Watching the World Cup this week, I wondered if athletes should thank god after their victory. But, thank God for what? For the fact that they won, or conversely that others lost? Thanking God that others are worse off than oneself seems a little ungodly. The view that God favors oneself over others has lead to worse losses than victories. Perhaps it is the case that God is on everyone's side. God supports each athlete equally. But then why should anyone lose at all, why doesn't everyone win?
If that were the case there would no longer be a game of competition, just God playing with his puppets. But if they are thanking him for winning what does this amount to? For including them in his game?
Isn't one of the main purposes for entering any competition the satisfaction gained from knowing the achievement one has accomplished? If so, wouldn't that satisfaction be diminished if one found out that it wasn't due to oneself that victory was gained, but some external factors. If someone fixed the score of a game it (not only would it not be a real victory) wouldn't feel like a real victory. Similarly if God is the cause of me winning, then is it really my victory?
The other alternative is that God has nothing to do with the competition, he favors no one, and he just lets them play. In which case what do they thank God for, he didn't do anything? Perhaps just, ‘thank you God for not interfering, for letting me prove myself.’ In other words; Thanks for nothing!
(Perhaps this is the best way to understand the old saying that God helps those who help themselves.)
I look forward to your comments
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Monday, June 21, 2010
Why Does Evil Exist?
When assessing this question it is important to distinguish that there are two sorts of evils or causes of suffering: natural evil (earthquakes, diseases, natural disasters...) and moral evil (violence, theft, murder...). Often, it seems easy to say that we human beings are responsible for moral evil and suffering that we ourselves cause. We have free will, supposedly, and could prevent these causes of suffering. God's powers may not seem very challenged by moral evil. Often, though, certain moral evils, like the holocaust or the torture and murder of a child, are examples that seem to some people to defy any claims about our making our own choices and being solely responsible for all moral evil. When so many people die unjustly under horrendous circumstances not of their own making, it is hard to see why an all powerful and benevolent god would allow an evil event of this scale to happen. Likewise, when an innocent child dies senselessly, it is difficult to see how his or her free will was involved to begin with — why would an all powerful and good God allow a child without any opportunity to become morally responsible to suffer and die senselessly?
Natural suffering is also quite difficult to reconcile with our idea of God. We might think, 'Well, if God is so good and powerful, why does he allow as much of it as he does?' When a tsunami wipes out an entire community, it may seem reasonable to wonder if this isn't over-kill on God's part. Why not simply destroy peoples' property instead of drowning everyone? Some may find the answer here to lie in our fall from the Garden of Eden; we ourselves chose to reject the original paradise we were given. The world since then is a difficult place. Yet, others find that in cases of natural evil, God seems to act randomly. Natural disasters do not seem to be caused by the evil deeds of those affected by them. The more we have learned about the world, about the causes of earthquakes, tsunamis and diseases, the less inclined we have become to blame ourselves for these occurrences. If God is a master-planner, these evils seem like flaws in his design.
I look forward to your comments
Natural suffering is also quite difficult to reconcile with our idea of God. We might think, 'Well, if God is so good and powerful, why does he allow as much of it as he does?' When a tsunami wipes out an entire community, it may seem reasonable to wonder if this isn't over-kill on God's part. Why not simply destroy peoples' property instead of drowning everyone? Some may find the answer here to lie in our fall from the Garden of Eden; we ourselves chose to reject the original paradise we were given. The world since then is a difficult place. Yet, others find that in cases of natural evil, God seems to act randomly. Natural disasters do not seem to be caused by the evil deeds of those affected by them. The more we have learned about the world, about the causes of earthquakes, tsunamis and diseases, the less inclined we have become to blame ourselves for these occurrences. If God is a master-planner, these evils seem like flaws in his design.
I look forward to your comments
Monday, June 14, 2010
Is Science the New Religion?
The real-world answer, of course, is both yes and no, depending on how one views science, and religion. But let us take the ideal case.
In religion, one sooner or later comes to something that must be accepted unquestioningly, on faith: a dogma.
