You shall have no other gods before me.
You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.
You shall not bow down to them or worship them

(From Deuteronomy 5, NIV)

Start with a clean slate. Postulate a vague entity/idea/principle worthy of the name “God”. Do not personify the entity. (Personification is already “extra information”, we’re trying to work with the bare minimum here.) Also, rather stay away from the “God of the Philosophers”, the prime-mover original-cause idea, because a prime mover is not necessarily the meaning assigner and invokes infinite regression. (The third meh/lah post is on its way, dealing with this.) Rather define the bare-bones idea we’re working with in terms of “that idea or principle according to which humans should ideally live their lives”, in the God as “Meaning Assigner” sense.

If you conclude the idea is enigmatic, yes, that’s the whole point. Let it be an enigmatic idea that represents our enigmatic and hard to pin-down idea of what it means to live a good life. One reader concluded his concept of his God, working with these definitions, must be found in his sense of empathy and compassion. Right… With these ideas, let’s look at atheists and the Commandments…

A certain kind of “atheist” believes the idea of “God” presented by the Bible is a human creation, a development of human culture. As such, they effectively believe this idea is a “graven image”. Fundamentalists that believe in literal Biblical infallibility, for example, are actually idolising the Bible. A Greek Orthodox friend of mine recently told me that in their tradition, the Bible is not the Truth, the Bible is about the Truth, a very important distinction.

If you hold the “atheist”’s belief about the Bible and the idea of God presented by it, then arguably the best way to most faithfully hold the first few commandments is to reject the worship of that particular notion of God, it being idolatry. The atheist’s statement “there is no God” is, after all, working with the typical monotheistic definition of “God”. An atheist is so faithfully avoiding the worship of what he or she believes are false gods, that he or she is prepared to walk a path of social/cultural persecution for it. For their faithfulness, they are persecuted.

After all, the early Christians were atheists as well.

··· Pause for dramatic effect ···

See Philip Harland’s post: Breaking news: Early Christians were impious atheists . . . (NT 3.2) … “in the eyes of some angry Greeks and Romans, that is.” And that’s then the point: they were atheists according to the status quo, the surrounding Greek and Roman culture. Our contemporary atheists are the same, defined according to the surrounding Christian culture. What is an atheist anyway? Some argue the word shouldn’t even exist, being defined according to what they are not.

Cut each other some slack and see what we can learn from one another!

The girl’s name Alethea \a-le-thea\ is pronounced ah-lee-THEE-ah. It is of Greek origin, and its meaning is “verity, truth”. A learned coinage, not found before the 16th century. Mythology: goddess of truth.

Deacon is not referring to that mythological goddess of truth, he defines his God in his post Patron Goddess. Go read that post before continuing with this one.

From my amateur perspective, I see similarities between Deacon’s Alethea, and Spinoza’s God — or maybe even Tillich’s “Ground of Being”? (The point I actually wish to make here is that there exists a continuum of God concepts. Deacon’s Alethea might seem to be worlds removed from a conservative fundie Christian concept of God, but the continuity of God concepts allows taking a journey of small steps, small mutations of the God concept, all the way to liberal Christian notions of God and beyond.

So what about Alethea’s potential to be a source of meaning in life, or of morality?

Consider first another person, possibly in some role of authority. Merely believing that a person exists does in no way give you meaning or morality. However, such things emerge in a relationship with a person, in interacting, by whatever shape such relating might take. It need not be verbal communication. Crack a whip? Or how about your dog, which might deduce something of what you expect of it, despite lacking verbal communication — maybe training dogs by providing food: rewarding good behaviour and punishing bad?

OK, back to Alethea. Alethea’s mere existence or definition might have nothing to do with meaning. But meaning is found in the process of relating to Aletha, in the process of interacting with Reality. For one, we find “moral and ethical behaviour” gets rewarded in species with gregarious natures. By this manner of reward and punishment, we evolved the basics of our morality and our ethics, which may pivot around our sense of empathy. We evolved an understanding of “right” and “wrong”. (Oh, and this was also explained nicely in a talk I attended at a Dutch Reformed church — and I still hope to write a little about that some time.) Right, so that takes care of Alethea as a potential source of morality.

