Philosophy and Gospel

"Is the philosophical statement 'man is the measure of all things' nearer or further from the metaphysical implications of the gospel than 'human beings are dependent on something greater than themselves'?"

It's an interesting question, the answer to which sheds light on different Christian approaches to philosophy and specifically metaphysics.  It seems to me that for many who are involved in theological retrieval - that is to say, the project to recover for the church the classical theology of history - there is a conviction that ancient philosophy (broadly Platonist or Aristotelian) provides the underpinnings of much Christian theology, such that theological retrieval cannot really go ahead without philosophical retrieval.  There is a sense in which this is obviously true.  If we are reciting the Nicene Creed, we are dealing in categories which derive ultimately from the metaphysical world of late antiquity - we cannot say 'of one being' without to a certain extent entering that world.  Moreover, an implication of this is that it will indeed be crucial for Christian teachers to have a grasp of those classical philosophical terms.  How else could we be sure that when we recite the Creed we mean the same thing as the Fathers who framed it?

However, many push further than this.  It is not merely that a working knowledge of ancient philosophy is vital for a deep understanding of classical theology.  For many, the loss of ancient philosophy as a functional view of the world leads inevitably to a distortion of the gospel.  Modern philosophy, on this reading, is the enemy.  This, it seems to me, is related to a strand of Christian thinking on philosophy which dates back to at least the second century, and sees Greek philosophy as in some sense a preparation for the gospel.  I think we ought to resist that idea.  It introduces a second revelation, to be co-ordinated with Scriptural revelation.  Frankly, I think in some cases the metaphysics of the ancient world is brought to sit in judgement over Scripture - the Biblical storyline bent and twisted to fit within philosophical categories.  But even absent this particular error, I think it's theologically wrong-headed to suggest that classical culture was a 'preparation' in this way.  It cuts across our theology of grace,  I've pondered this a little before.

So, my suggestion - and the thought which led to me being asked the question with which we started - is that the right motive for seeking to understand the philosophical and metaphysical underpinnings of classical theology is so that we can learn to express the same gospel in a very different philosophical climate.  This is not a proposal for metaphysical indifferentism, the idea that Christians should just shrug when it comes to issues of ultimate reality.  The gospel does have metaphysical implications.  My thought, rather, is that we ought to see how our theological forebears allowed the gospel to shape their use of the prevalent philosophical categories; I think we will find that they are basically subversive in their approach.  Take the Nicene Creed again, or perhaps the Chalcedonian definition.  The way in which philosophical concepts - like 'being', 'substance', 'person', 'nature' - are used in these contexts draws on classical philosophy for vocabulary and for conceptual matter, but the final formulation is hardly something which the classical metaphysicians would have endorsed.  Classical metaphysics has been subverted to express the truth of Christian revelation.  And if that was possible then, why not now?

Back to the original question: which is nearest to the metaphysical implications of the gospel, the statement that 'man is the measure of all things', or the statement that 'human beings are dependent on something greater than themselves'?  My answer would be: they're both close, and they're both infinitely far away.  Take the second statement, which my interlocutor of course wants me to endorse as rather closer to gospel thinking.  Unless we are saying clearly and unequivocally that 'something greater' here means 'the Triune God', I don't see how this statement is at all friendly to the gospel.  The Unmoved Mover of Aristotle is an idea utterly hostile to the Christian revelation.  The notion of 'something greater' is not in and of itself at all well placed to service the gospel, or to provide a metaphysical grounding for the Christian doctrine of God.  But on the other hand, we can certainly subvert this notion to express Christian doctrine.  If the prevailing philosophical and cultural climate were theistic in the sense of this statement, it would certainly be worth proclaiming to them that this 'something greater' which they honour despite not knowing what it is has a name, and a face, and he can be known in Jesus Christ.  But once you've filled out the statement with the Triune God is simply doesn't mean the same thing anymore - for the 'something greater' on which human beings depend is found to be the humble baby in the manger and the crucified Saviour.

But still, 'something greater' is better than man as the measure of all things, right?  I don't really see how.  Of course the metaphysics which Protagoras is proposing in this statement is hostile to the idea that there is any unchanging God above humanity.  Protagoras wants all value to flow from humanity.  But in a culture - such as ours! - which is saturated with this sort of unanchored humanism, why not subvert the statement?  For sure, man is the measure of all things, so long as we're talking about the right Man.  And of course, as soon as we've realised that Man is really Jesus Christ, the statement no longer means what it did, and becomes a vehicle for the gospel.

