The Religious A priori

Why the Demand for direct emprical evidence of God is unfiar and inapplicable, why the atheist demand is special pleading

2011-09-11T09:49:00.000-07:00

Why the Demand for direct emprical evidence of God is unfiar and inapplicable, why the atheist demand is special pleading

This was a post did on the CARM board, and I exchange with an atheist who is a scientist, he doesn't like me using his name. The atheist demand for direct evidence is special pleading. That criteria is not even demanded in scinece. They demand it rigidly of all God arguments but even scientific theory doesn't have to live up to it. My God arguments can meet the same level of justification that these non empirical scientific theories can meet. Let's remember the theoretical construct of belief, that's it's existential and not scientific, it's rationally warranted and not proved.

God is beyond our understanding. God is not given in sense data and thus the demand for sense data proving God is silly and useless.

In one of their typically hypocritical moves those who claim they don't believe in the fortress of facts concept will turn around and take a page right off the heart of the fortress concept and demand empirical proof of God and when it doesn't come they will say "this is proof there's no God." But they have arleady been told "God is not amenable to this kind of evidence.

We know form scinece that there are many thing in scinece, whole knowledge levels above the scientific that are not given backed by any direct evidence and yet scientists assume they are real or that they could be real.

*big bang
*singularity
*string membranes
*dark matter (getting close)
*direct observation of neutrinos (were historically accepted as real long before any direct evidence, still don't have direct observation of them).
*Hawking's no singularity thing, (although that's pretty much set aside but it was accepted up front on the premise that we can't have direct proof).
Multivese (no direct proof, mathematical doesn't count).

that means not having direct evdience is not any kind of proof that they are not real.

The facts are just that we have to use other means of understanding God. that's all there is to it and theology has met that challenge by developing with scientific thinking, as with process theology.

Several reasons why it's not fair to expect direct evidence:

(1) God is not a thing in creation.

He's not on a par with objects in the world. he's the basis of all reality. that would be like expecting to find a piece of the laws of physics or the door to the unified field.

(2) God is not a big man in the sky but is being itself.

God is in everything. He's too big and too basic to be seen.

(3) God is the mind that thinks reality

we re figments of God's imagination. That means we can't get outside the thought and see what's thinking it. How could we possibility do that? I hate the film "the Matrix" no one bring it up. I prefer the holodeck on Star Trek TNG. how could a character of the Holodeck never know the truth?

(4) God's wants the search.

God doesn't' want to make it obvious. He makes it possible for us to find him but we have to seek. the reasons are laid out in my thing on soeteriological drama.

atheist says

Atheists might say God could make it obvious if he wanted to. Yes, but he doesn't want to because that would frustrate the process of interlinking values. Its' not unfair because the possibility is there. you only have to let go of your ego and seek God though the means that he may be found.

an atheist says:
Lets take a few things off:
*big bang
atheist says:

This comes from using we well verified theory in science (relativity) and extrapolating it back to the early universe after it was observed that the universe was expanding. but I can say the same thing about my arguments. I can say 'this come from using a well verified theory called modal logic ect ect." you want to make exceptions when it's knowledge you control then say all other forms of knowledge are crap. that's not fair.

But you see what he's done in making this response is special pleading. He's doing exactly what the atheists have been telling us we can't do, their slogan: "stop giving us arguemnts we don't want arguments, we want facts." Yet, he comes back on something that has no direct empirical evdience and make an argument that's it's right anyway becuase of the fit with theory, meaning he doesn't have empirical evdience but he's going accept an theocratic argument. That's what we are doing with God arguments, it' sthe thing we do that the atheist say they don't want. This is a logical fallacy called special pleading becuase it means suspend the rules for me but keep them for my opponent.

*singularity
atheist says

This shows that general relativity is incomplete as a physical theory. It signifies that there is a breakdown in the model.

same trick. I have argumetns that i can make make sense when I put them in the proper context. then the atheists say "I don't accept that context because if I did your argument would prove God. so I refuse the context, it's not evidence, therefore, you have no evidence."

there are physicists who say they don't accept the context of the singularity that proves it's not the fortress of facts. it's not a fact it's not solid, it could change. yet no one says "this isn't real becuase I don't have specific empirical evidence."

that is all about managing the context and that's all you are doing in rejecting God arguments.

*string membranes

atheist says

String theory is so for the only model that unifies all known forces at all scales, it can be shown that branes (as they are known) must exist for the theory to be internally consistent.

In other words, it's an argument based upon the fit of the theoretical phenomena with other theory. Same answer applies you don't' have direct empirical evidence I don't' see you saying its not reality. I have seen physicists say we may never have direct empirical evidence of this but you wont call it unreal.

*dark matter (getting close)

atheist says

There are some ideas, certainly but I wouldn't say that anyone is getting close.

This is interesting becasue I say we are getting close to finding empirical proof of dark matter he says "I wouldn't say anyone is getting close." He may have misunderstood what I meant so the meant in another way, it's hard to believe that since it seems so clear to me. Yet in another thread he say "i never said we were getting close." Which only works aginast his argument, makes me think he doesn't even realize what's going on in the whole thread.

you are not calling it unreal either. you just admitted we don't have the kind of evidence for it that you demand of God.

*direct observation of neutrinos (were historically accepted as real long before any direct evidence, still don't have direct observation of them).

atheist says:

Because they were predicted by a theory that was very well experimentally verified in other areas.

Classic example. That's nothing more than what I said. It's not better than I can do with any of my God arguments. I can prove all my God arguments on the same basis. The God arguments can be predicted by theories that are well verified in other areas (in other words, not in direct relation of God). All he is doing is managing the context, that is the context under which such and such a phenomenon is thought of as evidence for something, such as God. He's just managing the context under which these phenomena can be tough of as backed evdience. In other wrongs we don't have direct empirical evidence of them but they are not going to say they don't exist. They would if it was a God argument. The very same basis upon which I can prove my God arguments, indirect, predicted by accepted theory in other vain, but that wouldn't be good enough for the atheists. Yet science does it accept it for other things. it's part of a theory. you don't have empirical proof. and my God arguments are part of a theory. This guy can't understand that every time he argues such and such can be proved real anyway he's backing my case. He thinks he's proving "O scinece works and God doesn't" he's actually proving the basis upon which I claim my God argument is scientific.

*Hawking's no singularity thing, (although that's pretty much set aside but it was accepted up front on the premise that we can't have direct proof).

atheist says:

This is continued in the string model as as it has been explained to you that the beginning of the universe is no longer considered as a singularity.

In other words, it's proved by a model that is itself not the result of empirical data but is also assumed true by its fit with other theory. Meaning he's compounded the problem twice over. Now he establishes the precedent of twice arguing for something that scinece says s real but does not ahve direct empirical data to prove. That stands as the security form yet another theory for which there is no empirical data. So far can they stretch that point. I have God arguments that have to verified by other non empirical theories. No twice overs among my 42 God arguments.

*Multivese (no direct proof, mathematical doesn't count).

There are consequences that can be derived from the multiverse which can be tested and I am also told that they are looking at testing this idea experimentally already.

all the same deal.

All that really means is that without assuming the unverified multivariate they would have no answer temporal beginning argument or to the fin tuning argument.

after enough of this charge of special pleading and explaining what it means:

Originally Posted by this atheist

Absolutely not! proving something via modal logic is completely different to saying, this comes from a well tested model with very good predictive capability. The model comes from experiment, from the real world. Model logic comes from a set of axioms.

No it's not. it's really the very same thing. Yes modal logic is not the same thing as physics but that has nothign t do with the way that argument functions i your utterance. Not all the verification of God arguments is form modal logic, some is form cosmology just like these are.

He did not provide any direct empirical evidence. all he did was manage the context in which you consider the theory to make the anamorphic into evidence. In other words it's dependent upon the paradigm. The proof is that some physicists don't' accept the same big bang paradigm anymore so the big bang evidence is not evidence in their paradigm anymore.

my God arguments are not proof for atheists because they say "that's philosophy and I don't dig philosophy so it's not proof." I say "I dig philosophy so it is proof." that doesn't mean it' snot proof becuase you say it isn't, it is to me. It' just that you are managing the context in which proof is seen as proof.

another atheist chimes in:

Once again meta, you are comparing apples and oranges. We are talking about theories that have predictive capabilities, that have warn out the decades of experimental tests and still have been correct. Singularities appear in such models you know that there is something else to do on the theory.

I have 200 studies that are published in peer reviewed academic journals, everyone of them establishes the fact that religious experience fits the criteria of epistemic judgment, which is verified as valid by our daily epistemic practices. That means we can extrapolate from those findings and say this is verified by proven theory and it can be argued that it supports warrant for God belief. When I say that they go, "those studies don't' have 'god exists' as a finding so you can't extrapolate form it." The things they use to back these physical phenomena were not established on the basis that they back those phenomena. Einstein didn't propose relativity and say "and this valid as backing for a theory that will be put forth some day about neutrinos."

I'm really not doing anything any different than they do in their scientific work. In fact they don't do it, their priests of knowledge, the scientists do it. It's not different than what I do in my God arguments. Yet they allow it for scinece and not for God. That's what logicians call SPECIAL PLEADING!

They are using the difference in philosophy and phsyics like it's a big deal because they are managing the context. but the truth is the theory functions in their utterance the same way it does in mine. the problem is I accept a different theory than the one they conveniently ignore because it not in the one in their template of ideolgoical acceptance. The atheists have a template that spells out the ideologically favored ideas anything off template they ridicule and sweep aside with not thought or compunction.That is how they can condemn all of philosophy in one fell swoop without knowing anything about it. The template is based upon the concept of the fortress of facts. The theoretical big pile of facts that assures their view is truth. Of cousre only scientific fact then not all of them.

atheist says:

String theory reduces to the previous laws which do have good experimental evidence, you don't think that they just dreamed the whole idea up do you?

Meta said:

That does not equate to direct empirical evidence. you are compensating in every single case for not having the kind of evidence you demand of God talk.

you rationalize that lack by special pleading. you say "I can manage the context in which evidence is evidence and do it in such a way as to make up for the lack of what I require of God arguemnts.

you are saying "the rules apply to all the stuff off template but not to stuff on template." we call that "special pleading." In the lgoic world that's what it's called.

as I have explained, it's completely different.

special pleading.

you don't have direct evidence and you know you don't. It's a double standard it's special pleading.

apologetic, Atheist ideology, Atheist special pleading, empirical proof, God arguments, presumption in God talk

James Hannam's Gensis of Science: Other books that answer the Athiest Ideology of Science

2011-09-05T09:42:00.001-07:00

New Book Sets Record Straight on Religion's Role in Rise of Modern Science

James Hannam is a Historian, Ph.D. from Cambridge. He
has also been "Bede" one of the major internet apologists
known for "Bede's library." He is a member of the CARE.

On March 21 a ground breaking work, The Genesis of Science: How The Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution, (Washington DC: Regnery Publishing Inc. 2011), by Cambridge-trained historian James Hannam, takes its place in the United States on the shelf alongside other historical classics. The book has already been released in the UK (as God’s Philosophers).

For the last several decades historians of science have known something that still eludes the general public. Thanks to great books such as Margaret Jacob’s The Newtonians[i] or Lindberg and Numbers’ God and Nature,.[ii] the whole field of history of science is routinely aware of the fact that Enlightenment-spawned notions of the church persecuting burgeoning science in the Middle Ages, are just so much propaganda. As Hannam’s book documents there was no rash of would-be Einsteins in the Middle Ages put down and held back persecution of scientific ideas. The reason this book may be destined for status as a classic is two fold: first because Hannam’s engaging and easy style makes the material accessible; secondly because it fills a void not previously filled by the body of work in history of science.

Most of the works in question, such as those mentioned above, either deal with a later period (that of Newton and the Seventeenth or Eighteenth centuries) or they deal with the general sweep of history, touching upon every period and focusing mainly on modern times (such as the Lindberg book does). Hannam actually uncovers the depth of scientific work in the Middle Ages, the extent to which discoveries set up the process of scientific learning, and how the church nurtured it rather than held it back. The scope and details he brings to coverage of the period fill a void in a way other historians have neglected.

The work disabuses the reader of three grand misconceptions that the general public has been fed by non-specialist historical pedagogy at all levels of education: Medieval people did not think the earth was flat and their scholars could prove it was not; the Inquisition never persecuted anyone for doing or thinking about science; and the scientific learning that went on in the Middle Ages, including what the church promoted and enabled, set up the scientific revolution. The Jacob book demonstrates that English church men of the Seventeenth century made Newtonian science possible and boosted it among the general public, thus essentially creating modern science along the way; in the same way and with no less erudition Hannam demonstrates how the developments of the Middle Ages set up those developments in the latter era.

Hannam begins by discussing the history of the idea of the “dark ages.” How did historians come to regard this period after the fall of Rome up to the Renaissance as “the dark ages?” There has been a trend in history as a whole for the last 40 years to de-periodize history. The Renaissance is no longer understood as a period of time but more as a movement that overlapped several periods. One such major source would be Peter Burke, The Renaissance.[iii] According to Hannam, historians originally spoke of the “dark ages” meaning the period had little surviving in the way of documents or texts that furnished a lot of information about the era. It was the Enlightenment philosophers who began using the term in an anti-clerical way, to specifically refer to the church’s attitude toward science and the suppression of learning. It was really in nineteenth century France, Hamman tells us, where the structures of history were periodized and given names that reflect this ideology coming out of the Enlightenment. This was the century when the social sciences were organized and when August Comte began structural functionalism. They were extending the philosopher’s predilections to a re-write of the world.

In fact the centuries immediately after the fall of Rome saw much progress in the way of discoveries. Hannam opens the first chapter with the discussion of these discoveries. The old philosopher-based anti-clerical view sees the period it calls “the dark ages” (from the fall of the Western Roman Empire, to after the Norman conquest of 1066) as one in which progress stopped. In reality that era saw much in the way of progress. Western Europe made progress in technological terms, although the beginning of it seems very simple, low tech, unscientific--but it was not the arresting of progress. One of the first aspects of progress with the improvement of the plough, that led to increased food production and population explosion that enabled economic growth and the development of cities eventually. The Normans invented the stirrup that was a military advance and important in their conquest of the Saxons. The importance of conquest was the consolidation of power. There as a power vacuum after the fall of Rome. By consolidating power, greater communication became possible, discoveries could be disseminated. Most the discoveries in that era were in the area of agriculture.

The Genesis of Science is an immense research project pulled off masterfully. Oxford and Cambridge did their jobs in teaching Hannam how to research. It’s a vast understanding and spans the gamut of the field: medieval theology, cosmology, astronomy, even astrology and alchemy, all forms of medieval learning, mathematics--the vast range of human knowledge for people of the Middle Ages are summarized, and all the relevant developments to the story of how modern science emerged from human learning are recounted, yet in an accessible and easy to read style most engaging to the reader. The author proves his thesis that Christianity did not persecute science but nurtured it and enabled it to develop. “Popular opinion, journalistic cliché, and misinformed historians notwithstanding, recent research has shown that the Middle Ages was a period of enormous advances in science, technology and culture. The compass, paper, printing, stirrups, gunpowder, all appeared in Western Europe between 500 and 1500.” [iv] The compass allowed better navigation and trade and eventually led to discovery of the New World. Twenty million books were produced in the first fifty years after printing press was invented, a veritable explosion of knowledge which contributed in obvious ways to the rise of modern science, down the road. Yet there is a lot more to the story of development than just particular inventions from business and agriculture.

One of the major arguments made by skeptics, especially the “new atheists”, is that philosophy was useless and just “making things up,” but empirical scientific knowledge is factual and true and gives us an accurate understanding of the world. Actual scientists know there is more to it than this, but one hears atheists argue this way. Hannam’s book demonstrates that without the role played by reason, philosophy, and the church modern science would not have developed.

Modern science is a very specific kind of knowledge that blends empirical experimentation with rational analysis. Today we take it for granted and trust it to provide us with accurate information about nature. It’s hard to believe that a few centuries ago this scientific way of thinking hardly existed. Before the edifice of modern science could be built, it required the strong foundations that were laid for it in the middle ages. The cornerstone was a widespread acceptance of reason as a valid tool for discovering truth about our world. Clearly this could not happen without the approval of the Church, which at the time was the guardian of almost all intellectual endeavors. This means that the development of reason and its relationship with faith are both important parts of our story. So prevalent did rational argument become among philosophers during the middle ages that the period deserves to be thought of as the beginning of the “Age of Reason.”[v]

The traditional Enlightenment-philosopher-influenced historian has habitually lauded great individuals, such as Di Vinci for example, as bucking the trends, standing alone against the time, one guy by himself who was brilliant enough o see through the status quo. Yet Hannam points out that when one examines the immediate milieu of such thinkers, it usually turns out that they were products of a going concern, or influenced by trends already in progress around them. However brilliant the innovators, they were nevertheless the outgrowth of a progress that never stopped. One such example is that of St. Anselm of Canterbury, the author of the famous “ontological argument.” Fleeing his father in their native Aosta in the Italian Mont Blanc, across the Alps and into the Rhone valley, the young boy who would become St. Anselm settled for a time in northern France. He found the most dynamic region in Europe at that time. The ferment was around the Cathedrals because they served as focal points of human energy, effort, belief, concern and the use of technology of the day. The cathedral cities of Paris, Chartres, Rheims, and Orleans, provided a magnet that formed a hub of activity, not the least of which was a vital scene for scholarship and philosophy. It was out of this center that Anselm moved forth and helped to produce a theological and philosophical ferment. Skeptics look at medieval philosophy (or don’t look at it closely) and find silly unscientific concepts, but the truth is that these disputes, arguments and ponderings got science going.

Hannam deals with Copernicus and the fact that his system was never the least bit threatened by the church because it was proposed hypothetically and was not a challenge to authority. Hannam demonstrates a rich background that Copernicus drew upon, consisting of many ancient world and "dark age" thinkers known in the middle ages who believed in geocentrically solar system. The final chapter is a tour de force on Galileo demonstrating that his problems were politically driven not based upon any hatred of science by the church.

Overall Hannam has produced a wonderful book, and I think all who care about Christian apologetics, or even just the status of religion in the modern world, need to read it.

[i] Jacob, Margaret C. The Newtonians and the English Revolution: 1689-1720. Ithica New York: Cornell University Press, 1976.

[ii] David C. Lindberg and Ronald l. Numbers, ed, God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encoutner Between Christianity and Science. .University of California Press, 1986.

[iii] Peter Burke, The Renaissance, New York: Macmillian, 1997.

[iv] Hannam, Genesis of Science, xvii

[v] ibid, xix

2011-06-27T14:00:00.000-07:00

Newberg in Why god wont Go Away

"A skeptic might suggest that a biological origin to all spiritual longings and experiences, including the universal human yearning to connect with something divine, could be explained as a delusion caused by the chemical misfiring of a bundle of nerve cells. But …After years of scientific study, and careful consideration of the a neurological process that has evolved to allow us humans to transcend material existence and acknowledge and connect with a deeper, more spiritual part of ourselves perceived of as an absolute, universal reality that connects us to all that is."(p10)

"…Tracing spiritual experience to neurological behavior does not disprove its realness. If God does exist, for example, and if He appeared to you in some incarnation, you would have no way of experiencing His presence, except as part of a neurologically generated rendition of reality. You would need auditory processing to hear his voice, visual processing to see His face, and cognitive processing to make sense of his message. Even if he spoke to you mystically, without words, you would need cognitive functions to comprehend his meaning, and input form the brain’s emotional centers to fill you with rapture and awe. Neurology makes it clear: there is no other way for God to get into your head except through the brain’s neural pathways. Correspondingly, God cannot exist as a concept or as reality anyplace else but in your mind. In this sense, both spiritual experiences and experiences of a more ordinary material nature are made real to the mind in the very same way—through the processing powers of the brain and the cognitive functions of the mind. Whatever the ultimate nature of spiritual experience might be—weather it is in fact an actual perception of spiritual reality—or merely an interpretation of sheer neurological function—all that is meaningful in human spirituality happens in the mind. In other words, the mind is mystical by default."(p37)

Derrida and the TS: Derridian Background to the TS Argument

2011-06-16T08:12:00.000-07:00

Part 1

Jasque Derrida about mid life

This is a summary of Derrida on the Transcendental Signifier and why it "proves" the existence of God (in my special sense of "proof" that I use as "for practical purposes").

Derrida was from French North Africa, 1930-2004. here are two articles on him that will give you a basic run down:

Derrida on Wiki

Derrida in Philosophical Encyclopedia

Derrida was a student of Martin Heidegger. Derrida is the best known philosopher of recent times. Heidegger was an existentialist, then dropped that and began to call himself a "phenomenologist." Everything Derrida says came from Heidegger. Every move of decontracution is found in Heidegger, but Derrida put it together in a different package than Heidegger's.

"Deconstruction" was Derrida's babby. He invented it although one can find it's roots all over Western letters. He's plugging in elements from Heidegger, Sartre, Brintano, Nicholas of Cuza, Charles Sanders Pierce and all over the place.This is the run down on [B][I]Deconstruction.[/I][/B] I was taught Derrida by someone who had been his student in Paris in the late 60s before he moved to Yale.

Phenomenology is an attempt to place the observer at the center of awareness to allow sense data to be understood in ways that are not predetermined by preconceived categories. The idea is that the data will form its own categories. Attempts to gather sense data and heard it all into pre selected categories biases reality. In vernacular one might say "don't pigeon hole but remain open to possibilities for everything no matter how familiar or or obvious we think it might be. This attempt to pre select categories of knowledge is what Heidegger calls "Metaphysics." In this sense even science is metaphysics!

Derrida wants to explicate the end of western metaphysics,(his phrase). What does this mean? It means he, and most postmoderns, believe that the paths along which western metaphics have led us are dead ends. We have run out of metaphysics. We haven't run out of science, in the sense that there plenty of facts to look at, but in a way we have because reductionism has lowered our expectations about what we will find. But Derrida's beef is not with science. A Major segment of of postmodernists tried to attack modern science, but they were swept aside with the Alan Sokal stuff. Derrida was never one of them.

Derrida argues that Western metaphysics has always been predicated upon an organizing principal that orders reality and organizes sense data. William James Sums it up well in his Gilford Lectures:

"Plato gave so brilliant and impressive a defense of this common human feeling, that the doctrine of the reality of abstract objects has been known as the platonic theory of ideas ever since. Abstract Beauty, for example, is for Plato a perfectly definite individual being, of which the intellect is aware as of something additional to all the perishing beauties of the earth. "The true order of going," he says, in the often quoted passage in his 'Banquet,' "is to use the beauties of earth as steps along which one mounts upwards for the sake of that other Beauty, going from one to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair actions, and from fair actions to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute Beauty, and at last knows what the essence of Beauty is." 2 In our last lecture we had a glimpse of the way in which a platonizing writer like Emerson may treat the abstract divineness of things, the moral structure of the universe, as a fact worthy of worship. In those various churches without a God which to-day are spreading through the world under the name of ethical societies, we have a similar worship of the abstract divine, the moral law believed in as an ultimate object."

Derrida begins with Plato's theory of knowledge, this is the basis of Western metaphysics. Plato says that prior to birth we are in contact with the forms, thus knowledge is a matter of remembering, no learning for the first time. But then the question arises is speech closer to what we remember, or is writing? Socrates says the spoken word is closer to the ideas inside us, the memory of the forms, thus spoken word is better (more true, closer to reality) than written word. As he puts it "a writer dies his written words are like orphans since he is not there to defend them." This supremacy of the spoken word sets up a hierarchy of meaning and importance in western culture. We have come to value reason as the organizing principle of truth, as the "natural light" because it's an extension of the concept of this true Platonic knowledge. Reason becomes this overarching truth regime (Faucault's word) that organizes all reality. Everything is paired up into hierarchies, little hierarchies that fit into the big over all hierarchy, these are called "binary opossitions." They they take the form of couplets, consisting of the "true" or "correct" term and it's supplement; the false term or the unimportant addition to the "real thing." Examples are: up/down, black/white/ true/false/ male/female. Reason is construed as male and this resutls in "phalologocentrism."

Derrida's goal is to destroy hierarchies, to show that there is no truth, there is no meaning. We can't know anything. Derridian postmodernism is like archaeologists who try to piece together fragments of a broken vase. Some say "there is a vase here, we just have to fin out how the peices fit." Another says "there may be two vases." The postmodernist says "we don't have all the pieces, they may not have been a vase, it may be 16 vases, we can't know, there is no final answer, it's always going to be a jumble. The Deridian position is a good philosophical justification for nihilism. The difference being a nihilism takes too much effort.. The logical conclusion of Derridianism if one were consist would be to sit in a chair and say nothing until one starves to death. Of course Derrida himself was not consistent. He was one of the most prolific writers. His overall project was to tear down hierarchy and destroy the concept of the TS. Here is his argument against reason:

He asks "does reason ground itself?" Can we use reason to prove reason?

"Are we obeying the principle of reason when we ask what grounds this principle [reason] which is itself a principle of grounding? We are not--which does not mean that we are disobeying it either. Are we dealing here with a circle or with an abyss? The circle would consist in seeking to account for reason by reason, to reason to the principle of reason, appealing to the principle to make it speak of itself at the very point where, according to Heidegger, the prinicple of reason says nothing about reason itself. The abyss, the hole, ..., the empty gorge would be the impossibility for a principle of grounding to ground itself...Are we to use reason to account for the principle of reason? Is the reason for reason rational?"(Derrida in Criticism and Culture, Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schlefflier, Longman 1991, 20.)

Part 2

Derrida sought to destroy metaphysical hierarchy. How did he intend to do that? He did it by creating a method of reading a text, a critical tool that would allow him to dissect and destroy any hierarchy simply because it was a hierarchy. That tool was known as "deconstruction." To reconstruct one takes apart, in the sense of destroy; destruction = destruction.

Hierarchy is based upon the binary opposition. That means hierarchies are like stacks of couplets, each contianing a major term and suppolamental term:

God/
evil

up/
down

male/
female

the assumption is that the term on top is the "major term" the "real" thing, the one on the bottom is tacked on or er zots, or somehow inferior. A hierarchical metaphysics is constructed out of these binaries. These are among the categories we use to order our perception of sense data; and thus to order the world. We can see this in the atheist metaphysics of scientism:

Objective/
subjective

empirical/
logical

Derrida inverts the couplets. The "inferior term" is taken as the superior term, and the assumption is made that the hierarchy is false. But what move allows this? He accomplishes this move by the realization of the principle of "differance." This is not my dyslexia at work. He spells it with an "a" in order to out over the point that there is more to it than just "difference" as we understand it. That is, difference is the basis of meaning in language. Meaning of signifier is based upon the difference in one signifier and another. That means we call a "tree" a "tree" not because it is intrinsically endowed with treeness, but because we don't call it a "frog," a "bat" or an "elephant." The meaning of these terms, what they refer to, is totally arbitrary. Thus meaning arises through difference. Derrida uses this point as the staging ground for a multiple assault on all of Western thought. He derives from it the notion that meaning derives from absence (difference is absence) rather than presence. So Plato is screwed, the Platonic theory is crap. This is so because the meaning of truth in Platonic terms is presence, the proximity to the forms, remember? So the presence of the forms in our thinking is our nearness to truth. The closer the ware to what we recall of the forms the closer we are to truth. He sets up a hierarchy of presence in which speaking is closer to truth than writing.

Derrida destroys this hierarchy of presence by demonstrating that derives from absence (difference = absence because there is no presence of meaning in the signifier). He finds that meaning is never present. Meaning is always absent and sought after, always different and differed. He makes a pun on differ and deffer. Meaning is differed in that language has multiple meanings (why he likes puns) and one can never be sure that the meaning of a statement is always off stage waiting to come on, and when it does it only refers to another meaning. Life a child who always asks "why" the answer is never available, it's always in the next question, and the next, and the next. It's flickering away always. He uses the phase "always already," meaning is already absent.

