I can see how subjective phenomenology or social constructivism can be useful for studying subjective phenomena and interpersonal social phenomena.
What I cannot see is how it can address questions of fact. Does Dafyd's God of all creation exist? What is the composition of Venus' atmosphere? What is the solution to today's Wordle? - apart from denying that they exist at all. Which, frankly, seems barmy. Before there were rational beings, where did reality exist if not in an objectively existing material universe?
Do you think, for example, that the existence of God has a yes/no answer that's true for everyone regardless of what they think?
The problem here, is what a positivist thinks is a fact is not the same as what a social constructionist thinks is a fact / “actual reality”.
There a fundamental difference in what is defined as truth.
A weak social constructionist position - which may make more sense to you - is that there maybe a concrete unchanagable reality independent of the way we make sense of it. But the fact that we process it through fallible sense and using language and ideas we have created that are inherently subjective, means that we can never perceive it independently of our subjective/cultural understandings.
The theological complication is that if an omniscient omnipotent God created us and everything, it could presumably control our perception and/or decide to be perceived only via intuitive or imaginative ideas.
I can see how subjective phenomenology or social constructivism can be useful for studying subjective phenomena and interpersonal social phenomena.
What I cannot see is how it can address questions of fact. Does Dafyd's God of all creation exist? What is the composition of Venus' atmosphere? What is the solution to today's Wordle? - apart from denying that they exist at all. Which, frankly, seems barmy. Before there were rational beings, where did reality exist if not in an objectively existing material universe?
Do you think, for example, that the existence of God has a yes/no answer that's true for everyone regardless of what they think?
The problem here, is what a positivist thinks is a fact is not the same as what a social constructionist thinks is a fact / “actual reality”.
There a fundamental difference in what is defined as truth.
A weak social constructionist position - which may make more sense to you - is that there maybe a concrete unchanagable reality independent of the way we make sense of it. But the fact that we process it through fallible sense and using language and ideas we have created that are inherently subjective, means that we can never perceive it independently of our subjective/cultural understandings.
The theological complication is that if an omniscient omnipotent God created us and everything, it could presumably control our perception and/or decide to be perceived only via intuitive or imaginative ideas.
Thing is, that constructivist position doesn't work for the life I live day to day. I work on computer systems. How would I work by seeing a fault as a social construction? And if I managed that, by a "well it's a fault to you because you want it to do X", then how does social constructivism enable me to troubleshoot a problem that exists outside of me in the computer? Even if I acknowledge that what I'm actually doing to solve it involves manipulating a model of the computer system in my mind, that only works inasmuch and as far as that model is an accurate one of the real computer system on the desk some distance from my mind.
It feels very much like trying to carve a joint using paintbrushes. Wrong tool for the job.
(At the risk of being a smartarse, isn't the statement "X is a constructivist" a claim of an external objective reality wrt me, inasmuch as if true, it's true regardless of whether I know it, or even have met X, or know what a constructivist is, or are even alive?)
I can see how subjective phenomenology or social constructivism can be useful for studying subjective phenomena and interpersonal social phenomena.
What I cannot see is how it can address questions of fact. Does Dafyd's God of all creation exist? What is the composition of Venus' atmosphere? What is the solution to today's Wordle? - apart from denying that they exist at all. Which, frankly, seems barmy. Before there were rational beings, where did reality exist if not in an objectively existing material universe?
Do you think, for example, that the existence of God has a yes/no answer that's true for everyone regardless of what they think?
The problem here, is what a positivist thinks is a fact is not the same as what a social constructionist thinks is a fact / “actual reality”.
There a fundamental difference in what is defined as truth.
A weak social constructionist position - which may make more sense to you - is that there maybe a concrete unchanagable reality independent of the way we make sense of it. But the fact that we process it through fallible sense and using language and ideas we have created that are inherently subjective, means that we can never perceive it independently of our subjective/cultural understandings.
The theological complication is that if an omniscient omnipotent God created us and everything, it could presumably control our perception and/or decide to be perceived only via intuitive or imaginative ideas.
Thing is, that constructivist position doesn't work for the life I live day to day. I work on computer systems. How would I work by seeing a fault as a social construction? And if I managed that, by a "well it's a fault to you because you want it to do X", then how does social constructivism enable me to troubleshoot a problem that exists outside of me in the computer? Even if I acknowledge that what I'm actually doing to solve it involves manipulating a model of the computer system in my mind, that only works inasmuch and as far as that model is an accurate one of the real computer system on the desk some distance from my mind.
It feels very much like trying to carve a joint using paintbrushes. Wrong tool for the job.
(At the risk of being a smartarse, isn't the statement "X is a constructivist" a claim of an external objective reality wrt me, inasmuch as if true, it's true regardless of whether I know it, or even have met X, or know what a constructivist is, or are even alive?)
The code and frameworks you are using social constructions, the idea of a social constructionist is in itself a social construct. But going back to your trying to carve a joint with paintbrushes - I’d argue that is what you are doing when you try to use scientific enquiry to understand God.
I can see how subjective phenomenology or social constructivism can be useful for studying subjective phenomena and interpersonal social phenomena.
What I cannot see is how it can address questions of fact. Does Dafyd's God of all creation exist? What is the composition of Venus' atmosphere? What is the solution to today's Wordle?
Most of your interlocutors here are phenomenologists (and/or) social constructionists and would align with the critics of positivism. Where people are committed to different paradigms, despite best efforts, they often end up talking past each other. No-one can offer a defence of phenomenological reasoning in positivist terms, for example, because the paradigms are incommensurable.
You will keep saying, from conviction / first principles, there is this other real bit of reality, and as long as that is a fundamental principle of your worldview, there is nothing anyone with a phenomenologically inclined worldview can say to address that.
To be fair, the same principle applies the other way round. As long as your phenomenologically inclined interlocutors keep saying, from conviction / first principles, there is not this other ‘real bit of reality’ we can disentangle from subjective experience, there is nothing you can say from a positivist worldview to address that.
It doesn’t matter what examples we each reach for. We are just going to end up talking past each other. Indeed, we have been for some time.
(At the risk of being a smartarse, isn't the statement "X is a constructivist" a claim of an external objective reality wrt me, inasmuch as if true, it's true regardless of whether I know it, or even have met X, or know what a constructivist is, or are even alive?)
If a positivist says it, they are saying there is an external objective reality “a constructivist called X”
If a phenomenologist / constructionist says it, they are saying “I experience X as a constructivist” and offer it for intersubjective agreement. Others may or may not have an aligned experience.
People are normally talking within their paradigm and don’t have to unpack their everyday language in this way, that’s all.
If I may, God can only be known in the first instance scientifically.
So neither by faith nor coincidence?
Sure, but those don't compare. Knowing God in the first instance by faith is a lesser knowing. Subjective. I have no idea how one can know God by coincidence. Honestly. There are those who know God by their disposition with regard to a few numbers. That kind of thing? Or something unique to the individual?
If I may, God can only be known in the first instance scientifically.
Why ?
Sorry, should have replied to you first. There is no other consilient way of knowing. My answer to @Kendel applies. If God had done anything that science or parallel methods of enquiry (history, and er...?) raised an eyebrow at, we'd all know.
I knew God existed, as you all yawningly know, by the Pericope Adulterae. My appalling ignorance lasted 50 years. I now know better. For worse.
If it had been written by John at the age of 80, 60 years after the event, it is consensually more emotionally intelligent than anything up to that time. Where the subjective meets the objective.
Whatever. No matter how arguable to dust that is, if God can only be known by faith or coincidence (or aesthetics? Social construct?), they are utterly subjective.
Until we have, know God, by science, by impossible anachronism in history, none of the other knowings can have any weight whatsover. And even then.
And include all the fuzziness and outright paradoxes and weirdness of science, the relativity of social sciences, the reality of subjectivity leading to phenomenology and my only known belief, the Rogerian. Which I've yet to master in argument here...
But yeah.
I'm not aware of any reason not to be when it comes to the supernatural. Believing in anything supernatural without ever experiencing anything supernatural (analogously like the experts testifying for UFOs to Congress) would be a waste of precious belief.
Aren't you? With regard to God? Or the supernatural? I imagine not. Like many of the best. My spiritual advisor. Steve Chalke. Tom Wright. Brian McLaren. Pete Rollins. Oprah Winfrey, etc, etc. People I completely admire.
