On Conformity (Answer to the 3 AD Hypothetical)
Posted on 17 April 2011
Happy Palm Sunday!
My apologies for being light with my postings of late, but my latest manuscript is due in a fortnight, and I have more than forty pages of works to work. My copyedits for the previous volume are due and overdue, and my available time is under-sufficient.
In the spirit of Holy Week, let me post for this week’s post a brief thought I have been toying of as of late.
I have outraged some of my non-theist friends of late, and while I am sorrowful for this, I am in no way surprised. It is inevitable; unavoidable.
Does that sound like an excuse? This essay means to show that it is not.
We Christians are supposed to be outrageous. If we do not outrage the practical worldly thinkers (who have practical reasons to do and to excuse evil works) and the idealists (who have elaborate abstract reasons to do and to excuse evil works) and the zealots (who do evil works out of wrath and pride, without bothering with excuses) why, then we are not following in the footsteps of Our Master, who outraged the practical and worldly Sadducee, outraged the idealistic and elaborate Pharisee, and outraged the angry Zealot.
Human nature has not changed since the First Century, or since the Fall of Man, and the same thing outrages those who conform to the world now as then: the simple truth, spoken honestly. Conformists are not prone merely to admit that others have different opinions and go their ways: they are shocked or even angered by the existence of a non-conformist, as if they can think of no honest nor honorable reason for departing from the consensus.
Of all groups, the ones most angered by non-conformity are those who are tied together by a shared bond of mutual guilt, particularly if the group has agreed upon a fictional excuse to explain the guilt away. In such a case as this, the presence of a non-conformist, even if he is minding his own business and going his own way at his own pace, is an affront to the conformity, because the presence of anyone not playing along with the fictional make believe acts as an accusation that touches a sore spot on the conscience. You don’t think the fans of Stalin and Castro and Mao, deep down, know the number of murders their heroes have committed? Or deep down that the abortionists likewise know the enormity of their crimes?
Do not be surprised if I call Christians the non-conformists; the post-christians are the conformists, for all their talk of toleration and patriotic dissent. We Catholics have a formal Magisterium which tells us what we are morally obligated to believe and to think on those topics touching the Catholic faith — you remember the Magisterium, they were the bad guys from Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. But on topics where the Magisterium has made no ruling, we Catholics can disagree with each other, and still call ourselves Catholics.
We conform only on topics touching the universal and catholic faith our beliefs to the teachings of Christ and His Apostles and successors: for without this, by definition we would not be Catholic Christians. What falls outside, we can follow our own reasoning, vain imaginings, or even the fickle opinions and fashions of the world.
You conformists who have no Magisterium are not more free in your opinion, but less, because your informal Magisterium called peer pressure and party loyalty and Political Correctness has no such boundaries. Everything from your diet to the type of lightbulbs to all the matters of public question, war and peace, and which words you may say and not say, is under control of your non-Magisterium, and you must obey it to the last decimal, or else earn the scorn of your peers.
* * *
What makes Christians so different? Are we simply madmen?
According to the rational standards of the world, starting from worldly principles, the answer is yes. Worldly men believe in worldly things.
By this, I do not mean worldly men are hedonists and epicures and money-grubbers who kick grandmothers downstairs, watch gladiatorial games or (what is much the same) watch the bloody and sexy hypnotic dream-images of endless hours of television, or that they drink absinthe and suffer ennui, and divorce their long-suffering wives for younger trophy models with balloon-like silicon breasts. To be sure, some worldly men do these things, but I am speaking of men who are “worldly” in the philosophical sense, not in the hedonistic sense. A man can be an ascetic and still be, in the philosophical sense, worldly.
Those of you with a classical education know the process by which the consensus of a people is formed: a philosopher inspires a school of philosophers by his theories, which, unpopular or even reviled at first, he argues with strict rigor, or, for modern philosophers, outrageous passion and insolent contempt for rigor. Artists and intellectuals fall under the spell, adopt his world view, and being to slip overt or covert references to the world view into their works, and they in turn inspire authors, journalists, jurists, academics, and so on. The arguments in favor of the world view are forgotten or never learned by the general public, but the conclusions, the visions, the general world view is remembered. The common man accepts the world view as plain truth, and never hears the reasoning that birthed it.
