David, thank you for answering.
“I’m allergic to ‘why,’” and your worry about defending shoddy reasons, tell me more than another argument would have. I would rather have that honesty than a tidy case.
And you are right that all testimonies are interesting. Yours would be too, if you ever felt like telling it. No pressure either way.
I’ll leave the rest of it where it is.
Robert said
Let me know, Stephen, if you would like me to remove DavidFord’s inane posts from this thread.
Well he has already posted here extensively and since I didn’t originate the thread I would probably be overstepping my bounds.
At the risk of repeating myself, not only do I not believe in the supernatural, I think it is a stupid idea. The God whose existence I am skeptical of would be the God of Spinoza…
The thing that strikes me about the “supernatural” is what a modern concept it actually is. The ancients had no such concept; for them reality was whatever happened. That could include rust on a blade or flowers blooming in the spring or a god dancing on top of a mountain. To have a concept of supernature you just first have a concept of nature. And that is a modern invention though it can be traced back to those hardheaded pre-Socratic Greek philosophers.
The apophatic part of my apophatic agnosticism insists that God, if she exists at all, is not only unknowable, unable to be defined, which almost mimics a separate (if not specific) epistemological category, except for the fact that this “category” is not a genus of definition. Any god that is able to be defined conceptually is, by definition, not God. In this sense, I too do not believe in a god or the God of classical theism. This does not render the discussion moot; rather it liberates the mind from discussion of any and all lesser ideas.
Would we live our lives any differently if we were able to believe in some kind of mysterious Existence of this undefinable God? I would hope not! If anyone were to live their life differently if they believed in a god has a defective view of god and an immature personal morality. In my humble opinion.
A difference which makes no difference is no difference. (To misquote William James.) I cannot see the functional difference between the unknowable God and no God at all. And if a proposition can have no effect on how I live my life then frankly, is it worth my time or consideration?
I approach it a little differently. I have slowly come to the conclusion, not simply that God does not exist, but that the very concept of God itself is fundamentally incoherent. At best it is an artifact of language.
I have tried to explain my thinking before although I’m not sure how successful I’ve been. But trying to explain it helps me clarify my own thoughts so I will indulge myself.
Gods can only exist within a specific cultural context. Yahweh exists within a specific cultural matrix. In his case an Ancient Near Eastern tribal milieu. Outside that specific context his “existence” simply has no meaning. Not to go full tilt anthropological, but Yahweh, Shiva, or Zeus etc are “culturally situated” entities. They possess “narrative coherence“ because they exist within specific mythological, linguistic frameworks, and social histories. We can only evaluate them within their tradition. Their specific properties give them conceptual boundaries.
The God of “Classical Theism”, drawing from Neoplatonism and Medieval scholasticism, is an abstraction, an attempt to create an epistemic category of thought, “God”, which can transcend any specific cultural context. Hence its incoherence. “God”, in this sense, cannot exist. Only Yahweh, or Zeus, or Shiva etc can exist. And when the cultural context out of which they sprang vanishes then they cease to have meaning. Monotheism, rather than being considered as an advance in conceptual thinking, should be seen as simply an inevitable stage towards atheism.
Agree? Disagree? Does it even make sense (pardon the pun)?
Stephen, I understand Robert to meet your incoherence point from one side. He says the God worth talking about is beyond every concept, too far above our categories to be pinned down at all. I want to come at the same point from the other side. Where he goes up, beyond all definiteness, I would go down, into the most definite thing of all. What follows is another road out of your dilemma.
As I understand you, it runs like this. A god means something to us because he has definite, recognizable features. Zeus is the thunder-god, with his own stories, his own quarrels, and his own powers. You know what you are talking about. But the moment you try to speak of “God” in general, above every people and every story, you lose exactly those recognizable features. And a god with no definite features, you say, is a word with nothing inside it. So you call him not merely empty but incoherent. And from there your conclusion: the more universal a faith makes its God, the thinner that God becomes, until nothing is left and you arrive at unbelief. Monotheism is then not a step forward but a slide toward atheism.
Here is where I think it rests on one hidden assumption. You take it that there is only one way to become bigger or more universal: by leaving things out, by stripping away the particular, by rising to a vaguer and more general idea. On that picture, the larger something gets, the emptier it must become. And if that were the only road to universality, your conclusion would follow.
But I don’t think it is the only road. Consider a novelist. A great writer does not become universal by writing about “people in general,” about humanity in the abstract. He becomes universal by drawing one particular character, one man in one town with one history, so truly that readers everywhere recognize themselves in him. The most particular thing carries the most universal thing. Not by leaving the particular behind, but by going all the way into it.
