Prospero's Books

The God Delusion 2

Despite my negative take on Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion in my last post, I'm grateful that the book's simplistic theology has prodded me toward defining my own. Here are some working notes:

1. I am in awe of the cosmos, first that it exists at all (that there's "something" rather than "nothing") and then that life and consciousness have evolved within it.
2. My response to that awe is (appropriately, I think) gratitude.
3. To whom or what am I grateful? To the great unnameable mystery that lies not only beyond space and time, but also beyond existence itself. The traditional word for that mystery is "God." Among the best definitions I've found for "God" is Paul Tillich's "the ground of being." (Unfortunately Tillich doesn't appear in Dawkins's extensive bibliography and index.)
4. The only way I know to express gratitude to God is by addressing God in the only way I know, the way I address the most complex, loving things I know: other people. So I consciously anthropomorphize God, not to limit God, but to concede my own absolute inability to know God as God is.
5. I experience God not only as the mystery beyond the existence of the cosmos, but also as the mystery beneath my own existence, my own consciousness. The traditional language for this experience is that God is both transcendent and immanent. I feel God's transcendence in nature, especially in nature's systems. I feel God's immanence in art and ritual (signs and stories), in other people, and in the depths of my own meditation and prayer.

If you're on a spiritual quest, you may want to read The God Delusion. The experience may help you define your own theology.

The God Delusion 1

Like many people, I've been reading Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, a scientist's passionate effort to demonstrate "why there almost certainly is no God." I was pleased to find that on page 36 he anticipates my response to his work:

This is as good a moment as any to forestall an inevitable retort to the book, one that would otherwise--as sure as night follows day--turn up in a review: 'The God that Dawkins doesn't believe in is a God that I don't believe in either.'

He got me right. But in the rest of the paragraph, he trivializes my response:

'The God that Dawkins doesn't believe in is a God that I don't believe in either. I don't believe in an old man in the sky with a long white beard.' That old man is an old irrelevant distraction and his beard is as tedious as it is long. Indeed, the distraction is worse than irrelevant. Its very silliness is calculated to distract attention from the fact that what the speaker believes is not a whole lot less silly. I know you don't believe in an old bearded man sitting on a cloud, so let's not waste any more time on that. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented.

Even after all that, I still say, "The God that Dawkins doesn't believe in is a God I don't believe in either."

When I, and many other religious people, use the word God, we certainly don't mean a "thing" (as in Dawkins's "anything and everything") that is "supernatural" (that is, above nature).

And to that claim, Dawkins would reply that "God is not an appropriate name" for what I mean by it, "unless we very explicitly divest it of all the baggage that the word 'God' carries in the minds of most religious believers" (155).

And that assertion is, for me, the fundamental flaw in Dawkins's book. He insists, as he should, on defining scientific terms in a way that reflects his understanding of science. But he disallows religious people from defining God in a way that reflects their understanding of God. His book suffers from the same problems as would a book attacking evolution that reflected only the understanding of evolution held by most high-school graduates.

I realize that last paragraph may sound elitist, implying that I believe my knowledge of God superior to that carried "in the minds of most religious believers." I emphatically do not believe that. I believe that human beings understand God in a wide variety of ways that meet their experience and fill their needs, just as human beings understand science in a wide variety of ways that meet their experience and fill their needs.

A theologian and an astronomer found themselves sitting together on a plane. After some introductory talk, the astronomer said, "I don't see what you mean by studying theology. Can't all theology be reduced to 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you'"? "Hmm," said the theologian, "you might be right. After all, can't all astronomy be reduced to 'Twinkle, twinkle, little star'?"

Cymru am byth

As someone proud of his Welsh ancestry, I took notice today of a Reuters headline:

Study finds dolphins speaking "Welsh" dialect

The article reports that graduate student Ronan Hickey, at the University of Wales, Bangor, has discovered that "dolphins living off the coast of Wales whistle, bark and groan in a different dialect from dolphins off the western coast of Ireland."

Trying to teach that she was one

In The Elixir and the Stone (see What I've Been Reading), Baigent and Leigh quote at length from the  novelist Thomas Mann as a twentieth-century artist influenced by Hermeticism. Because I am fascinated by unity of the cosmos, and by the fractals and other patterns that occur throughout art and nature, at all scales, I was struck by this passage from Mann's Felix Krull:

The interdependent whirling and circling, this convolution of gases into heavenly bodies, this burning, flaming, freezing, exploding, pulverizing, this plunging and spreading, bred out of Nothingness and awaking Nothingness--which would perhaps have preferred to remain asleep and was waiting to fall asleep again--all this was Being, known also as Nature, and everywhere in everything it was one. I was not to doubt that all Being, Nature itself, constituted a unitary system from the simplest inorganic element to Life at its  liveliest, to the woman with the shapely arm and to the figure of Hermes. Our human brain, our flesh and bones, these were mosaics made up of the same elementary particles as stars and star dust and the dark clouds hanging in the frigid wastes of interstellar space. Life, which had been called forth from Being, just as Being had been from Nothingness--Life, this fine flower of Being--consisted of the same raw material as inanimate Nature. It had nothing new to show that belonged to it alone. One could not even say it was unambiguously distinguishable from simple Being. The boundary line between it and the inanimate world was indistinct. Plant cells aided by sunlight possessed the power of transforming the raw materials of the mineral kingdom so that it came to life in them. Thus the spontaneous generative power of the green leaf provided an example of the emergence of the organic from the inorganic. Nor was the opposite process lacking, as in the formation of stones from silicic acid of animal origin. Future cliffs were composed in the depths of the sea out of the skeletons of tiny creatures. In the crystallization of liquids with the illusory appearance of life, Nature was quite evidently playfully crossing the line from one domain into the other. Always when Nature produced the deceptive appearance of the organic in the inorganic--in sulphur flowers, for instance, or ice ferns--she was trying to teach that she was one (Baigent and Leigh 314-15).

