Well, if you aren't a Christian, then it makes sense that you wouldn't find a historically Christian society's vision of an excellent life compelling.
If a religion isn't willing to claim that it's good to adhere to it and bad not to adhere to it - if it isn't claiming to supply something that really matters, without which one's life is worse off - then why bother with it?
I mean it seems like this objection is more to the idea of a religion that claims to be exclusively correct and of the utmost importance to human life. If that's true, then of course it will be bad not to accept it. If Christianity really is God reconciling the human and divine and bringing us into his life through his entering into ours, then what a calamity it would be to decline God's invitation.
That's not to say that someone who rejects it is ipso facto a "bad person" the way a murderer, say, is a bad person. Presumably if a person rejects Christianity it's because of not believing that it is true. And we can only really expect people to act according to what they think is true, not necessarily what is actually true. But the fact remains that rejecting Christianity (given that it's true) makes one's life worse.
Entelecheia
1yr ago
Thanks for this comment, it was touching to read. Very sorry for your loss and wishing peace and consolation to you.
Entelecheia
1yr ago
A History of Ancient Philosophy vol. II (Plato and Aristotle) by Giovanni Reale. Been working on it for a while, it's remarkably rich in its understanding of the material, but unfortunately the style/translation make it a bit of a slog.
The problem with this position is that it's precisely contraception that enables people to think about sex in a way that makes abortion seem desirable. As long as sex is something that is done primarily for fun, and only incidentally, sometimes, if it's desired, for procreation, then the "what if the contraception fails" argument for abortion will always loom large in the background.
Now one might respond to this point with resignation, "the cat's out of the bag", but the point is that this cat creates a gravitational pull toward liberal abortion laws. Because when you have a culture of people who believe they are entitled to have sex for fun, it doesn't work to tell them, "if you forget to take your pill, or if the condom breaks, etc. etc. then sorry, you're out of luck, you have to have that child." That runs totally contrary to the way they understand sex and so it seems unlikely to me that they will accept that state of affairs. Why should they have to give up that entitlement to consequence-free sex and accept a dramatic change to their lifestyle simply because they made a little slip-up one time?
So sure, who knows, maybe we'll never be able to undo the sexual revolution...but in that case I really don't see how we'll ever shift the landscape conceptually and fundamentally away from abortion, such that abortion loses its gravitational pull. Success, if it's obtained through political wizardry, would always be an unstable imposition on a culture that would naturally incline the other way.
The cat that I'm referring to isn't having sex for fun, it's believing that you should be able to have sex for fun without incurring any consequences. That social attitude, which is enabled by contraception, is what (it seems plausible to me) creates the gravitational pull in favor of allowing abortion. Without that attitude, it's just seen as foolish conduct, not something that people are victims of and need to be rescued from.
Entelecheia
1yr ago
I was ok with "safe, legal and rare"
I mean, we were never okay with that. So it seems like this is less about "mask off" and more that we just started winning for once, and then people who don't like that noticed and decided to react accordingly.
So from our perspective, we can either (1) do nothing and lose every battle, or (2) do something and win some battles but cause people who disagree with us to push back and potentially lose some or all of what we won.
2 seems strictly optimal in comparison with 1.
these people directionally agreed with you, up until the point where you won too much and it went too far for them.
But this person says that "I want abortion available as an option". We don't. To the extent this is directional agreement, it seems quite weak and not really worth preserving at the expense of giving up on our actual policy goals. I guess you could say we might be alienating people who are willing to agree to a 20 week abortion ban or something, but not an earlier one, and sure, that's possible, but I'd just say the terms of that compromise are unacceptable to me so that's okay.
So, fair, my initial statement might have been a bit of an oversimplification.
Entelecheia
1yr ago
Even if you believe that abortion is murder, there is a strong argument that it is the lesser evil compared to forcing these types of women to birth and potentially raise these children
I believe unborn children are morally equivalent to everyone else in regard to their right not to be intentionally killed. So if you think I should treat abortion as a lesser evil because the children who are aborted might turn into dysfunctional people (and please correct me if that's a misrepresentation of your argument), then shouldn't I also treat killing dysfunctional people at any stage, whether child or adult, as a lesser evil than banning the murder of them generally, given that I think both have an equally strong right not to be murdered?
The point being to describe people who were far from Republican moderates pulling the lever in favor of abortion rights against ban attempts when the chips were down.
Right, and the point here is that (speaking as a pro-life person) if a condition of us getting their vote is that we don't do anything to ban abortion, we don't want it. So if you are arguing that we should moderate (in the sense of giving up on making abortion generally illegal) because of this, my response is no. If you are arguing that as a descriptive matter we'll have a harder time winning because of this, that may be right, but the alternative is a hollow victory that doesn't accomplish enough of our goals to make it worth it for us, so it's worth the risk.
If the proposal is a less stringent ban that actually gets us a lot of what we want but not all of it, like a total ban but with certain specific exceptions, then I think a lot of people would be open to considering that. But safe legal and rare isn't good enough.
