© Roger M Tagg 2010 - 2011
Welcome to FROLIO – a new attempt to merge philosophy and the "semantic web" . This website is under continuing development.
I have owned this book for many years, but had not - until my retirement - read it for about 30 years, i.e. since my early days of questioning things. I only really remembered the "playlet" in chapter 4 (a discussion between several people with contrasting opinions) - and finding DZP's own writing refreshing in its 'not-so-academic' approach.
This collection of papers appeared 12 years later than the collection edited by Flew and MacIntyre (F&M) (see my highlights of that book). I would describe this one as being rather wider in compass and less 'orthodox' - appearing, as it did, after Robinson's Honest to God. Like F&M, it does follow a theme - in this case that of 'understanding'. There are also two older papers from the 1930s.
| Chapter | Page | Highlight |
|---|---|---|
| Introduction | 1 | Phillips (DZP) expresses the view that it might save a lot of confusion, in philosophical reflection on religion, if philosophers looked more at the 'actual use of language', following the suggestions of the later Wittgenstein (RT: of 'language games' fame). He does admit, though, that this hasn't led to much convergence of positions so far. |
| Some alternative positions he proposes are: 1) belief in God is belief in 'an ultimate order of fact' or 'eschatological explanation'; 2) religion is 'learning to live no matter what happens to one'; 3) everything is part of the 'divine plan' which isn't clear to us now; 4) it's a matter of resolving to lead a certain way of life. And this is just in Christianity. | ||
| 2 | It's no more consistent between atheists, e.g.: 1) religious beliefs are intelligible but false; 2) they aren't false, just meaningless; 3) they are psychological aids to moral endeavour (but one doesn't need religion for that). | |
| Surface grammar is not the same as depth grammar (Wittgenstein). | ||
| 3 | "The philosopher ... cannot take the believer's expression ... or account of faith at face value." | |
| 3-4 | "Many philosophers ... have assumed far too readily that everyone understands the kind of claims made by religious belief. ... This confident attitude springs from a mistaken epistemology ... which assumes that there is a standard use of ... ordinary language ... which is the norm of meaningfulness for all uses of language." | |
| 4 | "The first task ... is to examine ... whether there is any such thing as an all-embracing concept of reality ..." | |
| 4-6 | DZP gives a brief introduction to each of the 11 papers. | |
| 5 | "I remember saying to a person once, 'I have no doubt that half-a-dozen gods are worshipped in (church X)', to which he replied 'Why stop at half-a-dozen?'" | |
| 6 | "If someone tells me that the barbaric practices of the early Hebrews reflect true religion more than the Passion of Christ, I can only ask him to look again." DZP says he doesn't claim any independent criterion of judgment here, just that what he knows of the Passion appeals to him as more 'divine'. (RT: what might we think after reading the Koran?) | |
| 1 - | 9 | 'Understanding a Primitive Society' by Peter Winch (1964) |
| Prof Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard (E-P) made his name with anthropological studies of primitive tribes in central Africa, one of these being (in 1937) of the Azande. Winch's paper has 4 parts: 1) criticism of some aspects of E-P's approach; 2) refutation of some criticisms (c 1962) by Alastair MacIntyre of both Winch's and E-P's positions; 3) criticism of some of MacIntyre's further statements; and 4) his own reflections on what we can learn from all this. | ||
| (RT: the papers by MacIntyre referred to are later than his involvement in F&M, but well prior to 'After Virtue'.) | ||
| 1.1 | 9-11 | The main issue is that the Azande "believe that certain of their members are witches, exercising a malign occult influence on the lives of their fellows", and use rites, oracles and magic potions to counter this influence. It all sounds nonsense to us, but E-P, while doing his best to look at things from their side, says they are logical but unscientific, and "not in accord with 'objective reality' ". This obviously begs the question of whether there is such a thing as culture-independent 'reality', even with science's reliance on experiment and testing. |
| 12 | Science is not the only field that claims to be dealing with 'reality' - religious language talks about God's reality. | |
| 13 | "... the distinction between the real and the unreal, and the concept of agreement with reality, belong to our language" (RT: my commas). E-P assumes these distinctions are language-independent. (RT: that's why in FROLIO I use "language-insensitive", meaning that there is a degree of consensus on how languages look at what we experience.) | |
| 14 | A more relevant question might be whether the Azande system is 'coherent' or 'rational' - but even then, these are 'our' terms. If we present them with contradictions in their system, they can still rationalize these in 'their' terms. | |
| 15 | We can talk about witchcraft and magic in our terms, but we see it as a perversion of more mainstream religion. | |
| 17 | "Witchcraft explains why events are harmful to man and not how they happen." | |
| 18 | "What criteria have we for saying that something does, or does not, make sense?" (RT: could one not suggest a pragmatist view, i.e. that long-term and in most cases, it led to better life for those involved?) | |
| 19 | "Oracular revelations are not treated as hypotheses". (RT: around here the discussion seems to go back and forth rather a lot.) | |
| 1.2 | 26 | MacIntyre (AM) agrees with Winch in that one must (in anthropology and elsewhere) have "descriptions" that are intelligible. He talks about a "stock of descriptions" which are continually modified over time. |
| AM then says that the notion of rational criticism requires the notion of choice between alternatives, hence we need criteria - which in turn need to be justified. But how can we explain why the criteria (and rules and conventions) are rational without relying on our own "norms of rationality"? | ||
| 27 | Winch seems to disagree with AM over how the norms can change, e.g. is there some continuity so that one can make the bridge? Will there need to be new ways of talking and "modifications in the grammar"? | |
| 28 | Whose "concept of rationality" are we talking about, ours or the alien people's? | |
| 29 | The alien culture may have "no interest" in our idea of rationality. | |
| "We have to build a new unity for the concept of intelligibility", which has to relate to the previous one (RT: or ones?) and may require "a considerable realignment of our categories". | ||
