The Problem of Pain

"I've been reading through your comments again as I work on my assignment. This time I am wondering if I can explore these comments with you as part of my ownexplorations.

"Having read your own email in response to mine, I will understand if you do not wish to comment or explore them. It would be exploring them as issues rather than specific to your mother's death though I guess any comment may reflect on that.

"While I have noted these comments from what you have written, they are not comments that are unique to what you have written. They are comments I have heard from others as well.

"I must have done something terribly wrong to be suffering this pain".

"I believe that was a comment of your mothers and I have a recollection that I heard her say that too. I am sorry now that I did not explore that with her.

"The other question is one that is implied and you yourself commented that the question is as old as Job: Why should the good (the nice) suffer?

A similar question is found in "Why should bad things happen to good people?"

You ask some big questions. While Nancy makes dinner, I'll try to pound out my thoughts for what they are worth.

(Some of the contents of this essay comes from interactions I have had with several people going back many years.)

As regards to mom, I heard her make that comment, but it of course needs to be contextualized in the pain and depression that she endured, so I don't give it any weight at all.

"Tell me about your God of love," an atheist wrote to me a few years ago, "forall that I see is 1 Samuel 15:3, 2 Samuel 24:15, 2 Samuel 6:6, and 1 Chronicles 21:14." Never let it be said that atheists haven't read the scriptures. Sometimes they have read it only too well. And I must admit thatI too I have trouble squaring God's command to "slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass" with the One who said "Permit little children, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven." That God would inflict pain or even allow pain has challenged man since the days of Job.

Grandma June provided one answer to Natalie Angier. "When I was eight yearsold, my family was in a terrible car accident, and my older brother almost died," she writes. "The next night, as I lay scared and sleepless on my paternal grandmother's living-room couch, she softly explained to me who was to blame. Not my father's Aunt Estelle, a dour, aging wild woman and devout Baptist, who, as usual, was driving recklessly fast. No, the reason Estelle's station wagon flipped over and Joe was thrown out the back window was this: my father had stopped going to church the previous year, and God was very, very angry."

A 16 year old had a question for an advice columnist: "When I was a little girl it was not so bad because I got used to the kids of the block makingfun of me, but now I would like to have boy friends like the other girls andgo out on Saturday nights, but no boy will take me because I was bornwithout a nose-although I'm a good dancer and have a nice shape and my father buys me pretty clothes. I sit and look at myself all day and cry. Ihave a big hole in the middle of my face that scares people-even myself-so I can't blame the boys for not wanting to take me out. My mother loves me,but she cries terribly when she looks at me. What did I do to deserve such a terribly bad fate? Even if I did some bad things, I didn't do any beforeI was a year old and I was born that way. I asked papa and he says he doesn't know, but that maybe I did something in the other world before I was born, or that maybe I was being punished for his sins. I don't believe that because he is a very nice man. Ought I commit suicide?"

The basic formulation for the problem is as follows: If God is good, He isnot God. If God is God, He is not good. If God is good, He would wish tomake his creatures happy. If God was all-powerful, He would be able to dowhat He wished. But His creatures are suffering. Thus, God lacks power or goodness or both. Either God doesn't exist or He is impotent or He is evil.

In The Brothers Karamazov, the greatest novel of the 19th century, Fyodor Dostoevsky puts into the mouth of the atheist Ivan the one irrefutable objection to a personal God, that the only possible religious answer is that human suffering will be justified by the divine harmony and the end of history. It's a hollow argument made by some theologians to explain the holocaust-that Hitler was God's punishment of European Jews for their secularization and Biblical prophecy was fulfilled when the state of Israel was born.

"Listen! If all must suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, what have childrento do with it, tell me, please? It's beyond all comprehension why they should suffer, and why they should pay for the harmony. Why should they, too, furnish material to enrich the soil for the harmony of the future? I understand solidarity in sin among men. I understand solidarity in retribution, too; but there can be no such solidarity with children. And if it is really true that they must share responsibility for all their fathers' crimes, such a truth is not of this world and is beyond my comprehension. Some jester will say,perhaps, that the child would have grown up and have sinned, but you see he didn't grow up, he was torn to pieces by the dogs, at eight years old. Oh,Alyosha, I am not blaspheming! I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the universe it will be when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud: 'Thou art just,O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.' When the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, 'Thou art just, O Lord!' then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached and all will be made clear. But what pulls me up here is that I can't accept tha tharmony. And while I am on earth, I make haste to take my own measures. You see, Alyosha, perhaps it really may happen that if I live to that moment, or rise again to see it, I, too, perhaps, may cry aloud with the rest, looking atthe mother embracing the child's torturer, 'Thou art just, O Lord!' but I don't want to cry aloud then. While there is still time, I hasten to protectmyself, and so I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It's not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its unexpected tears to 'dear,kind God'!"

The classic counter is that God made man not as robots but with free moral agency. God freely limited his own freedom and put no limit on ours. God thusly could not have created a moral universe without at the same time freeing man's spirit. If God had programmed all humans to be good, therewould be no evil but there would be no virtue as well. Evil exists because free will exists. Blind force, instinct, or the orchestrations of God do not compel us. This reply to suffering makes sense only if weassume that God is not in control of all that happens. If God controls plane crashes, terminal cancers, and atom bombs, then God must be responsible, just as I must be responsible if I allow my child dies after I let him to play in the traffic. If those actions are bad, then God must be fundamentally evil and also the author of evil. I cannot believe that. Rather, I believe that God created a contingent universe and delegated tohumanity the freedom to work through the vicissitudes of life-dealing withwar, disease, and poverty. By doing so, humanity develops morally, intellectually, and technologically. So this is another reason why I believe God's self-limiting sovereignty and that we determine our own destiny in the face of life, death, and God.

