Catching my drift.

The banner at the top of this site declares, "This is a theology and philosophy blog written by an non-theist". I’m not sure that non-theist is the best descriptor for me anymore. I think I’m drifting…

With blog posts like “God : what are we talking about”, and  "Beyond Logical Theology"  I have been investigating the middle ground between theist and non-theist. 

Sometimes that means showing how we all “worship” something and sometimes its about showing that we all have to operate without that something in hand. The classic one is truth. Whenever we argue for truth we are worshipping it in a way, but we don’t possess it. Hence we all function as both theists and atheists, living with and without “god”, all the time. To agree with that you will probably have to smudge and stretch your old concepts of god. I know I did.

That’s how I encountered a type of goddish concept I believe in. It’s taking me a long time to articulate though. In fact I would say this is a process of discovery that really kicked off with "Worshipping a Small God" well over a year ago. I was told my concept of god was too small. I found that a profoundly challenging concept. Hence I wrote a post that asks “What does it mean to separate God from their hugeness? What does it mean to worship a powerless source of good or a small god?”

I had previously put God into one of two categories. First there is the God who commands the unraveling of all history for their own glory and threatens us in a first person voice through their holy books. They still strike me as a spooky side-show attraction, at best. At worst they are a demonic evil that we ought to oppose no matter what.

The other category for God is an impersonal one. They are something non-material, non-rational and just as irrelevant. Plato called them the unmoved mover. Physicists and philosophers have used this God throughout history as a tool to make their sums work. They’re like “dark matter” on legs. I’ve never denied the existence of this kind of God. I just tend to think that we should call them something else like the Tao or Quantum energy. The word God evokes too personal a figure for many people including me, to use here.

What I’m beginning to contemplate is something which borrows from the impersonal god concept their field like characteristics. Fields are like a force in natural science however rather than being created at a particular point, spending their energy and then extinguishing, fields continue. They are continuing qualities of space and time. Gravity is a field rather than a force. It has no beginning or end.

What I am taking from the personal god concept is that this field has an interest in life. This field values certain ways of engaging with life over other ways. As I put this into words I feel uncomfortable with it. I’m ready to take it back. Am I really saying that I believe in a cosmic field that cares? You can see why the non-theist label is slipping. (You can also see some of these thoughts developing in " A moral world".

So how have I got to this point? A significant first step is in recognizing that morality underpins everything. You can’t have science without a concept of good and bad science. You can’t be a scientist without having outrage at flagrant superstition. Science is at its heart a moral enterprise before it is even begun.

This is true of all thought. Morality has to precede thought, or surround it, or sustain it (choose your metaphor) because otherwise you can’t have good thought and bad thought. Before you can think, you have to care about thinking.

Now you could say that this caring is just some evolved characteristic of our brains. You could certainly make the case for its usefulness to encourage learning. When we care we pay attention. However, even if you recognize it as merely evolutionarily expedient to give a damn about the world, you can’t shake it off. If you try to you’ll crash all your other functions of thought as a consequence.

Even if it didn’t do that it, rejecting morality would “be” wrong. That’s something I explored in "It's OK to Kill" The wrongness of throwing away your morality precedes anything else and persists even after you have thrown away your morality. I believe that’s because the wrongness is not a product of our individual morality but an observation of the moral field from which our morality is drawn.

Woah…hold on. Morality as a pre-existing field in which all other thought (and intentional activity) is sustained; that’s pantheism not non-theism. The key distinction is that in pantheism everything is connected by something akin to a single perspective. The theos is that connective aspect. Perhaps perspective is too strong a word. Perhaps moral orientation is a better term. As I said in The Problem of Evil if you believe in an underlying moral nature to the world you are at least pseudo-theistic.

Historically one of my key reasons for being a non-theist is that disconnection makes the most sense of the world. I still feel like there’s something to emphasise there. Viruses and floods and monkeys have separate causes and purposes. They intersect to create the web of life but they aren’t in any way part of a gaian hive mind. They aren’t intentionally working in concert but are just made to work in some kind of concert by sharing an environment. That is part of the splendor of the world to me.

However now I’m talking about something that is a single will – the will for good – that permeates at least intelligent life. By intelligent I mean whenever life is making conscious choices. Choices require some level of thought and thought exists in a moral field.

A reasonable objection to all of this is that it isn’t real. I am only describing feelings and to be honest those feelings have contradictory feelings as well. My response to this objection is that asking if God is real is a different question for different concepts of God. If God is a bloke with a staff on a chair then they ought to have the sort of reality you can poke a stick at. If god is a moral field in which everything makes sense then the stick test doesn’t work. In fact I would go so far as to say that if you’re hung up on whether god is real you’re missing my point entirely. Is love real?

None of this means that I have any more time for the idea that we are born under Adam and Eves original sin for example. I also still don’t believe in reincarnation or any  enduring self after death I’m certainly not saying a) there is a moral field so b) when Paul the apostle tells women their voice in church is a disgrace they ought to believe him. That’s a lot of leaps, in the wrong direction too.

What I am able to do is enter into religious stories in a different way. I’m understanding the resurrection for example in a way that I wouldn't have before. People sometimes talk about the resurrection as an event that can’t be taken non-literally without losing all meaning. I wonder how the transformed body of Jesus can be considered literally at all. What does literally walked through walls mean? Think about it; it’s not walking as we know it that’s for sure.

Instead of worrying about the atomic weight of a risen Jesus, I am considering how whenever we act with moral intent we are acting in a way that is out of the normal flow of time and space. There is something eternal about compassion and embracing a life of compassion attaches us to that eternity. (Just think about when you do something good for a stranger.) Hence the promise of an eternal life for those who embrace love of others is true – it was never going to be sitting on a cloud but it’s still true.

This is a journey I’m on. Writing this blog puts that journey out into a public space. I don’t mind how that puts me at risk of public contradiction. I see it as growth.

You can expect that I will grow from this point too. I may recant everything I’ve written here and in the posts I've linked to. That would be surprising. For the moment I wonder if I need to change this blogs description at the top. Pretty please comment with your suggestions for a new tag line.

UPDATE: Currently cycling through some options. For reference the original description of the blog was;

This is a theology and philosophy blog written by an non-theist who has a deep respect for sincere theism.

Expect arguments that intelligent and integritous people exist on both sides of this supposed divide between atheism and religion.

I also aim to do theology and philosophy which is both humble and yet trying to be wonderful in the existential tradition.

(Original artwork from www.ambernowak.org/ )

Beyond Logical Theology

Recently I published a post about intrinsic worth. What I put up on the blog was a severely abridged version of everything I wrote on that topic. The problem was that while writing that post this topic kept on trying to be written instead.

Logical argument is just a subset of communication. Communication in its broader sense permits an infinite range of positions - if we don’t have the right words we can make them up or use a tone or gesture to add nuance. Communication can play outside the rules of logic.

Three areas that logic struggles with are:

• Nonsense or Absurdity
• Ambivalence or Indifference
• Moderation or the Middle ground.

