“Why is this wall red?
Because it was painted with red paint.
Why is the paint red?
Because of the substances in the paint and how they reflect light.
Why do those substances behave that way?”
“Why is there any reality with laws of physics at all?”
David Hackett Fischer, _Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought_ (1970), on 14
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These are urgent questions, and they are empirical questions, which can be put to the test.
The reader will note that none of them are “why” questions.
In my opinion — and I may be a minority of one — that favorite adverb of historians should be consigned to the semantical rubbish heap.
A “why” question tends to become a metaphysical question.
It is also an imprecise question, for the adverb “why” is slippery and difficult to define.
Sometimes it seeks a cause, sometimes a motive, sometimes a reason, sometimes a description, sometimes a process, sometimes a purpose, sometimes a justification.
A “why” question lacks direction and clarity; it dissipates a historian’s energies and interests.
“Why did the Civil War happen?”
“Why was Lincoln shot?”
A working historian receives no clear signals from these woolly interrogatories as to which way to proceed, how to begin, what kinds of evidence will answer the problem, and indeed what kind of problem is raised.
There are many more practicable adverbs — who, when, where, what, how — which are more specific and more satisfactory.
Questions of this sort can be resolved empirically, and from them a skilled historian can construct a project with much greater sophistication, relevance, accuracy, precision, and utility, instead of wasting his time with metaphysical dilemmas raised by his profound “why” questions, which have often turned out to be about as deep as the River Platte.
Stephen said:
I think the experience of being alive is all that is available.
What do you think of that solution?
—-
Stephen, thank you, and for the question, which I take as the real one.
I think your answer is honest, and I understand it from the inside. I cannot prove why there is anything, and I am not going to pretend my answer is forced on anyone. So in one way we stand in a similar place: neither of us can settle the mystery by argument, and each of us takes up a stance toward it. You take the experience as enough in itself, to be lived rather than explained. I follow you a long way down that road.
Where I cannot follow is the last step. For me the experience does not stay anonymous. It comes as being addressed, as if a name were spoken, and it happens to be mine. I do have an answer to your “why,” then, but it is not a proof. It is closer to confession. And it too ends in a ground I cannot explain further. The difference is that for me that ground is not silent.
I will be honest about how it sits, since you asked. It is not simply that I hold on because I always want to. There are times when it would be easier, in some ways, not to be held by it. Nor is it only warm devotion on my side. What I give back is often only a few millimetres, no more. Head, heart, and whatever we want to call the rest are all in it, and none of them comes loose. What strikes me is that it holds anyway. It is less something I keep than something that keeps me.
I am not offering that as proof, and I am not trying to talk you back over a hill you left on purpose. You asked what I make of your solution. The honest answer is that I find it reasonable, and that mine is not more provable than yours, only differently inhabited. You hear the experience as the last word. I keep hearing a voice in it.
That is probably where the argument ends and something else begins. Luke 15. I live within these parables.
“three different kinds of argument appear.
The first is God as the explanation for gaps.
Someone may say:
‘We do not yet know how life came from non-life. Therefore God.’
Or:
‘We do not know exactly how the image on the Shroud of Turin was made. Therefore God.’
That kind of reasoning is weak.
If ‘God’ simply means ‘the explanation for what science has not yet explained,’ then God becomes a placeholder for ignorance.
And if the gap later closes, this God shrinks.
Against that kind of reasoning, Stephen seems clearly right.
One cannot simply say: Here is something science has not yet explained, therefore God did it.
That is too quick”
What do you think of this argument?:
Structure S has several characteristics known to be produced by intelligence/ mind.
Nobody has provided a plausible explanation as to how structure S could have arisen via totally-mindless-at-every-level processes.
Therefore, it’s reasonable to conclude that structure S was the workproduct of intelligence/ mind.
What do you think of this argument?:
When it comes to the question of what was responsible for the formation of the Shroud of Turin’s body image, there are 3 possibilities:
Either
1) a human/ forger/ artist produced it,
2) natural processes produced it,
or
3) something else was responsible for its origination.
Possibility 1) isn’t viable given reasons A B & C.
Possibility 2) isn’t viable given reasons X Y & Z.
Therefore, it’s reasonable to conclude that possibility 3) is accurate.
Quote Origin: When You Have Eliminated the Impossible Whatever Remains, However Improbable, Must Be the Truth
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David, I think this brings us back to Stephen’s challenge near the beginning of the thread: defend the God you actually believe in, for the reasons you actually came to believe.
That is what I have tried to do here, both in the “how did we get here” thread post163, and in what I wrote to Stephen. Not with a proof, but with something closer to where I actually live: how I came to faith, what still holds me, and why this is not simply an argument from an unexplained gap.
