Sunday, June 6, 2010

Logos, Pathos and Ethos

Almost a year ago, I came across an idea and I was intrigued by it. The idea was from the ancient philosopher Aristotle, who claimed that people's beliefs are influenced by numerous different factors- specifically factors relating to Logos, Pathos and Ethos. This clearly has importance when looking at communication and persuasion, and that's the context in which I came across the idea: I found a book titled "How to Argue Like Jesus: Learning Persuasion from History's Greatest Communicator".

Shortly after finding this book online and becoming fascinated by Aristotle's idea about beliefs, I attended a talk by Dr John Dickson. Little did I know beforehand, that Dickson uses these ideas in his presentations on Jesus as well- although in an entirely different context to the "How to Argue" book. After hearing Dickson's presentation, I decided I had to go out and buy the "How to Argue" book, and find out more about the Logos, Pathos and Ethos idea.

Dickson's presentation was about the evidence for Jesus Resurrection, but one theme he hit on during his talk was the idea that skeptics need to be honest enough to admit that their beliefs are influenced by several factors other than the intellectual element. He recently wrote an article which neatly presents some of these thoughts on this theme which he discussed during the talk I attended last year.

Click here to read the article, titled "The Way We Believe".

(Note: as with any online article most of the comments miss the point, disagree and abuse but don't provide any reasons why they actually disagree, or discuss something entirely irrelevant to the article actually written):

Saturday, May 15, 2010

Philosophy of the Bible- Video

Today I've found a video by Gordon J Glover, titled "The Evolutionary Creation Video". This 9 minute piece basically combines the modern scientific consensus (Big Bang and Evolution) with the timeless story of Jesus revealing himself to humanity and cancelling the sin of the world by reconciling people to God the Father.

I title this "Philosophy Of The Bible" because the point made so clearly by Glover in his accompany blog post is that we need to challenge the presuppositions around how we look at the Bible and what we expect from it.

For example, would it have made sense for God to have told Moses that E=MC squared, or would it make more sense for God to reveal things that people in that day and age needed to hear...? If you look at history and it's development, it's clear that in every age and culture, people's needs are different, EVERYTHING, in fact, is different.

I feel there are major difficulties in the way many conservative Christians read the Bible- how they approach it. I would bluntly summarise some of the problems as: lack of regard for context and history, minimal attempts to consider the implications of other fields of knowledge, a lack of integration between what we know about the Bible itself and how this might relate to our understanding of it, and a small picture outlook (as opposed to a Big Picture outlook). All of this leads to a unrealistic and occasionally absurd understanding of inerrancy and a general lack of thoughtfulness when approaching the Bible. I found Scot McKnight's book Blue Parakeets to be very helpful in exploring these issues, and it's a topic I enjoy thinking about and discussing so it will receive significant attention on this blog, I'm sure. Glover's video is superb, but it was the food for thought he provides around what I call "Philosophy of the Bible" that captured my attention.

See the blog post and video here:

http://www.blog.beyondthefirmament.com/video-presentations/the-evolutionary-creation-video/

Sunday, April 25, 2010

News

Vox Day throws some more barbs the way of the New Atheists. . The article he links from David Bentley Hart is worth reading in full.

Some interesting articles lately from Online Opinion. Atheism repels feeble Easter attacks, Buddhism and Science.

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Links

Ed West reminds us that: The horrific abuse committed by Catholic priests, and the cover-ups by bishops, has given the neo-Bolshevik New Atheists a spring in their step, and led to ever increasing levels of hostility to Catholicism. But it’s worth remembering that, terrible though those crimes were, far, far more terrible things have been done in the name of progress, equality and the pursuit of heaven on earth than in the name of God. Happy Easter. here

Archbishop of NSW Peter Jensen raises an interesting point about modern society and individualism contributing to loneliness. I've long thought this was the case, personally.

Scott Monk argues that the Bible should be part of the National Curriculum. His final point might disgust you, or you might find it particularly potent..or just thought provoking. For me it's mostly the last one.

They’re unpopular ideas—exactly as they were 2000 years ago when Jesus overturned conventional thinking and ended up being crucified, much to the delight of the self-righteous Pharisees. Neither will be the teaching of the Bible in public schools now.

