Existentialism

Chuck brought up the issue of existentialism, and thought that would be a good direction to take the discussion. Soon I plan on talking a little about Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky. Both of them have been called the 'father of existentialism'. Interestingly, both of them were Christians. For now, I'm just bringing them up, and if anyone wants to start by defining what existentialism is, go ahead.

Is anyone interested in meeting next Wednesday, the 16th? There is a lot going on at the church that night, but we could meet at someone's house. Rustin has said his place is open in the past, or my house. Just let me know.

I am using a book for some of Caleb's homeschooling called Handbook of Christian Apologetics by Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli. It is a supplement to his logic course. I just read a section that spoke to some things we've been talking about recently and I thought I'd share it with you. Here he they are talking about getting back to a more traditional, Aristotelian, view of logic.

Restoring the Older Notion of Reason
To make this restoration possible, another restoration is necessary: a restoration of the older, larger notion of reason itself. This means essentially two things:
1. seeing our subjective, psychological, human processes of reasoning as participation in and reflections of an objective rational order, a logos, a "Reason" with a capital R; and

2. seeing reason not as confined to reasoning, calculating--what scholastic logic calls "the third act of the mind"--but as including "the first act of the mind": apprehension, intellectual intuition, understanding, "seeing," insight, contemplation.

Using Aristotelian Logic
These two positions we take concerning the nature of reason lie behind our use of Aristotelian logic. This is a logic of (linguistic) terms, which express (mental) concepts, which represent (real) essences, or the natures of things. (The Greek word logos has all three of these meanings.) Many modern philosophers are suspicious and skeptical of the venerable and commonsense notion of things having real essences or natures and of our ability to know them. Aristotelian logic assumes the existence of essences and our ability to know them, for its basic units are terms, which express concepts, which express essences. But modern symbolic logic does not assume what philosophers call metaphysical realism (that essences are real), but implicitly assumes instead metaphysical nominalism (that essences are only nomina, names, human labels), since its basic units are not terms but propositions. Then it relates these propositions in argumentative structures just as a computer can do: if p, then q; p; therefore q.

The human mind is indeed a computer--we do compute, after all--but it is much more than that. We can also "see," or understand. Behind our use of Aristotelian logic is our hope that all our arguing will begin and end with seeing, with insight. Thus, we usually begin by defining terms and end by trying to bring the reader to the point of seeing objective reality as it is.

Cory,

This is really fascinating. That the spoken word, linquistics, are
the basis and substance of all reality seems absurd to us. It is
absurd of course when we think our words for our reality and define
it for us. I loved your final paragraph about "God's Word" being the
substance that forms our reality.

Reality is only subjective to the "subject" that performed the action
of the verb "created." It's objective to every other entity that can
perceive it.

Thank you for these thoughts. Wittgenstein might be worth some future
study sometime.

Chuck

Yes, I think this is great advice for dealing with Post-Modern
people. If they can come to accept the presence of evil, they must
recognize a standard by which it can be measured. That brings them
back to the possibility of an "objective" truth appropriate for all
humanity. That's what God gave us in the 10 commandments (or the
whole corpus of scripture!)

Thanks again Cory for your thinking in these areas.

Chuck

Wittgenstein

The other day at church Chuck brought up Wittgenstein, the German philosopher. That is another subject I passed over in regard to postmodernism, but I just wanted to make a comment about Wittgenstein.

I'm obviously not an expert, but I've always wanted to study up on him a little bit. It is hard to pin him down, because there is a lot of disagreement about him. His early views are different from his later views. And some people think his later views were kind of an argumentum ad absurdum and didn't reflect what he really thought. I think that might be the case. Or maybe he was just brain storming. During WWI he was actually somewhat of an evangelist. But I get the feeling he later lost his faith.

But the postmoderns picked up on his later thoughts having to do with language. What they take from him is that all of creation is just a linguistic construction. Both personally and in community we create our own reality. This gets to a really deep level for some people. Some people with more extreme views would say that the computer I'm using, the house I'm in, and the food I'm eating also only has existence as we create that existence with our words. Is there really an objective reality of an apple apart from the language I've used to talk about it. Those are extremes, and it gets kind of weird, but when it comes to morality it is easy to see how some people would say that those ideas are just linguistic creations.

I've thought about this a lot, and as with any good deception, I think there at least a hint of truth in that idea. I think all of creation is linguistically created. But we aren't the creators. "In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD as with God, and the WORD was God."

How to deal with postmodern people

The best way to wrap up postmodernism is to talk about how to approach a postmodern person. Talking to a postmodern person can be very frustrating. Sometimes they will be hostile to talking about Christianity, but often you can have an interesting conversation. Interesting, that is, until you realize you are going nowhere. Postmodern people love to dialogue. But the goal of dialogue is not to come to a conclusion, or to really evaluate what was said. The goal is just the dialogue. If right and wrong are just whatever my community and I want it to be, then there is nothing wrong with sharing each others' views. But if, for instance, you are talking about the resurrection and all the evidence for it and how that has an effect on what you believe, they won't follow you. They'll be interested in you experience, maybe, but they won't follow the reasoning, because they don't care.

So what do you do? Probably the best place to start is understanding sin. To a postmodern there is no such thing, and getting them to see that they are a sinner and need a savior can be quite difficult. But every once in a while a teachable moment shows up. Don Carson tells a story of how a friend of his witnessed to a very liberal lady in Washington D.C. (I'm paraphrasing here) She didn't believe in sin, or evil. Right and wrong was truly up for interpretation to her. Ideas of right and wrong are just local or personal constructions. So this Christian asked her if she thought evil existed and she of course said, no. So he tried to paint a picture of some brutal crime to see how she would react. She was of course aghast, but she really thought that this crime wasn't really wrong, it just happened to offend her own personal sensibilities, or maybe her instincts. But deep down it wasn't really wrong, or evil. But he kept at it. Every time he saw on the news that a little girl had been raped he got in her face and said, "Well, is it evil?" But she wouldn't crack. Until one day when she heard about a particularly heinous crime. I don't remember the details. But something got to her. And deep down inside she new that what had happened was wrong. It was evil. And the measure by which she judged this act wasn't just her own personal sensibility. Deep down in the heart of reality, what happened was wrong. But where did this come from? The only place these rules could come from would be from an eternal, infinite lawgiver. Today this lady is a mature Christian.

