I had no doubts about the existence of God until I was a teenager, and it occurred to me that the question was actually important. I never was able to construe the available evidence in any way that threw doubts on the existence of God, but I examined at length the question of how it was possible for people to not have fully evident at all times something that was of so much greater importance than many other things that it is humanly impossible to deny.
Such as physical pain. Humans that have the inability to feel pain are an extraordinary rarity, and yet pain is of very limited importance compared to direct cognizance of God's existence. Why should it be more possible, and far more widespread, for humans to lack immediate and direct cognizance of God than for them to lack a sense of physical pain?
Though I have more answers to that question now than I did as a teen, I cannot say I have anything like a really complete or satisfactory answer.
My Wikipedia search for Robert Rorty brings up Richard McKay Rorty (1931-2007). It contains a quote about him by Jürgen Habermas:
"Nothing is sacred to Rorty the ironist. Asked at the end of his life about the 'holy', the strict atheist answered with words reminiscent of the young Hegel: 'My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.'"
Equally ironic, it wouldn't occur to him that maybe his ancestors, remote and near, might already be in such a place.
7 November 2017 at 17:13
My views, my 'ideology', changed often and frequently through my teen years and adult life as I zig-zagged ny way to Christianity in middle age - in one such phase I was a pretty-much a post-modernist (more-or less from late eighties to early nineties - but publications listed below took a while to reach print).
My most-cited publication of this sort was probably this book chapter about post-modernity in health promotion - published in a multi-author sociology volume.
I also wrote about medicine and post-modernity.
And my essay on Robert M Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance was written while I was deep into the shallows of Robert Rorty.
I find it hard to imagine myself in this postmodern phase - but the evidence is there. One of the perils of prolific publishing, I suppose...
"When I was a post-modernist"
2 Comments -
I had no doubts about the existence of God until I was a teenager, and it occurred to me that the question was actually important. I never was able to construe the available evidence in any way that threw doubts on the existence of God, but I examined at length the question of how it was possible for people to not have fully evident at all times something that was of so much greater importance than many other things that it is humanly impossible to deny.
Such as physical pain. Humans that have the inability to feel pain are an extraordinary rarity, and yet pain is of very limited importance compared to direct cognizance of God's existence. Why should it be more possible, and far more widespread, for humans to lack immediate and direct cognizance of God than for them to lack a sense of physical pain?
Though I have more answers to that question now than I did as a teen, I cannot say I have anything like a really complete or satisfactory answer.
1 November 2017 at 05:18
My Wikipedia search for Robert Rorty brings up Richard McKay Rorty (1931-2007). It contains a quote about him by Jürgen Habermas:
"Nothing is sacred to Rorty the ironist. Asked at the end of his life about the 'holy', the strict atheist answered with words reminiscent of the young Hegel: 'My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.'"
Equally ironic, it wouldn't occur to him that maybe his ancestors, remote and near, might already be in such a place.
7 November 2017 at 17:13