“Faith”, according to Hebrews 11:1, “is being sure of what you hope for and certain of what you do not see.” The Danish theologian, Soeren Kierkegaard, wrote extensively on the topic of faith. According to Kierkegaard, you have an implicit relationship with God, one that you can nourish to growth, but won’t need to nourish in order to ensure its survival. It transcends time and space and it requires no words because it is all sense memory therefore no a priori or a posteriori truths can cover the depth of the relationship. God completely encompasses you. So while we, according to Kierkegaard, are condemned to create our own identity, our relationship with God will center us. The salvation of man is in this infinite openness of a relationship that never goes away.
While I have tried to boil his thought down to the very heart of the matter, I think it is still clear that there may be some truth to his work. Hegel, for instance, tried to systematize the existence of God. Kierkegaard criticized this, because, as he said; what would happen to mankind if the philosopher died before he could finish the system? Where would we be?
While recently reading Descartes, the same thought came to my mind. Descartes, in his 3rd Meditation, tries to prove the existence of God. The problem for Descartes is that his entire theory completely depends on the fact that he can prove God. While this ‘divine glue-job’ is somewhat nicely done, albeit with a few problems, it does not solve the questions Kierkegaard, or I, would have had for him. If the philosopher is not there to prove God for us, then what do we have? Nothing? I find it fallible, at best, to think that God’s existence depends, somehow, on mankind’s ability to prove Her/Him?! I tend to think that God would have to be so self-evident that one does not have to prove His or Her existence at all. Otherwise it would hardly be an omni-present God. All we really have to have then is faith. Faith gives us reason to leap into the delightful unreasoned reality where man can connect with God…just because S/He is, and I think there is some sense of real freedom in that.
What do you think?
- Linda Harris
I believe “God” is used to explain the unexplained to man. Thus, throughout human history, there has been less and less which God expains as humans learn and discover more. For example, explanations of concepts like lightning and rain were explained by way of God. Now that science can better explain our climate, most will agree that lightning does not occur because God or “the gods” are angry. So, as we increase our knowledge base, we decrease our “Godly” explanations. As always though, the remainder is oft attributed to God. And since it is highly unlikely that the Universe(s) be explained during our lifetime, to me, it is pretty evident that God will be around for a while.
What’s being left out here is a discussion on the foundation of religion - religious experience. People like our friend Steve R. believe that religion is a rational movement of the mind trying to understand the universe. Actually, it’s something quite different. Real religion is the result of a direct experience of the divine. One is not said to have faith in their computer desk - it’s right there, to be touched and observed. The religious experience works in much the same way; the mystic directly experiences “God” and so there’s no need for faith OR reason. It’s an observation.
‘If the philosopher is not there to prove God for us, then what do we have? Nothing?’
This is an interesting post. We should remember that historically speaking, religionists have never appealed to the philosopher (in the traditional sense), but to the prophet to reveal sacred truth. Only intellectuals or other philosophers seem to need philosophers like Kierkegaard or Decartes to help make sense of religion and faith.
‘God would have to be so self-evident that one does not have to prove His or Her existence at all.’
Some believe that God is self-evident and cite all nature as evidence for his existence. Whether or not they are correct in doing this is another matter of discussion.
In Concern to Steve:
While saying that the concept of God(s) was the product of people’s need to explain those things which were beyond the scope of humans to grasp, I think this counts more as a primitive idea of the nature of God and the concepts linked with Him (I understand that calling God by male terms is sexist, but I will use them for this response). I will admit God(s) were and are sometimes still used to explain the occurrences around us; the tale of Demeter and Hades gives a mythological explanation of the changing seasons and God’s wrath was used recently to explain the destruction of New Orleans (though I take Fawell and Robertson’s ideas that the existence of homosexuals and feminist irks God enough to decimate a whole city to be as believable as Sol being carried across the sky by a chariot). I will also grant you that as human history progressed and so did our scientific knowledge (which I believe you meant by the use of the “knowledge” in your response) we began to ascribe less spiritual explanations to the natural word and more scientific explanations.
