…when someone asks for the “objective meaning” of life…
Don’t you think this problem stems from our cultural and religious expectations that there is an “ideal” way of living and that success in life depends on our proximity to that ideal? One of the factors that first began to undermine my own religious upbringing was the perception of how different the world actually was from how I was taught it was. I spent years trying to bridge that ever-widening gap but eventually it became too much.
That’s not how I take the question. I think it is the desire (I rather suspect universal to the human experience) to feel like there is something that makes all the sh1t we put up with worthwhile. We want the daily slog of dragging ourselves out of bed–day after day for decades–to go to a job we were sick of after the first month to have some purpose. We want the tedium of endless diaper changes and sleepless nights to fulfill a grand design or have some eternal import. We want our boring, if not downright miserable, lives to matter. Because if they don’t matter, what is the point?
We want our boring, if not downright miserable, lives to matter. Because if they don’t matter, what is the point?
Well one point might be to rebel against boredom and misery. All I can say is that I don’t think life has any meaning. But that’s because it’s not a puzzle to be solved, or an equation to be balanced, but an experience to be had. All that is available to us is the experience of being alive. I can only speak for myself but when I began to think this way my expectations and what I am willing to endure began to shift.
Robert, the very impetus for my interest in ancient ways of thinking is precisely the encounter with minds that think differently. Even today I consciously seek out differing points of view. Also, I am totally fascinated wwith theological responses to science. How religion will navigate the troubled decades ahead interests me no end.
I had no idea you had actually engaged contemporary apologetics. I had the impression you were above all that. Learn something new every day!
My question is, what do theologians think they are doing? How can it be combined with the modern physcial sciences?
My question is, what do theologians think they are doing? How can it be combined with the modern physcial sciences?
I can wax about this, though I can only speak for my former-school.
First, think of the sciences as inquiry into explanations of why things are (and, often must be) as they are. These aren’t principally experimental, but deductive. They are concerned with some formal object, things that are alike in sharing some nature that determines what they are and how they must behave. The paradigm was euclidean geometry: You start with some really trivial axioms that capture something about the nature of stuff insofar as it has extension, then you apply those axioms deductively to prove all sorts of really interesting stuff that describes such things. This is basically the method of Aristotle’s Physics–if you read it it is a bunch of deductive logic that flows from the nature of motion, continua, and such things.
(This is not to say that induction isn’t important to science broadly taken. It is induction that let you discover the first axioms in the first place. But on the classical model of science, that inductive reasoning takes place before science proper starts. Think about physics, it is one thing to do experiments to discover and validate new laws. It is something else to take those laws and apply them to explain why things happen they way they do or predict what will happen. There is a semantic issue: in the modern conception of science, the emphasis is on the inductive process of discovery. In the classical model, the emphasis is on the deductive processes that follows once we have discovered.)
Second, these sciences are interrelated. One science proves (some of) the principles that another science takes as axioms. We can see this in modern sciences: To do biology, you need chemistry; to do chemistry, you need a bunch of stuff from physics; to do physics, you need a ton of math, and to do math you presuppose a bunch of metaphysics (like, “what is a number?”). (When I say ‘need’–you can just bindly accept the conclusion without understanding why; e.g., you can do chemistry without understanding the particle physics, you can just accept that there are certain electron rings and run with it, but that will leave a hole in your understanding. If you really want to understand why chemistry works, at some point you need to do the quantum mechanics that justifies it to do physics you can just use the theorems that mathematicians tell you work, but again, you won’t really be fully understanding until you go through the mathematical proofs that justify those theorems.)
You can also see the progression going the other way: as you investigate the lower science, you reach questions that can only be answered by moving into a higher science. Said otherwise, as you investigate causes/explanations, as you successfully discover one cause that explains something, you are then led back as that newly discovered cause offers you a new object to investigate. This movement is from the more specific to the more general, from the concrete to the abstract, from the particular to the more universal.
In theology, you study the ultimate cause of all else. When you get to the study of God, you get to the end of that line of more and more universal causes. You are studying that which accounts for everything else, and is ultimately responsible for everything else being intelligible in the first place. That’s why it is the queen of the sciences.
it’s not a puzzle to be solved, or an equation to be balanced, but an experience to be had. All that is available to us is the experience of being alive. I can only speak for myself but when I began to think this way my expectations and what I am willing to endure began to shift.
