Is Love Just a Little Feeling from Chrmiclas in Your Head?

 


This is an exchange I had with an atheist on CARM. I don't even remember the context that prompted it, but it brings up two issues that I think are very important. The first one deals with the near universal atheist acceptance of reductionism and how they truncate reality by reducing ideals such as love and justice to mere momentary feelings, which they dis-value as the result of chemicals and nothing more. The second issue deals with a notion I see more and more, the reduction of concepts to the realm of the un-real. Both of these are extremely important issues because they amount to nothing more than gimmicks, yet I see atheists trading on them all the time as ways of disparaging belief.

(1) feelings are bad, they are subjective, according to most atheists, they are only the result of chemicals in the head, they have no further use or value beyond this.

(2) concepts are always unreal, God is a concept, thus God is unreal (this gimmicky "argument" pulled by "Big Thinker" on CARM incessantly. No matter how many times one disproves it he's always bringing it up again.

So in argument with a particular atheist the issue of love came up. Is it a feeling or is there something more important and wider than just the feelings and physical response that go with the notion of "love?" I say there's a concept to it which of course he says means it's not real.

Below I said to him (in blue) "no it's not' meaning "no love is not just a feeling." Love is more than just the racing heart beat and butterfly stomach of momentary infatuation, in fact love is much more than just romantic infatuation; there are different kinds of love but they all revolve around the idea of the will to the good of the other (agope, the highest form of love).

He says it's just a reaction to chemicals firing across the synapse.


Originally Posted by Metacrock View Post
no it is not. It's not a feeling at all. It's a concept, the will to the good of the other. The feeling is something that comes with it and reinforces it.

Of course it's a concept. Everything is. But it's not "the will to the good of the other". That's something you have decided to attach to it. And please don't drag out some nonsense like "Oh, so you don't want good things for those you love?"

Meta:

you are reducing it to little butterfly feeling that's not really even the thing itself. Those are the results of love not love itself. It's a concept.

In saying that this is a concept I've added to love, he's also adding something to it. He's assuming that certain physiological responses typify the term "love" which means he's using a concept to designate a stimulus response, and he is no less evoking a conceptual understanding of a set of responses than am I.


Atheist:

The feeling is love - whatever else comes with that (and, of course, that varies wildly from person to person) is not love - it's a consequence of it for that particular person.

The idea doesn't come with the feeling, how could it? the feel is a consequence of the concept. That's like saying feeling good about voting is all there is to democracy.



Quote Originally Posted by Metacrock View Post
obviously it would. you can't just have chemicals promoting a feeling and also have that backing up an idea. There is no such thing as innate ideas.

Atheist:

Who said anything about innate ideas? We are talking about an emotion - love. One which is caused by certain chemical reactions in the brain. That feeling existed before we put the label 'love' on it.

The reason I brought up Innate ideas is becuase we are both attacking a term to a set of stimulus responses. He is limited the set to just certain physiological responses that go with romantic or ludic stimuli while I am taking in a large use that has often been made of the limited English term, "love." He's limited the use of the term in order to cut off the wider concept because that would disprove the propagandist notion that love is nothing more than this little narrow range of physical feeling. His view still henges upon the very thing he says mine henges upon, attaching a term to set of feelings.

Innate idea come in to it because for thousands of years people have been using concepts to describes things they feel that are deeper than just this one little set of ideological responses. Al the conceptual talk that goes with the idea of love (such as "will to the good of the other," agope, koinonia and the like) are descriptions of things people feel. If they weren't feelings that refer to a broader conception there would not be such elaboration on this one concept. To say that it's just chemicals is like saying the concepts that go with it must be innate because they too are suggested by the chemicals.

My position is that love is not just a feeling its an emotion. There's more depth to emotion than just a little momentary feeling. He's arguing that if you attack a broader concept to it then you are just making up a bunch of stuff becuase it's not confined this the narrow range. His view just arbitrarily cuts off most of the what had histrionically been used for. This is done for ideological reasons:

No you have reduced the meaning of emotion:

(1) atheist are scared to death of feelings
(2) anything involving feelings must be discredited by atheist
(3) you reduce love to just a feeling because if you did not it would destroy your world view.
(4) you are dogmatically asserting that the feeling is the thing itself and the word is made up to describe the feeling. that's arbitrary.

that is proved by the fact that other languages have different words for different kinds of love. English doesn't' have that. Greeks were highly educated, the Anglo Saxons were barbarian. The Anglo Saxon's stopped with the feeling,the Greek cataloged all the related phenomena.

Quote Originally Posted by Metacrock View Post
then you don't have argument against religious experience. so religious experience is a chemically induced feeling about something real. what's the problem?

Atheist

Did you actually read what I wrote? I have no problem at all with religious experience in as much as it is a chemically induced feeling. The problem comes up with someone claims that the cause for that religious experience is external - that is, that it is a chemically induced feeling about something real. That you cannot evidence.

The fact of the feelings in relation to the concepts, and the effect of religious experience upon that process, such that one's life is transformed in valuable ways across the board, is the proof that it has to be external. If not you have to accept that it's innate ideas, which against are supposed to be impossible so that would indicate some higher origin. As a direct result of religoius experiencing the person doing the experiencing senses undifferentiated unity, or an all pervasive sense of love (and in that feeling of "love" there is a grander and broader and deeper correspondence to concepts such as "will to the good of the other" than in any other kind of set of feelings to which we attach the term "love).


The effects found by two of the major studies include:

Long-Term Effects

Wuthnow's Sutdy:

*Say their lives are more meaningful,
*think about meaning and purpose
*Know what purpose of life is
Meditate more
*Score higher on self-rated personal talents and capabilities
*Less likely to value material possessions, high pay, job security, fame, and having lots of friends
*Greater value on work for social change, solving social problems, helping needy
*Reflective, inner-directed, self-aware, self-confident life style

Noble's study:

*Experience more productive of psychological health than illness
*Less authoritarian and dogmatic
*More assertive, imaginative, self-sufficient
*intelligent, relaxed
*High ego strength,
*relationships, symbolization, values,
*integration, allocentrism,
*psychological maturity,
*self-acceptance, self-worth,
*autonomy, authenticity, need for solitude,
*increased love and compassion

The reason for assuming it's an external cause is that these effects are in direct correlation to a sense of presence that the expericer citified as "God" or "higher power" most of the time. One of the most common effects is that the experience is drawn into religious belief, either first time or a deeper sense of commitment, as a result of the experience. This is all in relation to the correlation bewteen sense of presence and the all pervasive sense of love, which the person experiencing identities with the broader concepts not with just the little truckled set of physiological response.

The atheist gimmick would be to say concepts are about unreal ideas in the mind. Yet concepts are about anything. Everything we think is a concept. I have a concept of the world around me. I have concepts of millions of real things all the time. You hae two things working there, the concept and the referent that it is a concept of. Some referents are only in the mind, like Superman. Some referents are real, like the world around me. All concepts are in relation to their referents. Being a concept in no way means the referent is unreal. So the the referent of the concept of Love includes but is not limited to the little set of physiological feelings, but also the deep and broader senses that are attached to the various words that English reduces to the one word "love."


the Greeks even had about several words for different kinds.


eros--the desire to have sex (simiar to ludos)
koinonia--comradeship
phileo--brotherhood
agope--the will to the good of the other.

All of those are both feelings and concepts. I have a concept of willing the good of the other, but I also feel a sense of the rightness of this. The strong feelings I have for it reinforce the idea that it's right enable me to be committed to it. It's not less just becasue I can put it into words. The words are probable inadequate to give full justice to what is being felt.

If we look though the literature of the world we find vast amounts of evidence for this idea. In Huckleberry Finn when he decides slavery is wrong and feels it deeply enough to say "Ok I'll go to hell then." He's willing to go to hell for the rightness of freeing slaves, and he knows it's true, but he feels it. There the concept is correlated with a physical feeling in connection with it. The feeling backs up the concept. Its' not just an "illusion" brought of my physiology it's concept that he knows is right by the concept of the concept.

