Science and religion meet at the boundary of humanity’s ignorance

 I watched a YouTube debate (90 mins) between Sir Roger Penrose and William Lane Craig, and, if I’m honest, I found it a bit frustrating because I wish I was debating Craig instead of Penrose. I also think it would have been more interesting if Craig debated someone like Paul Davies, who is more philosophically inclined than Penrose, even though Penrose is more successful as a scientist, and as a physicist, in particular.
 
But it was set up as an atheist versus theist debate between 2 well known personalities, who were mutually respectful and where there was no animosity evident at all. I confess to having my own biases, which would be obvious to any regular reader of this blog. I admit to finding Craig arrogant and a bit smug in his demeanour, but to be fair, he was on his best behaviour, and perhaps he’s matured (or perhaps I have) or perhaps he adapts to whoever he’s facing. When I call it a debate, it wasn’t very formal and there wasn’t even a nominated topic. I felt the facilitator or mediator had his own biases, but I admit it would be hard to find someone who didn’t.
 
Penrose started with his 3 worlds philosophy of the physical, the mental and the abstract, which has long appealed to me, though most scientists and many philosophers would contend that the categorisation is unnecessary, and that everything is physical at base. Penrose proposed that they present 3 mysteries, though the mysteries are inherent in the connections between them rather than the categories themselves. This became the starting point of the discussion.
 
Craig argued that the overriding component must surely be ‘mind’, whereas Penrose argued that it should be the abstract world, specifically mathematics, which is the position of mathematical Platonists (including myself). Craig pointed out that mathematics can’t ‘create’ the physical, (which is true) but a mind could. As the mediator pointed out (as if it wasn’t obvious) said mind could be God. And this more or less set the course for the remainder of the discussion, with a detour to Penrose’s CCC theory (Conformal Cyclic Cosmology).
 
I actually thought that this was Craig’s best argument, and I’ve written about it myself, in answer to a question on Quora: Did math create the Universe? The answer is no, nevertheless I contend that mathematics is a prerequisite for the Universe to exist, as the laws that allowed the Universe to evolve, in all its facets, are mathematical in nature. Note that this doesn’t rule out a God.
 
Where I would challenge Craig, and where I’d deviate from Penrose, is that we have no cognisance of who this God is or even what ‘It’ could be. Could not this God be the laws of the Universe themselves? Penrose struggled with this aspect of the argument, because, from a scientific perspective, it doesn’t tell us anything that we can either confirm or falsify. I know from previous debates that Craig has had, that he would see this as a win. A scientist can’t refute his God’s existence, nor can they propose an alternative, therefore it’s his point by default.
 
This eventually led to a discussion on the ‘fine-tuning’ of the Universe, which in the case of entropy, is what led Penrose to formulate his CCC model of the Universe. Of course, the standard alternative is the multiverse and the anthropic principle, which, as Penrose points out, is also applicable to his CCC model, where you have an infinite sequence of universes as opposed to an infinity of simultaneous ones, which is the orthodox response among cosmologists.
 
This is where I would have liked to have seen Paul Davies respond, because he’s an advocate of John Wheeler’s so-called ‘participatory Universe’, which is effectively the ‘strong anthropic principle’ as opposed to the ‘weak anthropic principle’. The weak anthropic principle basically says that ‘observers’ (meaning us) can only exist in a universe that allows observers to exist – a tautology. Whereas the strong anthropic principle effectively contends that the emergence of observers is a necessary condition for the Universe to exist (the observers don’t have to be human). Basically, Wheeler was an advocate of a cosmic, acausal (backward-in-time) link from conscious observers to the birth of the Universe. I admit this appeals to me, but as Craig would expound, it’s a purely metaphysical argument, and so is the argument for God.
 
The other possibility that is very rarely expressed, is that God is the end result of the Universe rather than its progenitor. In other words, the ‘mind’ that Craig expounded upon is a consequence of all of us. This aligns more closely with the Hindu concept of Atman or a Buddhist concept of collective karma – we get the God we deserve. Erwin Schrodinger, who studied the Upanishads, discusses Atman as a pluralistic ‘mind’ (in What is Life?). My point would be that the Judea-Christian-Islamic God does not have a monopoly on Craig’s overriding ‘mind’ concept.
 
A recurring theme on this blog is that there will always be mysteries – we can never know everything – and it’s an unspoken certitude that there will forever be knowledge beyond our cognition. The problem that scientists sometimes have, but are reluctant to admit, is that we can’t explain everything, even though we keep explaining more by the generation. And the problem that theologians sometimes have is that our inherent ignorance is neither ‘proof’ nor ‘evidence’ that there is a ‘creator’ God.
 
I’ve argued elsewhere that a belief in God is purely a subjective and emotional concept, which one then rationalises with either cultural references or as an ultimate explanation for our existence.

Addendum: I like this quote, albeit out of context, from Spinoza:: "The sum of the natural and physical laws of the universe and certainly not an individual entity or creator".

Logic rules

I’ve written on this topic before, but a question on Quora made me revisit it.
 
Self-referencing can lead to contradiction or to illumination. It was a recurring theme in Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel Escher Bach, and it’s key to Godel’s famous Incompleteness Theorem, which has far-reaching ramifications for mathematics if not epistemology generally. We can never know everything there is to know, which effectively means there will always be known unknowns and unknown unknowns, with possibly infinitely more of the latter than the former.
 
I recently came across a question on Quora: Will a philosopher typically say that their belief that the phenomenal world "abides by all the laws of logic" is an entailment of those laws being tautologies? Or would they rather consider that belief to be an assumption made outside of logic?

If you’re like me, you might struggle with even understanding this question. But it seems to me to be a question about self-referencing. In other words, my understanding is that it’s postulating, albeit as a question, that a belief in logic requires logic. The alternative being ‘the belief is an assumption made outside of logic’. It’s made more confusing by suggesting that the belief is a tautology because it’s self-referencing.
 
I avoided all that, by claiming that logic is fundamental even to the extent that it transcends the Universe, so not a ‘belief’ as such. And you will say that even making that statement is a belief. My response is that logic exists independently of us or any belief system. Basically, I’m arguing that logic is fundamental in that its rules govern the so-called laws of the Universe, which are independent of our cognisance of them. Therefore, independent of whether we believe in them or not.
 
I’ve said on previous occasions that logic should be a verb, because it’s something we do, and not just humans, but other creatures, and even machines. But that can’t be completely true if it really does transcend the Universe. My main argument is hypothetical in that, if there is a hypothetical God, then said God also has to obey the rules of logic. God can’t tell us the last digit of pi (it doesn’t exist) and he can’t make a prime number non-prime or vice versa, because they are determined by pure logic, not divine fiat.
 
And now, of course, I’ve introduced mathematics into the equation (pun intended) because mathematics and logic are inseparable, as probably best demonstrated by Godel’s famous theorem. It was Euclid (circa 300BC) who introduced the concept of proof into mathematics, and a lynch pin of many mathematical proofs is the fundamental principle of logic that you can’t have a contradiction, including Euclid’s own relatively simple proof that there are an infinity of primes. Back to Godel (or forward 2,300 years, to be more accurate), and he effectively proved that there is a distinction between 'proof' and 'truth' in mathematics, in as much as there will always be mathematical truths that can’t be proven true within a given axiom based, consistent, mathematical system. In practical terms, you need to keep extending the ‘system’ to formulate more truths into proofs.
 
It's not a surprise that the ‘laws of the Universe’ that I alluded to above, seem to obey mathematical ‘rules', and in fact, it’s only because of our prodigious abilities to mine the mathematical landscape that we understand the Universe (at every observable scale) to the extent that we do, including scales that were unimaginable even a century ago.
 
I’ve spoken before about Penrose’s 3 Worlds: Physical, Mental and Platonic; which represent the Universe, consciousness and mathematics respectively. What links them all is logic. The Universe is riddled with paradoxes, yet even paradoxes obey logic, and the deeper we look into the Universe’s secrets the more advanced mathematics we need, just to describe it, let alone understand it. And logic is the means by which humans access mathematics, which closes the loop.
 

 Addendum: I'd forgotten that I wrote a similar post almost 5 years ago, where, unsurprisingly, I came to much the same conclusion. However, there's no reference to God, and I provide a specific example.

