Being Does So have to be, Answering Blowfly

I recently put up a new version of my major God argument, cosmological necessity, on CARM. I changed the basic trust and made it more in line with Tillich on being itself and less about cosmology. I call it "being has to be." Atheists just went wild They were totally incensed by the idea of the audacity to actually argue for God. I don't understand this because they spend all their time going "show me some evidence, there's not one thing to prove God exists, show me something." So I did and they went wild wiht angrily "how dare you try to prove God exists?" One of them actually said belief in God is a dangerous idea that must be silenced adn trying to prove God exists is usurping scinece and reality. You can see my reports on their comments on Atheist Watch: "Orwellian Atheism."


After the smoke cleared, Blowfly puts up a piece trying to disprove the argument by ridicule and misrepresentation. Here's what he says:




blowfly

It's because Being is just... wait a minute, let's get rid of that capitalization, it's misleading. "being". That's better.

It's capitalized to distinguish the eternal necessary aspect (which proved in the nature of the argument, see link above) from the particular examples of "the beings," the contingent temporal aspects of being that come and go all the time.

Now, "being" is just an abstract concept. It's not something profound ontological foundation which forms the ultimate fabric of reality demanding some philosophy account. It's just an abstract concept, like "love", or "The number 12", or "pinkness". Abstractions exist in our heads, not in some Platonic realm, or in some strange manner weaving their way through each of their instantiations.

this concept that being is an abstraction is wrong and is completely repudiated by Tillich. There's a long passage in Systematic Theology II (10-11) where he shows that this is merely a modernization of a nominalist position (for Tillich "nominalist" is correlated with to modern reductionism or scientism).

When a doctrine of God is initiated by defining God as being itself, the philosophical concept of being is introduced into systematic theology. This was so in the earliest period of Christian theology and has been so in the whole history of Christian thought. It appears in the present system [meaning in his systematic theology] in three places, in the doctrine of God where God is called being as being or the ground and the power of being; in the doctrine of man…and in the doctrine of Christ where he is called manifestation of New Being…In spite of the fact that classical theology has always used the concept of “being” the term has been criticized from the standpoint of nominalistic philosophy and that of personalistic theology. Considering the prominent role which the concept plays in the system it is necessary to reply to the criticisms and at the same time to clarify the way in which the term is used in its different applications.

The criticism of the nominalists and their positivistic decedents to the present day is based upon the assumption that the concept of being represents the highest possible abstraction. It is understood as the gneus to which all other genera are subordinated with respect to universality and with respect to the degree of abstraction. IF this were the way in which the concept of being is reached, nominalism could interpret it as it interprets all universals, namely, as communicative notions which point to particulars but have no reality of their own. Only the completely particular, the thing here and now, has reality. Universals are means of communication without any power of being. Being, as such, therefore, does not designate anything real. God, if he exists, exists as a particular and could be called the most individual of all beings.

The answer to this argument is that the concept of being does not have the character that nominalism attributed to it. It is not the highest abstraction, although it demands the ability of radical abstraction. It is the expression of the experience of being over against non-being. Therefore, it can be described as the power of being which resists non being. For this reason the medieval philosophers called being the basic transcendetntale, beyond the universal and the particular. In this sense was understood alike by such people as Parmenides in Greece and Shankara in India. In this sense its significance has been rediscovered by contemporary existentialists such as Heidegger and Marcle. The idea of being lies beyond the conflict of nominalism and realism. The same word, the emptiest of all concepts when taken as an abstraction, becomes the most meaningful of all concepts when it is understood as the power of being in everything that has being.

The concept is old and has been floating around philosophy for centuries it's even older than Christianity itself.


Blowfly again:

And so "being" doesn't need to have any sort of existence beyond a simple abstract concept in our heads. And so I reject these "ground of being" arguments.

Being can't be an abstraction if byt hat we mean only an summation in the mind of all such things which a certain characteristic. Being has to be a valid concrete force that actually gives rise to temporal contingency, since the argument proves that things must always been, nothingness as a putative state is impossible, thus something eternal must always exist. That eternal aspect is what we call "being itself" or "primordial being." It's a way to distinguish not only the eternal aspect of being but the fact that we are not talking about a localized being such a big man in the sky. We are talking about an aspect of reality, the aspect that is always underlying all temporal contingent appearances of existence.

Atheist poster Magnus understands this and actually came to the aid of the argument at least to that aspect of the argument:

Magnus:

No, this is 100% wrong. Being is all that exists. To put it another way, being *is* existence. That fact there is something means that it is being. I don't know where you got the idea that being, or existence, was an abstract concept.

Quote:
Originally Posted by blowfly View Post

But you're still reifying "Being". I don't see why that's necessary. Existence is a property we ascribe to things, not the foundation for their existence.

HRG called it reification as one of his usual usages of a term to give the illusion that he has an idea. What's really going on there is merely his knee jerk reaction to an idea that challenges his nominalistic tendencies.

this other guys jumps in:

Originally Posted by Spacemonkeyadb View Post

Well, you can define 'being' as simply the totality of existence if you like. But to then go on to say that God is being itself (as Metacrock likes to do) would reduce theism to the atheistic kind of pantheism. You don't get to say that the fact there is something means that it is 'being', unless you want to say that something is everything.

