Thanks, Jay - for that flurry of responses and thoughts … which I don’t want to distract from - will want to see more discussion.
And meanwhile, this is especially for @Daniel_Fisher who I think will enjoy this article, and for any of you here as Lewis fans. I haven’t even finished reading it yet, and think there may be good relevant discussion material from it too.
[And yes … it is from evolutionnews.org but I’m still more interested in content more than what sort of pedigree or taint any particular source is assigned.]
There is a difference between comprehending the infinite* and apprehending it. Do you mean that we cannot do the latter?
*The question can also be phrased substituting ‘absolute truth’:
There is a difference between comprehending absolute truth and apprehending it. Do you mean that we cannot do the latter?
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
288
There is nothing but the holy trinity basis of logos, ethos and pathos. There is no logical basis, i.e. no rational basis for believing in a tiny minded pathologically righteous God. If God exists, then the cosmos reveals Him generally. The only possible warrant for believing that He does is the Jesus story. Jesus who transcends the evolving God of the OT although He has His DNA.
If your non sequitur is the best that you can arrive at, I’m not at all surprised. There is nothing I can do about your aesthetic disposition that evil is good.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
289
As you know, I trust the first seven letters at least of Paul implicitly. I’ve read them all many, many times. I trust in reasoning as God commands. So what have I missed in Paul? In Paul’s evolving understanding of God in Christ? If my reasoning that God is not tiny mindedly pathologically righteous is wrong, YOU show me by reasoning. Not by mere assertion and Biblicism; proof texting.
No dispute there in principle… but therefore we ought not attempt to approach or draw nearer to that objective moral truth? And God is somehow incapable of sharing or revealing said truth in any comprehensible way?
No, I’ve been talking to too many real people and watching real people’s actions… who will repeat to my face, sometimes quite loudly, that there is no such thing as truth, that I am arrogant for claiming that there even is such a thing, Who am I to claim that someone or something is “wrong”, (either morally, or even factually in many cases), and repeat that mantra in some form or fashion whenever it helps their particular topic… I’m told I can’t “legislate morality”, I’m told I have absolutely no right to in any way “force” my morality on others…
but who will then turn right around and defend something as absolutely and incontrovertibly true when it becomes convenient. My belief in one true religion is arrogant, my belief in absolute morality is faulty, because we all have our own truth, I am repeatedly told.
But then, if I dare try to offer an opinion that is out of lockstep with the reigning societal narrative, I am told that _their_motality is unquestionable, indisputable, and that I am morally repugnant for even asking legitimate or logical questions about thei reigning social dogma. They all of a sudden have the moral imperative to force their morality on dissenters through the coercive power of government.
And hence, I do indeed find it quite disingenuous.
In this conversation, I have not been defending anything, I have rather been asking you (repeatedly) to simply explain the logical basis of your viewpoint, which I must therefore conclude you are either unable or unwilling to do.
I could, and likely the same answer I would give…but, whatever your answer, are you suggesting that the answer to this question, then, was unknown or unknowable before the advent of “postmodern thought”?
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
293
What has not been acquired by reason cannot be refuted by reason. It can can only be refuted for the benefit of waverers, of the undecided, of the open, innocent, fearful. The little ones. It’s like exposing murdering Russian lies, it doesn’t change them, nothing can, it arms us.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
294
Well, sounds like we agree thus far, then, that you have no reasoned, rational or logical basis for your beliefs.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
296
That’s not reason. I have nothing but reason and desire. You have demonstrated no capability of understanding reason at all. Just wooden Biblicism. We’ve all been brainwashed that way here. The conditioning can be broken. But not once elastic limits have been exceeded. Like with certain kinds of terrorist.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
297
Don’t you? Why do you ask that and the last question?
My Lord Jesus has delivered me from that. Not that I’m not tempted but now when I am aware of the temptation I turn my eyes and thoughts away from the object. Not just women but anything my flesh would lust after. It is because of what God has done in me by Christs death and resurrection. God put a new spirit in me. Not just a law that says dont lust, but my new spirit that loves God and my neighbor. God’s law of love written on my heart. And God’s spirit leads me in the path of righteousness. God through my death and resurrection in Christ’s has made and continues to making me a free man. That is what salvation is and does for all of us who where slaves of sin. God saves use and leads us into continued salvation. Temptation comes as it did to Jesus but by the power of the Holy Spirit and because of my love for God and my neighbor, Gods law written on my spirit leads me in the way of love. It is not something I ever would have imagined God would do but now I see the reasonableness of it. What I could not do myself, God chose to do it through my death and resurrection in Christ. If there is something else in me that is following the flesh nature, then the Spirit convicts me of that and compels me to overcome that too. Am I perfect in obedience yet, sadly, not perfect yet but literally moment by moment the Spirit labors on my behalf and continues to deliver me as I call on the name of Jesus, the only name that can save, my only hope. I know I deserved justce and wrath but the Father showed me mercy in Jesus.