How about meaning? Well, what is meaning in life, where is it found? It could be found in our interacting with reality, in finding something worthwhile to do. We could say that some interact with Reality by taking part in sport races… duking it out against other people interacting with Reality in the same manner, or just pushing their own limits. I prefer a nicer example: scientists finding meaning in the search for a better understanding of Alethea, exploring the cosmos with whatever probes and technology we develop. These Alethea “worshippers” make it their life’s mission to better understand Alethea, they “seek Alethea’s face” (referring in part to a quote by some scientist (who?) about observing the cosmic background radiation being like seeing “the face of God” ).

Thus, in conjunction with Deacon’s explanations on his blog, “Alethea” can also be a source of morality and meaning/purpose. I hope this served as another illustration of the implications of a “meaning assigner” definition of a “god”.

To be an atheist you need God’s help

It is a parable. And many atheists’ conditioned knee-jerk responses may have them fuming at simply reading that title, which is understandable. But they would be mistaken, as Peter isn’t an evangelical fundie, he’s a trained philosopher. And he’s exploring particularly interesting ideas…

Of most interest to me, also in the process of better understanding Peter’s views and thoughts, were the comments below that post. Good reading… Here I am reproducing one of his last couple of comments in its entirety, I hope he doesn’t mind:

Hey Rob

Thanks for the post. I actually write a chapter on the miraculous in Fidelity of Betrayal. But that dodges your question slightly as it tries to shift focus away from spectacle toward miracle as metanoia. Having said that I have indeed been direct witness to a whole host of interesting things which defy easy interpretation (some very very interesting). For me, my move away from the Charismatic tradition was not because I was stifled by it or because I never saw it working in peoples lives but rather because I wanted to step beyond what I considered to be a confusion between the idea of the ‘God of the philosophers’ and the ‘God of faith’.

It may sound strange but I place all things that look like divine intervention into the God of the philosophers category. This means that they potentially lend credibility to the idea of a God ‘out there’. They can be used as part of the philosophical debate and personally keep me sympathetic to the idea of God as ‘out there’. This idea is affirmed many times within the bible and throughout the Christian tradition (I am not using the term ‘God of the philosophers’ as a slag here, but rather as a description).

However, for me the ‘God of faith’, is the one we affirm as the name of our transformation, the happening of metanoia. These two ideas (’God of philosophers’, and ‘God of faith’) might link up but they also don’t need to and can’t be connected philosophically. In other words, someone could affirm the God of faith and yet question the God of the philosophers – indeed this is the position I defend throughout my work as the most fertile and potent one (and the one which is expressed by many within ikon).

The God of faith is affirmed in the testimony, ‘I was blind but now I see’, while the God of the philosophers is affirmed in, ‘X points toward the idea of a first cause’. The relationship between these is not simple and I am keen make sure they don’t blur to much at the expense of the former.

You will, if you know him, see the hand of Pascal at work here! Also I should mention that there is nothing to stop a Charismatic from embracing this idea and I am sure many in fact do. Indeed I would want this expression of faith to have a place within the emerging stuff – but that place will be very different than what you see with people like Tod Bentley et. al.

Hope thats useful

Following all that, I simply couldn’t help it: I ordered both books he has out already. They’re lying here next to me. They are How (Not) to Speak of God (amazon, kalahari) and The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief (amazon, kalahari) — see the Amazon links for reviews and overviews. (Pity they’ll have to wait a while… I have two books on “high priority”.)

With regards to “What is God?”, I believe I share Peter Rollins’ take: I’m much more interested in the “God of faith”, which Peter nicely defines as “the one we affirm as the name of our transformation, the happening of metanoia”.

Let the discussion begin… thoughts, experiences (of conditioned knee-jerk reactions, e.g.), questions?

Relevant to the discussions on my blog, Wilkins’ “random thoughts” from a recent post of his:

One of the commentators thought that I was wrong to say that it’s hard to find a religion that lacks supernatural beings, and instanced Buddhism, Confucianism and Jainism. A quick trip to the Encyclopedia of Religion sorted that mistake out: there’s a common distinction between popular and elite religious forms, and just like you can find Catholicism without the saints, you can find Buddhism without the devas, Brahmin, or various family gods, etc., but it isn’t the popular religion. And that got me thinking…

I have criticised PZ Mangle and others for attacking the popular forms of religion and not dealing with the intellectual (read: elite) forms. Here I am being criticised in the same manner. Poetic justice, perhaps? It raises an important point about my project: in order to understand religion, you absolutely must not deal with the “pure” philosophical forms alone. In fact, they are very often the province of the “clergy”: those whose lives are devoted to the religion, and who are supported by the popular religious. It’s hard to envisage a church of Tillichs, for example.

