Dear Organlearners,
Leslie Lax <leslax@cnx.net> writes:
> I have struggled with this thing called faith ever since my early teens
> and am struggling still. For many years I called myself an atheist until
> a good friend and colleague commented that he was not sure he would have
> the arrogance to be an atheist. So, I must be a committed agnostic. To
> make sense of this statement, I will offer the following:
Dear Les,
Thank you for your kind response. It affords me to reflect on my own
learning on a level which seldom happens.
Like you I have also struggled with this thing called faith all my
life. I find it most extraordinary that you and I, seemingly at
opposite ends, both struggle with faith.
Do we struggle with faith because faith is something fictitious and
not authetic? In that case it is better to scrap all faith from my
existence. But when I do that, that which remains cannot sustain
itself any more. I may then just as well die.
As I have written before, faith is for me an emergent of learning
which thus sustains my learning. As an emergent of learning, the
adjoints of faith like happiness and curiosity makes my learning
worthwhile. Thus your words
> I am of the opinion that "faith" in learning is a necessary condition
> for sustainable systems and is thus implicit in much of the discussion
> of systems. In this light, I believe that faith is an integral part of the
> learning organisation as a sustainable system.....
gives me great joy.
Some people have told me that faith is something which we cannot
think about and thus have knowledge of. If I were to lable them,
they would fit the traditional, etymological definition of agnostic
(Greek: "a"=without, "gnosis"=knowledge). But I am very happy that
you have qualified your "agnostic" by referring to Kirkegaard.
"The important thing... is ... the subjective truth of one's own
commitment in the face of an objective uncertainty."
I see it differently and rather complex. Reality, for me, consists of
complementary duals, the "reality outside me" and the "reality inside
me". Much of my life goes into harmonising these duals, to let each
one grow into the other. Truth is essential to reality. Thus I also
have to harmonise the "truth outside me" and the "truth inside me".
You will notice that I carefully avoid the words objective and
subjective. The reason is that when I discovered during 1982-83
empirically that entropy production also happens in the world of
mind, I became aware of a "truth outside me" which had profound
ramifications on the "truth inside me". It is better known as a
"paradigm shift" or a "transformation of consciousness". I became
aware of things, some which puzzled me immensely. One of those things
is that "objective" and "subjective" can switch roles! (It is like a
chemical reaction having two reactions: one forward and one reverse.)
This brings a mind-boggling perspective for hermeneutics.
Entropy production is not something that we can give a cursory glance
and then go on with other things. It is the cause of chaos and order,
of birth and death, of immaturity and senescence. Thus I became aware
that what I often thought to be uncertainty was rather immaturity.
Just like a child is not less human than an adult, immaturity is not
less authentic than maturity.
The next part of your writing which I now will quote, rings bells of
truth within me:
> ... it is my firmly held conviction that as lifelong learners we must
> allow for the possibility of all possibilities. (This may be the important
> part of wholeness?)
No, I do not think so. The "all possibilities" have to do with the
sixth essentiality "otherness" while "the possibility of all
possibilities" have to do with the seventh essentiality "openness".
(We will get to this one in our series, if God permits.) I know that
it is difficult even to think of a whole which is open because then
something else must be beyond the whole. But one way to overcome this
difficulty is to think of the whole as something which has to grow.
> Thus, if I am an atheist, I do not allow the possibility of
> the existence of God and am therefore arrogant in my exclusion. As an
> agnostic, I am able to continue exploring my beliefs while accepting
> others' beliefs (as beliefs, not truths), providing room for dialogue and
> the emergence of shared meaning.
Les, in my own systems thinking, I make many careful distinctions
(not fragmentations!). One of them is the subsystem faith. In this
subsystem a make many distinctions between the various "articles of
my faith" (personal beliefs). My primary distinction is between
articles concerning God and articles concerning the Creation. (It is
almost like the distiction between the plant and animal kindoms in
biology.) In the case of other people who do not want to have beliefs
in a godhead, they would have another primary (encompassing, most
important) distinction. There are others (among the post-modernists)
who believe that the faith system should have no distinctions, i.e.,
it should be a plasmodial or one-element faith system. Lastly, there
are others who believe that there should be no faith system, i.e. the
have an empty faith system.
My primary distinction between articles of faith concerning God and
articles concerning the Creation is also the distinction which I have
to question most and which confuses me the easiest.
Let me give you an example. Like you I believe I have to accept other
people's beliefs as essential to their lives and as part of the
reality outside me. I place this article under Creation. It harmonise
with what I believe to be a powerful message in the Bible -- God
wants all people to live. I place this article under God. Because God
wants all people to live, "He gives rain" over the righteous and the
wicked. The universal law of "entropy production" is the primordial
cause of all outcomes, even rain. This is also an article of faith
which I place under Creation. On the other hand, God takes care of
His Creation through Universal Laws, is an article of faith which I
place under God. Thus the "He gives rain" does not give me problems.
But what about the distinction "righteous" and "wicked"? Where does
this distinction come from? How much had God as Creator had to do
with wickedness? Is the floods like that which China is now
experiencing and in which thousands of people have drowned not also
from God? How does all these deaths harmonize with the article "God
wants all people to live"? Let us investigate this question
My late father lived as a boy next to the Vaal River near Christiana.
Often he had to save cattle from floods, a work dangerous for even
adult men. When I was a young boy, whenever we went near any river,
he always warned me: "Never ever trust a river." In December 1966 me
and my wife (then my fiancee) visited may parents camping near Parys
at the Vaal River. As usual my Dad had selected a high ground some
distance from the river. We saw how he warned other people when they
parked their caravans next to the river and how they laughed at him.
