What
is all this stuff really about? It never ceases to amaze me how
passionate atheists can be about nothing. I mean by that, atheism is
supposed to be nothing more than an absence of belief, right? Yet so
many times I see them full of fire and arrogance, blowing their little
minds just because someone holds a view they don't like. Why? Consider
this tirade by Arizona Atheist on Atheist Watch:
Arizona Atheist
Faith
is bullshit. Your claiming it's "complex" does nothing to solve your
problem. Theists have no evidence for their beliefs and that's that. All
"arguments" are simply "god of the gaps" arguments and nothing more.
Due to the tremendous lack of proof/evidence for all theistic claims
it's all based on "blind faith." So, yes Loftus is correct. Faith is
nonsense.
Clearly outraged by belief, but why? The major
thinkers in Western culture have been religious, only a tiny handful of
great thinkers throughout history have been true atheists, yet to look
at such comments (which are a dime a dozen) one would think that belief
was the most idiotic thing anyone ever thought of. One of the things
that really strikes me as absurd is their insistence that "there's no
evidence at all..." This is bound to strike me the wrong way when I have
42 arguments for the existence of God (of course we all know the
importance of the number 42). No evidence, except
these 42 arguments!
Why the histrionics? here I will argue two things: (1) The reason it
seems that there is no evidence is because atheists value only the
methods that give them the answers they want, they do not accept
evdience for God because it has to come from the wrong methods, and they
reject the methods becasue they are mining their data. (2) They are
angered by the concept that other methods may be valid because would
imply that they are only looking at the surface of the issues. Why that
should I alarm them so I'm not sure. I think it's a cultural thing, the
hate group derives some sense of superiority from deriding the target
(according to the standard FBI model).
As I have pointed out
numerous times, belief in God is not merely adding a fact to the
universe. The question of God is not a question about just the existence
of one more thing. It's a question of orientation to being as a whole,
especially to one's own individual being. If God exists then all of
reality is something other than we think it is. If God is real then I
am more than myself I am a creature of God. Atheists and theists live in
two different worlds. Thus no amount of empirical data is valid as an
answer. So the kinds of answers that would count cannot be sought
though scientific evidence alone. The atheist approach is to see this
as a limitation or an indication that there is no God. That approach
obviously fist what they want to see in the first place. Now many of
them wills ay "I was a Christian for 20 years." None of them ever follow
that up by saying "I scored real high on the M scale, i had mystical
consciousness and union with Christ and Baptism of the Holy Spirit and
then I realize it was all false and delusion and made up.The only people
who come to this conclusion are those are didn't have it in the first
place.
I'm not arguing that they weren't "saved" or they weren't
"real Christians." Being a "real Christian" and having Baptism of the
Holy Spirit, or "mystical experience" are three different things, they
are not three different names for the same thing. Nor am I saying that
strong Christians can't give up their faith. Bu strong Christians tend
to give up their faith because they fall into sin, they outgrow their
milieu and don't go on to higher understanding, or they suffer grave
disappointment (such as death of a spouse) and never work through it. No
one that I know of ever gave up belief in God just because some
intellectual argument was hard to answer, or some body of work intimated
that it wasn't true, and here I am speaking of those who had the
advanced personal experiences. Those sorts of experiences indicate that
it is real. These are such deep confirmations in the heart of hearts
that they cannot be easily denied or given up. Of course atheists don't
even value this form of knowledge. Deeply fearing the subjective, they
just ascribe it to "psychology" and for them that term is as good as
saying "lie."
The difference in these two ways of thinking is
striking. But the atheists can offer no evidence or arguments to
invalidate the phenomenological approach. Faith is an existential
response to an phenomenological apprehension. This means that faith is
personal individual response, not one formed by education or trained
through opponent conditioning; it is a response of the individual
although course cultural and learning and even genetics come into it.
It is a response to the apprehension of sense data apart from the
organizing principles imposed upon sense data by genetics, culture,
trainnig, psychological pre disposition. It's a response to the
suggestions made by the phenomena themselves as we apprehend them. By
"existential" it is fundamental to our existence and within the moment
of perception. What exactly is being perceived? That we can't know,
but it varies from person to person. Or I should say the vehicle of it
varies from person to person. One person may find that a full blown
mystical experience is what brings them around, another may be exposed
to just one phrase or one image and find that merely a pang of the
heart is all that is needed.