In both cases, there are likely misunderstandings that will emerge, and will have to be worked through.  Hangovers from the philosophical background will distort out theology and need to be carefully worked through.  I would humbly suggest that hangovers from the world of classical philosophical have in fact distorted classical theology, and seeking to express the gospel in different philosophical concepts might help to knock off some of the sharp edges that remain.  We will never get there; our theology will always be an approximation, theologia viatorum.  That's okay.  Better that than to be stuck in a philosophical and theological dead end because we've committed ourselves to metaphysical constructs which are not themselves part of the gospel.

Gospel, philosophies, cultures - disconnected thoughts

1.  The only culture to which the gospel is bound is that of Israel, as that culture is created and witnessed through the Scriptures of the Old Testament.  That the gospel is bound to this culture is no comment on the suitability of Israel per se, but relies on the fact that the Word of God has taken Jewish, Israelite flesh into personal union with himself in Christ Jesus.  The pre-existence of Israel, before the coming of Christ, is already founded on his future incarnation.  So the gospel is bound to the culture of Israel as expressed in the OT because God has bound that culture to himself in Christ.

2.  No philosophical or cultural background other than OT Israel is inherently more suitable for receiving or expressing the gospel than another.  The gospel has power to express itself in a variety of cultural and philosophical settings, but this power does not come from or depend on the cultural or philosophical milieu.  The power is all in the gospel, in God's Word, to take conceptual, linguistic, and narrative worlds which are in themselves merely human (and therefore incapable of being vehicles for God's revelation) and use them to express divine truth.  Or to put it another way, Jesus can speak many languages.

3.  Every culture and philosophy - and I am not clear in my own mind whether this includes OT Israel or not! - has a tendency to distort the gospel.  Maybe it's the tendency of classical philosophy towards freezing god; maybe it's the Hegelian tendency to bury god in the processes of history.  Maybe it's the modernist assumption that salvation means progress; maybe its the postmodern assumption that salvation means individual liberation from all norms.  Whatever it is, there is always a particular ditch, or several particular ditches, into which any cultural and philosophical framework threatens to drive the gospel.  This does not prevent the Word of God from speaking into and even through those frameworks; nor does it imply that in all, or any, other respects those frameworks are inherently suitable for the gospel (see point 2 above).  But we are not excused from trying to discern the weak points and the danger areas.

4.  A philosophical or cultural framework can shift under prolonged 'pressure' from the gospel.  Classical philosophical concepts, for example, end up being reshaped as Christian content is 'poured' into them.  This can give the impression that here we have a 'Christian philosophy' or a 'Christian culture'.  Better to say that we have a philosophy or culture which has been affected by Christianity, but which still in itself stands against the gospel and in need of constant correction.

5.  Where the church has historically wrestled through particular theological issues using a conceptual and linguistic framework from the past, we may consider ourselves to be bound to their conclusions without being bound to that framework.  For example, we may (and I think should) hold that the church made an irreversible decision and definition at the councils of Nicea, Constantinople, and Chalcedon; but we are also at liberty to express that same conclusion in a different philosophical framework, and indeed we may have an obligation to do so.  In such cases, we can expect a degree of tough questioning as to whether we are really saying the same thing; and that is something to which we should be prepared to submit.

Two books on truth

I had cause recently to do a bit of reading around the concept of truth, and two books in particular caught my eye.  This is not a review or even a detailed overview of either, but just some reflections on the different trajectories truth is taking at the moment in our culture.

Matthew D'Ancona is a political journalist, and his book Post-Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back deals primarily with the apparent departure of truth from the public sphere in the UK and USA.  Most of his examples of post-truth are derived from the Donald or the Brexit Referendum.  The diagnosis of where we've got to, and the widespread loss of trust that follows a culture of pervasive lying, is good.  I think he doesn't go deep enough, philosophically, but maybe it's not that sort of book.  In particular, I think it would be worth spending more time pondering whether the practitioners of post-truth would see themselves as lying.  I think the situation is more like something 'beyond truth and falsehood' - the opposites of truth-telling and lying have both become outmoded as concepts, and instead we're left with politicians and other public figures telling stories for power.

The solution D'Ancona proposes is less good.  There is an alarming section where he seems very excited about the future potential to have AI weeding out 'fake news' from the internet.  Then there is a desperately naive attempt to return to modernity - he actually invokes the values of the Enlightenment a number of times.  We must demand that we be told the truth.  We must insist on facts.  But all this is to write as if the 19th and 20th centuries had never happened - as if Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud had never put pen to paper.  The insistence that there is a value-free, interpretation-free, straightforward truth to be had is really not going to get us out of this mess.  He seems to recognise this, because he also talks about the need for those who support Enlightenment values to work hard at telling a better story, constructing a more convincing narrative.  I'm afraid that within the framework of the book, this just comes across as a call for propaganda.  The 'new modernism' which D'Ancona appears to be advocating comes across as alarmingly totalitarian, for someone must surely be appointed to decide which truth is the real truth (at least until we can train the robots to do it for us!) and which narratives should be ruled out of court.