It is commonly said that God is omnipotent, having the power that admits of no bounds or limitations. The word itself doesn't exist in the Bible, which firstly makes the claim suspect. There are certainly many references to God the creator, that the winds and the sea obey Him, that Satan is bound by His will, and that "in Him we live and move and have our being." All of this is true. But it doesn't follow that God is all powerful in the sense that God intervenes in natural law. We see this is Jesus rebuke of Satan when when Satan tried to tempt him in the desert (Matthew 4). I also believe that God constrains Himself when it comes to consience and will. We say this with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, where Our Lord said "Not my will, but thine be done." I read that to mean there was nothing preordained about the choice that Jesus made.

My boys brought home their report cards yesterday with almost all As and a few Bs. They are the best answer I can think of to the problem of pain. Their intellect is to a great extent than perhaps I would want to admit mere chance--that mystery of DNA alchemy as well as the accident of birth that put them in community with great schools and teachers that mades them who they are are with their unique minds, temperaments, and appearances. The smallest chemical inbalance could have made both children profoundly retarded and barely sentient. Let us say that my children were disabled. Can we really say that the enabled children are blessed by God and the disabled are cursed by God? But what isn't luck are the chain of choices Ben and Zach will take in the future with the power and the potential to be a a physician or a porn site web master. And this, I believe, is where God comes in-- not in orchestrating the rain that falls or whether we like or don't like vanilla ice cream, but in inspiring and sustaining us to to live up to our full intellectual and emotional potential. I see the converse of this in what I call atheist infomercials, those annoying but strangely fascinating televangelist shows that purport to make you rich and healthy if only you will send in your contributions to a sliver-tongued man of the cloth. What is perhaps even more heritical are those who ascribe to God such soveriengnty that they decline to take commonsense medical precautions on behalf of their children, such as blood transfusions. Whatever these people may profess, they are by their actions the walking embodiment of evil. For by their actions, they are practical atheists in the worst sense, as they reject the existence of a God that can gave us doctors and medicine and our minds to make such decisions.

My view accords with the view of Harold Kushner, whose young son had progeria, the rapid aging disease. By the time his son had died at 14,the boy looked like an old man. "An aching sense of unfairness" ledKushner to write the best-selling book When Bad Things Happen to GoodPeople. Kushner argues that bad things didn't happen because God wants topunish us for our sins, test our strength, or teach us lessons. (In mymother's case, what possible lesson or opportunities for personal growthwould be imparted as she lay on her broken back starving to death?) Instead, Kushner sees randomness to the universe. Lottery winners are merely lucky-not blessed. And when bad things happen, we shouldn'tquestion ourselves or God and be angry because the world is imperfect andunfair. Insurance companies call earthquakes and hurricanes that kills hundreds of people "acts of God", but they use God's name in vain. These are acts of nature, not acts of God. Nature is morally blind. The act of God is the courage of us to continue in the face of disaster.

But I think this somewhat of a sterile argument that doesn't address the core issue of the suffering of the innocent. I think for example of thetwo million Jewish babies and children that were swallowed by the maw ofthe Nazi death camps, including kids of relatives of my wife. It makes me think that if there is a God, it's a God who is blind. That children must die so that we will be good strikes me as incomprehensible. Following the death of his young boy, Huxley replied to a letter from the Reverend Charles Kingley: "As I stood behind the coffin of my little son the otherday, with my mind bent on anything but disputation, the officiating minister read as part of his duty, the words "If the dead rise not, let useat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die." I cannot tell you how inexpressibly they shocked me. Paul had neither wife nor child, or he must have known that his alternative involved a blasphemy against all the best and noblest in human nature. I could have laughed with scorn. What! Because I am face to face with irreparable loss, because I have given back to source from whence it came, the cause of great happiness, stillretaining through all my life the blessings which have sprung and willspring from that cause, am I to renounce my manhood, and, howling, grovelin bestiality? Why the very apes know better, and if you shoot theiryoung, the poor brutes grieve their grief out and do not immediately seek distraction in the forge."

I have great sympathy for this reaction, and should I lose my wife or child,my grief would be as great, but I could not be persuaded that their lives hadbeen at no purpose leading us to chuck our ethics. I think of the Oxford don C.S. Lewis who aggressively promoted the classic Christian answer to evil and suffering in The Problem of Pain that I mentioned earlier. You may remember the movie "Shadowlands", played by Anthony Hopkins as Lewis, in which he had acrisis of faith when he watched his young bride die of cancer. At the end ofthe day, there are no satisfactory answers-only the consolation of faith in the One who also suffered-- and our friends. In one of the last scenes in"Shadowlands," we see the professor hugging his young step-son after his wife had just died-- both in tears.

Perhaps that is the only real answer in the face of the silence and distance of God. Faith is not all green pastures and still waters. The comforters in the Book of Job put forth their rational arguments, and at the end Job-without an explanation but with the existential experience of God-turns for questioning to wondering silence: "I will lay mine hand upon my mouth." In this fragment of time on this island in space,we are in this together and we must help each other out. Evil and sufferingis inextricably part of the human condition individually and institutionally, and if there is one thing we must believe in, it is that we can make a difference. To live is to suffer. To suffer is to find meaning. And, if there is purpose in life, there must be purpose in suffering and death. The Psalmist said that "My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth." It did not say, "My tragedy comes from the Lord."

The bad that happens in our life has no meaning. But we can redeem it by giving it meaning.

"There seems to be a very thin line between a "tough love" God and a "not there / uninterested" God. How do you distinguish which God version correctly explains the human situation? Faith alone?"

I cannot say that I've nailed the question of theodicy. But it is my attempt to reconcile what may very well be irreconcilable-- the existence of an imminent God to the more deonstrable existence of nature bloody of tooth and claw.