Sigmund Freud’s and C.S. Lewis’s fictional encounter

Last week I went and saw the movie, Freud’s Last Session, where Anthony Hopkins plays Freud, when he was in London on the very cusp of WW2 and dying of cancer of the mouth, and Mathew Goode plays the Oxford Don, C.S. Lewis. It’s a fictional account, taken from a play I believe, about their meeting at Freud’s home. Its historical veracity is put into question by a disclaimer given after the movie proper finishes, saying that it’s recorded that Freud did, in fact, meet an Oxford Don, but whose identity was never revealed or confirmed.
 
It's the sort of movie that would attract people with a philosophical bent like myself. I thought the cinema better attended than I expected, though it was far from full. Anthony Hopkin’s Freud is playful in the way he challenges Mathew Goode’s Lewis, whilst still being very direct and not pulling any punches. There is an interruption to their conversation by an air-raid siren, and when they go into a bunker, Lewis has a panic-attack, because of his experience in the trenches of WW1. Freud helps him to deal with it in the moment.
 
I’ve read works by both of them, though I’m hardly a scholar. I actually studied Freud in a philosophy class, believe it or not. I’m better read in Jung than Freud. I think Lewis is a good essayist, though I disagree with him philosophically on many counts. Having said that, I expect if I’d met him, I’d have a different opinion of him than just his ideas. I have very good friends who hold almost exactly the same views, so you don’t just judge someone for what they believe, if you get to know them in the flesh.
 
And that’s what came across in this hypothetical exchange – that you have 2 intellectuals who can find mutual respect despite having antithetical views about God and religion and other things, like homosexuality. On that last point, Sigmund’s daughter, Anna, was in a relationship with a woman, which Freud obviously didn’t approve of. In fact, the father-daughter relationship in the movie, was portrayed as very Freudian, where they both seemed to suffer from an unhealthy attachment. Nevertheless, Anna Freud went on to make a name for herself in child psychoanalysis, and there’s a scene where she has to deal with an overbearing and arrogant young man, and her putdown made me want to clap; I just wish I could remember it. Anyway, Anna’s story provides a diversionary, yet not irrelevant, subplot, which makes the movie a bit more than just a two-hander.
 
There are scenes where Mathew Goode’s Lewis has dreams or visions and finds himself in a forest where he comes across a deer and one where he sees a bright overwhelming light. There was a sense in these scenes that he felt he was in the presence of God, and it made me realise that I couldn’t judge him for that. I’ve long argued that God is a personal experience that can’t be shared, but we overlay it with our cultural norms. It was in these scenes that I felt his character was portrayed most authentically.
 

The Library of Babel

 You may have heard of this mythic place. There was an article in the same Philosophy Now magazine I referenced in my last post, titled World Wide Web or Library of Babel? By Marco Nuzzaco. Apparently, Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) wrote a short story, The Library of Babel in 1941. A little bit of research reveals there are layers of abstraction in this imaginary place, extrapolated upon by another book, The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges’ Library of Babel, by Mathematical Professor, William Goldbloom Bloch, published in 2008 by Oxford University Press and receiving an ‘honourable mention’ in the 2009 PROSE Awards. I should point out that I haven’t read either of them, but the concept fascinates me, as I expound upon below.
 
The Philosophy Now article compares it with the Internet (as per the title), because the Internet is quickly becoming the most extensive collection of knowledge in the history of humanity. To quote the author, Nuzzarco:
 
The amount of information produced on the Internet in the span of 10 years from 2010 to 2020 is exponentially and incommensurably larger than all the information produced by humanity in the course of its previous history.
 
And yes, the irony is not lost on me that this blog is responsible for its own infinitesimal contribution. But another quote from the same article provides the context that I wish to explore.
 
The Library of Babel contains all the knowledge of the universe that we can possibly gain. It has always been there, and it always will be. In this sense, the knowledge of the library reflects the universe from a God’s eye perspective and the librarians’ relentless research is to decipher its secrets and its mysterious order and purpose – or maybe, as Borges wonders, the ultimate lack of any of these.
 
One can’t read this without contemplating the history of philosophy and science (at least, in the Western tradition) that has attempted to do exactly that. In fact, the whole enterprise has a distinctive Platonic flavour to it, because there is one sense in which the fictional Library of Babel is ‘real’, and it links back to my last post.
 
I haven’t read Borges’ or Bloch’s books, so I’m simply referring to the concept alluded to in that brief quote, that there is an abstract landscape or territory that humans have the unique capacity to explore. And anyone who has considered the philosophy of mathematics knows that it fulfills that criterion.
 
Mathematics has unlocked more secrets about the Universe than any other endeavour. There is a similarity here to Paul Davies’ metaphor of a ‘warehouse’ (which he expounds upon in this video) but I think a Library is an even more apposite allusion. We are like ‘librarians’ trying to decipher God’s view of the Universe that we inhabit, and to extend the metaphor, God left behind a code that only we can decipher (as far as we know) and that code is mathematics.
 
To quote Feynman (The Character of Physical Law, specifically in a chapter titled The Relation of Mathematics to Physics):
 
Physicists cannot make a conversation in any other language. If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in. She offers her information only in one form.
 
And if we have the knowledge of Gods then we also have the power of Gods, and that is what we’re witnessing, right now, in our current age. We have the power to destroy the world on which we live, either in a nuclear conflagration or runaway climate change (we are literally changing the weather). But we can also use the same knowledge to make the world a more inhabitable place, but to do that we need to be less human-centric.
 
If there is a God, then (he/she) has left us in charge. I think I’ve written about that before. So yes, we are the ‘Librarians’ who have access to extraordinary knowledge and with that knowledge comes extraordinary responsibilities.

 

In the beginning there was logic

 I recently read an article in Philosophy Now (Issue 154, Feb/Mar 2023), jointly written by Owen Griffith and A.C. Paseau, titled One Logic, Or Many? Apparently, they’ve written a book on this topic (One True Logic, Oxford University Press, May 2022).
 
One of the things that struck me was that they differentiate between logic and reason, because ‘reason is something we do’. This is interesting because I’ve argued previously that logic should be a verb, but I concede they have a point. In the past I saw logic as something that’s performed, by animals and machines as well as humans. And one of the reasons I took this approach was to distinguish logic from mathematics. I contend that we use logic to access mathematics via proofs, which we then call theorems. But here’s the thing: Kurt Godel proved, in effect, that there will always be mathematical ‘truths’ that we can’t prove within any formal system of mathematics that is consistent. The word ‘consistent’ is important (as someone once pointed out to me) because, if it’s inconsistent, then all bets are off.
 
What this means is that there is potentially mathematics that can’t be accessed by logic, and that’s what we’ve found, in practice, as well as in principle. Matt Parker provides a very good overview in this YouTube video on what numbers we know and what we don’t know. And what we don’t know is infinitely greater than what we do know. Gregory Chaitin has managed to prove that there are infinitely greater incomputable numbers than computable numbers, arguing that Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem goes to the very foundation of mathematics.
 
This detour is slightly off-topic, but very relevant. There was a time when people believed that mathematics was just logic, because that’s how we learned it, and certainly there is a strong relationship. Without our prodigious powers of logic, mathematics would be an unexplored territory to us, and remain forever unknown. There are even scholars today who argue that mathematics that can’t be computed is not mathematics, which rules out infinity. That’s another discussion which I won’t get into, except to say that infinity is unavoidable in mathematics. Euclid (~300 BC) proved (using very simple logic) that you can have an infinite number of primes, and primes are the atoms of arithmetic, because all other numbers can be derived therefrom.
 
The authors pose the question in their title: is there a pluralism of logic? And compare a logic relativism with moral relativism, arguing that they both require an absolutism, because moral relativism is a form of morality and logic relativism is a form of logic, neither of which are relative in themselves. In other words, they always apply by self-definition, so contradict the principle that they endorse – they are outside any set of rules of morality or logic, respectively.
 
That’s their argument. My argument is that there are tenets that always apply, like you can’t have a contradiction. They make this point themselves, but one only has to look at mathematics again. If you could allow contradictions, an extraordinary number of accepted proofs in mathematics would no longer apply, including Euclid’s proof that there are an infinity of primes. The proof starts with the premise that you have the largest prime number and then proves that it isn’t.
 
I agree with their point that reason and logic are not synonymous, because we can use reason that’s not logical. We make assumptions that can’t be confirmed and draw conclusions that rely on heuristics or past experiences, out of necessity and expediency. I wrote another post that compared analytical thinking with intuition and I don’t want to repeat myself, but all of us take mental shortcuts based on experience, and we wouldn’t function efficiently if we didn’t.
 