However, God is much more than just a means to the end of explanation. He is a spiritual role model for one to look to (and if God is all good, then what better role model would there be?), a comfort to those in need of help, a bridge between people of differing backgrounds (think of the communities and friendships that are fostered an referred to as the ‘Body of God/Christ’), etc. Also, I fear that implying that as scientific explanations increase so will God’s applicability and use to us will decrease you beg a great many questions that are apparently being presupposed by your assumptions. If God is a concept that encapsulates the spiritual realm, which is beyond the scope of science (as least it is to me and other theological scholars that I have read), then God will always be an important part in explaining life; I believe people are becoming more aware to the wisdom of Hamlet when he said to Horatio that there is “more to heaven and earth” than is found in our sciences and books. Along with that, just because we have scientific explanations about a specific occurrence or natural fact that ‘Godly’ explanations will decrease for those same items. There are arguments to be found in theology called Fine-Tuning arguments which use science as a means to inject the concept of God and the plausibility of His existence; you may, through testing and mathematical trickery, show that the gravitational constant is G and that the radiuses of an electron’s orbit are quantized and can only be specific values, but why are they that way? Is it not reasonable to claim that the great fine tuning of universal constants implies a creator or designer. If so, then are not scientific explanations also, if we make a ‘leap’ of meaning, theological, or ‘Godly’ explanations.
I would to see how you respond to this. If I made an egregious use of your reply, I apologize greatly and hope you can correct me where I misused your own words or implications.
In concern to Lind:
Having read Kierkegaard’s works and being a bit of a follower of some of his existential ideas, I hope to be able to give my ‘two cents’ when I can, though I felt a stronger will to respond to Steve’s response for now.
Ian Wasser
Undergrad @ Stetson U.
Hi Linda,
I’m not exactly sure where you find SK saying some of the things in your first paragraph. Maybe they are in his more edifying works (which I confess to have not read much of save Works of Love).
But you ask, “What do you think?” And so I shall tell you.
First, regarding Kierkegaard contra Hegel, I was under the impression that the matter wasn’t “What would happen were there no philosophers to construct proofs to the existence of God?” Rather, I’ve understood SK to be saying the whole idea of constructing a proof to show God exists is laughable.
Second, I don’t think many people think God’s existence depends on a proof—even (especially?) those who construct proofs to show God exists. Maybe you mean to say our belief depends (or should not depend) on a seal-the-deal proof?
Third, I don’t think SK thought God’s existence is self-evident, but if he did I’d love to know in which book he says so. It would be helpful. Truly.
Fourth (which, incidentally, ties into my comments above), I would be surprised if SK described the so-called leap of faith as ‘delightful’ and here’s why:
If you read Fear and Trembling, for instance, you will see SK’s pseudonym, Johannes de Silentio (Silent John), explaining that what has always been missing from the story of Abraham as told in church is anxiety.
When Abe got the word to kill his son, mightn’t it have been a hallucination? Or a demon? Or couldn’t Abe have suffered from some mental disorder? How, in other words, do we know it was God who told Abe to do this? How, for that matter, did Abe know? These are epistemic questions, of course, and Silent John basically says: We don’t know. Yet Abe committed himself to killing his son. Indeed, he had killed his son in his heart, according to Silent John.
Silent John says he hasn’t the courage to do what Abe did. I don’t remember how it is spelled out in the book, but the gist of it seems to be that Silent John couldn’t face doing something so horrible to the person he loved the most with the glaring possibility that it might not have even been God who commanded it be done. But Abe is ‘the knight of faith’ because he did it.
Do I find freedom in all of this? Sure, I find freedom. But freedom isn’t always so happy. Or maybe, it isn’t pure bliss. Hence the book’s title: fear and trembling.
Please feel free to disagree with my reading of SK.
Ian,
Hi, I’m a Stetson alumn (majors: philo and psych) and now a grad student at UNF. Perhaps we’ve met?
Jennifer Lawson
While I very much enjoyed Linda’s post, and think it is an excellent primer on how religious faith is viewed and practiced in post-Enlightenment times, I cannot help but notice that little thought is given as to how the Ancients understood faith. We moderns define faith as belief in something that cannot be proven or defies rational explanation. To a person of the First Century, that wasn’t what it meant at all.
My prime resources here are “The Handbook of Biblical Social Values” article on Faith/Faithfulness by Bruce Malina (lead translator of the RSV Bible), the article “What is Faith” by J.P. Holding (a personal acquaintance of mine) and the article “Patron-Client Relations and the New Community in Luke-Acts” by Halvor Moxnes, found in the book “The Social World of Luke-Acts” (part of the Social Sciences Commentaries on the Gospels series).
To a First century person, “faith” would have been understood as trusting in someone, in this case God, whose trustworthiness had already been proven by some means. Even today we still have this concept of faith, although it is not the primary way we define it today:
American Heritage Dictionary:
faith: n. 3. loyalty to a person or thing; allegiance.