You're certainly right about that thin line. Perhaps one way to analogize it is look at our relationship to Our Father in Heaven to our father on earth-- parents and their relationship to their children-- not when thir kids are able to harm themselves by playing in the street-- but as adults themselves-- making what we hope are sensible choices at the university but with us there only in spirit to guide them. Could it be that God expects that level of maturity from us, not to expect magic tricks, a hand on the back of the bicycle, or checks in the mail but to look within ourselves and to others to make the right decisions and take the right actions?

H1N1: Shall We Get Innoculated?

1,000 Americans, including 100 children, have died because of the swine flu, according to news reports.

Obama Declares National Emergency

Like any parent, I want to do the right thing. But what is that? I've been innoculated for flu before and I have never been so sick.

In 1976, up to 50 people died because of reactions to innoculations for the swine flue "epidemic".

My grandfather died in the pandemic of 1918. Is this a replay?

If we get injected and then the flu mutates again, will that invalidate the original innoculation?

Is it better to forgo an injection completely?

I will be especially interested in hearing from medical professionals on this topic.

Here is some good advice.

It seems new to us. Well, in actuality it's got the same risk factors as every other innoculation, and it's been well tested. Most of the stuff against it turns out to be unfounded or by an agendicized, quack source.

I thought alot about it, and someone pointed out "risk vs Benefit". That's what I'm going to consider: Risk vs Benefit. Right now, it's better to get the shot than to leave yourself open for the flu.

Deliverance: A Mean Banjo

I Want These Cats

I'm In A Box

I'm In A Box - BALLOON BOY PARODY - watch more funny videos

Today's Google Factoid: Results 1 - 10 of about 399,000,000 for i'm in a box. (0.20 seconds)

Quine's Empiricism

As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer . . . For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing, the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conceptions only as cultural posits.

In his book from which you quote, Quine rejects the analytic (true by the meaning of the words) -synthetic (true by virtue of facts) distinction. The fact of a physical object is not subject to falsifiability while theories that contain those facts are. I think Quine is suggesting a cautious or humble approach to facts as the selection of those facts may be just as dubious as the theory that Thor controls thunder.

Spinoza's Monism

"Great spirit and monist, now considered atheist, Spinoza used the term God to refer to the total of Being and Nature which constitute the only one substance that exists."

There is a curious verse in the Bible that also seems to suggest monism.

Acts 7:28: "For in him we live, and move, and have our being."

California Dreaming

Except for the traffic and the politicians, California is wonderful.

Here some pictures of our Spring break trip to Southern California.

I wrote this to my father last week.

It is Friday night when I’m writing this letter. We just came from a late-evening trip to La Jolla, a seaside town near San Diego. We had an ice cream and then walked to the beach in the dark. The ocean breakers crashed against the cliffs sending up sprays of water and foam.

We left Sunday morning for California at about nine am. I drove for the first four hours and Nancy drove for the remaining three hours. It was interesting to see the whirring windmill farms. We arrived at the resort at about four and then drove to Oceanside, about twenty miles away, where we had a dinner at Ruby’s, a restaurant on the mile long pier.

The Lawrence Welk Resort is beautifully situated amid golf lawns and lakes and under hills studded by large boulders. Monday was misty, overcast, and chilly. We went for a timeshare presentation where we traded in our Scottsdale property for the Welk property. We felt this would give us more trading power for less money. That evening, we drove to Culver City near LA. On Tuesday, Nancy appeared on The Price is Right at CBS. The show will be shown on December 17th.

On Wednesday, I drove Zach to a charter school where he took his PSAT. It was a fairly grueling three hour test, but he thinks he did OK.

On Thursday, we drove 90 miles to Knottsberry Farm. Nancy enjoyed the Pony Express ride while I was thrilled by the Silver Bullet and its four corkscrew turns. We let the boys enjoy the rides while Nancy and I walked around Downtown Disney. Saturday we see a play “The Andrew Brothers.”

We hope you continue to be well and you remain in our fondest thoughts and prayers.

Band Kids Rock

The Best Cat Scratcher Ever

For more than a decade, we have watched out cat demolish our furniture. Good money has been spent on one solution after another. But we finally found something that delivers. Here is a cat scratcher from Petsmart that costs $20. It is made of corregated cardboard and included catnip. Kitty goes nuts over it.










(I'm not associated with Petsmart. I'm just passing along good information.)

Obama's Nobel Prize: Gilt By Association

Yes, Obama's Nobel prize is premature. But the committee was trying to make a statement of encouragement-- that multilateralism is to be preferred over unilaterialism and that the soft power of diplomatic and culutral influence must come before hard power of bullets and bombs. It was also a rebuke to neo-conservatism with its theory of preemptive war, nation buliding, and international crusades.

Chaparral v. Horizon v Streaker

My boy and I were watching the marching band play during the halftime. My other boy plays in the band, and it was impressive to see the chorographed marching and excellent playing. But the military precision was interrupted by a moment of anarchy when a streaker dashed across the field and into the darkness. A student next to me said about this moment of unsolicited entertainment: "Dude, that three dollars was totally worth it." The upshot is that the student was expelled.

http://utep.scout.com/a.z?s=366&p=2&c=907389&refid=400

Rio's 2016 Olympics

One fact to remember before you book your flight to the games. Last year, there were 2,069 murders in Rio.

Jesus Holding the Constitution

Impressive Christianist realism.

Writing A Conservative Bible

Who knew that Marxists wrote the NIV? The Conservative Bible Project is an effort to re-write the Bible to reflect conservative political bias, sometimes by removing verses to which they object.

"The earliest, most authentic manuscripts lack this verse set forth at Luke 23:34:[7]

Jesus said, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing."

