But if an atheist is only an atheist because he infers what it is which “God” refers to based only on what those in God’s kindergarten have to say, then he is not very devout in his pursuit of the truth. It is better to seek out religion’s best fruit and to judge a steel God rather than the many straw versions one encounters. Being a human being is not an easy thing and there are many more ways to go wrong than right.
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You are right! And also–God recognizing, and having patience for, the fact that we’re not perfect will be one of the criteria in my mind that the idea of God is more accurate, I think 
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This is very helpful. I am going to copy it in a discussion with a YEC friend of mine (if you don’t mind). Thanks.
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And then there is the objective evidence we have of God’s providential interventions into his children’s lives.
You should have this chiseled on your gravestone. One reason I’ve never spent five seconds examining your evidence should be pretty obvious: once in a while, someone catches a break.
Good thing happens = God did it!
Bad thing happens = God works in strange and wonderful ways
Not an impressive case for your Guy.
You neglect that we are talking about entire sets of otherwise disjunct events except for the meaning infused because of the individual involved. One-offs may be subject to your inaccurate criticism, “Good thing[singular] happens”, not that they don’t, à la Glenn’s Turkish translator experience (and it was a set of at least two, actually, because there was prayer involved).
Your dismissive and disparaging tone and “your Guy”, is telling, too, because we all know you have spent way longer than five seconds “examining” the evidence, not that you can honestly write it off since it’s objective and the meanings and implications are obvious and real.
Sorry, you can’t get rid of reality that easily.
I wouldn’t mind, although I may not be likely to have one, since I’m a whole body donor to my state’s anatomical board.
Not a bad plan but I’m hoping for composting.
That’s one way to change reality, I suppose. ; - )
Somewhere in the past we’ve spoken of the “three boxes” (Richard Rohr) that people spend their lifetimes in: Order, Disorder, Reorder. And how some people try to spend their entire lives in the first box. Others, after they “see through” the first box, try to spend all their lives deconstructing everything in the second - and even try to start their children out in the second box. There is no shortcut, non-stop flight from the 1st box to the 3rd. You have to go through the second one. [And I would add to Rohr’s thoughts there, that there is also no healthy way to skip the first box to try to start out in the second either. Many (most?) of us had a solidly first box launch into life as kids (if we were fortunate). We typically started with order - and blessedly so.]
Recently I came across an Oliver Wendell Holmes quote that I think goes hand-in-hand with all of that, and also expresses so well some of the life dispositions I’ve observed in this very forum.
“I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
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Woke up a bit early and read your long and interesting post over again but still don’t feel finished with it. This part stood out for me. You speak of a kind of blindness endemic to many Christians of your tradition. But I think it applies to many of us unless we are fortunate enough to sometimes find ourselves struck by art or ideas that don’t readily reduce to factoids, which feel instead loaded with implicit meaning which will always escape us so long as we insist on binding it into more familiar forms without first just listening fully and letting it move us as it will. In terms of Richard Forty’s three boxes which @Mervin_Bitikofer just mentioned, I think this sort of open attention is how you get on with exploring the third box.
And there is the alarm. I definitely feel there is more to hear in what you’ve written.
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What a helpful framework!
Not having read Rohr, I am curious if the “disorder” box includes “tension” or if he sees that as a realistic feature of “Reorder.”
I find living with tension essential to truth-seeking and basic honesty. While I dislike the experience and sensation and would much prefer the “Order box,” that’s just not possible for me. I’d prefer things all nice and tidy, but I am constantly confronted with views and information and other peoples’ experiences that knock the loosely fitting lid right off the “Order box.” So, tension seems to be a constant companion.
Tension reminds me I am human and limited, oh so far from omniscient. I also see it in other peoples’ boxes, who don’t know what to do with it and try to ignore it.
Maybe tension and intuition that @MarkD and I have been bantering about go well together in these boxes. If we are willing to encorporate them into our lives both tension and intuition force us to at least expand our boxes somewhat, maybe even before we need to move from one to the next.
And now I see the quote from Holmes. Of course, he captured my thoughts much more cogently and elegantly.
Thanks for sharing this idea.
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and @Mervin_Bitikofer and now I see I should have read to the end of the thread before I replied about the boxes. So gauche of me in this communication format. : \
Sadly, Mark, (and you probably already know this), the Puritan tradition, from which my denomination developed, really fought against intuitive understanding outside the sacred tradition, and that mostly limited to words. It wasn’t just a gut feeling; it was built into the doctrines. Fiction for example, was generally seen as a falsehood, because it didn’t actually happen. Reading novels was considered an immoral waste of time that should be used for “God’s work” which was often just WORK.
Inside the sacred tradition, they created some absolutely exquisite works of poetic prayer. (I recommend the book Valley of Vision published by Banner of Truth Trust as an example. Wowie zowie! Who knew Puritans could feel anything that intensely.)
All of this to say, intuition has been theologically bred out of many denominations. And even farther, denominations that had it bred out and have brought it back in have done it badly, making their version another matter of doctrine.
