On humans, naked and clothed
The other day a commenter wrote, in a thread about buying clothes:
As a hardcore nudist I probably find this more interesting/amusing than most. I’m also retired, so I no longer feel any need to try to impress anyone with my wardrobe. (In reality I don’t think I ever did.)
Why do we humans think that our garments make us look good? It seems pretty odd to cover something and claim to have improved its appearance. Maybe you shouldn’t go out in public. I know that most of us think there are fundamental flaws with our bodies, but it is not your clothes that make your butt look bigger than you like, and your clothes don’t really hide it either. Your body is what it is. Accept it, or work to change it. Don’t hide it, it’s beautiful.
Why do we find it necessary to cover our bodies with expensive fabric creations that require so much care? Imagine how much could be saved if we wore clothing only when required for warmth or protection. Think of the savings from reduced air conditioning. Think of how good it feels to remove even your most comfortable clothes.
People are different from each other, I guess. Very different. For example, I love wearing my most comfortable clothes, which are really comfortable as in: comforting. Soft, non-binding, soothing.
And we wear clothes because we are human, not just to keep warm. They serve so many purposes. Warm in winter, cool in summer (sun protection and sweat absorption, for example), and just plain pretty and even beautiful. It is part of human nature – for most people, although apparently not that particular commenter – to want to adorn oneself, to gild the bare forked lily. As King Lear says, in the extremity of his emotional suffering:
Why, thou wert better in thy grave than to answer with thy uncovered body this extremity of the skies.—Is man no more than this? Consider him well.—Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha! Here’s three on ’s are sophisticated. Thou art the thing itself. Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.—
Off, off, you lendings! Come. Unbutton here. (tears at his clothes)
In some anthropology course or other I recall learning (can’t find a link now) that all human societies practice adornment, if only of a very perfunctory type. A string around the waist will do, or a necklace for the milady, without which she is considered shockingly naked.
Clothes – or some form of adornment, even if it only be this or this – are somehow a human near-universal. Ever wonder why? It’s not because of the clothing industry. And it’s not because of negative body image, either. Modesty? The urge to not let well enough alone?
If nudists don’t share that feeling, that’s fine. I have nothing against nudist camps; I just don’t want to go to one. But nudity among consenting nudists is 100% okay with me.
It is also of interest, however, that in the Bible the story of Adam and Eve has them eating from the Tree and then for the first time feeling the need to cover their nakedness. I have long interpreted that story as being a parable describing the dawn of human consciousness, which includes self-consciousness and the distinguishing of humans from animals, which are always naked (unless humans dress them in funny little outfits). In Genesis you find the story:
Genesis 2:22-25 And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed…
[3:6-7]And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.
There’s some question about the word “aprons,” but for our purposes let’s just accept that they were coverings serving the function of loincloths, at the very least. And if you want to take the word literally, you can purchase your very own Adam and Eve aprons.
Clothing is old, very very old – even older than some of my clothing:
Scientists are still debating when people started wearing clothes. Estimates by various experts have ranged from 40,000 to 3 million years ago. Some more recent studies involving the evolution of body lice have implied a more recent development with some indicating a development of around 170,000 years ago and others indicating as little as 40,000. No single estimate is widely accepted…
According to archaeologists and anthropologists, the earliest clothing likely consisted of fur, leather, leaves, or grass that were draped, wrapped, or tied around the body. Knowledge of such clothing remains inferential, since clothing materials deteriorate quickly compared to stone, bone, shell and metal artifacts. Archeologists have identified very early sewing needles of bone and ivory from about 30,000 BC, found near Kostenki, Russia in 1988. Dyed flax fibers that could have been used in clothing have been found in a prehistoric cave in the Republic of Georgia that date back to 34,000 BC.
As I said, very very old.
Without clothes, some of us would burn terribly…!
Been there, done that.
Well…it was the first day the pool was open and it was cloudy…it didn’t _look_ like the sun would be a problem. But it was – and I had to stay in my room for three days before I could tolerate wearing anything on my sunburned blistered shoulders. I still have the freckles that showed up after the blisters finished peeling.
Clothes are good!
These days, in NYC, even a nudist—sorry, naturalist—should admit that there is one article of clothing that should be worn at all times (preferably by everyone, it seems):
https://nypost.com/2020/08/01/shooting-victim-whose-bra-stopped-bullet-says-nyc-needs-cops/
Well, maybe also Chicago.
(Though the subject of this story’s conclusion seems to be missing the moral of her deliverance. Clearly, NYC needs more cops AND more bras
Clothing in climates outside of equatorial Africa would seem to be very practical. It gets cold!
Clothes serve as a smoothing function, at minimum, a shield, at most.
Clothing makes us look better. It’s as simple as that.
Every time I’m in a locker room I’m reminded as to why most of us look better clothed.
Someone once said ‘nudist camps are a great idea in theory but not in reality’.
Sounds about right.
“…a shield…”
Indeed. Now might be the time to invest in companies that develop and manufacture fabric/clothing that incorporates kevlar fibers.
(Even if some products don’t seem to need kevlar…)
In regard to the human interest in self-adornment, I suspect that a good many nudists are not about to give up their tats.
Yawrate has a point, as do most of the other commenters. The passive aggressive and in your face intimacy of a half nude slob waddling across the common spaces is far from welcome. These people obviously have no respect for other people and their sensibilities, nor for the sacrifices which these others make to tolerate and include them in their social space, with conditions.
Platitudes concerning the beauty of the human body – any body – simply don`t stand to reason. And those earliest philosophical architects of logic and proportion, the Greeks, whose human art featured nudity most prominently of all ancient civilizations, knew it full well.
I don’t object to practioners of nudism doing their thing. But their arguments, become frivolous, and unserious, and disingenuous in the extreme, when they start spouting cant about aesthetics and physical health.
Any athlete , as Yawrate implies, or even public school student who in 8th through 12th grades spent time in gym, and in the locker and shower rooms 5 days a week, knows that. Unless you are going to be passing out towels in the university’`s senior girls swim team locker room, you might as well be looking at road kill.
By the way of establishing some reference point in this regard, my public school was an early attempt to integrate females into some of our classes in joint participation experiments. Though it was limited to volley ball and non contact games when they actively participated. And this while dressed in the standard tees, and gym shorts. Of course the females were probably at near peak physical in their lives, so I personally cannot remember any who were the equivalent of the pathetic cases of some of the really unfit guys.
Generally it went without trouble. However my school was a wrestling mania school, and the audience for the intramural round robin practice eliminations – performed in gym attire, not wrestling gear – was mixed. And I do recall sitting next to the mat surrounded by girls, as the inevitable happened and one of the guy’s tackle escaped when the ref was on the far side and didn’t see to call time. The half of the audience which one would expect to react seemed serenely unperturbed , though the action, so to speak, was literally – well, almost- in their faces. . Finally, after about a minute, a couple of us guys called time out so the proper adjustments could be made.
But no, we did not shower with the girls.
“Your body is what it is. Accept it, or work to change it. Don’t hide it, it’s beautiful.”
No, it is NOT. Maybe for some, actually very few, a naked body is beautiful.
And if someone wants to go naked in their own space or with other like-minded individuals in their shared space, I am okay with that.
But, no, some folks do need to cover up – and it isn’t just because they are not “eye-candy” – basic hygiene comes to mind. I do NOT want to share a seat, or even space, with someone who has bad hygiene and sweats (and other stuff) all over where I am sitting or standing. That’s just plain gross; not beautiful.
