From comments:
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I am saying we need not postulate the existence of an ideal chair to explain the phenomenology of chair recognition, appraisal and/or discussion. It is of course conceivable that such an ideal chair exists, since the lack of evidence for something is not evidence against it BUT the notion of platonic forms underlies Christian Theology SO if God loves me and wants me to understand Him and believe in Him THEN He must want me to believe ideal forms exist because I need to to even begin to grasp the Christian world view AND YET no observation I have ever made in this universe has even implied the existence of ideal forms, all being better explained by materialism, strongly implies that the Christian Worldview is inconsistent with itself and this, combined with the fact that it offers me no more ability than materialism to predict, understand, and/or make sense of the world, implies that I can neglect it as the tattered edges of the dreams of pre-rational man.
This is the basic argument which I will probably repeat over and over : I do not claim to understand the universe in any complete sense BUT Christianity does. To convince me of the validity of Christianity you must first convince me that I can know anything at all, that what I will know if I apply myself to the question of the universe is that the cosmology of the Christian Universe is True, and, in parallel, that the Cosmology of the Christian Universe is internally consistent.
Friday, October 3, 2008
8 comments:
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InterestingPhysics said...
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There you go. We were talking about chairs, and then POW! attacking Christian worldview. Can we at least take smaller steps? Its very instructive to trace the lines that take us from here to there. If you've arrived at a truth that is objectively better than mine, then I'd be a fool to reject it... (although, if you really have arrived at a truth that is objectively better, or rather more ideal than mine, then you've nullified your hypothesis. After all, when it comes down to it, Truth (in your worldview) must ultimately be reduced to stuff, since stuff is all there is.
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October 3, 2008 at 12:55 PM
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InterestingPhysics said...
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and so Truth can't be all that different from Chairs.
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October 3, 2008 at 12:57 PM
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J.V. Toups said...
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No, in fact Truth can be vastly different from chairs. I am not ruling out the possibility that some phenomenon are "fundamental", although it is difficult to discuss what these might be (we could say, for instance that "strings" correspond to some fundamental aspect of the universe somehow and so conceptions nearer to strings are more correct than conceptions away from them, but scientifically we just aren't at that point).
What I am saying is that "just because you can think of something does not mean it corresponds to any such notion of an ideal form". This is pretty obvious since it is clear that "chairness" is subjective. A log may or may not be perceived as a chair or may be perceived as more or less chair-ish to different people. Truth might very well be quite different from chairs, in other words.
In any case I think you go too far to suggest I have a "worldview". I have a collection of functional conceptions, each easily disposed of in the face of new evidence. You should convince me that there is, can be, any more than that.
The syllogism from Chairs to Christianity is pretty clear. We could belabor the point that Christianity is grounded fundamentally in early Greek Philosophy or something very much like it if you'd like, but the form of the argument remains: I can't know things, Christianity asserts that I must know things to avoid punishment by a loving God who wants me to avoid punishment, ergo Christianity seems inconsistent. -
October 3, 2008 at 1:12 PM
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s said...
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Where did you ever get the idea that "the notion of platonic forms underlies Christian Theology"?
Or the notion that Christianity claims to understand the universe in a complete sense?
Both of these are real humdinger statements. -
October 9, 2008 at 9:46 AM
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s said...
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You say "I can't know things, Christianity asserts that I must know things to avoid punishment by a loving God who wants me to avoid punishment, ergo Christianity seems inconsistent."
And here I thought that the ultimate argument against Christianity was that it demands "faith." In other words, that its central tenant was precisely that there are things that we cannot know, and yet must act upon, the very thing that you admit that you do in ALL of your interactions with the world, personal and otherwise.
And yet you seem to say here that Christianity's chief weakness as a philosophy lies in the fact that it demands that you "know" things in order to stay in the Good Graces of God.
You appeal to the contrarian in me, I must admit, by keeping up the attack on both fronts. -
October 9, 2008 at 9:53 AM
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J.V. Toups said...
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Christianity has a complete world view at least in the sense that you know whom to ask for an answer if you have a question and that, regardless of whether the answer is knowable by a human mind, the universe makes sense, at least insofar as sense is identified directly with God.
The two prongs are related. Christianity does not ask me to make a choice (strange you should mention this today, since we discussed this at great length last night). It asks me to make a guess, a guess which will, ultimately, lead either to perdition or salvation, by most reasonable scans of the religion.
It is a guess because I lack perfect information. That is to say, that while Christianity may assert that the fundamental problem facing humanity is Sin, and that we must look for Salvation from it in God, the REAL fundamental problem facing humans, before sin can even be considered, is ignorance. Humans do not know the nature of the universe and arguably cannot know it.
Living my day to day life, I obviously make assumptions. Whether or not these constitute acts of faith is another matter - I would argue that they do not, but that is an aside. But I make such assumptions because I have no other choice, and no omnipotent agency appears to exist to enable me to have pure knowledge, and so I must hobble along as best I can.