Magnus

No one would say something is everything. They would say that all things are part of being, which is of course correct. That doesn't mean that things are not distinct in other ways. Something doesn't need to be everything to be part of being.

The bottom line is Tillch's statement that being has depth. If you know being has depth you can't an atheist. So the atheist have to deny that being has depth and since they don't understand what that means all they do is keep insisting that being can't be (whatever they think that means) and that existence is merely the fact of not being nothing. At this point they are not even coherent. Without understanding what it means to way being has depth there's no way you can deny that it does.

Tillich's statement:
(the shaking of the Foundations)

The name of infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of our being is God. That depth is what the word God means. And if that word has not much meaning for you, translate it, and speak of the depths of your life, of the source of your being, of your ultimate concern, of what you take seriously without any reservation. Perhaps, in order to do so, you must forget everything traditional that you have learned about God, perhaps even that word itself. For if you know that God means depth, you know much about Him. You cannot then call yourself an atheist or unbeliever. For you cannot think or say: Life has no depth! Life itself is shallow. Being itself is surface only. If you could say this in complete seriousness, you would be an atheist; but otherwise you are not.

what it means to say being has depth

all of these arguments are documented by reference to Tillichs ST v II 10-11 or 163-164 except also reference to John MacQuarrie, Principles of Christian Theology, op cit (find where he says being and the beings)

Tillich tells us that the notion of God as being itself is old; it can be taken back to the pre-Socratics. It has been used throughout the history of the church. The two major criticisms are the idea that it is nothing but an empty abstraction and that is means an impersonal view of God. As will be seen both criticisms are false. The criticism that it is an empty abstraction is basically a reductionist criticism, going all the way back to the nominalists. In its modern incarnation it is a reductionist criticism. In refuting this argument Tillich implicitly denies that his concept of God is anything like an atheistic concept. He denies that his view is that the fact of existing things is God, or God is nothing more than the sheer fact of existence. The alternative to mere abstraction that Tillich offers is the “power of being.” By that he means being as an active force that resist nothingness. He almost makes it sound like nothingness is an active force, or like gravity, pull us to the center of mass, or like water draining out of a sink. We are being sucked down the drain to the sewer of nothingness except the drain stopper of being prevents this. The transcendental transcends both universal and particular according to Tillich. In Platonic analogy that would give being itself the role of “the one” as the form of the forms. That’s probably somehow analogous to the role the idea played in Tillich’s understanding. What he says about the same word can be either the emptiest or the most meaningful of terms depending upon one’s assumptions, is actually a good fleshing out of what he means by being having depth. Not only is he saying that things are not as they seem on the surface, but one way in which they are not the same is that there’s a power to being that resists nothingness. Being is “on,” by that I mean it’s a positive force; it is the most basic thing aside from nothingness.

The quotation given above continues:

No philosophy can suppress the notion of being in this latter sense. It be hidden under presuppositions and reductive formulas, but it nevertheless underlies the basic concepts of philosophizing. For “being” remains the content, the mystery and the eternal aporia of thinking. No theology can suppress the notion of being as the power of being. One cannot separate them. In the moment in which one says that God is or that he has being, the question arises as to how his relation to being is understood. The only possible answer seems to be that God is being itself, the sense of the power of being, or of the power to conquer non being.

At this point the terminology gets sloppy and hazy. Is God the power of being? Is being itself the power of being? Is being the power of being? If being is the “power of being.” This is a redundant phrase. What does “being is the power of being” tell us about what being is? Of course we can always sort it out in our own way and hope we are on the same page with Tillich. God is the power of being, but that would mean that God is also something other than being which furnishes being its power. Unless we want to say that Being is power. What is being? Power. What is power, being? What in the heck are we saying? The answer is that Tillich says himself this phase “God is being itself” is a metaphorical way of speaking. It’s a symbol, it’s not meant to be a literal and precise formation tracing the essence of the divine. We might also note that John MacQuarrie makes a distinction between Being and “the beings.” Contingent being are “the beings” and they cohere in reality because they participate in Being as creatures of the Being itself. Being is the power to resist nothingness, the power to be. Thus we can say God is the basis upon which all that is coheres and has its being. God is the basis upon which “the beings” (all existing things) have their being. The power of being is its nature to generate becoming. Just as existentialism presupposes an essential to play off of, so becoming presupposes state of Being to develop from. Yet, these statements must be taken as metaphors, as Tillich himself says. We cannot understand these terms as scientific style terms which accurately tell us the physical make up and dimensions of a given object. These are not ways to promote a scientific understanding of God, or could hey be nor should they be.