And it isn’t just totally naked people either. Think of the guy wearing a tank top who ends up standing next to you with his smelly, sweaty, armpit in your face on a crowded subway car!
Clothing does have a lot of functional uses. Like everything we humans do, we have converted function into an art form. For example, from the need for shelter came architecture.
Personally, I wouldn’t feel safe and secure walking about town naked even if the weather were not an issue. Not to mention the questions about a lack of pockets to put stuff in.
On the other hand, wearing clothing to go swimming in your back yard pool seems silly. And if you have never swam naked, then you really should try it.
Nude? I dislike it and think it would be quite rude of me to appear in public in a manner that would spook the horses.
As for Bowser and his standardly boring “Your body is what it is. Accept it, or work to change it. Don’t hide it, it’s beautiful.” blather that nudist freaks have drooled since forever…. well, he’s just another nut in 2020’s overflowing bowl of bar nuts.
I think nudists are afflicted with some sort of mental disorder. The quoted nudist is a fine example, apparently unable to comprehend the multiple uses of garments other than as an attempted corporal disguise, in which he insults the talents of tailors.
Let him go out unclad into the Sahara! Or the Arctic.
Nudists are typically not in their teens and twenties, when adult bodies are at their most attractive. They are in their fifties and sixties, many of them. They are as insistent on their “right” to disrobe as a feminist is to her “right” to be paid more than she’s worth. Gross.
Most humans are not beautiful to behold in naked states, any more than is a Ford engine, greasy and filthy under the hood of an old pickup after 200,000 miles.
I am reasonably sure Islam does not condone nudism.
Before they closed the gym, I often saw, in the locker room, women in my age group changing after a group water exercise class. Most of them seemed to be nice people, but really, they were no longer physically beautiful in the nude. Trust my judgment on this.
When we lived in the Central African Republic (1983-1988), we had occasion several times to spend time with the pygmies in the deep rain forest. They are hunter-gatherers who move daily. As in every single day. They do not spend two nights in the same place, building new huts in a new location every afternoon.
As one might imagine, they do not have a lot of possessions: the clothes on their body, a pot, and a machete are about all they own. For clothes, they might have the fruit of an American mission barrel that has made its way through several owners since arriving in a shipping container in the capital city. It is threadbare at best, and some of the women wear nothing but a string around their waist. The men usually wore shorts, and occasionally flip-flops.
We have a photo hanging on our wall that we took of a couple in front of that day’s hut. The man has on shorts and a very threadbare sports shirt without buttons, the woman is wearing a string around her waist.
Those bodies are beautiful, in my eyes. But they are the only bodies I think I ever saw that I would call beautiful unadorned. There is not an ounce of fat on them, although the woman’s dugs hang nearly to her waist, but they are truly beautiful to look at. I would consider them to look like what Adam and Eve looked like (after Eve had nursed a couple of infants). Truly natural. No embarrassment.
Everyone else, please put on clothes!
I remember once on the Tonight Show during the 1970’s, one of Johnny Carson’s guests (I think it was David Steinberg) was reading from some New Age-ish literature that encouraged one to stand in front of a full-length mirror in the buff, taking time to admire and appreciate one’s own body.
When asked if he ever does that, Carson deftly replied, “Not after swimming.”
Like everything we humans do, we have converted function into an art form.
Indeed. Taken to its logical conclusion, our nudist should not care about his hair, his car’s look, his house’s look, any gardens, any art, any dance, any … well pretty much anything. On the surface that is all vanity.
A few religious aesthetics actually live their lives on that basis, but the rest of us enjoy good looking things more than ugly things.
Neo
In the Genesis narratives, humans were already distinguished from the animals by virtue of “naming” them. The fall into sin is different in that humans take for themselves that which has been forbidden & discover their nakedness as a threat. It is being aware of their vulnerable & contingent selves as opposed to their “good” selves imago dei.
The idea that wearing clothes is some kind of unbearable burden has always seemed extremely odd to me.
Clothes allow you to express yourself and show different moods on different days. Clothes are the way we differentiate professional settings vs casual, formal, etc. Getting dressed is an important ritual in getting ready to face the day, and therefore your life. Most people want and need clothes to feel better about themselves.
That’s just for starters.
Think of all the women who live for new clothes and new shoes, what would they do to survive?!
No clothes? Whole body tats! Problem solved. Please post no pics or links.
The word in the original Hebrew translates as “belts” or “sashes” of fig leaves.
Neo’s connection to the birth of human consciousness jibes with traditional Jewish teaching, which does not see this as an all-corrupting “Fall of Man” as Christianity does… At the end of the story, the Man (literally “the earth creature” – that “the” is in the Hebrew and is retained by good translations: ‘Adam’ is not a proper name) turns to The Woman (as he referred to her until now) and expresses their newfound personhood by giving her a name. This is one of the most poignant – and important – moments in the Bible. Not only have good. evil, and free will come into the world: now intimacy and love are possible. Now the human story begins.
… It’s amazing that this thread brings together (and contrasts) nudism with the Biblical idea of clothing as expression of a uniquely human personhood.
Stripping down has been used to rebel against ‘artificial’ Western definitions of humanity and morality from the Romantic era through the psychedelic 60s and up to the current LGBT and Antifa rallies. They were often accompanied by communes and other attempts to reconfigure the “unnatural” nuclear family.
It’s telling that the nudists claim nothing more than beauty and naturalness – and repeat the ritual casting off of shame that is the stock-in-trade of all Progressives. Is there nothing else to being human?
Some fools still wait for “natural” human nature to usher in Utopia….
My father was a nudist. I am not, but I’m probably more than usually indifferent to clothing and modesty. We hang out naked by the pool every day, wearing clothes when they’re needed for protection, or when others join us–no need to expose people to what they don’t want to see. We’re in our 60s and not exactly Adonis and Venus.
Way back in the mists of time – when I was 20 years old and in the Navy, The town I was stationed in had a nude beach. I had heard of such things but had never experienced anything of the sort. So I decided one day that I would go see what it was all about, and I visited the beach. I had never in my life been naked outdoors in a public place. And it seemed to be a very popular place. There were all sorts of people there ranging from little kids all the way up to seniors. At first, I was very self-conscious. But after a short while when I realized that no one was paying me a bit of attention, I found it rather exhilarating. I was there for about an hour.
I paid a steep price.
Do you know that for non-nudists, there are some parts of your anatomy that have *never* seen the sun. Well, some of mine definitely saw it that day. I was sunburned in places that I had never been sunburned before, and those places, I might add, were the most tender of places.
I laugh about it now, but for a couple of days afterwords, I wasn’t laughing at all. And then, having to get my sunburned tender parts treated by the hospital corpsman just added to my discomfiture.
If other people like nude beaches and nudist colonies and that sort of thing then more power to them. It’s really none of my business. But in the 46 years since, I have never had the desire to repeat that experience.
‘eating from the Tree and then for the first time feeling the need to cover their nakedness.’
well, I don’t know about Eden…
’round here, when apples are ready for picking and eating, the weather’s getting kinda …nippy.
Cool breezes prevail. protruding extremities hardest hit.
