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Well, if you're looking to Jefferson for consistency, I don't know how to talk to you. That may sound like a shot, but it's not meant to be. Thomas Jefferson is perhaps one of the most striking examples we've got for inconsistencies.
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I'm using my cane to separate out the "you need three verified miracles and be recognized in a process taking years and then be canonized by the Pope" saint from the "I can call a graphics library and create a fractal or pop out a baby" McSaint Posts: 7593 | Registered: Sep 2006
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quote:Originally posted by Tresopax: The trouble with concepts like "miracle" and "supernatural" is that what qualifies in either category is pretty much a matter of subjective opinion. For instance, if God exists there really isn't any reason to consider Him any less "natural" than many of the other strange things out there that exist. And if some bizarre phenomenon happens, there is no real reason to call it a "miracle" instead of "something yet to be explained".
Given this, I'm not sure either concept can be relied upon to make any sort of strong argument for or against anything.
I am about to say something I thought I never would.....
I agree with Tres completely on this point. Posts: 15082 | Registered: Jul 2001
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Now we get into the murkey area of whether anything a person does actually makes them a saint, besides believing in Jesus and some simple ordinances.
And yet Mormons get grief all the time for being works oriented. It's very odd.
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1) The Vatican's process is for recognizing a saint, it does not cause someone to become one.
2) Calling up a graphics library does not create the wonder that is fractals, so the person doing so has not done a miracle. Nor has the person who gives birth to the miracle that is a baby.
3) A saint is someone in close relationship with God, not someone who performs miracles.
4) As others have already said, all Christians are called to be saints.
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quote:He wrote to Benjamin Rush that Jesus corrected the religion of the Jews by adding true ethics to their monotheism; he wrote the same to Priestly.
Yes. The implication here is that their monotheism lacked ethics, so the addition of ethics was an improvement. He's not saying that he's a monotheist; he's saying he's an ethicist.
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quote:Originally posted by Javert: [qb]If it was repeatable, that would put me well on the way to becoming a believer.
OK, so what you in fact said was, "First I would have to exhaust every conceivable natural explanation, and then I would be 'well on my way" to becoming a believer (in miracles)."
This isn't really related to your discussion with Javert, but your paraphrasing of Javert's point is the only valid way of finding evidence for a supernatural being. We live in a natural world by definition so plausible natural explanations for events should be favored over supernatural explanations by default (basically an application Occam's Razor). Supernatural explanations should be considered plausible only in cases where (a) we have a decent understanding of the subject area concerned with the event and (b) the event would be astronomically unlikely given our understanding of the related subject area.
Examples: - Our knowledge of diseases such as cancer is still far from complete so the arbitrary [and rare] recovery of a cancer patient without treatment is not valid evidence for a supernatural being. - If an amputee has a limb spontaneously regrow in an hour then a supernatural explanation is worthy of consideration.
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quote:Originally posted by dkw: 1) The Vatican's process is for recognizing a saint, it does not cause someone to become one.
2) Calling up a graphics library does not create the wonder that is fractals, so the person doing so has not done a miracle. Nor has the person who gives birth to the miracle that is a baby.
3) A saint is someone in close relationship with God, not someone who performs miracles.
4) As others have already said, all Christians are called to be saints.
First, even if we accept your premise 3) and 4) contradict. Not all Christians have a close relationship with God, thus not all Christians are saints.
Second, if we accept 4) and all Christians are to be called saints, why not just rename all Christians to saints and be done with the middleman? And of what possible worth is a title that millions of people can all get with little or no effort?
Third, in the case of 3). Sure it does. I call a compiler, I've created a program. I use a Microsoft Word, I've created a document. I call a graphics library, I've created whatever images are encoded in the graphics library. Unless you want to get pedantic and say my computer created it....but I'm not sure we're ready for St. Athlon 3200+ X2
Fourth, I never said that the Vatican created saints, I just said it takes them a lot of work and research to decide if someone is a saint. If everyone and their dog can become a saint, then they're certainly wasting a lot of time and they have a heck of a backlog since they're probably in what, the thousands range for saints?
