I don’t know whether I’m the sort of person you’re asking about here. Whenever some atheist suggests to me that religious people have staged a general retreat from physical gods to a vaguely-defined spiritual god because the evidence has forced us to do so, it never makes any sense to me. I believe in one God, Jesus Christ, who was born as a human being and lived at a known place and time. Therefore I believe in a much more definite and well-defined God than people did in the times before Christ.
As for the notion that describing God as a spirit (whether the Holy Spirit that is one third of the Holy Trinity or any other) is trying to escape through vague definition, as Diogenes suggests, there’s a chapter-length rebuttal of the charge in Mircales, by C. S. Lewis. The basic argument is that any definition of spirit sounds vague to materialists, because those offering the definition need to keep emphasizing that spiritual is non-material, and materialists only believe in the material. But the Christian concept of God is extremely well-defined. Being non-material does not mean being vague; it only sounds that way if you arbitrarily limit your universe to material things.
Cute, but wrong. Magic always was an attempt to understand the world, and has developed through various stages. Shamanic magic combined a certain view of pantheism with practical know-how. It was unable to decipher the causes of things, but it did not attempt to create a coherent view of the world or develop a deepr understanding. Later magic evolved alongside science, and in fact was a conjoined twin from the start - it’s heyday belongs not in the era of general ignorance, but in the relative eras of understanding and develpoment. Hence Pythagorus and Cornelius Agrippa.
You are talking about superstition, which is another bag entirely.
Or whatever. It seems to me that once you reach the idea of god as Super, Natural, rather than Supernatural (see “The God We Never Knew” by Marcus Borg), there really is no difference in the way you live your life than that of an atheist.
If you’ll excuse the question, I don’t see why you draw a line there. Superstition along the lines that Der Trihs describes seems to be the natural result of attempts to understand the universe. People used symbols and totems because they believed that by doing so they would be having some effect, either by affecting the universe or by simply following the rules of it, at least as far as I can tell. What am I not understanding correctly?
Only if you assume that the material world is all there is. “But of course it’s true!” one might object. Mere assertion is not the same as proof, though.
“But we have never observed anything other than what is material” some of the more stubborn objectors might say. Even if we grant that to be true though, it takes a certain amount of hubris to say that if we’ve never perceived something, then it cannot possibly exist. You need a firmer argument than that.
Earlier, a certain somebody said that a spirit must be defined “in scientific terms” before we consider its existence. And yet here, we have the blanket (and scientifically unproven) claim that nothing outside the material world can possibly exist. That strikes me as a rather severe double standard.
BTW, it’s worth noting that ITR Champion specifically cited CS Lewis’s statement that “Being non-material does not mean being vague; it only sounds that way if you arbitrarily limit your universe to material things.” To respond by saying that only material things can possibly exist is not a rebuttal. If anything, it’s a demonstration of the specific problem that CS Lewis was lamenting.
We know and experience the material world. The supernatural is just hearsay and cannot be given any merit just because millions of people believe in it.
Oi, it does get complicated. The basic distinction is that magic (and its twin sister, science) always follows rules: these rules may not be well understood, but they are never arbitrary. The Shaman does not carry out the dance for no reason, but because he believes it entertains and appeases someone specific who will respond. The Greek Magician does not fiddle with his lines and angles for no reason, but because he believes they are universal laws laid down by Reason which govern reality and can be manipulated. The European Natural Philosopher does not experiment for no reason, but because he thinks these is a fundamental divine mechanism he can control. Magic is always bound by rules, but they are not arbitrary, and frankly, most are not very imaginitive.
Science is the shy, buttoned-up bookish twin which everyone wants to do their homework, but she’s a cute geek girl who loves stories and imagination. Magic is the athletic outgoing girl everyone wants to date, but who doesn’t come up with anything new.
But they are twins nonetheless. They were born from the same root and still have lunch frequently. Science now works for a major pharmaceutical firm developing treatments for depression. Magic is now working at a New-Age shop where she does very well for herself selling poulticies, crystals, bongs, herbal supplements, and looks after her annoying cousin during the daytime. Both Science and Magic are about equally effective in treating depression. Science had a real breakthrough while back with Newton brand physics and later the Einstein series. Both did some real good but were gruesomely abused by junkies looking for a military solution to their problems. She still has not fully recovered her confidence.
Superstition, as mentioned, is the bratty younger cousin who constantly demands things and screams acidly when balked.