One of the things that the authors don’t discuss (maybe they do in their book) is that the Universe obeys rules of logic. In fact, the more we learn about the machinations of the Universe, on all scales, the more we realise that its laws are fundamentally mathematical. Galileo expressed this succinctly in the 17th Century, and Richard Feynman reiterated the exact same sentiment in the last century.
 
Cliffard A Pickover wrote an excellent book, The Paradox of God And the Science of Omniscience, where he points out that even God’s omniscience has limits. To give a very trivial example, even God doesn’t know the last digit of pi, because it doesn’t exist. What this tells me is that even God has to obey the rules of logic. Now, I’ve come across someone (Sye Ten Bruggencate) who argued that the existence of logic proves the existence of God, but I think he has it back-to-front (if God can’t breach the rules of logic). In other words, if God invented logic, ‘He’ had no choice. And God can’t make a prime number nonprime or vice versa. There are things an omnipotent God can’t do and there are things an omniscient God can’t know. So, basically, even if there is a God, logic came first, hence the title of this essay.

What is existentialism?

 A few years back, I wrote a ‘vanity piece’, My philosophy in 24 dot points, which I admit is a touch pretentious. But I’ve been prompted to write something more substantive, in a similar vein, whilst reading Gary Cox’s How to Be an Existentialist; or How to Get Real, Get a Grip and Stop Making Excuses. I bought this tome (the 10^thAnniversary Edition) after reading an article by him on ‘Happiness’ in Philosophy Now (Issue 147, Dec 2021/Jan 2022). Cox is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, UK. He’s written other books, but this one is written specifically for a general audience, not an academic one. This is revealed in some of the language he uses, like ‘being up shit creek’.

 

I didn’t really learn anything about existentialism until I studied Sartre in an off-campus university course, in my late 40s. I realised that, to all intents and purposes, I was an existentialist, without ever knowing what one was. I did write about existentialism very early in the life of this blog, in the context of my own background. The thing is that one’s philosophical worldview is a product of one’s milieu, upbringing and education, not to mention the age in which one lives. I grew up in a Western culture, post WW2, and I think that made me ripe for existentialist influences without being conscious of it. I lived in the 60s when there was a worldwide zeitgeist of questioning social mores against a background of a religious divide, the Vietnam war and the rise of feminism. 

 

If there is a key word or mantra in existentialism, it’s ‘authenticity’. It’s the key element in my 3 Rules for Humans post, and it’s also the penultimate chapter in Cox’s aforementioned book. The last chapter is on counselling and is like a bookend.

 

As Cox himself points out, existentialism is not a ‘school’ of philosophy in the way ‘analytical philosophy’ or ‘logical positivism’ are. There’s not really a set of rules – it’s more about an attitude and how to live a life without losing your soul or self-respect. It’s not an epistemology, nor an ideology, even though it’s probably associated with a liberal outlook, as I hope will become clear.

 

Many commentators associate existentialism with atheism, the absurd and nihilism. I agree with Cox that it’s actually the opposite of nihilism; if anything, it’s about finding purpose. As I wrote in a post last year:

 

If the Universe has any meaning at all, it’s because it created sentient beings who find meaning against the odds that science tells us are astronomical, both literally and figuratively. Existentialism is about finding purpose in an absurd universe, which is the opposite of nihilism.

 

And that’s the most important lesson of existentialism: if you are to find a purpose, only you can do that; it’s not dependent on anyone else, be they family, a spouse, an employer or a mentor. And logically, one could add, it’s not dependent on God either.

 

Cox doesn’t talk about God at all, but he does talk quite a lot about consciousness and about it being ‘nothing’ (materialistically). He very fleetingly gives mathematics as an example of something else that’s not ‘corporeal’, specifically numbers. Very curious, as I think that both mathematics and consciousness are ‘special’ in that they are distinct, yet intimately connected to the physical world, but that’s another topic.

 

He also talks about consciousness having a special relationship with time. I’ve said that consciousness is the only thing that exists in a constant present, whereas Cox says the opposite, but I believe we mean the same thing. He says consciousness is forever travelling from the past to the future, whereas I say that the future is forever becoming the past while only consciousness exists in the present – the experiential outcome is the same.

 

So how does God enter the picture? God only exists in someone’s consciousness – it’s part of one’s internal state. So, you can be ‘authentic’ and believe in God, but it’s totally an individualistic experience – it can’t be shared. That’s my interpretation, not anyone else’s, I should emphasise.

 

An important, even essential, aspect of all this is a belief in free will. You can’t take control of your life if you don’t have a belief in free will, and I would argue that you can’t be authentic either. And, logically, this has influenced my prejudices in physics and cosmology. To be consistent, I can’t believe we live in a deterministic universe, and have argued strongly on that point, opposing better minds than mine.

 

Existentialism has some things in common with Buddhism, which might explain why Eastern philosophy seemed to have an influence on the 60s zeitgeist. Having said that, I think the commonality is about treating life as a journey that’s transient. Accepting the impermanence and transience of life, I believe, is part of living authentically.

 

And what do I mean by ‘authentic’ in this context? Possibly, I never really appreciated this until I started writing fiction. I think anyone who creates art strives to be authentic, which means leaving your ego out of your work. I try to take the attitude that it’s my characters’ story, not mine. That’s very difficult to explain to anyone who hasn’t experienced it, but I know that actors often say something similar.

 

In my professional life, my integrity was everything to me. I often worked in disputatious environments and it was important to me that people could trust my word and my work. Cox talks about how existentialism intrinsically incorporates our interactions with others. 

 

Freedom is a much-abused, misappropriated term, but in existentialism it has a specific meaning and an interdependent relationship with responsibility – you can’t divorce one from the other. Freedom, in existentialism, means ‘free to choose’, hence the emphasis on free will. It also means, if you invoke the term, that the freedom of others is just as important as your own.

 

One can’t talk about authenticity without talking about its opposite, ‘bad faith’ (mauvaise foi), a term coined by Sartre. Bad faith is something that most of us have experienced, be it working in a job we hate, staying in a destructive relationship or not pursuing a desired goal in lieu of staying in our comfort zone.

 

Of course, sometimes we are in a situation outside our control, so what do we do? Speaking from personal experience, I think one needs to take ownership of one’s response to it; one needs to accept that only YOU can do something about it and not someone else. I’ve never been a prisoner-of-war, but my father was, and he made 3 attempts to escape, because, as he told the Commandant, ‘It’s my job’.

 

I’ve actually explored this in my own fiction. In my last story, two of my characters (independently) find themselves in circumstances of ‘bad faith’. I only analyse this in hindsight – don’t analyse what you write while you’re writing. In fact, one of those characters is attracted to another character who lives authentically, though neither of them ‘think’ in those terms.

Addendum: Someone asked me to come up with a single sentence to describe this. After sleeping on it, I came up with this:

Be responsible for what you are and who you become. That includes being responsible for your failures. (2 sentences)

Grayling railing against God (I couldn’t help myself)

 I’ve just read A.C. Grayling’s book, The God Argument; The Case against Religion and for Humanism (his emphasis). It’s really a polemic against all deistic religions, even though he claims it’s not a polemic, while acknowledging it probably comes across as one. 

His basic argument, which he iterates in many different ways, is that any belief in God or Gods is irrational, starting with the gods of Norse and Greek mythology and including the Biblical God. It’s a sound argument, because, depending on your culture, you tend to treat one variant as fiction and the other as having personal and spiritual significance. Grayling doesn’t address it in this way: instead, arguing that a belief in God is no different to a belief in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy; one you grow out of and the other you don’t. The inference is that you are immature or unintelligent or, at best, delusional.

 

I’ve said before that all the Gods I know about have cultural ties and that includes the Abrahamic one. But comparing them to Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy is like comparing them to fictional characters like Superman and Tarzan, or Luke Skywalker. So, what’s the difference? The difference is in the potency that you give them. A God or Goddess is something internal that only has meaning for you. I’ll return to this idea throughout, because I think that God has no meaning outside someone’s mind. 