ISTM that neither subjective phenomenology nor social constructionism are equipped to deal with whether an entity exists or not. Subjective phenomenology is concerned with phenomena as they appear to the subject. Intersubjective corroboration is simply the process by which it is discovered that other people experience phenomena in the same way. Subjective phenomenology critiques the idea of the purely impartial observer, but in relation to the existence of something it can only say ‘everybody so far asked experiences this phenomenon in the same way’. Where people experience phenomena differently from each other, it can’t AFAICT evaluate that difference, it merely notes it.
Social constructionism is also not interested with the existence or not of an entity, but only with the meanings and significance people adduce from it.
I agree, of course, but (at myself) am delighted to be able to incorporate them, if only so late in life. It's almost an aesthetic. The brute facts of science remain, positivistically, for me, a separate magisterium nearly.
ISTM that neither subjective phenomenology nor social constructionism are equipped to deal with whether an entity exists or not. Subjective phenomenology is concerned with phenomena as they appear to the subject. Intersubjective corroboration is simply the process by which it is discovered that other people experience phenomena in the same way. Subjective phenomenology critiques the idea of the purely impartial observer, but in relation to the existence of something it can only say ‘everybody so far asked experiences this phenomenon in the same way’. Where people experience phenomena differently from each other, it can’t AFAICT evaluate that difference, it merely notes it.
Social constructionism is also not interested with the existence or not of an entity, but only with the meanings and significance people adduce from it.
I don’t think that is quite right. Instead, it is a belief that the existence of something can be approached but only through our experience - and that involves the meaning and significance tied in to our interpretation of something. It’s not possible to strip that out. In everyday life those meanings and significance could include ‘scientific’ interpretations in a way. For example, when I look at the stars I see giant thermonuclear reactors (my experience includes reading, conversation…), but I also see constellations and have triggered literary and musical connections about stars, and maybe think of ‘the love that moves the sun and other stars’…
But you are right on one level. Phenomenology approaches the world through our experiences, and the premise is that going back to the ‘things themselves’ means looking at those experiences as the primary things. As such it is more interested in, say, natural scientists than natural science and has little to say about what the existence of things sans human experience might be.
I would also add that science also requires falsifiability and uses agreement, and will (or should) say, ‘all the research so far points to this thing in the same way, so for now that is what we believe’. And then scientists see (e.g.) giant galactic clusters that don’t fit the model, and have to think again…
I think Cameron is in danger of describing idealism and calling it phenomenology.
Idealism is the flip side of positivism. Both idealists and positivists start from the individual's subjectivity - the paradigm being Descartes sitting in his stove - and ask how can I build a bridge from my sense experiences to the outside world. The positivist tries to put forward rigourous conditions and the idealist declares that there is no point.
The founder of phenomenology, Husserl, as I understand it, started from such a position. Hence he called his major work Cartesian Meditations. What he eventually worked his way through to though, I gather, is that our subjectivity only makes sense as part of the external objective world. We don't have experiences: sense impressions projected onto the screen of a subjective observer. We have experience - we acquire knowledge through interaction with a world external to and independent of us. So when Heidegger wants to talk about knowledge he talks not about a philosopher in his study or stove but about a builder with a hammer working on a house. Phenomenology is about knowledge by an embodied agent in the world.
It seems to me that KarlLB's appeal to computer programming is more genuinely phenomenological than anything else in this thread. Because it is an appeal to experience.
Maybe God doesn't want to be known objectively - maybe he only wants to be known subjectively.
Whether God can be known objectively or subjectively is a very different question from whether God exists objectively or subjectively.
They're obviously related questions, but *how* different they are depends on the viewpoint of the reader, which was part of the reason for juxtaposing them.
I do keep wondering whether the words 'objective' and 'subjective' are actually useful. They have different meanings when applied to different concepts; but people keep switching between the different meanings in argument.
I think it's pretty inevitable, given the kind of discussion it as and the range of views held by the various participants, and especially the range of worldviews on show.
Another aspect is that the language we use is doing what we want it to do, imperfectly. We all have various meanings in mind to which the expressions we put into print serve only as a rather vague "waving of hands in the direction of" signpost. Even if we were all more disciplined thinkers, our language would tend reflect the discipline(s) in which we were disciplined. Cross-discipline discussions often come unstuck. We do the best we can with the language we have. On these forums, sufficient meaning appears to be transmitted to enable the successful continuation of posting, which is the primary aim (and maybe all we can hope for) of a forum that serves a community.
Kierkegaard says in the beginning to the Concluding Scientific Postscript that faith is a subjective passion. And I think he makes the useful point that no amount of evidence could amount to a proof that Jesus was God. But if I remember correctly - I would have to reread it - Kierkegaard doesn't think that faith is knowing subjectively.
Things that are known subjectively may include my gender, possibly whether I am in pain, and so on. The point is that in each case other people may offer input or help me think through it, but I am the final arbiter. But if God exists then I am not the final arbiter; if God exists for me God also exists for the whole creation and I am not the final arbiter of whether God exists for the whole creation.
Hmm. I think I would make a more qualified consequential assertion. (Bearing in mind thoughts about omnipotence and creation, etc, in previous posts on a couple of other threads)
How do you formulate such a view using only language games that have no moves that count as access to objective reality?
In short - you don't need to be able to access objective realities to be able to consider their existence.
That's just asserting that you haven't accessed objective realities in considering their existence.
In order to consider the existence of something you have to have formed a concept of that something, either by access to that something or by adapting some other concept that you have use for.
We can consider the existence of dragons without ever having 'accessed' a dragon. That's because we have uses for the concepts of reptiles, fires, dangerous animals, and so on, and we can develop the concept of dragons from them.
Mythology is worth considering in relation to "believing in" type beliefs. As is storytelling. I don't think we know nearly enough about the role the imagination plays in constructing concepts to conclude much one way or the other.
But my contention is that we cannot form the concept of an objective reality without at least some access to that objective reality. All prior concepts from which the concept is constructed depend in some way on the process of learning that the world is sometimes not as we believe it to be.
We could be learning that the world doesn't behave as we expect it to behave. "Belief" could just be a word we give to a collection of expectations about a particular type of subjective encounter. Learning doesn't inherently require access to objective reality.
Can we do any more that assert and contend in relation to these things?
I believed that the lunchbox was in the school bag; I learned that I was wrong.
Even if the access is imperfect, it is still access. (If it were perfect, we again would not have the concept.)
Even without taking all the religious credence stuff on board, I'm inclined to think that the way these kind of "believing that" beliefs engage the imagination (if they do at all) is sufficiently different not to tell us a lot.
You spoke before about switching from epistemological questions to ontological questions.
Not I. All mentions of those words were in the exchange of posts between Cameron and KarlLB
My mistake. You're still switching between them as if they're parallel. And they are not parallel.
I'm switching between them because I can. One of the points I'm trying to get across is that our worldviews exist to serve a purpose. They don't have to define us. We should be able to use the one we see fit to use, according to who we're talking to, and what we're talking about. The fact that they often *do* define us is possibly derived, in the first instance, from the extent to which they are often used in the "-ist" sense to define the people whose (paid) job it is to define them and, more generally, the way western knowledge systems work.
@Dafyd. As a too late developing layman, I see I've made an artificial distinction between positivistic God precluding science, and phenomenology. Yet it almost seems implicit to the thread. I love the holism of 'Phenomenology is about knowledge by an embodied agent in the world.', yet the world is so brutally (out) there w.r.t. infinite nature; it doesn't matter what we feel or think about it. But we can't not loop, ruminate in our wetware.
@Dafyd. As a too late developing layman, I see I've made an artificial distinction between positivistic God precluding science, and phenomenology. Yet it almost seems implicit to the thread. I love the holism of 'Phenomenology is about knowledge by an embodied agent in the world.', yet the world is so brutally (out) there w.r.t. infinite nature; it doesn't matter what we feel or think about it. But we can't not loop, ruminate in our wetware.
"The world doesn't care about our agency - maybe there's a world-creator who does."
IANA philosopher and have never formally studied philosophy. But from my limited reading around it seems that what's being called phenomenology on this thread sounds rather more like phenomenalism, which is a different thing.
I can see how subjective phenomenology or social constructivism can be useful for studying subjective phenomena and interpersonal social phenomena.