Superstition is different, and not neccessarily worse. Superstition is a fairy-tale. Some people avoid black cats and throw salt over their shoulder to avoid bad luck. Why? Because it’s a rule. You’ll get bad luck. The fairies might curse you. The gnomes will nab your car keys. There’s no reason - it just is. Folkisms.
it is true that the boundary in any one case is not always clear, but that’s fairly normal. The boundary between magic and science is not clear, either. Unless you are very educated, you probably don’t know how everything works. Even if you re very educated, there are large gaps in your knowledge. We know a computer does work, and that someone designed it to work, but not every bit of how it does what it does. We skim over that. We sometimes shade into supersition of taking weird actions becuse it seemed to work once.
It does have a darker side. Supersition often believes it can accomplish things if it just believes hard enough, or orders somebody else to do it. Science must have to have a way to get there - Superstition just wants it and doesn’t think about it. Even to give Magic her due, she’s in the business of fixing problems, not shoving them onto other people.
On a slightly more serious note, I consider msot of the social sciences Magical in nature. Let’s face it: despite a lot of advances, psychology is as much an art as a science. it knows there are rules for people’s behavior, and that people respond in somewhat predictable (if often irrational) ways, but it has to get by with hald-understood principles and whatever biology can lend it. History is a desperate attempt to understand how things happened in the face of time and distance. Economics is basically voodoo, but with money.
Well here is how I see it. Religion as it was, was an attempt to understand the reality around us. It uses similitudes to come up with ideas. I think the modern analytical mind is too quick to blow these off as useless superstition, though I think that the process of the mind learning to consider things grew up through these various ideas, and that formal logic ultimately grew out of our ability to imagine.
Biologically, we have created categories that separate one organism from another. But all organisms live in a larger ecosystem, the life of which depends upon the organisms that inhabit it.
The human body as such is an ecosystem. We could consider our cells to be individual organisms, but we don’t, because the hierarchy we have created in order to understand biology is anthro-centric, IE, we view creatures by their relationship to human beings. Ultimately though, all creatures are protein compounds that bring elemental matter into different forms.
We believe the human being to be sentient, either the only sentient creature in the universe or the MOST sentient. For instance bioethicists such as Peter Singer have developed the idea of sentience as the ability to form preferences, and as such his morality is based upon this preference system. This makes a lot more sense to me than anything else. Especially as we move toward a possible transhumanism, our literature is rife with the ethical questions regarding the possibility of our creation of a sentient species that is distinctly not human.
I subscribe to a collectivist view of sentience. We like to think of ourselves as sentient, but we aren’t. A lone human cannot survive in the wild like other mammals can. We have a long nurturing process whereby the architecture of human sentience is imparted to us by our cultural collectives. This process was largely formed by religious institutions in the past. We have taken the same sorts of inculcation processes and stripped them of the language of similitude as we have found ourselves capable of doing so.
Nothing that we know, we know in a vacuum. Our knowledge is intimately linked toward our ability to function in society. Even the loan woodsman who likes to think of himself as self-sufficient is bound to the millenia long tradition of skills that allow him to ply his trade. Even the very act of swinging an axe is dependent upon thousands of years of human industry, the harvesting of plant matter, and the ability to fashion metal being the foundations of all industry and the physical sciences. We know things based upon our ability to perceive variations in physical forces, we notice changes in the ambient energy in our environment (temperature) or by the reflection of photons (sight) changes in pressure (proprioception) changes in gravity in relation to the angle of a surface (balance) the aerosolized components of different molecules (olfaction) or the vibration of sound waves moving through the elements we inhabit (hearing) and the subtle variations of surface areas (touch). In essence our very ability to perceive is based on external inputs.
We have defined ourselves as being limited to the ends of our skin, but we are more than that, we are our relationships, our homes, our cars, our families, our vocations, etc… There are so many characteristics that are externalities that we consider intrinsically linked to who we are. As such we share some of these externalities, we become a part of larger hive structures. Just as an ant hill and the warrens that exist within it are as much a part of the hive as the individual ants, so too are we in our cities, suburbs, corporations and other such externalities that serve to contain groupings of human beings.
Human beings are completely and totally incapable of original thought. All of our ideas are recombinant. We take existing ideas and we put them together into larger concepts and then we test those concepts mercilessly, we share them, take them apart and put them back together again. The very act of cognition is a social process.
