Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

So God created mankind in his own image,
    in the image of God he created them;
    male and female he created them.
God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

• Genesis 1:27-28

The man said,
“This is now bone of my bones
    and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called ‘woman,’
    for she was taken out of man.”
That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.

• Genesis 2:23-24

“‘Do not steal.
“‘Do not lie.
“‘Do not deceive one another.

• Leviticus 19:11

“If someone says to us, ‘My next-door neighbors consist of a red-haired man and his fat wife’ that could perfectly well be true, but it could equally well be untrue.  The only sure way to establish it is carry out a careful investigation to determine whether a man lives next door who is red-haired (as against, say, dark-haired, fair-haired or bald), whether he has a fat wife (as against, say, a thin wife or no wife), and whether these two are the only inhabitants of the neighboring house. But if someone says to us: ‘My next-door neighbors consist of a bachelor and his fat wife’ we know without further ado that the statement is false. We do not need to carry out any investigations at all to establish this because ‘bachelor’ means unmarried man, and therefore the neighbor cannot both be a bachelor and have a wife – the statement is self-contradictory, and therefore cannot possibly be true. Leibniz argued that all truths must belong to these two logical types. Either we have to examine the facts in order to find out whether a particular statement is true or false, or we can do that without examining the facts, in which case the statement must be true or false by virtue of the use it makes of its own terms. Because we can determine the truth of statements of this latter type by analyzing them without having to look outside them, they became known later in the history of philosophy as ‘analytic statements.’ The other sort became known as ‘synthetic statements.’  These two terms are now in common use.”

• 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

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) was a German polymath, contributing to the fields of mathematics, philosophy, and science.  He was a diplomat.  He is credited, along with Sir Isaac Newton with the creation of calculus.  He worked in binary arithmetic and statistics.  He has been named by some as the “last universal genius,” making significant contributions in many fields.  He worked in the fields of the history of mathematics and philosophy, showing how we got to the knowledge of his day.

But the example argument that the author uses is filled with traps.  God established “Holy Matrimony” between a man and a woman, no exceptions.  God created two genders, male and female.  The first man and woman sinned, and the entire world became broken as a result, but that does not change the definition of marriage or the number of genders.  But sinful people can change the definitions of all that for their own sinful purposes.

Even then, I doubt if anyone would claim to be a bachelor who had a wife.  Then again, no one these days would characterize the man’s wife as “fat.”

The arguments are still good arguments.  Some statements can be proven false just on the face of the statement itself.  But to prove any argument true, there needs to be evidence.

While the redefining of definitions in the discussion so far does not change whether something is a sin or not, the idea of stating something as a “fact” that is then proven to be false is just one more lie.

And to be honest, I think that the constant change in definitions to keep people off balance is sinful.  If you define something to not look like a lie, but it is a false concept, you are deceiving someone, and maybe everyone.  Whether that is called a lie or not, changing the definition rapidly still leads to deception.  Both are prohibited in Leviticus 19.  Most of the laws in chapter 19 deal with basic decency, being a moral person.  Sometimes, we take our rebellion against the norm too far.

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.