What Can We Believe, Then?

[Rhizomorph13]

Because I hit him where it hurts, Rhiz.

Yeah, you bull-baited him into engaging you while completely missing the point of the thread. Great job! /sarcasm

I just don't get it though. If it were me and I asked a question to a bunch of people like, "Hey what do you think about solipsism?" while wearing a shirt about atheism and one of those people told me, "Atheists are a bunch of assholes!" while several people answered my question. I would want to talk to the people who answered me.

[Minimalist]

Because reality cannot be so easily separated from "philosophy." He knows the problems the church has brought on itself; its been headline news for years now. To sit there and simply pretend those issues do not exist while extolling the virtues of the organization which caused them is to simply stretch reality to the breaking point.

Most catholics I knew have given up on the church in disgust. Many have quit outright. So when an apologist shows up who is willing to overlook their crimes I am going to call him on it.

By all means, feel free to engage him on whatever grounds you like.

[QuestingHound08]

Of course you've hit me where it hurts--the only reason to be hurt by someone not agreeing with you, is if there's something going on that can legitimately distract them from agreeing with you, and you feel guilty for it (for myself, it's not living my own creed as well as I should--I'm also aware that it's happened with other Catholics)...that distraction is that people are not living their faith. Seeing that failure in Catholics, other people may assume either that the non-faithful Catholics are representative of all Catholicism, or else that Catholicism has no power to change a persons' life by bringing them in touch with the Truth. Neither of those options are the case.

it's true that specific disobedient priests have abused people, and specific other disobedient bishops or higher-ups have covered it up. And they're being called to account for it, as they should be. But those abuses and cover-ups and scandals are never what the Church stands for. They're stupid decisions, at best--Watergate moments within the history of the Church. You can indict Nixon--but you don't indict the US government, or the office of the Presidency. Individuals committed a crime--and other individuals coverd it up.

And no amount of other abuse by other groups of people can make it less of a crime than it is. I agree with you and applaud you for seeing that statement through. I think you also see that your view on the Catholic Church is an inability to get over that statistic, and a willing to use that particular scandal as the face or facade of what the Catholic Church is, or an aggravator of other issues on which you think you disagree with them--at least, in your post, that's how it seemed to me.

So yes--I don't overlook anyone's crimes. I also don't impute those crimes to anyone who didn't commit them. Any Church lasting 2000 years and including most of the Western World necessarily has sins committed by people who claim to belong to it, or even to administrate it. But that doesn't falsify what the institution is, any more than it would discredit, say, the Green Movement if Ralph Nader picked up a shotgun and started blowing people away or doing sick things...it would just get a lot of bad mileage for the party, in the public press. I'm not some rabid conservative who believes everything that EVERYONE claiming to belong to my pet party does is correct--but I'm asking you, if you really want to relate to or even to justly criticize what the Church is, to look at what her actual doctrines and teachings are...look at the planks she's laid down for a vision of reality. If you disagree with those, there's capacity for arguing and for dialoguing about why. If I just react to an impression of a group, culled from its sickest members, then I'm never going to be open to actually saying the truth about it.

I'd just be running off of my own fumes.

---

So, why would you focus on Min's post when there are people who actually answered your question and not just attack your character?

You're right, Rhiz.

I guess the answer I would give so far is this: certainty is never ultimately possible, unless there's some type of Beatific Vision where Ultimate Reality directly feeds it into you. We can always doubt that our faculties are gathering objective information.

So, to have stable knowledge, you have to start somewhere--first your experience (or you have nothing to start with), then a willingness to post-pone judgment, or to be persuaded by what you experience (or else you STILL have nothing to use). Then, an attempt to consistently analyze that material you've accepted. Then, ability to grasp it in its entirety, parts-and-whole. At least, that's the four levels of knowledge the Greeks taught--Poetic Intuition, Rhetorical Persuasion, Analytical Dialectic, and Contemplative Scientia (seeing things directly in their essence).

The fact that we need to accept SOMETHING more or less blindly, doesn't mean that we need to, as some commented "insert an imaginary architect" into the process as a Deus Ex Machina, or cheap shortcut to have things make sense...but we need to be open to EXPLORING the phenomena of a seemingly ordered universe, or that we have the desire to know. That means, if one wants to reject God conclusively, but to do it with integrity like a good existentialist (Nietzsche, one of the most intriguing authors I have ever heard of, had moments where he felt this attraction to the world's intelligibility)--that person first must be willing to explore the idea that a Person-al Being could be behind this order that speaks to us so powerfully as persons. If one is ever fully seeking the truth, that person ought to be willing to find it anywhere. To say 'I'll search anywhere--but just not there!' is a forfeiture.