Every part of the human being is complexity derived from increasing the scale of simplicity. From the atom to the molecule to the protein, and from the neuron to the cluster structures, to the brain, to the central nervous system, to the human being. We think of our thoughts as being distinctly our own, but they are not. They are built upon a bed of ideas passed down to us by our ancestors. We have a very interesting capability of assimilating broad and sweeping ideas and being affected by people throughout history.
I feel like I can safely say that not a single person reading this is uninfluenced by Jesus Christ, Buddha, Mohammed, Genghis Khan, Einstein, Beethoven, Planck, Aristotle, Plato, Avicenna, Maimonides, Confucius, Tokugawa, Caesar, Tamerlane, Ahmadinejad, Bush, Obama, Clinton, Merkel, Sarkozy, etc… The very act of society of civilization is an act of cognition greater than the individual human actors.
It seems to me that human thought and human action are mutual activities, they do not occur in a vacuum, they are shared. We test our ideas upon one another, we put together pieces of the puzzle with one another, we figure things out together. We communicate in order to be heard by others that we may more efficiently link our minds into a grander unified collective cognitive entity.
We sprang from the universe by some process that is as of yet opaque to us. How does conciousness arise from the valences of atoms? How did the universe’s matter go from element to molecule, from molecule to protein, and from protein to self-aware being? I see it as folly to assume that consciousness is a process that emerges solely from the human being. The human being is dependent upon too many external factors. We are not separate and distinct from our environment, we are an integral part of it. The Nature vs Artifice argument is one of the grandest category errors in the history of mankind. We are a part of nature. As such, we are the matter of the universe experiencing itself. Even if we are the only fully conscious beings anywhere in the universe, then we are God’s brain. We are able to know the universe through the act of cognition, but the act of cognition is a collective process.
The ‘Spirit’ would be that part of us which is left over for future generations, the body of knowledge, the traditions, the thing that persists regardless of individual elemental composition.
From your descriptions, I would say that the difference between superstition and magic (and science) would be the existence of people who understand it. A shaman may perform his dance, and understand both the dance and its purpose. A scientist may perform an experiment, and understand both the method and the reason for the experiment. But someone watching the dance, or watching the experiment, may well be able to see what actually occurs, and possible even copy it, but don’t necessarily see the reason why the act affects the results. I might be able to drive a car (well, I can’t, but you get the idea), and I might understand that using a car allows me to get places, but a mechanic may know both as well as how the actions of driving result in movement.
The difference seems to be that, when it comes to superstition, there are no people who explain the how. That doesn’t strike me as making it a different type of beast, just something which is affected by practical concerns. You could achieve the same affect by killing all priests, or all scientists; you’d still have people saying Hail Marys, and people driving. That, essentially, superstition is not a thing in and of itself, it’s just the name we give things that we do, expecting a result, but that we can’t explain.
Thanks for the explanation, though. Though now i’m pretty unsure as to how you would seperate magic and science, to be honest.
The very act of animism itself is an useful tool. Think of an Android. That is an animistic concept. It is imputing the idea of intelligence upon a machine. Now, an Android is theoretically plausible in some senses. Regardless we know for a fact that we can create robots and that this machines can be animated to perform a particular function, a car is no less animism than an Android. Animism at its root is the ability to imagine something as having an animating spirit. You have since then changed your vocabulary to reflect the scientific/rational environment in which you live.
Der Trihs used the term, ‘imaginary’ as a dismissal. The implication is that they are imagining something that is not there. But the problem here is that imagination is an integral part of cognition. This is a problem I have with getting into Spinoza, apparently from commentary I’ve read he was very derisive of the imaginary and wanted to achieve a life of pure intellect. It seems to fit based upon his philosophy which is a very step by step and logical approach to the formulation of the universe as God. What he did, is what Der Trihs has done, and put the ‘imaginary’ in the category of the ‘not real’, which is a mistake. Just because something is imaginary doesn’t mean that it’s not real. You are now sitting in a building that was originally imaginary, and then an architect sat down with sheets of reconstituted paper pulp, a wooden tube filled with a soft metal, a metal 90 degree angle with lines and numbers written on it, and two metal spikes attached to a metal hinge.
Superstition is when one insists the imaginary exists in a way in which it does not.
Technically, an android is simply a machine built in the image of men. It doesn’t itself imply that where it compares is in intelligence.
