Ontology: Faith vs Reason

Supernatural Order Denotes Superiority of Others Over Self

Yesterday and Monday I quoted the Catholic Encyclopedia (CE) on the subject of soul. Catholics insist the soul is given to man by "Supernatural Order, by God, for the purpose of raising the rational creature above its native sphere to a God-like life and destiny."

Today, that same quote can be used as a refutation of the denial that faith negates reason.

"Some have held that there can be no conflict between the two—that reason properly employed and faith properly understood will never produce contradictory or competing claims—whereas others have maintained that faith and reason can (or even must) be in genuine contention over certain propositions or methodologies." http://www.iep.utm.edu/f/faith-re.htm

"In the Old Testament, the Hebrew [word for faith] means essentially steadfastness, [ ] hence it comes to mean faithfulness, whether of God towards man or of man towards God. It would, however, be illogical to conclude that the word cannot, and does not, mean belief or faith in the Old Testament for it is clear that we cannot put trust in a person's promises without previously assenting to or believing in that person's claim to such confidence. Hence even if it could be proved that the Hebrew does not in itself contain the notion of belief, it must necessarily presuppose it." (CE) [italics added]

The 6th century theologian (and government leader) Boethius made the dictum, "Insofar as is possible, join faith to reason." This was because Christianity had been running almost entirely on faith, in the belief in miracles as the basis for their religion. The Virgin Birth and the Ressurection were the two upon which Christianity was built; but there were those from the Old Testament which could not be disbelieved, assented to as in confidence that revealed revelations deserved their faith.

He knew this unconditional faith could not last much longer. Joining them would seem to defy the notion that one negates the other. Modern Christianity is build on that dictum, in the attempt to separate reasoned theology from unsubstantiated faith.

"Logic became important in the Middle Ages because it provided the epistemological foundation of scholasticism: 'Through reason and the powerful tool of Aristotelian logic, men could resolve the seeming contradictions between faith and reason, Christian truth and Greek science, and attain insights into the nature of the world, of man and of God.' (Overfield 1984, p. ix)" http://faculty.ed.uiuc.edu/westbury/textcol/HAMILTO1.html

But the contrary is true; the unconditional faith, necessarily presupposing unsubstantiated belief, negates the substantiations made by reason. The attempt to join faith to reason is the attempt to short-circuit the faculty of mind that automatically identifies, ontologically, the material provided by man’s senses.

This automatic identification is not fool-proof-perfect. It is, after all, the result of non-omniscient thought. But to the degree that such thought bears the characteristics and integrity of non-contradictory logic, it is substantiated enough to be separable from faith.

Faith in supernatural deities and acts begins as assention to miracles and to the claims of the recipients of such miracles. As assention to these things faith is faith in the superiority of others begining with a God substantiated only by the word of others that miracles have occured.

"Faith and reason cannot be joined in the extreme because they are diametrically antithetical. No form of creationism can argue for faith without using the principles of deductive reasoning. Such reasoning can only go so far in explaining faith and the moral principle of God; then it comes up short because faith and reason can be joined only as far as is possible, and that possibility comes up short. The argument for faith always relies, in the end, on the belief in faith to explain faith." http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/2008/09/non-reductive-monism.html

What is "the purpose of raising the rational creature above its native sphere to a God-like life and destiny," if not a claim to some form of gaining knowledge that is above reason?

And what is this form of knowledge that is greater than reason, if not the antithesis of reason, i.e., of faith in the reality of omniscient, omnipotent intelligence, for the purpose of somehow being raised above reason, and this in order to submit one's self to the superiority of others.

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"sntjohnny" is a Rational Christian; Taxing for Green; Web Deceits

"sntjohnny" is a Rational Christian
With Whom I Can Have Dialogue

Anthony Horvath is the Executive Director of Athanatos Christian Ministries. Horvath, who calls himself sntjohnny though his name isn't John, calls his website St.Johnny.com, perhaps to differentiate himself: "Will the real St. John please stand up?"

"[B]y the very definition of God according to Christian theists, there is a great deal that could only be known if God told us." Horvath was describing "special revelation."