The God of Christendom is omnipotent and quite capable of providing knowledge up to and including full knowledge of his existence and/or nature. Christianity believes He desires to do this because he incarnated his Son/Self into the physical world and then went to the trouble of being painfully murdered, all to demonstrate and/or play out a kind of spiritual drama meant to entice human souls back to him.
What perplexes me then about Christianity is the utter lack of manifest person-god in the contemporary universe when there is no reason there could not be such a person-god presence and when there seems to be a claim of motive on the part of that person-god's representatives that leaves us with a question the reason behind the absence of this presence.
What this all amounts to is that a man, imperfect, might very well, entirely by accident, end up not believing in the reality of the Christian world view, and then might very likely end up in eternal perdition. This does not seem like justice to me. You may assert "It is just because it is the will of God." But this is an awful way to address the world, to change the definition of each word when it is out of line human conception of that word. All words become meaningless. It becomes an act of love to consign one to eternal suffering, a just act to damn a fool who you have created foolish. This is too incredible to believe when the unvierse makes so much more sense without these hypothesis. -
October 9, 2008 at 10:12 AM
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s said...
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To try and hit a few points directly, you try to answer my question about Christianity's alleged claim "to understand the universe in a complete sense" with the following:
"Christianity has a complete world view"
This is very different from a claim to understand the universe in a complete sense, as you suggested previously. Specifically, it is merely a statement that there is a correct view upon the world, not that the view encompasses everything there is to know about the world. Watch it.
"at least in the sense that you know whom to ask for an answer if you have a question"
Whom would that be? Just not sure of your meaning.
"and that, regardless of whether the answer is knowable by a human mind, the universe makes sense, at least insofar as sense is identified directly with God."
I don't know what you mean by "directly with God." You could say, I suppose, that humans have "sense" because God made them in coherence with the world that he also made, and thus, so to does the world "make sense." But this does not make God and "sense" the same thing.
Later, you distinguish choices from guesses, but by that definition, what are choices? About what do you have perfect information and thus, are able to make a "choice," as you define it?
For instance, you must then merely "guess" that your parents love you, or perhaps, you actually just "guess" that you ought to love them back? You don't have perfect information there, just hearsay and often intangible or non-repeatable evidence. I keep harping on the parents thing, because Christianity is centrally about a relationship, not about sin or rules or actions or worldviews.
Also, can you tell me where Christianity says that the fundamental problem with humanity is sin, as opposed to ignorance? I suppose you could say that a major way that Christianity attempts to begin a discussion of the relationship between God and man is to examine the problem of evil, or why man acts upon his fellow NOT as he would like to be treated. In any case, this is often used because it is often the place from whence people begin any search for truth, along with "Why am I unhappy?" and the like.
"What this all amounts to is that a man, imperfect, might very well, entirely by accident, end up not believing in the reality of the Christian world view, and then might very likely end up in eternal perdition."
I don't know that I have ever read a single solid piece of Christian theology that would agree with your oversimplification here, although I can see how a cursory reading of perhaps some basic morality through religion books or a glance at a few minutes of religious television with no context might give you that impression. My understanding has always been that the honest man, or the sincere man, or the man who lives his life with meaning, will likely end up in purgatory, by the Grace of God.
I am not entirely sure what you mean by "entirely by accident," though. The path to perdition is one of choices (or, as you would have it, of deliberate "guesses") and includes the choice to be without God, a choice that God grants, unfortunately for the soul that chooses it. -
October 12, 2008 at 10:04 PM
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s said...
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And you never responded to my query about how you come to the conclusion that Christian philosophy somehow relies upon Platonic forms?
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October 12, 2008 at 10:05 PM
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Toups,
Does one have the luxury of simply believing or not believing in ideal forms? Wouldn't they either exist or not exist? And if they do not exist, what does that imply about one's ability to reason?
October 3, 2008 10:50 AM
Ideal forms are a solution looking for a problem. When they were conceived, the problem was that people could recognize various objects as belonging to categories and the process by which this occurred seemed to require some large sense of "what things actually are."
These days we know how you recognize a chair for a chair. A series of neural networks analyze various components of your sensory input for properties and if enough properties are operant in that stream, they eventually activate a network of neurons corresponding to a fuzzy category of "things I call chairs so that I can communicate with other people." There is no need to postulate an abstract chair being anywhere. The notion of chair is much better explained as the activity of some neurons in your brain.
October 3, 2008 10:57 AM
In other words, I am not going to take seriously the notion of "ideal forms" until you give me a single piece of tangible evidence that I need them to understand some phenomenon in the world around me.
October 3, 2008 10:59 AM
So you are saying that chairs are chairs, and one chair is not better than another or closer to the ideal chair than another (since no ideal chair exists). And so it follows that one might perceive a chair as being better than another, but that is really only her preference. Is that right? (feel free to begin a new post).
October 3, 2008 11:51 AM