As to your overall argument, I tend to disagree. I can see where you’re coming from, and I would certainly say that the imaginary, or that which exists only in the mind, is itself an existing thing. But that doesn’t mean that it is the same thing as, or has the same kind of existence as, a physical object. The plans in the mind of an architect exist, but they are not the same as a completed building. They exist, not as a physical object, but as an imagined idea. It would be wrong to say that imagined things or people (or, in this case, gods) do not exist; they do. But saying that the idea exists is not the same as saying the thing itself exists physically, or spiritually. I don’t know for sure, but considering his views I would be very surprised if Der Trihs did not believe that religious people truly held and believed in deities; I doubt he’d deny the existence of those ideas in their minds. What he’s saying is that they don’t exist as anything other than those ideas. And while i’m sure you and I would disagree to some extent with that, I think we’d both agree that the existence of an idea of something is not the same as, nor does it imply the physical or spiritual existence of, that which the idea defines. If I imagine something, there’s no reason at all based upon that why my imagined thing exists as anything other than an idea.
No, it was an attempt to declare that the world works the way its believers wanted it to work. There was no “attempt to understand” involved. Rather like its close cousin religion, magic is a denial of any attempt to understand the world, in favor of insisting that it MUST work the way you want it to work.
Yeah, that would be me, except perhaps for the “impersonal” part. That’s trickier. I don’t think my ‘conversations’ with God are personal for God, who is not a person. I, however, experience them as personal. I suppose someone might say “yeah but that’s an illusion” but it all depends on how you define “personal”.
Combo of the two. I was raised Methodist, which (as the vast majority of you are no doubt aware) is one of the subflavors of Protestant Christianity; emphasis growing up was on doing good works and how to discern good in a confusing world. In more or less consecutive order from my parents and other folks around me, as I grew up, I was exposed to these notions…
•God isn’t a translucent guy with a beard and heaven isn’t “up there in the sky”; that’s a kind of babytalk version. God is “everywhere” and doesn’t have a body as we know it. If there are 9 legged intelligent two-headed aliens that come in 3 sexes instead of 2 on some planet out there, God is as much “unto them” (and akin to them) as “unto us”.
•Hearing God speak, as the various prophets in the Bible did, would not have been like actual sound waves that your Panasonic recorder would have picked up on; this refers instead to a more abstract process; one hears God speaking in one’s head. And when we say the Bible was divinely inspired it doesn’t mean God dictated in Hebrew (or for that matter Greek, Latin, or Old English, heh) but rather that folks wrote down what they heard God to be speaking from in their head. And obvously no absolute certainty can exist there, since some nut could THINK God was speaking in his or her head (but over the centuries we are securely comfortable that these works are indeed divinely inspired, yadda yadda)
• Maybe the ‘miracles’ of Jesus such as the loaves and fishes, the walking on water, etc, were ascribed to him the way people in awe do ascribe fantastic things to the people they admire. Sort of a 1st century Paul Bunyan thing. The important part was the message.
• The remainining mysteries, supernaturalia, and miracles [“Oh, well yes of COURSE he really DID rise up from the dead, THAT part is real don’t get me wrong”] were discussed in terms that made it obvious (and quite overtly and honestly acknowledged), that Methodists have a hard time coming to grips with “what this means” and would go through some awfull convoluted mental constructs intermixed with a lot of “there are things that we as mortals may never be able to comprehend”.
I went on to make additional leaps from my own experience and in conjunction with praying to God and asking some pointed questions.
OK… both how and what, then. (You asked!). I reached a point in my life (age 20/21 & circa 1979-80) where quite a handful of things needed answers. Personal questions about my life interwoven with philosophical questions about human nature, political and social questions about social organization and the apparent failure of a lot of idealistic visionary dreams… in short, a set of strong feelings about “How things Oughta Be” on the one hand, and a really troubling philosophical concern on the other hand that maybe one’s feelings about how things “oughta be”, whether unique to that person or widely shared by the rest of the species, have no validity, that they are just meaningless emotional artifacts, that there actually is, in the abstract, no such thing as “how things should be”, that, instead, things simply are what they are, and quite meaninglessly so. That there is no goodness to strive for (successfully or otherwise). That nothing matters. If the latter were so, I’d just as soon be dead, since it would not matter if I were not dead. On the other hand, that obviously created a psychological need that would be MET BY A BELIEF IN a God, or at least a belief in purpose, in the abstract “oughta be”, in the notion that there really is a meaning to it all, *without anything of the sort necessarily correlating WITH such a belief, see what I mean?
