Atheist Reject Liberal Theology by Resorting to Fundamentlaism.

Atheist criticism of modern liberal theology is to theology as Fancis Shaffer's criticism of art is to art.

Recently I find more and more atheists on CARM going on the offensive against liberal theology. Yet since they refuse to read any they don't know anything about it. They base thier understanding of it on Spinoza becuase that's all know about. this refusal to learn about the things they critize is giong to a mainia. On CARM Magritte says:

Since at least Spinoza and the Enlightenment when it became safer (relatively speaking) to directly criticize the Bible and theism, apologetics has been waging a war of redefinition and redrawing of boundaries. Modern "liberal" Christianity now has boundaries that are practically fractal in their infinite detail. Whenever a threat emerges, apologetics swiftly whisks God to safety with rationalization. Boundaries are redrawn, words redefined.

Spinoza is not very important to modern liberal theology. They just think that because he's the only alternative view of God they understand. They think primarily that Spinoza is a pantheist which they are willing to tolerate because they see it as a step toward atheism. This guys sees liberal theology as some kind of refuge that fundamentalism takes when it can't stand up to atheism. That is totally ignorant on many levels:

(1) Spinoza has very little to do with modern theology,t hey are ignorant enough to think if it's not the big man in the sky it must be Spinozian deified nature (Spinoza did not deify nature but they don't bother to learn what he really thought).

(2) Liberal theology is much older than fundamentalism. It definately existed about 300 years before inerrency (19th century). Way before any modern athiesm so trying to see ita s a refuage of failed apologetic is just sheer ignorance.

(3) Fundamentalists hate liberal theology. Liberal theologians are not fundamentalists hiding from atheism they are rarely former fundiese. Most fundies see liberal theology as satan infiltrating the faith to steal away the faithful. Most of them wont go near it. Most liberals see fundamentalism and apologetic is country corn pone hick's ville and they wont go near it!

(3) Calling liberal theology a renationalisation is total stupidity. This complety ignores the rich intelletual tradion that is traced back to Erasmus and the Northern Renaissance.

This atheist assault interprets everything it doesn't understand as "rationalization." Here is his answer to one argument I made.

This sometimes gives a strong whiff of desperation and post hoc thinking. I'll give an example: I was asking Metacrock a while back about why God did not heal amputees. His reply was that limb regrowth would be such a strong indication of God's presence that it would take away our free will as to whether or not to believe. How is one to argue with an opponent who pulls such things out of his keister on the spur of the moment?

This is totally taken out of context. Fist of all that's not even my answer. It's only a small part of my answer and it's argued hypothetically anyway. For a more full understanding of my answer on the amputee thing see my essay God and Amputees and also why wont God heal stupidity? The answer he's talking about is based upon a larger argument that is my answer to theodicy: Soteriolgocal Drama. That's my answer. It's unique to me. He's asserting that it's some srot of arche type for all liberal theology when in reality no liberal theologians even know about it and if they did they probalby wouldn't embrace it. That is idea is unique to me. But then CARM atheists are so ignorant of theology they tend to assume that I'm the only liberal. I went I went to seminary with other people. I'm just sure there were other students in those classes. Someone took those degrees on graduation. I doubt if they canceled commencement just becuase i didn't go. I graudated I just didn't feel like doing the cap and gown thing.

I invite other atheists, deists and agnostics to submit their own examples of this sort of thing. It's been going on for many generations and we should at least do it the dignity of understanding it.

He speaks giving it the dignity of understanding which is ironic becuase he has not giving it that himself. He read any theologians. When one mentioned reading them they say "they just make stuff up." This is stupid, it's just lapin stupid anti-intellectual grab age. If they had the gumption to actually read some they would find out its not just making stuff up but they can't even take the obvious step of doing some basic study. The older example was to charge that liberal theology 'enables' fundamentalism. I don't what these people think they are saing. Do they ever think at all? That's like saying socialists are enabling capitalism. How? By opposing it? That logic suggests that atheism is enabling Christianity. They might as well argue that modern art enables old fashioned realism in art.

In that CARM thread I have to hand it to Humble thinker. He usually blocks with atheists even though he claims to be a Christian, but this time he has a cogent comment:

But I think the question is this: is the "strongest possible case" in question merely post hoc rationalizations in an attempt to make the case stronger or is it a prior held belief that, upon questioning, is presented without the intention of artificially making the case stronger? Hopefully that sentence didn't get too convoluted.

