Charles posted this interesting little rant by Ann Coulter on the main-forum thread about Regent's new DL DBA. I'd like to discuss it, so I moved to this more appropriate forum. I think that it's misleading and historically inaccurate to try to redefine American liberalism and conservatism in narrowly religious terms, in terms of those who worship God and those who rebel against him. But Coulter's proposed distinction is certainly an interesting one. The problem that I see is that there's no reliable way to distinguish between what is divine and what isn't, that would convince those who don't already believe that they know the difference. What's more, there seems to be no convincing way to distinguish between true religions and false ones, or between true religious doctrines and error. If there is a "God" at all, "he" always seems to remain hidden behind the phenomenal facade of finite reality. God never appears to man directly, but always through circumscribed intermediaries, whether scriptures, churches, "incarnated" saviors, historical traditions, philosophical arguments, subjective religious experiences or whatever. All of man's ideas about God are man's ideas, with all the human limitations that implies. If the assertion that man is created in God's image is going to have any tangible meaning, then we will have to know the divine archetype that we are supposedly the image of. We have to know why we should accept that particular proposed archetype and not some other. And if we want to read moral and political meaning out of the 'image' imagery, as Coulter obviously does, then we have to understand what social and behavioral norms and standards are implied by all of this. I think that's very true. But if it's true, then it presents real problems for the Coulter-style theocrats. If man can't distinguish between divine truth and human error, then we are left in the position of doing the best that we can in an environment where absolute certainty has gone missing and has been replaced by man's own best guesses. Decisions no longer reflect God's infallible revelation, they reflect man's own fallible choices. So if Coulter wants to characterize human beings making their own decisions as people setting themselves up in God's place, then she has a real problem on her hands. There seems to be no other option open to man. If religious commitment is a matter of faith in the manner suggested by Little Fauss, then it seems to be as much a matter of human choice as anything else that man decides. All of this suggests that Coulter may have her criticisms reversed. I would argue that choosing in full awareness of man's fallibility, in recognition of our imperfect information and our limited cognitive powers, is to choose without confusing ourselves with God. But it's essentially both relativism and fallibilism, because it accepts man as a finite being embedded in his finite world. But choosing in the apparently unfounded belief that our information is infallible and our faith divinely guided, is to confuse ourselves with God. People behaving in this way make their own human choices about what they will accept, just like all of us do, but then they assert that their choices come direct from God's own mouth and reflect God's divine will. That kind of confusion seems to not only be extremely dangerous here in the earthly political sphere, leading as it does to fundamentalist excesses like we see in contemporary Islam, it also seems to be a terrible blunder in a religious sense, the gravest of mortal sins: confusing one's own finite and mortal self with God.
The REAL difficulty is one understood mostly by phenomenologists (which I ain't one of, BTW) Every human being probably experiences the sense of self and unique identity but as von Neumann of computer fame showed, it is absolutely impossible to verify in any objective way whether another person is, in fact, conscious. Assuming that I am NOT alone and that my senses do not deceive me, my experience of self and consciousness must be a common one, extending even to my three cats, MAYBE even to my computer at some very low level. Now, a thoroughly modernist person like me considers it a fundamental tenant that nothing is really real that is not objective and cannot be verified through research. I reject claims of faith healing or ghostly visitations for example explaining these things as the products of superstition or fraud or as simply the results of natural processes that we haven't yet explained. Post modernism, the ability to place belief in all sorts of foolish nonsense is anathema to me. Faith by itself doesn't move mountains (though people motivated by faith certainly MAY). But what about this consciousness of self? THAT'S the crack in the Modernist's armor. I am not willing to jump from this phenomenon to the full scale acceptence of a diety; for one thing, that construct doesn't really solve anything, but the fact is, there it is! Now, one perfectly valid approach to consciousness of self is to do exactly what Coulter suggests: I am the only "self" whose reality is verifiable to me. Perhaps I AM God in some way and have somehow deliberately forgotten it because I was bored! This, believe it or not, was taught by the est movement of the 'seventies. Or perhaps all consciousness is somehow connected into one big consciousness. Or maybe it's all an illusion (but if so, what or who is being fooled?) It seems to me that Coulter's analysis is so trivial in the face of the real mystery as to be almost (forgive me) blasphemous.
Not for Nothing, but Based on my own experience, every time someone tries to divide situations into liberal vs. conservative camps it's in order to sell a bill of goods. I am confident, again based on my own experience, that there are God fearing and faithful "liberals" as well as "conservatives" who cynically use religion as an excuse to say and do hurtful, selfish things about and to the people around them. The idea that "liberals" are all one way and "conservatives" all another is rubbish.