Generally we praise logic for its exclusion of nonsense. It’s fair to say that nonsense can often look like a cogent argument and that logical thinking can help uncover that deception. I’m not certain excising nonsense and absurdity all the time is good. The benefit of nonsense is not making any concession to others from the personal goal and pleasure of speaking it. It has a place. However I think if we are going to employ absurdity then we should do so with full self-awareness. Then we won’t expect others to respond as if we have spoken in a common language. I’m very grateful that logical thinking works towards encouraging nonsense to show some restraint at least.

In my post on Moralising I hopefully showed how ambivalence or indifference is a valid position to take outside of logical argument. Logic proceeds from concern for an issue. Sometimes we ought not to be concerned. That’s a position that should be subject to criticism (even using logic) but there is still a time for saying that a question is unimportant or even silly rather than always answering it.

Moderation is something which is not entirely excluded by logical thinking. However logical thinking has a natural tendency to create extreme positions. If I can logically argue that X is right and Y is wrong then I am likely to be also saying X is very right and Y is completely wrong. The distinction between these positions (X is right and X is very right) is not easy for logical thinking to notice. The issue is usually one of a poverty of language that creates an either/or proposition when a richer palette of terms would allow lots of in between ideas.

It’s this lack of room for moderation that I want to explore in this post. In particular I want to look at a central theological position that I hold, how it usually argues with it’s opposite and how that logical argument creates a well of silence in which possibly most people fit somewhere in between. I’m a fan of “most people” and so while I like my own position best I hope I can throw up some ways this middle ground can be articulated better.

My own theology in a nutshell: The Attributes of God are more important than God.

I believe that the why of a person’s worship is much more important than the who of it. When Christians praise God they often will use words like loving, merciful and kind. My own view is that if you have found ultimate love, mercy and kindness in your God then you indeed should worship them. It would be odd if you didn’t. If I found those things there I would worship there too.

Similarly if I have found the greatest source of love, mercy and kindness somewhere else then I hope you would encourage me to my knees. So long as religious conversations remain in praise of love, mercy, and kindness I see reason for agreement far outweighing any differences. We can have reasonable arguments about whether one source or another is indeed loving, but we at least begin on the same page. We are essentially worshipping the same "things". In fact the tendency to discourage that agreement is a failing of the Gospels and the biggest reason why I’m not an unqualified fan of Christian philosophy.

Now even I can see I hold this position in its extremity. This came up when I had a chat with a Christian involved in a missional community. They made the fairly common statement about Jesus; “What matters about Jesus is whether or not the claims that he is God are true. If he was just some guy who said interesting things then that wouldn’t matter anywhere near as much.”

My reply was quite forcefully in disagreement. “Of course it matters more if what he said was interesting. If he is God but said nothing interesting then God is uninteresting and we shouldn’t bother with him. If however what Jesus said was interesting, if it genuinely would make a positive difference to our lives to listen to him, then whether or not he was God is neither here nor there.”

The opposite theology in a nutshell: Who are we to say if God is good enough?

There is a position which is directly contrary to my own. This position agrees that God is loving, merciful and kind; however those words are rendered meaningless (so the agreement is tokenistic). This is done by asserting one or both of the following;

• We are so worthless and our suffering is so insignificant, or we are so indebted to God for everything, or we are so sinfully deserving of punishment, that anything at all that God does to us should be considering loving, merciful and kind. Even if God was to punish us for eternity we would be deserving of double punishment for double eternity so God is still being merciful in that case.
• God is in fact the sole arbiter of what is loving, merciful and kind so we can use no standard beyond them to measure these attributes of God. In fact God is Love is not meant to describe God but to define love.

Both these assertions deny loving, mercy and kindness their common sense meaning. This raises the question of why worship God which can be answered in one of two ways in this theology. Firstly God’s power, in particular their enduring authorship over creation, is considered to be the basis for a natural authority. God’s will is supreme and thus to not worship it is really foolishness at a very basic level. Equally a natural gratitude is owed to our creator. There’s no perceived need to justify it further.

Secondly this question of why worship God can be pretty much rejected as nonsense. God is God and our being and theirs simply demands a relationship of worship. We are not able to even begin to evaluate God in terms of whether they should be worshipped. Even notions of gratitude are going to be ridiculously understated in our minds. In fact if we have any feeling other than complete awe (and personal shame) in the sight of God then we haven’t truly encountered them.

My view and the second view are fiercely opposed. They are so opposed that, without understanding their opposition, each particular view might not make sense to you. It is important for my view to bang on about separating God’s attributes from God precisely because I am arguing against the second view.  That view has combined God and their attributes to the extent that God could never be unloving (even if they drowned infants) and thus loving becomes an empty term. That’s a direct attack on my god.

Equally the second view needs to make a big deal out of the impossibility or inappropriateness of our judging God precisely because of my view being the end of that road. My view renders knowing anything specific about God secondary at best and completely irrelevant at worst because why we like God rather than God them self is what’s essential. Proponents of the second view consider that to be deeply tragic. They suspect that we will wander wildly off the mark of what is loving when we try to discern it, but also it is because they consider the who of worship to be the most relevant aspect for its own sake.

Stuck in the middle; Maintaining a relationship.

Just as these two views make sense of each other, from their black and white perspectives what is neither one nor the other can vanish from sight. It’s like two mountain peaks that can’t see the vast terrain between them for the clouds. Yet most people seem to occupy some part of that middle ground.

Rabbinical Judaism is all about arguing with their text. The most common belief is that no one interpretation can ever be definitive. The story of Jacob wrestling with the Angel is sometimes used to represent this. Further, this conflict is meant to be governed by a compassionate heart over and above a literal reading. Despite this a Rabbi does not put down the Torah and pick up the Koran with the same reference. They may worship God only with the right attitude but they are still monotheistically and historically particular about the revelation of God they worship.

Similarly my partner’s brother recently visited us. He is a church-attending Christian. Yet he felt great affinity with a non-theistic guest who shared with him the importance of acting ethically above all else. He stated he often experiences such affinity. However he also involves himself in small groups with other Christians with whom he reads the bible for guidance. He is loyal to the particular way of inspiring his ethics that being a follower of Jesus offers him. But he definitely feels a connection between himself and atheists who also want to make the world a better place.

When I try and articulate this middle ground I think of “relationship” as being the best word to describe it. It’s a bit like my own relationship with my partner. I want her to be with me for the right reasons. That’s deeply important. If she was with me but for any reason or none it would be completely wrong. However I also don’t want her to just be with anyone for those same reasons. I want her to be with me for those reasons.

In my view and it’s opposite you need to decide which is more important, the attributes of God or God themselves. Then you evaluate one with the other. In a relationship however you don’t begin with a list of ideal partner traits and then find the person who suits. However neither do you find a partner and consider ideal whatever traits they have. Instead you work things out as you go along. You wrestle with each other. You have some deal breakers but you compromise stuff you mightn’t have expected you would. It’s messy.

