Christian Existentialism QUESTION: Christian Existentialism - Is it compatible? What is the Christian worldview toward Existentialism?ANSWER:Secular existentialism is a philosophical movement that is gaining an ever increasing popularity in the American society and to a degree has slowly crept its way into some liberal circles of Christianity. But the worldview of traditional Christianity is that it is not compatible. Here are some reasons why. Existentialism is a 20th century movement viewed by Christianity as the antithesis of faith in God because the philosophy asserts that God nor absolute truth exist. Existentialism believes in the total autonomy of a person from a world and life view apart from a God of sovereign authority, whereas Christianity acknowledges the existence of an all knowing, all powerful, and all present personal Creator who revealed Himself for the purpose of giving human life meaning. Existentialism states that the world is absurd, and there is no hope.
Christianity states that the world is absurd, and it is a wonder there is hope. Existentialism is opposed to rationalism and traditional Christianity is not. Existentialism asserts that man is free from imposed moral values. Traditional Christianity believes in God’s transcendent universal moral values. Existentialism asserts that each person is their own authority concerning truth.
Traditional Christianity insists that God is the absolute final authority over His creation and all things. Existentialism believes that existence precedes essence. Traditional Christianity believes that a person’s essence is predestined from God and precedes existence.Religious existentialism on the other hand is a philosophy of its own that is not compatible with either secular existentialism, nor traditional Christianity. There is a wide variety of forms of existential religion with differing doctrinal beliefs. Kierkegaard and later Karl Barth are sited for attempting to make theology, particularly the Christian faith, compatible with existentialism.Its premise is that a person must submit themselves totally to God without reasoning - that is, true absolute faith must be void of philosophy or intellect.
I want to go on to introduce ’s Idealism, but before I do I need to get a few things straight, namely the distinction between Idealism, Materialism, Rationalism, Empiricism, Realism, Nominalism, Dualism and Monism. In the study of philosophy these words come up often and it can be challenging at times to keep them all straight. That is partly because some of their meanings are separated by subtle distinctions and partly because some of them have both a technical philosophical meaning and a more common meaning that seem to conflict.So for all of our sake lets walk through them slowly.First of all they are all generally related to one of the most foundational philosophical dualisms there is – mind and matter. At least since the the problem of mind and matter, thought and thing, the spiritual and the material, has existed. And as long as that dualism exists – and it has, for the record dramatically fallen out of favor – the fundamental question that needs to be tackled is, “Which is more real? Mind or matter?”Idealism is the belief that the mind and ideas is the primary structure of reality and that physical or material reality is secondary.is the opposite of Idealism and sees matter as the primary reality and all other things including thoughts as the product of interactions of matter.is the belief that the rational mind is the best way to know something. If you are a rationalist you believe that your mind is more trustworthy than your sense.
A stick in the water might look bent, but you know rationally that it only looks that way because it is in the water.is the opposite of rationalism and it is the belief that the senses are the best way to know something. You might think something is true, but you only know it is true if your senses confirm it.In consideration of the above it is good to keep in mind that you can’t be an Idealist and a Materialist and you can’t be a Rationalist and an Empiricist. On the other hand, you can be an Idealist and a Rationalist or an Idealist and an Empiricist.
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You can also be Materialist and a Rationalist or you can be a Materialist and an Empiricist.That is because Idealism and Materialism are statements of ontology which means they are statements about what you believe is real. Rationalism and Empiricism are statements of epistemology which means statements about what is the best way to know what is real.As if this were not confusing enough we also have Realism and Nominalism.Realism is the belief that there are real existing entities behind universal or general ideas.
For instance there is a “thing” called justice. Nominalism on the other hand is the opposite and it is a belief that there are no real existing entities behind universals. There is no “justice” per se, there are just individual instances of justice.
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Only the individual instances of justice are real.Now for our last two terms we have Dualism. Dualism is the belief that mind and matter represent two different and distinct types of being.
