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Faith Transcends Reason
The ball and the cross at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. Picture by Colin; click for details.
There is some evidence for the truth of some religious claims.
Some religious claims cannot be perfectly proven.There is some evidence for the truth of some religious claims.
Some religious claims are beyond our complete comprehension.There is some evidence that faith is the right move to make in life.
Faith goes beyond reason.
The word “transcend” is the best I know for this sort. X transcends Y when Y fails to contain X while still being relevant to it in some way. The top floor of the skyscraper transcends the middle floors, but not so much the local zoo. Marriage transcends engagement and courtship, but not a jar of peanuts.
Faith is outside the jurisdiction of reason, but that doesn’t mean they are completely separate.
It’s a real shame I don’t have more Luther, Calvin, and Edwards in my head. What’s worse is that I never learned Hebrew. But I can tell you from my own personal study that these ideas are in Christian thinkers like Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Aquinas, G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, Francis Schaeffer, and Alvin Plantinga. (And Kierkegaard is probably closer than you think.) Philosophy giants William James and Immanuel Kant–maybe not exactly Christian, but friendly enough–are pretty similar.
Much more importantly, this is also in the New Testament.
Here’s how I put it in my essay in this recent book I edited, which is very cheap on Kindle (hint, hint):
Published in Religion & PhilosophySay a young man (call him Mark if you like) is in love with a young lady (you could call her Shonda). He is seriously thinking about putting a ring on her finger. Suppose he were to sit down with a pen and paper to analyze his situation and were to estimate the probability that this course of action will lead to years of marital bliss (stipulating that he is the kind of nerd who might actually do this). He is not going to end up with a result of 100 percent. There is always the tiny, tiny chance that she is secretly a witch, an alien, or a robot. More likely, perhaps personality differences that have already become evident hint at years of communication problems and marital fights. Optimistically, the young man would be pretty lucky to be able to estimate a probability of around 95 percent.
But what young lady wants 95 percent of a ring?
The fact of the matter is simple: His action ought to be either 100 percent or 0 percent.
Of course, the conclusion of the matter may be a 100-percent matter. Given pretty good odds that they are meant to be together, it is reasonable to say that there is only one right course of action. What right action avoids all possible risk of a bad outcome? And that is another way of making the main point: Even an action which is certainly right may be based on uncertain evidence. In any case, the action must be either done, or not: He must give his lady friend a ring, or not. Similarly, she must agree to be his wife, or not; if she is less than fully convinced about it, she cannot act accordingly by becoming less than fully a wife, for there is no such thing, and if there were he is not asking her for it.
Faith is like that. It involves a commitment, not only of belief but of life. There is no faith without repentance (Acts 17:30–31) or without works (Jas 2:14–26). There is no faith without following Jesus, who says, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me” (Matt 16:24). This commitment is meant to be total; we do not get to keep 10 percent of our idols and 10 percent of our sins, and follow Jesus carrying 90 percent of a cross if a good study of apologetics leads us to assess the probability that Jesus is the Messiah at just 90 percent. The evidence is not binary, but the action is: We do it, or not.
So, let me get this straight: you are worried about behavior in a place you don’t believe in.
Eco bio can’t really explain anything. It’s a field of study seeking to understand life as it exists and the processes of how it became what it is. It certainly can’t explain Consciousness, which is necessary to conceive of Good. It can’t explain why or what life actually is.
No. I am placing the “free will” explanation of the problem of evil under scrutiny.
If you want to scrutinize free will relating to evil you have to start with the exchange between Erasmus and Luther. De Arbitrio Libero vs De Arbitrio Servo. Then you can start on your scrutiny
You’ve got God’s supposed omnipotence on the one hand and man’s responsibility on the other hand.
So sin boldly
Sage advice.
I don’t understand. What do you mean?
No, it just undercuts your oversimplification of the FW defense as entailing that G-d has to maximize FW all the time.
This again?
Again, FW is not the only or the greatest good.
That theory won’t even do what it does unless you can figure out how matter creates consciousness.
And what that theory does is explain away morality as an illusion rather than explain how proper functions or moral law exist.
I think within the next 50 years neuroscientists might obtain a very good understanding of how the neurons, cells and blood vessels create consciousness. But even now we know that “material,” like a brick, can alter consciousness if that brick is hurled at the head with enough force.
But let me point out that I am not necessarily arguing for “materialism.” Perhaps I might be willing to argue for some sort of “naturalism” if I were more studied up on those philosophers who argue in its favor.
