More Pre-modernism

It's about time for another installment in my series of explanations on 'pre-modernism'. Just to refresh some memories, it's not about going back to belief in a flat earth and blood-letting. There was an understanding of reality in the pre-modern, Judeo-Christian world, that was much more accurate than the modern world. Our views of things are so colored by the modern, or post-modern assumptions we make that we can't recognize our own biases.

What I'm about to say is going to ruffle some feathers. Some people definitely won't like it. That's ok. Let me hear about it.

I'm going to start by just coming out with the controversial part, then I'll go back and explain. That might take a little while. But here we go.

Conservative Christians have come to believe they are fighting against the modern world which tries to explain away the Bible. The modern world doesn't believe in miracles, so the miraculous parts of the Bible were obviously made up. So they say. The problem with the Christian response is that it often --usually-- relies on some of the same modern assumptions that are used to criticize the Bible. What happens is that the Christian ends up defending the Bible on the grounds that, "God can get His facts straight."

That is just simply not acceptable. There are good arguments on both sides of debates about which passages in scripture are historical and which are literary. Both certainly exist, which can be easily demonstrated. The historical truth of the existence of King David, the accuracy of the gospel of Luke, etc, and many other points on which the historical facts do back up the Bible. Then there are parts of the Bible that are obviously poetic or symbolic. In the Psalms, and by Jesus in the N.T., God is described as a chicken who cares for her chicks. And in Psalm 57 David says, "In the shadow of thy wings will I make my refuge." Does that mean God is a great big Chicken?

Then there are cases that are more difficult to determine. Genesis, Jonah, Job, Daniel, Revelation, just to name a few. I believe there are good arguments for why different passages may be historical/literal or more 'literary', on both sides. And I don't have all those points figured out. Even if I did, it is often of less importance than applying the passages to our lives. But nevertheless, it is a mistake to use the argument, either directly or as a hidden premise, that "God can get his facts straight."

As I explain myself I'll be covering some ground we've covered before. As we went from predominantly pre-modern to modern, the meaning of 'fact' changed. There was also a corresponding change in the meaning of 'objective.' The original meaning of 'objective' was that something had it's origin outside of an individual's mind. For example, it is 'objectively' true that adultery is wrong. This is something determined by God, who is the law giver, the one who decides right and wrong. It isn't something I think is true because I happen to prefer it to be true. It really is. But the modern understanding of 'objective' is different. The word now means that something is true, "and I can show it to you." The modern world only accepts as 'objective' those things that can be demonstrated empirically, through the senses.

The same thing happened to the word 'fact.' Facts today deal with only material and measurable things. So, it may be a 'fact' that the earth goes around the sun, but it cannot be a 'fact' that adultery is wrong. It can be a preference or an opinion, but not a fact. To a modern mind many of the realities of life are optional opinions because of the way 'fact' as been defined.

This is also tied together with the modern misunderstanding of cause and effect. I've pointed out before that to really understand something you have to understand it in 4 different ways. Things have formal, final, material, and efficient causes, not just one cause. In the modern way of understanding there is only 1 category of causes, and it's a hybrid cause, a combination of the material and efficient. The modern world has done away with formal and final causes, that is, design, meaning, and purpose.

What happens when conservatives go to interpret the Bible, all too often, is we start with the unspoken premise that "God can get his facts straight." But it involves a modern mindset, that puts the entire emphasis on material causes. This limits our ability to understand what God is telling us. I don't know for sure whether creation happened in 6 days, billions of years, or somewhere in between. I tend to think it took a long time. I also think there are some good arguments both ways. But I also think that God was not writing/inspiring with the modern misconception of the word fact. Ironically, sometimes as we try to prove the modern world wrong, by the argument we use we end up agreeing with them.

More to come.

Chuck,

Those are good questions. I'm afraid I don't have a great explanation of 'circular' thought processes as it relates to ancient Hebrew thought or Native American thought. That's partly why I said, "Please don't dwell on that analogy too long, or try to take it to far." But it is probably worth exploring.

