I've been thinking a lot about the need for revelation.
Now, first of all, we either need it or we don't. In other words, either we can form an accurate and complete map of the cosmos with wholly natural means, or we can't.
Well, we can't. Sez who? Sez common sense. But if that's not enough, sez Gödel.
Stanley Jaki, in his Brain, Mind and Computers, correctly notes that Gödel's theorems prove
that even in the elementary parts of arithmetic there are propositions which cannot be proved or disproved in that system (emphasis mine).
And then, before philosophers had time enough to digest the implications of that little depth charge,
even wider implications of his work came to be recognized. To begin with, Gödel's analysis centered on the most basic of all formal systems, the system of integers. It was, therefore, plausible to argue that as a result no formal system is immune to the bearing of Gödel's conclusion (emphasis mine).
Now, the mind is not a logic machine. If it were, then we couldn't be having this metalogical discussion about logic. At any rate, there is
a basic, insurmountable difference between the abilities of the human mind and of formal systems of which machines are obvious embodiments.... For a machine to be a machine, it can have only a finite number of components and it can operate only on a finite number of initial assumptions.
And "it is a basic shortcoming of all such systems"
that they have to rely on a system extraneous to them for their proof of consistency. Gödel's theorem, therefore, cuts the ground under the efforts that view machines... as adequate models of the mind.
The bottom line is that any machine, because it embodies a formal system,
can never produce at least one truth, which the mind can without relying on other minds.... No matter how perfect the machine, it can never do everything that the human mind can.
So, our most porfect manmade system of thought will necessarily have to put its faith in at least one thought or principle or axiom or assumption or intuition or speculation or delusion or hallucination that the system cannot justify, and which comes from outside the system.
Therefore, if I am following my argument correctly, there is no escaping faith.
Back to our opening blast:"either we need revelation or we don't."
Looks like we do. But which one?
Well, in point of fact there are surprisingly few. Buddhism, for example, is not a revelation. Nor are the Upanishads or Bhagavad Gita. Besides, what's wrong with the one that stands at the ground of our civilization? I'm old enough to remember that Western civilization was the best of all civilizations, so I'll stick with the Greco-Judeo-Christian revelation, thank you.
Greco? Yes, that's one of the things I've been thinking about vis-a-vis revelation. You're free to take it or leave it -- Raccoon opinion diverges in the subject -- but ancient Greek philosophy may almost be thought of as a kind of complementary Old Testament to go along with the jewsual one.
Certainly the early Christian thinkers approached it this way, if not literally, then in spirit. That is, they were eager to ground the new revelation in the old, and also to show how the former was entirely consistent with the best available "manmade" philosophy.
I put manmade in quotes, because we already showed that no manmade philosophy is self-justifying, and must draw on something above, behind, or beyond itself.
As it so happens, I'm reading a book called From Plato to Christ: How Platonic Thought Shaped the Christian Faith that claims the works of Plato
can be most profitably read on two simultaneous levels: as works of genius in their own right and as inspired writings used by the God of the Bible to prepare the ancient world for the coming of Christ and the New Testament.
And why not? I say, the more testaments the merrier, so long as they not only don't contradict but deepen one another. Although you may not want to put him on the same level as the OT prophets,
Plato was nevertheless inspired by something beyond the confines of our natural world.... Plato glimpsed deep mysteries about the nature of God and man, the earth and the heavens, history and eternity, virtue and vice, and love and death that point to the fullness of the Judeo-Christian worldview.
Moreover,
The very reason that Aristotle and Virgil could serve as forerunners and guides to the two greatest repositories of medieval Catholic learning (the Summa theologiae and the Commedia) was because Aquinas and Dante understood that their pagan mentors had access to wisdom that transcended their time and place.
I think you just need to widen out your world, so it becomes a place where it is a matter of course for vertical energies to flow in from above in all sorts of ways. This was Chesterton's Universe (another book I recently read), which is vastly larger than the one confined to scientistic naturalism. The cosmos is always more than the cosmos, such that... how put it....
Let's just say the cosmos = cosmos + x. And x is... further discussed in the next post, I'll bet.