I’m not sure I’m nailing this here. That’s to be expected given my own stance. I have my theological position and I like it. I’m not aiming to change it. The diametrically opposed position is one I am comfortable railing against too. That makes this middle ground difficult to see let alone articulate. I’m just aware that it is there and populated by a great many people I admire.

Uncovering the middle ground in philosophy requires more than just logic. It requires a willingness to hear new languages and that requires listening beyond what my own language can describe - just like a relationship.

The Hipocrisy of Christian calls for Gratitude.

Previously I stuck the boot into the Atheist movement with my piece The Problem with Atheism. Basically my point there is that Atheism assumes the massive importance of whether God exists or not. That’s an importance I don’t agree with.

To put it another way, even Atheists believe that some atheists are prats while others are not. I’m interested in what makes us less of a prat. At least Evangelical Theists try to make a case that I shouldn’t be primarily interested in that question or that actually somehow theism does help a person improve their behavior. Atheists just say “Not believing in God doesn’t make someone a worse person,” which is a double negative dodging my concern. “Okay,” I reply, “It’s not God that improves us but what is it?”

However there is one area in which Atheists have been receiving the stick which is deeply unfair. It is good advice for the Atheist to hear but it is still definitely unfair. So this piece is going to go on the counter attack for the New Atheists in this regard.

The Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) is a mining industry funded, climate change denying and anti-immigration think tank. It also has a long history opposing native title and the national apology. I know because I did a short tenure there for high school work experience and have kept an eye on them since. It is always a source of frustration that this organization gets regular column space in the Age newspaper.

Just recently Chris Berg from the IPA wrote an article essentially arguing that the Atheist movement should recognize its debts to Christianity in the forms of secularism and free speech, amongst other legacies. In The Folly of Appraising Christianity I point out that this is based on a false premise, namely that we wouldn’t have these things without Christianity. We don’t and can’t really know that. We can only guess based on predispositions in Christian language and the limitations of other philosophical languages. When we do this we may sound scholarly but it’s really just extreme speculation because all languages are capable of change. Christianity itself is just a changed Judaism after all, and what historian would have seen that coming?

Furthermore if we are going to (just for fun) make a sweeping appraisal of Christianity we would have to recognize that this Christian legacy also includes the notion of thought crimes, the retardation of mathematics and science for centuries and a far greater tension over multiculturalism (even today) than was held in many places before Christianity. Of course all these problems may have emerged without Christianity too. Maybe we would have jumped straight to Islam which shares some of these problems.

My real objection to Chris Berg’s article and its arguments, however, is something different. It is completely unhumbled by history. You would think if you were going to stand on a Christian platform[i] and make a virtue out of acknowledging one’s past you would want that virtue to be one Christians practiced. If not you might at least make note of your hypocrisy.

If secular atheists owe anything to Christianity then Christians also owe the following to preceding cultures:

• Writing
• Sanitation
• Ship building and Cartography
• Mathematics
• Metallurgy
• Logic
• Architecture
• Astronomy
• Poetry, Dance and Music

Who honestly believes that Christianity pays fair homage to its predecessors for these legacies? Yet each of these aspects of society were not developed without reference to the God or Gods or the whole cosmology of the ancient world. They are all legacies of their world view.

Mathematics had an especially sacred place as a magical language in the pre-Christian world. We have evidence the Egyptians had achieved advanced trigonometry and algebra by 1800BC. Early Christians believed that as Jesus was returning soon, holding on to and respecting that knowledge was less important than cleansing Egypt of any non-Christian culture. To be fair, Muslims were a further wave of destruction at a later date but they only had remnants to destroy. We now have mere scraps for Egyptologists to study.

Of course you could argue that times have changed but see if you can talk for five minutes with an evangelical Christian about numerology without their eyes glazing over. Just think of the dignity they usually afford any knowledge that was before Jesus and not in the Old Testament. There isn’t any more respect from most evangelical Christians for the pre-Christian past than there was in the first few centuries of Christendom. There’s just more Christian past for them to glorify.

The same goes for our own country’s history and beliefs prior to the invasion of Christianity. Personally I know more about the ancient greek pantheon than I do about indigenous beliefs from my own country. That’s embarrassing. I would also be surprised (pleasantly) to be schooled by an evangelical Christian in this regard. Yet I am still told that I should pay even more attention to a Christian heritage that I already know far better. That’s insane.

Christians also have a particularly obvious heritage to respect in Judaism. This is so neglected that the fact that Jesus was a Jew was an actual astonishment in my youth. It’s true that Christians have retained the Jewish scriptures, however they have re-read them as often as possible as pointing to the New Testament. In the third century Jews were not permitted to publicly read from their scriptures unless they also stressed a Christian interpretation of them. I still encounter the theology that Jews were so blind to the truth for all four thousand or so years of their walk with God that they didn’t even have a correct interpretation of Genesis until Christianity re-read it.

I’m not even going to touch here the more virulent anti-semitic forms of Christianity. The above theology is generously speaking the orthodox mainstream for Christians. My point in this post is merely to say if Atheists do the same to Christians how can they complain? If Atheists re-write Christian scriptures so that Jesus was only properly understood by a new atheist reading will that be considered sufficient homage? It might give Jews cause to chuckle.

However Jews as a group themselves haven’t been particularly interested in paying homage to the cultures around them or before them either. There’s no Jewish state in ancient or modern history that has expressed the worth of non-Jewish beliefs that I can think of. In the Jewish Bible non-Hebrew beliefs are characterized as evil and completely without worth. The critique of atheists in this IPA article is really a critique we can make of everyone. We think we’re the best and dismiss the rest. That’s how religions work.

This is sadly just the latest way New Atheism is looking like a religion. Under the leadership of Richard Dawkins, Atheists are being encouraged to be mocking of any theistic tradition. Atheists are told to consider themselves as having grasped a truth that dimmer minds can’t deal with. Atheism is treated as the only moral position. If Dawkins was a historian instead of a biologist he might realize his path eventually leads to us having to go to Atheist mass on Sundays or be burnt at the stake. He  and his adherents are creating the monster they aim to fight.

To avoid this future Atheists should heed Chris Berg to some extent. I agree with the article that Atheists are being foolish if they just render all history not approved of for its Atheism as not worth contemplating. Berg goes too far when he encourages more than that. Gratitude for a debt to Christianity depends heavily on fanciful speculation. Respect however would be appropriate. I think it would be wonderful if the New Atheists were the first metaphysical movement after paganism to fairly credit their past and to be willing to learn from their peers.

Evangelical Christians who want to wield the Chris Berg article against New atheism are just being ridiculous however. There was history before 1 AD too. There was a culture in Australia before white Christian settlement. If you want to mention the splinter in Dawkins’ eye stop wearing the plank in your own. Maybe then we could all show each other some respect for a change.

