See the newly released book by Gordon E. Carkner for a fuller development of the following important ideas:The Great Escape from Nihilism: rediscovering our passion in late modernity
We continue our resistance (agonisme) to the idea that freedom can be reduced to a mere matter of the will alone: naked individual choice. According to philosopher Charles Taylor, the potential resolution of this dilemma of the plurality of goods, this tension between goods, comes by way of a highest good among the strongly-valued goods: within the moral framework, this is called the ‘hypergood’ (1989, pp. 63-73, 100-102, 104-106). “Let me call higher-order goods of this kind ‘hypergoods’, i.e. goods which are incomparably more important than the others, but provide the standpoint from which these [other goods] must be weighed, judged, decided about.” (1989, p. 63) The hypergood has hierarchical priority and dominance; it has a significant shaping power within the moral framework. It is the good that the individual self is most conscious of, is most passionate about, a good that rests at the core of one’s identity. Read More…
The following is an inquest into the possibilities for dialogue among us moderns, people with divergent philosophical positions and postures. Who indeed are we moderns? Where are our roots? What do we have to say to each other? How can we live and work together in a fruitful way amidst intense plurality and difference? In his 2007 award winnng tome, A Secular Age, top Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor offers a deep reflection on the history and current state of modernity in the West. He documents a major change in the social imaginary, the way things seem or make sense to us. This change is a shift in ethos, involving people’s basic sensibilities, their assumptions and perceptions about the way things really are. Taylor notes that human flourishing has become the main focus of life in a period of unbelief in the transcendent or divine. We have moved from a transcendent to an immanent worldview over the past five centuries, from a world picture where God was the ultimate good for the majority of citizens, to one where human flourishing in itself is the ultimate good and prime goal of human existence. Read More…
The wars and violence against innocents at work in our global village are staggering. Remembrance Day is a time to stop the clock, to step back from our aggressive pursuits and struggles, our grab for power and dominance at all costs, our climb up the many ladders of success. The biblical book of James chapter 3 is a place to dwell for a moment, especially verses 13-18 speaks of Two Kinds of Wisdom, one of the most profound, watershed passages in Scripture, reminding us of the cry of wisdom in ancient Hebrew literature (Proverbs). There is deep and practical relevance here, a sounding of human depths. God is in the business of taming the tongue, sourcing and directing our hearts towards the higher good. With Rene Girard lenses, one realizes how mimetic rivalry (bitter envy, selfish ambition, rancour and partisanship) and violence is so close to the heart of the human condition (despite our continuous denial of it). There’s a pirate in us all if we dare look at our dark side. Science has no answers in this arena; it remains dumbfounded. Read More…
Within the moral horizon, according to Taylor, the domain of the moral includes many different goods that vie for one’s attention. This can be frustrating and confusing; there is often competition and even conflict between these goods, especially in society at large, but even within the self. Taylor wants to strongly affirm these goods for the benefit of the self, in their plurality; he does not want to stifle their potential just because they come into conflict.
Conflict is not negative here. This may seem counter-intuitive, but he believes that the tensions between goods are a healthy sign, and thus he does not want to resolve these tensions in any facile way by allowing that, for example, one good should devour, repress or eliminate the rest. This can happen in various schools of moral thought. Taylor believes that within the moral framework, one good—the hypergood—tends to surpass in value, and organizes the other lesser goods in some priority. Read More…
Fides et Ratio: Ten Mythologies that Shape Western Culture
1. Faith and reason are inherently incompatible, or in opposition.
2. Reason does not involve faith at any level of its operation.
3. Modern (Enlightenment) reason has made Christian faith redundant; faith is a primitive disposition of our medieval ancestors.
4. Faith is credulous assent to unfounded premises, a belief in something that is untrue or at least suspect.
5. Reason is a pure, disinterested obedience to empirical fact; methodological naturalism implies/requires belief in philosophical naturalism.
6. Reason is morally and ideologically neutral, the same for all thinking human beings, therefore universal–unifying society.
7. Faith & reason exist is separate incompatible arenas; reason deals in physical causes only, while faith deals with supernatural/spiritual/magical causes.
8. Faith is the irrational belief in the opposite direction of where scientific evidence leads us.
9. Faith is seated in the emotions or sentimentality; reason is a non-emotional, cool operation of the disinterested mind.
10. Good reason requires a materialistic universe; materialism is a fact of deductive logic.
I realize that this is a bit provocative; we will respond to these myths/misconceptions in a future post(s). These issues are emerging in the context of our GCU Book Study on philosopher Alvin Plantinga’s Where the Conflict Really Lies. First Things editor and philosopher David Bentley Hart also writes a volume in this topic: The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss. (Yale, 2013)
Gordon E. Carkner, PhD in Philosophical Theology
See also my recent book released in October, 2016 on Amazon: The Great Escape from Nihilism: Rediscovering Our Passion in Late Modernity. It covers this kind of issue. One could say that it involves my answer to these ten mythologies as part of the resistance to nihilism and promotion of meaning.
John Stackhouse on Faith & Reason: Rheinhold Niehbur
Jens Zimmermann, Hermeneutics: a very short history. (OUP 2015)
Cullen Buie, MIT Mechanical Engineering Professor Veritas Forum, “What is Your Faith In?: an MIT Professor Reflects on God, Science and Self”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-PEJC4Izu0
Anonymous: “There is a great element of faith even in the most disinterested rationality.” “All positions start with unprovable assumptions and build from there.”
