ENTER: October.
"Harvests. Autumn. Dry, cool air. Time & Nature mirror urgency. Days wane shorter. Limbs, stiffer. Leaves change."
Monday, 30 September 2013
Saturday, 28 September 2013
PHI 2010 - D3: The Problem of Evil
Opinion on The Problem of Evil.
The Problem of Evil is difficult. Death, murder, robbery, abuse, genocide, and natural accidents take things we set our happiness on, things we'd love, and sometimes our hope along with them. If our Hope is in God or in something else, these evils can diminish that hope by proxy. It’s common, if unhealthy, to hinge our happiness onto one ideal or another; not doing this, can be a much healthier way to be.
There are things I repeatedly practice in my life that help me remain hopeful in the face of moral evils. I avoid a dependence on emotional highs as to not be dependent and despair when the lows inevitably come. I also normalizing perceiving limitations as capacities, much as the beauty of scars being wounds allowed to heal and not mere aberrations. Recognizing my happiness-held-hostage attachments - to people, relationships, ideas - as what they are helps as well. This better prepares me for when the winds inevitably change against my favor. Instead of cursing the wind, or celebrating it, I am then more-free to adjust my sails, and further on. These attitudes defy in-group mentalities that invariably identify with something other than pulse and breath. While these two important things remain, there is always an ember of hope from which fires great and small may yet be ignited.
As for a god in The Problem of Evil, if one exists as I believe he does, he can survive our disbelief. We must first believe in ourselves, working with whatever great-or-small grace we have. If this grace, this state-of-being matches our ideals or not, the world remains as it is, so there is no use in resenting it. We’ve every right, however, to be grateful for what spark and breath remain, and to use them for the greatest moral good within our given varying capacities (or limitations). I do not recognize Ontological Evils then as-much-as greater and lesser natural or material Goods. These Goods we employ for more-or-less useful moral purposes, less useful purposes being Morally Evil by comparison. This choice of how to employ material Goods by our informed and dynamic consciences is a grace God gives us - our means, and free-will. When we reject the possibility of a god, it is never a god mysterious to us.
Does Evil prove or disprove a loving, all-powerful god? How?
I am not of the opinion that the presence of Evil disproves the presence of an all-loving, knowing, and powerful God. This is due to my belief that all material existence is good, and that moral evil is but the choosing of lesser-good acts in place of equally-accessible greater ones. This ability to choose the greatest moral act - and thereby participate in our own creating - I attribute to the gracious nature of a generating and sustaining god who does not violate his creation into a danse-macabre, a mindless puppetry, but would gradually and gently romance man toward perfection, making all our crooked lines straight with us. The existence of a moral evil, then, is not an option to fail, but for success, and redemption.
Do you side with Hume or Hick? Is Hick's reply the best?
I tend to agree with most everything Hick shares in our reading. Perhaps if I understood Hume’s circumstances more I could speak better about his argument. I have little love for refutals, and strongly disagree with each of Hume’s four seemingly-idealized points against a god existing despite the presence of evil, if for different reasons.
Are there other replies? Are there better replies?
There are more and better replies to The Problem of Evil than just Hume and Hick’s. The world is vast, with many philosophies in it, which we have come across before, and will likely encounter. Ours is only an Introductory Philosophy class, and it is unlikely that we can plumb the depths of The Problem of Evil here. Boethius' Consolation in our text (14th Edition), for example, is an amazing and heartening read on the subject that greatly helped me wade through Hume's rhetoric.
---
-XV, 27 September 2013
The Problem of Evil is difficult. Death, murder, robbery, abuse, genocide, and natural accidents take things we set our happiness on, things we'd love, and sometimes our hope along with them. If our Hope is in God or in something else, these evils can diminish that hope by proxy. It’s common, if unhealthy, to hinge our happiness onto one ideal or another; not doing this, can be a much healthier way to be.
