The Big Paleantologist in the Sky:The Dawkins Side of the Armstrong Quote

A couple of weeks ago I put up a quote by Karen Armstrong about the being itself thing. Some atheists mistakenly thought it was saying that religion is stupid and outdated when it really said he opposite, because they are so ignorant they have no concept of liberal theology. When they read some liberal theology they think it's atheism because they don't even know what liberal is. I bot so caught up on that side of the article I totally forgot the article was the result of a request by the editor of two different people about their views. The other commenting person was Dawkins. They two did not know what the other said. A quick rehash of Armstrong's view then we should look at what Dawkins said.

Armstrong said that religion was hurt by the literalizing of the metaphor of the guy in the sky. she said that ancient religion understood something modern evangelicals have forgotten, that God is being itself and the big guy in the sky is just a metaphor. She used Newton as an example of one literalizing the metaphor. Newton decided he science proved God and since that gave him a literal understanding of the existence of God he just literlized the metaphor to fit scinece thinking he didn't need it as a metaphor as long as he had his scientific proof. Then in the next generation La place (really about a hundred years latter) said "we have naturalistic cause and effect so we don't God anymore." Now we go over and look at what Dawkins says we find the only understands the literilzed metaphor.

the orginal Arrmonstrong Quote and my few comments are here:

My analysis of what the Armstrong Quote means here:



The Dawkins part of the article is subtitled "Dawkins argues that Evoluion Leaves God with nothing to do."

Dawkins

Before 1859 it would have seemed natural to agree with the Reverend William Paley, in "Natural Theology," that the creation of life was God's greatest work. Especially (vanity might add) human life. Today we'd amend the statement: Evolution is the universe's greatest work. Evolution is the creator of life, and life is arguably the most surprising and most beautiful production that the laws of physics have ever generated. Evolution, to quote a T-shirt sent me by an anonymous well-wisher, is the greatest show on earth, the only game in town.

Paley was another example Armstrong used to say that "here's a Christian who is literilzing his metaphors." So of Dawkins is taking the literized version as the real thing. He's treating evolution as a final case as though there need to be a reason for evolution to exist or any prior conditions that make it work or make it possible.

Indeed, evolution is probably the greatest show in the entire universe. Most scientists' hunch is that there are independently evolved life forms dotted around planetary islands throughout the universe—though sadly too thinly scattered to encounter one another. And if there is life elsewhere, it is something stronger than a hunch to say that it will turn out to be Darwinian life. The argument in favor of alien life's existing at all is weaker than the argument that—if it exists at all—it will be Darwinian life. But it is also possible that we really are alone in the universe, in which case Earth, with its greatest show, is the most remarkable planet in the universe.

Not likely that we are alone. If he's write about the natural of evolution but that doesn't put a damper on God. Only if you see God as big man in the sky and you think he has to make a decision about each and every little thing he's doing that this would be a problem.

What is so special about life? It never violates the laws of physics. Nothing does (if anything did, physicists would just have to formulate new laws—it's happened often enough in the history of science). But although life never violates the laws of physics, it pushes them into unexpected avenues that stagger the imagination. If we didn't know about life we wouldn't believe it was possible—except, of course, that there'd then be nobody around to do the disbelieving!

Here he talks as though there are prescriptive laws of physics. Of course if you make a God argument, "who prescribes the prescriptive laws" then atheists will say "don't you know anything? there are not actual 'laws' they are not prescriptive they are only descriptive. If that's the case then of course nothing can ever violate them because what ever happens is a prori what the laws the law says, since it doesn't actually actually do anything bu describe what happens. So why is he talking like there's some sort obeying to be done? My hung is that this is a sort of devotional langauge that atheists use. Since science is their God they they speak about it in different terms when praising it then they do when describing how it works, as Simone Weil said "the language of the nuptial chamber is not the language of the market place." Witness above:evolution is probably the greatest show in the entire universe.

I think what's happening here is that they are literelizing their own metaphor. When you call them on it (law demands a lawgiver) they do "O yea that's just a metaphor, forgot about that." But Just as a fundamentalist really does think of God as literally a man in the sky becuase he has no other model for thinking about it, Atheists really do in their heart of hearts believe that there are prescriptive laws of physics, that's why their devotional language is about prescriptive laws.

The laws of physics, before Darwinian evolution bursts out from their midst, can make rocks and sand, gas clouds and stars, whirlpools and waves, whirlpool-shaped galaxies and light that travels as waves while behaving like particles. It is an interesting, fascinating and, in many ways, deeply mysterious universe.

The laws of physics move in mysterious ways, their wonders to perform. Yea, they don't have any "devotional language," they are not worshiping scinece! come off it.

But now, enter life. Look, through the eyes of a physicist, at a bounding kangaroo, a swooping bat, a leaping dolphin, a soaring Coast Redwood. There never was a rock that bounded like a kangaroo, never a pebble that crawled like a beetle seeking a mate, never a sand grain that swam like a water flea. Not once do any of these creatures disobey one jot or tittle of the laws of physics. Far from violating the laws of thermodynamics (as is often ignorantly alleged) they are relentlessly driven by them. Far from violating the laws of motion, animals exploit them to their advantage as they walk, run, dodge and jink, leap and fly, pounce on prey or spring to safety.

Never once are the laws of physics violated, yet life emerges into uncharted territory. And how is the trick done? The answer is a process that, although variable in its wondrous detail, is sufficiently uniform to deserve one single name: Darwinian evolution, the nonrandom survival of randomly varying coded information. We know, as certainly as we know anything in science, that this is the process that has generated life on our own planet. And my bet, as I said, is that the same process is in operation wherever life may be found, anywhere in the universe.

Holy Tialhard de Chardin Batman. That's devotional enough to be found in Hymn to the Universe.

What if the greatest show on earth is not the greatest show in the universe? What if there are life forms on other planets that have evolved so far beyond our level of intelligence and creativity that we should regard them as gods, were we ever so fortunate (or unfortunate?) as to meet them? Would they indeed be gods? Wouldn't we be tempted to fall on our knees and worship them, as a medieval peasant might if suddenly confronted with such miracles as a Boeing 747, a mobile telephone or Google Earth? But, however god-like the aliens might seem, they would not be gods, and for one very important reason. They did not create the universe; it created them, just as it created us. Making the universe is the one thing no intelligence, however superhuman, could do, because an intelligence is complex—statistically improbable —and therefore had to emerge, by gradual degrees, from simpler beginnings: from a lifeless universe—the miracle-free zone that is physics.