Read my quote carefully, Bill. I'm not saying that one can't believe in God because it's impossible to be certain about anything given the limited tools of our minds and consciousness. I'm saying that pure human logic and reason are fallible, and that a lot of people who have tried to comprehend God purely with their reason and intellect have found the whole exercise to be futile, and thrown the whole works out the window to their detriment. This will go over about as well as a lead zeppelin on this forum, but what I'm saying is that to understand God in any way whatsoever, you have to use something more than the limited little mass of gray matter in your skull and rely on faith. Reason can only get you so far. Reason does have some utility, however, for example one can look at the claims of a faith and see if there's historical accuracy or logical consistency. If a faith doesn't measure up and makes patently absurd claims, such as those of the Raelians or Scientology (surely a faith that only a Hollywood star could stomach), that system can likely be rejected as untrue. But there are other faiths that seem to have something there, some grain--or boulder--of truth that make them not so easy to dismiss. I tend to think of the writings of Acquinas, Moses in the Pentateuch, the words of Jesus: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" and think: there's something there that deserves investigation. However, I'm not going to fool myself and think that upon investigation, I'll have arrived, by dint of nothing more than my puny brain, at any real understanding of a God so great that He could bring a universe billions of light years from end-to-end into existence with a crick of his finger, a God that doesn't require a creator, but exists outside the bounds of time and space--that's not an entity that a person who has trouble keeping his checkbook balanced is going to reason his way up to. A necessary corollary is that given your severe limitations as a member of the human race, you also can't say: "There is no God." What laughable pretension! A lot more presumptuous by far than saying that God does exist. Therein lies the dilemma. If God exists (and I believe He does), He's so impossibly beyond our comprehension that He can only be understood--and just marginally at that--by faith. So perhaps that ignorant blue collar holy roller crowd, that crowd scorned by polite society because they shout in church and raise their hands with tears streaming down, are tapping into something more than a mere psychological reaction. Perhaps they're being touched by this God, and it's easier for them to receive it because they don't have the "constraints" of an efficiently-functioning brain just full of the smug knowledge of literature and science and culture--like us.
This is going to be short and sweet. Coulter is unquestionably a babe, and worthy of making sweet, sweet love to..... but a politico/religious philosopher/expert, she is not.....
Actually, little fauss, you'll find that most of the more thoughtful (and theologically educated) members here will respect your opinion. I, who am by NO means so educated, have made similar statements here in the past and have received nothing but courtesy in response. The thing that you and I don't accept that many here do is "revelation". Did God ever speak directly to Man? If you accept revelation, the rest of the revealed religion follows as the night does the day. If you don't, but like me remain awe stricken at the sheer mystery of being, you end up where we are.
Thanks for your response. I think God did speak to Moses directly, I can't read Torah and not believe it.
That's philosophy's familiar "problem of other minds". There's a huge literature on it. Obviously we know that other people act as if they were conscious. They respond to their environments, so they must be conscious of their surroundings in some minimal sense of 'conscious'. And they speak about their inner states and show other evidence of being influenced by them, so clearly there's some kind of internal self-referential process going on in other people. Whether a self-referential internal process can generate that peculiar sense of subjectivity, of being an 'I', that we experience (however inchaoately) in ourselves, is obviously an open question. But I don't think that anyone (even philosophers) has to go to those analytical extremes to feel that other people are people and not just walking-talking automatons. (Assuming that perfectly simulating a person without the simulater developing human-like subjectivity is possible.) Small babies attend preferentially to human faces (and to objects arranged like faces). They like being held and spoken to. Young children acquire tremendous facility in natural language without any formal instruction, despite those languages being so complex that linguists still don't fully understand them. Children are experts at reading (and attempting to manipulate) other people's motivations and inner states from the subtlest clues of tone and gesture. The only reason that all of that stuff isn't totally startling and amazing is that it's so utterly familiar to every human being everywhere on earth. (Autistic individuals may be exceptions.) Pretty clearly, humans don't come into this world as blank slates. (Perhaps religion's tendency to personalize the divine may have its origins in this innate human optimization to live with other people.) I don't think that it's completely safe to assume that. Obviously human beings are delimited not only by their spatial-temporal circumstances, but by the limitations of their own sense and cognitive powers. There could easily be countless aspects of reality (in some more ultimate sense) that are no more accessable to human beings than electromagnetic theory is to a cockroach. In other words, it's very possible (even probable in my opinion) that realty overflows our ability to understand it. But despite not having a clue about Maxwell's equations, the cockroach runs from light. That suggests that humans may also be able to intuit and respond to important aspects of their surroundings without being able to fully cognize them. My comments immediately above explain why I leave open the possibility of transcendent interventions. The unknown almost certainly exists and it probably has its effects from time to time in our lives. But even if we assume that transcendent interventions are possible and that human beings can recognize them when they occur, there's still the problem of justifying why reports of them should be believed by all of those who didn't share the experience. There's also the individual problem of distinguishing between reality and illusion in our own personal experiences. I think that your objective verification scruples are probably best applied at this point. The upshot