God, belief and semantics; some brief observations

I do wonder whether we are a little naive to assume that it is even possible to believe in what we cannot conceive.

What is the actual extent of our understanding? It seems to me that most of what we do is rearrange a set of flexible metaphors and symbols into pleasing pictures. With language we combine loose tropes within a system of holistic meaning; we attempt to domesticate and schematise this nebulous thing ‘experience’. And yet we are already within it.

We enlarge the use of our language by taking familiar usages and applying them in new ways. I want to ask, if this process has anything of the character of analogy, then does this mean that the whole process is critically unpinned, lacking deliberate direction, and ultimately arbitrary in a way which casts serious doubt on our ability to even grasp, let alone master, the system of meaning we inherit in language?

This is certainly not all. If belief is a having-before-oneself, a kind of knowledge or intimacy, then it would seem that whatever cannot be known cannot be believed.

Specifically, if God cannot be known, if he is Wholly Other and beyond the impetuous attempts of metaphysics to domesticate him, then what hope have we for a meaningful faith? Whosoever thought that they believed in God, would merely believe that they believed in God. Epistemologically, a soaring gulf would prevent any further intimacy.

And yet this seems almost too easy. There is an undergrowth of nebulous conceptualisations here which resist being brought into the light. I will restrict my observations only to that conception of religion in the west which, following on from Zwingli and Calvin, came to see its defining and most important characteristic as ‘belief’, rather than ritual. This is belief as a kind of articulated conviction conveyed in the medium of language. As far as I can tell, this makes the entire argumentative position of Christianity weaker.

As soon as we talk about language we run into the above problems concerning metaphor. The very idea of symbolic language in religion is problematic. I am not referring just to the kind of criticisms which have grown out of the development of radical interpretation (think Donald Davidson). I think that these kinds of arguments are often thought to pull more argumentative weight than they actually do.

For the sake of exposition, the argument says that symbolic language cannot reach out to something which is Wholly Other, and whatever is only ‘partially’ Other, such as the revealed God, can just as well be described in literal langauge, making symbolism redundant. I think this argument stands or falls on the tenability of any delineation between ‘symbolic’ and ‘literal’ - and seeing as this is unresolved I will not use this as foundational for my argument.

(If it is not, then we go down the road towards Richard Rorty, or so it seems to me. If it is valid in some sense (a view I am inclined towards), this would not be an argument against God, and it would not necessarily be an argument against the possibility of believing in him (as some who make this argument might want it to be). However it would mean that anyone unable to explicate their conception of God would be open to the criticism that what they believed in was actually a kind of covert negative theology. This is especially true of all those people who in frustration, and perhaps a kind of repressed contempt (a rarer thing I have found than is sometimes thought), say something like ‘God is beyond our comprehension’.)

In other words, we come to the conclusion; ‘if you cannot tell me what you believe, then you do not believe it.’

I think there is something to be said though for the idea that even a literal language involves a kind of domestication of what is foreign. Anything else, I am sure Quine would tell us (amongst most others these days), would be a reversion to Platonic realism and the bad old days. Not that most analytic thinkers I have read have a very contextually or historically adequate understanding of Plato or any of the other Greek thinkers.

This kind of domestication, I am tempted to say, erects an idea of God in place of the real thing. I am told, however, that this is not allowed.

(Between a rock and a hard place.)

James

Hi James,

Your assumption seems to be pointing towards language being clear enough to express experience adequately, but no experience can be caught in language so adequately as to describe all impressions made. Analogy, however, may grasp the key emotion or other component of an experience and be reliable to pass this on to a multi-cultured audience without even being bound by time.

I think you must also take into account the fact that biblical tradition also has several historical layers that portray the development of an oral tradition into scripture and its subsequent editing when being placed into devotional writing. There are a number of religious experiences being woven together, producing inspirational scripture. There are a number of influences here that elude us but are effective in the lives of believers.