We see this reflected all the time in literature around the world, complex idea accompany deep feelings and we call them "emotions." In reducing concepts to feelings and then dis-valuing feelings the atheist reductionists are merely truncating reality and setting up a situation where your world view so automatically privileged and the data that disproves it is lost.

The concept of agope, sometimes translated "charity," although that's inadequate, or "God's love," is not only a Christian concept but had a currency in Greek culture. It is defined by Tillich as the willingness to according the other the basic human dignity due him/her. That requries a complex and compound conceptual referent. Not only does it involve the idea of "good of the other" but also the concept of "human dignity." The reductionist says "you are just sticking a bunch of things on this simple set of physiological responses." Of cousre truncating it in that way takes away the concepts which are felt in themselves. One can have passionate feelings about the good of the other, and about willing the good, about human dignity and according it to people who are being denied it.

I have always sensed that the feelings I feel when responding to something like civil rights workers singing "we shall over come" are must different kind of feeling than a response to the stimulus of a beautiful woman, and I consciously understand that they are and can feel that depth in the feelings at the moment. These are not the same feelings. When thinking of the term "love" in the broader context of agope I clearly sense the connection. There is something in that amalgum of feelings I have about political committment to ideals I care about that I can easily term "love." Che Guevara said Marxism is a strange kind of love, not for gleaming steel factories but for people.

Dave uncovers the secret behind belief in God.

My Friend Dave comes back with more challenges. I think he's taking the cynical view. Actually my title was a tease becasue he is not exposing belief in God per se, just belief in the sort of God fundamentalist and I talk about.

Dave:

Ironically, my whole point was that only the personified image of God was an amplified notion of humanity, but in any case, based on what you've written over the years, I can't help but see this as part of a larger pattern. It's as if you really just want to believe in a loving old man in the sky who personally hears you and takes care of you, God as an individual, a person.

The thing that's so unfair about this observation, and perhaps most unfair becuase it has truth to it, is that it's natural for humans to want to find reflections of their parents in the divine. The association between God and father, mother, grand parents, is as old as belief in God and it's probably no coincidence. How natural to associate the center of the center of love, care, concern, protection, acceptance, with these loving giants who held you close to themw hen you were small. There's the deep dark secret behind beilef in God: It's based upon the need for a father and love of parents. Of course I had parents. The fact that I loved and needed them didn't make the myths, they were real. It doesn't make God a myth, not even a conscious self God, just becuase we need him. If that sense of need get's mixed up with other bases for belief, such as rational conjecture and possible answers, that's just a hazard of being human. It doesn't make God be unreal just because we might confuse our love and need of parents with God. Nor does it mean that God is not conscious or self aware.

What bothers me is that Dave, usually one of my most intelligent friends whom I have always respected for him intellect, seems not to understand something very basic. He seems to be overlooking the full range of what I have espoused for years just becuase he spots one pattern.I had really wonderful parents and really wonderful grandmother. I loved them very much and they loved me and they were the closet thing to the Cleavers not on television in the early 60s. It just makes sense, especially after caring for them as they died for three years (which basically destroyed my life) that I would want to continue some slight connection between God and parental love. Even that doesn't disprove God's personal nature. I have ratioanl reasons for holding in addition psychological ones. Now if Dave wants to psychological everyone who opposses him I hope he's prepared to demonstrate that his desire to deny God self awareness isn't based upon his own psychological needs. It's a variant of the genetic fallacy to think that we have disproved an idea merely becuase we expose a psychological nerve in someone's motive for holding. In thinking of the full range of my God concept the self aware aspect is only a small but, I'll get that latter.

Yet you realize that this image is culturally and psychologically constructed and too simplistic to be the grand and mysterious higher power worthy of the idea of God. Thus the appeal of a God that is beyond words and concepts, a God that is immune from simply being labeled as a human projection and all of the criticism that invites.

I don't have an appeal for a mystical God. I had an experience of the thing, whatever it is, beyond understanding. I had an experience of God that fits the description of the mystics. I never said "I think I'll support this mystical God because it suits my fancy," I experienced the erality of such a God, or object of ultimat concern or whatever you wish to call it. Again, he's making the same genetic fallacy. This is where the idea comes form (some psychological thing that goes along with the idea) so that must disprove the idea. It doesn't disprove it,it only means that why we like it. He's not even dealing with my real concept of God. In fact it might just be his own allure for the mystical that he's talking about.

It's like the philosophical material is a cover, a way to convince others or perhaps yourself that it's OK to believe in the God you really want to believe in, if only you can just juggle enough concepts and arguments at once and make it all fit together. Any criticism is deflected by switching back to the argument that the personified individual God you talk about is really just a convenient shorthand. When that is called into question, you become very upset and abandon logic or philosophy for claims that your faith is being attacked.

I don't actually believe in God because I sat down one day and said "what kind of God do I want to believe in?" I experienced stuff I said "wow God is neat." The woman who led me to the Lord, Judy, used to say that was one of God's major attributes right after Omnipotent, omniscient, and
omnipresent, he's "neat." It was a few years before I read Evelyn Underhill and said "wow, that really what I experienced that time and what I feel when I pray." If Dave wants to be cynical and believe he's uncovered some deep dark sense I have of a need for a certain aspect, God so what? I probalby do have desire to see God in that way. That doesn't mean there's no some reality there to things I experienced. Dave is doing a reductions tactic of losing phenomena and re-labeling. He's trying to impose his own suppositions and pass them off as mine. I don't think anyone could feel real love for an impersonal force. God is clearly about love. I felt this all pervasive deep penetrating love from God, and thinknig about that I feel a sense of love for God.I can't really comment on the "kind" of love I feel for God. It' snot really like the love I felt for my father but of cousre that wrapped up with concrete experiences of my father and knowing he was man and seeing his limitations.

Dave:

I am not attacking your faith, I am questioning your assumptions and arguments. If that disturbs you, just ignore my comments or ask me to stop posting them.

No you are wrestling with your own!

The term I've used to denote my concept of God is "trans-personal." That means God includes the personal but is beyond it as well. God is more than personal. When I say "Personal" that is grating becuase God can't have a personality because personalty is shaped psychologically and has hang ups. God is the source of consciousness and thus has self awareness. That doesn't mean he fits personality theory.Of cousre it means he's more than a grandfather or a father, he's not a big man in the sky, I shouldn't even say "He" except it's impossible to find a metaphor that allows for the love and excludes the gender. That is the primary thing I think about God, above all else, God blows away our neatly conceived categories.

One thing I do know is that when I went through through the period after losing my house where I was angery at God I went through period of transition where I was recovering from shock where I wanted to feel good about God but I couldn't believe that God could be personal because if he was personal surely he wouldn't let anyone go through the things I have been through. I began to think of God as an impersonal set of energies sort of like bandwidth. Part of that scale of bandwidth was a type of energy that mirrors our psychological states. so we getting our own love back at us like looking in a mirror. We think it's God's love and it's our love for ourselves. I actually had some sense of peace from that. The problem is it just didn't fit. God seemed to answer prayers when I related to him as a self aware thing with a sense of its own agenda. It didn't work to think of him as an impersonal force. I developed the basic idea that any time I decide to my will ahread of God's will it wont work. Whatever else is true, however transcendent or beyond our understanding God may be, God has a will of his own and he expect me to fit that.

I think God is beyond anything we could understand. We develop of sense of knowing God through prayer and feeling his presence, especially through those experiences which can't be communicated except in the most basic terms. In this sense of knowing God personally, as it were, we have a sense of the familiar like God is an old friend. It's hard to think of an old friend as not personal. The fact of knowing that words are only metaphors and that all we can say of God will always be analogical (all religious language is analogy and all language itself has a metaphorical aspect) this means that we are trapped in the words and we never really get at the thing itself unmediated except in so far as we have a transcendent experience that we can't put into words. For this reason I don't get upset with people like Dave who offer "altneratives' of impersonal nature of thinknig of God. They are right too because thir altenatives are also metahors and analogies. they are not wrong. All analogies have like and not-like. God is like a father in many ways, and also not like a father in many ways.