The little I know of Tillich’s views so far, I like very much. I became acquainted with the name when I heard Spong is very much influenced by Tillich’s theology. Wikipedia mentions, about Tillich’s theology:

God is called the “ground of being” because God is the answer to the ontological threat of non-being, and this characterization of the theological answer in philosophical terms means that the answer has been conditioned (insofar as its form is considered) by the question.

Back to the divide between the “elite” and “popular” forms. Wilkins mentions the “elite” form being that practised by the “clergy”, and the “popular” form that by the congregation: this is something I’ve heard from various sources. One of my recent sources was a pastor of a Dutch-Reformed church (not in Stellenbosch, btw — it was through gtalk). He mentioned something that was discussed in the Synod: the greatest portion of the Dutch-Reformed congregation considers the Bible the literal, word-for-word word of God, while the preachers/pastors don’t see it that way. There is a chasm… He also mentioned how hard it is to get a congregation to think. They’re often there for some words of wisdom that they can easily go and apply in their lives, rather than to have their own thoughts challenged.

This chasm is indeed a problem, and how to get it “fixed” is very far from easy. Rocking the boat too much (e.g. writing this blog post?) gets the “Bible Believers” (propaganda term) running from the “theologically/scholarly informed” Dutch-Reformed church to fundamentalist “Bible Believing” churches. In fact, I suspect this may be what Angus Buchan (of Faith Like Potatoes fame) may have been alluding to when he endorsed Shofar with the words “It’s a church that’s transparent with no hidden agendas. [...] I’ll tell you one thing about them: what you see is what you get.” (That was in Shofar’s marketing pamphlet at the beginning of the year.)

So that’s one way of getting your congregation and your leadership to be on the same page: get the leadership on the same level as the congregation. Another solution: get the congregation onto the level of the leadership instead. This is much of what I see happening on the more radical branches of the emerging church movement, which can also be considered a “publishing movement”. Ditto for the books of the liberal theologians. (And that is the angle of this blog as well: I want to share what I’ve come across with regards to Bible scholarship, and play my own part in the evolution of religion.)

Back to Wilkins, these “random thoughts” of his are about a recent grant application of his, for a project on the evolution of religion:

So I must consider (not critique, this is not that project) all forms of religions, and not fall into the philosopher’s trap of dealing solely with the philosophical. Nor shall I do the reverse, and reject the elite forms as irrelevant. We want to know how the whole kit and kaboodle evolved (always wanted to use that phrase here).

The interaction between the two must indeed be quite interesting. I wish Wilkins the best for his research, and look forward to any interesting blog posts that may come of it.

Next post should be on “The God of Philosophy and the God of Faith”, stealing Peter Rollins’ material, who has another particularly interesting and somewhat contrasting take on the role, or lack thereof, of the “philosophers’ God” — an “intellectually informed” form of Christianity, but focusing on the faith experience/life and de-emphasizing the philosophers’ God.

I myself am a philosopher, and one of our occupational hazards is that people ask us what the meaning of life is. You have to have a bumper sticker, you have to have a statement, so this is mine:

The secret of happiness:
Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.

He points out that this is The subordination of genetic interests to other interests. No other species does anything like this. Fine, yes, that we know of… but Dennett said that!

What Dennett’s bumper sticker wisdom is advocating here, as the secret to happiness, in “New Testament Terms”: find yourself a god.

