I don't really see myself as an atheist - because I am too careful by nature to say boldly "There is no God." and think it unassailably true. In my short, somnolent life I have however become aware of two awesomely contradictory ideas, or better superfamilies of ideas. One is the idea that there is power in faith, or God-consciousness, etc. The other is that not only can you not prove a damn (sic) thing about God or spirit, but there isn't a single incontrovertible artifact ("miracle?") of the intersection between the mundane and the divine. Lots of arguable ones - like the nature of the Bible, resurrection, and your "x to the xth power" observation showcased in the "hall of loving people" example you offered.
So - I accept the premise that "there is no God." as plausible. Does this make me agnostic? or maybe an "Athewimp"?
I have not studied philosophy in proper depth. But every argument I have heard on the nature of Reality or Truth has been logically incomplete. So I'll assume for now that the final word on Reality or Truth - the necessary fulcra of any faith - is not in hand.
Indeed, my search for Truth has always been pulled up short by the seemingly circular nature of sensation and cognition. "Cogito, ergo sum" is imho magnificent but circular at the rigorous level. Allow me to introduce a second level - the mundane. "truth" in small caps. This is the everyday truth of our continuity - the framework in which Descartes and Samuel Johnson were right. Common sense kinda stuff.
Many of us do hunger to make the link between truth and Truth however. The philosophers have either taken a sloppy shortcut - or declared their despair. Like the existentialists, who get a tip of my hat for intellectual honesty. But I wouldn't wanna party with them. Believers in any of a myriad religions have their myriad manifestations and codifications of God or the God-nature as the guardian and minister of Reality. The comfort in that is hard to overstate.
Okay. I'm gonna play <null set>'s Advocate and operate from the premise that "There is no God."
To me, the agonizing next step, the one which highlights the courage inherent in an expressed stance of atheism, in such a public act of dissidence, is:
"Okay then. From here - where do we go?"
These are half-baked ideas on my part. I welcome the logicians among us (Hi, Jfred, yes, you) to punch holes where they're punchable.
So - the atheist looks at the stove and sees it as being out. He pulls on a coat and steps into the cold wasteland outside. Tremendous courage (unless an agnostic is styling himself as an atheist for the trivial purpose of cultural rebellion. I speak not of these abundant poseurs).
Let me play this back to you because I don't want to get it wrong. One of your practical complaints with hard-core atheism is that you don't see a workable final anchor for a system of personal and communal ethics. I will state as axiomatic that a workable system of ethics can be entirely humanistic and work without recourse to an external arbiter.
I must admit that this does not happen often or for long. Man is a religious animal. So I will come with Outrageous Premise No. 2 and say that the basis of religion is completely describable as internal to people. It is a psychological consequence of the way our brain is wired. (Disclaimer: This is not subordinating God to Science. Why not? Because our psychological sciences are nowhere near good enough to test such a premise. I am stating a personal belief.)
What are the final touchstones of religion? The elements of the doctrine which say "Here's a reason why this is the Truth"? They are necessarily to be found in the borderland between the mundane and the spiritual. These are 1) miracles and 2)mystical experiences.
1)Miracles: I have never seen an incontrovertible one. (The condition of reproducibility applies! Without it all we have is an account.) Spiritual people like to speak in terms of "energy". This offends me because it subverts a scientific term in an effort to legitimize a spiritual phenomenon. I would withhold the misuse of that term unless this energy is consistently, reproducibly measurable on a material device (Failure to satisfy the adverbs is what killed "cold fusion".) Without measurability, the "x to the power of x" effect is a metaphor but not a principle. (Semantics.)
2) Mystical experiences. Here I ask you to bear with me - I will speak of psychedelics. I have had a single psychedelic experience and have read widely about others. A striking property of these drugs is that they reproducibly induce a mystical state. Spirit-awareness. Cosmic consciousness. Communion with God.
And yet, you come down, and you see - some shriveled mushrooms. A white powder. A freaking sugar cube with corporate logo pressed in! Thoroughly material, completely mundane items. Keys to Heaven and Hell.
My belief, my completely personal vision of faith, is that we have within us an inherent ability to sense God. Spirit-awareness. Having had two spells of cosmic connection, one with psychedelics and an earlier one without - I tentatively conclude that spirit-awareness is a perceptual oddity of Man. And it is so powerful and pervasive that even in a total doctrinal vacuum we will weave myths and superstitions and our capacity for awe into religions. Into ways to reconcile Man and Nature with God. It's our nature. I don't think a single atheistic people ot tribe has ever been found.
My impression - from personal "experience" - which I am intellectually honor-bound to qualify as a probable construct of my brain - is something I want to illustrate with a mathematical metaphor.
Let's think about identity, about what someone means. It is one of the fundamental units of our consciousness and ability to communicate. I am someone, all but the unreachably insane share that unargued axiomatic starting point. So when we are taught religion - or when we have one of those sublime moments of very own personal spirit-awareness, we are biased toward thinking of Someone. I submit however that our conceptions of consciousness - awareness - identity are one-dimensional. There are infinite points on a line - but a line is still one-dimensional. Infinity of the first order.
An area is doubly infinite - it contains an infinite array of already-infinite lines. From a Linearist's perspective, an area is both "not a line" and "all possible lines".
This is how I feel about God. God isn't an entity. It isn't "somebody" or even an "it". It is "All", all at once, without being confinable to a "somebody" with the attendant qualities of viewpoint and will.
So here's what I think. I reject the narrow identity-concept of God that is built into a vast majority of religions. I rather like the Taoist concept - all is God, God is All, and people are both "not at all" and "constantly all the time" in contact with God. |
