Kevin's Watch

Avatar wrote:You were the one who said "You seem to have no trouble accepting this concept in science..." I was pointing out that the concepts are not analogous between the two.

As for consensus, it depends very much on external factors...the consensus for example that the earth was flat, or the centre of the universe, was overturned by the work, (and interpretation), of individuals.

Mere consensus alone is irrelevant. It has to be supported by demonstrable and repeatable evidence. Where there is no evidence, any opinion has a similar weight to any other.

I am sure that you are right on one score at least, and that is that it's unlikely any individual could grasp every possible theological (or anything else) question. But that is not the issue at discussion. For any given question, any given interpretation has as much chance of being right as any other, under conditions of lack of evidence either way.

Still, although I'm not claiming to be able to grasp every issue, I have no problem admitting the arrogance of the assumption that my interpretation is better or more accurate or whatever. I do tend to suffer from a minor megalomania. But I don't really insist that I'm right. Just that my interpretation has as much chance of being right as any other. (Although of course I like to think that it's more, but that's just that megalomania I mentioned. )

--A

It is only with one aspect of humility that we are here concerned. Humility was largely meant as a restraint upon the arrogance and infinity of the appetite of man. He was always outstripping his mercies with his own newly invented needs. His very power of enjoyment destroyed half his joys. By asking for pleasure, he lost the chief pleasure; for the chief pleasure is surprise. Hence it became evident that if a man would make his world large, he must be always making himself small. Even the haughty visions, the tall cities, and the toppling pinnacles are the creations of humility. Giants that tread down forests like grass are the creations of humility. Towers that vanish upwards above the loneliest star are the creations of humility. For towers are not tall unless we look up at them; and giants are not giants unless they are larger than we. All this gigantesque imagination, which is, perhaps, the mightiest of the pleasures of man, is at bottom entirely humble. It is impossible without humility to enjoy anything -- even pride.

But what we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt -- the Divine Reason. Huxley preached a humility content to learn from Nature. But the new sceptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn. Thus we should be wrong if we had said hastily that there is no humility typical of our time. The truth is that there is a real humility typical of our time; but it so happens that it is practically a more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic. The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether.

At any street corner we may meet a man who utters the frantic and blasphemous statement that he may be wrong. Every day one comes across somebody who says that of course his view may not be the right one. Of course his view must be the right one, or it is not his view. We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table. We are in danger of seeing philosophers who doubt the law of gravity as being a mere fancy of their own. Scoffers of old time were too proud to be convinced; but these are too humble to be convinced. The meek do inherit the earth; but the modern sceptics are too meek even to claim their inheritance. It is exactly this intellectual helplessness which is our second problem.

The last chapter has been concerned only with a fact of observation: that what peril of morbidity there is for man comes rather from his reason than his imagination. It was not meant to attack the authority of reason; rather it is the ultimate purpose to defend it. For it needs defence. The whole modern world is at war with reason; and the tower already reels.

The sages, it is often said, can see no answer to the riddle of religion. But the trouble with our sages is not that they cannot see the answer; it is that they cannot even see the riddle. They are like children so stupid as to notice nothing paradoxical in the playful assertion that a door is not a door. The modern latitudinarians speak, for instance, about authority in religion not only as if there were no reason in it, but as if there had never been any reason for it. Apart from seeing its philosophical basis, they cannot even see its historical cause. Religious authority has often, doubtless, been oppressive or unreasonable; just as every legal system (and especially our present one) has been callous and full of a cruel apathy. It is rational to attack the police; nay, it is glorious. But the modern critics of religious authority are like men who should attack the police without ever having heard of burglars. For there is a great and possible peril to the human mind: a peril as practical as burglary. Against it religious authority was reared, rightly or wrongly, as a barrier. And against it something certainly must be reared as a barrier, if our race is to avoid ruin.

That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself. Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought. It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, "Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?" The young sceptic says, "I have a right to think for myself." But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, "I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all."