People of the future could think of God in radically different ways, even Christan. We do not think of god at all the same as did our great great grand parents, much less the first Chrsitians. That doesn't matter because no one will ever get it right. About the only universally true things we can pin down about God is that he is love, he is something we can't pin down, he blows away our neat little categories, he's necessary, eternal and infinite, and he deals in redemption. Anything else is metaphor. I know the loving father is a metaphor but I approach it as a reality becuase aspects of it are reality. It's a tight rope act.


Even Dave in his expose of belief is impossing his own limition of thinking in terms of gender and mind. We don't have a concept for mind that is not male or female, but God is not a human mind. We have no idea what God would be like up close and personal but the only thing we can do is relate it to what we know and Dave is doing that even in his desire to debunk it. Being a mind doesn't make God a jumped up man. We have no cocnept of mind that is not jumped up humanity of one gender or the other. God blows away our neat little categories.

We must live in the metaphor and treat the metaphor as reality without internalizing it.

Are We all Atheists?

There is an argument one hears atheists make quite often. It's stated as well as any by a poster on Atheist Watch:

"Jake" a poster on Atheist Watch

we are all atheists of some form. Christians are hindu atheists, Hindus are Muslim atheists, and I am an everything atheist. We all know what it is like to no believe in a certain doctrine, so the fact that we are not all born as omnireligious or polyreligious nutbags, suggests that belief is part of the indoctrination process.

The problem with this argument is two-fold: (1) it uses not the modern ideological definiton of atheists which internet atheists will always use religiously (lack of belief), but the old first century pre modern definition that was used of Christians in the beginning, those who fail to acknowledged the right gods. (2) The second problem is that the basic assumption it makes demonstrates a real lack of understanding about the nature of belief in God. I say this because it seems to me that the original statement comes out of an assumption that belief in God is about choosing between a host of little personalities. God is a big man in the sky and all beliefs about God revolve around which big man is up there; is it Zeus? Jehovah,, Juptier, Brahamin, or whomever?

This is not the basis of belief in God. Belief in God is not about choosing between a host of little personalities. All of those personalities are merely place holders, they designate something beyond of all them. God is the ground of being, the basis of all reality, there can't be two of them. It's not a context between little personality figures, those are merely place holder that point to the one true reality beyond all of them. Individual personality gods are merely personifications of concepts, all the concepts pertain to the same basic idea. The only real questions are two fold:

(1) What does God want?
(2) which tradition best mediates relationship with the divine?

The second question assumes that the first question is answered by some notion of unity with the divine.

A Hindu is not an atheist to a Christian. I don't think of Hindus as atheists, I think of atheists as atheists I think of Hindus as people with a different understanding of what God wants. That's a pretty good give away that the atheist argument is wrong, because if I don't see Hindus as atheists then they probably don't see me as one either. Of course atheists resist this kind of understanding about it because they are losing several rhetorical helps at this point. First, they are always looking for ways to bolster their numbers and this allows them the illusion that everyone is an atheist and thus their position is really dominate after all, it's just a matter of realizing it. Secondly, it allows them to play divide and conquer agaisnt religious people, which they are always doing. They try to leverage one religion against them all on the pretext that since we can't prove one is true and all others false then one can be true.

When we point out that all can be true in some sense, as I show above, they go to pieces. That is one approach they can't handle, that accounts for the atheist viciousness to all of my theological positions. They focus upon the minutia of a religious tradition, ceremonies, and formalities, theology, and ignore the experience of the living presence of God that individuals experience, which is the same all over the world.

Hand in hand with this argument that we all born atheists because we are born without belief. That in itself is begging the question. There are lots of reasons to supposes that we have an intuitive sense of God and we are born with it. I present a lot of data in my argument on religious instinct and demonstrate the position in many ways, from the dawn of per-human history to genetic evidence.

The argument actually says that the fact of a religious species is far too coincidental to be merely the product of random chance. Why why would it be that we are fit to be religious, that it is our instinct and our way of life? That would indicate that an object of religious devotion designed religiosity into humans. In summation the following factors indicate that religiosity is part of human nature:

a) Historical Tendency:

The vast Majority of Humans have been religious as far back as we have evidence of humanity (50,000 years) [see above A. 3]

b) Believers have always been vast numerical majority

That is not appeal to popularity, it's an argument about behavior which indicates an innate condition. Almost 90% currently of world population are rleigious believers in some sense.

c) Trans cultural

When anthropologists see a behavior that transcends culture they assume it is innate. There has never been a culture that was atheistic. Every culture we have ever seen or found traces of on earth going back as far as we can has been religious in some way.

Even in cultures such as China where the government attempted irradiation of religious belief there are still 51% religious and many more undecided but not "anti-"religious

d) Physical fitness for religion

Our bodies work better when we are religious, it is the major factor in health and far more of a motivator than any other trigger of the Placebo effect [see above C.3]

e) Archetypes Universal

Archetypes are natural part of the human psyche (see the next argument). Also see Jesus Chrsit and Mythology page II. Archetypes are psychological symbols which point to transcendent ideal beyond the material realm. Studies show that they are natural to all people and emerge under a broad variety of psychological techniques.Maslow says that they are found among all people using ever technqiue of psychoanalysis. [above B.3]

f) Psychologically fit for religion

Psychological factors, relgious believers have far less depression and incidence of mental illness so the human mind works best when religious. [above C]

g) Transformative power

IF the appeal of the argument were merely popularity, it would not turn on things other than popularity. Obviously these reasons I'm giving here are not popularity. But, the transformative power of religious experience is another aspect of the argument which proves that it' not merely an appeal to popularity. Religious experience transforms lives, it gives people life affirming experiences which makes them better as people and makes life worth living. Not all psychological factors are capable of doing that. We are so constituted as a species that we respond to these experiences in such a way that they do transform our lives. That proves that we are fit to be religious, and that is not an appeal to popularity.[see also point C above on psychological normality and self actualization]

h) brain wave patterns

Brain wave patterns are changed by religious experience. We go from Alpha waves to Beta and to other levels of Brain wave patterns when we have these experiences.

i) "God pod" (God module in the brain)

Scientists have identified a cluster of neurons in the brain which, when stemulated, produce feelings and thoughts about God and the transcendent. This is too great a coincidence that nature would just produce this by random chance, especially when taken together with all the other ways in which we are fit to be religious. It's an evidence of design, we are made to be a religious species.

j) Sense of the Numinous universal

the studies I've talked about intently have demonstrated that around the world mystics experince the same phenomena in the presence of God inspite of the doctrine of their traditions.

Moreover, infants should not be counted as believers in any sense. We should hold the title of "believer" in abundance for infants and young children. No one is born with an intellectual theological thesis or is capable of stating a systematic belief. But most people come closer to having innate beliefs in God than to being without of any kind of belief.

In Memory of John Hick (oct 22 1922--Feb 9 2012)

John Hick (1922-2012)



John Hick was a major philosopher of Religion. He was the last great Philosopher of what I call the "holders of the fort," the generation right before Plantinga and the back to God movement of the 80s took over the watch and brought Philosophical arguments for the existence of God back onto the battle field with a strong position. That means that Hick made a name for himself in the era when modern secular society and academia had decided that religion was a thing of the passing away. They didn't attack it with belligerence because they felt it was passing away. Other major holders of the fort included Father Frederick Copleston, Arnold J. Toynbee, E.L. Mascall*, Johnathon Wisdom, Etienne Gilson, and of these Hick was on the first rung. These were the guys who one found in undergraduate philosophy textbooks tucked into the section on philosophy of religion. Hick was one of the most often found in those sorts of anthologies.

