Sartre, existentialism, and science

Faith & Science Conversation
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I love this intro to “Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre”!

…a bewildered outsider might well conclude that the only thing they have in common is a marked aversion for each other.

!!!

the refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, and especially of systems, and the marked dissatisfaction with the traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from life – that is the heart of existentialism.

What a potent description.

And group of people! 10 existentialists walk into a bar…

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I am reading through Capital volume II at the moment.

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First you should know that my father was an active communist. He was black listed and watched by the FBI. There was no hardship for me in this BTW. My early life was filled with peace marches, communes, and a considerable criticism of the Christian establishment.

I have only read the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx. The result is a considerable aversion to Marx. The economic theories sounded nonsensical to me and it seemed filled with over the top irrational hatred. There was nothing in it which appealed to me.

As for Das Kapital, I would say, if that is the hypothesis, then all experiments have shown that the hypothesis should be rejected. And the human cost of these experiments was extraordinarily high.

To be sure, my impression of capitalism especially in the US is terrible. It seems to breed a considerable amount of dishonesty and cheating ones fellow man. It is very wasteful of resources and destructive of the environment. But I think that is the measure of the people themselves, and all it really proves is that capitalism is not a solution to human problems. But that doesn’t mean there is any reasonable alternative. It is after all a simple consequence of accepting a basic necessity of human civilization that those who make things and provide services should profit by it.

So I see more promise of a solution in religion that motivates people to work for higher ideals such as honesty and serving ones fellow man. If people are so motivated then capitalism does work and I think this is the reason for what success capitalism has had in the US. Which BTW includes considerable improvement in dealing with impacts on the environment. Though I wouldn’t credit Christianity for that, but it is still a matter of inspiring a service to higher ideals.

Furthermore, I see no evidence that revolution produces anything good. Incremental changes have proven far far more able to improve society than revolutionary change. The American revolution had good results because it wasn’t a revolution at all, but a fight to preserve what they already had from foreign interference.

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Some say those writings include nice thoughts. Reality shows the ugly face.
I grew up in the neighbourhood of USSR, during a period when many young people swallowed the nice talks about the justice and peace that the communist ideologies would bring to the world and simultaneously, blinded their eyes from the reality behind the words. Useful fools, as KGB labelled them.

USSR, East Europe during the communist regime, China during the leadership of Mao Zedong, Cambodia during the regime of Pol Pot. Those kind of examples formed such an injection against the ideological speeches that I am (probably) permanently immune towards the communist propaganda. Words are just words, acts and reality reveals what is behind the words.
That is one strenght of Christianity. True Christianity is not just nice words and doctrines, it leads to a relationship that can give real life.

A funny thing is that many young supporters of communist movements (there were many and they had hostile attitudes towards each others) became right wing capitalists when they grew up and started to gain wealth. Makes me wonder how much common there is between the extreme left and right, or between communism and right wing capitalism. You would think that there is little in common. Yet, the same persons may switch from one to the other and what follows is not nice, at least when viewed through the eyes of a Christian.

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Well that is what you get when you add Lenin, for I did read “What is to be done” by Lenin as well. That book is far worse – downright evil. It is basically a strategy of deception – useful fools indeed!

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Essence is a word that does not clarify messages, rather the opposite. I agree that it could (should) be left in the darkness of history. Not useful.

This discussion about ‘essence’ has been useful in the sense that it has made me think about what is permanent and what is transient in our lives. It seems there are very few things that are permanent or even semi-permanent in us.

Our body changes and ages. Even our brains change.
Our thinking, hopes and interests change.
Our values change, more or less.
Feelings are fleeting illusions.
Our relationships change.

What we believe is initially mostly copied from what others tell us. As we grow, gain knowledge and start to think more independently, the copied beliefs start to change towards our own ideas. Yet, even the new ‘own ideas’ are largely copied or reflection from the input we get and change as we learn more.

What is more permanant are the features that are used for identification, like fingerprints, eye pattern and DNA. Even these may change a bit but stay similar enough to help in identification.

The spiritual side of us (whatever that is) does not either seem to be permanent. Spiritual rebirth is the most substantial change possible, as @Mervin_Bitikofer wrote.

According to classical Christianity, our current physical, mortal body will one day be replaced with a ‘spiritual’ body, at least if we ‘stay in Christ’. What happens after that is something that will only be revealed when we experience it.