| 30 | "To say of a society that it has a language is also to say that it has a concept of rationality", although this says "nothing about what in particular constitutes rational behaviour in that society". | |
| 31-32 | We can't assume that our own standards "occupy a peculiarly central position" regarding standards of rationality. AM criticized Winch for overlooking the fact that criteria and concepts have a history. But Winch replies that AM overlooked the fact that the criticism of the criteria also has a history, and is assuming that our view of that history is right. (RT: sounds like an opportunity for infinite regress?) | |
| 1.3 | 32 | Winch now turns to AM's point - that the Azande's belief in the effectiveness of their rites in ensuring their crops thrive is proof against being undermined by bad harvests (they just say that someone must have had evil thoughts) - stands in need of rational criticism. AM suggests they don't have the categories of 'science' and 'non-science'. |
| 33 | Winch claims that AM confuses "sophistication of the interest in classification" with the "sophistication of the concepts employed" (RT: similar to 31-32?). He suggests that we sophisticated people should "jettison our sophistication" if we want to understand practices in a primitive society. | |
| E-P's description suggests that the Azande do have a working distinction between the technical and the magical, although these do sometimes get confused. | ||
| 34 | Is the Azande's belief that good crops depend on their rites and no evil thoughts a 'hypothesis' - like we may put down a period of heavy rain to atomic explosions? The concept of 'A affecting B' may not be the same across cultures. (RT: see Frolio comments on Cause and Effect.) | |
| "What made Jones get married" is not like "what made the aeroplane crash". | ||
| The Azande don't totally ignore technological steps to make their crops thrive. The magical rites may not help scientifically, but may provide a (RT: psychological?) prop against the crops possibly failing. | ||
| 35 | He brings up as an analogy the biblical story of Job, with the point that the believer needs to be free from dependence on what he is praying for. Prayers don't influence the outcome, so the believer says "if it be Thy Will". | |
| The Azande rites, analogously to Christian prayers, "express an attitude to contingencies", recognizing that one can't control all contingencies in life. | ||
| 36 | The Azande rites are not just to do with consumption, but are fundamental to social relations. | |
| 1.4 | 36-37 | Language games are not insulated from each other - we are usually involved in several, and we relate to others who may play different ones. (Rush Rhees, 'Wittgenstein's Builders' (1960)) |
| 37 | " ... by studying other cultures ... we may learn different possibilities of making sense of human life ... for a man trying to contemplate the sense of his life as a whole." | |
| Marx's "alienation" may come about through being too focussed on one aspect of life, in his case "efficiency of production for consumption". | ||
| 38 | Doesn't this force us into "ethical relativism"? | |
| 38-42 | He talks about "limiting notions" - things that all cultures have to face, i.e. birth, reproduction and death (sounds like TS Eliot). (RT: what about maintaining ourselves, e.g. food, health, defence against threats?) | |
| 39 | "Unlike beasts, men do not merely live but also have a conception of life." | |
| 40 | Is it incoherent to, like some Aborigines, carry a stone around with one that represents one's soul? Winch compares it to our use of wedding rings. | |
| 41 | Sex is one "limiting notion", but it certainly gets regarded differently between cultures (RT: including within western culture). | |
| 42 | He quotes G Vico, who surely goes over the top by saying "all nations ... all have some religion, all contract solemn marriages, all bury their dead" and that "these institutions will be able to give us the universal and eternal principles (such as every science must have)". (RT: This may provide a benchmark for anthropology, but I'm not sure it helps with religion.) | |
| summary | (RT) | This paper is long and really tough going. DZP obviously included it as a challenge, as it contains much that is analogous to talking about religion. It makes the point that appeals to 'independent reality' are not enough to justify even our use of logic and rationality. It shows the dangers of assuming that our view (and use of terms) is more correct than some other culture's, (although I don't think Winch proved that they were all equally valuable to good quality of life). Both philosophy and religion are full of people running down some other view (as Leibnitz said, that's the main fault in philosophers). |
| 2 - | 43 | 'Anselm's Ontological Arguments' by Norman Malcolm (1960) |
| 43-59 | Malcolm uses "arguments" in the plural on the ground that there are two slightly different arguments in two different works; Anselm didn't distinguish between them. However for most of us, the gist as I see it is this; because we can understand the concept of a thing greater than which cannot be conceived, then we have to accept that it exists, because 'existing' would be greater than just 'conceivable in the mind'; and only God is a candidate for such a thing. | |
| There have been many great minds who rejected this proof of God's existence, including Gaunilo, Aquinas and Kant - the last-named saying that 'exists' is not a valid predicate (as for example 'has 3 sides' is for a triangle). Descartes was a supporter, but it looks like what he said wasn't quite the same as Anselm. In the Flew-MacIntyre collection, IM Crombie and JJC Smart had their differences with Anselm, and JN Findlay even offered an ontological disproof of God's existence - not that Malcolm fails to find holes in that. | ||
| It seems that despite many convincing criticisms of Anselm's reasoning, counter-arguments can be put forward against most objections or alternatives. The distinctions and differences seem to be very fine ones. Malcolm admits that he can't find a proof that the concept suggested by Anselm's argument isn't contradictory. | ||
| 60 | After 17 pages of nit-picking, Malcolm says "But even if one allows that Anselm's phrase may be free of contradiction, one wants to know how it can have any meaning for anyone" (Malcolm's italics). "Why is it that human beings have even formed the concept of an infinite being, a being greater than which cannot be conceived?" | |
| Malcolm's own answer to this is our common feeling of guilt (RT: = conscience?) for which we need "a forgiving mercy that is limitless". (RT: sounds like another of DZP's "half-a-dozen gods" from page 5.) | ||