In interaction between theist and atheist, this use of theistic language is a great source of strife. Theists sometimes points out that atheists also have a god, and the atheists argue. The reason? Atheists go by the definition of “god” that is “a metaphysical personal sky-daddy that performs miracles”, while the “theological-psychology theory” of god-worship is not that. For a scriptural example, the New Testament talks about the worship of mammon. Says Wikipedia:

Webster defines ‘mammon’ as: 1) the false god of riches and avarice. 2) riches regarded as an object of worship and greedy pursuit; wealth as an evil, more or less personified.[1] Winston defines it to mean: 1) wealth, worldly gain; 2) greed for riches; cupidity.[2] Oxford defines: god of wealth, regarded as evil or immoral; ‘those who worship mammon’ = greedy people who value money too highly.[3]

Mammon is considered a “false god” by Christians, by which they mean mammon is not worth worshipping, that materialism is a degenerate way to live. A non-Christian money-loving capitalist might disagree, believing mammon is worth worshipping. Irrespective of whether mammon is worth worshipping or not, mammon is a “god” in the sense of “meaning/purpose assigner“. This is the concept of “a god” that I’m running with.

Consider another of these greater ideals: humanism. The humanist — committed to the “more important” idea of humanism — would, in “ancient-lingo”, be worshipping a god of reason and empathy/compassion towards his fellow humans (love your neighbour), irrespective of his metaphysical convictions.

With regards to Matthew 22:36-39 then:

36″Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” 37Jesus replied: ” ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’[b] 38This is the first and greatest commandment. 39And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[c] 40All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

Compare that to a humanist that is committed to humanism, an idea more important than himself, with all his heart and all his soul and all his mind, with an integral part of that idea being to love his neighbour as himself. So yes, a humanist has a “god”, when cast into the terminology of that “theological-psychology theory”.

More: the “god” that Pullman (a secular humanist) advocates, is apparently a god of “inquiry, curiosity, maturity, compassion, determination, loyalty, opposing tyranny and evil”. (Hat tip to Timothy Mills for that list — I wrote about it in my post about the Golden Compass.)

Most humans have a “god”: most humans seek a purpose, seek meaning in life, except maybe committed nihilists. And atheists? Well, there are different kinds. You do get nihilistic atheists, but they are really not very common. (I wonder how many nihilists reached nihilism by “deconverting” from a supernaturalist worldview, in comparison to how many naturalists end up at nihilism? The ratio would determine whether supernaturalism might not have to bear much of the blame.) Most atheists are not nihilists. They do have a “god”, that “god” is just not personified and named, and is not an interventionist god.

Comments, thoughts, objections?

The conversation was great. It rotated around the meaning of life, the source of values, “why be good”… And it helped hack out some terminology and ways of expressing ourselves in order to bridge philosophical divides. Bring two thinking people together, coming from somewhat different perspectives, and figure out the language that you could both agree on, leads to increased ability to communicate the ideas to others.

So that’s what I’ll be trying to do soon: namely, trying to share all the ideas from that conversation (discussing the likes of theistic existentialism, atheistic existentialism, absurdism and nihilism, referring to the table)… but it will take me some time to get there. I will make some run-up posts (stalling for time?), and maybe tie up loose ends of previous “threads” if I feel I need to do so first.

Here’s a thought to start off with then, another attempt at “defining God”, :n the general sense: god as the source of meaning in your life, the source of your values, the source of your concept of what is right and what is wrong, especially including the reason that you stick to doing right and avoid doing wrong. (The answer to “why be good?”… and “why bother living?”)

God: the assigner of meaning and value in life…

Much of human fighting and disconnectedness results from a lack of understanding of the Other’s perspectives. What one says, is not what the Other hears. Because we do not speak the same languages, even if we use the same vocabulary. What one word means to one group of people, is often something quite different from what it means to another. And this meaning? Is not always rational, is not dictionary definitions. Having the same definitions for words don’t lead to understanding. Because it isn’t words… It is feelings, it is emotional responses, it is the very sense of being. With a misunderstanding on that level, things can very quickly turn ugly.

Good communication requires empathy. It requires an understanding of the Other’s frame of reference, in order to understand what meaning the Other will attach to particular words or gestures. The meaning is found in the context of an entire Meh.

This post was not inspired by religion, it was inspired by something completely different, but it applies just as well: the meaning we attach to words, irrespective of our dictionary definitions, which we may agree on, can differ dramatically. In terms of “God”, what God means to the Believer, is not about the rational definitions, not about the words. So the battle is not about rational concepts, it is something touching deep inside. Abusing Tillich’s words, it touches your very Ground of Being.

Respect a person but disrespect their ideas? I’m sorry, sometimes people’s ideas are experienced as an essential part of them… I believe it shows a lack of understanding of humanity to think that disrespecting their ideas will not be experienced as a disrespect of their person. These things are too interwoven.

