What to Expect
when you are Expecting: Debating Faith
with the Faithful
I suggest that the essence of god occurs to many people in
many ways. Here are a few: I will not address Agnostic or Atheist for
the moment:
1. The Devote
Faithful, never without their god in their conscious, never questioning the
ubiquity or magnitude
2. The Apathetic,
which I suggest is not the same thing as Agnostic or Atheist. They simply do not allocate any thought time
to the idea of god, and symbols( churches, crosses, etc.) blend seamlessly in
with the architecture of the world, and cause no special thoughts on the
subject.
3. The Desperate -
when all else fails "break glass to sound the alarm". Those faced with sudden death and/or dying,
those on the fringes of survival, those who has been subject to a
"Jobian"-esque experience and have exhausted themselves and their
minds in trying to cope and repair
4. Early Philosophers
and seekers of Truth - the idea of Faith, Truth, and the possibility of a god
are fundamental principals in many discourses on any number of different
philosophical studies. The earliest
philosophers were concerned with Logic.
These early arguments were concurrent with various forms of beliefs in
gods, but their philosophical musings were not necessarily dependent on Faith
or god.
5. Middle
Philosophers, retained many of the fundamental structures for philosophical
debate, but given the ages they lived in, it was often be Faithful or be
killed, and this has a way of "permeating" even the best intents to
be purely academic. Descartes, Locke,
Kant, Hobbes, of course Aquinas - they all had to deal with Faith and Higher
powers, but not necessarily for the same reasons:
5. a - The Religious Philosopher - Assumes Faith and god as
a starting point of Truth, and seeks to explain these existences and their
impact of life
5. b - The Reluctant Philosopher - Having exhausted every
known means of explaining all that they could explain, there still remained a
void that defied every explanation they could think of, except for the
existence of a god, but the conundrum was that if "god" is the
answer, how do you rationalize it? Or in any way isolate this
"solution", and we end up with famous works like Kant's
"Critique of Pure Reason".
Purity of reason is no small task, especially when it is your job to
explain things that defy explanation (This by the way, was also how Black Holes
were rationalized: “If nothing is there, then something very powerful must be
there"
Of course there are many more Characterizations; these are
just as a few.
As for assigning god with human qualities, the possible
constructions of the human mind are both finite, and infinite. Descartes covered this off very well, so I
will quickly summarize: our imaginations
are limited to reconstructions of ideas, perceptions and experiences that we
already have knowledge of. We cannot
describe something using language or concepts that we have no knowledge of, so
we explain "the explainable" using the tools that we have. Again, this has been discussed exhaustively
in many places at many times. So, unless
you allow god to be described in the only way that we as humans are able, you
are left with two choices: 1) State the
matter to be Ineffable, and end the discussion. 2) Outlaw the utterance of the name of god, such
that any apparent descriptions are abstracted by at least one level away from
god, so as to make every consideration of "him", a disintermediated
model with (an understood), not vocalized linkage. This in the hopes that reverence is
preserved.
There is no known bedrock to this debate, and it has been
searched for since the earliest known recordings of man's thoughts. I do not pretend to have the answers, but the
question was basically: why do we sometimes describe god using secular
concepts. The catch is this: you simply cannot have a meaningful
discussion about something that you are unable to describe. Your ability to describe is finite. It is bounded by a priori knowledge and intellect.
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