Category: Anthology – Implications

Anthology

Posted on

Donovan paragraphs 55, 60 and 61

The objection is a sound one. If there are encounters between God and people they may be chiefly for those non-intellectual interpersonal reasons, and not for the sake of acquiring knowledge. It is only if a claim to know is based on experiences taken as encounters with God, and on them alone, that the philosophical difficulties considered above apply. And the fact is that believers often do try to argue that they have knowledge of God purely on the strength of such experiences. The effect of the philosophical criticisms has been simply to show how inadequate that kind of argument is.

The chief point of the philosophical criticisms of ‘knowing God by experience’ amounts to this. Where popular religious reasoning falls down is not in taking the sense of God too seriously, but in trying to treat it as a form of knowledge, of a self-certifying kind, immediately available to those who have it. Knowledge, the philosophers point out, is just not like that—whether it is knowledge of God or of anything else. The sense of knowing is never on its own a sufficient sign of knowledge. (That distinction is a key to many of the philosophical difficulties in claims to know God by experience.)

But if the sense of God fails, in the end, to count as knowledge of God, what is to be said about it? Is it of no further philosophical interest and to be discarded, like a pricked balloon, as being simply a great illusion?

a) Examine the argument and/ or interpretation in the passage – 30 marks

This is the end of Donovan’s argument and he is summing up the ideas he has put forward in the rest of his article. He has been concerned with expressing his doubts and philosophical difficulties with accepting the kind of knowledge, the intuitive ‘sense of God,’ gained through religious experience on its own merits. He does not doubt that the knowledge is both beneficial and genuine knowledge but his worry throughout has been that if it is only of the ‘self-certifying kind‘ then unless it can be argued for on rational grounds too, it is of dubious value to anyone other than the original experient. Here Donovan differs from Ayer
who categorically denied the possibility of any knowledge gained from any other source than empirically verifiable and only acknowledged the validity of knowledge gained by the 5 senses. Any other kind of supposed knowledge gained by ‘mystical intuition‘ is ‘nonsense.‘

He takes issue with HP Owen’s claim that intuitive knowledge gained through religious experience is as genuine as any other sort of knowledge and that it ‘requires no further argument or support.‘ He worries about those believers in anything who say ‘I just know‘ on the grounds that this kind of claim has led to all sorts of abuses in the past: from George W Bush’s claim that God told him to go to war on Iraq to Peter Sutcliffe’s claim that God told him to murder prostitutes and including Hitler’s belief in the inferiority of the Jewish race or even in more modern times the Muslim fundamentalists who felt they had to bomb the World Trade Centres to make their point. Unfortunately intuitive ‘I just know’ knowledge does not hold up in a court of law and if we are going to justify our actions we have to be sure that the ‘knowledge’ those actions are based on is rational. As he says there is a difference between ‘feeling certain and being right.‘

Earlier Donovan has quoted Bertrand Russell’s point that ‘deception is constantly practiced with success‘ and using the prosaic example of love showed that human beings are indeed frequently deluded about the strength or validity of another’s feelings for us. He points out that ‘The sense of knowing is never on its own a sufficient sign of knowledge.‘

However although he ends his article with the question about what use this kind of knowledge really is he has already answered it in his discussion about the qualitative difference between ‘knowledge about‘ and ‘knowledge of.’ He borrows Martin Buber’s
I-It and I-Thou description of the difference between knowing theoretically about something e.g. earthquakes and having experience of being in one, which is quite a different thing. There is a modern expression which says ‘on the internet no-one knows you’re a dog,’ which encapsulates this idea of the difference between knowing about someone, i.e. what they tell you about themselves and actually really knowing them from experience and seeing them in action. The Old Testament figures who claimed to have had experiences of God had learned about the God of their people and had an I-It kind of knowledge but until He made himself known to them and upgraded their relationship to an I-Thou kind, it was a kind of knowledge which didn’t affect their lives. As soon as God made his demand upon Moses to go to free his people in Egypt Moses knew it was going to affect his life and not in a good way. Jonah too, told by God to go and tell the people of Nineveh to mend their ways, immediately took passage on a ship to get out of reach of God. Needless to say he ended up doing what God wanted him to anyway! With a little help from a whale!

While St Teresa of Avila stated unequivocally ‘it is wholly impossible for me to doubt that I have been in God and God in me,’ nevertheless Russell‘s cautionary message still stands and we are now more aware than ever that there are alternative explanations for these experiences which are called ‘religious’ but which may have neurological explanations or be nothing more than delusory, or may be brought on by other factors within or outside of the experient’s control like fever, illness, drugs, fasting or even alcohol induced. Again Russell
asked the question ‘what is the difference between a man who drinks too much and sees snakes and one who eats too little and sees God?‘ It’s a good question and shows how cautiously we should treat the so-called intuitive knowledge gained from these so-called religious experiences.

