Charles and I argue about "religion" although the arguments are really about, on my end, several other, related, topics. First is epistemology - we cannot discuss what we know about the world, and therefore religion, until we know what we know and how we know it. The second subject is cosmology, which I will apply in a rather slipshod manner to mean merely "what sort of universe are we living in?" The reasons I cannot accept Christianity fall into on or the other of these categories. The details of Christianity are of only mild importance.
I will make an attempt to sketch out the broad outlines of these reasons here. Epistemology first. There are two sub-strokes to this argument - the first is the more general and the second flows from making some conditional assumptions about the epistemology presented in Christianity and asking whether Christianity seems "reasonable" under those assumptions.
First things first. What is my position with respect to being? I say "my" and not "our" because establishing that anything else in the universe is of the same "kind" as me, whatever that means, is something for much further down the philosophical road. For now we begin with just this particular "thing" being without concerning ourselves whether any other particular thing "is" the way I find myself to be.
I find myself existing, but what does that mean? It is unfortunately unclear. The things which I can say about this state with anything like certainty are that 1) Denying that the existence "is" does not cause the sensation of existence to cease; 2) Denying that I exist also leaves me immediately in a difficult position logically, because "who denies?" if I deny my own existence; 3) there are things other than me, by which I mean that I cannot anticipate by self reflection all aspects of my conscious experience. It is possible that all "existence" is the product of "my brain," whatever that is, but I still consider that to "other than myself" philosophically. "My self" means here "that which is". My self would continue to be even if I could not recall, for instance, that my first memory is of a giant clay colored ant-pile across the gray chain-linked fence of my pre-school or the exact plump tulip petal of my first real kiss. These things, as far as I can tell at this moment, have no more objective reality than the images in a film. My senses, my memories, so on and so forth, could have a variety of sources unrelated to any substantive world. I make some kind of immaterial effort and they appear before me with some vividness, but vividness alone is not evidence for reality. Novels are often vivid and describe things which are not "real". What I cannot deny is that these things come from something other than me - they arrive from somewhere else. To watch a young woman clog out in the country was in some sense no more a matter of my own volition than the upwelling of sadness from nowhere I feel when losing love. Both were upon me as experiences, and neither could be avoided as they happened. A most interesting "thing" besides the mote of my existence is time, this sensation of a medium in which things happen and through which I pass.
How can we proceed? Being seems to have not provided us with the tools to distinguish it from a maelstrom of false impressions and imaginary memories. Honestly I don't believe at this point in the discussion we can really convince ourselves of the reality of the external universe or our "internal universe." We can only move forward with thinking because to not do so is at the very least just as much of a waste of time. So I move forward making the conditional assumption, more for the purposes of amusement than anything else, that my senses and mind report to me things which are real, by which I at least mean "fixed" in some sense. That the nightmare I had of the attic fan being haunted in my first home is a real experience, corresponding to something that actually "passed through" this body at some point. That the sensation I have right now of a tooth pick sliding loudly between my two front teeth corresponds to some "thing" following some rules "out there" which is consistent enough to learn about. That learning is itself possible. These are assumptions - but they are conditional. The universe might very well decohere into a kaleidoscope of sensations tomorrow or in the very next moment and under those circumstances I would have to re-evaluate my assumptions, just as I might suddenly realize the fact of dreaming within a dream.
In other words, "I appear to be, therefore I might as well think." Descartes's tautology might be comforting, but it gets us nowhere and I prefer to acknowledge that fact more directly.
So here we are being and thinking and assuming that there is some regularity in the external world. This brings us into the realm of cosmology. And the first place we kiss gently the subject of religion. Two kisses, in fact.
It is interesting that the scientific world view flows naturally from this epistemology. Science is the business of making conditional assumptions, and the first such assumption - the mother hypothesis - is that "things will make sense." Science has not yet encountered a nut which, able to crack it, has born fruit which called into question this fundamental assumption. Many a youthful hypothesis has fallen to the depredations of callous reality, but in each case we fall back and say "well, that isn't true, but this must make some kind of sense" and in all cases, some kind of sense has been made. Some questions are beyond our material or intellectual ability to probe, and so are left open (perhaps temporarily, perhaps forever - the universe made me no promise of understanding when I found myself being a moment ago), but it is important to note that nothing we can get into the lab refuses to submit, ultimately, to sense. This is a remarkable property of the content of being. There is certainly nothing in our Quiver of Fundamental Ideas (described above) to imply directly that this would be true. The Remarkable Consistency of Things is the second wonderful surprise of being, the first being being.