Monism is the belief that there is ultimately only one type of being. If you are a Monist you could also be an Idealist which means that you believe that everything is made up of mind or ideas, so even matter is ultimately made up of ideas. A monist could also be a Materialist believing that all ideas are ultimately products of matter.OK, that should be enough to get us started. Hello all,Hoping not to appear contradicting or claiming to know more than what’s been presented above, I’m merely thinking aloud and expressing my reservations.I feel discomfited to be pigeon-holing all the different categories which I believe presents the situation where it precludes that the synthesis of every view of reality is probably what is where it’s at.
It seems that the duality of Science and Belief is not necessarily actual though it’s often very strictly observed. Entertaining a suspension of belief and disbelief and accepting the paradox seems to me OK, to accept that what is true may also be untrue. Being predisposed to believing that the two are parts of the same coin of Being.Does this make sense at all?
It’s how I operate rather comfortably. So, if I understand you correctly, materialism and idealism are both inherently dualistic because they distinguish between “matter” and “form” as did Plato — an often-cited source of dualistic thinking in western thought. I know that the definition of materialism from your link says that “the ONLY thing that exists is matter,” but if that were true, then how could we distinguish between matter and anything else? What would the concept mean?
Is an idea matter? Or does it not exist? How can we deny its existence?
If it does not exist, then how can we “have” it or how can it even be a word? It seems to me that, following the Aristotelian tradition, we have swallowed dualism so deeply with language and concepts that have us trapped in it.The distinction between rationalism and empiricism seems to preclude natural science as I understand it because in science we gather empirical evidence and we use rational thinking to make sense out of our observations, e.g., inferring causal relationships when one observation seems to predict another. But I’m guessing that in your view science fits into one of these, not both. Which is it?I think this is why I have always preferred Taoism and similar traditions (including to some degree Judaism) because dualistic concepts and language are not embedded into their foundations.From my view, this is one of the beauties of Skinner’s science of behavior — it treats all things, all experience, everything we “know” as behavior (activity, process), not as some “stuff” that we must categorize as either material or non-material. It avoids the whole issue, treats it as irrelevant. Whatever we observe, experience, think, feel, or know is behavior.
Hi Brian:As symbolized by the Yin Yang symbol, that speck of the other side’s color is a brilliant acknowlegement that truth is not absolute. If you examine and ponder any absolute comment, I wonder if you’ll be shown as I am that there aren’t any absolutes, that there’s usually an upside and a down side to any issue.
In the matter of science, the truths it disclosesmay not be disproved until ages later so their discoveries may seem absolute. Then along comes some brilliant person who upsets the status quo.
This sets up a new standard of truth till further developments and discoveries. And so it goes.Dos this satisfy your query?.
Jeff: Nice explanation. It’s difficult to be succinct on such a topic but you did it.One comment on Rationalism.You wrote: “A stick in the water might look bent, but you know rationally that it only looks that way because it is in the water.”True, but you can “know” that rationally only if you have actually previously witnessed such refraction of light by the water’s surface, which brings us back to Empiricism.
Or, perhaps, you need a different example. Empiricism and Rationalism perhaps should be seen as two ends of a continuum, with many (infinite?) practical locations in between. You wrote: “It seems to me that, following the Aristotelian tradition, we have swallowed dualism so deeply with language and concepts that have us trapped in it.”Great point. Dualism is one of the background supporting struts of our western world-view model, and we unconsciously permit it to push us into either/or situations.
General Semantics uses the “multi-valued orientation” (see my comment to Jeff immediately above) rather than the “two-valued orientation” as a fundamental in its “non-Aristotelian” system, which you might find interesting.In the view of cognitive psychologists (& MDs) Newberg & D’Aquili, the Binary Cognitive Operator is one of (at least) eight functions performed by the brain to organize sense-data received. This would supply the dualism you mention. Another CO is the Holistic (seeing the forest in the trees) which Frank promoted in his comment above.