Atheists draw such a hard and fast
connection between science and the world. One could easily get the
impression that the world comes with little labels on rocks and trees
that say "naturalistic." If religion was true the labels would say
"trees by God." But when I argue my Transcendental Signifier argument
they will say that we are just imposing meaning. That's one tier
standard response. Human brain sees pattern and imposes meaning upon
pattern it's just ink blots. The world is a big ink blot. But they
don't apply that to science. They seem to think scinece is just
straight forward and literally true and unlimited in its ability to know
all of reality that ever be. We derive the kind of certainty from
scinece that we do because it's dealing mainly with things that can be
observed. These are relatively easy questions. No one thinks a question
like "where did the universe come form" is easy. Atheists seem to infer
that it is easy and if challenges that sense of certainty they become
irate. I often wonder why certainty is so important to them. But have
totally obscured the truth of scinece, that it is culturally
constructed and not absolute. Their ire is such that when I argued this
on CARM once one of them said "you are scum!" Of course they pronounce
the basis of knowledge (epistemology) to be 'bull shit" because it's
philosophy, but they never try to undersatnd the philosophical basis to
their empiricism. They take that as absolute proof beyond question.
Science
is a relative cultural construct. It is not absolute knowledge, it is
not progress based upon cumulative effects. It works by paradigm
shifts, with each shift the whole ground changes. Every time it changes
we start over. It is not linear or progressive.
Example: Top down causality in brain mind.top
down means something above the brain is directing causal states in
brain function: the mind is not reduced to the brain because its
directing the brain. Top down causlity is a scientific fact, it was
proven log ago, but because it disproves the reductionist ideology it is
ignored as though its not true:
Quote:
Rosenberg (from journal of conscientiousness studies)
"Take
the matter of 'downward causation' to which Harman gives some
attention. Why should this be an issue in brain dynamics? As Erich Harth
points out in Chapter 44, connections between higher and lower centers
of the brain are reciprocal. They go both ways, up and down. The
evidence (the scientific evidence) for downward causation was
established decades ago by the celebrated Spanish histologist Ramon y
Cajal, yet the discussion goes on. Why? The answer seems clear: If
brains work like machines, they are easier to understand. The facts be
damned!"[Miller quoting Rosenberg, Journal of Consciousness Studies, op.
cit.]
e.Consciousness as a basic property of nature.
JCS, 3 (1), 1996, pp.33-35
Naturalism loses its ground.This
is a probabilistic justification argument; It does not seek to
directly prove that God exists, but that it is rational to believe in
God and that there are good reasons to. In a nut shell the argument
says that the concept of materialism has been changing over the years.
It has now incorporated so many idea that were once lumped in with
magic, supernatural, or generally "unscientific" categories that the
old concept of materialism as an objection to God belief and a
refutation of religion is now obsolete. Essentially there are 10 areas:
(1) Quantum Theory (no need for cause/effect)
(2) Big bang Cosmology (realm beyond the natural)
(3) Medicine (healing)
(4) Consciousness (invites concept of dualism)
(6) Maslow's Archetypes (universal ideas)
(7) Miracles (empirical evidence)
(8) Near Death Experiences (scientific evidence)
(9) Esp Research (the fact that they do it)
(10) Validity of religious experience (Shrinks no longer assume pathology)
The
argument turns on the basic historical fact that atheists have lost
the ground upon which they dismissed God from science in the first
place. In their book Lindberg and Numbers demonstrate that the moment
at which this happened was when La Place said "I have no need of that
hypothesis," meaning the idea that God created the universe. What he
meant was that God was not needed as an explanation because we now have
naturalistic cause and effect, which explains everything. But the
atheist has cashed in cause and effect to over come the Big Bang.
Naturalists
are now willing to consider ideas like the self caused universe,
Hawkings unbounded condition which removes cause completely as a
consideration; or based upon quantum theory they are willing to accept
the notion that causality is an illusion, that the universe could just
pop up out of nothing. With that commitment they lose the ground upon
which they first removed God from consideration. Now, perhaps they still
do not need God as a causal explanation, but in the Religious a pirori
argument, and in the innate religious instinct argument I say that
belief was never predicated upon a need for explanation in the first
place.
Nevertheless, the fact still remains, the reason for
dismissing God was the sufficiency of natural causation as explainable,
with that gone there is no longer any grounds for dismissing
consideration of God from the universe.I will argue that more than that
is going. There is a paradigm shift underway which demonstrates a total
change in scientific thinking in many areas and over many disciplines.
That change demonstrates that the materialist concept is wrong; there
is more to reality than just the material world. There are other
aspects to the material world wich are non-deterministic,
non-mechanistic, and which call into question the whole presupposition
of excluding the supernatural from consideration.
