There have been some great comments here of late, and I want to thank you all for that. Your input makes things far more interesting -- at least for me.
Recently I recommended a book to you all, and now that I have finished that book (last Saturday), I would like to recommend it again.
What's So Great About Christianity, written by Dinesh D'Souza, is superb. But I will guess that -- at least to some Christians -- the book's major flaw, if there is one, might be its title. For this is not so much a celebration of Christianity as most Christians might celebrate it. It is more a look at theism's contribution to Western culture. Yes, the emphasis is on Christian theism, but the case for theism in general is more aptly made. In other words, while Mr. D'Souza's work might edify lots of Christians by his excellent defense of the role Christianity has played in the world, his book might not convert people to follow Christ. Of course, I admit this is probably not Mr. D'Souza's intent. And I know that some skeptics will indeed find in this book answers to many or even all of their questions. This book is an excellent polemic; it is a great contribution to Christian apologetics. But this book is not a companion to, let's say, the Gospels; this is not a piece like Romano Guardini's amazing and MUST READ classic, The Lord. Nor is it really that much like C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity. For both of these great works feel far more "churchy" or Christian than what Mr. D'Souza has given us. So, the book might very much edify and interest, but I don't see it as an integral part of a discipleship program. That, too, was not Mr. D'Souza's intent.
None of this, for me, detracts from Mr. D'Souza's book. What I particularly liked about What's So Great... is that Mr. D'Souza explores epistemology, with Immanuel Kant as his centerpiece. This, as I've said before, is an excellent thing: Kant is a great starting point. Mr. D'Souza makes very clear what Kant himself could only manage to write about in an abstruse manner. Kant (if I have this right) made a compelling case that we cannot know "things-in-themselves," we can only know our perceptions of things. For Kant, our senses even corrupt what we experience: I say a lemon tastes tart when in fact "tartness" is not a quality of the lemon, it is a quality of my experience of the lemon. My taste buds create tartness; from them, I infer a cause of that experience, namely the lemon. But I cannot know the lemon as it is; in fact, my senses prevent me from doing so. In sensing an object, all we can know is that we have sensation. We experience phenomena. But the cause of the phenomena -- the thing-in-itself -- we can't know.
But that is just part of the argument, and I must give Mr. D'Souza high marks for how he presents it, especially as it opens the mind to the idea that faith is foundational to all knowledge.
Pertinent to this is the quite interesting fact that no atheist seems to have refuted this argument -- ever. I have asked dozens, perhaps hundreds of atheists to reply to my "Letter to Christopher Hitchens." Not one has done so. My letter, too, as noted above, incorporates ideas gleaned from Immanuel Kant. To date, no atheist has expended any effort here to even debate it in any analytical way (except perhaps this comment by JW Haws). Granted, this does not mean it -- or Mr. D'Souza's argument -- is irrefutable. My piece may be so much fluff and bluster; I know that I have lots of blind spots in my psyche. But one would think that someone would rise up and dismiss what should be quite easy to debunk if, in fact, I have written fluff and bluster.† (I further note that no one has rebuffed the ideas presented in "Speaking In Parables," a short-story I penned in mid-September. I think some skeptic out there would have a counter-argument.)
Now, back to your comments for a moment. A recent comment in this D'Souza thread left by reader Luke Buckham has made me unsure of something I drafted. I wrote:
"most of D’Souza’s detractors will not read any or all of the book. Many, in fact, will not expend the requisite intellectual strength necessary to read the entire thing."
Luke Buckham responded thusly:
"I agree, totally. This is a big problem in our culture: most of ANYONE'S detractors don't bother to read the whole book. I vow to be an exception."
Now, I am flattered Luke agrees with me. But, for whatever reason, I heard something ironic in his words. I confess that I may have added the irony; Luke probably did not intend it.
What I am saying is that I am not sure I agree with myself. Admittedly I averred what I did about Mr. D'Souza's detractors' laziness merely to be provocative -- appealing even to readers' vanity and conceit ("Well, I have what it takes to read the whole thing!"). But that only can be defended so far. Why? Because I think a reader can critique parts of some collection as long as the critic does not assume the parts make up the whole. I can critique argument A if I've not read B -- but only as long as I am sure my interlocutor has conveyed that B has nothing to do with A, or vice versa. Critics do this frequently. Egads, I do this frequently. And, yes, sometimes I get it right. But sadly I also sometimes get it quite wrong: I commit the fallacy many critics commit. In fact, this fallacy is one of the most popular and pervasive fallacies. It is the fallacy that argues that one false part nullifies not only whole sets of arguments, one false part nullifies the totality of the person making the arguments. If Mr. Smith is wrong about X, well, he must not only be wrong about Y and Z, he's really wrong about everything!
