Via 3quarksdaily, here is Richard Skinner (”poet, writer, qualified therapist and performer”) elaborating on Why Christians should take Richard Dawkins seriously. I would argue that they should take him seriously because much of what he says is true, but that’s not Skinner’s take.
Skinner suggests that Dawkins is arguing against a straw-man notion of God (stop me if you’ve heard this before). According to the straw man, God is some thing, or some person, or some something, of an essentially supernatural character, with a lot of influence over what happens in the universe, and in particular the ability to sidestep the laws of nature to which the rest of us are beholden. That’s a hopelessly simplistic and unsophisticated notion, apparently; not at all what careful theologians actually have in mind.
Nevertheless, Dawkins and his defenders typically reply, it’s precisely the notion of God that nearly all non-theologians — that is to say, the overwhelming majority of religious believers, at least in the Western world — actually believe in. Not just the most fanatic fundamentalists; that’s the God that the average person is worshipping in Church on Sunday. And, to his credit, Skinner grants this point. That, apparently, is why Christians should take Dawkins seriously — because all too often even thoughtful Christians take the easy way out, and conceptualize God as something much more tangible than He really is.
At this point, an optimist would hope to be informed, in precise language, exactly what “God” really does mean to the sophisticated believer. Something better than Terry Eagleton’s “the condition of possibility.” But no! We more or less get exactly that:
Philosophers and theologians over the centuries, grappling with what is meant by ‘God’, have resorted to a different type of language, making statements such as “God is ultimate reality”; or “God is the ground of our being”, or “God is the precondition that anything at all could exist”, and so forth. In theological discourse, they can be very helpful concepts, but the trouble with them is that if you’re not a philosopher or theologian, you feel your eyes glazing over - God has become a philosophical concept rather than a living presence.
The trouble is not that such sophisticated formulations make our eyes glaze over; the trouble is that they don’t mean anything. And I will tell you precisely what I mean by that. Consider two possible views of reality. One view, “atheism,” is completely materialistic — it describes reality as just a bunch of stuff obeying some equations, for as long as the universe exists, and that’s absolutely all there is. In the other view, God exists. What I would like to know is: what is the difference? What is the meaningful, operational, this-is-why-I-should-care difference between being a sophisticated believer and just being an atheist?
I can imagine two possibilities. One is that you sincerely can’t imagine a universe without the existence of God; that God is a logical necessity. But I have no trouble imagining a universe that exists all by itself, just obeying the laws of nature. So I would have to conclude, in that case, that you were simply attaching the meaningless label “God” to some other aspect of the universe, such as the fact that it exists. The other possibility is that there is actually some difference between the universe-with-God and the materialist universe. So what is it? How could I tell? What is it about the existence of God that has some effect on the universe? I’m not trying to spring some sort of logical trap; I sincerely want to know. Phrases like “God is ultimate reality” are either tautological or meaningless; I would like to have a specific, clear understanding of what it means to believe in God in the sophisticated non-straw-man sense.
Richard Skinner doesn’t give us that. In fact, he takes precisely the opposite lesson from these considerations: the correct tack for believers is to refuse to say what they mean by “God”!
So, if our understanding of God can be encapsulated in a nice, neat definition; a nice, neat God hypothesis; a nice, neat image; a nice, neat set of instructions – if, in other words, our understanding of God does approximate to a Dawkins version, then we are in danger of creating another golden calf. The alternative, the non-golden-calf route, is to sit light to definitions, hypotheses and images, and allow God to be God.
It’s a strategy, I suppose. Not an intellectually honest one, but one that can help you wriggle out of a lot of uncomfortable debates.
I’m a big believer that good-faith disagreements focus on the strong arguments of the opposite side, rather than setting up straw men. So please let me in on the non-straw-man position. If anyone can tell me once and for all what the correct and precise and sophisticated and non-vacuous meaning of “God” is, I promise to stick to disbelieving in that rather than any straw men.
Update: This discussion has done an even better job than I had anticipated in confirming my belief that the “sophisticated” notion of God is simply a category mistake. Some people clearly think of God in a way perfectly consistent with the supposed Dawkinsian straw man, which is fine on its own terms. Others take refuge in the Skinneresque stance that we can’t say what we mean when we talk about God, which I continue to think is simply intellectually dishonest.
The only on-topic replies I can see that don’t fall into either of those camps are ones that point to some feature of the world which would exist just as well in a purely materialistic conception, and say “I call that `God.’” To which I can only reply, you’re welcome to call it whatever you like, but it makes no difference whatsoever. Might as well just admit that you’re an atheist.
Which some people do, of course. I once invited as a guest speaker Father William Buckley, a Jesuit priest who is one of the world’s experts in the history of atheism. After giving an interesting talk on the spirituality of contemplation, he said to me “You don’t think I believe in G-O-D `God,’ do you?” I confessed that I had, but now I know better.
For people in this camp, I think their real mistake is to take a stance or feeling they have toward the world and interpret in conventionally religious language. Letting all that go is both more philosophically precise and ultimately more liberating.
Skinner’s Theorem:
God has infinite Kolmogorov complexity.
I looked up the Terry Eagleton mentioned in the blog and found his article on Dawkins book. Pretty painful to read.
The first part of it rests on Terry’s believe that Dawkins’ hasn’t read anything by Christian authors. What if he has? It is a rather poor line of argument.
Believing in God, whatever Dawkins might think, is not like concluding that aliens or the tooth fairy exist. God is not a celestial super-object or divine UFO, about whose existence we must remain agnostic until all the evidence is in.
Well, what is it then? Oh wait he does respond:
He [ God ] is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.
Whatever it is he’s smoking I want some. Dude, like God’s the matter AND the anti-matter at the same time! Don’t bogart that joint!
He is what sustains all things in being by his love
I thought food and sunlight did that. Well what do I know as I haven’t read some obscure Christian authors.
The huge numbers of believers who hold something like the theology I outlined above can thus be conveniently lumped with rednecks who murder abortionists and malign homosexuals.
The trouble is they are reading the same book and seeing their own message in there and can “prove” it to be true. This is unlike a math book, for example, where you can’t go all crazy and expect anyone to take you seriously. This is all because religion forces you to give up your rational mind and rely on faith — you can’t suddenly say “but I want to be a rational one!” as you’ve already given up that right by getting in with these people.
I don’t think I have come across one. For most non-fundamentalists, defining God is like trying to put their finger on top of a blob of goo without it oozing out on all sides. They just can’t pin it down.
Witness Alistair McGrath’s efforts when debating Christopher Hitchens just the other week. Here is a well respected theologian who has written numerous books about God and religion, and yet when challenged to define what God was to him, did nothing but waffle.
The problem is that, from the perspective of mystics and many theologians, asking for a precise definition of God from a human being is like asking a mitochondrion for a precise definition of a human being.
When people misuse religious language and treat it as literal statements of fact rather than myth and metaphor, they get criticized, and rightly so. Why would you also criticize those who are attempting to argue that such language is a way of pointing to transcendence and mystery rather than a description?
