Do God's Omniscience and Onipotance Contradict?

Atheists think it is. I've seen many a knock down drag-out fight, multiple threads, lasing for days, accomplishing nothing. I wrote that dilemma off years ago before I was an internet apologist, so long ago I don't remember when. I wrote it off because at an early date I read Boethius who, in his great work The Consolation of Philosophy (circa 524), puts to rest the issue by proving that foreknowledge is not determinism. In this essay I will demonstrate not only that this is true but the atheist error about omniscience and omnipotence contradicting are actually hold overs from the pagan framework which Boethius disproved.

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Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius

(480?-524)
 Aurthor The Consolation
 of Philosophy
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For years my debates on the matter were marked by silly repetition. I would constantly argue that just knowing that someone does something is not controlling it. But atheists were always cock sure that it was. I used the follow analogy: I know how the Alamo turned out. Travis and the men stepped over the line and chose to stay and die. I know they did that, does my knowledge of it mean that I made them do it? Of course the atheist say "O of course not, but you are not in the past, you are knowing this by a look back in history to see what they already did." Of course, but God doesn't know about events before they have happened in time, he knows about them because he's beyond time and he sees everything in time as a accomplished fact. From our perspective in time God's knowledge is "foreknowledge" becasue it is for us. But it's not foreknowledge for God, he doesn't know before it happens, he knows about events because form an eternal perspective its a done deal. Just as my knowing what the men at the Alamo already did does not give me control over their choices, so God's knowledge of facts we have already accomplish does not give God control over our choices.

Of course, predictably, the atheists dismiss this idea as "nonsense" and go right on asserting that to know of an action is to control, but they can't tell me why. They can tell me a  theoretical reason but they can't tell me why if my knowing about the Alamo ex post facto does not control those actions why would God's knowledge of a past even already done control the past event? Why are these not analogous if God is outside time and sees all things in time as accomplished facts? They can't tell me but they are certain the idea is nonsense. The reason they give initially is this. Say that God knows today that I will go to the store tomorrow. That means that i can't tomorrow morning decide "I don't want to go tot he store, I hate the walk." I can't decide that and follow it because God already knows I went so I have to go. But the problem is they are not following a modern concept of God knowing becuase he's outside of time. They are still stuck in the pre Christian framework which has clung to modern Western Philosophy lo these many centuries. That frame work can be clearly seen in Boethius because that's what he was arguing against. The fame work is the Greek Gods were controlled by the fates, but they also had foreknowledge, so they were trumping the fates, to whom they were really subject. That creates an issue. Moreover, foreknowledge was about things that had not yet taken place, thus that is a contradiction; it hasn't taken place, how can it be known what one will do, to know it is to set in stone and thus not free will. But that only holds in the case of god in time not outside of time. It doesn't apply to the idea of God transcendent of time and thus that's why they can't answer me, but because they know the philosophers they read still assert the old Greek idea they must cling to it.


We can see the exact kind of thinking the atheists use in the Consolation and it is the framework against which Boethius toils. This quotation is form a summary in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The summary is by John Marenbon.

The first point which needs to be settled is what, precisely, is the problem which Boethius the character proposes? The reasoning behind (7) seems to be of the following form:

9. God knows every event, including all future ones.
10. When someone knows that an event will happen, then the event will happen.
11. (10) is true as a matter of necessity, because it is impossible to know that which is not the case.
12. If someone knows an event will happen, it will happen necessarily.(10, 11)
13. Every event, including future ones, happens necessarily. (9, 12)

The pattern behind (8) will be similar, but in reverse: from a negation of (13), the negation of (9) will be seen to follow. But, as it is easy to observe, (9–13) is a fallacious argument: (10) and (11) imply, not (12), but

14. Necessarily, if someone knows an event will happen, it will happen.

 (emphasis mine)

 The summary of the problem he's working against indicates exactly the problem I frame it, that the atheist (following the Greeks) is not assuming transcendence of time but is working on the assumption that God's knowledge is prior to the completed nature of the action. This was framework in which Boethius found the problem in his own contemporary scene which came from the pre-christian Hellenistic world. Even when the philosopher writing the article sums it up he still speaks form the same perspective:

The fallacy, therefore, concerns the scope of the necessity operator. Boethius has mistakenly inferred the (narrow-scope) necessity of the consequent (‘the event will happen’), when he is entitled only to infer the (wide-scope) necessity of the whole conditional (‘if someone knows an event will happen, it will happen’). Boethius the character is clearly taken in by this fallacious argument, and there is no good reason to think that Boethius the author ever became aware of the fallacy (despite a passage later on which some modern commentators have interpreted in this sense). None the less, the discussion which follows does not, as the danger seems to be, address itself to a non-problem. Intuitively, Boethius sees that the threat which divine prescience poses to the contingency of future events arises not just from the claim that God's beliefs about the future constitute knowledge, but also from the fact that they are beliefs about the future. There is a real problem here, because if God knows now what I shall do tomorrow, then it seems that either what I shall do is already determined, or else that I shall have the power tomorrow to convert God's knowledge today into a false belief. Although his logical formulation does not capture this problem, the solution Boethius gives to Philosophy is clearly designed to tackle it.

He's speaking form the perspective of future events which have not yet happened, being known before they happen. But that leaves out the assumption that's God's is not actuality foreknowledge so much as translucence eternal knowledge that sees the events as an accomplished fact because it sees the the end result from a perspective after the event is accomplished. That's the wider perspective. Transcendent eternal knowledge is the knowledge of all time as the "eternal now" not "foreknowledge" in the sense of known only prior to the doing of the event. Then there is also an issue about the nature of the knower. This is a point Boethius may be making but it's hard to say. God knows form the standpoint of eternity but he speaks within times arrow to us so it appears to be foreknowledge, knowledge of that which has not yet transpired. Thus the illusion of determinism is created. But the fact of it is the knowledge comes from viewing all events as accomplished facts. It's in the perspective of timeless transience which only God can have.

This latter issue of the nature of the knowledge is marked by the summary and by the text itself as "modes of cognition." The Constolation of Philosphy is the old fashioned Philosophical dialogue which no one writes anymore, the kind Berkelely write (out of date in his day--early 1700's).

Erronious: "hi fallacious how's it going?"
Fallacious: "great, I'm now considering a new idea"
Erronious: "prey tell good sir what idea might that be?"

And they go on to discuss and provide endless house of fun writing Monty Python style paradiges of themselves. Then burst into a course of "Rene Descartes was a Druken fart, 'I drink therefore I am.'

But before they do that they discuss issues and the philosopher places his arguemnts in the mouth of the character. In the Consolution the Charactor Boethius is agonizing over philosphy when Philosophy personfie as a beautiful woman comes to him and gives him the answers. That's the context in which this reviewer states the following:

Her view, as she develops it (in V.5 and V.6), is based on what might be called the Principle of Modes of Cognition: the idea that knowledge is always relativized to different levels of knowers, who have different sorts of objects of knowledge. Although she initially develops this scheme in a complex way, in relation to the different levels of the soul (intelligence, reason, imagination and the senses) and their different objects (pure Form, abstract universals, images, particular bodily things), for most of her discussion Philosophy concentrates on a rather simpler aspect of it. God's way of being and knowing, she argues, is eternal, and divine eternity, she says, is not the same as just lacking a beginning and end, but it is rather (V.6) ‘the whole, simultaneous and perfect possession of unbounded life.’

Boethius did not have the knowledge of modern cosmology, the big bang, quantum theory or any of the other scientific data that we have so he did not possess the concepts of being outside of time. He did however have an understanding of eternity that came form his own spirituality, and it seems to coincide remarkably with the modern notion. What's he's saying is that God an eternal perspective. He can see the events of what to us are the future but to him is an eternal now. So he's not knowing something that hasn't happened yet, he knows something that to him has happened, but to us has not yet happened. Without the big bang Boeithius still has the concept of God being outside of time and he saw that as the basis of non-deterministic events in time which known to God as completed events due to God's unqiue persective.

A being who is eternal in this way, Philosophy argues, knows all things—past, present and future—in the same way as we, who live in time and not eternity, know what is present. She then goes on to show why, so long as God knows future events by their being present to him, this knowledge is compatible with the events’ not being determined.

Through the mouth of philosophy Boethius speculates that there two kinds of necessity. The first is:

Simple necessities are what would now be called physical or nomic necessities: that the sun rises, or that a man will sometime die. By contrast, it is conditionally necessary that, for instance, I am walking, when I am walking (or when someone sees that I am walking); but from this conditional necessity it does not follow that it is simply necessary that I am walking.