Deconstruction works by finding a contradiction in the thesis and using that to flip over all the meanings. The classic Derridian example is the distinction in Rousseau between nature and nurture, the natural and civilized. Rousseau says that we can have natural morality we can be naturally good and naturally happy by being spontaneous and rooted in nature. He also says, however, that civilization is good because it nurtures us and gives us a basis in education and understanding. This is an inherent contradiction and Derrida exploits it to show that all of Rousseau's ideas are meaningless. In fact he shows that all meaning is meaningless. Everything falls apart, there is no grand edifice of truth that can stand before the onslaught of deconstruction. If one takes deconstruction seriously one must, to be totally consistent, just wind up sitting in a corner and never speaking and never assuming anything.

I ended part 1 with his statement that logic cannot be secured by logical argument He undermines logic and reason in this way and reduces them to ashes. Thus the final step in deconstruction is to show that there is no meaning, there is no truth all lies in ruin. His main objective is to destroy the Transendetal signifier because that is the essence of Platonic meaning,t he big idea at the top of the hierarchy that secures meaning and makes sense of all other marks that make sense of the world.He is quite aware that the TS equals God, he says so himself. This is his ultimate triumph over Christianity. It's a supreme moment for atheism, but of course the American scientifically obsessed, philosophically challenged atheists could never appreciates it. Once you come to truly understand Derrida and your faith survives it, nothing in the nature of an intellectual argument can ever threaten your faith again.

How does one survive it? One of the major pastimes in graduate school for student just encountering Derrida is to sit around trying to deconstruct Derrida. Everyone does this and everyone thinks he's the first person to think of it. You can just tell when student's understanding is reaching critical mass and she/he is about to say "Hey, let's deconstruct him!" Derrida knew this, and he traded in it. Its' one of the features that assured that people wanted to study him more. But it doesn't matter if you deconstruct him because it only proves his point. Since he says there is no truth there is no ultimate reality there is no meaning, ti doesn't matter if what he says is untrue and not meaningful. Except for one thing: you don't have to make the final step. If you are to reverse Derrida then you don't want to prove that he has no ultimate meaning, you want to prove that he does have meaning and he's just wrong. This is can be done by using his method, but not using the final step. Don't conclusion there's no meaning, just show that his meaning is wrong.

Derrdia follows Heidegger in almost everything. Almost every step he makes can be seen in Heidegger's Parmenides book. Both thinkers say that metaphysics is undeniable. Derrida wants to explicate the end of metaphysics, but he also says there is no hope of escaping metaphysics. Even language itself is metaphysical. We cannot help but do metaphysics. That means metaphysical hierarchies are inescapable which means the TS is inescapable. Thus the choice we have is to assume there is a TS or to fall silent and never speak, never try to think coherently.But we cannot live with that choice. Because we have to assume it, we can't live without it, we should assume there is a Transcendental signifier, and as Derrida points out, that's just a truncated version of God.

Transcendental Signifier Argument

2011-06-11T18:04:00.001-07:00

I have said we don't need God arguments, but I didn't say I'm opposed to them. In looking back over the history of the blog I notice I've put this one up several times but in a truncated form. I've never put in the full version. So here it is. I consider this to be a modern ontological argument.

If this is clear as mud to you and you want further background on the Derridian roots of the argument see these two articles:

Derrididan background part 1

Derridian Background part 2

Definitions

(1)Transcendental Signifier (TS):

The signification mark (word) which refers to the top of metaphysical hierarchy; the organizing principle which makes sense of all sense data and groups it into a meaningful and coherent whole, through which meaning can be understood.The corollary, the thing the Transcendental Signifier signifies, is the "Transcendental Signifiered (designated as TSed)"

(2) Signifier:

The term used of written words in the linguistic theories know as "structuralism" and in the theories of French Linguist Ferdinand Saussure. A signifier is a "mark," that is writing, which designates a concept forming a word, that which points to an object as the thing that it is and no other. ie, a physical tree is the signified, the object of the signifier "t-r-e-e."

Preliminary Observations:

(1) Any rational, coherent and meaningful view of the universe must of necessity presuppose an organizing principle which makes sense of the universe and explains the hierarchy of conceptualization.

(2) Organizing principles are summed up in a single first principle which grounds any sort of metaphysical hierarchy, the Transcendental Signifier (TS)

(3) It is impossible to do without a Transcendental Signifier, all attempts to do so have ended in the re-establishment of a new TS. This is because we cannot organize the universe without a principle of organizing.

(4)TS functions Uniquely as Top of The Metaphysical Hierarchy.It's function is mutually exclusive.

Argument:

P1) TS's function is mutually exclusive, no other principle can superceed that of the TS since it alone grounds all principles and bestows meaning through organization of concepts.

P2)We have no choice but to assume the reality of some form of TSed since we cannot function coherently without a TS

P3) We have no choice but to assume the reality of some form of TSed since the universe does seem to fall into line with the meaning we bestow upon it.

P4) The logical conclusion would be that There must be a TSed which actually creates and organizes the Universe.

P5) The signifier "God" is one version of the TS, that is to say, God functions in the divine economy exactly as the TS functions in a metaphysical hierarchy.

P6) Since "God" is a version of the TS, and since TS and God concept share a unique function which should be mutually exclusive, the logical conclusion is that: God and TS share identity.ie "God" concept is discretion of the Transcendental Signified.

P7)Since the TS should be assumed as real, and TS and God share identity, we should assume that God is the Transcendental Signified, and thus is an actual reality.

rational warrant for belief in God's existence, QED.

B. Transcendental Signifier is the ultimate metaphysical principle which makes sense of the universe.

The transcendental Signifier (TS) is the mark that gives meaning to all the marks that make sense of the world; the "zeit geist," the "urmind", the "overself", the "object of ultimate concern", the "omega point", the "Atmon", the "one," the "Logos", "reason." all the major top ideas which bestow meaning upon the world are examples of the TS. People have always advanced such notions. (The word "G-O-D" is the Transcendental Signifier, the thing those letters refer to is the "transcendental signified")

1) All people have some notion the "big idea" which makes sense of everything else.

William James, Gilford lectures:

"Plato gave so brilliant and impressive a defense of this common human feeling, that the doctrine of the reality of abstract objects has been known as the platonic theory of ideas ever since. Abstract Beauty, for example, is for Plato a perfectly definite individual being, of which the intellect is aware as of something additional to all the perishing beauties of the earth. "The true order of going," he says, in the often quoted passage in his 'Banquet,' "is to use the beauties of earth as steps along which one mounts upwards for the sake of that other Beauty, going from one to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair actions, and from fair actions to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute Beauty, and at last knows what the essence of Beauty is." 2 In our last lecture we had a glimpse of the way in which a Platonist writer like Emerson may treat the abstract divisiveness of things, the moral structure of the universe, as a fact worthy of worship. In those various churches without a God which to-day are spreading through the world under the name of ethical societies, we have a similar worship of the abstract divine, the moral law believed in as an ultimate object."

2) All Metaphysical Constructs include a TS.

Metaphysics is not merely realms unseen, but the organization of reality under a single organizing principle (this definition comes form one reading of Heidegger). All systems and groupings of the world verge on the metaphysical. Derrida and Heidegger say that it is impossible to do without metaphysics since even language itself is metaphysical. Everything points to the Transcendental Signifier. ( see Heidegger, Parenthesis, and Introduction to Metaphysics, and Derrida, Margins of Philosophy and almost any Derrida book).

3) Science has TS

William James--Gilford lectures:

"'Science' in many minds is genuinely taking the place of a religion. Where this is so, the scientist treats the 'Laws of Nature' as objective facts to be revered. ..."

Science is very Metaphysical. It assumes that the whole of relaity and be organized and studied under one central principle, that of naturalism.

"For essential reasons the unity of all that allows itself to be attempted today through the most diverse concepts of science and of writting, is in principle, more or less covertly, yet always, determined by a an historico-metaphysical epoch of which we merely glimpse the closure." [Derrida, The End of the Book and the Begining of Writting, trans. Gayatri Spivak 1967 in Contemporary Critical Theory, ed. Dan Latimer, New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovonovitch, 1989, p.166]

MetaListon Scinece and religion
http://www.meta-list.org/ml/ml_frameset.asp
Stephen Hawking's

"In his best-selling book "A Brief History of Time", physicist Stephen Hawking claimed that when physicists find the theory he and his colleagues are looking for - a so-called "theory of everything" - then they will have seen into "the mind of God". Hawking is by no means the only scientist who has associated God with the laws of physics. Nobel laureate Leon Lederman, for example, has made a link between God and a subatomic particle known as the Higgs boson. Lederman has suggested that when physicists find this particle in their accelerators it will be like looking into the face of God. But what kind of God are these physicists talking about?"

"Theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg suggests that in fact this is not much of a God at all. Weinberg notes that traditionally the word "God" has meant "an interested personality". But that is not what Hawking and Lederman mean. Their "god", he says, is really just "an abstract principle of order and harmony", a set of mathematical equations. Weinberg questions then why they use the word "god" at all. He makes the rather profound point that "if language is to be of any use to us, then we ought to try and preserve the meaning of words, and 'god' historically has not meant the laws of nature." The question of just what is "God" has taxed theologians for thousands of years; what Weinberg reminds us is to be wary of glib definitions."

C. Attempts to Deconstruct TS lead to abyss of Meaninglessness, and back to TS.

1) Derridian Deconstruction.

The French Post-structuralist Jaque Derrida seeks to explicate the end of Metaphysics which is the final project of Western philosophy. His technique of deconstruction aims at undermining any logos or first principle that would give rationality to the universe by unseating the privileges of reason which under gird all such projects. Even logic itself is undermined.

Derrida:

"Are we obeying the principle of reason when we ask what grounds this principle [reason] which is itself a principle of grounding? We are not--which does not mean that we are disobeying it either. Are we dealing here with a circle or with an abyss? The circle would consist in seeking to account for reason by reason, to reason to the principle of reason, appealing to the principle to make it speak of itself at the very point where, according to Heidegger, the principle of reason says nothing about reason itself. The abyss, the hole, ..., the empty gorge would be the impossibility for a principle of grounding to ground itself...Are we to use reason to account for the principle of reason? Is the reason for reason rational?"

Derrida in Criticism and Culture, Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schlefflier, Longman 1991, 20.

Derrida's argument amounts to saying, "logic does not endorse itself." The point of the quotation above seems to be that logic is in a dilemma. If one tries to prove logic by its own terms, one is merely arguing in circle. But, if one does not do this, there is no foundation upon which one can base logic, because logic is the foundation.

[Quotes from Derrida from "The University in the Eyes of It's Pupils" Diactricits]

2) Into the abyss and back out to TS.

Many critics of Deconstruction have noted that if we take this principle seriously we would wind up unable to speak or think, even language requires an organizing principle which orders the world of our thought and speech (of course the basic thrust of Postmodern thought understands us to be trapped in, as Jameson said, "the prison house of language" unable to get at the real things of the world and their understanding because all we can really ever think through is language). But in opening this abyss Derrida creates a safe bridge over it as well, although that is not his intention. He uses the principle of difference (which he spells as "differance" to indicate that meaning is both differing and differing) but difference becomes the organizing principle of a Derridian universe. IT not only explains how meaning is derived from signifiers, not only does it tear down the meaning of all hierarchies, but it actually builds new ones because it becomes the foundation of value in valuing difference.

"The constant danger of deconstruction is that it falls into the same kinds of hierarchies that it tries to expose. Derrida himself is quite aware of this danger--and his response--which is really a rhetorical response...is to multiply the names under which deconstruction traffics..." [--Con Davis,Culture and Critique 178-179]

D. unavoidable nature of TS indicates God is a priori.

Either way, heather we try building a reductionist notion of the universe or heather we tear down the hierarchies of reason that implies a TS, we can never escape the TS. This inescapable nature of the transcendental signifier points to the a priori nature of the God concept. That reality is ordered by a single principle which gives meaning and rationality to all other principles is inescapable, but humanities multifarious attempts to understand that principle, and the frightening conclusion that the principle leads to a creator God is the logic inference. All of the many signs which have been used to understand this uber-sign imply an intelligent ordering rationality which makes sense of the universe, and therefore, logically must have created it in the first place.

1) Transcendental Signifier is unavoidable.

As has been pointed out above, there is no possibility of holding a rational view of the universe without an organizing principle, a "thing at the top." This indicates the ultimate necessity of a TS. In other words, the fact that we cannot get away from the TS indicates that there must really be one.

2) God is the ultimate Transcendental Signifier.

"Without God, who has been the ultimate Transcendent Signified, there is no central perspective, no objective truth of things, no real thing beyond language." [Nacy Murphy and James McClendon jr." Distinguishing Modern and Postmodern Theologies." Modern Theology, 5:3 April 1989, 211]

E. God is the ultimate unifying principle.

1) Coincidence of Opposites.

Nicholas of Cuza's concept that God's infinity is a universal set subsuming all finite sets of opposites. (See Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology)

"The universe of Nicholas of Cusa is an expression or a development, though of course necessarily imperfect and inadequate, of God--imperfect and inadequate because it displays in the realm of multiplicity what in God is present in an indisputable and intimate unity (complication) a unity which embraces not only the different but even the opposite, qualities or determinations of being. In its turn every single thing in the universe represents it--the Universe-- and thus also God in its own particular manner; each in a manner different from that of all others, by contracting the wealth of the universe in accordance with its own unique individuality."[--Alexandre Koyre' From Closed World to The Infinite Universe, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University press, 1957, 8-9.]

Cuza's vision of a universe taken up metaphysically in God in an undifferentiated unity is grounded in the paradoxical nature of geometry. One example Cuza gives is of the dichotomy between straightness and curvilinear. But if one was dealing with an infinite circle, from every point along the circle it would appear that the circle was a straight line. Or another example; large and small are opposites in a finite perspective, but in dealing with the infinitely large circle and the infinitely small one the center loses its special qualities, both are at the same time both nowhere and everywhere, and thus equally meaningful and meaningless.This may not seem like a particularly Christian notion of God, but Paul Tillich remarks that Martin Luther embraced it," one of the most profound conceptions of God ever developed." Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought.

2) God as Being itself.

As being itself God is Metaphysically above the level of existing things in the universe and constitutes all the potentiality and all actuality. This the nature of God is to order and to bring to concreteness potentialities. The signifier 'G-o-d' universally signifies and therefore takes up into itself all concepts and principles of rationality.

3) All people seek TS, therefore, this reflects innate sense of God.

Not only do we seek it, we cannot avoid it. The alternative is a meaningless universe, and more than that, a universe without coherence to reality. Of course we have the rules of logic, and we have science to tell us facts, but those move toward the TS becasue they are both predicated upon organizing reality under a logos, a rationale.

F. Objections.

1) Deconstruction and Postmodernism.

The climate of opinion today is that all metaphysical structures are merely constructed hierarchies of meaning and we can simply deconstruct them by reverse the terms, bringing out the contradictory elements in a text, or unbracketed that which is silenced by the text. But the move of Derrida to the metaphysical level form the linguistic level is totally unwarranted.The deconstruction of metaphysical hierarchies is nothing more than arbitrary. Moreover, Derrida simply makes his own TS through the concept of "difference" (he even spells it with an "a" to show that it is more than mere "difference" but induces differing and differing meaning. Yet this principle comes to define the universe, to set all values, to play the ultimate arbitration; in effect it has become its own TS.

2) We merely impose meaning upon a randum and cold universe.

We imposes meaning upon the universe as part of the brains innate pattern making ability, which is an evolutionary deposit allowing us to determine what to eat in the world and to recognize danger, remember where the good mushrooms are ect.and as cultural deposit owing to our need for security in a cold universe. Answer: While this is going to be the commonplace assumption in the current climate of opinion, and while it is no doubt true in general, even the "objective" "proven" "advocate of human knowlege" science must be nothing more than the imposition of a pattern of meaning upon nature to make us feel better in a cold universe. Of course the skeptic will break down the dichotomy between metaphysical meaning and "objective fact" about the workings of the universe. But science no less than religion transforms itself into metaphysical organization in dictating its materialist assumptions about ultimate reality. While it is true that we imposes patterns and read in meaning this in no way proves that there is nothing "out there" and the fact that it seems to be a natural inclination of humanity to find it implies that there is an innate sense of it laid upon our being as a divine program, to find the mark that gives meaning to all other marks.

3) This is an attempt to squre the circle.

Answer: This criticism has been made of the use of Nicholas of Cuza. Note, Cuza's argument does not mean that the square and the circle change shapes, it is not saying that sureness is really roundness. It is saying that in infinity all distinctions between binary opposition become meaningless. The shapes are the same, but from the view point of a finite observer in infinity the distinctions are meaningless.

my own resurrection harmony

2011-04-09T12:36:00.001-07:00

this page black = Matt's account
Orange = John's account
blue = my narration showing how they fit in one harmony. I use Matt to stand in for all three synoptic because the other two are not as difficult to harmony with Matt.

Matt 28: harmonized with other accounts:

Matt 28: 1 Now after the Sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to look at the grave.

Two Mary's and probalby undisclosed grou pf women.first thing they see is the stone rolled away. Agreement with all other accounts: Luke 24:2, Mark 16:4, Peter 13:55, John 20:2, at this point Mary Magdeline leaves to get the others, thinking the body has been stolen. She sdoes not look in side the tomb, this is agreement with John 20:2.

John 20:

1 Now on the first day of the week Mary Magdalene came early to the tomb, while it was still dark,and saw the stone already taken away from the tomb. 2 So she ran and came to Simon Peter and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved...,

Begin Flashback:

2 And behold, a severe earthquake had occurred, for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled away the stone and sat upon it. 3 And his R1151 appearance was like lightning, and his clothing as white as snow. 4 The guards shook for fear of him and became like dead men.

end flashback

Women don't don't see this event,it happened the night before.

5 The angel said to the women, "Do not be afraid; for I know that you are looking for Jesus who has been crucified. 6 "He is not here, for He has risen, just as He said. Come, see the place where He was lying.

angel begins to speak to the women in v5. We are not told where they first saw or heard him, inside the tomb or outside. meanwhile MM goes back to the desciples and tells them:

and said to them, "They have taken away the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid Him." 3 So Peter and the other disciple went forth, and they were going to the tomb.

Meanwhile, back at the tomb, the angel is telling the women to go tell the disciples. 7 "Go quickly and tell His disciples that He has risen from the dead; and behold, He is going ahead of you into Galilee, there you will see Him; behold, I have told you." 8 And they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy and ran to report it to His disciples. 9 And behold, Jesus met them and greeted them. And they came up and took hold of His feet and worshiped Him. 10 Then Jesus said to them, "Do not be afraid; go and take word to My brethren to leave for Galilee, and there they will see Me."

We do not know where or how far from the Tomb site the women saw Jesus. As this was happening, MM and Peter, and John were proably reaching the tomb. Peter and John go in, exmaine the empty tomb and grave clothes. This happens as Jesus himself tells the otehr women he is risen.

4 The two were running together; and the other disciple ran ahead faster than Peter and came to the tomb first; 5 and stooping and looking in, he saw the linen wrappings lying there; but he did not go in. 6 And so Simon Peter also came, following him, and entered the tomb; and he saw the linen wrappings lying there, 7 and the face-cloth which had been on His head, not lying with the linen wrappings, but rolled up in a place by itself. 8 So the other disciple who had first come to the tomb then also entered, and he saw and believed. 9 For as yet they did not understand the Scripture, that He must rise again from the dead. 10 So the disciples went away again to their own homes. 11 But Mary was standing outside the tomb weeping; and so, as she wept, she stooped and looked into the tomb; 12 and she saw two angels in white sitting, one at the head and one at the feet, where the body of Jesus had been lying. 13 And they said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping?" She said to them, "Because they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid Him." 14 When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, and did not know that it was Jesus. 15 Jesus said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking?" Supposing Him to be the gardener, she said to Him, "Sir, if you have carried Him away, tell me where you have laid Him, and I will take Him away." 16 Jesus said to her, "Mary!" She turned and said to Him in Hebrew, "Rabboni!" (which means, Teacher). 17Jesus said to her, "Stop clinging to Me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to My brethren and say to them, `I ascend to My Father and your Father, and My God and your God.' " 18 Mary Magdalene came, announcing to the disciples, "I have seen the Lord," and that He had said these things to her.

Twelve Angry Steriotypes: answering atheist parody theodicy probelm

2011-04-09T09:02:00.000-07:00

original tv play "Twelve Angry Men"

a Friend from CARM emailed me this article found on Internet Infidels.Its' a parable (or anti-parable) about the problem of pain. It supposedly critique twelve different views of God and the approaches taken by those who hold said views, and the inadequacy thereof. I promised this friend a critique. But I will only defend the views that I find close to my own. I may make comments on some of the views, but not all. I see no point in defending views I don't hold. Apparently this essay is a "must read" according to HRG (Hans R. Groum) the star of the atheist board on CARM.

Before getting started I have one general observation. The argument made here uses the medium of parable, and thus uses the idea of policemen watching a murder and not intervening as the analogy. The problem is, we hired cops to do a specific job, they are regular men and they have limited understanding. They are put up to a specific task which is understood of them and they have our own limitations in understanding the nature of the task or how to carry it out. This means the analogy is limited and dubious as analogous of God and the world. God is not hired to carry out a specific task. God allows things to happen in relation to divine wisdom, which is not something we understand well. We have to allow God to use his own judgment in how he things things should go. We can say to a cop "you know your job is to keep the pace and you allowed this crime to transpire right in font of your face" but we do no know God's role. We do not know God's understanding. We do not know God's limitations (if any). Thus this means there is no analogy. Where there is no analogy there is no argument.

Secondly. This essay carries the same weakness as the design argument. It doesn't outweigh God arguments it falls to them because it argues from the state of the world to the existence of God. If that is a mistake for design arguments, it's a mistake for theodicy arguments. If it is not a mistake for theodicy it is not a mistake for design; moot point at best.

thirdly, of course, I have made my own theory of theodicy, the "Soteriological Drama." Of cosrue this essay makes no mention of it. So any argument gleaned from this parable is countered by my essay. Please read it!

now to the parable:

The Tale of the Twelve Officers (2002)
the Tale of Twelve Officers
by

Mark I. Vuletic
Previously "The Five Officers" (2000), and then changed to "The Nine Officers" (2001), Vuletic has now made the final update to this essay to include a total of twelve points of view.

The First officer:

It was, of course, sad to hear that Ms. K had been slowly raped and murdered by a common thug over the course of one hour and fifty-five minutes; but when I found out that the ordeal had taken place in plain sight of twelve fully-armed off-duty police officers, who ignored her terrified cries for help, and instead just watched until the act was carried to its gruesome end, I found myself facing a personal crisis. You see, the officers had all been very close friends of mine, but now I found my trust in them shaken to its core. Fortunately, I was able to talk with them afterwards, and ask them how they could have stood by and done nothing when they could so easily have saved Ms. K.
"I thought about intervening," said the first officer, "but it occurred to me that it was obviously better for the murderer to be able to exercise his free will than to have it restricted. I deeply regret the choices he made, but that's the price of having a world with free agents. Would you rather everyone in the world were a robot? The attacker's choices certainly weren't in my control, so I can't be held responsible for his actions."

I'm not correcting his spelling. If there is a misspelling in the block quote the atheist put it there.

Of course here we see the mocking of the Free will Defense. My Soteriological Drama is a free will defense. I urge the reader to read it as an answer. But notice here there is no reason for free will given. No attempt to weight the consequences of not having free will vs having it and having to suffer because of it. So no decision cam be made about the wisdom of such a course. The empty mocking of the position says it wall, "would you rather everyone be a robot?" Of course they would. atheists wish they were robots. rather they wish everyone else was a robot. So much for their disingenuous concern for humanity. They can't even understand the basic condition necessary for their own rebellion. if they were robots of God they could not be atheists. But that would suit them, they want to be absolved built and responsibly

The Second Officer:

"Well," said the second officer, "my motivation was a little bit different. I was about to pull my gun on the murderer when I thought to myself, 'But wait, wouldn't this be a perfect opportunity for some unarmed bystander to exercise selfless heroism, should he chance to walk by? If I were to intervene all the time like I was just about to, then no one would ever be able to exercise such a virtue. In fact, everyone would probably become very spoiled and self-centered if I were to prevent every act of rape and murder.' So I backed off. It's unfortunate that no one actually showed up to heroically intervene, but that's the price of having a universe where people can display virtue and maturity. Would you rather the world were nothing but love, peace, and roses?"

spoiled self centered people always mock those who lecture them on being responsible and selfless. I don't really know of any position that says God allows pain so we wont be selfish. I guess its' closest to the old "pain builds character idea" but I don't of anyone who is really willing to argue that seriously. C.S. Lewis argues something similar in the Problem of Pain But he is sophisticated enough to develop it into something more than that. Since I'm not defending Lewis I'll move on.

Third Officer:

"I didn't even consider stepping in," said the third officer. "I probably would have if I hadn't had so much experience of life as a whole, since Ms. K's rape and murder admittedly seems pretty horrible when taken in isolation. But when you put it into context with the rest of life, it actually adds to the overall beauty of the big picture. Ms. K.'s screams were like the discordant notes that make fine musical pieces better than they would have been had all the notes been flawless. In fact, I could scarcely keep from waving my hands around, imagining that I myself was conducting the delicious nuances of the orchestra."

This is really a straw man argument. I don't know of any Christian apologist who argues that pain adds to the beauty of life. I sometimes tell myself "it's all part of the rich pageantry of life," but only as a facetious commentary on how generally screwed up things are. This is really a major misunderstanding that atheists have about Christian positions. I guess they must think Christians have to think everything is huncky duncky. I don't think that. I think the world is screwed. That might go along with the Christian concept of a fallen world. I certainly Don't blame God for it. But then atheists are looking for things things to blame ;God for. Then they catch themselves and say "but I don't believe in him." but they blame him for everything.
Fourth:

"When I first arrived on the scene, I actually drew my gun and pointed it right at the rapist's head," confessed the fourth officer, with a very guilty look on his face. "I'm deeply ashamed I did that. Do you know how close I came to destroying all of the goodness in the world? I mean, we all know there can't be any good without evil. Fortunately, I remembered this just in time, and a wave of such strong nausea came over me when I realized what I had almost done, that it knocked me to my hands and knees. Man, was that a close one."

This is a misapplication of several arguments none of which say that if God stops evil good will be destroyed. I have argued against atheists views that try to make evil into an essence. Thus many times they will argue that some contradiction obtains because God is good and evil exits, thus God is contradicted by evil or some such idea. Sometimes they push this to the point of making evil an essential quality. I say evil is not a positive thing. It's the lac of good. But that doesn't mean that in space somewhere there's this big "lack of good" sitting around. The lack of Good is in the heart, the human heart, or the attitudes. That is not an argument that evil is in anyway necessary to good. The relationship of good to evil is like that of light to shade. Light does not depend upon shade for its existence. Shade does depend upon light.

