As the bird returneth often to its nest, and as the wayfarer hastens to his home, so doth the mind continually pursue the object of its choice. [Good or bad, wise or otherwise.]
C.H. Spurgeon
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Objective? I have my doubts. 
Viva la difference!
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I do think that truth is about what you can put your faith in beyond the horizon of what we can see or know for sure. It isn’t about what what is factual in any objective way. I think the Christian belief that sees the stories of the Bible as a historical record of a one time reaching across the void from the other side is best thought of as a literary device.
Mark, this is where I find myself banging my head.
Maybe the context matters. Back to the example I used, I don’t know what could be “known” or “understood” or “learned” from the belief I described, which was demonstrably false. Menstral blood is revolting but not deadly or otherwise powerful. To bring it up as if it were a true statement, or even true for the women who claimed it, seemed bizarre.
Part of the process of categorizing the value of beliefs (thinking out loud here) is if they’re falsifiable or not. Falsifiable things might give me categories for helping me understand human nature and human relationships at a ground-level, or help me think about what God or an afterlife might be like. But they don’t tell me, for example, how to understand or treat forms of mental illness, and the application of belief can make the situation so much worse.
And I understand the caveats: I’m demonstrating my own cultural biases in those statements. I’m overlooking my own falsifiable beliefs which I apply as knowledge, ……
Perhaps some “truths” such as these are a part of a larger truth that does pack some practical importance and very real benefit. For example - the use of ritual cleansings using clean water turns out to be something quite beneficial for health as a general principle, even if people didn’t yet know about bacteria or microbiology. Or the practices of forcing “unclean” peoples to separate themselves from society (as tragic as that was for those affected), does anticipate modern quarantine practices, even if their application of it was often in regard to things that weren’t really contagious. But some things are, and they had observed enough to at least know that; hence the practice.
And none of that diminishes your good point that for too many things, religious belief just plain gets it wrong, and with no silver lining or even remotely redemptive perspective in sight. There is great value in being able to hold each tradition at arm’s length, so as to be able to discard this or that practice when we finally learn that following it is harmful to self and neighbor.
You may have seen this before, but this little book by a physician details quite a few, including psycho-physiological factors (great peace and freedom from worry for instance):
Yeah, Merv, the benefits of a particular practice that happens to serve practical purposes is not what I had in mind.
I am processing this part of Mark’s quote:
The particular example I had mentioned regarding menstral blood involved the claim that it could kill a man, and was seen as evidence of the great, inherant power of reproductively mature women in a matriarchal society. The claim is falsifiable. It doesn’t tell us anything more (in my understanding) than that it is what some people believe/d.
So, it fits the metaphysical description Mark quoted, but I am questioning the value of such beliefs, particularly those that can be falsified.
I grasp that the very ideal of forming the questions I am forming may be evidence for my inculturated reasoning process. But that process (along with my hard-wired personality) forces me to question the value of beliefs that are clearly falsifiable. (That x=1 on my results over in the quiz thread makes sense to me.)
I know. A dangerous line of questioning to begin to follow.
Google and Wiki know most answers. Wondering what you knew about his politics, I finally just looked it up.
Hart is a Christian socialist[30] as well as a democratic socialist[31][32] and an anarcho-communist.[33][34] Hart has been a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
On April 3, 2022, Hart wrote:
In my heart of hearts, I want to vote for someone whose entire political philosophy is derived from John Ruskin by way of Kenneth Grahame, with lashings of William Cobbett, Gilbert White, and William Morris; failing that, I want to enjoy the luxury of writing in Wendell Berry on every ballot. But the imminent collapse of the civil order of the entire world doth make pragmatists of us all. I long for the day, however, when I can return to my posture of airily insouciant disdain for the whole system and can again cast votes only for hopeless third party candidates with a clear conscience. But I suspect I will die before that day comes.
So knowing he gets that much right don’t you think you owe it to yourself to find out how he disagrees with you theologically? These two look particularly promising:
Oliver Burkeman, writing in The Guardian in January 2014, praised Hart’s book The Experience of God as “the one theology book all atheists really should read”.[24]
Roland in Moonlight was chosen by A.N. Wilson as his November 2021 “Book of the Year” for the Times Literary Supplement . Wilson described this “dialogue with the author’s dog Roland, who turns out to be a philosopher of mind, with a particular bee in his bonnet about the inadequacy of materialist explanations for ‘consciousness’” as “probably the dottiest book of the year” while noting that “I KEEP returning to it.”
If it should come about I would be most appreciative to receive your impressions of where and how this political Saint of a man went wrong. No one could accuse you of conquering only the lowest lying fruit if you could help out this lovely fellow.
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I know how. And he can’t be helped. Like me.
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I do wish we could get a podcast interview with this guy. Superficially at least he and I agree on this one point.
God so understood is not something posed over against the universe, in addition to it, nor is he the universe itself. He is not a “being,” at least not in the way that a tree, a shoemaker, or a god is a being; he is not one more object in the inventory of things that are, or any sort of discrete object at all. Rather, all things that exist receive their being continuously from him, who is the infinite wellspring of all that is, in whom (to use the language of the Christian scriptures) all things live and move and have their being.
David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss
Of course I don’t think “all things which exist receive their being continuously from him” means the same as it does to say all programming on the television depend on AC coming in along its electric cord to exist.