Although some philosophers disagree,  she is not noting the scope fallacy above but is actually using Aristotelian modality to argue about the eternal perspective. All things are known to God as though they were in the present. Future events for God are necessary in just the way that present events are necessary for us. What I'm doing writ now I am necessarily doing because I'm really doing it. But because it's my choice to do it and I'm doing it now (as opposed something I already did five years ago) my will to do it is not negated. I can stop doing it and so something else. But I can't go back five seconds ago and stop doing it in the past. All moments are known to God from this perspective.

Now so far so good. But there are two problems:

(1) Most philosophers today do not accept this reading of the issues.

It is important to add, however, that most contemporary interpreters do not read the argument of V.3–6 in quite this way. They hold that Philosophy is arguing that God is a-temporal, so eliminating the problems about determinism, which arise when God's knowing future contingents is seen an event in the past, and therefore, fixed.

That's going to be a problem for me becasue it means that timeless state of "beyond time" would mean God is "frozen" unable to act and thus can only act in time and thus the temporal problem. Rather, God sees as past and while may not control past is also not free to act in the past becuase it is a done deal.

(2) Philosophy seems to swing to a predestination view at the end.

She make God the determiner of events. There are also interpreters who see the Consolation as a satire that should be called "the insufficiency of philosophy." The only problem for me is that atheists will read this part of hte article and say "O see Metacorck is stupid because he didn't read the whole article." Marenbon argues that Boethius purpose is complex it can't be summarized as either "philosophy is insufficient" or "the whole issue is decided." what he's really saying is that philosophy is an ongoing concern. The true consolation of philosophy is not that such issue can be put to rest and summed up easily in nice little easy to understand phrases that only take a few syllables but we can have partial solutions and we can continue to work on problems and continue to seek answers and the act of so doing is a consolation even if we never find clear and easy answers. The interpretation of the Consolation is a literary problem, not a theological one. I will, therefore, bracket that until such as a time as I work on literary criticism.

The first problem is of much greater concern but I have an answer. I think I've analyzed Boethius' claims in the section where philosophy answers the issues of foreknowledge,I think I have that right and it works. It doesn't seem to work when we extract it form the framework of his day and place it in the world of modern cosmology, but it works again when we extract it from the framework of modern cosmology and place it in the framework of my theology (the Berkeley-Gaswami argument). My theological frame work differs from the modern cosmological in this way: I do not see God as a big man in the sky existing beyond the big bang which is a timeless void. I see God as the mind that thinks the universe, and the universe is therefore, analogous to a thought in a mind. I say "analogous" becuase it's a metaphor. If it was literal it might be more deterministic than any other view because it would mean that all events are thoughts in the mind of God in a litteral sense. I do not think that. The Gaswami part comes in where I take a page form the book of physicist Amit Gaswami (a Hindu vedantist who teaches physics at University of Oregon. Like Gaswami I see mind as the fundametnal stuff of the universe rather than energy or mater. I don't mean that in the sense of the universe being a mind, but that is related to mind in the way that a thought is related to a mind. I take that as a metaphor because like
Bishop George Berkeley I accept the premise "to be is to be perceived." God is the observer that collapses the wave function and causes the universe to be by beholding it. God is observing a thought that he has set up to run on it own. He's not making it happen or thinking every event at a microscopic level.

Two analogies that will clarify the difference. In the standard view God's relation to the world is like that of a man standing in a big room holding a world globe. The room is the timeless void beyond our space/time. The man is God, of course, and the globe is our space time. That puts God as a thing in "creation" or at least a timeless void, it makes God subject to the laws of physics and the problem of time. It makes God out to be a big man in the sky, although really far up in the sky. My view we have the room and the globe, no man. The room is the mind of God. the globe and the empty void of "timeless" are both thoughts in the mind of God. What this means is God is not subject to either time or the problem of non time. Both are pseudo problems for God because they are just ideas he thought up to create a framework for our world, which is a further thought of that preliminary thought in his mind. God is no more subject to the problems of time or even non time than we are to our day dreams and momentary fleeting fantasies that cross our minds.

This has many implications that have to be weighed. For one thing we just forget about the issues surrounding the omnis,, let them go completely. Not that God is not all knowing or all powerful, but the concepts "all knowing" and "all powerful" are hazy shadowy concepts that do more to confuse us than to help us. These are Aristotelian ideas and they hold overs from Greek philosophy. These things enter Western philosophy from Greek thought and they preserved by the prejudices of Western European philosophers. Modern philosophers still think the Greeks were the summit of human civilization, even the Church adopted ht language of Greek philosophy to discuss doctrine so we should look to the Greeks. The Hebrews were corn pones and the early Christians were Greeks themselves so Greek ideas hang on in philosophy. Thus the older meaning of "foreknowledge" and it's problems adhere to all modern discussions. The chruch began to use the language of Aristotle after the Apostolic age so we continue to speak of "omnipresent." "Omnipotent" even though the Bible doesn't so speak. We should scrap the language of "all knowing" " all powerful" because it communicates badly. Rather than these we should say, not that God is the "most powerful" that's a mistake too (from a Tillichian perspective) but that God can do whatever is logically doable. God knows whatever is logically knowable.

The problem is ni speaking of God as "doing" and "knowing' we give the importation of God as a big man and God's knowledge as the kind of knowledge city zoning board use to plan things. All of this anthropomorphic language is bring God down to the level of a thing in creation. It's not preserving the transcendent nature of God's knowledge which so different form ours we can't even know what it's like. What we can be sure of is that God has left us free will and he's not violating it. God knows whatever is logically knowable. It may not be logically knowable for God to know how it feels to be not God. But at the same time, he does know empathy, he knows the heart he knows the mind, he can take a much better intuitive feel of what that might be like than even we can ourselves. He doesn't know first hand what it's like to be human.

God does not have to make rocks he can't lift. That is a childish trap set for eighty grade apologetic hobbyists in Sunday school classes. I know because I'm still smarting from falling for it in eighth grade.God can't smell next Tuesday because days don't have smells. The eager beaver atheist can say "there's something God can't do." I say "so?" God cannot do nonsense, ok so what? We need to redefine the omnis and come up with a new term  ( I don't like "maximal greatness" too easy to confuse with "most power being"). The import this has for this issue is that there is no contradiction between omniscience and omnipotence because those are not helpful words and they don't really mean that much so they don't really describe God's attributes well. Since God is beyond the problems of either time or non-time he is not in the big room of timeless void so he's not frozen. Thus God's knowledge can come form all perspectives, from the eternal now and from time's arrow.

Might there actually be aspects of time God chooses not to see? The problem with that question is it assumes God is a rubber-necking tourist roving the expanse of all  existing matter and observing it as one would observe the country side of France from a  train window. Because God is not a big man in the sky, not anthropomorphic we can come up with other metaphors to compare God to, and that indicate that God's relationship to time is one we can't understand. Compare God to the strong force, to the unified field, to the laws of physics, the Hegelian dialectic. The Zeitgeist. I don't believe that God is impersonal but I do think it's a good exercise to think of him that way at times just to break the habit of thinking of God as a big man in the sky.

Such a God cannot waste his time worrying about conflicts between one badly worded phrase that doesn't really describe him and another badly worded phrase that doesn't describe him. Thus the problem is now reduced to a pseudo problem. It' an antiquated problem because it's rooted in the pre-Christian Greek understanding of God and time and the world, and it's also rooted in thinking of God as a big man in the sky rather than the transcendent and immanent ground of all being that God is.

Answering Atheists Attacks on The Religious a prori

 


The Original argument to which this refers (the religoius a prori) was the argument discussed on friday last. It reminded me of this older discussion I had about the same arguemnt with atheists on CARM.

HRG (poster on CARM) sort of walked into it. This is a look at a response that MkeWC gave. Mike is a pretty bright guy. In 13 years of arguing with atheists on the net he's the first one I've met who really understands Derrida.

It's interesting that you say religion is derived phenomenologically, therefore it has a kind of epistemic autonomy, that it carries its own terms of justification within it.

The problem is that phenomenology has been critiqued into the dust. It can't do without something that synthesizes the manifold of phenomena, and no one has ever offered a coherent account of how that could be. It always ends up in metaphysical speculation: Husserl, Heidegger, Jean-Luc Marion, they all end up finding a substrata of presence that finally cannot be supported.

Of course that's a pretty exaggerated claim. Any popular school of thought has been "critiqued ad nausium." Or "into the dust." That is not to say that he has any real criticisms of the way I used Tillich's Heideggerian based phenomenology in understanding the religious a prori. Although his initial description of the a prori, it has a kind of epistemic autonomy, that it carries its own terms of justification within it, is a good description of what that means. The claim that phenomenology has never offered a coherent account of the manifold nature of phenomena is a question begging and ironic claim. The thrust of Heidegger's phenomenology is to impressing sense data into preconceived categories and allow the data to suggest it's own category. A good example of what I mean is seen in a recent 'discussion' (p'ing contest) with an atheist on CARM who keeps habitually refereeing t religoius experience as "funny feelings." This atheist will not alter that term no matter how I have explained that it's purposely derisive, doesn't describe anything that corresponds to RE and is not ever used in any of the studies. The typical atheist fear of the subjective and hatred of experience is used as a preconceived category in which this atheist heard any kind of data that would contradict the usual atheist ideology.