There are things I repeatedly practice in my life that help me remain hopeful in the face of moral evils. I avoid a dependence on emotional highs as to not be dependent and despair when the lows inevitably come. I also normalizing perceiving limitations as capacities, much as the beauty of scars being wounds allowed to heal and not mere aberrations. Recognizing my happiness-held-hostage attachments - to people, relationships, ideas - as what they are helps as well. This better prepares me for when the winds inevitably change against my favor. Instead of cursing the wind, or celebrating it, I am then more-free to adjust my sails, and further on. These attitudes defy in-group mentalities that invariably identify with something other than pulse and breath. While these two important things remain, there is always an ember of hope from which fires great and small may yet be ignited.
As for a god in The Problem of Evil, if one exists as I believe he does, he can survive our disbelief. We must first believe in ourselves, working with whatever great-or-small grace we have. If this grace, this state-of-being matches our ideals or not, the world remains as it is, so there is no use in resenting it. We’ve every right, however, to be grateful for what spark and breath remain, and to use them for the greatest moral good within our given varying capacities (or limitations). I do not recognize Ontological Evils then as-much-as greater and lesser natural or material Goods. These Goods we employ for more-or-less useful moral purposes, less useful purposes being Morally Evil by comparison. This choice of how to employ material Goods by our informed and dynamic consciences is a grace God gives us - our means, and free-will. When we reject the possibility of a god, it is never a god mysterious to us.
Does Evil prove or disprove a loving, all-powerful god? How?
I am not of the opinion that the presence of Evil disproves the presence of an all-loving, knowing, and powerful God. This is due to my belief that all material existence is good, and that moral evil is but the choosing of lesser-good acts in place of equally-accessible greater ones. This ability to choose the greatest moral act - and thereby participate in our own creating - I attribute to the gracious nature of a generating and sustaining god who does not violate his creation into a danse-macabre, a mindless puppetry, but would gradually and gently romance man toward perfection, making all our crooked lines straight with us. The existence of a moral evil, then, is not an option to fail, but for success, and redemption.
Do you side with Hume or Hick? Is Hick's reply the best?
I tend to agree with most everything Hick shares in our reading. Perhaps if I understood Hume’s circumstances more I could speak better about his argument. I have little love for refutals, and strongly disagree with each of Hume’s four seemingly-idealized points against a god existing despite the presence of evil, if for different reasons.
Are there other replies? Are there better replies?
There are more and better replies to The Problem of Evil than just Hume and Hick’s. The world is vast, with many philosophies in it, which we have come across before, and will likely encounter. Ours is only an Introductory Philosophy class, and it is unlikely that we can plumb the depths of The Problem of Evil here. Boethius' Consolation in our text (14th Edition), for example, is an amazing and heartening read on the subject that greatly helped me wade through Hume's rhetoric.
---
-XV, 27 September 2013
Thursday, 26 September 2013
2013 Sep 26 -"Eye has not seen,..": a small reflection on Heaven & Autumn.
"Eye has not seen, nor ear heard..."
You think you know.
...you don't know. ...I don't know.
Saints, martyrs... are not bloody-masquerades, horrific masks of what was done to them. They are happy, purposeful, peaceful, hopeful. Joyous!
Who cannot find that attractive, to be that way?.. To get to know THAT? and have it get to know you?
You think you know.
...you don't know. ...I don't know.
Saints, martyrs... are not bloody-masquerades, horrific masks of what was done to them. They are happy, purposeful, peaceful, hopeful. Joyous!
Who cannot find that attractive, to be that way?.. To get to know THAT? and have it get to know you?
Thursday, 19 September 2013
PHI2010 - D2: Religious Faith
XV
D2: Religious Faith
PHI2010 INTRO TO PHIL
Thursday, 19 September 2013
This week's readings all center on the topic of faith - so what do you think of the idea of faith? Is faith more of a belief, or an idea that we have, in a god-like being as Pascal suggests? Do you believe that Kierkegaard is right and that faith can only work as a deep, meaningful relationship with a god? Or is faith just a made up concept that misguides people?