Now the analogy has a limit, and it is the important one. A novelist’s character exists only within the book; there is no Anna outside Tolstoy’s pages. The image shows how the particular can carry the universal. It does not show that the character exists on his own. And here the biblical claim says something the novel does not. It does not offer a God it invents, who lives only between its covers. It speaks of a God who makes himself known in actual history: who called a people, formed a story, and, in Christian confession, came in Christ. The novel says, “imagine this man.” The Gospel makes a different kind of claim: not merely that this is meaningful, but that God made himself known in what happened. That is the whole difference between a God who is a cultural construction and a God who makes himself known through culture and history.
So here is the shape I would put against your dilemma. The God of the Bible does not become knowable as universal by thinning out into a general category above all the stories. He becomes known by descending, into one people, and finally into one life. Not “God in general,” but this one, here, concrete: a name, a history, a face. And that is exactly why he is not empty. He has all the definiteness you say a meaningful god must have. But that definiteness does not shrink him to a local tribal god, because it is the Maker of everything who is meeting us in it. The particular is not the cage of the universal here. It is the way the universal reaches us.
So I would say your critique lands hard against two things: against gods who live only inside their stories, and against an abstract “God” that has floated free of every story into a general idea. But I am not sure it touches the claim I would actually want to make: that this God is not known apart from the story of Israel and Christ, yet is not produced by that story either. He is universal, but not abstract. He is concrete, but not confined.
Testimonial
Lee Strobel, _The Case for a Creator: A Journalist Investigates Scientific Evidence That Points Toward God_ (2004)
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It was no accident that my admiration for scientific thinking was developing at the same time that my confidence in God was disappearing.
While many of my classmates in Sunday school and confirmation class seemed to automatically accept the teaching of the Bible, I needed reasons for trusting it.
When nobody wanted to hear my questions, I began to suspect it was because nobody had any convincing answers.
And if there wasn’t any scientific or rational evidence for believing in God, then I wasn’t interested.
That’s when, on that day in biology class, I began to learn about scientific discoveries that, for me, opened the door to atheism.
…
My teacher explained that life originated millions of years ago when chemicals randomly reacted with each other in a warm ocean on prehistoric Earth.
Then, through a process of survival of the fittest and natural selection, life-forms grew increasingly complex.
Eventually, human beings emerged from the same family tree as apes.
Everything fell into place for me.
My conclusion was that you didn’t need a Creator if life can emerge unassisted from the primordial slime of the primitive Earth, and you don’t need God to create human beings in his image if we are merely the product of the impersonal forces of natural selection.
In short, I decided, you don’t need the Bible if you have _The Origin of Species_.
====================================
A Frequent Testimony
Richard Goldschmidt, _In and Out of the Ivory Tower_ (1960) aka
_Portraits from Memory: Recollections of a Zoologist_ (1956) aka
_The Golden Age of Zoology_ (1966)
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Page 25 — It is surprising that, under such circumstances, I did not read poor literature or even obscene books.
Actually I read mostly good books that increased my knowledge, trained my literary taste, and prepared me for much of what I later did professionally.
The great turning point came when I hit upon Büchner’s _Kraft und Stoff_, the bible of monists and atheists, a book that impressed me immensely and had lasting influence.
I know now how superficial this book is, but when I was fourteen years old I was ready for just that type of fare.
=======
Richard Weikart, _From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics and Racism in Germany_
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Page 12 — Haeckel, Büchner, and many young men and women influenced by them saw Darwinism as more than merely a biological theory.
For them it was a central ingredient of a new worldview that was locked in combat with traditional Christian religion and indeed any dualistic religion or philosophy.
Alfred Grotjahn, professor of social hygiene at the University of Berlin and leading figure in the eugenics movement, fondly recalled the time in his youth when he read Büchner’s book, _Force and Matter_, which stripped him of all traces of religious faith.
Büchner’s Darwinian materialism influenced not only him, but many of his generation, according to Grotjahn (who was born in 1869):
“Like hundreds of thousands of other young people it swept my brain clear of metaphysical conceptions at an age decisive in the development of my world view and freed me up to receive positivist views and this-worldly ethical values.”^41
Many other German scholars and intellectuals have similarly testified that in their youth their encounters with popular Darwinist writings—especially those by Haeckel and Büchner—were decisive in the formation of their worldviews.^42
=======
[Einstein]”Thus I came– though the child of entirely irreligious (Jewish) parents– to a deep religiousness, which, however, reached an abrupt end at the age of twelve.
Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true.
The consequence was a positively fanatic [orgy of] freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies;
it was a crushing impression”
Albert Einstein, in _Albert Einstein: Autobiographical Notes_ (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1979), editor and translator Paul Schilpp, on 3, 5
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Page 3 — When I was a fairly precocious young man I became thoroughly impressed with the futility of the hopes and strivings that chase most men restlessly through life.
Moreover, I soon discovered the cruelty of that chase, which in those years was much more carefully covered up by hypocrisy and glittering words than is the case today.
By the mere existence of his stomach everyone was condemned to participate in that chase.
The stomach might well be satisfied by such participation, but not man insofar as he is a thinking and feeling being.
As the first way out there was religion, which is implanted into every child by way of the traditional education-machine.
Thus I came– though the child of entirely irreligious (Jewish) parents– to a deep religiousness, which, however, reached an abrupt end at the age of twelve.
Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true.
The consequence was a positively fanatic [orgy of] freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies;
it was a crushing impression.
Mistrust of every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude toward the convictions that were alive in any specific social environment– an attitude that has never again left me, even though, later on, it has been tempered by a better insight into the causal connections.
Page 5 — It is quite clear to me that the religious paradise of youth, which was thus lost, was a first attempt to free myself from the chains of the “merely personal,” from an existence dominated by wishes, hopes, and primitive feelings.
Out yonder there was this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking.
The contemplation of this world beckoned as a liberation, and I soon noticed that many a man whom I had learned to esteem and to admire had found inner freedom and security in its pursuit.
The mental grasp of this extra-personal world within the frame of our capabilities presented itself to my mind, half consciously, half unconsciously, as a supreme goal.
Similarly motivated men of the present and of the past, as well as the insights they had achieved, were the friends who could not be lost.
The road to this paradise was not as comfortable and alluring as the road to the religious paradise;
but it has shown itself reliable, and I have never regretted having chosen it.
Robert said
I affirm all the concreteness of religious experience and communal and interpersonal relationships, all of which can be understood and affirmed to be an experience of God immanent in the lives of believers, but this is all analogical, metaphorical, at the level of our imagination, kind of a personal and communal mythology not abstract or dogmatic metaphysics. I believe this is what happens in the daily lives of believers today and this same type of analogical experience was communicated in the gospels by believers expressing their faith so long ago in the initial generations after Jesus was no longer around. It would be the kind of experience Jesus had as well, though thisbway of understanding religious experience is in no way limited to Christianity. As a former believer, I still appreciate and highly value my past personal, interpersonal, and communal religious experience as a believer; it is still part of my personal mythology. Even when I was a believer, it was already personal mythology, not to be taken too literally. For me that was always a corrective against the dangers of dogmatic over-certainty, fundamentalism, or religious elitism and arrogance.
Robert, thank you for this. It is generous and honest.
You are right that faith is always mediated. It comes to us through analogy, metaphor, imagination, memory, community, song, inherited language. No believer steps outside all of that and lays hold of God directly. And your warning against over-certainty and arrogance is one I share. I have my own reasons and history to distrust a faith that is too sure of itself.
Where I hesitate is this: the move from “mediated” to mythology in the sense of something finally produced within us. In much of our knowledge of persons, mediation is not a disqualification. We know others through memory, interpretation, the images and stories that reach us, and we do not conclude from this that they are our own invention. Mediation is simply the form personal knowledge often takes. So that an experience is mediated does not by itself settle what it is mediating.
And here is the part I cannot quite let go. The experience does not present itself to me as something I am making. It comes as address, as given, as reaching me from beyond myself. That is not yet a proof about God. It is a description of how the experience arrives.
This is where our trust falls differently. The experience presents itself as given, as address. You read that sense of givenness as something imagination, memory, community, and inherited language may produce. I have to allow for that possibility too. But from within the experience, I also have to allow for another possibility: that the address is real, and that the mediation does not create it but carries it.
That makes our choices not quite the same. Yours reads the givenness as appearance, or at least as possibly appearance. Mine takes it, carefully and imperfectly, at its word.
I do not offer this as proof, and I do not pretend it is. I only mean that the word “mediated” does not yet decide the matter. It may be personal mythology, in your sense. Or it may be personal knowledge, carried through metaphor, story, song, memory, answers to prayer, and community. The honest place to leave it may be here: what each of us takes as given, and what each of us treats as appearance.
One more thought, Robert.