Since the point of Heideggerian phenomenology is to allow the data to suggest the categories themselves, in the above example this would be done by perhaps description RE the way those who experience it describe it, then the claim that it has never found a coherent explication of the manifold nature of experience is just saying "gee these guys don't want preconceived categories don't have any preconceived categories." How about that? That like criticizing the army as "too military." That's like criticizing the courts system as "too bound by legal conventions."

Mike goes on:

Besides that, phenomenology was developed as a philosophical tool. That contradicts your statement that religion is not derived from other disciplines.

I didn't say religion is derived from phenomenology. I said we should use a phenomenological approach to understand it.

Induction is not a cheat. In your example about balls dropping from a tower, we know they will fall at the same rate because physics tells us they will. You're right we only ever see particular balls, but that doesn't matter to physics.

That's really circular reasoning, by way of being question begging. He doesn't understand that this example is right out of Karl Popper's major work. Without extrapolating by way of inductive logic we would have to watch every case of the dropping of balls to make sure that it always worked the same say. Yet in using inductive we automatically consign a lot of things to falling between the cracks. Of course Popper's point was that you can't derive regular law like statements from general principles. The nature of empiricism demands empirical observation. If this is not to be endless it must be extrapolated inductively. His statement assumes there's a rule book of physics already written and waiting to be consulted even in the very early days before Newtonian physics. If laws of physics are derived entirely descriptively when how can we have a preconceived rule that "physics tells us they will." That's really cheating empiricism. It's quite ironic because it means he's evoking the preconceived category that phenomenology seeks to avoid.

Causal induction is an entirely valid principle. However, this does not disprove miracles.

I didn't say that induction is not valid. I said it has problems it runs afoul of impossing a preconceived rule upon experience, and in the need to extrapolate things fall through the cracks. What I meant by that was miracles. Just because 99.9% of cases work a certain way, dead men don't rise and walk, doesn't mean 100% of cases work that way. Since miracles are supposed to be impossibilities where's the sense in evoking standard expectation?

You're right that science cannot finally chase away the possibility of miracles, defined as an event caused by a supernatural force. But that just establishes a negative knowledge: "we don't know if miracles are possible or not." Note that this is different from saying "we know miracles are, in principle, possible."

All epistemic gaps must be crossed with the assumption of positive side rules. We do this in everything. Otherwise we would have to sit down, stay silent and starve to death because we can never bee 100% sure of anything. In all of our major epistemic gap crossings we assert the positive side. The cogito, "I think, therefore, I am" taken by foundationalists to be absolute proof of the most indubitable premise, is a positive affirmation of the lack of knowledge that the "I am isn't a different I than the I that says "I am." Any principle that says "I have no reason to make that assumption" is mere turning the negative aspect of knowledge in the face of a gap in knowledge into a possessive assertion.

But you cheat and say that science's inability to discern miracles produces that positive knowledge. Hence, you just say there have been 100 resurrections in the past, without feeling the need to provide any details.

That's not true at all. I did actually document a couple of sources. I was speiifically reffering the book by Duffin (recently reviewed here) Medical Miracles about her research i the Vatican Archives. I don't have space to reproduce her whole book in a text box. That's a cheap attack because no one does on a message board have that kind of space. No one expects that. Giving a printed source is fine for official intercollegiate debate it should be fine for a message board. There's a gap on the message board where one guys "I don't have time to look it up but I doubt it" the one says "It's true I read it" but he doesn't give it. What can you do it's not a official event? you just let it go. One can go look it up if one cares, and rarely anyone does.

You can't get from that negative knowledge (we don't know if supernatural caused events are possible) to positive knowledge (we know they are possible) without first providing a rigorous concept of what that force is. Which means you have to prove God exists before you can claim miracles exist.

That's horse manure. What he's saying is we have to know all about God with absolute certainty before we can assume God. That's not fair. physicists don't play that way. When atheist use the multivariate as an example to the fine tuning argument they are using an argument that has absolutley no empirical backing. We have no evidence other than hypothetical mathematics that such a thing exits. Notice Mike is also diong a "hide the ball" maneuver in asserting that my only basis for argument is negative side assertions, we can't disprove miracles. He's ignoring the fact that I've given a pile of miracle evidence in Lourdes miracles and in Casdroph and Catholic saint making miracles and Vatican archival research.

Without proof that God exists, the hypothesis that a supernatural force caused a particular event will only ever be that, a hypothesis. And one that is entirely untestable. It can never be wrong; it can only be accepted as right on the basis of faith.

That is a totally ludicrous statement. The miracle appeals are a ratioanl warrant for beleif in God. He's saying you have to prove God before you an argue for proof of God.If that were the case you could never make the argument. If we did physics that way before we do any research on dark matter we must already prove it exists. If we take that dictum down a peg to providing some form of verisimilitude then have that in spades with the 200 studies on religious experience. The Lourdes evidence supplys that concern a prori.

The other thing is, miracle stories always come with caveats that limit investigation. They always happen in the distant past, or in distant countries, or they are on the order of "God healed my sore back."

That is obviously not true. My father was dead then came to life. That event coincided with my dream that the Pope brought him to me and said "he will be ok." That was not long ago or in a foreign country, not the time it happened it was right then. The Lourdes miracles are immediate they are not long ago and far away.

With the exception of the resurrection of Jesus and the creation act itself, these events are never used as explanations of anything in the historical record. They never seem to have much effect on history at all. Maybe they happened, maybe then didn't.

That's because of the way modern historiography is construed. The ground rules for history as a modern social scinece rule out any but a naturalistic account. Jurgen Moltmann's rules change argument, the "history making" aspect, allows miracles to be brought in the back door. Moreover, the HRG (yes the guy on CARM) peremise that laws of physics an nature are totally descriptive open the door to further descriptions. There is no law-like statement in the universe that say "thou shalt not have violation of naturalism." Violations are just further observation of the behavior of the universe.

The whole post of Monday's post was that HRG steped in the trap by arguing in a circular fashion that physical laws are nothing but descriptions yet we have to rule out any miraculous idea on its face because we don't have such descriptions. Yet we do have them so there is no basis upon which to rule them out.

The Fall of Humanity: Not An event in History

Recently an atheist, call him "George," on a certain Message board was outraged and alarmed by my habit of looking at the fall from a different perspective than the one he knew as a fundamentalist. In his mind there's only one possibility for view points, that's the one he's into at the moment. Of cousre he sees the fall as a historical event, so he assumes that if the Genesis creation myth is wrong (as in evolutionary) then all of Christianity is wrong becuase then there's no fall, we don't need redemption the point of having a religion is blown. My answer alramebed becuase it wasn't the fundamentalist banter he expected. I discussed. What rally "blew his mind" as we used to say, was the idea I advance that it's actually a coming of age myth. Maybe I'm over the top in calling it that, perhaps I should clarify that I don't mean it in a form sense, but it does have overtones of being a coming of age myth.

First, let me set out exactly how I deal with the fall, how it can still be a valid category even though it's not an event in history. My view was influenced by Reinhold Niebuhr whom I read in seminary; Niebuhr was one of the greatest theologians of the 20th century, and the more concise and insightful of the Niebuhr boys.* Reinhold Niebuhr sets out his view in his great work The Nature and Destiny of man Volume I. He separates the fall from the historical view derived from the text in Genesis and based that upon Augustine's understanding of the nature of sin. Sin is an inherent aspect of sentient being. Augustine understood sin as a response to anxiety. I wont go into that I merely mark that in the lectures of Dr. Carney this was the frame for the issue. Niebuhr modernizes the concept of anxiety and sin by casting it in terms of self transcendence. We project into the future by remembering the past and extrapolating. So we think "If I don't get my rent paid I'll be on the street, that will be very miserable I know form past experience I don't like pain." So this sense of anxiety leads us to steal to pay the rent. Of course this is a very simplistic example and motives can get much more complex.

The basic sense is that the fall is something that happens in each of us as we grow. That's where the coming of age bit comes in. Rather than see it as a point in time that marks human history the action of one man became part of something like the genetic code the actual real life fall is distributed throughout all of history and marks the lives of each on an individual basis. It can be described as a fall in the sense that it represnts the loss innocence. We move form the state of being blameless due to youth to being blameworthy because we have come of age (or the "age of accountability"). We can pull back from seeking to resolve the anxiety through injustice ot others and and seek to resolve it through faith. That's the hard part because faith requires confidence to be placed in God, and that is much easier to come by once we have already experienced God's grace. So that's where redemption comes in.