In science, ideally, one may not have dogmas. There is, for science, nothing in any principle, methodology, or idea that cannot be investigated as to its validity, applicability, and so forth. Including that statement. Nothing is sacred, above questioning, including scientific methodology. Nothing.
And that, in a nutshell, is the difference between science and religion. Now I am not saying that scientists as individuals and as schools have no dogmas, assumptions, and so forth. But the history of science is a history of the investigation of those assumptions, their overthrow and replacement by other principles.
Now, is this a religion? Is the principle that everything, including this principle, can and should be investigated by any methodology available, and checked and rechecked for accuracy and validity a religion? Well, if it is, then there is nothing that is not a religion, and the terms "religion" and "non-religion" become meaningless distinctions, don't they. If science, as this ideal, is a religion, then that's the end... everything is a religion.
On the other hand, one can ask something like, "do too many people have a blind faith that science will benefit them?" And if that is making science a religion, then, given the current political and ideological climates worldwide, my own very personal response would be that we need much more of that version of science. The world now seems to me to be in the grip of various religious frenzies; a little more science would be wonderful at this point, in my very politically-incorrect opinion. To put it more calmly... science is a tool, and results in tools. Tools can be used for good or for bad; one can use a hammer to beat someone else over the head. Science per se is something that must be properly directed; and by the same token, it will always both be used properly and misused, just as all tools are, by human beings.
I look forward to your comments
In religion, one sooner or later comes to something that must be accepted unquestioningly, on faith: a dogma.
In science, ideally, one may not have dogmas. There is, for science, nothing in any principle, methodology, or idea that cannot be investigated as to its validity, applicability, and so forth. Including that statement. Nothing is sacred, above questioning, including scientific methodology. Nothing.
And that, in a nutshell, is the difference between science and religion. Now I am not saying that scientists as individuals and as schools have no dogmas, assumptions, and so forth. But the history of science is a history of the investigation of those assumptions, their overthrow and replacement by other principles.
Now, is this a religion? Is the principle that everything, including this principle, can and should be investigated by any methodology available, and checked and rechecked for accuracy and validity a religion? Well, if it is, then there is nothing that is not a religion, and the terms "religion" and "non-religion" become meaningless distinctions, don't they. If science, as this ideal, is a religion, then that's the end... everything is a religion.
On the other hand, one can ask something like, "do too many people have a blind faith that science will benefit them?" And if that is making science a religion, then, given the current political and ideological climates worldwide, my own very personal response would be that we need much more of that version of science. The world now seems to me to be in the grip of various religious frenzies; a little more science would be wonderful at this point, in my very politically-incorrect opinion. To put it more calmly... science is a tool, and results in tools. Tools can be used for good or for bad; one can use a hammer to beat someone else over the head. Science per se is something that must be properly directed; and by the same token, it will always both be used properly and misused, just as all tools are, by human beings.
I look forward to your comments
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
If Life is Finite, Why am I Watching this Damn Game?
With so much else to do in life, and with each of our personal time clocks ticking a finite number of ticks, why should anyone spend hours on a sporting event which is ultimately trivial (a question my wife asks)? Why take part in thirty minutes of pre-game sentiment or the lackluster three-hour baseball All-Star Game that follows? Several months later millions more fans would shift to the sporting event du jour, watching football, basketball or hockey or all three. For those seeking perennial distractions, sport offers up a smorgasbord. To participate in any of these games professionally, you need to give your sport about half your life. To be a spectator, you need to sacrifice more time than that.
While philosophy pays attention to ‘issues’ in sports – issues involving cheating, competition, fairness, sportsmanship, to mention just a few – one might find many of these same concerns rearing their heads in business ethics. What is peculiar to sports is the play element. Sports are essentially invented competitions whose outcome has little bearing on the rest of our lives. By the afternoon on the day after the Superbowl, who, besides gamblers, is even affected by who won or lost?
On one level of course, this academic neglect hardly matters to the fan. The attraction of it all is clear: it’s unbridled fun. When the fan is in the ‘rooting moment’, the expenditure of time is the last thing on his mind. Issues of meaning are not paramount. Fandom, after all, is not intrinsically rational or self-examining. Cleveland Brown fans dress up like dogs, in a kind of weekly celebration of Halloween. Other fans pursue options less creative perhaps but just as free, watching an entire January contest in northeastern temperatures with team colors smeared across their faces and bare chests.