Fifth

"Look, there's really no point in my trying to explain the details to you," said the fifth officer, who we had nicknamed 'Brainiac' because he had an encyclopedic knowledge of literally everything and an IQ way off the charts. "There's an excellent reason for why I did not intervene, but it's just way too complicated for you to understand, so I'm not even going to bother trying. I mean, you admit you are nowhere near as knowledgeable as I am, so what right do you have to judge? Just so there's no misunderstanding, though, let me point out that no one could care about Ms. K. more than I did, and that I am, in fact, a very good person. That settles that."

this one is typical of the atheist not willing to allow God to be God. They can't allow that anything anywhere could know more than we do. I can't blame them entirely for this answer since I don't like mystifications either. Too often Christan will slough off an answers with this "no one knows the mind of God" sort of thing. On the other hand it is arrogant and stupid to pretend that we do know everything. We have to allow God to be all knowing and ou to be very ignorant. We ave to accept that we don't see the big picture. HOw could we? why shouldn't the big picture be beyond our scope?

There the atheists are looking for an all purpose handy dandy god defeater argument that has to be true. They use the excuse of point as a kings x. o God allowed this so there cant' be a God. It' just a big atheists Kings X.

Sixth!!!!

"I would have defended Ms. K," said the sixth officer, who was notoriously careful about staying out of the public eye, "but it simply was not feasible. You see, I want everyone to freely choose to believe in me. But if I were to step in every time someone was about to be raped or murdered, then the evidence would be so clear-cut that everyone would be forced to believe in me. Can you imagine a more diabolical infringement upon their free wills? Obviously, it was better for me to back off and let Ms. K be raped and murdered. Now everyone can freely choose to believe that there is this extraordinary cop out there who loves them like his own children."

Ok now we are getting someplace! Even though he doesn't say it, this is aimed at me. this is my view which is unique. This means I've had an impact such that they have to answer my own view. Yeah yip yip ypiee!!! (exuse my outburst). This is based upon my view in Soteriological Drama

If one will read the link one finds that there is much more to this view that is left out of the atheist frame work He just said "I didn't help because I want people to believe in me." what's is missing is the all the analysis about how why direct intervention would negate belief and what that means.

(1) It totally misses the point that what would be negated is not just belief or not belief at all. I state explicitly we would all believe in God if God make it plain enough. Not the point.

(2) We would believe but at the price of resentment. If we felt that we had to be good no matter what, there's no ambiguity, God is watching at all times and if we screw up we are in trouble, we would resent it. We would resent God.

(3) God wants more than just belief. He wants us to internalize the values of being good.

(4) The only way to do that is to instill these values in such a way that we want to believe them.

(5) That's the logic of the search. If we have to search for the truth we embrace the truth we find. If part of that truth is the values of the good then embrace them. we internalize them.

(6) If God stopped based stuff all the time there would be no need for a search. there would be no internalizing the values.
This involves an answer similar to no 4, but if we are not careful we might think that this is no. 4. But it is not. I am not saying Good requires evil. Nor am I saying suffering builds character. thse are answered specifically on the page linked to above.

seventh

"What are you complaining about?" exclaimed the seventh officer when I turned to him, his eyebrows shooting up in exasperated disbelief. "I just saved a woman from getting raped and murdered last week! Do I have to jump in every time I see something like that about to happen? I would say the fact that more women are not raped and murdered in this city is almost miraculous testimony to my goodness."

eight

The eighth officer, too, looked frustrated. "Nothing I do is good enough! Do you know how much worse it could have been? The thug actually had a blowtorch with him when he started out, but I said 'No way, not on my watch,' and knocked it away from him with my nightstick. Sure, I let him keep the switchblade, the pliers, the coat hanger, and the vial of acid, but think how much worse it would have been with a blowtorch! Ms. K should have thanked her lucky stars that someone so loving was there to watch over her."

both are highly inadequate parodies of positions I've given in the past. These answers were specific to certain atheist arguments. they are not meant to be general answers to the entire problem of pain. Atheists wont allow an honest answer. They can't take anything seriously and they can't represent an argument fairly. They always leave out the crucial bits that make so much difference. See above on Six see what was left out that makes a fine response look idiotic.
Seen and eight do not represent views of God. They are taken of out context. Which is what I would expect from atheists.

Ninth:

"I'll let you in on a secret," said the ninth officer."Moments after Ms. K. flatlined, I had her resuscitated, and flown to a tropical resort where she is now experiencing extraordinary bliss, and her ordeal is just a distant memory. I'm sure you would agree that that's more than adequate compensation for her suffering, so the fact that I just stood there watching instead of intervening has no bearing at all on my goodness."

here he's not even trying. Just mocking the concept of after life. I could make a better parody of the "God will make it up to us in heaven" mentality.
Tenth

The tenth officer gave us all quite a start when he revealed a surprising secret about Ms. K. "I genetically engineered her from scratch. I made her, therefore she's my property, and I can do whatever I want with her. I could rape and murder her myself if I were so inclined, and it would be no worse than you tearing up a piece of paper you own. So there is no question of my being a bad person for not helping her."

Of course here we have the atheist inability to argue within the guidelines of a position. I've seen them do this over an dover again. They think 'well it doesn't matter if those guys believe God created us, I don't believe th so he didn't." Then you get this sort of wired argument that doesn't quite accept the premise of it's opponent, even for the sake of argument, and yet expects one to go along with the argument anyway even though tit's not really Germain to anyone's actual belief. Why would we be surprised to find that God created humans? If a real cop said this of course it would be delusional, but not if God say sit. I can just hear the atheists missing the point and saying "but there is no God to say this."

Eleventh

The eleventh officer chimed in, gesturing at the tenth officer "I hired him to create Ms. K for me, because I wanted someone to love and worship me. But when I approached Ms. K about the matter, she actually turned away from me, as though she could find meaning and happiness with someone else! So I decided the loving thing to do would be to break her spirit by arranging to have her raped and murdered by a common thug, so that she might turn to me in her extraordinary suffering, thereby fulfilling the purpose for which she had been created. Well, mission accomplished, I'm happy to say! A few seconds before she died, she was so insane with terror and pain that she actually convinced herself she loved me, since she knew that only I could end her ordeal. I'll never forget the love in her eyes when she looked up at me the last time, begging for mercy, right before the thug bent over and slit her throat. It was so beautiful it still brings me to tears. Now I just have to go to that island so she can claim her prize of servitude."

I don't know of anyone who says that God allows pain so that we will have to love him. This is seems like the typical atheist misrepresentation and distortion they are constantly into. As I say they can never really gasp what an argument is about and they can never represent a Christian view point accurately.

Twelve:

"Well, this is quite a coincidence," chuckled the twelfth officer. "It looks like the thug got himself double pay, because I actually hired him to carry out the murder, too! Why? Oh, well it was just a test. Ms. K and I had been dating for some time (no offense, I didn't know she was someone else's property), and one beautiful night she finally told me she loved me. So, naturally, I wanted to see whether this was indeed love - that is, whether she would continue to adore me even while drowning in a pool of her own tears and blood, with me standing before her doing nothing."

I have to had it to him on this one. This is pretty much why I reject the "this is all a test" theory of spirituality. But of course their fuming hatred at people who say this marks their inability to empathize.

By now, it had become clear to me that any difficulty I might have had in reconciling the presumed goodness of the officers with their behavior that day was unfounded, and that anyone who sided against them could do so only for love of evil over good. After all, anyone who has experienced their friendship in the way I have knows that they are good. Their goodness is even manifest in my life - I was in a shambles before I met them, but now everyone remarks on what a changed person I am, so much kinder and happier, apparently possessed of an inner calm. And I have met so many others who feel exactly the same way about them - so many who, like me, know in their hearts the truth that others try to rationalize away with their cold reason and sterile logic. I am ashamed that I ever doubted the entitlement of the twelve officers to my loyalty and my love.
As I was getting ready to leave, the first officer spoke up again. "By the way, I also think you should know that when we stood there watching Ms. K. get raped and stabbed over and over, we were suffering along with her, and we experienced exactly the same pain she did, or perhaps even more." And everyone in the room, myself included, nodded his head in agreement.

Of course this is not kind of answer to the process theology position that says God suffers with humanity but can't save 100% of life. Pain and suffering are those things cannot be saved. The assumption made here by the author is that they could stop such things. Thus it fails to even speak to views such as process, or deism or a view of an impersonal God (the God principle) which assert that God cannot stop such things.

The usual atheist mentality is to mock and blaspheme such a God and to assert that he's not worth worshiping. Then they turn around and idealize Buddhism as atheist spirituality even though its essentially offering the same thing as an impersonal God principle, even though they don't' say that.
Now comes the passive aggressive bit.

Postscript

Religious readers, do not take offense. I have made this parable as brazen as I could, but my purpose is not to insult or blaspheme.

I just got through distorting and insulting your view of life, but I don't mean to insult you.

I have found that religious believers are often conditioned to accept trite solutions to the problem of suffering, and that it is all but impossible to shake that conditioning through dry analysis. The temptation to offer to an entity a moral blank check simply because it sports a nametag with "God" written on it, is overwhelming in our theistic culture. Hence, this attempt to make the point through a medium as far removed from dry analysis as possible. But again, it is all to make a point, not to cause anyone harm. I have not written anything that I would not have wanted directed at me when I myself was a believer.

yes I think you are a perfect idiot to hold your beliefs but don't' be offended.

Atheists are really stuck with the need to reduce answers to pablum because theodicy is one of the major arguments they possess. They can't prove there is no God, they can't win a God argument to save their lives. About the only thing they can do si throw up sweeping objections to the concept of God based upon the nature of the world. Of course we need to be aware of The reverse design argument. (see up top) The best they can get out of it is a moot point because it is either outweighed by God arguments, or equal tot hem; can't reason form the state of the world to God or rule out God's existence for same reason.

comparing God to a big cop in the sky is just another version of thinking of God as a big "guy in the sky." This seems to be about the only way atheists can think about god.

Oddly enough I was thinking of doing an argument along these lines. I don't think sufficient attention is given to the impersonal God option. Even though that is not my view I will do one on it, the impersonal God as an answer to theodolites. I'll put that up in a couple of days. I'll how it relates to a valid Christian position. In the mean time we should recognize that we don't need a definite answer tot he great oceanic questions to justify belief. If I' don't know why God allows pain" is the only answer, they must show why this is not good enough. Because they can't answer other oceanic questions without appealing to God. why aren't we robots? why do we have wills, why do we find meaning in belief? why is the human brain wired to respond to God talk? They can't answer that. At that level all of it has to reduce to personal decision.

The atheist fails to secure his big all purpose God beater argument.

Soteriological Drama: Pain and Short Lives.

2011-04-09T08:50:00.000-07:00

If you are coming over from the CADRE blog, I apologize for the duplication.I meant to post this here and I thought I was in the Metacrock's blog section but I was in the CADRE section and posted there by mistake. Rather than take it out i thought well those guys could use it too. I'll just post in both places.

Yesterday I had a discussion with atheist on theodicy problem. That's the problem of pain and evil. Why does God allow it. There are two questions there but I think the answers to both are related. My classic answer is my own version of the "Free Will defense." The thing that makes my version different is the twist I put on internalizing the values of the good. This my version from Doxa and here's how it plays out. I call it "Soteriological Drama." Soteriology means the study of salvation. I am saying there's a drama, not entertainment but the kind of real drama one finds in life, concerning the pursuit of salvation. God has designed a serach into the process because it is only by searching that we learn to internalize the values of the good.

Basic assumptions

There are three basic assumptions that are hidden, or perhaps not so oblivious, but nevertheless must be dealt with here.

(1) The assumption that God wants a "moral universe" and that this value outweighs all others.

The idea that God wants a moral universe I take from my basic view of God and morality. Following in the footsteps of Joseph Fletcher (Situation Ethics) I assume that love is the background of the moral universe (this is also an Augustinian view). I also assume that there is a deeply ontological connection between love and Being. Axiomatically, in my view point, love is the basic impitus of Being itself. Thus, it seems reasonable to me that, if morality is an upshot of love, or if love motivates moral behavior, then the creation of a moral universe is essential.

(2) that internal "seeking" leads to greater internalization of values than forced compliance or complaisance that would be the result of intimidation.

That's a pretty fair assumption. We all know that people will a lot more to achieve a goal they truly beileve in than one they merely feel forced or obligated to follow but couldn't care less about.

(3)the the drama or the big mystery is the only way to accomplish that end.

The pursuit of the value system becomes a search of the heart for ultimate meaning,that ensures that people continue to seek it until it has been fully internalized.

The Actual Argument:

(1)God's purpose in creation: to create a Moral Universe, that is one in which free moral agents willingly choose the Good.

(2) Moral choice requires absolutely that choice be free (thus free will is necessitated).

(3) Allowance of free choices requires the risk that the chooser will make evil choices

(4)The possibility of evil choices is a risk God must run, thus the value of free outweighs all other considerations, since without there would be no moral universe and the purpose of creation would be thwarted.

This leaves the atheist in the position of demanding to know why God doesn't just tell everyone that he's there, and that he requires moral behavior, and what that entails. Thus there would be no mystery and people would be much less inclined to sin.

This is the point where Soteriological Drama figures into it. Argument on Soteriological Drama:

(5) Life is a "Drama" not for the sake of entertainment, but in the sense that a dramatic tension exists between our ordinary observations of life on a daily basis, and the ultimate goals, ends and purposes for which we are on this earth.

(6) Clearly God wants us to seek on a level other than the obvious, daily, demonstrative level or he would have made the situation more plain to us

(7) We can assume that the reason for the "big mystery" is the internalization of choices. If God appeared to the world in open objective fashion and laid down the rules, we would probably all try to follow them, but we would not want to follow them. Thus our obedience would be lip service and not from the heart.

(8) therefore, God wants a heart felt response which is internationalized value system that comes through the search for existential answers; that search is phenomenological; introspective, internal, not amenable to ordinary demonstrative evidence.

In other words, we are part of a great drama and our actions and our dilemmas and our choices are all part of the way we respond to the situation as characters in a drama.

This theory also explains why God doesn't often regenerate limbs in healing the sick. That would be a dead giveaway. God creates criteria under which healing takes place, that criteria can't negate the overall plan of a search.

On Doxa I designed into the presentation an answer to the issue of babies dying:

One might object that this couldn't outweigh babies dying or the horrors of war or the all the countless injustices and outrages that must be allowed and that permeate human history. It may seem at first glance that free will is petty compared to human suffering. But I am advocating free will for the sake any sort of pleasure or imagined moral victory that accrues from having free will, it's a totally pragmatic issue; that internalizing the value of the good requires that one choose to do so, and free will is essential if choice is required. Thus it is not a capricious or selfish defense of free will, not a matter of choosing our advantage or our pleasure over that of dying babies, but of choosing the key to saving the babies in the long run,and to understanding why we want to save them, and to care about saving them, and to actually choosing their saving over our own good.

In deciding what values outweigh other values we have to be clear about our decision making paradigm. From a utilitarian standpoint the determinate of lexically ordered values would be utility, what is the greatest good for the greatest number? This would be determined by means of outcome, what is the final tally sheet in terms of pleasure over pain to the greatest aggregate? But why must that be the value system we decide by? It's just one value system and much has been written about the bankruptcy of consequentialist ethics. If one uses a deontological standard it might be a different thing to consider the lexically ordered values. Free will predominates because it allows internalization of the good. The good is the key to any moral value system. This could be justified on both deontolgoical and teleological premises.

My own moral decision making paradigm is deontological, because I believe that teleological ethics reduces morality to the decision making of a ledger sheet and forces the individual to do immoral things in the name of "the greatest good for the greatest number." I find most atheists are utilitarians so this will make no sense to them. They can't help but think of the greatest good/greatest number as the ultaimte adage, and deontology as empty duty with no logic to it. But that is not the case. Deontology is not just rule keeping, it is also duty oriented ethics. The duty that we must internalize is that ultimate duty that love demands of any action. Robots don't love. One must freely choose to give up self and make a selfless act in order to act from Love. Thus we cannot have a loved oriented ethics, or we cannot have love as the background of the moral universe without free will, because love involves the will.

The choice of free will at the expense of countless lives and untold suffering cannot be an easy thing, but it is essential and can be justified from either deontolgoical or teleological perspective. Although I think the deontologcial makes more sense. From the teleological stand point, free will ultimately leads to the greatest good for the greatest number because in the long run it assumes us that one is willing to die for the other, or sacrifice for the other, or live for the other. That is essential to promoting a good beyond ourselves. The individual sacrifices for the good of the whole, very utilitarian. It is also deontolgocially justifiable since duty would tell us that we must give of ourselves for the good of the other.

Thus anyway you slice it free will outweighs all other concerns because it makes available the values of the good and of love. Free will is the key to ultimately saving the babies, and saving them because we care about them, a triumph of the heart, not just action from wrote. It's internalization of a value system without which other and greater injustices could be foisted upon an unsuspecting humanity that has not been tought to choose to lay down one's own life for the other.

The connection of the two issues:

The two issues are of course, evil and disaster, or pain not connected to decision making. We can't call disease or weather or problems of accident "evil" because they are not tied ot anyone's personal choice. Moral valuations such as "good" and "evil" only apply where a choice can be made. One could try to charge God with evil in saying that it's his choice to allow it. This is would be foolish since there is no standard of Good if the creator is evil. Then evil would be the original concept, and good would be the fall from evil. That's can't be because evil is not constructive. Evil doesn't build but tears down; evil is rebellion against a standard not the establishment of a standard. Yes it does bother me as an old "red" from the 60s to support "establishment." I tell myself the establishment of this world is the rebellion against the establishment of life.

Thus the connection between evil and disaster is that God can't forestall disasters every time they occur and still expect us to conduct a search. No one searches for what he knows to be the case. The search is the search for truth, the answer to the big question, what are we doing here? what's the point of it all? No one searches if he knows the answers. It would be a dead give away if every time something almost happened some miraculous force stopped it. So there has to be what we might call a "normal world" that runs on its own steam. God can stick his finger in and change things, but there have to certain rules he put in place for doing that, like faith for ex maple, otherwise he's going to have to do it all the time, that would sort negate the need for searching.

This searching aspect is what angered this atheist. He was extremely indignant about it. He accused me of being selfish and self absorbed because I'm letting God off the hook for my desire to learn things and have personal fulfillment. I think what made it so unnerving was the way he spoke as though he knows God is real and just hates him anyway. I am not saying all atheists think that way, just this one guy. It's not that I expect this little answer to really satisfy someone who has lost a child. Of course I do not, and for anyone who has lost a child my deepest sympathy. Had I lost a child myself I would certainly not be content with such answers and I don't blame anyone who is angry at God. That will be a short term anger. One can't let the hurt create a life-long bitterness and negate being able to re-unite if such a thing is possible. Yet I am here to lecture people in what they "should feel."

I find it gulling that this guy tries to abrogate my right to explore life. He wants to control my reactions to pain as though only he has a right to feel and only he knows the right way to feel. I am here in life wondering what it's all about and I have as much of a right to wonder as anyone. I am still doing my own search. I do feel I have the right direction. I have every right to feel that I do since I've been searching all my life. No one has a right to mock or ridicule the answers I"ve found. After all I'm not tryign to impose anything on anyone I'm just offering my little warped ideas and holding up my little end of the conversation.

I don't imagine this answer will make anyone feel good I do think intellectually it's the best answer. Over time when people heal a bit they might be able to see that. The answer is that we have to have a real world. God has to let it go as a real world under its own steam even though that means pain and torment and problems. As Jesus said "in the world you will have tribulation but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world." "All things for together for Good for those who love the lord" (Paul said that). In the end it will be worked out. those who seek will find.

If I could think of any more cliches I'd use them.

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Answer to Theodicy: Soteriological Drama

2011-04-09T08:36:00.000-07:00

The Free Will Defense is offered by Christian apologists as an answer to any sort of atheist argument such as the problem of pain or the problem of evil. The argument runs something like: God values free will because "he" ("she"?) doesn't want robots. The problem with this approach is that it often stops short in analysis as to why free will would be a higher value than anything else. This leaves the atheist in a position of arguing any number of pains and evil deeds and then crying that God had to know these things would happen, thus God must be cruel for creating anything at all knowing the total absolute pain (which usually includes hell in most atheist arguments) would result from creation.

The apologists answers usually fail to satisfy the atheist, because in their minds noting can outweigh the actual inflicting of pain. Something atheists evoke omnipotence and play it off against the value of free will, making the assumption that an "all powerful God" could do anything, thus God should be able to cancel any sort of moral debt, make sin beyond our natures, create a pain free universe, and surely if God were all loving, God would have done so.

The better twist on the free will defense would be to start from a different position. We should start with the basis for creation, in so far as we can understand it, and then to show how the logical and non self contradictory requirements of the logic of creation require free will. What is usually missing or not pointed out is the necessity of free will in the making of moral choices. This is the step that atheists and Christian apologists alike sometimes overlook; that it is absolutely essential in a non-self contradictory way, that humanity have free will. Thus, free will must out weight any other value. At that point, since it is a matter of self contradiction, omnipotence cannot be played off against free will, because God's omnipotence does not allow God to dispense with Free will!

Before moving to the argument I want to make it clear that I deal with two separate issues: the problem of pain (not a moral issue--tornadoes and diseases and the like) becasue it doesn't involve human choice. Pain, inflicted by accident and nature is not a moral issue, because it involves no choices. Thus I will not deal with that here. I am only concerned in this argument with the the problem of evil that is, the problem of moral choice. The free will defense cannot apply to makes where the will does not apply.

Basic assumptions

There are three basic assumptions that are hidden, or perhaps not so obivioius, but nevertheless must be dealt with here.

(1) The assumption that God wants a "moral universe" and that this value outweighs all others.

The idea that God wants a moral universe I take from my basic view of God and morality. Following in the footsteps of Joseph Fletcher (Situation Ethics) I assume that love is the background of the moral universe (this is also an Augustinian view). I also assume that there is a deeply ontological connection between love and Being. Axiomatically, in my view point, love is the basic impitus of Being itself. Thus, it seems reasonable to me that, if morality is an upshot of love, or if love motivates moral behavior, then the creation of a moral universe is essential.

(2) that internal "seeking" leads to greater internalization of values than forced compliance or complaisance that would be the result of intimidation.

That's a pretty fair assumption. We all know that people will a lot more to achieve a goal they truly beileve in than one they merely feel forced or obligated to follow but couldn't care less about.

(3)the the drama or the big mystery is the only way to accomplish that end.

The pursuit of the value system becomes a search of the heart for ultimate meaning,that ensures that people continue to seek it until it has been fully internalized.

The argument would look like this:

(1)God's purpose in creation: to create a Moral Universe, that is one in which free moral agents willingly choose the Good.

(2) Moral choice requires absolutely that choice be free (thus free will is necessitated).

(3) Allowance of free choices requires the risk that the chooser will make evil choices

(4)The possibility of evil choices is a risk God must run, thus the value of free outweighs all other considerations, since without there would be no moral universe and the purpose of creation would be thwarted.

This leaves the atheist in the position of demanding to know why God doesn't just tell everyone that he's there, and that he requires moral behavior, and what that entails. Thus there would be no mystery and people would be much less inclined to sin.

This is the point where Soteriological Drama figures into it. Argument on Soteriological Drama:

(5) Life is a "Drama" not for the sake of entertainment, but in the sense that a dramatic tension exists between our ordinary observations of life on a daily basis, and the ultiamte goals, ends and purposes for which we are on this earth.

(6) Clearly God wants us to seek on a level other than the obvious, daily, demonstrative level or he would have made the situation more plain to us

(7) We can assume that the reason for the "big mystery" is the internalization of choices. If God appeared to the world in open objective fashion and laid down the rules, we would probably all try to follow them, but we would not want to follow them. Thus our obedience would be lip service and not from the heart.

(8) therefore, God wants a heart felt response which is internationalized value system that comes through the search for existential answers; that search is phenomenological; introspective, internal, not amenable to ordinary demonstrative evidence.

In other words, we are part of a great drama and our actions and our dilemmas and our choices are all part of the way we respond to the situation as characters in a drama.

This theory also explains why God doesn't often regenerate limbs in healing the sick. That would be a dead giveaway. God creates criteria under which healing takes place, that criteria can't negate the overall plan of a search.

Objection:

One might object that this couldn't outweigh babies dying or the horrors of war or the all the countless injustices and outrages that must be allowed and that permeate human history. It may seem at first glance that free will is petty compared to human suffering. But I am advocating free will for the sake any sort of pleasure or imagined moral victory that accrues from having free will, it's a totally pragmatic issue; that internalizing the value of the good requires that one choose to do so, and free will is essential if choice is required. Thus it is not a capricious or selfish defense of free will, not a matter of choosing our advantage or our pleasure over that of dying babies, but of choosing the key to saving the babies in the long run,and to understanding why we want to save them, and to care about saving them, and to actually choosing their saving over our own good.

In deciding what values outweigh other values we have to be clear about our decision making paradigm. From a utilitarian standpoint the determinate of lexically ordered values would be utility, what is the greatest good for the greatest number? This would be determined by means of outcome, what is the final tally sheet in terms of pleasure over pain to the greatest aggregate? But why that be the value system we decide by? It's just one value system and much has been written about the bankruptcy of consequentialist ethics. If one uses a deontological standard it might be a different thing to consider the lexically ordered values. Free will predominates because it allows internalization of the good. The good is the key to any moral value system. This could be justified on both deontolgoical and teleological premises.

My own moral decision making paradigm is deontological, because I believe that teleological ethics reduces morality to the decision making of a ledger sheet and forces the individual to do immoral things in the name of "the greatest good for the greatest number." I find most atheists are utilitarians so this will make no sense to them. They can't help but think of the greatest good/greatest number as the ultaimte adage, and deontology as empty duty with no logic to it. But that is not the case. Deontology is not just rule keeping, it is also duty oriented ethics. The duty that we must internalize is that ultimate duty that love demands of any action. Robots don't love. One must freely choose to give up self and make a selfless act in order to act from Love. Thus we cannot have a loved oriented ethics, or we cannot have love as the background of the moral universe without free will, because love involves the will.

The choice of free will at the expense of countless lives and untold suffering cannot be an easy thing, but it is essential and can be justified from either deontolgoical or teleological perspective. Although I think the deontologcial makes more sense. From the teleological stand point, free will ultimately leads to the greatest good for the greatest number because in the long run it assumes us that one is willing to die for the other, or sacrifice for the other, or live for the other. That is essential to promoting a good beyond ourselves. The individual sacrifices for the good of the whole, very utilitarian. It is also deontolgocially justifiable since duty would tell us that we must give of ourselves for the good of the other.

Thus anyway you slice it free will outweighs all other concerns because it makes available the values of the good and of love. Free will is the key to ultimately saving the babies, and saving them because we care about them, a triumph of the heart, not just action from wrote. It's internalization of a value system without which other and greater injustices could be foisted upon an unsuspecting humanity that has not been tought to choose to lay down one's own life for the other.

Objection 2: questions

(from "UCOA" On CARM boards (atheism)

Quote:

In addition, there is no explanation of why god randomly decided to make a "moral universe".

Why do you describe the decision as random? Of course all of this is second guessing God, so the real answer is "I don't know, duh" But far be it form me to give-up without an opinion. My opinion as to why God would create moral universe:
to understand this you must understand my view of God, and that will take some doing. I'll try to just put it in a nut shell. In my view love is the background of the moral universe. The essence of "the good" or of what is moral is that which conforms to "lug." But love in the apogee sense, the will to the good of the other. I do not believe that that this is just derived arbitrarily, but is the outpouring of the wellspring of God's character. God is love, thus love is the background of the moral universe because God is the background of the moral universe.

Now I also describe God as "being itself." Meaning God is the foundation of all that is. I see a connection between love and being. Both are positive and giving and turning on in the face of nothingness, which is negativity. To say that another way, if we think of nothingness as a big drain pipe, it is threatening to **** all that exits into it. Being is the power to resist nothingness, being the stopper in the great cosmic drain pipe of non existence.