John Caputo's book Truth: The Search for Wisdom in the Postmodern Age is more philosophical, which is what you would expect from a professional philosopher.  It also takes a much longer historical view, dividing the story of Western culture into three periods - Ancient, Modern (Enlightenment), and Postmodern.  That perspective enables Caputo to see that something significant was lost at the Enlightenment.  For the Ancients, truth was something to be loved, something to be pursued, something that had a claim on us.  Truth was related to goodness and beauty and the good life.  The Moderns, on the other hand, separated truth out, made it just bare facts.  In Kant, truth is no longer something to be loved; 'truth' is just the label we give to whatever propositions and experiences come out when we make the right and appropriate use of our faculties.  Caputo uses religion as a test-case for how this view of truth works, and that enables him to show how much is lost.  For the Moderns, religion (along with most anything that gives life value) is excluded from the realm of truth, and therefore from having any real content at all.  Postmodernism is a response to this, an attempt to recover that sense of truth as something to be loved and lived.  But this not a return to the Ancient world; there is no going back.  Rather, this is living into an always-open future.  Caputo uses Derrida (whether accurately or not I couldn't say; Derrida is an unexplored land for me) to argue for a vision of truth that is closely related to whatever is open to the future.  That is true which will carry us into the future, which is open.  That is false which closes off the future.

So Caputo's response to the crisis of truth is to push deeper into Postmodernism.  From a Christian perspective, it's hard not to see this as some sort of eschatological project, but with an indefinitely delayed eschaton: the truth is always over the next hill.  Anyone who claims to have the truth is inherently proved wrong, because truth is always in the future.  There is, then, a criterion for deciding what is true and what is false - but it doesn't seem to have much to do with reality per se.

I think these are basically the two secular responses to the truth crisis: back to modernity or forward into deeper postmodernity.  The latter is more exciting and, to me at least, appealing.  But will it help us, really?  Won't we just end up with a series of competing eschatological visions, with their attendant narratives about the present?  When it hits the street, won't this just boil down to 'I have my truth and you have yours'?

Of course, I think the answer lies in the fact that the One who is the truth has been here amongst us - that one life amongst the many human lives of history is the truth to which every other life, every fact, every aspect of reality, is related.  But that is another story.

Taking ourselves seriously

I don't manage to read as much philosophy as I would like.  Yesterday I perused a few pages of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, a book I've been reading on and off for a couple of years, and enjoyed it immensely.  It's mostly the continental philosophers I like to read nowadays, and I think that is because continental philosophy hugs the borders of religion pretty closely.  Increasingly I'm struck by the fact that I don't think there can be serious thought which does not interact with questions of ultimate meaning, and that means interacting with God, either as a presence or an absence.

I guess what I mean is this: a lot of what passes for thinking in our contemporary culture is pre-committed to the idea that our thinking just doesn't really matter, because nothing at all matters.  We, as thinking subjects, are not to be taken seriously.  Questions that ought to be big are made small because they are placed within the framework of meaninglessness.  Take the ethical question, for example.  I think we instinctively assume that the question 'What ought we to do?' is a Big Question, perhaps the biggest.  But when it is re-framed within contemporary naturalism, it becomes a small question, which can be answered by reference to nothing greater than my own preferences and a few societal norms.  It becomes almost a triviality.

Now, that isn't to suggest that there can't be any profound thinking that is atheistic.  Consider the way that the ethical question is framed by the existentialists, who accept naturalism but still take human beings as persons with absolute seriousness.  'What ought we to do?' is a Big Question in this framework, and that is why it is laden with so much anguish.  It is, if you like, a Big Question in a small universe, just as on the existentialist view human beings are Significant in a universe of insignificance.  Hence all the angst and stuff.  Now, that is profound thinking, which wrestles seriously with what it might mean to be an actual human being in a universe defined by the absence of God.  Go read some Sartre, or Camus.  Then go read A.C. Grayling, and see what is lost.

From a Christian point of view, I think one of the reasons the Christian message doesn't resonate with many of our contemporaries is that people don't think they are really human.  They don't take themselves seriously as ethical and purposeful beings, because any ethics or purpose they might talk about are squeezed into the framework of naturalism.  The questions only sound big; they are actually insignificant.  Without big questions, the big answers of the Christian story just don't find anything to latch on to.  Perhaps we need to take a big step back, and instead of providing answers we need to point out that if God has been here, in our reality as one of us, then we are actual, real human beings - and that means our big questions are really Big Questions.

