The superstitions of cultural atheism,

Part 3 of 4 on Atheism

See here for part one, part two, part four

In the previous two posts we spoke about Atheisms intellectual hypocrisies, but what about cultural atheism ? Stephen RL Clarke remarks,

“Those who don’t believe in, or don’t worship, the gods of a particular tribe may still have gods, ideals and rituals of their own.

In times past to be atheistical was simply to be irreligious, impious. Piety lay in respecting the authorities of our day, and our ancestral traditions. Religion lay in obeying both moral and ritual requirements (not always easily distinguished). It might require us to respect, even if not obey, a child, a stranger, a sacred spring, a healthy animal. All such presences impose themselves upon us: showing contempt for them, our ancestors supposed, would earn the anger of more powerful gods.

Obviously, those who pretended to swear by gods in whom they did not believe, and whose judgement they did not fear, could not be trusted to keep their vows."

Obviously, those who feared no immortal judgement could not be expected to treat suppliants or other powerless strangers well. Obviously those who thought that the only good was pleasure, the only evil pain, were defenseless in the face of threats and bribes. 

‘Theism’ was not a theoretical position, but a practical determination to acknowledge what was sacred in our lands and tribes. It was not – and is not – merely an explanatory hypothesis, but an inspiration.

In Durkheim’s words, ‘the real function of religion is not to make us think, to enrich our knowledge, nor to add to the conceptions which we owe to science others of another origin and another character, but rather, it is to make us act, to aid us to live’. This isn’t the whole truth about ‘religion’ (as Durkheim himself acknowledged), but it is a central truth.

We cannot simultaneously say – as mainstream atheists say - that there is no objective, rationally obligatory way of life and thought, that ‘right and wrong’ are only ‘social constructions’, and that our way of life and thought is obviously right! Or rather (since this is exactly what so many people say) we cannot say this without self-contradiction.

A really radical, nihilistic atheism denies that anything is sacred – not even that shibboleth of liberal modernism, the ‘happiness’ of the greatest number (in practice, the health and pleasure of the greatest number of human beings in a particular political region). ‘Human beings’ are only the current survivors of the hominid branch of mammalian evolution, with no special claim on the cosmos and no intrinsic value as ‘images of God’. Many of those who think that they are ‘atheists’ somehow retain a conviction that ‘human health and happiness’ – though perhaps not human life – is so obviously a good that everyone (every rational being, that is) must immediately acknowledge it. Lacking any reason to believe that each human life is sacred this conviction easily mutates into some form of collective hedonism, modified – as before – by an insistence on knowing and telling the Truth .





A really radical atheism might prefer to remodel all our habits, all our customs, in the expectation that a properly scientific outlook will be able to devise a coherent plan of life acceptable to all (or at least to themselves), once we have broken free of the demons of our past: a project that Edmund Burke rightly deplored when it was initiated by French lawyers! ‘When ancient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss cannot possibly be estimated. From that moment we have no compass to govern us; nor can we know distinctly to what port we steer’.

And those who think that they are ‘properly scientific’ may be as self-deceived as any prelates who suppose that they are true Christians!"

Clark is correct, indeed, the Enlightenment myth of an “age of reason” was about “freedom”, to liberate us from any notions of divine or natural law that might place unwelcome constraints upon our wills, Christendom was just as rational, it simply served different basic commitments.

But language, conscience, rationality, will, freedom, meaning, personal identity, and purpose — the distinctively human attributes — have metaphysical character not privy to calculative reasoning. 

Reducing ethical reasoning to technocratic rationalism, we cut off access to our wisdom traditions.

Moral value is something real, if we deny this we sever reason from reality, from Truth & Goodness, from culture & tradition, it is to banish the human from thought itself, thus reason becomes simply a will to power….as the murderous ideologies of the past century attest to.

Nicholas Lasch says,

"In this twilight of the twentieth century, we need urgently to understand how little the destructiveness of gods and demons is diminished by denying their existence or by clothing them in ‘secular’ and hence (supposedly) more innocuous descriptions."

Clarke ends saying, "Modern atheists have also inherited a strange combination of ideas: on the one hand, the ultimate cause and context of all things is infinite and incomprehensible; on the other, human intelligence can be expected to be raised so far as to speak and act for all things, but perhaps on the condition that it abandons or transforms its own ‘primitive’ or ‘animal’ nature. This is what marks such atheism as a specifically Christian heresy, of a kind that would not easily arise even in other Abrahamic traditions, let alone Hindu or Chinese.”

And this is echoed by John Milbank : "Whereas the Enlightenment sundered reason from reality, logic from feeling, and culture from nature, in religion Reason itself is incarnated & sustained in a certain corporate presence of ritual, symbolic expression, practice, association, contemplation and intellectual reflection.



But they do this not on the basis of calculation, but rather as a matter of instinct and commitment. Yet throughout history this instinct has proved more rational than the operations of a coldly detached reason and has engendered everywhere a civilising effect.



For this reason, not only is the modern secular person already a cyborg, she is also inherently schizophrenic….
"

In 1978 the Berkeley molecular biologist Gunther Stent published a book called “Paradoxes of Progress,” in which he wrote that “the most meaningful [contemporary] definition of progress can be made from the purview . . . of the will to power”; but, he added, “it is a totally amoral view of progress, under which nuclear ballistic missiles definitely represent progress over gunpowder cannonballs, which in return represent progress over bows and arrows.”

Aeschliman writes about just that HERE,

"Reductionism and the will to power (libido dominandi) are closely related, epistemologically and ethically, amounting to what T. S. Eliot called a degrading, schizoid “dissociation of sensibility”: We reduce realities (including human beings) to their manipulable and exploitable physical features in order to dominate them: we reduce thou to it, persons to things, ends to means, subjects to objects, essences to existents, mind to matter, spirit to flesh, reason to sense experience.

Rationality, conceptualization, volition, and language itself are irreducibly metaphysical: For those who refuse to see this, Socrates lived and died in vain. The current reductionist rampage and regime is an obscene, transgressive violation of the greatest insights and products of the Western (and world) mind, spirit, and imagination in philosophy, ethics, literature, architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and humanistic discourse itself. It justifies the worry of the great Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga (1872–1945) that the anti-metaphysical animus of modernist culture is fundamentally dehumanizing and disintegrative, an “abolition of man” (to use Lewis’s phrase).

The militant partisans of “the secular border patrol” would do well to consider that when the metaphysical or religious dimension and horizon of human persons, societies, and cultures are denied, ignored, scorned, or attacked, there is no clear warrant for peace and goodwill on earth, which are hardly the “natural” attributes of human beings. Glenn quotes the English Labour-party politician Roy Hattersley (an atheist) as adding that “if suffering human beings have to wait for atheists and agnostics rather than religious believers for help, they are likely to wait a very long time.”

Hart's “governing conviction” is that what our new atheists regard as modern progress in the direction of rational liberation is itself a reactionary superstition. The modern Enlightenment has actually been a rebellion against the whole truth about our natures, about who we are, and about the true source of our freedom and dignity. And that rebellion has been not so much radical as selective and self-indulgent. By compassionately privileging personal freedom and human rights over what they believe they know through science, the new atheists remain parasitic on the key Christian insight about who we are. Their attachment to the humane virtues makes no sense outside the Christian claim for the unique and irreplaceable dignity of every human person. That claim is completely unsupported by either ancient (Aristotelian) or modern (Darwinian) science. The sentimental preferences of our atheists are really those of a Christianity without Christ.