 

I rejected the biblical God in my teens, after a childhood spent immersed in its teachings. But the decision was more an emotional one than an analytical one. Grayling acknowledges, by the way, that religious belief is emotional, which, for him, is just another reason to dismiss it. I rejected God because I grew to really, really dislike Him. He was the worst type of tyrant: he ruled by fear and terror; he practised genocide on a global scale (the Noahic flood); he sent his ‘children’ to everlasting torment for disobedience; he tortured Job to win a bet with the Devil. Oh, almost forgot: he was going to get Abraham to kill his son, Isaac, to test his loyalty.

 

I once commented that the question: Does God exist? is the wrong question. The real question, which enters the consciousness of any rational person is: What’s the point? Is there a higher purpose to our existence? This is what religions have attempted to address, and in consequence, some have invoked deities.

 

Grayling, in a philosophical sleight of hand, categorises some Eastern philosophies, like

Buddhism and Confucianism as not being religions, because they don’t invoke gods. I think it’s fair to categorise Confucius as a philosopher in the same mould as teachers like Plato and Aristotle. But, like Jesus, both Buddha and Confucius had disciples, and they were all iconoclasts, challenging the social mores of their day, which they believed to be unfair and iniquitous. In fact, I would put Jesus in the same category as Buddha, Confucius and Socrates, who were all persecuted for challenging the status quo.

 

But Grayling conveniently overlooks that the Chinese, who adopted both Buddhism and Confucianism, culturally worshiped their ancestors, which is surely a religious practice. Perhaps Grayling doesn’t know many Chinese, whereas I have lived with Chinese individuals, and they definitely have deities as part of their traditional culture.

 

I’ve argued previously that science is neutral on the existence of God. In other words, science does not rule out a ‘creator’, yet there is obvious conflict between science and religious texts. Science is an epistemology and religion is not – they don’t compare. Some people argue that religion explains what science cannot, but that’s an argument from ignorance. There will always be things we don’t know – I’ve written extensively on that point – but no religious text can provide an explanation to a question that contemporary science can’t answer.

 

I think the notion of an omniscient God has problems with logic. Clifford A Pickover wrote a very thought-provoking book, The Paradox of GOD and the Science of Omniscience. To give examples: even God doesn’t know the last digit of pi, because it doesn’t exist; and God can’t make a prime number non-prime. Some people argue that God created logic and I argue that God is restrained by logic the same as us. The Universe obeys logic not because God created the logic but because logic transcends the Universe.

 

When I say that science does not rule out ‘God’, I mean it doesn’t rule out a ‘purpose’ that may be beyond our kin. We really don’t know. That doesn’t make me agnostic, as I don’t believe in an anthropomorphic creator, but neither does it mean that people who do, are axiomatically irrational, as Grayling contends. I’ve argued before that, in fact, it’s a non sequitur to believe the God you find inside your mind is the creator of the entire universe.

 

The major problem I have with polemical texts against religion is that, whether intentional or not, they promote intolerance. Back in 2010, I quoted Grayling where he seemed to be promoting religious tolerance.

 

And people who didn't have a religious commitment wouldn't mind if other people did privately and they wouldn't attack or criticise them. 

So there was an unwritten agreement that the matter was going to be left quiet. So in a future where the religious organisations and religious individuals had returned to something much more private, much more inward looking, we might have that kind of public domain where people were able to rub along with one another with much less friction than we're seeing at the moment.

 

I believe this is fundamentally the society I live in (in Australia) where, for the most part, people don’t care what you believe, and where religion is not part of our political landscape. In fact, despite having religion as part of my education, I was brought up with the tacit understanding that religious belief was personal and therefore only shared with others under the mutual understanding that it was confidential and deeply private. A secular society is not an atheistic society; it’s a tolerant society or it doesn’t work. 

 

I know people with completely different religious beliefs to me, best friends, in fact. What’s more, in our current society, I’d say political beliefs are far more divisive than religious beliefs. It puts a lie to the argument, proposed by Grayling and other militant atheists, that if we eliminated religion, ‘at its root’, then we would overcome the world’s conflicts. It’s not only simplistic, but naive, even dangerous. Religion does contribute to conflicts but only when it is politicised, which is what we witness in places where religion demarcates territorial disputes or differences in status. Religion is just one marker of ingroup-outgroup discrimination, with race, language and wealth being more likely contenders.

 

Grayling is contemptuous of people who adapt their religious beliefs to their circumstances, arguing that they ‘cherry-pick’ and are ‘hypocrites’. Well, I readily admit that I cherry-pick all the time - just read my blog - but I don’t see that as hypocrisy.

 

Don Cupitt provides a different perspective, which is the opposite point of view:

 

The only ideas, thoughts, convictions that stay with you and give you real support are ones you have formulated yourself and tested out in your own life… In effect, the only religion that can save you is one you have made up for yourself and tested out for yourself: in short, a heresy.

 

Grayling addresses the teleological arguments and the ontological argument and the cosmological argument, all in some detail, which I won’t go into. Paul Davies spent considerable time on them as well in his book, The Mind of God. 

 

But there is one argument that Grayling addressed which I found interesting, and that was Plantinga’s version of the ontological argument based on modal logic. I’ve come across this before, which is based on the premise that if something necessarily exists in a possible world then it must exist in all possible worlds (my emphasis). The problem is with the premise that God must necessarily exist in a possible world. I’ve always thought that this argument is somewhat circular, because it seems to assume that God necessarily exists, which is what it’s trying to prove, via logic alone. Grayling goes into it in some detail and claims that Plantinga eventually gave it up, falling back on an even less credible argument that we know that God exists in the same way we know that the past exists. I may have oversimplified it, but that’s the analogy that Grayling used.

 

The teleological argument comes from Aristotle, as Grayling expounds, because he argued that everything manmade has a ‘final cause’, which is the cause that prompted someone to make it, and you could apply this to the whole universe. I have my own response to this. If humans are the ‘final cause’ of God’s ‘creation’, then, without humans, God has no reason to exist. And this leads me to argue a reverse logic that God is dependent on humans rather than the other way round.

 

This is related to the fine-tuned argument that the Universe is ‘just right’ for complex life to emerge and leads to the anthropic principle. Grayling doesn’t mention the anthropic principle, probably because it tacitly allows teleology back into the picture. Grayling makes an analogy by saying that his antecedents only existed so he could exist, which is a good argument. But the point I like to make is that without conscious entities, the Universe may as well not exist. And we are special in as much as we have the unique ability to comprehend the Universe, as Einstein famously pointed out. Or, as Paul Davies said, ‘we can unravel the plot’. The alternative is what Davies calls the ‘absurd universe’, which appears to be the one Grayling plumps for: we give it a meaning because we are predisposed to providing meanings, but there is no reason to think one should exist. 

 

But this goes to the heart of the debate for me. The whole reason we have religion of any type is because humans wondered if there was something beyond the mortal realm. No one can answer that, but it’s why we created gods in all their manifestations. So gods become a part of a collective consciousness, which is why they can seem real to us. In this context, God is a projection that we laden with all our prejudices and hopes beyond death. One cannot dissociate any notion of God from the human psyche, as Ludwig Feuerbach pointed out in the 19^th Century. God is always in human image, not the other way round. Grayling doesn’t discuss this at all, but I fail to see how one can address God independently of a human context. In effect, we get the God we deserve. And by God, I mean the ideal we imagine we should aspire to. This is why we deify mortal humans like Jesus and Buddha, because they represent an ideal that they could only achieve beyond death.

 

The second half of his book talks about humanism. He spends a chapter on the importance and interdependence of authenticity and truth, and another on human rights. They remind me of my 3 rules for humans. He spends an entire chapter on the ethics of sexual conduct and how it’s been perverted by civilised societies. The book is worth acquiring for that alone.

 

Anyone who reads my blog, knows that I think God is subjective, not objective. Anyone who is a believer, will tell you that God came to them, meaning that God only exists in their mind, not out there. I have no issue with this idea of God; but it’s not what religions tell you. Anyone who has a religious experience is an iconoclast, including Jesus and Buddha. I think the idea that God evolves as a product of our consciousness is far more logical than the idea that He (why he?) created us in his image, as potential companions.

 

I make a distinction between non-theists and atheists. In Australia, there are a lot of non-theists, meaning they don’t care what you believe. Going by this tome (2013), Grayling is ‘anti-theist’, though he claims it’s not a religious belief; it’s the opposite of belief. However, his polemic indicates that he cares about whether someone believes in God or not and, like Dawkins, Harris and others, he proselytises atheism. This is not a non-theistic attitude. Anti-theism may not be a religion, but it’s anti-religious in its rhetoric.