The transubstantiation trap

Transubstantiation is a very sensible and coherent way of expressing Roman Catholic eucharistic doctrine - or at least it was in about 1250.  The classic formulation, in Thomas Aquinas, explains that in the mass the essence or substance of the bread and wine is genuinely changed into the essence of the body of Christ.  The bread and wine still appear to be bread and wine to us, because their accidents are unchanged; that is to say, all that appears to the senses is still exactly as it was before.  Faith is required here: not to make the change (this is thought to be objective), or to receive the changed host (this is done, whether to judgement or salvation, by everyone who partakes), but to perceive the host as genuinely being the body of Christ, since the senses won't help.

As I said, this all makes sense in 1250.  Aquinas leans heavily on Aristotelian philosophy for the language of substance and accidents.  For Aristotle, accidents or properties of things reside in their substances.  The substance is the thing proper, and the accidents are, if you like, the presenting face.  Of course, for Aristotle these things couldn't be separated.  The idea that you could have a table that presented as a chair whilst remaining a table would have seemed bizarre to him.  Aquinas would appeal to miracle here, again not unreasonably.

Now, there are all sorts of reasons not to follow Roman eucharistic theory at this point.  The general thrust is wrong.  But granted the basic direction of Roman Catholic theology, this made sense.  Unfortunately, because at the Counter-Reformation the Catholic Church rather painted itself into a corner in terms of doctrinal change and the impossibility thereof, this is still the way the mass is explained today.  And it makes no sense.  Nobody believes in substances and accidents in this way anymore; nor should they.  It is certainly not inconceivable that the doctrine of the mass could be re-expressed in a way which kept its essentials intact without relying on an obsolete philosophy - but Roman Catholicism has closed that path to itself 500 years ago.  It's stuck with Aquinas, and therefore with Aristotle.

The reason I mention all this is because there is always a danger that Evangelicals, who are in theory open to their doctrine being continually reformed by the word of God, actually fall into the trap of holding on to formulations that no longer make sense, and in so doing losing the heart of the doctrine they're trying to defend.  As an example, I was reading someone recently who, when challenged that the evangelical doctrine of inerrancy is a species of philosophical foundationalism, simply gave the verbal equivalent of a shrug - we are apparently committed to epistemological foundationalism.  That would be an error.  Foundationalism has, in my view rightly, been found wanting philosophically.  And if our doctrine really springs from Scripture, we'd hardly want to wed ourselves completely to a philosophical doctrine that emerged with the Enlightenment!  Surely we can express our commitment to the authority of Scripture in a new way - without losing it?  Because my worry is that we will surely lose it - or at least, lose adherence to it - if we continue to express it in terms of an obsolete philosophy.

This is not about compromising with the spirit of the age.  It's about recognising that we have always used the language and concepts of the day to express what we think we're hearing in Scripture.  That is both inevitable and right - how else would we communicate today?  But yesterday's formulations must be open to re-expression if we're to make sure that it is God's revelation attested in Scripture that is driving our doctrine, and to avoid getting stuck in philosophical cul-de-sacs.

Living Philosophically

I recently read A Brief History of Thought by Luc Ferry, and I would recommend that anyone interested in philosophy, or indeed Western culture more broadly, take a look.  The book is subtitled A philosophical guide to living - and that is what it aims to be.  By taking us on a walk-through of the history of philosophy, Prof Ferry tries to show how philosophy ought to have an impact on our daily lives.

You can cut this book two ways - diachronic and synchronic, if you like.  Structurally, it is a history, and takes us from ancient philosophy (especially the Stoics) through Christendom to the Enlightenment, then beyond into post-modernism and then the contemporary philosophical scene.  The book is driven forward by the repeated question of why people abandoned the thought of one epoch in favour of the next.  But then within each chapter the period in question is dealt with in terms of three areas of thought: theory (what is the universe like?), ethics (what ought we to do?), and soteriology (what is it all about and how we will cope with our own role and finitude?)  It is this last question which places Ferry firmly within the Continental tradition, and which makes him interesting.  He is not content that philosophy analyse the human condition; he wants it to provide hope and meaning.  For that reason, he quite sensibly places philosophy on the same plane as religion.  They are meant to do the same thing.

As a Christian reader, I'm fascinated and frustrated by Ferry's interaction with Christian thought.  He understands aspects of the gospel very clearly, but misses other things.  I suspect that the problem comes from treating the gospel as if it were a philosophy rather than a history.  What he does understand is that in contrast to philosophy Christianity is about humility: the humility of God who becomes incarnate, and the humility of the believer who finds truth, ethics, and salvation in accepting the word of another rather than thinking himself out of the problem.  In the end, Ferry thinks Christianity is too good to be true, offering as it does real life after death; for him, there is no such salvation, and philosophy should occupy itself with questions of how to face the inevitability and finality of death.

