Of Heathens and Heresy

On Mr. Wright's blog an atheist by the name of Rolf Andreassen who also happens to be a physicist asserts that a sense of fairness intrinsic to man by the internal nature-of-his-mind has moral authority arising from its power to compel his mind to agreement.  This is an interesting argument in that it has parallels to orthodox Christian belief and yet shows the caustic nature of heresy but let's set that aside for the moment and unpack his assertion.

For his argument a sense of fairness is considered the ur moral rule that is built into man.  This sense of fairness is then compared by him to eyesight.  For some their eyesight is impaired or underdeveloped, and in others it is missing altogether.  So then, goes his assertion, is the sense of fairness in man.  Interestingly his analogy does not touch upon those whose eyesight is superior to the norm, nor does he address how mechanical correction, to use his term, or enhancement (think of a microscope or telescope) might apply to man's sense of fairness.

Dr. Andreassen's argument is then that through the process of evolution into a social species man has developed a sense of fairness that is commonly though imperfectly shared across all of humankind.  The standard for what is fair is then set by him as what an impartial man with perfect knowledge and understanding of a situation who also has sufficient time to make the decision would do in that particular situation.  Again there is a certain parallel to orthodox Christian belief but more interesting is the inherent contradiction of the logic used.

Starting from the premise that moral authority arises solely from a sense intrinsic to an individual, we find that we have segued into moral authority as authentic because it has broad commonality (though imperfectly realized) among mankind, to finally arrive at a perfect individual (which is understood as being unreal) being the real arbiter (standard) of fairness.  This means that Dr. Andreassen's assertion that moral authority arises from within a man's internal nature compelling his mind into agreement is inchoate and not in agreement with the philosophy that he believes to naturally flow from it.  In other words, a man can and indeed must be compelled by others to submit to their sense of fairness as the group may believe the individual's sense of fairness deficient in some manner or another even if he believes it unfair that he be so coerced.  This situation rapidly devolves into no one is right because everyone is right.

Unless of course his imaginary perfect man could come forward and provide an ethic for men to follow so that they could be more like him.

A word on the caustic nature of heresy.  Before I embraced the Eastern Orthodox faith I was wary of the term heresy.  Heresy seemed to me a hateful phrase and something with which to bludgeon intellectual curiosity.  Instead now, it seems to me, a constraint to help intellectual curiosity by providing a sense of discipline to thought.  When one comes to think, for example, of Jesus as simply a man (or even an imaginary man) then it becomes simple to become unmoored from the truth of His message -- a truth that in many ways apostate and heathen atheists agree with.  But because of the particular heresy or heresies that have been embraced novel ways of arriving at truths have to be found and upon these strange, dark, and twisted pathways men often become lost and find themselves accepting and embracing falsehoods and sin and with no light or map to guide them back to safety or their true destination.

Does God equal good?

On the estimable John C Wright's blog there is a debate on Whether Secularism Implies Moral Subjectivism.  During this debate John Hutchins related to me that nowhere can he find the assertion (I assume in the Bible) that God = good.  Implicit in his statement is that I said or believe this.  It is also possble that Mr. Hutchins has conflated me with a poster by the name of Ofloinn who did say precisely this.

However I did write

So those things that make you more like God (bring you closer to Him) are by definition good. It is not then that God is good and good is God, it is that God IS good. This does not mean however that good IS God in the sense that you meant above. Instead good in that context is the process of becoming like God.

This may come across as some form of irrational nit picking so I will try to unpack what I meant.  First though it should be noted upfront that the Orthodox faith is neither one of Sola Scriptura nor one that believes the Old and New Testaments are intended to be read in a literal sense.  This is a position that both the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox faith have held for two millennia and not something adduced recently to upset atheists.   Anyone that disagrees with these points will be fundamentally unhappy with this essay.

My argument is not that God and good are one-and-the-same but that when man strives to be like God through the Icon of His Son Jesus Christ (John 14:9) that he moves towards his true and intended nature (Gen 1:27) and thus towards good.

St. Augustine writes in On Christian Doctrine

For when the one supreme God of gods is thought of, even by those who believe that there are other gods, and who call them by that name, and worship them as gods, their thought takes the form of an endeavour to reach the conception of a nature, than which nothing more excellent or more exalted exists. And since men are moved by different kinds of pleasures, partly by those which pertain to the bodily senses, partly by those which pertain to the intellect and soul, those of them who are in bondage to sense think that either the heavens, or what appears to be most brilliant in the heavens, or the universe itself, is God of gods: or if they try to get beyond the universe, they picture to themselves something of dazzling brightness, and think of it vaguely as infinite, or of the most beautiful form conceivable; or they represent it in the form of the human body, if they think that superior to all others. Or if they think that there is no one God supreme above the rest, but that there are many or even innumerable gods of equal rank, still these too they conceive as possessed of shape and form, according to what each man thinks the pattern of excellence. Those, on the other hand, who endeavour by an effort of the intelligence to reach a conception of God, place Him above all visible and bodily natures, and even above all intelligent and spiritual natures that are subject to change. All, however, strive emulously to exalt the excellence of God: nor could any one be found to believe that any being to whom there exists a superior is God. And so all concur in believing that God is that which excels in dignity all other objects.

