Lessons In Incoherent Intuitions # 1

The blogging audience is the forgiving audience. Neither grammar nor ideas require the exactitude one would except to appear in a publication or paper. The misplaced comma or immature idea deserve absolution based on, or so we all feel, the belief that informal mistakes aren’t really mistakes so much as instances of intimacy between reader and writer. We all realize that these things are written too quickly and too enthusiastically to be taken too seriously. I hope that merely by mentioning this, I may forego your criticisms, and, more to my wishes, retain your attention as I blather on about myth-theory and Christianity. Forgive me, likewise, for failing to translate, as it were, what I am about to say. Big words and mention-making of foreign names and Latin phrases do not, as is commonly thought, reveal intelligence; they only show that a clear formulation has yet to fully developed, and provide evidence for a case charlatanism.

In psychology and myth-theory, the previous generation of professors dismissed the possibility of universals—not to mention what philosophers thought. One could not, or so they thought, subscribe the particular religious phenomenon of the Australian shaman under the same categories which apply to the Catholic priest, nor especially to every religious person throughout space and time—including hypothetical space and time. Attempts at universalization never do justice to the particularity of an individual phenomenology or historical events. These particularist should not, I don’t think, go unheeded. Categories are only useful insofar as they cultivate the intellectual environ. Where seeds cannot grow, what’s the use?

Still, we should treat the value of caution cautiously; this methodology tends, at least in the classroom, to indulge in that kind of unhealthy skepticism present only in internalists approaches to epistemology or, even worse, within reductionism and positivism. After all, we all really do think that in spite of particulars, there is a thing called a human being—and that, of itself, is a universal claim. (I would like, if I had space, to juxtapose pernicious caution of this type with the Classical menos, e.g. the mean between fear and recklessness, also called courage. There is probably, at least on the Christian model, a mode whereby one ought to enact his imaginative powers to begin formulating paradigms capable of explaining the human condition. So somewhere between skepticism and naivety, say, a word which would marry curiosity to epistemic humility. But all of that is a side note to universality.)

Plantinga does some good work in Warranted Christian Belief on the sensus divinitatis, postulating that an innate, metaphysical, human organ recognizes God’s handiwork in, to be scandalously brief, all axiological categories. Plantinga, Calvin, and Aquinas are all, to my knowledge, unabashedly concerned with demonstrating—whether in de facto or de jure terms— the existence of God via this model. My provisional concern with it at present does, eventually, have import on questions surrounding the existence of God, but I’m more curious about the inherent content of this supposed metaphysical faculty, that is, I want to know of what the thing consists, what is the sensus divinitatis? If I look at the sun, and I begin to think in causal terms, Plantinga and company, not to mention Solomon and Paul the Apostle, would say that I have likely and unconsciously initiated the sensus divinitatis. Likewise with ethical phenomenon, we instinctively feel that there is something objectively right or wrong, and that if there is a source, it would be sensible if it were Divine—C.S. Lewis’ formulation of Natural Law seems to me to instantiate this claim. But what I’m wondering, on a wholly different plain, is whether psychological phenomenon, things such as archetypes—as represented primarily in myth, secondarily in art, and lastly in laicized society—are expressions, not of the unconscious, but of the sensus divinitatis. In other words, I’m wondering if the sensus divinitatis not only includes properties associated with cosmogony (Plantinga) and morality (Lewis) but also of psychology and phenomenology—Freud, Jung, James, Eliade. Specifically, affective psychological and phenomenological dispositions.

I am beginning to think that all this psychological talk about a collective unconscious, or a universal Spirit, or what have you, is really only a modern formulation of the Medieval Christian sensus divinitatis. In order to explain the commonalities between individuals, thinkers like Freud, Jung, and James have developed the collective unconscious—innate and universal—, like the sensus divinitatis, out of which man expresses his innermost desires, meanings, and needs. Like Plantinga and company, they don’t really explain what exactly this faculty is, per say, only that it’s epiphenomenon seem at play with something fundamentally and unequivocally human.

Nietzsche, in his way, talks along the same lines. He insists upon the despair of the ancient Greeks, and says that the aesthetic reaction—the invocation of what he calls the Dionysian— mollified the ‘souls’ of the Greeks via participation in an ecstatic, primordial state of consciousness and/or being. In less ridiculously vague Nietzschian terms, man feels better when he is—in more reasonable Pascalan terms—distracted by entertainment. But this need for distraction is itself a demonstration that we think that things ought to be otherwise, or of the feeling that something has gone terribly wrong with the world. This desire for the original Dionysiac state, in other words, may be a sign of the sensus divinitatis.

Likewise Freud with his, for lack of a better term, colorful ideas surrounding the Oedipus and Electra complexes. Freud is doubtless a quack in universalizing his select few therapy cases, but he rightly shows that there were under-girding, unconscious activity playing a pivotal if not primary role in human thinking. Moreover, and more to the point, he shows that this activity exists within the dream: both night and day dream. The rhetorical force inherent to the dream/myth analogue remains to this day equitable. We dream because we need to, because we are dissatisfied with the world: ennui or trauma are not preferable to psychological health. Man still needs his distractions, man still, to include Eliade in the discussion, looks for the illus tempus, or Eden, or the Golden age—a phenomenon that truly IS universal in empirical time and space, and, more remarkably, hypothetical time and space. The purity of Eden, or the pleasantries of the Golden age, in Freudian terms, is the pre-natal or pre-traumatic period, when the man was untainted by the world, pure, and unharmed.