I'm not sure that type of 'circular' as opposed to 'linear' thought is the same thing as 'circular' reasoning, but they may be related, so I think we can start there. Circular reasoning is basically when you assume your conclusion is true in one of your premises, and use that to prove your conclusion. As an informal logical fallacy it is known as 'begging the question.' But we think of circular arguments as 'fallacious' and don't give them the credit they are due. It isn't without merit, sometimes, to have a circular argument because it can show that your position is consistent, or it can help you restate your conclusion in another way, which might help someone else understand your position better. Where a circular argument falls short is when you are claiming to 'prove' that your position is true by way of a circular argument.

Here's a real life example of circular reasoning:

"The healthcare system in the US is not as good as in other countries because it is not socialized. Therefore, since socialized medicine is better, the US should change it's healthcare system to be more like other countries."

The World Health Organization actually does this. They rate the US low for it's health care and claim to show the US needs to become more socialized. But the rating process is designed to give high marks for socialized systems and low marks for those that aren't. So are they are really saying is, "We like socialized medicine!"

I'm not so sure the Greeks were purely linear in their thinking. I think they were more comprehensive than that. The fact that they consider 4 causes instead of 1 or 2 is an example. Linear thinking shows up both in logical progressions and cause and effect relationships. An example in cause and effect is 'cue stick strikes cue ball, which strikes another ball, which gets to a pocket, then is acted on by gravity...' The more comprehensive explanation of cause and effect would mention the intentions and purposes of an agent with a mind and a cue stick who has in mind some strategy (why did he hit that ball that direction), along with things like 'entertainment.'

So, a linear thought process is like a chain. Each proposition (in logic) or each event(physics) is just connected to the next like links in a chain. It's just 1-dimensional. Circular reasoning (whatever that is) might be like the chain looping around back on itself. It's 2-dimensional. But a more comprehensive process wouldn't involve just a chain with links, but each link being attached to links above and below it. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Chain mail is a whole fabric made of links that support each other in many directions, and the fabric can be wrapped around and connected together to be 3D.

Here's an example using the ontological argument. Some people claim there is a circular nature to the argument because, so the argument goes, the only people who would agree that "It is possible that a greatest possible being exists," are people who are already prone to believe there is a God. So you are assuming what you are proving. But that's not true. There are an enormous number of other things in life that support the idea that God is at least possible. There are other arguments based on natural theology like the cosmological arguments, design arguments, moral law arguments, personal experiences of many people, historical arguments, etc, etc. All these things, and more, point to the fact that the existent of God is 'possible' at a minimum. So the ontological argument isn't really circular after all. The first premise is just one ring in the chain mail shirt that has support from several other rings.

There is no one point of view of reality that removes all doubt or all mystery. Whether you are a Christian, an atheist, a Hindu, Muslim, or whatever, there are going to be some difficulties at some level. For a Christian, the Trinity is a mystery and difficult to understand. As David Stove, the atheist who wrote Darwinian Fairytales, says, "Or rather, to tell the truth, it's "triune" God has been its Achilles' heel all along, and a perpetual source of scandal, ... to the countless sensible Christians who cannot help thinking that 3 and 1 are different numbers." The problem is that rejecting the Trinity causes countless other problems, and at the end of the day accepting that as a location of mystery, and recognizing that "3 in 1" is just a metaphor, answers far more than it brings into question. So the point isn't to have a system of thought that removes all doubt and questions, but one that answers things better than all the rest. Christian thought is a shirt of mail that has far fewer weak spots than any other. Besides, a good shirt has a few holes it for your head and arms. (Maybe that's what God means by 'holy'. Sorry, just a bad joke.)

I know my explanation of circular thought leaves something to be desired. If anyone else can explain that better please post it. Michal gave me a book for Christmas about a Norwegian commando who was hunted by the Nazis in WWII. He ended up escaping with the help of the Lapps, the reindeer herders in northern Scandinavia. They apparently also have a sort of circular way of thinking. When I get a chance I'll go back and look at that.

