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to Unedited Philosophy Quotes and Ramblings about Intequinism.
Book: THE MYTH OF RELIGIOUS NEUTRALITY: An Essay on the
Hidden Role of Religious Belief in Theories
Author: Roy A.
Clouser
Edition: Revised
Edition
Copyright: 2005
University of Notre Dame
Publisher:
University of Notre Dame Press
Place: Notre Dame,
Indiana
Reader: Mnr.
Marquard Dirk Pienaar
p 3
"To be more
precise, I will contend that one or another religious belief
controls theory making in such a way that the interpretation of
the contents of a theory differs depending on the contents
of religious belief it presupposes."
p 4
"This position is
bound to provoke stiff resistance from many quarters, and
doubtless one of the strongest objections will be directed
against my claim that the influence of religious belief
extends to everyone."
"What will be
demonstrated is that no abstract explanatory theory can fail
to include or presuppose a religious belief. In that case,
we may say that the
only people who could possibly avoid all religious belief
are those who believe no theory whatever!"
p 9
"The second thing
to remember is that the definition I will offer focuses on
one particular use of the term "religion," the sense in
which it qualifies belief.
p 15-16
"Now there are at
least two senses in which one belief may be primary with
respect to another. One is a noetic sense, that
is, a sense that concerns the order of our beliefs. In this
sense one belief is primary with respect to another when it
is a necessary presupposition to the other, such that one
could hold the secondary belief without already holding (or
assuming) the primary belief. The other sense of primacy is
ontic, that is,
it concerns the order of reality. In this sense one belief
is primary with respect to another when the object of the
secondary belief is taken to depend on the object of the
primary belief for its reality. … In the first case, the
primary belief is necessary to hold the secondary belief; in
the second case the object of the primary belief is held to
be what generates the reality of the object of the secondary
belief."
p 17
"In Hesiod's
account, the natural world in an undifferentiated state is
what just is; it exists unconditionally and gave rise to
everything else after it generated a gap between the earth
and the heavens he called Chaos. Following
that initial change, all other specific forms of existence
were generated including the gods. According to Homer the
primordial reality was Okeanos, a vast
expanse of watery stuff from which arose all else including
the gods."
P 18
"The proposal is
that we think of what may be common to the various primary
divinities as the status
of divinity, on the one hand, and distinguish that
from the specific
description of whatever is believed to occupy that status,
on the other hand."
P 19
"So the question
is: is there anything that can, in a parallel way, be
distinguished as the status of per se divinity? Is it
possible .. common agreement among all religions as to what it means to be
divine? … Now this is exactly what I find to be the
case! For I have never found a single religion that fails to
hold the divine per se to be whatever is
unconditionally non-dependently real."
P 21-24
" .. I formulate
as follows: A religious belief is a belief in something as
divine per se no matter how that is further described, where
"divine per se" means having unconditionally non-dependant
reality. … To be complete, therefore, our definition must be
expanded as follows. A belief is a religious belief provided
that:
(1) It is a belief in something as divine per se no
matter how that is further described, or
(2) it is a belief about how the non-divine depends
upon the divine per se, or
(3) it is a belief about how humans come to stand
in proper relation to the divine per se,
(4) where the essential core of divinity per se is
to have the status of unconditionally non-dependent
reality."
P 27
" .. , that person
would still have to admit that the things we observe in the universe are
not divine."
P 29
'In the ancient
world there were Greek mystery religions in which the divine
was believed to be "the ever-flowing stream of life and matter."'
P33
'To rephrase the
quote from Luther cited earlier: whatever our heart clings
and entrusts itself to as unconditionally
trustworthy is really our God (our per se divinity). …
And this remains the case whether or not a believer's
subjective feelings
of confidence do or do not correspond to the unconditional
status believed to be possessed by the object of his or her
trust. … As I see it, faith or trust "in" something is the
more basic expression, used to signify trust in its central
meaning: openhearted acceptance of, and reliance on, what is
believed. On the other hand, faith or trust "that" something
is the case is an expression which is used with respect to
belief which has undergone reflective judgment.'
