Hume “Dialogues” Part XI
The character Philo is of the opinion that we cannot prove the existence of a good God from the world around us. Philo asserts that a benevolent God would not make it so that a small change in atmosphere can kill and animal and could have created a world of pleasure where hunger/thirst was indicated by a lessening of perpetual pleasure. He also asks why it cannot be possible for small changes to the world to be made, e.g. that the powerful are always virtuous, thus lessening the amount of pain in the world. However, it might be that there must be pain in order to have pleasure, and that the world as it is now is the best possible. We cannot know for sure because we are in the world and cannot see from God’s perspective. Philo argues that a Creator with inexhaustible power could have created animals which were less prone to death, and not had disease in humans. He could also have organised it that more humans were industrious, which would alleviate many problems in the world today.
Nature often goes to extremes - so rain helps crops but also causes drought and flood, when a benevolent Creator could have made nature more moderate in effect.
It is by such deficiencies that natural evil is created, and a wise and benevolent Creator could easily modify the world to reduce such evils. However, as we cannot know the mind of God, nor can we step outside the world nor conceive of another (as we have not experienced any other) it would seem difficult for us to know that this is not the best of all possible worlds. Without knowing the mind of God how also can we know that he is indifferent to natural evil, or impotent in the face of it?
Kant “What is Enlightenment?”
For Kant, enlightenment is the act of throwing off the bonds of tradition and thinking for oneself. He defines two uses of reason, public and private. One of the examples of private reason (the free use of which, Kant condemns), would be that of a soldier, given orders before a battle, who wishes to use his own reason to debate his orders. Kant characterises this as inappropriate use of reason, as there is a good reason not to debate orders from a higher source during a war.
Kant also has a concept of public reason, which every person has the right (and, indeed, the obligation) to exercise. This is reason as used by scholars and the press, and Kant is strongly against any censorship of reason in this form. The only time reason may not be utilised is when it would be detrimental to a larger body of people, and inappropriate because of the position held by the individual. Otherwise, although it is discouraged by early training, public use of reason ought to be encouraged. Kant uses the example of a clergyman, who must preach the doctrines of his Church from the pulpit, and may not dissent from those, however, if he were to write as a scholar against the doctrines of his church he would be exercising public reason and no blame would attach to him. Kant describes restriction of public reason when it is contrary to the prevailing ideology as a “crime against human nature”. Kant believes it is an inalienable right of all men to exercise their public reason without fear of censorship. However, the question of whether it would be appropriate for a clergyman to write against his church in his capacity as an official of that church, as it could be both inappropriate and damaging to the church for him to do so, remains unanswered.
Plato, “The Cave”
If we imagine a group of people who have been chained all their lives inside a dark cave, backs to the light facing a wall. They can see shadows of the real world on the wall, and they imagine the reflections to be the real world. One of these, then, is cut loose from his chains and ventures out into the light. The light is painful at first and confusing to one so long in confinement. However, the freed man eventually comes to an acceptance of the real world and comprehends that his former conception was unreal. Suppose then that he is returned to the cave where, should he try to convince the others of reality, it is likely they will not believe him and, as he would no longer be able to see as well as the other prisoners, they would believe him bereft of his eyes. Plato also supposes that should he attempt to free others, it would be unwelcome and they might decide to kill him.
This is the analogy of a man on a spiritual or intellectual journey.
Plato uses this as a model of government where neither the ignorant (prisoners) nor the perpetual student (those who would not come back to the cave) should be allowed to govern. Those who have some knowledge of the truth must be made to return to the cave and govern the unenlightened, for although they will be unhappy, the prisoners will be edified. The task of the legislator is to make the largest number of persons happy and it is those with knowledge of reality who must be legislators. Those freed people can be forced to work for the state because they have received the education that led them to the truth from the state, as though the hammer which broke the chains in the cave had been given by a fellow prisoner. The educated will be of use to the state because they can discern truth of the images we see reflections of. Plato also believes that such a man will not rule for personal power or gain, but rather for a sense of justice and a desire to educate the populace. However, Plato does not show how seeing Truth will change a man to rid him of unworthy motives for accepting office and not merely give him a sense of superiority to the general public, and therefore lead to corruption.
Read and Comment on Henry Allison “Kant’s Transcendental Realism”
Transcendental realism is the view that objects exist independently of our senses, “time and space as something given in themselves, independently of our sensibility” (p15). Kant thought that this view would inevitably lead to empirical realism, which is the view that we cannot have immediate experience of these objects and states that should we follow such a course, neither nature nor freedom would be possible. The opposite view to transcendental realism is that of transcendental idealism, which belief is that there is no reality outside what we perceive to be reality. All objects are only appearances and have no existence outside our thoughts. Kant believed that transcendental realism confuses the appearance/representation of an object with the object itself, so appearances are treated as though they were things in themselves.