| Kirkegaard said (albeit specifically about Christianity): "There is only one proof of the truth ... and that, quite rightly, is from the emotions, when the dread of sin and a heavy conscience torture a man into crossing the narrow line between despair bordering on madness - and Christendom". | ||
| 60-61 | Malcolm admits that it may seem absurd to us (nowadays) to be quite so hung up about sin (RT: but it probably was in the 1800s). | |
| 61 | Even if a currently atheistic person was convinced that Anselm's arguments were valid, this would not make him change to Theism. One needs to feel a religious impulse from within. (RT: and even then it might not tally with a particular Christian, Moslem or other orthodoxy.) | |
| 3 - | 63 | 'Faith, Scepticism and Religious Understanding' by DZ Phillips (presumably after 1964) |
| (RT: I have broken this into 3 sections: 1) the problem of philosophical theology in addressing God's existence independently of believers' experience; 2) the approach to God through 'love of one's neighbour' (abbreviated to LOON); 3) the argument that belief and understanding can be equated by this route.) | ||
| 3.1 | 63 | "The philosophical assumption behind the ignoring of religious testimony as begging the question, and the search for external reasons for believing in God, is that one could settle the question of whether there is a God or not without referring to the form of life of which belief in God is a fundamental part." |
| 64-65 | DZP asks "Why is there this lack of contact between many philosophers and religious believers?". Norman Kemp Smith (see ch 5) suggested that philosophers may take "the phraseology of religious devotion" and examine it inappropriately by taking its strictly literal meaning, and that they overemphasize the "anthropomorphic" view of God. | |
| 65 | "Many philosophers assume that everyone knows what it means to say that there is a God, and that the only outstanding question is whether there is a God." DZP says one could say the same for unicorns. | |
| 65-67 | He says one can't treat the issue of the existence or otherwise of God in the same way as one considers the truth or otherwise of facts. So what is appropriate instead? "Suppose one asks 'His reality as opposed to what?' " | |
| 67-68 | "The possibility of the unreality of God does not occur within any religion, but it might well occur in disputes between religions." Are people worshipping the same God? St Paul might claim that the God he spoke about was the same as for Abraham (RT: so could Moslems - but one could point out some pretty big differences. Personally, I don't think this argument from tradition is a good one.) | |
| 68 | One can't claim that "there is a paradigm of rationality to which all modes of discourse conform". "Coming to see that there is a God is not like coming to see that an additional being exists. If it were, there would be an extension of one's knowledge of facts, but no extension of one's understanding." (RT: isn't this suggesting that religion is the only means of extending one's understanding?) | |
| 69 | Alasdair MacIntyre criticized the singling out of particular religious utterances by philosophers, in isolation from the whole package of belief. | |
| "One cannot understand what praising, confessing, thanking or asking mean in worship apart from a belief in an eternal God." | ||
| "Discovering that there is a God ... is to discover that there is a universe of discourse we had been unaware of." (RT: but for many, this happens in reverse. We knew about this universe of discourse, but maybe decided it was irrelevant, or didn't make enough sense in our ordinary lives.) | ||
| 70 | It's all to easy to say things like "Finite understanding cannot understand the eternal", but such utterances can only be said within religious belief - they wouldn't convince anyone on the outside. | |
| 70-71 | DZP supports John Anderson (Aust Jnl of Psych and Philo, 1941) who deplores a tendency of some religious speakers who imply that theirs is a hierarchically higher interpretation of 'reality' than that of the rest of us. If we have an issue, he says, "any intelligible answer brings us back to human relationships, to the struggle between opposing movements". | |
| 3.2 | 71 | DZP starts by talking about mine and yours, then via one-on-one relationships to ours. But this ours excludes those outside the relationship. He then says "Christianity wishes to speak of a kind of love which is such that no man is excluded from it. It calls this love, love of one's neighbour" ... "without knowing what this love is, one cannot know what the love of God is either". |
| 72 | He contrasts self-love, as "the desire to possess the maximum of what one considers to be good for oneself". This love is all too easily thwarted, e.g. by wars, disasters, competitors or bereavements. It is "dependent on the way things go". Even erotic love and friendship are subject to this - friendships cool; lovers fall out, change, move or are taken away. | |
| LOON on the other hand is not dependent on how things go, doesn't change and doesn't suffer defeat. One is not asked to choose between LOON and love for a friend or partner, just not to love the latter to the exclusion of LOON. | ||
| 73 | So, who is one's neighbour? DZP says it's "every man", regardless of "the particularity of relationship" e.g. family, friend or lover, "but simply because of his being". DZP also mentions "self-renunciation" (RT: putting one's own interests on the back burner?). (RT: I wonder how animals might come into all this? What if they are colonial animals like corals or Portuguese Men o' War? What about plants, fungi etc?) | |
| (RT: All this emphasizes 'individual-to-individual' relationships. But our relationships are often with groups - and this brings in what I call the 'Société Anonyme' or 'Co. Ltd.' effect. We might be able to love individual neighbours, but we often, for practical reasons, lump them into groups, and it's harder to feel the same way towards such groups (see my essay on Guerin's Social Strategies). Then there is the whole issue of 'tribalism', i.e. 'we and they' - we support our group and want to do down, or blame, rival groups. I sometimes wonder why we don't think of God, rather than as an individual person, as a company, or an organization - like Oxfam, Vinnies or the Salvation Army?) | ||
| 73-76 | DZP includes 5 quotes from Kirkegaard's 'Works of Love': a) contrasting friendship, or erotic love, with LOON, he says you can't truly call an individual beloved or a friend if they really change, whereas with your 'neighbour' in the LOON sense, "it is your love which holds your neighbour fast"; b) in the above case, if one gives up one's love, it is the former lover that loses out, not the loved; c) "what would we think of a man who affirmed that he was in love and also that it was a matter of indifference to him?"; d) "he who in love forgets himself ..." in fact gets benefit; e) it is part of LOON that one can't expect to receive forgiveness without oneself being forgiving of others. | |
