Course Material Philosophy of Religion

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Part 1: PHENOMENOLOGY OF RELIGION

THE RELIGIOUS DIMENSION AND CONTEMPORARY DEVELOPMENTS

“all mankind, Greeks and non-Greeks alike, believe in the existence of gods,” so said Plato more than two thousand years ago. indeed it is conceded that some form of religion is universal among mankind. and so for millennia the place of religion in human life was of supreme importance. it dominated and colored all other interests. religion remains important even today but the phenomenon of the religionless man has appeared, and undeniably religion and religious observance have declined in many parts of the world. this decline of religion is a process that many suspect will continue with the spread of education and science and the secularization that they seem to bring inevitably in their train. there are indications however that this observation is not completely accurate. it has often been the case in history that just when a religion seemed to have exhausted itself and to be on the verge of expiring, it revived and launched out on a new and more vigorous chapter in its history. even among those who explicitly renounce religion, there seems to be a need to find some substitute for it. it may well be the case that even if particular forms of religion grow old in course of time and are no longer able to hold their place, the religious spirit itself endures and seeks new forms, because it has deep roots in our human nature. Lecture 1: The Sacred and the Profane Mircea Eliade - devoted his life to the comparative study of religion. he held steadfastly to the thesis that religion must always be explained on its own terms. his two works on religion are Patterns in Comparative Religion and The Myth of the Eternal Return. the first explored the role of symbols in religion while the latter investigated the concepts of history and sacred time as well as the differences between archaic religion and modern thought.

1. believed in the autonomy of religion which should therefore not to be explained by

way of some other reality. “a religious phenomenon will only be recognized as such if it s grasped at its own level, that is to say, if it is studied as something religious. to try to grasp the essence of such a phenomenon by means of physiology… or any other study is false; it misses the one unique and irreducible element in it - the element of the sacred.” the way to study religion is through phenomenology, the comparative study of things in the form, or appearance, they present to us.

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in seeking to understand religion, Eliade suggested that we enter the world of the archaic man. archaic people are those who have lived in prehistoric times or who live today in tribal societies and rural folk cultures, places where work in the world of nature - hunting, fishing, and farming - is the daily routine. what we find everywhere among such peoples is a life lived on two decidedly different planes: that of the sacred and that of the profane. the profane is the realm of the everyday business - of things ordinary, random, and largely unimportant. the sacred is just the opposite, it is the sphere of the supernatural, of things extraordinary, memorable, and momentous. while the profane is vanishing and fragile, full of shadows, the sacred is eternal, full of substance and reality. the profane is the arena of human affairs, which are changeable and often chaotic; the sacred is the sphere of order and perfection, the home of the ancestors, heroes, and gods. wherever we look among archaic people, religion starts from this fundamental separation.

it should be stressed that for Eliade the concern of religion is with the supernatural,

plan and simple; it centers on the sacred in and of itself, not on the sacred merely as a way of depicting the social. this sacred is encountered by people and when they do they feel in touch with something otherworldly in character; they feel they have brushed against a reality unlike all others they know, a dimension of existence that is alarmingly powerful, strangely different, surpassingly real and enduring.

“for primitives as for the man of all premodern societies, the sacred is equivalent to a power, and in the last analysis, to reality. the sacred is saturated with being. sacred power means reality and at the same time enduringness and efficacity… thus it is easy to understand that religious man deeply desires to be, to participate in reality, to be saturated with power.”

among archaic peoples the idea of the sacred is more than just common; it is

regarded as absolutely crucial to their existence, shaping virtually every aspect of their lives. they refer to it even when they think of something so basic as the time of day or the place where they live. it is crystallized into mythical tales that serve as archetypes which they choose to follow wherever they act. such sacred patterns govern all sorts of archaic activity from the grand and ceremonial to the ordinary and even trivial. these archetypes also served the purpose of rules for people to abide by. archaic peoples lived by these rules because they believed that the ways of the gods are the best. divine models showed how life ought to be lived.

in The Sacred and the Profane, Eliade presented numerous examples from a wide

range of cultures to show just how seriously such traditional people took the business of following the patterns set by the gods.

there is another significant element to be found in this intense effort to imitate the

gods. it is in fact part of an even deeper desire that archaic people have. they wish

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not only to mirror the real of the sacred but somehow actually to be in it, to live among the gods. all archaic people have a sense of a fall, in the sense of a profound separation, a great tragic loss, in human history. they feel that from the first moment human beings become aware of their situation in the world, they are seized by a feeling of absence, a sense of great distance from the place where they ought to be and truly want to be - the realm of the sacred. their most characteristic attitude accordingly is a “deep nostalgia for paradise,” a longing to be brought close to the gods, a desire to return to the realm of the supernatural.

one problem in this approach is how to describe the sacred which is precisely wholly

other than anything in normal experience. Eliade pointed to indirect expression as he claimed that the language of the sacred is to be found in symbols and in myth. he therefore sought to explain and explore religious symbols - what they are, how they work, and why archaic peoples made use of them.

the first thing about symbolic language is that just about anything can be used as a symbol. most of the things that make up ordinary life are profane; they are just themselves, nothing more. but at the right moment anything profane can be transformed into something more than itself - a marker or sign of that which is not profane, but sacred. anything can become a sign of the sacred if people so discover or decide. once recognized as such, moreover, all symbolic objects acquire a double character: though in one sense they remain what they always were, they also become something new, something other than themselves.

it seems irrational however that something profane could become its opposite, the

sacred. this is possible because according to Eliade it is not human reason which is in charge of the transaction. symbols and myths make their appeal to the imagination, which often thrives on the idea of the contradiction. they grip the complete person, the emotions, the will, and even subconscious aspects of personality. and just as in the personality all sorts of colliding impulses are joined, just as in dreams and fantasies all sorts of illogical things can happen, so in religious experience opposites like the sacred and profane do converge. in an intuitive burst of discovery, the religious imagination sees things otherwise ordinary and profane as more than themselves and turns them into the sacred. the natural becomes supernatural.

2. the world of nature as the source of symbols - the main supplier of materials

for symbolism and myth according to Eliade is the world of nature. to the archaic mind, the physical world is a veritable storehouse of prospective images, clues, signs, and analogies. all that we see in the world is part of a grand framework which the gods brought into existence at the beginning of time, and everywhere in it, the sacred waits to shine through. in all of its beauty and ferocity, its complexity, mystery, and variety, the natural world is continually opening windows to disclose the different aspects of the supernatural - the modalities of the sacred.

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this choice of the world of nature as the source of religious symbols has one

important psychological aspect. it tells us not only about the world and the sacred but also shows “the continuity between the structures of human existence and cosmic structures.”

3. nostalgia for paradise - archaic people had a rather hostile view to their

circumstance in history. for them, the events of ordinary profane life, the daily round of labor and struggle, are things they desperately wish to escape. they would rather be out of history and in the perfect realm of the sacred. Eliade maintained that the desire to go back to beginnings is the deepest longing, the most insistent and heartfelt ache in the soul of all archaic people.

the significance of this desire can be drawn from the motives that in the view of

Eliade inspired this myth of return. archaic people accordingly were deeply affected not only by the mysteries of suffering and death but also by concerns about living without any purpose or meaning. they longed for significance, permanence, beauty, and perfection as well as escape from their sorrows. the idea that the human adventure as a whole might be merely a pointless exercise, an empty spectacle with death as its end is a prospect that no archaic people could bear. this “terror of history” explain why archaic people were unusually drawn to the myth of eternal return.

because ordinary human life is not significant, because real meaning can never be

found within history, archaic people chose instead to take their stand outside of it. in the face of life’s drab, empty routine and daily irritations, they sought to overcome all in a defiant gesture of denial; through symbol and myth, they reached back to the world’s primal state of perfection, to a moment when life star6ed over from its origin, full of promise and hope. “the primitive by conferring a cyclic direction upon time, annuls its irreversibility. everything begins over again at its commencement every instant.”

4. the revolt against archaic religion - almost everywhere in archaic and civilized

ancient cultures the problem of history was central and the solution was found in some form of the myth of eternal return. Judaism, however, and later on Christianity which was derived from the former, took a different view and held that the sacred can be found in history as well as outside of it. in these two religions the meaningless cycles of nature was pushed into the background, while human events were made to occupy center stage and took shape along the line of a meaningful story - a history - with the sacred, in the form of the God of Israel, a participant in its scene. in place of endless, pointless world cycles, a meaningful sequence of sacred historical events is asserted.

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the prophets of Israel proclaimed that historical events have a value in themselves, insofar as they are determined by the will of God. this God of the Jewish people is no longer an Oriental divinity, creator archetypal gestures, but a personality who ceaselessly intervenes in history, who reveals his will through events. historical facts thus become situations of man in respect to God, and as such they acquire a religious value that nothing had previously been able to confer upon them.

the encounter with God in Judaism was considered a very personal transaction. Christianity inherited this same perspective. the sequence of events that make up the life and death of Jesus forms a singular and historic instance, a decisive moment which, occurring once only, serves as the basis of a personal relationship of forgiveness and trust between Christian believers and their God. in celebrating the life, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ, the Christian faithful do not engage in a ritual of seasonal rebirth; they do not act out an eternal return to beginnings. they remember a specific and final historical event, one that requires from them an equally singular and final decision of personal faith.

5. the revolt against all religion - the shift away from archaic attitudes initiated by

Judaism and Christianity was the first great rejection of the myth of eternal return. this was followed by another revolution far different and quite new in human history - the wide acceptance of philosophies that deny the existence and value of the sacred altogether. advocates of this views claim that it makes no difference where one wants to find the sacred, whether in history or beyond it, for the simple reason that human beings do not need it. the truth, they claim, is that there are no gods, no sacred archetypes, which can show men how to live or what ultimate purpose there is to live by and strive for.

the emergence of this novel sentiment and movement, in the opinion of Eliade,

could be linked to the move by Judaism and Christianity to supplant the archaic religions of nature with their brand of religion of history. this gave modern thinkers the idea that transforming religion could be done and that it may even be discarded altogether without much difficulty. thus from the new religions of history evolved philosophies of history and society which excluded precisely religion.

through the long passage of centuries, and especially in Western civilization, the removal of the divine from nature has slowly opened the way for entire societies to adopt a style of thought that only a few isolated individuals ever seriously considered until the coming of the modern era. that style is secularity: the removal of all reference to the cared from human thought and action. Eliade called the creed of this secular movement as “historicism,” a type of thought that recognizes only things ordinary and profane while denying any reference at all to things supernatural and sacred. historicists hold that if we want significance, if we want some sense of a larger purpose in life, we obviously cannot find it in the archaic way - by escaping history through some eternal return. but neither can we find it in the

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Judeo-Christian way - by claiming that there is in history some great plan or purpose of God. we can find it only in ourselves.

Lecture 2: The Idea of the Holy Rudolf Otto the essence of religion cannot be reduced either to a set of beliefs or to moral conduct, but is the experience of this world in its profundity, the realization of its eternal content by the feeling of a contemplative and devout mind. it is non-rational and non-moral. he therefore developed a detailed description of the holy which for him is the essence of religion. the holy or the numinous indicates whatever it is whose apprehension evokes the consciousness of creaturehood, of ontological dependence and limitation. “it is the emotion of a creature, submerged and overwhelmed by its own nothingness in contrast to that which is supreme above all creatures” [10]. Otto therefore formulated this definition of the holy – mysterium tremendum et fascinans – the awful and fascinating mystery. 1. mysterium - the holy as mysterium emphasizes the otherness of the holy. that

which is holy is mysterious, not because it is a puzzle to be solved, but because it is something out of the ordinary. thus it is the wholly other.

“the ‘wholly other’, that which is quite beyond the sphere of the usual, the

intelligible, and the familiar, which therefore falls quite outside the limits of the ‘canny’, and is contrasted with it, filling the mind with blank wonder and astonishment.”

“this feeling or consciousness of the ‘wholly other’ will attach itself to, or sometimes be indirectly aroused by means of, objects which are already puzzling upon the ‘natural’ plane, or are of a surprising or astounding occurrences or things in inanimate nature, in the animal world, or among men.”

“but I perceive, not with my fleshy eyes, which look on this icon of thee, but with the eyes of my mind and understanding, the invisible truth of thy face, which therein is signified, under a shadow and limitation. thy true face is freed from any limitation, it hath neither quantity nor quality, nor is it of time or place, for it is the absolute form, the face of faces.” [Nicholas Of Cusa, The Vision of God]

in the experience of the holy the person who has it transcends the limits of what can be ordinarily known and perceived to encounter a reality different from entities within the world and therefore itself transcendent.

“the truly ‘mysterious’ object is beyond our apprehension and comprehension, not

only because our knowledge has certain irremovable limits, but because in it we

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come upon something inherently ‘wholly other’, whose kind and character are incommensurable with our own, and before which we therefore recoil in a wonder that strikes us chill and numb.”

“of one who has entered the first trance the voice has ceased; of one who has entered the second trance reasoning and reflection have ceased; of one who has entered the third trance joy has ceased; of one who has entered the fourth trance the inspirations and expirations have ceased; of one who has entered the realm of the infinity of space the perception of form has ceased; of one who has entered the realm of the infinity of consciousness the perception of the realm of the infinity of space has ceased; of one who has entered the realm of nothingness the perception of the realm of the infinity of consciousness has ceased.” [Samyutta-Nikaya, xxxvi]

on Wednesday morning, december 6, the feast of Saint Nicholas, Thomas arose as usual to celebrate the mass of the feast in the chapel of Saint Nicholas. during mass, Thomas was suddenly struck by something that profoundly affected and changed him. “after this mass he never wrote or dictated anything.” in fact, he “hung up his instruments of writing (an allusion to the Jews who hung up their instruments during the exile) in the third part of the Summa, in the treatise on penance.” when Reginald realized that Thomas had altered entirely his routine of more than fifteen years, he asked him, “father, why have you put side such a great work which you began for the praise of God and the enlightenment of the world?” to which Thomas answered simply, “Reginald, i cannot.” but Reginald, afraid that Thomas was mentally unbalanced from so much study, insisted that he continue his writing and return to his former routine, at least at a slower pace. but the more Reginald insisted, the more impatient Thomas became until he replied, “Reginald, i cannot, because all that i have written seems like straw to me compared to what i have seen and what has been revealed to me.” [James A, Weisheipl, Friar Thomas d’Aquino: His Life, Thought, and Works]

“in mysticism we have in the ‘beyond’ again the strongest stressing and over-

stressing of those non-rational elements which are already inherent in all religion. mysticism continues to its extreme point this contrasting of the numinous object, as the ‘wholly other’, with ordinary experience. not content with contrasting it with all that is of nature or this world, mysticism concludes by contrasting it with all that is of nature or this world, mysticism concludes by contrasting it with being itself and all that ‘is’, and finally actually calls it ‘that which is nothing’. by this ‘nothing’ is meant for only that of which nothing can be predicated, but that which is absolutely and intrinsically other than and opposite of everything that is and can be thought. but while exaggerating to the point of paradox this negation and contrast - the only means open to conceptual thought to apprehend the mysterium - mysticism at the same time retains the positive quality of the ‘wholly other’ as a very living factor in its overbrimming religious emotion.”

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2. tremendum - the holy is the uncanny in the presence of which we experience fear, terror, shuddering, dread, and horror. it is this aspect of the numinous that the Bible expresses as the wrath of God, that the Greeks refer to as the jealousy of the gods, and that Indian art portrays as the grotesqueness of the gods. Otto speaks of the holy as “absolutely unapproachable” and “absolutely overpowering”.

the element of awefulness: fear, tremor -

“the Hebrew hallow is an example. to ‘keep a thing holy in the heart’ means to mark it off by a feeling of peculiar dread, not to be mistaken for any ordinary dread, that is, to appraise it by the category of the numinous.”