This is a very revealing paragraph because it shows us two things: (1) He really does think of God as just a jumped up man, that's his basic concept and he can't understand or even does know that there is any other option or concept more sophisticated. He really clearly thinks that this is what exactly the notion deity is about. Not the Ground of being but a guy with a ray gun who could zap you and then beam up to the ship before you know it. The big alien in the sky with the Ray gun is no closer to being God than is a cave man with a club in the sky or a pond scum in the sky. The only thing such an image can ever be is a er zots metaphor litearlized and put over in place of the real concept of necessary eternal being which is not a man in the sky. (2) It opens a window into Dawkins own concept of devotional language and his notion of what he worships. I think this explains why atheists are bullies on message boards. What they worship is what they seek and it's their reason for doing scinece: power. I've often observed that the real hateful sort of atheist, the street hood who is filled with so much he's banned from board to board is just hung up on the idea of being powerless and taking it out upon a class of people who he assumes have a measure of social power, church people.

To midwife such emergence is the singular achievement of Darwinian evolution. It starts with primeval simplicity and fosters, by slow, explicable degrees, the emergence of complexity: seemingly limitless complexity—certainly up to our human level of complexity and very probably way beyond. There may be worlds on which superhuman life thrives, superhuman to a level that our imaginations cannot grasp. But superhuman does not mean supernatural. Darwinian evolution is the only process we know that is ultimately capable of generating anything as complicated as creative intelligences. Once it has done so, of course, those intelligences can create other complex things: works of art and music, advanced technology, computers, the Internet and who knows what in the future? Darwinian evolution may not be the only such generative process in the universe. There may be other "cranes" (Daniel Dennett's term, which he opposes to "skyhooks") that we have not yet discovered or imagined. But, however wonderful and however different from Darwinian evolution those putative cranes may be, they cannot be magic. They will share with Darwinian evolution the facility to raise up complexity, as an emergent property, out of simplicity, while never violating natural law.

So he deifies the agency or the tool through which God works, but can't understand that there's a deeper aspect to it than just the creativity of the agency itself. His concept of deity is clearly contingent and rooted in the magnifying of natural things, such as "big man in sky." Not just any man in the sky, but a big man.

Where does that leave God? The kindest thing to say is that it leaves him with nothing to do, and no achievements that might attract our praise, our worship or our fear. Evolution is God's redundancy notice, his pink slip. But we have to go further. A complex creative intelligence with nothing to do is not just redundant. A divine designer is all but ruled out by the consideration that he must at least as complex as the entities he was wheeled out to explain. God is not dead. He was never alive in the first place.

The reason it appears to leave God out is because all he's really saying is "I can't understand the idea of God in any more complex fashion than a big man in sky, but I have a bigger man in the sky." In other words, big white lab coat guy with test tube in sky beats big cave man in sky. In posing the question "what would have to do" he's positing the notion of God as a man who get's board, waits around, has to find things to do. Presumably God would be using evolution as a tool and doing all that stuff he talks about. But we don't need to say that because even that caters to a model of God as a mechanic with a tool. Now I am not saying that God is evolution, but let's think about using evolution itself as the metaphor for God, then to say "what would God be doing while things are evolving? That is a meaningless question, he would be evolving them!

But Dawkins knows just enough about modern theology be dangerous. He tries to preempt the argument:

Now, there is a certain class of sophisticated modern theologian who will say something like this: "Good heavens, of course we are not so naive or simplistic as to care whether God exists. Existence is such a 19th-century preoccupation! It doesn't matter whether God exists in a scientific sense. What matters is whether he exists for you or for me. If God is real for you, who cares whether science has made him redundant? Such arrogance! Such elitism."

That is a copy of a sort of existentially based take on God popular in the early 60s rooted in the works God is dead movement people such as Van Bearuean and Altizer. But doesn't apply to Tillich or his existential ontology (God as being itself).

Well, if that's what floats your canoe, you'll be paddling it up a very lonely creek. The mainstream belief of the world's peoples is very clear. They believe in God, and that means they believe he exists in objective reality, just as surely as the Rock of Gibraltar exists.

Here we see a tactic used by atheists on every message board where I have argued this. They always copy and imitate their Master's example and appeal to popularity because they think Christianity is just about following the herd. Notice how he equates a literalism of the guy in the sky with belief in God itself, "they believe in God" as though Tillich didn't believe in God. Because his only conception of God is the simplistic guy in the sky. Notice how he doesn't really address the issue of other views of God which are not based upon the Suzerain model. He goes for the most fluphy sounding wavy gravy existential bs he can find.

If sophisticated theologians or postmodern relativists think they are rescuing God from the redundancy scrap-heap by downplaying the importance of existence, they should think again. Tell the congregation of a church or mosque that existence is too vulgar an attribute to fasten onto their God, and they will brand you an atheist. They'll be right.

What he says here is important because it clues us in. He can only think of existence in literal biological terms. God has to be the big man in the sky to exist, and Dawkins big scientist in the sky is better because he's a more modern big man. Concepts of process theology and being itself and all that is just wasted on him.

Atheist show thier problems in Reading Comprehension

Both on carm and comments to this blog have illustrated the problem atheist have with understanding simple statements. Its' so clear what Armstong is saying one can always tell what atheist want to believe is being said becuase it varies so widely with what is said. They all start out saying "she does not say that big in the sky is not possible." they say "she doesn't say she believes anything" they want so badly to believe she's an atheist because they think she's offering more bolster for the little brain washing. I guess she must be an atheist favorite and they can convince themselves of anything. They think she is against religion because they interpret your statements against literalism in religion as meaning she's against all religion.

She is not brash enough to say "I believe this..." what she does say makes it absolutely clear that:

(1) She blames the belief in big man in sky for ruining the ability of modern religious thought to proceed in a sophistacted fashion and understand science.

(2) She makes it quite clear that she considers belief in big man in sky to be stupid literalism. >Literalism is always the stumpier option.


let's look at the quote:

Despite our scientific and technological brilliance, our understanding of God is often remarkably undeveloped—even primitive.

Up front we are told that religious thinking lags behind scientific thinking. But this is not because scinece is true and religion is false. that's probably what atheists want to see in it but it's not true as will become plain in a minute. I'm sure atheists read that to mean all religious thinking is stupid and primate and to as good as science. That is clearly not what she's saying. It's so obvious there's no way a thinking person could read it this way unless they were so longing to have her agree with the atheist prattle.

In the past, many of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers understood that what we call "God" is merely a symbol that points beyond itself to an indescribable transcendence, whose existence cannot be proved but is only intuited by means of spiritual exercises and a compassionate lifestyle that enable us to cultivate new capacities of mind and heart.

this is a description of mystical theology and the God beyond God concept, which will be made even more clear in a moment. Now I supposes probably most atheists read this phrase and says "that says religion is fiction it's made up stuff and not true. Anyone who thinks that's her meaning is an idiot and can't read. Contrast this with what she said before, which view will see as the "screw up" or the one "lagging behind" that she mentions in the fist section? Well it is not this one, so it obviously has to be the big sky the sky since these the only two that she talks about.

