Atheisms
It seems as if there are at least two kinds of atheism.
Consider: Keith Burgess-Jackson, a philosopher who happens to be an atheist, expresses frustration with some of his fellow atheists:
I find it disturbing that some of my fellow atheists dismiss theism as merely a matter of faith or emotion. This begs all the interesting and important philosophical questions, such as what faith is, what emotion is, whether faith is compatible with reason, how emotion is related to reason, whether belief in God is properly basic (i.e., such that it requires no justification), and whether there is any evidence for theism.
. . .Theistic philosophers such as Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne are as hard-headed and rational as any atheistic philosopher. Each has made important contributions to metaphysics and epistemology. If you want emotion, read Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. Their contempt for theism—and for theists—is palpable.
Again, consider Burgess-Jackson’s response to a recent debate between Sam Harris and Rick Warren:
I sometimes link to things before I read them. Did anyone read this? Forgive my bluntness, but it is one of the most insipid and unedifying things I’ve ever read. . . .Newsweek’s editors should be ashamed of themselves for publishing such pabulum. No wonder our public discourse is so shallow and uninformed.
My former teacher, D. Z. Phillips, once wrote (and often said) that the deepest divide in philosophy of religion was not between believers and unbelievers, or between theists and atheists. Rather, the deepest divide was “between those who recognise and those who do not recognise, that the limits of human existence are beyond human understanding” (Phillips, On Not Understanding God in Wittgenstein and Religion, 153).
The Best Books Ever
If you’re like me, you don’t have all the answers and you don’t know how to respond in all situations immediately. However, act you must (in life). And when you act (and when you answer) from what do you draw?
Where has your mind been?
Hugh Hewitt (interviewer extraordinaire) questioned two distinguished professors on the importance of reading good books, and asked them to provide a list of the most important books one should read (see here).
David Allen White:
I think you’ve got to turn to the greatest writers who can give you some sense of what it’s all been about, why you’re here, what it means and where you’re going. And that means you’ve got to delve into the great writers.
And if we’re going to form souls that are good, true and beautiful, we can’t begin with our own souls, because all of us are in process, too. The great writers know how to shape us morally, to get to goodness. They know how to help us find the big ideas, the truths that never change from culture to culture. And they know most importantly how to make us beautiful, so that we don’t fall into the trap of thinking only things that work matter. We need beauty in our lives as well.
I’ve provided professor Reynolds’ list and professor White’s list. But before the list, ask yourself how many of these books you read in college. These lists, at least, provide a measure of the quality of your education. Secondly, notice the lack of contemporary books on the lists. There’s a reson for this.
Professor White:
The Bible
Shakespeare
Plato’s dialogues
Homer’s Iliad
Dante’s Divine Comedy
Cervantes’ Don Quixote
Dickens’ David Copperfield
Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov
Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited
Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago
Aeschylus’ Oresteia
Aquinas’ Summa Theologica
Pensees of Pascal
Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice
Immortal Poems of the English Language
Melville’s Moby Dick
The Song of Roland
Alice In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass
Anna Karenina
collected poems of T.S. Eliot
Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor
Witness by Whittaker Chambers
Norman Mailer’s Of A Fire On The Moon
Walker Percy’s Lost In The Cosmos
Professor Reynolds’ list:
The Bible
Plato’s Republic
The Odyssey
Aristotle’s Ethics
Oedipus Rex
Augustine’s Confessions
Second Treatise on Government by Locke
Virgil’s Aeneid
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address & Second Inaugural Address
Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States
Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
Communist Manifesto by Marx.
On The Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche)
Civilization And Its Discontents (Freud)
C.S. Lewis’ Abolition of Man
Aquinas’ Summa Theologica
Canterbury Tales
The Prince
The Faeire Queene
Calvin’s Institutes
Paradise Lost
Boethius, the Consolation of Philosophy
Cicero on Friendship and on Duties
Hobbes’ Leviathan
For brief comments on both lists, as well as criticisms of the lists, read Hewitt’s interview.
Who Was D. Z. Phillips?
Philosopher William Vallicella takes on my former teacher D. Z. Phillips (see here). Phillips is a difficult philosopher to understand. My dissertation, in fact, is an attempt to understand Phillips. I’ve witnessed philosophers from Stephen Davis to Kai Nielsen express frustration at trying to understand him (and this with Phillips sitting beside them).
Dr. Vallicella produces an interesting (and common) criticism of Phillips. However, it misses the mark.
First, let me clear up some misconceptions. Phillips was not a fideist. In fact, he did not think the phrase Wittgensteinian Fideism made any sense. This is the label often put on Phillips. In fact, I once watched Kai Nielsen (for two days) try to convince Phillips he was a fideist. An entire book came out of the exchange, and I recommend it to anyone interested in the debate. Neither is Phillips an anti-realist. Phillips rejected both realism and anti-realism in metaphysics.
Phillips is sometimes (and is in Dr. Vallicella’s criticism) thought to hold the view that God is merely a logical concept. In other words, God exists in a language-game. Or rather, God exists as a concept. Because of this, he (Phillips) is thought to hold the view that God is dependent upon human beings (no language, no God). According to Dr. Vallicella:
God, however, is not a rule, nor a linguistic presupposition, nor concept, nor anything dependent on human talking and acting. So the necessity of God is not the necessity of a rule. God is a necessary being, which implies that he is a being, which implies that he exsts independently of human talk and speech if he exists at all. God cannot be reduced to God-talk and God-ritual. Chess just is chess-talk and chess-ritual: chess has no reality outside chess conventions and the chessic form of life. Not so with God.
Phillips is thought to hold these views because Phillips argued that God was not an object (which is true). So, the reasoning goes, if God is not an object, then God must not be real. Or put differently, if Phillips says God is not an object, then he must be saying God is merely a grammatical rule, a conceptual entity, an invention of human language, or a moral principle. And if that is the case, then Phillips’ position is just one step removed from atheism. What’s the difference, after all, between saying there is no God and saying God is an invention of human langage. In either case, there is no God “out there”.
Phillips, to the surprise of many, argued that metaphysics lied at the heart of philosophy (see his Philosophy’s Cool Place). Phillips thought, however, that questions of meaning should precede all other questions in philosophy. For example, before we debate the existence of God, argued Phillips, we should ask what it means for God to exist. There are significant conceptual differences between “God exists” and “Paul exists”, and these differences matter to the philosophical debate. Of course, God is a being. But what does that mean? What does it mean to affirm the existence of God?
Phillips (from Introducting Philosophy, p. 145):
Why do we assume that no matter what the subject matter – trees, money, love, God – we can always draw the distinction between the real and the unreal in the same way? How would we go about distinguishing between a real and an unreal tree, real and unreal money, real and unreal love, and a real and unreal God? It is in the different ways in which we go about this that we come to appreciate the notions of reality involved.
So we do not know, free of any context, what the distinction between the real and the unreal come to. But if this true, why should it not apply to religion? Should we not explore the kind of reality involved here? May we not find that, surprisingly, the reality involved is a spiritual reality? If this is so, then finding God would be finding this spiritual reality. Struggling to believe would be struggling to find it. Rebellion would be defying or hating this spiritual reality. This is the direction I think the enquiry should take.
How To Determine Greatness (The Beautiful)?
Do you think it is sometimes hard to tell the difference between the great and the ordinary (not always, but sometimes)? One test of greatness is history. Shakespeare, for example, is still read (400 years later) because his plays and poetry are great. Our proximity to the music, literature, and people of our time may work [...]