I tried this tactic once. A college student was working as a receptionist at the ER desk in Council Bluffs, and he was showing off some of what he'd learned in philosophy class. So I asked him if he thought there was such a thing as evil. Then I challenged him. Anyone can think up examples of terrible crimes. And to find real situations all you have to do is watch the news. And working in the ER provides plenty of opportunity to see sin and evil face-to-face, too. It got to him, and he got the point. I don't know exactly where he's at with his relationship with the Lord, but he's not an atheist any more. His girlfriend at the time was Catholic and they have since married and go to church. But that was at least a start.

Chuck suggested some discussion on existentialism, and I think that's a good idea. But first I want to wrap up some things in regard to post-modernism. Following are the beginning and ending of a paper by Arthur Leff in the Duke Law Journal from 1979. Leff was a law professor at Yale, and from what I understand, he never gave another lecture on the philosophy of justice. Could it have been that he was confused, in a Nietzschean sort of way.

Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law

I want to believe--and so do you--in a complete, transcendent, and immanent set of propositions about right and wrong, findable rules that authoritatively and unambiguously direct us how to live righteously. I also want to believe--and so do you--in no such thing, but rather that we are wholly free, not only to choose for ourselves what we ought to do, but to decide for ourselves, individually and as a species, what we ought to be. What we want, Heaven help us, is simultaneously to be perfectly ruled and perfectly free, that is, at the same time to discover the right and the good and to create it.

skip to end of article

All I can say is this: it looks as if we are all we have. Given what we know about ourselves and each other, this is an extraordinarily unappetizing prospect; looking around the world, it appears that if all men are brothers, the ruling model is Cain and Abel. Neither reason, nor love, nor even terror, seems to have worked to make us "good," and worse than that, there is no reason why anything should. Only if ethics were something unspeakable to us, could law be unnatural, and therefore unchallengeable. As things now stand, everything is up for grabs.

Nevertheless:

Napalming babies is bad.

Starving the poor is wicked.

Buying and selling each other is depraved.

Those who stood up to and died resisting Hitler, Stalin, Amin, and Pol Pot--and General Custer too--have earned salvation.

Those who acquiesced deserve to be damned.

There is in the world such a thing as evil.

[All together now:] Sez who?

God help us.

Wow. That just goes to show you, or me anyway, that if you reason well enough you can hardly miss the truth. Unless your heart is hardened. Which unfortunately is the condition of most people.

Remember the syllogisms?

If God does not exist, then morality cannot be justified.

God does not exist.

Morality cannot be justified.

But morality exists.

Heaven help us. (Leff's words)

One of the first things you learn when you study logic is that if your conclusion (that morality cannot be justified) is truly unacceptable, but it follows from your premises, you have to go back and examine your premises. But Leff, and the rest of the modern/postmodern world, is committed to those first two premises. That leads to quite a conundrum. That was Nietzsche's conundrum, too. But in his more brazen moments Nietzsche thought we, or at least one of us, would evolve past it. It should be fairly obvious we can't, and won't. (Unless you count becoming like Christ a type of 'evolution.' Thanks be to God, huh? But I digress.)

In the body of that article from Leff above, he discusses some options that could plausibly explain how legitimate ethical systems develop, assuming there is no God all the while. One option is that each individual decides what is right and wrong for himself. But, what governs the interactions between two 'Godlets' [Leff's word] when they disagree and conflict with one another? There still would have to have some lawgiver (ie God) who could govern those interactions, or there would be no ethical system. This is obviously a problem. Whoever the lawgiver is it would have to be eternal and infinite (ie God). This is one of the problems with Nietzsche. How could Man evolve into something transcendent, something that is eternal and infinite? Leff recognizes all this.

Another of Leff's options, the postmodern option, is that whatever is right is what is right for me AND my group or community. Leff doesn't name it postmodern, but that is one of the characteristics of postmodernism, that what is right is determined by me and my community. This allows for some coherence between members of the community. But the problem is that you have just the problems mentioned in the last paragraph back a little farther. But who is going to decide what laws govern the interactions between the different groups? Who is going to decide who wins in conflict, for instance, between homosexuals, Christians, and Muslims? Again, we need an eternal, infinite law giver, or else all we have is power, political, military, or otherwise.

Thus the current dilemma created by postmodernism. The one solution remaining for a postmodern is constant, interminable 'dialogue'. It is for exactly this reason that the UN opts for constant dialogue, diplomacy, compromise, and negotiation. That is why they balk at enforcing any resolutions they come up with. The use of force is bad, though they can never say why, and all they have is dialogue. Over time this dialogue will get us all to see eye-to-eye. Or so they say. There is a lot of Marxist/Hegelian dialectic in there, too, but it is definitely postmodern.

Thus, modernism itself led to a lot of bloodshed in the bloodiest century ever. It looks as though postmodernism will likely lead to more of the same. Man's attempts to create Utopia always end up creating a place you don't want to live.

So what is left when postmodernism runs its course? There is an article written several years ago by David Hart in First Things called "Christ and Nothing." Those are the two options left. Either go back to Christ or embrace total nihilism. If anyone wants to read that article I can find a link for you.