It is clear from the Biblical examples that these experiences were genuine for these people and the kind of knowledge they gained as a result of them has had a far reaching impact even up to today. And perhaps to answer Donovan’s question for him the way we can rationally accept the claims by these people to ‘just know’ is by looking at the effect on their individual lives and then on the lives of others. If that effect is good maybe that is the rational criterion by which we should be judging them and they are not ‘simply a great illusion.’

Philosophers Bad examples Good examples Concepts
Buber George Bush Moses I-It / I-thou
Russell Peter Sutcliffe Jonah Intuition
Ayer 9/11 St Teresa of Avila Religious experiences – alternative explanations
H P Owen Kind of knowledge
Self-certifying versus empirical, verifiable
Posted on

Notes on the paragraphs of Westphal

Westphal extract

1 explains that from the time of Hume and Kant to that of Nietzsche the focus shifted from philosophising about God (i.e. about his nature and what he is like) to philosophising about religion (and its nature and practices) from philosophical theology to philosophy of religion
2 Hegel‘s complaint is that since the assumption was that we do not know God we talk about religion instead.
3 It is to Hegel that we should be grateful that the philosophy of religion came to be recognised as a branch of philosophy in its own right.
4 Westphal explains that pre-Kant there were two schools of philosophical theology: scholastic and deistic. Both attempt to explore knowledge of God through reason rather than revelation. However the Scholastic follows Augustine in viewing reason as going hand in hand with faith and the two as complementary. Deistic by contrast seeks to separate the two not just distinguish between them. Both wish to bring religion within the ‘limits of reason alone,’ to separate the rational kernel from the irrational husk ie to demythologise religious faith and practice. [Albert Schweitzer and his Quest for the Historical Jesus and Rudolph Bultmann and his work on Form Criticism (ie the investigation into the sources and original forms and influences of the gospels)] [Isn’t this what Ayer would have agreed with?]
5 Deism he goes on was the religion of the Enlightenment, when after the horrors of religious warfare and persecution enlightened thinkers sought a way to make religion foster moral unity rather than hatred toward anyone of another faith or society. [To prevent it happening again!]
6 These thinkers believed that a non-violent religion could only occur once unique specific religious claims were sublimated to the ‘universality of reason.’ Indeed religious claims had to be limited (whether claimed through logic and argument or through experience) to those which were available to ‘all people at all times and in all places.’ What this meant was that individual claims by individual religions were rejected and only those which were non-specific e.g. didn’t rely on salvation by faith in Christ or Mohammad, or by virtue of birth as a Jew for example, were acceptable.
7 Continuing his explanation of the roots of modern philosophy Westphal says that the deist project was motivated by three primary concerns: first for the autonomy (i.e. the independent authority) of human reason; second for religious tolerance (they wanted no more wars or crusades in the name of religion; third an anti- (as he calls it) clericalism meaning wherein no single religious body has supreme power or unique claim to knowledge or to being right. [Donovan links?] It was confident that all we need to know about God could be known through ‘unaided human reason.’ The thrust of deism was to discuss the human aspects of religion and the effects of it on society. As he says at the end the project aimed less to try and prove God’s existence than to try and urge the precedence of religious morality (in other words it’s the human twisting of religious dogma which ends up being perverted and used to sanction war and other atrocities.) The philosophy of religion then became much more concerned with religion’s impact on human society than on discussing the actual nature and existence of God.
8 Moving on to Hume and Kant, Westphal comments that their criticism of the standard a priori and a posteriori arguments (that’s the cosmo, teleological, and onto arguments) for the existence of God succeeded in undermining them (you would need to know how – see specimen essay) and that subsequently it seemed as if philosophy could only make relevant discussion about the impact of religion on human life.
9 Hume and Kant now suggested new directions for philosophy.
10 “Deism is a religious and philosophical belief that a supreme natural God exists and created the physical universe, and that religious truths can be arrived at by the application of reason and observation of the natural world. Deists generally reject the notion of supernatural revelation, miracles etc. as a basis of truth or religious dogma. These views contrast with the dependence on divine revelation found in many Christian,[1]
Islamic and Judaic teachings.” Kant, attributed with having demolished the rational arguments on which deism was based and yet being a deist still, now sought to rescue it.
11 Kant’s contribution to the debate amounted to his claim that though we cannot know God purely through ‘theoretical’ reason we can know him through ‘practical’ reason; what he means by this is that we can see the existence of God through the actions of humans, in their worship and through their interactions with each other. He thus developed what are known as his arguments from morality (i.e. that there is a Categorical imperative based on the concept of duty) and from immortality (if there is a future world what actions are needed to ensure a place in it) to replace the ones he had demolished.
