Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

The mouths of the righteous utter wisdom,
    and their tongues speak what is just.
The law of their God is in their hearts;
    their feet do not slip.

• Psalm 37:30-31

If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you.

• James 1:5

But not everyone possesses this knowledge. Some people are still so accustomed to idols that when they eat sacrificial food they think of it as having been sacrificed to a god, and since their conscience is weak, it is defiled.

• 1 Corinthians 8:7

The Lord said to Moses, “Chisel out two stone tablets like the first ones, and I will write on them the words that were on the first tablets, which you broke. Be ready in the morning, and then come up on Mount Sinai. Present yourself to me there on top of the mountain. No one is to come with you or be seen anywhere on the mountain; not even the flocks and herds may graze in front of the mountain.”
So Moses chiseled out two stone tablets like the first ones and went up Mount Sinai early in the morning, as the Lord had commanded him; and he carried the two stone tablets in his hands. Then the Lord came down in the cloud and stood there with him and proclaimed his name, the Lord.

• Exodus 34:1-5

“One of the problems for 20th-century philosophy is determining a role for philosophy given the success of the natural sciences. This is one of the main concerns of German-born Rudolf Carnap in The Physical Language as the Universal Language of Science (1984), which suggests that philosophy’s proper function-and its primary contribution to science-is the analysis and clarification of scientific concepts.
“Carnap claims that many apparently deep philosophical problems—such as metaphysical ones—are meaningless, because they cannot be proved or disproved through experience. He adds that they are also in fact pseudo—problems caused by logical confusions in the way we use language.
“Logical positivism accepts as true only strictly logical statements that can be empirically verified. For Carnap, philosophy’s real task is therefore the logical analysis of language (in order to discover and rule out those questions that are, strictly speaking, meaningless), and to find ways of talking clearly and unambiguously about the sciences.
“Some philosophers, such as Willard Quine and Karl Popper, have argued that Carnap’s standards for what can be said meaningfully are too exacting and present an idealized view of how science operates, which is not reflected in practice. Nevertheless, Carnap’s reminder that language can fool us into seeing problems that are not really there is an important one.”

• Sam Atkinson (senior editor), The Philosophy Book, Big Ideas Simply Explained

Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970) once wrote, “In logic, there are no morals.”

I think this quote is absolutely true, to a point.  If you use the rules of logic, you will determine what statements are true and what statements are false and then you have your unassailable answer.  But Carnap also postulated that we should not waste our time on issues that cannot be resolved by logic.  By Carnap’s quote then, all moral issues fall into the category of unsolvable logic issues.  I do not agree with that premise.

The secular progressive movement worldwide rejects the Judeo-Christian Ethic.  Definition of good and bad have been turned upside down.  As a result, lawlessness is on the rise.  Two dystopian novels come to mind: When the Sleeper Awakes by H. G. Wells and 1984 by George Orwell.  Their future worlds both speak of science and logic taking over with no sense of morality.  The world has become a horrible place in which to live.  Yes, these are both works of fiction, but they point to what is obvious to anyone who is not brainwashed into the new world way of thinking.  The trends in lawlessness are proving the novelists correct, at least on this one point.

We are imprinted with a sense of right and wrong by our Creator.  To argue against the Carnap quote, logic is bound by objective truth.  Moral objective truth was handed down by God, written in stone by His own hand on Mount Sinai.  Our sense of right and wrong stems from what God wrote on those tablets of stone.

Thus, with objective truth in the Law that God has set down in stone, we have truth to measure all moral concepts using the rules of logic.  But there is still the problem that Carnap suggests in the issues regarding language.  In interpreting the meaning of those words, there are many people who create a cloud of gray where there is mostly black and white.

And most of that gray, which really is not gray at all, is Satan’s playground.

If you like these Tuesday morning essays about philosophy and other “heavy topics,” but you think you missed a few, you can use this LINK. I have set up a page off the home page for links to these Tuesday morning posts. I will continue to modify the page as I add more.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.