The “classic” revelations of the Jewish/Christian tradition were repeated by Jesus in response to the question, “Teacher, which commandment is the greatest?” Jesus replied: “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and the first commandment. And, the second is like it, ‘You shall lover your neighbor as yourself.” Then, Jesus adds, “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22: 37-40) Last week I discussed how difficult these commandments are in that they have required the work of all the law and the prophets, as well as the work of more than two thousand years of theological reflection to try and ‘interpret’ or ‘explain’ what it means to ‘love God’ and ‘to love your neighbor as yourself.’
This week I review a wonderful little book by Hilary Putnam, “Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life” (Published by Indiana University Press in 2008) in which we discover that the need to ‘interpret’ and ‘explain’ how to ‘love of God’ and to ‘love of neighbor and self’ is alive and well in the twenty-first century (C. E.). Putnam, a well-know philosopher in his own right, examines the work of three Jewish religious philosophers, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Emmanuel Levinas, as well as the religious thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The thrust of all four philosophers, as argued by Putnam, is to express these two major commandments within the context of twentieth century philosophy.
These philosophers agree that we need to get away from metaphysics, for metaphysics is a search for the “essence” of things. In metaphysics, the philosopher “seeks an imaginary position, one outside the flow of time. He seeks to view everything, even himself, as if he were an ‘outsider’ and seeks to view the world as if he were not in it.” (p. 28) But this is not the philosophy we are involved in Rosenzweig argues, we need “another sort of philosophy.” (p. 19) Man needs “a proper relation to God” as well as “a proper relation to other human beings or to the world.” (p. 26) Putnam suggests that “our task is to acknowledge God” but, as Rosenzweig believes, “one can acknowledge any one of the three—God, Man, and World—as they demand to be acknowledged unless one acknowledges the other two.” (p. 26) This leads to the conclusion, also reached by Wittgenstein, that “religious belief…it’s really a way of living, or a way of assessing life. It’s passionately seizing hold of this interpretation.” (p. 27)
In terms of the existence of God, Putnam writes that “we construct our images of God in response to demands that we do not create” but that “for a religious person theorizing about God is beside the point.” (p. 6) He quotes Buber: “Man receives, and what he receives is not a ‘content’ but a presence, a presence of strength.” (p. 6): and he continues, with Wittgenstein, that “religion is a deep-going way of life.” (p. 11) One must maintain, Putnam argues, the ancient idea of transforming one’s way of life and one’s understanding of one’s place in the larger scheme of things and in the human community…” (p. 13) As with Pascal, one must see one’s religious continuity as a way of life, to be learned, studied, and lived.
In order to move into this community, Rosenzweig contends that we need to continually think as if we were with another person. We must ‘speak’ to some one and think for some one. This makes a person live philosophical or theological problems. We need ‘readiness’ rather than ‘plans.’ By being ‘ready’ we can respond to another person. If we have plans, we are not listening to another because we already have determined a pathway. (pgs. 31-33) Our existence within the community allows for this listening and learning.
We “are always in the presence of God” and, therefore, there is “essentially just one commandment, the commandment to love God.” (pgs. 35-36) Revelation is always ‘an event between the two.’ Thus, a ‘religious experience’ is known ‘again and again’—“For we know it only when—we do.” (pgs. 42-43) For God calls us to love him…and we respond “Here I am!” We do not always hear this voice saying “love me”, but it is there. (pgs. 46-7) The request is for us to step outside of ourselves, to enter into relationship.
However, this is the hardest thing to do. Rosenzweig continues that “the tragedy that threatens everyone, the tragedy of being completely enclosed in oneself” is “the greatest danger facing the soul.” (p. 47) “Once one becomes God’s lover, however, one can no longer be completely enclosed in oneself, but one cannot escape that fate simply by returning God’s love…To return God’s love properly involves imitation dei—‘Be thou holy, for I the lord thy God am holy’…love of God cannot have a, so to speak, ‘vertical dimension’ without a ‘horizontal dimension’; ‘love of God’ without a direction out to other fellow human beings is not really love of God at all.” (p. 48) “I have to be able to love each and every human being as a human being.” (p. 49) “To sum up: the whole purpose of human life is revelation, and the whole content of revelation is love.” (p. 54)
Buber sees these relationships as a dynamic interaction, between God and a person as well as between a person and the world. This is captured by the I—thou relation. But, the relationship between God and a person is one that can only be of short duration. The important thing is that once one has experienced this connection the “It—World” relationship is transformed. It transforms not only the individual’s interior life but it also transforms the person’s social life. The experience of the divine is not an end in itself…but the end is the transformation of life in the world. (p. 64) One cannot describe God or theorize about him. One can only enter into an “I—You” relation with God and become transformed. (p. 65) Buber argues that you can never answer the question, “How do you know that God exists?” The “I—You” relation is never a matter of knowledge. The “I—You” relation is a shared relation, a mode of being, that can transform one’s life even when one is back in the “It” world. (p. 67) So we believe in God and therefore act in the image of God which brings us into closer relationship with God. It is a cumulative thing!
But, Levinas argues that one cannot act according to a formula such as “Behave in such and such a way…” This is a disaster because it says “treat the other as an end and not as a means…” (p. 70) and this, basically, assumes that all people are “fundamentally the same.” (p. 71) Levinas attempts to describe the “fundamental obligation of one person to the other” (p. 73): he states that the fundamental obligation we have is the obligation to make ourselves available to the neediness of the other person. (p. 74) Levinas goes on to say that to be a human being in the normative sense involves recognizing that I am commanded to say ‘Here I am’ to the other. “If you have to ask, ‘Why should I put myself out for him/her?’ you are not yet human.” (p. 75) “A genuine ethical relation to another presupposes that you realize that the other person is an independent reality and not in any way your construction.” (p. 78) And, this fundamental obligation is not derivable from any metaphysical or epistemological picture.” (p. 80) The bottom line is: “every human being is responsible for every other.” (p. 81) This is an ideal, Levinas admits, but without an ideal everything becomes mediocre.
As mentioned above, by being in the community we can come to perceive a ‘trace’ of God’s presence in the tradition of the Commandment and the interpretative community that continues to work out what the Commandment means. But, the individual in the community must feel a profound experience of being Commanded by a God with whom she or he has not had a numinous experience. (p. 86) The ‘human truths’ of the Old Testament as interpreted by Levinas are (1) every human being should experience him/herself as commanded to be available to the neediness, the suffering, the vulnerability of the other person; (2) know that, philosophically, they cannot gain an account of how this is possible; and (3) know that the divine command lacks a metaphysical basis and is not based on a personal epiphany. (pgs. 86-7) This obligation of the individual exists without the feeling that the other has the same obligation. (p. 96)
Putnam does contend that in this argument Levinas leaves out one major point about love: Levinas does not consider the love that an individual should have for themselves. Putnam argues that one cannot love others if one does not love oneself. (p. 99) Putnam claims Aristotle as his teacher on this point.
Reading this book, one certainly feels that the effort to explain the ‘love of God’ and the ‘love of neighbor’ is alive and in good hands.
Friday, March 28, 2008
Friday, March 21, 2008
The "Classic" Christian Revelations
In the posting last week I discussed faith as warranted belief and related this to the revelations of the communities that we belong to. These revelations are divided into those that are ‘classic’ or ‘primordial’, that is the revelations that are associated with the founder or founders of the community in question and the revelations of later members of the community that are ‘repeated or re-enacted’ by individuals as a part of their present experience as members of the community.
It seems important, at this time, to present what I believe to be the ‘classic’ revelations of the community I belong to, the Christian community. Therefore, what follows is what I believe are the foundations.
The first revelation is that there is a god…that is, God exists. This revelation cannot be attributed to anyone one person or group of persons. But, it is the ‘primordial’ revelation. Also, there are no proofs or anything else to accompany the insight. The revelation is presented in the Torah, the Old Testament to the Christians, the foundational document of the Hebrew/Christian tradition and is there, right in the very first sentence of the book: “In the beginning, God…” (Genesis 1:1) In my opinion, we do not need anything more than this to serve as the foundational revelation of our belief. We need no proofs, no justifications. The existence of God is the most basic, deeply held assumption that we possess.
The next two revelations are tied very closely together. Since I am a Christian I will start out with Jesus, for he is my teacher. His public ministry is dated somewhere around 25 to 27 C. E. In the scriptures we can read the following story in three of the four Gospels: Matthew 22: 34-40; Mark 12: 28-34; and Luke 10:25-28. I will quote from the Gospel of Matthew. In chapter 22, verses 34-36, Jesus is asked by a lawyer: “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”
Jesus answers: “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And, the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22: 37-40) That is, everything else is interpretation.
The quotation marks inside the quotation marks are because Jesus is quoting directly from the Torah. The first quotation, relating to God, comes from Deuteronomy 6: 5; the second, relating to the neighbor, is from Leviticus 19:18. That is, Jesus is just repeating the ‘classic’ or ‘primordial’ revelation that is referenced in the older scriptures.