---

[i] Chris Berg begins his article stating he doesn’t believe in God himself. However his article has been shared by Christians I know across facebook and it echoes the arguments they make.  It may not have begun as a Christian article but it is being used as one. Further the IPA is a historic defender of Christian culture (Berg actually spoke himself at a Christian “Reasons for Faith” conference this week) so I think “Christian platform” is sound despite the atheism of the author.

Sermons I would like to hear: Faith is a gift.

This is the second in a series of sermons I would like to hear. I’ve found them both great fun to write. I can be much more playful with concepts and if nothing else get to wander around the house spouting my terrible Desmond Tutu accent.

In fact in “researching” for this post I watched some Desmond Tutu clips on the net. He and I may be supposed to be theological opponents but I can’t see how a daily dose of that man wouldn’t make me an all round better person. That’s pretty much the point of this post.

You may have heard it said that faith is a gift. But what can be meant by this; surely not that our opinions are gifts?

Our opinions are the product of our work. We deduce and conclude in order to derive them. Opinions are tested and evaluated. In fact we should hope our opinions are not gifts. Any opinion that has flown into our mind without any work is apt to fly out as suddenly.

Our perception however, does come to us like a gift. No amount of brute work can force us to take a new perception. Our dignity resists the imposition of a perception which we do not genuinely already know to be there - that is to say which isn’t spoken to us from the world. All we can do to change our perception is to turn our worlds this way and that in order to see what such manipulation shows us. In fact we use the term “reveal to us” because the key to perception is revelation.

Healthy perception is also rightly cherished like a gift. I know from my own experience with depression that the perception that life matters and that I am worthwhile is a fragile treasure. There is work we can do to gain this perception but it is very strange intellectual work. We must eat breakfast. We must exercise. We need to stop moving and breathe; we are re-entering ordinary time after all from the eternal landscape of despair.

We cannot just manufacture a healthy perception from the midst of depression. This is the source of our suffering and that of those who love us. All we can do is prepare ourselves to receive wellness from the world. It reminds me of my favourite prayer in the Roman Catholic liturgy “Lord I am not ready to receive you but only say the word and I shall be healed.”

Then when we are well the madness of depression is equally foreign to us. We cannot get back there except by undoing the work of health. It is like an alternative life. By contrast an opinion is merely an island to which we can build, dismantle and rebuild the logical connections.

And what of faith in God? There is the part that is opinion supported in turn by argument. This is the part that is constructible and dismantle-able and ultimately replaceable. It is like scaffolding. However it is only like scaffolding in that it allows us to approach for study the perception of the world it surrounds. Opinion is not the skeleton of our perception – it is not holding it up. Our perception holds our arguments and opinions up.

This is why all arguments about God are fundamentally frustrating. Our only effective way to change a person’s mind about God is to turn the world the way we see it and show them. This is not much of an argument, the logicians point out. There are potentially an infinite number of ways to turn the world. So there is no way of knowing which way is necessarily right. It may be mine or yours or one neither of us have thought of.

Meanwhile those acts of speech which make good arguments only knock scaffolding off each other. Each party only ever leaves in doubt that their study of what they know is correct. The perception which essentially is the faith remains unchanged.

Up to this point you may think I am simply going to recommend a continuation of where we have been. The notion that faith is a gift was taught to me as a child with a specific meaning; theists are to count themselves lucky for having received their gift from baptism, conversion or their parents. Non-theists are to mourn that they missed out. If they lack the good sense to do that, non-theists should be ignored. Without the gift of faith to ground their opinions and arguments they have nothing to say.

Understandably non-theists have lost clumps of hair processing this way of thinking. There is a silencing pity behind it. Some non-theists however would like to make the argument themselves if only they could have gotten to the pseudo-moral higher ground first. More and more we do hear the claim that they are the gifted ones with the theists having missed out instead.

Many more people are just frustrated by such an end to any conversation. Both theists and non-theists can find the idea that we are trapped in separate alternative lives chilling. “There but for the grace (or gracelessness) of God go I” is a tragic truncation of humanity’s quest for understanding.

The most polluting element of the discussion is that we have closed our ears to each others joy. The theist and the non-theist are inclined to imagine the other is suffering in either a bleak or a totalitarian world view, deprived of wonder. Why is this so? Such an either/or situation doesn’t match the actually happy and healthy non-theists and theists I know. We have created it!

Are we victims of our leaders’ propaganda? Do they so fear losing us that they must tell us we are surrounded by a perceptual desert when we are not? Or have we simply become so embittered by conflict that we cannot hear a good thing about our neighbours’ world without taking it as an insult to ours?

Imagine if instead we all laid out our gifts like happy children on Christmas morning. Imagine if instead of thinking that your gift is bad because I prefer mine I asked you to show me its awesomeness. Imagine if I measured what you see in the world, not by how it makes me feel but by whether you are healthier and happier for it. Imagine if I tried to feel that happiness too.

Perhaps we will gain the ability to turn our head and see things the other persons’ way. If we do we might find that our own way of seeing is in fact, in contrast, like a depressed person’s vision.  In which case, we won’t need arguments to change our view. The soul leaps for health as I did when I escaped depression. But the anticipation that one of us will be unwell flies in face of our human history with and without God. There have been great lives lived with great joy by theists and non-theists both.

It may be that as our gifts are passed back and forth we will see in a way we have never seen before. I am not optimistic enough to say that if we lay our perspectives side by side we will make one whole world view but we might notice a missing piece. At least let’s reclaim the joy of discovery. There are gifts to open.

The Problem with Atheism

I want to write about Atheism and specifically about what is wrong with Atheism. However I feel certain that I will be misunderstood. Basically I am opposed to the Atheist project but not atheism in particular. See that probably didn’t make sense to you.

Firstly I am not saying there is a God. I am not disputing the facts of Atheism. This is exactly where it feels most people are at in this conversation, trading proofs of Gods existence or non-existence. I think the conversation has to move on from this. It is fruitless and boring and unedifying. 

I understand that Atheists may find saying “No sorry, but not for me” about someone else’s God is so frustratingly difficult that moving the conversation on from whether God has to exist is premature. “I’m still trying to gain some wriggle room here,” may be their thinking.

Alternatively evangelical Atheists may not want to move the conversation on just yet because their opponents haven’t been convinced (or humiliated). Stopping now feels like halting the Crusades before they even get going, to which I reply “Yes, that would be a good idea.”

 

This kind of silliness has been recorded for centuries. Arguments over God’s existence make a glacial progress which is far outstripped by the pace of our forgetfulness.  Once in a thousand blue moons someone actually says something different and it’s usually a reworking of something said previously. I quite fancy the argument from Divine Hiddenness but it’s not much more than the argument from suffering rejigged.

Furthermore it is all, both arguments for God and arguments against God, arguing from plausibility while pretending you’re arguing logic. To do so, is sneaky and malicious debating.  The honest thing to do is not to say “You are all a pack of idiots because you can’t see that clearly obviously due to X and Y God exists or doesn’t,” but instead to say “I think this because of this. Sure it could work the other way but that makes less sense to me.” I believe that almost everyone involved in these debates knows this but denies it. At least I hope they are just being sneaky; I shudder to think that so many high profile Atheists and theists are so colossally stupid to be genuinely unaware that plausible and logically necessary are not the same thing.