Frankly, I don’t want to see most people’s bodies. 1) Most human bodies are not beautiful. 2) Most people who like to show a lot of skin-be they the chick wearing ultra mini skirt, and boobs hanging out of her top or the guy running down the street with his shirt off -I find both a bit narcissistic. And often misplaced narcissism because of well, see 1)
Clothes are a form of communication, starting with “I am a member of society.”
Ask Naked Athena
For most humans, there seems to be something essential about clothing as a signaling mechanism, even if there remain underlying utilitarian functions as well. Consider the role of clothing in erotic fantasy (or, for that matter, reality; some of us have been fortunate to have our partners literally excuse themselves from living room chat to “change into something less comfortable…”)
It’s also interesting to me that what positive connotations are associated with a style of clothing are so culturally defined. For example, here is modern geek-girl chic, all black t-shirt and choker:
And here is the same woman:
Is there some reason to say the latter is artificial, but the former isn’t?
When we were first married our house was well beyond “clothing optional” because clothes got in the way of having sex. As children came along, we became – a little – more circumspect, although when they moved past the tub bath stage, about age 2, taking showers with mommy or daddy was common. As they grew we endeavored to instill the concepts of “private areas of the house” vs “public areas” along with decorum and respect for others, most of whom could be expected to be uncomfortable around unclothed people.
In Florida we don’t have winter, we have “6 weeks of not quite summer” and there’s a minimalist quality to attire not observed elsewhere, based both in climate and a very casual culture.
As the kids grew – we wound up with 2 of each – we often rented a summer cottage in the mountains to “the north” for a few weeks in August to escape the heat. Evening skinny dipping in the lake was standard practice, and afterward sitting nude around the patio and talking until bedtime was not an exceptional practice, even as they became teenagers, traditionally the age where young people, especially girls, become sensitive about “body image.”
As we’ve aged and become empty nesters we’ve adopted the philosophy of some friends’ semi-retired parents: unlike us, they live in a 4-season climate, on considerably more than enough acreage to grant privacy, and they aren’t “nudists,” they just don’t wear clothes when they’re not needed. My bride and I are certainly not as physically attractive as we were 30+ years ago, despite one’s best efforts to stave it off, ageing does that relentlessly. To each other, however, we’re pretty damn content.
I suspect much, if not most, of the problems people have with nudity is gender related; some years ago I read an article about a photographer in NYC who, among the usual pursuits, also did public nude photography. In the article were a couple photos, two of which were a nude woman on a halfway crowded subway car and a nude couple adjacent to the Merrill Lynch bull on Wall Street. He commented that “when people see a nude woman they smile; when they see a penis they frown.” I suspect there’s more relevance there than we are aware of.
Humans, despite the best psych-war efforts of The Left, come in only 2 versions, and if you’ve seen one of each you’ve pretty much seen them all, it’s the same parts in the same places. There’s a big difference between “look at what I’ve got” and “this is who, and what, I am.”
Not only have good. evil, and free will come into the world: now intimacy and love are possible. Now the human story begins.
The intimacy of a woman and a man exclusively sharing their bodies in a commitment to love, life, and posterity. The human story of choice guided by religion (i.e. moral philosophy) and a terrestrial proving ground.
Hey, @Neo,
You say, “I have long interpreted [the Genesis 2] story as being a parable describing the dawn of human consciousness, which includes self-consciousness and the distinguishing of humans from animals, which are always naked (unless humans dress them in funny little outfits).”
Can I offer you an alternative view, which keeps (I think) the benefits you derive from the aforementioned interpretation, but avoids (I think) some pitfalls and provides some more nuance?
My view is that these pre-fallen humans were more conscious and self-aware than modern humans prior to sinning…or, that they were minimally as aware. That’s suggested by Adam’s role naming the animals (surely involving classification into categories and trying to abstract and sum up the essence of each kind), and his awareness that Eve was a fit companion for him whereas the even the best of the animals lacked something and couldn’t really fill that role. I don’t think any of that’s possible without the kind of higher-order reasoning by which humans say, “I am me; that human over there is not me but still human; that animal over there is neither me nor human; that second animal there is of the same kind as the first; that third animal is of a different kind.” And of course any act of naming something requires an exercise in both creativity and aesthetics (ask any parent): We take the initiative to change the future of the world by the name we assign, and try to do so in a way that is “fitting.”
But as a matter of our own experience we know that sin makes us stupid and weak: We get into bad habits and lack the strength to rise above them; our intellects know what’s correct but our animal-level gut-inclinations often “win out” over our right-reason. Is any man less free than the hopeless addict who has given up wanting to change? Whatever his natural intellectual gifts, is he not goaded towards his next fix like one of Pavlov’s salivating dogs? It’s for this reason that I hold pre-sin Adam is smart-though-untested; post-sin Adam is tested and a little bit wiser through sorrow, but sin is “crouching at his door” and he must “master it,” and if he doesn’t, he will never attain the wisdom he would have had, had he only endured the trial to the end, without falling.
What, then, about the sudden awareness that “they were naked?”
I don’t think that awareness is self-consciousness in the sense of knowing the difference between “me” and “another,” or that continuity that the human in my chair five minutes ago, and the human in my chair right now, are both the same “me.” As I’ve said, I think they already had that.
I think they became “self-conscious” in another sense: They became aware of their bodily “selves” as vulnerable to being used as an object rather than loved as a person. They became vulnerable to being judged according to their Sexual Marketplace Value, to borrow the modern phrase. And they became vulnerable to violence, susceptible to the elements, and to death.
If they had become “self-aware” in the first sense, I would think their first move in reaction would have been to write autobiographies. Why would they suddenly stitch body-coverings, if “consciousness” was the result of eating the fruit?
But if I’m right in thinking that they became “self-conscious” of their vulnerability, then it makes sense that they’d weave bodily coverings for themselves. Eve would react the way a teen girl reacts if a stranger walks into the room while she’s changing clothes: She grabs something to cover up; there’s a moment of chagrin, doubt, suspicion. The Fall makes us estranged not only from God, but from each other.
So I think being careful about the particular kind of “self-consciousness” that resulted actually fits the story better.
Furthermore, self-awareness in the sense of consciousness simpliciter is a good thing, don’t you think? Does it make sense of the narrative to say that they lacked that, but then somehow got it as a reward (!) for disobedience? If we hold that something that’s naturally good for humans comes only as a consequence of sin, it’s rather like God saying, “Obey me so that something good won’t happen to you. My laws are not for your betterment and protection, but for your stultification and impoverishment.” That paints God as an evil tyrant and the serpent as the liberator. It would seem to be playing into the serpent’s temptation and trap: “You can’t trust God; He doesn’t have your best interests in mind; He only forbids you that fruit because He’s trying to hold you back; if you break His law you’ll be better than ever, wiser than before.” Pretty standard diabolical propaganda, that is!
So, that’s my take, for your consideration.
R.C.:
Interesting. But I’m not a Christian, and I don’t believe in the doctrine of original sin. I believe that the Tree of Knowledge was in fact a tree of knowledge – as in, becoming fully human, with free will and morality (there is no conventional morality in Eden because there is no choice except the one about whether to eat of the fruit or not), as well as the need for work and the feeling of self-consciousness that makes people want to cover their bodies and in particular their private parts.
Also see Ben david’s comments above.
@Neo:
Gotcha…but, knowing your background, I actually wrote that in such a way that I hoped it would not require you (or any other reader) to assume a specifically-Christian “take” on Original/Ancestral Sin. There’s more than one such take, anyhow.
