@ Porphry
Thanks for responding. I actually agree with what you have posted in this thread. Most humans seem to feel a need to find some deeper meaning in the world, and objects that call remind us of important people, places, things or ideas can be said to embody those meanings. It has been said that those of us who don’t see beyond the crackers and grape juice have poorer interior lives than those that do, and there may be some truth in that. My personal view is that the desire for transcendent meaning, like a desire for ultimate justice, proves nothing other than that those desires exist, but I know the people who make claims of transcendent meaning and ultimate justice sincerely believe what they are claiming.
But is it really “meaning” that we want? What does a waterfall “mean”? Lightning? Or gravity? Isn’t what we really want the experience of being alive? Awe and wonder we experience. Beauty, and terror. All that transcends “meaning”. And none of it goes away when we abandon our childish superstitions.
Atheists are often accused of “reductionism”, or of trying to rob people of something precious. But look at it with the traditional language of religion. What is an Idol? An Idol is a shrunken, lifeless image. We worship something lesser than ourselves. Perhaps it began as a medium by which the transcendent could be contemplated but soon we mistake the Idol for the thing that is transcendent. God has become an Idol. Jesus has become an Idol. Only by smashing the Idols can we truly experience transcendence. The gods are masks for that which has no face. We do not create the mystery of being. We create the masks.
Hold up your hands. The atoms in each were formed in the fires of exploding stars uncounted billions of years ago. And the overwhelming likelihood is that the atoms in your right hand were formed in a different star than the ones in in your left. What is a burning bush compared to that!
A Hungarian Nobel Prize winner convinced me that life is an electron looking for a place to rest. Another scientist convinced me that the purpose of life is to hydrogenate carbon dioxide. First he invented it, then he said where to look for evidence and it was found at the bottom of the ocean. A young Orthodox Jew who is an outstanding scientist proves that both entropy itself and its counteraction lead to the construction of increasingly complex chemical structures to preseve and collect energy. It seems that the appearance of the mass triggered time and consciousness. Mass is equivalent to time in Einstein and Planck’s famous equations E=mc2=h/T. There is no mass, there is no time.
And so scientists made me believe in the existence of transcendence, which is the modern name for God.
If the computer on which I am writing these words suddenly disappeared, it would surprise me less than the fact that there is no God.
No god but God
Robert said
I enthusiastically support the much maligned idea of the “God of the gaps.” Anything that cannot be adequately or completely explained is a mystery, temporary or perhaps eternally beyond our ken. That is the only category into which God can be placed from the perspective of apophatic theology. I’m afraid if we do not put God in that category, we are only talking about idols and gnosticism. I’m more opposed to idolatry and gnosticism than I am to agnosticism.
I’d not heard of “apophatic theology” but did a quick search. It seems fascinating. Any books or articles you’d recommend?
Thanks.
Bruce
Tell us more about this mystery of being, please?
The experience of being utterly astounded at being alive. If you can answer the question as to why the cosmos exists then you still have to explain why consciousness exists. And if you explain why consciousness exists then you still have to explain why this here particular consciousness exists. These questions – which are one question – admit of no answer. They are probably brute facts. That’s just the way it is. (Perhaps everything that can exist must exist. Perhaps nothing can be otherwise.)
To me the “mystery of being” then, is an experience, equal parts astonishment and wonder, leavened with more than a bit of terror. The ultimate existential “WTF?” moment. Surely I’m not the only one here who’s had this experience!
The problem with the “God of the Gaps” is that when we fill the gaps God is nowhere to be found. My attitude at this stage is like how I view Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster. The onus is on the believer to demonstrate some compelling reason to think these things might be true. Up until that point, why bother with it?
I’m afraid I know more about “apophatic theology” in Hinduism than I do in Christianity. My perception is that the Christian Orthodox traditions are more accepting of it. In the West it tends to be the province of the mystics. See Meister Eckhart.
These are old arguments probably not to be solved anytime soon.
Why is that a problem? For me that is a feature, not a bug. The whole point is to baptize rational inquiry as the driving force in theology, just as it is in the (other) sciences.
Well at this point I don’t think theology is a science. More like one of the liberal arts.
That implies a very limited conception of God, a god that can be defined as a kind of being, rather than as some kind of ground of being, the mystery of being itself, as one might say.
Well I have no particular conception of god in mind but if he/she/it cannot be said to exist and have some meaningful impact on reality as we observe it, then I’m not really interested. My concept of the “mystery of being” as I described it above is an experience of mysteriousness. I don’t understand what “ground of being” even means.
God is an analogy or metaphor for our search for and creation of meaning.
Ok, then I would say “God” is a dead metaphor, reduced to a figure of speech drained of substance and import by extensive and repetitive usage. A well-worn path to a stodgy destination.
Look, I was raised on the Lord of Hosts who appeared out of the midst of the whirlwind, full of terrible voices and lightnings. These dessicated philospohical concepts just won’t do.
The whole point is to transcend desiccated philosophical concepts of classical theism.
But at least the classical theists thought they were making truth statements about reality. They were wrong so we abandon them. The “ground of being” just sits there fooling us into thinking we’re actually talking about something.