I say more about what I, as a religion scholar but also a person of faith, understand “God” to mean on my blog in more than one place - for instance, at http://exploringourmatrix.blogspot.com/2007/07/god-is-mystery-not-explanation.html
BELIEVE in something doesn’t mean that it needs to have any meaning, it’s just the act and it don’t need comprehesion. I don’t care if god exists or what is god, the only thing I know is that i’ll have a tomorrow till the day I day, with or without god. So I prefer the ‘agnostic way’
James, how would things be different if God didn’t exist?
You say that atheism is completely materialistic, and describes reality as just a bunch of stuff obeying some equations…
Question: Where exactly does that place your own consciousness?
Isn’t the reality you are talking about, an external reality - external to your own consciousness?
If you say that consciousness is “only some physical processes in the brain” I find it self-evident that this is not true.
And another thing: Atheism is not necessarily materialistic (e.g. Buddhism).
Sean, If God didn’t exist, I would think that people who believe that God Exists would say, there would be no existence. That’s how things would be different. Wow!
Sean, why is the question of “how things would be different” necessarily the question that matters? It depends on whether that’s what matters to you. I care about whether there is something “more” behind the universe, and so it is meaningful to me aside from whether things would happen differently here. It is hard to be sure what that would be, that isn’t intellectual dishonesty. If you want to think about those kind of issues, then it just isn’t easy to get a handle on it. Consider the arguments about what the wave function is, how it “collapses” etc. You can ignore the “ultimate reality” question about that if you want, and shut up and calculate. But if you do want to think about it, it is not easy to get a handle on that great smoky dragon. (PS: decoherence schemes don’t explain it away, just consider the basic collapse of a single photon wave function somewhere on a spherical shell. For even more fun, consider the Renninger negative result of non-detection on say a half-shell inside the main shell: then, the WF must redistribute (?!) because now it can’t hit in the shadowed part of the outer sphere. And then, what do unreliable detectors do to wave functions?)
You talk about it being acceptable to think, this universe just here with its laws etc., but that is avoiding the questions of why this and not something a little or a lot different, why just curiously friendly to living beings, what is logically necessary and self-sufficient, whether “existing” is even a meaningful distinction and if so, can you define it non-circularly (or, in formal logical terms not referring to mathematical type existence: our world distinct from other describable “logically possible worlds” that allegedly do not have this “property” of “existence”, etc. This is the Modal realism argument - the cute irony is that although “materialists” claim the mantle of supreme rationality, “material” is not a formally definable entity in the logical universe! You can’t use logic to tell us the difference between our world and a “platonic” description of some other configuration and behavior. For all the talk about how you can’t pin “God” down, you can’t pin “this” down except that we experience it.) Check back over the previous “Why is there something rather than nothing” etc. In addition, we have the multiple universe question, and once we admit some multiplicity, what is to circumscribe the scope of that? (I am not a modal realist, but use it as a challenge to show the contradictions in “rational materialism.”
There may even be a real “consequence.” Materialists tend to scoff at ideas of personal survival, falsely and crudely thinking that depends on some kind of “stuff” inside us that escapes like a gas. But, we don’t consider “programs” to die just because the computer they first (or later) ran on is destroyed. If the same thing happens somewhere else, the program “lives again.” Again, the irony: materialists like to consider “the mind” as a program not a mystical stuff, but then don’t usually (except for Bart Kosko, Frank Tipler who is really a modal realist, and a few) consider this sort of possibility. If there is a suitable multiverse, the process of a person or etc. could “run” again and they could experience again. It doesn’t even have to be what we formally consider information - leaving room for qualia and etc. (Our formulating such concepts do not give them inherent powers of circumscription and self-containment.) I consider “god” to be something which organizes the multiverse could be organized well enough to have that established. I also think it is why our laws are life friendly - for the literal purpose of having beings to exist. (why else? can you explain it) I can’t prove that, sure, it is philosophy and not science. But talking about what science is and what we can know or should try to know, what is meaningful or not and why, etc. - that’s philosophy to. You just can’t escape it. You have to practice metaphysics to argue against it (or anything it postulates.)
The problem with the conventional view of god described above, is that it amounts to an example of Plato’s Ideal Forms, as applied to the individual soul. That we are imperfect examples of an ideal from which we have fallen.
The problem with this logic is that the absolute is basis, not apex. So the spiritual absolute would be the essense of out of which we rise, not a model of perfection from which we fell.
Consciousness is bottom up emergent phenomena, while intellect is top down ordering of context. Good and bad are not a dual between forces of light and dark, but the biological binary code and the intellect rises out of emotion when yes and no are abstracted from good and bad. A god of aspiration, not intention. The journey, not the destination.
At what level does biology begin to manifest consciousness. Are athletes, who have pushed their responses to the very edge of reactive impulse, conscious? If so, how different is this from animals, if not even insects? The fact is there is no way to determine just how far down into biology some sense of awareness exists. Rather then a byproduct of the central nervous system, it may be the operating principle.
Here is a related argument; What is time? Consider; If two atoms collide, it creates an event in time. While the atoms proceed through this event and on to others, the event goes the other way. First it is in the future, then in the past. This relationship prevails at every level of complexity. The rotation of the earth, relative to the radiation of the sun, goes from past events to future ones, while the units of time/days go from being in the future to being in the past. To the hands of the clock, the face goes counterclockwise.
So which is the real direction? If time is a fundamental dimension, then physical reality proceeds along it, from past events to future ones. On the other hand, if time is a consequence of motion, then physical reality is simply energy in space and the events created go from being in the future to being in the past. Just as the sun appears to go from east to west, when the reality is the earth rotates west to east.
Since energy is just moving around, previous information is constantly being recycled by and giving structure to the present, as the energy by which it is recorded continues on its path. Rather then the straight line of a dimension, time is a loop, where the new is being woven out of strands pulled from the past.
Time as consequence of motion means it has more in common with temperature, then space, which is not intuitive, but it is logical, as they are both descriptions of and methods for measuring motion. The brain of insects have been described as thermometers. On the other hand, our minds are mostly a function of narrative.
One of the many anomalies of modern physics is that quantum uncertainty seemingly leads to multiple realities, but if it is information going from future to past, then it is the wave of future potential collapsing into the order of the past.
Using time as a dimension is like dissecting an organism. It lays everything out there for you to look at and poke and examine, but it’s rather lifeless.
To the extent time isn’t a real dimension, biological beingness is primarily a function of the present and secondarily a function of the individual. The elemental biological awareness is attached to the energy and moves toward the future, but our intellectual comprehension is information that is constantly receding into the past. Ultimately we are cells of a larger organism that is constantly moving on to the next generation and shedding the old like dead skin. It is our individual lives that start in the future and end up in the past.
I like your post. It has a crispness usually not found in these sorts of discussions. You ask for a “meaning” of God. To me this is like asking for the meaning of a proton. A proton is or it isn’t—I don’t think it has a meaning. On the other hand, what God means to us as individuals I think is a very good question.