The word translated as “faith” most often in the NT is the word “pistis”, which was used as a specific rhetorical term for “Forensic Proof.” (See Arist. Rhet. 1.2.2-3, in which persuasion, according to Aristotle, is brought about through three kinds of proof (pistis) or persuasive appeal: logos (the appeal to reason), pathos (the appeal to emotion), and ethos (the persuasive appeal of one’s character). It could also be used as a verb, meaning “trust or LOYALTY based on evidence or prior trustworthiness”. (You’ll see why I capitalized LOYALTY in a moment.)
This is important, because Jews and Hellenic Gentiles would have recognized the proper relationship between God and man as what was called a Client/Patron relationship. Holding writes:
“”Second, note that in very few cases is this form of pistis, as meaning a proof, in view. The meaning does give us a clue as to the nature of other meanings. It is often used as a noun to refer to the Christian “faith” as a set of convictions. In far many more cases the meaning intended is in the sense of faithfulness, or loyalty as owed to one in whom one is embedded for service (in this case, the body of Christ). This now leads to an expansion of the pistis concept as derived from deSilva. As deSilva shows, the relationship between the believer and God is framed in terms of an ancient client-patron relationship. As God’s “clients” to whom he has shown unmerited favor (grace), our response should be, as Malina and Neyrey frame it, a “constant awareness” of prescribed duties toward those in whom we are indebted (God) and the group in which we are embedded (God’s kin group, the body of Christ). This “constant awareness” is the expression of our faithfulness of loyalty — in other words, this is our pistis, or faith. “Faith” is not a feeling, but our pledge to trust, and be reliable servants to, our patron (God), who has provided us with tangible gifts (Christ) and proof thereby of His own reliability.”"
This is why the earliest evangelistic efforts were citing the miracles of Jesus, fulfillment of Old Testament prophesy and the Empty Tomb; they were the EVIDENCE by which trust in Christ could be placed, and proof of indebtedness to God, our patron. This is also why casual reading of Hebrews 11:1 (Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.), which by itself support a modernist definition of Faith, are incomplete without reading the laundry list of proofs of Jesus’ actions given as reason for trusting and being loyal to God.
Which brings us to how the definition changed. Blame Kierkegaard.
In his view, faith is defined as belief in the face of absurdity, since the Christian belief system is based on a “leap of faith”, not on verifiable proof. Kierkegaard believed Christianity involved paradoxes offensive to reason, thus making faith and reason incompatible. This formed the basis of his criticism of the Danish Church, in that it had adopted a Hegelian view of Christianity as an objective proposition, thus robbing the Faith of its power to change lives. He argued that because the paradoxes were so offensive to reason, the only appeal to accept Christ lie in the emotion produced in the choice to believe in spite of the paradox. This choice changes the believer for the better, producing the subjective proof of God through experience. The fundamental problems of life defy rational, objective explanation; the highest truth is subjective truth.
Christians today seem to define faith in a manner roughly consistent with traditional academic interpretations of Kierkegaard. Reason must be suspended for faith to be authentic, since faith is the mechanism used to reach for the highest level of existence. Paradox defines faith for Kierkegaard, and he gives two examples of these paradoxes in his works; the paradox that God, an eternal and transcendent being, could become human in the form of Jesus, and the actions of Abraham in sacrificing his son Isaac. Yet criticism of Kierkegaard can and has been made that he misunderstood the definition of Biblical faith and the relationship of Jesus to the Trinity, and of Isaac and Abraham’s relationship to God; he was completely unaware of Wisdom Christology (a topic perhaps for another time) and oblivious to the fact that the late birth of Issac was the pistis for trusting God would stay the knife in his hand.
Tom Bryant
Religious Studies@Clemson
(former UNF Philosophy major)
I’m going to have to offer my apologies for being a bit late responding to Linda’s post. I’ll try and answer the initial post first and the relevant comments afterwards:
Linda:
I’ll admit I’m initially a bit suspicious of Kierkegaard’s reasoning on the issue of God. The specific part you and I may diverge at is that “it is still clear that there may be some truth to his work.” If Kierkegaard is correct, then no Hegelian abstraction or empirical methodology is able to discern the difference between the existence or non-existence of God. Kierkegaard has, effectively, severed the idea, or even use, of ascribing a truth value to God’s existence. According to the way you have formulated his argument, one is essentially left with no way to reject or test the proposition.
