(More excerpts/summaries from Substance and Shadow)
Nowadays it is not uncommon for persons who are completely sceptical of religion to call themselves rationalists. But in the Europe of a few centuries back, the aim of most rationalists was to prove that the Bible is perfectly reasonable and God is a logical necessity.
One logical proof rationalists offered was that just as a watch requires a watchmaker, so the intricate arrangement of the world requires a creator, God. This is a form of the well-known design argument, which holds that intelligent design is a priori to material form. But David Hume raised such difficult questions about the design argument that it was swept completely off the stage of serious European philosophy. Hume analyzed the rationale of divine cause and decided that it proved that God is neither benevolent, perfect, magnanimous, infallible nor even existent. (refuting the nature of such claims is dealt with in another thread ..... or if people feel that thread is not adequate, feel free to start a new one)
Hume's scepticism left ravages upon the European mind. The response of the rationalists came from Immanuel Kant who was highly impressed by Hume's logic. Kant attempted to synthesize scepticism and rationalism into what is known as Critical Philosophy. In doing this, he fell victim to contradictions. He argued that while reason is transcendental (i.e. it stands outside sense perception), it is meaningful to us only in terms of sense perception. We must rely upon our senses to know whether an idea is reasonable or not. Therefore the design argument is (from the human perspective) unreasonable, because the world we perceive does not appear to have been created by a beneficent and omnipotent God. But if perception proves reason, how does Kant prove from sense perception his contention that reason is transcendental to the senses? On this point, he fell victim to contradiction.
Kant's conclusion was, for all practical purposes, agnostic: God is confined to the realm of the unprovable, beyond the senses. Therefore discussing God is a waste of the philosopher's time. Rationalists who philosophize about a reality transcending our experience are in what Kant called transcendental illusion. Thus Kant ended an era of rationalist defense of Christianity.
What followed was an era of rationalist attack on Christianity. Kant's Critical Philosophy spawned such atheistic strains of thought as Marxism, Positivism, Pragmatism and Existentialism. These bring us right up to the contemporary period of uninhibited materialism.
The irony is that before Kant, rationalism was largely identified with theism and deism. Today, people take rationalism to be a synonym for atheism and scientific scepticism. There is an Indian Rationalist's Association dedicated to debunking religious beliefs through scientific proofs. Western philosophy, whether it is called empirical or rationalist, is ultimately dedicated to human-devised, human-centered inductive thinking. Induction may sometimes float theistic ideas. But as saying goes, water floats a ship, and water sinks a ship.
So where does that leave rationalism and scripture?
The rational argument of design started off with a serious handicap that left it open to Hume's attack. The handicap was incomplete knowledge of the purpose of creation. In her book “Heresy”, Joan O'Grady writes that this problem arose from a tenet ...
... developed from the Old Testament, that God, the Creator, made a world that is good. And God saw everything that He had made and, behold, it was very good. (Gen 1.31) From that it follows that our bodies are good.
If the world and our bodies are good, what are they good for?
And what is evil?
On these points, the 'orthodox' teaching has never been completely clear. Being unable to deduce what the creation is good for from an unclear premise, rationalist Christians induced it to be good for what historian P. Johnson calls enlightened self-interest. This self-interest was defined as the long-term and prudent pursuit of happiness. In simple language, the rationalists supposed God's creation to be good for sense gratification.
The comparison of God to a watchmaker is a reasonable assumption inasmuch as we know that watches do not assemble themselves. But the analogy of the watchmaker implies a further assumption about God's relationship with His creation. A watchmaker manufactures the watch for another person, who becomes its owner, controller and enjoyer. What makes the watch good is the satisfaction it gives the one who takes possession of it. Hume's scepticism struck just this point. How can you say God created a world good for our sense gratification? It isn't logical. We suffer pain as well as pleasure, we are forced to live under strict controlling laws, we have only limited powers and faculties, and our world is too often chaotic.
In viewing the world as being ultimately meant for our enjoyment, it is very hard to understand why a God who made it good allows pain to offset pleasure; why He strictly rules this good world by law; why He is frugal in distributing powers and faculties; and why this good world is too often disturbed. Rather than trouble themselves with these contradictions, materialistic philosophers find it reasonable to jettison God from their systems, and get working on remaking the world into what it should be.
Greed for material pleasure, power, wealth, and comfort is the path of materialism. This path bends reason away from the real purpose of creation, which is to reform us from our illusion. In the name of awakening from the slumber of dogma, materialistic reasoning first assumes God irrelevant, as did Kant's Critical Philosophy, and then assumes the material world as mankind's own godless paradise, as did Marxism, Positivism, Pragmatism and Existentialism.