In other words, philosophy seeks to find salvation from the fear of death; Christianity offers salvation from death itself.  Ferry would of course prefer the latter - but the former is all he thinks we can realistically expect, and in the end the prescription to overcome the fear of death is disappointing: just a radical emphasis on the present, with the prospect of death spurring us on to do now what we will not be able to do later.

By emphasising the element of philosophy which contemporary thought (at least in the Anglo-Saxon world) most neglects - soteriology and the question of human meaning - Ferry inadvertently highlights that philosophy is unable to answer the ultimate questions.  By taking us through the history of philosophy, he shows that fashions of thought have changed over time - philosophy is a ship at sea, blown this way and that by various winds of doctrine.  The story is fascinating, but the conclusion is strangely hollow.

What words mean 1: 'Extremism'

'Extremism' is all over the news at the moment, mainly in relation to the activities of the so-called 'Islamic State'.  Sometimes 'extremist' is used with qualifiers - 'Islamist extremists', 'Sunni extremists', 'religious extremists' - but often just by itself 'extremist groups'.

But what does 'extremist' even mean?  It conjures up an Aristotelian view of life in which the mean is the ultimately desirable thing.  For Aristotle (or at least the Aristotle of parts of the Nicomachean Ethics), extremes are in general to be avoided.  For example, on a spectrum of abject cowardice through foolhardy bravery, both extremes are to be avoided; the mean is a cautious bravery.  Is this the sort of thing that people mean when they talk about extremists?  Apparently not.  I don't think that when the BBC writes about Islamist extremists that they mean that one ought to strive for moderate Islamism, or that a Sunni extremist is someone who thinks and acts like a Sunni Muslim more than they ought to.

Can I suggest that what is actually meant by 'extremist' is usually something more like 'someone who doesn't take the blasé, indifferentist approach to questions of reality and life which is preferred within our liberal democracies'.  The average Westerner in the 21st century thinks that ultimate reality is pointless, and therefore holding serious beliefs about ultimate reality is pointless.  Arguing about metaphysics makes no sense.  Believing, on the basis of one's convictions about ultimate reality, that there is a right and a wrong way to live and to order society is just daft - and probably offensive.  Everyone ought to confirm to the bland, beige reality of secular life, and if they do entertain speculations about the true nature of the world and human life, keep it to themselves.

An extremist, then, is just anyone who thinks that things really matter, that there is a higher reality than the economy and a few beers at the weekend.  Western society, as a whole, finds such people intolerable.  People who try to live in a way which is logically and practically consistent with a particular view of ultimate reality are dangerous.

I am very much okay with extremism.  I think a society which cannot contain extremists is already broken.  The problem I have with IS is not that they are extremists (in the sense outlined above), but that the beliefs which they hold and try to live out are wrong, and therefore wicked.

My contention would be that the language of extremism is used to avoid having to ask questions like: 'are their beliefs about ultimate reality true or false?'  This is a question which must be avoided, because it leads to other questions like 'do Islamic beliefs (or some variant or subset of these) about ultimate reality lead, when taken seriously, to IS and its like?'  I don't propose to answer that; only to show that the point of talking about extremism is to put people a priori beyond the pale, so that we don't have to consider their actual beliefs, something that our mushed together Western non-culture will always struggle to do.

"Philosophical Theology"

The scare quotes are to indicate that I don't think there is any such thing.  Permit me to make a couple of remarks.  They are not all that well thought through yet, but perhaps you'll bear with me and even make helpful suggestions.  It is my blog after all.

1.  The best philosophical argument for the existence of God is the ontological argument.  It is the best, not only because there is something rather elegant about it, but primarily because - if it were valid - it would actually show that God exists with the degree of certainty which every theistic religion demands of its adherents.  Sadly, there is no such thing as a valid ontological argument.  If anyone tells you otherwise, I permit you to chide them gently.  Try not to extend this into scoffing.  Be nice.

2.  I am increasingly convinced that probabilistic arguments for God's existence have, as well as their failings to persuade anyone as far as I can tell, the major failing that they are actually blasphemous.  Let me put it this way: if Christian Theism is true, it is impossible that anything should exist on the supposition that Christian Theism were false.  If we say of any thing, 'does this not make it more probable that God exists?', we are doing one of two things (or most likely both).  Either we are moving God into the class of things which may or may not exist - a class which contains all things other than God already - and in so doing denying Christian Theism, or we are actually meaning something more like 'does this not make you feel more like God exists?', in which case we are appealing to subjectivity in a way which makes me uncomfortable.

3.  If the existence of God is a philosophical question, not one of the Biblical authors ever thought to address the issue.  Scripture is full of history; it is full of God proving himself in his words and deeds.  It contains not a word of anything we might recognise as philosophy.  I do not think Christians should be relying on a methodology which the Biblical witnesses, inspired by the ultimate Witness, saw fit to completely neglect.  For us, it is history or bust; resurrection or atheism.