I asked the last question because you say God is love and love would do good to its neighbor, so, do you love your neighbor. If you follow the flesh and allow yourself to lust than you are not loving your neighbor. If you see no harm in lusting than the love of God is not in you, for lusting is what leads to fornication and adultry and that is not love. If I lust after my neighbors wife or daughter that means I want what is not lawfully mine. Reasoning alone will not save you from the power of sin that rules in you. The old man must literally die and a new man must be born. Born of God with the Spirit of God in him. If it doesnt bother you to lust then you dont love God or your neighbor. Isnt that reasonable?
Jay, you won’t find many bigger fans if Kierkegaard than I. You are quite right, his idea of “subjective truth” (especially I found in such works as Fear and Trembling, Practice in Christianity, Attack upon Christendom, For Self-Examination) meant that if we only have “objective truth” about God, I.e., study him at arms length, in the objective manner a scientist would examine some phenomenon, then we cannot know him. Truth is subjective in that context, especially in the sense that we must be in a subjective relationship with Him. But at the same time, this is a simply a good out-working of the basic principle that all Christians would in principle affirm, that “even the demons believe [the “objective” truth] about God.”
In that particular sense, I am as postmodern (and Kierkegaardian) as they come. Not to mention your example of the four gospels I think one of the weaker you could have chosen, as all four evangelists, while different in specific emphasis, are nonetheless all shooting in generally the “same direction.” This doesn’t give many Christians much pause. Trying to wrestle with the seemingly polar perspectives of Deuteronomy/Proverbs and Job/Ecclesiastes, or the intentional, agenda-driven, often seemingly opposing re-write of Samuel/Kings by the Chronicler, I think would have been more poignant examples.
(Perhaps there is an unfortunate equivocation (on my part) or carelessness in my use is the term “objective truth.” It can mean what I intend, which is that some things are true whether or not any “subject” believes it or not. The world would still be round even if every inhabitant believed otherwise. Their “subjective truths” would be objectively wrong. This is what I mean when I refer to an “objective truth.” But perhaps for clarify I should use the term “absolute truth”, I as do indeed fully embrace Kierkegaard’s concept that all truth is subjective, insofar as it must be lived and embraced and experienced personally.)
I think what separates us is that I find no inherent benefit or virtue in “postmodern thought”, unless or insofar as it simply helps correct us back into “biblical thought.” Multi-perspectivalism (for lack of a better word) did not originate with the advent of postmodernism, it was actually quite biblical.
Insofar as certain strands of postmodern thought helped correct those unfortunate modernist oversimplifying tendencies that had blinded us to seeing such multi-faceted truth in Scripture, I applaud it. But only insofar as it returns us to biblical thought, not as an independent intellectual movement in itself. And, insofar as the postmodern experiment goes so far beyond recognizing multifaceted truth, and moves into the realm of denying truth (implicitly or explicitly), then I part ways as well.
I can put it another way. The differences in emphasis, tone, purpose, agenda, and intent between the theology of Deuteronomy (especially the closing “blessings and curses” section), and the theology offered by Job, are indeed striking. And embracing both strands of theology, simultaneously, in all their diversity, is what I would call a “biblical” approach.
Now, on the one hand, I have seen the radically “modern approach” to such theological diversity, one which desperately attempts to iron out any conceivable difference, that is extremely uncomfortable without finding “the” answer to these questions, that wants to harmonize every single last verse with any other, an approach that tries to say that those two disparate perspectives were really saying the same thing, or that resorts to hermeneutical contortions to ignore clear and obvious differences.
On the other hand, I have seen the radically “postmodern” approach… the recognition of theological ”diversity” used to essentially deny that there is any real truth being revealed… Each of those two theological strands were in hopeless conflict with each other, one was writing in order to outright contradict the teaching of the other, there is no harmony possible between them in any way, and this demonstrates to us that every generation has the right to similarly invent their own theology, so we might as well re-invent God however we’d want to interpret him as well. Something to that effect.
My take, rejecting both the extreme modern and postmodern tendencies, is to recognize that there are absolute truths, that both Job and Deuteronomy are absolutely revelation from God, and each and both demonstrate (absolutely and unerringly) the fact that life and truth is very complicated, that there are eternal principles and exceptions to every principle, that there are simple-to-state absolute standards and principles but not necessarily easy answers or easy applications, that sort of thing.
But I simply don’t credit “postmodernism” with my ability to see multifaceted truth, any more than I credit “modernism” with my ability to recognize the eternal and changeless multiplication table.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
301
Reasoning based on it’s not right, it’s not faithful to my wife, our children, it’s not faithful, honourable to my neighbour, it’s not decent, it’s treacherous, it’s not civilized, it’s not using consequential REASONING, it’s being dangerously unbridled, self destructive, anti-social, untrustworthy, immoral in the proper sense; what would people think. How one can ever dispense with reason in these matters is beyond me. Reason is essential, not some arbitrary imposition. I don’t need illusory, deluded threats about my afterlife.