Here St. Augustine is arguing that when men think of God they imagine him to be the best, truest possible example of what is good.  In other words men hold God to be a transcendent good.  Note also how St. Augustine makes it clear that even this transcendent good which man endeavours to imagine is not a complete or correct image of God (John 1:18 and 1 John 4:12), because God is ineffable, but instead is the best that man can understand with his limited (non-infinte) reason.

In On the Incarnation St. Athanasius writes

For God is good—or rather, of all goodness He is Fountainhead, and it is impossible for one who is good to be mean or grudging about anything. Grudging existence to none therefore, He made all things out of nothing through His own Word, our Lord Jesus Christ and of all these His earthly creatures He reserved especial mercy for the race of men.

Here again it is clear that God is a transcendant good, but beyond that God is also the source of all that is good (Gen 1:31).  So great indeed is God's goodness that He gave man free will -- the choice to stay true to God's image or to be something less.  This 'less' is turning away from man's true nature and purpose (Gen 1:26) and in Greek is called hamartia -- literally 'missing the mark.'

As with almost anything in Scripture, or at least those areas not dogmatized by the seven ecumenical councils, hamartia or, in English, sin may be understood in several ways.  In the Western traditions of Christianity, sin and man's relation with God is most often understood in legal terms.  In the Eastern traditions this is rarely so.  Instead man's relationship with God is typically understood in pastoral terms with sin viewed as disease and Jesus as the Great Physician of man.  Neither tradition is in and of itself necessarily wrong but they do tend to lead Christians along different paths to the same goal.

As the transcendent good, God may in a sense be thought of as goodness itself.  I would argue this is dangerous as it tends to reduce God into a god of goodness akin to something out of pagan mythology.  A reduction that would likely create opportunity for heretical understandings of God.

The TOF Spot: Finality vs. Efficiency

The TOF Spot: Finality vs. Efficiency

A fascinating and erudite article from author Michael Flynn.  He should really consider expanding on it for a book.

The Old Truth

The title of my blog is μυστήριον, which in Koine Greek means secret or mystery but would probably be better understood as that which can not be known by empirical evidence but instead requires revelation. The inspiration for μυστήριον is my journey into the Orthodox Catholic Church, perhaps better known in the West as the Eastern Orthodox Church, though I will undoubtedly blog about more than just this journey.

As a child I was a unitarian universalist long before I was aware of any such historical movements, or even the proper theological words to describe my beliefs.  By unitarian I mean that I believed that the trinitarian god of 'traditional' Christianity was incorrect, possibly blasphemous, and that Jesus was simply a really good man.  By universalist I mean that I thought that everyone eventually found their way to Heaven.  Whether that path to Heaven was through something akin to purgatory or reincarnation or something else altogether I was resolutely undecided.  I was almost indescribably spiritual and spoke daily, and sometimes hourly, with God.  These conversations were not the normal intercessory prayers that so many seem to be focused upon, but were instead conversations about what happened in my day or what I was thinking about or found important.

As a teenager when I started to read science, history and philosophy and began to study religions such as Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism I found myself adrift of my rather weak Christian moorings.  In fact it would be better to say that I wasn't moored to Christianity at all.  Rather I had floated about in vaguely Christian shallows and when the storm of new philosophies and ideas swept over me I found myself asea with no bearings.  I also found that my sense of spirituality had ended and I no longer found myself speaking with God.

In my late teens I found shelter from the stormy theistic seas in the grey harbor of atheism, though I'd have demurred at the label on the grounds that I was a scientific realist who was open to the evidence of the divine and should be considered at minimum a nominal agnostic.  The bar that I set for evidence of God was high.  Evidence had to be empirically measurable and so axiomatically everything was physical.  This meant if someone were to offer evidence of a vision, I would redefine the vision as a hallucination and explained it away as a fundamentally biological process that was explainable by any number of just-so stories, though if pressed my response would have been that it wasn't incumbent upon me to prove why it wasn't evidence, all that I had to prove was that an alternate explanation was possible.

I was never a comfortable atheist.  I took an unseemly delight in foundering the faith of those about me and yet did not find my belief system useful in making sense of the world.  The morals that I subscribed to all had as their foundation Christianity and Judaism, yet so that my beliefs were not tainted by irrational theism I ascribed my morality to ideas such as social contracy theory.  Oddly however, these theories were not the source of my morals but were instead purposefully sought out as equivalences.  This left me often in the odd position of holding a moral belief but having no foundation upon which it sat or even, more dreadfully, having a moral belief that my foundational equivalence, if taken to its rational conclusion, opposed.

So it was in my late twenties that I found myself thinking again about God and religion, not in a dismissive or anthropological manner but instead as a way to better understand reality and find purpose to life.  My life as an atheist had soured me to 'organized religion', though as the son of parents who were religious only in the nominal sense of the word (I had in fact always thought them both atheists until I asked them about it when I was an adult) I had never developed much of a taste for it.  Besides, the idea of being bound by some form of orthodoxy felt too intellectually constraining.

It wasn't until the birth of my son that I again began to look seriously at churches.  I didn't want him to have such a shallow understanding of his beliefs that encountering other religions and philosophies would be as if encountering a whirl wind for the first time.  The various forms of Protestantism were my first areas of inquiry but I found each of them (though some offered more theological freedom than others) wanting and often incoherent.  In the end only two 'churches' made sense to me: the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Catholic Church.  In coming posts I'll describe some of the reasons I found the Orthodox Catholic Church to be the more compelling of the two.