Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

For you created my inmost being;
    you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
    your works are wonderful,
    I know that full well.
My frame was not hidden from you
    when I was made in the secret place,
    when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed body;
    all the days ordained for me were written in your book
    before one of them came to be.
How precious to me are your thoughts, God!
    How vast is the sum of them!
Were I to count them,
    they would outnumber the grains of sand—
    when I awake, I am still with you.

• Psalm 139:13-18

“If you love me, keep my commands. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever—the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. Whoever has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me. The one who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love them and show myself to them.”

• John 14:15-21

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

• 1 John 4:7-12

“We have seen that, according to Aristotle, form is that which causes something to be the thing it is. This leads him to examine the notion of ‘cause’ in this context; and he ends by breaking the concept of ‘form’ down into four different and complementary kinds of ‘cause.’ Since what he calls ‘the four causes’ constitute the reasons why a thing is as it is, it can be helpful to think of the them as the four ‘be-causes,’ in short the four becauses.  Form is the explanation of things.
“Let us take his example of a marble statue. For this to be the thing it is there needs first of all to be the marble. This would be called by Aristotle the material cause, the what-is-it-made-of cause. We have already learnt from Aristotle that this is not enough in itself to make the statue, which requires no fewer than three other causes, yet nevertheless the material is necessary, even though not sufficient. For the statue to come into being it needs to have been hewn out of a block of marble by a hammer and chisel: this hewing is what Aristotle calls the efficient cause, the what-actually-does-or-makes-it? cause. But again, to be the thing that it is, the statue needs to take the shape that it does, that of a horse or a man or whatsoever – a block of marble hacked at random is not a statue.  Aristotle calls this shape the formal cause, the what-gives-it-the-shape-by-which-it-is-identified cause. Then, finally, all of this only happens because a sculptor has set out to make a statue in the first place. All three of the other causes have been called into operation in order to realize intention: the overall reason for the statue’s existence is that it is the fulfilment of a sculptor’s purposes. Aristotle calls this the final cause, the ultimate-reason-for-it-all cause.”

• Bryan Magee, The Story of Philosophy

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

• C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

Aristotle (384-322BC) was discussed last week.  Really we discussed the error of the authors equating some of Aristotle’s philosophy to Christianity.  While there might be similarity and some early Christian philosophers went down those rabbit holes, it comes far too short of explaining the basics of Christianity.

But this idea of the four causes is interesting.

Practical people just look at a statue and see a statue.  If the statue is of Abraham Lincoln, a comedian might ask, “Statue, Abe?”  (Meaning “Is that you, Abe?”, but reduced to a simple contraction.)

But in developing organized thought, it provides something that Plato’s Forms was missing.  It is not quite to Sir Isaac Newton’s Cause and Effect.  Aristotle developed the concept of causality, but Newton applied that to Physics in his third law of motion.

The age-old question that many philosophers tackle is how to explain existence.  Most people take existence for granted but less use Aristotle’s four causes to a Christian’s existence.  This may be instructive even to those who take it for granted.

The “what is it made of cause” is the same for any human being.  We are made of bones, flesh, internal organs, etc.  But as a living and thinking being, we have a soul, a spirit, and a mind.  Again, whether the atheist agrees to those three, we have them also.  The soul is what lives forever. The spirit provides drive, purpose and emotions.  The mind is what is conscious of our existence.  Some people may quibble here on the divisions, but just for discussion purposes, these three things are observable, but not measurable.  When we die, the soul lives forever, but not in the body.  The brain is dead, and the mind loses that function.  But we will experience a new existence, thus what is in all three are around in some form in the next life.  But then, as a Christian, the Holy Spirit indwells us.  This is not observable other than a change in purpose, attitude, and as a result of those changes, behavior.  It takes all that to explain what a Christian is made of.

What actually makes a Christian is simple.  The biology is like any other human being.  We come from an egg that is fertilized.  As Scriptures state, we are knitted in our mother’s womb.  That phrase is interesting knowing that the placenta looks like a knitted garment under a microscope.  But for the spiritual part of our being, God does that.  It is not that we do anything to be saved.  We simply cease actively fighting against God (although it is often not simple).  God enters us in the person of the Holy Spirit to guide us.

What gives a Christian its special shape?  We are much like other human beings, but the song says it well, “They will know we are Christians by our love.”

And our ultimate purpose is the praise and glorify God forever.  Why?  For one thing, because God is Love.

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.