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3 & 4 are not contradictory All Christians are called to be in close relationship with God. Not all actually are.
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Now we're getting somewhere. His religion is indeed one of ethics rather than the supernatural; however, he credits the existence of ethics to God. This God is neither personal nor interventionist. However, he is the ultimate source of creation; providence.
The Priestly letter, excerpts:
quote: II. JEWS. 1. Their system was Deism; that is, the belief of one only God. But their ideas of him & of his attributes were degrading & injurious.
2. Their Ethics were not only imperfect, but often irreconcilable with the sound dictates of reason & morality, as they respect intercourse with those around us; & repulsive & anti-social, as respecting other nations. They needed reformation, therefore, in an eminent degree.
III. JESUS. In this state of things among the Jews, Jesus appeared . . . He corrected the Deism of the Jews, confirming them in their belief of one only God, and giving them juster notions of his attributes and government.
2. His moral doctrines, relating to kindred & friends, were more pure & perfect than those of the most correct of the philosophers, and greatly more so than those of the Jews; and they went far beyond both in inculcating universal philanthropy, not only to kindred and friends, to neighbors and countrymen, but to all mankind, gathering all into one family, under the bonds of love, charity, peace, common wants and common aids. A development of this head will evince the peculiar superiority of the system of Jesus over all others.
3. The precepts of philosophy, & of the Hebrew code, laid hold of actions only. He pushed his scrutinies into the heart of man; erected his tribunal in the region of his thoughts, and purified the waters at the fountain head.
This is classic deism. Note that Jefferson maintains that all true religion is intellectual; it's about reasoning out the nature of things and determining true behavior. It acknowledges God, but elevates the abilities of humanity.
This is the sort of thing Jefferson was praising in the Waterhouse letter, when he declares that he hopes the entire nation will become Unitarian, and declares as "the great truth" this:
quote: 1. That there is one only God, and he all perfect.
2. That there is a future state of rewards and punishments.
3. That to love God with all thy heart and thy neighbor as thyself, is the sum of religion.
quote:Note that Jefferson maintains that all true religion is intellectual; it's about reasoning out the nature of things and determining true behavior. It acknowledges God...
I'm not sure where any acknowlegment of God occurs, with the possible exception of the positing of a "future state of reward and punishment," something that many pre-Enlightenment scholars felt was the only obvious justification for a system of natural morality.
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: The only pre-Enlightenment atheist I know of -- as opposed to some version of a "God of the Gaps" deist -- is Epicurus, and even he spent a lot of time talking about gods. He just defined the "gods" in such a way that they were non-sentient natural forces. The term "atheist" is very old, but the modern form of atheism -- in which no supernatural forces are believed to have ever been necessary -- is as far as I know indeed very modern.
Tom, the way I understand it that isn't true, as I remember learning about the "watchmaker god" theory specifically relating to Deists. By their beliefs all things are both natural AND miracles. God set things in motion, but is pretty much hands off until things wind down completely.
After that who knows.
Nature to me is one of the MOST miraculous things in the world. Posts: 15082 | Registered: Jul 2001
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quote:I'm not sure where any acknowlegment of God occurs
Really?
quote:II. JEWS. 1. Their system was Deism; that is, the belief of one only God. But their ideas of him & of his attributes were degrading & injurious . . . III. JESUS. In this state of things among the Jews, Jesus appeared . . . He corrected the Deism of the Jews, confirming them in their belief of one only God . . .
quote: 1. That there is one only God, and he all perfect.
Now, this 'one God' was as I've said, neither personal nor Trinitarian; rather, it was the source of both the creation and the ethics by which human societies would best operate.
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quote:Now, this 'one God' was as I've said, neither personal nor Trinitarian; rather, it was the source of both the creation and the ethics by which human societies would best operate.
And, again, there was at that time no other viable theory for physical creation, and for that matter only a couple of out-of-fashion philosophers who'd posited the possibility of a "natural morality" without resorting to divine fiat. How can you get more "God of the gaps" than that?
