My Grand Apologetics Project 3c-f

See these past posts:

http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2012/12/my-grand-apologetics-project-part-1.html?m=1

http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2012/12/my-grand-apologetics-project-part-2.html?m=1

http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2012/12/my-grand-apologetics-project-part-2-cont.html?m=1

http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2012/12/my-grand-apologetics-project-part-3-a.html

http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2013/01/my-grand-apologetics-project-part-3b.html?m=1

c. The Importance Of The Moral

Most people are familiar with attempts to justify belief in God using morality. Such arguments begin with the (not universally accepted) fact of objective morality. Then it is suggested that to make sense of this objective morality, it becomes necessary to posit God. But beyond the fact of the moral is our experience of it. And as elsewhere in this evaluation, this is where I want to start.

The big issue I want bring up here is the seeming importance of the moral life. Whenever we fail to do the right thing, we are naturally afflicted with guilt, and guilt is a regret of a different order than other sorts. If I miss an important monetary opportunity, it might bother me, even for rest of my life. But this kind of regret is nothing compared to the kind of loss one feels when, say, betrays a serious trust. The feeling of loss is real. And this is true even when no physical consequences result. 

Why isn't morality just one concern among many? Why do we feel like it is naturally the top priority in our lives? And that is just what we take it to mean to BE a good person...to make right and wrong the center of our concerns in life. Just as creative risk-taking makes you feel like the whole world is on the adventure of life with you, so guilt makes you feel like the whole world sees and judges what you do. Moral violations feel like a loss of something of ultimate significance. Now, we know that guilt can be escaped, that this experience doesn't stick with us no matter what. Such an escape is only possible by giving up the moral rule that was the source of the original experience. So long as a moral truth is held to, it's violation will seem to us of great import. Simply put, we feel like the good has supreme import, even in a world that encourages to put other concerns first. 

d. Hope

This is the most important experience we will discuss here, as in many ways it will help tie everything together in the next section. A life without hope is a life all but lost. One of the marks of clinical depression is a sense of hopelessness. Humans are future-attenuated creatures. We are shaped by our past, we live in the present, but our vision of our future is the real key to who we are. All the other experiences spoken of here remain incomplete without a sense of hope.

We cannot see life as adventure without seeing some goal to which we work. Interconnectedness with all things can bring only pain if the ultimate destiny of life is meaningless void. Laughter and play can bring no joy if they are placed in the context of a life that looks forward to nothing, for one cannot fully enter into the experiences if one is dominated by the sense that they are 'nothing but' lies. Moral action loses its sense of import if it appears as nothing but wasted effort.

Hope itself can bring joy, but it need not bring immediate joy. It does, however, make joy possible. Hope need not bracket off the world as it is, someone can hope for something that is strongly tied to the facts of the world. Moreover, if the facts of the world fully contradicts ones hope, it is destroyed. One cannot hope for something one knows not to be possible. What one can do, indeed must do, is hope beyond the evidence. It makes no more sense to hope in what is certain than to hope in what is impossible. The experience of hope is one of trust in uncertainty. And this is the phenomenological quality I want to focus on: hope comes to us as justified beyond evidence.

This is not counter to the evidence. Again, hope cannot negate certainty. If a man has an illness with a high probability of death accompanying it, we would not counsel him to apportion his attitude towards the evidence. A person who chooses to live, indeed to believe, as if he will live is not one we can criticize. Indeed, such a person seems beyond judgment, either epistemic or moral. That is because the belief and hope is useful on a number of levels. Hope helps one fight disease, it extends life, and it increases quality of life. Hope does not stand beyond ALL rational analysis. But it stands in a position of relaxed rational standards. We know this intuitively, we know it from our own personal experiences of hope and hoping. 

I will go on to analyze one more human experience which is germane to our discussion but is not necessary for the main part of the argument I am making here. After that, I will conclude this long section and we will, in the next section, move from these premises to some kind of conclusion. I will at last bring all this together into a cumulative case for believing in God.

e. Aesthetic Experience

Aesthetic experience, or the human encounter with beauty, is perhaps the most evaluated of any that I have discussed here so far. The annals of philosophy are full of thoughts about beauty and what it is like to experience it. Further, my thoughts here are likely to be the most controversial of my reflections so far, which is why I put it at the end. I think it is worth mentioning, but it is not necessary for the overall case I am making here. This one you can take or leave, but I suspect even here I will have some takers.

The one major point I want to make about our experience of beauty is that it seems informational. Beauty always feels like it sends a message. Beauty is exciting, it motivates and inspires us. People are captivated by a piece of great art because they yearn to know what the artist is trying to say through the piece. Even when the message is unclear, the sense of something being said is almost instantaneous. And yet learning about a piece, about the thought processes behind it, doesn't end the yearning, it only deepens it. For ultimately it is the beauty itself that literally 'speaks to us'.

And what is true of art is true of natural beauty as well. We stand before a beautiful waterfall, or stare into the face of an innocent child, and we feel as is we are being TOLD something, that knowledge is being imparted in the experience. Notice that I am not making the so-called 'argument from beauty', which I will address later. I am, again, simply addressing phenomenology, in this case the phenomenology of aesthetic experience. My analysis here may be controversial, but I think it largely correct. 

f. Conclusions & Reflections

We have reached the end of our journey through this part of the human experience. All of these individual encounters with the world add up to a large swath of the human condition. This is our humanity laid bare. For me, this is part of the data that confronts me when I think about the world and our place in it. This is the data of me. These experiences are also those I would subsume under the heading of "religious experience". They are all a central part of what it means for me to be a religious person. They do not exhaust the category of religious experience (RE). They are also not what most people talk about when they use that terminology. Some more paradigmic examples of RE will looked at later. But I choose these experiences because I feel they are experiences everyone can relate to, religious or not. My analyses my not have universal assent, but they should have wide appeal that crosses philosophical and ideological lines.

Most people should be able to understand what I mean when I talk about tension and catharsis in humor. Most should be able to grasp what I mean when I talk about stepping into counter-worlds of joy and un-seriousness. Most should be able to talk about experiencing Interconnectedness and life as adventure. One need not accept all my analyses to accept the case I am about to make. Agreeing with only half of what I have said here should suffice for you to grasp my argument, though the totality of this case will be used when I explain why I think Christianity in particular makes sense.

If you don't agree with me so far, well that is that. We have phenomenological disagreements, or epistemological disagreements. That should be where your counter-arguments are aimed. But don't go around worrying about the faith I am about to champion. Our disagreement is more fundamental than that.