A long long time ago, but not in a far away galaxy, tribalism was the order of the day, and it was good. Some insist that tribalism is the natural state for humanity. Borrowing a paragraph from Wikipedia’s article on Tribalism:

According to a study by Robin Dunbar at the University of Liverpool, primate brain size is determined by social group size. Dunbar’s conclusion was that the human brain can only really understand a maximum of 150 individuals as fully developed, complex people (see Dunbar’s number). Malcolm Gladwell expanded on this conclusion sociologically in his book, The Tipping Point. According to these studies, then, “tribalism” is in some sense an inescapable fact of human neurology, simply because the human brain is not adapted to working with large populations. Beyond 150, the human brain must resort to some combination of hierarchical schemes, stereotypes, and other simplified models in order to understand so many people.

This combination of “hierarchical schemes, stereotypes and other simplified models” is the root of much evil. Such unavoidably impersonal societies bring many challenges, and necessitates that other big evil, politics. But I digress.

Tribal Stories

Humans are story-telling creatures. Most “moderns” have lost an appreciation for how the oral tradition worked, having been replaced by writing and “modern western culture”. If you have gone camping with a large group at a young age, you likely have memories of stories told around the camp fire. Nowadays we often tell ghost stories or horror stories. Education takes place in schools, after all, camp fire stories are there for entertainment. Picture an illiterate culture, prior to the development of a writing system though. In such societies, tribal stories become your education.

In pre-modern times, people looked up at the stars, played connect-the-dot, constructing pictures of creatures and men, populating the sky with images that were then connected to stories of creation and seasons and human nature. The sun took part in these stories, as did the moon, the wind, the sea, everything man saw was permeated with meaning. Man “named” the creatures and the elements, the stars and the rocks. This happened numerous times in numerous cultures, creating different stories and different pictures.

Some stories described the origins of everything, for example “the wonderful creation stories of the people of the high Andes and the frozen north”. Other stories describe the tribe’s past, retold over generations, defining the character of the people and shaping their future. I.e. the stories do contain elements of history, but in a pre-modern era, the real value of these stories to their tribal hosts were not in “factual history”, but rather as narratives to shape their present and their future. These stories were told and retold and developed to the point where they provided identity and meaning, and some understanding or acceptance of the human condition.

The narratives included lessons on ethics and morality, about how we should relate to nature, they contained foreign policy guidelines on how to relate to neighbouring tribes. These stories defined the tribe’s identity, their world view, their values. These stories are, in my opinion, some of the most remarkable and beautiful things in human culture, and should be cherished. I look forward to the days when I can share diverse cultures’ stories with my children, in part an excuse to discover their beauty for myself.

I don’t know how much exposure most people have to diverse cultures and mythologies. I was in the fortunate position to have spent five years in a British school in The Netherlands (called, aptly, “The British School in The Netherlands”, or BSN). I remember learning about ancient Egyptian mythology there, and I have had some exposure to Greek mythology, but I cannot even remember how much or from where. What mythologies are South Africans exposed to? Do South Africans learn about diverse cultures, or is that not as common in a strongly religious country with shared and cherished religious narratives?

The stories and narratives I am most familiar with, are indeed those absorbed into the Judeo-Christian culture, and partly into western culture. For one example, the primary narrative of the Israelites, the founding story of their tribe (which was a state-level society, thus technically no longer a “tribe”, but you’ll notice I’m not going with academic definitions here), is the Exodus story: the story of their journey out of Egypt, a narrative about the return from exile. This narrative was repeated via the Babylonian exile and return, and is foundational to the Israelite or Judean culture. It echoes throughout their scripture.

An Aside: Zombie Religion

I believe the emerging church conversation is bringing the flesh back, that many there understand the nature and value of narratives and oral traditions, and that this could restore the tradition to a “living, breathing” organism again. Yes, many mainline traditions have managed to keep the flesh, by good training of its leaders, but I suspect modernism and “fact fundamentalism” have still atrophied or mortified some of the tissue. I hope that there too, some stretching and some exercise will restore the organism to a more glorious state. May it again become a symbiotic partner amongst our diverse cultures.