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You don't have to 'get God of the gaps.' It wasn't as though Jefferson and John Toland and Locke and Tindal and the rest were struggling to escape theism. Indeed, Toland denounces atheism in Christianity not Mysterious, as does John Locke in A letter concerning Toleration. Jefferson read and cites both these guys; atheism was therefore certainly an option to him.
Yet he wrote to Waterhouse that he was
quote:anxious to see the doctrine of one god commenced in our state .... the population of my neighborhood is too slender, and is too much divided into other sects to maintain any one preacher well. I must therefore be contented to be an Unitarian by myself, although I know there are many around me who would become so, if once they could hear the questions fairly stated.
For all these guys, deism explained the way they believed the universe worked better than atheism did.
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quote:It wasn't as though Jefferson and John Toland and Locke and Tindal and the rest were struggling to escape theism.
See, that's exactly my claim: that Jefferson specifically was struggling to escape theism. His use of unitarianism basically constitutes the modern version of weak atheism, deprived of modern arguments for morality and abiogenesis; it's not for nothing that modern unitarians basically are atheists who need an excuse to drink coffee with other people. I think he would have leaped for joy had he been made aware of those developments in his own lifetime.
Consider, after all, Locke's own rationale for fearing atheism (later echoed by Washington in his famous address): that oaths and allegiances would be meaningless to an atheist, and morality could not be shared without a common god to whom we could appeal. This was considered sound argument to the people of this era, Matt; there was at the time no real response formulated to this criticism. I think Jefferson in particular, of the political figures of his day, would have welcomed one.
Heck, to be perfectly honest, I think almost every single Deist of the Enlightenment would be an atheist in the modern climate; the cases for deism are simply too weak to persist when atheism exists as a rational option.
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Modern Unitarians are different from non-trinitarian deists of Jefferson's day.
And I don't believe science has yet revealed a first cause for the creation of the Universe. To the believer, the big bang proves God more than any other event because it was extremely improbable. Well, based on this big picture book my 6th grader brought home from school the other day. But the picture book made fun of the biblical account, so... there it is.
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quote:And I don't believe science has yet revealed a first cause for the creation of the Universe.
Science hasn't settled on a first cause, but there are a few plausible theories out there nowadays. Now, when you say "we aren't completely sure how or why X happened," X is much, much smaller than it used to be.
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I think we've gone in circles a bit here, Tom; what you've just written is a slightly less ambitious version of your first argument, which was that Jefferson was secretly an atheist. Now you're arguing that he would have liked to have been one, but couldn't bring himself to it because he feared atheism's effect on morality.
If I'm reading you right, you're arguing that atheism could not answer two questions: 1)the first cause; 2)the ultimate source of morality. Thus, these folks were required to turn to deism as a second best scenario. Setting aside the fact that a few Enlightenment folks (like Voltaire) made nontheist cases for these things, I actually think deism ran deeper than these.
The problem is that folks today seem to assume that atheism has the market cornered when it comes to rationality and religion is inherently a-rational. For the deists, the reverse was the case: the Enlightenment convinced them that _everything_ was ultimately subject to reason. Since science, the fruit of human reason, seemed able to explain the universe, it was logical to them that the universe was itself a product of reason, and hence of a reasoner. Atheism to Toland, for example, posited a cosmos devoid of rational order.
All of this is to say that it appears to me that you're edging close to a progressive view of history, in which humanity gradually attains enlightenment, which equals us. This seems a fallacy to me. Rather, I'd argue that Jefferson and the rest lived in a world qualitatively different from our own.
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quote:I think we've gone in circles a bit here, Tom; what you've just written is a slightly less ambitious version of your first argument, which was that Jefferson was secretly an atheist.