But by the end of the 17th century, instead of looking through the symbol to "the God beyond God," Christians were transforming it into hard fact.

This is the beginning of the section where he will lay the blame on the shoulders of literalistic scientific thinking theists and not on the God beyond God concept. In this phrase she says they were transforming the expansive mystical theology into a literalistic (she calls "hard fact") way of thinking. that this is negative become clear immediately.

Sir Isaac Newton had claimed that his cosmic system proved beyond doubt the existence of an intelligent, omniscient and omnipotent creator, who was obviously "very well skilled in Mechanicks and Geometry." Enthralled by the prospect of such cast-iron certainty, churchmen started to develop a scientifically-based theology that eventually made Newton's Mechanick and, later, William Paley's Intelligent Designer essential to Western Christianity.

Odds are she would not think Paley was great, so in linking his thinking to that of Newton she's obviously lambasting Newton for trying to make religion scientific. She's saying that the Newtonian are ones who made it literalistic. The scientific thinking is degrading the expansive God beyond God sophistication and bringing it down to a literalistic level of big man in the sky. Why does she talk about the Mechanic? What's the difference in big man on throne and big mechanic in the sky? the big mechanic in the sky is just a slightly more educated version of big man in sky. That it leads to Paley is a bad thing for her as I don't think she is a creationist or the argument form design type.

But the Great Mechanick was little more than an idol, the kind of human projection that theology, at its best, was supposed to avoid.

this proves it! She links the big mechanic in the sky with the big man in the sky and that's bad because it's just a projection and calling it an "idol" definitely condemns it. But I'm sure that atheists read that and thought she's saying all belief in god is like that. In reality it's perfectly obvious that she's distinguishing between big man in sky and God beyond God. Atheists see this as referring to all religion no doubt. Clearly she is distinguishing.

God had been essential to Newtonian physics but it was not long before other scientists were able to dispense with the God-hypothesis and, finally, Darwin showed that there could be no proof for God's existence. This would not have been a disaster had not Christians become so dependent upon their scientific religion that they had lost the older habits of thought and were left without other resource.

now they read this and to them it says "all region is stupid and all we need to science." they see her say others after Newton dispensed with God and they think she's saying "we can all dispense with God of any concept." But we already know that she sees the big scientist in the sky thing of Newton as a come down from the ancient notion of God beyond God and being itself. Since that's a come down the other alternative has to be better. So she is not saying all ideas about God can be dispensed with, that's obvious that she's not saying that.

Symbolism was essential to premodern religion, because it was only possible to speak about the ultimate reality—God, Tao, Brahman or Nirvana—analogically, since it lay beyond the reach of words. Jews and Christians both developed audaciously innovative and figurative methods of reading the Bible, and every statement of the Quran is called an ayah ("parable"). St Augustine (354-430), a major authority for both Catholics and Protestants, insisted that if a biblical text contradicted reputable science, it must be interpreted allegorically. This remained standard practice in the West until the 17th century, when in an effort to emulate the exact scientific method, Christians began to read scripture with a literalness that is without parallel in religious history.

How many atheists read this and think she's describing a process of making things up and she thinks that's stupid and she blames all religion for doing that? I would wager that almost atheists read it that way. Obviously, she's describing a good process, the choice that she thinks is better than the guy in the sky, the one that has been degraded. We already estabilshed that. she clearly says there's a come down and Newton brought us down form a better way to think about God and here shes' describing what that is.

Most cultures believed that there were two recognized ways of arriving at truth. The Greeks called them mythos and logos. Both were essential and neither was superior to the other; they were not in conflict but complementary, each with its own sphere of competence. Logos ("reason") was the pragmatic mode of thought that enabled us to function effectively in the world and had, therefore, to correspond accurately to external reality. But it could not assuage human grief or find ultimate meaning in life's struggle. For that people turned to mythos, stories that made no pretensions to historical accuracy but should rather be seen as an early form of psychology; if translated into ritual or ethical action, a good myth showed you how to cope with mortality, discover an inner source of strength, and endure pain and sorrow with serenity.

So atheists read this and say "surely she wouldn't accept myth as a valid way to think. myth is fiction it's a lie so she wouldn't like that, that's unscientific." But that's exactly what she likes. Clearly there's a type of postmodernism in her thinking that is anti-chronocentric. In other words she doesn't see ancient world people are being stupid and everything they did was wrong. She believes there is timeless truth and people of all ages discover it. Notice that she's saying good things about it. "a good myth helped you cope with morality." That's not a criticism it's a good thing.

In the ancient world, a cosmology was not regarded as factual but was primarily therapeutic; it was recited when people needed an infusion of that mysterious power that had—somehow—brought something out of primal nothingness: at a sickbed, a coronation or during a political crisis. Some cosmologies taught people how to unlock their own creativity, others made them aware of the struggle required to maintain social and political order. The Genesis creation hymn, written during the Israelites' exile in Babylonia in the 6th century BC, was a gentle polemic against Babylonian religion. Its vision of an ordered universe where everything had its place was probably consoling to a displaced people, though—as we can see in the Bible—some of the exiles preferred a more aggressive cosmology.

Here she clearly identifies herself with a kind of new agie postmdoern thinking, the sort of Campbell and Elaide thing. That's a good reason to think she supports the God beyond God idea. She doesn't say "I think this..." but the intelligent person can gather what a person supports from what they say even if they are explicit about it. Atheists can't do this for obvious reasons. But those of us who learn reading comprehension can do so.

She doesn't say "I believe in Being itself" but she even uses the phrase "God beyond God" (Tillich) and does she say about it? She says that it's better, it has good threatening uses, it can perk you up and transform your life, it was degraded and religion was made more literalistic and less able to cope by trying to make it scientific and that Newton just had a big guy in the sky. Newton's guy in the sky was a bit mechanic but he was still a guy in the sky. So clearly she prefers the other approach.

Maybe she doesn't actual believe that God is being itself, but she clearly understands the concept, doesn't think it's stupid, and supports it over the literalism of the guy in the sky.

Please excuse the long quote. This is by Karen Armstong. This statment is so good I would like to use it as my manifesto. Of course the atheists on CARM can't understand what it means. This is exactly what I'm trying to tell them but they just can't hear it.

Despite our scientific and technological brilliance, our understanding of God is often remarkably undeveloped—even primitive. In the past, many of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers understood that what we call "God" is merely a symbol that points beyond itself to an indescribable transcendence, whose existence cannot be proved but is only intuited by means of spiritual exercises and a compassionate lifestyle that enable us to cultivate new capacities of mind and heart.

