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TiggerS
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What I wrote was certainly not meant to be offensive in any way and my very real apologies if it seemed they were.
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R_Daneel
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Of course not.
I did not want to insinuate that they were. It just so happens that our perceptions are so different that it may be impossible to conduct a meaningful conversation. How could I evaluate your assertion that you “experience” God? The very word “experience” indicates sensory perception to me, and obviously God is not perceived (and cannot be perceived) by the senses.
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donsnow
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I have gained a little insight, as to how our Church can say that all suffering is necessary.
It came to me, that some suffering is meant to be alleviated by us. It’s necessary for that.
It came to me, that some suffering is meant to be alleviated by us. It’s necessary for that.
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Spirithound
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Correct.
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R_Daneel
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R_Daneel
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Yes, I heard argument like that. However, it does not wash. Allowing person “A” to suffer so that person “B” can exercise “good behavior” and help him - renders person “A” to be just a “tool” - in this respect. And that contradicts the supposed “human dignity” of the person “A”. Furthermore, even if this were a good explanation, it would not account for the millions of instances, when suffering cannot be alleviated.
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Spirithound
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Have your corrected post now, and going again.
scborromeo.org/ccc/p1s2c1p4.htm#302
This is the pertinent section of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
Here are some highlights:
302 … …We call “divine providence” the dispositions by which God guides his creation toward this perfection
303 The witness of Scripture is unanimous that the solicitude of divine providence is concrete and immediate…
307 To human beings God even gives the power of freely sharing in his providence… Though often unconscious collaborators with God’s will, they can also enter deliberately into the divine plan by their actions, their prayers and their sufferings.
324 …Faith gives us the certainty that God would not permit an evil if he did not cause a good to come from that very evil…
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R_Daneel
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Thank you kindly. I appreciate it very much that you took the pain and effort to quote the Cathecism for me. I hope you realize that as soon as you (or the CC) must resort to appeal to faith, the subject is no longer in the realm of rational discourse. Maybe you might wish to say that reason and faith are compatible, but they are not. The arguement may be logical (ex hypotesi quodlibet) but no longer rational.
Just as a remark, without wishing to see a reply (though it would be welcome). Try to see the situation with my eyes. There are millions and millions of instances of sufferings each and every day. Some happen to humans, a lot happen to animals. For anyone without faith there is absolutely no rational explanation why should an allegedly benevolent deity stay aloof and not intervene. (Especially in the case of animals, which are innocent and which cannot get any “reward” for their suffering.) Some instances are the result of natural causes (diseases, natual disasters, or maybe lack of rain), some are the result of human malevolent actions (genocides, rapes, tortures, etc.).
To say that all of those atrocities are part of God’s plan, that those horrifying acts are necessary to achieve some unspecified and unspecifyable greater good; that none of the amount of torture could be lessened (without losing that benefit); that all the perpetrators of those atrocities are “unconscious collaborators” in God’s plan is beyond pale and comprehension. Don’t even try to say that the ones who try to help the sufferings are God’s unconscious collaborators, while the ones who commit them are not. Since God permits both sides to do their acts, that fact will “elevate” both sides to the status of “collaborators”. I bet that the writers of the Cathecism overlooked this simple fact. The last thing on their mind would have been to say that the perpetrators of rapes and tortures are God’s “unconscious collaborators”. But that is what they said, and actually it is perfectly logical (though far from being reasonable).
The faith that gives you “certainty” (of all words!!!) that all that is the best, optimal way to reach God’s goal - is the quintessential blind faith.
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Spirithound
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You are most welcome.
I see it from another angle: I say we left the realm of rational discourse when you tried to comprehend God’s methods without admitting faith. Pope John Paul II wrote an encyclical called “Faith and Reason”, and I think he did a good job in showing how they are not only compatible, but necessary for each other.
CS Lewis wrote a book called “The Problem of Pain”. I think it might help you in your concerns expressed below. He actually has a chapter on the pain of animals.
Pain is really unpleasant, but I believe that God settled the matter nearly 2000 years ago when He sent his Son to Earth to die for us, to experience pain as we do, physical pain certainly, but also emotional and spiritual pain, and I believe that the spiritual pain was the worst since He bore all of our sins on His heart for us. This is why we can choose to unite our pains with him, and grow closer to God for it.