(In fact I fretted a bit over using the word “diabolical” in that second-to-last sentence because I was trying not to operate in an explicitly Christian paradigm…but then I figured I needn’t be coy about the fact that I’m a Christian; I just needed to avoid assumptions you wouldn’t share.)
I see what Ben David wrote, and I get where that’s coming from. I tend to “nerd out” on such topics with those of my Jewish friends/relations who’re interested and willing to talk about such things (though I admit that’s only 3 people, and their views may not be broadly representative).
But Ben David seems to be under the impression (and perhaps you are, too, Neo?) that the Calvinist understanding of Original/Ancestral Sin (“all-corrupting,” etc.) is typical of all Christians, whereas in fact that’s a minority view even now, and it was unknown before the 16th century. (I don’t mean to be talking past you, @Ben David; feel free to chime in here if I’ve misunderstood!)
In the majority Christian (Catholic, Orthodox, some non-Calvinist Protestant) view, both the term “Total Depravity” and the idea of Original Sin as some kind of “personal guilt, but somehow contracted like a genetic disease” are rejected in favor of a more nuanced view. That view, roughly, is: Man, through disobedience, loses natural, preternatural, and supernatural benefits he otherwise had as a result of his original state of friendship with God. Lacking these, he cannot pass these unearned advantages (or “favors” or “graces”) to successive generations, just as one cannot pass down a million-dollar inheritance if one has blown it all at the track. Man’s nature is injured/impoverished by this lack, but not wholly useless or depraved; his will to do good is not destroyed, but is hampered or injured in its struggles against the body’s concupiscent and irascible appetites. God puts two ways before man: life and death, and bids man turn eyes and heart towards God in order that he might have life, enter a covenantal/familial bond with God, and remain in God’s friendship, enjoying the supernatural help/blessings thereof.
I don’t mention all this to be pushy or anything, Neo! …but because in the United States, I find that our largely-Protestant/Puritan history can result in non-Christians making assumptions about Christianity that’re actually only common to certain narrow and historically-novel sects. The Plymouth Rock crowd gets taken to be the whole show (as if the builders of Hagia Sophia had been walking around in brass-buckled shoes!).
Now of course, nobody expects you or other non-Christians to know all the different groups and their views! But I mention it, because I find my Jewish friends often have an impression of what “Original Sin” is that a Presbyterian or Lutheran might accept, but which would leave Catholics and Russian Orthodox and Copts and Thomasites loudly protesting. To be sure, the views of the latter groups do still differ from the post-70 CE Rabbinical Judaism view, but not, I think, by as much.
Anyway, thanks for the friendly reply, and I hope this clarification comes across the same way.
Cheers, R.C.
R.C.:
No, I wasn’t using the term to mean “total depravity” or anything like that. But the idea that eating of the tree constituted some sort of “original sin” (defined in different ways by different Christian churches) is fairly universal in Christianity, as far as I can see. For example, this is apparently in the Catholic catechism:
So although I don’t pretend to be any sort of expert on Christianity, I am aware that the idea of original sin is usually part of it. I am also aware that the idea is absent in Judaism:
Regarding the Genesis story and its nudity theme..
Whatever it was intended to convey in the Hebrew Scripture [and no I do not recognize the so-called oral Torah, as having any real scriptural equivalency to the Torah], it does not seem to me that it was intended as some kind of subtle Promethean tale celebrating man’s rise to self-consciousness and real humanity, much less an esoteric bit of Luciferian theosophy. Though, to be quite blunt, that latter is basically what a certain metaphorical take on the “fall story”, results in its becoming.
And perhaps the Tower of Babble tale is also in reality originally meant as a thinly veiled affirmation of man’s struggling ascent to his own godhood? A better luck next time, and “persistence pays” type of lesson? No … probably not, I think.
From, http://www.mechon-mamre.org … chosen for its bare bones, editorial free, Hebrew to English rendering.
@Neo:
Fair enough. No need to belabor the point, of course, and I realize this isn’t really the thread-topic anyway.
But I’m going to try to contact the author of that article in jewishvirtuallibrary.org and ask him/her to please fix it on several accounts:
1. It claims that the “doctrine of original sin” is “totally unacceptable to Baptists,” which is broadly incorrect. (Maybe he’s thinking about infant baptism, which Baptists do reject.) I don’t know about Assemblies of G_d.
2. The formula for being “saved” presented in the article and attributed to “Christians” generally comes from, I would guess, some 20th century evangelism tract of the kind used by Evangelical Christians in the U.S.; but that formulation originated among 18th century American revival preachers and was utterly unknown before that.
3. Catholics and Orthodox would vehemently deny that “Christianity teaches” that man is “inherently sinful.” They’d say that if that were the case, the first parents of humanity would have started out in a state of emnity with G_d and would not have been created “good” at all (which obviously contradicts the text). That’s why the quote you cite from the Catholic Catechism calls man’s current situation a “deprivation” (like an inherited fortune being absent because your grandfather squandered it) rather than an intrinsic natural quality (like the fact that, as a human, you have two legs and one nose).
Anyway it seems that the author is presenting a kind of approximation of the Calvinist view, as often happens, but is unaware of the older/majority view.
Of course you’re right to say that most Christian groups use the term “Original Sin” (the Orthodox usually say “Ancestral” rather than “Original”) but my point was that they mean very different things by it, and what is meant by the Catholics and Orthodox is different from Judaism, but less so.
Sigh. Maybe it’d be better if each group chose a unique term that accurately described their view rather than all of them using a shared term (“Original Sin”) that’s misleads everyone about all the views! But at this late date, trying to excise such a long-established term, however misleading, is impossible.
But, again, not your problem! Sorry for geeking out on the topic; it’s just something that interests me, and I realize others aren’t usually so interested. And thanks again for the kindness of a reply.
(Now…how to contact the author of that JVL article? Hmmm….)
DNW:
And yet I see it that way, except I would not use the phrase “celebrating man’s rise to self-consciousness and real humanity.” I would say “describing man’s rise to self-consciousness and real humanity,” because the development of mankind’s self-consciousness and humanity is a mixed bag.
The excerpts from the Bible that you put in your comment only accentuate that interpretation, for me. The tree of knowledge – the more developed brain of modern man as opposed to animals – allows humans to think, understand, have knowledge of good and evil. The larger brain – the bigger head – is what causes childbirth to be more painful and dangerous for humans than for animals. Henceforth humans (as opposed to animals, who graze or hunt) must labor for much of their food (including agriculture, gathering, cooking, all of that). And from now on humans will have consciousness of death, of their own mortality.
Why was the tree there in the first place? You could say as a test, a temptation, but my theory is that it was a temptation that was foreordained to not be resisted, and that mankind would need to become fully human and that was part of the plan.
” tower of babble” hahaha. Kind of right. In a way. Just gotta love the auto correct feature. If it isn’t correcting a small problem it is creating a bigger one.
@DNW:
Re: “Just gotta love the auto correct feature. If it isn’t correcting a small problem it is creating a bigger one.” I feel your pain, friend. It must be 3-4 times a day my wife or one of my kids sees me start to stab at my cellphone’s screen angrily, saying, “STOP trying to HELP me!”
@Neo:
Re: “Why was the tree there in the first place? You could say as a test, a temptation, but my theory is that it was a temptation that was foreordained to not be resisted, and that mankind would need to become fully human and that was part of the plan.”