We have been treating “mediated” as if it counted against the experience, as if the fact that faith comes through imagination, language, and memory already made it suspect. But consider what mediation actually is. Everything that reaches me reaches me that way. The world comes to me mediated, through the senses and the brain’s own shaping. Another person comes to me mediated, through voice, face, word, and the images I form of them. I do not conclude from this that the world is my invention, or that the other is not really there. Mediation is not the wall that shuts the outside out. It is the way the outside comes in.
So the question I arrive at is this. If a human being takes in everything through mediation, can such a being still be addressed by a God who makes himself known? And I cannot see why mediation, of all things, would be what rules that out. If it ruled out being reached from beyond, it would rule out the world and the other too, and leave me sealed inside my own constructions. Whatever else is true, that cannot be.
It does not show that God does address me. It only shows that mediation cannot be the reason to deny it. The question of whether anyone is actually there, on the far side of the address, stays open, and I do not think I can close it. But I do not think you can close it by pointing to mediation either. That leaves us, again, with what each of us takes as real, and what each of us treats as appearance.
I want to thank the three of you. This is one of the conversations I come to this forum hoping to find, and too rarely do: honest, unhurried, willing to say where each of us actually stands.
Stephen, you gave the sharpest questions. Robert, you gave the most generous disagreement I have met in a long while. Judith, you reminded us that some of this is not argued but lived.
I learn from all of you, and I am grateful.
Robert, there is much here that I recognize, and much that connects us. Whatever is received is received within the limits of the one receiving, and it can grow or be distorted over a life. I believe that too. I have never thought I hold God; only that I am held, more tightly than I understand, and never as fully experienced as I would wish.
And what you say about the elderly, listening to people near the end of the road who have grown deep, moved me. These stories matter, and yet for some reason they are often kept quiet. It is close to something I carry: the sense that the journey is going somewhere, that it is met. We may name that differently, you and I. For me, the name I keep returning to is Luke 15: the lost being sought, the son being waited for, the homecoming that is already waiting before we know how to come home. But I think we are listening for something close, even if we name it differently.
Soon I have to leave; I will be away for quite a while. I will probably check in now and then.
Thank you for this, all of you.
Testimonial – 10y ago
reddit.com/r/TrueAtheism/comments/4r8sr8/did_understanding_evolution_cause_you_to_leave/
reddit.com/r/TrueAtheism/comments/4r8sr8/comment/d502zzz/
Learning evolution was the final tipping point for me.
Born and raised Lutheran Christian, even made it as far as being confirmed at age 14.
I’d always had my doubts, though, even going so far as to question the existence of God in my Sunday school classes at the tender age of 8.
The answer I got back then was “it’s faith”, which of course is utterly useless to an inquisitive young mind.
Religion was unable to answer some fundamental questions I had about our true origins:
I couldn’t accept the creation story in Genesis, I couldn’t accept Noah was able to round up the millions of different species from all over the world and find time to care for them on his little boat, didn’t understand if we all descended from Adam and Eve why we all didn’t look the same, didn’t understand the origin of Satan/evil and why God didn’t simply eliminate them, etc.
Freshmen year in high school, our biology teacher taught us evolution.
That was the very last time I considered myself a believer in God.
From that moment on, I knew I’d been deceived, that the real answers for everything I’d ever wondered about lie in science, and that religion is just a collection of feel-good fairy tales for those who can’t accept the reality that there’s nothing else beyond our very short existence here on Earth.
So for me, evolution absolutely was the tipping point.
But I _wanted_ to learn the truth, so I was 100% open to learning about it.
I was never brainwashed as a young child to reject science, to reject evolution, that it’s the work of the devil, etc.
So for that I have to thank the more liberal churches that I attended for not instilling such false beliefs.
Today it would not be possible for some creationist to attack evolution and get me to go back to a life with God.
I know too much now, and can defend evolution quite handily against the deniers.
Testimony
_Monologe im Führerhauptquartier 1941-1944: Die Aufzeichnungen Heinrich Heims_, Herausgegeben on Werner Jochmann
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43* Führerhauptquartier
24. 10. 1941, abends
Gast: Generalleutnant v. Rintelen,
Rom117
H/Fu.
…
Die Kirche liegt in immerwährendem Streit mit der freien Forschung.
Es gab Zeiten, in denen der Widerstand der Kirche gegen die Forschung so groß war, daß harte Zusammenstöße, geradezu Explosionen erfolgten.
Darauf hat sich die Kirche zurückgezogen, und die Wissenschaft hat an Schlagkraft verloren.
Heute wird in der Religionsstunde um 10 Uhr die Schöpfungsgeschichte mit den Worten der Bibel erzählt, während in der Naturkundestunde um 11 Uhr die Entwicklungstheorie vertreten wird.