| 3.3 | 75 | Following b) above, DZP asserts that "for the believer, love itself is the real object of the relationship between himself and another person"; "Once this is realized, one can see how love and understanding are equated in Christianity"; and "There is no theoretical understanding of the reality of God". |
| 76 | Following c) to e), he says "Belief, understanding and love can all be equated with each other in this context". | |
| 76-77 | Alasdair MacIntyre (AM) questioned this, saying that it cannot give a sensible account of rejection of religious belief. DZP points out that 'rejection' can just mean "it's mumbo-jumbo as far as I am concerned" - which is really a form of not understanding. | |
| 77-78 | But there is also 'rejection' by defiance of a proposition that one does understand. DZP says that the person then does believe in God as understood, but objects to what such a God stands for (RT: maybe like Nietzsche?). | |
| 78 | Norman Malcolm (of ch 2) said: "Belief in God encompasses not only trust but also awe, dread, dismay, resentment and perhaps even hatred". (RT: I don't think he meant we have to have all these - but what if we don't have any of them?) Malcolm goes on to say that "belief in God will involve some affective state or attitude, having God as its object". (RT: but I'm not sure I see why - can't one just accept that LOON is the best way to live?) | |
| DZP: "One must not think of belief in God as an all-or-nothing affair" - it's not just one's attainments, it's also one's aspirations. But without some attainments, just aspirations are not enough. | ||
| 78-79 | One can have a 'believer' who rebels and is not worshipful (RT: maybe Job before his enlightenment? But I would say that this is not a common thing, compared with those who think it is all just irrelevant.) | |
| 79 | DZP says that 'love of God' (equated with LOON) "is fundamental in religion since all other attitudes can be explained by reference to it". | |
| Kirkegaard: "There is no understanding of religion without passion". DZP: "This is why understanding religion is incompatible with scepticism". (RT: surely this depends on the definition of 'scepticism'. I accept that "LOON is the best way to live", but I wouldn't call myself 'passionate about religion' (my wife might disagree, as I spend so much time studying it). I'm certainly sceptical about the God proposed by major religions, and certainly about attributes like omnipotence and omniscience.) | ||
| 4 - | 81 | 'Four Men Talk About God' by RP Anschutz (1934, Australasian Journal) |
| Rather than try to précis the blow-by-blow arguments of this mini-drama, it seems better to characterize the positions of each role, and then just highlight some of the "sticking points". | ||
| 'Agnostic' takes the position of a presiding judge who doesn't feel there is enough evidence for or against the existence of 'God'. He regards it as a matter of probabilities about what facts are true or otherwise. | ||
| 'Protestant' thinks that the initiative to believe comes from God - one has to have the experience to feel the conviction. He claims to have had such experience, and that's all the proof that is needed. He thinks logical argument is a waste of time, and contributes least to the discussion. (RT: he doesn't seem to worry about those who haven't had an experience) | ||
| 'Atheist' thinks that only the ontological argument could have any logical validity, but as that is pretty vacuous and flawed, he feels that's enough to say that there is no such thing as God - at least as commonly discussed. | ||
| 'Catholic' takes the view that there is a "system of reality" above our "system of knowledge", and that the ontological argument is valid de jure if not de facto. He claims that the Divine nature is not adequately known in this life (implying, a priori, that there is another life to come). | ||
| 82 | Atheist asks Protestant why he interprets his experience of being about God (RT: and I would add, why as characterized in his particular religious tendency). All Protestant can say is that if you had had the experience, you would know. | |
| 83-84 | They talk about "survival value" (RT: = 'pragmatic'?) of a belief in God, although Atheist says it could be a strong belief in anything, e.g. Communism. | |
| 88-89 | In response to the challenge that God allowing men to have free will contradicts his omnipotence, Catholic argues that it shows more omnipotence to create men with free will than without. | |
| 90 | As in science, we have to take account "the position of the observer" - we are creatures, part of the whole that we are talking about. | |
| Atheist says we are being asked to accept a particular point of view (e.g. First Cause) in order to stop further enquiry (because we are faced with an infinite regress). | ||
| 91 | Does the above lead to the position that we are assuming what we say can't be known? He says "Catholic is saying that our relation to God is such that we cannot know our relation to God". | |
| "Theism is obscure" (Agnostic) - but that doesn't prove it is true or false. (RT: surely it's a 'model'?) | ||
| 92-93 | "Religion is a fact that can't be denied because it has not yet achieved a foolproof philosophical statement." (RT: sure, religion exists, but Buddhism, for one example, does not have a God.) | |
| 93 | Catholic doesn't see how one can practice religion without some theory or theology. (RT: But whose theory?) | |
| 93-94 | Protestant says "God is the giver of all good things", but that has to be "of all things", which has to include the bad things too. Catholic says "they are all good". | |
| 94-95 | They all agree that all the things of this world are in flux, but Catholic says that's because they are 'imperfect' (RT: that doesn't seem necessary to me. Change may be just a feature of how things are.). | |
| 95-98 | This leads on to discussion of chains of causation (e.g. that make the changes), and hence to infinite regress and "First Cause'. | |
| 96 | Agnostic points out that talking about 'existence' of God is not the same as talking about 'characterization' of God | |
| 100 | Catholic claims that the 'universe' is not comprehensible without an 'includer' (RT: infinite regress applied to Frolio's Composition relationship). | |
| 101 | There is the usual hang-up about contingent facts and necessary facts (RT: to me, the 'necessary' lot aren't facts, they are just there to fill the logical structure in a consistent way). | |
| 102-4 | It may be a matter of personal preference about whether infinite regresses need to be resolved. Atheist suggests we can just stop when we want to. | |
| 103 | Catholic: "Scholasticism may be humbug, but ..." | |