Is this a liberal corruption of the original? This does not appear in any other Gospel, and the simple fact is that some of the persecutors of Jesus did know what they were doing. This quotation is a favorite of liberals but should not appear in a conservative Bible.

How To Fix the Leno Show

It needs fixing.

Objections To Proofs That God Exists

Here is a run down of my objections to so-called proofs for the existence of God.

Cosmological. If God was the theoretical catalyst for existence, it doesn't follow that God still exists and nor does it answer the question as to why there cannot be a predicating cause to the first cause.

Telelogical. The complexity and order of the universe merely defines what the universe is and perhaps always was and will be. We cannot logically infer from that complexity God. If that complexity always was, then it would follow that God would not be necessary and will not be necessary.

I was once seduced by the ontological argument, but then came to see it as Platonism. God might not merely be a conceptual bucket-- an intellectual abstraction-- but could also psychological projection of our fears and hopes. We certainly cannot make the leap that a "being greater than that which cannot be conceived" exists. Also, we have no way of knowing if God is a being.

If the basis of our belief in God is the Bible, we can only assume that God is what is stated: spirit or Logos, and not being at least as we normally conceive a being.

I'm skeptical of the moral argument-- that a belief in God is necessary to moral law and order, as there are countless godless people and legal systems who root their ethics in something other than a belief in God, for example, in the categorical imperative or in custom.

Testimony as evidence is worthless for many obvious reasons.

One of the stronger arguments (although it still seems weak to me) is the prevelence of the belief in God(s). It seems that humans are generally wired to believe in God for some reason.

I asked why wife why she believed in God, and she simply answered: "My eyes." That's not a bad argument-- the miraculous ability to see and also the things we do see. But I can also see how one can be a hard atheist and at the same time get a sense of numinous in looking at a new baby or the Grand Canyon.

Why is this problem unsolvable? It is unsolvable because the question "Does God exist" is not logically and linguistically meaningful. It I was to ask the question: "Do cats exist in the universe?" it would also be unanswerable. Why? It is because the subject "cats" is definable whereas the predicate "universe" is undefinable. If you were to ask" "Is there a cat on my desk?" it is answerable because both subject "cats" and predicate "desk" can be apprehended within the natural world. Until we define "God" and "exist" within the context of the natural world, we can never prove that God exists in the natural world.

So what is the resolution? For me, it is to simply accept Genesis 1:1 at face value: "In the begininning God . . .". We must accept or don't accept God's existence as axiomatic.

But why choose as an a priori "The God of the Bible is"? I think the choice must be of necessity a leap of faith which we must then road test by personal experience. While personal experience proves nothing, it does prove everthing to those who are looking for confirmation that a belief in God's existence as an operating and organizing principle for life is sound.

The bridge between belief and non-belief is not reason but faith in Jesus. If the essence of Christianity is faith and if God has revealed Himself by appealing to a facility in men and women other than reason, then argument is not enough. Apologists for Christianity use one rational argument after another, only to find as Locke said “as far as reason will help them, make use of it gladly: and where it fails them, they cry out, ‘it is a matter of faith—and above reason.” It’s an illusion that we can arrive through reason at a belief in God, as the ground for that belief must be reason itself. Thus, the person who can discern through reason that God exists has only discerned that Almighty Reason exists, since reason is what that person ultimately trusts. “God can no more prove His existence than He can swear,” Kierkegaard said. “He has nothing higher to swear by.” The goal for validating the existence of God must be on meaning rather than reason.

I believe for the same “reason” that monkeys scramble up a tree to avoid the teeth of a hungry lion.

Bonhoeffer wrote that we can only speak "of" God, we cannot fruitfully speak "about" Him. I didn't get this at first but now I find this is true. We must speak of God in the way God wants it. We must stay close to scripture and to honesty and to wisdom. Conversations like this have God reaching down from Heaven. But conversations "about" God pull Him down on our level and we toss Him around like a basket ball. We must be aware that God is holy, and without seeking holiness we cannot progress in knowing God. See, try to imagine someone who wants to have peace with God. He cannot have peace with God on his human terms ... he must allow God to make peace with him, the human, on God's terms. God wants everything to start at the cross where He can restart lives on His terms and with His vision.

Beautifully expressed. In talking"about" God, I think Christians are in error by using as a chief justifier reason just as I think they are in error by using science as a chief justifier about the Bible. It puts us into a position of chasing a God of the gaps while losing sight that the chief gap may be within.

I’d be interested in why you think this is true. It seems to me that if we posit "Either God exists, or He does not" then we can reach a well grounded conclusion."

Why? What if we ask the question: Does glghrr exist? Can we really have a well-grounded conclusion as to whether glghrr exists? How so?

"Which, of course, doesn’t address evidence for the existence of God, at all. It simply says "I like my explanation better than yours". He then proceeds to change the subject from Design to Evolution, begging the question."

Evolution at least can be decomposed into units that be be analyzed, refuted, or confirmed. A statement that "God created the Grand Canyon" can be believed but it cannot be refuted or confirmed.

"You seem to be implying that Christians hold an irrational belief simply by saying God is Personal."

I don't suggest Chrsitians are irrational if they believe in a personal God. I am saying that such a belief is arational, not subject to principles of induction or deduction. It doesn't follow that the subject of their belief doesn't exist.

"What is your ‘idea of truth’? Truth is a characteristic of a claim: either it corresponds with reality (true) or it does not (not true).."

There are different kinds of truth, including spiritual truth and aesthetic truth. But truth as commonly understood pertains as you suggest to correspondence between what is subjectivly apprehended and what objectively exists. This is an ethical as well as an epistemlogical principle, as when I asked my child: "Did you or did you not take that cookie." The resolution is only yes or no. In the case of God, it is not enough that God is in our heart but that God exists outside all hearts. I believe that is true. I only contend we cannot know that is true through reason.

