21st-century Christian Philosopher

Ray, at The Freedom Sanction, writes about the role of place in shaping us. (here) But, here he talks about how that this perception is not as clear as it used to be.

There is, however, a moving away from being marked by place to being marked by the date range of our birth. Marking by place has been replaced by identification with our generation.

I find him on target when he relates it to the “Generation Gap” of the boomers.

[T]he generation of the counter-cultural movement…began to establish their identity by trumpeting the fact that they were born AFTER the WWII generation. Because there were so many of them, their ideas caught like wild-fire. Each subsequent generation has since been labeled by sociologists. Similarities and differences have become magnified.

But I would add that since then, it has been carried and amplified by one or two forces that rise and continue from that age. This is just my take on it, but the following sounds right to me:

Cultures had always expressed themselves in musics. But the Blues voice crying out in the deep South changed into the R&B voices rooted in the Urban culture. It still bore ties to their blues roots. But by some odd accident of the emerging media, R&B reached out across the waters to kids in Liverpool, Kent and London, who “returned” to America with their own takes on this music. Youth connected with youth.

Rock-n-roll “culture” was a culture about music—and attitude. It has ties to a more tradtional culture of place, but has long ceased to be an expression of that culture. “Mainstreaming” cultural music has happened often enough, but the result usually ends up being a publically palatable much. It doesn’t usually become a “culture” of it’s own.

But since then, I think we expect that your age defines you. You and your contemporaries pass through the tides of fashion in the pop-culture. You are in the same place to see the same fad pass in the same way.

We, who have passed this point before, saw a different stream when we were here. But we coveted what we saw in the same way anybody does full of hunger and promise.

And as McLuhan pointed out, the media is the message. So the media tells us, “Buy more”—”Buy in more.” “You know you want it.” Simply because it is the very organ that delivers it to us. You need to be informed. You need to know what the cool kids are wearing—or—what they are no longer wearing. You need to know what other kids think and what other people think, so you can it as counsel.

But, even as we turn away from the rush of media to raise children and “do something,” we carry away momentos of youth to forever remind us what it was like to be young. So this arriving “Global Village” offers a culture of trappings.

Let the internet illustrate: We get together with other bowlers or bikers or fellow fans of our favorite band on the internet. I have long been a fan of 70s-style progressive rock (called “prog” on the net to avoid arguing with ninnies who don’t think it has “progressed” from there.) I had never read so much about the bands until the internet. And I’ve never heard so much prog music in my life before internet radio.

Take a look at blogspot.com profiles. I believe it is unintentional, but it seems to convey that what makes me up are my “Interests” and “Favorite Movies,” “Favorite Music” and “Favorite Books”. The internet channels our correspondence with people who share our interests.

Now, of course, there is the blogging, which allows us to define ourselves in greater detail than our interests do. And I clearly enjoyed the service provided to learn about my favorite bands. After all I couldn’t say that I learned all that stuff without deciding to read about it.

The mesage of the internet is whatever you enjoy, we can provide you with more information about it and you can talk to plenty of people who enjoy it. I think here we see the culture of generations. turn into the culture of tastes. We can see where we’ve come from: mass produced music, movies, and books which give us an illusion of “voice” Songwriters “speak for a generation,” as some people used to put it. As a result, different people of different ages shared different pop-cultures, with nothing more substantive to identify with, they’ve identified themselves with their generation.

Although the kid born in 1995 can buy Bob Dylan’s albums or complete seasons of Patrick McGoohan’s Danger Man series (b/w) on Amazon, (both before my time, I must mention somewhat ironically) not that many kids his age will follow. It will continue to be the stripe of another generation.

And although you may have some 40-year olds addicted to Playstation or Nintendo, that also is not going to happen often enough to form a trend. Also both of their peer groups will try to put a kabosh on such strange behavior in their peers.

Such a wide variety of media to see our peers provides an internal peer pressure that reinforces the external so that we are fixed on shaping ourselves in the image of our peers. Peer identification is media-wide and global, even suggested by what I metioned of its roots.