That being itself indicates the power of being is part is metaphorical, at the same time it is part of the concept of the depth being. Being is not merely the fact of existence but it also contains the basis upon which all being is. That would correlate to God as creator. In MacQuarrie’s terms, “being let’s be.” This may imply a more passive role than Tillich had in mind. He views God’s creative role from the standpoint of a check on nothingness, but what both are really talking about is an active force of creative power that brings more being out of being itself. Being let’s be is such a passive way to register the idea of “resisting” nothingness, but at the same time both are means avoiding the direct statement, “God is the creator of all that is.” Nevertheless that’s obviously what’s they are saying, or trying not to say. Obviously, then Being is necessary and “the beings” (in McQuarrie speak) are contingencies. Being itself is necessary being, the being are contingent being. This is another aspect of the depth of being. It’s not just so simple that all we need to do is to rattle off a list of concrete things we can observe in the world. There are two level, necessity and contingency, or two modes of being. Within each role there are different roles. On the level of necessity being is eternal, on the level of contingency being is temporal. Tillich makes much of this distinction. The difference in the two and the sense of the numinous it evokes are very important for Tillich and will figure prominently in the arguments that can be made in terms of reasons to believe.

The reason Tillich take such a backwards way of expressing God creative force is to emphasize the distinction between being and nothingness. This is the primary first and original distinction in reality, the bottom line so to speak between something and nothing. The first distinction in existence is that between being and nothingness. The power of being to resist nothingness (God’s creative force) is the first basis upon which anything is at all. That means we can look at this creative force as the nature of being the basic bottom line of what it means to be and what being is. Thus if we choose for some reason to call this force “God” if we want to use that term, which Tillich says in the quotation above is the meaning of that term, we can say that God is “being itself.” God is this basic force that is the first dentition in all of reality. It is both first temporally (it would be the basis of time) it would be “fist” ontologically. Tillch is thinking in a way that modern scenically ensorcelled people are not really able to think, and have never thought in. McQuarrie puts it into a passive sense “let’s being,” for a different reason. He warns of Heidegger’s tendency to “stretch language” or the awareness of Heidegger (and himself) that to speak of being at an ontological level is a stretch beyond the confines of fact based conceptualism. For him being role as the fomentation of more being, or “the beings” is expressed in a passive sense to remove the emphasis upon the activity of a creative agent.

Another aspect of the depth of being is the diversity of being. Tillich develops many themes of meaning, diversity, and historicity in laying out the Gospel framework and translating it into his phenomenological take on the diversity of being. Human being, fallen nature, sin, redemption, new being in Christ, these are standard Christian themes but a good deal of his Systematic Theology is devoted to exploring them from the perspective of their relationship to being. What he’s doing there is demonstrating the depth of being ontologically and in terms of human experience. Part II of Systematic Theology vol I is about “Being and God.” Here he deals with topics of “The Question of Being: Man, Self and World.” “God is the answer to the question implied in Being” he says. He first deals with reason and revelation. Then he moves into the question of being and its meaning. He says that in coming to term with reason and its take on existential conflicts, ond one is forced into asking the most essential question of all, why is there something rather than nothing at all? But I have given this in Heidegger’s terms. Tillich puts it a big differently “why is there something, why not nothing?” He points out that to ask “why is there not nothing?” is to attribute a kind of being to nothingness. Thus as he puts it “one cannot go behind being.” What he’s saying is, like trying to imagine one’s own non existence, it can’t be done. We cannot get under being itself, its’ the furthest we can go back in our understanding, and it eludes our understanding. Thought is based upon being and it can’t go beyond its base. One can imagine the negotiation of things, however, and it can “describe the nature and structure and structure of everything that is the power of resisting non being.” Ontological questions, he points out, are not tautologies because of this ability to mentally play with being and non being. We are not merely saying “being is being” when we try to define what it is, because there’s a possibility of negating any particular form of being. The possibility of universality and less than universal aspect of forms of being make ontology possible. There are concepts which are less universal than being but more universal than any concept about being, thus these are “categories” of thought.

These categories form the basis of theological significance. These are central concepts that make theology “go,” so to speak (not Tillich’s phrase). These are ontological concepts, ontology is not theology. One can be an atheist and totally secular and do ontology as part of philosophy, and such a thinker would have to deal with these concepts. But in like manner all theologians must deal with them as well. While they are not theology per se they are essential to theology. The concepts are: (1) the structure implicitly in the basic ontological question (why is there something rather than nothing?); (2) the elements which constitute ontological structure; (3) characteristics of being which are the conditions of existence; (4) categories of being and knowing. The structure (1) is that the question presupposes an asking subject, and an object being asked about. This is the subject/object structure that is presupposed and that in turn assumes the structure of world and self; this as the basic articulation of being. That the self has a world to which it belongs and from which it will deduce the nature of its being precedes all other structures and will be the basic analysis which precedes all other analysis. The elements of the ontological structure he groups into three sets of pairs: individuality and universality, dynamics and form, and freedom and density. These are polarities and the first expresses self referential nature of being.

The ontological concepts pertaining to number (3) (characteristics of being) “expresses the power of being to exist,” in Tillich’s own words, “and the difference between essential and existential being.”

Nature of faith confussing in Moderity

A lot of people are confused about the nature o faith. Some think these are contradictions. A big soruce of misconception s a popular definition of faith as "believing thing without reasons." Take a comment, one I find typical, from a recent message board encounter:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Atheist_Devil View Post (carm aug 31 2007
I completely disagree with you. As Dan Barker calls it, faith is the "Great Escape".

So here we see the atheist take on faith still casting it in pejorative terms. The atheists set up their straw man definition of faith in which it is defined as "believing things without a reason. OF this is a totally inadequate definition.