"Lance" another atheist poster reiterates and magnifies the original theme. In so doing illustrates more ignorance:

Doesn't it seem strange to you that as our philosophies and sciences have become more and more sophisticated, he concept of God has been shrinking back and becoming more and more abstract? God's become more and more unfalsifiable, more and more difficult to clearly define and theistic language seems to have become more and more obscure when speaking about him. Did not people used to believe that God wanted all people to have a personal relationship with him, to the point of him preforming miracles in front of crowds of people? God used to make a splash. Now modern theologians have changed his nature such that he's hiding from us, not letting us have any very solid reason for believing he's even there because he doesn't want to make his existence obvious.

He asserts that the concept of God is "shrinking back becoming more abstract" because he defines teh true and proper understanding as the big man in the sky. He does this because he privileges fundamentalist as the truth Christianity even though liberalism is must older. Also becuase like a true fundie he's reading the Bible literally so the metaphor of king and father he sees a literal instruction about the nature of God.Atheist are really fundies. The think the reason they are atheists is because they take the Bible super literally and can't think their way through it. They see any problematic nature as contradiction becuase they can't think, they see answering problems as some form of "giving up." He says God has "become more unfalsifiable." When was God ever falsifiable? That's becuase he has to understand problematic nature of God as grounds to see contradiction and give up the faith. that's what makes him an atheist. So he's really privileging atheism and in the final analysis the whining because they can't reduce liberal theology to their frontal of finding trivial contradictions in the bible.

The question of God's falsifiability is a complex one and deserves a lot more attention then these guys are willing to give it. I've written on the question of God's falsifiability on this blog in the 2007, and also more recently in 2011. Modern theologians have changed it so that God is now hiding form us. This is just sheer ignorance of a group of ideologues who refuse to study their opponents views but reduce them to a set of slogans. Modern liberal theologians deny that God is hidden. When they give answers atheists do not listen. I've repeated Hartshorne's answer many times:

quoting myself from my Thomas Reid argument (no 8 on the god arguemnt list--see page 2)

According to Hartshorne, "[o]nly God can be so universally important that no subject can ever wholly fail or ever have failed to be aware of him (in however dim or unreflective fashion)." Now the issue of why God doesn't hold a "press conference" has do do with the fact that God does not communicate by violating normal causal principles. In process terms, the "communication" of God must be understood as the prehension of God by human beings. A "prehension" is the response of an occasion to the entire past world (both the contiguous past and the remote past.) As God is in every occasion's past actual world, every occasion must "prehend" or take account of God.

It should be noted that "prehension" is a generic mode of perception that does not necessarily entail consciousness or sensory experience. Impervious postings I explained that there a two modes of pure perception --"perception in the mode of causal efficacy" and "perception in the mode of presentational immediacy." If God is present to us, then it is in the presensory perceptual mode of causal efficacy as opposed to the sensory and conscious perceptual mode of presentational immediacy. That is why God is "invisible", i.e. invisible to sense perception. The foundation for experience of God lies in the nonsesnory non-conscious mode of prehension. So now, there is the further question: Why is there variability in our experience of God?. Or, why are some of us atheists, pantheists, theists, etc.? Every prehension has an initial datum derived from God, yet there are a multiplicity of ways in which this datum is prehended from diverse perspectives.

I agreed with Hume that sense perception tells us nothing about efficient causation (or final causation for that matter). Hume was actually presupposing causal efficacy in his attempt to deny it (i.e., in his relating of sense impressions to awareness). Causation could be described as an element of experience, but as Whitehead explains, this experience is not sensory experience. From Hume's own analysis Whitehead derives at least two forms of nonsensory perception: the perception of our own body and the nonsensory perception of one's past.

I will make it more simple than that. Being is hidden. A basic reading of Heidegger will tell us this. God is being itself, the basic hiddenness of being is the hiddenness of God. But being is not hidden it's mere ready-to-hand. This phrase refers to the nature of being that is so familiar we take it for granted and don't notice it. It's like a carpenter who so familiar with his tools that usin them is such second nature he doesn't even have to think about it. Saint Augustine says God is nearer than my inmost being. I used to use a whimsical example: suppose a fish could be scientist and a fishy committee assigns him to find this substance humans talk about, water. He studies every aspect of the world around him and never finds water becuase it never occurs to him he's looking through it.

