I will save you descriptions of CK's mental state and novice
grasp of debate and logic- it is clear enough for anybody who read
it in here.
I shall look at his case instead.
First and foremost let's just look at where CK is actually
right, he
is right in saying that unless one has faith, it is actually
impossible to know God at all. The reasons for this are obvious,
and in fact there would be no fight at all if he didn't decide to
make such a big issue of it in here.
Any sane Christian would accept that principle- that if you want to
know the unknowable, you have to be able to float on the infinite
sea and not try to cross it with finite means. You must stick your
head in heaven and not try to let fit it into your head, lest it
splits.
And secondly, CK is also right in saying that one has to approach
God in humility and admitting that one actually knows nothing about God. Only those who are
willing to be taught by the master will ever learn anything as
opposed to the student who insists that there should be this and
that reality without listening to the ultimate master.
So far, so good. But where does CK go wrong?
Simply put, he is fuddling humility and knowing nothing, with the
concept of mental and emotional nullity when one comes to a point of
faith. He suggests this when he says :
' How can I put this to you?
You cannot come to God expecting to meet God and know God;
expecting to experience the love that nothing in this world will be
able to tear you away from. To meet God you have to come to God
wanting nothing; expecting nothing; desirous of nothing but only
with total humility and totally at the mercy of God, by Faith.
Understanding and remembering what I say and the ability to repeat
it means nothing. You must have Faith in God.'
Unfortunately this is a state that is by far for us, impossible.
Basically one has to desire and expect this state. And basically this
is also a rather Keatian point of view, which was considered for a
moment by many great thinkers but then thrown out- for good
reason.
The thing about meeting God is that in the first place, you must
know if there is a God to meet at all. Already this is a first
thought which is undeniable, that one has to believe that a God (of
any kind), exists out there and that He (or It) is meetable. As
buddhist-like as CK tries to suggest a frame of mind for us to meet
God with, we realize that we can't start unless we have a beginning
notion of Him.
I can't reach for the cheese unless I know there is such a thing as
a cheese to reach for, what kind of cheese this is, if it is rotten
or not is something I may not know, but obviously one needs to
start with this conception of cheese. Of course this is the very
concept that CK wants to reject, for he says quite clearly that one
cannot have any mental notes:
You might not have it
written down in a piece of paper in your wallet; if you have it
written down in a mental note, it is the same.
But this is unavoidable, one has to start with a mental note of God
in some way or another, it is a unavoidable logical barrier. The
only way to deny this is to deny logic itself, in which case there
would be no need for CK to make any case for the logical congruity
of his point of view at all, he should just leave it up to us to
decide and believe. He don't need to bother to prove me wrong or
'confused' simply because it does not matter and helps his case
nothing anyway.
Back to mental notes, as you can see it is impossible not to start
with a mental note of sorts. What CK is annoyed about is that he
assumes I start with mental notes like:
Jesus is God
God's way is Christianity
The best picture of God is provided by Christianity and
Judasim
Which is untrue. What actually happened to me is that I started
with just one singular notion, and that is:
God exists
Obviously the acceptance of that notion is based entirely on faith
at first. You have to have faith in any kind of a belief for it to
grow on you.
Now the thing is this: If you have faith in a God that exists, you
must now believe certain things about Him. The very logical next
step to do would be to believe that you can know Him. And by know I do not mean
they way you know a frog by cutting it up or a car by taking it
apart, but by know I refer
to a contact of knowledge.
If I believed that God didn't want to be known, or choose not to
reveal Himself in any possible way to us mortals, then all of CK's
mind-emptying exercises would be in vain, an exercise in futility
in trying to reach a God that does not want to be reached.
So the very next article of faith would be to believe that God
wants to be known.
Beyond that, one again needs to believe that this God is worthy of
knowing. We have to believe if He is either good or evil,
omnipotent or omniscient (or both), we have to start believing what
kind of God He is. Before long, you might realize that you have
formed a core of faiths about God that is the very thing CK
attacks.
CK's beef with people of religion starting from a conception of God
and then believing in it is upside-down. Rather people start
believing in God then they start believing in their conceptions of
Him. If these conceptions are wrong or right is another matter, but
you can't start with make judgement on anything if the nullity of
your very logic has knocked the feet from under you.
He is correct in saying that you can't know God unless you have
faith, where he gone wrong is asserting that if you have faith in
God and start to know Him, you cannot say anything about Him. It
seems obvious to me that there are some people who say certain
things about God because they don't know anything about Him, but
all the same there are those who say certain things about Him
precisely because they know Him.
