2. Doctrinal Beliefs and Christian Existence

2.      Doctrinal Beliefs and Christian Existence

     Whitehead’s analysis of basic features of reality has religious implications congenial to Christian faith. These features characterized all human experience at this prereflective (prethematized)level. 

1) the desirability that Doctrine conform with prethematized experience

2) the inevitability of selective emphasis introduced by doctrine

3) The implication of these ideas for the grounds for belief

4) the relation of Christian doctrine to history.

Doctrine and experience

     Doctrine is a form given to consciously held beliefs. Such beliefs are derived from induction, deduction, and authority as well as from immediate experience, and there is great diversity among them.

     Belief at this level must be distinguished from the complex of prereflective beliefs that we all hold in common, since we all immediately apprehend a common reality in every moment of our experience. → these deeper beliefs are originally preconscious and prereflective. //experience 는 정확한 것인가?

     One’s conscious beliefs may conflict with what is known to be true at the prereflective level.→//당연히 질문이 따른다. question??//

     Efficient causation vs. constant conjunction → the experience of causation as real influence cannot be effaced.

     It is now widely agreed that saving faith, the kind of faith that alone can bring wholeness, is primarily a matter of the basic emotions, attitudes and commitments from which one’s behavior follows. That is, faith is fundamentally a mode of existence.  

     The recognition of a prereflective level of knowledge, which includes knowledge of deity, does relativize the importance of conscious beliefs. The elements of this prereflective knowledge affect our attitudes, emotions, and behavior, regardless of what we consciously believe.  

     Hence, whether we consciously believe in efficient causation or not, our total life-stance will still reflect our prereflective knowledge of its reality. Our conscious beliefs do not efface this knowledge and its consequences for our attitudes, emotions, and decisions.

     We all know, at the prereflective level, that there is a sacred reality, whose existence is supremely valuable, and that our lives finally have meaning because of our relation to this holy reality.

     Hence it is not only our rereflective faith in God and the value of life that cannot be effaced but also the effects of God’s activity on us. The Holy Spirit in the universe has its impact upon our mode of existence, whether or not we consciously believe in it.

     Conscious beliefs are not all-controlling.

     We are sometimes led to think of conscious beliefs in this way by the great inconsistency observed between avowed opinions and actual practice.

     Whitehead saw ideas as having a force of their own such that, once they have been consciously accepted, they work toward their own fuller embodiment. →doctrine that all human beings are ensouled arose among the Greeks in barely recognized tension with the accepted institution of slavery. → doctrine survived and was assimilated into Christianity, where it gradually heightened the sense of the inappropriateness of slavery. → finally, the humanitarian movement of the eighteenth century, combined with a religious sense of the kinship of men, has issued in the settled policy of the great civilized governments to extirpate slavery form the world.//노예제도가 기독교 때문에 없어졌다고 하기 어렵다.   

     Each individual moment of experience involves a complex mutual adjustment of its aspects, and consciously held beliefs play their part in this adjustment.

     In this sense doctrine has a certain priority in the Christian life.  → this claim needs clarification.

1)     The priority of conscious beliefs is not genetic. →Consciousness is a derivative element in experience, not its foundation. In each moment of experience, one’s emotions, purposes, valuations, and preconscious awareness of the outer world are genetically prior to the emergence of any conscious judgements. → however, a moment of experience is an atomic totality, in which there is a mutual sensitivity among all the elements. →just as the quality and content of consciousness is conditioned by the other elements, these other elements- the emotions, purposes and valuations – are themselves conditioned by the emergence of conscious beliefs.

2)     Consciousness has cumulative effect. → hence, the emotions, purposes, and valuation with which a moment of experience begins may well be derived most importantly from previous conscious beliefs, valuations, purposes and emotions. It is for this reason that, in long run, the individual’s affective attitudinal purposive behavioral stance in life can be dominantly influenced by his or her conscious judgments.

     So, conscious beliefs are neither all determining nor epiphenomenal. → for sake of psychic wholeness and consistency of action, it is important for our conscious beliefs to correspond with the prereflective beliefs involved in our primordial experience.