Devil's Advocate

"Everything I've told you is either an extraordinarily elaborate lie---or the very simple truth."

Arkady Renko
Gorky Park

Divine Simplicity

Richard Dawkins confuses the mind itself with a mind’s thoughts. A mind’s thoughts can be complex, but a mind’s thoughts are not the mind itself, because a mind can stop thinking its complex thoughts and contemplate something else instead.

adapted from William Craig

reasonablefaith.com, Q&A Question #1

A Lesson For Science

Any argument for or against belief in God, already assumes a system of God-level criterial statements that have the ability---and the authority---to decide the issue.

Invasion of the God Object

How many similarities with God does an object of thought have to have before I can no longer tell the difference between that object and God?

Background Music, Here and Yonder

The farther thought progresses, the more its system reveals a universal system that lies beyond.

Concrete Necessity and Human Insight

Of course we have not proved our view of the goal of thought. There can be no proof, or even a question about proof, if the nature of proof itself is already in question. All we can say is: Here is the standard and ideal that we actually use in thinking.

When we understand, it's always through a system. As our understanding grows more complete, it's always through a system of greater unity.

If the ideal seems unconvincing and artificial, consider its alternatives. Do they formulate better or worse what we mean by understanding? When we read a famous book called Ethics Geometically Demonstrated, most of us feel we are getting insight.

In the end this illumination is merely following associations.

But that explanation of understanding cannot itself be verified.

If we deny all degrees to necessity, and confine it to a set of the barest abstractions, not much insight remains. The genuineness of insight does not depend on ensuing changes in practice. Perhaps in a poem, a piece of music, or some religious experience an insight is gained that one hesitates to call understanding, because understanding has become so identified as something abstractly intellectual. But such insight is understanding, unique, limited in degree, but still with rights of its own. And to reject it as understanding on the ground of its concreteness is absurd.

If I accept the ideal of concrete necessity, these varying insights are legitimized, ordered, and appraised. If I accept any other, some insights must be excluded.

32.24

The Goal of Reflection

From it's beginning in perception, thought more or less unknowingly seeks a potential goal in every idea, the unified system implicitly at work at every stage of reflection, exercising its steady influence against irrelevant excursions and developing its fragmentary knowledge by the rules of an ideal system. The farther thought progresses, the more clearly does its system reveal the character of a system that lies beyond it.

Our study of reflection began with examples of the kind of unified system that governs reflection in ordinary thought. They were only provisional. Because the impulse of thought is toward self-revision, those examples become superseded by more complete systems. What is at the end of this process of continual self-revision is unknown, nor can we ever know what it is until we have attained it. But we can see the direction in which we must move if we want to attain it.

Thought tries to supersede all partial systems by a more developed overall system that will absorb and extend its earlier gains, and it can rest only when this process cannot be continued further. And thought is the potentiality of the object it seeks to know. Therefore, what fulfills the theoretic impulse must also bring about the most complete and immediate experience of the real.

32.23