@mitchellmckain thank you for your interest in this book and taking the time to read, think and write about it.
Penner points to the foundational differences between premodern (classical Christianity) and modern worldviews throughout this book as the basis for his critique of apologetics. For example on page 6:
By and large, apologetic arguments and natural theology are linguistic survivals from the practices of classical Christianity that have lost the context that made them meaningful and relevant. Subsequently, as with moral discourse, modern arguments around the existence of God, God’s goodness, etc., are subject to interminable disagreement and a deep confusion that stem from their dislocation from a premodern worldview.
I am curious what differences you see in the underlying assumptions of these two worldviews and how those differences would alter the way in which reasoning is carried out, if at all.
Agreed. I don’t see much value in these apologetic arguments, and I would say further that “natural theology” is steeped in pagan thinking alien to Judeo-Christian Biblical thought. I also see considerable confusion between the artifacts of language and measurable reality which modern science has been of considerable help in distinguishing.
I accept the disagreements as natural and unavoidable when dealing with the highly subjective topics under discussion in religion and philosophy. I certainly do not accept any so called modernity or post-modernity as a requirement for any thinking to be meaningful.
To be sure I have frequently admitted that I do have a filter of meaningfulness and rationality quite disconnected from “premodern (classical Christianity)” but that is to be found in the unreserved affirmation of modern science and not in any modern philosophy. From there I forge ahead in building a basis for rationality (in Christianity as well as other things) borrowing from whatever seems useful. Some have noticed that I have found Aristotle useful while having nothing but contempt for the ideas of Plato (as well as derivatives such as Whitehead).
Sigh… sounds like work for the academic philosopher which I am not. For me it seems more useful to lay out the principles I have for rationality.
logical coherence which is requisite for a belief to be meaningful.
consistency with the objective scientific evidence which is requisite for a belief to be reasonable.
compatibility with the ideals of a free society which is requisite for a belief to be moral in the kind of society I would want to live in (so that I do not take up arms against it).
Someone’s decision may be moral or immoral and thus the fact of the decision has a moral value, but how are there other moral facts, any more than there are moral raindrops? It is a fact, a neutral fact neither moral nor immoral that cigarette smoke is harmful. Where morality comes into play is in the decisions concerning it. So what kind of ‘moral facts’ are there besides peoples’ moral or immoral choices?
LOL is that all Nietzsche is claiming? That facts are not moral in themselves any more that the word red is actually the color red?
I thought the claim was something rather more than that. That there are no facts which inform morality as there are facts which inform science.
After all, in the story told in the introduction of the reading, we have an excellent example of how facts are not science and that people may recite all sorts of scientific findings without doing any science whatsoever.
Actually when I looked this up to find out where Nietzsche said this, I found that he said there are no facts at all but only interpretations. But I can go Nietzsche one farther to say that without interpretations there are only photons, molecules, and their motions. It is the brain using beliefs which turn these into a perception of objects and actions in the world. But so what? This doesn’t make the objects, actions, and facts (moral or otherwise) any less real or true. How is this any different than the rhetoric of Zeno arguing there is no such thing as motion?
I’ve barely touched Nietzsche, but in an intro to ethics I first came across the claim that there are no moral facts. This might be as simple as saying morality is not objective.
In your previous comment you detailed a number of examples that include harm to other people. And one moral judgement my class had to consider was whether it was acceptable to harm one person to save a group of others. Usually it’s a large group to add extra weight to the judgement.
I’m not either, which is why this book requires so much of me as a reader and thinker. I research a lot as I read, and reread and rereread.
If you’re interested, I just added a link to the list of resources above, which includes a chart comparing some aspects of different world views by cultural periods (premodern, modern, postmodern). Of course, there is no obligation to look at it or trust any of it. But this is a nutshell summary of concepts Penner bases the book on.
For me, working through a book like Penner’s is a challenge that is worth taking up. I hope you find it so as well.
