Faith
and Irrationality; Kierkegaard
http://plato.stanford.edu/search/searcher.py?query=Kierkegaard
http://kingjbible.com/genesis/22.htm
1 And it came to
pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him,
Abraham: and he said, Behold, here I am. 2 And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest,
and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him
there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.
3 And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two
of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burnt
offering, and rose up, and went unto the place of which God had told him. 4
Then on the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes, and saw the place afar off. 5
And Abraham said unto his young men, Abide ye here with the ass; and I and the
lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you. 6 And Abraham took the
wood of the burnt offering, and laid it upon Isaac his son; and he took the
fire in his hand, and a knife; and they went both of them together. 7 And Isaac
spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father:
and he said, Here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire and the wood: but
where is the lamb for a burnt offering? 8 And Abraham said, My son, God will
provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering: so they went both of them
together.
9 And they came
to the place which God had told him of; and Abraham built an altar there, and
laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon
the wood. 10 And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay
his son. 11 And the angel of the LORD called unto him out of heaven, and said,
Abraham, Abraham: and he said, Here am I. 12 And he said, Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto
him: for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing
thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from
me. 13 And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold behind him a ram
caught in a thicket by his horns: and Abraham went and took the ram, and
offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son.
Until the time of Kierkegaard
philosophers pretty much presumes that we want/ ought to believe all and only
what is rational. (Anselm, Aquinas, Pascal, Clifford,
James, Kant, Advocates of the Problem of Evil)
In contrast, Soren
Kierkegaard (from Denmark) says belief in God is not, not cannot be rational,
but that doesn’t make it a bad thing.
- Religious
faith is not nor can it ever be a “rational” matter
- Kierkegaard
referred to himself as an anti‑philosopher,
- Brooded over
the nature of “faith;” performs a sort-of conceptual analysis.
The time and country he lived in a
largely Christian. They were complacent
in their religious belief; religious belief amounted to sort of a daily
passionless habit.
What is real faith about? Kierkegaard
claimed that complacent, thoughtless, routine is not real faith;
Since Abraham is known to the faithful
of the Abrahamic religions as the "Father of Faith" because had an
unique relationship with God, Kierkegaard examines the story of Abraham to
discover what “religious faith” is since those who use the word often point to
this story as illustrative. Keirkegaard is engaged in a sort of "conceptual
analysis" of "faith."
Story of Abraham
Abraham had son, Isaac whom he loved
deeply. How does Abraham interpret God's
request that Abraham take his son out and kill him? It is a mistake to think he merely had to
decide whether to do God’s will or not.
Rather, he had to decide what that “voice in the night” meant.
Various interpretations are open to
Abraham. He must choose to interpret and
that choice cannot be “rational” or based on evidence since it is the masking
of the choice which will determine WHAT the “evidence” is evidence of.
"Voice" in the night might
be evidence of:
1. God’s sincere desire?
2. God’s test of Abraham’s morality?
3. A demonic trick?
4. Abraham’s own insanity?
Abraham's choice (and only his choice)
determines what this voice is evidence of.
After his choice of interpretation he must
further decide how he will respond to the (newly created) evidence.
Kierkegaard is pointing out that,
contrary to what we might initially suppose, we do not base our choices on
evidence, but rather the other way around; we base evidence on choices. The voice is not evidence of anything until
it is given an interpretation. What
interpretation it is given is a free (undetermined) choice for which we are totally responsible. Further, we can get no rational assistance in
making these choices, but the most important things in our live rest on them.
Nothing is “reasonable” (or
unreasonable for that matter) until after one makes the choices.
This is why Kierkegaard is considered
the founder of Existentialism.
Existentialism – school of thought founded by Kierkegaard which
stresses individual personal choice and responsibility; major and minor decisions
made in life are your choices; free to choose whatever you will; complete
freedom but therefore total responsibility rest with the individual. They are matters of creative self-definition.