In this conversation, however, I am simply arguing for non-Theism.
Take the pythagorean theorem. Given a right triangle, the square of the hypotenuse is always equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.
Mathematicians state that this theorem is true even though there is no matter involved. Now, you could apply this abstract concept to a material situation, like calculating distances on a football field or something like that.
Morality might work in a similar way. One might believe, as Abraham Lincoln said, that slavery is always wrong. This could be true even if you can’t point your telescope or adjust your microscope and see this abstract truth directly.
Some people think that God is all powerful and all knowing while human beings possess limited power and limited knowledge.
If so you’ve got God on one side with infinite power and knowledge but human beings, limited as they are, posses responsibility. At least according to many theists.
Now that‘s faith–in this case, faith without evidence.
Old news, and as helpless to prove the proposition that mind is matter as it always was.
Ok.
Of course moral principles and triangles are true even if there is no matter involved. Of course they can be applied practically. The fact that they are true is the issue, and as long as ethics and math are not just branches of psychology, their truth must be mind-independent. Since it’s mind-independent and independent of matter, there must be some non-physical realities there.
Read up on Gödel. There are propositions in any system of natural numbers that cannot be proven to be true by the axioms of that same system of natural numbers, and yet nevertheless are true.
Think about what that means. Or disprove it. If you do that, you’ll get the Fields Medal for sure, and the undying gratitude of atheists everywhere. Or at least the ones for whom logic is a thing.
Yes, humans have responsibility and G-d is omnipotent. What is your point? Why even mention it as two separate hands? Are you imagining some tension between these things or something?
LOL.
I don’t know what’s funny.
(So maybe it’s me.)
Tension between God’s omnipotence and our intransience?
Gotta be a book or two in that.
Note that it is our problem, not God’s.
Why? Isn’t that just the one aspect of the supposed tension between omnipotence and free will?
See #259.
I don’t rule out non-physical realities like numbers, equations and moral facts. Quite the contrary. I think non-physical realities exist.
You seem to think we are debating materialism. But we are actually debating Theism and anti-Theism. So, it seems like you are debating a position, materialism, that I am not actually interested in defending, at least not this highly restrictive version of it, where even the fundamental theorem of calculus has to be made of atoms.
It’s really just me making an estimate about something that might or might not happen in the future. But let’s say that even 50 years from now there has not been enough scientific progress to where we know how matter creates consciousness. So what? There are tons of things we do not know about the human genome and lots we do not know about the cosmos.
I’m not sure how Gödel is relevant to this discussion regarding Theism and anti-Theism. Maybe you can elaborate on why you brought this seemingly unrelated issue up.
Oh, thank Heaven!
Thanks for clarifying.
I wish you had mentioned this in # 197. I had just said, “Theism can explain evil. Materialism cannot explain good.” Your first response should have been that you were not even committed to materialism. You do realize that you’ve been referring to your view as a “naturalism” (as in # 177) and that “naturalism” usually means materialism?
Let’s say you have a 1 year old child. Usually we don’t think that this 1 year old child is responsible for going to the grocery store to purchase food for himself and prepare himself a meal. In other words, because a 1 year old child is limited in his power and his knowledge, we allocate less responsibility onto that 1 year old child.
We tend to allocate responsibility to someone based on how much power and knowledge they have.
That’s why I think God’s infinite power and infinite knowledge and man’s limited power and limited knowledge is interesting to think about, if we think that responsibility tends to be correlated with power and knowledge.
Fair enough; I shouldn’t have called it faith; you had a crucial “might” in there. Sorry.
So nothing. That doesn’t matter. No argument that mind is not matter is an argument from ignorance.
Ok, ok–someone probably made an argument like that. But I’m pretty sure it was no one I ever heard of.
Well, that’s true.
Well, as I said, it only matters if you are into logic.
Responsibility requires some base level of power and knowledge–yes.
What has that to do with the power someone else has?
We have an infinitely powerful and infinitely knowledgeable X on the one hand. We have Y with limited power and limited knowledge on the other hand. (We will use X and Y and replace those variables later.)
We would allocate infinite responsibility to X given that X has infinite power and infinite knowledge. We would allocate limited responsibility to Y given that Y as limited power and limited knowledge.
So, replacing the variables X and Y with God and man, we see that we would allocate infinite responsibility to God and limited responsibility to man. So, all of the death, disability and misery we see in the world and throughout history is God’s responsibility.
At least that is one way to look at.