P36
"Doesn't
materialism require a distinctive view of human values and
happiness which is offered as the proper way to live
in the light of its alleged truth? Doesn't it require, e.g.,
either that there are no real value properties in the world
or that they are all physically determined?"
P52 - About the
biblical type (Clouser's theory is according to him
radically biblical but not fundamentalist)
'And although
biblical religion stresses the role of experience in a
person's belief in God, it does not require it to be a
"mystical" experience in the sense that Hinduism or Buddhism
require. On the biblical view, since God completely
transcends creation, even experiences of unity with God are
never taken to be with God's essential being but are always
mediated through (and to) something he has created. Still
less does any experience lead to becoming part of
God. The promised destiny of believers is not to be absorbed
into God's Being, since in the biblical religions humans are
and always will be creatures distinct from God.'
Self
Clouser uses the
word "transcend" as something God does from outside the
universe into the universe. Other philosophers for example
Kant and Jaspers use the word "transcend" as an action by
humans.
P70
"Earlier we saw
that some sciences theorize across aspects as well as within
them. This allowed us to notice the possibility of
developing a more general theory not restricted to a
specific aspect, but one that gives an account of how
properties of different aspects interconnect in certain
data. That point raises the possibility of a wholly general
theory, a theory about how all the aspects
connect."
P71
'But just what is
meant by a "general theory of reality"? It is a theory that
tries to discover the essential
nature of reality. Its aim may be stated as trying to
find what kinds
of things there are. But saying it this way must not be
mistaken for asking what types of things
exist. Types of things would be an enormous list that would
include: shoes, mountains, animals, clouds, people, etc. So
the question here is not what types of things there are, but
what is the most basic nature of them all. The traditional
approach to answering that question can be thought of this
way: if the various aspects of the things we experience are
represented as beads on a necklace, then a general theory of
reality wants to know "What is the string?'
P72
"It should be
clear, then, that theories of knowledge and reality seek to
explain the general connectedness between the aspects
forming the domains of all sciences in a way that parallels
the way most sciences try to explain the relations of data within a particular
aspect."
P76
"So the real role
of experiments in theory making is more subtle. It is this:
when a theory survives a number of (well-planned and
well-executed) attempts to prove it falls, theorists in that
field regard themselves as justified in being more confident
about it. The theory is then said to be confirmed by
experiments. (Experiments can have other employments as
well, of course. They can, e.g., help decide between
competing theories.) But no set of successful experiments
can ever reach the point of conclusively proving a theory
true."
Self
I think it was
Popper who explained that my paper "experiment", which shows
that honesties cause creativities, is not a theory or an
experiment, it is logic, therefore it is confirmed as
correct.
P77
'So I call this
second type of theory a "perspectival" hypothesis. … It then
defends its priority assignment by arguing that its chosen
aspect accounts for the connectedness between all the others
because all the
others are either identical with or generated by the
one(s) assigned priority. The priority is therefore an
ontological priority.'