4.  "Philosophical Theology" leads to Theism.  Theism is not Christianity, or a relation of Christianity, or a stepping stone to Christianity.

5.  "Philosophical Theology" generally wants to appear rational and sensible in conversation with the outside world.  This desire may be well motivated in many, although I know that in my own period of chasing the no-god of natural theology that for some at least (i.e. me) the driving force is pride, and a desire to avoid the offence of the cross - which is foolishness to those who are perishing.

Thought Experiment

Imagine you woke up one morning, started to go about your normal day, and then nobody reacted to you in any way. I don't mean they ignored you - that's a reaction - but there was just no reaction. As if they couldn't see or hear you.

What would you do?

I'd push someone over just to prove that I existed.

In your face, Descartes!

Knowledge and People (3)

Apologies for the delay...

Why does all this matter?

I guess there are two effects that I see. One is relational, the other epistemological, but they're very closely intertwined.

Relationally, it becomes very hard to take other human beings seriously. Reductionism becomes the best approach. We think we can analyse the behaviour of another in much the same way that we would analyse the behaviour of an animal. You hear people say things like "love is just a combination of hormones" - meaning, I think, initially, other people's experience of love. Conversation becomes farcical on this view. The fact that we do actually have conversations, and do actually fall in love, betrays that the ratio-empiricist view does not capture all our experiencs: there is a Thou out there behind the face of this human being. Thank God for inconsistency in this regard!

There is an alarming possibility here. Most recently I have heard several people deconstruct their own experience of love in the way demanded by ratio-empiricism. What is happening? I suspect that we are seeing the loss of the primacy of the subject. People are applying their reductionist understanding of the Other to themselves. I cannot believe that this really reflects their experience of being themselves; it is a stifling interpretive grid. Unable to view others as truly human, they come to view themselves as less than human as well. We truly do need other people to know ourselves at all.

Epistemologically, acquiring knowledge becomes all take and no give, or perhaps no receive. In a world where I am the only subject, all learning is by analysis and systematisation of what I experience around me. This seems to lead into the loss of a concept of testimony. Although philosophers acknowledge that testimony is one of the most basic and common speech acts, and although in actual fact we would all have to admit that the overwhelming majority of what we know has been learned through testimony, ratio-empiricism tends to distrust it. In the absence of a genuine other, what can testimony be?

This then has an effect on the way we approach texts, for example (there is at least one person reading this who knows that I am now trespassing on his area of expertise. I'll try not to leave dirty footprints). Is it not inevitable that a text becomes an object to be manipulated in any direction we see fit on this worldview? After all, we cannot be assured of the existence or significance of the author (and this is as true for a living - even a present - author as it is for a dead or absent one), so why should we not take a text in whatever way we choose? I wonder whether ratio-empiricism makes knowing inherently violent...

To this whole worldview, Christianity asks three questions:

1. Given the fact that your worldview cannot account for central human experiences, why should we follow it?

2. Given that all your arguments against Christianity are based on this worldview, why should we take them seriously?

3. Have you considered that ultimate reality might be personal?

Knowledge and People (2)

So, what exactly is my problem with ratio-empiricism?

It's all to do with the way this epistemological viewpoint understands the relationships between me and the world. Ratio-empiricism inherits from its parent views the basic orientation of a thinking/experiencing subject confronted by a world of passive objects. I am the subject; everything else is an object. Now, in one sense this is a simple truism. As Kant so helpfully pointed out, it must be possible for me to attach the label "I think" to every one of my thoughts and perceptions - that is to say, I am the subject of all my thoughts and perceptions. If it were not so, they would not be my thoughts or experiences.

(As an aside - and feel free to skip this paragraph - this is actually not nearly so simple as it sounds. Kant himself ends up reducing the "I" which is subject to nothing more than a logical tag - quite literally, an ownership label which holds thoughts/perceptions together in one consciousness. The problem emerges most clearly when you consider introspection: me thinking about myself. It must be possible for me to say "I think" about these thoughts, or they are not mine. But the "I" in "I think" is the subject of the thought, whereas the thought itself is of me as an object. How "I" become an object to myself is quite difficult. Kant avoids the problem by maintaining that "I as subject" and "me as object" are completely different, the former being noumenal. Well, that's transcendental idealism for you.)

This orientation - a thinking/experiencing subject confronted by a world of objects - will get you a long way in the natural sciences. Any critique of this viewpoint cannot be absolute, but must be simply a qualification - if you like, a "yes, but..." Still, it is possible for a "but..." to raise such a fundamental question that one is forced to revisit the "yes" and reconsider it. This is, I think, one of those cases.