I didn't say he was secretly an atheist. I've consistently said that he was as atheist as it was possible for a rational man to be at that time. Not all deists were rational men, certainly. (I'm looking at Toland, here, who was as you've noted a complete sap; Jefferson's friend Priestly, who may or may not have actually considered himself a deist, was scarcely better.) Jefferson, however, was (IMO) just rational enough to have difficulty reconciling the pat deist insistence on a divinely-authorized "common morality" with his own observations. By this I mean that while he was clearly conversant in the "five principles" of Deism, I don't get the sense from his work that he actually believed them.
I'm sure you're familiar with his writings on the topic of religion; it's hard for me to understand why, then, you would think he would not embrace with open arms the substantial developments of modern philosophy. Like almost all the "deists" among the Founding Fathers, Jefferson's greatest struggle with non-religious thought was with the gaps -- specifically the two I've identified. Jefferson's Bible is an enormous intellectual failure for all the reasons Ben Rush identified, and I'm willing to project a bit and imagine that Jefferson, who in most other things was more rigorous, fell apart here when trying to project his own morality upon a text that simply wasn't compatible with it. One of the reasons I'm so sure he's an atheist, in fact, is that this sort of projection has about it the same air of desperation that I've seen with in modern atheists who, being familiar with theology, initially work to reconcile reality with faith before giving up; his tendency to fall back upon old platitudes without questioning them is exactly the sort of intellectual cowardice I'd expect in that situation. He's aware of the emptiness in the center of what he's writing, but doesn't have anything to fill it with; the things to fill it with won't be a matter of public discourse for another hundred years. There's a great loneliness there that's missing the comfort that someone like, say, Washington takes from the same philosophy.
I think you're also missing the fact that Deism was, in Jefferson's time, also a form of quasi-political anti-papism; if you disliked the machinations of the Catholic church, and were uncomfortable with the Calvinists, deism provided what seemed like a "big tent" alternative -- and one that was perfectly consistent with observable reality, at that. You could be a godless deist without too much blinking; Voltaire even got accused of it himself, and of course Toland eventually headed in Epicurus' direction before going all wacky.
quote:All of this is to say that it appears to me that you're edging close to a progressive view of history, in which humanity gradually attains enlightenment, which equals us.
Not quite. I believe we have gradually attained enlightenment, but are not yet enlightened. We're certainly more enlightened than the people of the 18th century, though. And they were, in turn, more enlightened than the people of Augustine's time; a simple glance at what passed for logic under Anselm demonstrates that sort of thing, in my opinion.
quote: I believe we have gradually attained enlightenment, but are not yet enlightened. We're certainly more enlightened than the people of the 18th century, though. And they were, in turn, more enlightened than the people of Augustine's time; a simple glance at what passed for logic under Anselm demonstrates that sort of thing, in my opinion
I believe this is about a perfect description of a progressive view of history. It makes for an interesting argument for our own time, but it does little to explicate the actual history. Rather, it uses history as a fashioned tool for self-examination/aggrandizement.
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Seriously. I'm curious too. My thought on it all was that Western philosophy has largely ignored East Asian philosophy. They are talking about largely different things, and/or approaching the subject from very different POV. The Chinese purposely encode multiple levels of meaning into their writing, quite often. Without the code, it's hard to get every level. This doesn't mean I understand every level, far from it. It does mean that I know more is there than I can see myself at this point.
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quote:It makes for an interesting argument for our own time, but it does little to explicate the actual history. Rather, it uses history as a fashioned tool for self-examination/aggrandizement.
Why is it necessary to think of the people of the past as our equals to understand them? I understand my daughter pretty well, but I know she's not my equal. Surely you'd argue that God understands us, but you wouldn't claim He's our equal. Society is better now by any standard I care about than it was three hundred years ago; I don't see how that statement somehow reduces the study of history to flattery. In all seriousness, I can't understand why we'd have to pretend that, for example, Anselm's argument for the existence of the Christian God is anything but ridiculously stupid in order to study his contemporaries; it was stupid, but they didn't realize it was stupid, and we can move on from there. His logic doesn't get any better just because it's historical.
History isn't "progressive." Societies, however, are. They don't always improve, but I think it's silly to assert that they don't always progress.
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quote:My thought on it all was that Western philosophy has largely ignored East Asian philosophy.