So, being stubborn and skeptical and yet very much WANTING there to be some underlying ‘realness’ to the sense of purpose and values embedded in my idealism, I did the prayer thing: Hey you out there, ARE you out there? Well if you’re not then you oughta be. Settle this. I am totally NOT going to live my life believing in something I do not know to be true just because it would be a convenient belief. IF YOU ARE REAL I need to understand some things. I need to understand why the world is like THIS if there is indeed a valid “oughta be” as opposed to meaningless feelings on my part about so-called “good” and “bad”. I need to understand why my LIFE is like this. If I do not get to understand all this then I need to understand WHY I don’t get to understand all this; I’m not going to just shrug and say there is actually a meaning and that values do count for something when I do not KNOW that to be true.
Results (described in conventional theological terms): God answered me, I got divine revelations, answers, things became clear to me. Not in words, but “in my head”; more like being “shown” the answers than “told” the answers. (In fact the process of learning how to EXPRESS any of it in words was frustrating and time-consuming)
Results (described in conventional nontheological terms): Individuals are part of a larger whole, ultimately part of the entire world around them; this is as genuinely real as the local individual sense of self although for presumably obvious reasons our everyday awareness is focused on the local single individual self. This highly intense mental process, in which strong feelings are mapped to specific thoughts in a mode of inquiry, seeking understanding, promotes correlations in the mind among the library of life’s entire range of experiences to date, formulating abstract understandings, intuitive leaps of comprehension.
Also the Results (described in both terms): Since a major component of the CONTENT I had prayed about was specifically and very centrally theological, the content of my answers addresses the very process by which I was receiving them, and God, and my relationship to God.
God is a participatory sense of self, an ALL of which we are all a part. (Pantheism, you could say). The entire universe from the moment it came into existence is a conscious verb, all of it here because it has chosen to be. No windup toys have ever been “sent” but rather instead all people who have come to understand the messages that are conveyed when one reaches these understandings, and to communicate them to other people, have done so as volunteers, just as all who have sought to do good have done so on a voluntary basis, and none of them is or was intrinsically more divine but rather sought to become so. AND despite superficial appearances to the contrary, lo and behold this is what most of the old moldy institutionalized religions originally were trying to convey. (I did not “invent” an entirely new religion nor was an entirely new one “revealed” to me so much as I, too, saw what has so often been seen before).
More specific to our day and age, the species human happens to be in an unusual situation these last few thousand years. We are in a state of transition — not some supernatural woo-woo stuff but rather a slow transformation FROM the agrarian patriarchal civilization structure we first opted for roughly 10,000 years ago and TO a new arrangement that we can’t yet see because we are not there yet. I am told that the Chinese used to use “may you live in interesting times” as a curse; don’t know if that’s an urban legend or not, but I’ll borrow it anyhow: we do live in interesting times, and it makes for lives of confusion, moral and mental and emotional stress and a very shaky sense of solidity and meaning compared to what our species has had in other times. We have, perhaps, higher hopes and glimmerings of a much better world, a more fair world, a world of more freedom, a world more driven by the beliefs and principles enunciated by (for example) Jesus of Nazareth in the Sermon on the Plains and Sermon on the Mount as actual day to day operating principles and the basis of organizational structure than anything we’ve ever had so far. At the very same time, we are haunted by visions of a planet rendered dead by our own hands, of ourselves made extinct by our own violence and foolishness, or, perhaps worse, a dull grey impersonal institutional police-state world void of anything pleasant, a high-tech prison passing for a society. And again at the same time as both of these visions, the sense that the components of everyday life are “black boxes”, incomprehensible routines and activities that we get paid for or are forced to engage in without understanding why any of it takes place or what goes it does for anyone.
I believe I might be wrong. I believe all useful theological understanding, just like all useful scientific understanding, starts with that. With NOT believing things you do not know and then refusing to question or reconsider them. I believe that all userful social structures must incorporate the holy sanctity of our human fallibility and hence not judge as if one could judge from certainty and not coerce or boss or decide on others’ behalf as if one could do that with absolute knowledge.
I believe that truth can be described in theological terms but that those same truths can be described in deliberately nontheological terms. Words are just words. If they do not communicate they are perhaps poorly chosen.
You seem to be describing deism. As far as I can see, deism is probably closer to atheism than theism, at least as far as the conclusions you can derive from it regarding morals, science etc - you know, the practical stuff.