Christ the creative wisdom of God, and God’s active Word in creation, is enfleshed in the temporal-historical dimension of our world as the concrete Jewish Messiah, Jesus the Christ…. This is the Word through whom all things were made, and the Word hid in the eternal bosom of God, the Word who spoke through the prophets, the Word whose mighty acts defined the history of Israel. In Jesus the Christ, this Word has become flesh, and the eternal has become temporal, but without ceasing to be eternal…. In Christ temporality and eternity are conjoined…. In the incarnation, creation, the world, time and history have been taken up into the God-man, who is the center of reality…. Faith and reason are inseparable because their unity is in Christ. (Jens Zimmermann, Incarnational Humanism, 264-5)
One of the challenges for anyone who is a theist is how to explain God’s interaction with the physical world. Of particular concern is explaining the “miraculous” or the “supernatural.” Classically, God’s interaction with the world has been described in terms of “general” and “special” providence. General providence is his work in and through the “laws of nature” established in his creative work. Special providence refers to his “interventions” in the miraculous, and perhaps also to God’s work through intercessory prayer.
These kinds of “breaking in” events are problematic to scientists committed to the regularity of the natural order. For some who retain a belief in God, the response has been to maintain some sort of theistic naturalism, which often seems to incorporate miracles into God’s creation instructions. The difficulty is that this is hard to distinguish from deism, the idea of a clockwork universe that God has wound up and set running.
Christopher C. Knight explores this landscape and seeks to provide a different framework that would see the miraculous as a “breaking out” or “breaking through” a fallen creation where God is working within to restore and fulfill his purposes. Key to his thinking is the Incarnation and an understanding of that which draws heavily on Eastern Orthodox theology, particularly its understanding of the logos, in and through whom creation came to exist and is sustained. God is a continuing “primary cause” of all that occurs in nature even if scientists may only have access to “secondary” causes. Because of the fall, sometimes God’s activity consists in breaking out or through the grime of the fall to restore and fulfill his purposes, supremely in the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus.
This seems to me to be an intriguing proposal but one about which I have some questions. In taking this stance, Knight identifies his position of “incarnational naturalism” with panentheism, the idea that all that exists is in God (rather than pantheism, which says that all is God). While panentheism seems an attractive alternative to classical theism which emphasizes the distinction or transcendence of God vis a vis the creation, I think it means giving up some essential and distinctively Christian truths. If all the creation is in God, then in some sense evil is as well. And if God is identified with this then salvation is not a Holy God acting on behalf of a fallen world in redemption but rather God and the world striving together to attain God’s creation purposes. Furthermore, I am concerned with the reality that panentheism may collapse into eastern pantheism or into some form of universalism, which I do detect at points in Knight’s writing, particularly in his pyschological-referential account of revelatory events which seems to put other revelatory experiences on a par with Christian revelation. [I will note that for me this account was the most difficult to understand part of the book.]
What I found of value was that, classically we have spoken of God being both transcendent and immanent, but often seem to be at a loss to reconcile how God is immanent with the laws of nature. I would argue that one needn’t resort to panentheism to argue for the incarnational naturalism Knight contends for. The presence of the Logos in his creation that reaches fulfillment in Jesus, the God-man is fully consonant with the biblical narrative and an understanding of God who is both transcendent and immanent.
The book is closely written and assumes a certain familiarity with historical theology both Eastern and Western. Chapter 15, titled “A New Understanding” serves as a good recapitulation and summary of his argument that was helpful to me in pulling it all together. Before his “Afterword” he includes a chapter on intercessory prayer within the model he proposes.
While I take issue with the panentheism this author proposes, I believe his efforts to draw upon Eastern Orthodox thought, his thinking about the incarnation, and his effort to propose a “non-interventionist” explanation for miracles needs to be considered in the ongoing dialogue about faith and science and is a worthy addition to Fortress Press’s “Faith and the Sciences” series.
English: Faith and Reason united, with St Thomas Aquinas teaching in the background and the inscription: “divinarum veritatum splendor, animo exceptus, ipsam juvat intelligentiam”, from Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris (13). Painting by German painter Ludwig Seitz (1844–1908), Galleria dei Candelabri, Vatican. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Identity formation is also about using language to self-interpret, to articulate, discover and define self. We must constantly answer the question, ‘Who am I and what do I stand for and what am I able to contribute?’ There is an important implication of the sociality of the self that is forwarded by Taylor (Sources, p. 34). Contrary to the traditional view in behaviourist social science, the self is not an object or substance in the usually understood sense. We are not selves in the way we are organisms and we don’t have selves in the way we have livers and lungs. As Taylor points out, it is a fundamentally misguided question to ask what a person is in abstraction from his/her self-interpretation. This important dynamic self-interpretation is worked out in community through a language and a story, which the individual has accepted as a valid articulation of various identity questions and orientation within society. Read More…
Through his discussion about frameworks, Taylor recovers an interest in a commitment to the good. In his understanding, development of identity emerges in a way that is closely linked to one’s orientation within a particular moral framework or horizon, that is, where one is positioned with respect to one’s moral map and the goods within one’s horizon. This is the defining edge of meaning in one’s life; he claims that a self with depth (a thick self) must be defined in terms of the good: ‘In order to make minimal sense of our lives, in order to have an identity, we need an orientation to the good, which means some sense of qualitative discrimination, of the incomparably higher’ (Taylor, 1989, p. 47). What one calls the good is the most significant defining factor: ‘What I am as a self, my identity, is essentially defined by the way things have significance for me and how I orient myself to the good’ (1989, p. 34). Read More…
David Lyle Jeffrey has been Distinguished Professor of Literature and Humanities at Baylor University since 2000. He is also Professor Emeritus of English Literature at the University of Ottawa, and has been Guest Professor at Peking University (Beijing) since 1996 and Honorary Professor at the University of International Business and Economics (Beijing) since 2005. Read More…
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