While you may be correct in asserting that it’s somehow fallible to locate God’s existence in the mind of man or woman, it hardly follows that God’s existence is, necessarily, self-evident. In fact, it is not at all clear why, if God’s existence is self-evident, one needs faith at all. Another point might be that if God’s existence is self-evident, how does one explain the disputes not only concerning God’s existence, but the various interpretations of how, exactly, God exists?
A classical critique (and one I still find pressing) of your position concerning God as omnipresent and God’s existence as self-evident is that once you claim he/she is in the world – by definition he/she must be in the world if he/she is everywhere – you have asserted at least some aspect of God’s existence as empirical (in some sense or another). If this is the case, not only does this give rise to a contradiction in Kierkegaard’s earlier position, but it also opens up the possibilities of verification. Thus, God’s existence or non-existence becomes an empirically testable proposition. I assume this is not what you want?
Steve R and Ian Hall:
Your assertion of a possible history of religion seems, well, possible to me. H. L. Mencken offers a similar account in “Treatise on the Gods.” Yet, I think anyone would be hard pressed to boil religion, religious belief, or religious experience down to such a story.
I’m not sure what distinction Ian is making when he references “Real” religion. It also seems as if you are using the word “observation” in two different ways, one when describing the desk, and one when describing God. If not, I’m curious to see how this is explained.
Jay Heiny:
I would disagree that the religious have never appealed to philosophers. St. Augustine and St. Aquinas are, I think, two very good examples of the intersection of philosophy and theology. If you think that Augustine and Aquinas are not really philosophers or are too intellectual, then I imagine their appeal to Plato and Aristotle (amongst others) might qualify. If, as some assume, the basis for a good amount of theology is steeped in Greek philosophy, one would seem hard pressed to not see how most individuals, whether they realize it or not, are appealing to philosophical doctrines. Yet, this seems beside the point. If an intellectual or a philosopher “needs” to understand the existence or non-existence of God through philosophy, I hardly see how this invalidates or critiques their positions.
I think I have taken up enough time/space. I look forward to the responses!
peterolen,
Good points. My earlier comment wasn’t meant to invalidate any position. It was merely a casual observation. I was just indicating that if the philosopher did in fact fail to prove the existence of god, the faith of religionists would go mostly uninjured. Ultimately, religions do not rely on the proofs of philosophers. But perhaps this could be debated. You mentioned Aquinas and Augustine, both of which contributed substantially to Catholic doctrine. Does the Catholic church owe its success to those who intellectually invested so much into it? If so, perhaps the philosopher does play a much more substative role in the success of religious belief.
Jay
I am clearly not as “up” on my SK and others as this forum is; which I suppose is okay since I study public administration. To clarify, my thoughts have been strongly influenced by reading Carl Jung, Stephen Hawking, and Lao Tszu as it pertains to symbology, and the concepts of “nothing” and “everything”. At the end of the day, I think of God as this ubiquitous force (in my mind like a REALLY complicated algorithm that is being decoded small pieces at a time by us) that comprises nothing and everything at the same time. I appreciate the deeper analysis by the others in here, but I don’t feel I have the scholarly reading to match philosophical wits beyond that.
Linda,
Might there be too much emphasis put on the spiritual nature of the relationship between God and Man? Consider two central teachings of traditional Christianity, both of which deal with the connection between the physical and the spiritual, namely, the incarnation and the sacraments. As the story goes, in the incarnation God in heaven became man on earth. One of the purposes for Jesus living, dying and living again, was to make a connection/relationship between God and Man. Consider the significance of Jesus having a physical body, a real body that went through the natural physical process, from birth to death and unnaturally life again. You could have touched him, as Thomas did, feeling the warmth of the real/physical blood in his veins. You could have washed real dirt off of God’s feet.
Consider the two sacraments (broadly agreed upon as sacraments) of the Christian Church. In baptism, real water touches a real body in a sort of initiation process. And in the Eucharist/Lord’s Supper the Christian eats and drinks physical bread and wine which in one way or another “is” the body of Jesus. Once again, consider the necessity of the physical in the Christian religion.
Peter Leithart wrote “[There was a] time…when you could despise the body and love God, or despise God and love the body. One could be an ascetic or a hedonist.
Then God got Himself a body. Despite efforts to retain this choice (Nietzsche, flagellants), the incarnation made the ancient choice of ascetic or hedonist impossible. Since the incarnation the only choices are to love the body and God, or to despise both.”
see- Leithart.com
I’d like to make a quick comment on Descartes. Chiefly, there are those (myself included) that read Descartes’ supposed theism as a misdirection to keep very earthly powers off of his back. His own narrative in Discourse on Method explains how he was en route to publish a tome on natural science when he caught wind of Galileo’s persecution. Subsequently deciding to destroy his treatise on natural science, it can argued that from that point on he wrote more than a touch esoterically.
