Faith and the Unknown

The ‘academic consensus” of the Modern Age is that Faith is dead, stabbed to death by the Natural Sciences, Reason, and Empiricism. Modernity says all knowledge and information, can be reduced to material properties and physical interactions, aka Naturalism.  While I find this absurd, I am more concerned with why such a belief is existentially damning.

What is Love? This question can be addressed through a variety of referential mediums. The physical, chemical, sociological, theological, the list goes on. But one thing characteristic of all of these mediums is they do not address the being itself doing the loving, they never address Love as a subjective experience, only an objective one, only an act in reference to other things outside the thing loving. Naturalism cannot explain the subjectivity of Love, that the I, a conscious being, experiences it, and experiences it solely and only in reference to itself.  Naturalism will never be able to accurately explain this, but the bigger problem is it has not explained it

Which is exactly the irony of the Dawkins types. Dawkins may laugh at my belief in the soul, but it would only be fair to laugh back due to his belief that mental properties, consciousness and subjectivity somehow arise out of material substances and physical interactions. The only difference would be I recognize my belief rests upon Faith, while he does not.

So is Faith dead? Surely not, it’s more alive than ever, and its more arrogant and full of hubris amongst individuals who deny its validity. Faith is everywhere, everything rests on it. The denial of this fact, especially on the societal scale, results in the disaster of Modernity, as this error radically corrupted the West's view of the human person. The current cultural depravity is partly due to the inability to accept Faith as not only necessary but valid. With the denial of Faith came the denial of God and all the Goodness He entails. Faith is the wisdom of Unknowability, the perception of the Infinitely Ungraspable, a Divine Mystery. Through this, beauty is retained, as beauty requires mystery, at least in our current sinful state.

The necessary end to alienation is not through more reason but in acceptance of life’s unknowable truths. Truths which can be sensed and actualized by the individual, while reaping their benefits without understanding every detail. We need to leave the unknowable to be known by the All-Knowledgeable, and live as we feel we must.

Life before Philosophy

        Philosophy should be an attempt to rationalize the experienced, not an attempt to force experiences through reason. The former is the process of critiquing and understanding while the latter is an impossibility and leads to renegade illogical thinking and existential crises.
The human person, is endowed with consciousness, a first person subjective immaterial narrative grafted onto a third person material reality. The I, is the agent which partakes in that first person account, and lives it. Not live in the biological sense, but as a group of experiences, both mental and physical, each the result of one or more fundamental causal principles, succeeding each other in some fashion and creating a ‘ground’ on which the I forms its identity.
That identity, the I’s conscious experience of its own ontological reality, is in flux due to variance of experience it successively partakes in. Some result in more ontological privation while others assist in filling that ontological hole through conforming to the being's natural causality.
Excessive reason without action as belief, only gives way for the inability for the I to find that ground, through an excessive doubt of the causal principles which naturally precede the experiences. Philosophy then becomes a passive act, more of a methodological practice contrary to lived experience. What is experienced, instead of being taken itself as inherently informative and meaningful, must stand the test of hyper-skepticism, which cannot be passed because the I refuses to concede its own limitation.
The result, is the systematic self-fulfilling doubt of everything, stripping all of its essential nature and quality. Reducing everything to consideration, which cannot stand the test of the over-rationalizing I’s need of successive propositional truths.
In other words, the I’s knowledge is limited, so every bit of information, whether empirically derived or rationally discovered can be stripped of its certainty because there’s a limited number of propositions which can be reasoned to in order to defend the original one. Hyper-Skepticism is Infinite Regress in action.
         This does not mean that the I can know nothing, it certainty can, but only if it takes certain things as axiomatic. It only means the I’s ability to abstract is limited. That is the point of Philosophy. To describe, understand, and critique based on the axioms. It should not be used to doubt EVERTHING, including the axioms. If even the axioms are doubted, the limitation of successive propositional truths will simply result in a hyper-skeptical thought process beyond reasonability, which always result in acts full of contradictions, such as a man doubting his own existence, something completely self-contradictory.
           Point being, these axioms, logical foundations, are lived. They are validated repeatedly through experience. They are in fact constantly experienced. They always precede the abstractions and philosophical considerations which the experiences give rise to. The human person precedes human reasoning. To know something truly, one first must believe it. Only then is it validated intellectually. To try and first validate it intellectually, removed from the experience, is to neglect the property of thing as a lived experience. And if it cannot be experienced, it is ontologically empty to the I and ideas about it are equally empty of knowledge.
           Philosophy comes second, Life first. Stop doubting what you know to be true, and validate it by living it.

