Wednesday, January 06, 2010

 

Apologetics is the whole of the consensus of the views of those who defend a position in an argument of long standing. The term comes from the Greek word apologia (απολογία), meaning a speaking in defense.

Early Christian writers (c 120-220) who defended their faith against critics and recommended their faith to outsiders were called apologists



posted by Sastry Rama 6:44 PM

Tuesday, January 05, 2010

 
"the great seventeenth-century philosopher-scientist René Descartes is often said to have banished teleology from science. He envisaged a unified style of explanation based ultimately on the universal laws of mathematical physics that governed the behaviour of all natural phenomena, celestial and terrestrial alike. There was no room for any irreducible purposiveness or goal-seeking deep down in nature.The job of the scientist was to subsume all observable events under the relevant mathematical covering laws; and in respect of these ultimate laws there was no attainable answer to the question ‘why?’ One could say – and Descartes did say – that God had decreed that it should be so; but he immediately added that the rationale for God’s decrees was not for human scientists to discover: it was ‘forever locked up in the inscrutable abyss of His wisdom’. David Hume, writing a century after Descartes, took an essentially parallel line, though couched in entirely secular language: the job of science was to map the observable natural world, but any supposed ‘ultimate springs and principles’ of nature were beyond human power to fathom."

"Belief in God, according to Freud’s view in Civilisation and its Discontents, is based on an infantile response: the terrifying ‘feeling of helplessness’ in childhood aroused the ‘need for protection’ – for protection through love – which was provided by the father; and the recognition that this helplessness lasts throughout life made it necessary to cling to the existence of a Father, but this time a more powerful one. This Freudian diagnosis has been highly influential, and can often be seen as informing the idea, voiced by many contemporary atheists, that God is merely a projection formed in response to our human insecurities. But there are at least two problems with this way of dismissing the religious impulse. ..."

[Source: "On the Meaning of Life" by John Cottingham]

living grudgingly vs. living gratefully
posted by Sastry Rama 5:21 PM

Monday, January 04, 2010

 
"For non-human animals, life can be wretched or happy, but there is nothing much they can do about how it turns out. For human beings, by contrast, at least those who are fortunate enough to have the material resources to free them from the daily struggle for existence, there is the opportunity to reflect on how life should be lived. Among the educated citizens of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, many found it natural to turn to philosophy for guidance; as for the philosophers themselves, though few were prepared to offer instant solutions, most saw it as a main part of the purpose of philosophizing to reach a view on how to achieve fulfilment in life. In the centuries that followed, philosophical systems became steadily more complex and elaborate, but their authors held fast to the old aspiration of philosophy to help humans lead happy and worthwhile lives.
Nowadays, things are very different. ..."
[Source: Philosophy and the Good Life (Reason and the Passions in Greek, Cartesian and Psychoanalytic Ethics) by John Cottingham]

Other books by the same author (John Cottingham):
Why believe?

The Spiritual Dimension - Religion, Philosophy and Human Value

Theodicy: the branch of theology that defends God's goodness and justice in the face of the existence of evil

submission to god: an obsolete ideal? "... The paradox of our humanity is that we oscillate between two poles: on the one side our contingency and dependency, and on the other our aspiration to independence and autonomy. The admission of dependency which {one might dislike in prayer to the Lord} is simply a religious expression of something fundamental to what it is to be human. For pace the existentialists, we are not self-creating beings: our fulfilment hinges on a nature and a context we did not create, and cannot radically change. Today’s fashionable talk about ‘life-style choices’ often seems to gloss over this central truth – indeed the legitimate scope of our choice is taken by some to embrace even the supposed ‘self-assignments’ of gender and bodily appearance that are made possible by modern plastic surgery. But one does not need to pass judgement one way or the other on these costly attempts at self-recreation with the aid of the surgeon’s knife in order to believe that there will always remain (irrespective of gender and appearance) an essential structure to our humanity, not of our making, which has to be accepted, like it or not, if we are to function as human beings in the first place. It is hubris to think that we can rewrite these fundamental rules – for example the rules of love and vulnerability that determine what we can achieve in relationship to our fellow humans. We can try to force things our way, to demand, to insist, to reject, to rant and rail, but ultimately we can only achieve our goals by conforming to the laws of love: give, not take, fellow-feeling not arrogance, patience not grasping, waiting not insisting. These laws are written deep in our nature as moral beings; and the submission to them which is encapsulated in religious expressions such as ‘Thy will be done’ is not some strange self-abasement before an alien will, but an expression of objective moral realities to which, like it or not, our lives must conform if they are to flourish.

... It is a complete misunderstanding to suppose that the religious stance – ‘Thy will be done’ – involves a servile submission to an alien power. The Will that is held up as our destiny is the kind of will that a human parent has for a child – a will that envisages not conformity but open-ended growth."
[Source: Chap. 3 The Spiritual Dimension - Religion, Philosophy and Human Value]
posted by Sastry Rama 6:43 PM