What I cannot see is how it can address questions of fact. Does Dafyd's God of all creation exist? What is the composition of Venus' atmosphere? What is the solution to today's Wordle? - apart from denying that they exist at all. Which, frankly, seems barmy. Before there were rational beings, where did reality exist if not in an objectively existing material universe?
Do you think, for example, that the existence of God has a yes/no answer that's true for everyone regardless of what they think?
The problem here, is what a positivist thinks is a fact is not the same as what a social constructionist thinks is a fact / “actual reality”.
There a fundamental difference in what is defined as truth.
A weak social constructionist position - which may make more sense to you - is that there maybe a concrete unchanagable reality independent of the way we make sense of it. But the fact that we process it through fallible sense and using language and ideas we have created that are inherently subjective, means that we can never perceive it independently of our subjective/cultural understandings.
The theological complication is that if an omniscient omnipotent God created us and everything, it could presumably control our perception and/or decide to be perceived only via intuitive or imaginative ideas.
Thing is, that constructivist position doesn't work for the life I live day to day. I work on computer systems. How would I work by seeing a fault as a social construction? And if I managed that, by a "well it's a fault to you because you want it to do X", then how does social constructivism enable me to troubleshoot a problem that exists outside of me in the computer? Even if I acknowledge that what I'm actually doing to solve it involves manipulating a model of the computer system in my mind, that only works inasmuch and as far as that model is an accurate one of the real computer system on the desk some distance from my mind.
It feels very much like trying to carve a joint using paintbrushes. Wrong tool for the job.
(At the risk of being a smartarse, isn't the statement "X is a constructivist" a claim of an external objective reality wrt me, inasmuch as if true, it's true regardless of whether I know it, or even have met X, or know what a constructivist is, or are even alive?)
The code and frameworks you are using social constructions, the idea of a social constructionist is in itself a social construct. But going back to your trying to carve a joint with paintbrushes - I’d argue that is what you are doing when you try to use scientific enquiry to understand God.
I don't attempt to use scientific enquiry to understand God.
I'm not seeking within the context of this discussion, to understand God. Just establish whether there exists an entity which can reasonably be called God.
I'm not trying to use scientific enquiry either. What I am asking is what verification you would use to justify a belief that God exists, given a specific means of enquiry.
I have personally reached an uneasy truce with the likely reality that this in fact impossible. I suspect that the toolkit to demonstrate God's existence doesn’t exist.
This leads to the uncomfortable conclusion that a godless universe looks exactly like one in which God exists. One can posit, for example, that the universe's existence itself is the phenomenon which would not exist without God, and/or that God’s providence happens through natural phenomena which are also adequately explicable scientifically. But these proposals can be used to demonstrate compatibility of God with naturalistic explanations; they cannot demonstrate that God necessarily exists.
Which by a weird quirk of fate brings the path of this discussion close again to the starting point. The statement someone quoted:
"When I pray, coincidences happen. When I don't, they don't"
That can be used to make a statistical prediction that in principle at least could be tested. I wonder if it has?
I think Cameron is in danger of describing idealism and calling it phenomenology.
Idealism is the flip side of positivism. Both idealists and positivists start from the individual's subjectivity - the paradigm being Descartes sitting in his stove - and ask how can I build a bridge from my sense experiences to the outside world. The positivist tries to put forward rigourous conditions and the idealist declares that there is no point.
The founder of phenomenology, Husserl, as I understand it, started from such a position. Hence he called his major work Cartesian Meditations. What he eventually worked his way through to though, I gather, is that our subjectivity only makes sense as part of the external objective world. We don't have experiences: sense impressions projected onto the screen of a subjective observer. We have experience - we acquire knowledge through interaction with a world external to and independent of us. So when Heidegger wants to talk about knowledge he talks not about a philosopher in his study or stove but about a builder with a hammer working on a house. Phenomenology is about knowledge by an embodied agent in the world.
It seems to me that KarlLB's appeal to computer programming is more genuinely phenomenological than anything else in this thread. Because it is an appeal to experience.
I think Cameron is in danger of trying so hard to keep the terms clear and simple - per requests - that he is being much less precise than is his wont, to the point of straying.
I would have thought the opposite of idealism was realism though, not positivism, if want to keep the terms precise.
As to KarlLB’s appeal to programming, I did not read that as a case of a particular experience. Instead, it was more like, “as a programmer I think it must work this way otherwise how would it be possible?”
I can see how subjective phenomenology or social constructivism can be useful for studying subjective phenomena and interpersonal social phenomena.
What I cannot see is how it can address questions of fact. Does Dafyd's God of all creation exist? What is the composition of Venus' atmosphere? What is the solution to today's Wordle? - apart from denying that they exist at all. Which, frankly, seems barmy. Before there were rational beings, where did reality exist if not in an objectively existing material universe?
Do you think, for example, that the existence of God has a yes/no answer that's true for everyone regardless of what they think?
The problem here, is what a positivist thinks is a fact is not the same as what a social constructionist thinks is a fact / “actual reality”.
There a fundamental difference in what is defined as truth.
A weak social constructionist position - which may make more sense to you - is that there maybe a concrete unchanagable reality independent of the way we make sense of it. But the fact that we process it through fallible sense and using language and ideas we have created that are inherently subjective, means that we can never perceive it independently of our subjective/cultural understandings.
The theological complication is that if an omniscient omnipotent God created us and everything, it could presumably control our perception and/or decide to be perceived only via intuitive or imaginative ideas.
Thing is, that constructivist position doesn't work for the life I live day to day. I work on computer systems. How would I work by seeing a fault as a social construction? And if I managed that, by a "well it's a fault to you because you want it to do X", then how does social constructivism enable me to troubleshoot a problem that exists outside of me in the computer? Even if I acknowledge that what I'm actually doing to solve it involves manipulating a model of the computer system in my mind, that only works inasmuch and as far as that model is an accurate one of the real computer system on the desk some distance from my mind.
It feels very much like trying to carve a joint using paintbrushes. Wrong tool for the job.
(At the risk of being a smartarse, isn't the statement "X is a constructivist" a claim of an external objective reality wrt me, inasmuch as if true, it's true regardless of whether I know it, or even have met X, or know what a constructivist is, or are even alive?)
The code and frameworks you are using social constructions, the idea of a social constructionist is in itself a social construct. But going back to your trying to carve a joint with paintbrushes - I’d argue that is what you are doing when you try to use scientific enquiry to understand God.
I don't attempt to use scientific enquiry to understand God.
I'm not seeking within the context of this discussion, to understand God. Just establish whether there exists an entity which can reasonably be called God.
I'm not trying to use scientific enquiry either. What I am asking is what verification you would use to justify a belief that God exists, given a specific means of enquiry.
I have personally reached an uneasy truce with the likely reality that this in fact impossible. I suspect that the toolkit to demonstrate God's existence doesn’t exist.
This leads to the uncomfortable conclusion that a godless universe looks exactly like one in which God exists. One can posit, for example, that the universe's existence itself is the phenomenon which would not exist without God, and/or that God’s providence happens through natural phenomena which are also adequately explicable scientifically. But these proposals can be used to demonstrate compatibility of God with naturalistic explanations; they cannot demonstrate that God necessarily exists.
Which by a weird quirk of fate brings the path of this discussion close again to the starting point. The statement someone quoted:
"When I pray, coincidences happen. When I don't, they don't"
That can be used to make a statistical prediction that in principle at least could be tested. I wonder if it has?
"[Galton] conducted research on the power of prayer, concluding it had none due to its null effects on the longevity of those prayed for"
"When I pray, I notice coincidences happen. When I don't, they don't". I notice coincidences often and I don't pray. Neither do I attribute anything to the coincidences but time and chance. It's a very weak hostile "thing" to say.
That big para is fertile. And I love your phenomenon almost too much. To critique:
This leads to the uncomfortable conclusion that a godless universe looks exactly like one which exists in God.
But yeah. God creates as if He didn't. Infinite nature exists as if it were perfect, complete. God explains nothing it doesn't and, in fact, makes things much worse.
One can posit, for example, that the universe's existence itself is the phenomenon which would not exist without God
I do, have for years, here : ) But it's purely abstract, academic, neither here nor there. Being grounds itself. Is that being, intentional? If It is, It goes to inordinate lengths to deny it. Including in Its paradoxical revelation.
If God exists, then infinite nature can. If He doesn't, then it does.
OK, catadromous from the spring now:
I don't attempt to use scientific enquiry to understand God.
