To me there is something repulsive when a natural scientist, after having pointed to some ingenious design in nature, sententiously declares that this reminds us of the verse that God has counted every hair on our heads. O, the fool and his science, he has never known what faith is! Faith believes it without all his science, and it would only become disgusted with itself in reading all his volumes if these, please note, were supposed to lead to faith, strengthen faith, etc.
Kierkegaard, journals 3:2810
Basically why creationism and intelligent design are shams.
For those interested, I will post the final paper after the conference at my academia.edu page. You may find the first (and less philosophically rigorous) paper on the subject there as well.
What Kierkegaard objects to is not speculative thought as such but the assumption that often characterizes speculative thinkers, that all truth can be known objectively and, in particular, that the truth of Christianity can be known objectively. For Kierkegaard, there were many things that could not really be grasped intellectually, many things that could be understood only by being lived. For Kierkegaard, as devoted as he was to intellectual rigor, there was something higher than “speculative happiness” - eternal blessedness - and while its pursuit did not preclude the pursuit of speculative happiness, it was absolutely crucial that the two not be confused. The point was not to grasp Christianity intellectually. The point was to believe.
M.G. Piety, Ways of Knowing: Kierkegaard’s Pluralist Epistemology (via landofoblivion)
Nature, the totality of creation, is God’s work, and yet God is not there, but within the individual human being there is a possibility (he is spirit according to this possibility) that in inwardness is awakened to a God-relationship, and then it is possible to see God everywhere.
Kierkegaard’s faith is perfected in the subjectivity of a passion of inwardness expressed in his imitation of Christ, about which he cannot say more without turning to either the mysticism of the early Church or the rationalism of the post-Enlightenment.
H. Tristram Engelhardt, Rationality, Belief, and Kierkegaard: Being a Christian in the Post-Christian Age
Kierkegaard’s paradigm of monasticism is drawn from the Western Middle Ages rather than from the first millennium when monastics provided a critical spiritual force over and against the official hierarchy of the Church. Kierkegaard’s criticism of monasticism fails to recognize a parallel between his pamphleteering and the critical public role of the monk. Where Kierkegaard’s pamphleteering was a rebuke to the restrained Christianity of the established church, the monk is a rebuke to a life lived comfortably in the world. True monasticism constitutes a kind of perpetual pamphleteering and criticism of the world as well as to the established church.
H. Tristram Engelhardt, Rationality, Belief, and Kierkegaard: Being a Christian in the Post-Christian Age
This is an abstract that I’m preparing to submit to a university colloquium on religion. Somebody please be as (constructively) critical as possible, because I really want to present this.
A musical analogy may be more appropriate: the Apophthegmata is a polyphony of solo voices that sometimes combine, sometimes diverge, sometimes even clash around a core of favored motifs. The Apophthegmata does not have one theology of the monastic life, but many… It is always a temptation, given the undoubted poignancy of certain stories and sayings, to overgeneralize instead of hearing a given saying as one voice among many. The challenge is to hear the polyphony.
William Harmless, S.J., Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism
…what a monstrous mistake it is, almost the greatest possible, to didacticize Christianity, and how altered Christianity has become through this continual didacticizing is seen in this: that now all expressions are formed according to the view that truth is cognition, knowledge (now one speaks continually of comprehending, speculating, observing, etc.), whereas in original Christianity all the expressions were formed according to the view that truth is a [way of] being.
To meet Christ, according to Kierkegaard, in the passion of faith, is to come to know that God is love, that love is a living, dynamic force, not a mere fact, and that Christian truth is a way of living rather than a set of propositions. To meet Christ in the moment of faith is to come into contact with the reality of God’s love.
M.G. Piety, Ways of Knowing: Kierkegaard’s Pluralist Epistemology, pg.158
…Everyone is more or less afraid of the truth; and this is being human, for the truth is relating to being ‘spirit’ - and this is very hard for flesh and blood… Between a human being and the truth lies dying to the world - this, you see, is why we are all more or less afraid.
Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals (Pap. XI A 614)
In the monastic movement there was at least passion and respect for the absolute [telos]. But the monastic movement must not be made meritorious; on the contrary, it must be made humbly before God and not without a sense of shame. Just as a sick child does not regard it as meritorious to be allowed to remain home with his parents… so must a candidate for the monastery regard his relationship with God. And if he does that, then there can be no further objection to his choice, no matter what one deigns to say in the 19th century.
Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments
Of this there is no doubt, our age and Protestantism in general may need the monastery again, or wish it were there. ‘The Monastery’ is an essential dialectical element in Christianity. We therefore need it out there like a navigation buoy at sea in order to see where we are, even though I myself would not enter it. But if there really is true Christianity in every generation, there must also be individuals who have this need. […]
Kierkegaard’s Papers and Journals: A Selection, translated and edited by Alastair Hannay, 47 VIII I A 403, pg. 275
