Sugar crystal in polarised light, photo by the brillliant niknak3
From what vantage point can you see God if it isn't from a vantage point above God, surveying God, so to speak? There is an implied dualism in the demand to see empirical evidence for the existence of God; between the observer and the observed.
How can you see your own head without a mirror? If you are God stuff and if everything is God stuff then you are looking right at God from God not from some vantage point. If I were a theologian I could pronounce that God and his creation are one. Except of course humans are not bright enough at this stage to encompass it and probably never will be.
The atheists real argument is: 'Just enjoy all the stuff, learn how to use it and don't worry about where it comes from.' Ants in a sugar bowl.
Curiosity about God is the original scientific impulse. The Ionian natural philosophers started off by asking the question. 'What is this God stuff all around us?' The questions asked of nature were religious questions before they became scientific questions.
Hesiod categorised the Gods in his compendiums and Homer gave them narrative roles, and then there was Pherecydes' reification and abstraction of God forces. Thales was the step between Pherecydes (his contemporary) and Pherycedes transformed Gods into God forces, more abstract and less anthropomorphic, and Pythagoras was his student.
Investigating these forces was the birth of Greek science. Pythagoras took the leap by seeing that there were truths independent of material processes. It was an investigation of the 'mind' of God that got the old polytheists going and this investigation of the divine reality kicked off scientific inquiry, and it was the assumption of meaning and purpose and order in the natural.
Of course the assumption of the natural philosophers was correct. There was meaning order and logic in everything they looked at. Heat death of the universe or no heat death, the universe is a very ordered place. The fact that it is self-ordering is suspicious.
The only difference between the pre-classical and modern assumption of the Goddity of things is hubris. Once we can understand things and the processes associated with them, we think we can account for them. Untrue. And we are capable of actually reverse engineering very little of it. Humanity is a bit like a weatherman who thinks he brings the weather. 'Today I am sorry but all we have to offer you are gray clouds, but tomorrow I promise you a bright and sunny day.' Do you need to look for God? Not if you are an ant. Just carry on licking at the sugar.'
The truth is everything about us points us in certain directions. Our identical twin is married to a woman called Frangipani and we both drive a Citroen Maserati and work in the fishing industry and have a flat on Plum Island. Isn't it surplus to requirements to look about for God if we are survival machines driven to reproduce and succeed? Certainly we should look at those who manufacture personifications of Goddity with great suspicion, whether these are inspired or not. These personifications are devices to harness divinity as if it were electricity or horsepower and to use it to drive forward conquests and conformity.
Shelley, for example, was a great poet and a useful revolutionary soul. There are lots of great poets and useful souls. What do they need God for? Yes, they may have called themselves atheists because they felt like it, but that's neither here nor there. Pause to chuckle at the silliness of the whole religious thing and get on with writing poems or catching fish.
The God of the Bible, Koran and Torah is a literary God. It derives from human literature. God is real in the way that Shakespeare is real, or Russian Acmeist poetry is real. People communicate in metaphors and abstractions - language. In the beginning of the Bible was a word. Taking the insights into the nature of Goddity as literal truth is merely a sign of ignorance. Ignorance of the people who make up the Gods they subsequently don't believe in or those who believe in complicated poetic texts with a ferocious and fanatical literalism.
For Shelly to say, 'If I can't see God he doesn't exist.' is an example of sarcasm and a challenge to the idea of God as a monarch. His is a progressive and enlightened attack on 'the authority' as Pullman would have it. But that is neither here nor there in the what is or isn't really God stakes.
For me the compelling evidence of Goddity is in the fact that nature will generate sentience and that that sentience can look back over nature and ultimately has the opportunity to understand it. Not humans, but some other more advanced sentience. A universe that can cause life to arise and life that can understand itself? Now that is very spooky indeed - suggestive of Goddity. It suggests sentience is inherent; intrinsic to the universe itself. Well there's going to be the mommy and daddy sentience of them all, isn't there? The one which can make sense of everything, even chaos.
I could be wrong, of course. But in my view, all people who believe in a personal God can only be agnostics because they cannot know. But not all agnostics believe in a personal God.