The act of bestowing being upon the beings is the nature of God because God is being. Those the two things God does because that's what he is, he "BES" (um, exists) and he gives out being bestowing it upon other beings. This is connected to love which also gives out and bestows. So being and love are connected, thus the moral universe is an outgrowth of the nature of God as giving and bestowing and being and loving.

Quote:
Thus the question isn't really answered. Why does god allow/create evil? To create a "moral universe". Why? The only answer that is given is, because he wants to. Putting it together, Why does god allow/create evil? Because he wants to?

In a nut shell, God allows evil as an inherent risk in allowing moral agency. (the reason for which is given above).

There is a big difference in doing something and allowing it to be done. God does not create evil, he allows the risk of evil to be run by the beings, because that risk is required to have free moral agency. The answer is not "because he wants to" the answer is because he wants free moral agency so that free moral agents will internatize the values of love. To have free moral agency he must allow them to:

(1)run the risk of evil choices

(2) live in a real world where hurt is part of the dice throw.

see my answers to atheist attacks on this idea in my essay: "Twelve Angry Stereotypes"

page 2 (Pain and Short Lives)

what do you put in place of scinece to prove theology?

2011-03-17T07:05:00.001-07:00

Paul Tillich

Athesits are always talking about how stupid theology is. "I don't have to read the theology because I know it's stupid." I hear various ones (not all but many) say that all the time. I would like them to actually read some theology and tell me why it's stupid. Here is some theology for them to read. They are always saying "what else would you use but scinece?" What that really means is their self selected set of facts form scinece that back their ideology, excluding those that disprove their ideology. My answer to them is "phenomenology." But you have to read this to know how it works.

Enter Tillich

Born August 20, 1886, in Starzeddel, then a province of Brandenberg, Germany (now part of Poland), family moved to Berlin 1900. His father was a Luthern Pastor. He was ordained as a Luthern Pastor in 1912 and kicked around giving lectures at various universities: Berlin, Dresden and Frankfurt.[i]

His liberalism and opposition to the Nazi movement led to his dismissal in 1933. Fortunately, Reinhold Niebuhr, whom he had met in Germany, offered him a position at the Union Theological Seminary in New York. Tillich became a U.S. citizen in 1940, then took up a position at Harvard in 1954, followed by one at the University of Chicago in 1962, where he was to remain until the end of his life.[ii]

Paul Tillich is the central figure in the current effort; Heidegger is definitely a major influence upon Tillich. Be that as it may the great Theologian did not merely copy off the philosopher’s understanding of being. Tillich was a influenced by Heidegger philosophically, but was also his political enemy. The former was a leftist and a socialist, the latter a right-winger and Nazi. Tillich was coming from the perspective of a larger tradition; Christian theology is not all Aristotelian, there’s a whole Platonic wing that produced centuries of complex and brilliant ferment form which the average communicant is totally cut off. That tradition also has it’s own take on being. Tillich lived in that tradition like a fish lives in water. Perhaps it was Heidegger’s connection with the “life world” that gave him his connection to Nazism through the notion of the folks, the soil, the people and their traditions.[iii] It’s easy for us to judge looking back on Nazism as the emblematic evil, while we forget many intelligent people were duped by it. Perhaps it was Tillich’s connection with the medievalists and his love of the Platonic that enabled him to see the valuable connections in Heidegger’s ties to the past. Tillich was not a dusty scholar, however, stuck in the library with no connection to the life of the day. He was a vibrant intellectual of modernity and he constantly tried to bring his medievalism into the present and understand it in a modern light. He used Heidegger to modernize. Nevertheless, in the world of their present, however, Germany of the 1930’s these arid philosophical issues took on a concrescence of life and death.

Tillich’s response to the political situation of his day was a proving ground for his theological method, and he responded to the crisis of Germany in the twenties and thirties the same way he responded to modern theology; by relating the human situation in which he lived to the larger picture of faith and the Christian and seeking the psychological points of contact where the human perception of God manifested it in symbolic terms pointing to our ultimate concerns. Tillich contrasts “Kerygmatic” theology with “apologetics.” Kerygma refers to the unchanging truth, and this contrasted with the temporal situation, always in flux.[iv] Tillich’s concept of “the situation” includes the cultural context of time and place. Tillich is the embodiment of his own concerns. He more than any other theologian of the twentieth century, personified liberal theological credo; translating the timeless truth of the Gospel into the moment in one’s own cultural context, as he advocated doing.

Tillich’s major methodological move is called “correlation.” In a nut shell, he correlates the great truths of Christian doctrine, though an understanding of the symbols it uses, with the existential apprehensions within the current situation, when the two stack up in some way, he lined them up.[v] Tillich understood this as a philosophical task, even for theologians. The task of the philosopher must draw upon material from all realms of culture.[vi] One central question give focus to the entire inquiry: what does it mean to exist? Tillich understood this as an “existential” analysis. The cultural context of this term as used in that era meant that the question was central to human understanding.[vii] The term “existential” is closely related to phenomenology. Both deal with allowing the sense data to suggest the categories into which we organize the data. Both deal with human understanding as rooted in its own immediate life situation. It begins with the perspective of the individual in the concrete situation. One immediate implication of this aspect is that it might suggest that we ignore the phony Aristotelian perspective of which atheists try to hard to root themselves, the “rational man,” the “scientist” (meaning “reductionist”) who decides before the tally is ever made that there can’t be anything beyond the material. This “rational man” is a phony place to start because it automatically rules out the transcendent, the sacred, the aspects of human existence that have always meant the most to people. It assumes form the beginning that there’s “nothing there” and reality must be defined by pre set ideology involving the wearing of white lab coats.

As the term “existential” implies, the perspective is concerned with the meaning of existence. According to Tillich’s perspective of the existential self understanding rooted in the standard point of the meaning of existence was the primary issue and fundamental problem around which all of human understanding orbits. “Existence is the question which underlies all other questions.”[viii] Yet Tillich did not pin the answer upon existentialist dogma. Nor did he root the answer in the situation itself. The answer would not come from the situation but from the universal and timeless message brought by the symbols of the Christian faith. This is no retreat to the ivory tower; it’s an attempt to bring the truth of the message to the place where it is needed, the actual concrete situation of life, and to apply in a relevant way. Tillich said “the method of correlation explains the content of the Christian faith through existential questions and theological answers in mutual interdependence.”[ix]

The term “correlation” Tillich uses in three different ways. It can indicate the correspondence of a series of different sets of data; it can designate the interdependence of concepts; or it can designate the real interdependence of things in structural wholes.[x]

There is a correlation in the sense of correspondence between religious symbols and that which is symbolized by them. There is a correlation in the sense between concepts denoting the human and those denoting the divine. There is a correlation in the factual sense between man’s ultimate concern and that about which he is ultimately concerned. The first meaning of correlation refers to the central problem of religious knowledge…the second meaning of correlation determines the statements about God and the world, for example the correlation of infinite and finite. The third meaning of correlation qualifies the divine human relation within religious experience…[xi]

This is a crucial passage in Tillich, because these concepts, his take on symbols and their participation in what they symbolize, the use of symbols as the delivery system for revelation, meaning, answers, as well as the religion of the eternal and the temporal, these are the concepts which form the basic engine of his ontotheology. [xii] In the next chapter these concepts will be crucial in formulating the meaning of “being itself, “ or “the ground of being.” There has been a certain degree of fear expressed by various theological concerns that correlation relativizes the divine or makes God dependent upon man. Tillich argues that God is not dependent upon man but our understanding of God’s revelation to us is dependent upon our willingness to understand. Solidarity between humans and the divine is dependent upon our willingness to be in solidarity.[xiii] Thus it is also dependent upon our wiliness to seek correlation.

The methodology of correlation proceeds as follows: In analyzing the human situation the theologian demonstrates that symbols used in the Christian message offer answers to the existential questions that arise. The answers are much older than existentialism. Tillich points out that they are as old as humanity and they have been expressed in many ways since humans began to think philosophically.[xiv] In pondering our existential condition we realize that we are strangers in the world and we can’t penetrate beyond the surface level of science. In coming to grasp this realization we also realize that we ourselves are the answer to this problem. Because we are human, because we are trapped in an existential dilemma we automatically have the credentials and the method for moving beyond the surface level, which is the level of science, and penetrating the nature of being. Though our state as examples of being for itself we are able to understand the nature of existence. This is where we can employ philosophical thinking in understanding our own being. “whoever has penetrated into the nature of his own finitude can find the traces finitude in everything that exists. And he can ask the questions implied in his finitude as the question implied in finitude universally.”[xv]

The Scientific Argument

At this point I can hear the critics, the atheist reader saying “this approach still has none of the virtues of science.” The argument would say science is the only reliable and systematic means of verification for claims one makes about reality. Reliable and systematic are important, and that leads to the concepts of verification, prediction, replicability. Without scientific methods there are no way to guarantee such things, those are the bottom line of scientific work. The more ideologically oriented critic is going to be saying “this is all made up, this is just philosophy, and philosophy is made up crap, only with science can you have this assurance that you have a factually based solid principle.” I’ve already discussed the problem with that concept. Their “factually based” principles are based upon a selective set of facts. It should be enough to point out the ideological nature of a line of thinking to cast doubt upon it. We’ve already discussed the limitations of science. The argument originally is that science can’t get at God. God is beyond our understanding, not given in sense data, the basis of reality, and thus can’t be an object of empirical study. Given the fact that science is not available we are looking for alterative. This is not a matter replacing science with a mutually exclusive from of discovery. It’s a matter of what to do with the gaps where science can’t function.

First, there is an inherent foolishness in expecting theology to do what science does. The skeptics don’t like theology, they don’t want theology to do its job, they don’t understand its job. For atheists science is their er zots religion; it functions for them as a religion. They see theology as transgression against science because it’s a competing form of religiosity. Yet since science is limited in its ability to grasp the divine, it’s not a fit tool for the job. At least in the sense of replacing theology totally, science is not the tool. The skeptic is going to have to allow theology to do what it does, of course that assumes the skeptic listens long enough to get some idea of what theology is supposed to do. We can’t have scientific results, but we should not expect them. We can use science in a way that employs them where divine aspects overlap with empirical data, but we can’t expect the kind of “certainty” and selective pretense of “factual” view point that we from science. The ideology of scientism, the view that says only science counts as knowledge, doesn’t offer the sort of certainty it pretends to, it is merely the pretense of objectivity. The scientistic ideologue cuts off reality at the point where her data ends. If the scientific method cannot be used to deliver certainty then the scientistic adherent just assumes that there is no reality beyond that point. Reality is trucked and closed in on itself as only that which can be controlled through empirical understanding. There is a tendency among legitimate scientific thinkers to follow in the wake of the ideology. This demand for certainty and factualism is actually a bid for control. Phenomenology teaches us to open up to possibilities, to accept that reality is bigger than our understanding. We are not seeking to control but to discover.

Secondly, my standard is global knowledge. I do not push to replace science with theology but to use all we have and use it in an appropriate way. We should use science in conjunction with theology in a manner that employs scientific thinking and methods when and where they are appropriate for the task. There are areas where science is used effectively to tell us something about theological truth; the M scale developed by Ralph Hood that measures the validity of one’s “religious” experience with respect to it’s “mystical” authentication. A huge body of empirical scientific work has been done to understand the effect of mystical experience upon the receiver of that experience.[xvi] Yet, we can’t translate that data into an argument about the existence of God without understanding the proper limits of science and then using theological method in its proper perspective. We should never expect the same kind of results with get with science. We can employ scientific understanding in those areas where we have the possibility of empirical results, and extrapolate from those results by means of deductive reasoning.

The Co-determinate and the Logic of the lamp post

The logic of the lamp post says you should not search for your missing car keys in the dark. You can’t find the keys in the dark so search under the lamp post. If they are to be found that’s where you could find them. One might question this logic on the grounds if we weren’t standing near the lamp post but over in the dark that’s where they will be. Yet there is a lamp post in the quest to answer the God question, that lamp post illuminates the most likely ground. The lamp post is the co-determinate, the concept of Schleiermacher, the “signature,” the trace, the marker that accompanies the presence of God; that would be the effect of experiencing the presence of God. I set out these concepts to a greater degree in The Trace of God.[xvii] This is not phenomenology, although there are overlaps. The Trace of God deals with a huge body of scientific work, mainly from psychology of religion (a much larger sub-discipline than most people realize). This body of work consists of several hundred studies (I say 200 to be conservative) All of which demonstrate that religious experience is life transforming; that is to say it dramatically and profoundly changing life long term is a positive way. This includes self actualization, emotional healing, physical health, mental health, across the board. Those who have such religious experiences are much less likely to be depressed or mentally ill and feel their lives are purposeful and meaningful and score higher on happiness scales than do their religious counterparts, much less unbelievers.

Over the years numerous claims have been made about the nature of spiritual/mystical and Maslow’s “peak experiences”, and about their consequences. Wuthnow (1978) set out to explore findings regarding peak experiences from a systematic random sample of 1000 persons and found that peak experiences are common to a wide cross-section of people, and that one in two has experienced contact with the holy or sacred, more than eight in ten have been moved deeply by the beauty of nature and four in ten have experienced being in harmony with the universe. Of these, more than half in each have had peak experiences which have had deep and lasting effects on their lives. Peakers are more likely also, to say they value working for social change, helping to solve social problems, and helping people in need. Wuthnow stressed the therapeutic value of these experiences and also the need to study the social significance of these experiences in bringing about a world in which problems such as social disintegration, prejudice and poverty can be eradicated. Savage et al., (1995) provided clinical evidence to suggest that peakers produce greater feelings of self-confidence and a deeper sense of meaning and purpose. Mogar’s (1965) research also tended to confirm these findings.

Some researchers in the recent past have found that life satisfaction correlated positively with mystical / spiritual experiences, and these experiences were further found to relate positively to one’s life purpose (Kass, et al., 1991). In fact researchers are of the view that a positive relation between positive affect and mystical experiences may not be surprising given that intense positive affect is often considered to be one of the defining characteristics of these experiences (Noble, 1985; Spilka, Hood & Gorsuch, 1985). The few studies that investigated well-being measures, spirituality and spiritual experience have found that people who have had spiritual experiences are in the normal range of well-being and have a tendency to report more extreme positive feelings than others (Kennedy, Kanthamani & Palmer, 1994; Kennedy & Kanthamani, 1995)…A study by De Roganio (1997) content-analyzed and organized into a paradigm case examples found in themes of 35 lived-experience informants and 14 autobiographers who represented a wide range of people with physical disability and chronic illness. It was found that the combined elements of spiritual transformation, hope, personal control, positive social support and a meaningful energetic life enabled individuals to improve themselves and come to terms with their respective conditions. These experiences led many people to realize their own interest, sense of wholeness and unity, and to experience and integrate a deeper meaning, sense of self and spirituality within their lives….Some studies have offered a spiritual approach to addiction problems. Caroll (1993) found that 100 members of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) benefited from spirituality which was found to correlate positively with having a purpose in life and the length of sobriety. Frame and Williams (1996), in their study of religions and spiritual dimensions of the African-American culture, address the role of spirituality in shaping identity, and conclude that reconnecting AA clients to their powerful spiritual tradition may be a crucial catalyst for personal empowerment and spiritual liberation. The finding was confirmed in a later study by Wif and Carmen (1996). Another study reported by Green et al., (1998) described the process of spiritual awakening experienced by some persons in recovery during the quest for sobriety. The data suggested that persons in recovery often undergo life altering transformations as a result of embracing a power higher than one’s self i.e., a “higher power”. The result is often the beginning of an intense spiritual journey that leads to sustained abstinence.[xviii]

The most important step in pulling together an understanding of the significance of this work was the development of the “M scale” (Mystical scale) by Ralph Hood Jr. the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. Hood used the theories of W.T. Stace about the nature of mysticism to construct a questionnaire that measured how closely a person’s experiences conformed to the typology that Stace’s theory suggests.

The scale has been so successful it has become the standard operating procedure[xix] and replaces the former practice of the researcher trying to develop her own scale, a practice that led to as many scales as there were studies. The M scale is by far the most successful and has been cross culturally validated with great successes. It is based on the phenomenological categories of mystical study by W.T. Stace and makes certain assumptions of William James. Hood’s original measuring instrument, the REEM, was based upon the categories of James. The M scale follows the phenomenological development of Stace. The scale uses 32 items (these are questions that are asked of the subject). The items are organized with 16 Positive and 16 negatively worded. Independent studies supported Hood’s original design, (Caird, 1988, Reinert and Stifler, 1993).[xx] Originally M scale measured two factors: (1) Assesses items of an experienced unity (introvertive or extrovertive). (2) Assesses items of a experience of religious or non religious and knowledge claims. This is consistent with Stace’s concept that Mystical experience can be interpreted in many ways. Reinert and Stifler suggested religious items and knowledge items might emerge as separate factors. This would split the interpretative factors between religious and non-religious factors. That would not contradict Stace. There is a distinction between “spiritual” and “religious.” Mystical experience can be interpreted (as we have seen already) as “spiritual” without being thought religious, or as “mystical” without involving God. The two-item approach allows greater interpretation. But the interpretive factor was religious in nature. The assumptions made in the study and taken to answering the questions tended to be religious.[xxi]

Hood changed his strategy from two analytic factors to three (“the three factor solution”). The Three factor solution sets up three categories, which more closely follow the predictions of Stace based upon his reading of mystics and person experience. (“phenomenological”). The three categories for Stace were: Staces’ categories of Introvertive and extrovertive mysticism emerging as two separate factors. The third factor is an interpretive dimension where the respondent relates the experiences to knowledge claims (“God is love” or some such). Interovertive means the mystical experience is beyond word though or image, it is iner directed and not related to any outside phenomenon and I supposed to be beyond description. This will also be discussed more in chapter five (“Religious Apiori”). Extrovertive means the subject’s experience is related to nature or to some external image in the immediate environment, a sense of the numinous, the harmony underlying all of nature or something on that order.[xxii]

The M scale has been tailored to many different cultures and been verified and validated in a half dozen different countries, several cultures and religious traditions.

In a series of empirical measurement based studies employing the Mysticism scale introvertive mysticism emerges both as a distinct factor in exploratory analytic studies[xxiii] and also as a confirming factor analysis in cultures as diverse as the United States and Iran; not only in exploratory factor analytic studies (Hood & Williamson, 2000) but also in confirmatory factor analyses in such diverse cultures as the United States and Iran (Hood, Ghornbani, Watson, Ghramaleki, Bing, Davison, Morris, & Williamson. (2001).[xxiv] In other words, the form of mysticism that is usually said to be beyond description and beyond images, as opposed to that found in connection with images of the natural world, is seen through reflection of data derived form the M scale and as supporting factors in other relations. Scholars supporting the unity thesis (the mystical sense of undifferentiated unity—everything is “one”) have conducted interviews with mystics in other traditions about the nature of their introvertive mystical experiences. These discussions reveal that differences in expression that might be taken as linguistics culturally constructed are essentially indicative of the same experiences. The mystics recognize their experiences even in the expression of other traditions and other cultures. These parishioners represent different forms of Zen and Yoga.[xxv] Scholars conducting literature searches independently of other studies, who sought common experience between different traditions, have found commonalities. Brainaid, found commonality between cultures as diverse as Advanita-Vendanta Hinduism, and Madhmika Buddhism, and Nicene Christianity; Brainaid’s work supports conclusions by Loy with respect to the types of Hinduism and Buddhism.[xxvi]

The M scale developed by Hood has been validated by many studies in cross cultural context, while Greely’s Gallop Poll questions have been used both cross culturally and longitudinally.

The two major exceptions to the lack of shared instrumentation are the mysticism scale by Hood (1975) which has been used in quite a number of studies by Hood and others, and the repeated use of certain questions in survey research by Greeley and the Gallop Organization over a sixteen year period.[xxvii]

Holm (1982) “mysticism and intense experiences” demonstrates another level of cross-cultural validation.

Method: The author translated into Swedish several Hood scales designed to measure mystical experiences. The items describing religious experiences drawn from William James, on Hood’s (1970) Religious Episode Experience Measure (REEM) with narratives taken from Nordic anthologies. Eighteen teachers of religion and psychology each administered the scales to 6-9 persons.

Findings: The study replicated most of Hood’s findings with the same instruments. “The results of our empirical study of mysticism in a Finnish-Swedish environment largely coincide with Hood’s results in an American environment…The cross-cultural testing that some of Hood’s methods have received as a result of our research on another continuant and in another linguistic area means that the results have received a wider range of applications.[xxviii]

Holm (1982) presented a Swedish M scale administered to 122 Swedish “informants.” Factor I correlated best to non Christian profiles, while factor II worked best with those who had Christian assumptions. Holm accounts for a general mysticism factor and general religious factor. This parallels earlier research in Sweden (Solderblom—see Holm 82, 275-76) .[xxix]

The M scale has been validated with Iranian Muslims.

In a mostly Christian American sample (N = 1,379), confirmatory factor analysis of Hood's (1975) Mysticism Scale verified the existence of Stace's (1960) introvertive and extrovertive dimensions of mystical phenomenology along with a separate interpretation factor. A second study confirmed the presence of these three factors in not only another group of Americans (N = 188), but also a sample of Iranian Muslims (N = 185). Relationships of the introvertive and extrovertive factors with the interpretation factor were essentially identical across these two cultures, but the Americans displayed a stronger association between the two phenomenology factors. In both samples, the interpretation factor correlated positively with an intrinsic and negatively with an extrinsic religious orientation, and the introvertive factor predicted psychological dysfunction. Associations of the interpretation factor with relative mental health appeared only in the Iranians. These data offered general support for Stace's phenomenology of mysticism, although the ineffability he linked with interpretation proved to be as much or even more a feature of the introvertive experience, as hypothesized by Hood.[xxx]/[xxxi]

Tillich doesn’t deal with that sort of empirical data. Yet he does begin with empirical religious experience (but does not offer scientific data) and basic concepts like the eternal vs. temporal, the object of ultimate concern and basic ontological concepts grounded in human experience. This lamp post logic enables us to start from an empirical position backed by concrete data. From there we can follow Tillich as he moves from the empirical to the ideal and the symbolic. He has a whole philosophy of the symbolic that understands symbol as participating in that which is symbolized. Thus God can be both a concrete reality and a symbol of human experience. The concrete data provided by these psychological studies and the M scale furnishes us with an understanding of the experience as the co-determinate of the divine, the concept of Schleiermacher. “God is co-present in religious self-consciousness.”[xxxii] The empirical work in psychology referenced by The Trace of God [xxxiii] offer a means of grounding divine/human encounter in the concrete and the measurable. Thus the experiences are established a rational warrant for the assumption of the co-determinate based upon their content and their concrete effects. The experiences offer grounding in the practical to establish the relationship to the transcendent.

Before we can proceed to applying the method to demonstrate that it is a viable method of understanding we must first understand what we are talking about. The central theme of my approach is Tillich’s concept of God as being itself, or as it should be known from historical Christian theology, the superessential Godhead. The next chapter will be a discussion of Tillich’s view in an attempt to explain what it means. That view is heavily laden with philosophical (especially ontological) assumptions. The next three chapters are about explicating this concept. After that I will deal with applying this method to demonstrate something in the way of a truth content that the reader can cling to. I say all of this in hopes that the reader will not being reading the next chapter while thinking “where’s the science! This is just philosophical garbage, how does he know this? Where’s the science?” Yet what one will see in the way of Tillich’s views in this next chapter, an explication of his systematic theology with regard to the concept of ground of being (being itself) will actually demonstrate the method in action. We will see Tillich reasoning out from human experience in the act of being, to conclusions based upon understanding Christian doctrine in light of phenomenological apprehension.

Depth and Eternity

Two major examples that we will see used in the next chapter, concepts of depth and the eternal; by” depth” Tillich speaks of being having depth, as in “there more to it than meets the eye,” and he also uses the phrase in relation to depth psychology. For him the depth of being means “deep” in these of more to it and hard to understand requires knowledge and thought. This is all a reflection of the psychological effects of our experiences in being.

The eternal is also important in understanding human experience. We can’t know the experience of the infinite or the eternal but we can know the experience of the temporal. The disjunction between the concepts, knowing the temporal and longing for the eternal, and the psychological effect that has on human understanding forms an important basis in understanding the nature of being and its depth. Thus in all of his ontology Tillich is reflecting this dialectical approach that works between historical doctrine and human experience. The two coordinate at some point, but doctrines are shaped by humans. Ultimately it’s all a reflection of our understanding of being as gathered first hand from our participation in being.

Pyschology of Atheism: Motivation is Bad Self Esteem

2011-02-23T06:51:00.000-08:00

I have for a long time now contended that most atheists had low self esteem. I found several sources that asserted it but with no empirical proof. The reason I thought it must be true is because they are always mocking and ridiculing religion and religious people. It stuck me that they were doing that to bolster their own egos. I have now found empirical evidence of this notion. There are several studies that claim to demonstrate that atheists have low self esteem. This is still not proof. There is a long way to go to prove the argument, and I'm sure that its not true of all atheists anyway. These studies are limited in many ways. but there are several of them and they do cover more than one culture. It's a good start on exploring a hypothesis. The main study I am examining here, however, is called "rejection of Christianity and Self Esteem." I will refer to this study as RCSE.

All the studies are done by the same group Emyr Williams, Leslie J Francis, Mandy Robbins
University of Wales, Bangor, UK the major study uses A sample of 279 13- to 16-year-old secondary school pupils in Wales completed the Rejection of Christianity Scale and the Coopersmith Self-Esteem Inventory. After controlling for sex differences a small but significant correlation was found between the two variables, indicating that low self-esteem is associated with the rejection of Christianity. Leslie J. Francis did three of the IQ studies that show no correlation between religious belief, lack thereof, and intelligence. The last such study he did was in 1996, but he has done three such studies on IQ and religious belief.

The rejection of Christianity scale was constructed by Francis, but not just for this study. The Coopersmith Self-Esteem Inventor is standard has been used for a while.The study was done as a smaller piece of a larger picture that consists of several more studies and seeks to understand the relationship between self esteem and religoius belief. The larger picture is an argument that acceptance of Christianity is based upon good self esteem.

From RCSE:

Much of the work that measures religiosity uses items that are specifically designed to determine positive valency. For example, the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity (Francis, 1978; Francis & Stubbs, 1987) assesses how positively people feel about God, Jesus, the Bible, prayer and church. Using this instrument, a number of studies have demonstrated a positive association between a positive attitude toward Christianity and a range of positive psychological categories, such as happiness (Francis, Jones, & Wilcox, 2000), general psychological health (Francis, Robbins, Lewis, Quigley, & Wheeler, 2004) and life satisfaction (Lewis, 1998). In particular, several studies have now confirmed the link between a positive attitude toward Christianity and better self-esteem (Jones & Francis, 1996).

In other words a fairly large body of work already exists documenting the relationship between acceptance of Christianity and good self esteem. Measurements of things like happiness and self esteem are standard and have long been demonstrated by well validated measurement instruments.

The rejection of Christianity scale:
from RCSE:

By way of contrast, the Rejection of Christianity Scale proposed by Greer and Francis (1992) was designed to assess negative valency. The authors of the measure presented 32 negatively phrased questions to a sample of 875 fourth- and fifth-year secondary school pupils attending ten Catholic and ten Protestant schools in Northern Ireland. The questions that received the lowest item-rest-of-test correlations were rejected, leaving a scale of 20 items generating alpha coefficients of 0.94 for the Protestant sample and 0.90 for the Catholic sample. This scale has been shown to have internal consistency reliability among Northern Irish undergraduate students (Lewis, Maltby, & Hersey, 1999) and Welsh undergraduate students (Robbins, Francis, & Bradford, 2003).
Little research has been done to relationships between this measure and self-esteem. Since previous research has shown that there is a positive correlation between self-esteem and indices of religiosity designed with a positive valency (Jones & Francis, 1996), it is hypothesised that a negative relationship will be found between self-esteem and this measure of religiosity designed with negative valency.