I would be remiss not to include Aldous Huxley’s breath-taking and prophetic dichotomy between the two mutually exclusive value sets of 1.) truth and beauty 2.) comfort and stability as presented in Brave New World. American man watches his television, facebook booms, and Hulu dominate, because man cannot stand the thought of self-reflection, cannot “sit quietly in his room.” He must invoke a Jungian Hero archetype to occupy his consciousness, he must kill time at work, he must escape from the present, he must pretend in order to feel good. Plato too, insists upon a kind of return to an original good—via the soul’s recognition of the Beautiful, to the forms. After all his disparagement of myth, Plato curiously invents his own myth in Bk. 10 of the Republic, and there, the soul remembers the Good, and desires to participate with it.

All of this distraction, by the way, is why Tolkien’s Middle Earth dominated the 20^th century, and why, moreover, the gospel infiltrated American culture via the subconscious in the form of a preparatoria evangelica. Man, in trying to escape ‘the machine’ of Modernity, in trying to escape the dehumanization of the industrial and technological age, found himself with a predilection for Fantasy literature in it’s most extreme form. The only counter-balance to dehumanization was, and still probably is, a world within which to escape—not from the reality of work or of Starbucks, but of their unreality—out of the prison of a monotonous life and into the reality of the illus tempus, the traditional values, into Christianity. Frodo’s world is not fake, Frodo’s world is real, and the sensus divinitatis knows it.

All of this is highly confusing, and I could add names, and aggregate philosophies—I know nothing of Hegel, for example, but gheist seems to me--prima facie-- an facsimile (or just simile) of the collective unconscious. I wish only to mark the consistencies within the multifarious enterprises. Major psychologist, anthropologists, historians, philosophers, literarians etc all touch upon this remarkable phenomenon of affective dissatisfaction. The affective dissatisfaction seems to me, merely the negative logical equivalent of Classical Antiquities’ eudemonia. Man above all desires to be happy, BECAUSE he realizes that he is not!

But from where could a man recognize that he is unhappy if he did not have some notion of perfect happiness? One cannot logically infer immutable happiness from ephemeral happiness for the very same reason that you cannot infer steak from cake. The desire is specific to the object. From where could I know perfect happiness if I never had the experience? How can I have a desire for an object which does not exist within the peripheral of my experience when every other desire I have exists specifically because there are objects within my experience? I only desire cake because I have tasted it, I do not desire some tasty African dish for the very simple reason that I have no idea what it is. But how, and from where could I desire a perfect, immutable happiness if it lies beyond the bounds of my experience? Augustine was right, I think, and “our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee”— simply because we are made that way. “You have made us to praise You” suggest in very clear terms the inherent quality of a sensus divinitatis. I am hungry because I have a stomach. I desire the Good because I have the sensus divinitatis.

But if this is true, then that thing we call the unconscious, those universal phenomenon we call archetypes, are either the sensus divinitatis in function or its by products. Right? And if the phenomenon is, indeed, universal, wouldn’t that further corroborate the Christian notion that the sensus divinitatis is universal? Of course, the very existence of the different mythologies, religions, and values demonstrates that, given this model, the sensus divinitatis, like all other human faculties is fallen in different ways and to different degrees. But it would also explain the phenomenon that certain people are more spiritually clairvoyant than others—Christians and non-Christians alike. If man is made in the image of God, and the sensus divinitatis in some way reflects the divine nature, then given that all men are made in God’s image differently than others, different ontological powers will be possessed differently by different people.

Kevin's 12 Must Read Books of 2010-2011

#12. What at first seems like a remarkable waste of time upon finishing turns into material for which to make sense of 20^th century despair. Nothing happens, and indeed, “The Sun Also Rises.”












#11. This was my first taste of Faulkner. Though there is a sense of overall thematic banality, the rhetorical pressure cannot be denied. American English usually falls significantly short of British. But Faulkner breaks through the stereotype; truly a rare occasion in American Lit










#10. Both the opening and ending passages of this book make the whole thing worth reading. We love where we are going and where we end up. In its way, this novella succeeds, or so I think, unlike any other story in pure tragi-comedy. Usually these sorts of hybrids fail, but in Cannery Row the hybrid somehow manages to grant life to the whole story.









#9. Chesterton at his finest. His internal journalist and internal philosopher combine here to create what is undoubtedly his masterpiece. Unlike any other Christian literature, Chesterton offers an existential argument comparable in effect and antithetical in doctrine to Camus and Sartre. Although this is technically a book from the 2009-2010 season (and ranked #1), I could not help but include it here. I rarely write a word or read a book which does not in some way resonate with Orthodoxy.