But by the end of the 17th century, instead of looking through the symbol to "the God beyond God," Christians were transforming it into hard fact. Sir Isaac Newton had claimed that his cosmic system proved beyond doubt the existence of an intelligent, omniscient and omnipotent creator, who was obviously "very well skilled in Mechanicks and Geometry." Enthralled by the prospect of such cast-iron certainty, churchmen started to develop a scientifically-based theology that eventually made Newton's Mechanick and, later, William Paley's Intelligent Designer essential to Western Christianity.

But the Great Mechanick was little more than an idol, the kind of human projection that theology, at its best, was supposed to avoid. God had been essential to Newtonian physics but it was not long before other scientists were able to dispense with the God-hypothesis and, finally, Darwin showed that there could be no proof for God's existence. This would not have been a disaster had not Christians become so dependent upon their scientific religion that they had lost the older habits of thought and were left without other resource.



Symbolism was essential to premodern religion, because it was only possible to speak about the ultimate reality—God, Tao, Brahman or Nirvana—analogically, since it lay beyond the reach of words. Jews and Christians both developed audaciously innovative and figurative methods of reading the Bible, and every statement of the Quran is called an ayah ("parable"). St Augustine (354-430), a major authority for both Catholics and Protestants, insisted that if a biblical text contradicted reputable science, it must be interpreted allegorically. This remained standard practice in the West until the 17th century, when in an effort to emulate the exact scientific method, Christians began to read scripture with a literalness that is without parallel in religious history.

Most cultures believed that there were two recognized ways of arriving at truth. The Greeks called them mythos and logos. Both were essential and neither was superior to the other; they were not in conflict but complementary, each with its own sphere of competence. Logos ("reason") was the pragmatic mode of thought that enabled us to function effectively in the world and had, therefore, to correspond accurately to external reality. But it could not assuage human grief or find ultimate meaning in life's struggle. For that people turned to mythos, stories that made no pretensions to historical accuracy but should rather be seen as an early form of psychology; if translated into ritual or ethical action, a good myth showed you how to cope with mortality, discover an inner source of strength, and endure pain and sorrow with serenity.

In the ancient world, a cosmology was not regarded as factual but was primarily therapeutic; it was recited when people needed an infusion of that mysterious power that had—somehow—brought something out of primal nothingness: at a sickbed, a coronation or during a political crisis. Some cosmologies taught people how to unlock their own creativity, others made them aware of the struggle required to maintain social and political order. The Genesis creation hymn, written during the Israelites' exile in Babylonia in the 6th century BC, was a gentle polemic against Babylonian religion. Its vision of an ordered universe where everything had its place was probably consoling to a displaced people, though—as we can see in the Bible—some of the exiles preferred a more aggressive cosmology.

She is obviously saying that the big man in the sky doesn't exist, but he doesn't have to exist to know that there is a God and that some aspect of being is divine. The atheists are not capable of that kind of thought, let alone any kind of thought.

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.”

Atehist Fear of the Ancinet world.

I've seen a tendency of atheists lately to mock and ridicule ancient world people and by extension to condemn religion becuase ancient people believed it. We know atheists have always believed such things, but in the last month I've gotten a dozen or so comments to the effect "why would you want to be link ancient Bronze age people?" They specifically target the bronze age. why? it's illogical. Here are two examples form the same post on CARM. By a guy named "Too."

Are bronze age men worthy of absolute trust?
Christians beliefs depend almost entirely on trusting the words of bronze age men. ( and later 'editors etc)

So why are these bronze age guys so trustworthy? It surely can't be because they, themselves say they are.

Is there evidence that men back in the bronze age where above reproach. They all were without sin?Any of them were?

Yet I hear their translated words echoed here time and time again as if they were known to be absolute truths.

Would you trust your life to their word alone at a trial? Why?

I fail to see any evidence that bronze age men were in any way free of the many imperfections that all humans have today.
__________________

and then this:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Too View Post
Then you have absolute faith in them. Perhaps in god , IF THEY WERE TELLING THE TRUE FACTS, but as we know humans are never without fault.

Faith in the word of bronze age men is what Christianity is based on.

Jesus, the Christian god, everything you think you know about god originated from the mouths and pens of bronze age men (and early more primitive men). This is an undeniable fact.

First of all you show your true ignorance of history here. Waht youa re saying is just manifest crap. You are leaving out a little thing called SOCIAL EVOLUTION! what you are saying would be like arguing that the Mustang mock 1 circa 1971 was crappy car because it was directly related to the model T and that the 1998 Torus was a crappy car becuase it's just another direct extension of the model T.

The ethical standard Jesus put down anticipate Kant. The views of the NT, especially Paul are clearly evolved way beyond anything Bronze age people thought about. If you follow that track from the Ice man and his mushrooms you follow it far enough you come the development of modern scinece. It's silly beyond compare to condemn human ancestry becuase it's nothing less than the bedrock of who are today.

Obviously an evolution in thinking. this evolution opens up the reality to timeless truth. Timeless truth was true in Bronze age and it's true today and it will be true a million years form now. We view timeless truth from different perspectives but it never goes away just because it's old, that's why it's timeless. The develop of perspective is evolution that's what atheists embrace but that's what you ignore here: religious belief has evolved it has kept pace with human understanding.

It amuses me to no end how atheists can be so unthinking. I mean come on, it's one thing to try and mock and ridicule the hated target group, all hate groups do that, but to pick one out that died off thousands of years ago and sit there going "I am so much better than the ice man! see how stupid he was, he fore to death because they was ni the mountains I'm so much better than him." LOL how silly can you get?

what is this need atheists have to hate ancient world people? It must be the latest tangent, becuase even though I've seen atheists say these kinds of things for years, just int he last month I've seen about a dozen statements such as "how can you be like ancient Bronze age people?" They are so scandalized by the idea that our ancinet ancestors lived a lot time ago and believed pre scientific notions. That's so shocking, how will I ever live that down?

When archaeologists dig up pot shards they don't do "O look at this stupid pot, it broke to pieces." they learn from the artifacts. Why should we look at our ancient ancestors, the basic material from which we evolved and made fun of them for the time lived in? This is some sick mentality that can only approach life through ridicule of others. You must have some brittle self esteem.

If we are going to avoid everything that Bronze age people did because being ancient they were stupid and everything they thought was bad then here's a list of things we have to give up:

Mushrooms as medicine
the idea that natural herbs can help with sickness.
the idea of seeking new solutions through trial and error
Loving our children
loving our parents
loving our mates
Loving our selves
understanding ourselves as part of group
goup loyalty
understanding ourselves as distinct from the group
making fire
making the wheel
riding horses.
making clothes


there are probably more things but this is off the top of my head.


why must we think that ancinet people who so incredibly stupid? Anthropologists no longer understand the origins of religion as primitive failed scinece. They now understand that it was the dawning of mystical consciousness that created the notion of religion. Since we know that this sort of consciousness is real good for us and changes our lives for the better (as demonstrated over and over again by the hundreds of empirical scientific studies that prove it) we really should conclude that Bronze age people were not so dumb, that they actually discovered a timeless truth or two that are still good today.