So I am reluctant to move now into another round about the Shroud, DNA, or structures you read as pointing to mind. I understand why those questions interest you, but for me they still risk turning God into the explanation for what has not yet been otherwise explained.
I would be more interested in the question Stephen asked. Not first the case for God, but your own ground: why do you believe?
Lastly, David, on the form of your last two arguments I would only point back to what BruceRMcF wrote earlier in post 512. He was answering the Shroud version, but the point is general: once the remaining option is only “something else,” not specified by the evidence, the same reasoning can be led almost anywhere, toward the Qur’anic Isa or an anti-Nicene Christ just as easily as toward your conclusion. That is why it settles nothing. I cannot improve on how he put it.
But I would rather not stay with these arguments in this thread. The thread was at its best when people said where they actually stood. That is what Stephen asked for at the start, and it is what I would rather return to. Not first the case for God, but your own ground. I’d be glad to hear it.
Robert: “If anyone were to live …”
Would you believe I live my life differently because I’m a believer and believe God is with me always. I have to watch myself! I cannot allow myself to think or behave in a certain way. I feel accountable for how each day is spent and at night have often asked forgiveness for having spent it frivolously.
Thanks to the blog, I’ve come along in the way I believe in God but I still think no one knows anything about God. How each of us believes can be as individualistic as we ourselves are!
Hello Robert. On the undefinable God I find I am close to you. As a believer I hold that any god I could fully define would already be an idol. I do not really comprehend God.
Where I am genuinely unsure, and I mean unsure, not rhetorically, is this. Can the One we cannot define still become known? Not be defined, but address us? For me faith is less comprehending God than being met by him, without ever holding him in my hand. I do not know whether for you that already says too much, whether being addressed, God making himself known rather than us defining him, is itself one of the “lesser ideas.” I would honestly be curious where you place it.
Judith, and partly because of that question, I was glad to read your post. You did the thing this thread IMHO is at its best when it does: you simply said where you actually stand, out of your own life rather than out of an argument. That you feel accountable for how a day is spent, and that you sometimes ask forgiveness at night, was honest and recognizable to me. For me too, even after a lot of thinking and reasoning, faith is less a set of conclusions than something I live inside, imperfectly.
And I think you are right that none of us possesses God. How each of us believes is as particular as we are. That does not make it less real.
Robert, I am glad to read your “Sure, absolutely.”
I think “may be produced” is exactly an honest word. It may be imagination reaching toward God through metaphor and song. What you say there is often what I think myself when I see certain things in certain communities (but who am I to judge?). I cannot and would not want to rule it out from the outside, and I will not pretend to.
But I’ll take the room your “may” leaves. From the inside it does not feel like imagination reaching outward. Some experiences after hopeless prayer were too sudden, too strong and too impactful for that. I do not offer it as proof; imagination might feel that way too, and I cannot stand outside my own experience to check. I only mean that your “may be produced” and my “may be real” sit side by side, and which one a person lives in is not settled by the argument. It is settled, if at all, somewhere else.
Robert, surely after today’s comments, I would be invited in the kindest way to find a more suitable blog. Instead, you said something unbelievable. You can have no idea how difficult a time I’m having trying to manage myself with what all is going on in the world today. But thank you and thank you again.
“defend the God you actually believe in”
It’s hard to defend something one doesn’t “believe in.”
“your own ground: why do you believe?”
I’m allergic to “why.”
“for the reasons you actually came to believe… what I would rather return to. Not first the case for God, but your own ground”
Suppose I “came to believe” for shoddy reasons.
Do you want me to defend something with shoddy reasons I know to be shoddy?
“how I came to faith, what still holds me”
I imagine your testimony is quite interesting.
As all testimonies are.
“the Shroud, DNA, or structures you read as pointing to mind. I understand why those questions interest you”
Perhaps you know me better than I know myself.
“for me they still risk turning God into the explanation for what has not yet been otherwise explained”
There are different ways of arguing for the existence of a creator, testimonials being merely one way.
“I would be more interested in the question Stephen asked”
Different people are interested in different things.
“I would rather not stay with these arguments in this thread”
You’re of course welcome to do as you wish.
“once the remaining option is only ‘something else,’ not specified by the evidence”
Evidence + reasoning can result in inferences to the best explanation.
Given the evidence, the “something else” would have to have particular characteristics that would result in particular features of the Shroud body image, e.g. involvement of an actual dead corpse, blood stains preceding body image formation, photonegativity, degrading/ accelerated-ageing of only microfibrils of the cloth, falloff of cellulose degradation at a distance resulting in encoding of 3-dimensional information, etc.
