Alizia wrote: ↑Fri Mar 29, 2019 2:18 pm
do not think that you 'believe in' the story of Adam & Eve
It's less controversial than you think.
Whatever the particulars, even were you a thoroughgoing evolutionist, you'd have to believe that the human race was started by an original mating pair. It's far less plausible to suppose that the fully-evolved humanity sprang suddenly into existence all-at-once, on multitudinous fronts -- and that would require some near-magical kind of genetic explanation. Rather, the evolutionary story requires that a pair that was possessed of the right DNA combination eventually mated, and that their progeny represented the next stage of evolution.
Now, all that raises a question as to how that genetic "advantage" was preserved by the original mating pair from reversion in the very next generation: but it's not my job to try to save the Evolutionists' story. Either way, whatever you want to believe, you can see that an original mating pair is inescapable.
God is Dead -- and We Killed Him, in my view, must be looked at in this way: through following through on 'the truth shall set you free' promise, the real truth was sought, in this but in hundreds of other areas and arenas, and what 'truth' revealed was the undermining of the facticity of the Story. Anyone could easily go on and bring up as a topic of truthful enquiry numerous different elements of the Christian story: the facticity on which it was based.
What did you have in mind?
You could go on in this vein. We have undermined former notions of God and if God is to survive we have to 'resurrect Him' through different intellectual and perceptual ways. Or even through poetry!
It wouldn't work, though. We'd merely be deluding ourselves (no matter how poetically or pleasantly) if God were "dead." (as a concept and as a reality)
What you have done in the quoted paragraph (you did not really answer my question but you offered this as an answer) is to have understood the Adam and Eve story as a story. Parable, allegory, metaphor, take your pick
.
No, see above.
But I think you've grabbed all this at the wrong end. We could discuss Cain's hat size or the number of angels on the head of a pin, but these are distractions, really. Begin at the core -- Jesus Christ. Was He what and who he said? Work outward from there, and you'll get a solid grip on what a Christian self-understanding is.
Nevertheless a particular 'meaning' does still stand and does still exist: that we live in a 'fallen condition'.
That is a real problem for Atheism. What does it mean to say there is "evil" in the world, or that mankind is "fallen" in any sense (moral, practical, whatever)? In the universe as Atheists understand it to be, there is no objective meaning to "evil" and no "good" from which anyone can "fall." So just what is the right explanation for what human beings have come to call "evil" in this world?
We all
know it exists: and, of course, a person can be an Atheist and still love good things and hate evil ones if he/she chooses. But for the Atheist the real question is, HOW do we know evil exists? Nothing in the Atheist account gives a substantive basis to the idea.
To me, that has always been a cardinal flaw in Atheism. It has no account of evil. And yet, it seem intuitively very obvious -- perhaps nothing is so obvious -- that this world is not what it should be, and is not what it should be in very serious, troubling moral ways. Failure to grasp that signals more than a lack of moral seriousness; it signals a real departure from reality, I would suggest.
the only way that you could preserve the meaning in it -- is by converting it into a metaphor.
As you can see, that is not what I have done. But if I had, I would agree with your critique: making these things metaphor does not save them. However, I have met many secular moralists who try to do just that -- to preserve Christian morality by claiming to find ways to hold onto the metaphorical value of things they admit they believe are just not literally true.
What then happens is that the whole story eventually, piece by piece, fades away -- that is, no longer is seen as 'real' -- and yet some Meaning remains, like the smile of the Cheshire Cat.
Yes, that's essentially the decline historians call "The Loss of Faith" in the early-modern West.
It happened because people started seeing their "Christianity" in a loose, metaphorical, merely-moralizing kind of way...they said, "We live in a Christian country," but they felt they could increasingly let go of the particular facts and moral demands of their own proclaimed "religion." The term "Christian" became a sort of lame synonym for "polite, socially-respectable Westerner," and then kept fading until it meant little more than "my family was once nominally Christian," and then "I live in a non-Muslim, non-pantheist, non-polytheist but basically secular region with vague Judea-Christian legal traditions," and then it really meant nothing much at all.
Of course, there wee also always those who remained real in their faith. But the numbers of those people merely
nominally attached to "Christendom" certainly fell off sharply at the turn of the century, and especially after the horrors of WW 1.
In some sense then, it seems to me, you show that to be able to 'believe', one's only option is to seize the irrational. Said in another way, to be a Christian believer, and also a 'rational philosopher' (if you'll allow that term), one must turn against one's own disbelief and 'take a leap of faith'.
Okay, but we have to be careful here, there are not two straightforward opposites, cold-blooded rationality versus total irrationality. That would be epistemologically naive, if we were to suppose it. And it is not the case that a believer is "irrational," and skepticism is "rational." There are rational and irrational beliefs, with degrees of each, and there are irrational skepticisms, such as skepticism about one's own existence.
A "leap of faith" is part of all science. When I perform ten experiments and presume to think that the same phenomena will appear when I conduct the eleventh (even though I have not done it, and perhaps never will bother), that's a leap of faith. When Newton's legendary apple hit him on the head (if indeed it did -- we don't know), Newton did not already know about the forces involved. It was necessary for him to have some faith that his hypothesis might turn out to be explanatory -- and if he'd know it already by pure rationality, he'd have need no further science.
