« Conclusions I've reached| Main | Signs You Have Too Much Process »
Philosophy of Religion
Save 70%! Great Courses by America's Top Professors
I just finished a tape series entitled "Philosophy of Religion" by Professor James Hall and the Teaching Company. It's part of my goal to pick up college-level courses I might have missed during some of my free time during the day, like when I am driving to a client site.
I really enjoyed the tapes, which were an overview of the various philosophical facets around the existence of God. What can we say about God that is knowable?
This was one of these tapes that I'm pleased that I DID NOT run into when I was in my twenties! What did Steve Martin say? "I took philosophy in college. Not enough to do anything, just enough to be messed up for the rest of my life" There is some truth in that. At some point, philosophy becomes a game of noise and symbolism, not of immediate import. In my opinion, you have to have a firm foundation in the real world to begin to weigh and understand these arguments. So many brilliant men, having made an initial jab into something new for the species, went overboard and took their ideas to the point of absurdity.
So what did I learn about the big guy from these tapes? The professor did not take a position, but here's what I got out of them using my own life as a backdrop. This isn't mean to be controversial -- I'm just recording my current feelings about what I think you can know or not about God. If I get hit by a bus, maybe my kids or grandkids one day might find this piece interesting to them.
- Does God exist? You can't prove it yes or no. That doesn't mean much of anything, except atheists are just as screwed up as the rest of us. I can say, from looking around me, that it seems that humans are programmed in some fashion to believe in something bigger than us, just like we are bigger than other things. Blaise Pascal, famous mathematician, had another salient point:
God is, or He is not. But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separated us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up...Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose. This is one point settled. But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.
Pascal was basically saying you don't know, but if you run the numbers it's a safe bet to consider believing that there is some Great Beyond out there, even if it turns up to be Elvis in a UFO. There are criticisms of his wager, but in a general sense, Pascal had a point. - It's okay to be an agnostic Christian (or Muslim or whatever). There's a long way to go from believing in something and believing in everything. Too often, people are expected either to be non-religious or to believe in a long list of assertions. It's okay to be in the middle. In fact, those folks who say something like "I don't just believe X, Y, and Z, I know it" really take away the entire point of faith -- you're not supposed to know, you're supposed to believe in faith. Saying "I believe" instead of "I know" is probably a sign of spiritual maturity. There's a great lesson in Abraham here -- when pressed on to sacrifice his son, Abraham simply said "God will provide", nothing more. He believed, he didn't grandstand, he didn't know, he didn't preach a sermon about the benefits of his creed. He just made a choice and believed.
- Is God in our everyday life or far away? Oddly enough, it seems the closer we want to bring God to us, the more we make him like us, which then causes all sorts of other problems. In the simplest case, God is the "big angry guy in the sky" -- a person just like us who has a set of standards and is going to kick butt if we don't play along by the rules. On the other hand, some of us want to keep God far away, like somebody who built a wonderful clock and set it running for all eternity. In that case, then why does he matter to us? And if we keep him close up, then why is there evil in the world?
- Why is there evil in the world? Stuff happens. Job asked the same question. He had a long talk with the big guy, and he was fairly upset over getting crapped on. He told God it was probably pointless to argue with him because he felt God would just say something like "You'll never understand me, how dare you question me" God said go ahead and complain, Job did, and sure enough he got the answer he predicted. Stuff happens. When you get to be God, then you'll understand all of it.
- Can you believe in God and science at the same time? Yes. In my opinion, science is about what can be proven and demonstrated. God is about how we deal with the areas that cannot be proven or demonstrated. Do we know everything? If you think so, then there is no God (and I feel sorry for you). But as long as there is an unknown, we must come to some sort of symbolic belief about how it is constructed. It's our nature. Put another way: the people who are using science and logic to prove or disprove God are as silly as the people using religion to prove or disprove evolution. Both groups are seriously confused. The two concepts are mutually orthogonal.
- What about the Holy Books? That's a much more involved question. I used the example of Abraham as a story only. There is a larger question about which holy books make sense, which is right or wrong, blah-blah-blah. This is about what can we know about God, not what should we do with our lives. That is an individual choice and responsibility.