To free the mind for ultimate reality, whatever that turns out to be.
Well assuming such a thing actually meaningfully exists, we will want to focus our attention on the observations of the folks at the Large Hadron Collider and the James Webb Space Telescope.
Stephen said
I’m afraid I know more about “apophatic theology” in Hinduism than I do in Christianity. My perception is that the Christian Orthodox traditions are more accepting of it. In the West it tends to be the province of the mystics. See Meister Eckhart.
Thanks. Stephen. I’ll start reading up on Meister Eckhart as well as seeing what I can find in the Christian Orthodox traditions.
I just want to answer that I really don’t have anything to add beyond what Robert offered as a recommended book on apophatic theology. I never really studied it in its own right as a unified topic; it was more just a thing that I encountered while studying individual theologians.
Some random thoughts as I read through this:
What does a waterfall “mean”? Lightning? Or gravity? Isn’t what we really want the experience of being alive? Awe and wonder we experience. Beauty, and terror. All that transcends “meaning”.
Yes; I am really hung up on the fact of my own consciousness. The experience of beauty and wonder and awe and love–love in that special deliberate and self-sacrificial sense–are real, they are more real than all the other things I experience, and I mean that quite literally: of all the things I experience, what I am most certain of are the very fact that I have those experiences.
That said, I’m not sure what it means to say such things transcend meaning, but certainly they give meaning. When I think of Camus’s essential philosophical question, the only compelling reasons I have not to kill myself are these things. At the very least, I do in fact care about my kids, and I couldn’t subject them to the that trauma.
As to the discussion of the ground of being:
Copleston and Russell had a debate on BBC radio, in which Russell rejected the ontological proof on the grounds that the world is neither necessary (simply cannot not be, such that it, so to speak, accounts for itself) nor contingent (its existence is determined by another), it is rather, he said, gratuitous: It might not have been (so it isn’t necessary and it might not have been), but it isn’t contingent (in that there is no other thing that determined whether it would or wouldn’t be.) What really boggles the mind is that this gratuitous world would follows laws, and not just any laws, but at least some laws (like laws of math or laws of logic) that we can discover through reason with precious little experience. There is something really crazy in the realization that a person doing cutting-edge work in pure math can, just sitting in his study using deduction, discover laws that turn out to accurately describe the actual physical operations of the world. If the world is at root gratuitous–if it just is, though it could just as well be otherwise,–without explanation or rhyme or reason–why does it conform to our reasoned predictions of how it must work?
The fact that the world does conform to our innate sense of logic is what drove Plato to postulate his crazy theory of reminiscence, and what drove Kant to postulate his bizarre epistemology of the categories (the world operates according to our concepts because our very experience of the world is filtered through our inborn concepts–we impose our logic on our experience of the world–we subconsciously force our experiences of the world to be logical before we even have those experiences).
This is a really deep problem. Once you see if you can’t unsee it. And the only solutions are sort of crazy.
…I’m not sure what it means to say such things transcend meaning, but certainly they give meaning.
I would say that we can derive meaning from experience but experience is prior to interpretation. I’ve had the hair-raising experience of a lightning bolt striking an object a few dozen yards away from me. I fell to my knees temporarily blinded and deafened, the air full of the pungent smell of ozone. I can understand readily why an ancient person might interpret this as the anger of a god even though I look at it differently. However differently we come to view it we share the existential experience.
This is a really deep problem. Once you see if you can’t unsee it.
Precisely. Haunting. Find a mathematician of a philosophical bent and ask them if we discovered math or invented it!
Robert wrote
It is more true to say that God does not exist than to say that he exists, but both statements are insufficient because of the limitations of our ideas of existence and of God. Since God is no thing, we can say that he is No-thing-ness. Or, in other words: Any god whose existence can be either affirmed or denied is not God.
I’ve come to think that it is meaningless to discuss “god” apart from specific religious traditions. It is meaningless to ask if “god” exists. What we should ask is if Yahweh exists. Or Thor. The scholastic “god” of so-called Classical Theism is an empty abstraction.
Your view of “no-thing-ness” resembles the great Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna’s concept of sunyatta, the “void”, or more accurately “voidness”, since it is not a thing but a quality. But also neither, of course!
I’m thinking of starting a new religion whose prophets are Nagarjuna and Wittgenstein. I’m not the first one to notice how interesting are some of their similarities.
would say that we can derive meaning from experience but experience is prior to interpretation.
Just so. Insofar as we disagree on this, I think it is verbal.
One of my big light bulb moments was the realization that when someone asks for the “objective meaning” of life (or the world or whatever) he probably doesn’t actually care about the objective meaning as such. What he is really asking for is a reason to care, he is almost invariably asking for you to give him a sense of purpose, and that is by nature something subjective, not objective. We want to feel like our lives really matter, but before you get to the “really”, you start off with the “we want to feel”. Consider if someone asked of you the objective meaning of his life, and you replied that God is a sadist and the inquirer was made for God’s amusement; it is unlikely that the inquirer would feel that the desire that underlied and motivated his question had actually been satisfied.
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