We probably oughta move this thread. I don’t think any of the others are following it anymore, we’ve drifted way off the ‘are there errors in the septuagint’ question. I think sfworker has gone home.
First off, I’m not interested in defending the specifics of Judeo-Christian belief to anyone. I’m interested in the philosophical notion of God (all-perfect, necessary being), and the partly philosophical and partly aesthetic notion of a sacred (i.e. perfect) book. I believe that when we reject the possibility of these, we lose whole vistas of thought, and impoverish the world for ourselves.
Thus, I am interested in (and study) idealism, and I am not interested in (and do not study) the free will/determinism problem. I talk about it when I have to, but it always seems to become a bad tennis match. I will always come down on the claim that if we have no free will then it is not worth talking about, and nothing’s worth doing at all, because no one’s actually doing anything, we’re all just being done to. No one I’ve said that to has ever responded directly to the claim, except to say something like ‘that’s the breaks, kid.’ (The argument that comes out of this may be paraphrased: “IS NOT.” “IS TOO.” “IS NOT.” “IS TOO.”)
Note that I do not claim to know whether or not we are free. Being a good transcendental idealist, I claim that we cannot possibly know whether or not we are free. And being a good transcendental idealist, I acknowledge that from the perspective of the empirical world, determinism is the rule. (Actually a TI takes a stronger line on this than a Humean does, because a TI claims that it is demonstrably true that the world as we experience it is governed by causal laws, whereas a Humean dismisses even that as a metaphysical claim that cannot be supported by the evidence.)
So, idealism.
Hume was not an idealist. He didn’t deny the “thing in itself,” because the term hadn’t been coined yet. (It’s Kant’s terminology, and he was in part responding to Hume.) Hume did, however argue against all metaphysics – i.e. any attempt to make claims about how the world really really is. This includes scientific or materialist claims. Put extremely crudely, he argues that all we can say about science is that it seems to be working out pretty well, as opposed to explanations of phenomena that require supernatural entities.
Hume argued, as Kant did, against taking either revelation or ‘natural theology’ (i.e. philosophical attempts to prove God) as evidence for the existence of God. (Kant is generally credited with destroying the last shreds of credibility for ‘proofs of God’ by showing that all proofs of God rely on the ontological proof, and that the ontological proof makes the error of assuming that existence is a predicate: A parody of the ontol. proof would read “God is perfect, therefore God is.”)
But in both of these cases what is argued about is knowledge (evidence for/against), and not the rationality of belief. Kant concludes that there is no evidence for or against that is convincing. Therefore he claims that we ought to disavow all knowledge of the existence/non-existence of God, and he argues strenuously against anyone who tries to make knowledge-claims about the existence of God. (He called them “Schwaeremerei”: “swarmers,” and made bitter, witty fun of them at every opportunity.)
So we cannot know whether or not there’s a God, and we cannot know whether or not the world as we experience it is the way the world actually is, independently of our ability to experience it. But this does not end up with the wall/door problem you bring up, because it’s not an ‘anything might happen’ kind of line. The space it creates for empirical science is inviolable, the boundary between knowable and unknowable is a hard and clear one: there aren’t going to be any surprise intrusions from a “thing in itself”, because “thing in itself” just means the world independently of our ability to perceive it. (Which of course we can’t perceive.) Bizarre or unexpected phenomena, like walls suddenly disappearing, would be exactly that, bizarre or unexpected, and a TI, like a Humean would respond by seeking an explanation that accords with the available science.
[There’s a lot of debate in the Kant literature about whether the thing in itself/possible experience distinction is a metaphysical distinction (two worlds, a world of things in themselves and a world of experience) or an epistemological distinction (same world, two ways of looking at it.) I fall on the epistemological side of that question, because I think the important thing in Kant is the strong line between what can be known and what can’t.]
The wall/door problem is a common misconception about one tenet of idealism, the claim that the world as we experience it is in part constituted by our minds. People hear this and the first thing they think is – oh so I’m making it all up? You say I live in fantasy-land? At least for Kant this is decidedly not the case. (As for some of the freakier extrapolations from Fichte and Hegel, who knows.) For Kant, the “form” of experience is constituted by the mind. All possible experience will have certain characteristics: space, time, and causality (and some other hotly disputed quasi-logical laws, too). This is what the mind ‘gives’ to experience. The world as it is apart from our experience may also be in space/time and governed by causal laws, but we can’t know that, because we can only know what can possibly be experienced.
(Kant’s argument to this is something like: If our experience did not have these basic features, it would not be experience, but just disconnected twinges and images. But if we did not experience then we would not be able to form a functioning sense of self. But it’s clear that we do. Therefore we can be certain that all experience has these features. This is what is called a ‘transcendental argument’: ‘transcendental’ meaning 'having to do with the conditions of possible experience.)
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Ok, all of this gives ONE argument for the rationality of religious belief. A negative one. Belief in something demonstrably false is irrational. But neither theism nor atheism is demonstrably true or false. Therefore the atheist doesn’t have the ‘you believe things that are demonstrably false’ tool to kick the leg out from under the theist, and vice versa.
At this point the question becomes whether or not there are reasons to believe or disbelieve apart from demonstrable truth or falsity, because we can’t have that. So, yes, at this point it becomes about wants and needs, i.e. what the ancients called ‘ethics’. The question, what is a good life and how do I go about getting me one. My reasons for entertaining the idea of God and not dismissing it out of hand are at the top of the post. The concept of God, unlike the ad hoc logical puzzle counterexamples you’ve been bringing up, isn’t an imaginary but conceptually mundane creature like a Pegasus (take horse, add wings, there aren’t any around as far as we know, but it’s easy to think what one would be like) and it isn’t a logical contradiction (like a square circle). The concept of God is unique, as seen for example in Anselm’s definition “that than which nothing greater can be thought.” That doesn’t mean “the greatest thing” or “big daddy in the sky.” It is a concept unlike any other because in order to even try to think it you need to make up new rules of thinking: that than which nothing greater can be thought. Trying to think the thought takes one to the limits of our ability to conceptualize and think at all. It’s a focal point, an asymptote, something we approach but do not achieve, but in the process of approaching it our ability to think and to experience is enlivened and enriched in ways that other concepts don’t. It’s a “negative” concept in the sense of what they call negative theology, a thought that one can never comprehend – no attempt at a conceptualization ‘sticks’ – but attempts to comprehend it open up new conceptual strategies, manners of expression, and ways of thinking. (Ah, had to end with Nietzsche. It is a kind of hard-headed poetic ideal I’m championing here, much more than a confessional one. God is the Hard Thought.)
Now, if this thought doesn’t entice you, that’s fine. I’m not trying to convince you to entertain belief in God. I’m only trying to convince you that it’s not irrational to do so. Also, of course, what I’m championing here has little if anything to do with the doctrinal specifics of any religion. I do have to say that Christianity involves a massive twist on the Hard Thought that I don’t think any other religion shares: the belief that God became fully human at a definite and localizable moment in human history while remaining fully divine for eternity. If you like crazy metaphysics (and I obviously do) Christianity’s got the goods.
Note, this is not Kant’s argument for belief in God: his involves needing to postulate a divine judge in order to not fall into despair about the fact that the connection between being a good person and having a happy life is contingent. Deserving happiness doesn’t imply having it. I don’t find it to be a terribly convincing argument. He has earlier arguments about needing the concept of a necessary being in our conceptual repertoire in order to ‘orient’ ourselves in thinking about the world, which I like more. But that only requires what I’ve called “entertaining” the possibility of God’s existence, being open to it. It doesn’t require out and out belief.