The attempt to put a rational test onto the religious experience is to misunderstand its nature altogether. Religious experience can of course be described – I have done this several times here in ILP, but the results are never satisfactory. I know my lacking in the linguistic expression of such experiences. All the same, I know they are real and it will always be a case of trusting the person, not only on the merit of what he says, but also of what he does. That is why Religion is an exercise in community and not something you can just read out of books.

This reminds me of what I have read recently by Thomas Merton:

Of course this is an experience that has deep implications and must stand the test of life. The language is unattractive and awakes a multitude of images that we have tried to avoid in modern society, but which regularly come back in existential situations. There are those who practise being an emotional concrete block, and those who almost drown in a whirlpool of emotion everyday, but they represent extremes of the superficial. Existential experiences are different and are deep. They change lives and set people off in directions others would never have expected.

I believe that Christianity has often weakened its argument. In its attempts to defend believers against ‘heretical’ propositions, it has often made the whole issue very narrow. Any attempt to shake off such a corset has been dealt with rigorously, which in itself weakens the NT message. The broadness of religious experience has often worried Church authorities – not without reason – and the reaction was often overkill.

You are making a claim that you don’t back up here. Besides, I don’t see symbolic language “reaching out,” but rather seeking some kind of a rough equivalent that could be used to describe something for which we have no words. If it were possible to use literal language, I have no doubt, it would have been used.

Many people can tell you what they believe, but not in a language that would satisfy you. Once they fall into descriptive or figurative language you tell them that anything they can’t explain reasonably without metaphors is unacceptable. Well, it looks like you will have to do without an explanation.

Shalom
Bob

Hi James,

My impression is that you are looking for a word(s) or concept that explains God, or that which is, in some complete or ‘knowable’ way.

I’m sure that if it were possible, it would have been done. There has been an on again-off again discussion of the ‘ineffable’ God. That explanation that goes beyond language and concept. I believe the consensus has been that for that which we cannot name, there must be silence. Therein lies the paradox. In a causal explanation (Religion as you’ve defined it) there is a beginning and an end. Time is linear within such an explanation. If there is a beginning, linear time, and an end, then there must be a knowing of what that entails. And so you are stuck with explaining the unexplainable. Not that we haven’t tried.

There are other explanations that fall outside traditional Western religions, but you’ve excluded them from this thread.

JT

James,

“Specifically, if God cannot be known, if he is Wholly Other and beyond the impetuous attempts of metaphysics to domesticate him, then what hope have we for a meaningful faith?”

“God” is and has always been the “principle that coheres”. Its presence is before you in all things, yet its interpretation and comprehension is ever in debate. In this way actually one has no choice but to believe in God, but not perhaps be able to understand him/it/her, whatever that might be. Language games just operate within that coherence.

Dunamis

Hi James

I would say it is naive

If people could believe or have meaningful faith, Christianity would not be necessary. Christianity exists because of our nothingness in relation to our potential. We’re in a mess and we need help.

You may believe one day that you want to lose weight so avoid desert… On the next you believe that you want chocolate cake and eat it. Which do you really believe? You believe both. One day you believe you want to love your neighbor and the next day you want to shoot them. Which do you believe? Both. This is how we are so you must put the word “believe” in quotation marks since it is changeable.

A person can learn by impartial self knowledge of their own nothingness. Instead of fighting to believe and to give the appearance of belief, a person comes to admit that they don’t believe. Very few have the courage see this within themselves. Bob quoted from Thomas Merton:

The ego plays a curious role here. On the one hand it prevents deeper belief since it varies in its superficial beliefs keeping us continually enchanted. On the other hand it denies the ability to openly experience what is necessary in order to accept the inability to believe. It is through the ancient traditions such as Christianity that it becomes possible to get beyond the limitations of our egotism to begin to experience what we are and what it means to be human. Since being human allows us to experience the connection with the higher, we will have what is necessary to believe.

On That Side, beyond the clouds,
The mountain is blue-green as jade
The white clouds on the mountain
Are whiter than white
From the spring on the mountain,
Drop after drop
Who knows how to see the face
In the white clouds?
Clear skies and rain have their times,
They’re like lightening
Who knows how to listen to the
Sound of this spring?
It flows on without stopping
Through thousands
And thousands of turns
The moment before thought is
Already wrong
To try to say anything further
Is embarrassing.