Another is the Causal CO, another is the Reductionist CO (seeing the trees in the forest). We need them all, and they are all “built into” the human nervous system. Relying on one at the expense of the others (as when we get “hung up” on Dualism) leads us into trouble. In my opinion.2).
You also wrote: “From my view, this is one of the beauties of Skinner’s science of behavior — it treats all things, all experience, everything we “know” as behavior (activity, process), not as some “stuff” that we must categorize as either material or non-material. It avoids the whole issue, treats it as irrelevant. Whatever we observe, experience, think, feel, or know is behavior.”My recollection of Behavioral Psychology is that the “mind” is considered a black box: stimulus in – behavior out (simply stated). No conjecturing about what was going on “in there”, and not really permitting the postulation of an “in there” in there.
Thus no debate about mind vs body. But perhaps it has changed in the 40 years since I studied it in college. Carl, you wrote: “The distinction between rationalism and empiricism seems to preclude natural science as I understand it because in science we gather empirical evidence and we use rational thinking to make sense out of our observations, e.g., inferring causal relationships when one observation seems to predict another.
But I’m guessing that in your view science fits into one of these, not both. Which is it?”I’m a bit late coming to this discussion, so I’m not sure you’ll see this, but here’s another way to think about the distinction. Empiricists and rationalists have different answers to the question: What can the faculty of reason or thinking by itself give you?Empiricists believe that the only truths reason by itself gives us all have the status of tautology.
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They don’t tell us anything about what the world is like. So, for example, the truths of mathematics would have this status. It is true that “57 + 68 = 125” but from this truth I can’t gain any knowledge of how the world is. For that I need to gather information from the senses.For the empiricist, reason is simply a tool we use to organize the information from our senses, which, as you said, is what science does. So, empiricists endorse the scientific approach because it is using our rational capacities to make sense of our experience.
But any knowledge we gain will come after we have gathered and analyzed empirical evidence. No knowledge can come from reasoning alone.Rationalists, on the other hand, believe that reason by itself can provide knowledge about what exists in the world and what its qualities are.
Rationalists offer deductive arguments based on first principles for the existence of various entities in the world. For example, there have been many proofs offered for the existence of God based on reason or thinking alone.Whereas empiricists reject the possibility of knowing any truths about the world through reason alone, rationalists elevate these truths above any other kind. Some, though not all rationalists reject the idea that there can be any “truths” about the ever-changing world of the senses.Plato, for example, thought that the only true knowledge we could have was of the eternal, unchanging Forms, accessed through pure reason.
The world accessed by our senses is just a shadow cast by the Forms, so it’s not a world in which any true knowledge is to be had. So, Plato rejects the possibility of scientific or empirical “truth.”Other rationalists, e.g. Descartes, think that we can have empirical knowledge, but it depends upon more fundamental truths that are known through reasoning alone. For Descartes, the first truth upon which all others are built is that the “I” exists. Thinking alone establishes the existence of the purely thinking self. Descartes eventually gets round to proving the existence of a material world, which is accessed through sensory experience. So, for him, there can be scientific knowledge, but it has no basis without a purely rational foundation.In short, how you describe the scientific method is exactly the approach an empiricist would adopt, though empiricism doesn’t necessarily follow from accepting that approach.
Rationalists can also endorse the scientific method as a way of understanding the world of the senses, but any knowledge gained in this way will be of lower status than knowledge arrived at through reasoning alone.Hope that helps!. The rational mind has held the intellectual community in its grip for a long time and I note there’s a pushback with some of the comments I pick up on EN and other places. To extoll and champion reason and make light if not disrespect our human spiritual component is enforcing a dualism that is now seeming to be acknowledged as a fault in thinking.Rational minds would of course have that bias in their outlook but I think in the long term, a holistic balance that can incorporate reason and metaphysics, maybe with a whole lot of suspension of disbelief and an embracing of a rational spirituality, will be the way to restore a balance in humanity’s view of reality.