What is the ‘me’ that stays when our current body changes to the ‘spiritual’ body?
I do not really know. It could be the assumed ‘soul-spirit’, an idea that has been circulating among Christians from the first centuries onwards. It could as well be something else, like God transferring our identity to the new body when He resurrects us.

If there is some kind of ‘soul-spirit’ that continues living after our mortal body dies, then there is something permanent that stays through ages. Otherwise, the only semi-permanent features seem to be those that can be used in our identification. That would mean that ongoing change is the most permanent feature of ‘me’, at least during this life. My ‘essence’ would be a continuously moving target.

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I need to re-read Sickness Unto Death. I seem to have forgotten most of it.

My personal opinion is that there is nothing permanent or “essential” about an individual person. We are constantly in flux. Change is our only nature. Perhaps that’s why the Bible constantly emphasizes the unchangeable nature of God. Paraphrasing Pascal, when everything is in motion, as on a ship, one needs a fixed point of reference, such as God (the eternal, the infinite), to notice the change.

Good summary. @mitchellmckain may correct me, but if memory serves, the line in Western philosophy runs through Aristotle and Aquinas. It takes into account animal species – we know how ants and cats go about existing before they make “choices” to show us what they are – but the primary focus is “human nature,” or what it means to be human. What they missed is that everything “uniquely human” has its roots in the animal kingdom, so the entire project was misguided from the start.

Good gosh. I’m totally unfamiliar with him, so I thought you were talking about a Catholic saint or something. haha

I’m sorry, but this is the kind of Christian rhetoric that I used to believe but just didn’t stand up to my experience, especially in the last decade. Having good motives for right actions isn’t impossible for someone who hasn’t been “born again” and received the Holy Spirit. Rather, what I’ve observed in my 63 years on Earth is people who claim to be “born again” yet show no difference in their behavior from the time they became Christians until now. And then there are those who say all the right words yet somehow transmogrify Christianity into a call to hate rather than love one’s neighbor. Jesus went to the cross, but it didn’t ensure obedience, let alone right motives or his followers being known for their love.

Yes. Actions speak louder than words.

Playing Devil’s Advocate, one could easily apply that standard to the current state of American Evangelicalism. Nice thoughts. Reality shows the ugly face. It’s why people are exiting Christianity in droves right now.

Yep. Here’s Kierkegaard (sounding like Girard) in Two Ages:

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My favorite part is the fact that, to become a “self,” the individual must first break out of the prison of his/her own envy, but then they find themselves in the vast penitentiary built by everyone else’s reflection of envy. Of course, SK’s prescription for this is “religious inwardness,” which is his term for the individual’s relationship with God.

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Final thought for now. I’m not a fan of the term “obedience.” It’s been used in the church and in Christian homes for centuries to justify all sorts of abuse – sexual, physical and emotional.

I’m also not a fan of obedience to the “law” of Christ as defining what it means to follow (be a disciple) of Christ. Christians can’t agree on what that means. Many Christians insist it excludes LGBT+ from the kingdom of God because of their “sinful” life. I reject that conclusion. The only “law” I find applicable in everyday life is to love God and to love one’s neighbor as oneself. The rest is drawing lines in the sand.

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I understand and share in the reasons for your discomfort with that as you stated it. My own discomfort with it (in addition to sharing yours) also includes much less noble reasons in my case. I don’t like the strict application of it to myself. And that’s really the only place it ought to be applied - which I think (in principle - if not reality) addresses your concerns. Our collective church history is of people turning it into a power play to apply to others instead of to themselves. Which yeah - understandably leads to the reaction you express. But if one takes Christ law to be the new law of love, then that (applied as a law of love) should not be weaponized into what churches have turned it into instead. The passages I quoted were at pains to say none of us are off the hook for taking on board and doing our best to follow the sermon on the mount. In a time in our nation here when so many religious leaders bend over backwards to sideline just about everything Christ taught as “impractical”, methinks these authors have more closely adhered to scripture - and to Christ by bringing our focus back to actual obedience - or shall we say conformity to Christ’s way, if that makes it sound any better. Still could be used for power-grabbing I realize. There are no words that can’t be made devoid of love.

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Don’t despair, @Jay313.

We are.
I could accept some of the rock-bottom ideas of “essence.” Parameters for DNA, for example. Within these constraints we have a human, rather than a bonobo, or a fish. Or a range of descriptors that includes human diversity of all kinds. Maybe my ideas are naive, assuming that there is some set of common denominators the establish the category “human being.”

For Pascal to be right, he assumed unidirectional change at the same rate.