"Special" is contrasted with "natural revelation" whereby "natural revelation" means arguments for the existence of God, Horvath says. "Simply put, ‘natural’ revelation, or ‘natural theology,’ is what one can learn about God running exclusively on your own steam without any assistance from God. Aristotle’s Prime Mover arguments and Aquinas’s ‘Five Ways’ are such efforts." http://sntjohnny.com/front/natural-versus-revealed-religion-how-atheists-drop-the-ball/349.html

"One of the confusions here is the treatment of the Bible as revelation. It certainly is revelation. However, when it concerns God, it is, strictly speaking, revelation about revelation. So, the ’special revelation’ would be what happened to Paul on the road to Damascus. He then reveals what was revealed to him. In other words, the accounts of this incident are Paul’s revelation. Also, all that we know about Jesus is revealed to us through his disciples. [italics added]

"Atheists at this point are probably scratching their heads because from their perspective I will not have made the situation any better. What many of them are specifically looking for is their own ‘Road to Damascus’ experience."

I should say not. Atheists don't believe such revelations are possible, because the cause of them does not exist. Any person who could possibly be looking for a "revealed" revelation would be a fence-sitting agnostic. By definition, an atheist knows there is no god, in the sense that all the resolutions of logic one has in one's mind is what he "knows." This is sometimes called "justified true belief," as opposed to "unjustified." The justification comes from the soundness of the argument.

Theists "know" God exists. Atheists "know" he does not. Each of them has found the soundness, the justification, within his own logic that to doubt it would be to doubt his own mind. To go looking for a revelation implies that one knows nothing either way, and perhaps has no beliefs one way or the other.

Horvath begins his blog asserting "that atheists fail to distinguish between ‘natural revelation’ and ’special revelation’ but they are not entirely to blame. Arguments for the existence of God tend to be in the realm of ‘natural’ theology."

Yes, they do "tend to be considered theology," and therein lies the differences between theists and atheists. One thing I'm beginning to admire about sntjohnny is that he seems to have an understanding of naturalism that is better than that of many naturalists. But his understanding of naturalists themselves isn't as discerning. No naturalist who is also atheist has any justified true belief in either kind of revelation. The naturalist who believes in "natural" revelation is not an atheist. The person who believes in "revealed" revelations is not a naturalist.

Horvath is familiar with my very public differences with Austin Cline, the Deity of Atheism over at About.com. [See the Academy Blogger http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/2008/09/threaded-with-austin-cline-saturday.html ]

I have thus publicly disagreed with Cline about the definition of atheism. I maintain that not only do atheists justifiably believe there are no gods, but also that atheists don't have the faith required to see within the "naturally revealed" world the existence of any god. Cline says an atheist merely has no belief in god, and may consider it to be true that gods exist, and have faith in other forms of supernaturalism!

Far from being skeptical, the atheist who believes there are no gods finds no reason to be skeptical since he/she finds no reason to argue with him/herself about whether he/she is correct in his/her belief.

On the other hand, the believer is the skeptic and the more devout the belief the more skeptical he/she is. That is because in order to believe in the "revealed revelations" of the Bible, the Christian must "suspend his disbelief" http://www.mediacollege.com/glossary/s/suspension-of-disbelief.html , overcoming it with reason. It was the theologian Boethius, after all, who told Christians, "Insofar as is possible, join faith to reason."

It is not in my constitution to suspend my reason only to replace it with faith, which must then be rationalized by overcoming my disbelief with sound justifications that overcome them. The theist who cannot find the sound justification to overcome his/her disbelief is a Christian with a crisis.

sntjohnny does a credible and understandable job of overcoming disbelief--for the agnostic, or the Christian with a crisis of belief. I do not believe, and he states unequivocally that he also does not believe, anything less than a "revealed" revelation would be enough to convince an atheist.

If he is right, and I agree that he is, Cline's definition of "atheist" has been knocked out of the ballpark.

I have provided my readers with a link to Horvath,aka stjohnny, in the sidebar under the heading "Interesting Reading." Horvath is a very rational Christian who comprehends that preaching to an atheist doesn't work, even if he thinks we are all waiting for our own personal revelation from a god. What he does understand is that in reason, there can be dialogue between theists and atheists, which is the only way for the two camps to talk, aside from just leaving each other alone altogether.