"Going back to the original statement, let me explain my reservations. By the way, thanks for clarifying that you do not advocate Logical Positivism. However, leaning on Wittgenstein and Ayers, both Logical Positivists, lends some difficulty in distinction."

(Wittgenstein is one of the few philosophers I've tried to understand.) It isn't accurate to say that Wittgenstein was a logical positivist, although he influenced logical positivism.

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Logical_positivismHis writings also lend no credence to the view that Wittgenstein disclaimed belief in God. To the contrary, I came across the following in his "Notebooks". "How things stand, is God. God is, how things stand. To believe in God means to understand the question about the meaning of life. To believe in God means to see that life has meaning. To believe in God means to see the facts of the world are not the end of the matter." Compare this last statement to Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Chapter One: "The world is everything that is the case" and you have Wittgenstein's acognosticism-- a category other than theism, atheism, and agnosticism.
Ludwig Wittgenstein closes his Tractatus with: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.” Into Wittgenstein’s silent category go statements such as “Personal encounter is the only sure avenue to truth.” Since these are neither true by definition nor empirically verifiable, they are meaningless. (Edit: This also applied to the statement: "Only emperically verifiable statements are meaningful"! Doen't all synthetic a priori truth-- all what Kant calls transcendental forms-- fall into this category? ) Of the “Last Judgment,” Wittgenstein writes that “I couldn’t say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the statement that there will be such a thing. No ‘perhaps’ nor ‘I’m not sure’. It is a statement that does not allow for such an answer.” It is meaningless to affirm or deny that God exists or even to raise that question. It is not a meaningful question to raise, because God is in the realm of value, and the world is the realm of fact. What Wittgenstein tried to do was to refocus philosophical debate away from questions that elicit meaning to words as they are used. For example, "what is time" is exceedingly difficult to answer, whereas it isn't so hard to answer the question "what is the time." I think Wittgenstein is correct in his repudiation that the spectrum of belief is merely theisim or atheism, or theism, agnosticism, or atheism, as if these were all embracing and mutually exclusive categories. Consider the sentence: “Jesus is God.” Wittgenstein would say that such a statement cannot be affirmed or denied or even addressed any more than we can evaluate the sentence “@#$ is %^&.” We cannot even suspend judgment on the question as we have no basis for any kind of a judgment. This is not to say that "Jesus is God" cannot be an article of faith and that Jesus is God" is an irrational statement or is false.
"I’m not sure at all why you think the question meaningless: it certainly seems like a question that has value, and can be answered."
It is certainly and often intensely personally meaningful. It is just not logically and linguistically meaningful. (Edit: I have often noted in rligious and philosophical debates long discussions that fall and rise on the meaning of words, as we struggle to associate English with the presumed reality behond that English. It is I think an erroneous assumption that the words we use corresponds to the reality we are trying to describe or define.)

"Why, certainly it can be answered. All I have to do is find a cat. I actually don’t even have to do that. I can ask for a measurable definition of ‘cat’ then find a reliable report of a cat from a trustworthy source."

Not so. I would not quarrel with you identification of the entity "cat". (I dropped off such a not especially happy furry entity at Pet Mart's cat spa this afternoon.) But, speaking not in the venacular but as strict logicians, we cannot assume that the "cat is in the universe" until we know what the "universe" is-- some kind of domain of reality of which the cat is a part. We cannot assume that the cat is in the universe like we can see that the cat is on the desk. It is perhaps no more meaningful to ask ourselves whether or not "a cat has a soul" or whether "a cat has a ghrty" or whether or not a "hyrt has a tq$4." Without some reference to Wittgenstein's world of facts, we are left wandering in a Jabbocky universe where cats "gire and gimble in the wabe."

I presume that you use the term ‘natural world’ in the sense of ‘all of creation’. "

The natural world is the world that you and I live in. (Edit: It is the exterior world, the world that is not a projection based on abnormal cognitions. For example, there can be no overlap between the world of facts and solipsism or nightmares or mirages or delusions.) I grant that there are people with intuitions beyond other people and creatures that can see colors and hear sounds that humans cannot not. But my bar for logical and linguistic permissibility is extremely low, but it nevertheless exists. The subject and predicate must be apprehended in some way from something or someone other than ourselves. It is the distinction between "I believe in angels" and "I see angels in my living room." I have no brief with the first statement as a conviction. As to the second statement, I don't think it is inappropriate that exceptional claims require exceptional evidence and if it can be proved, it must be proved.
In my earlier post, I made this point. You tell me what this entity "God" is and I will tell you whether or not this entity "God" exists. Only on the surface, is this question an easy one, for the word God is one of those words that everyone uses but no one really defines. When politicians say that we’re one nation “under God”, the question becomes exactly what is it precisely that we are under? If the answer is: a supreme being, the question then ecomes, what exactly is this supreme being and how do we know that it is interested in us or if it even exists? The Bible isn’t clear as to whether God is a “being” and if “supremacy” is a quality of God. It surely rejects the notion of the old man with the white beard and the deep voice, as God is defined as spirit (John ), fire (Hebrews ), light (1 John 1:5), love (1 John 4:8), and logos (John 1:1). The Church of England defines God as “living, without body, parts or passions” but I certainly have trouble picturing a life that is without body, parts, and passions, like an autistic the Friendly Ghost. If God is spirit, is God therefore emotion-- a chemical reaction or firings of neurons? Does God exist in the same way that my cat exists or in the same way that my love for my cat exists? Is God a metaphor for what we don’t know or cannot know? Is God real in the same way that Santa Claus is real? Is God a sewer that flushes away the waste and the worst of this world? Does God exist in the same way that a unicorn exists? What is it that distinguishes the reality of the Christian God from, for example, the unreality of Zeus? Can we believe in God if we cannot define or describe God? If God is consciousness, is that consciousness human consciousness, which would die when all humans die? Is God nature, as the Deists believe, or the sum of all natural laws, as Albert Einstein believed? Is God all that which is not—all that which is outside an imaginary circle drawn around all that exists? Is God localized in persons, places, or things—the Buddha, volcanoes, or money? Is God someone playing with her retarded sister in a playground while both giggle with delight? Are we, as some New Age religionists believe, God? Could God not be noun at all but a transitive verb— like the loving relationship of my boy to his worthless but comforting teddy bear? Does God care about us? Is our Father in Heaven a reflection of our fathers on earth—a cruel and distant father on earth makes us believe in a cruel and distant God, a loving and tender father lets us believe in a loving and tender God? Is God numinous—the awe we feel when we look at a sunset or a baby? Is the word God a mental bucket—a meaningless word that only gains meaning when we fill it with meaning? Is belief in God animated only by the fear of our death and the fires of hell? Is belief in God a utilitarian decision-- because the majority of people are theists, our lives will be easier if we are theists? Is belief in God a kind of celestial bet? Is God a projection of our hopes, a mass delusion, or a part of our biological wiring? Do we believe in God because our fathers and their fathers believed in God? Is God as Karl Barth said ganz Anders—wholly different? Is God the absolute, all matter and all force, swirls of atoms and hurricanes and galaxies, the first cause and the end of history, the alpha and the omega? Is God not here, not yet, evil, impotent, a crutch, a drug, a clown, asleep?