Two nights later a heavy rain fell in the catchment area and
afterwards the river was in full flood. It washed away several of
those caravans next to the river. He helped to save the very people
who he warned not to trust the river.
But let us get back to the Bible. It tells us that we should trust
only God. (This is a very important article of my faith which I will
place under God. See also my reply to Winfired Deijmann). It entails
that we cannot trust even such a thing as a river to stay the same.
So if a river comes down in flood and people drown, is it God who is
wicked, or is it people who act irresponsible or ignore learning?
Thus it is not surprising that the following is an article of my
faith which I place under Creation: People need to learn all their
lives about all things which their lives relate to.
Les, you also quote the following
> "The fundamental premise of constructivism is that we humans are self
> regulating organisms who live from the inside out. As a philosophical
> counterpoint to naive realism, constructivism suggests that we are
> proactive co-creators of the reality to which we respond. Underlying this
> concept is that perception is an active process in which we 'bring forth
> distinctions'. It is our idiosyncratic distinctions which form the
> structure of the world(s) which each of us inhabits." (Alan Stewart -
> http://bart.northnet.com.au/~pfell/construc.html )
My belief is somewhat differently, but in the same direction. I do
not belief in constructivism because of its "ism" -- it does not
account for the whole picture. Creativity can be constructive or
destructive. With respect to the "reality outside me", I try to be as
constructive as possible and try to avoid destructive acts. But with
respect to the "reality inside me" I had to destroy much of what I
had constructed previously in order to emerge to higher qualities. (I
had to "unorganise" as Simon Buckingham would call it.) In other
words, with respect to the reality outside me, I follow
constructivism, but with respect to the reality inside me I follow
controlled destructivism (deconstructivism).
The seven essentialities helps me to understand why emergences
(constructive creativity) happens either impaired or not at all. It
will be the case when one or more of the essentialities are impaired.
They also helps me to understand destructive creativity. Before my
discovery of the seven essentialities, I found it diffcult to destroy
something within me because I did not know how to do it. Now it
happens easily. I just hunt for the impaired essentiality which led
to the thing which I have to destroy or reform.
> This notion of faith of course extends beyond belief in God, and as At
> argues, has important implications for learning, organisational and
> personal. " We may think of faith as a first order emergent of learning
> and as a second order emergent of creativity."
>
> In my reading of Critical Systems Thinking, and related ideas it is true
> that I have not come across any explicit discussion of faith as systemic
> belief. But without stretching the point too far, I am of the opinion
> that "faith" in learning is a necessary condition for sustainable systems
> and is thus implicit in much of the discussion of systems. In this light,
> I believe that faith is an integral part of the learning organisation as a
> sustainable system; faith that changes with changing "subjective truth[s]
> of one's own commitment in the face of an objective uncertainty".
I am very happy that you have taken up this lead and proceeded so far
with it. In my reply to Winfried Deijman I have said it somewhat
differently, namely that faith is essential to our humaneness. In
terms of phenomenology, if we think our faith away, we became
inhumane.
People often say that they will defend another person's right to
express an opinion, even if they do not agree with such an opinion. I
have heard much less people going further, saying that they will
defend another person's right to express a belief, even if they do
not agree with such a belief.
I have a problem with theologists who say that faith is a gift of
God, but cannot explain what they mean by it. My articles of faith
which I place under God are explicit gifts of God. I obtained them
from the Bible where they are free for anybody to find.
But there is also a deeper issue involved. These articles of faith
concerning God as well as the articles of faith concerning the
creation, are "content" without "form". They are merely information
like all the other information which we have to deal with from day to
day. To sustain them as "articles of faith", they have to be "carried
by a suitable container" -- a "form". What is this "form"? It is
exactly the "thing" which I refer to by "We may think of faith as a
first order emergent of learning and as a second order emergent of
creativity."
Why did I place the word "thing" in quotation marks? Did you think
about the "thing" as a "being"? Well, for me, it is not a "being",
but a "becoming". But I have to use words such as "faith" and
"creativity" which I think connect better to your context. If I had
to reformulate that sentence just for myself, I would have written it
as
"I am thinking of believing as a first order emergent of learning and
as a second order emergent of creating."
> Thanks for the space to think "aloud".
The same here, Les. The authentic dialogue which employs a diversity
of natural languages is for me one of the enticing wonders of
Creation. It is one of the things which humans used to do openly when
they originally lived in the Garden of Eden. Maybe this is the deeper
reason why Internet has come to stay -- to create among other things
a virtual Garden in which we can have dialogue openly.
Thanks Rick for supplying us with the opportunity to do so.
> (At, while it is true that the written dialogue has more permanence over
> the spoken dialogue, I do think that this can add to dialogue by allowing
> room for reflection - we can always revisit the conversation for further
> reflection and perhaps contribution.)
I would not have written the above in brackets. I might even have
written it capital letters.
Spoken dialogue has a wave-like nature as I have explained in another
contribution. Unlike the written dialogue, it reminds me very much
of a saying in Afrikaans which you might have encountered: "As dit
pap reen, moet jy skep." Its direct translation into English would
be: "If it rains porridge, then you must scoop". This saying is used
to remind a person to make use of "fleeting opportunities". The
perminancy (lack of "becoming" in the essentiality liveness) of the
written dialogue makes us careless so that the "written dialogue"
immerge (reduce) into "written monologues".
Best wishes
--At de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre for Education University of Pretoria Pretoria, South Africa email: amdelange@gold.up.ac.za
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>