What do Calvinists mean by predestination?
The belief that everything that happens has been pre-arranged by God. For example, if you decide to do X today, that is only because God made you in such a way that you would certainly do X. More specifically, the doctrine is about who will be saved and who won't. God predetermines some people to salvation, but not everyone. "Double predestination" is the slightly stronger view that God predetermines some people to salvation and predetermines others to damnation.
What is the consequence of Theology on the formation of society?
I'm not sure what you mean by that.
This kind of truth is completely out of vogue in physics. Even the cosmologists have adapted a pragmatic point of view (in their professional work).
But what has physics got to do with it? We're not talking about physics.
Of course I have nothing about debating such isses for recreational purposes. I'm just saying they are entertainment rather than science.
I hope you don't think that all activities can be categorised as
either "entertainment"
or "science"! Isn't a lot of science "entertainment", in the sense that it has no practical purpose, or at least is not undertaken with a practical purpose in mind?
I've nothing against logic. Given a meaningful problem and usable assumptions logic can be a very powerful tool.
Right, but that doesn't really address the point I was trying to make.
Well in that case this truth isn't really of any use to us except recreational debate (that is, if it really is undemonstrable, unobservable and cannot lead to useful manipulations).
The point I'm trying to make is that
truth and
use don't have anything to do with each other.
Now I do half-agree with you that non-scientific questions are "recreational", in the sense that people engage in (many of) them for non-practical purposes. Although surely major exceptions to this are ethics and politics. One of the largest subjects in philosophy is ethics, and people engage in that not simply to find out what is true but because it is supposed to have a practical application. Yet, of course, you can't use the scientific method to work out right and wrong, or define what right and wrong are.
But for the most part, philosophy is about trying to work out what's
true, simply because you want to know, not out of pragmatic concerns. It's a pure quest for knowledge for its own sake. And in that respect it's very similar to science, or at least to how science used to be. I'm sure that when Galileo pointed his telescope at the moon it wasn't because he expected to learn anything of any use whatsoever, but because he wanted to know about it. And when the first members of the Royal Society met up at each other's houses to perform unpleasant experiments on dogs it was simply because they were curious about how the world worked. That is why science was, for a long time, simply a branch of philosophy: it was that part of it which dealt with the natural world. Over time, of course, natural philosophy developed methods and presuppositions of its own, and some time in the nineteenth century became its own discipline. But in intent, philosophy and science have the same basic goals in common. Now if you want to characterise the quest for knowledge for its own sake simply as "recreation" then fair enough, but then most human endeavour will fall into that category too, and certainly the most interesting parts of it.
In other words, we could define (modern) philosophy as the attempt to find out truth that can't be established by (strictly defined) scientific methods. Of course that's perfectly scientific in the literal sense of the word. But to protest that the notion of "truth" employed is not that used by natural scientists, or that the methods used are not those of natural science, is rather to miss the point. Of course it's not, otherwise it would
be science!
Again, I'm not against recreational debate and like it a lot. It hones rhetorical as well as thinking skills so I suppose there is some value there, but I still don't see the matter of "absolute truth" to be anything other than an impediment to actual operative science. Better to be flexible. By this I mean that by all means have some "absolute truth" in the back of your mind, but be ready to throw it away in an instant if experiment proves it wrong. A major problem is that people tend to get emotionally attached to absolute truths more than operative definitions.
That is certainly the case; but don't infer from that that there
isn't such a thing as absolute truth, no matter how unknowable it may be.
Well, I'll just have to throw out the standard "There might also be an invisible and undetectable magic tortoise running around in New York City"- argument as an example as another thing that might be true but not knowably so. I know it's a tired counterargument, but I believe it does illustrate the fact that debating these truths merely serve as training grounds for intellectual faculties rather than usable propositions about the universe.
I don't see how that's a counter-argument to what I said. In fact it supports it. If you think that "There is an invisible and undetectable magic tortoise in New York City" is making a claim that is
different from "There is no such tortoise in New York City" - that is, if you think they are making distinct claims about the world - then you have accepted my point. But by your own standards, these two claims actually describe the same hypothesis, since they are observationally exactly similar. And if that's the case, then it is just as rational and indeed just as true to say that the tortoise exists as it is to say that it doesn't. I don't care how
operationally similar these two statements may be - that doesn't make it them equally rational.
Then if we had a suitably large set of such universes, the inhabitants of either universe would perceive exactly the same laws of nature, and given the same set of starting conditions would have exactly the same technology/life expectancy/art/cuisine as each other. So operatively it makes no difference.
But the point is that there would still be a difference, even if no-one could recognise it. It's not enough to keep insisting that "operatively" there would be no difference; you need to show why we should suppose that a lack of observable difference entails a lack of
any difference.
This also cuts to the core of why religion debates (with non-fundamentalists) are usually fruitless. If one can define ones own personal belief system in such a way that it doesn't conflict with observable phenomena, then no army of Dawkinses can topple you.
Quite, and as an account of the psychological difficulty of arguing against such a view, that's entirely right. Certainly if two rival hypotheses are both equally consistent with all observed (and observable) data -
and equally probable in themselves - then it would seem that there could be no rational justification to believe one over the other. Now the two hypotheses could be very different, and it could well be the case that one is true while the other is false, but if we can in principle never know which, it's going to be rather hard to discuss them.