CRITERIA FOR
JUDGING THEORIES
P84-87
'The first of
these criteria rules out any theory that makes a claim
which, while not contradicting any other statement of the
theory, is incompatible with itself. Following a number of
recent thinkers, I will call such a claim
"self-referentially incoherent." … example of the strong
sense .. "Nothing can be said of the Tao." …
The next criterion
says that a theory must not be incompatible with any belief
we have to assume for the theory to be true. I will call a
theory that violates this rule "self-assumptively
incoherent." As an example of this incoherence consider the
claim made by some philosophers that all things are
exclusively physical. This has been explained by its
advocates to mean that nothing has any property or is
governed by any law that is not a physical property or a
physical law. But the very sentence expressing this claim,
the sentence "All things are exclusively physical," must be
assumed to possess a linguistic meaning. … Moreover, to
assert this exclusivist materialism is the same as claiming
it is true, which is another nonphysical property; and the
claim that it is true further assumes that its denial would
have to be false, which is a relation guaranteed by logical,
not physical, laws. …
The last of the
three criteria, like the previous one, also has to do with
the compatibility of a theory with a factor that lies
outside its explicit content. But rather than being
concerned with the compatibility of a theory with its own
unstated assumptions, this final one concerns the
compatibility of a theory with conditions necessary for its
production. In other words, it says that a theory must be
compatible with any state that would have to be true of a
thinker, or any activity the thinker would have to perform,
in order to have formulated the theory's claims. To borrow
and recast an old Marxist expression, a theory must be
compatible with "the means of its production." Any theory
that violates this criterion will be said to be
"self-performatively incoherent." … To illustrate the weak
version of the criterion, take the case in which we are
asked to determine the temperature of water in a glass by
using a thermometer. The fact is, once we put the
thermometer into the water we cannot coherently claim to
know what the temperature was prior to performing that act.
…
A more serious
example of the strong sense of this incoherency is the one
offered by Descartes … "I do not exist." …
Ascribing
independent existence to any aspect is always
self-performatively incoherent in the weak sense. Its
employment will show that any attempt to justify
the claim that an abstracted aspect is self-existent (and
thus divine) is always in-compatible with the activity of
abstraction required to make the claim.'
P114
"The biblical view
is not that rain and other natural events are all partly
miraculous, but that none of the things, events, or laws
found in nature would exist at all unless God had created
them and continued to sustain them.
So while it is the
case that God's creativity and providence are the ultimate
reason why there are such things as winds, clouds, and
water, and the laws which guarantee their orderliness, it is the created order
which explains created events in the sense that science
looks for explanations. A scientific explanation of
rain does not include why space, time, matter/energy, and
all the laws that govern creation exist at all. That is a
metaphysical and – ultimately – religious issue.
Moreover, while God is the creator of the causal order which
allows us to explain rainfall, he is not himself one of its
causes alongside all the other causes – not even its first
cause. Strictly speaking, God is not the cause of the
universe, but the creator of all the kinds of
causality in the universe."
P117
"Thus the account
is intended as a literary framework – a figure of speech –
rather than as a literal six days. This is confirmed by the
internal structure of the account when we notice the way
Days 4, 5, and 6 correspond to Days 1, 2, and 3. Day 1
separates light from darkness, while Day 4 introduces the
sun, moon, and stars; Day 2 separates sea from atmosphere,
while Day 5 speaks of the creation of sea life and birds;
and Day 3 sees the appearance of dry land and plants while
Day 6 records the creation of animals and humans. The
following diagram may help convey this correspondence:
|
Day 1 light darkness |
Day 2 sea atmosphere |
Day 3 land plants |
|
Day 4 sun moon stars |
Day 5 sea life birds |
Day 6 animals humans |
This
correspondence is just too prominent a feature of the
account to be mere coincidence."
Self
Whilst reading
Clousers book I thought God made something on the 8th
and 9th days as well and rested again on the 10th
day because the work on the 9th and 8th
period was as much work as from the 1st to the 6th
period.
P124-125
"One point cannot
be overemphasized: a presupposition is a belief. This is
why, strictly speaking, it is not beliefs or the sentences
which express them that presuppose; it is people who
presuppose. It is people who may presuppose the truth of one
belief when they hold another belief. Thus a presupposition
is a belief-in-relation to some other belief; it is a belief
anyone would have to hold in order to accept another belief
to which it is the presupposition."
P186
"Aspects, we saw,
are basic kinds
of properties and laws, and what I'm about to say about them
applies equally to any listing of them a thinker accepts,
not just the list I'm provisionally working with. My
examples will, however, be drawn from that list because most
of its members are so widely accepted. You may also recall
that theories of reality have traditionally taken some one
or two aspects as the basic nature of all reality. They have
done this by proposing either that their favored aspect is
the only genuine one (the strong version of reduction), or
that their favoured aspects generate all the others (the
weak version of reduction)."
