Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

Hear now my argument; listen to the pleas of my lips.

• Job 13:6

I would state my case before him and fill my mouth with arguments.

• Job 23:4

Flee the evil desires of youth and pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace, along with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart. Don’t have anything to do with foolish and stupid arguments, because you know they produce quarrels. And the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but must be kind to everyone, able to teach, not resentful. Opponents must be gently instructed, in the hope that God will grant them repentance leading them to a knowledge of the truth, and that they will come to their senses and escape from the trap of the devil, who has taken them captive to do his will.”

• 2 Timothy 2:22-26

I waited while you spoke,
    I listened to your reasoning;
while you were searching for words,
    I gave you my full attention.
But not one of you has proved Job wrong;
    none of you has answered his arguments.
Do not say, ‘We have found wisdom;
    let God, not a man, refute him.’
But Job has not marshaled his words against me,
    and I will not answer him with your arguments.

• Job 32:11-14

How painful are honest words! But what do your arguments prove?

• Job 6:25

“This elucidation of concepts, though, fascinating as it is, is the mere surface of philosophy. The greatest philosophers have gone much deeper than that and questioned the most fundamental aspects of our existence and our experience. We human beings find ourselves in a world we had no say about entering. In its most obvious and basic features it consists of a framework of space and time – three dimensions of space and one dimension of time – inhabited by a large number of widely differing material objects, some of which are people like ourselves. And philosophers have raised questions like: ‘What is time?’ and ‘Is everything that actually exists, including people, a material object and nothing more? Can something that is not a material object have real existence? If so, what is the nature of that existence?’ In asking questions like this they are not just trying to achieve a deeper understanding of concepts.  They are striving towards a fundamental understanding of whatever it is that exists, including ourselves.  And they are trying to do this without making it a question of religious faith, or appealing to the say-so of an authority.”

• Bryan Magee, The Story of Philosophy

“Philosophy begins in wonder.”

• Plato

“Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.”

• C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

“the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline.”

• Oxford Language, Definition of Philosophy

The etymology of philosophy breaks down into two Greek words, philos, meaning love, and sophia, meaning wisdom.  Thus by the component parts, philosophy means a love of wisdom.

If you have not noticed, these philosophy posts have been weekly for almost exactly five years, except for one brief hiatus. And I am just now “defining” philosophy.

But I always go back to my first day of summer school, ever, but with an ROTC scholarship and the heavy load that engineers take, I had to complete everything in a total of four years, with the ROTC classes being above the heavy load.  Half of my semesters in school were overload semesters.  All of the semesters were overload semesters in many college’s definition used today.  So, with accepting my ROTC scholarship during the end of my first college summer break, my next was taking four courses in Philosophy.  And between my junior and senior years of college, I worked as an Army recruiter (unpaid, except for reimbursing expenses) and ROTC summer camp and a wild two-week vacation from Mississippi to New Brunswick, Canada and back, swinging through New Brunswick after visiting Quebec.

But that first day in the Intro to Philosophy (where we read over one hundred pages every night, and the next summer term that immediately followed roughly three hundred pages each night), the head of the Philosophy department said, “I see from the enrollment that we have a few scientists and engineers in this class.  Think of Philosophy as the science of argument.”  And he treated the class that way.  Sure, we studied the ancient philosophers quickly, after all this was summer school, and then we started slowing down with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.  Then the professor cherry picked philosophers.  By then, he knew who we were.  The University of Mississippi has always been a conservative university, but in this class, we had some pseudo-hippies, born-again holy rollers, and good old country rednecks.  He slowed down with philosophers whose views would start an argument in class. And we argued without getting angry. Imagine that!

Oddly, all sides in our arguments agreed that George Berkeley should have been institutionalized instead of being a bishop in the church and leading professor of philosophy.  You may disagree, but that was our diverse class’s unanimous conclusion.  How can your office not exist when you were not in it to observe it?  Okay, maybe not locked up crazy, but close.  His conclusion to that problem was that God recreated the office to look exactly as it had been when he left.  Mind you, not preserved it from destruction – recreated!  Otherwise, he had no experiential data to justify the existence of God.  (Yet, he was a bishop in the church?!)

But this gives a bit of a background on how I got hooked into philosophy.

If anyone was wondering, I switched books with five present-day philosophers left.  I simply ran out of energy.  The one paragraph excerpts to describe their work was not enough for me to chew on.  I was intrigued by Marcel Gauchet’s ideas regarding religion, but the small amount that was said left me more confused than intrigued.  I might do a stand-alone article if I can do some deeper research.

But while philosophy may indeed be the science of argument, we mustn’t get to the point of making foolish arguments (Paul’s admonishment to Timothy in 2 Timothy 2), or we will be back to that office disappearing and being nonexistent, just because I am not presently observing it.

The Scriptures from Job are shuffled to tell a story.  Listen to my arguments.  My arguments fill my heart and I must express them.  But then foolish arguments should be avoided, or once spoken, we each go our way by saying, “Well that was nice” and hopefully with a convincing tone.

Then, we have Elihu’s opening arguments.  We hear a lot from Eliphaz, Zophar, and Bildad, but Elihu listens and waits to pounce after everyone else gets tired.  He might have something to say, but why wait that long?  Elihu tells the other friends that none of them has proven Job wrong.

And Elihu shows what is wrong in our society today.  He sat back.  He sat without speaking.  He listened.  And he determined everyone else was spinning around in circles.  These days, anger erupts, and everyone is spinning around in circles with their arguments or throwing bricks through store windows and stealing televisions.  Have you ever thought that looting is not spontaneous?  How can you justify a defense that you were over come by the oppression being expressed by the marchers that you took a brick out of your pocket and through it through a store’s window?  Did the brick just materialize in your pocket?  Is it a normal thing in your city to always have a brick in your pocket – just in case?

And then the last line about all the arguments have proven nothing.

Philosophy should get people to think.

But once having thought, the knowledge must get from the head to the heart for it to take root in our lives.  Without God in our hearts, all the knowledge of the world means nothing.  Without God’s direction it becomes vacuous knowledge in the Great Void.

But I will continue writing these Tuesday morning posts, due to C.S. Lewis’ comment, if not for any other reason.  Good philosophy must exist to answer all the bad philosophy that is out there, or mediocre philosophy that does not reach the right conclusion.

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.