Kierkegaard ad objective reasoning

It has been suggested (by Robert Adams) that Kierkegaard promulgates 3 main arguments against objective reasoning in religion:

1) The Approximation argument: Kierkegaard argues (as a Christian theist, recall) we cannot base our eternal happiness on objective reasoning about historical facts, since historical evidence never completely excludes the possibility of error. In relation to an infinite passionate interest (like salvation or eternal happiness) no possibility of error is too small to be worth worrying about. But faith must be decisive and resolute. So the decision of faith is to act on what is believed, without hedging one’s bets to take account of any possibility of error.

2)The Postponement argument: Kierkegaard suggests that one can’t have an authentic religious faith without being totally committed to it. But one can’t be totally committed to any belief which is based upon some inquiry in which one recognizes any possibility of a future need to revise the results. (For instance, beliefs based on investigation of historical documents of the resurrection, or philosophical arguments for God, or design arguments in science…) In that case, total commitment to that belief will be postponed. Thus, authentic religious faith can’t be based on an inquiry in which one sees any possibility of a future need to revise the results.

3)The Passion argument: The most essential and valuable feature of religious commitment is passion, indeed – infinite passion of the greatest possible intensity. Now, in order to have an infinite passion, one needs improbability. If you have probabilities and “likelihoods” of religion being true, you no longer have faith. Our faith and passionate commitment should be risky, so that we’re venturing all of ourselves absolutely. Our religious beliefs ought to be based on a strenuous exertion of the will – a passionate striving, according to Kierkegaard.

From Newsweek, the last decade summed up in 7 minutes. Apparently sports and religion went on hiatus for the last 10 years.

The Prodigal Son, Inverted. Or set right.

I went for a walk today, or more specifically, for a limp.

After snapping my patellar tendon, I no longer run. I limp.

My six year old boy wanted to come along with me on my hobble down the walking trail behind our house. I sternly advised him that he was to remain utterly silent, because after all, this was to be my prayer time, not fathering time. He agreed to ride his bike silently next to me, but couldn’t resist giving me a giant grin when I glanced down at him. Children love being present with their parents.

We walked a bit, and I decided that the gravelly tread of the tires was diminishing my contact with God. I informed Grant that he would need to turn around and head home. A bit distraught and resistant, he remonstrated with me for awhile until he saw that I was determined to dismiss him. He swung his bike around and skidded for our house. I hit the bottom of the trail, and swung around for an oscillation up to the top and back home.

I skirted back past our house, which happens to be roughly the midway point of the trail. I was far past when I heard the faintest tug of a voice earnestly calling out, “Hiiii, Daaaddeee!” Grant had poked his bike back out on the trail and was frantically waving to me. He just wanted to say hi.

I waved a distant hand, and spun back around on track. My knee buckled slightly. Four months past surgery has made it stronger, but it's still brittle and unsteady. Grant sent a few more indiscernible yells my way, but I pretended I couldn't hear them. I walked on and pondered the soft autumn of our mild November, mumbling the Jesus prayer in time with my uneven steps.

I checked in on our suburban neighborhood estuary, which now lies silent and vacated as the sun's rays steadily angle and dim towards winter. Nor were there signs of life from the malicious animals who have been known to drive golf balls at the horses belonging to the rancher who sits on his acres just east of our development. I inhaled the absence of the Saturday morning, and started the trudge back home.

I'm a head down type of walker, but I happened to lift my head and raise my eyes to see Grant still sitting on his bike, still jutting out on the trail. His head had stayed turned my way, and his eyes had been scouring the trail, waiting for me to reappear in view. I was too far away to see his face, but my heart brightened.

He tore into his pedals and furiously sent up a dirt bike dust cloud as he sped towards me. When he reached me, he didn't say a word. He swung his bike around and rode silently next to me while I hobbled home. I glanced over at him, and he smiled. And he was present.

The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Two different friends of mine have recently shared this with me. It's brilliant, because, well, it's Wendell Berry.

