In the rash of Atheism posts centered around the Postive Liberty crowd, last night I dropped a comment (which I can’t (grr) find), in which I started as I did once before on an earler post pointing out the following argument (derived loosely I think from Augustine). That the Christian God can be seen as an ansatz in which First Cause (ala Plato or Aristotle) is identified with the Ideal (Plato) of Good. At this point we have a philosophical framework in which worship and Ethics are identified. Ethics can be defined as a study of Good (that Ideal again) as moral actions are those tending toward the Good (you choose things which you think are good. What Good is then defines Ethics). Then worship of God (which is the Ideal of Good + First Cause) is put in practice in that our behaviour at all times should lean toward God. But this is all philosophy and not religion at all. How much do we add before we get to religion.
At this point, connecting with Mr Kuznicki’s “Hard Athiesm” commentary is relatively difficult. for he is “agnostic” about a First Cause just that if it is necessary just can’t be a logical impossibility. Presumably an Ideal of Good in that is a philosophical and not concrete idea is also possibly not out of bounds. The question then, is by marrying the two ideas have we arrived at a gaseous solid (heh!) or some such actual logical impossibility. Mr Kuznicki despairs of the descriptions of God from “major religious texts” for that God is “often vain and petty”. On to that a bit later.
For the first part, the philosophical part, we don’t have religion then, because it is too abstract (duh?). We have more data to add, in Augustine (and my) case written transcriptions of oral traditions of God teaching (teasing?) the early patriarchs from their polytheist pagan roots into by Moses time a sophisticated non-anthromoporphic(!) monotheistic religion of surprising depth and complexity as well as the rest of the Old Testament and the Gospels, to which is added writing of the Apostles and all the writing and hard thinking done in the early and later Church making sense of it all. Is that religion?
Wiki tells us:
William Alston has suggested that the presence of a number of the following characteristics would make a set of practices a religion: 1) Belief in supernatural beings (gods), 2) a distinction between sacred and profane objects, 3) ritual acts focused on sacred objects, 4) a moral code believed to be sanctioned by the gods, (5) characteristically religious feelings, 5) prayer and other forms of communication with gods, 6) a world view, or a general picture of the world as a whole and the place of the individual therein, 7) a more or less total organization of one’s life based on the world view 8), a social group bound together by the above (Alston 1967, pp. 141–142).
Yes. We now have something more like religion. Of what sort?
Religion is regarded as more than a philosophical pursuit and likewise (as Augustine surely knew) that ansatz is not where Christianity ends, but where it begins. Christianity regards this God as not a far off distant thing but (Option Three via Wright’s Simply Christian
As an aside, Mr Kuznicki remarks:
When I once insisted that my own soul was not a bottomless pit of depravity, I was calmly informed that I lacked the proper temperament for religious inquiry. Go figure.
To my somewhat amateur eye, this seems by his instructor a misreading of the Reformed “T” of TULIP (where “T” stands for “Total Depravity”). Total Depravity is the idea that man has no good, but against Pelagius (and Babel), man by his own efforts cannot be made Good. See Reno’s book Redemptive Change
The rest of Mr Kuznicki’s essay point to a rejection of the idea of a creator which one can have a personal interaction (Option two) as a logical impossibility based likely on scale and scope, that is we cannot comprehend such a thing (which oddly enought is a theme repeated quite frequenly in the Bible). As was pointed out by one of his commenters, that Eastern tradition (Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and other Eastern Fathers) follow that conception of God as well. His other objection is that there is (or can be) no evidence for God. Christianity exists because of events on that first Easter, when Jesus “came through death and came out the other side” to quote Wright.
One Response
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.
Continuing the Discussion