Argument:
(1) Scineitifc reductionism loses phenomena by re-defining the nature of sense data and quailia.
(2)There are other ways of Knowing than scinetific induction
(3) Religious truth is apprehended phenomenoloigcally, thus religion is
not a scientific issue and cannot be subjected to a materialist critque
(4) Religion is not derived from other disciplines or endeavors but is a approch to understanding in its own right
Therefore, religious belief is justified on its own terms and not according to the dictates or other disciplines
In
my dealings with atheist in debate and dialogue I find that they are
often very committed to an empiricist view point. Over and over again I
hear the refrain "you can't show one single unequivocal demonstration
of scientific data that proves a God exists." This is not a criticism.
It's perfectly understandable; science has become the umpire of
reality. It is to scientific demonstration that we appear for a large
swath of questions concerning the nature of reality. The problem is
that the reliance upon empiricism has led to forgetfulness about the
basis of other types of questions. We have forgotten that essentially
science is metaphysics, as such it is just one of many approach that
can be derived from analytical reasoning, empiricism, rationalism,
phenomonology and other approaches.
Problem with Empiricism
Is empirical evidence the best or only true form of knowledge? This is
an apologetics question because it bears upon the arguments for the
existence of God.
Is lack of empirical evidence, if there is a lack, a draw back for God arguments?
I deny that there is a lack, but it has to be put in the proper context.
That will come in future threads, for this one I will bracket that
answer and just assume there no really good empirical evidence (even
though I think there is).
I will ague that empiricism is not true source of knowledge by itself and logic is more important.
True empirical evidence in a philosophical sense means exact first hand
observation. In science it doesn't really mean that, it implies a more
truncated process. Consider this, we drop two balls of different size
from a tower. Do they fall the same rate or the bigger one falls faster?
They are supposed to fall at the same rate, right? To say we have
empirical proof, in the litteral sense of the term we would have to
observe every single time two balls are dropped for asl ong as the tower
exists. We would have to sit for thousnds of years and observe
millions of drops and then we couldn't say it was truely empirical
because we might have missed one.
That's impractical for science so we cheat with inductive reasoning. We
make assumptions of probability. We say we observed this 40,000 times,
that's a tight correlation, so we will assume there is a regularity in
the universe that causes it to work this way every time. We make a
statistical correlation. Like the surgeon general saying that smoking
causes cancer. The tobacco companies were really right, they read their
Hume, there was no observation fo cause and effect, because we never
observe cause and effect. But the correlation was so tight we assume
cause and effect.
The ultimate example is Hume's billiard balls. Hume says we do not see
the cause of the ball being made to move, we only really see one ball
stop and the other start. But this happens every time we watch, so we
assume that the tight corrolation gives us causality.
The naturalistic metaphysician assumes that all of nature works this
way. A tight correlation is as good as a cause. So when we observe only
naturalistic causes we can assume there is nothing beyond naturalism.
The problem is many phenomena can fall between the cracks. One might go
one's whole life never seeing a miraculous event, but that doesn't mean
someone else doesn't observe such things. All the atheist can say is
"I have never seen this" but I can say "I have." Yet the atheist lives
in a construct that is made up of his assumptions about naturslitic c/e
and excluding anyting that challenges it. That is just like Kuhns
paradigm shift. The challenges are absorbed into the paradigm untl
there are so many the paradigm has to shit. This may never happen in
naturalism.
So this constructed view of the world that is made out of assumption and
probabilities misses a lot of experience that people do have that
contradicts the paradigm of naturalism. The thing is, to make that
construct they must use logic. After all what they are doing in making
the correlation is merely inductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning has
to play off of deductive reasoning to even make sense.
Ultimately then, "empiricism" as construed by naturalist (inductive
probabalistic assumtions building constructs to form a world view) is
inadquate because it is merely a contsuct and rules out a prori much
that contradicts.