| summary | What this discussion doesn't cover includes human psychological and emotional needs, e.g. for explanations, purpose in life, pragmatic working models, even beliefs (whether or not these are illusory or mythological). My impression is of four old academic fogeys round a dinner table in some Australian 'sandstone' university hall. However the original paper was dated 1934! | |
| 5 - | 105 | 'Is Divine Existence Credible' by Norman Kemp Smith (1931) |
| The motivation for this article arose from a statement after an Anglican Lambeth conference: "We are aware of the extent to which the very thought of God seems to be passing away from the minds and hearts of many even in nominally Christian nations". (RT: This strikes me as much more to the point than the previous chapter, and seems still true at the time of writing this.) | ||
| NKS distinguishes "crude-minded types of disbelief" from "more refined questionings". (RT: but I wonder if he considered feelings that belief is irrelevant, or not high priority when we are so busy with other things. In any case, he doesn't address crude-minded disbelief in any serious way) | ||
| 106 | He dismisses some disbelief on the part of those who pick up the religious utterings they were brought up with, but then take only their literal meaning, and over anthropomorphize God (RT: like an up-market Father Christmas? But whose fault is this? Surely religious leaders ought to have 'their fingers on the pulse' of the way lay people live, think and talk?) | |
| He says it's a grave error to pretend that belief in God is easy for those 'on the outside'; it's a maximum, not a minimum sort of belief. | ||
| 107-8 | He disagrees with Tennant who said that only the 'argument to design' is a valid proof of God's existence, and not personal experience. Hume and Kant rejected that argument on logical grounds. | |
| 108-9 | Regarding this argument, NKS says: 1) there's a distinction between artificial and naturally evolving products, which Paley's 'divine watchmaker' argument misses; and 2) we are likening the Designer to a creaturely being who has human features like foresight and planning ability - on p111 he says "God as magnified self" (RT: an up-market civil engineer). "Creator" is a better model than "Designer". | |
| 111-3 | NKS debunks omnipotence, omniscience, eternity and omnipresence as good arguments for believing in God - they have no analogy with one's knowledge of oneself, and they pre-suppose God's existence. | |
| 114 | Hume and Kant recognized that, despite their debunking the argument, many people do experience psychological wonderment about nature - this might provide a drive towards belief. | |
| 115 | Aldous Huxley debunked "Wordsworthian adoration of Nature"; he said that Wordsworth should have been taken to a tropical jungle. AH said "Man has re-created Europe in his own image". | |
| 117 | NKS wonders how data "worthless as evidence of design" can create such an overwhelming impression in some people. However he thinks the Hebrews started earlier with their conception of God, and didn't use the argument to design. | |
| 119 | Having disposed of all the arguments (the other Thomist and Anselm arguments being worse), he concludes that we have to look to direct experience to find a way to belief. | |
| 120 | We only experience the self in relation (or contrast) to other things around us. | |
| 121 | Our conviction of the existence of other selves is based on directly experienced fellowship, not on inference. The same goes for the Divine. | |
| Near the bottom of the page, he proposes a distinction between feeling and emotion. He says feeling (pleasure or pain) is purely subjective, whereas emotion is about some objective situation. Experience of the Divine comes into the emotion category. (RT: I'm not sure I buy this - most pleasure or pain in my experience does relate to something objective - even in the case of vague feelings it usually turns out to relate to some particular thing.) He goes on to make 4 points. | ||
| 121-2 | 1) Experience of the Divine can be numinous, without "isolable and constant accompaniments" (RT: isn't that in his 'feelings' category?) | |
| 122 | 2) Consciousness of the Divine through Nature has been a consistent factor over time (RT: but not as an argument) | |
| 122-3 | 3) Religion is a historically evolving thing, starting with primitive forms. It often arose from men reflecting on what seemed to them wonderful or mysterious. (RT: but what seems mysterious keeps moving on over time, as we learn more of how things happen. Anyhow, NKS's drift here seems like a good argument against one-off revelation and holy books that have to be taken as the literal word of God for all time.) | |
| 123 | 4) Religion, over time, gets caught up with "social exigencies", and hence we get all the various religious traditions (RT: a very good observation, I would say). | |
| 124 | It won't be the developed religious traditions that cause an outsider to have the Divine experience - it has to be a simpler, basic insight. | |
| 124-5 | At the end of the paper, NKS seems to back off the good conclusions he has been leading to, and re-trenches himself into a more traditional laager. Examples: "by the Divine we must at least mean that upon which all things rest" (a tall order for the unbeliever); "Admittedly, power is not the highest of the Divine attributes. None the less it is fundamental". He justifies this on the grounds that otherwise, there would not be enough 'efficacy' to justify looking for the Divine "in the works of Nature and in those of Grace". I (RT) think this is a bit circular, and in any case, he has pulled 'Grace' out of a hat without explaining what he means here. | |
| 125 | He concludes instead "Divine existence is more than credible: it is immediately experienced". The "more than" here seems to fall into Anderson's "hierarchical epistemology" fallacy (see ch 3) - i.e. the implication that it is a "higher" form of reality than we normal folk can understand. And to say that "it is immediately experienced" when the motivation at the beginning of the paper suggests that it is not being experienced by many people - seems to negate the purpose of the whole paper. | |
| 6 - | 127 | 'Birth, Suicide and the Doctrine of Creation: an Exploration of Analogies' by WH Poteat (1959) |
| The general aim, in both this chapter and chapter 11, is to see if we can get any useful meaning out of some religious utterances which, when taken literally, seem contradictory, silly or just "bad science". The particular utterances targeted here are "creation from nothing" (ch 6) and "overcoming death" and "resurrection of the body" (ch 11). | ||