#8. The ranking here will seem to some rather poor. But I stopped halfway through this book because I could not conceive of it getting better--I plan to finish it soon. The Grand Inquisitor chapter is probably the single greatest chapter in the history of the novel. It may very well be the finest passage in all of literature










#7. This was 450 pages of boredom which altered into 450 pages of existential satisfaction with one short, final paragraph. It is the best ending to a story I have ever encountered and I suspect ever will. I still read it with tears in my eyes












#6. One cannot consider himself educated unless he has read The Republic. This is the umpteenth time I’ve read it, and I’m still learning. Iris Murdoch says that Plato was our best philosopher. She may be right. His theory of education has never been surpassed, nor can we expect that our best and newest philosophers will ever escape the parameters set by his metaphysics.









#5. Percy’s connections between the philosophy of language and art cannot be ignored. His inclusion of Pierce’s dyadic and triadic distinction shall forever haunt my philosophy. It has been almost as influential to my thinking as Lewis/Hamilton’s distinction between the Contemplated and Enjoyed









#4. Wittgenstein, like Plato and Descartes, changed the world. It is conceivable that we will not have another thinker like him for millennia. One cannot do contemporary scholarship without at least a cursory knowledge of Wittgenstein. Reading The Blue Book was like learning the alphabet all over again. It’s one of those instances when you realize that you never knew what the world was like until now.









#3. American literature paled in comparison to Russian and British literature until I read “Call me Ishmael.” I can barely describe the relief of knowing that our American English does possess the inherent quality of poetry. Melville sweeps away a lifetime of skepticism toward even great Americans like O’Conner and Hamilton. Moby Dick is the premier American literature, and my favorite novel.












#2. I only wish that I had the taste for O’Conner’s short stories like I have a taste for her theory of art. She is the superlative Christian aesthete, and one cannot, and probably should not, attempt writing fiction or poetry without reading Mystery and Manners. Rarely does anyone read 200 pages of theory in less than two days. I could not put the book down, and still read sections once a week.












#1. I had never encountered a work which combined scientific inquiry and intellectual honesty so enchantingly until The Varieties of Religious Experience. William James places the incontrovertible facts in front of us, and offers a clear, satisfactory explanation, concluding with a kind of healthy agnosticism. It is a masterpiece, and influences my thought today more than any other work, particularly in the connections between psychology and spirituality.

Living In A Nerd-ish Paradise

I am beginning to feel the results of choosing a secular education over a theological one. Yesterday, I had coffee with a Christian friend in UPenn’s PhD Classics program. We both expressed the relational disjunct between ourselves and the church laity. His sentiments are summarized best in the phrase ‘ignorance is bliss,’ where mine were concerned more with the incongruity between my sentiments and those persons in my Sunday school class.

At CIU, the advantage lay in surrounding myself with thinkers with common intuitive affections. The classroom consisted in an overall effort for honoring and understanding God. At UPenn, my classroom method takes a more surreptitious form, and following a train of thought (as an inchoate intuition) requires manipulating the classroom milieu toward value claims, objectivity, and even the gospel. My friend and I sit in the same class, and our Christian attempts often find mutual support from each other coming at least in the form of head-nods and smiles. But we are dealing with men and women who are at least and usually more psychologically clairvoyant than ourselves, and desirous of situating the discussion around other value sets—the most popular being ideological provocation and novelty, regardless of counter-convention.

We concluded, while sipping our coffee, that our exposure to this atmosphere has placed us in both a precarious and burdensome situation. It is precarious because not one class or books goes by which does not place our Christianity on the slab and hand us the butchering knife. Presently, my friend is feeling the despair that results from this more than myself. Having had occupied this valley of death for some years, I have no intention of returning soon--not to mention that I have crossed the threshold of anti-Christian beliefs so many times now that I’m kind of used to the feeling.

As an example, the question of Jesus’ sacrifice as a historical fact, and not a contrived legend no longer seems as implausible, in the logical sense, as it once did. People have been constructing mythologies for millennia, and it does not take a genius to do it. To point to parallels in the Synoptics, and mark them as a reformulation of the Osiris myth—or the myth of Balder—thus creating a mythology that both explains and infuses meaning into the world to the satisfaction of the masses, is not a wild stretch of logic. Christianity on this model would not be an anomaly, it would be a recapitulation of mythological history. Myths are indeed remarkably identical, so identical, in fact, that hundreds of theories try to explain why.

This is not to say that I don’t believe there are answers to these difficulties. The point is that the number of Christians dealing with these difficulties is very limited. It might not be a wild statement to say that I sit in a category of under 100 Christian students in the world dealing with this sort of material—that is to say, dealing solely with secular mythological theory. (I still look daily for Christian mythological theorists, and have found only traces of them. If anyone knows of anything toss it my way)

As I said, there is also a burdensome factor to it. If my friend and I are Christians, and we are, it follows that we must come to its defense, either by fighting against its opponents or nurturing the Christian mythos. I have chosen the latter road, one which will require a vast knowledge of mythological theory, not to mention a decisive theory of education. Thank God my other class in moral psychology has helped me identify exactly the sort of Platonic/Aristotelian paideia I intend to employ for the rest of my life.