I do. (Which God?) Positing that infinite nature is an aspect of Love.
I'm not seeking within the context of this discussion, to understand God. Just establish whether there exists an entity which can reasonably be called God.
Unless science, positivism, global consilience, establishes it, no. Only a theoretical one, that doesn't work.
I'm not trying to use scientific enquiry either. What I am asking is what verification you would use to justify a belief that God exists, given a specific means of enquiry.
Consensus after consilience. But what means of enquiry can we use if we can't use sensory experience? Like my oft posted favourite bit from The Second Coming. You must have clicked on my link to that before. So I won't link to it. It's as wonderful as the wonderful bit in 2010.
I have personally reached an uneasy truce with the likely reality that this in fact impossible. I suspect that the toolkit to demonstrate God's existence doesn’t exist.
Likely by how many sigmas? Don't be shy. There is no toolkit. It's entirely up to Him. Most here and many other smart, kind, more high profile people reckon He's done it. I wish I was Steve Chalke.
I wish He'd do it for you and Caliban me. Hidden in plain sight in the text that they intuitively, Jungianly feel it is. Where I once ignorantly knew it was. Or even in actual history. In the beginning of the Church.
@Dafyd. As a too late developing layman, I see I've made an artificial distinction between positivistic God precluding science, and phenomenology. Yet it almost seems implicit to the thread. I love the holism of 'Phenomenology is about knowledge by an embodied agent in the world.', yet the world is so brutally (out) there w.r.t. infinite nature; it doesn't matter what we feel or think about it. But we can't not loop, ruminate in our wetware.
"The world doesn't care about our agency - maybe there's a world-creator who does."
If it looks odd. Like a new and most distinctive, radical, peaceful, deeply religious, inclusive, social justice movement emerging overnight, OK in fifty days on top of 1,300, in Judaism, from a martyred itinerant carpenter, born of a young woman mystic who was kin to an older woman mystic who was mother to another male mystic.
(Buddhism and Islam, also based on individuals, don't compare.)
The default position is that it is all an extraordinary natural phenomenon, a locus of several happening exponentially in less than a century, in 3 degrees of separation, in a funny little province that has had the tides of many larger cultures wash over it for over a thousand years.
We can write a goodwill natural story of the kinswomen and their sons. Can we do so of the Church's infancy after their martyrdoms?
Church 1st circle adult male populations (by the book)
AD
27 1, 12, 70
31 3,000
By history:
Starks according to Kyle Orton's excellent (he invokes Bart Ehrman) blog.
7,500 Christians by the end of the first century (0.02% of sixty million people);
40,000 Christians by 150 AD (0.07%)
200,000 by 200 AD (0.35%)
2 million by 250 AD (2%)
In its early centuries, Christianity achieved a phenomenal growth rate: it is estimated that it had hit roughly 30 million followers by AD350.
Orton's final para and it's central link are most persuasive (Brit. understatement). Of nature.
For the unnatural we have to look at 50 BCE - 40 AD Jerusalem. Elizabeth, Mary, John, Jesus, the infant Church, for the epidemic of terrifyingly theologically mandated kindness (which Islam does regressively echo, as the epidemic mutated).
So do you find your research is adequate to answer your questions, or is the matter still under consideration?
If it looks odd. Like a new and most distinctive, radical, peaceful, deeply religious, inclusive, social justice movement emerging overnight, OK in fifty days on top of 1,300, in Judaism, from a martyred itinerant carpenter, born of a young woman mystic who was kin to an older woman mystic who was mother to another male mystic.
(Buddhism and Islam, also based on individuals, don't compare.)
The default position is that it is all an extraordinary natural phenomenon, a locus of several happening exponentially in less than a century, in 3 degrees of separation, in a funny little province that has had the tides of many larger cultures wash over it for over a thousand years.
We can write a goodwill natural story of the kinswomen and their sons. Can we do so of the Church's infancy after their martyrdoms?
Church 1st circle adult male populations (by the book)
AD
27 1, 12, 70
31 3,000
By history:
Starks according to Kyle Orton's excellent (he invokes Bart Ehrman) blog.
7,500 Christians by the end of the first century (0.02% of sixty million people);
40,000 Christians by 150 AD (0.07%)
200,000 by 200 AD (0.35%)
2 million by 250 AD (2%)
In its early centuries, Christianity achieved a phenomenal growth rate: it is estimated that it had hit roughly 30 million followers by AD350.
Orton's final para and it's central link are most persuasive (Brit. understatement). Of nature.
For the unnatural we have to look at 50 BCE - 40 AD Jerusalem. Elizabeth, Mary, John, Jesus, the infant Church, for the epidemic of terrifyingly theologically mandated kindness (which Islam does regressively echo, as the epidemic mutated).
So do you find your research is adequate to answer your questions, or is the matter still under consideration?
Forever the latter. At best : ) Limbo. Fading limbo.
Forever the latter. At best : ) Limbo. Fading limbo.
But stasis is death.
Getting used to death.
Must dot that aye at Launde, eh?
Aye?
It has come to mind a number of times in the last week. If one could know beforehand, as with so many things, that the outcome would be as desired, then absolutely: yes! Whatever the return might be, though, it won't be the same as the first time.
In spite of my expression of enthusiasm, you are the only one who has a feel if it might be worth while to meet with someone there or might be more beneficial to go for a nature walk.
Limbo
It's hard to spend one's existence in the front car at the top of the coaster, dangling, staring down that first, terrible hill. Suspended, without a workable resolution or ability to go forward. Even into the un(or vaguely)known. Actually, I think you have been going forward, maybe will glancing back often. But it's a hard way to live, isn't it? I expect that limbo fading is a relief to some degree. Life support can't last forever.
Death
There are all kinds, aren't there?
They're none of them easy to get used to. We spend our lives avoiding momento mori at the most bizarre costs. A coworker was going to a "homegoing" today. Reframing it in such pathetic terms in order to mask the reality of gaping loss -- even for this Christian -- seems like opioid abuse.
I find Eagleton's meditation far more valuable. The entire chapter is outstanding, this is one of many sections I value; I think a good deal of this applies to the death of faith as well:
Death draws a line under one’s life, but it does not thereby invest it with a determinate direction, central meaning or aesthetically gratifying shape, so that one’s existence continues to seem unbounded and death, in consequence, is bound to appear notional. One’s death is both an absolute certainty and the very prototype of pure abstract speculation, like an ominous rumour picked up at second or third hand – unsettling but remote enough to shelve at present and attend to later. How can one experience as real an event which undercuts the reality of experience? Thomas Aquinas thought that the mind was incapable of seizing upon the concept of Creation because it was unable to grasp the notion of nothingness, nothingness being the only background against which the Creation as such might swim into view. If one’s existence is similarly hard to get in one’s sights, it is partly because, death being no more than a speculative affair, one really has nothing definitive from which to mark it off. And if the end of life can loom up as unreal, so can life itself when contemplated in the light of that cutting off. Anything that can vanish so irretrievably at any moment, however apparently substantial, is bound to have a smack of illusion about it, like a stage performance the very flamboyance of which (the sumptuous costumes, the glare of the lights, the larger-than-life gestures) seems designed to disavow the fact that it will imminently disappear.
Eagleton, Terry. Radical Sacrifice, Bookshare edition in Calibre, 34%.
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I don't attempt to use scientific enquiry to understand God.
I'm not seeking within the context of this discussion, to understand God. Just establish whether there exists an entity which can reasonably be called God.
I'm not trying to use scientific enquiry either. What I am asking is what verification you would use to justify a belief that God exists, given a specific means of enquiry.
I have personally reached an uneasy truce with the likely reality that this in fact impossible. I suspect that the toolkit to demonstrate God's existence doesn’t exist.
This leads to the uncomfortable conclusion that a godless universe looks exactly like one in which God exists. One can posit, for example, that the universe's existence itself is the phenomenon which would not exist without God, and/or that God’s providence happens through natural phenomena which are also adequately explicable scientifically. But these proposals can be used to demonstrate compatibility of God with naturalistic explanations; they cannot demonstrate that God necessarily exists.
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Looking at this again, it strikes me that the God you're seeking to establish the existence of is not the God of Christianity. More significantly, I'm not sure if it's possible for the God of your inquiry to be the God of Christianity.
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I don't attempt to use scientific enquiry to understand God.