“… the ‘wrath of Yahweh’… there is something very baffling in the way in which it ‘is

kindled’ and manifested. it is, as has been well said, ‘like a hidden force of nature,’ like stored-up electricity, discharging itself upon anyone who comes too near. it is ‘incalculable’ and ‘arbitrary.’ anyone who is accustomed to think of deity only by its rational attributes must see in this ‘wrath’ mere caprice and willful passion. but such a view would have been emphatically rejected by the religious men of the old covenant, for to them the wrath of god, so far from being a diminution of his godhead, appears as a natural expression of it, an element of ‘holiness’ itself, and a quite indispensable one. and in this they are entirely right. this orge is nothing but the tremendum itslef, apprehended and expresed by the aid of a naïve analogy from the domain of natural experience, in this case from the ordinary passional life of men.”

the element of overpoweringness: might, power “the temenedum may then be rendered more adequately tremenda majestas, or

‘aweful majesty’. this second element of majesty may continue to be vividly preserved, where the first, that of unapproachability, recedes and dies away, as may be seen, for example, in mysticism. it is especially in relation to this element of majesty or absolute overpoweringness that the creature-consciousness… comes upon the scene, as a sort of shadow or subjective reflection of it. thus, in contrast to ‘the overpowering’ of which we are conscious as an object over against the self, there is the feeling of one’s own submergence, of being but ‘dust and ashes’ and nothingness. and this forms the numinous raw material for the feeling of religious humility.”

“…one of the chiefest and most general features of mysticism is just this self-

depreciation, the estimation of the self, of the personal ‘i’, as something not perfectly or essentially real, or even as mere nullity, a self-depreciation which comes to demand its own fulfillment in practice in rejecting the delusion of selfhood, and so makes for the annihilation of the self. and on the other hand mysticism leads to a valuation of the transcendent object of its reference as that which through plenitude

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of being stands supreme and absolute, so that the finite self contrasted with it becomes conscious even in its nullity that ‘i am naught, thou art all’.”

“there is no thought in this of any causal relation between god, the creator, and the

self, the creature. the point from which speculation starts is not a ‘consciousness of absolute dependence’ - of myself as result and effect of a divine cause - for that would in point of fact lead to insistence upon the reality of the self; it starts from a consciousness of the absolute superiority or supremacy of a power other than myself, and it is only as it falls back upon ontological terms to achieve its end - terms generally borrowed from natural science - that the element of the tremendum, originally apprehended as ‘plenitude of power’, becomes transmuted into ‘plenitude of being’.

“’creature consciousness’… not ‘feeling of our createdness’ but ‘feeling of our

creaturehood’, that is, the consciousness of the littleness of every creature in face of that which is above all creatures.”

the element of ‘energy’ or urgency: vitality, passion, emotional temper, will, force,

movement, excitement, excitement, activity, impetus - “omnipotentia Dei…is nothing but the union of ‘majesty’ - in the sense of absolute

supremacy - with this ‘energy’, in the sense of a force that knows not sting nor stay, which is urgent, active, compelling, and alive. In mysticism, too, this element of ‘energy’ is a very living and vigorous factor, at any rate in the ‘voluntaristic’ mysticism, the mysticism of love whose burning strength the mystic can hardly bear, but begs that the heat that has scorched him may be mitigated, lest he be himself destroyed by it… ‘love’, says one of the mystics, ‘is nothing else than quenched wrath.’”

3. fascinans - the holy has another aspect in which it shows itself as something

uniquely attractive and fascinating. the holy is also overwhelmingly attractive, “an object of horror and dread, but at the same time it is no less something that allures with a potent charm, and the creature who trembles before it, utterly cowed and cast down, has always at the same time the impulse to turn to it, nay even to make it somehow his own.”

“the ‘mystery’ is… not merely something to be wondered at but something that

entrances him; and beside that in it which bewilders and confounds, he feels something that captivates and transports him with a strange ravishment, rising often enough to the pitch of dizzy intoxication…”

“the ideas and concepts which are the parallels or ‘schemata’ on the rational side of this non-rational element of ‘fascination’ are love, mercy, pity, comfort; these are all

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‘natural’ elements of the common psychical life, only they are here thought as absolute and in completeness.”

it is not just a matter of wrath and jealousy, but of love, mercy, grace, comfort, and bliss. hence there is a deep, nearly incomprehensible desire and yearning in the believing soul to be with the holy; and where the believing soul and the holy are properly together there is talk of exaltation, ecstasy, rapture, beatitude and bliss unspeakable.

“the mysterium is experienced in its essential, positive, and specific character, as something that bestows upon man a beatitude beyond compare, but one whose real nature he can neither proclaim in speech nor conceive in thought, but may know only by a direct and living experience. it is a bliss which embraces all those blessings that are indicated or suggested in positive fashion by any ‘doctrine of salvation’, and it quickens all of them through and through; but these do not exhaust it. rather by its all-pervading, penetrating glow it makes of these very blessings more than the intellect can conceive in them or affirm of them. it gives the peace that passes understanding, and of which the tongue can only stammer brokenly. only from afar, by metaphors and analogies, do we come to apprehend what it is in itself, and even so our notion is but inadequate and confused.”

“it is not only in the religious feeling of longing that the moment of fascination is a

living factor. it is already alive and present in the moment of ‘solemnity’, both in the gathered concentration and humble submergence of private devotion, when the mind is exalted to the holy, and in the common worship of the congregation, where there is practiced with earnestness and deep sincerity, as, it is to be feared is with us a thing rather desired than realized. it is this and nothing else that in the solemn moment can fill the soul so full and keep it so inexpressibly tranquil.”

“the divine is indeed the highest, strongest, best, loveliest, and dearest that man

can think of… but… God is not merely the ground and superlative of all that can be thought; he is in himself a subject on his own account and in himself.”

“know that to be Brahman, than the gain of which there is no greater gain, than the happiness of which there is no greater happiness, and than the knowledge of which there is no greater knowledge. Know that to be Brahman, having seen which, there is nothing else to be seen, having become which, there is nothing else to become, and having known which, there is nothing else to be known.” [Atma-Bodha]

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Part 2: THE GROUNDS FOR UNBELIEF

ATHEISM AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

Lecture 1: The Challenge of Atheism 1. atheism defined - the critique and denial of the major claims of all varieties of

theism, which banners the belief that “all the heavens and the earth and al that they contain owe their existence and continuance in existence to the wisdom and will of a supreme, self-consistent, omnipotent, omniscient, righteous, and benevolent being who is distinct from, and independent of, what he has created.”

2. outline of the discussion:

a. to note inadequacies in various arguments widely used to support theism - cosmological, ontological, design, moral, and religious experience arguments;

b. to expose incoherencies in the very thesis of theism c. to enumerate some points of positive doctrine to which by and large

philosophical atheists seem to subscribe. 3. atheism is not necessarily an irreligious concept for theism is just one among many

views concerning the nature and origin of the world. moreover, atheism is not be with identified with sheer unbelief, or with disbelief, in some particular creed of a religious group.

4. atheistic philosophers are divided into two major groups:

a. those who hold that theistic doctrines is meaningful but reject it either because the positive evidence for it is insufficient, or the negative evidence is quite overwhelming.

b. those that hold that the theistic thesis is not even meaningful and reject it as just

nonsense or literally meaningless but a symbolic rendering of human ideals. 5. atheism continues to be a form of social and political protest directed as much

against institutionalized religion as against theistic doctrine. it is a moral revulsion

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against the undoubted abuses of the secular power exercised by religious leaders and institutions.

religious authorities have opposed the correction of glaring injustices and encouraged politically and socially reactionary policies. religious institutions have been havens of obscurantist thought and centers for the dissemination of intolerance. religious creeds have been used to set limits to free inquiry, to perpetuate inhumane treatment of the ill and the underprivileged, and to support moral doctrines insensitive to human suffering.

the refutation of theism has thus seemed to man an indispensable step not only towards liberating man’s minds from superstition but also toward achieving a more equitable re-ordering of society. powerful, social motives in fact actuate many atheistic arguments.

6. as long as theism is defended simply as dogma, asserted as a matter of direct

revelation or as the deliverance of authority, belief in the dogma is impregnable to rational argument. in fact, however, reasons are frequently advanced in support of the theistic creed and these reasons are the subject of acute philosophical critiques.

7. the following presents the atheistic critique of the main rational arguments for the

existence of god:

a. cosmological argument - argument from a first cause. every event must have a cause. if there is no end to this backward progression, the progression will be infinite. an infinite series of actual events is unintelligible and absurd. hence there must be a first cause, and this first cause is god, the initiator of all change in the universe.

critique: if everything must have a cause, then god must also require a cause of its existence. the answer of theism is that god is self-caused. but if god is self-caused there is no reason why the world cannot be self-caused. there is no reason to require a god transcending the world to bring it into existence and to initiate changes in it. the supposed inconceivability and absurdity of an infinite series of regressive causes will be admitted by no one who has competent familiarity with modern mathematical analysis of infinity.

b. ontological argument - since god is considered to be omnipotent, he is a perfect being. a perfect being is defined as one whose essence or nature lacks no attributes whatsoever, one whose nature is complete in every respect. it is evident that we have an idea of god; since this is so, god who is the perfect being must exist. his existence follows from his defined nature. for if god lacked

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the attributes of existence, he would be lacking at least one attribute of existence and would therefore not be perfect. “since we have an idea of god as a perfect being, god must exist.”

critique: Immanuel Kant - the word existence does not signify any attribute. it

does not follow therefore from the assumption that we have an idea of a perfect being that such a being exists. for the idea of a perfect being does not involve the attribute of existence for there is no such attribute.

c. argument from design - calls attention to the remarkable way in which

different things and processes in the world are integrated with each other and concludes that this mutual fitness of things can be explained only by the assumption of a divine architect who planned the world and everything in it. for example, living organisms can maintain themselves in a variety of environments and do so in virtue of their delicate mechanisms which adopt the organisms to all sorts of environmental changes, an intricate pattern of means and ends is to be found throughout the animate world. but the existence of this pattern is unintelligible, except on the hypothesis that the pattern has been deliberately instituted by a supreme designer.

William Paley: if we find a watch in some deserted spot, we do not think it came into existence by chance, and we do not hesitate to conclude that an intelligent creature designed and made it. but the world and all its contents exhibit mechanisms and mutual adjustments that are far more complicated and subtle than are those of a watch. the conclusion must be that these things have a creator.

critique: the conclusion of the argument is based on an inference from analogy. the watch and the world are alike in possessing a congruence of parts and an adjustment of means to ends; the watch has a watchmaker; hence, the world has a world-maker.

we have never run across a watch that does not come into existence except through the operations of intelligent manufacturers. the situation is not like this with such innumerable animate and inanimate systems with which we are familiar. the living organisms, though they are generated by their parents are not “made” by these parents in the same sense in which watchmakers make watches. there is an alternative explanation. the facts which the hypothesis of a divine designer is supposed to explain can be understood on the basis of a better supported assumption. Darwinian biology - one can account for the variety of biological species, as well as for their adaptations to their environments, without

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involving a divine creator and acts of special creation. the Darwinian theory explains the diversity of biological species in terms of chance variations in the structure of organisms, and of a mechanism of selection which retains those variation forms that possess some advantages for survival.

d. moral argument - we are subject not only to physical laws like the rest of

nature, but also to moral ones. these moral laws are categorical imperatives which we must heed not because of their utilitarian consequences but simply because as autonomous moral agents it is our duty to accept them as binding. though virtue is its own reward, the virtuous man - the man who acts out of a sense of duty and in conformity with the moral law - does not always receive his just desserts in this world; nor does he shut his eyes to the fact that evil men frequently enjoy the best things this world has to offer. in short, virtue does not always reap happiness.

the highest human good is the realization of happiness commensurate with one’s virtue. it is a practical postulate of the moral life to promote this good. the guarantee that this highest good is realizable is God who must exist if the highest good is not to be a fatuous ideal. the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God is thus postulated as a necessary condition for the possibility of as moral life. critique: Bertrand Russell: postulation has all the advantages of theft over honest toil. no postulation carries with it any assurance that what is postulated is actually the case. and, though we may postulate God’s existence as a means to guaranteeing the possibility of realizing happiness together with virtue, the postulation establishes neither the actual realizability of the ideal nor the fact of its existence.

e. argument from religious experience - those who have undergone such experiences often report they feel themselves to be in the presence of the divine and holy, that they lose their sense of self-identity and become merged with some fundamental reality, or that they enjoy a feeling of total dependence upon some ultimate power. the overwhelming sense of transcending one’s finitude, which characterizes such vivid periods of life, and of coalescing with some ultimate source of all existence, is then taken to be compelling evidence for the existence of a supreme being. God, the object which satisfies the commonly experienced need for integrating one’s scattered and conflicting impulses into a coherent unity, or as the subject which is of ultimate concern to us. a proof of God’s existence is found in the occurrence of certain distinctive experiences.

critique: the fact that an individual experiences a profound sense of direct

contact with an alleged transcendent ground of all reality, does not constitute

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competent evidence for the claim that there is such a ground and that it is the immediate cause of the experience.

experience of ghosts analogy - to establish the existence of such things,

evidence is required that is obtained under controlled conditions and that can be confirmed by independent inquiries.

an overwhelming feeling of being in the presence of the divine is evidence

enough for admitting the genuineness of such feeling; it is no evidence for the claim that a supreme being with a substantial existence independent of the experience is the cause of the experience.

8. incoherence of theism - there is a central difficulty arising from the simultaneous

attribution in theism of omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence to the deity. it is how to reconcile these attributes with the existence of evil in the world.

atheism believes it is not possible to reconcile the alleged omnipotence and

omnibenevolence of God with the unvarnished facts of human existence. the hypothesis of a divine providence is not capable of explaining anything which cannot be explained just as well without this hypothesis.

9. atheistic principles - apart from their polemics against theism, philosophical

atheists have shared a common set of positive views, a common set of philosophical convictions which set them off from other groups of thinkers.

a. philosophical atheists reject the assumption that there are disembodied spirits, or

that incorporeal entities of any sort can exercise a causal agency.

they are generally agreed that if we wish to achieve any understanding of what takes place in the universe, we must look to the operations of organized bodies. accordingly, the various processes taking place in nature, whether animate or inanimate, are to be explained in terms of the properties and structures of identifiable and spatio-temporally located objects. moreover, the present variety of systems and activities found in the universe is to be accounted for on the basis of the transformations things undergo when they enter into different relations with one another – transformations which often result in the emergence of novel kinds of objects.

b. atheists generally manifest a marked empirical temper, and often take as their

ideal the intellectual methods employed in the contemporaneous empirical sciences.

there is substantial agreement among them that controlled sensory observation

is the court of final appeal in issues concerning matters of fact. it is indeed this

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commitment to the use of an empirical method which is the final basis of the atheistic critique of theism. for at bottom this critique seeks to show that we can understand whatever a theistic assumption is alleged to explain, through the use of the proved methods of the positive sciences and without the introduction of empirically supported ad hoc hypotheses about a deity.

c. atheistic thinkers have generally accepted a utilitarian basis for judging moral

issues, and they have exhibited a libertarian attitude toward human needs and impulses. the conceptions of the human good they have advocated are conceptions which are commensurate with the actual capacities of mortal men, so that it is the satisfaction of the complex needs of the human creature which is the final standard for evaluating the validity of moral ideal or moral prescription.

the emphasis of atheistic moral reflection has been this-worldly rather than other-worldly, individualistic rather than authoritarian. the stress upon a good life that must be consummated in this world has made atheists vigorous opponents of moral codes which seek to repress human impulses in the name of some unrealizable other world ideal. the individualism that is so pronounced a strain in many philosophical atheists has made them tolerant of human limitations and sensitive to the plurality of legitimate moral goals.

on the other hand, this individualism has certainly not prevented many of them from recognizing the crucial role which institutional arrangements can play in achieving desirable patterns of human living. in consequence, atheists have made important contribution to the development of a climate of opinion favorable to pursuing the values of a liberal civilization, and they have played effective roles in attempts to rectify social injustices.

10. atheists cannot build their moral outlook on foundation upon which so many men

conduct their lives. in particular, atheism cannot offer the incentives to conduct and the consolations for misfortune which theistic religions supply to their adherents. it can offer no hope of personal immorality, no threats of divine chastisement, no promise of eventual recompense for injustices suffered, no blueprint to sure salvation. for on its view of the place of man in nature, human excellence and human dignity must be achieved within a finite lifespan, or not at all, so that the rewards of moral endeavor must come from the quality of civilized living, and not from some source of disbursement that dwells outside of time.

accordingly, atheistic moral reflection at its best does not culminate in a quiescent ideal of human perfection, but is a vigorous call to intelligent activity – activity for the sake of realizing human potentialities and for eliminating whatever stand in the way of such realization.

