Matt McMahon's Archive

I really like Viktor Frankl and his ideas. I have been reading Man’s Search for Meaning for the paper and he has become one of my favorite thinkers that I have encountered in this class. His idea of logotherapy shows his redemptive spirit. His ideas about how people must find meaning in their lives offers hope. He had first-hand experience of the depths of human experience, spending three years in the Nazi Concentration Camps but his ability to be able to focus on the hope of seeing his wife again along with the opportunity to rewrite his manuscript, gave him meaning  and by his own admission saved his life. That hope that shines through in his own person story is what makes it so clear that although he is classified among the existentialists, who often fit in the fall, he is a man who looked to help people in their search for meaning and to help them redeem themselves from themselves and their situations. I especially like the quote that we talked about today about how we ask life questions but how life also asks us a question. That question is, “What are you going to do about the situation you are in?”. He says that the only way to answer it is to find meaning to go on and live responsibly. That is the kind of redemptive thoughts that flowed from him throughout his career and life.

Behaviorism at its most basic level is about creation. It seeks to explain how we came to be the way we are.  You can see this theme in the work of all the major behaviorists including Pavlov, Watson and Skinner. However, behaviorism also seems to have a very different perspective on how our own personal creations happen. They do not see human personality shaped by a god or anything like that but instead see it, at least in Skinner’s view, as people who are shaped purely through their experience. He believes that every single quirk or thing that can be observed in a person has behavioral roots. Some experience caused it. Behaviorism also is concerned with creation in the sense that in use during therapy it can be used to create new behaviors as a way to change old less functional behaviors or habits.  Skinner liked to show how using his methods he could create behaviors in pidgeons such as teaching them to turn in circles or made  pidgeons with gambling addictions. He believed that these lessons could and should also be used on humans. This may cause some ethical problems but even so does not negate the fact that it has often proved to be an extremely effective way to do therapy in many cases.

The idea of Pragmatism was first proposed by the American psychologist William James. I had a hard time deciding which category I thought this idea fit under but I decided that it fit best under Redemption.  The reason I think that is that Pragmatism was James’ reaction to the idea that people should try and find if an idea is valid in all cases. He saw this as a flawed system and in that way it is comparable to the fall. He believed that one way to fix this problem was the belief of pragmatism. Pragmatism which says that all ideas should be judged on their usefulness in the current situation counteracted the problem James saw. In this way Pragmatism actually has hope connected to it. According to him there is no way to know for sure if an idea is true but that doesn’t matter as long as it is useful it has value. In fact you can even the redemptive quality of this idea in the life of William James. When he was young he went through spells of depression most of it seeming to come from his issues with the ideas of fatalism and whether or not anyone truly had free will. However when the idea of pragmatism came into his life it helped because he realized that no matter how much he would dwell on it he couldn’t prove whether or not he truly had free will but it was a useful assumption to think that he did so he chose to live his life as if nothing was predetermined and that the choices he made truly did matter. That change in his outlook embodies to me the reason that I believe Pragmatism fits well into redemption.

Soren Kierkegaard was both a philosopher and a theologian. While he was one of the first major voices who seemed to fit into the existentialist mold he also was a devout Christian, which was rare among the existentialists, especially later on. I feel that he fits into the category of Redemption for several reasons. He exemplified redemption in his own life from rejecting religion after his father told of his marital unfaithfulness when Soren was young. He then returned to faith when he was 25. Existentialism does not seem like a theory that necessarily speaks of hope and redemption but the way Kierkegaard explained it is. You can see Redemption in how he explained faith as well as his Stages. He tries to redeem the faith of his time which was very much in the mold of Luther and therefore was quite rigid. He came in with the spirit of a Romantic and spoke in terms of having a Love affair with God. He believed that faith shouldn’t be based on rules in regulations but instead the individual having a relationship with God. This in many ways sounds like the way much of the church feels now. Another way that Kierkegaard fits the redemption mold is the stages he thinks people go through. He thinks they start out in the aesthetic stage, in which they broken and hedonistic. They search for pleasure. The next level is the ethical stage where they make their choices on ethical principles but they are principles learned from others. Finally is the religious stage which is described as the highest level of existence. This is where they are accepting of their responsibility and have a personal relationship with God. This exemplifies an attempt at redemption because Kierkegaard is disagreeing with many others of the time who say that faith is weakness he is trying to bring faith back into the equation saying that not only is valid but in fact, the most valid way to live.

St. Thomas Aquinas has been one of the most influential voices in the history of the Church as well as having some important things to say about subjects that fall under the field of psychology. I believe that while he said many important things I think his ideas about the Reconciliation of Faith and Reason fit him into the category of Redemption. He shows Redemption because he is able to take two viewpoints that most people of the time thought were totally opposite and was able to show that in fact they were able to work together. This shows redemption in the sense that while their was a broken situation that led to struggles between groups the situation could be renewed and made better. This helped Christians who felt like they had to turn off their brains when they went to church because Aquinas made the point that no matter how the truth is found it is still pointing you to God. He believed that the way to best understand the world was to use both methods. You could observe things around you and use reason to try and explain how they worked but he believed that they only worked when talking about particulars but not universals.

I believe Pythagoras and his followers, the Pythagoreans taught ideas that fit well into the category of creation. Much of their teaching seems to answer the question of “Where are we?” Their teachings about how the world is governed by indisputable laws of math speaks to their desire to explain how the world works. They explain that  everything is interrelated by these rules of math. The most well known of these is the Pythagorean theorem, but while it is the most well known it is only one of the many mathematical laws that flow throughout the natural world in Pythagoras’s opinion. I am interested in these ideas because while Pythagoras was by no means a Christian,these ideas could be used to make a strong argument for God, like we talked about in class on Wednesday. The idea of eternal laws of math make an easy jump to an eternal God.

Another creation question that they talk about is, “Is this world real?” Pythagoras theorized that there were two worlds the physical and the abstract. The physical is the world is where we live but according to him the abstract is better because it is where these Laws truly function.

I believe that this math guided world that the Pythagoreans espoused informs a creation view.