Western philosophers took the bits of East Asian philosophy they thought they understood and tested it against their Western philosophies, and basically used it to fill in the holes. I'm pretty sure that exactly the same thing would happen if we met aliens; they'd bring us some new perspectives, we'd test them against our preconceptions, and we'd eventually accept the result.
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You used the phrase "self-aggrandizement;" this strongly suggests that you believe there's a component of superiority.
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Hey Matt, out of curiosity, what do you mean by this statement:
quote:Fugu, I think you're overstating the influence of Lincoln's depression. He never really experienced a conversion of the evangelical sort. In his maturity, however, he was certainly not a deist; indeed, in his maturity he seems to have tended to a cultural, non-Christian Old Testament style Calvinism.
I'm confused at the terms "cultural, non-Christian, and Old Testament" being used to modify Calvinism.
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: Western philosophers took the bits of East Asian philosophy they thought they understood and tested it against their Western philosophies, and basically used it to fill in the holes. ...
Examples? I must admit I am curious about this too, not having studied the subject much from this perspective.
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Well, there's a whole field out there called "comparative philosophy" that basically deals with the fallout. In my experience, though, comparative philosophers overstate the differences between the philosophies by playing up the gulfs in epistemology; the problem with that sort of "emphasize the divergence" approach is that Western philosophy has been very concerned with epistemology since at the very least Hume, so Eastern philosophy doesn't actually bring anything very contradictory to the table. Lots of Western philosophers already believed that reality could not be accurately addressed through a positive contract; they just happened to be in a functional minority, since I think it's pretty indisputable that that particular approach is impractical.
That said, I think the argument that certain fundamental "world pictures" have colored different philosophical approaches is indisputable; many Chinese philosophies emphasize that the world is the way it is, and philosophy's role is seen as a way of helping someone find his or her place in that world -- which is, of course, at odds with traditional Western approaches. I disagree with the claim that this makes the two traditions incompatible; they may well be trying to answer different questions, but I think that this is precisely where they best contribute to each other. Western thought has not, in my opinion, generally dealt well with coming to peace with the way things are; it seeks excuses or reasons for the status quo, but rarely (until recently) useful techniques for contentment. As a consequence, Western society rather greedily adapted pseudo-deep "pop psychology" from Eastern traditions; exhortations to "just let go" or "minimalize your life" as actions for their own sake, as independently beneficial things, are the result. (It's worth noting that Eastern religions themselves would probably no longer recognize the way this has been adapted to Western culture.)
At the end of the day, and to make this really brief, I don't think Eastern philosophy had that much to offer Western philosophy that Hume and his compatriots hadn't already started to explore -- but I think familiarity with the concepts was made easier by a long Eastern tradition of anecdotes and "personalized" applications of these principles that helped to fill in the gaps and confusions that might otherwise have arisen from arguments over the nature of knowledge.
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I think you do the contributions of Eastern philsophy an injustice. There are several fundametal additions to Western philosophy, such as a workable system for the union of opposites and field theory, that it carried.
In Psychology, cross-cultural psychology has been one of the hotter topics since the early 90s, and has led to revolutions of our conceptions of conceptions of the self and what, really, is "human nature".
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It should be noted that (having said all this about the great leaders of the 1800s), if you asked people to list the great leaders of this most recent century, the list would include mostly people who were quite religious: Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., the Dalai Llama, Pope John Paul II... FDR's Episcopal background likely influenced his welfare policies towards the poor... for conservatives Ronald Reagan was a Christian too... Who else belongs on such a list? Churchill is the only one I could think of who'd likely make the list who would even be borderline. Even Albert Einstein, who was not a political leader but was probably the century's most influential thinker, was significantly religious.
So, I'm not sure what the point is about Jefferson, Lincoln, and Washington but - it is certainly not true that atheism has been a prominent feature of the world's most recent great leaders. And if society is progressive, the trend from one century to the next of our most iconic and effective leaders is headed in the direction of greater religious faith, not towards atheism.