• T’aego (1301-1382)

Another way of reading my assumptions would be that I am arguing against the validity of the general conception of knowledge in accounting for religious experience. I would not be the first to do this, obviously, although I see such an argument as a double-edge sword, cutting both ways.

Whatever cannot be articulated, however real, cannot be ‘known’ in this sense, otherwise we would be able to articulate it after all. This pushes us down another path which I stayed away from in the original post. It is the use of ‘immediate’ experience in a sort of phenomenological fashion, in order to explain how we can have knowledge of God even though are language is insufficient to encompass this knowledge. My favourite thinker who uses this kind of reasoning is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, although I am disheartened somewhat by the flaws in his reading of Heidegger.

Simply switching to ‘God-speak’ is inadequate; in order to avoid merely playing a role, the experience must be immediate.

What follows is a question over just who has these experiences. Are they, in fact, universal? This description assumes that the experience is the same, and that it is only the manner of recognition which differs. Consequently, the experience of God is already immanent within you and I. I then ask with what system of measure a religious description is held to be superior to any other, which does not make use of God? I can smell a question being begged somewhere along the line here. Where does this (necessarily) even more primordial knowledge come from?

When I say ‘reaching out’, I mean precisely what you describe in your second sentence. The notion of ‘equivalence’ seems founded on an epistemological assumption about the ‘knowability’ of God. It may or may not therefore beg the question against what I am saying, as it is precisely this knowability whose impossibility is a premise in my argument. That is why I am pretty much forced down the road to the argument for immediacy - the phenomenological account. This takes the assumption that we are already seperated from the world and need to ‘reach out’ to it in order to have knowledge of it - and reconfigures the definition of ‘knowledge’ into something primordial to language and the articulated word.

Indeed it is your last sentence that worries me the most. Tentative made a similar remark, and I think there is a good chance you are both right. But if I were to argue the devil’s advocate, it may not be necessary to admit this (that if literality were possible it would have been done already), unless you are comfortable to argue that what is not literally knowable in some experiential sense is nonetheless accessible in some other fashion.

I do think, unfortunately, that the phenomenological account has its own problems, which is why I say that I am ‘between a rock and a hard place’.

Indeed. It is because my thoughts are directed towards a particular person who I am exploring this with, who is Christian. However you will notice that my overall argument does not apply just to Jehovah, nor does it require the (seeming) weakness of this particular example. It is anything the knowledge of which cannot be articulated in literal language. Arguments over the Christian God can be an argument against a particular, extant corpus of knowledge. The metaphysical existence of any God whatsoever is not touched by any of my arguments. In fact it is a premise of my argument that it could not, by definition, be reached in this manner.

There are several outstanding areas of disagreement between my friend and I. It is these interactions which fuel my observations.

For one, she cannot tell me what she believes without making use of ‘God-speak’, which is quite unintelligible to me, even though I know how to speak the language. Maybe what I want to say is not that it is itself unintelligible, but that any decision to use it is not bound by any epistemological necessity, which makes it seem, from the outside, wholly arbitrary. I want to know what would be required to make it otherwise, but she cannot tell me.

Well I must say I do prefer Bonhoeffer to Tillich - call me oldfashioned if you must. I am disturbed (not in a personal sense but because of the possible implications) that Tillich feels the need to make the argument about coherence, when most of the Christians who I know find it distasteful or even ‘unchristian’. The question is whether he is forced into that argumentative position.

You seem though to be using the ‘principle that coheres’ in a broader sense, although it still seems that this idea of God is rather far from the traditional ones (and hence a kind of argument against them). Perhaps it is somewhat disingenous, intellectually, to call it ‘God’ at all.

Thanks for all the responses.

Regards,

James

James,

“Perhaps it is somewhat disingenous, intellectually, to call it ‘God’ at all.”