Sean, when you make a tough decision, one that impacts your life and others I’d be surprised if you didn’t carefully weigh the data and the options. Often that final decision is not an easy one, but I suspect you’re careful and respectful in the process. For me that decision process has the added dimension that I believe God will guide me, if I listen, to make the best decision. I think that the physical realm and the spiritual realm are essentially orthogonal and non-interacting except for this one intimate point of contact. When I wrestle with issues of right and wrong I think it is an advantage to have access to the ultimate authority
How do I tell the difference between God guiding my decision and me simply contemplating the circumstances and deciding by myself?
This article (the one by Skinner, that is) confirms once again for me that a lot of Serious Theologians are really Deists, and just don’t realise it yet.
Sean, before I attempt to answer your question. Do you agree that this is an alternate view of reality that offers a meaningful difference?
Regarding telling the difference I don’t think there is an analytical way to tell the difference. I think this sort of differential analysis is outside the intimate point of contact I talk about. Personally it can be pretty obvious when I disregard God http://meditations-on-an-eyeball.blogspot.com/2007/06/gods-word-in-wal-mart.html
I think most Christians really want some sort of proof that they are tapped into God (hence ID movement etc.). But I think God asks for the belief without proof (kind-of axiomatic)–and we have to embrace the risk we have massively deluded ourselves
I can’t agree that the difference is meaningful until you tell me what it is. If you can’t tell me what it is, then I don’t think it’s meaningful.
“Proof” is beside the point, as nobody is asking for any.
Hi Sean,
People believe in God because of personal experiences and revelation. That is, they have a “personal experience”, and then there exists an infrastructure to tell them that the experience they had is the God of such and such revelatory text talking to them. Having made that connection, you don’t need a definition of God. Even though you don’t know what he is, you know he exists because he said he exists (in scripture). If you’re a philosopher you might try to make up a definition, but in the end its impossible. If you ever end up believing in God, it won’t be from a logical argument.
-Sam
Ok, point taken. The difference is that God’s insight/perspective on any topic is dramatically better than mine. An alternative selected that is aligned with God’s input is going to result in higher overall good (from a totally holistic standpoint).
What I believe “God” to be (and there’s no point in arguing it, because there is no evidence proving God’s existence or God’s non-existence) is a consciousness that exists beyond the boundaries of matter and energy. And I don’t mean beyond as in past the outer edge of the universe, I mean beyond in a way that the human mind can’t possibly comprehend. (Such as in a 4th or 5th dimension that we only exist on one plane of. There have been other explanations of that which are far better than what I can come up with, so just look it up.) Now as far as God interfering with our 3-dimensional surroundings, I don’t believe in inexplicable events and the reversal of death (re: Jesus), but I can accept changes to our universe by outside forces in higher dimensions.
That’s what I believe God to *be*. But what He means? God means different things to different people. And there’s no changing that. If there was, then we’d all be identical people, because a person’s opinions and entire existence are changed by events that they experiences, and those experiences change what anything will mean to them.
Now, the reason that you can’t prove or disprove God’s existence is really quite simple. You can’t test what you can’t perceive. If you can’t sense God with any of your six senses (smell, taste, touch, hearing, sight or proprioception (equilibrium or spatial orientation)) then how can you say for sure if He’s there or not? We can’t.
And once we all drop the issue and accept that we’re all gonna be different, no matter the fuck what, then we can start along the path to not bloody arguing over pointless crap that you won’t know the answer to until you die. And we can start getting along as a society, hell even a world. (Sorry, went off a little there. But it’s all good, because we’re all different, and we’ve all got our flaws, and everything.)
Oh, and if anyone wants to talk to me about what I said… I just Stumbled this page and probably won’t be visiting back again. If you really, really want to talk about it contact me somehow…
I am not looking for reasons why people do or do not believe in God. I want to know what it means. What is the difference between “God exists” and “God does not exist”? To the world, not just to my belief.
I would have to say that I’ve asked for the exact same thing from theists in the past. And I’ve never gotten a good answer. Remember that you answer must have this property:
We use the term “God” to describe a being which is (such and such). Due to this description, it is necessarily the case that (such and such) can be observed, or (such and such) cannot be observed, if God exists.
For example, a valid answer (though a poor one) would be to say:
God is a being who gives us eternal life in response to how we handle our lives here on Earth. As a result, when we die we will go to either heaven or hell. This will necessarily be different from a universe in which God does not exist.
This is the sort of response that I would like to see (and I would hazard to guess that Sean would as well). But the problem with this response is that it isn’t really testable, because we can’t come back after death. So, what specific thing would be different in a universe without God as compared to one with God? What thing that we could look at or feel would be different?
To elaborate on Sam@16, I think of God is a story we tell ourselves about some of our conscious experiences. So the difference between a universe with a God and a universe without is exactly whether the stories someone is telling about their experience include the word God (and associated mythology) or if the stories include some other words…which is to say ‘none’, in the sense Sean means. It’s a narrative thing, not a literal thing.
That’s the objective difference, at least with the sort of belief that’s being discussed here. That so many insist that it is a literal thing is because that’s part of the story for most people, theologians and non-theologians alike based on the arguments I’ve seen over Dawkin’s book.
It’s a deeply conforting story to most of the believers I’ve spoken too. Sean, perhaps that comfort is the strawman you’ve been attacking?
“God” means many things to many people. But to me - just me - “god” is a desperate attempt to take the awesome inexhaustible mystery of the universe - the fact that the deeper you go in any direction, the more you find - the blinding beauty and heart-rending tragedy of it all - and package it into a kind of “thing”.
In my work I often experience this sense of awesomeness, of depths that pass beyond my understanding - in fact, that’s what I live for. But I don’t find it helpful to package it into a “thing”. After all, this strange “thing” can’t be a normal sort of thing in the universe, so it’s easy to conclude it’s either in some other universe (say, “heaven”), or doesn’t exist at all, or exists in some very tricky sense. But all these alternatives are just distractions, as far as I’m concerned.
So for me, saying that god “does not exist” is just as silly as saying that god “does exist”. They both take me further from the mystery of the universe into the realm of petty squabbles.
But, if we imagine that certain - not all - people talking about “god” are actually trying to convey an experience of the hair-raising awesomeness of reality, its shattering majesty, some things they say might make more sense. To take a few examples just from Christian theology:
No one has seen or can see God. (John 1.18)
He lives in unapproachable light. (1 Timothy 6:16)
The true knowledge and vision of God consists in this—in seeing that He is invisible, because what we seek lies beyond all knowledge, being wholly separated by the darkness of incomprehensibility. (Gregory of Nyssa)
God is infinite and incomprehensible and all that is comprehensible about Him is His infinity and incomprehensibility. (John of Damascus)
I’m approaching this from the perspective of panentheism, since it doesn’t seem to make sense to me to separate God from everything else and make “him” just one being among many. For me, the question is not “does God exist” because I am talking about all of reality in its highest level of transcendence and organization. If God is being itself rather than a being, then there is no real doubt that being exists. The question is about the character of this all-encompassing reality.
Since we’re talking about a reality that transcends us, we use metaphors and symbols. One analogy that I’ve used before is of two cells in a human body having a conversation. One says “I look around and there is nothing but cells. We’re born, we die, that’s it”. The other says “sometimes I think we’re all part of one big cell”. The latter is being ‘cellulomorphic’ (rather than anthropomorphic, we tend to be), but isn’t it also intuiting something that is in a genuine sense a correct perception of the nature of its existence, even though it cannot describe that transcendant reality adequately?