For example the splendiferous universe is sometimes given as proof of God, whereas the Atheist instead puts forward the terrible wastefulness of the universe as proof of no-God. For the theist the finely tuned balance of the laws of gravity and the time it takes to soft boil an egg (a minute! That’s bloody convenient!) proves a cosmic designer. For the atheist the countless witless deaths of individuals, whole species, even whole solar systems, just to deliver the Quran between 610 and 632 AD is so inefficient the cosmic designer is more likely to be someone’s idiot nephew than God. But neither of these supposed arguments compel logically.  Both sides can shrug their shoulders at the others point of view and say “I see it differently,” because these arguments are only compelling personally. They are narratives which take credibility from plausibility.

 

 God is a conceptual squirrel. I’d wear that on a t-shirt. The whole point of (some) Gods is that they are different from us and certainly within the monotheistic traditions followers are beholden of God to tell us what they’re like. Consequently as ludicrous as God might seem to me there is no way to reason from that ludicrousness that God doesn’t exist. They may squirrel themselves into some path of reasoning we can’t perceive. Hence both the mystic and the atheist sing together that God makes no sense. Case in point is Jesus’ return. Is two thousand plus years enough to conclude he’s not coming back?  What ever you think, it should be obvious that not only one conclusion can be drawn.

 

The above may sound like criticism of Atheism and a (as in any one) theism equally but it’s not.  The arguing for God’s existence is only a small part of any theistic religion – the part that directly engages with Atheists. Meanwhile Atheism has little else going on. Consider the following free associations with Christianity and Atheism; 

Christianity;

• Free Lunches
• Into Singing.
• Believes Jesus is the Son of God.
• Into marriage but not for gays.
• Burnt witches (while ago now but witches remember).
• Op-shops.

Atheism;

• Doesn’t believe in God.
• Has conferences and speeches about not believing in God.
• Writes books about not believing in God.

Now as a contrast let’s look at Buddhism; 

• Into Meditation.
• Stories about washing rice bowls and what not.
• Vegetarian
• Believes in reincarnation.
• Supposed to be calm all the time.
• Doesn’t believe in God. 

I think the above illustrates how the inanity of arguing about God’s existence is a little more crippling for the Atheist movement than it is for Christianity. Of course I’m being facetious, these are not poll results and certainly not objective facts (not all Buddhists are vegetarian, there are defacto Christians, most atheists don’t go to atheist conferences). Certainly there is nobody however much a part of the Atheist movement who would only do the three things listed above under Atheism in their life. However regardless of the many activities an Atheist gets up to atheistically (making cheese for example) all that gets badged as Atheism is the above. Meanwhile Buddhists, while being atheists themselves (some of them that is), have a lot more going on under the name of Buddhism. The effect of this is that making a big deal out of being an Atheist (the Atheist project) functions as celebrating a myopic obsession with pointless and often malicious debate.

 

This isn’t entirely the Atheists fault. You see Atheist is not originally an atheists’ word. It is a theist’s word for those people outside of its fold and its function has always been to slur. Even the early Christians were called Atheists by the Romans for not believing in Roman Gods. This was in preparation for lunch time for lions. More closely linked to the modern Atheist movement, European empiricists and materialists were marginalised or silenced through the 18^{th and} 19^th centuries by the charge of Atheism. Atheists have merely reclaimed the word, effectively saying “Where’s the insult?”

 

Reclaimed words are a great source of power for resistance movements. They blunt your enemy’s worst verbal attack. I embrace Queer, Wog and Freak at times in my own life. However they are also dangerous. Definition is a very important power and ceding it to others even if you separate out the pergorative aspect should have its costs recognised. The definition of people who don’t believe in God as Atheist is not tautologous but says something important. It says that this issue of God’s existence is the primary basis of their identification. It gives them only the face that fronts on to theism. 

But how is an Atheist supposed to escape being an Atheist when they are surrounded by theism that seems to force just such a definition? It’s not uncommon in my experience to be engaged in conversation with someone who talks about God, not as a belief they hold but as a present and matter of fact reality. In such a situation it feels appropriate, almost necessary to mention that I don’t believe in God. The moment I do, snap, I am presenting myself in terms of unbelief in contrast to their belief.

The answer is to understand the religion game. Religions are answers to “life’s great questions” of what’s it all about and why should we bother with anything.  When a Christian says they’re a Christian they are saying that somehow Christ (and everything that concept drags in to a conversation) answers those questions. When a Buddhist gives their descriptor they mean that Buddhahood or awakening is the answer (the root of Buddha is a Sanskrit word meaning awaken).  When an Atheist says they are an Atheist it sounds like they are saying that being an atheist is the answer; that somehow realising Gods non-existence reveals what it’s all about and why we should bother with anything.

I think that’s deeply weird and I’m an atheist. Further despite the noise of Atheist trumpets selling books like hotcakes I think most Atheists feel the same way. God’s non-existence is a fact for us. Any answer to lifes’ great questions we have will therefore have to incorporate that fact but knowing God’s non-existence isn’t the answer itself. That distinction is important.

So when someone tells me about their God the appropriate response is to recognise our conversation as one in which we are sharing our answers to life’s great questions and respond with mine. If I don’t like the conversation that’s fine to say. If I have no answer then that’s fine to share too. If I don’t believe there is just one answer but that everyone has to find their own calling then that’s also fine. If I believe it’s just about comforting each other on this strange blue orb in space then that’s good enough. If my companion chooses to scoff at these and say “That’s not much of an answer,” I can point out that I didn’t criticise their answer and hopefully they’ll apologise.

But if I say “I’m an Atheist” then I’ve misunderstood the conversation. In return I’ll probably be misunderstood myself – as myopically obsessed with a fruitless debate in lieu of any engagement with the great questions of life. Because that’s what I’ve just said.

Testify!

Whatever’s the opposite of writers’ block I’m suffering from it. I just seem to keep on writing and writing without much editing capacity and the results are not so good.

The following is one of several posts I’ve been working on and they all seem to have no end in sight. It’s scaring me. So I’m posting in the hope I break the trend. I don’t think it’s too painful to read but you could skip to the “aside” at the end if your short on time and you’d get the gist.

______________________________________________________________________________  

One of the perennial challenges of discussing spirituality with other people is when you encounter the person who expects you to treat their experience of the spiritual as evidence – the testimony as proof.

Just the fact's, Mam.

I’m fairly liberal when it comes to what constitutes evidence; I think we should compose our opinion of the world and god based on our experiences even if they aren’t repeatable under controlled conditions. Other peoples’ experiences that aren’t repeatable or even independently observable should also be allowed to influence our world view. That doesn’t mean that there is no standard to testimony at all however. It doesn’t mean someone can make any kind of assertion as their experience and call it proof.