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Lecture 2: Atheistic Philosophies Ludwig Feuerbach: Religion as an Illusion - raised in a solidly Christian family, went to Heidelberg University, because he wanted to become a protestant minister but later moved away from theology toward philosophy. saw as unquestionably situated solely in reason perfections such as unity, universality and infinity, which were formerly and normally attributed solely to God. considered religion merely as a past phase in man's intellectual progression, called for a new religion of action, and insisted on man's undivided concentration on this world so that an "efficient, spiritually and physically sound people could be formed from this revolutionizing liberation from the absolutist God.” 1. hegelian influence - Georg W.F. Hegel was far from being an atheist himself but

he set the stage for the assault upon God. he questioned whether the philosophers or the theologians had succeeded in attaining the real God. he protested that the God of the christian experience was an inadequate, a premature, not-yet-developed God. he thus set himself the mission of rescuing the God of christianity from the vagueness of imagery, the symbolism of myths, the simplistic charm of parables.

moreover, Hegel had a bill of particulars against the christian God. the trouble with the christian God is that he is only experienced and remembered when the human conscience is sick or in trouble. but this jewish-christian God, who is unapproachable and inscrutable in his aloof transcendence and unattainable by the imagination, mind or heart of man, arouses in man resentment against the only choice he is offered by this mysterious God - obedience or revolt. frustrated by the demoralizing experience of failing futilely to satisfy his hunger for communion with the transcendent God, humbled by the degrading knowledge of his abject powerlessness, man resents the situation that equates God's glorification with his own depreciation. in effect, says Hegel, the judaeo-christian God is a cruel tyrant who fosters between himself and men the infamous dialectical relationship of master and slave.

despite the apparent liberation of the spirit found in the new testament, the apparent snapping of the bonds of fate, the seemingly magnificent release from the master-slave degradation, Hegel brands judaeo-christianity as a backward religion, a religion of endless, hopeless waiting whose devotees are either wandering in a desert looking for a land flowing with milk and honey or sighing in a vale of tears scanning the horizon for the advent of the new heaven and earth beyond time. jews and christians suffer from unhappy consciences which beget not true religion but sentimental religiosity. both insist God is apart, beyond, divorced from this world which at best is a sinners' prison, an exiles' passing and dying city.

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Hegel's basic opposition to the jewish and christian religions is that they create men who can be witnesses and martyrs for the next world, but never "heroes of action" in this. he concluded that christianity was a social and historical failure. for souls who are withdrawn by religious conviction from their age can never create a great civilization; they can only produce a spiritless era in which men reluctantly endure the happenings of time for the happiness of eternity. the judaeo-christian God is all too purely transcendent, so far out of this world as to be irrelevant. all modern atheism will thus be seen to be rooted in Hegel's rejection of the God of the master-slave relationship, the God who begets an unhappy conscience in man, the God who reduces man from being a hero to being a beautiful soul.

2. crit ique of Christianity - christianity broke upon an ancient, pagan world, burdened down with countless Gods, spirits, demons and controlled implacably by the tyrannical stars and fates above, as the great liberator. its good news proclaimed that man is the effect of infinite, creative love. a divine seal within man's nature reflects, however dimly yet unmistakably, the ineffable nature of his absolute creator. reason, liberty, immortality, providence over cosmos and community are divine endowments which God shares with man, his favorite image. man, having been liberated by christianity, found reason to rejoice in a world expanded with newly revealed horizons for intelligence, freedom, love. each man, one by one, was now seen to be the known, the chosen, the person individually embraced by the absolute lover. "i have loved you with an everlasting love, therefore have i chosen you, taking pity on you." so the initial emotions that christianity released in a converted world that was formerly pagan and idolatrous were those of intense, exhilarating gladness, radiant joy, triumphant applause, inexpressibly peaceful relief at the deliverance from fatalism and the reception of new human life in the divine family of the holy trinity. from now on man's greatness was to consist in his grateful recognition of his divine origins and in his enthusiastic cooperation for the attainment of his divine destiny - eternal, supernatural communion within the unveiled family of God.

though christianity reminded man that he was and would ever remain during his life on earth wounded by sin, yet it also assured him that in christ, the redeemer, and in his message and mission entrusted to his living church man would find all the power needed to overcome his debilities and the superabundant graces needed for his sanctification. here was a message and mission capable of keeping man young in spirit, vital, free, creative and, above all, joyously striving to grow up in christ, despite the rampant ravages of sin in history all around him. here was a message and mission that would develop man and his cosmos to divine greatness, while it overthrew the powers of evil in the visible and invisible worlds.

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when Feuerbach looked at the world of his times, alas, he discovered an astonishing phenomenon. illusion, indecision, immorality were rampant in a supposedly christian civilization. he wrote: “we are living on the perfume of an empty vase.” yet, even though men were no longer moved by the christian ideal and no longer strove for supernatural greatness, they were, nevertheless, still haunted it. Feuerbach himself testified that “because of its indecisive half-heartedness and lack of character... the superhuman and supernatural essence of ancient christianity still haunts the minds of men - at least as a ghost.” he planned to dissolve the ghost, dispel the perfume. he made it his sacred mission to restore man's spiritual coherency by "erasing this most rotten stain, the stain of our present history." he would break man's ties to both God and christianity, myths that held a guilt-ridden society in total bondage.

3. atheistic humanism - Feuerbach was convinced that he could account for the

christian illusion in particular, and for the illusion of religion in general, through psychological and anthropological causes. in his essence of religion, he proclaimed that God is merely a myth which embodies the highest aspirations of the human consciousness. “those who have no desires have no Gods… Gods are men’s wishes in corporeal form.” so he vowed to make it his mission to displace religion.

a. negative thesis – alienation: according to Feuerbach alienation arises in man

when man discovers that, in his struggle for a better life, his existence is dependent, limited, threatened; he is agitated by needs, ideals, desires, fears; he is buffeted by loves and hates, attractions and abhorrences, values and disvalues; he is forced to sift the good from the evil, all the time realizing from distressing experience that he finds in himself unstableness and weakness yet, at the same time, an attraction for noble virtues and deeds. in his desire to stabilize the noble qualities he finds in his nature, man hypostasizes, idolizes, absolutizes them outside his own changeable being into an absolute other who is unchangeable. this other is endowed with wisdom, will, justice, love, all the noble feelings and virtues which man himself experiences from time to time, both in himself and in his fellowmen. thus the absolutized attributes appear to man as if they were the exclusive ornaments of another, an infinitely more perfect being than himself. spontaneously, religiously, man projects and objectifies his own goodness and greatness in the fantastic being he calls God. God is thus the product of pure human imagination. God is for man the commonplace book where he registers his highest feelings and thoughts, the genealogical album into which he enters the names of the things most dear and sacred to him.

in this way man simultaneously dispossesses himself and enriches his God; in affirming God he denies himself; the poorer he becomes, the richer his God becomes; nothing really exists in God except what belongs and actually really still is in man's heart.

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God as the epitome of all realities or perfections is nothing other than a compendious summary devised for the benefit of the limited individual, an epitome of the generic human qualities distributed among men, in the self-realization of the species in the course of world history.

thus man strips himself and the human species of his highest attributes and creates with these virtues the essence of his own God. man must die that God may be born.

b. posit ive thesis – repossession: following the hegelian dialectic, Feuerbach

contended that every antithesis must rise to the synthesis; every rejection must move to a higher reception; every alienation becomes a more perfect repossession. man has reached that point in his historical development where he has to take back from religion and God that nature which he had rejected in their favor. Feuerbach saw himself as the prophet and the expediter of this process of reclamation and the herald of the advent of the kingdom of man. thus he set out to destroy the vampire of God, to dispel the phantom of religion, to liberate man from the mighty myth of the absolute other, to restore man to man and hence to his own greatness. Feuerbach indicated that the principal aim of his mission was to present mankind to the greatness of his own essence and thereby to inspire men to have faith in their humanity.

God was my first thought, reason my second and man my third and last - 1 deny only in order to affirm. i deny the fantastic projection of theology and religion in order to affirm the real essence of man. - while i do reduce theology to anthropology, i exalt anthropology to theology; very much as christianity while lowering God into man, made man into God.

i aim to change the friends of God into friends of man, believers into thinkers, worshippers into workers, candidates for the other world into students of this world, christians, who on their own confession, are half-animal and half-angel, into men - whole men… theologians into anthropologians… religious and political footmen of a celestial and terrestrial monarchy and aristocracy into free, self-reliant citizens of earth. here was an atheistic humanism that destroyed God as the absolute other; yet simultaneously here was a theistic humanism that divinized man.

the divine essence is the glorified human essence transfigured from the death of abstraction. in religion man frees himself from the limitations of life; here he throws off what oppresses, impedes or adversely affects him; God is man's self-awareness, emancipated from all actuality; man feels himself free, happy, blessed only in his religion because here only does he live in his true genius; here he celebrates his sunday

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Feuerbach did not divinize individual man in his particularity, but he identified God with the essence of man, with humanity. his is a religion of humanity, the apotheosis of man though the apotheosis of mankind.

it is the essence of man that is the supreme being… if the divinity of nature is the basis of all religions, including christianity, the divinity of man is its final aim… the turning point in history will be the moment when man becomes aware that the only God of man is man himself. ‘homo homini deus! man spontaneously conceives of his own essence as individual in himself and generic in God; as limited in himself and infinite in God.

but when man finally sheds this mythical view and accepts personal participation in his common humanity, man finally realizes the divine dimension of his own being.

i have only found the key to the cipher of the christian religion, only extricated its true meaning from the web of contradictions and delusions called theology; but in doing so i have certainly committed sacrilege. if therefore my work is negative, irreligious, atheistic, let it be remembered that atheism - at least in the sense in this work - is the secret of religion itself; that religion itself, not indeed on the surface, but fundamentally, not in intention or according to its own supposition, but in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of human nature.

5. authentic atheism - thus what theology and philosophy have held to be God, the

absolute, the infinite, is not God; but that which they have held not to be God is God: namely, the attribute, the quality, whatever has reality. hence he alone is the true atheist to whom the predicates of the divine being - for example, love, wisdom, justice - are nothing; not he to whom merely the subject of these predicates is nothing. and in no wise is the negation of the subject necessarily also a negation of the predicates considered in themselves. these have an intrinsic, independent reality; they force their recognition upon man by their very nature; they are self-evident truths to him; they prove, they attest themselves. it does not follow that goodness, justice, wisdom are chimeras because the existence of God is a chimera ...the fact is not that a quality is divine because God has it, but that God has it because it is in itself divine: because without it God would be a defective being… but if God as subject is the determined, while the quality, the predicate, is the determining, then in truth the rank of the Godhead is due not to the subject, but to the predicate.

the essential message of all religion and of the gospels of christianity is that they are treating fundamentally about man and human greatness under the myth-symbols of God and supernaturalism.

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FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: The Death of God and the Will to Power - demanded that we take the unreality of God more seriously than secular modernity does. he maintained that if god is real then the divine absoluteness renders everything human relative at best. every attempt to make human existence, whether individual or collective, practical or theoretical, its own foundation and norm is at once foolish and arrogant. the securities offered to the self by socialization and legitimation are radically put in question as being human, all too human. 1. god is not real. when religion is examined apart from the ontological support that

theism provides for it, it turns out to be the ideological support for a moral order that does not deserve our support. when secular modernity recognizes the full implication of its atheistic posture, it will see that it has lost its moral compass and has become human existence at sea, a freedom at once exhilarating and terrifying. new values will have to be created to replace the old, discredited ones.

2. god is dead - this means that there are no objective values. to view values as

objective or absolute is to conceive of an independently existing world of reality that provides a basis or a ground for all our moral judgements. in asserting that god is dead, Nietzsche is not merely claiming that we cannot know which value judgements are true. he is making the more radical claim that we must reject the very idea of a world in itself that could serve as the ultimate standard or foundation for the truth of any value judgement. there simply are no universal moral principles, no single moral code, and non non-natural properties guaranteeing that a given action is right or wrong. for Nietzsche, all judgements of value are objectively false. since there is no real world and no facts that could provide an objective ground for the truth of any value judgement, we cannot with absolute certainty say that, in a all contexts, one course of action rather than another is morally preferable.

the death of god as a being that is the ground of objective values is of enormous significance. if we think of values as objective, then they have a kind of power over us. throughout our childhood, we have values instilled in us by parents, friends, and mentors. by definition these values do not come from within, but they undoubtedly control us throughout our lives. if we go against these ingrained values we feel guilty, and for that reason there is tremendous psychological pressure to conform. we therefore become slaves to god, and god, as representing objective values, is our master. if, however, god is dead, the effect is exhilarating. for if god is dead and there are no objective values, then we are free to create our own values

thus the death of god liberates and frees us to make our own decision and choices. before we were slaves to god: we obeyed god, we were ruled by god, and we acted in accordance with his commands. but now we can become legislators of our own values, we can become little gods, we can become masters of ourselves. we no longer need to be ruled by objective values, but can now be ruled by ourselves.

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you shall become masters over yourself, master also over your own virtues. formerly they were your masters; but they must be only your instruments besides other instruments. you shall get control over your for and against and learn how to display just one and then the other in accordance with your higher goal.

3. critique of the ethical:

a. the ethical individual is not the existing individual because he is not aware of the all important fact of the death of god.

b. the ethical individual still believes that decisions and choices are based on

objective values. c. the ethical individual is completely unaware and unwilling to face the fact that

values are our own responsibility. [although such individuals are ethical because their actions are based on values, they seldom, if ever confront themselves in making decisions and choices.]

d. thus to be ethical, to do what is objectively right or to view values as being

binding on us, is one way to avoid facing oneself. if we view values as being objectively valid, as being given to us by some

external source then we may think that we can avoid ultimate responsibility for the values we adopt. we may claim that we are just doing what we are told or what society judges to be right. but we cannot avoid taking responsibility for the values we adopt, but we seldom, if at all, are aware of the existentially relevant fact that we have to decide on our own what values to adopt.

all actions may be referred back to valuations, and all valuations are either one’s

own or adopted, the latter being by far the more numerous. why do we adopt them? through fear, i.e., we think it more advisable to pretend that they are our own, and so well do we accustom ourselves to do so that it at last becomes second nature to us... a valuation of our own is something very rare indeed!

e. although values are our own responsibility we seldom recognize this because we

take for granted that the value instilled in us as children are correct. and then when we are older we fear asserting our own values against the values of others, and consequently we automatically make valuations that coincide with those of others.

4. critique of christianity:

a. it is a slave morality, the morality common to those people who are weak willed, uncertain of themselves, oppressed, and abused. the essence of slave morality

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is utility. the good is what is most useful for the community as a whole. since the powerful are few in number, compared to the masses of the weak, the weak gain power vis-à-vis the strong by treating those qualities that are valued by the powerful as evil, and those qualities that are valued by the powerful as evil, and those qualities that enable the sufferers to endure their lot as good. thus, patience, humility, pity, submissiveness to authority, and the like, are considered good. slave morality begins with a negation: a resentment of excellence, achievement, individuality, and power.

b. it is the result of certain errors of reason. christianity is a systematic distortion of

reality, since its basic precepts are all imaginary and false.

in christianity neither morality nor religion has even a single point of contact with reality. nothing but imaginary causes, nothing but imaginary effects. intercourse between imaginary beings; an imaginary natural science; an imaginary psychology; an imaginary teleology.

god is a being who is wholly love. his actions are always completely unegoistic

and unselfish; he acts and desires everything for others and nothing for himself. the concepts of an unegoistic being and an unegoistic action makes no sense.

no man has ever done anything that was done wholly for others and with no

personal motivation whatever; how, indeed, should a man be able to do something that had no reference to himself, that is to say, lacked all inner compulsion which would have its basis in a personal need? how could the ego act without the ego?

even those actions that are most obviously altruistic are done in the service of a

personal ideal. c. christianity is nihilistic. it is against life, this life. it distinguishes between this

world and the next. the next is a more perfect world where the good will be rewarded and the evil punished. the next world has greater reality than this world while this world is thought to be corrupt. for Nietzsche, it is the weak who suffer from the world, who need to create another world.

d. christianity has done more harm than good. the majority of humans are weak,

infirm, sick, and failures and a further weakness of christianity is that it seeks to preserve these excesses of failures. for Nietzsche, christianity has preserved too much of what ought to perish. it encourages the lowly to stay in their place. it places value on the weak willed and teaches them how to deal with their oppression all the while doing so only for the sake of keeping them oppressed.

