A part of one of Ed’s recent blog posts, and then one of his comments:
Don’t be a sucker for the philosophical arguments to support any part of this conflict. Obey what your convictions demand within the context; don’t listen to any other voice. Christ is a Person, not a body of ideas. He lives and speaks to us only in our hearts, where our convictions stand. If your mind can make no sense of it, seek His face in prayer until you know what God requires of you. Nothing else matters. There is no appeal to some objective standard on which humanity can or should agree, because humanity is morally blinded by the Fall.
The myth is that reality is objective, something that is the same for everyone, that we can all know the same reality. It assumes the reality is stable — even static — and that everything about it is ultimately explainable.
This is the common assumption underlying the whole of Western Civilization as we know it today. I take the position that reality is best understood as a person. We can all know reality like we know the same person, but we should expect reality to treat each of us individually. Thus, reality only appears to be stable and consistent across the human experience. Further, it is not possible to really know reality. There will always be surprises and things held back.
But it’s not that I say reality is that way, only that it is the best approach to consider it a person: sentient, active and willful. My experience with reality should be somewhat different, and yours is just as valid as mine. In that sense, reality is fungible — one person’s experience is just as good as another. We should avoid questioning someone else’s experience in that sense. We can surely decide their experience is too foreign to hang around them, but it serves no purpose to deny someone’s experience just because it is significantly different from ours.
This is why miracles are so rare in Western society. All of Creation should be treated as if it were alive, sentient and willful. Jesus spoke to the storm, spoke to dead bodies, and to invisible beings called “demons.” The results indicate that this is the way we should view the world in which we live.
I don’t disagree with Ed, but I’d like to clarify what he means.
By “objective reality,” most philosophers mean (partly) that anything in existence can be sufficiently understood by human faculties. If not now, then eventually by some dint of progress. Now while anything that exists is, technically speaking, an object humans can understand to a degree by way of attributing characteristics to it, it’s a mistake to understand some things as just objects. The pencil next to me on the table is an object that I can understand sufficiently for the time being, though there’s plenty about it I couldn’t describe if I found the descriptions relevant. My wife is also an object (hello, feminists), a long list of descriptors, but she’s certainly not just an object. And I certainly don’t have an ontological relationship to her as if she were just an object, and the fact that she is an object is irrelevant to that same relationship.
So it’s extremely misleading to describe the enduring, ultimate reality of the supernatural realm as objective. Sure, it some ways, the metaphysical domain and God are objects, because they exist, but their significance doesn’t lie in that fact but in our relationship to them by way of conviction. How, and in what manner, are we drawn to them, what is the standing of God in relation to our own existence, and what does our sensus divinitatas (per Calvin, Plantinga)—the non-material faculty or “sense” of divine conviction—tell us about Him? Those are questions only we as individuals can answer with any non-falsifiable certainty. Those are the pertinent questions, over whether He exists or not, or whether we can coherently describe Him or attribute this or that quality to Him.
When we regard things as merely objects to be understood, we are underhandedly categorizing them as being graspable by the human intellect, a collection of knowledge-collecting faculties that have been badly damaged since Eden and are not reliable for understanding the supernatural domain.
6 Comments
Exactly; it’s not a question of being, but of contextual purpose. You can know what it is and not have a clue what part it plays in your life. But if you know what part it plays in your life, you don’t really need to understand much more than that in order to serve God.
I don’t know the history of philosophical language, but that point up there about philosophers using the word objective as shorthand for something being “graspable” enough by the intellect to be considered “knowledge” is big assumption on my part. It’s just that philosophy hasn’t figured out the details of that process–I don’t think since maybe Kant that anyone has really tried to answer it so extensively. Some, like us (as though we are philosophers), don’t make that assumption about objects or the intellect, so it makes talking about this sort of thing hard. I’m not too formally educated in philosophy, so I can’t answer all of this fully.
And I have forgotten a lot of philosophical terminology I learned in those courses because it serves no purpose for me. I’m more interested in trying to put the ideas within reach of folks who have no use for the vast piles of names and terms.
In general, I find myself in the opposite camp. I don’t think of philosophy too much until the subject comes up, then I dive into a hole. I am also reading a book right now on the history of philosophy, so your post and comment were very timely.
I seem to find myself at the crossroads for a lot of these issues. There must be a shared reality, or else nothing would be able to affect anything else. We’re all islands, in the sense that we each have our own vantage point. (Or at least, it seems intuitively true that this is the case.) There is order to nature, but there is also chaos.
“Obey what your convictions demand within the context; don’t listen to any other voice.”
Maybe I’m misinterpreting, but I don’t think anyone’s convictions are infallible. I think reason and conviction are both capable of good and bad. I can see how this might be true if God were solely speaking through someone, without any human imperfection getting in the way. I don’t know how often that’s possible though, to get past the I-Thou and only be left with the Thou?
You are right that there’s a shared reality, we simply synthesize it differently. You and I, compared to the church at large, might synthesize it in a similar fashion, given our similar backgrounds, etc.
You are also correct when you mention the fallibility of convictions. I hold conviction are like any other form of knowledge. Like our sense, it’s an a priory faculty we can’t step outside of and “be convicted” of something else, though we can easily imagine others having different convictions. They are fallible but that trait is irrelevant. God imparts convictions onto us, like a phonecall or marching orders, to accomplish something beyond our rational grasp. How will we handle them?
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