From this consistency - from the mere assumption of this consistency, has flowed a concussive wave of "knowledge" by which we may as well mean a giant catalog of consistencies. Things can be described in terms of position, direction, energy, and momentum. Electrons have this particular charge and mass. A hydrogen atom behaves this way. The rainbow I saw arching between two peaks in the alps, a sick heat in my heart, is the conspiracy of a trillion rain-drops bending fleet photons. Oh the beauty of this catalog, the magnificent fixed variety. The blue sky! The blue sky of scattered light! A heart could fill and break and mend and fill again a thousand times on it all. And miracle of miracles, this catalog is built on nothing but the silver sliver of a thought, that things ought to be predictable, comprehensible, sensible.
This is the first reason to discount Christianity - because we do not need it. The universe is quite believable if we merely assume that some prior provides nothing more than the possibility that things be consistent. This is next to nothing. The hypothesis that this prior source of order is a "person" is, to the naive, scientific mind, a kind of maudlin clown of an idea. An effigy of man attempting to embrace an infinitely more broad and beautiful universe.
Have we explained everything? Certainly, obviously, not. But neither does Christianity. Christianity plucks from the fertile forest of the universe all the questions which we cannot face and stuffs them together into a scarecrow and labels it "God." I felt no more "sure" of things when I tried to believe in God than I do now. I had the same mass of questions, though perhaps they were turned sideways or upside down.
This is the first kiss.
The second kiss involves the fact that wrapping up all the questions this way does nothing but twist the fabric of thought into a grotesque, nightmare landscape of pitfalls and peaks for the adventurous mind. I will deal with this kiss later.
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15 comments:
Addendum:
"I appear to be, so I might as well think." - the situation is actually more than that, as anyone who has meditated probably knows. It is actually very difficult to stop thinking, even if you want to.
wow, Martin Heidegger anyone?
more like Martin Heidegger, although less precise and too much emotion
I don't believe that art is a separate adventure from philosophy.
Appropriate that you talk about a scarecrow there towards the end, because the God you describe (as with most materialist versions of who/what they think God is) is quite the strawman, and VERY easy to knock down, for a crow or otherwise.
It reminds me of a slightly more meta-version of the "bearded man in the sky" argument, as in "Oh come ON, you can't possibly believe there's a bearded man in the sky controlling everything!"
Which is something like telling a physicist, "Oh COME on, you can't possibly believe that the letters E, M, C or the number 2 govern the laws of the conservation of energy!!"
The scarecrow is only a bit of imagery. The real issue is that God, whatever other things he is in Christian theology, represents a cognitive stop - many questions are simply nullified by the invocation of the Divinity.
I might say "If order must be created and God is the representation of order, then where did this order come from?" and someone will say "Obviously those rules don't apply to God."
All sorts of questions are thus "suspended" in the notion that reason does not apply to statements about God. Yet we can easily split up the qualities of God and distribute them more naturally. For instance it is clear that some "thing" must enable the universe but it is not clear that that thing must be a Person - by which I mean a thing with a mind. All experience points to minds being entirely material phenomenon of a very particular kind and so imagining that a mind is prior to the universe is a bit strange. It is better to let that question of "what is a mind," roughly, or questions about minds, live here, in the world of physical verifiable phenomenon, and to delay postulating a mind at the beginning of all things until there is some really compelling reason to.
There isn't such a reason (obviously as far as I am able to ascertain).
First of all, we should agree on (or at least discuss) what it means to be 'reasonable' should we not? if we get stuck on reason then there is not much use in moving further.
Toups, you say that "the scarecrow is only a bit of imagery" as if to dismiss the statement. If we take all language to be representative of something that is, but not the thing itself, then isn't all language "a bit of imagery"? In any case, I still say that it's telling that you make a scarecrow metaphor as part of setting up your strawGod.
It is a common mistake to say things such as, "God is the representation of order" or "We make God into a person because that's how we think of ourselves." It reminds me of a statement that you once made to the tune of "Only God can be unjust."
And I said then, as I say now, that this reductionist view of God (surely held by some believers, I don't doubt that) is looking at theology precisely backwards. It is not that we think God has some characteristics that remind us of personhood, but that what we call personhood is reflective of some characteristic of God. Order is not something that we notice God doing at times, it is that our recognition of order comes from God, and the way the God-created world operates (the trite expression "cleanliness is Godliness" comes from just this notion, of course). I am not attempting to exhaust these particular topics here, of course.
And even saying that God can be unjust is at least inverted, because what we call justice is that which corresponds to what would be or is the economics, if you will, of our relationship with God. God can only be "just" because "just" is how we describe that way in which God interacts or relates to the world and us in it. We might say God is unfair, but that is because fairness is in relation to one another, and our inter-personal relations, whereas justice is (or should be) in relation to God.
To attempt to get into the God postulate itself now is more than a comment can handle, but it is telling that the ancient philosophers such as Aristotle arrived at the God concept often with little or no cultural referent. And Aristotle in particular did not set out to prove God, or anything of the sort, but arrived at God by attempting to determine how we javascript:void(0)humans might be happy, something that strikes me every time I think of it. It is perfectly possible and can be intellectually honest to find God without looking for Him (I suppose some would say that what happens there is that he finds you).