But, this story is not the only one that exists about the repeating of this revelation. The Jewish religious leader, Hillel, who taught in the period 30 B. C. E. to 10 C. E., emphasized the love of one’s fellow human beings as the essence of the entire Jewish tradition. It is reported that he was asked to summarize the whole of Jewish teaching (while standing on one foot) and he replied:” What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow man: this is the whole Law; the rest is the explanation…” This, to Hillel was the summation of Leviticus 19:18, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Of course, to Hillel, as it was to all the religious Jews, it was understood that “The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” (Deuteronomy, 6: 4-5)
The Christian teaching of the revelation is exactly the same as the Jewish teaching; Hillel, as did Jesus, just repeated the ‘classic’ or ‘primordial’ revelation that existed in the older tradition. But, this is not what I find to be remarkable in their statements. What I find remarkable is their claim that “the rest is just explanation” or “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” What this tells me is that to ‘love God’ and ‘to love your neighbor as yourself’ is very, very difficult! It sounds so easy…’love God’…’love your neighbor’…but we have the Old Testament…we have the New Testament…we have all the law and the prophets…and we have two thousand years of additional writings…just to interpret and explain what it means to ‘love God’ and to ‘love your neighbor.’
Why is it so difficult to interpret or explain what love means? It is so difficult because the essence of the Jewish/Christian faith is relationship, not theory. That is, the law and the prophets help us to define and understand what it means to be in relationship with God and with ‘our neighbor’. The law and the prophets are not the basis of a dogmatic structure or a systematic theology. They are a way of living.
But, why do we need all the law and the prophets? Isn’t love…well…just love? The answer to this is that love is not just love. Love means a lot of things. Love is dependent upon the situation. Just look at the way Hillel expresses the second greatest commandment which is like the first: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow man…” What does this mean? The only appropriate answer to this is that it means that…it depends! It depends upon what the situation is. And, this is the essence of love. How do I love you when you are doing something despicable? How do I love you when you are kind and gentle? How do I love you when you are sick and not feeling well? How do I love you in the routine of life?
This is why we need the law and the prophets to interpret or explain what it means to love God…to explain what it means to love our neighbor. This is why we need the teachings of Jesus and Hillel. Think back to the story that Jesus tells about the Good Samaritan. What is this story in response to? It is in response to a question a lawyer poses to Jesus. The lawyer asks: “And, just who is my neighbor?” Not only is it difficult to define love…we even have trouble in understanding who our neighbor is!
Do we need interpretation? Do we need explanation? The answer is obvious. The essence of love, it seems to me, is that we need to know enough about the one that is loved to be able to provide the loved one with what they need, and not with what we want to give them. We have to be sufficiently self-less to learn enough so that we can respond to where the loved one is. This is very, very difficult. For example, we need to know as much as we can about God in order to truly love God and respond to him as he would want us to. Likewise, we need to know as much as we can about our neighbor so that we can respond to her/him in a way that is most meaningful to them. This is what strikes me so in the stories about how Jesus healed individuals. We note that first he physically heals them. Then, in almost every case, he gives them a verbal instruction: “Don’t tell anyone about your healing”; or “Go to the synagogue and praise God.” These instructions of Jesus are very personal and must be related to the spiritual healing of the individual. Jesus knows enough about these people so that he can not only physically heal them, but provide a way for them to be healed spiritually in order to become whole human beings. Love is knowing the loved one sufficiently so that you can be where they are and not just where you are! Jesus is a model to us of this kind of love and he wants us to be a model to others of this kind of love.
The final revelation of love given to us by Jesus is captured in the story of his death and of the events leading up to his death. According to the stories we have, Jesus was a threat to a segment of the organized religion of his time. (But, not, seemingly, to the part that Hillel represented.) The leaders of this segment emphasized ‘the Law and the prophets’ in their teachings. In fact, the information provided us in the Gospel teachings indicate that these leaders made ‘the Law and the prophets’ their ultimate concern. They, in this sense, turned the teachings of Jesus and Hillel up-side-down. Jesus told these leaders over and over again, “Think in the right way! Don’t make ‘the Law and the prophets’ your ultimate concern. Make God your ultimate concern!” But this was threatening. It challenged their teaching. And, Jesus, apparently, was sufficiently successful in drawing people to him and to his teaching that they had to do something about him. As the story goes, these threatened leaders conspired to have him killed. The final lesson that Jesus gives us is the example of how he died…he stayed true to his teaching about love to his last breath, even asking for those connected in any way to his death to be forgiven. The life of Jesus shows us how one could live…and how one could die…loving God and loving neighbor.
It seems important, at this time, to present what I believe to be the ‘classic’ revelations of the community I belong to, the Christian community. Therefore, what follows is what I believe are the foundations.
The first revelation is that there is a god…that is, God exists. This revelation cannot be attributed to anyone one person or group of persons. But, it is the ‘primordial’ revelation. Also, there are no proofs or anything else to accompany the insight. The revelation is presented in the Torah, the Old Testament to the Christians, the foundational document of the Hebrew/Christian tradition and is there, right in the very first sentence of the book: “In the beginning, God…” (Genesis 1:1) In my opinion, we do not need anything more than this to serve as the foundational revelation of our belief. We need no proofs, no justifications. The existence of God is the most basic, deeply held assumption that we possess.
The next two revelations are tied very closely together. Since I am a Christian I will start out with Jesus, for he is my teacher. His public ministry is dated somewhere around 25 to 27 C. E. In the scriptures we can read the following story in three of the four Gospels: Matthew 22: 34-40; Mark 12: 28-34; and Luke 10:25-28. I will quote from the Gospel of Matthew. In chapter 22, verses 34-36, Jesus is asked by a lawyer: “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”
Jesus answers: “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And, the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22: 37-40) That is, everything else is interpretation.
The quotation marks inside the quotation marks are because Jesus is quoting directly from the Torah. The first quotation, relating to God, comes from Deuteronomy 6: 5; the second, relating to the neighbor, is from Leviticus 19:18. That is, Jesus is just repeating the ‘classic’ or ‘primordial’ revelation that is referenced in the older scriptures.
But, this story is not the only one that exists about the repeating of this revelation. The Jewish religious leader, Hillel, who taught in the period 30 B. C. E. to 10 C. E., emphasized the love of one’s fellow human beings as the essence of the entire Jewish tradition. It is reported that he was asked to summarize the whole of Jewish teaching (while standing on one foot) and he replied:” What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow man: this is the whole Law; the rest is the explanation…” This, to Hillel was the summation of Leviticus 19:18, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Of course, to Hillel, as it was to all the religious Jews, it was understood that “The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” (Deuteronomy, 6: 4-5)
The Christian teaching of the revelation is exactly the same as the Jewish teaching; Hillel, as did Jesus, just repeated the ‘classic’ or ‘primordial’ revelation that existed in the older tradition. But, this is not what I find to be remarkable in their statements. What I find remarkable is their claim that “the rest is just explanation” or “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” What this tells me is that to ‘love God’ and ‘to love your neighbor as yourself’ is very, very difficult! It sounds so easy…’love God’…’love your neighbor’…but we have the Old Testament…we have the New Testament…we have all the law and the prophets…and we have two thousand years of additional writings…just to interpret and explain what it means to ‘love God’ and to ‘love your neighbor.’
Why is it so difficult to interpret or explain what love means? It is so difficult because the essence of the Jewish/Christian faith is relationship, not theory. That is, the law and the prophets help us to define and understand what it means to be in relationship with God and with ‘our neighbor’. The law and the prophets are not the basis of a dogmatic structure or a systematic theology. They are a way of living.
But, why do we need all the law and the prophets? Isn’t love…well…just love? The answer to this is that love is not just love. Love means a lot of things. Love is dependent upon the situation. Just look at the way Hillel expresses the second greatest commandment which is like the first: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow man…” What does this mean? The only appropriate answer to this is that it means that…it depends! It depends upon what the situation is. And, this is the essence of love. How do I love you when you are doing something despicable? How do I love you when you are kind and gentle? How do I love you when you are sick and not feeling well? How do I love you in the routine of life?
This is why we need the law and the prophets to interpret or explain what it means to love God…to explain what it means to love our neighbor. This is why we need the teachings of Jesus and Hillel. Think back to the story that Jesus tells about the Good Samaritan. What is this story in response to? It is in response to a question a lawyer poses to Jesus. The lawyer asks: “And, just who is my neighbor?” Not only is it difficult to define love…we even have trouble in understanding who our neighbor is!
Do we need interpretation? Do we need explanation? The answer is obvious. The essence of love, it seems to me, is that we need to know enough about the one that is loved to be able to provide the loved one with what they need, and not with what we want to give them. We have to be sufficiently self-less to learn enough so that we can respond to where the loved one is. This is very, very difficult. For example, we need to know as much as we can about God in order to truly love God and respond to him as he would want us to. Likewise, we need to know as much as we can about our neighbor so that we can respond to her/him in a way that is most meaningful to them. This is what strikes me so in the stories about how Jesus healed individuals. We note that first he physically heals them. Then, in almost every case, he gives them a verbal instruction: “Don’t tell anyone about your healing”; or “Go to the synagogue and praise God.” These instructions of Jesus are very personal and must be related to the spiritual healing of the individual. Jesus knows enough about these people so that he can not only physically heal them, but provide a way for them to be healed spiritually in order to become whole human beings. Love is knowing the loved one sufficiently so that you can be where they are and not just where you are! Jesus is a model to us of this kind of love and he wants us to be a model to others of this kind of love.