This is not an argument against empiricism. It is an argument that says that sentience is inherent - intrinsic to the nature of the universe. Its DNA.
ReplyDeleteAgain, by stating it's against a particular interpretation of the universe you have catagorised it only. Absolute negation isn't even half excellence. You havent not defended your own assertions, which I summerised in the above final paragarph.
ReplyDeleteKindly; call me Ex-sheikh
What beautifully expressive ideas, only if they were accurate. Of course I need a mirror to see my head but certainly I do not a mirror to caress my now surprised cheeks. It seems you’ve reduced empiricism to its one quantifying dimensional aspect; how could any just being blame empiricism for the prodigious patterns in the universe that don't suggest worship-demanding God? Marveling at the flawless celestial order, pure reason suggests the existence of gods and not a God.
ReplyDeleteStill rather taken aback by your tiptoeing around the necessary dichotomy between the alleged Maker and the Made; if I were God stuff and looking at other God stuff all the time, then that means I'm looking at the exact material in essence, not higher or inferior. Pantheism isn’t always hubristic manifestation and neither is empiricism at the very least.
Religion has had indeed inspired great minds to question our existence and thereafter great discoveries were made. Of that there is no doubt. Religion to humanity was and is snobbery to society; it was the needed flame to cook dinner, not the dinner itself. For example, look here to see a societal benefit of religion; how to cope. At a smaller scale; something similar to inferiority complex of a neurotic teenager girl, who has through learning and pertinacity metamorphosed into a confident young woman. Nobody can say that the humble beginnings were good or means in themselves.
To the contrary, there is no humility in acknowledging the presence of God. It is an artificial humility that those who say 'we are not in control' and state the obvious tend to wallow in. Well, good luck to them. Empiricists never said 'we are in control'. All that they said is we have a better, accessible-to-all explanation(s) for existence than that of your religious one.
The agnostics, like myself, have had acknowledged their 'not-bright enoughness' in understanding God's omnipresence. Yet their argument to the weatherman is very simple; your speculations are informed enough to be the best that we can have at the moment. If they are wrong then it is because you're fallible, not because you meant to misguide us. We pardon thee, weatherman, and move on.
Having read your blog I do not think you've ameliorated or added something significant to the debate. Could that be a result of my inadequacy? Very possible. Could that also be a result of your not thorough-enough approach? Equally possible, a logician would suggest on the account that fallibility is not a holy subsidiary of one human being.
There is space we are bound to make for spirituality, temporary metaphysical escapes from our subjective confinements and transcendentalism. This space acknowledges our collective weakness without insulting our collective intelligence. Your un-literal idea of Goddity has as an equal personifying, if not insulting, dimension for She/He/It is of your own making.
Ex - sheikh
Ex-sheikh
ReplyDeleteIf you asked me what was the rhetorical purpose of what I write then I would have to say that my rhetorical purpose was 'to find out what I think' and to explore what I know and don't know.
You speak of 'necessary dichotomies'. I don't recognise that as a valid assumption at all. In dealing with questiuons of belief and experience and perception there are few 'necessary dichotomies.
I suggest you read William James and Montaigne and I know you will.
Are moral dilemmas necessary dichotomies? To someone deciding whether to give someone asylum, or not; for someone deciding to kill, or let live; for someone deciding to imprison or to free, I suppose they are.
Otherwise there are not. There is no dichotomy between the maker and the made. That is indeed my intuition, not my assertion, a matter I explore from a position of an agnostic - which you say you are.
However, to force dilemmas as assertions onto people saying that there is a necessary dichotomy between what is and what is, is hardly a signal of agnosticism but of a fundamental belief.
What is 'belief'? That's the question.
I think your response is perfectly adequate, by the way, though I find your own assertions unwarrented, intuitively and formally.
But in your criticism - because it would have to be more substantial before it could be called a critique - have you thought what you propose as your own view?
The puzzle about God to me is to see 'him' as separate. If God is, then he is. He is not a creature from another dimension. He is. Ontologically it's ridiculous to expect a God that is, not to be. To be separate from what is.