I'm not seeking within the context of this discussion, to understand God. Just establish whether there exists an entity which can reasonably be called God.
I'm not trying to use scientific enquiry either. What I am asking is what verification you would use to justify a belief that God exists, given a specific means of enquiry.
I have personally reached an uneasy truce with the likely reality that this in fact impossible. I suspect that the toolkit to demonstrate God's existence doesn’t exist.
This leads to the uncomfortable conclusion that a godless universe looks exactly like one in which God exists. One can posit, for example, that the universe's existence itself is the phenomenon which would not exist without God, and/or that God’s providence happens through natural phenomena which are also adequately explicable scientifically. But these proposals can be used to demonstrate compatibility of God with naturalistic explanations; they cannot demonstrate that God necessarily exists.
...
Looking at this again, it strikes me that the God you're seeking to establish the existence of is not the God of Christianity. More significantly, I'm not sure if it's possible for the God of your inquiry to be the God of Christianity.
...
I don't attempt to use scientific enquiry to understand God.
I'm not seeking within the context of this discussion, to understand God. Just establish whether there exists an entity which can reasonably be called God.
I'm not trying to use scientific enquiry either. What I am asking is what verification you would use to justify a belief that God exists, given a specific means of enquiry.
I have personally reached an uneasy truce with the likely reality that this in fact impossible. I suspect that the toolkit to demonstrate God's existence doesn’t exist.
This leads to the uncomfortable conclusion that a godless universe looks exactly like one in which God exists. One can posit, for example, that the universe's existence itself is the phenomenon which would not exist without God, and/or that God’s providence happens through natural phenomena which are also adequately explicable scientifically. But these proposals can be used to demonstrate compatibility of God with naturalistic explanations; they cannot demonstrate that God necessarily exists.
...
Looking at this again, it strikes me that the God you're seeking to establish the existence of is not the God of Christianity. More significantly, I'm not sure if it's possible for the God of your inquiry to be the God of Christianity.
The idea of a godless universe being like one with God, is very familiar to me from atheist friends, who would ask, what would the difference be? It's a question that assumes the godless variety, isn't it? It makes me think of Milton's monism, I mean a universe which is alive, or with sensibility. I guess this is not Christian, not sure, but here you cant "add" God to lifeless matter, since it is alive, with divinity.
The idea of a godless universe being like one with God, is very familiar to me from atheist friends, who would ask, what would the difference be? It's a question that assumes the godless variety, isn't it?
Not really; it rather asks what a Godless universe would look like and asks how ours, if it isn't Godless, looks different.
The problem is that our universe does appear to be compatible with God not existing. So if he does, then the answer seems to be "godless and 'godful' universes look the same"
The question is then whether godless universes exist within the phase space of possible universes. If God is essential for there being something instead of nothing - the sort of nothing in which there's nowhere for something to exist; in which indeed "in which" has no meaning. I don't think that question is amenable to any means of enquiry, so God remains an enigma.
I suppose you could also argue that if God exists we only know what Godful universes look like, and if he doesn't we only know what Godless universes look like. It ends up in the same place though - we don't know which the actually existing universe is.
I suppose one could speculate that. godless universe would lack either life, or if life were present - affection. But as you say - we have no way of knowing, without a comparison it’s an unanswerable question.
Looking at this again, it strikes me that the God you're seeking to establish the existence of is not the God of Christianity. More significantly, I'm not sure if it's possible for the God of your inquiry to be the God of Christianity.
I think this remark, if it is not to be outright dismissive, needs a lot of unpacking.
(The God of Christianity is no doubt not merely an entity like created entities and God's existence is not like the existence of created entities. But that doesn't mean that faith in God can get by with no rational warrant.)
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I don't attempt to use scientific enquiry to understand God.
I'm not seeking within the context of this discussion, to understand God. Just establish whether there exists an entity which can reasonably be called God.
I'm not trying to use scientific enquiry either. What I am asking is what verification you would use to justify a belief that God exists, given a specific means of enquiry.
I have personally reached an uneasy truce with the likely reality that this in fact impossible. I suspect that the toolkit to demonstrate God's existence doesn’t exist.
This leads to the uncomfortable conclusion that a godless universe looks exactly like one in which God exists. One can posit, for example, that the universe's existence itself is the phenomenon which would not exist without God, and/or that God’s providence happens through natural phenomena which are also adequately explicable scientifically. But these proposals can be used to demonstrate compatibility of God with naturalistic explanations; they cannot demonstrate that God necessarily exists.
...
Looking at this again, it strikes me that the God you're seeking to establish the existence of is not the God of Christianity. More significantly, I'm not sure if it's possible for the God of your inquiry to be the God of Christianity.
Why on earth would you say that?
I could have put that better, but I was thinking about how someone could go about demonstrating the existence of God empirically.
You previously wrote about setting out a definition of what you mean by God. I'm not entirely clear what would be included in your definition, but the Christian God (at least) is often defined in terms of his qualities, attributes or properties. I've been wondering for which of God's attributes there could be an empirical test.
For example, you previously proposed that there could only be one "real" God (or none). I suggest this would correspond to the uniqueness of God, for which an empirical test seems unlikely.
So, if there are no empirical tests for any of the attributes of the Christian (definition of) God, I was wondering if that would mean it would be impossible for him to satisfy the conditions of your inquiry
As to KarlLB’s appeal to programming, I did not read that as a case of a particular experience. Instead, it was more like, “as a programmer I think it must work this way otherwise how would it be possible?”
Well, of course it wasn't "a case of a particular experience" because from the standpoint of phenomenology there is no such thing as "a case" (singular) "of a particular experience" (singular). Experience isn't reducible to particular experiences.
I feel your reading of KarlLB was such as to make it easier to dismiss what he is saying and where he is coming from, and I am suspicious of readings of other people that make it easier to dismiss what they're saying and where they're coming from.
As to KarlLB’s appeal to programming, I did not read that as a case of a particular experience. Instead, it was more like, “as a programmer I think it must work this way otherwise how would it be possible?”
Well, of course it wasn't "a case of a particular experience" because from the standpoint of phenomenology there is no such thing as "a case" (singular) "of a particular experience" (singular). Experience isn't reducible to particular experiences.
I feel your reading of KarlLB was such as to make it easier to dismiss what he is saying and where he is coming from, and I am suspicious of readings of other people that make it easier to dismiss what they're saying and where they're coming from.
I don’t follow your understanding of how phenomenological analysis proceeds, which omits bracketing which is used to focus on particular experiences, for example (citing from the page linked):
“For example, the act of seeing a horse qualifies as an experience, whether one sees the horse in person, in a dream, or in a hallucination. 'Bracketing' the horse suspends any judgement about the horse as noumenon, and instead analyses the phenomenon of the horse as constituted in intentional acts.”
I don’t understand how analysis proceed on the basis of handling the whole of (a) human(s) experience? That’s a rhetorical question, to be clear.
On your second point, I feel that I have been taking a consistent position and I don’t recognise my intentions in your interpretation of them. But I feel no obligation to try to persuade you about that.
The idea of a godless universe has surely dominated, since the disappearance of animism. Then, matter itself is dead, without spirit, and we have to look around to find God, over there somewhere. But there have been figures such as Milton who brought animism back, considered heretical in his time. I must dig up some quotations.
I'm looking on some of these exchanges and the links posted, and the impression I seem to get is that God can only be apprehended through the use as a worldview of a philosophical methodology that requires an undergraduate degree in Philosophy (or at least considerably more reading of the subject that the vast majority of people are able, inclined or have the opportunity to do) to understand. This seems a remarkable way for God to hide himself. Especially when the philosophical methodologies in question only appear to have been around for a couple of hundred years.
The idea of a godless universe has surely dominated, since the disappearance of animism. Then, matter itself is dead, without spirit, and we have to look around to find God, over there somewhere. But there have been figures such as Milton who brought animism back, considered heretical in his time. I must dig up some quotations.
Is animism distinct from pantheism in that it posits a distinct spirit in each object or category of objects as opposed to a single spirit inhabiting all things?
I'm looking on some of these exchanges and the links posted, and the impression I seem to get is that God can only be apprehended through the use as a worldview of a philosophical methodology that requires an undergraduate degree in Philosophy (or at least considerably more reading of the subject that the vast majority of people are able, inclined or have the opportunity to do) to understand. This seems a remarkable way for God to hide himself. Especially when the philosophical methodologies in question only appear to have been around for a couple of hundred years.