P187-188
"The question is
this: what makes it
possible (and actual) for properties of the different
aspectual kinds to be connected in the way we find them to
be in our experience, or postulate them to be in our
theories? … This is why hypotheses about the basic
nature of reality (the string for the beads of the necklace)
were among the first to be proposed when systematic theory
making first arose (so far as we know this was in ancient
Greece). …
The first stage of
the argument in favour of the unavoidability of accounting
for the inter-aspectual connectedness is drawn from the
activity of abstraction necessary to the construction of any
theory. … We noticed, too, that a high degree of abstraction
is required for theories of science and philosophy, a degree
that isolates not only individual properties but whole kinds
of them from the objects that exhibit them. … <p188>
Therefore, as long as high abstraction is unavoidable to
forming theories, the question of how the different
aspectual kinds connect is also unavoidable. … By contrast,
pre-theoretical thinking never raises the question of how
the law-and-property-kinds relate, since it never abstracts
them from the things that exhibit them, nor distinguishes
them from one another sharply enough to make their
connectedness into a problem.
P191
"Whatever makes
possible and actual the connectedness between qualitatively
different kinds of properties and laws is what they all
depend on for their existence, since – so far as we can
think of them at all – they can't exist apart from one
another. That is why theories have been forced to offer
explanations as to the nature of their connectedness. ..
weak reduction … strong reductionist theory …"
p200-201
'Here then is an
impressive array of replies to the (preliminary) objections
listed above. They don't dispel the irony of the fact that
theistic thinkers intent on harmonizing their theories with
belief in a transcendent Creator, have
favoured a way of doing it which insists that many entities
and properties found in the cosmos are independent of God
and therefore uncreated. Nor do they dent the even greater
irony that the reason of these thinkers have felt compelled
to hold such a position is their understanding of the nature
of that Creator! But the irony of this theology is not an
argument against it. The questions before us are whether
this view of God's nature is (1) internally coherent, and (2) consistent
with what is revealed about God in scripture. These
questions are important because it is this view of
God's nature which is what I referred to above as the
deepest presupposition of the attempts of theists to
retain reduction theories. So in the course of
examining it I will try to make clear why and how it
commends rather than forbids the reduction strategy for
theories, as well as say why I find it to be an unacceptable
view of God. I will argue that it is unacceptable because it
has difficulties of internal coherence which can only be
solved in ways that leave it incompatible with the biblical
doctrine of creation. Since that is to be a central point of
this critique, it is therefore necessary that we be as clear
as possible about the meaning of the term "created" before
going any further. To that end, we must now distinguish
three senses in which something may be said to be created.
The sense in which
we most commonly use the term is that something is said to
be created if there is a time at which it comes to be,
before which it did not exist. From now on, I will call this
sense of the term created1. Another sense in which one thing
is said to be created by another is when it is produced
<p.201> by and is distinct in being from the other.
This sense is important in speech about God since it is how
scripture speaks of everything other than God as His
creation. I will call this sense of the term created2. The
third sense is one I will follow Thomas Aquinas in
distinguishing from the first two senses. In this third
sense, something will be said to be created3 if it is wholly
dependent on God for its existence such that had not God
brought it about it would not exist. God can, of course, do
this ex nihilo; that is He can do it "out of nothing" where
"nothing" is not the name of reality but the assertion that
aside from God bringing something else into existence there
would be only God. But once God has brought it about that
there are creatures in addition to Himself He can also use
the agency of some of them to bring about yet other things
and events, all of which would also entirely depend on Him
in this third sense.'
p.203
"Finally, there is
the premise that God has only perfections. This means that
God not only possesses all the great-making attributes, but
that nothing else is true of Him. He has all and only
perfections; that is why He is the greatest possible being.