I should have used this as another reason in my debate why atheism is bankrupt.


No movement that thrives ont he sick ego warping drive to put yourself up by putting others down can survive for long.
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Atheists Battle Their Super Egos

I have often accused atheists of only being able to understand the big man in the sky rather than more expansive views of God, such as process theology or Existential ontology. But I've slowly begun to realize that they really are using God of the Bible as a means of venting in a cathartic process of battling their own super egos. Look at the way they sound when they rant about how evil God is, they sound like teenagers who have just moved out of the house becuase they an't stand their father. One such prime example is that of a poster on carm:Roarian

Indeed, I would put him straight in the category of malevolent and elitist : he doesn't care one bit about what you did with your life or what you believed, but merely what you did not believe : if you weren't a part of his posse, you're out forever.

Can't you just hear a post smoking kid of the 60s saying 'Dad doesn't care about me?' not that I mean to belittle this guy's feelings by saying that. Most guys my age have been there, even with the post smoking. The fear that God is only concerned with penalizing you for believing wrong things rather than with how good you may be because you believe a few right things, this is not only a tortured understanding of the Gospel, but also reminds me so deeply of a wounded kid in a struggle with his/her father.

Instead of giving all people an equal and fair chance at getting it right, he makes an imperfect world that is extraordinarily bad for getting 'good souls' if you will : he knows beforehand that billions upon billions will never even hear of him, and billions of others will be brought up in opposing beliefs, which are in this world equally unsupported by any evidence.

Such complaints are fraught with misunderstandings. As Christians we look at the wondeful love of Jesus dying on the cross for your sins and at the parables of Shepard chasing down lost sheep out of pure love. The atheist is the wounded inner soul who looks at the fear that he's being held accountable for getting it wrong. No attempt to reason about the nature of theodicy. Of course there are plenty of theories one could support, C.S. Lewis the Problem of Pain, or dare I say in the same breath (not to compare) My own Soteriolgoical Drama. Which I think covers the bases pretty effectively. The issues of billions and billions who will never know Jesus existed (where do these guy's live?) going to hell because they are in the wrong religion is merely an outright misunderstanding of the Gospels which is countered by Paul himself in two different books.

He then expects everyone to just go on faith that this particular religion among thousands is correct. He has his instructions penned down and translated several times, many of which incorrectly, in a tome some 2000 years ago in a sparsely populated area of the world.

The atheist's special vehement hatred of the Bible must be brought into it because its one of the few concrete pieces of data they actually have that's not just opinion. The understanding what we are to do in spreading the Gospel is of course totally inadequacy since ti assumed the wrong translation of the Great commission and does not come to terms with the concept of being a witness or spreading the love of God. These unhappy creatures who can't find their creator because they want to look in the right way think that it's all a matter of just spouting the right cods; we as Christians let them down when we fail to show by example that its not about bringing belief to the world but bringing God's' love to the world.

He then sits around and billions continue to die without ever being able to even known Christianity, while the bible writers sit around waiting to be inspired, finally in 300 AD or such resulting in the Bible.

But of cousre this view that God is "sitting around" rather than working every moment to draw people to himself is indicative of their lack of receptivity and their own refusal to respond. Of cousre he must mix it with the haterd of the Bible because that's really their own tangible piece of evidence, which is largely based upon poor reading skills.

This book is so poorly written that it is then misinterpreted and used as an excuse for hatred,

Poorly written. Has he ever ever read it? It's written in Greek and Hebrew you know. Most likey he's only a translation so he really don't know how it's written. Since he probably doesn't read it daily but relies upon atheist message boards to spread his venom and only cares about finding contradictions not finding value in it he really has no room to talk. Sure enough he has no argument to make as these are nothing more than platitudes he's mouthing.

and millions head to hell because of internal strife between different factions of his one chosen people, sending millions more to hell because nobody can agree on the correct religion and wars and dark ages break out. This all goes on for about 1700 years, ultimately ending up today, where a guy called Metacrock would call him omnibenevolent.

Of course it's only going on in his imagination because he's making fundamentalist assumptions instead of seeking to truly understand the Gospels.

Popular misconceptions of the nature of the Gospel.

"Gospel" means "Good News." The Good News is not that people are going to hell. The Good News is that God cares and provides a way to orient our lives toward him so that we can know him in this life, and in the world to come.

Are there really well meaning people?

"All have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God." From a human perspective, relatively speaking from one human to another there are, of course, well meaning people. There are good people all around us, from a human perspective. Relative to the Divine however, no one is good, no one is capable of meriting salvation. We all have our sins, we all have our human frailties. We are all caught up in "height" (our ability through the image of God in which we were created to move beyond our human finitude and seek the good) and "depth" (our nature burrdened in the sinful wickedness to human deceit).

These are Augustinian terms and they basically mean that we are both, good and bad, saint and sinner. God knows the heart, He Knows what we truly seek. God is merciful and is able to forgive our trespasses. But, if we are really well meaning toward God we will seek the truth. If we are seeking the truth than God will make it plan to us.

Other Religions

Paul said "To those who through persistence seek glory, honor and mortality he will give eternal life.But for those who are self-seeking and who reject the good and follow evil there will be wrath and anger...first for the Jew and then for the gentile; but glory honor and peace for everyone who does good. For God does not show favoritism. All who sin apart from the law will perish apart form the law and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law. For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God's sight, it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous.

Indeed when Gentiles who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves even though they do not have the law, since they show that the requirement of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences bearing witness and their hearts now accusing, now even defending them..." (Romans 2:7-15). New American Standard and other translations say "their hearts accusing, now excusing them..." Most Christians are afraid of this conclusion and they down play this verse. Often Evangelicals will come back and say "he makes it clear in the next passage that no one can really follow the law on their hearts." Well, if they can't, than they can't. But if they can, and do, than God will excuse them. God knows the heart, we do not. The verse clearly opens the door to the possibility of salvation (although by Jesus) through a de facto arrangement in which one is seeking the good without knowing the object one is seeking (Jesus). In other words, it is possible that people in other cultures who follow the moral law written on the heart know Jesus de facto even if they don't know him overtly. Paul backs up this conclusion in Acts 17:22 Paul goes to Athens as is asked by the Athenian philsophers to explain his ideas to them.