However, I think that any decent belief system, whether religious or not, should avoid being such a "null hypothesis". This is especially so when we think in terms of probability rather than mere consistency. For example, most philosophers of religion today agree that theism is consistent with the existence of evil. This is because there could be some reason (which we don't understand) why God permits evil to exist. However, even granted this, we might still think that such a situation is improbable: if God exists, he would
probably not permit the sort of evil that we see, although it is
possible that he would. If that is our view, then the existence of evil is evidence against God's existence, although it does not definitively disprove it.
So debates of this sort can have teeth, as it were, even if we accept that all rival hypotheses are equally consistent with the observable facts. For example, suppose that we are trying to explain the fact that presents appear under the Christmas tree each year. One possible hypothesis is that parents put them there, and tell their children it was Father Christmas. Another possible hypothesis is that it really is Father Christmas, who not only delivers the presents but modifies the parents' memories. Each of these hypotheses is equally consistent with the observable evidence, but we would probably think that one is far more probable than the other.
Isn't "In how many ways can people perceive the same color differently yet unmeasurably" getting awfully close, though? (Note: I might have misunderstood the context in which it was brought up, and if it was relevant then I apologize).
Well, we haven't talked about causation here at all, so I'm not sure I understand your point.
MayNilad Man said:
How much research has been devoted to the study of Gnostic theology?
Sorry, I missed these questions before. A vast amount. There is a huge quantity of literature on Gnosticism.
MayNilad Man said:
Can you enumerate some of the more internally consistent theologies in the world, if possible?
That's not really possible, because most theologies don't have names; there is just the theology of this person, the theology of that person, and so on. There are identifiable
trends in theology, which often get names: major trends in the twentieth century have included Cross Theology, Process Theology, Liberation Theology, Feminist Theology, Death-of-God Theology, and so on and so forth, but each of these will vary in different writers according to the different uses that they make of them.
MayNilad Man said:
What was the justification for the practice of indulgences?
In the late Middle Ages, it was believed that all you need to be saved was to have faith in Christ. However, it was also believed that, as a rule, you couldn't go straight to heaven when you died; although you would be saved if you had faith, your soul would still be in a bad way, and you would need to go through purgatory first. The more sins you had committed, the longer you'd spend in purgatory before reaching heaven. Now it was also believed that some people led such good lives that they didn't have to go through purgatory at all. These were the saints. In fact, some of them had been so good that they had built up a sort of excess of goodness, a "treasury of merit", which was at the disposal of the church. The effect of which was that the church could, if it wished, apply some of this treasury of merit to whomsoever it liked and reduce their time in purgatory. And that's what an indulgence was. Indulgences started with the Crusades, when the church declared that anyone who went on Crusade would get time off purgatory in exchange; after a while the church realised it was onto a good thing, and by the late Middle Ages you could simply
buy time off purgatory.
It's important to recognise that indulgences weren't a matter of buying forgiveness, or buying salvation; the church always believed that forgiveness and salvation came through faith in Christ and couldn't be bought or sold. However, by the time of the Reformation, some apologists for indulgences seemed to be very close to the brink of saying things like that. That's one of the things that annoyed Luther so much, with the following result (sorry, couldn't resist it):
Upper case C: Is not limited to Roman Catholics, it includes Anglican and Eastern Orthodox.
My question was more on what defines a catholic (lowercase), i.e. what is the universal church, who defines the church, what does it mean to be a member of the universal church?
Different theologians would have different answers to that. The first thing to bear in mind is that the distinction between upper-case-C "Catholic" and lower-case-c "catholic" is not one that the early Christians would have recognised. In fact it's really a post-Reformation distinction. Before then, people generally assumed that to belong to the church as a whole necessarily meant belonging to the Church as an identifiable historical and social institution. Thus, when there were schisms, the people on each side denied that those on the other were members of the "universal church". The church fathers had no concept of ecumenism!
How, then, could one be sure that the organisation to which one belonged was the One True Church? The answer was a combination of historical pedigree and correct doctrine, which for the church fathers were very closely connected to each other. The idea was that Jesus taught the true doctrines to the apostles and charged them to establish his church. The apostles went off and founded churches in various cities, which continued to teach their doctrines. Each bishop of these churches was ordained by his predecessor, guaranteeing the correctness of the doctrine. Moreover, the doctrines were taught publicly, so that anyone could check them against those taught in the other churches (in contrast to the gnostic belief that there was a hidden tradition of teaching available only to the initiated).
So true doctrine was what was taught in an apostolic church. Those churches which were not of apostolic foundation could be judged simply by comparing them to the ones that were. If they taught the same doctrine, then they were part of the same church. So:
Tertullian said:
It is clear that all doctrine which agrees with the apostolic churches those moulds and original sources of the faith must be considered true, as undoubtedly containing what those churches received from the apostles, the apostles from Christ, Christ from God. And all doctrine must be considered false which contradicts the truth of the churches and apostles of Christ and God.
The idea was that all the parts checked each other. So if one apostolic church were to lurch into heresy, for example, you'd be able to tell because the others would oppose it. And if all the churches were to become heretical, you'd still be able to tell because they would contradict the Bible, which was understood as a sort of written record of the apostles' doctrine, which also acted as a check. All of these elements together defined the "canon" of belief, and were mutually checking and consistent.
Could you explain what the heck the following bible quote means in plain english:
"Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." -John 12:24
Well, if you insist on quoting the AV, it's not going to be very plain English. The idea is presumably that if you want to live, you must die: in other words, success comes only through sacrifice. In the context, of course, it means that Jesus can only accomplish his mission if he dies. In antiquity, people thought that seeds literally die before they sprout, which is why the metaphor is relevant.