is that there may conceivably be true reports that it nevertheless isn't fully rational to accept. We may choose to accept them anyway, through some kind of act of faith, but that's going to be hard to justify to skeptics (including those within). I think that David Hume made similar points in the 18'th century about miracles. One difference between the two is that all human beings (with a few severely impaired exceptions) seem to share these as-yet unexplained intuitive feelings about other people. So even if philosophical issues remain, they don't really create problems for us because normally we're all on the same page. (One area where problems of this sort do crop up is in the abortion and euthenasia debates. We all share our social instinct, but we don't always agree on its precise boundaries in problem cases.) But religion is rather different. We lack that instinctive unanimity that we see when people respond to other people. Some religions have dieties while other religions don't. Some dieties are described in personal terms, while others are more abstract and transcendent. Even among the personal dieties, there's no unanimity on how many of them there are or on their identities. There's no agreement on which particular historical tradition best reveals these things. Whatever social unanimity that we do see in particular societies is best explained by the contingencies of the history of religions. The idea that human subjectivity is a divine-like principle and that phenominal experience (even of ourselves as names and forms) is less real somehow, really isn't so outlandish. Advaita Vedanta philosophy certainly agrees. You see similar suggestions in the Kantian tradition here in the West. Solipsism is obviously a potential problem. But people who believe this kind of thing tend to believe that everyone is an aspect, a fragment, of the same transcendent principle, and that our division into separate viewpoints, the individual phenomenal selves of our personal experience, is part of the illusion. We are (so they say) confused fragments of a single reality, in some ultimate sense. But getting back to Coulter, if she is suggesting that every liberal is a solipsist who believes that only he or she exists as a subjective self, then that's just ridiculous. I read her differently. I think that she is echoing ideas popular among some conservative Christian thinkers who distinguish between humanity obedient to God, and humanity acting independently of God, making its own decisions for itself as if man was a little God in his own right. It's all part of a larger criticism of the modern secular world. That was what my first post was meant to address, however incoherently it was expressed. I argued in a slightly existentialist manner that man is doomed to make decisions, and that even religious faith involves a decision. So if we are all doomed to decide, we probably are best advised to decide in humility, in full awareness of our own finiteness. (That's defensible in both religious and philosophical terms, as my comments up above hopefully illustrated.) But the implications of that humility seem to suggest fallibilism (our current beliefs are provisional and may prove to be wrong) and relativism (our current beliefs are based on our limited experience and cognitive powers). To flatly announce that the results of our own decisions (even faith-decisions) are infallible is (so I argued) to put ourselves in God's place and to presume to speak for "him" from out of our position of finiteness. So I concluded that Coulter (and those she echoes) had things precisely backwards.
Actually, if I had written that in Hebrew, it could indeed have been read exactly as you jest. Are you (little fauss) able to read Torah in Hebrew? Many of the misgivings I have about its divine authorship are textual. Others come from the fact that the Code of the Law contains many borrowings from, and references to, the law of surrounding tribes.
BillDayson, Splendid post! This is what happens when we take words seriously. Coulter certainly didn't.
No ancient Hebrew scholar I, sorry to disappoint. There are certainly textual variances and all manner of issues with the scrolls and fragments that exist, but overall, I'd think it's the best attested and most accurate work of antiquity going, both in terms of number of existing manuscripts and agreement among them. Remember, the oldest existing manuscripts of Torah and the prophets are over 2,000 years old, and they deal with incidents that occurred up to 3,500 years ago! I have a tough time understanding teenagers these days; I sometimes have a tough time understanding my wife with whom I sleep every night; don't you suppose there are a few hundred idioms and understandings between a people wandering the wilderness in a culture so very different from ours speaking a language so very different that are lost on us today--that critics dismiss with a wave of the hand: "Ah, dusty old myths and contradictions all." And yet, couldn't they still be true and couldn't we be the ones who lack understanding? That cultural divide cannot be ignored--we may be missing the boat. And isn't there yet enough there--the grandeur of the story of Joseph--such irony as to make O. Henry seem a hack, or the awesome beauty of Solomon's Song--love poetry to make Browning blush, to indicate that there just may be a little more there? Certainly there are a number of parallels between the law in Deut and Exod and the law of surrounding tribes, but who ever said the One who spoke to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses kept a tight lid on His truth? Also, some things are just common sense, laws are rather universal, you being an attorney of some standing know that--hey, the concept of legal precedent goes back at least to the ancient times, the scriptures mention it. Finally, why should the Creator of Abraham, the Friend of Moses, be bound to impose upon His chosen people laws entirely foreign to them, why not borrow from that with which they are already familiar, so long as it doesn't contradict His truth, and then put His own true spin thereupon? And in any event, we can't really be certain, based on the evidence we have, who was borrowing from whom; scholars who make such presumptions against Torah have been demonstrated over the years to receive more than their share of egg on their faces. By the way, friend, do you celebrate Pesach? Less than two months away, can't wait!
With a name like Theo, how could you expect me not to confuse myself with God? (Hint: if you don't know your Greek, ask someone who does.)
As a non-Christian, non-Muslim, non-Buddist, non- well, anything: I'm always amazed by the amount of people who speek for God. I believe in God, for my own reasons. But I've yet to meet someone who I believed was his personal spokesman.