Where do we turn for an understanding of faith? The best place would be the Westminster's Dictionary of Christian Theology, which is the official defining source of theological concepts. Here we see the simplistic bromide "faith is believing things without reasons" just wont do.

Westminster defines faith in a complex way, the article is very long and the definition is long.

The only atual Biblical definition of faith (Heb 11) does not encapsulate all that the Bible says on the subject, but indicates its main features 'the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.'

some translations say "evidence of things not seen. Faith is not a wild abandonment of logic, it is like faithfulness, it is a commitment to an understanding or a realization one takes as truth, and that realization can be gleaned from many sources including revelation, logic, personal experience. All of these things can be good reasons.

Westminster demonstrates the commitment aspect of faith in the sense of faithfulness which is part of the definition it gives for faith.

It is a confident obedient trust in the reality, in the power and love of God known through his acts, and an awaiting of their future consummation. The bible contains a variety of emphasis within this overall view. The noun 'faith' is comparatively rare in the OT where, (eg Hab 2.5) It may indicate faithfulness or loyalty to God rather than a passive reliance. But dependence upon God as distinct from human powers was imortant for Isaiah (7.9, 30.1-5). While the OT so often sees faith concertized as obedient action (Duet 6.1) the note of trust also resounds especially in the psalms.

Not to lose the complexity in a simplistic short hand, but we can encapsulate the OT view of faith as "trust, faithfulness, obedience." We see that is not passage acceptance of truth claims without reasons. The definition says the trust is based upon "The power of God" and that is a reason, it may one atheists don't like but it is a darn good one. If one has experienced the power of God in one's life one need no better reason.

In the Synoptic Gospels those who respond to Jesus' proclamation of the kingdom and respond to his salvific powers, are commended for their faith (Mark 2.5, 5.3) Unbelief is a hardness of heart a refusal to accept the immediacy of God's saving power (Mark 6.1).

Atheists have a strong tendency to deny that belief is a choice. They seem to think that it is some conclusion one is compelled to by logic, or maybe by stupidity; although in the context of religious belief they say that faith is antithetical to reason. They are missing the boat, in this definition we see that Jesus expected us to make a commitment, that is the essence of faith (from the last preceding quote). The basic skeptical position is hardness of heart, refusal to accept immediacy of God's saving power.

The dictionary lists tensions with faith. Tension is a favorite concept among theologians. It means the pull exerted between two seemingly contradictory ideas which are both true and yet conflict in some way. Tension is not a real contradiction but often results form either misunderstanding wrong emphasis. Tensions with faith are:

The first on the list is faith vs works, which I will not go into here. The second is faith verses reason. That's the atheists cease upon as a contradiction but they are driven by the wrong understand ing of faith. The Catholics have always recognized that "reason was capable of demonstrating the existence of God." (Ibid) while Protestants tended to down play reason as the product of the fallen human mind. The source of the modern misunderstanding of faith is the result of historical accident. It comes from the skeptical crisis in early modern Europe. This is specifically the 1600s, after the religious wars, when the Protestants and Catholics squared off against each other to decide which was the true way, faith or reason. We need to take note of a couple important thing here:

(1) the Catholics did not say "boo faith we like reason." They said faith and reason are not enemies. Faith and reason work together.

(2) the Prots did not say "reason is no good don't ever reason" they said human understanding can't equal the truth of God, faith is required for salvation so faith is over reason.

(3) The Prots did something else interesting: they turned to empirical proof rather than logic as the exposition of reason. The Catholics like logic because they Aquinas and the logic of their God arguments. the Prots had God arguments too but they preferred their own empirical God arguments such as the design argument.

The Protestants also used a form of Scholasiticm that was more rigorous than the Catholics version (and purposely so, to counter the Catholic intellectual heritage) but this went by the way side when they place all their epistemic eggs in the science basket. As a result seventeenth century Protestantism was instrumental in the rise of modern science. On the Catholic side Descartes made his name writing philosophy which was in direct response to the Church's request that the enter the battle on their side and help defeat the intellectual claims of the protestants. that is what produced the meditations. That whole period is known as "the skeptical crsis of early modern Europe." It was a major problem and created vast social upheaval and led to the rise of modern science as a means of checking reality. A major part of the struggle was over which to accept, tradition and authority or empirical proof. Tradition and authority were the answer of the faith camp. One might be tempted to think that this was the answer of the faith only camp but not so. It was the reason camp (Catholics) who construed tradition and authority extensions of reason. It was the faith only camp (Protestants) who developed empirical experimental methods as an extension of faith. Although a Catholic invented range and domane (Descartes) and a Catholic invented statistical probability. All of these things came out of this era and had some tangential connection to the skeptical crisis.





My dialog partner continues:

Quote:
When faith is invoked, you've admitted you've lost the rational argument and have retreated into the land of conjecture, speculation and maybe. Believers are not on the same intellectual plane.

This is because he misconstrues faith as "being stupid and beilef without reason." Kierkegaard called faith "irrational" but he did not mean by that blind stupidity crashing around and accepting stupid things. He meant an existential encounter, first hand face to face experience of truth. For him logic was hypothetical, only on the pages of books. He wanted engagement with God!