Here’s the difference between “God exists” and “God doesn’t exist”. People sometimes have out-of-body experiences. This could only happen if God exists.
Oops, maybe not…
reality as just a bunch of stuff obeying some equations
Hmmm, interesting. It seems you inadvertently used the word “obey”, illustrating your own point (freudian slip?). That would make God equivalent to math. I agree - nothing to be gained by it. If “God” cannot be defined as something uniquely distinct from other ordinary concepts, then “God” is a meaningless word. Although… it’s still curious why all this “stuff” conforms to equations. If you’re a believer, I guess that’s a religious question.
“obey” here isn’t a Freudian slip. It’s just the language used in physics.
General comment: These debates are hurting the desmination of science to people who are not normally exposed to science. Besides the “preach to the choir crowd” the people to whom these books are aimed are most likely science illiterate. Why not spend this energy to make them science literate before we reopen ancient debates?
I define God as non-spatiotemporal, conscious, loving intellect that is the ground of spatiotemporal existence (note the lack of an article — God is these attributes, not a being with these attributes). I came to believe in this God when I realized that ordinary human consciousness transcends space and time, that the experienced “now” is not a point but extended over space and time, which I think is impossible if consciousness is assumed to emerge from spatiotemporal activity. I realize this argument does not convince others, but it convinces me, especially since it agrees with what mystics have been saying for millennia (and it provides an interpretation of the quantum measurement problem).
Some differences that this makes:
1. The pursuit of a theory of consciousness that attempts to explain it in terms of spatiotemporal activity is hopeless. Rather one should look for explanations of spatiotemporal activity in terms of consciousness (e.g., that space and time are produced in the act of perception, like color, taste, etc.)
2. It makes survival after death a possibility.
3. It implies that there is something wrong with us in that this ground is not obvious to us (Christians call this Original Sin, Buddhists call it avidya (ignorance), Vedantists call it maya), but I believe mystics when they say they experience this ground, that it is possible to overcome this wrongness.
4. That it is of utmost importance, individually and socially, that we acknowledge and deal with (3).
The difference, I think, would be that a universe with god is more meaningful than one that without. It gives a sense of purpose. Is this a meaningful difference to you? What kind of difference you’re looking for? A physical difference?
I’m not a believer, but how is this for a “difference”?:
God has no observable effects at all. But belief in God has observable effects; a society of people who all believe in God is more successful (in the historical sense of conquering and exterminating rather than being conquered and exterminated) or more good (in terms of keeping its people happy) than one that doesn’t.
I don’t seriously think any theologian believes this. And, more to the point, it’s a property of cultures and institutions, not beliefs. The Catholic church, as an institution, historically had more political power than most princes, and could thus produce happiness and misery. Its theology is only barely relevant, coming in in places like papal infallibility.
If this is the case, then I would say “God does not exist, but it’s useful to believe in Him anyway.”
tytung:
People can have a “sense of purpose” without thinking that the Cosmos was arranged for their benefit by an intelligence bigger than but somehow akin to their own. Love will do that to you, for example. And people can have a “sense of purpose” if they believe that the Cosmos is a stage for human family drama, whether or not that’s the case.
Personally, I think we do ourselves a grave injustice by attaching to our sense of heartbreaking wonder the name of a bad Bronze Age dream, a petty tyrant and thunder-tosser with a taste for blood and an unhealthy interest in others’ sex lives. For every claim by prophet or scribe that “He lives in an unapproachable light,” there are far too many verses which claim to have penetrated that light and found the adamant within:
If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned. (John 15:6)
Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. (1 Timothy 2:11-2)
In response to Scott Roberts, who posted:
Well, then, we can get drunk. Ergo consciousness is naturalistic, as deviations in consciousness can be imposed via physical means.
Quick followup question: What does it mean to be ‘Christian’?
The practical problem with the concept of “God” is that we tend to reductively define unity in terms of the unit. Oneness in terms of one. The universal state as singular set. Even science re-enforces this tendency with Big Bang theory, that the entire universe is a singular narrative unit that was born and will eventually perish. It is natural for us to think in terms of structure, since that is what our intellect perceives, yet process is continually creating and consuming structure. So to the extent we are one, it is as process, not structure.
The concept of meaning is inherently static and reductionistic, so reality has no meaning, in the sense that it can be reduced to some hard nugget of mathematical formalism, or spiritual divinity. Reality has purpose in that everything is a dynamic and wholistic aspect of everything else.
That God is a person is not a straw man:
“As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you (Isaiah 66:13)”
“If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him! (Mt 7:11)”.
These are simplistic ideas. But I don’t think God was concerned in the Bible with the theological equivalent of string theory (or whatever). Just as it is useful to ordinary human beings to think of objects having position and momentum, it is useful to the ‘average person is worshipping in Church on Sunday’ to think of God as a person. God is beyond our full understanding, but by His grace, we do know a little about Him. And that little is enough for practical Christian living:
Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen (1 John 4:20).
No one has seen or can see God. (John 1.18)
How does he know that, and why is he talking as though he’s so sure about what he’s saying, and why are you quoting that person?
He lives in unapproachable light. (1 Timothy 6:16)
How does he know that, and why is he talking as though he’s so sure about what he’s saying, and why are you quoting that person?
The true knowledge and vision of God consists in this—in seeing that He is invisible, because what we seek lies beyond all knowledge, being wholly separated by the darkness of incomprehensibility. (Gregory of Nyssa)
How does he know that, and why is he talking as though he’s so sure about what he’s saying, and why are you quoting that person?
God is infinite and incomprehensible and all that is comprehensible about Him is His infinity and incomprehensibility. (John of Damascus)
How does he know that, and why is he talking as though he’s so sure about what he’s saying, and why are you quoting that person?
Blah blah blah…
Sean said, “I can imagine two possibilities:”
“One is that God is a logical necessity. But I have no trouble imagining a universe that exists all by itself, just obeying the laws of Nature”
Is that a bit like saying I have no trouble imagining a universe without strings, or the theory of a landscape and the multiverse, or the MegaVerse of universes.
And of course others may feel this universe does not ‘need’ dark energy, or there could be some other physical (material/particulate) explanation why some galaxies may appear to be drifting apart.
“The other possibility is that there is actually some difference between the universe with God and the materialist universe”
Well if you have a multiverse, the idea or concept of heaven in a universe other than this universe, is not that ‘alien’. That is of course even allowing for the fact that you need to go as far as a landscape of universes or the multiverse, outside our own universe, to find conditions which are inherently different from those we know. For in all honesty and speaking truthfully we have absolutely no ‘proof’ of what the conditions may be in another galaxy six billion light years away in the ‘observable ‘ universe.
But all that aside Sean, the simple concept is between believing there is life after death (in la-la land or disneyland or wherever) or there is nothing after death, to which you clearly subscribe.