Because there is simply no room in this world of subject/objects for people. There is, presumably (although this concept is not without problems), one person - me - but there are no others. A person, I take it, is someone who can themselves be a subject in the same way that I can be a subject. Obviously, not a subject of my thoughts/perceptions, but a subject of their own thoughts/perceptions - another centre of consciousness.

Qualifications: obviously, there will be a sense in which another person is an object to me. And strictly speaking, ratio-empiricism does not of necessity deny that the object in front of me could be another centre of consciousness.

But ratio-empiricism does make this concept highly problematic (in both the common and Kantian sense). If knowledge really works the way the ratio-empiricist claims, or rather assumes, it does, then I am bound to treat the other person as a passive object. I am bound to approach them, epistemologically, as if they were not a person in the way that I am. The gap between my consciousness and theirs cannot be bridged in any way on this worldview. The idea of other conscious beings becomes something that is strictly beyond my ability to know: it can be thought, but not tested, and therefore lies outside knowledge.

There is no room for people in Kant's world.

If this isn't making sense, I promise it will start to come together tomorrow when I run through some of the implications as I see them...

Knowledge and People (1)

I haven't started writing yet, and I can tell this post is going to contain massive generalisations and over-simplifications, and yet still manage to be really pretentious. I'm sorry, I really am. Try to bear with it, I think it might be important.

Epistemology. Broadly, the discipline which discusses knowledge and seeks to express just how it is that we come to have it. I think we live in an age that is obsessed with epistemology. And I think that this raises quite a few problems.

Let me explain to you how I see the history of this issue. When I was studying philosophy at A level, we used to talk a lot about rationalists and empiricists. Your average rationalist privileges thought over experience, whilst your common or garden empiricist thinks that experience is what is most important. This is, of course, an over-simplification, but it helps us to see two big epistemological traditions in western philosophy. At the head of each stands a greek.

Plato is, if you like, King of the Rationalists. He thinks that what you see around you is all just shadow. What can be thought is much more important than what can be sensed. Plato loves maths, and also a good bit of mysticism, because these things are in the mind. He thinks general and universal things are much more exciting than particular or limited things. He loves to make systems of thought that are internally coherent, and barely cares whether these systems match the shadowy empirical world around him.

Aristotle, on the other hand, is Captain Empiricist. He loves to look around him at the world. He considers the main source of truth to be the senses, and thoughts are to be directed by experience rather than vice versa. He takes a keen interest in particular things - he enjoys cataloguing animals, for example - and is much less interested in mysticism. He likes logic - a lot- but mainly because it helps with the exploration and understanding of the world around him.

The philosophical descendants of Plato and Aristotle bickered for centuries.

The genius of the Enlightenment is the construction of a worldview which binds rationalism and empiricism tightly together. Science - as opposed to the random observation of facts in nature - is a perfect blend of rationalism and empiricism. A system is thought which explains prior (perhaps haphazard) observations, and then observations are made (systematically) to test the system. Plato and Aristotle are friends. Good friends. Their love-child (eww) is Kant, because Kant extends (or attempts to extend) the scientific method to metaphysics, and with it ethics and religion. He is quite explicit about this endeavour, and he really thinks that he has done it in his critical philosophy. No need to go into detail on that here.

So from Kant onward, ratio-empricism rules the roost in epistemological discussion.

Tomorrow: why ratio-empiricism is very, very bad...

Arguing for God

Kant famously rejects most of the traditional arguments that philosophers advance in favour of the existence of God. He breaks them down into three categories:

At the tertiary level, there are what Kant calls physicotheological arguments. These take as their starting point a particular feature of the world (e.g. apparent design, order, etc.) and argue from these to the existence of a God responsible for these features. Kant is unimpressed, suspecting that any argument of this sort must secretly depend on a cosmological argument. No one would begin to look for explanations of particular features of the world unless they were convinced already that the world as a whole required explanation.

The cosmological argument represents the second layer in the traditional proof for God. It proceeds, not from any particular aspect of the universe, but from the existence of the physical universe at all. In other words, it sees God as the answer to the question "why is there something rather than nothing?". Kant is equally dismissive of this argument. He believes that is essentially a cover for the ontological argument. No one would feel the need to posit God as an explanation for the world unless they already considered the notion of a necessary being to be coherent, and to require the actual existence of such a being.

At the most basic level, there are ontological arguments for God. These move from the concept of a necessary being, arguing that by definition the most perfect being must exist. Kant refutes the argument by asserting that existence simply is not a predicate and does not work in that way. In this opinion most philosophers have followed him. I'm not so sure myself, but I'm certain on other grounds that any form of ontological argument must ultimately fail.

In this fashion, Kant dismisses all traditional natural theology. You could argue that in fact what Kant shows is that one only finds God at the conclusion of the traditional theistic proofs if one is already predisposed to seek him there. This is the death of natural theology as traditionally conceived.