Violence and disorder within the human experience certainly exists--but that is not as remarkable as the fact that, with all the limited vision we have, and all the turbulence we experience, we act as if we're made for understanding, and we desire to understand.

[Rhizomorph13]

Our faculties never gather objective information, everything we perceive is filtered through everything we have experienced and what we have decided about those experiences. That doesn't mean we can't know anything, it just means that we have to develop a standard for knowledge that is based on more than just our own perceptions. For me that would be peer reviewed opinions based on evidence and the scientific method.

I've heard it said that God is the objective thing behind all things. For example He offers objective morality. Well, that's nice, except that objective message has to come through the subjective experience of a human mind so how objective could it be really?

[QuestingHound08]

Our faculties never gather objective information, everything we perceive is filtered through everything we have experienced and what we have decided about those experiences. That doesn't mean we can't know anything, it just means that we have to develop a standard for knowledge that is based on more than just our own perceptions. For me that would be peer reviewed opinions based on evidence and the scientific method.

Quite right--we start with our experiences, and what we've decided about them. But the interpretative step we take in deciding to believe something is a real step, something like the difference between having vague and disconnected sensations, and having a unified concept formed in the brain. My understanding is that animals are able to respond directly to experiential stimuli, without understanding them. We have instincts that make us jump when we hear a loud noise, before our understanding interprets it. When we interpret it, however, we impose or accept a meaning giving form and coherence to that information. Why we should ever take that step at all is a big question...

Peer review and scientific method--both those standards show that you are a person of common sense--by which I mean, you believe in a sense of reality common and objective, able to be checked up against the experiences of others, and tested by a consistent method. A fool is (at least, in the explanations I have heard) someone who lives in their own mind, and is unaware or purposely ignoring its connections to others, and its sources of meaning. Such a one is by necessity, perpetually isolated from anyone but themselves, because they insist on only mediating reality (including their knowledge of others) through their own artificial lens.

But with you, that doesn't seem to be the case. Why we have that reliance in the experiences of others, or a stationary empirical method...that is another question. I think of it as part of our natural (at least, present in infancy) orientation towards receiving the experiential world as if it can and ought to be understood. That basic positive direction of learning allows us to use different tools like the experiences of others, and a system of examination, to grow in a systematic and relational way. But none of it, none of it would be any good if we didn't have the conviction that there was a real world to come to know. And that conviction ultimately gets down to a personal experience of life--an experience telling you that life has to be either ordered and purposeless, or ordered and purposeful..and, if you're Christian, experience is grounded in a permeating experience of relationship to a Person--a Someone shining through the order of the world as a pen-pal's personality-ness shines through the lines of ordered symbols on a page. We not only see the organization--we understand some hint of a message. So you're right--whichever way you choose, a view of reality is based upon a subjective experience, taken either to order and purpose, or order and purposelessness. And a lot of temptation remains to make the rest of our lives simply an evidence-gathering expedition for the conclusion we've already made. Although, in a purposeless universe, I don't much see the purpose in that . I humbly submit that life be explored to the 'enth degree, by opening up all the doors that reality provides. That means exploring what the world would be like without purpose--but that's a dead end. It's like that dead-end street in the first matrix movie. I've just found that belief in God is a door which opens up possibiilities for living that are huge--curiously without shutting down any of my other doors. Even out of sheer love of adventure alone, and out of integrity of searching, I'd have to check it out. Also--there are just creepy ways that it starts fulfilling desires and intuitions one picks up as a kid, just looking at the world. Personally I think that's why Socrates and Plato, Aristotle, these guys who just hunted the truth ruthlessly down--believed in a God, even if they couldn't understand Him personally, yet.

Sorry--I'm blathering on. I DO appreciate your comments and your thoughtful remarks.

[Rhizomorph13]

You are verbose. I think we make our own purpose based on desires. I think the only reason we integrate into society, or even see that as a valuable goal that is desirable, is because we are taught that. The reason we teach that to our kids is because it has proven to be beneficial to our species.