It sounds like a sort of sophisticated Epicureanism: Stop looking for meaning and just take in the breadth of experiences. Enjoy the ride.
I was about the agree pretty strongly with this (as a practical philosophy, it does resonate, both with a number of my own disorganzied thoughts and with sentiments I’ve heard from others who worked their way to that general point independently), but then I had to stop.
I’m pretty committed to an ethic that has strong obligations (I am at heart an ethical Kantian). There might be all sort of moral ambiguities, but sometimes I think there is clearly one right course of action, and though it may be exceptionally unpleasant, it’s out job to suck it up, put on our big-boy pants, and do it. I’m not immediately sure how to reconcile that ethical conviction with a just-enjoy-the-experience practical philosophy.
Do you share my commitment to such strong duties, and if so, how do you reconcile that conviction with this philosophy? Is the answer just that you simply can’t enjoy the experience of life unless you maintain a clear conscience? If that is the problem, would it be intelligible to set out deliberately to dull one’s conscience–say, by periodically making a point of doing what you believe is wrong, going out of your way to steal now and then and such–, since that would make life more enjoyable? In other words, to deliberately form ourselves into the ubermensch?
Please consider this as a place-holder since unfortunately today I am pressed for time. (Perhaps one of those “duties” you speak of Porphyry?) So just some quick comments.
Science does away with the concept of “final authorities” and “absolute truths”. Which is why it is so difficult to turn into a religion. Alas, not for lack of trying! PhScs talk about “models”. Here is where we are based on our current understanding, always subject to revision, update, or even disconfirmation. Slowly but surely we peel back the layers of the onion. To mix me some metaphors, does the universe have a floor or a ceiling? We may never know. It is astonishing how many people see a willingness to revise your opinions based on updated information as a character flaw! But we are taught by our religions to seek an absolute truth from an unquestionable authority and to hold on to that truth no matter what, as if that were a virtue!
…a sort of sophisticated Epicureanism: Stop looking for meaning and just take in the breadth of experiences. Enjoy the ride.
And put that way it immediately invites the same criticism historically given to Epicureanism, that it is a call to a dissolute and trivial lifestyle, when of course it is just the opposite. (Thanks for that “sophisticated”. Let’s hope!)
Yes there are duties and obligations. But they must be understood and freely accepted, not imposed.
I’ll save theology for when I have more time.
I lost my lengthy first reply, so this will be brief.
Yes there are duties and obligations. But they must be understood and freely accepted, not imposed.
Saying that obligations need to be understood seems to imply that they are, in some sense objective. There is some truth to comprehend, to lay hold of with the mind.
This is what I mean by saying that I think obligations are objective. There is–at least sometimes–some truth of the matter. If a man tells me he may murder his loving and faithful wife for the insurance payout, I think I can judge he is mistaken, just as I could say he was mistaken if he informed me that the square root of 25 is 4.
That said, I also agree that obligation is by nature subjective. The person needs to understand it before it can impose the duty–bind his conscience–in the way that is distinctive of moral obligation. Simply conforming to threats and orders out of fear is not following conscience and it doesn’t bespeak obligation.
But that still leaves us with what Mackie calls the queerness of obligation. Obligation tells us what should be, not what is, nor even what will be. But if truth is grounded by reality, if it is something like the correspondence of the idea to the things, what thing can possibly ground prescriptive truth claims?
You can call it dogmatic theology or fundamental theology, but it should be neither fundamentalist nor dogmatic.
Ok then what should it be? Are theologians making truth claims of some sort? If so then must their claims accord with reality as we observe it? If a theologian is asked to briefly describe their enterprise what would they say?
We realize there are different senses of “truth”. There is of course, “what actually happened”. Biographies. Histories. Then there is artistic truth. Fiction, poetry. Here we speak of not, “what actually happened”, but of verisimilitude, being “true to life”. Even in Dickens’ caricatures and grotesques we recognize humanity however distorted. Philosophers, excepting extreme postmodernists, think they are saying something about truth, about reality. What are theologians doing? What is theological truth?
Salve, Robertus!
Do you know of any important contemporary theologians? What are the hot button issues in the field? I am pretty detached at this point.
Porphyry, ave!
I’m much too simple minded to think abstractly for any length of time. Best for me to use an example.
