Dear Friend
Merry Christmas! It’s the time of Santa Claus and unbridled commercialism again…
How did you spend the holiday? For me, it’s more low-key this year. My leaves were cancelled last minute! Just need a little rest and read Lord of the Rings… heheh…
Thanks for sharing about your personal journey into philosophy. Like you, I like to experiment with different ways of living too.
For example, Kierkegaard’s existentialism sounds like fun to me. Also, trying to go deeper into my Chinese roots i.e. Confucius.
A Reformed worldview can open up new explorations because God has spoken in every culture. The trick is to discern what He has said and what has been distorted by us.
But I try not to consciously allow myself to flow with the ‘mood and situation’ because a worldview ought to be robust enough to handle the different ‘tests’ life throws at it. If not, don’t force it… may be time to modify it a bit! If coherence is missing, it’s easy to make decisions based on mood swings alone.
So perhaps, a suggestion is to evaluate the worldviews with some tests:
1) Logic – is it contradictory like a square circle? Is it consistent? (which is probably what attracted you to Rand)
2) Existential satisfaction – Does it lead to a practical and good life? Does it explain my human experiences adequately? (probably what attracts you in Pascal and existentialism)
3) Empirical evidence – is it verifiable by science, history and observations? (Sometimes, religion makes certain testable hypothesis within the realm of science i.e. an eternal universe)
4) Ethical guidance – Does it help us to be a better person? In community? Like you mention about Buddhism helping us to deal with angry, ambition, hatred, greed…
(You’d probably watched movies about how robots learn to be human and develop the intuitive side i.e. Bicentennial Man, ‘I, Robot’ so you are right to see both objective and subjective elements in the human mind come into play here… Pascal would agree, in fact, that it cannot be all pure subjectivity… but there is no pure objectivity either. A worldview that treats us as mere brains without speaking to emotions like love seems too narrow to address the fullness of our human experience)
Did you hear about the famous atheist Antony Flew? He changed his mind after decades of attacking theism because of the scientific evidence for Intelligent Design.
You wrote that “as long as i can find an argument for theism that is still irrefutable (meaning not necessarily demonstrates that God exist, only if the argument has not been shown to consist of logical fallacy”, I am very inclined to accept the fact that God exist”.
Well, there are a couple of usual reasons for God’s existence like cosmological argument (William Lane Craig), moral argument (CS Lewis, which I find quite handy), Intelligent design (Paley/Dembski) which do not involve a logical contradiction. Of course people do attempt to refute them.
IMHO, these mysteries provide some clues to how God looks like but I don’t think such arguments compel us coercively to faith, by the way. Maybe God wants to leave room for existential commitment?
Regarding the ‘transcendental argument’, well, I happen to agree with you that there ARE some self-evident truths like logic, the existence of other minds, etc.
I also mention to Reformed folks like Elder Yong that they've mixed up the question of ontology with the epistemic question – How do I know? My current view (tentatively) is like this: (quite close to yours) Our starting point is a set of self-evident knowledge about the world and ourselves… that we are personal, rational, moral beings in an apparently complex universe that leaves us in cosmic wonder. Now, how do you account for this? Which worldview(s) explains this data more adequately?
Ignoring these questions can be just an easy cop-out. We can’t leave these self-evident pointers hanging in the air without asking, “Why?” It doesn’t justify us to invent new deities but it also doesn’t justify us to accept worldviews which do not take such data seriously.
You may like to check out my view on Russell’s analysis of religion as motivated by fear here: http://hedonese1.blogspot.com/2004/12/fear-of-god.html
For example, if we take a naturalistic view of the universe… freewill, love, personhood is an illusion, our choices are determined by bio-chemical reactions in the brain. Energy and matter cannot account for the universal law of logic in the human mind so it’s probably a man-made construct. Now, it doesn’t seem to fit our daily human experience, does it?
So we backtrack and ask if a theistic worldview makes sense of all this ‘self-evident data’? I think our personhood makes sense because the Creator is ultimately a personal being. If logic is not man-made, but God Himself is rational then it would explain its universality and transcendence. Our sense of right and wrong makes sense because that Person is also moral and holy.And so on…
Some forms of Buddhism believe our sensory experiences in the physical world lead us to be ignorant of true reality (shamsara)… liberation is when we realize that the world is illusory. And so on… So self-evident ‘data’ serve as pointers for a worldview. Some pointers are rational, others are relational or personal...
To be fair, though, a card-carrying Van Tilian may object and say, “No, your notion of logic as universal and transcendent is incoherent if your worldview is without God… It is firmly planted on thin air unless you presuppose God is. To deny God’s existence, you’d have denied the basis for your logic and so it’s self-defeating.”
OK, this mail is getting unwieldy so I better stop now.
Have a merry Christmas and look forward to hear from you again!
Merry Christmas! It’s the time of Santa Claus and unbridled commercialism again…
How did you spend the holiday? For me, it’s more low-key this year. My leaves were cancelled last minute! Just need a little rest and read Lord of the Rings… heheh…
Thanks for sharing about your personal journey into philosophy. Like you, I like to experiment with different ways of living too.
