Sunday, 24 January 2021

Ask an abstract question, and you'll get an abstract answer

It has been a problem of theology since the early days of the Christian church; that people ask abstract questions and get abstract answers. 

The problem is that all abstractions are on the one hand 'models' of reality, not reality itself - and consequently they have an unreal and unsatisfying quality about them; so that 'human psychology' remains unsatisfied by abstract explanations, at a deep level*.  

Yet the identity of abstraction is typically un-clear, and the meaning of infinite likewise. So, this is an explanation that does not explain - rather, it layers incomprehension (mystery) upon incomprehension; while apparently explaining. 


What about the power of God? For Christians, God is the creator. Because 'creation' is an abstraction, this, statement invites explanation of what exactly is created - from what? Orthodox theologians say that God creates everything (except God himself) from nothing (termed creation ex nihilo). 

But creation ex nihilo is an assertion of something beyond natural human experience and understanding. Indeed, the concept of a phenomenon of creation ex nihilo seems to have arisen among Greek philosophers, who were abstractly reasoning about ultimate causes. Before this, there was no such concept, and certainly there was no such concept for the ancient tribal Hebrews who wrote the Old Testament. 

Therefore, to explain the abstract property of creation in terms of an abstract ultimate is not to 'explain' but to layer abstractions, and to create intrinsic mystery. If abstraction is regarded as the real-reality, then we get a root un-clarity that becomes definitional; as happened with orthodox Christian theology.


As another example: How great is the power of God? 

Power is an abstraction - and indeed, it is very difficult to provide as satisfactory definition of power. But in trying to explain the scope of God's (undefined) power, the philosopher finds it impossible to conceive of a clear boundary to God's 'power'.

(...Especially if the philosopher is already assuming that God is capable of creation ex nihilo; which seems to suggest that God can make anything thus do anything.) 

So the abstract philosopher then reaches for another abstraction and states that God's 'power' is 'infinite' - i.e. that God is omnipotent


This layering of abstractions - which abstractions are then taken as definitional - then creates all sorts of (as I would regard them artifactual) problems. Especially when it comes to explaining the presence of evil in a reality created from nothing by a Christian God axiomatically described as wholly good. 

(In that a wholly-good God, that created everything from nothing, and was of infinite power - would seem to be incapable of creating evil.) 

The apparent conclusion was that there is no evil in reality, that therefore the apparent evil which Men observe must be an illusion... 

And at this point, the philosophers - leaping from abstraction to abstraction, layering one upon another, and taking each abstraction as definitive - have apparently demolished Christianity!  


I am, myself, in search of clarity; and I am not satisfied by explanations that create mystery, and then rationalize mystery on the basis of asserting that ultimates are intrinsically mysterious. 

And, further, rationalize this by asserting than anyone who seeks (or even attains) clarity of understanding is necessarily misguided. 

A clear explanation is then regarded as a false explanation; an over-simplification, an instance of childish, human-sized, perhaps 'anthropomorphic' modelling of reality - on the basis that the philosophers have pre-decided that only abstractions can capture reality.  


For myself, this is an error traceable back to an original prejudice in favour of abstractions; which probably relates to the Platonic assertion that this earthly world of time and change is illusion; and real-reality lies elsewhere in a world of timeless-hence-changeless ideas, of archetypes: that is, a world of abstractions.  


My point here is (as so often!) that we get-out what we put-in, if we start with abstractions, we will end with abstractions; and noticing that primary (i.e. metaphysical) assumptions structure and dictate reasoning and what counts as 'evidence'. 

I believe that these abstractions are essentially alien to the core of Christianity, and have deformed and distorted Christianity since its early years. 

Christianity was originally common sense, simple and clear; as it was taught, explained and exemplified by Jesus - especially in the most-authoritative source of the Fourth 'John' Gospel; was later picked-up and rapidly, but wrongly, inserted-into a framework of pre-existing, not-Christian, philosophical and abstract modes of explanation. 

This led to all kinds of insoluble paradoxes, which were then explained-away (but not actually explained) by further abstractions; and the paradoxes were dealt with by re-labelling incoherence as mystery. 


It is such factors which led me to trying to understand Christianity is a simple, natural, spontaneous, and (so far as possible) non-abstract way - while accepting that language is itself an abstraction. 

So we can only take the process so far as to point-at a direct and intuitive comprehension in non-linguistic thinking

By this, I find that clarity is attained only when regarding reality as consisting of Beings in personal relationships (an 'animistic' world view); which is therefore the primary assumption of my own metaphysics.     


*Wittgenstein seems to have noticed this problem with his early (Tractatus) philosophy, and tried to resist it in his late (Philosophical Investigations) philosophy - but without much success!