Hmm. I buy “foreknown” or “foresaw” in the sense that G_d knew/saw perfectly well that Adam and Eve would eat the fruit. But when you say “foreordained” do you mean that they had no choice but to disobey? Or do you mean that G_d gave Adam and Eve a choice but foresaw what it would be? Put another way: Do you view G_d’s “foreordaining” role to be permissive or compulsory?
If it’s the latter, I’ll have to agree to disagree. I think one can walk right up to the line of G_d making robots of men, given His pervasive power and providence; but I think one can’t cross that line, in such a way that moral responsibility (or the ability to love) vanishes. And it feels like moral responsibility would vanish, in the “compulsory foreordaining” scenario. (But if you feel I’m missing something, please let me know!)
(Incidentally, how wonderful it is to interact with people who still believe in things like real moral truths, objective reality discernible through reason, and the usefulness of conversation and argument to discursively arrive at them! …and who, thus, have phrases like “agree to disagree” in their thought-system! The Leftists and their Critical Theory “motte and bailey” tactics would drive that mutual respect out of our civilization completely, replacing it wholly with language-exercised-as-power.)
I think there G_d has a two-pronged way of achieving His ends in history, demonstrated repeatedly throughout the Tanakh: He lays out two options and then foreordains that His purposes will be accomplished either way whether we like it or not: The difference is whether we are blessed by the process through obedience, or wind up enduring a more painful alternative process through disobedience. He is not “a beast, that we could stop his path,” or “a leaf, that we can twist His shape”; whatever we do He can make good of it; but the good achieved in spite of (and often making use of) our disobedience is different than the good that would have been achieved through obedience.
That’s the way I look at the story of Adam and Eve’s disobedience: G_d foresaw it, and G_d made great good of it, because He’s G_d. In one sense, He never needs a Plan B, because G_d, having knowledge of All Times As Now, knows what’s going to happen: It’s always Plan A.
But in another sense I think the Disobedience-Path To His Will is a “Plan B,” a thing inferior to the Obedience-Path. I think Adam and Eve could have done the right thing. I think it was entirely in their power. I think that had they obeyed, their eyes would have been opened to what temptation was, and what evil was, and what free will is, in a more enlightening way than what happened instead: For I believe that the knowledge one has of an enemy by defeating him is better than the knowledge one gets by his defeat of you. David and Samson both knew the Philistines; but David’s knowledge was the better.
In short, I think that when G_d presents us with such challenges, He gives us opportunity to be blessed by His plans, or not: But the ends are achieved either way. I think He says, “You can have it My way; or, you can have it My way.”
Ah, well! Whatever the truth of it, here we are now, we imperfect humans! Let us be kind to one another in all cases, and pray for the country.
All the best to you and yours,
R.C.
R.C.: Even when I was a Christian, or thought myself to be, I couldn’t make sense of arguments like yours — especially when those arguments extend, as they inevitably must, into the matter of punishment, i.e. hell.
Liberal Christians prefer to sidestep the issue. I attended an Episcopalian church which had a homegrown hymn, “When Good Folks Die.” It’s second verse dealt with Bad Folks:
______________________________________
When bad folks die, they end up in heaven,
All rounded up by the Holy Ghost,
There’s no escape,
There’s no getting out of it,
God wants us all in the Heavenly Host!
______________________________________
That’s one solution to the problem of hell, though not an orthodox one.
OTOH, eternal damnation — billions and billions of painful years to the infinite power — is hard to square with an all-loving, Divine Parent, even if it is said, “Well, God, gave you the choice.”
(Yes, I’ve also read C.S. Lewis.)
R.C.:
Human nature is human nature, and I can only imagine that God would be extremely aware of human nature. So yes, my interpretation is that the situation was basically inevitable and part of the nature of humans in their development as humans, with all the positives and negatives that went with it.
I am not a fundamentalist. I believe the stories in the Bible are, among other things, parables that express deep truths about humanity and its nature.
@ Neo, re. ” the fall”
The topic is so rich with material for discussion on so many levels and aspects that it could produce volumes of text.
I’ll limit my comments to the germane, I hope.
First of all I think that your take has been a relatively common one in recent times, and would seem plausible in both approach and conclusions to educated people familiar with the psychological and anthropological literature of the day; and who were interested in reconciling to whatever extent possible, their cultural inheritance with modern understandings.
Then too, for those so nterested, there has apparently been a so-called hermetic tradition of more or less longstanding; elements of which date back some few centuries – or very much longer, depending on who you believe. This latter view is the take of the Promethean/Gnostic/alchemical/luciferian ( and possibly certian talmudist types, though I`d have to check my sources) school of thought. This line of hermetic thinking was of course possible well before the rise of modern science, which nonetheless can be mined to support some varieties of the ‘man ascends to god-hood ‘ lines of thinking.
I think both of these approaches are ultimately, logically untenable if one understands the God of the Bible to be the God of Isaiah and Jesus. This is a God, who though his ways and thoughts may not be your ways and thoughts, is nontheless all holy, and who can by His nature, neither deceive nor be deceived. Though of course he may withdraw from men allowing their own moral blindness, to deceive them
The trickster God, the spiteful dual natured Jehova of the secret traditions, is incompatible with orthodox Christianity, and I would suspect, with certain strains of classical Judaism; though how penetrating the influence of kabbalistic and esoteric thought has been on the underlying assumptions informing the later Talmud, I could not personally say.
In any event, although Christianity per se has in principle no irreconcilable problems with evolutionary time frames, it is irreconcilable with the either the vision of Promeathean man, or the sly evil/good God. The notion that a wholly contingent being could equate itself with the source of being , is in addition either logically absurd on its face, or through an equivocal jiggering of definitions, expressive of a form of hermetic pantheism.
Hi, @Huxley,
I figured someone would recognize the Perelandra quote. (It’s disappointing if nobody recognizes a citation!)
But I don’t understand — although I’m not sure you’ve fully stated — what you believe to be the problem with “arguments like [mine].” Can you clarify? Is it specifically the injustice of hell, or something broader? It doesn’t seem like you could be responding to “arguments like [mine]” by criticizing the idea of hell, because, well, I never brought it up! So is there something else in what I wrote that you find objectionable?
(I didn’t recognize myself to be arguing at all, BTW; more like “geeking out” — by the kind permission of the blogmistress! — on a topic-of-interest, writing descriptively rather than persuasively. Given that I was, electronically speaking, in my interlocutor’s own living-room, I think that trying actually persuade, y’know, putting on a full-dress apologia, would seem churlish.)
I’m happy to say that I’m unfamiliar with the song you cite. I don’t suppose even the mushiest liberal Episcopalian would mistake a particularly bathetic bit of doggerel fit for a middle-school youth group as a serious statement of theology, worthy of analysis or refutation. A more serious Anglican (I have in mind someone like N.T. Wright) certainly wouldn’t.
There’s probably an orthodox way — in fact, there’s even an Orthodox way — to construe the “bad folks” verse you’ve cited. But, as with most modern lyrics, it can be just as easily construed in a heterodox way or a merely-dumb way. It’s a perennial problem since about 1960: Bad music, bad lyrics. I may not know that song, but I’ve suffered through plenty of others in my time as a church musician. If I didn’t have other reasons for belief, I suppose the prevalence of bad music alone might have led me to write the whole thing off. (As it is, I tend mostly-humorously to regard bad church music as a kind of satanic conspiracy against aesthetics, and the lyrics as a diabolical plot against human intellect!)