I hope by now you see the problem.

Why does the existence of a moral law require a law giver? Because that is the nature of imperatives, mandates, laws: they carry authority only because they are mandates from a personal being. Your description (along with other problems) doesn’t justify the ‘oughtness’ of moral laws (to borrow from another). "

I fail to see why a moral rule: "That shalt not kill" requires either a belief in God or God. Humans from the beginning of time have had such a prescription for their own self-preservation and the preservation of their tribe. This is true even in the most bloodthirsty of peoples, such as the Vikings, Mongols, or Mayas. As a utilitarian device, they combined this moral rule with their theism to give their moral rule legitimacy. As law became more secularized, legitimacy found its roots not in theism but in the consent of the governed or in godless totaliterianism. Arguably, with this has come greater morality generally-- for example, less tolerance for child abuse and labor, the subjugation of women, and slavery. The mandate "Thou shalt not kill" carries authority because its violation tears asunder the fabric of society, not because an Thor or Yahway said "Thou shalt not kill." Such a mandate doesn't come from an assumed supreme being but all normal beings.

We Continue To Talk

1) Moral licentiousness and decay weakens a society
2) The left champions moral licentiousness and decay
3) Therefore, the left champions policies that weaken society
If you want to deny the conclusion you must deny one or more of the premises.

Which premise(s) do you wish to deny?

I deny both premises. As to #1, and speaking as a father of two teenagers, I think exposure to moral licentiousness and decay are not unmitigatedly bad as it exposes them to the real world and thus innoculates them for the real world. Of course, exposure to such is not the same as consent to such. I take a quasi-Nietschean, social-Darwinian view that a world without evil is a world without struggle and a world without the potential for good.

As to #2, I see that as neither a premise or a fact. To the contrary, who do you suppose it is that owns and manages the vast and effectives engines of moral corruption but rightist business people, most of whom are conservative Christians? Why? Because it is in their financial self-interest to do so. Fox is a stirling example. O'Reilly, who I admire for his tough-minded (albeit wrong-minded) independence of thought (in contrast to Beck who is a lunatic and Hannity whom is a GOP apparatchik) nevertheless almost always has a needlessly salacious segment on his show. But drill down a bit more. Who do you suppose are the people who are having abortions, the people who are getting divorced, the mobsters, the pediophiles, the murderers? They are not just generally Christians but conservative Christians, and repeated statistical studies support this. The denial of this ("No true conservative Christians are morally depraved") is of course the No True Scottsman fallacy, which takes this form:

Argument: "No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge."
Reply: "But my friend Angus likes sugar with his porridge."
Rebuttal: "Ah yes, but no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge."

The problem with this argument is that it derives an unproved predicate ("puts sugar on porridge") from the subject ("Scotsman"). The move is from a synthetic-contingent proposition (one that can be falsified by facts) to an analytic-necessary assertion (one that is true by definition but has no relationship to the facts). Now, sometimes the argument is valid as when the predicate derives from the subject, as in "no true vegetarians eat beef".

The family was generally in accord with that stipulation. This is a good example of the vast spread between principle and application and where deeply held principles are chucked in favor of situational ethics. We clearly don't see eye to eye on the pro-life issue although we are in accord with the general principle of an undivided reverance for human life. It is the application in real time under the fog of crisis that is the rub. At the time, I was disappointed at my family for thisi decision, although I've tried hard not to conceptualize in in legals terms such as homicide or suicide. I can conceive of a situation where it may be acceptable to remove nourishment from me if I was in my mother's place. However, I would never want this to happen if I was still conscious, as was the case for my mother, and nor should such decisions be compelled one way or another by the legislature. These kind of decisions are difficult, which is why I am suspicious of moral absolutist claims of any kind as compelleing as they may seem at the time. Such people who make them simply have not lived enough life or thought deeply enough to make them in my opinion.

I'm sorry it has taken me a while to get back to you on this. The account of your mother's late life and death is very moving.I take it that your family, supposedly pro-life as it was, was in accord with the stipulation to withhold nutrition and hydration?It is my own view that extraordinary measures may be withheld when it is pretty clear that a person's natural life-expectancy has reached its course, but that basic necessities such as nutrition and hydration should never be intentionally withheld. Those things, I believe, are the right of any human person, if they are available. So I think I'm with you on this one, and I am truly sorry for the suffering your mom had to endure at the end of her life, and I'm sorry that you had to witness it. I'm not looking forward to it. I'm sure it is not easy.