It was Nietzsche who prophesied that our fading, subjective experiences of dignity, freedom, and love have a very limited future as merely beneficial illusions

Hart reviews In The Enchantments of Mammon, How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity by Eugene McCarraher, HERE

Like MacIntyre, McCarraher “is impatient with those tedious modern dogmatisms that masquerade as deliverances of enlightened and disinterested rationality. He too finds the modern displacement of any moral grammar based on the cultivation of virtues by a fragmentary ethos of private values, public platitudes, and voluntarist individualisms a depressing reality. He too laments the reduction of ethical reasoning to little more than assertions of the will and celebrations of private property as the supreme index of the good.”

The enlightenment, modern capitalism, “Instead, is another kind of religion, one whose chief tenets may be more irrational than almost any of the creeds it replaced at the various centers of global culture.

Rather than a sane calculation of material possibilities and human motives, it is in fact an enthusiast cult of insatiable consumption allied to a degrading metaphysics of human nature. And it is sustained, like any creed, by doctrines and miracles, mysteries and revelations, devotions and credulities, promises of beatitude and threats of dereliction.

McCarraher urges us to stop thinking of the modern age as the godless sequel to the ages of faith, and recognize it instead as a period of the most destructive kind of superstition, one in which acquisition and ambition have become our highest moral aims, consumer goods (the more intrinsically worthless the better) our fetishes, and impossible promises of limitless material felicity our shared eschatology. And so deep is our faith in these things that we are willing to sacrifice the whole of creation in their service. McCarraher, therefore, prefers to speak not of disenchantment, but of “misenchantment”—spiritual captivity to the glamor of an especially squalid god.”

Elsehwhere Hart writes,

"What distinguishes modernity from the age of Christendom is not that the former is more devoted to rationality than was the latter but that its rationality serves different primary commitments”

All reasoning presumes premises or intuitions or ultimate convictions that cannot be proved by any foundations or facts more basic than themselves, and hence there are irreducible convictions present wherever one attempts to apply logic to experience. One always operates within boundaries established by one’s first principles, and asks only the questions that those principles permit.”

…it is only that Christianity expressly forbids the various evils that have been done by Christians, whereas democracy, in principle, forbids nothing (except, of course, the defeat of the majority's will).

The Age of Enlightenment—considered in purely political terms—was itself merely the transition from one epoch of nationalist warfare, during which states still found it necessary to use religious institutions as instruments of power, to another epoch of still greater nationalist warfare, during which religious rationales had become obsolete, because the state had become its own cult, and power the only morality.

...surely the belief that moral principles are only a combination of evolutionary epiphenomena and sentimental predilections must weaken the will to seek the good, and a whole culture that truly came to believe that all moral choices are merely personal preferences might find that the inventiveness and spontaneity of the liberated will are capable of just about anything, and responsible to nothing. After all, it is not as if the lessons of modern history have given us no cause for apprehension on that score.”

So much of what we imagine to be the testimony of reason or the clear and unequivocal evidence of our senses is really only an interpretive reflex, determined by mental habits impressed in us by an intellectual and cultural history. Even our notion of what might constitute a “rational” or “realistic” view of things is largely a product not of a dispassionate attention to facts, but of an ideological legacy.”

" The modern period has never been especially devoted to reason as such; the notion that it ever was is merely one of its “originary” myths. The true essence of modernity is a particular conception of what it is to be free, as I have said; and the Enlightenment language of an “age of reason” was always really just a way of placing a frame around that idea of freedom, so as to portray it as the rational autonomy and moral independence that lay beyond the intellectual infancy of “irrational” belief.

But we are anything but rationalists now, so we no longer need cling to the pretense that reason was ever our paramount concern; we are today more likely to be committed to “my truth” than to any notion of truth in general, no matter where that might lead

The myth of “enlightenment” served well to liberate us from any antique notions of divine or natural law that might place unwelcome constraints upon our wills; but it has discharged its part and lingers on now only as a kind of habit of rhetoric. And now that the rationalist moment has largely passed, the modern faith in human liberation has become, if anything, more robust and more militant.

What I find most mystifying is the strange presupposition that a truly secular society would of its nature be more tolerant and less prone to violence than any society shaped by any form of faith. Given that the modern age of secular governance has been the most savagely and sublimely violent period in human history, by a factor (or body count) of incalculable magnitude, it is hard to identify the grounds for their confidence.....the modern secular state's capacity for barbarism exceeds any of the evils for which Christendom might justly be indicted, not solely by virtue of the superior technology at its disposal, but by its very nature.

...surely the belief that moral principles are only a combination of evolutionary epiphenomena and sentimental predilections must weaken the will to seek the good, and a whole culture that truly came to believe that all moral choices are merely personal preferences might find that the inventiveness and spontaneity of the liberated will are capable of just about anything, and responsible to nothing. After all, it is not as if the lessons of modern history have given us no cause for apprehension on that score.

Can one really believe—as the New Atheists seem to do—that secular reason, if finally allowed to move forward, free of the constraining hand of archaic faith, will naturally make society more just, more humane, and more rational than it has been in the past? What evidence supports such an expectation? It is rather difficult, placing everything in the scales, to vest a great deal of hope in modernity, however radiantly enchanting its promises, when one considers how many innocent lives have already been swallowed up in the flames of modern “progress.”

At the end of the twentieth century—the century when secularization became an explicit political andcultural project throughout the world—the forces of progressive ideology could boast an unprecedentedly vast collection of corpses, but not much in the way of new moral concepts. At least, not any we should be especially proud of.

So, how do political systems use atheism to control; the sheep ? See HERE in part 4

Nietzsche against the idolatry of atheism

Part 1of 4 posts on Atheism

Besides Christianity, Nietzsche was equally disgusted with the various delusions and hypocrisies that modern atheist’s haven’t the courage to face.

RR Reno speaks on Nietzsche's deeper Truth, he writes,

“Nietzsche correctly anticipates will be the one truth that his readers cannot bear: the inescapable power of self-denying moral ideals., the human being needs a goal.

Nietzsche surveys the standard modern methods of self-liberation from the narrow way of faith: art, philosophy, humanistic studies, politics, and even atheism. In each instance, he shatters illusions. Covert forms of Christianity, they are all the more unappealing because of their self-­protective blindness and uncreative mendacity.

The human will needs a goal. Is this so difficult to understand, asks Nietzsche? We want to make something out of our lives; we want to add up to something. But do we really understand what it means to “make something of our lives,” to achieve something “worthwhile,” to choose something “meaningful,” to create something “beautiful”?

Do we not see that wanting to be something—anything—involves obedience to an ideal? Modern fantasies about post-Christian ways of life make men and women into the most deformed of all possible creatures: ignorant slaves of slave morality.

Our painting must render what is real. Our poetry must serve the muse. “The musician himself” must become “a kind of mouthpiece of the ‘in itself’ of things, a telephone from beyond.” The composer is a “ventriloquist of God.” The listener is no less subservient. We must put ourselves entirely at the disposal of the music. “Not my will but thine” remains as the covert imperative.

The same holds for the larger project of modern, critical education. We must question our dearly held pieties. We need to discipline ourselves to step back and coolly examine our presuppositions. Nietzsche sees the spiritual effect. Guided by the modern critical project, “we violate ourselves nowadays, no doubt of it, we nutcrackers of the soul, ever questioning and questionable.” 

The conclusions may contradict Christian doctrine, but the underlying knife of self-denial cuts as deeply as ever. “We experiment with ourselves,” Nietzsche observes of the modern atmosphere of critique that contemporary professors continues this, , “in a way we would never permit ourselves to experiment with ­animals and, carried away by curiosity, we cheerfully vivisect our souls.”

When physical science puts on airs and claims to defend intellectual integrity and experimental rigor, it reveals its religious character as a strict disciplinarian. “This ‘modern science’—let us face the fact!—is the best ally the ascetic ideal has at present.” The human sciences—sociology, modern history, anthropology, psychology—are equally characterized by an “insistence on intellectual cleanliness,” and these disciplines “still have faith in truth.”