5. newfound freedom

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a. this newfound freedom is accompanied by an uncontrollable exhilaration.

indeed, we philosophers and free spirits feel when we hear the news that ‘the old god is dead’ as if a new dawn shone on us; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectation. at long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again, perhaps there has never yet been such an ‘open sea’.

b. it can be argued that in a world in which all value judgments are false, in a world

in which there are no values, it is impossible to choose and thus, that it is impossible to be free.

in the horizon of the infinite – we have left the land and have embarked. we have burned our bridges behind us – indeed, we have gone farther and destroyed the land behind us. now, little ship, look out! beside you is the ocean: to be sure, it does not always roar, and at times it lies spread out like silk and gold and reveries of graciousness. but hours will come when you will realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. woe, when you feel homesick for land as if it had offered more freedom – and there is no longer any land.

c. the freedom left for individuals who set out on their own course without anything

to base their decision on except themselves is a cagelike freedom. they are faced with having to make a choice in an infinite sea that contains no path or road marked out as the right one. their infinite freedom has become an unfreedom. it has become a paradox that requires enormous strength to overcome, if it is to be overcome. this can be done through the will to power.

4. the will to power

a. the will to power manifests itself in humans as the ultimate psychological

explanation or motivating force behind all our actions. b. happiness is the feeling that the power is growing, that resistance is overcome.

thus the ultimate goal of all our actions is to achieve power or the feeling of power. the will to power is not a will to life, but a will to exist in a certain way. it is a will to perfection, a striving for distinction.

c. striving for distinction may manifest itself in tyranny over others, but dominating

others is the means, not the end. the end is to increase power and ultimately to attain power over ourselves.

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d. our instinct to freedom, our instinct to power, has as its goal - the creation of

something that is truly one’s own, a monument to one’s uniqueness. it also aims at self- mastery: the mastery that comes through being able to set goals for oneself and then overcome the obstacles that might interfere with their realization.

in the end, the obstacles that stand in the way of realizing our instinct or will to power are found within.

e. the realization of the will to power is a painful process. only those who have

strength and courage can fully realize the will to power thereby coming to have an awareness of themselves as those who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves their own laws, who create themselves.

f. the will to power is the will to create a certain type of person – a superman or

overman – and in this ideal type a resolution of the paradox of choice is to be found.

g. the truly free individual can overcome the paradox of choice or freedom by

having the strength of will to assume responsibility for self-created values by living in accordance with them.

KARL MARX: Religion as Alienation - presents not just a theory of religion but a total system of thought that itself resembles a religion. 1. declared the primacy of matter over mind. for Marx the realm of concepts and ideas

is just the reflection of a world that is fundamentally material in nature. this general principle, that what is basically real about the world can be found in material forces rather than mental concepts, became the philosophical anchor for all of his later thinking. in particular, it underlies two themes that took center stage as his thought developed:

a. the conviction that economic realities determine human behavior; b. the thesis that human history is the story of class struggle, the scene of a

perpetual conflict in every society between those who own things, usually the rich, and those who must work to survive, usually the poor.

the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight

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that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

2. for Marx there is one thing in the history of humankind that has been constant: from

their first emergence on earth human beings have been motivated not by grand ideas but by very basic material concerns, the elementary needs of survival. this is the first fact in the materialist view of history. everyone needs food, clothing, and shelter. once these needs are met, others, like the drive for sex, join them. reproduction then leads to families and communities, which create still other material desires and demands. these can be met only by developing what Marx calls a mode of production. the necessities and even comforts of life must in some way be produced - by hunting and gathering foods, by fishing, growing grain, or entering on some other labor.

moreover, because various people are involved in these activities in different ways,

they sooner or later fall into a division of labor; different people do different things. these ties or connections among those who divide their labor in this fashion are called relations of production.

3. from communism to capitalism - the earliest and simplest form of society was a

kind of primitive communism. al resources were commonly owned by everyone in the village and each one shares all things as need may arise. for Marx this original tribal communism was in a sense the most natural of human organizations. it allowed people to enjoy variety in their lives by participating in a healthy mix of meaningful work and refreshing leisure. they belonged to the group but also knew the worth of their separate selves.

what changed this primeval set-up was the introduction of the notion of private ownership. each one began to claim as his own the product of his labor. and they began to deal with each other by exchanging what they have made, that is, by selling the product of their labor. before long, by talent, crime, or good fortune, some acquired more and better private property while others were left with virtually nothing. in addition, as the mode of production changed from hunting and gathering to the growing of grain, those who happened to hold property found themselves in a position of tremendous advantage. they owned not just products but also the very means of production p the land on which corps are down. since others did not, the landowners were the masters; the rest feel in as their dependents, assistants, or even slaves. private property and agriculture - two hallmarks of early civilization - thus helped to create the central crisis of all humanity: the separation of classes by power and wealth, and with it the beginnings of permanent social conflict. later still, in the medieval era, the mode of production remained largely the same. it was agricultural, and the structure of class conflict continued unaltered. the feudal lord and serf simply replaced the ancient master

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and slave. even among craftsmen, the master artisan and his lowly apprentice reenacted the old conflict between the Roman patrician and plebeian.

in the final, modern stage of development, this age-old conflict of classes persists, but it acquires a new intensity and a darker coloring. modern capitalism introduces a new mode of production: trade and manufacturing; and with it comes also a profound change in the relations of production. owner and worker are still with us, but now the conflict between them is far more intense. by introducing commercial activity and the profit motive on a large scale, capitalism produces great wealth for some, for those whom Marx calls the bourgeoisie, or middle class. meanwhile the proletariat, or workers, are left with almost nothing; they must sell their precious daily labor to the owner-managers in return for wages on which they simply subsist. this bad situation is made even worse because capitalism has also become industrial. it has given birth to the factory, the place where workers spend long, exhausting hours at machines that make objects in huge quantities and bring a fabulous return of wealth - of course only to their owners. the spread of this industrial capitalism thus raises the conflict between classes to a fever pitch, ushering in its last and most desperate phase - a period of proletarian misery so great that workers find their only hope in revolution. they lash out, bitterly, in an attempt to overthrow by force the entire social and economic order that oppresses them. violence in this situation is to be expected, for the rich will never give up what they have unless it is taken by force. confrontation, is, in fact, unavoidable, for it is driven by deep historical forces that no one group, nation or class can resist.

Marx drew a connection between the social class divisions and certain stages of

economic development. he believed that in the future this struggle would lead to revolution and the end of classes altogether.

4. so human history is destined toward a happy future but only after passing through a

sequence of oppositions marked by ever more bitter and violent episodes of struggle. this idea he derived from Hegel who developed the idea that reality evolves through a triadic dialectic process. each time an event, thesis, occurs in the world, spirit generates an opposed event, antithesis, which tries to correct it. the tension between these two is then resolved by yet a third event, synthesis, which blends elements of birth, only to serve as the new thesis for yet another sequence of oppositions and resolution. history, concluded Hegel, is indeed a great scene of conflict at the core of which is alienation. Marx agreed with him but he thought that Hegel failed to see just how deeply alienation and historical progress are rooted not in ideas but in the basic material realities of life.

it is concrete, actual, working human beings who create their own alienation, and precisely by attributing to others - including the realm of ideas - the very things that properly belong to themselves. that is the real alienation and the rue source of

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human unhappiness. in religion, god is always being given the credit, the worship, that properly belongs to human beings.

alienation has been made cruelly worse by the coming o modern industrial capitalism. each of the workers creates an enormous amount of surplus value for the capitalist factory owner. after working a short time to earn their wages, they continue to create value - surplus value - all of which is taken directly from them and sold for profit by the factory owner. surplus value, in other words, is quite simply that which is left over after the workers’ wages are subtracted from the much greater value they daily produce in their work.

“within the capitalist system... all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the laborer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labor-process... they distort the conditions under which he works, subject during the labor-process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of capital.”

5. the social structure - the central drama of history is the struggle of classes, a

conflict controlled from below by the hard realities of economic life. in a world of private property, some - usually the rich - own the means of production, while others - overwhelmingly the poor - do not.

Marx distinguished between what he called the base of society and its superstructure. through all of history, he insists, economic facts have formed the foundation of social life; they are the base that generates the division of labor, the struggle of classes, and human alienation. by contrast, certain other spheres of activity, the things that are so visible in daily life, belong to the superstructure. they not only arise from the economic base but are in significant ways shaped by it. they are created by the deep, hidden energies and emotions of the class struggle. the institutions we associate with cultural life - family, government, the arts, most of philosophy, ethics, and religion - must be understood as structures whose main role is to contain or provide a controlled release for the deep, bitter tensions that arise from the clash between the powerful and the powerless. Marx used a special word for all of the intellectual activity that makes up this superstructure: the endeavors of artists, politicians, and theologians all amount to ideology. such people produce systems of ideas and creative works of arts which in their minds seem to spring from the desire for truth or love of beauty. but in reality these products are mere expressions of class interest; they reflect the hidden social need to justify things as they stand, the natural inclination of those who benefit from injustice to show why

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the circumstance that creates it should remain unchanged. the thinkers are always the servants of the rulers.

6. critique of religion - religion is pure illusion. worse, it is an illusion with most

definitely evil consequences. it is the most extreme example of ideology, of a belief system whose chief purpose is simply to provide reasons - excuses, really - for keeping things in society just the oppressors like them. as a matter of fact, religion is so fully determined by economic that it is pointless to consider any of its doctrines or beliefs on their own merits. these doctrines differ from one religion to the next, to be sure, but because religion is always ideological, the specific form it takes in one society or another is in the end largely dependent on one thing: the shape of social life as determined by the material forces in control of it at any given place and time. for Marx belief in a god or gods is an unhappy by-product of the class struggle, something that should not only be dismissed - but dismissed with scorn.

Marx was influenced in his thinking about religion by Ludwig Feuerbach who created a sensation with his scathing attack on orthodox religion in his book the essence of christianity

. Feuerbach contended that when theologians talk about some alien being - about god or the absolute - they are really talking about humanity and nothing more. christian theologians notice all of the personal qualities we most dearly admire - ideals like goodness, beauty, truthfulness, wisdom, love, steadfastness, and strength of character - then proceed to strip them from their human owners and reject them onto the screen of heaven, where they are worshipped - now in a form separate from ourselves - under the name of a supernatural being called god.

following this theory Marx affirmed that “man, who looked for a superman in the fantastic reality of heaven... found nothing there but the reflection of himself. the basis of irreligious criticism is: man makes religion, religion does not make man.”

7. there is a striking parallel between religious and socioeconomic activity. both are

marked by alienation. religion takes qualities - moral ideals - out of our natural human life and gives them, unnaturally, to an imaginary and alien being we call god. capitalist economies take another expression of our natural humanity - our productive labor - and transform it just as unnaturally into a material object, something that is bought, sold, and owned by others. in the one case, we hand over a part of ourselves - our virtue and sense of self-worth - to a wholly imaginary being. in the other, we just as readily deliver our labor for nothing more than wages to get other things money will buy. as religion robs us of our human merits and gives them to god, so the capitalist economy robs us of our labor, our true self-expression, and gives it, as a mere commodity, into the hands of those - the rich - who are able to buy it.

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the alienation evident in religion is therefore to be seen as a reflection, a mirror image of the real and underlying alienation of humanity, which is economic and material rather than spiritual. in these terms it is easy to understand why, for many people, religion has such a powerful and lasting appeal. better than anything else in the social superstructure, it addresses the emotional needs of an alienated, unhappy humanity.

“religious distress is at the same time the expression of real [economic] distress and the protest against real distress. religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. it is the opium of the people. the abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. the demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.”

8. religion is the opium of the people - like real opium, which is a hallucinogenic

and narcotic substance, religion eases pain even as it creates fantasies. this is the role of religion in the life of the poor. through it, the pain people suffer in a world of cruel exploitation is eased by the fantasy of a supernatural world where all sorrows cease, all oppression disappears. for Marx it is just this unreality, this leap into an imaginary world, which makes religion such a wickedly comforting business. after all, if there is neither a god nor a supernatural world, being religious, is no different from being addicted to a drug, like opium. it is pure escapism. worse, in terms of the struggle against exploitation in the world, it is also fundamentally destructive.

religion shifts their gaze upward to god, when it should really be turned downward

to the injustice of their material, physical situation.

escape, then, is the main thing religion offers the oppressed. for those who are not oppressed, for those lucky enough to control the means of production, it offers something far better. religion provides the ideology, the system of ideas, which they can call upon to remind the poor that all social arrangements should stay just as they are. god wills that the owning rich and laboring poor remain where they are, which is just where they belong. religion’s role in history has been to offer a divine justification for the status quo, for life just as we find it.

“the social principles of christianity justified the slavery of antiquity, glorified the serfdom of the middle ages and equally know, when necessary, how to defend the oppression of the proletariat, although they make a pitiful face over it. the social principles of christianity preach the necessity of a ruling and an oppressed class, and all they have for the latter is the pious wish [that] the former will be charitable… the social principles of christianity declare all vile acts of the oppressors against the oppressed to be either the just punishment of original sin and other sins or trials that the lord in his infinite wisdom imposes on those redeemed. the social principles of christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submission, dejection.”

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9. belief in god and in some heavenly salvation is not just an illusion; it is an illusion

that paralyzes and imprisons. it paralyzes workers by drawing off into fantasy the very motives of anger and frustration they need to organize a revolt. desire for heaven makes them content with earth. at the same time, religion also imprisons; it promotes oppression by presenting a system of belief which declares that poverty and misery are facts of life which ordinary people must simply accept and embrace.

Marx however did not see any need to target the downfall of religion directly. for him, religion, for all its evil doings, really does not matter very much. though it certainly aids the oppressors, there is no need to launch hysterical crusades against it, for it is just not that important. it is merely the symptom of a disease, not the disease itself. it belongs to society’s superstructure, not to its base. and the base is the real field of battle for the oppressed.. he was confident that in time religion, like the state and everything else in the superstructure of oppression, will wither away on its own.

Lecture 3: The Problem of Evil within a theistic framework the presence of evil in the universe is a grave difficulty. even the most unquestioning minds are disturbed by it, and to the rest of humanity it constitutes by any reckoning a special problem. some consider it the greatest obstacle to religious belief. the presence of evil in the universe has puzzled theists because God is understood to be above all not only “fons bonitatis,” the source of all that is called good, but the creator of all finite beings while also unlimited in power. to some believers it has seemed not only an intellectual problem but a cosmic moral affront. where, as in the Hebrew bible, God is depicted as justice personified, one might expect to find the righteous rewarded with health, prosperity, and that longevity that the Hebrews were inclined to account a mark of divine favor, and to find the wicked plagued by pestilence, crushed by poverty, and punished by early death. Job was much troubled by reflection on the fact that, on the contrary, the righteous are often tried with sufferings almost beyond endurance, while the wicked, enjoying all the commonly coveted blessings, live on to mock them. “why do the wicked live, reach old age, and grow mighty in power?” the emphasis on justice and other ethical notions that was characteristic of the late period in Hebrew literature to which Job belongs made the flagrant injustice he discerned in human affairs look like a reproach to God. the question then seemed to be: which is defective, God’s goodness or God’s power? to say either sounded blasphemous. 1. there is a central difficulty arising from the simultaneous attribution in theism of

omnipotence and omnibenevolence to the deity. it is how to reconcile these attributes with the existence of evil in the world.

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is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? then he is impotent. is he able, but not

willing? then he is malevolent. is he both able and willing? why then is there evil? 2. the problem: the existence of evil neutralizes any positive evidence for the

existence of god. it also demonstrates that it is unreasonable to believe in god.

the paradox: an omnibenevolent and omnipotent god that allows the existence of evil in the world.

if he is perfectly good, why does he allow evil to exist? why did he not create a

better world, if not one without evil, at least one with substantially less evil, than what we find in this world?

3. the logical problem of evil – John Mackie. there is an inconsistency between

certain theistic claims about god and evil. on the one hand, the theist affirms that an omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good god exists; on the other hand, he affirms that evil exists in the world.

these two statements are inconsistent with each other. this means that they both

cannot be true. since no person is rationally entitled to believe an inconsistent set of statements, then it is not rational to believe both.