“the same reasoning can be led almost anywhere, toward the Qur’anic Isa or an anti-Nicene Christ”
It’s fun to see where reasoning and evidence goes.
In Islam, Jesus didn’t die.
One guy’s testimonial:
Antony Flew, _There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind_ (2008)
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Page 22 — During my time as a graduate student supervised by Gilbert Ryle, I became aware that it was his obviously principled practice always to respond directly, person to person, to any objection made to any of his philosophical contentions.
My own conjecture, although Ryle certainly never revealed this to me or, as far as I know, to anyone else, is that he was obeying the command that Plato in the Republic attributes to Socrates:
“We must follow the argument wherever it leads.”
Among other things, this principle requires that every objection made person to person must also be met person to person.
It is a principle I myself have tried to follow throughout a long and very widely controversial life.
Page 89 — My departure from atheism was not occasioned by any new phenomenon or argument.
Over the last two decades, my whole framework of thought has been in a state of migration.
This was a consequence of my continuing assessment of the evidence of nature.
When I finally came to recognize the existence of a God, it was not a paradigm shift, because my paradigm remains, as Plato in his Republic scripted his Socrates to insist:
“We must follow the argument wherever it leads.”
Feynman, Richard P. 1998. _The Meaning of It All_, 133pp. On 26-27
Scientists, therefore, are used to dealing with doubt and uncertainty.
All scientific knowledge is uncertain.
This experience with doubt and uncertainty is important.
I believe that it is of very great value, and one that extends beyond the sciences.
I believe that to solve any problem that has never been solved before, you have to leave the door to the unknown ajar.
You have to permit the possibility that you do not have it exactly right.
Otherwise, if you have made up your mind already, you might not solve it.
Lyttleton, R. A. 1977. “The Nature of Knowledge” in _The Encyclopaedia of Ignorance_, Ronald Duncan and Miranda Weston-Smith, eds. (NY: Pocket Books), 9-17. Lyttleton was a Professor of Theoretical Astronomy, and Fellow of St John’s College, University of Cambridge. On 13, 14
The scientific attitude to adopt in regard to any hypothesis in my view (and we are talking of subjective things) can be represented schematically by means of a simple model of a bead that can be moved on a short length of horizontal wire (see diagram on next page).
Suppose the left-hand end [is] denoted by 0 (zero) and the right-hand end by 1 (unity), and let 0 correspond to complete disbelief unqualified, and the right-hand end 1 to absolute certain belief in the hypothesis.
Now the principle of practice that I would urge on all intending scientists in regard to any and every hypothesis is:
_Never let your bead ever quite reach the position 0 or 1._
This is quite possible, for however close to the end one may have set it, there are still an infinite number of points to move the bead to in either direction in the light of new data or new arguments or whatever.
If genuine scientific data reach your attention that increase your confidence in the hypothesis, then move your bead suitably towards 1, but never let it quite get there.
If decreasing confidence is engendered by genuine data, then let your bead move towards 0, but again never let it quite reach there.
Your changing confidence must be the result of your own independent scientific judgment of the data or arguments or proofs and so on, and not be allowed to result from arguments based on reputation of others, nor upon such things as numerical strength of believers or disbelievers.
…
It seems to be a common defect of human minds that they tend to crave for complete certainty of belief or disbelief in anything.
Not only is this undesirable scientifically, but it must be recognized that no such state is attainable in science.
However successful and reliable a theory may be up to any point of time, further data may come along and show a need for adjustment of the theory, while at the other extreme, however little confidence one has in a hypothesis, new data may change the situation.
We come now to the reason why one should never allow a bead to get right to 0 or 1:
it is that, if one does so, the bead will fall into a deep potential-well associated with every facet of non-scientific or even anti-scientific emotion.
In some cases the depth may tend to infinity, especially with advancing years, and no amount of data conflicting with the certain belief or disbelief will ever get the bead out of the well back onto even the tenor of the wire.
Any attempt to bring about the uplifting of a bead so situated, by means of data or reason, can sometimes lead the owner of the bead to manifest further attitudes unworthy scientifically.
In some cases it may be useless to discuss the hypothesis or theory to which the bead relates.
On the other hand, if the bead is kept somewhere on the wire _between_ 0 and 1 always, it can if necessary be moved quite readily in response to new data with the owner remaining calmly tranquil rather than undergoing an emotional upset.
With such reaction to hypotheses and theories, one can get genuine scientific pleasure from adjusting one’s beads to take account of new data and new arguments.
BDEhrman
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