If you want a testimony to be credible and evidential to other people you need to actually talk in facts. These facts are not interpretations of events but the “stuff” that leads into the interpretation. This includes subjective feelings, heck it can even include thoughts but those thoughts are treated as events. Here’s a basically decent testimony of a premonition complete with feelings and thoughts as events;

“I was walking along the beach on a sunny day and I felt a cold chill along my spine. Although I felt fine I had a thought pop into my head that I could die soon. I decided not to go swimming. Later I read the reports of shark attacks that day.”

Because the testimony stuck to facts we can consider them and come to our own conclusion. We can also spot missing details. An obvious question that comes to mind is whether there are frequent shark attacks at that beach or not. Another obvious question is whether the person avoids swimming for fear of death most days or just that day. Is this the one in a million premonitions that came true? Personally I don’t believe in premonitions however if there were rarely any shark attacks at that beach and if this person regularly swam there then this testimony would weaken my disbelief.

Here is a terrible example of a testimony;

“I have experienced Gods touch, his love and his mercy over and over again. Recieving his Holy Ghost, and being renewed are times I will never forget. Being able to be in his prescence should never be taken for granted. God has blessed me tremendously as a young person...” from http://www.wordsoftestimony.com/

This person has just strung together a series of conclusions with none of the “stuff” that led into them. “I have experienced God’s touch” and “God has blessed me” are interpretations of facts. Those facts may have been the sensation of a touch or a lift in mood or a run of good luck but the attribution of them to God is the conclusion. Jumping to conclusions adamantly and repeatedly is not good testimony.

I’ve included a decent testimony about a psychic phenomenon and a poor testimony about Christianity deliberately (and without difficulty). This is because a particular type of Christianity is the religion par excellence for both privileging the testimony as proof and doing it badly. This particular type of Christianity is labelled Evangelical; those churches of the Wesleyan legacy and the American revivalist traditions and their numerous offshoots. Due to their prominence in America these groups have had profound influence across the western world so much so that many denominations outside of a strict category of Evangelist contain members with a similar flavour.

The evangelical tradition is the inspiration for many amazing elements of modern Christianity. Although other Christians also opposed European slavery it was evangelicals who turned the tide. Many of the suffragettes were evangelicals. The Salvation Army is also born of the evangelical movement as was Alcoholics Anonymous, the YMCA, the social work profession, many Christian peace movements and so on. Evangelicals have challenged other Christians to roll up their sleeves and involve themselves in the need around them. Evangelical churches reversed a nineteenth century European trend that church was for the wealthy by growing new churches among the poor. In the case of African Americans and Hispanics, along with the missionary movement in Asia and Africa (a mostly evangelical enterprise) this has challenged the ethnic and geographical centre of Christianity as European.

The evangelicals also expanded Christian liturgy. Most Protestant Hymns were just reworked psalms prior to Evangelicals. Pop music and church music were very separate. An evangelical liberality in worship styles brought forth both Amazing Grace, and O When the Saints Go Marching In. Today Christian Heavy Metal, Rock, Folk and R&B music all owe their acceptance to evangelicals. On the one hand Evangelicals gave us the alter call, estatic worship and mega-churches. On the other the small home church and the pub church go back to them too.

Lastly personal testimony as evidence is also a legacy of this movement. Due to its evangelical nature (which means to spread the gospel) non-christians encounter personal testimony more so than quieter expressions of Christianity. Some people first encounter it on t.v. on many Christian panel shows or when approached by a street preacher or at a drop-in youth group. In such cases there may be no other knowledge of Christianity to compare it to even when the viewer converts. Subsequently modern generations of Christians see personal testimony as a core element of Christianity even though it plays little part in Orthodox, Catholic, High Anglican, Lutheran and Presbyterian traditions historically.

Personal testimony is so central in evangelical Christianity it can rival and exceed the importance of scripture. From About.com:Christianity;

“Skeptics may debate the validity of Scripture or argue the existence of God, but no one can deny your personal experiences with him. When you tell your story of how God has worked a miracle in your life, or how he has blessed you, transformed you, lifted and encouraged you, perhaps even broken and healed you, no one can argue or debate it. You go beyond the realm of knowledge into the realm of relationship with God.” (Their emphasis)

That’s an insanely privileged place for personal testimony to hold. I’m not even sure what the last sentence means exactly but you know it’s good. I can’t think of any other faith outlook that puts personal testimony on such a high pedestal except the equally conversion orientated Seventh Day Adventists or interestingly aggressive atheism.

As for doing it badly Christians who testify seem to suffer under an obligation to say that there is nothing metaphorical at all about their meeting Jesus. Some will tell you it was a real meeting of a real person, as real as they are meeting you. Those people will then say that Jesus entered their heart. Now either one of those statements is false or there would have been a god-awful mess. This obligation to effectively lie is the consequence of first of all the privileging of personal testimony amongst evangelical Christians. A personal meeting with God can in some churches be the difference between a real Christian and a pending one. This can even be referred to as a second baptism (baptism being a Christians ritual introduction to membership) so that without such a meeting you are only a nominal member. This pressures an evangelical Christian to amplify the personal basis of their faith.

I also think there is a wider cultural bias about the right basis for belief that Christians must contend with and that newer denominations are themselves riddled with. Perhaps it’s a by-product of the cultural reach of American individualism or maybe it’s a consequence of empiricism as the default way of knowing; maybe it’s the inevitable effect of Protestantism feeding back into itself; maybe it’s just diversity in the spiritual marketplace and our consumer role in it. Whatever the cause, we seem to expect people to believe in God for unique individual reasons in a way that was less common for people only a few generations ago. In addition this experience must be absolutely non-metaphorical. It must conform to direct sensory perception. This certainly afflicts the newest faith on the block, popular atheism, which equally treats a personal and empirical experience of God as the sole legitimate basis for belief. Christians who rise to this criticism of their faith are obliged to produce such an experience of God.

Personal testimony is also a key element of the other new faith which competes in the western world with Christianity –New Age beliefs. The problem for Christianity (as I see it) is those phenomenons included as New Age are just so much more amenable to this kind of evidential testimonial treatment. Whether it’s a premonition as testified to above, or psychic pets or the recollection of past lives these are phenomenons which are happily reducible to facts. They are discrete chains of cause and effect distinct from every day life with each link able to be described independently of the observer.

In fact New Age beliefs seem to me to be exactly those aspects selected from a range of broader traditions which are amenable to evidential testimony. Crystal healing are removed from any broader understanding of how spiritual and physical overlap. The I Ching is used to divine without a broader appreciation of Chinese thought. The New Age movement takes the rituals of Paganism or Wicca and throws them into a toolkit of “useful” things from completely different worlds such as an Egyptian motif tarot deck. Each selection though is pseudo-scientific enough to provide the basis for evidentiary testimony.