[although a world in which all persons always freely do what is right is certainly

possible, it is not a state of affairs that was within the power of god to create. all of the free creatures in that world would have to help bring it about by their own choices. the free will defender insists that god cannot determine the actions of free persons.]

4. the evidential problem of evil – Wesley Salmon. the existence of god is improbable. given the existence of evil, it is improbable or unlikely that god exists.

evil is an evidence against god. it cannot be explained on a theistic account of the

world. the evil with which we are all acquainted is not what one would expect if an omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good god created and superintends the world.

[there are cases of evil – evils that thus appear utterly pointless or gratuitous – in

which all available theistic explanations seem to break down, and that the prospects are dim that any adequate explanation will be found. perceptive critics have even pressed the point that some cases of evil are so extreme that we cannot even sensibly imagine what sort of justification they could ever have.]

the brothers karamazov, by fyodor dostoevsky, portrays the reunion of the

two brothers, ivan and alyosha, long separated by the odyssey of their different lives. ivan, a university-educated and worldly wise man turned atheist, seeks to

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elicit an answer to one of the most profound problems in life from alyosha, who has become a faithful monk.

by the way, a bulgarian i met lately in moscow... told me about the crimes

committed by the turks and circassians in all parts of bulgaria through fear of a general rising of the slavs. they burn villages, murder, rape women and children, they nail their prisoners to the fences by the ears, leave them till morning, and in the morning they hang them – all sorts of things you cannot imagine. people talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that is a great injustice and insult to the beast; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. the tiger only tears and gnaws, that is all he can do.

ivan reveals that he collects stories of such evils, particularly those of the suffering innocent children. his point is that the god of alyosha is supposed to be mighty and just, but that the world is full of absurdity and injustice, pain and suffering. ivan insists he cannot embrace a system of religious beliefs that fails so utterly to make sense of life.

theologian eugene borowitz, writes of the holocaust:

any god who could permit the holocaust, who could remain silent during it, who could “hide his face” while it dragged on, was not worth believing in. there might well be a limit to how much we could understand about him, but auschwitz demanded an unreasonable suspension of understanding. in the face of such great evil, god, the good and the powerful, was too inexplicable, so men said “god is dead.”

4. the reality of evil – whether encountered in the indescribable horror of the

holocaust, unrelenting hunger in underdeveloped countries, violent crimes in large cities, political corruption, or the desperate suffering of terminal cancer patients – the presence of evil in our world cannot be ignored. evil in one form of another touches all of us.

5. a range of responses – the traditional strategy has been to reconcile the classical

concept of god with the existence or extent of evil. process theodicy modifies the classical concept of god in order to address the problem of evil.

a. one popular approach contends that evil is a necessary contrast to the good.

just as we learn what the color yellow is by experiencing the contrast between it and other colors, experiencing evil allows us to understand and properly appreciate the nature of goodness.

[a much smaller amount of evil than we actually have would suffice to help us

understand the good.]

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b. another approach common among religious believers is that evil is a punishment

for wrongdoing. [the punishment theory flirts with sheer absurdity in cases such as the death of

innocent infants or the tragic destruction of the population of an entire village.] c. Gottfried Leibniz - this is the best of all possible worlds. a perfect god has the

power to create any possible world; being perfect, god would create the very best possible world; no creaturely reality can be totally perfect but must contain some evil; so, god created a world possessing the optimum balance of good and evil. since some goods are made possibly only by the presence of evil, god had to weigh the total value of all possible worlds and create the one in which the evils contributed to that world’s being the very best one.

[the concept of a best possible world is logically incoherent. the Leibnizian

approach seems to imply that our world is not capable of improvement, an implication that runs counter to our ordinary moral judgments. it might be asked why god consented to create a world at all given that it had to have this much suffering.]

d. the ultimate harmony solution – all is well with the world from the perspective of

god or all will be well in the long run. since the knowledge of god is complete whereas human knowledge is partial and fragmented, only divine judgment about the state of things is ultimately valid. another version of this argument is the position which maintains that divine morality is higher than human morality. we cannot apply the same perfect moral standard as god would in appraising events of the world.

[this approach projects a picture of god as a moral monster, as one whose moral

standards are completely contrary to our deepest moral convictions.] John Stuart Mill - in everyday life i know what to call right or wrong, because i

can plainly see its rightness or wrongness. now if a god requires that what i ordinarily call wrong in human behavior i must call right because he does it; or that what i ordinarily call wrong i must call right because he so calls it, even though i do not see the point of it; and if by refusing to do so, he can sentence me to hell, to hell i will gladly go.

[the claim that all evils will eventually result in higher goods is the future, either

in temporal life or in eternity does not clarify how such future goods justify the present occurrence of evils. it is quite a conceptual from the notion of a good outweighing an evil to the notion of compensating for an evil, and a very large jump to the notion of a good justifying the existence of evil. the advocates of

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this approach end up by saying that human beings, with their limited powers, simply do not understand how future goods make up for present evils. only god in his wisdom does.]

e. the natural law explanation – (natural evils – those terrible events that occur in

nature of their own accord, such as hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and natural diseases that cause suffering to animals and human.) it is reasonable to think that, as part of his creative program, god would bring about a natural order – a world constituted by objects that operate according to physical laws. the operation of physical laws of all sorts, then, makes possible a host of natural benefits, such as physiological feelings of pleasure or even helpful warnings of pain and simply bodily movements as well as complex behaviors. furthermore, a generally stable and predictable natural order supports a moral order in which rational deliberation can take place and in which free choices can be carried out in action. but the possibility of natural evil is inherent in a natural system. the same water that quenches our thirst can also drown us; the same neurons that transmit pleasure can also transmit unbearable pain.

[critics of this natural law – H. J. McCloskey - theodicy have argued that god

could greatly reduce or eliminate natural evils, either by miraculously intervening in the present natural system or by creating an entirely different natural system altogether. some theists – Richard Swinburne – have countered that to expect frequent divine intervention contradicts the attributes of god and the concept of a natural system. the very concept of a natural system implies that it is not frequently adjusted from outside the system, that it runs more or less of its own accord and would be abrogated by frequent divine intervention.

f. the free will theodicy – (moral evils – all those bad things for which humans are

morally responsible.) according to the divine wisdom and goodness, god decided to create morally free beings. god knew that they would sometimes willfully choose to do wrong, but god granted free will anyway because a world of free creatures is more valuable than a world of automatons. god cannot extensively interfere with creaturely free choice because doing so would jeopardize genuine free will.

[critics of this view argue that god could have created free human beings with

stronger dispositions toward right conduct than they actually have. doing this would surely reduce much of the evil brought about by the misuse of free will.]

6. some important global theodicies – in the history of theodicy answers to the

problem of evil and general insights into the human conditions have been woven together in particular ways to fashion comprehensive scenarios of the way god works in the world. certain solutions to aspects of the overall problem of evil are

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incorporated into larger visions of the origin and destiny of humanity, visions which are referred to as global theodicies. a. augustinian theodicy - the universe – the whole creative product of god – is

good. God, though self-sufficient, created the universe - which, being his creation, is

intrinsically good, like himself. everything God has created must be good, therefore, in its own way, though there are degrees of goodness as there are degrees of importance in any structure.

evil, metaphysically, is not a positive, substantial reality that exists independently of god; rather it is the lack of good, the privation of goodness. unlike god, who is absolute and unchangeable, the universe was created out of nothing and is thus mutable or changeable. this explains how its original goodness is corruptible and thus can manifest evil. it is particularly the misuse of free will that allows the entry of sin or evil into human experience. the fall spoiled the originally perfect creation. this original sin brought guilt and punishment upon the whole race. but believers will be redeemed by divine grace. history will climax in the establishment of the kingdom of god.

[how, on his account, an originally good creature, possessing free will, can

engage in sin. if human beings once enjoyed an ideal state or golden age in which there was no evil, then how is it that they would choose to do evil? Augustine, in reply to these questions, maintained, in the end, the mystery of finite freedom.]

[J.L. Mackie: if there is no logical impossibility in a man’s freely choosing the

good on one, or on several occasions, there cannot be a logical impossibility in his freely choosing the good on every occasion. God was not, then, faced with the choice of making innocent automata and making beings who, in acting freely, would sometimes go wrong as the classic Augustinian tradition presents the case for the inevitability of moral evil: there was open to Him the obviously better possibility of making beings who would act freely but always go right.]

b. irenaean theodicy – according to John Hick, a modern advocate of this view,

the Irenean theodicy involves a different scenario from the one pictured by Augustine. adam and the original creation were innocent and immature, possessing the privilege of becoming good by loving god and fellow creatures. But it would be an error to think that original innocence can be equated with original perfection. Indeed, it is not clear that god can instantaneously create morally mature persons, since moral maturity almost certainly requires the experience of temptation and according to some,. the actual participation of evil. hence, evil is to be explained not as a decline from a state of pristine purity and

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goodness, but rather as an inevitable stage in the gradual growth and struggle of the human race.

Hick calls this explanation soul-making theodicy because it paints a picture of a

divine grand scheme of helping human beings become morally and spiritually mature. on this view, a special kind of environment is critical to the whole soul making process. an environment conducive to spiritual and moral growth must be one in which there are real challenges, real opportunities for the display of moral virtue, and real possibilities of expressing faith in god. a major component of this environment will be a community of moral agents interacting in special ways and even a natural order of impersonal objects that operate independently of our wills. obviously , in such condition there is the genuine risk of evil – of failure and ruin, suffering and injustice. interestingly, Hick even deems it important that the world appear as if there is no god, and evil certainly plays an important role in forming this appearance.

[various criticisms have been leveled against the different aspects of this view:

Stanley Kane – argued that the epistemic distance Hick postulates between humanity and god in order to make room for faith can be maintained at much less cost. severe moral and physical evils do not seem necessary to give the appearance that god does not exist, since there surely are other ways in which god can conceal his presence. / another criticism is that it lacks empirical support for its central claim about the world being engaged in a program of soul making. there are enough failures in temporal life alone to cast grave doubt on whether a program of soul making is under way. Surely, there are so many people whose characters do not develop and mature but are stunted or ruined that severe critics rightly question the effectiveness or even the existence of some process of soul making. moreover, many critics wonder whether the goal of soul making, even if it did succeed in an ample amount of cases, could ever justify the means used to achieve it.]

c. process philosophy – Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne.

process thought modifies the classical attributes of the theistic god. in general it is based on a view of reality as becoming rather than being, which is a direct reversal of the traditional approach. the central theme in process theodicy therefore is the concept of change, development, and evolution – both in god and in finite creatures. creatures are conscious, ever changing centers of activity and experience. god, for process thought, has two natures, his primordial nature and his consequent nature. his primordial nature contains all eternal possibilities for how the creaturely world can advance; his consequent nature contains the experiences and responses of creatures as they choose to actualize some of these possibilities in their lives. as his consequent nature changes in response to events in the creaturely world, god may be said to change or to be in process.

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process philosophers deny that god has a monopoly on power as traditional theology affirms. finite creatures are also centers of power and thus can bring about new states of affairs as well. this creaturely power is freedom. this freedom is rooted in the very structure of reality, with each creature having the inherent power of self determination. god has all of the power that it is possible for a being to have, but not all of the power that there is. creatures, too, have some power of their own, which allows them to choose good or evil possibilities for their lives. the power of god must be viewed therefore as persuasive rather than coercive: god can try to lure creatures toward the good and away from evil, but he cannot force them to choose the good.

David Griffin – God cannot eliminate evil because god cannot unilaterally effect any state of affairs. instead god offers persons possibilities for the realization of good, adjusting his plans appropriately when finite creatures fail to live up to the divine plan and trying to lure them into fulfilling the next set of ideal possibilities, with the ultimate aim of enhancing and enriching their experience. ultimately, all positive and negative experiences are conserved and reconciled in the conscious life of god.. the continual, ongoing synthesis of all things in this life is the basic hope for the triumph of good and the redemption of the world.

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Part III THE THEISTIC RESPONSE

RATIONAL FOUNDATIONS FOR RELIGIOUS BELIEF

Lecture 1: Arguments for the Existence of God more important than the question of the formal validity of the arguments is the discovery of the concrete experience behind them and the sort of intelligibility they lend to experience. the following arguments were developed originally under the influence of religious motives and they were intended to have a religious function. the arguments about god were never meant to be merely a dialectical exercise. if we are to understand the full import of these arguments we cannot afford to ignore either their religious import or their foundation in experience. if these two aspects are kept in the foreground, the arguments will not be reduced to logical exercises by means of which philosophers express their secularity in refuting the arguments or their piety in defending them. ONTOLOGICAL APPROACH

1. the starting point is the idea of god, the content of which is a peculiar combination

of given historical meaning and constructive speculative interpretation. the formula – “that than which nothing greater can be conceived” [id quod majus cogitari non potest] – identifies god with a fullness of being which cannot be surpassed by any other reality.

on the one hand, the formula expresses what is meant by god in a historical religious tradition of experience and faith; on the other, it represents an original philosophical interpretation of what it means to be god. so the idea simultaneously refers to the god of christian experience and to the god described through concepts which are inherently universal. it is thereby quite wrong to claim that the argument has no significance beyond the limits of christian revelation. for a philosophical formula, containing a universal concept of god is not confined to any one religious tradition. for the ontological approach, god is understood as the summit of being, of power, of truth, of love.

2. reflection on the meaning of this idea results in the crucial rational apprehension

that if god is correctly expressed in or described by the above formula then it is necessary that god be real. this is to say that the argument asserts that whoever understand god in this sense will also apprehend that the conception excludes non existence by rendering it self contradictory and by removing it from the ream of possibility.

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3. from the standpoint of logical validity, the principal objection to the ontological argument has always been that the claim to existence is a peculiar claim and that it requires for its support something more than logical consistency and the direct apprehension of a necessary connection between ideas; in short, it has been objected that existence can be known only in and through experience or encounter, and that can never be elicited from ideas alone unless those ideas themselves are already the expression of direct experience.

what the classical objection points out is that the apprehension of necessary existence or the grasping of the conclusion that god must be real does not provide us with the actual encounter in experience which is supposed to be required for actual, concrete existence as distinct from the rational apprehension that a god whom we have never in fact met must nevertheless be real. the argument provides only rational encounter if it is viewed in a purely formal sense; it is as if we knew that there must be at least one person in the universe who loves us without our ever in fact having encountered that person.

4. the objection is not completely accurate because the ontological approach can be

approached separately from the experience upon which it is based and it must be taken as the movement of living reason seeking intelligibility within that experience. the reflecting self, participating as a total self in its own thought, starts by considering the meaning of a tradition of experience and belief about the nature of god; the course of the argument represents the path by which the self seeks to develop the implications of the initial point of departure. the central point of the ontological approach is that the reflecting self discovers a fundamental implication following from the meaning entertained at the outset.

5. the religious aspect is represented in the form of tradition and encounter; the

rational element is represented by the one crucial, logical transition. thus in the ontological approach reason does not provide the first encounter from which the fact of god’s reality ultimately derives; experience has the priority because it furnished the meaning with which the argument begins. but reason does provide rational support because it carries the self along from the starting point to the place where it sees that the reality intended is a necessary reality and to further reflection that this rational result makes the initial meaning intelligible.

6. it is admitted that the necessity of divine existence asserted by the ontological

argument is not a matter of encounter but of rational apprehension. it takes us beyond experience without ceasing to be logically related to that experience. this means that it is possible to pass beyond direct experience in the course of developing its meaning and implication in thought without losing an intelligible relation with the experiential starting point.

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COSMOLOGICAL APROACH

1. the starting point of the cosmological argument is neither god nor the self, but the

world of nature and certain of its features. the essence of the approach is to avoid all explicit beginning with god and to commence instead with empirical reality as present in everyday experience. the aim is to proceed from this point by way of the principle of causality to another fact – the existence of god – which must be admitted if the starting point is admitted.

the approach means that we reach god by showing that existing things are dependent for their being and for certain aspects of their natures upon a necessary ground that is beyond any of them. the argument from the existence of something which has been called the cosmological argument differs from other arguments in that it singles out existence itself as the fact with which to begin rather than a particular attribute of that existence. So whereas the other arguments seek to find an ultimate reason for certain characteristics exhibited in the world, the cosmological argument is more radical and asks for the ground of finite existence as such.