Kant believed that we can only know what is inside ourselves; if objects outside ourselves exist in themselves, how can we know that as they are outside us and all we know is what is in us? Thus for Kant transcendental realism is an absurdity. For transcendental realism objects like God are outside ourselves and exist independently of us, if we cannot know of God because he is outside ourselves then he cannot exist. Thus transcendental realism can be seen as an appeal to an Ultimate Intelligence, the standard by which human intellect is measured. Kant, however, believed that if we do not comprehend God he cannot exist, and he cannot exist independently of our experiences.
For transcendental idealists (or formal idealists, as they are called by Allison) like Kant, it is not that no object has independent existence but that existence cannot be attributed in the manner in which they are represented. For the idealists, we know objects because of experience of them, whereas for realists we only know objects as well as we are near to the understanding of God concerning these objects. All knowledge is therefore a posteriori, as we can only know things after we have experienced them. Kant believes this cannot explain knowledge because of its reliance upon God.
Transcendental idealism holds that “objects must conform to our knowledge” (p29). This allows for an anthropocentric rather than a theocentric model of the world – things exist as we, humans, perceive them, not because God perceives them. The human mind sets the conditions to which an object must conform.
A theory similar to transcendental idealism and with which it is sometimes confused is that of phenominalism which holds that objects are constructed out of sense data. Whereas transcendental idealism holds that objects are collections of sense data. However phenominalism is also a realist perspective as it treats objects as things in themselves.
Something may only possibly be real if it is possible we will or have experienced it. We can only say something is real if we may encounter it in our own experience. Therefore if it is possible we will experience something, for example, it is possible we may experience the moon, therefore the moon is real. However this would seem to pose some problems with regard to Time, as it is impossible that I should experience the 1800’s, and that would (according to Kant) mean it was not real.
Find a reference to God in a newspaper or magazine article. How is God described there? Does the article make it seem difficult or easy to describe God?
“God at Risk” Wendy Murray Zoba in “Christianity Today” 16 March 2001 Christianity Today
This article deals with two ways of describing God, one being process theology and the other a more traditional way to describe God.
In process theology God freely gave up the ability to see the future in order that humans have totally free will. God tries to make people fulfil his ideals for the future, but he has no means of knowing what their response will be and cannot determine their response. This is an extremely personal view of God, a God who is in the same time frame as a human, and who is travelling through time at the same rate into an unknown future. However this view promotes a “God at risk”, as God cannot determine the future, nor the present without encumbering free will, so he has only the past to work with.
The difficulty with this way of describing God is that it does not fulfil its aim of removing from God the responsibility for evil in the world. It allows God to be the classical God selectively, so he creates the world and knows the future at that time, seeing Christ in the future and can enable prophecy, but does not take the opportunity during that time to eliminate evil. So this method of describing God neither frees him from the problem of evil and in addition makes him only God at selected moments.
The article then goes on to describe a more traditional view of God. In this view, God is very definitely in control of the world and presents us with free will as a gift of grace. We only achieve true freedom when we submit to God. This is a relatively easy way of describing God as it is largely taken from the Bible and describes a helpful rather than helpless God.
Read and comment on “God” in Henry Allison’s “Benedict de Spinoza: An Introduction”
Spinoza wrote about God as being a “substance” taking this concept from Aristotle and Descartes. For Spinoza, a Substance exists in itself (necessarily exists), has an infinity of attributes and is conceived through itself (can be explained in itself and is not reliant on anything else.) Attributes are “what the intellect perceives of a substance as constituting its essence” – they are what we think of as being Substance, although what they are is an expression of substance. So therefore we might think of God as being good, that is an attribute of God, but it is just one way in which Substance expresses itself.
There can be, according to Spinoza, only one Substance in existence. He states that substances may not have any attribute in common, or they would be the same substance. If therefore, Substance has an infinity of (that is, all) attributes, it follows that there is no possible Substance with different attributes to the one Substance. There can necessarily only be one substance. Substance is that which lies beyond change, it is the Unchanging essence behind the change of the world. If, therefore, there is Change in the world, there must be the unchanging Substance in the world also. Therefore Substance (or God) necessarily exists.
There are severe problems with Spinoza’s view of God from a Judaeo-Christian perspective, as his Substance contains all possible attributes, so it would be just as true to describe Substance as evil as it is to describe it as good. There is also a problem in that Substance can have no individual thought as thought is defined by Spinoza as being dependent on something else for its existence and therefore cannot be Substance. The divine intellect is merely the total of all possible knowledge, it is not conscious, as such. However, Spinoza’s argument does have some strong points as it follows the traditional view of transcendental realism (see above) of saying that everything in the world is explained through Substance, as Substance is everything there is.