By this account falling from Grace is just a natural part of life. It comes with the territory of growing up, thus I call it a "coming of age myth."Of course this outraged George the atheist. I'm not quite sure why. He produced a quote saying that all modern scholars are sure the authors of Genesis understood it as literal history. The quote actually spoke about six day creation not the fall. It did not say "there is no mythology in Genesis." It's pretty clear the redactors of the text were working form pagan myth such as the Sumerian and Babylonian/ Akkadian creation myth. Cornfled shows that the outlines are the exactly same event for event (see Genesis). It has all the ear makrs of mythology including non specific mythical time frame ("in the begining") an enchanted world (talking serpent--God Walks with man in the cool of evening). Clelarly we are dealing with a mythological text. According to Campbell mythology is a technique o dealing subconscious truth through archetypes. The selection of archetypes need not be conscious.

Tom Collin's Interview
with Campbell:Context
Institute

Tom: What does myth do for us? Why is it so important?

Joseph: It puts you in touch with a plane of reference that goes past your mind and into your very being, into your very gut. The ultimate mystery of being and nonbeing transcends all categories of knowledge and thought. Yet that which transcends all talk is the very essence of your own being, so you’re resting on it and you know it. The function of mythological symbols is to give you a sense of "Aha! Yes. I know what it is, it’s myself." This is what it’s all about, and then you feel a kind of centering, centering, centering all the time. And whatever you do can be discussed in relationship to this ground of truth. Though to talk about it as truth is a little bit deceptive because when we think of truth we think of something that can be conceptualized. It goes past that.

It doesn't matter that the redactors thought the events in the Genesis story really happened. Myth functions at a psychological level and the symbols are not necessarily chosen knowingly.


Joseph Campbell: from Interview
with Bill Moyers on Myths-Dream-
Symbols.

Experience of life. The mind has to do with meaning. What's the meaning of a flower. There's the Zen story about a sermon of the Buddha in which he simply lifeted a flower. There was only one man who gave him a sign with his eyes that he understood what was said. Now, the Buddha himself is called "the one thus come". There's no meaning. What's the meaning of the universe? What's the meaning of a flea? It's just there. We're so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it's all about....Read the myths. They teach you that you can turn inward, and you begin to get the message of the symbols.

There is no statement in chruch council that the events of the Genesis creation myth are literal history.There is no chruch council that mandates that we believe Genesis literally as history. The only we have this feeling that it's some kind of holy law that we must understand it this way is because it's been drummed into the culture since the nineteenth century by the fundamentalists. The fundamentalists largely exist today because they represent a visceral reaction to the modern world and resistance to Darwin. It's only because they drummed it into our heads that we think we have to support it as literal history.

*see H Richard Niebuhr
see Reinhold Niebuhr

Rationalizing One's Choices

I usually try to keep the squabbles with atheists on Atheist Watch. I quote atheists from the CARM atheist board a lot on AW. This is an exception, not becuase it's a chance to take a swipe at an atheist, but becuase it's such a prime example of self brain washing and affords an opportunity to broach a topic I've been wanting to talk about for some time. That topic is the inner life and the rationalizations we put up to keep God at arms length. The atheist foil is a poster on CARM atheist board called "1337."

This essay is excluding the reality of atheists and skeptics and non theists have genuine intellectual questions about God's existence. There's a whole other group that is rationailzing a bias against even consider God's reality.


1337 carm

There are often times when people fall away from their faith and are faced with the task of informing their religious parents about their loss of faith. There's an interesting reaction that takes place here.

The blame for why they lost their faith usually goes to one of 3 different things.

1) The parents wonder why they didn't do a better job
2) The one that lost their faith must not have been doing devotions or praying regularly (or just weren't putting in enough effort)
3) The devil has a foot hold in the person's life

For me, this is evidence that god doesn't exist and I'll explain why.

For him this is evidence that God doesn't exist! Here's another desperate charter who is just itching to get God out of the way. He's actually going to try and stick God with the blame for his own bad judgement and silly reasoning. So we know right away this is a rationalization and there's something wrong in the inner life. He made the decision to give up God or to either renounce belief or to admit he didn't have it. Many atheists are told that one can't choose a belief, I think that's utter rubbish. One caters to one's own biases always.

The reason is because the blame is misplaced. The real question should be, why isn't anyone asking what god failed to do to keep this person faithful? Why is it that the almighty creator of the universe who can keep track of the minds of 6.5 billion people and can perform miracles and influence reality couldn't make himself real enough for someone to believe?

So he decides he doesn't believe, shuts off the influences of those who do, hangs out on websites of those who don't. Listens to the propaganda of third rate thinkers and those with an ax to grind, fiercely fights the urge to accept God arguments and come up with rationalizations like this every time he hears a reason to believe in God, but it's God fault for not forcing him to accept the truth.

He says "make himself real enough for someone to believe." God is real enough for me to believe. How real does something have to be before you believe it? What he really means is make it so obvious and so overwhelming that he can't resist it. They want to be conquered. This is well known because many times on boards I've seen them argue "why didn't God make me a robot?" I've seen them say "I would rather be a robot than have to risk being wrong about God existing." This is exactly the reason Pascal invented his wager. It's not a proof but tie breaker. Its' a decision making paradigm. They can' hear it without mocking and ridiculing it as a bad proof. They don't want a decision making paradigm they want to be forced. If God wont force them then they are angry and refuse to listen.

But I've developed a theory about why God doesn't make himself more obvious. That is my soterioloigcal drama. Please read that carefully becuase I think it really explains. In a nut shell, God created us to so that free moral agents could willingly choose the good. That's important because we can't internalize the values of the good unless we search for the truth. So the search must remain inviolable that's why God can't go around making demonstrations that render his existence too obvious to doubt.

The fact that it's God's way and not their, it requires effort that outrages them. You can see the difference between the rationalizes and the real thinkers who have a legitimate skepticism because the latter don't rationalize their own choices and try to use them as proof of the veracity of the choice. This guy is literally saying "I must have made the right choice because I made it." He's trying to turn the fact of his unbelief into a proof of the veracity of it.

It would be like if a child stopped believing in santa, nobody blames santa because there is no santa doing things to keep the kids faith alive. The parents may think "We could have done a better job explaining santa to keep his faith alive longer" which is recognition that there is no santa that can play a part in the kids faith. Likewise, there is no god that can play a part in people's faith so we blame people. If we don't want to blame people and aren't really interested in the reasons for the rejection of god, we may just blame the devil because that's the easy out for parents, it's not their fault or god's fault, it's the devil.

Of course he's leaving out certain obvious aspects:

(1) The people making such excuses are rationalizing too, they covering for their loved one. they could be saying "It's our kids fault because he's an idiot." or "I knew that kid was no good the first time he pooped in his diapers"

(2) Of cousre he's over looking the fact that 92% of American society and 90% of the world believe in some form of God. So they find the reasons satisfactory and the proof level adequate. So apparently God does enough to keep 92% happy but this guy must be in the hard cases.

(3) I highly suspect that like many atheist he doesn't really want evidence of God's existence. Like one said the other day on the same board in teh same discussion "I didn't read the evidence you posted because it's too long." So not only do they want God to give them indisputable proof but it has to be 25 words or less. It's has to be convenient for their busy schedules. That guy had a lot more mocking and ridiculing to do that day and didn't have time to read the proof about how wrong he was.

TL;DR - Nobody blames god for not trying hard enough to make himself known, which implies he doesn't exist. This is really just a version of the Divine Hiddenness problem.

Or that you hate God for making you the person you hate most and you are not willing to listen to reason. Now that's not to say that all who decide the evidence doesn't move them are just rationing. Yet people who try to turn their decision into proof that they made the right decision are clearly rationalizing.

Please read my essay on why God doesn't make himself more obvious. This is another case of not letting God be God. Belief is not a matter of being overwhelmed by the obvious it's an inner life. The search is in the heart and if one is not willing to confront the heart one misses the search. To rationalize one's own choices as proof of their own validity is a short cut that is designed to doge the problematic nature of the search, but in so doing it also negates the possibly of insight that leads to belief. We can't circumvent the search by dodging the necessity of inner life, confrontation with our own self imposed demons and the necessity of the deicision to reject doubt. that's all part of the process one must pass through on the way to faith.

Responses on the Religious a priori Argument

On Monday's post I talked about my religious a priori argument. HRG (poster on CARM) sort of walked into it. This is a look at a response that MkeWC gave. Mike is a pretty bright guy. In 13 years of arguing with atheists on the net he's the first one I've met who really understands Derrida.

