Posted on 07/16/2007 4:13:26 AM PDT by Kaslin
Years ago I had a series of debates with the literary scholar Stanley Fish. Our topic was political correctness. I portrayed Fish as the grand deconstructor of Western civilization, and he fired back in There’s No Such Thing As Free Speech, several chapters of which are an answer to my arguments. As I got to know Fish, however, I recognized that although he defended some of the practices being promoted in the name of multiculturalism and diversity, he was not himself a politically correct thinker. We became friends, and in 1992 he and his wife attended my wedding.
Fish has of late been demonstrating his political incorrectness by writing critically of separation of church and state, and also by challenging leading atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christoher Hitchens. Indeed Fish uses his detailed knowledge of Milton as well as his famous skills of literary deconstruction to show the emptiness of the atheist arguments.
In his New York Times blog, Fish takes up the argument advanced by Dawkins and company that belief in God is a kind of evasion. According to this argument, we avoid the responsibilities of this life by putting our hopes in another life. Religion makes us do crazy things.
Fish takes as an example of the Harris-Hitchens-Dawkins critique the behavior of Christian in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Christian becomes aware that he is carrying a huge burden on his back (Original Sin) and he wants to get rid of it. Another fellow named Evangelist tells him to "flee the wrath to come." Evangelist points Christian in the direction of a shining light. But Christian can't clearly see the light. Still, he begins to run in that direction. Bunyan describes his wife and children who "began to cry after him to return, but the man put his fingers in his ears and ran on, crying Life! Life! Eternal Life!"
For Harris, Hitchens and Dawkins, this is precisely the kind of crazy behavior that religion produces. Here is a man abandoning his duties and chasing after something he isn't even sure about. Fish writes, "I have imagined this criticism coming from outside the narrative, but in fact it is right there on the inside." Bunyan not only has Christian's wife and children imploring him to return, he also has Christian's friends struggling to make sense of his actions.
Fish comments, "What this shows is that the objections Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens make to religious thinking are themselves part of religious thinking. Rather than being swept under the rug of a seamless discourse, they are the very motor of that discourse." Citing the atheists' portrait of religion as unquestioning obedienece, Fish writes, "I know of no religious framework that offers such a complacement picture of the life of faith, a life that is always presented as a minefield of difficulties, obstacles and temptations that must be negotiated by a limited creature in the effort to become aligned with the Infinite."
Fish observes that while religious people over the centuries have dug deeply into the questions of life, along come our shallow atheists who present arguments as if they first thought of them, arguments that Christians have long examined with a seriousness and care that is missing in contemporary atheist discourse.
In a follow-up article, Fish deepens his inquiry by looking at the kind of evidence that atheists like Hawkins and Harris present for their “scientific” outlook. Harris, for example, writes that “there will probably come a time when we will achieve a detailed understanding of human happiness and of ethical judgments themselves at the level of the brain.” Fish asks, what is this confidence based on? Not, he notes, on a record of progress. Science today can no more explain ethics or human happiness than it could a thousand years ago.
Still, Harris says that scientific research hasn’t panned out because the research is in the early stage and few of the facts are in. Fish comments, “Of course one conclusion that could be drawn is that the research will not pan out because moral intuitions are not reducible to phyhsical processes. That may be why so few of the facts are in.”
Fish draws on examples from John Milton to make the point is that unbelief, no less than belief, is based on a perspective. If you assume that material reality is all there is, then you are only going to look for material explanations, and any explanations that are not material will be rejected out of hand. Fish’s objection is not so much that this is dogmatism but that it is dogmatism that refuses to recognize itself as such. At least religious people like Milton have long recognized that their core beliefs are derived from faith.
Fish concludes that “the arguments Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens mostly rely on are just not good arguments.” We can expect our unbelieving trio to react with their trademark scorn, but Fish has scored some telling points.
Jesus says, “Come unto me all ye that labor and I will give you rest; take my yoke upon you and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart; and you will find rest for your soul.”
Dylan Thomas says, “Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
St. John says, “And they blasphemed the God of heaven because of their pains and their sores, and repented not of their deeds.”
God says, “I am, THE I AM!..... it is done!”
The fool says in his heart, “there is no God”.
First the existence of God is not a proven fact. Secondarily, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle proves that an Omniscient God cannot exist, because it is impossible to know both the position and momentum of a particle at the same time.
Atheism is the wrong term. Do you call someone who doesn't believe in Santa Claus an anticlaus? The burden of proof is on those who believe in Santa Claus to prove that he exists.
hear, hear!
>>Do ya think he would verify his philosophy as absolutely true?