This is sad. As people in the world, we need to use all the faculties God had given us. No one gains empathy rationally. No one savors beauty rationally. No one finds actual meaning that can be applied to problems in this world by contemplating the patterns of bare trees against a sunset rationally.
Many of us have created an impairment out of fear and distrust of a gift from God that we could use so fruitfully, if we exercised it.
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I suppose it could, but often people manage to become comfortable in that box too - as in, they now feel they have deconstructed everything they used to believe, and they’re quite smugly happy about having done that too. Or a less flattering way I might put it (to borrow from a thought I heard elsewhere), the second box might also include the angry people who’ve discovered they were lied to about Santa Claus and they’re still bitter about it. In short - it might not be tension they feel so much as satisfaction that they have run away from their first box. The problem being (in my perspective here) that their whole life still remains dominated by their frantic disassociation with anything ‘first-boxish’. In short, they’ve only succeeded in replacing an initial fundamentalism with yet another. But that’s taking it quite a bit beyond where Rohr went, at least where I heard him speak of it (linked below).
You can listen to this 6 minute clip of Rohr himself talking about it to a small group of older men. Must have been a retreat of some kind.
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Thanks, @Mervin_Bitikofer.
That is NOT the way I would like my boxes arranged or filled. And I am certainly not interested in deconstruction (neither the technical use or the common uses of the word).
But that means I have to live with tensions. I am confident that the God of the Bible, the Bible itself and a scientific understanding of God’s endlessly fascinating world and what grows out of it are real/true/reasonable. However, there are (apparent) theological tensions that stem from my holding on to all of those things.
My life is short. My mind is limited. My eyes are pretty bad, and I’m not a fabulous auditory learner, but had better improve. I don’t expect to have these tensions all worked out in my lifetime. But I’m not willing to say, “Hang it all! I give up. If I can’t make this work together, then I don’t want any of it.”
So, I’ve got to live with the tension, trust God that He IS trustworthy and has also given us our powers of reason and observation. Even if I can’t find the clean, neat explanation for everything (or understand it if I could), I think I can live well in the box that holds all that.
Thanks for the link to the clip. I will try to listen to it later today.
(I REALLY need to get to the presentation I came to the computer desk to work on. Oh my!)
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We see participants in the forum in each of the three boxes, don’t we, and of several persuasions in the first. In a thoroughly Christian worldview, the third and truly ordered box can only be Christian.
The characterization I gave above of the first two boxes was probably way too cynical. Rohr does a better job showing all three in their authentic lights.
But yeah… Get to work on your presentation.
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And we have objective evidence.
I’d meant to ask for a source of his idea too and a quick Google search of “Rorty’s 3 Boxes” didn’t get me there. So thanks.
Perhaps my own example would be illustrative though not for someone looking to reintegrate fully into the Christian tent. This structure makes sense from my perspective nonetheless as I see myself in the process of reordering. This is how the three boxes apply for me:
Box 1: The world view I received from family and church looked like this. In the beginning was God only. He created everything but us in particular for companionship. He knows each of us thoroughly, cares and wants the best for us. When we address ourselves to God we do so knowing He already knows us and that helps us to level with ourselves since no hiding is possible from Him. Oh … and Mary, Bethlehem, miracles, kind wisdom, killed but resurrected, joins with/becomes God, and waiting in sky now for when we die and can meet him face to face to debrief our lives and choices.
Box 2: My family stops attending church within my first couple years of elementary school. By puberty the miracles, God as creator and the prospects of any kind of afterlife seem untenable. But the inward sense of being known and accountability persists. I stop thinking about religion at all but when Bill Moyer did the series on Joseph Campbell’s dive into mythology I was very interested. Read much of Jung then James Hillman and attended a conference he led in San Francisco as no one with any credentials. Here I was also introduced to philosophical phenomenology and met the poet Robert Bly (later attending a weekend retreat he led for men at a camp in the woods with many poetry readings). Re-enrolled in junior college where I took art, philosophy of consciousness, marine biology and yoga. The philosophy class exposed me to Alan Watts (tons of books but The Wisdom of Insecurity, a treatise on the folly of certainty, was hugely influential for me). Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Mororcycle Maintenance was another influence at the time. Later I went back to junior college with the intention of finally trying to get a degree, transferred to UC at Berkeley where I majored in philosophy because I wanted to know what the finest minds had found noteworthy down through time. Later as a middle school math teacher I gravitated to online atheist forums which I came to despise. That eventually led me to here where I discovered smart Christians with insight and expertise I don’t have.
Box 3: Bill Moyer was my first encounter with a thoughtful Christian not hell bent on converting anyone. He and you guys made me want to understand what it is that originally gave rise to God belief and what it gives those taking part in a wisdom tradition in which that played a role. I ran across that witty video of Iain McGilchrist while I was still teaching and before I quit hanging out at the atheist websites. That has led to reading his Master and His Emissary book. This and the Jungian stuff and phenomenology have given me a handle on the question. I sometimes wonder what I’m missing out on by not being part of such a wisdom tradition. Of course, I did start out in the Christian one and I do see how that has shaped my experience but for now I’m content to acknowledge my inheritance and indebtedness without seeking to have my membership renewed.
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