- - - - -
Thinking of how higher-order knowledge matters such as the concept and/or existence of God and the subject of religious faith; matters with communal, local and global culture repercussions are addressed at the beginning of our philosophy course, when we are least informed and capable of addressing them, as opposed to later-on or at the end, when we'd be more informed and capable of addressing issues with such historic and yet topical interest, as well as how Pascal's Wager, so-called, is taken seriously hand-in-hand with the approach of that illuminating and necessary leap-of-faith presented by Kierkegaard provokes in me a great desire to cuss, and to use colorful metaphors unsuitable for minors and those with gentler social customs than fishermen and construction-workers may possess, comparing prostitution and marriage, and the like.
Pascal is about as wrong as I imaginable with his wager:
He supposes faith, is nothing more than a choice... like what tie or shoes we'll wear on a given day. How many believe, trust, and love, by choosing??
Pascal supposes a god fit for worship, in the custom of his community on their own formative faith journey, that might yet somehow condemn one's soul (that being most souls) for not carrying themselves as his own faith community does, professing faith in YHWH, Jesus and the Holy Church, despite their circumstance... to the reward of an infinitely-happy Paradise if they do, and the eternal condemnation of Hell if they don't. Such a monstrous-puppeteer god, who would see no worthy nobility in unprofessing men of good will without the intervening of a formal dogmatic profession would not be fit for service.
Pascal follows that all noble men must eventually come to believe, thus being able to live noble lives, where only the wretched and miserable would choose (choose!) not to believe. And what of the Church's since-refined teaching on free-will versus predestination, master? Perhaps in a couple weeks...
Kierkegaard, he gets it. Faith is a cliff. It is Jesus walking over the abyss of the unknown and threatening deep, calming the waters as "Who is this man, that even the wind and seas obey him?"... the seas of the in-group beyond, into, and amidst the out-group. It is that trust, hoped-for-but-unproven in the support and enduring loyalty of a loving spouse. It is a gift given and sought to and from the beyond, unknown that, once having and dynamically participating with it, opens up progressing new avenues of accepting, of allowing, of understanding - a lens, and perspective to connect and relate that Known, and the previously and constantly Unknown.
Faith, is a leap, not a choice; a bridge, not a wager; a gift, not a gamble. Faith is not the utterly analytic, impersonal, flawed and unthinkable proposition we see in Pascal's Wager. Faith... is a relationship that Great Other has with our very personal, immediate, vulnerable-and-yet manifest self.
Saturday, 14 September 2013
D1: Proofs for the existence of God
PHI 2010 : D1: Proofs for the existence of God
Arguments:
1 St Anselm's Ontological Revelation (argument)
2 St Thomas Aquinas' Cosmological Arguments
3 Willaim Paley's Teleological Argument
4 Blaise Pascal's Wager toward the Reasonableness of Choosing Religion
-----
Do they speak to believers?
The ontological argument through St Anselm does speak both to and from belief, as he says.
St Acquinas' cosmological argument does not speak to believers, but as a believer yet to other mere men, making a case for an uncaused first principle consistent with our a reasoning of gradience in being, like from what we know of absolute zero temperature to unknown limits of heat, energy, etc.
William Paley's teleological argument of the watch necessitating a watchmaker does not necessarily speak to believers, but merely presents the reasonability of wagering in favor of religion.
Blaise Pascal's wager in favor of the reasonability of choosing religion does not speak to believers.
Do they understand god & being?
Based on St Anselm's position, I do not think he sees God so much as the ACT of BEING, but as an entity similar yet ineffably greater than all, somehow proven to exist because the opposite is unthinkable to him. His critics in our text do little better if at all.
St Aquinas' argument doesn't seem intent on understanding God, but on seeing in him a root foundation for all act and being. He does not here define God, but does demonstrate an understanding of the nature of the world, time, & causation, and of how God places in our order of events.