In the Second World War I would have felt an obligation to support and to participate in the fight against fascism. Theirs was an attack not simply against other nation states but against civilization itself. In that context, pacifism, however noble, would not have made sense to me. But what about our recently completed “war” in Afghanistan? I understood the reasons given for going in. The country was being used as a haven for terroristic attacks on the US. But the war lasted two decades! When was the policy, extending through multiple administrations, ever clearly expressed? If five minutes after we left the country it reverted back to the very same condition it was in before we invaded, what the hell has our military been up to? Of course now we have a volunteer military so there was no obligation to participate but did I have an obligation to support the policy?
The fundamental difference for me is that I understand the rationale for the one and not for the other. Does my citizenship in and of itself incur an obligation to support it? Must I understand? I was once verbally, and nearly physically, assaulted because I questioned the impulse of anyone to go halfway around the world, to kill people you’ve never met, on the orders of people you’ve never met, for reasons you don’t clearly understand. Why would someone who claims to believe in freedom be so flabbergasted by such a question? When does acquiescence become a flight from responsibility? (I’m afraid we’ve reached the point where support for the troops is synonymous with support for military policy and to question one is to automatically question the other. And perhaps paradoxically, the all volunteer army serves to reinforce this attitude.)
I guess my point here is that obligations cannot be imposed. They must be recognized and taken on voluntarily. And in a civil society they are reciprocal. Which is why democracy is so hard. It’ll always be easier to just put somebody in charge and do what they tell you. And then congratulate ourselves for having done so.
Judith asked
Do you think democracy is even more difficult now with “alternative facts”?
With truth claims easier and easier to check through online media it does seem odd to be told we live in a “post-truth” universe. I suppose the ideological mindset considers fact-checking oneself to be a sign of weakness. What is worrisome is that despite living in such a media drenched environment it seems almost impossible to have a meaningful public conversation about anything.
Democracy has the defect of its virtue. The problem with Old Media (newspapers, magazines, etc) was the presence of gatekeepers. Who gets to decide who has access? While the gatekeepers mostly did a good job of excluding the fools and the cranks, they also tended to exclude unpopular and marginal points of view that needed to be heard. The solution apparently is New Media/Social Media. Everyone has a voice. (Well not everyone of course. You must have the wherewithal to possess and manage the necessary technology involved. Perhaps another more subtle form of gatekeeping.)
The problem with New Media is that not everyone has anything interesting to say. Yet everyone who participates has access to a megaphone with only one volume setting – extra loud – and no inducement to consider their words. Either the valuable voices are drowned out, or worse, media atomizes into hermetically sealed bubbles of discourse, where “never is heard a discouraging word”. How many people have ever endured a thoroughgoing critique of their most deeply held beliefs? No need for that ever again. I think that is much worse than just outright lying.
Robert wrote
I haven’t bothered with theology for more than 30 years, and even then, all the hot-button issues were already ancient.
Well that’s the problem. What can theology add to the conversation? If we heard on the news that an earth shaking discovery about the origin of the universe was going to be announced this week who would expect it to be issued from a pulpit!
Having said that I confess to an interest in how theology might respond to the discoveries of science. The disappointing part is that in many cases the solution has been to try to simply graft new realities onto ancient issues. One of the side benefits of science is its ability to change our perspective. But that’s exactly what you can’t do with divine revelation. So you spend all your time trying to reconcile absurdities. Of what possible interest could the mystic revelations of a Bronze-Age sheepherder be to an alien from a planet half-way across our galaxy? So consider the paradox of a truly cosmic theology. What room would it have for Yahweh, or Zeus?
But as I said my perspective of the field is limited to the occasional article or video. I would love to read the work of some theologian open to the universe revealed by observation. Are they out there?
Stephen: How many people have ever endured a throughgoing critique of their most deeply held beliefs?
I believe I have just this past Sunday. On PBS someone was discussing truth. I have long believed truth was based on
facts and faith and belief in those facts. That had me wondering if there can be truth now with alternative facts. Sunday someone said truth is beyond facts. He mentioned how poets could sometimes get at the truth better. That had me thinking about Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “I found Him in the shining of the sun. I mark’d Him in the flowering of His fields. But in His ways of men, I find Him not.” My way of defining truth cannot be applied to that!
Judith, We should probably distinguish between “reality” as detectable and measurable by our instruments, and our own subjective experience of it. We can accurately describe the physiology of sex but what most people mean by it is their personal experience of it. The universe is neither sad, glad, nor indifferent lest we see it so.
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