The final revelation of love given to us by Jesus is captured in the story of his death and of the events leading up to his death. According to the stories we have, Jesus was a threat to a segment of the organized religion of his time. (But, not, seemingly, to the part that Hillel represented.) The leaders of this segment emphasized ‘the Law and the prophets’ in their teachings. In fact, the information provided us in the Gospel teachings indicate that these leaders made ‘the Law and the prophets’ their ultimate concern. They, in this sense, turned the teachings of Jesus and Hillel up-side-down. Jesus told these leaders over and over again, “Think in the right way! Don’t make ‘the Law and the prophets’ your ultimate concern. Make God your ultimate concern!” But this was threatening. It challenged their teaching. And, Jesus, apparently, was sufficiently successful in drawing people to him and to his teaching that they had to do something about him. As the story goes, these threatened leaders conspired to have him killed. The final lesson that Jesus gives us is the example of how he died…he stayed true to his teaching about love to his last breath, even asking for those connected in any way to his death to be forgiven. The life of Jesus shows us how one could live…and how one could die…loving God and loving neighbor.
Friday, March 14, 2008
Warranted Belief
“A community of faith usually traces its history back to what may be called a ‘classic’ or ‘primordial’ revelation. This classic revelation, a definite disclosive experience of the holy granted to the founder or founders of the community, becomes as it were the paradigm for experiences of the holy in that community. A revelation that has the power to found a community of faith becomes fruitful in that community, and is, so to speak, repeated or re-enacted in the experience of the community, thus becoming normative for the experience of the community. Yet only because the primordial revelation is continually renewed in present experience can it be revelation for us, and not just a fossilized revelation.” John Macquarrie, “Principles of Christian Theology,” Second Edition, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,1977), pages 8-9.
In the past two postings I have discussed the importance of community and the fact that we belong to communities that, in a sense, believe in the things that we believe in or believe in the things that we want to believe in. These communities represent how we would like to live, both within the community itself and in relationship with the world outside of the community. Today, the emphasis is not upon the founder or founders of the community, but in those that come later. Our emphasis is upon those that ‘repeat or re-enact‘ the community’s primordial revelation in their present activity so that the revelation is constantly renewed and alive.
The ‘classic’ or ‘primordial’ revelation of the community essentially creates a ‘possibility for life,’ a ‘worldview,’ a ‘hypothesis.’ The classic revelation presents something that must be and will be tested over time. Of course, it is not complete, in and of itself. It needs to be reflected on. Its meaning needs to be explored. Interpretation is required to place it into a context that can be understood. And, then people need time to see how it works, refine the message, and build a framework or structure around it. The process is one of going from the unknown to the known and this is not easy. At first, we don’t really know all the ramifications and consequences that surround the revelation. These must be worked out.
In words that we have used before, this primordial revelation results in the creation of a model. We are not always sure about what this model does or should be applied to. Yes, there are some immediate applications of the revelation because the revelation generally provides an explanation for something we did not understand before. The recipient of the revelation had asked a question, implicitly or explicitly, and the revelation is, in some way, an answer to that question. We assume that the revelation must be quite rich if a community of faith is founded upon it. By rich we mean that we find many more applications of the revelation when we live with it for an extended period of time and we use the model on a regular basis. That is, we must, over time, find that the model or models that are derived from the revelation fit with experience; the world and the revelation, we find, ultimately are consistent with one another.
In other words, the community finds that as it continually renews the revelation in present experience, the model or models related to the revelation work. They provide relatively adequate predictions that can be used by the members of the community, as well as the community itself, to solve problems and make decisions that lead to the life that those in the community would like to live. The model or models used by the community ‘work’ in the sense that they produce desirable and sustainable results. The community comes to have ‘faith’ in the revelation or revelations it subscribes to.
A ‘classic’ or a ‘primordial’ revelation that does not achieve success in this way over an extended period of time will not survive. And, we observe in history, that communities are founded that survive for a period of time as the models used by the community are satisfactory for a ‘local’ or ‘regional’ situation, but do not possess a more universal message and so tend to fade as they come into competition with other communities whose revelation is broader and more robust. Thus, part of the relevance of the revelation, and the survival and growth of the community, depend upon the ability of the community’s model or models to expand or adapt to more and more universal conditions. That is, the model or models must allow the community to solve more and more difficult problems that apply in more and more different situations. This is what the community does as it renews itself in the ‘present experience.’ The primordial revelation is alive and does not, as Macquarrie writes, become ‘fossilized.’
This is how faith is built and grows. It is because of our action, our decision making. Action is, ultimately, the source of our perceptions and our general belief. More generally, a belief is warranted if there is sufficient experience that the model or models believed in can be relatively successful, either as seen in others, such as other members of our community, or as actually experienced by ourselves.
This is an important point for a couple of reasons. First, humans tend to focus just on current or short term outcomes. This response has been built into them because of the need to respond to immediate danger in order to act in a way that optimizes their chance for survival. However, as human beings evolved and came to live more and more in civilized communities reliance on an immediate response did not always result in the best outcomes over time. In this respect, the community helps the individual member of the community by showing that its models do produce favorable results. This is one of the fundamental reasons we belong to the community. But, the community also helps the individual member persist in the use of the models, even though the results may not turn out to be, in the short run, the outcomes that are most desired.
This emphasis on process allows the individual member of the community to move away from the concentration on short term results. The only way a belief can become warranted is that it must lead to the ‘expected results’ over the longer run. But, how long is ‘long term’? It is subjective and there needs to be some consideration of ‘balance’ concerning the tradeoff between staying with the model or quickly dispensing of the model to get a new one. We must accept the fact that our models are tentative. Still, we must not be too willing to get rid of a model too quickly. Our communities help us to make a reasonable decision about staying with a model.
A belief that is warranted is a belief that is justified. But, one belief may not be as strong as another belief. That is, beliefs are subject to varying degrees of belief. In some instances, we have a very high degree of belief in a model and consequently we may feel very confident in using that model. In this sense, the degree of belief influences how far we should act using a particular model. The probabilistic models that we use really are just projections of our degrees of belief; in this our models are but predictive instruments.
We must accept the fact that we don’t know everything and we will never know everything. This was the point of my post on January 19, 2008 titled, “What is Missing?” As a consequence of this we will never know the ‘truth’ about anything. Especially if everything is connected in some way to everything else even our ‘reductive’ science cannot provide us with knowledge of the ‘truth’. Creation is just too sophisticated and complex and the minds of human beings don’t have the processing power to model all of the world in order to be able discern what the ‘truth’ is. We do construct models to help us make the predictions we need to solve problems and make decisions. But our models are limited, our knowledge is bounded. They are tentative because we can’t know everything. Since we can’t know everything, our predictions can only be probabilistic. Faith in our models, therefore, is a necessary condition of our life and we develop more and more trust in our models as our belief becomes more warranted. That is the best we can hope for.
In the past two postings I have discussed the importance of community and the fact that we belong to communities that, in a sense, believe in the things that we believe in or believe in the things that we want to believe in. These communities represent how we would like to live, both within the community itself and in relationship with the world outside of the community. Today, the emphasis is not upon the founder or founders of the community, but in those that come later. Our emphasis is upon those that ‘repeat or re-enact‘ the community’s primordial revelation in their present activity so that the revelation is constantly renewed and alive.
The ‘classic’ or ‘primordial’ revelation of the community essentially creates a ‘possibility for life,’ a ‘worldview,’ a ‘hypothesis.’ The classic revelation presents something that must be and will be tested over time. Of course, it is not complete, in and of itself. It needs to be reflected on. Its meaning needs to be explored. Interpretation is required to place it into a context that can be understood. And, then people need time to see how it works, refine the message, and build a framework or structure around it. The process is one of going from the unknown to the known and this is not easy. At first, we don’t really know all the ramifications and consequences that surround the revelation. These must be worked out.
In words that we have used before, this primordial revelation results in the creation of a model. We are not always sure about what this model does or should be applied to. Yes, there are some immediate applications of the revelation because the revelation generally provides an explanation for something we did not understand before. The recipient of the revelation had asked a question, implicitly or explicitly, and the revelation is, in some way, an answer to that question. We assume that the revelation must be quite rich if a community of faith is founded upon it. By rich we mean that we find many more applications of the revelation when we live with it for an extended period of time and we use the model on a regular basis. That is, we must, over time, find that the model or models that are derived from the revelation fit with experience; the world and the revelation, we find, ultimately are consistent with one another.
In other words, the community finds that as it continually renews the revelation in present experience, the model or models related to the revelation work. They provide relatively adequate predictions that can be used by the members of the community, as well as the community itself, to solve problems and make decisions that lead to the life that those in the community would like to live. The model or models used by the community ‘work’ in the sense that they produce desirable and sustainable results. The community comes to have ‘faith’ in the revelation or revelations it subscribes to.