Those of you with a classical education know that the modern world accepted the vision or world view of Kant, who proposed that the only true knowledge as empirical knowledge, and that noumenal or non-empirical reality was forever and eternally beyond the realm of knowledge. Everything from mathematics to morality to theology was either arbitrary constructions or a priori assumptions or mere opinion. It was not knowledge because it was not certain.
When this powerful yet false notion was passed through the hands of intellectuals to the general public, the strict technical distinction between knowable empirical fact and unknowable noumenal fact became a maxim or a feeling considerably less strict and technical: empirical facts became the only kind of reality there was. Noumenal reality was downgraded from being real-but-unknown to not-real.
If you have a modern education, of course, you have been indoctrinated with this world-view of radical empiricism, and have probably never heard any arguments for it, because it has never been presented to you that any other argument or world view was possible, or that there was any case seriously to be considered. To the moderns, those of us who do not believe in the modern world view are merely barbarians and yokels, or, worse, out of date and unfashionable.
The unassailable ignorance of the modern mind is such that they take their own inability to argue, or even imagine, the other side of the case as a chrism of their superior intelligence and their deeper understanding.
The Christian world-view, or, to use the technical term, the truth, does not dispute that empirical facts are empirical facts any more than it disputes that the outside skin of a red apple is red.
What it disputes is that there is no meat and no core to the apple, and no seeds that bring forth more life: Christianity disputes that the shallow surface appearance is all the reality that there is.
Empiricism is shallowness. That is what it is designed to be.
What every man can see of the surfaces of things with his eye, or feel of the surface with his hand, are things that cannot be doubted if and when other observers, looking also at those same surfaces, confirm it.
The Empiricist can, of course, cut the apple: but then all he has done is made more surfaces and surface features. Those he can, of course, describe the cut open surfaces with the same exactitude and shallowness that characterizes his method, and the limits of his method.
What he can never see, because it cannot be exposed to his gaze by cutting, it the nature of the thing, that that-which-makes-it-what-it-is. He cannot see the purpose of the thing, that-for-the-sake-of-which-it-is. He cannot see the ethical uses and abuses, the legal or political characteristics, the economic value, the geometric ideal, nor anything else that cannot be seen with the eye, directly or through an instrument. The method of empiricism deliberately prevents this.
We Christians, and the classical pre-Christian philosophers who were groping blindly but successfully toward the Christian world view (i.e. the truth), we think there is an essential nature to the apple; that it is, in fact, a thing. We think that there is a creator to the apple; that it does, in fact, come from somewhere for some reason and even for some purpose. There are right uses and wrong uses, and not only do we know some of these things, there are some things we can’t not know even if we want to.
Jamming the apple into the mouth of an innocent baby to kill him without mitigation, justification, or excuse, is, for example, always known always to be wrong: anyone who cannot know this is wrong is insane in the eyes of the law, and unfit to stand trial, but must be confined like a dangerous beast. Likewise feeding an apple to Eve or to Snow White. Everyone knows it is wrong, and knows it is wrong to deny that it is wrong.
What Empiricists never, ever do is ask themselves how they know. They pretend such knowledge is mere opinion or social conditioning, and in this they lie, and they know they do wrong so to say, and you can see the guilt in their evasive hostility that blooms in their words when questioned on the point.
Profound ideas like “nature” and “essence” and “reason” and “purpose” are ideas the modern mind cannot refute because they cannot be comprehended by the axioms of modernity.
My experience has been that the modern minds I debate merely have one of two reactions when confronted by non-empirical ideas that they themselves use even in order to explain or justify their empiricism.
First, they blithely assert that non-empirical ideas, when used by them, are actually empirical. For example, when asked how the properties of a purely ideal triangle can be deduced by a geometer, the modern empiricist, without breaking a smile, soberly asserts that the triangles are made of atoms in the brain of the geometer, and the geometer is sensing those atoms by means of a hitherto undiscovered new sense impression above and beyond the normal five senses, which allows him to sense the brain-atoms of which the ideal triangle is composed. And the properties of the ideal triangle inhere in the atoms.
