Comments on: How Do You Debate the Saggy Baggy Elephant?

By: David Nickol

David Nickol — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 18:33:02 +0000

David are you truly objecting to experts dictating to people what they can and cannot do? jason taylor, I am saying that in matters of morality and personal choice, people have to be able to understand the issues involved and make their own decisions about what is right and wrong. In matters of morality, I am saying that if people are expected to live by a certain moral code, they must be able to understand it and abide by it because they are convinced it is right, not because they are told it is right by people with advanced degrees. I wouldn't say that rules out public health efforts like anti-smoking campaigns, requiring truthful labeling, and so on. It also doesn't rule out such things as requiring vaccinations. But when it comes to personal morality, I think people must follow their own consciences, and to do so, they have to understand the issues. And if those issues can't be explained in intelligible terms to people who don't have advanced degrees, then I think people have a right to ignore abstruse arguments and make up their own minds according to their own understanding. A married man and woman should not have to take graduate courses before they decided when and how to have sex with each other.

By: David DePerro

David DePerro — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 17:30:07 +0000

The ordinary people don’t have any trouble understanding the moral arguments. It is the experts who cannot understand them–or understanding them, believe them. Lost in the Cosmos lampoons the “expert” self-help gurus upon which the postmodern suburbanite depends to tell her/him what to do and how to live–hence the arcane language of semiotics. But the book’s alternating obscurity and transparency show that moral decisions are both much more difficult and much simpler than we make them out.

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 16:54:33 +0000

Thank you for this excellent post. You ask, “If stories are just stories, and what’s compelling to one person is nonsense to another, how do we talk to each other?” While you may be on to something with your tentative solution, I think that what distinguishes one story from another boils down to credibility. A seminary professor of mine once said that 40% of what makes for good preaching is the preacher’s ethos–i.e., are you believable? Christians can only come across as credible if they (1) speak the truth in love, (2) practice what they preach (congruence), and (3) give evidence of the joy and peace that they experience in their relationship with Jesus Christ.

By: jason taylor

jason taylor — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 15:47:20 +0000

David are you truly objecting to experts dictating to people what they can and cannot do? If that is the case, I would like to hear more of that from liberals. Then we can stop obsessing about what science says, stop worrying about food, and stop conscripting people for compulsory education at taxpayer expense.

By: David Nickol

David Nickol — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 21:45:12 +0000

It seems to me in making moral arguments about contraception, homosexuality, and other matters of human sexuality, in order for them to be worthwhile, ordinary people without advanced degrees in moral philosophy have to be able to grasp them. So I am looking forward to a simple explanation of how Charles Sanders Peirce’s “triadic semiotics allow for a robust and integrated conception of reality, rhetoric, reason, and the human person.” If ordinary folks can’t understand moral arguments, what you have is “experts” dictating to people what they can and can’t do.

By: Mary

Mary — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 20:15:14 +0000

How does one argue with the argumentum ad misericordiam?

By: Steve Billingsley

Steve Billingsley — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 19:42:24 +0000

Leroy,

Very thought provoking. I have a great sympathy for Lindbeck (and a lot of respect for Hauerwas, although I don’t always agree with him), but have been troubled by the way some streams of “Emergent” theology have appropriated the narrative language while taking it in an entirely different direction than I think that Lindbeck had in mind.

Tony Campolo has also been influential to me in the past. But what troubles me also is that the “Red Letter” movement ends up being akin to a latter-day Marcionism, which just excises entire portions of Scripture without attempting to deal with them seriously to favor portions which tend to support their narrative.

I do think that you are right that much of our attempts to convince run end up being pretty irrelevant. Most of the reasons that people reject or hold the Gospel at a distance have very little to do with reason. We are beings with a God-given capacity for reason (and it is a wonderful gift), but to observe humanity at any level isn’t the observation of a lot of reasonableness. (I think of some long comment streams and back-and-forth with other commenters as I type) We often tend to live and react to issues/policies and even core teaching at a visceral, non-rational (notice I don’t say irrational, although sometimes that applies) way. We tend to react and decide and using reason to support our reactions and decisions after the fact.

That being said, reason is too valuable to throw overboard. The main weakness in my own theological training (of the liberal mainline Protestant variety) is the distinct lack of Aristotelian/Thomastic influence – a weakness that I have been trying to address ever since.

Other than Percy and Pierce, Is there other reading that you (or other commenters) might recommend?