Self-conscious atheism reinforces rather than overcomes the logic of confessional submission. “Unconditional honest atheism (and it is the only air we breathe, we more spiritual men of this age!) is therefore not the antithesis of [the ascetic] ideal, as it appears to be,” Nietzsche writes. “It is rather only one of the latest phases of its evolution, one of its terminal forms and inner consequences.” In fact, atheism may be the most extreme form of self-denial. It is a frenzied perfectionism of the intellect that “forbids itself the lie involved in belief in God.” Saying no to dogma in obedience to pure reason still involves saying yes to the logic of self-denying service to the truth.

In the final section, he even suggests that the cold facts of our fragile humanity make self-denial the only real alternative for a human life that does not simply give up in despair. “To repeat in conclusion what I said in the beginning,” the final line declares, “man would rather will nothingness than not will.” We would rather live for an otherworldly ideal than abandon ourselves to enslavement to the fickle instincts of our decaying bodies. We would rather consume ourselves in fires of self-imposed moral discipline than simply live and allow ourselves to be slowly, inexorably consumed by the cruel ravages of time.

He clearly despised Christianity and yearned for a form of human life that is creative, free, and fully developed. Yet his most lucid and disciplined investigation into the dynamics of faith ends with a mockery of modern alternatives and a grudging affirmation that the human animal was made to worship, serve, and obey. For if we leave our lives simply as we find them, he suggests, then we are doomed to live a nihilism deeper and more threatening than the most unworldly and aggressive asceticism—life without will.

Nietzsche’s almost unwilling final affirmation of the ascetic impulse echoes St. Augustine’s basic insight into the human condition. Our hearts are restless. The human animal wishes to give itself to something higher. It is a need more basic than our instinctual urges. It is a nature more fundamental than everything our age wishes us to affirm as natural.

Our restless hearts suggest that the real dangers of the present age are not to be found in an open-ended, nihilistic non-judgmentalism that encourages us to imagine our world devoid of compelling truths. Such possibilities are abroad, but, as anyone who has been exposed to our educational establishment knows, it requires the constant infusion of disciplinary energy to keep young people from actually believing something.

Instead, if Nietzsche is right, the danger we face may be idolatry. Deprived of a God worth worshiping, we will find substitutes, even to the point of ­prostrating ourselves before birds or animals or reptiles that our modern minds have transformed from graven images into shrill moral imperatives and brittle political causes.

The last century’s graveyards testify to the reality of this danger. Turned away from something truly greater than ourselves, we do not come to rest in a modest ­loyalty to humanity. Instead, as Nietzsche’s and Augustine’s insights into the human condition warn us, we fall into a devotion to subhuman primal powers that reward our service with debasement.”

So, how exactly are Atheists hypocritical secret Christians ? See the part 2 HERE

Atheism as primitive Christian heresy

Part 2 of 4

Part one , part three , part four

In my last post HERE I quoted excerpts from Rust Reno's essay on Nietzsche, who not only lambasts Christianity’s slave morality but also mocks his naive atheist enlightenment readers, with their equally superstitious modern illusions of objectivity, a naive belief we can redirect our lives and our culture on the basis of rational analysis and well-intentioned judgment, their naive worship of “Reason” (with a capital R, God must go somewhere), their pious moral demands we must search and uphold objective knowledge. Modern atheism is nothing but a heretical, and particularly hypocritical, Christian sect. Here I continue the conversation.

As John Gary points out in his new book on Atheism,

“…much modern Western thought is a bastardized and degenerated version of Christianity, cherry picking the anthropological and ethical fruit while hacking away at its metaphysical roots. “The God of monotheism did not die, it only left the scene for a while in order to reappear as humanity – the human species dressed up as a collective agent, pursuing its self–realisation in history.”

“A remark made by Wittgenstein about Frazer applies equally to Richard Dawkins and his followers,” he notes: “‘Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages… His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves’.” (11) Not only do the “smears and fulminations” of the New Atheists make sense “only in a specifically Christian context,” but they only do so within “a few subsets of the Christian religion”.

Stephen RL Clark writes about the specifically Christian type of atheism he claims is a Christian sect HERE, one particular to modernity, :

“Epicurean philosophers were considered atheistical – although they clearly stated that all the usual gods existed, somewhere in the infinite expanse of being – because they rejected the usual cultic rituals. It is no accident that ‘atheism’ has often been considered anti-social (as both Christians and Epicureans were), since the rituals that atheists rejected were ones that validated the existing social order. But of course those atheists often had their own ideas about what social order to create or to preserve – they had, in short, gods and a cult of their own, and once they won through to power themselves they imposed the cult on other people with almost as much ferocity as ever was used against them!

Those who don’t believe in, or don’t worship, the gods of a particular tribe may still have gods, ideals and rituals of their own.

Abrahamic theism in its various guises - gives us a reason for valuing truth, and for thinking that it is, in the end, coherent and such as we can at least in part conceive. A.O.Lovejoy spoke of ‘the inexpugnable faith of humankind’: that there really is a truth which is not dependent on our wishes or our reasonings, and that this truth is nonetheless attainable - in part - by those who follow the right way. 

R.M.Rorty rejected both ideas as absurd….he was merely applying the logic of current naturalistic, evolutionary theory. Current evolutionary theory on the other hand suggests that we are likely to believe only what will be socially and reproductively useful (and that is therefore all we should do): the Muslims perhaps calculated accordingly that it would do them no good to let themselves be infected by a socially disadvantageous meme.

Robert Chambers, gives a theistic account of nature :

“The objective structure of the universe and the intellectual structure of the human being coincide; the subjective reason and the objectified reason in nature are identical. In the end it is ‘one’ reason that links both and invites us to look to a unique creative Intelligence.”

The success, so far, of rational enquiry does not prove that this is true: we can never be sure that we have read the signs correctly, or that the very next moment will not reveal that the pattern of events has been entirely other than we supposed. Even our notion of what counts as a resemblance, or what will count as ‘doing the same thing’, has no basis in any merely logical understanding. Even in working out mathematical formulas, though we cannot prove that we are on the right track, we may still hope we are, and continue – there being no rational alternative – in faith: a faith that is much more reasonable on theistic principles than atheistic.

It was from the perspective of Judeo-Christian theism – and from that perspective alone – that it was predictable that science would have succeeded as it has. Without the faith in the rational intelligibility of the world and the divine vocation of human beings to master it, modern science would never have been possible, and, even today, the continued rationality of the enterprise of science depends on convictions that can be reasonably grounded only in theistic metaphysics."

"We have to psychoanalyze science, purify it. . . . Its concept of Nature is often only an idol to which the scientist makes sacrifices, the reasons for which are due more to affective motivations than to scientific givens. "

—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Nature”


How is this thing, this Newtonian phantasm . . . this Natural Religion, this impossible absurdity?

—William Blake, “Milton”


Of course a self-sustaining, closed nature is logically impossible, nature requires a “super-nature.

As David Hart remarks, 

Naturalism, alone among all considered philosophical attempts to describe the shape of reality, is radically insufficient in its explanatory range. The one thing of which it can give no account, and which its most fundamental principles make it entirely impossible to explain at all, is nature’s very existence. For existence is most definitely not a natural phenomenon; it is logically prior to any physical cause whatsoever…. In fact, it is impossible to say how, in terms naturalism allows, nature could exist at all.

There is, after all, nothing inherently reasonable in the conviction that all of reality is simply an accidental confluence of physical causes, without any transcendent source or end. Materialism is not a fact of experience or a deduction of logic; it is a metaphysical prejudice, nothing more, and one that is arguably more irrational than almost any other.”

…an incoherent concept, and one that is ultimately indistinguishable from pure magical thinking.”