He made waves in the 1980s when he moved away from Christianity and into a more pluralistic view point. While I can't agree with the Chrirstology that he adopted, I admire and respect his position on enlarging the sphere of faith to include those of other traditions. It's quite sad to see the official John Hick website, once covered with blurbs about his books, now with an obituary article. Hick was bron in Scarborough England, developed an interest in philosophy in his teens. He began at University of Manchester but changed to Edinurgh in 1941 after conversion to Evangelical Christianity. During his career he taught at Claremont Graduate University and University of Bermingham

From Wiki

Hick played important roles in a number of organizations centered around community relations. Non-Christian communities, mostly Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh, had begun to form in this central England community as immigration from the Caribbean Islands and Indian subcontinent increased. Due to the influx of peoples with different religious traditions, organizations focused on integrating the community became necessary. During his fifteen years at the University of Birmingham, Hick became a founder, as well as the first chair, for the group All Faiths for One Race (AFFOR); he served as a chair on the Religious and Cultural Panel, which was a division of the Birmingham Community Relations Committee; and he also chaired the coordinating committee for a 1944 conference convened under the new Education Act with the aim of creating a new syllabus for religious instruction in city schools.^[1]

Hick has been hailed as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, philosophers of religion of the 20th century (Smid, Robert (1998-1999). "John Harwood Hick". Boston Collaborative Encyclopedia of Western Theology. http://people.bu.edu/wwildman/WeirdWildWeb/courses/mwt/dictionary/mwt_themes_875_hick.htm#John%20Harwood%20Hick. Retrieved February 2008.). That doesn't mean his contributions to God arguments are better than Plantingas it means among philosophers who write about the problems of religion in a philosophical way, Hick was the best. Philosophically Hick was influenced by Kant, influences which helped to move him toward his position of religious pluralism.

One of the ideas he explored that was of greatest influence to me and I feel one of his greatest contributions was his answers to the issues of verification and religious faith. He advanced the idea of eschatology verification. Verification has to wait for the end of our lives, but we can falsify various claims. He is the author of one God argument on my life of 42 God arguemnts: No 34, Argument from Personal Origin:

Xenos Christian Fellowship
Theistic Apolgetics Dennis McCallum

The main critique of the cosmological argument is that it involves special pleading.

1. If everything requires a cause, then God requires a cause. If God requires no cause, then not all things require a cause.

• However, if it can be shown that the eternal existence of God is different than the eternal existence of the Universe, this argument might hold up.
  
  John Hick has argued that since God is personal, He is not subject to natural law, (e.g. thermodynamic laws) which apply to the physical realm. Therefore, there are fewer problems with His eternity than there would be with the eternity of the physical universe.[footnote 7] (John Hick, Arguments for the Existence of God. (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971) pp.34 ff. He also gives other reasons for distinguishing between God and the universe in the area of eternalness.)
  

He wrote a fine book, although short,on the issue of researchers who claim to evoke religious experiences by stimulation of the brain: the New Frontier of Science and Religion I drew upon that work in my research of the topic. As far as I'm concerned he uncovered a huge pool of bad research in atheist claims about brain chemistry and religious experience. His work The Many Faced Argument is one of the most lucid, through, and helpful books on the ontological argument, The Many Faced Argument. Hick rejected the modal argument of Hartshorne on the grounds that it deals with "logical necessity" whereas the faith of the Apostles was about ontological necessity. Whether that's a good argument I have my dobuts. The book is through and includes all the major developments form Anselm to Hartshorne.

Books by Hick

Articles by John Hick




Hick was one of the first great Christian thinkers I discovered early in my Christian Walk. I liked his philosophy and it meant a great deal to me to know that there were fine contemporary philosophers who were Chrsitians and were still writing. Whatever truth was disclosed thorugh the life of thought he lived, he now has eschatology verification. I mourn the loss of his ideas.



*The Wiki article on Mascall says so little about his work I used one that says more about it. For the details of his life see the Wiki article linked here.

(1) Wiki article sites:Hick, John. "A Pluralist View." More Than One Way? Four Views on Salvation in a Pluralistic World. Eds. Dennis L. Okholm and Timothy R. Phillips. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1995. 27-59. Print.

Reasons for Belief

Atheists have a new trick--which is actually their original trick but dusted off. They seem to be on a tangent of arguing that "there's no proof for your God." Of course, they have never really stopped saying that. But perhaps a new generation is coming up. I find more of them more often arguing that there is not "one single piece of scientific evidence..." When I put out several posts on the CARM atheist board similar to the previous post here, Kuhn, science is a social construct, they just went ape. One of them was saying "you are making such a fool of yourself to say these things..." Of course it takes real ignorance not to know that not so long ago (mid 90's perhaps) Kuhn was hot stuff. He was a major force, considered a major thinker in the world for about four decades. But I'm making a fool of myself! When I told them we should not expect to find scientific of evdience of God because God is not a scientific question they just sort of blinked their eyes (in writing so to speak) and said "that's why you shouldn't believe in him." Before it was all said and done one of them had made several pronouncements to the effect that "science tells us everything that is worth knowing and if something isn't given in science it's not worth knowing." Moreover, "the only meaningful questions are scientific questions because that's what makes them meaningful." I bet that guy is magic in a relationship.

There's even a more recent gimmick of arguing that God is just an idea in the mind and nothing more. The erason for this is--well--there's no hard phsyical data for God so therefore, he must just an idea in the mind. Afer all everything we can't see touch or smell is just an idea in the mind, right? I say "what about dark matter?" What about sub-atomic articles. Then they say (they being "big Thinker" atheist on CARM, and others) those are just place holders. Then they explain that there's a correlatin between those concepts and some kind of phenomena that might suggest them, so they are theoretical construct meant to mark that relationship whle we try to find out what it really is. Then I say I can do the same thing with God, the object the religious experiences people have, the results of which are concrete and can be studied and have definitely measurable effects on their lives. They say "no that can't be because God is just an idea in the mind. So when it's there place holder it's concrete and has a pile a facts behind it, when it's a place holder they don't want it's pile of facts is just BS and it's only an idea in the mind.

What can one say? Everyone likes a booster. When confronted with the challenge to prove that science is the only valid form of knowledge--with scientific data only--of course they responded with philosophical arguments and logic. Naturally they never tried to offer one single piece of evidence from science, and when I put up the post defending religious experience with 300 studies they just poo pooed and said it wasn't science. So science is the only valid knowledge, but you can't prove that with science, and when it supports religion it's not science. Of course the real problem is its impossible to really tell people why we believe in God. No one actually comes to believe because of some fact or argument. It's so ultra foolish to expect scientific proof because belief is a world view, it's not based upon any one fact, but upon thousands of fact, upon the way we look at ourselves and the world. It's important to make God arguments, not to prove the existence of God, but because you can't say "I have reasons, they are supported by lots of things and deal and junk and stuff." God arguments help us to focus on detailed reasons that support belief, but they are not meant to prove anything.




The real problem is, on the one hand, the believer really doesn't have a single cogent provable reason for belief, on the other hand, the atheist doesn't understand the nature of world views. Atheists don't understand their own unbelief. They can't get it that they are touting an ideology. They think all the have to do is say "it's the absence of a belief" and that's suppose to make it real simple and clear it of any ideological connotations. But its' not that simple. Belief is a world view.It's foundational, that is is serves as the basis for everything else you think and the ways you view the world. You can't just take out the centerpiece of a world view and not replace it with something. Its' absurd to say "atheism is just the absence of a belief" there is no such thing. The absence of a belief is the presence of unbelief and that is an ideology. This is what Derrida teaches us: absence is presence and presence is absence. It's easy to be a skeptic all you have to do is just keep doubting things and demeaning that no evidence is of any value until it lines up with the ideology. But they have a very clear ideology to fill in the blank left by God and it is based upon reductionism. Nothing short of absolute scientific proof will do becasue the absence of the foudnation requires the presence of a replacement foundation.

atheists can only see the primitive misunderstanding, they can't see the sense of transcendence behind it.



Maslow talks about the psychological necessity of being able to maintain a tranformative symbology. He is not merely saying that we should do this, but that we do it, it is universal and through many different technqiues and psychological schools of thought he shows that this has been gleaned over and over again. What Jung called the Archetypes are universal symbols of transfomration which we understand in the uncoscious, and we must be able to hold them in proper relation to the mundane (the Sacred and the Profane) in order to enjoy healthy growth, or we stagnate and become pathological. It is crucial to human psychology to maintain this balance. Far from merely being stupid and not understanding science, striving to expalin a pre-Newtonian world, the primatives understood this balance and held it better than we do. Religious beleif is crucial to our psychological well being, and this fact far more than social order or the need for examplianation exaplians the origins of religion.