MANIFESTO: THE MAD FARMER LIBERATION FRONT by Wendell Berry
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion - put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

Popper is all about Popper

I'm re-reading Bryan Magee's marvelous "Confessions of a Philosopher" and the anecdotes are delightful. Magee hung out with Karl Popper and Bertrand Russell. As he puts it, "Most people go through life without ever getting to know anyone of genius, so I count it a piece of good fortune that I have known two..."

However, it turns out that while Karl Popper may have been a genius, if you're gonna hang with him, it'll be entirely on his terms. Know anyone like this?

I discovered on these visits that there was almost nothing to be gained by my raising any matter in which Popper had not at some time in his life been involved. If I talked about what I had recently been doing myself, apart from philosophy - friends, music, theatre, travel, the current political situation - his lack of interest was unconcealed, and if I persisted he would find an excuse to bring out meeting to an early close. He needed to talk about what directly involved him, and could sustain interest only in what he himself had done at some time or other, or was currently doing.

To do list: ask people questions.

I'm pretty sure you should buy this book for me.

I rarely buy books, let alone pre-order them. But I'm doing it for this one: Jamie Smith's Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

Here's how Smith describes his own project:

"In particular, I'm pressing the limits, even distortions, that attend "worldview"-talk which tends to now dominate Christian higher education. Such worldviewism, I suggest, continues to reduce Christianity to an intellectual system that can be grapsed apart from the church and is then "taught" as information to be merely transferred from one head to another. In contrast, I argue that Christian discipleship is a matter of formation, not mere information--and that "Christian" education should be fundamentally a matter of shaping our love, our desire, to be oriented to the shape of the kingdom of God. And such formation happens not primarily via the heady, cognitive "lectures" (whether in our Protestant sermon factories or our Christian college classrooms) but through embodied practices that seep into our imagination and get hold of our gut, our heart, our kardia."

This sounds like a delightfully positive antidote to the Truth Project.

How do you pick your intellectual authority?

Karl Giberson recently interviewed Francis Collins, former director of the Human Genome project, and now Obama's pick for NIH director. In the course of the interview, Giberson asks this question, which I find absolutely spot on and absolutely baffling:

We are all part of social groups, and people we trust tell us things. I believe in evolution because people like you that I trust have told me it's true. I've never done a genome sequence; I've never done a fossil dig. So what do I—Karl Giberson—really know about evolution? All I know is that people I trust say it's true and people that I have less confidence in say it is not. But how are people outside the scientific community supposed to navigate this complex web of social authority, to try and figure out which voices they should listen to, and which voices they shouldn't?

Consider credentials. On paper the credentials of the better creationists and id people are like yours and mine. Take you and Michael Behe. You both have PhDs. You have both done research and published articles. So if somebody wants to put Behe up against Collins and say, "Well, here's a guy and I like what he says. And here's another guy and I don't like what he says. And you're asking me to follow Collins over Behe? Well, why should I do that?"

Collins basically responds that the Americans who pick Behe (or more typically - Ken Ham??) and anti-evolution do so out of a fear that science is atheistic. If they just knew the facts, he suggests, the debate would cease.

I guess I agree in principle, but I think that's a bit methodologically naive. Perhaps there's a name for the problem I'm thinking of, but I lamely call it bookshelf paralysis: young Christian You is at Borders or B&N, and you've come to the Christianity section. You've no clue what to buy on the topic of science and religion, the historical Jesus, or for that matter - anything. How in the world do you make that choice? Further - note down what road of authors your various choices take you! You can end up on a science/religion diet of Behe, Dembski, and Wells; or worse, Ham and Gish. You may end up on a historical Jesus diet of Borg, Crossan, and Ehrman. The choices are existentially huge, whether one realizes it, and that's precisely the point: uneducated Joe probably can't realize it. And it's quite paralyzing if you do realize it.

Whether we know it or not, we depend mightily on the authority of others. But how does a novice, who by definition knows almost nothing about the topic, pick a reliable guide?