There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped. That is the ultimate evil against which all religious authority was aimed. It only appears at the end of decadent ages like our own: and already Mr. H. G. Wells has raised its ruinous banner; he has written a delicate piece of scepticism called "Doubts of the Instrument." In this he questions the brain itself, and endeavours to remove all reality from all his own assertions, past, present, and to come. But it was against this remote ruin that all the military systems in religion were originally ranked and ruled. The creeds and the crusades, the hierarchies and the horrible persecutions were not organized, as is ignorantly said, for the suppression of reason. They were organized for the difficult defence of reason. Man, by a blind instinct, knew that if once things were wildly questioned, reason could be questioned first. The authority of priests to absolve, the authority of popes to define the authority, even of inquisitors to terrify: these were all only dark defences erected round one central authority, more undemonstrable, more supernatural than all -- the authority of a man to think. We know now that this is so; we have no excuse for not knowing it. For we can hear scepticism crashing through the old ring of authorities, and at the same moment we can see reason swaying upon her throne. In so far as religion is gone, reason is going. For they are both of the same primary and authoritative kind. They are both methods of proof which cannot themselves be proved. And in the act of destroying the idea of Divine authority we have largely destroyed the idea of that human authority by which we do a long-division sum. With a long and sustained tug we have attempted to pull the mitre off pontifical man; and his head has come off with it.

Lest this should be called loose assertion, it is perhaps desirable, though dull, to run rapidly through the chief modern fashions of thought which have this effect of stopping thought itself. Materialism and the view of everything as a personal illusion have some such effect; for if the mind is mechanical, thought cannot be very exciting, and if the cosmos is unreal, there is nothing to think about. But in these cases the effect is indirect and doubtful. In some cases it is direct and clear; notably in the case of what is generally called evolution.

Evolution is a good example of that modern intelligence which, if it destroys anything, destroys itself. Evolution is either an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things came about; or, if it is anything more than this, it is an attack upon thought itself. If evolution destroys anything, it does not destroy religion but rationalism. If evolution simply means that a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox; for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly, especially if, like the Christian God, he were outside time. But if it means anything more, it means that there is no such thing as an ape to change, and no such thing as a man for him to change into. It means that there is no such thing as a thing. At best, there is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything and anything. This is an attack not upon the faith, but upon the mind; you cannot think if there are no things to think about. You cannot think if you are not separate from the subject of thought. Descartes said, "I think; therefore I am." The philosophic evolutionist reverses and negatives the epigram. He says, "I am not; therefore I cannot think."

rusmeister wrote: At heart, it appears that you question the validity of reason itself.

Avatar wrote:

rusmeister wrote: At heart, it appears that you question the validity of reason itself.

What on earth gives you that impression?

--A

But I don't really insist that I'm right. Just that my interpretation has as much chance of being right as any other.

Avatar wrote: Actually, I'm very much in favour of reason. My own and everybody else's. And we're talking about interpretation, not knowledge. Indeed, in an earlier post I specifically said that that only area in which I would concede other people an advantage would be in one of study. Science's dogma on the other hand is far more open to reinterpretation. Something religious dogma tends to be opposed to. Reason however is a tool that can be wielded by anyone.

As for Chesterton, that's all very well, but he can't reply to my criticisms, especially since I would never expect you to answer for him. So I prefer addressing your opinions to his.

--A

rusmeister wrote: There are good reasons why religious dogma tends to be opposed to reinterpretation, as you put it. Religion is not science - religion offers answers to the question of "Why?", not the question of "How?" Thus, it is not experimental in nature at all. Christianity doesn't even pretend to know what it claims via human ability and experimentation. It freely admits that its claims of knowledge come from special revelation - that things external to the universe are impossible for us to know unless specially revealed from outside...

Avatar wrote:

rusmeister wrote: There are good reasons why religious dogma tends to be opposed to reinterpretation, as you put it. Religion is not science - religion offers answers to the question of "Why?", not the question of "How?" Thus, it is not experimental in nature at all. Christianity doesn't even pretend to know what it claims via human ability and experimentation. It freely admits that its claims of knowledge come from special revelation - that things external to the universe are impossible for us to know unless specially revealed from outside...

So it's actually the church that is opposed to reason?

--A

Rusmeister wrote:Some things may not be provable by reason because they are only known through special revelation, but if accepted can be found to explain things about our nature and experience - iow, be compatible with reason.