Do you see my mother's death in terms of either suicide or homicide?
I think many Kantians (although not Kant!) claim to be moral objectivists rather than moral absolutists. I see no incompatability with situational ethics or utiliterianism and Kantianism so long as the former is rooted in moral objectivity.

I agree there is a distinction between utiliterianism and deontological ethics in that the former considers consequences while the latter does not. However, there can be an overlap as well, as they both try to root moral rules in something other than God or feelings. In the case of Bentham's utiliterianism, it is happiness for the greatest number and Fletcher's situational ethics, in which agape love is the great goal, and in the case of Kant's categorical imperative, it is to treat others as an end rather that as a means to an end. I'm aware that both Bentham and Kant tried to turn their principles into absolutes, but that need not be the case. Consider for example Kant's discussion in Grounding for the Methaphysics of Morals on suicide: "A man reduced to despair by a series of misfortunes feels sick of life, but is still so far in possession of his reason that he can ask himself whether taking his own life would not be contrary to his duty to himself. Now he asks whether the maxim of his action could become a universal law of nature. But his maxim is this: from self-love I make as my principle to shorten my life when its continued duration threatens more evil than it promises satisfaction. There only remains the question as to whether this principle of self-love can become a universal law of nature. One sees at once that a contradiction in a system of nature whose law would destroy life by means of the very same feeling that acts so as to stimulate the furtherance of life, and hence there could be no existence as a system of nature. Therefore, such a maxim cannot possibly hold as a universal law of nature and is, consequently, wholly opposed to the supreme principle of all duty." The contradiction is framed in terms of the conflict of universalizing self-love with self-hate. There are historical episodes when suicide has been regarded not just as a heroic act but as a moral act, as in the Masada deaths. In my mother's case, there is both ambiguity as to consequences but also good will by all concerned, not that that mitigates the act by my mother and the doctor. I disagree with the existentialists that suggest that the action is meaningless or the cause for that action so long as we act in good faith. I'm looking for more.

I don't know enough about the circumstances surrounding your mother's death to say whether it might have been suicide, homicide, both, or neither. I'm only pointing out that you can use those terms morally and not just as legal terms.As for Kant, the principles generated by the CI, whatever they may be, are supposed to be absolute principles. That's the whole point of their being universalizable.You may not see any incompatibility between utilitarianism (or situationalism, or whatever you wish to call it) and Kantianism, but Kant sure did. That was the whole point behind his so-called second formulation of the CI: "Now I say man...." It was to preserve the dignity of the human person against any calculations of utility, which is what he took Hume to be pointing at and presciently feared would become a widely accepted moral theory.There is a lot more to Kantianism than mere objectivism. Utilitarianism is an objectivist moral theory, and Kant was a staunch opponent of (what we now call) utilitarianism.Kant would not have struggled with the permissibility of terminating innocent human life. He would have said it was impermissible because he thought it could not be absolutized as a universal moral law.

If the principles in either of these systems are not taken to be absolute, then one has moved into a different system of ethics all together.

I feel like seconding William James' "damn the absolute." It seems that absolute principles of morality are both nonsensical (unless we want to endorse an application such as "death to all killers" and dangerous. My father, for example, is a wonderful man in many respects. But there is not the slightest doubt that having to make a false choice between Jesus and my death, he would choose my death, and fanatics make choices like that constantly. In the more sane world, we also have doctors and generals who struggle with difficult lifeboat choices that confound deeply held principles. I'm not quite as dismissive as you are toward existentialism, especially when such choices are attached to a spiritual goal. It seems to be based on a realistic view of man and society and it upholds the notion of man's freedom of to make choices, as does Kant.

I wouldn't say "there are no absolutes" (even in the metaphysical sense) is a credo of any existentialism of which I'm aware. It also seems to me that you greatly mischaracterize existentialism in your comment below and also incorrectly tie the philosophy to "pro choice" impulses.

The Existentialists are crass non-cognitivists with respect to morality.. They held that something becomes morally permissible simply on the basis of its being chosen by an agent, and no truth-values attach to statements about morality. This intellectually jejune and socially naive exaltation of will and "choice" in ethical decision-making is still alive and well. It allows people to resort to violence against the innocent when they deem it convenient to do so."

In my years of debate, I've encountered only one person who tried to argue that "everything is relative" and "that we can be sure of nothing" including even trivial facts of science, i.e. the earth circles the sun. In my view, it isn't even something worth debating as it is a variation of solipsism.

I was introduced to the existential imagination in a honors literature class in high school. My teacher Richard Delzingero (we called him "Mr. D.") was one of a small handful of those rare teachers who really pushed me to think and write. He later went on to become a Barnabites priest.

http://www.catholic-church.org/barnabites/b56vocn1.html

Soren Kierkegaard is regarded as the father of existentialism, and his thinking came out of his critique on the Danish People's Church for its secularism, politicization, and hypocrisy, and attack that hasn't lost its relevancy. (If you haven't already, I recommend you take a look at his writing.) One of his key concepts is the "leap of faith" to God. I also have come to see theistic apologetics as arguing in circles and there is not a single proof for the existence of God that compels my respect at least. His "subjectivity is truth" statement doesn't mean that principled ethics are chucked. It does mean, as I understand him, that an interior quality of acceptance needs to take place before ethical action can commence.