No, he would not claim it to be true. Fish is a sort of Nietzscheanized pragmatist - he would claim an particular belief to be useful before he would claim it to be true.
Common fallacy to state.
It’s intersting to note that the common accepted idea of Hell is the absence of Reason.
The absence of Reason also supposes the existance of it. Pure reason. Reason even beyond our comprehention.
It’s not hard to imagine being ignorant of laws of nature. We, as a species, have spent the overwhelming majority of our existance learning how ignorant we are.
Lack of understanding is not proof of not being in a situation. Just because we can’t comprehend (yet) momentum versus position, does not mean it is “impossible” Only “uncomprehendable”.
The fact of the matter is- we don’t know all the facts about existance yet, so how can either side boast claims to proof of anything? *Especially* the people who venture to say there is no God. An unexplained origin is at least an origin. “No God” supposes we are then looking for proof of nothing... which in our own limited growth translates to “Why the hell should we even care?”
The answer comes back- because there is an origin, and you will know it!
It’s not “What” or “Why” of God doing things that bothers atheists, but “Who”.
Stanley Fish as former head of the English Department paved the way for the deconstruction and destruction of great literature and of Duke University. He truly is the father of lies. The fact he is right on this point does not convince me of anything about Stanley Fish or atheism.
Regardless, I would point out to you that there is such a thing as subjective evidence...evidence that is entirely sufficient for me, but not at all adequate for you. For example, let's say that you once met Paul Newman at a dinner party. You tell someone "I once met Paul Newman at a dinner party," and they challenge you with "Oh yeah? Prove it!"
Your experience is adequate to prove to you that you once met Paul Newman; you can remember he was drinking red wine, and he told a story about Robert Redford. However, your experience is utterly inadequate as proof to anyone else who didn't happen to also be at that same party. This is what I mean by experiential evidence.
So when you say "First, the existence of God is not a proven fact," you may be correct in the classical sense of the word "proof," in that the existence of God has not been logically proven to an objective standard. You may also be correct according to your personal experience, which contains within it no evidence for the existence of God, let alone proof.
However, you cannot assess others' experiential evidence.
I agree. Atheism seems to be a logical fallacy, an argument from silence, or poor abductive reasoning (what of the order in the universe, and the fact that the first mover must be outside of time and so supernatural?). Agnosticism is a more intellectually and personally defensible view.
There, now its correct.
To believers it is a proven fact through direct experience of God.
Secondarily, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle proves that an Omniscient God cannot exist, because it is impossible to know both the position and momentum of a particle at the same time.
OK, I'll bite. Heisenberg was a Christian. How does a theory in science disprove God? Did Heisenberg address what and how God knows at all in his theory or are you just misapplying it? DOH!
Interesting line of reasoning, but the problem with all reasoning is that it cannot bootstrap itself.
So, by asserting that “we have mastered all other streams of thought...” presupposes that we could know what those are. Either way, you come up against the notions of infinity and the absolute. These are the key concepts to be pondered, I would assert. We are finite beings in and of ourselves. The question is whether we can cross the divide from the finite to the infinite. This is where faith comes in, IMHO. If there is an Absolute, an Infinite, then that would be God, and we should look to determine whether God has revealed Himself to us. Note that such revelation, by necessity, cannot be limited to the finite. Thus it would defy empirical scientific “capture”. It would instead work through an entirely separate mechanism. That is what I believe to be faith. Faith is actually a manifestation of the Inifinite, of The God. This is because faith comes from God as a means to help us mortals apprehend the reality of that which is beyond the 4 W’s + H that leads to the 5th W=why.
Faith is not the sort of belief in the finite, like “I believe the sun will rise tomorrow”. This will be true or not and we shall know tomorrow if it will be true.
The faith I refer to is that which, by means of a mechanism associated with the Supreme Being, we are brought to a knowledge, a conviction, of His existence, and of the corollary knowledge that “true” reality, “real” reality encompasses so much more than we can perceive merely through our temporal mortal senses.
By using the temporal mortal sense to deny the Infinite Immortal Being, is certainly within the bounds of logic, but not necessarily within the bounds of Reality. Reality is perceived through this meechanism outside of the senses - faith. Call it whatever you liike, but there must be a way to perceive that there is a fuller Reality if such exists. Such perception is necessarily denied by reliance on the finite and mortal.
Not sure this methaphor works, but it is something like the following:
If you are blind, you cannot see. At least recognize that you may be blind. That is a possibility after all. Atheists, IMHO, attempt to say that because they cannot see, blindness is all there is.