Since you have read at least some of Lewis’ stuff, I should ask: Did that include The Great Divorce? That book’s analogy for the relationship of hell to Heaven seemed both sensible and perfectly orthodox (both when I was a conservative Baptist, and later as a Catholic). But if I’ve missed some flaw in it, please let me know.
@Neo:
Re: “I am not a fundamentalist. I believe the stories in the Bible are, among other things, parables that express deep truths about humanity and its nature.”
Ah. Me neither.
While I hold that the Genesis 1 narrative, and also the Genesis 2-3 narrative, are describing some kinds of real-world events in some way, I don’t suppose (for example) that Adam would have answered to the name “Adam” if you called him that, or that the yom of Genesis 1 was intended (even by the original human author!) to be taken to mean “a 24-hour rotation of the earth on its axis.”
My best guess as to the literary genre of Genesis 1 is that it attempts to convey meaning using the same kind of symbolical or mythopoeic language that we find in the lyrics to “American Pie” by Don McLean. (But neglecting rhyming word-endings in favor of the the structure-and-meaning parallelism we find in most Hebrew poetry, of course.)
Just as the “the jester” and “the king and queen” and the “marching band” all reference real things in that song, so too I think “the fruit” references something real in the Genesis narrative. But anybody who asks whether the marching band featured one snare drummer or three is missing the point; and so too with anyone who asks whether “the fruit” is an apple or a pomegranate.
Finally, I tend to hold the view that G_d, as the author of history, can make real-world objects and events serve as symbols or signposts pointing to other things, without in any way making the original events less real. So from my perspective, it’s a false dichotomy to ask whether Genesis 2-3 depicts an original act of human disobedience to G_d that really happened in human history, or is it intended, after the fashion of a parable, to show us things about humanity and the temptations we face, for our edification? The word “or,” I believe, is properly replaced with “and/or.” It could, of course, be one or the other, but it can also be both. To say that it must be only parable or only event — that G_d can only foreordain a real event or inspire a parable in a human writer — would seem to suggest that G_d lacks the authorial skill that good human novelists have: To make an event at the start of the book really happen in the plot while simultaneously “pointing to” a major theme of the book.
So, yeah: Not a “fundamentalist” in the sense that word is usually thrown about. (But, I hope to be faithful to the fundamentals in a broader sense: To live justly, love mercy, walk humbly with G_d, and at least not make too much of an ass of myself between here and the grave.)
Well, conceptually speaking, not only “all-loving” but all-good, and all righteous, and a number of “all” other analogical attributes too.
And there is a sense I suppose in which you would readily concede that Goodness per se, cannot admit evil into its presence. Nor, according to the conventional understandings, would a lover of evil find existence in the presence of The Good tolerable, much less congenial.
So along with the somewhat analogical attributes of God, such as “loving”, are others, such as “good”, and “true” and “holy” and “just”. And although evil may be (we are speaking merely conceptually here) tolerated in a limited domain of time and matter for certain ends and goods transcending time and space, one would hardly expect the evilly inclined personality/entity/being to find a situation in an extra-temporal domain wherein all is good, as tolerable. Nor is the Good expected to coexist in the final state, with appetites for deceits, manipulations, exploitations, and degradation which are perpetrated on the innocent for the sake of egoistic self-worship, dominance over others, and vainglory.
The devils and the damned, as they say, and as RC alludes, “choose Hell” under this conceptual framework.
OK. I’m going to do something I really don’t want to do. And I am doing it, only because it may serve to illuminate a certain perspective concerning the nature of God and of Hell. And of course there may be many more. But this one, is in significant measure, illustrative of an early mid 20th Century Roman Catholic one.
I present this as a fable. As written, it purports to be no more than the dream of a nun. And even at that, it might have been meant as a kind of private short story, about a dream.
That said, the psychological insights this nun had into human motivations and attitudes, is pretty remarkable. I guess that is what a cloistered life and scrupulous attention to all of one’s acts, day in and day out, might do for some people.
Again, a link to what has been promoted around the Internet by some naive and uncritical people as a true experience – perhaps by people like those who maintain the site to which I intend to link – but which was probably intended as an edifying “short story” by its author. For your conceptual perspective only.
https://www.americaneedsfatima.org/The-Last-Things/a-letter-from-beyond.html
R.C.: I did not mean to say you were arguing, but that you were making reasoned claims in a logical sequence intended to support a conclusion.
My problem is that just about all Christian theology sounds like a flatworm trying to make claims about Einstein only much worse. The idea of God as a sort of a parent giving humans choices or the necessity of Jesus to come to redeem us strike me as stick figure diagrams that have been useful for humans to develop, but I can’t believe come anywhere near the vastness of God and what God might be up to — all far beyond human comprehension.
So when theologians assemble their belief system based on some Bible verses here and some scraps of reasoning there, all I have to say is good luck.
Or as St. Thomas Aquinas said after having a religious experience and three months before his death:
___________________________________
Such things have been revealed to me that all I have written seems as so much straw.
https://www.holytrinity.net/st-thomas-aquinas-all-i-have-written-seems-like-straw/
___________________________________
Which isn’t to say, I consider Aquinas or Christian theology useless, but I can never lose sight of the Big Picture which is really really Big. To me Christians often mistake their simplifications as Truth.
PS. The hymn I mentioned was home-grown, i.e. written by two talented members of the congregation.
DNW: I read that “Letter From Beyond” a long time ago. Fun that it’s still kicking around.
You realize of course that that vastness of God should one exist, and by implication/extension the reality which It/He has created, is, strictly speaking, irrelevant to man’s relationship, if any, with such a God.
And furthermore, there is no reason why parts of reality should not be intelligible … especially those “planes” or domains in or on which man lives his life.
I don’t think that the size or vastness of reality, has the same necessary effect on mankind as mankind, that the overthrow of geocentrism was supposed to have had with regard to man as some supposed pinnacle of creation.
This is where for example, as you undoubtedly already know, “made in the image and likeness” with regard to some particular attributes, is misread as “a mini-me version of” LOL
I am shocked, and amazed, that you or anyone else has read it.
I cannot imagine in what context a one-time Protestant would have encountered such a peculiar text … which could have been born in some urban legend factory for all I know. (And I did spend about 20 minutes trying to track it down)
I’m certainly not in the habit of reading pietistic literature, and I don’t think that I have ever in my life been able to get through more than a few paragraphs of mystical text without feeling suffocated and so annoyed I wanted to throw the book against the wall. It’s as bad as reading French philosophy. All description, no analysis, argument, or proof.
But this thing however I can across it, resonated with me as bearing certain conceptual insights, as I read the unapologetic, hell-bound defiance, resentment, and impotent rage of the damned; i.e., Who the hell does this God-fellow think that he is!???
According to this, they want to be there, given only one of two choices: repentance, or damnation.
@huxley:
Thanks for the reply.
I guess “making reasoned claims in a logical sequence intended to support a conclusion” does actually constitute an argument in one sense. From my “geeking out” perspective, I was mainly trying to learn what Neo was saying/thinking and to what degree it could be reconciled with my own ideas. For that, I needed to share my own conclusions along with the thoughts which made them convincing to me. That’s fun to me, because I habitually find coherent and detailed conclusions derivable from multiple independent chains of reasoning to be interesting and even exciting. (What can I say? What with COVID-19, I don’t get out much.)