| The device Poteat uses is to distinguish 3 meanings of 'the world': 1) Kant's world of reason (concepts, but content-free); 2) common language, but without the use of 'I' or 'me', i.e. 'observer-independent' language; and 3) the language of 'my world', or 'the world as I see it. However he doesn't make use of the first, treating it as similar to the second. | ||
| 129-30 | He first looks at the notion of man wanting to be God-like (RT: like "I am invincible", or the attitude of some young car drivers?). He quotes Adam and the apple, St Augustine and stealing pears, Camus's Rebel, Dostoyevski's Kirilov, and even e e cummings (the "no capitals and no punctuation" poet). | |
| 133 | He regards suicide as "total destruction of my world" as an (opposite) analogy with "total creation by God of his world". (RT: sounds far-fetched to me). | |
| (RT: Isn't Poteat's idea a bit like a child covering its eyes, thinking that if it can't see, then it can't be seen?) | ||
| Poteat points out that Hamlet's "To be or not to be" is not the same 'verb to be' as in "to be or not to be a doctor (or whatever)". (RT: Hamlet's 'be' sounds like 'exists as far as I am concerned'.) | ||
| 134 | Poteat says it is having the 'sense 3' relation to the world that constitutes, for a Christian, being in the image of God. | |
| 135-7 | He then turns to analyze the expression "I was born", and says that if we think of the date of our birth, that is "a subtle commitment to objectivist language", and does not look beyond the "obstetric event". (RT: I would say though, that using Poteat's analogy, the point where we humans start to think of 'my world', i.e. when we become self-conscious, is not a single point in time, but is a gradual learning process.) | |
| 137 | He suggests that the difference between Fred Hoyle and Genesis is that Hoyle has the same subtle commitment to 'the world' in sense 2. (RT: however, I don't think Genesis as written is any more in sense 3, it is just a "holding myth" because human understanding was less advanced when Genesis was written - probably during the Babylonian captivity.) | |
| 138-9 | He points out that a physicist, a biologist and a psychologist might all give different scientific explanations of how a human develops as a person. | |
| 139 | He says "my body in my world is, as mine, radically discontinuous with this body, the body, etc in the world" (in sense 2). | |
| He doesn't however, claim that his analogy ought to be used. He is just saying that although the doctrine of "creation from nothing" is a queer notion, it isn't maybe totally meaningless. | ||
| summary | I found this idea very difficult to follow, and am not sure what it buys us, especially for today's western citizen. However I would admit that, being someone who is not unmoved by some poetry, that value and meaning are not limited to scientific statements capable of verification (or disproof). I can also be moved by some Bible passages - especially in the King James version - and I am a lover of church music. But I suspect that may be partly due to nostalgia for my childhood. It is surely useful to remind ourselves that our view of 'my world' may not be the same as our view of the '3rd person only' world - even science admits that observation is always relative to the observer. In Frolio, I try to take on board some of the relationships we as 'first person' beings have with the concepts and objects around us. | |
| 7 - | 141 | 'Love as a Perception of Meaning' by JR Jones (1957) - a 'beginning of term' address at the Univ Coll of Swansea . |
| 141-2 | He starts with 1 Corinthians - the 'glass darkly' bit. He comments that, these days, we don't have a sense of 'bafflement' - science has emancipated us from that. But he suggests that science is a 'restricted' outlook. | |
| 142-3 | He introduces (RT: unwisely, maybe?) the ideas of 'Eternity' and the 'view from Eternity'. He doesn't really define it, and it might not mean a lot to many people. He also takes the 'Face to Face' bit from Corinthians with his preferred but undefined meaning. | |
| 143-4 | Wittgenstein said that the usual view of objects is "from the midst of them", whereas the view from Eternity is from outside those objects (this is opposite to Poteat's approach in chs 6 and 11, where he emphasizes the 'my world' view). | |
| 144 | Science is concerned with how the world is, whereas the view from Eternity is 'that it is' (RT: and how about, "why are there any facts?") Jones says "Religion is not concerned with facts, with how the world is". (RT: so why do creationists and others disagree and try to impose religion on science? That seems no better than the reverse.) | |
| 145 | Wittgenstein also said "How the world is is completely indifferent to what is higher". (RT: in a different universe of discourse, maybe - but doesn't 'higher' suggest he has fallen into Anderson's fallacy (see p 70)? | |
| We may sometimes (RT: but some of us may not) "suddenly have what might be described as an awareness of existence ... a feeling of the world as a limited whole." (RT: like Hinduism, I think - I can't see why this feeling has to be of the personal God of traditional western theism.) | ||
| 146 | This all relates to what is often called "the meaning of life". | |
| 147 | Faith is being convinced of what we do not see, in particular "that the world has meaning". Faith is a leap - not a rational belief. | |
| 147-8 | "Genuine faith is so often compounded with a persistently threatening doubt." (RT: presumably, that there is no purpose in life, or the world. But this may not worry some of us.) But if one is bothered by this doubt, one may cling passionately to a belief (RT: not like Sartre!) | |
| 148 | "You cannot leap without passion, without anguish." (RT: maybe the reason that many of us don't leap is because our life is too comfortable.) | |
| Unamuno: "We do not hope because we believe, but rather we believe because we hope". | ||
| 149 | When a thing is loved by us, that's the "closest to seeing it as God sees it" (RT: presumably by definition or assumption - not by deduction). | |
| "We can have love towards all living things, and towards the non-living as well. ... We may or may not like them ... we love them because they exist." | ||
| 150-2 | He uses as an example of this Coleridge's Ancient Mariner - and the 'slimy things' (RT: maybe eels in the Sargasso Sea?) | |
| 152 | "The view of religion as essentially obscurantist and joyless is, therefore, false. ... This is what being happy means - being in agreement with the world." | |
| Wittgenstein: "The world of the happy is a different world from the world of the unhappy". | ||
| Jones: "It isn't that those who live happy are having a happy time"; the world "is still a place of struggle and suffering". | ||
| 152-3 | "Religion has to do fundamentally with ... drawing man out of the burden of pre-occupation with himself." | |
| 153 | Corinthians: "Love beareth all things, suffereth all things". | |