The Question of Being: Brute Fact or Deep Scturcture

This came up for me on CARM the other day when someone made an argument trying to show God is would have to create brute facts. Ohter atheists chimed in saying God w would be a brute fact.


The meaning of the controversy is the difference between Paul Tillich's view of God as being itself, and the atheist understanding that "the universe just is." Tillich said that if we know that being has depth that it's not just "surface only" then we can't be atheists (Shaking of the Foundations, chapter seven). The atheist understanding has long been their answer to arguments like the cosmological argument. When theists divide up mobes of being into necessary and contingent,the atheist merely says "well what if being just is, it has no meaning or reason for being its' just there?" Of course that's a possibility but it doesn't answer the question, and saying it doesn't make the depth we can see in being go away. What is meant by "depth" of being is that there more to being than just the surface fact of things existing. That's what the concept of "the universe just is" tries to convey, the idea of no reason, not no scientific cause necessarily although they do sometimes try to say that too. These are two totally diametrically opposed understandings. The atheist view says being just is, no reason, nothing to consider or worry about, it's just there for no reason, absurdity. The theists seems more to the nature of being than meets the eye from the surface level. There has to be more to it than just the fact of things existing.

The cosmological argument, for example has different versions, but in generally all CA's assert that there must be final cause to account for the existence of the whole of reality. The atheist's often counter this final cause with an infinite series of contingent causes such as the oscillating universe of big bangs and big crunches. This is called an ICR (infinite causal regression). The atheist asserts that the universe just happens to be for no reason and it's made up of a series of little universes that come in and go out of existence. The whole chain, contingent though it may be (some deny validity of the category "contingent") passes on existence to the next version in the form of a big crunch that then expands avian in another big bang. Some argue that the crunch (contraction of gravitational forces) becomes a blog hole and "punches out" the other side as a new big bang. This is not the only mechanism for ICR. They also posit the notion of quantum tunneling and string membranes. The oscillating universe, however, is the most popular form of ICR becuase it's the only one with proven potential, even though the evidence disproves it (scroll down to (2) Cyclical Universe). As ICR for origin of the universe quantum tunneling invovles self causation where the singularity, or some original element or fragment of reality keeps tunneling back to cause itself at another point in time. This would involve being just having no logical origin but causing itself over and over eternally. String membrane in the sense of ICR is more or less the idea of a floating dimension just drifting along, bashing into another floating dimension and causing a third dimension. Since it posits the idea of a dimension just floating for no reason (2 actually) why bother with the mess? Why not say the universe needs no origin?

There's no absolute proof in any of this. If we want to get technical there's no actual proof that we are even living in a state of "reality." We assume the reality of the world, and thus our ability to study it and formulate hypothesis that "explain it" but if we want to start special pleading about explainations we don't like and just asserting the unproved nature of origins to hedge bets on those we do then we cant' be too picky when the other guy calls our bluff and says "now it's the skeptic's burden of proof." Why? Because presumption is on the side of explainations. Science assumes we need them. No one ever hears a scientist say "we don't need to explain that, let's forget it." The problem is atheists fool themselves. They demand science so much when they need to reach back to philosophy (Kant--the question about brute facts begins with Kant) it's reaching beyond science to philosohpy, which most atheists condemn anyway. There's a loss of credibility there. More importantly, they have already promised explainations then special plead and say "we don't need them in this area." Hey, for religious experiences we need them and they must be naturalistic!

The idea of "the universe just is," in philosophical terms is called a "brute fact." It means there is no reason it' just there. The problem with brute facts is that philosophers usually avoid them excusable they are meaningless, they are provoking and they beg the question. They are not satisfying. As stated, the explainable has been established as the proper procedure for dealing with unknowns, yet in this one reach of the metaphysical nature of being they are willing to just let it go. It's a true case of special pleading. The unsatisfying nature of the brute fact is set off against the basic intuitive sense of being meaning one finds in the question of existence. Meaning is part of the depth of being and we sense the depth of being in even asking the question "where did it all come from?" The issue seems like an arbitrary stand off, either there is a reason or not. Either there is meaning or not. We can't really tell why think there is when the only thing that we can be sure of is the blind random existence of what is? The scietnific evidence does suggest bind random accident and evolution.

