God, the rewarder

"...without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him” (Romans 11:6).

I am getting through Mircea Eliade's seminal work, The Sacred and the Profane. Much like Rene Girard, Eliade makes the convincing case that historically, while Wikipedia will tell you monotheism has not always existed, humans have actually always worshipped a supreme being -- and by pleasing this God, humans always believed they could and would achieve favorability. Despite the different traditions (some involving polytheism, animalism, etc.) the internal impulses that have always existed in women and men have been towards one true God. The ways history has revealed how we have aimed to please this supreme God -- many ways barbaric, genocidal and horrifying -- is testament to this impulse. 

When God was more fully revealed to humankind 2000 years or so ago, so was the only way we draw the reward of God: Through the divine, cosmic currency of Faith. 

Even Darwin says go to church

Tyler VanderWeele's group at Harvard just published http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2521827  a comprehensive study indicating longevity is correlated with spirituality.

I know Vanderweele because he is an outspoken Christian, but he is also one of the leading epidemiologist in the world.

It's an interesting study and adds credence to the idea that religion gives a Darwinian survival advantage; more importantly than this data, it is well documented that Theists have more children than Atheists.

Loss of another great philosopher - Hilary Putnam

Not too long since one of the great contemporary Theist philosophers, Dallas Willard, passed on, I was saddened to read about the death of another: Hilary Putnam died in Boston at the age of 89. Putnam was most famous for his thought experiments like "Twin Earth" and  "brain in a vat",  but I suspect from what I could gather he was most respected among philosophers for his willingness to change his mind. Academia, strangely thought to be full of "free-thinkers", is no less guilty of being closed-minded as people in any other field.

Putnam's willingness to have an open and honest mind probably could not be divorced as a jack-of-all-trades philosopher; there was rarely an area of philosophy that he did not write or think about. 

From legal positivism where he initially studied, during a long career teaching at Harvard, Hilary Putnam eventually became convinced that Theism was not only a competing worldview, but was the correct one. In 1994, at the age of 68, Hilary Putnam had his own bar mitzvah.

Putnam found solace in another well known Jewish philosopher, Franz Rosenzweig, who, like Putnam, came to his Jewish faith late in his life. According to Benajamin Balint, Putnam understood Rosenzweig's thoughts on metaphysics as an "exaggerated form of a disease in which everyone is susceptible -- the disease is borne by those who substitute words that have no religious content because they have no internal relation to a genuine religion life."  This easily resonates. 

One other note: Putnam's obituary in the New York Times had an amazing story line in it I was unaware of. In an amazing coincidence, or not, perhaps the only more famous philosopher at Harvard, Noam Chomsky, knew Putnam for 75 years -- since they were classmates in high school in Philadelphia.