Q + Tree = Dignity.......What???

I must say, I have yet to succeed in getting into the blog rhythm. Many many a thing interest me in the topic under which I created this blog, but so often the subject, as it comes up, frustrates me too much, fades away too quickly, or I just simply find myself too busy to feel justified in spending my time on typing it for the internet world to see...as if I really cared. Well, I suppose I do care a bit, because I like dialogue and conversation, and I'm told that's what blogging is all about. So maybe for a while I'll attempt to blog about things that I can sum up in few words and then perhaps it won't demotivate me so much from blogging at all. We'll give it a shot...

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So this one goes back a few months, but I've never been able to let it go in my mind. I have this scholar friend of mine. He is a thorough Christian thinker with a master's degree in apologetics (Christian apologetics, to be clear). A small handful of you who may read this know who he is; most of you don't. Either way, it doesn't really matter, as he will remain nameless. I used to meet with him once a week for breakfast to talk about Christianity, theology, philosophy, etc. Many of the things that came out of those conversations will make it on to this blog at one point or another; some already have. My point is that I am not mentioning him so that I can attack his character. Rather, I am intrigued and often frustrated by some of the things that he believes and argues and thus, they make for good blogging material. I just wanted to make that clear: this isn't a bash-fest.

Moving on, here's one particular topic we talked about one morning over breakfast. We entered onto the subject of the traditional Christian doctrine of hell. This is a subject that I've spent so many hours thinking about over the years that I would actually just like to say "screw it" and get some of those hours back for more productive purposes. However, the devil himself probably couldn't even make that happen, so we'll just live with it. Here's the conversation. I was asking the following question, which may resemble my personal beliefs to some degree that perhaps not even I am aware of. But more importantly, it was for the purpose of discussion.

(from the human perspective) "Why does a finite amount of sin warrant an infinite amount of punishment?"

The following is his response (verbatim):

Well, a finite crime against an infinite being warrants an infinite amount of punishment.

Now here's my response to that (that unfortunately I did not have at the time). Why on earth would someone think this makes sense? From the viewpoint of a logician, this is absurd. The reason so many people in the western church culture would buy this argument (among many many other reasons, I think) is because is sounds really nice. In fact it sounds very mathematical. However, there is no real logical basis for it. Who says a finite amount of crime against an infinite being warrants an infinite amount of punishment? Why doesn't a finite amount of crime against an infinite being warrant a finite amount of punishment? Why does the punishment reflect the victim rather than the crime, or even the criminal? I'm not trying to rule out anyone's response to this, but I honestly don't think an American court system analogy would do any good here, as I'm not talking about a general consensus of morality. This subject is clearly much bigger and unfortunately, abstract.

Anyway, there's the food for thought. Please understand that I am not trying to spark a debate about the existence, reality, consequence, or doctrine of hell. That subject is way too big for right now and I have no interest in going into it as a whole. So please, any thoughts you may have out there should only relate to the above argument, not the topic at large.

There, so much for keeping it short.

Logic, Subjectivity, & Persuasion...

We all know the phrase “be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.” Well, in philosophy, it goes something like “be careful what you study, it just might change your point of view…whether you like it or not.”

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This is somewhat of a continuation of the previous post. However, the aspect of atheism that I'd like to dissect here really has nothing to do with atheism at all and more to do with perspective, attitude, and persuasion.

I'm currently taking a class entitled Language, Logic, & Persuasion. (it’s essentially an Intro to Logic course), and I've enjoyed this class immensely thus far. One of the most important things to me in any class is the professor. I like a professor who has a point of view but knows how to effectively teach objectively. It matters not to me what their point of view is (in life or on particular topics), but I like to know what they are because it's interesting and helpful to know where he or she is coming from. The following are some thoughts that I began to put together in my head more clearly via several conversations with a fellow classmate of mine (Joe, if you're out there and you find this blog, I would enjoy your comments).

So in the case of this class my professor is an atheist. I have no problem with this and it's of little consequence to me. I knew this from the start because the professor has his own website with course materials as well as personal stuff and I took the initiative to read his bio at the beginning of the semester. It’s interesting but like I said, in the end I couldn’t care less where a professor is coming from so long as they can, in fact, teach objectively. However, I begin to notice certain things...