Or, second, other moderns without so well developed a blindness to paradox, simply pretend that the conclusions of pure reasoning are the results of contingent experiments. When asked to produce the name and initial conditions of the experiment, the modern merely asserts that these things have been known since antiquity, and that they are obvious, and that anyone at any time can confirm for himself various conclusions of mathematics, geometry, moral reasoning, epistemology, ontology, or what have you.
When you point out to empiricists of this second type that an “experiment” by its nature MUST have a contingent outcome, i.e., it is possible to imagine and outcome with different values or different results, such as an apple falling on Newton’s head at less or more than sixteen feet per second squared; whereas conclusions of reason and metaphysics by their nature MUST have a necessary outcome, i.e., it is impossible to imagine, or even talk sense, about something is necessarily not the case, such as unequal vertical angles, dishonesty being honest, or A being non-A — that therefore experiments in physics must assume and cannot confirm nor deny metaphysical axioms, much less mathematical or moral ones — they give you a blank look and change the subject.
The more ambitious ones accuse you, classically educated man, of being an ignoramus.
The modern educated man, having never read Kant, perhaps having never heard of him, cannot even discuss the topic of Kantian metaphysics, nor say why Kant holds all prior metaphysics to be in error: nor can I clearly explain (unless my listener is very patient, and I have abundant free time) why I deem Kant to be in error.
Let me attempt in brief, and without being too technical. Kant’s error is a paradox. If you believe the metaphysical axiom that only Empirical knowledge is true knowledge, then all metaphyiscal axioms, including this one, are not true knowledge. And if it is not true knowledge, you cannot account for believing it.
This paradox can be resolved only two ways: either accept this (and all) metaphysical axioms as blind and arbitrary acts of the will (This is the Nietzsche solution, and that way leads madness); or accept that this (and all) metaphysical axioms are contingent assumptions like the rules of a chess game, merely inventions for the pleasure and convenience of man, but having nothing to do with reality (this is the logical positivist solution, and that way lies another type of madness).
Since a schoolboy can poke holes in the paradoxes and errors that either one of the two paths to madness maintain, I need not do so here. Just take a look at the post-modern and post-rational, post-ethical world around you.
The real solution to the paradox, of course, is to reason that if the axiom leads to an absurd conclusion, instead of assuming the absurdity is the truth, assume the axiom is wrong.
Classical and Christian metaphysics holds that other valid forms of epistemology exist aside from empiricism, and, indeed, one cannot validate empiricism without reference to one of these other forms of knowledge, either rational or revelatory.
Rationalism, in brief, holds that as rational creatures, by definition we must have certain truths built into us, and built into the mechanism of reasoning. We could not reason if reasoning itself were not true. If we lived in a universe where A equaled Non-A, we could not come to the conclusion that this were so, nor to any conclusions. Merely because we are rational, and for no other reason, we know certain truths to be self evident.
Revelation, in brief, holds that the Truth, acting by its own will, may and can and does from time to time reveal something of itself to those creatures with the truth in them.
These epistemologies cannot be explained to anyone who has been chloroformed by the modern indoctrination that passes for the education of the intelligentsia. You cannot find words simple enough or examples clear enough to overcome their ingrained self-satisfaction, to explain these roots of knowledge to them–even such roots of knowledge they themselves employ in their own world views, such as the idea that human life is sacred, or that men have natural rights, or that A is A.
One cannot lead or lure them to examine their own ideas, or question their premises. What a humble philosopher takes as a joyful speculation and an exciting adventure, the proud intellectual takes as an attack on his shaky self esteem. Here I will make no attempt to do it: there are over two thousand years worth of philosophical and theological works sufficient to do that task for me.