Are You That Certain of Yourself
That You Can Tax the Rest of Us for Your Beliefs?
"Cool Look at the Future, by Richard Rahn. How much in additional taxes are you willing to pay now in order to ensure that the Earth would not be 3 degrees warmer 100 years from now (assuming the science is even possible) - $100 or $1,000 or $10,000 or more? Should the government prevent us from selling some of our body parts to allow others to live or have better lives? The above questions and many others were the subject of learned discussion at the 60th anniversary meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) that just concluded here in Tokyo." Cato Today http://www.cato.org/recent_opeds.php

Internet Lies and Deceits
"I was intrigued to discover recently that I am a secret services mouthpiece designed to undermine the left by publishing neo-conservative views and apologies for racism. You'll not be surprised to learn that these ludicrous allegations were made on the internet. The web has become a clearing house for all sorts of nonsense ideas.

"Many of the most enthusiastic pioneers of the internet have now become seriously worried about its capacity to promulgate lies and distortions. Larry Sanger, one of the co-founders of Wikipedia, became so disillusioned that he started Citizendium as an attempt to bring more quality control to online, collaborative encyclopaedias. Just last week, the creator of the internet, Tim Berners-Lee, also said that we need to find ways to control the spread of falsehoods on the web."I share their concerns, but I wonder if blaming the web is just shooting the messenger for radically upping his productivity."

Julian Baggini http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/features/display.var.2446993.0.Can_we_untangle_this_web_of_deceit.php

Mr. Baggini also has a link provided by the Academy Blogger under the heading "Interesting Reading."

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Non-Reductive Monism; Now in Politics--SMS and Congress

Conventional Wisdom v.
Ontological Wisdom in Naturalism
In the sense of conventional wisdom, naturalism is the metaphysical position that "nature is all there is and all basic truths are truths of nature." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_(philosophy)#cite_note-0

But it also involves reducing life to "strictly physical beings [who] don’t exist as [ ] either mental or spiritual," [and where,] "Thought, desires, intentions, feelings, and actions all arise on their own without the benefit of a supervisory self, and [ ] are all the products of a physical system, the brain and the body." [italics added] Naturalism.Org

This reductive monism is an ontological nightmare, and a contradiction.

"Ontology is the theory of objects and their ties. Ontology provides criteria for distinguishing various types of objects (concrete and abstract, existent and non-existent, real and ideal, independent and dependent) and their ties (relations, dependences and predication)." Raul Corazzon http://www.formalontology.it/ For an introduction to ontology see: http://www.formalontology.it/

The very nature of distinguishing one thing from another under the same genus, e.g., life, presupposes either a dualism of one sort of another, or non-reductive monism whereby the genus is monistic, and the differentia do not imply dualism, but instead support the axiomatic concept of "Being," i.e., identification of a primary fact of reality, namely that, "You are an indivisible entity of matter and consciousness." [italics added] Ayn Rand; "Atlas Shrugged"

Under this theory of non-reductive monism we discard "irrational conflicts and contradictions, such as: mind versus heart, thought versus action, reality versus desire, the practical versus the moral. [You] will know that the conceptual level of psycho-epistemology—the volitional level of reason and thought—is the basic necessity of man’s survival and his greatest moral virtue." [italics added] "Galt’s Speech", For the New Intellectual; Ayn Rand

In the "strong" sense, dualism or "the idea [ ] that, for some particular domain, there are two fundamental kinds or categories of things or principles," [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP)] has given empirical science the permission it needed to create the dualism of the soul/body dichotomy, of the dichotomy of matter/spirit; and then to divide the material of cognizant life into brain versus body and conclude that what the mind is made of is chemical and electrical signals that cause us to believe we have souls (spirits).