Place is very real. But it is evermore less so as fewer of us know our neighbors. As someone who has moved 10 times in the last 15 years, place seems like hardly a factor at all. So I think corporate relocation and a fluid and national job market have played their part as well. It could be that you move enough and you find yourself living by people you don’t know enough, so it begins not to bother you.

Another thought strikes me. It relates to the birthplace of the generation gap. The colleges. I would suggest that the increase in college attendance plays a role as well. You spend some time, “out of place”, in a rough peer group, at times entrenched against the “townies” or “locals” who in an alien fashion go to work and don’t party all night and don’t really appreciate hearing somebody else do it. You attend the University, the “locals” don’t. Locality is entrenched. Parochial is a pejorative. And when you get right down to it, in that mass media, we’ve seen all sorts of bad things happen after somebody says “You’re not from around here.”

I linger on this word for what it represents. Some use the motif to explain why we are here and what is not. Some use it to argue that God is not.

But really, the concept focuses not on states, but on words and statements.

Taken from its roots, this word means “to speak against”. But looking past its origin, we observe that Dictionary.com gives 3 definitions:

1. To assert or express the opposite of (a statement).
2. To deny the statement of. See Synonyms at deny .
3. To be contrary to; be inconsistent with.

Now, let’s check it against my previous statement. Words assert and express statements (#1); and words also deny (#2). So I’m on firm ground there.

Definition #3 breaks the pattern. So even if I’m right about 90% of it. We still have a sense that contradictions can be about states. So I seem to be wrong, and this statement seems to undo what I have said before.

Perhaps, but I have further arguments. One being that the word statement comes from expressing the state of something (and not from any root having to do with words). Thus, your bank statement does what you would prefer and tells you the state of your bank account. So to some degree, with the repetition of “statement” in the previous two definitions, we have been dealing with states all along.

However, in the issues that I related above, an actual state would not work. Contradictions cannot be. How this is, I will explain:

Naturalists have been at a loss to explain how pure chance would generate creatures like ourselves. There is not enough time for us to become probable, by raw chance. We remain improbable in the life-span of the universe that science knows.

The solution for this has been the multi-verse. One naturalist explained it to me that “everything that is not a contradiction exists in some universe.” And because we are not contradictions we are bound to exist in some universe. Thus, with infinite universes, one universe where improbable life evolves and observes itself is made probable. Simply by not being a contradiction.

Thus, by this reasoning, if you are talking about a state of actual being, you cannot be talking about a contradiction. The universe does not generate contradictions to be contrary with anything.

As well, atheist philosopher Michael Martin counters the TAG (The Argument for God) argument with TANG, by saying that God is inconsistent with Logic. Because if God can do anything, he can nullify the Rule of Non-contradiction on which Logic rests. If he cannot do that, he is only another observer of Logic.

What is the Rule of Non-contradiction? That two contradicting statements cannot both be true.

So let’s take it this way: If you have two contradicting statements, and you give them a value of “true”, you have a contradiction. Both of these statements cannot be the case, by the Rule of Non-contradiction. So a contradiction is a relationship between a pair, or a set, of statements.

If I am wholey emerald green, no state of my being wholey sapphire blue can exist in a state contrary to this. There is no actual state to describe as per definition #3. We can talk about how I cannot be both blue and green at the same time. We can talk about how both of the statements, “I am wholey emerald green” and “I am wholey sapphire blue” cannot both be true. But the “being” contrary can only be seen as applying to the description of a contrary state. If I paint myself blue, I am blue, and given time to paint and re-paint myself, neither statement contradicts the other. Instead they represent different states of the same object.

We might describe the duckbilled platypus as “inconsistent”. But we would stretch it too far to suggest that it is a “contradiction”. Because then, contradictions may exist by the hand of Nature. So although a platypus may “be inconsistent” in one usage, it does not do so in the form above. Instead we have to challenge our basic assumptions about “consistency” in animals, such as the icon that a single animal should have a single “motif”. We find this generally characteristic of animals, but the platypus is only inconsistent with our expectations and set by our experience with many other cases and not with nature.

