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PaperclipPerfector  21d ago (text post)   32355 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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I fail to understand why the similarity of the gospels to myth, whether for, or against, or both(?) has relevance to whether or not god exists.

Like "humans tend to tell similar sorts of stories, with some differences" is a perfectly reasonable rebuttal to these kinds of arguments.

You're thinking of God's existence as an empirical question whereas Lewis is not thinking about it in those terms and considers it a spiritual question, wherein truth takes a more directional form as the nature of things is considered ineffable.

Humans tell similar stories because those stories are true. And they tend to be true insofar as they are similar.

You can't refute the virtue of heroism, that's a category error. There's no evidence that's going to come in and convince the nature of the human experience of the universe to be different from what it is fundamentally.

"God exists" really means "the universe has intentional meaning". Is it more right (in a axiological sense) to believe in this proposition or not? That's essentially what religion is about. Not whether some specific physical claim can be proven.

You can arrive at some rationalistic explanation for this through some evolutionary model and arrive at some model of values that way, but it's eventually going to become homomorphic to religion and natural law insofar as one is willing to have the humility to provide for being inside what's being modeled.

"God exists" really means "the universe has intentional meaning". Is it more right (in a axiological sense) to believe in this proposition or not? That's essentially what religion is about. Not whether some specific physical claim can be proven.

I think this take would have been considered blasphemous in most religious societies.

Religions have both exoteric and esoteric meaning, and it is usually forbidden to mix them in public, that is correct.

I don't recommend evaluating the content of a philosophy by what random people off the street tolerate.

wherein truth takes a more directional form

The existence of God is one of the least “directional” questions we can consider.

What people want from God is immortality. They want a guarantee that biological death is not the end. My immortal soul will either ascend to paradise upon my death (or I will experience bodily resurrection at some point in the future etc, whatever your preferred theology is), or it won’t. That makes a big difference in terms of what I can expect to directly experience in the future. Being “directionally correct” is cold comfort if you don’t get the actual immortality along with it.

The retreat from viewing eternal life and eternal damnation as very concrete, tangible, and urgent matters is yet another symptom of religion continuing to cede ground to materialism and atheism.

I find the concern with one's corporeal life instead of the symbolic meaning thereof to be the cthonic position here actually.

Souls aren't material objects.

The existence of God is one of the least “directional” questions we can consider.

I don't think so. Orthodox Christian theology indicates that God does not exist in any sense that we could comprehend as existence. To say that God exists would be considered inaccurate, as the notion of 'existence' we're (capable of) using does not apply here. But it would also be wrong to say that God does not exist, as our idea of that is wrong too. God is beyond existence and nonexistence.

What people want from God is immortality. They want a guarantee that biological death is not the end. My immortal soul will either ascend to paradise upon my death (or I will experience bodily resurrection at some point in the future etc, whatever your preferred theology is), or it won’t. That makes a big difference in terms of what I can expect to directly experience in the future. Being “directionally correct” is cold comfort if you don’t get the actual immortality along with it.

How do you explain pre-Christian Judaism, in which major schools of thought denied an afterlife and most of the major ones said 'idk' at best? Personally, while I like my (wrong) notions of what eternal existence will be, I'm much more concerned about what we might call ultimate consequence. Meaning, if you will. I don't need personal eternal existence to live a meaningful life.

Or, you know, any pagan religion which doesn't posit an afterlife, or indicates that the afterlife is fairly uniformly terrible.

Being “directionally correct” is cold comfort if you don’t get the actual immortality along with it.

I'd take being sure of that in a heartbeat.

The retreat from viewing eternal life and eternal damnation as very concrete, tangible, and urgent matters is yet another symptom of religion continuing to cede ground to materialism and atheism.

This narrative just doesn't ring true to me at all, not least for the reasons above.

To this comment I'll append some words by Fr. Thomas Hopko of blessed memory.

Did not expect to see a reference to Fr. Thomas Hopko here… he baptized me as an infant.

…In the Latin, Aristotelian line, God was being, but not becoming; God was unchanging but not changing; God was simple and not multiple; God was static and not moving, not dynamic, and so on. Whereas the Bible, or how the Eastern Fathers, like Gregory and Basil and the other Gregory and Maximos and Simian and others said — especially Dionysius — they said, ‘No; God is completely different! God’s not like anything that exists. God is beyond being. He’s beyond becoming, beyond un-being. That in God, the one and the many — God isn’t one as opposed to many; God is beyond one and many. But He reveals Himself to us as being itself, as goodness itself, love itself, truth itself… but He also reveals Himself in a multiplicity, countless number of the divine actions and energies because He is the living God, and these operations or actions or energies of God, His speaking, His acting, His being angry, His revealing Himself, His hiding Himself — these are all real. God is a living God. He’s beyond anything in the created order. We can’t simply identify Him with ‘being’. In fact, Gregory of Palamas will say, ‘If God is being, I am not. If I am being, God is not. If God is, I am not. If I am, God is not.’ What he meant by that is, you can’t use the term ‘being’ for God and for creation in the same way.