The groundwork
for understanding this shift was laid by Thomas S. Kuhn in his theory
of paradigm shifts. Kuhn's famous theory was that scientific thought
works through paradigm acquisition, and that paradigms change when they
can no longer absorb anomalies into the model and must account for
them in some other way. This theory entails the idea that science is
culturally constructed; our ideas about science are culturally rooted
and our understanding of the world in a scientific fashion is rooted in
culture. For this reason he thought that science is not linear
cumulative progress. "scientific revolutions are here taken to be those
non-cumulative developmental episodes replaced in whole or in part by a
new one..." (Thomas kuhn
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," (92)
"In
section X we shall discover how closely the view of science as
cumulative is entangled with a dominate epistemology that takes
knowledge to be a construction placed directly upon raw sense data by
the mind. And in section XI we shall examine the strong support provided
to the same historiographical scheme by the techniques of effective
science pedagogy. Nevertheless, despite the immense plausibility of that
ideal image, there is increasing reason to wonder whether it can
possibly be an image of science. After the pre-paradigm period the
assimilation of all new theories and of almost all new sorts of
phenomena has demanded the destruction of a prior paradigm and a
consequent conflict between competing schools of scientific thought.
Cumulative anticipation of unanticipated novelties proves to be an
almost nonexistent exception to the rule of scientific development.The
man who takes historic fact seriously must suspect that science does not
tend toward the ideal that our image of its cumulativeness has
suggested. Perhaps it is another sort of enterprise."(Ibid,94)
What
all of this means is that science is not written in stone. We do not
pile one fact upon another until we get to the truth. We formulate a
concept of the world and we hold to it and defend it against changed
until there are too many problems with it then we move to another
totally different world view. This is what has been going on in science
since the French enlightenment. Materialism replaced super-naturalism
and Materialists have been defending it against change all this time.
Now there are too many problems, they have brought in so many ideas
contrary to materialism it is not meaningful anymore; paradigm shift is
immanent and has begun in many areas. This is not to say that Kuhn had
anything to say about the supernatural, he was a materialist. But his
theory shows us that change in the concept of materlaism is on the way.
Kuhn
is not alone in these observations, major scientific thinkers have
questioned scientific 'pretense of objectivity' throughout the century:
This 'bigger' aspect can also be seen in Rosenberg's 'liberal naturalism' [CS:JCS:3.1.77]:
"The
question of scientific objectivity becomes more compelling when one
considers that doubts about the reductive paradigm are by no means new.
William James (1890), Charles Sherrington (1951), Erwin Schrodinger
(1944, 1958), Karl Popper and John Eccles (1977)--among others--have
insisted that the reductive view is inadequate to describe reality. This
is not a fringe group. They are among the most thoughtful and highly
honored philosophers and scientists of the past century. How is it that
their deeply held and vividly expressed views have been so widely
ignored? Is it not that we need to see the world as better organized
than the evidence suggests?
"Appropriately,
the most ambitious chapter of this section is the final one by Willis
Harman. Is the conceptual framework of science sufficiently broad to
encompass the phenomenon of consciousness, he asks, or must it be
somehow enlarged to fit the facts of mental reality? Attempting an
answer, he considers the degree to which science can claim to be
objective and to what extent it is influenced by the culture in which it
is immersed. Those who disagree might pause to consider the religious
perspective from which modern science has emerged.
"There
is reason to suppose that the roots of our bias toward determinism lie
deeper in our cultural history than many are accustomed to suppose.
Indeed, it is possible that this bias may even predate modern scientific
methods. In his analysis of thirteenth-century European philosophy,
Henry Adams (1904) archly observed: "Saint Thomas did not allow the
Deity the right to contradict himself, which is one of Man's chief
pleasures." One wonders to what extent reductive science has merely
replaced Thomas's God with the theory of everything."
Science
lacks the absolute guarantee that many atheists think it has. The more
complex and removed from immediate observation the question is the
less certainty it has. This means that it is not a fit vehicle to tell
us about god.God is not a scientific question. Science is not prior to
philosophy but the other way around. Science evolved out of philosophy,
it used to be called 'natural philosophy.' While science does offer a
sense of "working" its what it works for that matters. It does not work
to give us any understanding of ultimate reality. Thus is it not a
fair question to ask why there is no proof of God scientifically? Of
cousre not, because God is not a scientific question. The reason God is
not science is because God is not empirical. God is not given in sense
data. Now atheist may ask why that is, they sometimes ask "why doesn't
God make himself better know," that's because God is not a big guy in
the sky. The same reason why he's not empirical. Because he's not a
"he" the "he is just a metaphor. God si beyond our understanding, the
basis of reality. God is prior to even epistemology. That would be like
expecting evidence of the eloctro-magnetic spectrum to tell us about
the basis of existence itself. Atheist continually treat God as though
he is a big man in the sky, although for some this may be because they
want to take on the fundies most of all. Such an atheist is John
Loftus.