Quote:

"For practically all primitives, these matters that I have spoken about are seen in a more pious, sacred way, as Eliade has stressed, i.e., as rituals, ceremonies, and mysteries. The ceremony of puberty, which we make nothing of, is extremely important for most primitive cultures. When the girl menstruates for the first time and becomes a woman, it is truly a great event and a great ceremony; and it is truly, in the profound and naturalistic and human sense, a great religious moment in the life not only of the girl herself but also of the whole tribe. She steps into the realm of those who can carry on life and those who can produce life; so also for the boy's puberty; so also for the ceremonies of death, of old age, of marriage, of the mysteries of women, the mysteries of men. I think that an examination of primitive or preliterate cultures would show that they often manage the unitive life better than we do, at least as far as relations between the sexes are concerned and also as between adults and children. They combine better than we do the B and the D, as Eliade has pointed out. He defined primitive cultures as different from industrial cultures because they have kept their sense of the sacred about the basic biological things of life.

"We must remember, after all, that all these happenings are in truth mysteries. Even though they happen a million times, they are still mysteries. If we lose our sense of the mysterious, or the numinous, if we lose our sense of awe, of humility, of being struck dumb, if we lose our sense of good fortune, then we have lost a very real and basic human capacity and are diminished thereby."

"Now that may be taken as a frank admission of a naturalistic psychological origin, except that it invovles a universal symbology which is not explicable through merely naturalistic means. How is it that all humans come to hold these same archetypical symbols? (For more on archetypes see Jesus Chrsit and Mythology page II) The "prematives" viewed and understood a sense of transformation which gave them an integration into the universe. This is crucial for human development. They sensed a power in the numenous, that is the origin of religion."

He is saying that the reductionist can only see a flimsy superstition in such primitive doings, but the real knight of faith sees in it the sense of the numinous the way religion really affects people on in daily life. In the words of Thomas Indinopulos:

I think this is a healthy development. When emphasis shifts away from what a Christian believes or does not believe, we can begin to understand the power and meaning of Christianity in a given culture, at a certain time. In other words, I should say that a better way to ascertain Christian belief is to focus on how Christians actually live their lives. I say this on the basis of years spent with Greek villagers who, when asked what they believe, can hardly answer in any precise way. But ask them how they would identify themselves as Greek Orthodox and you will hear a recital of ritual observances and traditional acts of faith that leave no doubt that their faith is not a matter of what is believed or thought about, but rather what is done or felt or imagined. For such villagers the daily life of faith is not reducible to or equatable with a set of formal beliefs. The academic or pedagogical implications here are enormous. When professors teach Christianity as a matter of beliefs, ideas, and institutions, they may be teaching something that is not at all equivalent to the religion practiced by the people who claim the Christian religion as their own. But if they were to teach Christianity as practiced, they would have to pay attention to that which is not so easily categorized as doctrine -- the unspoken, often emotional undertones of faith on the part of ordinary believers.

My point being that real belief is faith, not words on paper. The reasons people relay believe in God have to do with the way they sense their presence in the world and the relation to that sense of God which they also intuit in the world. A good example of this came out in a message board discussion I had on CARM recently:

I don't remember who the other party in the discussion was, I'll just call him "friendly atheist."

Quote:
Originally Posted by Metacrock View Post
the studies show believers are less depressed. you should encourage her faith even if you dont' believe in it. I'm not saying it's your fault but obviously it's very damaging to someone who fervently believes to have that crushed. Please don't think I'm accusing you.

FA:Many of us who are no longer believers have dealt with the transition. I'm not sure that 'damaging' is the correct word. Sometimes growth is hard. Sometimes realizing that what you believed for a long time is false can be hard to deal with. It requires a commitment to intellectual honesty and a desire to know rather than to believe.

Meta: a lot will depend upon why the loss of faith. If one outgrows the Provencal nature of one's faith context, then it's not damaging it's actually a form of growth. Unfortunately due to the fundies and other religious people a lot of people never find the more progressive style of faith so they don't go on with it. But to lose faith due to personal tragedy or just being worn down and not having a chance to cultivate it is deadly. it's killing.

Quote:
FA:My wife and I don't argue about it. I'm not 'anti' about it.

Meta: that's good. what do you hope for? The best you can do is momentary happiness and not really that if you have hard times.

FA:Even in hard times there are things that can be hoped for. I hope for ease, happiness, love, the same as anyone

Meta:Yes but I have someone to trust in hard times. I know from personal experince I can trust God to me through anything. I'm not the least bit worried about the backing collapse. I expect to die in the gutter but I'm looking froward to a lot of republicans learning something!

more than just beyond life. It's the hope that some force of love cares about you.

FA:I prefer to be loved by someone rather than think that I am loved by a 'force'. Perhaps being loved by a force is sufficient for many people but 'love' to me is an active thing.

Meta:I understand why it would be hard for you to think of god as real, but It's not all hard for me. In fact the opposite. it's nearly impossible for the to deny God's reality, becasue the experinces I've had cannot be denied.

even in times when I thought God abandoned me I was still not wiling to give up the concept, I was willing to think of God as impersonal before I was willing to say there wasn't one. Then he came through and I knew I just needed to trust.

I know it's hard for you think of that as a reality since you have not experienced it. but I have and i know it's real. I know it as well as I know I exist myself.


Meta:It's not the hope of getting money because you pray for it anything like that. But meaning in life gives hope.

FA:I agree. I would rather have real meaning than imaginary meaning. But either way, whether one believes that God has a purpose or if one gives credit to something else for their purpose, ultimately it all comes from the self. WE determine our purpose, our meaning.

Meta:meaning that I get from God is a priroi. IT is real and it doesn't depend upon the existence of a God with a mind who knows who I am. Just the attitude to being that undersatnd from studying theology gives me a rock solid meaning that can't be deneied. It is real and I prove it's real (the meaning that is not the being named God who thinks and knows who I am).

Now I believe God is mind and knows who I am but even at a default of an impersonal ;God who si just being itself and nothing ore the meaning that comes from that is undeniable.

but the experinces I've had lead me to have a major hope because I know God is real and is more than just being.

Quote:
Quote:
Atheists can only have localized small letter meaning, meaning that is related to the immediate context. Believers in God can have big capital letter meaning.

FA:Atheists and believers are no different here, the 'meaning' in our lives comes from the same place, ourselves. Some just have the need to put the cause on something else.

Meta:I disagree. I've been both. I was a Sartean atheist so the idea of making youkr own meaning was crucial to my thinking. it was total revolution when I got saved. It was day from night.


repentance is not just saying words. It means "turn from sin" so you are changing your thinking and your behavior. if one really repents one does not want to do the same things again.

FA:Did the thief on the cross do more than just say the words?

Meta:Yes, he sure as hell did. His words were not empty they were backed by the attitude of the heart, which is true repentance. He did more than say words, he repented, he turned his heart toward God!

Faith is not beliving things without proof

Originally Posted by aussiedave

Faith is a belief and does not require any intellectual basis. An "intellectual belief" is still a belief.
Neither have any facts to substantiate them.

One finds atheists saying things like this all the time. Atheists tend to define faith as "belief of soemthing without any evidence or a valid reason." for support they sometimes turn to Webster's on-line Dicitonary

Definition of FAITH

1

a : allegiance to duty or a person : loyalty b (1) : fidelity to one's promises (2) : sincerity of intentions

2

a (1) : belief and trust in and loyalty to God (2) : belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion b (1) : firm belief in something for which there is no proof (2) : complete trust

3

: something that is believed especially with strong conviction; especially : a system of religious beliefs faith>

Of course it usually doesn't dawn on them that this is three different definitions and not a collective one. The third one can't be taken as indicative of all religious faith. There's another reason not to let them use Wesbter's, not at all. That's because it's only indicative of popular use and not theological teaching. Because they don't use a technological dictionary atheists make a straw man argument. They are not dealing with the way the teaching authority of Christian theology uses the term "faith." They are only reflecting the general conception, or misconception of faith, apart from Christian teaching. The whole idea of their argument is that Christian teaching accepts faith as belief with no evidence, when in reality there is no such dictum in any Christian teaching.