Besides, not being critical in Part A while waiting for Part B can lead to absurdities. If I can't denounce Mr. D'Souza before I get to the end of his current book, then it should follow that I can't denounce him until he gets to his LAST book. After all, he might emend things later on; he might even change his mind in his next volume, and the next one after that. Surely I should wait until he is finally done?!
So, all this to say that I am not sure I really believe myself on this one point.
Have a great life!
†Other puff pieces can be found here and here.
©Bill Gnade 2007/Contratimes. All Rights Reserved.
12 comments:
I look forward to more thoughts on the book.
But, I won't read them until I've finished the book myself.
:)
Cheers.
Bill--
Taste is a sense. Your taste buds do not create tartness, they merely sense it. The tart, acidic taste of the lemon is due to what it contains, not due to what the tongue contains; the tongue merely has the equipment to experience some of its properties. Science has explained this perfectly well.
How exactly would the tongue have a non-distorted, "truer" experience of the lemon? There's something borderline nihilistic--and childish--about these these kinds of "arguments". It reminds me of a aquaintance of mine who used to annoy my friends and I by asking, usually during dinner, "how do you know we're really here right now"?
The question seems profound, but all one had to do was ask him to provide counter-evidence to our apparent presence at the dinner table, and the superficiality of his provocation showed through immediately. That's why I never took your "prove that you exist" challenge seriously; it isn't serious. Even if we grant, for the sake of argument, that none of this is actually taking place (whatever that means), this holographic dream-world, or delusion, still appears to be ruled by consistent laws, and those laws hold firm. And it's interesting--but not surprising--that people so often snort at those laws in an attempt at vindication of the belief in a Lawmaker.
Immanual Kant is an expert sophist, but not much of a philosopher.
--Luke
Actually, Luke, Immanuel Kant is an outstanding philosopher.
Have you ever heard of Heisenberg's Principle of Certainty? You should check it out sometime. It's a thrill, and it is a bit analogous to what has been said here: we influence what we experience -- and hence, we cannot experience the thing-in-itself.
You may think tartness exists in the lemon, but you cannot know it. You merely infer it: you can only know your sensation -- the phenomena. And you might think this childish, but it isn't. It is as rational and hard-headed as one can be. Of course, you are free to infer from an effect to a cause anytime, just like theists are free to infer from the "reality" of natural laws to a law-giver. Not that there are actually any laws. You just think there are.
It startles me to no end that you persist in thinking the "prove yourself" argument is not serious. It remains rather unshaken; you have yet to even remotely challenge it. Of course, you made a valiant effort at debunking ALL God definitions by showing how they were ALL self-contradictory. When I showed that this was not true, you finally conceded the point, only to take it up again and defend it. How do you account for this? You have not shown a thing pro or con about the alleged puerility of Kant's philosophy, and yet you dismiss it. And I have shown that you were wrong in your main thesis about God definitions, and yet you continue to think that thesis sound.
I am perplexed.
"Science has explained this perfectly well." I love that.
Oops. That should be Heisenberg's Principle of UN-certainty, or indeterminacy. My apologies. And while it might not fully serve as an analogue to what I am discussing, it approaches it. Our ability to KNOW is imprecise at best.
Oops, again.
For some reason the comment permalinks at your blog are not working. My link to your concession only gets you to the original post. But your concession is found in the comments thread in your comment just prior to my last one. Yours was dated 4:32 pm. Therein you wrote:
Again, I don't mind conceding that there are some definitions of god that are not self-contradictory. But the non-self-contradictory ones you've quoted don't prove a damned thing, and I fail to see the point in quoting them. What have you accomplished by doing so, other than making my eyelids heavy?
Actually, now that I read this comment of yours, I realize that my "non-self-contradictory" definitions do prove a "damned thing" other than making you weary.