Faith is a free-for-all. If one faith claim is accepted, any other faith claim can be "true" as well. All it takes is "belief". How egalitarian! Everything is as good as everything else with no standard used to make these world views held to account. Ah, but there is a standard, isn't there. It's called results.

Of course the claim that I "admitted this" is nonsense, I don't' know what I said that made him assume this. But in anyway, he does the point, how can choose between conflicting tenets of faith? I really don't think this is a very tough one, although the answer may allude many people. The answer is bipolar:

two tensions

(1) On the one hand, there is the personal existential aspect of faith.

This is what people are seeing when they give that most annoying of answers: "it's truth for you." This is the kind of relativism that makes fundies cringe. But I have to admit I do my cringing too when I hear it, even though I think I have a handle on it.

This is not saying that truth very from one person to another, although some who use that phrase, I can't help but feel really think that. It means that since we don't understand truth exhaustively the existential commitment is what I recognize immediately as truth, even though ti's really just similitude. This is an aspect of my understanding that is standing in for truth since our understanding of truth is limited. It's personal commitment, that is it my on self defining moment that clarifies for me what I'm willing to faithful to as a sense of ideal and idea.

It's a way of saying "I am willing to keep my commitments, as long as I understand truth this way I will treat this as truth." This is the nature of the case an needs must be, because your understanding of God is pathetic. We can't possibly stack up to the reality of God, it's too overwhelming. Everything we know of God has to be metaphor because we just handle the way God really is. It's beyond words and thus beyond anything we know.

(2) the use of logic.


On the other hand, at the other end of the pole is the use of logic to understand. We can sort our competing truth claims by the use of logic. The atheist bromide that faith is anti ethical to logic is simply wrong. Logic is the standard we can use to sort out competing truth claims, even if they are the result of this other pole of personal existential commitment to perceived truth. How can these two co-exist without contradicting? Logic is also a personal commitment. It is an objective truth finding mechanism but we are not objective creatures. We cannot be objective. Objective truth exists "out there" but we just can't understand it exhaustively. For this reason we must hold our logical conclusions as personal existential commitments so we don't' impose them harshly upon others, but we can live by them ourselves.



Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology
. ed., Alan Richardson and John Bowden, Great Briton:Westminster Press, 1983.207

Kid knownothing (Hindenberg) strikes again

Kid Knownothing was the guy who launched bitter unnecessary personal attacks on me just because he found something on my blog he didn't agree with. I called him "Hindenberg" (in "answering attack on my experience argument")because he was a bag of hot air (hydrogen) that exploded all over everything and bombed. I saw a blog called "Sophie's Ladder" which I do link to, and "Sophie" was agreeing with me on the issue. That was actually a better rendition than I could give, it is explained clearly and concisely.

In discussions of whether brain activity indeed causes mystical experience or whether it simply runs parallel with it, one controversial issue has been the definition of mystical experience and how one confirms it. On the one hand, Metacrock argues that 1) researchers are not confirming in their work that their subjects are indeed having religious experiences – mystical experiences should be defined by use of the M-scale and long-term effect on the subject; and 2) correlation of brain activity and experience does not prove cause. On the other hand, Kidnonothing contends that 1) the M-scale is useless because it cannot tell us about neurological function; and 2) that predictability and repeatability indicate cause. My own view is that mystical experience is confirmed only by the experiencer andfor that and other reasons, brain activity as cause of mystical experiences cannot be demonstrated.

First of all, Kidnonothing seems to miss J.L. Hinman’s (Metacrock) point when he discards the use of the M-scale. What is at issue here is whether brain / chemical activity produces religious experience (whether what we claim to be spiritual is actually physical). If one is to say that X causes Y, then one must confirm that Y has indeed occurred. Hinman argues that Y (religious experience) has NOT been confirmed in the studies he is critiquing – and the only way this can be done is through use of the M-scale and observation of long-term effects. Metacrock is asserting that to be true scientific work, researchers must scientifically document the occurrence of the mystical experience, not just take the subject’s word for it.

I find from that blog that good old Hindenberg is at it again. He's answered my arguments (so he thinks). So let's look at his come back.


The No-Nothing's Space:

Know-nothing:

In a response to my initial contentions with respect to Hood's Mysticism Scale and Joe Hinman's reliance on it, Jeff at Sophie's Ladder has taken the time to provide something of a substantial response. Here is the first part of my reply, beginning with two correction.

This is a childish slight because as good as that synopsis is, it doesn't say anything I didn't say myself in my own arguments against him. But be that as it may:


Know nothing:

First, I don't think that the m-scale is useless because it has nothing to do with neurology or cannot identify what's happening in the brain. I think that its conclusions are irrelevant to neurological research. And any criticism of such research based on a reliance on the m-scale is misguided. The m-scale has provided us with a means of giving words to what Hood, Stace and other religious psychologists call an ineffable experience. And it provides empirical data for quantitative studies on self-representation and identification (for example).

Meta: that merely confuses the issue to say that criticism of the research based upon the M scale is misguided. Of course the real criticism is based upon the Non use of the M scale! It's not the research in principle I have a problem with, it's the fact that they don't use a valid means of understanding when they produce a religious experience. He just wasn't to assume that any old idea about God qualifies as mystical experience. that is not the case and without the M scale they really have no way to prove that they produced a mystical experience. It's odd but this guy just doesn't seem to get that.