The theological authoritative dictionary for Christian Theology is called Westminster's Dictionary of Christian Theology (ed Alan Richardson and John Bowden SCM pres ltd 1983) (on Amazon). That is to the theology what the Oxford Unabridged Dictionary is to the English language. It's what Black's Law Dictionary is to the Lawyer. Really all Chrsitians should own a copy. There are two volumes one is about theologians the other about doctrines. I will concern myself today only with the latter.

The Westminster dictionary of Christian Theology has a long article on faith starting on page 207. Believers often use the term faith as a short hand term for those living according to apostolic teaching (207). The Dictionary points out that the only actual Biblical definition of faith is found in Hebrews 11.1 (evidence of things not seen) and that it "does not encapsulate all that the Bible says on the subject."(ibid). Westminster translates Hebrews 11.1 as "the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." This changes certain nuances but reinforces other. I have always liked to point that that faith is a kind of evidence in its own right. That's becuase something has to prompt faith. It's insane to assert that faith is ever held for no reaosn at all. Of cousre the atheist wants to assert that the reason is stupid but that's his burden of proof. What is the stimulus that prompts the response of faith?

Westminster's Dictionary understands faith in many contexts and constructs a complex picture of the term.Faith "...is an obedient confident trust in the reality love of God known through his acts, and awaiting their future consummation." (ibid). The dictionary brings out a variety of nuances from scripture. In OT faith is comparatively rare. When it is used it indicates faithfulness or loyalty rather than passive reliance. Yet dependence upon God and not human powers is important for Issiah (7:9, 30:15). Faith is concieved as Obedient action. (Dud 6:1) Faith as trust is also echoed in the psalms. In the NT belief and trust in Jesus' salvation is referred to as faith.(Mark 2:5, 5:34). Unbelief is hardness of heart, so the opposite of faith, unbelief, involves a refusal of the heart. Again making faith more a matter of some deep relationship than just a passive acceptance of an affirmation. (Mark 6:1).

There's no particular reason to understand this notion of faithfulness as bestowed for no reason. There is no statement about "faithfulness with no proof for no reason." Indeed the whole concept of faith in being about a condition of the heart is removed a step from this idea of accepting an intellectual proposition for no reason. In the Johonine epistles we see doctrinally oriented faith in a credal formula. In that community faith took on doctrinal proportions. Christ came in the flesh, Jesus is he son of God, (20:31, 1 J. 5:1). There is no indication that this is a matter of belief for no reason. NO reason is given but it's obvious the reason is bound up with the faith of the community as a community. One sees the community itself as the witness. The community as a whole testifies "we saw this, we heard this."

In Pauline Theology faith is utter reliance upon God's grace. The person of faith is the one who knows that grace cannot be obtained by works, that justification is only through union with Christ and reliance upon God's grace rather than works or by the law. Faith is not merely assent to an intellectual proposition but a relationship of trust culminating in the acceptance of God's Grace. Grace through faith means reliance upon God's ability to make us holy, nothing of our own effort.

The article points out several tensions that emerge from the centrality of faith to Christian doctrine. This is the kind of subtle theological idea that makes theology interesting and maddening to atheist who can't think subtly. Tension is mistaken for contradiction by skeptics but it's not contradiction. It's a good thing in theology to have tension. As one of my professors at Perkins (school of ethology SMU) put it "if you have no tension on your kite string your kite is not in the air."

One such tension is between weather faith is the response of trust in God or the acceptance of doctrinal propositions.The issues clearly transcend the notion of faith as rule keeping or merely an acceptance of intellectual propositions.

The article winds up with a discussion of Kierkegaard's notion of the leap of faith. This mind tend to make one think that faith means the irrational acceptance of of a proposition with no evidence.SK says faith is irrational and that it's achieved by an irrational leap. Yet one must note that the leap itself is an epistemological ploy, it's an attempt to get over the final chasm which can't be bridged by evidence or logic. The road up to the final gap can be paved with argument and reason. One can make a find philosophical diving board to prepare for the leap. The point at which one makes the leap can be narrowed. The leap is always there. Even in the world view there are epistemic blind alleys from which there are no returns. So in the final analysis there is no basis to the atheist straw man definition of faith as "believing things without evidence."

Arguments vs. Facts

I keep hearing this really dumb idea that "we don't want arguments we want facts that prove things." They seem to have adopted this tactic as a new mantra along with "there's no proof for your God." It reminds me of one of my favorite Monty Python things about the "argument clinic." "Argument is an intellectual process by which one lays out a logical heuristic in favor of a proposition, not the automatic gain saying of anything he other fellow says." "Yes it is." Sounds like CARM. I wonder if people who make this distinction between argument and facts understand what argument is.

The problem is, as with all English words, there many meanings and they are determined by context. When logicians say "argument" they mean something as different in the context of logic from when a historian says "argument" as Black Adder from real history. In general when we have people making arguments for the existence of God, the context in which this discussion arises, they are usually going to be people who have read William Lane Craig or Plantinga, and who are given to the emulation of philosophers and philosophical thinking. In that context the definition is going to be closer to that of the "straight man" (Michael Palin) in the Python sketch linked above; the heuristic supporting a logical proposition.

Many atheists speak as though this is just BS, it's just like saying "I deem that X = Y because I like X, and it has sanctifying grace and it reminds me of my geography teacher in eighth grade." Of course they just skip right over the fact that many such arguemnts are attempts to plug scientific facts into propositions confirming belief in God. I have had three major arguments spanning huge threads about the fine tuning argument. In the first one atheists went 40 posts wit out saying anything more substantial than "that's no good, that's not scinece, I don't like that." Every single post I made was about scientific facts, most of them were quoting a scientist named Andre Linde (on Doxa) who is an atheist but you took Fine tuning seriously enough to write an article several years ago (Scientific American, Oct 97) listing many of the more obvious problems facing the formation of life in the early development of our universe.

This argument is all about facts, it contains thousands of facts. Of course their reaction to it was something "this is stupid. this doesn't prove anything." I have a feeling that what they mean by "a fact that proves something" is something DNA. They want to find God's fingerprint or hair sample, but it has to be so obvious the it can't be questioned. Of cousre they can always question. Like the EPCEP thing, it's just another excuse to raise the bar as soon as the request facts are produced. The fact that half of my God arguemnts turn upon scientific facts (in my list of 42 arguments) doesn't even mean anything to them. What they really want is a done deal, something they can't even begin to question that totally prove it so they are forced to believe and they can't possibly be mistaken.

The idea that you have a fact that proves soemthing and you don't have to make an argument to show how it proves something is ludicrous. That's arguments are, they are connecting links that move from evidence to conclusion and explain things.Arguments are not tricks or emotional tirades that seek to lul one into a frame of mind apart form facts. Arguments can be based upon logic, they don't have to be based upon empirical evidence, but you can't make empirical evidence "prove" something without making an argument.Even if you could somehow pull back the curtain of reality and see God at the controls, so to speak, you would still have to make an argument that this si God and these are the controls that govern the universe, just pulling back the veil itself wouldn't do it.

The only potions atheists embrace are those shaped by arguments. They think that when they say "there's no proof for your God so I have no rational reason to believe" that they are making a statement of fact that needs no elucidation and is transparent when spoken. In point of fact that in itself is an argument.All the atheists potions are the result of argument and not of facts.
Science data is not self explainable or self revealing. It only means something when you shape into an argument and make it mean something.

Facts do not announce themselves as such. Nature is not festooned with little tags that say things like "scientific data, by nature." "This is a scientific fact." There is no scientific data until we transform qulia into data by the process of scientific study. No one just stduies raw data by itself. Economists don't collect dates on coins in the economy, sociologists don't count the number of bricks in housing projects, geologists don't count the grains of sand on the shore, then let it go at that rejoicing that they have found scientific facts. Data is put into context of "meaning" through interpretation. Data always must be interpreted and the complexity of the world means there can be more than one interpretation. This is a very simplistic source but I think anyone naive enough to think that scinece is just a pile of facts needs this level of simplicity:

Understanding Science: How
Science Really Works.