In MacIntyre’s words:

"To believe in God is not to believe that in addition to nature, about which atheists and theists can agree, there is something else, about which they disagree. It is rather that theists and atheists disagree about nature as well as about God. For theists believe that nature presents itself as radically incomplete, as requiring a ground beyond itself, if it is to be intelligible, and so their disagreement with atheists involves everything."

Clarke continues,

"We cannot explain existence as a whole by referring to some one thing that happens also to exist. Either there is no explanation (things ‘just happen’) or it lies – as Plato said – beyond existence. But though there is a disagreement here about the nature of ‘Nature’ itself, it may still be true that theists of this stamp will prefer a ‘naturalistic’ reading of our evidence.

Naturalism, the thesis that the cosmos works according to its own internal rules without being constantly reset or interfered with by its transcendent creator, was a theological doctrine in its beginnings, and there is no way of proving that it is true by an empirical enquiry. So also was the Enlightenment decision to neglect ‘final causes’ in our account of what occurs in nature: since we do not know God’s purposes, nor His techniques for realizing them, we should content ourselves with describing what occurs, and trusting to our rational – and God-given – insight to uncover useful patterns. Christians also explicitly rejected animism, and so provided the spokesmen of experimental science with their characteristic rhetoric."

And Hart asks,

“Why presume that the scientific image is true while the manifest image is an illusion when, after all, the scientific image is a supposition of reason dependent upon decisions regarding methods of inquiry, whereas the manifest image — the world as it exists in the conscious mind — presents itself directly to us as an indubitable, inescapable, and eminently coherent reality in every single moment of our lives? How could one possibly determine here what should qualify as reality as such?

Perhaps the scientific and manifest images are both accurate. Then again, perhaps only the manifest image is. Perhaps the mind inhabits a real Platonic order of being, where ideal forms express themselves in phenomenal reflections, while the scientific image — a mechanistic regime devoid of purpose and composed of purely particulate causes, stirred only by blind, random impulses — is a fantasy, a pale abstraction decocted from the material residues of an immeasurably richer reality.”

"Some atheists," Clarke goes on to say, "it seems safe to conclude, wish to deny that the world is packed with fairies, spirits, ghosts and goblins: at the very least our fantasies and fears do not themselves have any direct effect on the way things work. They may wish that the world be governed by ‘natural law’ (that is, that it go on doing ‘the same thing’, whatever that may be) or by the operation of ‘physical nature’, and fear what they take to be the implication of a robust theism: that natural law and the present nature of the things they deal with could suddenly be suspended.

The principles that good atheists wish to see applied - reason, science and the power of the human mind – are ones that they have imbibed from two millennia of Hebrew and Hellenic culture. The criticisms that they mount against ‘religion’ – that religious people have persecuted minority opinions, bullied unbelievers, humiliated women, waged war against the infidel and so forth – make little sense as criticisms rather than observations if there is no transcendent standard of behaviour and motivation of the sort we learnt from that supposedly wicked book Leviticus

Atheistical critics, especially the most vociferous, are, I suggest, motivated by a passionate attachment to ideas of truth and justice that depend historically and logically on mainstream Abrahamic theism – perhaps especially its Christian variety.

The demand that we be ‘objective’ is, exactly, a moral demand.

If the Truth is not worth knowing, and we have no reason to expect that we have the power to know it even if it were, then the reasonable decision would be to prefer the fictions."

David Hart remarks that, 

“modern science,” in particular, is a distinct culture, with all the historical, linguistic, and conceptual conditionality that this entails; and every culture incubates within itself, even if only tacitly and tenuously, certain metaphysical presuppositions: what, for instance, constitutes reason; what the limits of knowledge are; what questions ought to be asked; which methods of inquiry should be presumed to reflect reality and which should be regarded only as useful fictions. And it is here, at the level of culture, that the truly irreconcilable conflicts between scientific and theological thinking are inevitably found; for in most circumstances it is not what we can prove, but what we presuppose, that determines what we think we know or imagine we have discovered.

After all, the sciences invoke questions not only of physical origins, properties, and processes, but also (even if only indirectly) of their intrinsic intelligibility, rational coherence, and even modal plausibility, which inevitably touch upon questions that classical theology asks as well.

So much of what we imagine to be the testimony of reason or the clear and unequivocal evidence of our senses is really only an interpretive reflex, determined by mental habits impressed in us by an intellectual and cultural history. Even our notion of what might constitute a “rational” or “realistic” view of things is largely a product not of a dispassionate attention to facts, but of an ideological legacy.”

All reasoning presumes premises or intuitions or ultimate convictions that cannot be proved by any foundations or facts more basic than themselves, and hence there are irreducible convictions present wherever one attempts to apply logic to experience. One always operates within boundaries established by one’s first principles, and asks only the questions that those principles permit....
One can, I imagine, consider the nature of reality with genuine probity and conclude that the material order is all there is. One can also, however, and perhaps with better logic, conclude that materialism is a grossly incoherent superstition; that the strict materialist is something of a benighted and pitiable savage, blinded by an irrational commitment to a logically impossible position; and that every “primitive” who looks at the world about him and wonders what god made it is a profounder thinker than the convinced atheist who would dismiss such a question as infantile. One might even conclude, in fact, that one of the real differences between what convention calls the Age of Faith and the Age of Reason is actually the difference between a cogent intellectual and moral culture, capable of considering the mystery of being with some rigor, and a confined and vapid dogmatism without genuine logical foundation."

Atheism to Control the sheep

Part 4 of 4 on Atheism

Here is part one, part two, part three

Paul Tyson, in his account of Platonism in his superb book Returning to Reality, writes on how our modern atheism is really a Christian heresy the Elites push to gain control,

“Politically, the evolution of the idea of the discretely supernatural, as a realm fully separate from the natural realm, has deep roots in late medieval theology and philosophy. Modernity is still thoroughly medieval to the extent that this astonishing innovation is accepted largely without question by modern people, be they religious or not. Thus was the tangible cosmos ontologically disenchanted, and a new approach to political and technological power and to religious authority follows naturally on that development.

All the seventeenth-century fathers of modernity do is put these late medieval ideas into practice in such a way that the structure of the high medieval way of life can no longer support it. So modernity is actually the life form that fits the theology of the late medieval theological innovators whose ideas we have briefly sketched. That is, the reality assumptions and operational givens of the modern way of life rest on our collective belief in late medieval theology.

Our modern worldview typically assumes that the physical cosmos is a self-contained and entirely material reality, sealed off from the discretely supernatural realm of the spiritual .Functionally, within modernity, there is no practical difference between the assumed realisms of a materialist non-Christian and a “supernaturalist” Christian—to both the here-and-now world operates within an entirely natural, entirely non-spiritual realm as known by objective science. In contrast, Jesus, Paul, John, and Plato all consider the material world to be fundamentally dependent on eternal meaning (Logos) and value (the Goodness of God); for them it is simply inconceivable to consider it as a discretely and self-contained material reality.”

This eventually led to modern atheism, Tyson says,

“These operational norms and the assumptions about the nature of reality that go with them are at least partly shaped by the vested power interests of those who govern us. Thus shared reality beliefs are intimately enmeshed in the necessary power structures, with all their vested interests, in which we live. ….it may well be that those power structures are as interested in promoting zones of illusion that hide oppression within our assumed understanding of reality as they are in facilitating the true flourishing, freedom, and dignity of our lives. Those who never question the realities with which they are presented are easily controlled by those who set up the power structures and wield influence in any given society.

“Increasingly a deep cultural unknowing regarding what the point and meaning of our wondrous objective knowledge and manipulative power might be is now a pervasive background feature of our cultural life form. This leaves us at the mercy of the brazen manipulative irrealism and the morally unconstrained instrumentalism of consumer culture. The vested power interests native to pragmatic consumerism delight in playing with our subjective beliefs and molding our objective behaviors to suit its merely instrumental ends. Market realism and the mass media age thrives on generating seductive ready-made consumer identities saturated in powerful illusions that prime our fantasies of desire and manipulate our inchoate fears, and all for the meaningless “point” of getting us to spend money.