In a recent column in this space, I asked my patient atheist and theist readers a hypothetical: if you were teleported through time back into the First Century Palestine, and saw the miracles of Christ, would this be sufficient empirical evidence to convince you to repent, bow the kneel, and become baptized? I promised I would then reveal, in this hypothetical universe, whether there actually was or was not a God, and whether those miracles were indeed signs that he who performed them spoke the truth; but at no point did I say what, if anything, he spoke.
Alert readers will have noticed it was a trick question.
The hypothetical actually took place in the same blasphemous background universe of Michael Moorcock’s stupid hackjob of a book BEHOLD THE MAN. The person pretending to be Christ was another time traveler, like yourself. The various events that looked like miracles were the by-products of advanced technology from other groups of time-travelers from further in the future, either trying to create Christianity, so as to preserve the main timeline, or trying to obliterate Christianity, so as to create Athiestopia.
The recruiter for the assassins of Christ was, of course, merely another time traveler, someone loyal to Atheistotopia.
SCORING!
Those of you who thought the Atheistotopian was Great Lord Lucifer of the Abyss are docked two points for not adhering to the terms of the hypothetical, which was a question about EMPIRICAL evidence and what conclusions can be based on EMPIRICAL evidence. The Atheistotopian recruiter offered not one shred of evidence that he was a supernatural being. He sat and smoked a cigarette and asked you to shoot Christ. The only correct empirical conclusion to be reached from those facts are (1) he is a being who sits. (2) He smokes. (3) He asked you to shoot Christ. Any conclusions beyond that are not empirical conclusions.
Those of you answered that you would repent and be baptized one you saw the Transfiguration, or the Ascension, or the Nativity are docked one point, because the terms of the hypothetical were asking about EMPIRICAL knowledge. To know yourself, that you are a wretched sinner, and that you thirst for the water of life that will wash sin away, is not only not an empirical proposition, it cannot be expressed or described in an empirical way.
It is a type of knowledge that not only cannot be proven to a worldly and empirical man, it cannot even be described to him. No matter what words you use, O faithful Christian, to tell the worldly man this basic truth of reality, he CANNOT hear it. To him, the words will simply mean something else. It does not matter what words you use, or what examples, or what rhetoric.
It is a truth that cannot be spoken to a man with no truth in him, for the same reason that reasons cannot be given to beasts who have no power of reasoning. First the truth must be inside him, in his soul, and then the truth will react or respond to the truth in your words, if you speak truly.
You, O faithful Christian, have no power, no power at all, to plant this truth in the soul of someone who knows it not. No more than Mr. A Square of Flatland can his fellow two-dimensional beings the wonder of a sphere, can you speak to those who are dead about the glories of life. They are dead. It is not their fault they cannot understand you.
Only the Truth itself (or, rather, Himself) can plant this truth. He will do it only when asked by the dead man. Naturally, the dead man cannot be convince beforehand by some empirical evidence to ask: because no empirical evidence whatsoever has any bearing on the question.
Those of you who answered that signs and wonders do not, by themselves, transform the soul, bring the dead to life, open the eyes of the blind, nor turn mourning into joy are not docked any points, because you got the point of the hypothetical.
The Good Book is full to bursting of warning about false prophets and false messiahs, and the false gods who can — as all wellinformed Christians are required to believe — produce signs and wonders of their own. Did not the magicians of Egypt cast down their rods also and turn them into snakes? Did not Christ Himself warn you that Antichrist will perform signs and wonders to deceive the faithful?
Now, if any of my modern readers who are Christians scoff at the idea of Egyptian magicians, or the miracles of the Antichrist, I suggest you go have your credentials renewed. If you do not believe what the Church teaches, you are outside the Church. If you do not believe what Christ said, you are outside Christ.
Those of you who said that only the Holy Ghost can grant that grace which makes a man realize his wretchedness, and move the soul to ask or salvation, you get a point and win the hypothetical.
If my Catholic friends think this answer sounds suspiciously like Calvinism and Lutheranism, think again: those heresies are simplifications of a doctrine taught in our catechism by our Magisterium.
The hypothetical was a trick question: it was asking how much empirical knowledge is needed to reach a non-empirical conclusion.
The answer is: there ain’t no such animal and you can’t get there from here. Not even an infinite amount of horizontal lines will raise you one inch to the vertical.