 

I will leave the last word to Einstein, who talks about religion with no mention of God.

 

The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as of all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimely reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all there is.

Christianity and Buddhism

Last month’s issue of Philosophy Now (Issue 132, June/July 2019) had as its theme ‘West meets East’, so it was full of articles about Eastern philosophies and comparative philosophy. It led me to revisit this essay I wrote when I was a student some 20 years ago, studying philosophy, and specifically, when I took a unit called Religious Studies.

I should point out that I was brought up Christian, which I rejected in my mid to late teens, and in my 30s I took an interest in Buddhism and neo-Confucianism. So I had some background knowledge before I took the course. One can already see my existentialist leanings. 

Whilst I have previously written a post on Jesus, I haven’t written a post on Siddhārtha Gautama specifically, though I’ve made references to Buddhism in various posts.


‘Most religions envisage the spiritual path as a journey away from the false claims of the illusory self towards an understanding of the Real Self.’ Critically discuss this in relation to at least two of the three traditions studied in this course.

I will address this topic with respect to two of the religious systems under study: Christianity and Buddhism. The terms ‘illusory self’ and ‘Real’ or ‘True Self’ are open to wide interpretation within both systems, but if we perceive life as a journey, then what we are discussing is nothing less than the purpose of that journey as interpreted by both these religions.

This essay is not about the relative merits of Buddhism and Christianity, nevertheless it compares philosophical doctrines and points of view in relation to man’s mortal existence and his destiny. It also compares two views of a metaphysical universe which of course directly impact on how man perceives himself.

Buddhism and Christianity are both religions that evolved from earlier religions: Hinduism and Judaism respectively. Both arise from a distinct personality who remains central to the beliefs of their respective systems. Accordingly, I think there are two parts to these religions, and I intend to discuss both parts. Firstly, there is the part concerned with the personae: their lives as exemplars; and secondly their teachings and the philosophies that evolved therefrom.

Any great man, any personality who had an immense impact on a large body of people, eventually becomes mythologised, and it is the myth that continues and lives in people’s consciousness until it completely displaces the original persona. This is no different with Jesus and Siddhārtha Gautama, but as I will explain later there are more mythic qualities associated with the Christ than with the Buddha.

Historically, myth and religion have been synergistic. A myth, often but not always, includes factual elements, but it is not my intention to distil truth from fiction. For the purpose of this discussion, I’m taking another tact, where the mythic elements are not the focus.

When people refer to ‘The Buddha’, it is generally acknowledged that they are referring to Gautama Buddha or Siddhartha, even though he is not the first or only Buddha. Siddhartha was a prince born of the Ksatriya caste, a warrior and ruling caste, who became an ascetic when he juxtaposed his privileged style of living with the suffering of ordinary people. His impulse was not as simplistic as that however, because he was also aware that sickness, old age and death were burdens on human life that neither privilege nor wealth could avert.

As a result, he spent his entire life searching for the means, psychologically rather than physically, in releasing man’s spirit from this burden. At the age of 35 he achieved a state of enlightenment or awakening: an event which defines Buddhism in its essence. ‘The portrait of the Buddha...  is thus one of a man of both great wisdom and great compassion moved by the spectacle of human suffering and determined to free men from its fetters by a rational system of thought and a way of life.’ (ref. Encyclopaedia Brittanica)

Jesus’ story on the other hand, is told within the context of an enormous history: the history of the Jewish people. But it is more than that because it has mythic consequences relating to Divine judgement and the end of mortal history. But I would prefer, for the purposes of this discussion, to look at Jesus in a human context because I believe that is where his greatest message lies.

Jurgen Moltmann in Man gives a very good account of Jesus that reminds us of Jesus’ basic humanity and how he related to the lowest strata of society rather than those privileged by birth. Jesus provided a role, which to this day, very few people follow. I am not referring to the role of martyr, but to the role of facing the worst in human suffering and human weakness and human oppression, and revealing to such people his common humanity with them. There is a resonance here with Simone Weil’s Essay: On Human Personality; which reminds us that the intelligent person recoils from affliction in the same way ‘flesh recoils from death’.

I believe this is the greatest lesson Christ ever taught: that he was superior to all people, yet he gave his Grace to those least fortunate, regardless of creed, background or social position.

Buddha was not mythologised in the way that Christ was, neither was he a martyr, but in the final analysis these differences are of less significance than the hope they provide to all people through their example, their teachings and their lives. Both Christ and Buddha are not heroes in the traditional sense. They were antiheroes and pacifists, who were both renowned for their incomparable compassion to their fellow man. In this way, by their very lives, they both point to an identity and a destiny that ordinary people can emulate. This of course, is not how either of these religions are defined, but the lives of these men hold as much significance, perhaps even more, than their teachings.

On the other hand, to approach the destiny of the Self from a purely philosophical viewpoint, in either Christianity or Buddhism, one needs to go to the core of their respective beliefs. In Buddhism this is the concept of karma, and in Christianity it is a relationship with God through Christ. This also highlights the fundamental, and some would say irreconcilable differences between their philosophical and religious viewpoints.

Karma is generally understood as a causal connection between man’s actions and his destiny or fate. This causal relationship has metaphysical consequences, because it traverses lives. In other words, action in this life can affect destiny in the next life, which infers that some aspect of the Self is reborn. In Buddhist philosophy this leads to a contradiction because the Buddha explicitly preached a philosophy of no-self: that is no attachment, but also no soul.

Karma is a concept common to Hinduism, and is used as an explanation and rationalisation of the caste system, but Buddha considered the caste tradition inequitable.

More significantly, there is another way of perceiving karma that is best explained by John Hick in Death and Eternal Life, where he discusses the concept of a world karma. Hick explains with this concept that there is no need to consider an individual karma or rebirth, and so overcomes the contradiction. With or without the contradiction, the idea of a universal karma has a certain appeal and finds resonance in other concepts like Jung’s ‘collective unconscious’.

Masao Abe also makes reference to a similar, if not the same concept, when he cites Shin’ichi Hisamatsu’s notion of FAS: “Awakening to the Formless Self”. What Hick and Abe are both inferring is that there is a collective karma of the whole of mankind: past, present and future. What Abe describes as the ‘depth, breadth, and length of human existence’ According to Abe, Hisamatsu identifies this awakening as the same experience as satori (enlightenment in Zen Buddhist terminology).

To many Buddhists, satori, enlightenment or nirvana, is the whole purpose of man’s existence as an individual, and this is what is meant by finding the ‘True Self.’ Personally, I believe there are other perspectives to this question, without denying the significance of satori, and I will return to them later.

But another significant attribute of karma in Buddhist philosophy is that it deals with good and evil in human life without acknowledging a Deity or a Devil. I think this is fundamental in understanding the differences in Buddhist and Christian beliefs and also how they approach the question of the Self and its destiny.

To elaborate we need to examine the other obvious distinction between Christianity and Buddhism, which is that Christianity fundamentally requires a relationship with God. To a large extent, this philosophical nexus also determines the role of Christ.

It is Christ that makes Christianity unique in a way that Buddha doesn’t. As Fritz Buri says: ‘But in distinction to the Buddha, Jesus is not only teacher, but also an actor in the history of existence.’ It is Christ’s resurrection that places him mythically above man, though not immortal. It places him perfectly between God and man. In the Christian perspective, Christ is our connection with God, with Heaven and with a consciousness beyond death. This is the Christian response to both karma and nirvana.

Much of contemporary Christian belief revolves around the idea of being born again; of ‘finding Christ’. Many believers maintain that without this rebirth, which includes the acceptance of Christ as their saviour, there is no possibility of achieving the kingdom of Heaven. Yet according to Matthew this is not enough. In Matthew 7:21, Jesus says it is not enough to use his name: ‘It is not anyone who says to me: “Lord, Lord”, who will enter the Kingdom of heaven, but the person who does the will of my Father in Heaven’.

But in Christian doctrine, it is the metaphorical rebirth that signals a change in spiritual identity. To the orthodox Christian, this is the only path, the only destiny for the Self to consider.

Once again, I believe there are other perspectives to be considered, and it is another passage in Matthew which provides a clue. In Matthew 12:33-37, Jesus maintains that what comes from a man’s mouth (in words) comes from his heart - in this way one can tell evil from good. Specifically: Matthew 12:34; ‘You brood of vipers, how can your speech be good when you are evil? For words flow out of what fills the heart.’