Nowadays it is not uncommon for persons who are completely sceptical of religion to call themselves rationalists. But in the Europe of a few centuries back, the aim of most rationalists was to prove that the Bible is perfectly reasonable and God is a logical necessity.
One logical proof rationalists offered was that just as a watch requires a watchmaker, so the intricate arrangement of the world requires a creator, God. This is a form of the well-known design argument, which holds that intelligent design is a priori to material form. But David Hume raised such difficult questions about the design argument that it was swept completely off the stage of serious European philosophy. Hume analyzed the rationale of divine cause and decided that it proved that God is neither benevolent, perfect, magnanimous, infallible nor even existent. (refuting the nature of such claims is dealt with in another thread ..... or if people feel that thread is not adequate, feel free to start a new one)
Hume's scepticism left ravages upon the European mind. The response of the rationalists came from Immanuel Kant who was highly impressed by Hume's logic. Kant attempted to synthesize scepticism and rationalism into what is known as Critical Philosophy. In doing this, he fell victim to contradictions. He argued that while reason is transcendental (i.e. it stands outside sense perception), it is meaningful to us only in terms of sense perception. We must rely upon our senses to know whether an idea is reasonable or not. Therefore the design argument is (from the human perspective) unreasonable, because the world we perceive does not appear to have been created by a beneficent and omnipotent God. But if perception proves reason, how does Kant prove from sense perception his contention that reason is transcendental to the senses? On this point, he fell victim to contradiction.
Kant's conclusion was, for all practical purposes, agnostic: God is confined to the realm of the unprovable, beyond the senses. Therefore discussing God is a waste of the philosopher's time. Rationalists who philosophize about a reality transcending our experience are in what Kant called transcendental illusion. Thus Kant ended an era of rationalist defense of Christianity.
What followed was an era of rationalist attack on Christianity. Kant's Critical Philosophy spawned such atheistic strains of thought as Marxism, Positivism, Pragmatism and Existentialism. These bring us right up to the contemporary period of uninhibited materialism.
The irony is that before Kant, rationalism was largely identified with theism and deism. Today, people take rationalism to be a synonym for atheism and scientific scepticism. There is an Indian Rationalist's Association dedicated to debunking religious beliefs through scientific proofs. Western philosophy, whether it is called empirical or rationalist, is ultimately dedicated to human-devised, human-centered inductive thinking. Induction may sometimes float theistic ideas. But as saying goes, water floats a ship, and water sinks a ship.
So where does that leave rationalism and scripture?
The rational argument of design started off with a serious handicap that left it open to Hume's attack. The handicap was incomplete knowledge of the purpose of creation. In her book “Heresy”, Joan O'Grady writes that this problem arose from a tenet ...
... developed from the Old Testament, that God, the Creator, made a world that is good. And God saw everything that He had made and, behold, it was very good. (Gen 1.31) From that it follows that our bodies are good.
If the world and our bodies are good, what are they good for?
And what is evil?
On these points, the 'orthodox' teaching has never been completely clear. Being unable to deduce what the creation is good for from an unclear premise, rationalist Christians induced it to be good for what historian P. Johnson calls enlightened self-interest. This self-interest was defined as the long-term and prudent pursuit of happiness. In simple language, the rationalists supposed God's creation to be good for sense gratification.
The comparison of God to a watchmaker is a reasonable assumption inasmuch as we know that watches do not assemble themselves. But the analogy of the watchmaker implies a further assumption about God's relationship with His creation. A watchmaker manufactures the watch for another person, who becomes its owner, controller and enjoyer. What makes the watch good is the satisfaction it gives the one who takes possession of it. Hume's scepticism struck just this point. How can you say God created a world good for our sense gratification? It isn't logical. We suffer pain as well as pleasure, we are forced to live under strict controlling laws, we have only limited powers and faculties, and our world is too often chaotic.
In viewing the world as being ultimately meant for our enjoyment, it is very hard to understand why a God who made it good allows pain to offset pleasure; why He strictly rules this good world by law; why He is frugal in distributing powers and faculties; and why this good world is too often disturbed. Rather than trouble themselves with these contradictions, materialistic philosophers find it reasonable to jettison God from their systems, and get working on remaking the world into what it should be.
Greed for material pleasure, power, wealth, and comfort is the path of materialism. This path bends reason away from the real purpose of creation, which is to reform us from our illusion. In the name of awakening from the slumber of dogma, materialistic reasoning first assumes God irrelevant, as did Kant's Critical Philosophy, and then assumes the material world as mankind's own godless paradise, as did Marxism, Positivism, Pragmatism and Existentialism.
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