Sure, we can make logically true, factual statements about love or beauty, but they’re abstract concepts. “Facts” belong to the material world. They can be observed and measured. Love isn’t like that. Is there a scale with specific criteria that tells you how much you love your spouse, or whether you love her or not? I can tell you what sorts of capabilities are necessary for a human person to be capable of love. That might be a “scientific” description of love, but does it tell us anything of what love is?
I feel like I’m doing a poor job getting across this idea, so I’ll link to a favorite article about Wittgenstein and scientism:
There are many questions to which we do not have scientific answers, not because they are deep, impenetrable mysteries, but simply because they are not scientific questions. These include questions about love, art, history, culture, music–all questions, in fact, that relate to the attempt to understand ourselves better. Scientific understanding is given through the construction and testing of hypotheses and theories; philosophical understanding, on the other hand, is resolutely non-theoretical. What we are after in philosophy is “the understanding that consists in seeing connections.”
Non-theoretical understanding is the kind of understanding we have when we say that we understand a poem, a piece of music, a person or even a sentence. Take the case of a child learning her native language. When she begins to understand what is said to her, is it because she has formulated a theory? We can say that if we like—and many linguists and psychologists have said just that—but it is a misleading way of describing what is going on. The criterion we use for saying that a child understands what is said to her is that she behaves appropriately–she shows that she understands the phrase “put this piece of paper in the bin,” for example, by obeying the instruction.
… One of the crucial differences between the method of science and the non-theoretical understanding that is exemplified in music, art, philosophy and ordinary life, is that science aims at a level of generality which necessarily eludes these other forms of understanding. This is why the understanding of people can never be a science. To understand a person is to be able to tell, for example, whether he means what he says or not, whether his expressions of feeling are genuine or feigned. And how does one acquire this sort of understanding? Wittgenstein raises this question at the end of Philosophical Investigations . “Is there,” he asks, “such a thing as ‘expert judgment’ about the genuineness of expressions of feeling?” Yes, he answers, there is.
But the evidence upon which such expert judgments about people are based is “imponderable,” resistant to the general formulation characteristic of science. “Imponderable evidence,” Wittgenstein writes, “includes subtleties of glance, of gesture, of tone. I may recognise a genuine loving look, distinguish it from a pretended one… But I may be quite incapable of describing the difference… "
It’s my opinion that most, if not all, of us are Christians because of “imponderable evidence” of the sort that Wittgenstein attempts to describe. It’s the sort of evidence that speaks to the heart, not the head.
I think we can conceive and describe the infinite, but we can’t really comprehend it. I’m a Pascalian in that regard. We set adrift between two infinities – the immensely huge and infinitesimally small – and left to our own devices, we cannot find a “fixed point” to anchor ourselves.
Yes, we should. Since the goal is the union with Christ – the way, the truth, and the life – then we should be moving in that direction during this lifetime. Simply another way of understanding “sanctification,” which is growth in Christlikeness. Therefore, those who are nearer to Christ are nearer the truth, but nearness is measured in resemblance to him, not in “head knowledge” of him.
On your second question, yes again. But people are capable of misunderstanding whatever means God chooses to reveal himself – whether general or special. We also should remember that the ultimate revelation of God is Christ. The Lord didn’t provide us with a systematic theology or philosophy. He gave us his Son as an example to follow.
Oh, I’ve run across such people too, but 9 times out of 10 they are just repeating a mantra. The odd exception is the out-of-work PhD. haha
Of course not. Most of the time, an idea big enough to become a “movement” simply puts into words what everyone knew but hadn’t noticed. How many truly “original” ideas have there been?
See. We have more in common than either of us thought. We should focus on that once in a while, but here we tend to talk about our differences and emphasize those.
Sure. It’s what came to mind. But try to imagine what sort of Christianity would’ve resulted without Luke’s gospel, or Matthew’s, or John’s? And would Matthew and Luke even exist if not for Mark?
No one’s asking you to. As I said way back, take the wheat and discard the chaff. We do the same with every philosophy. I don’t agree with Kierkegaard or anyone else in every detail. Maybe I’m just defective in that regard!
…are about reality, and not just material reality. You did not specify scientific facts.
And about aesthetics, you would deny the suggestion that a soiled chamber pot is universally repugnant? That seems pretty objective. (I won’t be more graphic. )
Haven’t symmetrical faces been scientifically demonstrated to be more attractive than less symmetrical ones? How about pupil dilation?
That is what I was suggesting, and we can know truth about God. Also, God is knowable as a Person, a Father (and Jesus as a Brother and Friend), and not just ideas about him.
That seems pretty objective. (I won’t be more graphic. 
)