‘What fills the heart’ is perhaps what the True Self is all about, and has resonances with Buddhism as well as other Eastern philosophies, but more importantly, is a key factor in Augustine’s neo-Platonic influenced philosophy: ‘...to reach the good, which is the real, one must “return into” oneself; for it is the spirit at the heart of man’s inmost self that links him to the ultimate reality.’ (ref. Encyclopaedia Brittanica)

In Christianity, the essential element of life’s journey is man’s relationship with God. This relationship is obviously deeply individualistic and despite the rituals and liturgies of the traditional churches, can really only be achieved within an individual’s consciousness. Again, in reference to Augustine: ‘Grace awakens the dormant power of the mind to see God’s image in itself, to see itself, that is, as God’s image.’ In other words, God is found only by looking inside ourselves, not by a leap of imagination into the unknown, conjuring images of a supreme being or a pantheistic spirit. That is not to say that Augustine didn’t recognise God as creator of the Universe, but man’s conscious accessibility to God is an inner journey, not an external relationship.

This, I believe, provides the best insight into the Christian perspective of understanding the Self and its destiny. The state of Grace that the Christian strives for, is to my interpretation, the same state as satori or nirvana, that is the Buddhist’s highest goal.

In Buddhist philosophy, as perceived from a Western perspective, the biggest conceptual hurdle is the belief in karma but not the soul. To overcome this paradox, Buddhist philosophers invoke the concept of no-self, but it tends to create more confusion than resolution.

If one simply dwells on the self or no-self paradox in Buddhism, then I believe one misses the point. The point of the journey of life is to acquire meaning and perhaps also an identity. In Christianity the notion of identity is very clear: it is achieved in a metaphorical rebirth (finding one’s identity in Christ). In Buddhism the purpose of the journey is to achieve satori or nirvana. But if the emphasis is changed from the destination to the journey itself, then it gives a different perspective. It is then concerned with the way we live our lives. It is the notion of karma that gives substance to Buddhist belief, not a concern with self or no-self. Buddha’s teachings on the no-self, I believe, reflect his concern with man’s preoccupation with the self and its unhealthy consequences. Whilst karma can be seen as a stick and carrot approach to religious teaching, this is a misplaced emphasis. If karma is seen instead as man’s connection to the rest of humanity, including past and future humanity, then one begins to grasp the point.

‘Interconnection between the individual and the whole universe is stressed in the Buddhist doctrine of karma.’ (ref. Encylopaedia Brittanica) From this conceptual viewpoint, the notion of individual karma and rebirth can be taken as a secondary consideration, and is neither denied nor affirmed.

But perhaps more relevantly, individual karma and therefore the Self, should not be considered as being independent of our universal or collective karma. That, at least, is my interpretation.

There is still another perspective of the Self, which is man’s purpose given by God. An idea that finds resonance in both Christian and Eastern beliefs. Tu Wei-Ming, a Confucian scholar, expresses it best: ‘...we are guardians of the good earth, the trustees of the mandate of Heaven....embedded in our human nature is the secret code for Heaven’s self-realisation.’

Humankind is above all else, the caretaker of the planet Earth. If one believes in a God, Christian or otherwise, as a creator who explicitly places man in charge of his creation, then the responsibility is huge indeed. Buddhist doctrine, on the other hand, ignores any explicit reference to this responsibility; nevertheless man’s karmic relationship, either individualistic or holistic, points him in the same direction - Earth’s fate has a causal dependency on man’s fate. From this point of view, one cannot ignore that the individual’s journey has a connection to humankind’s collective journey, with or without a heaven, with or without rebirth. From this perspective, the difference between the illusory self and the True Self is perhaps not one of identification but of awareness. An awareness not of Divine inheritance but of responsibility to our inheritance.

In the final analysis, I believe that religion or religious viewpoint is not so much a belief as an attitude. An attitude towards the Universe, towards one’s life and life in general, but above all, an attitude that reflects the Self at its deepest core rather than at a superficial level.

The spiritual journey is a euphemism for the search inside oneself to discover the true nature of the Self so that it may ‘light the world’  (Budda’s last words, purportedly). This is why the artist who has the most impact on us, is the one who digs deepest into his or her psyche. Augustine was right when he said the search for God was an inner journey. It is the inner journey which finds the True Self not the journey in the material world. Both Buddhists and Christians agree that the desire to create a position or an identity for ourselves in the world of business, commerce or social environment is the illusory self. The True Self, through which we engage our relationships to others and to the world at large, is, in the final analysis, the means by which we gain satisfaction from living.





References:

Abe M., Transformation in Buddhism, Buddhist-Christian Studies, Vol.7, 1987, pp.15-20.

Augustine, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Edition 15, 1989, Vol.14, pp.286-390.

Balthasar H.U. von, Engagement with God, trans. J. Halliburton, SPCK, London, 1975, Part 2, ch.4, pp.67-80.

Bultmann R. Existence and Faith, trans. Schubert M. Ogden, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1961, pp. 248-66.

Buri F., Ingram P. & Streng F. (Eds), Buddhist-Christian Dialogue - Mutual Renewal and Transformation, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 1986.

Burnaby J., ‘Introduction’, in J.Baillie, J.T.McNeill et al. (eds), The Library of Christian Classics, Vol.III, SCM Press, London, 1955, pp.23-31,31-6.

Ching J., Paradigms of the Self in Buddhism and Christianity, Buddhist-Christian Studies, Vol. 4, 1984, pp.31-50.

Cochrane C., Christianity and Classical Culture, Oxford University Press, London, 1944, pp.399-411.

Collins S., Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Therevada Buddhism, Cambridge University Press, 1982, Part IV, pp.218-24.

Coward H., Psychology and Karma, Philosophy East and West, Vol.33, No 1, 1984, pp.54-58.

Fenner P. ‘Cognitive theories of the emotions in Buddhism and Western psychology’, Psychologia, vol.30, 1987, pp.217-27.

Fenner P., The self and its destiny in Buddhism, Religious Systems B,
 Deakin University, Geelong, 1996.

Hick J. Death and Eternal Life, Collins, London, 1976, ch.18, pp.347-60.

Hopkins J. & Rinbochay L., Death, Intermediate State and Rebirth in Tibetan Buddhism, Rider, London, 1979, Introduction, pp.13-21.

Howard W., Christianity according to St. John, Duckworth, London, 1943, ch. IV, pp.81-105.

Lichter D. & Epstein L., ‘Irony in Tibetan notions of the good life’, in C.F. Keyes & E.V. Daniel (eds), Karma. An Anthropological Enquiry, University of California Press, Berkeley, Calif., 1983, Part 2, sn 9, pp.233-38.

McLellan D., Utopian Pessimist: The Life and thought of Simone Weil, 
Poseidon Press,1990.

Moltmann J. Man, SPCK, London, 1974, pp. 16-21, 105-17.

The New Jerusalem Bible - New Testament, Darton, Longman & Todd, Reader’s Edition, 1991.

Newsletter, Religious Systems B, The Self and Its Destiny in Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism, Deakin University, 1996.

Nordstrom L., Zen and karma, Philosophy East and West, Vol.30, Issue 1, 1980, pp.77-86
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Paul D. ‘The Structure of consciousness in Paramartha’s purported trilogy’, in Philosophy East and West, Vol.31, No.3, 1981, p.314.

Suzuki D., Zen and Japanese Culture, Bollingen Series LXIV, Princeton University Press, 1959

Tu W., LIFE magazine, Dec. 1988, p.93.

Some notes on religion and God

I’ve written quite a lot about religion on this blog, so I’m not sure I have anything new to say. My main reason for writing is that there is a dichotomy which is rarely explored or even acknowledged. I’m currently reading The Paradox of God And the Science of Omniscience by Clifford A Pickover. He’s written a number of books, but the handful I’ve read relate to mathematics and physics. He’s very good at collecting vignettes on a subject that covers its entire breadth, then putting them into an accessible volume with high quality allusive graphics. This book is completely different, both in content and presentation.

I mention him because his latest book has many references, including biblical quotes I never heard in Sunday School; partly because they don’t show God in a good light, and partly because they’re not fit for children’s ears. For example, in Exodus (4:24-26) God was going to kill Moses, but his wife, Zipporah, quickly circumcised her son and put the blood on Moses’ feet, then said: “Surely, you are a bridegroom of blood to me”; which satisfied God, for reasons that perhaps only God and Zipporah know. Pickover provides 4 different versions to demonstrate that the gist of the story is consistent across translations.