Now if you say that ‘God is’, then you have to qualify that God is beyond anything. For example, if a Christian was, let’s say, walking down the street, and wearing a cross, and some person came up to him and said ‘Hey, are you a Christian, you’re a believer, you have that cross on?’ Say ‘Yeah’. And then if the person said, ‘Do you believe God exists?’ And of course the first Christian answer would be ‘Yes, of course. We believe God exists.’ But if we were really doing our duty, according to the Bible and according to the Holy Fathers — certainly according to St. Gregory of Palamas — we would say to that person, ‘You have a minute? Let’s chat.’ And then we’d say to that person, ‘You know, I just said to you “God exists.” And by that I mean, yes, there is God. Yes. It is not true that there is no God. There is God. But, if you think that God exists like I exist, or you exist, or that building or that tree exists, or even like the planet Earth exists, or like the hundred billion galaxies with the hundred billion stars in the expanding universe exist, then we would have to say God does not exist. God brings into existence creatures who can say that they exist. But God is beyond existence. He’s even beyond non-existence.’

In his summary of the patristic writings that he wrote in the Ninth Century, St. John of Damascus said, ‘God is not only beyond being, He’s beyond non-being.’ That we have to negate even the negations that we make about God. Because if we say that God does not exist like the creation exists, that concept would even be somehow contingent upon an idea of creation. But God, as Prophet Isaiah said [a] long time before Jesus, ‘God doesn’t have any comparisons.’ There’s nothing in Heaven and on Earth to compare with Him. As it was already revealed to the men and women of the old covenant, God is holy. Kadosha, holy. And ‘holy’ means not like anything else. It means completely different; completely other. Like there’s nothing you can say about God but just to contemplate His activities in silence. St. Gregory of Nyssa says, quoting Psalm 116, ‘If we dare to speak about God, then every man is a liar.’ ‘Cause whatever we say, we have to correct somehow. Even the great Englishman and great theological writer, John Henry Newman, who was a Church of England person who became a Roman Catholic, mainly because of the Church Fathers, he said that theology for a Christian is ‘saying and unsaying to a positive effect’. Metropolitan Kallistos Ware quoted that once. I loved it. He says that that’s the same thing that the Eastern Church Fathers say. Theology is saying and unsaying for a positive effect. For a good reason. Because you affirm something — in technical language, that’s called cataphatic — and then you negate it. That’s called apophatic. And so when you say anything about what God is or what God is like, you can say it! You can say ‘God exists, God is good, God is love’, but immediately you have to correct it and say, ‘not like being and not like goodness and not like love that we can capture with our mind. God is way beyond that.’

Nevertheless, He acts. He speaks. He shows Himself. As Gregory of Nyssa said way back in the Fourth Century, ‘His actions and operations,’ he said, ‘they descend even unto us.’

This reads like modern neogender theory.

Yeschad.jpg

Liberalism is rebellion incarnate, and rebellion incarnate works only by self-deification. Neogender theory is describing the self as God.

You're thinking of God's existence as an empirical question whereas Lewis is not thinking about it in those terms and considers it a spiritual question, I mean you've got me there. I think it's clearly an empirical question, especially when talking about the Christian god.

Not whether some specific physical claim can be proven. Christianity tends to make a lot of physical claim - most Christians seem to believe miracles are possible, or that god can answer prayers.

I'm always frustrated when these topics come up because people with totally different vocabularies of the same words just talk past each other because the cogs don't roll the same way.

What's a miracle to you?

If your mother falls deathly ill of an incurable illness, you piously pray every day while doing everything in your power to sate her and she makes an unexpected recovery, did a miracle occur?

Did the laws of physics get suspended to make this happen or is your mother just so extremely lucky? Is there a functional difference between these two statements?

One of the main innovations of Abrahamism is the metaphysical claim that fortune or fate isn't separate from the intentional will behind the existence of the universe. This is usually called Providence.

Insofar as miracles make sense as a concept within this framework, one has to distinguish between the general form that upholds the natural order and the special form where God (the breath behind the universe) intervenes more directly in the lives of people.

Positions on this latter category vary of course. But it doesn't seem to me that this general metaphysical principle is a testable claim.

You are right to feel underwhelmed, because Lewis wasn't so much putting forward an argument in favor of Christianity there but responding to one of the current significant arguments against Christianity of his day: that because Christianity is similar to other myths, it must not be true. As Lewis wrote,

If you start by knowing on other grounds that Christianity is false, then the pagan stories may be another nail in its coffin: just as if you started by knowing that there were no such things as crocodiles, then the various stories about dragons might help to confirm your disbelief. But if the truth or falsehood of Christianity is the very question you are discussing, then the argument from anthropology is surely a petitio*

In other words, yes, "people tend to tell the same kind of stories" is a perfectly reasonable explanation of the phenomenon. But its not a good positive argument against Christianity being true, which is what atheists were claiming at the time.

*Meaning, begging the question.

Hm, thanks for that explanation, I see what he's going for and why he'd make both kinds of arguments. Kind of agree with him that similarity to other religions is not really the best angle to go for if you're trying to refute Christianity. (I guess I think there's a bit of an angle here -> it's weak evidence that Christianity is the result of the same process that makes humans tell pagan myths, but not really enough on it's own)

it's weak evidence that Christianity is the result of the same process that makes humans tell pagan myths

Lewis would agree, but would say that the process that makes humans tell pagan myths could be the fact that there is a God, so it's not good evidence either way.

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