The experience of sinfulness and salvation, of changes in what seems important and insight into one’s own behaviour are never going to fit neatly into the sort of testimony that constitutes evidence because these are not independent facts occurring at discrete moments in time in chains of cause and effect. This may be why such elements of faith outlooks like Wicca are left out of New Age toolkits. Perhaps this is also why when such Christian experiences are competing with new age stories then the metaphorical language which sums up the whole experience has to be turned into a series of mundane facts, e.g. I met Jesus. He spoke to me. This would explain why such testimonies are so hollow of detail such as the sound of Gods voice or where they touched you; because these mundane facts are really metaphors.

Ultimately if Christianity remains committed to evidentiary testimony it will evolve Christianity into the type of faith that evidentiary testimony can express. Healings, prophetic messages (inspired premonitions) and full sensory experiences of a walking, talking Jesus will be more central to the faith because that is what can be talked about in a testimonial format. In those churches which most think of testimony as evidence we can already see this trend. It’s a sort of New Ageing of Christianity just as other faith outlooks have suffered.

On my very first post on this blog I expressed an interest in hearing about people’s experience of God. That interest remains and I’ve certainly heard a few experiences since then. I’ve written this post partly because I’m getting tired of slippery language that insists on being taking seriously without a standard for what evidential testimony is. But more so because I don’t like what the trend towards that language is doing to Christianity, a faith tradition I admire.

There are amazing stories to be shared by Christians. There are lives lived differently in response to a big idea like love one another and a reliance on faith to maintain that commitment. There is the feeling of coming home to the faith, of being disconnected without it and of understanding oneself best in the language of Christianity. I am more interested in these stories than those miraculous evidentiary moments that some seem to think an atheist needs to hear. But if you do insist on telling me that a corporeal Jesus held your hand then I will expect you to remember left or right.

An aside...(probably the best bit)

The Gospels contain a fascinating story about an apostle who needed personal physical proof of Jesus’ resurrection. Thomas is called the doubting apostle but it would be fairer to say that he is disbelieving. Without any doubt at all Thomas thinks that the other apostles are talking rubbish when they say that Jesus is alive. And Thomas has a pretty high standard of proof before he’ll change his mind.

Jesus then appears to the apostles, in a locked room none the less, and in accord with Thomas’ demand for proof places Thomas hand in the wound in his side.

Here’s the thing; I identify with Thomas. I like a guy who needs to experience something for himself all bloody and mucky too. In fact the comments about atheists and their privileging of personal experience in this piece are about myself. However I also think that this need is warping Christianity by producing false testimonies of Thomas like experiences. On the one hand I won’t believe until my hand in is in his side. On the other I don’t think Christians should make that the focus of their faith. Am I having my cake and eating it too here? What do I really want Christians to do?  Whatever it is I hope they don’t care enough to jump to it.

Science vs God (and The Coffee Table).

I was involved in a recent exchange of ideas which seemed to me to have at its heart a gross misconception about Science. The issue was whether Science could prove that God doesn’t exist. At the same time my partner is reading a book which describes Catholic opposition to birth control as superstition (implying that support for birth control would be scientific by contrast). I thought its time to set the record straight about what “science” does and how it does it. Unfortunately there’s no “straight” record of science to go by.

Science is itself a subject of sociological study. If you take Levi Strauss perspective then Science extends back into the proverbial mists of time. “Primitive” [1] science is just trial and error with some memory of results. “Modern” science is not so different – the note taking systems are usually more regulated and the questions are less concrete  at times – but the principle is the same.

In fact Science and religion are not distinct in any way for much of human history. Religion (at least in ancient times) was also about trial and error. You made a sacrifice to one God instead of another or in one way instead of another in the same way that you cooked a joint of meat over coals instead of flame or attacked your enemy from a hill top or a valley and then suffered the results. If you were a prophet or sage (a proto-scientist) and your advice ruined dinner or lost a battle then your model of reality was brought into question. With some swift talking you might be able to account for the discrepancy but your claims about God, magic, divination and destiny just like your claims about cooking and tactics were likely to fall out of favour in relation to other peoples. Similarly success brought credibility.

Now in addition to this role of science/religion – the role of producing direct results – religion/science had another role. This can be understood as social cohesion. Basically you could make a very good case that the Gods wanted the smartest woman in the village to be ruler. This could even be tried with success. If your explanation led to social unrest or if the smartest woman had usurped the angriest man then there was a possibility that your theory could be “disproven” by a violent vote.

That’s an unflattering example of the politicisation of science/religion. A more positive example is that two peoples may have competing claims over a fishing cove. The model of reality worth having would have enabled the peoples to share the cove without abandoning the warrior attitudes necessary to protect their other borders. Other models of reality may have been leading to wasted resources and possibly no-body being able to use the cove safely.

Nowadays we would call this kind of science/religion, political science. To modern eyes this fishing cove example appears completely different to problems about how fire operates on meat - but why? In both cases models of reality are being tested on the basis of their benifits. In primitive cultures science/religion are both remembered through story telling. We would be hard pressed to tell the difference between the stories which explain the hygiene rules of primitive cultures and the stories which explain who is the king and why there is one. This is not to say that cultures can’t “believe” their stories (holding them to be absolutely correct without a metaphoric quality). This too is no different to modern western cultures. However we now seem to have two different ways of storytelling, Science and religion which are supposedly hostile to each other.

The source of the split between science and religion is hard to uncover. Bertolt Brecht in The Life of Galileo suggests the split is a consequence of religious persecution of claims of new knowledge based on direct observation; in reaction these claimants have to become purely interested in knowledge for knowledge’s sake and abandon any goal of serving humanity to religion. This is what we call Science. Brecht is writing a commentary on his own atomic age however under the guise of history so this is not a reliable source. The play is compelling though and I recommend it wholeheartedly.

The split between science and religion may simply be a consequence of accelerated change and what Levi Strauss calls the shift from a cold to a hot culture. A hot culture celebrates winning whereas a “cold culture” tries to avoid anyone losing; celebrating in game terms “the draw”. Cold cultures are capable of mainintaining consistency for a lot longer than hot cultures which are far more adaptable. We can see this operating in regard to the conflict between generations. Cold cultures utilise traditions of elder respect and formalised rites of initiation to adulthood so that there are smooth transitions in leadership. Hot cultures are wilfully blind to generational tensions. Knowledge claims are meant to be evaluated regardless of their authors’ prestige and oppositional debate is highly valued. Knowledge production in a hot culture is akin to boxing with the expectation that one day some “young turk” will K.O. the previous champion, only to be K.O.d themselves one day.

It would be neat to say that Science has become a term to capture hot culture values while religion is the refuge of cold-culture values. Certainly there are associations which back up this claim; hypothesis vs. hypothesis to the death is the scientific approach while interpreting findings to fit in with previous revelation is religions game. However we enter a circular problem of definition. Basically we would have to conclude that religion in its hot states is being “sciencey” and science in its cold culture forms is becoming a “religion”. This is generally what occurs by advocates of science over religion. Their definition proves itself and is really just a championing of hot culture values. I think it is fairer to try and identify another distinction and then allow hot and cold culture values to explain how science in (mostly hot) forms and religion in its (less commonly hot) forms thrive or struggle.