Entelecheia
1yr ago
he still thought that the catholic church should appeal to intellectuals and that this would help bring back the european masses to church (see Fides et ratio and his regensburg lecture). I think he was wrong on two levels: first he completely failed to attract intellectual, second the masses don't actually give a shit about what intellectuals think.
Well, I don't think it was a kind of...business strategic decision optimizing for growth. I'm sure he hoped he would influence people to come back to the pews, but I think he thought and wrote this way because he believed that man is meant to search for the truth and must attempt to articulate to himself real, satisfying answers to his deepest questions. This is probably part of why he struggled with the job, because he was always more inclined toward theology than administration.
I'd also say that the crafting of an intellectual edifice is a lifetime of work that can only be judged from a generational, rather than immediate, perspective. When Socrates died it probably looked like he was a failure (from an external perspective - of course he succeeded in living how he thought was right), but his way of thinking about man and the soul (via its modulation in Plato and Aristotle and combination with Christian ideas) ended up ruling the Western world for a long time.
As a Catholic I hope that the slow decline of the west we are witnessing will lead to curiosity and interest in the questions that Ratzinger considered central to man's life and destiny but that modern society tends to obscure or deny. I hope it will also lead to fruitful engagement with the lifetime of work that he produced in attempting to answer those questions for himself. But even if it doesn't have any outsized downstream impact, it was worth doing anyway.
Entelecheia
1yr ago
Wait, who recommended the book? How'd I miss this?
Hi, it's me!
There are lots of better ways to succeed if by succeed you just mean grow. But if by succeed you mean really satisfy man’s need to understand the world, his place in it, and his purpose and destiny, putting a primacy on the search for the truth is the only way to do it. If that means getting fewer converts than you could by being a less substantive philosophy, so be it.
(I mean, that’s the enterprise we are trying to be in. You (the reader) may or may not think we do that particularly well, but that’s the point of all of this, not just converting people to…something or other.)
Philosophical classical theism along the lines articulated initially by the high metaphysical philosophers of ancient Greece would be the main alternative. Christianity is a synthesis of the scriptural tradition and this philosophy, but the philosophy itself is not inherently connected with any particular religion. In fact it was developed initially in opposition to the prevailing pagan religious mentality as a more pure and theoretically coherent conception of what we might call an absolute, unconditioned reality than the gods portrayed in the Homeric myths. This tradition developed arguments for the existence of said absolute, unconditioned reality that are much stronger (taken on their own terms) than many people are aware of or give credit for. In particular, refined versions of the cosmological argument - as opposed to popular apologetics versions - are very strong.
I say "taken on their own terms" because they require a fairly robust conception of the metaphysical enterprise to get off the ground - that is, the idea that metaphysical concepts describe real features of the real world. This ability of metaphysics to grasp real features of the world is what enables the inference from effect to cause even in the case of inferring a supersensible and transcendent cause for a sensible and physical effect. In contrast, if one believes that metaphysical concepts have to do with the way we think but not the way things are - so that causation is a question of how we organize and conceptualize phenomena rather than a real mind-independent relation between beings as such - then we cannot use causation to infer the real existence of something beyond what we could possibly experience.
I am still a novice in these matters but I suspect that this kind of meta-philosophical controversy is why theism remains controversial today in philosophy. In other words it's not coincidental, or due to anything like social pressure or force, that the whole philosophical world was theistic until relatively recently. Within a "realist" metaphysical framework of the kind that the ancient Greek philosophers are the chief examples, theism more or less tends to be the natural conclusion, and that framework is what is called into question today.
That's not to say that there aren't still controversies over the validity of theistic arguments even within that framework. The technical issues in the arguments are complicated and difficult. However this shift may explain, from a historical perspective related to the general philosophical atmosphere, the differences in the baseline perception of plausibility of theism and atheism.
Entelecheia
1yr ago
I always got the impression that the arguments the New Atheist made were never successfully refuted
I don't think this is true unless you mean on the level of popular discourse. As a theoretical matter, I don't think New Atheist argumentation was ever particularly respected in, say, the world of academic philosophy, which is dominated by atheists, so it's not a question of bias. And the need to respond to New Atheism prompted a re-engagement with classical philosophy among religious thinkers - see people like Edward Feser - that made their position much more theoretically defensible and less vulnerable to New Atheist arguments.
If you mean as a popular matter, then sure, I could see people thinking (incorrectly) that that whole episode sort of settled all these questions, because the sophisticated religious response to their claims turned out to be rather less of a popular phenomenon than the original claims were.
Entelecheia
1yr ago
It boils down to the fact that it is incoherent to assert that only what is empirically verifiable can count as knowledge. To demonstrate this, simply attempt to apply the proposition's criterion to itself.
Entelecheia
1yr ago
Are you sure the constraints on science are not actually constraints of reality?