2. the major objection leveled against this approach is that it depends upon asserting

the unintelligibility or impossibility of a series which has no first term. the contention is that this assertion is unwarranted. Bertrand Russell, for example has argued that the existence of mathematical series which have neither first nor last terms furnishes us with an illustration to the contrary and that consequently we cannot allow the contention that every series must have a first term.

this objection is very far from being conclusive in view of the fact that the series in question is not a series whose members are empirical events but mathematical entities. apart from a special argument showing that the particular series referred to in the arguments for god is of the type that needs have no first term, the objection easily fails to be conclusive. on the other hand, it must be admitted that in the cosmological argument much depends upon the fact that for as many terms as we care to take each will fail to be the first term required.

3. the desired conclusion of a necessary first term depends upon the general

consideration that the regress can be stopped at a point only if there is a term requiring no predecessors. and it is here that a general appeal to intelligibility becomes necessary; the first cause and the prime mover can be reached only by invoking the principle that the entire series is unintelligible unless there is a first term. the argument, then, takes the form that there must be a first term if there are any terms at all, and this term will differ significantly from every other since the function performed by the predecessor of any term in the series will have to be performed for this term by the term itself.

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4. Immanuel Kant saw that the necessity involved is a necessity of thought or intelligibility, since we do not have the same direct access to the necessary term that we have to all the other terms in the series. it was this consideration that led him to claim that the cosmological argument is dependent upon the ontological – the conclusion of this argument, he contended, is all necessary thoughts, and the transition from these thoughts to the realities they intend can be made only via the ontological argument.

the cosmological argument depends not upon the ontological argument as such, but

upon the basic principle implicit in the ontological approach, namely, that a necessity of thought determines a corresponding reality. this does not mean that the cosmological argument is identical in form with the ontological; rather, it does call attention to its dependence upon the general demand for intelligibility and the further principle that whatever is demanded by thought for explaining a fact is itself to be counted among the real.

5. another form of the cosmological argument is the argument from contingent

existence. this form of the argument is more elemental than any other because it does not direct attention to any specific feature of the world, but raises instead the question of the existence of finite entities. this undercuts the others because it touches the reason for existence of finite things rather than some particular fact about these things. it starts with the assertion, something exists, and claims that the existence taken both individually (proper or finite parts of the cosmos) and collectively (the cosmos as a system possessing a grade of togetherness sufficient for it to be taken as one system) is something of which we can say, it might not have existed. from an examination either of what does exist distributively or of its togetherness as a system, we cannot conclude with confidence that the something in question exists of necessity. failure to discover within the nature of the existent any reason warranting its necessity reveals the contingency of that existent or, what is the same, the fact that it might not have existed. the argument may then be stated as follows: if anything exists and everything might not have existed, which is in fact the case for the finite existent accessible to us, then there must be at least one existent capable of giving existence to itself, or, which is the same, one existent which necessarily exists.

what this argument reveals in a more radical and devastating way than the others is

the fact that finite or contingent existence is not self-supporting – god as the necessary existent is not identical with the world or with any of its proper parts.

6. contingent existence individually and the world as a system do not contain within

themselves the ground of their own existence; this ground, if found at all, will have to be beyond them. the argument from the fact of existence itself makes explicit the insufficiency of finite existence. it demonstrates its incompleteness and testifies to the fact that finite existence, as it stands, is neither self explanatory nor self

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supporting. this fact is not a logical consequence of the principle of sufficient reason, but is discovered to be true of finite existence when that principle is invoked. moreover, since what is shown to be without rational support when taken by itself has the nature of a fact, there is a strong presumption that the reality supporting it and making it intelligible must have the status of fact. finite existence is not explained and supported by what has no more than notional or hypothetical status. this is a contribution of great importance and it is probably what was meant by those thinkers who urged the superiority of the cosmological approach over the ontological.

7. a serious problem confronting this approach is that of connecting the necessary

existent reached via the various cosmological routes with god as understood in the religious tradition within which the thinker exists and believes. the question naturally arises whether the connection between the prime mover, the first cause, and gods is external or whether some intelligible connection is to be found. the connection can be established only if the cosmological arguments explicitly begin with an idea of god embracing the functions and characteristics of the divine nature which are revealed in the cosmos and are made known through the arguments. there is no way of connecting god with the being reached through the arguments unless the connection is presupposed at the outset. the cosmological arguments must therefore begin with the initial assumptions that god is, first, actually manifested in the world, and, second, is inclusive of the functions and characteristics discovered via the cosmological route.

there is but one way in which this can be done, namely by assuming at the outset that god is already known to have a nature of certain sort and that this nature includes the power of being expressible in the world. this means that the specific cosmological type arguments all assume some one aspect of god, such as that of first cause, or final cause, which correlates with the cosmological aspect selected. in this regard, it is more accurate to say that the arguments yield necessary functions of god in relation to the world rather than god himself, god being presupposed at the outset as capable of expressing himself in the cosmological features.

TELEOLOGICAL APPROACH

1. the teleological approach properly belongs to the category of cosmological

arguments, since it proposes to approach god by starting with the world of nature. and insofar as it is a cosmological type of argument, what has been said about that way of approach will hold for the teleological argument as well. the teleological way has, however, at least two features which serve to distinguish it from its near neighbors: first, it seems closer to ordinary experience and observation than the other more philosophical proofs; and, second, in viewing the world in its totality as the expression of a self conscious plan the argument more closely approaches the

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idea of god as a purposive being than is the case with the other cosmological proofs.

as regards the first point, it is a well known fact that the abundance of orderly process in the world has impressed the mind of man from the beginning of recorded history. the accessibility of nature made it inevitable that man should seek in its order and pattern some clue to its origin and to his own destiny.

2. the argument from design expresses a quest for a purposive power in the universe

capable of accounting for the order and adaptation to function displayed in it. the argument reaches out for or points to a self conscious being insofar as the idea of deliberate plan has figured in the many formulations of the proof. unless the element of purposiveness is involved there is no need for introducing a self conscious being.

the fact of order taken quite apart from the supposition that it is chosen purposely so as to achieve some ultimate purpose for the world might be explained by other means. a merely immanent order might belong to a system necessarily and not contingently and hence would require no reference to a source beyond itself. it is therefore essential to the teleological approach that the order itself be seen as requiring explanation and thus as contingent in the same sense as the other cosmological characteristics.

3. Immanuel Kant objected to this argument on two grounds: first, it points to a

designer fashioning already existent material according to a plan, but not to a creator in the classical sense; second, we cannot know from the cosmos as such that its architect is all wise or all powerful since we have no standard of comparison that enables us to arrive at this judgment. the most that we can say is that the designer has just the power and the wisdom to fashion what in fact presents itself to us.

the important point raised by this criticism is that the cosmological approach, while it is important for preserving the expression of god through the natural world, is that it must ignore the specifically human experiences from which the religious conception of god ultimately derives. no cosmological type of argument, confined to nature and its features, can reach the concept of a self conscious purpose which is of the essence of the religious conception of god.

4. the cosmos, considered solely as the object of theoretical knowledge, cannot lead

the self to the idea of the good which is essential for the concept of purpose. it is for this reason that arguments of the cosmological type, when employed in the religious context, are all dependent upon an initial conception of god assumed at the outset and not derived from the analysis of nature or the form of the argument itself.

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ANTHROPOLOGICAL APPROACH

1. this approach maintains that there are in human experience three fundamental

marks of the presence of the divine. these are the three fundamental points at which the self and its experience are touched by an unconditional element containing a question and a concern and thus combining both a conceptual and a feeling pole. these three points in experience involve a question to the extend to which we are aware of quest for meaning, and they involve concern to the extent to which one making the quest is aware that the answer is internally related to his own being and to the quality of his life, and this is not a theoretical quest in which he may or may not be involved.

2. the three occasions are: a] the awareness of the contingent character of one’s

existence and the question of, and concern for, the ground of the from whence of life; b] the awareness of the limit of existence in non-existence or death and the question of, and concern for, the goal or ultimate destiny of life, the to whence of life; and, c] the awareness of being a responsible being and the question of and concern for, the moral direction and quality of the self in its concrete, historical existence. when man encounters these three points at which his life is related to something unconditional, he encounters the signs or marks of god.

3. it should be noted that the ontological approach does not merely offer a new datum

from which to infer the existence of god. it does not start with a datum from which to infer the existence of something else but begins rather with an experience which contains in itself the presence of a reality not immediately known as such. here we have a concrete self existing within an experience and aware of the internal connection between that experience and its own being; here the self does not take the experience as a datum initiating a process of inference, but as a portion of its life within which it dwells while it seeks to understand that experience and permeate it with reflection.

4. the anthropological approach develops the meaning of an experience. this is

distinctive to this approach. the reflecting self is reflecting upon its own experience as something had and lived through and the reflecting self does not seek to observe the object of its reflection in order to explain it or discover its cause; it seeks instead to understand experience, to discover the bearing on any particular item or aspect of experience upon the total patterns or purpose of its own self.

5. reflection within experience leads to the discovery that a reality already encountered

manifests the presence of something else not immediately known as such at the time; reflection is not properly to be taken as inference from something experienced to something else that is then proved to exist. in the experience described as the points at which the unconditional elements is present, one must see in them the

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signs which reveal the presence of god. the process whereby religious experience becomes intelligible is not one of formal demonstration, but rather one of interpretation in which certain signs apprehended stand in need of being read or interpreted. when interpreted, these signs are understood as the medium through which the divine presence is revealed.

the rational movement is from experience through the signs to the discovery that in the very experience with which we have begun there is present a reality not known as such at the time of initial encounter. if we could know this presence immediately there would be no need for the rational process, but since there is no experience of god which is not also the experience of something else at the same time, it is necessary to move through the signs, interpret them, and thereby arrive at the conclusion that in having those initial experiences we were actually in the presence of god.

6. in reflection the movement from the initial experience to its interpretation is not a

movement away from the starting point to something else, but rather the discovery that there is more actually present in a starting point than we knew. the discovery of a reality present in a starting point is different from arguing that a given starting point used as a premise requires the existence of something beyond but not present in it. this approach to the existence of god is not a syllogistic process of passing from a datum to the necessary existence of another datum but a process of interpretation whereby experience is made intelligible and its full content is made explicit. what is present in experience, though not immediately present as such, becomes clear and explicit, through interpretation and understanding.

Lecture 2: Creatio Ex Nihilo 1. creatio ex nihilo - doctrine of the radical creation of the universe: God created

everything outside of Himself out of nothing.. this does not mean that nothing was the material out of which God made the universe. it means rather that God is responsible for bringing into existence the total being of the universe. there was nothing at all presupposed to His creative act of will.

2. metaphysics of existence - discovery of existence as an inner act of presence.

being is that which is, that which is actively present itself to all the others by its inner act of essence.

existential insight: our understanding of being passes from the recognition of the

mere fact of existence to the awareness of the inner act of existing inside the being which makes it to be actually present. this act is what we call esse and that which exists by virtue of this act is called ens.

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esse is the “most intimate in all reality and the fundamental validity of every perfection, penetrating everything from which nothing could withdraw without losing all meaning and existence.” esse thus surpasses absolutely everything that is in ens,, because only by virtue of esse do all other perfections accrue to ens. it is as such more powerful than anything else that belongs to the ontological structure of being.

this act of presence is also the deepest and most all embracing bond uniting all real

beings, from the tiniest subatomic particles all the way up to the greatest possible being. so we can speak of a community of existents in the world of reality. there is then a radical bond of affinity, of likeness, between all real beings. each one shares in this absolutely basic common property or perfection of existence.

it must also be pointed out that although all existents constitute a unity, however they are also distinct from one another for each exists in its own way according to each particular essence. so we can speak of this community of real existents as both one and many: one, because all share in the common unifying property of real existence; many, because it is made up of many different beings, each distinct from every other.

3. doctrine of participation - now wherever one finds a community of beings, all of

which possess some real common property and yet each of which is distinct from the other, there must be a structure of composition of two component principles inside this being: one to explain what they have in common, the other to explain how they differ.

the act of existence or esse is that which they all share in common and essence is that by which each being is this individual unique being and not that

this community of existents, each with its own inner composition of an act of

existence and a limiting essence, cannot explain its own unity if we remain on the level of these composed limited beings:

a. not one of them can explain why it is this particular mode of being and not some

other possible modes; b. as finite being, each cannot be the source of its own perfection or property of

being; c. the unity of this community cannot be explained precisely because the members

are many and different, one from the other. the oneness cannot be explained by their manyness or diversity.

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to ground the unity of this community of all things we must go back to a single source of this common property of actual existence shared by all. this ultimate source cannot itself be a limited degree of existence, but must be the pure unlimited act of energy of existence existing by itself alone, in the self-sufficient splendor of infinite fullness of all perfection that does or can exist, without any limiting essence, and without beginning or end. this esse is that which we encounter it in our direct experience of the ens. it is the power by which the ens is brought out of nothingness and through which it is continuously sustained in existence. it is therefore an esse that is conferred by the only possible source from which it can come and that is pure esse itself. thus for Thomas Aquinas the metaphysics of esse cannot be separated from the doctrine of creation.

4. the capacity of the creature to endow itself with esse is manifestly impossible. only

the being which is pure being can be the source of the creaturely esse. and because in the creature everything else ontologically depends on its esse, it therefore follows that all that is there in the creature comes from pure being. nothing could have been effected by any other cause; indeed, any other cause is not conceivable, simply.

metaphysical reflection on esse leads to the ipsum esse, being itself, the subsistent fullness of being whose essence, unlike that of the creature, is esse completely devoid of any imperfection whatsoever, in whom all other entia participate in a limited maner, and from whom all of them derive the entirety of their existence. this nature of the ipsum esse is what distinguishes creator from creature, a contrast greater than any possible similarity - in tanta similitudine major dissimilitudo - in so great a likeness an even greater unlikeness.

so in metaphysical reflection the mind is directed towards the super-eminent reality, driven to surpass the world, to conceive the plurality of things as existentially dependent on and as in some sense manifesting a transcendent one. there is, in other words, a movement of the mind from the many, the multitude of beings, entia, which partake of esse, all in a manner imperfect and finite, to the one, the ipsum esse, who, rather than merely possessing it, is truly esse, in all its perfection and fullness.

5. nature of the creator - the total alterity of God, flowing from the preeminence of

His reality, establishes God as the unique cause of all creatures and originary source of their esse.

such is the nature of creative communication. it is total, encompassing, and absolute that there is nothing in the recipient - the creature - that did not come from the giver - the creator. and precisely because of this entitative dependence,

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creatures must dwell continually in esse for them to remain in existence. so a necessary correlate to the notion of causality in our apprehension of god is that of participation:

beings in their existence, knowing, and loving participate in the divine being, and so receive all that they are as a gift, in nature and in grace. each finite being in its totality exists-in-relation-to-being from which it comes, and in which it homes for its ultimate fulfillment.

esse is a perfection that is endowed and, as a perfection, it is a good that is bestowed. Aquinas considered goodness as a transcendental attribute of being so that for him being and goodness are interchangeable: to be is to be good and to be good is to be. we find this equation articulated in the Summa Theologica as follows: goodness and being are really the same and differ only in idea; which is clear from the following argument. the essence of goodness consists in this, that it is in some way desirable. hence the philosopher says: goodness is what all desire. now it is clear that a thing is desirable only insofar as it is perfect: for all desire their own perfection. but everything is perfect so far as it is actual. therefore it is clear that a thing is perfect so far as it exists; for it is existence that makes all things actual. hence it is clear that goodness and being are the same really.

it follows therefore that the very source of esse, the ipsum esse [being itself], being the fullness of ontological perfection is also goodness itself. this goodness was initially manifested in the first act of creation and is continually disclosed by God in the ongoing gift of His being to the created realm. it is most gracious on the part of God to continue to allow the creature to participate in His being. for the finite creature has no claim on infinity so that its preservation in being is not necessary. enmeshed in its contingency or existential fragility, the creature is utterly dependent for its esse on the continued support of God. that God grants this dependence is most praiseworthy.

such an act of God cannot but be an act of love. for to will the esse of the creature is to will its good, which is what love is all about - the desire for what is good. as such, created power is to be identified with radical love. and so we arrive at an extremely gratifying realization: the Ipsum Esse Subsistens [subsistent being itself] is simultaneously the Ipsum Amare Subsistens [subsistent love itself]. or as Tony Kelly puts it: “the notion of god as being discloses the radicality of the divine being-in-love.”