The most important observation that I think one can make on on Descartes’s writing is that his method doesn’t begin with God but with the self. Cogito ergo sum. It is only after establishing the self as a certainty, that he moves on to establish God as a certainty. It isn’t God that establishes certainty of the self but the self that establishes the certainty of God. Further, Descartes only needs the existence of God to fend off a specific argument against the Cartesian system, the case of hyperbolic doubt. God in the Cartesian system, then, is only necessary to those who doubt the validity of the senses by appealing to one form of solipsism or the other.
More interesting still is the role that God plays in the Cartesian system after defending it from hyperbolic doubt: absolutely none. The whole Cartesian project is to eliminate any possible human need for God by improving medical science to make Man immortal (and cure every possible wound or malady) and by inventing an infinity of devices to accomplish every conceivable labor. By eliminating the two halves of the Genesis curse, Descartes wants to achieve paradise without God’s help. In effect, his system is a system for Man to become God with no appeal to anything mystical, spiritual, magical or supernatural.
This view of religion being useless extends also to his advice to those who would follow him in his method. He suggests that they hold to the outward appearance of believing whatever religion they were raised to believe in whatever it may be. In this part of The Discourse on Method, religion is presented as nothing more than a provisional morality useful for keeping those in line who are insufficiently intelligent to understand the need to act sensibly without the threat of eternal damnation and the promise of paradise.
But once the Cartesian project is complete, there is no more need for this. Once medical science can cure whatever harm is caused by wantonly acting out the most depraved of passions, there is no need for even a provisional morality. With no consequences for any action, there is no true sin and certainly no need for repentance. Hence his later reference to his method as THE TRUE SCIENCE OF MORALITY.
So at least in the case of Descartes, there is no real threat to his system if it is true that the existence of God cannot be proven. In the Cartesian method, God acts more of a guarantor that Descartes would not be persecuted as did Galileo than a guarantor of the correctness of his system. The correctness of his system lies in his certainty of himself, not in his certainty that God exists.
Also, I think one can answer Kierkegaard by way of Aquinas’ suggestion that humanity can know about God in two distinct ways.
On the one hand, philosophers can learn some divine truths through reason. This requires lots of hard work. Not every human being is capable of doing it. It lies on a path filled with possible mistakes. The philosopher who does this may very well die before the project is complete.
Aquinas then argues that it is for precisely this reason that God has also revealed himself to humanity. The direct revelation of God can teach humanity all the truths about God that reason can reach without recourse to divine revelation and then some as Aquinas held that there are some truths about God that cannot be known through reason alone.
So Aquinas’ answers Kierkegaard’s question to Hegel with a “on the whole, not much, but it is a tragedy.” Aquinas would say that humanity may have lost out on one specific way of knowing God through reason alone but not only do other ways of knowing God through reason alone exist, but humanity has also received divine revelation through which anyone can know God without recourse to reason.
The tragedy in the Aquinean view is that the more ways that one knows God, the more complete one’s knowledge of God becomes. Losing one way of knowing God (perhaps forever) makes humanity that much less complete. Being something of an Aristotlean, for humanity as a whole to be less than complete is an evil. Evil in his system is the lack of some good that ought to obtain. Inasmuch as humanity is prevented from reaching its final end as a complete and flourishing society, evil obtains.
In response to Tom:
I have a few qualms with your description of Kierkegaard. However, I would like to write them out as to better understand Kierkegaard through the discussions being posted here.
You state: “Kierkegaard believed Christianity involved paradoxes offensive to reason, thus making faith and reason incompatible.” However, I don’t think this is so and I would like to, if you will allow me, use some geography to represent concepts (if David Lewis can use words like “compossible,” I think I have leeway to do this).
