The Long Discussion: Such Larks!

Socratic discussion is my life’s work and I am going to dialog with a religious skeptic today.

Of course, I dialog with religious skeptics most days, I am a teacher with all sorts of students. As a follower of Socrates, I am also skeptical myself, properly understood, about everything including my own religion!

This is joyful, but not because the outcome is certain.

I have met people who wanted to make Socratic dialog end up (for sure!) in Christian faith. Lately, I have run into an odd group that thinks done “correctly” dialog will end in atheism and some genial form of 1950’s naturalism. Whatever the merits of either position, neither person was engaged in Socratic dialog.

Socratic dialog tests everything. That does not mean it cannot reach tentative conclusions and then test those! Of course, that is part of it. Being wrong would be joyful, because then I would see deeper truth. Some things I thought as a graduate student in philosophy (how to read Aristotle!), I now think were deeply mistaken.

Faith is the reaction, a gift, to the goodness, truth, and beauty of God and that reaction immediately should activate many responses: art, singing, poetry, and reason. Of course, partly this is because I might be wrong, but mostly it is because reason will clarify the good, the truth, and the beauty I have experienced. Faith is somewhat like an intuition where I see the solution to a problem (and know enough to sense that it is going to be a good solution), but still have to take the steps to show that the conclusions follows.

I must do the work to say QED, but the work is delightful.*

Some might wonder: what if it is explained away? What if it is just a brain state? I am unsure how an idea can “just be” a brain state, but let’s assume that it could be. That state would be no less beautiful, good, or true, because it triggered a state in my brain. Maybe the person fears that I will discover it is only a brain state and that there is no external God causing it. 

Maybe.

This is also where arguments for God’s existence are helpful. Like all philosophical arguments, they are honed, attacked, then improved again. Rational people, many with no prior commitment to theism, keep finding reasons to suggest the existence of God.

The existence of mathematical objects, consciousness, and relationship of ideas to “matter” also seem like reasons not to reduce the world to material causes. Daniel Dennett is willing to get rid of the self in order to hold to his philosophy, but such a move seems to destroy the plausibility of the general philosophy. AN Wilson (first believer, then atheist, then believer) is right: man is a living soul. Idealism strikes me as more plausible than such strained materialism.

Yet, even then, faith in itself may be indubitable, my experience of God is not. I can doubt my sanity, my understanding, my interpretation of events. All of this is possible, so I continue to seek God, think hard, reason as carefully as I can, live out faith reasonably and artistically in a community. 

The web of all my beliefs must cohere, must be reasonable, must connect to the external world properly. Am I sure? I am sure enough to live by faith reasonably, in Socratic dialog with others, and that is sure enough.

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*This is another way of talking about the ladder of Diotima in Symposium.