6. creation and science - refers both to the ultimate bringing into, and maintaining

in, existence - creation out of absolutely nothing.

the creation with which we are familiar in the sciences - with which they deal and which they are capable of describing and explaining on the basis of the theories which they elaborate – is not creatio ex nihilo, but rather the transformation of

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previously existing material or physically accessible entities into qualitatively new ones.

a photon, for example, becomes an electron and a positron through pair creation. the positron and the electron are not necessarily existing entities - they do not of their nature have to exist, they do not explain their own existence. in each case their existence depends on something else, in this case the photon from which they were created, along with the whole causal claim that every physical entity or object is not necessary but only contingent. no physical entity explains itself or its own existence. each can be traced to prior or more fundamental ones. and those in turn to others. and so on. thus, at some temporal or logical point we must explain the transition from nothing to something.

the principal content of creatio ex nihilo is simply to underscore the insight that the existence of something, whether it be energy, material particles, or operative laws, requires a cause which either necessarily exists in itself, or ultimately rests on a cause which necessarily exists in itself - a primary cause, the first in the causal chain, not needing any other cause to explain its existence. to have a chain of contingent entities stretching back into the past, none of which explains its on existence and none of which causally depends on an entity or cause which explains its own existence, is simply unintelligible. or to put it another way, to trace the underlying causes of an entity to more and more fundamental entities and processes which themselves depend on other entities, causes and processes for their existence does not fully explain the existence of the entity on question, unless the search terminates in an entity or process which explains or causes itself, which necessarily exists, which of its nature cannot not exist. if it terminates, or seems to terminate, in an entity - a geometric manifold, a symmetry group, some cosmic egg - which is not necessary in this sense and we simply throw up our hands and say that this entity simply exists, simply is, without searching for any primary cause upon which to rest the cosmic egg, then we have prematurely and arbitrarily abandoned our quest for the intelligibility of the whole chain. then we have no explanation whatsoever for the ultimate cause of the existence of anything - or for why this symmetry group or manifold exists, and not some other imaginable one, or why this particular one which we can mathematically investigate is given concretization within reality rather than some other one. if it is not necessary, as symmetry groups and geometric manifolds are not, then there is nothing in its nature which specifies that it must be concretized or instantiated in physical reality. if the universe as we know it, or as we come to know it at some stage of its previous history, a “ground state,” explains or necessitates its own existence by its very nature then this would be perfectly obvious, and not obscurely hidden behind veils and veils of contingency.

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Stephen Hawking: “what is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?… why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? or does it need a creator, and, if so, does he have any other effect on the universe? and who created him?… even if there is only one possible unified theory it is just a set of rules and equations… the usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why should there be a universe for a model to describe.”

this means that any physical model of the universe - even though it be the definitive unified field theory - will apparently not be able to account intelligibly for the existence of the universe by itself. it will need some underlying existential ground or support, which must be presupposed by science and which science itself, as it is presently conceived and practiced, cannot completely reveal. this existential ground or support is exactly what creatio ex nihilo purports to supply. it does not, of course, completely reveal the ground or support, but it does argue to the necessity of its existence. the nihilo to which creatio ex nihilo refers is absolute nothingness, not just the vacuum of physics. there can be absolutely nothing - no matter, no energy, no laws, no concepts, no mind, no time, no space, no manifolds, nothing - no laws of statistics, probability, quantum fluctuations, no context of logic or order, except - and here is where language has already broken down - a necessary being, a primary cause. this doctrine of the creatio ex nihilo is a philosophical conclusion, the result of philosophical analysis of reality.

it should now be pointed out that physics and cosmology, when they deal with the

origin of the universe, rarely do so directly, and always in terms of the origin of certain pervasive features of the universe, like space and time, or space-time, matter, or rather mass-energy, and so on. and in investigating their origin they must inevitably do so in terms of some pre-existing entities or structures or some pre-existing set of laws which they obey. even the vacuum in physics is such a structure and obeys certain laws. it is not absolutely nothing. neither is geometry - nor the principles of mathematics and logic. the origins with which science can deal are always what we might call “relative origins,” which are indeed very important, absolutely crucial, for us to understand. this is because the natural sciences must always presuppose the existence of something to study and an order of regularity which characterizes the behavior of that something, such that is can be described by a body of laws - such as the laws of conservation of mass-energy, or of momentum. if something exists but is absolutely chaotic and unpredictable in its behavior, science would be at a loss from the start: it would be impossible. so the sciences as such are incapable - at least as their methodology now is - of describing or characterizing absolute origins, or of justifying or grounding the assumption of

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order. they presuppose that something exists and is orderly, and they then discover that these two presuppositions are supported by what is revealed or discovered n their investigations on the basis of these two assumptions.

it is clear why the sciences cannot deal with ultimate origins and cannot determine why what exists exists and why it is orderly and not completely chaotic. in order to do so, science would have to detect, discern, reveal, and describe absolute nothingness or absolute disorder as well as the entity or cause which moves reality from these states to the states of existence and order. this would be the creation event, whether it was a temporally unique event, or a metaphysical event which is always occurring. cosmology and the other sciences cannot disclose such an event simply because they are incapable of transcending the barrier between absolute nothingness and something, between absolute chaos and order: they are not methodologically established to have one foot on each side of that divide. they do not have access to what is before existence and before order, simply because they have presupposed both basic existence and basic order and have not questioned the ground of either.

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Part 4 THE IMPERATIVES OF BELIEF

FAITH AND HOPE

Lecture 1: The Religious Stage of Existence SOREN KIERKEGAARD: man is a finite and fallible being who searches for meaning. his primary task is to create order and meaning in an ambiguous situation through his freedom to choose, think, and act. 1. the aesthetic stage – “boredom is the root of all evil.” the chief goal of existence

therefore should be to escape boredom and to fill one’s life with novel and interesting experiences.

in this way of life, the aim is pleasure. the aesthetic individual admits of no restraint and constantly satisfies himself in new and different ways. enjoyment of life is his aim. his focus is self-centered. he seeks to avoid dependence on people and things which threaten freedom. thus he rejects marriage and other similar relationships. for him the immediate moment, the now, takes precedence over long-range commitments. freedom is understood as the absence of dependence and commitment. if it is not preserved, boredom, the worst of all human conditions, is sure to occur. the aesthetic stage has serious defects and can ultimately destroy a person. this kind of life fragments the self. the aesthete is more dependent than he realizes, for the escape from boredom depends largely on the external circumstances and on the moods and whims that he happens to feel. what if a new situation or opportunity does not present itself, or what if the new situation turns out to be less exciting or interesting than an earlier one? boredom is likely to triumph after all. such a life is in discord and chaotic, since what one wants is constantly vanishing, and so one is constantly changing one’s immediate goals. the result of pursuing the pleasure of the moment is despair. one’s life reduces to the pleasure of the moment, but the moment is so short that one’s life and indeed the individual becomes almost nothing. boredom may begin with a thing, a place, another person, but then it may lead to the more devastating sense of boredom with oneself. after a time, the aesthetic approach to life may itself become boring and an aesthete is likely to find that he is

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sick of himself. melancholy and then despair set in. the flavor of life goes stale. one finds his life to be without a center, without meaning that lasts and sustains. there is a resistance factor in human existence. inner stability and the achievement of lasting meaning are incompatible with the dispersal of the self that is required for pursuit of and aesthetic life style. to avoid or to extricate oneself from the ultimate self-destruction that can emerge from an aesthetic life, a fundamentally different orientation is needed. at the very least, what is required is a turning within to cultivate a sense of resolute commitment to a goal or ideal that transcends the capriciousness of the aesthetic life.

2. the ethical stage – arrived at by radical decision on the part of the individual to

avoid the despair of the aesthetic level.

the ethical is the universal, the realm of objective moral truths that everyone ought to accept or live by. the ethical individual is thus the person who has morality as the chief principle of his conduct. the ultimate aim of the ethical individual is to perform his duty. the ethical individual is personified by the person who commits himself in marriage for he finds this relationship to provide a lasting sense of meaning and self-identity. through commitment to another person and to the fulfillment of the duties that marriage entails, continuity and stability emerge. whereas the aesthetic individual must be constantly on the move to avoid boring repetition, the ethical individual lives so that the repetition of everyday activities and responsibilities become a source of deepened commitment and satisfaction. the ethical man feels obliged to fulfill an ideal. but every ethical man has some experience of having failed to do his duty, of having left undone the things that he ought to have done. if it is rightly understood, the ethical stage clearly demands more than any man gives. guilt is unavoidable, and the ethical stage has no way to remove it from the individual. if the inescapable boredom of the aesthetic individual can drive one to despair, the inescapable guilt of the ethical stage can do the same and the result is likely to be the experience that life seems hollow and that fulfillment is negated. the ethical individual is one who gives up his individuality in order to become the universal, to act as others do. to exist at the level of the ethical leads to the individual to think in general terms and to forget that he is an existing individual. the experience of guilt can heighten the self-awareness and inwardness of the ethical man. he may come to reflect on the despair that guilt can produce and on the possibility of release from both guilt and despair. such possibility is realized in

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the religious stage. to move to that stage requires a fundamental reorientation of one’s will, a definite choice and commitment.

3. the religious stage – its essence is the affirmation of one’s allegiance to and dependence on God, the transcendent but personal source of existence.

the religious individual shapes one’s life in terms of the faith that God has acted through Jesus Christ to redeem man from sin and to endow him with peace, meaning, and eternal life. the christian faith is not something that can be conclusively verified, demonstrated, or rationalized so as to assure everyone that it is highly probable, if not absolutely certain. Instead, it offers hope and meaning to individuals through the paradox of the incarnation, and the appropriation of this hope and meaning ultimately depends on a movement of faith that goes beyond the boundaries of reason. to have faith is to make a decision entirely on one’s own without the security of objective reasons to back it up. it is such a difficult decision and one that must be constantly renewed in order to be maintained. the person who has faith arrives at self-awareness because in faith the relationship to God involves one of conscious self-activity and self-creation. when i subjectively believe that God exists i understand that what i believe cannot be rationally understood or justified, since it is objectively a paradox. yet, if in spite of the lack of external support, i still believe, then it must be because i consciously decide, with all the passion of the infinite to chose to bring this commitment into existence. in faith i confront myself as an existing individual, since i am entirely responsible for my faith and i know that i am alone with my faith. knowledge – involves a cognitive relation between a subject and an object, an object whose existence owes nothing to the passionate interest or commitment of the subject faith – the objects owes its existence to an infinite passion and a continual will and commitment to believe in light of objective uncertainty. religious faith is irrational. religious beliefs cannot be supported by rational argument for true faith involves accepting what is absurd. he insisted that it is absurd and logical irrational for christian belief to hold that God who is infinite and immortal, was born as Jesus Christ, who was finite and mortal.

Kierkegaard does not believe that human reason establishes the final criteria that determine what has been, is, or can be real. reason’s inability to comprehend does not eliminate the possibility that God came into temporal existence in Jesus of

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Nazareth. and so if the Christian claims are to be understood as true they must be appropriated through faith.

the Christian claims offer an eternal happiness. they offer hope and meaning by asserting that life is eternal and there is victory over sin, guilt, and death. this eternal happiness, however, is proclaimed in the form of an objective uncertainty. thus they can only be appropriated through faith.

but it is precisely when one lives in faith that he is truly an existing individual. a man who lives in faith recognizes that he is a finite creature in a precarious world. at the same timer he acknowledges that he is a being who seeks meaning and who hopes for fulfillment and understanding. in faith, both the awareness of the precariousness of existence and the qualities of hope and desire for meaning are extended to a maximum.

Lecture 2: A Phenomenology and Metaphysics of Hope Gabriel Marcel stressed that the tragic aspect of life, with its possibility of despair, cannot be taken lightly, as a superficial optimism would have us do. it is not despair per se that lies at the centre of our condition; rather it is the temptation to despair. this temptation to despair can arise in my own personal situation, as a result of my own particular tragedy; the fundamental datum here is that ‘i can take a stand before my life considered as a whole, that i can refuse it, i can despair.’ on the other hand, when confronted with the evil, suffering and betrayal that surround me on all sides, i can despair of reality as a whole, i can make the negative judgment that 'there is nothing in the realm of reality to which i can give credit - no security, no guarantee.’ 1. the essence of the act of despair seems to be capitulation before a certain fatum

laid down by our judgment. therefore it is my act, my decision, to adopt the perspective of the worst. but there is more to it than a fatalistic judgment regarding, for example, an ordeal or illness of some kind. to capitulate is not just the attitude of recognizing the inevitable; the hoping man can recognize the inevitable too. despair is to unmake myself, to go to pieces under this sentence, to 'renounce the idea of remaining my self', to lose my inner cohesion and conscience, to bring about my own destruction. such a 'going to pieces' constitutes a fundamental despair, one that like its counterpart in hope transcends the particular context in which it has arisen. despair is not fear at all. it consists in establishing oneself in the irremediable in such a way as to let oneself be interiorly dissolved by it. such a despair has its logical outcome in suicide.

2. hope is to ‘keep a firm hold on oneself, to safeguard one’s integrity.’ hope, in so far

as it is an active battle against despair, is a refusal of fatalism, an active non capitulation.

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3. a further aspect of despair is its immobilizing character. despair anticipates the

ceaseless repetition of a life frozen in an inner determinism.

the despairing man not only contemplates and sets before himself the dismal repetition, the eternalization of a situation in which he is caught like a sea of ice. by a paradox which it is difficult to conceive, he anticipates this repetition....despair here appears an enchantment, or as a kind of witchcraft, whose evil action has a bearing on all which goes to form the very substance of a person's life.

in the presence of a situation that seems to me irremediable, whether it be my imminent death, or the closing in of the creditors to whom i owe money, or even the mechanical repetition of monotonous days, i can see no way out. i have the feeling of being in an impasse without issue, caught in a vice, incarcerated. despair has a petrifying effect on me, immobilizes me, holds me in its grip. the despairing man anticipates and is immobilized by each waiting day's disappointment.

4. closely connected with the obsessive and immobilizing aspects of despair is the

sense of time as being closed, rather than open to future possibilities. it is as though the man in despair sees time as already consumed; he loses his sense of personal rhythm, his patience, because the time at his disposal for effective action is already used up. in his world, time no longer passes, or what comes to the same thing, time only passes without bearing within it the possibility of something new. basing himself on his past experience, the despairing man anticipates nothing but the eternalization of his present situation. time is for him a counter-eternity, an eternity turned back on itself, frozen in the hopeless present.

despair seems to me above all the experience of closing or, if you like, the experience of time plugged up. the man who despairs is the one whose situation appears to be without exit. but this is no mere statement fact. the man in despair is affected in the strongest sense of the word, by that absence of exit, and this shows that the negative term 'absence' does not give an adequate account of what is happening here. it is really as if the despairer kept hitting against a wall, the wall being faceless certainly, and yet hostile, and the result of this shock or impact is that his very being starts to disintegrate or, if you like, to give up.

in the judgment of the one who despairs, his past life is an accumulation of disappointments, and it is this which he projects into the future. to the extent that the future is based on anticipation, and anticipation is an extrapolation of the past, to that extent, the future is seen as closed, as capable only of exemplifying the past. the future appears as a negation, an anticipation of future failure, and thus appears to be 'plugged up', to be an 'absence of exit'.

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5. another important feature of despair is a state of solitude, of being closed to other persons. Marcel links this closing in on oneself with the sense of time being closed .

despair is hell…one could add that it is solitude. there is nothing more important than to bring our the rarely perceived conjunction between closed rime and the rupture of all living communication with others.

to be enclosed in this immobilizing time is by the same stroke to lose those

spontaneous communications with other people which are the most precious things in life, which are even life itself...in closed time friendship is no longer possible; and inversely, what is still more important, when friendship is born, time begins to move again, and simultaneously hope awakens like a melody which stirs in the depths of memory. communication between persons, at any level of a relationship, involves an openness which always holds the possibility of creative development, a deepening of the relationship, mutual fulfilment. this is therefore the reverse of the situation of closed time where future possibilities are cut off. if a despairing person seeks help from another, however diffidently or with however slight expectation, this very gesture indicates that he is not yet shut up in his despair; time is not completely lost. perhaps it is impossible to really despair with someone. perhaps it must be a private act.