| summary | I certainly prefer Jones' approach to many of the others in this book. No wonder DZP moved to Swansea from Bangor. | |
| 8 - | 155 | 'The Miraculous' by RF Holland (1965) |
| 155-7 | He first factors out those cases where a number of coincidental factors result in a surprisingly good result (from some person's or group's point of view). This might even be referred to as 'luck'. | |
| 157 | "But although a coincidence can be taken religiously as a sign and be called a miracle, ... it cannot without confusion be taken as a sign of divine interference with the natural order." | |
| 157-8 | Holland calls the above the "contingency concept" and goes on to consider the "violation concept", where the reported miracle goes against natural principles that have become established over time; turning water into wine is an example. | |
| 158 | Hume's criterion was to ask which would be more miraculous, the event itself or the possibility that the testimony is false. | |
| 159 | Holland asks "What if we observe the event ourselves?" | |
| 160 | He goes on to contrast natural laws with judicial laws. Are the former prescriptions, or predictions, or just a summary description of what has been observed in the past? | |
| 163-4 | He considers some explanations, like some other force (e.g. magnetism), statistics, and the behaviour of atoms (where quantum theory says there is no exactness). | |
| 167 | He asks "what if the event is empirically certain and conceptually impossible?" (RT: I suppose it depends on how well developed our concepts are.) | |
| 167-9 | He analyzes "turning the water into wine" in more detail - he concludes that it is definitely a "miracle story". | |
| 170 | He concludes: "It is not part of my case that to regard a sequence of events as senseless or miraculous is to construe it as if it were a sort of action, or to see the invisible hand of a super-person at work in it". | |
| summary | I'm not quite sure what his conclusion is. If it's an argument that violation-type miracles do happen, I don't think it's convincing - it's just mythology - a bit like Harry Potter. | |
| 9 - | 171 | 'The Devil' by RG Collingwood (1931) |
| We are coming "more and more to discard the idea of a Devil, and yet the idea is orthodox". | ||
| "Is the disbelief in the Devil only part of that vague optimism, that disinclination to believe in anything evil, that blind conviction of ... the perfection of our civilization, which seems at times to be the chief vice of the modern world?" | ||
| "A world more rudely awakened once more to the conviction that evil is real may come again to believe in a Devil." (RT: he hadn't long to wait - Hitler came to power 2 years later.) | ||
| We confuse Manichaeanism (i.e. God and the Devil are struggling for men's souls) with orthodoxy (RT: like Faust?) | ||
| "The vital question is not 'Does the Devil exist?' but 'What concept have we of the Devil?' " | ||
| 172-4 | The 2 most striking groups of evidence for the existence of the Devil are 'obsessions' and 'visions'. | |
| 175 | "How, it is asked, do we account for the existence of all the world's evil?" Some attribute it to the Devil - because they want to have a First Cause for evil. | |
| He claims that God is not a hypothesis (to the religious mind), and "not a far-fetched explanation of phenomena". "He is about our path and about our bed." | ||
| 176 | "Granted there is a Devil, why do people do what he wants them to do?" | |
| 177 | "To the question 'Why do people do wrong?' the only answer is 'Because they choose to'. ... The will of a person acting determines itself and is not determined by anything outside itself." (RT: but what about people with mental problems?) | |
| "If the Law of Causation (RT: not something I personally accept) is a good servant, it is a bad master." | ||
| "An act of the will is its own cause and its own explanation." (RT: i.e., to blame the Devil for the bad things you do is a cop-out, like blaming drink, anger etc - it's an attempt to deny responsibility.) | ||
| 178 | If it's right that A should have object X, and also right that B should have it, "God cannot will all that is good". | |
| 178-9 | He claims (RT: why?) that "on any given occasion there can only be one duty (RT: I suppose he means religious duty), and if there is a conflict, then one duty must be mistaken. Our 'real' duty is what is good for the whole world (RT: what if we are not sure which is better?) | |
| 179 | If the Devil is the counterpart to God, one can't say similarly that there is only one correct sin (RT: i.e. it's the law of the jungle). | |
| 181 | "Evil, and therefore the Devil, is not a mere negation, not the shadow cast by the light of goodness. Nor is it identical with matter, body, desire or any other single item of quasi-Manichaean antithesis." | |
| 182 | "The immense majority of crimes are done under a kind of self-deception. ... The essence of crime is ... the feeling ... of superiority to convention and vulgar prejudice ... we believe, or persuade ourselves, that (the right opinion) is a mere fiction or convention; and we represent ourselves as rebels and martyrs for a noble cause." | |
| But in some cases, "we admit that it (the crime) is morally wrong ... but hold that it has a value other than, and transcending, that of morality". | ||
| 185 | "It remains that we should regard the Devil as a myth." | |
| 186 | "No such beings (personal minds) need to be postulated to account for human sin. ... The devils within us are our own evil selves." However one man's badness can infect others, and "There may be a kind of unity, a kind of momentary kingdom of evil, when the same devil seizes upon a large number of people and they do in a crowd things which no man would do by himself. ... And such a false ideal may be kept alive for generations." (RT: like Nazi Germany, or vendettas.) | |
| 187 | " 'The Devil' is any given case is simply the person who is sinning." | |
| 188 | "Idolatry, self-worship and devil-worship are one and the same thing; and they are identical with evil in general." | |
| Collingwood then slips back into traditional religious language, saying "God alone exists" (we may not agree) and "The type of all false religion is to believe what we will to believe, instead of what we have ascertained to be true." That puts at least (n-1) of the worshippers mentioned by DZP on page 5 as false believers. Certainly I myself have not found, in traditional religion or elsewhere, anything religious that I have "ascertained to be true". | ||
| 189 | "But God is a person, not a thing; a mind, not an object. We contemplate objects, but do not contemplate persons." (RT: this is said without justification. Some other writers oppose such anthropomorphism, while others go similarly for an I-Thou relationship. But I think a lot of believers and unbelievers would not see this Collingwood's way.) | |