I am not, and never expect to be, a scholar. I have neither the background nor the talent. And for that matter, a hunched back and kidney problems from too much coffee seems comparatively barren to living a normal life with wife and child. But the true burdensome part lies in that discontinuity between my sentiments toward the scripture and most Protestant Christians. The burdensome part is the loneliness. The burdensome part comes, in other words, when I realize that I may never have a wife who can empathize with the psychological repercussions which results from constant exposure to atheistic and agnostic literature of this caliber. The burdensome part comes when it’s time to teach my children the stories of the O.T., and I don’t know what to tell them. I claim agnosticism where many Christians claim certainty. The effects are a difference in sentiment. And when my coffee friend and I walk into a Sunday service expected to feel exactly the same way about Elijah going up into the clouds as everyone else, that embarrassing outsider emotions piques. We only wish that we felt the same. Every day we look for that shooting star of Christian literature which will indefinitely resolve our problem. For all we know, it might be part of our burden to provide such a literature.

As a Christian student of myth, psychology, and philosophy, I am bound to take note of the truth, to notice the obvious and multifarious parallels between narratives, and insofar as my Christian duties are concerned, provide psychological evidence—not to mention assert metaphysical reasons—why Christianity says these repetitions occur. I plan very much to focus my study exactly to this end in regards to story, to call upon all my imaginative and rational powers to make sense of O.T. miracle and narrative. But unlike the normal Protestant Christian, I would not be that bothered over finding out that Elijah didn’t really ascend into heaven via a chariot of fire. I cannot cut off vestigial ( to use Lewis' term in Myth Became Fact) Christianity altogether i.e. i refuse to cut off the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ, nor do i want to remove all the miracles of the O.T. I merely want to decipher if all of the miraculous claims in the O.T. are, in fact, miracles. Who but God knows what I will find? But it is this need to find, and not simply to believe what I was told, this difference in dogma, which can result in relational disparity; it can weigh on a man, much as it presently weighs on my coffee friend. Our brothers and sisters can seem far away, and were we to openly confess our troubles, the level of intimacy would deteriorate, resulting, or so we fear, in our demarcation as black sheep.

In short, I do not know what to tell you about facts, but I can certainly express the sentiment of not knowing the facts. I do not have the answers; I am a repository of questions. But during the coffee break, I mentioned in a rather spasmodic episode that maybe this is part of our calling. Maybe my friend and I are supposed to grapple with these questions so that others don’t have to. Maybe we’re not supposed to sleep as comfortably at night so that the souls of our intercessors may have rest enough to bend their knees without falling asleep, so our pastors can spend their hours awake, ready to ward off the wolves, our priests vigilant in administering the sacraments, the layman alert so he can perform whatever service God requires of him with a clear conscience and a ready faith. It was only an ebullient expression, and it appears more poignantly here than it did at the time, but I think there must be something about being part of the educated body of Christ. I cannot believe it makes me much more than a fingernail, or perhaps I may rise to the dignity of a pinky toe, but I consider the burden easy and the yoke light so long as it is in His service. After all, I get to learn for fun. It’s a nerd paradise if ever there was one.

I ask for your prayers, as I am weak, and insufficient for the task. And I ask, moreover, for my friend, who at present deals more readily with the emotions accompanying our temporary vocation.

the K.H.

Sunday School Answers

When my Sunday school teacher started class, it hadn’t occurred to me that part of my experience would entail a moment of nostalgia. The teacher asked if any one had prayer requests, and the first person to answer was a man replying, “I don’t have a request, but I do have a praise.” At that, what at first felt like an ordinary class beginning shifted for me into a memory flashback.

You have to step into my shoes to understand how odd this seemed. I hadn’t attended Sunday school since childhood, and hearing “praise” used in that sense brought back images of restless children raising their hands, ready to divulge all the kindnesses God had bestowed upon the family cat.

I want to talk about what this man said. But first, it’s important to make a tedious distinction between what someone says and what they mean. When someone says they wish to offer a praise, very rarely do they mean praise as such. They mean more to give thanks, or to be specific, they mean to combine thanks and praise, to be grateful toward the acts of a powerful and benevolent God. Strictly, praise is an act of adoration absent from any provocation other than cognitive recognition of who someone is. When a husband tells his wife she is beautiful, he is praising a property, not an action. On the other hand, gratitude, strictly speaking, is a stimulus/response act toward someone specifically as a result of receiving something.

I make this tedious distinction only to establish more clearly the possibility for the communication of its contraposition, the combination of meanings, or what might be called vagueness.

I want to talk of praise like the man in Sunday school talked of praise. I am not, in other words, concerned with praise strictly speaking, or thankfulness strictly speaking. Philosophers are always nitpicky about saying exactly what they mean, and you will find me sympathetic to them even here. Our only difference at present lies in that where they usually prefer to narrow words I prefer to broaden them. Mark that I still obey my philosophers by saying exactly what I mean, only notice that what I mean tends toward being vague. As will be clear momentarily, this is not a contradiction in terms. For the moment, I merely want to point out that there is value (it is the poets value) to being vague. And this value, insofar as I speak to it, exists within the psychological sphere.