METHOD

Participants

A total of 279 secondary school pupils in Wales from years 9, 10 and 11 completed the 20-item Rejection of Christianity Scale (Greer & Francis, 1992) and the 25-item Coopersmith Self-Esteem Inventory (Coopersmith, 1981). One quarter (25%) were aged 13, one third (32%) were aged 14; 30% were aged 15, and 13% were aged 16. Males comprised 56% of the sample and females 44% of the sample.

Measures

The Rejection of Christianity Scale (Greer & Francis, 1992) is a 20-item Likert-type instrument, employing a five-point response scale ranging from ‘agree strongly’, through ‘agree’, ‘not certain’, and ‘disagree’, to ‘disagree strongly’. The scale measures negative valency toward Christianity. This scale is designed so that higher scores indicate a higher tendency to reject Christianity.
The Coopersmith Short-Form Self-Esteem Inventory (Coopersmith, 1981) is a 25-item instrument, employing a dichotomous response scale of ‘yes’ and ‘no’. The possible range of scores for this form of the Coopersmith Self-Esteem Inventory is 0-25, with higher scores indicating higher self-esteem.

RESULTS

Both measures achieved satisfactory Cronbach alpha coefficients (Rejection of Christianity Scale, .88; Coopersmith Self-Esteem Inventory, .80). After controlling for sex differences by means of partial correlations, the data demonstrated a small, but significant, correlation (r= -0.14, p <.05) between self-esteem (M = 15.3, SD = 4.9) and rejection of Christianity (M = 62.7, SD = 13.2) indicating that as teenagers’ endorsement of negative statements concerning Christianity increases, their scores of negative self-esteem also tend to increase.

CONCLUSION

The present study has explored the relationship between rejection of Christianity and self-esteem among adolescents in Wales. After controlling for sex differences a small but significant negative
correlation is found between high-self esteem and rejection of Christianity, as hypothesised. This finding strengthens the conclusions drawn from studies like that of Jones and Francis (1996), which demonstrated a positive correlation between high self-esteem and a positive attitude toward Christianity by demonstrating that the association is not a function of the valency of the measure of religiosity. Evidence of this nature appears to be suggesting that the Christian tradition is supportive of the development of self-esteem among young people rather than detrimental to it.

(References used by RCSE can be seen in link above).

The major criticism is that this study is not representative. It's only a small sample of Welsh children.

The rejection of Christianity scale has been validated.

fromRCSE :

This scale has been shown to have internal consistency reliability among Northern Irish undergraduate students (Lewis, Maltby, & Hersey, 1999) and Welsh undergraduate students (Robbins, Francis, & Bradford, 2003).

That is to say these are not the same as above, where those were done on secondary students these are done on college (Undergraduate). Although Wales and Ireland are basically the same general culture. The work on self esteem and rejection of Christianity is just getting started. The other pieces of the puzzle in this equation have all been put in place. The rejection of Christianity scale has been validated cross culturally in several studies. The link between postie self esteem and acceptance of Christianity has been validated cross culturally and the attitude toward Christianity scale has been validated cross culturally. Francis scale of attitude toward Christianity has been cross validated in Hong Kong and Belgium.

A second argument used by atheists is that kinds are being given negative self images by religion, they are blamed for being gay and other things churches call 'sin' thus they are given their negative self esteem in return they reject religion because it has rejected them. On the face of it that looks a pretty likely senerio. Through what mechanism does this happen? Is it inherent in all religion or is there way to avoid it? Ralph Peidmont wrote a book that is part of a multi-volume set called Research in the Social Scientific Study of Religion, this is Volume 16. He discusses a study by Francis (p105) that establishes a positive correlation between a positive God image and high self esteem. In other words if you teach children that God is good and loves them they will will tend to have higher self esteem than if you teach them a negative, that is critical, fault finding, legalistic, blame oriented view of God.

The Fracis study in Peidmont's book used

...a 735 secondary pupils between 11-18 competed the Coopersmith Self-Esteem inventory and Revised Junior Eysenck Personality Questionnaire and a semantic differential index of God images in order to examine the relationship between God images and self-esteem while controlling for personality factors. The data demonstrates a significant corroboration between positive God images and positive self esteem, after controlling for individual differences in personality. (105)

Peidmont traces the currents of social science research on the top through seven different "strands" of thought which include everything form "religions causes negative self-esteem" to "religion causes postiive self esteem" and all the machinations one can think of based upon variations of those two poles. The problem is none of that research was based upon the kind scientific instruments and controls that Francis uses. Peidmont discusses the work of Spilka and Benson who start from the other end of the spectrum and investigate the assumption that self-esteem shapes he acceptability of God images. Peidmont quotes Benson and Spilka in 1973:

Persons with high levels of self esteem may find it difficult to share the same religious belief. A theology predicated upon a loving accepting God is cognitively compatible with high self esteem, but it could be a source of discomfort for a believer low in self esteem. It does not make good cognitive sense to be loved when one is unlovable. Consequently the latter person can march to a different theology, one that is more consistent with his self image. (Benson and Spilka 209-210).

The implications are intriguing becuase it not only means that people who present a mean legalistic view of God have low self-esteem, not only that atheist's rejection of God is due to their low self esteem but that for those atheists who really rail against God as evil, mean, and vicious, they are really railings against themselves. Whereas it doesn't necessarily follow that we can correct it by teaching people that God is loving. Would they just reject the notion of a loving God because it doesn't fit their sense of self?

Benson and Spilka* did two studies in (73) and (75). the latter done by Spilka, Addison and Rosenshon. Both studies determined self esteem by a modified Coopersmith. They assessed God images by means of semantic differential grid which generated two scales defined as measuring a loving God image and a controlling God image.Self-esteem was negatively related to a wrathful God image. Among female students self esteem was negatively related to a wrathful God image. Although Peidmont shows other studies that didn't find a correlation, Cartier and Goehner (1976) related measures of self-esteem with God images (Peidmont 109).

The significance of this is two fold. If it is true that theological teaching is to blame for self image, or to laud for good self image, it behooves the chruch to seek to teach healing images of God. This may be a huge short coming for which a great deal of theological education deserves blame. It may also be the case that being an atheist, at least for some, has less to do with reason and logic as the atheist tyr to argue it does, and more to do with hidden psychological motives.

my list of religoius experience studies

2011-02-22T04:17:00.000-08:00

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Have Tomb, Will Argue

2011-01-24T06:23:00.000-08:00

Professor Biddle (The Tomb of Christ) proves the site of the current Church of the Holy Sepulcher (CHS) is the very sight selected by Constantine for his chapel because he believed it to be site of the tomb of Jesus, the one that turned up empty, and the near the cross of Golgotha. It's only a few yards from the site of the crucifixion (so some believe). In the past atheists have become very angry over this point and gone to great lengths of deception and hostility to avoid the obvious conclusions. Nevertheless, their obfuscations is not impressive, even though their persistence is tiresome. The real question is what made Constantine choose this site? The atheists would do anything to divert belief form the historical claims that the site site was always known to local Christians, they marked it, keep up with it, and told it to the incoming gentile Christians. Some atheists who used to harass this blog will do anything to have you believe otherwise. While they are basically right there is no final proof that is beyond question, there is very good reason to assume that the legend is true.

In their fomentation two in particular, "anonymous" ( aka, "Goliath"--"go lie" as I call him) and "loyal opposition" (LP) tried to convence the reader that only they understood the sources that the only the only sources that mattered were Eusebius and Constantine through Eusebius. Even Eusebius himself they ignored completely because he offered evidence that contradicted their view. They only accepted one quote of Constantine that came through Eusebius that they asserted ruled out any of the other stories and reports no matter who handed them on (see comment section this blog May 21, 2007). There is no hard evidence. They right about that. That does not mean there is reason to accept that site as valid. The likelihood is good. Atheists can't understand likelihood unless it's in their favor. There are sources that need to be considered. Scripture tells us that Jesus' body was laid in a new tomb lent by Josephus of Aremathia. There are a few scant details mentioned all the Gospels. (Matthew 27:60; Mark 15:46; Luke 23:53).John 19:17 no details of tomb but mentions Calvary. John 19:41 says the place of the tomb was near the place of the crucifixion.

New Advent, Holy Sepulcher

No further mention of the place of the Holy Sepulchre is found until the beginning of the fourth century. But nearly all scholars maintain that the knowledge of the place was handed down by oral tradition, and that the correctness of this knowledge was proved by the investigations caused to be made in 326 by the Emperor Constantine, who then marked the site for future ages by erecting over the Tomb of Christ a basilica, in the place of which, according to an unbroken written tradition, now stands the church of the Holy Sepulchre.

The Christians fled the city with the fall of the temple in 70. Some came back and re-established their community. There are Jewish Christians there at the time of the expulsion of Jews after the barkaba revolt in 135.

The Christians who were in Jerusalem when Titus laid siege to the city in the year 70 fled, it is true, across the Jordan to Pella; but, as the city was not totally destroyed, and as there was no law prohibiting their return, it was possible for them to take up their abode there again in the year 73, about which time, according to Dr. Sanday (Sacred Sites of the Gospels, Oxford, 1903), they really did re-establish themselves. But, granting that the return was not fully made until 122, one of the latest dates proposed, there can be no doubt that in the restored community there were many who knew the location of the Tomb, and who led to it their children, who would point it out during the next fifty years .(Ibid)

We don't have many real mentions of the site by many writers of the era. Those are named usually are quoting Eusebius. Some of those not connected to Eusebius are mentioned but their works are not on the internet and very hard to get. Such are the works of Melito of Sardis.

It is recorded that Melito of Sardis visited the place where "these things [of the Old Testament] were formerly announced and carried out". As he died in 180, his visit was made at a time when he could receive the tradition from the children of those who had returned from Pella. After this it is related that Alexander of Jerusalem (d. 251) went to Jerusalem "for the sake of prayer and the investigation of the places", and that Origen (d. 253) "visited the places for the investigation of the footsteps of Jesus and of His disciples". By the beginning of the fourth century the custom of visiting Jerusalem for the sake of information and devotion had become so frequent that Eusebius wrote, that Christians "flocked together from all parts of the earth".(Ibid)

Alexander of Jerusalem (d. 251) made a trip to the holy lands to investigate the sacred places, and Origen (d. 253) "visited the places for the investigation of the footsteps of Jesus and of His disciples". "By the beginning of the fourth century the custom of visiting Jerusalem for the sake of information and devotion had become so frequent that Eusebius wrote, that Christians "flocked together from all parts of the earth" (Ibid, same New Advent article). Because I don't have a quote by Eusebius that wsay "I read Malito of Sardis and he talks about the tomb" those atheist asserted that he does not. Becasue I can't obtain the original easily this is was certain proof to them that it's a lie. There is of course, no reason to assume such a drastic bit of casuistry. The Scholarship speaks of it, this is documentation enough they provide a better documented source saying it's not true. Dcoumented debate is like dueling sources. You don't need best to support highly probable idea that is basically common knowledge. New Advent documents that "all scholars" (almost) agree with it. The great Biblical Archaeologist Corbo made clear in Archaeology of the Bible book by book (1976) that accepted the tradition as a valid and likely theory.

Helena and Macarius, having made fruitless inquiries as to the existence of the Cross, turned their attention to the place of the Passion and Resurrection, which was known to be occupied by a temple of Venus erected by the Romans in the time of Hadrian, or later. The temple was torn down, the ruins were removed to a distance, the earth beneath, as having been contaminated, was dug up and borne far away. Then, "beyond the hopes of all, the most holy monument of Our Lord's Resurrection shone forth" (Eusebius, "Life of Constantine", III, xxviii). Near it were found three crosses, a few nails, and an inscription such as Pilate ordered to be placed on the Cross of Christ. (Ibid)

There's a great book on the subject of early holy places in Christianity and especially concerned with the Holy Sepulcher: The Sepulcher of Christ and the Medieval West, by Colin Moris (Oxford U. Press). Moris Makes several arguments. Tombs were venerated and were important. The lack of mention of place names but the rapid grouping of many such names around Bethany and Bethphage and Gologthy in Mark indicated that the readers knew the places. Hegesippus tells us that they knew the tomb of James, even in his own day which a century latter. Would they continue to remember the tomb of James and play no attention and forget that of Christ! (G. Schille, ‘Das Leiden des Herrn: die evangelische Passionstraditionund ihr Sitz im Leben’, Zs. für Theologie und Kirche, 52 (1955), 161–162,
and E. Trocmé, The Passion as Liturgy: A Study in the Origin of the
Passion Narrative in the Four Gospels (London, )) (see also Morris,8).

He quotes certain early writers that who relate pretty clearly the tradition that the Temple of Venus was built on top of the site of Jesus' tomb. "Several writers comment that 'the place was hard to find, the persecutors of hold having placed a statue of Venus on it, so that, if any Christian should presume to worship Christ in that place he would seem to worship Venus. Thus the place had fallen into oblivion.'" this quotation he attributes to the Ecclesiastical History of Gelasius (Borgehammar, 54). He continues:

This suggests that there was still a tradition of where Golgotha was However difficult it was of access. The balance of probability is that the site of Golgotha like certain other Biblical sites remained known to the Palestinian Christians during the first three centuries.(14).

It is possible to get the book and investigate further. Just because we don't have Eusebius saying it doesn't mean there's no evidence for the tradition. Go-lie and OP were desperate to disprove anything they could and to divert attention of the the fact that historical probability indicates the tomb was venerated. One of the major arguments they made by quoting a long passage from Euebius that is suppossed to demonstae that Contantine did not have a prior traditon tht he followed for the site but just made it up, pretending it was "form the Lord:"

"He judged it incumbent on him to render the blessed locality of our Saviour's resurrection an object of attraction and veneration to all. He issued immediate injunctions, therefore, for the erection in that spot of a house of prayer: and this he did, not on the mere natural impulse of his own mind, but being moved in spirit by the Saviour himself.....but calling on the divine aid, gave orders that the place should be thoroughly purified, thinking that the parts which had been most polluted by the enemy ought to receive special tokens, through his means, of the greatness of the divine favor. As soon, then, as his commands were issued, these engines of deceit were cast down from their proud eminence to the very ground, and the dwelling-places of error, with the statues and the evil spirits which they represented, were overthrown and utterly destroyed.....Nor did the emperor's zeal stop here; but he gave further orders that the materials of what was thus destroyed, both stone and timber, should be removed and thrown as far from the spot as possible; and this command also was speedily executed. The emperor, however, was not satisfied with having proceeded thus far: once more, fired with holy ardor, he directed that the ground itself should be dug up to a considerable depth, and the soil which had been polluted by the foul impurities of demon worship transported to a far distant place".(III, XXV-XXVII)

I quoted that passage a number of times myself, but when he wanted to sweep aside my evidence also from Euesbius of a prior tradition he would say something to sound disgusted such as "Ok here it is again" then quote that very quote. The quote says NOT that there was no prior tradition, not that he chose the site because God showed him where it was but because but that his motivatin for doing finding it came from the Lord. Not the site itself, but the motive. see above highlighted. I had argued before my siting of the passage what Eusebius says that gives a context to Constantin's undertaking of the search:

The Franciscans (their websites) put this in as the context before the quote given above:

In 325, during the first ecumenical council of Nicea, the bishop of Jerusalem, Macarius, invited Emperor Constantine to destroy the pagan temples built atop the Christian holy sites in the Holy City. The Emperor, now Pontifex Maximus of the whole Roman Empire and strong in his position decreed the demolition of the pagan temples built atop the Christian Holy Site. This is how Eusebius describe s the event:

This is an indication that they knew the locations of these sites. Why ask for the pagan temples to be destroyed if they didn't know where the true sites were, or at least if they didn't have an idea where they thought they were.

Where does this leave us? It doesn't resolve the issue or prove that the CHS is the original site of Jesus resurrection. It does give us some interesting ammunition. The atheists at times are given to argue that if Jesus really existed and if he was really crucified and there was an empty tomb why didn't they mark. Don't let them argue this on the premise that we can't prove where the tomb is. We don't have to prove that. We can prove there was a tradition, that ancinet writers claim they marked the site. That's enough to negate their argument. When they say why didn't they mark it, well we have reason to believe they did.

Have Tomb, Will Argue part 2

2011-01-24T05:48:00.000-08:00

In response to the empty tomb book published by the ensomble of internet infidels.My arguments are found in several pages that disprove any assertion of a late developing tomb myth.

http://www.geocities.com/metacrock2000/Jesus_pages/Resurrection/Tomb_yes.html

I have two major argments both of which demonstrate the historicity of an early claim of an existing empty tomb.

(1) The per Markan redactions includes story of empty tomb as early as AD 50

(2) archaeoloigcal evidence indicates the tomb is under the chruch of the Holy Seplechur.

this is the second argument:

One of the major Skeptical arguments against the Resurrection of Christ states that no tomb was ever venerated as the stie of the Resurrection until Constantine arbitrarily chose one in the foruth century;that the Chruch of the Holy Seplechur, the oldest traditional site, was just a fabrication. None of this is true. While it cannot be proven conclusively that the CHS is the actual tomb site, there is a strong probablity that it is, and there is good evidence to suggest this. The tradition can be traced back to the first century. Thus a tomb was venerated in the first century.

The Church of the Holy Seplechur is owned jointly by three major Christian denominations: The Roman Catholics, the Orthodox, and the Arminian Orthodox. The site was chosen and "discovered" to be the orignal tomb of Christ by Constantine in 336 AD when he accompanied his mother to the Holy Land in search of the true cross and other artifacts.

My Argument is not that we can prove that the CHS is the tomb, but that the strong probablity that it was venertaed as the tomb in the frist century, destorys the skeptical claim in books such as The Empty Tomb.The skeptics contributing to that book must disprove the possiblity of the CHS before they can dismiss historicity of the empty tomb.

My arguments will be presented in three major areas:

I. The modern site of CHS is the site Constantine chose; its place in the sourrounding city is an exact fit for the physical and social envoriment of the tomb.

II. Oral tradition guided Constantine's choice, passed down from the Jewish Christian community to the Gentile Chrsitians.

III. Modern archeaology verifies the claims of this tradition.

I. The modern site of CHS is the site Constantine chose; its place in the sourrounding city is an exact fit for the physical and social envoriment of the tomb.

A.Validation of Constantine's site two sources:

(1) The Description of the site itself

The Descriptions given by Eusebius, and by Crusaders in the Middle ages, match the actual site.

Carbo Excavation.

Chruch of The Holy Seplechur--Government of Israel site, visited 6/7/01

http://www.israel-mfa.gov.il/mfa/go.asp?MFAH00v10

"This courtyard, outside the present-day Church of the Holy Sepulcher, is partly supported by a large, vaulted cistern. The northern wall of this cistern is very impressive, consisting of large blocks with dressed margins, still standing several meters high. It has been suggested that this early wall served as the retaining wall of the second century Hadrianic raised platform (podium). This appears to support Eusebius' statement that the Temple of Venus, which Hadrian erected on the site of Jesus' tomb, stood here before the original church was built."

"The Basilica: Early masonry below the catholicon of the Crusader period was exposed during the excavations. This made possible the reconstruction of the original design of the 4th century basilica. The position of the two central rows of columns in the basilica (out of the four rows) may be determined by the remains of their foundations, which can be seen along the northern and southern sides of the chapel of St. Helena. In a small underground space north of this chapel, a massive foundation wall of the early basilica was exposed. On a large, smoothed stone which was incorporated in this wall, a pilgrim to the original church left a drawing of a merchant ship and the Latin inscription: "O Lord, we shall go." Beneath the apse of the present-day catholicon, part of the apse that marked the western end of the original church was exposed. Eusebius described this apse as being surrounded by twelve columns, symbolizing the twelve apostles."

"The Rotunda and Sepulcher:The most important element of the complex is the rotunda which contains the sepulcher itself. The sepulcher stands in an elaborate structure within the rotunda, surrounded by columns supporting an ornamented, domed roof.Some masonry remains were revealed below the floor and around the perimeter of the rotunda. Wherever bedrock was exposed, there were indications of stone-quarrying in earlier periods. The quarrying operation lowered the surface level around the sepulcher, which thus stood well above its surroundings. An architectural survey of the outer wall of the rotunda - 35 m. in diameter and in some sections preserved to a height of 10 m. - shows that it maintains its original 4th century shape. The sepulcher itself is surrounded by a circle of twelve columns - groups of three columns between four pairs of square piers. It is possible that the columns for the 4th century rotunda were removed from their original location on the facade of the Roman temple. Renovation of the piers exposed evidence that the columns had originally been much higher and that the Crusaders cut them in half for use in the 12th century rotunda.The renovation of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is still in progress, but after generations of neglect, the building has already regained most of its former beauty.

"The survey and excavations were conducted by V. Corbo, Ch. Coüasnon, M. Broshi and others, on behalf of the Christian communities which control most of the Holy Sepulcher: the Roman Catholic; the Greek Orthodox; and the Armenian Orthodox."

(2) Description of the Edicule.

The Edicule is the little house put over the tomb to protect it, before the basillica was built. Constantine is known to have put up the first one, and it has been described and documented in many ways. Biddle Traces this developement and finds:

The History of the Edicule

ad communications.org.

"From the time of Constantine to the present day historians have been blessed with the archaeological evidence discovered showing the Edicule in its original form. The following list is only a fraction of what has been retrieved and the approximate dates of their origination.

Appearances of the Edicule (325-1009 ad)

1) 440 a.d.: on ivory casket side carving.
2) a Narbonne marble model (5th century).
3) Casket lid (6-7th century).
4) Pewter flask (6-7th century).
5) Pewter Medallion.
6) Glass Flasks.
7) Pottery Pilgrim Flask (shows Edicule and Golgotha).
8) Gold ring with the 3D Edicule on top.
9) Mosiac in the Church of St. Stephen in Jordan.
10) Bronze Censer casts (1009 a.d.)

Appearances of the Edicule (11th Century -1555)

1) Paintings.
2) Drawings.
3) Crusader Coins/Seals.
4) Models.

Appearances of the Edicule (1555-1808 ad)

1) Stone scale models.
2) Wooden models of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre with Edicule model inside.
3) Engravings.
4) Pottery.

Martin Biddle

Tomb of Chist

Israel Review of Arts and Letters

Wesite belonging to:Israel Ministry Foreign Affairs

visited 1/8/05

Biddle:Constantines edicule, the first of the four "little houses" which have covered and protected the remains of the tomb since its discovery in 325-6, was destroyed in 1009 and no fragment of it has been seen since. How then do we know what it looked like? The best evidence is provided by a replica standing about a metre high, cut in a block of Pyrennean marble, found at Narbonne in south-west France, and dating from the fifth or sixth century CE. Being cut in local marble it cannot be a direct copy of the edicule in Jerusalem, but must be based on some intermediate copy, probably itself a model rather than a set of drawings. Its evidence is therefore second-hand, but there are sufficient other sources to show that it is likely to be in architectural terms a close representation of the Jerusalem original. The other fifth to seventh-century sources are pictures in mosaic, moulded pewter flasks and medallions, the painted lid of a box of relics (found in the Lateran in Rome), images on pottery and glass, and the written records of pilgrims. All these sources present their own problems of date and interpretation, but it is a remarkable range of evidence in different media, more evidence perhaps than for any other vanished building of late antiquity. But the picture is confused by the parallel existence of completely fanciful representations, some of the highest artistic quality, in the form of ivory panels carved in Alexandria and Italy. These show idealized edicules, bearing no relation to reality, but they have confused generations of scholars. Only the objects made in Palestine, mostly probably in Jerusalem, for the pilgrim trade, or copying such local products, like the Narbonne marble, tell us what the edicule built by Constantine was really like.

Constantines edicule survived for 600 years until it was deliberately destroyed in 1009 by order of the Fatimid Caliph of Egypt, al-Hakim, in an insane and short-lived attack on the holy sites of Christianity. Within three or four years al-Hakim had relented, urged on by his mother, Maria, a Christian whose brother Orestes had been Patriarch of Jerusalem. By 1012 rebuilding had begun, and by 1014, Maria had "began to rebuild with well-dressed squared stones the Temple of Christ destroyed by her sons order."

The destruction had been very thorough: Constantines great church of the Martyrion was cut down and never rebuilt, but al-Hakims agents admitted that they could not entirely root out the tomb, and they left parts of the rotunda surrounding the tomb standing to a height of about 11 metres, as one can still see today. By the millennium of Christs crucifixion in 1030 or thereabouts, when thousands of pilgrims were again travelling to the Holy Land, the edicule and the rotunda had been put back into sufficient order for pilgrims to take part in the Easter liturgies and to observe the ceremony of the Descent of the Holy Fire.

William of Tyre, the great Crusader historian, who wrote in the 1160s and 1170s, says that the restoration was completed by the Byzantine Emperor Constantine IX Monomachos in 1048. William is our only evidence for this, and his indications of date are inconsistent. No Byzantine chronicler believed this. John Skylitzes, writing in the mid-11th century, a strictly contemporary witness, noted that the Emperor Romanos III (1028-34) "strove eagerly to take the rebuilding in hand; but his death intervened and his successor completed the work." This was the Emperor Michael IV, the Paphlagonian, who reigned from 1036-41.

Biddle traces the full history in the article (see link).

The shapes and appearances have been correlated by the Biddle excavation using advanced thechnology wihch enable the archaeologist to see inside to the orignal layer. The Ediclues was repaced many times wiht scuceeding layers, until it became onionlike, hiding an original core of Constantine's Dome, which has now been penitrated by Biddle using the most advanced technology. There is virtually no doubt that the CHS is the site Constantine chose.

Secrets of the Dead (PBS)

In addition to the traditional methods used by archeologists to study buildings, including taking comprehensive and detailed photographs and studying ancient documents and drawings, archeologists Martin and Birthe Biddle and their colleagues employed a number of sophisticated scientific techniques to examine the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the edicule that purportedly houses the Tomb of Christ.

The primary technology used in their survey of the site was photogrammetry, which allows researchers to create two or three-dimensional images of a structure from any vantage point. The data from which the images are constructed comes from conventional or digital photographs. Not just any photographs, however; they have to include small, reflective "targets" stuck on walls or other surfaces with adhesive. The targets have cross-hairs, which allow their exact location to be measured with a surveying tool called a theodolite. From the location of the targets, an imaginary coordinate grid is constructed in and around the entire site -- within the edicule of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, for example. "When you take your photographs you have, preferably, four of these targets in each one," says Martin Biddle. The photographs are taken in "stereopairs," overlapping images that, when viewed in a certain way, form a three dimensional image of an object. "The stereopairs are set up in a photogrammetric plotter with the coordinate values you know from your survey. Thereafter, you can plot any point in the stereo image in terms of that coordinate grid. You know the x and y and z axes -- up and down and sideways," Biddle explains. "Once you have that data in, you can instruct the machine to print out a view looking up from underneath, or down from above -- whatever way you want."

http://www.bib-arch.org/barso99/roll2.html

B. Site's Physical and Social Fit in the Jerusalem Environment

(1)Site location is right in Relation to City Wall

One of the major means of identification is through the relation to the city wall. They know where the tomb was suppossed to be in relation to the wall and that gives a vector in which to begin searching. Than there are two other peices of crucial evidence, the description by Eusebius and artifacts which link the site with the tomb.

ad communications.org

The Tomb of Jesus, where is it?