Once we are out of touch with thinking about moral and spiritual reality it does not take long for us to get out of touch with material reality as well (think of speculative trading and the non-material bubble worlds possible within cyberspace). The escapism, narcissism, and virtual brilliance of our powerful entertainment industry, and a flagrant disregard for the physical environment on which our very lives depend, is also characteristic of our times. ”

For now we have power without wisdom or piety, existence without nobility, lives without any transcendently referenced point, birth and death without intrinsic meaning, time and seasons without liturgical reference, holidays without the holy. (Though, of course, we do have very fancy and cheap flat screen TVs.) Now the West has unleashed enormous instrumental and military forces on the globe and has built a set of global structures that facilitate unprecedented economic and material exploitation; but all this power is directed to no common good, to no intrinsically valuable end. Under this situation, if we have no sense of accountability to any moral truth or any sacred meaning in how we govern the world, then we may drag the whole world down into the West’s spiritual bog and visit unprecedented destruction on the entire globe in the process.

What these different discourses of power consider as real and knowable, and what they do not perceive and thus label as unreal and unknowable, has enormous importance on how we actually live. Disciplines of desire and character formation are naturally aligned with the tacit collective goals of any given life form, and these goals are only visible within shared frames of belief, and those shared frames of belief have deep leverage on our way of life because they are richly, imaginatively, and allegorically constructed.

Yet ironically—as Nietzsche himself understood—any view of reality that is only defined within the order of the tangibly apparent, the empirical realm, is just as much imaginatively constructed and a shared frame of belief as are outlooks situated within a metaphysically three-dimensional frame of belief.

Formation in any collective belief alignment is deeply mytho-poetic and happens below the conscious and “adult radar of our stated metaphysical convictions. The metaphysical formation that we absorb from the stories and ideas of our culture’s collective imagination become the background cultural wallpaper of any given way of life.

Thus, typically unknown to us, it is the distinctive narratives and particular imaginative landscapes of our culture that shape our sympathies, our apathies, and our social norms.

These deep narratives discipline our desires and motivate our actions. Thus, the visibilities and invisibilities thrown up by a culture’s mythopoetic outlook shape its most basic moral and political framework.”

“Yet this dynamic of the normalization of exploitation via the techniques of skillfully-crafted marketing illusions and production invisibilities. . . almost any tradeable commodity—is tied to a deep cultural belief that makes the modern Western consumer way of life work. The belief that makes it all work is that public facts and material things are objective and have no inherent value or meaning, for values and meanings are matters of personal preference and are thus up to individuals to select for themselves. And that belief is a function of a one-dimensional metaphysical outlook where only objects that you can see and touch are really real.”

“ it is the functional assumption that meanings and values are not part of objective reality but are rather essentially personal and cultural constructions that means that financial and objective “realism” trumps personal and cultural values and meanings, without us even noticing that there is a contest.”

…this way of seeing and acting easily makes abstract fantasies (such as money) into real objects, and embodied normative realities (such as human dignity) into abstract fantasies. But if there is only one dimension to reality then both money and human dignity are equally artifices of manipulation, and there is no meaningful way of saying why one of them is more intrinsically important than the other.”

According to David Hart, part of the therapeutic appeal of naturalism is its current set of addictive infatuations: scientism, capitalism, and, above all, consumerism.

Late modern society is principally concerned with purchasing things, in ever greater abundance and variety, and so has to strive to fabricate an ever greater number of desires to gratify, and to abolish as many limits and prohibitions upon desire as it can.

Such a society is already implicitly atheist and so must slowly but relentlessly apply itself to the dissolution of transcendent values. It cannot allow ultimate goods to distract us from proximate goods. Our sacred writ is advertising, our piety is shopping, our highest devotion is private choice.

God and the soul too often hinder the purely acquisitive longings upon which the market depends, and confront us with values that stand in stark rivalry to the only truly substantial value at the center of the social universe: the price tag.

So it really was only a matter of time before atheism slipped out of the enclosed gardens of academe and down from the vertiginous eyries of high cosmopolitan fashion and began expressing itself in crassly vulgar form.

It was equally inevitable that, rather than boldly challenging the orthodoxies of its age, it would prove to be just one more anodyne item on sale in the shops and would be enthusiastically fêted by a vapid media culture not especially averse to the idea that there are no ultimate values, but only final prices. In a sense, the triviality of the movement is its chief virtue.

It is a diverting alternative to thinking deeply. It is a narcotic. In our time, to strike a lapidary phrase, irreligion is the opiate of the bourgeoisie, the sigh of the oppressed ego, the heart of a world filled with tantalizing toys.

Hart's “governing conviction” is that what our new atheists regard as modern progress in the direction of rational liberation is itself a reactionary superstition. The modern Enlightenment has actually been a rebellion against the whole truth about our natures, about who we are, and about the true source of our freedom and dignity. And that rebellion has been not so much radical as selective and self-indulgent. By compassionately privileging personal freedom and human rights over what they believe they know through science, the new atheists remain parasitic on the key Christian insight about who we are. Their attachment to the humane virtues makes no sense outside the Christian claim for the unique and irreplaceable dignity of every human person. That claim is completely unsupported by either ancient (Aristotelian) or modern (Darwinian) science. The sentimental preferences of our atheists are really those of a Christianity without Christ.

It was Nietzsche who prophesied that our fading, subjective experiences of dignity, freedom, and love have a very limited future as merely beneficial illusions

Hart says,

“What I find most mystifying in the arguments of the authors I have mentioned, and of others like them, is the strange presupposition that a truly secular society would of its nature be more tolerant and less prone to violence than any society shaped by any form of faith. Given that the modern age of secular governance has been the most savagely and sublimely violent period in human history, by a factor (or body count) of incalculable magnitude, it is hard to identify the grounds for their confidence.”

All of this, however, is really of only secondary importance. The modern period has never been especially devoted to reason as such; the notion that it ever was is merely one of its “originary” myths. The true essence of modernity is a particular conception of what it is to be free, as I have said; and the Enlightenment language of an “age of reason” was always really just a way of placing a frame around that idea of freedom, so as to portray it as the rational autonomy and moral independence that lay beyond the intellectual infancy of “irrational” belief.

But we are anything but rationalists now, so we no longer need cling to the pretense that reason was ever our paramount concern; we are today more likely to be committed to “my truth” than to any notion of truth in general, no matter where that might lead.

The myth of “enlightenment” served well to liberate us from any antique notions of divine or natural law that might place unwelcome constraints upon our wills; but it has discharged its part and lingers on now only as a kind of habit of rhetoric. And now that the rationalist moment has largely passed, the modern faith in human liberation has become, if anything, more robust and more militant. Freedom for us today is something transcendent even of reason, and we no longer really feel that we must justify our liberties by recourse to some prior standard of responsible rationality. Freedom—conceived as the perfect, unconstrained spontaneity of individual will—is its own justification, its own highest standard, its own unquestionable truth.”

 

Reasons of the Heart ? Pascal on overcoming skepticism.

Terence Cuneo writes about Pascal and faith HERE in his essay,
Combating the Noetic Effects of Sin: Pascal's Strategy for Natural Theology, he offers a few quotes by Pascal on the heart before commenting :

“We know the truth not only through our reason but also through our heart. It is through the latter that we know first principles, and reason, which has nothing to do with it, tries in vain to refute them. The sceptics have no other object than that, and they work at it to no purpose. We know that we are not dreaming, but, however unable we may be to prove it rationally, our inability proves nothing but the weakness of our reason, and not the uncertainty of all our knowledge, as they maintain.