For in truth, half-meanings and immature formulations constitute the majority of our day to day conversation. To use praise in the broader sense is to include all that psychology which partakes of time and events. The prayer of praise in that classroom did not originally have the same meaning it does now. Words gain or lose meaning from the time they are spoken until they are extinguished from the memories of speaker and audience. As it happens, the more potent the word, the longer it’s tenure in our memories, and more importantly, the more time that word has to mature within our minds. This, by the way, is why the gospel must come primarily through the foolishness of preaching. If a word hooks into the psyche, it evolves with veracity, eventually attaching itself to every thought.

The subject of praise often strikes a nerve in me, and I suspect that my distant, abstract treatment of it thus far somewhat demonstrates my feelings toward it. I care nothing for platitudinous gratitude or praise, in their strict sense, and cringe when I find someone inserting one liners into their prayers in attempts to enrich a conspicuously barren spiritual life. I speak of those moments when men and women pray to an audience and not to a Creator.

But praise in the sense of Sunday school dodges these sorts of criticism primarily because of its naivety. It does not know that it does not know what it means, and is, moreover, unconcerned with people’s opinion. It is too excited by the mere fact of God’s interaction, too enthusiastic to bother with details. I both agree with this sentiment and wish to ascribe myself to it. As an involuntary emotional response, it shows right orderedness within the soul. Properly, man ought to feel praise toward his God.

I only treat the details here because I have a need to make sense of the psychological process. I want to know why the Sunday school definition of praise seems intuitively valuable to Sunday schoolers, including myself. The reason, I take it, is quite simple, though hard to articulate simply. In the moment of praising, any number of mental processes ignite. Belief in an omnipotent God couples with gratitude over, say, a much needed car, and suddenly the happy impulse leaks through all our inhibitions, unfettered and reckless. The reciprocal smiles and head-nods accompanying the story which follow are likewise the result of the same mental process in others, the same coupling of the Divine and the material.

For these reasons and many more, I believe it a sin to stymie praise, to inhibit feeling wonder and gratitude, to whatever degree, at the kindnesses given us. I don’t merely mean that the problem lies with failing to communicate God’s goodness to others. As is my way, I mean something more intimately psychological. I have heard too many people say “I’m just waiting for things to fall apart.” The idea is one of resisting the enrapturing presence goodness in order to be prepared for the inevitable. Truly, if life seasons act at all like the harvest seasons, pleasantries are guaranteed to diminish. Winter is on the way. But it is the essential condition of happiness to be happy. I say this not to promote naivety on our part. To the contrary, I insist we think properly about praise. The rejection of complete happiness is, in the moments it comes, the rejection of a God given grace. I am of the opinion that our feelings are good things when they are employed properly. To adulterate the moment with fear or with anything negative is not to have the genuine moment. But man, or at least some men, I think, are meant to have such moments. Defense mechanisms of this sort halt the movement of grace, deprive of us a good, and thus keep us ignorant of the full nature of God’s kindness. The rejection of grace, in other words, is a rejection of knowing God’s interaction, and, by implication, His character. How, in those days of anguish, are we to combat the darkness of our thoughts when we have never fully seen what it is to be in the light?

But I did not write on praise with this level of detail to reprimand; I wrote all this as a segway for praising, indeed, as a formulation of praise.

A year ago this time, I had been suffering depression for near 2 years. A year ago this time, I was tossing cold, deformed bread in a basket. A year ago this time, I had no idea why I was alone, where I was going, or when things were going to change. Funny enough, all that jabber in my childhood Sunday school classes sustained me through the darkest days. “Remain faithful”, my teachers would say, “and in His right timing you will run and not be weary, walk and not faint.”

The foolishness of preaching, indeed. I cannot recount, mostly because I cannot count, the graces bestowed on me these past few months. I am indeed full of gratitude. I am likewise cognizant of God’s greatness. But what I prefer to say is the Sunday school thing, “I don’t have a request, but I do have a praise.”

Philosophers Do the Tango and Happy Meals

I cannot figure who would be more fun to watch trying to dance, Nietzsche with his bouncing mustache or me with clumsy feet. Regardless, the two of us, no matter how hard we tried, could never do the tango. Freud and Nietzsche, however, might get along much better. I always imagine Freud as a tall, pretentious Austrian and Nietzsche as a short, pretentious German. The effeminate Nietzsche, overly sensitive and excitable, would swoon in the arms of a well-organized doctor of Psychiatry. Whether that’s a bit anachronistic I leave to the historians, so far as a read of their books go, implicit in Nietzsche’s words is a small man complex while implicit Freud’s confidence are signs of the next ubermench. (If you didn’t catch that last joke, don’t worry: on a 10 point dork scale that’s a 8.5.)

After rummaging through each gentlemen’s respective yard-sale, I find myself dissatisfied. Usually the post-shopping spree moments consist in sighs of relief and happiness at what one has acquired. Of course, part of the problem derives from not fully understanding their systems. And it might even be that I am projecting some criteria prior to reading their works, expecting what neither man intended to give. But there was a lack of rigor and clarity found, say, in William James that left me a bit miffed. Freud employs some pretty shoddy logic—or rather avoids it altogether, and Nietzsche rarely, if ever, achieves clarity.