You get the idea. We mustn't buy into the Atheist's facile opposition between knowledge and belief, or between facts and faith. They are not opposites, but coordinated features of human understanding.
But what would all of this mean for me? I mean me personally. That is, what do I do or what have I done after having taken all this in? Why would I then still choose to 'be a believer' or to act as if I were one? My answer is I think one that demonstrates what I call 'desperation' but I do not mean this as a negative term nor as it sounds. You have, in a post just above, described what happens to a person psychologically when they face nihilism and the loss of an existential metaphysics based in facticity, less in metaphor. They still have their 'tendency to believe' and they search for surrogates. Isn't that what you said? That when religiousness is removed, it is replaced in a sense by what we might have to call 'obsessions': things that fill the void.
Well, yes, and things that are usually totally unworthy, as well. People become consumerists, desperate pleasure-grabbers, anesthetized by entertainment, fanatical political ideologues, and so forth. When the ceiling of the world is nailed to the horizon, there's nothing left to desire but the transient and empty materials of a dying world. And these are desperate responses, in the negative sense.
However, I think we "religious" types can also practice a desperation born of that sort of angst. I think the mythologizing of belief is one example -- a desperate attempt to keep the "religious" payoffs while not actually believing at all. Or the bifurcation of knowledge from belief -- that's also a desperate measure, usually to keep the former from destroying the latter. Or the insistence on saying one believes what one does not, in fact, believe at all -- that's indoctrination.
"Bad faith" has not just its Sartrean forms, but its Kierkegaardian ones as well.
I do not mean to say that I am either 'desperate' nor am I 'filling the void' (and I mean with senseless activities that are a surrogate for properly lived life infused with ethical and spiritual values). But I do mean to point out that Nihilism is the result of a series of causes that are not easy of 'cure'. And that these diseases surround us. In fact I would go further: in many ways they define us if modern life is understood as having neurotic aspects.
Yes, quite. The meaninglessness of life under secular modern expectations has been widely remarked by secular theorists, artists and philosophers. The desperate attempt to keep meaning in an essentially meaningless existence, what can it produce but mental illness?
But, we might ask, how much better adjusted would be the desperate attempt to keep God out of the universe, when in fact He really exists? Would that produce any better a mental condition?
So, when the man in the Bergman film Winter Light prays (half-heartedly of course, in his depression) "And what of those who want to believe but cannot?" I think it is a statement with definite poignancy.
Well, one of my big influences and favourite authors has been Thomas Hardy. You could probably not find any novelist who better explained what it's like to live with the longing for a God you neither believe in nor can afford to disbelieve in freely. He was not a Christian, by any standard -- but he was not a happy Atheist either. He was a tortured man, a lost soul, but brilliant and honest.
In fact, my own commitment to Christianity was largely a product of reading some of the great Atheists and agnostics. Their answers were so dusty, and their paralysis in the face of evil so great that they made me look for better answers. So I owe them one for that.
I also now want to offer a comment to your truthful statement that religiosity is not decreasing but increasing. This is true. And what has happened is that both Pentecostalism and Islam have have exploded as 'options for religiousness'.
Yes. Lots of people don't know that. I'm interested to see that you do. The former, in particular, is growing by conversion; the latter is largely growing by physical reproduction and conquest. But both are expanding.
What's equally interesting is the number of "rogue" religions on offer -- Beatles Buddhism, the New Age, astrology, psychics, crystals, spirit-guides, "wellness" cults, and so on. And over all these is the common "smorgasbord" religions of the West, in which contradictory elements of each are poached and recombined into a melange to suit the individual. All are exploding.
And though it would raise great ire, I would add socialism, Atheism, social justice, environmental religions, and a whole bunch of other such stuff to the list of what I regard as "religions." After all, they all are used as substitutes in the same purpose -- to introduce meaning into a situation in which no inherent meaning has been located before.
And one could -- obviously -- see the explosion in Islam as having similar, but very different, emotional/enthusiastic bases. What I mean to say is that I am not sure that either of these really represent 'positive developments' within the Occidental (and the Oriental) world. (Obviously, my overall concern is the Occident.)
Yes, enthusiasts are a concern. I agree. There are immoderate forms of all kinds of things...however, I do not think this counts for much in worrying about religions,
unless the fundamental elements of the religions in question actually advocate these kinds of excesses. In other words, a fundamentalist Quaker, Hassidim or JW really doesn't trouble me: their issues are their own. But a fundamentalist Jihadi or a fundamentalist Atheist does: both are aggressive and political.
It does not require a thoughtful, thinking, intelligent citizen who carefully and theologically thinks things through with philosophical care, but rather an individual who chooses a sort of 'schizophrenic break' as a way of confronting Nihilism and the 'nihilistic condition of postmodern man'.
Yes. And this is what I would point to as a "bad faith" example. We can't just embrace a belief because we feel it's a cold world without it; it actually has to be convincing to us as true. So these are not cases of adjusting to Nihilism, but rather what Camus called, "intellectual suicide" to avoid Nihilism.
But so is being an Atheist who insists that meaning, morality, social order, law and human rights can be legitimized. Any Atheist that says that either has just not understood the problem, or has not really thought about it, or he has simply taken one look at the big, black pit of Nihilism and, in terror, has eaten his brain.