No matter what you see with your eye through the medium of light, it makes no difference even in the slightest what you apprehend immediately in your soul.
So it does not matter what the Time Travelers show you, and it does not matter whether you conclude as an empirical matter that God really exists.
The Prince of Darkness, Great Lucifer, knows God exists. The Dark Lord knows for sure, with more clarity in his superhuman, angelic mind than you mere mortals can even imagine, he knows that God exists. He is not likely to repent and seek baptism. He may not be capable of it: I leave that question to theologians.
Again, it does not matter what your five sense show you, and it does not matter whether you conclude empirically God really exists. Empirical knowledge does not make you fall in love. It does not make you forswear narcissism or eschew pride, envy, avarice, sloth, wrath, gluttony, lust.
Nothing you see with your eye or hear with the ear or touch with your hand, either directly or through an instrument, can get a dead man to yearn for life. He is dead. He does not have the power in him, even theoretically.
The reason why the AD 3 Hypothetical was a trick question, and was an unfair trick question, is that my atheist and agnostic friends not only could not guess or get the right answer from the information given, they cannot even understand, except, perhaps, by analogy, what the right answer could be.
Knowing about God is not the same as knowing God. Facts are things you know about. People are persons you get to know. Divine persons are persons who take you up into them, and who shine in you and through you like light through a pure crystal. When you drink the blood of Christ and eat the flesh, you do not take Him into you, He takes you into Him, and He says. “Well done, good and faithful servant. I know you now.”
Human knowledge can only comprehend a little ways. We cannot comprehend infinity. Human love can comprehend everything. We can love the God who is infinite love.
That is why Christ asks us first to love. Understanding, what little is given us, that comes later.
I cannot explain it clearer than this, because it cannot be explained clearer than this, any more than you can explain love to a man who has never been in love.
Explanations only explain the surfaces of things. Reality is the core of things. Reality cannot be explained to post-modern post-Kantian post-rational post-ethical neo-barbarians because they have no category in their minds and no words in their vocabularies for the core of things. They only know surfaces, and their unquestioned and unquestionable axiom is that nothing but surfaces exist.
If they could question this unquestionable axiom, they would not be proud modern men. They would be humble philosophers.
We Christians cannot conform to the world any more than the visiting Sphere can conform to the shallow surface world of Mr. A Square of Flatland. Our metaphysics and epistemology can only be explained, if at all, by analogy, or, to use the geometer’s term, by projection. We cannot conform even if we wanted to. Neither can we conform to the secular age because it is a temporary age. We are eternal, and will outlive and outlast it.
We are both too multi-dimensional to fit into the confines of the world, and too eternal to shrink to its span of time.
So the world has to be outraged at us. We claim to be bigger and greater in space and time than spacetime. It is an outrageous claim.
It also happens to be true.
Would you like, my skeptical readers, some empirical proof that reality beyond the bounds of empiricism reaches exists?
Ah, but that is another trick question.
Dear Skeptical Reader, you are invited to win a bonus point if you tell me what the trick involved in the question is. Perhaps, in so doing, you can take a step down the path that leads toward philosophy and beyond.
Am I still down a point if I forgot that I was supposed to try to answer the hypothetical as an empiricist?
Even accepting other types of evidence other than empirical ones there was no logical proof given that the actors in the story were telling the truth and the observer in the story never recieved the spirit saying what was the truth. Since the teachings were never heard, there were no actions to take to test if the teachings were worth listening to. In which case the best that can be said is that something strange was happening that merited further investigation into the subject by some other means other than empiricism.
No visible miracle by itself is, or should be, enough evidence to convert someone or even to convince someone. Magic shows are based on creating seemingly miraculous events for entertainment, the magician is no prophet and they aren’t even real miracles.
So based purely on the hypothetical being converted was the same as being taken in by a magic show. Hopefully everyone that decided to be baptised based on the hypothetical were bringing into the hypothetical extra information that should not have been applied to the hypothetical.