Re:"javascript:void(0)humans"
I think I have revealed too much.
S,
What I mean by a bit of imagery is that the force of the argument is somewhat less than the vividness of the presentation. In any case, you accuse me of having a reductionism view of God which is not quite true, since I don't believe in God. But I do have a reductionism view of The Universe because having such a view has ultimately been the most successful of human strategies in making sense of it all.
We are getting ahead of ourselves but I'd like to address the issue of the "personhood" of God, because to a large degree the issue of whether the "prior thing which enables the universe" has the "property" of "personhood" determines whether I am an atheist or an deist.
There is no "property" personhood in the sense of some ideal conception of things. As we've discussed before, I don't even believe in "ideal forms." I believe in phenomenon which may or may not bear to one another a particular degree of similarity. A "person" is not an a capital "I" Idea. Persons are very particular kinds of informational phenomenon being computed quite manifestly on a very particular kind of material substrate called a brain. Not only is there no credible evidence of "extra-natural" phenomenon underlying the experience of consciousness, there is not any information which suggests we need such a phenomenon. The picture is complete and satisfying, if some details are not yet filled in. If you were to open my brain what you would find would not be a luminous orb or some "fundamental particle of consciousness" which might imply that somehow consciousness was built into the fabric of reality. What you would find is a mess of biological computing devices crammed together by the controlled madness of evolution, neither designed nor optimal in any obvious sense.
Every object in the universe which exhibits intelligence is directly correlated with objects that have similar properties. There is no evidence that "intelligence" is any kind of "fundamental property" such as the conservation of energy or momentum that we might expect to have some essential relationship with the enabler of all being, even if we believe that such relationships exist at all, which there is no reason to assume. With respect, the notion that the enabling condition for being is a "person" is just not a hypothesis I can find reasonable. It certainly could be true, but we could just as easily imagine that the enabling condition for being had an "asparagus nature" or a "mycological nature" (which is, by the way, close to what Paul Stamets believes). The fungal phenomenon is just as complex as the human one, and there is hardly much to distinguish the two hypotheses given our current grasp of the universe.
I'm not in the business of advancing hypothesis which I don't need to advance for any obvious reason and I imagine that if the God of Christianity existed, He would not expect me to be in that business, if only because the number of unconstrained hypotheses is infinite and He would have made my life finite.
This leaves us with the question of why people routinely advance this hypothesis. As you know, this is not really an important question. The fact that many people advance a hypothesis has utterly no bearing in a philosophical sense on its truth given that any particular person can be wrong and people have, in the past and in the present, been wrong en masse before. Never the less, I think there are compelling reasons derived from the study of man as an organism which give us enough of a foothold explanation, and it boils down to the fact that humans conceive of the world in terms of a giant consciousness because we perceive the world as tiny consciounesses, and consciousness is intimately part of our experience of things (is our experience of things, really). But our perspective no more determines the nature of the universe than the apparent size of a man down the street makes him crushable between our thumbs.
Toups,
Does one have the luxury of simply believing or not believing in ideal forms? Wouldn't they either exist or not exist? And if they do not exist, what does that imply about one's ability to reason?
Ideal forms are a solution looking for a problem. When they were conceived, the problem was that people could recognize various objects as belonging to categories and the process by which this occurred seemed to require some large sense of "what things actually are."
These days we know how you recognize a chair for a chair. A series of neural networks analyze various components of your sensory input for properties and if enough properties are operant in that stream, they eventually activate a network of neurons corresponding to a fuzzy category of "things I call chairs so that I can communicate with other people." There is no need to postulate an abstract chair being anywhere. The notion of chair is much better explained as the activity of some neurons in your brain.
In other words, I am not going to take seriously the notion of "ideal forms" until you give me a single piece of tangible evidence that I need them to understand some phenomenon in the world around me.
So you are saying that chairs are chairs, and one chair is not better than another or closer to the ideal chair than another (since no ideal chair exists). And so it follows that one might perceive a chair as being better than another, but that is really only her preference. Is that right? (feel free to begin a new post).
Junior Varsity T.,
Just to be clear, I never suggested that you have a reductionist view of God, but that your view of how other people think about God is reductionist. That is, you find God to be untenable because of X and then you assign X as a pivotal factor in all belief in God.
It's something like saying "My opponent declares that straw is a fine material for making a scarecrow, but clearly here, you can see this scarecrow entirely made of straw neither scares crows, nor is even able to stand convincingly in this cornfield. A quaint notion, straw, but nevertheless one that we must dismiss," while your opponent keeps trying to tell you that straw is merely one element of the scarecrow he is talking about.
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