Know-nothing:

While Stace maintained that the proximate cause of the experience is irrelevant (and I agree to some extent as does Hood), we should recognize the particularly constrained aspects of the experience that researchers are trying to reveal. For example, items 3, 6, 8, 12 etc. on the scale (the items Hood identifies as "Introvertive Mysticism") deal with the a-spaciotemporality and ineffability of the "mystical experience". Item 12 on the scale says: I have had an experience in which I realized the oneness of myself with all things.

This particular sensation isn't unique to people having mystical experiences as defined by the m-scale. Astronauts have described the same sensation while leaving the Earth's atmosphere and entering space "proper". Jill Bolte Taylor described the same sensation while suffering from a stroke. Now, this is not a criticism in and of itself. But the fact that this introverted mysticism occurs outside of the "mystical experience" as described by the m-scale suggests that further study is required that goes beyond the m-scale. In fact, it also suggests that one doesn't need the m-scale to validate any particular component of its whole. And it is more than plausible that human neurology: demarcating and processing stimuli or being systematically reoriented triggers this sensation.

Meta: Here he is pulling a bait and switch. He argues that certain sensations cover on the M Scale can be found outside mystical experience then having set up the idea that we don't need the M scale because we can experience these things apart from it, then he changes over to the idea that we need further study on those qualities. Now he's ready the lower the boom and try to suggest that we don't need the M scale at all. But that doesn't follow because he hasn't proved that those are the same experiences, nor has he demonstrated that they can separated from the religious experience framework and have the same meaning apart from the theories. It's meaningless anyway since they are not being produced in connection with other things but the nature of mystical experience itself is at issue. This the same mistake the Brog study on serotonin makes. They think they can duplicate mystical experiences by using personality tests and just asserting there are similarities. But this just totally unscientific.

What if they did field trials on the new H1N1 vaccine but did not test for the type of flue the subjects had. What if they just counted all flue as the same on grounds that many of the symptoms of H1N1 are found with other kinds of flues? I wonder if Kid Know Nothing would be willing to try that vaccine on and to trust it as scientific?



Kid know nothing

Second, and this will be short, I did not assert that predictability inferred or infers cause. In fact, I made sure to highlight that certain neurological activity predictably correlate with an introvertive mysticism. And this specific sensation can be replicated by instigating this neural activity.

Meta: Where does he demonstrate this with any sort of evidence? He asserts it but he does not prove it. How does know it if he's not going by the M scale in the first place? What was the control used to determine that it was mystical experience when began comparing the symptoms?


Kid Know Nothing:

Now to my first contention: Hood has defined “mysticism” as “the enigmatic” in his unity thesis, citing the etymological development of the word “mysticism”, stemming from the Greek verb: to close to the modern incarnation of “mysterious” or “the enigmatic”. It's important to recognize that he's not referring to something “out there” or “in us” that in and of itself has some divine or special quality—outside of an introverted and extroverted universality (common core).

He's using Stace's writings to construct the categories. His construction of the three part aspect of the test is much more complex than Know Nothing would lead us to believe. But the basis for all of it is the comparison with his former study and the works of Stace. The validity of Stace as proven by the studies is what guarantees the vitrifaction of the categories.


Know Nothing:

So, I don't think a mystical experience is mystical in the sense that people like Joe use the word. And that's why I assert that there really is no way to tell if the experience is mystical to begin with.

Meta: What a stupid argument! That's just sheer sophistry. All he's saying is the terms do not line up with the etiology of the words used to depict them so therefore they are exactly accurate. So what? That has absolutely nothing to do with the issues. He could identify them by numbers if he wished. So what? People have experience 246.209 tend to have long term positive effects such as life transformation experiences, more often than those who don't! Who care's the label says? That has nothing to do with how they line up the study. That's like saying "well in double blinds you are not really blinded you can see so therefore not really double blind."

Kid Know Nothing:

I believe that there is a kind of “pseudoconflation” occurring in which the first two factors: the introvertive and extrovertive aspects) of the experience, which are a part of Stace's common core thesis, and the interpretative factor are being mashed together.

Mashed together?

The items on the scale that deal with the interpretative elements of the experience are themselves inducted into subjective language. Hood acknowledges that the interpretative factor is not intersubjective and doesn't carry over across cultures. And common sense would tell us this is true as well. To the Jew he uses “G-d”, to the Wiccan “nature”, and explicitly refers to the religious, affective and noetic subfactors (or contextualized results of the experience) as comprising the third factor in the three-factor m-scale analysis. But the third factor isn't a part of the common core, which is what the scale does validate. So the purpose of the scale is not to show that a religious experience has occurred, as Jeff writes and Joe assumes.

But the point to that that's he's over looking is that when they do take the names out the experiences are still the same. Of course they have to use the traditions in which the people live or they wont have any results. How would a Christian respond to question about "did you sense the presence of Buddha?" What would that mean? Or if you asked "did you sense the presence of X" they would say "what the heck is X?" You have to have a comparison. Once that's established then you can compare the results. The comparison shows they are all having the same kind of experiences. But that would be meaningless without first establishing what they are talking about as far s the actual people experiencing understand it.