The more I think about it, maybe circular in this case just means, "not linear."

Cory,

I'm not sure I get the chain mail shirt, but I get the idea of looking at things in 3D. That's simply reality. That's seeing things as they really are.

I've always had trouble with the linear vs cyclical thought patterns that I hear about. Some say, Hebrew, is a circular or cyclical thought process unlike Greek. But I don't understand that. Can you pretend that I'm an 8th grader, no wait, a 4th grader, and give me an illustration of linear Vs Circular thought. What would linear thought look like on a particular issue or subject, verse how it would look in a circular one. Does this make sense?

Chuck

More Pre-Modernism

More than once I've mentioned that I'm more 'pre-modern' than 'modern' or 'post-modern.' The last post about the ontological argument provided a good example of what pre-modern thought might look like. I've thought of a couple more examples of what pre-modern thought is like. Just so you don't think I'm planning on going back to horses and wagons, or that I believe the earth is flat, I want to share another example.

It has been said that westerners think linearly, with thoughts moving from one to another like a chain, and other people, like American Indians, think in a circular path. Some people think this explains why our cultures are so different. There may be something to that, I don't know, but the analogy works for our purposes. In light of the last post, I believe both the linear and the circular paths are incomplete. The best way of thinking is in 3-D. I mean that our ideas should fit together like that chain mail shirt mentioned in the last post.

Please don't dwell on that analogy too long, or try to take it too far. It's just that the chain mail shirt is still coming in handy for descriptive purposes. One of the most prominent characteristics of modern thought is it's linear nature, and this carries over into modern descriptions of cause and effect. This has significant influence on many aspects of our lives, including politics, religion, medicine, ethics, etc.

The pre-modern understanding was that to understand the cause of something you had to know 4 different causes. These are the material, efficient, formal, and final causes. An easy example of this is to consider a statue. The material cause is the marble or wood, or whatever it is made out of. The efficient cause is the sculptor. The formal cause is the design or plan in the sculptor's mind. And finally, (no pun intended) the final cause is the purpose of the statue (ie to beautify the city, or whatever).

The problem with the modern way of thinking is that it only deals with the first 1 or 2 of those causes. Usually, all there is to know from a modern perspective is the material the thing is made of. As far as science goes, the interaction of matter is all that is needed to explain cause and effect, or so we are told. Modern science sometimes allows for efficient causes, and sometimes not. Often the material world is considered explanation enough, as the material universe is the efficient cause.

Here's why it matters. That is what Darwinism, among other things, is all about. There is no design, purpose, or final plan for anything in biology, to a Darwinist. Once in a while you'll here someone in medical school take Darwinism to it's logical end and deny, for instance, that the purpose of the heart is to pump blood. It just happens to be a muscle that contracts in such a way to pump blood. But it really all happened as an accident. Fortunately, few people can continue thinking this way, even if they don't understand where the faulty thinking is. It is clear to most people that the reason we have cardiologists is because some people's heart don't behave the way the ought to.

Another way of saying this is that the modern way of viewing things is reductionistic. The explanation of everything is just an explanation of the material parts. If you understand the physics and chemistry of a human body you've explained all there is to explain. In medical school reductionism rears it's ugly head all the time. Fortunately, in my experience most people in medicine have at least some understanding that people are more than the sum of their parts. But they still have a tainted view of people and their souls. The most obvious example I can think of reductionism in medicine is in the way abortion is handled. An unborn baby is just 'products of conception'. Also, in neuroscience reductionism plays a big role. The standard view in neuroscience is that all you are as far as your identity goes is your brain. The chemistry in your brain is what you are. Your thoughts are really just chemical reactions. And of course there is no soul. Souls are immaterial and don't neatly cooperate with the view that material explanations are all that are needed. In reality, souls and the mental activity they engage in are immaterial. Looking into a brain and thinking you have found the thought is like tearing apart a radio trying to find the voice (that's an illustration from CS Lewis). The brain is a thought processing organ, but a bunch of neurons don't exhaustively explain the thought.