Some people think that existentialism is devoid of faith, because of the anti-clerical writings of Nietzsche and atheistic writings of Jean-Paul Sartre. However, most existentialists were theists. I see the same false dichotomy between Christianity-- love for God-- and humanism--love for man. Jacques Maritain, the Catholic philosopher, wrote a book defining and defending Christian humanism Such belief are not in opposition to each other, and nor is existentialism necessarily in opposition to Christianity. Of theists who influenced existentialism, we must include Hegel, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Kafka, Dostoevsky, and others. Unlike much of religious and modern thought that minimizes or suppresses the idea of man's free will, in existentialism man's free will provides the axiomatic backdrop that asks us to choose in a morally ambiguous world. Man defines himself by the sum of his choices, according to Sartre. Man is free. The coward makes him cowardly. The hero makes him heroic. Because God doesn't exist, Sartre says, man defines his essence though his actions. But I don't think this follows. Why should the non-existence of God have any bearing whatever on our actions? Why should it matter if our death results in nothingness, heaven, or reincarnation, so long as we act morally and authentically today? It makes as much sense to say: Because God exists man defines his essence through his actions. Bad faith emerges when we attribute to God consequences to our actions, or when we allow a creed to dictate our life rather than our conscience. As Dostoyevsky says: "Thou shalt love life more than the meaning of life."
The architects of the Cambodian genocide studied the existentialism of Sartre in the Paris of the early 1950s. Were Satre's children correct to make the leap from life is meaningless tohumans are worthless? Can we attribute the veneration of any kind of choice, no matter how willfully ignorant or immoral it is, to Kierkegaard? To me, that makes as much sense as blaming Hiroshima on Thomas Jefferson. All that they heard was that life is absurd, reality nauseating, and that man was free of commandments and obligations, while entirely forgetting the dimension of hard moral choice and hard moral courage. While Sartre was a Stalinist fellow traveler, he certainly wasn't advocating the abdication of morality that would result in pyramids of skulls under an Asian sun. The syllogism is not that since all is absurd, every act we take is absurd, including the claim that all is absurd. Rather, these are starting points to allow us to find meaning in the face of meaninglessness and absurdity. I cannot deny that in existentialism we find nihilism and violence for its own sake. E. M. Cioran defined the case for total pessimism: "Life is a passionate emptiness, and intriguing nothingness" He writes that "I cling to the world no better than a ring on a skeleton's finger" but also says that "I fall back on God if only out of a desire to trample my doubts underfoot. Since all life is futility, the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all." But what the existentialists generally emphasize about man is that is a decision-making creature blessed or cursed with the freedom to choose among a number of possibilities in a mysterious. Dostoyevsky asserted the eternal necessity for the soul to be free, but discerned that the moment man indulged this freedom, it led him into tragedy and evil. To be truly human, must man must accept this freedom by a commitment to authenticity. That authenticity can translate into either acts of immorality or acts of morality, but the act rests entirely with in our hands. This message can be become bracing in the religious version of existentialism in which choice is directed at a transcending spiritual goal.

Meaningful Questions

We invest great effort in trying to answer moral questions. But the wrong kind of questons can result in wasted effort and mental dead ends. They can also have deadening moral consequences as well.

So what are the right kind of questions?

I would suggest the following rules. These rules will lead inevitably to a resolution or to Ludwig Witttgenstein's "silence". ("Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.")

1. A intelligible question can only be formulated in which both subject and predicate are present in the natural world. Thus, the sentence "does my cat exist?" is unintelligible as the subject cat is part of the natural world while the predicate exist is not. To make this clear, consider the question "Does my cat exist in the universe?" Until you can define "the universe", that question is logically meaningless. However, "does my cat exist in my house?" is intelligible and thus resolvable as both "cat" and "house" either are in the natural world. "Does my cat have a soul?" or "Do souls exist?" are both meaningless truth statements as "soul" is not part of the natural world. This is not to say that questions outside of the natural world, in which subject/predicate don't correlate within anything that we can see, feel, or touch are not worthy of contemplation or debate. Of coure they are, and they will ever be. It means only that we must accept that such questions are unresolvable.

2. The next test is: Does the question concern the human world? This is not to say that animals and automata are not subject to acts of morality or immorality. I merely posit that humans are the only actors to which we can fairly evaluate.

3. The corrollary to proposition two is: How do those human actions manifest itself? Thus, our investigaton must strictly be on consequences of actions, not or any presumed interior state such as faith, hope, or love. A person's interior states are by definition subjective. Further, two people with the same interior state such as good will can result in diametrically different behaviors. By focusing on actions and consequences rather than cognition and conscience, we have a natural-world baseline to evaluate whether that behavior resolves itself into either true or false or good or bad.

4. By focusing on actions, we may state as a rule that actions that conform to custom are ceteris paribus to the good. We define good strictly in terms of collective utility: does it pay or does it not pay. Pragmatic behavior is moral behavior. We do well by doing good.

5. Ethical choices is a result of both a act of partciularizing and universalizing. Thus, "humanity" does not exist. Only people-- Tom, Mary, Mohammed, etc.-- exist. Our capacity to abstract indivudals into tribes (communists, atheists, republicans etc.) is a capacity lacking in all lower animals and accounts for our violence against our own species. By particularizing, we allow for nuances and exceptions to guiding principles, and it is this leap of empathy that allows us to make morally correct applications and adjudications. However, by attempting to universalize, we put our mind outside of ourself by considering how our actions would be regarded in the context of all humanity. Kant's categorical imperative to be the benchmark:

"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law".

"Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end.

"Therefore, every rational being must so act as if he were through his maxim always a legislating member in the universal kingdom of ends." [

6. The premise behind this schema for asking meaningful questions is that first we can ask such questions. That is to say, we have cognition, and we have the freedom to choose and the freedom to act. This does not presuppose that all people are rational and freedom-seeking. To the contrary, a rational view of man must presuppose that many people are not rational and all people are never always rational. However, we have a duty to ourselves, consistent with the categorical imperative, to harmonize our own ethical behavior with the world as it is. And, by so doing, we can indeed ask and answer moral questions.