These were pagan followers of another religion. Paul stood up and said to them, "Men of Athens, I see that in every way you are very religious for as I walked around and observed your objects of worship I even found an alter with this inscription 'TO AN UNKOWN GOD' Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you."He basically says that they are worshiping God, they just don't know who he is. That's why he says "I will make it known to you." He doesn't say "you have the wrong idea completely." Most Evangelicals dismiss this as a neat rhetorical trick. But if we assume that Paul would not lie or distort his beliefs for the sake of cheap tricks, we must consider that he did not say "you are all a bunch of pagans and you are going to hell!" He essentially told them, "God is working in your culture, you do know God, but you don't know who God is. You seek him, without knowing the one you seek. He goes on,(v27)"God did this [created humanity and scattered them into different cultures] so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out and find him though he is not far form each one of us." This implies that God not only wants to work in other cultures, but that it is actually his paln to do things in this way. Perhaps through a diversity of insights we might come to know God better. Perhaps it means that through spreading the Gospel people would come to contemplate better the meaning of God's love.

In any case, it does mean that God is working in other cultures, and that God is in the hearts of all people drawing them to himself. Of their worship of idols, Paul said "in past times God overlooked such ignorance but now he commands all people everywhere to repent" (v30). Now what can this mean? God never overlooks idolotry or paganism, in the OT he's always commanding the Israelite to wipe them out and expressly forbidding idolatry. It means that on an individual basis when God judges the hearts of people, he looks at their desire to seek him, to seek the good. That their status as individuals in a pagan culture does not negate the good they have done, and their ignorance of idolatry does not discount their desire to seek the good or the truth. IT means that they are following Jesus if they live in the moral life, even though they follow him as something unknown to them. IT also means that all of us should come into the truth, we should seek to know God fully, and when we do that we find that it is Jesus all along.

Justice of Punishment.*

Jesus himself never speaks directly of hell, but always in parables. The other statements of Hell are mainly in euphemistic passages or in apocalyptic passages such as the book of Revelation. But I suggest that for some crimes hell is deserved. The slaughter of innocent people, the disruption of thousands of lives, the Hitlers of the world, and those who rationalize the deeds through "following orders" deserve to suffer the consequences of their actions. Evil has consequences, and those who commit evil should suffer the consequences, and they will.I have no direct knowledge of what hell is. It is based upon the Greek mythological concept of Tartarus which got into Hebrew thinking through Hellenization. There is no "hell" in the Tennach or the Pentateuch ("OT"). In the Hebrew scriptures there is only mention of Sheol, or the "the grave" to which everyone goes. But in the books of Revelation it does speak of those who work inequity being "outside the Kingdom of God." I don't' believe that hell is littoral fire and brimstone, I do believe it is some state of anxiety or desperation from God.

Knowing God.

Heb. 8:10-12 "...I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts I will be their God and they will be my people. No longer will a man say to his neighbor 'know the Lord' for they will all know me from the least of them to the greatest. For I will forgive their wickedness and remember their sins no more." This passage promises a "personal religion ship with God."The word for "to Know" is the Greek Term Ginosko, which means personal epirential knowledge. To give one's life to Jesus means to develop a personal relationship with Jesus. Jesus said (John) "My sheep know my voice..." Personal relationship means that it is more than a set of rules, more than an ideology or a belief system, but a matter of the heart, the emotions, religious affections. IT may not be through dramatic miraculous effects (although I do believe that that is open to all Christians) but it is deeper than mere rule keeping, and does make for a satisfaction nothing else can match.God acts upon the heart. Salvation is a matter of "knowing God" not of mere intellectual assent. What does it mean to know God? It means that being a Christian is a matter of experiencing God's love in the heart and of loving God and others. It is also a matter of being "led" by God through impressions upon the heart, and not merely a set of rules or a list of beliefs that one must check off. IT is the development of "religious affections."The excitement of knowing God is unequaled by anything else in this life.

There are so many misconceptions to disabuse them of, but I really put the blame on myself and other Christians. We have to show them the love of God. This is the only way we are going to correct these misconceptions.


*This was one of the first articles I put on Doxa years ago. At that time I still had a sort of Hell light idea, with some form of separation but not the big fire stuff. Now I don't believe in hell at all. I do believe that those who reject God and die in their sins will cease to exist and perhaps they will before doing so realize what they did wrong. But I also believe that God is love, so I don't know if even this much hell is real. I know God is mercy and I also know that atheists expect to cease existing so they really complain about it too much if that's the case. what I don't believe is that God will torture people becuase they believe the wrong thing. That idea is childish and it was never what the Bible said.

Some Observations on Being Itself.

As regular readers of my blog know I am very influenced Paul Tillich, the German-American Theologian. He held to the notion that God is being itself, to understand what that means one must understand the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Existentialism and phenomenology will both be very important to understanding. What follows are some observations I put out on CARM in an attempt to clarify the issues involved. that has been a useful exercise in that I see I need to clarify more the definition of Being.


I don't want this to be an argument about the truth of that concept. Several people have ask what it means, so this is a thread for clarification. I want to explain the concept and I want you guys to refrain from arguing about it reality this time and we can do that latter. Just do clarification questions now if you please.

Trying to summarize the idea in a quick one line is like asking someone to explain Quantum mechanics in one line. Tillich is very complex, he didn't invent the idea it's the very fabric of Christian thought going back to the early dark ages. This is the essence of Christian philosophy from its earliest times, and even before that in the intertestamental times.

I'm going to summarize by putting down a series of numbered observations. This is not a modal argument or any kind of argument. It's just a series of observations by way explanation.

(1) The basis of Christian mysticism is a dichotomy between experience and understanding: the way of negation and the way of union.

I say this because you are going to want to know a very detailed idea of Being Itself. Tillich resists that. He has a very complex world view, God as being itself is that entire world view, but it's the edges around things like "what is God exactly?" Because in Christian mysticism God is beyond our understanding. That doesn't mean we can't know anything about God, but what we know experiences. It's not knowledge on paper that counts it's experience.

Experience is beyond words. So it has to be loaded into cultural constricts and stated as a metaphor. The problem with fundies is they literailze the metaphors. It's takes a subtle mind to understand metaphor so the less subtle mind make it literal.

Talk of God can only be either analogical or negative. Negative meaning we say what God is not not what God is. But we make for this by experiencing God, and that means experiencing God's love. So the statements about love are not metaphors, but they filtered through human constructs of love. That's all we have. that's the only way we can think.

(2) The God beyond "God"

Tillich speaks of the God beyond God. That means the reality beyond he metaphor. The big man on the throne is the metaphor. There can't be a big man in the sky. This is one thing that stimulates atheist incredulity I think. The God beyond God is the reality that is beyond the analogical image of the big father/king figure. That figure merely serves to evoke the superego. So atheists are fighting the father figure, fighting their super egos. conversely fundies are serving their superegos.

(3) God is not a thing in creation or a fact added to the universe.

see I'm doing that negative theology thing here "God is not..." that's called "apophatic." God is not on a par with things. He's beyond a comparison with things in the universe.


the conventional wisdom would look at the existence of thing and that the fact of each thing as evidence or argument for the nature of reality. The universe is just a collection of these things, stars and planets things on the planets. God is more than the sum total or the whole, God is the basis of the nature of that it means to be. that includes the basis of all reality and al that there is, and all potential as well.