The problem is the brute fact in terms of ICR or universal origin is just made up of contingent things. The states of bang and crunch that make up the oscillating universe, for example, consist of constituat parts such as space-time, gravitational field, and naturalistic things. Naturalistic things are contingent. To posit the whole totality of all universal meaning, eternal truth, the nature of all that is upon a meaningless happenstance that just happens to be, while everything else about existence requires explaining and implies something greater than itself (such as truth) creates a state of dissatisfaction. If we are disatisfied metpahyically we have the right to question that state. ICR and brute facts don't answer the questions we ask. The atheist is content to lose the phenomena and pretend there is no meaning and no answers but in so doing is no better off or no more intellectually justified than the faithful making excuses about "no one knows the mind of God." There is a deciding factor or two and they are a prori part of the basic fabric of the question. There's an aspect to the nature of the contingent happenstance that makes up the brute fact of existence that suggests depth of being in a greater sense.

The eternal and necessary nature being suggests the distinction between being as a brute fact and being as depth. The very mechanism the atheist seeks to ply aging final cause is the disproof of the brutish nature of fact. To explain this I must explain the difference in my CA and that of others. For example the Kalam argument is a version of the CA. This says anything that beings to exist needs a cause. That argument, therefore, turns upon the nature cause. Thus arguments about Kalam revolve around efficient cause in nature, and thus ICR (if allowed to stand) is a valid answer. ICR contains cause even though it means an endless series of meaningless cause the whole of which cannot be explained, our own particular universe has its cause then in the previous big crutch and it's blowing back out as a big bang. My version of the CA, however, the Argument from Cosmological Necessity doesn't turn upon causes but upon attributes of God. The argument turns upon demonstrating that the attributes that make up the God concept already exist and are known to us as aspects of reality, thus it's just a matter of understanding their relation to being we can see that they spell out something deep inherent meaning in being that disproves brute fact. After all if being has a deep inherent meaning it can't be a brute fact, that is a prori truth. The deciding factor is the eternal nature of being. There is another version of the argument that turns upon the eternal nature of being.

The reason it's not a moot stand off between the two concepts is because the ICR itself has to be eternal. the individual aspects of the regression that move from one universe to another are contingent and temporal, but the whole string in so far as it must stretch back eternally is both eternal and infinite. Both states evoke the sense of the numinous. That means it's a fit object of worship because anything that evokes the sense of the numinous is a fit object of worship since that state is the very reason religion exists in the firs place. That's what worship is, its the nature being moved by the sense that there is something profound and special in being. The atheist protest that "the universe just happens to be" is self negating becuase it's eternal and infinite nature suggest the quality of the numinous and are thus more in and of themselves than they perpetual to be. That in itself is depth of being. In seeking to posit the whole they actually must suggest something that triggers religious devotion and thus prove the depth nature of being.

Atheists logically should have to support the concept the universe moving from a state of absolute nothing. This is because the ICR just moves the problem back eternally but never really confronts the issue of origins anyway. Since the atheists affirm the idea of brute fact, meaningless accident, irrational existence, and so on they should actually just take their lumps in abandoning ratinoal explanations. This is not all there, however, the issue is not a done deal. We can't just leap from eternal being triggers the sense of the numinous to "therefore God is real." We have to deal with the other attitudes. Even though they all actually flow out of the eternal nature of being, necessity is the more independent one of the lot. The attrubites I emphasis are:

Eternal
necessary
ground of being
first cause

I am also challenged by atheists constantly to include "consciousness" or "personal being." There is no necessity in theology to assume God is personal. Even though I do assume so that is not a priamry quality because other things are personal as well. I'm concerned with the qualitaties that make God God and that God can't share with anything else. Whatever is eternal is by definition necessary (at least ontologically so) because it's not dependent and can't cease to exist. Nothing else really is necessary in the sense that God is (totally, no nature as the effect of a prior cause), so these are primary qualities. If there is eternal necessary being then by definition it is the ground of being. That would only be logical to assume that it is the first cause since nothing else is on a par with it ti would be the best candidate to assume that all else has it's origin in that which is eternal and necessary.

That brings us to the issue of necessity. This is a very important issue because the whole about ICR includes a large part about necessity vs. contingency. That will be discussed on Monday.

