I spent a lot of chapter 1 and 2 having much the same reaction to Penner as what you describe here. “What do you mean, suggesting that human rationality has nothing outside itself for appeal?” Scientists will happily point you to creation itself which is going to cast a significant vote on how well your ‘rationality’ stacks up. So it isn’t as if human reason is just completely untethered to any reality outside itself.
My own answer to this then (which I think would be Penner’s response) is that Penner isn’t trying to give us some new tool for exploring the cosmos, nor is he questioning the efficacy of our newly minted modernist tools toward that particular exploration. He is questioning its efficacy for answering the higher philosophical questions - the ones that religion take interest in, and ones that many (though not all) of us around here would agree that science cannot address. Penner has his sights set on the “God questions”, the ethics and meaning and beauty and value questions. And it is with regard to these that Penner thinks modernism has made a mess of it.
Awesome quote, man. People say Plato and Spinoza made the blunder of assuming rationality in the world. But I don’t think it’s that much of a blunder. If either postulated that the real is necessarily rational, they were wrong. But still,…a bunch of things in the world are understandable through rationality.
Maybe not everything. But most of the things that matter to us are graspable by reason.
CHAPTER 2 : COMMUNITY SOURCED THOUGHT QUESTIONS
Check for additions. Last edited: 8/1/2022
Kendel: One:
I hope to hear the group’s take on these four statements Penner makes on page 48 and 49:
“Note how the apologist debater functions something like an expert witness who is uniquely gifted and highly trained–and therefore especially qualified–to articulate and defend Christian truth in a way the rest of us cannot.”
“Objections to Christian faith in modernity come from the intelligentsia–from the highly sophisticated and intellectually rigorous modern scientific worldview.”
“As the challenge is for Christians to articulate the epistemological warrent or justification for their beliefs in terms that are objective, universal, and neutral, the average Christian in the pew may not possess the intellectual qualifications or have the requesite training to defend the faith. It is difficult, often, to even understand the objections to faith, let alone know how to respond to them.”
“I suggest modern Christian apologetics subtly undermines the very gospel it seeks to defend and does not offer us a good alternative to the skepticism and ultimate meaninglessness of the modern secular condition.”
And finally, how Penner’s description of the modern apologist square’s with this.
Two:
This quote on page 73
My strategy to this point has been “deconstructive” as I have tried to show how modern epistemology and its assumptions about human reason are merely onedevolves into ideology.
leads me to ask, what do you read/have you read outside of white, male, western philosopy/theory/literature? Penner has not overtly stated until here (that I remember) the cultural grounding of OUNCE. I wish he had. It’s of enormous importance to his argument. Reading widely of texts from non-white, non-western, non-male, non-straight writers is revelatory.
Three:
A plea–Footnote 64 is nearly opaque to me. Can anyone help provide clarity? Much appreciated!!!
But my point is that, unless I (or We) agree that “fact” is a useful and meaningful construct, then “fact-gathering” is not a useful and meaningful enterprise.
Assuming that fact-gathering is a useful and meaningful enterprise, the questions arise: “How many facts do I/We need?” and “How shall I/We interpret the facts we have?”
At that point, allhell breaks loose.
A note about “reading Penner”: Reading Penner is kind of like mountain-climbing; there are altitudes where breathing becomes difficult, and there are altitudes where breathing becomes impossible. The impact of the altitudes is relative to some extent, depending on your physical condition, skills, and stamina. Mine is limited.
You aren’t alone. I think that attempted adjustment challenges all of us.
And that is the perfect modernist manifesto, right there! (I exaggerate, to make a point.) I can’t imagine Penner (or pre-moderns) disagreeing with us - yes, what we now call “facts” are important - many of them probably worth sharing and arguing over, even. I think the challenge is for us to dethrone “facthood” (which really means “our grasp of facts” - that’s the inescapable PoMo caveat talking right there) from being our centrally enthroned touchpoint for our faith.
This makes the modernist feel naked. Without facts, what am I? What is my knowledge? What is my faith? For the modernist (Like Descartes), facts - ones for which we can have certitude, are the barest starting point. Premoderns weren’t bereft of what we now call “facts” or propositions. If I’m not mistaken - premoderns probably didn’t have a word like our “fact”, did they? I can’t remember if I read this from Penner or somewhere else, or maybe I’m just imagining it. But they certainly claimed confidence about things (what we would now label as fact claims.) And they had their language’s version of our word “Truth”. But, as Penner discusses, that word was much more expansive for them. I’m not so sure they would have wasted it on trivial things like “did I tell the truth about what I had for breakfast” - though the notion of falsehoods (and the command not to tell them) certainly was in full use. But John makes use of the word Truth and declares that Jesus himself is the Truth. Even today we can think of someone as being true - usually meaning faithful or dependable, it referred to something more significant than just the percentage of their propositions found to be factual.