A ‘classic’ or a ‘primordial’ revelation that does not achieve success in this way over an extended period of time will not survive. And, we observe in history, that communities are founded that survive for a period of time as the models used by the community are satisfactory for a ‘local’ or ‘regional’ situation, but do not possess a more universal message and so tend to fade as they come into competition with other communities whose revelation is broader and more robust. Thus, part of the relevance of the revelation, and the survival and growth of the community, depend upon the ability of the community’s model or models to expand or adapt to more and more universal conditions. That is, the model or models must allow the community to solve more and more difficult problems that apply in more and more different situations. This is what the community does as it renews itself in the ‘present experience.’ The primordial revelation is alive and does not, as Macquarrie writes, become ‘fossilized.’
This is how faith is built and grows. It is because of our action, our decision making. Action is, ultimately, the source of our perceptions and our general belief. More generally, a belief is warranted if there is sufficient experience that the model or models believed in can be relatively successful, either as seen in others, such as other members of our community, or as actually experienced by ourselves.
This is an important point for a couple of reasons. First, humans tend to focus just on current or short term outcomes. This response has been built into them because of the need to respond to immediate danger in order to act in a way that optimizes their chance for survival. However, as human beings evolved and came to live more and more in civilized communities reliance on an immediate response did not always result in the best outcomes over time. In this respect, the community helps the individual member of the community by showing that its models do produce favorable results. This is one of the fundamental reasons we belong to the community. But, the community also helps the individual member persist in the use of the models, even though the results may not turn out to be, in the short run, the outcomes that are most desired.
This emphasis on process allows the individual member of the community to move away from the concentration on short term results. The only way a belief can become warranted is that it must lead to the ‘expected results’ over the longer run. But, how long is ‘long term’? It is subjective and there needs to be some consideration of ‘balance’ concerning the tradeoff between staying with the model or quickly dispensing of the model to get a new one. We must accept the fact that our models are tentative. Still, we must not be too willing to get rid of a model too quickly. Our communities help us to make a reasonable decision about staying with a model.
A belief that is warranted is a belief that is justified. But, one belief may not be as strong as another belief. That is, beliefs are subject to varying degrees of belief. In some instances, we have a very high degree of belief in a model and consequently we may feel very confident in using that model. In this sense, the degree of belief influences how far we should act using a particular model. The probabilistic models that we use really are just projections of our degrees of belief; in this our models are but predictive instruments.
We must accept the fact that we don’t know everything and we will never know everything. This was the point of my post on January 19, 2008 titled, “What is Missing?” As a consequence of this we will never know the ‘truth’ about anything. Especially if everything is connected in some way to everything else even our ‘reductive’ science cannot provide us with knowledge of the ‘truth’. Creation is just too sophisticated and complex and the minds of human beings don’t have the processing power to model all of the world in order to be able discern what the ‘truth’ is. We do construct models to help us make the predictions we need to solve problems and make decisions. But our models are limited, our knowledge is bounded. They are tentative because we can’t know everything. Since we can’t know everything, our predictions can only be probabilistic. Faith in our models, therefore, is a necessary condition of our life and we develop more and more trust in our models as our belief becomes more warranted. That is the best we can hope for.
Friday, March 7, 2008
The Communities We Belong To
Pascal argued that the possibility for belief rested with the community or communities that we join. His discussion related especially to the possibility for one to believe in God and the community he referenced was the Christian community. However, his argument for belief can apply to any potential belief that we might want to consider and the ‘community’ that supports and promotes that belief. The community can be explicit or implicit; vague, ill-defined and loosely organized; or controlled, highly-delineated, and tightly organized; or any of a number of different ways of existing. It could be an economic class, say the bourgeoisie, middle-class, or capitalist, a philosophical community, say modern, post-modern, or existential, or a political movement, say liberal, conservative, or socialist, and so on.
The important thing about ‘community’ is that it helps you define yourself by displaying how the people within this community live, what they believe in, and how they relate to the world outside the community. In this world of uncertainty where we operate with only incomplete information, we grow up in communities and this helps us to grow and to develop our problem solving skills because the community has models of the world that we can use to solve problems and make decisions. The community exists because the models used by the community have apparently been relatively successful, at least up until this time. That is, the community is still there because it has been able to survive using the models of the world that the community is based upon.
Not all communities, however, are improving their chances of survival. All communities exist because, at one time or another, their models did provide a means for those within the community to survive and perform satisfactorily relative to other communities. But, communities are in competition with one another and the more successful communities seem to thrive and grow at the expense of those whose models do not seem to work as well. So, we have some communities that are ‘advancing’ and others that are ‘in decline’. Those that are in decline are either attempting to modify their models so as to create more successful models of the same tradition, or, the declining community becomes very defensive and sticks with its existing models and turns inward, thereby exacerbating the decline.
Regardless, one chooses the communities one belongs to and in so choosing commits, on various levels, to the things that the community stands for. Some of these commitments become what Paul Tillich has defined as “Ultimate Concerns.” An Ultimate Concern is something a person gives especial allegiance to, something that dominates and influences all a person does. For example, God can be the Ultimate Concern. But, a political party may also be a person’s Ultimate Concern. A book, like the Bible, may become a person’s Ultimate Concern. Wealth or social standing may become the Ultimate Concern of a person. Or, a way of thinking may become an Ultimate Concern.
In this sense, the choice of community is a spiritual decision and this is something we are very interested in. The obvious concern, therefore, becomes whether or not the Ultimate Concern that a person chooses is really “Ultimate”. If the commitment is to something that is really Ultimate, then the person making the commitment can achieve some kind of peace of mind by seeking the Ultimate. Problems occur, however, if the commitment is made to something that is not really Ultimate. In these instances, the one committing does not achieve peace of mind because he or she is giving their allegiance to something that cannot fully satisfy them. That is, a commitment to something that is not truly Ultimate leaves one incomplete in a number of different possible ways. A commitment to something that is not truly Ultimate does not provide “the peace which passes all understanding.” In biblical terms the commitment is to an idol and the pursuit of this idol is idolatry.
How can one distinguish between a commitment to something that is Ultimate and the commitment to something that is not? I would like to argue that one major difference is that when one commits to something that is not Ultimate, one is committing to an outcome or to a series of outcomes. That is, one is basing ones commitments on the possibility of receiving something. The problem with putting the emphasis upon receiving something is that one can fall short of what one wants to receive; or, a person, not being satisfied, continually revises their expectations of what they want to receive, setting the standard higher and higher. In focusing on outcomes, a person is never satisfied; that person is always discontented and restless. This is not the way to peace of mind.
It seems to me that if a person is to focus on something that is truly Ultimate then that person will focus on a process and not on a specific outcome or outcomes. That is, if God is the Ultimate Concern, then one wants to focus on God and on what God does. And how can this be done? One definition of truly being with God is to be in unity with God. Jesus speaks of the fact that he and the Father (God) are one. Expanding this definition somewhat to be consistent with the teaching of the Christian Church, one can argue that one wants to be “in unity with God, with self, with others, and with creation.” That is, one would like to be ‘with’ all components of life and move together with them. Thus, for something to be truly an Ultimate Concern, it must bring people into a relationship with all of these elements so that the individual can claim that they are one with God and God’s creation.
There is no specific ‘outcome’ here for all these elements are always changing. Being in unity with each of them, therefore, requires a process for gaining and, hopefully, maintaining unity over time. The important thing to note is that what gains unity and then maintains unity will not always be the same. That is why ‘process’ is important because ‘outcome’ will necessarily vary!
This means, that when one makes a commitment to a community of belief one is making a commitment to learn and grow so as to maintain a unity with the community and with all the things that the community stands for. If the choice of community is too narrow, then things are left out of the commitment and one can never become complete or whole. But, most importantly, the commitment must be one to change with the community and keep in unity with the community over time and not just at one time in history.
This is where the concept of love comes into the picture. To me, love is not something that exists, but a process of commitment between the one that loves and that which is loved. Love is something that allows for change and growth and is not something that is fixed and limited. It is a relationship and not a constant. Love allows for the one who loves to change and for that which is loved to change. Love is related to knowing and understanding, to learning and adjusting. Only by accepting this does one have any possibility of unity or wholeness when considering someone or something else that one loves.
Returning to the relationship between belief and community one can now understand that the relationship is a dynamic one and not static, something that is forever new. One does not come to ‘believe’ in something; one comes to a ‘belief in’ someone or something and that belief is continually renewed over and over again by actively working to understand the loved one and one’s self and living through the process of commitment and love. This, I believe, it is the model that Jesus displayed to us in his life and is the model that the Christian community lives by. It is the model that Christians, everywhere, attempt to exemplify in their own lives.
The apostle Paul writes in his first letter to the Corinthians 13: 4-8: “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Lover never ends.” What does this specifically mean? I don’t know…it is a process and not an outcome.
The important thing about ‘community’ is that it helps you define yourself by displaying how the people within this community live, what they believe in, and how they relate to the world outside the community. In this world of uncertainty where we operate with only incomplete information, we grow up in communities and this helps us to grow and to develop our problem solving skills because the community has models of the world that we can use to solve problems and make decisions. The community exists because the models used by the community have apparently been relatively successful, at least up until this time. That is, the community is still there because it has been able to survive using the models of the world that the community is based upon.