I'm getting started and it's already too long.

There is no "he" that's a metaphor. There is no big king on a throne, no gain brain. let's put it in analogy to something in science.

(4) Analogy

The universe is a collection of contingent things. But it's all held together by this mysterious sort of thing called "gravitational field." Now that's not just gravity, that's vaccum flux, it's the four dimensional coordinate system of space/time. When phsyicists say "nothing" they don't mean literally nothing at all, they mean vacuum flux.

The big bang emerged from the singularity but the image of it exploding is wrong. A better analogy would be bread baking. Matter is like the raisins and the bread itself, the dough is gravitational field. It doesn't explode out of a single point, it' sort expands like a balloon and "emerges."


God is analogous to gravitational field. The convention view of God as the big man or the gain brain is like a raisin. He may be the biggest raisin or the most powerful but he's still a "thing" alongside other things. But God in terms of being itself is like the dough that becomes the bread. ti's the fabric of the structure of what holds the raisins together and makes up the basis of the bread.

(5) Personal nature


This is going to be real complex. There are modern physicists who are not Christians, so you don't need to be afraid of them, who think that consciousness is more than just what goes on in your head. Consciousness is seen by many as a basic property of nature. If that's the case then it could as well be a basic property of being. After all Sartre talked about two basic aspects of being: en soi and por soi. En soi (in itself) is just inanimate objects. Por Soi (for itself) is consciousness. Consciousness is a basic aspect of being.

Some atheists have said "how can the basis of reality be conscious?" that's because you are trying to think of being as an impersonal force like magnetism. Vacuum flux is not a force. The dough in the bread is not a force.

Reducing God to impersonal force is just as anthropomorphic as making him a big man in the clouds. Because it's what we would expect if we are trying to come with an idea of something alien or scientific. Its' still a product of human though.

God's consciousness would be totally above our understanding. It would be something we cannot get, unless we experience it and then it can be communicated to us.

Some physicists think that thought is the basis of reality, not matter. reality is based upon mind. That doesn't mean we can control it. We don't need to become mind science guys, but mind is a form of energy and matter is a form of energy. We know that energy is the basic substance or form of substance. But mind is a form of that. So why can't there be a transcendent mind thinking he universe?


Ok this doesn't even do it justice but it's getting there. So please bring clarification questions only ok? We can argue about it latter.

(6) things it is not


it's not a abstraction, it's supposed to be a real thing. that's what Tillich. Tillich answers the argument that Hans always makes by saying this. Being itself is the power of being to resist nothingness. that means it's a positive force that enables being to emerge from primordial being. So the beings, things in the world, come from the intial state of being.

here we could bring in the analogy of a string membrane.

Hans will say it's a just an idea in the mind. But the concept is real actual being. that is not a concept in the mind, it's a fact that fact is all around us.

look at a patch of empty sapce, look at a hard object. that's the difference. Its' not an idea in the mind its what the hard object is doing as it sits there existing.
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Metacrock

Question time:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Donald View Post
Okay-

how do you define "being?"

Meta:(and thank you, BTW)
The primordial act that separates something form nothing. Tillich calls it the "power to resist nothingness." I though that is phrased so strangely it makes it sound like nothingness is running around trying suck people the drain or something.

Aquinas saw it as an act in the sense that it's something you engage in from moment to moment. It invovles the fact of existence but is more than jsut that by itself.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Donald View Post
Okay, this leads me to a few more questions-

First, what does it mean, "being is an act?" How does one engage in being, apart from merely existing?

Meta: well for contingent things that's the primary thing, their existence is an extension of being. The fit into the structure and categorizes, self and world, finite and infinite and so on.

being as an act may be too scholastic for modern understanding. It's a really old way of looking at things. Just a way of saying that existing is an act, it's something you do. Not that you do it actively but you are existing form moment to moment.

Quote:Don

And, second, to what does this apply? I assume that someone who has worked out such sophistocated issues is well aware of the problems of identity. So wouldn't it be true that the Theseus, to use a well known example, is not actually engaged in the act of being, as it is not the same entity from one moment to the next? IOW, in what sense is it "resisting nothingness," as it were- after all, that which it was a moment ago has ceased to be, and has been replaced by something else. So, my second question is, what aspects of nature engage in the act of "being?"

Meta:"process" or "becoming" Tillich addresses. That is a form of being it's part of the act that the beings do as they exist, the act of becoming. Part of the ontological structured. That's a really important conflict in the history of philosophy and religious thought. the conflict is between the static and the procession. Process theologians accuse the orthodox Platonist and Thomistic of holding a static view of God. God is perfect and unchaining. The process theologians see God as di polar and the consequent pole is in process with the universe, with everything. They go through the tradition of Scotus and the Nominalists.

Tillich was the man in the middle. He thought that existentialism was dependent upon essentialism for its base, and its not meaningful to talk about the existential without the essential. Stasis, Thomism, essentialist, those go together. Scotus, process, existential, those go together. Tillich as known as an existentialist and he had sympathies for pocess theology and he is admired by the process guys, but they seem him as stopping short of where he needed to be because he appreciated the essentialist side too.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DrB View Post

What always confuses me Meta is how saying something has 'being' is any different to saying something simply exists.

Meta: Being is not merely the fact a thing existing. We speak of individual things as The beings." And God as Being Itself. In a sense analogous to the particulars and the Platonic forms.

But "the beings" are not just things that exist factually and that's all there is to say about their relation to being. They are also contingent beings. Tillich keeps that distinction by speaking of contingencies as "existing" and being as "Being." So he says God Doesn't exist, but he is being itself.

So to speak of things as "the beings" is to move beyond the facticity of there mere existence and place them in relation to being itself.



Quote:
Originally Posted by HRG View Post

Should we say that once you realize that "being" is a trivial and shallow concept you can't be a theist `?

Meta: show me why it is? That's saying you are going to unlearn to read. Once you know Being has depth you can't take it back. Apparently you just don't know that it has depth.

Doesn't it ever occur to you that you just don't certain things?

Quote:HRG
In the mind of Tillich. Others realize that a grammatical structure (a gerund) has been artificially blown up to (alleged) actual existence; that's exactly what improper reification means.

Heidegger and MacQuarrie both admit that language is inadequate. that's the whole point of the bit about experience over lanague. Beyond understanding and all that. Something that words do not do justice.

Hans has learned a new word, reification, that's his gimmick for the week.