What if we still have and allow for these “facts” - even insisting on some as the Spirit may lead, but that the whole enterprise of me building and maintaining a catalogue of facthood is put off to the side as not central to what I’m called to do? Some might be called to attend to that - maybe the spirit does give them a mission of sorting out good from bad, authentic from bogus, etc. But it should be Christ on the throne calling the shots, and our pursuit of facts - our pushing of “facts” ought to be at his pleasure and in his service. And whatever we think we know intellectually, even if it’s correct and qualifies as objectively factual, may not be the important thing called for in any given exchange we have with a particular person.
As a sort of transitional question that might bridge chapter 1 and 2 material, here is something that I’ve been wondering about as I was going back to peruse Chesterton’s “Orthodoxy”.
Is there a century or a part of some century that anyone would put forward as the ‘zenith’ or perhaps a kind of golden age apex of modernism? And if so what period would you nominate?
What got me thinking of this was seeing how Chesterton’s late ninetheenth, early 20th century penchant for logic and using conversational opposition (Can anybody remind of the word for that? …didactic isn’t quite it) dialectic [Thanks, Mike] to lead his readers instructionally. You can see this influence on Lewis. It is a very mature form of modernism - the very kind Penner has in his sights. They wear it proudly and well - and very much unconsciously. I.e. - though Lewis is deep enough and reflective enough to not let all such presuppositional thinking and methods go entirely un-noted, he nonetheless assumes that mantle as his largely unquestioned armor brought to bear without question for nearly everything he addresses.
I mostly agree with you except of course it isn’t the objects let alone the whole jumble of objects in the world which is rational. “Rational” describes the relations between the objects as those are perceived and more and more understood from the point of view of a particular being, ourselves in this case. But to think we can ever explain the universe or the cosmos as a whole? We can learn more and more but ever understand everything in such depth and completeness that we can explain everything? Don’t think so. Why would it even matter? It would be better to understand what we are and what really should matter to us but we have no way to discover that as a fact. If we ever do approach that goal we will not possess the answers as settled facts. Hopefully we’ll get better at recognizing where we can rely on our explanations and where we must proceed with less certainty.
Just my $.02’s worth of course but I can’t see why understanding what we can would ever be a waste of our time.
Thank you! That’s exactly the word I needed … so close, but I couldn’t get the lightning to strike.
My curiosity is piqued. I don’t know much of Hegel - I think Penner mentions him somewhere. Usually when I hear references to him it’s seemed unfavorable. Will have to see how he influences Kierkegaard and through him, Penner & Co.
Me too. Just a casual perusal of Hegel on Wikipedia shows a whole lot more than I’m prepared to delve into - which I guess isn’t surprising, regarding a philosopher of his status. It’s interesting that he gets praise from such a diverse cast of characters from Karl Barth to Marx and Nietzsche. But maybe this paragraph is revealing:
Hegel’s influence was immense in philosophy and other sciences. Throughout the 19th century, many chairs of philosophy around Europe were held by Hegelians and Søren Kierkegaard, Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels—among many others—were deeply influenced by, but also strongly opposed to many of Hegel’s central philosophical themes. Scholars continue to point out Hegelian influences in a range of theoretical and/or learned works, such as Carl von Clausewitz’s book on strategic thought, After less than a generation, Hegel’s philosophy was banned by the Prussian right-wing and was firmly rejected by the left-wing in multiple official writings.
Kierkegaard got engaged to Regine Olsen in Sept. 1840, then immediately regretted it, had 2nd thoughts, and went through inner turmoil until he finally gave Regine the engagement ring back, in August 1841 Copenhagen gossip filled the air, and he went to Berlin and attended the University.
Friedrich Scheller was a professor there and lectured on Hegel (who had died in 1831). Kierkegaard attended the lectures. [Karl Marx also attended the lectures; “diallectic” is a big word in Marx’s philosophy.]
Hegel was “a powerful influence on all European intellectual life at the time.”
One of my best friends in the dorm in Munich was a Yugoslavian Marxist, studying physics. He introduced me to this semi-Hegelian dialectical formulation (in German, of course):
These => Antithese => Prothese
My impression is that Hegel was a prolific “genius”, to use Kierkegaard’s term in a pejorative way:
Lectures on Aesthetics
Lectures on the Philosophy of History
Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion
Lectures on the History of Philosophy
Lectures on Logic
Of Hegel’s philosophy, Arthur Schopenhauer wrote: “If I were to say that the so-called philosophy of this fellow Hegel is a colossal piece of mystification which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudo-philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage, I should be quite right.”
Hegel’s quote was a response to his detractors.
P.S. In 1947, Bertrand Russell wrote: "Hegel’s philosophy is so odd that one would not have expected him to be able to get sane men to accept it, but he did. He set it out with so much obscurity that people thought it must be profound. It can quite easily be expounded lucidly in words of one syllable, but then its absurdity becomes obvious.
Terry! I wish I had been aware of Schopenhauer’s and Russel’s evaluations of Hegel’s work. They would have saved me a great deal of time, trying to decide how to comment on some of my Freshman Comp students’ papers back in ‘92/‘93.