Not all communities, however, are improving their chances of survival. All communities exist because, at one time or another, their models did provide a means for those within the community to survive and perform satisfactorily relative to other communities. But, communities are in competition with one another and the more successful communities seem to thrive and grow at the expense of those whose models do not seem to work as well. So, we have some communities that are ‘advancing’ and others that are ‘in decline’. Those that are in decline are either attempting to modify their models so as to create more successful models of the same tradition, or, the declining community becomes very defensive and sticks with its existing models and turns inward, thereby exacerbating the decline.
Regardless, one chooses the communities one belongs to and in so choosing commits, on various levels, to the things that the community stands for. Some of these commitments become what Paul Tillich has defined as “Ultimate Concerns.” An Ultimate Concern is something a person gives especial allegiance to, something that dominates and influences all a person does. For example, God can be the Ultimate Concern. But, a political party may also be a person’s Ultimate Concern. A book, like the Bible, may become a person’s Ultimate Concern. Wealth or social standing may become the Ultimate Concern of a person. Or, a way of thinking may become an Ultimate Concern.
In this sense, the choice of community is a spiritual decision and this is something we are very interested in. The obvious concern, therefore, becomes whether or not the Ultimate Concern that a person chooses is really “Ultimate”. If the commitment is to something that is really Ultimate, then the person making the commitment can achieve some kind of peace of mind by seeking the Ultimate. Problems occur, however, if the commitment is made to something that is not really Ultimate. In these instances, the one committing does not achieve peace of mind because he or she is giving their allegiance to something that cannot fully satisfy them. That is, a commitment to something that is not truly Ultimate leaves one incomplete in a number of different possible ways. A commitment to something that is not truly Ultimate does not provide “the peace which passes all understanding.” In biblical terms the commitment is to an idol and the pursuit of this idol is idolatry.
How can one distinguish between a commitment to something that is Ultimate and the commitment to something that is not? I would like to argue that one major difference is that when one commits to something that is not Ultimate, one is committing to an outcome or to a series of outcomes. That is, one is basing ones commitments on the possibility of receiving something. The problem with putting the emphasis upon receiving something is that one can fall short of what one wants to receive; or, a person, not being satisfied, continually revises their expectations of what they want to receive, setting the standard higher and higher. In focusing on outcomes, a person is never satisfied; that person is always discontented and restless. This is not the way to peace of mind.
It seems to me that if a person is to focus on something that is truly Ultimate then that person will focus on a process and not on a specific outcome or outcomes. That is, if God is the Ultimate Concern, then one wants to focus on God and on what God does. And how can this be done? One definition of truly being with God is to be in unity with God. Jesus speaks of the fact that he and the Father (God) are one. Expanding this definition somewhat to be consistent with the teaching of the Christian Church, one can argue that one wants to be “in unity with God, with self, with others, and with creation.” That is, one would like to be ‘with’ all components of life and move together with them. Thus, for something to be truly an Ultimate Concern, it must bring people into a relationship with all of these elements so that the individual can claim that they are one with God and God’s creation.
There is no specific ‘outcome’ here for all these elements are always changing. Being in unity with each of them, therefore, requires a process for gaining and, hopefully, maintaining unity over time. The important thing to note is that what gains unity and then maintains unity will not always be the same. That is why ‘process’ is important because ‘outcome’ will necessarily vary!
This means, that when one makes a commitment to a community of belief one is making a commitment to learn and grow so as to maintain a unity with the community and with all the things that the community stands for. If the choice of community is too narrow, then things are left out of the commitment and one can never become complete or whole. But, most importantly, the commitment must be one to change with the community and keep in unity with the community over time and not just at one time in history.
This is where the concept of love comes into the picture. To me, love is not something that exists, but a process of commitment between the one that loves and that which is loved. Love is something that allows for change and growth and is not something that is fixed and limited. It is a relationship and not a constant. Love allows for the one who loves to change and for that which is loved to change. Love is related to knowing and understanding, to learning and adjusting. Only by accepting this does one have any possibility of unity or wholeness when considering someone or something else that one loves.
Returning to the relationship between belief and community one can now understand that the relationship is a dynamic one and not static, something that is forever new. One does not come to ‘believe’ in something; one comes to a ‘belief in’ someone or something and that belief is continually renewed over and over again by actively working to understand the loved one and one’s self and living through the process of commitment and love. This, I believe, it is the model that Jesus displayed to us in his life and is the model that the Christian community lives by. It is the model that Christians, everywhere, attempt to exemplify in their own lives.
The apostle Paul writes in his first letter to the Corinthians 13: 4-8: “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Lover never ends.” What does this specifically mean? I don’t know…it is a process and not an outcome.
Friday, February 29, 2008
The Lack of Certainty
Human beings are problem solvers. I have argued, however, that when humans make decisions they never have all the information they need in order to know for certain what outcome will result from the action they take. That is, they must make decisions where “something is missing” from the picture they are observing. (See “What is Missing?” posted on February 1, 2008.) They must solve their problem or make their decision based upon incomplete information.
The assumption here is that if a person facing a problem had complete information about the decision he/she faced there would really be no problem making a decision for the appropriate decision would be obvious. There would only be one ‘best’ decision. So, if people had complete information pertaining to every decision they had to make thereby making each decision obvious, the world would be deterministic for everything would have already been determined.
If a person does not have complete information, the decision that needs to be made is not obvious. The problem solver, therefore, is confronted with at least several possible outcomes from any solution that might be decided upon. We can say that the outcome of the decision is uncertain. Since human beings do not have complete information about anything, we can say that all of their decisions are made under conditions of uncertainty.
One model of the process of problem solving/decision making under uncertainty is as follows. First, for a given solution or action, the decision maker must state all of the possible outcomes that could result from that solution/action. Then the decision maker must determine how likely it is for each possible outcome to occur. Here the term ‘probability’ is introduced for what the decision maker must do is assign, subjectively, the likelihood that an outcome will happen relative to the likelihood that all the other outcomes might happen. Thus, the decision maker could argue that in two out of four days, it will be sunny; in one out of four days it will be cloudy but it will not rain; and in one out of four days it will rain. These assignments are subjective because they represent ‘the degree of belief’ that the individual has concerning the likelihood of each possible outcome occurring. The decision maker must do this kind of analysis for all the possible solutions/actions that he/she is considering concerning the problem under review. The general decision rule is to choose the solution/action that provides the problem solver with the ‘best’ expected outcome from all the solutions/actions considered.
In our previous post, it was argued that the world is sufficiently ordered so that human beings can solve problems in ways that contribute to the survival and evolution of their species. That is, humans can build models to predict outcomes that contributed to their welfare. We can extend this argument one step further: the world is sufficiently ordered so that human beings can build models that produce probabilistic predictions so that they can survive and evolve.
Working in a world of uncertainty means that people are not going to find the correct solutions or make the right decisions every time they have to produce a solution or make a decision. Because of this, individuals really need to focus on the process of problem solving or decision making rather than upon just a specific outcome at a particular time. In other words, a person needs a methodology of problem solving that is used and refined over and over again. An individual also needs to internalize the use of a probabilistic approach. Human beings crave certainty and even when using a probabilistic approach they tend to use too narrow a range of possible outcomes in their problem solving. Humans must accept the fact that they don’t have complete information and learn to be as comfortable as possible knowing that this is how life is.
The problem solver must also accept the fact that they cannot judge the results of a probabilistic system over the short term because in the short run one can always be overwhelmed by the randomness that seems to be present in the world. That is because we, as humans, know so little about the world, it can seem, at times, to be very chaotic. It has been argued that to find order we must really search for it because it is not altogether obvious. (See post of February 8, 2008, “On ‘On Looking into the Abyss.”) So, human beings must find systems that seem to work and stick with them over time. Again, the process is crucial, not a specific outcome.
Belonging to a community can play a very important role in the models one chooses and in the persistence with which one sticks with these models. For example, belonging to a church implies that you spend time with other people who roughly believe the same things that you do. This is important for a community like this has models that ‘work’ (if they don’t work the community would disappear) and that provides a support system to help people through those times when the models don’t seem to be working. Belonging to such a community also helps one to ‘believe’ in what lies behind the models.
In this respect we can examine the wager attributed to Blaise Pascal. Ian Hacking has argued that this wager should be expressed as follows: “As Pascal sees it, you either act with complete indifference to God, or you act in a way that you will, in due course, believe in his existence and his edicts….One cannot decide to believe in God. One can decide to act so that one will very probably come to believe in God. Pascal call that the wager that God is. To wager that He is not is to stop bothering about such things.” (“The Emergence of Probability,” Second Edition, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006) p. 66) In other words, a person bets on the existence of God by joining a church, thereby putting themselves in a position where it is possible for them to believe. By living their life within that community they are more likely to believe in God and in the models of the church than if they were not a member of such a community.
This is an entirely different picture of the commitment one makes to God than is presented by some existentialist thinkers. The image I had of this commitment, coming from the period of time when I was caught up in the existential way of thinking, was of a person standing on a totally barren hilltop at night with thousands of stars shining in the sky. This isolated, alienated person had to make a decision, had to decide all by himself whether or not he believed in God. It is his existential moment. Once this individual makes a choice, then he must live out that existence every day…the choice was his and his alone…it was his selection of being.
