Touchy thing, ain't I? Way too serious for my own good. Of course, apology accepted. Just in time though. When I wrote that last night I was just mildly irritated and I'm usually less so in the warm sunlight of the morning. I woke up far more instead of far less and was contemplating a rather rabid response. I'm glad it didn't turn out that way.
Take your time, I'm trying to cut down anyway. I love FreeRepublic, this is one of the best sites on the web. But it takes too much of my time. Even if I'm not writing I'm thinking about what I'm going to write. I need to spend more time on other things.
Hope you had a nice week off.
The self, the individual is the universal standard. Every person is ultimately concerned with him or her self. Reason is the means to understand and function in reality, to further that self. Only those that are concerned with reality need embrace reason.
There’s no way that I know of to reason a “happy middle” between the two views. I simply must accept that you don’t believe in God, and you to accept that I don’t believe in man (so to speak – that is, that man is the standard). And that’s just the way it is, the reality of the matter “at this point in time.”
Yet I seem to get you upset when I try to explain what I think and believe – probably because you think it totally far-fetched and “unreasonable.” You wrote: “Feelings don’t matter in this case, thoughts do. But only for those who think. Maybe one day you can join us.” [emphasis added]
From which I gather you do not consider me a thoughtful, reasoning individual, rather a thoughtless person “unconcerned with reality,” and given to fits of “feeling.” Or – good grief! – maybe even a mystic!!! (whatever that term signifies to you). Sigh…if that is the case, then why do you – a hard-headed rationalist -- want to waste your time speaking with me?
FWIW, having actually thought about and struggled with the problems of transcendence and immanence over several decades, I have concluded there is nothing unreasonable about faith. I look at it this way:
We live in an ordered, intelligible universe. It must be intelligible, otherwise man could not understand it; or alternatively, one could say that man has the “gift” of reason precisely so he can understand the way the world is. For man, a spiritual being, was “put in the world” -- i.e., man is an incarnated spirit – and must labor in it if he is to survive. Reason is man’s best “survival skill,” we might say.
Now if the universe is intelligible, it must be the product of Intelligence. Its orderliness speaks of conscious, rational, willed design. I do not see how the universe can be the product of purely random processes, of an “accidental piling up of accidents.” No, where there is design, there is Designer; where there is thought, there is a Mind to think it (pace Hegel); that there is “something” rather than “nothing at all” bespeaks a Desire, a Creative Will at work. The universe is “lawful” – in both the physical and spiritual (i.e., moral) realms. And it was consciously designed to be that way.
Its laws are the “measure” for man. For man cannot be his own “measure,” for to argue otherwise is to make every individual a “law unto himself.” If this were true, then what can the meaning of law really be – let alone the meaning of justice?
Earlier I wrote:
The world that “IS” can only be a world that is possible.
To which you replied:
You have just defined reality. See, I knew you knew. But you left something out, ‘at this point in time.’ And if any of us truly accepted that, then none of us would do anything to make a better world. The world changed when Aristotle codified logic. The world changed when Newton used those rules to try to develop universal principles. This is no different. We live in a world that was impossible 500 years ago.
A quibble here: Yes, the “world changed” when Aristotle codified logic, or when Newton developed the science of mechanics. But the laws of the universe don’t change: They were presumably such for Aristotle and Newton as they always have been and ever will be. If the laws change willy-nilly, then they cannot be said to be “laws.” If there are no laws, then I don’t know what either Aristotle or Newton could have “discovered” – for precisely their discoveries were of the operations of certain universal laws, as best as they understood them in their own time. Neither possessed “final truth” – each made a “best effort” that contributed enormously to human progress.
It may be more accurate to say, not that the “world changed,” but that the “world of man changed.” To put it another way, the conditions of human existence have changed; but that does not mean that human nature – as finite, contingent being – has changed, or that the human condition (which is ineluctably “conditioned” by man’s finitude and contingency) has changed….
But it seems to me the more the conditions of human existence change, the more man needs to understand God’s law. It further seems to me that the only way a man can really “make the world a better place” is to live in God’s Law. To try to live outside that Law is to disorder one’s own existence, and that of the community of which one is a part. It is to “go against the grain” of the universe, so to speak.
So I have a quibble with this: “Reason is the final arbiter of justice, that is correct (beyond a reasonable doubt). As human beings we have no other means at our disposal.”
Reason is a tool, not a “final arbiter of justice”; or so it seems to me. The Law is the “final arbiter of justice,” or the standard by which justice finds its measure. Reason is that which allows us to think constructively about the Law and its applicability to human problems.
You continue: Justice concerns reality and reason is how we understand and take actions in reality. And the reason why human history has failed so far to bear this out is, it has never been truly tried, never completely tried. It has never been fully implemented. The closer we come to it, the more effective justice is, but we still, to this day, have yet to really put it in practice. But if no one ever says that this is what we must do, then it will never happen.
Man cannot “save himself.” There is no perfect state that man can construct, no perfect justice that man can mete out, such that man can “save himself” out of the action and passion of the human condition. Men may long passionately for justice – that they even have a notion of such a thing speaks of the human ability to perceive ineffable, spiritual things – for justice is part of God’s Law which is indelibly imprinted “on earth, as it is in heaven.” Man may strive to achieve justice here on earth; but in all likelihood, for all his reason and pains and even sacrifice in its pursuit, he will fail.
The astonishing thing is that man has a seemingly ingrained sense of justice – he “knows” what it is. This would seem to argue in favor of the idea that man “instinctively” (for lack of a better word) recognizes the Law. There is something in man that resonates to it, even if its Source – God Himself -- is denied; and even if a man does not choose to act in accordance with what is highest and best in him.
I must close for now – but first, one last comment. You wrote:
As I said before, this definition of ‘Rights’ is what is at the basis of the Bill of Rights. They were trying to create as secular and universal a definition as possible, which is why there is no mention of God in the Constitution. England had proven that couldn’t work, and Locke had given them a way to define it, natural rights, that didn’t rely upon religion as a basis….
I do not say that “Rights” rest on religion. I say they rest in God, Who is their Source – as Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence clearly maintains. (I like to think that the DoI is the “preamble” to the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution….) Ours is a secular society because we do not wish to repeat the “European” mistake of picking and choosing a sectarian-religious basis for government. (Pick one and you “disenfranchise” all believers of the “excluded sects,” and this sort of thing hardly makes for civil peace.)
But to say that we do not have a religious basis for our government isn’t to say that we do not have a government of Law. And the Law that we have is “biblically-based” in the Old and New Testaments. That doesn’t make it “religious” Law. It just makes it True Law, and eternally valid.
Don’t know if any of this helps, LogicWings. But I did honestly try to explain what I think – and thus what I believe.
p.s.: I know what you mean about FR being so engrossing -- "Even if I'm not writing I'm thinking about what I'm going to write." Sometimes you've just got to take a break from it. So do that if you need to, LW. We can chat again anytime you feel like it. 'Bye for now....