That is the only One thing you need to keep believing or disbelieving as the case may be, and at least for now, the definitive answer certainly seems to be beyond ‘contemporary’ science.
However let us not forget that simply believing is not error-proof proof of truth or existence, and disbelieving is not error-proof proof of lack of existence, whether we are talking strings, dark energy or the ’spirit’ - after all speculation, fiction, science fiction, the internet, theoretical physics and the imagination are filled with things that do not exist.
John testified further, saying, “I saw the Spirit come down like a dove from the sky and remain upon him.
Okay, you can see the spirit but you can’t see the god then. Alrighty then, I’ll go and look up some more stuff from this “John 1.18″ fellow and see if he agrees with you on evrything you say about other stuffs too.
Balh blah…
John Baez (#23) wrote:
I’m sure most thoughtful religious people include the “shattering majesty” of reality in their definition of God. The problem is, by any sensible definition of “religious” and “God”, they also mean something more. Is it really such a petty squabble for those of us who don’t believe in that something more to wish to be clear about the distinction? It’s not silly or empty to assert either “God exists” or “God does not exist” when you use the word with any reasonable degree of linguistic precision based on its traditional associations.
I wish we had a good word in English that meant only “the shattering majesty of reality”, so atheists could make it abundantly clear that they’re aware of this majesty, but don’t imagine that it’s due to anything that resembles a person in any way. But what atheists absolutely should not do is say “Well, I’m going to use the word ‘God’ to mean ‘the awesomeness of the universe’”. This is helpful for selling lots of tenth-rate pop-science books with “God” in their titles, and for winning the Templeton prize, but even when it’s not plain venal and dishonest it’s linguistically sloppy.
Honest users of the word “God” mean a being that possesses consciousness of some kind. Maybe vastly different from ours, “greater” than ours, whatever … but if you don’t think God ever had so much as a thought in its mind, you need to pick another word for what you’re talking about.
Sean, there’s a straightforward definition of God. Start by listing every possible conception of God that you have a compelling argument against.
Well, God’s not any of those things, OK?
Didn’t you get the memo?
It doesn’t mean anything, because any viable notion of God that is not contradicted by experiments/observations is not well defined enough to be able to make a difference.
The same can be said about the notion of a physical universe apart from a purely mathematical universe, as discussed here recently.
Stop being so obtuse 386sx.
Greg Egan, did the word ‘awesomeness’ come close before it
became used to describe hot dogs and novelty lamp shades?
It is quite interesting to hear scientists talk about god. Almost as much so as religious people talking about science!
I like what Ann @31 said. I see ‘god’ as a philosophical place-holder. If you try to pin people down by asking for a clear operational definition which is testable, they simply cannot provide one. But humans are animistic to the core, and we must wrap the universe in a story, so the narrative center becomes (ta da!) god. But human stories are really about humans, even if the central actor is super-human, and so they incorporate our in-group out-group distinctions. So religions distinguish their in-group from the hated out-group by using ‘god’ as a shibboleth - and I mean that literally (witness the many heated discussions over the true name of god, eg, ywh -v- allah etc). Using the right name and adhering to the dogma are required signs of group membership.
Well, then, we can get drunk. Ergo consciousness is naturalistic, as deviations in consciousness can be imposed via physical means.
Getting drunk alters your perception, not your consciousness. You still need your consciousness to perceive that you are drunk. No matter how drunk or stoned you get, short of becoming unconscious, there always seems to be an “I” underneath everything.
I think my comment is going into your anti-spam.
I think Quasar put his finger on it — it’s about avoiding the reality of death. Any conception of God will do as long as he/she/it relieves us of death.
Where does consciousness go when you sleep, then?
The argument “consciousness is special because you always have it until you don’t” is not particularly persuasive.
Some may want to read or reread my explanation of how our awareness could perhaps survive death of the body (summary: the process making your mind could run somewhere else, in a suitable system in a diverse multiverse.) Some say that “isn’t testable” because you couldn’t tell everyone else. Well, it is testable (even if not fully) because *you* can find out. Would you say a prediction about what will happen in one million years is “not testable” because we won’t be around to find out? That isn’t what really matters, as long as someone or some sentient entity can appreciate it. It is ironic (and the hard atheist ideologues avoid such ironies and flies in the scientistic ointment) that survival actually is testable, but the wording of spoken conversations last year is not (because of how randomness and quantum uncertainty destroy even the ability in principle to find out. Sure, there are memories (maybe - but what if those people died?), but that is not very precise and reliable.
I am also still waiting for some “clarity” of explanation of what the wave function “really is”, especially the oft neglected (!) question of how unreliable detectors (what’s what most are anyway, right?) “affect” the wave function. For that matter, I am still waiting for good answers/rebuttals to most of the points I have been making about this general subject of knowledge/God/reality in various threads.
Blake: consciousness is special because of the having of qualitative feelings, sensations, not just conceptualizations and information (*to us*.) Some rather dishonest philosophers (”feigners of anesthesia”) deny or evade this, but it’s the primary fact of life (not anything about “the material universe” or our supposed constraint by a specific program - science - designed to find out certain kinds of things about the workings of the world, not be a uniform program for knowledge or speculation or philosophizing entire.)
What he is saying is that God is beyond rational discourse. Then you say “can you explain that to me in the terms of rational discourse”, and the answer is of course “no”, and you have a wonderful case of two people talking past each other.
For what it is worth, modern atheistic philosophy does know non-(words/things/concepts) that can not be given a definition of the form you ask for.
Andrew quotes 1 John 4:20.
Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.
But what about Luke 14:26?
If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.
You can tell this bothers people, because in some more recent translations, “hate” gets changed into “love to a lesser degree”. For example, the Good News Bible says, “Whoever comes to me cannot be my disciple unless he loves me more than he loves his father and his mother, his wife and his children, his brothers, and his sisters and himself as well.” But the Greek word miseo really does mean “hate”, and in every verse where it appears, it clearly indicates the exact opposite of love. Should Luke 16:13 also be retconned to say that we must love Mammon a little less than we love God?
Greg Egan says,
This is why I describe quantum mechanics as Loki playing dice with the Universe. Come on, Loki may be subtle, but he’s not malicious, right?
Let’s take 19th century deterministic physical theory - the ‘clockwork universe’ model - as a starting point. The religious establishment rebelled against that because it left “no room for God” other than as some kind of supreme original architect.
Then along came quantum theory, relativity and chaos and now we have the probabilistic - statistical model of the universe. Stephen Hawking pointed out that even if we do ever come up with a grand unified theory of everything, the equations will be chaotic and will be of little use for many predictive purposes, right?
Einstein didn’t like this too much, thus the famous “God doesn’t play dice with the Universe” statement.
So, in the current view of things, “God” could go around interfering with probabilistic outcomes for specific events - and you’d never be able to tell the difference. The same goes for Maxwell’s Demon - a little demon that is somehow able to acquire information about the world without interacting with it, and then is able to alter conditions to affect outcomes.
Which can all be summed up as: “If God played dice with the Universe, he’d win.” Thus, believing in God is not any different from believing in Maxwell’s Demon - it’s an untestable hypothesis. Thus, for the question posed by Sean - “What is the difference between “God exists” and “God does not exist”?” - the answer seems to be: nothing.