It's interesting that you say religion is derived phenomenologically, therefore it has a kind of epistemic autonomy, that it carries its own terms of justification within it.

The problem is that phenomenology has been critiqued into the dust. It can't do without something that synthesizes the manifold of phenomena, and no one has ever offered a coherent account of how that could be. It always ends up in metaphysical speculation: Husserl, Heidegger, Jean-Luc Marion, they all end up finding a substrata of presence that finally cannot be supported.

Of course that's a pretty exaggerated claim. Any popular school of thought has been "critiqued ad nausium." Or "into the dust." That is not to say that he has any real criticisms of the way I used Tillich's Heideggerian based phenomenology in understanding the religious a prori. Although his initial description of the a prori, it has a kind of epistemic autonomy, that it carries its own terms of justification within it, is a good description of what that means. The claim that phenomenology has never offered a coherent account of the manifold nature of phenomena is a question begging and ironic claim. The thrust of Heidegger's phenomenology is to impressing sense data into preconceived categories and allow the data to suggest it's own category. A good example of what I mean is seen in a recent 'discussion' (p'ing contest) with an atheist on CARM who keeps habitually refereeing t religoius experience as "funny feelings." This atheist will not alter that term no matter how I have explained that it's purposely derisive, doesn't describe anything that corresponds to RE and is not ever used in any of the studies. The typical atheist fear of the subjective and hatred of experience is used as a preconceived category in which this atheist heard any kind of data that would contradict the usual atheist ideology.

Since the point of Heideggerian phenomenology is to allow the data to suggest the categories themselves, in the above example this would be done by perhaps description RE the way those who experience it describe it, then the claim that it has never found a coherent explication of the manifold nature of experience is just saying "gee these guys don't want preconceived categories don't have any preconceived categories." How about that? That like criticizing the army as "too military." That's like criticizing the courts system as "too bound by legal conventions."

Mike goes on:

Besides that, phenomenology was developed as a philosophical tool. That contradicts your statement that religion is not derived from other disciplines.

I didn't say religion is derived from phenomenology. I said we should use a phenomenological approach to understand it.

Induction is not a cheat. In your example about balls dropping from a tower, we know they will fall at the same rate because physics tells us they will. You're right we only ever see particular balls, but that doesn't matter to physics.

That's really circular reasoning, by way of being question begging. He doesn't understand that this example is right out of Karl Popper's major work. Without extrapolating by way of inductive logic we would have to watch every case of the dropping of balls to make sure that it always worked the same say. Yet in using inductive we automatically consign a lot of things to falling between the cracks. Of course Popper's point was that you can't derive regular law like statements from general principles. The nature of empiricism demands empirical observation. If this is not to be endless it must be extrapolated inductively. His statement assumes there's a rule book of physics already written and waiting to be consulted even in the very early days before Newtonian physics. If laws of physics are derived entirely descriptively when how can we have a preconceived rule that "physics tells us they will." That's really cheating empiricism. It's quite ironic because it means he's evoking the preconceived category that phenomenology seeks to avoid.

Causal induction is an entirely valid principle. However, this does not disprove miracles.

I didn't say that induction is not valid. I said it has problems it runs afoul of impossing a preconceived rule upon experience, and in the need to extrapolate things fall through the cracks. What I meant by that was miracles. Just because 99.9% of cases work a certain way, dead men don't rise and walk, doesn't mean 100% of cases work that way. Since miracles are supposed to be impossibilities where's the sense in evoking standard expectation?

You're right that science cannot finally chase away the possibility of miracles, defined as an event caused by a supernatural force. But that just establishes a negative knowledge: "we don't know if miracles are possible or not." Note that this is different from saying "we know miracles are, in principle, possible."

All epistemic gaps must be crossed with the assumption of positive side rules. We do this in everything. Otherwise we would have to sit down, stay silent and starve to death because we can never bee 100% sure of anything. In all of our major epistemic gap crossings we assert the positive side. The cogito, "I think, therefore, I am" taken by foundationalists to be absolute proof of the most indubitable premise, is a positive affirmation of the lack of knowledge that the "I am isn't a different I than the I that says "I am." Any principle that says "I have no reason to make that assumption" is mere turning the negative aspect of knowledge in the face of a gap in knowledge into a possessive assertion.

But you cheat and say that science's inability to discern miracles produces that positive knowledge. Hence, you just say there have been 100 resurrections in the past, without feeling the need to provide any details.

That's not true at all. I did actually document a couple of sources. I was speiifically reffering the book by Duffin (recently reviewed here) Medical Miracles about her research i the Vatican Archives. I don't have space to reproduce her whole book in a text box. That's a cheap attack because no one does on a message board have that kind of space. No one expects that. Giving a printed source is fine for official intercollegiate debate it should be fine for a message board. There's a gap on the message board where one guys "I don't have time to look it up but I doubt it" the one says "It's true I read it" but he doesn't give it. What can you do it's not a official event? you just let it go. One can go look it up if one cares, and rarely anyone does.

You can't get from that negative knowledge (we don't know if supernatural caused events are possible) to positive knowledge (we know they are possible) without first providing a rigorous concept of what that force is. Which means you have to prove God exists before you can claim miracles exist.

That's horse manure. What he's saying is we have to know all about God with absolute certainty before we can assume God. That's not fair. physicists don't play that way. When atheist use the multivariate as an example to the fine tuning argument they are using an argument that has absolutley no empirical backing. We have no evidence other than hypothetical mathematics that such a thing exits. Notice Mike is also diong a "hide the ball" maneuver in asserting that my only basis for argument is negative side assertions, we can't disprove miracles. He's ignoring the fact that I've given a pile of miracle evidence in Lourdes miracles and in Casdroph and Catholic saint making miracles and Vatican archival research.

Without proof that God exists, the hypothesis that a supernatural force caused a particular event will only ever be that, a hypothesis. And one that is entirely untestable. It can never be wrong; it can only be accepted as right on the basis of faith.

That is a totally ludicrous statement. The miracle appeals are a ratioanl warrant for beleif in God. He's saying you have to prove God before you an argue for proof of God.If that were the case you could never make the argument. If we did physics that way before we do any research on dark matter we must already prove it exists. If we take that dictum down a peg to providing some form of verisimilitude then have that in spades with the 200 studies on religious experience. The Lourdes evidence supplys that concern a prori.

The other thing is, miracle stories always come with caveats that limit investigation. They always happen in the distant past, or in distant countries, or they are on the order of "God healed my sore back."

That is obviously not true. My father was dead then came to life. That event coincided with my dream that the Pope brought him to me and said "he will be ok." That was not long ago or in a foreign country, not the time it happened it was right then. The Lourdes miracles are immediate they are not long ago and far away.

With the exception of the resurrection of Jesus and the creation act itself, these events are never used as explanations of anything in the historical record. They never seem to have much effect on history at all. Maybe they happened, maybe then didn't.

That's because of the way modern historiography is construed. The ground rules for history as a modern social scinece rule out any but a naturalistic account. Jurgen Moltmann's rules change argument, the "history making" aspect, allows miracles to be brought in the back door. Moreover, the HRG (yes the guy on CARM) peremise that laws of physics an nature are totally descriptive open the door to further descriptions. There is no law-like statement in the universe that say "thou shalt not have violation of naturalism." Violations are just further observation of the behavior of the universe.

The whole post of Monday's post was that HRG steped in the trap by arguing in a circular fashion that physical laws are nothing but descriptions yet we have to rule out any miraculous idea on its face because we don't have such descriptions. Yet we do have them so there is no basis upon which to rule them out.

New God Argument: God on the Brain

 


As with all my God arguments this one does not claim to prove God's existence, but to demonstrate that bleief is rationally warranted and thus meets a reasonable prmia facie burden.

Argument:

(1) Studies of religious experience and brain reveal a sense that there is an innate idea of a God cocnept in human brain.

(2) The brain structures seems to be organized in such a way that this concept of "the divine" is so much at the center of the way it works that's actually good for us to ponder it.

(3) Innate ideas are impossible and genes can't ponder ideas. This would seem to indicate that these ideas are somehow purposely implanted by some higher form of mind that understands them and wants us to have them. The fact that they are good for us to think about indicates that we are "designed" to know God.

Analysis:
Science doesn't recognize innate ideas. Many people might think it does, they are fooled into thinking by the nature of genetic disposition. Genes determine many things in our behavior and of course everything about our physical endowment. Those are not ideas. Behavior is not an idea and we call "instinct" is not an idea. That is to say we don't' have fully formed concepts that we are born with, we are born with urges and drives to pursue certain things. We don't have fully formed ideas of these things, they have to be discovered and the ideas must be developed.