12 Kant in his book Religion clearly separates religion from morality in 3 principles: ‘morality does not need religion’, ‘morality leads inevitably to religion’ and ‘religion is the recognition of all duties as divine commands.’ And though it can aid the moral life it isn’t essential to it.
13 In advocating a ‘universal religion’ Kant explains that we can do nothing for God, ordinary church based rituals like baptism and communion are what he calls ‘fetish-faith’ and he places as supreme, love of fellow humans as a way of acting out love of God, sort of reversing Jesus’ supreme commandment ‘love God and love each other’ to be ‘love each other to show you love God.’ Rituals can be nothing more than aids to living a moral life.
14 In Kant’s view the perfect religion is an ethical commonwealth of humans desiring moral self-improvement and Christ is only relevant as some sort of ideal example of moral perfection.
15 Lessing suggests that rational knowledge of God cannot be dependent on anything historical contingencies (ifs and possibilities) and traditional Christian themes need demythologising e.g. then, if the church is teaching the importance of the virgin birth it must be subject to scrutiny to remove any possible elements of myth to leave only historical or factual truth.
16 Schleiermacher adds his rather more empathetic view; he separates religion into its husk (anything metaphysical – which he dismisses) and its kernel (anything to do with feelings of the infinite through e.g. religious experience – which is its importance) [link to Donovan and intuition]
17 Schleiermacher moves away from the idea of a personal god separate from the created world to one implicitly bound up in creation and whom we can know through our feelings of oneness with creation.
18 To Schleiermacher anyone who recognised this feeling of unity with the Infinite and Eternal could belong to this one true religion. He calls this a ‘church’ an association of likeminded people who are seeking the true religion, the ‘true church.’ Yet acknowledges that true religion can be discovered through the religions which are like pale shadows compared to it. [Like Plato’s ideal forms?]
19 Still in Schleiermacher’s view this religious feeling needs to be understood within a particular religious context i.e. with the rituals and practices like baptism etc. but which are still not essential for true piety. What he is saying here is that we understand and categorise our experiences through religious rituals but you don’t have to have rituals to have the experiences.
20 While Kant reduced religion to morality and Schleiermacher reduced it to a feeling of the Infinite, Hegel regards knowledge of God as in need of a conceptual framework which needs to be ‘articulated and defended.’ [Religious language ]
21 Hegel decides that religion and philosophy are the same but only philosophy has the necessary conceptual framework to explain it while religion places too much emphasis on feeling and the senses and historical narratives. [R L]
22 Thus Hegel’s is a philosophy of the idea in that it places great importance on the ability to ‘articulate and defend’ itself. [R L]
23 While Kant found that understanding or reason is incapable of knowing God, Hegel doesn’t so much separate God and the world as rank God or the infinite spirit as higher than the world or nature or the finite spirit.
24 Religion is the raising of the finite spirit to the infinite level, literally consciousness raising, often apparently misinterpreted as a religious experience or encounter with Someone Other [Otto’s wholly other?] and the discovery of the highest form of human self-awareness being full self-knowledge.
25 He calls Christianity the supreme religious example because Jesus is the embodiment of the concept that the human is divine.
26 Hume – Modern philosophy grew out of dissatisfaction with historic Christianity. Hume and his followers looked to see if the problem lay in the kernel of religion i.e. in its heart, not in its ‘disposable husks.’
27 Hume suggested that we should be suspicious when asking what the underlying ‘motives are for religious beliefs and practices and what functions they play.’ Religion has become nothing more than a flattering of ‘gods’ in return for favours and that self-interest causes self-deception, for believers cannot accept that what is regarded as sacred is nothing more than a means to an end! (We pray to pass our driving test – we pass – we are pleased for we have gained!) He calls this ‘instrumental religion.’
28 Marx is more concerned with function. Historically societies survive on exploitation and religion becomes the tool to enforce and encourage cooperation. As he puts it ‘religion is a matter of social privilege seeking legitimisation and of the oppressed seeking consolation.’ Or the shorter form religion becomes the opium of the people encouraging them to maintain the status quo.
29 For Nietzsche religion makes the strong feel guilty and God is defined as one who will punish the enemies. He based his observation on slaves and their desire less for consolation than for revenge and religion fulfilled that function as the priests became accessories to the depiction of the oppressors as evil. Slaves thus became morally superior! If nothing else!
30 Kierkegaard criticised what he called bourgeois Christianity; its ‘double ideological function’ in that Christianity equates the present social order with the kingdom of god therefore confusing this unequal and ‘unfinished’ world with the perfect one to come and by suggesting that to gain access to the ultimate kingdom we must be good citizens in this society.