| summary | While the discussion of the Devil is interesting, I don't think Collingwood could ever put himself in the position of a non-believer. His conclusions only make sense for committed - and fairly traditional - Christian believers, who must also have some inclination to think philosophically - but within doctrinaire limits. | |
| 10 - | 191 | 'Moral and Religious Conceptions of Duty' by DZ Phillips (1964) |
| DZP wants to maintain that "duties to God are given, whereas moral duties are not". He also mentions military duties, which - in theory - are also given. | ||
| 193 | In religion, unlike in moral, duty, "in the command to love and forgive one's neighbour, we are not given a limit at which to stop". (RT: but I think Nietzsche would say that maybe Christians go too far). | |
| 193-4 | Moral duties are usually in relation to needs (of a person or group), whereas God does not need our efforts (or us). "God does not have ups and downs." | |
| 195 | "In morality, adherence to certain values often involves a recognition of why those values are important." | |
| 196 | But DZP quotes St John of the Cross who says we ought to become ignorant of all that, in relation to our duties to God (RT: presumably because the duty is simple? But I wouldn't say it was that simple.) | |
| "The above argument which contrasts religious acceptance (of duty) with moral understanding" should be understood as "a corrective, rather than an independent thesis". DZP doesn't want religious language to be a special language cut off from other forms (RT: why do religious people try so hard to do so, then?) | ||
| He also wants to avoid the view that religious concepts can be totally accounted for in moral terms. He quotes Gilbert Murray, who just thought we need a mythology to answer the question why we should be good. | ||
| 197 | In military duties, there is a possibility of challenging orders if there is a higher consideration, but duty to God is the highest possible consideration (RT: by definition, I suppose). | |
| summary | I don't accept this "become ignorant" doctrine - I think we live a better life if we understand why it's good to do good. | |
| 11 - | 199 | 'I Will Die' by WH Poteat (1959) |
| This chapter follows the same idea as in ch 6, but in relation to the doctrine that we will overcome death, and as the Bible says, will all be raised at the last trumpet. This is, for some people - maybe more in the past than now in the west - one source of motivation for behaving morally; i.e. there is the threat of hellfire if we are judged to be one of the 'goats' rather than one of the 'sheep' in the Last Judgment. | ||
| This is in contrast with the existentialist approach, that we must sort out for ourselves the meaning of our life as we proceed towards death. | ||
| 200-1 | Antony Flew asked in 1956 "Can a man witness his own funeral?" and concluded that the suggestion that we survive death is self-contradictory. | |
| 202-7 | Poteat embarks on a curious analysis, saying that 'I' with the verb 'to die' is not "symmetrical" with respect to tense, since it does not make sense to say "I have died". He talks about a "logically extended" concept of death and the pronoun 'I' being a "meta concept". This is partly based on his chapter 5 distinction between 'the world' in sense 2 (3rd person only) and in sense 3 (with 'I' and 'me', and meaning "my world". | |
| 207 | "For myself, I am not in the world as Jones is in the world" (RT: presumably, because it's my world!) | |
| He suggests that "unless Flew is willing altogether to deny himself the privilege of thoughtfully using himself the expression 'I will die', he must involve himself in the use of what I am here calling myth". (RT: I suppose Poteat is claiming that it's just Flew's 'model' | ||
| 207-8 | H says that we all have to "resort to the use of logically extended concepts", and that "it is this pressure which legitimizes - indeed makes inescapable - the language of myth or meta-concepts" if we are to make the eminently sayable phrase "I will die" have any meaning. (RT: but even accepting this, Flew's myth is a lot nearer our current knowledge and experience than the official Christian myth of all being raised at the last trumpet.) | |
| 209 | "It is a dispute between rival eschatologies." (RT: why do we need one of these?) | |
| 210 | He goes on to address the Resurrection specifically; he says "whatever else the Christian may be claiming when tying the logically extended concept of death to the myth of the Resurrection, he is not claiming and could not claim that there is any survival of death". | |
| 211 | It "does not mean that what is beyond in the concept 'I' is a ghostly thing, for 'thing' is itself a concept which can be cashed only in empirical language". | |
| 211-12 | The Christian "will have to use myth.... It would be impossible to invent such a myth. In fact, I have posed the problem in this way because I have started with the myth of the Resurrection of the body as given." (RT: sounds a bit circular?) | |
| 212 | "Let us suppose that the key to this thought is the concept of a relation between man and God which is an I-Thou relation." Later, he says "In an I-Thou relation the distinction between me and my body disappears". | |
| "If someone asks, 'What then is eternal life? ... we reply that these questions cannot be answered in this universe of discourse. There is a more radical break with our common-sense discourse involved." (RT: that would seem beyond most people who think for themselves.) | ||
| 213 | He says "finally, that the Christian myth is fundamentally different from alternative ones and is at least as well grounded". (RT: I don't think many people in the western world today would agree with this.) | |
| summary | As the creator/designer/map drawer of my own imaginary island, Fire Island, the concept of "my world" has some meaning to me. However I do not think that Poteat's line of argument here helps anyone who is not already "on the inside". |
This book contains some good stuff, but some of the approaches seem to play fairly obscure language games (in the sense of the later Wittgenstein). Some of the authors do not seem to have picked up the drift recognized by JAT Robinson in 'Honest to God' - though admittedly, several of the papers pre-date that 'turning point'. The book seems more appropriate for theology students than for philosophical unbelievers, or even those within the church who struggle with the heavy heritage of doctrine and church language.
Index to more highlights of interesting books
Some of these links may be under construction – or re-construction.
This version updated on 7th April 2011
If you have constructive suggestions or comments, please contact the author rogertag@tpg.com.au .