11 comments:
The formula titling the post is "Reality = Cosmos + X." Your ending formula is "Cosmos = Cosmos + X." Is that a typographical error, or, are you alluding to the solution to X?
As to Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, and others', works having a bearing on Christian learning, why wouldn't they, or couldn't they? It's not as if the intelligence of The Creator, as limited as it is for humans, was only instilled in Adam and Eve and then, poof, was forgotten.
For a machine to be a machine, it can have only a finite number of components and it can operate only on a finite number of initial assumptions.
To quote Homer J., "In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!"
Thanks Bob. I take your point that the Judaeo-Christian tradition is the ground of Western civilization but to suggest that the other great religions of the world contain no revelation is clearly untenable. After all, what is ‘revelation’ but Divine disclosures to humanity via the pronouncements of God-men, avatars, prophets and sages throughout history. In a 1947 letter to Benjamin Black Elk, Frithjof Schuon said the following:
“Very early in my life I saw the falseness of modern civilization—the ‘White Man’s way’—and I saw it for two reasons: First, I saw with my eyes and my heart the beauty, grandeur, and spirituality of the other civilizations and the ugliness and selfishness, the slave-minded materialism, of the modern civilization in which I grew up; second, I could never believe that one religion alone in the whole world was the true one and that all other religions were false. As a boy, when I read about non-Western peoples in books my father gave me, I could not believe that so many noble and wise men could have been abandoned by God and that so many bad Western whites could have received the truth; how could God, wishing to save every human soul, have given the saving truth to only one people and thus condemned so many others, who are no worse than these, to remain forever in deadly darkness? I soon came to feel that this must be false and that the holy Truth must have many forms, just as a light may have many colors; God has given the indispensable Truth to every race in a form that suited its corresponding mentality. Of course, there have been people who forgot this Truth, such as the ancient Europeans to whom God sent Christianity, but He did not send Christianity to all the people in the world, for most had not forgotten the meaning of their religion … The Great Spirit gave the indispensable Truth to every race: He gave the American Indians their manner of praying just as He gave Christians, Muslims, Hindus and Yellow peoples theirs. Every old and true religion is a necessary form of the eternal Truth and a gift from God.”
‘Splendor of the True’ (pp.202-203).
Eh. If I were an Indian I'd probably die of boredom, even before I died of being eaten by the tribe next door.
What an ignorant, uncharitable and disrespectful thing to say. What is it about Christians that seeks to demonize other traditions by portraying them in the worst possible light (and ignoring anything positive about them) while deliberately playing down the serious problems and limitations in their own religion? Stick to what you do best and leave commentary on other faiths to those who don’t hold them in contempt and who are much better informed.
And people vote with their feet. There's a reason Schuon chose to live in Bloomington rather than Baghdad, Bombay, or Beijing. What sane person wouldn't prefer all the benefits of the West?
And whom did I demonize? That I would be bored without books is just a fact, as is the fact of cannibalism, human sacrifice, and other problematic practices.
Joke that I first heard more than 70 years ago-
Saint Peter is giving an introductory tour of Heaven to a new arrival. "That section over there is for the Buddhists, beyond that are the Muslims, then the Presbyterians, Anabaptists, Hindi, ...".
"Who is behind that big wall over there?"
"Shhh, those are the Catholics. They think they're the only ones here.".
Whoever wants to know what the serious objections to Christianity are should ask us. The unbeliever has only silly objections.
"I'll stick with the Greco-Judeo-Christian..."
I suppose you're using it a bit differently, but Greco without Roman, just seems lonely, like the OT without the NT. And as of all the times & places he could've chosen to visit, he came to a Roman occupied zone, I'll stick with the ol' Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian. But that may just be me.
That’s true about Schuon living in Bloomington . But Bob you certainly know that he was there to be close to a native American community to practice their primal religion. It is also noteworthy that he believed the American Indian’s religion was an equally salvific vehicle for its adherents to the Christian tradition . With regards to voting with one’s feet , it should also be noted that three of the four founding members of the Perrenialist School became practicing Muslims - the first of which , Rene Guenon , abandoned his Roman Catholicism and spent the remainder of his life in Cairo Egypt.
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