It seems now that we are born with a certain idea of God. That seems to stretch the credibility of evolutionary theory and marks the game as fixed. That's like finding the fifth ace up someone's sleeve. Beginning about mid 90's the media began talking about "the God part of the Brain." They ran stories on scientists stimulating people's brains and producing religious feelings. Here's a quote from one of those early stories:

by Steve Connor
Science CorrespondentSunday Times,UK 11/02/97

SCIENTISTS believe they have discovered a "God module" in the brain which could be responsible for man's evolutionary instinct to believe in religion. A study of epileptics who are known to have profoundly spiritual experiences has located a circuit of nerves in the front of the brain which appears to become electrically active when they think about God. The scientists said that although the research and its conclusions are preliminary, initial results suggest that the phenomenon of religious belief is "hard-wired" into the brain.Epileptic patients who suffer from seizures of the brain's frontal lobe said they frequently experience intense mystical episodes and often become obsessed with religious spirituality.
A team of neuroscientists from the University of California at San Diego said the most intriguing explanation is that the seizure causes an overstimulation of the nerves in a part of the brain dubbed the "God module". "There may be dedicated neural machinery in the temporal lobes concerned with religion. This may have evolved to impose order and stability on society," the team reported at a conference last week. The results indicate that whether a person believes in a religion or even in God may depend on how enhanced is this part of the brain's electrical circuitry, the scientists said. Dr Vilayanur Ramachandran, head of the research team, said the study involved comparing epileptic patients with normal people and a group who said they were intensely religious. Electrical monitors on their skin – a standard test for activity in the brain's temporal lobes – showed that the epileptics and the deeply religious displayed a similar response when shown words invoking spiritual belief.[1]

Since that time researchers (notably Andrew Newberg) have discovered that there is no one area that is stimulated by religious behavior. There are several areas, different areas for different activities such as meditation or prayer. These areas are mainly in the parietal lobe and the temporal lobe.

two arguments:

I. Innate idea:

the same basic set of ideas about the ultimate or the top of the metaphysical hierarchy are found around the world. There is some variation between personal or impersonal but essentially they all refer to the notion of some kind of Ground of being or Transcendental Signifier. They all center on the notion of a "divine" or "Holy" referent. These are actual ideas not merely instincts and their nature as ideas, our reactions to them which the same world over, seem to indicate this is more than an instinct and yet it shouldn't be more than that.

that gives us pause to think that it's a clue. It's something we are meant to have in order to find the higher reality. More than just evolutionary because evolution can't give you full blown ideas.

Those who try to explain religion away as a by product of the way our minds work, nevertheless help illustrate the innate idea in God awareness.

Mind Power News
Original Source is Michael Brooks
in New Scientist

That's not to say that the human brain has a "god module" in the same way that it has a language module that evolved specifically for acquiring language. Rather, some of the unique cognitive capacities that have made us so successful as a species also work together to create a tendency for supernatural thinking. "There's now a lot of evidence that some of the foundations for our religious beliefs are hard-wired," says Bloom.

Much of that evidence comes from experiments carried out on children, who are seen as revealing a "default state" of the mind that persists, albeit in modified form, into adulthood. "Children the world over have a strong natural receptivity to believing in gods because of the way their minds work, and this early developing receptivity continues to anchor our intuitive thinking throughout life," says anthropologist Justin Barrett of the University of Oxford.

Even though this is an atheist trying to explain away God belief,we must ask why do our minds work in such a way as to produce the idea of God? More on this below under objections.

II. Good for us to think about.

Because it's good for us that would indicated we are fitted for it. We are made for it, it is there for a purpose. It's more than just survival of the fittest mechanism there's no indication that it's genetic, that is the positive aspects of thinking about it.

Newberg:Random House
Excepts of How God Changes Your Brain

In Why God Wont Go Away I demonstrated that the human brain is unquely constructed to perceive spiritual realities....spiritual practices even when stripped of religious beliefs enhase the neural functioning in ways that improve phsyical and emtional health... long term contemplation of God and other spiritual values appears to permanently change the structure of those parts of the brain that control our moods, give rise to our conscious notions of self, and shape our sensory perceptions of the world. Contemplative practices strengthen a specificc nuerologial circut that generates peacefulness, social awareness, and compassion for others.
(website by Random House with excepts from Newberg's book)

III. objections and answers

A. Naturalistic origin Turnaround

Skeptics argue that the idea of stimulating the brain and getting religious proves that religion is just a naturalistic part of genetic endowment. That is proof enough for them that God is not involved. I argue quite the contrary it actually makes a dandy God argument (it meets the prima facie burden on rational warrant--gives us a reason to believe in God).

Newberg doesn't believe that naturalistic mechanisms rule out God. He says the skeptic is too hasty in assuming this:

Newberg, Why God Won’t God Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief. (New York, Ballentine Books), 2001, pp. 157-172.

A skeptic might suggest that a biological origin to all spiritual longings and experiences, including the universal human yearning to connect with something divine, could be explained as a delusion caused by the chemical misfiring of a bundle of nerve cells. But …After years of scientific study, and careful consideration of the a neurological process that has evolved to allow us humans to transcend material existence and acknowledge and connect with a deeper, more spiritual part of ourselves perceived of as an absolute, universal reality that connects us to all that is.

…Tracing spiritual experience to neurological behavior does not disprove its realness. If God does exist, for example, and if He appeared to you in some incarnation, you would have no way of experiencing His presence, except as part of a neurologically generated rendition of reality. You would need auditory processing to hear his voice, visual processing to see His face, and cognitive processing to make sense of his message. Even if he spoke to you mystically, without words, you would need cognitive functions to comprehend his meaning, and input form the brain’s emotional centers to fill you with rapture and awe. Neurology makes it clear: there is no other way for God to get into your head except through the brain’s neural pathways. Correspondingly, God cannot exist as a concept or as reality anyplace else but in your mind. In this sense, both spiritual experiences and experiences of a more ordinary material nature are made real to the mind in the very same way—through the processing powers of the brain and the cognitive functions of the mind. Whatever the ultimate nature of spiritual experience might be—weather it is in fact an actual perception of spiritual reality—or merely an interpretation of sheer neurological function—all that is meaningful in human spirituality happens in the mind. In other words, the mind is mystical by default.5

---

5 Ibid., p37

The medieval German mystic Meister Echkart lived hundreds of years before the science of neurology was born. Yet it seems he had intuitively grasped one of the fundamental principles of the discipline: What we think of, as reality is only a rendition of reality that is created by the brain. Our modern understanding of the brain’s perceptual powers bears him out. Nothing enters consciousness whole. There is no direct, objective experience of reality. All the things the mind perceives—all thoughts, feelings, hunches, memories, insights, desires, and revelations—have been assembled piece by piece by the processing powers of the brain from the swirl of neural blimps. The idea that our experiences of reality—all our experiences, for that matter—are only “secondhand” depictions of what may or may not be objectively real, raises some profound questions about the most basic truths of human existence and the neurological nature of spiritual experience. For example our experiment with Tibetan mediators and Franciscan nuns showed that the events they considered spiritual were, in fact, associated with observable neurological activity. In a reductionist sense this could support the argument that religious experience is only imagined neurologically, that God is physically ‘all in your mind.’ But a full understanding of the way in which the brain and the mind assemble and experience reality suggests a very different view.7

---

7 Ibid. pp. 35-36

B. God works through natural

God created nature and can work in it all the time. Tielhard de Chardin believed that the strong force was God's presence holding the universe together. There's no reason to reject God from the natural, unless one is a skeptic and searching for an excuse not to believe. The only problem with this answer is that there must be something one can point to that determines a difference between God being involved and not involved. Without that it can't be a rational warrant for God belief. That difference need not be a naturalistic biological mechanism. Otherwise there's a tie, and we need tie breakers.

C. Tie Breakers:

(1) The innate aspect of the idea refutes naturalistic assumption
There are still aspects of the innate God sense, such as it's nature as an innate idea, that argue agaisnt a totally naturalistic origin. If the atheist argument were true and universality is examined by human brain structure, we all have the same brain so we all have the kinds of religious experiences, then we should all have the same language and the same culture. On How stuff works (website) there's an explaination as to why we don't all have the same language.

One prominent theory about the development of the first languages relates to tools and resources. Teaching another person how to use tools requires a certain, agreed-upon vocabulary, as does the process of sharing and protecting resources like food and shelter. Small groups of people living in close quarters would therefore need to develop a way to understand each other, so they came up with a vocabulary and syntax that meant something to them. A group of people across the world from them, though, would probably need an entirely different vocabulary of words, so the languages would have developed differently in isolation. Think of the oft-quoted (but erroneous) example that Eskimos have 100 different words for snow because they have so much of it. While that common statement is wrong, there are cultures that have far more words for rice and camels than, say, English does.