As has been mentioned previously empiricism doesn’t provide proof of anything just degrees of accuracy given certain conditions. This means that no empirical proof can be given for anything, but you can still be reasonably sure that if a cable holding a ton of bricks over your head were to be cut the bricks would crush you.
With their nice little list of things you are to revolt against, and if you don’t toe the line, they think you are not rebelling.
Our two highest commandments are to love. And love makes us all mad. So of course!
Oh rub it in, John. I was educated right on the edge of all that classical stuff going out. Just enough to realize how much I had been cheated out of. It saddens me whenever I see glimpses of that which was missed.
Or as I like to joke: if anyone says “faith is belief without evidence” then eventually they’ll find that faith sustains all. They’ve self-refuted.
Tell us now you feel, really.
Well, slap me in the face with a wet haddock!
I thought the description of the Nativity reminded me of the scene where Karl Glogauer goes back to meet the real Mary and Joseph (only you kindly left out the bit about Jesus being discovered to be mentally retarded and hence, by the primitive standards of the time and place, considered by the credulous natives to be ‘god-touched’), but I thought no more of it than either a coincidental resemblance or a deliberate reference.
Tricksy philosophers – we hates them!
“When a being who admits to being the Christian devil approaches me and asks me to do a certain thing, in a situation where I am uncertain whether the Christian god exists or not, and justifies it by telling me that the Biblical account is all propaganda, just how stupid am I supposed to be, that I take him at his word?”
It also means that Rolf Andreassen gets the points and I don’t. It’s like I’ve been told in every exam I ever sat: “Read the question. Don’t read half-way through and start answering; read all the way through and only when you’re sure you understand what you’ve been asked, then answer.”
This is why I don’t get As on final tests, isn’t it?
He does not get any points for this response. The recruiter to assassinate Jesus in the hypothetical never says “I am a the Devil” He says, “You know me. I am the prince of this world. I was there at the beginning, when the sons of light cried out for joy when the first stars rose. I am the king of all the children of pride.”
While that might be enough information for a attorney, or a man of common sense, to deduce who is speaking, the hypothetical was specifically asking about empirical facts. As an empirical fact, he does not say who he is, and they hypo gives no experimental or observational evidence on which to impeach or support his testimony — indeed AND HERE IS THE POINT empiricism does not even have a concept of testimony, or impeaching a witness. Empiricist have no methods or tools by which they decide between competing statements. Their tools are only for deciding between competing theories to explain physical and measurable events. Their tools do nothing else and can do nothing else.
The whole exercise is merely to emphasize to our local and lovable village atheists that you cannot drive a nail with a screwdriver.
In a world whose creator is deliberately deceptive, one cannot expect to arrive at truth. This does not alter the best methods for arriving at truth, namely to judge the available evidence with one’s best attempt at rationality.
I must confess that I find the argument from inspiration, or personal intuition, or whatever we are to call it, rather strange from someone who claims to have been converted by evidence. It seems to me that the `knowledge’ that comes from inspiration (I’ll call it thus until someone tells me a better term) is not open to discussion; you have either been inspired or not. “A man cannot be reasoned out of a belief that he wasn’t reasoned into”. So if your excuse for belief is inspiration, then there is nothing more to say; we must either be silent, or come to blows.
How shall we judge between the inspiration of the Christian, and that of the Moslem who straps on a suicide vest and goes out joyfully to kill the infidel, earning eternal life thereby? Certainly the one is more pleasant company than the other, but we cannot judge truth by pleasantness. The empirical effects of the one, likewise, are better than those of the other; to see blood and brains splashed over a peaecful street and hear the screams of the grieving is not nice; but again this is mere empirie, to be discarded in the face of inspiration. After all, the Moslem says that this is for the better in the long run, and who is to gainsay him? If his inspiration is the true one, it may well be that he has sacrificed nothing (for the unbelievers were doomed to hell however they died) in exchange for a great good; and we cannot object to that.