“To believers it is a proven fact through direct experience of God.”
Fair enough, but that’s not a proven fact in the sense that “the earth is round” or “George Bush is president” are proven facts. It’s not objectively provable and your “direct experience,” while certainly very real and very powerful to you, is not something that others can be privy to or verify on their own.
I see that this clown's understanding of science is as defective as his Neville Chamberlain approach to the Islamofundie barbarian hordes.
Ten seconds of Googling the phrase "iterated Prisoner's Dilemma" would have corrected this flagrant ignorance.
It's hard to take someone trying to deconstruct God's existence seriously if they miss out on one of the most fundamental aspects of the Fall of Man.
Satan - the serpent in the Garden of Eden - tempted Eve into tasting the forbidden fruit. Eve then tempted Adam. Satan - not humans - brought imperfection into this world. Once Satan did his deed, it was done.
Sheesh. Has Chad even read the Bible?
I agree, and would add that, in my experience, one of the key errors in thinking by atheists is their attempts to describe God’s attributes, including the things He would do or not do. They kind of undermine their own arguments by doing this since they move to the realm of metaphysics, the very place they deny exists.
I would assert that this is not logical, or sincere, discussion but posturing using rhetoric. It is certainly not scientific.
That’s an excellent point, and I would tend to agree with you. Here’s the thing, though, we (and I use that term advisedly) cannot begin to try and address the majority of believers in scientific terms, so often do try to present arguments based on metaphysics, which probably can’t help but turn out badly. However, I would argue that the same Bible that’s available to you is available to us, and we’re certainly free to use it to make an attempt to describe God’s attributes. I myself don’t do this, and I don’t think it’s a good idea for non-believers to do it, but I can see how it happens.
Is it an error to point out that this supposedly infinitely-compassionate, omniscient being created humanity with the full and precise foreknowledge that billions of people would stray from His One True Path - and that he also created Hell in order to punish those (an eternity of torment for only a lifetime of sin) who strayed? Why create beings with the full foreknowledge that you wil just consign them to eternal torment? Does this perfectly reasonable exercise in logic have a flaw? Could someone please show me where that flaw might be? Or is it just “The Lord Works in Mysterious Ways” - that tired old cop-out. Why would anyone want to: 1) believe in a deliberately-malign deity, 2) Want to worship such a deity? I hear Christians always talking about the Creation as an act of Love - was it an act of Love to create Hell? I’d say it was the worst act of sadism ever if it was true.
What was the fallacy?
Lack of understanding is not proof of not being in a situation. Just because we can’t comprehend (yet) momentum versus position, does not mean it is “impossible” Only “uncomprehendable”.
No, we understand the superposition principle clearly. It is what governs the universe. Some people may not like it, Einstein famously declared that 'God does not role dice' but even he bowed to defeat in the end.
The fact of the matter is- we don’t know all the facts about existance yet, so how can either side boast claims to proof of anything? *Especially* the people who venture to say there is no God. An unexplained origin is at least an origin. “No God” supposes we are then looking for proof of nothing... which in our own limited growth translates to “Why the hell should we even care?”
The answer comes back- because there is an origin, and you will know it!
True, we are just beginning to understand the physical laws that govern the universe and most of our explanations are found wanting. The origin though, is clearly explained by quantum Mechanics. Something can come from nothing, it's all about the odds.
You are right. The only credibility my testimony has is for myself, and to some degree for people that know me now and knew me before, or who trust me. In terms of objective proof, I’m strongly persuaded by the “first mover” argument. If everything must have a cause, and the first thing cannot, by definition, have a cause, that first thing is supernatural. Similarly, the argument from complexity, the very ordered nature of the universe indicates a rational creator, since the whole string of cause and effect unravels if a single law of nature is changed. It is not dispositive in terms of a “proof.” But surely it is enough to get rid of juvenile athiesm and the view that God is impossible and disproven somehow by science (a science often created by scientists who were also Christian, see Newton, Leibniz, Heisenberg, Copernicus, etc.). The sophomoric athiest seems to think that he can prove the reverse somehow, that he can “prove” the non-existence of God. He does this without even subjective proof, a visitation from the great nothing, who told the athiest that he does not exist. The most I can say is that my faith is based on evidence and is rational.
While Paul Newman is alive it is relatively easy to prove that I met Paul Newman. All we have to do is ask Paul Newman. Proof is easy.
However, you cannot assess others' experiential evidence.
You are correct, but without evidence to support their experiental evidence it can be dismissed without evidence. Would you believe me if I told you that I had a pink Unicorn that talks to me?
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