Yes? If only what is scientifically demonstrable is knowable, then we have no way of knowing that science is a valid source of knowledge, because a scientific demonstration of the validity of scientific knowledge would be circular.
Entelecheia
1yr ago
It means that if we have any knowledge of anything, then we can be sure those are not the actual constraints of reality. Either our item of knowledge K is not scientifically verifiable, in which case the point is proved, or it is scientifically verifiable, in which case in order to count as knowledge, the scientific method must be known to be reliable, which cannot happen by scientific verification.
It is the study of being as such, as distinct from the special sciences which study being under some aspect, as we might say roughly and imprecisely that modern physical science studies being as corporeal and quantitative (philosophical physics like Aristotle's studies being as corporeal but not quantitative, heh).
So metaphysics is about rising above particular kinds and concepts of being to the most general analysis of being. And there we get to questions like: we know there's at least one sort of being (the corporeal kind), is that it, or is there a kind of being that is incorporeal or supersensible? That question is the main theme of Plato's corpus.
And it studies categories applicable to being in general (not just one kind of being), like causation, or contingency and necessity. So there you will get questions like whether the existence of contingent beings ipso facto implies the existence of a necessary being, and what attributes a necessary being must have in virtue of its necessity. Or whether a chain of causes implies a first element in it and what we can say about such an element based on the properties it must have in order to be the first element in such a chain.
This may (or may not, like I said I'm still learning) help to explain why the validity of metaphysics as a discipline that grasps being as it is is so critical for classical theistic arguments. If all of these concepts - causation, contingency, necessity etc. - are just a matter of how we think about the stuff that appears to us, we can't use it to draw conclusions that go beyond what appears to us, because it's basically just a schema for organizing all of that (this is why Kantianism threw such a major wrench in philosophy). But if it's grasping being as it is, then we can.
Entelecheia
1yr ago
The comment you are replying to was just a sketch of the thread that has served as the key polar opposite to atheism in philosophy. One can believe this without believing in any particular religion, so the question of theism or atheism should not turn on whether any particular religion is true.
Whether particular religions that attempt to build upon this foundation have added enough to make them philosophically interesting in their own right is another matter that I didn't mean to comment on.
Actually I'm not sure if I've been interpreting this argument correctly up to this point. My objection is to a kind of methodological materialism or ruling out a priori the possibility of knowledge from philosophical methods. I'm not sure that's coherent because of the obvious issue with stating that one knows this. Perhaps one could deny that one knows it but say it is possibly true, but I don't think that makes any sense, because advancing that proposition (p = "I don't know if the scientific method is the only way to knowledge, but it could be true") is effectively asserting knowledge of p, and one does not know p scientifically.
If what @SSCReader or you mean is just that metaphysical materialism may be true - that it may turn out to be the case that materialism is right and we can make philosophical arguments for and against that and evaluate them according to philosophical methods to arrive at knowledge - then I have no objection.
Entelecheia
1yr ago
I really dislike the First Mover argument since it just pushes back the problem of what comes first. If the universe needs a cause, why doesn't God?
But the arguments explain why the universe needs a cause and God doesn't, so this doesn't seem like a fruitful objection. In particular the basic structure of many cosmological arguments is an inference from contingency to necessity, and the existence of something contingent and actual implies an external reason why it is actual as opposed to not (i.e. a cause), whereas the existence of something necessary does not.
Entelecheia
1yr ago
What do you consider the place I should have ended up in after I had done all my investigations?
I'd say that if you diligently investigate the merit of classical philosophical theism then you should arrive at a place where you consider it philosophically formidable and worthy of respect if not actually true. The best introduction to this tradition that doesn't require you spending an inordinate amount of time reading Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas is probably Edward Feser, who has a couple books that distill a lot of the classical argumentation into a more approachable format.
Entelecheia
1yr ago
It's a meaningless argument against the concept of knowledge itself
No, it's an argument against your proposed criterion of knowledge on the basis of it being self-contradictory.
does absolutely nothing to actually advance the notion of god existing
That's because it's an argument whose goal is to figure out what knowledge is, not whether God exists. If you want arguments that advance the notion of God existing, you should look at those, rather than looking at an argument about knowledge and observing that it doesn't prove that God exists.
Goodbye to one of the last great men of Christian Europe, an apostle of being to a nihilistic world, and one of the few contemporaneous people I look to as a genuine example for my life. I am sad that he is no longer with us, but more sad for us than for him. For as the pagans recognized, "all who have duly purified themselves by philosophy...pass to still more beautiful abodes which it is not easy to describe, nor have we now time enough." (Plato, Phaedo)
I'm not sure if this needs a statement of culture-war relevance, but Benedict XVI is the closest person I can think of in our age to really living out the west's classical paradigm of an excellent human life: to be a wise, cultured, orthodox Christian gentleman. The value of this paradigm will likely be discussed and debated within the coming days.
(Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity)
(Ratzinger, homily, Missa pro eligendo Romano Pontifice, 18 April 2005)
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