Religion is not science

Prebe wrote:

Rusmeister wrote:Some things may not be provable by reason because they are only known through special revelation, but if accepted can be found to explain things about our nature and experience - iow, be compatible with reason.

That's the key argument used by intelligent design proponents.

Prebe wrote:

Religion is not science

Then stop pushing it as such.

(Although I'll push theology as a science, and have backup from major public universities around the world in doing so).

Lord Mhoram wrote:rusmeister,

(Although I'll push theology as a science, and have backup from major public universities around the world in doing so).

I'm not so sure of that. For one, theology itself has been in a long, inexorable decline in the West since around the Enlightenment. For another, I would wager that even the remaining serious theology departments (Boston College, for example) would no more call theology a science than philosophy departments would call themselves scientific. In other words, practically not at all. Think of it this way: religious studies isn't a science either, and that deals with the exact same subject matter. Calling theology science (the so-called "Queen of the Sciences" in the Dark Ages) is a bit like continuing to call alchemy a science.

if it means that it is becoming 'less valid' then I sharply disagree.

The study of Anglican, Catholic, Orthodox, Judaic, Islamic or Buddhist theology requires scholarship quite as much as the hard sciences (or history or whatever) do.

But if State universities succeed in replacing them with DA's or DS's then it will be a clear sign of a similar decline in philosophy (which I believe has already taken place).

rusmeister wrote:
Sorry, I don't understand how this inference could be drawn from what I said. Some things may not be provable by reason because they are only known through special revelation, but if accepted can be found to explain things about our nature and experience - iow, be compatible with reason. It is a choice to accept or reject those things.

It freely admits that its claims of knowledge come from special revelation

Lord Mhoram wrote:rusmeister,

if it means that it is becoming 'less valid' then I sharply disagree.

On validity, we won't convince each other of anything. I agree with you that theology is less important, and therefore I would posit less relevant, in Western academia and in Western culture quite generally. I applaud this.

The study of Anglican, Catholic, Orthodox, Judaic, Islamic or Buddhist theology requires scholarship quite as much as the hard sciences (or history or whatever) do.

I agree with that. But you're missing something important. We don't have to study religion from a religious standpoint, which is theology. We can do it from a secular point of view, which we call in Anglo-American academia religious studies. Not sure what other cultures call it. In any event, what I mean to say is that we can still study religion with a high degree of scholarly rigor without resorting to religiosity. I would wager to say that the more neutral and balanced secular method of the study of religion is of a higher scholarly caliber than the theological one, which has an agenda which is even more flagrant than that of most scholars.

But if State universities succeed in replacing them with DA's or DS's then it will be a clear sign of a similar decline in philosophy (which I believe has already taken place).

I don't agree with this. Cf. New York Review of Books, Vol. 55 No. 15, 10/9, "A Rescue of Religion." Unfortunately not available online, but see this abstract:

Contemporary philosophy is a discipline in which religion hardly figures. A subject called philosophy of religion exists and has some devoted practitioners, but in the discipline as a whole inquiry into religion is a marginal activity. No doubt many circumstances have contributed to this state of affairs, some of them lying outside philosophy, but a part of the explanation lies in the recent history of the subject.

Religion and philosophy have diverged. Philosophy has become intertwined with science to a degree that I do not like very much. But nevertheless, this keeps it relevant. To say nothing of traditional metaphysics, political theory, philosophy of language, aesthetics, and a myriad of other important topics to which we still look to philosophy.

Not sure why you think one must be religious in order to study theology. Last I heard one is not required to be an adherent to learn about a discipline.

If you mean "what a lot of people like" then again, clear.

In short, "relevance" here is a rhetorical weapon with no ammo.

Just so we acknowledge that radical agendas can exist among the proudly irreligious as well.

If you take a posit and develop ramifications from it, which describes how traditional thought and philosophy developed, then you have a valid field of study.

By now you might have picked up that I get a kick out of busting on terms like "contemporary" or "modern", both of which merely mean "that which is now" - and since now is an ever-changing term, it can have no meaning of lasting value. It effectively means "temporary" but few people think that far, imo.

To say that "religion and philosophy have diverged" is merely to say that there has been a growth in philosophy that rejects religion.

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice ? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

Rus wrote:The shorthand is that you can have no progress unless you can define absolutes