Help Remaking America by George Shollenberger, Idea 100 + XXXIII (Intelligent Design, XVI)

The works of Susanne Langer and Ernst Cassirer represent some of the early efforts in the U.S. to understand our national English language as a symbolic language and understand these symbols and their use in life. The work of another person sought the same understandings. This person was Kenneth Burke (1897-1993). He was a poet, writer, and literary critic nan saw man as a symbol-using animal. (click) . Burke's pic is on the left.

Burke says that, symbols can reveal truths. But he also says that symbols can produce different ways of life for man. Thus, contrary to materialists and theists, human life cannot be explained with logic. Yet, for over the last three years, materialistic and atheistic logicians have argued wrongly that my book, "The First Scientific Proof of God," is filled with non sequiturs. So Cassirer, Langer, Burke, and I reject materialism and atheism, which is the belief that all human knowledge can be completed by the physical sciences.

When I reject materialism and theism, my view of nonliving and living things is new. In this newness, all nonliving things become infrastructure for all living things. Further, spiritual atoms become the foundation of all things. Since all spiritual atoms are independent, all formed things become functional things. Since all spirits have independence, the body does not contain the spirits, like a glass contains water. Although an infinite God created all things, God does not contain the spiritual atoms. However, when human spirits develop lives and interact with each other in life, these interactions are contained.

When people develop lives and interact, Burke says that these lives are dramatic. In a particular life, the drama portrays this life with its conflicts and emotions. Since the people in the drama develop motives, Burke says that any complete statement about the people’s motives will offer some answers to these five questions: (1) the act (what was done); (2) the scene (what or where the act was done); (3) an agent (who did it); an agency or a means (how the actor did it); and (5) why (purpose or end). As seen, the lives of humans are very complex activities. So, human life cannot be explained by physical science and logic as materialists and theists argue. On the subject of life as a drama, see ‘A Grammar of Motives’ and ‘Rhetoric of Motives’ by Kenneth Burke.

When reading Adolf Hitler’s book on 'Mein Kampf,' Burke predicted and announced the Jewish Holocaust. See ‘The Philosophy of Literary Form,’ P. 191-220. But, governments did not response to Burke’s prediction.

The symbolic languages of every nation are flawed. Unfortunately, these flaws create many ideologies that are nothing more than personal perspectives, which are lived as truths. The development and use of symbols must become more perfect.