Martin Striz (striz1@MARSHALL.EDU)
Wed, 26 Nov 1997 11:14:49 +0100
Hello Lila Squad,
I was reading through my school's 000.marshall.religious-talk newsgroup
when I came across this posting:
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Subject: Re: paradox in religion
Message-ID: <1997Nov20.083957.14913@hobbit>
From: Raymond A Bailey <bailey9@users.marshall.edu>
Date: 20 Nov 97 08:39:57 EST
References: <1997Nov14.085259.14752@hobbit> <1997Nov14.130223.14763@hobbit>
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: Just like the Rick's statement, if it's true, it's false. However,
: since it is exclusively self-referential, if it is false, then it's
: true. How can this be? Is the statement true or false? Or is it
: meaningless? No, it is not meaningless, or otherwise we would not
: be able to conclude that if it's true, it's false, and if it's false,
: it's true.
: ~~~~~~
: But the above addresses paradox from an exclusively
: philosophical/logical perspective. What is paradox to religion?
: Does paradox have value? I find paradox to be valuable as an
: intellectual exercise (plus it can be fun). But is paradox of
: deeper significance in religion? Any thoughts?
: --Chad
I've been thinking about this problem for a while (since Dr. Bady's post),
and I think I can only offer two comments, neither of which may be truly
meaningful.
First, I doubt seriously you'll be able to isolate any truths in todays
average religion that exist in a paradoxical state.
There is an interesting study of paradox in a book by Dougas Hofstader
called "GEB" affectionately, or properly "Godel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal
Golden Braid". First let me offer an unequivocal recommendation for this
book. Paradox usually comes about when a statement or idea spans two
logical "layers", if you will. Heres a rudimentary diagram that I use
frequently:
---------------------------
Intellectual?
---------------------------
Social (gleeful colonies of organisms)
---------------------------
Biological (organisms)
--------------------------- (certainly more substrata in here)
Physical (atoms)
---------------------------
There's no kind of wishwash newage metaphysics here, these layers simply
describe "orders" of existence, or complexity in evolution. It's often
possible that social "truths" can conflict with biological ones in ways
that seem paradoxical. For example human beings are equipped, by god
supposedly, with reproductive facilities, yet social truths (perhaps most
noticeably during the victorian era) were rock solid on the fact that they
were cursed instruments and really shouldn't be used. That's my idea of a
paradox, but it's
very easily resolved when you consider the meaning of the two truths
individually. There are two layers of meaning at work in that statement-
two systems. One uses the other as a foundation but is not a function of
it.
Language is the cause of paradox; it's difficult for one language,
especially in the course of one statement, to resolve schizm (for lack of a
better word) between formal layers of complexity. Hofstader has a more
elegant presentation of this idea that deals with AI programming languages
that are often forced to resolve issues occurring on different logical
layers in a program. There's a great deal of talk about pushing and popping
and such.
Shooting from the hip, however, I can level all sorts of things that I
find somewhat paradoxical at Christians, specifically. It's because
Christianity is the only religion I'm intimately familiar with that
constantly delivers mandates about the nature of the universe, and other
stuff like that. One of those ideas is that if some God created the
Universe in a well thought out way, why then, isn't the path to a closer
relationship with God the study of his Universe? It seems instead that
Christians (a good portion of them anyway) tend to reject all the truths
we're able to determine, even though they were extrapolated by nothing more
than the very Universe that all-mighty, all seeing, ad nauseaum God himself
has created for us to mingle around in. That doesn't fit the simple idea of
paradox that I think we all agree on elegantly, but it certainly has the
effect of making me throw my arms into the air (perhaps even delivering a
stream of expletives) each time I think of it.
I don't think such paradoxes in Christianity can be resolved, primarily
because I think Christianity has a very limited lifespan when faced with
the overwhelming evidence produced by the diligent study of the Universe in
which we live.
-- --------------------------------------------- R. Andrew Bailey, Jaded Sr. Systems Programmer, MU Computing Services http://www.marshall.edu/~bailey9/--------------------------------------
Is anyone familiar with Douglas Hofstader? I can't determine from the wording whether the author invented these levels himself or got them from Hofstader, in either case, it just struck me that someone else divided reality into these subsets.
martin
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