Non-reductive monism is the principle that consciousness as an attribute of biological entities is the means by which they acquire awareness of a reality that exists outside their consciousness and is not dependent on their consciousness for its existence. This monism puts both consciousness and all that is independent of consciousness in the same genus called "Being," or existence; and futher, that existence is the given, is primary, and is not contradictory to a non-material differentia called consciousness that is yet predicated of material. This monism does not admit of such consciousness transcending or succeeding the existence of the life form in which it resides; in other words, 1. it is caused by material actions; 2. it is itself non-material but dependent on matter for its existence; 3. cannot by definition exist without the matter which created it.

It is, therefore, not a belief that souls exist, but instead it is the given that we can be conscious of something that Man calls soul whatever it may be, and that as we are conscious of pleasure and pain in wherever is the seat of our physical emotions, so Man is conscious of something which he calls soul.

Naturalism, done correctly, is not reductive monism. It is the power to overcome this reductionism, as well as the cosmological, mechanical, and moral arguments generally associated with creationism or its equivalent. Non-reductive Naturalism overcomes these, wherein
1. cosmology is taken to mean that which treats of the origin and structure of the universe; [see below]
2. mechanical is taken to mean the explanation of the present and the future in terms of the past;
3. and the moral argument is taken to mean an argument for God based on man's moral nature. This is an objective nature recognized by non-reductive monism, and that it gives Man cause to make moral assertions about existence, but has no basis for conclusions of the supernatural.

Reductive naturalism does not overcome creation theories, but dismisses them as invalid, thereby giving creationism room to argue for validity. Non-reductive naturalism proves the soundness of it's own position, leaving no room for creationism to argue except to do so either by getting off theme or off subject. Reductionists will argue with creationists about creation; non-reductionists will argue only about the ontology of its arguments, placing creationism in the position of being less than the skeptical position of Naturalism. Creationism cannot argue with non-reductive monism because it assumes the moral argument, which requires the extreme position of the defence of faith, which requires relinquishing reason.

"Insofar as is possible," wrote Boethius, "join faith to reason." But they cannot be joined in the extreme because they are diametrically antithetical. No form of creationism can argue for faith without using the principles of deductive reasoning. Such reasoning can only go so far in explaining faith and the moral principle of God; then it comes up short because faith and reason can be joined only as far as is possible, and that possibility comes up short. The argument for faith always relies, in the end, on the belief in faith to explain faith.

1. Cosmology also refers to the structural view that is the world view of physics. However, as to cosmological origin, let me be clear: there is no origin. If existence itself had an origin, then the pre-existing condition of existence would be non-existence, which by definition can have no existence and therefore cannot have been a state of being prior to existence. It is a contradiction of an axiomatic concept.

2. The opposite of mechanical is teleological, i.e., the explanation of the past and the present in terms of the future, i.e., "Becoming." [see above for comparison]

3. The only moral argument acceptable is teleological, meaning it must be the answer to the question of whether--not why--Man needs ethics; and what those ethics must be in terms of the objective nature of Man himself as "that, of which Man is all there is," in terms of deducing the natural, not the super-natural, existence of existence.

Now In Politics
Why have SMS (texting) rates doubled since 2005? That is what Senator Herb Kohl, chairman of the Senate's antitrust panel, is asking.

"'Maybe because mergers and acquisitions—witness Sprint-Nextel, Verizon-Alltel, and AT&T-BellSouth—have led to less and less competition,' Kohl said.
"'I am concerned with whether this consolidation and increased market power by the major carriers has contributed to this doubling of text-messaging rates over the last three years,' wrote Kohl, who gave the carriers a month to justify their higher SMS rates." Yahoo! Tech http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/patterson/26695

Government interference in the marketplace is not political naturalism. Naturalism is freedom, the freedom that man started with before thoughts of political power and its coercive corrosion of that freedom became the antithesis of protecting it--in the name of protecting it for the common good.

The common good is the good of the individual, first.

"When Apple and AT&T announced that free text messages would not come with the data packages offered to iPhone 3G customers, I predicted that Democrats in Washington would schedule SMS hearings and denounce the "excessively high costs. How long before we're treated to the spectacle of Kohl dragging all for CEOs to testify before his Senate committee?" Andrew Smith http://techblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2008/09/sms-rates-senator-asks-cell-ca.html

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