Put another way: if God had properties that were less than
perfections, He would not be the greatest conceivable being,
for we could then conceive of a being with only perfections
and it, not God,
would thereby be the greatest being conceivable. Once again,
I find this premise also to be highly objectionable."
"Please keep in
mind as we proceed, that the reason for this excursion into
philosophical theology is to show how and why the AAA view requires the cosmos to
be explained reductionistically, while the C/R view of God
forbids reduction."
p.210
"It is this:
according to the AAA position, God's attributes (goodness,
justice, or power, e.g.) exist as necessarily and are as
uncreated as He is and
are shared (in a lesser degree) by humans. The
difficulty with this that humans are thereby made to be
(partly) divine because the qualities humans share with God
would have to be as uncreated3 in us as they are in God."
p.211
"But humans would
not be wholly
creatures, which is exactly the way scripture depicts them."
p.216
"Finally, consider
1 Corinthians 15:24-28 as compared with Colossians 1:17. In
the latter passage Christ (in his divine nature) is said to
be the one on whom "all things" depend, while the former
says that in God's final kingdom Christ will rule "all
things" except for God himself. It seems quite natural to
understand "all things" as having the same extension in each
case: Christ rules what depends on him. But if that is
right, then we have the explicit teaching that nothing about
creation2 is either uncreated3 or not ruled by Christ except for God Himself.
Thus the extension of "all things" is established as
everything other than God, visible or invisible!"
p.217
"Rather, humans
are in God's image and can know God because God has assumed
to Himself created3 relations and properties we know from
His having also placed them in the world and in us."
p.226
"Thus while it is
beyond us to grasp conceptually what that being is,
we can have the idea that
there is ultimate, unconditional being upon which all else
stands in the relation of total dependence.
p.230
".. God anthropomorphized
Himself."
Chapter
11
– A non-reductionist theory of reality
p.241
"SOME GUIDING
PRINCIPLES …
It is the principle of
pancreation defended in the last chapter: Everything other than
God is His creation and nothing in creation, about
creation, or true of creation is self-existent. … the
principle of
irreducibility: No
aspect of creation is to be regarded as either the only
genuine aspect or as making the existence of any other
possible or actual."
p.243
THE
FRAMEWORK OF LAWS THEORY
p.244
'There are several
species of laws that will need to be distinguished as we
pursue this approach. One of these is what we usually call
"causal laws," another is what I've been calling "aspectual
laws," while a third is what I will term a "type law." … our
provisional list of aspects so as to clarify several of its
members:
fiduciary
ethical
justitial
aesthetic
economic
social
linguistic
historical
logical
sensory
biotic
physical
kinetic
spatial
quantitative
I have tried to
avoid nouns to designate the members of this list since
nouns tend to promote the misunderstanding that these are
classes or groups of things.'
p.252
'So far as we
know, of all the creatures in the earthly cosmos, only
humans have active functions in all the aspects.
Perhaps the
following diagram will help make this part of our theory
clearer:
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Fiduciary |
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Ethical |
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Justitial |
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Aesthetic |
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Economic |
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Social |
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Linguistic |
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Historical |
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Logical |
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Sensory |
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Biotic |
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Physical |
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Kinematic |
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Spatial |
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Quantitative |
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Rock |
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Tree |
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Animal |
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Active
function |
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Passive
function |
Figure 6'
p.254
'.. the principle of
aspectual universality: Every aspect is an
aspect of all creatures since all creation exists and
functions under all the laws of every aspect
simultaneously.'
p.257
'.. principle of aspectual
inseparability. This means that aspects cannot be
isolated from one another since their very intelligibility
depends on their connectedness.'
p.260
'THE NATURES OF THINGS
A.
Natural Things
...: the
qualifying aspect of a thing is the aspect whose laws
regulate the internal organization of the thing taken as a
whole.'
p.263
'B.
Artifacts'
p.267
'Here, then is a
summary of the concept so far introduced by the law
framework theory: