Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Tue Dec 07, 2021 3:10 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon Dec 06, 2021 11:16 pm
In my view, it's pure speculative fantasy. And there are good reasons to think so, actually. The idea of the Eternal Recurrence, for example is actually contrary to mathematical probability to an infinite degree.
Nietzsche was a rhetorician, really. But this I'll grant you: he saw the sort of nasty, incoherent, power-driven, ethics-bereft world that secularism promised to deliver, and named it for what it was.
Some part of what he *saw* can be described as speculative fantasy, but then if that is true all interpretations of life are similarly speculative, and all fantasies.
Umm...
I really have to admit that I don't understand the logic of that conclusion.
Nietzsche was speculative, therefore all interpretations are speculative? You're going to have to prove that one, I think: it's not obvious to me it's even plausible.
I admit that this world he saw is the world as defined by science and scientific view.
Oh, heavens, no. There's nothing "scientific" about Nietzsche.
You might argue he presupposed Materialism perhaps, but that's the limit of that.
...that world envisioned by Nietzsche et al is a world in which metaphysics does not apply.
That's true...and if Nietzsche had been consistent, that also would have been his conclusion. But Nietzsche also tries to "rescue" a kind of metaphysics, bringing it back in unannounced, through the back door. For while he says that, for example, we should be "beyond good and evil," devoid of such categories altogether, he still wanted us to think "life" and "will to power" were values, and that the ubermenschen were admirable models.
How is that possible in a world devoid of value standards? Well, it's not. Not even survival itself is a virtue in a world without any virtues.
And therefore it seems to me that what Nietzsche is doing, or what is being done in him (by events and causality set in motion previously) is disrupting metaphysical view. Is it a disease of the mind? Is it a sickness? Is it an *error of perception*? I think that you must say that it is.
No. It's just a wicked and selfish man, but one being courageous with his commitments, insofar as he pushes the logical conclusions of his worldview farther than most Atheists will even dare. They're impressed by his fortitude and dazzled by his high rhetoric, but they're also afraid to follow him there. Atheists generally, I've found, do not manage to be as wicked as Nietzsche tells them to have the courage to be.
To enter your world you will have to 'suspend judgment' and indeed 'suspend knowledge' of the Earth that Nietzsche described in what I quoted.
Not at all. For what Nietzsche offered was not "knowledge," in the sense that it was not the necessary reading of things. It was a reading of things derived from his first commitment: "God is dead." And if Nietzsche had been right, then the rest would have followed logically (...or
most of it would have, I should say, since not even Nietzsche managed to be consistent with Nietzsche on that, as noted earlier.) But Nietzsche was not right; and his first premise, the death of God, stood on nothing but Nietzsche's rhetoric itself.
So no, one does not have to suspend judgment or reason or knowledge at all: one merely has to be willing to doubt Nietzsche's first premise, and take an alternate reading of the facts, using reason, from there. And one will arrive at the premise that God is not dead, and subsequently, that value categories are real and objective, and that life has a
telos or direction, and meaning is possible, and "will to power" is not the secret of the universe, and the stars are not all black.
What you ask of people is I think literally 'the leap of faith'. But that leap is 'speculative' and literally unprovable.(Except that I think you will not say this, and that might mean that you won't admit it.)
You should give me more credit. I'll "admit" to you what's true. But what would be the merit in me agreeing to "admit" something I don't believe is true? So I will question it, instead.
I think you're perhaps being overimpressed with the phrase "
leap of faith." I don't deny that there are people whose faith is "leapy," but I'm not one of those. So I suggest maybe we just drop the exaggerated metaphor, and just speak of "faith."
What is faith? Depending on whom you ask, you're going to get some different answers. Atheist cynics will tell you it means "believing what you know ain't true," or plunging blindly into a lie of some kind, because you're afraid of the truth, maybe. Some Pietists will say it means something like, "believing when you have no reason to believe." That's highly emotional, perhaps, and it's maybe what they themselves are admitting they are doing; but it's not a representation of Biblical faith.
Biblically speaking, faith is conviction that God's word and God's character are reliable, especially when circumstances do not immediately give us their assurances. Biblical faith is grounded in the trust that God is a Keeper of His promises, and that circumstances do not change that fact. So it casts beyond the present, but on the basis that God gives us reason to do so. And it does not step outside those parameters, speculating in some other way.
So faith isn't a "leap," when you know the One you're having faith in is the eternal, omniscient God. Rather, it's a calm, rational conviction that your trust is anchored in the only truly relaible place. And this imparts to faith a stability, rationality and certainty that the prior definitions would certainly suggest no "faith" can have.
Spiritual life can take shape in many ways and has many levels. One level is simply following the ethical commands (or 'sensible recommendations') of a respected authority.
That would actually be a definition of "compliance," and would fit any totalitarian system admirably.
Many people in many churches do just that. How could one criticize them? Maybe they cannot do anything more?
Why "cannot" they?
I think they can. And if they can and don't, then they're certainly criticizable on that basis.
Others seem to launch into other, more involved spiritual projects. This is where I refer to *the novel* (and I do not agree that the novel only began in the 18th century though it certainly developed there. The Golden Ass is a 'novel' or a man's journey, which is essentially a spiritual journey, and it far predates the 18th century).
There's debate about the origin date of the novel -- when did, for example, the mere "epistolary method" become capable of the features of what we should rightly define as a "novel"?
Most experts accept that the few earlier "proto-novels" were not true novels, and that the form did not really come into its own until novels like "Pamela" in the 18th Century. But it's of little consequence, since the "novel" form is certainly not very old, historically, and nowhere near old enough, by
any account, to have relevance to the Bible.
I see you as, perhaps, unfairly condemning of Nietzsche. You see him as 'benighted' and that is only part of the story.
No, I seem him as (mostly) consistent with his own (incorrect) theory of how things are. I wouldn't call him "benighted" in that sense, because he at least used reason to extend his suppositions fairly far; but his were the wrong suppositions, and they were only his "suppositions," so the conclusions were, to that extent, not "light" but "darkness."
The natural world is a cruel world that operates according to strict, determined laws of relationship. One thing feeds off another. It is a closed system, an energy system, and whatever it is, though it may have been *intelligently designed*, is not the Christian imagined world.
Actually, it's exactly what the Christian "imagines" it is. It's a good world, but one marred by sin. It's fallen, and is deeply not what it ought to have been; but it's also inherently a gift from God, as all life is derived from Him, and contains both good and bad elements, though not in equal proportions. And as a Christian "imagines," it's also a temporary world, a moribund world, one headed toward its own end. But it is a redeemable world, as well, one in which the grace of God is still present and active, and rescues men from the doom toward which they are precipitating themselves.
All of that is eminently realistic, I think, and reflects the observable world quite accurately. There's a profound realism to Christianity, a kind of truth-telling that the fatalistic pessimism of the Materialist and the utopian dreaming of the ideological Atheist wholly misses, I think.
There is no 'heaven world' for any other creature (that I am aware of) except man who visualizes a 'world beyond'.
The Bible speaks of "a new heaven and a new earth." And while "other creatures" do not come into blessing apart from mankind's salvation, the natural world is most certainly cleansed and restored to life in the Kingdom of God. As the saying goes, "The lion lies down with the lamb" in the new world. So I think, maybe, you aren't aware of the right passages on that.
...the abstract God that Christians visualize.
"Abstract"?
Such a word. Now I'm
certain you aren't aware of what Christianity actually "visualizes."
I have no idea what your frame of reference, or your experience, makes you inclined to think "Christians" are or believe about that. I'm quite certain it's nothing like what Christianity actually teaches, or like what I think. But I think that further exploration of what the Bible actually says about that would be useful. However, that's a topic as large as the Bible itself, really.
I'm actually kind of baffled but intrigued by how you try to fit my questioning proposals into some kind of structure. Are we nothing more than a world of structures debating/fighting/opposing each other? Perhaps people can become so identified with their thought structures, they cannot hear or imagine beyond them? Is it really so hard to imagine living life effectively without big mental stories -- rather, finding a balance between education, experience, and awareness of the current moment, without building or subscribing to a specific rigid platform/structure of some sort? Why would we think we need to be identified through that?