Further still, this is among the most
important choices of his life. Abraham's
world (his son, his relationship with God, his progeny) was riding on this
choice.
He must therefore make a Leap of Faith
Leap of Faith: a passionate commitment that one makes without regard
to reason, evidence or argument.
Why then is he a Christian? The only honest answer anyone can give is
because he chooses to be one- NOT because of supposed evidence for or
against.
Should you be a Christian?
Kierkegaard would ask, “Why are you
asking me?” You have to choose what you
will be; this is what makes it an “existential” choice. You create yourself through such leaps and
choices.
To further demonstrate the disconnect
between faith and reason, Kierkegaard notes that sometimes Christianity
requires the embracing of two things that are mutually impossible,
irrational. For instance, Abraham
believed that he would kill Isaac AND that through Isaac, Abraham would go on
to have many descendants.
Kierkegaard claims that religious
faith is of the same character as are any of the really important decisions we
make in life. They are not made on
evidence; they are choices. Religious
faith is a non‑rational commitment irrespective of evidence, argument, or
reason. We believe in God (or believe in
NO God) simply because we choose to; such beliefs can't be based on evidence;
what you are looking at doesn't have a meaning until after you make a
choice. (Note this is not unlike the
choice to live a moral or immoral life; this is not evidence based. We can always rationalize after the fact, but
the reality is that we simply choose to be who we choose to be.)
Kierkegaard says ‑ Religious
belief is a leap of faith; a passionate commitment that we make regardless of
evidence or argument; regardless of Theist or Atheist; choice precedes evidence;
choice makes evidence.
Finally, we must not imagine that once
an existential choice is made, it is over.
Each day requires we make ourselves anew. For Kierkegaard, the Christian life calls for
constant reaffirmation. Everyday it is a
struggle to be a Christian.
Alternatively, just because I did not cheat the last time I had an
opportunity does not mean that is the choice I am compelled to make today. Since every day we are free to define
ourselves, everyday we are compelled to answer for ourselves “Who am I?”
As illustrations of the sort of thing
he has in mind, consider tow cases; The
"Bloody Glove" in the O.J. Simpson murder case and the Shroud of
Turin.
In the O.J. Simpson murder case there
was a key bit of "evidence" was a pair of bloody gloves:
Bloody Gloves:
One dark,
cashmere-lined Aris Light leather glove, size extra
large, was found at the murder scene, another behind Simpson's guest house,
near where Brian "Kato'' Kaelin heard bumps in
the night. Mrs. Simpson bought Simpson two pair of such gloves in 1990. DNA
tests showed blood on glove found on Simpson's property appeared to contain
genetic markers of Simpson and both victims; a long strand of blond hair
similar to Ms. Simpson's also was found on that glove.
Prosecution:
Simpson lost the left glove at his ex-wife's home during the struggle and, in a
rush, inadvertently dropped the right glove while trying to hide it; explained
that evidence gloves didn't fit Simpson in a courtroom demonstration because
the gloves shrunk from being soaked in blood and Simpson had rubber gloves on
underneath.
Defense: glove
behind guest house was planted by Detective Mark Fuhrman, a racist cop trying
to frame Simpson; blood on glove may have been planted by police; gloated that
evidence gloves didn't fit; hair analysis isn't sophisticated enough to be
trusted.
What were the gloves
"evidence" of? Well, from a Kierkegaardian point of view- nothing until you choose to
believe. If you choose to believe he is innocent,
they are evidence of a corrupt police plant and frame job. If you choose to believe he is guilty, they
become evidence of his presence at the
seen and participation in the murder.
But again, it would be a mistake to assume the evidence determines what
it rational to believe; it is what you choose to believe that will determine
what "evidence" there is.