Cue: God

In theistic traditions, these stories are about “the gods”, or about “God”. As the subject of these stories, God becomes the shared central idea of a tribe with regards to how they relate to one another, the environment around them, and towards that which is bigger than them and outside of their control (“in the hands of God”).

In polytheistic traditions, the stories are about a whole pantheon of gods. The god a particular person chooses to be loyal to, reflects something of that person’s character. This ties in with the idea of a culture and its values being defined by its stories and its God.

In eastern traditions, trying to identify a “central concept” or named entity or idea is more tricky. In Taoism, the stories are about the Tao, or the path or the way. (Remarkable similarity with the early Christians considering themselves people of the way, no?) Buddhism is tricky to cast into this mold I’ve sketched out. I suppose we could talk about “awakening” (enlightenment, or maybe attainment of “nirvana”), but that doesn’t quite work. What would be a unifying factor amongst a “tribe of Buddhists”? Again, they’d be unified in their way of life, or their search? Meh… moving on…

Some traditions have “nature” as their “God concept”, focusing directly on how they relate to their environment. Other traditions revere their ancestors. All can be considered an attempt to connect to that “something greater”, that “thing beyond themselves”. From a monotheistic perspective, all would be considered an attempt at connecting to “God”, while from a non-theistic humanist perspective, all could be considered an attempt of connecting to, and understanding, that “transcendent” thing: the human experience. (With the human experience being subjective. I’m defining the word “transcendent” in such a way that I can use it to refer to it: the experience of the various forms love, for example, I’d like to describe as “transcendent”. A reductionist understanding or description would have you babbling about things like serotonin or somesuch, but doesn’t really talk about what the experience is like, to be a part of the whole, consisting of all the reductionistic parts, with the whole being somehow “more” than “just the sum of the parts”.)

In Focus: The Monotheistic Tribal God

Bringing all of this back into focus for this blog: in monotheistic traditions then, “The Tribal God” aspect of “God”, is the central subject of the narratives of monotheistic culture, the pivotal point or focus point for that culture. In effect thus, a particular monotheistic tribe is defined by its God.

The “God concept” then permeates all aspects of that culture, from discussions on how people relate to one another (described in terms of the concept of “living out God’s love” towards one another), to thinking about what is “right” and “wrong”, what it means to be thankful and appreciative for existence, what creativity is, and how to relate to — and accept things — that are out of your control. While I’m touching on the “personal God” idea here, that was the topic of the previous post. The most important idea I’m trying to convey in this post, is the concept of shared narrative, of communication and relation within the tribe.

Your connection to and solidarity with the tribe depends on this shared concept, the common corpus of stories to which you can refer when dealing with fellow tribesmen. This ties in with what I have suggested in the past, that these traditions are a “language”. It is the language of the tribe, a language with which to describe the world and the human experience.

I am not theologically trained, I’m just an electronic or software engineer that turned amateur theology into my official thesis procrastination project. (This was a part of the process of deconstructing and defeating the harmful memes that had lodged themselves in my mind, as well as figuring out how best to help other people stuck with harmful memes. But I digress.) During this time, I came to understand more of what I believe is taught to people studying theology. This post is based on that. I’d love it if some of the theology students reading this blog, or any other theologically educated person, could comment on my understanding (or lack thereof).

In theological language, every human has a god. Their god is the thing by which they direct their lives, that thing that serves as their moral compass, that influences their decision making. Let’s start with some simple, stereotypical examples…

The alcoholic has a life ruled in part by alcohol. The drug addict, drugs. This influences their ethics (consider drug-induced theft, etc), their behaviour (while under the influence), their motivation in life (figuring out where and when to get the next fix). In theological language, one could say that alcohol is the alcoholic’s god, drugs the junkie’s god, etc. (I realise I’m over-simplifying the situation, please bear with me and understand what I’m trying to communicate, rather than poking at the holes.)

The psychopath, or the serial killer rather, to take another extreme-stereotypical example, is someone who has in some ways made himself his god. He goes around deciding who lives and who dies, without much care for any other kind of authority, they have become their own ultimate authority. On a much lighter note, I’d suggest a number of stereotypical celebrities also have a strong element of self-worship going on.

I’m sure the “god-shaped hole” is something most of my readers would have heard of by now? There is something in this remarkable human creature that has a particular desire to attach itself to some guiding principle in life.