You can attribute any given probabilistic outcome to the laws of chance, to God, to Maxwell’s Demon - it doesn’t really matter. If you look at a large number of outcomes, you find they follow certain rules, and it you like you can attribute those rules to nature or to God or to whatever you like - and you can keep checking to make sure the rules are obeyed, and you might even find circumstances where you have to revise the rules. Thus, Dawkin’s fixation on the issue seems like a waste of time and effort.
For most people though, religious belief is an attempt to find meaning in what they view as a cold, impersonal world where death is the inevitable outcome.
However, look at a growing plant - isn’t that meaningful all by itself? A solar energy converter constructed using an internal evolved genetic blueprint that creates incredible (and still not completely understood) complexity out of sunlight and simple elements and molecules? Then we’ve got the universe itself to look at - I mean, go and take a long, long look at the Hubble Ultra Deep Field shot. Think about that for a while. It’s a lot more fascinating than religion, isn’t it? What’s out there?
Sunday Egan…
Greg Egan writes,
I wish we had a good word in English that meant only “the shattering majesty of reality”, so atheists could make it abundantly clear that they’re aware of this majesty, but don’t imagine that it’s due to anything that resemb…
Sean,
You are not going to get a good answer to this question. People believing in god has no clear idea what god is or means. This is of course because god does not exist. It’s like asking small children to describe Santa. You are going to get all kinds of stories.
Carl
Neil,
Fortunately, some part of ourselves surviving our deaths [i]is[/i] testable, as it makes a very specific prediction. The relates directly back to my previous statement on getting drunk. Specifically, what it means is that if there is a part of ourselves that survives our deaths, then that part of ourselves must necessarily also survive any damage to our bodies. If it doesn’t survive that damage, then it certainly can’t survive our death.
Now, then, we would need some determination as to what it would mean for us to survive our own death. What, exactly, would survive? Well, there are two components, really, our memories and our personality. For this survival of a piece of ourselves to have any meaning at all, then some portion of either our memories or our personality would have to survive. But our memory can be lost when the brain is damaged in the wrong places. And our personality can be altered, in a myriad of ways, due to the introduction of chemicals (i.e. getting drunk), or due to damage to any number of locations in the brain. So no, because there is no component of ourselves that is immune to such damage, there is no component of ourselves that can possibly survive our own demise.
Well, then, we can get drunk. Ergo consciousness is naturalistic, as deviations in consciousness can be imposed via physical means.
A response to this from my viewpoint is that nervous systems, and alcohol, and the effect of the latter on the former, all have non-spatiotemporal reality (their quantum reality?) that is turned into spatiotemporal reality in the act of perception. Which is to say that no experiment (leaving out mystical disciplines) can distinguish between the two viewpoints, so both viewpoints are metaphysical, not two competing scientific theories. But the choice of which viewpoint one adopts does have consequences, which is the point relative to this post.
Greg Egan, earlier, said:
I recently heard of a word that might be what you’re looking for: “numinous”. As far as I know, there’s no real religious connotation to it, and it’s a pretty neat sounding word anyway.
I’ve seen it used as a noun before too, so instead of a careless atheist saying “God” they could say “the numinous”.
Where does consciousness go when you sleep, then?
This is getting a bit off-topic, but let me just say this: Some might turn that around and say, “where does the universe go when you sleep or die?” Positivism can lead you down a strange path: http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/27640
The argument “consciousness is special because you always have it until you don’t” is not particularly persuasive.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s “special” - I think “suspicious” is a better word. It seems to underly everything that is known or can be known about reality. It is a box from which there is no escape. You can never be someone else. Which may lead you to ask to the why-am-I-me question, i.e. why should reality be experienced as you, and not as someone or something else? Stand on a hilltop on a starry night and imagine all the other consciousnesses that must be out there in the vastness of the universe. And yet, the universe seems to have a preference for viewing itself through your eyes? Why?
consciousness is special because of the having of qualitative feelings, sensations
This is another thing that bothers me. I’m not sure that qualia can be reduced to math or physics, which are purely descriptive in nature. Information about your consciousness, received through your consciousness, is not equivalent to the actual experience of your consciousness. I believe others (Wigner?) have also made this point.
[recovered from spam filter — sean]
What is the difference between “God exists” and “God does not exist”?
Dear Sean,
Perhaps some insight (although not a precise answer to your question) can be found in the very well written and thoughtful treatise by Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution.
In special, the last chapter of that book deals with the “affirmation of something” as compared to its negation (a nice point of view worthy of mentioning that is also useful to your post “Why is there something rather than nothing?”). Bergson argues that those are not as symmetric as they would appear (specially when seen from a purely mathematical point of view). Rather, negation is a second degree affirmation, not the opposite of it, or the absence of it. So the point is, perhaps your question does not embody two absolute and opposite conditions, and therefore cannot be given a unique or even meaninful answer distinguishing those conditions.
It was a pleasure for me to find Bergson’s book. It’s simply brilliant. Yes, one could have arguments against some of his points, but there is no way to deny that his arguments are quite subtle, original and important to address.
I wrote previously about whether I was looking for God, in reply to a commenter. I would have to re-write it in accordance the novel insights that the reading of Bergson gave me (when I wrote that post, I had not read Bergson’s book). But in any case, I believe you will not find a reasonable answer to your question easily.
Best regards,
Christine
God, to my mind is a mathematical calculation.
See update above.
Hi Jason Dick, interesting argument.
So basically all stem cell research and promises of cures, even to brain damage or loss of ‘memory’ - are irrelevant. The proverbial cow dung or pie in the sky.
Are you suggesting the best way to assure ‘death’ of the criminal mind or any ‘evil’ mind would be a bullet in the head, are you suggesting that anyone who dies burnt in a fire (or is cremated) can’t possibly pass into the afterlife.
Hmm, that reminds me how some people in the dark ages used to think decapitation was the best way to ensure no one could come back to haunt you. Or the old myth that if you had any part of your body missing (except the foreskin, and perhaps your teeth too) you could not enter heaven.
I don’t think you have demonstrated that there is nothing survives death, any more than anyone 50 years ago demonstrated that neutrinos do NOT exist. And the whole idea of CERN and the LHC is to find stuff we cannot currently find or measure - things which nevertheless may or may not be ‘predicted’ by theory.
Now, I am not suggesting that anything CAN or does survive death, or what form it takes. I AM suggesting you cannot prove nothing survives death, or that you cannot prove that suddenly you do not go into a parallel universe, or even a parallel state (call it heaven, nirvana, or cuckoo land) on some distant galaxy, almost or even at the speed of light - the actual time it takes to get there, whether millions or billions of light years, seemingly irrelevant to the equation.
And of course Sean could argue, that even if there is an afterlife, it is still not proof of God - because the afterlife could simply be Nature’s Way - and Cosmic Karma is as predictable as Particle Physics. Who knows?