So what about the dictionary reference to be-ing (contrary or inconsistent)? Well, if a thing is. What is contrary or inconsistent to it either exists or does not. If it does not exist, we are saying that a physical object is “inconsistent” with some non-existent thing. I wonder if we should be alarmed whether or not a clearly existing object conflicts with a non-existing thing.

If the other exists, we have to reconcile that 1) either contradictions do exist–mulit-universe naturalists and Martin, notwithstanding–or 2) we have some problem stating what is and what isn’t a contradiction. If this is the case, one wonders what it is that cannot exist apart from man’s dim conception of things that cannot co-occur. And if we doubt this, how can we be sure that the naturalist or Martin have a clear idea of what is not occurring.

Outside of that, we’re back to statements.

I don’t usually read Reader’s Digest, but my wife wanted me to read a recent article on the role of the father in child development. Before I found it, I flipped around the pages and came across al etter about a previous article on healing prayer. (Since I won’t touch on it again, I recommend the article on fathers.)

The writer of that letter identified themselves as an athiest. They wrote:

Isn’t prayer a paradox? As an atheist, I’d like to know how the religious think prayer works. Most Christians believe that God is all-knowing and has a plan. So, if you pray to God to cure you of cancer, you’re asking him to change his plan for you. When God hears you prayers and changes his plan, does that mean that he was not all-knowing before?

I get from this that some atheists, if left without facts that challenge the power of prayer in healing, will do what they can to challenge the theology. Keep in mind, I’m not saying somebody couldn’t challenge the study, but the writer didn’t. Instead the letter tries to present the case that 1) were there a God, and 2) had he a plan for your life, it wouldn’t make sense to regard your prayers. Otherwise, it would prove that he didn’t know something.

First of all, I’ll deal with a challenge to God’s knowledge. But before this, we need some context: what is prayer? Is it a list of facts that we think that God is somehow ignorant of or has forgotten?

Well, I’m going to be no more pre-emptive with a definition of prayer than I am with any other definition. So the better question is “How is prayer done?”

First, Believers pray.

This often means those who are already convinced of God and his knowledge pray. God knows about the ailment, even if we don’t. God knows about our situation just as much as we do. I don’t need to remind God that if I suffer from cancer unto death, it makes my kids fatherless. If he were to heal me, it wouldn’t be because he had forgot that. At least, not in the mind of a believer.

So reverence shapes the prayer. We don’t refute God. We do not expect him to respond “Whoops, good point. My bad. I’ll change it.” This is not how the believer responds. Even were “new” information offered to God by a lack of reverence, this is not the way that most believing prayer is offered.

As well, if we should try to refute God, we’ll need facts. So what we claim is “new knowledge” to God, might not be, or might not be knowledge outside of our thinking it is. But were it real fact, we have accumulated it with less than perfect knowledge. If God answers prayers, he knows what we do not—that so-and-so prayed for something.

We can argue that any God that can “hear” prayers has more data at his fingertips than we do. But God has yet more knowledge. But before we go on to this, I’d like to look at the content of a particular prayer for healing.

I guess that more than 90% (or more) of the people who read this can probably guess my cancer preference. Unless we somehow propose that God is ignorant of what a great number of people can pretty much surmise, there is no challenge to God’s knowledge of what I am asking. That I’d really rather not have cancer, should not surprise God.

From here, let’s start off with the observation that if prayer works, it works by God. So who is this being hearing prayers and bringing healing.

The concept is that God designed and assembled the world. The world runs, very largely, the way godless scientists suggest, without a challenge to God’s knowledge. We might argue that the world has at least as much or greater complexity than the current model.

The writer/s of Job might have had a dim understanding of what God might have had to do to “hang the world on nothing”, but God in Job does not quantify the distance of his knowledge from ours as much as he stresses a great distance. Thus, most complexity introduced through hundreds of years of empirical study, in this model might put us closer to the Creator in Job. But we’re just making salad out of paradigms and logic to suggest that this difference in technological understanding is fixed in how the writers of Job thought God might have done it. With the facts being B > A and C > A, B and C have no clear relationship to each other.