Argument from the Sublime: Good is Sublmie and Evil is a Fall

 


 As I watched tv late the other night I saw one of those Christian stations where they show scenes of nature and play chruch music and you just sit there memorized by the beauty. Then they had a commentary by a guy I like named Paul Williams (not the short blond pudgy song writer of the 70s). This would be the worship network's own Paul Williams. About the only Christian Television I watch, those 'creation spaces.' Williams is about the only Christian talking head I like listening to on Christian tv. He had a little thing about the beauty of nature point beyond themselves to some greater reality because he feels there must be "someone to thank for it all." This reminded me of a God argument on my list I rarely use, no. 9 "argument from the sublime." My argument is a lot more sophisticated than Williams little one liner, but basically hints at the same idea. I was also reminded it of it's corollary and wondered if I could answer it. The corollary: The ugly evil horrible things in nature must also point beyond themselves. Do we also have God to thank for the bad things? If so how do we square that with Christian theology, and if not, why not? The myth of the fall? That opens another can of worms, in the from of "why wold God allow he fall." These are of course perinial questions I've known them all my life, I don't imagine I've solved them and I'm sure they will be around as long as humanity is around.


The other Paul Williams

 The answer that I would tentatively take to the question of the fall must be understood against the background of my argument from sublime. It's ot argument from beauty per se but form the sublime which is somewhat different. The sublime can be either beautiful or terrible, horrible, ugly, monsters, catastrophic. Sublime does not mean "good." It means something beyond, far beyond our understanding or our limits. In the sense of the "terrible sublime" 9/11 was sublime. The Holocaust was sublime. These things totally transcend our limits, our capacity to understand and the framework we keep for the real. The good and the beautiful can surely be sublime as well. the Sunset is  the beautiful sublime, Mother Teresa is the good sublime. To that extent the sublime itself sort of answers the issue of can we infer from evil that we have one to thank for that too? Of course there is always the answer that yes we do have one to blame for evil but it's not God.  On the other hand since this will lead to the issue "isn't God more powerful why couldn't he stop satan," then we can't really just stop there. We need a transcendent overall answer that incorporates the whole.

The answer is, tentatively, that the sublime, being either beautiful or terrible points to a reality beyond the natural, the mundane. It points to a meaning beyond the world and beyond itself, beyond the things that make up the sublime of the moment. We get a sense of the overall profound nature of being and the ground and depth of being. We don't necessarily have a theological answer all wrapped up and ready to go but we can infer one. The sublime is not in itself a fall but evil is. That is to say, evil can surely be sublime, such as the Holocaust, but the evil aspects are not the same kind of thing that the good aspects of subliminal are, they are a fall from the good. How do we know they are a fall? Consider the creative and giving nature of being, love, the good. These are aspects that go together. Goodness is creative it's building it's not destructive, healing is not destroying. There's a sense in which destroying is part of work of healing and building, but in that sense it's not the evil aspects of destruction. The evil aspect is it's pointless non creative part of destruction, such as the Holocaust or 9/11.

Being, in itself the basic thing that it is to be is not to cease being not to destroy or take away but a positive force of being there, a standing firm a sense of giving. Being creates more being. Weather biological organizers, viruses, germs, evolution all the basic forces that enable prolongation of life are also creative of life. Being is giving out and leads to more being. Evil is a falling away from this standpoint of being there and healing and building and giving. Evil is a pointless taking away, destruction. Thus evil is a departure form the original, a falling away from the basic footing of the good or of being. Evil moves toward non being. Evil destructive, it creates no being, it is moving toward a loss of being. Thus the evil aspects have an element that is more than just the terrible sublime but also the pointless falling away form the sublime. That means we resisting tagging God with the responsibility for evil. Evil is moving in a direction away form God and from what God is and God does. Evil is a falling away.

St. Augustine said evil is the absence of the good. Evil is not a valid thing or a positive force is the absence of something. Like atheism is the absence of a belief, evil is the absence of the good. It's a falling away. It's not something God does it's something moves away form God. It's the putting away of God's love and God's presence and being without God. Evil is the absence of God. Now I will present my argument form the sublime and then tie it all up at the end. 





Argument from The Sublime.