You say, “My problem is that just about all Christian theology sounds like a flatworm trying to make claims about Einstein only much worse.” Well, isn’t that exactly what we should expect, every time we humans are taking the initiative to try to describe G_d? After all, in the hierarchy of being, the difference between G_d and a human is much bigger (actually, infinitely bigger) than the difference between a human and a flatworm.
However, I make a point of not speaking so dismissively when I consider two other categories of “descriptions of G_d”:
1. Directly-revealed, divinely-approved analogies;
2. “Backtraces” that humans run against the data of revelation.
I think these both score points over any “description of G_d” operating purely out of human initiative.
Take Category 1: We can’t, of course, just assume that something is divinely-revealed merely because someone claims it is. But there is a proper time to say, “This, I think, really was revealed by G_d” if right-reasoning causes us to draw that conclusion.
And if we find that at such-and-such a time to so-and-so, G_d has in fact revealed Himself, and that revelation includes messages from Him saying, “Think of Me like a Father; but different in the following ways…. Consider Me as you might consider a human husband or lover, but with these provisos…. Imagine Me as a sovereign who makes you a junior member of my family through covenant oaths….” In such a case, no doubt the analogies He is providing for us are simplifications or condescensions. BUT: They’re the simplifications or condescensions that He thought would work best for us.
In that case it’s no good our complaining that the analogies are simplifications. It’s precisely because of who and what we are (and aren’t) that the simplification is necessary. If there were better analogies on-hand, He’d have used those; but since He used the ones He used, we can presume that there aren’t. If we could have handled something more sophisticated without misunderstanding, He’d have given us those. But He didn’t; and it’s reasonable to assume that He knows us, and our limits, better than we do.
So even if the Category 1 analogy or model we have in mind looks like a “stick figure,” if it’s a divinely-sourced “stick figure” I’ll give it special consideration.
Category 2 is a middle case: Here, G_d has provided some revealed information about ourselves and we’re trying to run a “backtrace” on it to find out yet more. This system can work, for of course if we catch hold of two true premises, nothing in the world will stop us trying to rub them together and find a conclusion that follows from them. Revealed truths will always yield further implications which were implicit in the original revelation. But, notice I say that it can work; it doesn’t always because we can reason badly from true premises. Still, by anchoring ourselves in true premises we are better off than if we just try to speculate about G_d on our own steam.
With Category 1, by virtue of G_d’s condescension, we get stick-figures rather than reality, but we can assume they’re drawn in such a way as to maximize their utility to us. With Category 2, we get stick-figures yet again; but this time, the lines are drawn in a shakier hand.
In either case, the descriptions of the reality fall short of the REALITY. But, isn’t that what we should expect? A map of the Atlantic Ocean falls short of the experience of the reality! …but if you need to plot an ocean journey from Boston to Bermuda, the map will do you a lot more good than the overwhelming experience. Our stick-figure descriptions are mere abstractions, certainly; but perhaps they have real practical value nonetheless.
You say: “To me Christians often mistake their simplifications as Truth.” Okay, fair enough, but again, are you talking about their simplifications, or G_d’s? If it’s G_d’s simplifications, then surely there’s some truth in there; perhaps it’s the most truth we’re capable of grasping.
Or, do you think that the Christians are trying to apply those simplifications beyond their range of applicability? (All analogies fail, beyond a certain point.)
There’s one more thing I’d like to point out, and I’m not sure quite where the point belongs, so I’ll put it here: When we make analogies to the natural world, or to our own experience, we’re grabbing from a bag of examples which, for us, is fixed and pre-provided. But G_d does not have that limitation: If He wants to provide humans a better analogy for what He is like than the universe currently provides, He can simply alter the history of the universe so that, by the time we humans show up, the universe contains a better analogy!
The Apostle Paul says something like this, describing G_d the Father “from whom all heavenly and earthly fatherhood [family] is derived.” The point he’s making is not that G_d is a little bit like a good human father, but rather, that G_d invented the idea of human fathers in order to provide us a visible reality that gave us good analogical insights about Him, and the human family in order to situate our relationship to Him in parallel to others’ relationships to Him, so that we view them as our brothers and sisters.
For this reason, I think we can have great confidence in any analogy G_d uses when revealing Himself to us. He wasn’t merely stuck selecting from a bunch of bad analogies; He had a hand in selecting (even optimizing) which analogies were available.
Now none of this matters if all you were trying to say can be summed up as: “I think Christians are just wrong, that what they claim is false even by analogy.” If that’s your position, fair enough: We can either agree to disagree without further comment, or you can lay out you what you think’s false and I’ll respond if I can.
But if it’s really the simplification that was bothering you, then hopefully the above explains why it doesn’t bother me. I acknowledge that doctrines about G_d aren’t the same as G_d Himself, and when I worship, I worship the Creator of all things visible and invisible, not the doctrine which posits that He is their creator! I can see, and even map, the difference between the sea and a map.
R.C.: I salute your sincerity, faith and perseverance, but for me, just about everything Christians have to say about God is what Christians say about God, and I don’t put much stock in their reasoning. Back to our friend, the flatworm.
I don’t put much faith in the Bible as anything more than a record of human attempts to understand themselves and God. Valiant and necessary, but not that special or reliable.
I don’t say I’m any better. I had a period of several months where I thought I was in contact with God and Jesus. It was pretty exciting and I spent about eight years participating in a few churches until I got tired of dealing with Christians and Christian beliefs.
Nonetheless, I don’t discard that as nonsense, wishful thinking, or quirks of brain chemistry. I do believe there is a deep mystic reality underneath Christianity, but it’s rather like Jacques Vallee, a brainy software guy who was also a UFO researcher, said about UFO contactees:
______________________________________________
I now have grave reservations about all the physical details they supply. They are like people after an auto accident. All they know is that something very serious has happened to them.
I’m certainly not in the habit of reading pietistic literature…
DNW: I’ve been reading pietistic literature since I read “The Little Flowers of St. Francis” in seventh grade.
Lovely stuff, not without value, but taking it literally is a category error.
@huxley:
Fair enough. Nowhere to go, really, in reply to most of that.
Can you answer me one question, though? When you say, “I don’t put much stock in their [Christians’] reasoning,” is that because you’ve come to mistrust Christians, or because you’ve come to mistrust the kinds of reasons they give, or something else? In reading that sentence, I found I was trying to guess which one it was.
If you felt there was something uniform to the style of reasoning done by all Christians (and which made the whole swath of their thought unpersuasive to you) then I’d really want to know what that was. (The styles of reasoning used by Aquinas, Augustine, Boethius, Leibniz, Francis Turretin, Thomas Cajetan, Étienne Gilson, Elizabeth Anscombe, Richard Swinburne, Alasdair MacIntyre, C.S. Lewis, Peter Kreeft, Mortimer Adler and Alexander Pruss all seem very different from one another. Is there something other than their conclusions that unites them?) From your earlier comment, it seemed as if the Via Negativa might be “more your bag.” For that, you’d need Gregory of Nyssa, John S. Romanides, etc., and some of the great spiritual writers like Teresa of Avila. But perhaps there’s some way that even they are consistent with the less-apophatic writers?