"In 1963 Archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon while digging near the Church of the Holy Sepulcher proved that at the time of the Crucificion, the Church location was outside the walls of the Old City, during a dig a 49 ft. trench revealed a quarry which was in used between the 7th century b.c. and the first century. Additional support comes from the middle 1960's where repairs were given to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (floor) as well as a nearby Lutheran Church where quarrying evidence and pottery was uncovered. In addition to these discoveries the 1976 excavation by Dr. Christos Katsambinis revealed a cone-shaped grey rock with an incline (35 ft. high) probably the famed Golgotha which had two small caves that from a distance looked like a large skull (E.B. Blaiklock and R.K. Harrison)."

(2) Site was a Cemetary with Garden

Martin Biddle

Tomb of Chist

Israel Review of Arts and Letters

Israel Ministry Foreign Affairs

"It is not as if it was the only tomb there. Some eight rock-cut tombs have so far been found below the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Some have kokhim (Heb.), the deep niches at right-angles to the wall into which a body could be inserted as into the drawers of a modern mortuary. At least one of these tombs (now below the Coptic Patriarchate) seems to be very like the tomb whose remains are still today covered by the edicule. Perhaps Eusebius identified the tomb now preserved within the edicule as the Tomb of Christ because it was near to Golgotha. This is suggested in St. Johns Gospel when it says that there was a "garden" at the place of Crucifixion, and that in that garden there was a tomb. But it may also have been because of the features of the tomb then discovered: a movable rolling stone, a low entrance through which it was necessary to bend down to look in or enter, and a bench on the right-hand side where Christs body could have lain and the "angel" could have sat, matched those described in the Gospel."

(3) Name Galgotha Stuck to the Site.

"Some points are crucial to note. First, the site was outside the city walls at the date of the Crucifixion in 30 or 33 CE. Second, the tomb was in an existing Jewish cemetery of rock-cut tombs typical of the Jerusalem area in the Second Temple period. Third, the place-name Golgotha seems to have lived on in local memory, despite the vast changes in the area brought about by Hadrians foundation of Aelia Capitolina in 132 CE. Before the end of the third century, Eusebius wrote in his Onomastikon, the "Place-Names of Palestine," that: "... Golgotha, place of a skull, where the Christ was crucified ... which is pointed out in Aelia to the north of Mt. Sion."

"It is only in recent years that study of Eusebius text has shown that the writing of his Onomastikon should be dated to the late third century, perhaps to the 290s, long before Constantines workers cleared the Rock of Golgotha and uncovered the tomb.

There was thus a landmark to guide Constantines workmen. They removed the Roman temple covering the site and the masses of earth and rubble forming the platform on which it stood, cleared the Rock of Golgotha and then, to their surprise, found a tomb which fitted the Gospel descriptions. The position is best put by the Israeli scholar Dan Bahat, former City Archaeologist of Jerusalem:

"We may not be absolutely certain that the site of the Holy Sepulchre Church is the site of Jesus burial, but we certainly have no other site that can lay a claim nearly as weighty, and we really have no reason to reject the authenticity of the site."

II. Site Location Handed on by Oral Tradition.

No one really knows how Contantine chose the site. Biddle thinks it was by graffiti found on the walls. Most historians beileve that the Jewish-Christian community passed on an orgal tradition telling their Genitle counterparts how to find the location.

A. Location Handed Down From First Century Jewish Christians, To Gentile Christians, to Eusebius.

New Advent
Catholic Encyclopeida
Holy Seplechur

A.L. MCMAHON
Transcribed by Robert B. Olson

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07425a.htm

"But nearly all scholars maintain that the knowledge of the place was handed down by oral tradition, and that the correctness of this knowledge was proved by the investigations caused to be made in 326 by the Emperor Constantine, who then marked the site for future ages by erecting over the Tomb of Christ a basilica, in the place of which, according to an unbroken written tradition, now stands the church of the Holy Sepulchre."

The oral tradition makes the most sense because it would give the clearest marker. Of course it is true that Constantine could have just chosen the site at random, or for some other reason. But oral tradition is alluded to by Eusebius, and it is validated by modern archaeology. Before getting into that, let's explore the tradition itself.

B. Tradition linked to First Century.

Several issues that skeptics will raise include: 1)the tradition only began in the foruth century, 2) That Helena just chose the site arbitrarily, 3) that the site was moved in the middle ages, 4) that legonds and "traditions" are worthless. But all of these are false. The tradition can be linked to the first century..

New Advent
Catholic Encyclopeida
Holy Seplechur

A.L. MCMAHON

Transcribed by Robert B. Olson

1) Site remembered by Jewish Christian Community after departure from Jerusalem in 60.

"These scholars contend that the original members of the nascent Christian Church in Jerusalem visited the Holy Sepulchre soon, if not immediately, after the Resurrection of the Saviour. Following the custom of their people, those who were converts from Judaism venerated, and taught their children to venerate, the Tomb in which had lain the Foundation of their new faith, from which had risen the Source of their eternal hope; and which was therefore more sacred and of greater significance to them than had been the tombs of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and David, which they had hitherto venerated, as their forefathers had for centuries. Nor would Gentile converts have failed to unite with them in this practice, which was by no means foreign to their own former customs.

2) Christian Community Re-established in Second Century.

"The Christians who were in Jerusalem when Titus laid siege to the city in the year 70 fled, it is true, across the Jordan to Pella; but, as the city was not totally destroyed, and as there was no law prohibiting their return, it was possible for them to take up their abode there again in the year 73, about which time, according to Dr. Sanday (Sacred Sites of the Gospels, Oxford, 1903), they really did re-establish themselves. But, granting that the return was not fully made until 122, one of the latest dates proposed, there can be no doubt that in the restored community there were many who knew the location of the Tomb, and who led to it their children, who would point it out during the next fifty years. The Roman prohibition which kept Jews from Jerusalem for about two hundred years, after Hadrian had suppressed the revolt of the Jews under Barcochebas (132-35), may have included Jewish converts to Christianity; but it is possible that it did not. It certainly did not include Gentile converts."

3) Tradition past from Jewish Christian community in Jerusalem to Gentile Christians.

"The list of Bishops of Jerusalem given by Eusebius in the fourth century shows that there was a continuity of episcopal succession, and that in 135 a Jewish line was followed by a Gentile. The tradition of the local community was undoubtedly strengthened from the beginning by strangers who, having heard from the Apostles and their followers, or read in the Gospels, the story of Christ's Burial and Resurrection, visited Jerusalem and asked about the Tomb that He had rendered glorious."

C.Trial of Witnesses from Second Century to Contantine.

1)Pilgrims.

[Ibid]

"It is recorded that Melito of Sardis visited the place where "these things [of the Old Testament] were formerly announced and carried out". As he died in 180, his visit was made at a time when he could receive the tradition from the children of those who had returned from Pella. After this it is related that Alexander of Jerusalem (d. 251) went to Jerusalem "for the sake of prayer and the investigation of the places", and that Origen (d. 253) "visited the places for the investigation of the footsteps of Jesus and of His disciples". By the beginning of the fourth century the custom of visiting Jerusalem for the sake of information and devotion had become so frequent that Eusebius wrote, that Christians "flocked together from all parts of the earth". It is at this period that history begins to present written records of the location of the Holy Sepulchre. The earliest authorities are the Greek Fathers, Eusebius (c.260-340), Socrates (b.379), Sozomen (375-450), the monk Alexander (sixth century), and the Latin Fathers, Rufinus (375-410), St. Jerome (346-420), Paulinus of Nola (353-431), and Sulpitius Severus" (363-420).

2) Eusebius.

[Ibid]
Of these the most explicit and of the greatest importance is Eusebius, who writes of the Tomb as an eyewitness, or as one having received his information from eyewitnesses. The testimonies of all having been compared and analysed may be presented briefly as follows: Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine, conceived the design of securing the Cross of Christ, the sign of which had led her son to victory. Constantine himself, having long had at heart a desire to honour "the place of the Lord's Resurrection", "to erect a church at Jerusalem near the place that is called Calvary", encouraged her design, and giving her imperial authority, sent her with letters and money to Macarius, the Bishop of Jerusalem. Helena and Macarius, having made fruitless inquiries as to the existence of the Cross, turned their attention to the place of the Passion and Resurrection, which was known to be occupied by a temple of Venus erected by the Romans in the time of Hadrian, or later. The temple was torn down, the ruins were removed to a distance, the earth beneath, as having been contaminated, was dug up and borne far away. Then, "beyond the hopes of all, the most holy monument of Our Lord's Resurrection shone forth" (Eusebius, "Life of Constantine", III, xxviii). Near it were found three crosses, a few nails, and an inscription such as Pilate ordered to be placed on the Cross of Christ. The accounts of the finding of the Holy Sepulchre thus summarized have been rejected by some on the ground that they have an air of improbability, especially in the attribution of the discovery to "an inspiration of the Saviour", to "Divine admonitions and counsels", and in the assertions that, although the Tomb had been covered by a temple of Venus for upwards of two centuries, its place was yet known."

Of course, Corfeld says that these pagan monuments, intended to defile the site and make it unfit for veneration, only served to mark the location, so that Christains could remember where it was by marking the pagan monument.There are more serious considerations which I do not have time to address here. I suggest that the reader click on the link above and read the entire article. But the point here is that, unlike many skeptics try to claim, the situation is not that no one ever heard of the site before Contantine; he did not pull it out of think air. There is a traceable tradition going back to the fist century.

D. Site not questioned until 18th century.

[Ibid]
"It was not until the eighteenth century that the authenticity of this tomb was seriously doubted. The tradition in its favour was first formally rejected by Korte in his "Reise nach dem gelobten Lande" (Altona, 1741). In the nineteenth century he had many followers, some of whom were content with simply denying that it is the Holy Sepulchre, because it lies within the city walls, while others went further and proposed sites outside the walls. No one, however, has pointed out any other tomb that has a shred of tradition in its favour."

Agaisnt Infinite Causal Regress

2011-01-19T12:27:00.000-08:00

The Infinite causal regress is an important issue in dealing with the cosmological argument, especially the Kalam version, and the argument form final cause. It basically means that any infinitely recurring causality for any event is impossible, since one never actually arrives at a cause. The importance of this argument applies not only to the now largely abandoned notion of an oscillating universe, but to any finite causes of space/time. This is because in light of the impossibility it means that the ultimate cause of the universe must be a final cause, that is to say, the cause behind all other causes, but itself uncaused and eternal. These are two major issues because they indicate why the ultimate cause of the universe has to be God. Since arbitrary necessities are impossible, the ultimate cause cannot be something which is itself contingent, such as an eternal singularity. The ultimate cause, or "final cause" must be God, since God is a logical necessity.

But lately skeptics have sought to deny these principles. They have actually been denying that infinite causal regress is impossible. This causes me to suspect that they don' really understand the concept. For no one truly understanding the notion of an eternally repeating cause could seriously consider that an infinite causal regress can actually exist. But this denial takes two forms. First, they just deny it outright. They don't' believe me. And secondly, they sometimes try to provide examples such as the number line, that's a favorite. And of course the ever popular claim that God is also an infinite Regress. That is three arguments to deal with:

1) Out right denial that ICR is impossible

2) The argument that one can find examples in Mathematics

3) The idea that God is also an ICR

Before dealing with the nuberline I will just make a little argument on the impossibility of an actual infinite causal regress (that is that one could actually exist in real life).

1)A beginingless series of events is impossible.

A actual infinite is defined as A beginingless series of events This is not to say that nothing actual could be eternal, but that a series of events with no beginning cannot exist in reality. A thing is said to be actually infinite if part of it is equal to the whole. For example, mathematicians show that the number of fractions is equal to the number of whole numbers, even though fractions can divide whole numbers infinitesimally, because its all infinity and infinity is without number. Now here I'm distinguishing between existence in actuality, the "real world," as opposed to existence in mathematics.

A linear Causal infinite regress is thought to be possible by Aquinas and Farther Copeleston, but only if it has a prior hierarchical cause. In other words, the causality can be not just linear but also hierarchical. A hierarchical infinite regress is also impossible for the same reason, it never really has a cause since it has no beginning. A linear regress of causal nature is impossible without a hierarchical cause.

The great mathematician David Hilbert argues for the notion that a beginingless series of events with no higher cause is impossible. ["On the Infinite" in Philosophy and Mathematics (Englewood Cliffs New Jersey: Prentice Hall), 1964, 139, 141.)

(2) ICR is Circular Reasoning

William Row Quoted on website below

www.faithquest.com/philos...cosmo.html

Rowe's version of the standard answer goes as follows: Suppose we are wondering why A exists. Suppose further that A was linearly caused to exist by B and that B was linearly caused to exist by C, etc. Here is a causal series, Rowe says, which might well extend infinitely back in time. This is because we need do nothing other than point out B in order to explain why A exists; although B was itself caused to exist by C, we still need refer no further back than B to explain the existence of A. But, Rowe says, suppose we are trying to explain not why A exists but rather why a certain sort of causal activity - the activity of causing A presently to exist - is going on. Here we cannot as before merely point to B. because presumably B is itself being caused to engage in the causal activity of causing A presently to exist (and is thus only a kind of intermediary). Accordingly, we have to talk about C's causal activity the causal activity of causing B to cause A presently to exist. This, then, is a series that cannot be extended infinitely; this series must have a first member. For if there were no first member, we would never succeed in arriving at an explanation of the existence of the causal activity of causing A presently to exist. We would never be able to explain why this activity is going on.11

(But this author supports Aquinas' and Copleston in saying that linear causal regress is possible but not a hierarchical one. Easy to see why he says this, because he believed the universe to be infinite in time, but he still asserts that there must be a higher eternal generation)

Just extend Rowe's argument a little further to see that ICR is circular reasoning. The need for a cause is granted bye ICR advocate; and that need will be supplied, so they say, by the cause of the previous event (for example in an oscillating universe, the previous Big Bang supplies the need for the cause of this universe). But, when it comes to explaining the ca usual relation to the whole series they will say that is uncessary, because they have that previous link in the chain and it's covered by the infinite serious of previous links, but nothing ever explains how the previous link could be there, except a previous link.

This is just circular reasoning because no matter how far back you go you have a cause that allows for any particular link to exist. Take this example:

a => b, b => c, => d => e, e => f

Now if we say "how can f exist without a cause? They say well it has a cause in e. But e doesn't have a cause except in a equally unexplained d, and go back as far as you will, there is never an explanation for how this could be. Yet they agree that the causal principal is necessary because they keep sticking in intermediate causes. If the causal principal is necessary, then there must be a final cause that explains how it could begin. Causality is linear and if they are going to argue for cyclical universe they have cover a linear concept of cause and effect.

If a series of events go back in time forever it is a beginingless series of events. IF the universe existed forever, for example, this would constitute an actual infinite. This is because the series of events that led to the current universe would be infinite. This is to distinguish it form a "potential infinite" which might be achieved by adding one event to another in a series and going on infinitely. But a series of events that has already transpired infinitely is an actual infinite.

Or let's look at the notion of finishing an infinite series. If a man claims to have been counting for infinity and is at last about to reach zero, he says -3, -2, -1, he's finally finished. Yet, he should have finished eons before, an infinity of time passed eons ago, or centuries, or decades, so he should have finished by now. Another strange paradox is that if we could check this man's counting in the past we would never find him counting. For he would have finished an infinity ago so we could never find him counting at any time that we ever checked his counting. Yet if he never counted he could never finish. Now may skeptics are going to say that it is impossible to count infinitely and so forth, yes, obviously. But these are the kinds of examples used in transfinite mathematics to illustrate this point.

"This illustrates once more that the series of past events could not be without a beginning for if you could not count numbers from eternity, neither could you have events form eternity. These examples underline the absurdity of a beginingless series of events in time, because such a series is an actual infinite and an actual infinite cannot exist. This means that the universe began to exist, which is what we set out to porve" (William Lane Criag in his early work, The Existence of God and The begining of the Universe Here's Life Publishers 1979 p.4 [and don't forget the empirical scientific data which also proves this same pint with the Big Bang).

3) An Actual Infinite Cannot Be Achieved by Adding one event to the series, thus the series of events in time can never be actually infinite.

This can also be understood in the fallacy to trying to count to infinity. This should be pretty obvious, because no matter how many events we add we can always add one more and continue to add events forever. One can never count to infinity. Most people understand this pretty well.So one could never add one event to another and reach infinity, it's the same thing. This is also called The impossibility of traversing the infinite.

Thus an actual infinite could come to exist only if all the members came to exist at the same time. As Craig points out "if an infinite number of Days existed before today, today would never come because one can never traverse the infinite." (50).

Philosopher John Hospers states:

"If an infinite series has proceeded the present moment, how did we get to the present moment? How could we get to the present moment--where we obviously are Now--if the present moment was proceeded by an infinite series of events?" [An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis, 2nd ed. (London: Rutledge and Kegan Paul, 1967) 434)

This First argument, the impossibility of a beginingless series of events with no higher cause was repeatedly defended and always successfully by G.J.Withrow, Professor of Mathematics at University of London's Imperial College of Science and Technology. see "The Age of the Universe,"British Journal for Philosopher of Science (1954-55) PP215-225. Natural Philosophy of Time (London: Thomas Nelson, 1961) See also Philsopher William Rowe The Cosmological Argument Princeton University press 1975

Now What if someone argues that the infinite series would be beyond time? In that case the skeptic loses the argument that there is no causality before time. IF there is no motion, causality, or change beyond time than there cannot be a series of events leading form one cause to another beyond time.

Now let's examine the three arguments.

1) Out right denial that ICR is impossible.

Well, if they don't believe the logic, they are pretty hopeless. And if they don't' accept the word of the mathematicians that are quoted, there isn't much you can do about it. But it seems pretty obvious that if you have an infinite series of causes leading back infinitely you would never have an actual cause, and the thing to be caused would not exist, just as you cannot count to infinity, or just as the counter claiming to have arrived at zero from infinity would never have actually counted.

2) That the number line is an example from Mathematics that proves the actual infinite, or Infinite causal regress.

David Hilbert has prove, as quoted above, that transfinite mathematics cannot exist in life. The number line is not an actual series of events, it is only hypothetical. Moreover numbers do not cause each other. It is not a causal regress.

3) That God is an ICR

This is merely to confuses an infinite with an infinite regress The ICR is an infinite series of events. God is not a series of events. God is not an event, God is not a recursion of causes, he is one final cause. God is not in time, he is eternal. So the two are not analogous at all. God is not an ICR.

The ICR is an impossibility, it cannot exist in actuality. This means the universe cannot be eternal, for the universe is an infinite series of causes, each one leading to the next. It certainly means the old oscillating universe notion of eternally recurring big bangs and crunches is right out! Therefore, there must be a final cause which is eternal and is not a series of events but one final cause that transcends the chain of cause and effect. It causes the universe but it is not in turn an effect of any other cause.

Aristotle and Bertrand Russell agree

Robert Koons, University of Texas

www.la.utexas.edu/phl356/lec5.html

Lecutre 5 Phil 356 Theism Spring 98

Another example is mentioned by al-Ghazali. Suppose that the sun and moon have each been revolving around the earth throughout an infinite past. There are 12 revolutions of the moon for every revolution of the sun. As we go back in time, the gap between the number of months and years grows ever wider, yet, taken as a whole, there are an equal number of elapsed months and years (both infinite). Cantorian set theory agrees with this paradoxical result: the cardinal number of months and years is exactly the same.

Bertrand Russell discusses a similar paradox, which he called the Tristam Shandy paradox. Tristam is writing is own autobiography. He takes a whole year to write down the events of a single day. In an infinite amount of time, Shandy can complete the task. Here's a time-reversed version of the paradox: suppose that Tristam is clairvoyent -- he writes about his own future. Last year he wrote about today's events; in the year before last, he wrote about yesterday's events. Today, he has just completed an infinite autobiography, cover all the events of his infinite past, despite the fact that, as we go farther in the past, Shandy is every further behind in the task -- i.e., 1000 years ago, he was still writing about the events of only the last three days.

Final note: The paradox of Time.

Some thinkers believe that time is an infinite series. I do not agree with this notion, I accept t=0, time begins in the Big Bang. But this is a valid viewpoint, I just dont' happen to agree. But that does not prove that a beginingless series of events with no higher cause can exist. Time can still have a higher cause, God perhaps, in heierarchical fashion.

2010-04-21T02:50:00.000-07:00

See The Ultimate Online Sartre resource: "have a coffee Break With Jean-Paul."

I have decided to flesh out several themes that are implicit in the piece I wrote in "Open Letter to John Loftus and the DC crowd."In doing so I will be speaking in a very general sense. Obviously I can't lay out the whole history of western civ. in a blog spot. I realize I will painting with a broad brush. But this an attempt to spell out the ideas that have always acted as undergirding for my belief system and spur me on to faith. I don't claim to be making pronouncements from on high. I don't claim that I could prove all my beliefs. Rather I shall attempt to spell out some of the basic reasons for my world view.

Perhaps the most important underlying theme of that essay is that of meaning and transcendent truth. Meaning in life plays a big role in the playing our of my youthful formation, because as a Sartian existentialist I bought into the line that "life is meaningless and absurd." it certainly seem meaningless to me when I was young. This was what the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre was all about. I felt then and I still feel today that Sartre was entirely correct his assertion that his philosophy was the logical consequence of not God. If there is no God Sartre was basically right about life and meaning. Existentialism had its hay day in the 50's. It burst on the scene after the war, the late 40's the major thinkers were turning to social ills, as the country tried to get back to civilian life. Hollywood began making "film noir" movies, and socially poiniant films like "the Best Years of Our Lives." Films that either dealth with the dark side of human nature, or tried to expose social ills. In that context existentialism suddenly took center stage in cultural world and the world of letters, because it was seen as the way to put France back in the center as the culture leader it had been before Nazi occupation. Sartre had fought in the underground, escaped from a Pris ion camp by just walking out and acting confident like he was supposed to be doing it!

Existentialism hit its stride in the 50's when many thinkers became famous for it, such as Gabriel Marcel with Christian existentialism, Niebuhr bothers (Reinhold and H. Richard) and Paul Tillich with existentially based theologies. Albert Camus hit his stride in that decade. In art Jackson Pollock represented existentialist themes, and in film Ingmar Bergmann. By the 60s existentialism has become a cultural icon. The philosophy became fuzzy in people's minds. As with "Postmodernism" the exactly meaning of the term was replaced with an image. People who didn't know what to call a painting or a film that seemed "edgy" or confusing called it "existential." The term conjured up images of people wearing berets and sipping espresso at a side walk cafe on the left bank and smoking Galloir cigarettes and saying things like "It is all absurd!" In the 90's this image worked its ay into beer commercials. The clown of life and the slogan "why ask why" were parodies of this "existential" feeling. "why do you sit on the beach with the sad clown of life? why ask why?" That image and the feeling it evoked lent a je ne c'est qua to our adolescent rebellion and our lonley youthful strivings. My brother and our best friend Lantz saw the Bergmann film "Smiles of a Summer Night." The talk of "the yellow pavilion" in that film gave them the idea of speaking of Lantz's garage as "the yellow pavilion," (because it has just been painted yellow). We did not want to be in Dallas, we wanted to be in Paris or New York, so we forged our own Texas version of existentialist image, sipping coffee in Ihop and smoking camel filters dipped in paragaric and saying "It's all so absurd!" Texas Rednecks in ear shot would say "whut are them bo-ahs talk'n about?" as we unabashedly and loudly discussed the metrical patterns of Keats, Marcuse, Joyce, Descartes, and of course Sartre. Once my brother and friend were were working on an atheist critique of the bible, with a bible present. A redneck who didn't know up from down thought they were Christian fundametalists making apologetic notes and he came over to them and shouted, baning on the table, "a couple bible thumping bad ass boys!" I said to my brother when he told about this "why didn't you tell him what you were doing?" He said "I don't want that guy on my side!"

One of my favorite scenes in Woody Alan's filmAnnie Hall is a parody of this general image that existentialism had been stuck with by the 70's. Woody is in an art museum. A woman is gazing before a famous painting by Jackson Pollock. She says "can't you just feel the anxt, the deep respire, the black abyss of meaningless and nothingness." Long pause in which Woody contemplates what was said. He then says "what are you doing tonight?" The woman replys "committing suicide, at 12:00 midnight!" Wood says, "what are doing at 11:45?"

Despite this romanticism, existentialism was a cogent philosophy, well thought out and based upon an older tradition that stretches back to the middle ages.

Sartre explains his philosophy most cogently and non technically in his essay
"Existentialism is a Humanism." The essay was first published in 1956, the year of my birth. But its most available incarnation is in Walter Kauffmann's book Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre 1989l, however the original lecture was given in 1946. Sartre begins his discussion in defining existentialism as the belief that "being proceeds essence." This will have a profound bearing upon the concept of both meaning and truth because it is a direct attack upon age old theistic notions of the meaning of truth. The age old is say that essence proceeds being. In other words, first there is an idea in the mind of God, then God creates that idea in concrete existent form. This stems from the thinking of the scholastics and Thomas Aquinas. But there are other themes that might challenge this notion. Aquinas was an Aristotelian. In his day he was greatly despised for brining novelty into theology. Theology was supposed to be set in stone, the really true truth that you didn't mess with. Thus Augustine was the philosopher of the Church. He was a Platonist. Aristotle was the philosopher of the Arabs, they saved his ideas. Plato was the intellectual bedrock of the church, and all the language of the creeds, with its incidents and accidents, was shaped by Plato. To bring Aristotle into it, especially after he was identified with the Arabs, who were infidels, this was a scandal.

The roots of existentialism have long been seen as stretching back to Augustine, but more so to Aquinas. The major difference in Plato and Aristotle is what they do with the forms. Plato said the world we know is the reflection, like a reflection of an object in a pool of water. The reflection (the "real" world) participates in the forms thus has it's being. Augustine said the forms are in the mind of God. So the participation in the forms is that of a thought in a mind; like the idea of an art work in the mind of the artist, or of an object such as a piece of furniture in the mind of the artisan who makes it. Aristotle said "there is no form without essence." This means there is no world of the forms "out there," the forms themselves appear with and in the concrete examples of them. Thus there is no form of mud, there is mud right here and that mud contains the form of mud, there is no general universal ideal mud that it participates in.

The idea of the forms in the mind of God gave life meaning, it meant that it is an expression of what God had conceived for it in his mind. Now Aquinas obviously believed that God created the world. But taking Aristotle's view of no form without essence he left open the possibility for individual "particulars" (the things in the world, in the concrete examples) to be shaped by "incidents and accidents." These ideas already existed. The major aspect of Platonic thought that played upon the Christian notion of Trinity was the concept of "essence." This comes from the concept of substance (really the same ideas); the Greek term is hamosios. This means the aspect of something that makes it what it is. So the Platonic Augustinians are saying a thing is what it is because it is first held in the mind of God. But the Aristotelean scholastics were saying that the from, the substance that defines it is in the individual event not in some pre set concept. The third view was Nominalism that comes form the followers of Duns Scottus. They said "a rose is a rose is a rose." Meaning there is no special form that defines a thing, it's just what it is. Even though they were Christians too, they are the forerunners of modern reductionism. Well The particulars of this story get pretty complex. I have to skip over the rest to get tot he point. Suffice to say Sartre came into it and said "there is not only no form without essence but being proceeds essence."

This is a radical jump from the previous stage. I am not saying Sartre was the first to say that. But he took it and made it his own. The idea is that there is no pre set formula or concept for things in the world, they are just what they are becasue they just happen by accident and random chance. The upshot of all of this is humanity; what is humanity? Because the themes of the past said humanity is a creature of God, thus as humans we have a duty to God. Unfortunately time does not permit a exploration of this concept of "accident." Because the scholastic notion of accident is much like our modern random chance notion, and that's where it comes from. All of our modern concepts of cause and effect, occurrence (incident) and random "accident" have their origins in the scholastic notion of cause and effect. The modern world just cut off the bits that pertain to first cause and the other forms of causes and left sufficient cause as our modern notion of c/e. Thus c/e comes out of the concept of necessity and contingency.