That’s a digression. Pickover also references Karen Armstrong’s A History of God in a completely different context: how God has evolved over the centuries. Armstrong, I note, has effectively disappeared from the parapet after being attacked from both sides of the religious divide. It’s obvious from my reading of her that she was trying to bridge the divide and had the opposite effect. A History of God covers the 3 monotheistic religions chronologically, so it does read like a history, plus she makes references to Hinduism and Buddhism where she thinks it’s apposite, without giving them the same attention and overall coverage. Personally, I think it’s one of the best books I’ve read on the subject, written well before she became a pariah to atheists and fundamentalists alike.

One of the themes, for want of a better word, that ran through Armstrong’s account was that there was almost always a conflict in philosophy, which alludes to the dichotomy I mentioned in my introduction. Basically, there were scholars who argued that God should be explained and revealed by intellectual reasoning, whilst others argued that God could only be understood through a personal mystical revelation. I think this dichotomised approach still applies today. It also highlights a fundamental difference between institutionalised religion and personal religious experience.

I spent a large part of my childhood exposed to institutionalised religion so I have that perspective from which to draw. Reading Pickover’s discussion of Genesis, where he talks about the ‘tree of knowledge of good and evil’, he points out an obvious paradox that Eve couldn’t have known it was evil when she was seduced by the snake as she had no knowledge of good and evil prior to eating the fruit (others have also pointed out this apparent contradiction). I remember as a young teenager asking how could eating fruit give one knowledge of evil (I was very literal), and I was told that it was a metaphor and I was given to understand that it was really about knowledge of sex. So sex was evil, and I was neurotic enough to believe that.

I digress again. Many years ago I had friends who were Jehovah Witnesses and I enjoyed arguing with them, and I think they enjoyed arguing with me. Now I do it with my Baptist neighbours. Basically, when it comes to arguing intellectually for the existence of God I find I’m an atheist. I was in my teens and still going to Sunday School when it first occurred to me that God could simply be a state of mind and not an existential entity that existed externally. I’ve long argued that God is subjective and, like Don Cupitt, believe that the only religion that matters is the one you’ve worked out for yourself.

Paul Davies is a well known physicist, author, philosopher and astro-biologist, as well as a self-confessed Deist (even Dawkins treats him with respect). Agnosticism and theism, I’ve noticed, is more common among physicists than biologists. I expect there’s 2 reasons for that: biologists have felt under siege by the Church for over a century; and physicists marvel at the mathematical concordance and unexplained serendipity of Nature’s laws. I wrote a post on Davies’ The Mind of God a couple of years ago, which is more about physics than God, but I concluded that the idea of God, as something that evolves, was the only one that made sense to me. If humanity is the only link between the Universe and God, then we are the only reason for God to exist. I’ve made this point before. I think God is a projection, because it is part of our cognitive capacity to imagine a future in a way that no other animal can. This means that we can imagine a future beyond death, which is the real genesis of religion and religious belief. If God is a consequence of us, rather than the other way round, then the problem of evil is automatically resolved - we get the God we deserve.

God and science

Sometimes people I disagree and argue with hold extreme positions. This frequently happens in politics and religion, and it’s currently happening globally in the Western world. A curious observation I’ve made is that people, who hold an extreme position, often assume that anyone who disagrees with them holds the extreme opposite position – there’s no room for compromise or nuance.

This is especially true when arguing about religion. People who believe that the Bible is the sole arbiter of truth, when challenged, will automatically assume that the challenger is a militant atheist in the mould of Richard Dawkins. I’ve struck this from both sides. For example, on this blog, when I once pointed out to an anonymous contributor that the Universe created the means to understand itself (a point I’ve often iterated), I was told that I must be a creationist.

The reality is that extreme positions begat extreme opposition. So, when Islamists practice extreme prejudice against non-Muslims (to the point of genocide) it creates a backlash against all Muslims.

In recent posts, I’ve argued strongly against the idea that ‘mind’ pre-originated the Universe and therefore us. This could be taken as an argument against God, but it’s not. Mind is something that we experience and it has evolved. Most scientists and most people (with a Western education) believe that there existed a time in the Universe’s history when there was no mind. In fact, in the context of the history of the Universe, it was mostly absent of any mind (that we are familiar with). God, on the other hand, must exist outside the Universe, and therefore, arguably, outside of space and time. Even Augustine made this point (according to Paul Davies, if my memory serves me right, in one of his many books, probably The Mind of God).

I mentioned Dawkins earlier, as an exemplar of someone who holds militant atheist views (by his own admission), yet he’s always referenced Davies with respect, even though they are philosophically miles apart.

In the latest issue of Philosophy Now (Issue 122, October/November 2017), the theme (they always have a theme) is Socrates, which, of course, must include Plato. In fact, they coin the term ‘Socrato’ and boldly write it on the cover. Within there is an article by Ray Liikanen called The Reverse Solipsist, which is a fictional Socratic dialogue between a resurrected Socrates and a science philosopher (in the mould of Dawkins). I was suitably impressed by this ‘dialogue’ that I looked up a reference for Liikanen at Causalargument.com where there is a 50 page document discussing Kant’s and Hegel’s arguments for ‘first cause’ and Liikanen’s own specific argument, which ostensibly answers Leibniz’s famous question: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" Liikanen is not credited with any titles or academic credentials (neither am I) but is cited for his essay, Beyond Kant and Hegel, published in The Review of Metaphysics (March 2013).

You are probably wondering what my 3 introductions have in common. Well, the crux of Liikanen’s 50 page argument is that the answer to Leibniz’s question is ‘mind’, and, whilst I disagree with much of his argument and his overall thesis, it contains elements that I actually agree with.

In particular, he references a Socratic dialogue (by Plato this time) whereby he puts a compelling argument (in response to Anaxagoras) that explaining an effect does not explain its cause. Socrates argues by analogy, that explaining how his muscles and bones and sinews work to get him in a sitting position doesn’t explain the motive and mental processes that led him to decide to sit. Liikanen extends this argument to the entire cosmos, whereby cosmology explains the evolvement of the Universe in all its machinations and Evolutionary theory explains the diversity and progenitorial process for speciation, yet no scientific theory explains the cause. To quote Liikanen:

Where all empirically grounded theories naturally fail is that they are limited in their explanatory scope. It is for this same reason that present day apologists employing an empirical method fall into the same kind of fallacious reasoning pointed out by Socrates more than twenty-four centuries ago.

But where I part company with Liikanen is that he argues that ‘pure reason’ can provide answers that empirical science cannot. I argued in a post almost 3 years ago (Dec 2014) that science is a combination of theory, mathematics and evidence, but only evidence can gives us ‘truth’. Mathematics provides abstract truths and its role in formulating physical theories has become increasingly significant in the last 4 centuries (since Galileo, Kepler and Newton), yet, without evidence, mathematically based theories (like String theory) are just theories.

Liikanen takes Kant’s and Hegel’s arguments for a priori deductions over empirically derived ones to give an ‘inevitable’ answer - even a proof - that the cause for the effect we call the Universe is ‘absolute mind’, which, of course, equates to God. I readily admit I can’t do justice to Liikanen’s arguments, given the time and space, but I have a fundamental issue with the premise that pure reason can provide answers that science is unable to furnish. If there is one thing we’ve learnt from science (especially in the last century) it’s that nature’s mechanisms, at all scales, are beyond anything we can imagine. Pure reason is not going to solve a puzzle that science can’t fathom. And, as I’ve pointed out elsewhere, there will always be puzzles beyond science, because science is a never-ending endeavour. But I actually agree with Liikanen that there are limits to what science can tell us.

Liikanen makes the point that we live in a finite universe (thus far) that arose from an infinite nothingness or void. And here’s the thing: infinity is something that we struggle to grasp cognitively let alone intuitively. Only mathematics provides a home for infinity in a way that we can cognise, even to the extent that we can differentiate between countable infinities and uncountable infinities.

If one looks at other intelligent species like all the primates or dolphins or some species of birds, none of them can grasp the astronomical reality that we have discovered – a discovery that started very early in human development – let alone esoteric topics like quantum mechanics or complex algebra or differential calculus. My point is that there could be concepts that are beyond us in the same way that cosmology is beyond every other species we know.