Or, is it perhaps the Christians, as a class of persons? Are you basically saying, “This argument wasn’t entirely persuasive anyway; but if it’s coming from that lot, I trust it that much less” …? And if that’s the case, what “lot” would you find more trustable?
Or is it the conclusions themselves? Is it, “The Christians are mostly decent people as far as they go; the reasoning seems to connect in valid syllogistic fashion; it mostly involves plausible premises; but the actual conclusions just leave me cold and unpersuaded” …?
Anyway, I don’t want to put words in your mouth by making unfounded suppositions! D’ya mind helping me understand the statement a bit better?
Thanks,
R.C.
R.C.:
I can’t speak for huxley. But your questions to huxley are interesting. My response is that I have met Christians (at least one, anyway) who believe that Christianity and its tenets can be proven to be true by reasoning. I have no idea whether that is a common Christian view, but it is one I have encountered. My response was that to a non-Christian, the reasons Christians give are reasons that for the most part are only convincing to those who already believe in Christianity or who are somehow close to believing in it or are inclined to believe in it. I think it boils down to faith in it or not, although the person I was talking to about that definitely disagreed with me.
I have written on my reactions to C.S. Lewis in this post. As you can see if you click on the link, there were a lot of comments.
@Neo:
Thanks for referencing that earlier post. Yes, I get what you’re saying, there.
You’re certainly correct that some Christians believe that Christianity and all its important tenets can be proven to be true by natural reasoning alone, and that (consequently) the person who merely hears the reasons (provided they’re properly and winsomely stated, not badly misstated by someone obnoxious) either will become convinced and then become a Christian, or ought to.
I’m not in that camp. (I wasn’t, before I became a Catholic; and Catholicism specifically denies certain parts of that view.) I think the folks who hold that view are, among Christians, a lot like the folk among libertarians who insist that Ayn Rand was the world’s premier thinker. It’s a distinct personality type.
There’s a more-careful view which doesn’t go so far, but still values reason very highly. It’s my view, so I’m biased. But even trying to be objective, I think it’s fair to describe it as being common to the best thinkers among Catholics, the various Orthodox churches, and those Protestant communions that are neither fundamentalist nor postmodernist.
Before I describe that more-careful view, let me deal with the fundamentalists and the postmodernists.
The former (fundamentalists) are a subculture self-selecting for two personality types: Some are impatient with making fine distinctions; others are already experiencing a close friendship with G_d and aren’t interested in why it makes sense; they just want to keep on being close to G_d. They practice strong Biblical literalism out of the conviction that (a.) G_d is owed loyalty, (b.) that includes being willing to take unpopular positions for G_d against strong social pressure and be thought a fool, and (c.) Biblical literalism is an example of doing that. Consequently, they have an “Ugh Field” around the idea that maybe Genesis 1 doesn’t involve 24-hour days. It feels disloyal to G_d to think that way, so they don’t…especially if doing so might allow them to “fit in better” with the rest of the world: That worldly pressure feels like a temptation.
The latter (postmodernists) a product of the usual left-wing infection of institutions: Robert Conquest’s Three Laws at work. They don’t think Christianity can be proven because they don’t really seriously think it’s true. But they think it’s a nice banner under which to spread leftism, so they keep on saying the Apostles’ Creed at church every Sunday (if their church does that), while privately redefining all the terms in that Creed. (“God,” for example, gets redefined into something like “a kind, compassionate feeling that everyone should have in their hearts.”) Other Christians describe this group’s beliefs as “Moral Therapeutic Deism,” (or, less charitably, “mealy-mouthed apostasy”) but the group themselves still call themselves Christians.
And then there’s the more-careful view, the view which is most-widespread amongst those who retain the beliefs that are common to most of the serious Christians across all times (you find it in Augustine) and all places (East and West), but who aren’t fundamentalists.
According to this view…,
(a.) The doctrines of Christianity are not intrinsically irrational (not self-contradictory) and thus can be reasoned about;
(b.) The doctrines don’t contradict anything that can be shown to be true about the world outside of the tenets of Christianity (not falsified by science or philosophy), and thus are not in conflict with any of the sciences or with reason, generally;
(c.) At least one tenet of Christianity (namely, that G_d exists and has the attributes ascribed to Him in classical Theism), can be logically demonstrated by careful reasoning from sensible and broadly-accepted premises, without requiring any recourse to divine revelation;
(d.) Other tenets dealing with historical matters (e.g. the Exodus/Sinai story and the Resurrection) can be shown to be very plausible, and maybe even to be more-probable-than-any-alternative-explanation; and,
(e.) The remaining tenets of Christianity can be shown to be probable, provided one has first established the existence of G_d, the Exodus, and the Resurrection, and can use them as premises in further argument.
Items (a.) through (e.) put this position pretty close to the position you first described, “Christians who believe that Christianity and its tenets can be proven to be true by reasoning.”
But, we’re not done until we add Items (f.) through (i.):
(f.) Some Christian doctrines (e.g. the Trinity, the Hypostatic Union) cannot be arrived at by natural reason alone. These doctrines require revelation; because creation doesn’t provide us enough data to come to know them any other way. Thus, we can only “reason our way to them” by first reasoning our way to the belief that such-and-such event (e.g. Sinai) is a real revelation from G_d, and then trusting that revelation.
(g.) Our culture is widely sentimentalist and postmodernist. That makes our culture a bad one for producing clear thinkers. Also, some percentage of persons don’t want to become convinced that G_d exists, let alone that Christianity is true, because they like their life and relationships the way they are, and G_d/Christianity might mess that up. Of those that are willing to be convinced through reason, only a minority are inclined to be logical and careful and diligent as they work through the issues. Of those, an even smaller minority ever acquire the mental tools and vocabulary needed for reasoning about metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, etc.. And of that tiny group, many of those who try to reason correctly about religious topics will make errors and reach wrong conclusions. Consequently, Items (c.) through (e.) above are largely theoretical: Careful reasoning can in principle establish G_d’s existence, the historical items, and then the doctrines; but in practice, most people who believe these things didn’t get there by being reasoned into it.
(h.) G_d often providentially arranges events in the lives of human persons to help them arrive at true beliefs about Him, in order that their anti-rational culture, or their own lack of information, or their disinclination to think carefully, doesn’t remove all hope of their coming to know Him. In short: He knows it’s hard for us to think, so He helps us out now and then. (That’s another way that divine revelation comes into play: Not only does it tell us things about G_d we couldn’t know any other way, but it gives us a partial “answer key” against which we can check our answers to the problems that we can reason about.)
(i.) G_d gave humans an intellect in order that they might use it, and He doesn’t approve of intellectual slacking. Consequently, a person who does believe in Him does well when he uses his intellect to learn more about G_d. Investigating the arguments for your belief system turns out to be a great way to error-check one’s own understanding and to sharpen one’s mind. Therefore Christians are encouraged to learn some of those arguments.
Okay. That’s it. Sorry it’s so long. I was trying to be carefully exact.
Anyway, I hope that explains why some Christians sound like they believe Christianity can be proven by reason. Some tiny subset of them believe that, full-stop. And the most-respectable view (sorry, I know I’m biased) has long been that the faith is rational, that much of it could in principle be proved (or shown probable), and that while most people don’t come to faith that way because of the practical difficulties, learning the arguments is still edifying.
Christianity also admonishes people not to be ponderous bores. Sorry if I’ve transgressed in that area…and if you read this whole thing, thanks for your patience!