Neither William Paley nor Blaise Pascal seem to present an understanding of God but both focus more on the nature of existence or creation, albeit from differing aspects.
Do they prove anything?
St Anselm and the critics of his ontological faith-argument in our text do not prove or disprove the existence of a god, but concepts merely.
The cosmological argument of St Aquinas I find very compelling, as it reaches only into our common human experience of cause & effect and the necessity of primal, universal truth.
Neither Pascal nor Paley present a proof of God.
pick one argument:
St Anselm didn't have a proof or discovery. He had a revelation, as he attests, through and to belief, without which such a supposed argument would be impossible, as he also claims, that God must exist, because he - as the greatest of all perfections beyond which there can be nothing - cannot be fathomed not to exist. Taking his account as a proof is not valid, as it is more based on illumined knowledge, that is, a faith seeking proof after belief, and not mere proof for any and all. It must remain in context.
Charles Hartsborne asks if the eternal being would not have to be changing, likely as a misappropriation of his seeming changing in the Old Testament salvation narrative, which should rightly be interpreted as a change in Israel reflected in the character of unchanging YHWH, and not an actual change in himself.
James Rachels assumes an apriori understanding of God-worship as this vs. that and not both/and, and upon this his 3-point anti-god argument fails. Were worship, meaning service, without one's role as an autonomous moral agent, it could only be as without the one first, just as identity foreclosure remains ones identity. It rests on a false-polemic of an imagined autonomy apart from relation against a worship construed somehow as creative yet self-abandoning act. A train on rails, as-expected, remains a train being itself, and loses nothing of it's essence by doing as expected. This metaphor describes how we lose nought of ourselves, but are more ourselves, more realized, doing freely as is yet expected of us, so long as it is yet a free act. What good then is strength, but to give? Surely having is not enough.
Norman Malcolm:
The concept of an unlimited being not being self-contradictory, illustrates only that the conceiving of such am unlimited being is possible. NM reaches to say the concept requires the existing of such a being to be necessary, where such a being could only be either impossible or necessary, as if the conceiving would require the act of such a being existing. This is just as St Anselm does, a reach, as no concept of infinity can exceed being a concept of itself, nor require a reality beyond itself. A dream is real inasmuch as it is real as a dream, yet reality exists even unconceived.
Paol Davis:
Were God a being -in- the Universe, he'd be subject to physics, as we understand it. God as being-in-act, or as the act of being, would have the Universe existing then by him, this of course redefining him as something other than a being among beings, more consistent with the creation mythos than empiricism, or with the wonder of poetry vs the delineament of mathematics. "The poet seeks merely to get his head into the heavens. The logician, the heavens into his head... and it is his head that splits!".
Charles Hartsborne states two reasons for his belief. First: a need for a God to understand order as possible, though we observe order before coming to any belief, as in our tripping before and besides the -concept- of gravity, if not apart from it; and the Second in our text: a need for significance in our mortality beyond the present now existing, somehow immortalized by his god-concept in a reality other than the now.
St Anselm's proof, as supposed as one, and the ontological unexperienced arguments, refutals, and criticisms of the argument he represents in our text do not compel my belief or disbelief, as all are closed to an existence of God irreverent of our conceiving. None are near big enough.
Arguments:
1 St Anselm's Ontological Revelation (argument)
2 St Thomas Aquinas' Cosmological Arguments
3 Willaim Paley's Teleological Argument
4 Blaise Pascal's Wager toward the Reasonableness of Choosing Religion
-----
Do they speak to believers?
The ontological argument through St Anselm does speak both to and from belief, as he says.
St Acquinas' cosmological argument does not speak to believers, but as a believer yet to other mere men, making a case for an uncaused first principle consistent with our a reasoning of gradience in being, like from what we know of absolute zero temperature to unknown limits of heat, energy, etc.