The word ‘fan’ is short for ‘fanatic’, and one of the greatest attractions of being a fan of some team is that the world of deadlines, plummeting stocks, and bills recedes in importance, if only for a few hours. Add those hours across days and weeks and seasons and the aggregate time could equal a two-month hiatus from the cares of life.
On a deeper level, sports can address a need for meaning, as a kind of secular religion. With sports, the observer is in a sense united with a player or team outside of himself. The Latin root of the word ‘religion’, religio, means ‘to be bound to’. While one can watch a sporting event without being bound to one team or another, indifference among spectators is the overwhelming exception. It is beyond dispute that most fans spend more time in a week following their team than they do in a month at religious observances. The bond between God and believer is long-term, founded on devotion and, for many, a desire for future insurance. But the bond between team and fan is immediate, with constant emotional payoffs and debits.
To take the sports plunge with abandon is to risk losing oneself in the fortunes of one’s team, not to mention the lives of all its members, in endless discussions of trivia and minutiae with other fans. Again, why go through with all of it?
One ‘answer’ would be “why not?” Notice how the question about the depth of spectator’s devotion doesn’t arise in the same way with the arts. Do people press the devotee of classical music about why he spends so much time with his love? Does the visitor to the Metropolitan Museum of Art incur criticism for repeatedly returning to view the permanent Egyptian collection? Probably not. So there may be a kind of high-culture/low-culture distinction that fuels the indifference to – and, for many – disdain for and loathing of sports. But if this common/uncommon distinction is all that lies behind it, then the reason for philosophy’s neglect of sport is surely mistaken. For is there anything common about an Alex Rodriduez homerun that makes it inferior to a symphony being played at the Lincoln Center? The aesthetics of A-Rod’s achievement – the very precision of his swing and its singular power – seems every bit as spectacular, and certainly more rare, than the beautiful sounds of a choir.
One needn’t be a philosopher to raise the question of what counts as meaningful or worthwhile. Most people who raise questions of what is meaningful in a life are not philosophers. But it might help to at least be philosophically inclined to probe whether it is meaningful or useful in some way to spend one’s time following a team.
Whatever we choose to do, our choices always say something about what we find meaningful. What is meaningful is, after all, influenced by the various subjective elements – tastes, desires and likes – that each of us brings to the decision. So if I watch a game, it will because I like it and that makes it a meaningful choice for me, at least some of the time. Whether we choose sports or something else, we face our own finite time, the fact that the clock is counting down. Time is a constant, a background condition of our lives, whether we’re thinking of sports or philosophy or anything else.
I look forward to you comments
While philosophy pays attention to ‘issues’ in sports – issues involving cheating, competition, fairness, sportsmanship, to mention just a few – one might find many of these same concerns rearing their heads in business ethics. What is peculiar to sports is the play element. Sports are essentially invented competitions whose outcome has little bearing on the rest of our lives. By the afternoon on the day after the Superbowl, who, besides gamblers, is even affected by who won or lost?
On one level of course, this academic neglect hardly matters to the fan. The attraction of it all is clear: it’s unbridled fun. When the fan is in the ‘rooting moment’, the expenditure of time is the last thing on his mind. Issues of meaning are not paramount. Fandom, after all, is not intrinsically rational or self-examining. Cleveland Brown fans dress up like dogs, in a kind of weekly celebration of Halloween. Other fans pursue options less creative perhaps but just as free, watching an entire January contest in northeastern temperatures with team colors smeared across their faces and bare chests.
The word ‘fan’ is short for ‘fanatic’, and one of the greatest attractions of being a fan of some team is that the world of deadlines, plummeting stocks, and bills recedes in importance, if only for a few hours. Add those hours across days and weeks and seasons and the aggregate time could equal a two-month hiatus from the cares of life.