Maybe what happens after death is as irrelevant as what was there before the big bang, to the observable universe. But I am increasingly of the persuasion that the ‘observable’ universe is only the ‘visible’ portion (and possibly a very small portion) of the whole universe delimited by the Cosmic Event Horizon, there is no falling off the edge of the flat universe at the cosmic event horizon. But hey I too, am free to believe or disbelieve what I will - am I not?
Wow, 64 comments and not one mention of Shiva or Thor, Vishnu or Viracocha., Aphrodite or Xi Wang Mu. Interesting that so many who profess their deep faith in their “god” can so comfortably reject another’s expression of faith in her/his own (and please don’t be so silly as to suggest that these are just other names for “your god, they definitely are not).
As for the discussion on consciousness, reviewing some of the contemporary, extensive, philosophical discussions might be valuable, if one is seriously interested.
PS - lol to your update.
Indeed it must be quite liberating (if not comforting) for the old & the dying to know that their disease ridden or decay-ed bodies have simply reached the end of their particulate journey. And their lives whether they are remembered or not, was meaningless and to all intents with no more purpose than any other group of atoms wondering aimlessly or with purpose, around the universe simply obeying the laws of physics as described mathematically (mathematics a language constructed and comprehensible to the human Mind).
Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust.
SPYDER, I have not suggested I have any particular God or that other gods may or may not be different manifestations of the same god, though string theory would mathematically postulate that to be possible.
Quasar9,
Technically, we can’t prove that that reality isn’t an illusion, that we aren’t Boltmann brains who just popped into existence, had a single thought, and popped right back out of existence again. That’s why I don’t ever talk about proof (as I’m not a mathematician). But the problem is, the sheer variety of changes one can make to a person’s personality through physical changes to the brain just ensures that it makes no sense whatsoever that there is a component of ourselves that is survives our death.
Consider this situation:
Imagine that you are heterosexual, and there is a particular form of brain injury that will cause you to become homosexual.
Now imagine that there is another person that was born homosexual, while there is a similar brain injury that would cause that person to become heterosexual.
With these two cases, what survives death? The homosexual personality, or the heterosexual personality? Consider, after all, that objectively speaking, there is no preference between the two points of view (the rest of the universe really doesn’t care whether your sexual desires are conducive to you having children or not). And yet the change could be affected by a physical change in the brain, and furthermore this is an aspect of ourselves which we consider an integral part of our personal identity. So no, I don’t see how the idea of life after death is in any way coherent, and thus just can’t be correct.
But this really just underscores the catch-22 that theists are in, along with others who believe in various supernatural. Either you place your beliefs in something that is empirically testable, and in so doing put your beliefs on the line, or you define your beliefs in such a way that, even in principle, they could never be tested, and in so doing make your beliefs functionally identical to those of the materialist. I think Sean is spot-on when he describes these “high-minded” ideas of god as category errors. But what’s worse is when a person claims to have a “high-minded” idea of god, and then starts making claims about the nature of reality that are testable, such as whether or not we survive our own deaths.
“God is a concept by which we measure our pain.”
— John Lennon
Hi Jason Dick,
I have deliberately attempted to avoid the word God, since that clearly opens up the whole other can of worms of ‘which’ god, or ‘whose’ god we are talking about, or to answer Sean’s question: Which or what god to disbelieve in.
As to your argument, I do understand where you are coming from.
You are not the same ‘persona’ that was in your mother’s womb, nor the same ‘persona’ that crawled, wore nappies and learnt to walk & talk. Nor the same ‘persona’ that grew up to be the various people you have been or become in your adult life. You may choose to become or believe something totally different tomorrow than you are today. And aside from the mental state, you have also undergone all the normal physical changes and the natural multi cell deaths that the body undergoes at its various phases of growth, change and decay. And yet all the while I presume there is a thread that you hold onto that is you, or you identify as you. Clearly like actors we play different roles throughout our life (son, brother, father, uncle, …) but there is something that we generally hang onto that we identify as I.
That may be something very personal (based on personal experiences), which others cannot ever wholly know or see - and in some cases may be based on experiences or memories which we may even wish to forget.
And of course as you point out, there are those who either thru disease, trauma or injury have lost some part of themselves (some or all their memories), and there is also the onset of alzheimers, which would posit that if there is degeneration of the brain, there is increasing difficulty in identifying ourselves, never mind recognising others. Mind you these are things which medical science and medical research genuinely hope to be able to ‘prevent’ and even ‘repair’ whether it is possible or not, remains to be ’seen’.
But returning to my point - we cannot possitively discount that there is more to the human being than the physical (ie: what we know to date) any more than we can discount that there is more to the universe that we do not know, than we really care to admit. After all we like to know things, ironic really since any knowledge no matter how absolute, is simply ‘temporal’ knowledge that can so casually be mislodged or lost by a careless blow to the head.
But no matter how liberating Sean suggests dismissing that there is anything more to us - what you see is what you get - I would find it irrational to dismiss that there is or may be a Spirit (soul or Onion call it what you will) that contains or can contain the sum total of our experiences & memories, good and bad. Those we may wish to hold onto or even those we’d wish to forget, those we’d like to hold onto but can’t prevent losing, since there is nothing that categorically can prove there is nothing after death - until we pass that particular stage or phase. As to what comes out the other side, I shall not speculate further here - since clearly I could only possibly ever hope at best to speculate on what may or may not be.
You need to recognise, that just as Sean can justify the universe by what we ‘know’ what is observable & measurable - there are ‘physical’ things we cannot quite observe or measure yet. Things we theorize or speculate about, whether it be Strings, Dark Energy or Gravitons… which may turn out to be true and exist (or not) and lead us onto further things we do not know.
But my original argument in reply to Sean was
If there is life after death, then that would be something that would change the universe we know (as we know it). I did not presume to be able to prove it.
As fundies seem to be less of a baleful influence on education and legislation in the UK than the US (although muslims are increasingly vociferous), we can generally afford to take a less combative and more dispassionate stance on religion.
What querulous atheists forget, or sweep under the carpet, is the huge evolutionary advantage religion has had, from the dawn of mankind to the present day. Dawkins of all people, as a biologist (I think?), should at least concede that, although not having read his book I don’t know whether he did.
Despite the veneer of civilization, under the skin we’re all the same hairy-assed dark-souled savages, whose instinct honed over literally millions of years is to accept and look up to one boss, and however this is sublimated today in various forms of hero worship, or even abstract ideas, the same applies now as much as ever.
One advantage of religion is to render that boss a nebulous mysterious entity rather than a person. Yes, maybe sovereigns and chief priests and so forth have claimed to rule by divine right; but they know and everyone knows that all, including the ruler, are answerable to this higher power. The problem with atheists is that in the absence of a God they presume to take on the role of God themselves!
Yes, I’d concede that religious societies haven’t always been on their best behaviour, as in the Crusades for example. But look at the French Revolution, or Stalinist Russia, or the Chinese revolution, or Pol Pot’s Cambodia, all the work of idealistic atheists, and bathed in the blood of countless millions, far more than any religious wars.
Sean, few are anywhere near as educated and trained in logical thought as yourself or the average poster here, and if everyone suddenly turned atheist, as you appear to wish, I guarantee you’d be on your knees before a statue of the Virgin Mary, begging her to intercede in stopping the horrors that would ensue!