It is to validate Stace's common core thesis and provide empirical data for and verification of Hood's unity thesis: the Jamesian view that there is little diversity among mysticisms if one focuses on experience rather than its interpretation (1). So, simply put, the mysticism scaleverifies the common core. That is, “the enigmatic” experience is experienced everywhere with little variation. But it does not validate the third factor, whether the experience is religious, noetic or affective.

He's totally missing the point again. You can't make a comparison of noetic qualities if people don't know what you are asking. The third factor validates it, not vice versa.

So, the m-scale provides us with a set of worded characteristics for the ineffable experience that Hood and Stace call mystic. Neurologists can study these characteristics freely without having to study the totality of the experience and being bogged down by whether they're truly replicating the whole experience or not. So it doesn't matter if they can't be sure if they're replicating the experience in its whole. They're trying to mimic various components of the experience and find their cause (being what the second part will deal with).

He still doesn't understand what tit's for. he thinks the point is to understand the qualities of the experience better. Its' not. Its' to determine if the experience is validly mystical, or in other words does it stack up the categories that Stace found when he studied the writings of all the major mystics. In validating Stace in previous work Hood created a situation where further validation of the experience itself is possibly by building a typology from the confirmation of the experiences in the lives of people. In other words it's an empirically tested index of what people experience in that sort of thing called "mystical." It doesn't compete with brain chemistry or studies thereof, it's a profile, it's a stack of characteristics of these sorts of people. Researchers like Borg are merely asserting that any reference to God or transcendence or spirituality is as good as any other and that this is mystical experience. But that misses the boat because there is this complex set characteristics which people have who fit the profile of a mystic have experienced. The M scale tests that, the personality study doesn't.

People who have those kinds of experiences (the argument that it's not "mystical" is so lame,but Maslow also called it "Peak" -- let's seem him argue that it's not "peak) these people are experiencing a range of things, many characteristics. To boil it down to one or two and say "well they have this and that and so does he so looked we produced in the lab because we got him to experience two things that mystics experience" is just not any kind of proof and is not any kind of scientific method.

what would it hurt to use the M Scale? If it's going to blow their study to use it maybe that means their study is no good?







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God Argument: Fire In the Equasions

1) Naturalists assume necessity of naturalistic cause and effect (from empirical observation).

Dictionary of Philosophy Anthony Flew, article on "Materialism" "...the belief that everything that exists is ethier matter or entirely dependent upon matter for its existence." Center For Theology and the Natural Sciences Contributed by: Dr. Christopher Southgate: God, Humanity and the Cosmos (T&T Clark, 1999) http://www.ctns.org/Information/information.htmlIs the Big Bang a Moment of Creation?(this source is already linked above) "...One of the fundamental assumptions of modern science is that every physical event can be sufficiently explained solely in terms of preceding physical causes.." Science and The Modern World, Alfred North Whitehead. NY: free Press, 1925, (1953) p.76

"We are content with superficial orderings form diverse arbitrary starting points. ... science which is employed in their development [modern thought] is based upon a philosophy which asserts that physical causation is supreme, and which disjoins the physical cause from the final end. It is not popular to dwell upon the absolute contradiction here involved."[Whitehead was an atheist]
http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gr/public/qg_qc.html Cambridge Relativity and Quantum Gravity. 1996, University of Cambridge The physical laws that govern the universe prescribe how an initial state evolves with time. In classical physics, if the initial state of a system is specified exactly then the subsequent motion will be completely predictable.



2) Therefore, if we agree with them, it is logical to assume naturalistic cause and effect as background condition to the emergence and/or production of the universe.

Dr. Sten Odenwald (Raytheon STX) for the NASA IMAGE/POETRY Education and Public Outreach program

Q:Which came first, matter or physical laws?

"We do not know, but matter is derivative from energy, and energy is derivative from 'field' so in some sense, the physical laws that determine the quantum dynamics of fields must have been primary, with matter as we know it coming much later."



3) Since physical laws would have to proceed matter/energy, they would have to reside in some organizing principle (such as a mind?) since they could not reside in the workings of universe that did not yet exist.

This leads to a Dilemma:


a) Either the laws of physics are general law like statements demanding a law giver (law implies a law giver)

b) Or they are mere tendencies which mark conventional frames of reference for our observations of the universe.


*If the former, than since all products of the natural world require a cause, what causes the laws of physics? It seems there must either be an infinite regress of causes for physical laws, or a single organizing principle capable of directing physical law; such as a mind?

*If the latter, than the skeptic loses the lock on scientific rationality and with it, the basis upon which to critique religious belief as �unscientific.� After all, just because we don�t notice regular tendencies toward supernatural effects does not mean that they are impossible, if physical laws are nothing but mere tendencies.

4)Major Physicists propose Unitive principle they call "God."