 For knowledge of first principles, like space, time, motion, number, is as solid as any derived through reason, and it is on such knowledge, coming from the heart and instinct, that reason has to depend and base all its argument. The heart feels that there are three spatial dimensions and that there is an infinite series of numbers, and reason goes on to demonstrate that there are no two square numbers of which one is double the other.

Our inability must therefore serve only to humble reason which would like to be the judge of everything, but not to confute our certainty. As if reason were the only way we could learn! Would to God, on the contrary, that we never needed it and knew everything by instinct and feeling. (F 110, ).”

We find that instinct corresponds to Ie memoire, or an inchoate recollection we have of our pre-fallen grandeur .

"That is the state in which men are today. They retain some feeble instinct from the happiness of their first nature... (F 149)."

"Man is therefore nothing but disguise, falsehood and hypocrisy, both in himself and with regard to others. He does not want to be told the truth. He avoids telling it to others, and all these tendencies, so remote from justice and reason, are naturally rooted in his heart (F 978).

I say that it is natural for the heart to love the universal being or itself, according to its allegiance, and it hardens itself against either as it chooses (F 423)."

Cueno comments, “…reason is not our sole epistemic faculty; neither need it serve the whims of a corrupt heart.  The intellective aspect of the heart and reason evince goodness and value when directed by the volition of a virtuous agent.

Pascal places great emphasis on the idea that the volitional aspect of the heart can greatly influence which beliefs we hold. Thus, in some sense, Pascal believes that the volitional part of our being can influence the intellective part of the heart and our reason. 

Pascal then adopts a form of doxastic voluntarism, or the doctrine that some portion of our beliefs are subject to voluntary control. In particular, Pascal champions a form of indirect doxastic voluntarism with respect to beliefs concerning the spiritual and moral state of ourselves, our neighbors, and the existence of God.

This is to say, Pascal is not claiming that we can by fiat decide whether or not to believe some proposition concerning ourselves, our neighbors and God; rather the claim is that by acts of volition we can influence what beliefs we hold on these subject matters by deciding what persons or states of affairs to direct our attention, what influences to admit in our belief forming tendencies, what beliefs to keep in the forefront of consciousness, and so on

Moreover, and this will become clear as we examine Pascal's natural theology, if the volitional part of our being can influence the intellective part of the heart and our reason, it turns out reason can in some sense influence the volitional aspect of the heart, and indirectly, the intellective aspect of the heart.

Pascal makes two major claims concerning our belief in God. First, belief in God is necessarily attained via the heart. Second, we cannot know God without knowing our own morally and spiritually depraved state.

Pascal argues,

“Knowing God without knowing our own wretchedness makes for pride. Knowing our own wretchedness without knowing God makes for despair (F 192).”

Man's true nature, his true good and true virtue, and true religion are things which cannot be known separately.

This realization will prevent us from considering ourselves the most worthy object of our own trust and love. We will not be able to absolutize ourselves.

“The nature of self-love and of this human self is to love only self and consider only self. But what is it to do? It cannot prevent the object of its love from being full of faults and wretchedness: it wants to be great and sees that it is small; it wants to be happy and sees that it is wretched; it wants to be perfect and sees that it is full of imperfections; it wants to be the object of men's love and esteem and sees that its faults deserve only dislike and contempt (F 978).”

Pascal holds that our volition must, as it were, turn outward to find a more worthy object of love, an object that satisfies this insatiable appetite for eudaimonia.”

On the connection between a morally virtuous character and epistemically virtuous belief Cueno writes,

“….a virtuous epistemic agent must be characterized not only by the desire and ability to see reality truthfully, but also exhibit enough honesty to accept what is true.

In fact, this is how Pascal defines reasonableness; reasonableness is a wholehearted desire for truth.

We increase our sensitivity to both the true state of our characters and the reality that surrounds us; hence, we increase the amount of true beliefs we hold. For Pascal, at least, for one to hold true beliefs concerning the emptiness of self-love requires an advanced stage of moral development.

It is the heart that perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason.

Though faith is a most complex concept, we might provisionally view it as an inclining of the volitional part of our being to trust in God.

In short, faith in God is a phenomenon that involves both the volitional aspect of the heart inclining towards God and the intellective aspect of the heart perceiving God in a non-inferential manner…the psychology of faith is an instance of the volitional aspect of the heart directly influencing what the intellective aspect of the heart perceives.

For Pascal, a necessary condition (note, not a sufficient one) for faith is that the volitional aspect of the heart turn away from love of self; the upshot of this, Pascal argues, is not some inferential process by which we come to believe in God but a movement of divine grace in which the heart turns its love toward God and perceives the reality of God.

Most of us will find ourselves seeking evidence for the existence of God and yet remaining unconvinced of His reality.

“There is thus evidence and obscurity, to enlighten some and obfuscate others. But the evidence is such as to exceed, or at least equal, the evidence to the contrary....Thus there is enough evidence to condemn and not enough to convince....(F 835)”

Pascal puts forth the "proof from the machine" to demonstrate how one might come to believe. The idea behind the proof from the machine is that many of our doxastic attitudes are largely a function of our habits and actions.

“For we must make no mistake about ourselves: we are as much automaton as mind. As a result, demonstration is not the only instrument for convincing us...Proofs only convince the mind; habit provides the strongest proofs and those that are most believed...it is, then, habit that convinces us and makes so many Christians. It is habit that makes Turks, heathen, trades, soldiers, etc. In short, we must resort to habit once the mind has seen where the truth lies, in order to steep and stain ourselves in that belief which constantly eludes us, for it is too much trouble to have the proofs always present to us (F 821).”

We can, according to Pascal, take certain steps, acquire certain habits so that we come to believe certain propositions we did not believe previous to practicing these habits.

Reason can then influence the volitional part of a person in such a way that the will induces that person to undertake certain actions that in turn influence what beliefs he holds.

A person's coming to believe in the existence of the Christian God in this way entails both that person's believing that it is in some sense rational to do so and that person's cultivating good habits such as attending mass and taking holy water so as to "steep and stain" himself in the ways of faith.

Habit functions in such a way that it turns the volitional part of the heart further away from self-love and prepares the way for God's movement of grace through the intellective part of the heart."

MIND & WORLD, REALITY & REASON

The knowledge of love, revelation, meaning, morality, intrinsic purpose - are these all convenient , subjective mental fictions inside our heads ? How is the universe intelligible to us ? Is there a rational structure to the world ? Can our minds even make contact with what’s really out there ?

Paul Tyson, in his superb book, Returning to Reality, (only 2.99 on kindle HERE ! ) gives a different vision of reality, one based on an ancient understanding of mind and cosmos, he writes,


“To Plato, these spiritual powers are extra-mental realities that inform all en-mattered things. That is, these “ideas” do not originate in our minds even though they can be apprehended by our minds. To Plato intelligible essence is a deep feature of reality, it is not something subjectively generated within our consciousness and then projected onto a meaningless objective cosmos.

So the tangible realm is seen as a partial reflection of the spiritual realm and hence all physical things are never simply physical, but are incomplete and passing functions of spiritual powers, intelligences, ideas, values, meanings, and authorities, which are the real source of the dynamics of our immediately perceive reality contexts.

Significantly, this does not entail a dualism between the physical and the spiritual, for there is no possibility here of the physical being in any way viable without its dependent relation to the spiritual. To the ancient worldview, the material could not be comprehensible, ordered, or meaningful were it not for its participation in the spiritual.

Jesus, Paul, John, and Plato all consider the material world to be fundamentally dependent on eternal meaning (Logos) and value (the Goodness of God); for them it is simply inconceivable to consider it as a discretely and self-contained material reality.

To Plato, the realm of tangible appearance would simply not be sensible or comprehensible were it not for eternal forms being transiently expressed in space and time.