William Paley's teleological argument of the watch necessitating a watchmaker does not necessarily speak to believers, but merely presents the reasonability of wagering in favor of religion.
Blaise Pascal's wager in favor of the reasonability of choosing religion does not speak to believers.
Do they understand god & being?
Based on St Anselm's position, I do not think he sees God so much as the ACT of BEING, but as an entity similar yet ineffably greater than all, somehow proven to exist because the opposite is unthinkable to him. His critics in our text do little better if at all.
St Aquinas' argument doesn't seem intent on understanding God, but on seeing in him a root foundation for all act and being. He does not here define God, but does demonstrate an understanding of the nature of the world, time, & causation, and of how God places in our order of events.
Neither William Paley nor Blaise Pascal seem to present an understanding of God but both focus more on the nature of existence or creation, albeit from differing aspects.
Do they prove anything?
St Anselm and the critics of his ontological faith-argument in our text do not prove or disprove the existence of a god, but concepts merely.
The cosmological argument of St Aquinas I find very compelling, as it reaches only into our common human experience of cause & effect and the necessity of primal, universal truth.
Neither Pascal nor Paley present a proof of God.
pick one argument:
St Anselm didn't have a proof or discovery. He had a revelation, as he attests, through and to belief, without which such a supposed argument would be impossible, as he also claims, that God must exist, because he - as the greatest of all perfections beyond which there can be nothing - cannot be fathomed not to exist. Taking his account as a proof is not valid, as it is more based on illumined knowledge, that is, a faith seeking proof after belief, and not mere proof for any and all. It must remain in context.
Charles Hartsborne asks if the eternal being would not have to be changing, likely as a misappropriation of his seeming changing in the Old Testament salvation narrative, which should rightly be interpreted as a change in Israel reflected in the character of unchanging YHWH, and not an actual change in himself.
James Rachels assumes an apriori understanding of God-worship as this vs. that and not both/and, and upon this his 3-point anti-god argument fails. Were worship, meaning service, without one's role as an autonomous moral agent, it could only be as without the one first, just as identity foreclosure remains ones identity. It rests on a false-polemic of an imagined autonomy apart from relation against a worship construed somehow as creative yet self-abandoning act. A train on rails, as-expected, remains a train being itself, and loses nothing of it's essence by doing as expected. This metaphor describes how we lose nought of ourselves, but are more ourselves, more realized, doing freely as is yet expected of us, so long as it is yet a free act. What good then is strength, but to give? Surely having is not enough.
Norman Malcolm:
The concept of an unlimited being not being self-contradictory, illustrates only that the conceiving of such am unlimited being is possible. NM reaches to say the concept requires the existing of such a being to be necessary, where such a being could only be either impossible or necessary, as if the conceiving would require the act of such a being existing. This is just as St Anselm does, a reach, as no concept of infinity can exceed being a concept of itself, nor require a reality beyond itself. A dream is real inasmuch as it is real as a dream, yet reality exists even unconceived.
Paol Davis:
Were God a being -in- the Universe, he'd be subject to physics, as we understand it. God as being-in-act, or as the act of being, would have the Universe existing then by him, this of course redefining him as something other than a being among beings, more consistent with the creation mythos than empiricism, or with the wonder of poetry vs the delineament of mathematics. "The poet seeks merely to get his head into the heavens. The logician, the heavens into his head... and it is his head that splits!".
Charles Hartsborne states two reasons for his belief. First: a need for a God to understand order as possible, though we observe order before coming to any belief, as in our tripping before and besides the -concept- of gravity, if not apart from it; and the Second in our text: a need for significance in our mortality beyond the present now existing, somehow immortalized by his god-concept in a reality other than the now.
St Anselm's proof, as supposed as one, and the ontological unexperienced arguments, refutals, and criticisms of the argument he represents in our text do not compel my belief or disbelief, as all are closed to an existence of God irreverent of our conceiving. None are near big enough.
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