Sartre just moves it over one. It's not that the essence is within the form, essence is following form. For humanity that means we first exist. We exist for no particular reason except the c/e reason that science uses to explain the random event that led to life on earth, and the it is up to us to us to make ourselves what we will. In other words we are free to become what we wish to become. This is a principle concept for Sartre, radical freedom. We are free, we are condemned to be free. This means we can't avoid making decisions, we can't rest upon being shaped by prior forces. Sartre would have none of the modern determinism stuff of chemical determinism. We are radically free, we have to choose what we will become. He re shapes the concept of essence. It first meant (substance, hamousios)the quality that defines what a thing is. Thus the substance of a horse is long nose, mane, tail, four legs with hoofs, and so forth. But for the scholastics it was like a special unseen quality that pervades things. For Plato there was a special realm somewhere beyond the world we know where the universal ideals exist (forms) and the particular instances of these things participate in these ideals in a way that is mediated through the spend el of necessity. But For Aquinas the substance was actual in the particular. For Sartre substance boils down to an abstract definition of what something is. This is very crucial. This must be understood, because it is up to us to decide for ourselves what we are, we determine our own essence. If I want to be brave, I want to be a brave man, I define brave formyself. "I am brave because I go to the store by myself." I am brave because I'm not worried about McCain winning. We set a value and we define if we live up to that value. Thus in a sense we are making truth for ourselves. We making meaning for ourselves.

Meaning is the whole point. For Sartre life is meaningless and absurd. This has a particular meaning. I am not doing justice to the complexity of Sartre's philosophy. He was a brilliant thinker, and his most technical philosophical treaties is hard to read and requires a real educational background in Philosophy. It is called Being and Nothingness. That book is widely known throughout the academy to have been a "ripoff" of Heidegger's Being and Time. Heidegger was Sartre's teacher. It is true that he was greatly influenced by his old professor. I see Being and Nothingness as an attempt to translate the ideas of Heidegger into French thinking, not as out and out theft. Sartre does ad his own original slant to the ideas. But the necessity of baptizing into French culture ideas of a German philosopher was a very real problem. So Sartre was doing a service to Heidegger not just stealing his work.

For Sartre "meaningless" means there is no pre set essence, there is no predetermined value or ideal or definition for life. We are free we are not shaped by any duty or obligation to God or any higher power. We just organisms and we are here. Then it is up to us to decide what our lives mean, what value there is int them, to define for ourselves the meaning we wish to put on it. The most crucial step, humanity becomes what it wishes to become. Humanity is that thing whatever it is. We are not creatures, we were not created, we are not creatures of God, we are creatures of ourselves because we crate for ourselves our own meaning. We create our own truth because truth, if defined as "that which is" is a function of essence. We shape our own essence by the force of our own being, then we are defining truth according to what we have become. That which we are is a function of that which we chose to be. This should all have real resonance with atheists. Even atheists of today who have no background in existentialism should find kinship with these ideas.

So I believe that Sartre has one of the best readings of meaning of life, if there is no God! If there is no God then there is Jean-Paul Sartre! But the problems in Sartre's views then become for me problems in being an atheist. They becomes reasons to assume the reverse of Sartre's view. Sartre was explicating the consequences philosophically of a world with no God, thus if these consequences prove to be false, that would be a reason to assume there is a God. Of course we can't think of it as proof. But I tend to think of it as a good reason to assume God in understanding what we should do about civilization.

There's one more step before I cover, self authentication. One determines one's own essence, that means we attach our own meaning to our lives by deciding upon our own values. When we do this in such a way as to act in freedom for ourselves to define ourselves, we make ourselves who we are, this Sartre calls "self authentication." It is in a sense the Sartian alternative to salvation. A Sartian existentalist doesn't die and go to heaven, he lives out his/her life on earth, enjoys it, and that is called self-authentication. Of course I'm leaving out a lot; good faith, bad faith, shinking under the gave of the other, neusia, the state that arises from realizing the meaninglessness and absurdity of it all. Also this is connected to anxiety, in existentialist terms "anxt." This is most important but I have no time to cover it. Now lest one think there is none of this in Christian existentialism, all of these moves are found in Keirkegaard in one form or another, and certainly in Gabriel Marcel.Of cousrse Kierkegaard lived over fifty years before Sartre was born, while Marcel was a big fan of Sartre's (even though he was a Christian and Sartre an atheist). Christian existentialism proceeds not from the move "being proceeds essence" but form the move that the point of life is find connection with our source and thus become "more ourselves," (Keirkegaard).

Time and space does not permit more. This is only a blog but I will do part 2 of 1 next time. In that essay I will show why all of this really can be reversed and indicates a fine justification for belief in God.

part 2: meaning and truth

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this site is both a blog and a website too. you can enter it through these words. just look for the one that fits what you want to find.

so what the heck is the religious a priori?

Limits of Scinece part 3: Things Fall Though the Cracks

2009-04-01T18:42:00.000-07:00

True empirical evidence in a philosophical sense means exact first hand observation. In science it doesn't really mean that, it implies a more truncated process. Consider this, we drop two balls of different size from a tower. Do they fall the same rate or the bigger one falls faster? They are supposed to fall at the same rate, of course. To say we have empirical proof, in the literal sense of the term we would have to observe every single time two balls are dropped for as long as the tower exists. We would have to sit for thousands of years and observe millions of drops and then we couldn't say it was truly in an empirical sense because we might have missed one. That's impractical for science to do this so we cheat with inductive reasoning. We make assumptions of probability. We say we observed this 40,000 times, and it worked the same way every single time. That's a tight correlation, so we will assume there is regularity in the universe that causes it to work this way every time. We make a statistical correlation. Like the surgeon general saying that smoking causes cancer. The tobacco companies were really right, they read their Hume, and there was no observation of cause and effect, because we never observe cause and effect. The correlation, however, was so tight we assume cause and effect. Empirical scientific observation covers the unobserved instances with probability based upon tight correlation that allows things to fall through the cracks. For example, on average most men are stronger than most women. There are women, however, who can lift a lot more weight than I can, women who make me look weak, and they are probably not hard to find. We make assumptions and then construct standardized tests to measure our assumptions. If one of those assumptions is that intelligence means the ability to work math, there can be intelligent people who for one reason or another have trouble with math. Someone might be better at philosophy or history than a mathematician and not be good in math. The standardized test will say the mathematician is smart and the historian isn’t. Things are always going to fall through the cracks.
The ultimate example is Hume's billiard balls. Hume says we do not see the cause of the ball being made to move, we only really see one ball stop and the other start. But this happens every time we watch, so we assume that the tight correlation gives us causality. The naturalistic metaphysician assumes that all of nature works this way. A tight correlation is as good as a cause. So when we observe only naturalistic causes we can assume there is nothing beyond naturalism. The problem is many phenomena can fall between the cracks. One might go one's whole life never seeing a miraculous event, but that doesn't mean someone else doesn't observe such things. All the atheist can say is "I have never seen this" but I can say "I have." Yet the atheist lives in a construct that is made up of his assumptions about naturalistic cause and effect, and it excludes anything that challenges this assumption. So this constructed view of the world that is made out of assumption and probabilities misses a lot of experience that people do have that contradicts the paradigm of naturalism. The thing is, to make that construct they must use logic. After all what they are doing in making the correlation is merely inductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning has to play off of deductive reasoning to even make sense. Ultimately then, "empiricism" as construed by naturalist (inductive probabilistic assumptions building constructs to form a world view) is inadequate because it is merely a construct and rules out a prori much that contradicts.

Other realms

Consciousness—dualism in a new package

Lourdes miracles

The Question of other realms is a good test for the limits of science. Up to this point in human history science had no way to tell if there were other realms or not. For most of the life of modern science the idea of other realms, conjuring in the popular mind images of heaven, hell, Dante’s Inferno, and Superman’s Phantom zone were a laughing stock. With the advent of the twentieth century, relativity, Quantum theory and a lot of other physics, other realms have not only become fashionable they are basically mandatory. Atheists treat the idea of a multi-verse as though it’s a proven fact when in reality there’s no empirical evidence for it at all. There are now physicists making noises about maybe having the first hint of proof, maybe we are in a position begin real systematic study of the question, but as it stands now there is no actual proof that all scientists are willing to accept as fact at the moment. The question of other realms is all tangled up in the popular mind be it atheist or believer with the fear that God will be proved and the hope that God will disproved. This removes most atheists from the sphere of the objective status the prize so highly. There are disinterested scientists working on the question who seek pure knowledge (if they aren’t human). David Detsch, an Oxford Physicist, claims to have proved mathematically that the multiverse is “the only explanation for the nature of reality.”[i] National Geographic has reported:

"Dark flow" is no fluke, suggests a new study that strengthens the case for unknown, unseen "structures" lurking on the outskirts of creation. In 2008 scientists reported the discovery of hundreds of galaxy clusters streaming in the same direction at more than 2.2 million miles (3.6 million kilometers) an hour. This mysterious motion can't be explained by current models for distribution of mass in the universe. So the researchers made the controversial suggestion that the clusters are being tugged on by the gravity of matter outside the known universe.Now the same team has found that the dark flow extends even deeper into the universe than previously reported: out to at least 2.5 billion light-years from Earth.After using two additional years' worth of data and tracking twice the number of galaxy clusters, "we clearly see the flow, we clearly see it pointing in the same direction," said study leader Alexander Kashlinsky, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.[ii]

We are all being sucked toward some opening or other leading to this multiverse, the collection of parallel worlds. Of course with such an amazing claim such scanty evidence it’s easy to over look the fact that we have no empirical evidence at all to validate it. The observation galaxy cultures heading off in the same directing is empirical in a scientific sense (although not the philosophical sense) the problem is it just doesn’t tell us what’s doing it. It’s all fine and good to say “it doesn’t’ conform to any known model” but what’s the real cash value as proof of multiverse? It could just as easily be a an astronomical feature that doesn’t conform to a known mode but isn’t a multiverse. Its one thing to say “no known model” another to say ‘we are really working hard at coming up with another model that it could be instead.’ It’s probably not a giant handkerchief or a turtle that’s about we can say about it.

While we should not doubt that the search for mulitverse is undertaken from the standpoint of the human drive for pure knowledge, there is a very obvious cash pay off in terms of atheist apologetics and it’s pretty clear this is in the minds of many who do the “pure” scientific research. Discover magazine does a spread on what is at the moment Hawking’s new book, it talks about “M theory” and it relates to physics, adding this:

STEPHEN HAWKING'S new book The Grand Design sparked a furore over whether physics can be used to disprove the existence of God. But few have noted that the idea at the core of the book, M-theory, is the subject of an ongoing scientific debate – specifically over the very aspect of the theory that might scrap the need for a divine creator. That the laws of nature in our universe are finely tuned for life seems miraculous, leading some to invoke divine involvement. But if there is a multiverse out there – a multitude of universes, each with its own laws of physics – then the conditions we observe may not be unique.[iii]

The article in which this appears is entitled “M-Theory, Doubts Linker over Godless Multipverse.”[iv] This doesn’t mean they don’t have pure scientific motives, but everyone who studies the issue, from the top physicists to the science beat reporters to the average aficionado who buys the magazine, they all understand the relationship to the issue of God’s existence. That doesn’t mean the scientists are cooking up the theory to thwart religious believers, but they do know they on whose toes they are stepping. Why are they talking about God to begin with? It’s totally out of their domain.

Not all physicists are convinced either. Peter Woit is a mathematical physicist at Columbia University, he’s not a joiner. Woit has authored a booked entitled Not Even Wrong (a phrase by Wolfgang Pauli that became an inside joke among physicists meaning so bad it’s not even wrong) in which he argues that there is no proof of string theory. What does string theory have to do with this? M-theory and string theory are both important to the hunt for a unified theory that will tie everything together and explain everything. Hawking identifies M-theory with the grand unified theory, according to Woit it is the super symmetrical theory of gravity.[v] String theory, according to Woit is:

a very complex set of ideas that lots of people, a very large amount of people have worked on and have done a lot of different things with. Probably what it's best known for and what got people all excited about it in the physicist community is the conjecture that, at the most fundamental level, you can understand matter and the universe in terms not of point particles, which is the way our best theory is, currently, you can understand things, but in terms of, if you like, vibrating in loops of some elementary objects here, your elementary object instead of being a point-like thing is something you should think of more as a one dimensional loop, or a string which is kind of moving around.[vi]

These are not exactly the same things but they are very related. Woit writes his book about the inadequate proof for string theory, but in his article about Hawking’s soon to be released book he shows the inadequacy of M-theory. Grand unfied theory is not some attempt to disprove God, it’s a much more purely scientific quest for knowledge. It centers on the basic need science has to explain everything. Woit talks about the beautify of the standard model and how successful its been but it doesn’t explain everything. There are many open questions it does not answer, such as why do different kinds of particles have different masses.[vii] This is a purely scientific question but as the origin of religions got tangaled up with attempts to explain the natural world, so pure attempts at doing modern science are always tanagled up with the need to answer the question of God; or to deny the question of God as the case may be.[viii] As for the proof of string theory:

Question: Will string theory ever be verifiable or unverifiable?

Peter Woit: Yeah, well as I said, String Theory is actually a very complicated story. If you start out with this hypothesis that maybe your ephemeral objects are not points, but are these strings, there's a lot of different things you can try and do that you have a whole different class of theories you can play with. So, I think a lot of - if you look at what most people, who are still going String Theory are doing, they're actually not directly trying to develop this unified theory anymore. They're off doing other things with String Theory. People these days are trying to apply it to problems in nuclear physics; they're applying it to problems in Solid State Physics, understanding super conductors. So, the people who are still interested in it are often kind of - even if they may or may not explicitly admit that they've given up on the unified theory idea, but they're often doing other things. So, there's a very active pursuit of String theory with other applications that don't have anything to do with unification.

It's also turned out to be very interesting in mathematics. There's a very, one of the things that I'm most interested in is the intersection between mathematics and physics and the way the two fields affect each other and ideas from physics lead to very interesting things about mathematics, ideas in mathematics get used in …physics. And String Theory has been very, very fruitful in terms of raising questions which have led to very interesting mathematics. So, there's a very active field of research kind of in between math and physics in String Theory. But it just doesn't seem to be relevant to this question of unification.[ix]

As for the proof of M theory, the new Hawking book is a very interesting case of public relations over science. Woit comments on the book n his blog “Not Even Wrong.” He quotes Hawking in a full reversal of this question forr grand unified theory. The publishers focused upon the shcok of “brilliant major scientist gives up on God” but the publicity guys forgot to point out that he’s actually giving up on is his replacement for God. Woit quotes Hawking thirty years ago when he said “we are quite close to a final unified theory.”[x] He quotes him in the new book where he says “we seem to be at a critical point in the history of science

We seem to be at a critical point in the history of science, in which we must alter our conception of goals and of what makes a physical theory acceptable. It appears that the fundamental numbers, and even the form, of the apparent laws of nature are not demanded by logic or physical principle. The parameters are free to take on many values and the laws to take on any form that leads to a self-consistent mathematical theory, and they do take on different values and different forms in different universes.[xi]

In other words, he’s giving up on grand unified theory because it can’t square with logic or the laws of physics. On the other hand we can set parameters in any number of ways (he means ignore logic and physical law) the math can be self consistent. That is to say it works on paper but we can’t really prove it. Above I showed that he left gravity as the way out through the back door, gravity replaces his organizing principle of grand unified theory which he previously called “the mind of God.”[xii] One wonders which “god” did he really give up on, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in whom he did not believe in the first place, or the grand unified theory God? Woit Quotes him as saying in the Grand Design that it may not be possible to decipher the nature of M-theory: “People are still trying to decipher the nature of M-theory, but that may not be possible. It could be that the physicist’s traditional expectation of a single theory of nature is untenable, and there exists no single formulation. It might be that to describe the universe, we have to employ different theories in different situations.”[xiii] Woit points out that M-theory doesn’t meet the basic criteria Hawking sets forth for a successful theory:

A good model:

1. Is elegant
2. Contains few arbitrary or adjustable elements
3. Agrees with and explains all existing observations
4. Makes detailed predictions about future observations that can disprove or falsify the model if they are not borne out.

The fact that “M-theory” satisfies none of these criteria is not remarked upon.[xiv]

What is falling between the cracks here, apart from proof for the theory? The whole scientific community seems not to even be waiting for the eggs to hatch, they have not yet been laid, they are just thought about. Suppose they do prove the theory of everything, suppose they do prove a mutliverse exists, does this actually disprove God? The only God it could disprove would be the big guy in the sky; It would only be differing examples of being and thus the fact that more more examples of being have been found would hardly disprove the ground of all being. Moreover it would not even disprove the guy in the sky, as there would still have to be some sort of explanation for a first cause for the mulitverse. Where did gravity come from? Where did the laws of physics that makes the multiverse come form? Why do these disembodied laws seem to work? No doubt they would have to repair to a infinite causal regression. This is something real science has not done in relation to the question of world. They have provided the ability to understand the concept, but they don’t actually say “this is a scientific fact.” Why would they say that for the mutliverse? What about the ability of plantes in the multiverse to bear life? Wouldn’t we have to actually go there to see if they do? Unless we have empirical proof that many parallel planets actually do bear life the existence of a mulitiverse of barren gracious planet is not disproof of the fine tuning argument. Of course let us not forget all of this assumes we argue for a guy in the sky anyway. People are assuming that a mulitverse would have the same laws of phsyics and thus would produce life as our universe has, but that is not an assumption Hawking makes. As already quoted above: “The parameters are free to take on many values and the laws to take on any form that leads to a self-consistent mathematical theory, and they do take on different values and different forms in different universes..” (see FN 27 above). In other words, all the other universes could have different laws of physics and all of those laws of physics could produce a bunch of empty rocks or bags of gas as planets and no life. But all of these possibilities slip between the cracks. The way induction works we make statistical averages, since the only concrete data we have to go by is us, we just average in the factor of live instead of ruling it out, and we assume a godless universe teaming with life.

Another idea lost between the cracks is an answer to Deutch (above) who says that the Mv is offers the only explanation for the nature of reality. The problem is that is only because they are not willing to a possibility that reality si beyond our ability to understand. They can’t really accept that even if it’s true because it would mean there’s an absolute limit on their mission as scientists. As scientists their basic assumption is they have to keep going until they know it all, at least in terms of the physical world. For other matters they rule that out a prori because it’s not part of the mission. So when he says the Mv theory is the only one that explains reality, the unspoken obvious caveat is, “without becoming a mystic or philosopher.” At this pinot naturalism becomes circular reasoning. Mysticism and philosophy are ruled out because they require one to go beyond naturalism. The assumption is made that only science can prove absolutely in concrete terms what it postulates. The problem is it’s already ruled out other view points, not on concrete terms but because they aren’t’ in its domain. Well, the fact is the theory of everything is not proved, so it can’t be that we are ruling out mysticism on the basis of scientific proof against it! Another possibility that’s ruled out is that even with a naturalistic universe it may not be possible to have a theory of everything. That is also ruled out on ideological grounds, this point will be driven home all the more since Hawking has admitted it.

Miracles are a good example of things falling between the cracks. Miracles are a very difficult thing to discuss. There are many modern academics who will run in dread at the mention of the term, but that serves to prove my point all the better. Miracles, while they are extremely difficult to prove, are not banned from reality from modern thinking because they have been proved false, the methods used to keep them out, both by creating such amazing prejudice that no one will listen, and by circular reasoning which fallaciously makes them out to be false a priori, these methods are merely the enforcement of a truth regime not indicative of scientific discover. Time and space does not permit a discussion that would truly do this complex subject justice, I shall hit upon some of the scarce highlights. The object here is only to prove, not that miracles happen, but that if miracles did happen their exclusion would be based entirely upon falling through the cracks in the web of naturalism. Or to put it another way, the point is to prove that the exclusion of miracles is not a scientific fact but an ideological protocol. Atheists and skeptics often assume that this kind of talk is motivated by creationist assumptions, and they construe it as an attack upon science. I am not a creationist! This is not an attack upon science; it’s an attack upon the ideology that accompanies science, the doppelganger of science to speak. Atheists assume science is an arm of atheism. Scientists assume they are neutral and no concerned, as scientists, with sectarian matters. Many scientists have their opinions about religious belief and thus they might be gung ho on the ideology that accompanies science as anyone. Science is a human endeavor it cannot be divorced from human motivations in practice. In terms of pure science itself it’s a great and wonderful thing. I would be the last person who wants to put the kybosh on scientific thinking. Nor do I construe scientific thinking as privileging the Bible. As a theologian I privilege the Bible, not as a scientific thinker. I don not call myself a “scientist.” The closest I come to scientific thinking is as a historian of science, in which I was trained at Ph.D. level. There is a distinction between a scientist and historian of science. While I refrain from calling myself that out respect for those who are truly trained academically in the actual pursuit of scientific learning, not out of any disregard for science, I am not exactly unaware of scientific thinking.

Miracles would be impossible to disprove scientifically. To say that miracles are disproved one would have to disprove all reports; there could always be a report somewhere that hasn’t been disproved. In order to get around these problem naturalists just make an abstract extrapolation based upon induction. We fail to observe miracles in any occasion that we know of and thus we can extrapolate to all of reality. On the other hand, this is the formula for things falling through cracks. It means that some miracle could happen and because it didn’t make it into the reports that science has considered then it’s assumed not to be true. This is even significant than an instance of some drug working or smoking not causing cancer in a few cases, because such things will always be ruled out as anomalies. A true miracle has to involve God (to be a true miracle) and thus if it could be proved to be a true miracle would prove that God is real. Thus that one miracle could happen and fall though the cracks would be very significant. As it so happens there is a great deal of evidence for miracles. The problem is the crack falling process is made even worse because the naturalists take the lack of proved miracles as proof that they don’t happen. It then asserts that further evidence must be false because “there is no evidence.” So even when good evidence exists and is proved it’s ignored. The thing that makes it easy to ignore is that there is and always will be an epistemological gap (this goes back to what I said at the first of the chapter) that science can’t penetrate. Unfortunately, faith can’t penetrate it either. We will always have this gap; it’s the chiasm over which one must make a leap of faith. We can’t observe an event and know by looking if God did it or not. A woman has a broken leg. We x-ray it and see clearly it is broken. We pray for her leg and x-ray it five minutes latter and it’s not broken anymore. The believer will say “the prayer was answered.” The skeptic will say “It was an ‘atypical healing process’ but there’s no proof God did it.” They both have their points. In such a situation the failure to prove God’s involvement is not disproof of a miracle. On the other hand, in a situation like the one described there’s a huge probability argument the believer can make to back up the assumption of a miracle. That assumption would immediately ignored by the skeptic on the grounds of all the other examples where the proof has been ignored. There is no way to overcome the epistemic gap, except by a leap of faith. The gap could be made more easily traversable by a really good platform from which to leap, that’s where arguments come in. Science can’t really ever say “this is not a miracle” because that is beyond its domain. What it can say is “this outstrips our ability to determine the naturalistic reasons for it.” The only thing the believer can say is the very same thing. So there is always going to be a epistemic gap that must be bridged by a leap of faith.

The absolute best evidence for miracles is the Catholic miracles committee attached to the miracles of Lourdes. The miracles committee operates with the strictest rules in the world for miracle hunters.

The paradox of human miracle assessment is that the only way to discern whether a phenomenon is supernatural is by having trained rationalists testify that it outstrips their training. Since most wonders admitted by the modern church are medical cures, it consults with doctors. Di Ruberto has access to a pool of 60 - "We've got all the medical branches covered," says his colleague, Dr. Ennio Ensoli - and assigns each purported miracle to two specialists on the vanquished ailment.

They apply criteria established in the 1700s by Pope Benedict XIV: among them, that the disease was serious; that there was objective proof of its existence; that other treatments failed; and that the cure was rapid and lasting. Any one can be a stumbling block. Pain, explains Ensoli, means little: "Someone might say he feels bad, but how do you measure that?" Leukemia remissions are not considered until they have lasted a decade. A cure attributable to human effort, however prayed for, is insufficient. "Sometimes we have cases that you could call exceptional, but that's not enough." says Ensoli. "Exceptional doesn't mean inexplicable." "Inexplicable," or inspiegabile, is the happy label that Di Ruberto, the doctors and several other clerics in the Vatican's "medical conference" give to a case if it survives their scrutiny. It then passes to a panel of theologians, who must determine whether the inexplicable resulted from prayer. If so, the miracle is usually approved by a caucus of Cardinals and the Pope.

Some find the process all too rigorous. Says Father Paolino Rossi, whose job, in effect, is lobbying for would-be saints from his own Capuchin order: "It's pretty disappointing when you work for years and years and then see the miracle get rejected." But others suggest it could be stricter still.

There is another major miracle-validating body in the Catholic world: the International Medical Committee for the shrine at Lourdes. Since miracles at Lourdes are all ascribed to the intercession of the Virgin Mary, it is not caught up in the saint-making process, which some believe the Pope has running overtime. Roger Pilon, the head of Lourdes' committee, notes that he and his colleagues have not approved a miracle since 1989, while the Vatican recommended 12 in 1994 alone. "Are we too severe?" he wonders out loud. "Are they really using the same criteria?"[xv]

I will not go into any detail about the development of rules which is very complex and a rich history in itself. After 1977 the following list became opporational:

1) The diagnostics and authenticity of the disease has been preliminarily and perfectly assessed;

2) The prognosis provides for an impending or short-term fatal outcome;

3) The recovery is sudden, without convalesce, and absolutely complete and final;

4) The prescribed treatment cannot be deemed to have resulted in a recovery or in any case could have been propitiatory for the purposes of recovery itself. These criteria are still in use nowadays, in view of their highly logical, accurate and pertinent nature.[xvi]

This is in addition to very rigorous rules Author: Cardinal Prospero Lambertini,
future Pope Benedict XIV, 1734. The committee requires the finest modern diagnostics and they much receive the records from the patients’ doctor. They control for remission, for this reason do not accept leukemia cures unless the person has been cured for ten years (because remission often go back). The committee is made up of medical experts, they use skeptics on the committee as well. The town doesn’t own or control the committee and has no role in the process. The theological issues and input of church hierarchy only go to work on cases passed to them by the medicos.

These arrangements are so rigorous that out of thousands of miracle claims only about 65 have been accepted as official miracles. They also have 2,500 “remarkable” claims[xvii] that are inexplicable but don’t make the cut due to technical problems in documenting or something of that nature.[xviii] There’s good reason to think a miracle might have occurred somewhere in all of this. There is reason to understand it as a miracle, an event unexplained connected to the divine and guided by the divine for purpose of getting human attention. The only factor that isn’t nailed down with medical documentation and adds to any potential change in the satiation is prayer. The length of time between the healing and the prayer is so short the two can clearly be connected. That leaves a lot of room for gaps in cases where the process is not submitted to the Lourdes committee. In other words who really can say that God would not take a long time to answer a prayer for healing? That rules all those cases and make the epistemic gap even greater, but it is entirely possible miracles could be overlooked all the time.