For example, Kierkegaard’s existentialism sounds like fun to me. Also, trying to go deeper into my Chinese roots i.e. Confucius.
A Reformed worldview can open up new explorations because God has spoken in every culture. The trick is to discern what He has said and what has been distorted by us.
But I try not to consciously allow myself to flow with the ‘mood and situation’ because a worldview ought to be robust enough to handle the different ‘tests’ life throws at it. If not, don’t force it… may be time to modify it a bit! If coherence is missing, it’s easy to make decisions based on mood swings alone.
So perhaps, a suggestion is to evaluate the worldviews with some tests:
1) Logic – is it contradictory like a square circle? Is it consistent? (which is probably what attracted you to Rand)
2) Existential satisfaction – Does it lead to a practical and good life? Does it explain my human experiences adequately? (probably what attracts you in Pascal and existentialism)
3) Empirical evidence – is it verifiable by science, history and observations? (Sometimes, religion makes certain testable hypothesis within the realm of science i.e. an eternal universe)
4) Ethical guidance – Does it help us to be a better person? In community? Like you mention about Buddhism helping us to deal with angry, ambition, hatred, greed…
(You’d probably watched movies about how robots learn to be human and develop the intuitive side i.e. Bicentennial Man, ‘I, Robot’ so you are right to see both objective and subjective elements in the human mind come into play here… Pascal would agree, in fact, that it cannot be all pure subjectivity… but there is no pure objectivity either. A worldview that treats us as mere brains without speaking to emotions like love seems too narrow to address the fullness of our human experience)
Did you hear about the famous atheist Antony Flew? He changed his mind after decades of attacking theism because of the scientific evidence for Intelligent Design.
You wrote that “as long as i can find an argument for theism that is still irrefutable (meaning not necessarily demonstrates that God exist, only if the argument has not been shown to consist of logical fallacy”, I am very inclined to accept the fact that God exist”.
Well, there are a couple of usual reasons for God’s existence like cosmological argument (William Lane Craig), moral argument (CS Lewis, which I find quite handy), Intelligent design (Paley/Dembski) which do not involve a logical contradiction. Of course people do attempt to refute them.
IMHO, these mysteries provide some clues to how God looks like but I don’t think such arguments compel us coercively to faith, by the way. Maybe God wants to leave room for existential commitment?
Regarding the ‘transcendental argument’, well, I happen to agree with you that there ARE some self-evident truths like logic, the existence of other minds, etc.
I also mention to Reformed folks like Elder Yong that they've mixed up the question of ontology with the epistemic question – How do I know? My current view (tentatively) is like this: (quite close to yours) Our starting point is a set of self-evident knowledge about the world and ourselves… that we are personal, rational, moral beings in an apparently complex universe that leaves us in cosmic wonder. Now, how do you account for this? Which worldview(s) explains this data more adequately?
Ignoring these questions can be just an easy cop-out. We can’t leave these self-evident pointers hanging in the air without asking, “Why?” It doesn’t justify us to invent new deities but it also doesn’t justify us to accept worldviews which do not take such data seriously.
You may like to check out my view on Russell’s analysis of religion as motivated by fear here: http://hedonese1.blogspot.com/2004/12/fear-of-god.html
For example, if we take a naturalistic view of the universe… freewill, love, personhood is an illusion, our choices are determined by bio-chemical reactions in the brain. Energy and matter cannot account for the universal law of logic in the human mind so it’s probably a man-made construct. Now, it doesn’t seem to fit our daily human experience, does it?
So we backtrack and ask if a theistic worldview makes sense of all this ‘self-evident data’? I think our personhood makes sense because the Creator is ultimately a personal being. If logic is not man-made, but God Himself is rational then it would explain its universality and transcendence. Our sense of right and wrong makes sense because that Person is also moral and holy.And so on…
Some forms of Buddhism believe our sensory experiences in the physical world lead us to be ignorant of true reality (shamsara)… liberation is when we realize that the world is illusory. And so on… So self-evident ‘data’ serve as pointers for a worldview. Some pointers are rational, others are relational or personal...
To be fair, though, a card-carrying Van Tilian may object and say, “No, your notion of logic as universal and transcendent is incoherent if your worldview is without God… It is firmly planted on thin air unless you presuppose God is. To deny God’s existence, you’d have denied the basis for your logic and so it’s self-defeating.”
OK, this mail is getting unwieldy so I better stop now.
Have a merry Christmas and look forward to hear from you again!
Comments
You know what I speak of Dave, to see some truth for example with group A, and some more with group B, the irresponsible thing to do would be to say, both A and B are right. The right thing to do would to map the areas of agreement and disagreement with them.
So I find that a lot of folks make good arguments here and there, but the very snippets of truth they affirm, contradict each other! And having no conviction to reconcile their various positions, they move on happily thinking they have good intellectual foundations to stand on.