I don’t think you have to know the philosophical terminology - in plain English you’d say - God is not something you can prove, disprove or test. God is known through faith and personal experience of meaning in one’s life.
In the same way everyone knows what love is, but few people would set out looking for its molecular structure.
I'm looking on some of these exchanges and the links posted, and the impression I seem to get is that God can only be apprehended through the use as a worldview of a philosophical methodology that requires an undergraduate degree in Philosophy (or at least considerably more reading of the subject that the vast majority of people are able, inclined or have the opportunity to do) to understand. This seems a remarkable way for God to hide himself. Especially when the philosophical methodologies in question only appear to have been around for a couple of hundred years.
I don’t think you have to know the philosophical terminology - in plain English you’d say - God is not something you can prove, disprove or test. God is known through faith and personal experience of meaning in one’s life.
But people have faith and experiences that lead to contradictory ideas about God. How do we know who's getting it right?
In the same way everyone knows what love is, but few people would set out looking for its molecular structure.
Because it would be a category error. Love is an emotion, a feeling, a commitment to act in particular ways. God is proposed to be a person, and people certainly can be examined. And not just physically, but in terms of their personalities. That is not, in my experience, true of God. Or is experience only a guide when it points in the "right" direction?
The irony is that while being ultimately agnostic I remain provisionally Christian on entirely subjective grounds. But contra what a lot of people say, that isn't actually working out.
I'm looking on some of these exchanges and the links posted, and the impression I seem to get is that God can only be apprehended through the use as a worldview of a philosophical methodology that requires an undergraduate degree in Philosophy (or at least considerably more reading of the subject that the vast majority of people are able, inclined or have the opportunity to do) to understand. This seems a remarkable way for God to hide himself. Especially when the philosophical methodologies in question only appear to have been around for a couple of hundred years.
I don't see how philosophy can adequately approach this question, either. With or without a degree or a class or one book. As we've seen in this thread. People seem to be clarifying what they think, what they think is knowable, how one may know what is knowable, etc, but never actually whether God exists.
Science doesn't seem to have developed tools for identifying or measuring the existence of the divine either. Unfortunately.
Our problem, I think, is that the "rules have changed" regarding how we think we can know anything about God, that is the Christian God. I know I'm not telling you anything you don't know already, @KarlLB .
Historically, standard-issue-Christians didn't approach the question of God's existence or action in the world philosophically or scientifically. And they didn't require special schooling or special smarts. They based their belief on what they understood to be reliable, eye-witness accounts of God's unusual work in the world -- demonstrations of his godness -- particularly in the works of Jesus. Up until fairly recently. This is not new news.
Biblical texts recognize this concept of witness and rely on it. I am grateful for the empathy some of the authors demonstrate for later Christians, who wouldn't have access to the original witnesses, or anyone else from that time. The empathetic writers understood the challenge of faith without having seen it oneself.
If the biblical texts about God are entirely, fundamentally, indubitably demonstrated to be fraudulent, then it seems to me we are walking on air.
I'm looking on some of these exchanges and the links posted, and the impression I seem to get is that God can only be apprehended through the use as a worldview of a philosophical methodology that requires an undergraduate degree in Philosophy (or at least considerably more reading of the subject that the vast majority of people are able, inclined or have the opportunity to do) to understand. This seems a remarkable way for God to hide himself. Especially when the philosophical methodologies in question only appear to have been around for a couple of hundred years.
I don’t think you have to know the philosophical terminology - in plain English you’d say - God is not something you can prove, disprove or test. God is known through faith and personal experience of meaning in one’s life.
But people have faith and experiences that lead to contradictory ideas about God. How do we know who's getting it right?
Well, many Quakers would claim that the leading of the spirit for one person may not be the same as the leading for someone else. There may not be one right answer.
I'm looking on some of these exchanges and the links posted, and the impression I seem to get is that God can only be apprehended through the use as a worldview of a philosophical methodology that requires an undergraduate degree in Philosophy (or at least considerably more reading of the subject that the vast majority of people are able, inclined or have the opportunity to do) to understand. This seems a remarkable way for God to hide himself. Especially when the philosophical methodologies in question only appear to have been around for a couple of hundred years.
I don’t think you have to know the philosophical terminology - in plain English you’d say - God is not something you can prove, disprove or test. God is known through faith and personal experience of meaning in one’s life.
But people have faith and experiences that lead to contradictory ideas about God. How do we know who's getting it right?
Well, many Quakers would claim that the leading of the spirit for one person may not be the same as the leading for someone else. There may not be one right answer.
Different and contradictory are different things though.
The idea of a godless universe has surely dominated, since the disappearance of animism. Then, matter itself is dead, without spirit, and we have to look around to find God, over there somewhere. But there have been figures such as Milton who brought animism back, considered heretical in his time. I must dig up some quotations.
Is animism distinct from pantheism in that it posits a distinct spirit in each object or category of objects as opposed to a single spirit inhabiting all things?
"When I pray, coincidences happen. When I don't, they don't"
That can be used to make a statistical prediction that in principle at least could be tested. I wonder if it has?
This is a digression. We live in a part of the world in which it is not unusual to find oneself driving at 20mph stuck behind a tractor on a road with a speed limit of 60 or 70 mph, with too many bends / oncoming traffic to overtake. My husband gets totally exasperated by this.
When our children were small, I objected to him using the sort of language I didn't want our children picking up. They were still young enough that we generally avoided not just swearing but "unkind words." So, to counter this, when I was driving and got stuck behind a tractor, I started praying out loud Dear Lord, we give thanks for farmers who work so hard to provide our food, and in particular we pray for the farmer driving the tractor in front of us, who was up and working this morning while we were still in our beds.... etc etc.
I regarded this as modelling good behaviour to our children. (My son as an adult describes it as classic passive aggression.)
BUT, I kept being thwarted! No sooner would I start praying than the tractor would indicate and turn off the road! I probably started "tractor prayers" about 25 years ago, still do it, and I don't think I've ever been stuck behind one long enough to finish my prayer.
By contrast, my husband still gets stuck for miles behind tractors.
I'm fairly sure this is just a perception thing. My husband starts to get annoyed when he sees a tractor on the road ahead; I start praying when I'm actually behind it. So that must create a couple of minutes difference, and then time spent praying happily passes more quickly than time spent grinding one's teeth.
However, it is a fact that, as far as the North East family is concerned, Dad gets stuck behind tractors but Mum doesn't. This isn't answered prayer, of course, because I'm not praying for the tractor to pull over. It's just a thought on the perception of a situation.
Comments
The problem here, is what a positivist thinks is a fact is not the same as what a social constructionist thinks is a fact / “actual reality”.
There a fundamental difference in what is defined as truth.
A weak social constructionist position - which may make more sense to you - is that there maybe a concrete unchanagable reality independent of the way we make sense of it. But the fact that we process it through fallible sense and using language and ideas we have created that are inherently subjective, means that we can never perceive it independently of our subjective/cultural understandings.
The theological complication is that if an omniscient omnipotent God created us and everything, it could presumably control our perception and/or decide to be perceived only via intuitive or imaginative ideas.
Thing is, that constructivist position doesn't work for the life I live day to day. I work on computer systems. How would I work by seeing a fault as a social construction? And if I managed that, by a "well it's a fault to you because you want it to do X", then how does social constructivism enable me to troubleshoot a problem that exists outside of me in the computer? Even if I acknowledge that what I'm actually doing to solve it involves manipulating a model of the computer system in my mind, that only works inasmuch and as far as that model is an accurate one of the real computer system on the desk some distance from my mind.
It feels very much like trying to carve a joint using paintbrushes. Wrong tool for the job.
Love doesn't do that. Not you. Such a weird God.
The code and frameworks you are using social constructions, the idea of a social constructionist is in itself a social construct. But going back to your trying to carve a joint with paintbrushes - I’d argue that is what you are doing when you try to use scientific enquiry to understand God.
That’s because you align with positivism.
You will keep saying, from conviction / first principles, there is this other real bit of reality, and as long as that is a fundamental principle of your worldview, there is nothing anyone with a phenomenologically inclined worldview can say to address that.
To be fair, the same principle applies the other way round. As long as your phenomenologically inclined interlocutors keep saying, from conviction / first principles, there is not this other ‘real bit of reality’ we can disentangle from subjective experience, there is nothing you can say from a positivist worldview to address that.