Since the apparitions at Lourdes in 1858, a procedure has gradually developed for verifying the cures and healings which occur there. Today, Lourdes is recognized as the Church's foremost center for investigating healings. There, medical personnel from all the world are invited to investigate the evidence for reported healings. Included among the medical examiners are those who allow and those who exclude the possibility of miraculous healings. The procedure also attempts to respects the dignity of the person who has been cured. John Paul II reminded the medical personnel of Lourdes that the verification of miraculous cures is Lourdes' "special responsibility and mission" (Nov. 17, 1988).[xix]

This is nothing for a skeptic to deny. Skeptics can always deny. There is no trick to denial, one can deny anything. The point is any or all of these cases could well be miracles. Here are examples of some of the cases:[xx]

Colonel Paul Pellegrin
3 October 1950
age 52; Toulon, France Post-operative fistula following a liver abscess in 1948. By the time of his pilgrimage in 1950, the condition had degenerated to an open wound that required multiple dressing changes each day, and showed no sign of healing. On emerging from his second bath in the waters, the wound had completely closed, and the condition never bothered him again. Recognized by the diocese of Fréjus-Toulon, France on 8 December 1953.

Brother Schwager Léo
30 April 1952
age 28; Fribourg, Switzerland multiple sclerosis for five years; recognized by the diocese of Fribourg, Switzerland on 18 December 1960

Alice Couteault, born Alice Gourdon
15 May 1952
age 34; Bouille-Loretz, France multiple sclerosis for three years; recognized by the diocese of Poitiers, France on 16 July 1956

Marie Bigot
8 October 1953 and 10 October 1954
age 31 and 32; La Richardais, France arachnoiditis of posterior fossa (blindness, deafness, hemiplegia); recognized by the diocese of Rennes, France 15 August 1956

Ginette Nouvel, born Ginette Fabre
21 September 1954
age 26; Carmaux, France Budd-Chiari disease (supra-hepatic venous thrombosis); recognized by the diocese of Albi on 31 May 1963

Elisa Aloi, later Elisa Varcalli
5 June 1958
age 27; Patti, Italy tuberculous osteo-arthritis with fistulae at multiple sites in the right lower limb; recognized by the diocese of Messine, Italy on 26 May 1965

Juliette Tamburini
17 July 1959
age 22; Marseilles, France femoral osteoperiostitis with fistulae, epistaxis, for ten years; recognized by the diocese of Marseille, France on 11 May 1965

Vittorio Micheli
1 June 1963
age 23; Scurelle, Italy Sarcoma (cancer) of pelvis; tumor so large that his left thigh became loose from the socket, leaving his left leg limp and paralyzed. After taking the waters, he was free of pain, and could walk. By February 1964 the tumor was gone, the hip joint had recalcified, and he returned to a normal life. Recognized by the diocese of Trento, Italy on 26 May 1976.

Serge Perrin
1 May 1970
age 41; Lion D'Angers, France Recurrent right hemiplegia, with ocular lesions, due to bilateral carotid artery disorders. Symptoms, which included headache, impaired speech and vision, and partial right-side paralysis began without warning in February 1964. During the next six years he became wheelchair-confined, and nearly blind. While on pilgrimage to Lourdes in April 1970, his symptoms became worse, and he was near death on 30 April. Wheeled to the Basilica for the Ceremony the next morning, he felt a sudden warmth from head to toe, his vision returned, and he was able to walk unaided. First person cured during the Ceremony of the Anointing of the Sick. Recognized by the diocese of Angers, France on 17 June 1978.

Delizia Cirolli, later Delizia Costa
24 December 1976
age 12; Paterno, Italy Ewing's Sarcoma of right knee; recgonized by the diocese of Catania, Italy on 28 June 1989

Jean-Pierre Bély
9 October 1987
age 51; French multiple sclerosis; recognized by the diocese of Angoulême on 9 February 1999

There are any number of reasons why these would fall through the cracks. One of them main reasons is because they are Catholic. They are not the work of official medical academic entities, although they certainly make use of medical experts and scientific data. The official channels of the academy are important. There good logical reasons why we couldn’t trust information if it had no connection with outside sources. On the other hand, skeptics will merely demand that it has to be a lie if it has any connection with a religious institution and then it’s down between the cracks. There may be logical reasons to be couscous but the point is if something falls between the cracks of the world view, the truth regime the ideology in question whatever that may be, science is not in the business of excavating the cracks and it would take remarkable effort to even admit there can be cracks. What the existence of cracks the potential for any sort of epistemic question or ontological reality to fall between them proves is that science is limited, science is human observation, and science is not all knowing. These limitations of science and the propensity to fall between the cracks is a good indication that questions like the question of God are not scientific questions. Saying God is not a scientific question does not mean that God is not a valid belief or that there’s no reason to believe in God. What not being a scientific question means is that we have to use other methods to seek God. Perhaps we should try the method that God seems to have indicated he should try, the human “heart,” meaning the deepest recess of our consciousness, the part of ourselves that is capable of wonder, of desire, of making commitments.

[i] Susan Barber, “A Physicist Explores The Mulitpverse: Quantum Computer Predict Parallel Worlds,” Electrinic Magazine: The Spirit of Ma’at. Vol 2 number 2. URL: http://www.spiritofmaat.com/archive/sep2/multivrs.htm visited 9/13/10.

[ii] John Roach, National Geographic Daily News, online for National Geogrphaic News, (March 22), 2010, URL: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/03/100322-dark-flow-matter-outside-universe-multiverse/, visited 9/13/10.

[iii] Kate McAlpine, “M-Theory: Ddoubts Linger Over Godless Universe,” New Scientist, (14 September) 2010 Magine isse 2778 URL: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727780.301-mtheory-doubts-linger-over-godless-multiverse.html visited 9/13/2010.

[iv] Ibid

[v] Stephen Hawking and Peter Woit, bouth statements on Woit’s blog, “Not Even Wrong” 9/7/2010 URL: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/ visited 9/13/2010.

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] Peter Woit, Interview, “Is Sting Theory Stringing us Along?” Big Think Electronic magazine. (Jan 18) 2010. URL: http://bigthink.com/ideas/18234 visited 9/18/2010

[viii] J.L. Hinman, the Trace of God, op cit, chapter 3, “Aguments.” The origin of religion is the sense of the numinous, the human sense that there is some form of holiness or unified nature ot reality, something beyond our understanding that makes reality special. The Atheist assertion that religion was invented to explain nature is really based upon their need to explain nature, once religion became part of human consciousness human naturally looked to it for all answers, but that doesn’t mean that was it’s origin. I draw an analogy between that origin of religion and it’s relation to primitive science, and modern science and It’s tangential nature of questions of God.

[ix] Woit Interview, Ibid.

[x] Woit paraphrasing Hawking, Ibid.

[xi] Ibid.

[xii] Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time. New York: Random House, 1991, 185. “if we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason - for then we would know the mind of God.”

[xiii] Ibid

[xiv] Ibid.

[xv] David Van Biema, and Greg Burke, “Modern Miracles Have Strict Rules,” Time Magazine on line. April 10, 1995. URL: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,982807,00.html

[xvi] Franco Balzaretti Vice Presidente Nazionale - Associazione Medici Cattolici Italiani (AMCI)
Membre du ComitÃ© MÃ©dical International de Lourdes (CMIL) Online Chatolic Newsletter Leadership Medica 2000. http://www.leadershipmedica.com/scientifico/sciedic02/scientificaing/10balzae/10balzaing.htm visited 9/16/2010

[xvii] Marian Library Newsletter, No 38, (new series) 1999, the original quotation is form Nov, 17,1988. URL: http://campus.udayton.edu/mary/respub/summer99.html visited 9/17/2010.

[xviii] Balzaretti, Ibid

[xix] Marian Library Newsletter, Ibid.

[xx] Patron Saints Index Lourdes cures. Website URL: http://www.catholic-forum.com/saints/stb06001.htm visited 9/17/2010. More detailed information available @ Our Lady of Lourdes, another website, URL: http://www.theworkofgod.org/Aparitns/Lourdes/Lourdes1.htm visited 9/17/2010

The Limits of Science in the Search for God part 2: Questions Science Can't answer (and Religion can)

2009-04-01T18:37:00.000-07:00

The dispute between theists and atheists is, in large part, a squabble over epistemology. Atheists tend to be empiricists, as famous atheist blogger Austin Cline puts it:

Atheists tend to be either exclusively or primarily empiricists: they insist that truth-claims be accompanied by clear and convincing evidence which can be studied and tested. Theists tend to be much more wiling to accept rationalism, believing that "truth" can be attained through revelations, mysticism, faith, etc. This is consistent with how atheists tend to place primacy on the existence of matter and argue that the universe is material in nature whereas theists tend to place primacy on the existence of mind (specifically: the mind of God) and argue that existence is more basically spiritual and supernatural in nature.[i]

The allure of empirical evidence is apparent. The atheist lives in a socially constructed totality of mutually reinforcing doubt. Anything that is not surface and thing oriented, a material object that can be touched, must be doubted. The truncated world of mere surface nature, a world constructed entirely out of material objects, ‘things,’ and nothing more, is consistently being touted as the only valid form of existence because it’s so solid, so in front of one’s face, so “there.” All one need do is examine Cline’s speech to see the totalizing understanding at work. He says: “Theists tend to be much more wiling to accept rationalism, believing that "truth" can be attained through revelations, mysticism, faith, etc.(above).” One wonders what is in that “ect,” but he classes among the tools of RATIONALISM revelation, mysticism and faith! Sense when? Rationalism has never meant supernatural and spiritual aids, it means reason and logic. The philosophes in the enlightenment were rationalists. Atheists themselves pride themselves in their rational natures, yet Cline would have us believe that to be a rationalist is to be a mystic.

The reason for this is no great mystery. Atheism thrives on the notion that it is the rational choice. It clings to science and the value of scientific thinking because science has come to be understood as the umpire of reality. Religion really does involve a global use of knowledge, thus the atheist emphasizes the less scientific more “irrational” methods of religion and conveniently forgets that theology also uses logic, reason, scientific approaches, textual criticisms, archaeology and so forth. When atheists are confronted with God arguments based upon logic suddenly the use of logic becomes foolish, unimportant, inadequate unable to give us answers. Then the rationalist becomes not a logician but a mystic. Theistic rationalism is boiled down to the “spiritual” aspects and cut off from reason to make theism appear foolish. The truth of it is the atheist is truncating the world, cutting of everything below the surface. The atheist world is like a frozen sea where ice bergs end at the waterline. It’s true that religious thinking does employ these means that atheists seek to make appear foolish, revelation, mystical experience and so on. That’s part of being global. Global approach to knowledge means using everything we know. Those more pneumatic methods are related to and grounded in the use of reason and the validated of scientific testing. This is true even on the level of daily living where untrained laymen do not make clinical field trials but live their lives, they gravitate to that which works for them and that which doesn’t work they leave alone. The more academic theological thinker employs all the techniques known to modern humanity, including science. Yet the true ground of understanding for God is in the heart. The atheist seeks to cut off the heart by disparaging it as “subjective,” “superstitious,” “unscientific” but that’s because they have to do that to make their case. Their case is based upon truncating reality.
Is empirical evidence the best or only true form of knowledge? This is an apologetics question because it bears upon the arguments for the existence of God. Is lack of empirical evidence, if there is a lack, a draw back for God arguments?
I deny that there is a lack, but it has to be put in the proper context. That will come in future chapters, for this one I will bracket that answer and just assume there is no really good empirical evidence (even though I think there is). Empiricism is not the true source of knowledge by itself, logic is more important. What I’m really aiming at is not logic alone but a global approach to knowledge, using everything we have. It all has to work together. Part of that global approach must include the use of epistemology as a starting point; otherwise we are making unfounded assumptions about method without really considering our basic premises before we start. It seems that a fundamental aspect of getting started has to be to acquire an understanding of our tools and an understanding of what they are designed to do. Empiricism, though it is often approached as value and commitment by the atheist, is really just one of several tools. The tool of empiricism is designed to give us a basic understanding of the immediate nature not an exhaustive and final rendition of all reality. This is illustrated best by the nature of questions that empiricism can’t answer and can’t even begin to deal. These are epistemological questions. Epistemology is branch of philosophy concerned with the theory of knowledge.[ii] Epistemology is on a more basic level of human inquirers than science; science grew out of an attempt to answer epistemological problems. Science basically deals with systemic observation of sense data, its aim is to understand the workings of the physical world. The empiricist transforms the design of a tool into a philosophy in itself trying to cause us to stay stuck at the level where all we ever consider is the physical world. The inability of science to answer basic epistemological questions demonstrates that it is unsuited to answer questions about the ultimate nature of reality.

Descartes the rationalist reached one of the seminal moments in western thought; his cogito is important to any modern scientific thinker because it helped to stem the damage of the intellectual crisis of Europe and provided a basis for relative certainty that allowed confidence in human ability to gather knowledge and to move forward with modern science.. Descartes wanted to find the basic level of certainty that he could not doubt. He asked questions such as “how do I know I exist?” “How do I know that I’m not being deceived by an evil genius?” The most basic thing he could not doubt was that he was thinking about how he knew he wasn’t being deceived. His answer is formulated thus, “I think, therefore, I am,” (Latin: cigito, ergo sum referred to as “the cogito”). Now the un-initiated non philosophy people who first encounter this in introductory classes mock and ridicule it saying “what a stupid thing to worry about, we know we exist because we are alive and looking at the world.” In so doing they are basically the same steps. Of course no one worries about this, Descartes didn’t worry about it. What they miss is the fact that Descartes wasn’t actually worried that he might not exist; he was trying to work up a method that would find the most indubitable thing and work out form there. This is all pabulum for a philosophy student, Philosophy 101, fall semester. The problem is there’s a basic fallacy that Descartes is often accused of committing, it used to be “the epistemologist fallacy” sometimes called “the empiricist dilemma.” The empiricists came along and said “but you can’t get outside of your experiences to check and see if they are true.” In other words, the cogito may be the one thing of which you can be certain but you can’t move on from it by pure reason to establish the world, you have to accept your sense data as the primary source of knowledge. Thus the basic school of the empiricists was born.

The nature of epistemological questions holds a greater problem for the adherent of scientism or the adherent of reductionism, the new atheist, the scientific empiricist than just a mere technicality in the history of philosophy. The fact that science can’t provide the answer, not that there aren’t good answers, but that science can’t provide them presents a very significant problem for those who believe that science is the only source of knowledge. For those who believe this, science is usually understood as holding an answer to everything, or everything worth knowing. Just collecting more data wont resolve questions of perception being illusory, any data collected would be suspect as part of the illusion.[iii] That science can’t provide the answers for questions of epistemology is crucial because epistemology of course is about how we know what we know, for one who believes that this one kind of knowledge is the only knowledge, to see that this source of all knowledge has no answer for this one kind of question, a question of knowledge itself, if it’s really taken to heart, has to be crushing. Of course they don’t take it to heart; they usually just rationalize it away. Be that as it may the reductionism, the champion of scientism usually comes back and says something like “I don’t have to worry about whether or not I exist because here I am, assuming I do seems to work rather well because it enables me to get through the day so I’m justified in assuming that I do exist.” Look at the nature of the answer; that is not science, its philosophy! They are essentially demonstrating my point in trying to answer because they have to resort to philosophy, having no scientific data to dispel the possibility of illusion cast over our perceptions. The nature of the answer is rather amusing because it allows one to then posit that religious experience is just as trust worthy as a huge body of scientific data demonstrates that religious experience enables one to navigate through life in certain respects.[iv] So when there actually is some data pertaining to the matter, it supports religious belief and not atheism. But the point is one must pull together a meaningful answer to this kind of question by use of means other than scientific. Thus there have to be other forms of knowledge and in dealing with the ultimate concerns of human being those other methods are crucial.

There are many such questions. One can easily come up with them, from the banal, “How do we know the sun will come up tomorrow?” To the profound “why is there something rather than nothing.”

How do we know the sun will come up tomorrow?
How do we know the future will be like the past?

How do we know we exist?

How do we know other minds exist external to our own?

How do we know our lives are not illusory

How do we know we are not butterflies dreaming we are humans?

How do we know we are not brains in vats, ect ect.

The trick always works the same way. They try to answer the question by departing form scientific data and making use of philosophy, however slight or undeveloped their understanding of philosophy. The question about the sun coming up is a good trick because many atheist confuse probability with science, they think they are giving a scientific answer when they say “because it always has before” as though just any reference to numbers is scientific. Yet, probably, while a major tool used in science, becomes something more like philosophy in this context, because it requires a philosophical understanding to argue that we should allow ourselves to trust the probability. This is still the childish level of fun with arguments and a more sophisticated scientific type who knows something about the philosophy of the Cartesian era would bash it out in a few minutes. We have a more complex problem when we being to ask questions about navigation in life and about meaning in life. It’s not that big a trick to figure out why we should trust the sun to come up, or why we should trust out senses when they are so regular and consistent.

The upshot is that not only do we have to bring in philosophy to offer these answers, but we have to make them or else just ignore the question. In other words, no scientific data will ever answer these questions; they have to be the result of a judgment. We have to make an epistemic judgment to answer to such questions. The skeptic thinks she’s triumphantly answering this argument when she resorts to this fact, but in reality she is giving the answer the apologist wants to hear. Of course we have to make a judgment, that the judgment is based upon empirical data from the senses doesn’t prove that science answers the question, no far from it, it proves that science can’t answer it and the inquirer has to be based upon a judgment call and the next best thing to actually answering it is going by empirical observation. Even at that level it’s not “science” per se that’s enabling us to make the judgment, but a philosophical turn of mind that is willing to extrapolate from the data (closer to philosophy because the skeptic always rails against extrapolation when it’s about faith). The decision to make a judgment requires a philosophical deliberation, and the subject matter is not scientific. The fact of this the necessity to make the judgment is the basis for my God argument I call “argument from epistemic judgment.”[v] If the perceptions we have are regular, consistent, inter-subjective and enable navigation (and the studies studies show the affirmative on all counts) then we have the same reason to trust them that we have to trust regular experiences of the world, even though these are religious experiences. Science can’t go near the question or any of these the above questions because it’s job is to tell us about the physical world not how we know what we know, not the ultimate nature of reality. One must make a leap of faith or beg the question to assume that there is nothing more to reality than just the physical fact of things existing. This is faith, not science. Science does not work by faith.

Not only do these epistemological questions of the empiricist dilemma highlight the need for philosophical thinking, the limited nature of science to answer such questions, but science itself shows us empirically (pardon the irony) that science is unable to provide the answer to epistemology. Andrew Newberg tells us:

The medieval German mystic Meister Echkart lived hundreds of years before the science of neurology was born. Yet it seems he had intuitively grasped one of the fundamental principles of the discipline: What we think of, as reality is only a rendition of reality that is created by the brain. Our modern understanding of the brain’s perceptual powers bears him out. Nothing enters consciousness whole. There is no direct, objective experience of reality. All the things the mind perceives—all thoughts, feelings, hunches, memories, insights, desires, and revelations—have been assembled piece by piece by the processing powers of the brain from the swirl of neural blimps. The idea that our experiences of reality—all our experiences, for that matter—are only “secondhand” depictions of what may or may not be objectively real, raises some profound questions about the most basic truths of human existence and the neurological nature of spiritual experience. For example our experiment with Tibetan mediators and Franciscan nuns showed that the events they considered spiritual were, in fact, associated with observable neurological activity. In a reductionist sense this could support the argument that religious experience is only imagined neurologically, that God is physically ‘all in your mind.’ But a full understanding of the way in which the brain and the mind assemble and experience reality suggests a very different view.[vi]

The brain re-writes reality for us as part of the cognitive features that make up our physical perceptions. That means not that our physical perceptions are giving us an accurate representation of the world but that they are re writing the world for us. Our perceptions are not what is actually there but what our brains have re-written to present to us as a simulacra of what is there. It’s not that we can establish reasonable probability that enables us to get by in life, of course we can. The fact that we do this all the time indicates that this is not a debilitating condition; the fact of it is, however, that our ability to do that depends upon philosophical thinking and making of metaphors, not upon empiricism or scientific data.

We have to put together all the sense data and the re-written version of reality our brains give us, but we have to apply philosophical thinking to come up with the answer “I can trust the sun will come up because it has always done so before.” We can’t really do this without thinking philosophically. The answer to questions about how we know what we take to be “reality” is “real,” involves a philosophical leap of faith. We can’t bridge the gap in knowledge by literally establishing the accuracy of the way the brain re-writes the world, we can only make an epistemic judgment; that’s what the answers people give, “the sun will come up again because it always does.” That answer is a judgment, it’s really guess based upon probability. That’s philosophical. In fact Newberg shows that the brain actually has a philosophical judgment function already “built-in” to our perceptions. He calls them “cognitive operators.” One such operator enables us to see the whole broken down into component parts and another allows us to group component parts and see the whole. It’s as though what we need to gather data and build a picture of the world is designed into our cognitive array. My purpose here, however, is not to make a design argument. Rather I am arguing that the only things that really make all of this work are counter intuitively not aspects that allow one to one accurate viewing of the world but instead enable the kinds of thinking that empiricists and atheist don’t like, thinking that’s more a part of the arts and humanities, and philosophy; the making of metaphor, without which language would be impossible, and extrapolation, requiring imagination.[vii] Without these kinds of thinking and the ability to employ them philosophically to questions of perception and to general questions about the meaning of life, we would not be able to operate in the world. This is not supplied by scientific data, nor could it be. This is not an issue that can be bridged by better gathering of data because any data we gather would be useless without the ability to extrapolate form it and think philosophically.

What we see at work in the reliance upon philosophy to bolster science in the epistemological realm, and then to criticize philosophy for not being science, is the tendency of scientism to bring philosophy in through the backdoor; that is a necessary move to bolster the atheist ideology because without that they could never even suggest anything about the nature of reality. Of course real scientific thought is much more sophisticated than anything I portray here, as is real philosophical thinking. Hopefully real major physicists don’t think that science is the only source of knowledge. I am inclined to pick on those who do think this and I refer to them as “sciensistic.” Atheists and skeptics tend to be scientistic. The scientism crowd must bring philosophy in the back door because without doing that they could not tout their ideology. Ideology touting is a philosophical move. Pronouncements such as “metaphysics is useless made up garbage” is a metaphysical statement. Thus one must do metaphysics in order to say “metaphysics sux.” Sometimes major physicists do talk rot and move too far into the realm of expropriating philosophy, especially when they want to sell books. Such an instance is seen now in the new publicity stunt Stephen Hawking, who, awaiting release of his new book declares that God did not create the universe. The book is not yet out, thus we have only pre-release reviews to go by. We do know one thing already; science has no business making pronouncements about God because God is not a scientific question. God is in the realm of questions that science can’t answer. The proof is to sit back (with popcorn) and watch the circus as scientist like Hawking sneak in philosophy disguised as science.

The shocking proclamation of the book is to be that God did not create the universe, science can accent for it all. Most reviewers have lost no time in pointing out the obvious; Hawking’s mechanism (gravity) is left unexplained.

God did not create the universe, world-famous physicist Stephen Hawking argues in a new book that aims to banish a divine creator from physics. Hawking says in his book The Grand Design that, given the existence of gravity, "the universe can and will create itself from nothing," according to an excerpt published Thursday in The Times of London. "Spontaneous creation is the reason why there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist," he writes in the excerpt."It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper [fuse] and set the universe going," he writes.[viii]

Probably that is the hook when the book is released, the pretense that does explain. Prediction: the book will be sold on the premise that it disproves the need for God because it accounts scientifically for gravity, but the real trick is to what for what is surreptitiously lurking behind the veil. Not the idea that they can’t demonstrate the basis for gravity

The questions that science poses and the questions that religious belief pose are totally different sorts of questions. There are points of overlap. Most of these stem form the ages before science really had an systematic to it, the ancient world, pre historic world. These are the days when the most sophisticated scientific knowledge was smelting and sword making, and even that was not understood in a way that we would call "scientific." In that setting it was natural (meaning logical and practical) to use religion as the explanation for the natural world. From this era when people looked to religion to make it answer questions it can't answer, we have hold over ideas (such as Genesis creation myth--which we need to learn how to read as a myth--and that means we need to learn the value in myth) that we have these conflicts. Science doesn’t work by faith, but science’s task is to understanding the workings of the physical world. On the other hand, this is not the only thing that humans wonder about. The nature of human wonderment is bigger than just the physical world. We wonder about our very place in being. How are we going to understand the nature of being empirically when we can't get outside of being to study it? We can understand it from the standpoint of beings in being, but that's subjective. We can't get outside of being to understand what being is. This is why science is inadequate to deal with questions like the existence of God, thus the lack of empirical evidence for God cannot be understood as a reason to disbelieve the existence of God. Atheists reject “subjective” view points and evidence, but that’s the only of knowledge we have. Objectivity is a pretense. Humans are not objective and science is not an objective means of obtaining all possible truth. The reductionists will counter with the assertion that the only possible alternative is superstition or magic or some kind of primitive animism, but they ignore logic, philosophy and phenomenology.

Heidegger’s ultimate question, why is there something rather than nothing at all. This probably the most important question of ontology, and it's one science can't begin to answer. The basis of religious thinking, although Heidegger was an atheist, it need to entail a religious answer. To even begin to think about the issue one must depart the field of science, leave aside the workings of the physical world and embark upon contemplation of a concept foreign to scinece; the question of "why?" Science thrives on "how?" It doesn't contain "why?"

In addition to epistemological questions and ontological there are also moral questions. Much has been done to try and construct moral philosophy based upon scientific underpinnings, mainly though trying to establish a genetic basis for morality. This is not valid because it can’t tell us the “should.” Moral philosophy, ethics, morality all of these kinds of thinking require the word “should” be part of their formulations; one should or should not do X. Merely establishing a fact of nature lending itself to a predisposition toward a certain kind of behavior does not tell us that we should or should not do that behavior. To try and base morality upon genetics is a violation of Hume’s fork. One cannot establish and ought from an “is.” Suppose we dissected living humans to observe the workings of the human body. We could learn a great deal, science would be greatly served, but science can’t tell us we should or should not do that, and doing it because it serves science is no guarantee that it would be ethical. Now one might argue “that’s common sense, this is repugnant because it’s a violation of our human feeling, we feel in the gut that’s it is wrong and that’s all we need to ay it is wrong. The feeling is not science. Utilitarianism is not science. Enlightenment self interest is not science. None of the basic reasons atheists and physicalists will give for not doing so are science. The moral answers atheists take to the questions have to come from thinking other than scientific thought, and certainly scientific data can’t tell us where the “should” is. If we even care about the dimension of the moral in the first place, we have to move into the realm of philosophy and ask other kinds of questions than that science can answer. Questions of moral philosophy overlap with questions of God, much more so then they do with questions of science. Scientific empiricism is not prepared to answer such questions, nor to deal with epistemology, but also has inherent problems even for it’s own tasks.

[i] Austine Cline, About.com, Atheism/Agnosticism (blog) URL: http://atheism.about.com/od/philosophybranches/p/Epistemology.htm Visited 8/27/2010

[ii] Antony Flew, A Dictionary of Philosophy, revised second edition. New York: St. Martin’s press, 1979,109.

[iii] When I employ this game playing strategy in argument with atheist on the internet they usually become outraged at the point where they realize that more data won’t help. The start cursing and saying that I’m “attacking science, and saying things like “that’s crazy, no one would worry about existing or not.” But the reasons they give are always indicative of philosophical thinking, even the ones who say philosophy is just made up rubbish.

[iv] See my previous work The Trace of God, Grand Viaduct publishing. Chapter 3

[v] see J.L. Hinman. The Trace of God, Dallas and Colorodo Springs: Grand Viaduct Publishing, 2010 ,chapter 3, “Arguments”

[vi] Andrew Newberg, Why God Won’t God Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief. (New York, Ballentine Books), 2001,35-36.

[vii] Ibid 52.

[viii] Richard Allen Green. “Stephen Hawking:God Didn’t Create the Universe” CNN World. (September 02, 2010).

see part 3