I do not say these things because I do not think they have important things to say. On the contrary, I have never read a book that gave me more insight into inert question within myself till last week in Freud’s “Moses and Monotheism.” Likewise, after reading Nietzsche’s “The Birth of Tragedy” I finally have material to make sense of etiological (causal) questions surrounding mythology. A brief report of my last two weeks would be “Wow, really, awesome, huh, seriously, I like it, marry me, never mind, lame, false, where’d you pull that crap from? That’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever heard.” My goal here is not to express what positive elements I took away from the two, nor really the negative.

In other words, I am not concerned with the parts but with the whole. And in particular the whole compared with the whole of individuals like Augustine, or to be more contemporary, Plantinga. Nietzsche as I would express it caused post-modernity. In effect, he demolished what remained of Western Christianity in one fell swoop of brilliant insanity. His influence cannot be denied; nor can Freud’s. Projection, repression, complex, unconscious, etc etc are words and concepts entirely absent from the world until this freak genius rose out of the shambles of the world wars to construct psychoanalysis, and in my readings, the pages of “Moses and Monotheism.”

But in an act of apologetics, I think it’s equally important to note the influence of others. Plantinga is singlehandedly, or so I think, responsible for the destruction of epistemological internalism. To put that in lay terms, the destruction of Descartes, Hume, and Kant—three equally important individuals. And Augustine, God bless him, dominated the entirety of the Medieval era, and still, to this day remains the founding church father.

I am not trying to make any argument other than this. In the same way that I would not go to the uneducated atheists to argue for the existence of God and the objectivity of values, it is unfair to treat uneducated Christians as if they are naïve because they have not studied and rejected Kierkegaardian fideism. God knows I have not studied him, though, I suspect I would probably not reject him.

Let me be clear that I am not talking about a moment of human contact and conversation. As usual, I am concerned with the psychological process. I am talking about a vague sense of ‘atheist’ or a vague sense of ‘Christian’ as present in someone’s particular psychology. The atheist in my mind is the compilation of actual people I’ve known and books I’ve read that are atheist. (And the atheist, in my experience, is much sillier, and less of a threat than the agnostic.) But that ‘atheist’ is not AN atheist: it is a projection of my accumulated experience. When I say ‘atheist’ I am never referring to someone. The same goes for Muslim, Hindu, or Christian. The label contains the meaning, and the meaning is dependent on my view.

And it’s that view that I want to repair in the mind of the Atheist as well as the Christian. Billy-Bob, my psychological atheist, as well as his brother Billy-Bud, my psychological Christian, posses an intellectually weak, incoherent, and sloppy philosophy. But we must not commit the uncharitable sin of treating Billy-Bob as if he represented Hume or Billy-Bud as if he represented Aquinas. Who they do represent, who these psychological ‘people’ represent most of all is most people. So if in an argumentative scenario played out in my head, my metaphysical construct of the sensus divinitatis rattles Billy-Bob’s atheistic construct, isn’t it because the poor man doesn’t have a construct? If from here I intuit that the majority of atheists have no constructs—which is true— therefore all atheists are unintelligent and atheism is false, haven’t I played a trick on myself? Yes, in logic it’s called a hasty generalization, and it turns out to be nonsense.

But why, dear sweet me, are atheists allowed to pull exactly this psychological bit of balderdash? For in effect, those external arguments they produce are the result of these internal sophistries. If most Christians don’t concern themselves with rigorous philosophical principles—which is true— it doesn’t follow that Christianity doesn’t have rigorous philosophical principles. God knows if a professional artist judged a child’s drawings by contemporary artistic standards, the giraffe/camel/animal/thing on the refrigerator door would get some rather harsh and inappropriate criticism. That artist would get a stern look and a stiff fist in the face—and not a one of us would protest.

The truth is that if one has intellectual questions, he must go to the specialist, the intellectual. If you want a happy meal, you don’t go to Burger King. Though you may be happier for it, you never got the real thing, and can never make a valid judgment concerning a happy meal. For all you know, you aren’t happier for it, and a happy meal claims to make you happy for a reason.

Imagination in its Application

To my knowledge, there are two ways of doing science. The first resembles a child playing hide-and-seek. He has no rigorous system for finding the other players, maybe, other than looking into the place he just hid. His movements are sporadic, one moment pealing a curtain back, and the next going outside to check the bushes. He aims only for discovery, and, for him, anyone could be hiding anywhere. The world is the playing field. The other way of doing science is more methodical, something you might find an adult doing when he is coaxed into playing the same game. He systematically starts at the top floor of the house, and moves his way down, eventually going outside to find the remaining players.

To our modern and adult minds, the latter option seems the most efficient. But as is my way, I am of the opinion that children always know best, even though they don’t know why they know best. Imagination comes naturally to them, and as a guiding principle for us imagination is particularly suited to address what I take to be a problem in current scientific inquiry.