It doesn’t matter what examples we each reach for. We are just going to end up talking past each other. Indeed, we have been for some time.
For example:
That’s true from a positivist perspective, but not true from a phenomenological point of view.
If a positivist says it, they are saying there is an external objective reality “a constructivist called X”
If a phenomenologist / constructionist says it, they are saying “I experience X as a constructivist” and offer it for intersubjective agreement. Others may or may not have an aligned experience.
People are normally talking within their paradigm and don’t have to unpack their everyday language in this way, that’s all.
So neither by faith nor coincidence?
Why ?
Sure, but those don't compare. Knowing God in the first instance by faith is a lesser knowing. Subjective. I have no idea how one can know God by coincidence. Honestly. There are those who know God by their disposition with regard to a few numbers. That kind of thing? Or something unique to the individual?
Sorry, should have replied to you first. There is no other consilient way of knowing. My answer to @Kendel applies. If God had done anything that science or parallel methods of enquiry (history, and er...?) raised an eyebrow at, we'd all know.
I knew God existed, as you all yawningly know, by the Pericope Adulterae. My appalling ignorance lasted 50 years. I now know better. For worse.
If it had been written by John at the age of 80, 60 years after the event, it is consensually more emotionally intelligent than anything up to that time. Where the subjective meets the objective.
Whatever. No matter how arguable to dust that is, if God can only be known by faith or coincidence (or aesthetics? Social construct?), they are utterly subjective.
Until we have, know God, by science, by impossible anachronism in history, none of the other knowings can have any weight whatsover. And even then.
Yeah.
And include all the fuzziness and outright paradoxes and weirdness of science, the relativity of social sciences, the reality of subjectivity leading to phenomenology and my only known belief, the Rogerian. Which I've yet to master in argument here...
But yeah.
I'm not aware of any reason not to be when it comes to the supernatural. Believing in anything supernatural without ever experiencing anything supernatural (analogously like the experts testifying for UFOs to Congress) would be a waste of precious belief.
Aren't you? With regard to God? Or the supernatural? I imagine not. Like many of the best. My spiritual advisor. Steve Chalke. Tom Wright. Brian McLaren. Pete Rollins. Oprah Winfrey, etc, etc. People I completely admire.
I envy you all.
Social constructionism is also not interested with the existence or not of an entity, but only with the meanings and significance people adduce from it.
I don’t think that is quite right. Instead, it is a belief that the existence of something can be approached but only through our experience - and that involves the meaning and significance tied in to our interpretation of something. It’s not possible to strip that out. In everyday life those meanings and significance could include ‘scientific’ interpretations in a way. For example, when I look at the stars I see giant thermonuclear reactors (my experience includes reading, conversation…), but I also see constellations and have triggered literary and musical connections about stars, and maybe think of ‘the love that moves the sun and other stars’…
But you are right on one level. Phenomenology approaches the world through our experiences, and the premise is that going back to the ‘things themselves’ means looking at those experiences as the primary things. As such it is more interested in, say, natural scientists than natural science and has little to say about what the existence of things sans human experience might be.
I would also add that science also requires falsifiability and uses agreement, and will (or should) say, ‘all the research so far points to this thing in the same way, so for now that is what we believe’. And then scientists see (e.g.) giant galactic clusters that don’t fit the model, and have to think again…
Idealism is the flip side of positivism. Both idealists and positivists start from the individual's subjectivity - the paradigm being Descartes sitting in his stove - and ask how can I build a bridge from my sense experiences to the outside world. The positivist tries to put forward rigourous conditions and the idealist declares that there is no point.
The founder of phenomenology, Husserl, as I understand it, started from such a position. Hence he called his major work Cartesian Meditations. What he eventually worked his way through to though, I gather, is that our subjectivity only makes sense as part of the external objective world. We don't have experiences: sense impressions projected onto the screen of a subjective observer. We have experience - we acquire knowledge through interaction with a world external to and independent of us. So when Heidegger wants to talk about knowledge he talks not about a philosopher in his study or stove but about a builder with a hammer working on a house. Phenomenology is about knowledge by an embodied agent in the world.
It seems to me that KarlLB's appeal to computer programming is more genuinely phenomenological than anything else in this thread. Because it is an appeal to experience.
I think it's pretty inevitable, given the kind of discussion it as and the range of views held by the various participants, and especially the range of worldviews on show.
Another aspect is that the language we use is doing what we want it to do, imperfectly. We all have various meanings in mind to which the expressions we put into print serve only as a rather vague "waving of hands in the direction of" signpost. Even if we were all more disciplined thinkers, our language would tend reflect the discipline(s) in which we were disciplined. Cross-discipline discussions often come unstuck. We do the best we can with the language we have. On these forums, sufficient meaning appears to be transmitted to enable the successful continuation of posting, which is the primary aim (and maybe all we can hope for) of a forum that serves a community.
Hmm. I think I would make a more qualified consequential assertion. (Bearing in mind thoughts about omnipotence and creation, etc, in previous posts on a couple of other threads) Mythology is worth considering in relation to "believing in" type beliefs. As is storytelling. I don't think we know nearly enough about the role the imagination plays in constructing concepts to conclude much one way or the other.
We could be learning that the world doesn't behave as we expect it to behave. "Belief" could just be a word we give to a collection of expectations about a particular type of subjective encounter. Learning doesn't inherently require access to objective reality.
Can we do any more that assert and contend in relation to these things?
Even without taking all the religious credence stuff on board, I'm inclined to think that the way these kind of "believing that" beliefs engage the imagination (if they do at all) is sufficiently different not to tell us a lot. I'm switching between them because I can. One of the points I'm trying to get across is that our worldviews exist to serve a purpose. They don't have to define us. We should be able to use the one we see fit to use, according to who we're talking to, and what we're talking about. The fact that they often *do* define us is possibly derived, in the first instance, from the extent to which they are often used in the "-ist" sense to define the people whose (paid) job it is to define them and, more generally, the way western knowledge systems work.
I don't attempt to use scientific enquiry to understand God.
I'm not seeking within the context of this discussion, to understand God. Just establish whether there exists an entity which can reasonably be called God.
I'm not trying to use scientific enquiry either. What I am asking is what verification you would use to justify a belief that God exists, given a specific means of enquiry.
I have personally reached an uneasy truce with the likely reality that this in fact impossible. I suspect that the toolkit to demonstrate God's existence doesn’t exist.
This leads to the uncomfortable conclusion that a godless universe looks exactly like one in which God exists. One can posit, for example, that the universe's existence itself is the phenomenon which would not exist without God, and/or that God’s providence happens through natural phenomena which are also adequately explicable scientifically. But these proposals can be used to demonstrate compatibility of God with naturalistic explanations; they cannot demonstrate that God necessarily exists.
Which by a weird quirk of fate brings the path of this discussion close again to the starting point. The statement someone quoted:
"When I pray, coincidences happen. When I don't, they don't"
That can be used to make a statistical prediction that in principle at least could be tested. I wonder if it has?
I think Cameron is in danger of trying so hard to keep the terms clear and simple - per requests - that he is being much less precise than is his wont, to the point of straying.
I would have thought the opposite of idealism was realism though, not positivism, if want to keep the terms precise.
As to KarlLB’s appeal to programming, I did not read that as a case of a particular experience. Instead, it was more like, “as a programmer I think it must work this way otherwise how would it be possible?”
?
One is my general approach. The other is a hypothetical that I noticed could be done if you were so inclined.
Anadromously (upstream). If I may.
It was done repeatedly from 1872
"[Galton] conducted research on the power of prayer, concluding it had none due to its null effects on the longevity of those prayed for"
"When I pray, I notice coincidences happen. When I don't, they don't". I notice coincidences often and I don't pray. Neither do I attribute anything to the coincidences but time and chance. It's a very weak hostile "thing" to say.
That big para is fertile. And I love your phenomenon almost too much. To critique:
But yeah. God creates as if He didn't. Infinite nature exists as if it were perfect, complete. God explains nothing it doesn't and, in fact, makes things much worse.
I do, have for years, here : ) But it's purely abstract, academic, neither here nor there. Being grounds itself. Is that being, intentional? If It is, It goes to inordinate lengths to deny it. Including in Its paradoxical revelation.