It does seem some people are trying to turn Darwinism or evolution into their god, caring only about game theory or survival as the ultimate truth in their lives. (Such people would argue for altruism only for its survival benefits.) How our altruism or morality evolved is not important in this discussion, that’s “Lah”. We live and experience on the level of “Meh”. We believe in compassion and the golden rule as a guiding principle, not because we had a debate with our genes and our genes convinced us through better rhetoric that compassion is a better choice…

This is potentially one of the big breaks in communication between “sophisticated” theologians and atheists, they’re not talking about the same kind of God concept. The atheist often talks of “god”, referring only to the supernatural, while the “sophisticated” theologian would like to know what the atheist’s “god” is, i.e. what concepts he has guiding his life. What has the atheist, what has Dawkins, for example, filled his “god-shaped hole” with? (Science and empiricism plays a big role for him, clearly, and guides most of his life?)

I’d like my readers to each contribute descriptions of their god. You don’t have to call it “god”, you can also name fictional characters if you like. Christians: please try to refrain from citing scripture or dogma. Please describe your “god” in terms of values. (A God of love? Compassion? Or a God of jealousy and punishment?)

The humanist, for example, would be worshipping a “God of compassion/love and reason…” Feel free to drop the “god” part, I’m just explaining the language. Some people have “humanity”, community, or our grand interconnectedness, as a kind of “god”. Some people have a pantheistic notion of “existence as a whole”, the universe, being “god”.

In my post about the Golden Compass, I quoted Timothy Mills:

…she is only reacting to what Pullman rejects and condemns in his books; she makes no mention of what he promotes. Inquiry. Curiosity. Maturity. Compassion. Determination. Loyalty. Opposing tyranny and evil.

If that were to be described in “theological” language as “a God of inquiry, curiosity, maturity, compassion, determination, loyalty and opposition to tyranny and evil”, it would sound much like the kind of God Christians are supposed to be worshipping, right?

So, according to what values and principles do you direct your life? Where do you find your meaning in life? What values and principles would you be prepared to die for? Or more interestingly, what would you live for? Please try to be as constructive as possible, and try your best to leave phantoms and other people’s baggage outside. Thanks.

I can just as easily deal in tired, overused, clichéd Dawkins-fanboy responses. They’re getting particularly boring and irritating. (Kinda like quoting Biblical truthisms? *ducks and runs*) That kind of rhetoric might work in certain fundie circles, it might even work on 95% of all Christians (I doubt it though), as most Christians are as “theologically illiterate” as Dawkins was when he wrote “The God Delusion”. (I prefer to believe Dawkins himself is a little more theologically literate than he lets on, or that he has learned quite a bit since the publishing of his polemic.) This blog isn’t a fundie blog though. If you want to spout fundamentalistic empiricism, please do so elsewhere.

Here’s an interview with Dawkins that might irk some fanboys: God… in other words. There is a lot of good stuff to read there. One little excerpt that is relevant:

“I do think that intelligent, sophisticated theologians are almost totally irrelevant to the phenomenon of religion in the world today. Regrettable as that may be.” Why so? “Because they’re outnumbered by vast hordes of religious idiots.”

Unfortunately for Dawkins, people often judge him based on the behaviour of those that look like his “followers”. These fanboys sadly lack Dawkins’ more admirable qualities. Jesus kinda has the same PR problem today.

Some thoughts from a review of Alister McGrath’s book, “Dawkins’ God”:

Throughout, McGrath maintains a balanced tone, treating Dawkins’ writing respectfully even when it is ignorant or nasty. He also contents himself by showing that Dawkins’ atheism is suspect rather than demonstrably wrong.

If that sounds odd, it is because we have been conned into the kind of over-simplistic thinking that Dawkins sometimes promotes and that McGrath criticises – specifically, the idea that unless something can be proved, it is false; that either you know something by proof or you don’t know it at all. McGrath shows that this is not so; that many theories are critically ‘underdetermined’ by evidence and that it is not just religious people who live by faith.

I’ve misplaced a link to another McGrath review that I quite liked. (It was more critical, and had a particular piece I wanted to quote.) Oh well.

Exercise to the reader, especially the atheistic ones: identify some of the things that you accept, despite them being “underdetermined” by evidence.

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God exists.