Humans have the trouble with thinking in paradigms. I often picture thoughts as bouncy balls stuck in cube, that cube being a specific paradigm. If I ask a question, any question at all, the kind of valid answers I receive are limited to the inherent content of that question. When my mother asks me how classes are going, I don’t answer “yeah, only if you put cheese on it” or “the square root of 14.” There a limited set of valid answers to this question: like “boring” or “great,” or I could even tell a long story about how my professor accidentally rubbed chalk on their face. Even this latter answer, though indirect, relates to the question in an important way.

The same can be said of science: if I ask a certain question, the answers I can receive are limited by that question.

The trick of it, or so it has been argued, is to learn how to ask the best question so as to extrapolate the best answers. A controversy over whether this is even possible could arise here, and though I could go down that track, for the sake of argument let’s assume what i'm saying is true.

Given that certain paradigms are more advantageous than others for solving issues within a specific arena, I want to move on to the arena where both the principle of a better paradigm and a childlike imagination come in handy.

Ironically, the study of prehistory is the result of a paradigm shift like the one I explain above. Prior to Darwinian evolution, the very possibility for a prehistory didn’t exist. Scientists and philosophers didn’t ask questions about origins prior to the 17^th century—at least in the West. Genesis, after all, gives a clear indication that “in the beginning God created the heaven’s and the earth.” At the time, theology hadn’t considered what ‘in the beginning’ might mean beyond theological interests: things like the creation mandate and God’s aseity. Theologians, in other words, were not biologists or archeologists, they were theologians. Their theology naturally influenced the Christian scientists of the Medieval era, even on into the pre-Enlightenment.

With Darwin’s discoveries, however, came raw scientific data for which that current scientific community could give no rational account. In some of my reading, I’ve often noted the feeling of confusion and shock expressed by Christian scientists at the inability of theology to account for the new scientific data. For us, these sentiments seem both familiar and alien. Any post-Reformation worldview where solo scriptura dominates the psyche inevitably results in over-sensitivity to the exclusion scripture at any time. To be honest, however, though I understand the initial feeling, many of these overactive sentiments pervade contemporary Evangelicalism to the point of being silly. Scripture is a type of authority, it is not the authority in all things. In an simple sketch: scripture does not contain all truth; it contains certain objective truths. Scripture is doubtless the authority when formulating a definition of love, but it is not the authority on underwater basket-weaving or Post-Kantian metaphysics, nor is it, as I am suggesting on science. How can it be? (One may want to say that scripture inadvertently refers to everything. Really? We have to be careful in saying precisely what we mean. Anything is related to everything in some way. I could say that the label on my toothpaste inadvertently refers to everything, and it be equally true. What is meant is that scripture gives an account of reality, not an account of everything in that reality.)

Contemporary atheists rightly point out the flaws in both the past and present Christian psyche for failing to make this distinction. They may be operating from a problematic paradigm. I commend Creationist’s desire to uphold a literal interpretation of the Genesis 1 account. They may very well be right, and, more importantly, have somehow managed to insert teleology back into the scientific discussion. But they might likewise be misguided if all they want is to preserve a bit of theology that qualitatively goes unchanged whether the macro-evolutionary process is true or not. The miracle of creation remains a miracle whether it takes 7 seconds, 7 days, or 7 millennia. When Peter saw Jesus walk across the water, he didn’t think, ‘If only he had run across the water, now that would have been something”!

I return to paradigms and prehistory.

If we are going to construct a prehistory that resembles normal history in the most important way, the way of including facts, we can only do it on empirical grounds. This is the only reliable paradigm. To get reliable results, we can only employ the second kind of science, the methodical science to do it. Normal history is the construction of data over time from either eye witness accounts or reliable hearsay. Whether the bias of the author alters the details of that history is, of course, another question (and one with great import on this subject). At present, I only want emphasis that history needs facts to be history.

But what I find is mental gymnastics on the part of some of our contemporary scientist: I have in mind Renfrew and thinkers like him. They say they take the first approach, that of science in the older way, as an act of discovery. But they’re fooling themselves. The way they do this is by constructing a paradigm from which to ask questions, and then given that paradigm, they begin to make empirical observations. It is an attempt at discovery through a lens. With their given story, they begin to make empirical inferences. But they’re not constructing the right kind of paradigm; they’re constructing a tale.

In other words, contemporary scientists still have the propensity for assimilating data with empirical validations, but they are finding that the quantity of data (for which to make assertions toward the Darwinian model) is lacking. To resolve the issue, they tell a believable story of what might have happened within, say, the process of natural selection, then manipulating the data to see if it fits that story. But what they have done is mistaken the first view of science, discovery, with complete non-science, or narrative. In doing so, they have constructed a paradigm which limits the use of the data, not one that exploits it. In attempts to construct a paradigm for doing science, they construct a fairy tale for doing bad science, or what may be more accurately called non-science, or mythologizing.