Quote:
Tillich, like many Western philosophers or theologians, has been ensnared by the grammatical possibilities of Indo-European languages.
You are really reaching beyond your capacity of your knowledge I bet you can't give me an example that is not merely a matter of language itself being unequal to the task of describing the transcendent.

besides:
Look man you are not playing fair. I said this was for qualitification that doesn't mean make an argument and put it in a thin excuse for qualificiation.

so unsubtle you might as just go, "here's a question fo clarification: do you understand how stupid you are?"
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Health Care And Strangelove

Sellers as Dr. Stragelove





There is a film I would like to recommend concerning the current healthcare crisis. No it's not "Sicko" by Michael More (although that is an excellent one to see). But my healthcare movie is "Dr. Stangelove" staring Peter Sellers, Peter Sellers, Peter Sellers, and Peter Sellers (he really does play five parts in the film). It also has a host of other stars including Keenan Wynn, George C. Scott and several other old actors from the 60s. The film was the first major picture by Stanly Kubrick, who made "2001 a Space Odyssey," "Full Mettle Jacket," "Spartacus."


Its a hilarious film, in the great tradition of 60's style sarcasm and satire, the whole thing is a total farce, but acted in deadly serious earnest. It was 1964,the the height of the cold war, height of the arms race. Filmed in black and white, with man hand held shots it has the look an early 60s documentary. In fact the producer tells as story that the film began as a serious drama but he and Kubrick kept laughing as they put paranoid right sing thinking into the mouth of the general who goes nuts and sends the order to attack the Soviet Union with nuclear bombers. Finally they realized it was a comedy. The changed the General's nate of Major General Jack Ripper, who is concerned that communists are stealing our precious bodily fluids, and orders the a mission for a B52 to drop a nuclear warhead on the USSR. The President in the war room and all his advisers tell the Soviets about the rogue bomber, the Soviets tell them they have dooms day device and if the bomb is dropped it will set off every warhead in their arsenal, thus destroying the world.The U.S. Military helps the Soviet shoot down the few bombers that connect be recalled. One bomber makes it through. The head of the joint chiefs of staff, George C. Scott, is concerned that we have a "doomsday machine gap." AT that time in history there was much talk about "the missile gap." this is the kind of thinking Carl Sagan latter mock with his analogy about the basement filled with gasoline we are arguing about who has the most matches.

The one B52 piloted Slim Pickens does actually make it through. The bomb is stuck in the hanger and Pickens jumps on it to force it out of the bombay. As he falls to his death the rides the bomb like a bronco, waving his stetson in the air and shouting "Yeeeeehaaaaaaa!" There is then a serious of nuclear blasts, one mushroom cloud after another, as the doomsday device is ignited. The movies ends with the President and joint chiefs listening to Dr. Strangelove, refugee from the Nazis who keeps addressing the President as "mine Fuhrer," then saying "o sorry Mr. President" and who keeps fighting his arm which seems to have a life of its own, either zig hieling or trying to choke him. Strangelove discusses a plan to save some elements of humanity in the deepest mine shafts, it would only a hundred years before they go back to the surface. The scene fades out into the credits with Geogre C. Scott declaring, "We must not fall into a mine shaft gap." The Russian ambassador sneaks a small camera in his watch and takes a picture of the big war room board, and sneaks off hopeful of making it back and surviving in a Russian mine shaft. They others discuss the next cold between mine shafts.


The basic theme of the movie is: "the people in charge at the top don't know anymore about what's going on than I do, but they are willing to blow up the whole damn world to make us all think they know."

this film is the best symbol of the health care crisis because exactly the same kind of thinking dominates the medical care crisis and the Republican's response to Obama's plan that dominated the cold war. The insurance companies have manipulated the situational so long that health care now has nothing to do with helping people, but we are going to pretend it does and get very angry and enraged when someone proposes a change. No at the top really knows what they are doing, although Obama has tried to find out, but they are willing to let the system fall apart to make you think they know what's going on.

What's going on is you are going to die if you get sick. The silly irate angry red necks are so easily manipulated. The people who want power tell them, "Obama is going kill Granma. We need to stop this health care thing becuase those evil tax and spend democracies will kill grandma." So the red necks go the meeting and shout their stupid little heads off "I don't trust you you evil liberal tax and spend democrat blah blah" guess what? The present system is going to kill Grandma. Grandma will die if she get's sick, we don't need death panels to make that happen, it's going to happen now. That's the nature of the system. Its' not there to help anyone.

when my Mother began acting funny in the head the doctor said it was Alzheimer's and nothing we could do and just give her vitamin e and Ginco. She got worse and died and never got tested, never got any treatment or help because the insurance company wouldn't go for it. she paid into it all her life and when she got sick it didn't do her a bit of good. That's what's going to happen to Grandma if we don't get Obama's plan.

I have Medicaid. But guess what? I can't use it because the only doctor who takes it and who is anywhere near me is either the one that has 400 people waiting in line on any given day, or one who is about fifty miles away, and that's in Dallas Texas,a major metro area. One of the many lies the Republicans have told about Obama's plan is that there will be long lines, people waiting forever. Gee guess what? that's the way it is now, especially if you aren't rich.

As the President said, that's the ticking time bomb that is going to undermine our ability to work off the deficit. How quickly we forget! Remember just about a year ago were all scared to death that the banks were going to fail we were going to be in knee deep in Great Depression II and nothing we could do about it. Obama didn't bail us out alone but he did preside over the major part of it. Now we don't want to trust him or follow through with the things elected him to do because we are scared they cost too much. But if we don't do something soon it's going to cost a lot more.

the Republicans are just like the guys who were willing to blow up the world to stay in power. They are willing to allow the whole system to collapse and come down around their ears in order to screw Obama so they can get back in.

The scene where Pickens rides the bomb to ground zero is very apt in temrs of this medical crsis. That's just what's happening now in terms of the economy and the society. A bunch of idiots are riding on the bomb in one last futile and totally unnecessary blaze of glowry displaying their ignorant redneck cultre as they go.

Am I My Brother's Publisher?

My Brother is a fine poet. I have published a book of his peotry. Everyone says it's really good but no one will buy a bopy. It hasn't sold a copy and no one will write a reader review. Please do so someone!

Not religious poetry it's everything poetry. Highly literary.

come on look at it and see that's it's good!

I have a sample website for his poems here: you can find several examples on there.

Product Description
Ray Hinman's poems are vibrant with the tension between light and darkness, life and death, and they are a cycle of rebirth in which corpses can blossom again. It is a world built through conversations with the dead, with the voices of the literary past, allusions to the things that have come before and constructed with a clear, conscious sense that poetry is a Craft. These poems understand the value of things like aesthetics, culture and meaning. Ray Hinman understands the poet as the modern descendent of the Shaman, treading the boundary between what is forbidden and what is allowed to guide us beyond the things that distract us and drown the spirit to the transcendent and the sublime.

Artifacts: Poetry by Ray Hinman

His book is on Amazon in Print on Demand:


buy on Amazon: Our Cities Vanish by Ray Hinman