A question I would put to fellow Christians is whether they are content to take these arguments seriously? Are they prepared to leave natural theology behind? Note that this is something that we have to do even if we find the arguments convincing. Because of course we would find them convincing. We are looking for God, and lo and behold there he is. If you find design in the world around you that requires explanation, fair enough - so you should! But if your Christianity needs this philosophical foundation, I honestly think you're in trouble.

Religion within the bounds of mere reason

Sorry, apparently when I say "tomorrow" I may well mean "sometime next week if you're lucky..."

Kant's starting point has a very serious effect on his approach to religion. Because he starts with the autonomous human being, and makes the autonomous human being the measure of many if not all things, he is inclined to emphasise the things that are (in principle at least) open to everyone, and to minimise anything particular. In religion, that means Kant is keen on things that can be worked out about God by reason, without revelation. He is not keen on anything that requires a particular story to be told, or things that rely on particular facts. He wants us to run after "a plain rational faith which can be convincingly communicated to everyone" rather than "a historical faith, merely based on facts". (This is also tied up with Kant's idea of duty in the field of ethics - possibly more of this later). So natural theology is in (except that Kant doesn't think you can do much of it - again, more possibly to follow on this) and revealed theology is out, or at least is strictly speaking superfluous.

And Kant's direction has a similar effect. He is interested in practical reason, with the emphasis on practical. Kant has no time for any doctrine which does not improve us (morally). Into this bracket fall such things as the idea of atonement, the historical incarnation and the like. If the incarnation is to be of use, it can only be as presenting a perfect example of humanity for us to follow, in which case it must not be strictly a historical incarnation, but a simple idea of reason. Everything is about what it means for me in practice. The further we get from this concern, the more we veer into speculation and useless debates. Religion, for Kant, is basically a department of ethics.

I think both these concerns still lurk in our church culture today. The latter is most obvious - how many times have I been in a Bible study discussing the most astonishing truths about Christ and been asked "yes, but what does it mean for me? What do I have to do?" And this is antiChristian through and through. The former concern shows itself more subtly, most obviously in the desire to make natural theology work, primarily as an apologetic (i.e. an answer to "what about those who haven't heard..?") I think this is also antiChristian.

At some point in the future, I'll suggest some steps to shake these things out of our minds...

Enlightenment

I've been doing a lot of reading in Kant over the last few weeks, partly refreshing my undergrad knowledge and partly expanding my Kantian repertoire. The more I read, the more I become convinced that Kant is Public Enemy Number One as far as Christian theology is concerned. I plan to write a few posts over the next couple of weeks to explain why. Here is post number one.

Kant represents the high point of the intellectual and cultural movement which we refer to as the Enlightenment. He was a self-conscious advocate of this very self-concious movement, and provided the clearest definition of the heart of Enlightenment thought in an essay titled "What is Enlightenment?" The motto of Enlightenment, says Kant, is "Sapere Aude!" - dare to understand! The movement is all about being bold enough to use and rely on your own understanding without external guidance.

We could talk about this in terms of starting point and direction. For Kant, the starting point is simple: oneself. Adopting this starting point is inevitable for Kant - as far as he is concerned, there is simply no other to choose - but it is also essential to his entire project. If we begin anywhere other than with ourselves, we are already denying ourselves enlightenment. Only if I am the starting point can I be truly free; only in a world in which my own reason is an appropriate beginning to thought about life, the universe and everything can I trust my reason to guide me.

As far as direction goes, Kant favours practical reason. In the snappily-titled essay "What does it mean to orient oneself in thinking?", Kant outlines the necessity of restraining speculation and training our reason to be guided by practical usage. Nevertheless, he is clear that reason is king - "only do not dispute that prerogative of reason which makes it the highest good on earth". Reason, oriented towards practical living rather than metaphysical speculation, is the direction of Kant's thought. The further reason departs from experience, the more likely it is to end in dead-end speculations about things that cannot be known. Reason that restrains itself will be able to venture forth from the starting point of autonomy in the direction of good living.

Now try to forget Kant for a moment. What passage of Scripture might pop into your mind if we mentioned the word "enlightenment"? 2 Corinthians 4:1-6 occurs to me. Have a read of it. There is a radical difference of vision here, relative to Kant. For the Apostle, enlightenment comes from above, and he is essentially a passive recipient. God shines in a person's heart - that is the source of enlightenment. The starting point is God, and the direction is toward Jesus and his glory. (Read the end of 2 Corinthians 3 for a description of this journey!)

The point is this: if the most important thing a human being could possibly know - namely, how to relate to God - cannot be found within the framework that starts from the autonomous human being and proceeds in the direction of practical reason, what use is that framework?

To be worked out in more practice tomorrow...