If the Christian God is there to plan cancer and hear prayers and admit ignorance, he is there also to create the world and assert the superiority of his technical knowledge. Therefore there are really 3 sets of knowledge. The scholars of Job’s age, modern scientists, and God.

It’s pretty safe to assume that God knows which and how much cancer I prefer. My guess is also that he knows that if it continues to kill me, my kids will be deprived of a father. So, even if I pray that, soberly, I’m pretty sure he knows this. QED.

So now we get into this problem: why didn’t he pre-grant my prayer?

Well, the following may sound specious, but I think it has some validity: What if I were to say that perhaps God has pre-granted people billions of prayers which they never prayed because they never were in that circumstance to pray for release. And perhaps he has granted it to them because he knew that they would pray for release. Or perhaps, God foresaw that I would see a special on caner and “count my blessings,” which is close enough to a prayer given the actual circumstances.

Do you or I or does anyone know whether or not God has done this? It would be preposterous to claim that I can support that he has. If I somehow went through life never suffering a serious illness because all the while God pre-cleared me, would I know that this has happened. The atheist perspective would ask me to describe my life as “lucky” or attribute it to “well adapted immune system genes”. Now, what if it weren’t just me, but everybody who might pray in that instance, what would religious literature have in it about actually praying for God’s healing? Nothing.

Within this rationale, I may have been pre-granted a million mercies, just not this one. Still though, God’s plan for my life may be only to get cancer; pray; invite the concern of my friends, neighbors, and church members and have them pray; and be delivered from it. I’m not saying perhaps prayer can save everyone from cancer, but perhaps for my life, succumbing to cancer would be parting from God’s plan for my life.

But to address the seeming speciousness of counting blessings about things that did not happen to me, My ignorance and your ignorance is precisely the point. We wouldn’t know if this had occurred, so whether it has occurred or not is moot. But we also err on an evidential ground when we ask, why could not this have come in a way that I would have no evidence to even suggest that it happened. Thus, the most compassionate mercy of the Lord, would come in a way that is even disqualified in the mind of an atheist were He to exist behind the scenes and pre-fix things behind the scenes.

For he would need to exist in order to save me from sickness and to do so in a way that prevents me from knowing about it. Thus we pose a situation where God is more desirable for not leaving any evidence. But, not only that we take that there is no absence of evidence as evidence that God does not really care for me because he let me fall into sickness. And if he planned a less than permanent stay there, then I have good reason to doubt that God has a plan for my life.

So 1) if he pre-saves me from sickness, I have no evidence, and the skeptic is unmoved. 2) If we annoy atheists with evidence of effective prayer, then the evidence convicts God. If this argument is sound, God lacks foresight by not concealing the evidence, so to prove that he is really all that smart, he need to provide less evidence that he can alter anything. And 3) If we can effect our situation with prayer, God lacks any plan that could have foreseen that we as “brain-damaged” religious believers in dogma (about prayers, as well), with some strange dislike for cancer would ask God to take it away from us. If 21st-century atheists present us as so predictable, how can they argue that our even apparent predictability throws God somehow.

But what I like about this whole discussion is not based in any concept of slapping down anti-theists. That’s just icing. What I like, is the paradox that I often find, that even people who have no love or belief in God are willing without knowing to argue his wisdom. Perhaps not the whole of it, because if God is all that I think he is (he probably is much more), knowing as God knows is knowing what God knows. We cannot check God’s math, so understanding the rule, at least in the immediate sense, is better than drowning in the theory.

So what am I saying? What is the atheist writer saying that I can argue little with? What is she saying that despite its pointedness toward God is actually Biblical in principle?

Paradoxically enough, God’s wisdom is found in the age-old challenge about the concurrence between God’s all-knowing and all-loving aspects.

Quite simply: We’d be better off with no evidence (or knowledge) of Evil.

Gee, why didn’t God think of that?!?!