I don’t consider Spinoza disingenous -intellectually, or otherwise- at all. I thought you were trying to understand/investigate something here, rather than set up dancing anthropomorphic strawmen to knockdown with your broom handle. Well, happy piñataing.

Dunamis

Indeed. I do think though that the charge of anthropomorphic dancing is rather misplaced (nice phrasing mind you). If what we seek is so far removed from the (according to you?) bad old days of anthropomorphic tomfoolery, then perhaps it creates more confusions than it relieves, to use the word ‘God’ to speak of it. That was more my point. You seemed to go exactly in the opposite direction with your interpretation. Here’s an idle question; why does that happen between you and I?

Given the historical baggage of the word ‘God’, shouldn’t we be trying to get away from all the confusion? If the ‘principle that coheres’ is so radically different from the old man in the clouds, then why use the same word for both, as if they both refer to the same thing? If they did refer to the same thing, even if only marginally, then we come to the conclusion that the two aren’t so different after all. But then you would not be as consistent when criticising me for dancing with strawmen.

etc etc

Regards,

James

James,

“This is certainly not all. If belief is a having-before-oneself, a kind of knowledge or intimacy, then it would seem that whatever cannot be known cannot be believed.”

The purpose of directing your attention to “the principle that coheres” is that it undercuts one of the primary assumptions of your examination, (see above). Belief is not “having-before-oneself”, it is the experience of internal coherence which produces the “having-before-oneself”, so you are looking in the wrong direction for “God” if you are looking “out there” before oneself. This is central to Augustine’s conception of God, taken from Plotinus, that having-before-oneself produces illusion and inaccuracy, but rather it is the triune experience of existence-knowing-love that is constitutive, that gives key to the nature of God. The tenant of your proposition here presupposes a knowing that is secondary to the knowing of “God”, at least in the Neoplatonic tradition.

Given the historical baggage of the word ‘God’, shouldn’t we be trying to get away from all the confusion? If the ‘principle that coheres’ is so radically different from the old man in the clouds, then why use the same word for both, as if they both refer to the same thing?

I do not consider the historical unfolding of the images of God, “baggage”, nor do I imagine one manifestation to be more true than another. Each expresses the meaning of “the principle that coheres” within the cultural contexts of its time, and the genealogy of ideas and images gives light and history, not failure, to the concept of God. The genetic “truths” of God actually shed light upon its modern day nature. That I call it “the principle that coheres” is simply a guidepost, a hint of the possible thread that has linked all these manifestations, if they are going to be examined in philosophical contexts at this moment in Time. I don’t believe that it is anymore accurate to the “reality” of God, than any other.

Dunamis

Hi James,

I would agree with you that it isn’t ‘knowledge’ that we possess in religious experience. ‘Knowing’ in the Bible has the connotation of intercourse, which suggests interaction, not a block of information that can be known as true. Religious ‘knowing’ is experience in diverse forms and is intuitive because of that.

I think we have a lot in common, since it is this ‘knowing’ that I turned against when I turned toward Mysticism. There were too many people around me using the Bible like a set of directions that were to be followed by the letter, instead as a set of inspirative scriptures that intuitively showed believers a direction. The figurative speech was used as though it was meant literally.
The fact remains however, that God, or whatever is behind that metaphor is an experience and source of inspirative and intuitive hope. People who stress their ‘assuredness’ must not confuse this with ‘knowledge’ or certitude. However this comes from the tendency to speak about faith instead of showing it, and is perhaps the result of the argument about ‘works’ not being redemptive. Faith without ‘works’ is, as James writes, dead.

I agree, Bonhoeffer’s best works were his writing out of the prison he died in at the end of WWII. That was immediate religious experience expressed in a fashion that was inspiring for generations to follow.
There is a tendency amongst German Theologians to practise this ‘God-speak’ and form arguments that suggest ‘knowledge’ and not hope – especially frustrating, because I consider hope as extremely valuable for a society. This probably happens because of the attempt to combat the influence of rationality as an overbearing authority in German society (which in its extreme gave grounding for the extermination of supposed ‘undesirables) with something substantial. Unfortunately, religious truth isn’t something that can oppose, but something that complements rationality. It is a case of apples and pears.