But when boys are accessing internet porn for the first time, on average, aged eleven, teenage guys are using their mobile phones to swap images of sex with their girlfriends like footy cards, and sportsmen and women cheat on their partners by engaging in group orgies, we have to accept that as a society we’ve drifted too far from our common foundations.

If the best and brightest artists of the past were brave enough to explore the wide-ranging impact of the Bible on Western thought, why can’t we challenge our own generation’s best and brightest? The compulsory national curriculum is a perfect time for a rethink.

Thursday, April 1, 2010

Feser on scientism

Catholic Philosopher Edward Feser is a blogger at edwardfeser.blogspot.com, and I'm a regular reader of this page. He mainly seems to focus on three things: As a philosopher of mind who espouses substance dualism, a thomist who writes about the philosophies of Thomas Aquinas, and a right wing idealogue who promotes conservative Catholic social positions. I don't agree with all of Feser's positions (especially on the conservative issues) but generally I find that he has lot of potent points to make, and that he's a rhetoritician capable of putting a serious sting in the tail of his writings.

Recently he wrote a two part series on scientism:

Here- Part 1- Blinded by scientism

and

Here-Part 2- Recovering sight after scientism

In Part 1 Feser argues that scientism is either self refuting or trivially true and thus should be rejected. In Part 2 he suggests we need to return to traditional philosophical metaphysics. Part 1 was more convincing that Part 2. I'd like some more detail on exactly what's so special about Aristotle and Aquina's, and I suspect there's some very strong counter arguments which may contend that there's some very good reasons why modern day intellectuals have moved away from those ancient ideas. For this reason, Feser's The Last Superstition is a book I wouldn't mind reading one day.

Here are some quotes that best summarise his main ideas from the two articles:


The claim that scientism is true is not itself a scientific claim, not something that can be established using scientific methods. Indeed, that science is even a rational form of inquiry (let alone the only rational form of inquiry) is not something that can be established scientifically. For scientific inquiry itself rests on a number of philosophical assumptions: that there is an objective world external to the minds of scientists; that this world is governed by causal regularities; that the human intellect can uncover and accurately describe these regularities; and so forth. Since science presupposes these things, it cannot attempt to justify them without arguing in a circle. And if it cannot even establish that it is a reliable form of inquiry, it can hardly establish that it is the only reliable form. Both tasks would require “getting outside” science altogether and discovering from that extra-scientific vantage point that science conveys an accurate picture of reality—and in the case of scientism, that only science does so.


Here we come to the second horn of the dilemma facing scientism. Its advocate may now insist: if philosophy has this status, it must really be a part of science, since (he continues to maintain, digging in his heels) all rational inquiry is scientific inquiry. The trouble now is that scientism becomes completely trivial, arbitrarily redefining “science” so that it includes anything that could be put forward as evidence against it. Worse, it makes scientism consistent with views that are supposed to be incompatible with it


If a certain method of studying nature affords us a high degree of predictive and technological power, all that shows is that the method is useful for dealing with those aspects of nature that are predictable and controllable. It does not show us that those aspects exhaust nature, that there is nothing more to the natural world than what the method reveals. Neither does it show that there are no rational means of investigating reality other than those involving empirical prediction and control. To assume otherwise is fallaciously to let one’s method dictate what counts as reality rather than letting reality determine what methods are appropriate for studying it. If wearing infrared night vision goggles allows me to perceive a certain part of the world remarkably well, it doesn’t follow that there is no more to the world than what I can perceive through the goggles, or that only goggle-wearing methods of investigating reality are rational ones.


If we are to know what that inner nature is, and to know of anything else about which empirical science is silent, we must go beyond science—to philosophy, the true “paradigm of rationality,” as John Kekes puts it.

But can philosophy really tell us anything? Don’t philosophers notoriously disagree among themselves? Even if it is conceded that there is more to the world than science tells us, mightn’t we nevertheless be justified in throwing up our hands and concluding that whatever this “more” might be, it is simply unknowable—that scientism is a reasonable attitude to take in practice, even if problematic in theory?

The trouble is that this is itself a philosophical claim, subject to philosophical criticism and requiring philosophical argumentation in its defense.