John Loftus
We’ve
argued against the concept of faith many times before, but let me try
again. I have argued that the Christian faith originated as and is
purely human religion completely accountable by humans acting in history
without needing anWy divine agency at all. But setting that important
discussion aside, faith is a cop out, especially when it comes to the
number of things Christians must take on faith in order to believe.
Let’s recount some of them.
Here is a typical example of
an atheist ragging on faith. That is to say, he is not analyzing the
basis of faith at a deep level, but merely dismissing it as some sort of
non answer. It will become clear in a moment that the specific
reasons he gives are those that view God as an empirical object of
knowledge and thus a big man in the sky. I know that Loftus will say
this is because he's concerned with the fundies more than with
liberals. But true though that may be it still gives a mis-impression
to only deal with faith at such a superficial level and never
acknowledge that it is a much more complex process than this. Consider
his argument about questioning why God created:
No
reasonable answer can be given for why a triune God, who was perfect
in love neither needing nor wanting anything, created in the first
place. Grace and Love are non-answers, especially when we see the
actual world that resulted. For Christians to say God wanted human
creatures who freely love him is nonsense, for why did he want this at
all? If love must be expressed then God needed to express his love and
that implies a lack.
He speaks of "he" and "want" and so
forth as though God is just a big man. This is part of his incredulity
over the Trinity because how could a big man in the sky be three big
men in the sky and yet just one big man in the sky? He's basically
arguing here that god can't be a big man and thus can't want anything.
But assumes that he must know what form God could take if he isn't a
big man. That means he has to regard God as an object of empirical
knowledge, of course it would never apply to anything beyond our
understanding. If we regard God as the
ground of being these
questions are all moot, thus we have to frame them differently. We
could begin by not asking "why would a God who has no needs craete in
the first place?" That question is unanswerable for the ground of being,
since we don't even know if we can speak of "creation" in the same
sense. By what can't be answered can't be answered negatively either. We
can't rule out the love answer on the premise that God can't love
becasue he's the ground of being. Indeed most of the major theologians
who speak of God this way (Tillich, McQuarry and Von Balthsar) find a
link between being and love in the first place. Of course we can't speak
of God "needing" but we could speak of God producing. Or we can speak
of being producing the beings. McQuarry speaks of "being lets be." We
have to ask a different set of questions to begin with if we conceive of
God as the basis of reality rather than an object of knowledge.
Loftus goes on to play the same game in relation to the three in one aspect:
It’s
hard enough to conceive of one person who is an eternally uncased God,
much less a Godhead composed of three eternally uncased persons. There
are some Christians who maintain the Father eternally created the
Logos and the Spirit, while others claim that three persons in one
Godhead is simply an eternally brute inexplicable fact. Why is that
brute fact more reasonable to accept than accepting the brute fact of
the laws of the universe, which is all that’s needed to produce the
universe? There are social Trinitarians and anti-social Trinitarians.
Both sides accuse the other side of abandoning the Chalcedonian creed,
either in the direction of tri-theism, or in the direction of
Unitarianism.
First of all his knowledge of Orthodoxy is
slipping here. Either that or he doesn't care to define Christianity by
the ruels of the Christian community. No Christian believes that the
Logos and the Spirit are created, as that is a violation of the creeds.
His appeal to the laws of the universe is not applicable here because
it is not a competitor for God's position as transcendental signifier.
In fact laws of nature are totally inexplicable and we do not know what
they. They no longer carry the same wight they did in the
enlightenment. Thus they are a dandy reason to believe in God, because
the supposition of a mind an notion of a set of disembodied laws is
pretty had to grasp (see the previous article). But the argument he
makes is absurd in light of the Ground of Being. we don't have to ask
how can a big man in the sky be three big men in the sky and yet one
big man in the sky. As ground of being God can easily contain within
his divine economy three persona which share the same essence as all
three are merely reflections of the one ground of being. McQuarry makes
this point himself where defines the Trinity as having to do with the
one and many and the notion of being as the ground of diversification
of existence (see
Principles of Christian Theology).
Atheists
storm about the suppossed lack of evidence, yet they put all their
marbles on issues such as string theory and mutliverses, matters for
which there is no empirical data of any kind. Then they rail against God
because there's no empirical data! Belief in God is a realization that
comes from understanding about the nature of being, especially one's
own being. It is not the result of empirical data, nor can it be. The
concept is misguided and that expectation is a waste of time. There two
trajectories that inform us of the nature of being such that we might
associate it with the sense of the numinous. These are deductive
understanding fo transcendental signifiers on the one hand, (matters
such as the ontological argument), and then personal experience on the
other. Mystical experience, the sense of numinous these are matters of
realizing God. They offer a deep seated conviction that can't be refuted
by mere circular reasoning or question begging of atheist assertion.
On the other hand, deductive arguments demonstrate the logical
necessity of thinking about being in religious terms.