Remembering that primitive science/religion is also sciences’ history, any distinction between science and religion to be found is not going to be a creed that begins and ends what is science. Instead we can see progressive (and contentious) clarifications of science that gradually distinguish it from religion until we have our current split. Three distinctions I can identify are the philosophies of Empiricism, Methodological Naturalism and Logical Positivism. Rather than viewing these as boundaries on science I see them as waypoints which indicate a direction. Scientists are never just those who completely adhere to these ideologies but the cluster of people who are close to them. To put it another way these philosophies are the flagships of the scientific enterprise of their times (and cultures).

 Here are my immensely crude summations of Empiricism, Methodological Naturalism and Logical Positivism. Firstly Empiricism states that the vehicle of knowledge is sense data alone. This does more than rule out other less fragmented pictures of what is known (ie. intuition). Empiricism resets the direction of knowledge creation as coming from the observer rather than from the observed object. It is observing that creates what we know of things not “being” by the thing itself. This means the natural awe generated by empiricism is really awe of one’s observational powers rather than of an external object; a big difference to a sense of being spoken to by nature.

An even bigger consequence of empiricism is a move away from the goal of knowing true reality. As all we can ever obtain is sense data generated by observation, then an underpinning reality represented by the sense data is only a possibility – it’s not a knowable thing. The strict empiricist would say this doesn’t matter. There may not really be a coffee table in the middle of the room, however the sense data of a coffee table like foreground image over the carpet, allows us to reasonably predict that running across the room will lead to some nasty sense data in our shins. Sense data is all we have and all we need. An underpinning reality is only a predictive model of future sense-data. This reduces the primacy of knowledge derived from core-to-core or soul-to-soul meetings between knower and subject. Such experiences (including religious ones) are rebadged as feelings/sensations. What was once a privelaged knowledge is, under empiricism, less than seeing.



That's some nasty sense data there.



This leads directly to methodological naturalism, the explicit practical assumption that the only types of explanations science should look for are ones which are predictable and which can be controlled for; essentially “natural” explanations. What this means is that the sense data of the coffee table image and the hurt shins should avoid explanations which wont obey laws that help us to avoid banging our shins or predict other sense data. This has proven to be a useful limitation for society as essentially rogue explanations which we can’t predict are unable to be applied by us to solve their own and other problems. If we assume that the coffee table is a physical object we can step around it and we can put a coffee cup on it for example. Methodological naturalism however makes a big assumption that all knowledge is supposed to be practically applicable and this assumption can portray not only God but free will as “useless” explanations.

Logical Positivism is the most controversial of our three philosophical waypoints for Science. In its strongest form this philosophy holds that a statement is meaningless unless its validity can be conclusively established by a finite process. Although this seems reasonable this principle soon came into difficulty. Can the validity of the statement “there is a coffee table in the room” be established? Most would say yes. Look there it is. But what about the statement, “there is no coffee table in the room”? We can imagine all sorts of tests that would prove this reasonably but conclusively? (What if the coffee table was magicked invisible?)

As the totalising philosophy its authors imagined it to be Logical Positivism hasn’t been a success. There are however legacies of Logical positivism that have defined Science. Statements for which no process for establishing any validity can be imagined have been recategorised as nonsense for the purposes of doing science. This extends to ethical judgements and much of metaphysics (including God). Related to this is the importance of falsibility. Falsibility, the ability to be proven false, is now a pre-requisite of any meaningful serious scientific hypothesis. Of course to the extent that the narrative of science is generally accepted as the means of producing knowledge then this nonsense description of metaphysics and the importance of falsibility is taken up by broader culture. If anything this seems to me to be provoking a backlash particularly in the areas of ethics where society wants to have more than personal preference as a guide.

So can Science prove there is a God or not? I hope that I have shown that Science just isn’t a discrete entity so saying what Science can or can’t do is only ever based on the Science of a particular culture and time. It’s possible that future philosophical pushes will create a Science that is deeply interested in supernatural explanations and metaphysics. If so that would be very different to what we have now. As it is now Science is disinterested in the supernatural and metaphysics precisely because they cannot be put to use by us. In the same way that primitive science/religion evaluated its own culture we are all in the process of evaluating whether that disinterest is a beneficial approach to reality.

Science as it stands now is also only interested in those hypotheses which can be disproven. Is God such a hypothesis? Can anyone (not just Scientists) prove God doesn’t exist? Or for that matter can anyone other than Scientists prove that God exists? If not wouldn’t that mean that believing in Gods existence is just a personal affair like aesthetics? Or even nonsensical? Before reaching that conclusion however we should ask whether believing something and being able to prove something are the same thing. I certainly don’t live my life as if they entirely are.

Lastly and most importantly science is not about the existence of things anyway. Science is about developing predictive models of reality. A scientist doesn’t think of their belief in the coffee table as the goal and conclusion of their research. The conclusion of their research is more likely to be a reduced incidence of shin injury and a place to put their coffee cup. If the coffee table is actually God or a chaotic ball of electrons or mostly emptiness but for all intents and purposes the label coffee table captures the sense data we obtain from observing it and are going to obtain from interacting with it... well who cares?

The real point at which Science encounters God is in the investigation of applications of a belief in God such as prayer and whether they are reliably supportive of Gods existence. This is how science investigates such phenomenon as  Tarot cards, Ouija Boards, Water Divining, Vitamin loading to prevent cancer, Drinking Milk to prevent Osteoporosis, nailing wood to hold it together and so on. “Does She work?” is the scientific question of God.

The original theological experiment; Elijah calls down fire from heaven.

So far any scientific study I have seen has failed to show outcomes from “using” God that support Gods reliability. When people (generally not scientists) suggest that science has proven God is nonexistent this failure to perform is the only reasonable thing they might be referring to. However aside from some faith healers, most modern theists don’t expect God to be “useable” in this way. As C.S. Lewis put it God is not a “tame lion” who answers our commands.

It’s something to note that if worshipping a God does not provide tangible benefits then modern religion has moved further from primitive science/religion than modern science has. It would be unrecognizable to ancient people (including the Hebrews for much of the Old Testament) that a God is not supposed to be evaluated on their efficacy. It may even be that acts of worship that don’t have any anticipated “pay-off” in terms of tribal and individual success are ultimately not sustainable. Time will tell.

Time will also tell if the real issue is not whether God exists at all. If we recall the other primitive purpose for models of reality is to produce social cohesion and minimise unnecessary conflicts. It may be that we will not miss God as a cure or cause of disease or as a bringer of military success or failure or as anything particular useful in themself. It may be that we will miss our belief in God and the social effects that has. That’s a political science question.     

---

[1] This post is already too long to consider making it more comprehensive or self-critical. Please treat it as a rough introduction and accept the somewhat circular definition of primitive as pertaining to cultures without a marked division between science and religion.