The right answer, in my view, is a return to the philosophical wisdom of the ancients and medievals. Their physics, as Galileo, Newton, Einstein and co. have shown us, was indeed sorely lacking. But their metaphysics has never been surpassed. And while they certainly had disagreements of their own, there is a common core to the tradition they founded—a tradition extending from Plato and Aristotle to the High Scholasticism of Aquinas and down to its descendents today—that sets them apart from the decadent philosophical systems of the moderns. This core constitutes a “perennial philosophy” apart from which the harmony of common sense and science, and indeed even the coherence of science itself, cannot be understood. And it is also in this perennial philosophy that the rational foundations of theology and ethics are to be found.

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

The Great Theological Debate of Calvinism vs Arminianism

Neither Calvinism nor Arminianism are completely “biblical”. Calvinism seems to be to me slightly more “biblical” than the alternative but I don’t consider myself a Calvinist for reasons I’ll now go into.

I’ve found that there are many passages in the Bible which are difficult if you try to map the mind of God like a puzzle, which is effectively what you’re doing if you choose one system over the other and say “without qualification, this is the correct system”. And this goes both ways. The Calvinists will talk about certain passages and they make perfect sense, yet when discussing other things in the bible they really are forced to make some quite implausible interpretations and create some difficult justifications to make them fit within their system. Similarly, there are some passages in the Bible which align perfectly with the Arminian understanding, and others where the Arminian theologians are forced to scratch their heads and come up with less-than-perfect interpretations. Also, this is a philosophically difficult issue. This point gradually dawned on me, especially when I read a book 18 months ago with four theologians/philosophers making their case for different understandings of God’s sovereignty and human free will.

How does a Calvinist account for God appearing to change his mind? How do we account for passages that seem to say contradictory things? Why do both systems have what appear to be inexplicable problems which weaken one aspect of God's character at the expense of another? Why are theologians and philosophers who study this issue forced to supply complicated explanations which leave the average person's head spinning in order to make sense of their own system? (For example the Calvinist idea that God has two seperate wills- his perfect or sovereign will and his permissive will? Somehow an all powerful being, who ordains all things needs to have two distinct wills, within himself. Somehow man has no power to overcome God's will, except in instances where it's convenient for Calvinists. OK slightly flippant, but my point is clear- this whole idea is simply a complicated, convuluted system created by man in order to understand God).

This problem led me in the direction of some conclusions on the matter. This post is an introduction to my views so I'll summarise them here. My conclusions also closely relate to my view of the Bible and how it is to be interpreted, and this is yet another topic which will receive attention on this blog in the future.

Firstly, perhaps the Bible isn’t completely inerrant in the word-for-word sense which is assumed when topics like these are debated. Perhaps Paul, and other biblical authors were simply writing down their understanding about the will and God’s control. Perhaps we need to give more dues to context, and I'd strongly suggest we also need to question whether the Bible was meant to be some kind of word to word dictation or whether there is a more sensible approach to take. Many Christians seem to hold that the Bible is a word for word dictation like the Koran, but I think this view looks silly once you look into debates such as Calvinism vs Arminianism, Faith vs Works and compare the various passages on these topics.

Secondly, perhaps there is this conflict in the Bible for a reason. Perhaps this is a mystery that God is leaving open. In the absence of clear answers, and considering the difficulties of fitting each and every passage into one system or the other, this seems a reasonable view to take. We see through a glass dimly.

Thirdly, it makes sense that finite beings who are constrained by time may not be able to effectively figure out how an infinite being (who is not constrained by time), relates to time. Rob Bell gives an illustration of how someone in a two dimensional world would have no idea what they were looking at if someone from a 3D world entered into their 2D situation. Something similar could be analogous here. This all makes me wonder whether it's acceptable and rational to plead mystery in some instances (this being one of them) rather than create complex systems which will inevitably leave us with more questions than answers.

Friday, March 26, 2010

New Atheists ripped to pieces

Vox Day rips some of the New Atheists arguments to shreds in a succint powerpoint display here.

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Atheist Convention

Some of the media coverage of the recent convention in Melbourne:

Barney Schwartz of The Age and Andrew Bolt of the Herald Sun both seem to think that the ridicule of the New Atheists reduces their credibility.

Bolt's piece- Speakers' true love of hatred

Scwartz's Atheists' ridicule won't win friends and influence people

Sydney Anglicans posted an article with similar sentiments here.