A single all-embracing and all-encompassing totality

In The Elixir and the Stone (see What I've Been Reading), Baigent and Leigh describe the worldview that this blog is, in part, based on:

For the Pythagoreans, and for the Alexandrian Hermeticists who followed them, 'harmonic attunement' was the governing principle. And it applied not just to music, but to the whole of creation. Creation was perceived as a single all-embracing and all-encompassing totality, an all-pervasive whole in which everything was interconnected and interrelated. Harmony was regarded as the binding agent, the adhesive whereby every component of creation was connected and related to every other (197-98).

That's not a bad description of the systems view of the world that's shared by (among others) modern environmentalists and modern physicists.

The stairs to the third floor

Another good article from the Summer 2004 issue of Parabola is "Ours Is Not a Dead Universe," by Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Nasr argues that as a result of scientism, "all the levels of consciousness were reduced to a single level (6).

He elaborates:

The consequence of cutting human consciousness off from the higher levels of consciousness in the prevalent scientistic worldview is the weakening of access to the transcendent. Although the higher levels do not go away by our denying them, taking away the ladder or stairs to the third floor in this building means that one does not try to go up to the third floor any longer, and gradually the existence of the third floor is denied. Therefore, the quest for transcendence--for the empowering and illumination of our consciousness, which was the goal of all traditional civilizations--becomes irrelevant, and is ignored as an illusion (9).

(The illustration for this blog posting is an antique Masonic second-degree "tracing board," a visual teaching tool. The ritual for passing to the second degree includes the symbolism of the stairway.)

The interaction of our souls, our hearts, our visions

Another clipping in my Prospero's Books idea folder is from the Summer 2004 issue of Parabola: "An Interactive Dialogue: Talmud and the Net," by Max [sorry] Mel Alexenberg. The article makes the often-expressed point that the Talmud was perhaps the world's first hypertext, and it points us toward a fascinating Web page, by Professor Eliezer Segal, that demonstrates this point by interactively annotating a Talmud page.

But Alexenberg goes beyond this observation to discuss the "spiritual dimension" of the Web. He quotes Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson:

The divine purpose of the present information revolution . . . which gives an individual unprecedented power and opportunity, is to allow us to share knowledge--spiritual knowledge--with each other, empowering and unifying individuals everywhere. We need to use today's interactive technology not just for business or leisure but to interlink as people--to create a welcome environment for the interaction of our souls, our hearts, our visions (32).

A biological basis for free will?

Today Reuters reports:

A tiny fruit fly--without any input from the outside world--will spontaneously change directions, researchers said on Monday in a finding that just may rescue the notion that free will not only exists but is a basic function of the brain."

The researchers, at the Free University of Berlin, placed one fruit fly at a time in a sensory-deprivation environment, then tracked their movements. The result: without outside stimuli, the flies didn't move randomly, as expected. "Instead," says writer Julie Steenhuysen, "the flies showed a pattern of flight that was generated spontaneously by the brain and could not have been random."

The article concludes:

George Sugihara, a mathematical biologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego who helped with the data analysis, said the pattern of variability shown by the fly's choices revealed a non-linear signature--something typical of many biological processes.

"We show free will 'can' exist, but we do not 'prove' it does," Sugihara said.

"Our results eliminate two alternative explanations of this spontaneous turning behavior that would run counter to free will, namely randomness and pure determinism," he said in an e-mail.

He said the results address the middle ground between simple determinism--the brain as an input-output machine--and utterly random behavior.

"We speculate that if free will exists, it is in this middle ground," he said.

Sacred knowing

Later in the Summer 2004 Parabola article cited in the previous post, Jacob Needleman writes:

Step outside one starry night. Go to a place where the "light pollution" of man-made cities is lessened. Go to a place out there and in here where our inventions of concepts and explanations no longer obscure the subtle intimations of higher truths within oneself. And look up at all those shining worlds.

What do you feel?

No. That is not the only question to ask oneself.

The question is: What do you know?

It is the same question.

Then observe your inner state. Could you hate? Could you be overwhelmed by envy or resentment? Could you dishonor any man or any woman? Is it not true that your wish to know more and more about the great world around you is now joined to the deep yearning to serve one's neighbor and whatever it is that is, for you and for me, God? Is it not true that no man or woman has ever committed a crime in the state of wonder? Is it not true that there is such a thing as sacred knowing? And can there be any real knowing, worthy of the name, that is not embedded in a sense of the sacred out there and in oneself? Does our world cry out for anything more fundamental than this sense of the cosmos? (25)

(The Parabola article cited in this and the previous post is from Jacob Needleman's A Sense of the Cosmos: Scientific Knowledge and Spiritual Truth.)

The power of feeling and the genius of the intellect

"The very word 'cosmos,'" writes Jacob Needleman in the Summer 2004 issue of Parabola, "signifies that the universe itself is a living organism, unimaginably vast in its extent and in the depth of its purposes and intelligence--and its beauty and, above all, in its goodness."

He continues:

To know this universe, to know reality, it is necessary for a man or a woman to perceive it with more than the intellect alone. It is necessary to perceive it with the unique source of perception by which beauty and goodness can be perceived--with the depth and subtlety of the power of feeling. The power of feeling--not the violence and chaos of what we usually know of as our emotional reactivity--the power of feeling must be joined to the genius of the intellect in order to know the nature of reality (23).