MetaList on Science and religion

Stephen Hawking's God

In his best-selling book "A Brief History of Time", physicist Stephen Hawking claimed that when physicists find the theory he and his colleagues are looking for - a so-called "theory of everything" - then they will have seen into "the mind of God". Hawking is by no means the only scientist who has associated God with the laws of physics. Nobel laureate Leon Lederman, for example, has made a link between God and a subatomic particle known as the Higgs boson. Lederman has suggested that when physicists find this particle in their accelerators it will be like looking into the face of God. But what kind of God are these physicists talking about? Theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg suggests that in fact this is not much of a God at all. Weinberg notes that traditionally the word "God" has meant "an interested personality". But that is not what Hawking and Lederman mean. Their "god", he says, is really just "an abstract principle of order and harmony", a set of mathematical equations. Weinberg questions then why they use the word "god" at all. He makes the rather profound point that "if language is to be of any use to us, then we ought to try and preserve the meaning of words, and 'god' historically has not meant the laws of nature." The question of just what is "God" has taxed theologians for thousands of years; what Weinberg reminds us is to be wary of glib definitions.

Ok These guys are not talking about the God of the Bible, but the fact that they do resort to organizing principle proves my basic point. They can't just leave the laws of physics unexplained, they have to resort to organizing principle that ties it all up in one neat package. But why assume that principle can't be the personal God of the Bible? The rest of this Website argues that it is. But the main point here is that it is very logical to assume an organizing principle such a mind which organizes and contains physical laws.But "which god" is dealt with else where. at the very least this argument gives us a Spinoza-like God.

5) Mind is best explanation for organizing principal.

This principal would not dwell in any location, since it must proceed the existence of all physical matter and objects. It cannot resides in any location, or in the actions of a energy and matter, since it must proceed them for them to come to be, or to exist. Mind is the only thing that explains:

a. non physical location--no topos

b. Organizing function; organizing information and structures. The major element of mind is organization and containment of information. Like a genetic structure has to reside in genes, where does an organizing principal for the universe reside? In a mind that creates the universe?

6) A mind that contains physical law can be said to be creator and thus God. Therefore,if we assume physical law there must be a "lawgiver," therefore, God exists QED


Corollary:Science cannot Explain Laws of Physics

A. Cause of Physical Laws Unknown

1)Physical Law Merely Assumed to Exist.


OFFICE OF DR. ROBERT C. KOONS Post-Agnostic Science:How Physics Is RevivingThe Argument From Design

Robert C. Koons

Associate Professor of Philosophy
University of Texas
Austin, TX 78712
koons@phil.utexas.edu


"Some have objected that the anthropic coincidences cannot be explained, since they involve the fundamental laws of nature. The laws of nature are used in explaining other things -- they themselves cannot be explained. They are rock-bottom, matters of physical necessity, immutable and uncaused. This objection is sometimes based on actual scientific practice -- scientists seek to discover the laws of nature and to use these laws in constructing explanations of phenomena. They do not try to explain the laws of nature themselves. There are several points to make in response to this."


2) Skeptics object, but Some scientits now Ask.

Paul Davies, Author of God and The New Physics, and The Mind of God, skeptic turned believer due to the new evidence on design. From First Things, Tempelton Award address:

"All the richness and diversity of matter and energy we observe today has emerged since the beginning in a long and complicated sequence of self- organizing physical processes. The laws of physics not only permit a universe to originate spontaneously, but they encourage it to organize and complexify itself to the point where conscious beings emerge who can look back on the great cosmic drama and reflect on what it all means."

"Now you may think I have written God entirely out of the picture. Who needs a God when the laws of physics can do such a splendid job? But we are bound to return to that burning question:
Where do the laws of physics come from?
And why those laws rather than some other set? Most especially: Why a set of laws that drives the searing, featureless gases coughed out of the big bang toward life and consciousness and intelligence and cultural activities such as religion, art, mathematics, and science?"

Koons, (Ibid.) "...It is no longer true that scientists never seek to explain the laws of nature. Much of recent cosmology and unified force theory has attempted to do that. ...even if scientists never did attempt to explain the fundamental laws, it would still be an open question whether they should do so. Finally, whether something can or should be explained is itself an empirical matter, to be decided on a case by case basis, and not on the basis of dogmatic, a priori pronouncements. The anthropic coincidences are themselves excellent evidence that the laws of nature can and should be explained. If the laws really were absolute rock bottom, inexplicable brute facts, then we would be faced with a set of inexplicable coincidences. If the only price we have to pay in order to explain these coincidences is to revise our beliefs about the rock-bottom status of physical laws, this is a small price to pay."



B. How do Physical Laws make a universe?

Stephen Barr

"The laws of physics are proposed by some, as brought out by Furgesson, as constituting a "final cause" in place of God. This view is actually suggestive of an inversion and can be turned around into an argument for the exist of God. Barr states "The more serious problem with this idea of laws of physics as necessary first casue is that it is based on an elementary confussion. At most the laws of physics could be said to be the 'formal cause' of the physical universe, whereas by first casue is meant efficient cause, the cause of its very existancde. Hawking himself asked percisely the right queitson when he wrote 'even if there is only one possible unified theory is it just a set of rules and equasions? What is it that breaths fire into the equassions and makes a universe for them to descirbe? The usual approach of science constutcing a methematical model cannot answer the question of why there should be a universe for the model to describe.' That is decisive--crushing...." (in First Things)