If you think about it that's just another way of saying "becasue it's not pre-determined." We have different experiences and so we have different reactions. This would indicate that religous experiences are actual;u experience of something, which the same thing for all.



Objection to tie breaker 1:
Isn't generative grammar an innate idea?

Noman Chomsky says there is a "preprogramed" language organ in the brain.

Answer: Not really the same thing. We don't have fully formed concepts of grammar in our minds as we grow up. We know how to use grammar instinctive but we don't have to have grammatical theories fully formed in our heads. Yet people seem to respond to religious experinces with the sense taht there is this "thing" God, the divine, the transcendent. There's a concept to that that's already formed; the numinous.

tiebreaker
(2) The universality of the idea

Adrew Newrber
The Mystical Mind 199

In Western Religion and in Hinduism...God is conceived as the ultimate externaltiy (transcendent) the ultimate internatility (immanent) and sometimes as both...Often God is not perceived as simply a higher being but has been has been described as the Ground or substance of all being. Thus God is not only the higher being but also a state of higher being or ultimate realty. In fact, in the mystical traditions of Western religions, the goal of the practice of meditation is to become intensely untied with God...The important point is that no matter how this ultimate being or state of being is described, it's fundamental characteristics are remarkably similar across traditions and cultures. (on line page 4)

That correlates with Dr. Hood's findings that when one removes the specific names and doctrines, the nature of the experiences and the way people relate to them are the same across all cultural boundaries. (Hood, Ralph. W. Jr. (2006). The common core thesis in the study of mysticism. In P, McNamar (Ed.), Where God and science meet, Vol. 3, pp. 119-138. Westport, CT: Praeger.)

Hood States in German Psychological Journal

Elsewhere I have argued for reading James' treatment of mysticism in the Varieties as an example of the unity thesis in mysticism (Hood, 2003). The unity thesis is the view that both within and outside of the great faith traditions, is an experience that is essentially identical, regardless of interpretation. James put the issue thusly:

In Hinduism, in Neoplatonism, in Sufism, in Christian Mysticism, in Whitmanism, we find the same recurring note, so that there is about mystical utterances an eternal unanimity which ought to make a critic stop and think, and which brings it about that the mystical classics have, as has been said, neither birthday nor native land. Perpetually telling of the unity of man with God, their speech antedate language, and they do not grow old (James, 1902/1985, p. 332, emphasis mine)

The above quote clearly hints at two of the basic assumptions of those who support the unity thesis. First, it implies that a distinction can be made between experience and its interpretation. Second, it suggests that for at least some linguistic descriptions, an underlying uniform experience cuts across language differences (Hood, 2003, 2006). This position has been most systematically developed by Stace (1961) under the rubric of the common core thesis and is the basis of the most commonly used empirical measure of mysticism, the Mysticism Scale which has been used in numerous studies for more than a quarter of a century (Hood, 1975, 1997).(http://www.journal-fuer-psychologie.de/jfp-3-2008-04.html)

Atheist objection to no 2:
Human Brain Structure produces Universal Ideas?


This is the answer most often given to the universality argument for mystical experience and the God sense in the brain that seems to unite people across cultures. That would be their direct Answer to Tie barker number 2.

Answers:

(a) No scientific correlation between uniformity of brain structure and uniformity of experience

Clearly we don't all experience the same things just because we are human.

(b) Universal behavior is always assumed in scinece to be genetically based in some sense.

We must assume that ideas are from culture. Fully formed concepts are cultural constructs. These are not genetic the usually differ form culture to culture.

Anders Rassmussen Blog
"Universal Human Behaviors"
Friday, December 29, 2006

There is a trend amongst scholars in sociology and gender sciences to argue that more or less everything is social constructions. Relationships and roles in the society are constructed by humans in our conversations. Hence, they argue, there are almost no universal behaviors. Anthropologists writing about strange habits in different societies are often cited to show that there is great variability between people living in different places, and indeed there is. However, it is often overlooked that there are many similarities between different cultures as well. I argue that even though there are many differences between people in different societies that stand out, there are also many, more fundamental, behaviors which do not vary between different cultures. These behaviors seem so natural to us that we barely notice them...

Take beauty for instance. Is it true that beauty is in the eye of the beholder? Research suggests not! People from cultures all around the globe agree on what faces are beautiful and which are not beautiful. For example, symmetrical faces are seen as more attractive than non-symmetrical faces. Similarly, around the globe a 0.7 and 0.9 waist to hip ratio for women and men respectively, is considered the most attractive body shape. Preferences for the amount of fat on the body varies between cultures. In starving countries in Africa "wider" ladies are generally preferred whereas in western cultures almost anorectic women are seen as very attractive, but consistently it is found that people prefer 0.7 and 0.9 waist to hip ratios. We can do even better than this. For example, have you seen someone who becomes happy when faced with misfortune and sad when life is good? Have you heard of a society where there is neither love nor hate?

If there's a genetic disposition to the idea of God that's a pretty good reason to believe God had to put it there. Could a gene or a Spandrels really develop based upon an imaginary being in the sky? Or even based upon the ground of being? There would require ideas implanted in the gene structure, if they were false ideas that would be even more remarkable.

Either it's cultural in which case it shouldn't be universal or it's genetic in which case the geentic structure of an idea must be explained.

(more tie breakers)
(3) the "coincidence" of the idea

It just happens that this beneficial mutation or combination of genetic endowments happen to produce this confirmation of a full blown idea in the mind that is about not only something that doesn't exist but also the one thing of which atheists are terrified and spend their lives fighting, and it just happens to be this one thing. No other natural sense taht we have is about unreal things. We have an instinct for food, food exist. We don't have any other instincts that give us a mythology of fantasy about unreal things that happen to serve us better than reality.


(4) Problems with Evolutionary Assumptions



From O'Connor article above.

Evolutionary scientists have suggested that belief in God, which is a common trait found in human societies around the world and throughout history, may be built into the brain's complex electrical circuitry as a Darwinian adaptation to encourage co-operation between individuals.

Problems:

(a) why not just adapt to genetic trait for co-operation? why all the mystical and religious hubub just for that? It seems that would be more efficient and would have been more likely.

(b) in other endowments we don't mustache belief in fantasy and unreal things that just happens to work out to benefit us.

"Religion Is Not an Adaptation" 159
Lee A. Kirkpatrick
In Where God and Science Meet
ed Patrick McNamara
Preager

Finally, perhaps the biggest problem with religion-as-adaptation theories
is that, in virtually every example I have encountered, it seems clear that a
much simpler design could solve the (presumed) adaptive problem at least
as well as religion. Natural selection is a very conservative process that,
starting from the existing design, fashions new adaptations by changing as
little as necessary. Simpler designs are more evolvable designs. Consider, for
example, suggestions that religious beliefs are adaptive because they provide
relief from anxiety or other psychological benefi ts. In addition to other problems
outlined previously as to how religion could represent an adaptation
designed to produce such effects, it seems obvious that a much simpler way
for natural selection to reduce anxiety would be to simply tweak a parameter
of the anxiety system or mechanism to make it quantitatively less reactive
in response to threats or to simply recalibrate it to produce consistently
lower levels. Such a minor change in an existing anxiety system would be far
easier—and thus more likely—for natural selection to produce than all the
complex systems and mechanisms (not to mention group-level phenomena)
required to produce anxiety-reducing religion.

(c) that assumes that somehow our genes would know that religious is bound up with social cooperation. It just happened to develop as side stream of co-operation but that's assuming a lot. There's no reason why belief in God had work into a social thing. The individual aspects of belief indicates there's more to it than that.

(d) The full blown concept of TS, the top of he metaphysical hierarchy and the basis of all that is seems to be present in all God concepts, weather personal or impersonal. Evolution can't bestow a full formed idea. That has to be a cultural construct and a produce ot culture becuase it's sophisticated and consists of too many prior concepts.

Atheist Objection:
way the mind works

The argument (from Michael Brooks above) that a separation between animate and inanimate is created in infancy and childhood by the seeming disembodiment of dreaming and mind/body distinction.So we can project a mind in the sky.

This is pretty much begging the question, and does more assuming about religious ideas being fully formed. It just as easily confirms the innate idea of god. It's assuming a host innate concepts such as life after death are projections of the way the brain works, still means innate ideas.

Summary:

What this argument does not do is establish God as a fact beyond dispute. We don't' want to do that. That would circumvent the personal search God wants us to conduit to internatlize the values of the good. What it does do is demonstrate that we have empirical data that can be used to extrapolate from logcially and in a valid way, to warrant belief in God in a ratinoal and verifiable way. These verifiable scientific facts about the effects of God concept on brain chemistry indicate that:

(1) We have God finder equanimity designed into us

(2) It's good for us to use it, indicates we are designed to have it. We are fit to be religous.