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quote:I didn't say he was secretly an atheist. I've consistently said that he was as atheist as it was possible for a rational man to be at that time.
Tom, again, I think you're confusing atheism with rationality, and buying into the accusations of orthodox Christians of the day that made deism merely a stepping stone to atheism. I'm uncomfortable with that - and the sort of presentist interpretations of Jefferson that people like Hitchens produce, because they tend to reduce the complexities of historical context down to simple Whiggism.
Priestly, by the way, was in no sense a deist; he was a Unitarian, a millenarian, and didn't believe in free will.
Belle - By that I mean that Lincoln, while he certainly did not believe in orthodox Calvinism (and indeed, probably was not a Christian), absorbed the mood of somebody like Edwards or Samuel Hopkins; he developed a strong sense of God's providence, of the nation as a moral entity, and the war as means to purge national sin. This is of course, reminiscent of the way God interacted with the children of Israel in the Old Testament.
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By the way, I think we merely disagree about Jefferson's writings; I see in them a great deal of enthusiasm for rational religion. Hitchens and Dawkins, of course (who I suspect you've read here) do not.
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quote:Originally posted by Tresopax: Even Albert Einstein, who was not a political leader but was probably the century's most influential thinker, was significantly religious.
That claim is fairly bogus. When Einstein said "God does not play dice" he was referring to the idea that randomness plays a part in our universe. A more telling statement that he made was "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings." I don't think that beliefs like that fall under the category of "significantly religious."
quote:Originally posted by Tresopax: And if society is progressive, the trend from one century to the next of our most iconic and effective leaders is headed in the direction of greater religious faith, not towards atheism.
I see absolutely no evidence to support that claim though I have no idea how you define "greater religious faith." For example, I would argue that Martine Luther had greater religious faith* than Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., etc. and that his actions had a much larger impact on our lives (specifically our rights) than any modern day civil rights leader.
* I'm using "greater religious faith" to mean "more fundamentalist." In other words, a young earth creationist has greater religious faith than a mainstream "modern" Christian who accepts evolution and does not take all parts of the Bible literally.
Edit: I realized that my use of "rational" to describe "modern" Christians may be offensive to some. I changed it to "mainstream" because that is closer to what I meant.
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quote:Tom, again, I think you're confusing atheism with rationality, and buying into the accusations of orthodox Christians of the day that made deism merely a stepping stone to atheism.
Barring personal revelation of some kind, I think atheism is pretty much a necessary condition of rationality, yes. That's one of the reasons why I think deism is an extremely poor choice in the modern era, which has rendered deism absolutely unnecessary. (That I disagree with orthodox Christians on many things does not mean that I must disagree with them on everything; like them, I think a rational deist is on a very slippery slope towards atheism, barring any obvious "gaps.")
quote:And if society is progressive, the trend from one century to the next of our most iconic and effective leaders is headed in the direction of greater religious faith, not towards atheism.
Part of that, IMO, is that we give religious leaders a wider berth. John Paul got away with a lot because he was Pope that he wouldn't've gotten away with if he were, say, the elected leader of Poland. If the Dalai Lama weren't a lama, but were merely a revolutionary leader, he'd probably be dead.
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* I'm using "greater religious faith" to mean "more fundamentalist." In other words, a young earth creationist has greater religious faith than a mainstream "modern" Christian who accepts evolution and does not take all parts of the Bible literally.
Well that's certainly an example of writing your definitions to support your conclusion.
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quote:Barring personal revelation of some kind, I think atheism is pretty much a necessary condition of rationality, yes.
Why the wink? Does this not describe what you've been trying to say exactly?
And to set things at right, I'll point out that the effect of Western philosophy on China has been completely poisonous.
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quote:Originally posted by pooka: And to set things at right, I'll point out that the effect of Western philosophy on China has been completely poisonous.
To China, or to the West? Or both?
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It's a barb on the ethnocentrism of considering the influence of China on the grand edifice of Western philosophy.
I think the Romans were pretty sure that their civilization represented the pinnacle of social progression.
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