The Shroud of
The Shroud of
Turin is a linen cloth bearing the image of a man who appears to have sustained
wounds and to have died in a manner consistent with the story of the
crucifixion of Jesus. It is housed in
the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist in
In 1988, for the
first time, the Catholic Church permitted radiocarbon dating of the shroud by three independent teams of
scientists. Each concluded that that the
shroud was made during the Middle Ages, approximately 1300 years after Jesus
lived. Almost immediately, spokesmen on
behalf of the Roman Catholic Church acknowledged the results, acquiesced to the
judgement of science, expressed their disappointment
and pledged, nevertheless, the take care of the shroud as so many did find it
inspiriting nevertheless.
Sometime a later
a group of Protestant theologians and scientists issued their own
statement. They criticized what they
thought was an unnecessary and overly hasty acceptance of this scientific
evidence about the age of the shroud.
They argued that if there were a resurrection (as the Catholic Church
and other Christians are supposed to believe) and if there were at that time a
great release of electromagnetic radiation or the like, (as may seem plausible)
then we ought to expect that the radiocarbon dating process is give us the
wrong, much younger, date.
So, radiocarbon dating suggests that
the shroud is only approximately 700 year old.
What is that evidence of? Does it
prove that the shroud is a fake. Or does it prove that it is genuine and
further is evidence of the resurrection of Christ? Kierkegaard might claim, either. It depends on you. Both require your leap of faith.
Camus' Myth of Sisyphus (Taken
from my notes on suicide)
One reason some people think that
suicide is wrong is because the noble thing for human to do is to persevere,
even in the face of meaningless pointless suffering and struggle.
(Existentialism/ Camus Essay "Myth of Sisyphus")
Existentialists believe that we are
totally free in all are actions and that we are totally responsible for all our
actions. When you try to push your freedom off onto others, this bugs
existentialists. They refer it is as "Bad Faith." You are not living "authentically"
according the them. For example, when a
salesman convinces you to buy something overpriced and then you blame him when
you found a better deal later ("He talked me into it… etc.") ,
existentialists will remind you that you chose to listen to him and it’s your
own fault. You can try to pretend it
wasn’t your choice, but that's a lie.
Likewise, if I told my friends at the end of the evening that I has to
go because my wife was making me leave; this too is bad faith. The reality is that I am choosing to go
home. I am choosing to work for my boss,
I am choosing to remain alive. That
means I am the one responsible for all of that.
Not my wife, nor my boss nor my mother.
You get the picture.
Now, there are consequences, and you
may not like those consequences, but it was still your choice. Further, while
there are some things that are out of your control, such as your height, still
it is you who choose what these things mean to you. In a sense you do choose your height; it is
under your control. You assign the
meaning to these things and it is something you choose. There is a sense in
which you DO chose to be that height because chose what being that height
means. You live exactly the life you
choose to live. To be totally responsible
for everything in your life can seem quite burdensome. This is one of the reasons the Existentialist
speak of "Existential Angst."
Soren Kierkegaard comes to his
existentialism as a way to understand faith. He understands faith as a choice
someone makes. There is this unknown and we can respond to the unknown by
saying “God” or “not God”, but in either case we’re making a choice and in
either case it is a choice undetermined by evidence.
Later existentialists add to this view
another important component. There is no
God. Therefore, no one’s "keeping
score." And we’re NOT immortal. To fully understand what our life is we
must fully understand what our death is.
Our death is our total annihilation.
And all these choices for which we are
responsible and with which we struggle, don’t really matter in the long
run. We’ll eventually die and will
eventually be forgotten. Our lives only
have the significance that we attribute to them and for as long as we do it.
This sentiment goes back a long way…
Ecclesiastes 1
1 The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king
in Jerusalem.
2 Vanity of vanities, saith
the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.
3 What profit hath a man of all his labor which
he taketh under the sun?
4 One generation passeth
away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth
for ever.
5 The sun also ariseth,
and the sun goeth down, and hasteth
to his place where he arose.
6 The wind goeth
toward the south, and turneth about unto the north;
it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.
7 All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea
is not full: unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return
again.
8 All things are full of labor; man cannot
utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.
9 The thing that hath been, it is that which
shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no
new thing under the sun.