Evaluating an idea in light of the evidence should be simple, right? Either the results match the expectations generated by the idea (thus, supporting it) or they don't (thus, refuting it). Sometimes the process is relatively simple (e.g., drilling into a coral atoll either reveals a thick layer of coral or a thin veneer), but often it is not. The real world is messy and complex, and often, interpreting the evidence relating to an idea is not so clear-cut. To complicate things further, we often have to weigh multiple lines of evidence that are all relevant to the validity of a particular idea. Tests typically generate what scientists think of as raw data — unaltered observations, descriptions, or measurements — but those must be analyzed and interpreted. Data become evidence only when they have been interpreted in a way that reflects on the accuracy or inaccuracy of a scientific idea. For example, an investigation of the evolutionary relationships among crustaceans, insects, millipedes, spiders, and their relatives might tell us the genetic sequence of a particular gene for each organism. This is raw data, but what does it mean? A long series of the As, Ts, Gs, and Cs that make up genetic sequences don't, by themselves, tell us whether insects are more closely related to crustaceans or to spiders. Instead, those data must be analyzed through statistical calculations, tabulations, and/or visual representations. In this case, a biologist might begin to analyze the genetic data by aligning the different sequences, highlighting similarities and differences, and performing calculations to compare the different sequences. Only then can she interpret the results and figure out whether or not they support the hypothesis that insects are more closely related to crustaceans than to spiders.

That process contains a number steps that are not only very similar to argument but that also require argument when interpretations vary. Just interpreting data requires a form of argument sense one is making a connection from sign to conclusion based upon a logical association involving a claim. In the argumentation theory of Stephen Toulmin data is part of the grounds or a claim. The warrant links data and other grounds to a claim, legitimizing the claim by showing the grounds to be relevant. The warrant may be explicit or unspoken and implicit. It answers the question 'Why does that data mean your claim is true?' That process is just like the process through which one assertions the significance of any given data in hypothesis testing.

On a more sophisticated level we can see that entire scientific project rests upon "paradigms" which in effect are arguments. Science changes when the paradigm is no longer able to adsorb and explain or dismiss anomalies that cause us to question the paradigm. This is part of the thory of Thomas S. Kuhn. Kuhn was the biggest name in history/philosophy of scinece for several decades, even beating Popper (the 60s-90s). When the Postmodern project fell apart in the 90's Kuhn went down with the ship even he was only tangentially related to Postmodernism. I think we can argue that Kuhn's fortunes have risen again as I predicted at the time they would. I see much more Kuhn related material, he's still in universities. One such class is that of Professor Frank Pajares, Emory University. He prepares an online study guide and his summary of Kuhn's first chapter in Structures of Scientific Revolutions runs as follows:

Kuhn begins by formulating some assumptions that lay the foundation for subsequent discussion and by briefly outlining the key contentions of the book.

1. A scientific community cannot practice its trade without some set of received beliefs (p. 4).
1. These beliefs form the foundation of the "educational initiation that prepares and licenses the student for professional practice" (5).
2. The nature of the "rigorous and rigid" preparation helps ensure that the received beliefs exert a "deep hold" on the student's mind.
2. Normal science "is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like" (5)—scientists take great pains to defend that assumption.
3. To this end, "normal science often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments" (5).
4. Research is "a strenuous and devoted attempt to force nature into the conceptual boxes supplied by professional education" (5).
5. A shift in professional commitments to shared assumptions takes place when an anomaly "subverts the existing tradition of scientific practice" (6). These shifts are what Kuhn describes as scientific revolutions—"the tradition-shattering complements to the tradition-bound activity of normal science" (6).
1. New assumptions (paradigms/theories) require the reconstruction of prior assumptions and the reevaluation of prior facts. This is difficult and time consuming. It is also strongly resisted by the established community.
2. When a shift takes place, "a scientist's world is qualitatively transformed [and] quantitatively enriched by fundamental novelties of either fact or theory" (7).

In other words science is like a status quo of a governmental regime or one might liken it unto the negative in policy debate round, it is the status quo, the way we view the world. If it is going to change it must do so because it can no longer answer crucial questions (absorb anomalies) that must be answered to continue to assume the received view of the world. Kuhn himself tells us:

"scientific revolutions are here taken to be those non-cumulative developmental episodes replaced in whole or in part by a new one..." (Thomas kuhn The Structure of scientific Revolutions, 92). "The choice [between paradigms] is not and cannot be determined merely by the evaluative procedures characteristic of normal science, for these depend in part upon a particular paradigm, and that paradigm is at issue. When paradigms enter as they must into a debate about paradigm choice, their role is necessarily circular. Each group uses it's own paradigm to argue in that paradigm's defense...the status of the circular argument is only that of persuasion. It cannot be made logically or even probabilistically compelling for those who refuse to step into the circle." The Structure of Scientific Revolutions(94)In section X we shall discover how closely the view of science as cumulative is entangled with a dominate epistemology that takes knowledge to be a construction placed directly upon raw sense data by the mind. And in section XI we shall examine the strong support provided to the same historiographic scheme by the techniques of effective science pedagogy. Nevertheless, despite the immense plausibility of that ideal image, there is increasing reason to wonder whether it can possibly be an image of science. After the pre-paradgim period the assimilation of all new theories and of almost all new sorts of phenomena has demanded the destruction of a prior paradigm and a consequent conflict between competing schools of scientific thought. Cumulative anticipation of unanticipated novelties proves to be an almost nonexistent exception to the rule of scientific development.The man who takes historic fact seriously must suspect that science does not tend toward the ideal that our image of its cumulativeness has suggested. Perhaps it is another sort of enterprise. [ Structures...92-94]
(see my entire summary of Kuhn Here)

The simplistic concept that science is a pile of facts that prove the truth of all reality as long as we peruse the proper scientific methods is just a fantasy. There is no neat simplistic choice between fact and argument. Expecting to test the validity of God belief on the basis of the belief to conform to the norms of scientific is equally stupid. This is why I do not argue for the existence of God. All of my arguments I bill as "rational warrant for belief" simply becuase God is beyond empirical data. It would be as absurd to expect to prove god empirically as it would be to prove reality itself empirically. If you remember what I've said in the past about basic epistemology, that cannot be done. No one has. The only thing that was every produced along those lines is a epistemological judgment based upon warrant. Every time I argue it out with atheists to this point they say proudly and triumphantly "I can rest assured with a very good implication of what I know based upon the probability suggested by empirical data." I love to deflate that line when I say "that's what I get with my God arguments."

That's all they have to do, all we need is a rational warrant becasue the gap there between absolute certainty and warrant, which even the atheists admit they can't fill, that's the gap one leaps over in a leap of faith. The atheist has just admitted he leaps over it too. So the big fortress of facts that seems so assuring in atheist rhetoric is really just propaganda sloganeering.

Is Love Just a Little Feeling form Chemicals in The Head?

This is an exchange I had with an atheist on CARM. I don't even remember the context that prompted it, but it brings up two issues that I think are very important. The first one deals with the near universal atheist acceptance of reductionism and how they truncate reality by reducing ideals such as love and justice to mere momentary feelings, which they dis-value as the result of chemicals and nothing more. The second issue deals with a notion I see more and more, the reduction of concepts to the realm of the un-real. Both of these are extremely important issues because they amount to nothing more than gimmicks, yet I see atheists trading on them all the time as ways of disparaging belief.

(1) feelings are bad, they are subjective, according to most atheists, they are only the result of chemicals in the head, they have no further use or value beyond this.

(2) concepts are always unreal, God is a concept, thus God is unreal (this gimmicky "argument" pulled by "Big Thinker" on CARM incessantly. No matter how many times one disproves it he's always bringing it up again.

So in argument with a particular atheist the issue of love came up. Is it a feeling or is there something more important and wider than just the feelings and physical response that go with the notion of "love?" I say there's a concept to it which of course he says means it's not real.