The A priori
God is not given directly in sense data, God transcends the threshold of
human understanding, and thus is not given amenable to empirical
proof. As I have commented in previous essays (bloodspots) religion is
not a scientific question. There are other methodologies that must be
used to understand religion, since the topic is essentially
inter-subjective (and science thrives upon objective data). We can
study religious behavior through empirical means and we can compare all
sorts of statistical realizations through comparisons of differing
religious experiences, behaviors, and options. But we cannot produce a
trace of God in the universe through "objective" scientific means. Here
I use the term "trace" in the Derision sense, the "track," "footprint"
the thing to follow to put us on the scent. As I have stated in
previous essays, what we must do is find the "co-detemrinate," the
thing that is left by God like footprints in the snow. The trace of God
can be found in God's affects upon the human heart, and that shows up
objectively, or inter-subjectvely in changed behavior, changed
attitudes, life transformations. This is the basis of the mystical
argument that I use, and in a sense it also have a bearing upon my
religious instruct argument. But here I wish to present anther view of
the trace of God. This could be seen as a co-detmiernate perhaps, more
importantly, it frees religion from the structures of having to measure
up to a scientific standard of proof: the religious a prori.
Definition of the a priori.
"This notion [Religious a priori] is used by philosophers of
religion to express the view that the sense of the Divine is due to a
special form of awareness which exists along side the cognitive, moral,
and aesthetic forms of awareness and is not explicable by reference to
them. The concept of religion as concerned with the awareness of and
response to the divine is accordingly a simple notion which cannot be
defined by reference other than itself." --David Pailin "Religious a
pariori" Westminster Dictionary of Chrisian Theology (498)
The religious a priroi deals with the speicial nature of religion as
non-derivative of any other discipline, and especially it's speicial
reiigious faculty of understanding which transcends ordinary means of
understanding. Since the enlightenment atheist have sought to explain
away religion by placing it in relative and discardable terms. The major
tactic for accomplishing this strategy was use of the sociological
theory of structural functionalism. By this assumption religion was
chalked up to some relative and passing social function, such as
promoting loyalty to the tribe, or teaching morality for the sake of
social cohesion. This way religion was explained naturalistically and it
was also set in relative terms because these functions in society,
while still viable (since religion is still around) could always pass
away. But this viewpoint assumes that religion is derivative of some
other discipline; it's primitive failed science, concocted to explain
what thunder is for example. Religion is an emotional solace to get
people through hard times and make sense of death and destruction (it's a
ll sin, fallen world et). But the a priori does away with all that.
The a priori says religion is its own thing, it is not failed primitive
sincere, nor is it merely a crutch for surviving or making sense of
the world (although it can be that) it is also its own discipline; the
major impetus for religion is the sense of the numinous, not the need
for explanations of the natural world. Anthropologists are coming more
and more to discord that nineteenth century approach anyway.
Thomas A Indianopolus
prof of Religion at of Miami U. of Ohio
Cross currents
"It is the experience of the transcendent, including the
human response to that experience, that creates faith, or more precisely
the life of faith. [Huston] Smith seems to regard human beings as
having a propensity for faith, so that one speaks of their faith as
"innate." In his analysis, faith and transcendence are more accurate
descriptions of the lives of religious human beings than conventional
uses of the word, religion. The reason for this has to do with the
distinction between participant and observer. This is a fundamental
distinction for Smith, separating religious people (the participants)
from the detached, so-called objective students of religious people (the
observers). Smith's argument is that religious persons do not
ordinarily have "a religion." The word, religion, comes into usage not
as the participant's word but as the observer's word, one that focuses
on observable doctrines, institutions, ceremonies, and other practices.
By contrast, faith is about the nonobservable, life-shaping vision of
transcendence held by a participant..."
The Skeptic might argue "if religion as this unique form of
consciousness that sets it apart form other forms of understanding, why
does it have to be taught?" Obviously religious belief is taught
through culture, and there is a good reason for that, because religion
is a cultural construct. But that does not diminish the reality of God.