One, in presenting and dissecting arguments, he has, on numerous occasions, pointed out some classic Christian and theistic arguments and why they are faulty or at least weak. At first this really doesn't bother me much, mostly because he's right in his analyses and they're often arguments against portions of Christianity that I don't personally subscribe to anyway and I really appreciate learning that. But what I've noticed at this point is that not only is he an atheist, but that he likes to embrace opportunities to "point out" Christianity. Still no problems yet, just interesting observations.

Next, I began to notice that he doesn't seem to have a strong concept of deconstruction and it's mental and psychological effects on the individual. In other words, you can't simply crush a person's worldview (which they may depend on to a very strong degree) simply in the name of truth. I say "truth" here as nothing more than the individual's perception of objective truth through the eyes of a subjective experience. He will very casually make comments about theism (particularly Christianity) and do so with a hint of a smirk or attitude that suggests "this stuff is really quite ridiculous and you guys shouldn't buy into it." What I think is interesting is that throughout the course he has never so much as taken an informal survey of the class's religious or lack of religious convictions (which philosophy professors commonly do). There are always some students that will respond in humorous agreement with him when he makes these comments, but what of those who make no comment? For all he knows, they could all be devout Christians, Jews, Muslims, Mormons, Agnostics, even Jehovah’s Witnesses (as the professor indicates in his bio that he himself was raised as, but now thinks is essentially ridiculous.....”like all other religions”). I guess the point I'm trying to make in this paragraph is that for those who have been given the “power” of philosophy, which is inherently a very dangerous but infinitely valuable and important study, much responsibility has to be included (Spiderman, anyone?). In a philosophy class (or any class), you’ve got one instructor, and that instructor has free reign to teach whatever he or she likes. And for the simple fact that that teacher inherently has about a thousand times more knowledge than the student, they can twist it in any way they like. Or to quote Jack Black in School of Rock, “all I need are minds for molding.”

In this latter half of the semester we are studying the concept of critical thinking, which could be otherwise described loosely as "reasonable skepticism" or the “reality of belief in something without good reason." This is where the class has taken a turn of difficulty for me, but not for reasons one might guess. The material is fascinating and I'm embracing critical thinking more and more. In fact, I'm discovering that I've been a critical thinker for several years now, but never knew what to call it (the church generally doesn't embrace critical thinking and for obvious reasons doesn't do much to encourage it; if it's not supported by the teachings in the bible, it's not true, and that's really all you need to know). No, this class is becoming difficult because the professor is using a lot of biased philosophy (oxymoron) to make points that benefit his atheistic perspective. Last week after class my friend and I speculated on the possibility that our professor believes the following:

“If you take critical thinking to its absolute limit, you will have no choice but to end in atheism.” (i.e. radical skepticism)

Where this gets interesting is that the whole idea of critical thinking is to evaluate things in the world that people believe but generally have little to no good reason to. Obviously as an atheist it would seem that my professor would say that this includes ALL things that cannot be explained by science, including religion in general (though he has yet to specifically state this). Side note: how does this guy teach metaphysics? But to come back a bit, what’s happening here has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that I’m a theist and he’s an atheist. I really couldn’t care less about his personal beliefs. Actually, if I were the atheist student and he was a Christian professor trying to slip in biased opinions about the absurdity of atheism while masking them as objective philosophical reasoning, it would probably irritate me even more. But what’s getting to me is his attitude toward what he believes and more importantly his attitude toward that which he does not believe, which speaks against his whole background in philosophy.

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Ok, so I actually began writing this a couple weeks ago and put it down until now, so I’ve lost a bit of the passion that I had about this particular topic and I’m not entirely sure where I was headed. But I think there’s enough stuff here to serve as, at the very least, some food for thought.

I guess my point, if anything, was that as humans we tend to adhere to the “rationale” that helps our agenda, or more specifically, we tend to buy into the arguments that encourage our point of view (this is the fine line that traverses theistic apologetics). We never seem to give weight to the arguments against our beliefs. We find one argument (with strength level x) to support our argument and ascribe value x + 10 to it. Then we find one argument against our position (also with strength value x) and multiply it by -1, negating it and making our overall position shine above all as undoubtedly true. The overlying problem is that math and logic are not subjective, but the way we present them often is.

If this is confusing to anyone, I will probably go into this a bit more in the next post, so hang tight. If it’s not confusing, please share your thoughts.