The action words, however, are ‘isolated’ and ‘alienated.’ The existent had to do it all by himself. No one else could choose for him. No one could live for him. But, this image does not work if one has internalized a probabilistic approach to the world. There is no process here. There is no methodology to work with. There is no trying and testing of the system. There is no support for the ‘down’ times. The focus is on the Abyss and not on the order that exists within creation.
Pascal argues that the individual needs to pick a way of life that one would like to live. But, this requires other individuals that are living the life that one would like to emulate. Once a choice is made one puts oneself into a position where they are living with those they would like to emulate and in doing so they have role models and a support system that helps them to keep their eyes on the process and not on the randomness. In this way, faith is built and lived. And this is our topic for the next post.
The assumption here is that if a person facing a problem had complete information about the decision he/she faced there would really be no problem making a decision for the appropriate decision would be obvious. There would only be one ‘best’ decision. So, if people had complete information pertaining to every decision they had to make thereby making each decision obvious, the world would be deterministic for everything would have already been determined.
If a person does not have complete information, the decision that needs to be made is not obvious. The problem solver, therefore, is confronted with at least several possible outcomes from any solution that might be decided upon. We can say that the outcome of the decision is uncertain. Since human beings do not have complete information about anything, we can say that all of their decisions are made under conditions of uncertainty.
One model of the process of problem solving/decision making under uncertainty is as follows. First, for a given solution or action, the decision maker must state all of the possible outcomes that could result from that solution/action. Then the decision maker must determine how likely it is for each possible outcome to occur. Here the term ‘probability’ is introduced for what the decision maker must do is assign, subjectively, the likelihood that an outcome will happen relative to the likelihood that all the other outcomes might happen. Thus, the decision maker could argue that in two out of four days, it will be sunny; in one out of four days it will be cloudy but it will not rain; and in one out of four days it will rain. These assignments are subjective because they represent ‘the degree of belief’ that the individual has concerning the likelihood of each possible outcome occurring. The decision maker must do this kind of analysis for all the possible solutions/actions that he/she is considering concerning the problem under review. The general decision rule is to choose the solution/action that provides the problem solver with the ‘best’ expected outcome from all the solutions/actions considered.
In our previous post, it was argued that the world is sufficiently ordered so that human beings can solve problems in ways that contribute to the survival and evolution of their species. That is, humans can build models to predict outcomes that contributed to their welfare. We can extend this argument one step further: the world is sufficiently ordered so that human beings can build models that produce probabilistic predictions so that they can survive and evolve.
Working in a world of uncertainty means that people are not going to find the correct solutions or make the right decisions every time they have to produce a solution or make a decision. Because of this, individuals really need to focus on the process of problem solving or decision making rather than upon just a specific outcome at a particular time. In other words, a person needs a methodology of problem solving that is used and refined over and over again. An individual also needs to internalize the use of a probabilistic approach. Human beings crave certainty and even when using a probabilistic approach they tend to use too narrow a range of possible outcomes in their problem solving. Humans must accept the fact that they don’t have complete information and learn to be as comfortable as possible knowing that this is how life is.
The problem solver must also accept the fact that they cannot judge the results of a probabilistic system over the short term because in the short run one can always be overwhelmed by the randomness that seems to be present in the world. That is because we, as humans, know so little about the world, it can seem, at times, to be very chaotic. It has been argued that to find order we must really search for it because it is not altogether obvious. (See post of February 8, 2008, “On ‘On Looking into the Abyss.”) So, human beings must find systems that seem to work and stick with them over time. Again, the process is crucial, not a specific outcome.
Belonging to a community can play a very important role in the models one chooses and in the persistence with which one sticks with these models. For example, belonging to a church implies that you spend time with other people who roughly believe the same things that you do. This is important for a community like this has models that ‘work’ (if they don’t work the community would disappear) and that provides a support system to help people through those times when the models don’t seem to be working. Belonging to such a community also helps one to ‘believe’ in what lies behind the models.
In this respect we can examine the wager attributed to Blaise Pascal. Ian Hacking has argued that this wager should be expressed as follows: “As Pascal sees it, you either act with complete indifference to God, or you act in a way that you will, in due course, believe in his existence and his edicts….One cannot decide to believe in God. One can decide to act so that one will very probably come to believe in God. Pascal call that the wager that God is. To wager that He is not is to stop bothering about such things.” (“The Emergence of Probability,” Second Edition, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006) p. 66) In other words, a person bets on the existence of God by joining a church, thereby putting themselves in a position where it is possible for them to believe. By living their life within that community they are more likely to believe in God and in the models of the church than if they were not a member of such a community.
This is an entirely different picture of the commitment one makes to God than is presented by some existentialist thinkers. The image I had of this commitment, coming from the period of time when I was caught up in the existential way of thinking, was of a person standing on a totally barren hilltop at night with thousands of stars shining in the sky. This isolated, alienated person had to make a decision, had to decide all by himself whether or not he believed in God. It is his existential moment. Once this individual makes a choice, then he must live out that existence every day…the choice was his and his alone…it was his selection of being.
The action words, however, are ‘isolated’ and ‘alienated.’ The existent had to do it all by himself. No one else could choose for him. No one could live for him. But, this image does not work if one has internalized a probabilistic approach to the world. There is no process here. There is no methodology to work with. There is no trying and testing of the system. There is no support for the ‘down’ times. The focus is on the Abyss and not on the order that exists within creation.
Pascal argues that the individual needs to pick a way of life that one would like to live. But, this requires other individuals that are living the life that one would like to emulate. Once a choice is made one puts oneself into a position where they are living with those they would like to emulate and in doing so they have role models and a support system that helps them to keep their eyes on the process and not on the randomness. In this way, faith is built and lived. And this is our topic for the next post.
Friday, February 22, 2008
Problem Solving: The Most Human of Activities
Why is it important that creation is sufficiently ordered? The answer given last week is that creation has to have enough order to it so that human beings can solve problems and make decisions. One must immediately expand this, however, to include all living things because without sufficient order to creation, life, at least in the forms we know it, would not be able to survive and even thrive. Human beings are not the exception. It is just that humans have taken this problem solving ability to the highest level of any species that is known.
If creation were chaotic so that nothing followed from anything else, even the simplest forms of life, whose whole existence is nothing more than a reaction to stimuli, could not survive because there could be no necessary consistency to their reactions. Living and surviving is based on developing responses to repeated patterns in the environment. Without being able to find patterns living things could not survive, let alone evolve into more advanced species. Order is needed so that living creatures can survive and grow, can have offspring and evolve.
This skill evolved many years ago and the ability to solve more and more difficult problems resulted in a species that was better able than others to survive and prosper. The Hominid species, in its present form, survived and has survived spectacularly. Investigators have identified about 20 hominid species that lived at various times and they have estimated that the total number of Hominid species peaked about 2 million years ago. Modern humans are the sole surviving representative of the hominid linage. (pages 52-3) [All references are to J. Wentzel Van Huyssteen, “Alone in the World: Human Uniqueness in Science and Theology,” The Gifford Lectures (Spring 2004), published b. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, MI, 2006.]
To survive a species must possess some talent(s) or skill(s) that help to account for its survival. The specific talent that seems to have contributed the most to this success of the human species is the ability it has to solve problems. This skill has allowed human beings to become self reflective in that they are the only species to be able to experience guilt, shame, and pride. They are able to anticipate events far into the future. They can invent metaphors and analogies. They speak a language with a grammar. And, they reason about hypothetical circumstances. These are talents that make humans unique among all species. (page 36)
Furthermore, human communities formed and transmitted these talents through cultural evolution that brought more complex and sophisticated cultures into being. Change was always occurring and new structures constantly emerged. (page 38) Special attention is given to the period ranging from 45,000 to 35,000 years ago. It seems that during this time period, human consciousness and intelligence emerged, and along with it, creative, artistic, and religious imaginations. This is referred to as the Upper Paleolithic revolution, the cultural ‘big bang’. From this period the rest, as they say, is history. (pages 64 and 66)
But, what is problem solving? Let’s take the very simple example of a man walking in the woods after there has been a fresh snowfall. The man sees an area of snow where it appears as if someone or something has been walking. The tracks in the snow, however, do not appear to be made by a human being because the pattern is not one of a two-footed mammal walking upright, but of a four-footed beast ambling through the snow with the stomach dragging in the snow from time-to-time. Could it have been a deer? No, the man concludes that the tracks have been made by a bear. He removes himself from the area.
The process here is that the human being observes something…the snow has been disturbed. Furthermore, the disturbance seems to be in the pattern of tracks that a living thing might have caused. The man instinctively finds a model that could apply to this situation. The model must be able to make some predictions as to what kind of living thing would have created the specific tracks that are observed. The tracks could have been made by a human being. The tracks could have been made by a deer. The tracks could have been made by a bear. Focusing on the specific tracks that he observes, he assigns probabilities as to the likelihood of each of the possible causes. He decides that the most likely creature that could have produced these tracks is a bear and bears attack human beings…so…he makes the decision to leave the area.