Melanie Phillips article was called "Dawkins preaches to the deluded against the Divine" . She concludes by saying that Dawkins is "not the most enlightened thinker on the planet, as his acolytes regard him, but instead the Savonarola of scientism and an intolerant closer of minds."

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Quote of the day

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

Aristotle
Greek critic, philosopher, physicist, & zoologist (384 BC - 322 BC)

I heard this quote a while ago, and it's stuck with me. I looked it up today and was surprised to find the exact wording. I'd remembered something or other about holding ideas in tension- perhaps the author quoting this was talking about that. So for mine, I'll reword to this: "The mark of an educated mind is having the ability to hold ideas in tension without accepting them".

I think this is true, simply because of the sheer bulk of ideas one will get exposed to as they journey through life. As one learns more, experiences more and becomes more educated they'll inevitably be exposed to a plethora of ideas, ideologies, arguments, philosophies and views. Yet, we don't always have the time or the willpower to form our own view on every one of them. Furthermore, there's a certain wisdom in having the ability to refrain from holding to an opinion- sitting on the fence is fine from time to time. Having the ability to hold two ideas in tension, whilst weighing up the possibilities can also bring a certain calm.

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Creationism

Creationism.

This is a controversial and divisive topic if ever I have heard of one. So, what does it mean and why is it so controversial? What are the various views held on this topic? What philosophies and theologies underpin these views?

These are all questions I will be exploring on this blog, as they are questions I've considered thoughtfully. I haven't necessarily studied them in painstaking detail but I have done some reading on the topic and have a basic understanding of the issues.

This is a topic which pops up frequently enough on blogs and websites I visit, but today I saw an article where Answers In Genesis man Ken Ham laments the direction of our culture and says that we're informing our worldviews with human ideas rather than God's ideas and ultimately this is to our detriment. This was a frustrating article to read because my response was a mix of agreement and disagreement. I'll avoid specifics right now to allow my point to be made loud and clear: Voices like Ham's are precisely the reason why this is such a big issue. Creationism is a topic that informs opposition voices in the "culture wars" today in the United States. Anything at the crossroads of the American culture wars is sure to be controversial. Shrill voices are constantly speaking out on this issue, and I'll be exploring those voices.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Today someone wrote a letter to the editor in the mX newspaper, claiming that Harry Potter and similar movies are more believable than the Bible. "A man walking on water? Come on", they wrote.

This immediately made me think of C.S Lewis essay called Dogma And The Universe, which I read last night. In it, he suggests that the mere existence of the universe is a miracle. So I texted in a response:

If you really think about it, the existence of the universe is an unexplainable miracle. So why denounce the beliefs of those who believe in a few more miracles than you do?

Hopefully I get into mX as I've got a good success rate of getting published on those rare occasions when I do message or email in.

So is this correct? Is the existence of the universe a miracle? It would appear so. After all, what is a miracle? I had some thoughts about this after reading C.S Lewis' essay, and I agreed with Lewis in that there were a couple of key points that I thought would make something a miracle: Something unexplainable, and something that doesn't ascribe to any natural laws we know of. Under this definition, the existence of the universe fits the definition. Science can describe the natural world for us, but it cannot tell us why these natural laws exist and not others. We do not know how something can come from literally nothing, and no known laws could make it so (in fact I'd argue it's metaphysically impossible). And if the universe is eternal instead (which opposes the current dominant scientific hypothesis, which suggests that the universe has a finite past) we know of no real reason why this should or shouldn't be the case. We just have to take it as a kind of brute fact.

I googled "miracle" and the definitions agreed with the definitions I'd been pondering, for example:

This website: An event that appears inexplicable by the laws of nature and so is held to be supernatural in origin or an act of God

Now, the part about God isn't important to my argument. Whether or not someone holds something inexplicable to be supernatural or an Act of God is really an act of faith. And that's the whole point, isn't it? We have this something called existence which we can't really explain, making it very much miraculous. And that brings me back to the original point: We all believe in miraculous things, whether we want to or not. So why berate those who believe in a few more miraculous things than you do?

Furthermore, I believe the existence of a necessary being is the best explanation for existence itself and the universe. But that's another topic for another day!