If you are disagreeing with me, if you say “no he doesn’t”, you have missed the point already. You have assumptions that are blinding you to what I’m saying. You can tell me what it is that doesn’t exist, but you have not worked with the same axioms that I have, so we are not communicating.

So drop that nonsense of yours, remove all your assumptions, all your baggage, all your fundamentalistic brainwashings (and atheists are prone to that as well), and accept only one axiom (and it’s an axiom, so don’t argue):

God exists.

Done that? Great. Now you tell me about God. The God that does exist, not the one that does not.

Three weeks ago, I experienced what some might call a synchronicity (a concept introduced by Carl Jung). Wikipedia defines it as follows:

Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events which occur in a meaningful manner, but which are causally unrelated. In order to be synchronous, the events must be related to one another conceptually, and the chance that they would occur together by random chance must be very small.

A “fundamentalistic atheist” (sorry about the label, can’t be helped) will typically assume that synchronicity is nothing other than observational selection, i.e. bias. We remember and notice the interesting coincidences more than the uninteresting ones. The “fundamentalistic theist” will typically assume that synchronicity is definite proof of the existence of their God.

The scientist? What will the scientist do? Ideally: neither. The scientist would think: “Hey, this is interesting! Can’t we test it? Let’s test whether it is nothing other than coincidence, or something more…” (assuming funding could be found for such experiments). A scientist that would love to “prove” it, should ideally try his or her best to disprove it, in order to avoid his or her own bias. (See What is Science?)

Incidentally, the Wikipedia page seems to indicate this matter is not yet satisfactorily settled. (Not that you can take Wikipedia’s word for it, though. Wikipedia is not God after all ) The (ideal) scientist would go look for literature on the matter, to find out what experiments have been done, and what can be learned from them. He/she will then design another experiment, possibly improving on previous ones, or otherwise re-testing previous ones, to test whether this is merely coincidence and observational selection or sampling bias, or whether there really is some unexpected and unpredictable coincidences that we can not yet explain.

If the scientist finds these coincidences, the conclusion is not “Wow! There is a God!” If the scientist finds it is nothing other than sampling bias, the conclusion is not “See! There is no God!”

In the first case, the conclusion is just: Ah, there is some surprising but measurable effect that we don’t yet understand. It would seem there may be some form of “connectedness” between things in the universe. Whether that “connectedness” is God or not, is not relevant to science. (Jung, for example, believed synchronicities occur too often to be random chance, even after controlling for observational selection.)

In the second case, the conclusion is ah, it would seem accounts of synchronicity really are nothing other than a case of sampling bias. Even if the sequence of events are purely random chance, I think the subjective experience of meaning behind a random sequence of events, can still be attributed to “God”. Why not? What’s wrong with that?

In this sense, I’d argue there is no way of either proving or disproving “God”. In this sense, God isn’t within the realms of science. In this sense, I feel I must agree with Stephen Jay Gould’s idea of “non-overlapping magesteria”, though I have yet to read any of his books.

Enjoy.

ps: So the discussion of such experiences is then not in the realm of science. (I wonder, does that put such discussions outside the realm of the “Freethinking Maties” society?) If it’s not a scientific discussion, what is it? Theology perhaps? Or something similar at least?

What then, of the thesis? Well, the vision did seem to indicate I will yet finish my thesis… however, visions aren’t to be trusted as literally true.

So what would it take for me to finish my thesis?

A Miracle. That’s what.

There are two possibilities. One, I finish it before 1 December. Damn-nigh impossible. Two, they actually allow me to finish it next year, hand it in “when I’m done”. They were being so difficult this year already, I cannot imagine what they will do to me if I’m not finished on 1 December. That is more impossible.

So what is a miracle? The seemingly impossible happening. With a subjective experience of meaning attached to it.

Finishing my thesis, will be a miracle. I’d have to be thankful, if I succeed. Thankful? Where does one direct thankfulness? To some abstract idea? Can we personify this idea and call it “God”? I should definitely also thank the people around me that made it possible, through their contributions. Might we call the inspiration of their contributions, the fact that they care, the love or compassion that encouraged them, might we call that “God”?

God is on a Milk Carton

Thanks to RLP for pointing it out. If you want a little quote, see RLP’s post on it. I don’t feel like quoting any of it, or making any comments. Just read it.