On a deeper level, sports can address a need for meaning, as a kind of secular religion. With sports, the observer is in a sense united with a player or team outside of himself. The Latin root of the word ‘religion’, religio, means ‘to be bound to’. While one can watch a sporting event without being bound to one team or another, indifference among spectators is the overwhelming exception. It is beyond dispute that most fans spend more time in a week following their team than they do in a month at religious observances. The bond between God and believer is long-term, founded on devotion and, for many, a desire for future insurance. But the bond between team and fan is immediate, with constant emotional payoffs and debits.
To take the sports plunge with abandon is to risk losing oneself in the fortunes of one’s team, not to mention the lives of all its members, in endless discussions of trivia and minutiae with other fans. Again, why go through with all of it?
One ‘answer’ would be “why not?” Notice how the question about the depth of spectator’s devotion doesn’t arise in the same way with the arts. Do people press the devotee of classical music about why he spends so much time with his love? Does the visitor to the Metropolitan Museum of Art incur criticism for repeatedly returning to view the permanent Egyptian collection? Probably not. So there may be a kind of high-culture/low-culture distinction that fuels the indifference to – and, for many – disdain for and loathing of sports. But if this common/uncommon distinction is all that lies behind it, then the reason for philosophy’s neglect of sport is surely mistaken. For is there anything common about an Alex Rodriduez homerun that makes it inferior to a symphony being played at the Lincoln Center? The aesthetics of A-Rod’s achievement – the very precision of his swing and its singular power – seems every bit as spectacular, and certainly more rare, than the beautiful sounds of a choir.
One needn’t be a philosopher to raise the question of what counts as meaningful or worthwhile. Most people who raise questions of what is meaningful in a life are not philosophers. But it might help to at least be philosophically inclined to probe whether it is meaningful or useful in some way to spend one’s time following a team.
Whatever we choose to do, our choices always say something about what we find meaningful. What is meaningful is, after all, influenced by the various subjective elements – tastes, desires and likes – that each of us brings to the decision. So if I watch a game, it will because I like it and that makes it a meaningful choice for me, at least some of the time. Whether we choose sports or something else, we face our own finite time, the fact that the clock is counting down. Time is a constant, a background condition of our lives, whether we’re thinking of sports or philosophy or anything else.
I look forward to you comments
Thursday, June 3, 2010
What Is The Nature Of Reality?
Gazing upon a beer bottle I hold in my hand, I consider that I am not seeing the beer bottle as it exists, out there, in ‘reality’. Instead, I am looking at a picture of it as produced in my brain via my sensory perceptions. That is, my senses provide data about the object of my perception (a beer bottle), and using the sensory data my brain assembles a picture for me to see. At any rate, it is the picture in my brain that I see and not the bottle of beer I hold in my hand. But because the picture in my brain is not the object itself, one may come to doubt the very existence of the object out there, in reality. How can we ever know whether objects really exist externally, if all we have to look at are images of them in our heads? Is ours a world of ideas, or is our world really real? The answer is, both. Reality is at once a world of ideas, and an objective world of empirical reality.
Although one may never perceive physical objects apart from our perceptions of them, we can safely conclude that the objects out there really are there, and so really are real, because there is general consensus about them. People agree, generally, as to what objects are. If I were to throw my beer bottle and hit a passer-by on the head with it, that person would tell the police I threw a beer bottle at him – as opposed to having been kicked in the head by a flying blue unicorn, for instance. If there were no such consensus about the perceived external world, then the fact of one’s experiences would be all one could be sure of, with little by way of meaningful discourse with others. Yet, there is consensus about the perceived external world. Like moviegoers in a theater, we all see the same movie.
I look forward to your comments
Although one may never perceive physical objects apart from our perceptions of them, we can safely conclude that the objects out there really are there, and so really are real, because there is general consensus about them. People agree, generally, as to what objects are. If I were to throw my beer bottle and hit a passer-by on the head with it, that person would tell the police I threw a beer bottle at him – as opposed to having been kicked in the head by a flying blue unicorn, for instance. If there were no such consensus about the perceived external world, then the fact of one’s experiences would be all one could be sure of, with little by way of meaningful discourse with others. Yet, there is consensus about the perceived external world. Like moviegoers in a theater, we all see the same movie.
I look forward to your comments
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