A. Aesthetic and Sublime clues to transcendence.

It always used to sound so stupid to me when people would say "O, look at the beautiful sun set, how can people deny that there's a God? (my Mother used to say that). Than after becoming a Christian I saw a really great sunset one day, the sky decked out in orange, pink, Gold, peach, cobalt, cerillian, and all punctuated by the most delicate suffering strips. It suddenly occurred to me why anyone would think that. Because we are the type of beings that are capable of appreciating beauty. It is not merely that aesthetic apprehension is beyond the ability of a dead random universe to produce, but that it spurs us to consider higher things. We realize from the appreciation of these things, art, music, poetry, literature, nature, that there is a realm of the sublime which transcends the mundane world of reductionism. I don't necessarily mean a supernatural realm--it could be a "realm" of our emergent qualities. But the fact that we can appreicate these things indicates that there is more to reality than merely the realm of science, technology, and the that to which reality is reduced by technocratic natrualists who can't appreciate higher possbilities.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

"Sublime" refers to an aesthetic value in which the primary factor is the presence or suggestion of transcendent vastness or greatness, as of power, heroism, extent in space or time. It differs from greatness or grandeur in that these are as such capable of being completely grasped or measured. By contrast, the sublime, while in one aspect apprehended and grasped as a whole, is felt as transcending our normal standards of measurement or achievement. Two elements are emphasized in varying degree by different writers, and probably varying in different observers: (1) a certain baffling of our faculty with feeling of limitation akin to awe and veneration; (2) a stimulation of our abilities and elevation of the self in sympathy with its object.

That all people, given the right exposure, can appreciate the sublime, beauty in nature and art, in such a way as to seek some realm beyond that of the mudane physical is a direct implication that something more exists to be found. While this is not a proof of God in and of itself, it might be logica to infur from this sense of transcendence that reality is more than just the physical realm, and therefore, even though this is a highly subjective notion, if one finds that God satisfies this urge best of all, than God is probably the object of our longings for the sublime.

Peter Suber's Infinite Reflections
All college address at ST. John's College in Oct. 96
published St John's Review XLIV 2 (1998) 1-59
The Sublimity of the Infinite

"I am profoundly grateful that understanding infinity does not deprive it of its majesty. If the infinite were only interesting because of the paradoxes it generates, and the absorbing academic issues raised by the need to resolve them, then it would not be studied any more than self-reference, a prolific but more pedestrian engine of paradox. But the infinite is also majestic, one might say infinitely majestic."

"An hour under a clear sky at night, looking up, gives some sense of this. The depth of space is a wild blue yonder, not a true, perceived infinity.[Note 34] But it inspires contemplation of the true infinite, and the slightest brush with that idea is breath-taking, invigorating, expanding, lifting, calming, but also agitating, alluring, but also distant and magnificently indifferent. One reason to study mathematics is that you can get these feelings in broad daylight or indoors."

"There are many ways to become precise about these feelings, and many ways to praise and honor the infinite. I'd like to use Kant's term: it is sublime."[Note 35]

Peter Suber's Infinite Reflections
All college address at ST. John's College in Oct. 96
published St John's Review XLIV 2 (1998) 1-59

"Just for comparison, Cantor had a different set of numinous feelings about the infinite. He was not only a great mathematician, but a very religious man and by some standards a mystic. Yet his mysticism was supported by his mathematics, which to him was at least as strong an argument for the mathematics as for the mysticism.[Note 36] Apart from claiming divine inspiration for his work, we don't know exactly what spiritual views he linked to his mathematics, but his theorems[Note 37] give support to the following. Measured in meters, we are tiny specks compared to the universe at large. But measured in dimensionless points, we are as large as the universe: a proper subset, but one with the same cardinality as the whole. Similarly, measured in meters, we may be off in a corner of the universe. But measured in points, the distance is equally great in all directions, whether universe is finite or infinite; that puts us in the center, wherever we are. Measured in days, our lives are insignificant hiccups in the expanse of past and future time. But measured in points of time, our lives are as long as universe is old. We are as small as we seem, but simultaneously, by a most reasonable measure, co-extensive with the totality of being in both space and time. This is truly (as Blake put it) "[t]o see the world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour."[Note 38]

B. How do we get from the Sublime to God?

The first step is realizing we are the kind of beings who can appreciate the sublime. This appreiciation, though culturally bound, and though it is an aquired taste, stems form our basic nature as personally aware centers of consciousness. This is espeicially true in the way that art makes us think of transcendence. Why should the cold universe be able to produce centers of conscious awareness from dead matter? The structure for awareness must exist in the universe, and since the object of our awareness seems to be a longing for the sublime we can infurr that the answers lies in the sublime, in God.