@heymike3,
This is an interesting quote from Nietzsche. Can you give some background to it? Where were his thoughts/arguments going? How did he draw this conclusion? How might it help inform our understaning of Penner’s discussion?
Thanks
Interesting…
I guess I come out as 30% premodern, 70% modern, and 0% postmodern.
Realism in Metaphysics (which includes the supernatural), Pragmatism/faith and science in epistemology, psychology and existentialism for human nature, virtue ethics (which is pretty individualistic), and liberal capitalism. I counted my metaphysics as premodern, epistemology as 50-50, and the others as modern. BUT I don’t think this is a complete picture because there are heavy implications from physics which is all from the last century – relativity, quantum physics, and chaos science. And the reduction of pragmatism, psychology, existentialism and virtue ethics to premodern and modern is terribly oversimplifying. My feeling is that post-modernism has not digested these scientific developments at all but marched on single-minded with philosophy divorced from the rest of human experience.
This is the first time I’ve read the quote in the original context. I never took it that seriously because it is factually wrong to treat people like they don’t exist when you believe they do, and it’s wrong to love that which is imperfect as if it was perfect. The soon to be phenomenon of love relationships between humans and AI would be analogous.
“My demand on philosophers is well-known: that they place themselves beyond good and evil—that they put the illusion of moral judgment beneath them. This demand follows from an insight which was formulated for the first time by me: that there are no moral facts at all. Moral judgments have this in common with religious ones: they believe in realities that are unreal. Morality is just an interpretation of certain phenomena, or speaking more precisely, a misinterpretation. Moral judgments, like religious ones, belong to a level of ignorance at which the very concept of the real, the distinction between real and imaginary, is still absent, so that “truth” at this level refers to all sorts of things which today we call “fantasies.” Thus, moral judgments can never be taken literally: literally, they always contain nothing but nonsense. But they are semiotically invaluable all the same: they reveal, at least to those who are in the know, the most valuable realities of cultures and inner states that did not know enough to “understand” themselves. Morality is just a sign language, just a symptomatology: you already have to know what it’s all about in order to get any use out of it.”
Today I began to casually listen to Christopher Butler’s Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction. Usually when I listen to these books it makes me feel smarter and I find a few good lessons.
One big takeaway was how intentionally obscure postmodern writers were. John Rawls, who I enjoyed reading after laboring with Rousseau, represented a “consensual method… for further clarification and piecemeal correction by the philosophy profession as a whole.” And postmodernists thought that this clarity “would have simply reproduced a bourgeois view of the world, and aimed at an unjustifiable universal acceptance.”
What makes universal acceptance (or a meta-narrative) unjustifiable? I almost ask rhetorically, but couldn’t put it into my own words with any confidence right now.
I don’t know that the apologetic enterprise needs to be solely construed as an us trying to convince them project. Why mightn’t we look at it as Christians helping Christians as well, and as a faith strengthening and confidence building undertaking.
It may be encouragement to young believers like I received when I heard and read cool accounts of God’s providential interventions. Legitimate arguments and evidence, even though not compelling to those who have hard hearts towards the knowable God, may strengthen the faith of Christians and lead to the softening of other hearts and to the unstopping of closed ears for some who are not yet believers. There is plenty of rocky ground out there, but there is good soil too.
See “The parable of the sower” (with a couple of other appropriate parables in the same chapter included).
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
28
In my pomo journey, drowning in deconstruction, I wave the following reconstructive hand whilst treading water: life’s better with God. Even the damnationist killer God for most such believers. Which is why in my church activity I never… 99-99.9%, knock Bible believing folk Christianity. However an excellent Baptist minister of my weekly acquaintance, despite her damnationist fears, only presents that life is better with God. That there are only positive reasons for, funnily enough, evangelizing; declaring nothing but good news. Not carrot and Gehenna.
Thanks for this fuller quote. So much more valuable to have some context. This one is actually a pretty good description of the diagnosis of morality proffered by Postmodernism.
Regarding the reading of postmodern writers:reading about them is hard. Reading them, not all of them, but the most influential, is excrutiating. Although, i have found my “gloss over” that took years, invaluable.