Arguably, this example describes the problem solving process, one that results in a decision. Simplifying the process, the man observed some information (the disturbance of the snow), he selects a model that seemed to be appropriate to the situation, he made some forecasts, he applied probabilities to the possible outcomes, and then he made a decision based on the likelihood of each possible action he could take given the expected outcomes.
What are the crucial elements in this process that are specifically tied to human problem solving and decision making? Humans can invent ‘metaphors and analogies’ or models, they can deal with ‘hypothetical circumstances’ like the existence of different types of causes and different possible actions that can be taken, and they ‘anticipate’ or predict the future. Furthermore, human beings can do this without complete knowledge of the specific situation they face! That is, creation is sufficiently ordered so that they can make relatively adequate decisions without knowing the whole story. They can act even though they know that ‘something is missing’. (See posting of February 1, 2008, “What is Missing?”)
For now, two comments need to be made about the models that a problem solver uses. Since the problem solver uses models to make forecasts of outcomes upon which his/her decisions are based, the models must be grounded in their ability to perform. That is, a model must help an individual make good decisions. David Tracy writes that, for a given situation, a model must be relatively adequate which means that it must be logically consistent and must be able to forecast as least as well as any other logically consistent model used in a situation like the one being considered. Problem solving/decision making is not just an intellectual exercise. Actions are taken and actions have consequences. The objective is to make better and better decisions and solve more and more difficult problems.
The second comment relates to the structure of the model that the problem solver uses. When we use the term model we most often think of logically formal models or mathematical models. But, formal or mathematical models are adequate only for a limited number of situations, usually situations where only a few causative factors are relevant and the relationship between the relevant factors is fairly clear. But, the vast majority of situations faced by human beings are not of this kind. Many of them contain far too many potentially causative factors for the individual to mentally process and use and the relationships between the relative factors tend to be very complex and uncertain. Human beings have developed many different ways to model relationships given these vague and ambiguous situations. They use stories and narratives, fables and proverbs, rules of thumb and superstitions, to just name a few. In using their abilities to abstract from reality, humans build models of all sorts to assist them to solve the problems they face from those pertaining to daily life, to building organizational structures, to science, to discussing mysteries, to religion…to everything that concerns them.
If creation were chaotic so that nothing followed from anything else, even the simplest forms of life, whose whole existence is nothing more than a reaction to stimuli, could not survive because there could be no necessary consistency to their reactions. Living and surviving is based on developing responses to repeated patterns in the environment. Without being able to find patterns living things could not survive, let alone evolve into more advanced species. Order is needed so that living creatures can survive and grow, can have offspring and evolve.
This skill evolved many years ago and the ability to solve more and more difficult problems resulted in a species that was better able than others to survive and prosper. The Hominid species, in its present form, survived and has survived spectacularly. Investigators have identified about 20 hominid species that lived at various times and they have estimated that the total number of Hominid species peaked about 2 million years ago. Modern humans are the sole surviving representative of the hominid linage. (pages 52-3) [All references are to J. Wentzel Van Huyssteen, “Alone in the World: Human Uniqueness in Science and Theology,” The Gifford Lectures (Spring 2004), published b. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, MI, 2006.]
To survive a species must possess some talent(s) or skill(s) that help to account for its survival. The specific talent that seems to have contributed the most to this success of the human species is the ability it has to solve problems. This skill has allowed human beings to become self reflective in that they are the only species to be able to experience guilt, shame, and pride. They are able to anticipate events far into the future. They can invent metaphors and analogies. They speak a language with a grammar. And, they reason about hypothetical circumstances. These are talents that make humans unique among all species. (page 36)
Furthermore, human communities formed and transmitted these talents through cultural evolution that brought more complex and sophisticated cultures into being. Change was always occurring and new structures constantly emerged. (page 38) Special attention is given to the period ranging from 45,000 to 35,000 years ago. It seems that during this time period, human consciousness and intelligence emerged, and along with it, creative, artistic, and religious imaginations. This is referred to as the Upper Paleolithic revolution, the cultural ‘big bang’. From this period the rest, as they say, is history. (pages 64 and 66)
But, what is problem solving? Let’s take the very simple example of a man walking in the woods after there has been a fresh snowfall. The man sees an area of snow where it appears as if someone or something has been walking. The tracks in the snow, however, do not appear to be made by a human being because the pattern is not one of a two-footed mammal walking upright, but of a four-footed beast ambling through the snow with the stomach dragging in the snow from time-to-time. Could it have been a deer? No, the man concludes that the tracks have been made by a bear. He removes himself from the area.
The process here is that the human being observes something…the snow has been disturbed. Furthermore, the disturbance seems to be in the pattern of tracks that a living thing might have caused. The man instinctively finds a model that could apply to this situation. The model must be able to make some predictions as to what kind of living thing would have created the specific tracks that are observed. The tracks could have been made by a human being. The tracks could have been made by a deer. The tracks could have been made by a bear. Focusing on the specific tracks that he observes, he assigns probabilities as to the likelihood of each of the possible causes. He decides that the most likely creature that could have produced these tracks is a bear and bears attack human beings…so…he makes the decision to leave the area.
Arguably, this example describes the problem solving process, one that results in a decision. Simplifying the process, the man observed some information (the disturbance of the snow), he selects a model that seemed to be appropriate to the situation, he made some forecasts, he applied probabilities to the possible outcomes, and then he made a decision based on the likelihood of each possible action he could take given the expected outcomes.
What are the crucial elements in this process that are specifically tied to human problem solving and decision making? Humans can invent ‘metaphors and analogies’ or models, they can deal with ‘hypothetical circumstances’ like the existence of different types of causes and different possible actions that can be taken, and they ‘anticipate’ or predict the future. Furthermore, human beings can do this without complete knowledge of the specific situation they face! That is, creation is sufficiently ordered so that they can make relatively adequate decisions without knowing the whole story. They can act even though they know that ‘something is missing’. (See posting of February 1, 2008, “What is Missing?”)
For now, two comments need to be made about the models that a problem solver uses. Since the problem solver uses models to make forecasts of outcomes upon which his/her decisions are based, the models must be grounded in their ability to perform. That is, a model must help an individual make good decisions. David Tracy writes that, for a given situation, a model must be relatively adequate which means that it must be logically consistent and must be able to forecast as least as well as any other logically consistent model used in a situation like the one being considered. Problem solving/decision making is not just an intellectual exercise. Actions are taken and actions have consequences. The objective is to make better and better decisions and solve more and more difficult problems.
The second comment relates to the structure of the model that the problem solver uses. When we use the term model we most often think of logically formal models or mathematical models. But, formal or mathematical models are adequate only for a limited number of situations, usually situations where only a few causative factors are relevant and the relationship between the relevant factors is fairly clear. But, the vast majority of situations faced by human beings are not of this kind. Many of them contain far too many potentially causative factors for the individual to mentally process and use and the relationships between the relative factors tend to be very complex and uncertain. Human beings have developed many different ways to model relationships given these vague and ambiguous situations. They use stories and narratives, fables and proverbs, rules of thumb and superstitions, to just name a few. In using their abilities to abstract from reality, humans build models of all sorts to assist them to solve the problems they face from those pertaining to daily life, to building organizational structures, to science, to discussing mysteries, to religion…to everything that concerns them.
Friday, February 15, 2008
Sufficient Order
Why is there apparent order to creation rather than chaos? This seems to be a corollary to the famous question Ludwig Wittgenstein ask: “Why is there something, rather than nothing?” In the February 8 post, I ended up talking about order but all that was said is that, by looking for order in creation, we can find order, although it is not always easy to do. Finding order in creation is important for two reasons. First, as discussed in that earlier post, the apparent absence of order can be disturbing, but it can also be interesting and can lead to a fascination with the Abyss. Second, finding order is necessary to be able to problem solve and this is the thing that human beings do best. This will be discussed in the next post.
So, we look for order…and we find order. Not an all encompassing order because we human beings are incapable of finding any all encompassing order. We do not have the computing skills to collect, process, store, or use with feedback all the information that we need. We are bounded, rationally. Thus, we are always working with an amount of information that is (often far) less than what we need in order to perceive an all encompassing order. Humans do observe or identify sufficient order to make decisions and solve more and more difficult problems. And, this has allowed them to evolve and progress from a very primitive stage of development to the situation they now find themselves occupying.
We cannot ascertain how early in their history human beings recognized order, whether implicitly or explicitly. The recognition had to have been there, since order allows for practical problem solving and so is beneficial to the survival of the species. The appearance of a lack of order leads to uncertainty and anxiety and requires another kind of problem solving if one is not to be drawn into the Abyss. A response to the problem solving effort of human beings within the context of no apparent order can be religious in nature. (We will discuss this aspect of human development in the February 29 posting.) The fact that order is not obvious in all situations leads to a constant tension between direct problem solving and the kind of problem solving needed to deal with those situations in which order seems to be absent. It is a tension that has never been resolved, even up to this day.
A belief in order is important to us as human beings and it needs to be a part of our communal belief systems in order for cultures to thrive or survive. Unless a society can adequately solve problems and go on to solve more and more difficult problems, it will either decay or be surpassed by other cultures or societies that are better at solving problems. So, I would argue that we need to have in our world view some belief (implicitly or explicitly) that there is order in the world and that we are a part of that order.