 Sublime as Co-determinate of Transcendent Reality.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philsophy
James McCosh writting of Archibold Alison's theories
on the Sublime

"The conclusion, therefore, in which I wish to rest is, that the beauty and sublimity which is felt in the various appearances of matter are finally to be ascribed to their expression of mind; or to their being, either directly or indirectly, the signs of those qualities of mind, which are fitted, by the constitution of our nature, to affect us with pleasing or interesting emotion." There is a singular mixture of truth and error in this statement: truth, in tracing all beauty and sublimity to the expression of mind; but error, in placing it in qualities which raise emotion according to our constitution. Beauty, and sublimity are not the same as the true and the good; but they are the expression and the signs of the true and the good, suggested by the objects that evidently participate in them." {316}

 God is co-determinate of Transcendence.

If there is a higher reality there must be something real about it. To transcend the world is to obtain something of some higher realm. But an empty higher realm is meaningless. Since we are the kind of beings who can percieve the trasncendent we must have been created in such as way that we are capable of understanding the transcendent. If beauty is a sign of the good than the sublime must be a sign of the source of the good. Since we are personally conscious beings capable of reading the transcendent in a sunset we must have been created by a conscious being who is cabable of putting it there.

C) Objection answered.

All The basic objections deal with reducing the phenominon to some naturalistic explaination and naturalizing it.

1) Fear , Terror and beauty.

The skeptic might argue that the sublime is merely the resut of feeling overwhealed by the huge or awed by the beautiful and is therefore merely a stemulous response.

Internet Encyclopedia of Philsophy

http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/s/sublime.htm

"The element of magnitude in beauty was noted by Aristotle, and given by him a prominent place in tragedy. But the earliest extant determination of the sublime as a distinct conception is in the treatise ascribed to Longinus, but now supposed to be of earlier date (first century C.E.). In modern philosophy, it was given special prominence by Edmund Burke in his Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful (1756) and Henry Home in his Elements of Criticism who sought a psychological and physiological explanation. According to Burke, it is caused by a "mode of terror or pain," and is contrasted with the beautiful (rather than being part of the beautiful). Kant also distinguished it as a separate category form beauty, making it apply properly only to the mind, not to the object, and giving it a peculiar moral effect in opposing "the interests of sense." He distinguished a mathematical sublime of extension in space or time, and a dynamic of power. Most subsequent writers on aesthetics tend to bring the sublime within the beautiful in the broader sense insofar as its aesthetic quality is closely related to that of beauty."

a) Can view sublime in saftey.

Suber:

"As long as we are physically safe when viewing the sublime immensity, Kant argues, it helps us know our moral dignity and nonphysical invulnerability undiminished, even accentuated, by our forceful acknowledgment of our physical smallness and frailty."[Note 42]

b) Can't be reduced to any one of these elments.

  Clearlythe sublime is not reducible to just fear, terror, or beauty. If so, why would these three (really two) very different things bring on the same response? And again this is missing the mark. The real question is why are we the sort of beings who can experience this sense? Animals in nature navigate to a large extent by pattern recognition. We should not be surprised to find that we did evolve a sense of the sublime, we are after all physical creates and we evolved. On the other hand why would be evolve such a highhanded sense of it? And moreover, since it is not reducible to any one of these things, but may be triggered by them (as well as by mathematics and abstractions) than it is transcendent in itself beyond any of these reductionist accounts.

2) Pattern recognition.

Of course the reductionists will tell us that beauty and aesthetics began as some form of communication, it helped us determine who to mate with and how to avoid posion berries or something. To take that line is merely silly. It simpley reduces these things to less than they are. If we catch a glipse of the sublime we do understand that "something is afoot in the universe" (uh, Godwise).

a) Not reduceable to immensity or beauty.