Thanks for looking over the table. Of course, you are right that it is limited. About 600 years of thought were crammed into that center column alone, and divvied up into just a few broad categories. But it helps to give us some hooks we can use, while we work through new or different ideas and then to employ them in evaluating a system that is nearly impossible for us to perceive. Itks a crude tool to employ as we build better ones.
You are right in your assessment that the thinkers involved are unaware of physics.
Critical theory, which is largely what we are working with here, comes out of sociology and is heavily engaged with philosophy. I am unaware (as a pre-junior apprentice, not even advanced enough to claim to be the water-girl) of any reference to physics or other sciences, except medicine and psychology.
I’m finding Butler’s introduction helpful in appreciating what postmodernism got right and what it didn’t. Where it succeeded and where it fell flat.
Following a brief look at the pomo take down of science, specifically deconstructing reproductive studies, Butler said:
“All these radical postmodernist arguments are now under severe attack, but they have very much changed the way in which the scientific disciplines are perceived within American and European culture, towards a more sceptical, and politicized, view.”
“Of course, it hardly needs to be added that ‘realist’ history and novel writing, film making, science, and newspaper reporting also continued on their way in the era of postmodernist theory…”
“Postmodernists liberally opposed all holistic explanations (even if they sometimes readmitted them through the back door by promoting arguments which were in sympathy with those of Freud and Marx), and their oppositional, negative postmodernist critique was, as we shall see, in many ways immensely liberating, certainly for women, for cultural minorities, and for much of the artistic avant-garde.”
Much of my academic work dealt with critical theory and literature examined through it. It was back from about '92-'97, so much has changed. In spite of that fairly intense work, one learns that one really know so little. The landscape is intimidatingly broad, and there is no way anyone can claim BOTH breadth AND depth in this area of study. I learned intense respect for my professors, who actually really understood what they were talking about.
The French critics are particularly excruciating to read. Their highly elevated writing style does FEEL deliberately obscuring, but I don’t believe it is. Much of my trouble with their work was a lack of background. After them, Terry Eagleton was reviving, if for no other reason that the Marxists wrote in straight-forward, democratic prose.
There is much to evaluate in critical theory. However, it provides us important tools for examining our world and culture. I believe that Penner employs it well in his analysis of apologetics.
Since the discussion of the Intro is “scheduled” to start the 18th to accommodate Real Life, reading, background reading and the like, I think using these days beforehand to discuss background concepts and reading could be very fruitful, if people would care to.
I know there’s at least one other person who has expressed interest in this discussion, but has time constraints that made a schedule necessary.
Sounds like Butler’s book is a good one. I may actually have it, but my eyes have aged past the font size OUP uses in their very short intros. So, whenever I get to that (not during this discussion) I’ll be using my Bookshare account for the text.
Kendel - thanks again for your OP - which, if I understand it correctly, means you plan to launch a discussion of the introduction of Penner’s book on July 18th?
Before I realized that you had posted a link to free online access to the material, I was casting about on the web a bit and landed on this interview with Penner which provides an hour discussion of the same book. It sounds like his interviewer (or the organization) might be hailing from the Mormon tradition, but the subject discussed is Penner’s book, and Mormonism doesn’t get much more than a couple mentions. If people want any preliminary overview or don’t have enough time for longer reading, they could at least get a feel for it there. I already caught a couple insights that I’ll be looking for when we reach those chapters of the book. Thanks again!
[One of those insights was Penner’s take on postmodernism, which I found quite compelling - clarifying my own thoughts on it as well. Since I see that is already coming up in discussions - it’s hard to wait for it!]
Although such intentionality would fit with rejecting logo centric texts.
Butler: “The often obscure, not to say obfuscating, modes of speech and writing of these intellectuals were sometimes even intended to signify a defiance of that ‘Cartesian’ clarity of exposition which they said arose from a suspect reliance upon ‘bourgeois’ certainties concerning the world order.”