The Jewish/Christian tradition contains a belief that creation is ordered; and this belief is presented at the very beginning of its “book”. What do we read in the first chapter of the first book in the Bible? We read an imaginative rendering of the creation of the earth…and it is a very ordered rendering. The world was created, we are told, in a set amount of time and in a specific order. There is nothing haphazard or chaotic in this creation…it is very structured. And, note, this world was created ‘out of the chaos.’ That is, the distinction is made between what was created and the chaos, and it can be concluded from this that creation, the world, is not, at its foundation, chaotic!
Note also that the rendering starts out with the words, “In the beginning, God…” This is important because it shows that to the author(s), the existence of God is an assumption…God’s existence does not need to be proved. God is right there from the very beginning of the story. This narrative then tells us, right up front, that there is a God, that this God created the world we live in, and that the world is ordered. And, we are also told that God looked at this creation and called it “good” which implies that the creation was as God wanted it.
Now, since creation is ordered, human beings can be held accountable for their decisions. That is, they are responsible for what they do. Why is this? Well, if you don’t have order and everything is chaotic then people can have no idea what the results of their actions will be and hence no one can say that they are responsible for what they do. To be held accountable, people must be able to forecast what might result from the actions they take. Only by forecasting the possible outcomes of their actions can they make an informed decision as to what they should do in a specific situation. In this respect, there must be sufficient order in the world for cause-and-effect to work. Only if there is order can there be a cause for every effect.
But, a new issue has been introduced into the argument. I intentionally introduced the phrase ‘possible outcomes.’ We are back to the human condition that was mentioned in the second paragraph above. Human brains have limited computing power. That is, human decision making is bounded because human beings never have all of the information they need to make a decision. In other words, they do not have complete information pertaining to the full cause-and-effect relationships that exist in any specific situation. They must make decisions in the face of uncertainty of outcomes. We don’t know exactly what outcome will occur given a specific action because so many other things that we can’t identify might impact the result of our decision. A forecast of possible outcomes can only be probabilistic.
Does the bible story include any consideration of this aspect of the human condition? Yes, it does. We must move into the story of the Garden of Eden to pick up this aspect of human existence. God indicates that there are certain trees in the Garden from which the human beings are not allowed to eat. One of these trees is called the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Some interpreters argue that this tree is really the Tree of the Knowledge of Everything, because if one knows everything there is to know about Good and Evil, then one knows everything. And, why doesn’t God want human beings to know everything? We are told that if human beings know everything then they would be like god! The further implication of this is that God is the only one who knows everything…that is one thing that makes God, God. Thus, human beings are faced with having to live their lives with only incomplete information and this, of course, means that all decision making is made under conditions of uncertainty.
Therefore, we see at the very beginning of the foundational literature of the Jewish/Christian Bible the following beliefs: God exists; there is order in God’s creation; this order means that human beings can be held accountable for their actions; and human beings do not have all the information they need when making a decision so that decisions have to be made in the face of uncertainty. This last belief does not relieve human beings from the responsibility for the decisions that they make. This is because there is sufficient order in creation so that humans are expected to make the ‘best’ decision that they can make most of the time. We will, of course, come back to this point again!
We cannot leave this story line without bringing up one more aspect of human decision making: human beings do make decisions that are not always in their best interest. This raises the question as to whether or not there might exist something either within the individual human or within creation that distracts humans from making the ‘best’ decisions. We are told that Eve (the first woman) was confronted by a serpent. She was persuaded by the serpent to eat a certain apple, a fruit that God had told the humans that they would die if they ate of it. But, the serpent also told Eve that God did not really mean that they would die if they ate of the apple and he was right! God did not mean that they would die physically…only that they would die in a spiritual sense. This opens the door to the possibility that there might exist outside influences that distract individuals so that they make decisions that are not in their best interest. These influences might be called serpents, the devil, Satan, or something else. We will have to hold the discussion of this topic till later.
So, we look for order…and we find order. Not an all encompassing order because we human beings are incapable of finding any all encompassing order. We do not have the computing skills to collect, process, store, or use with feedback all the information that we need. We are bounded, rationally. Thus, we are always working with an amount of information that is (often far) less than what we need in order to perceive an all encompassing order. Humans do observe or identify sufficient order to make decisions and solve more and more difficult problems. And, this has allowed them to evolve and progress from a very primitive stage of development to the situation they now find themselves occupying.
We cannot ascertain how early in their history human beings recognized order, whether implicitly or explicitly. The recognition had to have been there, since order allows for practical problem solving and so is beneficial to the survival of the species. The appearance of a lack of order leads to uncertainty and anxiety and requires another kind of problem solving if one is not to be drawn into the Abyss. A response to the problem solving effort of human beings within the context of no apparent order can be religious in nature. (We will discuss this aspect of human development in the February 29 posting.) The fact that order is not obvious in all situations leads to a constant tension between direct problem solving and the kind of problem solving needed to deal with those situations in which order seems to be absent. It is a tension that has never been resolved, even up to this day.
A belief in order is important to us as human beings and it needs to be a part of our communal belief systems in order for cultures to thrive or survive. Unless a society can adequately solve problems and go on to solve more and more difficult problems, it will either decay or be surpassed by other cultures or societies that are better at solving problems. So, I would argue that we need to have in our world view some belief (implicitly or explicitly) that there is order in the world and that we are a part of that order.
The Jewish/Christian tradition contains a belief that creation is ordered; and this belief is presented at the very beginning of its “book”. What do we read in the first chapter of the first book in the Bible? We read an imaginative rendering of the creation of the earth…and it is a very ordered rendering. The world was created, we are told, in a set amount of time and in a specific order. There is nothing haphazard or chaotic in this creation…it is very structured. And, note, this world was created ‘out of the chaos.’ That is, the distinction is made between what was created and the chaos, and it can be concluded from this that creation, the world, is not, at its foundation, chaotic!
Note also that the rendering starts out with the words, “In the beginning, God…” This is important because it shows that to the author(s), the existence of God is an assumption…God’s existence does not need to be proved. God is right there from the very beginning of the story. This narrative then tells us, right up front, that there is a God, that this God created the world we live in, and that the world is ordered. And, we are also told that God looked at this creation and called it “good” which implies that the creation was as God wanted it.
Now, since creation is ordered, human beings can be held accountable for their decisions. That is, they are responsible for what they do. Why is this? Well, if you don’t have order and everything is chaotic then people can have no idea what the results of their actions will be and hence no one can say that they are responsible for what they do. To be held accountable, people must be able to forecast what might result from the actions they take. Only by forecasting the possible outcomes of their actions can they make an informed decision as to what they should do in a specific situation. In this respect, there must be sufficient order in the world for cause-and-effect to work. Only if there is order can there be a cause for every effect.
But, a new issue has been introduced into the argument. I intentionally introduced the phrase ‘possible outcomes.’ We are back to the human condition that was mentioned in the second paragraph above. Human brains have limited computing power. That is, human decision making is bounded because human beings never have all of the information they need to make a decision. In other words, they do not have complete information pertaining to the full cause-and-effect relationships that exist in any specific situation. They must make decisions in the face of uncertainty of outcomes. We don’t know exactly what outcome will occur given a specific action because so many other things that we can’t identify might impact the result of our decision. A forecast of possible outcomes can only be probabilistic.
Does the bible story include any consideration of this aspect of the human condition? Yes, it does. We must move into the story of the Garden of Eden to pick up this aspect of human existence. God indicates that there are certain trees in the Garden from which the human beings are not allowed to eat. One of these trees is called the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Some interpreters argue that this tree is really the Tree of the Knowledge of Everything, because if one knows everything there is to know about Good and Evil, then one knows everything. And, why doesn’t God want human beings to know everything? We are told that if human beings know everything then they would be like god! The further implication of this is that God is the only one who knows everything…that is one thing that makes God, God. Thus, human beings are faced with having to live their lives with only incomplete information and this, of course, means that all decision making is made under conditions of uncertainty.
Therefore, we see at the very beginning of the foundational literature of the Jewish/Christian Bible the following beliefs: God exists; there is order in God’s creation; this order means that human beings can be held accountable for their actions; and human beings do not have all the information they need when making a decision so that decisions have to be made in the face of uncertainty. This last belief does not relieve human beings from the responsibility for the decisions that they make. This is because there is sufficient order in creation so that humans are expected to make the ‘best’ decision that they can make most of the time. We will, of course, come back to this point again!
We cannot leave this story line without bringing up one more aspect of human decision making: human beings do make decisions that are not always in their best interest. This raises the question as to whether or not there might exist something either within the individual human or within creation that distracts humans from making the ‘best’ decisions. We are told that Eve (the first woman) was confronted by a serpent. She was persuaded by the serpent to eat a certain apple, a fruit that God had told the humans that they would die if they ate of it. But, the serpent also told Eve that God did not really mean that they would die if they ate of the apple and he was right! God did not mean that they would die physically…only that they would die in a spiritual sense. This opens the door to the possibility that there might exist outside influences that distract individuals so that they make decisions that are not in their best interest. These influences might be called serpents, the devil, Satan, or something else. We will have to hold the discussion of this topic till later.
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