The idea of superiority is something that dogs our lives generally and not something that is primarily a religious problem. It probably arises in Christianity because of the apologetics of Christian teaching and it’s supersessionalism. In modern days, we should take the circumstances of the growth of Christianity into account for some of the attitudes we meet within scripture, and duly put them in their place. The need to give each letter authority has long passed; it is the spirit of scripture that needs to become influential. Then we would find how noble we could become, acknowledging the wisdom of other traditions whilst living within our own traditions. The fact that we don’t is an influence of fundamentalism even within mainstream churches.

Yes, one of the reasons why it doesn’t leave me alone, but has me fascinated.

I have long claimed that religion is the result of awe and sentience. The lack of religion in the sense that I have described is, in my opinion, a result of separation. Our separation from the world is well documented; especially in modern times we only have to see the idol-worship of people like Britney Spears or Paris Hilton to see how far removed we are from the physical reality of life. But it is the confrontation with that reality and reflection of our experiences that produces valuable understanding, which in turn becomes religion.

Which is precisely where man is, and that is the problem that religion should address.

Shalom
Bob

Indeed it does. However one of the reasons I raised this assumption was to show how it was already (critically?) undercut in several ways. I did not, as you say, argue against it from the position that ‘principle that coheres’ (at least not ostensively) - a phrase which, I must admit, I have not understood entirely in your use of it. It seems to function like states-of-mind in Being and Time, the (pre-)understanding that grounds interpretation. Is part of what you are saying that our orientation to existence is built on, or is itself, God? This again sounds like Bonhoeffer. Perhaps I should start a seperate thread on him sometime.

Yes I would imagine not. Do you then, call my (lack of) experience, somehow wrong, or incomplete? Or it is just that I have misapprehended a certain experience, a certain way of being in the world?

I think there is some simularity, although I remain on the other side of all of these fences. I do agree with many of your observations, though.

What fascinates me is my lack of this apparently fundamental experience. Where has it gone? Did I loose it on the way to the grocer one day? I wonder where it went.

I wonder how to explain this, given especially that I have been arguing for the necessity of a prior experience the reality of which would underpin our semantic misgivings. I want to ask, given that Bob has such an experience, and I do not - how we can maintain that each is in some sense primordial and unquestionable. Or if there is some room for questioning - if one of us is mistaken, then on what basis? Some argument or theory (i.e. words)? Do we both believe in God, inescapably, whether we realise or not? If we are baptising the same experience differently, then perhaps the reverse is true - that we both do not believe, regardless of what we may think.

This is not even the beginning of our troubles though, you must know.

Regards,

James

Hi James,

I believe that all of us are idolaters somewhere along the line, but that it isn’t the point. Jesus answered someone in debate, “You are not far from the Kingdom of God” and I think that we can be glad when that can be said of us. The ideas of perfection and rights and wrongs take us away from what is important - being open to awe and sentience. That is what makes us human and ‘the image of God’.

Shalom
Bob

James,

Is part of what you are saying that our orientation to existence is built on, or is itself, God?

I suppose it can be stated this way. The reason that logical proofs of God all fail, as valiantly as they try, is that they use the very coherence of their being in an attempt to prove itself, something that cannot be done. God is constitutive, but also God is historically expressed. The historic expressions are not “wrong” or even “baggage” but simply part of the unfolding of immanance, accurate and powerful in its time.

Do you then, call my (lack of) experience, somehow wrong, or incomplete? Or it is just that I have misapprehended a certain experience, a certain way of being in the world?

I do not consider you to have a “lack of experience”. We are simply discussing the possibility of the meanings and the histories of the term and images “God”, in a context that we share. If you don’t find the significance of my points, there is no flaw in you, but only in our communication.

Dunamis

Why does one run in the rain, when walking will give the same soaking?

Hi Sagesound,

Who runs?

Shalom
Bob

Stupid people Bob…stupid people. PoR probably comes to mind.