In any case, we live surrounded by lies and deceptions great and small. Why bother to wear clothes if the weather is not inclement? It would be more rational to save wear and tear and the effort of washing clothes to walk around stark bollock naked where practical. Also, why this insistence that everyone matters? In truth, hardly anyone matters a fig in the grand scheme of things, even distinguished scientists. If any of us dropped dead tomorrow, someone else would take our place, and any achievements we might have made could be made by others.
The point is, what is one more white lie (even if as an atheist you believe it so) if it makes the vast majority of believers feel and act as better people. Hell, if chanting round a mouldy old tree stump, as our druid ancestors did, improves one’s spirit and outlook, I’d go and join them.
Apologies for length of this post, and hopefully it makes some sense. Truth is I’m as pissed as a mattress, having polished off several G&Ts, and will probably regret it tomorrow.
Jacob (#59) wrote:
I’m personally allergic to this word, but other people’s mileage might vary. There’s an Australian atheist radio broadcaster who uses it a lot, but I’ve also heard members of the Woo crowd using it to distinguish their refined feelings from those of Evil Reductionist Scientists.
Dictionary definitions include “1. having to do with a numen 2. arousing elevated or religious feelings.” (A “numen” is “a deity; a divine power or spirit”). So I suppose there’s just room for a non-religious meaning in the “elevated feelings” half of meaning 2. It would be nice to have something with less baggage, but I can’t think of any good candidates myself.
Haludza (#43) wrote:
It probably did, but we’ve well and truly lost it now. I could cope with surfers and skaters in the 1980s who initially were at least using it for things that genuinely impressed them, but I was recently told by a customer service officer at a finance company that the fact that I’d sent him a fax was “awesome”. I don’t think he was actually in awe of either the technology, or the content of my fax.
Jason Dick,
It is worth bringing up issues of our changing personality making it hard to say what should survived death. However, your argument above that brain damage in effect disproves survival is fallacious. If the brain is damaged, then the “program” running on *that machine* is impaired while that “machine” is running at all. That doesn’t keep the “program” from running on a completely different “machine”, which was my point (and which is testable, if enough of you can survive to think, “Wow, I’m still around somehow.”)
As for what version of your changing personality should survive, well that depends on how the system works (how it was “built”, no apologies …) But consider this: why do you consider your “self” to survive the changes in your personality over time? Why does it matter to worry about your own experiences years from now, when your mental processes will be different? Maybe the idea of “process” is not good enough, and there is a persisting unstructured whole behind the changes of the mind. That whole might not even be individualized, in the sense of being the same “one” behind each person (not n monads per n sentient beings.) This is the great insight of many Eastern religious traditions, and I have experienced it (quite beautiful) even though I am not sure it is true.
Finally, talk about God interfering in the world (whether overtly or through quantum cracks) is not the most important question, but rather concerning the why of the world, the grounding of existence (versus mere Platonism), and its being life-friendly in terms of both laws and experiential realness. Sorry, but thinking this particular world could just “exist” self-sufficiently without deeper cause is like thinking the number 23 among all numbers just happens to be made into “real” brass numerals somewhere. And if they all exist, its chaos.
I suppose this is repetitious, but I’ll try keeping it simple. As John Ramsden point out, the general concept of God is of a top down authority figure, but absolute isn’t apex, it’s basis. So the spiritual absolute would be the essence of awareness, not an ideal form of it. What is to say that it isn’t the same element of being peering out of all life and evolution is multiplying complexity? As individuals, we are constructs in the first place and our sense of individuality is a function of mental focus. Because we view a potential deity as top down in order to maintain social and civic order, we assume it is intentional, but if it is bottom up, raw awareness, then it is aspirational, which is a good description of conscious behavior.
Currently humanity is top predator in the eco-system, but if life on this planet amounts to a single organism, then humanity has the potential to be its central nervous system.
Atheism is a form of reductionism, but life is wholistic.
But Neil, in this case the program is the machine. There is no difference. This makes the whole idea of an immutable soul nonsensical.
Also bear in mind, Quasar9, that I am not trying to prove anything. That is impossible. I’m merely trying to show that you need to make up completely unevidenced (and indeed, unevidenceable) entities that don’t make sense when examined in order to support the idea of life after death. That makes life after death exceedingly unlikely to be correct.
Finally, as Sean argues quite well, talking about God as the “grounding of existence” or the “why of the world” is completely meaningless. Might as just drop the word entirely.
John - it’s an Ouroboros thing. The absolute is basis, but also apex because it is the “plenum”, the opposite of nothing. All that can be advanced is latent within it. People who can believe (with good reason, of course) that “space” itself is spontaneously a field of every kind of particle shouldn’t find the idea of God so difficult to at least entertain (and that’s all I’m asking them to do, not have it “proven” to them.) I think God is like the ultimate generalization of what the virtual sea is in more particular and limited form. It has intelligence, not as process, since all that can be thought is wrapped up in that omnifarious superspace. (That includes all grounds for evaluation and the rules for validity of same, so God is not even-handed in attribute towards good and evil etc. if one is following this line of thought.)
Greg Egan wrote:
Really? Any sensible definition? I think it’s better to discuss thoughtful people’s ideas on a case-by-case basis, instead of trying to quantify over all possible things they might sensibly mean. But never mind: you’re right that lots of them mean something more… different things in each case.
If someone starts talking about god, you’re certainly entitled to press them on what exactly they mean - and it’s actually a good thing for you to do if they’re using vague talk to confuse or coerce people, as is so often the case.
What I said - just to clarify - is that for me to say either “I believe in god” or “I don’t believe in god” would only lead myself away from what I’m interested in, into the realm of petty squabbles. They’re great ways to start an argument, but terrible ways for me to express how I feel.
Jason, I don’t see why you think the program is the machine. Most thinkers, either AI or traditionalists, would not agree. Why can’t it happen somewhere else?
Finally, as Sean argues quite well, talking about God as the “grounding of existence” or the “why of the world” is completely meaningless. Might as just drop the word entirely.
No, neither he nor anyone I know of argues that quite well or explains why I should consider it “meaningless” (which itself means, defensibly: ?) If you can reason abstractly at highest level and challenge whether it is sensible for a given particular like our universe to be the/an uncaused “given” that’s just here etc, then it is a game point and quite sensible to at least suspect that something fundamental and quite different from all this (even if not easy to define or imagine) is instead that which is “necessary”, and is a contingent necessity for the particular things like those of our world and its properties. You don’t have to care about that or think it “matters” (whether it does is, I say, a choice to make and not a fact anyway), but that doesn’t mean those of us who are interested should give up or follow your lead in what should be considered relevant.
PS: Please read The Mind of God by physicist Paul Davies on this question in like vein (not per religious tradition.) It is indeed the modern classic.
Greg Egan wrote:
Jason wrote:
Greg Egan wrote:
I don’t think you’re going to find a word that means what you want but doesn’t attract a swarm of silly people to it like moths to a candle flame. Unless, of course, you make up the word and don’t tell anyone what it means!