Your objection seems to be in the mechanics of how to best grow from pain, but this is not something that science, or even philosophy can measure. We can’t “see” someone’s spiritual state, whether they’re being nourished or cut off, but through faith and divine revelation, we can know.
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donsnow
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Well, R Daneel -
First, it washes with me. Second, I was raised to be a tool and I have found much dignity in being a tool of the USMC, the USNR, any many employers since then. There is no contradiction, in my mind, between being God’s instrument and my and other people’s ‘human dignity’. “The Heavens and the earth and all that are in them are the Lord’s; Jesus Christ is Lord.” That’s a line, the repeating chorus, of a poem I once wrote. It pleases me to belong to and become the property of my Creator. The only alternative is becoming the Devil’s property.
I have already written that our choices call upon us much of the “…millions of instances, when suffering cannot be alleviated.”
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R_Daneel
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Unfortunately the pope’s opinion counts for nothing. If something can be explained for completely rational grounds, there is no need for faith. As soon as faith is declared to be necessary, the assertion is no longer rational.
“Spiritual state” is undefined. But you can try and show me how would a toddler benefit from being burned alive. How would his “spritual state” grow?
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R_Daneel
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Our ethical system does not even allow the “usage” of our corpses, without our prior, written permission. Both laws and the ethical system forbids the cutting up of a corpse for harvesting its reusable parts.
Also, the doctors cannot take a kidney from a healthy person and transplant it into someone else, even if the process would save the other person’s life (without the permission of the donor). So don’t tell me that “using” someone as a tool is ethical. To see how incorrect your view is, just ponder for a second the usage of the aborted fetuses and tell me if you consider that process ethical and acceptable.
If you, personally are happy to be the property if God, that is your own business.
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Spirithound
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That’s your world-view. You came here asking for our explanation, and you have received a couple of them consistent with the Catholic faith. Naturally it reflects our world-view.
I can’t answer that. That’s an empirical question for which I am unequipped to collect the actual data.
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R_Daneel
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Now that brings up an interesting and highly discouraging question. How do you define what is “rational”? How does that relate to something that requires also faith? It seems to me that we cannot even find a common platform such basic definitions. If we cannot agree on what such simple categories mean (reason and faith) then it is totally impossible to conduct a conversation. Truly, this is my impression. Our stances are so different that even the basic definitions for the meaning of words is incompatible with each other. And that is really discouraging. We may not even use the same language…
You see, it is natural that we assess the same objective phenomenon differently, since our world-view is different. That is not a problem. But to be unable to agree on the meaning of the building blocks… that is pretty frightening. Especially since we are not adversaries, neither of us wants to browbeat the other one, we just attempt to exchange ideas. No wonder that a discourse is impossible when political agendas come into the picture.
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Spirithound
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You know, I’m not even sure how to answer this post. I will try to formulate an answer to your initial questions over the next little while, but could you explain how you see faith and reason to be incompatible with each other? Preferably with a concrete example?
I feel like this conversation is already going to more fruitful places than most have, and I want to thank you for your thoughtfulness and civility.
Peace
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R_Daneel
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OK. Let’s see a few examples.
We all know about the power of gravity. If someone would decide to jump off the Empire State Building, he would be very certain that the jump is fatal. There is no faith needed to come to that conclusion. If someone would belive that he can survive the jump without a scratch, that would need tremendous faith (even though it did happen, that someone jumped out of an airplane, his parachute failed, and he still survived).
Now, in reality, things are not so simple and clear-cut.
Suppose we have a new medication, which was developed to cure a certain illness. When the clinical trials are organized, they form two groups, the test group and the control group. The test group is given the new medication, the control group is given some placebo. The doctors, who give out the medication are not privy to the information, who gets which kind - this is called a double blind setup. After a while, the groups are evaluated, and the results are placed into a correlation matrix. The matrix has 4 slots. In the first one we place the number which is the number of recuperations for the test group. The second slot will contain the number non-recuperations in the test group. The third one will contain the number of recuperation in the control group. Finally, the fourth one will contain the number of non-recuperations in the control group.
From these numbers we can calculate the **correlation **between the medication and the recuperations. In an extreme case, it can happen that everyone will recuperate if they received the medication, and no one will recuperate in the control group. That would indicate full causation, not just a correlation. Conversely, it might happen that everyone dies in the test group and no one dies in the control group. That would also indicate a causation - the medication is not ineffective, but very harmful.
