misnomer. Why? Because blind faith requires that you know absolutely nothing about that which you are trusting, which is impossible. If you do not know anything about God, period, it is impossible to put your trust in him because the issue doesn't even come up in your mind. If you do not know anything about banking, you cannot trust a bank to keep your money safe, because you do not even have any sense of their existence, not even to think about the word "bank." Blind faith, therefore, is kind of a contradiction in terms, because we have to know at least something about the sources which we place our trust in.
Reason is a process of thought by which information is compared with other information to form a conclusion. It is not objective. It has the requirement of previous knowledge which comes with an inherent bias, because if one knows absolutely nothing, there is nothing to reason about. Reason requires more than one statement in order to be coherent.
Example :
People who are intelligent plan ahead.
This is a statement in a vacuum. There is nothing to reason about, there is no argument being presented. This is not reason, because there is no comparison, analogically or otherwise.
Intelligent people plan ahead.
Mary is an intelligent woman.
The process of reason takes two individual pieces of information and compares them. It is by nature something that requires a person to take information or concepts or truths they already possess and to use those to acquire new or undiscovered truths. Any attempt to use one piece of information to show anything else logically betrays a veiled truth that is being used to say something.
Example :
God exists.
Therefore, I should believe God exists.
Immediately the individual would be giving away the underlying assumption that :
"If something exists, i should believe it exists."
All this shows us that reason by definition requires previous knowledge. It is not objective - that is, it is subject to previously accepted truths.
One might say that reason holds the power to check all currently held beliefs and can show objectively whether or not they are true. This gives away an inherent bias.
Let's say that we have a room full of clocks. All have different times. The only way to figure out which one is right is by appealling to an accurate standard. Reason alone could not tell us which time was correct, if any of them. One might reason that they could consult the official time indicator on the internet, and this would be valid, but that comes from the rational belief that this standard is correct, and one has left reason alone and now consulted a standard in addition to that reason.
So reason itself is not the arbiter of truth - reason requires an objective standard in order to understand life. So we could actually create a new definition for reason that is refined by this parable.
Reason is the process by which new questions are answered based on a previously proven or accepted standard.
Note that this definition says nothing about the standard itself, because if the standard is wrong, regardless how well one has reasoned, they are still wrong.
Faith, therefore, is trust based on some measure of previous knowledge concerning some subject. For example, i could say the following:
I have faith that the next time i flip the light switch, that light switch will turn the light on, because the last time i flipped the switch, the light came on.
Likewise, one might posit the following:
I have faith that reason produces good in society, because reason has produced technology, saved lives, and increases our knowledge.
What this brings us two is how these concepts are related, and how they might be different. Let us ask the following: Why is reason good? Let's try it this way:
Reason is good because it allows us to come to conclusions we believe to be correct concerning the world around us.
If the standard used in the course of reason is wrong, it may or may not bring us to correct conclusions. Therefore, reason relies on faith in that reason requires a standard. Faith provides an objective and absolute standard, because if we only accepted that which we can 100% prove, we would accept nothing and therefore could not reason about anything.
Faith itself becomes ultimately superstitious without reason as a method of taking pieces of information and comparing them with each other, because it may fail to differentiate the source of what has occurred.
Example :
I have faith that whenever i walk on my tiptoes for the first 2 minutes i am up every morning that i will have a good day. I may indeed have a good day, but it may not necessarily be because i walked on my tiptoes for 2 minutes in the morning.
What i believe is starting to substantiate is that faith and reason are conclusively linked. Reason requires faith that reason itself is effective, whereas faith requires reason to give itself substance and sustainability as a way of approaching reality.
I have done this at length because i see few scholars approach this subject beyond typical antithetical treatises, often loaded with anti-theistic polemic based on the supremacy of reason. It is interesting that what humans divide is often meant to be united, and what humans unite is often meant to be divided.
Opener
If i do not know you, who are reading this, i have a few statements i would like you to consider -
1. I make a solid distinction between disliking a person's belief and the person specifically. I do not intend to attack any person, although i will critique their worldview and i will certainly critique their actions. Example: I am in horrible disagreement with Richard Dawkins, but it is of a necessity that i believe God, that Dawkins is made in the image of God, and though he is fallen as i am, God loves his soul and desires fellowship with him.
2. In critiquing any action, one must first consider their own infirmities and their own shortcomings. No man is righteous of his own power. A Christian's righteousness is only derived from their faith in Jesus; the horrible torture and death our savior endured for us is the only reason we can claim "righteousness." As Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness, so a Christian's trust in God brings his righteousness into our lives. This is not always pleasant.
3. There are certain assumptions and non-negotiables in my thinking, as with anyone. I will plainly list them to you -
a) God is a triune being, 3 persons in one entity, and within the relationship of the Godhead, God needs no one else, and is entirely self-sufficient; he does not derive a reason for existence outside of himself.
b) Jesus is the Messiah predicted in scripture, he is the son of God, and he is both fully deity and fully man (hence the titles son of Man and son of God used in the gospels). All cults of Christianity have attempted to fiddle with Jesus' status in the Godhead.
c) As such, Jesus is the Word, or Logos, and is the pattern son for the Church. In him all things consist and have their being.
d) God is rational; human beings are not always rational. Human beings do not always perceive reason correctly. God has an absolute standard, and his actions and words are always in agreement. Man's actions and words are not always in agreement.
e) Truth has certain non-negotiables. By definition, if one thing is true, another is false. Only fluid truths are subject to change. Solid truths, or "Truth" with a capital T does not, because it is based inextricably in the character and words of God. Truth is non-contradictory. (I will elaborate somewhere in the course of this journal.)
f) Love is the highest ethic. It is also the most restricting, most difficult, and most unpleasant. But it is also ultimately the most rewarding.
I may in this post somewhere offend you or someone else. I do not apologize for offending people merely because i have offended them - but i will apologize if i have offended someone wrongly. Offense can be a sign of one of two things - either what i have said has been said in order to take a jab at someone else for a particular purpose, or what i have said is a concept or belief or part of a worldview which you find repugnant.
I apologize if in the course of this blog i say things that are not out of the deepest respect and love for those whom God has put his image within; i apologize if i do offend in merely behaving myself unseemly and vaunting myself forward, potentially in a motivation of pride. I do not apologize if I offend in merely speaking plain truth.
God is good, but human beings can be bad.
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