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Well yes. I had no intention to imply we change our essence without a great deal of divine help. The point was that our essence is not something which never changes.

Not in the traditional sense. Part of the problem is the Plato/Gnostic/Neoplatonic confusion of the mind with the spirit, which I refute. So with regard to the traditional mind/body problem I see an effective dualism in a basically physicalist approach. Specifically, I see the mind as a physical thing but as a living organism distinct from (though dependent upon) the body. Language provides a medium of life for the mind just as DNA provides a medium of life for the body.

With regard to the similar spirit/physical problem I am more of a dualist though mostly epiphenomenal with nearly all the causality going from the physical to the spiritual (when it comes to ourselves, not God of course). And even this is in a broadly monist approach, for it seems to me that dualism is always inferior in that it asserts a difference but fails to explain the difference between two things. Science demonstrates the power of the monistic approach, explaining many phenomenon as different forms of energy.

Many of our actions are not free will choices. Disease and drugs can take away our freedom of choice. There is nothing absolute or universal about our freedom of will. It is fragile and varies greatly. And yes even then, many things influence our free will choices. But if they are free then we choose which influence to follow.

Caution. That can easily erase the person completely, for then there is no identification of one moment to the next. I would say we have much in common with the snowball rolling down a hill in the snow growing in size. That the outside appearance is constantly changing doesn’t mean there is no part remaining the same… and isn’t it our experience that those older parts inside us are very difficult to change?

Change and choice in individual organisms depend on the sophistication of the nervous system. So for most of the species the choices which distinguish them are in the development of the species as a whole, where evolution is the learning/choosing process.

That only applies to our biology, i.e. our body. The human mind is different, for there is no direct inheritance of ideas from the animal kingdom. So the choice is either to believe that we have invented all these ideas ourselves or if there is a God then perhaps some of those ideas came from Him.

So take morality for example. That is a traditional candidate for something uniquely human. But I don’t think so. I think every community of organisms must have a moral code of some kind. The only difference with humans is the use of language to conceptualize our morality in the mind.

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Reminds me a bit of a book I just finished by Richard Beck, “The Shape of Joy,” in which he describes our quest for happiness or joy is found not on looking inward, or even in finding satisfaction in relationships with those around us, important as that may be, but rather in transcendence, looking outward to that beyond ourselves, and mattering despite our failures and flaws, which in Christianity we call God’s grace.

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Oops premature post.

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I don’t know why Beck imagines he can dictate where everyone’s “quest for happiness is found.” It is obvious to me that people find happiness in all different kinds of things. I don’t think they are all equal in their ability to make us happy. I think most have limitations by themselves.

And this part confuses me. How are relationships not in the beyond ourselves category?

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Pascal is wrong about many things, but he has a way with words. The metaphor was comparing culture/morality to a ship with everyone on board. Relative to one another, they don’t seem to be moving or changing. But if there’s a fixed point for comparison, the ship’s motion becomes obvious.

Sounds like a biological definition of a species.

Agree

I have a hard time distinguishing your definition of mind from a definition of spirit. It has a life of its own distinct from the body’s life?

Interesting metaphor and true to a point.

Right. And many people are born with disabilities that make normal development and “rational choice” impossible.

But this spurs another thought. @Kendel worried that her notions of personal “essence” were naive. Not necessarily. Pascal also mused that the faculty of memory was what made his every thought possible. When people suffer from Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia, at a certain point their loved ones feel that the essential personality of that person has been “lost.”

Good metaphor and a true observation. I think we are born with a certain personality “type,” and a great deal of that may be chalked up to something hardwired into us. I’ve struggled with anger my entire life, for example, but I’ve also learned to manage it better. (The Holy Spirit didn’t fix it for me, no matter how hard I prayed.)

No, it pretty much applies to everything. Chimps have first order theory of mind on the same level as human toddlers. Point to something uniquely human, and I’ll be glad to point out its roots in the animal kingdom.

Morality isn’t biological, and other communities of organisms have expected, “normal” behaviors for their species, but that’s not a moral code.

That’s not the only difference. Much more is involved, but truly mature human morality requires abstract nouns, such as “good” and “evil,” to symbolize and categorize behaviors.

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You are confusing the brain with the mind. I understand the mind to be a product of language with all the representational capabilities of DNA and more. This is demonstrable because we can use language to explain DNA and how it functions. No there is no evidence that any animals have anything like this. I think it would be great if they did. But all the evidence is that they have communication but not language with any such capabilities. The difference is important because with capabilities comparable to DNA, language can be a medium for the process of life itself.