As a result, we have professional scientists doing the work of the amateur novelist. Scientists and parts of scientific story are stuck somewhere in limbo: between art and science. For example, apotheosis as a theory is an act of the imagination, but it is neither scientific (in either sense) nor aesthetic. Darwin stuck to science, the Romantics infused aesthetics into nature, but what are these scientists doing? Can it be that they are practicing the ancient art of myth making, only leaving out the art? Their actions are logically equivalent to taking Tolkien’s Middle Earth myth, calling it prehistory, and inferring empirical data. If there's a bone, it probably belonged to an elf. If king Theodin had riches in his tomb, he was probably considered deity. In short, if the empirical accounts prove viable 1.) they prove viable only in accordance with that fairy-tale, and thus, 2.) are narrow both in application and, to use narrow in a difference sense, to the exclusion of the use of imaginative powers outside of that myth—a story they know very well that may be mistaken. This use of the imagination is not the same as the child’s, though it seems like it. Scientists limit in order to control the data, whereas a child has neither limitations nor control. On this model, nothing is left to mystery until empirical science absolutely contradicts.

Then the story has to change in order to fit the data. These scientists have been doing this now since Darwin, and have refused to change the model. One cultural upheaval arose about 5 years ago concerning the evolution into man in middle and high school text books. I forget the exact data problem, but the trouble science was being taught when it wasn't science. But science, by definition, especially empirical science, should never result in outright contradiction, only in modification. Newton's theory of gravity has kinks in it, and implications, but we still think that an apple falls from a tree for some reason. But we do not believe, as we used to, in the world-wide advent of homo sapiens. Now, apparently, humanity started with 2,000 nomads coming out of Africa. How can both stories come under the name of science?

How odd. How strange that scientists would create a mechanism, a paradigm, in an effort to find truth when that very mechanism cuts off data portions with which they have never imagined or encountered. One would think that with the wild discoveries in Quantum Physics that that sort of approach would have been done away with.

I would prefer to operate from another sort of paradigm, one which allows for the free flow of the imagination. I don’t, in constructing a prehistory, want to look at a picture in a cave and infer art because it fits well with my given paradigm. I want to be able to look a cave picture and infer either art, or a game, or a teaching lesson or whatever. The fact of my agnosticism is better than a hope in what may or may not be a fact. In other contexts, this paradigmatic approach may be best. But it does not work best for constructing a prehistory.

Why? A paradigm for the construction of prehistory must depend on facts. (This is why Renfrew succeeds with material engagement in the sense of constitutive symbolism, and fails with material engagement as concerns the extended mind.) Otherwise, we are no longer talking in terms of history; we have switched genres over into mythology or novel writing. The only continuity between prehistory and history is facts. To exclude them, is not to talk about history.

Only from the world of facts can one deduce the possibility for the unknown. The psychological phenomenon of the man who learns more and more but feels less and less intelligent should show us there is more out there than we could ever imagine. The activity of the imagination must be allowed to go wherever, without restraint, like the child. Prehistory exists, but we must be patient to find out what that means.

The Gum Predicament: Based On Real Events

You know when you’ve made your way from the parking lot to your car, how something felt strange, but you weren’t sure what it was? How, once you turn the car on, the feeling grows worse? Then you know how your right foot is sticking to brake peddle, and how, you tilt your head to the side, trying to make sense of it? Then, to your horror, you see a pink string extending from the closed doorway, over your left sandal, and tucked beneath your right foot? You know that sudden drop of emotion? And you know how you can tell it’s a fresh piece, and how you can tell by the circumference of the string that this particular piece is particularly large? You know how you try to take off that sandal, but the steering wheel gets in the way of lifting your knee, and you can’t reach down, so you have to open the door, and swing your legs around? But you know how you reacted too quickly and disgustedly and only made the situation worse, and now the gum string that anchored itself to the doorway pasted itself comfortably onto your left jean leg while you swung your legs? You know how, now, you’re really freaking out, and turn around to look in your car for something to peel it off of jean and sandal, and see a scrap piece of paper in the passenger seat? But you know how it’s too far away, how you imagine the attempt at reaching for it, but part of the scenario involves likelihood of pasting the gum to the floor mat? You know that sinking feeling of defeat? How you wished it would all go away, or that you would have seen the gum in the parking lot and stepped over it? Then you know how return to reality, though still tragically harboring a mite of hope? How you look for a small stick on the ground somewhere in view, but can’t find anything? And you know how you begin to grovel, and mope a little, reaching between your legs and underneath your car, blindly scraping your fingers against the pavement for something, anything? And you know how you feel an object, so you take hold of it, and you let an instant of hope back into your heart. You know how it’s only a crumbly leaf? And you know how the remnant of that poorly timed hope makes it seem that the leaf will be sturdy enough to give it a try, so you take your sandal off and flip it over? You know that face you give at the first site? And that little wheezy grunt? And you know how you begin to wipe, but because it’s a leaf it tears open immediately and unexpectedly and your thumb touches the gum a little? You know how, in a moment of terror, you throw the leaf so as to expel whatever diseases you may have just touched, but how, unfortunately, because it’s a leaf it pauses six inches away from your hand, dropping bottom gum-heavy like an air strike directly atop your clean sandal? And you know how you can’t figure out whether you should clean your thumb or sandal first? How you stand up quickly in the excitement only to realize that you don’t know why you’re standing, so you sit back down? You know how, just after you look around to make sure no one sees you? You know how once you notice that the soccer mom over there saw you, that you pretend like nothing’s happening, starring up at the sky and yawning, still secretly freaking out about the tragedy of the gum predicament?

the K.H.