Wendell Berry is a Christian writer who explains it like this: modern, reductionistic science is useful and has value, but in terms of really explaining things it is 'more like a bucket than a well.' When you leave out design and purpose and anything immaterial you end up with less ability to explain reality, not more.

Historically, Descartes is the one is given credit with this focus on material causes. I don't think he intended all the consequences of that. And it wasn't all bad. Science does work. It just isn't the complete answer it is made out to be. In the first 100 or 200 years after Descartes scientists were obviously Christian, and they did their science from the point of view that the universe and been created by a God who had put it in order, and therefore the material universe could be explored and understood. Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton were all like this.

A curious thing happened with Newton, however. In one of his scientific works he said, in Latin, "Hypothesis non fingo." In English that means, "I feign no hypothesis." In other words, he wasn't pretending that his physics provided a complete understanding of reality. He was merely describing the physical universe without reference to purpose or design. That doesn't mean the purpose and design weren't there. It is interesting that Newton came up with most of his discoveries in math and science in a very short period of time. Most of it happened in 1 year. He spent a far greater amount of time investigating things like numerology in scripture, and contemplating spiritual things. The volume of his writings on such things greatly outnumbers his writing in math and science that we remember him for today. His religious views were a little odd, and he wasn't a Christian as we understand it because he didn't believe in the Trinity. But he understood the bigger picture was there.

Compare that to a century or so later when LaPlace was giving an explanation of his work to Napoleon. LaPlace had written a book on the solar system and planetary motion. Napoleon asked him how God fit into his explanation. "I have no need of that hypothesis, Sir," was LaPlace's response. What a change! Now, I don't know about LaPlace's spiritual life, but he was apparently a practicing Catholic. Christians will sometimes defend LaPlace because math and physics had progressed to a point where that really was all that was needed to explain the solar system. Or was it? He could have at least said that, "Well, God designed the solar system and it works according to his purposes," or something like that. We are back to the bucket vs the well. Even if a description of the solar system seems of little consequence, the schism had happened. The formal and final causes were removed. The consequences are more dramatic when one considers this same materialism led to Karl Marx, Darwin, etc.

The Ontological Argument

I've been reading a really good book recently, called Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity, and Other Fables of Evolution. It was written by David Stove, an atheistic philosopher from Australia. He was an expert on David Hume, the 18th century philosopher known for his skepticism. David Stove applied this skepticism well in criticizing Darwin and all the neo-Darwinists. It can be very useful when arguing against atheists if you can quote another atheist.

I could go on for a while about this book, but that's not why I'm writing. A while back we were talking about the 'ontological argument' for the existence of God, and Chuck brought up the objection that it is not at all clear that 'existence' is a property of things. Well, while reading David Stove's book I ran across a passage in which he criticizes Richard Dawkins 'discovery' of something called 'memes'. (That subject deserves a discussion of it's own.) Stove called Dawkin's discovery a pseudo-discovery, then gave a couple of examples of other philosophical 'pseudo-discoveries'. One of them is Kant's 'discovery' that 'existence' is not a property. It goes like this:

"Any property that a real x had, an imaginary x could have, and any property that an imaginary x could have, a real x could have.

So,

Existence is not a property."

Stove doesn't elaborate any further, he just threw it out there as an example. There a probably several ways to object to Kant's idea here. The first thing that comes to my mind is that one reason some people are prone to dislike the the ontological argument is that it seems so simple and child-like that it can't possibly be true. And if evidence of God's existence is so simple, doesn't that trivialize faith a little bit? To the first objection I would say that a) we are supposed to be child-like as Christians, and b) it would be very ironic for serious, grown-ups to claim to have easily dismissed such a childish notion with such a childish notion of their own. To the second objection I would say that, a) in addition to the admirable quality of being child-like, we find in Romans 1 that reality shows us clearly that God exists, and that not to see this is to suppress what we should naturally understand, and the ontological argument is an example of that, and b) it is a misunderstanding of faith (a subject we've already covered before).