Culture teaches religion but God is known to people in the heart. This
comes through a variety of ways; through direct experience, through
miraculous signs, through intuitive sense, or through a sense of the
numinous. The Westminster's Dictionary of Christian Theology ..defines
Numinous as "the sense of awe in attracting and repelling people to the
Holy." Of course the background assumption I make is, as I have said
many times, that God is apprehended by us mystically--beyond word,
thought, or image--we must encode that understanding by filtering it
through our cultural constrcts, which creates religious differences, and
religious problems.
The Culturally constructed nature of religion does not negate the a
priori. "Even though the forms by Which religion is expressed are
culturally conditioned, religion itself is sui generis .. essentially
irreducible to and undeceivable from the non-religious." (Paladin). Nor
can the a priori be reduced to some other form of endeavor. It cannot
be summed up by the use of ethics or any other field, it cannot be
reduced to explanation of the world or to other fields, or
physiological counter causality. To propose such scientific analysis,
except in terms of measuring or documenting effects upon behavior,
would yield fruitless results. Such results might be taken as proof of
no validity, but this would be a mistake. No scientific control can
ever be established, because any study would only be studying the
culturally constructed bits (by definition since language and social
sciences are cultural constructs as well) so all the social sciences
will wind up doing is merely reifying the phenomena and reducing the
experience. In other words, This idea can never be studied in a social
sciences sense, all that the social sciences can do is redefine the
phenomena until they are no longer discussing the actual experiences of
the religious believer, but merely the ideology of the social
scientist (see my essay on Thomas S. Kuhn.
The attempt of skeptics to apply counter causality, that is, to show
that the a priori phenomena is the result of naturalistic forces and not
miraculous or divine, not only misses the boat in its assumptions
about the nature of the argument, but it also loses the phenomena by
reduction to some other phenomena. It misses the boat because it assumes
that the reason for the phenomena is the claim of miraculous origin,
“I feel the presence of God because God is miraculously giving me this
sense of his presence.” While some may say that, it need not be the
believers argument. The real argument is simply that the co-determinates
are signs of the trace of God in the universe, not because we cant
understand them being produced naturalistically, but because they evoke
the sense of numinous and draw us to God. The numinous implies
something beyond the natural, but it need not be “a miracle.” The sense
of the numinous is actually a natural thing, it is part of our
apprehension of the world, but it points to the sublime, which in turn
points to transcendence. In other words, the attribution of counter
causality does not, in and of itself, destroy the argument, while it is
the life transformation through the experience that is truly the
argument, not the phenomena itself. Its the affects upon the believer
of the sense of Gods presence and not the sense of Gods presence that
truly indicates the trance of God.
Moreover, the attempts to reduce the causality to something less than
the miraculous also lose the phenomena in reification.William James, The
Verieties of Religious Experience (The Gilford Lectures):
"Medical materialism seems indeed a good appellation for the too
simple-minded system of thought which we are considering. Medical
materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to
Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an
epileptic. It snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of
Assisi as an hereditary degenerate. George Fox's discontent with the
shams of his age, and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a
symptom of a disordered colon. Carlyle's organ-tones of misery it
accounts for by a gastro-duodenal catarrh. All such mental
over-tensions, it says, are, when you come to the bottom of the matter,
mere affairs of diathesis (auto-intoxications most probably), due to
the perverted action of various glands which physiology will yet
discover. And medical materialism then thinks that the spiritual
authority of all such personages is successfully undermined."
This does not mean that the mere claim of religious experience of God
consciousness is proof in and of itself, but it means that it must be
taken on its own terms. It clearly answers the question about why God
doesn't reveal himself to everyone; He has, or rather, He has made it
clear to everyone that he exists, and He has provided everyone with a
means of knowing Him. He doesn't get any more explicit because faith is a
major requirement for belief. Faith is not an arbitrary requirement,
but the rational and logical result of a world made up of moral choices.
God reveals himself, but on his own terms. We must seek God on those
terms, in the human heart and the basic sense of the numinous and in the
nature of religious encounter. There are many aspects and versions of
this sense, it is not standardized and can be describes in many ways:
Forms of the A priori.
Schleiermacher's "Feeling of Utter Dependence.