Let us say I, as a person wanting to believe in a theistic God as envisioned by Kierkegaard, am standing before a large abyss that is only a few feet deep, but because of some well placed fog it appears deeper. The land I am standing on is the land of reason, the fog represents absurdity, and the bottom of the abyss is faith. For Kierkegaard, each person, in trying to come to terms with a belief of God (and perhaps the spiritual realm), will find themselves at the edge of reason and will be unable to go no further. This is so not because faith is ‘offensive’ to reason or is riddled with ‘paradoxes,’ but because the Spiritual Realm (which I take to be that which God is part of/represents) exists just beyond the scope of reason and that all the proofs of God’s existence are but failed attempts at capturing God into formal/informal logical terms. (In fact, and this is much more of my ideas being injected into Kierkegaard, to make a case of faith or belief based in reason neuters God of His grandness; how silly it would be to think that because Anselm slapped a few lines of Latin on a page that God becomes a necessary being.) While some components of Religion (which I will use to refer to the monotheistic religions which are the topic of these comments) may contain paradoxes (such as God becoming human or god demanding the death of an innocent), it is the product of Religion itself. I take it that Religion is the voiced or written expression of a people’s belief in the Spiritual Realm, which can have fallible facts or exaggerated stories. Spiritual belief (which I refer to as Spirituality) is not a paradox in that it simply is concerned with whether one believes or dose not believe matters ‘outside’ of reality (what a metaphysician may call The Reality). Better put: Religion suffers from paradoxes in that is tries to make spiritual beliefs and their implications as valid/sound even when being compared to other aspects of the observable, experimental word (a story of a messiah raising from the dead is contradictory to our notions of death) – it attempts to put something unreasonable into a reasonable context. Spirituality dose not suffer from paradoxes or a defiance of reason since it is based not with making reason of one’s belief but only in the willingness of one to believe in something outside of reason (though one may try to use reason to better support their ideas, but deep down it is willingness and not reasonableness that makes the final call). The ‘fog’ which exists beyond the edge of reason is what Kierkegaard would call the Absurd, though he dose not put such a negative value to it as we commonly ascribe to it when we call another person or concept absurd. Thus, if a person wants to make a ‘leap of faith’ to believe in God, etc., they make a ‘leap’ or ‘embrace’ the absurd and find themselves outside of reason but on the terra firma of faith. Though, one is not lock into their decisions since, if one finds their faith misplaced, they can ‘leap’ again out of the absurd. Of course, Kierkegaard would tell us that this leap is to made by the person qua individual, perhaps why faith for him is so entwined with being an person for while we can use all the reasons from others or ourselves to make the leap, it comes down to the person’s will to make the leap, or their freedom of choice (though as a Nietzschian I would debate this, but Kierkegaard is out concern). I do not agree that “[t]his choice changes the believer for the better, producing the subjective proof of God through experience” either since words like ‘proof’ and ‘experience’ suppose without either the person did not make a leap of faith as envisioned by Kierkegaard. I believe you should have said here “subjective truth,” not “proof;” a leap of faith neither entails one’s ability to prove God’s existence (for that would mean no leap was made and they are still on the land of reason), nor an experience of God’s presence (which is based on empiricism and that, too, is on the land of reason). However, I do want to stress that the ‘leap of faith’ or ‘embrace of the absurd’ is not irrational or defies reason; it is in fact the reasonable thing to do on the path to belief from a Kierkegaardian point of view.
This is, of course, my interpretation of the ‘leap of faith’ in “Fear and Trembling” and I would really like it if people who disagreed with me brought to light items I may have failed to see in that work.
Ian Wasser
Undergrad @ Stetson U
iwasser@stetson.edu
Ian W.,
Myself, I usually envision a large gouge (like a Grand Canyon) when thinking of the leap, but I’m sure that is because SK quotes Lessing who uses the “broad, ugly ditch” imagery.
I think it is good to emphasize that SK didn’t advocate blatant irrationality. It is, in my mind, unfortunate when people think SK advanced such an irrational view. To say we cannot create a tower-of-Babel argument that reaches up and touches God is not to also say “Down with reason! Down with rationality!”
As for Fear and Trembling, there’s a lot to be said about that book. But what I’ve found most interesting recently is that Abe receives his son back again.
Jennifer
I know I am a late bloomer in this already progressing blog but I thought I would let this discussion be my first and test run to see how this works.
I think you make a lot nice points with Kierkegaard Linda.
In the ‘boiling down to the heart of the matter’ I think it is important not only that we need to have faith, but that all we can do is believe.
Aquinas, Anselm, Pascal all tried to “prove” the existence of God. Look through a rough epsitemelogical lens, none of us can “prove” anything. We can relate or explain our experiences but I cannot, just as the great thinkers cannot boil God down to a nice compact algorithm or logical syllogism. If we could, well God would not be God.
It would be Us.
Anyway,
I hope this goes through and I am able to participate more in the discussions.