"Meaning is found both in the acceptance of fate and in the struggle to remain free, to make value choices amid a constricted range of possibilities. Whatever the gods do, we are still summoned to be the guardians of our souls.
The challenge to each of us is to accept the danger of our personal journey and thereby accept the gift of our lives”.
James Hollis
God doesn’t decide what we do with our lives, or even how long or short they are. Ours is not a purely mechanistic world with pre-determined outcomes. Luck plays a large part as do our choices. If you want Heaven on Earth and decide that without it, God either doesn’t exist or is evil, then that’s up to you. I just think it’s a very limited way of thinking.
Our existence comprises both the world governed by the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, maths, in other words what we call science, and the metaphysical world which sits above below and within it.
It's this metaphysical world which means that everyone believes in something; behaves in religious ways toward something; has faith in something.
Appreciation of love, beauty, art of all types, are in no way an evolutionary necessity, yet to one extent or another everyone has these. Why?
I put it to you that it's because these unseen, unexplainable things including consciousness and how the mind interrelates with consciousness, are just as much part of our world as the scientific.
Question:
What is sacred to you or what does the word sacred mean to you?
We are biologically finite creatures. Thus, in the midst of life we are in death. i.e. we can die with no warning at any moment.
Worse, in some ways, we can be struck down with an affliction so debilitating that we would rather have died, or so we think.
The luck that automatically comes with the gift of free-will sometimes brings with it terrible unfairness and suffering. But your free-will allows you to decide in what way to deal with it, as Socrates did for example, when he chose to refuse exile and be executed.
Why would he do that? How was he able to make that ultimate self-destructive choice? Who knows but it’s just one example of people choosing to use their free-will to face suffering and unfairness in other than a bitter angry way.
Solzhenitsyn endured mistreatment and the Gulag through his chosen attitude to the situation. He was told he was to be executed several times but he remained calm.
Many Jews in the concentration camps were able to stay calm of mind in appalling circumstances etc etc
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It’s irrational to suppose that we can rationally achieve answers to the big questions like, God, human nature, the nature of the cosmos etc. That is in itself a leap of faith.
It’s arrogant human-centric, ‘we are the be all and end of all of intelligence and knowledge’ thinking.
Most scientific discoveries were not made via the scientific method. They were made by imaginative leaps to which the scientific method was later applied to prove them.
Seeing something clearly is only a function of the resolution you choose to apply; the tools you choose to use. Choose the wrong resolution, the wrong tools, the wrong way of thinking and you will always get the wrong answer, or certainly only see and therefore understand part of reality.
We often mistake conviction for certainty or worse, accuracy or fact.
The only thing of which we can be certain is that we can’t be certain of anything, and anyone holding closed-minded dogmatic positions using reductionist materialist concepts as their only tool – the left brain only - on the big issues of love, consciousness, the universe, God, the sacred, human nature, appreciation of beauty etc are almost bound to be wrong because they are using the wrong tools to think about these things.
You can’t measure love or human nature or the beauty of nature in a laboratory. Does that mean they’re not real? NO! Do we fully understand them? No!
The right brain is needed to look at all possibilities and be comfortable with not having certainty.
Too many don’t want to hear that we don’t know what we don’t know. They want to believe that what they know, or think they know, or think they don’t know, is it; the final unchangeably correct position to hold.
Currently this is true most obviously with acceptable morality, even though we know acceptable morality has changed often through human existence.
There's a belief that by only using the mechanistic reductionist tool of modern science can you find everything out and thence decide what’s right and wrong. That you can explain everything; that anything that can’t be seen, touched, measured, weighed and fitted into an equation or law is just fantasy, ‘woo’, to be ignored or stamped-out; and this is just wrong. It's the worst example of left-brain dominance that our society is currently trapped in.
When you look at the universe through a telescope, you see things. When you look at something on a slide through a microscope you see very different things.
It’s not that one is correct and the other wrong. It’s that you have to use the correct tool for the thing you’re studying.
And if you only have one tool or you tell yourself that only one tool is valid; that anything that tool can’t see or explain doesn’t exist or is not worth bothering with, you’re doing yourself and society a grave disservice.
God is not a thing in the way a bicycle or a rock or an animal is a thing. God is not anything that we can fully know or can properly comprehend. It’s a form of arrogance to say that because I can’t see something other people can, it must be wrong or not exist or be malevolent. God is unknowable to us in the same way we are unknowable to an ant or a snail. They may know a little about us, yes, but they don’t have the capacity to know just how much more knowledge and cognition we have than them or why we do things. They may therefore assign incorrect motives or reasons for our behaviour – if they even have that capacity.
We can’t write down in a scientific or mathematical text the full and precise content of human nature. So with God, whatever God is. We simply don’t have the capacity to understand anything more than our limited brain capacity allows.
Imagination is vital to our Being, to our well-Being. Why do we imagine, in our limited way, God? Because God exists and it’s in our given nature to feel that spark, to want to reach that essence which is greater than ourselves?
Or because we’re weak, fearful and irrational?
I prefer the first reason; you may prefer the second.