If God exists, then infinite nature can. If He doesn't, then it does.
OK, catadromous from the spring now:
I do. (Which God?) Positing that infinite nature is an aspect of Love.
Unless science, positivism, global consilience, establishes it, no. Only a theoretical one, that doesn't work.
Consensus after consilience. But what means of enquiry can we use if we can't use sensory experience? Like my oft posted favourite bit from The Second Coming. You must have clicked on my link to that before. So I won't link to it. It's as wonderful as the wonderful bit in 2010.
Likely by how many sigmas? Don't be shy. There is no toolkit. It's entirely up to Him. Most here and many other smart, kind, more high profile people reckon He's done it. I wish I was Steve Chalke.
I wish He'd do it for you and Caliban me. Hidden in plain sight in the text that they intuitively, Jungianly feel it is. Where I once ignorantly knew it was. Or even in actual history. In the beginning of the Church.
Just an n'th more Lord!
Uh huh. Secretly. What's the use of that?
So do you find your research is adequate to answer your questions, or is the matter still under consideration?
Forever the latter. At best : ) Limbo. Fading limbo.
But stasis is death.
Getting used to death.
Must dot that aye at Launde, eh?
Aye?
It has come to mind a number of times in the last week. If one could know beforehand, as with so many things, that the outcome would be as desired, then absolutely: yes! Whatever the return might be, though, it won't be the same as the first time.
In spite of my expression of enthusiasm, you are the only one who has a feel if it might be worth while to meet with someone there or might be more beneficial to go for a nature walk.
Limbo
It's hard to spend one's existence in the front car at the top of the coaster, dangling, staring down that first, terrible hill. Suspended, without a workable resolution or ability to go forward. Even into the un(or vaguely)known. Actually, I think you have been going forward, maybe will glancing back often. But it's a hard way to live, isn't it? I expect that limbo fading is a relief to some degree. Life support can't last forever.
Death
There are all kinds, aren't there?
They're none of them easy to get used to. We spend our lives avoiding momento mori at the most bizarre costs. A coworker was going to a "homegoing" today. Reframing it in such pathetic terms in order to mask the reality of gaping loss -- even for this Christian -- seems like opioid abuse.
I find Eagleton's meditation far more valuable. The entire chapter is outstanding, this is one of many sections I value; I think a good deal of this applies to the death of faith as well:
Eagleton, Terry. Radical Sacrifice, Bookshare edition in Calibre, 34%.
Why on earth would you say that?
Not really; it rather asks what a Godless universe would look like and asks how ours, if it isn't Godless, looks different.
The problem is that our universe does appear to be compatible with God not existing. So if he does, then the answer seems to be "godless and 'godful' universes look the same"
The question is then whether godless universes exist within the phase space of possible universes. If God is essential for there being something instead of nothing - the sort of nothing in which there's nowhere for something to exist; in which indeed "in which" has no meaning. I don't think that question is amenable to any means of enquiry, so God remains an enigma.
I suppose you could also argue that if God exists we only know what Godful universes look like, and if he doesn't we only know what Godless universes look like. It ends up in the same place though - we don't know which the actually existing universe is.
(The God of Christianity is no doubt not merely an entity like created entities and God's existence is not like the existence of created entities. But that doesn't mean that faith in God can get by with no rational warrant.)
You previously wrote about setting out a definition of what you mean by God. I'm not entirely clear what would be included in your definition, but the Christian God (at least) is often defined in terms of his qualities, attributes or properties. I've been wondering for which of God's attributes there could be an empirical test.
For example, you previously proposed that there could only be one "real" God (or none). I suggest this would correspond to the uniqueness of God, for which an empirical test seems unlikely.
So, if there are no empirical tests for any of the attributes of the Christian (definition of) God, I was wondering if that would mean it would be impossible for him to satisfy the conditions of your inquiry
I feel your reading of KarlLB was such as to make it easier to dismiss what he is saying and where he is coming from, and I am suspicious of readings of other people that make it easier to dismiss what they're saying and where they're coming from.
I don’t follow your understanding of how phenomenological analysis proceeds, which omits bracketing which is used to focus on particular experiences, for example (citing from the page linked):
“For example, the act of seeing a horse qualifies as an experience, whether one sees the horse in person, in a dream, or in a hallucination. 'Bracketing' the horse suspends any judgement about the horse as noumenon, and instead analyses the phenomenon of the horse as constituted in intentional acts.”
I don’t understand how analysis proceed on the basis of handling the whole of (a) human(s) experience? That’s a rhetorical question, to be clear.
On your second point, I feel that I have been taking a consistent position and I don’t recognise my intentions in your interpretation of them. But I feel no obligation to try to persuade you about that.
Is animism distinct from pantheism in that it posits a distinct spirit in each object or category of objects as opposed to a single spirit inhabiting all things?
I don’t think you have to know the philosophical terminology - in plain English you’d say - God is not something you can prove, disprove or test. God is known through faith and personal experience of meaning in one’s life.
In the same way everyone knows what love is, but few people would set out looking for its molecular structure.
But people have faith and experiences that lead to contradictory ideas about God. How do we know who's getting it right?
Because it would be a category error. Love is an emotion, a feeling, a commitment to act in particular ways. God is proposed to be a person, and people certainly can be examined. And not just physically, but in terms of their personalities. That is not, in my experience, true of God. Or is experience only a guide when it points in the "right" direction?
The irony is that while being ultimately agnostic I remain provisionally Christian on entirely subjective grounds. But contra what a lot of people say, that isn't actually working out.
I don't see how philosophy can adequately approach this question, either. With or without a degree or a class or one book. As we've seen in this thread. People seem to be clarifying what they think, what they think is knowable, how one may know what is knowable, etc, but never actually whether God exists.
Science doesn't seem to have developed tools for identifying or measuring the existence of the divine either. Unfortunately.
Our problem, I think, is that the "rules have changed" regarding how we think we can know anything about God, that is the Christian God. I know I'm not telling you anything you don't know already, @KarlLB .
Historically, standard-issue-Christians didn't approach the question of God's existence or action in the world philosophically or scientifically. And they didn't require special schooling or special smarts. They based their belief on what they understood to be reliable, eye-witness accounts of God's unusual work in the world -- demonstrations of his godness -- particularly in the works of Jesus. Up until fairly recently. This is not new news.
Biblical texts recognize this concept of witness and rely on it. I am grateful for the empathy some of the authors demonstrate for later Christians, who wouldn't have access to the original witnesses, or anyone else from that time. The empathetic writers understood the challenge of faith without having seen it oneself.
If the biblical texts about God are entirely, fundamentally, indubitably demonstrated to be fraudulent, then it seems to me we are walking on air.
Well, many Quakers would claim that the leading of the spirit for one person may not be the same as the leading for someone else. There may not be one right answer.
Different and contradictory are different things though.
Definitely the latter.
That can be used to make a statistical prediction that in principle at least could be tested. I wonder if it has?
This is a digression. We live in a part of the world in which it is not unusual to find oneself driving at 20mph stuck behind a tractor on a road with a speed limit of 60 or 70 mph, with too many bends / oncoming traffic to overtake. My husband gets totally exasperated by this.
When our children were small, I objected to him using the sort of language I didn't want our children picking up. They were still young enough that we generally avoided not just swearing but "unkind words." So, to counter this, when I was driving and got stuck behind a tractor, I started praying out loud Dear Lord, we give thanks for farmers who work so hard to provide our food, and in particular we pray for the farmer driving the tractor in front of us, who was up and working this morning while we were still in our beds.... etc etc.
I regarded this as modelling good behaviour to our children. (My son as an adult describes it as classic passive aggression.)
BUT, I kept being thwarted! No sooner would I start praying than the tractor would indicate and turn off the road! I probably started "tractor prayers" about 25 years ago, still do it, and I don't think I've ever been stuck behind one long enough to finish my prayer.
By contrast, my husband still gets stuck for miles behind tractors.
I'm fairly sure this is just a perception thing. My husband starts to get annoyed when he sees a tractor on the road ahead; I start praying when I'm actually behind it. So that must create a couple of minutes difference, and then time spent praying happily passes more quickly than time spent grinding one's teeth.
However, it is a fact that, as far as the North East family is concerned, Dad gets stuck behind tractors but Mum doesn't. This isn't answered prayer, of course, because I'm not praying for the tractor to pull over. It's just a thought on the perception of a situation.