The atheist slogan will be employed "we don't arguments we want facts" I've already demonstrated that the same kind of extrapolations are used by scientists in support of theory.

(a) Neutrino

Scientists first proposed the neutrino based upon theory and the behavior of other particles They did not have any direct proof of a neutrino for 30 years but they continued to assume they were real based upon argument form theory!




(b) smoking as a cause of cancer

We went 40 years without knowing the mechanism for smoking causing cancer but we acted on the fact of a very tight correlation by itself. (

Website “Cancer Research UK,” URL http://info.cancerresearchuk.org/healthyliving/smokingandtobacco/, “Smoking and Cancer” visited March, 24, 2009.

See my page on Religious a priori, "Scientists Extrapolate to Argue for Theory" Where I present more evidence on the Neutrino argument.

Dave uncovers the secret behind belief in God.

My Friend Dave comes back with more challenges. I think he's taking the cynical view. Actually my title was a tease becasue he is not exposing belief in God per se, just belief in the sort of God fundamentalist and I talk about.

Dave:

Ironically, my whole point was that only the personified image of God was an amplified notion of humanity, but in any case, based on what you've written over the years, I can't help but see this as part of a larger pattern. It's as if you really just want to believe in a loving old man in the sky who personally hears you and takes care of you, God as an individual, a person.

The thing that's so unfair about this observation, and perhaps most unfair becuase it has truth to it, is that it's natural for humans to want to find reflections of their parents in the divine. The association between God and father, mother, grand parents, is as old as belief in God and it's probably no coincidence. How natural to associate the center of the center of love, care, concern, protection, acceptance, with these loving giants who held you close to themw hen you were small. There's the deep dark secret behind beilef in God: It's based upon the need for a father and love of parents. Of course I had parents. The fact that I loved and needed them didn't make the myths, they were real. It doesn't make God a myth, not even a conscious self God, just becuase we need him. If that sense of need get's mixed up with other bases for belief, such as rational conjecture and possible answers, that's just a hazard of being human. It doesn't make God be unreal just because we might confuse our love and need of parents with God. Nor does it mean that God is not conscious or self aware.

What bothers me is that Dave, usually one of my most intelligent friends whom I have always respected for him intellect, seems not to understand something very basic. He seems to be overlooking the full range of what I have espoused for years just becuase he spots one pattern.I had really wonderful parents and really wonderful grandmother. I loved them very much and they loved me and they were the closet thing to the Cleavers not on television in the early 60s. It just makes sense, especially after caring for them as they died for three years (which basically destroyed my life) that I would want to continue some slight connection between God and parental love. Even that doesn't disprove God's personal nature. I have ratioanl reasons for holding in addition psychological ones. Now if Dave wants to psychological everyone who opposses him I hope he's prepared to demonstrate that his desire to deny God self awareness isn't based upon his own psychological needs. It's a variant of the genetic fallacy to think that we have disproved an idea merely becuase we expose a psychological nerve in someone's motive for holding. In thinking of the full range of my God concept the self aware aspect is only a small but, I'll get that latter.

Yet you realize that this image is culturally and psychologically constructed and too simplistic to be the grand and mysterious higher power worthy of the idea of God. Thus the appeal of a God that is beyond words and concepts, a God that is immune from simply being labeled as a human projection and all of the criticism that invites.

I don't have an appeal for a mystical God. I had an experience of the thing, whatever it is, beyond understanding. I had an experience of God that fits the description of the mystics. I never said "I think I'll support this mystical God because it suits my fancy," I experienced the erality of such a God, or object of ultimat concern or whatever you wish to call it. Again, he's making the same genetic fallacy. This is where the idea comes form (some psychological thing that goes along with the idea) so that must disprove the idea. It doesn't disprove it,it only means that why we like it. He's not even dealing with my real concept of God. In fact it might just be his own allure for the mystical that he's talking about.

It's like the philosophical material is a cover, a way to convince others or perhaps yourself that it's OK to believe in the God you really want to believe in, if only you can just juggle enough concepts and arguments at once and make it all fit together. Any criticism is deflected by switching back to the argument that the personified individual God you talk about is really just a convenient shorthand. When that is called into question, you become very upset and abandon logic or philosophy for claims that your faith is being attacked.

I don't actually believe in God because I sat down one day and said "what kind of God do I want to believe in?" I experienced stuff I said "wow God is neat." The woman who led me to the Lord, Judy, used to say that was one of God's major attributes right after Omnipotent, omniscient, and
omnipresent, he's "neat." It was a few years before I read Evelyn Underhill and said "wow, that really what I experienced that time and what I feel when I pray." If Dave wants to be cynical and believe he's uncovered some deep dark sense I have of a need for a certain aspect, God so what? I probalby do have desire to see God in that way. That doesn't mean there's no some reality there to things I experienced. Dave is doing a reductions tactic of losing phenomena and re-labeling. He's trying to impose his own suppositions and pass them off as mine. I don't think anyone could feel real love for an impersonal force. God is clearly about love. I felt this all pervasive deep penetrating love from God, and thinknig about that I feel a sense of love for God.I can't really comment on the "kind" of love I feel for God. It' snot really like the love I felt for my father but of cousre that wrapped up with concrete experiences of my father and knowing he was man and seeing his limitations.

Dave:

I am not attacking your faith, I am questioning your assumptions and arguments. If that disturbs you, just ignore my comments or ask me to stop posting them.

No you are wrestling with your own!

The term I've used to denote my concept of God is "trans-personal." That means God includes the personal but is beyond it as well. God is more than personal. When I say "Personal" that is grating becuase God can't have a personality because personalty is shaped psychologically and has hang ups. God is the source of consciousness and thus has self awareness. That doesn't mean he fits personality theory.Of cousre it means he's more than a grandfather or a father, he's not a big man in the sky, I shouldn't even say "He" except it's impossible to find a metaphor that allows for the love and excludes the gender. That is the primary thing I think about God, above all else, God blows away our neatly conceived categories.

One thing I do know is that when I went through through the period after losing my house where I was angery at God I went through period of transition where I was recovering from shock where I wanted to feel good about God but I couldn't believe that God could be personal because if he was personal surely he wouldn't let anyone go through the things I have been through. I began to think of God as an impersonal set of energies sort of like bandwidth. Part of that scale of bandwidth was a type of energy that mirrors our psychological states. so we getting our own love back at us like looking in a mirror. We think it's God's love and it's our love for ourselves. I actually had some sense of peace from that. The problem is it just didn't fit. God seemed to answer prayers when I related to him as a self aware thing with a sense of its own agenda. It didn't work to think of him as an impersonal force. I developed the basic idea that any time I decide to my will ahread of God's will it wont work. Whatever else is true, however transcendent or beyond our understanding God may be, God has a will of his own and he expect me to fit that.

I think God is beyond anything we could understand. We develop of sense of knowing God through prayer and feeling his presence, especially through those experiences which can't be communicated except in the most basic terms. In this sense of knowing God personally, as it were, we have a sense of the familiar like God is an old friend. It's hard to think of an old friend as not personal. The fact of knowing that words are only metaphors and that all we can say of God will always be analogical (all religious language is analogy and all language itself has a metaphorical aspect) this means that we are trapped in the words and we never really get at the thing itself unmediated except in so far as we have a transcendent experience that we can't put into words. For this reason I don't get upset with people like Dave who offer "altneratives' of impersonal nature of thinknig of God. They are right too because thir altenatives are also metahors and analogies. they are not wrong. All analogies have like and not-like. God is like a father in many ways, and also not like a father in many ways.

People of the future could think of God in radically different ways, even Christan. We do not think of god at all the same as did our great great grand parents, much less the first Chrsitians. That doesn't matter because no one will ever get it right. About the only universally true things we can pin down about God is that he is love, he is something we can't pin down, he blows away our neat little categories, he's necessary, eternal and infinite, and he deals in redemption. Anything else is metaphor. I know the loving father is a metaphor but I approach it as a reality becuase aspects of it are reality. It's a tight rope act.


Even Dave in his expose of belief is impossing his own limition of thinking in terms of gender and mind. We don't have a concept for mind that is not male or female, but God is not a human mind. We have no idea what God would be like up close and personal but the only thing we can do is relate it to what we know and Dave is doing that even in his desire to debunk it. Being a mind doesn't make God a jumped up man. We have no cocnept of mind that is not jumped up humanity of one gender or the other. God blows away our neat little categories.

We must live in the metaphor and treat the metaphor as reality without internalizing it.