Further, to Plato, if we did not have minds wrought and formed of spiritual reality we would not be able to comprehend the ever-present traces of eternal Reason as expressed partially within time. To Plato what we now call scientific knowledge would not be possible without divine order and value being expressed in nature.


*“If you think about the “grace and nature” controversies of modern theology you will quickly notice that these controversies could not arise within a broadly Platonist outlook on reality. In ancient terms one might think of nature as space, time, and matter and of grace as order, value, purpose, and meaning. In those terms nature is the medium for the partial expression of grace.

But notice, within this outlook there is no way in which it is possible to conceive of nature as other than fundamentally graced.

How could you have matter without form, how could you have facts without meaning, how could you have objectivity without value, how could you have time without eternity, how could you have thinking without reason? *


For to Plato, everything expressed in space, time, and matter is a derived and on goingly dependent creation of the divine Reason that emanates from The Good.

That reality is intelligible and full of qualitative richness is the start and grounds of meaningful knowledge; knowledge cannot be asked to establish the intelligibility of reality or the reality of value and meaning."

Likewise David Bentley Hart here asks us to notice the way our minds seem to mirror nature,

“And, with Plotinus, we may ask if “being” can be separated from notions of intelligibility, if not, then things exist already “intending” to be known - they purposely “fit” the human mind. There IS a constant correlation between that act of rational consciousness and the intelligibility of being, a correlation that is all but unimaginable if the structure reality were not already rational. Better than the essentially magical theory of perception as representation anyway…

The reciprocity between the mind and objective reality seems to indicate a universe that is mind-like, or mental.

….the seemingly indivisible relation that exists between them in the very encounter between nature and mind: the intelligibility of the world and the power of thought to lay hold of it. Perhaps all we need consider is how the inherently formal and intentional structure of rational thought seems to correspond so fruitfully to the rational structure of the world.

This by itself invites us to reconsider something at least like the causal language proposed in the Aristotelian tradition, in which (again) nature’s deepest rational relations are more like the syntax of a sentence, or mathematical equations, than like mere accidental concrescences of physical forces.

….the ancient intuition that nature and mind are not alien to one another precisely because nature already possesses a rational structure analogous to thought. Perhaps the ground of the possibility of regular physical causation, in the energetic and mechanical sense, is a deeper logical coinherence of rational relations underlying all reality; and hence mind inhabits physical nature not as an anomaly, but as a revelation of the deepest essence of everything that exists.

The intentionality of mind then is neither a ghostly agency inexplicably haunting a machine, nor an illusion reducible to non-intentional and impersonal forces, but instead the most intense and luminous expression of those formal and teleological determinations that give actuality to all nature.

On Plotinus Hart notes,


https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/mind-over-matter

“Plotinus gave exquisitely refined expression to the ancient intuition that the material order is not the basis of the mental, but rather the reverse. This is not only an eminently rational intuition; it is perhaps the only truly rational picture of reality as a whole.

Mind does not emerge from mindless matter, as modern philosophical fashion would have it. The suggestion that is does is both a logical impossibility and a phenomenological absurdity.

Plotinus and his contemporaries understood that all the things that most essentially characterize the act of rational consciousness—its irreducible unity of apprehension, its teleological structure, the logical syntax of reasoning, and on and on—are intrinsically incompatible with, and could not logically emerge from, a material reality devoid of mind.

At the same time, they could not fail to notice that there is a constant correlation between that act of rational consciousness and the intelligibility of being, a correlation that is all but unimaginable if the structure and ground of all reality were not already rational.

Happily, in Plotinus’s time no one had yet ventured the essentially magical theory of perception as representation. Plotinus was absolutely correct, therefore, to attempt to understand the structure of the whole of reality by looking inward to the structure of the mind; and he was just as correct to suppose that the reciprocity between the mind and objective reality must indicate a reality simpler and more capacious than either: a primordial intelligence, Nous, and an original unity, the One, generating, sustaining, and encompassing all things.”

This is true for Christianity as well, the Orthodox theologian Fr. Dumitru Staniloae writes,


“But man and the cosmos constitute a natural revelation also from the point of view of knowledge. * The cosmos is organized in a way that corresponds to our capacity for knowing. The cosmos - and human nature as intimately connected with the cosmos - are stamped with rationality, while man (God's creature) is further endowed with a reason capable of knowing consciously the rationality of the cosmos and of his own nature.

We consider that the rationality of the cosmos attests to the fact that the cosmos is the product of a rational being, since rationality, as an aspect of a reality which is destined to be known, has no ex­planation apart from a conscious Reason which knows it from the time it creates it or even before that time, and knows it continually so long as that same Reason preserves its being. On the other hand, the cosmos itself would be meaningless along with its rationality if there were no human reason that might come to know the cosmos because of its rational character.

In our faith, the rationality of the cosmos has a meaning only if it is known in the thought of an in­telligent creative being before its creation and in the whole time of its continuing in being, having been first brought into existence precisely that it might be known by a being for whom it was created, and that a dialogue between itself and this created rational being might thus be brought about through its mediation. This fact con­ stitutes the content of natural revelation.

The "reasons" or inner principles of things reveal their light in human reason and through the conscious rational action of man. Likewise, our reason reveals its own power and depth even more richly by uncovering the reasons within created things. Yet, in this recipro­cal influence, it is human reason and not the reasons within things which has the role of a subject working consciously. 

The reasons within things disclose themselves to human consciousness and must be as­similated by it and concentrated in it. They disclose themselves in­ so far as they have human reason as their virtual conscious center and by helping reason to become their own actual center. They are the potential rays of human reason on the way towards being revealed as its actual rays, and it is through these that human reason extends its vision farther and farther.”

Instead of believing what our direct experience of reality tells, us, that the cosmos is full of value, we artificially put that direct experience into some secondary category, into our “unconscious” or some other ideological construct, Paul Tyson says,

“For value and purpose understood in the actual categories of our existential experience are magical to the terms of modern realism. This is because modern realism only counts what you can materially observe, quantifiably measure, and then mathematically model as real.

This means we modern people are required to reinterpret our direct (magical) experience of value and purpose in the abstract (so-called “realist”) terms of quantification and instrumental function.

Thus, biological necessity and social conditioning become the primary realities of human motivation (for these things are materially measurable) and quality becomes a secondary and subjective fiction produced by “real” material causes.

Both Plato and Aristotle thought that we can know the world because all beings in the world have an intellective essence, a “form.” That is, it is in the nature of a being to have defining qualities and characteristics, and it is in the nature of the world that it is an intellectively integrated and logical cosmos where all individual beings are unified through Being itself.

When we know something, we grasp something of its essence in our mind. Now we may only ever have a partial knowledge of the true essence of things, and we certainly have a very limited knowledge of Being, and even less of its divine grounds, but what truth we can grasp is genuine truth.

Here, the essential nature of all things is fundamentally communicative and fundamentally intellective. So Being conceived of as in some manner the divinely given framework of reality; Logos as the ordered communicative reason expressed in all aspects of the cosmos; and form or essence, giving specific knowable characteristics to beings in the world, all conspire to make the world intelligible to us.

Here, the cosmos itself is embedded in Mind (Nous), and our minds are in communion with the cosmos-ordering Mind that is the ground of being and that defines the field of reality.

*To the essentialist stream of classical and medieval thinking, thought is meaningful and knowledge can be true because **the nature of reality itself is intrinsically intellective.**”


(Let that sink in . . . there is a lot in that sentence.)

“To classical and medieval epistemology and metaphysics, Mind was the most basic feature of reality, and all material beings (as well as immaterial beings) were embedded in thought. Anyone who did not take this as the premise of reasoning was not serious about reason itself, and you would be wasting your time if you tried to reason with them.