Beides widerspricht sich absolut.
Ich habe als Schuljunge den Wider- Spruch empfunden und mich hineinverbohrt;
ich habe dem Professor der zweiten Stunde vorgehalten, was der der ersten gesagt hatte, so- daß die Lehrer in Verzweiflung gerieten.
Die Kirche hilft sich damit, daß sie erklärt, die Darstellung der Bibel sei sinnbildlich zu verstehen.
Würde einer vor vierhundert Jahren das behauptet haben, so wäre er unter frommen Gesängen geröstet worden.
translate.google.com:
43* Führer Headquarters
24 October 1941, evening
Guest: Lieutenant General von Rintelen,
Rome117
H/Fu.
…
The Church is in a state of perpetual conflict with independent inquiry.
There were times when the Church’s resistance to such inquiry was so intense that fierce clashes—veritable explosions—occurred.
Since then, the Church has retreated, and science has lost some of its momentum.
Today, during the 10 o’clock religious education class, the story of Creation is recounted using the words of the Bible, while in the 11 o’clock natural science class, the theory of evolution is taught.
The two are in absolute contradiction.
As a schoolboy, I sensed this contradiction and became obsessed with it;
I would confront the teacher of the second class with what the teacher of the first had said, driving the instructors to despair.
The Church resolves this by explaining that the biblical account is to be understood symbolically.
Had anyone claimed this four hundred years ago, they would have been roasted alive amidst the singing of hymns.
hat tip
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Is it possible that
[Erasmus Darwin]”all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which the great First Cause endued with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions, and associations;
and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity”?
=========================
1872 edition of _Origin_
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There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one;
and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), _Zoonomia_ (1818)
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Page 395 — The contrivances for the purposes of security extend even to vegetables, as is seen in the wonderful and various means of their concealing or defending their honey from insects, and their seeds from birds.
On the other hand swiftness of wing has been acquired by hawks and swallows to pursue their prey;
and a proboscis of admirable structure has been acquired by the bee, the moth, and the humming bird, for the purpose of plundering the nectaries of flowers.
All which seem to have been formed by the original living filament, excited into action by the necessities of the creatures which possess them, and on which their existence depends.
Page 395 — From thus meditating on the great similarity of the structure of the warm-blooded animals, and at the same time of the great changes they undergo both before and after their nativity;
and by considering in how minute a proportion of time many of the changes of animals above described have been produced;
would it be too bold to imagine, that in the great length of time, since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind,
would it be too bold to imagine, that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which the great First Cause endued with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions, and associations;
and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end?
Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), _Zoonomia_ (1794) (read many ‘f’s as ‘s’s)
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Page 505 — From thus meditating on the great fimilarity of the ftructure of the warm-blooded animals, and at the fame time of the great changes they undergo both before and after their nativity ;
and by confidering how minute a portion of time many of the changes of animals above defcribed have been produced ;
would it be too bold to imagine, that in the great length of time, fince the earth began to exift, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the hiftory of mankind, would it be too bold to imagine, that all warm-blooded animals have arifen from one living filament, which THE GREAT FIRST CAUSE endued with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propenfities, directed by irritations, fenfations, volitions, and affociations ;
and thus poffeffing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down thofe improvements by generation to its pofterity, world without end?
============
Charles Darwin read Erasmus Darwin’s _Zoonomia_ at-least twice.
_The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809-1882: With Original Omissions Restored_ (1993)
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Page 49 — He one day, when we were walking together burst forth in high admiration of Lamarck and his views on evolution.
I listened in silent astonishment, and as far as I can judge, without any effect on my mind.
I had previously read the _Zoonomia_ of my grandfather, in which similar views are maintained, but without producing any effect on me.
Nevertheless it is probable that the hearing rather early in life such views maintained and praised may have favoured my upholding them under a different form in my _Origin of Species_.
At this time I admired greatly the _Zoonomia_;
but on reading it a second time after an interval of ten or fifteen years, I was much disappointed, the proportion of speculation being so large to the facts given.”
_Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836-1844: Geology, Transmutation of Species, Metaphysical Enquiries_ (1987, which is the same as a 2008 copy), 747pp.
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Page 544 — hours of sleep during prolonged starvation], were usually (though not invariably,) of a pleasant character, being very often about the enjoyments of feasting.’
In Erasmus Darwin 1794, 1:23, is the following penciled marginal notation made by Charles Darwin (in his personal copy of _Zoonomia_),
“This is strange as hungry men never dream of hunger’.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
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