Core Beliefs 

Important aspects of philosophy and theology - both in academics and in people's everyday lives - seem to have a common logical structure: namely, assume something as axiomatic and then deal with the apparent contradictions between that axiom and the world as we experience it as well as other other conceptual truths or axioms. For example, the axion "God is absolutely Good" presents an apparent contradiction to the idea of Hell (apparent conceptual contradiction) and to the evil we experience on earth, both natural evils like death and our own tendency to do evil to each other and the world. A lot of theology is an attempt to explain this seeming contradiction away.    

In philosophy, an axiom like "Universals are just names we conventionally apply to the natural world for purely pragmatic reasons" seems to contradict science, for example when biology identifies really existing species (universals) through genetic analysis and in general contradicts our common sense understanding of the world (i.e. that there are kinds of things). 

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The problem of evil in Christian theology can be formulated as a dichotomy:

"If evil exists, then either God is not omnipotent, or God is not perfectly good."

The facts of evil and suffering is hard to reconcile with both axioms: God is omnipotent and God is good. It suggests that if God is omnipotent (all-powerful), He would have the ability to prevent evil. If God is perfectly good (omnibenevolent), He would desire to prevent evil.

And I wonder whether there is any practical difference between Gnostic dualism and the idea of the world as darkness because of sin. Seems like the latter just gets God off the hook and explains the potential contradiction between a good Creator and an evil world. Both agree the world is evil. Lewis uses in some book the metaphor that being alive on earth is like being behind enemy lines in a war. The world, the Creation has been occupied by Satan. Both Gnosticism and Christianity thus strive for a release of the soul from the material world.

   For this very reason the prime heresy combated by the early Church, culminating in Augustine, was Gnosticism, or Manicheanism – any conviction that there are two incommensurable realms of being: material and spiritual. God, who is goodness itself, created the spiritual realm; the Devil or some evil spirit created the material world as a mimicry or corruption of the latter. Our souls are imprisoned in this material world in our material bodies, which are evil. We ensnare other souls through sex, which is evil. There is an eternal war between these two camps.

No Christian could except this view because it denies God’s omnipotence, denies that God created the material world, denies that God is the source of all being. But it does preserve God’s goodness. If we want to good his omnipotence too, then we have to say the material world was created by God. So the evil cannot be God’s fault. It’s ours. We brought sickness, death, floods, draughts, earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, hurricanes – all such evils into the world by freely choosing to disobey God. That we were, in some readings, seduced by a dark angel who did the same, is no excuse.

    Moreover, the injustice and other evils we inflict on each other is because our originally good nature (including our reason) ‘fell’ into something very much like nature as understood by the dualist heresies. Like them Christianity – in one of its understandings – sees the body as corrupted by the Fall as a prison of the soul; sees human life on earth as something to be left behind for Paradise in the afterlife (spiritual of course). But that conflicts with another axiomatic proposition: Through Jesus nature is redeemed, and a whole new need to reconcile and justify axioms opens up. And indeed the very meaning of concepts like ‘omnipotence,’ ‘goodness,’ and ‘redeemed’ creates radical vagueness and ambiguity at the heart of the ‘system’ that theology spins out. 

   And it keeps on until at some points it hardens and becomes ‘dogma’ enforced by some organization, or until the largely ad hoc attempts to reconcile the different axioms among themselves and the axioms with life experience that cannot be sanely denies blows itself out like a tornado (i.e. it ceases to be able to make sense of people’s lives).

  And this whole process – which can absorb reflective people while they are in it – seems to have some analogy to what Popper called a ‘pseudo-science’ or what we think of today as a ‘conspiracy theory.’ [There are essential differences, too.] Theological systems – systems because everything follows from axioms – seem logically resistant to refutation. Experience may test a theology or seeming contradictions between axioms may surface under the pressure of life (of thought), but unlike scientific theories that strive for falsifiability and empirical verification – at least as we imagine them – theology can be structured in ways that allow for continual qualification and reinterpretation in response to challenges. This flexibility enables theological discourse to maintain a fragile semblance of internal coherence. But the process never stops unless thinking stops, which is to say, unless some power just stipulates a certain phase of the process as ‘dogma’ and enforces it. The ability to qualify theological arguments through repeated adjustments serves to protect core beliefs from outright falsification, fostering at best theological dialogue and interpretation within diverse religious traditions – which is interminable unless stopped by decree or mind-death.

And the same structure applies to philosophy.