If inspiration is to be our means of judging truth, then do we not come back to Calvin’s predestination? Either one has the sort of mind that is inspired, or one doesn’t; there is no act of will that can cause inspiration. (I note in passing that materialism is orthogonal to this; it does not matter whether the mind arises from atoms or from mind-stuff – either way it is a single mind, and either of the kind to be inspired, or not.) If judgements of hell and heaven are to be based on the kind of mind one has, and not on one’s acts towards others, then that is a damnable doctrine. It may be true, but it is not just.
That is untrue; I have myself asked this many times, and honest men of my acquaintance have also done so, on the strength of the empirical evidence that others believe such prayers have an effect. Answer came there none. And so we are again in the realm of empirie, for you have proposed that such-and-such an action will have this-and-that effect, and your claim has been disproved, or at any rate, shown to be in need of modification. I suggest that, if you are honest, you will retract both the claim itself, and also your further claim that this is not an empirical procedure.
John 7:17
Alma 32:17-19
Alma 32:26-34
James 1:5-8
Moroni 10:4-5
It is not empirical in the sense that it is measurable by instruments, also empiricism to me implies skepticism which seems to contradict all of the quoted scriptures that deal with the subject. It may actually be measurable by some type of instrument but I can see multiple problems with trying to measure it in that way. Hopefully this is enough to show that the claim most likely hasn’t been disproved and, since they are original sources, has no need of modification.
You have at some point come to the incorrect conclusion that God is a wish granting genie. God hears all our sincere prayers. He knows what we need and He grants our prayers, but in such a way that we benefit from them. In other words, you don’t always get what you want, but you get what you need.
Eastern Orthodoxy does not limit faith to an intellectual pursuit. In fact, Scripture defines faith as being assured of things that have not yet been seen. One can intellectually understand all there is to understand about this or that, but intellectual understanding can not guarantee that one will put his or her faith in someone or something. Put another way, I can know all about God, but until I know God - that is, until I accept His revelation, until I experience Him in my life and in the lives of others and in the life of the faith community - I do not enter into the realm of faith.
It may be a good time to step in and point out that in Roman Catholicism, at least (I known the LDS church has a different view), nobody is promised any sort of mystical experience or vision, and our greatest mystics have warned enthusiasts that they ought not to seek after such things. Mr. Wright’s conversion experience is not the norm.
I get the impression, perhaps wrongly, that you think mystical experiences can be treated like empirical phenomena, and that when someone has one, you can replicate his circumstances, expecting to get the same experience. And when you don’t get the same experience, you leap to the conclusion that the first person didn’t have the experience either.
Even if mystical experiences could be replicated, this attitude of experimentation would hardly be conducive to replicating them. When you suggest that God’s existence could be tested for by rounding up a group of atheists and having them all sincerely convert at once (though how you would create a religious conversion in a laboratory for the purpose of an experiment is impossible for me to imagine), you are indicating that you do not quite understand the subject.
Rolf, if you seek God, you will find Him. The evidence that you have found Him will be obvious to you.
You make the same arguments over and over and over on this blog, so I think you must be searching for Truth. This comment is just the same argument you always make. It’s the same argument I’ve read for three plus years now. You use different words and difference scenarios, but it’s always the same argument.
Let me answer. There is more to this life than matter. There is nothing to be said or argued until you move past that. There is more to this life, to existence, to reality than matter, atoms, measurements, and equations. More than 95% of humans since the beginning of time have agreed that there is more to this life than matter, atoms, measurements and equations. The may have disagreed on what it was exactly, but most people since the beginning of time, have agreed that there is more to this life, to reality, to the world around you than matter, atoms, measurements, equations and rules. There is more.
But this is not mere empirie; the mere empirie is the brains and blood on the street. The not-niceness of it is non-empirical.
As you state in the first half of your essay, all the empiricists I have observed reach conclusions on the basis of something other than purely empirical knowledge. Therefore, empirically, I was acting as an empiricist when I decided to repent and be saved after seeing the Ascension. Therefore I should not be docked two points. QED.
Excellent. Man … very excellent. God has gifted you with a sound mind and a wonderful pen. Should anyone wonder that the great minds of time have been those who know God, know His purpose and seek to glorify Him? In His image God makes us and He loves us so much that we get to know Him! God is good.