That so adaptable it amounts to a meaningless claim. So I give you the T_Aquaticus challenge: how can this claim be falsified? I repeat my counter-claim: none of our ideas and concepts have come to us directly from animals. And to say something is inspired by them is a completely different thing. For after all, anything, even a pretty rock, can inspire us to create ideas and concepts. This doesn’t make the rock the origin of those ideas and concepts. We have no translators from an animal language to human language by which animals have communicated some idea or concept to us. No such thing has happened. Boy would it be cool if it had happened. But it has not.

I think that is an example of defining something into being true. The point is the idea of “moral code” can be extended beyond the human use of concept and language to biologically evolved behaviors. And frankly I don’t see so much difference because DNA is much like a language in which such behaviors can be codified.

You know… you frankly seem to be contradicting yourself… as if you are putting morality forward as an example of something which has no “roots in the animal kingdom.” This suggests that our discussion is getting lost in semantics.

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I never was any kind of practicing Christian, young earth or otherwise, but my reasons for not wishing to join a church were never because I viewed God in as some kind of cosmic bully. For me one reason is the obsession with creeds which must be espoused from the start. That some finite list of bullet points can come to represent the criteria for membership is odd and off-putting. All I ever had of Christianity was the mythos and that on very sketchy terms. I see articles of faith as only being necessary for those who have none. The value of a mythos is that it can interact with you at various levels and mean various things at various points in one’s development. Why would anyone trade that for a subset of logos talking points?

I think life is about relationships to the world, to God and to each other by which we discover who we are and by extension who others might be. Being human means always coming to understand more and better, not choosing and defending positions.

I find the mythos of other traditions also enlightening but recognize it was my early brief encounter with Christianity which framed my relationships. I’m grateful not to have to defend my evolving understanding of the Christian mythos from foreign Incursions. I don’t desire an exclusive relationship with any sacred tradition. They all answer the same need and highlight similar and different aspects of the sacred. For me that is a plus, not something to guard against.

But most of all I couldn’t join a tradition which would require I triangulate any new idea against scripture. That would make me feel suffocated.
There were so many good points raised by many here which this post touch on but not in any organized way. It was too much to put together so late in the game but perhaps you can identify which of my points were inspired by your own posts.

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Of course not. It is like the bizarre fundie assertion that atheists are rebelling against God. It is ridiculous to claim they are rebelling against something which they see no reason to believe exists. However, this does not mean that the “God” which many so called Christians are pushing doesn’t come off like some kind of cosmic bully. And to that we have the answer of Camus in “The Myth of Sisyphus.”

In this I think you may misunderstand somewhat. It is more like scripture gives Christians a medium of communication. It is a kind of Rosetta stone between the disparate thinking of individuals on subjective matters so that they can have a communal relationship. Thus, in effect, you are declaring above is yourself to be an island with no need for any common ground with other people.

Thus scripture is not the filter for any new idea, as if Christians could no nothing more than church alone. Instead it is a way of sharing a common experience in terms we know other Christians can understand. At least that is what it can be – what it is for many. To be sure for others it a weapon to beat on people.

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It seems obvious that we believers are not robots or copies of each other. God has given a new life and goal inside us but much of what drives our thinking originates from what we hear around us, including the social media. Learned patterns of thinking and ‘bullying’ opinions form the loudest voices, what God is advicing us to do may be a quiet voice within a noisy landscape of opinions. Strong opinions and pride may override the possibility to hear, understand and receive the advice of God. The biblical scriptures are utilized as a potential supporter (weapon) for my/our opinions, rather than as a source that might reveal the will of God to a humbly listener.

From this point of view, it is not surprising that there are conflicting opinions and interpretations among believers. What is sad is that the most aggressive and loudest voices often get more visibility and supporters than the humble voices. When someone is not sure what to think or how to interpret something, it is too easy to follow those strong personalities that seem to be sure that they know the way and the truth.

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As far as that goes I approve and am even envious. But I know many believers think scripture amounts to rules and facts, and anything which contradicts these is rejected. So it also acts as a filter. I don’t think the Bible contains all the needed rules so it shouldn’t be reasoned from as if it did. Different perspectives are too often deemed right or wrong by virtue of aligning with ones favorite scripture. Most perspectives offer different views which can widen understanding.

I see it analogously to science. Accept it as a work in progress rather than a settled body of knowledge and everything is fine. But treat it as the comprehensive final word and you get scientism and people ruling ‘things’ like God out preemptively.

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