The truth is that both the ontological argument and the 'existence' objection are simple on one level, yet you can spend a lot of time thinking them through. Not all Christian thinkers agree with the ontological argument, for various reasons, but some of it stems from Kant. But many, such as the Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga, do think it is sound. And there is the old story of Bertrand Russell walking across the yard at Cambridge mumbling to himself, "Great God in boots, the ontological argument is valid!"

To me, the 'existence' objection reveals a certain, modernist, bias. Remember that I've said before that I'm more pre-modern than modern or post-modern. But Kant was a modernist, and there are a few things it would have been good for him to remember. Ancient philosophers, and this would have included the church fathers, understood that there were up to 12 different ways in which something can be said to exist. I don't know most of them, but Caleb and I are going to learn them next year in his logic class. But the two different senses of existence that stand out to me are to exist 'in the mind' or to exist 'independent of the mind'. Take the example of a child's imaginary friend. If a child comes into the house and says that their friend has just been hit by a car, it is appropriate to respond differently if this is a real friend who lives down the street, or if it is an imaginary friend. Both friends exist, but one only exists in the child's mind, whereas the real friend who lives down the street has an existence independent of the child's mind. Clearly, there is a sense in which one of the friends 'exists' and the other doesn't. The friend who lives down the street has a property that the other one doesn't.

There is an objection to the ontological argument that I think is a lot more powerful. In a deductive argument, if the premise(s) is true, and the conclusion follows from the premise(s), then the conclusion is true. It is a slam dunk. In this case the premise, "It is possible that a being greater than which no being could be exists," (or however you want to formulate it) is not going to be readily accepted by everyone. In simpler form it be simply, "It is possible that God exists" or "It is possible that a necessary being exists." I accept those premises, and it seems an agnostic would too, but some atheists won't.

This brings up another pre-modern idea. "I believe in order to understand." Ancient thinkers understood that we all do this. We see it in real life all the time. Someone who believes in global warming believes all the evidence points to the conclusion that man-made global warming is real. And the global warming skeptics do it as well. We all do. Evolutionists, creationists, whatever. It looks a little bit circular, doesn't it? The ironic thing here is that the ancients and medievals understood logic better than anyone, and to them this was ok. It doesn't mean that a circular argument by itself proves anything. But, for moderns a logical chain of thoughts was just that, a chain. One thought follows from another like links in a linear chain. But to the ancients it was more like chain mail armor. It isn't just a chain of links but a whole, 3-dimensional shirt. So, if we take the ontological arugment by itself, there is some room for doubt about that premise. But when we take into consideration everything else we know about reality, and all the other reasons that we have to believe that the existence of God is at least possible, the ontological argument become quite strong.

Cory,

I enjoy reading your posts and their responses. I cannot enter into you conversations at the level you men are, but am challenged by how you all think. I may be making myself vulnerable to your knowledge and study with this, however Iconsider your use of 'postmodernism' as a generalization. I'm not defending postmodernism any more than I would condemn modernism. Both have characteristics of value as well as areas of concern.

This document that I've attached describes the difference and the reason for the apparent shift. Agree or disagree, it is interesting. I'm just concerned of generalizing statements that 'write off' an entire thought process by only citing the areas that align with existentialism.

The 'emergent' church, in the strictest sense, is loosing ground to the more favorable 'missional' church. Both 'emergent' and 'postmodernism' (both of which many say we've moved beyond) were corrective measures and a reaction to bring balance to strict modernism which they would say elevated knowledge without regard to the experience and outworking of that knowledge alongside it.

Anyway. Like I said, it's the generalization that hit me of center more than anything else. Otherwise, great discussion and admire the knowledge and history your guys bring to it.

Vito