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Although it's a very important point, I'll put to one side for the moment the fact that we neither have the cognitive ability or the language skills to fully comprehend or explain what God is. So, putting that to one side, there are three main questions:
1 did a Being/Entity/Essence largely outside of our knowledge or comprehension create the universe, everything in it, and by definition all the laws of maths, physics, chemistry, biology?
2 if so, does that Being/Entity/Essence intervene in our affairs?
3 if so, how can this Being/Entity/Essence be described as good or loving when there is so much suffering on earth.
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1. We cannot know in the narrow empirical sense the answer to the first question unless God chooses to make it so obvious that even we cynical sceptical humans have no choice but to acknowledge its truth.
The existence of God cannot be proven or disproven using the scientific method.
The first part of that claim is obvious but so is the second part, since absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. That is one of the basic tenets of the scientific method itself.
So the most that anyone can say, if they are being objective and truthful is, ‘I choose to believe there is’ or ‘I choose to believe there isn't’. Both are faith claims because, to repeat, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, unless you decide you want it to be of course.
Some cannot see past the narrow-minded arrogance of modern scientism and simply refuse to contemplate the idea that the universe, vast and complicated though it is, has been created by an external essence, which some call God.
To me, it is just as likely that such an external essence DID create the universe as that physical matter just appeared out of a vacuum where no physical matter previously existed.
2. It depends on what you mean by intervene and it depends how much intervention and how that intervention manifests itself you decide is necessary for it to be true.
Of course, if you make it easy for yourself by simplifying things such that God should be intervening every moment, every time something which any individual person thinks bad is happening, and therefore a good God would intervene, then no, God doesn't intervene.
But surely, simply applying our own human logic, there would be no point in creating a world in which you had to intervene billions of times every day.
And of course, our lives are not completely straightforward, completely black and white in such a simplistic way. So it would be unreasonable to insist that by only intervening from time to time and usually in ways which only the individual concerned understands as God's intervention, somehow that doesn't count or is in some way insufficient.
If it's OK for you or me to intervene in other people's lives from time to time, when we choose to, not all the time, why do we get to say that it's wrong of God to do the same? Are you saying when you see something which makes you feel like intervening but you then decide not to, that immediately and irrevocably makes you a bad/evil/morally odious person? I hope not. That sort of guilt-ridden self-flagellation simply makes everyone miserable.
There are many examples over millennia of things happening to people which are inexplicable other than just waving it away with a term like coincidence or worse, claiming that the person is lying or crazy.
I completely accept that it's up to every individual to decide whether a person's account of what happened to them and their belief that it was an intervention by God is true or not but that doesn't move us forward.
Indeed, I would suggest that there may well be many times when God intervenes on someone's behalf where they simply don't realise that it's happened. That things that they put down to coincidence, good luck, were in fact divine interventions.
I don't press that point but it's certainly possible. Perhaps all that matters is what the individual person who experienced the intervention thinks, not what other people think?
3. This is, in reality, not only the trickiest question but actually the only one of any real importance. I suggested the three questions in what seems a logical order. However, really, it is only this third question that matters. For many non-believers, the fact that anything bad happens to any person at any time is all they need to know to say that God, at least God in the Christian tradition, does not exist.
Indeed the fact that bad things happen in the world means they fervently hope God does not exist because who wants to feel they are being overseen by an unkind/nasty or at best amoral Being?
Thus they choose non-belief as the preferable option to 'believe'.
But as I've said before, what would be the point of creating a second perfect realm? If a state of bliss or perpetual contentment exists, what would be the point of simply replicating it within biological bodies?
Where is the satisfaction in creating something wherein you know precisely what every character within that thing is going to do and say at all times? Oh, and all of it is, in our terms, 'nice'?
And thus we hit the main problem, which is that we are trying to understand something which we cannot understand. We only have our level of cognitive function and that is simply insufficient to understand God. We find it hard enough, indeed sometimes impossible, to understand our fellow humans, let alone God.
And this brings me back to the human centric arrogance that we are capable of knowing and understanding everything. It may well be a few millennia from now, that we believe we understand how the universe works in terms of our science, but we will never be able to fully understand the entity/Being/essence that is God because we simply do not have the cognitive ability to do so. As the ant and the snail are to us, so we are to God, if such an entity exists.
I understand that for many who believe that scientism or material reductionism is all there is don't like to even contemplate that there is anything more, and certainly that there is anything we won't in time be able to fully understand and explain.
But I and millions of others believe in this second non-material level, this meta level, this spiritual level, within our universe which reductionist material scientism simply cannot explain and so, refuses to acknowledge even could, let alone does, exist.
I am genuinely sorry that people see the fact that everything in everyone's life is not perfect all the time and indeed that for some people there is, in our moral terms, unfairness and suffering to a high degree as a reason to say that they don't believe God exists or that God is not kind and loving. God may indeed not be kind and loving in the way our limited cognition is capable of conceiving it but we have within us the ability to transcend unfairness and suffering in the way we react to it.
It could well be that the more you suffer in this life the happier or more content you are in the next. Or that the more suffering you cause in this life will mean the less happy you are in the next.
Who knows?
And that, in the end, is the true state of this discussion; we do not and cannot know; we can only decide what we choose to believe.
PS Science is fantastic and has helped us know and achieve marvelous things but to me, it's not all thee is or can be. It's both/and NOT either/or.