Atheism...

Welcome all who have visited and browsed. My apologies for the slow start. It has been a combination of finding the time to gather my thoughts and type as well as avoiding topics that I think about very often but simply don't have the energy to dive into just yet (we'll get there...). I have, however, been contemplating the idea of original sin to a certain degree lately, and I'm thinking I might start there.

But first, I've been having a conversation with a very good friend of mine on a MySpace blog that he actually started (I don't want to take the credit). So far, I've been the only one to reply, so it's been limited to a two-way conversation thus far. So after the last post, I asked him if I could re-post the conversation thus far over here to see what interest it may spark. Please join in and share your thoughts. Let's learn from each other (although I really mean that, I concede that it does sound a bit like an after-school special :) ).

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AUTHOR:

Subject: Atheism

"...atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there is no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning."

~C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

I am not sure anyone ever reads these blog things, however I am interested in what people think. I am not looking for "Christian" answers I want real thoughts based upon this quote I found while reading. Please critically think about it and write. If you are not a Christian, please write write write. I really what to know what you think. Thank you, hope I get some good well thought statements.

MY RESPONSE:

As a philosophy major I am forced to think about this sort of stuff every day. Approaching this from the subject of logic, here's what I have to say:

"If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning". This argument implies that humans need to have meaning in order to be able to think and reason. It's an interesting notion, but one would have to prove that first, and I'm not sure that it could be done.

Also the comparison that is being made here is committing a classic fallacy known as Weak Analogy. It is suggesting that there is an accurate correlation between "meaning" and "light." This is hard enough to do when comparing two things that might both be physical objects. Here, it's even more difficult because the two things being compared are 1) an idea and 2) a form of energy. The same problem arises with the Teleological argument for the existence of God, also known as the argument from design. To suggest that the complexity of a watch inferring the existence of a watchmaker is the same as the complexity of the universe implying the existence of a universe-creator is another classic Weak Analogy. The primary focus here is that we have a very good understanding of how a watch is made because we (humans) invented the watch, whereas we have no proven idea (only a few theories) of how universes are made. It's certainly possible that there could be a correlation between the two, but it isn't proven as of yet and therefore isn't enough to make an analogous claim.

As I think about it, it commits yet another fallacy known as Begging the Question. It poses a premise that implicitly relies on the conclusion that it is trying to prove. In other words, if the universe has no meaning --> we shouldn't be able to find that out because we wouldn't have meaning --> but the reason we wouldn't have meaning is because the universe doesn't have meaning --> but if the universe has no meaning, we shouldn't be able to find that out because we wouldn't have meaning.....and so on. It's simply a circular definition.

For the record, I don't believe any of this necessarily disproves the existence of God, it's just an evaluation of an argument.

AUTHOR RESPONSE:

"This argument implies that humans need to have meaning in order to be able to think and reason."

What are we reasoning about if or thinking about if there is no meaning? When thinking about something aren't we trying to understand the meaning of that thing? Asking the why?? Question at least modern science continues to ask that question and modern Christianity. Most are lost if there is mystery. I also could be talking out of my butt.

<> Tony-I am still thinking about the rest. I will answer soon enough. But this is my initial though after a couple of days. :)

MY RESPONSE:

I think we need to definite the word "meaning." Does it just mean that something has a nature, a form, a predictable (or even unpredictable) behavior? Or are we defining it as something that has an intelligent design of some sort.

And with regard to meaning and reasoning, I'm not suggesting that our ability to reason isn't the result of our having meaning. I'm only saying that you cannot logically use something to define itself.

Premise + Premise = Conclusion.

If one of the premises relies on the conclusion (which by the definition of logic must rely on its premises), you end up with a circular definition. You would have to go back and think more about why reasoning implies meaning (whatever "meaning" means). But you can't say that reasoning implies meaning simply because that seems to make sense.

This is a circular definition.

P: reasoning
C: meaning

P: meaning
C: existence of god

P: existence of god
C: why we're able to reason

I will admit, I could also be talking out of my butt, this is a tough one to digest, mostly because words like "reasoning" and "meaning" are really difficult to define.

AUTHOR RESPONSE:

You are right that it is circular reasoning, however in this case what's the problem with that? I also agree that it is hard to define "reasoning" and "meaning". Go ahead and post this on your blog and lets keep talking about it.