10 Is there any thing
whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time,
which was before us.
11 There is no remembrance of former things;
neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those
that shall come after.
Ecclesiastes 3
19 For that which befalleth
the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth,
so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so
that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity.
20 All go unto one place; all are of the dust,
and all turn to dust again.
William Shakespeare - To be, or not to
be (from Hamlet 3/1)
To be, or not to
be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis
nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and
arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms
against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing
end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a
sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and
the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir
to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep:
perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep
of death what dreams may come
When we have
shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us
pause: there's the respect
That makes
calamity of so long life;
For who would bear
the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's
wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of
despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of
office and the spurns
That patient merit
of the unworthy takes,
When he himself
might his quietus make
With a bare
bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat
under a weary life,
But that the dread
of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller
returns, puzzles the will
And makes us
rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others
that we know not of?
Thus conscience
does make cowards of us all;
And thus the
native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of
great pith and moment
With this regard
their currents turn awry,
And lose the name
of action. - Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia!
Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd.
Macbeth Act 5, scene 5, 19–28
To-morrow, and
to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this
petty pace from day to day,
To the last
syllable of recorded time;
And all our
yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty
death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a
walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and
frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard
no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot,
full of sound and fury,
Signifying
nothing.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, published in 1818
OZYMANDIAS
I met a traveller
from an antique land
Who said: Two vast
and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the
desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a
shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip,
and sneer of cold command
Tell that its
sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive,
stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that
mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the
pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works,
ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains.
Round the decay
Of that colossal
wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level
sands stretch far away.
There is a final component to modern
existentialism. The "Absurd." The absurd as I characterize it is this: even though we KNOW our choices are
meaningless and there is no reason to prefer A over B. we MUST
choose. We cannot avoid choice; we
cannot avoid our freedom. Even the
choice not to act is a choice. And choice
presumes rational preference, the very things that as Existentialists, we know
we cannot have.
Some people jumped the gun and thought well, then I should just kill myself, since there’s no point to my life. Albert Camus considered the merits of suicide in an influential existentialist essay, “The Myth of Sisyphus.” He points out that that is merely another meaningless choice. So, existentialists think we shouldn’t kill ourselves. Our lives may be full of pointless, arduous struggles, but the noble thing is to struggle on, even in the face of pointless struggle. It is what we make of ourselves (self-creation) in the struggle that is important. That is the source of our nobility and ending our lives ends the possibility to "be."
To illustrate his point, Camus retells
the story of Sisyphus.
Sisyphus was an ancient Greek
king. To test the love of his wife,
before Sisyphus died, he forbade her from burring his body. (The thinking being is that if she really loved
him, she could not obey this command.)
However, his wife did obey and Sisyphus, annoyed, asked for permission
to return to Corinth to yell at her. He
was granted permission only on the condition that he promise to return, which
he did promise. Once back on the upper
world though, he found he did not want to go back to the land of the dead. He refused though Hades sent several
massagers, Eventually he had to be
dragged back kicking and screaming to the underworld by Hermes. As a punishment for his disobedience and
hubris Sisyphus was compelled to roll a huge rock up a steep hill, but before
he could reach the top of the hill, the rock would always roll back down again,
forcing him to begin again. Now for the
Greeks, this was Hell. The be tied to
unending, meaningless struggled. To be
completed to labor even when one knows that one's labor will amount to nothing.
But to Camus, Sisyphus is our hero and
emblematic of the humans condition. We
are all tied to arduous struggle, meaningless choices from which we cannot
escape. And Why? What was Sisyphus' crime? To be.
To live. But if this is the price
of existence says Camus, then it is worth it.
For our nobility arises in what we make of ourselves in the
struggle. The struggle with the absurd
is the source of our dignity and result of our freedom. We must imagine Sisyphus happy, he concludes,
for "The struggle towards the heights itself is enough to fill a man's
heart."