6. another characteristic of the despairing consciousness is the judgment it makes on

the meaninglessness of life. the judgment about meaninglessness is closely connected with the self-centeredness of a person who is closed in upon his own world of suffering. the root of this judgment on the meaninglessness of life is the spirit of abstraction. the spirit of abstraction is an absolutizing of objectivity, a reduction of all reality to what can be objectively explained. ‘whatever can be catalogued is an occasion for despair.’ for if one remain at that level, one is asserting a practical nihilism which amounts to a denial of being and value. practical nihilism easily becomes cynical. it is the spirit of ‘nothing but’: love is nothing but an instinctual drive, hope is nothing but an illusion, my personal reality is nothing but a complexus of physics and chemistry, my life is nothing but a game of chance - with death at the end or the last play of the dice.

7. hope arises out of a situation that is such that despair is also possible; secondly, hope consists in putting forth a sort of interior activity, which is 'our being's veritable response' to the trial situation. a first specification of this activity is to consider it as an active struggle against despair. we have seen that despair is a capitulation, a going to pieces before a fatum laid down by the judgment. it judges the future by the past and anticipates nothing but the irremediable experience of the past. the future, regarded as though it were already present is, as it were, eternalised and immobilized, so that time appears closed, frozen in the present. the despairing man is obsessed by his situation, closed in on himself, isolated from others. finally, despair tends to transcend the particular context within which it has arisen and to pronounce on the meaninglessness of all that is, on the futility of life as a whole.

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8. the object of hope is not an object, if by ‘object’ we understand an empirical object

or a definite and specific goal that can be characterized as ‘such and such’. hope in its fullest sense, transcends any determinate object, any particular image or representation.

Marcel takes the example of a mother who persists in hoping that she will see her son again, although his death has been certified in the most definite manner by witnesses who found his body and buried it. is not the mother's hope, in this case, illusory and irrational? first of all, Marcel maintains that no observer has the right to pass such judgment, to deny to the mother the right to hope beyond the bounds of empirical evidence. nevertheless, is not this example calamitous for Marcel's whole argument, in that the mother would seem to have a definite and specific hope? the second point he makes is crucial: it consists in examining what is the real ‘intention’ of hope in this case. if the mother said “it is possible that my son will come back”, meaning perhaps ‘he will one day come walking through the door, i will see him and touch him’, then she has fixed her mind on a specific object, and in this case he hope is illusory and she is destined for disappointment and possibly despair. but in believing that she will see her son again, in affirming that his loss is not absolute, what is she really saying? she is not talking in ‘the language of previsions or making a judgment based on probabilities’. what she is affirming is the indestructibility of the living bond of love that links her with her son. her hope is ‘for a communion of which she proclaims the indestructibility’. she hopes unconditionally, and her hope amounts to a denial of the ultimacy of death.

9. even where hope is apparently for some specific object or state, such as recovery of

health or deliverance, it refuses to dwell on a particular image or representation. hope seems to be bound up with a method of surmounting. from the moment when he will not only have recognized in an abstract manner, but understood in the depths of his being, that is to say, seen, that everything is not necessarily lost if there is no cure, it is more than likely that his inner attitude towards recovery or non recovery will be radically changed; he will have regained liberty, the faculty of relaxing.

true hope involves a deeply felt personal insight that non fulfilment of a specific wish is not what would matter most. hope keeps all the possibilities open; it does not close the case on the basis of given evidence. it is not mere ‘wishful thinking’. the affirmation that is strong enough to overcome the temptation to despair, the evidence being what it is, requires a continuous engagement, a deliberate and sustained effort, which is far beyond the scope of any ‘wishful thinking’ - to transcend the trial is also to transform it interiorly, to assume it fully. the battlers live in hope, not the wishful thinkers! absolute or unconditional hope transcend all particular objects. It is directed not to anything a person can have, but rather has to do with what a person is, with his fulfilment in being. all hope, says Marcel, is

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hope of salvation. salvation can have no meaning except in a world which admits of real injuries, one in which despair is also possible.

this hope arises when all ordinary hopes have been disappointed; it is not a hope ‘for something’, but is hope per se. disillusionment, or disappointment of ordinary hopes, teaches that salvation not only consists in something else entirely, but that we ourselves hope for this ‘something else’, hope for it with a far more vital and truly invincible force, and have always hoped for it. hope arises only where temptation to despair is possible; one has not necessarily succumbed to it.

10. hope arises out of an experience of captivity where despair is possible and it

involves an intellectual modesty that refuses the fatalism of the judgment in adverse circumstances. the despairing man makes such judgment as: ‘there is nothing in the realm of reality to which I can give credit - no security, no guarantee.’ hope refuses this statement of complete insolvency, not recognizing in itself the right to make such a judgment. hope’s non capitulation is a non acceptance which is not revolt. it is, rather, a relaxation, as the hoping man adapts himself to the rhythm of the trial and treats it as an integral part of himself. the hoping man meets disaster with a non acceptance of its finality. patience is also an element of hope. the impatient man attempts to compel time, to burn up time - witness the emphasis on speed for its own sake in modern life. the hoping man does not try to alter time's duration; he puts his confidence in a certain process of maturation in the temporal order, believing that reality is such that growth and development are possible.

11. hope is trust in reality. it has a prophetic character that does not depend on

categorized experience; it is rather a response to something that is offered to it; this response involves a mutuality between persons and is ultimately a response to a Thou. the hoping man has a basic assurance that reality in general contains a creative principle and goes beyond the order of simple prediction.

hope consists in asserting that there is at the heart of being, beyond all data, beyond all inventories and calculations, a mysterious principle that is in connivance with me, which cannot but will what i will, if what i will deserves to be willed and is, in fact, willed by the whole of my being.

within the empirically given situation, there are signals of transcendence that do not depend, for their discernment, on any ‘special’ experience but are incarnated in ‘prototypical human gestures’. one of these is the very simple example of a mother's assurance to a child, who wakes crying in the night, that everything is all right, everything is ‘in order’. is the mother lying to the child? if the ‘natural’, that is, the ‘empirically given’ is the only reality there is, then the mother is lying to the child, not consciously of course, but in the final analysis lying just the same. why? because the reassurance, transcending the immediately present two individuals and their situation, implies a statement about reality as such. the statement that

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everything is all right, everything is in order can be translated into a statement of cosmic scope - ‘have trust in being’. at the core of our humanity we find an experience of trust in the order of reality. thus man’s ordering propensity implies a transcendent order, and each ordering gesture is a ‘signal of transcendence’. the parental role, therefore, is not based on a loving lie, but is a witness to the ultimate truth of man's situation in reality. trust in reality lies at the heart of hope. [Peter Gerber]

the only thing that can explain the existence of genuine hope is humanity's profound and essentially

archetypal certainty - although denied or unrecognised a hundred times over - that our life on this earth is not just a random event among billions of other random cosmic events which will pass away. death, or the awareness of death - this most extraordinary dimension of man's stay on this earth, one that inspires dread, fear and awe - is at the same time a key to the fulfillment of human life in the best sense of the word. without the experience of the transcendental, neither hope nor human responsibility have any meaning. the key to solid human coexistence lies in respect for what infinitely transcends us, for what i call the miracle of being. [Vaclav Havel]

needless to say, there is no empirical method by which this hope can be tested since it is not

confined to empirically testable experience. ‘on the one hand there is an established and catalogued experience… on the other hand, there is an experience in the making that does not necessarily rely on what has happened in the past. this is what Marcel means when he says that hope is creative; 'it is engaged in the weaving of experience now in process'; it is not chained to the categories of past experience as a basis for projecting into the future. free from the calculation of possibilities on the basis of accepted experience, it can create its own experience afresh.

in hoping, i do not create in the strict sense of the word, but i appeal to the existence of a certain creative power in the world… where, on the other hand, my spirit has been tarnished by catalogued experience, i refuse to appeal to this creative power, i deny its existence; all outside me, and perhaps within me appears to me as simple repetition.

12. the hoping man, therefore, is not chained down to the closed time of repetition.

despair, Marcel says, ‘enclosed me within time as though the future drained of its substance and its mystery, were no longer to be anything but the place of pure repetition.’ if despair is in a certain sense the consciousness of time closed, hope appears as a 'piercing through time', a kind of memory of the future. memory refers to the past, yet hope is 'memory' of the future. this can only mean that my past experience holds within the promise of what i hope for - experiences of inner renewal when one is conscious of a creative power at work in one's life, which offers us as it were a token of reconciliation, a promise of restoration. this is what Marcel means by the prophetic character of hope, understood as a ‘kind of radical refusal to reckon possibilities.’ it is as though it carried within it as a postulate the assertion that reality overflows all possible reckonings; as though it claimed, in virtue of some

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secret affinity, to touch a principle hidden in the heart of things… which mocks such reckonings. beyond all probability, all statistics, ‘i assert that a given order shall be re-established, that reality is on my side…’such is the prophetic tone of true hope. hope refuses to rest all on the security of calculation, on the inventory approach to reality. despair is the place where one can make an inventory, but being is beyond all inventories, reality overflows all possible reckonings.

13. at this point, we may well ask the question: is there no relation between hope and

reason for hoping? can one hope when reasons for hoping are insufficient or completely lacking? the question is misleading, for it is posed from the viewpoint of an observer, even if it is i who am observing my own hope. to ask the question is to detach oneself in some degree from one's own hope. for if a person ‘truly recognizes in all sincerity that these reasons are non existent or insufficient, he himself admits that he does not really hope’. in so far as he hopes, the question does not arise for him, for 'hope and the calculating faculty of the reason are essentially distinct. if he asks himself if he has reasons for hope, he is entering into the process of a calculation of possibilities and to that extent he is not hoping. hope is in a sense supra rational; its intelligibility is immune to critique in the level of objective impersonal evidence, since it does not claim to be factual knowledge.

there is room for hope when the soul manages to get free from the categories in which consciousness confines itself as soon as it makes a clear line of demarcation between what it knows for a fact on the one hand and what it wishes or hopes on the other. perhaps hope means first of all the act by which this line of demarcation is obliterated or denied… hope is a knowing which outstrips the unknown - but it is a knowing which excludes all presumption, a knowing accorded, granted, a knowing which may be a grace but is in no degree a conquest.

hope's intelligibility therefore is not expressed in an affirmation made in the void; rather 'at the root of hope there is something which is literally offered to us'. this is the heart of the matter: Marcel has designated an 'experiential' source of hope. it is akin to the 'hold on the real at root of intelligence' for which no epistemology can account, for it continually presupposes it. genuine hope therefore always consists in awaiting a certain grace, the nature of whose power we may not clearly define to ourselves, but to whose bounty we think we can assign no end. the hope that looks to this 'beneficent power' sees itself as called to respond actively rather than to receive in a passive sense. i can refuse hope, i can refuse to give credit to reality, and in this sense hope depends on me. on the other hand, because it is something i receive, there is a real sense in which hope does not depend on me. hope is the willed response to a reality which appears to it as gracious.

14. a defence of hope, a case for the intelligibility of hope must rest on the decision to

accept the inner logic of the experience as cognitive. a theory of hope that treats it merely as a subjective disposition is dealing with home from the outside. hope by

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its inner logic is directed towards a beyond which it regards as real. this ordination to the transcendent is in no way assimilable, in Marcel’s view, to a subjective disposition: where a subjective disposition exists, it is interpreted as the sign of a soul inhabited by hope.

hope can in no case be reduced to a simple interior disposition; i shall say that it is much more than a psychological state - and even that the psychological as such is perhaps incapable of discerning its nature - hope is a life and, i might add, a radiant life, not at all a life bent back on itself. this radiating aspect is translated into relationships with the neighbor.

15. one of the most fundamental aspects then of hope is its intersubjective character.

hope is always in some way related to a ‘thou’. in this it differs from desire, which is egocentric, and from despair, which cuts itself off from relationship s with others. hope is always linked to intersubjectivity and vice versa. clearly this means that hope is always centred on a nous, on a living relation, and if we do not realize it, that is because all too often we use the word hope when it is really a matter of desire. as an example of this, Marcel goes back to the situation which occasioned many of his reflections on hope, the situation of prisoners in concentration camps during the last war. not all of them would have been animated by hope; for a good many of them, their time in prison would have been a period of inert waiting, a dead time: ‘...let us even say a time of death, for each individual would have been literally decomposed into impotence and depression.’ but there were others who knew the active waiting that is characteristic of hope. what is it that would have enabled these prisoners to wait actively, to retain their hope in spite of external restraints and even dehumanizing conditions? it was, Marcel says, because it was 'a hope for all of us, a hope which went far beyond the desire which each one could feel for himself.' because they hoped, they ‘remained open to one another; a real communion was established among them.’ hope, therefore, seems to involve a spiritual bond in which there is openness to others or communion with them; reciprocally, this communion itself generates a hope that keeps the soul in a sort of active readiness to believe, trust, take action, overcome despair.

if hope is generative of action this is primarily because it creates or implies a communion, and this word should be taken in its strongest sense. if a real bond is established between me and my companions in captivity. ..a ‘we’ is constituted, which is not simply the functional we of the crew, but rather an interiorized, spiritualized expression of it.

16. hope and love are intimately connected. hope is not only an interior resource, it is a

gift from another. we can speak of hope, Marcel says, only where 'the interaction exists between him who gives and him who receives, where there is that exchange which is the mark of all spiritua11ife.’ in the example given of prisoners, for example, for each one of them isolation and despair were possible:

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when I am alone and on trial, or more exactly when i treat myself as alone or on trial, the question of knowing what will happen to me seems almost bare of interest or significance ...it is not the same if i know that in one way or another the one i love depends on me, is vitally affected by my fate.

the ‘one i love’ need not refer to the other prisoners, even though a level of communion has been established among them, but to the ‘someone’ or ‘someones’ who are waiting for me at home. completely isolated from any attachment to anybody or anything, man has little reason to hope. hope is primarily centered on a ‘we’ and not an ‘i’.

17. the hoping man is open to others. the more closed a man is, the less room there is

for hope in him. openness ‘is realized not only in the act of love but also in the act of hope’, so that the hoping man is at the same time the most fraternal, for to love one's brothers is at the same time to have hope in them. isolated, man is delivered to despair believing himself fixed in the inner determinism of closed time. openness therefore takes on a double significance: it is not only openness to the other person, it is a sort of openness to reality as a whole, an openness that discovers on the ‘borders of experience, all manner of alliances, all manner of promises of a deliverance, of a dayspring beyond our power to imagine.’ being open minded, hope is intrepid; it is intrepidity itself for ‘inevitably laying itself open to mockery, even to the sarcasms of those who base their invariably discouraging forecasts on carefully catalogued precedents’; it nevertheless ‘with scandalously carefree grace’ undertakes to take its stand against these assertions.

18. The ultimate and authentic formula for hope is, according to Marcel, 'I hope in thee

for us.'

‘in thee-for us’: between this ‘thou’ and this ‘us’ which only the most persistent reflection can finally discover in the act of hope, what is the vital link? must we not reply that ‘Thou’ is in some way the guarantee of the union which holds us together, myself to myself or the one to the other, or these beings to those other beings? more than a guarantee which secures or confirms from outside a union which already exists, it is the very cement which binds the whole into one.

the passage from giving credit to reality to discovering a ‘thou’ at the heart of reality has been effected via reflection on the relationship between love and hope. notice that Marcel says that ‘only the most persistent reflection’ can finally discover the Thou who is the transcendent source and guarantee of absolute hope. the phenomenology of hope reveals an unconditional element at the heart of hope, a demand. that love should have an absolute foundation. Since hope seeks its fulfilment in love, then hope also requires faith in an absolute Thou who secures and confirms the communion of love. In hope, love and faith are united.

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19. Marcel’s last word on hope is that hope is a risk, but not to hope is riskier still.

unhope leads to despair and despair is the ultimate undoing.

perhaps the human condition is characterized not only by the risks which go with it and which after all are bound up with life itself. ..but also, and far mote deeply, by the necessity to accept risks and to refuse to believe that it would be possible... to succeed in removing them. experience teaches us. ..that we can never refuse to take risks except in appearance, or rather, that the refusal itself conceals a risk which is the most serious of all.

the hoping man, therefore, is homo viator who can only say that in life's journey we are on the way to a goal that we both see and do not see. if we saw perfectly clearly, we would not hope; conversely, if we did not see at all we could not hope. in either cases we would be immobilized. it is hope that makes the journey more than a mere wandering, and establishes man's status as that of homo viator.