Frederick Schleiermacher, (1768-1834) in On Religion: Speeches to
it's Cultured Disposers, and The Christian Faith, sets forth the view
that religion is not reducible to knowledge or ethical systems. It is
primarily a phenomenological apprehension of God consciousness through
means of religious affections. Affections is a term not used much
anymore, and it is easily confused with mere emotion. Sometimes
Schleiermacher is understood as saying that "I become emotional when I
pay and thus there must be an object of my emotional feelings." Though
he does vintner close to this position in one form of the argument, this
is not exactly what he's saying.
Schleiermacher is saying that there is a special intuitive sense that
everyone can grasp of this whole, this unity, being bound up with a
higher reality, being dependent upon a higher unity. In other words, the
"feeling" can be understood as an intuitive sense of "radical
contingency" (int he sense of the above ontological arugments).He goes
on to say that the feeling is based upon the ontological principle as
its theoretical background, but doesn't' depend on the argument because
it proceeds the argument as the pre-given pre-theorectical
pre-cognative realization of what Anslem sat down and thought about and
turned into a rational argument: why has the fools said in his heart
'there is no God?' Why a fool? Because in the heart we know God. To
deny this is to deny the most basic realization about reality.
Rudolph Otto's Sense of the Holy (1868-1937)
The sense of power in the numinous which people find when confronted by
the sacred. The special sense of presence or of Holiness which is
intuitive and observed in all religious experience around the world.
Paul Tillich's Object of Ultimate Concern.
We are going to die. We cannot avoid this. This is our ultimate concern
and sooner or latter we have to confront it. When we do we realize a
sense of transformation that gives us a special realization
existentially that life is more than material.
see also My article on Toilet's notion of God as the Ground of Being.
Tillich's concept made into God argument.
As
Robert R. Williams puts it:
There is a "co-determinate to the Feeling of Utter dependence.
"It is the original pre-theoretical
consciousness...Schleiermacher believes that theoretical cognition is
founded upon pre-theoretical intersubjective cognition and its life
world. The latter cannot be dismissed as non-cognative for if the life
world praxis is non-cognative and invalid so is theoretical
cognition..S...contends that belief in God is pre-theoretical, it is
not the result of proofs and demonstration, but is conditioned soley by
the modification of feeling of utter dependence. Belief in God is not
acquired through intellectual acts of which the traditional proofs are
examples, but rather from the thing itself, the object of religious
experience..If as S...says God is given to feeling in an original way
this means that the feeling of utter dependence is in some sense an
apparition of divine being and reality. This is not meant as an appeal
to revelation but rather as a naturalistic eidetic"] or a priori. The
feeling of utter dependence is structured by a corrolation with its
whence." , Schleiermacher the Theologian, p 4.
The believer is justified in assuming that his/her experinces are experiences of a reality, that is to say, that God is real.
Freedom from the Need to prove.
Schleiermacher came up with his notion of the feeling when wrestling
with Kantian Dualism. Kant had said that the world is divided into two
aspects of relaity the numenous and the pheneomenal. The numenous is not
experienced through sense data, and sense God is not experineced
through sense data, God belongs only to the numenous. The problem is
that this robbs us of an object of theological discourse. We can't talk
about God because we can't experience God in sense data. Schleiermacher
found a way to run an 'end round' and get around the sense data.
Experience of God is given directly in the "feeling" apart form sense
data.
This frees us form the need to prove the existence of God to others,
because we know that God exists in a deep way that cannot be estreated
by mere cultural constructs or reductionist data or deified phenomena.
This restores the object of theological discourse. Once having regained
its object, theological discourse can proceed to make the logical
deduction that there must be a CO-determinate to the feeling, and that
CO-determinate is God. In that sense Schleiermacher is saying "if I have
affections about God must exist as an object of my affections"--not
merely because anything there must be an object of all affections, but
because of the logic of the co-determinate--there is a sense of radical
contengency, there must be an object upon which we are radically
contingent.
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apologetics, God talk, phenomenology, religion, Rudolph Otto, Schleiermacher, sense of the holy, Tillich