The Recognition of certain states of being, or tensions produced by being dwarfed in immensity bring on the sublime.
Peter Suber's Infinite Reflections
All college address at ST. John's College in Oct. 96
published St John's Review XLIV 2 (1998) 1-59

"Kant's theory of the sublime does not rest on these Cantorian theorems. His chief thesis for our purposes is that, "That is sublime in comparison with which everything else is small."[Note 39] Clearly the infinitely large is a perfect fit for this definition.[Note 40]

"The sublime is not an easy notion, and the best approach to it may be via negativa, showing how it differs from something familiar, the beautiful. Sticking only to those differences which bear most on the sublimity of the infinite, Kant says that the beautiful concerns a bounded object while the sublime object can be unbounded; the beautiful is compatible with charms while the sublime is not; the beautiful attracts the mind while the sublime both attracts and repels it; and the beautiful "seems as it were predetermined for our power of judgment" while the sublime is "incommensurate with our power of exhibition, and as it were violent to our imagination, and yet we judge it all the more sublime for that."[Note 41]

"The infinitely large meets these criteria almost by design. The infinitely large is unbounded, incommensurate with our powers of imagination, and to engage and satisfy us it no more needs charm than spring water needs sugar. It is so large that some of its proper subsets are just as large, a property shared by no finite magnitude."

"What triggers the feeling of the sublime most is immensity. Immensity in turn makes us feel a tension between two aspects of ourselves. On the one hand it makes us feel the inadequacy of our senses and imagination. On the other it makes us feel that there is more to us than senses and imagination, whose adequacy cannot be brought into question by immensity, no matter how spectacular or infinite. This second dimension of ourselves is not conception but moral vocation. While physically the immensity dwarfs us into insignificance, this very fact highlights that within us which is not dwarfed.
The Internet Encyclopedia of Philsophy James McCosh writting of Archibold Alison's theories
on the Sublime


"But there is a higher element than all this in beauty; an element seen by Plato and by those who have so far caught his spirit,-- such as, Augustine, Cousin, MacVicar, and Ruskin, but commonly overlooked by men of science and the upholders {315} of the association theory. The mere sensations or perceptions called forth by the presence of harmonious sounds, colors, and proportional forms, is not the main ingredient in the lovely and the grand. Beauty, after all, lies essentially in the ideas evoked. I hold by an association theory on this subject. But the ideas entitled to be called aesthetic should be of mind, and the higher forms of mind, intellectual and moral. There was, therefore, grand truth in the speculation of Plato, that beauty consists in the bounding of the waste, in the formation of order out of chaos; or, in other words, in harmony and proportion. There was truth in the theory of Augustine, that beauty consists ill order and design; and in that of Hutcheson, that it consists in unity with variety. Alison had, at times, a glimpse of this truth, but then lost sight of it. He speaks with favor of the doctrine held by Reid, that matter is not beautiful in itself, but derives its beauty from the expression of mind; he holds it true, so far as the qualities of matter are immediate signs of the powers or capacities of mind, and in so far as they are signs of those affections or dispositions of mind which we love, or with which we are formed to sympathize. He thus sums up his views: "

b) Therefore, not reduceable to patterns.

"The idea in the pattern recognition argument is that patterns that trigger the sense of the sublime key us in to the feelings of fear or beauty that we have experinced in the past and almost hypnotically cerate the sense of awe. Nevertheless the concept is comlpex and cannot be reduced to merely a sring of patterns. This argument makes sense in thinking of music or visual effects, but form the sense of aloneness in nature or the night sky we are reaction to more than juat pattern recognition. IT can also affect us with new pattterns or with non -physical phenomena such as mathematics."

3) Chemical determinism.

a) Functionalist can't make good on their claims.

The brain/mind reductionists that try to say that consciousness is nothing more than chemicals in the brain (brain function) are simpley missing the point. Here is a long (I mean really long long long) boring dry but excellently scientific article showing that these guys are no where near figuring out what consciousness is, and that the complexity of the brain is still so vast we can look in wonderment at the sunset and dream of trasncendent possibilities, and commune with nature and sense God's reality without fear that we are nothing more than an accidently produced batch of neurons chemicals. Lantz Miller (who is not a Christian and it not a religious article) The Hard Sell of Human Consciousness (part I).
(See also the answers below on Consciousness argument which draw upon Miller's work)

b) Reduction loses phenomena.

To reduce the sublime to mere chemical determinism or brian functionalism loses the phenomena. When we try to analyze or disect the sublime we lose the charictoristics that trigger it. These attempts merely ignore what is being experienced.

4) Evolutionary function.

One of the major arguments is that we appreciate beauty as an evolutionary function so that we will seek out the better mates and have good genes. But this is super reductionism that ignores all kinds of phenomena. I do not get horny looking at sunset s or studying set theory, I do sense the sublime on those occassions. The sublime is a value added proposition and there is basically no reason for it in evolution.

More on Wednesday.