Well, @MarkD, I hadn’t planned on reading Burkeman’s article you shared about Hart’s book, but I’m glad I took a few minutes to.
God, in short, isn’t one very impressive thing among many things that might or might not exist; “not just some especially resplendent object among all the objects illuminated by the light of being,” as Hart puts it. Rather, God is “the light of being itself”, the answer to the question of why there’s existence to begin with. In other words, that wisecrack about how atheists merely believe in one less god than theists do, though it makes a funny line in a Tim Minchin song, is just a category error. Monotheism’s God isn’t like one of the Greek gods, except that he happens to have no god friends. It’s an utterly different kind of concept.
Since I can hear atheist eyeballs rolling backwards in their sockets with scorn, it’s worth saying again: the point isn’t that Hart’s right. It’s that he’s making a case that’s usually never addressed by atheists at all. If you think this God-as-the-condition-of-existence argument is rubbish, you need to say why. And unlike for the superhero version, scientific evidence won’t clinch the deal. The question isn’t a scientific one, about which things exist. It’s a philosophical one, about what existence is and on what it depends.
Burkeman is right, that this (at least by itself) is not the normal Christian concept of God, although I think that concept includes Hart’s. It would be hard for me to strip back my understanding of God to this. Reviewing the quote, too, I realize I keep changing the phrase “light of being” to “ground of being.” Neither of which I can claim I really have a firm grasp on.
I think they indicate questions like, “Why is there something, rather than nothing?” But we can also ask, “Why would we assume nothing to be the basis?” Both questions seem equally unanswerable to me, at least at 2022.12.22. 19:37EST.
We’ll see what my mind does with this in 5, 10 years.
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”Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.”
Mark 10:14-15
The kingdom of God is not just about ‘the hereafter’ – it is here, and now.
Now it is I who must thank you. I had not read that article and had no idea how it could be found by following the links until you wrote this. (I’m actually feeling most chuffed about having figured out the routing.). What he writes just seems obvious but important of course. It’s why, I finally realized, I would never find like minded souls on an atheist forums. They generally are not engaged in trying to understand what all of this is really about; most are content to show that their conception of what God belief is about is absurd. They succeed splendidly because their understanding really is as shallow and superficial as what they attribute to believers. Burkeman gives Hart credit for doing for showing these atheist characterizations fail to capture what believers actually believe. From Burkeman’s article:
If you think this God-as-the-condition-of-existence argument is rubbish, you need to say why. And unlike for the superhero version, scientific evidence won’t clinch the deal. The question isn’t a scientific one, about which things exist. It’s a philosophical one, about what existence is and on what it depends.
But too often, instead of being grappled with, this argument gets dismissed as irrelevant. Sure, critics argue, it might be intriguing, but only a handful of smartypants intellectual religious people take it seriously. The vast majority of ordinary folk believe in the other sort of God.
As Hart points out, there are two problems with this dismissal. First, you’d actually need to prove the point with survey data about what people believe. But second, even if you could show that most believers believe in a superhero God, would that mean it’s the only kind with which atheists need engage? If a committed creationist wrote a book called The Evolution Delusion, but only attacked the general public’s understanding of evolution, we’d naturally dismiss them as disingenuous. We’d demand, instead, that they seek out what the best and most acclaimed minds in the field had concluded about evolution, then try dismantling that .
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Here is another video by Hart. I find the first 8 or 10 or 13 or … minutes interesting. That there are experiences which make the case for positing God compelling is undeniable. That The Who/what that is is best understood as an ideal father figure with limitless genie powers turns it into something laughable even though what it really is is anything but. This why nothing-but atheism and settled-fact theism have so much to say to each other but nothing at all of any interest to me.
Assurance is available. Read the epistles.
Perhaps to a growing number of us - on either side!
Those two are (I think) increasingly being seen as the two noisy customers arguing loudly with each other in a restaurant while everybody else is just trying to enjoy their lunch.
One side is busy trying to ‘prove God’ and in the process, gives Him such a makeover as to make nobody want to believe in such a God even if it were true, while the other side doesn’t seem to be aware that anybody else is even in the restaurant, and resigns himself to arguing with and only with the “my-proven-God” guy.
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I like the way you put it. Both sides risk throwing the baby out with the bath though only one side denies there is any baby in the bath. Anyone locked in a polemic over that which cannot be proven but only claimed in faith needs to reflect more about it.
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Or perhaps God is in the business of turning the world upside down… Just imagine the look on their faces when it’s realized how they got it so incredibly wrong. Where “Don’t look it up!” isn’t a rock in the sky, but a simple question: What if I am the eternal necessary being?
Pieper quotes Aquinas responding to a polemic directed at him: “They hold a plainly false opinion who say that in regard to the truth of religion it does not matter what a man thinks about the Creation so long as he has the correct opinion concerning God. An error concerning the Creation ends as false thinking about God.”
Pieper then makes this observation: “the reception of Aristotle in the thirteenth century was not merely the result of “a choice between rival philosophies,” but was a theological act, the work of a theology in full possession of its faith (though also a theology that had not yet become a mere special branch of scholarship jealously fencing off its particular area); the action of a theology which was not yet separated from the world, its conditions, its perspectives, its procedures, its culture.”
Josef Pieper, Guide to Thomas Aquinas