Tag

god

Browsing

By James Bishop

Philosopher Edward Feser perhaps has one of the most well articulated and detailed testimonies I recall having read (which at this point is quite a few). Feser is a professional philosopher after all, so it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. Nonetheless, in this short post I have attempted to summarize Feser’s journey while also attempting to outline some of the key moments that had taken place within it. I am confident that this summarized testimony will be helpful to those who don’t necessarily have the time to read through the 7000 word testimony on Feser’s own website. However, I do encourage reading the full testimony for there is much in the details not included here.

As a way of biography, Feser is a well-known philosopher in the profession having penned numerous academic articles on several subjects ranging from the philosophy of mind to metaphysics. He is the Associate Professor of Philosophy at Pasadena City College, previously a Visiting Assistant Professor at Loyola Marymount University, and a Visiting Scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center. He has authored numerous books including Aquinas, Five Proofs of the Existence of God, Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction, and The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism. Feser was also once an atheist naturalist until he converted to Christianity.

Feser explains that he was a convinced atheist naturalist for a period of 10 years in the 1990s and that his transition away from it “was no single event, but a gradual transformation.” He was brought up Catholic but ultimately lost his faith while a teenager around the age of 13 or 14. His atheism stayed with him well into his university years as a passionate philosophy student. While at university he discovered a new interest in existentialism and existentialist philosophers, particularly Soren Kierkegaard. This interest led him to discover other existentialists such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Kaufmann of whom he both appreciated but especially Kaufmann in particular. In the more modern philosophical climate, the atheist analytic philosopher J. L. Mackie proved appealing to Feser, and he considered Mackie’s book The Miracle of Theism to be a solid piece of philosophical work. Feser remarks that Mackie’s book was “intellectually serious, which is more than can be said for anything written by a “New Atheist.”” Philosopher Kai Nielsen would also appeal on issues of morality and religion. According to Feser,

What really impressed me was the evidentialist challenge to religious belief. If God really exists there should be solid arguments to that effect, and there just aren’t, or so I then supposed… Atheism was like belief in a spherical earth — something everyone in possession of the relevant facts knows to be true, and therefore not worth getting too worked up over or devoting too much philosophical attention to.

However, when he examined analytic philosophy in some more detail during the course of his studies it would, before long, bring his “youthful atheism down to earth.” The genesis of Feser’s transition away from atheism came about when he first began to look into the philosophy of language and logic. Over the several following years, during which he weighed information and arguments presented in his course materials, he reasoned that the existing naturalistic accounts of language and meaning failed to satisfy,

I already knew from the lay of the land in the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind that the standard naturalist approaches had no solid intellectual foundation, and themselves rested as much on fashion as on anything else.

Read the Whole Article

Do you find these posts helpful and informative? Please CLICK HERE to help keep us going!

by Gavin Ortlund

I think logic and argument can suggest God. I have personally benefited from apologists like William Lane Craig, who do this well.

Of course, this is not the only way to suggest God. It’s possible to make God plausible, not as the conclusion of a thread of reasoning, but as the premise of human experience. This approach says, in effect, “if God doesn’t exist, so much of life—so much of what we simply assume every day in the way we function—becomes mysterious and inexplicable.”

Such a strategy is often rationally avoidable. But that doesn’t mean it’s less effective in real life. In fact, in our cultural setting, many of the lonely, transcendence-starved, quietly despairing people around us may resonate with aesthetic and existential considerations more than a logical case. Quite often the sheer beauty of the gospel is its most powerful apologetic. That is why I go back to C. S. Lewis’s fiction again and again. He speaks to the imagination powerfully.

Quite often the sheer beauty of the gospel is its most powerful apologetic.

Here are three aspects of human life and society that are somewhat out of place—homesick, we might say—within the confines of a naturalistic worldview. They don’t prove God, but they’re just kind of weird without him.

1. Thought

If our brains are simply the epiphenomenal byproduct of a naturalistic, evolutionary process, then thought becomes something of an oddity. In naturalism, our brains function as they do because of the winnowing effect of unimaginable eons of natural selection. Passing on our genes has determined everything. So can we trust our use of reason—or any of our knowledge? More basically, what exactly is thought? How is it generated from strictly physical processes?

You don’t have to be religious to appreciate the complexity of this question. It’s a perennial challenge of philosophy. Consider the issue of consciousness, for instance. Thomas Nagel, who happens to be skeptical about God’s existence, thinks human consciousness is not reducible to strictly material process. In his excellent introduction to philosophy, he admits:

I myself believe that this inner aspect of pain and other conscious experiences cannot be adequately analyzed in terms of any system of causal relations to physical stimuli, however complicated. There seem to me two very different kinds of things going on in the world: the things that belong to physical reality, which many different people can observe from the outside, and those other things that belong to mental reality, which each of us experiences from the inside in his own case.

This whole idea of a “mental reality,” distinct from the physical one, is curious. Why should the physical world generate this separate, mental realm?

This whole idea of a ‘mental reality’ is curious. Why should the physical world generate this separate, mental realm?

Take, for example, math. We tend to think of math as a strictly logical, self-explanatory phenomenon. But when you think about it, math is highly mysterious. Why should it be the case that 2 + 3 = 5 always and everywhere? The physical world is interdependent and relative—even time and space are interwoven, as Einstein showed. But the world of numbers is fixed and universal and binding. So where did it come from?

Here’s a way to grasp the problem: If the entire universe collapsed into non-being, would it still be that 2 + 3 = 5? Most people say yes. But if the universe is all there is, what gives these numbers their stability? Why does the mental realm have permanence if the material realm is in flux? What is this intellectual world that rises up all around us, like an invisible castle—and how did it get here?

Without God, thought seems out of place.

2. Choice

Choice is another oddity within naturalism. If the universe is a closed system of cause and effect, then ultimately everything that happens has a prior material cause—like one pool ball hitting another.

So, if we are strictly material entities (albeit highly complex ones), where would free will come from? We make choices with our brains, and our brains are physical objects, alongside the whole panoply of other physical objects in the universe, from stars to sponges to sauerkraut. What would make our choices something other than the result of an extremely complicated series of previous material events—trillions of pool balls?

If reductive physicalism is the whole show, in what sense can our actions be objectively good or evil?

Read the Whole Article

Do you find these posts helpful and informative? Please CLICK HERE to help keep us going!