Bill said...I have asked dozens, perhaps hundreds of atheists to reply to my "Letter to Christopher Hitchens." Not one has done so.
I will, soon enough.
Dear John W. Loftus,
Alas, a John sighting! Welcome, welcome.
I can't wait for comments from you on this. No pressure, though. Take your time. But I will tell you that you bring glad tidings to my ears, for the problem I've posited has me stumped. Perhaps you can offer some way out.
Peace to you!
Bill Gnade
Bill i don't think you understand the proof that the lemon doea in fact contain tartness. it is easy to isolate what makes the lemon taste like that and than check if other things like that taste the same. additionally if somebody cut off your tastebud's it would be impossible to taste as much as your mind wants to. If you velieve you have no evidence that the lemon is not in fact tarty and you cannot come up with a way to test if it is than your not really asking a question because you cannot even imagine what certainty and an answer would be. Kant was a sophist and a marginal phylosopher
Dear Anonymous,
I appreciate your comments. Thanks for stopping by. I know this was probably not what you were searching for, but thanks nonetheless for taking time to read through this post and comments thread.
Maybe you can enlarge upon your own position: How DO we know that the objective world exists?
Peace,
BG
hey bill it's me again. I think my point is that the only way to deny the real world exist is to already acknowledge that it apears to exist. You will already be speaking and operating in a system that assumes the existence of the real world my point is that to deny that existence you have to prove to me that I should doubt it. I think looking at it any other way is distorting how we think of certainty.
Dear Anonymous,
I appreciate your point, but I think you have misunderstood mine. I am not saying that we should or even can deny that the "real world" exists. I am saying that to know anything, one must first begin with an assumption (as you've just said). Where do assumptions get their "authority"?
What I am exploring is that reason is not the intellectual advantage that some possess over those who have "faith." Faith is the starting point of all knowledge. Hence, the "reasonable" are not exempt from faith; they possess it in mighty doses.
Often I find myself perplexed by, I don't know, let's say, Unitarian Universalists. This group often presents itself as more reasonable, or more accurately, reasoned, than its religious neighbors. UUs are often rather proud in this claim; some of the UU literature comes across rather boastful.
What stymies my mind is how few UUs understand their own deep commitment to faith; and their own profound ignorance of the limits of reason. Indicative of this is the grotesque misunderstanding of Roman Catholicism (or evangelicalism) by some of my UU peers. For neither the RC church nor many evangelicals are one whit irrational. In fact, the RC church in particular is incredibly rational; many protestant sects rejected the Catholic Church precisely because of its over-reliance on reason (recall Luther's "The whore, Reason"). Even more interesting, many of the evangelical authors I read (as well as the RC), actually presented more rational arguments than those I've read posited by those who claim a rational advantage.
As for your earlier post, I can only say that the lemon does not contain "tartness." You may be right: there might be a chemical that we link to tartness. But there is no reason we should think there is something tart about the chemical; it might be sweet or even bland on the taste bud of a monkey, or some other organism. We can only say that we experience tartness in association with other proximate experiences. But there is no reason to say that the lemon is intrinsically, necessarily or essentially tart. Only OUR experience of it suggests tartness. And then all we can say is that our individual experience of it is tart: I cannot say a lemon is tart universally among all men. The man with no gustatory capacities will not find anything tart about a lemon at all.
I am, perhaps, making no sense here. But I think I am.
As for your claim that Kant was a "marginal" philosopher, well, I guess you would stand in the very singular position of being the only person I know who would make such a claim. The great Frederick Copleston, S.J., one of the greatest historians of philosophy if not the greatest, authored a monumental encyclopedia spanning the bulk of western philosophy. I say with some confidence of that massive series that only Kant had an entire volume devoted to his contribution to western thought. His influence was truly enormous.
Be well, dear soul.
Gnade
Fair enough on your ascertion that kant is a very influential phylosopher. I think the distinction I am trying to make though is that I am not in fact making an assumption when i say something is red I already see it as red. Now to state that all I can know is that it appears red to me seems to be making an assumption that i may be the creator of this perception. My argument is that since as you have stated their is no way to know whats causing the redness how can you know that it may in fact be you who are causing it on what basis do you suppose that it may in fact not be intinsic of what you are looking at. How do you know that we change things about perception and if we cannot know that we do why suppose it?
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