- Will science ever find God? Yes. I believe it will. Perhaps there is a "God gene" that makes us religious. Perhaps, as I am beginning to believe, there is a 2-dimensional computational chaotic substrate that underlies our reality. Such a substrate would be everywhere, know everything, touch everything yet be far away. Sounds like the big guy to me. Perhaps, some time after the great singularity (where man and machine blend) there is another singularity, the Omega Point, like Tipler proposes, where we basically evolve into the Cosmos. Perhaps Elvis shows up in that UFO one day. Whatever happens, it seems to me that eventually we will come up with some very good reasons for believing that there is a reality outside of our reality which has affected us in the past. Will that be the end of religion? Heck no! At this point, we'll be left with the central question of religion, which to me is "Is God moral?" Referring to a computationally higher system than our own, this might be a question that will forever be left to faith. Or better put, by the time we evolve change and grow enough to answer the question, we won't be the same beings we are now.
That's my view, at least as of today. I was very happy with my Christian upbringing and belief system, but as I got older I went through a period where I threw it all away because it didn't make any sense. Now that I'm half-way through life, I'm taking a look at what I threw away -- is there any part of that is still worthwhile to me in my personal life? I think the answer is that there is. I don't have the full picture like I did when I was 12, and maybe I never will, but I have enough to believe I am headed somewhere. I'll let you all know when I get there.
In Gods realm, everything is fixed already. We are in time and things have to play out. Did you every just stop and think. Why am I even here? Or, why does anything even exist at all? Get to that point of nothingness and you will find completeness.
"Did you every just stop and think. Why am I even here? Or, why does anything even exist at all?"
That's kind of a trick question, isn't it? I mean, if I didn't exist, I couldn't very well ask such questions. So I can't exist and NOT be able to ask those questions, which is another way of saying, since I'm here, I get to wonder why I'm here. It's kind of nonsensical -- not that it's bad, it just has no meaning in real terms.
God has to be the thing outside of the stuff we can observe and reason. There is always some limit to our knowledge, therefore there will always be a great unknown, a great "beyond". So really, the more I think about it, the more it seems obvious that God exists; the key question is: is God moral? How would we know? If he were immoral, what would that mean? It's certainly possible for things like the death of a child to not make sense to us. We reassure ourselves that such things occur because God has a higher view (and God is acting directly in our affairs). Just like your statement, I don't think such questions have any meaning in our world, yet they are some of the most important questions ever.
My current line of reasoning is very similar to what you write. It seems that God is a pure logical function that cannot be either moral or immoral. Morality is a human dilemma that doesn't apply to a higher power or intelligence. Everything we know, or can ever know, is a subset of God. So morality and immorality are also contained within as part of the whole of creation, and the choices we make between good and evil must be based purely on human knowledge and understanding.
So God is, in fact, trans-moral to us. That is, we cannot begin to calculate whether he acts morally or immorrally, and indeed, such words may have no meaning when talking about him.
That's an intersting concept, because in my world view, a spaceship could land tomorrow on the White House lawn and a giant alien creature get out and announce it is God. As proof, it could offer us a complete history of everything that ever happened on our planet, with demonstrations of how it intervened to change events. This would include, of course, the seeding and husbandry of human life.
Or we could create some kind of telescope or other communications device that would let us contact the almighty. At that point, does traditional relgion dissappear?
I would answer no, it doesn't. If there is some physical manifestation of God, then we are still left with the unknown. What does God worship? What is the outside of the outside? Like two inchworms in a football stadium speculating on what's outside the world of grass, and then what's outisde what's outside the world of grass, we have nothing to go on.
I wonder, however, if it would be possible to program a machine to make and analyze moral judgements? Such a machine could, in principle, be able to analyze the actions of any two intelligent beings in any universe big enough to hold them both. What would it tell us about God? And could we trust it? Is there a universe bigger than God, or, like those inchworms, are we just too limited to get anywhere at all near answering those questions?
This is making my head hurt.
Okay. Another way to look at this is the question: is it possible, without recourse to any religious creed, for one being to be more moral than another? Am I more moral than my dog?
I sure hope the answer is yes, because I really don't want to learn how to lick my rear-end.
In my view, only humans can be moral because morality is a human construct. The common belief is that God handed moral codes down to certain dudes who wrote it all down. I'll buy that these dudes were divinely inspired by their own vision of a higher power, but not that God actually materialized, pulled up a rocking chair and spilled his moral beans for hour after hour. I believe that as civilization progressed, the need for morality grew out of purely human problems and desires (whereas an alien or an inchworm might have completely different moral needs).
And it's a good thing that morality was cemented way back then. They had fewer distractions and far greater moral clarity than any of us butt lickers could possibly muster in modern times!