Usually, the correlation is not this kind. If there is a positive correlation, we say that the medication is somewhat beneficial. If the correlation is negative, we discover that the medication is somewhat harmful. The stronger the correlation, the higher the confidence, that the medication is beneficial. Suppose the correlation is around 70-80%. This would indicate a good reason to decide that the medication is beneficial. Suppose, the correlation is around 10-20%. It would not give a good reason to trust this medication. If the correlation is very close to zero, then there is no reason to trust the medication.
If someone would nevertheless trust the medication, it would be purely on faith.
Now, a different case: the alleged efficacy of prayer. The first problem is that there is no way to set up a proper control group. You could never ensure that only the members of the test group would be prayed for, but not the people in the control group. Therefore the correlation matrix is already dubious. Yet, when such experiments were actually conducted, there was no discernable correlation between the prayer and the recuperations. None, whatsoever.
So to trust prayer as a means to help sick people is unreasonable, since it is not supported by data.
Summary: if an assumption is supported by data, if the experiments for that data can be repeated, and the result is similar, we call that rational or reasonable assumption. If there is no supporting data (worse if the data actually contradicts the assumption), or the correlation is very weak, we say that the assumption is accepted on faith.
The line is usually drawn at 75-80% where we can say that the data sufficiently supports the hypothesis. If the correlation is under 20%, we say that the data does not support the hypothesis. Inbetween we say that the data is inconlusive. If, however, the data flatly contradicts the hypothesis, and someone still accepts the hypothesis, that is not just “faith”, it is “blind faith”.
Thank you very much.
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Prodigal_Son
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In other cases where there is no way to set up a controlled experiment, do we label the belief irrational? There is a difference between “not dictated by reason” (or “arational”) and “irrational”. The so-called conflict between faith and reason stems from a misunderstanding of this distinction.
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R_Daneel
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It depends. Can you tell me what do you have in mind? Don’t forget that the example I gave was just an example to illustrate the concepts. Don’t assume that I tried to give a fully inclusive set of possibilities.
Again, there are many levels of believing something for which there is not enough data. These all can be called “based on faith”. Obviously not all of them are irrational. Example: there is absolutely no data supporting a belief that there is intelligent life somewhere in the universe. Yet, based upon probabilities it is reasonable to assume that there is. (And remember Hobbs’ saying (from Calvin and Hobbs, of course): “The strongest evidence that there is intelligent life in the Universe is that they never tried to contact us”.
I like to paraphrase this: “The strongest evidence that there is no God is the fact that he never comes down and kicks the butt of Christians for speaking so disrespectfully about him”. In case you wonder: to assert that God is a peeping Tom, whose primary interest is what two loving people do in the privacy of their bedroom.)The faith exhibited by many posters when it comes to question of suffering is not of this kind. There is no data supporting the hypothesis that all sufferings are beneficial for the sufferers. On the contrary, common sense says that most of the sufferings are unnecessary. There is no possible explanation just what kind of a benefit can come out from the indiscriminate mass sufferings coming from a natural disaster. Much less explanation can be given for the sufferings of victims of human malevolence.
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Prodigal_Son
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The example that pops to mind is not an experiment that we can’t do, but an experiment that is unethical. For example, a study on whether pregnant women can use a powerful drug safely. Here, circumstantial evidence, if one had access to it, would be the best evidence you could find. In such a case, even one correlation between the drug use and a miscarriage would provide some grounds for a conclusion. You would be quite rational in believing there to be a connection, after two circumstantial correlations, although you certainly have no scientifically verifiable evidence.
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R_Daneel
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I am afraid this leads off to a tangent. First, what kind of circumstantial evidence is there? The drug was either tested, or not. If it was tested, it was already an experiment, which is an indication that the drug had undesirable side effect. After all, one cannot know if the drug has side-effects without some kind of experimentation.
Second, such an experiment is only unethical, if the patient is exposed to it without her informed consent. Many times these trials are conducted on a test group, and as long as the patients are informed of the risk, and they consent to be exposed to the risk, there are no ethical problems. But we are not concerned with ethical ramifications here, merely with the question of rational and irrational beliefs.
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