Below I said to him (in blue) "no it's not' meaning "no love is not just a feeling." Love is more than just the racing heart beat and butterfly stomach of momentary infatuation, in fact love is much more than just romantic infatuation; there are different kinds of love but they all revolve around the idea of the will to the good of the other (agope, the highest form of love).

He says it's just a reaction to chemicals firing across the synapse.



Originally Posted by Metacrock View Post
no it is not. It's not a feeling at all. It's a concept, the will to the good of the other. The feeling is something that comes with it and reinforces it.

Of course it's a concept. Everything is. But it's not "the will to the good of the other". That's something you have decided to attach to it. And please don't drag out some nonsense like "Oh, so you don't want good things for those you love?"

Meta:

you are reducing it to little butterfly feeling that's not really even the thing itself. Those are the results of love not love itself. It's a concept.

In saying that this is a concept I've added to love, he's also adding something to it. He's assuming that certain physiological responses typify the term "love" which means he's using a concept to designate a stimulus response, and he is no less evoking a conceptual understanding of a set of responses than am I.


Atheist:

The feeling is love - whatever else comes with that (and, of course, that varies wildly from person to person) is not love - it's a consequence of it for that particular person.

The idea doesn't come with the feeling, how could it? the feel is a consequence of the concept. That's like saying feeling good about voting is all there is to democracy.



Quote Originally Posted by Metacrock View Post
obviously it would. you can't just have chemicals promoting a feeling and also have that backing up an idea. There is no such thing as innate ideas.

Atheist:

Who said anything about innate ideas? We are talking about an emotion - love. One which is caused by certain chemical reactions in the brain. That feeling existed before we put the label 'love' on it.

The reason I brought up Innate ideas is becuase we are both attacking a term to a set of stimulus responses. He is limited the set to just certain physiological responses that go with romantic or ludic stimuli while I am taking in a large use that has often been made of the limited English term, "love." He's limited the use of the term in order to cut off the wider concept because that would disprove the propagandist notion that love is nothing more than this little narrow range of physical feeling. His view still henges upon the very thing he says mine henges upon, attaching a term to set of feelings.

Innate idea come in to it because for thousands of years people have been using concepts to describes things they feel that are deeper than just this one little set of ideological responses. Al the conceptual talk that goes with the idea of love (such as "will to the good of the other," agope, koinonia and the like) are descriptions of things people feel. If they weren't feelings that refer to a broader conception there would not be such elaboration on this one concept. To say that it's just chemicals is like saying the concepts that go with it must be innate because they too are suggested by the chemicals.

My position is that love is not just a feeling its an emotion. There's more depth to emotion than just a little momentary feeling. He's arguing that if you attack a broader concept to it then you are just making up a bunch of stuff becuase it's not confined this the narrow range. His view just arbitrarily cuts off most of the what had histrionically been used for. This is done for ideological reasons:

No you have reduced the meaning of emotion:

(1) atheist are scared to death of feelings
(2) anything involving feelings must be discredited by atheist
(3) you reduce love to just a feeling because if you did not it would destroy your world view.
(4) you are dogmatically asserting that the feeling is the thing itself and the word is made up to describe the feeling. that's arbitrary.

that is proved by the fact that other languages have different words for different kinds of love. English doesn't' have that. Greeks were highly educated, the Anglo Saxons were barbarian. The Anglo Saxon's stopped with the feeling,the Greek cataloged all the related phenomena.

Quote Originally Posted by Metacrock View Post
then you don't have argument against religious experience. so religious experience is a chemically induced feeling about something real. what's the problem?

Atheist

Did you actually read what I wrote? I have no problem at all with religious experience in as much as it is a chemically induced feeling. The problem comes up with someone claims that the cause for that religious experience is external - that is, that it is a chemically induced feeling about something real. That you cannot evidence.

The fact of the feelings in relation to the concepts, and the effect of religious experience upon that process, such that one's life is transformed in valuable ways across the board, is the proof that it has to be external. If not you have to accept that it's innate ideas, which against are supposed to be impossible so that would indicate some higher origin. As a direct result of religoius experiencing the person doing the experiencing senses undifferentiated unity, or an all pervasive sense of love (and in that feeling of "love" there is a grander and broader and deeper correspondence to concepts such as "will to the good of the other" than in any other kind of set of feelings to which we attach the term "love).


The effects found by two of the major studies include:

Long-Term Effects

Wuthnow's Sutdy:

*Say their lives are more meaningful,
*think about meaning and purpose
*Know what purpose of life is
Meditate more
*Score higher on self-rated personal talents and capabilities
*Less likely to value material possessions, high pay, job security, fame, and having lots of friends
*Greater value on work for social change, solving social problems, helping needy
*Reflective, inner-directed, self-aware, self-confident life style

Noble's study:

*Experience more productive of psychological health than illness
*Less authoritarian and dogmatic
*More assertive, imaginative, self-sufficient
*intelligent, relaxed
*High ego strength,
*relationships, symbolization, values,
*integration, allocentrism,
*psychological maturity,
*self-acceptance, self-worth,
*autonomy, authenticity, need for solitude,
*increased love and compassion

The reason for assuming it's an external cause is that these effects are in direct correlation to a sense of presence that the expericer citified as "God" or "higher power" most of the time. One of the most common effects is that the experience is drawn into religious belief, either first time or a deeper sense of commitment, as a result of the experience. This is all in relation to the correlation bewteen sense of presence and the all pervasive sense of love, which the person experiencing identities with the broader concepts not with just the little truckled set of physiological response.

The atheist gimmick would be to say concepts are about unreal ideas in the mind. Yet concepts are about anything. Everything we think is a concept. I have a concept of the world around me. I have concepts of millions of real things all the time. You hae two things working there, the concept and the referent that it is a concept of. Some referents are only in the mind, like Superman. Some referents are real, like the world around me. All concepts are in relation to their referents. Being a concept in no way means the referent is unreal. So the the referent of the concept of Love includes but is not limited to the little set of physiological feelings, but also the deep and broader senses that are attached to the various words that English reduces to the one word "love."


the Greeks even had about several words for different kinds.


eros--the desire to have sex (simiar to ludos)
koinonia--comradeship
phileo--brotherhood
agope--the will to the good of the other.

All of those are both feelings and concepts. I have a concept of willing the good of the other, but I also feel a sense of the rightness of this. The strong feelings I have for it reinforce the idea that it's right enable me to be committed to it. It's not less just becasue I can put it into words. The words are probable inadequate to give full justice to what is being felt.

If we look though the literature of the world we find vast amounts of evidence for this idea. In Huckleberry Finn when he decides slavery is wrong and feels it deeply enough to say "Ok I'll go to hell then." He's willing to go to hell for the rightness of freeing slaves, and he knows it's true, but he feels it. There the concept is correlated with a physical feeling in connection with it. The feeling backs up the concept. Its' not just an "illusion" brought of my physiology it's concept that he knows is right by the concept of the concept.

We see this reflected all the time in literature around the world, complex idea accompany deep feelings and we call them "emotions." In reducing concepts to feelings and then dis-valuing feelings the atheist reductionists are merely truncating reality and setting up a situation where your world view so automatically privileged and the data that disproves it is lost.

The concept of agope, sometimes translated "charity," although that's inadequate, or "God's love," is not only a Christian concept but had a currency in Greek culture. It is defined by Tillich as the willingness to according the other the basic human dignity due him/her. That requries a complex and compound conceptual referent. Not only does it involve the idea of "good of the other" but also the concept of "human dignity." The reductionist says "you are just sticking a bunch of things on this simple set of physiological responses." Of cousre truncating it in that way takes away the concepts which are felt in themselves. One can have passionate feelings about the good of the other, and about willing the good, about human dignity and according it to people who are being denied it.

I have always sensed that the feelings I feel when responding to something like civil rights workers singing "we shall over come" are must different kind of feeling than a response to the stimulus of a beautiful woman, and I consciously understand that they are and can feel that depth in the feelings at the moment. These are not the same feelings. When thinking of the term "love" in the broader context of agope I clearly sense the connection. There is something in that amalgum of feelings I have about political committment to ideals I care about that I can easily term "love." Che Guevara said Marxism is a strange kind of love, not for gleaming steel factories but for people.