Will Begin Posting Again Soon

Finally realized I can join communities through Google+, so I'm looking forward to communicating and networking with like-minded people.

The nature of Evil

The last post was a simple argument as to why I see Creation as perfect, and that is because Evil only manifests as an attribute of an act, not of a thing, and no amount of act can transfer the metaphysical privation of goodness within a being to creation itself, because the act has no direct influence on the ontological state of other beings, only the influence the being allows the act to have.

In other words, Satan cannot make Creation flawed, because first, Creation is perfect by its nature of coming from the perfect Creator, second, Satan’s acts cannot alter the will of other beings. The other being, must partake in the temptation willingly in order to commit an evil.

            This is best summarized by Socrates when he stated “A good man cannot be harmed either in life or death”. If one stays virtuous, no amount of suffering or temptation can alter the good man. That being said, can an evil be done to a person?

            An evil act may be done to a person, but is only evil insofar as it is an immoral act, it is not evil as a result of the unpleasantries it creates. The murder is evil because it is anti-teleological and against Natural Law, it is not evil because it hurts another, because one being causing pain to another is not intrinsically negative.

            Someone could cut my leg off in an unprovoked violent attack, making me bedridden, and as a result I devout my time more to prayer and coming closer to God. Overall, this would be a Good thing. So does that make the violent attack a good? It depends. It does not change the act itself as intrinsically evil. The materialization of the act does not affect the nature of the act itself. The nature of the act is intrinsically bad, despite the consequences being good. That is the point though, that Act and Consequence can and always do manifest separately.

            Now, the next question is, is a negative consequence an evil? I would say no, once again a look at the Book of Job or even a look at the entire story of Christ’s crucifixion, one can see that suffering, pain, and struggle are not intrinsically evil. But can what seem to be ‘negative consequences of acts’ be evil at all?

            No, for no amount of unpleasantries can actually alter the nature and will of the being. This is what Socrates was alluding to. In a Christian context, all unpleasantries, all ‘negative consequences of acts’, are simply tests of character and all pleasantries simply rewards.

            The metaphysical result of this is that evil exists only in act, not as a result of an act.  Evil cannot actually be done to a person, for the materialization of the act is determined by consequence and the chosen affect it has on other beings and not by the will of the being doing the acting. Only unpleasantries can be done to a person, it is their choice whether they allow it weaken them and push them towards evil acts.

Is Creation perfect or imperfect?

An entirely good Creator could not create an only partially good creation. I take this as a given. God could never have created a flawed world, for He is Perfect, as Christ could of never sinned, as He is perfect.

 So how can the world have the attribute of being flawed, or rather, seem imperfect? I think one needs to define what exactly evil is. It is the conscious, deliberate, and freely chosen act which is contrary to God's Will, Natural Law, the being's teleological purpose, all these being different names for the same thing. The key to this is that Evil is an act, not a characteristic. All of creation is good by its nature of being created by the Perfect Creator.

So again, why does the world seem imperfect? It seems imperfect because we mistake Unpleasantness for Evilness. Existence is a struggle for limited beings, as Freedom of Will means temptation, and possibility of failure. This possibility is necessary for us to be good, because a forced attribute is not worthy of recognition by God, Goodness must be freely chosen. Evil being an act, cannot materialize onto creation as a whole, it only remains the fault of the being doing the act.

The Book of Job best demonstrates this. The suffering God allows for Job is not evil, it is a righteous test, evil only manifests if Job falters and succumbs to Satan's pressures. No amount of unpleasantness or pain could overcome Job's holiness, the struggle only amplified his holiness. Suffering in itself is not evil, what matters is how the being suffering acts in relation to the suffering. If one is weak, he errors, commits an evil act, he fails. If one is strong, he chooses good, as Job did, his holiness is heightened. Suffering can be a blessing, the greater the struggle, the greater the success, the more likeness to God.

 The World is perfect, for all its perceived flaws are simply beautiful unpleasantries meant to be overcome, and all its pleasantries a reward. This conception of evil, coupled with Leibniz's Best of All Possible Worlds argument, that this world has the perfect balance of attributes to maximize goodness, dispels any criticism of Creation as flawed.