ReplyDeleteGod is a self-organizing system - You've heard of the Gaia hypothesis. Well let's use that as a metaphor. Complexity, though it may be localised in the universe, gives rise to simple life forms...somehow, which then gives rise to sentience and then machine human connected intelligence - and then... Well who knows.
But the point is this. God can only be what is otherwise he is not.
The great words of the Bible were.
I AM THAT I AM
And these words were capitalised. The very first and most powerful argument for God is ontological, then.
God simply is.
The profundity of Douglas Adams continues to irritate me. He said that there was a sign at the end of the universe which was a message from God and everyone went on a pilgrimage to see it. The sign read.
We apologise for the inconvenience! Or something like that.
The point is that how can you say that God and his creation are one when there is so much suffering? This must be a Godless universe. Job's problem.
Be that as it may it is a universe that will inevitably, always produce continually evolving and expanding sentience. This is programmed into the very bones of the cosmos.
A cosmos with vast senmtience programmed into its bones is a strange cosmos indeed.
What are the implications of the existence of such a place?
You tell me.
It blows my mind.
Ex Sheik's article on ARS NOTORIA
ReplyDeletehttp://arsnotoria.blogspot.com/2011/04/arguing-islam-value-of-anonymity-and.html
Forgive me, dear tutor, but I thought I were thinking out loud too. The only certainty I have is my uncertainty. I spoke of one necessary dichotomy, not dichotomies for I'm aware of the lazy and vacuous nature of sweeping statements. This counterbalances what you said and went on to build on, namely human related moral dilemmas.
ReplyDeleteTo posit that in essence there's a logical gulf between the Made and the Maker appears highly consistent with the position of agnostics. Unless agnosticism should otherwise vary from leaning towards either certain belief or certain disbelief/atheism; I think both positions are taking the extreme. I simply say I don't/won't know for surety.
Again allow my ignorance, If God and I were one thing; why can't I create, be infallible and will the truth? Am I less 'godlier' than God? Say 'divinity' in human form has been diluted with replication after Adam and Eve till today, were the couple more Godlike less human than you and I?
Let me put it as I understand it and do correct me my dear; I didn't create the universe and I don’t say it certainly did create itself. Scientific evidence tells us that the universe has been after it hasn’t. Judeo-Christian version too adheres to this. But Judeo-Christian version of God, a separate entity, is that he has always been there; a nebulous and unfathomable concept for limited creatures, like ourselves, to begin to grasp. You can't understand, they say which is true, so don't try to, which is absurd as collective trying so far has disproved their explanation.
I have been taught in Islamic deductive reasoning that to believably account for something, you need to a) have seen it or b) seen its twin/replica or c) it has described itself for you. Judeo-Christian version of God falls into category C and that only the He who sets natural law can bend/suspend them. It is taken as the complete truth not because as they perennially argue "it's self-evident or it makes sense" but largely because the source/teller with His miracles does not lie. I think that is a fair summarization of faith-base argument.
On the other hand, your perception of God is a medley of un-literalism and subjective manifestation of your intuition to distance yourself, as it appears, from yet another equally built-in self-explanatory argument. That is why I said God of your own making. It is true that I might unwittingly have said something and meant another in my previous reply but you weren’t generous enough to make allowance for my lack of expressiveness and, to say the least, were defensive if not a bit dismissive too.
I appreciate suggesting William James and Montaigne for me; both have been on my reading list for quite some time. I still have a long way to go before becoming adequate in arguing you on your terms/understanding of God when I at this stage need to offer an alternative. That is what you are doing/thing out loud here against the inherence of sentience; you offered an alternative, I humbly did/do not. My 'criticism' is that yours is similar to that which you're disassociating with and that is not a fundamental belief. A belief, I stress I could be very wrong, has to be in/about something and when it comes to the universe I have yet to find 'anything' that is in its own deemed believe-worthy.
Your second reply (10:19) needs some time to read and respond to. I felt the same after reading Self-reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
I think I'm agnostic in that I probably will never know God and, to borrow your simile, will continue to consume the sugar for beyond the bowl doesn’t matter to me. Should it matter in a way that I'd be held accountable? Well, that would be the perfect description of tyranny.
Ex Sheikh