Thus, those skeptics who were not prepared to have good faith in reason itself could be relied on to play sophistic linguistic tricks in conversation, and to substitute irrational desire or power or pleasure for reason as the basic ground of human communication and action.

This entails an irrational and instrumental fatalism that both Plato and Aristotle and their many types of followers found beneath philosophical reasonableness.

For the truth possibilities of reasonable speech were—to the essentialists—all premised on the cosmos being produced and enchanted by divine Mind. In this cosmos, value, purpose, beauty, unity, meaning, and goodness were all real features of natural reality, as well as human reality.

In this cosmos, a reasonable knowledge of the world is entirely natural, and the world itself is embedded in the higher values and meanings of Mind. What I want you to notice here is that divine Mind—which is also, to Plato, the ground of Being, and the Goodness beyond Being—is the ontological foundation of knowledge to this outlook.

*That is, a vision of reality as intrinsically ordered, intrinsically meaningful, intrinsically valuable is the ground of our sense experience, and of all human meaning, purpose, reason, and knowledge.

Nature (as far as we are concerned) is here a medium of communication between the divine Mind and human minds, and we are ourselves situated within this shimmering, beautiful, and yet unmasterable and inherently mysterious, meaningful medium (nature).

The intellective essence of any being or thought we experience has its first source in the Mind of God, and when we comprehend any intellectual truth, we are hearing the Logos of God speak into our minds.

As a quick aside, I should point out that one does not need to be religious to think about the meaning of the cosmos along these sort of lines. Professor Paul Davies—see his book The Mind of God—is a physicist and entirely non-religious, and yet the intellectually brilliant structures and the delicately balanced and beautifully elegant synergies of nature leads Davies to think about reality in ways that have quite serious ties to this ancient essentialist outlook.

Because material nature is a medium of divine forms in Plato, the material exists as a secondary order of reality when compared to the intellective (spiritual) realm.

To Plato, the realm of the material is quite incomprehensible if one tries to consider it in isolation from the intellective, because all one will see if one looks for an abstracted, “pure” material nature (matter apart from form) is contingency and flux.

Things cannot be understood—things would have no enduring essence—if matter and energy in temporal and material transience is all there is. Indeed, there could be no such thing as “things” in such flux.

*If the limits of our senses and the grammar of our logic are all we have to go on, then the apparent reality we think we perceive and understand cannot be known as true, and is itself a function of incomprehensible flux and contingency.

Plato has no interest in such an anti-reason, absurdist stances. To Plato, the things that make material nature really (albeit partially) intelligible are eternal truths. Eternal truths are not subject to contingency and flux.

Mathematical truths, for example, are timelessly and essentially true. Through mathematics we see that the material space-time realm of flux and contingence is embedded in the eternal realm of Mind and the eternal “now” of Being.

This embedding gives the tangible world its remarkable order, intelligibility, and reality. This divine realm of Mind produces the high forms: Beauty, Being, *Unity, Truth, and above all Goodness. Value, meaning, reason, and purpose are found by us within nature because nature itself is embedded in the eternal realm of divine forms.

That reality is intelligible and full of qualitative richness is the start and grounds of meaningful knowledge; knowledge cannot be asked to establish the intelligibility of reality or the reality of value and meaning. "


So, metaphysically, that would mean the entire Cosmos IS communication, my next blog post discusses that HERE

And then HOW do we gain this vision if nature as divine revelation, I discuss that HERE

The Unreason of Reason

In Jonathan Israel's 'Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750' he explores history in the wake of the Scientific Revolution, the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the complete demolition of traditional structures of authority, scientific thought, and belief by the new philosophy and the philosophers, which effectively overthrew all justification for monarchy, aristocracy, and ecclesiastical power.

Peter Leithart summarizes it HERE :


There were, of course, varieties of Enlightenment, some more favorable to tradition than others, but what Jonathan Israel has called the “Radical Enlightenment” won, and they were the most hostile to traditional social and political forms. The Radical Enlightenment was committed to absolute freedom - from the past, from limits, from anything that stood in the way of critical reason. 

As Adam Ferguson, a moderate rationalist, saw it, the radical enlighteners were like “an ambitious architect who aspires to tear down the entire existing edifice of institutions and then rebuild it from scratch on purely rational principles.” The Radical Enlightenment was determined to receive nothing except what has passed through the purging fires of criticism. The gifts of the past are not received because we honor the giver, or because we believe these gifts are ultimately from a Divine Giver, but only because we have found the gifts measure up to our standards. Between the gift and the reception there is a moment of evaluation – is this a gift we want to receive? 

Radical Enlightenment is, we might say, founded on a massive act of ingratitude. 

But that ingratitude is incoherent. “Denken isst danken,” Heidegger says somewhere: “To think is to thank.” We cannot even begin to think without making use of categories that we did not invent. We cannot discover, teach or be taught, without making use of a language that pre-dates our existence by some thousands of years. 

The freedom to think, discover, reform and renew, all of it depends on gratitude, a reception prior to any critical scrutiny, a reception upon which critical scrutiny itself depends. When reason becomes an absolute, it dissolves into unreason; when criticism is given priority to reception, it destroys the foundation on which it rests. 

As Hegel realized, the Radical Enlightenment aspiration to absolute liberty turned on itself. Irrational tyranny turned wolfish and ate up its original hopes. Not only were the Radicals bound to fail to deliver on their promise of liberation, but absolute liberty had, Hegel thought, an internal drive toward its opposite. 

Theoretically, the ideology of absolute freedom fails because its conception of liberty is purely negative. Absolute freedom is freedom from constraints of any and every kind, the refusal to accept any authority that has not been chosen. By that definition, my family, my ancestry, my nationality, my early education, even my own body count as unchosen constraints that need to be overcome if I am going to be truly free. 

The psychological toll is massive. I am who I am because I am related to others, but according to the notion of absolute liberty, those others are chains that limit my freedom. When I unleash my corrosive rationality against those constraints, I am breaking the ties that define my specific identity. 

Absolute freedom is a bid to be as God, but in the end it leaves me even less than myself. Absolute freedom is far from a purely abstract theory, and as a practical political agenda it is also destined to collapse into tyranny. Guided by the principle of absolute freedom, French Revolutionaries turned on the structures of the ancient regime, and when those structures had been reduced to rubble they had to free themselves from themselves by turning the same destructive power on the revolution itself. 

Celebrating his survival of an assassination attempt during the preparations for the Feast of the Supreme Being, Robespierre gave an impassioned speech in which he swore “by the daggers already reddened with the blood of martyrs” that he would “exterminate every single one of the criminals who want to rob us of happiness and liberty.” A few days later, he wrote a set of laws designed to protect the Republic’s freedoms against her enemies. Over the next month, over 1300 people were guillotined for offenses against the state like sawing down a tree of liberty, producing sour wine, or shouting “A fig for the nation.”

 Hegel discerned the inner continuity between the witty salon talk of Voltaire and Diderot, and the bloody regime of Robespierre. Enlightened liberty was not betrayed by the Terror; Terror was its fulfillment. Terry Eagleton summarizes Hegel’s argument this way: “Since limits make us what we are, the idea of absolute freedom is bound to be terroristic. There is certainly the case for Hegel, who finds such absolute freedom epitomized in the French Revolution and names it ‘the freedom of the void.’ Such liberty has a taste of death about it – but a death which is struck empty of meaning, ‘the sheer terror of the negative that contains nothing positive, nothing that fills it with a content.’

 This purely negative brand of liberty, so he considers, is a ‘fury of destruction,’ which can break with the ancien regime but proves incapable of building another in its place. This is a logical incapacity, not an empirical one, since whatever such freedom might fashion would inevitably constitute a constraint on it. It can feel alive, Hegel observes, only in the act of destruction . . . Aspiration is thus strangely close to a kind of nihilism.”