Science tells us that the Universe is fine-tuned for complex life to emerge, and as I’ve said before, we are the evidence. Whether this implies a God is completely dependent on what one believes irrespective of science. I’ve long argued that science is neutral on the question of God, and I agree with Michio Kaku that whilst there are some unanswered questions that will be answered by science (in say, 100 years time) the existence of God isn’t one of them.

I’ve always maintained that God is totally subjective. Liikanen’s ‘proof’ for the existence of God is a philosophical argument premised on the belief that there must be something instead of nothing even when there was nothing.

Liikanen makes the point, that I’ve often made, that without mind the Universe may as well not exist. But mind is a consequence – it’s an effect rather than a cause.

Liikanen argues that the Universe’s increasing complexity contradicts the second law of thermodynamics. It so happens that I’ve been re-reading Roger Penrose’s book, Fashion Faith and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe, and Penrose spends copious print on this specific topic as he does in virtually every book he writes on cosmology, because it’s a conundrum that most science writers tend to ignore. In my last post, I described entropy as being probabilistic and gave the example of perfume molecules dispersing to all corners of a room instead of congregating in one particular place. Penrose describes a similar scenario, only on the scale of the Universe. The difference is gravity, which makes the particles in the Universe clump together rather than disperse.

Entropy occurs when you have a system in equilibrium, but a system that’s far from equilibrium with an energy source (like the Sun) creates self-organising complexity. Davies makes the same point in The Cosmic Blueprint.

Addendum: My reference to Penrose's book is a bit of a gloss. His discussion is quite elaborate, even dense for some readers, including myself. Having said that, I think it provides a refreshing alternative to String Theory and is worth repeated readings if you're interested.

Creation Science: a non sequitur

A friend of mine – someone whom I’d go to for help – leant me a ‘Creation’ magazine to prove that there are creationists who are real scientists. And, I have to admit, my friend was right: the magazine was full of contributors who had degrees in science, including one who has a PhD and honours and works at a run-of-the-mill university; but who wrote the following howler: ‘Cosmology is unscientific because you can’t do an experiment in cosmology.’ I wonder if said writer would be willing to say that to Australian Nobel Prize winner, Brian Schmidt. Only humans can be living contradictions.

Creation science is an epistemological contradiction – there’s no such thing – by definition. Science does not include magic – I can’t imagine anyone who would disagree with that, but I might be wrong. Replacing a scientific theory with supernaturally enhanced magic is anti-science, yet creationists call it science – as the Americans like to say: go figure.

The magazine was enlightening in that the sole criterion for these ‘scientists’ as to the validity of any scientific knowledge was whether or not it agreed with the Bible. If this was literally true, we would still be believing that the Sun goes round the Earth, rather than the other way round. After all, the Book of Joshua tells us how God stopped the Sun moving in the sky. It doesn’t say that God stopped the Earth spinning, which is what he would have had to do.

One contributor to the magazine even allows for ‘evolution’ after ‘creation’, because God programmed ‘subroutines’ into DNA, but was quick to point out that this does ‘not contradict the Bible’. Interesting to note that DNA wouldn’t even have been discovered if all scientists were creationists (like the author).

Why do you think the ‘Dark Ages’ are called the dark ages? Because science, otherwise known as ‘natural philosophy’, was considered pagan, as the Greeks’ neo-Platonist philosophy upon which it was based was pagan. Someone once pointed out that Hypatia’s murder by a Christian mob (around 400AD) signalled the start of the dark ages, which lasted until around 1200, when Fibonacci introduced the West to the Hindu-Arabic system of numbers. In fact, it is the Muslims who kept that knowledge in the interim, otherwise it may well have been lost to us forever.

So science and Christianity have a long history of contention that goes back centuries before Copernicus, Galileo and Darwin. If anything, the gap has got wider, not closer; they’ve only managed to co-exist by staying out of each other’s way.

There are many religious texts in the world, a part of our collective cultural and literary legacy, but none of them are scientific or mathematical texts, which also boast diverse cultural origins. It is an intellectual conceit (even deceit) to substitute religious teaching for scientifically gained knowledge. Of course scientifically gained knowledge is always changing, advancing, being overtaken and is never over. In fact, I would contend that science will never be complete, as history has demonstrated, so there will always be arguments for supernatural intervention, otherwise known as the ‘God-of-the-Gaps’. Godel’s Incompleteness theorem infers that mathematics is a never-ending epistemological mine, and I believe that the same goes for science.

Did I hear someone say: what about Intelligent Design (ID)? Well, it’s still supernatural intervention, isn’t it? Same scenario, different description.

Religion is not an epistemology, it’s a way of life. Whichever way you look at it, it’s completely subjective. Religion is part of your inner world, and that includes God. So the idea that the God you’ve found within yourself is also the Creator of the entire Universe is a non sequitur. Because everyone’s idea of God is unique to them.

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics

I originally called this post: Two miracles that are fundamental to the Universe and our place in it. The miracles I’m referring to will not be found in any scripture and God is not a necessary participant, with the emphasis on necessary. I am one of those rare dabblers in philosophy who argues that science is neutral on the subject of God. A definition of miracle is required, so for the purpose of this discussion, I call a miracle something that can’t be explained, yet has profound and far-reaching consequences. ‘Something’, in this context, could be described as a concordance of unexpected relationships in completely different realms.

This is one of those posts that will upset people on both sides of the religious divide, I’m sure, but it’s been rattling around in my head ever since I re-read Eugene P. Wigner’s seminal essay, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences. I came across it (again) in a collection of essays under the collective title, Math Angst, contained in a volume called The World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy and Mathematics edited by Timothy Ferris (1991). This is a collection of essays and excerpts by some of the greatest minds in physics, mathematics and cosmology in the 20th Century.

Back to Wigner, in discussing the significance of complex numbers in quantum mechanics, specifically Hilbert’s space, he remarks:

‘…complex numbers are far from natural or simple and they cannot be suggested by physical observations. Furthermore, the use of complex numbers in this case is not a calculated trick of applied mathematics but comes close to being a necessity in the formulation of the laws of quantum mechanics.’

It is well known, among physicists, that in the language of mathematics, quantum mechanics not only makes perfect sense but is one of the most successful physical theories ever. But in ordinary language it is hard to make sense of it in any way that ordinary people would comprehend it.

It is in this context that Wigner makes the following statement in the next paragraph following the quote above:

‘It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here… or the two miracles of the existence of laws of nature and of the human mind’s capacity to divine them.’

Hence the 2 miracles I refer to in my introduction. The key that links the 2 miracles is mathematics. A number of physicists: Paul Davies, Roger Penrose, John Barrow (they’re just the ones I’ve read); have commented on the inordinate correspondence we find between mathematics and regularities found in natural phenomena that have been dubbed ‘laws of nature’.

The first miracle is that mathematics seems to underpin everything we know and learn about the Universe, including ourselves. As Barrow has pointed out, mathematics allows us to predict the makeup of fundamental elements in the first 3 minutes of the Universe. It provides us with the field equations of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetic radiation, Schrodinger’s wave function in quantum mechanics and the four digit software code for all biological life we call DNA.

The second miracle is that the human mind is uniquely evolved to access mathematics to an extraordinarily deep and meaningful degree that has nothing to do with our everyday prosaic survival but everything to do with our ability to comprehend the Universe in all the facets I listed above.

The 2 miracles combined give us the greatest mystery of the Universe, which I’ve stated many times on this blog: It created the means to understand itself, through us.

So where does God fit into this? Interestingly, I would argue that when it comes to mathematics, God has no choice. Einstein once asked the rhetorical question, in correspondence with his friend, Paul Ehrenfest (if I recall it correctly): did God have any choice in determining the laws of the Universe? This question is probably unanswerable, but when it comes to mathematics, I would answer in the negative. If one looks at prime numbers (there are other examples, but primes are fundamental) it’s self-evident that they are self-selected by their very definition – God didn’t choose them.

The interesting thing about primes is that they are the ‘atoms’ of mathematics because all the other ‘natural’ numbers can be determined from all the primes, all the way to infinity. The other interesting thing is that Riemann’s hypothesis indicates that primes have a deep and unexpected relationship with some of the most esoteric areas of mathematics. So, if one was a religious person, one might suggest that this is surely the handiwork of God, yet God can’t even affect the fundamentals upon which all this rests.

Addendum: I changed the title to reflect the title of Wigner's essay, for web-search purposes.